Christ, Jesus : Jesus is Greek for the original Hebrew Joshua meaning Saviour, & Christ from the Greek Christos translation of the Hebrew Messiah. The main sources of his life are the Old Testament compiled in Hebrew from the 13th to the 1st century BC, & the New Testament written probably in Greek, during the 1st century AD. No original manuscripts of either survived resulting in theological controversies on where & in which year, month & day he was born, whether he was of the ‘same substance’ or only a ‘similar substance’ as God, etc., etc., until 6th century Christian theologians resolved to begin the Christian era with Jesus’ birth on December 25, c.6 BC & hence his crucifixion in 29 AD – at the age of 35. Sri Aurobindo: There are four very great events in history, the siege of Troy, the life & crucifixion of Christ, the exile of Krishna in Brindavan & the colloquy with Arjūna on the field of Kurukshetra. The siege of Troy created Hellas, the exile in Brindavan created devotional religion (for before there was only meditation & worship), Christ from his cross humanised Europe, the colloquy at Kurukshetra will yet liberate humanity. Yet it is said that none of these four events ever happened. [SABCL 17:83] ― The Avatar, comes as the manifestation of the divine nature in the human nature, the apocalypse of its Christhood, Krishnahood, Buddhahood, in order that the human nature may by moulding its principle, thought, feeling, action, being on the lines of that Christhood, Krishnahood, Buddhahood transfigure itself into the divine. The law, the Dharma which the Avatar establishes is given for that purpose chiefly; the Christ, Krishna, Buddha stands in its centre as the gate, he makes through himself the way men shall follow. That is why each Incarnation holds before men his own example & declares of himself that he is the way & the gate; he declares too the oneness of his humanity with the divine being, declares that the Son of Man & the Father above from whom he has descended are one, that Krishna in the human body & the supreme Lord & Friend of all creatures are but two revelations of the same divine Purushottama, revealed there in his own being, revealed here in the type of humanity. [SABCL 13:140-41] ― When we thus understand the conception of Avatarhood, we see that whether for the fundamental teaching of the Gita, our present subject, or for spiritual life generally the external aspect has only a secondary importance. Such controversies as the one that has raged in Europe over the historicity of Christ, would seem to a spiritually-minded Indian largely a waste of time; he would concede to it a considerable historical, but hardly any religious importance; for what does it matter in the end whether a Jesus son of the carpenter Joseph was actually born in Nazareth or Bethlehem, lived & taught & was done to death on a real or trumped-up charge of sedition, so long as we can know by spiritual experience the inner Christ, live uplifted in the light of his teaching & escape from the yoke of the natural Law by that atonement of man with God of which the crucifixion is the symbol ? If the Christ, God made man, lives within our spiritual being, it would seem to matter little whether or not a son of Mary physically lived & suffered & died in Judea. [SABCL 13:12] Maganbhai Desai: “I was simply a country lad, way back, without any hopes or future…. Since the age of fourteen I have had a strange pull for religious life. I lived a spartan life, slept on a plank & ate the simplest kind of food. But a hankering for spiritual life was constantly there & hence a search of a Guru…. In 1953 I had, for the first time, an interview with the Divine Mother. It lasted for about 45 minutes…. During this talk I told her some of my experiences & asked if they were simple imaginings. She assured me that they were real experiences. (1) For some two or three years I felt the nearness of Jesus Christ. Behind him was the Mother Mary. His body would be identical with the shape of my body & a brilliant light (as powerful as a searchlight) would emanate from my heart (the sacred heart of Jesus). It was very powerful & lasted for a long time. (I no longer have that experience though I often feel the presence of Jesus, even as I write this!)” [“The Grace of the Mother” in Breath of Grace, ed. M.P. Pandit, Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry, 1972]
... beings as a spiritual inner conversion on the lines of what Paul writes in the two Epistles noticed by The Jerusalem Bible: Romans and Ephesians. Romans 6:4-6 tells us about baptism "in Christ Jesus": "You have been taught that... when we were baptised we went into the tomb with him and joined him in death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the Father's.glory, we too might live... learn: "when we were dead through our sins, [God] brought us to life with Christ - it is through grace that we have been saved - and raised us up with him and gave us a place with him in heaven, in Christ Jesus." 148 Here too the baptismal ceremonial is a symbol as of a resurrection while one is alive, but the symbolised state Page 185 is couched in a strange mode suggesting the... Prisca, with the church that meets at their house, send you their warmest wishes, in the Lord." 266 Towards the end of Romans he writes: "My greetings to Prisca and Aquila, my fellow-workers in Christ Jesus, who risked death to save my life: I am not the only one to owe them a debt of gratitude, all the churches among the pagans do as well" (16:3-4). 267 Once more, in 2 Timothy 4:19 we find: "Greetings ...
... nothing without Him. And 3. Op. cit., pp. 371-72: "...je re me suis jamais senti en meme temps plus plein de 'mon evangile', et plus integralement dependant, corps, ame et esprit, du Christ-Jesus. J'ai un sens a la fois doux et douloureux que je ne puis absolument rien sans Lui. Et simultanement je suis effraye de voir combien je l'apercois toujours plus loin et plus haut sur 1'axe (j'espere... super-natural: it impels the whole of creation along one and the same line, first towards the fullest development of consciousness, and later towards the highest holiness: in other words towards Christ Jesus, personal and cosmic." 46 Let us start with the astonishing phrase making the universe "as physical and as great as" Christ. It is the converse of the one we find in Intimate Letters:" ...
... 221-2 Char, Rene, 207 "Chanson des Etages", 206 Chattopadhyaya, Harindranath, 69n -The Strange Journey, 69n -"Blue Profound", 69n Chicago, 196n China, 133, 281 Christ, Jesus, 68, 107, 114, 116-18, 120, 122-4, 129, 240, 267 Christianity, 120, 125, 240, 244, 276 Coleridge, 84, 235 -Kubla Khan, 84 Commonwealth, 284, 290 Communism (Sovietic), 253 Confucius ...
... the Eucharistic rite: it merely carries on in a visible manner a process of universe-consecration that Christ as the World-Soul has always carried on. The antecedence of Christ-Omega to Christ Jesus is plain in several words of Teilhard. He has written: 7 "the supreme focus of unity is not only reflected in each element of consciousness it attracts, but also, in order to produce final unification ...
... mercy: when we were dead through our sins, he brought us to life with Christ - it is through grace that you have been saved - and raised us up with him and gave us a place with him in heaven, in Christ Jesus" (2:4-5). 64 The Jerusalem Bible's gloss 65 is very significant: "Here as in Colossians 2:12; 3:1-4 the use of the past tense shows that the resurrection and triumph of Christians in heaven is ...
... What is meant by Matthew in the more direct statement becomes seizable from two great announcements by Paul. Galatians 3:26-29 runs: "For ye are all the children of God by faith in Christ Jesus... There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ"... In Colossians 3:11 Paul adds another pair of categories - "Barbarian ...
... less substantial and distinct to me" (Letter of 8 January 1936). - "I have never felt myself so full of my 'gospel' and at the same time more wholly and entirely dependent, body, mind and soul, on Christ Jesus. I have a bitter-sweet feeling of being completely powerless without him. And at the same time I am terrified when I realize that my view of him is continually carrying him further and higher along ...
... formulated in human terms and can never express the total reality which transcends both word and thought. This applies to the second question which you raise about the second coming of Christ. Jesus expressed himself in regard to the second coming in terms of Jewish apocalyptic. This is essentially a symbolic mode of expressing a transcendent reality. The early Church certainly understood ...
... brother of Jesus who was called Christ, James by name, and some others" to be stoned as breakers of the law. If, as seems certain, Book XVIII did carry an account of Jesus, an originally hostile one which was later displaced, the mention in Book XX which is merely factual is very likely to be genuine. So a historian of the period can be taken to have mentioned "the phenomenon of Christ". ... "Chrestiani". There is no evidence of Christians before Jesus. The Mother's saying that what is known as Christmas was really "the festival of light" which had been observed before Christ does not mean that before the birth of Jesus it was already called "Christmas" and that therefore there must have been Christians before Jesus. The fact is simply that Christianity in 354 A.D. or a little earlier... many-faceted letter, expressing doubt about the historicity of Christ. I am surprised that my article in the Mother India of last December - "Augustus Caesar and the Birth of Jesus" - has revived your scepticism. It accepts the historicity of Christ as much as that of Augustus Caesar. And it would not have done so if Sri Aurobindo and the Mother had anywhere been uncertain. In that very issue you ...
... or moral qualities of Jesus". Secondly, whatever Jesus was - man or God or both -two thousand years ago is of no ultimate importance for Teilhard: "in a sense, the past does not interest me." Thirdly, the Jesus offered us by the first three Gospels is "irreplaceable" only as showing "the real, historical beginnings of Christ": he is not the full Christ and it is the full Christ, as revealed by Saint... Epiphany of Jesus. If you suppress the historical reality of Christ, the divine omnipresence which intoxicates us becomes, like all the other dreams of metaphysics, uncertain, vague, conventional -lacking the decisive experimental verification by which to impose itself on our minds, and without the moral directives to assimilate our lives into it... The mystical Christ, the universal Christ of St. Paul... before Christ's mystical Body was visualised, and has continued from the remote past into later ages independently of Christian mysticism. It bears no relation to "the historical reality of Christ" and "the Epiphany of Jesus". Even the Teilhardian emphasis on that reality and that Epiphany is played down by Teilhard's own pronouncements a little later in his book. Addressing Jesus he 6 says: ...
... (b) Christian : Christianity insists that Jesus is the anointed* descendant of King David. Through this and other signs from prophets of the Old Testament, Christianity declares Jesus to be the Messiah. In Greek, the word 'messiah' is 'christ' or the anointed one, so according to the faith of Christianity, Jesus becomes Jesus Christ. In the Gospels, Jesus refers to himself as 'the son of man' which... he was Jesus Christ. The Jewish belief that the coming of the Messiah still lies in the future is one of the major differences between the faith of Jews and Christians. The Christians believe that the Messiah came 2000 years ago in the person of Jesus. Although faith in the Messiah had been entirely Jewish, and still is to this day, the Christians claimed Jesus as the Messiah (Jesus Christ), but... a Passover meal, Jesus and his disciples ate only unleavened bread. It is this unleavened bread which became the bread of the Eucharist. — Messiah or Christ Christ is a Greek word and means Messiah. It was applied to Jesus even in the New Testament to show the faith of the early Christians in the unique meaning of his death and subsequent resurrection. That is, Jesus was the Messiah; ...
... Testament to describe the life and works of Jesus Christ as well as the contents of the Christian message. The coining of the Christ was considered the fulfilment of God's promise to mankind as foretold by the Prophets of the Old Testament; it is also viewed as the inauguration of anew epoch in the relation between God and man. The most relevant facts about Jesus Christ were preserved by oral tradition before... day, the influence of the message of Christ is to be found in the professed ideals of modern society such as humanitarianism and aspirations to liberty, equality and fraternity. These are the translations into the social and political sphere of the spiritual truth that Christ put forward to mankind. Such is the strength of the exceptional message of Jesus Christ that it has been the keystone of one... Introduction Jesus Christ's 1 personality is indescribable. One cannot but be deeply attracted to this enigmatic, gentle, yet powerful figure. In the past, questions were raised as to whether his life is not mainly a fiction, a legend constructed around a much lesser personality. But today there seems to be a consensus that Jesus not only existed, but that he was truly as ...
... Germany, was the result of a historic process which went back all the way to the life and death of Jesus Christ, and which was closely connected with Christianity. The attitude of Europe, where Christianity became the chief element of the culture, rested on the assumption that the Jews had refused to accept Christ as the Messiah and that they had killed him. This was written in the New Testament, revered... for granted that Jews killed Jesus, that the Romans were merely their reluctant agents, and that this implicates not only the perpetrators but (as Matthew insists) all their progeny in evil. Throughout the centuries, countless Christians listening to the gospels absorbed, along with the quite contrary sayings of Jesus, the association between the forces of evil and Jesus’ Jewish enemies. Whether illiterate... force behind Jesus’ crucifixion.” Pilate washed his hands, according to Matthew, to indicate his innocence of bloodshed, and at that moment “the Jewish leaders as well as ‘the whole nation’ acknowledged collective responsibility and invoked what turned out to be a curse upon themselves and their progeny: ‘His blood be upon us and upon our children!’’’. 543 Judas Iscariot, who betrayed Jesus to the Romans ...
