In Dharmic terms, Jesus the Christ is also known as the Avatar, the Buddha, the Bhagavan. The Avatar is the descent of the Divine into human form. The Buddha is the awakener, the realizer. Bhagavan is the Blessed One. The Hebraic "son of God" refers to someone with a close relationship to God, and Jesus would certainly fit the bill and more. The Christian "Son of God" refers to someone who has realized his fullness-in-God, to the point of being one with God consciously and embodiedly.441 In the Old Testament, "son of God" is a title given to the angels, the Chosen People, the children of Israel, and their kings. It signifies an adoptive sonship that establishes a relationship of particular intimacy between God and his creature. When the promised Messiah-King is called "son of God", it does not necessarily imply that he was more than human, according to the literal meaning of these texts. Those who called Jesus "son of God", as the Messiah of Israel, perhaps meant nothing more than this.
442 Such is not the case for Simon Peter when he confesses Jesus as "the Christ, the Son of the living God", for Jesus responds solemnly: "Flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven." Similarly Paul will write, regarding his conversion on the road to Damascus, "When he who had set me apart before I was born, and had called me through his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son to me, in order that I might preach him among the Gentiles..." "and in the synagogues immediately [Paul] proclaimed Jesus, saying, 'He is the Son of God.'" From the beginning this acknowledgment of Christ's divine sonship will be the centre of the apostolic faith, first professed by Peter as the Church's foundation.
In Dharmic terms, the Son of God would be a Sat-Guru, someone capable of bringing others into the state of fullness-in-God, to the point of being able to confess "I and the Father are One". Many followers of Jesus the Christ believe that Jesus is the Only Son of God; many followers believe otherwise. In any event, the important point is that whichever Sat-Guru would follows, one should be aware of the nature of such a relationship. The Divine Physics of that relationship flourishes in the context of the recognition of the very Divine Incarnation of the Sat-Guru. Sts. Peter and Paul recognized that Divine Incarnation in Jesus. Arjuna recognized it in Krishna, the Avatar. Sariputra recognized it in Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha. Khadijah recognized it in Muhammad, the Rasul.
Thus, Christianity is based on Guru-Bhakti Yoga, or the Spiritual Practice of Devotion to the Divine-Human Person. Swami Sivananda outlined some of the laws inherent in Guru-Bhakti Yoga:
1. To learn cooking, you need a teacher; to learn science you need a professor; to learn any art you need a master. Is not Guru necessary to learn Atma-Vidya?
2. Guru indeed is the sole refuge to take you across the Samsaric deluge.
3. On the thorny path of Truth to guide you there is none but Guru.
4. Guru’s Grace can work wonders.
5. In all your struggle of daily life, Guru will guide and protect you.
6. Guru is the torch-bearer of wisdom.
7. Guru, Isvara, Brahman, preceptor, teacher, Divine Master, etc., are synonymous terms.
8. Salute your Guru first before you salute God, because he takes you to God.
9. Take Mantra Diksha from your Guru. This will inspire and elevate you.
10. Guru will not do Sadhana for you. You will have to do it yourself.
11. Guru will show you the right path.
12. Guru can select the right Yoga for the disciple.
13. By Guru’s grace, the disciple can overcome obstacles and doubts on the path.
14. Guru will lift the disciple from the pitfalls and snares.
15. Sacrifice your body and life to serve your Guru. Then he will take care of your soul.
16. Don’t expect a miracle from your Guru to lift you up into Samadhi. Do rigorous Sadhana yourself. A hungry man will have to eat himself.
17. If you cannot get a Satguru you cannot progress in the spiritual path.
18. Be patient and wise in selecting your Guru, because you cannot divorce your Guru afterwards. It is the greatest sin.
19. Relation between Guru and Chela is sacred and lifelong. Understand this point very well.
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Hinduism/Vedanta - Bhakti Yoga - Quotations by Zen Master Rama, Dr. Frederick Lenz
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Zen Master Rama, Dr. Frederick Lenz:
"There are four principal pathways that lead to enlightement: The yoga of love, the yoga of service, the yoga of knowledge, and the yoga of mysticism.
