What is the central message of Christ? What is the central mystery of Christ? It is something that the vast majority of those who call themselves Christians have not grasped. It is something that the vast majority of those who call themselves Christian leaders, or even call themselves representatives of Christ, have not grasped. Perhaps we can begin this impossible quest of explaining the impossible by looking at the expression that someone claims that they represent Christ on earth. Or perhaps they make the claim that an institution represents Christ on earth. Can anyone represent Christ on earth? Does Christ need a representative on earth? Nay. What is the central message of Christ? The kingdom of God is within you, meaning within every human being.
Every human being has the potential to experience higher awareness directly within themselves, within their hearts, within their minds. That is the central message of Christ. If every human being has the potential to experience the presence of Christ, the being of Christ, the mind of Christ within themselves, why do they need a representative of Christ that supposedly stands between them and Christ, that somehow brings to the people what the people cannot have themselves? Why is that necessary when the central message of Christ is that you do not need anything or any person or any institution between you and higher awareness? You can contact higher awareness directly within yourself. There is no need for any person who claims that they represent Christ to people who cannot contact Christ directly.
There is no need for any institution that claims that they represent Christ to the people who cannot contact Christ directly. If you claim that you represent Christ, if an institution makes this claim, what are they demonstrating? That they do not experience the presence of Christ. Because if they did experience it, they would know that what Christ wants is that all people have that experience, so they would go out and teach people how to have that experience, instead of claiming that they represent Christ and that therefore, their role is to tell the people what Christ wants the people to do. The reality is that Christ, the mind of Christ, the presence of Christ, higher awareness is perfectly capable of telling each person not what they should do, but giving them that frame of reference that there is something beyond their present level of consciousness.
What is the central message of Christ? It is this: there is something beyond your present level of consciousness. It does not matter who you are. It does not matter where you are at on the scale of the 144 levels of consciousness. The message of Christ is always that there is something beyond your present level of consciousness. The closer you get to the 144th level of consciousness, the more clearly you realize that there is something beyond and the beyond is ultimately a higher level of awareness than what is possible on earth.
Now, you look back at the past 2000 years, perhaps you look back at the time when Jesus walked the earth and you might say: “Well Jesus, why didn’t you tell us this 2000 years ago? Why didn’t you give that message back then?” Well, the answer is in the central message of Christ. There is something beyond your present level of consciousness. The level of consciousness that people had, the level of the collective consciousness, 2000 years ago, was considerably lower than it is today. What Jesus gave 2000 years ago was what could be given based on the level of the collective consciousness. It would have been meaningless to give the message back then that higher awareness is giving today because people could not have grasped it. They could not have comprehended it. They had no way of relating to this in their minds so you see, based on this, a very important aspect of grasping the central mystery of Christ.
There is no fixed teaching of Christ. It is not possible to give a fixed teaching at any point in time and say this is now the absolute teaching of Christ. This is the final teaching of Christ. This is the absolute truth of Christ. The truth of Christ is always: there is something beyond your present level of consciousness, whatever that level of consciousness is. But what most people have not understood, because they have not even thought about it this way, is the difficulty for the Christ mind, for higher awareness, to do what it is here to do.
Consider that you were in the position that Jesus was in. You are considering, how can we help the people on earth? How can we give them a message that will help them grow? The reality is that the collective consciousness, both now and 2000 years ago, is at such a level that it is completely impossible to give a higher truth through words. It needs to be experienced.
What is the purpose of giving a teaching in words? Well, it is to give people something that will encourage them and help them to experience something beyond their present level of consciousness. How can you do this? You must give a teaching in words that is adapted to people’s present level of consciousness so they can grasp it. If they completely fail to grasp what is being said, the teaching cannot help them. Therefore, you must give a teaching adapted to their level of consciousness. Is it not clear that that teaching cannot be the ultimate truth?
You see by this how meaningless it is that billions of Christians around the world still consider the Bible to be the word of God, or the final revelation that Jesus Christ wanted to bring forth on earth. And they look to this book as if this was supposed to be able to answer all of their questions, all of the questions they have in the modern world, 2000 years later. They should be able to find answers in this book, but this book, these scriptures, were not given for the level of consciousness that people have today. They were given for the level of consciousness that people had 2000 years ago.
What happens when you raise your level of consciousness? Well, the more I know, the more I realize I don’t know. The more you know, the more you raise your consciousness, the more questions you can formulate so look at yourselves as more aware people. Look at the internet. Look at all the questions people have today about life, about spirituality, about God, about this or that. Many of these questions people could not even have formulated 2000 years ago. So how can a scripture given 2000 years ago provide the answer to the questions people have today? It makes no sense.
