There is a metaphysical distinction between Jesus of Nazareth, the historical human personality, and the Christ as God’s “Only-Begotten Son” (Nicene Creed), the Second Person of the Holy Trinity. Ordinarily, when we speak of Jesus, we talk as though Christ were Jesus’ last name.

We say, “as Jesus said to the woman at the well,” or we might say, “as Christ said to the woman at the well,” or again, “as Jesus Christ said to the woman at the well.” This ordinary usage is convenient but it can create a serious problem in understanding not only who Jesus was but also who we ourselves are.

Most Christians, of course, know that Christ was not the last name of Jesus of Nazareth but a title given to Jesus by the early Christians, meaning the “anointed one” or Messiah. Nevertheless, even though we know the origin and meaning of the title, Christ, we still ordinarily use the word Christ as if this were Jesus’ last name in the same way that Smith is used as a last name for persons whose ancestors were blacksmiths. Understanding the origin of the last name doesn’t alter the usage in either case.

What exactly is the problem? The problem comes when we try, in light of this familiar usage, to interpret the words of the Nicene Creed: “I believe in Jesus Christ, the Only-Begotten Son of God.” What we usually end up mistakenly thinking is that the Creed means Jesus of Nazareth is God’s Only-Begotten Son. That is, we mistakenly think that Jesus, and Jesus alone, was God’s Son, and that all other humans are therefore less than Jesus.

That is not what the Creed means. To think so is a serious metaphysical error. And this error is so grave that, unless corrected, it can actually prevent us from taking our place with Jesus in the Christ Consciousness, and later in the Kingdom of the Father. It is the Christ who is God’s Only-Begotten Son, not Jesus.

True, Jesus of Nazareth knew he was the Christ; that is, that he had the Christ Consciousness (and the higher nondual consciousness of oneness with the Father). He knew that, as Christ, he had been directly begotten by God from all eternity. But Jesus knew and preached that the same was also true for us.

We too, according to Jesus, are to become Christ by putting on the mind of Christ, that is, the awareness that we too are directly begotten by God. One of the reasons Jesus called himself the Son of Man was that he wanted us to realize that our reality and destiny are the same as his.

Most Christians make this theological mistake of thinking that Jesus of Nazareth, rather than the Christ, was God’s only-begotten Son. I made it myself, and it caused me a great deal of confusion when my consciousness was trying to realize Christ Consciousness. ….

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~ From: Putting on The Mind of Christ, by Jim Marion

“I walked to-day in sheltered wooded valleys; and at one point, in a very lonely and secluded lane, leaned long upon a gate that led into a little forest clearing, to watch the busy and intent life of the wood. There were the trees extending their fresh leaves to the rain; the birds slipped from tree to tree; a mouse frisked about the grassy road; a hundred flowers raised their bright heads.

None of these little lives have, I suppose, any conception of the extent of life that lies about them; each of them knows the secrets and instinct of its own tiny brain, and guesses perhaps at the thoughts of the little lives akin to it. Yet every tiniest, shortest, most insignificant little life has its place in the mind of God.

It seemed to me then such an amazing, such an arrogant thing to define to describe, to limit the awful mystery of the Creator and His purpose. Even to think of Him, as He Is spoken of in the Old Testament, with fierce and vindictive schemes, with flagrant partialities, seemed to me nothing but a dreadful profanation.

And then all these anxious visions left me; and I felt for awhile like a tiny spray of seaweed floating on an infinite sea, with the brightness of the morning overhead. I felt that I was Indeed set where I found myself to be, and that if now my little heart and brain are too small to hold the truth, yet I thanked God for making even the conception of the mystery, the width, the depth possible to me; and I prayed to Him that He would give me as much of the truth as I could bear.”
~ From: The Thread of Gold, by A C Benson

He made his first trip to India in 1954 where he studied Indian philosophy and religion at the University of Mysore and Banaras Hindu University, where he met several Western monks seeking Eastern forms for the expression of their Christian beliefs. “I left Europe [for India] as a Christian, I discovered I was a Hindu and returned as a Buddhist without ever having ceased to be Christian,” he later wrote.