... passages, descriptions and sayings of Jesus and Moses found in the Bible. For this reason, although the term "Christ" is explained, Jesus himself is only referred to as "Jesus" throughout the essay. The focus of this essay is God's Love for humanity as it is found in both the Old and New Testaments, and particularly as it is brought forth by the sacrifice of Jesus on the Cross, that is, the Crucifixion... The Crucifixion Editor 's Note All of the words of God and Jesus that are used in this essay are printed in italics. Furthermore, those sayings which have become famous and are used as proverbs are underlined. Certain words and expressions which deserve the reader's special attention, are explained either in the text or in the Notes. There are many versions... Bible. The one chosen for this essay employs modern English rather than older versions which use archaic spellings and grammar. The Bible is the only source of the events as well as words of both Jesus and Moses. Modern scholarship and archaeological research are making attempts to clarify as many points as possible. However, it is the Bible which has been the foundation of Judaic-Christian belief ...
... The meaning of the Resurrection The followers of Jesus were absolutely convinced that he had been raised from the dead and had been taken away into heaven as a proof of his identity as Jesus Christ, the Messiah. He was the crucified and then risen Lord. The Resurrection brings a different perspective to the understanding of Jesus. If anyone thought of him as only a prophet, as a messenger... priest's house. Peter followed at a distance. Jesus is accused of blasphemy by the high priest of the temple [Mat 26:57] Then those who had seized Jesus led him to Caiaphas, the high priest, where the scribes and the elders had gathered. [Mat 26:58] But Peter followed him at a distance, as far as Page 80 CHRIST ON THE MOUNT OP OLIVES, by Botticelli (1445-1510) ... priest stood up and said, "Have you no answer to make? What is it that these men testify against you?" [Mat 26:63] But Jesus was silent. And the high priest said to him, "I adjure you by the living God, tell us if you are the Christ, the Son of God." [Mat 26:64] Jesus said to him, "You have said so. But I tell you, hereafter you will see the Son of man seated at the right hand of Power, and ...
... ition, by which Jesus realises his Messianic mission: the divinity he had come on earth to manifest is now no longer latent but dynamic in his person. Spencer 2 refers to the'"Western text of Luke 1:22" where "the words are said to have been: 'Thou art my Son; this day I have begotten thee.'" The event suggested by this text was sometimes described in the early Church as "Christ's second nativity"... of Christ's Sonship common to the other Gospels, would we be mistaken in thinking of the Kingdom of God as within men no less than among them in those verses of Luke? It is what is within that shall be among - the outer life manifesting the inner God-principle which is one in all and therefore capable of effecting an outer corporate organised spiritual kingdom. If, behind the language of Jesus' teaching... Luke 18:16-17 - "But Jesus... said, Suffer little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God. Verily I say unto you, whosoever shall not receive the Kingdom of God as a little child shall in no wise enter therein." A particular inner attitude or state of receptivity, a happy harmonious within, appears to be implied as a prerequisite of the Christ-centred new world ...
... if you don't have a test to examine that hypothesis, it's not worth anything. We do not have a test for Jesus Christ." Yes, there is a distinct reservation here, but the full assent to the alleged correspondences in the Gospels is striking. It is worth looking into the popular pro-Christ claim. First, we must observe that there are four Gospels - Matthew's, Mark's, Luke's and John's. The first... described a wound in the side of Christ, and John should have been more clear about the nature of the burial cloth. But above all, any evangelist who knew the Shroud should have mentioned the marvellous preservation of the image of Jesus. Silence on this point is particularly startling in the Fourth Gospel which makes a point of describing the burial clothes left by Jesus in the tomb. (I for one do not... or nails. Only in John do we learn of nails when Jesus is said to appear before his disciples after his death and to show his wounds (20:25). John alone recounts of Jesus when he had died: "... one of the soldiers with a spear pierced his side and forthwith came there out blood and water" (19:34). This second detail is crucial in any comparison of Jesus with the man in the Shroud. So we may legitimately ...
... Caesar and the Birth of Christ Some Reflections on their Contemporaneity December 25, year 0 or else 1 (authorities differ on the point): this has been observed for centuries as the date of the birth of Jesus. The historical situation of it has been highlighted from two statements in the New Testament. The Gospel of Matthew (2:1) tells us that "Jesus was born in Judaea, in... his seat of government as well as his headquarters in Syria between 10 and 7 B.C. 1 So Jesus' birth may be dated to this interval with 7 B.C. as the latest possibility. This dating would synchronise it with Herod's reign on the one hand and "Cyrenius"'s governorship on the other. The paradox of being "before Christ" arises simply from our current confused calendar which was fixed in the sixth century... achievable and rendered a complex yet balanced modern psychology a predictable part of "things to come" by embodying to the nth degree one side of that synthesis at a critical time, a time when Jesus Christ embodied to the maximum the other side and might have tilted by his luminous extreme the fate of Europe in favour of an inward other-worldliness based on an outward primitivism. However ...
... second part of the passage. Then, "has drunk the bitter cup" is a direct echo of Christ's in the Bible in the symbolism that is obvious in his words. When Judas Iscariot helps the men of the Jewish Chief Priest to capture Jesus, his disciple Peter attacks the slave who nears his Master and cuts off his ear. Jesus tells Peter to put his sword in his sheath and asks Shall I not drink the cup... identification of the Wisdom Women with Christ, Brown shows the almost identical language with which they are described in the Wisdom Books of the Old Testament and St. John's Gospel respectively: Lady Wisdom existed with God from the beginning even before there was an earth (Proverbs,viii, 22-23; Sirach, xxiv, Wisdom, vi, 22; so also the Johannine Jesus who is the Word who was in the beginning(I... words of Jesus at the end of the passage and the Christian expression advent at the start lead us on to another aspect of our subject. Till now we have been stressing the identity of Word of the New Testament with the Wisdom of the Old Testament and both with the Supreme Mother and her Avatar in Savitri. It was pointed out even at the start that Savitri is also associated with the Christ-figure ...
... them at any time; (2) God is incarnate in Jesus Christ. His incarnation directly infuses divinity into the world of matter and, by virtue of Christ's resurrection after his death, it keeps a special intermediary divine presence at all places and at all times, a Holy Spirit constituting a mystical Body and unifying all believers, a Body whose nucleus is the Christ-appointed Church. This intermediary presence... for some revealing word to come from the mouth of Him who is." And this revealing word is what Teilhard calls the Universal Christ, the Cosmic Christ. The function of such a Christ is evidently different from whatever cosmic office Christianity has so far attributed to Jesus in extension of his nature as God-man. For, that office is inde- 1. The Divine Milieu, translated by Bernard Wall... writes: "He tried to show in our Lord Jesus Christ 'the synthesis of the created Universe and its Creator': did he not sometimes seem to establish this synthesis at a too accessible level and thus, in spite of the qualifications and corrections we have noted, and against his unmistakable intention, to some degree naturalize Christ?" The naturalisation of Christ to some degree is undeniable and cannot ...
... mission he was not responsible to anyone except Jesus and needed neither telling nor confirming of it by human beings? The Jerusalem Bible 10 translates Paul: "The fact is, brothers, and I want you to realise this, the Good News I preached is not a human message that I was given by men, it is something I learnt only through a revelation of Jesus Christ... God... called me through his grace and chose... adoration by the cosmos, new title of Lord. This hymn is concerned solely with the historical Christ in whose personality godhead and manhood are not divided..." 29 Elsewhere we are informed of Philippians 2:6-11: "...this poem is our chief proof that the early Church believed in the divine pre-existence of Jesus." 30 This "pre-existence" is something typical of Paul and the Evangelist John and the writer... similar low estimate of the relations between Jesus and his family is found in 3:21, 31-35. There Mark first tells us that 'his own' thought that Jesus was beside himself (or frenzied) and went out to seize him; then Mark tells us that Jesus' mother and brothers came and, standing outside the place where he was, sent in to call him. Apparently, Mark includes Jesus' mother among the 'his own' who thought ...
... is, in the Fourth Gospel, Jesus recognizes in himself and is recognized as the Page 31 Christ. Therefore, while Jesus urges his disciples to keep the Law, it could be said that Jesus sees the Law alone as being unable to regulate human action. John sees Jesus as fulfilling the Law, as its completion. Jesus goes beyond the letter of Law. The dialogue between Jesus and the Jews in John 7 ... gives special significance to his many references to the name of Jesus there: from "descended from David according to the flesh... Jesus Christ our Lord" in the first chapter, to "the preaching of Jesus Christ," which "is now disclosed and through the prophetic writings is made known to all nations" in the final sentence. Here Jesus is, as Paul says of himself elsewhere, "of the people of Israel..... SERMON ON THE MOUNT, by Gustave Dové The Crucifixion Introduction -Jesus and the Theme of Love II. —Jesus and the Theme of Love In his famous speech at St. Helena, Napoleon exclaimed: "I know men, and I tell you that Jesus Christ is not a man. Superficial minds see a resemblance between Christ, and the founders of empires and the gods of other religions. That resemblance ...
... sentence. First, however, Jesus was scourged or whipped and then was made to carry the horizontal part of the cross along the Via Dolorosa as the traditional path he trod to the site of the Crucifixion is called. That Jesus is God and died on the Cross to allow sinners to be saved is one of the most basic dogmas of the Christian religion. And thus Jesus becomes Jesus Christ. This is officially stated... this is possible as she is a virgin. And Gabriel tells her of the miraculous conception* of the child who is to become Jesus Christ, the Saviour of mankind. And the miracle is that the Holy Spirit, another name for God, has fathered the child. That is to say, the Father of Jesus Christ is God. This scene of the Angel appearing before the startled Mary is called the Annunciation and has been a favourite... Then Satan carried Jesus to the top of the temple in Jerusalem and advised him to jump, reassuring Jesus that God would catch him and prevent him from being hurt. To which Jesus replied, "You shall not tempt your Lord, your God." Finally, Satan takes Jesus to a place where he can see all the nations, and tempts Jesus once more. Satan promises that Jesus would become the ruler of ...
... Whatever happens thereafter is not part of Christ's schema , therefore! Thus, another myth is laid to rest. What engages Sethna at length is the examination of the dogma regarding the resuscitation of the crucified body as distinct from the resurrection of Jesus in a different form. The extreme physicality Luke and John attribute to the appearance of Jesus after the burial is suspect. Paul does... does not support it despite having spent time with Peter and James the brother of Jesus and referring to six contemporary instances of Jesus' appearance. The NT stresses that his form was different and disciples could not recognise him till he announced himself. Paul says, "Even if we did once know Christ in flesh, that is not how we know him now... there is a new creation; the old creation has gone... raised regarding the historicity of Christ are taken up by Sethna and shown to be without foundation. For Ramakrishnaites, however, a stumbling block remains in the dream Swami Vivekananda recounts having seen near Crete while travelling back from Almora: one of the Therapeutae of Crete appeared to say that their teachings had been propagated mistakenly as those of Jesus who never existed. Even Eusebius ...
... humanity. To St. Paul the birth of Jesus was like that of any other man. But, even granting that there is scriptural authority for something extraordinary happening to Mary's body, how can it be compared to that of the resurrected Christ when Griffiths compares it also to those of "other saints and Yogis"? Has any saint or Yogi obtained a body comparable to "the body of Christ, which is no longer limited... 15:52) — a sheer sudden miracle with merely a faith in Jesus and an ordinary religious piety as its antecedent or its conditio sine qua non. Thirdly, the Resurrection is promised solely at the end of time. No one doing the Christian Yoga gained or even hoped to gain by his inner development a body such as is attributed to the risen Christ. I don't understand what Griffiths means in his book (p... taken place in Jesus, why did they not ever give a hint of it? It should be clear to us that there were radical differences between the Aurobindonian transformation and what the Resurrection of Jesus could be. First of all, Jesus died before he was "raised". Neither Sri Aurobindo nor the Mother thought of a post-mortem transformation. Secondly, the Resurrection, whether in Jesus or in his followers ...
... of a Seraph, with six wings... He who appeared to me then was not an angel but was my Lord Jesus Christ in the form of a Seraph..." 17 In poetic vision too a Christ with wings has occurred. Vaughan, a part contemporary of Milton and a near predecessor of Blake, has a poem, That Night, addressed to Jesus and 16.XII: 3-4. 17. The Little Flowers of St. Francis, translated from the original... Ascension of Jesus, picturing Jesus' passage through several levels and having towards the end of the composition the lines: But thou, with spreading wings, Broke through the azure dome And rested in the spheres Of pure Intelligence. 23 Even on a deeper level - the level of fundamental doctrine -the wingedness of Christ in one particular sense can be argued for. Christ in his own... we not trace this relationship in the doctrine that distinguishes Christ as the Son from God as the Father - the doctrine in which Christ is the Second Person of the Trinity and God the First? Although essentially one, may not the two Persons have a difference of degree in practical functioning? Do not the words of the incarnate Jesus of the Bible imply the essential unity and yet this difference again ...
