Exploring The Western Spiritual Heritage

Fundamentally and ultimately, there are only two actual religions that exist; one being positive, the other negative; that is to say; one leading towards God and one leading away from God.

Having said this it is entirely possible for two people espousing the same faith, Christianity, Islam, Judaism or Buddhism for instance, to, by virtue of how they have organized their beliefs and subsequent actions, be going in opposite directions; one towards God and the other away; while both may be externally following the protocols of the same religion. "Being saved" then, becomes little more than a cliche; especially if self proclaimed; as far as Christianity is concerned anyway.

This is possible because there are also only two truths that can exist. There is the constant and unchanging "Absolute Truth" that we live within and out of which we form our reality and, there is "relative truth;" which is formed through our observations, experiences and our reason, out of which we form our "theories" which, in the end, are nothing more than our best guess at what the Absolute Truth is. This dichotomy is sometimes also expressed as the Light versus the false light; the Ignis Fatuus. When you are in accord with Absolute Truth you are with the Light and in the Truth. The Absolute is immediately and constantly all around us. We all wander within the Absolute Truth often without any real awareness of It. Only the pure of heart can see it. The impertinent are completely blind to It and so act according to their own light believing it to be the only light. Therefore, it is quite pointless to suggest to anyone that what we may be offering here is better than what anyone else is offering somewhere else because, in the end, everything is and will always remain a simple matter of spiritual maturity and belief; everyone must be left to decide things for themselves that they might come into the Light through their experience, consciously. Then, their experience and knowledge is truly their own. Up until then it is merely a borrowed experience; hearsay. When people are coerced into thinking and believing according to another persons reality it produces a sort of insanity with people reasoning using another persons reason. The effect of modern day media is a good example of this.

The personal concepts that everyone organizes their life around are based on personally experienced perceptions that have been formed through their environment. The only way to change, or at least "mature" our conceptualized beliefs is through ongoing expanded experiences, cold blooded objective observation and reasoning and a good measure of daring that would sufficiently free us to explore, examine and compare for ourselves what is real and what is fantasy. Although it is everyone's right to adhere to a dogma that may have been taught from birth, examining what had been taught and testing the truth of it has always been a personal responsibility and in exercising this responsibility one approaches the Absolute, maturing one's personal beliefs. In the West this Absolute is sometimes called God.

Should a belief be modified through a life experience, it follows that personal theories and concepts must change with it. The fundamentally new outlook on life that arises is commonly called a paradigm shift. Every time this happens a person feels as if reborn because of the newly found reality they now find themselves within. They see things with different eyes, from a previously unknown and liberating perspective. Therefore, and by extension, Spiritual rebirth is nothing more than the realization that we are images of the Absolute that have consciously become active within It. This is the purpose of any religious paradigm and antagonistic to none.

Karl von Eckartshausen states that - "Of what you have no perception, you can have no conception."

In other words in the infinity of God's creation there will always be something that we will have no knowledge of because we are without an awareness of it. Even the Archangels admit this. What our senses have not detected, we cannot know exists.

Then, just to complicate things further, we have to be aware of the fact that our physical senses are often less than perfect. They can be obscured by other physical phenomenon present at the time of perception that might get in the way and by emotional predispositions as well as learned and environmental biases. What we think we may be seeing, may not be what we think it to be.

One thing is for certain; "God is the All in All." Everything that exists, can only exist within God and by His Will. Within God we are all free to explore and examine everything, if it has value explore it further, if it does not you are free to reject it. The path that this process opens is the path that leads towards God.

God wishes to be recognized and wants us to recognize Him without coercion that we might know His love and that we might awaken and exercise our own love freely. Believe it or not, this is what Christianity is fundamentally all about - everything else is ceremonial window dressing. Jesus Christ having come to us in physical form, dying and then resurrecting is just God showing Himself to us and removing the impediments that we might see Him and know Him.