The Mystical Christ and Christ Consciousness

When we delve into the background of Jesus’ teachings, it becomes clear that the Gospels contain a universal esoteric message that has been awaiting full and systematic explication since the apostolic age.

The mystic Christ is not a personality, but a Divine essence. It is a spiritual emanation from the God. It is the Son of God. In its creative aspect, that power which animates all manifestation of life. It is the great stream of life, giving creative essence, which manifests all things, on all planes, as the animating principle of the one life.

Prayer

Oh Christ, lay down within my heart the loving flame of love and wisdom that I may dwell forever in thy radiance and rest in thy light.

Christ and Jesus

The first and cosmic incarnation of the Eternal Christ, the perfect co-inherence of matter and Spirit see (Ephesians 1:3-11), happened at the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago. Christians believe that Jesus of Nazareth was the human incarnation of that same Mystery a mere 2,000 years ago, when we were perhaps ready for this revelation.

Christ is not Jesus’ last name, but the title of his historical and cosmic purpose. Jesus presents himself as the “Anointed” or Christened One who was human and divine united in one human body, as our model and example. Peter seems to get this, at least once (Matthew 16:16), but like most of the church, he also seems to regress. Christ is our shortcut word for “The Body of God” or “God materialized.” This Christ is much bigger and older than either Jesus of Nazareth or the Christian religion, because the Christ is whenever the material and the divine co-exist, which is always and everywhere.

Teilhard de Chardin,

I think we are all sad to admit that organized Christianity has often resisted and opposed the true coming of the Cosmic Christ. The coming of the Cosmic Christ is not the same as the growth of the Christian religion. It is the unification of all things.

Paramahansa Yogananda speaks of Christ consciousness. The “Only Begotten Son”, that was born as the vast omniscient Intelligence of God in every part and particle of creation. This Consciousness is the “only begotten Son of God,” so designated because it is the sole perfect reflection in creation of the Transcendental Absolute, Spirit or God the Father.

It was of that Infinite Consciousness, filled with the love and bliss of God, that Saint John spoke when he said: “As many as received him (the Christ Consciousness), to them gave he power to become the sons of God.”

Rediscovering the Heart of Jesus’ Message

The lack of individual prayer and communion with God has divorced modern Christians from Jesus’ teaching of the real perception of God, as is true also of all religious paths inaugurated by God-sent prophets whose followers drift into byways of dogma and ritual rather than actual God-communion.

Those paths that have no esoteric soul-lifting training busy themselves with dogma and building walls to exclude people with different ideas. Divine persons who really perceive God include everybody within the path of their love, not in the concept of an eclectic congregation, but in respectful divine friendship toward all true lovers of God and the saints of all religions.

The Kingdom of God within You

There is a beautiful accord between the teachings of Jesus Christ to enter the “kingdom of God within you” and the teachings of Yoga set forth by Lord Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita to restore the Soul, the reflection of God in man, to its rightful place of the bodily kingdom, with full realization of the soul’s godly states of consciousness.

When man is settled in that inner kingdom of divine consciousness, then the awakened intuitive perception of the soul pierces the veils of matter, life energy, and consciousness and uncovers the God-essence in the heart (essence) of all things.

Raja Yoga, the royal way of God-union, is the science of actual realization of the kingdom of God that lies within oneself.

The coming of yoga to the West in the 20^th century

It seems likely that the division between Christian teaching and India’s ancient spiritual science will finally be bridged. Paramahansa Yogananda’s new book, The Second Coming of Christ, holds out this promise, arguing that the division has always been superficial. The implications for yoga practitioners in the West and for society at large are enormous.

The traditional Christian teachings hold that Jesus Christ came to the world in order to reconcile the fallen children of the Lord to their creator. The means of redemption was for Christians to believe from the depths of their soul that Christ’s sacrifice on the cross was full payment for the arrogance and disobedience of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.

This is the mainstream of Christian belief. Less visible but no less ancient is a body of esoteric belief, that depicts Jesus as a mystic, as a yogi teaching in the manner of Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita. The essence of these esoteric teachings is that if we explore our own soul in the depths of meditation, we will find that we are partners with Christ in our access to cosmic consciousness.                                    

With the publication of The Second Coming of Christ, the argument for mystical Christianity no longer needs to be drawn from isolated fragments of the past 2,000 years, the Gospel of Thomas, the pondering of the desert fathers, the neo-Platonism of Plotinus, or the insights of Meister Eckhart.

Now we have a 1,700-page commentary on the Gospel story that finds, in the words 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 oblique or puzzling. To start with a passage that is an obvious summons to meditation, let us consider 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). He writes in The Second Coming of Christ:

Jesus addresses man as the perennial seeker of permanent happiness and freedom from all suffering: “The Kingdom of God, of eternal, immutable, ever-newly blissful cosmic consciousness is within you. Behold your soul as a reflection of the immortal Spirit, and you will find your Self encompassing the infinite empire of God-love, God-wisdom, and God-bliss existing in every particle of vibratory creation and in the vibration- less Transcendental Absolute.”

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.

Many people think of heaven as a physical location, a point of space far above the 

atmosphere and beyond the stars. From the esoteric perspective, the kingdom of God and the kingdom of heaven consist, respectively, of the transcendental infinite Cosmic Consciousness and the heavenly causal and astral realms of vibratory creation. These realms 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 exegesis. 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 their unmediated knowledge of spiritual truth.

We saw, that 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. 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).

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 and or of a true Master can help his disciples to gain a better place in the many-mansions of vibratory spheres in the after-death state.

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 devotees. His immediate task is to clear their spiritual path of the delusional debris that stand in the way of deep meditation i.e. God communion.

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

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 impurity is cleansed by meditation and gives way to the unitive immersion of the individual self in universal spirit.

It is hoped, that the esoteric or inner explanation of the gospel teachings will lend life and greater understanding about these writings and perhaps even lead to a renewed interest in what the scriptures are actually telling us.