WORSHIP NOT YOUR GOD. REACH INSTEAD FOR THE HIGHER REALMS WITHIN, AND BECOME SUFFUSED WITH THE ECSTASY AND BLISS OF THE PRESENCE. THE MYSTICAL AND SACRED PURPOSE OF OUR SPIRITUAL PILGRIMAGE IS TO TRANSCEND MERE SUBSERVIENCE AND TO INSTEAD LIVE THE SPIRITUAL TRUTH OF OUR ONENESS WITH THE ALL. FOR ALL IS ONE AND WITHIN THAT SACRED AND MYSTICAL TRUTH IS GOD.
When religious people ordinarily talk of worship and indeed talk of worship as our greatest duty and what God requires of us, they have actually taken something fundamental and to some extent distorted it. When we enter into the higher realms, perhaps through deep contemplative prayer or meditation, indeed the closer we get to the ONE, the more beautiful everything is, the more subsumed with bliss everything is. We cannot help ourselves but to be lifted into a state of grace, of peace, of divine bliss. This can easily be interpreted as worship. But worship carries connotations of the servant offering worship to the master, and indeed the master requiring of us such worship (which so many of us see as diminishing the whole concept of God or the ONE—my new favourite phrase), when in fact it is a sharing of the ONENESS. It is a sharing of the ONENESS. It is beautiful, it is unconditional. At the end of the day, or even at the beginning, it doesn’t entirely matter how we interpret that extraordinary experience. My only concern is that by interpreting it as that traditional ‘worship’ we run the risk of alienating those who can never again accept the old view of God. The experience remains. Redefining it, achieving new understanding of it in light of our remarkable developments in science and philosophy become ever more an imperative for our time.