Sikhism/chrisitanity

[tkkookar]

does bani says anything about christianity?...when guru ji says "one with god" does guru ji means .. like become one ????

[naam_jap]

About the Adam and Eve story, its all about the symbolism. Its not a real event, but a story. it has its meanings though... that relate to other things in life...

Aadmi means man in punjabi, adam in english... interesting link...

Hmm! a line just came to my mind... relating to this topic of Christianity and Sikhism....

"But the teachers of the teachers is the One who appears in so many forms" -Sri Guru Granth Sahib Ji

[Raju]

About the Adam and Eve story, its all about the symbolism. Its not a real event, but a story. it has its meanings though... that relate to other things in life...

113379[/snapback]

Adam and Eve is not just a story. Earlier even I thought that it was just a story. But when I learnt that the name Adam is derived from the Hindu name for Shiv je viz 'Ardhanareeshwaram' (obviously a tongue twister) and whom the babylonians shortened and called Adham and greeks called Adam. It is a tale present in way too many cultures to be just a story, though it is really old and there are a lot of discrepencies in how different societies relate the tale, but the common strand in this is just too strong to be dismissed as a story.

I called the story of Adam and Eve in the Bible as just another story because the Bible nor the greeks from whom the Bible took the story from are not the original bearers of this tale. Bible just has another version of the original story. The closest to the original story is probably with the hindus somewhere.

[Shaheed]

the story of adam and eve is from the old testament, how could the greeks have had it

[Raju]

Old testament is a compilation of ancient tales and practices of- and borrowed from the ancient hebrews, Assyrians, Greeks, Chaldean etc among other numerous Christian communities that existed at that time in and around the region. All of the practices mentioned in the old testament clearly have pre-christian origins.

[Ambrosia]

The Old Testament in the bible is part of the Torah of the Jews. They are pre-Jesus writings.

There were a lot of other scriptures, that havent been included today's bible, because of their "unbeleiveability"... like... Songs of Solomon, book of Enoch 1, book of Enoch 2...

and in the new testament they have not included many of the dead sea scrolls that allegedly contain writings of some of the other apostles of jesus; Scroll of St.Thomas, Testament of Mary Magdalene, Early years of jesus... etc etc... apparently from the Scrolls of St.Thomas are quotes of jesus's actual words.

the Catholic church has rejected many scriptures because it may detract from their authority. one such example (that isnt in the bible, but was an account by his apostle Thomas) is:

Jesus said "The kingdom of God is within you. Not in the buildings of brick or stone. Split a peice of wood and you will find me, lift a stone and i am there"

The hardest thing about christianity, as opposed to Sikhism, is that the scriptures are Accounts by people, written and compiled much later. Not even to mention all the translations from Aramaic to greek and latin, to old english, then to more modern english... and all the other languages in between. A meaning in a sentence can change by just a shift of a letter or a comma... its very hard to preserve something for 2000 yrs without alterations... There are a lot of controversies in christianity regarding scriptures... the truth got a lil diluted over time. Though, Im sure if it had all be written by jesus himself, it would have been much different, and maybe preserved better.

But, Sri Guru Granth Sahib Ji is the essence of Truth, given by the Gurus and Enlightenned others - it is not an account... its the real thing, Hense, it is so special!!!!!!!!!!!

[tkkookar]

like there is a story of adam eve .. how god made earth .. what does guru ji says asbout creation of earth or duniya and human life? can anyone please tell me the shabad

waheguru ji ka khalsa, waheguru ji ki fateh

[Pheena]

i hate copying and pasting loooong stuff, but i thought this would bring a new prespective to this discussion.

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"The Adam and Eve story is incomprehensible to me!" I observed with considerable heat one day in my early struggles with the allegory. "Why did God punish not only the guilty pair, but also the innocent unborn generations?"

Master was more amused by my vehemence than my ignorance. "Genesis is deeply symbolic, and cannot be grasped by a literal interpretation," he explained. "Its 'tree of life' is the human body. The spinal cord is like an upturned tree, with man's hair as its roots, and afferent and efferent nerves as branches. The tree of the nervous system bears many enjoyable fruits, or sensations of sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. In these, man may rightfully indulge; but he was forbidden the experience of sex, the 'apple' at the center of the bodily garden.14

"The 'serpent' represents the coiled-up spinal energy which stimulates the sex nerves. 'Adam' is reason, and 'Eve' is feeling. When the emotion or Eve-consciousness in any human being is overpowered by the sex impulse, his reason or Adam also succumbs.15

"God created the human species by materializing the bodies of man and woman through the force of His will; He endowed the new species with the power to create children in a similar 'immaculate' or divine manner.16 Because His manifestation in the individualized soul had hitherto been limited to animals, instinct-bound and lacking the potentialities of full reason, God made the first human bodies, symbolically called Adam and Eve. To these, for advantageous upward evolution, He transferred the souls or divine essence of two animals. 17 In Adam or man, reason predominated; in Eve or woman, feeling was ascendant. Thus was expressed the duality or polarity which underlies the phenomenal worlds. Reason and feeling remain in a heaven of cooperative joy so long as the human mind is not tricked by the serpentine energy of animal propensities.

