© 2004 Ken Glasziou
© 2004 The Brotherhood of Man Library
Commencing around 600 years BCE and progressing to about 600 CE, a remarkable set of individuals appeared on Earth and proceeded to awaken mankind to the fact of God’s existence–and that God’s spirit dwells within the mind of every receptive individual human being to foster their spirituality. This indwelling God-Spirit is the real source of all true goodness, all morality, all spirituality.
This is exactly the same indwelling Spirit of God that was friend, guide, and counselor to such remarkable sources of divine revelation as Moses, Lao Tzu, Siddartha Gautama, Jesus of Nazareth, Muhammad, and many others during their short interlude on Planet Earth.
This synopsis constitutes a framework for discovering the existence of God and the mind of God. It also generates a logical basis for religious belief more basic even than does Whitehead’s “Process Theology.”
Neither fire nor wind,
Birth or death,
Can erase
Our good deeds.
Buddha
The Occam’s razor principle is a universally recognized problem-solving procedure. It requires the elimination of all unnecessary hypotheses, leaving only the simplest for further exploration. Our question: “what is the minimal set of axioms that will provide us with a valid system of religious belief.”
Considering the beginning of all things we have only two options: thought was involved, or all arose spontaneously from nothingness.
Choosing the latter hypothesis automatically generates difficult insoluble questions, such as: we are thinking, self-conscious beings, capable of creativity, abstract thought, etc. How could such properties arise from nothingness?
But if we allow thought to be involved, we have a built-in explanation for such phenomena. And so we choose the simpler of the two and express it as:
Axiom 1. God is the one self-caused fact existent in the whole of reality, hence must be the source and substance of all that is. (from “Origin of Origins of Tao Te Ching,” about 500 BCE).
We give our “Original Creative Thought” the name “God,” noting that since time and space came into being together as space-time, prior to that moment there was only the infinite eternal NOW. Hence questions such as what came before God are irrelevant.
In order to keep our system simple we have need of one more primary axiom, and propose this:
Axiom 2. God is perfect goodness.
Dedicated belief in these two axioms is all that civilization requires to eventually evolve to a near perfect world of love and goodness.
Given God’s perfect goodness, the next most important question every individual must ask is, “what does God require of me?” The simplest possible answer is that God would want us to be like him–good. Why? Well, if God did not want that, then we could make life miserable for others. Hence there would have to be a higher God whose goodness is superior to one who does not require that we should aspire to being good.
If we have the choice of wanting to be like God or not to be like him, then obviously we have free will. What would a world be like in which all us were created perfectly good–and could be nothing else but perfectly good? Unfortunately the answer to that question is that we would be automata, programmed to respond in fixed ways with no possibility of doing otherwise.
A God who loves us–as we would expect from one who is perfectly good–must grant us free will to choose, else there must be a more perfect God who would do so.
Our next question: Is there life after death? A God who is perfectly good must have had a purpose for creating earthly children capable of self-awareness, consciousness, abstract thought, spontaneous worship, etc. That purpose must provide for life beyond physical death. For if not, since our axiomatic God is perfect goodness, there would be a more perfect God who would so do.
What would qualify us for this reward? Well, certainly the desire, however feeble, to eventually attain God-like goodness. Possibly nothing else.
Finally–where do we find God? For that, our simplest answer must always be–within ourselves. For if God’s spirit did not indwell each of us to encourage us towards our goal of eventual God-like perfection, the fact of our animal heritage would prevent all progression.
Our real life purpose? That we receive God’s gift of eternal life wherein we seek to complete our task, finally to bask in God’s presence.
And because we know that our God is perfectly good, we also know that the eternal life that is on offer is one we will eternally cherish.
In summary: God is; God is perfect goodness.
The way up and the way down are the same way.
Heractitus
Somewhere around 2,500 years ago, there was a remarkable event. A new concept, sometimes given the name of “Perennial Philosophy,” entered the human psyche. Eventually it became the benchmark philosophy of all major religions. Its four main principles are:
Matter and self-consciousness are manifestations of the First Source and Center, known also as God, Tao, Brahman, Yahweh, Heavenly Father, Allah, etc.
God is knowable to all self-conscious, self-reflective minds.
The Spirit of God indwells all such minds.
The purpose of human life is union with this God-Spirit-Within as the initiating event leading to our ultimate attainment of God, the First Source and Center.
These primary principles persist in all major religions. The path to understanding appears to be improved through special individuals such as those believed by their followers to be incarnations of the Godhead, (Krishna, Jesus, Gautama for some Buddhists) or else God-inspired prophets (Muhammad and his Qur’an). Given these basics, mankind’s religious philosophy, at its source, is uniform, and all human life has the same source, the same purpose, and the same end.
Conflict between such religions must be an anathema to the God who created us–perhaps to the point of wondering whether our creation was an error. But that is human-type thinking. So surely efforts to spiritualize our minds in the hope of reducing conflict must accord with God’s desire for us.
Is He not closer than the vein of thy neck? Thou needest not raise thy voice, for He knoweth the secret whisper, and what is yet more hidden.
The Koran
To understand the spiritual life, it is vital to understand the role that must be attributed to the indwelling Spirit of God.
Although few are aware of it, it is referred to in the Bible’s New Testament in at least 25 of its verses, e.g. “Know you not that you are the temple of God, that the Spirit of God dwells in you” (1. Cor. 3:16), and, “If we love one another, God dwells in us.” (1 John 4:12). It was also known among the ancient Egyptians, Persians, Hindus, Sufis, and other followers of Islam.
This indwelling Spirit is the source in our minds of all true meanings and values of a non-material nature. Thus it is the source of true morality, beauty and goodness, and all revealed and non-material truth.
So, one way or another, all true revelation is from God–regardless of the means of its apparent origin. But the recognition of this truth is an individual function, crucially dependent upon the personal relationship between the individual and the God-Spirit within. Empirical truths of science may appear to be different, but basically, they are not.
The great goal of our human existence is to attune to the divinity of this indwelling Spirit. The great achievement of our mortal life is the attainment of a true and understanding consecration of self to the eternal aims of the divine Spirit who waits and works within our mind. And our ideal life is one of loving service to our fellow travelers.
While it may be true that a God in heaven would not feel our pain, our joys, or our sins, nevertheless this cannot be true for the God-Within, who must know everything that we know and feel everything that we feel–including even our most secret thoughts, good or evil.
Jesus of Nazareth was approaching thirty years of age at the time of his baptism by John, the time when he began to be certain that he really was indwelt by the Spirit of God. As their relationship grew, Jesus also became aware that this same Spirit of God indwells all of his earthly children as their mentor and guide.
Jesus realized that he had been given the task of making known the fact that God desires to indwell and guide all of his earthly children; hence he lived his life in the flesh so as to inspire us ever to seek to know and do the will of this indwelling Spirit of the heavenly Father.
If the Spirit dwells within us, potentially we are free and liberated children of the Spirit. The secret of self-mastery is faith in our Indwelling Spirit which ever works by love. If then we are born of the Spirit and led by the Spirit, we are forever delivered from a life of self-denial and watch-care over the desires of the flesh and are translated into the kingdom of the Spirit–whence we spontaneously show forth the fruits of the spirit in our daily lives. These fruits include: love, joy, peace, gentleness, goodness, faith, righteousness, truth.
Underlying man’s personality and animating it is a reservoir of Being that never dies, is never exhausted, and is without limit in awareness and bliss. This infinite center of every life, this hidden self or Atman, is no less than Brahman, the God-head, Body, Personality, and Atman- Brahan—man is not completely accounted for until all three have been named.
Hinduism