Did Jesus want to start a new religion?

Every scholar who decides to follow Jesus in his journey through Asia and study his life –From Palestine to Egypt, to Afghanistan, into India and Tibet- would quickly realize that Jesus, while teaching, was not just addressing people of Hebrew origin or Jews like himself; he was actually addressing every human being who came to listen to what he had to say and that includes people of all religions, of all races, of all colours …..

My own study of great spiritual teachers like Jesus, like Siddhartha Gautama, like Sathya Sai Baba, has made me realize that enlightened teachers do not think in term of ‘mine’ and ‘theirs’, but always in term of ‘ours’…meaning that over and above their own condition, they are more concerned with the good of humanity and the world as a whole, not just with part of humanity, for those who claim they are Hindus, Christians, Muslims or Buddhists…etc……Becoming enlightened, for me, means becoming aware of one’s true nature…That one is not just associated with the physical body which serves as one’s vehicle everywhere in life, but that one is also –and more importantly- part of the universal body of God…..People who are stuck with the issue ‘This is Mine, this is My religion, this is My culture….’ are actually still far from having understood the truth that Jesus came to teach us two thousand years ago…This is just petty-mindedness and it is clear that Jesus wanted us to evolve from that kind of mentality.

To support this idea, I will now refer to someone that I’ve just discovered recently. His name is Daniel Meurois-Givaudan. He is a French writer, now established in Quebec where he continues to work tirelessly with spreading his own knowledge of Jesus’ life and teachings. How does he know Jesus? Not just through the study of scriptures like we do, but he also has a special talent. In his early twenties, he once had an authentic out-of-body experience…. He discovered that he could actually leave his physical body and explore time and space……This is how he managed to rediscover his own past lives and his own relationship with the being we know as Jesus. I’ll bring more information on Daniel in articles to come….But if you want to know more about him, you can start reading here.

This is how Daniel would answer the present issue I am dealing with now. In one of his conferences in 2004, entitled ‘The first teachings of Christ’, this is what he had to say on the subject. I will quote three extracts from this conference which sum up what I’ve just stated here.

I Crucifixion and Post-Crucifixion message of Christ

“Jesus studied and practised a certain number of disciplines, not only in Palestine in the midst of the Essene Brotherhood of Carmel, but also in Egypt, in India, in the Himalayas. In fact, when he was 14 years of age, as soon as he left Carmel Mount and that all the religious formalities were completed, he went on a first journey by boat to the south of Great Britain, in Cornwall with his uncle Joseph of Arimathea, during about a year and a half. There, he familiarized himself with the Celtic culture and assimilated it.

Then, he went through Egypt, made a great trip by the route which brought him into India where he lived many years. He went through Tibet where he also lived many years. We have stayed with Anne Givaudan and other people as well in a monastery of the Himalayas in 1981, and we were lucky (because we had a beautiful letter of reference from a very great Lama) to sleep in the cell of a Lama, and while discussing with the chiefs of this monastery, they certified that they had manuscripts written and signed by the hands of Jesus himself, proving that he had stayed in Ladhak for several years. It is not the same monastery as we can find today because it’s been rebuilt, but it’s the same ecclesiastical order. Therefore, there are indeed traces of his passage, that he has not only taught there, but that he was also taught there. We will come back to what he has assimilated during that period of his life.

Then he stayed in India for several years, more precisely in the city of Puri, which is on the coast of Bengal, in the south of Calcutta. We can even say that he did his first serious preach there, because he taught a lot in the midst of the Brahmins, but he went even further than their freedom of conscience would allow them, which means that, at a certain period, the Indian society, which was very strongly structured on the basis of caste, wanted to eliminate Jesus; there has been an attempt on his life which he avoided just in time.

According to what he had told us himself –because sometimes, he also spoke to us, while we were together, of aspects of his life-, this attempt on his life has been extremely formative for him because it taught him that he had not come to do a work that should have political implications. Indeed he had tried to intervene in the Indian society to break the caste system there. We can note that two thousand years later, the same thing was tried by Gandhi and he has been killed.

It is as from this moment, Jesus told us, that he decided to keep things straight and to focus his mission essentially on the mystic aspect, even if it had some revolutionary aspects which would have some real repercussions on society.

II Did Jesus die on the cross?

As we explained in The way of the Essenes, Jesus did not die on the cross. There has been clinical death or N.D.E, but his return to life was nevertheless due to a complicity between certain factions of the Brothers of Heliopolis and certain Romans who agreed to pierce his side - but not the heart as some have claimed- in order to release the pleural liquid so that he can continue to breathe.

Indeed, crucified men would not die of their wounds but of suffocation. People thus believed that he had died but he had rather sunk in a coma. In the Gospels, one wants to make us believe that Jesus had lost so much blood that there was only water running out of his body… but that is false, the wounds did not bleed to this extent, and the water which came out of his body was the pleural liquid.