"The human body was therefore not solely a result of evolution from beasts, but was produced by an act of special creation by God. The animal forms were too crude to express full divinity; the human being was uniquely given a tremendous mental capacity—the 'thousand-petaled lotus' of the brain—as well as acutely awakened occult centers in the spine.

"God, or the Divine Consciousness present within the first created pair, counseled them to enjoy all human sensibilities, but not to put their concentration on touch sensations.18 These were banned in order to avoid the development of the sex organs, which would enmesh humanity in the inferior animal method of propagation. The warning not to revive subconsciously-present bestial memories was not heeded. Resuming the way of brute procreation, Adam and Eve fell from the state of heavenly joy natural to the original perfect man.

"Knowledge of 'good and evil' refers to the cosmic dualistic compulsion. Falling under the sway of maya through misuse of his feeling and reason, or Eve—and Adam—consciousness, man relinquishes his right to enter the heavenly garden of divine self-sufficiency. 19 The personal responsibility of every human being is to restore his 'parents' or dual nature to a unified harmony or Eden."

As Sri Yukteswar ended his discourse, I glanced with new respect at the pages of Genesis.

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14 "We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden: but of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die."-Genesis 3:2-3.

15 "The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat. The woman said, The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat."-Gen. 3:12-13.

16 "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it."-Gen. 1:27-28.

17 "And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul."-Gen. 2:7.

18 "Now the serpent (sex force) was more subtil than any beast of the field" (any other sense of the body).-Gen. 3:1.

Back to text

19 "And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed."-Gen. 2:8. "Therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken."-Gen. 3:23. The divine man first made by God had his consciousness centered in the omnipotent single eye in the forehead (eastward). The all-creative powers of his will, focused at that spot, were lost to man when he began to "till the ground" of his physical nature.

Source: The Autobiography of a Yogi Chapter 17.

[Pheena]

All of you need to read this link, i could post it here, but i don't want it to take half of the page, so here is the link. somehow i doubt anyone will because we have arleady judged Jesus as a mere man who fell short of God.

http://www.sikhawareness.com/sikhawareness...opic.php?t=3760

here is a cut that relates to specific points made in this topic.

There are two kinds of births. One, through others--from the father, from the mother--that is a bodily birth. The other birth you have to give to yourself, you have to be born out of yourself; you have to become the womb, the father and the mother and the child. You have to die as the past and you ate to be born as the future. You have to beget yourself. That's why I say that the book starts in an incredible beautiful way--very significant: Jesus begat nobody, Jesus begat himself.

That is the meaning of crucifixion and the resurrection. The body is crucified, you cannot crucify the spirit. You can destroy the body. You cannot destroy the spirit. The body is gross: the sword can cut it, the poison can kill it; and even if nothing is going to kill it, death is going to come and the body will be gone. it has to go, it is meant to go; it is only there for the time being. Those who are conscious, they use that time to create spirit in them.

The body is like grapes. The grapes are to go. You cannot keep grapes for long--they will go rotten; but you can create wine out of the grapes, that's why it is also called 'spirit'. You can create spirit in your being, a wine. Grapes cannot be accumulated, they are temporary, momentary. But wine can stay forever. in fact, the older it becomes the more precious and valuable it is. It has a non-temporal duration, it is something of eternity.

The body is like the grapes, and if you use it rightly you can create the wine in you. The body is going to disappear, but the wine can remain, the spirit can remain.

Jesus has done many miracles. One of the miracles is his miracles of tranforming water into wine. These are metaphors--don't take them literally. If you take them literally, you destroy their meaning, their significance. And if you start proving that they are historical facts, then you are stupid, and with you Jesus also looks stupid. They are metaphors of the inner world.

The inner world cannot be expressed literally, but symbolically--only symbolically. Turning water into wine simply means creating the eternal into time, creating that which remains into that which cannot remain.

If you keep water, sooner or later it will start stinking. But you can keep wine for ages, for centuries; and the longer it is there the better it becomes, the more powerful, the more potent it becomes. Wine is a metaphor for the eternal.

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Jesus is transformed through his sacrifice. Nobody is ever transformed without sacrifice. You have to pay for it: the cross is the price that you have to pay for it. You have to die to be reborn. You have to lose all to gain God.

