Perennial Philosophy:
Quotes, Passages and Commentary
Chapter II: The Nature of the Ground
Pages. 22-23
God may be worshipped and contemplated in any of his aspects. In Mahayana Buddhism there are the three bodies of Buddha: the absolute Dharmakaya, the Clear Light of the Void; the Sambhogakaya, the personal god of the three major religions of the Levant; and the Nirmanakaya, the material body and world.
Demonstrated by Huxley in analyzing the first few words of the Lord’s Prayer. “Our Father who art in heaven”. God is ours, in the same intimate sense that our life and consciousness is ours. God is also the transcendent and personal Father, who loves us and his creation. He is also “art”, “are” and “is”, the immanent and transcendent One. And finally, God is in heaven with a divine nature.
But to persist in worshipping only one aspect to the exclusion of the others is to run into spiritual peril. It we approach God as exclusively the personal, transcendental, all-powerful ruler of the world, in a kingly sense, we run the risk of becoming entangled in a religion of rites, sacrifices, and legalistic observances. If God is an unapproachable monarch outside of us, giving mysterious orders, our world will be as such. The best that can be said for ritualistic legalism is that it can improve conduct. It does little to alter character, and nothing of itself to modify and expand consciousness.
Things improve when God is regarded as a loving Father. This can modify both conduct and character. But the complete transformation of consciousness which is “enlightenment”, “salvation” comes only when God is affirmed as both transcendent and immanent, supra-personal as well as personal.
The Perennial Philosophy: by Aldous Huxley
HarperCollins Publ. 1944