World Savior
Jesus is a world savior who incarnated on earth for the spiritual benefit of all life forms. He is a source of grace and a means of drawing closer to the divine.
The Christian Religion
At its core Christianity is bhakti yoga, a religion based on devotion and surrender to Jesus. Through Christianity we recognize the divinity of Jesus, and he becomes a source of grace in our lives. He is a role model that we try to emulate in our thoughts and deeds. Such is the beauty of Christianity.
Christianity is a man-made religion put in place in the decades and centuries after the death of Jesus. And like all religions, Christianity has limitations.
For the most part, the people who turned the life story and teachings of Jesus into a world-wide religion were not spiritually advanced. They interpreted reality through the ego-controlled mind and were often unable to discern the difference between their beliefs and the deeper truth.
Beliefs are thoughts that exist only in the mind. They are a subjective view of reality as seen through the filter of the ego.
The deeper truth is the infinite, formless unity that sustains creation. It is incomprehensible and can only be experienced beyond the limitations of the thinking mind.
At best spiritual beliefs can point you to the truth and allow you to experience it directly. And at worst beliefs keep you trapped within the confines of the mind.
When the Church hierarchy tried to understand the life and teachings of Jesus, they were impeded by the ego and their inability to align with the deeper reality. They perceived only duality and not the oneness of the infinite. And their subjective understanding of Jesus and his teachings became a commonly accepted Christian belief system that is still taught today.
We live in a world of light and dark, good and bad. The Adversary is always present to impede our personal happiness and spiritual progress. The truth is often obscured so that we remain trapped in the illusion of separateness. The teachings of saints like Jesus, who have incarnated on earth to help us progress spiritually, are misinterpreted. We focus on external rituals and beliefs, instead of the simple techniques that allow us to align with the deeper reality.
For many people the religious institution of Christianity has become synonymous with Jesus and his teachings. Yet they are not the same, and recognizing the difference between them will enable you to make greater spiritual progress.
I recommend that you do some research into the history of the Christian religion. There are documentaries that describe the life of Jesus, the early Christian movement, the canonization of the Holy Bible, and the history of the Roman Catholic Church.
As Christians we should not be afraid to understand all the aspects of our religion. How was it formed? Does it accurately describe the teachings of Jesus? Is it helping you to go beyond the limitations of thought and experience the divine directly, or does it keep us trapped in the thinking mind?
There is profound wisdom in the Bible. Yet we should always remember that none of the words it contains were written by Jesus. And the four gospels are not the entirety of his teachings.
Each person’s spiritual path is their own. You may be well served to attend church on a regular basis. Many people gain strength from the fellowship of other Christians. At the same time, recognize the limitations of institutionalized religion and the group thinking that it fosters.
Even with all the obstacles that have been put in place, Jesus and his teachings have helped billions of people draw closer to the divine. Imagine what could be done if we learned how to connect with Jesus and keep him in our hearts always. This is the path of a bhakti yogi.
Connecting with Jesus Now
Anyone who has opened his heart to Jesus knows that he is real. At some level you can intuitively discern his enlightened presence; you can feel him. This intuitive feeling is what I call faith. It is something you can experience instead of belief, which exists only as thoughts in the mind.
Many Christians are accustomed to interacting with Jesus through the thinking mind. So for them belief and faith are one in the same.
If you are a Christian, try to distinguish between your ideas about Jesus and your faith in him. Go within and search for the intuitive feeling that you have about Jesus. By consistently focusing on this feeling, you can learn how to escape the limitations of the thinking mind and create a deeper internal connection with Jesus. Then you have found a true spiritual path that will bring more grace into your life and eventually free you from the illusion of separateness.
A Faith Based on Direct Experience
I am a Christian. I was baptized in a Catholic church and then attended a Baptist Church growing up. My relationship with Jesus is an important part of my spiritual path.
In my mid-twenties, I went through a period in which my faith was tested. I had just finished six long years in college earning two undergraduate degrees and a master’s degree in business. After all that work, I ended up in an unsatisfying job. I was confined to a cubicle, under fluorescent lighting, crunching numbers all day for a large corporation.
In addition, I had contracted a bizarre illness that caused me to be tired all the time. Western medicine had no cure for it, so they called it chronic fatigue syndrome. When I first became ill, I was so tired that I would wake up in the morning wondering, “Is this the day I’m going to die?”
The soul-crushing job and the illness caused me to reevaluate everything about my life. I had bought into the commonly held idea within our society that making money would lead to happiness. But that day had not arrived. As I looked around at the other people who worked at my company, almost all of them were unhappy too. Something was very wrong here.
What other ideas had I accepted as true that were actually wrong? Perhaps God did not exist either. After all, I had not seen this being called God; I had only been told about him. Why would God allow me to be so sick?
Back then, my faith was little more than the beliefs I had been taught in church growing up. Jesus felt distant and inaccessible.
Many Christians have their faith tested. Their relationship with Jesus is based mostly on ideas instead of direct experience. And something can come along in their life that causes them to question their ideas about Jesus.
It was only after I read The Second Coming of Christ by Paramahansa Yogananda that Jesus became real to me. Yogananda was born in India where his enlightened teacher, Sri Yukteswar, taught him about the teachings of Jesus. Because Yogananda is Indian, he was not indoctrinated into the same Christian belief system that is commonly accepted by many people in the West.
Yogananda’s explanation of Jesus, his life, and his teachings removed the religious dogma and misunderstandings that had impeded my relationship with the divine. Jesus became much more than an idea about someone I would meet in the afterlife. I can connect with him right now, in this moment. His love flows to me, and I am uplifted.
