Entries Tagged as 'Yogananda'
October 8th, 2011
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.
Emancipation from reincarnation is possible by playing the living drama of a perfect life of health, abundance, and wisdom on the screen of consciousness; that is, if one can remove the consciousness of sickness and not fear sickness if it does come, and not desire health while suffering from ill health, then one can remember one’s soul, which was always well and was neither sick nor healthy.
If we can feel and know that we are the children of God, and as such possess everything, even as our Father, God, does, although we may be poor or rich, we can be free. If we can feel that we have Divine knowledge, because we are made in the image of God, although humanly speaking we know little–then we can be free from reincarnation.
Fear of sickness and a desire for mortal health, fear of poverty and a desire for opulence, a feeling of lack of knowledge as well as a desire to know everything, belong to the domain of ignorance. Of course, if we are stricken with ill health, failure, or ignorance, we need not continue to remain so. We should strive for health, prosperity, and wisdom without being afraid of failure.
Know That Imperfections Are Dream-Born Delusions
While struggling, man must know that his struggle for health, prosperity, and wisdom is born of delusion, for he already has all he needs within his inner powerful self. It is only because he erroneously imagined, when in spiritually ignorant mortal company, that he did not have these–that is why he lacked them. All he has to do is to think right and not strive to acquire things. He needs only to know that he already has everything.
Once a healthy, wealthy, and wise prince dreamed that he was poor, and in the dream he shouted: “Oh, I am suffering from cancer and I have lost all my wisdom and riches.” His wife, the queen, woke up and aroused him, saying: “Look, prince, laugh and rejoice, for you are neither suffering from sickness nor have lost riches and wisdom, but you are comfortably lying at my side in health and wisdom, in your rich kingdom. You were only dreaming about these catastrophes.”
So it is with ignorant man. He is dreaming about lack and failure, when he might claim his birthright of joy, health, and plenty as a son of the ruler of the universe. He is now living in his perfect kingdom, but is dreaming evil.
Know God First
The constant desire for health and prosperity, which is so much harped upon in modern spiritual organizations, is the way to slavery. We must seek God first and then find health and prosperity through Him. Beggars get only a beggar’s share, whereas a son of God gets his son’s share. That is why Jesus spoke of seeking and knowing the kingdom of God first. When that is actually accomplished, then health and prosperity will be added. The acquirement of wisdom and everything else that the soul of man needs will be received as a matter of his Divine birthright.
It is best to feel by visualization and by Divine contact in meditation that you are already perfect in health and wisdom and have abundance, rather than try to succeed by begging for health, prosperity, and wisdom. In fact, man’s mortal efforts are bound by the laws of cause and effect. Man cannot get more than he deserves. By the method of begging, no human being can ever fulfill all his endless desires, but by first realizing his oneness with God, man can own everything he needs.
Man cannot have immortality by begging for it or by feeling a desire for it. He should know that he is already immortal and that so-called death is only a dream.
According to the plan of God, man should have experienced growth from childhood, and through youth to manhood, but should never have experienced death by old age or disease. Even if man becomes old, he should never die of disease or suffer painful death. In the drama of life and death, when beheld with Divine understanding, there can be no pain in death, but only the showing or stopping of the motion picture of life at will without physical or mental pain.
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Tags: Teachings of Jesus · Yogananda
September 17th, 2011
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.
God made man immortal. He was to remain on earth as an immortal. He was to behold the drama of change with a changeless immortal mind, and after seeing change dancing on the stage of changelessness, he was to return to the bosom of eternal blessedness. Then evil crept in, causing man to concentrate on the changes of life and on outward appearances rather than on the underlying immortality in all things, and thus made him conceive the false idea of death or complete annihilation.
