Tempted by Delusion

“Jesus led up of the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil. And when he had fasted forty days and forty nights, he was afterward an hungred. And when the tempter came to him, he said, If thou be the Son of God, command that these stones be made bread.  But he answered and said, It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God. Then the devil taketh him up into the holy city, and setteth him on a pinnacle of the temple, And saith unto him, If thou be the Son of God, cast thyself down: for it is written, He shall give his angels charge concerning thee: and in their hands they shall bear thee up, lest at any time thou dash thy foot against a stone.

Jesus said unto him, It is written again, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God. Again, the devil taketh him up into an exceeding high mountain, and sheweth him all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them; And saith unto him, All these things will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me. Then saith Jesus unto him, Get thee hence, Satan: for it is written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve. Then the devil leaveth him, and, behold, angels came and ministered unto him.”  ~ Matthew 4:1-11

"Adya: … the whole temptation of the devil is basically, in lots of different ways Saying: "Use your powers for self-centered reasons." And he's always rejecting that at every...whether it's power, or to show off, or to test God, or to prove his own enlightenment. Anything that's self-serving, He's basically saying, "No, I won't use any of my powers for any of that." That's a teaching that dovetails with all the miracles you'll see, because all the miracles you'll see are not self-serving miracles. The devil, everything he wanted Jesus to do was always egoically utilizing that power. And I've always seen those two teachings dovetailing each other really quite well.

Rick: That's interesting because a lot of spiritual teachers have perhaps succumbed to that temptation.
Adya: Sure, perhaps
Rick: From the devil. "Guru" is almost a dirty word because so many gurus have tripped up when tempted by this, that, and the other thing.
Adya: Sure, well, power's a dangerous thing, any kind of power, whether it's just power somebody gives you as authority, whether it's spiritual power, any power is. Anybody that thinks they're beyond the temptations of power, have already begun to succumb to it. You know, it's a potentially very dangerous thing to play with, and I think that's why all the traditions talk about what it is to wisely utilize power. Whether you call it, in Buddhism "right action," or you see it in the devil tempting Jesus, or however you do that, there's always an acknowledgement of the dangers of power, and the necessity to be able to use it in a wise and compassionate - basically a selfless way, because that's part of waking up. You become a more powerful person, it's part of the deal.
Francis: And it's the insight too, isn't it, that you don't own that power? There's nobody really to be enlightened, in a certain sense. You don't own enlightenment; there's just clarity of vision, there's clarity of seeing. It doesn't belong to anyone. You can't claim it and say, "Oh, you know, that's something that will give me something to talk about at cocktail parties now. I'm not only a millionaire at 35, but I'm also enlightened."
Adya: And Jesus, when he would often, always say, basically, "I'm not doing this; it's the Father that's doing it."
Francis: Exactly.
Adya: His reference was always to something larger than his humanity. And I think that's another important counterbalance to certain other forms of spirituality. Even forms of our own insight, where we can forget that on a human level, that it's really wise to have some sort of sense of something bigger. That's the paradox. It's like, I am That, I am the All and I'm a human being. And I have to be in a correct relationship to the All because it is me, and in one sense, it's also bigger than me. And I think that if it gets out of balance, that you're only in relationship, then you're never fully awakened. If you just go, "It's all me," and you fall out of any human relative relationship with what's bigger than you, then...
Francis: You're a megalomaniac.
Adya: You're a megalomaniac, yeah, yeah. Your enlightenment has unfortunately deluded you…”

~ Adyashanti & Francis Bennett on “Resurrecting Jesus” - BATGAP Interview

Paintings by Jacques Tissot (1836 – 1902), was a French painter and illustrator. He was a successful painter of Paris society before moving to London in 1871. He became famous as a genre painter of fashionably dressed women shown in various scenes of everyday life. He also painted scenes and characters from the Bible.