Invited to Russia on business as the Soviet Union was collapsing at the beginning of 1990, I was surprised, in the
avowedly atheistic USSR, by a question that Russians asked me everywhere I went: “Are you religious?” I gave a terse,
truthful response: Religious without a religion.
Not speaking the language, my interpreter remarked, “That sounds good even in Russian.” So I learned it in Russian –
religioznyy bez religii.
As a person prone to so-called mystical experience since I left the Catholic Church at 17, it’s a starting point for
examining what is now being called, “the emergence of a new form of religion, though not a new religion.”
Around business meetings with my joint venture partner, my Russian hosts, in what I soon realized was a large network
with ties to the top, took me to every church they could. These ranged from basically a museum of the former (and now
ruling again) Russian Orthodox Church, to the most concentrated assemblage of devout believers I’d ever seen. (And I
grew up attending compulsory Mass six days a week in a Latinate Catholic Church.) The experience of Gregorian chanting,
with incense filling the church and women weeping in the aisles, is imprinted on my mind and heart.
Finally, in what was still Leningrad, the cultural leaders of the city took me to Russia’s most important and impressive
church, St. Isaacs. I had never been to a European cathedral, and was overwhelmed by the scale and beauty of the
cavernous structure, which was covered in the high Russian style with gold and jewel inlay. The church was completely
empty as we entered, a huge domed space without so much as a pew.
We were all chatting as we walked in, and I immediately motioned for the group of half dozen to be quiet. I had long
wondered why, given the poverty in the Middle Ages, people built cathedrals, often taking generations to complete. As I
stood under the dome alone looking up, the insight came with force: Such places convey the same feeling of mystery and
awe that standing on a peak in the High Sierra gives one. Thus they replicate the beauty of nature.
When I returned to the group, the Russians, seeing that I was clearly moved, remained silent. After some seconds the
cultural leaders of the city that would be again called St. Petersburg by the end of the year asked: “What do we do with
it?”
I laughed. You’re asking an American, your sworn enemy for decades, what to do with the most important spiritual site in
your vast country?
Yes, they said. Ok, I replied, just don’t give it back to the Russian Orthodox Church. Make it a spiritual site for all
Russians of whatever faith and ethnicity.
They did just that, until Putin returned it to the Orthodox Church some years ago in his unholy alliance between State
and Church.
There was a narrow window of opportunity to forge with Russians what my partners and I called “an ecologically and
ethically sound partnership with our former superpower enemy.” ‘Former’ lasted about a decade, as American hubris and
Russian pride carried the day and slammed the door on a true, post-Cold War order.
During President Xi’s visit to San Francisco this week, I read a quote that sums up where things went wrong in relations
between China and America. It’s from a Chinese-American economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan
School of Management: “Essentially, these two countries, China and America, got married without knowing one another’s
religions.” How sadly ironic that rings to my ears.
It’s no use lamenting where things are versus where things could have been if the tremendous goodwill that Russians had
toward Americans and the spiritual and intellectual riches of the Russian people had not been squandered. We are, as
human beings in what is now a global society, in the hellish place we are, and have to find, as one commentator on the
horrendous conflict in Israel put it, “the road out of hell.”
An inner life is essential to human beings. Indeed, without one, we cannot grow as human beings. So what does this
“emerging new form of religion without a new religion” look like, if it can actually come into being? Clearly, it isn’t
the juvenile idea, as one conservative Catholic pundit put it, that “the U.F.O. phenomenon may be revealing some of the
raw material of religion.”
There’s an old joke about organized religion. Someone spends decades searching for the truth, and when she finally
discovers it, the devil comes along and says, “Here, let me help you organize it.”
Therefore without respect to belief systems, is this new form of religion synonymous with a new form of consciousness in
the human being?
I feel so, since we’re talking about the enormous difference between religion and the religious mind. In actuality
however, the new form of religion and consciousness isn’t a form at all, since space and silence have no form.
So what characterizes the religious mind? The religious mind is simply one that has a basic insight into symbolic
thought, and practices, without a method or system, the art of gathering unwilled attention sufficient to quiet the mind
every day.
Self-knowing is the wellspring of insight for the serious human being, which encompasses the totality of one’s conscious
and subconscious mind, as well as the emotions. As such, self-knowing includes the entirety of human consciousness,
which is enfolded in microcosm like a hologram within all of us.
Self-knowing, which is of the moment, non-accumulative and ever changing, enables one to go beyond the prison of
thought-based consciousness (which includes all beliefs, opinions and ideas). And in the silence of Mind that ensues
during methodless meditation, there is communion with the immanent and the eternal.
From this infinite wellspring of insight the human beings will, if man doesn’t destroy everything first, create a new
society and civilization.
Martin LeFevre