I have a friend on Facebook who asks very sincere questions about his relationship to Jesus Christ. He, like many Christians wants what is called a personal relationship with Jesus.Like many Christians I have met down the years they see Christianity as Jesus being a saviour and that in order to be saved they must put their faith in him as a person. The same approach applies with the Krishna Consiousness movement only instead of Jesus we have Krishna as Christ.
My personal view, which arises from direct experience of putting on the Mind of Christ (which is a grace and not something I do) is that they mistake the personality of Jesus for the direct experience of Christhood.
Jesus would, I think be, astonished that people worship his personality. Rick Warren in The Purpose Driven Life - What on Earth Am I here for? suggests that we work out and practice Christlike behaviour. What he suggests is that you change the way you think. However, Christlike behaviour has nothing to do with what YOU think. Thought is the very thing that keeps you separate from the experience of Christ. Christlike behaviour is a living stream. It isn`t a learned habit of thinking positive thought.
The Christ within you and me isn`t thought but Love in action. You might think good thoughts and this is to be commended. However, to use a Christian metaphor, you are still eating of the tree of good and evil. You are still using your dualistic thinking to try and behave like Christ. Christ action is non-dualistic - beyond the experience of good or evil. In Christlike behaviour the persona is not something one identifies with - the Father and I are one. This cannot be an experience of separateness.
The nearest relationship to Christ (not Jesus) is silence. It is the reason why one of the most powerful instructions within the bible is, "Be still and know that I AM God." This stillness is the stillness of no mind. It is the fullness of God. It is what is meant by putting on the Mind of Christ.
To study the life of Jesus Christ is to study the path to Christhood that he called each and everyone of us to journey on. To think that Jesus died to save us from sin is to accept that God was somehow annoyed at his human creation - which after all he created in the first place. This cannot be unless you accept that God is NOT Love but some moody kind of oddball who sends his son to be murdered so that he can feel better.
Rick Warren in The Purpose Driven Life says that you can overcome sin. He never says that at the level of Christ Consiousness there has never been sin, meaning separateness from God. Thus there is no need for a saviour because there is no one to save.
This is the same view of the Buddhist who realises nirvana and who becomes a Bodhisattava vowing to save all sentient beings while realising there are no sentient being to save.
Unlike Rick Warren, who advises that God wants you to grow up and behave like Christ, the Christ path asks you to disappear. The way you do this is to give yourself away but not because you want to be saved or because you are guilty of being a sinner. Jesus Christ poured himself away in total surrender to the will of the Father. This is a very different experience to thinking good thoughts and calling it Christlike behaviour.
The path to Christhood is totally radical and transforming. Even harrowing. The ones to teach the Way the Truth and the Life are the mystics of all traditions and none who know what it means to live as I AM. These are the ones who have put on the Mind of Christ and who would be astonished to hear that those claiming authority are inviting you to worship their personality.
The Christ within you and me is universal. It comes through the personality but to worship the personality is like claiming the wave is the ocean. Rick Warren and other Christian teachers I have met are like those who want you to make the wave better and who have never been to the ocean that is Christ Consiousness. They have never put on the Mind of Christ.
Picture - The Shadow of Death - William Holman Holt
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