... the cosmic Christ was necessarily a consequence and extension of the historic Jesus rather than the historic Jesus being a concentrated manifestation of the cosmic Christ. As might be expected of so complex and tension-fraught a thinker, Teilhard himself comes to our help here. Piet Smul-ders, 4 a fellow-Jesuit, notes a "typical exaggeration" on Teilhard's part: "the primacy of Christ over the whole... has had to 'materialize' itself in the form of an element of consciousness (the Christic, historical 'I'). In order to act effectively, the Centre of centres reflected itself on the world in the form of a centre (Jesus Christ)." Obviously, if the cosmic Christ is Omega, he must precede and prepare the appearance of Jesus. What that appearance, with its life and death and resurrection and "glorified... modern evolutionism is accepted, it is impossible for his cosmic Christ to figure in whatever St. Paul or contemporary religion posits in non-scientific terms. By insisting on evolutionism, Teilhard makes himself irrevocably unorthodox. As for the historic Jesus in this context, his being subsequent and subordinate to the cosmic Christ cannot be denied the moment we correctly grasp Teilhard's ide ...
... described as a growing into the likeness of the Lord. His true self, his own image is implanted within us; he is there in the profoundest depth of our being as Jesus, our beloved and our soul rests in him in utmost bliss. We are aware neither of Jesus nor of his spouse, our soul, because of the obsession of the flesh, the turmoil raised by the senses, the blindness of pride and egoism. All that constitutes... meaning of Christian charity, forgetfulness of self. "What is sin but a wanting and a forbearing of God." And the whole task, the discipline consists in "the shaping of Christ in you, the casting of sin through Christ." Who then is Christ, what is he? Page 116 This knowledge you get as you advance from your sense-bound perception towards the inner and inmost seeing. As your outer nature gets... deepest layer of the being, one stands face to face to one's soul, the very image of God, the perfect God-man, the Christ within. That is the third degree of our inner ascension, the entry into the deepest, purest and happiest state – in which one becomes what he truly is; one finds the Christ there and dwells in love and union with him. But there is still a further step to take, and that is real ascension ...
... Page 42 the Bible to mention Jesus, does so at one place - which is adjudged authentic and not an interpolation 7 - by way of mentioning "James... the brother of Jesus who was called Christ" ( Antiquities, XX.9,1). Could Paul and Josephus no less than Mark, Matthew, Luke and John mean half-brothers or cousins of Jesus? A wife of Joseph before Mary and, by that wife,... wrong. Jude begins his Epistle: "Jude the servant of Jesus Christ, and brother of James..." If this "James" is the same as Paul's "brother of the Lord", why does Jude not call himself correctly yet humbly "the brother and servant of Jesus Christ"? Why bring James in? Again, out of the several James's of the New Testament, who is this James? We know of three persons separately mentioned but bearing the... from Paul. More than one analogy is to hand. A sequence is projected as a certainty when Paul spoke of Jesus: "Who is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation..." (Colossians 1:15). Again, Paul, in the course of hailing Christ's universal primacy, tells us with the resurrected Christ in view as our fore-runner: "...he is the head of the body, the church: who is the beginning, the firstborn ...
... from Occidental occultism to Eastern mysticism to the teachings of Jesus Christ … Also included were a German translation of Stanley Jones’s 1931 best seller, The Christ of the Mount; and a 500-page work on the life and teachings of Jesus, published in 1935 under the title The Son: The Evangelical Sources and Pronouncements of Jesus of Nazareth in Their Original Form and With the Jewish Influences... not meant for recruitment pure and simple, it was not cold calculation. The propaganda made by Goebbels, Hess, Streicher and Strasser expresses what Hitler believed of himself. Hitler really saw Jesus Christ as his precursor,” writes Peter Orzechowski. And he quotes Hitler’s words from a speech made during the high tide of Nazism: “Today, my German Volk, I ask from you: come and stand with your faith... “The model for Adolf Hitler is Christ”, 765 and John Toland asserts that “National Socialism was a religion and Hitler was its Christ.” 766 This is much more than a simile. Hitler took his role of saviour “with the utmost seriousness”, writes Joachim Fest, and attached a special significance to the fact that he had begun his public life at the age of thirty, as Christ had done. “We are admittedly small ...
... 15:52) - a sheer sudden miracle with merely a faith in Jesus and an ordinary religious piety as its antecedent or its conditio sine qua non. Thirdly, the Resurrection is promised solely at the end of time. No one doing the Christian Yoga gained or even hoped to gain by his inner development a body such as is attributed to the risen Christ. I don't understand what Griffiths means in his book... are invariably associated everywhere else in the Bible with natural humanity. To him the birth of Jesus was like that of any other man. But, even granting that there is scriptural authority for something extraordinary happening to Mary's body, how can it be compared to that of the resurrected Christ when Griffiths compares it also to those of "other saints and Yogis"? Has any saint or Yogi obtained... bodies and hoping to achieve in those of their followers what had taken place in Jesus, why did they not ever give a hint of it? It should be clear to us that Page 3 there were radical differences between the Aurobindonian transformation and what the Resurrection of Jesus could be. First of all, Jesus died before he was "raised". Neither Sri Aurobindo nor the Mother thought of ...
... Marcion's one-sided emphasis on Paul. "We are uncertain when Acts, a history of the works of Jesus' disciples, was put on a plane with the Gospels, an account of Jesus himself; but such an evaluation shows a mature understanding of the role of the Church in continuing the role of Christ. There is every evidence that Acts was accepted as canonical from 200 A.D. on." We may sum up... tries to assure [the Roman Governor] Felix that even if he is a member of the sect of the Nazoreans [= followers of Jesus of Nazareth], this is still in line with all that the Pharisees [= members of Paul's original sect] hold most dear.... He is at pains to show that his allegiance to Christ is not arbitrary, but the logical outcome of Pharisaism. I worship the God of our fathers: Lit., 'the paternal... parallel between the Gospel and Acts, but we also find that Acts continues where the Gospel leaves off. In Lk Jesus never preaches immediately to Gentiles, nor is the kingdom fully established with Jesus. The Kingdom must include the Gentiles, but this universal scope is realized only after Jesus' ascension, in the ministry of the Church, as described by Acts. Luke repeatedly reminds its readers that the ...
... wilderness Jesus is therefore brought, though presently Satan begins "another method", bears Jesus through the air to Jerusalem and sets him on the "highest pinnacle" and challenges him either to stand or cast himself down. Jesus resists even this subtle temptation, and, So, strook with dread and anguish, fell the Fiend. 132 Gautama Siddharta's and Jesus Christ's successful... space and a movement in time; and it is the struggle between Light and Darkness for "the soul of the world called Satyavan". In the Buddha story and the Jesus story, there is a struggle, but the Buddha and Jesus are alike passive, and aim only at preserving the purity and calm of their inner paradise against the onslaughts of Mara and Satan respectively. In Savitri, the inner... tempt the Master. But Buddha heeded not, Sitting serene, with perfect virtue walled As is a stronghold by its gates and ramps... 129 Page 332 Jesus too is likewise tempted in the wilderness after his forty days of fasting; the story of the temptation is detailed both by Matthew and Luke, 130 and elaborated into epic proportions by Milton in ...
... expanded, "all the universal Family" is "One Man" - "Jesus the Christ" - beheld by the Eternals, we realise that it is Christ who is described in The Eternal Great Humanity Divine surrounded by His Cherubim & Seraphim in ever happy Eternity. 59 There are also the words: "Jesus / The Eternal" 60 and "the Divine Lamb, even Jesus, who is the Divine Vision" 61 and 56. Ibid... universal Family, and that One Man "We call Jesus the Christ; and he in us, and we in him "Live in perfect harmony in Eden, the land of life, "Giving, receiving, and forgiving each other's trespasses." 55 In this last passage we have not only Blake's insight into Supernature summed up but also the heart of his intuition of Christ. Christ is to him not simply a marvellous spiritual... lines not only associating Christ with a supernatural carnivore but also suggesting a merger of the two, a sort of Tyger-Christ, a Divine Beast of Prey. In The Everlasting Gospel (c. 1818) we read how Jesus is a fury of fire and how his voice is loud as thunder when he defies Satan and refuses to worship him: Thunders & lightnings broke around, And Jesus' voice in thunders' sound: ...
... e to the Cosmic Christ whom he saw taking shape from the Resurrection of Jesus - a stepping-stone he 20.Ibid., p. 368. 21.Ibid., p. 369. 22.Ibid. Page 142 practically ignored in his worship once he had arrived at that universal divinity. Further, as the Cosmic Christ is but the Principle of Evolution apotheosised, the name "Christ" marks no more than... implies that the human Jesus, though necessary for the World-Soul to be named Christ, does not draw Teilhard's adoration at all. And this exclusion is quite pointedly prepared a little earlier when, while appreciating "the real historical beginning of Christ (with a practical code of moral comparison with Him)" presented by "the first three Gospels", he 48 declares: "If Jesus were no more than 'a... is only the next desideratum. And it is wanted because it supplies a God-Man. Not this religion especially but any that provides a God-Man will serve. A Christ of one kind or another is indispensable - not necessarily the Christ we know of as Jesus of Nazareth. Such, logically, is the sense of the adjective "some" which the Concise Oxford Dictionary 10 defines as: "Particular but unknown or u ...
... qualified sense of Jesus' aspiring can be read in Paradise Lost in a general Christian fashion will not go against the grain of Blake's concept of Jesus. To him, as Miss Raine urges, "Jesus is God", and yet this "God" can say: "I am doing my Father's business" 2 and Blake can write of "the kingdoms of God & his Christ". 3 From the subtlety of the aspiring by Jesus we can derive... situation and exist only as its symbolic form. So with other symbols. I don't accept what you write about Jesus "aspiring" to the Father. This may be Milton's view of Jesus (though to me you have not proved it) but it is certainly not Blake's, for whom Jesus is the Imagination of God in man. "Jesus is God." As to seizing, it may not necessarily be a "theft" but it is certainly a "taking possession" of... hardly be Jesus the Imagination, the Logos, God the Son, a genuine facet of the Supreme Divinity, whom it would be an error to dub demiurgic in any definite sense or to look upon as at all ambiguous, leave aside evil. To introduce Jesus into The Tyger in whatever manner and even go so far as to say, as Miss Raine did to Sir Geoffrey (January 21, 1961) at her first contact with my central Jesus-thesis: ...
... be plain that there could be no real condemnation of universal sin in a body of Jesus' self-sacrifice unless the body he had taken were built in the same way as all "sinful flesh", even though he himself committed no sin. This posture of salvific action is underlined in the note preceding the one we have quoted: "Christ alone, who by his death destroyed our unspiritual nature (lit. 'flesh') in his own... 'flesh' was. Man formerly carnal is now, through union with Christ, spiritual." 22 The identical posture is brought home to us in 2 Corinthians 5:2: "For our sake God made the sinless one into sin, so that in him we might become the goodness of God." 23 At the word "sin" we are sent to the note: "By a kind of legal fiction God identified Jesus with sin so that he might bear the curse incurred by sin... To be precise, however, Paul is speaking about the reality of Jesus' birth, not about the manner of his conception. The phrase 'born of a woman' is meant to stress what Jesus shared with those whom he redeemed, precisely because it was applicable to everyone who walks this earth. It no more supports the virginal conception of Jesus than the figurative phrase 'born of the seed of David' in Romans ...
... their triumph—seeking, mournful, marred, Through angry mobs the blind cold spikes of death! O poet Jesus, love was your sole law; Yet such strange love that Magdalen's matchless grace Burned not so keen in your celestial thought As the intractable heart of man you saw Her wondrous worshipping mouth, yet gave your face To the hollow kiss of the Iscariot! Page 28 ... The Secret Splendour (From the French of Henri Malteste) To Christ gave Magdalen her exquisite soul. Was it to God surrendered? Who can guess The secret balsam soothing her distress, The mystic urge that made his feet her goal?— Unearthly feet touched by impassioned breath And soft hair odorous with spikenard, Losing their ...