It must be noted that during the first centuries of Christianity, Christ was never represented crucified; he was shown in all his glory, only the finality of his work was shown, not the suffering, which was very different in term of thought. But, when he started being shown on the cross, he was shown, not with a wound on his heart, but on his left side as we can still see with a number of statues of Jesus on the cross.

Well then, as far as I can say, he survived from his wounds, but the aim was to make believe that he had died so that he could be removed as fast as possible from the cross. Now, it is clear that, to succeed, this also demanded a lot of his own capacity of regeneration, in the hours and the days that followed, to regain a lot of his strength. On the other hand, he also received help from the Essene healers.

All this did not take place like a plot; we simply wanted to save him because we thought that he shouldn’t die like this and that if he had a chance, it shouldn’t be missed. Indeed the crucifixion situation took place at a very high and mysterious level, but we soon realized, under the impulsion of Joseph of Arimathea, that we could not prevent this idea of resurrection which corresponded to the archetype that was very deeply rooted in the conscience of humanity.

In fact, during the first hours, we could argue as much as we can with people saying that he has not died, that he had simply regenerated and that we could see him, we quickly realized that people did not want to believe us, because for them, he had to be resurrected, it had to match with the great Osiris myth. If we consider all the great avatars of Vishnou, we will note that most of them had a death with resurrection. This happens because it is a model in the subconscious mind of humanity.

Therefore we realized that it was futile to try to explain the truth and that, finally, it would do a lot of good to people to believe that this resurrection on the physical level did indeed take place. It is possible that Jesus would have been capable of regenerating by himself completely, I am not saying otherwise, or trying to diminish his capacities, but the fact is that it took place like I just described.

I had the delightful joy of being there when he came out of the tomb, and then, he had to be literally charged on a horse because he was very much weakened, but if he managed to survive, it was essentially due to his yogic regenerating powers. Then, he continued to re-oxigenate himself for some few weeks, after that, there was that famous meeting at Emaus with Thomas, and many other apostles, and myself with them. He continued to give us his teachings and explained to us why it was useless to fight against this idea of resurrection. He also gave us guidance for the work to come, and repeating that there was no religion to create….because here, we were beginning to see that with such a great death, it would give an impulse to his message. It’s often the death of a great being that give the impetus to his message because it literally prints it in the collective conscience and gives a dynamic to his message.

At this moment, we saw that what we have worked for three years, even more for some, was beginning to bear fruits in an incredible manner, because so many things started being said about Jesus, and there were people who added things on top of that, pretending that they had saw Jesus coming out of the tomb and rise to heaven, etc….people became delirious in many ways. Even among those who were at his side and who respected him, there were some who were telling stories, to give more strength to the message they believed in. Some pretended they had seen him, touched him and even assisted to his resurrection and ascension, etc…

We try to stop that, but it eventually gave birth to many small schools of thought, which later gave birth to some gospels which we would qualify as apocryphal today.

Nevertheless, during that time, Jesus practically gave each one of us, a direction and saw to it that we kept that way and warning us not to transform his sensibility and thought into a religion. On this aspect, we have to admit that we failed completely….but I also think that it was inevitable and I am persuaded that, as far as possible, he tried to guide us in another way.

(Note that Daniel was called Simon at the time of Jesus and that he was from an Essene family, and from the age of 6, was placed in the monastery at Carmel where he received the initiation and formation as a healer.)

III The foundation of Christ revolution

“We will now see the major foundation of the teachings of Master Jesus. I have to say that he was not the first to elaborate on this teaching on Earth. 1500 years before him, the Pharaoh Akhenaten had also set the basis of this teaching in the collective conscience or in the collective subconscious mind.

Akhenaten started with the basis that there is only one God and that there was no need for any priest to communicate with this unique divinity, that each of us had the capacity to plunge directly into the divine, that each of us had access to the One whom, personally, I call the Big Boss!

But this idea has been further explained and with stronger force by Master Jesus, and we can even say that it’s the fundamental idea in his teachings: “Address yourself directly to your Father, you need no temple or priest!”….and he said this while respecting the temples and the priests, but his principle is that we all had, each and every one of us, access to the divine. It was a revolutionary idea and this is what disturbed the Pharisees who feared that they would lose their power if people learned that they could address themselves directly to God without going through the priest. It was the whole social edifice which was being shaken.

However the aim of Master Jesus was not to shake the society at that level but to send each one of us to his own self, by saying: “You are beautiful, noble, great and true enough to have inside access to the Father without having to go through someone else. Now, if you don’t feel ready, not strong enough, you can still turn to someone or go to pray in a temple, but the real temple is inside of you.”

