Avatars come forth at moments of change, of crisis, of movement from one cycle to another when humanity is at a particularly acute crossroads and in need of new direction. They embody in themselves or they exemplify the new quality that’s needed by humanity as a whole.
Robert: Welcome. Inner sight is simply seeing that which is always present, but not yet fully recognized. You have within you the ability to see yourself and the world around you in a new way, with new eyes, so stay with us and together we’ll look at the world and ourselves with inner sight. Our topic for today is Buddha and Christ and before we begin I’d like to give some credit to the founder of the Lucis Trust organization, Alice Bailey. She wrote twenty-four volumes of literature and the main inspiration for the dialogue that you’ll hear on this show emanates from the works of Alice Bailey, as does the following thought: “The massed intent of humanity is that evil must end and a better and truer life become possible. At the moment of greatest tension and difficulty, the demand goes forth. Response comes. The Avatar appears, and light pours in, making the way clear.” Well, let’s find out more about Buddha and Christ. I guess we’re doing a little bit of a comparative study here. We hear the word avatar a lot these days. Were the Buddha and Christ Avatars? And if so, what was their function?
Sarah: Yes, they’re examples of Avatars. Maybe it would be useful, first of all, to explain what the word means. It’s a Sanskrit word and it means literally: coming down from far away. It implies in that definition, I think, protection from above, divine protection being anchored or transmitted through an Avatar. Avatar is one of those words that’s become kind of popular and it’s entered the common language of the day in ways that I find kind of appalling. I’ve heard of even restaurants being named after the word avatar. Maybe I have no sense of humor, but these are deeply sacred concepts like samadhi. That’s another word that people casually toss around. An Avatar is a sacred, deeply realized spiritual being and the Buddha and the Christ are what are called in the writings of Alice Bailey transmitting Avatars, which is an interesting concept. There are various grades of Avatars and they, she says, were two supreme examples of beings who were able to transmit or manifest qualities or expressions of divinity. And these Avatars, she says, come forth at moments of change, of crisis, of movement from one cycle to another when humanity is at a particularly acute crossroads and in need of new direction. They embody in themselves or they exemplify the new quality that’s needed by humanity as a whole. An Avatar, as I understand it, is one who is able, by coming down from far away, to anchor on earth within humanity a quality that previously had not been there.
Dale: And the “coming down from far away” doesn’t mean that they have come from some other planet or some other system. They have been right here all along but they tend to be far away in consciousness. They are able to come in at a time when humanity’s own consciousness is at a point of tension, when they are at the greatest point of need.
Sarah: And need is what brings them forth. The opening thought said that: “the demand goes forth” and “response comes.”
Dale: It’s a matter of invocation and evocation and we’ve talked about that before and the power of invocation and that’s why the Great Invocation that we sound at the end of these programs is so important because that is one of the major tools that humanity has at its disposal to invoke these great beings and the energies that they provide.
Sarah: I suppose in a sense we can’t have what we don’t ask for. And by generating the urge or the aspiration for the particular quality of divinity that is embodied in the Avatar, we humanity have reached a stage of readiness to receive that energy. For example, the Buddha came at a time when—according to the religious scholar Karen Armstrong—there was a great change and questioning, very similar to today’s period, in what she called the “Axial Age,” axial being from the word axis. It was again a time of a pivot point when humanity was moving into a new cycle of consciousness, a new system of governing itself, and particularly in countries—I think she named four of them—China, Iran or Persia, Greece, and India. And the Buddha came in rebellion against the Orthodox and crystallized beliefs and doctrines of the Hinduism of his time.
Dale: And then five hundred years later, we see the Christ coming in and doing much the same thing for the Middle Eastern countries and for the Jewish people, which then of course spread to the European continent.
Sarah: So in a sense they were rebels, I suppose you could say. They were rebelling against a system of religious teaching and practice that had become empty and barren in that time.
Dale: And I think it’s important for all of us to realize that the work that these two great Avatars did is a combined effort, even though they came five hundred years apart—roughly. It was a combined piece of work and it’s still ongoing and their work is not yet completed.
Sarah: We’ve talked about that in our program on Wesak, the great Buddhist festival, that their work continues.
Dale: And the religions that were founded around their work and in their name have been developed as two distinct religions, but I think it’s high time that we see them as one work, really, because essentially it is one work that they are doing.
