I have touched on only four interreligious disputes. With the exception of the last one, which springs from a moot and insufficiently precise formulation, these disputes are founded on discrepancies in the spiritual experiences of the great prophets, on the fact that while viewing certain objects from different vantage points in Shadanakar, from different spiritual points of view, these visionaries see different aspects of the given objects. Such disputes can be provisionally labeled horizontal conflicts, meaning by that the validity of the points of view and their illusory contraposition.
Yet another example. Throughout their existence, Christianity and Islam have been battling with what they call paganism. Over the centuries the idea that monotheism and polytheism are irreconcilable and incompatible has become impressed on humanity as a kind of axiom. Discussion of why and how that came to be would lead us to digress too far. What is important is the question, On what basis did the religions of Semitic origin, while affirming the existence of spiritual hierarchies and devising a detailed description of them-both an angelogy and demonology-in the Middle Ages, restrict their number to those few that found a place in medieval schemata? Is there even a shadow of consistency in their denial in principle of truth to all other experience of spiritual hierarchies? There are absolutely no grounds for it, except references once again to the Gospels' and the Quran's silence on the subject. It was because there were insufficient grounds for a blanket denial that the Christian Church, in the first few centuries of its existence, did not so much deny the existence of the gods of the Olympic pantheon as identify them with the demons and devils of Semitic canonical texts. In doing so, the Church, contrary to the facts, ignored the character of the divinities as it was intuited by the polytheistic spiritual tradition, arbitrarily ascribing to them demeaning and shameful traits or deliberately overemphasizing the all too anthropomorphic element the subjects of knowledge-polytheistic humanity- had introduced into the images, an element which by that time had been preserved only in its lower, popular aspects. As if acknowledgment of the existence of hierarchies of nature, of great elementals, or of national guiding spirits could undermine the oneness of God-the Creator and Builder of the Universe, the source and estuary of the earthly flow of life- more than would acknowledgment of God's other beautiful children-angels and archangels, not to mention those demons of the Bible!
Unfortunately, even today that ancient misunderstanding has not been cleared up. For a long time now, nothing has remained of classical polytheism. But a hardened, narrow-minded intolerance lacking all wisdom is discernible every time the Christian churches-or at least those persons who speak in their names- have occasion to pass judgment on the Hindu, Chinese, Japanese, or Tibetan systems. The two other religions of Semitic origin are just as intolerant. What we are dealing with here is a typical example of horizontal differentiation between religions. Without contradicting each other in the essentials, without clashing with each other in the boundless spiritual cosmos, Christianity and Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam, Judaism and Shinto speak of different things, of different spiritual lands, of different parts of Shadanakar. But human ignorance interprets this as a contradiction and pronounces one of the teachings true and the rest false: «If there is one God, then other gods are nothing but shams. They are either devils or figments of the human imagination.» How naive! God is One, but there are many gods. The writing of that word with both a capital and small g testifies in clear terms to the differing connotations attached to it in both cases. If someone is frightened of repeating the word in different senses, let that person substitute some other for it when speaking of polytheism-«great spirits» or "great hierarchies"-but nothing will be changed. That is, nothing will be changed if we discount the possibility that the use of the word «spirit» could in certain cases lead to misunderstandings, as many of those gods are more than spirits- they are powerful beings possessing material form, though they do so on other, transphysical planes of being.
All these disputes arising from misunderstandings between religions bring to mind an analogy I once saw in a religious text, though I do not remember which one. It told of several hikers who each climbed different slopes of one and the same mountain, saw and studied its different faces, and upon their return argued about who among them saw what really existed and who saw nothing but figments of the imagination. Each believed that the mountain was exactly as he or she had seen it, and that the testimonies of the other hikers about the other slopes were lies, absurdities, and traps to snare human souls. Thus, the first conclusion that follows from our examination of interreligious disputes reveals a path to eliminating those that arise either from a simple misunderstanding or from a discrepancy between the religious objects of knowledge experienced-that is, horizontal conflicts.
Not only polytheism but animism and preanimism, too, consist of more than vague, random, subjective images that arose in the minds of prehistoric humans. Transphysical reality lies behind them as well. Providence is Providence for just the reason that it has never left peoples and races to be the dupes of fantasies and illusions without any possibility of contact with a higher reality. One would have to posit in place of God a dark, evil power as the true shepherd of humanity if one were to think that prehistoric humanity was barred for tens of thousands of years from the possibility of experiencing anything spiritual, or at the very least variomaterial, of coming into contact with something besides the physical world and our own fantasies.
But if this is so, how can the spiritual experience of so-called savages enrich us, who stand on such a high level of spiritual knowledge compared to them? By that which was intuited back then, in that milieu, by that inimitable psyche, but was not passed on and not included by succeeding spiritual traditions in their treasury. Research specifically devoted to theurgic beliefs and the tradition of protological thought could help not only to «rehabilitate» those ancient beliefs in their essential features but could also establish a place for them in the synthesized religious worldview that is now beginning to take shape. It would come to light, for example, that the belief of the Arunta tribe of Australia in a single living substance that flows between matter constantly and everywhere, from being to being, from object to object (and in essence the religion of that tribe consists entirely of such beliefs) is one of humanity's oldest revelations about the transphysical cosmos. It is a vivid, brilliant revelation, more definitive than any later ones about that single life force. The Australians called it arungvilta, the more highly developed religion of Hinduism calls it prana, and we have yet to hear what science will call it in twenty or thirty years from now.