In 1962, he was summoned to Rome by Opus Dei director, Josemaría Escrivá, who expelled him after a brief trial where he was charged with disobedience! He became a visiting professor at Harvard Divinity School. in 1966 and a professor of religious studies at University of California, Santa Barbara in 1972. For many years he taught in the spring and spent the rest of the year doing research in India.

Here’s a clip of Panikkar speaking on the metoaphor of ‘windows’ in inter-religious dialogue

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A: That kind of question has been asked and talked about by many philosophers and it has remained a kind of stumbling block in the Christian religion. So let’s see what the intuitive answer is. In this sense-perceived universe, if you want to use anything here to compare God to, the most appropriate thing in this sense-perceived universe would be the sun.

The sun is the source of seemingly inexhaustible energy, and the giver of life. The very heat in your body comes from the sun indirectly. The sun of course is not eternal, but compared to the human life span it can be considered virtually eternal, it’s so much vaster. And it gives freely of itself, millions and millions of years of pouring out energy.

Now let’s say the sun is in a process of becoming conscious of itself, because my intuition is the Universe, or rather that which underlies the Universe, or the One behind the many, is in the process of becoming conscious of itself in the dimension of time. The One also exists in the timeless dimension, where there is no past and future.

So God, to use that word for a while, in the timeless, God is already complete and perfect. But it seems that in the realm of time, God is becoming conscious through all these life forms. Now if that were the sun, then in the process of becoming conscious, the sun continuously emits zillions of photons, light particles. Let’s say the individual photon is part of the process of becoming conscious for the sun.

Now in that process, the individual photon would undergo a change of consciousness arising. Temporarily, the individual photon, as it becomes together with the sun, as consciousness arises it mis-perceives itself as a separate entity. It no longer realizes its oneness with the sun. There’s a continuum, it never really loses connection with the sun. So temporarily, as part of the process of becoming conscious, it believes itself to be separate. It’s a temporary thing.

While it believes itself to be separate, it creates all kinds of illusions that reflect the basis illusion of separateness. That’s basically where we are at, where humanity is at. The human being is the photon, the sun particle, so to speak. The consciousness within is the consciousness of God, there’s only one consciousness. And that consciousness, in the process of the whole becoming conscious, mis-perceives itself temporarily. And that creates the illusion of separateness in the individual human.

That creates the illusion of the identification with form, which is the illusion of separateness. That’s seeing oneself as a separate entity. The stronger that illusion is, the more that gets reflected in its actions outside, which then become deluded. And that’s called evil.

Ultimately in evil, nothing is destroyed. The essence of all life forms is eternal. But on its own level, it’s not pleasant. From the point of view of the larger whole, it’s only a brief dream episode that takes place as the One is becoming conscious. So that is the answer to “Did God create evil?”

So the teachings that say that evil ultimately is not real, of course that is correct. But it’s a question of levels. If you look at it from one level, it has a certain reality. The fact that it ultimately is not real doesn’t mean that on this temporary level it appears very real. But it must be recognized as deluded.

Evil can be defined as complete identification with form — that is the illusion. The more an entity is identified with form, the more seemingly evil the entity creates, and the more suffering is created.

What’s the answer? The answer, of course, is why we’re here. We are the arising of the answer. The answer is not just the answer, it’s the end of the illusion of separateness and the end of so-called evil.

~ Eckhart Tolle www.eckhartteachings.com

But fundamentally, temptation exists in two parts: 1. The being, action or object we desire. 2. Our own strength or weakness in confronting it. In both cases, temptation is internal, rather than external. What might surprise you is that many cultures had no concept of temptation as something primarily external until they came into contact with Christianity.

Temptation takes center stage in both the Bible’s Old and New Testaments where humans are not only tempted by people or objects, but have the additional burden of resisting the temptations offered by powerful evil forces. The ‘apocalyptic’ view is a theory that the Jewish people came up with to explain the misery they experienced even though they kept the laws they believed God had given them.

The book of Job is a symbolic explanation of the theory that tells us the misery we see on earth is the result of a cosmic war between good and evil, with humans in the middle of the struggle. Many of Jesus’ earliest followers shared this apocalyptic view and interpreted his teachings through this belief system. These ideas still permeate our culture, whether we’re believers or not, so it’s important that we see them for what they are.

