Why would these same powers be evil when displayed by ordinary men and women?

The official Canonical Gospels of Mark, Matthew, Luke and John have detailed, meticulously, the extraordinary mental powers or abilities of Jesus, which were regarded as miracles by Christians.

But they are not miracles. Everybody who believes in Jesus can do the same. In fact, he commanded his disciples and followers to do what he had done: “The works that I have done you will do, and much more than these.” (John 14:12)

What I can’t understand is why Church officials consider as evil these powers when performed by ordinary men and women.

Combat heresy

During the infamous reign of the Holy Inquisition from the 12th to 19th centuries, many innocent people were tortured, burned at the stake, or fed to beasts, for having abilities as predicting the future, seeing spirits, reading another person’s mind or merely having a birthmark, mole or blemish on the skin.

The Inquisition, which was instituted by the Church to combat heresy committed by Christians, began in the 12th century in France and spread all over Europe. It was abolished in the early 19th century, after the Napoleonic Wars. The Inquisition was later renamed the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. The estimated number of people tortured and executed ranged from 300,000 to one million.

Church historians, however, downplayed the number to less than 1 percent of those estimates. It sounded like the Philippine National Police dismissing the huge number of extrajudicial killings as “exaggerated.”

Jesus Christ performed the same psychic feats that people living during the Inquisition were accused of. If he had lived in Europe at the time of the Inquisition, he would have been accused of being “in league with the devil.”

Among the psychic powers Jesus possessed and demonstrated, as described in the four Gospels were telepathy, precognition, materialization, exorcism, psychokinesis (or telekinesis), reviving the dead, levitation, psychic reading and teleportation.

As the Russian mathematician and mystic P.D. Ouspensky correctly pointed out in his classic book, “A New Model of the Universe” (published in 1931), “The four gospels are written for the few, for the very few, for the pupils of esoteric schools. However intelligent and educated in the ordinary sense a man may be, he will not understand the Gospel without special indications and without special esoteric knowledge.”

Christ’s words often have two meanings: one exoteric or open, and the other esoteric or hidden. Unfortunately, church theologians adopted only his outer or exoteric meaning and completely ignored the esoteric one. It developed a complicated reasoning process to prove that their interpretation of Christ’s teaching is correct and everybody else wrong.

Burned at the stake

As P.D Ouspensky pointed out, “Christ’s Christianity from the very beginning contradicted in many respects the ideas of Christ himself. Later, the divergence became wider.

“It is by no means a new idea that Christ, if born on earth later, not only could not be the head of the Christian Church, but… would most certainly have been declared a heretic and burned at the stake.”

Of course, Catholic Church theologians and defenders of the faith have different explanations for Jesus’ psychic powers. They call them “miracles.”

I ask readers to judge for themselves as they read these series or articles during Lent.

By performing psychic feats, Jesus showed that we can do them ourselves when we achieve greater spiritual consciousness. He is the model of what man can become. As the Catholic palaeontologist Rev. Fr. Teilhard de Chardin SJ pointed out in his classic book, “The Phenomenon of Man”: “Christogenesis is the Omega point of man’s evolution on earth.” Christ said what he has done, we can do, and much more than these.

Conservative Christians, I am sure, will not agree with my interpretation of Christ’s so-called miracles as manifestations of his psychic powers. But then, nothing new or original is at once accepted by people. As Alfred North Whitehead said: “Any really original idea appears ridiculous when first introduced.”

To say that so-called miracles performed by Christ are manifestations of his psychic powers is to be accused of heresy. But this does not mean it is false. It only means it does not conform to the official teachings of the Church. Galileo’s theory that the earth revolves around the sun was considered a heresy, because it was believed by the Church, at the time, that the sun revolved around the Earth.

Galileo’s theory was heretical, but not wrong.

The March 30 schedule of “Soulmates, Karma and Reincarnation” seminar is full.

Another one is scheduled on April 6, 1-7 p.m. E-mail [email protected], tel. 8107245 or 0998-986292