Do You Need God to be Good?

Here are a couple of questions I was independently asked recently about whether you need God to be good, and why a person can't just lead a decent and kind life without having to worry about spirituality or whether there is a Creator or not.


Q. I often encounter 'decent,' well-meaning humanist types who disarmingly suggest to me that in the absence of a clear verifiable affirmative for the existence of deity, then surely it's reasonable just to believe in love and do good deeds: charity, putting others before oneself, etc?  What is wrong with just focusing on the core messages of the spiritual traditions instead of worrying about whether God exists or not? Sometimes I find myself sympathising with this perspective and asking myself how do I really know if these things are real?  How would you respond to these doubters? I ask for myself but also through a desire to be better armed against uncertainty and doubts along the spiritual path. 

A. Here are a few thoughts on this. Aren’t such people just saying obey the second commandment (love your neighbour) but ignore the first which is love of God? But the second only has any basis or reality to it in the light of the first.  There is no love in the real sense outside God.  He is the tree and it is the fruit. No tree, no real fruit. There's only human emotion which can be nice and warm and friendly but is not divine love because at root it is self-centred (not necessarily the same as selfish) even though it may appear otherwise. True love only comes from going beyond yourself, or even other people, to a higher, transcendental truth and that is God. In effect these people are counselling the horizontal path without acknowledging the vertical but the horizontal without the vertical keeps you firmly in this world with its falsehoods and illusions, and you will never find height or depth. 


So I would counter them by saying their approach is based on nothing more substantial than good intentions and will never last without something deeper to support it which can only be acknowledgement of the reality of a higher power. In the absence of an absolute standard of goodness and truth (which can only be God) everything becomes relative and conditional which means subject to change.

And even if their humanism helps them do kind things in this world where does that really get them or anyone else? They still remain in this world and the true spiritual aspirant can never be satisfied with this world because it is not his real home. Any truth here only exists as a reflection of the reality of the higher spiritual world. 

Even Jesus (in Mark 10:18) denied being good of himself when he said "Why do you call me good? There is none good save one, that is, God". If Jesus could not be good without God how on earth can anyone else? Is there any individual who can really look into his heart and say "I am a good person"? All goodness flows from God. As the Masters told me "The Master Jesus and all the Masters of old knew they were as nothing and that all they were came from the Creator." Where does the assumed goodness of the humanist come from? Is it a reality or an aspiration?


So the answer is that certainly you can lead a good life, up to a point, without a sense of a higher reality but how good will it really be and on what is it based? Goodness which does not have God as its foundation is not real and can never last.

And, by the way, the core message of all spiritual traditions is that God exists. That is the central truth of them all and the rest depends entirely on that to have any meaning. Even Buddhism, the one exception, points to the Unborn, Unmade and Uncompounded as the reality beyond this world. The Buddha may not have talked about God possibly because he was reacting against the mythological speculations of the Brahmins of the time but the fact that it does not acknowledge the Creator is the great flaw of Buddhism and why it is not really suitable as a religion for people in the West unless it is supported, supplemented and seen in the light of Christ.

Here is the second question with just some additional points in my response so as to avoid repetition.

Q. Why does it matter whether you believe in God or not? Why can't you just be a good person, care for the sick, feed the poor or whatever it might be? What extra would believing in God add?

A. The extra is critical because it has to do with the work of spiritual transformation. Only if you believe in God can this spiritualising work start to take place within you and you be recreated as a spiritual being rather than a limited earthbound material one. Of course, you already are a spiritual being but not in full consciousness. You are spiritual in your origin and potential but not in your current state. Belief in God is necessary because without it you cannot be pulled out of earthly darkness and into the spiritual light. It is like the sun that makes a seed planted in the earth grow.

Q. But many believers aren't transformed. They remain they same petty, selfish people.

A. True but I would say two things to that. Firstly, the process is a long one and depends on the base level at which you start. And secondly, many people only believe in their heads but it is the heart not the mind that matters. Theoretical belief is of little use if the heart and the imagination are not involved. That is because only belief in the heart and the imagination affects the whole person.