Sarah: Yes, I suppose if you regard religion as a human construction, essentially. To the best of our ability, religion is our grasp of what we think divine will and intent is. But on the level of the transcendent great beings who have passed beyond the human experience, I don’t think they see the barriers of different religions like we do. That’s one of the most joyful aspects of the Ageless Wisdom, I think: the presentation of the work of the Buddha and the Christ as the work of “two brothers,” as they’re called, who cooperate together and form, in a sense, a team effort. The Buddha was the one who broke through the veil of glamour or fog or desire that humanity had lived in for so long by letting in the light of the mind. And his Four Noble Truths embody really three D’s: Detachment, Discrimination, and Dispassion. He taught his followers that the whole problem of human suffering is hinged on desire. That we desire emotionally and that we desire the wrong things. We desire that which is material and therefore must pass away. And he taught that by freeing oneself from the emotional grip of desire and facing reality, with the light of the mind, we are able to liberate ourselves. “Be a lamp unto your own feet,” he said. You have the light within you. And we have that light within us because he, as an Avatar, anchored this divine quality in human experience. He was the first to really make that breakthrough when he sat under the Bodhi tree for forty days and arose only when he had achieved his illumination. And his very name Buddha means the awakened one or the illumined one.
Dale: And then Christ continued that work and brought forth and embodied the great love of God and the attractive uplifting power of love. That also was an effort to dissipate the many illusions of the mind that we have created, and humanity was just at that point when the mind was beginning to awaken. So, the emphasis was upon love and lifting oneself up and redemption because he said, “I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto me.” I think sometimes that has added to the illusions that one has to join the church; one has to follow Christ. If you don’t follow Christ, then you’re going to be lost. But I don’t think that’s what Christ really meant. He meant, I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto me: unto the Christ within.
Sarah: The principle which is the soul.
Dale: And it’s represented by the great love of God. That is the power that lifts one up, and each one of us can find that same great power within us.
Sarah: Interestingly, though, the work of the Buddha or the achievement and the breakthrough of the Buddha was necessary as a foundation and a preliminary step to the Christ’s work. Because power of mind and clarity is necessary to realize in one’s spiritual life before one can become an expression of love. We might think of love as a purely emotional force. Spiritually it is even higher than clarity of mind. It exists on a level of the intuition, of pure reason and it’s transcendent of even the mind. But to reach that state of perfect, pure love we need to be able to use the mind as a bridge, a passageway to that pure transcendent state of love: as God loves us kind of love. It’s not attachment, which many of us mistake for love. So the Buddha set the stage, you could say, for the Christ’s work, and the Christ then carried the possibility for all human evolution forward in his example of perfect pure love.
Robert: Very often humanity has wrong desires and those desires are sometimes self-defeating. What do you think Buddha would have said about what we should desire?
Sarah: I wonder how one can speak for the Buddha but here I go. I suppose he would say you have to desire your own liberation because he spoke clearly and forcefully against the passive approach of praying to whatever God or Gods one thinks exist and are overshadowing us. You have to rescue yourself; you have to liberate yourself. And not just because he thought tough love was a good idea, it’s not that. He understood that within every human being there is the kernel or the germ of their own salvation. This also was demonstrated by the Christ. That’s what’s so interesting to me and so hard for me to convey about an Avatar. They come embodying a certain divine principle that—by their embodiment and anchoring of it in human experience—somehow quickens and awakens that principle within all humanity. The Buddha’s breakthrough in his enlightenment was a demonstration of what each of us, every human being, can and must achieve. And so he would say to give up desire for material things, give up desire for the world of form and substance, because everything dies, everything disintegrates. This is a fundamental principle of Buddhism: that what endures is the ocean of being, and that one is inevitably an aspect, a fragment of that ocean of being, and liberation enables one to recognize that one already exists. There’s a Buddha in that ocean. There’s a Buddhist concept of rowing oneself from one shore to the other as achieving or reaching Nirvana, but in fact, when one reaches that other shore, one realizes there is no other shore. It is all present right here now, but we have to awaken to it. And the Buddha’s very name means I am awake.
Dale: And I think that’s one reason why he didn’t emphasize even a belief in God or a deity, because that very belief system would also be a hindrance to that enlightenment that we all should be seeking.
Sarah: It would be a motivation to seek something outside oneself. I’m not saying that we are gods. We are not. But we are made by God, and that divine essence exists within us and is the means of our own liberation.
