Divine Incarnations: God's Emissaries - Discourse 1, Part 1

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Dear All,

 

In Discourse 1 - Divine Incarnations: God's Emissaries, here is a list of the

subject matter that is covered:

 

(p.1)

 

The Mission of Divine Love That Jesus Came to Fulfill

 

The Nature of an Avatar's Consciousness

 

The One Spirit: Source of All Creation

 

The Meaning of the Holy Trinity

 

The Cosmic Word or Holy Ghost:

Intelligent Creative Vibration of Aum

 

" Only Begotten Son " Refers Not to Jesus' Body,

but to His Christ Consciousness

 

How the Darkness of Delusion Blinds Man

to the Light of God's Presence in Creation

 

All Souls are Children of God, Made in His Image

 

----------------

 

" 'The opening verses of Saint John's Gospel may rightly be called Genesis

According to Saint John....[They] should be considered first when the true

meaning of the life and teachings of Jesus is being sought'. "

 

 

Just before Discourse 1, Paramahansa Yogananda included this beautiful poem,

which he wrote, to Christ:

 

 

(pg.2)

 

Come to Me, O Christ, as the Good Shepherd

 

O Christ, beloved Son of God! thou didst embark on a storm-tossed sea of

prejudiced minds. Their cruel thought waves lashed thy tender heart.

 

Thy trial on the Cross was an immortal victory of humility over force, of

soul over flesh. May thine ineffable example hearten us to bear bravely our

lesser crosses.

 

O Great Lover of Error-Torn Humanity! In myriad hearts an unseen monument has

arisen to the mightiest miracle of love--thy words: " Forgive them, for they know

not what they do. "

 

Mayest thou remove from our eyes the cataracts of ignorance, that we see the

beauty of thy message: " Love even thine enemies as thyself. Sick in mind or

asleep in delusion, they are still thy brothers. "

 

O Cosmic Christ, may we, too, conquer the Satan of dividing selfishness that

prevents the gathering in sweet accord of all men in the one fold of Spirit.

 

As thou art Perfection, yet wert crucified, teach us not to resent the

inevitable tests of life: the daily challenge to our fortitude by adversities,

our self-control by temptation, and our goodwill by misunderstanding.

 

Purified by contemplation on thee, innumerable devotees perfume their lives

with emanations from thy flower soul. O Good Shepherd! thou leadest thy

countless flock to the evergreen Pastures of Peace.

 

Our deepest aspiration is to see the Heavenly Father with open eyes of

wisdom, as thou dost; and to know like thee that we are verily His sons. Amen.*

 

* From Paramahansa Yogananda's 'Whispers from Eternity' (published by

Self-Realization Fellowship).

 

The Second Coming of Christ (The Resurrection of the Christ Within You) Volume

I, Discourse 1, pg. 1-2

Paramahansa Yogananda

Printed in the United States of America 1434-J881

ISBN-13:978-0-87612-557-1

ISBN-10:0-87612-557-7

 

Here now, is Discourse 1, Part 1.

 

Enjoy,

 

violet

 

 

 

 

Divine Incarnations: God's Emissaries - Discourse 1, Part 1

 

 

" 'Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do'. "

 

(p.3) With these words, Jesus placed his signature on a unique life that

enthroned him everlastingly on the altar of worshipful hearts as the incarnation

of God's loving compassion. The Good Shepherd of souls opened his arms to all,

rejecting none, and with universal love coaxed the world to follow him on the

path to liberation through the example of his spirit of sacrifice, renunciation,

forgiveness, love for friend and enemy alike, and supreme love for God above all

else. As the tiny babe in the manager at Bethlehem, and as the savior who healed

the sick and raised the dead and applied the salve of love on the wounds of

errors, the Christ in Jesus lived among men as one of them that they too might

learn to live like gods.

 

For mere mortals to cope with a life of unsolved and unsolvable mysteries in

an inscrutable universe created by the omnipotence of God, of the omniscient

essence of His omnipresence, would indeed be an overwhelming challenge were it

not for divine emissaries who come on earth to speak with the voice and

authority of God for the guidance of man.

 

Aeons past, in ancient higher ages in India, 'rishis' enunciated the

manifestation of Divine Beneficence, of " God with us, " in terms of divine

incarnations, avatars--God incarnate on earth in enlightened beings. The

eternal, omnipresent, unchanging Spirit has neither a corporeal nor heavenly

form called God. (p.4) Nor as the Lord God Creator does He fashion a form in

which He then deigns to dwell among His creatures. Rather, He makes Himself

known through the divinity in worthy instruments. Many are the voices that have

intermediated between God and man, 'khanda avatars', or partial incarnations in

God-knowing souls. Less common are the 'purna avatars', liberated beings who are

fully one with God; their return to earth is to fulfill a God-ordained mission.

The Lord in the sacred Hindu Bible, the Bhagavad Gita, declares: " Whenever

virtue declines and vice predominates, I incarnate as an Avatar. In visible form

I appear from age to age to protect the virtuous and to destroy evildoing in

order to reestablish righteousness " (IV:7-8). The same one glorious infinite

consciousness of God, the Universal Christ Consciousness, 'Kutastha Chaitanya',

becomes familiarly apparelled in the individuality of an enlightened soul,

graced with a distinguishing personality and godly nature appropriate to the

times and purpose of the incarnation.

 

Without this intercession of God's love come to earth in the example,

message, and guiding hand of His avatars, it would scarce be possible for

groping humanity to find the path into God's kingdom midst the dark miasma of

world delusion, the cosmic substance of human habitation. Lest His benighted

children be lost forever in creation's delusive labyrinths, the Lord comes again

and again in God-illumined prophets to light the way. The glory of Christ in the

form of Jesus made visible the Invisible Light that leads to God.

