Blessed Night, Loves 😊

I Pray All Is Well With Everyone…And Your Hearts And Minds Are Full Of Love, Joy, And Compassion…For All God’s Children…And All God’s Creation! And Where That Is Sincerely So For Any Of Us – Know That Those Higher Qualities Will Then Radiate Effortlessly From Within Our Beings Throughout All The Atmosphere Around Us! And The Energy Of The Living God Is At That Time – Active – And Representing Our Human Selves On This Earth…With All The Power And Authority Of Our Very Own…”Mighty I AM Presence”! Amen…

Give Thanks And Praises For Love And Life…

And Y’all Be Love…

“The history of the Western world, since it accepted Jehovah as its Lord and Master, has been in the main the history of religious persecutions and religious wars; and men, in perfect good faith, have proved their zeal for God by devoting the bodies of their fellow men to the flames, and their souls to the torments of Hell.

…When the Western mind accuses the Eastern of pantheism, it instinctively assumes that the Eastern standpoint is the same as its own. In point of fact the “higher pantheism” of the East is an entirely different thing from the materialistic pantheism into which Western thought, in its seasons of revolt from the worship of a supernatural God, is liable to relapse. The only fault that can be found with the former is that very few persons can breathe freely on its exalted heights. To give his heart to One who is not merely supremely real but alone real, and who is therefore in very truth the All of Being, “exceeds man’s might.”

For all but a chosen few the figure of Brahma must needs recede into the dim background. As it recedes, lesser Gods, some beautiful, some terrible, some loathsome, some grotesque, emerge from the darkness and claim man’s homage. The further it recedes, the lowlier are the Gods that man worships. In China and Japan, where faith in the individual soul is strong but the “intuition of totality” is weak, Brahma (or his equivalent) becomes the mere shadow of a shade, and the souls that are worshipped are those of departed men. Thus, the creed of the East tends to degenerate either into polytheism, which becomes at last the dead worship of dead Gods, or into ancestor-worship, which is indeed within its limits a living faith and does much for the stability of social life, but which, even in its most exalted moods, can present no higher ideal than that of patriotism to the aspiring souls of its votaries.

From the un-charitableness of super-naturalism, the creed of the East is, in theory at least, entirely free. All men, without exception, are near and dear to the Universal Soul, for all are sparks from its central fire. More than that, life as such, be it high or low, is sacred because of the fountain from which it issues. Not religious toleration only, but all-embracing charity is of the very essence of the faith that directs itself towards the All. One needs but a superficial acquaintance with the sacred writings of the East to convince oneself that, unlike his Western rival, Brahma is not, in any sense of the word, a “jealous” God. Jehovah’s jealousy of other Gods and vindictiveness towards those who worship them, suggest that he is conscious of his own limitations and is not secure of his position.

Brahma knows that the lesser Gods whom men worship are his Viceroys, embodiments in their several ways of the ever-changing dream of him, who is All in All, which possesses the growing soul of Humanity; and, far from resenting the worship that is paid to them, he accepts it as meant for himself: “Nay, and of hearts which follow other Gods, in simpler faith, their prayers arise to me, O Kunti’s Son;  though they pray wrongfully; For I am the Receiver and the Lord Of every sacrifice.”

Religions have indeed been persecuted in the East, but always for social or political reasons. Of Buddhism, the dominant creed of the East, one may say more than this; one may say that it has never persecuted, that, in practice as well as principle, it is an entirely tolerant creed. “Throughout the long history of Buddhism,” says Dr Rhys Davids, “… the Buddhists have been uniformly tolerant; and have appealed, not to the sword, but to intellectual and moral suasion. We have not a single instance, throughout the whole period, of even one of those religious persecutions which loom so largely in the history of the Christian church. Peacefully the Reformation began; and in peace, so far as its own action is concerned, the Buddhist church has continued till today.”

The idea of torturing a fellow man to death because his theology happens to differ from one’s own, is wholly alien from the Eastern tone and temper of thought, as alien as is the assumption which makes religious persecution possible, and the atheistical assumption that Divine Truth can be imprisoned in a form of words. Each of these dominant types of religion has, as might be expected, its own psychology, its own eschatology, and its own moral and social life. The West regards the soul as dependent on the body, coming into being with the latter, growing with its growth, and either dying at its death or surviving it by the grace of the Supernatural God.

… In Christendom and in Islam, the immortality to which the believer is taught to look forward is supernatural and quasi-material. On some future day the outward and visible world (which Western thought identifies with “Nature”) will pass away, and a supernatural order of things, also outward and visible, will take its place. The bodies of the dead will then be raised from the grave, and their souls, which meanwhile have been leading a dubious twilight kind of existence, will be restored to them, and will dwell in them forever, either in the light of God’s visible presence or in the lurid darkness of Hell.

