...in the contemporary world of cross-cultural communication, where the minds of men, leaping the local fences, can recognize common fields of experience and realization under alien forms, what many priests and sociologists regard as eight distinct deities, the comparative mythologist and psychologist can take to be aspects of one and the same. The nineteenth-century saint and sage Ramakrishna stressed this psychological—as opposed to ethnological—orientation when he spoke of the ultimate unity of all religions.
"A mother prepares dishes to suit the stomachs of her children," he said. "Suppose she has five children and a fish is brought for the family. She doesn't cook pilau or kalia for all of them. All have not the same power of digestion. She prepares for some a simple stew; but she loves all of her children equally.... Do you know what the truth is?" he asked. And he answered his own question:
God has made different religions to suit different aspirants, times and countries. All doctrines are only so many paths; but a path is by no means God himself. Indeed, one can reach God if one follows any of the paths with wholehearted devotion. You have no doubt heard the story of the chameleon. A man entered the wood and saw a chameleon on a tree. He reported to his friends. "I have seen a red lizard." He was firmly convinced that it was nothing but red. Another person, after visiting the tree said, "I have seen a green lizard." He was firmly convinced that it was nothing but green. But the man who lived under the tree said, "What both of you have said is true. But the fact is that the creature is sometimes red, sometimes green, sometimes yellow, and sometimes has no color at all."
Every student of comparative mythology knows that when the orthodox mind talks and writes of God the nations go asunder; the deśī, the local, historical, ethical aspect of the cult symbol is taken with absolute seriousness and the chameleon is green, not red. Whereas, when the mystics talk, no matter what their deśī, their words in a profound sense meet—and the nations too. The names of Śiva, Allah, Buddha, and Christ lose their historical force and come together as adequate pointers of a way (mārga) that all must go who would transcend their time-bound, earth-bound faculties and limitations.