Love is the Fulfilling of the Law
ON GOD; Part XCVIII
“Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world. Hereby know ye the Spirit of God: Every spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God: And every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God: and this is that spirit of antichrist, whereof ye have heard that it should come; and even now already is it in the world. Ye are of God, little children, and have overcome them: because greater is he that is in you, than he that is in the world. They are of the world: therefore speak they of the world, and the world heareth them. We are of God: he that knoweth God heareth us; he that is not of God heareth not us. Hereby know we the spirit of truth, and the spirit of error. Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God; and every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love. In this was manifested the love of God toward us, because that God sent his only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through him. Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another. No man hath seen God at any time. If we love one another, God dwelleth in us, and his love is perfected in us. Hereby know we that we dwell in him, and he in us, because he hath given us of his Spirit. And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Saviour of the world. Whosoever shall confess that Jesus is the Son of God, God dwelleth in him, and he in God. And we have known and believed the love that God hath to us. God is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him. Herein is our love made perfect, that we may have boldness in the day of judgment: because as he is, so are we in this world. There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear: because fear hath torment . He that feareth is not made perfect in love. We love him, because he first loved us. If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar: for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen? And this commandment have we from him, That he who loveth God love his brother also” (1 John 4:1-21).
We devoted yesterday’s post to an attempt to show the underlying message of the Buddha, one that is greatly missed like so much of the message of the Christ is missed. The essentials of the messages are the same; Enlightenment as the way to Universal Love and to discipleship which is Nirvana is the message of the Buddha and Love as the way to Enlightenment and to discipleship which is the Kingdom of God is the message of the Christ. Both Nirvana and the Kingdom of God are the same thing, the same place and state of being and this is ever within each of us awaiting our discovery and arrival. From our perspective Enlightenment leads one to Love in that in this state we realize Truth and in this Truth we see no separation, only the Unity of ALL. From our perspective we should also see that Love encompasses ALL; within Love is Enlightenment and Truth. The Buddha teaches us to let the Inner Man, the Truth so to speak, live through the form and the consciousness; He gives us instruction on how to see the world and how to see the Truth and He asks us to choose. The Christ teaches us to let that same Inner Man live through the form and the consciousness by seeking Him and focusing upon Him and, of course, by Him we do mean both the Christ and the Christ Within. The Christ gives us instruction on how to Love, KNOWING that in that Love that IS God is the righteousness and the Truth, the Enlightenment.
It is commonly understood that the Buddha does not speak of God but this is only True from the narrow perspective of the man in the world. He speaks of the Truth that lies within us, of the Inner Self which is at times translated as mind, He speaks of the Soul and it is in these ways plus the idea of Nirvana that the Buddha speaks of God. The common understanding does not see this because it is blinded by the illusion and the galmour and, of course, the doctrines that teach him otherwise. If we accept that God IS and can see Him as we have premised then we are accepting the FACT that God IS ALL:
GOD IS: Life, Existence; He is the ONE Boundless Immutable Principle; one Absolute Reality which, antecedes all manifested conditioned Being. It is beyond the range and reach of any human thought or expression**.
Can this be disputed? Do any understand God in a better way than this? There are many opinions and understandings of God and His relationship to His creation but all of this is philosophical banter as the FACT still remains as above, God IS beyond the range and reach of any human thought or expression and being such, cannot be put into the manifold boxes that each different ideology or philosophy or religion want to place Him. We speak about Him as a person using personal pronouns because we frankly do not know a better way of doing so and many there are who still believe in their understanding that God is a person on a throne in Heaven and many a preacher portrays Him just this way. If we look into the vastness of space on a clear night and see that in every direction there is no end to what IS and that what IS is filled with mystery and is infinite in scope and eternal in nature, we are looking into the manifestation of God, His manifest universe. God IS however more than the manifestation because we know that He is also Spirit and in the statement on God above we see this Spirit as Boundless Immutable Principle and there are not words in any language to define this in any better way. The Master tells us that “God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth” (John 4:24) and there is a depth to this understanding that has eluded man and which we will try to develop as we proceed with our thoughts.
