Yuku free message boards

Dawnrays, you seem to think I'm blaming Jesus, but to me it's more like an effort to remove him from the pedestal that peoples legends and myths have made him. I truly do not think he intended to produce the 'religion' that his followers created. Those who refer to a book as the 'true word of God' are also "idealogues". We could call them "idolaters of the Book", so to speak, because those words are the result of years of idealizing, shaping and creation by followers with an agenda, whether they are conscious of it or not. Much of it is Myth and Legend and therefore the carrier of a truth that can teach us. Personalities can be role models and guides, but I truly, with all my heart, do not think that we should 'rely' on the "Masters", or those who take their words, or the words of a holy book, literally and unquestioningly, to improve the world or to tell us what is real and what isn't. Often, it seems to me, what we hear and see from higher sources is a symbol or a "method" by which we may be able to tap into the God Wisdom within us, but we get stuck in the 'literalness' of the symbol and don't go any further, never realizing that we are dealing with a symbol or a method

I find that it is often our "literalness" that causes the problems. We think that we are "this" or that God is "this" or Truth is "this" and that becomes a standard by which everything else can be measured. While that is good and making judgments is necessary and good, it can also produce hatred and ignorance. So we take symbols and make them absolutes and solid realities and fail to be able to use them as tools to awaken ourselves.

Etz

"I don't think you can state that you basically don't believe he was anything more than one of the many of the Jewish mystics who were wandering around Israel at the time (and there were others, some also claiming to be the Messiah) and then expect him to "do something" about the Visgoths, the Inquistion and the Holocaust and every other Christianity related tragedy in history."

That's precisely my point! If he was anything more than just another Jewish Mystic, if he really was the Moshiach, we would have entered into the Messianic age and the prophecies would have been fullfilled. There would be no more wars and violence, etc., etc. People have made an Image of him that has nothing to do with him, and created a religion that, while it has the potential to guide people and be a valid spiritual path, like many other forms of religion, has also produced a huge amount of judgmental hatred and self-righteous violence. They've thrown the responsibility that is there's over to a mythical, magical being.

I don't expect Jesus to interfere with anything because I think that we are who is responsible for the world and we can't rely on supernatural beings who somehow magically save us, or that if we 'believe' in something or someone and go to a specific 'church' or 'temple' or 'synagogue' or 'mosque' we are somehow brought to a higher plane and 'saved'. We may be aided by higher beings, but it's certainly not just Jesus who is doing this, to say the least. Just because many people have decided he is someone different and special does not mean that that actually corresponds to reality. Astral beings of various types interact rather frequently with us, some for good reasons and some for bad. Every once in a while an even higher being interacts with us. Sometimes all the differentiation goes away, and it's truly God, with no division, interacting.

At a fundamental level, though, I believe that it's our responsiblity to work on ourselves, and by extension, to improve the world. Whatever assistance we have received from higher beings to make this world better is far overshadowed by the everyday efforts common people, like us, have made to widen our perceptions and understanding, our consciousness and wisdom, and help stop attrocities that are caused by religious hatred or ethnic hatred or just scarcity. I thinks it's up to us.

Dawnrays, first, there is the issue of "Messiah". According to the Prophets, the Moshiach will bring in an age of peace and love. This is a major and fundamental condition - "The lion shall lie down with the lamb". Unless there is a complete redefinition of what the "Messiah" represents, which is what Yogananda did, to a great extent, the only ways to get around it are the say that the Messiah did not come yet, or that he will have to come a second time to finish his job, which is what the Christians did.

Second, the earth plane is the "Mars" plane, symbolically speaking. The 3rd Chakra up is ruled by Mars, and this is where we, as a group, are centered. Our lesson in this plane of existence is to move out of the Mars vibration into the Venus vibration (symbolized by the physical Earth being situated in between Mars and Venus). Mars, of course, represents war, violence, the lower ego.

It's true that Jesus represents the idea of moving to the heart center, but unless we do a redefinition of the Messiah figure (which is based on the Prophets and is fundamentally a Jewish concept), he did not bring about the Messianic era, although the Christian movement did it's best to rationalize or force him to fit into the role.

What Yogananda did was a complete redefinition of the idea of the Messiah figure. It doesn't fit either the Jewish definition or the Christian definition, but, while saying that this was the "original Christianity, it is clearly a Hindu interpretation of the Messiah idea, reworked to fit into the Avatar paradigm, which is also a reworking of that idea, because in the traditional Hindu view, Vishnu has ten incarnations, which are the 'classical' Avatars. The first nine have already manifested, the 10th, Kalki, is the one that hasn't. While the Messiah idea and the Avatar idea are similar, the early writings of Christianity do not reflect the idea of a multiple set of incarnations for God. There is the first coming and the second coming of the SAME incarnation, and the earliest writings seem to be very "end time" oriented, and reflect the idea that the second coming was very near, not thousands of years in the future.