From Savage to Sage

In the 1980s when I was in India I wrote a book I called 'From Savage to Sage'. I wrote it with pen and paper on a 19th century rosewood roll top desk bought in a market in Bangalore for next to nothing - another world! Anyway, the book was never published. When I returned to England I sent some sample chapters to a couple of publishers, one of whom replied that it was an interesting read but “the audience for which we cater is receptive only up to a point”!  
That was not because the book mentioned the Masters because it didn't. At that time they were still talking to me, though not as regularly as they had been during the first year of their contact covered in Meeting the Masters, and I was always reluctant to mention them when they were still communicating except in a general sense, by which I mean that I was happy to state that I believed such beings existed but not that I had personally encountered them.

The subject of the book, as implied by the title, was the evolution of consciousness, outlined in general terms according to my understanding of the time. This was the process that, as I saw it, transformed an Adam into a Christ. That is to say, the evolutionary process that turned a new formed spiritual being into a fully functioning son of God. The journey is one from innocence to experience and then back to innocence again but this time as a fully self-conscious state with all the fruits of experience, will, intellect, creativity and so on, added.

The early adamic state is when the newly created individual is not yet conscious of his individuality. He is one with nature and his environment.  He is one with spirit as it is manifested in nature but totally ignorant of his Creator, the transcendent God.  So he has to leave the paradise of union with the Mother principle in order to know the Father.  This means he has to experience the sense of separation and become conscious of duality, and that, of course, introduces the possibility of pain and suffering in a more than purely physical sense.  So he has to discover himself as a person and a true individual. Alone but also free. Early man lived in what we now call a participation consciousness. It was a state of unity but natural not spiritual meaning that the union was an unconscious one with what you might call the anima mundi not a fully conscious union of love with the Creator. So Adam fell in order to know himself. Whether this fall was intended or not is an interesting point.  My belief is that it was not, not in the way that it happened anyway. Adam was meant to evolve in a gentler fashion, one in which death and suffering would not have played so great a part. However the process was disrupted in the way mythologically presented in the book of Genesis, and sin entered in.
 God had to remake his plans for the evolutionary path but he has to do this constantly in response to the exercising of human free will anyway. He may have a plan but it is not fixed. It is an organic thing, always growing and changing according to how human beings react to it and what they instigate. There is destiny and there is free will and the two necessarily interact at every moment as life unfolds. So God's plan alters second by second according to events but its direction remains constant. Yet we need to remember that all this occurs only in time. There is also the timeless state in which everything that ever happens is known to the mind of God in an eternal present. However it would be a mistake to conflate the two modes of being, temporal and atemporal.

So, whether or not the Fall was part of God's original plan (or, most likely, anticipated but not intended), it has happened and we are here as  result of it. We have fallen but we can rise again. The first step in that, though, is to recognise that we have fallen, and this modern man stubbornly refuses to do. There is no doubt that in our journey from spirit to matter and back to spirit again we have reached the nadir.  Like the prodigal son we must turn round and head for home. All the fruits of a separated consciousness that we have gained we must now put in the service of a higher path, one of the journey back to the Creator. But, as a group, the human race shows no signs of doing this which explains the truly dangerous situation in which we find ourselves at present. There are forces who will make every effort to keep us in darkness, either by convincing us that there is no God or else distorting our ideas about God in ways that might serve them. If our hearts were pure we would see through this because a pure heart sees truth. But our hearts are not pure and they will not be so without repentance, the honest acknowledgement by each individual that he is a sinner. There are two things required for this. The awakening to a love for the good and the true, and a genuine sense of unworthiness. This is not a self- flagellating attitude (always a sign of egotism) but a right and proper humility before our Creator.

We must turn the corner. We have experienced the fullness of the stage of conscious separation. There is nothing more to be gained from that and everything to be lost if we continue down that path. But when we search for oneness we must do so in the right way. Currently there are many people and groups who respond to oneness but who do so incorrectly. What they do is seek it on a horizontal level but it is not there and, if it is sought there, all that will be found is a false or artificial oneness, an unnatural oneness. It must be vertically understood, that is to say we must seek connection to God, and only then will we be able to relate to our fellow men and women in the right way. If we try to establish oneness without doing so in the light of God all we create will be oppressive because the horizontal level is that of expression hence one of difference, hierarchically ordered. Oneness can only be in God, and it is to that we must turn. The Masters told me that there are many teaching half truths at present. Nowhere is this more obvious than in ideas about oneness which are distorted and misinterpreted by being applied where they should not be and ignored where they should be operative.

'From Savage to Sage' (the manuscript of which is now lost) attempted to describe the whole process of humanity's spiritual development, going from a state of unself-conscious oneness to conscious separation to conscious oneness. On the face of it, this might conflict with conventional religious teaching, whether of East or West, but I believe it finds a place within that since it since it simply looks at the same question, how to put unregenerate man right with God, from a different perspective and through a longer lens.