Destroying the Idea of Death
The motion picture of a man’s life, his birth, life on earth, and death, seen on the screen, produces the joyous consciousness of his birth and the sad concept of his death, or end. But Satanic ignorance hides from view the motion pictures of man’s pre-natal life as he joyously began the descent from God, and the joyous return to God as he hurried back after death. Satan has made us forget our pre-natal and post-natal experiences, and by showing us for a time this drama of life and then lowering the curtain, it has produced in us the erroneous conception called death.
I am not denying the experience of the change called death, but I consider it only as an outwardly moving link in the chain of immortality, all of which is hidden from our view. To say that death or change does not exist, is unmetaphysical and erroneous. To forget this dismal, delusive death, man should behold all change as dancing on the bosom of changelessness. Man should behold the changeless ocean of Infinity as wavelets of change appearing and disappearing.
Supernatural Death Versus Painful Death
If Adam and Eve had not transgressed the wishes of God, and their descendants had not allowed themselves to be influenced by hereditary ignorance, then modern man would not have to witness the heart-rending painful deaths through accident and disease.
Man appeared on earth, being materialized by God, and was to live on earth, beholding the birth, sustenance, growth, and the painless, sorrowless, return of the body in complete perfection. Then, as it is possible to watch the slow process of a flower budding, growing, and disappearing on the movie screen, so man should behold his life pictured on the screen of his consciousness through the stages from childhood to a full-grown individual, and then his disappearance unto God of his own accord by his own power of dematerialization.
Man, being out of tune with God, has lost his power of dematerialization, so he is frightened by the screen picture of life prematurely cut off even before he has finished seeing the whole perfect picture of his changeful life. This premature withdrawal of the motion picture of life produces pain due to attachment to those screen pictures of flesh and consciousness and is known in the world as terrible death by pain.
We mortals have so many misconceptions about death that it has grown into importance and has fixed in us an idea of annihilation and pain instead of being seen as a phenomenon necessary in the successive steps which the soul must follow in order to return from the state of change to the changeless state. It is necessary for death or change to come, so that the soul may finish beholding this motion picture of life and be released in order to go back to the home of Immortality.
How Reincarnation Was Created By Satan
Satan saw that it would all be very simple if the immortal children of God, after beholding a perfect earthly existence with a changeless attitude, would go back to immortality again, so Satan made imperfect patterns or tampered with the showing of a perfect picture of life before it was completed, and caused mental and bodily pain through delusion. This dissatisfaction, arising from an imperfect, prematurely destroyed picture of life, created in man the desire to see perfect pictures of life in order to behold them until completion.
Ever since, the immortal images of God forgot their already perfect immortality and began to introduce delusive imperfections in the perfect dramas of life staged on the screen of time. Ever since, immortals have been coming and going from earth by the law of cause and effect, which governs desires. Ever since, this law of cause and effect has affected free souls as the Law of Karma (action), which keeps them earthbound. This law of cause and effect, which imprisons souls on earth in Satan’s Kingdom of finitude, has been called “reincarnation.”
How To Destroy Reincarnation
Immortal souls can only expect to be free by utterly destroying all seeds of earthly desires by Divine contact with God through meditation. This reminds the soul of the unending fulfillment in the immortal inheritances of Bliss which makes desires for earthly ways unnecessary and ridiculous.
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Tags: Teachings of Jesus · Yogananda
August 28th, 2011
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.
Since God is almighty and knows that we are suffering, why does He, being almighty and eternally blessed, allow weaklings to suffer from the temptations of evil?
The answer is, that after receiving independence, the cosmic delusive force began to fill creation with patterns of imperfections, displacing the perfect patterns of God’s first plan. God then destroyed all creation, as described in Genesis, but seemingly He found Himself illogically using His almighty power in arbitrarily destroying creation. Also, He seemed to be contradicting His own laws, inasmuch as He destroyed the power of Satan after once giving him independence of action.
Then God created again and reinstated the original power of independent free choice which He gave to Satan and to all creation. God could destroy Satan even now and free us at once from the thraldom of earthly miseries, imperfections, broken hearts, and death, by using His almighty material force, but He would not do that because that would be taking away our independence.
