One summer more than twenty years ago, during a period of great mid-life crisis, I retreated to the Samye Ling Tibetan Centre in Scotland in order to reflect on the direction my life should take for the future. I intended to work in order to justify my stay at the Centre so I took all my tools with me in order to be able to make a practical contribution to their work. I knew that they were frantically working to finish their temple ready for its opening in a week or so and I was delighted to be able to join them in this work. I began by working on the temple railings, filing and grinding the excess runs and droplets from the decoration that had been overly galvanised. The golden temple roof, which was completed while I was working there, can be seen from some miles away as one approaches Eskdalemuir on the road from Lockerbie and is an extraordinary sight in the landscape of the Scottish Borders. The colourful temple opening ceremony went by with some detail work still to complete on the interior of the temple.
 
Along with some of the group who were still working on the temple, I was called to the Abbots room. Their retreat house, which was hidden away high on the hillside, needed the completion of its new timber framed first floor, in order to accommodate a larger group of monks who were starting their seven year retreat there that autumn. The Abbot asked me if I would go and help with the work. Having heard that apart from a small group of senior monks and nuns, usually only those going into retreat were ever permitted to go to this house. I felt that I had no place to be going to this rather secret place because of my status as a non-Buddhist, so I thought it important to point this out to the Abbot. He told me not to worry because he knew that I was a Buddhist, because he said, “you follow the Dharma”, (one who seeks to meet all implied obligations and duties of the Universal Truth). I was very humbled by this remark and not at all sure that it was deserved, but I did agree to go and it did start me thinking about what qualities would be needed to be spiritually acknowledged in other faiths.
 
Certainly I was attempting to live by that truth which is the Dharma although I saw myself then, and still do now, as primarily a follower of the Christ (although in my early life I was a member of the Church of England I feel that it would be wrong to see me now as a Christian). What would it take I thought, to also be able to live as a good Jew, or a Muslim, a Hindu, or a Sikh. I believe that those essential qualities of spirituality which are encapsulated in a true devotion to the One Life, which are; love of God, complete selflessness, love of all others and service to all, are, it seems to me, central to the lives of all true followers of each of the faiths. I felt that for one who lives by these universal qualities it should be possible with a thorough understanding of a faith and without contradiction, to live as a devotee of that faith and to be accepted by its most understanding followers without compromising the essential truth that lies at the centre of that faith or any other faiths to which one has a sense of belonging. 
 
Each of these religions do, of course, have that same very great depth but also I think, an area that one could call the shallows to accommodate those ‘ordinary’ souls who are not ready or prepared to go deeply into the principles of faith. It is very sad that so many committed people of faith still measure ‘other’ religions by their most obvious trappings as seen by an outsider and this is usually, of course, the outer trappings of those shallow edges. That faith is then most likely to be measured by the behaviour of the kind of people who inhabit its perimeter rather than those who live at the heart of faith. The people of the shallows are the least likely to understand or follow the deeper truths of their religion and are likely to be encompassed by much mythology beyond which is hidden the path to the central truth.
 
Since that short time at Samye Ling I have made friends in each of these faiths, friends who I believe are equally committed to those same principles of devotion to the One Life, friends who by their attitude of inclusive thinking are spreading the development of an understanding of the universality of the spiritual life. This is hopefully not just an understanding of interfaith relations but one that will eventually embrace all the faiths at the deepest level and yet in doing so transcends them. This seems to me to be the needed level of understanding that will lead to the faith of the future, a universal religion that embraces the one Universal Truth that lies at the centre of the spiritual world common to all today’s faiths. 
 
In the last fifty years the floodgates of the world’s cultures have been opened and most of us now live in a multi-faith community. I think that here in the United Kingdom we have yet to fully embrace the appropriate mindset for this multi-faith world and I see this as the principle task for our quickly growing interfaith movement. It is time for the spiritual thinkers to fully realise that it is not only Judaism, Christianity, and Islam that are Monotheistic religions for so also are Hinduism, Sikhism and Buddhism (although some Buddhist would argue that it is not a religion that they follow but rather a set of precepts, yet these are essentially those same precepts of the Universal Truth that all deeply spiritual men and women understand).
 
Slowly we will each come to the realisation that all are worshiping the same God, the One Life that pervades us all, yet few realise how widespread the concept of the divine trinity is throughout the faith communities. Is the Christian concept of God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit essentially different from the Muslim concept of Allah (Arabic for “God”) who is viewed as the One God, a triad of the creator, sustainer, and restorer of the world? This mirror is reflected again in the Trimurti of Hinduism with Brahmā who is God the ultimate reality, Vishnu the second person of this trinity, the protector and preserver of the world and restorer of the universal truth (dharma) and Shiva who is both the destroyer and the restorer.
 
