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The lack of individual prayer and communion with God has divorced modern Christians and Christian sects from Jesus' teaching of the real perception of God, as is true also of all religious paths inaugurated by God-sent prophets whose followers drift into byways of dogma and ritual rather than actual God-communion. Those paths that have no esoteric soul-lifting training busy themselves with dogma and building walls to exclude people with different ideas. Divine persons who really perceive God include everybody within the path of their love, not in the concept of an eclectic congregation but in respectful divine friendship toward all true lovers of God and the saints of all religions.

 

Paramahansa Yogananda

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The Great Means for the Teaching, and the Blessing, and the Awakening, and the Divine Liberating of mankind (and of even all beings) Is the Adept-Realizer. The true Adept-Realizer (of any degree or kind) is One Who (by Virtue of True Divine Realization) Is Able to (and, indeed, cannot do otherwise than) Stand In and As the Divine (or Real and Inherent and One and Only) Position, and to Be (Thus and Thereby) the Divine Means (In Person) for the Divine Helping of one and all. This Great Means Is the Great Esoteric Principle of the collective historical Great Tradition of mankind. And Such Adept-Realizers Are (in their Exercise of the Great Esoteric Principle) the Great Revelation-Sources That Are at the Core and Origin of all the right and true religious and Spiritual traditions within the collective historical Great Tradition of mankind.

 

Adi Da

 

The heart of the great dispensation of Jesus has survived not necessarily in any temporal power of an outer institution, but in those great devotees and saints whose protracted devotions and meditations established within them temples of Christ Consciousness and God-communion...
It is such saints and masters who have actually communed with God — those known to history as well as countless anonymous true souls devoted to Christ, hidden in monasteries and convents in wholehearted consecration — who have verily been the "rock" on which Jesus' inner church of Christ communion has endured these two thousand years.

 

Paramahansa Yogananda

 

We propose to entirely exclude prayer and every form of ritual. Thus shall we avoid even the appearance of interfering with those to whom prayer and ritual, as a mode of expressing religious sentiment, are dear. And on the other hand we shall be just to those who have ceased to regard them as satisfactory and dispensed with them in their own persons.

 

Felix Adler

 

Yogananda draws parallels between the Christian trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit and the yoga concept of Sat, Tat and Aum. Both traditions use the trinity to distinguish among the transcendent, divine reality; its immanence in creation; and a sacred, cosmic vibration that sustains the universe, he says.
And he asserts that Bible passages used to exclude non-Christians from salvation have been misconstrued. Some Christians believe, for instance, that Jesus' saying that "no one comes to the Father except through me" requires a belief in Jesus the man as God and personal savior. Yogananda, however, asserts that Jesus was referring to the need to achieve the same "Christ consciousness" he personified as a way to achieve oneness with God.
"Christ has been much misinterpreted by the world," Yogananda wrote. "Even the most elementary principles of his teachings have been desecrated, and their esoteric depths have been forgotten."

 

Paramahansa Yogananda

 

It would be more proper to classify Islam as a Christian sect or group of sects, since the word ‘Christian’ properly designates all of the innumerable sects that attribute divinity to the Jesus who is the protagonist of the “New Testament,” although, of course, there is naturally great hostility between competing sects, each of which claims to represent the “true religion” and even tries to deny the term ‘Christian’ to all of its competitors in the salvation-business. It is true that Mahomet claimed to be the successor of the Jewish Jesus, whom he, like the Christians, regarded as not having been a christ in the strict sense of that word (i.e., a divinely appointed king to lead the Jews to dominion over the whole world), but as a Saviour who, like Zarathustra, could bestow a pleasant immortality on anyone, regardless of race, who believed the right dogmas while keeping his reason in abeyance.

 

Revilo P. Oliver