As has been said before, the metaphysical Cosmic Satan, once having the independent power to create by the law of relativity, does not want finite things to return to God, as at the end of a storm the waves, after a perfect individual existence, peacefully dissolve into and become part of the sea again.

Satan saw that the divine plan was for all finite creation, after a perfect existence, to go back to God, and he knew that with the disappearance of all finite creation, his kingdom would be gone, so he determined to use his God-given power to create imperfect independent desires in finite creatures in order to make them come back to earth again and again through reincarnation.

Satan created the consciousness of death through accident or fear, and thus started a desire in human beings for a perfect life on earth. This desire caused souls to reincarnate again and again in their vain hope of finding a perfect existence on earth, which can only be found in God.

God is almighty. He could destroy Satan, but if He used His physical miraculous force, He would subjugate Satan, but would not convince his immortal intelligence of his evil ways, so God is using love to convert Satan. As Satan is trying to keep human beings deluded by greed, anger, fear, desire, attachment, and delusion, so God is using the psychological counterparts of unselfishness, calmness, courage, satisfaction, unattached divine love, and wisdom, to bring man to His divine Kingdom.

Evil

There was no evil in God. Satan precipitated evil by the misuse of his God-given free choice, and his power of creating finite things. God might have anticipated the origin of evil in Satan through His omniscience, yet He organized the Cosmic Play in order to enjoy Himself through His many selves, and because He knew that, ultimately, His goodness would bring all things back unto Him. After God gave independent power to Satan, who had been an archangel, to create perfect finite things, Satan misused his independence, in the same way a rebellious general sometimes turns against his king. Ever since then Satan has created an ugly counterpart for every beautiful creation of God–in man’s body, mind, and soul, and in Nature. God created a beautiful body to be charged by Cosmic Energy , and to live in a free, unconditioned, divine state, but Satan created hunger, and the lure of the senses. For mental power, Satan substituted mental temptation; for soul’s wisdom, Satan invented delusive ignorance; for beautiful Nature, Satan substituted ugly warfare, disease, germs, earthquakes, cataclysms, floods, and other disasters.

If there were no individual and collective greed, selfishness, sex temptation, or false ambitions, this earth would be free from physical and moral crimes and war. By these misfortunes, Satan is systematically fighting God’s perfect plans of unselfishness, international cooperation, self-control, and true ambition, which includes the happiness of other people in one’s own happiness, brotherhood, and so on.

Living by God-Power

Why must God’s children be hungry? The soul, identified with the Satan-desecrated human body, feels hungry, and in turning to the earth-products for nourishment, remains earthbound. Thus the soul forgets that it can live like God by God’s Cosmic Energy.

Jesus, as He contacted God, found that hunger is a delusion connected with the law of change in the body, and can be overcome gradually until one can live entirely by God’s energy. Man should behold the soul as above hunger and the desire for food, for as long as the soul feels dependent upon food, it is earthbound, and so long must it come back again and again to satisfy this flesh desire. This does not mean that the spiritual aspirant should stop eating, but it does mean that he should joyously eat to maintain the temple of God (the body) and not eat just to satisfy sense craving. “Your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost” I Corinthians 6:19). “Ye are the temple of God, and the Spirit of God dwelleth in you” (I Corinthians 3:16). “Ye are the temple of the living God” (II Corinthians 6:16.

Even when Jesus said that stones could be made into bread by changing their rate of electronic vibration, He realized that it would be foolish to remember and encourage his mortal habits when tempted by Satan, since He knew that He was immortal and could live by God-power. Stones can be changed into bread when man understands how Divine Intelligence controls atoms and electrons. God’s intelligence has divided vibrations into solids, liquids, and gases, and is holding them in balance by mind, thermal, and electrical laws.

Man must understand how his intelligence controls the atoms of his body. When he learns that, he will find that his intelligence is a reflection of Divine Intelligence, which supports the life of his body. When he understands that, he knows that his body is not maintained by the physical law of bread only, but that it is sustained principally by God’s Cosmic Energy. So Jesus controlled His mortal enemy of hunger by His Divine Memory of unconditioned spiritual existence, which is self-sustaining.

The Cosmic Satan, through past mortal memory, asked Jesus to use His divine power over atoms to change stones into bread. Satan wanted Jesus to forget his newly-remembered divine state of unconditioned existence. So Satan worked through the mind of Jesus, and said: “Why don’t you use your divine power to change stones into bread?” If Jesus had done that, he would have misused His divine power, and also would have again catered to the Satanic psychology of physical hunger, instead of living by Cosmic Energy.

