Long have I considered this question. When I was growing up, my father introduced me to Joseph Campbell, who in my reading promoted the sameness of all spiritual traditions teaching a comprehensive truth through different symbols. When I spent years as a fundamental Vajrayana Buddhist, I developed a great deal of disrespect for this view, based upon what I saw as the cultural projection of Joseph Campbell and his Heroes Journey onto the vast rich tradition of Vajrayana Buddhism. I can assure you, he really did not know what the symbols meant in their own tradition, but was commenting upon them based on his own belief system. That being the case, it was a logical assumption that he was misinterpreting all other oriental spiritual traditions.
One result of leaving the confines of the Buddhist retreat center which I was holed up in for 12 years, I had to grapple with the question of other spiritual traditions and their hierarchies having value and meaning or not.
Humanity has a plethora of spiritual hierarchies throughout history. Angels, Daemons, tribal mediums, ascended masters, beings of folklore, Wisdom beings of Abrahamic, Vedic, Daoist, First Peoples, or Buddhist origin. All of which are claimed by their adherents to be archons of spiritual elevation above and beyond the human realm and experience.
It must be one of two possibilities when considering these beings. Either they are all different and unique expressions of the human cultures and societies that they grew out of, or they are all the same hierarchy of being moving towards the One, but under different cultures have different names.
Each spiritual tradition will claim they are unique in teaching the pure truth, but it is impossible to consider they are all separately true, for that would imply that the mind that is the common experience of all beings lives in separate truths from all other minds. This would imply that there is no common set of spiritual experiences.
Yet if we are to assume instead that the minds that are our common basis of experience all come from a single universal wholeness, and instead we differentiate it based on cultural experience, then we must assume that all beings share the same truths of being. This would mean then that all spiritual hierarchies are the same, they just appear differently, are named differently, and are experienced differently by varying cultures and minds.
This is summed up nicely in the Mahayana Buddhist expression that Bodhisattvas will appear in whatever forms are necessary to benefit beings.
The resulting conclusion I am currently contemplating is that to consider any spiritual path that brings one to an experience of virtue and wholeness superior to another, is to conclude that there is better or worse in the continuum of being, the All Noble Body of infinite perfection. By definition this is not possible. So, it is all good.
On the other hand, as the perfect phenomena of spirituality comes into contact with matter and confused minds, it can become contaminated with self clinging mental poisons. The result of this is distorted spiritual traditions arise and loose connection to the pure hierarchies of being, becoming causes of confusion.