Here, he was putting his finger on something which is really not well understood today by us, the human beings. He was putting his finger on the fact that there is fundamentally no difference between God and us. Of course, he did not say so to the mass because he would not have been understood, and it would have ended badly for him. But in the small circles of initiates who had the possibility to come closer to him, he compared each of us to the cell of a human being.

On this subject, we have the impression sometimes that we’ve discovered this notion of cell in modern time, but it existed since the earliest Antiquity, certain Greeks even spoke of the notion of atom, this is to say that the notion of the infinitely small has already existed on Earth for a very long time.

Master Jesus compared each one of us to a cell belonging to the Great Body that we could call God, and he said that we were not outside God, we were part of His Body, He is inside of us and we are inside of Him, there is no separation, no frontier. When we speak of God, we are already placing a boundary in between Him and us, meaning that we place him outside our conscience.

Master Jesus said that we, as incarnated humans, when we consider one of our cells, are in fact behaving just like God when He addresses to one of his own creatures, and the work of God through each of His own creatures is a work on Himself to make each of his own cells conscious of itself and conscious of being part of a Great Body called God.

And what is requested from us as human beings is the deification of every cell of our body (physical, ethereal, emotional, mental, etc…). What we should not do is to create division, fractures at all level of our being, of our reality. We should recreate the marriage between the subtle and the dense, between the divine and the human incarnated.”

(Extract from the 2004 seminary in Quebec entitled ‘The first teachings of Christ’)

This whole process of rediscovering the life and teachings of Jesus should therefore lead man to realize he needs to raise himself above this tribal mentality so common today in between people of the world, above this notion of ‘my religion’ v/s ‘your religion’, or even the idea of ‘superior’ and ‘inferior’ religions because truly, religion is merely the product of our human mind while spiritual enlightenment should in fact be the real focus in our evolution. What Jesus brought to us is wisdom, and wisdom can come from anywhere and from anyone; it doesn't have to be only from someone of my own race or religion; wisdom is universal...And Jesus is a universal master!

Bhavishya Purana

Bhavishya Mahapurana 115 AD

(Click on the photo for a clearer view)

One of the most cited documents by scholars (See Jeff Salz’s comment in previous video) who have interested themselves in the journey of Jesus to India is the Bhavishya Purana. This Purana (Meaning 'of ancient time' in sanskrit) is believed to be one of the eighteen Puranas written in sanskrit by Vedavyasa, the renowned sage, who, after having written the Mahabharatha, did not feel happy with its content, and decided to write the eighteen puranas to complement with wider explanation the philosophy of the Mahabharatha. While tradition stipulates that this Purana is indeed the work of Vedavysa, it is clear that this document contains texts written much later, with entries as late as the 19^th century. Some scholars have also gone to the extent of suggesting that 'Vedavyasa' is actually a title given to the most learned and unbiaised sage of every era. Generally speaking, scholars are of opinion that the basic text of the Bhavishya Purana could have been written over a period of two millennia from 2^rd to 3^th century AD with additions as late as 1850 AD.

The important thing is that this document is one which contains references to Christianity, and most importantly to Jesus as being 'Isha Putra' or ‘The Son of God’, and his arrival in Kashmir, India is clearly described in this respected work of Hindu culture. He meets with King Shalivana of Kashmir who welcomes him in his land.

[Bhavishya Purana: Pratisarga Parva, Chaturyuga Khanda Dvitiyadhyayah, 19th Chapter, Texts 17 to 32] Transliteration of Sanskrit text:

vikramaditya-pautrasca
pitr-rajyam grhitavan
jitva sakanduradharsams
cina-taittiridesajan

bahlikankamarupasca
romajankhurajanchhatan
tesam kosan-grhitva ca
danda-yogyanakarayat

sthapita tena maryada
mleccharyanam prthak-prthak
sindhusthanam iti jneyam
rastramaryasya cottamam

mlecchasthanam param sindhoh
krtam tena mahatmana
ekada tu sakadiso
himatungam samayayau

ekadaa tu shakadhisho
himatungari samaayayau
hunadeshasya madhye vai
giristhan purusam shubhano
dadarsha balaram raajaa

ko bharam iti tam praaha
su hovacha mudanvitah
iishaa purtagm maam viddhi
kumaarigarbha sambhavam

mleccha dharmasya vaktaram
satyavata paraayanam
iti srutva nrpa praaha
dharmah ko bhavato matah

shruto vaaca maharaja
prapte satyasya amkshaye
nirmaaryaade mlechadesh
mahiso 'ham samaagatah

mlecchasa sthaapito dharmo
mayaa tacchrnu bhuupate
maanasam nirmalam krtva
malam dehe subhaasbham

naiganam apamasthaya
japeta nirmalam param
nyayena satyavacasaa
manasyai kena manavah

dhyayena pujayedisham
suurya-mandala-samsthitam
acaloyam prabhuh sakshat-
athaa suuryacalah sada

isha muurtirt-dradi praptaa
nityashuddha sivamkari
ishamasihah iti ca
mama nama pratishthitam

iti shrutra sa bhuupale
natraa tam mlecchapujaam
sthaapayaamaasa tam tutra
mlecchasthaane hi daarune

svaraajyam praaptavaan raajaa
hayamedhan cikirat
rajyam krtva sa sasthyabdam
svarga lokamu paayayau

