Jesus Left Humanity with a Simple Test
But simple isn't always easy.
Pray also for me, that whenever I speak, words may be given me so that I will fearlessly make known the mystery of the gospel, for which I am an ambassador. Pray that I may declare it fearlessly, as I should.
-Ephesians 6:19-20
“Love is the bridge between you and everything.”
-Rumi
Billions Served
I spent much of my life in and around formal Christianity, abandoning it two seperate times, first to escape the judgement of an angry God; and again later as the doctrine of Biblical inerrancy dissolved under honest scrutiny.
All this running away only to find myself spending my agnostic years in deep study of who Jesus actually was and how the New Testament came to be formed.
It seems no matter where I ventured I could never fully abandon Jesus.
He fascinated me, not the celebrated stories of his birth and death, but the words he spoke and the life he lived. If Jesus’s message of radical love feels difficult for us today imagine how insane it must’ve sounded in a low-trust environment like Roman-occupied Judaea twenty centuries ago.
His guidance was so radical most people misunderstood what he was up to. His lifestyle was so straightforward that we’ve had to add layers of dogma to bury the truth of who he was.
And so billions have accepted a story that Jesus was some sort of one-and-only impossible God figure, our only way of avoiding an eternal torture chamber overseen by a supposedly loving higher power.
I meet regularly with forty-something professionals still traumatized by the dark theology of Hell. Our time together gives them permission to accept that they are Divinely loved and held, regardless of whether they believe in the right story or spell God’s name correctly.
Churches who’ve been brave enough to jailbreak from the Hell doctrine tend to see Jesus as a sort of social justice warrior; a good guy who empowered women, fed the poor, and spent time with outcasts. They’re not wrong with their emphasis, but they tend to drain all the power from Jesus, dismissing the miracles and maybe even the Resurrection as metaphorical rather than metaphysical.
The challenge with traditional Christianity™ for most of the last 1700 years has been that few within its walls, regardless of denomination, have actually understood who Jesus was or what the Christ energy is.
Who Was Jesus Christ?
Let’s take a moment to see the story with fresh eyes…
Jesus of Nazareth was incredibly special. He was a human being, a very advanced soul, almost certainly raised in and around the Essene Community,1 a band of mystics adjacent to Judaism, who were expecting a messiah, meaning not a savior, but someone anointed with the Divine.
And this anointing came in the form of the Christ energy, the Logos, which Jesus was able to take on and withstand not only because he was an advanced soul, but also because he had ample training in the mystical arts.
Mystical arts that have always been with us, before our great traditions, before the world religions, before the classroom histories, before the placeholder names we currently use like “God.”
When the time was right the Essene network sprung into action, coordinating and supporting the ministry and movements of Jesus throughout Eretz Yisrael.
Jesus likely entered the world with a deep remembering of what this whole Earth School is about, as a few rare mystics do even today. And even Jesus, if he truly was a model for all of humanity, likely had to experience some level of the veil and the subsequent remembering, along with the associated doubt that comes with that territory, before wholly stepping into the full expression of his divinity; making him both more relatable and giving the entire human story far more hope and excitement.
If we want Jesus to be both fully human and fully divine, this is how it’s done.
Through a process, an evolution, even in a single lifetime. An advanced soul born into a human body, lighting the divine fire within, and fanning that flame into an all consuming blaze of Divine presence, a heat felt by all who come near.
Instead of the impossible God-man the Church has mythologized, Jesus is a brother-guide offering to show the rest of us what’s actually possible.
You are gods; you are all children of the Most High.3
But our older brother Jesus, showing us the way to our own higher consciousness, has been lost for nearly 2000 years, captured by egos and power structures who soon turned him into an impossible figure, a God that does all the work, allowing centuries of congregations the excuse to remain largely complacent, missing the opportunity to make the most of their lives, to expand their own consciousness and ability to love; to become more Christlike themselves.
So What’s the Point?
This reframe of Jesus and the Christ energy can be very disorienting to those exposed to a lifetime of church doctrine and Christian™ theology. I experienced this confusion myself in my early days of studying mysticism.
