I can tell exactly when the New Age concept of religion started.

It was September 11, 1893, in Chicago. There, Swami Vivekananda held a speech at the “World’s Parliament of Religions”, essentially sucking up to everyone by saying they’re all good: all religions lead to God, like rivers that all lead to the same ocean. Which is kind of obvious, considering how many people from all kinds of religions have reached God.

Yes, that was sarcasm, and the applause from appealing to all that narcissism must have been something to see.

God can truly adopt whichever form is most effective for leading the worshipper. Sometimes, it means that if you pray to God through a certain religion, God will reveal Himself to you in that form. However, sometimes it means God will reveal Himself in the form that actually teaches you and leads you from a wrong path to the correct one. I’ve heard of Muslims having visions of Jesus and converting to Christianity, or having NDE visions where they saw that Islam is completely wrong and Christ is the Lord, again, converting to Christianity when they were revived. That doesn’t look very much like “all religions are equally good”, or “God will reveal Himself in whichever form you pray to”. No: God is the Truth, and He will lead you to Himself. Your starting point can be whatever – it’s obvious that most are terrible. However, God can meet you in your pit of spiritual doom and show you the way out. That doesn’t mean you will see Allah if you’re a Muslim. It means you will see the way to God from your bad place.

I’ve heard about Protestant Christians who had a vision of Mary, mother of Christ, because that was the aspect of God they deliberately neglected and looked down upon, and that was the vision God chose as their next step and a way out of their spiritual darkness. It’s something you need, and don’t have.

People think what Vivekananda, and later Sai Baba taught: that you can imagine God in whichever form and God will reveal Himself to you, means that you can do whatever – imagine God in form of a sexy girl, for instance, and visualise some “tantra”. In Hindu tradition, this would be known as “aparadha”, translated as either “offence” or “transgression”, and means something that either ends your spiritual path altogether, or gets you a vacation in some picturesque section of hell. There are rules for this, you know. A form in which you can visualise God can be very few things, and always something that is the strongest association with God in your soul. It can’t be a bottle of Coca Cola, or a centrefold from Playboy, or anything that’s not actually God. Also, it can’t be anything that God personally wouldn’t approve of, because, believe it or not, God does actually have a say in this. If God doesn’t approve of your conduct, your spiritual path will either be thorny or lead through Shit Creek. When I followed this instruction from Sai Baba, that God will answer in whichever form was closest to us, I thought about it, and meditated on Jesus. Why, because He was the default association with God in any kind of form, and I visualised Him in the sermon on the Mount, in His moment of power and glory. That was obviously a good choice, because I received initiation immediately thereafter.

So no, you can’t just “do whatever” and hope to have good outcomes, because God has a say. God needs to approve of your consciousness, conduct and choices. You need to impress God with your actions, for instance by manifesting sincerity, purity and choice for transcendence and away from the worldly. Sure, God can sometimes show Himself to people who are on a very wrong path in order to snap them out of it, but I would not count on that being some kind of a rule. It is much better to do things that are recommended, and meditating on an incarnation of God, rather than some form that you “like”, is a good start. If you want to reach God, meditating on a person of God is the way to go. Trying to avoid meditating on the known person of God and instead visualising some other form translates into trying to avoid God because you have some issues with Him. Better get those sorted out first, methinks.

As for religions, have in mind that not all rivers lead to the sea. Some lead to deserts where they evaporate. Some lead into desolate, isolated lakes that serve as radioactive waste dumps. Some religions, in fact, don’t lead to God, are not created by God, and don’t have anything to do with God. Some have a transcendental component, but also contain serious errors. You can’t rest assured that whichever religion you are born in or have chosen for yourself, your eventual fate will be in God. Most likely, you will have to change your religion at least once if not many times, and at some point you will actually need to have thoughts of your own because no religion will suffice.

If you actually read more of Vivekananda, you will see that his actual opinion on this is far from “any religion will do”. In fact, he thinks that various religions are good for people on that particular level of spiritual evolution. The idea that anything will lead you from the beginning to the end is naive. In the beginning, sophisticated ideas will be too much for you. Near the end, no idea will likely encompass your understanding properly, because it will simply be too vast. Also, of course, Vivekananda held a reductionist view of religion, where advaita vedanta is the real truth, and everything else is a lesser knowledge that might be necessary along the path, but will later be discarded for a more superior knowledge, culminating, of course, in what he personally believed. 🙂

In the end, always remember: God isn’t some impersonal energy you can focus and manipulate. God might not be a person the way you are a person, but only because He’s much, much more of a person than you are. Where your level of personality is like a mass-value of a rock, God’s level of personality is like a mass-value of a galactic supermassive black hole. God is much, much more of a person than you are, and not just one; and He has opinions, He has a say in things, and He will make a judgment on you. Doing “whatever” will end “wherever”. Doing your best to find God by focusing on the best possible idea you have of God, is likely to get God’s attention. But that’s not a magical recipe for invoking God, because, remember: God is a person, and He has opinions, feelings and judgments. He has the final say.