For more than two thousand years, religion has been one of humanity’s central organizing principles, alongside family and nation. Most people alive today have encountered religion in one form or another, whether through belief and practice, cultural inheritance, spiritual searching, or even through the decision to reject religious belief.

Why, throughout history, have people turned to religion and spirituality, especially in times of difficulty? What did religion provide that people could not readily find elsewhere?

In our postmodern world of extraordinary technological capability and material abundance, people continue to struggle, often with growing intensity, with health, mental wellbeing, relationships, identity, meaning, and a sense of belonging. Many therefore turn to traditional religion for solace and orientation, yet for increasing numbers, inherited religious forms no longer seem able to provide what they once did.

What is the story of religion inside the epochal change underway, as one epoch approaches its conclusion and another begins to emerge? What was the function of religion, and what might become possible now?

In Universalis #34, Aviv Shahar, together with Karen Heney and Kyriaki Nikandrou, continues the inquiry into religion begun in Universalis #32 and #33.

Building on the Essence View opened in those conversations, they explore two additional perspectives, the People’s View and the Epochal View, before bringing all three into a larger picture.

At the heart of the conversation is the proposition that religion historically nourished and facilitated three essential forms of communion:

1. Communion with one another: religion created rituals, gatherings, celebrations, and shared practices through which people came together at important moments in their lives and at significant times in the seasonal calendar.
2. Communion with the bounty and mystery of nature: especially in early tribal and shamanic cultures, religious life helped people participate in and relate to the living world around them.
3. Communion with something beyond: with the invisible, the sacred, a higher power, or a source greater than oneself.

In our increasingly atomized lives, saturated with technological stimulation, something very different has come to occupy much of the space once held by these nourishing communions. Entertainment and continual stimulation can consume attention and energy rather than replenish them, leaving less interior space in which the deeper questions of life can arise.

Religion also served as a mediating structure. It offered a theater, a symbolic language, and a story through which people could locate the circumstances of their lives inside a larger frame. Birth and death, suffering and celebration, the seasons and the mysteries of existence could acquire meaning, significance, and purpose. Through this symbolic language, people could orient toward and commune with something invisible yet potent.

The conversation then turns to the Epochal View and the Essence View, including a revelatory diagram describing the octave step-down of religion. What happens when a religion becomes progressively disconnected from the living essence that originally inspired its founder or finder, catalyzed its teaching, and gathered its first community?

At its source, this living contact could offer nourishment, strength, vitality, healing, uplift, and the inspiration to sculpt oneself inwardly in the image of the essence encountered. As the original contact became more distant, structures arose to preserve and transmit what had been discovered: teachings were ordered, practices formalized, and institutions built. Over time, however, the form could remain even when the vibrant presence that originally animated it was increasingly difficult to access.

This leads to a pivotal question: Can the Green updating impulse rejuvenate the Yellow epochal current and open a pathway back toward essence communion?

Throughout the epoch, there have always been people who in one way or another declared: Hold on a minute. This cannot be all there is. I am not prepared to settle for a second-hand or third-hand experience. Show me the path toward direct interior experience and a form of knowing that is not merely recycled or conceptual.

Can that impulse be rediscovered and renewed for our time?

In Portals, we believe it can, and that the time to explore this possibility is now.

Highlights from the Conversation

• The function of the Axial religions was to fuel humanity’s journey through the epoch, providing vessels that could support the movement from the planetary tribal human, through the individuating Solaris human, and toward the foothills of the Universalis human.
• Religion and entertainment can produce opposite energetic effects. If religion at its best sought to nourish and replenish human beings, much contemporary entertainment captures and consumes attention and energy, leaving less inner space to engage with the larger questions of existence.
• In the Sevenfold Epochal program, Yellow represents a realignment impulse. Where Orange expansion can lead to fragmentation, Yellow seeks to restore coherence and reopen communion with a higher principle.
• The Essence View begins with the founder or finder: a person driven by a profound search who makes contact with an essence, presence, or angelic form. From that communion arises a charisma that informs a teaching and catalyzes a community around it.
• The essence source of religion could offer healing, uplift, energetic nourishment, and even experiences of redemption and renewal. It also offered people the possibility of inwardly shaping and sculpting themselves in relation to the essence they encountered.
• The octave step-down of religion illuminates how living contact can gradually become teaching, codification, institution, and eventually habitual practice. The outer motions may remain even when the inner transference of knowing and the animating presence have become difficult to access.

The Green impulse represents a recurring human refusal to settle for inherited or second-hand formulations. It asks whether direct interior experience, living knowing, and renewed essence communion can once again become available.

The Three Communions invites us to reconsider religion not simply as belief, doctrine, or institution, but through the human and epochal functions it sought to serve, and to ask what becomes possible when the thirst for communion seeks a new expression.

This episode continues the Universalis journey into the evolving frontiers of human consciousness, coherence, and capacity, where knowing becomes a living force, and validation is no longer abstract but deeply alive in the experience of life itself. Information about upcoming special events can be found on the Events page. Also visit and subscribe to our YouTube channel.