Since God gave independence to man and Satan, He can free them only through teaching them the right use of their own power of free choice. God is not enjoying His eternal blessed state in selfish happiness, but He is suffering for our miserable tragic existence, delayed evolution on earth, and belated return to the paradise of all-emancipating wisdom. He is continuously trying to use the superior force of divine love expressed as the parental, friendly, filial, all-surrendering, pure, conjugal love to coax man to forsake his cooperation with evil, which helps and strengthens it to destroy him.
Man Must Make His Own Choice
Man stands in the middle, with God on one side and Satan on the other side, each ready to pull him in whichever direction he wishes to go. It is up to man to signal God or Satan as to which direction he wants to be pulled. Man is perfectly free to act without being influenced by God or Satan, but whenever he does act right, or has a pure ennobling thought, that is the signal to God and he is automatically pulled toward God. But as soon as man thinks or acts evil, he is automatically pulled toward Satan. However, being essentially an image of God, man can never be eternally drowned in the “hell” of evil.
Eternal Hell Is Impossible For Man
No matter how persistently sinful man is, he can never suffer eternal punishment. Evil promises happiness and results only in unhappiness. As soon as man realizes this, then he begins to wish for emancipation and for God. This wish for goodness and freedom serves as a portal through which God is again invited to come into the life of the prodigal son and lead him to the abode of freedom. Even fathomless evil cannot destroy man’s soul, for he is essentially immortal and eternally good.
Evil is a Temporary Parasite
All evil is a passive graft, a temporary parasite on the tree of life, which can be amputated by the knife of wisdom possessed by man. Whenever man initiates good actions, he is proceeding toward a paradise of bliss, hidden in the womb of eternal futurity.
God Coaxes Through All Good–Satan Tempts Through Evil
God is coaxing us with an array of limitless good happenings and is influencing us for our own welfare, whereas Satan is tempting us with pleasant-looking but fleeting happiness-producing patterns of evil. Satan’s patterns are temptations because they are deceptive contrivances created to consciously delude us by promising us good and giving us evil instead.
According to the dual conception of good and evil (God and Satan), it becomes easy to understand why there is so much good, together with so much evil. The sky and earth are full of the productions of God’s patterns of perfection and Satan’s patterns of imperfection to influence man. The beautiful sunshine, clouds, and rain are created by God to benefit man. Cataclysms, earthquakes, and floods were created by Satan to make man uncomfortable.
An eternal display of goodness is materialized in nature and the life of man, proving that God is trying to impress man and influence him to use his free will and return to the abode of bliss. Satan, through deceptive, apparently pleasant contrivances of temporary happiness-yielding acts, greed, and lust is trying to keep man tied to this misery-making limited earth. Jesus, as a manifestation of God, came to speak of the eternal Kingdom of Heaven, upon whose threshold no sorrow can tread. Jesus taught that permanent happiness can only be found in God. Satan deludes man into seeking permanent happiness in impermanent material things.
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Tags: Practical Wisdom · Teachings of Jesus · Yogananda
August 14th, 2011
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.
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Tags: Practical Wisdom · Teachings of Jesus · Yogananda
August 4th, 2011
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 contemporary Christian Church has failed to differentiate between Jesus the body and Jesus the vehicle in which the Only Begotten Son, or Christ Consciousness, was manifested. Jesus Himself said that he was not speaking of His body as the Only Begotten Son, but of His soul which was not circumscribed by the body, but was one with the Only Begotten Son, Christ consciousness in all specks of vibration. “God so loved the world [or matter]; that He gave His only begotten Son” to redeem it (John 3:16). That is, God the Father remained hidden as Christ Intelligence in all matter and in all living beings in order to bring all things, by beautiful evolutional coaxings, back to his home of All-Blessedness, when they should overcome all mortal tests, and should reincarnate in matter no more–i.e., “go not more out” (Revelation 3:12).
