Thank you for posting this Jordan. I'm feeling inspired to write a response, which I will soon as a substack post. Just wanted to drop a note saying that I appreciate your perspective and the nobility of the quest you're on.
"Meta-religion suspects that reality has no way of knowing its own deepest secret."
I love what Bernardo Kastrup has eluded to in some interviews, specifically about Jung's book "Answer to Job "
That "God" hasn't got a clue what's going on either.....
I asked Bernardo, in a recent Q and A, if he agreed that we are teaching God to be a better God. And he said he does agree.
I had a waking up experience 4 years ago. I found it tough. I especially wrestled with notions of God, having a christian background. I hadn't been to church in years. But I still love the stories and wisdom of the bible. And JC. Wow. What a dude !
After many months of head fuck. I saw clearly. There is no God, cos there's nothing but God.
I also love what Voltaire had to say
" “Cherish those who seek the truth but beware of those who find it.”
Your insights here are brilliant. They give me the sense that universe is an ever deepening mystery, and we can resonate with its beauty through letting go of answers and opening our beings as perpetual questions. Are we dancing or being danced?
Transcendence and immanence are two concepts that refer to different ways of understanding the relationship between the ineffable and the physical world.
Transcendence implies a separation between the Divine and the physical world.
Immanence is the integration of both. Not a "letting go" as is popular in new age thinking.
BEING IT. ALL OF IT.
"I searched for God and found only myself. I searched for myself and found only God."
paraphrasing: no god = nothing but god. I can't work out this equivalence logically, perhaps because whatever truth it reveals is beyond thought, words, concepts, beliefs. But as a practical matter, such a paradox can be a valid and useful pointer. Like a koan.
Another home run for JB. Great post! I have been intuitively walking along this path and you put into words in a beautiful way. I am enjoying the list format.
Ah yes, meta-religion—a term that sounds like it should be wearing a turtleneck and quoting Alan Watts at a rooftop poetry slam. But truly, Jordan Bates has brewed a rich, spiced spiritual chai here. The kind you sip slowly while watching your old beliefs decompose into fertilizer for your soul’s weird little garden.
Let’s be clear: this isn't “choose your own adventure” spirituality. It’s “remember your ancestors were already in the adventure, and maybe you should stop burning their temples down just because you're now microdosing and reading Rumi.”
The beauty of meta-religion is that it dares to do the unthinkable in our age of algorithmic orthodoxy: include things. It doesn't cancel your upbringing; it composts it. You don't have to become a Zen-washed husk pretending to have no story—you can reclaim the clunky, awkward sacredness of your grandma's rosary and your ayahuasca trip where you briefly became a wombat priest.
“Transcend and include” isn’t just a Ken Wilber soundbite—it’s the mystical equivalent of “keep the baby and the bathwater, but turn the tub into a hot spring.”
And Jordan nails it: each tradition is a facet on an endlessly spinning disco ball of Being. No one path gets a monopoly on divine customer service. Whether you’re worshipping the Tao, the Trinity, or the deep intelligence of fungal networks, what matters is that you show up to the altar of reality with reverence and curiosity—and maybe a towel, because awakening gets messy.
Meta-religion doesn’t say, “everything is true” like some spiritual buffet where wisdom is measured in Instagram likes. It says: everything is a valid way to engage the Mystery—some just come with better music or fewer colonizers.
So yes, build your ether-cathedral. But also remember: sometimes the holiest temple is a weird little room inside your chest where your inner child is still waiting for someone to light a candle and say, “Yes, this too is sacred.”
🕯️ Meta-religion loves you.
Virgin Monk Boy just asks that you take your shoes off before stepping onto the cosmic prayer rug. Unless your path is barefoot dancing in the mud. In which case… carry on, disciple.
I also believe in meta-religion. But my religion includes elements from Christianity, old and new testament, Buddhism, western mysticism, pegan archetypes, as well as fantasy fiction such as star wars and the matrix.
