Are you familiar with Christ Consciousness? In essence, it’s the same thing as higher consciousness, or a state of mystical experience in which the separation between the ego and the Divine is transcended. You sense that God is within you and all around you. And come to discover that everything is one.
In The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope For, and Believe, Franciscan priest and Christian mystic Richard Rohr takes a deep dive into Christ Consciousness. He explains how this his higher level of consciousness works and how we might experience it in our own lives.
While The Universal Christ is chock-full of spiritual wisdom, I’ve edited Rohr’s thinking down to five key points.
Point 1. Christ is not Jesus’s last name
Rohr tells us that God needed us to focus our attention on someone—and that someone was Jesus. But our inability to separate Jesus from Christ has left us worshipping Jesus the messenger and not the message of Christ. As famed Indian monk and author Yoganada explains:
His given name was Jesus; his honorific title was “Christ.” In his human body called Jesus, was born the vast Christ Consciousness, the Intelligence of God omnipresent in every part and particle of creation.
Rohr believes that “we have made the mistake of limiting the Creator’s presence to just one human manifestation, Jesus.” But in fact, the Christ Consciousness Jesus realized is available to you and me. This realization “has the power to radically alter what we believe, how we see others and relate to them, and our sense of how big God might be.”
Point 2. God is the DNA within all of us
Rohr writes that “The Divine Presence is here, in us and in all of creation, and not “over there” in some far-off realm.” The Kingdom is not in the heavens, but here on earth. Because of this, we are not separate from God. We are, in fact, immersed in God.
When we realize that God is in and of all things, we view the world differently. Rohr says that when we “stand in solidarity with everything and everyone else,” we see the Divine in literally “every thing” and “every one.” Everything visible, without exception, is the outpouring of God. God is the light inside of everything.
When we are able to see God in all things, it can cause a radical change in our perspective, as Rohr explains here:
Once we know that the entire physical world around us, all of creation, is both the hiding place and the revelation place for God, this world becomes home, safe, enchanted, offering grace to anyone who looks deeply.
Point 3. The signs of God are all around us
Rohr tells us that anything that “draws us out” is a sign of God operating within us and the world around us. This includes acts of goodness and things of beauty. These signs can be found “in a quiet word or a smile, during a meal shared with someone we care for, anytime you are suddenly enlivened by a force larger than yourself.”
- When we see someone helping others, that is a sign of God.
- When we see a newborn baby, that is a sign of God.
- When we watch a beautiful sunset or the waves crashing on a beach, that is a sign of God.
When you see a sign of God, Rohr recommends that you return this presence with your own presence. When you “learn to trust and draw forth your own deepest experience, you will know Christ consciousness,” all day and every day. And you don’t have to go far to find these signs. They could very well be around you right now.
Point 4. We need to immerse ourselves in God
Rohr challenges us: What if instead of believing that God came into the world through Jesus, Jesus simply realized what was already there—a world saturated by the presence of God? It’s a presence we too can immerse ourselves in.
The key to having a healthy, personal relationship with God, is to look for God in you and around you. Rohr writes “you cannot deeply know yourself without also knowing the one who made you, and you cannot fully accept yourself without accepting God’s radical acceptance of every part of you.”
Point 5. All of us can experience Christ Consciousness
Rohr paints a vivid picture of Christ Consciousness from his own life and then illustrates how this type of consciousness can permeate our own lives. The more you look for it, the more you can see it. Rohr says that:
I can see Christ in my dog, the sky, and all creatures, and it’s why you, whoever you are, can experience God’s unadulterated care for you in your garden or kitchen, your husband or wife , an ordinary beetle, a fish in the darkest sea that no human eye will ever observe, and even in those who do not like you, and those who are not like you.
Like Jesus, we must see “Christ” in “every single creature—the teen mother nursing her child, every one of the 20,000 species of butterflies, an immigrant living in fear, a blade of grass. You reading this are in Christ and chosen from the beginning. You are never separate from God, nor can you be, except in your mind.”
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