Inward and outward religion, which one do you follow? Do you search for the soul within you, that part of you that is part of the blessed whole that is the cosmos? Do you seek the external forces that connect to you from the divine realm? Those Gods and Goddesses that are both part of and separate from all that is? Do you seek both?
The Greek religion, fortunately, evolved both forms of religious expression and introspection that allows us today to explore both the external and the internal of human religious thought.
The external is fairly simple. It is the need of man to commune with the divine expressed outward for the Gods themselves to see. It is ritual, poetry, song, and dance. It is the magnificent temple and the gracious garden sanctuary. It is the most pure hearted of all human expressions, for it is seeking to share something with another, that other being both our fellow man and the divine Gods.
The internal is harder to come to terms with. It is simply a matter of our own experience, seeking to make sense of all that we feel, all that we seem to know without being taught, and most of all, all that we fear come face to face with us in a dark mirror. It is the seeking of a reality that lies inside each and every one of us that binds us one to the other because we are all linked to the divine in some way.
The last couple of years have I seen changes in me. I still don’t believe in the fantasy of an eternal soul or an afterlife, but I have come to believe that there is something in us that is not us but part of a greater reality. Not something that survives death and is reborn, or anything like that, but something we share with the tree, the rock, the sea, the sky, the eternal blackness of space and the blinding light of the sun.
What is that? Where is it? Why?
The Chinese once called it “Heaven” and had created a system of belief they called “The Way of Heaven” that gave them a connection to this idea. The Vedic religion of India developed religious ideas around the concept of the Brahman, an ineffable something that was part of everything, and everything was a part of it. They found within themselves an atman, and constructed it through a pacifying of their emotions and desires.
The Greeks found, through Plato, the demiurge, and the demiurge was not a God in the true sense, but a movement or an action that caused all that is to come into being, using the eternal forms as the basis for all that is. The world around us is an imperfect emanation of these forms, from the smallest particle to the largest of galaxies, at least that is partly what he taught.
But what do I believe in so far as these things are concerned?
All things in nature, in our universe at least, begin at some point. The Gods are part of the eternal sphere, and so they do not have something you or I could call a beginning, but speculating about what could be the beginning of the Gods is pointless because it is simply not something we are capable of understanding. Even mathematicians, who have developed what is, perhaps, the best language for the exploration of such concepts as infinity and eternity, cannot claim to be able to fully conceptualize in a real way what those two concepts feel like, look like, or sound like.
Given the nature of our dimensional plane of being, things in our universe have a beginning, and what we call the big bang is that beginning.
This is, essentially, the demiurge at work. It is not a creator god in the sense of an all powerful deity that creates the universe, but of the entry into a third dimensional space time of the Gods. These Gods are called the Protogonoi. The first ones or most ancient ones.
On an internal level, all living beings feel this, know this instinctively. We sense the Gods in the same way we perceive time, in a peripheral way, and one of the ways is internally, through that living connection all life shares at the core with all other life in all other dimensional planes of being.
This, what some call the soul, is not eternal in the sense that you or I will live forever after we die, but it is eternal in the sense that it is something we share of the nature of the universe/multiverse.
But this soul is something we can nurture, not because that will allow us to live forever, but because nurturing it, growing it, listening to it, is a way we can learn to be better people. It is a way we learn how to connect with the Gods and expand our consciousness beyond our selfish desires and needs.
But the human experience is always dichotomous. Removing ourselves from selfishness is the key to inner peace and a true religious life, but being mortal means we are also in constant need. We need to eat, to connect to other human beings, stimulation of the mind in order to maintain our sanity. It makes the struggle to be selfless almost impossible. And here is another dichotomy, that the harder something is, the more we seek it and the more rewarding the result.
The Greek Religion did not seem to be overly concerned with inner awareness. The soul itself was not the main concern of the people, but the external expression of faith and piety became the way man sought to connect to the Gods.
This lead the Greeks to develop mysteries, such as those of Demeter and Persephone at Eleusis, that allowed man to experience the ineffable nature of the Gods through external rather than internal means. Many call this Orthopraxic religion, a religion that places importance not on what a person believes internally, but on how they express due respect and honor to the divine externally.
Greek Religion is, for the most part, an orthopraxic religion. You and I will agree on some matters of theology, disagree on others, but we are both expected to show proper respect to the gods in private and in public.
But can the two viewpoints come to an accord. Is it possible to create an orthodoxy of basic theological beliefs while maintaining the orthopraxic ideal of “freedom of belief.”
I am not sure it is, so maintaining the orthopraxic ideal becomes the more important of the two, and Hellenic Religion allows the orthodoxic views to gather in cult and even poleis, while allowing the general religion to do as they will.
For me, however, the little rituals I manage on a daily basis are accompanied by a search for the internal connection. I meditate or contemplate many concepts that I hope help me be a good and honest person, and these are almost always associated with my contemplations on the nature of the Gods.
