The Religious Urge distinguishes the heart's ineradicable religious instinct from traditional religious forms, and clarifies the services and disservices of institutional religion. It stresses that fulfilling the religious instinct is an essential step toward the attainment of wholeness, and that this step may or may not involve the rituals and teachings of an established religious organization.
With broad tolerance and critical insight, The Religious Urge speaks directly to the individuating modern mentality. It welcomes the diversity in religion and acknowledges, with profound gratitude, the invaluable services of inspired spiritual teachers throughout the world's history and in the contemporary scene. But at the same time, it fully sympathizes with those for whom institutional religion has become an oppressive cause of fruitless conflict. It will be useful to those struggling to re-establish reliable religious values, to those struggling for freedom from religious systems that have become stifling, to those who overvalue religion, and to those who undervalue it.
As throughout his writings, P.B. here discusses religion as the most elementary of three levels of spiritual development, succeeded in turn by the practice of mysticism and by the study and practice of mystical philosophy. A key point of this section, however, is that we should not take "most elementary'' to mean "least important.'' Rather, we should see a complete activation and integration of the religious instinct as our most fundamental resource when exploring the nature of self and world. A proper integration of this instinct, in its mature form, is essential to the establishing of a correct relationship between the ego and the divine individuality.
A final introductory remark on this section concerns the fifth chapter. Readers for whom this volume is a first contact with P.B.'s writing should not be misled by the fact that most of the paras on specific religions address Christianity. It appears that this section was so weighted because it was intended primarily for an audience whose religious experience has been with and through Christianity. Material on a variety of other religions runs throughout The Notebooks, especially in category fifteen, The Orient.
Editorial conventions here are the same as stated in the introductions to Perspectives and The Quest. Likewise, (P) at the end of a para indicates that it also appears in Perspectives, the introductory volume to this series.