... But what about Jesus Christ? Although they had been “badly baptized”, the Germans considered themselves a Christian nation, in a way the only real Christians, as proclaimed to the world by Martin Luther. Was Christ, the founder of their faith, not a Jew? Chamberlain contended that he was not. At the time Christ walked upon the earth Galilee was inhabited by non-Jewish tribes. Christ had “a large ... Christians than other peoples”. Hitler too believed that Christ was not a Jew. “Christ was an Aryan”, he said in one of his monologues, “but Paul abused his teaching to mobilize the dark forces and to organize a proto-Bolshevism”. 445 How far speculations of this sort can be spun out is shown by the following quotation from The German Christ, a book by Max Brewer, published in 1907 . “It is known... Germany. In any case, shortly before the birth of Christ German blood had again been instrumental in Galilee. Everything Christ says about reincarnation seems to be inspired by the bodily reincarnated blood.” 446 Alfred Rosenberg (1893-1946), the German Balt who had fled the conflagration of the Russian Revolution and been introduced to Hitler by Dietrich Eckart, was another admirer of Houston Chamberlain ...
... everyone agrees) could only have happened between Heaven and an Earth which was prepared , socially, politically and psychologically, to receive Jesus," There is also the categorical statement: 7 "The truth is that the Kingdom of Christ, to which our allegiance is sworn, cannot be established...except upon an earth that has been taken, along the roads of technology and thought, to the... culminate in the realisation of Omega Point, in the unfolding of a Divine Plenitude. This vision alone rendered convincing and credible the Christ of the Parousia, the universal Christie expansion which he had religiously derived from his acceptance of the historical Jesus as a God-Man and which had served as an inspiring idea to his search for the implications of evolutionary physics but which would have... view, locate and recognise the plenitude of Christ. For in no other type of cosmos, and in no other place, can any being, no matter how divine he be , carry out the function of universal consolidation and universal animation which Christian dogma attributes to Christ." A footnote to the end of the passage goes: "In other words, Christ needs to find a world-peak for his consummation ...
... Cosmic Christ is bound to be a divine name for the profoundest significance of that "within". In correspondence with panpsychism, the Cosmic Christ must represent pantheism, even if for the direct beginning of his most outer manifestation he has to wait until his birth as Jesus and his subsequent resurrection. Perhaps there will be an attempt to avoid this consequence by saying: "Christ is Omega... individual fact. It receives its culminating expression in the prayer of Jesus in Chapter 17. Jesus prays that all who follow him may share his union with God - that all may be one, as a living and interpenetrating unity of souls, 'even as Thou, Father, art in me and I in Thee, that they also may be one in us'. The divine destiny which Christ has attained, the divine glory which belongs to him in his perfect... sense: for if in the last resort Christians become 'one with God' this unity is achieved not by way of 1. Science and Christ, p. 128. . 2. Ibid., p. 136. 3. Ibid,, p. 122. 4.I bid., p. 124. 5. Ibid., p. 171. 6."Christ in the World of Matter", Hymn of the Universe, p. 53. Page 41 identification, God becoming all things, but ...
... I feel that Somerville will concur with me here since he writes that he agrees with those who "regard the Christ-event as extending beyond the life and death of the Man, Jesus". In explicit language what is meant is that, as Somerville admits, all this "makes the search for the historical Jesus pretty difficult". Thus what he calls "the material contained in the gospels", including the Sermon on the... have come away ignorant of it if it was a part of their Christianity. Directly from Peter and James he must have heard of the "appearance" of Jesus to them and to the apostles. From it as well as from an "appearance" of Jesus to him he derived the belief in Jesus' resurrection. It is impossible to think that if Peter and James believed in the virginal conception Paul could have been unaware of the doctrine... Paul's ignorance here is actually his negative knowledge: no more than what he offers us about Jesus can be taken as essentially correct. His Epistles are the nearest in time to the life and death of the Man, Jesus, and they were in touch with the information to be gleaned from those who had known Jesus the Man. Apart from Paul there really is darkness, no matter how fascinatingly filled with stories ...
... reminding us of Christ with their references to Gethsemane and Calvary, bleeding brow, crucifixion, two thieves and the last words "It is finished." We both saw that if the verse immediately following these lines - Hewn, quartered on the scaffold as he falls - had not been there we would have had a consistent picture reminiscent of the final act in the life of Jesus. May I now... your highly original idea of what must have been really the last words of Jesus on the Cross, nameiy, "I, I am God" - as caught by Sri Aurobindo's vast vision - the aspect of generality which I have presented would not nullify it but lead to it indirectly. For, what Sri Aurobindo says about all Saviours must apply to Christ. There is even a special touch here, however generalised, in regard to him... leads on to another immediately after it in which, as I have said, the Christ-aspect is not forgotten: His crucified voice proclaims, "I", I am God." But "crucified" here is metaphorical while still keeping a link with the Christ-reminiscence. Looked at thus, the entire passage starting with the Christ-aspect and ending with this reminiscence and bringing in the middle the ...
... I am crucified ! Why did the Mother utter these words ? What was Her sorrow? What was Her pain? It was but natural to think of Jesus Christ. He had to bear so much suffering and persecution and in the end he was put on the cross. The Mother told us that Jesus Christ had come down to bring Light and Love to humanity on the earth. But man’s ingratitude was such that man crucified him. But it was for ...
... 47,48, 104 Page 272 Jeffrey, 42 Jerusalem, 65,75,151,155,193,248 Jerusalem, Emanative, 1,53,55,244, 245,246,247,248,251,262 Jesus, Jesus the Imagination, 262,265, 266 Jesus of the Bible, 51-52 Job, 47 John o' London's Weekly, 141 fn. 8 John the Baptist, 108 Jung, 4,141,142,146 Kazin, Alfred, 22 Kelley, Maurice,... Dr. Ferdauz N . , vii Cat Jeffery, 42 Cave of the Nymphs , 134 chain, 36, 68, 123-4 Cherub, 105 Cherubim , 48, 105, 225 "Cherub Cat", 42 Christ, 33, 40, 43, 5 1 , 61, 64, 66, 68, 92- 1 10, 1 5 1 -53, 247. 261 "Christ the tiger", 4 1 , 42, 256 Christian Doctrine , 102 Christology , 40, 69 "climb", 150, 157 Coleridge, 5, 127 Colossians , 102, 231 fn. 309 "... 46 Little Flowers of St. Francis, The, 48 fn. 17 Little Girl Found, A, 134 Little Girl Lost, A, 133,239 "Living Creatures", 4 Logos, 43 Locke,249 Los, Los(-Christ), 4,28,141,142,172, 208-23,225,231,233,242,243,244, 252,257 Lowe, J. Livingstone, 126 Lucifer, 40,47,48, 59,104,181-82 Luvah, 4,141,142,177,178,180,189, 236 Lyca, 134-36 ...
... Eastern Path, each of them claiming to be the only, the original, the undefiled doctrine of the Buddha. The same fate overtook the teaching of the Christ; that too came to be made in the same way into a set and organised religion. It is often said that, if Jesus came back, he would not be able to recognise what he taught in the forms that have been imposed on it, and if Buddha were to come back and see... some Power, and under the influence of education and tradition calls it Buddha or Christ or by any other familiar name. It is difficult to affirm that it was Buddha himself or the very Christ with whom there was the contact, but none can assert either that the inspiration did not come from that which inspired the Christ or the Buddha. These human vessels may very well have received the inspiration from... that Great One." I knew one who affirmed that he was both Christ and Buddha! He had received something, had experienced a truth, had seen the Divine Presence in himself and in others. But the experience was too strong for him, the truth too great. He became half crazy and the next day went out into the streets, proclaiming that in him Christ and Buddha had become one. One Divine Consciousness is ...
... by the forms. The Indians believe (or have the experience) that the Divine lives in the human being. The Europeans don't believe it. For them, he is somewhere above. He has incarnated only in Jesus Christ. So they don't bow down to any human person. But if one bows down to a person who has embodied the Divine Consciousness―of course with faith―then that person can more easily transmit his consciousness ...
... prophetis, novissime diebus istis locutus est nobis in Filio" (several times and in several ways God has spoken through the prophets, but now in these last days he has spoken to us through his Son Jesus Christ...). Thus God has spoken "in several ways." Page 103 I know that a new light has just appeared, a new Consciousness—let us go in search of it. But we shall have to step down from our... centuries we have used the weapon of heresy, and we know the atrocities that were committed in the name of Christ: that was our defense—it was his wisdom to keep power But if Christ suddenly appeared here, in front of us, do you think he would recognize himself in us? Is the Christ we preach the Christ of the BEATITUDES? Our preoccupation is to prohibit opening. And we make fools of ourselves with the pill... has spoken of the SUPRAMENTAL, Page 102 but the word, the form or terms matter little.'(There I quoted you again.) 'If only Christianity could admit, for instance, Christ's reincarnation, or a second, FUTURE Christ, it would be saved, its attitude would be open instead of being closed. That is the crux of the whole matter, and beating about the bush, carrying out all kinds of reform and ...
... Divine Body of the Lord Jesus, blessed forever 60 - Jesus whom in this very poem he Miltonically calls "the image of the Invisible God" 61 and elsewhere 62 distinguishes as "all Virtue" because, in the sense of a supreme spontaneity, he "acted from impulse, not rules". But if to Blake his own Satan is Milton's Messiah how can The Tyger's "he" be the Miltonic Christ? Here comes the second... Almighty Father's light. And that Blake's sense of Christ was not in general without a Miltonic affinity is evident from not only the phrase already quoted from his Milton but also his line in Jerusalem on Jesus: ...the Eternal Vision, the Divine Similitude... 97 Also, just as the epithet "eternal" is here used by Blake for Christ, the epithet "immortal" is present in Milton about... though from Paradise Regained and not Paradise Lost. This suggestion would fuse the aspiring Satan and the aspiring Nimrod with Christ, "Son both of God and Man". The scene is in Jerusalem, and Satan is the speaker. After telling Jesus that he among the rest has heard Jesus pronounced by a voice from Heaven "the Son of God belov'd" at the ford of Jordan where people had flocked to John the Baptist, ...
... suffering he must assume and use so as to show, first, how that suffering may be a means of redemption,—as did Christ,—secondly, to show how, having been assumed by the divine soul in the human nature, it can also be overcome in the same nature,—as did Buddha. The rationalist who would have cried to Christ, "If thou art the Son of God, come down from the cross," or points out sagely that the Avatar was not... upon earth, in the mortal body; the Holy Spirit, pure Self, Brahmic consciousness is that which makes them one and that also in which they communicate; for we hear of the Holy Spirit descending upon Jesus and it is the same descent which brings down the powers of the higher consciousness into the simple humanity of the Apostles. But also the higher divine consciousness of the Purushottama may itself... the Buddhist legend the name of the mother of Buddha makes the symbolism clear; in the Christian the symbol seems to have been attached by a familiar mythopoeic process to the actual human mother of Jesus of Nazareth. ...
... possible for the human creature to open to the urgency of the new beauty and offer his surrender. It was not easy to prepate the Feast. I had to bear the full load of the cross and ascend the calvary. Jesus as he mounted to his destiny with the Cross on his back stumbled often and fell and rose again with bruised limbs to begin again the arduous journey. Even so, this being too had to go through many ... and straight going, but a tortuous and dangerous ascent. But at the end of the tunnel there is always the light. The calvary and the crucifixion culminated in the Resurrection: the divine Passion of Christ flowered into this supreme Recompense. Here too after all the dark and adverse vicissitudes lies the fulfilment of transformation. One must pass through the entire valley of death and rise to the topmost ...
... or only the words of Jesus, as Houston Stewart Chamberlain prefers: all that is nothing but the same Jewish swindle. It is all the same and it does not set us free. A German Church, a German Christianity is rubbish. One is either Christian or German. One cannot be both. You may eliminate the epileptic Paul from Christianity. Others have done so before us. You may turn Jesus into a noble human being... as shown so convincingly in the course of history, does one not have the right to apply to the Germans the words of Christ that other people [than the Jews] will once occupy a chosen position? All the rich fruits which the Christian spirit has borne among the Germans show that Christ’s heart itself is German, that it contains the sap of their sap, the blood of their blood.” 497 “We must declare ourselves... direction of a deepened religion without dogmas, and that the coming period will produce the people needed for this purpose”, he wrote. 495 What the youth wanted was “the God in one’s own heart”, “Christ in us”. “The human being obtains its own salvation: this is the new religion”, Diederichs wrote. It was only natural that they turned towards Meister Eckhart (c 1260-1328), the great German mystic ...
