ABOUT OUR UNITY WITH THE INFINITE, part III

ABOUT OUR UNITY WITH THE INFINITE, part III - by Guenther Zuehlsdorf, translation from the original German edition into Portuguese by Huberto Rohden and translated into English by Flavio de Mello.

 

 

 

The philosophy of cosmic monism should not be understood in the sense that the person of man, his personal ego, is God; in this sense, it would be even blasphemous. Our true Self, our individuality, is neither body nor ego, which is the person, the mask. Ramana Maharishi says that the ego is a ghost, with no intrinsic reality, there seems to exist because it has taken shape; the collective and illusory experience of sensory objects eventually crystallizes in the form of ego. The philosophy of cosmic monism does not increase the ego to the dignity of God, does not identify the ego-persona with God; but says that God is the consciousness of our essential core, of our essential individuality, of our universal Self. Therefore Ramana Maharishi says the significance of the great formula as follows: - "You are neither your body nor your senses, not your intellect, not your ego. You are what radiates like pure I-am, after that, in demanding of the true Self, disappeared all transient things".

 

 

However strange and difficult that this doctrine seems to be, it is in fact in almost all religions. The Greek philosopher Heraclitus says: "It is wise to admit that all things are one".  Plotinus writes: "God is not something external to us; He is present in all things, although we ignore Him". A Sufi poet sings: "I said goodbye to dualism. I did recognize as one in two worlds. I'm looking for the Uno, I see the Uno, I invoke the Uno. He is the first. He is the last. He is out. He is from within". Jesus, the Christ, also taught about the unity of life with the Father: - "Anyone who knows me also knows the Father... Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. And to Felipe he asks. "Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me?

 

 

The doctrine of unity with God seemed to the philosopher Fichte the spiritual content of Christianity. In his book "Anweisung zum Leben Seligen" (The Way Towards the Blessed Life) he writes: "God alone is, and external to Him nothing is (truth of easy comprehension, and only condition for any religious experience). The intuition that human life is one with the divine life is the deepest knowledge that man is capable to achieve".

 

 

Inspired by the philosophy of Fichte, Ralph Waldo Trine writes: "To live consciously in the belief that God is in us, that is, in fact, the life of our life... Only through this living realization of the unity of our life with the Father is that man can find true happiness".

 

 

 

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Translator's Note:

 

This thought, the presence of the unique Reality in all multiple facticity (Uni-verse) shines above all in the pages of the Gospel. "I and the Father are one; the Father is in me, and I am in the Father, but the Father is greater than me... The Father is also in you, and you are in the Father" - these words of Christ reveal that he saw the Infinite (the Father) in all men (me, you), but without identifying the finite, or the total sum of the finite with the infinite.

 

The monist philosophy of the neo-Platonic of Alexandria was, for three centuries, the characteristic philosophy of early Christianity. Only in the beginning of the fourth century, under the auspices of emperors and profane theologians began to prevail the Aristotelian dualism, that Thomas Aquinas codified in the 13th century in the Summa Theologicae, and the Council of Trent in the 16th century, officialised for the Roman church and today there is a growing trend towards a return to the sources of Truth.

 

 

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