The Second Coming of Christ

The traditional Christian teachings state that Jesus Christ came to the world in order to safe lost mankind.  For the Son of Man came to seek and to save what was lost. (Luke 19:10). The manner of redemption is for Christians to believe that Christ’s sacrifice on the cross was full payment for the disobedience of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.

This is the essence of Christian belief. The esoteric belief characterizes Jesus as a mystic, a yogi teaching in a similar way as described by Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita. The essence of these esoteric teachings is that if we are in touch our own soul through deep meditation and appropriate spiritual discipline, we will eventually find that we are partners with Christ in our access to cosmic consciousness or Oneness with God.

Paramahansa Yogananda shows that Jesus, like a guru in the yoga tradition, is acquainted with the realms the realms to which the soul may travel.

With the publication of The Second Coming of Christ, we no longer have only to rely on the Gospel of Thomas, the introspections of the desert fathers, the neo-Platonism of Plotinus, or the insights of Meister Eckhart. Now we also have access to the Gospel story that finds, in the inner teachings of Jesus, a fully developed vision of the path of meditation and the science of God-realization. To read Yogananda’s commentary is to discover that Jesus was preaching the same doctrine of spiritual self-discovery that Krishna, the apostle of yoga, preached to his disciple Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita.

This is true not only of the passages that point explicitly to inner spirituality, but also of passages that are perplexing. For example, Luke 17:20–21. “And when he was demanded of the Pharisees, when the kingdom of God should come, he answered them and said, ‘the kingdom of God cometh not with observation: Neither shall they say, Lo here! Or, lo there! For, behold, the kingdom of God is within you.’”

For Yogananda this statement is clearly in the tradition of Raja Yoga (meditation as the “royal” or highest path to God-union).

Jesus sees man as the perennial seeker of permanent happiness and freedom from all suffering: “The Kingdom of God, the eternal, immutable, ever-newly blissful cosmic consciousness is within you. Behold your soul as a reflection of the immortal Spirit.

The teachings of Jesus about God’s kingdom, sometimes in direct language, sometimes in parables laced with metaphysical meaning, may be said to be the core of the entirety of his message. It is mentioned 68 times in the King James Version.

Many people think of heaven as a physical location, a point of space far above the atmosphere and beyond the stars. In fact, the kingdom of God and the kingdom of heaven consist, respectively, of the transcendental infinitudes of Cosmic Consciousness and the heavenly causal and astral realms of vibratory creation that are considerably finer and more harmonized with God’s will than those physical vibrations clustered together as planets, air, and earthly surroundings.

The above passages bear no resemblance to conventional biblical definitions. There is no scholarly examination of the wording. There is no attempt to recreate the intellectual climate of Judaea 2,000 years ago.

Here Yogananda is speaking with the voice of the spiritual visionary, the voice of Patanjali, Shankara, and the Old Testament prophets. These are the sages who stand, not on the authority of their learning and intellect, but on their unmediated knowledge of spiritual truth.

Yogananda finds yogic truth in the words, “The kingdom of God is within you,” as he does in all of Jesus’ sayings. Take, for example, John 14:1–2, a passage whose meaning is anything but clear. Jesus says, “Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father’s house are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you.”

Yogananda comments as follows:

When Jesus said, “Let not your heart be troubled,” he voiced an exact parallel to a profound spiritual aphorism in the Yoga Sutras, the preeminent ancient treatise on Raja Yoga. There the illumined sage Patanjali says that yoga, union with God, is possible only by stilling the restlessness of the heart (chitta, the feeling faculty of consciousness).

Thus when Jesus says, “In my Father’s house are many mansions,” he warns his disciples that unless they attain Cosmic Consciousness, after death they would have to dwell on one of the variously graded planes of existence where unredeemed souls go according to their merits and demerits. His promise, “I go to prepare a place for you,” refers to the fact that the blessings of a true guru can help his disciples to gain a better place in the many-mansion vibratory spheres in the after-death state.

Here, Yogananda leaps headlong into the metaphysics, psychology, and space-time concepts of yoga philosophy and claims that throughout the entire Gospel narrative Jesus speaks to his disciples exactly as a guru speaks to his disciples. His immediate task is to clear their spiritual path of the delusional debris that stand in the way of deep meditation.

Yogananda also shows that Jesus, like a guru in the yoga tradition, is acquainted with the realms to which the soul may travel. The traditional geography of hell, purgatory, limbo, and heaven is bypassed. (Traditional Christianity envisions each soul as a pilgrim traveler in this dark and troubled world, headed toward some indeterminate rapture where time and space shall cease to be.)

Yogananda aligns Jesus with the great mystics of India, finding in his words a full vision of the yogi’s emancipation in spirit. In this view, the soul of man moves from life to life through many layers of spiritual space until the dross of the ages, cleansed by meditation, gives way to the unitive immersion of the individual self in Universal Spirit.