In the course of an individual being's evolution we will practice each of these yogas. One path is not superior to another.
The path that is followed by most persons in the beginning of their spitirual search is the path of love, bhakti yoga.
As you pass through bhakti yoga, as you pass through love, you're elated. You're fulfilled and you're joyous.
Love is the easiest and most effective way to begin our search for self-realization.
The art of spirituality is learning to be happy in any condition and in any circumstance. This is the art of love.
Love is the highest of all qualities we can experience.
Love is, in its essence, a free, formless strand of luminosity.
Beyond matter is spirit and in spirit there is nothing but love.
If we examine the essence of existence, we'll find that the essence is love. There really is nothing that isn't love.
God is love.
Love is the strongest force in the universe
Love is beginningless and endless ecstasy. It is an unfathomable mystery. It is the study of our lives.
Everything is a formation or an aggregate of love.
Love knits families together, friends, lovers, societies, nations and perhaps oneday a world.
In the most advanced state of love we don't love for any reason or purpose. We don't even direct our love necessarily to an object.
Most people suffer in love because of attachment. Attachment means we're interested in a net return on our investment.
This kind of love doesn't work very well, it destorys the nature of love.
Love is giving.
Love does not seek to please itself, but offers itself and its life to others.
The yoga of love is the yoga of acceptance. Love teaches us that which is most important is self-acceptance.
We begin by loving and accepting ourselves.
We learn that those around us are an extension of ourselves, both animate and inanimate. All things have a life and form. We learn to love them all.
In the Yoga of Love we see that matter and spirit are one. It's only the ego that separates.
The ego is a false perception of self. It's an idea, a transitory identity that we've picked up.
The ego is not harmonious with happiness and spiritual development. In the process of spiritual transformation we refine it. In the fire of love we melt the ego down.
What is there when the ego is gone? Eternity, love.
When we love we see beyond the prisim of illusion. Love takes us through the prism through emotional oneness.
The art of love is to embrace the world and that which lies beyond it.
We encompass all of existence, yet a particle of our awareness is focused in this world, in the moment.
On the path of love we feel that if we love today, it's only because God is loving through us, because there is a special grace present with which we can love.
Everything is the will of God -- we are only instruments of her will and we learn to just love and accept.
When you find that you're unhappy, know that it's because you're not loving properly.
In the yoga of love we learn to love consciousness. Consciousness is existence. It is the very stuff of which life is composed.
Love teaches us how to penetrate the inner worlds, to clean the glass of existence and see reality in its perfect essence.
If you want to follow the path of love, it's a good idea to meditate on the heart chakra everyday. The heart chakra is in the center of the chest.
Fix your awareness gently on the center of your chest. Try to feel love.
As you feel more and more love, begin to smile, let go, be free.
The path of love is its own reward. Your love itself, that is what completes you.
There's no place to go. There's nothing to attain. There's nothing to be reached. Love itself is all that you want.
The path of love has many opponents -- fear, self-pity, anxiety, hate, lust, greed, avarice - all the usual freinds.
The most successful way to combat these dark clouds that come between the light of you and that which you love, is to feel that love itself will rescue you.
One who practices the yoga of love is like child. When the child has a problem, it cries. When it cries, someone comes and helps the child.
So in the path of love -- rather than pulling our willpower together, using our discrimination, or working -- we just cry inwardly.
On the path of love we don't feel we necessarily have control. In the yoga of love we feel it's only God who does everything. We can't breathe one breath without God.
We sit in meditation and cry to God, we cry to the light, as little children, knowing God will do everything for us.
We're too insignificant and small to really be able to do anything, except cry, not unhappily, but an inner cry, a feeling of reaching to God:
"Oh God, God, please come to me, please illumine me, please act in me and through me. I don't know what's right and what's wrong. I can't tell anymore. I could be doing what I feel is right and perhaps I'm deceiving myself. Perhaps it's all my ego and my vanity. Please show me what's right or don't even show me. Please just do it, whether it brings me happiness or unhappiness, riches or poverty, sorrow or joy. Please act in and through me. I love only you."
