The Key by Whitley Strieber

regret?
    God forgives. But this does not mean that you should pray for forgiveness from some old graybeard in the sky. You must find who within you bears you forgiveness. An energetic body that bears such regrets bears them as areas of darkness, and if that body manifests its memory of its elemental self, the manifestation bears sores.
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    And we live again and again—why? What is the reason for recurrence?
    To row the boat of being toward ecstasy. You must live many times in order to build up a radiant body that is complete. To be born into this world takes but an hour. But to be born into the next takes many lifetimes. Unless you follow your own real path, then you can do it more quickly. Remember this—path within, signposts without.
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    What are the signposts?
    You find your own, in life, in love, in religion. But understand this: the teachings of Buddha, Christ and Muhammad are interlinked. They are one system in three, not three separate religions. This has been hidden from you for a long time.
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    Three in one? A triad?
    A triad. Christianity is the active side of the triad, Islam the passive, Buddhism the reconciling. Christianity seeks God, Islam surrenders to God, Buddhism finds God. When you see these as three separate systems, you miss the great teaching of which each contains but a part. Seek the kingdom as a Christian, give yourself to God as a Muslim, find your new companion in the dynamic silence of Buddhist meditation.
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    Then a true seeker seeks in all faiths?
    These three masters created one system. But there are many systems that have evolved in other ways, that have grown rather than been created.
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    Hinduism, for example?
    The gods of the Hindus are the structures of personality purified into their essential meaning. Hinduism is the path of soul-knowledge, for knowledge of the gods is knowledge of the soul. The great systems of self-knowledge were the Egyptian religion and Hinduism. No amount of scientific knowledge of the “unconscious” will provide as much food for the energetic body as true relationship with the Hindu gods.
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    Who were Muhammad and Buddha?
    Exactly who history portrays them to have been. But to understand what happened to them, you must understand that your entire pantheon of deities is you. God is you. The gods are you. Angels and demons are you. So it was mankind who spoke to Muhammad in his cave. So also, to Buddha under the Bhodi Tree, and to Christ in the desert. Who do you think showed him the cities of the plain? Satan is man, just as God is man. Satan seeks, God waits. But you do not surrender. Not even Muslims. Although the great Sufis have, some of them, somewhat, surrendered to God. As long as you defy God by self-will, Satan finds you and captures you.
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    Why don’t we surrender?
    Self-will, the illusion that you can act and must act on your own behalf, prevents you from entering the will of God. And the God of which I speak is not a distant being off in some heaven. You yourself are the distant being you seek.
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    But if the self is God—
    No, please, listen. God is not this “self” of yours which your western culture imagines. God is all being. To surrender to God is to make your energetic body transparent, so that the light of God shines through you. This “self” that so fascinates the west is only your brain-filtered concept of you as you appear to yourself in this life. It is very small. It does not include any of the experience you have amassed in other lives. Many human beings, at this point in history, are immense. But your concept of self is constricted. It relates only to this one life. It is tiny. The God within you is unimaginably vast.
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    You speak of a journey toward self-perfection. But isn’t perfection impossible for us to achieve?
    You can become perfect. Buddha did. Muhammad did. Christ did. Many have, hidden to history, done the same. You may find Buddha sleeping on a park