Theos-Talk Archives (August 1999 Message tl00001)

>I am wondering if all this is just misunderstanding. While Buddha himself
>claimed he was a human being like all of us, there are followers who tread
>Buddha as a God. It is quite possible that it is the followers's
>misunderstanding and overstatement of treating Sai Baba as a God.

I think this may be a bit of a cultural/religious misunderstanding ... the
mostly eastern concepts of realization, or becoming suffused with inner
divinity, or achieving the state of consciousness in which one is fully
identified with all of life might be seen as "being God" - though people
making the statement in this concept mean it in the sense that we are *all*
"God", and that we are just at different stages of the full awareness of
that interior divinity. When this relatively sophisticated concept gets
translated into the relatively dense conceptual paradigm of the western
world, it can get misinterpreted and reduced to "He's claiming to be
God!". -JRC