Temptation began to take a starring role as early as the story of original sin found in Genesis as Eve is coaxed by a serpent to eat forbidden fruit. The story of Adam and Eve paints the picture of a fearful world where even in paradise, evil lurks. No wonder the famous “Lord’s prayer” includes the line, “And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.”

If we believe this line of thinking, the stakes have become far higher than our regret over eating an extra piece of cake or buying something we can’t afford; eternal salvation is involved. But is this true? What really is temptation, where does it come from and what can we do about it?

Most people who have some familiarity with the Bible are aware of an account that describes Jesus being tempted by an evil force, Satan the Devil, just before he begins his public teaching work (Luke 4:1-13).

Although these verses read like an historical narrative, there were no witnesses to the encounter that could have reported it. It’s far more likely that Jesus originally told the story himself as a parable filled with symbolic meaning. It’s interesting to note that a very similar story of temptation is told about Buddha that also takes place at the same stage of transition in his life.

The verses tell us that after Jesus was baptized he was “filled with Spirit” and led to the wilderness where he spent 40 days fasting. Because Jesus lived in and near desert areas, we take it for granted that the story is literal and takes place in a actual location, but the desert and wilderness were also used in the Bible to symbolize a place of revelation.

While a crowded urban area might be likened to a mind filled with preconceived notions, attachments and aversions, a vast open wilderness pictures the mind that has let go of social conditioning and is open and willing to experience the Divine. Like a “sea change” the desert experience also symbolizes a major transition or significant life change, which certainly took place in Jesus’ case.

Bible readers also take the 40 day fast that led up to the temptation literally, but there’s good reason to see this as another symbol. The number 40 is mentioned 146 times in the Bible, particularly in the Old Testament: Noah’s flood lasted for 40 days and nights, the Israelites wandered in the wilderness for 40 years, and Moses was on the mountain for 40 days.

Usually the number is associated with a difficult or trying situation and a transition. Although we’re not familiar with the symbolism Jesus used, we must remember that those who were listening to him were.

For people who believe Jesus was either a god or demi-god (half god, half man), a 40 day fast may seem possible, but most fasts of that duration, even with water, result in hallucinations, convulsions, irregular heartbeat, organ deterioration, the loss of extremities and very often death.

If Jesus was superhuman, there was really no point to the fast or any reason for a struggle between good and evil because he would be beyond temptation. If he was human, the fast would have rendered him unable to resist a bug, let alone a powerful evil force. Again, we must come to the conclusion that we are dealing with a symbolic parable meant to take us past the surface and teach a deeper truth.

In fact, Jesus later clarified the symbolic nature of this temptation story when he said, “What comes out of a man is what defiles a man. For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts.” (Mark 7:20-23) So what can we learn from the story? Where does temptation really come from?

Jesus’ apocalyptic followers were unable to let go of their belief that the universe was locked in a cosmic struggle, so that is the slant they put on the parable. Their view took precedence and formed the foundation for the majority view of temptation down to our day. But a few of Jesus’ followers understood the universe in a very different way. They knew that the Oneness at the foundation of the universe is not a mixture of good and evil.

They also understood that our dualistic material universe is built on a very different foundation, one of polar opposites like good and evil. Our true identity remains in quantum Oneness, but as long as we continue to project duality, the positive will always be accompanied by the negative. The temptations that we feel and the evil that we see acted out in the world all originate in this dualistic mind set.

Let’s return to the parable to see what lay beneath the surface. (Keep in mind that the parable was written by early Christians who: 1. Held the apocalyptic view 2. Wrote their accounts years after Jesus’ death. 3. Did not know Jesus. So, it’s impossible to know how the parable was originally told.)

At the conclusion of Jesus’ 40 day fast, Satan showed up and tempted Jesus to turn a rock into bread. This first temptation was not really about food, but spiritual hunger. The inner temptation originating in Jesus’ own heart was to feed his spiritual hunger with something other than truth. He was tempted to return to the temple and fit in with the crowd instead of speaking the truth and making himself a target for those who feared truth.

