We are not humans walking the divine path, but divinities temporarily walking the human path. From the time we descended as pilgrim monads into the dense sphere of dualistic manifestation, we have so merged with the material that we are almost ignorant of who we really are. But we have not entirely forgotten because the inner vibration from the heart, the whispering Voice of the Silence, assures us there is more.
Individuals may heed this silent Voice, but mankind as a whole often fails to understand it. People follow faiths no longer rooted in the original teachings of a divine Messenger but in the thoughts of later followers. The inner keys to rituals and moral rules are long forgotten. Fortunately, however, world scriptures can still give us profound understanding of who and what we are and what our destiny is. Using these we may slowly climb to the summit of the conditioned sphere; but it is extremely difficult to step from this summit to the ultimate One. Instead of starting from below with a dualistic vision, however, we may take a different approach. Speaking of the underlying unity, H. P. Blavatsky says:
It is the one life, eternal, invisible, yet Omnipresent, without beginning or end, yet periodical in its regular manifestations, between which periods reigns the dark mystery of non-Being; unconscious, yet absolute Consciousness; unrealisable, yet the one self-existing reality; truly, "a chaos to the sense, a Kosmos to the reason." Its one absolute attribute, which is itself, eternal, ceaseless Motion, . . . is the perpetual motion of the universe, in the sense of limitless, ever-present space. That which is motionless cannot be Divine. But then there is nothing in fact and reality absolutely motionless within the universal soul.— The Secret Doctrine 1:2
All teachings, like rivers, flow eventually into the one Sea. The eternal One Life is what we are and what every other is. Meditating on it brings wisdom, generosity, patience, will, and altruism, unfolding from the top down, and in this way we become an awaking mind ready to help others.
(From Sunrise magazine, April/May 2006; copyright © 2006 Theosophical University Press)