Light From Eternal Lamps–Essays On Practical Spiritual Life–by Swami Nirmalananda Giri
Following Christ
“And when he had called the people unto him with his disciples also, he said unto them, Whosoever will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me.”
In this verse the Lord Jesus speaks of “whosoever will come after me.” What is meant by “going after” Christ? An incident from the first chapter of the Gospel of Saint John will elucidate this.
“The next day after John stood, and two of his disciples; And looking upon Jesus as he walked, he saith, Behold the Lamb of God! And the two disciples heard him speak, and they followed Jesus. Then Jesus turned, and saw them following, and saith unto them, What seek ye? They said unto him, Rabbi, (which is to say, being interpreted, Master,) where dwellest thou? He saith unto them, Come and see. They came and saw where he dwelt, and abode with him that day.”
Keeping in mind that the Holy Scriptures are symbolic picturings of esoteric matters, this passage gives us a thrilling message, the message that we can go after Christ and come to see and dwell in the identical state of being and consciousness in which He is established. In other words, by going after Jesus Christ we can ourselves become a Christ.
So Jesus is talking about people who have this wonderfully audacious aspiration and confidence, the assurance expressed by Saint John in his first epistle when he says: “Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be: but we know that, when he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is.” We are such people–people who understand that really being a Christian is to be one who is seeking for Christhood, that to follow Jesus Christ is to strive to become a Christ like Him. We realize that we are not to be mere carbon copies or mirror-reflections of Jesus, but are meant to actually become anointed Sons of God, established in the infinite consciousness of God. We aspire to one day hear the divine declaration: “Thou art my Son, this day have I begotten thee.”
All this being so, we must firmly keep in mind that we dare not ever be satisfied with less than the highest–with Christhood itself. We must not be content with just intellectual challenge and fulfillment, with feeling “good” or “spiritual” or being at peace or having a bit of psychic phenomena or even development of some psychic ability. We must aim much higher, understanding that being “a good Christian” in the usual sense is really being no Christian at all!
Now everything I have said so far is rather inspiring, but when we start to think about it, it can be pretty frightening, too. Because in this quest we do not get to write our own rules or impose our own standards. Instead, the perfection of Jesus Christ is the measuring stick! For going after Christ is not the same as going around the corner for a loaf of bread. It is an eternal journey. Further, there is no bending of the rules. For when Jesus uses the term “whosoever” it means there are no exceptions whatsoever.
Yet there is another side to “whosoever” that is perhaps more pleasing. It also means that anyone can do it. There are no exceptions here, either. Every single human being can become a Christ. There is no lottery that determines the lucky few who can become Christ. All can take the journey to Christhood and arrive intact and successful. That is assuring.
The language of the Gospel is very precise. Jesus does not say “whosoever comes after Me,” but “whosoever will come after Me.” The will is the highest faculty we possess. In fact, will is the highest faculty any relative being possesses. Therefore when we exercise our wills we are in training for higher levels of evolution as well. All of us are confident that we have free will and many like to make a point about it. Such an assertion makes us feel good and confident. But when asked to exert that will we sometimes are not so exuberant. For most of us have want power instead of will power. However, we cannot ignore the fact that putting forth our will is not only the first step of the journey to Christhood–every single step of the way involves our will. And since it is essential that we be ever free in our will, at every step of the way we have the ability to withdraw our will and fall back into our old mortality and ignorance.
Spiritual life is like a ladder. Saint John Climacus even wrote an entire book about this. Annoying as it may be, we have to realize that in spiritual life as in climbing a ladder, it is easy and effortless to fall back down, but every step upward takes real effort. Moreover, we have to hang on every moment! The only ladder that is easy to negotiate is one that is lying down and gets us nowhere, or a ladder whose angle is so slight that we cannot ascend to any significant level. We have to be like the old Southern hymn that after speaking of catching the spiritual vision says: “So I buckled on my shoes and I started….” Spiritual life is no easy stroll and we need to be “girded up” for the trip.
