Quote from The Gospel According to Jesus

The Gospel According to Jesus: A New Translation and Guide To His Essential Teachings For Believers and Unbeliever

by Stephen Mitchell

Harper Collins, New York, New York, 1991            310 pages

What is the gospel according to Jesus? Simply this: that the love we all long for in our innermost heart is already present, beyond longing. Most of us can remember a time (it might have been just a moment) when we felt that everything in the world was exactly as it should be. Or we can think of a joy (it happened when we were children, perhaps, or the first time we fell in love) so vast that it was no longer inside us, but we were inside it. What we intuited then, and what we later thought was too good to be true, isn’t an illusion. It is real. It is realer than the real, more intimate than anything we can see or touch, “unreachable,” as the Upanishads say, “yet nearer than breath, than heartbeat.” The more deeply we receive it, the more real it becomes.

Like all the great spiritual Masters, Jesus taught one thing only: presence. Ultimate reality, the luminous, compassionate intelligence of the universe, is not somewhere else, in some heaven light-years away. It didn’t manifest itself any more fully to Abraham or Moses than to us, nor will it be any more present to some Messiah at the far end of time. It is always right here, right now. That is what the Bible means when it says that God’s true name is I am. (p. 10)


-- quote submitted by Oriana K. H.

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