The Seer

The problem of Jesus’ last name is a misunderstanding most Christians have about who Jesus was. Even Pope John Paul II’s book of private reflections, Crossing the Threshold of Hope, contains this metaphysical misunderstanding.

There is a metaphysical distinction between Jesus of Nazareth, the historical human personality, and the Christ as God’s “Only-Begotten Son” (Nicene Creed), the Second Person of the Holy Trinity. Ordinarily, when we speak of Jesus, we talk as though Christ were Jesus’ last name.

We say, “as Jesus said to the woman at the well,” or we might say, “as Christ said to the woman at the well,” or again, “as Jesus Christ said to the woman at the well.” This ordinary usage is convenient but it can create a serious problem in understanding not only who Jesus was but also who we ourselves are.

Most Christians, of course, know that Christ was not the last name of Jesus of Nazareth but a title given to Jesus by the early Christians, meaning the “anointed one” or Messiah. Nevertheless, even though we know the origin and meaning of the title, Christ, we still ordinarily use the word Christ as if this were Jesus’ last name in the same way that Smith is used as a last name for persons whose ancestors were blacksmiths. Understanding the origin of the last name doesn’t alter the usage in either case.

What exactly is the problem? The problem comes when we try, in light of this familiar usage, to interpret the words of the Nicene Creed: “I believe in Jesus Christ, the Only-Begotten Son of God.” What we usually end up mistakenly thinking is that the Creed means Jesus of Nazareth is God’s Only-Begotten Son. That is, we mistakenly think that Jesus, and Jesus alone, was God’s Son, and that all other humans are therefore less than Jesus.

That is not what the Creed means. To think so is a serious metaphysical error. And this error is so grave that, unless corrected, it can actually prevent us from taking our place with Jesus in the Christ Consciousness, and later in the Kingdom of the Father. It is the Christ who is God’s Only-Begotten Son, not Jesus.

True, Jesus of Nazareth knew he was the Christ; that is, that he had the Christ Consciousness (and the higher nondual consciousness of oneness with the Father). He knew that, as Christ, he had been directly begotten by God from all eternity. But Jesus knew and preached that the same was also true for us.

We too, according to Jesus, are to become Christ by putting on the mind of Christ, that is, the awareness that we too are directly begotten by God. One of the reasons Jesus called himself the Son of Man was that he wanted us to realize that our reality and destiny are the same as his.

Most Christians make this theological mistake of thinking that Jesus of Nazareth, rather than the Christ, was God’s only-begotten Son. I made it myself, and it caused me a great deal of confusion when my consciousness was trying to realize Christ Consciousness. ….

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~ From: Putting on The Mind of Christ, by Jim Marion

Whether you consider yourself a Christian or not, if you live in Western civilization you’re influenced by the teachings of Jesus. We listen to music celebrating his birth, we collectively hold values imparted from his teachings and even ‘non-believers’ draw inspiration and guidance from his words and actions.

He has, perhaps, influenced our lives more than any other person, yet very few people have really studied the history of Jesus or the sect that he joined called the Essenes. The story of how Jesus enlightened is fascinating, and gives us insight into his teachings. So let me take a moment to share with you a part of the story not often told or even known by most people.

You’ve all heard of the Dead Sea Scrolls that were discovered during World War II. The Dead Sea Scrolls are the oldest Bible ever discovered … by far, dating just prior to Jesus birth. The Dead Sea Scrolls were written by a sect of Jews called the Essenes who lived in Qumran, near the north end of the Dead Sea in Israel and the deep end of the Jordan River where John the Baptist baptized.

Whereas most Jews would wash themselves before entering the temple, only the Essene sect of Jews make a ritual baptism in water as a rite of initiation. John was an Essene, and Jesus taking baptism with John indicates Jesus’s affiliation with this Essene sect of Jews.

The Essenes believed we were spirit entrapped in a body and that we needed to discover or realize this Divine nature within. That’s why they lived away from the cities in the quiet of the desert; they spent their time in contemplation, meditation and prayer.

The Essene was seeking God-realization.

Moreover, there were many other gospels written and read in Israel in the first and second centuries that were not included in the New Testament. During the Council of Nicaea that took place in 325 AD, the Bishops of the Eastern churches decided not to include the writing being used by the Semitic Christians, since they had differing theologies. But those other gospels were the ones being used by the Apostles themselves and those who followed them.