Dale: I know that this is one reason and one of the criticisms they have of Buddhism: that it doesn’t have a God. They don’t believe in God. At least that’s the belief among outsiders, that they don’t believe in God, so why should we follow this path? But that very belief sets up a barrier because it narrows one’s thinking down to a belief system that stands in the way of eventual enlightenment. So, it’s a very interesting approach that we have to accept about the Buddha.
Sarah: Yes, the Buddha believed firmly and deeply and unflaggingly in the capacity of every human being to be a lamp unto his own feet. And I think by that teaching, he expressed enormous confidence in and respect for the dignity of the human being, as did the Christ. He also taught that every individual is precious, but every individual has responsibility to the larger whole and does not exist as an island or a separated unit. So the Christ took the Buddha’s teaching and carried it a step further in the sense that he taught the inevitability of brotherhood. He said, “Love one another as I have loved you,” and he said, “Love thy neighbor as thyself.” I think that’s a very interesting command to meditate upon: love thy neighbor as thyself. Not as much as thyself but as thyself; as a reflection of and a mirror image of oneself. Everyone around us is mirroring back to us the same humanity and the same nascent and potential divinity. Therefore, he said, “Love one another.” These are such familiar teachings that they fall on the ear with a lack of magnetism because they’re so familiar and yet they contain the deepest possible truths within them.
Dale: Yes, I agree, those truths over the centuries have been so clouded over by all the illusions and the glamours that we have created around Christian teachings, the Christ teachings and the Buddhist teachings. Whole doctrines have been created around them that really deflect our thinking about these basic truths and deflect our right action taken. And I think that’s one of the things that we have to dispel and to give up and to dissipate. These are the things that are blocking the light: the illusions and glamours that they came into the world expressly to attack and to help dissipate and to help show us how we could dissipate them ourselves.
Sarah: You know, it’s interesting that there’s such an emotional fog that surrounds the whole concept of love, because in fact, love is the great revealer. Love and light are so similar. It’s said in the Bible that the Christ knew what was in man. And he knew what was in man because he loved. Love is the means by which we see into another person’s heart. We talked about this in a recent program, “Enter into thy brother’s heart and see his woe. Then speak.” The Christ knew what was in man because he loved. Love is what reveals another human being to us. So again, both the Buddha and the Christ brought revelation, and by enacting and demonstrating that revelation, they were showing what we too can achieve. I think the present time of confusion, with so much questioning and loss of additional values, is probably a sign that we are clearing the way for the next teaching, the next Avatar, because there has to be an interlude of release and letting go and inevitably confusion before one can be ready for the next dispensation, so to speak. So I see the present time—confusing and troubling as it is—as very creative and auspicious. I don’t see it as bad, because the old crystallized systems have to go, and then something new can come in. What the new embodiment of the coming Avatar will be, we don’t know except that it will have something to do with the spiritual will according to Alice Bailey.
Dale: It’s the very will of God that is working out here and what these two great Avatars are in fact doing. That’s why they come into the world: to do the will of God and to put forth what that will is calling for.
Sarah: Can you imagine when you think about it, what the consequences might be of a greater understanding and a greater capacity to wield the spiritual will. I mean, most of us can’t even stop smoking or lose five pounds but just imagine if we could express the spiritual will in a way that would enable us to achieve a resolution to the conflict in the Middle East or put an end to the terrible poverty of the world; I mean, the mind races. Those are targets that are deeply in need of the spiritual will. And what we need, I suppose, is an example of the possibility, which an Avatar can anchor and then we can begin to develop.
Dale: And those examples of the Middle East are, I think, why this problem is coming to the surface right now, because it’s a kind of a final exam, if you will, or a challenge to finally make the grade, finally achieve the relationships that must be worked out there.
Robert: You’ve been listening to Inner Sight. Now we would like to close with a world prayer called the Great Invocation. It’s a call for light and love and goodwill to flow into the world and into our hearts. Let’s listen for a moment to these powerful words.
Sarah: Closes the program by reciting the adapted version of the Great Invocation.
(This is an edited transcript of a recorded radio program called “Inner Sight.” This conversation was recorded between the host, Robert Anderson, and the then President and Vice-President of Lucis Trust, Sarah and Dale McKechnie.)
(Transcribed and edited by Carla McLeod)
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