Go to God, your beloved, and say:
"I would like to love more deeply and purely, more completely, and if it is your will, I will do that, if it is not, I won't and I'll accept that. I 'll just love you as best I can and love everyone as best I can.
Please act in and through me. Pleae let my love increase, if it is your will. I feel that's the right thing; but even if it's not the right thing, I'm willing to abide by your judment."
In the yoga of love, one has a teacher. It is the teacher whom one loves.
If one has an enlighened teacher and you come to this person with love, they will show you the ways of love.
The relationship between the student and teacher is ultimately important. In higher spirituality we don't study a subject as much as a person.
The enlightened teacher is someone who has become absorbed in eternity. While they may have a body like others, the essence of their being is light.
The yoga of love is for those who want an all-consuming relationship with their teacher. They see the teacher as an extension of God, of eternity -- which all of us are.
If you look deeply inside them you'll only see eternity; whereas with most human beings, when you look inside, you'll see all kinds of different things.
"Oh teacher, I love you more than anything and anyone else in all of existence. When you smile at me, the world lights up. If you frown, my world ends. If I create a block between us through my foolishness, my pride, my arrogance, my jealousy, my fear, my self-love, then I suffer. I suffer and suffer and it's only when I remove those obstacles that I 'll fee happy again. But I know that you love me no matter what I do because you are all love. You may be strict with me, you may be lenient. I trust you and I know that whatever you do or say is for my own good. I will do what you wish. I'll do my best of all, but even so, I know I'm an insignificant creature and not capable of fulfilling the dharma. So please show me, please guide me. If I make a mistake, please correct me. But more than anything, please love me and let me love you. Because as we merge our beings, as we fuse the light that is our reality together, that's my completion. That's when I see that I am you and that you are me: 'I am thine and thou art mine.'"
When you've become strong enough and developed enough, the teacher will fall away.
Merge your consciousness with that of a luminous being ... and then from there to eternity.
One should feel that one's friends, the people who meditate around you, who seek, are likewise pligrims on a journey. They're traveling to eternity also. You should love them. Whenever you see a good quality in them, you should repect them.
Whenever you respect and admire a spiritual quality, it starts to grow in yourself.
If you see faults in others, look the other way. Don't linger on imperfection.
If you were in a perfected state of consciousness, you would only see perfection in all things.
Everyone is growing and developing. Everyone has to go through a trial and eror process of finding what is right.
Actually everyting is right, even the errors.
A child in the 4th grade who's just learning algebra is not imperfect. While their may be a child in the 12th grade who's much better, the child who's learning is not imperfect.
When you follow the path of love you should feel that each one is perfect in their own right. While you can love others, never, ever, ever judge them.
The judgment that you pass today will only hinder a person in their spiritual evolution. All you do is say to the person, psychically: "This is what you are. You're fixed. You can't change."
Everyone is a flux -- so it's good to suspend judgements forever.
Lack of judgement doesn't mean that you don't see what is or is not. It simply means that you realize that everyone is constantly changing -- everyone is made up of conscioussness.
We cannot say that you are spiritually advanced if you are unkind to those around you.
The only way you can really evaluate spiritual advancement is to see how someone treats those who are close to them.
Someone maybe be able to meditate well, but if they can't manifest that meditation in just good common sense by loving and being king to those who are around them, then I can't say they're spiritually developed.
Real spirituality and love is always manifest. It always goes to those who are with us and around us.
Love is visceral and real. Love is physical. It embraces all things. Love doesn't space you out or take you out of this world.
Relationships are a proving ground for love.
Love is the chariot of emotion which takes us to our beloved.
When we love we see our oneness with others.
As we love truly and deeply, we see the white light of truth in them. Seeing this reminds us that the same light exists within us too.
As the Tibetans say: "Recognition is liberation."
Practice love in your relationships. The key to this is avoiding expectation.
