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Benedikt, Heinrich
E.
Spirituality versus
Religion
Principles of Interreligious Understanding and Self-Realization
We are living in a
time where there is a deep lack of orientation. Many people today
are consciously or unconsciously seeking for their true identity
but many of them, unfortunately, get caught in nationalistic
slogans or doctrines or religious creeds and dogmas which cause
rather painful and violent disturbances and even warlike antagonisms
in our already deeply shaken world. It is only through a spiritual
understanding which goes to the root and source of religion itself,
which is God, that we can discover the goal of our quest. The
answer to our lives can only be found by going within ourselves,
by overcoming the rulership of lust, pride and passion through
true detachment and surrender and by discovering the boundless
source of divine life, virtue, unconditional joy and love and
God-realization that is lying hidden in the depth of our souls.
Only in this way, which the author describes, will we be able
to transform this planet into a garden of brotherhood and peace.
Table of Contents
Some Basic Preliminaries
for the Path of Divine Life, Meditation and Self-Realization
God-Realization: The Goal
and Essence of all Spiritual Life .
The Two Aspects of Truth
and Religion
The Foundation of the Spiritual
Path
Is a Teacher or a Spiritual
Guide Needed? .
Where Are You Going?
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With the permission of the
Heinrich Schwab Verlag I am able to present you following excerpt.
Enjoy!
Excerpt
God-Realization: The Goal and Essence
of all Spiritual Life.
A God-realized master or person, like
Melkizedek, Lao Tzu, Ramakrishna, Buddha, Guru Nanak, Yogananda
or Master Eckhart, is not someone who has gilded his ego or polished
or sanctified his personality, but one who has reached a state
of total annihilation of his ego and personality in order to
merge into the sparkling ocean of Divinity. He has overcome his
feeling of "I" and "mine," his attachment
to mind and body and drowned himself in the light of pure consciousness.
In the scriptures God reveals Himself as 1 am an all-consuming
fire." Someone who has fully surrendered to Him will find
his little "i" consumed by the fire of God. His soul
is flooded with God's infinite light, His fire of cosmic consciousness
has entered his soul and taken the place of his little whiny
ego so that he can truly say, "Not I, but God lives in me.
" The saints have stated, 1 have died, but He has risen
within me," and I saw myself going out and Him entering
the house." The Mahatmas have called it "Sahaja Samadhi,"
Buddha called it "Nirvana," the Vedas named it "Aham
Brahmasmi" and the Torah has called it "I Am That I
Am." It is difficult to explain how and what this state
or experience really is since words cannot describe it; they
can only point to it. Only if a little spark of this awareness
has awakened within our soul, can we rise to some kind of feeling
or intuitive understanding about what these words might denote.
The nature of God is both transcendental
and immanent. He transcends all created worlds, whether gross
or subtle, but is, at the same time, the root, cause and essence
of all things and beings. This is also true of the consciousness
and identity of a realized soul; its awareness, identity and
love have become all-embracing. And since it has become aware
of the illusive nature of its previous personal self and the
whole universe, both of which are composed of the glamorous polarities
created by temporary sense qualities, its consciousness and perception
remain deeply rooted in pure transcendental self- awareness,
beholding the appearance of this world as a projection of the
all-creative power of this universal Consciousness onto its own
screen. In this way, the whole flow of life, as well as the great
stream of the changing appearances of this universe, are like
a great multidimensional movie. And one of the "objects"
or "actors" passing across the screen is this temporary
personality, incarnate in a body made of flesh and bone, which
one has identified with his own self.
The ancient sages and seers of India
have called this wrong identification of the "self"
with the "not self" or the mistaking of the "not-self"
for the self, "Maya" or "the great delusion."
They have discovered that the all-pervading, all- beholding and
all-embracing universal consciousness which projects all of these
myriad creatures and creation onto its own screen is the only
Absolute Reality. It Is That It Is. The experience of oneness
with It becomes the all- transcending experience of "I Am
That I Am." Everything else, like ego, mind, self, personality,
world or universe, has only transitory existence; they all have
a beginning and what has a beginning also has an end.
Awakened to the one transcendental
Consciousness, one finds oneself totally detached from mind and
body and their sensations, feelings and pains. This does not
mean that one is not aware of them, but that they are experienced
only as pale shadows on the surface of the sea of Absolute Being,
Consciousness and Bliss. At the same time our hearts, our intelligence
and all of our faculties, like reasoning, sensing, moving, smelling
and tasting, are doing their work and service in this relative
world but are no longer led by the whims and desires, concepts
and imaginations, ideas and projections of our personalities,
egos or individual wills. They are guided by the one wisdom-guided
will and plan of God. This does not mean that our individuality
is annihilated or destroyed; no, the individuality remains but
we do not experience an identification with it. We experience
only universal, divine self-awareness as our true self and being
and see individuality as one of the infinite instruments for
expressing this one universal consciousness.
It is this consciousness, called God,
which cares for all the jewels of individualities and beholds
them in His universal mind and memory. It is He who takes all
of these forms and moves them about on the screen of life. He
is the Creator and Mover of all things; He is the one life of
all created beings and the one light and self of all of us. lf
and when we have shaken off the delusive bonds of our blind little
selves and minds, we will become aware of Him as the One Living
Being who abides in all these names and forms, the very Self
of our selves and the Light of our lights. And, as I said above,
we will experience all these selves and bodies as our own self
and body! The joy of one of them will be the joy of all of us
and the pain of one of them will be our pain. Yet both, individual
pain as well as collective pain, will be carried and comforted
by the light, peace and joy absolute that are rising from the
unreachable depth of God, from the infinite Source of all sources,
from the bottom of the one all-pervading Self of all selves.
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