If you read those other gospels, such as, Thomas, Mary, Philip and James, they all teach a similar message: to look within. In each of these forgotten gospels and in the Dead Sea Scrolls lies a message of looking within to find God.

Jesus was a Yogi. In Thomas, Jesus advises “come to know yourselves” and “the Kingdom of the father is spread out upon the earth, and men do not see it.” In the Book of Thomas, Jesus advises Thomas, “examine yourself and learn who you are, and in what way you exist.” In James, Jesus tells his Apostles, “I tell you this that you may know yourselves” and that those that listen will “be enlightened through me.”

In the Gospel of Philip Jesus says, “those who come to know themselves will enjoy their possessions (life)”, “know thy Self” and “we shall find the fruits of the truth within us.” In the Gospel of Mary Jesus says, “the Son of Man is within you. Follow after him! Those who seek him will find him.”

In the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Semitic Gospels and in the letters between the first churches that have been preserved we see, or hear, Jesus advising his followers to go within and realize the truth, the light or presence of God. As we launch out into 2012, let’s embark on an inner journey and discover this ’spark of Divinity’ within ourselves. Then we can celebrate enlightenment together.

~ Steven Sadlier SelfAwareness.com

The life and deeds of the man Jesus triggered off the immense Christian religion nearly two millennia ago, but his most sublime and profound teachings were either largely disregarded or strongly reshaped by the practical needs of the early Christian Church.

This old religious package, which still survives today, no longer satisfies the current wave of practicing Christians and others seekers who are searching for clear answers to their pressing spiritual questions: What is the purpose of my life, and of all life? Where did I come from? What will happen to me after I die? Who am I? Why is there such suffering in the world, and why doesn’t “God” do something about it? And so on.

Only a small collection of mystics and saints over the ages since have touched this deeper wisdom through their individual devotional and intuitive efforts. It’s time now to release these original teachings of Jesus from their doctrinal, legendary and religious package.

Let it not be misunderstood: the Christian religion which emerged from the early Church has been a unique and unquestionably powerful, effective and worthy social factor in Western man’s evolutionary development over the last two thousand years. Just like other major world religions it has spawned valuable scholarship, unified social values and laws and generated a huge legacy of architecture, literature, music and art. It drew people together into cooperative and collective enterprises more than had ever occurred before in human history.

While its political policies varied from benevolence to treachery, it insisted that every human, even a heavy sinner, is worthy and loved. It provided hope in the form of an idyllic heaven, immortality and forgiveness for sins. It gave Western man a set of metaphors and positive symbols to sustain him through his miseries, even though they were embodied in a questionable legend. But this is what legends are for: to hold symbolically in the form of beliefs whatever of value cannot be maintained over time in the form of literal history, principles, customs and social laws.

Despite its shortcomings and terrible misuses the Christian religion has driven and nourished the spiritual lives of hundreds of millions of people. It has inspired the thought and work of countless contributors to society in many lands and callings. Highly successful in overall human terms, it is today the most salient religious influence in the lives of more than a billion people, and a strong underlying force in modern secular society throughout the planet.

Our position here is not to tear down Christianity but rather to encourage its enhancement and enrichment through a better understanding of what Jesus was actually teaching. In this way its adherents can choose to apply this deeper understanding in their individuaI lives, group endeavors and large-scale societal activities.

This is not unlike the process we follow when we raise a child. We do not continually criticize and judge it for being immature, or discard it for its frequent learning mistakes. Rather, we value it, nurture il and support it as it maliures. We take pleasure in participating in its creative growth so it may someday become responsible, self-fulfilled and a positive force in the world.

This is the same charge before each one of us as he tries to work out his personal relationship with the behemoth of Christianity, and find his peace with it whether he be Christian or not.

Many saints, prophets and devoted practitioners over the ages have experienced the Christian life very deeply. Their contemplative devotions generated insightful interpretations, novel insights and the resolution of some of the shortcomings in the Biblical account of Jesus.

A few of these practitioners found “hidden” truths within the Gospels and were able to write about them for later generations. The Christian contribution to the Perennial Philosophy arose in just this way…. Thanks in large part to this small minority of

Christian explorers we are better enabled today to experience for ourselves Jesus’ finer teachings and his grander vision. They have given us a head start, so to speak. We may dig even more deeply on our own now by building upon this background.

