This is Part II of the discussion of Jesus. The first one discussed who Jesus was not.
I made the point that it's impossible to understand the phenomenon of Jesus whether we're looking
at someone who appeared on earth 2100 years ago or someone who exists in our minds, as
long as we look at him through the lens of our own egos. Once we're able to set this
aside and bring our illusions about him to the truth, then we're free and our hearts
and minds are open to begin to explore who Jesus truly is. He says in the teachers manual
that the name of Jesus Christ is but a symbol, but it's a symbol of a love that is not of
this world. Perhaps the best way to understand that from a personal point of view is that
Jesus is a symbol of the Love of God as it is reflected in our right minds, therefore
he's a symbol. His name is a symbol. The individual identity of the man that we call Jesus is
a symbol. Indeed, everything in this illusory world is a symbol and either we are a symbol
of the wrong-minded system of separation, guilt, and specialness or we're a symbol of
the right-minded thought system of forgiveness, peace, and love. Jesus then, in the Western
world certainly, is our most important symbol of this love. As is also said in the teachers
manual...in "The Clarification of Terms" actually..."Some bitter idols have been made of him who would
only be brother to the world." But setting these aside for now, what he is to us is this
right-minded symbol of who we are. As long as we believe that we are separated from our
source, we need a symbol who represents that source for us and Jesus, for most of us, is
that symbol. He's the symbol of the greatest teacher that has existed. He's the symbol
of what we aspire to become. In Helen's lovely poem, "A Jesus Prayer," we are told that we
should identify with him as "A Child, a Man and then a Spirit" and that we should grow
up to become like him. He is, once again, whom we aspire to be. When we think of hearing
his voice or experiencing his presence, it is really our own healed voice and our own
healed presence or healed mind that we are experiencing. But as long as we experience
ourselves as separate, then we need a symbol that also appears to us as separate but who
reminds us that in truth we are all one. This is also explained in the section called "The
Link to Truth" which begins Chapter 25 in the text where the end of it specifically
speaks about how the Trinity is an illusion: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are not separate.
And within the so-called second person of the Trinity, the Son of God, Jesus is no different
from us, as he tells us at the beginning of the text, and that he is not separate from
us. But, once again, since we all experience ourselves as being separated and differentiated
among each other, we need a symbol that reflects to us this essential unity of God's Son and
the Oneness of this unity with God, "A Oneness joined as One," as it were. So that when we
speak to Jesus, when we pray to Jesus, when we ask Jesus for help, we are really seeking
to join with a part of us that we have dissociated from and, in fact from our ego's point of
view, a part of us that we wish never existed. And so going to Jesus for help is really going
to ourselves. He represents the right-minded choice to forgive, to choose a miracle instead
of a grievance, to choose love instead of fear, to choose to see shared interests instead
of separate interests. When we speak of our love for him, it is really speaking of our
love for the self that we believe we have denied, that we believe we have thrown away,
and that we believe that we will never access again. If we do not understand Jesus to be
this symbol, then we will never move away from the whole Santa Claus idea that we are
a little child and Jesus is our older brother who is always there for us to give us what
we want. Indeed, he wants us to begin as a child totally dependent on his love and his
wisdom, but only so that we would grow up to become like him, recognize we are a mind
that can choose between the wrong and the right mind and choose correctly, and finally
awaken from the dream and realize that our identity is Spirit as is Jesus' at which point,
of course, there is no Jesus. There is no individual identity. There is only God's One
Son. So that we need the symbol of Jesus to help lead us to the point when we could recognize
that there is no Jesus at all, there is only the Love of God.