Before anything, more than anything, with absolute urgency and sincerity, I want to write in letters of fire upon your heart that we have in Jesus our great evolutionary, revolutionary brother, a living, powerful, unbelievably tender, vulnerable, eternal friend, brother, Beloved.
Second, I want to say is that the historical Jesus—and I said this again and again in different ways in my previous posts —the historical Jesus is crucial not just to Christians but to the entire human race, because the historical Jesus lived out, nakedly and wildly and with unbelievable authenticity and ferocity and tenderness and courage, the life of the archetypal divine human, the archetypal life of someone being birthed into their human divinity.
For me, the key of keys to taking the Christ path is what it has always been for all of those from Peter to St. Macarius to Hildegard of Bingen to Teresa of Ávila to Howard Thurman, to all the Christian mystics.
The key is having a naked, simple, absolutely tender, absolutely trusting relationship with him. And one of the miracles that you discover on this path is that if you dare to open to the outrageous possibility that this being isn’t dead but more alive in more dimensions than you can possibly imagine, and available to you just as you, where you are on the path, without judgment, in total tenderness and total compassion and total presence, when you discover that, you discover something that will be an endless resource for you as you go through the different states and stages of this enormously challenging and difficult path.
The glory of Jesus is not, I believe, that he was the son of God but that he was the son of man. He was the being that erupted in our evolutionary history to show each one of us where we could go and what we could be if we loved enough and if we gave enough and if we were brave enough. And in so doing, he became the brother, friend, Beloved of any being who is mad and sane enough to plunge into the fire of divine love to be transformed by it into the divine human.
I’m saying very grand things, but I want you to see just how intimate this relationship is. It’s the key. It’s the key of keys—knowing him, loving him, turning to him, talking to him. What will happen, of course, is that at the beginning you’ll think that he’s in some way separate from you.
And as the relationship unfolds, many mysteries will be revealed to you. It will be revealed to you that he’s not separate from you, he’s living inside you. It will be revealed to you that his light, the light of the Cosmic Christ, is burning in every stone, in every cat, in every flower of the creation. It will be revealed to you at the end that what you thought was him was your own secret you, waiting to be awoken. All these mysteries will unfold if you fall in love with him.
And the reason why I love him above all the other teachers, and why I am so passionate about the Christ path as an essential part of our global evolution, is that when you truly read the Gospels with an open heart, and when you truly listen to the stories about him, and truly try and imagine what he went through, then you discover something which is of enormous help on your own path.
You discover that whatever fears you come to, he has faced them. You discover that however battered and lonely and abandoned and betrayed you feel—and you will feel those things if you’re on an authentic path and if you are telling truth to power and standing up—you will understand that what you are going through, he has been through and so knows that pain and that anguish intimately.
You will discover that he too was prey to the temptations of inflation; otherwise why would there have been the temptation in the desert? So even somebody like him, at the highest levels of realization, can be tempted by power, and that story shows how he was tempted and how he got through it and what happened to him, so that when it comes for you to be tempted by your own narcissism, by your own subtle ego, by your own hunger to claim your experiences for yourself, you have in him a companion through the shadow of yourself so that you can come to the radical humility in which divinization is possible.
There is nothing that a human being can experience on this earth, nothing of loneliness, of anguish, of desolation, of betrayal, of heartbreak, that he hasn’t experienced. And when you come to love him, love him passionately, you will find that wherever you are taken to, there he will be with you, holding you, loving you, encouraging you, but most of all saying, “I know. I know what it’s like to cry out and not be heard. I know what it’s like to wake up at three o’clock in the morning and see the burning world and imagine, will they go on destroying all this? What will wake them up? I know what it’s like to pour out again and again your essence to your friends and have them not understand. I know what it’s like to want to die. I know what it’s like to be unbearably lonely. I know what it’s like. I was there, and I am here with you.”
In the great progress of evolution and in the immensely difficult work of evolution, to have someone as your intimate Beloved who knows you, loves you, accepts you, sees you, and understands exactly what you are feeling and why you are feeling it, is an immeasurable and priceless gift.
And this is the gift that he is giving, not just Christians but all beings who want to put love into embodied action.
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To register for the “Cosmic Christ and Youth: The Occupy Generation,” the Christ Path Seminar weekend taking place online and on-site in Burlingame, CA, 10/11-13, see http://www.christpathseminar.org/ai1ec_event/cosmic-christ-and-youth-the-occupy-generation/?instance_id=99
To order the complete 12-DVD set of recordings from the first Christ Path Seminar weekend, “Cosmic Christ and the New Humanity”– including Dr. Fox’s delivery of the Saturday afternoon lecture from which this post is clipped, see http://www.christpathseminar.org/participate-by-dvd/
Be sure to sign up on the Christ Path Seminar mailing list to receive word when the DVDs from the second weekend, “Cosmic Christ and the Historical Jesus,” are released!