Perhaps most important, we may come to accept Jesus’ master-claim that God is not to be found external to man — which has been tacitly assumed by most Christians for one hundred generations — but lies rather within every one of us. While he said this very clearly, this central message has been largely disregarded, obscured or ritualized in Christianity.

To reclaim it one need only recognize this grand presence within himself, relate to it and then draw upon it. Could there be a simpler path to greater compassion, higher wisdom and a new awakening? ….

What is hardest to understand is why so little has been done in the long evolution of Christianity to correct the large divergence between it and the central principles Jesus taught. Apparently the same human needs have persisted for a symbolic, dogmatized and ritualized religious institution, a personified God-man as figurehead, a personalized savior from sin and a lingering hope for salvation in an indefinite future. Indeed, these needs are still widespread in the Christian world today. They are even built into the Christian creed.

Individuals who no longer find this Church offering supportive tend to step out of Christianity and seek their own way in another religion, or as agnostics or atheists entirely outside of the domain of organized religion. Many have followed a solitary spiritual path and discovered all by themselves their inner God-nature and all it has to reveal to them.

We may conclude that Christianity has only partially followed the track Jesus originally offered. Its base of knowledge and practice is only weakly related to Jesus’ teachings. As an organized religious institution it is rooted instead on a manufactured and persuasive legend, not on the reliable historic facts and the central teachings of the man for whom it is named.

Even though the Jesus movement grew obliquely out of Jesus’ exemplary life and sayings twenty centuries ago, Christianity is not the only, and not necessarily the preferred and universal gateway to a deeper understanding of the deeper message Jesus taught. It is this deeper understanding that we seek in this book (and E-pistle).

~ From: A New Jesus: Rediscovering His Deeper Teachings Through Intuitive Inquiry pp 14-16, by William Kautz, iUniverse 2011. ISBN: 978-1-4502-6344-3 (pbk)

Douglas Harding’s new sense-perception based approach to spiritual awakening or ‘enlightenment’, although relatively little known in the mainstream, has been studied, shared and lived, by a small but steadily increasing number of people around the world, over the past seventy years.

Harding was born in 1909, in Lowestoft, on the east coast of England. His parents belonged to the Exclusive Plymouth Brethren, a fundamentalist Christian sect notorious for its ultra-Puritanism and intolerance of other denominations and, of course, all other religions.

At 21, while studying architecture at University College, London, Harding apostatized from the Brethren much to his parent’s horror. To justify this step, he sent to the elders of the Brethren a thesis explaining that he saw the great religions as complementary rather competing, and as having, at their common core, the Beatific Vision.

From age 21, Harding was remarkably successful in leading a double life. Without knowing quite how he did it, he managed to earn a respectable living as an architect in private practice, while devoting most of his time and energy to “the discovery of What and Who he really is”, to piecing together an elaborate but credible cosmology-cum-epistemology, and increasing to work out its application to everyday life.

In fact, Harding’s crowning achievement has been to devise a toolkit of exercises or experiments for getting behind words and concepts to direct seeing into our True Nature. In all the great spiritual traditions, the true mystics — the Seers — have, hitherto, been limited to words or silence in their attempts to share their vision. No wonder they rarely succeeded.

But now at last, thanks to his toolkit, the essential vision is entirely shareable, indeed obvious and natural. It’s also revolutionary, and therefore resisted in traditional circles — decreasingly, it seems.

The first book that Harding wrote was his magnum opus, The Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth: A New Diagram of Man in The Universe. He wrote this book, of 650 huge pages, over eight years to 1950. His main purpose in writing this book was to answer his two questions: ‘What am I?’ and ‘What do I amount to in the universe?’ A shorter edition and a number of other books followed from time to time throughout his long life.

It’s been widely acknowledged that the greatest aspect of Harding’s spiritual teaching work has been his devising of thirty or so sense-based workshop ‘experiments’. These ‘awareness exercises’ are designed to enable people to see or recognize Who they really are beyond outward appearances. In the 35 years prior to his death in 2007, Harding travelled to more than 20 countries across 5 continents, offering ‘Look for Yourself’, or ‘Seeing Who We Really Are’ workshops, based around these experiments.

