“our own True Self [Christ consciousness]”
Jesus, also known as Jesus Christ, was a first-century Jewish preacher and religious teacher according to the Christian Bible. The word “Christ” is the English translation of the Greek word Christos which means the Messiah or the “anointed one.” The idea of the Christ in Christianity originated from the concept of the Messiah in Judaism. Christians came to believe that Jesus was the Messiah foretold in the Old Testament.
Simple Reality teaches that we are all “anointed” and therefore contain Christ consciousness (a True Self) which is our identity when we are in the present moment (Paradigm-A).
“Long before the advent of Jesus Christ, the Egyptians and other peoples believed in the coming of a messiah, a virgin birth, a Madonna and her child, and the incarnation of the spirit in flesh. While the early Christian church accepted these ancient truths as the very basis of Christianity, it disavowed their origins. What had begun as a universal belief system built on myth and allegory was transformed, by the third and fourth centuries A.D., into a ritualistic institution based on a literal interpretation of myths and symbols. [But] to take the Gospels literally as history or biography is to utterly miss their inner spiritual meaning.”[i]
Thomas Sheehan, a professor at Stanford, explains why the early disciples like most Christians today did not understand the Gospel. “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.”[ii]
“The uniqueness of Jesus’ message lay in his conviction that in some way the future kingdom had already dawned and that the celebration could begin.”[iii]
Insight # 41 comes to us from Roy Charles Henry (b. 1938). He is the creator of The Simple Reality Project.
“Christ, then, was our own True Self [Christ consciousness] projected onto an historical figure, Jesus of Nazareth, and given a personality that had compassion, wisdom and a profound sense of justice. … For those of us who understand that we are all ‘Christ’ the universe is friendly, and we are all without sin.”[iv]
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Additional Reading:
- Christ, The ABC’s of Simple Reality, Vol 1
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[i] Harpur, Tom. The Pagan Christ. New York: Walker and Company, 2004, pp. 138-141.
[ii] Sheehan, Thomas. The First Coming. New York: Random House, 1986, p. 221.
[iii] Ibid., p. 65.
[iv] Henry, Roy Charles. “Christ.” The ABC’s of Simple Reality, Vol 1, 2018, p. 77.
