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June 22 - July 3, 2018
Religious fundamentalism, whether Christian, Islamic, or Hindu, depends on the same archaic elements, in which fear and sin dominate.
“War doesn’t simply break out today or tomorrow. Being divided, humans are constantly at war inside. Even the most contented and calm-looking are pretending, or else they are deluding themselves. Fear and anger, hopelessness and despair are the enemies in the mind. What is to be done? This war inside is a sickness. The cure is obvious even though few seek it. End the division that creates joy one day and sorrow the next.”
Reality is the light, and the light can only be found in ourselves. In the words “Know thyself” is buried a new belief, that human nature is capable of reaching God without dogma, authority, and fear. The inner journey is afoot, and God has become the highest goal: complete self-knowledge. To quote another Indian saying, “This is wisdom you cannot learn; you must become it.”
As Einstein said, either nothing is a miracle or everything is. That may seem like one person’s belief system competing with countless others. Yet Paul added another argument for all the mystics to come. Miraculous worlds only await the touch of awareness.
“God is beyond reasoning,” declared Mandana. “If that were true, then any jumble of words could be called scripture. Nonsense would be divine if all that is needed is lack of reason. Madmen would be better than priests.”
“So being a good man means being without sin? If you are without sin, my dear opponent, don’t bother with faith. You are God already,”
“The faith of the wise is different from the faith of the ignorant,”
“I do. You’d say he was a cheat. So is the faith of the ignorant a cheat. They pay for it. They eat it and say that it’s sweet. But what nourishment is there? None. How much suffering do they avoid? Very little. On the other hand, the faith of the wise is pure sweetness and nourishes the soul. How? By taking you where faith is meant to go. Faith is another word for hope. We have faith that God is real, because it is our dearest hope. I may hope for a child to be born to me, but until the child is born, hope flutters on the windowsill like a candle. It signals to God, but is not the same as
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What good does it serve you to know that a rose has a beautiful scent when you have never smelled one?
the only God that could exist is not a person, even a vast, superhuman person, but something invisible and yet alive, a kind of infinite potential that can create, govern, control, and bring to fruition everything that exists. This God cannot be limited; therefore, he cannot be described. Not that “he” or “she” or even “it” is correct. No single quality can define God, who like the air we breathe is mixed into every cell without being detectable.
Was guilt hot or cold? Cold, like a frozen rock pressing down on your heart. Shame, on the other hand, is hot, like a fire spreading across your face. Guilt is nagging rather than stabbing, constant instead of intermittent, hard instead of soft.
“God disappears all the time.” So that was it. This longing for Shams was the same longing we have for a God who disappears, not because he hates us, but because all of life is a search—for love, for truth, for beauty. Whatever God stands for must be elusive; otherwise, we would all feast like a lazy rich man and fall asleep from excess and dullness.
There is no better protector of faith than ignorance.
“I praise all of God’s creations. It can’t be that one part is perfect and the other part diseased. We are pained by knowing that we have sinned. That pain was given to us to show where we have lost love. If we listen to our own pain, we will find a way through to love once more. Sin is repaid by bliss.”
“Sin is in God’s plan,” said Julian. “We are led by every sign, by everything that happens to us, toward love. That is why all is well. That is why all shall be well. What I told you is absolute truth. Pain comes and goes. We sin today and forget tomorrow. What abides forever is love.”
We may never come to the full knowing of God till we know first clearly our own Soul.
It was also made clear to her that awareness of God implies a journey from suffering to unity, again a common theme in this book.
Each religion is like a training program for dropping the shell of mortality in order to live in the gleaming sheath of immortality. When religions insist that only one training program works (and disbelievers will be punished as heretics if they say otherwise), immortality gets lost in dogma.
So where did consciousness come from? The only viable answer was that it came from itself. This is the mystical position, and few have voiced it as beautifully in modern times as Tagore when he portrays himself as a tiny speck in the infinity of God’s creation.
Behind the shifting appearance of the Many—the wildly diverse activity in nature—stands the One. The One is higher reality. We see, because It sees. We are moved by beauty, because It contains infinite beauty. When we feel that we know something to be true, our minds have touched, just barely and for an instant, the endless scope of absolute Truth.
I’ve offered ten such people, and they are connected by a thread that runs through the history of spirituality. It’s not faith that joins them, but consciousness.
The door is open for anyone who is eager for God. Or to be precise, four doors have opened. Looking back at the visionaries in this book, they followed four paths to reach higher reality.
The path of devotion
The path of understanding
The path of service
The path of meditation
when we read the book of Job, Plato, St. Paul, or Rumi, their words mean something. They stir us deeply enough that we feel reconnected, however briefly and vaguely.
Love is the only reality, and it is not a mere sentiment. It is the ultimate truth that lies at the heart of creation.