... not unmistakable history. Don't you know that the "resurrection" of Jesus is still a controversial topic among biblical scholars? We need not dispute what are called his "appearances" after death, but St. Paul, the earliest writer in the New Testament and the only writer affirming first-hand experience of the "raised" or "risen" Jesus, has drawn so sharp a contrast between what he terms the "physical... "physical body" and the "spiritual body" of the "resurrection", that a critical student may well ask: "Can the sudden appearance of Jesus in the midst of closed doors which two out of the four later-written Gospels report on hearsay be attributed, as these Gospels claim, to his physical body?" An occult phenomenon may strike one as the most likely event, a powerful materialisation of a non-physical form after... after death for a short time. Page 220 What is said about Apollonius of Tyana dates to over a hundred years after his death, even a longer period than that between the crucifixion of Jesus and the composition of the Gospels ascribed to Luke and John, and thus has no historical force. I don't know what to say about Trailanga Swami, but the report about him could be on a par with several ...
... the human creature to open to the urgency of the new beauty and offer his surrender. It was not easy to prepare the Feast. I had to bear the full load of the cross and ascend the calvary. Jesus as he mounted to his destiny with the Cross on his back stumbled often and fell and rose again with bruised limbs to begin again the arduous journey. Even so, this being too had to go through many... straight going, but a tortuous and dangerous ascent. But at the end of the tunnel there is always the light. The calvary and the crucifixion culminated in the Resurrection: the divine Passion of Christ flowered into this supreme Recompense. Here too after all the dark and adverse vicissitudes lies the fulfilment of transformation. One must pass through the entire valley of death and rise to the ...
... It is because Christ was 'inoculated' in matter that he can no longer be dissociated from the growth of Spirit... It is philosophically sound to ask of each element whether its roots do not extend into the furthest limits of the past. We have much better reason to accord to Christ this mysterious pre-existence... The endless aeons that preceded the first Christmas are not empty of Christ, but impregnated... The Vedantic Vision, the Historical Christ and Soul-Evolution Thus the ancient Vedantic vision is inclusive of all possible aspects of divinity and can harmonise the diverse currents of thought running through Teilhard's philosophy. Even the idea of the Incarnation the historical Christ-figure, can be a part of it; for the Avatar stands out in the Bhagavad... p, 48. Page 88 colourless, but living and luminous, an Infinite that knows and attracts." Yes, in diverse ways Teilhard's Christ affines himself to the Gita's Krishna. But the background of this Christ is a static universe which Teilhard's evolutionary vision has to struggle against and at times the victories of that vision are pyrrhic: the old background refuses ...
... December; then the sun again mounts to the north. Mother comments: That is why the 25th of December was a festival of Light long before Jesus Christ. This festival was in vogue long before Christianity; it originated in Egypt and very probably the birthday of Christ was fixed on the same day as that of the return of the Light. Then Mother reads the first part of her article "Energy Inexhaustible" ...
... to be associated with this volume of tributes to K.D. Sethna. Sethna has written on almost all topics under the sun. History, Archaeology, Old Testament Studies, Egyptology, the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, Science, Poetry, Aesthetics and last but not the least, facets of Sri Aurobindo's life and works. The clear ray of his luminous intelligence shed light on all of these subjects. However, the favourite ...
... taken to be those of Jesus..." But stanzas 1 and 2 are obviously built on the same plan, implying two figures -except that in the second stanza Jesus ('the Countenance Divine') comes in the two opening lines whereas in the first 'the holy Lamb of God" comes in the two closing ones. A pair of persons is apparently present in both. According to the "universal" reading, Jesus is twice mentioned in... that for Blake heaven and hell, good and evil, the 'contraries', must be married in 'Jesus, the Imagination'. I find myself reflecting on the 'wrath-fires' of the Father, as the matrix of creation (Boehme) as surely depicted in the Milton diagram of the Four Worlds with these fires without; in this scheme Jesus, the Son, is the principle of Light, whose origin is in the fires but whose nature... nature is different -mild and gentle. The 'fires' of creation are 'humanized' only in Jesus, and is not the Tyger one of the 'dehumanized' denizens of the Forests? But you may well be right, that fire is Urizen's enemy, and Los, who 'kept the divine vision' is the Smith who dared 'seize the fire' - the agent of Jesus the Imagination. I am bound to admit that I did not give enough Page 269 ...
... but the ordinary processes of their thought and action. It is by the use of the siddhis that the Siddhas sitting on the mountains help the world out of the heart of their solitude and silence. Jesus Christ made the use of the siddhis a prominent feature of his pure, noble and spiritual life, nor did he hesitate to communicate them to his disciples—the laying of hands, the healing of the sick, the ...
... Then I looked, wondering, "And what was Christ's path?"... Basically, he always said, "Love thy neighbor," in other words brotherhood (but that's a modern translation). For him, the idea was compassion, charity (the Christians say it's the "law of Love," Page 100 but we're not yet there—that will come much later). So I wrote: Jesus preached Compassion.... Then I thought: now ...
... said: "If it were not my own picture, I would call it "A Study for the Head of Christ'." "Yes, " she replied. She continued to gaze and remarked: "Very interesting." Then I asked her: "Why do you say that?" She explained: "there is an element of acting and pretending. I should like to ask you why you were playing Christ. It is different from your present state. At that time you were trying to look... visit, the hair became normal and the chin had no hirsute appendage at all. But some fundamental affinity with the Early Christians and with Augustine among the slightly later followers of Jesus lingered. In 1950 my wife Sehra's sister Mina received the initial fire-touch of Sri Aurobindo. When Sri Aurobindo passed away at the beginning of December that year she was startled into the awareness... harbouring the Augustinian struggle towards the Divine. There was no draw towards the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob as revived in the Vatican's Father in Heaven, no draw even towards the figure of Jesus. What was common to Augustine and Amal was a complex questioning intellectuality, an imagination on fire with the world's varied colourfulness, a passionate heart wide in its sympathy but acute in ...
... the keystone of a society that was everything Christ had denounced? Jesus died on the cross, for the benefit, it would seem, of those who united to slay him, the Sadducee, atheist & high priest, the Pharisee, zealot, hypocrite & persecutor and the brutal, self-seeking, callous military Roman. Now in its last state, after such a lamentable career, Christ's truth stands finally rejected by the world's... truth that was his message? As Christ himself foresaw, it has never been understood even by its professors. For five hundred years it was a glorious mirage for which thousands of men and women willingly underwent imprisonment, torture and death in order that Christ's kingdom might come on earth & felicity possess the nations. But the kingdom that came was not Christ's; it was Constantine's, it was ... Sat What is Truth? said Pilate confronted with a mighty messenger of the truth, not jesting surely, not in a spirit of shallow lightness, but turning away from the Christ with the impatience of the disillusioned soul for those who still use high words that have lost their meaning and believe in great ideals which the test of the event has proved to be fallacious. What ...
... into Bengali or Hindustani and presented to an educated Pundit who had studied both at Calcutta & at Nuddea or Benares. What would he make of them? It will be as well to take a concrete instance. Jesus Christ was a great thinker, a man who had caught, apparently by his unaided power, though this is not certain, something of the divine knowledge, but the writers who recorded his sayings were for the most... they imagined that he was setting up an individual claim to be God; hence the extraordinary legend of the Virgin Mary & all that followed from it. Well, we all know the story of the Last Supper and Jesus' marvellously pregnant utterance as he broke the bread and gave of the wine to his disciples "This is my body and this is my blood" and the remarkable rite of the Eucharist and the doctrine of Tran... Protestant. "Only a vivid Oriental metaphor and nothing more." If so, it was certainly an "unmeaning, artificial and silly" metaphor, nay, "even a hideous and repellent" one. But I prefer to believe that Jesus' words had always a meaning & generally a true & beautiful one. On the other hand the Transubstantiation doctrine is one which the Catholics Page 165 themselves do not understand, it is ...
... not been available for a long time. But the broad outlines were not in doubt. 1. Indian civilization was the dominant civilization of the world for a long time before the birth of Jesus Christ, the same as the modern Western civilization has been since the last two-three centuries; Page 398 2. India's presence world-wide could be seen in the language ...
... secondary importance. Such controversies as the one that has raged in Europe over the historicity of Christ, would seem to a spiritually-minded Indian largely a waste of time; he would concede to it a considerable historical, but hardly any religious importance; for what does it matter in the end whether a Jesus son of the carpenter Joseph was actually born in Nazareth or Bethlehem, lived and taught and was... to death on a real or trumped-up charge of sedition, so long as we can know by spiritual experience the inner Christ, live uplifted in the light of his teaching and escape from the yoke of the natural Law by that atonement of man with God of which the crucifixion is the symbol? If the Christ, God made man, lives within our spiritual being, it would seem to matter little whether or not a son of Mary... Teacher The peculiarity of the Gita among the great religious books of the world is that it does not stand apart as a work by itself, the fruit of the spiritual life of a creative personality like Christ, Mahomed or Buddha or of an epoch of pure spiritual searching like the Veda and Upanishads, but is given as an episode in an epic history of nations and their wars and men and their deeds and arises ...
... switched on the start-key. Then he called one of the villagers and told him: "Now utter the name of Jesus and push." "Victory to Jesus Christ", he hailed as he pushed the car. Hardly had he done this that the car started moving! "So you can see with your own eyes the greatness of Jesus," the Westerners proclaimed. "Now, look again. That tulsi plant is supposed to be God for you... In one such incident a group of Westerners came to a village in their car. Their objective was to propagate Christianity among the poor simpletons of the villages. They wanted to prove that Jesus Christ was greater than the gods and goddesses, Allah or the saints and fakirs of the village. The Westerners had deliberately disconnected the start- switch of the car. The curious villagers ...
... especially in America. One of the most fantastic interpretations is about the Anti-Christ. Poor John Carlos of Spain is cast in that role by one school of interpreters. The whole scheme is connected with the biblical vision of the Second Coming of Christ. I have studied this question very closely and can prove that Jesus prophesied his own return to take place fairly soon after his death. In the Gospels... Paul at first believed that the great event would be witnessed in his own lifetime: later, owing perhaps to a decline in his health, he held that it might happen soon after his death. No doubt, Jesus says in the Gospels that nobody, not even he, knows the exact day and hour: only God the Father knows them. But this in no way contradicts the declaration on several occasions that they would be ...
... the one who left was to prevent war. Consciously, he wanted all Christians to love each other! ( Mother laughs ) A childish hope. To love each other in Jesus—whom they leave on the cross. As Sri Aurobindo says, men... men LOVE grief, that's why Jesus is still nailed on the cross. 2 It's magnificent, that thing. ( silence ) With the others, the Communists, it's the opposite: they want everyone... See Aphorism 35 : "Men are still in love with grief; when they see one who is too high for grief or joy, they curse him and cry, 'O thou insensible!' Therefore Christ still hangs on the cross in Jerusalem." ...
... yesterday’s discussion. Indians believe (or at least that is their experience) that the Divine resides in man. Westerners don’t believe this. They feel the Divine resides somewhere high above. Only Jesus Christ has come down once. That’s why they do not bow to any human being. But if someone bows to a man in whom one can say with unmistakable confidence that there has been a descent of the Divine consciousness ...
... actually well-known in the West, for Jesus Christ was an avatar according to this definition. This is why the theological disputation concerning his avatarhood or the preponderance of either his divine or his human nature has its parallels in the literature of the Hindus. And this is why Sri Aurobindo, in his Essays on the Gita, mentions time and again the names of Christ, Krishna and the Buddha in the... s more) Avatars, the Christianized West recognizes only one. The importance of the Christ-avatar is generally accepted, but the evolutionary and historical development of the Earth and of mankind is put into a warped perspective by affirming him as the one and only avatar, a belief which makes the mission of Christ appear arbitrary and unreal. The cause of this attitude was probably the religious and... the words of Sri Aurobindo, addressed to a disciple who is still alive at the time this book is being written. And in the same correspondence Sri Aurobindo speaks about ‘the Path I have opened, as Christ, Krishna, Buddha, Chaitanya, etc., opened theirs.’ 17 The task of the Avatar cannot be executed by ordinary earthly beings; that is why the Divine has to come to do the job Himself. Such a mission ...
