Television changed life as we knew it. With its onset everyone throughout the entire world can now enjoy “the good life” and bring any preferred type of lifestyle into one’s private or public domain. “The world is on the march for unity,” the article declared. “It is a march that can never be long repelled, only understood. Christianity was essentially a unity movement but it lost its way in the development of churchianity.
There is a basic unity between God and man and between man and his fellowman. The only way to peace and freedom today, the only way to solve the problems of man’s inhumanity to man–in war between nations or prejudice between races-–is to realize this essential unity. Let the average man speak for all of us: “I understand this unity ideal with my intellect, but it is not so easy to accept it in my heart. I know that I should love my neighbor and, in principle, I do; but in practice, I think it is just good judgment to make mighty sure that my neighbor is the kind I can love. I love all people in principle but let’s face it: I also hate a few in particular.”
Perhaps we can find the answer in the ideal of our spiritual unity with God. Because we do not really know ourselves, behind the many faces of human consciousness, there is a deeper self that constitutes the real “I” of us, unchanging and permanent. And this deeper self, the real “I,” can be found in every other person too.
Division and separation. prejudice and conflict are surface reactions to surface expressions. When we really know ourselves in unity with the Infinite, we begin to realize our basic unity with all people. All beings are one Being, and each individual self is part of the one Self!
It is ignorance of this fundamental truth that is the cause of all forms of selfishness, envy, anger and hate; of all pride, vanity, conceit and contempt for others; of all injustice, greed, cruelty and crime; of all beliefs in the superiority of oneself or one’s group over other individuals or other groups.
Men have imagined wrongly that they were private, separate selves; that they lived private, separate lives and had private separate existences–with private, separate fates and destinies. This is the grand illusion, the monstrous superstition that has created all the disunity in the world since time began! Men in their true selves are nothing more or less than dynamic differentiations of Being in a unitary cosmic organism under phenomenally individualized and personalized forms.
Thus, all our individual lives are one Life; all our interests of every kind are absolutely mutual and the purpose of all our existences is forever the same–to serve, each in his own way, according to his individuality, the highest good of the living body of humanity. The great challenge then, is for everyone to look beneath the externals and recognize clearly the true Self in his fellows, rather than beholding and reacting to the surface selves with which we are constantly coming into conflict.
Jesus said, “Do not judge by appearances, but judge with right judgement.” Some may then say, “But if I held this attitude toward all other people, I would leave them free to take advantage of me, since they are still living in surface consciousness.” As a matter of fact, if we would only dare to treat people, not as they appear to us, but as they really are in their deeper Selfhood, it would do more to help them to discover their true self than all the preaching or lobbying or social action in the world.
Gocthe sensed this when he said: “Treat people as they are and you make them worse. Treat people as if they were what they should be, and you make them what they can be.”
(To be continued in next week’s edition.)
