The word primal is from the Latin word primus, which simply means first. So, our primal spirituality is our first spirituality, the spirituality we were born with, and not necessarily the one we were taught if we were taught one. It is the spirituality that we share in common with all people. And it is the truth of our spirituality as human beings that inspired the founders of all faiths.
No one can give a person the knowledge of their primal spirituality. But someone who knows their own primal spirituality can assist another person to find it for themselves. At Sunrise Ranch, we conduct six one-day courses that help a person to do exactly that.
The original leaders of the great faiths of the world today faced a culture in which the deep knowledge of self and the world had grown dim. They faced the ignorance and superstition around them and assisted people in finding their primal spirituality. They communicated what they knew in different languages and with their own unique way of speaking about it. But whether it was Moses, the Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed, or someone else, they sought to assist people to overcome their disempowering superstitious beliefs in favor of knowledge.
All true faiths seek to bring an end to human superstition. It was rampant in the ancient world. It’s rampant in the world today as well.
And what is superstition? It’s believing in powers you’re not a part of and cannot understand, but that profoundly affect your life. And so, as a weak human being who doesn’t control their own fate, you are in the position of attempting to understand what they are up to, placating them, and petitioning them for favorable treatment.
Superstition in the ancient world led to terrible things. Child sacrifice was rampant across the globe, on all inhabited continents. It was a significant factor in the biblical story. Abraham, the great patriarch of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity, faced this superstitious practice when he stopped short of sacrificing his own son to God.
And Abraham reached out with his hand and took the knife to slaughter his son.
But the angel of the LORD called to him from heaven and said, “Abraham, Abraham!” And he said, “Here I am.” He said, “Do not reach out your hand against the boy.”
Genesis 22:10-12, New American Standard Bible
Moses explicitly demanded that the Israelites not participate in the practice of child sacrifice by the people surrounding them.
I will also set My face against that man and will cut him off from among his people because he has given some of his children to Molech…
Leviticus 20:3, New American Standard Bible
The ignorance of this practice was the belief that a supernatural entity named Molech was controlling their lives. The superstition was that his favor could be won with human sacrifice. The result was an experience of victimhood and disempowerment.
The entire biblical story tells of the bizarre attraction to living a life of victimhood and disempowerment. The enlightened prophets of the story taught people to return to their primal spirituality and to experience themselves as empowered co-creators. They counseled people to stay away from the superstitious practices that surrounded them.
What is the antidote to superstition? Knowledge. If a person knows what is happening in their life, they can find their place as a co-creator in it. Jesus said it this way.
…and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.
John 8:32, New American Standard Bible
Knowledge is empowering. And it sets us free from superstition.
People in post-modern Western culture aren’t exposed to child sacrifice. But we do send our children off to war. We give our children up to the media, including social media.
Our culture looks to powerful forces beyond us as individuals to bring prosperity—governments, corporations, technology, and now artificial intelligence. We think, If we just give all power over to these functions, they will provide for us.
Segments of our population place their faith in autocrats who are a constant source of lies and misinformation. Others follow religions that have lost track of the primal spirituality brought by their founders. Many more have no foundation upon which to build their lives other than an endless quest for worldly survival and success. What are these things if not a throwback to ancient ignorance and superstition?
Isaac Newton discovered gravity in 1666 when he witnessed an apple drop from a tree in his garden. This marked the beginning of the scientific revolution that helped humanity move out of ignorance and superstition into a culture that prizes knowledge, or at least information. Today, there are 147 zettabytes of data housed in the computers of the world. One zettabyte is equal to a trillion gigabytes. We’ve developed artificial intelligence that can access that information.
The study of the physical sciences and the development of the scientific method assisted Western culture and then world culture to begin to move out of superstition, and to help us develop technology. But has that brought us as a human family into a place of knowing truth? Or of truly being wise? More and more, we’re discovering that the scientific method and the development of science don’t necessarily give us knowledge about what it means to be a human being. It hasn’t given us the power to bring peace on earth. It didn’t provide us the power to be together as a human family or even as a nuclear family. It didn’t take away our loneliness. Social scientists tell us that social media has added to loneliness. Dramatically!
Science hasn’t made us live in concert with the natural world. And for many people, it hasn’t empowered them to create.
Most of us love technology and probably love science. We’re on our iPhones and everything else. Science and technology offer tools, but they are no substitute for something else, which is knowing the truth of ourselves and the reality of the world in which we live.
Jesus stated that the truth he was speaking of has the power to set people free. Perhaps that means that people would be free from such things as involuntary servitude and persecution, or free from superstition. But freedom isn’t only freedom from something. It is the freedom to do something.
Our Bill of Rights in America talks about our rights to freedom of religion, speech, and assembly. These activities are part of something larger—the freedom to create because we are, by our nature, creators.
And you will know the truth, and the truth that you know will set you free to create.
It’s hard to create if you don’t see, know, and understand the world in which you live. It’s hard to create if you don’t feel and know what’s behind that world. Or if you don’t know the powers of creation within yourself and others.
If you don’t know the truth of another person, how could you be of service to them? And if you see them with eyes of judgment, you are not seeing the truth of who they are. How could you live a fulfilled life yourself if you do not know who you are?
To know the truth that sets us free you have to listen for it. As a boy, I read stories of the Native Americans of the Great Plains. They told of Native American hunters putting their ears to the ground to listen for the buffalo herds. I don’t know how accurate the stories are. Nonetheless, they portray how we come to know the world in which we live. We listen to it. We listen to nature. We listen to each other.
We put our ear to the ground. We look for signs. We open ourselves to receive the truth that is all around us. The whole world is telling us who it is and what it is. People are telling us who they are. But we have to listen to receive the knowledge they are offering us.
Modern science tells us to observe with our mind. And who would reject the necessity of that? But it takes more than a listening mind to know. There has to be a listening heart.
To know the reality of the world in which we live, we have to listen to the heavens as well as the earth—to the mystery of the invisible realms that are the Source of Creation. We must listen to the heartbeat of Creation within us, above us, and all around us.
The scientific revolution was a celebration of the power of the mind. The knowledge brought through the power of the mind has benefited world culture, but at the same time, it has created great risks to humankind.
Are we supposed to be just biological computers? Is that how consciousness works? We don’t know the truth just because we figure it out mentally. To know the truth of the reality in which we live—that is not enough. We have to celebrate the power of the heart to hear and know the Soul within all people and all Creation. We have to open our hearts to find our Soul Family.
When the heart is listening, the vibrations of Creation begin to come through us. The intelligence of the universe lights us up. It tells us who we are as a creator, what is being created now, and what wants to be created through us and in our world. It gives us the pattern of Creation, which is emerging in the world in which we live and reverberating through us.
This knowledge sets us free from superstition, disempowerment, and victimhood. It dispels ignorance like the sun dispels the darkness of night. It sets us free to co-create with Creator Beings everywhere.
There is a spirituality for today that doesn’t shun science, but that knows that there is far more to science than has yet been discovered. And that science and the use of the rational mind should encourage us to use our emotional body for the purpose for which it was designed—to know the heartbeat of Creation and to hear and know the world in which we live. Only then are we truly wise. Only then can we act with wisdom as a co-creator, not making a wreck of things through modern science without wisdom, which humankind has done over and over and over again.
Let’s embrace our primal spirituality with all our heart and mind, and know the truth of ourselves and the world in which we live.