THE UNITY OF RELIGIONS

By JULIAN HANCOCK Few thinking people, or people of compassion, would deny the beauty and validity of the essential teachings of Jesus -- love, forgiveness, humility, uprightness, service to others, and faith in the mysterious force that sustains and rules the infinite universe. But alas! Throughout the history of Christianity, these beautiful, simple truths have taken second place to bigotry and fanaticism. The Church which claims sovereignty over absolute truth, in practice fears truth above all else. The contamination of the gospel of Jesus by church leaders and laymen alike, has not prevented individual Christians from realising the fullness of a life of love, service and trust in God. But men and women of other faiths, and perhaps of no faith in the religious sense, have found the same fulfilment. There are testimonies in history of Buddhists, Hindus, Sufis, and others who undoubtedly attained the same fulfilment. If there is such an experience of feeling the presence of God and living in faith, then history testifies it has not been the exclusive privilege of those affiliated with the Christian Church. It appears to me the great weakness of Christianity lies in its claim of exclusive rights to absolute truth. It is this insistence on a unique revelation that leads so easily to bigotry. But examination of comparative religions leads one to believe that those men and women of various faiths who actually found God, and lived lives of love, trust, and service, practised basically the same religious techniques regardless of which school of religion they were affiliated with. I have witnessed people of all faiths saying "this is the greatest truth", or "this is the quickest, or most dependable path to God." No person, except perhaps an adept, can judge the value of another person's path to truth. All that one can honestly say is: "I was lost, and now I am found." Because this person's particular truth may have changed their life and given them hope where there was despair and love where there was bitterness and frustration, it does not necessarily follow that their path can be presented unchanged, in a convenient package, to every other seeker. I am suggesting that whilst the essentials of all religions are the same, the outer trappings undeniably vary considerably. But let us examine the essentials. I will list them as follows (the list is not necessarily complete): *Ethical and moral teaching; *Placing spiritual values above material gain; *Love; *Humility; *Service to others; *Faith in God; *Belief that man is a soul, or spirit, clothed in flesh; *The idea of some perfect state towards which man strives. I think it is self evident that the first five points are common to all major religions. Regarding the last three points, I think that there is a fair similarity between Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism, but Buddhism appears to stand apart on questions of God and the soul. But I believe these differences are more in terminology than in fact. For the Christian, salvation means eternal life in paradise. For the Hindu and Buddhist, "enlightenment" or "liberation" means freedom from involuntary re-birth. I don't think it stretches the imagination too much to see the similarity of these concepts. In Hinduism and Christianity, God and the human soul or spirit are central and unavoidable parts of the teaching. Buddhism appears to avoid discussion of god and soul, but refers instead to the Self, or Universal Mind, with which the individual self seeks to identify. Again, I think that with a little imagination, the reader might see that these are two different ways of saying the same thing. So far so good? Now we come to the stumbling block. "Jesus Christ, the only son of God, died to redeem us from our sin. There is no salvation except through belief in Christ." To the Christian, evidence to the contrary is irrelevant. The evidence I refer to is the example of the lives of great men of many faiths. I think that history will testify that a good Christian is not a better person than a good Hindu or a good Buddhist or a good anything else. The outstanding example in modern times is Mahatma Ghandi, who practised the teachings of Christ, yet he was happy to think of himself as a Hindu and resisted efforts to be converted to Christianity. I have read some of the writings of Christian mystics. Their personal disciplines and mystical experiences are indistinguishable from those of their Hindu counterparts. So if the proof of the pudding is in the eating, then it seems to me that any major religious pudding, if eaten with sincerity and devotion, will provide the same class of spiritual nourishment. The Indian holy man of last century, Sri Ramakrishna, practised in turn the disciplines of various sects of Hinduism, and of Islam and Christianity. Through each religious path he achieved the supreme realisation of God and was thus able to proclaim with the authority of personal experience: "So many religions, so many paths to reach one and the same goal." The only real proof of the unity of religious teachings comes from the intuition of the individual seeker. Most of us would have neither the time nor inclination to practice each religion in turn, as did Ramakrishna. But our intuition may reveal the truth to us if we examine the evidence with an open mind and heart. I think it is worth mentioning here that the alleged uniqueness of Christianity falls down when Christ is viewed as an eternal principle rather than a once-only historical event. And there is much in the Gospels to support this approach, notably in the introductory verses of St.John's Gospel, but also in Jesus' title "The Son of Man", i.e. Jesus Christ represents the ultimate achievement of man, or the end product (offspring) of man's creative endeavours—individual perfection, or God-realisation. If Christ represents the Divine Spark (the individualised spirit) in each man, then indeed for each man, his own highest self is "The way, the truth and the life". Well, friends, my brief sketch may have been too brief to be convincing, but I will summarise the main points I tried to make. *All major religions contain similar ethics and disciplines, and lead to the same goal. *Men and women have found God and served their fellow men selflessly, regardless of which religion they followed. *Differences in concepts of the major religions are often semantic rather than actual. Most of the evil that springs from religion (bigotry and subsequent persecution of others, and suppression of truth) comes from the assumption of a unique and final revelation of truth.

