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“Dharma has no recognized founder, or prophet, or originator, other than the direct will and causeless overflowing grace of the Absolute. At one time Dharma was the sole expression of humanity’s yearning to stretch its hearts and intellects beyond the known world, and to intimately know and experience the source of all reality. Dharma was humanity’s attempt to incorporate the will of the transcendent Divine into the everyday, phenomenal concerns of this world, and to live and explore politics, economics, the arts, music, philosophy, literary expression, and life itself as an everyday, every-moment celebration of the omnipresent imminence of the Divine. When the rational and divinely inspired laws of Dharma governed the world, spirituality served as a source of unity, tolerance, joy, and mutual understanding. It is only with the later rise of the denominations that religion was then used to divide people, and to aggressively conquer others in the name of a god. Being thus a pre-religious phenomenon, Dharma serves as the spiritual foundation of all later denominational expressions of spirituality, and thus, by extension, as the very source of all important civilizations on earth. Dharma is the common heritage of all humanity, whether or not individual humans today are ready to acknowledge this fact or not. (p. 51)” — Sri Dharma Pravartaka Acharya