The great teaching consciousness of the omniverse, the Krishna, consciousness, Christ consciousness or Buddha mind (use your own label), took the form of a jew, Yeshua bar Yosef, in a tribal society which believed in a destructive, vengeful God which feared death as a permanent state. This great Messianic teacher is known in English as Jesus. He did not come to change the universal laws of creation, the natural laws, but to change the unnatural laws of man which had so separated Man from God.

Except for the mystics, man, after about three hundred years, reverted to the old concept of God being separate from creation and become once again an observer dispensing rewards and punishments for mankind's actions. One mystic, St John of the Cross, a Spaniard of the 16th Century, turned within in meditation and eventually achieved union with God. He describes that enlightenment thus:

"The understanding of the ego is now the understanding of God; and its will is the will of God; and its memory is the memory of God; and its delight is the delight of God; and the substance of the person, although it is not the substance of God, for into this it cannot be changed, is nevertheless united in God, and absorbed in God, and is thus God by participation in God".

The Buddhist monk, Hakuin, describes enlightenment using different labels:

"When the gate opens, cause and effect are one. This very place the Lotus Paradise, this very body the Buddha."

Enlightenment is a direct, personal experience, not a concept nor an acquired flash of knowledge. Even in enlightenment there is delusion. The delusion being the personal interpretation of the experience which has been conditioned by ones own religious or spiritual beliefs. One cannot know 'God', only experience it. Nor is that experience a permanent condition, though it is very hard not to cling to it. In Zen we are told to "Take one more step from the top of the hundred-foot bamboo". That step brings you right back to earth. When ordinary mind becomes Buddha-mind, nothing has been added to it. When Buddha-mind becomes ordinary mind nothing has been detracted from it. To cling to union or enlightenment is to hold it as an ultimate goal, a state of static perfection in which there is no further room for growth, experience and development. No such state exists. Enlightenment is not the goal of life, it is the way to live it.

Father Thomas Merton, not necessarily in Union with the God within himself, but certainly aware of that creative life force within nature writes:

"There is not a flower that opens, not a seed that falls to he ground, and not an ear of wheat that nods on the end of its stalk in the wind that does not preach and proclaim the existence of God to the whole world. Often we refuse to her the million different voices through which He speaks to us, and our refusal hardens us against His grace, and yet He continues to speak to us; and we say He is without mercy."

The only problem here is that Fr Thomas Merton metamorphosises God by calling it 'He'. That which he calls God is beyond all form. Much more than the sum of all its part. It can be experienced, but cannot be defined.