How does something like this work?
Meditation, as practiced by the Chinese, Hindus, Buddhists, etc., is not really a Hellenic practice, but the Hellenes were famous for their adaptability, and I seek to adapt this practice to my own personal use.
Some forms of meditation require one to seek stillness. To give up the self and be “nothing” or “think nothing” in order to inspire a sense of selflessness. Other forms of meditation require contemplation on something specific. Whether it is the Vedic sacred sound “Om” or a deity or the nature of the Brahman, it forces one to think about something that will, hopefully, inspire deeper understanding of both the divine and our own inner domain.
My inner search is a difficult one. My mind is chaotic and difficult to bring to stillness, but I have found that combining ritual with meditation in a way that allows for movement meditation (Tai-chi does this too, by the way) has allowed me to often quell the chaos of my mind and in doing so have found myself face to face, so to speak, with deity and, most importantly, with my inner self.
My inner self is tumultuous. It is without doubt a result of earlier issues in my life, both physical and psychological, but this form of introspection is allowing me to control the emotional turmoil that disrupts the way I think.
As a matter of course, my conversion to Hellenism has pushed me to this point in my life. The Gods have moved me to seek them out and open myself to their influence so that I may understand the inner me and learn to control it.
Contemplation of deity is an easy enough thing to do. Our mythos and legend give us pointers, and for me, the concept of patron deities is important to this inner religious exploration.
My patron deities are several, but my primary deities have remained fairly constant throughout my time as a Hellenistos. Athena, warrior virgin goddess of wisdom. Hades, lord of the underworld, master of death, and my silent patron. Hestia, lady of the hearth, keeper of the sacred flames of Olympus.
Of these three, Hestia receives the most ritual in my home. She is at the center of my personal cult because she is the mistress of the home, and that home is her temple. Athena, however, fares most commonly in the inner search for deity.
I have always held close to Athena as Goddess of Wisdom and patroness of Philosophy (love of wisdom) and as such, it has always been this aspect of her that I have most often turned to in meditation.
Movement is important to me, because my mind and body have a hard time being still, and because if any Goddess can be said to be in constant movement, it is Athena. Athena moves on the water, she moves armies, she stirs the hearts of men into action, and so she became the heart and soul of my inner search for peace.
So I meditate. Soft music, to detract from the sounds of traffic, and I use the movements of my ritual, such as the cleansing of the hands and the lighting of incense, to set my mind into a state of focus.
This isn’t a long process for me, I have to work up to longer meditations, but as my mind focuses, I seek a concept in my head, preferably one that has weighed heavily on my mind during the day, and I try to let it unfold into something fully realized.
What does this mean?
I will use a recent example. The concept of deity is a complex one, and the nature of deity is even more complex for its essential ineffability, and I tried to relate it to my more rational thought processes. I sought out Athena in my mind. I do not conceptualize the Gods as anthropomorphic in my mind, so for me she was something a kin to a bright star shining in darkness. This brought to mind the old idea that had the earth at the center of the universe surrounded by spheres. This in turn brought to mind cosmology, and that in turn forces me to seek more focus because all of these are distractingly complex matter to think about.
So, cosmology and spheres, how do they relate? The star was the key, that is to say, the first mental image of Athena as a star in darkness was the key. A star is a brilliant and tumultuous thing. This image of it is only part of the truth. It is distant and unreachable, yet its light reaches us, is experienced by us, it has meaning to us.
Here the connection blossomed, and the spheres made sense. Our universe, as we experience it, is three-dimensional. The vastness of the cosmos itself, however, is far more than three dimensional, and the star in the distance was a conceptual view of a deity that exists at a much larger level of the cosmos, the eternal sphere that encompasses all others, and they are perceptible to us in the same way time is, in slices, because we are not part of the fourth dimension. We experience it because it is part of the over all cosmos, and the Gods, far beyond that fourth dimension, are timeless.
The star, or that conceptualization of Athena in my mind, showed me that the Gods exist in the entirety of the cosmos because they are part of the ultimate reality, are, in fact, the ultimate reality, but that like the distance that does not allow me to perceive the star correctly, the dimensional distance between myself and the Gods will not allow me to ever perceive them in their entirety.
What this accomplished for me was two fold. One, for a time, my mind was focused on a single thought process. This meant that I was able to connect to a part of myself that is not always accessible to me. Two, it gave me an “answer” to a complex thought that would have driven me to distraction had I not focused my energies into its resolution.
Spiritually, it gave me the slow moment I needed to connect to something greater than myself and forget myself in a thought process, to forget the selfish needs of my human body, and to relinquish my need for control which is just another selfish desire.
Desire is not itself a bad thing. I do not seek to become a yogin or renouncer, I seek to learn to keep my inner turmoil at bay so that I may learn and be real in a very real world and thus be a better person.