If Jesus had converted stones into bread, He would have had to depend again on bread for life. Of course, Jesus humanly ate bread even after this experience, but He did it as a God-man, and not as a deluded human being, subject to physical hunger. Great souls, who attain the highest, do not use their miraculous power for themselves, but live in the common human way, so that they may attract people to God by the higher miracles of love and devotion, and not by ostentatious physical miracles.

By not yielding to Satan’s temptation to turn stones into bread, Jesus conquered, and from then on it was at His option to live with or without food. Jesus found that a Son of God should not test God, for that is to doubt Him. God’s power should not be used to satisfy the challenge of unbelievers, unless so commanded by God Himself. For those who see the miracles of God, there is nothing left to disbelieve. It is those who believe in God’s power without seeing, who deserve to behold the miracles of God. (“Jesus saith unto him, Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed” John 20:29.)

So Jesus answered within Himself with a great vibratory force of thought, to the metaphysical Satan, who was tempting Him to transgress God’s laws. The word “said” signifies vibrating thought, and not a speaking voice. Jesus quoted the scriptural truth, not theoretically, as so many theologians do, but after His own experience of finding the mystery and origin of life through a forty-day fast, and by an intense inner meditative preparation. Man does not need to depend upon bread, or solids, liquids, and gases only for sustaining life, but upon the vibrating Cosmic Energy proceeding from the medulla (Mouth of God) into the human system.

Evil on earth was not all created by man’s wrong actions (evil karmas), accumulated during many incarnations. Evil existed from the time the Cosmic Satanic force first misused the Cosmic Energy to create imperfect things and beings. Even when Adam and Eve were created, Satan foresaw that if they remained perfect on earth, and were dematerialized and drawn back into God, there would be nothing left for him to do, and he would lose his power, so, even in that early period, Satan had already turned against God, and had created such patterns of imperfection as physical temptation, to make Adam and Eve transgress the perfect laws and become earthbound through the creation of imperfect desires.

Adam and Eve, by yielding to Satan’s temptation of physical procreation, lost the power of immaculate creation, by materializing their tendencies and energy into divine children, even as God had especially created them out of the ether. All creation is special in the beginning, and physical creation is secondary, for male and female must first exist before physical creation is possible.

From then on, the law of reincarnation became effective for the working out of human desires on the earth plane by rebirth. Satan created this law because he wanted souls to be bound to the earth by earthly desires.

Cause of Reincarnation

Reincarnation originated principally from Satan trying to immortalize changeable flesh in order to keep creatures under his subjugation. Satan found, however, that flesh was subject to the law of change, which included the change of the state called death.

Final Freedom

Souls, being immortal, could not go back to God, with the imperfect desires engendered on earth by Satan, so they had to return to earth, through reincarnation, to work out their material desires. In a way, Satan is helplessly acting as the tool of God in ultimately freeing souls from body and earth attachment. Reincarnation assures freedom, for it gives immortal souls time to work out their past desires. In that way Satan is deceived into thinking that souls will remain earthbound forever, whereas, at the expiration of the incarnation of desires, they will be liberated.

When a soul incarnates to work out its desires of past incarnation, Satan, fearing the freedom of that individual at the end of the working out of those desires, creates new desires in this incarnation by ingenious temptations, so that the soul may keep on reincarnating by weaving fresh nets of desire. Reincarnation, forced by earthly desires, is painful, and fraught with suffering, and is the tool of Satan to keep souls earthbound and miserable.

Death was to have been a conscious, happy transition from the changeful body to the changeless God. This was God’s idea of death. Satan created the painful, dreadful, unconscious phenomena of death. To desire lasting happiness in the body causes unconsciousness and pain at the time of death. Satan made souls think death was a parting from the beautiful earth, and as such, that they should grieve and desire to come back. Souls fail to see, due to Satan’s delusion, that death was to be a godly event, a promotion, a liberation from the toil-weary, imperfect earth life, to the perfect, everlasting freedom in 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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Many things are needed to ensure that spiritual life and practice can have their full effect on us. To get wheat, you need the seed. But possessing the seed is not sufficient. The right earth must be available. Moreover that earth must be prepared to receive the grain. Water and sunlight must also be provided. So although it is true that the corn harvest will only come out of the seeds that are sown (another necessary step), many other things are required to make the seed fruitful.

Swami Ramdas

In The Vision of God, his spiritual autobiography, Swami Ramdas states that he was “taken” up by the Name of the Lord, that his life became completely malleable to the action of the Name. Indeed, the Name of God became the sole force in his life. No longer Ramdas, but the Name of God lived in and through him. He put all his energies upon continually repeating the Holy Name. He cared for nothing else. But was repetition of the Holy Name really all he did?