The real question Jesus was asking himself was whether he would choose to satisfy his inner hunger with the things the world had to offer, or would he continue to choose nourishment that comes from a direct connection with the Divine?

Jesus’ second temptation is symbolized by Satan’s offer of rulership over all the kingdoms of the world. Jesus’ apocalyptic followers saw this as further proof that an evil force controlled the world, but if that were true, we would be forced to believe that God created an evil entity that had the strength to overpower God, or that good and evil were in partnership.

But let’s look at this from another direction. Since we are all pure consciousness that projects the material universe, each of us is already the master of all material existence. We have the ability to keep projecting it, or stop any time we wish. This is at the crux of Jesus’ inner struggle: would he continue to project the visible world, or would he stop?

In the last temptation, Satan again symbolizes Jesus’ own inner struggle, this time with doubt. Jesus is told to throw himself off the temple so God will save him from physical harm. Jesus had experienced the Divine, but in a moment of weakness before he commits to speaking publicly about what he knows, he wants a physical sign that will show him he’s doing the right thing.

Jesus’ three symbolic temptations were a conversation between the portion of his mind that had projected the material world of separation, and the One Mind we all share with the Divine. In the end, the True Mind prevailed, but we can all take heart that Jesus faced these struggles just as we do.

We each face the choices illustrated in Jesus’ parable. Will we listen to what the world tells us and try to fill our spiritual needs with junk food, or will we look within and discover what the Divine has to say? Will we continue to look for security in the material things the world has to offer, or will we realize we’ve traded away something far greater?

Will we be racked with doubts and look for signs, or will we acknowledge that our inner voice is telling us the truth? If we believe Jesus was superhuman, we may give up before we even start to ask these questions. When we know that Jesus was just like us, we realize that we too can stand up to our own inner temptations.

~ by Lee & Steven Hager in Why Does Suffering Exist www.thebeginningoffearlessness.com/

She asked a neighbour if she would follow him to school in the mornings, at a distance so that he wouldn’t notice her. The neighbour agreed, and said that since she was up early with her toddler anyway, it would be a good way for them to get some exercise.

The next school day, the neighbour and her little girl set out behind Timmy as he walked to school with another girl he knew. She did this for the whole week.

As the two walked and chatted, kicking stones and twigs, Timmy’s little friend noticed the same lady was following them, as she had every day all week. Finally she said to Timmy, ‘Have you noticed that lady following us to school all week? Do you know her?’

Timmy nonchalantly replied, ‘Yeah, I know who she is.’

The little girl said, ‘Well, who is she?’

‘That’s just Shirley Goodnest,’ Timmy replied, ‘and her daughter Marcy.’

‘Shirley Goodnest ? Who is she and why is she following us?’

‘Well’ Timmy explained, ‘every night my Mum makes me say the 23rd Psalm with my prayers, ‘cuz she worries about me so much. And in the Psalm, it says, ‘ Shirley Goodnest and Marcy shall follow me all the days of my life’, so I guess I’ll just have to get used to it!’

May Shirley Goodnest and Marcy be with you today and always!

Sent in by Marg Coombes-Pearce. Thanks Marg.

Take a quick moment to evaluate your life on the basis of these descriptions:

• Do you feel consumed by the demands of your job or schoolwork (or both)?
• Does it seem at the end of each day that you have been running a race of time, frantically trying to do everything on some mental list of required accomplishments?
• Do you suffer from stress of any kind on a regular basis?
• Do you feel that you and your life are stagnant, the opposite of frantic running, wallowing instead in inaction, boredom, despair, negativity or depression?
• Or, if you’ve said no to all the above, do you feel that your life lacks a sense of meaning and purpose, that you don’t know how to find it?

If any of these descriptions apply to you, then consciously or unconsciously, something is blocking your connection to meaning and purpose. That something is most likely you. It may be that you’re still living in survival mode (which may be true if any of the first four descriptions applied to you).

