Many Truths, Many Teachings: Why Spiritual Paths Unveil Reality Differently

Deep Transformation

This final episode of the A.H. Almas Wisdom Series explores the concept of 'Logos' as a unifying principle across diverse spiritual traditions. Drawing

Key takeaways

• Reality is not chaotic but governed by an underlying order, expressed through the concept of Logos.
• Each spiritual tradition has its own 'logos'—a unique logical structure and path that reflects a different aspect of universal truth.

Main topics

• The concept of Logos in ancient Greek philosophy
• The divine order and rational structure of reality

Notable quotes

"The truth is one. The sages speak of it in many ways." – Rig Veda

Conclusion

This episode affirms that the richness of spiritual diversity is not a barrier but an invitation to

Transcript preview

Speaker 3 (0:00) First of all, I would like to thank every one of you and let you know how grateful we are for supporting the podcast by becoming a member via Patreon or buying us a cup of coffee. And now, welcome to episode 20, the final episode in the A.H. Almas Wisdom Series. In this conversation, we delve into the mysterious revelatory power of the Logos. I'll name this episode, Breaking the Code. Speaker 3 (0:25) Welcome to Deep Transformation, self, society, spirit, life-enhancing, paradigm-rattling conversations with cutting-edge thinkers, contemplatives, and activists, with Dr. Roger Walsh and John Dupuy. Speaker 1 (0:41) Welcome to Deep Transformation, Self-Society Spirit, where we explore some of the great questions of our time and of all times. And I'm Roger Walsh, and our co-host is John Dupuy. And with us again today, we have the privilege of dialoguing with Hamid Ali, whose pen name is H. Almas. And we have been working our way systematically through his central text, The Inner Journey Home, Soul's Realization. of the Unity of Reality, a magnificent text. And we have systematically worked our way through the major chapters over the last year. And today we are taking another dialogue to explore one of the appendices, which is titled Logoi of Teachings. Not exactly a catchy title, but a very profound section. And here, Hamid explores the challenge that we currently face for the first time in history, having all the world's religious and contemplative traditions available to us, many seem to make quite divergent and even contradictory claims, and having sometimes quite distinct goals. And the question before us and before our times is how to make sense of this multiplicity of traditions and ideas and claims and beliefs. There have been a number of attitudes towards this. As Amid points out, sometimes there's just been a frank dismissal, saying, well, they must all be wrong, or my way is the only way, and the others are mistaken. Or on the other hand, there have been attempts to synthesize and integrate them. As long as ago, 4,000 years ago, the Rig Veda, one of humankind's earliest texts, said that, quote, the truth is one. The sages speak of it in many ways. So this idea of a common unity, or so-called transcendental unity of religions, is a venerable one. But Amid points out that these extreme views, by the for or against, don't necessarily hold. And it's quite possible that elements of multiple traditions may each have some value and validity, each being an expression of what Amid calls the logos, and each offering. valuable descriptions of both experiences and the path. And Hamid says that reality is more intelligent, magical, and loving than any individual view suggests. So Hamid, maybe a place to start is with this key term logos, which we've touched on before, but it'd be really good, I think, since it's a central theme. of this section, if you would speak to it again now. Speaker 2 (3:28) Yeah, I used the word logos, taken from the Greek logos, and from the Greeks, they looked at logos to mean order, the order of things, how things are ordered, how things have an orderly form, orderly sequence. It also means reason, you know, the word reason comes from it. So it's not just, it's order, the reasonable order, understandable order. And reality has an order to it. It's not haphazard, you know. Like a cat continues being a cat day after day after day. It doesn't turn into a dog and then change. Could Speaker 3 (4:07) you say intelligence also? The logos is... Speaker 2 (4:10) Usually the Greek, they don't put intelligence in the word logos. Intelligence is another word, I think. So logos is more the order of the changes of things. How things change, have an order to them. Just like our science depends on the fact that there's order. There's no order, there's no science. There are no laws of physics. All the physics, they see certain phenomena that have a particular order, and they try to find what is the law that governs it. And then they even have mathematical formulas to formulate that order. So order is basically the orderly pattern of things. Like the reality is not haphazard, is not chaotic. It's orderly. And from order, they saw rationality or reason. Reason, to have reason, to think reasonably, mean you're seeing the order of things and you're speaking in an orderly way that makes sense. That makes sense and leads to further understanding, further orders. So that generally, what I understand, I mean... Roger can read it off, you know, dictionary, probably, what the Logos, can you find that? Well, Speaker 1 (5:32) I'm sure it's, I know it's there. You Speaker 2 (5:35) can Speaker 1 (5:35) just, Speaker 2 (5:36) you know, Speaker 3 (5:36) Google it, you can find the Logos. I just looked it up this morning, so I'll find it again. Speaker 2 (5:41) Yeah, yeah. I'm sure you