Of course, you can say, “What is the point of telling you this? What is the point of telling this to people because what does logic and reason have to do with anything?” What is the central problem for Christ, for higher awareness, on earth? It is that people are trapped in a lower state of consciousness. But people do not understand, they do not see, they do not grasp that they are trapped. It is as if people are wearing colored glasses that distort their vision, but they are not aware that they are wearing glasses so they think that what they see is accurate. This is the way the world really looks. This is the way the world really is. And here comes Christ and Christ is not wearing colored glasses and Christ knows that what people are seeing is distorted and it is causing all of their suffering, but how can Christ tell them that what they are seeing is distorted? Will they be willing to listen? Will they be able to grasp what Christ is trying to say? Christ is trying to say, essentially, you need to take off the glasses and see the world as it really is, but people cannot grasp that message. They may be able to grasp it intellectually, but do they really grasp it? Even the more aware people could benefit from asking yourself the question: “Do I really grasp what Christ is trying to tell me? Have I fully grasped it?”
We may say that what people have not quite realized is how difficult a planet they are living on, how difficult of a planet Earth is. Now why is the earth difficult? Not really because the earth is difficult, it is not the planet itself that is difficult. It is the collective consciousness created by human beings over thousands of years. People have not recognized what kind of an environment they are living in and how this environment distorts their vision of the world, the way they look at everything. Higher awareness has given many teachings on this, the duality consciousness, the sense of separation, but people have not grasped it. They didn’t grasp it 2000 years ago. Most people have not grasped it today and it is because it is quite difficult. It is quite difficult, but why is it difficult?
Well, if you look at the outer things that are happening on Earth, you will see that this is a tumultuous planet, a chaotic planet, an insecure planet. So many things are happening. So many things could be happening from natural disasters to man-made disasters. How can you ever feel secure about anything on a planet like this? The reality is that the environment, the physical environment that people are born into presents them with such insecurities that people cannot deal with it psychologically. You cannot actually live psychologically on a planet like Earth. You cannot function psychologically. Of course, you look at people and you say: “Well, this person is doing quite well. That person is doing fine.” But listen closely. You cannot function psychologically given the level of insecurity. So what must you do? You must create a view of the world that gives you a sense that you have control over your life, some degree of control over your life and when you feel you have some degree of control over your life, then you can function psychologically.
You go back to the Middle Ages where most people lived in poverty. Most people were peasants that had little chance of improving their lives. Their daily lives were quite frankly miserable compared to what most people encounter in the modern world, so how did people function psychologically? Well, many of them had used Christianity, the official Christian doctrines, to create a worldview where they said: “Oh, it doesn’t matter what we encounter here on earth, because in a few short decades, we will be rewarded by Jesus coming and taking us to heaven.” So they could endure whatever hardships they were encountering in the physical because they thought what really matters is what happens when I go to heaven. This was a worldview created by people to help them function psychologically in a physical environment where they actually could not function in a normal, natural way. They covered over their fear, their insecurity, their sense of panic, by feeling that: “My worldview gives me some control, because no matter what happens on earth, Jesus will take me to heaven when I’m a good Christian.”
When you realize this, you see that if these people’s worldview had been questioned, what would have happened? Well, their sense of security, their sense of being in control would have been shattered. They would have been thrown into panic and in order to avoid this, they would have completely refused to question their worldview. If somebody threatened their worldview, they would have refused to listen, or they might even have been willing to kill the person who threatened their worldview. This is why you see that Christians throughout the Middle Ages were willing to kill, even members of the Christian community who didn’t follow the party line of the Catholic church. You see here the central challenge of Christ. In order to function psychologically and live what they call a normal life (even though it really should not be called normal life) on Earth, people have created a worldview. The price they pay, which they don’t realize they are paying, is that this worldview, this mental box they have created around their minds is a prison that keeps them trapped.
So here comes Christ and Christ only has one desire, to free them from their self-created mental prison, but how can Christ do this without telling them, showing them, there is more than your mental prison shows you? How will they experience that from inside the prison? They will feel threatened. So what do they do? They try to ignore Christ. If they cannot ignore him because he insists on marching right into Jerusalem, riding on a donkey, what do they then do? Well, they kill him. Then when they have killed Christ, what do they do as the ultimate way to kill Christ? They distort his teachings. They create the Catholic church that from the beginning distorted the teachings of Christ beyond recognition, and that created a mental box that was even more closed than the mental box that the Jews had when Christ appeared physically. Again, when they are in that mental box, they feel secure. They can deal with life on Earth.
