sion of the soul; the work is done,
and man and God are one. (59:10-12)
These words remind us of a similar passage from another modern gospel, perhaps the greatest of them, Nikos Kazantzakis’s The Last Temptation of Christ:
Struggle between the flesh and the spirit, reconciliation and submission, and finally—the supreme purpose of the struggle—union with God: this was the ascent taken by Christ, the ascent which he invites us to take as well, following in his bloody tracks. This is the Supreme Duty of the man who struggles—to set out for the lofty peak which Christ, the first-born son of salvation, attained.6
The Gospel speaks typically of the Christ potential in every person:
And Jesus said,
“I cannot show the king, unless
you see with eyes of soul, because
the kingdom of the king is in the soul.
And every soul a kingdom is.
There is a king for every man.
This king is love, and when this love
becomes the greatest power in life,
it is the Christ; so Christ is king.
And every one may have this Christ
dwell in his soul, as Christ dwells in
my soul.” (71:4-7.)
“And when he rises to the plane
of Christine consciousness, he knows
that he himself is king, is love, is Christ,
and so is son of God.” (71:16)
The emphasis is off of Jesus Christ in this gospel and on the reader, since Jesus came to initiate humanity as a whole into Christhood. “Christ” means “the Anointed,” but in this work it has come to mean “the Anointing.” Anyone can receive it, and thus anyone can become the, or a, Christ.
Jesus comes to bring the sav-
iour of the world to men;
Love is the saviour of the world.
And all who put their trust in Christ,
and follow Jesus as a pat-
tern and a guide, have everlasting life. (79:16-17)
Such occasional seeming demotions of Jesus from the focus of Christian worship means not to denigrate Jesus but rather to regain the focus on Jesus’ desire to pass the anointing on to us. “Christ is not a man. The Christ is universal love, and Love is king” (68:11).
Again,
“I am the lamp; Christ is the oil
of life; the Holy Breath the fire.
Behold the light! and he who fol-
lows me shall not walk in the dark,
but he shall have the light of life” (135:4).
Jesus is the bearer of the anointing, and he bears it for others. He is rather like the candle flame in the Buddhist parable which seeks to illustrate reincarnation as the sequential lighting of each candle in a series by the flame of the one before it. “I am the candle of the Lord aflame to light the way” (72:31). Jesus can even speak of himself in terms suggesting he senses the presence of the Christ as a distinct entity within him, the “sin” of the old Nestorian Christology:
“He who believes in me and in
the Christ whom God has sent,
may drink the cup of life, and from
his inner parts shall streams of li-
ving waters flow” (134:3).
His disciple Martha already understood this, that Jesus was not identical with that which he modeled: “And Martha said, ‘Lord, I believe that you are come to manifest the Christ of God’” (148:19, rewriting John 11:27).
The Aquarian Jesus is made to speak with the bitter wisdom of twentieth-century hindsight when he predicts what will happen in his name because people will have misunderstood his role as central, not as instrumental: “because of me, the earth will be baptized in human blood” (113:14b; cf. Luke 12:49). But perhaps it is not the fault of poor mankind. Perhaps it must recoil from the revelation: “Behold, the light may be so bright that men cannot see anything” (107:18).
The Aquarian Christology might be Pantheistic, given all these statements, but does it go far enough for us to be able to classify it under the rubric of New Thought? Indeed it does. We do find occasional boasts that, being one with Divine Reason and realizing it, one can move mountains at a word: “The greatest power in heaven and earth is thought” (84:22-28). Not faith, as in Mark 12:22-24, but thought. And there is the New Thought emphasis on wishing a thing and exercising divine power to get it, which strikes some as magical: “What he wills to gain he has the power to gain” (14:11).
If God is within us, so are heaven and hell:
My brother, man, your thoughts are wrong;
your heaven is not far away;
and it is not a place of metes and bounds,
is not a country to be reached;
it is a state of mind.
God never made a heav’n for man;
he never made a hell; we are
creators and we make our own.
Now, cease to seek for heaven in the sky;
just open up the windows of your hearts,
and, like a flood of light, a heaven will come
and bring a boundless joy;
then toil will be no cruel task. (33:8-10)
The devil is the greatest power in
our land, and though a myth, he dan-
dles on his knee both youth and age. (56:20)
At one juncture (34:4), when Jesus is sojourning among the Buddhists, and correcting them on a point or two, an interesting question arises, seemingly inevitably: Is Jesus the Buddha come again? “The priests and all the people were astounded at his words and said, ‘Is this not Buddha come again in flesh? No other one could speak with such simplicity and power’” (cf. Matthew 12:23; John 3:2). Of course, the implied answer is both yes and no. He is not Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha of the sixth century BCE, but he is one of that one’s successors, one of the pan-historical chain of Enlightened Ones. He need not be the same man reincarnated. The point is that no one individual need be the focus of Enlightenment—as if, without him coming back, we should be bereft of Enlightenment. If you or I were to give full vent to the Christ-potential we contain, we, too, should be Buddhas, at least Bodhisattvas, ourselves.
Etheric Ethics
One cannot really imagine a gospel without ethics, and, so to speak, plenty of them. After all, many people, hearing the word “gospel,” probably think at once: “Sermon on the Mount” and maybe nothing more.
One thing we seldom find in the traditional gospels is metaethics, the prior thinking on the presuppositions on the basis of which we decide the morality of specific issues. We are used to referring to this lack euphemistically, as if it were a virtue for Jesus to have simply issued moral demands with no thought of an underlying system which we might propound in order to decide new questions on the same principles. By contrast, it is to the credit of our Aquarian evangelist that he has provided an important glimpse of his Jesus’ moral calculus:
When men defy their consciences
and listen not