Enter Essence Of Religion

T H E
E S S E N C E
O F
R E L I G I O N

". . . but none of them
have sufficiently included
the core of religion . . . namely,
direct spiritual experience."
- Ken Wilber

"Have you thought of
one of the other major religions?
They're pretty much all the same."
- Reverend Lovejoy from The Simpsons

Your dedicated, trusty, and loveable LiveReal Agents
in our mettle-testing, gut-churning quest

"The Perennial Philosophy: The Evidence" begins with some of the fundamental questions about religion: where did all of these groups, rituals, beliefs, holy books, funny clothes . . . come from?

And more importantly . . . out of all the thousands of different religions in the world, which one or ones are "right"? Are they all "right"? What about the ways that they all disagree?

With so many different religions coming together today in a worldwide spiritual culture clash - and with each one claiming to be right, accurate, truthful, or even "the One" - how does anyone (who isn't already aligned with one particular tradition, or even who is) make sense of it?

From Catholicism to Calvinism, Buddhism to Islam, Judaism to Lutheranism . . . traditional to progressive, modern to historical . . . among the thousands of spiritual organizations and movements thriving today . . . how and why did these groups get started? What were they like back when they first got started? What were they like, before they evolved into what they are today?

Or in another way, if we subtract and strip away everything that is non-essential - if we reduce them all down to their most basic, elemental, fundamental components . . . then what is the core, the root, the origin of religion? And further, if we were to strip away all the non-essentials, what are we left with? (Take a minister: if a minister didn't wear a suit instead of a robe, would he still be a minister? Sure. If a minister didn't carry a Bible, would he still be a minister? Sure. If he didn't quote the Bible directly, but used all the same words or meanings . . . and so on. Continuing down this line, eventually we should arrive at what is "essential.")

The LiveReal Agents,
at least this far in our quest,
have made some pretty interesting discoveries:
Essentially, all of the books, rituals, buildings, and holy books of all religions trace back to one common ancestor: one person having a direct spiritual experience.

In other words, Christianity is based on the spiritual experience of Jesus. Buddhism is based on the spiritual experiences of Buddha. Islam is based on the spiritual experience of Mohammed. Taoism is based on the spiritual experiences of Lao-Tzu. And so on.

The evidence we have discovered so far points to a pretty fascinating conclusion: all spiritual movements, when traced back to their origins, eventually lead back to some sort of direct experience by the founders of these movements - concrete, actual experiences which are, of themselves, independent of their own time period, cultural trappings, and personal constructs.

In these cases, certain individuals witnessed or experienced . . . something . . . extraordinary, uncommon, and what they believed to be immensely profound. And further, these experiences, when described and compared, often have a very similar ring.

"Common Heart: An Experience of Inter-Religious Dialogue" by Ken Wilber tells the story of actual human beings from virtually all of the major world religions, meeting together in one place, and having a discussion about their differences and their commonalities . . .

If Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, Lao-Tzu, Confucious were all sitting around a table together (and speaking the same language) . . .

And when cultures collide, typically one of three things happen:
either one culture will conquer and consume the other one;
the two will keep a respectful distance for as long as possible; or
they will find common ground that they agree on, and learn from one another with mutual benefit.

Common Denominators is our investigation of this third option: when Christianity meets Buddhism, when Hinduism meets Taoism, when Islam meets Christianity . . .