Religion isn't really about worshiping a god, that’s just a cover story. The basic mission of them all is altering reality. Civilizations located in arid climates didn’t necessarily revere the rain god, but sought to flatter it with great ceremonial displays of affection, along with the occasional sacrifice ......so it would rain. We’re modern people, and we can cut out the middlemen, even though they be legion. Instead we can talk about bending reality directly, without all the incense and chanting.
First of all, it would be handy to decide what’s meant by ‘reality.’ Is reality just what you perceive, based on your own little bundle of life-experiences and unquestioned habits of thought, or is there something real out there independent of us, that we could all see together? The answer is ‘no, there isn’t,’ or, if there is, we can’t know it. All we have is this little machine that sorts all we see into discreet comparisons with stuff we’ve seen before, we call it thinking, and constantly discards the rest. If you’ve evolved ahead of the rest of us, and can see around corners and understand time, none of the rest of this applies to you, but for any remaining, you’re living in a box and the walls are defined by where you’ve been and what you’ve seen, perhaps along with what you’ve read and thought about, and that makes all of our realities a bit different.
Instead of religion, consider art, and it’s ability to shape and alter reality by exercising and stretching the flabby physique of the perceptual net, by tuning and calibrating personal discernment and stretching out the attention-span, and by opening up silted channels of sight and dredging out harbors of thought. Something else art does for us, has always done, and that’s to give us an island to swim toward, all of us are adrift in this sea of infinite possibility. Religions have all employed art to shape the reality they wanted, angels in clouds and demon enforcers below, but we don’t have to do it that way anymore.
Could looking at art cause rain to fall on parched crops, probably not, but no one knows how effective sacrifice at the temple is either. What art can do it is offer new possibilities to the nervous system, knocking the needle out of its well-worn groove, and the person probably won’t even know it's happening. Even so, in time they’ll begin to notice more detail in their surroundings, they'll listen better, and for some reason even good food will taste better. This is altering reality, as real as it gets. In the larger world, being more open to the array of possibilities at almost every moment should lead to better outcomes, and when the notion of irrigation arises, the rain god becomes less relevant and sacrifice goes out of style.
As identity silos become slimmer, as music becomes more fundamental, and as advertising covers every visible surface, wouldn’t now be a good time to unclog reception channels pounded shut by invasive stimuli, and utilize art for altering your own reality, tuning in to the world we all see, together?
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