Jesus on the Inside

Jesus on the Inside

Christian Mysticism

This can be summed up in one word and that is Embodiment. Historically in the church the idea was to sublimate or overcome the body. The spirit was primal and the body was seen as something that caused sin. This can be still seen in the fundamental practice of religion. One of the changes that is happening in Christian Spirituality today is the realisation that the body is a temple for the holy spirit and that the body has to be included in any spiritual practice. If this is not done then the practice of religion becomes just an intellectual one or even just one of doing. You see a lot of practising Catholics who have the ideas and even sometimes doings of the church but they don’t apply it to themselves in terms of embodying the message. And what does that mean, to embody Christianity? It basically means to look inwards. They have a similar process in Islam, which is called the Greater Jihad. The idea with the Greater Jihad is to look inwards and deal with your own stuff before you go out in to the world or even at the same time as you go out in to the world. This I think is the next stage for Catholicism or Christian Practice as a whole.

Up to now we have had a very relative type of relationship with Jesus and with God. Jesus and God seen mainly as literal figures that are outside of ourselves. Obviously the trap in that is that they are outside of us and this can lead to idolatry and dis empowerment of a person.  It is a particular way of practising a religion. What is happening now is people are being invited to embody those literal images in to metaphorical ones that live within us. What does it mean that God or Jesus lives within me? What does that look like? There is a shift in emphasis. We say that when we pray to God that prayer is active, and in that relational model we are praying to something outside of ourselves. In the old days when we meditated it was called passive, because the opposite of active was passive. In a way that hid the true sense of contemplation because the opposite of active is not passive, in the old days it was called Quiet ism and that was banned. The opposite of active prayer in meditation is receptive prayer and that is of course based on the feminine principle. Anything to do with the body was seen as feminine therefore, whether unconscious or not, was seen as some sort of threat that needed to be overcome. Therefore the rediscovery of the feminine principle, the Marian Principle if you want to base it on Mary in the Christian Tradition or the Mary Magdalene Principle is important. That we begin to bring God inside and also begin to bring Jesus inside. The way this works particularly obviously is the main ritual in the Mass where people receive the body and blood of Christ in the sacrament of Mass which means that Jesus is embodied within you. You are taking in the body and blood of Christ and within you Jesus is coming alive. You are not reading about some literal figure, you are not trying to emulate his values whether you believe in him or not, you are not just reading Gospel stories, but in a very deep ritualistic way you are saying the body of Christ is coming alive in me.

I am going to shift language because we need another language to continue the conversation, this is where it gets tricky because as I change language, people say that is new age language, or it belongs to a different frame of reference. I am prefacing this because it doesn’t, but we need the words. When we move to a metaphorical language, then things change. If Jesus is alive in me through the sacrament of the mass, then we have to introduce the words consciousness and energetic.  It becomes an energetic experience and it becomes one of Consciousness. Jesus has changed now from the literal figure and becomes a metaphorical representation for Consciousness, sometimes called Christ Consciousness. A particular way of seeing and witnessing and being in the world. That is how the literal figure changes to a metaphorical one. It is an energetic experience as well and I will talk about that later. If Jesus is alive in me and he represents a way of seeing and witnessing and being in the world, what does that mean in my internal self? Basically it is connected to the witnessing observer or witnessing presence if you like, in myself. Up to now Jesus and God were the witnesses of me in my daily life as I aspired to connect more with them. Now when I make a shift in to the internal metaphorical world, it is called the Mystical Shift, I am taking a mystical step, it is no longer outside me it is the next stage where I am inviting Jesus to be alive in me,  very much alive in me.

It is a little tricky whereby if people are not grounded in themselves, they become Jesus. It can impact people’s mental health, in that they become Jesus, they can have a psychotic type episode, or they become God if they have a schizophrenic episode. That is not what we’re talking about obviously, if it is done right, it is Jesus coming alive in me.  The difference being that In terms of my identity, this is another word I’m using: my sense of self: which is a psychological term that is another frame of reference I’m drawing from. But in terms of my identity, I am no longer looking for my identity, my sense of self in the external world, that means, in the story about my life, in the things that I have, the roles that I play, the jobs that I do, my haves and my have not’s, my dreams and so on. I am not looking for my identity there anymore, I am looking inwards now. In doing so I step back from the egoic self, the personality, the story a little bit, the content or the circumstances of what is going on in my life, into a position of observing and witnessing.  Observing and witnessing is not a passive position, this is where people get trapped sometimes, well you are just observing, you are not participating, and that is not the case. Observing and witnessing in this way is active. I am actively witnessing, actively observing in a particular way, this is where the sense of embodying Jesus in the Mystical Tradition comes in. I am witnessing and observing through the lens of Jesus Christ, which metaphorically again represents a non-judgemental, unconditionally loving view of the world, particularly linking to the Beatitudes of the New Testament. It is a particular way of witnessing and observing, it is active and it is using the lens of Jesus Christ. Even more so this changes the way I am in the world. It also changes my prayer life, in the sense that I am not praying to Jesus in the traditional sense outside of myself, praying to something, but Jesus is alive in me as a living prayer in every aspect of my life, all beings, everything that I connect to, that comes through. That is a very different type of Religious Practice to the one that is currently operating in our Society.

In a way I think that is what people are looking for, they are looking for that transitional element to be taught by Religious, so that they can practice it for themselves. In the next stage it is almost like I continue this process allowing Jesus to be alive in me as the loving observer, the witness.  Then also I begin to see, as Jesus is connected to God, I then begin to see God in all things and in all situations and in all people through the eyes of Jesus, because I am connecting to that level of consciousness, that sense of awareness that I can now see God in all things. This is sometimes called God Consciousness. Because this is an embodied experience, it is not just an intellectual one, by embodied I mean you feel the experience in the head, the heart, the gut, I am not just seeing God in all things, I am experiencing God in all moments. What is that like? That is the lived life of the Contemplative, experiencing God in all moments.  The separation between God in me and my individual self is no longer there, I don’t lose the sense of my personality, my life, my story but it becomes secondary to what is alive in me. My sense of identity has shifted away from the external egoic story of my likes and dislikes, my hopes and dreams in to an Inner journey in the Christian Tradition with Jesus and then into what is called a Mystical Marriage with the Divine. Here I can draw on the work of Carl Jung the psychotherapist, talking about the inner marriage between the masculine and the feminine. That is what is happening here as well because the traditional active type of praying to something outside of me to a literal figure Jesus or God has now become a receptive taking in of Jesus or God into me until there is a marriage between the two.. Again using another word outside of the Christian context, we become Whole or Holistic in the world. If Christian Religion is going to go anywhere in its renewal, or going anywhere in the 21^st Century, this is where it has to go.