Saint John said of Jesus that “[to] as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God” (John 1:12). The plural number in “sons of God” shows distinctly that it was not the body of Jesus but His spirit that was the Only Begotten Son, and all those could become sons of God who would clarify their consciousness by meditation and receive–or in an unobstructed way reflect–the power of God. In other words, they could be one with the Only Begotten reflection in all matter and become Son of God like Jesus.
Sons of God Existed Before and After the Birth of Jesus
Before Jesus came, the Sage Vyasa, the author of the Hindu “Bible,” the Bhagavad Gita (Song of God), was a Son of God, and knew how to be one with the Only Begotten reflection or Kutastha Chaitanya–the undistorted consciousness existing in all vibratory creation. So also, Swami Shankara (the founder of the Swami order of renunciation about 700 A.D.), Babaji, Lahiri Mahasaya, Sri Yukteswar (my guru), and others having Christ Consciousness were Sons of God. The Spirit could not be partial in creating one as Jesus and all others as mortal beings. A divinely-imported Jesus could be made by the thousands by God and they would, being predestined, naturally behave on earth as Christs–as spiritual puppets of God. Such Christs could not be the ideals of struggling mortals with all their frailties. But when we see a man who by self-struggle and proper use of his God-given free choice and power of meditation became a Christ, then we can stir hope of salvation in the weak, matter-tortured, fear-maligned, timorous, frail human breast.
Baptism of Human Consciousness in Cosmic Consciousness
As said before, just as the husband is born again in the wife as the son, so inactive God the Father, active and manifest in the Holy Spirit, became the only reflected, only begotten Son. Therefore it should be remembered that when the expanded consciousness becomes stable in all creation, it feels the presence of Christ Consciousness in all vibration. Then the meditator becomes Christ-like; his consciousness experiences the Second Coming of Christ; he feels in his vehicle the presence of Christ Consciousness just as Jesus felt Christ expressed in His body. All human beings find their consciousness hidebound by the body, but by intuitive Christ Consciousness the meditator realizes that God the Father’s cosmic consciousness exists inactively in regions where there is no motion or presence of the Holy Spirit Vibration. (For the Holy Spirit Vibration is limited only to a certain tract of space which is peopled by the cosmos and all island universes. The Holy Vibration is condensed into planetary creation.)
When the meditator feels his consciousness one with Christ Consciousness, he realizes that Christ Consciousness is nothing but the reflection of the cosmic consciousness of God the Father. Then, like Jesus, he can say, “I [Christ Consciousness in creation] and my Father [Cosmic Consciousness beyond creation] are one.” As the white light of the sun beyond a blue crystal held up to the light and the blue light in the crystal are the same, so also the cosmic consciousness (God the Father) existing beyond all vibratory (Holy Spirit) creation and the Christ Consciousness (Kutastha Chaitanya) in all vibratory creation are the same. When vibratory creation exists, God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit exist. When by cosmic dissolution (greater than Noah’s Flood, which was only partial dissolution), or when by universal dissolution the holy vibration is dissolved, then automatically God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit become reconverted into the one Unmanifested, Absolute Spirit.
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Tags: Teachings of Jesus · Yogananda
July 23rd, 2011
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 Spirit Is Ever-Existing, Ever-Conscious, Ever-New Bliss
It could be described as the ever-existing, ever-conscious, ever-new, joyous spirit.
Spirit is ever-new Bliss. There was even no space, for the Spirit did not exist in space or time; It was everything that there was, is, or is to be. Space and time are categories of objects; as soon as a human being sees a planet hanging in the sky, then he conceives that the planet is occupying dimensional space and is existing in time. But when there were no finite objects in creation, neither was there space nor time, but only the Blissful Spirit existed.
Spirit Becomes God the Father
But when the sun falls on a blue crystal its light undergoes formal change and division. The unmanifested Spirit felt, “I am alone. I am conscious Bliss, but there is no one to taste Me.” Even as He thus dreamed, He became many.
