A sculpture of Jesus in the Polish city of Laziska Gorne.

What Jesus really had in mind, according to Deepak Chopra

Once you get clear of the cloud of New Age puffery, starting with the pretentious subtitle, "How to Find Truth and Love in Today's World", this book - No 50-odd in Deepak Chopra's self-healing catalogue - has a lot going for it.

Jesus 1 is the little-known historical rabbi whose recorded utterances can be wildly contradictory, and Jesus 2 is the myth marketed by the Christian church, a political invention. Neither one is getting mankind anywhere.

Chopra's third Jesus is a genuinely enlightened individual who offers a plan for establishing God's kingdom on earth through radical changes in human behaviour. The key is to become God-like ourselves, and he says we can do this by understanding what Jesus was actually saying.

For example, Chopra writes, human nature makes the Golden Rule - "Do unto others, etc" - a pretty tall order, which is why the early church fathers downgraded it to "gilded", as in, "Just try your best, but if someone's really asking for it, smack him". The result was a church-sponsored war and a whole lot worse.

It was icily amusing to hear Barack Obama say the other day that the Sermon on the Mount "is so radical that it's doubtful that our own Defence Department would survive its application".

But Chopra examines the gospels' citations and shows how each of Jesus' well-known but little-heeded instructions can be applied in real life.

Analysis complete, he brings out the usual arsenal to accomplish this: meditation, affirmation and just plain thinking things through. More than a third of the book is mental and spiritual exercises for you to do at home.

TEXT BITE: "[Verse 144 from the Gospel of Thomas] is a helpful reminder from the Gnostics that Judgement Day isn't a literal moment but an event that occurs within, at the level of the soul."