ABSTRACT
Self-religions offer participants the experience of god. What they experience is themselves, the god within. The self itself is divine. Many will be perplexed by such claims. However, there is little that is new about this form of monism. The self-religions point to parallels, in both Western and Eastern traditions. Thus one of the first self-religions (Psychosynthesis, the Italian psychoanalyst-cum-mystic Assagioli founding the Instituto di Psicosintesi in 1926) cites the Renaissance Neoplatonist Paracelsus: ‘In every human being there is a special heaven, whole and unbroken.’ And the founder of est (the highly influential seminar training established by Erhard in 1971) observes that, ‘Of all the disciplines that I studied, and learned, Zen was the essential one.’ In fact Eastern traditions, whether the teachings of Patanjali, Sufism, or various forms of Buddhism (in particular Vajrayana), lie at the very heart of the self-religions. They are basically Eastern in nature.