… Wherever belief in the Supernatural is dying, belief in survival is dying with it. Modern skepticism, which is based, like the faith that it repudiates, on an instinctive belief in the reality of the outward world and an instinctive disbelief in the reality of the inward life, sees in death the extinction of the soul (which indeed has never been anything but a name) as well as the dissolution of the body.

Morality is a function of many variables, of which psychology and eschatology are perhaps the most important. The Soul, which is at once One and Many, is the real bond of union among men; and all communal sentiments, such as attachment to country, clan, or family, are ultimately rooted in the sense of oneness in and through the Universal Self.

The Western disbelief in the reality of the soul has hastened the dissolution of communal bonds and interests, and has helped to bring in, perhaps prematurely, the régime of individualism, a necessary stage in the development of the soul, but one in which selfishness is not merely permitted but directly fostered. The Western belief in the reality of the outward world, and therefore in the intrinsic worth of outward goods, has made the struggle for wealth, both by nations and individuals, one of the most prominent features of Western civilization.

… The psychology of the East is as simple as it is profound. The soul, or inward life, alone is real. Eternity is a vital aspect of reality. Birthlessness and deathlessness are the temporal aspects of eternity. The present existence of the soul is not more certain than its pre-existence and its future existence; and these three, the past, the present, and the future lives, are stages in an entirely natural process. The present life is always brief and fleeting; but the past begins, as the future ends, in eternity, in the timeless life of God himself.

Issuing from the Universal Soul and passing through axons of what I may call pre-natal existence, the soul at last becomes individualized, and enters on a career of conscious activity. Far from being dependent on the body, it accretes to itself, on whatever plane it may energize, the outward form that it needs and deserves; and, in each of its many deaths, it is the body that dies, deprived of the vitalizing presence that animated it, not the soul.

… The destiny of the soul is determined by its origin. Issuing from the Universal Soul, it must eventually be reabsorbed into its divine source. Beginning its individualized career as a spiritual germ, it passes through innumerable lives on its way to the goal of spiritual maturity. The development of the germ-soul takes the form of the gradual expansion of its consciousness and the gradual universalization of its life. As it nears its goal, the chains of individuality relax their hold upon it; and at last, with the final extinction of egoism, with the final triumph of selflessness, with the expansion of consciousness till it has become all-embracing, the sense of separateness entirely ceases, and the soul finds its true self, or, in other words, becomes fully and clearly conscious of its oneness with the living Whole.

This pure and exalted creed, besides placing before man the highest and truest of all ideals, that of utter selflessness, has the merit of bringing the whole of human life under the dominion of natural law. Indeed, it applies to the life of the soul that great natural law, the discovery of which in the sphere of physical life has been one of the foremost achievements of modern thought, the law of evolution. One consequence of this is that the notions of arbitrariness, favouritism, and caprice, which cling, de facto if not de jure, to the conception of a supernatural God, and which introduce a gambling element – a readiness to take risks, a tendency to put off things to the eleventh hour – into the practical morality of the West, have no place in the ethical philosophy of the East.

The Catholic belief in the efficacy of the last rites of the Church, the Protestant belief that a deathbed repentance may open the door of Salvation to one who has led an impious life, bear witness, each in its own way, to the presence in the religious atmosphere of the West of a fantastic conception of God which is absolutely irreconcilable with the primary assumption of Eastern thought. It is of Brahma rather than of Jehovah that the words of the Lawgiver hold good: “God is not a man that he shall lie, neither the son of man that he shall repent.”

The successive lives of the soul, to which Eastern thought looks backward and forward, are linked together by a chain of natural causation. What a man sows, that shall he reap, not in this earth-life only but also in the lives that are yet to be. The primary relation between the individual and the Universal Self is an essentially natural relation; and through this vast conception the whole spiritual world is brought under the dominion of natural law.

So pure, and so exalted is the inner faith of the East, that the excess of these qualities is perhaps its only defect. The ideas that it embodies immensely transcend the normal range of human desire and human thought, with the result that it has ever been and will long continue to be an esoteric creed. Yet the life of the masses in the East owes much to its occult influence.

Besides investing the ethics of half the human race with an atmosphere of natural law, the Brahmanic ideal of duty, though beyond the apprehension of ordinary mortals, makes two contributions of inestimable value to the popular morality, the sentiment of devotion to impersonal causes and the kindred sense of detachment from material aims and interests. We have seen that as the figure of Brahma recedes into the dim background, lesser Gods come forth and claim man’s homage. So too, as the Brahmanic ideal (devotion to, culminating in reunion with the Universal Self) fades into the background, lesser ideals, such as patriotism, tribal loyalty, filial piety, and the like, come forth and claim man’s devotion.”

The Creed of Buddha, by Edmond Holmes, 1919

Glass – Anno Domini Beats