A number of years ago, shortly after I my first initiation, I was having a conversation with a friend who is a hard-core skeptic. He tried not to smirk at my new-found path, and I tried to contain my adoration for the Gods from spilling out too much. Neither of us succeeded.
Not for the first time – or the last – I was told of how religion has come to be and how useless it is. He told me of how ancient men responded to a thunder storm, and how frightening it must have been to them to see the lightning flash across the sky and the thunder roll through the clouds. And how in fear and defiance, they raised their spears and sticks heavenward, shaking them, throwing them towards the powers they did not understand.
And in that instant, I was flung back, back through history, back through the ages and civilizations, to that point in time when there were no cities, no buildings, no roads. Back to the time when only wilderness covered this earth and these first forbearers, the first ancestors of our ancestors walked the earth in small familial tribes. And I saw that first thunderstorm that frightened them so.
It was an instance of great enlightenment and awakening, for I realized how significant it was, that first instance, that mankind’s first encounter with something larger and unmistakably beyond them. That recognition of the Great Spirit!!
That recognition could only have come, because mankind itself was endowed with the same Spirit!
People all over the world went on to develop civilizations, each with their own views, each with their own Gods and Goddesses, each building monuments and pyramids of great structures to honour these invisible but incredibly alive Deities, each thinking they were the only ones who have seen Them truly. Somewhere along the line, these views of the Divine caused schisms and divisions, and in an effort to protect their views, their ways of seeing the Gods, wars ensued.
From my vantage point, in the next instance, I saw things differently – each civilization, each ethnic group of people saw the Divine exactly as they were supposed to see it. The Divine is simply too large, too universal, too cosmic to see as a unified force. Whether one sees the Gods and Goddesses through the eyes of the Hindu, Egyptian, Buddhist, or Norse, whether Jewish, or Christian, what people see here are just splinters of the Godhead. Further, these splinters are sub-divided and every human, whether a believer or not, carries this spiritual fragments and it is by these, the earliest of mankind was able to recognize that Gods exist. Each culture is like a facet within the great diamond which is the Divine Godhead. Facets of a diamond do not fight with each other – they glow with their own unique spiritual light, even as each culture, and each person within each culture is supposed to shine with his and hers own unique spiritual light. Together, we all create a mosaic of light and wonder that reflects the Light and Wonder of the already eternally established spiritual realms of the Gods.
Ours is a very small planet spinning around a star of no great significance in the skies, and yet, we have here a life form called human beings. Around this planet is an aura, a spiritual cloud to which we all are connected, not only to each other and every other person on this world, and to the Divine power, regardless of how it chooses to reveal itself to us!
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