Saving from the troubles and misery is the general sense of the word saving. In spiritual sense saving means cutting all the worldly bonds and establishing real bond with God, Who alone is the truth? God is truth. This means that God is infinite power. The creation is just His imagination and is almost not true. The imagining person is said to be truly existing. The world, which is just His imagination and which is completely not nothing. The world is made of an iota of energy of God. God is like the infinite ocean of energy. Compared to God the world is almost nothing. Thus this entire creation is under the full control of God. Just like the person doing some imagination creates an imaginary world in him, God created this imaginary world in Him. The imagining person can fully control the world. He can transform any item into any other item. He can raise a dead body in His imaginary world. All the miracles of human incarnations can be explained only by this concept.

God who is present in the human incarnation does all these miracles only to establish this concept. If the world is equally true, then the world is equally powerful to God. In such case God cannot do whatever He likes. Since the world is least powerful and God is most powerful, God controls the entire world like a very strong person controlling very weak person. Thus the world truth indicates the omni-potent nature of God. When we say that this world is not true, it indicates the negligible power of the world. Suppose a small ant is on your shirt, will you say that yourself and the ant are present in the house? The ant is negligible and is treated as nothing. Therefore, a person who knows this concept surrenders to God and accepts Him as the saviour. In his eyes the entire world looks like an ant before God. You are a tiny particle in this ant-world. You can understand your position by putting a relative scale.

Assume that this ant is Infinite Ocean of energy. You are an iota of that ocean. This means your power is negligible before the power of this entire nature. The world is like the ocean and you are like a drop in it. God is like the ocean and the world a drop in God. You must understand this simile not in terms of volume but in terms of the intensity of the power. When we utter the word God, we immediately imagine Him as a very large figure with unlimited boundaries. The space is largest but as no power as it is treated has nothing. The atom bomb is very small but it has enormous power. Therefore, our idea about God should not be in terms of the three-dimensional space. When a person imagines a large city, the city is very huge but the person is very small. But that small person has created, maintains and finally dissolves this huge city. He can do anything in this huge city. In fact He is standing outside this huge city. When He wants to enter into this huge imaginary city, He will imagine a small form and He identifies Himself with that form. That small form represents the outside person. This imagined form, which is identified by the outside person, is treated as the outside person directly. This imagined small form is the human incarnation. The outside person is God. The imaginary huge city is this world.

Thus God identifies Himself with the human incarnation. From this angle the human incarnation and the God or one and the same. There is another angle in which the human incarnation is not the original God but a part and parcel of God. In this angle God and the human incarnation are treated as father and son. You can experience the Father only through this Son. In the third angle the human incarnation is just sent by God into this world as a messenger with some power. Jesus talked this truth in all the three angles. Jesus can save any human being who has any one of these three angles. Acceptance of Jesus as your saviour is the essential step in the spiritual effort. Here Jesus means the human incarnation in general. Only God is the saviour. But you cannot approach God directly. Only through the human incarnation you can approach God. This means you should accept the human incarnation as that very God. In such case only the human incarnation becomes your saviour.

God is like free electrons flowing in the atmosphere. These Electrons are the electricity. Then can you heat water by keeping the vessel containing water in the atmosphere? When these Electrons enter a medium like the metallic wire, you can heat water. If the medium is human form it is most convenient for you to clear your doubts, to love and to serve Him. Therefore, acceptance of Jesus as your Saviour means that you should accept the human incarnation as your saviour. It is told that Jesus will come again. This means that the human incarnation is coming in every human generation.

Otherwise, if one generation was only blessed by such fortune, the other generations will charge God as partial and such charge is justified. Therefore, if you think that Jesus means only that particular human incarnation, which came about 2000 years back, you have lost the whole concept. Through a particular example generalization must be made. If you say that sodium atom is indivisible it means the atom of any element is indivisible. If you say that Daniel is born, it means that every human being will be born. If this basic analysis is lost, the entire spiritual castle falls down due to the absence of its foundation.

surya

Early Christianity, the Gnosis Codex.

Nag Hammadi Library Codex, the link to all the writings of the early Christian Gnostics online. My favorite is the "Gospel of Mary", Jesus's beloved, at: The Gospel According to Mary of Magdalene.

Re-reading these texts (after an absence of some 30 years) reveals to me how truly naive, yet wise, were those early Christians. They were groping in the darkness of error just like they claim non-believers do, and it has as much fantasy as reason, though a very interesting historical work showing the minds of those people two thousand years ago.

I personally find Christianity too reliant on the FATHER image, which is supposed to control and create the ALL, and through Jesus steer us away from ERROR. That kind of sums up the "5th Gospel" in my mind, where the error of the Jews and pagans were that in their world God allowed cruelty and violence, while in the new world order of Jesus, these were not to be anymore in the new Kingdom of Heaven. (Too bad the Islamic people didn't pick up on that instead, and improve on it, rather than fall back into the violent teachings of the earlier religions.) I think the Nag Hammadi is a very important historical work in the evolution of the Eartly Christian Church, but the answers to problems confronting humankind all through time are still answerable only in each one of us, individually, in our conscience and in our choices in life. That, in a nutshell, is Gnosis.

Here is another descriptive source of The Nag Hammadi Library.

The essence of Jesus's teachings is exceptionally simple: "Love one another." That is straight from God.

Thanks for your post Surya.

Ivan

I offer the following as part of our continuing discussion of God, Religion, Destiny and Salvation.

