Hindus use the term avatar to designate the incarnation of a deity in human form. In Simple Reality there are no anthropomorphic gods or supernatural beings separate from the rest of Creation. Therefore, it could be said that we are all avatars or embodiments of the creative impulse of the Implicate Order. In that sense, we all possess “Buddha-hood” or “Christ Consciousness.”
The Christ we encounter in this article is not Christ the Savior as commonly understood in the Christian religion. From a psychological standpoint Christ was one in a long line of universal archetypes. From a metaphysical point of view all of humanity has the potential for Christ consciousness which would be the dominant human expression in P-A.
To understand the significance of Christ we will rely on profound insights among mystics and scholars who were in touch with their inner wisdom and/or intuition. We will not bother with the illusion of Christ the Savior found in P-B because that is precisely what we need to transcend. Starting with a paragon of compassion and a brilliant scholar who studied the life of the historical Jesus we find that “the renowned genius and humanitarian Dr. Albert Schweitzer, in The Quest for the Historical Jesus says that after years of careful study, he concluded there was no traditional [P-B] Jesus of Nazareth as a historical person.”[i] If the “traditional” Jesus of the Bible was created by the early church fathers for essentially political reasons, who is the Christ that mythology, the mystics and psychology talk about?
Tom Harpur’s research supports an important fact that Christ existed before Jesus was born. “No contemporary non-Christian writer even knew of Jesus’ existence. It’s for this reason that [mystics and some scholars were] able to declare Jesus a mythical person, the product of myth-making tendencies common to religious people of all ages, particularly the period of the early Roman Empire. Jesus is a radically Christianized version of the supernatural [hero] Joshua. The Gospel editors thus did not have to invent Jesus, or Yeshua. His name was already in the air. He was already in the documents they had re-edited or transcribed. But later ignorance changed him from a symbol (type) to a personal entity or reality. The Evangelists then, I am convinced, simply brought out to more popular knowledge hidden Gospels that already had a Joshua/Jesus central figure and had previously been concealed inside the depths of Essene and Mystery cult secrecy. They were an esoteric popularization, not a fresh literary or religious creation.”[ii]
Now let’s connect, with Harpur’s help, our mythical Jesus to the universal First Noble Truth of Buddha. “The evidence is overwhelming that in Paganism and early Christianity, the cross was always a symbol of life, never of death (except as “death,” in its symbolic sense, means reincarnation). To be in the body [in P-B] was to be put—even impaled or crucified—on this cross of fleshly existence. This is the powerful meaning behind Jesus’ command ‘Take up your cross’—that is, accept the discipline and ambiguity and suffering involved in being a fully aware human being. (The Greeks said that the body is the tomb of the soul, and they had a word play on it: soma [body] = sema [tomb].”[iii] Jesus was preaching surrender to reality as a first step to the paradigm shift. He knew the necessity of distinguishing between reaction and response before one could enter P-A (Heaven on earth).
Even Paul, the character so central to the unfolding of the Christian myth, has been profoundly misunderstood and his message also was twisted to fit P-B. “All his [Paul’s] language about being ‘in Christ’ or having ‘Christ in you’ reflects the current Hellenic theosophy and philosophy. It is really Orphic-Platonic-Mystery cultism, almost pure Hindu or Vedic yoga mysticism, with no immediate reference to the Gospel life of Jesus at all. It is the universal Good News of the incarnation of the divine in every human being.”[iv] Paul’s teaching like that of Jesus, was the universal Good News of the reality of P-A—simple, not complex; easy not difficult; and available immediately, not in some remote future time and space.
So how was the wonderful message that held the key to alleviate human suffering lost and remains so today? The P-B worldview cannot accommodate the principle of Oneness that is necessary to understand Christ’s central message. Notice the not-so-subtle difference between the P-A interpretation of the meaning of his life and that of P-B. “The great truth that the Christ was to come in man [P-A], that the Christ principle was potentially in every one of us, was changed to the exclusivist teaching that the Christ had come as man [P-B].”[v]
The mistake the early disciples made, and it was a grievous one, was to fail to understand Jesus’ message concerning God’s presence (the NOW). Thomas Sheehan put it succinctly, “They remade God’s presence-among-men into God’s presence-yet-to-come and eventually into Jesus himself. At this earliest stage of Christology, the disciples were in fact beginning the process of undoing Jesus’ message by reconstituting an apocalyptic future when he would supposedly bring what in fact he had already brought.”[vi]
And from a very different perspective, Seth reminds us that “the Christ personality said, ‘The kingdom of God is within (among) you’ (Luke 17:21).”[vii] In other words, “the kingdom of heaven is within” and “the kingdom of heaven is NOW.” These two key pronouncements became the “kingdom of heaven is out there and on its way.” We believe we will have to work very hard, be very good, and wait very patiently. Ironically, those very P-B behaviors would effectively block any chance that most people would attain our natural state of perfection, a state which Jesus had skillfully demonstrated.
Now we turn to C. G. Jung to better understand the universal significance of Christ. “Christ is of the opinion that whoever believes in him—believes, that is to say, that he is the son of God—can ‘do the works that I do, and greater works [choosing response over reaction] than these.’”[viii] Since we are all connected to the Implicate Order and the infinite energy of ongoing Creation, Jesus understood that we could continue the creative process as he had done. It was his fondest hope, however, that it would be within the context of the sustainable story of P-A.