A Devilish Masterplan

This may seem a bit of foolishness but it has a serious side to it. Obviously anyone who does anything like this owes a debt to C.S. Lewis.


Some time ago one of the chief devils and his advisers sat down to work out how they might best mislead humanity. "For a start we need to destroy Christianity." said one. "No doubt" sneered another "but how do we do that?"

They thought for a moment and then one of them said. "To begin with, we need to divide it to make it weaker. Didn't someone once talk about a house divided amongst itself? Then we can attack it with its own weapons".
"How does that work?"
"We emphasise the purely worldly and social aspects of it and push the spiritual aspects to the background. Pretty soon the social aspects will seem all important and the spiritual ones will only have relevance in the light of those, and then they will cease to have any relevance at all."

"Not bad" said the chief. "What next?"
"We'll get some of their thinkers to start expressing doubts about the reality of absolute truth. First of all, whether you can know it and then, when that's done, whether it exists at all. Take things in stages so they don't notice what's happening. That way they will eventually accept what they would never have dreamed of accepting at the beginning of the process. So we'll get their clever people to say that the only things we can know are what appear to us through our senses. Anything else is just theoretical and has no intrinsic reality. Before you know it they'll be thinking that there are no absolutes and everything is relative and that will make them feel that nothing means anything. Which of course is true"
"Give me more".
"We'll inspire them to question the reality of their own creation. We know that some aspects of life are left to chance because of the absurd plan of the tyrant and his ridiculous penchant for freedom. We'll get them to focus exclusively on those and ignore the main elements of the process which they can't uncover with their puny intelligence left to its own devices anyway. This will flatter their sense of self-importance and make them feel they direct their own future instead of, as we know, that little task being our concern."
"More. More"
"We'll make them reject the idea of higher and lower or better and worse in the name of an imagined unity, equality and fairness. They are mostly unable to hold two apparently paradoxical ideas in their minds at the same time anyway so that should be easy. We'll over-emphasise one side of the question and take it out of context, and that will make them reject the other side. We know that when you remove the idea of anything higher from the mix everything settles down nicely to a fairly low level which suits us very well."
" All right, but I want more."
"What about attacking the family and eroding the difference between man and woman? The first gives them too much security and a sense of deep rootedness. They shouldn't have security as it provides them with a nasty inner strength and confidence in stupidities like tradition, and they mustn't have strong roots so they're more easily manipulated. As for the men and women thing, well, haven't we always wanted to deviate nature and turn it against itself? Don't we delight in corruption? Once men and women start to see themselves as fundamentally the same they will lose any connection to an inner life. Then they will regard each other in a competitive light instead of being able to cooperate harmoniously in a complementary fashion as they were originally designed to do. Eugh! Of course, ever since that splendid victory in the Garden we've already made them fight but we can do much better."

"Persuade them that anything done in the name of love is good and if someone disputes that then they are a wicked and unloving person." said another.
"Attack their culture." said one more. " Destroy the sense of beauty and so called truth in their foul works of art. Let them see our more heroic truth in all its glorious abandonment of strait-laced convention and embracing of  the real freedom to do anything you want".
"Corrupt their music" said another. " We know that music can serve us or the enemy, and it affects humans and the way they think and feel in a powerful way. Make it serve us! We want noise and more noise!"

The chief devil considered the matter for a while. "All these ideas have some merit. I congratulate myself on giving you the hints to come up with them. But they are not enough. The enemy will undoubtedly send people to counter them. We need to do more. We need to inspire those humans who respond to us and make them think they are advancing the cause of humanity. We need to make humans believe that their salvation relies on progress in their world, on material progress and more knowledge to bend nature to their will. Give them lots of things to distract them,  then they will more easily be ours. Excite them with sex and more sex and get them to overlook what it's really for. That's always been easy but once we remove those bigoted and unnatural religious constraints it will be even easier. We need to foster atheism and materialism, of course, but we also need to infect their spiritual ideas with our own sweet additions that will poison the mix. We will send some of our disciples to lead astray those humans who are sensitive to spiritual matters but who also have their own ambitions and agendas which are ultimately more important to them. Wherever the enemy has his people we will attack relentlessly. We can sometimes bring them down through their desire for recognition or power. Many of them will resist us but many won't. We will prove to the enemy that our decision was the right one. I want souls! Get to work!"