I addmit to being rather traditional with regards to these matters, but retain an open mind

The Garden of Eden Discovered

ARCHAEOLOGY

Wouldn’t it be nice to find the actual location of the real Garden of Eden? In theological circles it would be a discovery that could equal that of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Well guess what? Archaeologist David Rohl claims to have found the site described in Genesis as “Eden” in a lush valley beneath an extinct volcano in northern Iran.

The Jerusalem Report (February 1, 1999) broke the story in the article – “Paradise Found.”

Ten miles from the sprawling Iranian industrial city of Tabriz, to the northwest of Teheran, says British archaeologist David Rohl, he has found the site of the Biblical garden . . . "As you descend a narrow mountain path, you see a beautiful alpine valley, just like the Bible describes it, with terraced orchards on its slopes, crowded with every kind of fruit-laden tree," says Rohl, a scholar of University College, London, who has just returned from his third trip to the area, where mud brick villages flourish today.

“The Biblical word gan (as in Gan Eden) means `walled garden,’ ” Rohl continues, "and the valley is indeed walled in by towering mountains." The highest of these is Mt. Sahand, a snow-capped extinct volcano that Rohl identifies as the Prophet Ezekiel’s Mountain of God, where the Lord resides among `red-hot coals’ (Ezekiel 28:11-19). Cascading down the once-fiery mountain, precisely echoing Ezekiel, is a small river, the Adji Chay (the name of which also translates in local dialect as ‘walled garden’). The locals still hold the mountain sacred, Rohl says, and attribute magical powers to the river’s water.

In order to make the journey to this most remote location, one must travel from western Iran, north through the Zagros Mountains of Iranian Kurdistan, down Mt. Sahand, and into the fertile Adji Chay valley. You quickly discover just how remote this location is when you try to find it on modern maps. The Jerusalem Report article gives a number of geographical locations. However, I did not find a single map that contained them all. I ended up with about five or six maps, each containing one or two of the places I was trying to find.

What made Rohl look in this location in the first place? One factor was that he read about it in ancient Sumerian cuneiform clay tablets held by the Museum of the Orient in Istanbul. The other factor was the work of the late, little-known British scholar Reginald Walker. The ancient tablets described a 5,000 year-old route to Eden. He has been researching the location since the late 1980’s through academic documents.

In April 1997 Rohl did something very remarkable to prove his point. He set out from the Iranian town of Ahwaz, near the northern tip of the Persian Gulf, with only his jeep driver for company. According to the article:

They traveled north toward Kurdistan through what Rohl calls `lawless’ terrain, trusting to luck to avoid the various guerilla factions active in the region. Rohl followed a route, documented in the Sumerian cuneiform epic `Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta,’ supposedly taken 5,000 years earlier by an emissary of the Sumerian priest-king of Uruk. The emissary had been dispatched to Aratta, on the plain of `Edin’ – known to Sumerians as a land of happiness and plenty – to obtain gold and lapis lazuli to decorate a temple that Enmerkar was building in Uruk. The cuneiform epic describes the dutiful emissary’s three-month trek on foot via seven passes through the Zagros Mountains, to the foothills of Mt. Sahand – the southern edge of Rohl’s Eden – and his successful procurement of the required valuable.

Rohl believes . . . the ancient Sumerians, Babylonians, and Assyrians all knew of an earthly paradise that had once lain beyond what they called the Seven Heavens. For them, Eden was still very much an earthly place. Only later Judeo-Christian tradition bestowed heavenly status on it.

The Garden described in the Bible places the headwaters of four rivers in it: the Tigris, the Euphrates, the Gihon, and the Pishon. Obviously, the Tigris and Euphrates are well-known rivers, but the other two have been real problems in the past. Rohl has identified them as the Araxes and Uizhun which puts the headwaters of all four rivers in his Eden. Interestingly, the Uizhun, Rohl's equivalent to the Pishon which the Bibles identifies with gold, is known locally as the Golden River, and meanders between ancient gold mines and lodes of lapis lazuli.

Making his case even stronger, Rohl says that he has found the "Land of Nod" which the Bible describes as "East of Eden." Nod was Cain's place of exile after the murder of his brother Abel. Today the area is called "Noqdi."

But it doesn't end there because a few kilometers south of Rohl's Nod, at the head of a mountain pass, lies the sleepy town of Helabad. Formerly it was known as "Kheruabad," which means "settlement of the Kheru people." He believes that this could be a permutation of the Hebrew word keruvim that is translated as "Cherubs." These people were a tribe of fearsome warriors whose token was an eagle or falcon.

And if this isn't enough to get your attention yet, he has also found what he believes to be the biblical "Land of Cush." No, it's not located down in Egypt as scholars have declared for centuries. It's just north of the Adji Chay river valley and over the Kusheh Daugh - the Mountain of Kush. One of the four rivers described above winds through it.

Modern scholars have argued that the Genesis stories were just myths and should be looked upon in an allegorical sense. Rohl's discovery is now essentially seeking to push back the start of history all the way to the beginning of the Book of Genesis. Since the Bible scrupulously documents the specifics of the garden's location and its surroundings, says Rohl, why shouldn't we take those descriptions at face value? "I consider the Bible a historical document just like the writings of Herodotus or a text of Rameses II," says Rohl. "It's ridiculous to throw it in the dustbin just because it's a religious text. If so strong a tradition evolves out of the past, it is likely to have a genuine geographical setting."

Dr. Rohl is returning to Iran this spring, but this time he is taking TV crews from the Discovery Channel and BBC. He plans to also start digging there at that time. His new book - Legend: The Genesis of Civilisation - provides a detail account of his discovery. It is not available yet in the USA. If you don't want to wait for it to be published here and would like order a copy today, go to