Into the Wilderness

I am continuing with my Lenten series, “Awaken with Jesus,” centered on the book Resurrecting Jesus – Embodying the Spirit of a Revolutionary Mystic by Adyashanti. I am basing my Sunday morning lessons on the book, and I am facilitating a book study on Wednesday evenings from 7:00 to 8:30 which is open to all who are interested. It will continue each Wednesday through April 8, possibly longer depending upon the level of interest and the speed with which we move through the chapters.

During last week’s book study, as we explored Adyashanti’s perspective on the story of Jesus as myth and as metaphor for our own journey of awakening, I was reminded of my own trepidation when I first began exploring the writing of New Thought teachers, such as Unity cofounder Charles Fillmore who said in Atom Smashing Power of Mind,

“We cannot separate Jesus Christ from God or tell where man leaves off and God begins in Him. To say that we are men as Jesus Christ was a man is not exactly true, because He had dropped that personal consciousness by which we separate ourselves from our true God self. He became consciously one with the absolute principle of Being. He proved in His resurrection and ascension that He had no consciousness separate from that of Being, therefore He really was this Being to all intents and purposes.

Yet He attained no more than what is expected of every one of us. ’That they may be one, even as we are’ was His prayer.”

While at the core of my being it felt true, when I began to read and comprehend what Mr. Fillmore was saying, that each of us not only can, but is expected to achieve the level of Oneness consciousness that Jesus did, I was a bit mystified. My thinking went something like, “How can I achieve Jesus’ level of consciousness? There is only one Christ, one son of God, and Jesus is it.” It was actually not until much later in my own journey that I was able to assimilate that Jesus and ‘Christ’ are not synonymous. Even though in some traditions the terms are used interchangeably, in Unity they are distinct.

The traditional Christian assertion is that Jesus was the one and only son of God, born knowing his divinity and living in concert with it from the moment of his birth. In other words, he was born fully awakened in Christ consciousness and he never diverged from it. In Unity we teach that Jesus was a human born into time and space just as each of us is and that his life was a journey of awakening and self-mastery as is ours.

We believe that Jesus was the great example, not the great exception. Like each of us, his personal consciousness was conditioned by his family, the oppressive society in which he lived and the religion of his birth. He, too, had to release himself from the bonds of the personal consciousness, often referred to as ‘ego,’ in order to awaken to his divine nature.

Through a series of events, Jesus awakened to the fullness of the Christ, which as Charles Fillmore said is, “the higher self…the spiritual man…the one complete idea of perfect man in Divine Mind.¹” As in the quote above, Mr. Fillmore reminds us that we are expected to do the same.

When we explore Jesus’ journey as a metaphor for our own process of awakening from an ego-dominated consciousness to the Christ, we can see that although his experiences were dramatic, they can represent the phases we may go through on our path to awakening.

In my lesson last Sunday, I explored the metaphysical significance of Jesus’ baptisms by water and by the Holy Spirit. Baptism by water is an ancient ritual that symbolizes death and rebirth. Jesus being baptized in the Jordan River by John the Baptist represents the first phase of his willingness to let go of the constructs of his life, the attachment to his family, work, and society. His baptism by the Holy Spirit signifies his willingness to die to the ego-dominated mind and be resurrected in his Christ consciousness. This is made clear in the story when he hears the voice proclaiming his divinity, “you are my son, the beloved; with you I am well pleased” (Mark 1:11 NRSV). In that moment, he experienced a conscious awareness of his transcendent nature.

But, the story does not end there. Immediately following his baptism “the Spirit drove him into the wilderness” (Mark 1:12 NRSV) where he spent forty days and forty nights with the “wild beast” and “Satan.”  This is an essential aspect in the journey of awakening, and this is where I will pick up this coming Sunday.

 

Like Jesus, when we have an awakening such as the one he experienced, we are often drawn into the wilderness of our own minds. Charles Fillmore said, “In individual consciousness the wilderness is symbolical of the multitude of undisciplined and uncultivated thoughts.²” We are brought face-to-face with all the thoughts that would deny our newly revealed nature. All the things we have been taught to believe about ourselves and the world arise in order to challenge us. We are given the opportunity to release them and let them go.

And, if that weren’t enough, Satan who represents the “great universal negative²” shows up with all the powerful beliefs of collective consciousness to tempt us from our initiatory awakening with promises of pleasure, power and riches, things that the ego-dominated mind often craves.

The story tells us little of what Jesus endured during his forty days and nights in the desert. We can only surmise. However, when we are willing to look at how the “personal consciousness by which we separate ourselves from our true God consciousness” shows up as the limiting thoughts and beliefs in our own minds, we have a pretty good idea of what he was dealing with.  We do know that he persevered. He walked out of the wilderness a changed man ready to continue his journey.

I hope you will join us Sunday as we continue to “Awaken with Jesus.” Join us as we explore how we can have our own wilderness experience and come through it victorious. 

¹Metaphysical Bible Dictionary

²The Revealing Word