India, Oct. 10 -- Not long ago, on an American podcast, a thoughtful host put a proposition to me. Religions, he said, are by their nature dualistic and separatist. They divide the creator from the created, the believer from the infidel, us from them. Human beings have persecuted and killed one another along exactly these lines. So perhaps humanity must now evolve beyond religion altogether.

I understand how one arrives there. Look at the history of organised faith and the evidence seems overwhelming. Yet the conclusion is backwards. We do not have to go beyond religion; we have to go beneath what has passed for religion, to its buried core. And at the core of every religious stream worth the name lies not division but the ending of divi...