'Your God - My God'

A discourse about the unity and the multitude

To a Rosicrucian, a temple is like one ray of the great temple that is in the middle, one ray of the divine sun that embraces everything and everyone.

He who finds the Light in the temple, is able to elevate himself. Pulled up as if by the rays of the sun, he is able to perceive what is illuminated in his own being. Like the sun is the centre, the source of life, of all existence in the universe surrounding us, God is the source, from which all of this has been created. It is the Source that illuminates everything, through whom and from whom all things have come forth, and to whom everything must return.

Lao Zi, a Chinese philosopher, expressed this as follows:

Through the One, the heaven is clear
Through the One, the earth is solid
Through the One, the spirits are luminous
Through the One, the ten thousand things have been created.

Sooner or later, the moment will arrive in life, when we begin to think about reality and where it is to be found, about the existence of God and about our purpose as the creature man here on earth. Some people say that there is no other reality, that the world does not contain anything permanent, and consists, as far as we human beings are concerned, of fleeting experiences. 

What we see is the incidental product of a natural process. Others believe that the world has been created by a divine creator, who occupies himself with us human beings and who rewards and punishes. 

Orthodox religion testifies to this. He who is unable to believe just like that, continues seeking for answers to questions like: Why is the earth a place filled with confusion? Why is there so much chaos instead of harmony, and why is there permanent suffering? Why is it that what is not divine is able to flourish everywhere? 

Then the quest for Reality begins. When we look in the world around us, we see an enormous amount of forms: for example, horses, thousands of horses, all different, yet nevertheless of a fixed type, horse. Or a rose, or an oak leaf, available in enormous quantities, but always clearly recognisable as a rose or an oak leaf. Not two of them are identical, but the product is always according to one form, one type.

This is the point of departure of our further contemplation, for here we see the one and the many. The problem is that the many can be examined extensively, because they are visible, but the one is never seen. Its existence can only be deduced from the many. Yet, paradoxically, the one is more real than the many.

Everything is ‘genesis’  In the visible world of this nature, everything is continuously changing. Everything is being born or is dying or is moving somewhere in between. Nothing ever achieves perfection. Plato said: The phenomena of nature always ‘become’ and never ‘are’. 

The mysterious one. Our five senses tell us that the phenomena of nature are real, but the mind can argue that the one, which is continually creating and is always the same, may be called more real than its permanently changing products. Plato also wrote that all knowledge already exists in our innermost depths. We should turn from mental thinking to a higher form of thinking, called ‘reason’. Or, as gnostic philosophy teaches, we should learn to think with the heart. The heart is always the centre, or the core of things. The same applies to the human heart. The heart is not only the motor of our life, but it is also the source, in which we can find this most profound knowledge.

The heart links us with the one, the mind brings us the many.

Master Eckhart, the German mystic, who lived between 1260 and approximately 1328, said:

‘God is everywhere and He is perfect everywhere. God alone moves in all things, in their essence… God is the innermost depth of each thing individually.’

 And you undoubtedly know the familiar Sufi saying:

God sleeps in the rock,
dreams in the plant,
moves in the animal,
and awakens in the human being.

Who am I?  In our time, our knowledge of the multitude, of nature, is so vast that it may be called world-encompassing. With this knowledge, we may enter a new development, the development of a human being who discovers what an inner journey of discovery implies. He would then discover the true nature of his consciousness. From the multitude, he would seek the unity. Peter Russell, a contemporary scientist and thinker, has extensively investigated this and arrives at the following conclusions: 

‘Trying to find our self is like shining a torch in a dark room, while you are looking for the light. Everything we find, are the different objects in the room, on which the light falls. It is the same as trying to look for the cause of all experiences. What I find, are the different ideas, images and feelings, on which my attention is focused. However, all of these are objects of experience and can, therefore, not be the cause of the experience.’

 What is this ‘I’…? The conclusion of another thinker, Erwin Schrödinger, is that on closer inspection, you will discover that what you really mean by ‘I’, is the repository, in which experiences and memories are collected.

What does remain when the spirit becomes silent and when all thoughts, feelings, observations and memories, with which we usually identify, have ceased? Do we then approach the source, the nucleus, that which we really are? Mystics have sought in their inner being and discovered the true nature of the self. They stated that God is the essence of the self, the ‘I am’, without personal properties. ‘I am’ is also one of the Hebrew names of God, Yahweh.

 Another word for God is the One. He who takes this One within himself as his point of departure, who has found God within himself, will receive a wholly new worldview. When God is identified with the ordinary consciousness, this concept acquires a different meaning. We daily observe this around us in thinking, religion and experiencing God. This is where people think in terms of ‘your god’ and ‘my god’.

I-consciousness is the multitude. The I-person is continuously occupied with separating, dividing. He chooses this one as his friend and that one as his enemy. Often, yesterday’s enemy is tomorrow’s friend. And what one person rejects is accepted as good by another person.

