We Have Lost Our Way
To riff on my old frenemy Aristotle (genius- misogynist), ‘Christ can be understood in many ways.’ Aristotle was among the first to deeply explore the meaning of Being and gave us his famous phrase: ‘Being is said in many ways.’ He opened up the polysemous nature of Being that includes many levels and layers. Being is another word for the One, the All, the Sacred, God, etc. To say ‘Christ is said in many ways’ allows us to explore the many and varied ways of understanding the word, person, and concept of Christ and hopefully find a richer way of understanding what can be meant by Christ.
Taken literally, the word Christ means ‘anointed’ or the anointed one. Beyond a literal interpretation, the narrowest understanding of Christ refers to the divinity of the historical Jesus of Palestine. More broadly, Christ is understood as an energy, often referred to as the Christ energy or the Christ Light. Christ consciousness refers to the highest level of unitive consciousness that is characterised by divine love. Another understanding of Christ is as the Cosmic Christ. This refers to Christ in the widest possible sense of both holding and the being the source of all meaning at the cosmological level. The Cosmic Christ describes the meaning and the inner laws of Being itself. Christ is also symbolic of the True Self which emerges in the process of awakening or inner transformation.
The historical Jesus instantiated Christ energy, unitive consciousness, and divine love as a new level of consciousness and made it accessible for all of humanity. Meister Eckhart said that Jesus divinised humanity. Others say he divinised all of life. Like a power station built in your local community, the historical Jesus incarnated and embodied Christ consciousness and made it available to all. He inaugurated a new era of human consciousness that would have the character of love as its defining quality. He seeded the potential for love in the ground of collective consciousness and it has been taking root in the human psyche and collective consciousness ever since. It is now ready to be born, is trying to be born, but is struggling in its birth. Christ consciousness is the level of consciousness to which all of humanity is invited. The first word Jesus spoke in his public ministry was ‘Metanoia’ which means radical change at the level of our being or consciousness. The change he was referring to is the transformation of consciousness from dualistic, binary consciousness to a unitive consciousness of love. How are we to achieve this shift?
The shift to Christ consciousness is achieved through radical inner transformation at the level of our consciousness. This process of inner transformation is often called spiritual awakening and is the age-old, archetypal wisdom path. The end point is to become our True Self, who we really are. It’s also a close cousin to Jungian individuation which Jung describes as the passage from persona to personality, and from the ego self to the ‘Self.’ In some traditions, including Eastern orthodox Christianity, it is known as the path of deification or divinisation.
The path to our becoming our True Self is the inner journey of life that goes on beneath the cacophony of the ego-based struggle to ‘be someone.’ The inner journey is the one that needs our greatest attention, yet it receives the least. Becoming authentic, becoming our True Self is why we are here. To be on the inner journey is the whole meaning of life, and anything less is a profound misunderstanding of life. The inner journey is the path back to our eternal Self in the Light and in Love, and sometimes called God. Love is both the essence of the spiritual path in life and its destination. It’s what calls the process of transformation into being and guides the journey. It both initiates the journey and is its conclusion.
Life is designed to be lived as a spiritual journey. The journey starts with a personal initiation which takes the form of a personal experience of the Sacred. Whether subtle or dramatic, a living experience of the Sacred changes everything. The experience makes it impossible to go on living out of our ego self or persona. The initiation, however subtle, guides us to desire to become our authentic self. It sets us on the innermost journey to wholeness that also reveals both the true calling of our soul and our true soul gifts.
To recognise and respond to that inner initiation to love is the true task of life. Nothing else matters. None of the things we think matter actually do matter. Nothing matters except a commitment to our authenticity, our truth, and the inner journey. It’s on this path that we recognise each other as sisters and brothers – recognise all of life as truly one. This is the journey that transforms us into who we truly are, into our Christ-self. It transforms our consciousness into Christ consciousness. It’s not easy. It’s not meant to be easy. It is however, the only thing that gives real meaning and purpose to our days and opens our eyes to the dignity and divinity of every other being on the planet and of the planet herself.
Awakening, or inner transformation, doesn’t progress by itself. It requires conscious commitment and a total about-turn in our lives. Not many people walk this road, and Jung said, only a few people individuate. It requires both that we respond to the experience of personal initiation, and it requires us to see the ‘given’ rationalist, capitalist, consumerist culture for what it is. It requires us to let the seeds of a new way of being take root in our own heart, in our own soul, and in our own lives so that a new way of being human can be born individually and collectively. No one else can do this inner work for us. Yes, there are guides and gurus on every street corner – some authentic, some charlatans – and yes, we need genuine guides if we can find them, but the work can only get done in the tabernacle of our own heart, in the cave of our womb. This is deep inner work that only we can do to birth our True Self. The inner journey is a hidden one, and in a world set up for ‘show’ and ‘show off’ the inner journey seems irrelevant and most people never engage. We humans are made for authenticity yet we live false and superficial lives.
Western culture no longer understands that transformation is the essence of life. We are designed to transform from our small, individual, finite selves, living primarily out of rational-scientific consciousness, and into our true and authentic Self living out of unitive, Christ consciousness which is love. We are meant to recognise the indissoluble connection of all of life in one beautifully connected whole. Instead, we live such little lives, worrying about the finite, material, limited aspects of life, blind to the majesty being offered in every moment when we turn inwards and connect with our own inner light, and when we turn outwards to truly appreciate the natural world and mother earth. The inner light is the spark of our divinity that needs us to be tended like an inner flame until it grows into a blazing fire, revealing our inner Truth that naturally knows the whole Truth of Life.
We were not made to be small, but infinite; not petty but magnanimous; not fearful but trusting of the magnificence and the natural abundance of life and nature. So long as we judge life by what we own or by whatever prestige we manage to acquire from a sick culture, we are totally off track. Life, Love, and the Light do not care what job we have or where we live or how much money we earn. Life only cares to help us to live on Life’s own terms, according to Life’s natural laws, which are founded upon inner transformation as the central axis of life. The transformation is into the consciousness of Love, Peace, Joy, and all the higher ideals.
Love is the source of our love; Light the source of light; Peace the source of peace. All these are offered for free, in divine generosity, to everyone in every moment. All that’s needed is that we would turn within to see the flow of these riches flooding our hearts. None of this is evident in the given culture. The culture in fact mocks the True Light with its glittering trinkets and baubles that appeal to the small-seeing eyes of ego, greed, and materialism. The eye of the heart sees True Light and when we stabilise in heart-seeing we become Christ-ed and can then contribute our part to the healing of the world and its transformation into a world where all are at peace, all are safe, all are fed, and all are loved and cared for.
Words are empty until they fill with divine reality. Love is only a word until it becomes a living commitment to live from and for love. We may live far from war, yet we have a responsibility to strive for peace personally and in the collective and so contribute to the raising of the collective consciousness in which we all live. The risk of spiritual narcissism and self-righteous activism is to be avoided. In the end, Christ is a symbol for the union of all opposites – of the divine feminine and divine masculine; of light and dark; of all duality into unity. This summarises the true path of life as one of radical inner transformation at the level of our consciousness so that we become beings whose essence is grounded in love. This is metanoia – and it’s the meaning of life.