Vishnu is certainly recognised by many esotericists as that same second person of the trinity as the Christ. Vishnu is chiefly known through his avatars (incarnations), particularly Rama who is the embodiment of chivalry and virtue and Krishna who I see as an embodiment of love and whose life explores the elaborate interplay between God and the human soul. There are altogether ten named incarnations of Vishnu and they appear in an evolutionary sequence. Rāma (hero of the Rāmāyana epic) was the seventh, followed by Krishna and then the Buddha Gotama. The tenth and last incarnation, Kalkī is yet to appear in order to restore the earth to its initial purity at the end of the age. Kalkī is often pictured returning seated on a white horse, with a naked sword in his hand, blazing like a comet, Christ is also seen returning on a white horse. In the Bhagavad-Gita, Krishna plays the supernal role normally associated with Vishnu. He tells Arjuna: “Whenever there is a decline of righteousness and rise of unrighteousness then I send forth Myself. For the protection of the good, for the destruction of the wicked, and for the establishment of righteousness, I come into being from age to age.”¹ It is clear that aspects of the Kalkī story contain symbols shared with the millennial aspects of other religious traditions, certainly the Christ returning on the white horse (symbolic of the soul) and the horsemen of the apocalypse in the Christian ‘New Testament book of Revelation’ and the descriptions of Shamballa in Buddhism. It is from Shamballa, described in the Hindu accounts as the village in which Kalkī will repeatedly appear and in Tibetan Buddhism as the secret mountain kingdom from which that future avatar will inaugurate a worldwide golden age. Yet it is useful to bear in mind a point of Indian wisdom while making these comparisons, which is, as many Hindus believe, that any representations of the divine can only be partial and, if taken in isolation, will be misleading.
 
There are many other instances of the idea of a divine triad. To name just a few, they appear as the San-ch'ing of Taoism, the Triad of Rashnu of the Zoroastrian and going back to religions that have disappeared there is Enlil, the Mesopotamian god of the atmosphere whose triad was completed by Anu and Ea, the Egyptian god Khnum who forms triangle of deities with the goddesses Satis and Anukis. She was also named as the companion of the god Amon at Thebes, forming the Theban triad with him and with the youthful god Khons, who was said to be Mut's (mother Earth’s) son.
 
Many of us, particularly those who are connected in some way to one of the religions originating in India use the sacred syllable Om more than once in the day, it is considered to be the greatest of all mantras or invocations. Om is composed of the three sounds a-u-m (in Sanskrit, the vowels a and u coalesce to become o). To many of us Om represents the triple sound of the One Life, the ‘three in one’ of the God of the Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims and Christians.²
 
The problem in understanding the scriptures of our faiths is that they were written for a time when most people throughout the world were like children who could only understand them as dramatic stories and who believed with a simple unquestioning faith. Now we must make sense of the ancient mysteries, embrace them as intelligent men and women and adapt them anew so that we can apply them to our life in the modern world. We must face the problems set in the teachings of the faiths as never before, because we have reached such a time of crisis for man where he must take on the responsibility for his own great physical power over the planet and the safety of his planetary home. Thus it is more important than ever that he begins to recognise his duality and confronts the struggle between himself as the self-centred materialistic man and the selfless spiritual man. He must begin to recognise this as a war between his lower nature and the higher spiritual nature, the soul, who is yet capable of so very much more provided that his lower nature can be saved by the higher. This unity within himself will make possible the unity of the planet, for he will vision all men sharing and working for the good of the whole family of man.  This needed interior battle has been pointed out by many dedicated servers over the centuries, as the disciple Paul pointed out so long ago while writing to the Christians at Ephesus, he commended each of them:  "... to make in himself, of twain, one new man, so making peace; and that he might reconcile both unto God in one body, having slain the enmity in himself." ³  Christ, as much as any divine man, demonstrated the truth of this.
 
Few Christians yet recognise that Christ presented the truth in such a way that it makes possible the bridging of the gap between the Eastern philosophy and beliefs and the modern materialist world and its scientific developments. His viewpoint bridges the gap between a self-conscious individualistic existence and the future group-conscious unified world, or how to transform the duality of man’s nature to the at-one-ment of the human and the divine.⁴  
 
Pisces represents that period at the end of which the complete blending of the soul or fusion of the personality and the soul takes place in order to produce the perfected individual soul. It is through this transition; once it is sufficiently embedded in humanity as a group, that the plan of Deity can emerge. It is likely to be different than we ever imagined because we have been imagining it in our own finite terms.⁵ This release of the soul from its captivity returns a man to the task of the world Saviour for he can now manifest the characteristics of the indwelling Christ. This is the task for which the lessons of Pisces prepare; it is the final lesson for the aspirant upon the reverse path where here it follows on from Aquarius rather than the ordinary path of rotation of the planet, which is currently moving from Pisces to Aquarius. This ordinary move through the planetary system should not, however, be seen as retrograde for the current age of Aquarius will offer a profound change in humanity, it will see the resurgence of the world servers who will build a truly inter-dependant, stable and united world community. We are entering the new age but we are still in the middle of a period of transition.  This transition from Age to Age is a period of about six hundred years as the influence of the new age waxes and that of the old age wanes. This process of re-adjustment and re-orientation to the new influences is always a period of chaos, hence the conflicts of our time that are essentially the old ways of living and believing, fighting against the new. The new conditions that are developing in the world will produce new crisis in everyone’s life demanding that we take on new personal responsibilities. All the teachings of religion will need to be re-interpreted in the light of a world that will become increasingly illuminated and we must re-adapt to the quickly changing conditions of the modern world. Pisces prepares a man or woman to say, “I leave the Father’s house and turning back, I save”,⁶ this is, as yet, an opportunity for the few but in this new age many shall have the opportunity to be able to say something like, ‘I build the Father’s house and as I do so, I serve’.
 
¹ ‘Bhagavad-Gita’, chapter IV.
 
² I am indebted to the ‘Encyclopaedia Britannica’ CD-Rom of ‘World Religions’ which I have used as an aide-mémoire in putting together some of the details of the divine lives and their relationships.
 
³  ‘Holy Bible’, Ephesians chapter II.15-16.
 
⁴  ‘From Bethlehem to Calvary’, Alice Bailey, Lucis Press, pp17-18.
 
⁵  ‘Esoteric Astrology’, Alice Bailey, Lucis Press, p115. 
 
⁶  The Pisces keynote for the disciple.