Was Jesus Crucified Or Not?

Here is a question asked in the September 29, 2018 World Satsanga about Jesus Christ: Was Jesus crucified or not? What really happened? How did Yogananda explain it? How did a great Catholic mystic, Therese Neumann, relive the experience?

Question: I hope you can clarify for me the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. If I remember correctly, in “The Origin Speaks,” you describe how the crucifixion did NOT occur, and in fact the event was a type of illusion that Jesus himself, along with his disciples, were able to create via group meditation.

I ask because while reading “Autobiography of a Yogi”, Paramahansa Yogananda visits a Saint [Therese Neumann of Konnersreuth, Germany] who does not eat, but who also visually re-experiences the actual crucifixion of Jesus Christ, including his labored walk to the crucifixion site. Paramahansa Yogananda described tears of blood coming from her eyes during this trance, and it is something she experiences weekly I believe.
Yogananda also expounds on the crucifixion himself making me believe he thought it to be authentic as well. This is also a central point to the several versions of Christianity as well as the religious world in general, so I was hoping you could clarify what happened, and if it were simply an illusion, why the reality of the crucifixion remains upheld even by the most spiritually advanced among us?

Guy Needler: “I have a big link with Yogananda, so I’m interested to answer this question. My understanding is that it’s very much correct that it was an illusion. But the illusion was so good that it has left a huge memory, which of course has been augmented by various different religions over the years, that an individual of note was crucified and that individual of note was capable of working with higher frequencies.

The reality of the situation with those who were immersed in the illusion is that it happened. But the reality of the situation for those who were outside of the illusion is that it didn’t happen.

So if you think of it in terms of those who are part of the illusion, and those who aren’t part of the illusion, then you start to see two different realities there: one reality where Christ was crucified, and one reality where he wasn’t crucified.

The reality where he was crucified was created by Jesus and his disciples to enable him to move out of that environment and to bring closure to a level of antagonism between various different individuals within Judea, etc. and the Romans and the Jews and everything else that was going on at that time. And so the feeling of that state of beingness would have been experienced on a massive level by everybody concerned, and so it would have been experienced like a true reality (see What Is the True Jesus Story? – Big Picture Questions.com). And this is what this lady [Therese Neumann] is logging into.

Yogananda, at the point of writing this, wouldn’t have discerned it or probably wouldn’t have wanted to illustrate that he understood what was really going on, because he had to work with these religions. He had to work with Christianity, he has to work with the Hindus, he has to work with the Jews, he has to work with Muslims, etc. to help create a truly universal system that was acceptable by all faiths.

If you remember, Paramahansa Yogananda created a church for all religions, so he had to make sure that he wasn’t upsetting anybody. So he wouldn’t — even if he knew what was going on — he wouldn’t have broadcasted that, because he knew that it would have been detrimental to the work he was doing.

And so therefore, sometimes we are a bit “economical” with the truth, so to speak, to allow a bigger picture to operate — the bigger picture being from Yogananda’s perspective his work, which has been very, very well received, widely received and has been very beneficial to many of his followers.

So in that respect, I feel that Yogananda fully — in fact, I’m getting an image of him nodding at me now and saying, I understood that sometimes you have to work with what’s there. This lady, he’s just telling me now, this lady was logging into the energy associated with the feeling of the loss of such an individual.

She was feeling the loss, not just the local loss of those individuals at that time, but the loss of every individual, who has incarnated between then and now as well.

And so what we’ve got here is a really interesting individual, who’s worked out through yoga that you can work purely in the energetic and doesn’t need to eat, but also she’s getting energy from the reality that was created by Jesus then to create this crucifixion, to create this image of the crucifixion that was an illusion of the crucifixion.

So if you think about that, then she’s experiencing the loss of all these countless millions of individuals over the years. But she’s also experiencing the loss that Jesus felt while having to do that illusion, having to stop after only three years his ministry, because he was advanced beyond comprehension to these people and they couldn’t cope with him.

So she’s also experiencing the loss of him having to create that illusion, so that he could continue to do some of his work covertly. I’m being told, he worked with Babaji in those covert years as well wherever he traveled around the world. But he never created the same level of “noise,” so to speak, or radical changes of thought process ever again, because he realized that it was too much for people and there was too much resistance in certain levels.

So my understanding is that Yogananda understood it was an illusion. He didn’t want to broadcast it, because it would have created a problem with his own work.

The lady is tapping into the energy that is associated with that being that is Jesus. She’s experiencing not just the loss or the images that were needed to be created, but the global loss of an entity, who was lost through illusion, but not in actuality. And a loss for the world by not taking on board Jesus’ ideas where it could have been, she’s taking on board that loss as well. But also she’s being able to work with the energies associated with Jesus as well to be able to create that condition, where she doesn’t need to eat any more as well.

So the loss that she’s experiencing is a global loss based upon what could have been, and the loss of what Jesus felt by having to create the illusion to allow his continued work but in a more covert way. So it’s a different way of understanding the loss.

And the tears of blood were a metaphoric statement basically that she’s been experiencing, because that is the level of negative energy that was being experienced by Jesus at that time. So the tears of blood are [that] we’re crying for the loss of the world, and we’ve lost ourselves, our blood, the blood of Jesus through its having to create this illusion to move out of the public eye, so to speak.

I don’t think I’ve explained that very well to be honest, but never mind. It is a very difficult thing to understand that things, that are understood metaphorically, are also understood by individuals, who decide not to broadcast this stuff, because it can be damaging to their work as well. And that’s totally understandable.

And actually, there’s a lot of things that are held back from the common people, because it would cause problems. Sometimes, if we know too much of the real truth, then the institutions and organizations that would have been based on an untruth, the destruction of those could be more detrimental than the maintenance of those. So that’s a way to think about it.”

Paramahansa Yogananda visited her and wrote about her case in his book Autobiography of a Yogi, published in 1946. He wrote an entire chapter, Therese Neumann, The Catholic Stigmatist of Bavaria, which reverently gives a vivid first-hand description of one of her Friday Passion trances. By the way, Mr. Wright (the guy in the middle) fainted at the terrifying spectacle of the saint (shown in color below).

Addendum 9/28/18: Regarding the tears of blood and stigmata, Needler feels that although stigmata are possible, this is simply an illness (e.g. bleeding disorder) turned into evidence from one who wanted to take away the pain from the people of the world and was given a vehicle to illustrate it.

This lady, although supremely religious, mistook one of these little understood illnesses as proof of one of her religious desires, so much so that those around her also dropped into the same mind set, as it justified their religion. As a result, and in reality, Saint Therese had a combination of a desire to help the world and a disease whose symptoms included tears of blood and stigmata, which were made up to look more than they were for photos and film of the time, the meaning being truly metaphoric.

Needler said indeed, it would not be the first time that religious people augment a natural condition or illness to resemble a spiritually significant phenomenon. We all see what we want to see and Yogananda would be no exception, especially if it augmented his story.