One of the simplest and most effective of Harding’s exercises can be done just by sitting down opposite a friend. Point to your friend’s feet, then yours; to his torso, then yours; to his head, then back to where others see yours. What, on present evidence, is your finger pointing at? (Warning: it’s no good just reading about this, you have actually to carry out the experiment for yourself.)

What you see by carrying this exercise in basic attention, is what it is to be 1st-Person Singular — the noumenous No-thing that is nevertheless keenly aware of Itself as the Container or Ground of the whole display. This seeing is believing. Altogether unmystical (in the popular sense), it is a precise, total, and all-or-nothing experience admitting of no degrees — so long as it lasts.

Now your task is to go on seeing your Absence/Presence in all situations, till the seeing becomes quite natural and continuous. This is neither to lose yourself in your Emptiness nor in what fills it, but simultaneously to view the thing you are looking out at and the No-thing you are looking out of. There will be found to be no times when this two-way-attention is out of place or can safely be dispensed with.

The initial seeing into your Nature is simplicity itself: once noticed, Nothing is so obvious! But it is operative only in so far as it is practised. The results — freedom from greed and hate and fear and delusion — are assured only while the One they belong to isn’t overlooked.

I’ll let Harding himself conclude this all too brief overview. In his Religions of the World: A handbook for the open-minded. he writes:

“Arrived at his goal, the truly Awakened one is, in fact, not Christian in any ordinary sense. He has broken loose from his parent tradition and become universal, above all distinctions whatever. But on his way there he has had a hard time of it. It’s no easy task to reconcile his direct vision with his inherited faith.

His intuition of the One, his dawning identification with the One, his clear sight of that One as the Light or Emptiness within, his resulting freedom from all desire and emotion and even love for man or God, his inability to meditate in the prescribed fashion (visualising, for instance, the Passion of Christ), or to pray, or to think good thoughts, or even to think at all — these sure evidences of his Enlightenment must at first seem to him grave spiritual defects.

To his spiritual counsellors or former co-religionists they may seem downright sinful. All the same, it is his direct experience, his original contact with the Real — ignored by the majority, condemned by the orthodox — which is the heart of this religion, as of all other religions. It is what makes Christianity true.

Because she gets to the Root, becomes that nourishing Root, she becomes also the whole tree with all its leaves and fruits. Ultimately, the (Radical), Mystic or Realised Christian has no preferences, no personal opinions. She doesn’t pick and choose among the innumerable sects and doctrines of Christianity.

Because she rests in their common Source, she is free of it all, and it is all very good indeed.”

~ For more info on Douglas Harding and current activities of the Headless Way, check out: www.headless.org. You can also try out many of Harding’s ‘experiments’ from links on the home page. This is an extensive resource and highly recommended. Ed.

Most religions promote humility as an essential quality necessary to gaining God’s favor. The Bible has at least 70 verses that refer to humility. For example, Luke 14:11 promises that those who humble themselves will be exalted and James 4:6 commands Christians to humble themselves before the Lord.

Although some in society still hold humility in high regard, its opposite, unabashed arrogance, has gained widespread acceptance over the last few decades. In fact, it often appears that those who indulge in the most narcissistic and conceited behavior are the most successful. Since “Godly humility” doesn’t appear to reap immediate rewards, but arrogance often does, many wonder if humility has any real value in our world. To answer that question, let’s take a closer look at what humility actually is.

The dictionary definition tells us humility consists of having a modest opinion of ourselves, our importance or our rank. A person who displays humility is thought by most to be meek, subdued, patient and long suffering. From the perspective of most societies, a humble person is one who may be highly accomplished, yet downgrades their accomplishments as insignificant.

The humble often refuse to accept well deserved praise or accolades, pointing out that others are far more deserving (whether they are or not). From a religious standpoint, the humble are expected to recognize their sinful state and consider themselves as nothing without the mercy of the Almighty.

When we look at these definitions, we cannot help but notice that humility often demands that we behave in an inconsistent (dishonest) manner. If we make an honest assessment, we may well feel that we’ve been very successful, but humility demands that we back off and degrade what we have done in the eyes of others. Sometimes this comes off as mock humility, just a backhanded way of tooting our own horn.

But when we believe we have no right to own our accomplishments and constantly downgrade what we’ve done in the eyes of others, it can also cause us to devalue ourselves. We become afraid to accept praise because others might think we’re arrogant, ignoring the fact that there is a wide rift between an honest self-appraisal and arrogance.

