The Transformation of Man

by Dr George Arnsby Jones

In his quest for the Ultimate Truth of life, man usually finds that he is faced with three fundamental questions:

1. How can he discover – or know – the Ideal Ultimate, or God?

2. How can he attain the values which serve the Spiritual Ideal of God?

3. How can he present a theology – or world view – of his Spiritual Ultimate which relates to the entire universe?

Obviously, these are the fundamental questions which underlie the search for Spiritual Truth, and, through the ages, great thinkers have endeavoured to answer these questions in many ways.

Whilst there are fundamental differences between the expressed theology of each major social religion, and it would be foolish to ignore these differences of expression, there has been a tendency in them all to recognise the concept of monotheism: one Supreme Being ruling the universe.

The Hebraic statement:

The Lord our God is one Lord; and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might!

is echoed through the primary statements of the world religions.

In the 14^th century B.C., Pharaoh Ikhnaton exhorted Egyptians to worship only the one supreme deity. He took the sun-god Aton as a visible symbol of the Supreme Being; but this was not paganism. The people had to see something tangible in order to worship the Supreme Being. Today, we accept far greater abstractions than did the ancient peoples, but the fact remains that the basis of revealed religion must be in seeing. To paraphrase the words of Plotinus, we must catch the sublime vision.

Even with the multiplicity of secondary gods, the oriental religion always posited a supreme Being at the head of a great hierarchy of beings. This attitude does not differ essentially from the picture of God, given by Judanism and Christianity, as having unlimited being, with infinited divine attributes and characteristics. The world religions, in their different ways, have answered question number three by creating theologies or world pictures in various attempts to show how the Ultimate relates to the entire universe and to all created things. In fact, it is the very magnitude of these world pictures, in the multitude of religious scriptures, that prevents sincere Truth seekers from seeing any fundamental Unity of religious beliefs. Also, most religions carry a significant body of laws and moral injunctions in their scriptures. These laws often reflect more of a national or racial difference than a religious one. For example, the attitude towards women expounded in the Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and Hindu scriptures – not to mention many others – are decidedly different. Thus, if the seeker bases his religion only on its many, and often conflicting, moral and ethical precepts, he will find that the great social religions differ a great deal from one another.

However, if the avowed aim of religion is to bind man back to his fundamental reality, then, in this simple statement, there is a meeting point for the world faiths, although it is a difficult task to persuade priests, rabbis, ministers, bikhus, and other holy men of different faiths precisely what is meant by this binding back to the Ultimate Reality.

A Buddhist bikhu will surely not mean precisely the same thing as a Catholic priest or a Jewisch rabbi, to cite a reasonably possible situation in which all three can meet in the fellowship of discussion. Question number two, then, is approached differently by practitioners of different religions. Of course, some of these practitioners would not agree to the nature or purpose that is symbolised by an Anglo-Saxon word – God. Nevertheless, these practitioners again often find a meeting point in the means that they take to gain the ends of their religious beliefs: prayer, contemplation, meditation, and other Spiritual Disciplines. They will then endeavour to answer question number three by using similar techniques, even if their religious beliefs and loyalties are different.

We have seen, then, something of the way that religions try to answer our preceding questions, numbers two and three. The first question is, of course, the basic one, and the most difficult, for it is in the supposition of the existence of God, the Ultimate Reality, that the other questions have any validity at all. In what is called the ontological argument for the existence of God, such a Christian Divine as St Anselm, the eleventh-century Archbishop of Canterbury, brought the concept of God into the following formula:

A being than which nothing greater can be concieved.

By the word greater St Anselm meant ‘more perfect’ and not necessarily ‘greater’ in a spatial sense. The sixteenth-century thinker Descartes, known as the father of modern philosophy, reformulated this argument in more philosophical terms. But since Descartes’s time there have been many new arguments on the nature of ultimate Reality, ranging from the statements of Immanuel Kant to the pronouncements of Bertrand Russel. In our own century philosophers have shown that language, whatever we do with it and however we use it, is inadequate to predicate any ‘reality’ at all – let alone the Ulimate Reality. In fact, these great thinkers, in their own way, have reached a conclusion which has been propounded by the greatest mystics and holy men through the ages: language is ineffectual in the understanding of Reality.

Again, to paraphrase Plotinus:

Words can only point the way towards the vision; it is that point where each one must see for himself.

The Spiritual Aspirant is given a mandate to see for himself by the True Satguru, or Spiritual Mentor. He is embarking on a journey that he believes will answer the three questions which were posed at the beginning of this article; he believes this sincerely, and he knows that to see, to hear, and to experience the reality of God must be the final answer for the individual, after all the examination and studying of the scriptures and philosophies of the world have availed no actual experience. Such studying may put him in the right frame of mind for his personal journey of the soul, but he should always remember that whatever questions have been answered by his own experience, these same questions still remain for others. Discipleship on a high Spiritual Path does not automatically give the aspirant a mandate to pontificate, preach, or ‘instruct’ other people on what he considers as the ‘one and only true path to liberation.’ If the disciple is aware that his own words, no matter how illumined his own Inner Experience will be, carry the seeds of error and illusion, then he will perhaps be a little more humble and let his actions – and not the loud verbal noises which issue from his lips – give a living testimony to the fact that he has found the Waters of Life.

It is the height of foolishness to exhort others to give up their religious beliefs or observances simply because you believe, with however much justification, that the spiritual path you are taking is superior to all others. It may be a superior spiritual path, but to the listener to your words it sounds as if you are just another of the many evangelical ‘tub-thumpers’ who abound on this tiny planet.

The aspirant to the Spiritual Path of discipleship should have at least some knowledge of the underlying questions of other people’s religious beliefs: he obviously should have a theoretical knowledge of the Spiritual Science which he is undertaking; and if he stands before the public, addressing them in terms of intellectual comparisons and differentiations, he should be able to convey the teachings of the Holy Science in intelligent terms. It is foolish to inform your audience constantly that the mind is a ‘snare and a delusion,’ whilst constantly using the basic tool of the mind: human language. The time has perhaps come when all who profess discipleship to the Satguru, and who profess practise to the Holy Science, reflect a little upon the responsibilities of discipleship and on the understanding of the questions which underlie all religious and Spiritual Endeavours. The Satgurus and Holy Men of all ages have reiterated that men are not transformed by the words which they utter, but by the Word that is of God and is God.