The Unknown Years of Jesus' Life--Sojourn in India - Part 5

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The Unknown Years of Jesus' Life--Sojourn in India - Part 5

 

(p.89) Christ has been much misinterpreted by the world. Even the most

elementary principles of his teachings have been desecrated, and their esoteric

depths have been forgotten. (p.90) They have been crucified at the hands of

dogma, prejudice, and cramped understanding. Genocidal wars have been fought,

people have been burned as witches and heretics, on the presumed authority of

man-made doctrines of Christianity. How to salvage the immortal teachings from

the hands of ignorance? We must know Jesus as an Oriental Christ, a supreme yogi

who manifested full mastery of the universal science of God-union, and thus

could speak and act as a savior with the voice and authority of God. He has been

Westernized too much. [1]

 

Jesus was an Oriental, by birth and blood and training. To separate a teacher

from the background of his nationality is to blur the understanding through

which he is perceived. (p.91) No matter what Jesus the Christ was himself, as

regards his own soul, being born and maturing in the Orient, he had to use the

medium of Oriental civilization, customs, mannerisms, language, parables, in

spreading his message. Hence to understand Jesus Christ and his teachings one

must be sympathetically open to the Oriental point of view--in particular,

India's ancient and present civilization, religious scriptures, traditions,

philosophies, spiritual beliefs, and intuitive metaphysical experiences. Though,

esoterically understood, the teachings of Jesus are universal, they are

saturated with the essence of Oriental culture--rooted in Oriental influences

which have been made adaptable to the Western environment.

 

The Gospels can be rightly understood in the light of the teachings of

India--not the caste-ridden, stone-worshiping, distorted interpretations of

Hinduism, but the philosophical, soul-saving wisdom of her 'rishis': the kernel

not the husk of the Vedas, Upanishads, and Bhagavad Gita. This essence of

Truth--the 'Sanatana Dharma', or eternal principles of righteousness that uphold

man and the universe--was given to the world thousands of years before the

Christian era, and preserved in India with a spiritual vitality that has made

the quest for God the be-all and end-all of life and not an armchair diversion.

 

In spite of the meaningless superstitions and pitiful provincialism in religious

thinking that have crusted on both Hinduism and Christianity down the ages, each

of them has done immeasurable good to mankind--each has brought peace,

happiness, consolation to millions of suffering souls; each has inspired people

to highest spiritual endeavor and granted salvation to many.

 

Oriental and Occidental Christianity:

the inner and outer teachings

 

My endeavor is to restore a proper view of Christianity as an aggregate of the

teachings of Jesus--separating them without any prejudice or partiality from

Western adaptations of dogma and sectarian creeds that can more accurately be

called churchianity, with its sundry defects as well as merits. In order to

understand Christ-ianity--that is, the pure teachings of Jesus--one must first

take away its Western crust, and then its Oriental crust. Behind the two opaque

coverings lies the universality of true Christianity.

 

Occidental Christianity is the outer crust, and Oriental Christianity is the

inner crust. The Oriental Christ always emphasized: " Take no heed for the body,

what ye shall eat, what ye shall wear. Bread, the men of the world seek after;

seek ye the kingdom of God, and all these things will be added unto you. " (P.92)

The proposition of the Occidental Christian is instead: " Take heed of the body

first, that in a healthy body temple ye may find God. Bread, ye men of the

world, seek first--and afterwards, seek the kingdom of God. "

 

In the warm Oriental climate, in a bygone age, " bread, " clothing, and shelter

were simpler and attainable without much effort; thus there was more freedom to

meditate on God in leisure and solitude. In the Occident, however, with its

artificially high standard of living, one has to think and work for these

material necessities, hard and fast and successfully, or he will have no time at

all, or strength, to seek the kingdom of God.

 

The universal teachings of Jesus Christ should be judiciously adapted according

to the respective needs of the Oriental and Occidental--emphasizing the

principles of Christian religion, and omitting the nonessential forms added to

them from time to time. Great care should be taken, however, to embody the

essential, living Christianity while it is being transplanted from Oriental

atmosphere to Occidental environment. Otherwise, it would happen that, as some

doctors say, " the operation was successful, " but the patient peacefully died on

the table! No difference should be made between Occidental religious methods of

salvation and the Oriental technique of salvation. The only distinction to be

made is between true Christ-principles and dogma-bound beliefs.

