THE ETERNAL SEARCH FOR GOD (3)

In most religious belief systems, behind everything is an Unknown Being who can be known only through His manifestations. For Muslims, God can be known because the Koran is his own utterance. When you listen to the Koran, you listen to the Word of God. For Jews, God revealed Himself to Moses giving him the Commandments. In the Hebrew prophetic period, the Word of God was transmitted through the prophets. Even though some reported they saw and spoke with God, still there remained the feeling that God was something mysterious and completely out of reach of man’s intellect; that God was utterly different from any possible image a man could conceive.

For the student of Hermeticism, God is a reality beyond comprehension; for man cannot know God in the way that man is able to know Nature. For God is beyond Nature and is the Source from which Nature comes. For the conscious being, the ultimate image of God is not as a personal deity. In Buddhism, the liberated man is able to know the Dharma and reveal it to other men; but all beings, even gods, are limited and subject to the laws of separation and transience belonging to the finite and time-limited universe. When the Buddha was asked the question, “Are there gods?”, he replied, “Of course there are gods. I know very well that there are spiritual beings.” Again and again in the Buddhist scriptures, the spiritual beings, even the supreme deity Brahma, are represented as appearing and talking to the Buddha person to person. They are also shown as being limited, and after the completion of an age having to be reborn. But the Dharma is beyond time and renewal; it is the Source of Everything.

There are many notions of the Absolute Source, which is beyond Being, of which nothing can be known. An impersonal character is always ascribed to it, because if it were personal, it would be knowable and would be too much like us to be called Absolute.

Now what are we to make of all this? Can you see that all these things are true, providing you look at them in the right way?

First, one can say that so long as one’s attention is confined to the existing world of objects, then the materialist view is correct. If it were not so, the laws wouldn’t be invariant. This is the world of law which can only be known through its laws; it is a world of separation for it’s very structure manifests discreetly as explained by quantum mechanics. It is a world of transience in which everything perishes.

Even the personal Image of God is not incorrect. For we are taught that our material universe is the work of either a Sole, Manifested, Creator God such as the Hindu supreme deity, Brahma or of the Manifested Agents of the One God, the Hebrew Elohim. Such happenings provide an explanation for how can it be that God is a person Who can be talked to, Who will listen to us and do something to help us because He cares for each one of us as individuals? This simple belief may not bring one to Cosmic Consciousness, but provides assurance that takes away anxiety and many other things for many people during their early stages of spiritual development. It would be terrible if that were to be disturbed by someone saying that it is naive to think that God is really like that and that he or she listens to silly little petitions and so on.

Now there is a tradition in the mystical literature of the existence of two quite different Gods in the world: one God that has created this world and rules it according to law and justice; and another God who is beyond this world, who has no power and authority in it, but whose characteristic is love and compassion is an ancient one. Knowledge of this distinction is preserved in the Ancient Egyptian texts, in the monasteries of Central Asia and through certain Buddhist and Sufi traditions. The God of Love and compassion is concerned with the consequences of the Creation. It is this God of Love that incarnates as an Avatar in order to compensate for the consequences of the God of power having created the world.

What we have to understand is how our limited world is connected to the Unlimited Expanse of God the Unmanifest. For that we must study the nature and content of our Sacred Images; for these Sacred Images are our personal mental and emotional pictures of God. They are the fruit of the closest personal experiences we have had with God.

Unfortunately, the difficulty with thinking about an image is that an image appears less than the object for which it is the image. Whenever we see an image in the mirror, we don’t think of it as really being there; what is “really there” is ourselves standing in front of the mirror. Our preprogrammed attitude towards images is that they are somehow less than the reality they depict. But looked at it in another way, you can see how powerful images are. Even in the simple case of an image in the mirror–if you are shaving or brushing your hair or arranging your clothes–it is the image that is the source of your actions. You see your hair is untidy and this makes you move your brush in a certain way. It is only because you are able to see the image that you can do something.

This principle can be applied a great deal further. For example, whenever you have the image of somebody as being wise or as able to do something, it is this image that makes you ask for help or advice. If a doctor doesn’t present to you the image of a man who is able to heal, he will have very little power to do something good for you. A great part of a physician’s work is to create for the patient the image of a healer in whom they can have confidence. Such images do more to heal than all the medicines given. When you really analyze the situation, it is that the image of the doctor which attracts you, not the man. Many people are alive today, who would otherwise be dead, because they really believed in the power and truth of an image. This enabled the doctor’s treatment to have a power over them that in somebody else’s hand the treatment would not have had. The contrary is also true, persons who see the doctor’s weaknesses and foibles destroy their image of a good and wise man and the medicine ceases to work. Therefore, you see that the details of our own Image of God determines the path we take in life and the place we end up.