Apart from a few years as a child, when I attended a Methodist Sunday School, I have never been a regular churchgoer or a member of any conventional religious organisation. Indeed, I don't think my own way of seeing things sits very comfortably with any such organisation any more than it does with the more vociferous proponents of atheism (or what has become described as the 'new atheism'). Nevertheless, I have always been curious to know what truth there might be behind religion even though I've never been able to blindly accept things on faith that seem to me to be absurd.
The philological roots of the word 'religion' are interesting. Most people are agreed that it comes from the Latin verb 'religare' which means to reconnect - but reconnect to what? In today's world religious fervour and religious expression would often seem to have the affect of disconnecting rather than reconnecting. And to say that religion means to reconnect to God is a little too simplistic, especially considering everyone seems to have a different concept of what God is. However, it does seem likely that the controversial mystical philosopher Gurdjieff offers us a few clues as to what might be meant by the idea of 'reconnecting' in the way that it was perhaps intended to be understood by the original founders of the major religions. He posited the very sensible idea that the root of our problems, perhaps even the root cause of what is called evil, results from an imbalance in the human psyche that affects every single one of us to varying degrees. In the terminology he uses, our 'intellectual', 'emotional' and 'instinctive moving' centres rarely work together harmoniously and are almost always at odds with one another with one centre often trying to do the work of another centre. A very simple example of the wrong working of centres is when the instinctive-moving centre carries on the work of reading a book while the intellectual centre is occupied elsewhere and not taking in the slightest word being read. Of course this is a fairly harmless example. However, history is littered with examples of catastrophes and cruelty, often perpetrated in the name of religion, which almost certainly had at their root the destructive energy which can be unleashed by the wrong working of centres. So what does this have to do with religion or 'reconnecting' you may ask? Well, perhaps initially one of the main aims of religion was to work towards the possibility of more frequent experiences of this 'reconnection of the centres' so that the mind was at greater peace, the feelings were able to act with a kind of objective sensitivity rather than from subjective reaction, and the body was able to move with elegance and economy in performing whatever duties it had to do. It is highly probable that the various forms of Buddhist meditation and the early Christians' idea of silent prayer, among other kinds of spiritual disciplines, were and still are meant to be means for aiding this attempt at reconnection and greater balance.