 

---------------------

 

The mission of divine

love that Jesus came

to fulfill

 

Because the periodic recurrence of divine incarnations is a part of God's

creative enterprise, signs of such a birth are imprinted in the Grand Master

Plan. Sages, through their awakened soul intuition, can read the heavenly

inscriptions; and if it be in accord with God's will that such a future event be

made known, they prophesy in plain or veiled revelations. This is one of the

many ways in which God assures His children of His awareness of their need for

His presence amongst them. Of the future coming of Lord Jesus, several

references in the Old Testament are cited by devout Christians and Biblical

scholars. From the book of prophet Isaiah:

 

" 'The Lord Himself shall give you a sign; Behold, a virgin shall conceive,

and bear a son, and shall call his name Emmanuel'. " (7:14). [1]

 

(p.5) 'My servant shall deal prudently, he shall be exalted and extolled, and

be very high....So shall he sprinkle many nations (52:13, 15).

All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way;

and the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all....He was taken from prison

and from judgment...he was cut off out of the land of the living: for the

transgression of My people was he stricken....He bare the sin of many, and made

intercession for the transgressors (53:6,8,12).

 

Divine intercession to mitigate the cosmic law of cause and effect, by which

a man suffers from his errors, was at the heart of the mission of love Jesus

came to fulfill. Moses brought the law from God to man, emphasizing the awful

justice that befalls willful heedlessness. Jesus came to demonstrate the

forgiveness and compassion of God, whose love is a shelter even from exacting

law. Similarly, Jesus was preceded by Gautama Buddha, the " Enlightened One, "

whose incarnation reminded a forgetful generation of the Dharma Chakra, the

ever-rotating wheel of karma--self-initiated action and its effects which make

each man, and not a Cosmic Dictator, responsible for his own present condition.

Buddha brought heart back into the arid theology and mechanical rituals into

which the ancient Vedic religion of India had fallen after the passing of a

higher age in which Bhagavan Krishna, India's most beloved of avatars, preached

the way of divine love and God-realization through the practice of the supreme

spiritual science of yoga, union with God.

 

" Greater love hath no man that this, that a man lay down his life for his

friends. " [2] Such was the exceptional mission shouldered by Jesus. Intercession

by intimates of God is the palliative elixir that gives a weakened mortal the

necessary strength to rise and conquer the forces of cosmic law he has roused

against himself by disobedient behavior. The interceder stands with the devotee,

offering him defense in the form of impermeable wisdom, and sometimes deflecting

onto himself a portion of a devastating onslaught.

 

Jesus came in a darkened age that was little able to appreciate him; but his

message of the love of God and his intercession on behalf of suffering humanity

was not only for that time but for all ages to come--that God is with man in his

darkest moments as well as in enlightened times. (p.6) He reminded a world

fearful of their Creator as a God of wrathful judgment that, though " God is a

Spirit: and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth, " [3]

the Absolute is also a personal God who can be appealed to in prayer and who

responds as a loving Heavenly Father.

 

The nature of an avatar's

consciousness

 

To understand the magnitude of a divine incarnation, it is necessary to

understand the source and nature of the consciousness that is incarnate in the

avatar. Jesus spoke of this consciousness when he proclaimed: " I and my Father

are one " (John 10:30) and " I am in the Father, and the Father in me " (John

14:11). Those who unite their consciousness to God know both the transcendent

and the immanent nature of Spirit--the singularity of the ever-existing,

ever-conscious, ever-anew Bliss of the Uncreate Absolute, and the myriad

manifestations of His Being as the infinitude of forms into which He variegates

Himself in the panorama of creation.

 

The scientific evolution of cosmic creation from the Creator-Lord is

outlined, in arcane [secret/mysterious] terminology, in the Old Testament book

of Genesis. In the New Testament, the opening verses of Saint John's Gospel may

rightly be called Genesis According to Saint John. Both these profound Biblical

accounts, when clearly grasped by intuitive perception, correspond exactly to

the spiritual cosmology set forth in the scriptures of India handed down by her

Golden Age God-knowing 'rishis'.

 

Saint John was perhaps the greatest of the disciples of Jesus. Just as a

schoolteacher finds among his pupils one whose superior comprehension ranks him

first in the class, and others who must be ranked lower, so among the disciples

of Jesus there were differing degrees of ability to appreciate and absorb the

depth and breadth of the teachings of the Christ-man. The records left by Saint

John, among the various books of the New Testament, evince the highest degree of

divine realization, making known the deep esoteric truths experienced by Jesus

and transferred to John. Not only in his gospel, but in his epistles and

especially in the profound metaphysical experiences symbolically described in

the Book of Revelation, John presents the truths taught by Jesus from the point

of view of inward intuitive realization. In John's words we find precision; that

is why his gospel, though last among the four in the New Testament, should be

considered first when the true meaning of the life and teachings of Jesus is

being sought.

 

The Second Coming of Christ (The Resurrection of the Christ Within You) Volume

I, Discourse 1, pg. 3-6

Paramahansa Yogananda

Printed in the United States of America 1434-J881

ISBN-13:978-0-87612-557-1

ISBN-10:0-87612-557-7

 

Notes:

 

[1] " Which being interpreted i, 'God with us' " (Matthew 1:23).

 

[2] John 15:13 (See Discourse 71).

 

[3] John 4:24 (see Discourse 18).