Esoteric Approaches to "Christ Consciousness"

Part two of a series

Leonardo Da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi...

I received so many interesting comments and suggestions after my first post on Christ consciousness. It seemed to strike a chord. People recommended many sources to me: The Magdalene Manuscripts, Meher Baba, Yogananda’s The Yoga of Jesus, Ibn Arabi, and so on. I will explore some of these later.

I feel drawn to explore Christ consciousness — returning to something like a foundation, a source — because it seems we have reached a place of near-total amnesia about whatever it was. We see various forms of Fundamentalism and Christian orthodoxy that weaponize scripture to support authoritarianism, seeking to take control of women’s bodies, repress sexuality, dehumanize homosexuals, roll back hard-won freedoms once again. Then we have the “post-New Age” hyper-entrepreneurial “spirituality” of characters like Tony Robbins and Joe DiSpenza who use occult ideas to shore up the cult of the individual self, embedded in marketing schemes. There is, also, the neo-shamanic/psychedelic libertarianism we find among devotees of Burning Man, cryptocurrency traders, and the organic-fabric-draped denizens of Ibiza, Bali, and Tulum. There is, of course, yoga, focused on the individual attainment of various postures, and generally more of a health-and-beauty cult than anything else at this point.

Whatever “Christ consciousness” actually signifies seems far removed from us, inaccessible. Still, as I mentioned, I don’t think I am alone in sensing a particular resonance or “feeling-tone" to this consciousness. A kind of silence, a solemnity, surrounds it. What resides at the core of it? A truly terrifying possibility: Becoming one with God, surrendering one’s self as a vehicle of the Divine will (whatever that means) and its impersonal, unconditional love.

To surrender in this sense would also be, one intuits, to unite with a truer, deeper aspect of one’s innermost reality. There would be ecstasy, bliss, rapture, in this self-willed annihilation of self. It isn’t something “you” could come back from.

I mentioned that I am willing to consider that Christ’s miracles and even his demi-god status, via the virgin birth, were real things that happened. In retrospect, I suspect this was the wrong place to start my inquiry. We will never know what actually occurred back then. While I find people like Edgar Casey and Rudolf Steiner fascinating and inspiring, there is no way to verify if their readings of the Akashic Record — the spiritual imprint of the past — were accurate.

One senses that something occurred of tremendous significance — a transcendent breakthrough, a revelation, powerful enough  to send shock waves across history for two thousand years. This initial breakthrough was like a powerful lightning strike, a voltage of electrical Shakti that had to be transduced, conducted, channeled, attenuated into a usable current for ordinary people. The dozens of churches around me in my New York neighborhood (three on my block alone, all different denominations) are like receptacles or nodes of this energetic force which propels through centuries and cultures, taking many different, many strangely distorted forms.

Along with Fritjof Schuon and Gurdjieff, I feel we have to draw a distinction between the “exoteric” and esoteric sides of religions. Schuon’s book, The Transcendent Unity of Religion, helped me to understand how the three main monotheistic traditions of the West actually fit together in an esoteric sense. This includes Islam, which, Schuon proposes, was a logical progression from Christianity. That the “divine revelation” of the Quran came through a mere human being, not a half-divine Demigod figure, is, for followers of Islam, a greater miracle than God taking human form through Christ.

As I said, I wanted to at least begin this investigation into Christ consciousness without resorting to notes or source-texts. I wanted to express my current weave of ideas around the subject as they are now, even though this conceptual network is something I have derived from many different sources over time. There will be opportunity to return to the textual sources later on — including Christ’s parables in the Bible, which, I feel, also possess a special, numinous quality. Once again, I have this sense of encountering a particular personality, a uniquely magical and artistic subjectivity, behind many of the ancient sayings attributed to Christ. Perhaps that is simply the weight and gravity of the historical tradition tricking me — a kind of psychological hallucination. But perhaps it is something else.