I grew up hearing about three kinds of Jesus. To the Irish and Italian Catholics in my Brooklyn neighborhood he was the only begotten son of God, Savior of all Mankind. Among the Jews there were two versions: the laudable ethical teacher -- a nice Jewish boy who met with a terrible fate -- and the Jesus that never existed, a creature of mythology, like Apollo or Zeus. In my atheistic home, where religion was the opium of the people, Jesus was largely irrelevant, except as a proponent of the Golden Rule and as the founder of a religion that perpetrated horrors in his name.
Then came the 60s, and I was introduced to a different Jesus, by way of India. Like millions of my contemporaries, my hot pursuit of truth and personal fulfillment led me to the spiritual teachings of the East. I read the sacred texts of Hinduism and Buddhism as well as modern interpreters such as Aldous Huxley, Alan Watts and Huston Smith. It was called mysticism, but I found it, ironically, non-mysterious and eminently rational. I tracked down a yoga class -- not easy to do back then, believe it or not -- and learned to meditate. Throughout my explorations, the name of Jesus cropped up surprisingly often, and always with respect. In Paramahansa Yogananda's seminal memoir, Autobiography of a Yogi, the rabbi of Nazareth is treated with such reverence that I thought I must be missing something.
So I bought a New Testament, and it blew my mind. Because my spiritual reference point was more Hindu than Judeo-Christian, the Gospels seemed more like the Upanishads or the Bhagavad Gita than the churchy dogma I expected to find. The main character was a master teacher, a guru who prodded his disciples not just to better behavior but to union with the divine. His term for the Ground of Being was "Father," but it was easy to evoke the language of the Vedic seers and substitute Brahman or Self. When he tells the crowd at the Sermon on the Mount not to pray conspicuously like the hypocrites, but to "go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret," I saw a guru directing his disciples to meditate. This was a Jesus I could live with: exalted in a way that befits a giant of history, but without the grandiose, cosmos-altering triumphalism that relegates non-believers to either irrelevance or damnation.
I soon learned that Hindus in general, and the swamis and yoga masters who came to the West in particular, saw Jesus in much the same way, as a sadguru (true teacher) and a jivamukti (enlightened being) of the highest order. Some afforded him the status of avatar, placing him on the same level as Krishna, Rama, and other divine incarnations. In keeping with their pluralistic tradition, they considered the teachings of Christ, when followed properly, to be a legitimate pathway to the unified consciousness that is yoga's true aim.
In researching my book, American Veda, I discovered that this perspective has been filtering into America's bloodstream ever since Henry David Thoreau equated Jesus with Buddha and called himself a yogi in Walden. It gathered steam as a stately parade of gurus arrived on our shores and exploded after the Beatles' legendary sojourn on the Ganges in 1968. For a great many angry or alienated Christians, seeing Jesus in this way enabled them to reconcile with their religious heritage; many returned to active participation on terms they could live with, although their Christianity was often closer to that of mystics like Meister Eckhart or Thomas Merton than to the mainstream church. Even Christians whose spiritual lives were, for all practical purposes, more Hindu than anything else have been encouraged by their own gurus to remain connected to their Christian roots. This often entailed seeing Jesus as their ishta devata (preferred form of God). That these prodigal sons and daughters found their way back to the Jesus they love by way of a tradition that has been besieged by missionaries for centuries is one of the great ironies of religious history. And, in similar fashion, thousands of Jews who studied Hinduism and Buddhism have come to see Jesus as a mystical rabbi, a passionate religious reformer and a moral leader whose legacy was sadly corrupted.
The image of Jesus as a sage and sadguru may not sit well with clerics for whom Christ can only be the one true messiah and the hinge of human history. They ought to be glad that millions of people like me, who might otherwise view this season as merely a respite from work, or as humbug, will instead celebrate the birthday of a great holy man.