Beautiful, thanks for sharing. My present mosaic holds strong elements of mystical/alchemical Christianity, Peter Brown’s Yoga of Radiant Presence, the Tao of Lao Tzu, Jungian archetypal understandings, the Advaita Vedanta of Anandamayi Ma & others, the Kumankaya Christian ayahuasca & Bufo path, Zen & Dzogchen, mystical men’s work, many forms of music, nature, fatherhood, marriage, family, friendship, and many other less-central threads. I also revere great modern myths such as Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, The Neverending Story, tales by Hesse, Dostoevsky, Murakami, Nietzsche, and DFW — and the mystical poetry of many seers, most notably a vast pantheon of rappers. Direct experience is central to my ever-evolving integration and exploration 🙏🏼❤️🔥
Perspectives are not all complementary. Some are contradictory. I think we have to acknowledge that false ideas exist as well. The idea of “getting it incorrect” is also central to many of the world’s religions too. Would you tell them “their truth” is false in this regard to maintain your meta-perspective?
So yes, we can talk about a multifaceted jewel and say that most if not all religions get something fundamentally correct about reality. Yet, some religions also get something(s) fundamentally wrong. Diversity cannot be homogenized to complete agreement without self-destructing. The jewel is a reality itself. There exist false statements about it. There even exist false experiences which make reality seem to be in a way it isn’t (think magic tricks).
I used to think like this influenced by the apophatic pluralism of Kenneth Rose. You should check out his book “Pluralism”, as it’s very similar. But now, I do think there are some key non-negotiable truths (which I won’t mention here to avoid debate). Actually I believe both of you also hold to some key non-negotiables and I bet if you found out what those were (assuming you dont already know) we could find you a religion which contradicts them as a central doctrine.
The work of “transcending and including” requires having a standard to know which details to transcend and which to include. Anyways, you may agree with the points I’m making, just thinking outloud!
High degree of correspondence with your reply here. The awareness and release of belief and concept is not a one-and-done. Fluid and ongoing instead. What is seen, felt and directly known will naturally and perhaps inevitably give rise to verbal or pictorial representations. Very human. Very wonderful. Without that there is dearth of great art, spiritual teachers and mentors, poets, and musicians. Let the dance, dance on!
Also much appreciation for bringing sensual awareness of the body into the discussion. For me anyway, this awareness effortlessly arises when loosening the sole preoccupation with thought streams, which streams almost always refer to past or future. Returning to here and now seems inseparable from felt experience of the body.
The wild thing is that reality fully has room for 'true vs false' modes as well as modes where all is simply ontologically equal in the light of being... it's not about choosing what to include vs what to transcend... it's simply all included -- yet reality itself is always beyond any way we hold it to be <3
I can agree with your empirical finding, yet also authentically suggest that some earth shaking truth is available when we suspend or let go of beliefs and ideas. How to reveal and "know" universal Presence and Being that's available experientially, but not intellectually? Such an investigation, my hypothesis says, is at the root of most if not all religions. Differences between them are attributable to personal, historical, and cultural differences between religion's founders, and the context in which they lived.
I think we approach such presence as human beings with our own personal conditionings and views also present. Human’s don’t exhaust divine presence. Like the article suggests we get perspectives. But, the way we interpret those perspectives may differ, AND the perspectives we have affect and condition our personal experience of that presence. That presence may be a reality, but our own distortions or more positively lenses humanify that presence. In other words, the human component is always thoroughly mixed into the experience of presence and that experience is never fully equal to that reality it reflects. It is always human+divine we experience, not divine alone.
So the point is our perspectives and beliefs cannot be casually dropped. We are not culturally free and assumption free when we approach presence. Those assumptions result in experiences of presence which are conditioned by us even if the presence itself is not. How then to know the real? Well we can try to do what you suggest and not cling to views and perspectives, but if we believe we have fully dropped them then we are in equally dangerous territory as having asserted our views as being ultimate. In either case we become dogmatists of one kind or another-either “mystical dogmatists” or else “theological dogmatists”.
The solution I believe is to fully integrate the whole of the human in the process. Head (views refined through rigor, debate, exposure to new religions), heart (emotional resonance, knowing through the heart), and gut (knowing through the body, deep seated gut-feelings). So instead of trying to drop views, I see us needing to work with our views as flawed and finite human beings, and to integrate them with our whole being. Then we have a chance to glimpse the jewel, but always through our own perspective!
