The Atma Jyoti Blog

This is a continuation of our extracts from Yogananda’s The Second Coming of Christ articles that originally appeared in East-West, Inner Culture, and Self-Realization magazines.

“And Jesus being full of the Holy Ghost returned from Jordan, and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness, being forty days tempted of the devil” Luke 4:1-2).

The Metaphysical Satan

Jesus, the man, had become one with the Holy Vibration, or Holy Ghost, and His consciousness was one with all the creation, in which His little body moved. His consciousness was Christ Consciousness. But until the consciousness goes beyond the Christ state and becomes one with the Father, and until the complete union of Holy Spirit, Christ Consciousness, and God Consciousness are perceived as one Spirit, mortal tests born of past delusion remain.

Although Jesus was one with the Holy Spirit, still His old limited human consciousness and its earthly desires, through the law of habit, tried to attract His expanded consciousness to earthly consciousness. This is the psychological explanation of the origin of the tempting, by the firmly established bad mortal habits, of the new Divine habit, in order to keep Him from contacting the Great Comforter.

All satisfaction comes from the Holy Vibration, for it is the sum total of all earthly things looked for. Sense pleasure is evil because it limits the soul, blinds it, and keeps it from seeking the unlimited happiness in the universal sensorium of the Holy Spirit.

The Cosmic Devil of Ignorance and the Conscious Devil, or Evil

The Spirit alone is perfect. Everything else in creation is imperfect. Creation started with the law of duality, with the law of division. The Spirit was perfect. Nothing else was necessary for His perfection. Hence, creation was unnecessary for His evolution. Then why did Spirit create at all? The only answer to that question is that He wanted to consciously enjoy Himself. The Spirit thought: “I am the very nectar of Bliss, but there is no one to enjoy Me, so I will create a cosmic play and divide Myself into many. Then Myself as many selves gradually with many mouths of minds may taste the nectar in My infinite Self.”

This Creative Desire is Imperfect

This cosmic play came out of the Spirit’s desireless desire; that is, this desire for cosmic play was unnecessary to complete the Spirit’s Being, for He was already perfect, but this cosmic desire itself was imperfect, for it was an urge, a desire to do something. Just as poison does not affect the serpent, so this cosmic delusive desire existing in Spirit does not affect Him.

How Imperfection Shared in Creation

This cosmic desire of Spirit was an unnecessary desire, just as sometimes a father may play with his child through a desireless desire which is unnecessary for the father’s development. It was imperfect because it wanted to accomplish something when that accomplishment was not necessary for the completion of the all-perfect Spirit.

This imperfect desire was the original thought vibration which divided the Spirit into many through the law of duality. Besides, the Spirit at first found that He alone, being the only substance existent, could not very well divide Himself into two distinct essentially different objects of Spirit and matter, so the Spirit created the differentiation between Spirit and matter in thought only, just as a piece of stone and a thought of a piece of stone in a dream have no essential difference except in the difference existing in frozen human imagination.

Thus the Spirit had to practice a cosmic deception, a universal mental magic, to perform before the duality of matter and mind and the dualities of finite objects.

The Supreme Cause of the Origin of Satan

This delusive cosmic differentiation in thought is responsible for all imperfections in creation. Then again, according to the law of cause and effect, the small selves which came out of Spirit were especially gifted with the power of free choice and independent action even as Spirit possessed.

This Cosmic Power Was Entrusted to Create Finite Objects

This cosmic delusive will thus inherited the power and free choice of Spirit to act independently of His perfect will. As the one sheet of water of the calm sea is chopped into many miniature pieces of water called waves by the action of a third agent, the wind storm, so the conscious cosmic, delusive, desireless desire of Spirit manifested itself as the independent conscious Magical Measurer, or the Maya (cosmic measurer of delusion) of the Hindu scriptures, and was solely entrusted with the independent power of superficially dividing the Spirit into the perception of perfect finite objects materialized as icebergs of planets and wavelets of stars, floating on the vast sea of Infinity.

Cosmic Delusive Power Creates the Holy Spirit

This cosmic delusive Magical Measurer has ever since manifested Itself as the Holy Spirit, the cosmic sacred vibration, or Nature (in Sanskrit: Prakriti).

The plan of Spirit was that this subjective, conscious, cosmic, delusive force should be endowed with independence in order to cooperate with objectified, conscious, cosmic vibration in objectified, conscious, cosmic energy, and with only reflected Christ Intelligence present in it, to create perfect finite objects.

Original Plan to Dissolve All Back Into Spirit

Perfect flowers, perfect plants, perfect animals, and perfect humans in perfect planets were thus created. These perfect objects, after displaying a flawless dream of perfect form, health, habits, and modes of existence on the stage of time, without disease or painful premature death, or cruel accidents, were to dissolve back into Spirit, just as numerous waves after a separate happy existence without the necessity of being killed or shattered by accidents dissolve back into their one self, the sea, at the end of the storm. That is why in the Christian Bible we find the perfect Adam and Eve communing with God, so easily and simply, under the tree and near the altar. They were only cast away from the paradise of Cosmic Consciousness when they were tempted by the devil of cosmic ignorance.