Remembering that we are working on aligning the words of the Buddha to the idea of God, we now have our working understanding of the nature of God; for our purposes we will continue to take ALL that we have said above and compress it into these simple words that can for us mean the same thing…..God IS. In this reference we should add, as we have before, the idea from the Old Testament regarding how Moses is to refer to God when speaking to the people. Moses says “and they shall say to me, What is his name? what shall I say unto them?” to this the Spirit that IS God says to Moses “I AM THAT I AM: and he said , Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you” (Exodus 3:13-14). There is similar understanding to be found in the sacred texts of most all religions and nowhere will we find a defining statement that will give us any better understanding than simply saying that God IS. This is much the same as trying to explain what is Life itself; we all have it as do the animals and the plants and we proceed through this phase of it in consciousness but we do not KNOW what Life is other that to explain it as a principal. We talk also about eternal Life which is an attribute of God as well so that in our understanding we can see that God and man are both eternal Spirit or principal. We understand man to be a spiritual being, that he is Spirit, and while there are no verses in the New Testament that specifically tell us this, it is a Truth. The verse above shows us that God is Spirit and that for a man to approach Him, he must do so “in spirit and in truth” and this could not be so were these not in man. The Apostle Paul puts this into perspective for us saying that “Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you?” (1 Corinthians 3:16) and here we KNOW that he is speaking of the relationship between the body as the “temple of God” and the “Spirit of God” as the Life. The Master refers to our Spirit selves as well in saying to His disciples “Ye know not what manner of spirit ye are of” (Luke 9:55).
Are we making sense here? Can we understand that God IS and that we, as True man, as Spirit, ARE as well. We continue here with the words of the Master regarding the relationship between the Father God who IS and Himself. Jesus tells us that “I and my Father are one” (John 10:30) which is a rather profound statement and one that is misunderstood and interpreted in doctrine to have some reasonable understanding; most doctrine denies the sameness of the Father and the Son because of their preconceived ideas on the Trinity and because they look at man as this form although he is told that he is not the form. We should understand this saying in the same vein as we understand, or try to understand, the idea of the Master’s saying to His disciples that “that ye may know, and believe, that the Father is in me, and I in him” (John 1038). There is no easy understanding to these sayings which are parabolic in nature as the Master is speaking to men in form about things of the Spirit which they cannot understand. Can we today see the essential ONENESS of the Father and the Son, which words are for our understanding as men in form so as to see our essential relationship with our God. We have said before that the Son, the Christ principal is the manifestation of the Father, the Boundless Immutable Principle. From our perspective these are ONE Essential Being and the efforts by the religions to divide are efforts to explain. We say that man is Spirit and that at the same time He is Soul and this is akin to the Master’s pronouncement above of “the Father is in me, and I in him“; for us the Spirit is the Father Aspect and the Soul is the Son. For reference and clarity we post again our chart here:
|
Aspect of God |
Potency |
Expressed as Fire |
Aspect of Man |
|
Father |
Will or Power |
Electric Fire |
Spirit or Life |
|
Son |
Love and Wisdom |
Solar Fire |
Soul or Christ Within |
|
Holy Spirit |
Light or Activity |
Fire by Friction |
Life Within the Form |
Our understanding here that the artificial divisions of God into Person or Attributes or lessor gods based on activity are just that, artificial divisions intended over the centuries to help man to understand the incomprehensible.
We have now an understanding of God Who IS and the Son, the Christ, who IS with Him. John, in His Prologue makes this explicitly clear saying “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1). There are many other verses that can take us to this conclusion but for our purpose today these will suffice to show that God IS and that in like fashion the Christ IS as well. Again we should not lose track of our objective here which is to show that the teachings of the Buddha, although they may not mention God as such, are about God insofar as they are about the Inner Man, the Soul. As we can see from our chart, the Son is to the Father as the Soul is to the Spirit and in this we should see the necessary relationships as are also expressed in our verses above as regards both our God and ourselves being Spirit and then as regards the Christ and the Father being ONE which is to say that the Christ is Spirit as well. We go forward now to show that the man in the world has a Oneness with the Christ and through the Christ with his own Christ Within, his Soul.
