Cosmic Consciousness: The Man-God Whom We Await

by Alexander J. McIvor-Tyndall

The Muslim is a fatalist, but this may be due less to the teachings of the prophet than to the peculiar quality of the Arab nature, which makes him stake everything, even his own liberty upon the cast of a die.

The leading doctrine of the all-powerfulness of God seems to warrant the belief in fatalism—belief which offers a stumbling block to all theologians, all philosophers, all thinkers. If God is omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient, how and where and in what manner can be explained the necessity of individual effort?

This problem is not at all clear to the western mind, and it is equally obscure to that of the East.

It is said of Mohammed that when asked concerning the doctrine of "fatalism" he would show more anger than at any other question that could be put to him. He found it impossible to explain that while all knowledge was God's, yet the individual was responsible for his own salvation, by virtue of his good deeds and words. Nevertheless, it is not unlikely that Mohammed possessed the key to this seeming riddle; but how could it be possible to speak in a language which was totally incomprehensible to them of this knowledge—the language of cosmic consciousness?

Like Jesus, who said: "Many things I have to tell you, but you can not bear (understand) them now," so, we may well believe that Mohammed was hard-pressed to find language comprehensible to his followers, in which to explain the all-knowingness and all-powerfulness of God, and at the same time, not have them fall into the error of the fatal doctrine of fatalism.

But throughout all his teachings Mohammed's chief concern seemed to be to draw his people away from their worship of idols, and to this end he laid constant and repeated emphasis upon the one-ness of God; the all-ness, the completeness of the one God; always adding "the Compassionate, the Loving."

This constant allusion to the all-ness of God is in line with all who have attained to cosmic consciousness. Nothing more impresses the illumined mind, than the fact that the universe is One—uni—(one)—verse—(song)—one glorious harmony when taken in its entirety, but when broken up and segregated, and set at variance, we find discord, even as the score of a grand operatic composition when played in unison makes perfect harmony but when incomplete, is nerve-racking.

Like all inspired teachers, Mohammed taught the end of the world of sense, and the coming of the day of judgment, and the final reign of peace and love. This may, of course, be interpreted literally, and applied to a life other than that which is to be lived on this planet, but it may also with equal logic be assumed that Mohammed foresaw the dawn of cosmic consciousness as a race-endowment, belonging to the inheritors of this sphere called earth. In either event the ultimate is the same, whether the one who suffers and attains, comes into his own in some plane or place in the heavens, or whether he becomes at-one with God, The Absolute Love and Power of the spheres, and "inherits the earth," in the days of the on-coming higher degree of consciousness, which we are here considering.

That Mohammed realized the nothingness of form and ritual, except it be accompanied by sincerity and understanding, is evident in the following:

"Your turning your faces in prayer, towards the East and the West, is not piety; but the pious is he who believeth in God, and the last day, and in the angels and in the Scripture; and the prophets, and who giveth money notwithstanding his love of it to relations and orphans, and to the needy and the son of the road, and to the askers for the freeing of slaves; and who performeth prayer and giveth the alms, and those who perform their covenant when they covenant; and the patient in adversity and affliction and the time of violence. These are they who have been true; and these are they who fear God."