What does it mean to truly follow Christ? What does it mean? Well, as an image let us imagine that you are walking in a labyrinth, in a maze. There are walls around you, there are corners, you cannot see what is behind the corner. There are many of these corners. You don’t know which one to take. There may be cobwebs hanging down and suddenly you hear a faint sound. You see the cobwebs moving as if a wind is moving through them but you cannot see what it is. You cannot see what is moving. Well, how do you react? That movement, that wisp of the unseen, the unseeable that is Christ showing you which direction to take in the labyrinth, but how will you react to this? Will you follow this that you cannot quite see, that you cannot grasp? Or will you stand there and insist that until Christ shows himself in a form that corresponds with your current mental box, then you will not follow him. This is the doubting Thomas: “Show me the wound in your side, so I can know it is you.”
So you see, again the central challenge. Christ is here to help people take one step up from their current mental box. In order to do this, he must show them there is something beyond, but are they able and willing to see it? This is why you see the situation described in the Gospel of Matthew, where Jesus asked his disciples: “Who do people say I am?” They give their answers and Jesus says: “Well, who do ye say I am?” Peter says, thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God and Jesus says blessed are you for this has not been revealed to you by flesh and blood and upon this rock will I build my church. This is what the Catholic church bases its very existence on, namely that Jesus said to Peter, you, Peter, are the rock upon which I will build my church. What sense does that make, that one person is the rock when everything must be understood as a symbol? It was not Peter as a person that is the rock of Christ. It was the ability that all people have to reach beyond flesh and blood, meaning their current mental blocks, their current level of consciousness.
All people have the potential to experience Christ within their beings because all people have the Conscious You, which is pure awareness that can step outside of your current sense of identity, your current mental box. All people have the ability to fall silent, to go into a neutral state of mind and therefore experience the presence of Christ, higher awareness. This does not mean they can experience the presence of Christ in its fullness, but they can experience the presence of Christ that is one step up from their present level of consciousness and therefore they experience there is something beyond and therefore they can choose to follow that until they reach that higher level of consciousness. Then they can repeat the process and continue going until they reach higher awareness. So this ability is the rock of Christ upon which Christ will build his church, not Peter as a person.
How can you see this? How can Christians see it? Well, read the following verses that the Catholic church usually ignores where Jesus starts telling his disciples that he will have to go to Jerusalem and be persecuted and executed by the authorities and Peter says: “Be it far from the Lord, this is not going to happen.” And what does Jesus say to Peter? “Get thee behind me, Satan.” And why does he say this? Because the consciousness of Satan is precisely that after you have had a revelation, an experience of the presence of Christ, you will not use that experience to transcend your current mental box. You attempt to pull Christ into your current mental box so that Christ will conform to that mental box and therefore validate the mental box. This is what the Catholic church has done from the year 381. It is what it is still doing today, 17 centuries later. That is why Christ can only say to the Pope, to the Catholic church, to the Protestant churches and their ministers who claim to represent Christ: “Get thee behind me, Satan, for thou art an offense to me. You are not interested in knowing the presence of Christ. You are interested in taking the authority of Christ, pulling it into your current mental box and using Christ to validate your mental box.” That is the consciousness of Satan as Jesus used the word Satan two thousand years ago. It is the consciousness of anti-christ.
Christ does not need representatives on earth. So who does need representatives on earth? Anti-christ does and so all of those who claim to represent Christ, in reality they represent anti-christ. Christ cannot be represented, the Christ cannot be represented on earth, because the Christ needs no representative, no representation. You can know the Christ not through any representative. You can only know the Christ through a direct, inner, personal experience and all people can have it. It is open to all people. But what have the forces of anti-christ, what has Satan done? He has created a Christian church that does everything it can to prevent people from having the direct inner experience of Christ, settling for a representation, a representative of Christ, rather than the real living presence of Christ.
This is what has not been understood, what has not been grasped.
Higher awareness understands how difficult it is to live on planet Earth and function psychologically on a planet with such insecurity. It fully understands it. But it also understands that the current chaos and insecurity and the seeming threats on the planet are produced because the vast majority of humanity are trapped in this satanic, dualistic, separate sense of consciousness and that conditions will not improve until more and more people start rising above that state of consciousness.
