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.

The Experience of My Preceptor’s Guru

Once Lahiri Mahasaya, my Preceptor’s guru, was teaching the Hindu Bible, or Bhagavad Gita, to a group of his students in Benares, India, and was speaking of the Kutastha Chaitanya, or his Christ Consciousness in all finite vibratory creation, when suddenly he gasped and cried out: “I am drowning in the bodies of many souls off the coast of Japan.” Later the disciples read in the newspapers that a shipload of people were drowning near the coast of Japan at exactly the time when Lahiri Mahasaya felt and saw the shipwreck in his omnipresence.

So it was with Jesus. By extending His consciousness through the different states of consciousness, He had arrived at this second Holy Spirit state.

Why Jesus Was Led by the Spirit to Be Tempted

At this time, after Jesus, the man, became Jesus, the Christ, He had to go through a metaphysical and psychological test before He could reach the third and last state of extending His consciousness to the Spirit of God the Father, the vibrationless region.

The devil, or conscious Cosmic Delusion and psychological temptations, began to tempt the Christ Consciousness of Jesus by reminding His of the limited needs of the body, so that instead of living by His newly-found Cosmic energy He might become mortal again by misusing His divine powers in changing atoms of stone to atoms of bread.

Before Jesus Entered the Third and Final State

Before Jesus attained the third and final state, in which He could behold Himself as the transcendental, vibrationless God, the Father, and the Christ Consciousness in vibratory space, He was led by the ultimate Spirit in the silence of the wilderness to be tested, to see if His Christ Consciousness had risen above all mortal memories of food and other small material temptations of the powers of miracles.

Superman and Miracles

Miracles are held in esteem by earthbound mortals, but they should not be loved or used by a superman to test the attention and love of God to the devotee. To test the love of God by invoking His miracles is to disturb the faith in Him and His all-protecting power. That is why Jesus refused to convert the stones into bread, even though His body was hungry from the delusive human standpoint. Also, that is why He refused to be tempted by Cosmic Satan into jumping from the top of the Jerusalem Temple to show whether the angels would hold Him or not. (“And he [Satan] brought him [Jesus] to Jerusalem, and set him on a pinnacle of the temple, and said unto him, If thou be the Son of God, cast thyself down from hence: For it is written, He shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee: And in their hands they shall bear thee up, lest at any time thou dash thy foot against a stone. And Jesus answering said unto him, It is said, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God. And when the devil had ended all the temptation, he departed from him for a season” Luke 4:9-13.)

The Christ Consciousness of Jesus found an adequate test in the temptations born of the memories of past mortal habits, and in the test of “living by bread alone,” and so forth, which was instigated through the Cosmic delusion of the metaphysical Satan.

Whether one believes in Cosmic Satan or not, it can be easily understood that the Holy Spirit, before giving the final transcendental, Cosmic Consciousness of God the Father, to Jesus, wanted to see if His newly-acquired Christ Consciousness could arise above the temptations born of the memory of mortal habits.

Jesus, in lifting Himself from the Holy Spirit state of feeling all Cosmic vibration and its universal Christ Consciousness, found a matter-ward pull of Cosmic delusion which began to remind Him of confining, limiting, human habits of incarnations.

Jesus successfully stood the test by saying: “I have found the new source of living by God, the Father, as the fountain of all life, and not by physical bread.” In doing this, Jesus teaches mankind one of the greatest methods of actually knowing that the body lives principally by God and secondarily by bread. Jesus said that the body does not live by the little condensed solidified energy of bread alone, but by the word of the unlimited vibrating Cosmic Energy of God.

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.

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