The Spirit was invisible, existing alone in the home of all space. He piped to Himself the ever-new, ever-entertaining song of Perfect, Beatific Bliss. As He sang through His voice of Eternity to Himself, He wondered if aught but Himself were listening and enjoying His song. To His astonishment, He felt He was the cosmic Son, and He was the Singing. Even as thus He thought, lo, He became two; Spirit and Nature, Man and Woman, Positive and Negative, Stamen and Pistil of the Flowers, Peacock and Peahen, Male Gem and Female Gem.
The Spirit Evolves Itself as Three
As soon as the cosmic bachelor Spirit becomes active and creates the universe, He is no longer Spirit but the husband, God the Father, wedded to the Virgin Mary or Cosmic Vibration.
Matter Cannot Be Different From Spirit
Spirit being the only substance that there was when He wanted to create, He had no substance but Himself to create with, for if there were two substances, spirit and matter, then both could not be infinite and all-powerful. Thus, Spirit having nothing else but Itself began to create a Magic Delusion, or the cosmic Magical Measurer, which made the infinite look like the finite, even as the calm ocean becomes distorted into ripples on its surface by the action of a storm. So all vibratory creation is nothing but frozen spirit. Spirit dreamed a vibratory universe, or Holy Spirit, and it was there.
All Forms of Matter are Different Rates of Vibrating Spirit-Thought
Thought of matter, energy, all matter, all things, are nothing but the differently vibrating thoughts of the Spirit, even as man in his dreams creates a world with lightning and clouds, people being born or dying, loving or fighting, and experiencing heat or cold. All the births and deaths, sickness and disease, solids, liquids, or gases in a dream are nothing but the differently vibrating thoughts of the dreamer. This universe is a motion picture of God’s thoughts on the screen of human consciousness.
Spirit Evolves the Holy Vibration
So all things–all created planets and living beings–in the Holy Spirit, or Holy Vibration, are nothing but the frozen imagination of God. This Holy Spirit in the Hindu scriptures is called “the Aum,” but by the scientists it is known as cosmic vibration. The Spirit, therefore, could not create matter as anything different from Itself, for It had only Itself as the tissue or material with which to build the cosmos.
God the Father
As soon as the Spirit evolved a cosmic vibratory thought, through the action of the cosmic magical measuring power of Delusion, it became condensed into cosmic energy. Cosmic energy then became condensed into the material cosmos with solid, liquid, and gaseous substances. After creating the Ideational [Causal], Astral, and Physical Vibration, or Holy Spirit, the uncreated, unmanifested Spirit became God the Father. Spirit became the creator of all creative vibration. This God the Father is called the “Sat” in the Hindu Scriptures, and is the Transcendental Intelligence, according to metaphysical science. This Virgin, vibratory creation, or Holy Spirit, became the consort of God the Father; that is, God the Father existed transcendentally–outside the vibratory creation–as a conscious, separate cosmic consciousness, just as the sunlight remains around and beyond a crystal held up to the sun.
It should be noted that all human similes are imperfect since by their material nature they are limited and cannot exemplify spiritual truths except in a limited way. It should be noted also that the sun does not create the crystal, whereas the Spirit, as God the Father, evolved the Holy Spirit. In order to divide itself the Spirit first differentiated itself as God the Father and the Holy Spirit Vibration.
Creation of the Only Begotten Son, or Christ
Then the Spirit found that the Holy Spirit could not sustain Itself just by Its inactive omnipresence, so It (the Spirit) made Itself manifest as the active Christ Intelligence in all vibratory creation, to create, recreate, preserve, and mold it according to its divine purpose. So the distinct, active, differentiated, conscious Intelligence, existing in all specks of vibratory creation, or Holy Spirit, is called the Only Begotten (Christ) Son. It must be remembered that Christ consciousness in all specks of creation is the only existing reflection of God the Father. Hence Christ Intelligence is spoke of as the Only Begotten Son.
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Tags: Teachings of Jesus · Yogananda
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