This Week’s Quotation:

Primal spirituality is spirituality before religion. Before there ever was a religion, before there ever was a spiritual path or a spiritual journey, there was primal spirituality. It is the knowing of our Being, the knowing of who we are, the knowing of our place in the universe, and our role as an embodiment of the Creator in Creation.

Primal spirituality is pristine spirituality. We often think of nature as being pristine. By definition, the Earth is a dirty place. And yet it is, at the same time, pristine, even with all its rotting leaves and other decaying plant life. Even with all the manure from all the animals. Nature is pristine.

The truth of the human experience is also pristine.

Becoming a Sun p. 230

Spirituality Before Religion

What would it mean for us to claim our primal spirituality?

Whether you consider yourself religious or spiritual or not, there is a primal knowing within all people. Primal simply means first. Before anything else—before culture, before growth and development, before religion, there is our primal spirituality.

How do we claim that knowledge for ourselves and honor that most foundational reality of the human experience? How else but by embracing the entire human experience, with all that is happening in it? We have our own human version of rot and decay. And yet, it is all included in a pristine reality.

Speaking of religion, Jesus got himself in trouble by speaking to religious people about these things. He could be brash and confrontational about his primal spirituality. In one argument he had with the people of his day, he said this:

Verily, verily, I say unto you, Before Abraham was, I am.

That statement got him into all kinds of trouble.

His beingness came before the spiritual journey of his people. And he knew it.

The same is true of all people. The difference is that most people don’t know it.

Primal spirituality doesn’t deny the spiritual journey. It doesn’t deny whatever good may come from religion. But the more we claim the already-existing, pristine state in which we live, the more we realize that all true journeys take us to a fuller knowing of that state.

Christmas celebrates the birth of someone who knew these things for himself and, through his example, sought to show that the same is true of all people. In that sense, it was the rebirth of primal spirituality in the world.

Why not let Christmas 2022 be a celebration of the rebirth of primal spirituality for us?

What does it mean to become a sun?

Every human being is already a sun on the inside—a being of intense love and light. The difference is that some people have the vision and courage to become a sun on the outside. This difference is our human destiny.