First, RELIGION is essentially discernment. It is discernment between God and the world, between the Real and the unreal, or between the Everlasting and the ephemeral. Secondly: RELIGION is union. It is union with God, the Great Spirit. Everything in RELIGION has its foundation in one of these two elements: in discernment or in union. Man is intelligence and will, and RELIGION is discernment and concentration . . . Religion is discernment between the Everlasting and the ephemeral, and union with the Everlasting. In other words, RELIGION is basically discernment and concentration; separation from evil, which is illusion, and union with the Divine Good, which is Truth and eternal Reality. (GTUFS: FSun, A Message on Indian Religion)
A RELIGION is an integral whole comparable to a living organism that develops according to necessary and exact laws; one might therefore call it a spiritual organism, or a social one in its most outward aspect. In any case, it is an organism and not a construction of arbitrary conventions; one cannot therefore legitimately consider the constituent elements of a RELIGION independently of their inward unity, as if one were concerned with a mere collection of facts. (GTUFS: UnityReligions, Christianity and Islam)
Religions are like lamps of colored glass; now a lamp lights a dark place because it is luminous and not because it is red of blue or yellow or green. On the other hand, the color transmits the light, but on the other hand, it falsifies it; if it is true that without a given colored lamp one would see nothing, it is quite as true that visibility cannot be identified with any one color. (GTUFS: ChristIslam, The Idea of “The Best” in Religions)
Religion (orthodox / heterodox): A RELIGION is orthodox on condition that it offers a sufficient, if not always exhaustive, idea of the absolute and the relative, and therewith an idea of their reciprocal relationships, and also a spiritual activity that is contemplative in its nature and effectual as concerns our ultimate destiny. It is notorious that heterodoxies always tend to adulterate either the idea of the divine Principle or the manner of our attachment to it; they offer either a worldly, profane or, if you like, “humanist” counterfeit of RELIGION, or else a mysticism with a content of nothing but the ego and its illusions. (GTUFS: LightAW, Religio Perennis)