Indeed not. He observed rigorous ascetic disciplines. He would go to places that were so freezing cold and physically miserable that he could not sleep and so would stay awake throughout the night constantly repeating the Name. He never ate meat or drank alcohol. He had nothing whatsoever to do with comfort and the life of the senses–especially sex. Much of his time was spent in solitude. So he did a great many more things than simply repeat the Name.

By themselves those disciplines would have meant nothing. It was the Name alone that brought him to enlightenment. But without the ascetic labors the Name would not have had such an effect on him. Therefore it was the Name alone that transformed him, but it was his disciplines that rendered him capable of being transformed. We must never lose that perspective. Many people met Ramdas and were inspired by him to repeat the Name of God, but only those few who also observed the other disciplines that had made his illumination possible attained what he did.

You can download a number of Swami Ramdas’s writings, including In Quest of God from the Anandashram website.

Is it real?

Krishna has told Arjuna that birth and death are simple illusions–that the unborn and undying spirit (Atma) is the sole reality of our being. That is not so hard to accept if we have intuition or actual recall of the fact of our having previously dreamed the dream of birth and death many times. But the real trouble is our identification with the experiences that occur between the two poles of birth and death. It is like a joke I heard a very long time ago. In a small town where metaphysical speculation was completely absent, the postmaster was a Christian Scientist. One day he asked a little boy, “How are you?” And the boy replied: “I have an awful stomach ache!” “Oh, you just imagine that,” chided the postmaster. “You only imagine you even have a stomach!” The next day the boy came in the post office and was asked the same question by the postmaster. He stood for a while, thinking, and then came out with: “I have an imaginary pain in my imaginary stomach that I don’t really have. And it HURTS!”

It is just the same with us. Simply saying: “It is all an illusion,” really does very little. Consider how we attend a play or a motion picture and become completely engrossed in the spectacle, responding with various emotions. All the time we know it is just pretend, but that does not keep us from responding as though it were real. How is this? It is the nature–yes, the purpose–of the mind!

I will never forget my first experience of Hamlet. The next day I could not attend any of my classes at the university, because I felt that I had seen an inexpressibly great person die right before my eyes. The words “Good night, sweet prince, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest” had utterly overwhelmed me with chagrin. For a few days I went around in an aura of shock even though I knew that I had only witnessed light and shadow patterns on a blank screen, that the “people” I had watched were actors playing a part–a part that my reading on the subject revealed was not even historically accurate. It made no difference. I was stunned by what I had seen. This is the nature of the delusive mind. Unless that nature is transcended, we will experience that “the play’s the thing” rather than an illusion. With this in mind, Swami Vivekananda subtitled his book Raja Yoga: “Conquering the Internal Nature.”

Read more of Swami Nirmalananda’s  Commentary on the Bhagavad Gita here.

God manifested the creation many creation-cycles ago as a perfect entity, but humans have spoiled it by their misdeeds and murderous ways. The individual human life and the cosmic life are interrelated.  Just as a human being carries his karma along with him, and that karma determines what his future lives will be, so it is with the world. Humans have progressively caused the creation to be increasingly flawed and painful.

Until they change themselves and thereby change the state of the world, things will keep on as they are or get worse. The choice is ours, not God’s. That is what free will is all about.

Q: If I kill another person for money and feel good about it and believe I am right, does that mean I will have no bad karma? If I cheat another person for money and believe it is justified and that I am right, does that mean I will have no bad karma?

No, it just means that you are a murderer and cheat that has no conscience. It also means that you are going to be cheated and killed in the future by someone who does not think he has done wrong.

Buddha said that karma is determined by the mind. That is, if we do something accidentally we are not guilty; but if we intend to do a wrong, then we are guilty, whether we succeed or fail in carrying out our evil intention.

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I’m fixing a hole where the rain gets in,
And stop my mind from wandering….
I’m filling the cracks that ran through the door
And keep my mind from wandering….

As a friend of mind listened to it with vacuous admiration, I asked her: “Do you know what that song is about?” What a sour note to intrude into her beatific coma! It did not need to mean anything, and she told me so. “But it does,” I crudely insisted. “It is about meditation. If you analyze the words they are describing the way meditation repairs the inner consciousness and makes it fit for ‘living in.’” Something clicked, even though I had not really expected it to, and it was not long until she, too, was stopping up the holes and filling the cracks through daily meditation.

Long before that inane little ditty with the profound message, Buddha had said: “In the same way that rain breaks into a house with a bad roof, desire breaks into the mind that has not been practicing meditation.” (Dhammapada 13)

Read how Buddha used mundane events to illustrate spiritual principles in “Rainproofing Our Mind.”

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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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