In our chapter that we have been posting every day for some time now we find a definitive statement by the Apostle John that tells us that “as he is, so are we in this world” and in this saying we have that same sense of equality, sameness and Oneness that we have in the saying by the Master that “I and my Father are one“. Now John is saying this to disciples and we should understand that it is in discipleship that we realize this Great Truth but this does not change the constitution of man as we see it in our chart. We are what we are and we are, ALL of us, the same; we are Spirit which is the Life, we are the manifestation of that Life which is the Soul and the consciousness and we are the activity of these two in form. These are ALL ONE and this is the nature of OUR GOD as well as He is Life and the sum total of the consciousness of ALL of His manifestation and the activity of the manifested Universe and in this saying is just an insufficient attempt to explain the unexplainable except to KNOW that the more that we can understand of ourselves, the more that we can understand of OUR GOD because as Christ and the Father are ONE and we as men are as the Christ is, then it must be that we are ONE with GOD as well.
This is our end point. Can we see clearly or at least understand the likelihood of our premises above as they are supported by scripture. Can we understand:
- The Nature of the Father as Spirit and as Life, the Life giving principal for ALL of His creation. That He is Existence itself and that He cannot be explained or comprehended by the man in form and that there are not even words to express the ultimate Truths. That in this we can see the reality of the saying that He is the ONE Boundless Immutable Principle; one Absolute Reality which, antecedes all manifested conditioned Being as saying that we do not KNOW other that what we can see and can reason with our finite minds which is not really much at all compared to the Infinite and Eternal Nature of God.
- The equality, the sameness and the oneness of the Christ with the Father which understanding is on all levels, the Cosmic, as the Christ and the personal. That on the Cosmic we have the words of the Apostle telling us that “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” which should clearly tell us that the Father and the Son are ever and always the same and that the words that we use can mislead if not understood as the Spirit and Soul of God which encompasses the Spirit and Soul of ALL things. On the human level, as enunciated by the Christ, we have again the equality, the sameness and the oneness as the Master testifies saying “I and my Father are one“. That on the personal level we have every verse that leads us to seeing the Inner Man the spiritual man, the Christ Within but no verse is so pointed as “as he is, so are we in this world” which again should show to us the equality, the sameness and the oneness that we have with the Christ.
- The dual understanding of the verse above “as he is, so are we in this world” which should tell us that we are the same as He is in form and in Soul and in Spirit for that is what we are in this world. We cannot separate one from another as we are the Spirit manifesting through the Soul and appearing as the form in the world of Things and we should recollect here that it is the activity of the Soul in form, from the least spiritual man to the fullest in full discipleship, that is the Holy Spirit.
Our point should be made here, that regardless of whether the Buddha mentions God at all in His sayings and His teachings, He is speaking of God when He speaks of Truth and of Soul and of the Inner Man that is not the self in the world. And we should see by reading His sayings as presented in the Dhammapada and in other works on the Lord of Enlightenment that His teaching is essentially the same as the teachings of the Master albeit in a different time and a different culture. We should remember here also that the average Buddhist comprehends the Truth of the teachings of their Master in about the same way as the average Chirstian comprehends the Truth of the teachings of the Christ; they are both ensconced in doctrine and in the dogma of religion.
This is the end for now of our thoughts on the Buddha and on the last saying that we have been discussing in the chapter from John’s epistle that tells us of our sameness with our Master. We will continue with this chapter in the next post.
Note on the Quote of the Day
This daily blog also has a Quote of the Day which may not be in any way related to the essay. Many of these will be from the Bible and some just prayers or meditations that may have an influence on you and are in line with the subject matter of this blog. As the quote will change daily and will not store with the post, it is repeated in this section with the book reference and comment.
The kingdom of God cometh not with observation: Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold , the kingdom of God is within you (Luke 17:20-21).
Today’s Quote of the Day is a saying that we should all be familiar with and understand; this is the forty first time we have used it or a part of it in our Blog. There is no other single saying by the Master that gives us the reality of our relationship with the Father, that He is within us. This is not a stretch but a logical following of the facts as we tried to do above in the main part of our essay. If the Father is in the Kingdom and the Kingdom is within us then it must be True that the Father is in us as well. This is a basic precept of ALL that we write, that God is within us and that He is manifest in us as the Christ Within expressing through form and, if we can see the reality of what we have presented above then we can also see that as the Master said, we can say: “that the Father is in me, and I in him“.
- * Buddha: His Life and Teachings; Peter Pauper Press, Mount Vernon, New York 1 1 r v
- ** A Treatise on Cosmic Fire by Alice A Bailey © 1951 by Lucis Trust