A GUIDE TO LIVING BY HIS HOLINESS THE DALAI LAMA

A DIFFERENT VIEW ON RELIGION

By JOHN A WILLS [Author of "ALBATROSS" (Poetry, Philosophy and Politics), May 20, 2002] Let me explain, in a simplified fashion, how I see different religions. There are those which emphasize the conscious mind, notably the Tradition of Abraham and Buddhism; and those which exalt subconscious or even visceral functions, such as Hinduism, secular humanism, and the like. Among those who emphasize the conscious mind, the Tradition of Abraham is distinguished by belief in a personal God who is the source of good. The Tradition of Abraham has a logical - not historical - division at Sinai. The Mussadek, including, of course, Christians, are strongly aware of original sin, even those such as deny the doctrine in that form, such as some Eastern Orthodox Christians. The Moslems seem to lack this awareness, although they do understand that there is a lot of sin in the world. The split is not between Christians and Moslems but between Mussadek and Moslems. The Mussadek have split into Jews, crystallizing at the time of Ezra; Samaritans; and Yemenites. The main difference here, I think, is that Jews eschew collective responsibility and insist that each man shall die for his own sin(Jr 31:29-30). Obviously there are exceptions galore, but that is the basic distinguisher, I claim, of Judaism from Samaritanism and, I presume, from Yemenitism, of which I know very little. All three kinds of Mussadek have much the same Torah, but much development is distinctly Jewish. The Jews at the beginning of the Common Era split into Christians, crystallizing at the Council of Jerusalem(Ac 15:6-29); Rabbinical Jews, crystallizing at the Council of Jamnia; and Falashas, about whom I know little. The difference is that Christians accept that Jesus is Messiah, while Rabbinical Jews reject him because he taught that the Law could not contradict itself(e.g. Mk 3:1-6); I do not know why Falashas reject him. Among Christians we find further splits, the main line crystallizing at the Councils of Nicea, Chalcedon, Constantinople etc., distinguishing itself from side-lines such as the Arians, Nestorians, Russelite Witnesses, what-have-you, in believing that Jesus the Messiah is true Word of God and true Human, and that the Word of God is God, as is the Spirit.

