Every spiritual tradition has this idea of death and resurrection. Deepak Chop

[Guest guest]

Deepak Chopra on Jesus

By David Van Biema

Thursday, Nov. 13, 2008

Time

 

This week, Deepak Chopra, medical expert, ayurvedic entrepreneur and

New Age savant picks up another title: New Testament author. Chopra's

book, Jesus: A Story of Enlightenment, speculates a story of the

Messiah-to-be during what might be called his early Wanderjahr. And

wander he does. We meet Jesus consulting with a guru on an icy

mountaintop in what seems like Tibet. He gets caught up with armed

Jewish zealots, dallies with the Essenes (who collected the Dead Sea

Scrolls) and eventually achieves a oneness with God. Chopra spoke

with TIME about his novel.

 

Your Jesus story is tremendous fun to read, but where is it in the

Bible?

 

It's not in the Bible. In the Bible, you have Jesus as a child in the

nativity scenes, then at age 12 at the Temple in Jerusalem, and then

you don't see him until he's 30. Where was he for those 18 years?

 

O.K. Where?

 

There's a lot of mythology, some of it involving the East. There was

a German scholar who claimed in the 1940s that Jesus traveled the

Silk Road, lived in India and may have visited a monastery in Lhasa

where there were Buddhist texts. The church of St. Thomas in India's

Kerala state is the only place where Christ is not pictured on a

cross but in a meditative samadhi posture. I also researched that

period in history for Jesus's religious context, political and

cultural contexts, the Jewish sects at the time, the occupation by

Rome. Then I went into incubation, meditation, and I allowed this

story to unfold. It fits into the category of " religious fiction. "

 

Your version of Jesus' " missing years " is heavy on his search for

enlightenment, on both external and internal journeying. Is that an

area in which you felt the Gospels needed supplementing?

 

When I was growing up, I went to an Irish-Christian missionary

school. I was totally fascinated by the New Testament. I must have

read it a few thousand times. One day I was reading the Gospel of

John 10: 30, where Jesus says, " I and God are one. " The crowd

immediately wants to stone him for blasphemy. But he quotes a psalm

that says " You are Gods, sons of the most high, " which he tells them

was addressed to " those to whom the word of God came. " He clearly

sees himself as equivalent to that group.

 

I interpreted this as " those who have knowledge of God are God. " In

Eastern philosophical systems there's an established idea of a path

through personal consciousness to a collective conscience to a

universal conscience, which people call the divine. I concluded that

Jesus must have experienced this consciousness, and that he must have

followed a path. The story is about that evolution.

 

In fact, you write " making [Jesus] the one and only son of God leaves

the rest of humankind stranded. "

 

Because we end up worshipping the messenger instead of the message

and excluding all the theologies that existed before Jesus was born.

 

But it's also the one thing that inspires Christ's most fervent

followers: that Jesus was God's only son, who died for them and so

took away sin. Isn't your premise of an acquired godhood heretical to

orthodox Christians?

 

It may be. Fundamentalist Christians always quote Jesus in the Gospel

of John saying " I am the way. I am the life. Nobody comes into the

kingdom of heaven except through me. " But what does Jesus mean

by " I " ? In his language, Aramaic, the word is translated as " the I

within the I. " So he may be speaking about himself as a universal

spirit. In that case he can't be squeezed into a body or the span of

a lifetime.

 

But God's crucifixion and resurrection as Jesus are all normative in

Christianity.

 

All religions develop, become exclusive, become divisive and

quarrelsome.

 

In your book there is a crucifixion, but only reported secondhand by

Jesus as something like a dream.

 

The symbolic language of the crucifixion is the death of the old

paradigm; resurrection is a leap into a whole new way of thinking.

The language of the Sermon on the Mount — if someone hits you, turn

the other cheek — he's making a creative leap, and that's the death

of an old way of thinking and the birth of a completely new way.

Every spiritual tradition has this idea of death and resurrection.

It's not unique to Christianity.

 

Time Magazine

Deepak Chopra on Jesus