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Growing Spiritually Beyond the Forms of Religion · Sri Aurobindo Studies

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  We see a growing movement around the world of people leaving the
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  religion into which they were born and starting down a
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  spiritual path of inner growth. A driving factor behind this
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  change is the perception among these people that the religion
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  has either lost any life force that it may have had in the
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  past, or else it has become so rigid that it acts as a means of
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  control rather than as a means of liberation.
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  What has happened to religion? If we examine the roots of
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  religion, we find that it is founded first and foremost as a
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  response to a lived experience. There is a spiritual awakening,
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  a vision, a direct communication between the divine presence and
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  the human representative. In many cases, a specific set of
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  activities, teachings, routines is developed to both try to
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  communicate the experience to others and to find a way to
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  repeat the experience. Over time, however, this rote
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  repetition and formalized worship tends to lose its energy
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  and become a mass of, in many cases, sleep inducing rituals
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  and rules of conduct that tend to bind the worshippers into a
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  fixed way of seeing and acting in life, even as times and
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  circumstances change. With Christianity, we saw a
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  dramatic development in the adoption by the Emperor
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  Constantine of the Roman Empire of Christianity as the state
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  religion. From that point forward, the
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  religion became a function of the state and was used to
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  control the populace by promising redemption and rewards
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  after death for subordination to powerful economic, political,
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  and religious forces in their lives.
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  Along the way, a few individuals were able to enter into the
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  original spirit of the religion and achieve spiritual
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  enlightenment, and in their lifetimes they were generally
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  either ostracized or condemned, while afterwards they were
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  frequently made into Saints to thereby capture those who tried
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  to follow their experience and turn them back under the control
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  of the religion. Religion, when the life force
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  and spirit recedes, frequently turns to the use of fear to
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  control its adherence, and thus we have teachings of sinful
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  conduct that will cause the individual endless suffering and
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  even prevent him from achieving heaven after his death.
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  In some cases, the wielding of fear is reinforced by physical
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  acts of torture or by exclusion of the individual from the wider
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  community, a means of sustenance and employment and acceptance
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  within the circle of the society generally.
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  Much of the power of the religion, however, is based in
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  the creation of a superstitious internal response that some call
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  conscience, but which is a systematically developed control
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  mechanism inculcated through teaching, repetition, and
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  example, and perpetuated through custom and tradition.
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  At a certain point in time, as we see taking place in today's
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  world, a number of people recognize the dryness and
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  emptiness of the religious institutions, the superstitions,
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  the fixed and rigid belief systems, and the regimented
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  control mechanisms, and they turn elsewhere to seek out new
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  spiritual realizations and direct experience.
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  The mother observes Quote. For example, there are so many
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  of these entities called Kali who are given besides quite
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  terrible appearances. So many are even placed in
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  houses as the family goddess. They are full of a terrible
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  vital force. I knew people who were so
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  frightened of the Kali they had at home that indeed they
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  trembled to make the least mistake, for when catastrophes
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  came, they thought it was Kali who sent them.
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  It is a frightful thing, thought.
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  I know them, those entities, I know them very well.
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  But they are vital beings, vital forms which, so to say, are
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  given a form by human thought. And what forms?
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  And to think that men worship such terrible and monstrous
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  things. From this point of view it is
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  good that for some time men get out of this religious atmosphere
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  so full of fear and this sort of blind, superstitious submission,
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  of which the hostile forces have taken a dreadful advantage.
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  The period of denial positivism is from this viewpoint quite
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  indispensable in order to free men from superstition.
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  It is only when one comes out of that and the abject submission
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  to monstrous vital forces that one can rise to truly spiritual
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  heights and there become the collaborator and true instrument
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  of the forces of truth, the real consciousness, the true power.
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  One must leave all this far behind before one can climb
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  higher. End Quote.
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  Reference Shriyorobindo and the Mother, The Hidden Forces of
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  Life, Chapter 5, Occult Forces, pages 119 to 120.