Order of the Rose and Cross

Christ: The Western Avatar
By Frater L.E.O.

Just who was the obscure person who changed the world ? In the Christian West the very calendar begins chronologically with the alleged birth of this God/Man Yeshua who lived at some time around the first century of this era. But how are we occidentals, who have been nurtured within the confines of the Christian Church, supposed to relate to him spiritually two thousand years on, in the early years of the twenty-first century ? Many theological opinions have been voiced as to the first question but all have been found wanting, and now the churches themselves are becoming spiritually bankrupt – a state that can only be remedied by a return to the centrality of mystical experience.
Let us consider the question ourselves. Was this Yeshua, this Jesus, the rebirth of the Sun-god cult that followed in the wake of Mithraism ? He is, after all, referred to symbolically in the Book of Malachi (Ch. 4, v 2) as the ‘Sun of Righteousness’. Could he have been merely an uneducated, inconsistent spiritual adventurer, or a poor carpenter’s son with egotistical obsessions, or even in some unknown way connected to the Herodian throne ? Or was he really what he claimed to be: the Son of God ? He did, after all, tell his followers that ‘I and the Father are one’ and ‘he that has seen me has seen the Father’.
For me he was an awakened Jewish prophet of the Jewish faith, who realised his true nature: that he was lit by the eternal light of Kether and was thus the most perfect emanation of the Supernal Triad. He was also aware that he was the central character in a very complex spiritual tragedy, and yet it is out of this tragedy that the road of salvation leads.
One of the most interesting of the theories, and for me one of the most persuasive, is that Jesus Christ was an initiate in one of the mystery schools that flourished then in Palestine – most probably that of the Essenes. These schools were, in effect, the universities of their day. Jesus himself hinted at this inner knowledge, which was reserved and passed on in apostolic succession (see, e.g., Matthew 13:10-11; Mark 4:10-11 and Luke 8: 9-10).
I have no doubt that Yeshua/Jesus existed and was the incarnation of the quintessence of God. Even if Jesus never existed historically on this earthly plane of Assiah, he most certainly existed and continues to exist archetypically in the collective unconscious psyche of western man, for all knowledge that ever was or shall be is already in the akashic realm.
All true religion is founded on personal experience, which for me is the experience that we are all at one with the great universal consciousness and that all life is one. It is the realisation that we are one with the Primal Will and essence of the universe, a state known within Hinduism as the Vedic experience of ‘Tat Tvam Asi’ (‘Thou art That’). This awakening to the Tat Tvam Asi is, I believe, the raison d’être of all true mystical and religious awakening.
Thus the eternal Logos became flesh and dwelt amongst us, for time and eternity crossed, and there at the interface of time and eternity a door was opened and the Limitless shone through. Jesus Christ was born with the knowledge that he was God and was a manifestation of the primal energy of all existence, even before he had the Vedic experience.
He knew that he was beyond time yet was in time, in this world of Assiah yet not of this world: “My Kingdom is not of this world”, yet this world was the way to the inner world of the spirit. He was in the here and now: “Now is the day of Salvation” (2 Cor. 6:2). And as everyone who stood around him was also made of the same Primal Energy and was made in the image of God, all of them were already there in the Kingdom of Light. He also reminded his hearers, “I said, ye are gods” (John 10:34, quoting Psalm 82: 6). Now the expression ‘Son of God’ means ‘Of the Nature of God’. We are all sons and daughters of God, we are all made of ‘God Stuff’, and when I use the words, God, Mind, Primal Energy, I mean the same thing: the spiritual substance which we cannot even attempt to describe.
A Son of God is one who has awakened to the knowledge that he is the living expression of this Universal Mind and can say truthfully with Christ, “I and the Father are One”. The problem for Jesus Christ was that he was born into a culture that was not sympathetic towards someone who thought that he was God. Had Jesus been brought up in a tradition like Hinduism, which is non-dualistic, and if he had said to the Hindus what he said to the Jews – “I and my Father are One” – they would have congratulated him that he had found this out, because the idea of God becoming man was perfectly acceptable within Hindu culture. The Good News of the Christian gospel is that if Jesus Christ could realise his true nature, then so could everyone else – and that really is good news.
Christianity is a religion born of time and history, steeped in the belief that truth began with Abraham and culminated in the Ascension of Christ, which is not correct if truth be absolute and universal. The Absolute cannot be located or confined geographically to a small religious group in Palestine. If the teachings of Jesus are to be given an air of theological respectability, then the adherents of the true religion of Jesus Christ must recognise that the Light of Truth which was lit at Pentecost burns in the hearts of all followers of truth, whether they be Christian, Hindu, Buddhist or of any other God-centred religion.