Jung continues, “He reminds his disciples that he had told them they were gods. The believers or chosen ones are children of God and ‘fellow heirs with Christ.’ When Christ leaves the earthly stage, he will ask his father to send his flock a Counsellor (the ‘Paraclete’) [intuitive inner wisdom], who will abide with them and in them forever. The Counsellor is the Holy Ghost, who will be sent from the father. This ‘Spirit of truth’ will teach the believers ‘all things’ and guide them ‘into all truth.’ According to this, Christ envisages a continuing realization of god in his children, and consequently in his (Christ’s) brothers and sisters in the spirit, so that his own works need not necessarily be considered the greatest ones. Since the Holy Ghost is the Third Person of the Trinity and God is present entire in each of the three Persons at any time, the indwelling of the Holy Ghost means nothing less than an approximation of the believer to the status of God’s son.”[ix]
That all of this would happen was predicated on humanity’s understanding of the prerequisite paradigm shift. Failure to accept the new context, the new story advocated by Jesus (P-A) would mean that the “Good News” would be null and void. And so far in the history of humanity, Christ’s promise is yet to be fulfilled.
As some believe, Christ consciousness is within each person and can be brought to awareness with a process of Self-realization or in the case of Simple Reality, with a change in worldview or context. Jung called the developmental Self-realization process ‘individuation.” “In psychological terms, the incarnation of God means individuation. To the extent that one becomes aware of the transpersonal center of the psyche, the Self, and lives out of that awareness, one can be said to be incarnating the God-image. This experience involves an encounter with the opposites. The Self is a union of opposites. When it first emerges into consciousness the opposites split apart and the ego is faced with the conflict of their opposition.”[x] This split between reality (P-A) and illusion (P-B) is experienced vividly by all of us and is described in various articles in this encyclopedia.
“‘The hallmark of individuation is the differentiation of the individual psyche from its containment in the collective psyche. This process is accompanied by a progressive awareness of the transpersonal psyche and the task of mediating and humanizing its energies. As soon as a more honest and more complete consciousness beyond the collective level has been established,’ writes Jung, ‘man is no more an end in himself, but becomes an instrument of God, and this is really so.’”[xi]
In terms of Simple Reality, becoming an instrument of God is experiencing the “flow” of the creative process in connection with the Implicate Order in the context of P-A. And this is really so!
Again, in Jung’s Christian language, we have Christ teaching the vengeful and jealous Old Testament Jehovah how to be compassionate and capable of the unconditional love found in the New Testament God. “Christ allows himself to be blasted by the wrath of God in order to redeem his fellow men. This sacrificial act not only redeems man but also transforms Yahweh. With his explosive rage spent by the innocent victim’s voluntary acceptance of it. Yahweh is transformed into a God of love through the example of a loving man.”[xii] This is also the significance and meaning of the story of Job in the Old Testament.
The Bible, both the Old and New Testament, is the story of the fundamental necessity of the shift from P-B to P-A before there can be any hope for a sustainable human community. Jung says: “In other words, the ego is given the strength and purpose to stand against the primitive self [false-self] through awareness of its sonship with the Self, which confers a sense of partnership in the mutual process of transformation.”[xiii]
And the next step, which even Jung failed to understand, is that once the ego has become healthier in realizing the self-destruction inherent in pursuing security, sensation and power, then it must realize its own insubstantial and ephemeral nature and surrender to the highest truth, the “no-self” reality.
Christ, then, was our own True self projected onto an historical figure, Jesus of Nazareth, and given a personality that had compassion, wisdom and a profound sense of justice, the qualities that Yahweh, our “primitive” false-self lacked. He was, in short, more conscious than Yahweh. For those of us who understand that we are all “Christ,” the universe is friendly, and we are all without sin. The transformation of God in the Bible foreshadows the transformation of humanity and will only occur in a more profound context than the current P-B narrative. In other words, the paradigm must be profound enough to contain such a transformed consciousness.
Christ consciousness is nothing more than our own inner wisdom being expressed and is crucial in guiding us to life in the present moment. “Since myths are part of the unconscious, they act as a bridge between the conscious and unconscious Christ, as a combination of God and man archetypes, is part of this bridge.”[xiv] Jung continues, “The image of Christ as essentially androgynous, uniting the anima (soul) and the animus (consciousness), is stressed. In the human psyche the animus is still seen to symbolize consciousness, while the anima personifies the unconscious.”[xv]
In P-A, we have the powerful awareness or “presence” characteristic of Christ consciousness. Ken Wilber offers his inimitable and poetic description of that consciousness. “Ascent straight to the formless Godhead, and a perfect Descent to a loving embrace of the entire world of the Many—the standard message of all Non-dual schools: transcend absolutely every single thing in the Kosmos, embrace absolutely every single thing in the Kosmos—with choiceless compassion or love.”[xvi]
This was the message of Christ and Buddha and remains their message today within each one of us where it has been from the beginning of Creation.
[i] Harpur, Tom. The Pagan Christ. New York: Walker and Company, 2004, p. 166.
[ii] Ibid., pp. 161-165.
[iii] Ibid., p. 45.
[iv] Ibid., p. 169.
[v] Ibid., p. 3.
[vi] Sheehan, Thomas. The First Coming. New York: Random House, 1986, pp. 190-191.
[vii] Roberts, Jane. The Nature of Personal Reality. New York: Bantam, 1974, p. 431.
[viii] Jung, C. G. The Portable Jung. New York: Penguin Books, 1971, pp. 582-583.
[ix] Ibid.
[x] Edinger, Edward. The Creation of Consciousness: Jung’s Myth for Modern Man. Toronto, Canada: Inner City Books, 1984, pp. 84-85.
[xi] Ibid., p. 94.
[xii] Ibid.
[xiii] Ibid.
[xiv] Jung, C. G. Abstracts of the Collected Works of C. G. Jung. Rockville, Maryland: NIMH, 1978, p. 61.
[xv] Ibid., p. 104.
[xvi] Wilber, Ken. Sex, Ecology and Spirituality. Boston: Shambala Publications, Inc., 1995, pp. 350-357.