could Google it and find many of these. Okay, Speaker 3 (5:47) here we go. In ancient Greek philosophy, Logos refers to the divine reason. implicit in the cosmos, ordering it and giving it form Speaker 2 (5:57) and meaning. Yeah, sounds good, yeah. Yep. We did a whole chapter that we call the Logos, which is, in this case, the way how things manifest, how reality manifests, how to account for changes in our experience and perception, and the whole, if you remember, the whole chapter details How do we see from the ground of reality how things appear and how do they change? And that there is not only the creative force that our nature or the ground of being is creative, but creative in the sense it creates reality. Creates reality instant, instant, but create not just haphazardly, there's an order to the creation. So the order that makes sense to what movement it is. what change is, what growth is, what development is, all of these things indicate some kind of order in the way things happen. So the dimension of the logos goes more than just how things happen, but how they happen. What is the mechanism or the dynamic that makes them happy, make them appear that way? So we did that, which is I call the divine logos or the... I think that's what they were reading, they're referring to the divine logos, or I call it the fundamental universal logos, which mean what is behind all of possibilities, what makes things happen. Because if you look at many of the teachings, the fundamental spiritual nature is simple, and they think of it as just simple. doesn't have details and all that. But then from that comes all of everything we experience and see in all levels and all dimensions of all people and all. And that is a function of the creativity of our nature, of our spiritual nature, where it not only has properties like, you know, indestructible and compatible, but it is always in an orderly way. I mean, it reminds me of some of the Christian ideas of God fashions the world. And here, yes, so God fashions the world in some sense. In the sense it manifests it. Not fashions it in the sense it rules all of it, but fashions it in the way it's created. And then here in this, in the appendix, I use the word logos. and use it in a more limited way than what I call universal logos, meaning that each teaching has its logos. Because that's another meaning of logos, which is, another meaning of logos is just the fact that any process or any field has its own order, has its own logic, its own logic, a feasible logic, orderly logic. So each teaching has its orderly pattern. orderly logic. So that's a limited sense that universal divine logo that creates everything. Here I'm saying that each teaching has its own logos, mean its own order more, mean visible order or pattern that detailed its view. how experiences happen to it, how practices are connected to realization, things like that. Speaker 3 (9:38) Yeah, Hamid, in the Christian tradition, in the Gospel of John, it's the fourth gospel of the New Testament and the most mystical one, and it starts out, in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God, and all things were made by him. But in the original Greek, it says, in the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was God, and all things were made by the Logos. And then it goes on to identify Jesus as being the manifestation or as being the logos. So it's in our Christian tradition also. Speaker 2 (10:10) Yes, I'm aware of that, yes, true. And I like that passage, actually, in John's Bible, because, well, what they say, you know, the beginning was God or logos was with God. Because the logos, the way we describe it as one of the... boundless dimension, it is an inherent, inseparable dimension, and separate from all other dimension, including the source dimension. So it is the creativity of the source dimension, which we call the absolute, in this book that we'll be studying. Speaker 3 (10:45) And you do a story about Logos and the different Logi, which is the plural of Logos, and that there's different ones, all these different traditions, and in the East there's Taoism, Vedanta, Hinduism, anyway. And they're related, but you say it's like they're all going to the one place, which is the absolute logos, but they all take a different journey. Some may go on a sailing ship. Some may go on a submarine. Some may go on a camel, a horse. Some people walk. Some people come over the mountains, but they arrive ultimately at the same place. But how they get there and the experience of getting there and the steps influences deeply the particular teaching. Speaker 2 (11:26) And not only how they experience when they arrive, how they experience what they arrive at. Even that experience, what they arrive at, is different. Like, let's take an example here. Let's compare Buddhism and Mahayana Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta. Advaita Vedanta, when you arrive, finally, they talk about the Brahman. And the Brahman is pure consciousness, pure being. and pure bliss, satchitananda, basically. That's how they describe it. That's how Vedanta sees the final goal. In Mahayana Buddhism, the final goal doesn't have the sense of being. They think of it as an empty awareness, transparent, empty awareness, which is non-being and being inseparable. And so they're formulated, it's different. There are, you could say they're similar in the sense they're both boundless and infinite and eternal and all that. It has all these, however, how you experience is different. And I have the privilege of being experienced, have experienced both. They're very different. You know, to experience a pure consciousness is like a fullness