The meeting closed and the devils went about their business. Far away in heaven the armies of light prepared themselves for the fight ahead. They knew that victory would eventually be theirs, of that there was no doubt, but they also knew there was a battle for souls to be had. Each individual human being was infinitely precious to their Master but each one had to make his or her own decision.

A Question on Krishnamurti

I received this question about J Krishnamurti whom I regard as one of the pre-eminent spiritual figures of the last century even if I don't agree with him on everything. His philosophy seemingly had no room for God but I would argue that he had a specific role to play which consisted of purifying the spiritual field of much past error and false ways of thinking about both God and spirituality. Moreover, his idea of the sacred can be construed as a way of describing the essence of God that is free of any ideological trappings or religious sentiment.


Q. Could you comment on the following quote by Krishnamurti? ‘”When you call yourself an Indian or a Christian or a Muslim or a European you are being violent because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. A man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any religion, any political party or any country.”

It did make me consider that perhaps we should attempt to transcend labels completely in the way that he is advocating here. After all Jesus was not a Christian and I am finding that there are fewer labels that are any more divisive than the label 'Christian.' I often wonder if it has ever been that any two human beings on the planet have ever totally agreed on a shared definition of what that means?! Inevitably, there must be some very subjective elements to the definition of anything and leap of faith to cover the distance between the islands of two conscious human souls attempting to share a perception of a thing.

A. What Krishnamurti is saying here is that if you identify yourself too much with a particular background you are creating division between yourself and the rest of humanity, and division leads to conflict. However I think he is mistaking patriotism for nationalism. Also, context is important. He grew up at a time when there was great division in India between Hindu and Muslim, often ending in violence as at the partition after independence between India and Pakistan. This was also when the English tended to look down on other nationalities, and most people thought themselves superior to other groups. It's not like that now so his point is less true even if it is the case that, from the highest standpoint, oneness is the underlying reality.

His basic point is that you should identify yourself with the inner spiritual reality not any external thing, and that I think is true. This can be taken too far and become unbalanced but it is surely the case that to define oneself is to limit oneself. But still, that doesn't mean that all externals are equally true and equally false. Some are truer than others. And we do, after all, all have an outer form as well as an inner being. The former must be in the right place and not usurp the place of the latter, but that doesn't mean it should be denied or rejected.

Q.  Surely Krishnamurti is either right or wrong. If he's right then the correct view is to transcend a self-label of Christianity and focus on the cohesive value of focusing on values and behaviours but not labels. But if he is wrong we need to self-label as Christian and encourage others to do so also even though this will inevitably seriously ruffle the worlds feathers! A self-label of Christian is almost universally despised, feared or rejected in anger by modern people. Krishnamurti’s quote on the other hand is something I have showed to people and they have immediately seen a truth in it. Religion being necessarily perceived as divisive and like something that is very dangerous and to be handled with extreme care or ideally not at all. And to be fair to secular people the reality of human history has given us ample reason to now view religious ideologies with a great deal of suspicion. People are too frightened to see that the divisive aspect of religion is only one side of it and there is great truth there as well.

A. Actually it is possible for Krishnamurti to be both right and wrong and I think he is. It depends on how you look at things. Firstly, everybody who believes anything self-identifies as something. It's impossible not to. You could say that Krishnamurti was a Krishnamurti-ite, and, as a matter of fact, his followers do often rather act like that. His view reflects his rootless background. He was born a Hindu but taken up by the Theosophists as a youth and then raised in their system which he reacted to by rejecting wholesale. Theosophy had certainly taken on a lot of nonsense at the time he rejected it even if its fundamentals remain interesting. He then travelled all over the world but had no fixed home so you can see that his philosophy is partly reflected in his life. This doesn't make it wrong, and you could say the life was the result of the philosophy, but you could also see an influence the other way. Anyway, it can  sometimes be a little one-sided I think. A necessary corrective to the other point of view that says you have to be a Hindu, Christian or whatever but it is assuming that the Hindu, Christian or whatever is attached to his beliefs and cannot see that they are only tools enabling you to get a grasp on reality. That is very definitely the case for many people but it need not be the case. For instance, I do not identify as a Christian in the conventional sense but I think the teachings of Christ are the highest teachings and contain more of truth than any other. I try to follow them. But I cannot identify with the external body of Christianity as it is today. Maybe I could have done so in the Middle Ages but not now.