How do we exercise our will? Through discipline. That often does not sit too well–especially if we have been indoctrinated in the “happy time” or “faith instead of works” view of religion. It must be faced, however, that the old “justified by faith and not by works” placebo is a deadly delusion. Like the Prodigal Son we must fulfil all three conditions. We must come to ourselves; we must arise; and we must start moving. Just waking up spiritually means nothing unless there is an ascent and a journeying back to the Father.
Since God is everywhere, and since we are unchanging spirits, why is there any talk about getting up and going? Why did Jesus even speak of those who would “come after” Him? It is easy to lose ourselves in the labyrinth of philosophy on this, so let us just say that since we are in delusion and believing it–even when we also believe that the way we see things is an illusion–we have to be spoken to in the terms we are used to thinking in, in the way we have been experiencing things for ages of relative existence.
The problem with our perceptions is not outside, but inside us. The mirror of our mind has gotten both cloudy and warped. So it is impossible in our present state to see anything clearly or accurately. The mirror must be put back into shape and clarified. It is this matter of interior clarity or obscurity that is meant when the Bible speaks of purity and impurity.
Although it is an inescapable fact that sin exists, we must not look at it in the sense of the exoteric religions. Instead we must understand sin as anything whatsoever that obscures the inner eye of the soul and warps the images of the intellect, preventing clarity of both perception and response. Presently our sight is really blindness and our hearing is really deafness. If we consider the pain and frustration that seems to be an integral part of human life (unless we are utterly unconscious, as some are) our blind and deaf condition should be obvious. When we think our way is clear and then crash into a wall it can reasonably be concluded that we are not seeing true. Perhaps the worst fact of all is that we are not exactly blind or deaf. Instead, we are seeing and hearing–but utterly incorrectly. This makes us form wrong conclusions and make wrong responses. Tennessee Williams wrote that we are all children trying to spell the Name of God with the wrong alphabet blocks.
This is true, but we need not be pessimistic, for correction is possible. When children try to walk, their falling down is inevitable. But success is also inevitable. The whole idea of Jesus Christ was the revelation of what we, too, can become. And when we realize that the Old Testament is a record of how Adam the first man became Christ the Savior, evolving from life to life, it becomes personally meaningful for us. We see the mistakes he made as Noah, as Moses, as David. Some of his mistakes had far-reaching and grave consequences. But in each life he moved forward. And he made it. As Yogananda often said: a saint is a sinner who never gave up. For us who are not so keen on discipline, a more apt saying is that a diamond is a piece of coal that never gave up. Think of the ages and ages of continuous, uninterrupted heat and pressure required to turn a porous piece of black carbon into a clear diamond that is one of the hardest substances on earth. We can make it a lot quicker than that. And the results will be more satisfying.
The hope we can hold is a dynamic thing, not a pipe dream. But it only becomes dynamic by our acting upon it through the application of self-correction and self-healing through the purifying process of discipline. Having this in mind, after writing the affirmation of our status as sons of God, Saint John continued: “And every man that hath this hope in him purifieth himself, even as he is pure.” “He” refers to God, the all-pure. We can attain the purity, the clarity, of God. What a thought! What a truth.
Saint John reveals to us that it is we ourselves who must engage in the purification process. This is because it is an interior process that must arise from within, from the very core of our being. Even though we shake off the apparent errors of exoteric religion, we often unknowingly retain many of its insidious conditionings. This is especially true in the matter of attitudes in regard to spiritual life. It is astonishing to see how most “new age” propaganda is thoroughly grounded in the attitudes of Protestant Fundamentalism. Many people complain about the negative attitudes of Roman Catholicism, but those attitudes are easy to recognize. In contrast, the “happy, holy” lies of revivalistic Protestantism are much harder to detect, since they appear positive and supportive of spiritual life. This is true also because they are mostly in the form of outlooks and emotional reactions rather than obvious theological errors. Both “old age” and “new age” follies are based on “feelings” common to both.
