Ways to Meaning and a Sense of Universality

Daniel M. Kolos is president of Benben Books, a company publishing
scholarly works.

The opening chapter of this powerful and closely argued book outlines
the diversity of religions. The author moves on to a discussion of the
existential underpinnings of all religions and the “ways” offered by
each to its adherents. In these practical instructions, he finds a
universality within which being and God (or an ultimate principle) can
come together. The main part of the book examines the “way” of the
seven major religions, as well as mysticism. Sahadat concludes the book
with a discussion of how people of different religions could communicate
the similarities of their religious experiences through dialogue.

Religions become similar, Sahadat claims, when they teach “that human
beings are in an existential predicament because they are alienated from
ultimate reality” and then offer an antidote replete with precepts and
practices that constitute “a way out of the predicament.” It is
these practices that can unite the diverse religions.

Sahadat fails to see that helplessness as a human condition can be a
social creation, that transcendence may be a genetically programmed
state of being, and, finally, that the theoretical speculations of
quantum physicists like David Boehm lead them to the realm of saints and
deep-trance meditators. When he proposes that “religious experience is
the mother of religion,” he is using methodology that is anachronistic
and may actually support alienation. He has not examined
interdisciplinary studies that imply the possibility that between the
extremes of intellectually constructed rejection of religion and
acceptance by faith, there is a third, developmentally verifiable
way—a natural, biological connection between experience and thought
whose amalgamation results in an equally natural spirituality.
Sahadat’s call for religious pluralism ultimately rings hollow because
he makes no effort to understand the cultural causes of what keeps the
practitioners of the individual religions myopic.