In my own search I found examples of mystics from around the world and throughout recorded history who’ve themselves performed the same miracles as Jesus. I can still recall my first reading of Tara Springett’s biography of Milarepa, a Tibetan Buddhist living nearly a thousand years ago:
[A]t his death, Milarepa demonstrate[d] signs that are seen in Tibetan Buddhism as proof of a fully enlightened being. There were many unusual rainbows and Milarepa’s spirit appeared to many of his disciples. His corpse started to shrink until it was the size of an eight year old child. In similar cases, the corpse of an enlightened person shrank until it had completely disappeared. But Milarepa’s disciples were so anxious to obtain relics that they quickly cremated him before his body could completely vanish.
In this account we have an enlightened figure whose physical body vanishes soon after death and the teacher later appears to his disciples.
Where have I heard that one before? And similar cases of “the rainbow body,” as it’s known, have been documented even in recent times.
So was Jesus just another enlightened teacher? Or was there something even more special about him?
My conclusion has been that Jesus was unique for many reasons, both known and unknown.
But beyond all the complicated theology and dogma that separate us from truly knowing this real Jesus I believe it’s very simple:
Jesus wanted us to know that he was the first of many, and that some who are aligned with the Christ energy will do even greater things, if we’re to take him at his word.2
I also believe Jesus primarily came to show humanity how to live.
Keeping It Simple
Jesus instructs those around him to become like little children. Little children keep things pretty simple. They also have enormous capacity for love. And while we admire this quality in kids we also see it as naive, and we quickly work to educate them on just how terrified they should be of the world, and especially of those people.
When asked about the greatest of the commandments, Jesus replied:
Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment.
And the second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself. All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.3
Sorry, I don’t hear anything in there about saying a special prayer to avoid Hell. Nothing in there about worshipping or “accepting” Jesus as a savior. He had his chance there, and he didn’t take it.
And yes, there are many “I Am” verses in John’s gospel providing guidance on how to expand one’s consciousness to the place where one is able to transcend the suffering of this world, and these can be understood as words being spoken not by Jesus’s human personality, but through the vessel of Jesus by the Divine Christ energy residing within him.
(This Christ energy is quite different than having “Jesus in my heart,” a common phrase within Christianity that points us to that still small voice of intuition, our higher selves that are always here to guide us, should we be still enough to listen. And of course intuition is available to all humanity, “Christian” or not. This said, I do have at least a couple of friends I deeply respect who are quite advanced on their paths and feel they’re able to connect directly to Jesus.)
It can be a shocking reorientation that takes a moment to wrap our minds around to understand Jesus as a remarkable human, a very advanced soul, sent by the Divine to help demonstrate for humanity not only how to live, but also how to merge with the Divine Christ energy. The “first of many brothers and sisters,” as even Paul’s writing acknowledges.
Circling back to Jesus’s response regarding the greatest commandment, I hear in his teaching a brother guide sharing that the best thing I can do as a human is be in alignment with the Divine and in alignment with my neighbor.
Elsewhere Jesus is asked to define what he means by “neighbor” and he tells the story of the Good Samaritan, representative of a group of people his listeners would’ve despised. Today it would be like telling someone who identifies strongly with a particular political party to love the other side. Most are so identified with their tribe they find it impossible.
And so the person we cannot love becomes the person we allow to stand in the way of our own spiritual expansion. How ironic and fascinating.
I once had a Christian friend give me a very detailed, convoluted interpretation of the parable of the Good Samaritan, going into how the thief represented Satan and the man who was attacked was Adam and the Samaritan was Christ, and so on, and so on…anything to avoid the truth of this very simple story: everyone is our neighbor, and we should seek to find a way to love them.
Notice I said seek to find a way. Because advancing in our ability to love, eliminating the snags that keep us from love, isn’t easy. There’s no flip-of-a-switch via Divine experience or psychedelic session that changes this. Yes, we can be shown the Unity of all existence, but we still have to return to the day-to-day, make the choice, and do the work.