Here is an English translation of this passage (Quoted from Search for the historical Jesus by Prof. Fida Hassnain, pg 191):

“During this period, Shalivahana, grandson of Vikrama-Ditya, laid hold on the kingdom of his father. He defeated the invincible Sakas (Scythians), and fought off the hordes from Cheen (China), Balhika (Bactria), Kamrupa (Parthia), Tatari (Mongolia), Roma (Rome- more probably Greece) and Khura (Khorasan).

He took possession of their treasures, and those who deserved punishments were punished. He also demarcated the border between the Aryans and the Mleechas (Amlekites), fixing the Sindhu (River Indus) as the boundary between the two peoples.

During this period, the king of the Sakas came to Himatunga (Himalayas). In the mountain area near Wyien, the king saw a dignified person of white complexion wearing a long white robe. Astonished to see this foreigner, he asked, ‘Who are you?’ The dignified person replied in a pleasant manner:

“Know me as Ishwara Putram, (or ‘Son of God’), or Kanaya Garbham (‘Born of a virgin’). Being given to truth and penances, I preach the truth to the Amlekites.

After hearing this, the king was astonished. He asked: Which religion do you preach? The dignified person replied:

O king, I come from a land far away, where there is no truth, and evil knows no limits. I appeared in the country of the Amlekites. And I suffered at their hands.

I appeared as Isha Masiha,(or Jesus the Messiah). I received Messia-hood or Christhood.

I said unto them, ‘Remove all mental and bodily impurities. Recite the revealed prayer. Pray truthfully in the right manner. Obey the Law. Remember the name of our Lord God. Meditate upon him whose abode is in the centre of the sun.’

When I appeared in the Amlekite country, I taught love, truth and purity of heart. I asked human beings to serve the Lord. But I suffered at the hands of the wicked and the guilty.

In truth, O King, all power rests with the Lord, who is in the centre of the sun. And the elements, and the cosmos, and the sun, and the God, are eternal. Perfect, pure and blissful, God is always in my heart. Thus my name has been established as Isha Masih.

After having heard the pious words from the lips of this distinguished person, I felt peaceful, made obeisance to him and returned.”

In this document, we can find clear indication that the presence of Saint Isa, (Name also given to Jesus in Buddhist and Islamic texts) which we believe to be Jesus himself, has been noted in Kashmir and that he could indeed have come to India after surviving the ordeal of crucifixion. And traditions in India reveal that he came there and continued his ministry until his death.

Jesus’ appearance is described: he has a ‘golden’ complexion or fair complexion and wears white clothes, which is the colour worn by the Essenes in general (We will explain this in next articles). He says that he comes from the land of Mlechas- of the west therefore and that he is 'born of a virgin'. He says his name is Isha Putra, or Son of God. He is also called Isha Masihah, or Jesus the Messiah. And he describes the persecution he went through after he started teaching his own people. The name 'Isha' or 'Isa' is found in many cultures as referring to Jesus. In the Koran, Jesus is referred to as Isa. For the Buddhists, Jesus is called Isa. Sathya Sai Baba also affirms that Isa is the original name of Jesus. You can note how vital such a document can be in explaining the reasons for Jesus to come to India. Most probably, he could not stay in Palestine after being condemned there as a criminal by Roman authorities. The way to India is the most probable route he could have taken in an effort to leave Roman jurisdiction. It should also be noted that this region of Kashmir was already inhabited by a tribe of Jewish origin. Therefore Kashmir could have been elected as the new home of Jesus and he would still be among his own people there. We know, from Notovitch’s translation of scrolls found in Tibet, that Jesus already came to India before in his youth, and that he probably already knew this place and its people.

Jesus in the Himalayas

This is a 9 minutes rendition of a one hour documentary aired on Discovery Channel produced by Ian Cross and Bini Adams, with Jeff Salz as presentator, entitled Jesus in the Himalayas (2001) and tracing the path taken by Jesus during his lifetime to travel across India, into the Himalayas. Anthropologist Jeff Salz retraces the journey allegedly made by Jesus, from the Indian foothills along mountain passes as high as 17,000 feet, rafting down rivers towards the Tibetan border, following the trade routes of the biblical era.