31 Principles of Meta-Religion
What is meta-religion and how can it help you?
I believe meta-religion is needed at this time.
I consider myself a kind of meta-Christian, and this capacity to transcend and include my ancestral Christian lineage is tremendously precious and useful to me.
I believe cultivating a meta-religious capacity would be beneficial for many beings at this time—and may be necessary for our species to avert some of its more dystopian timelines and reach toward higher possibilities on Earth.
Today I’d like to share a list of foundational principles of meta-religion.
31 Principles of Meta-Religion
If you were born into an ancestral religious tradition, that tradition is your ‘native language’ spiritually, religiously, existentially. There is something irreplaceable—felt in your heart, soul, and bones—about a native spiritual language.
There is likely gold waiting for you in the process of healing your relationship with your ancestral tradition—and reintegrating parts of it into your life.
Our ancestral traditions are often like ancient mighty Sequoias—super-structures reaching into the deep past. To reconnect to this ~millennia-old super-structure is to discover a spiritual backbone, a sense of deep-rooted grounding, and a precious experience of ancestral connection and continuity.
The modern ‘spiritual-but-not-religious’ crowd tends to drift somewhat aimlessly and capriciously among an endless smorgasbord of practices, tools, techniques, teachings, and traditions. This is a perfectly valid exploration, yet it tends to lack the deep-rootedness, the marrow, the tree-trunk, the fit, the depth, the ancestral connection, and the karmic appropriateness of anchoring oneself in one’s ancestral tradition.
Yet many people who do attempt to re-join their ancestral religions often encounter a great sense of inner conflict, contradiction, or dissonance in the process. For many people, there can be a feeling of obligation to believe everything from one’s ancestral tradition—or a sense of needing to reject all the wisdom one has gathered from other spaces, teachings, and traditions.
Meta-religion solves this challenge. Essentially, meta-religion invites you to transcend and include your ancestral tradition.
What this means, in practice, is to recognize that no single religion or tradition is the end-all-be-all. Reality is trans-religious, trans-modal, trans-perspectival—forever beyond yet ever-inclusive of all its numberless perspectives, religions, and experiential modes. Each mode, perspective, or religion is like a fresh angle or side of the infinite-dimensional polyhedron-jewel of reality. And no single mode, perspective, or religion can ever fully encapsulate or monopolize the ever-slippery truth of what is.
The infinite-dimensional polyhedron-jewel. Ancient religions tend to be mosaic-like collections of extraordinarily rich perspectival-experiential modes—rich, mythopoetic ways for reality to be with itself. These mythopoetic-experiential lenses have often been encoded with many subtle layers of ancestral wisdom.
Meta-religion reveals that it is entirely possible to deeply appreciate and reintegrate your ancestral religious tradition, while still recognizing it as a collection of perspectival-experiential modes.
Meta-religion recognizes that all perspectival-experiential modes are valid, real, and true in a profound sense. Any way that reality seems to be, is a real way reality can seem to be. Any deeply internalized perspective tends to become experiential. Any experience a conscious being has, is a real and true way reality can be experienced. Any way the presence of being presents, is fully and literally the presence of being. And being itself is the foundational miracle of existence—without which nothing would be.
So meta-religion holds a deep reverence for experience itself—for being itself—in all of its sprawling, many-flavored, numberless expressions. Being itself—the simple undeniable fact that this presence is here—is seen to be the ‘common denominator,’ the ‘finish line,’ and ‘what all the fuss is about.’ Meta-religion gapes in astonishment at the sheer fact of being—and the way in which being forever opens into more of itself, exploring its numberless modes and expressions.
Meta-religion notices that, in a profound sense, all religions, all words, and all symbols do point to the same astounding mystery of being. Yet simultaneously, meta-religion notices that the exoteric and esoteric forms of the myriad earthly religions also hold great diversity, in that they tend to prioritize, emphasize, and lead individuals toward a vast multiplicity of modes of being—(wildly) different ways being can express and experience itself.
In a profound sense, all rivers lead to the ocean and are made of the ocean. Yet in another sense, all rivers are utterly unique and lead to unique vistas. “There are as many paths to God as there are individuals.”
Again, meta-religion notices that the miracle of oceanic being is fully present in all its numberless modes or streams. Yet it also notices that individual conscious beings—which can be seen as waves, harmonics, or sub-systems within the all-inclusive oceanic continuum of being—have natural karmic affinities with certain modes or streams.
Meta-religion therefore celebrates the freedom of conscious beings to explore and fluidly drift among the numberless modes of reality, free to discover their own natural flow and center of gravity among the infinite ways reality can be with itself.
And again, meta-religion suggests that beings are likely to find substantial ‘buried treasure’ within their ancestral tradition: Pragmatic tools, practices, rituals, ceremonies, gatherings, celebrations, architectures, stories, heart-surgical technologies, and operating systems that are ‘karmically fitted’ to their souls in exquisite ways—providing a sense of cozy deep-rooted grounding in ancestral continuity.
