Article by Doug Esse

The following is from an email exchange by a reader who asked a question. Though I have written about this topic more extensively, I wanted to include our exchange here. It’s brief and more succinct that I normally write, so it may be helpful.

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Friend:

I’ve listened to 3 episodes of Another Name For Everything podcast so far today and I’m really digging it. Though the theology of Christ is new to me, beautiful and inspiring nuggets of what I’ve retained have reached my head and heart.

Here is one topic that touched me and inspired me to contemplate its function in my own experience. 

In the episode “Radical Inclusivity,” Richard Rohr quotes John 14:6 when Jesus answers: “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” Richard was discussing the common misconception that many religious sects have about this verse and how many people take it at face value believing we can only receive and experience God through Jesus the man. Or by joining a group that believes the same way.

Richard then explains that the deeper meaning is that the Father is only attainable by combining the material with the spirit (Encountering the Christ). He then goes on to say the said material could perhaps be a tree, flower or even a material moment… To think that Jesus was symbolically implying that he represents even a material moment in time kind of blew my mind. That’s deep AF. 

Would you say that in order to come to the Father one must have a Christ consciousness “lens” in order to combine this “spirit” with our material world? 

Is it as simple as keeping a few God-like qualities in the forefront of your mind and looking for opportunities in your day to utilize them? For example, love, compassion, humility etc? 

If you have any insight I’d love to hear it.

________________

Doug:

The name “Jesus” is code word for “particular” or “personal” or “immediate.”  The word “Christ” is code word for “universal,” or “cosmic” or “the macrocosm.”  When you put them together, “Jesus Christ,” you are saying essentially two statements, “Particular and Universal,” together; that the access way to the universal truth or God or Creator is through the particular.

When you are inspired by how a flower grows and it brings you to a sense of grandeur or transcendent, then that flower is “Jesus” for you. So, the man Jesus put together, awakened to, and is an archetype of living as both material (human) and the divine (God).  When Jesus is depicted in paintings as holding up two fingers, he is not giving a peace sign but rather revealing that he is both human and divine. As we are. We are also the Divine Incarnate. We are invited to put together these two things in a conscious way, as Jesus did. Like him, we are already one with the “Father” because we ARE the “Father” incarnated here as you and me. We awaken to this over a lifetime. We awaken to it through our embodiment and our life’s situation. This is why the road to ascension IS the road to incarnation. In other words, to “ascend” is to expand our conscious awareness, and we do this through “descending” down and into the immediacy of our lives.

Since you are an artist, you participate in a very real way as a co-creator. When you create art, you are giving others an experience through your art of a transcendent truth. When this happens, then your art is “Jesus” for others.

Everything is a portal to God for those who have the heart-eyes to see it. And speaking of heart-eyes, that means that in order for us to perceive universal love, the heart chakra is activated.  This is the beginning of Christ Consciousness.  

Ra, from the Law of One, says the same thing in Session 10.14.  They say that the moment contains love; that when we look in the mirror, we see the creator; that when we look around us at creation, we’ll see the creator; that when we look at other people, we’ll see the creator. I’ve written more extensively on this topic in my summary of session ten.

Spiritual teachers like Eckhart Tolle also help us to encounter the present moment as an unfolding of the divine.  This is Jesus in the moment, as the moment. You’d benefit from watching some of Tolle’s videos online at some point.  His big contribution to modern spirituality is a repackaging of the perennially idea that the Now is all there is.

To put it succinctly: “Christ” is all there is. It is another name for everything.  “Jesus” is a particular portal that captures your attention so that you enter into the experience of the transcendent, the universal.  

We can pray for the eyes to see this wonder and this will signal our unconscious, or to paraphrase Ra, “our roots of the tree of mind,” to begin activating the heart chakra, our “heart-eyes,” as I’m calling it. When we are ready to see everything as an encounter with the Universal Logos, or to put it differently, to see everything as “Jesus Christ,” (the particular+universal) then this is what we will experience. But until we are ready, we won’t have conscious access to the “Father,” or experience the Universal Christ, because we are not yet open to the fact that everything is indeed interconnected and one.

Furthermore, and to deepen the mystery here, when we are able to see how everything is Jesus Christ, we become aware that we, too, are Jesus Christ seeing Jesus Christ in a mirror. Like the flower that draws our attention and awakens our heart to the deeper reality of the unity of all things, or the sunset that brings us to awe and wonder, we are also a “particular,” an “immediate,” and a “momentary” portal to the divine.

This is what the great mystic, Meister Eckhart (1260-1327) meant when he said so beautifully “The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God’s eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love.” There is only Christ (us) experiencing Christ (the moment, the other person, creation about us).

• Christianity and the Law of One
• Law of One