It may not be clear how this can work with what I said before that some truths can contradict. Well some perspectives are fundamentally disintegrated with heart and body. They act based on a denial of the truths these have to offer. Or else they emphasize experience alone and deny head/reason relying on states of mystical frenzy. More than that it really is the case that perspectives can align more or less with reality. There is a kind of “resonance”-they do not capture reality fully (“there’s always more”), but they do harmonize with it and contain some truth. Other incorrect views may negate accurate (resonant) perspectives, failing to understand them in their own context. For instance a very simple and obvious false view is “there is no experience, no appearances, and we are not conscious at all in any sense”. Basically no one believes this, but there are views which creep up to it in one way or another! Such views are not equally real. They are false, perhaps containing a small glimmer of reality, but false overall.
If we look at a painting, we may have different experiences of the same painting which are all valid. But if the painting is predominantly green, and someone narrowly fixates on the blue sky at the top of it and says “no it’s predominantly blue”, then they are confused by their narrow perspective and incorrect. But we also can’t deny that as humans our attention is always focused on one section or another and our eyes constantly dart around the painting getting different angles. We don’t really see the whole at once. Even if we stepped far enough back, suddenly the details become blurry! Now we have a wider vision and perspective, but we’ve sacrificed detail. So it goes with “presence”.
So, yes drop all clinging to views. But, no do not try to drop all views. You cannot. To do so is to no longer be a conditioned human being. Instead use views as one means among many of knowing truth.
Thank you for posting this Jordan. I'm feeling inspired to write a response, which I will soon as a substack post. Just wanted to drop a note saying that I appreciate your perspective and the nobility of the quest you're on.
"Meta-religion suspects that reality has no way of knowing its own deepest secret."
I love what Bernardo Kastrup has eluded to in some interviews, specifically about Jung's book "Answer to Job "
That "God" hasn't got a clue what's going on either.....
I asked Bernardo, in a recent Q and A, if he agreed that we are teaching God to be a better God. And he said he does agree.
I had a waking up experience 4 years ago. I found it tough. I especially wrestled with notions of God, having a christian background. I hadn't been to church in years. But I still love the stories and wisdom of the bible. And JC. Wow. What a dude !
After many months of head fuck. I saw clearly. There is no God, cos there's nothing but God.
I also love what Voltaire had to say
" “Cherish those who seek the truth but beware of those who find it.”
Great post Jordan. Thank you.
thank you! really appreciate your words! much love & blessings <3
Your insights here are brilliant. They give me the sense that universe is an ever deepening mystery, and we can resonate with its beauty through letting go of answers and opening our beings as perpetual questions. Are we dancing or being danced?
I get the sense it's both ?
I enjoy the flavor of “both, neither, far beyond either”
Get on this too.
“An honest man is the noblest work of God”
― Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man
An honest God is the noblest work of man.
Robert Green Ingersoll
Both, neither, far beyond either ?
I wrote this ages ago.
Transcendence and immanence are two concepts that refer to different ways of understanding the relationship between the ineffable and the physical world.
Transcendence implies a separation between the Divine and the physical world.
Immanence is the integration of both. Not a "letting go" as is popular in new age thinking.
BEING IT. ALL OF IT.
"I searched for God and found only myself. I searched for myself and found only God."
Rumi.
That’s lush. Thank you
paraphrasing: no god = nothing but god. I can't work out this equivalence logically, perhaps because whatever truth it reveals is beyond thought, words, concepts, beliefs. But as a practical matter, such a paradox can be a valid and useful pointer. Like a koan.
yes, a good koan : )
Another home run for JB. Great post! I have been intuitively walking along this path and you put into words in a beautiful way. I am enjoying the list format.
Thank you brother <3 Means a lot
Ah yes, meta-religion—a term that sounds like it should be wearing a turtleneck and quoting Alan Watts at a rooftop poetry slam. But truly, Jordan Bates has brewed a rich, spiced spiritual chai here. The kind you sip slowly while watching your old beliefs decompose into fertilizer for your soul’s weird little garden.
