There is only one Truth, but there are many religions. Ultimate truth may be beyond human comprehension, but most of us would agree that Truth is an absolute: we balk at the notion that it is relative or that it varies from place to place, time to time or person to person. Another way to put it is that there is only one God. All the major religions agree on this point, even as their conceptions of God may vary. All of the social and political conflicts between human religions can be ascribed to the notion of religious exclusivity: most religions claim to know the Truth exclusively, that is to the exclusion of all other religions.
But since we tend to agree that Truth is an absolute, isn’t it more accurate merely to say that each religion recognizes or expresses different aspects of the one Truth? Truth is like a perfect diamond that casts brilliant reflections in different directions. Since one might say that God is Truth, the same thing may also be said about God. For example, Christianity sees or visualizes three facets of the diamond in the form of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Rather than referring to these “Persons” as the Trinity, C.S. Lewis preferst to call them “the three-personal God.” But ancient Jewish midrash discovered and described many additional facets or aspects of God and Hinduism is replete with vivid and seemingly infinite mythical manifestations of His presence, gods and goddesses that are actually facets of the One God.
Since these Hindu figures can be bewildering to a Westerner, the three-personal God of Christianity is a valuable representation to many of us. It is easy and even at times transformational for us to understand the concept of the Father and the Son, but I for one always got bogged down when the Holy Ghost or Holy Spirit was mentioned. However, when Lewis says in Mere Christianity that the Holy Spirit is the love between the Father and the Son and that this love, co-eternal with Christ, is therefore an equal Third Person with them, the perfection of the Trinity as a powerful symbol and representation of God becomes much more evident to me.
Because all of us perceive different aspects of the Truth, each one of us tends to be drawn toward one particular religion if we are drawn to religion at all. Of course, many of us are brought up in the culture of one of the religions and this group of people sees no reason to question their religion as a birth-right. Personally, I am in the company of others who see merit in many religions and therefore find it difficult or unnecessary to choose one. Those who do make a conscious choice, say to be baptized or to adopt a Buddhist practice of meditation, would argue that the rest of us are merely permanent seekers. If we never find, adopt and embrace our preferred refraction of Truth by clothing ourselves in the mantle of one religion, they would say that we never achieve the deeper spiritual growth that wearing such a mantle can offer. What is quite clear, though, is that there are many religions and philosophical paths one may choose to follow, but there is only one Mountain of Truth.
While each religion can be said to observe only one of the reflections of the Diamond, there is one point upon which all religions appear to agree, beyond a basic consensus around the Oneness of God. This point of agreement is that we must kill our ego or our “little self” in order to find God. The Muslims say that we must surrender to God. Gautama the monk struggled hard to triumph over his ego – he had to kill it or find a way for it to die in order to become Buddha. Christians who are truly Born Again, as opposed to those charlatans who are egotistical enough simply to claim that status, are born again because their lower self – the pleasure-seeking, pain-avoiding self that is not part of Christ’s essence–has been destroyed. When you accept that Christ is your Savior or that God is the pilot of your life, you are relinquishing the control that your ego has fought tooth and nail to keep for itself. Eckhart Tolle speaks of the intense fear his ego had around losing control before he achieved his Awakening. C.S. Lewis speaks of men as tin toy soldiers whom only Christ can awaken to real Life, soldiers that would really prefer to remain made of tin.
It appears that whatever path you decide to follow up the Mountain, in order to reach the summit you will have to relinquish your reigns or your walking stick to the Mountain itself. In other words, you have to understand you are mortal in order to realize that You are immortal. The little self must die so that the Higher Self (Hinduism) or Christ-self (Christianity) can live eternally. Only the soul is immortal; not the body, including its seat of government, the brain and its ego.
Bird of Spirit 