The UNIQUE and ENIGMATIC RELIGION of ANCIENT EGYPT

By RAMONA LOUISE WHEELER There is no one "head god" in the Egyptian pantheon, and this fact has mystified, frustrated, confused, puzzled, amused and outraged monotheists around the world for 2,500 years. Egyptian philosophy has been labelled with the curious oxymoron of "spiritual materialism," and so dismissed as primitive. The other "divine" forces of nature are mysterious and seem miraculous, yet are nevertheless bound by their own rules of logic and reality, and subject to scientific comprehension. In the ancient view, that is their divine nature. In our modern view, that is simply their physical nature. In our modern theosophical training, we tend to equate divine and "magical," as though god were some divine conjurer messing about with reality for whimsy sake. But conscious will/can change the laws of nature. By all the laws of divine reality, only winged beings can fly, but we have mastered the art in our way, defying such divine law. Yet because of our religious training, we deny ourselves the miracle of it since it is not levitation. Egypt was less concerned with magical tricks than achieving deeper understanding of the miracle of existence. In our modern, monotheistic worldview, divinity is separated out from everyday life, and concentrated in the single personality of the anthropomorphized deity to whom we are related -- "Our father" -- Zeus and family remote on Mt. Olympus, Yahweh/Jehovah/Allah in Their/His celestial isolation. The physical space/time world in which we live is seen as somehow "corrupted" in comparison to this celestial place. We are supposedly here on earth only to act as servants to this god on High. To see the path of the Egyptian in his/her lifetime, you must recognize how different from this was their sense of the miracle of existence. Egyptians preferred the divine nature of their own life-experience to contemplation of a distant deity, and saw all reality as a manifestation of the divine. The only "corruption" was in intentions and act, those expressions of "free will" for which only living souls have the capacity. The Egyptian is ruled by his divine soul, not by a divine being separated and remote from the world. A more modern example of the profound and profoundly subtle difference in worldview between the Egyptian nature of the divine and monotheism rests in the parable of Jesus and the episode of converting water into wine. In modern terms, a "god" is one who can perform, as a divine conjuring trick, a miracle such as turning water into wine. All divinity is concentrated in that one being. We can be servants to that divinity, but we cannot be that divinity. For a man to do this is sleight of hand. Yet, the "miracle" of converting water into wine is accomplished without ceasing by the humblest of creatures, the simple yeast cells which "create wine out of water" as a natural gesture of their existence. As monotheists, we are unimpressed by this natural miracle. The yeast is supposed to create alcohol, so where's the miracle? The Egyptian considers the existence of the yeast cell creating wine, and sees in that a manifestation of the divine presence enclosed in reality. They do not "worship the yeast cell," but a universe that would accommodate both such a creature as the yeast cell and a human to appreciate the wine. The Egyptians related humans to the divinity of the entire universe, not just to a remote, isolated deity of arbitrary will. This is also not an isolated nor indeed even an antiquated worldview. This sense of the divinity of all reality is the underlying principle of Oriental religion today. There is, however, a primary difference between the modern Orient and the ancient Egyptian mind. The erasure of identity is the goal of Oriental meditation, the complete dissolution of self into the bliss of undifferentiated consciousness. Egypt saw the uniqueness of identity as the ground of divine nature, and identity was the divinity of the soul. The purpose of life is to achieve and groom your own identity, polishing yourself into the finest golden image of yourself of which you are capable, your "Golden Horus name," and then carrying that polished image into eternity, to shine there in the next life as illuminated as the stars themselves. The difficulty with this philosophy for the peoples outside of Egypt was the problem of the "spiritual democracy" implied in the Egyptian doctrine of "i am divine as you are divine and we are divine together." The difficulty with that arises when you have something that I want to take, like desert tribes who want to take your crops to feed their children. If we are spiritual equals, then I have to earn what I need from you. If we are both servants of the One divine Being, then that master can direct one of his servants to take the possessions of another servant, and the loser has to declare it "the will of god." I can storm in, take what I want, believing that "god instructed me." This is, alas, what the tribes of the desert, swelled into nations of barbarian splendour, did to Egypt. The foremost Egyptologist of our time, John Romer, has made the observation that everyone brings their own interpretation of ancient Egypt with them. He had worked with archaeologists from three different nations, America, England, and Germany, and each had a different Egypt. Like the elephant of the seven blind men, ancient Egypt is too enormous for a single point of view. All Egyptologists, however, have a single point of view in common: we are all descendants of her conquerors, ancient and modern. The emotional need to reduce the extent of the destruction has led to a general devaluation of her timeless philosophy. That trend has been compensated in modern times by the need to see that ancient world as a nation of supermen, in touch with the technology of the stars. No civilization, modern or ancient, has successfully maintained as coherent or evenly sustained cultural identity as the peoples of ancient Egypt. Even china is three thousand years younger. This remarkable integrity has been attributed to the stable environment of the Nile river valley, yet no modern nation has made the Nile work for them as did The children of the sun. Khemm Ta, The Black Land, does not yield forth her bounty for the Arab-based culture as she once did for The Land of love. Her ancient stability has been called stagnation. Her universality of image-based communication is dismissed as primitive and one-dimensional. They did not build lasers in ancient Egypt, but neither did they worship animals nor multiple souls or gods. They were humanity's first true civilization and they, themselves, want you to know that. The pride they felt for their nation, their civilization, their lives, was deep and innocent, and beautifully expressed in their art and writings. It is this pride and joy of living that has been ignored and misinterpreted most often by scholars both ancient and modern. The primary, basic premise behind this author's assumption is that only a logical, practically minded philosophy could hold together a nation with such total and magically enduring coherency for so many millennia, through so many changes in the world around them. If their images seem irrational, it must be in our interpretation, not in their original intention and understanding. Seen with this author's prejudice, the ancient imagery is as intact, coherent and logical as scientific American magazine -- all grounded, however, in their absolute faith in the divine and eternal nature of the soul: Osiris. That is the only improvable, illogical feature of their philosophy, transforming it with sudden, transcendent light into a deeply profound spiritual teaching. Ancient Egyptians also utterly believed in the vital necessity of education, and this was their undoing: the peoples who conquered them never quite got the story right, and the resonance of their beliefs became the fragmented images of genuinely primitive cultures, copies of copies of copies ... Wherever possible, this author has drawn from direct sources from the artwork and words of the ancient peoples themselves. What is most impressive about the stubborn persistence of their words and images is that even now, thousands of years past their prime, their message has survived despite how much time and the desert have buried. Even this author's interpretation is corrupt; trust no one except the ancients' own images to tell their story. But if you look at their world, their works and their art using this guide, you will see their story more clearly, erasing the years and distance between. Their images speak most directly. Whatever the actual, absolute nature of the human soul, no one has ever pursued the language and imagery of it with greater eloquence, art and style than The children of the sun. [For more from and about Ramona Louise Wheeler, please visit http://members.aol.com/tokapu/Walkle01.htm]