and texture that prevails. It's just like love prevailing the whole world. Consciousness is a substance conscious of prevailing everything and is everything. In Mahayana Buddhism, especially as it is done in Vajrayana, for instance, there is a clarity in emptiness, and the emptiness feel like there's nothing there, pure absence of being. And they even describe it as nothing has inherent existence. Non-inherent existence cannot be just by itself. You can't just have emptiness by itself. The emptiness always emptiness of something. And here in the fundamental nature, the emptiness of awareness. So awareness is similar to consciousness, they're both a source of perception, but awareness is a differentiator between, that's why in my teaching, a differentiator between awareness and consciousness, because awareness is empty and is, in some sense, is simpler and more fundamental than consciousness, because it is the beginning of any experience, any perception. It is just what first arises out of the ground, the mystery, which is a clarity that has a searing emptiness to it. And everything appears as an empty clarity. And this empty clarity is the nature of everything. So when I say clarity, you think of a clarity of mind, a clarity of perception, but the clarity is that in the transparency. Everything is transparent and luminously clear. but shut through total non-beingness. While at very then Brahman, which is as Satyananda, is shut through beingness. And that's a big difference in the experience. So that is one reason, seeing those differences between teaching, that made me write that appendix to try to get some sense. why there are different kind of, not only different methodologies, different views, different perspectives, different paths, but even what's called realization and experience enlightenment is different. Speaker 1 (14:58) That's very important, Hamid, because there has been a prevalent view of the so-called transcendental unity of religions that these are all different paths up the same mountain and culminate in the same experience, but you... giving a much richer, more nuanced account, and uniquely based on your own direct experience, that these realizations are not necessarily identical. And also, I think we need to add that there are, clearly, we now know there are degrees of realization, and that that is another fact we have to take into account. Speaker 2 (15:34) Yeah, well, each teaching has degrees of realization. However, I don't grade the teachings. realization as one of them is deeper or more true than the other. The view I present that each one of them is valid, is true, and is absolute in that teaching and equally liberating and bring usual same fruition of freedom, liberation, being in the moment, simplicity. And with all the virtues of love and compassion and humility and generosity and quanimity, all of them have those things. So the virtues are true about all teaching. So by virtues, I mean the ways of behavior, what appeals through behavior in the world. But the fundamental inner experience of what we realize, what we recognize ourself as, our being is. is different from different, for different teaching. So it's not even, when you say that they're all going to the same mountain, they go to the top of the mountain. I mean, I use that metaphor at some point. I don't think that's really very accurate or very useful. I mean, because the way I look at true nature is that true nature is mysterious and has infinite potential. and its potentiality include how it manifests itself to the particular individual who is opening up to it. So it depends on the individual and the time and the culture and the practice, many of you think. So true nature is, manifests itself in different ways, each one of them true, fundamental, I mean, The teachings, especially in the Eid, they talk about the ultimates. Each one has their ultimate. And in that chapter, which I wrote, you know, 25 years ago, I would say, well, it seems like many ultimates. How do we deal with that? Here, that's why I wrote that chapter. Well, what does that mean, there's so many ultimates? Because the usual view, especially from the perspective of different teaching, I can only be one ultimate and theirs is the true ultimate. And the others are just not complete, not exact, this and that. Less ultimate. Yeah, less ultimate. And, you know, because that's, you know, in the East, I mean, they used to debate, do debate, like, you know, we know, we read about how the Buddhists and the Hindus used to have debates between them about, what is reality and each one, when or whatever. And even the Buddhists, they had debate between different teachers, like the Zen and the Vajrayana, what is that? Yeah, Speaker 3 (18:34) Christians did that too. I mean, it was called the Hundred Years' War. Speaker 2 (18:37) Yeah. Yeah, they debated in a different way. Yeah. Speaker 1 (18:44) And there's a classic story that Sharon Salzberg tells of the incomprehensibility Speaker 1 (18:53) incomprehensibility of the two different traditions. They brought Sonsonim, the Korean Zen master and one of the great Tibetan masters who spent many years in a cave unblocking his name together. Anyway, and brought them together for tea. And at a certain point, Sonsonim did his Zen thing of thrusting an orange in front of the nose of the llama and saying, what is this? What is this? And of course, the Lama was nonplussed and finally turned to his assistant and said, don't they have oranges in Korea? I Speaker 3 (19:28) have a pressing question for you. You talk about in this appendix, this part of the book, that you can have a teacher, you can engage in the practices, you can study