Let’s be clear: this isn't “choose your own adventure” spirituality. It’s “remember your ancestors were already in the adventure, and maybe you should stop burning their temples down just because you're now microdosing and reading Rumi.”
The beauty of meta-religion is that it dares to do the unthinkable in our age of algorithmic orthodoxy: include things. It doesn't cancel your upbringing; it composts it. You don't have to become a Zen-washed husk pretending to have no story—you can reclaim the clunky, awkward sacredness of your grandma's rosary and your ayahuasca trip where you briefly became a wombat priest.
“Transcend and include” isn’t just a Ken Wilber soundbite—it’s the mystical equivalent of “keep the baby and the bathwater, but turn the tub into a hot spring.”
And Jordan nails it: each tradition is a facet on an endlessly spinning disco ball of Being. No one path gets a monopoly on divine customer service. Whether you’re worshipping the Tao, the Trinity, or the deep intelligence of fungal networks, what matters is that you show up to the altar of reality with reverence and curiosity—and maybe a towel, because awakening gets messy.
Meta-religion doesn’t say, “everything is true” like some spiritual buffet where wisdom is measured in Instagram likes. It says: everything is a valid way to engage the Mystery—some just come with better music or fewer colonizers.
So yes, build your ether-cathedral. But also remember: sometimes the holiest temple is a weird little room inside your chest where your inner child is still waiting for someone to light a candle and say, “Yes, this too is sacred.”
🕯️ Meta-religion loves you.
Virgin Monk Boy just asks that you take your shoes off before stepping onto the cosmic prayer rug. Unless your path is barefoot dancing in the mud. In which case… carry on, disciple.
I also believe in meta-religion. But my religion includes elements from Christianity, old and new testament, Buddhism, western mysticism, pegan archetypes, as well as fantasy fiction such as star wars and the matrix.
Beautiful, thanks for sharing. My present mosaic holds strong elements of mystical/alchemical Christianity, Peter Brown’s Yoga of Radiant Presence, the Tao of Lao Tzu, Jungian archetypal understandings, the Advaita Vedanta of Anandamayi Ma & others, the Kumankaya Christian ayahuasca & Bufo path, Zen & Dzogchen, mystical men’s work, many forms of music, nature, fatherhood, marriage, family, friendship, and many other less-central threads. I also revere great modern myths such as Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, The Neverending Story, tales by Hesse, Dostoevsky, Murakami, Nietzsche, and DFW — and the mystical poetry of many seers, most notably a vast pantheon of rappers. Direct experience is central to my ever-evolving integration and exploration 🙏🏼❤️🔥
"transcend and include your ancestral tradition" - for many, this is a better approach.
🙏🏼❤️🔥🙏🏼
Very helpful - I especially like number 19.
Vibey. Worthwhile. Welcome.
I like the multiple “theses” format too.
<3 <3 thank you brother, much Love & Blessings <3
Perspectives are not all complementary. Some are contradictory. I think we have to acknowledge that false ideas exist as well. The idea of “getting it incorrect” is also central to many of the world’s religions too. Would you tell them “their truth” is false in this regard to maintain your meta-perspective?
So yes, we can talk about a multifaceted jewel and say that most if not all religions get something fundamentally correct about reality. Yet, some religions also get something(s) fundamentally wrong. Diversity cannot be homogenized to complete agreement without self-destructing. The jewel is a reality itself. There exist false statements about it. There even exist false experiences which make reality seem to be in a way it isn’t (think magic tricks).
I used to think like this influenced by the apophatic pluralism of Kenneth Rose. You should check out his book “Pluralism”, as it’s very similar. But now, I do think there are some key non-negotiable truths (which I won’t mention here to avoid debate). Actually I believe both of you also hold to some key non-negotiables and I bet if you found out what those were (assuming you dont already know) we could find you a religion which contradicts them as a central doctrine.
The work of “transcending and including” requires having a standard to know which details to transcend and which to include. Anyways, you may agree with the points I’m making, just thinking outloud!