... not come across any specific and detailed pronouncement by Sri Aurobindo or the Mother about the Resurrection of Jesus which the new Testament speaks of. But I have gathered from their writings or talks two points that can bear upon it. The kind of risen body which Christians claim for Jesus is not what Sri Aurobindo and the Mother call the transformed supramentalised body which they have as the ultimate... earth as a tangible lasting presence cannot answer to his view of the supramental physical. Once when the Mother's Page 322 attention was drawn to the resurrected body attributed to Jesus, she exclaimed: "but this body went to heaven!" The second point is that the supramental physical is the result of an evolutionary development of matter's own intrinsic dharma (or law) of... concentrate the evolutionary process into an accelerated revolutionary move-ment. It is not something achieved, as St. Paul says, "in the twinkling of an eye" during the hoped-for Second Coming of Christ at the world's end and taken up into the Beyond. A new gradually divinised life upon the earth and not a sudden transfiguration breaking with it and passing away from it: such is the Aurobindonian ...
... canons set down by military experts; neither did Buddha become the Enlightened because of his scrupulous adherence to the edicts which Asoka engraved centuries later on rocks and pillars, nor was Jesus the Christ because of his being an exemplar of the Sermon on the Mount. The truth of the matter is that the spirit bloweth where it listeth. It is the soul's realisation and dynamic perception that ...
... outside the Christian conventions: though he spoke constantly of Christ and identified the supreme fact of both poetic experience and spiritual life as "Jesus the Imagination", he poured scorn on the religion of the churches no less than on the Christian Deism which the scientific eighteenth century invented for its convenience. And Jesus the Imagination is fundamentally a tran- Page 155 ... is both One and Many, for he is an infinite Being and Body of "flexible senses" which, when contracted at will, behold multitude and, when expanded, see "as One Man all the Universal Family" . 32 Jesus the Imagination is also called the Universal or Eternal Man, and our whole world is really this Universal Man broken up in a false vision and striving towards self-completion: . ..Man looks out... All-God or Pantheos who is All-Man or Pananthropos, a Divine Humanity secretly perfect and waiting to be realised in an inner vision which embraces all outer things and holds them in an eternity of Jesus: such is Blake's Christianity and this Christianity is essentially at little variance with Wordsworth. A certain Gnostic element in Blake lacks in the unfettered Nature-love which is intrinsic to W ...
... words "of flame" go with "Miracle" and not with "Mary": the incarnating Christ is the "Miracle of flame" within Mary. The total expression in the two lines is repeatedly concrete in unexpected ways. We have not even distinct images, we have a picture in each phrase with an assimilation of whatever images are there. We see Jesus' origin in divinity from which he has come missioned as both force and grace... his departure from poetic conventionalism by picking out, as a critic has done, a verse from him and a couple of lines from Crashaw, both on the theme of Christ's incarnation through the Virgin Mary. Crashaw refers to the heavenly babe: Christ left his father's house and came Lightly as a lambent flame. Page 310 Here we have a good simile suggesting the soft secrecy of the... while meaning a movement delicate and refined, prepares the gentle light indicated by the closing phrase. Also perhaps in the adjective "lambent" we have a subtle allusion to the common phrase about Christ: "Lamb of God." But the cleverness is not obtrusive: it is assimilated into the fine taste of the whole expression. A variety of ideas and attitudes is smoothly packed into a couplet simple and sincere ...
... concept of the “Avatar” is generally understood to be typically Hindu, although, under other names, it is also alive in the West as a designation of Jesus Christ. While in Hinduism there is a succession of Avatars throughout the evolution, in Christianity Christ is supposed to be the one and only Avatar. In this, Christianity has been very “Eurocentric” and circumscribed in its outlook. The excuse is that... which is one of the treasures of mankind. When Christ died abandoned on the cross nothing seemed to be left of all that he had preached and tried to inculcate in his disciples, followers and the crowds that had assembled to listen to him. Centuries later the European civilisation came into existence from the seeds he had sown in the human soil. (“Christ from his cross humanised Europe”, wrote Sri Aurobindo... “I have said that the Avatar is one who comes to open the Way for humanity to a higher consciousness – if nobody can follow the way, then either our conception of the thing, which is also that of Christ and Krishna and Buddha also, is all wrong or the whole life and action of the Avatar is quite futile. X seems to say that there is no way and no possibility of following, that the struggles and sufferings ...
... Revolution in Historical Ideas. 4. "Raised from the Dead": An Approach to the Problem of the Resurrection of Jesus from the Descriptions of his "Risen" Body 5. Is Velikousky's Revised Chronology Tenable? A Scrutiny of Four Fundamental Themes 6. A Follower of Christ and a Disciple of Sri Aurobindo: Correspondence between Bade Griffiths and K.D. Sethna 7. "Classical"... residing at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram of Pondicherry, analyses, step by step, the poem on its own merits and comes ultimately to see in it a parable in which the Tyger is the embodiment of Christ's wrath when, empowered by God, he goes forth to battle with and expel from heaven into hell the rebellious angels whose ambience is conceived as "forests of the night" and who are themselves imaged... Apart from Milton, comparative aspects are found in various features of the general Christian tradition to elucidate the relationship the poem suggests between God the Father and Christ the Son, as well as the poem's picture of the winged maker of the Tyger, ascending to "seize the fire" with which to create his dreadful instruments. Several nuances of the poem in the perspective ...
... mentioned by Sri Aurobindo is not a person but a condition that will be shared by all those who have prepared themselves to receive it. May 1967 May I know if the miraculous elevation of Jesus Christ to heaven celebrated by the Roman Catholics on Thursday, 4th May has any sort of connection with the great day 4. 5. 67? Or would it be simply a pure coincidence? For Sri Aurobindo "coincidences" ...
... crucified with Christ, and I live now not with my own life but with the life of Christ who lives in me. The life I now live in this body I live in faith: faith in the Son'of God who loved me and who sacrificed himself for my sake." Yes, the key is here but it rightly deserves to be called a skeleton key. It needs to be fleshed out with the help of other passages in Galatians: "Christ redeemed us from... become the goodness of God." If Poh San would like me to elucidate the paradox in my own words, I would say: "We are all sinners and according to the Law of Moses we deserve to be punished, but Jesus got born like one of us and paid the full penalty on our behalf of a Law-transgressor, the penalty of the lowest of deaths, the death of a 'felon' who is crucified ('hanged on a tree'). Thus he brought ...
... reason and the void which was filled up by Christianity; for man cannot live by reason alone … Europe had killed its old creeds beyond revival and had to turn for its religion to Asia.” 14 Jesus Christ was an Asian. This may be the place to quote a revealing, seminal text of Sri Aurobindo’s, which was published in the Arya in 1915 and covers the whole range of the relations between East and... the West is still very distrustful of Eastern wisdom. For centuries the West has been convinced of its superiority, intellectually and religiously. The founder of its faith was the only Avatar, Jesus Christ, the one and only incarnation of God as man, of the Son of God who was also the Son of Man; the Christian institutions based on this faith were the only ones to possess the means of the salvation... the Empire were for the most part women and slaves.) Nowadays it is generally known that Christ and the religions which claim descendence from him are two different things. Christianity was much more the creation of St. Paul and the Church Fathers than of Christ himself, although the shining core of Christ’s mission has remained present on the Earth for a long time to contact with the soul and follow ...
... October 1933 While looking at the Mother when she came on the terrace, I suddenly saw in her lap a baby whom I took to be Jesus Christ Page 275 as it resembled his figure. The vision lasted for about a minute and I saw it with open eyes. It may be so—as Jesus was a child of the Divine Mother. 25 November 1933 I saw the Mother in the colour of the flower we call "Detachment" ...
... calm strength of their souls. Cannot epics, too, be fashioned in the same way? After all, what it the 'action' in an epic, or an epyllion, like Milton's Paradise Regained ? Satan tries to tempt Jesus, tries again and again, and fails. It is what Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch would have called the perfect 'static drama'. Page 374 The modern consciousness is obviously different... results —acknowledges Virgil as his master. If Virgil sang of arms and the man, Aeneas, Camoens sang too of arms and the men—the men who carved out the Portuguese Empire and won the gorgeous East for Christ: The deeds I tell of are real, and far outstrip the fabled adventures of any Rodamonte, Ruggiero or Orlando, even granting that Orlando did exist. In place of these you will meet ...
... be taken from his lips, was not the cup of physical suffering, but the bitter cup of the sins of mankind which he had been sent to drink. If it were not so, we should have to say that this Jesus was not the Christ, not the Son of God, not the avatar who dared to say "I and my Father are one", but a poor weak human being who under the illusion of Maya mistook his body for himself. Always remember that... patriot in his last moments has felt that this was no empty poetical moralising, but the feeble understatement of a wonderful and inexpressible reality. They say that Christ suffered on the cross! The body suffered, doubtless, but did Christ suffer or did he not rather feel the joy of godhead in his soul? The agony of Gethsemane was not the agony of the coming crucifixion, the cup which he prayed might... not human nature, but animal nature; human nature is divine & selfless and the average selfish man is selfish not because of his humanity, but because his humanity is as yet undeveloped & imperfect. Christ, Buddha, these are the perfect men; Tom, Dick & Harry are merely animals slowly shaping into men. VI. The Philosophical Justification of Altruism The philosophical justification for this outlook ...
... one Avatar would be enough for all ages to come. The individual embodiment of the Mother is the face and front of the Transcendent walking the earth for its ¹ Compare the words of Jesus Christ, "I am the door: by me if any man enter in, he shall be saved." Page 96 deliverance and transformation. It is an embodiment, instinct with the force and radiant with the glory ...
... his wife advanced in age and unable to bear children that he would beget a son and that he would become a father of a nation. God tests Jesus Christ, His own son, by allowing him to be tempted by the Satan while he was fasting and praying in the desert. Christ's suffering and death on the cross too were tests. Second, life is an opportunity to realise one's own self. The entire Indian tradition... place in the epic work Savitri. The most appealing aspect in Savitri is basic human life, life that is seen in time that passes into eternity. Once, we are told in the New Testament, Jesus of Nazareth narrated the people a parable. He said the kingdom of heaven is like a pearl that is most sought after. 2 And when one has found it he goes out, sells all that he has and buys the ...
... in the next. It has no means of finding out with surety the truth or untruth of a doubtful historical assertion; after a century of dispute it has not even been able to tell us yes or no, whether Jesus Christ ever existed. How then shall it deal with such a matter as this of rebirth which is stuff of psychology and must be settled rather by psychological than physical evidence? The arguments which ...
... is something unique, something unparalleled, rarely to be found in spiritual history. Perhaps you have some idea of Arjuna's association with Sri Krishna, Ananda's with Buddha, St. Paul's with Jesus Christ, and similar ones of others; in our modern days, associations of Vivekananda, particularly, and of his friends with Ramakrishna, and lastly, in our present time, here, of Pranab-da and Vasudha-ben ...
... realized soul that was Ramana Maharshi, a contemporary of Sri Aurobindo. And Christ said: ‘The Kingdom of God is within you.’ Does not The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis provide the soul with a method, a discipline to experience the revelation of its Beloved and to enjoy the resplendence of his Presence? Is not the Jesus prayer of the Orthodox Church a japa, a repetition of words charged with... that it is the same for everybody … And to That you can give the names you like, it does not matter.’ 8 By way of illustration: ‘Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness,’ said Christ, ‘and all these things shall be added unto you.’ So is to know God ‘the one thing needful’ of Sri Aurobindo, from which ensues all else. Without knowledge and the unification with God, all else is... into untruth in the mind of the hearer. Not always indeed; for sometimes he rose beyond his personal temperament and individual mind, his European inheritance and environment, his revolt against the Christ-idea, his war against current moral values, and spoke out the Word as he had heard it, the Truth as he had seen it, bare, luminous, impersonal and therefore flawless and imperishable. But for the most ...
... Determination of the aim of life: The meaning of an ideal Ideals of truth, beauty and goodness Ideal of perfection Page 48 Study of great personalities: Jesus Christ (a detailed study). Listening to music: selected ragas (Indian) and harmonies (Western). Examples of poetic excellence: regional poetry, Sanskrit poetry, English poetry. Need to control ...
... a little bit, has not really changed it fundamentally. Man is still under the same yoke of sorrow and pain and misery. Then Jesus Christ came with his message of love but that too did not solve the situation much. Man ended up putting him on the cross. Somehow Jesus managed to escape alive and came to India. It is said that he spent his final days in a cave in Latah. Shankar brought the message ...