 

Oriental Christ-ianity would consider the exoteric practices of churchgoing,

sermonizing, theological study of scriptures, as spiritual kindergarten work.

The purpose of these would be to emphasize and support the necessity of

" university-level " testing of religious beliefs in the laboratory of scientific

esoteric meditation, under the direction of a Self-realized guide who through

deep spiritual effort has found God in the light of his own intuitive

soul-perception. While Western Christianity has saved its civilization from a

plenary slide into atheism and immorality, it has accomplished relatively little

to awaken the desire, and the faith that it is possible, to attain personal

metaphysical experience of God, evolved out of the self-effort of scientific

meditation.

 

The community religious services of the West are marvelous if they turn the mind

to God and truth, but they are not enough if they lack meditation and knowledge

of the methods of actual communion with God. On the other hand, the East

emphasizes direct, personal realization of God, but is wanting in organization

and philanthropic social welfare work. (p.93) In order to understand Jesus

Christ's doctrine, it is necessary to combine organizational efficiency and

social welfare philanthropy with personal verification of Christ's teachings by

metaphysical study and the actual contact of God in the temple of meditation.

Then each one can, himself, realize what Jesus Christ was, and is, through the

intuitive self-verification of his teachings.

 

The Second Coming of Christ (The Resurrection of the Christ Within

You) Volume 1, Discourse 5, pg. 89-93

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] Through the remarkable discovery of early Christian gnostic texts at Nag

Hammadi, Egypt in 1945, one may glimpse something of what was lost to

conventional Christianity during this process of " Westernization " . Elaine

Pagels, Ph.D., writes in 'The Gnostic Gospels' (New York: Vintage Books, 1981):

" The Nag Hammadi texts, and others like them, which circulated at the beginning

of the Christian era, were denounced as heresy by orthodox Christians in the

middle of the second century....But those who wrote and circulated these texts

did not regard 'themselves' as 'heretics'. Most of the writings use Christian

terminology, unmistakably related to a Jewish heritage. Many claim to offer

traditions about Jesus that are secret, hidden from 'the many' who constitute

what, in the second century, came to be called the 'catholic church'. These

Christians are now called gnostics, from the Greek word 'gnosis', usually

translated as 'knowledge'. For as those who claim to know nothing about ultimate

reality are called agnostic (literally, 'not-knowing'), the person who does

claim to know such things is called gnostic ('knowing'). But 'gnosis' is not

primarily rational knowledge....As the gnostics use the term, we could translate

it as 'insight', for 'gnosis' involves an intuitive process of knowing

oneself....[According to gnostic teachers], to know oneself, at the deepest

level, is simultaneously to know God; this is the secret of 'gnosis'....

 

" The " living Jesus' of these texts speaks of illusion and enlightenment, not of

sin and repentance, like the Jesus of the New Testament. Instead of coming to

save us from sin, he comes as a guide who opens access to spiritual

understanding....

 

" Orthodox Christians believe that Jesus is Lord and Son of God in a unique way:

he remains forever distinct from the rest of humanity whom he came to save. Yet

the gnostic 'Gospel of Thomas' relates that as soon as Thomas recognizes him,

Jesus says to Thomas that they have both received their being from the same

source: 'I am not your master. Because you have drunk, you have become drunk

from the bubbling stream which I have measured out....He who will drink from my

mouth will become as I am: I myself shall become he, and the things that are

hidden will be revealed to him.'

 

" Does not such teaching--the identity of the divine and human, the concern with

illusion and enlightenment, the founder who is presented not as Lord, but as

spiritual guide--sound more Eastern than Western?....Could Hindu or Buddhist

Tradition have influenced gnosticism?....Ideas that we associate with Eastern

religions emerged in the first century through the gnostic movement in the West,

but they were suppressed and condemned by polemicists like Irenaeus. "

('Publisher's Note')