It's a question of changing perspective and each side needs the other to be whole. Each is incomplete without the other. We need each approach as a corrective to the extreme of the other which is why I say it is possible for K to be both right and wrong. It all depends on how you hold your view. If you are a Christian which is more important, your Christianity as a religion or your church or your love of God? Do you see the difference? It's a matter of inner and outer. Are you attached to the outer as a form or do you see it as an opening to the inner which is always the main thing.  That said, some outer approaches certainly do better reflect the reality of the inner, and are more able to guide one and attune one to it.  A rose is a truer reflection of beauty than a dandelion even though both are beautiful flowers.

So I would say Krishnamurti is right but can be taken to extremes and then he becomes wrong. Always spirituality is concerned with inner attitude  and the state of the heart rather than mental conceptualising. A doctrinaire Christian who nevertheless genuinely loves God is much closer to him than a philosopher who sees that identifying with a system keeps you bound but has no real love or humility in his heart.

I see Krishnamurti as someone who performed a valuable service in the 20th century when we had gone too far to one side of the matter. But now when we have lost nearly all sense of religion there is a risk of going too far to the other side so he is not so useful in this sense even if ultimately he is right. The Masters I spoke to were not, as far as I could see, Christians or Buddhists but then they knew truth directly. They did not need any help to see it. On this Earth the vast majority of us do need help and if it is not one thing it will be another. A universalist form of Christianity seems pretty good to me. I mean by this an approach that sees the uniqueness of Christ but can also accept that other religions are valid approaches to God too if their inner essence is adhered to rather than their outer form.

Religion is only divisive if people make it so. At the same time, Christ did say he came to sort out the sheep from the goats and you have to divide, or be able to discriminate, between truth and falsehood. Not everything is equally true or equally good, and sometimes you have to call a spade a spade and condemn what is wrong or misguided or downright bad. One of the great recent successes of the devil is to persuade people that judgment is wrong in the name of a spurious unity or fairness. Spirituality requires the most rigid discrimination if it is to accord to what is real.

Question on God and Duality

I received this question in response to the previous post. Answering it here gives me the opportunity to clarify my understanding of the relationship between the personal God and the idea of the Absolute.

Q. Frithjof Schuon, the Traditionalist writer, has a metaphysical system in which Beyond-Being is the Absolute or impersonal Divine Essence, and the Personal God only exists at the level of Being which he calls the first self-determination of the Absolute. So the Personal God is at a lower and more relative level of reality. This seems to correspond to the Kabbalistic Tree of Life with Ain Soph or absolute Nothingness manifesting as Kether, the first cause and root of Creation. In both of these systems God, as such, is a step down from the Absolute, and a mystical union with God would be a lesser realisation than Nirvana which is entry into Beyond-Being or Ain Soph. Would you like to comment on this view since it seems you are saying something different?

A. I am. In the past I have thought in a similar way to the approaches you describe above, and believed that Nirvana or entry into the Void of pure being must be a deeper and truer realisation than the mystic’s sense of oneness with God for in that there is still duality present. That’s the logical way of seeing things. Union is trumped by non-duality which must be better than duality. Or so one might suppose. But there was always a nagging doubt. If Ultimate Reality really is a formless Absolute of pure being or Nothingness whence comes anything at all? Where does the Creator God come from? How does he arise from Nothingness? How can something come from Nothing or form from pure and absolute formlessness? Why should Beyond-Being ever give rise to Being unless Being is already present within it in some way, and if it is then that is duality. There is not just pure and absolute oneness. There is oneness and the potential, at least, for something else, something more. If Nirguna Brahman (Brahman without attributes, without any qualities whatsoever) is the bedrock of everything where do the qualities and attributes come from? How could they ever arise? So Saguna Brahman (Brahman with attributes) must be present in some way in Nirguna Brahman which means that the Void, so called, cannot be completely empty, the Self cannot be pure, undifferentiated consciousness alone, and the Absolute must already contain the Relative within it. There can be no such thing as pure being without the innate capacity to become always and fully present within it. 

