Q. Woah! Wait! Not done just yet! Still have like one more question...
A. Really!? Wow! Ok! Shoot!
Q. Perhaps even though the Gospels tell the truth that Jesus claimed divinity, and even though he could not be a liar or a lunatic and therefore the claim is true, yet he didn't mean it to be understood literally but rather in a mystical way.
So basically, we shouldn't interpret His claim to divinity in a Western, that is, Jewish or Christian, sense but in an Eastern, that is Hindu or Buddhist, sense. Yes, Jesus was God, and knew it, and claimed it - but we are all God. We unenlightened nonmystics just don't realize it. Jesus was an enlightened mystic, a guru, who realized his own inner divinity. There are thousands of people today, as in the past, who claim to be God but are neither liars nor lunatics. They are gurus, yogis, roshis, "spiritual masters", "enlightened" mystics. Why couldn't Jesus fit into this well-established and well-populated class?
A. For one very simple reason: because He was a Jew. No guru was ever a Jew, and no Jew was ever a guru. The differences - more, the contradictions - between the religious Judaism of Jesus and the teaching of all the gurus, Hindu, Buddhist, Taoist or New Age, are so many, so great and so obvious that you have to be a dunce or a professor to miss them. It is utterly unhistorical, uprooted and deracinated to see Jesus as a Hindu and not a Jew, as a kind of generic, universal type of "enlightened consciousness". You cannot ignore his Jewishness.
If Jesus was in fact a guru or mystic who transcended and contradicted his Jewishness, then he utterly failed to get any one of the guru's teachings across to anybody, ever, for almost two thousand years. He was the worst teacher in history if he misled all his followers on every one of the following essential points where Judaism and Eastern mysticism conflict. The Jews were extremely proud of these distinctive beliefs and held to them tenaciously against worldwide disagreement, against the whole pagan, polytheistic, pantheistic, mythical and mystical religious world of antiquity, for nearly two millennia. Here are eight flat-out contradictions between Jesus' Judaism and the universal teaching of all gurus. Together they make it utterly impossible to call Jesus a guru.
To be continued.
18thJuly 2017