Therefore when we are in the grip of such instinctual emotionality, we are shocked when confronted with Jesus’ words: “I go my way, and ye shall seek me, and shall die in your sins: whither I go, ye cannot come.” When we realize that “sin” means “falling short of the mark” and not something that makes an insecure God angry, then we get the right perspective. To “die in sin” is to be dead–that is, devoid of consciousness–in the spirit. And the effect of this death is to have our awareness focused on the material world which is itself mortality–in other words, death itself. Jesus confirms this interpretation when right after saying this He continues: “Ye are from beneath; I am from above: ye are of this world; I am not of this world.” As we find continually when looking deeper into the Gospels, it is a matter of the placement of consciousness. “Beneath” and “above” are in direct opposition to one another. Those who look down into the world of death must die. Conversely, those who look up to the world of life that is God shall live. We must be truly “converted”–that is, turned around completely. And when we do make–and maintain–the turnaround, we will be in a position to effectually make this prayer: “O Thou Whose unveiled face we long to behold, allow us now to enter the inner veils of Thy Most Holy Place, that we may be no longer flesh but spirit, leaving behind the outer darkness of this world.”
This is all very well in theory, but just how are we going to do it? Jesus gives us a three-point procedure, saying: “Whosoever will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me.” Deny; take up; and follow. These are the three steps to begin the journey to Christhood.
Here, too, we must realize that the Lord is speaking to us in terms that are meaningful to us at the moment. When He speaks of denying our “selves,” He means the false conglomerate of body, mind, emotion, and intellect that we mistakenly think is our self. Like a door has to be opened and moved out of the way to enable us to see what is beyond it, so we have to displace the center-stage position of our not-self before we can discover our real self. But until then we must be spoken to as though what we presently know is the real thing.
Charity is said to begin at home, and so does the purification needed to become the sons of God. And the heart of that cleansing is the denial of the false self with which we have been identifying for age upon age throughout countless lives. It is interesting to see that Jesus does not list abstinence from sin as the first step, but rather the abstinence from ego. For the Greek word aparneomai literally means to deny utterly in the sense of disowning and disavowing something. In other words, we do not hate the false self or intellectually deny its existence. Instead, we drop it, tossing it away like the nothing it is.
Aparneomai also means to abstain from something. This is important to know, since dropping the ego is no easy or quick procedure. Until we succeed in that, we must abstain from any fulfillment of its demands. No matter how loud or subtly it may put forth its case, we must disregard it totally. That is, we must not enter into any dialogue with it–no, not even telling it to shut up. It must have none of our attention, for attention strengthens the object. This is why we must not dwell on the evils of sin, even in supposedly rejecting sin. For those who think on a thing eventually enter into contact with it. This is why secretly immoral people love to fume and fulminate against immorality–that is the way they get to think about it all the time.
It is said that a Roman Catholic priest was assigned to a new parish, and among the first whose confession he heard was a very old lady. At the end of her confession she quavered: “And, Father, I committed the sin of adultery more than fifty years ago.” Relieved that she had at last uncovered such an ancient guilt, the priest gave her absolution. But at the end of her next confession she again said: “And, Father, I committed the sin of adultery more than fifty years ago.” Supposing that she had forgotten her previous confession of the sin, the priest made no comment but pronounced the formula of absolution. This incident was repeated quite a few times. Upon once again being told: “And, Father, I committed the sin of adultery more than fifty years ago,” the priest finally said: “You have already received absolution for that sin quite some time back. Why do you keep mentioning it? Do you find it hard to believe that God has forgiven you?” “Oh, no, Father, it is not that,” came the voice from the other side of the screen. “It’s just that I like to talk about it.”
Sin is worthy neither of our commission nor our attention. And neither is the root of sin, the ego.
“And every man that hath this hope in him purifieth himself, even as he is pure.”
1) Mark 8:34
[Go back]
2) John 1:35, 39 [Go back]
3) I John 3:2 [Go back]
4) Hebrews 1:5 [Go back]
5) “Let your loins be girded about, and your lights burning.” (Luke 12:35) “Wherefore gird up the loins of your mind, be sober, and hope to the end for the grace that is to be brought unto you at the revelation of Jesus Christ” (I Peter 1:13) [Go back]
6) “And when he came to himself, he said, I will arise and go to my father.” (Luke 15:17,18) [Go back]
7) See Robe of Light for more about this. [Go back]
8) I John 3:3 [Go back]
9) John 8:21 [Go back]
10) John 8:23 [Go back]
11) I John 3:3 [Go back]