Pain, Accidents, Death, and Disease Were Not Created By God

According to God’s plan, the flower, plant, animal, and human cells were to live recharged by Cosmic Energy and not to cruelly feed on one another. Then, after a perfect existence, a perfect expression, and pleasant mutual entertainment, without suffering, all created forms were to dissolve back into Him. Just as rainbows come and go, just as forms of flowers, animals, and human bodies can be created by electrical devices in moving pictures for entertainment and switched on or off at will, so all living creatures and all created things were to exist like mutually entertaining motion pictures on the screen of space, and were to disappear in God at the end of their cycle, after the drama of that period was perfectly played.

How This Cosmic Delusive Force Became Rebellious

This conscious cosmic delusive force, receiving independent power from God, found that all things and all living forms after a perfect existence began to dissolve back into the Cosmic Energy. In this way the cosmic delusion force began to think that, inasmuch as the Cosmic Energy manifestations of the Holy Spirit or Holy Vibration were to dissolve back into Spirit, It must Itself cease existing with the disappearance of the Holy Vibration. Just as the storm disappears when waves dissolve into the sea, so with the withdrawal of Holy Vibration the cosmic delusive force would have to lose its separate existence. This thought frightened the cosmic delusive force, the force which aims to keep things in manifestation, and ever since he has rebelled. Before this the cosmic delusive force was considered an archangel of God and was in a friendly manner cooperating with Christ Intelligence and Holy Vibration in creating perfect finite objects. It was at this period that the cosmic delusive force fell from heaven in the form of lightning (Luke 10:18) and began to act in apparent opposition to Christ Intelligence and conscious cosmic Holy Vibration.

Lightning Falling From Heaven

The falling of Satan as lightning from heaven signifies that originally all Cosmic Energy, being vibrated by the Holy Spirit and Christ Intelligence, was flowing Godward, then the creative cosmic delusive force, fearing complete withdrawal of all energy back into God, began to turn the flow of Cosmic Energy away from His heavenly Presence toward finite creation. Just as, when waves want to fall back into the sea, a fresh storm can compel them to retain their forms, so the cosmic delusive force became rebellious and began, through the mundane desire of beings, arising from imperfect living, to slap them back into finite existence through the law of reincarnation.

Cosmic Delusive Force Becomes Satan

Reincarnation–in the sense of coming back again and again in the same kind of form–was started by Satan so that human beings would have to come back again and again to earth until they could lose their imperfect desire to stay on earth and could finally go back to Spirit. Ever since creating the law of reincarnation, the cosmic delusive force has tortured the immortal souls of the children of God by forcibly imprisoning them again and again behind the bars of painful flesh and making them stay away from their kingdom of omnipresence. By creating the law of reincarnation or punishment by law of cause and effect, which law governs human actions (Law of Karma), the archangel of God, the cosmic delusive force, converted himself into the rebellious Satan.

The Enmity Between Satan and Christ Consciousness

Since then this conflict has existed between the God-tuned, universal, Only Begotten Son of Christ Intelligence, the Holy Spirit, and the matter-bent love of finite creation, Satan.

The Cosmic Struggle

Jesus, possessing Christ Consciousness, realized the tug-of-war between the perfect, universally intelligent Holy Vibration and the Satanic pull of imperfection toward finite creation. Ever since his rebellion, Satan has created imperfect patterns, representing evil, disease, pain, and catastrophe, to disturb the desireless, perfect existence of human beings who were destined to return to God after perfectly playing His cosmic drama, inaugurated to entertain His immortal children.

Human beings, disturbed by disease, wanted perfect health, but were cut off by premature death. They wanted to live long, therefore Satan created in them earth-bound desires, and Satan also deluded them into indulging in mental desires which would bring them back again and again under his dominance by the pernicious law of reincarnation. Satan began to create imperfect patterns of plants, infested trees, and diseased human beings in order to foil the perfect patterns of perfect plants, healthy trees, and wholesome human beings instituted by God through Holy Vibration acting in consonance with Christ Intelligence.

It is Childish to Say Evil Does Not Exist

Many modern scriptural interpreters, unable to understand why Christ Himself introduced the idea of the existence of Satan, have tried to explain away the old conception of a devil by saying it is obsolete, that evil does not exist, or that God does not know evil. Such interpreters, unable to solve the problem of how it was possible for evil to originate in God, Who is only good, have gone to the extreme of denying the existence of evil. In the first place, let me say that the denial of the power of evil has some good points, although it is childish to deny the existence and temptations of evil in this world of seeming duality.

Even though the conscious evil force of Satan does exist, it could not influence human minds if we did not mentally accept it. It is better to know all the lures of evil and the ways to combat them than to be blind and deny their existence. Knowledge only, and not indifference, can produce final emancipation. The great drama of cosmic existence has endowed man with free choice and the power of reason. Man, the image of God, has the same liberty of free choice in his sphere as God the Father has.

Visit Amazon to purchase your copy of The Second Coming of Christ: The Resurrection of the Christ Within You (2 Volume Set) for continuous study.

Further Reading:

• Following Christ: A Raja’s Example
• Jesus and the Aquarian Age
• Is the Second Coming of Christ Literal or Symbolic?