BOOK REVIEW - The Yoga of Jesus: Understanding the Hidden Teachings of the Gospels

The Yoga of Jesus: Understanding the Hidden Teachings of the Gospels
By Paramahansa Yogananda
Self-Realization Fellowship, 2007, $14.00
ISBN 978-0-87612-033-0

Paramahansa Yogananda, spiritual leader, author, and founder of the Self-Realization Fellowship, reveals the unity between yoga and the teachings of the Christ. He shows that the mission of Jesus was to awaken consciousness of the divine in each of us, and this, he believes, is what is meant by the "second coming of Christ."

In this compilation of writings, previously published as the two-volume work The Second Coming of Christ: The Resurrection of the Christ Within You, Yogananda teaches that when Christ-consciousness awakens within us through meditation, we know in our very being that God is only a heartbeat away, to be met in the silence of the soul. The author states that "India's priceless contribution to the world, discovered anciently by her rishis, is the science of religion - yoga, 'divine union' - by which God can be known, not as a theological concept, but as an actual personal experience."

Our physical body is not an impediment to such awareness but is the medium in which it occurs, and its timing is now, not in the afterlife or at the end of a cosmic cycle. Placing Jesus in an Eastern context makes it possible to see the difference between "union" and "salvation," and Yogananda asserts that it is the former that is the essence of the mission and life of Jesus. Yogananda offers seekers their own experience of divine bliss.