The Role of Satan in God's Creation - Part 2

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The Role of Satan in God's Creation - Part 2

 

A degree of delusion

is accepted even by

God-sent saviors

 

(p.132) The Holy Ghost or Christ state, oneness with the presence of God in

manifested creation, is the commonality of divine beings who incarnate to serve

and uplift delusion-entrapped humanity. As it is none else than the Lord Himself

as individualized souls who is imprisoned in the multitudinous forms in the

created realm fraught with tests and trials, struggle and suffering, so also

saviors sent by God choose to share the challenges and woes of those they have

come to free. To redescend into a new body and mind necessitates taking on a

degree of delusion, even for fully liberated masters. The bliss of intimacy with

the transcendental God the Father, Spirit beyond all workings of delusion, is

embraced by Christs in periods of transcendence in 'samadhi' meditation, but

they return therefrom to the realm of manifestation and its circumscribing

creative principles that make possible the cosmic drama of interacting delimited

forces and forms. The nature of the manifested world is such that a prolonged or

constant state of mergence in Transcendence would be less than feasible--or even

possible--for one whose work for humankind is carried out in their midst.

 

Rare souls sometimes serve the world by remaining primarily in transcendent

meditation, sending forth powerful spiritual vibrations to balance the world's

evils; but these souls seclude themselves in remote haunts and seldom or never

appear before ordinary men. I have written of one such avatar, Mahavatar Babaji,

in 'Autobiography of a Yogi': Nature herself stands in powerless awe before him.

Stumbling man needs not only the silent blessings issuing from these exalted

spiritual benefactors, but also familiar examples who live as mortal beings to

bolster courage, faith, and desire for God, and to demonstrate the way to

redemption. Enter thus the divine ones who choose for their service the milieu

of human fracas.

 

There is an exalted state of inner transcendence in oneness with the Absolute

which in Yoga is defined as 'nirvikalpa samadhi': the soul remains in conscious

realization of its oneness with transcendent God even while the physical and

mental instrumentalities of the body engage in normal expression and exacting

activities. This is the goal of advancement, seen only in supernal beings. It

can be experienced for short intervals, or by the highly advanced for months at

a time, or for even a few years by those who attain what Yoga describes as

'Brahmasthiti', the state of being permanently established in God-union. (p.133)

To remain in the world of illusion while experiencing the indescribable bliss of

the Sole Unmanifested Reality makes one's hold on the body tenuous indeed; it

becomes eventually a difficult proposition just to sustain the atomic

cohesiveness of the specious material form and to prevent the soul-individuality

from dissolving into Spirit. So even in the highest states of divine oneness,

the outer nature of the God-united retains some degree of the individualized

consciousness of egoity and delusion, just to keep body and soul together.

 

Jesus the man become Jesus the Christ, enacting his special role in God's drama,

prepared himself for his culminating three years of ministry, when he would have

to face the strongest of foes, delusive evil and ignorance. To bear his

mission's foreordained burden, his physical and mental faculties needed to be

forged and strengthened in the fires of testing and temptation, securing his

outer consciousness in the God-union of his immutable inner realization. He had

to conquer the metaphysical and psychological tests of Satan before he could

relinquish all delusion in the third and last state of transcendence in

Spirit--the complete union of body, Holy Ghost, Christ Consciousness, and God

the Father perceived as one in Spirit. He knew that so long as he was incarnate

in 'maya's' domain, mortal tests born of delusion remain.

 

Although Jesus was already liberated in Spirit in his incarnation as Elisha, his

newly incarnated body and mind as Jesus bore somewhat of the pattern of past

existences. Though no longer binding, the memory and intimations of his prior

limited human consciousness and its earthly desires, through the law of habit

that attaches the soul to mortal existence, tried to attract his expanded

consciousness to earthly consciousness. This is the psychological explanation of

the tempting of Jesus' habit of divine consciousness by his past-life

established mortal habits in order to lure him from the Great Comforter--the

Holy Ghost Vibration from which comes all satisfaction, being the sum total of

all earthly things looked for.

 

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

You) Volume 1, Discourse 7, pg. 132-133

Paramahansa Yogananda

Printed in the United States of America 1434-J881

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

ISBN-10:0-87612-557-7