Now that we’ve introduced the three leading characters in life’s drama, I need to step back and address what it is about this account, and the philosophy it gives rise to, that makes it “integrated, direct and unitive.”
As much fun as we may be having in probing the mysteries, this account is intended to perform work: to offer an account that spans the religions and receives from them their truths, while leaving the rest behind.
That by the way is something we’re doing as individuals as well as religions. It’s the order of the day.
Integrated
What we want to know is the truth below all accounts. I’m speaking now at the level of knowledge because we’re producing knowledge here with the written word. I’m not talking about the ultimate truth perceived in spiritual practice. That truth cannot be conveyed in words or known by the mind.
Each of the accounts of the great masters was written for a particular era and, just as with mediums, had to draw on words in usage then, arranged in concepts that would make sense to that generation, and so on.
We’re faced with taking these accounts and integrating them into one, using a new vocabulary known to this generation.
Usually anyone who tries to integrate many accounts wants to simplify the story. The adherents of any one faith can take that simplified version back into their own religions and apply it for understanding in the way they prefer to understand.
Buddhist meditation master S.N. Goenka used to say that he would make Christians better Christians. The truth below all accounts can only make the religious better members of their own religion. Or it isn’t the truth.
So we’re drawing together accounts and substituting a standard set of words for words that differ at the present time. We’re doing this to increase understanding and tolerance.
Direct
Religions today and back through recorded history have given birth to bureaucracies that sometimes end up telling the faithful what they must believe, what they must do, etc.
Some bureaucracies have burned people at the stake for failing to follow the correct tenets. The faithful paid a heavy price in conformity.
All the time, a push went on to personalize religion, to demonstrate that no one needs an intermediary, an intercessionary, etc. Scriptures were translated into the vulgate language. They were disseminated by printing press.
Teachings arose that said that no one needed an intermediary between them and God. Westerners especially fell in love with Zen, which was a transmission outside the scriptures and aimed at direct experience of reality. This love affair was also part of not wishing to have a religious or spiritual intermediary.
Spirituality, as opposed to religion, has had its bureaucracies; witness Theosophy. But in the main, it allowed the practitioner complete freedom to choose path, object of devotion, and so on.
There’s no need to have anyone between our heart and God’s. No one needs to carry our message to the angels. All messages get through and are acted on in our best interests. We here at InLight Universal are now seeking to have a direct approach to God widely accepted and that’s what I mean by using the term “direct.”
Unitive
How much more unitive could things get than for us to realize that we’re all divine sparks coated in materiality? And then we put on bodily shapes, colored one this way and one that, belonging to different countries, deriving wildly-differing views. And then we make each other bad and wrong for the differences.
We’re saying that we need to see the divine spark in each of us and ignore the differences. Ignore them insofar as they create conflict, but not ignore them insofar as they’re different-colored flowers in a very large garden.
Love and unitive consciousness are probably one and the same thing. The experience of love dissolves barriers – any kind of barriers. In the space that’s left, it leaves only love and love unites rather than divides.
Unity and love must be synonymous. They feel synonymous. We’re one people. We’re tasked with the same mission – to realize ourselves as God. We inhabit the same world, that’s rapidly becoming a very large house rather than an increasingly-shrinking planet. And taking care of each other is coming to be recognized for the common, divine mission it is.
We can only do what we intend to do – build Nova Earth, a world that works for everyone – in loving unity.
So this new spirituality is integrated, direct, and unitive. It intends to draw together teachings from Earth and elsewhere, now and the past, and explain them in an integrated fashion to assist people to a direct and knowing relationship with their Source and Creator.
Tomorrow we’ll look at the event at the heart of the spiritual evolution that life invites: enlightenment.