Jesus begat himself. That phenomenon happened on the cross. He hesitated for a time, he was very much puzzled--it was natural. For a single moment he could not see god anywhere. All was lost, he was losing all; he was going to die and there seemed to be no possibility...That happens to every seed. When you put the seed into the earth, one moment comes when the seed is losing itself, and there must be hesitation--the same hesitation that happened to Jesus on the cross. the seed is dying, and the seed must cling to the past. It wants to survive--nobody wants to die. And the seed cannot imagine that this is not death, that soon it will be resurrected in a thousandfold way, that soon it will start growing as a sprout.

The death of the seed will be the birth of the tree, and there will be great foliage and flowering and fruits, and birds will come and sit on the branches and make their nests, and people will sit under the shade of the tree; and the tree will talk to the clouds and the stars in the night, and will play with the sky, and will dance in the winds; and there will be great rejoicing. But how can this be known to the poor seed which has never been anything else? It is inconceivable. That's why God is Inconceivable.

It cannot be proved to the seed that this is going to happen, because if the seed asks 'Then let me see what you are going to do', you cannot make it available, you cannot make visible to the seed what is going to happen. it is going to happen in the future, and when it happens, the seed will be gone. The seed will never meet the tree. Man never meets God. When the man is gone, God descends.

Jesus hesitated, was worried, was bewildered. He shouted, almost shouted against the sky 'Why have you forsaken me? Why? Why this torture for me? What wrong have i done to you?' A thousand and one things must have crossed his mind.

The seed is dying, and the seed is completely oblivious to what is going to happen next. It is not possible for the seed to conceive of that next step, hence faith, hence trust is needed. The seed has to trust that the tree will be born. With all the hesitation, with all kinds of fear, insecurities, with all kinds of anguish, anxiety--inspite of all of them--the seed has to trust that the tree will happen, that the tree is going to happen. It is a leap into faith.

And that leap happened to Jesus: he relaxed on the cross and he said 'Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done...' His heart was palpitating. It is natural. You heart will also palpitate, you will also be afraid when that moment of death comes to you, when that moment comes when your self disappears and you are losing youself into the kind of nothingness, and there seems to be no way to survive, and you have to surrender.

You can surrender in two ways: You can surrender reluctantly, then you will miss the real point of it, then you will simply die and will be born again. If you can relax in deep acceptance, trust, if you can surrender without any resistance....That's what Jesus did; that is teh greatest miracle. To me that is the miracle--not that he gave health to somebody who was ill, or eyes to somebody who was blind, or cured the leprosy of somebody; or even helped Lazarus to revive, to come back to life-- and he had died. No, those are not real miracles to me they are all parables, metaphors. Every Master has given eyes to those who are blind, and ears to those who are deaf. Each Master has brought people out of their deaths that they call life, has called them out of their graves. Those are metaphors.

But the Real Miracle is when Jesus--in spite of all of his hesitations, worries, doubts, suspicions--relaxes, surrenders, and says 'Thy will be done,' that moment Jesus disappears, Christ is born.

Teilhard de Chardin call it Christogenesis: Jesus begetting Christ. Through it Christogenesis, man becomes that which he really is; he loses that which he is not and becomes that which he is: man become 'Christified'. Be 'Christified', never become a Christian. The Christian is one who follows the Christian dogma. 'Christified' means one who dies as a seed and becomes a tree. 'Christified' means that you drop the ego, you disappear as yourself and you start appearing on the plane in a kind of transfiguration: a resurrection.

'Christified' means you are no more alone: God is in you and you are in God.

This is the paradox of Christ-consciousness. Christ calls himself many times Son of man and many times Son of God. He is both: Son of man as far as the body is concerned, Son of man as far as mind is concerned; Son of God as far as spirit is concerned, Son of God as far as consciousness is concerned. Mind is the mechanism of consciousness, just as the body is the adobe of the spirit. Mind belongs to the body, consciousness belongs to spirit. Jesus is the paradox: on the one hand man, on the other hand God. And when God and man work together, then if miracles happen there is nothing to be surprised about. Miracles happen only when God and man function together in cooperation.

Leo Tolstoy has said: Christ is God and man working together, walking together, dancing together. St. Augustine says: Without God, man cannot; without man, God will not. Christ is the combined operation--the meeting of the finite with the infinite, time and eternity meeting and merging into each other.

An old garder was diggin his plot as the priest came along. 'George' said the priest 'it is wonderful what God and man working together can do.'

'Yes sir, but you should have seen this garden last year when he had it all to himself!'

Yes that is true. Man alone is impotent. God also cannot work alone. God alone is potent but has no instrument. Man alone is a hollow bamboo-nobody to create a song on it, nobody to fill it with music, harmony, melody. God alone has the capacity to create a melody but has no hollow bamboo to create a flute.

[tkkookar]

pheena [panji/veerji] i don't understand what u saying in ur posts.. can you please explain in simple english ..

please

thanx