Because he is absolute, Jesus doesn’t offer a path of devotion that consists of daily prayer and piety to God. He wants total, unswerving devotion: You shall love the Lord your God with all your mind.
In other words, every thought must be of God and every action directed toward him. Such a teaching is unworkable except for the most pious of recluses. The same holds true for the complete selflessness required on the path of service and the total fixation on spirituality required on the path of contemplation.
But denying the world is a path to extinction, which no one can advocate. Nor can we assume that Jesus wanted us to annihilate our egos and personalities in the name of God. It’s more reasonable to assume that reaching Heaven requires an unfolding process.
Devotion, service, and contemplation remain viable ways to transform yourself, yet even the most devout Christians fall into the trap of believing that they don’t have to transform themselves inwardly, that performing enough acts of devotion will suffice or that doing charitable work among the poor and sick, or thinking about God as often as possible, will be sufficient.
Jesus warns us against this trap when he speaks, in parable form, about seed that falls on waste ground and doesn’t sprout. The seed is his teaching; the waste ground is a mind unprepared to receive the truth.
What Jesus doesn’t elaborate upon is how waste ground can be made fertile. We are neither hopeless nor fully realized in God. We turn to Jesus because he understands the territory of the unknown, the source not only of a messiah but of the soul itself.
Adapted from The Third Jesus: The Christ We Cannot Ignore, by Deepak Chopra (Harmony Books, 2008).
In other words, every thought must be of God and every action directed toward him. Such a teaching is unworkable except for the most pious of recluses. The same holds true for the complete selflessness required on the path of service and the total fixation on spirituality required on the path of contemplation.
But denying the world is a path to extinction, which no one can advocate. Nor can we assume that Jesus wanted us to annihilate our egos and personalities in the name of God. It’s more reasonable to assume that reaching Heaven requires an unfolding process.
Devotion, service, and contemplation remain viable ways to transform yourself, yet even the most devout Christians fall into the trap of believing that they don’t have to transform themselves inwardly, that performing enough acts of devotion will suffice or that doing charitable work among the poor and sick, or thinking about God as often as possible, will be sufficient.
Jesus warns us against this trap when he speaks, in parable form, about seed that falls on waste ground and doesn’t sprout. The seed is his teaching; the waste ground is a mind unprepared to receive the truth.
What Jesus doesn’t elaborate upon is how waste ground can be made fertile. We are neither hopeless nor fully realized in God. We turn to Jesus because he understands the territory of the unknown, the source not only of a messiah but of the soul itself.
Adapted from The Third Jesus: The Christ We Cannot Ignore, by Deepak Chopra (Harmony Books, 2008).
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