Can two things simultaneously exist that are mutually exclusive? It is neither one nor the other, The human being goes so far in his separating and dividing into yes and no, good and bad, that he also attributes these foolish properties to his god. It is time to achieve insight, and to make your and my god merge into the One!

A god-bearing cloud  In ‘The Book of Mirdad’, Mikhail Naimy wrote the following about the creations of the human being and those of God:

‘A crucible is the Word of God. What it creates, it melts and fuses into one,
accepting none as worthy, rejecting none as worthless. Whereas a cribble is Man’s word.

 What it creates it sets at grips and blows.

 Never be cribblers! For the Word of God is Life, and Life is a crucible, wherein all is made a oneness indivisible; all is at perfect equilibrium, and all is worthy of its author.

 Never be cribblers, and you shall stand in statures so immense, so all-pervading and so all-embracing, that no cribbles can be found to contain you. Seek first the knowledge of The Word that you may know your own word.

 For your word and God’s are one except that yours is still in veils.’

 The cribbles of the human being build the barriers and fences in the world.

 Would he be unable to think and understand that his flesh and blood are not his alone, but that all these wonderful bodies have been constructed from the same elements?

 That the earth, in which they dip their hands to cultivate, is the abode of all creatures populating it? That the light in the eyes of all is the same light, the life through which we see? That the lungs all breathe the same air? That the source in the heart was born from the same source? That the thoughts are shared in a sea of thoughts? That dreams are of all people? That they share joy and sorrow, and that it is the love of life itself, which makes every human being rise up again from the deepest misery…

 Beware, therefore, of fences! You but fence in deception and fence out the truth. For, The Book of Mirdad continues: ‘The Word, God, is the ocean; you the clouds. And is a cloud a cloud save for the ocean it contains? Yet foolish, indeed, is the cloud that would waste away its life striving to pin itself in space so as to keep its shape and its identity for ever. What would it reap of its so foolish striving, but disappointed hopes and bitter vanity? Except it lose itself, it cannot find itself.

 A God-bearing cloud is Man. Save he be emptied of himself, he cannot find himself. Save you be lost forever in the Word, you cannot understand the Word which is you – even your I.

Ah, the joy of being lost!’

 Never before have the possibilities to achieve new insight concerning these things been so great. We are free to choose, and are no longer bound to the spiritual tradition in which we were born. No, we have the whole spectrum of the wisdom of the world at our disposal. We learn about cultures, living at the other side of the world. We know the various traditions like Buddhism, Hinduism, the Sufis, the ancient Gnostics, the Hermetic wisdom, modern thinkers, former mystics… Has the longing for inner awakening ever been as great as it is now?

 Magazines, movies and books about spirituality appear abundantly. Meditation and yoga, for all age groups and problems, seem to be a solution. Would this, if we were really to become aware of our true nature, finally signify a turn around?

Is the human being, used and formed as to his thinking in the multitude, able to turn around radically, so that what is spiritual, indeed God, is not cribbled by him and is not reduced to his own human standards by him? So that the well-known words no longer apply to him:

In the Word was life,
and the life was the light of men.

The light shines in the darkness,
and the darkness has not overcome it.

Insight is the individual nature of the soul  In the writing De Castigatione Animae (The Admonition of the Soul), ascribed to Hermes Trismegistus, we read:

 ‘I will describe your state, O Soul, for I have long been wondering of it. You say and profess that you would fain escape from misery and sorrow; but in reality, you seek after them and pursue them, and envy those who possess them. You say and profess that you desire happiness and joys, but in reality, you shun them and turn away from them, and refuse to set forth on the road that leads to them.

 Such behaviour is in conflict with itself; it is such as can come only from a being that is not one and simple, bur partakes of a mixture and combination of diverse elements. For if a thing is simple, its way of action is necessarily simple and free from conflict.

It is clear then that sense, being a composite thing, apprehends composite things; but intellect, being a simple and indivisible thing, apprehends simple and indivisible things. Mark then how thought, when it deals with composite, concrete things, abandons simple things and simple apprehension, which is apprehension of the real and the pleasure of true cognition.

But when it returns from them to simple things, and abandons things that are composite and mixed, then it apprehends things simple and everlasting, and dismisses things that are composite and are bounded by limits of time.

This explanation makes it clear that the soul’s life is dependent on its departure from the physical world, and the soul’s death and lasting misery is effected by its abiding in the physical world. […]

Seek O Soul, to win sure knowledge of things by learning to know their existence and their essence, but disregard their qualities and quantities. For the existence of a thing and its essence are simple, and there is nothing that intervenes between the soul and them; but the qualities and the quantities are composite, and are circumscribed by limits of space and time.

And know, O Soul, that it will not be possible for you, when you depart from this world, to take with you any knowledge of the world of composite things, as though such knowledge were separated from external things. Grasp then the knowledge of simple things and abandon knowledge of composite things.’

If a thing is simple, its way of action is necessarily simple and free from conflict

© Lectorium Rosicrucianum 2010.

From Pentagram No 3, 2010