THE LAST SUPPER: Onwards.
The last supper was really very similar to or the same thing as the Essenic brotherly meal. It also coincided with Pesach or Passover in Jesus’s time, so adding significant meaning.
It was a sharing a breaking of bread and wine or more likely, non alcoholic must.
The words that Jesus spoke saying that this is my body and this is my blood, meant something other than a literal translation. He was talking as the Universal and indicating that everything was God and there wasn’t anything but God. This was his last teaching before the crucifixion, that all is One, we are all One with God. ‘Peace be with you’, which Jesus used was an Essenic expression. The bread and wine were used as emblems, of the ultimate truth, so that the ritual would be continued, as it is today in The Mass. There is much symbolism with the Essenes for they were into The Kabbalah and Prophecy.
Another important ceremony at the supper was the washing of the apostle’s feet. In India this is called Padanamaskar or Worship of the Feet. It is to show that one isn’t above anyone else and that the same God dwells within all of us. So we can worship God in anything even another human being. Peter at first refused to allow Jesus to wash his feet, and Jesus told him, 'He that would be the greatest would be servant of all.'
THE CRUCIFIXION:
Without going into the ‘Passion’, let us look at the words of Jesus on the cross. The most important were spoken at the end, where he cried out ‘ My God, My God, why have thou forsaken me’. From a Vedantic standpoint this sounds very much like the dying ego. As the ego dies there is much fear, and this is reflected in Jesus’s feeling of abandonment. The ego doesn’t want to die, it wants to preserve itself even on the other higher planes, sometimes it will attempt to escape to another type of body rather than die. So here we have Jesus experiencing the entire feeling of all human souls for their separation from their source. This empty abandoned plane, that has to be fought through when abandoning identity. It was the ego crying out not to be abandoned.
Yeshua’s words, ‘It is finished’, are not strictly about his death but about the end of the battle. The ego is finished, and Yeshua’s soul has realized its identity with the Universal, it has merged and dropped all illusion of separation. In Vedanta this is called Videha Mukti or Liberation at the death of the body.
RESURRECTION:
This is the revitalizing of the body, rebuilding it and energizing it. Yeshua’s mission, if you will was to show that there was no death, and this was programmed into his karma for this lifetime. So on his death and Moksha the body still had some time to function in the world. There was programmed karma to play out that is. However the consciousness is no longer that of Yeshua but the Universal.
Death in itself is a very relative term, for many yogis can go into samadhi or trance, and the body seems to have no vital signs. One has to appreciate the manifestation of consciousness to understand this. In Vedanta it is posited that we have three bodies, the gross material, the subtle and the causal, and these have to be purified.
Purification of the Buddhi, or the individualised version of the Universal Mind/Mahat, is necessary for spiritual progress. The Buddhi is an aspect of the Vijnanamayakosha or Awareness Sheath, it is the Inner Mind/Intellect or Antahkarana. When it is turned inwards it pierces through Maya and leads to Moksha or Liberation. When it is turned outward it only succeeds in enhancing the power of the Lower Mind or Manamayakosha. This part of the mind is turned out to desires and satisfaction of the senses. A Buddhi turned outwards is a distortion of its 'function. For man can manipulate his mind to enjoy the senses, out of season, so to speak. Unlike the animal, which only operates instinctively within its' Dharma.
I will briefly talk about the five koshas and how this purification process works. It is a reversal of consciousness as we know it, to its' "Natural" State. The five koshas are the ANNAMAYA, PRANAMAYA, MANOMAYA, VIJNANAMAYA, and ANANDAMAYA KOSHAS. THAT IS THE FOOD, ENERGY, MIND, AWARENESS OR INTELLECTUAL, and BLISS OR CAUSAL SHEATHS.
The gross material body is the food sheath, the subtle is made up of the energy, mind and intellectual sheaths, and finally the third body is the causal or bliss sheath. The subtle is withdrawn at death, and dwells on the subtle planes at different levels. This also occurs in meditation and sleep. The conscious mind is dropped in favour of the subconscious mind. There is a second death where the energy and lower mind sheath are left behind. This sheath looks like the physical body one used in life.
There are three states of consciousness, Waking, Dreaming and Deep Sleep, and when we are asleep we leave the gross physical body behind and its waking state. Sometimes this happens otherwise and is called an ‘Out of Body’, experience. Death is when the sheaths no longer go back into the body, the connection is broken. With Jesus this didn’t happen for as the individual ego died the Universal Consciousness took over the body and its residual karma. So we have Jesus dying and ‘The Christ’, rising.
THE ASCENSION:
The Ascension can be looked at in different ways. Obviously rising and floating up to ‘Heaven’, is figurative for Heaven is within. So what happened at the Ascension? Jesus probably did rise above the ground to give the disciples a better view. At this point he disintegrated the body into its natural constituents and it disappeared.
The other alternative is that it was only a projected body and the normal body of Jesus the Christ was somewhere else on the planet, playing out residual programmed karma. Some say that Jesus returned to India and the body didn’t drop until he was very old, and there is a lot of hypothesis concerning this.
Whichever theory one prefers, it doesn’t take anything away from the message of Yeshua the man who became The Christ Spirit. The word Christ is the Greek word for Messiah. There is another word used by some early Christian groups and that is Chrestus which means ‘Perfected One’. In actuality they both mean the same thing, as a Perfected Master becomes one with the Christ Spirit, or Caitanya Kuthasta in Sanskrit. It is also not dissimilar to the Hindu Shakti, or Universal Energy, or even the Shekinah in Kabbalistic Judaism.(Jesus who became the Christ..took birth from the Brahmaloka he was mostly in Nirvikalpa samadhi but not completely in Sahaja..so there was a residual ego he used to take a non causal birth. It is likely he was on the Bhakti path before that..Ramana reflects the minds of the questioner so he probably didn't want to offend Chadwick.that is why he said 'might'. Also he may have thought that Chadwick may not have understood the process of the final killing of the ego..in this case the bhakti ego of Jesus...A death process has to happen with all moksha...Jesus happened to be on the cross, in more painful circumstances.....he cried out for he was losing his bhakti to moksha otherwise he would have to go back to brahmaloka consciousness).