It would need to be stated that the word ‘Jesus’ and the word ‘Christ’ are not synonymous as the majority of people think. ‘Jesus’ is symbolic of our all too human side, whereas ‘Christ’ is our eternal nature, which is Yekidah in us all. ‘Jesus’ was born of time and died in time. ‘Christ’, on the other hand, is timeless and links us to the Kingdom of God. When the Logos spoke as Jesus his address was to the relative world, where human beings lived and died as Jesus himself did. When he spoke as the Eternal Christ he proclaimed to the people and to himself, “And now, O Father, glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory which I had with thee before the world was” (John 17:5); “Before Abraham was, I am” (John 8:58); and again, “Your father Abraham rejoiced to see my day” (John 8:56). These utterances point to the universality of all mankind, to all time and all being.
Now salvation means healing, and in the universal teaching of Christ it means to be healed of the ills of illusion, to be free from the spell of egotism and ignorance, to know one’s true nature and to be alive in the NOW. Awake to the Now moment as Christ says, “Now is the accepted time, behold, now is the day of salvation”. There is no journey to be taken, for we are already there before we set out.
When an avatar manifests in the world of form and time we could say that time crosses eternity. If time is represented by a horizontal and eternity by a vertical line, we have a cross – the centre of which is the Now moment of the axis of the universe. The four arms of the cross can represent the stages of one’s life: birth, growth, decay and death. If one then draws a circle around the arms of the cross we have the Tarot Key 10, Kaph. This is the wheel of life which can be the wheel of suffering and yet the wheel of bliss. We live at the axis of this wheel when we awake to the totality of all existence – to live at this centre is to live in the NOW, and this is what Jesus hinted at to his followers: “Take therefore no thought for the morrow”. In other words, ‘Live in the Now’. One could also say that the mystical teaching of Christ is one of living in the Now moment.
The teachings of Christ can be related to both astrology and alchemy. Alchemically we are made aware, in John, Ch 3, of two alchemical elements, Spirit and Water. In this gospel Jesus speaks about the necessity of being born of Spirit and Water in order to be reborn into the realm of the Limitless Light (the Kingdom of God). Again, in speaking to the woman of Samaria, who came to fetch water from the well, he spoke about the water of life.
The name of the mother of Jesus, Mary, is the Greek form of the Hebrew word meaning ‘bitter’. In Latin it becomes ‘Mare’ (the sea), and there are other words deriving from the same root (MA). Thus in Sanskrit we have ‘Maya’, the mother of Buddha, which also means the world of form; in Latin ‘Mater’ (Mother), and in English ‘Matter’, the prima materia of the alchemists. On the metaphysical level of understanding we have spirit in union with matter, producing the Son in virgin matter.
Jesus can also be represented astrologically. In Malachi (4:2) Christ is referred to as the Sun of righteousness. In Christian iconography the Bull, Lion, Eagle and Man are used as signs for the four Evangelists. There are also the fixed signs of the zodiac: Taurus, Leo, Scorpio and Aquarius. The Christian Church has adapted the sign of Pisces as its sign par excellence: its stands for the major influence or rule of the Spirit via the stars. The sun, in its equinoctial procession through the heavens, enters Pisces at a time that coincides approximately with the Christian era.
To conclude my paper, I do not believe that any of the ‘Christian’ churches of today have a true understanding of the inner teachings of Christ. Basically, I feel that the Gnostic Gospels that were unearthed in 1945 are close to what this Jesus Christ, the Western Avatar, proclaimed, but this question lies beyond the scope of this paper. In brief, the Gnostic Gospels teach a theology of the immanence and yet the transcendence of God.
For the Gnostics the only true knowledge is self-knowledge and the only sin is ignorance of your true sonship with the Father. We are a living kabbalistic Tree; we are the vehicle of the supernal Godhead. When we awaken to the knowledge of our oneness with all things we are, as it were, one with the Great Ocean of the Limitless Light, and like the bubbles in the Ocean we break and become one with that Great Ocean.
May all beings achieve awakening and realise their Oneness with the eternal spirit or, as it is so beautifully expressed in Arnold’s The Light of Asia,
‘Om Mani Padme Hum, The Dewdrop slips into the Shining Sea’

[Editorial note: It must be stressed that this article reflects the personal opinion of the author and should not be seen as representing the corporate views, aims or objectives of the Order of the Rose and Cross]

Editorial note: it should be borne in mind that the Gnostic Gospels are of later date than the Canonical Gospels and that few, if any, scholars would look to the Gnostic texts for a true understanding of Christ or of the Christian faith.