Follow Philip Goldberg on Twitter: www.twitter.com/phil_amveda
Deepa S. Iyer: The Sacred Act of Eating: A Hindu Foodie's Daily Ritual
A man who has succesfully integrated Vedic wisdom into Christianity is Bede Griffiths, a Catholic priest who founded an ashram in South India and whose books teach a very different kind of Christianity -- a Christianity for the future?
"At this moment the Avatar appears. Being the total manifestation of God in human form, He is like a gauge against which man can measure what he is and what he may become. He trues the standard of human values by interpreting them in terms of divinely human life."
Meher Baba
door into the sheepfold, but climbeth up some other way, the
same is a thief and a robber.
But he that entereth in by the door is the shepherd of the
sheep.
To him the porter openeth; and the sheep hear his voice: and
he calleth his own sheep by name, and leadeth them out.
And when he putteth forth his own sheep, he goeth before them,
and the sheep follow him: for they know his voice.
And a stranger will they not follow, but will flee from him:
for they know not the voice of strangers.
This parable spake Jesus unto them: but they understood not
what things they were which he spake unto them.
Then said Jesus unto them again, Verily, verily, I say unto
you, I am the door of the sheep.
All that ever came before me are thieves and robbers: but the
sheep did not hear them.
I am the door: by me if any man enter in, he shall be saved,
and shall go in and out, and find pasture.
The thief cometh not, but for to steal, and to kill, and to
destroy: I am come that they might have life, and that they
might have it more abundantly."
-Yogananda. The second coming of "Christ" (not Jesus) is when a human being attains "self realization," also called Nirvana
In The Second Coming of Christ: The Resurrection of the Christ. Within You, Paramahansa Yogananda
Paul, ROMANS
11
-But if the Spirit of him that raised up Jesus from the dead dwell in you, he that raised up Christ from the dead shall also quicken your mortal bodies by his Spirit that dwelleth in you.
12
¶ Therefore, brethren, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live after the flesh.
13
For if ye live after the flesh, ye shall die: but if ye through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live.
14
For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God.
Wonderful article.
http://www.boloji.com/hinduism/091.htm
If one prefers (as I do) to focus on the Destination those Roads converge upon...then, no.
The roads are seperate...and tend to best suit particular people with particular temperments who are lost in particular ways....to reach that destination.
Each road is valuable, because they offer (those best suited) a paved road by which to reach that Destination. It is valuable to maintain that seperateness, to the degree that it prevents people from constantly hopping from one road to another, mixing-and-matching such that they never reach the Destination.
It is a hinderance to maintain that seperateness, to the degree that (the flipside of the first situation) it keeps people focused on and arguing about qualities of the various routes...and keeps them from seeing the Destination that they all converge upon....
Because, at the end of the day, the Destination is what matters.
Not the Route taken to get there.
I highly recommend Joseph Campbell.
Mythology and the theology are just tools by which we try to organize and make sense of things which (ultimately) cannot be expressed in any words.
The Map is not the Territory.
The Syrian Malabar Nasranis are the descendants of the Jewish diaspora in Kerala [2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10] who were evangelized by St. Thomas in the Malabar Coast in the earliest days of Christianity"
Yeah, but that's nit picking on my part. I think this was the most interesting topic. A great holy Man.
BZ.
Do we know, accepting the present Gospels of the reality of Jesus, "Where was he during his those lost or unknown years"? People operating at spiritual level have a different behaviour from us - the mundanes; it may appear to us as if s/he is a lunatic or mad. But they are or live in a different plane than us and their vision is far beyond our contemplation. That is why, they are reffered to as "Seers" as well. They can see things beyond the "Three Dimensions", of which this "Seen World" is composed of.
So please hold your breath when you read columns like this. These may appear paradoxical to a novice or even worst - blasphemy to others.
I offer my full admiration to a wonderfully spiritual column.
God bless
Dr. O. P. Sudrania
I lIke what Gandhi said, "I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians." ;0)
BZ.
I knew there was a reason why I've always like the Jesuits. :)
Everything sells and so did this writeup. I've been living in India for 28 yrs now, and all of my friends are Hindus. People can anyways always make a living by linking anything and everything to Jesus!