... for if it proved to be true Earth would lose its privileged position in God’s creation, of which the Human would no longer be the king. Especially the Catholic Church, appointed custodian by Jesus Christ of everything true, reacted vehemently to defend verities contained in the books of the Ancient Testament . Did one not read there: “On that day when the Lord delivered the Amorites into the hands... forgotten or forbidden knowledge of the ancients, but also with previously discarded occult practices and wisdom traditions. The stuff of ancient Hebrew tribes and of the alleged reminiscences about Christ and primitive Christianity was now put to the test of reason and found for the most part to be invention, superstition, fabulation, and sometimes outright errors or lies. Intellectuals invested themselves... attitude of pragmatism and scepticism – the right to question anything now declared to be the birthright of any human – led inevitably to the decline of the angry and vengeful God of the Hebrews, whom Christ’s Father of Love had not succeeded in replacing. Moreover, experts now investigated the text of the Bible with the same objectivity as they examined any other text, and found numerous surprisingly ...
... "First of all, carefully excite in yourself an habitual affectionate will in all things to imitate Jesus Christ. If anything agreeable offers itself to your senses, yet does not at the same time tend purely to the honour and glory of God, renounce it and separate yourself from it for the love of Christ, who all his life long had no other wish than to do the will of his Father whom he called his meat... tremulous from weakness. Amid these torments he spent his nights and days; and he endured them all out of the greatness of love which he bore in his heart to the Divine and Eternal Wisdom, our Lord Jesus Christ, whose agonizing sufferings he sought to imitate. After a time he gave up this penitential exercise of the door, and instead of it he took up his abode in a very small cell, and used the bench,... condition. And when all my hopes in them and in all men were gone so that I had nothing outwardly to help me, nor could tell what to do; then, oh then, I heard a voice which said, 'There is one, even Jesus Christ, that can speak to thy condition.' When I heard it, my heart did leap for joy. Then the Lord let me see why there was none upon the earth that could speak to my condition. I had not fellowship with ...
... beginning of my college-career, I was very much affected by Christianity. Even now I am tremendously interested in the earliest original form of this religion, the form which was prevalent in the time of Jesus himself as evinced from our earliest documents, the epistles of Paul who was acquainted with Peter and with "the Lord's brother", James. One of my eighteen still unpublished books is on this form, directly... poet Longfellow's words, "the ancient town of Bruges, the quaint old Flemish city". The second aspect of my touch of depth-on-depth with you emerges from the quick transition I made from my Christ-coloured student-days to the period of profound fascination by Ramakrishna and Vivekananda who served as a passage to the still wider call of Sri Aurobindo. This call with its "integral" earth-accepting ...
... nearness? This is what weighs in the relationship between them and you. All your "strict Roman Catholic education" will drop away if you listen to your soul's cry. You were "taught to pray only to Jesus Christ" - but now you are not being just "taught" something else as a rival confession of faith. You are helplessly pulled towards Sri Aurobindo because, looking at his photograph, you see, as a poem of ...
... itself. Christ did the same, but as centuries have passed, we seem to have become forgetful of that call. 88 On the other hand, K.D. Sethna pleads persuasively that the Teilhardian intuitions Page 445 and insights, amplified by the Aurobindonian revelations and affirmations, should pave the way for what he calls a "Vedantic Christianity". Teilhard's "Cosmic Christ" must lead... French Jesuit, Teilhard de Chardin's, as outlined principally in the posthumously published work. The Phenomenon of Man (1960). Born to orthodoxy in a Catholic family, Teilhard entered the Society of Jesus. During the time of his theological training at Hastings in Sussex, he seems to have become increasingly conscious "of a profound ontological total drift of the universe" around him, filling the whole... 'Heaven and Earth equal and one' ", Teilhard wrote in 1934 in his Comment Je crois ('How I Believe'): If, as a result of some interior revolution, I were successively to lose my faith in Christ, my faith in a personal God, my faith in the Spirit, I think that I would still continue to believe in the World.... I surrender myself to this undefined faith in a single and infallible World, wherever ...
... helpless child seems quite illogical. So let us see the problem from another angle. Let us find out if man is really ignorant and if so how far. Leave aside exceptions like Lord Buddha and Jesus Christ, Sri Krishna or Sri Aurobindo. The average human being does feel his Ignorance and generally when we think of man's Ignorance our attention is mainly directed to his waking condition, to his apparent ...
... speech a picture of Christ. If Savitri was bom in the greatness of the Saviour then she must accept the lot of mortality in order to change it. The elaborate biblical picture of Christ is taken as an illustration. The Son of God comes as the Son of Man to drink the bitter cup. This is a direct echo of Christ's words in the Bible with the symbolism that is at once obvious. Jesus undergoes intense agony... between Jesus and Lady Wisdom as the Word of God, then there seems to be a close link between the Lady Wisdom and the Supreme Mother and her incarnation as Savitri. It is she who is "the Incarnate Word of God" in the poem. She is the Saviour. While speaking of her Narad brings before us the magnificent vignette of the Crucifixion. "There are hints of the association of Savitri with Christ from the... imply a close link between the two." Regarding Savitri's suffering we have the symbolism of passion-flower which "suggests the instruments of Christ's passion or his suffering on the Cross. The corona of the creeper suggests the crown of thorns." The Christ-figure is seen in Savitri in relation to the world's evolution and as a step in the direction. A study of Savitri seems to make the Old ...
... Savitri's father, first occurs only on page 368? Does a narrative or epic become simple merely by each character getting his proper name from the start? Does Page 240 Milton name Jesus or Christ anywhere in Paradise Lost? At the start he refers to him as "one greater Man" and everywhere else he is called the "Son". Even in Book XII, when his human birth is spoken of in a long passage of ...
... the name of Savitri's father, first occurs only on page 368 [p. 341]? Does a narrative or epic become simple merely by each character getting his proper name from the start? Does Milton name Jesus or Christ anywhere in Paradise Lost? At the start he refers to him as "one greater Man" and everywhere else he is called the "Son". Even in Book XII, when his human birth is spoken of in a long passage ...
... against the Romans, but then came Glaber, and the vile Crassus, who had six thousand of Spartacus' slaves crucified on the road between Capua and Rome. Crassus was before Jesus Christ. Hitler was after Jesus Christ. Where is the difference? Who will be the next Hitler? Where? Forty years later we know that Hitler has disseminated everywhere, and that he has won the war. No, it was... nce? No, not all. Long before the Greeks, very long before Buddha and the Upanishads, and perhaps even before the first Egyptian dynasty, some three to five thousand years before our young Christ, the Himalayan range was the dwelling place of strange songsters, called rishis , who have left their hymns and their secrets as intact as those of Thebes' hypogea and frescoes, for they were repeated ...
... brother of Saint John. He was one of those privileged to be admitted to the room where Jesus raised the daughter of Jairus to life. He was also one of the three apostles, along with St Peter and St John, who accompanied Jesus when he retired to the mountain in the spring of A.D. 29, and witnessed the transfiguration of Christ. Apostle of Spain, his body reposes at Compostella in Spain, it is claimed, which... come back and see what has been made of his teaching, he would immediately run back to Nirvana!" And if Jesus were to return and see the forms imposed on his teaching, "he would not be able to recognise what he taught." An achalāyatan. 1 As for Christ, Sri Aurobindo said clearly: "Christ came into the world to purify, not to fulfil. He himself foreknew the failure of his mission and the necessity... something like what Christ must have suffered when he felt the weight of the cross. It was the weight of a mass of obscurity, of ignorance, a universal ill-will, a total incomprehension, you know, something. . . . Truly, it was like that, as though I were carrying a dreadful weight—which was dreadful not because of its weight, but because of its obscurity. I then told myself, 'Well, well! Christ must have felt ...
... similar stories) 3. Determination of the aim of life: The Meaning of an idea Ideals of truth, beauty and goodness Ideal of perfection 4. Study of great personalities: Jesus Christ (a detailed story). 5. Listening to music: selected ragas (Indian) and harmonies (Western). 6. Examples of poetic excellence: regional poetry, Sanskrit poetry, English poetry.... Sri Rama; for public welfare he sacrificed his personal life; story of Sri Krishna and Arjuna; *** solidarity of people was the ideal given by Sri Krishna to Arjuna; story of goodwill; the story of Christ; Buddha's story of compassion and the idea of sarvodaya, can be emphasised here. Search for good, love, and joy (ananda). Indian culture is mil of festivals of joy, kavya, sangita, stories ...
... compound noun in the next. Of course, the words "of flame" go with "miracle" and not with "Mary": the incarna- Page 144 ting Christ is the Miracle of flame, within Mary. A picture concrete in several different ways is driven into our minds. We see Jesus' origin in paradisal divinity, from where he has come missioned as at once force and grace, pressure of power and largesse of love; we see... taciturnity, The august, inhospitable, inhuman night, Glittering magnificently unperturbed. Let me give one more illustration. Here's Crashaw economically picturing Christ's incarnation through the Virgin Mary: Christ left his father's home and came Lightly as a lambent flame. On the surface the couplet looks over-simple, rather conventional and almost verging on prose except for... prepares the gentle light which the closing phrase indicates. "Metaphysical wit" is at play here. It is implicit also in the adjective "lambent" with its subtle allusion to the common phrase about Christ: "Lamb of God." The cleverness, however, is unobtrusive and does not spoil the poetic spontaneity, the religious sincerity. Quite a contrast to the sweet economy of the couplet is the dynamic outburst ...
... similar stories). 3. Determination of the aim of life: -The meaning of an ideal -Ideals of truth, beauty and goodness -Ideal of perfection 4. Study of great personalities: Jesus-Christ (a detailed study). 5. Listening to music: selected ragas (Indian) and harmonies (Western). 6. Examples of poetic excellence: regional poetry, Sanskrit poetry, English poetry 7. Need ...
... There would, moreover, be no need to dream of a second advent of Christ if he had come to Earth the first time in all his power and glory. From the newly-born of Bethlehem to the god of the Parousia [the coming of Christ as judge on the last day], the entire human trajectory is outlined. There is nothing apocalyptic about the birth of Jesus, which does not refer to the notion of the End of Time, but to... eavouring to fix in the collective consciousness the elements of its superhuman future. One must imagine a thousand Christs or Buddha's or Krishnas being born on earth at the same time, possessing a more complete Page 22 wisdom than that which the Buddha, Christ or Krishna formulated, living with us on all levels and in all possible contexts. And, one must also imagine that these... devotional legends, the birth of Krishna in India, and of Christ in the Occident, would Page 44 have been similar. But it does not appear that we can view therein historic reality. For that would have entailed a much greater change in the race than the very significant ethical and spiritual change brought about by Krishna and Christ—the first having taught the adoration of God at a time ...
... patron that the artist's most important work lies in conception rather than execution. Page 192 In this case he had two great difficulties, he said: to conceive features worthy of Jesus Christ, and to picture a man as heartless as Judas. Leonardo spent much of his time searching the streets of Milan for heads and faces that could serve him in representing the Apostles. One of the tragedies ...
... countless barnacles, crustaceans resembling mussels which attach themselves to the ships’ hulls in clusters. Which Christian would take it gracefully that there was a monkey among the ancestors of Jesus Christ? But in June 1858 Darwin received an envelope from overseas containing a hastily scribbled essay which, to his stupefaction, developed exactly the same thesis as his. If the author “had read ...
... ambiguous.” In the Bible we find at least three different kinds of God: the tribal terrible, jealous and vengeful Yahweh, the metaphysical God of the prophets, and the loving God, the Father, of Jesus Christ. To these quite different Gods the Church Fathers added the Trinity, the three-in-one God. The tribal God belonged to a period of the establishment of morality among the primitive Hebrews, the... between. For example Alister McGrath, a theologian with a scientific training, is an absolute believer: “I write as a Christian, who holds that the face, will and character of God are fully disclosed in Jesus of Nazareth.” Among the Roman Catholics, Claude Tresmontant writes: “The Church has been communicating throughout the centuries the creative information which she has received initially from her Lord ...
... Charvaka or grow them in the garden of Epicurus. So is it with the lover of humanity, who loses or seeks to lose his lower self in mankind; no enlightened selfishness could have given us Father Damien or Jesus or Florence Nightingale. So is it finally with the lover of the whole world, of whom the mighty type is Buddha, the one unapproachable ideal of Divine Love in man, he who turned from perfect divine... tortures in which those they had lived with and perhaps loved, were agonizing. Divine love, divine pity, the nature of the Buddha, that was the message which India sent to Europe through the lips of Jesus, and this is how the European mind interpreted divine love & divine pity! The fires of Hell aptly and piously anticipated on earth by the fires of Smithfield, the glowing splendours of the Auto-da-fé... happy family, loving and helping each other; perhaps it still hopes, though there is little in the state of the modern world to flatter its dreams. But that millennium too will not come, not though Christ should descend with all his angels and cut the knot, after banishing the vast majority of mankind to the outer darkness where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth, by setting up this united family ...