Arrogance makes much out of very little, relying on the willingness of others to accept the egotistical person’s own inflated sense of self. But there’s no need for us to be dishonest with ourselves or swing wildly on the pendulum of humility and arrogance.

Instead, we can learn much by discovering the spiritual view of humility.

Consider the words of Rumi: “Abandon all arrogance, all vanity, and acquire Majesty.”

At first glance, his statement makes no sense. How could we give up arrogance and vanity to gain majesty? We can understand if we stop looking at humility from the standpoint of separation and view it in terms of oneness. If you’ve read our blog before, you already know quantum research has demonstrated that we live in a universe of indivisible, interconnected oneness.

The human eye and brain limit us to ’seeing’ a world of separate forms. But material forms are a virtual reality that overlays the Reality of quantum oneness. More important, that oneness is made of, permeated with, and sustained by the Divine. Therefore, everything in existence is the Divine.

Here is where humility takes on new meaning. We are the Divine, but do we truly agree with that statement and live in accordance with it? Or, do we argue that we are either too sinful to be Divine, or refuse to associate ourselves with the Divine, claiming instead that we came about by some cosmic accident?

Making either of these claims is vain and arrogant. After all, who has the right to tell us what we are? We can make all the claims we want to make, but the only valid assessment of who and what we are is the truth of our reality that emanates from the Divine.

It’s impossible for us to be more than we actually are, but it’s equally impossible for us to be less. When we consider that everything is the Divine, how can we see ourselves as either less or more than anything else in existence?

How can our talents, abilities and accomplishments be either less or more than an indivisible part of Divine oneness? Enjoy them, but see all talents, accomplishments and abilities from the standpoint of oneness. When we do that, we can work in unity for the highest good of all without being caught up in either arrogance or mock humility.

Of course in oneness, there is no place for sin and no need of salvation. All we need do is wake up to our Divine oneness. In oneness, humble worship becomes a ridiculous concept. Awe at the magnificence of All That Is, is reasonable, but so is the recognition that you are that magnificence.

From a spiritual standpoint, humility is the recognition and acceptance of Divine oneness, to see that oneness in everything in existence, and the sincere attempt to live in accord with that knowledge. Be humble; claim your majesty.

• One matter, one energy, one Light, one Light-mind, endlessly emanating all things—Rumi
• God is not external to anyone or anything, but exists in everyone and is in all things—Plotinus
• The Lord of Love is the one Self of all. Realize the Self hidden in the heart and cut asunder the knot of ignorance here and now—Mundaka Upanishad
• You are within God and God is within you. You could not be where God is not—Peace Pilgrim
• I am the Self in the heart of every creature—Bhagavad Gita
• At the center of the universe dwells the Great Spirit, and this center is everywhere, it is within each of us—Black Elk
• God is one; and he himself does not … exist outside the world, but in it … being wholly present … the animating soul of the universe—Pythagoras
• I saw my lord with the eye of my heart and I said, “Who art thou?” And he said, “Thou.”—Al-Hallaj
• God’s kingdom is inside you and outside you.—Jesus, Gospel of Thomas

~ by Lee & Steven Hager TheBeginningofFearlessness.com

On the human level, many give their lives in dedicated selfless service of mankind, and there’s nothing more noble than this. But Jesus said, despite all he did, “Greater works than these shall ye do,” and that is where the work, the consciousness, the vision, and the awareness of the mystic comes in.

Indeed, “among all those born of woman [the mortal] there is none greater than John the Baptist; yet even the very least in the kingdom is greater than he.” Such is the kingdom of Consciousness.

Universal Christ-Consciousness constitutes the true nature of Individual Being and is that towards which we journey. It is the coming of that Day of Awakening for which we must prepare, the awakening to Christ within ourselves; then the realization of Its omnipresence, the omnipresence of the One Indivisible Life.

This is the goal and Call of God in man, the life and world God intended for Man.

Any sense of waiting for “Christ to come” or the “Messiah to return” is but the out-picturing and perpetuation of man’s ignorant belief that Christ, “The Messiah” of every faith, is not ever present; as if Reality ever went anywhere and if only Reality could come back, all would be well.

Yet how many there are who well-meaningly entertain such a belief, thereby overlooking the original revelation of the Masters of all religion throughout all time that God constitutes Individual Being and is ever present.