If this is the case, then it’s very important that you take a good look at your priorities in life. Spend several days pondering this question throughout the day: “What am I making most important in my day right now?” You may be very surprised by what you find. Be honest with yourself and write down what you learn. Notice also how you feel about these ‘most important’ things you fill your days with.

How satisfying and fulfilling are they? How many unnecessary activities are unsatisfying to you? Take special note of those. They are the activities you can drop altogether. As you do, you will free up time and inner space from which you can begin to contact and develop your sense of purpose.

Your true purpose already exists, that’s the good news. You don’t have to create it and it’s not a matter of choosing it. Purpose is something you discover within yourself in the space of stillness. This is the only way you can find it, in your own stillness, not in a book or a workshop or in the analysis of your dreams. You must go within and be with yourself in stillness and there you will discover the purpose that has been waiting for you all along.

There’s no substitute in life for finding your true purpose. No amount of money, no degree of power, no activity will give you the satisfaction that a life of purpose provides you.

It’s important to know that your life has an inner purpose and an outer purpose. Your inner purpose is primary. It concerns Being. Your outer purpose is secondary and it concerns doing. Your inner purpose cannot be found on the outer level of life. It isn’t related to what you do but what you are. Your inner purpose, simply stated, is to awaken. This is the primary purpose of every person in the world.

Many people are very concerned with discovering their life’s purpose. They are normally referring to their outer purpose. Outer purpose can change over time and is unique for every person. Inner purpose can shed light on your outer purpose. Inner and outer purpose, ultimately, are intertwined and aligned. The more you are connected you are to your inner purpose, the more your outer purpose will come into focus.

Living in alignment with your inner purpose is the basis for fulfilling your outer purpose in the world and doing so successfully. Without this alignment, you will most likely struggle in your attempts to express your outer purpose. Without alignment to your inner purpose, there’s less joy in all of the activities in life.

Take time each day to reflect on your inner purpose of awakening. Do this by paying attention to your state of consciousness. Give yourself a daily discipline of practicing presence.

~ Eckhart Tolle EckhartTeachings.com

No matter which side of the paper you look at, you can see the strip of woven paper, but you can’t see the entire strip at one time.

This image fits nicely with Eckhart Tolle’s explanation of life, “Death is not the opposite of life. Life has no opposite. The opposite of death is birth. Life is eternal.”

There’s always more to life … the life that we are … than meets the eye, and like the strip of paper, though it can’t be seen by us in its entirety, it nevertheless exists eternally.

If you wish to embody Tao, stop prating and start practicing.
Relax your body and dampen down your senses.
Return your mind to its original pristine state.
Forget about being separate from others and from the Divine Source.

As you return to Oneness, do not think of this or even be awed by it.
These are just other ways of separating yourself from it.
Simply merge into the truth, and allow it to surround you,

~ Lao Tzu (6th cent. BCE), in Brian Walker’s: Hua Hu Ching: The Unknown teachings of Lao Tzu, Harper SanFrancisco, 1992, pp 61.

The division of ‘windface’ into wind and face is a conceptual division that seemingly divides experience into a face, ‘me’, and the wind, ‘not me’. As a result the ‘person’ and the ‘world’ seem to become two distinct and independent entities or objects.

In this way the seamless intimacy of experience is fragmented into two apparent parts — an inside self and an outside object, other or world — which are imagined to be joined together by an act of knowing, feeling or perceiving. Hence we say, ‘I know such and such,’ ‘I feel the wind,’ ‘I love you’ and ‘I see the tree.’

However, in the seeing of a tree for instance, there’s no seer and there’s no seen. There is no inside ‘I’ that sees and there is no outside ‘tree’ that is seen. The ‘I’ and the ‘tree’ are concepts superimposed by thinking onto the reality of the experience, which in this case could simply be called ‘seeing’.

It’s thinking alone that divides the seamless intimacy of experiencing into a subject and an object, into an ‘I’ that sees and a ‘tree’ that is seen. However, awareness, or ‘I’ and the reality of the tree are not two separate experiences. They are one. ‘I’ and ‘tree’ are one experience in the same way that the wind and the face are one experience. There’s never a subject or an object of experience. There’s always only seamless intimate experiencing.