I like to say that just because Paul met Jesus in a blinding, Damascus Road vision, so what? Lots of people have transcendent experiences and they remain unchanged, even if they switch teams, they’re still mostly the same person regarding their behaviors.
Jesus instructs that we’ll know the truly transformed by their fruits; by the external expression of their lives.
Yet many will go to great lengths to avoid the actual message that all of humanity is our neighbor, and we should genuinely seek to love everyone on Earth with the same heart as the Divine.
I’m not saying it’s an easy thing to do, and I’m certainly not saying that I’m able to do this all the time. But it’s a direction we can move in, and with focus and effort it’s a capacity we can radically expand for ourselves.
Practices like sending love will rapidly and radically transform the life of any individual who gives it serious effort. I’ve watched this happen again and again, and I would dare anyone to give it an honest try.
And don’t confuse what I’m saying with a weak, bypassing love. We’re not excusing terrible behaviors, nor are we tossing out accountability. True love is fierce, and will take appropriate and necessary actions to protect in service of the collective.
Take Up Your Cross and Follow Me?
Elsewhere in scripture Jesus calls on us to take up our cross and follow him.
What did he mean by this?
Was he asking us to be executed by the state?
Certainly over the last 2000 years many have been killed for opposing religious institutions and world power structures, but taking up the cross and following “the way” in which Jesus lived is more likely about how we engage our own existence within the Earth School.
This is as simple as being aligned with both the Divine and all Creation, including all humans, as represented by the cross of alignment:
The vertical beam of the cross connects Heaven and Earth (spirit and matter), while the horizontal beam represents the expanse of the material world.
The life of Jesus sits at the center within, embodying both divine and human nature simultaneously; in alignment with God and all Creation, including our fellow humans, the Earth, and all its inhabitants.
We take up this cross by doing the same. We love God by being in divine alignment, which is mostly about living well and loving our neighbor. And we love our neighbor by…loving our neighbor.
Much of today’s spirituality focuses on ascension. Getting out, escaping this mess.
This approach is understandable, but not quite mature.
The role of the aligned human is to be at the center of the cross, bringing Heaven down into the Earth for all humans, in service of all Creation.
Some of you are able to do this in mighty, astounding ways, creating entire systems that have widespread impact. Some of you do this one interaction at a time, via the power of your simple presence. Some of you can do both.
Despite the teaching and altar calls I heard in churches for decades, aligning our life with the Christ energy and principle isn’t accomplished by saying the right prayer and hoping Jesus does all the work.
In fact this doctrine of implied complacency held by many churches is opposed to the life and example of Jesus.
While an eternal Hell isn’t real, the consequence of billions of Christians taking a passive approach to their faith over many centuries has resulted in the emergence of countless hells on Earth through two millenia, just as Jesus promised in his reference to the fiery garbage dump of Gehenna.
The Price of Free Will
So if Reality is truly in the hands of an all powerful, loving Divine Force, why have these misunderstandings about Jesus been allowed to happen? If the perfect example for all humanity taught us how to create Heaven on Earth why did we lose the true doctrine?
This question is becoming my favorite part of the story.
Because free will is in play within the Earth on a far grander scale than most of us realize or are willing to accept. And because of free will we get to create as many messes (and hells) as we like, even when it comes to the Divine story.
Yes, God has allowed us to totally misunderstand God. For centuries and centuries and through billions of lifetimes.
And yet it still leads to a sort of perfection.
If humanity distorts or hijacks the Divine message through ignorance or malice that’s not a problem, and it’s probably to be expected. Jesus said the way to Life was through a narrow gate.
Go in the narrow door; because the door is wide and the road is broad that leads off to destruction, and many people are going that way. Whereas how narrow the door and how constricted the road leading off to Life, and how few people find it!
Do billions of people go through a narrow door? If we know our history we understand that our world, much of it influenced by “Christian” principles, even today, is filled with destruction. People like to make these scriptures all about the afterlife, Heaven or Hell, but we now have plenty of evidence (UVA research, NDE research, past-life regression research) that after we die we eventually come right back here, to this place of our own making; which is often a place of destruction.