What will it take to rise above that state of consciousness? You must be willing to question your current mental box. You must be willing to recognize: “There is something beyond my current mental box, something I haven’t seen.” Then, you must say: “Well, how can I come to see what I cannot see? That is where I need the mind of Christ, higher awareness.” Christianity has made Christ a very loaded word, but it is really a neutral word. You can use other words if people need it, but the reality is you are trapped in a limited state of mind. In order to get out of it, you need to have an experience that there is something beyond your mental box and that is a universal state of mind. Call it Christ, call it the Buddhic mind, call it higher awareness, whatever you want to call it.
What is it that is trapped in your current mental box? What is you? When you look at the situation of a human being, when you look at yourself and your own mind, you can ask yourself: “What is it that makes me self-aware? What is it that makes me conscious that I exist as an individual? What is it?”
Well, it is two things. First, you have an outer self. There are three higher aspects of this self, the emotional, the mental, the identity level. There is an outer self that is created in response to your outer situation. You are born in a certain country and a certain ethnic group, a certain race. You have a certain sex. You are brought up to identify yourself with these outer conditions, these outer situations. This is your outer self. It is this outer self that forms what we can call your mental box, your mental prison.
The outer self enables you to feel I am this, I am that, I am so and so, but if you go beyond this what is it that enables you to say just “I AM”, instead of “I am this?” There must be a core of your being that gives you the sense I AM, I exist. That is the very core of your being which is not trapped in your mental box, not trapped in your outer self. If you are completely focusing your attention on the outer self, then the core of your being, the I AM within you, is trapped, but the I AM has the potential to free itself from the outer self and experience something beyond the outer self’s current sense of identity. That is the rock of Christ that enables you to recognize Christ, there is something beyond.
In order to truly be a follower of Christ, or a Christian, or whatever you want to call it, a spiritual person, you need to be willing to consciously silence the outer mind. Find a way to go within and consciously decide, “I am going to set aside all of my outer sense of identity, all of my outer opinions, all of my outer sense of what life is like or should be like, because I am willing to open myself to a higher experience.” If you can do this and go into a neutral state of mind, you will experience a higher mind, a higher perspective.
Some have called it a mystical experience. It is actually a very natural experience. It only requires you to be willing to pull your attention away from the outer mind and be open to experiencing something that you cannot experience through the outer mind. Then, when you have had that experience, the next step is to make sure that you do not allow the outer mind to interpret the experience, to pull the experience into your mental box and make it conform to the mental box. You keep your attention on the experience that there was something beyond and then you use that to pull yourself up. It does not mean your entire worldview is shattered in one experience, although some people can have a more dramatic conversion experience. It means that you take a step up to a level of higher awareness and now your mental box has been expanded.
If you are willing to continually expand your mental box, then you will continue to grow until you can ascend from earth. This is the central mystery of Christ. With that, you gain a perspective where you realize that all of the ideologies, all of the religions, all of the philosophies and theories that human beings have created throughout the ages, they have all had the same purpose. That is to create a worldview that gives people a sense that they are somewhat in control of their lives and therefore, they can psychologically deal with the otherwise unbearable conditions on earth.
This is the purpose of all of them. Communism, capitalism, the Catholic church, all formal organized religions, they have the same purpose. For some people at a certain level of consciousness, this is all they can handle. All people have the option to experience Christ, meaning higher awareness, but many people are not willing. They are not ready. But this is not the concern of higher awareness. The concern is to help those who are ready to understand, to grasp the central message of Christ. They are the ones who are driving the progression of the ages, the raising of the collective consciousness, those who become the forerunners, those who are willing to silence the outer mind, experience a glimpse of the presence of Christ. Then, instead of demanding that higher awareness should conform to their mental box, they are willing to follow the glimpse, even though they cannot see it clearly, they cannot see exactly what it is. They will still follow it. They will walk around that next corner in the labyrinth and now they see something they could not see before. Then, they take a little time to get comfortable in that new part of the labyrinth. Eventually there is, again, a willingness to fall silent. They see another wisp. The cobwebs are moving and they realize: “That is the next turn for me” and they follow it, go around that corner. Now they see something else. Their mental box has been expanded. They see a higher view.
As you continue to do this, walking this path of higher awareness through the labyrinth of human consciousness, you gain greater and greater clarity, greater and greater appreciation and you can come to a point where now you no longer see Christ as a threat. You have come to that point which is really the point where you become a Christian, a follower of Christ where you do not fear Christ, you do not fear the challenge to your current mental box, your current beliefs, your current sense of security. You are not resisting Christ because you are afraid to lose the sense of control, the sense of security. You have come to the point where now you grasp that there is no security in the human consciousness.