Awakening reveals the nature of “this world” as a state of hypnotism, and the true nature of Man as eternal through his oneness with God.

“I and the Father are One” is not a personalized reference, true of one man alone, and is certainly not true of any “person,” no matter who, but the truth of Individual Being universally. When Jesus admonished, “Why callest thou me good? There is but One Good, thy Father in heaven,” he was revealing the good in us all through the Father of us all, rendering us all Children of the same Father.

Then when he went on to say, “but I go unto my Father and your Father, unto my God and your God,” he was saying that all, unconditionally, are children of the One Father and as such, each one an emanation and offspring of the fullness of God; that we are all Children of God, “My Beloved Son,” that One in all, that One that is all, “in whom I am well pleased,” who through true recognition is known to be none other than Christ, the “Son of the Living God.”

It’s a state of being, potentially available to and attainable by all men, in which man realizes and experiences himself as that One Divine Presence. It is a dissolution of all that man the mortal has ever known and a revelation of all that Man the Immortal truly IS and has ever been.

It is Man’s true eternal Identity as the Child, or Son, of God.

~ From: The Day of Awakening, by Tony Titshall. See: TonyTitshall.com

Arthur Stace, or “Mr Eternity” as we kids used to call him, was one of Sydney’s eccentrics. He was born in 1884 in a Balmain slum of parents who died of drinking methylated spirits. He had little schooling and by his mid-twenties he had only ever worked as a brothel pimp and a two-up school cockatoo, had a long police record and was already a chronic alcoholic.

One night he went to a Christian mission-meeting in Sydney because he had heard they served tea and hot pies afterwards. That night, Arthur Stace was converted. For the next twenty-four years, he worked tirelessly, caring for derelicts and down-and-outers of all kinds, preaching in the open air and visiting mental institutions, men’s hostels and the leprosarium.

In 1930. Arthur Stace heard John Ridley preach. “I wish I could shout “Eternity” through the streets of Sydney,” Ridley called out. The words forcibly struck Arthur. After the meeting, outside on the footpath, he found a piece of chalk in his pocket. He felt a powerful urge and with the chalk wrote “Eternity” on the pavement.

“The funny thing is,” he said later, “That I could hardly write my own name. I couldn’t have spelt “Eternity” for a hundred quid, but it came out smoothly and in a beautiful copperplate script. I couldn’t understand it and I still can’t.”

For the next thirty-seven years, Arthur chalked the word “Eternity” into the footpaths of Sydney and into the character of the city. He also chalked it into the minds and lives of countless people who testify to the power of his one-word sermon. Later on I met Arthur when he spoke at our church — a small, quiet man in an old suit.

He said eternity was something for all of us, something to lift us out of our ordinariness, out of our sin and give us hope. Arthur died in 1967, but today, near the Sydney Square waterfall, set in the paving stones in letters about 21cm high in white wrought aluminium, is the old word “Eternity” exactly as he used to write it. Arthur Stace is still held in the city’s memory.

~ by Rowland Croucher, in: High Mountains Deep Valleys – Eternity in our hearts.

Christian gnosis, or experiential knowing, is a loving knowledge …. it differs from the objective and purely rational knowing of science, which has become the epistemological standard in recent centuries.

In this sapiential (wisdom) knowing which is not purely objective but participatory, one shares in that which one knows, and knows it in the sharing. Ultimately — at the most interior level of this knowledge — it is a knowing by union, by identity. Here, in the language of antiquity, the knower, the knowing, and the known are one.

This knowing is affirmative; the knowing itself is an affirmation. In Christian tradition, it is faith that is the fundamental way of knowing, and faith with hope and love — the three are phases or modalities of a single act — is an affirmation. The whole person is opened and extended forward in affirmation.

The affirmation and the knowing are themselves inseparable from the identity of the person. It is as if the person awakens to his/her true identity in this affirmation and this knowing, as can be seen in the “recognition” scenes in the Gospels; someone awakens to his or her true being in the moment in which, through the gift of faith, they are suddenly able to affirm the divine reality that is in the man Jesus.

Faith, the fundamental mode of sapiential knowing, is a knowing in darkness, an affirmative cognition of mystery. What is known is “the mystery,” and the knowing is consequently obscure even as it is certain. Sapiential knowing ranges from a dark awareness in faith through various forms of symbolic understanding to the pure nondual experience of contemplation, a simple awakening to the unitive light.