So based on Jesus’s warning is there any surprise that, outside of Jesus’s recorded teachings, we often end up with overly judgemental scriptures, distorted doctrines, and a Church that worships the Bible rather than aligning itself with the Divine?
It will always be those souls who feel the call of their hearts to proceed beyond the veneer of man-made religion that find the true treasure waiting. Jesus talks of the effort required to access the Kingdom of Heaven, which is here and now, not beyond the grave. He says great force will be required. He says persistence will be required. He calls it a lonely path and says most will fail to find it. He warns to count the cost. He speaks of a treasure buried in a field; a lost coin that must be searched for.
In Luke’s gospel Jesus says we must agonizomai, or agonize/struggle, to find our way through the narrow gate because many people believe they’ll get in and don’t make it.
I want to be clear that despite all of the above, there is nothing exclusive about this path. It is a path that welcomes all, when they are ready. Jesus, as our guide and supportive brother, is always waiting to assist. And the consequence of our delay is not some forever Hell, but merely the delay of our receiving what’s been promised.
All that Jesus teaches in these scriptures lays out the framework of soul development.
It’s not a passive process. It’s not about saying a specific prayer, or attending a church service, or having the right story or interpretation of who Jesus is.
It’s an active journey designed to have a great many twists and turns, for the individual and the collective, over many lifetimes and centuries. Each soul proceeding at the pace they choose.
And this is the simple test for humanity.
Will we allow our hearts to be open enough to sense the true message of Jesus? The message not so much of his birth or his death, but the message of his life?
A message of aligning our lives with the Divine and with all humanity?
The irony that makes so much of what I’m sharing difficult to accept by traditional Christians is that early-consciousness Christianity often carries great warnings around focusing on behaviour by saying: Jesus was certainly more than just a good person, so we should set the behaviour piece aside.
In fact, I published a novella4 many years ago based on this premise.
As a kid I was told that even really good people who don’t “accept” Jesus will go to Hell. Many adults still believe this today. And yet Jesus explicitly says you will know them by their fruit, by the outward expression of their lives.
We’re all here on a long journey of soul development over countless lives,5 and for most humans the goal of that journey is as simple as one day reaching a point where they can more often choose love rather than fear.
Choosing their neighbor over themselves, even when it might be scary.
That’s it. That’s the simple test.
But What About the Bible?
Many Christians have been taught that the Bible is inerrant, meaning perfect and without error.
My guess is most Christians believe this doctrine of inerrancy goes back to the early days of the faith. But the term “inerrancy” was first used in its current sense in the 1830s by American theologian Charles Hodge, and the idea of biblical inerrancy as a doctrine didn’t gain widespread acceptance until the late 19th and early 20th centuries.6
So the entire idea that the Bible is the perfect word of God is less than 200 years old.
Yet many Christians are trapped within a framework of inerrancy and must therefore do the mental gymnastics to defend all sorts of misaligned ideas and concepts.
Many Christians have been taught to love the Bible more than they love God. That’s a strong statement, yep, but survey the Christian apologists (which are really Bible apologists) popular today and you’ll often see them fiercely defend the doctrine of Hell without the slightest compassion for the billions they’re sure will end up there.
That’s quite horrifying to think about. What kind of higher power do we think we’re aligning ourselves with if we accept this kind of man-made God?
But once again this is the test Jesus has left us with.
Does our compassion for humanity allow us to risk leaving behind a tyrannical, monstrous doctrine of eternal torture on behalf of Love?
All spiritual writing serves as a sort of map for our own consciousness development. I personally prefer not to rely solely on 2000-year-old maps to get me where I want to go.
That said, if you feel called to the original teachings of Jesus most mystics seem to agree that the Gospel of John and the Gospel of Thomas,7 as read through the lens I’m sharing here, are the way to go.
What’s the Point of All This?