So this is why I now don’t accept the idea that absolute reality is the divine darkness of nothingness which is what Beyond-Being or Ain Soph or Nirvana would be. It’s why I would no longer put the personal God on a lower level of reality than the impersonal one, seeing them now as simply two faces of the one reality, just the Absolute in different modes relating to passive and active existence or rest and expression. But even God at rest contains the active God, the Creator God in itself. The Creator is not a limited mode of the Absolute but the Absolute in movement, in becoming mode. But this becoming is the expression of being, integral to it and not in any way a lesser reality. How can it be since to be at all it must be there from the very beginning, indeed before the very beginning? Likewise time must exist in eternity in order to exist at all, ever. We can say it only exists in theory or potential but exist it must. It is not simply not there at all until suddenly it is. And so if God is the Absolute in expression, which he is, then he is fully there already in the Absolute. He is not a lesser or more relative thing at all. He is not and can never be part of maya.

All this, of course, has implications for the question of individuality, denied in Buddhism and advaita which don’t understand the reality of the relative world. Individuality is a real, God-given thing not an illusion of ignorance. And this means that enlightenment does not mean the end of the individual but the end of a limited identification with individuality which is an utterly different thing. The whole point of it is not the entry into pure, timeless, inert, changeless being or Nirvana but the integration of being and becoming to create something more than either on its own, something that encompasses and involves the whole being not just a part of it. This is found in the proper union of the soul with God, a union that accepts the totality of existence and does not seek to escape matter for spirit. It is the cosmic marriage that joins the two together, something that would not be possible (actually nothing would be possible) if the root of reality really were the featureless Beyond-Being postulated by Schuon who may not have realised the implications of his metaphysical position. To say that Being comes from Beyond-Being can only be acceptable if we acknowledge that it is already wholly present in Beyond-Being and is not a limited step down into a lesser reality.

For what is consistently misunderstood by monists and those who don’t properly distinguish between God and the soul, because they think that both arise from and sink back into the Absolute of Beyond-Being, is that the ground of pure consciousness is not God. Self-emptying can take one to this ground which then seems as though one has penetrated to the deepest mysteries because all has been stripped and there is nothing left but pure naked existence. But this is not God or not the completeness of God. It is but his outer being as existing in the soul. It is not his heart. The true mystic seeks a union of love with the heart of God. Heart to heart. This may be duality but it is a duality beyond non-duality and is the whole point and goal of creation which has to do with making something out of nothing. Who would be satisfied with nothing rather than something, with featureless being instead of eternal love? 

For the truth the non-dualists fail to see is that God is more than pure consciousness, and the oneness of pure being (identification with the ground) is but a precursor to a loving (and necessarily dualistic) relationship with the Creator. Because they make the mistake of envisaging formless being as beyond God, and see him as emerging from that, they confuse entry into the depths of their own soul with the spiritual goal. This is why some of them can say that there is no path, no goal and all you have to do is to realise what you already are. But that is false. There is a path, there is a goal and it requires more to reach that goal than simply to know yourself as pure consciousness. That may take you to the root of your being and realisation of oneness, but the mystic's goal of a union in love with God fulfils the purpose of creation to a much higher degree because it unites the two poles of life whilst fully preserving the truth in both of them. It does not deny love or creativity, as non-duality inevitably does if its implications are properly grasped, but sees these, or their coming to be, as the purpose of creation. God created, and he created us, so that there might be a ceaseless expansion of light, love and beauty, and this there can only be when being and becoming are both fully realised. If one is rejected for the other you are spiritually impoverished.

The conclusion we must draw is that twoness (or duality) is actually a higher thing that oneness, mystically and metaphysically considered, as long as we understand it to include oneness as a sub-structure. Besides which pure and absolute oneness cannot actually exist for, if it did, in what way could it be distinguished from 'noneness'? For there to be anything there must be two things, and if there are two things then there must be a third to connect them just as love connects the lover and the beloved. Nevertheless, although these are different, they are all completely one as well. Another way of putting this is to say that eternity must be dynamic if it is ever to be capable of expression.

From what I have written here and elsewhere it might seem that I reject the Buddhist approach to truth but that is not the case. Its great value is that it takes the subject away from identification with himself and leads him to a deeper insight into the true inner nature of the human being. It gives an understanding of immanence that is lacking in most modern Christianity and, as far as I can see, all forms of Protestantism. At the same time, Buddhism and similar paths lack a proper awareness of the Creator and Father of the universe and so overlook the need to form a loving relationship with God. So it is incomplete and needs to be balanced by the Christian way but then the same might be said in reverse too. So I return to the idea that both meditation and prayer are important for a complete approach to God, one that takes into account both his immanent and his transcendent aspects.