I happen to agree much more, at this point, with Yogananda, although the mystic I am really agreeing with is the 13th century Catalonian, Avraham Abulafia, who interprets the idea of an 'annointing' (the meaning of the Hebrew root word M-SH-CH, from which the word "Moshiach" derives) as an experience of the "oil" of God flowing over the head of the person and producing a realization of God consciousness. The "oil" is symbolic, of course, although the Kings of Israel and Judea were actually physically annointed by the leading prophet of their times with oil from the Temple, to symbolize their leadership. The Kingship failed when the 'annointed state' was no longer a reality in the Astral plane.

The Chasidic view of the Messiah holds that there is always a person on the earth who represents the Messiah. The "soul" of Messiah rests over the head of this person and the hidden Messiah engages in various Astral activities that prevent the world from sinking into an 'abyss' of lower energies until humanity as a whole have evolved enough to enter into the next era, which, for all practical purposes, is very much like moving from the plane of Mars to the plane of Venus. There are always 36 people alive who are in the act of secretly keeping the Earth in a state of relative balance, and when humanity as a whole has evolved to a 'ready' state, one of those 36 people will be revealed as the person who ushers in the Messianic age, an age of true peace and love.

According to this teaching, idividuals can achieve a state of Messiah before the actual age begins and these people are charged with the task of trying to enlighten the rest of humanity so that the new era can begin. There is no connection of the soul of the final Moshiach with a particular personality. Whoever is capable of carrying it at the right time will do the work.

Traditionally, it will be a male who's ancestry goes back to King David, only through the descent of the fathers. I happen to disagree with the patriarchal view of the matter, but men have more of the Martial energy in them than women, who tend to be more Venusian. The Chasidic view of this is that women are naturally more spiritual and do not need to engage in the traditional ritual techniques to bring them more in line with the higher level of vibration represented by the Messianic era and that era with have more feminine vibration altogether than the era we are living in.

The Patriarchal point of view indicates that it is fundamentally the male who needs to go through the necessary transformation. There is even a belief that women are only incarnating to assist men in overcoming their Martial tendencies. I find that a bit simplistic in the sense that while women may vibrate more to Venus, they are not more enlightened than men are. It's only a slight vibrational difference and doesn't account for the fact, as I see it, that souls do change sex periodically. There are indications showing up in our time period, though, that women may be ones who lead humanity into a Venusian era, but I consider that more symbolic than physically 'real'. The age of Aquarius (still hundreds of years away) seems to be very much as 'equal rights' era, so to speak, and the 'sexist' approach seems to me to be very simplistic and more of a 'competition/Martial' approach. Venus rules Libra, the 'Scales', and is more concerned with equalization than with who gets to win and be on top.

In my opinion, Yogananda's teachings, and the teachings of our lineage (ours was one of the first, aside from the Kali/Shakti schools to initiate women) are similar to this because both schools of thought are coming out of an understanding that is reflecting a true meditative and perceptive approach to understanding reality.

Etz

The Chasidic teaching are not in texts, by the way, they are taught orally and come out of meditation. The New Age beliefs are also contradicting Christian teaching, as well.

I don't see any evidence, at all, that Jesus was anything but a Jew. The Pharisees were one group among many during his time. There was no "Traditional" Judaism then, unless you take the Saducee point of view, because it was coming out of the Priestly tradition. Almost all the different subgroups at that time were opposed to the Saducees who held power because of the Romans. The other groups viewed them as corrupt.

The New Testament states that Jesus was a student of Gamliel. Gamliel was a Pharisee.

From historical study, it's quite clear that the church of James was very Jewish. We get this information from the arguments between Pauls churches, who had broken away from Judaism, and the churches of James in Jerusalem. It was Paul, not Jesus, who broke away. The arguments between Jesus and the Pharisees do not show that Jesus had broken away from Judaism, they show that he had disagreements with the stricter Pharisees. These arguments present a group of "Pharisees" who were even stricter than what we now accept. The Conservative Jews today are far more radical than Jesus ever was.

The reason that I said you were being emotional was because I was trying to discuss the matter with you using the available source information and sharing with you the ideas of the Chasidim. I'm not trying to shove anything down anyones throat. I was expecting further discussion, but your statements seemed to me to be a dismissal of the ideas that I'd brought in, much of which is extremely similar to what Yogananda was teaching. The Essene issue is not a settled issue among the scholars who are working with the Dead Sea material. There are many opposing opinions. I appologize if I seem like I'm trying to force my beliefs on people. I thought I was provided a different and much needed point of view. I've studied this period in great detail and have had access to scholarly material that most people do not have or are interested in going through and am more Jnani oriented than you, so I'll drop it here.

Etz