K used the word religious often. He didn't mean Catholic or Hindu or Muslim. He didn't mean someone who attends a service. He meant a specific quality of mind. He called it the religious mind, and he had a precise definition. The religious mind has no nationality. No creed. No method. No teacher. No group. It is the mind that has stopped accumulating.
The religious mind, in K's vocabulary, is the mind in which the fragment has stopped doing its accumulating work. No more identity to defend. No more position to hold. No more knowledge to display. Not because the mind has rejected these things. Because the mind has seen through their function and no longer needs them. The seeing is the religious move. The accumulation has ceased. What's left is religious. Nothing else needs to be added.
This redefines religion away from belief, doctrine, ritual, community — all the things organized religion offers. The religious mind has access to all of these and uses none of them. It can walk into a cathedral and be moved by the architecture without needing the cathedral's claims. It can attend a meditation without becoming a meditator. It can speak the vocabulary of a tradition without joining the tradition. The religious mind is structurally available everywhere and tied to nothing.
There's a particular openness in the religious mind that organized-religious minds often lack. The defendedness is gone. There's nothing to convert anyone to. There's nothing to argue. The conversations are different. The body is different. The room is different when one person in it is in this state. Other people can feel it without being able to name it. The fragment in them gets a little quieter just being near it.
The religious mind has no nationality. And no creed, and no method. It is the mind that has stopped accumulating. K's most precise use of religious vocabulary, which his organization-loving culture mostly missed. The opposite of religion. Or the original of it, before the organizations got hold.