The Melchizedek Teachings in the Orient

94:3.1While the high­est phase of Brah­man­ism was hardly a re­li­gion, it was truly one of the most no­ble reaches of the mor­tal mind into the do­mains of phi­los­o­phy and meta­physics. Hav­ing started out to dis­cover fi­nal re­al­ity, the In­dian mind did not stop un­til it had spec­u­lated about al­most ev­ery phase of the­ol­ogy ex­cept­ing the es­sen­tial dual con­cept of re­li­gion: the ex­is­tence of the Uni­ver­sal Fa­ther of all uni­verse crea­tures and the fact of the as­cend­ing ex­pe­ri­ence in the uni­verse of these very crea­tures as they seek to at­tain the eter­nal Fa­ther, who has com­manded them to be per­fect, even as he is per­fect.

94:3.2In the con­cept of Brah­man the minds of those days truly grasped at the idea of some all-per­vad­ing Ab­so­lute, for this pos­tu­late was at one and the same time iden­ti­fied as cre­ative en­ergy and cos­mic re­ac­tion. Brah­man was con­ceived to be be­yond all def­i­ni­tion, ca­pa­ble of be­ing com­pre­hended only by the suc­ces­sive nega­tion of all fi­nite qual­i­ties. It was def­i­nitely a be­lief in an ab­so­lute, even an in­fi­nite, be­ing, but this con­cept was largely de­void of per­son­al­ity at­tri­butes and was there­fore not ex­pe­ri­en­ci­ble by in­di­vid­ual re­li­gion­ists.

94:3.3Brah­man-Narayana was con­ceived as the Ab­so­lute, the in­fi­nite IT IS, the pri­mor­dial cre­ative po­tency of the po­ten­tial cos­mos, the Uni­ver­sal Self ex­ist­ing static and po­ten­tial through­out all eter­nity. Had the philoso­phers of those days been able to make the next ad­vance in de­ity con­cep­tion, had they been able to con­ceive of the Brah­man as as­so­cia­tive and cre­ative, as a per­son­al­ity ap­proach­able by cre­ated and evolv­ing be­ings, then might such a teach­ing have be­come the most ad­vanced por­trai­ture of De­ity on Uran­tia since it would have en­com­passed the first five lev­els of to­tal de­ity func­tion and might pos­si­bly have en­vi­sioned the re­main­ing two.

94:3.4In cer­tain phases the con­cept of the One Uni­ver­sal Over­soul as the to­tal­ity of the sum­ma­tion of all crea­ture ex­is­tence led the In­dian philoso­phers very close to the truth of the Su­preme Be­ing, but this truth availed them naught be­cause they failed to evolve any rea­son­able or ra­tio­nal per­sonal ap­proach to the at­tain­ment of their the­o­retic mono­the­is­tic goal of Brah­man-Narayana.

94:3.5The karma prin­ci­ple of causal­ity con­ti­nu­ity is, again, very close to the truth of the reper­cus­sional syn­the­sis of all time-space ac­tions in the De­ity pres­ence of the Su­preme; but this pos­tu­late never pro­vided for the co-or­di­nate per­sonal at­tain­ment of De­ity by the in­di­vid­ual re­li­gion­ist, only for the ul­ti­mate en­gulf­ment of all per­son­al­ity by the Uni­ver­sal Over­soul.

94:3.6The phi­los­o­phy of Brah­man­ism also came very near to the re­al­iza­tion of the in­dwelling of the Thought Ad­justers, only to be­come per­verted through the mis­con­cep­tion of truth. The teach­ing that the soul is the in­dwelling of the Brah­man would have paved the way for an ad­vanced re­li­gion had not this con­cept been com­pletely vi­ti­ated by the be­lief that there is no hu­man in­di­vid­u­al­ity apart from this in­dwelling of the Uni­ver­sal One.

94:3.7In the doc­trine of the merg­ing of the self-soul with the Over­soul, the the­olo­gians of In­dia failed to pro­vide for the sur­vival of some­thing hu­man, some­thing new and unique, some­thing born of the union of the will of man and the will of God. The teach­ing of the soul’s re­turn to the Brah­man is closely par­al­lel to the truth of the Ad­juster’s re­turn to the bo­som of the Uni­ver­sal Fa­ther, but there is some­thing dis­tinct from the Ad­juster which also sur­vives, the mor­ontial coun­ter­part of mor­tal per­son­al­ity. And this vi­tal con­cept was fa­tally ab­sent from Brah­manic phi­los­o­phy.

94:3.8Brah­manic phi­los­o­phy has ap­prox­i­mated many of the facts of the uni­verse and has ap­proached nu­mer­ous cos­mic truths, but it has all too of­ten fallen vic­tim to the er­ror of fail­ing to dif­fer­en­ti­ate be­tween the sev­eral lev­els of re­al­ity, such as ab­so­lute, tran­scen­den­tal, and fi­nite. It has failed to take into ac­count that what may be fi­nite-il­lu­sory on the ab­so­lute level may be ab­so­lutely real on the fi­nite level. And it has also taken no cog­nizance of the es­sen­tial per­son­al­ity of the Uni­ver­sal Fa­ther, who is per­son­ally con­tactable on all lev­els from the evo­lu­tion­ary crea­ture’s lim­ited ex­pe­ri­ence with God on up to the lim­it­less ex­pe­ri­ence of the Eter­nal Son with the Par­a­dise Fa­ther.