“Wisdom” can easily sound like an elitist specialization. The orientation of the wisdom we shall be concerned with — as consciousness and as theology — is the opposite of specialization; it moves toward an opening of the full spectrum of consciousness, as we find it in the New Testament and the ancient literature, before the imposition of the dogmas of rationalism.

To attempt to understand a sapiential text of the New Testament — let us say the prologue of John’s Gospel — purely by the scientific methods of modern historical criticism (despite the great usefulness of these methods) — is much like trying to render a Beethoven piano sonata on a typewriter.

With the machine you may succeed in bringing forth something about the music, but not the music itself — and between the two lies an immense gap. For the classical sapiential writers, in the light of spiritual understanding, the Scriptures opened to bring forth something like the polyphony of a string quartet, and they proceeded to bring forth the music of the biblical word in its vibrant fullness, from the cello’s sonorous depths to the nimble interplay of twin violins.

The metaphor is not unjust; this wisdom at its best is a theological music resounding through the whole of the human person.

~ From: The Future of Wisdom, by Bruno Barnhart. pp 6-7

I can’t tell you what the ‘kingdom of God’ is; no one can. It’s not a thing, it’s not a concept, it’s not a place.

The scriptures indicate that the ‘kingdom’ co-exists with that realm of consciousness witnin us which knows no change nor decay, no beginning nor end and that is subject to neither time nor space.

Our body, mind and personality develops, changes and deteriorates over our life-time, but there’s a dimension of Spirit at the core of our being, they say, that is constant, limitless and the seat of all that is sacred.

If this be true, it surely means that the ‘kingdom of God’ is neither remote nor unattainable. It’s closer than our skin and more immediate than our next breath.

You may wonder why so few seem able to find that which is closer than close and can never be lost, but it’s a bit like searching for your glasses when you have them on all the while.

St Paul urged those in a death-like spiritual sleep to awaken and to become completely open to the inner Light of Christ (Eph. 5:14). This light is like no other, being infinite, invisible and the living, luminous background that enables all things in our world to be known for what they truly are.

Those awakening out of spiritual torpor soon realize that the divine is as much inward as heavenward and that in the final quest of the soul, seekers become finders … and then, seers. In this way, they experience the divine at the core of their being.

Spiritual awakening is usually described as the final freedom, freedom from previous conditioning and mind-made suffering — freedom at last to consciously be What we really are and have always been. Awakening has nothing to do with perpetuating our egoic self.

Awakening is an opportunity to encounter our imperishable Self (the Christ) before the transient vehicle of the body/mind/personality disappears, as in the cycle of nature, it surely must.

~ Pete Sumner www.peterspearls.com.au/

“Some people who have come to me have been disappointed to discover that I have no supernatural powers to transmit, no magic wand to wave, no extraordinary knowledge to dispense which can make them instantly wise, loving, and happy.

“Who, then, are you?” they ask. “What’s your secret?”

My secret can be summed up in one word: selflessness.

Selflessness is the Truth. Selflessness is the Way. Selflessness is the Fruit. In reality, there is no ‘you’ nor ‘I’ nor any ’self’ whatsoever. There is only Consciousness Itself — the One True God — which is what we are.

All that is necessary is to Realize This, because to Realize This is Wisdom, to Live This is Love, to Be This is Happiness. So, if you really want to know my secret, look to your ’self’.

In finding the source of your ’self’, you will find Consciousness Itself, and nothing else. Then, you, too, will be free of your self and all its sufferings.”

“Enlightenment, Realization, or Gnosis is nothing that can be attained through any of our conventional ways of knowing. This is because conventional knowledge is based on imaginary distinctions, which we take to represent reality.

The Reality that Gnosis reveals, however, is non-dual, and without distinctions.

To the extent that we reify the distinctions of conventional knowledge as inherently existing entities and objects, they act as veils to our Realization of this Non-dual Reality (‘I and the Father are one’).

Thus, to attain Gnosis we must surrender our belief that conventional knowledge gives us knowledge of Reality.”

~ From: Naked Through the Gate,, by Joel Morwood

~ To see and hear a 10-minute presentation by Joel, the director at the Center for Sacred Sciences, where he explains how Gnosis is beyond all concepts, how thought and language create duality, and how even “nonduality” is a relative concept: >>>

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