God and Man

IX

These are the elementary steps we take. That is all right. But take a step further from where you are. Rise above the body consciousness, open the Inner Eye and see the Light of God within and enter the Kingdom of God, reach your True Home, the Home of your Father. This is the Ultimate Goal of all religions.

But there are wrong ways of preaching, I would tell you. Instead of uniting man to man, they are separating man from man; since the ministers themselves have no first-hand experience of that Reality, they must tell their people that man is man and God is God. 

All men are equal for God, and the same God is worshipped by us all. Naturally we have Love for one another. But we find that social religion is like a golden watch, studded with gems and jewels, which does not give us any time whatsoever. We have our social religions. Each social religion has the work before it to turn out perfect men:

Be ye perfect even as thy Father Which is in Heaven is perfect.

But instead of turning out perfect men, they are simply strengthening their own folds. Naturally, when you say this fold is higher than the other, there is a clash between class and class, and we see no True Progress. 

My point is, we have one God, the same God. Each religion does not have its own God. The same God is worshipped by all of us. Let us embrace each other and sit in amity, love and accord, to sing praise of the Lord as one family. Since we are lovers of God, we have to love all Godmen, Masters Who came in the past or Who may come in the future. Our respect goes out to all of them. We have Love for all the scriptures, because they speak of the same God and record the experiences that the Masters had with Themselves and with God. And we have Love for all holy places of worship, because they are meant for singing praises of the Lord.

So all mankind is One, and we are worshippers of the same God. We have different forms, outer forms, we belong to different religions outwardly, but our Beloved is the same. If we only keep that in view before us, we will be at peace, we will have peace on earth and goodwill among men. There will be no danger of war or anything of that sort.

Today’s subject was ‘God and Man.’ I have put it before you briefly. Next we will see that ultimately we have to know God. But until we know ourselves, how can we know God? 

It is the soul that has to have experience of God, because God is All-Consciousness, and our souls are also conscious entities. It is the soul that has to experience God, and for that purpose we will have to know the Inner Man, who we are, what we are.

Know thyself,

has been the motto set forth by all Sages. They never said ‘Know others.’ First if you know yourself, only then will you be able to know the Over-self.

That will be the next subject and along with it we will compare the higher values of life – physical, intellectual and spiritual. Next, we will take up the Kingdom of God: where it is, how we can reach that Kingdom, and how to open the Inner Eye to see. The Sages say that God is Light. How can we see God, see the Light of God? That will be the subject of our third talk. After that, we will determine which is the most natural way for having that experience: what other Godmen said, how the scriptures speak of the Godmen, that will be the subject of our last talk.