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All the world’s religions have something unique to teach, but they also share one common core. Their different lessons ultimately bring us back to that mystical experience from which they were all born and towards which they all strive.
Alan Richard ‘Bede’ Griffiths embodied two worlds. He was a Benedictine monk in good standing with the Catholic Church who adopted the name of a famed seventh-century monk, author and scholar. Yet, he was equally renowned as a sannyasi with his own ashram, who assumed the name Swami Dayananda.
He would perform traditional Catholic masses, yet include readings from the Bhagavad Gita and the Dhammapada. His writings ranged from the life of Jesus to spiritual commentaries on famed Hindu texts.
While undoubtedly a paradoxical figure, his influence on the world is still being felt. As a student and friend of C.S. Lewis, the young Griffiths soon discovered spirituality through his older mentor’s influence. When called to India to discover the ‘other half’ of his soul, Griffiths set up an ashram that would ultimately welcome thousands of curious visitors seeking the same treasures he had found at the heart of all religions.
One such visitor was the famed biologist Rupert Sheldrake, whose atheistic, materialistic worldview was shattered by the encounter, leading to him becoming one of the world’s most controversial and original biologists. Though Griffiths passed in 1993, his writings, including this compilation of his essential teachings, continue to appear and gain an ever-widening audience in both the East and West.
What do all the major world religions have in common? While there are obvious external differences, Griffiths believes that one core feature lies at their heart: the desire to encounter the divine. Many of us have experienced the divine during certain intimate moments of our lives. Yet these encounters can be fleeting and leave us craving to re-experience that rarefied sense of joy and bliss. It was moments such as these that drew Griffiths out of his comfortable agnosticism and into a vibrant embrace of the spiritual. The scientific materialism of his contemporaries did not have the vocabulary to make sense of these instances, but the monastery did.
Yet even here, something was missing. While the Catholic faith allowed him to regard the world in a more spiritual light, its rough division between God and humanity did not sit well with his soul. The God he knew was close, intimate and deep within. In other words, Griffiths was craving something that only India seemed to provide. After encountering the philosophy of Adi Shankara and Advaita Vedanta, Griffiths found that its essential nonduality was not only resonant with his experience of God but consistent with the theology of many of his Catholic forebears (especially those within the Christian mystical tradition).
In this meeting of East and West, Griffiths could make sense of the immanent identity of the divine within his Self without sacrificing the call to transcendence and the need to reach beyond to another realm of existence.
Every religious tradition has these truths buried within its core, and they all need the others as a reminder of this tenet. For instance, while Christianity rightly emphasises the need to transform the world and evolve towards the next spiritual stage, it often draws too sharp a division between the personal self and the higher, divine Self. By contrast, certain sects of Hinduism overemphasise the immanence of the Self and the oneness of all things, negating the call to action and service to others. For Griffiths, the perfect harmony of both sides can be found in enlightened individuals such as Gandhi and Sri Aurobindo. The latter, in particular, articulated a vision of humanity’s evolution to higher stages of consciousness without sacrificing the ultimate unity of all things in the divine.
For Griffiths, this rediscovery of the core of all religions comes about only once we abandon the rationalistic shackles of the modern world. The intuitive, feminine side within us all is the key to our future evolution. Embracing this aspect of both God and ourselves – something often forgotten in the West – moves us beyond the strict logical categories that trap our minds in the realm of duality. It allows us to embrace opposites, overcome either/or thinking and fully accept all parts of our world. This, for Griffiths, will culminate in a future where spirituality will transcend religion. And God – the Reality that surpasses all names and labels – will become a living experience for all who come along on the journey.
Many people have been turned off by traditional religion. Some find it cold, stuffy or confining, while others think it’s simply out-of-date. Bede Griffiths' testimony demonstrates that, to some degree, the lessons that form the core of traditional religious faith may still have relevance in today’s ever-shifting world. If Griffiths is correct, our goal when choosing a religion is not simply to choose the right one but to see how they can all witness the same underlying truths.
Indeed, if his life communicates anything, it is that seemingly disparate faith traditions can be reconciled and brought to a fuller, more enriching experience once they encounter and commune with each other. This has been the main lesson for him and the countless followers of his teachings – whose numbers grow with each passing year. Indeed, even after his death, Griffiths' influence has not waned, for as in his life, his teachings have something timeless to offer us all.
