"Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in Heaven is Perfect"*

By Sagittarius

One of the hidden pearls I alluded to in my article of April, 1964, one of those sayings of Christ's which modern Christians ignore, is his injunction to his followers to be perfect as God is perfect. But it is worse than that; they do not merely ignore it but deny its possibility, thereby revealing a presumptuous disagreement with the Master they claim to follow.

There is no more fundamental injunction in the whole Bible than this, for it is the injunction to realize the Supreme Identity. For how can you be perfect without being One with the Father? Christ himself said that only God is good (St. Mark, X, 18). Furthermore he reminded his Jewish critics of the saying in their own scriptures: "I said: 'You are gods'." He referred to men as 'sons of God' and bade them address God as 'Father'; and St. Paul also told them that they were all sons of God in Christ. If, then, a man is the son of God and can be called a God! and (as Christ also said) contains the kingdom of heaven within him, what is this but the Supreme Identity?

This injunction marks Christianity as a complete religion envisaging and striving after the Supreme Goal of Identity or Self -Realization, referred to in Hinduism as Moksha, in Buddhism as Nirvana, in Sufism as Fana. By denying its possibility, Christ's purblind followers have degraded their religion, which they still honour with his name, to the lower level of one that envisages only the proximate goal of a purified individuality in a formal paradise. A high goal, no doubt, but not the highest, not the perfection Christ enjoined, not real goodness, for "only God is good".

So resourceful is the human mind, however, that the blinkered theologians who have thus rejected Christ's command and restricted his religion have managed to turn the tables and make out the inferiority thus accepted to be superiority. They admit the truth of Christ's saying 'I and my Father are One' but limit it to him alone, so that if they have only one Perfect Man, other religions have none at all.

This belief is on a painfully low level of intelligence. Divine laws are universal. Even physically this is obvious, so how much more spiritually! The true doctrine of Identity is simple and yet at the same time intellectually satisfying. Being is One; therefore you cannot be other because there is no other; therefore if you realize your true Self you realize your identity with the One, the Father, and are perfect, as He is perfect. Only the imperfections of your apparent individual nature make you appear other; therefore if you remove them and become perfect, as the One is perfect, you realize your pre-existent Identity with the One. In place of this they put a myth to be taken on faith: that some perfect but not infinite or universal Being (how can he be infinite or universal if he excludes others?) creates a lot of separate imperfect beings and among them one perfect one. Apart from that, he makes it a rule that none of them can become perfect, although this one who is tells them to. No wonder they have to ignore or reject Christ's sayings if they want to foist so crude a doctrine on people.

This impossibility of obeying Christ's injunction to be perfect has become an article of faith with many who call themselves Christians. One of them once asked Swami Ramdas whether it is possible for a man to be perfect and without sin, and when the Swami cheerfully answered, 'Yes', he looked shocked as though, he had heard some blasphemy.

Have none of the Christian saints and mystics attained the perfection of conscious Identity? It is clear from the records they have left that some of them have had an intellectual understanding of it, fortified by at least occasional glimpses of Realized Identity. Eckhart certainly came near enough to be excommunicated. "Thou shalt lose thy thy-ness and dissolve in his his-ness; they thine shall be his mine, so utterly one mine that thou in him shalt know eternalwise his is-ness, free from becoming, his nameless nothingness."

The Protestant mystic Jacob Boehme said, as I quoted in my article of October 1964: "God has become that which I am and has made me that which He is." The mystic Tauler said: "When through all manner of exercises the 'Outer man has been' converted into the inward man, then - the Godhead nakedly descends into the depths of the pure soul, so that the Spirit becomes one with Him." The modern Christian mystic Joel Goldsmith reiterates it constantly throughout his books.

Now is a time of crass materialism among the masses both learned and ignorant, and of earnest seeking by the few. It is not too much to hope that some at least of Christ's followers will assume that he really meant what he said and refuse to be hobbled and blinkered any longer by those who claim to speak in his name.
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* St. Matthew, V. 48.