High degree of correspondence with your reply here. The awareness and release of belief and concept is not a one-and-done. Fluid and ongoing instead. What is seen, felt and directly known will naturally and perhaps inevitably give rise to verbal or pictorial representations. Very human. Very wonderful. Without that there is dearth of great art, spiritual teachers and mentors, poets, and musicians. Let the dance, dance on!
Also much appreciation for bringing sensual awareness of the body into the discussion. For me anyway, this awareness effortlessly arises when loosening the sole preoccupation with thought streams, which streams almost always refer to past or future. Returning to here and now seems inseparable from felt experience of the body.
My perspective:
The wild thing is that reality fully has room for 'true vs false' modes as well as modes where all is simply ontologically equal in the light of being... it's not about choosing what to include vs what to transcend... it's simply all included -- yet reality itself is always beyond any way we hold it to be <3
I can agree with your empirical finding, yet also authentically suggest that some earth shaking truth is available when we suspend or let go of beliefs and ideas. How to reveal and "know" universal Presence and Being that's available experientially, but not intellectually? Such an investigation, my hypothesis says, is at the root of most if not all religions. Differences between them are attributable to personal, historical, and cultural differences between religion's founders, and the context in which they lived.
I think we approach such presence as human beings with our own personal conditionings and views also present. Human’s don’t exhaust divine presence. Like the article suggests we get perspectives. But, the way we interpret those perspectives may differ, AND the perspectives we have affect and condition our personal experience of that presence. That presence may be a reality, but our own distortions or more positively lenses humanify that presence. In other words, the human component is always thoroughly mixed into the experience of presence and that experience is never fully equal to that reality it reflects. It is always human+divine we experience, not divine alone.
So the point is our perspectives and beliefs cannot be casually dropped. We are not culturally free and assumption free when we approach presence. Those assumptions result in experiences of presence which are conditioned by us even if the presence itself is not. How then to know the real? Well we can try to do what you suggest and not cling to views and perspectives, but if we believe we have fully dropped them then we are in equally dangerous territory as having asserted our views as being ultimate. In either case we become dogmatists of one kind or another-either “mystical dogmatists” or else “theological dogmatists”.
The solution I believe is to fully integrate the whole of the human in the process. Head (views refined through rigor, debate, exposure to new religions), heart (emotional resonance, knowing through the heart), and gut (knowing through the body, deep seated gut-feelings). So instead of trying to drop views, I see us needing to work with our views as flawed and finite human beings, and to integrate them with our whole being. Then we have a chance to glimpse the jewel, but always through our own perspective!
It may not be clear how this can work with what I said before that some truths can contradict. Well some perspectives are fundamentally disintegrated with heart and body. They act based on a denial of the truths these have to offer. Or else they emphasize experience alone and deny head/reason relying on states of mystical frenzy. More than that it really is the case that perspectives can align more or less with reality. There is a kind of “resonance”-they do not capture reality fully (“there’s always more”), but they do harmonize with it and contain some truth. Other incorrect views may negate accurate (resonant) perspectives, failing to understand them in their own context. For instance a very simple and obvious false view is “there is no experience, no appearances, and we are not conscious at all in any sense”. Basically no one believes this, but there are views which creep up to it in one way or another! Such views are not equally real. They are false, perhaps containing a small glimmer of reality, but false overall.
If we look at a painting, we may have different experiences of the same painting which are all valid. But if the painting is predominantly green, and someone narrowly fixates on the blue sky at the top of it and says “no it’s predominantly blue”, then they are confused by their narrow perspective and incorrect. But we also can’t deny that as humans our attention is always focused on one section or another and our eyes constantly dart around the painting getting different angles. We don’t really see the whole at once. Even if we stepped far enough back, suddenly the details become blurry! Now we have a wider vision and perspective, but we’ve sacrificed detail. So it goes with “presence”.
So, yes drop all clinging to views. But, no do not try to drop all views. You cannot. To do so is to no longer be a conditioned human being. Instead use views as one means among many of knowing truth.
Thanks for the reply!
“If you were born into an ancestral religious tradition, that tradition is your ‘native language’ spiritually, religiously, existentially.”
What is an “ancestral religious tradition” and what does it mean to be “born into” one?
Precise explanations would be helpful.