That said, meta-religion also recognizes the vital importance of updating, renewing, and rewilding our ancestral traditions—utilizing discernment to ‘dust off the cobwebs,’ infuse new life, and decline to integrate pieces of ‘outdated software’ that appear to have been distorted or corrupted by mankind.
And meta-religion also joyfully invites us to integrate wisdom from other spaces if we are inclined to do so—exploring, experimenting, cross-pollinating. and remixing so as to discover new modes and flavors that are deliciously auspicious for us as individuals, and which may provide resonant sustenance for others as well.
This allows for ‘the best of both worlds’ in which we can ‘have our cake and eat it too’: We discover that it is possible to be both deeply rooted in ancestral tradition—benefitting from the spiritual backbone of an ancient familial-cultural Sequoia—while also exploring the edges of wisdom, spelunking reality’s numberless modes, sampling the wide-ranging New Age smorgasbord, and searching for spices we may wish to infuse into the bubbling curry of our individual being-ness, as we seek to create a perspectival-experiential ‘culinary masterpiece’—a personal ether-cathedral supremely well-suited to our unique being, which also holds promising medicine for others in harmony with the whole, if we’re lucky.
You may find that you are less inclined to explore and more inclined to simply root deeply into the nourishment of your ancestral tradition. Or you may find that you are designed to be more of a pioneer playing at the edges. This is all entirely natural and welcome. “Different strokes for different strokes.” Many flavors are needed. Meta-religion is all about trusting your unique karmic blueprint.
Meta-religion recognizes that it has always been the case that each conscious being has his own religion—his own uniquely prioritized collection of perspectival-experiential modes; his own intimate ways of relating to reality. Meta-religion simply makes this fact conscious, invites us to celebrate it, invites a wise relationship to ancestral tradition, invites an openness to exploring endlessness, and invites us to consciously build the most wondrous, cozy, omni-uplifting ether-cathedral that we’d love to live in and share with our children, family, friends, and the whole.
Some may ask, “Which religion is actually true, though?” To this meta-religion responds that reality can never step outside of itself to objectively assess itself. Quantum physics has suggested that reality behaves differently depending on whether it is being observed—suggesting a mysterious interplay of ‘subjective’ and ‘objective.’ Meta-religion notices that reality seems trans-subjective and trans-objective: “Both, neither, far beyond either.”
Meta-religion suspects that reality has no way of knowing its own deepest secret. The trans-resolvability—reality’s endless capacity to transcend and include any way it is held to be—is baked in. Meta-religion suspects that if reality could speak for itself, it would note that it finds the idea of dubbing one set of modes ‘ultimately true’ at the expense of all the others to be rather boring. The fun is in the all-inclusivity, multidimensionality, fluidity, slipperiness, non-fixity, creativity, shape-shifting-ness, and everything-everywhere-all-at-once-ness. These qualities enable the endless playful dance.
“Yes, but, which religion is actually true?” Meta-religion suggests that they’re all true; none of them provide a complete picture; and the truth includes and transcends all of them.
For meta-religion, it is crucial to understand that suprapersonal divinity—being itself—can emanate forth as an endless pantheon of avataric ‘faces of God.’ When a Muslim weeps before the Grace of Allah; or a Christian’s heart cracks open to the Love of Christ; or a Taoist is subsumed into the Tao; or a paleolithic shaman comes face to face with the Goddess; or an indigenous animist sees Great Spirit shining in all things; or a scientist gasps in astonishment at the universe’s gargantuan mysteries—these are all utterly real and sacred experiences of divinity: Different ‘faces of God’ that reveal uniquely flavorful and preciously poetic ways reality can be with itself.
Far from diminishing or dismissing any such experiences as mere ‘culturally relativized illusions,’ meta-religion utterly celebrates and maximally affirms the reality of all these ‘faces of God.’ All these—and ultimately all experiences whatsoever—are seen as expressions of being’s miraculous capacity to immersively explore literally endless never-before-seen fractal permutations of its own hyper-connected interbeingness.
This all-inclusive adventure through labyrinthine wholeness emanates ambient primal qualities of hyper-meaning, intelligence, wonder, grace, completeness, artistry, and love.
Meta-religion notes that being itself is the simple ever-present truth. In that sense, truth is all there is. Yet as soon as you attempt to grasp, formalize, concretize, or otherwise pin down being, it slips through your fingers like rain.
Noticing the futility of all attempts to map ‘objective truth,’ meta-religion is much more fascinated by the question of: Which perspectival-experiential modes are we wise to codify and encourage within the reality-maps we pass on to our children?
And meta-religion suspects that many of the best answers to that question will be found within our ancestral traditions—especially as we revitalize, rewild, and renew them through celebration, discernment, integral infusions of other wisdom-streams, and the ever-fresh waters of direct mystical experience.
Meta-religion loves you. Exactly as you are.
Warm Bear Hug,
Jordan
P.S. If you are interested in exploring any of this more deeply or applying it to your life, feel welcome to reply to this email and let me know, or schedule a heart-to-heart with me here. I am happy to share dialogue around these topics.
You may also find this interesting as another articulation of meta-religion:
And feel fully welcome and invited to comment with any initial perspectives or impressions. I enjoy hearing from you.
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.