Why are we on this planet for multiple lives and why does any of this matter if the Bible says we’re all gonna die and go to Heaven?
The idea that we live our one little life and then go to Heaven is a simple story, not even well corroborated by the Bible, yet it’s been expanded through the centuries to consume most of organized Christianity.
Creation is infinite. There is no ceiling. It goes on forever in all directions. You can never zoom too far out, and you can never zoom too far in. You’ll never reach the edges.
This idea is too much for the human mind, so we settle for a God we think we understand. An earth-centric God in a box that we can become experts on. Hilarious.
We think of “Heaven” as a fairly empty place with a throne room, a dad, a son, and whatever the Holy Spirit is, plus some dead believers.
The reality seems to be that the entire Cosmos is filled with life, both biological and otherwise, and that all of Creation is conscious to some degree, with every little bit of that consciousness participating in the long path of spiritual expansion.
There’s a near infinite number of consciousnesses (animals, trees, plants, minerals, elemental spirits, etc) earlier in their journey than humanity. And there’s also a near infinite number of beings in the higher realms, meaning beyond our 3D reality, who are at various higher stages of their development. Encountering nearly any of these would convince you that you’d met the Divine, and in a sense you’d be correct, as they all contain aspects of the Creator, as we all do.
There’s a great deal to be concerned with in our world today, but we should take heart because this story never ends. Yes, it’s filled with polarity, the darkness and the light, but that’s what makes it the greatest story, the one which all others are based upon.
And love is the simple test. Simple, but not easy. And impossible to breach. It’s the narrow gate Jesus spoke of. Our path towards a greater experiencing of the fullness and expression of Creation. A path that never ends.
Love is the simple test for the individual, and for all humanity.
A Caveat for the Outliers
There’s always a part of me that feels bad writing about how off track much of Christianity™ is and has been. There are people I love and care deeply about who remain within church structures and who are incredible people that serve their communities wholeheartedly.
As my friend The Fourth Way recently shared, this shows the power of Jesus and his teachings to still penetrate the dogma and reach many hearts:
Take Jesus. His life carried an extraordinarily contagious message of love. That message has been corrupted over the centuries through the same mechanical patterns of thought that keep us enslaved to our fragmented state. And yet I’m still amazed at how many lives it continues to change, even now, even through the distortion. That’s a kind of catastrophic success: a signal so strong it survives millennia of noise.
For those who’ve been able to remain a part of official church structures and still live a life of radical love, without tribal limitations, you have my deepest respect, for you truly seem to have found a way to be in this world, but not of it.
World on Fire
I see a future where humanity becomes so rooted in love, and the community that arises from that love, that these discussions around doctrine and meaning become irrelevant.
Jesus didn’t come to start a religion or save us from the afterlife. That’s a children’s story and it’s time for us to grow up. Jesus showed us a way to proceed in this life now which, when followed far enough, wipes away our tribal tendencies and divisions.
He left us with a simple test: love. He gave us a simple promise: you shall do even greater things.
I see a future where we’ve set aside our fallacies of original sin, our churches will be repurposed, and the crucifix, that subtle reminder of what happens to those who oppose world systems, will be replaced by the cross of alignment.
Yes, we’ll have places of human connection and Divine alignment, but they’ll be our cities, they’ll be our homes, they’ll be our physical bodies.
We’ll know how to connect with the Divine Christ energy ourselves and finally understand that instruction of “Do this in remembrance of me.”
And our every action will be a prayer of thanksgiving to our Creator because our every action will be rooted in love.
But for those who are ready now we don’t have to wait. We can create these spaces now; in our homes, in our families, with our friends, in pockets of community. And yes, perhaps even in some existing congregations.
The Gospel of Thomas quotes Jesus as saying the Kingdom is spread out before us, yet we fail to recognize it. But the Kingdom is at hand, it is available now, for those willing to take it.
The world’s on fire and I suspect the heat and smoke will only grow more intense from here, so what are we to do?
Take action. Don’t wait for others. Be the one to go first. Claim what’s yours. Find community. Bring down the power and the spirit and the infinite love, and share it with your neighbor, not by telling them what you believe, but by simply being who you are.