It's expectation that makes most people miserable in love -- the return on the investment.
When you love someone, you shouldn't feel that they should love you in return. You have to give people freedom.
You cannot compel someone to love. Love is like the wind. It comes when it does, it stops when it does, it changes direction when it does. Who are you and I to criticize the wind?
Love has its own independent form and formlessness. When someone loves you be grateful for it.
If they stop loving, be grateful for that.
If they love another, let them love!
Know that life, which does everything perfectly, is now moving you in a new direction. The chess piece of your existence is being moved to a new square on the board of life.
Don't try to hold people to you, don't try to push them away. Let life do everything for you. This is the proper attitude on the path of love.
It's necessary when you follow the path of love to love those around you first. Desire tells us that we should have someone else in our life.
If someone else is supposed to be in your life, they will be in your life. You can't stop them from coming, if its the will of eternity.
Certainly, you may have been hurt beofre in love, but just because you get one bad apple doesn't mean they are all bad -- and you can learn from the difficult ones.
You don't love perfectly without first loving imperfectly.
It's far better to love impefectly than not to love at all.
Love is a modest and immodest teacher who will bring you through the school of existence, which is the heart.
When you love, you should always watch the quality of your love.
If you really love, then you're willing to step outside of your own love to do that which is right.
Ask youself: "Am I loving as deeply as I am capable of loving?"
While we all have a great capacity to love, very few of us will love the proper way.
If there's no one in your life to love right now, love yourself. A large part of the path of love is learning to love yourself.
Enjoy being with yourself, hanging out with yourself, doing things by yourself.
Love yourself even when you don't measure up to your own expectations. You have a certain idea of what you should do and what you should be -- it's only a silly idea that passes through your mind.
If you don't measure up to your expectations, realize that you should just be life without expectations.
You need to accept the fact that you will often do exactly the opposite of what you think is right. You need to accept that you're going to do that and still love yourself.
As long as you're running away from a part of yourself, you can't see immortality.
As long as you're too busy trying to become something that you're not, you can't see your own immortality.
Love all your different sides, only then will immortality come to you.
Try to have a more expanded sense of that which you are. Feel that you are eternity. There's only goodness. There's only light.
As your love grows, you will find that your attachment to this world will begin to fall away.
When we meditate with love we go very, very high , above thought, above form. Your love will cause you to have a union.
Only real love of the infinite will motivate you. While pain motivates, once we feel comfortable and the pain has stopped, we'll stop evolving. Love is a far superior spiritual vehicle.
Once we harness ourselves to love, it carries us to eternity.
Love teaches you to love your own mortality, just as we love the flowers that bloom for a short time and pass on.
The secret of love is acceptance, acceptance of our finite self, of our life, our birth ... our death.
The message of love is self-acceptance in the smaller sense and self-acceptance in the large sense -- the Self as eternity.
Love leads us to ourselves -- this is the mystery of love.
Love is the shortcut to meditation. Above thought is love, and within and below thought is love. Love is a ladder that we can climb through thought.
Instead of trying to stop thought when you meditate, focus your attention on love. Suddenly you'll find your thoughts are slacking. Light is everywhere and suddenly there is no thought.
In love we listen. We listen to what others say. We listen to what our own being is telling us about the nature of existence.
In this world people love to talk and be active. Everyone wants to express their opinion. Listen in meditation, not to your thoughts but to your feelings.
The true teacher of love is the heart. The heart is very, very wise. It makes mistakes from time to time, but it has a wisdom all of its own.
The heart is a place of great light and their are different gradations of light that pass through the heart.
It is only if you have the courage to follow your heart that you will succeed on the path of love.
The real test on the path of love is are you willing to give up everything for your love?
Follow your love as far as it will take you. Whether it brings you to salvation or damnation.
Don't be afraid to experiement with your life and with your heart, your meditation and your being. Just love.
Practice love and self-acceptance and you'll have an absolutely beautiful life.
The path of love. Good luck. May your love guide you through the bardo to eternity."
- Zen Master Rama, Dr. Frederick Lenz
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