... McPheeters see Shantimayi Jatti, B.D. 817, 821 Jawaharlal Nehru 404, 457, 595-6, 624, 716 Jay Holmes Smith 547-8, 589 Jaya Devi 233-4, 236, 239, 242 Jayantilal Parekh 691 Jesus Christ 180, 317, 482, 762 Jinnah, M.A. 446-7, 451, 458, 463 John of the Cross, Saint 41, 112 Jones, William 497 Joseph Szarka 674 Jotindranath 285 Juliana of Norwich 62 Kafka... 727, 754 Hydari, Sir Akbar 443 Page 901 L'Idée or Idea 29-30, 32ff, 44, 50ff, 64, 191, 298 L'Idée Nouvelle (New Idea Society) 101ff, 126, 128, 148, 150, 298 Imitation of Christ, The 639 India 46, 82, 128, 200, 404, 446-59, 488, 571, 808-10, 821 see also in The Mother - (3) Indira Gandhi 596, 777-9, 808-9, 821 Indra Sen, Dr 652, 676, 691 Inge, William Ralph ...
... Book Two Keshav Ganesh [Desai]—Trevor—Broome Wilson Keshav —Ah, Broome, so the magnetism of thought has broken the chains of duty? May I introduce you? Mr Trevor of Kings, Mr Broome Wilson of Jesus. Would you like wine or coffee? Wilson —Perhaps for an evening of metaphysics wine is the most appropriate prelude. Keshav —You agree then with the Scythians who made a point of deliberating... morality? Wilson —No doubt, but some are more excellent than others. Keshav —And do you cherish the opinion that your own Page 13 peculiar creed—I believe it to be Christianity without Christ—is indubitably the most excellent of all religions? Wilson —By far the most excellent. Keshav —And your own ethical scheme, again the Christian without the emotional element, the best of all... Bentham supplies. Keshav —Yours is a curious position, Broome. You are one of those who would expunge the part of Hamlet from the play that bears his name. Your religion is Christianity without Christ, your morality Benthamism without Bentham. Nevertheless my guns are so pointed that they will breach any wall you choose to set up. For this is common to all utilitarians that they lose sight of a ...
... to regress, voluptuously, to an order lower than that of the beast. Suffering and Ecstasy The Mother had to descend deeper and deeper to bring the Light there also. The cross the Avatar Jesus Christ had been dragging through the streets of Jerusalem up to Golgotha was a symbolic one. His real cross consisted of the fact that he, like all Avatars, had taken the past of humanity on his shoulders ...
... yesterday’s topic. The Indians believe or have the experience that the Divine lives in the human being. The Europeans don’t believe it. For them, he is some- where above. He has incarnated only in Jesus Christ. So they don’t bow down to any human person. But if one bows down to a person who has embodied the Divine Consciousness — of course with faith — then that person can more easily transmit his co ...
... religions, there should be a detailed study of the lives of great personalities associated with these religions, or various systems of yoga such as Rama, Krishna, Buddha Mahavira, Zoroaster, Moses, Jesus Christ, Prophet Mohammed, Guru Nanak, Sri Ramakrishna, Swami Vivekananda and Sri Aurobindo. What is called psychology of religion and spirituality could also be studied at least at the elementary ...
... annals of the human race. We content ourselves with mentioning only three of them here. The first example that comes to our mind is that of the death-scene of St. Stephen, a direct disciple of Jesus Christ. When he was taken out of the town by a howling mob and was being cruelly put to death by repeated hits with stones, he first prayed to the Divine, "O Lord, take my spirit," and then falling on... Aurobindo's Savitri?. - "Death prowls baying through the woods of life." In the fourteenth century, an unknown Christian mystic, the writer of the justly famous Latin treatise, The Imitation of Christ, elaborated the uncertainty of the moment of death in such words: "O the stupidity and the hardening of man's heart, which Page 29 thinketh only upon the present and doth not ...
... has no relation to the present degradation of this concept in some sectarian movements. It is also noteworthy that the Hindu concept of the avatar is applicable to the person and incarnation of Jesus the Christ on Earth, the one and only, while the Hindu series of avatars sustains the evolution of consciousness in its increasing complexity. “Once the evolutionary hypothesis is put forward and the ...
... Whom God Shall Make Manifest.’ The followers of the Baha’i religion believe him to have been the most recent in a series of past and future divine manifestations including Zoroaster, the Buddha, Jesus Christ and Muhammad. Baha Ullah spent most of his life in prison and was often subjected to torture, first in Persia, afterwards in Baghdad and Acre, where he died in 1892. Abdul Baha (1844-1921), his ...
... the "Supermind", has been vaguely dreamt of in various guises - the elixir vitae, le corps glorieux, the final alchemy achieved by the philosopher's stone, the esoteric sense behind the legend of Jesus' resurrection (quite different from mere physical resuscitation) - ever since the Rigveda spoke of liberating the sun buried in the earth and the Upanishads called Matter itself Brahman. You may... never came. No ananda as 1 think I wrote. I was surprised - I had expected to find that vision of beatitude in some form. Blake too said we can only worship God as a Man - the Self, the figure of 'Jesus, the Imagination', for that is the only form in which we as human beings can receive or conceive the living Self. Krishnamurti is much admired here, and my friend and co-founder of Temenos has built... all. But Shakespeare never created a Lord Krishna nor could any Western poet have done so or included the divine within a human world. True, it is in the Gospels, and the story of the death of the Christ, but differently. That story too is one of the great creations of the human spirit. I must now go and post my letters, including this most inadequate reply to your own. I do hope you will write ...
... boucassin, with fringes of silk. For device it bore the image of God the Father throned in the clouds and holding the world in His hand; two angels knelt at His feet, presenting lilies; inscription, Jesus, Maria; on the reverse the crown of France supported by two angels. She also caused a smaller standard or pennon to be made, whereon was represented an angel offering a lily to the Holy Virgin. ... anybody, much less documents of state to kings and generals, poured out this procession of vigorous sentences as fluently as if this sort of work had been her trade from childhood: Page 53 JESUS MARIA 'King of England, and you Duke of Bedford who call yourself Regent of France; William de la Pole, Earl of Suffolk; and you Thomas Lord Scales, who style yourselves lieutenants of the... And then the cross was fetched from a neighbouring church and was held before her eyes as she died. As the flames gathered around her she kissed the cross in her hands and cried out the one word, "Jesus!" Then she spoke no more. Her heart was found unburned in the pyre. Her ashes were thrown in the Seine from the bridge of Rouen. Page 93 A very remarkable fact, rare occurrence ...
... believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God : because many false prophets are gone out into the world. Hereby know ye the Spirit of God. Every Spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God; Page 672 And every spirit that confesseth not .. is not of God." As a doubt suggested itself: how there could be certainty of right decision; the next... will be made entirely firm. The sense of the Lilamaya Krishna in all, is growing firmer & more intense, but is sometimes still suspended by the mere Brahmabhava. 2 October 1914 And when Jesus was passed over again by ship unto the other side, much people gathered unto him; and he was nigh unto the sea— The sortilege has no reference to another exodus, but embraces at once several... anima in the last half hour. Nevertheless the true reactions are dulled and reduced, though marked by a sullen obstinacy. St. 1) Knowledge—to be the basis of perfected Tapas. 2) The True Christ. (vicarious exhaustion of the internal suffering). 3) Maya. Therefore. (ie the appearance of asiddhi & its reactions). Rupa Other rupas are less stable and represent the partial ...
... had known earlier. He was peaceful and cheerful. When I told him that we wanted him to be released, he said, "Since yesterday, I have been thinking deeply of two great personalities - Socrates and Jesus. Both were victims of the laws and judicial systems of their times; both would have been able to avoid condemnation; but both voluntarily allowed the chariot of time to pass over them. And both knew... ears : "Abandon all laws and take refuge in Me alone. I shall deliver thee from all sin; do not grieve." I could say nothing. But I, too, resolved to sit at the feet of Socrates and Jesus and to hear the message of the Gita. On the 20th June, my Law College opened and, as arranged earlier, I was granted admission under new rules. Law had yielded to the requirements of freedom. I... constantly re-discovered by the Buddha, the enlightened mind, the awakened spirit. The Mosaic law of religious, ethical and social righteousness is convicted of narrowness and imperfection. The law of Christ comes to replace it and claims at once to abrogate and to fulfil. The human search does not stop there and there is a constant search for the higher law of perfection, the higher rule of right living ...
... the surface. But Lele, who had accompanied Sri Aurobindo, asked him to make namaskar to the audience and wait, - and speech would come to him from some source other than the mind.* So * Cf. Jesus: "Do not consider anxiously what you are to say or how you are to say it; words will be given to you when the time comes; it is not you who speak, it is the Spirit of your Father that speaks in you... Palestine, but mediaeval Italy is not Palestine. Principles are a matter of chronology and climate, and it would be highly unphilosophical and unpractical of me to be guided by them as if I were Christ or Moses. ... Still I am a Christian and the nephew of a Pope, so my anchor holds, yes, my anchor holds." And, for a final illustration, there was the castigation of the whole class of Anglo-Indian ...
... ...reading The Life Divine is like the turning of the Globe wherein, rightly understood, is all there is to know and no part is greater or less than another, and all is one.... Both he and Jesus the Christ became God-conscious through mystical communion; both perceived that God Is, and that He is Infinite Divine Personality. 11 Like Haridas Chaudhuri in America, Arabinda Basu did much ...
... the later religions forgot. Having lost the central secret, they fell prey to all the aberrant dualisms, substituting obscure mysteries for the great, simply Mystery. "I and my Father are one," Jesus Christ said (John 10,30); "I am He," – so'ham – the sages of India say; indeed, this is the truth all liberated men discover, whether they be from the East or the West, from the past or the present... independent of conditions and circumstances – a window within us that will never close again. And since those conditions are difficult to meet here on earth, we speak of "God," of "spirituality," of Christ, of Buddha, and the whole lineage of great religious founders; all are ways of finding permanence. But it may be that we are not religious or spiritual men, but just men, tired of dogmas, who believe... particular stage of inner development, and Peter's way is not John's. That everyone should love a crucified god, for instance, seems unnatural to the average Indian, who will bow respectfully before Christ (with as much spontaneous reverence as before his own image of God), but who will see also the face of God in the laughter of Krishna, the terror of Kali, the sweetness of Saraswati, and in the thousands ...
... ago You descended upon earth? I have never left the earth since it was formed. 10 January 1935 It is said that Krishna, Buddha and Jesus Christ were Avatars. So weren't these people yourself? Krishna was an Avatar, but Buddha and Christ were only emanations. As for the second part of your question, I have no idea what you mean. 11 January 1935 Page 75 I would ...
... New World. It is a formidable battle, of which Auroville is only a small reflection. Two thousand years ago, what could a few men understand around a being called Christ? What did those few men know of what the seed sown by Christ was to become? What do we know today of Mother's and Page 206 Sri Aurobindo's meaning? Will this seed be perverted once again, imprisoned in a religion,... extent that they tell you: "Don't go into the bush, you might meet Matsuku (or I don't know who)" — their god of yesterday turned into a man-eater. 70 But the new god is not the Sacred Heart of Jesus one sees everywhere, but whisky, beer and frozen chicken (there were ten tons aboard the Moana , on which Sujata bravely experienced the sea for the first time; but the big pitching and tossing... Falsehood. The true Asura is not the "devil" whom everybody knows is dark and wicked, but the little saint who uses the Truth and utters the words of Truth for his selfish ends. In the name of Christ's "Love," more than one "heretic" was imprisoned and tortured and burnt. In the name of "nonviolence," they betrayed the true Shakti of India and encouraged a Page 80 mass of spiritual ...
... know Him. You are children, simple and beautiful within. The Divine will surely answer your heart-felt call. Haven't you heard of Dhruva and Prahlada? Jesus Christ also says that little children come easily to the Lord. Have you heard of him, of Christ?" "Yes. Wasn't he crucified?" "Yes. He suffered pain for the sake of the world." "Did you call the Divine when you were little?" "No, nobody... that it was a great mistake for me to have gone at all; for it had made Baroda quite intolerable to me. There is an old story of Judas Iscariot, which suited me to the ground. Judas, after betraying Christ, hanged himself and went to Hell where he was honoured with the hottest oven in the whole establishment. Here he must burn for ever and ever; but in his life he had done one kind act and for this they ...
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