As above, so below; bring it down, on Earth as it is in Heaven.
Freedom in Christ to Explore
Throughout the Bible we see stories of individuals who left the safety of establishment to have a direct encounter with the Divine.
Abraham left Ur.
Jacob fled his family.
Moses abandoned Pharaoh’s court.
And Jesus modeled this way with his life and teaching.
Why should our story be any different?
Many have been called to leave the crowds for a period in the wilderness. And if, in our sincere seeking, we leave the safety of the 99 we will eventually meet the True Shepherd, and he will rejoice at our reunion!
When Jesus says narrow is the way to Life, he means it. He’s not speaking about the labels we give ourselves or the stories we believe. He’s referring to our choice to live as he lived. To try and love as he loved. To follow his Way.
I can still recall the sadness and fear I had to endure when leaving the church, still traumatized by the idea of Hell, having been exposed to it since I was a boy.
But I could see the people trapped by those ideas were limited in their ability to love. And I could see that the scriptures they based those ideas upon didn’t hold up to rigorous scrutiny.
And so even though I gave up on traditional Christianity™ and made the decision to leave the church behind, I also had a trust that even if I was wrong, and if Jesus was truly the loving figure I’d always believed him to be, then he would allow me my time to explore, my time in the wilderness, and that if I was somehow misled about it all then he’d be the one to stand up and protect me from his angry dad.
What a gift so many years later, after all that wandering and despair, to meet up with Jesus once again, to know a truer representation of who he actually is, to finally begin to understand the power and the wonder and the beauty of what his life represents; and to believe that we too, as humanity, can emulate him.
It’s that simple.
“A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”
- Jesus of Nazareth
This article was written over many hours by me, a human, without ai, and this writing will always be free. The option of subscriptions is turned on for those who want to help me take this work even further through experience, research, and connection.
Can I support your mystical journey? If this writing resonates and you’d enjoy exploring this territory together please reach out. I work with individuals 1:1 as they explore and advance their own spiritual path, regardless of background or tradition.
It was from within this Essene mystery school tradition that Jesus almost certainly emerged. There existed an entire network of mystery schools across not only the Levant, but also deep into Asia and even up into the British Isles that would’ve been accessed via the merchant routes travelled by some of Jesus’s more powerful supporters and protectors.
It’s possible that a young and maturing Jesus spent time in some of these places, and a strong possibility that some of their greatest teachers came to him.
I used to find these ideas a bit far fetched, but have been pleased by what I’ve found in studying both the ancient mystery school networks as well as the local legends that persist in many of these regions. The legends of Joseph of Arimathea and the tin trade of Britain are especially captivating.
John 14:12
Matthew 22:37-40
If the concept of past lives is difficult for you to accept I encourage you to look into the decades of University of Virginia research, the thousands of past life regression accounts, and the Near-Death-Experience studies; all of which corroborate quite well. I firmly believe that within 20 years the concept of the soul incarnating over many lives will once again be as widely accepted by science as the many other cycles we see in nature: Summer, fall, winter, spring. Day and night. The tides. It seems all of creation is cyclical and our lives are no different.
In 1881, a group of conservative scholars formed the “Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy,” stating that the Bible is “without error or fault in all its teaching” and that “the Bible is the inspired Word of God and is therefore absolutely trustworthy and authoritative.”
The Gospel of Thomas is a particularly fascinating collection of Jesus’s teachings that’s clear and to the point. It’s a real shame more people haven’t read it yet.
Whenever I read one of your posts I have this overwhelming desire to share it with the entire Christian world. This post, in particular, contains so many ideas that call for both a deeper meditation and a communal conversation. Thank you!
This is marvelous and entirely resonant with my own - much clumsier - understanding of the Christ energy, what we are supposed to draw from the Christ experience and indeed how we are supposed to read and integrate the Scriptures. I suspect I am going to have to print and study this a few times, but bless you for writing it (so well). 🙏🏻