PARAMHANSA’S GURU’S ANGLE’S ON THE BIBLE

Paramhansa Yogananda

Master expounded the Christian bible with a beautiful clarity. It was from a Hindu guru, unknown to the role call of Christian membership, that I learnt to perceive the deathless essence of the bible, and to understand the truth in Christ assertion – surely the most thrilling intransigent ever uttered: “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.”*
(*Matthew 24:35)

The great masters of India mould their lives by the same godly ideas that animated Jesus; these men are his proclaimed kin; “whosoever shall do the will of my father which is in heaven, the same is my brother, and sister, and mother.”** “If you continue in my word”, Christ pointed out “then are ye my disciples indeed; and ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”*** Free men all, lords of themselves, the yogi Christian of India are part of the immortal fraternity: those that attain a liberating knowledge of the One Father.
(**Matthew 12:50)
(***John 8:31-32. St. John testified: “But as many as receive him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name (even to them that are established in the omnipresent Christ Consciousness).” – John 1:12)

“The Adam and Eve story is incomprehensible to me!” I observed with considerable heat one day in my early struggles with the allegory. “Why did God punish not only the guilty pair, but also the innocent unborn generations?”

Master was amused, more by my vehemence than by my ignorance. “Genesis is deeply symbolic, and cannot be grasped by a literalinterpretation,” he explained. Its “tree of life” is the human body. The spinal cord is like an upturned tree, with mans hair as its roots and afferent and efferent nerves as branches. The tree of the nervous system bears many enjoyable fruits, or sensations of sights, sound, smell, taste and touch. In these, man may rightfully indulge; but he was forbidden the experience of sex, the “apple” at the center of the body (‘in the midst of the garden’).****
(****”We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden but of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God has said, we shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it lest ye die.” Genesis 3:2-3)

The ‘serpent’ represents the coiled up spinal energy that stimulates the sex nerves. ‘Adam’ is reason and ‘Eve’ is feeling. When the emotion or Eve-consciousness in any human being is overpowered by the sex impulse, his reason or Adam also succumbs*****
(***** “The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree and I did eat. The woman said, The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat.” – Gen. 3:12-13)

“God created the human species by materializing the bodies of man and woman through the force of His will; He endowed the new species with the power to create children in a similar ‘immaculate’ or divine manner.****** Because His manifestation in the individualized soul had hitherto been limited to animals, instinct-bound and lacking potentialities of full reason, God made the first human bodies, symbolically called Adam and Eve. To these, for advantageous upward evolution, He transferred the souls or divine essence of two animals.******* In Adam or man, reason predominated; in Eve or woman, feeling was ascendant. Thus was expressed the duality of polarity that underlies the phenomenal worlds. Reason and feeling remain in a heaven of cooperative joy so long as the human mind is not tricked by the serpentine energy of animal propensities.

“The human body was therefore not solely a result of evolution from beasts, but was produced through an act of special creation by God. The animal forms were too crude to express full divinity; man was uniquely given the potentially omniscient ‘thousand-petaled lotus’ in the brain, as well as acutely awakened occult centers in the spine.

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“God, or the Divine Consciousness present within the first created pair, counseled them to enjoy all human sensibilities, with one exception: sex sensations.******** These were banned, lest humanity enmesh itself in the inferior animal method of propagation. The warning not to revive subconsciously present bestial memories was unheeded. Resuming the way of brute procreation, Adam and Eve fell from the state of heavenly joy natural to the original perfect man. When ‘they knew that they were naked,’ their consciousness of immortality was lost, even as God had warned them; they had placed themselves under the physical law by which bodily birth must be followed by bodily death.

“The knowledge of ‘good and evil’, promised Eve by the ‘serpent,’ refers to the dualistic and oppositional experiences that mortals under maya must undergo. Falling into delusion through misuse of his feeling and reason, or Eve- and Adam-consciousness, man relinquishes his right to enter the heavenly garden of divine self-sufficiency.********* The personal responsibility of every human being is to restore his ‘parents’ or dual nature to a unified harmony or Eden.”
(****** “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it.” – Gen. 1:27-28.)
(*******”And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.” – Gen. 2:7.)
(********”Now the serpent (sex force) was more subtil than any beast of the field” (any other sense of the body). – Gen. 3:1.)
(********* “And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed.” – Gen. 2:8. “There for the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken.” – Gen. 3:23. The divine man first made by God had his consciousness centered in the omnipotent single eye in the forehead (eastward). The all-creative powers of his will, focused at that spot, were lost to man when he began to “till the ground” of his physical nature.)

As Sri Yukteswas ended his discourse, I glanced with new respect at the pages of Genesis. “Dear Master,” I said, “for the first time I feel a proper filial obligation toward Adam and Eve!”**********
(********** The “Adam and Eve” story of the Hindus is recounted in the hoary purana, Srimad Bhagavata. The first man and woman (beings in physical form) are called Swayambhuva Manu (“man born of the Creator”) and his wife Shatarupa (“having hundred images and forms”). Their five children intermarried with Prajapatis (perfect beings who could assume corporeal form); from these first divine families was born the human race.

Never in East or West have I heard anyone else expound the Christian scriptures with so deep a spiritual insight as Sri Yukteswar’s. “Theologians have misinterpreted Christ’s words,” Master said, “in such passages as ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life; no man cometh unto the Father, but by me’ (John 14:6). Jesus meant, never that he was the sole Son of God, but that no man can attain the unqualified Absolute, the transcendent Father beyond creation, until he has first manifested the ‘Son’ or activating Christ Consciousness within creation. Jesus, who had achieved entice oneness with that Christ Consciousness, identified himself with it inasmuch as his own ego had long since been dissolved.”

When Paul wrote: “God… created all things by Jesus Christ” (Ephesians 3:9), and when Jesus said: “Before Abraham was, I am” (John 8:58), the sheer essence of the words is impersonality.

A form of spiritual cowardice leads many worldly people to believe comfortably that only one man was the Son of God. “Christ was uniquely created,” they reason, “so how can I, a mere mortal, emulate Him?” But all men have been divinely created, and must someday obey Christ’s command: “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect” (Matt. 5:48). “Behold, what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called the sons of God” (I John 3:1).

Understanding of the law of karma and of its corollary, reincarnation, is displayed in numerous Biblical passages: e.g., “whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed” (Gen. 9:6). If every murderer must himself be killed “by man”, the reactive process obviously requires, in many cases, more than one lifetime. The contemporary police are just not quick enough!

The early Christian church accepted the doctrine of reincarnation, which was expounded by the Gnostics and by numerous church fathers, including Clement of Alexandria, the celebrated Origen (both 3rd century), and St. Jerome (5th century). The doctrine was first declared a heresy in A.D. 553 by the Second Council of Constantinople. At that time many Christians thought the doctrine of reincarnation afforded man to ample a stage time and space to encourage him to strive for immediate salvation. But truths suppressed lead disconcertingly to a host of errors. The millions have not utilized their “one lifetime” to seek God, but to enjoy this world – so uniquely won, and so shortly to be forever lost! The truth is that man reincarnates on early until he has consciously regained his status as a son of God.)