RSS FEEDThe Ultimate, A Quotation
“…It is not that certain peoples such as the old Japanese believed that individual ‘spirits’ or ‘souls’ inhabited stones and trees, but that the One and Only Being, manifesting both simultaneously and successively through an indefinite multiplicity of states, spiritual, psychic, and physical, aroused their awe and received their reverence in and through one of these manifold forms which Being apparently assumes. This does not involve pantheism, which falsely assumes a substantial identity between Creator and creatures, but an essential and non-dual identity between Being and beings. It could more justly have been described as ‘panentheistic,’ implying that while God is not in the world, the world is in God. In practice…it is one of henotheism, in which the particular form, mythological or material, to which (a person) directs his veneration and awe, becomes the symbol of the Formless, the channel through which he communes with the Supreme Being. Like Hinduism and other Traditions of great antiquity, Shinto may wear the many-coloured robes of polytheism, but its undergarments are pure white: its eight million gods being but personifications of the Divine Names, the qualities and attributes of the One Reality.” Harold Stewart, from A Chime of Windbells, A Year of Japanese Haiku in English Verse.