There is only security in Christ, in higher awareness. There is, in fact, only life in Christ and you want the life of Christ! You want the ultimate security of being one and becoming increasingly one with higher awareness and therefore, you are not resisting it. You can throw away all of these selves that resist the exposure of your beliefs that you thought were not beliefs, but were reality. Therefore, you can come to the point that Jesus described when he said, “He who seeks to save his life shall lose it.” If you seek to save your mental box, your outer identity, your outer self, you will lose it. It will sooner or later be shattered. That which gives you security is your mental prison and if you will not follow Christ out of that mental prison, your only chance of being free is that the mental prison is bashed against the rocks and shattered. This is a very difficult experience where people stand there now not knowing who they are and some people go insane from it.
The alternative is to follow the path of higher awareness where you take one step at a time. Therefore, you are willing to lose your life for Christ’s sake, you are willing to lose not your physical life, but your outer self, gradually. “I die daily”, as Paul said. Every day you let a part of that outer self die, and come closer and closer to oneness with higher awareness. That is the ultimate security.
There comes that point where you make that shift where you no longer need a worldview to give you security. You are gradually letting go of all of this outer personality, this outer self and grant you, many people who have followed this path (and there have been mystics throughout the ages who have followed it), they can come to a point where they do not know who they are anymore, because you are not any more the outer self. In fact, you are no more a human being as human beings currently see it on earth. You come to a point where you have let those outer selves die, you have been willing to lose so many of these outer selves for Christ’s sake.
But there is still an outer self left that wants to somehow define you as human beings are defined in the world, because when you look at the world you see, human beings define themselves in many different ways. They have created many different roles, many different boxes that say: “This is what it means to be a Muslim, this is what it means to be a Christian, this is what it means to be an Arab, this is what it means to be such and such.” So many of these boxes have been created and there is a point where you have shed some of these outer boxes, but there is still a self that desperately wants you to fit into some kind of box.
But since there is nothing in your identity body that fits in any of these traditional boxes, this self is now in a state of confusion: “Where do I fit in? Who am I? What kind of being am I?” That is where you can come to the point where you can look at that self and see: “Oh, it’s just another self that wants to fit me into a box. Why should I accommodate that self? Why should I attempt to create a box of myself as a spiritual person? Why shouldn’t I just look at the self and say: ‘I am no longer going to do what you are telling me to do and try to put myself in an existing box or try to create another box for myself. I am just going to let you die, because I don’t have to be a human being. I don’t have to fit into any of the boxes defined by human beings. I will be who I will be at any moment, because I will flow with the impulses from my higher self.’” That is when you attain higher awareness. You are not representing Christ as the living Christ. You are demonstrating Christ to those who are open to seeing it. This is the path that is open to all.
Many of the more aware have come to a point where you could benefit from realizing that there is a self that wants to label you, that wants to put you in a box and you have lived your entire lifetime, allowing that self to drive you, to identify you as this, identify you as that. You have lived many, many lifetimes with that self that wants to define you because it is of course the manipulators who have created these mental boxes. They want to put people in that mental box so the manipulators can control them, but you can come to a point where you see that self, that wants to label you, that wants to put you in a in a box and you say: “No more! I’m not playing your game. I’m not trying to solve the problem of which box I fit into. I will not even create a mental box.”
All of the mental boxes that have been created need to go. All of the mental boxes that possibly could be created, you need to transcend them all. You might as well not create them. You can come to that point where you recognize there is a self. I see it as a self. I see that self is not me, this is not who I am because I am the Conscious You, I am pure awareness which I have experienced. I don’t have to follow that self and because I’m not the self and the self is not me, and that means I can let the self die and I will still be here, I will still exist. I don’t need that self in my life experience, I don’t need it to survive so I can look at it and I can say, “I don’t want you anymore in my life experience. Therefore, I’m letting you die. I refuse to feed you my energy and attention. I’m letting you die.”
Maybe you cannot do this right away, but then you can ask higher awareness to help you come to see the self, see that this self somehow has that belief that makes you feel you should fit in some kind of mental box that can be defined on earth. But why should you? The Christ does not fit, higher awareness does not fit. Higher awareness does not fit in any of the mental boxes that ever have been or ever could be created by human beings or the manipulators. The Christ refuses to fit in any mental box! That is why the Christ can help you escape any mental box when you follow the Christ instead of trying to pull the Christ into your mental box, which you of course can never do, you can never pull higher awareness into your mental box.
But what can you do? You can create a mental image of Christ that is created based on your mental box and then obviously that image of Christ will be in your mental box. That is what the Catholic church did in 381. That is what the vast majority of Christians have done and are doing to this day and that is why again, the Living Christ, will say, “Get thee behind me, Satan.”