 23. Brotherhood |
This is my command "That you love one another as I have loved you." i.e., when you also attain GOD-SELF REALIZATION as I have by becoming unidentified with the physical body and its self generating personality, you come to know that the TRUE SELF, that you have now become, is the same TRUE SELF in each other human being. You will also come to know (understand, have remembrance) that the TRUE SELF in each human being is also the same SELF as the UNIVERSAL SELF, or GOD, we are the same eternal spiritual SELF.
You shall love the Lord (the inner SELF is the lord of the body) with all your heart, your soul and mind: this is the first and greatest commandment. (love the natural state, your first love, of God-Self-Realization). The second is like the first: you shall love your neighbor as yourself, i.e., when you fulfill the first commandment and become God-Self-Realized, you will spiritually understand that the inner self, or consciousness, of your neighbor is the same as your consciousness and INNER SELF even though your neighbor appears to be different on the outside.
-Jesus, Matthew 22:37-38
There are countless snowflakes, no two are identical, and yet they are all snowflakes at heart, i.e., in spirit).
There is only one (God) but it has individualized itself and is in each one of us manifesting as each one of us.
What Jesus is saying is that when we "return" to God union which is "Self realization" all we see and feel is "one being" but individualized in many bodies or material animated forms.
The ill attributed to an "anthropomorphic" abstraction called "society" may be laid more realistically at the door of "everyman." Utopia must spring in the "private bosom" before it can flower in civic virtue, inner reforms leading naturally to outer ones. A man who has reformed himself will reform thousands.
-Yogananda
"You never will enjoy the world aright till the sea itself flowereth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heaven, and crowned with the stars, and perceive yourself to be the sole heir of the whole world, and more than so, because men are in it who are every one sole heirs as well as you; till you can sing and delight and rejoice in God, as misers do in gold, and kings in scepters . . . till you are as familiar with the ways of God in all ages as with your walk and table, till you are intimately acquainted with that shady nothing out of which the world was made."
-Thomas Traheren, "Centuries of Meditations"
"There is a principle which is pure, placed in the human mind, which in different places and ages hath had different names; it is however, pure and proceeds from God. It is deep and inward, confined to no forms of religion nor excluded from any, where the heart (consciousness) stands in perfect sincerity. In whoever this takes root and grows, of what nation so ever, they become brethren in the best sense of the expression."
