The Need for a Personal Savior

Saints have loosed and severed those bonds of ego-centricity. They understand that both direct perception and indirect, rational understanding must reach an intuitive level, which is forever beyond the power of careful reasoning. Only thus can anyone retrieve, as the saints have, his natural soul-level of awareness: Superconsciousness.

The ascent up ‘the spiral stairway of [spiritual] wakefulness’ (as Yogananda put it in a poem, ‘God! God! God!’) brings one to the point where self-awareness is no longer limited to the little ego and becomes, rather, awareness of the Infinite Self. Man perceives himself united once more with the infinite Source of his existence: the Supreme Spirit.

Human beings are so very close to that highest realization! All of us have the same highly developed and sensitive nervous system, the same intelligence, and the same latent spiritual possibilities as have the saints. The only thing preventing people from realizing God as their own Reality is the simple fact that ego-motivated desires direct their energy outward, away from their own divine center. The lower animals, despite having instincts (which sometimes manifest as intuition, known also as instinct), have yet to develop the mental clarity to seek self-expansion to Infinity. Man alone, then, is capable of knowing God.

At the same time, as is stated in St. John’s Gospel, ‘No man hath seen God at any time.’ (John 1:18) Human beings, self-enclosed as they are in their little ego-cocoons, and unable therefore to catch even a glimpse of the high, spiritual realities around and within them, cannot ever, in their human state, see God.

Our duty, then, as children of God, a duty assigned to us from the very beginning of time, is to realize once more that we are, and have always been, projections of God’s consciousness, and must reclaim our oneness with Him.

Excerpt from Revelations of Christ: Proclaimed by Paramhansa Yogananda, Presented by His Disciple, Swami Kriyananda (Chapter 19: The Need for a Personal Savior)