Or we could say that the apparent ‘I’ and the apparent tree share the same reality, are the same reality. It’s only a concept, an idea, which apparently divides them. However, this division between the seer and the seen, between the experiencer and the experienced, never actually happens. Separation is an illusion. It’s never actually experienced.

In other words, I don’t see a tree. In the experience of seeing, I am the tree. I am its reality. The only substance present in our experience of the tree is seeing and seeing or, more generally, experiencing, is awareness, our self. The awareness that’s seeing and the reality of that which is seen are not two separate things. They are one and the same.

We should say, ‘I am tree-ing.’ That is, ‘”I”, awareness, is treeing.’ The amness of ‘I’ and the isness of ‘tree’ share their being. The amness of self is the isness of things. The apparent mind, body and world is ‘I’ mind/body/world-ing.

All the great religions are founded upon this realization. For instance in Christianity the saying, ‘I and my father are one,’ means precisely this. It means that ‘I’, the awareness that is seeing these words or experiencing whatever is being experienced in this moment, is one with whatever is being experienced, that is, it is one with the reality of the universe.

The Sufis say, ‘There is only God.’ The Hindus say, ‘The Atman (the apparently individual self) and Brahman (the ultimate reality of the universe) are one.’ The Buddhists say, ‘Nirvana and samsara are one.’ This isn’t an extraordinary experience, known only by a few enlightened sages. It’s the direct, intimate, immediate experience of each of us, although it may not have been noticed.

In fact, the knowing of this unity between ‘I’ and the ‘world’, is a very familiar experience. It is known as beauty. When we are struck by the beauty of an object or landscape, all that keeps us at a distance or separate from that object dissolves and in that timeless moment, timeless because the mind is not present there, we realize our identity with the apparent object.

The experience of beauty is the dissolution of the apparent ‘objectness’ of the object and the ‘subjectness’ of our self, leaving only the seamless intimacy of experiencing.

Of course, when the mind returns it recreates the separate inside self and the separate outside object, other or world and we think and feel, as a result, that ‘I’ see the ‘landscape’. Thinking now attributes beauty to the landscape and in that moment beauty is downgraded from a revelation of the eternal nature that pervades all seeming things into a relative quality of the mind that belongs to some objects and not others.

In that moment, time and distance or ‘otherness’, which is another name for space, are created and the true experience of beauty is again veiled. When the same dissolution between ‘I’ and an apparent other is known, the very same experience is known as love.

Happiness, peace, humour and intelligence are all names that are given to the experience of this direct recognition of the seamless intimacy of experience. In fact, all the names of the mind, body and world refer ultimately to this one reality. It’s for this reason that love, happiness and peace are said to be unconditional, absolute. They depend on nothing. They are interwoven into the fabric of all experience.

Once the ‘I’ and the object, other or world have been conceptually separated from the seamless intimacy of experience, love, happiness, peace, beauty, etc., which are inherent in all experience, seem to become veiled and, as a result, the seemingly inside self embarks on a search for them in the apparently outside world.

The resolution of the search, which is known as peace, happiness or love, always involves the recognition that experience is not divided into two parts — ‘I’ and ‘other’, ‘me’ and the ‘world’ — whether or not it is actually formulated in these terms. Likewise, suffering always involves the forgetting or ignoring of this simple, primordial fact of experience.

Happiness is simply the unveiling of this ignorance. It is not a new experience. It does not come and go. It cannot be given or withdrawn. It can only appear to be forgotten and remembered or recognized. It’s like the keys under the papers. They seemed to be lost but are, in fact, always there. In the experience of peace and happiness the inside self and the outside world dissolve. In the experience of love, the one who loves and the one that is loved dissolve.

In fact, our only experience of the world and all others is made only of knowing, so we could say that in the experience of peace and happiness, the apparent otherness or outsideness of the world is dissolved in our experiential understanding that there is always only knowingness or awareness. That is peace, happiness, love and beauty.

However, it is only the mind that thinks that peace, happiness and love seem to be lost and seem to be found. Presence never loses itself.

~ From: Presence Volume II: The Intimacy of All Experience, by Rupert Spira. For more info about Rupert’s books, Click Here