Revolutionising Awareness

It’s interesting that I’m starting to get a few spiritual questions, rather than questions exclusively on the galactics, 2012, etc. What an interesting and enjoyable development.

If you ask me a general question that others may benefit from considering, I may share it online. I won’t mention you (so I don’t embarrass you).   This question is definitely one that I’m sure other people have wrestled with. Thank you for asking.

The question was on how one can reconcile Jesus’ apparent statements that he was the only way to God with everything else that the galactics and ascended masters are saying.  A supplementary question was how I regarded Jesus. What follows are just my views, not “the truth.”  (I don’t know the truth, though knowing it is all that motivates me.)

Jesus, in my view, is deserving of all praise and respect as an avatar or “descent of God into form.”  He is not an ascender like you and me, but a descender.  He embodies the energy of God in ways that you and I do not. Most specifically he is able to forgive sin.

In my view, he said he was an avatar when he taught that “Ye are from beneath; I am from above: ye are of this world; I am not of this world.” (1) In my view, this is a statement that only an avatar can make.

Besides that, Sri Ramakrishna declared him to be an avatar. And perhaps you’d enjoy reading that passage:

A few other examples of avatars include Buddha, Shankara, Rama, Krishna, and Sri Ramakrishna himself.

But Jesus spoke metaphorically, in the language of what some people call the “Biblical code.”  (3)

When he said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life,” in my opinion, he did not mean, I Jesus. He meant “the I,” “the Self”, the Soul or the Spirit, which is one with God, which IS God.

Knowing the “I,” or the “I am” as some prefer to call it, is indeed, as I understand it, the only way to God. We cannot know God unless and until we know the Self because the Self is God. (4) That’s what is meant when Jesus said that the Kingdom of Heaven is within. The Self is within. Knowing the Self is knowing God.

In my view, God set up life so that He (She or It) could only be known by an individual knowing him or herself.

Knowing the Self is knowing the truth. Knowing the truth frees us from having to be reborn into physical life at the Third Dimension. We ascend to the Fifth Dimension, free of one level of physicality, to use the language of the 2012 scenario.

Thus knowing the “I” is truly the way, the truth, and the life.

The “I” or “Self” is the treasure buried in the field, the pearl of great price, the mustard seed that grows into a great tree, the measure of meal that leavens the whole loaf. The “I” or “Self” is the Christ, the Son of God, the messiah, the savior, the prince of peace.

Hindus call the “I” the Atman or Brahman (the Father) within the individual. Nothing Jesus said does not fit in with what Krishna or Buddha said. We just have to understand the context in which he was speaking.

But Christians have taken this statement and interpreted it as meaning that Jesus of Nazareth is the only way to God. I don’t think Jesus ever meant it that way or he would not have said “Ye shall do greater than I.” If he is the only way, how could we do greater than he?

So I believe that one has to divest oneself of an exclusivist, narrow interpretation of Jesus’s words for his teachings to be wide-open and unrestrictive. Once one does, what Jesus says lines up with what all the major spiritual teachers have said.

I myself am (nominally) Jewish but I love Jesus more than many Christians I know. His words are endlessly profound once they are released from the narrow interpretive limits that have been imposed on them for centuries. I have never ceased to thrill reading the Gospels. I live my life by a few sentences contained in the Sermon on the Mount, beginning with “Take no thought for the morrow, what ye shall eat and what ye shall wear.” I never stop enjoying talking about Jesus.

Make that one alternation in Jesus’s teachings and they line up with those of Sri Krishna, Lao-Tzu, Buddha, Rumi, etc.  Make that one alteration and the basis of religious wars falls away.

Matthew Ward has said that many fundamentalists will have difficulty letting go of narrow views like Jesus being the only way to God. They will choose to leave this life instead:

What a shame when only a single adjustment might remove the difficulty and increase the range and embrace  of Jesus’ teachings by an order of magnitude.

Footnotes

http://sbeckow.wordpress.com/2010/07/19/what-might-jesus-have-meant-by-saying-i-am-the-way-the-truth-and-the-life/