Jesus was a man, but only just. His humanity, the fact that he shared our DNA and looked kind of like us, is enough to justify him as the necessary conduit between pure humanity and the divine. He’s just enough human to be relatable, but otherwise, he’s wholly otherworldly and inaccessible. Even if it makes Jesus no more accessible, I like to think of him more like a Ronald McDonald or Big Bird than the son of God. To be frank, Jesus did some badass stuff, but him being the son of God is not one of those things because we are all children of God. God is the air we breathe.  Jesus was no more the son of God than Ronald McDonald (and no less), and his power has very little to do with anything he did. If walking across water and turning water into wine justify him as a deified figure, look no further than the yoga sutras.  Book Three outlines specific (if esoteric) instructions on how to do much of what Jesus accomplished and more, called siddhis. The author, Patanjali, while outlining these “yogic superpowers,” emphasizes time and again that the powers themselves are perhaps the most dangerous and tantalizing aspect of yoga but are nothing more than obstacles to overcome in the path to Godhead. The fact that an author knew enough to outline all the “miracles” Jesus performed and warn against the temptation of seeing these powers as the “ultimate goal” long before Jesus was born indicates that more than just a few individuals were experimenting with Godhead, or achieving Christ Consciousness.  For a lot of esoteric mysticism, the feats performed by Jesus are no more than parlor tricks. Tempting, sure, but in any event, a subtle and more advanced version of the sensory pleasures provided by sex, drugs, or a double bacon cheeseburger. The real power of Christ comes from the fact that he overcame these temptations and pursued first total enlightenment, or Oneness with all of reality. Then the ideals of the Bodhisattva, to teach enlightenment to the masses.  But… Jesus eschewing being superman and living a life of humility while proclaiming his message that we are all One is not the reason we base our entire calendar off of him. The proclamation that all that is is love and we can give up all our wants and desires is not why countless thousands have died in his name. Like Ronald McDonald, Jesus is a brand, a symbolic representation of complex geopolitical goals of rulers old and new.  When we say we love Jesus Christ, we are making two different statements. The first refers to the actual person, named Yeshua, who existed a couple of thousand years ago and had some radical ideas about love and acceptance that even today would be way ahead of their time. This individual was a human like you and me who had the same capabilities and limits. The second statement refers to Christ, which we usually think of as the individual himself but truly represents all individuals’ potential. Like buddha-nature or tao, Christ-consciousness is a reference point for the divine in the mundane, infinity existing as now. That Yeshua achieved christ-consciousness was an indication that we can all achieve this in the here and now. Salvation is a matter of accepting all that is right now.    The Man, The Myth, The Ego Jesus died for our sins. This statement isn’t so much a fact as a story we tell, one so pervasive and powerful that it may be hard to recognize it as a story at all. It’s very comforting. Jesus died for my sins. My sins are justified because an immortal superheroic figure from the land before time made the ultimate sacrifice for me. Sure, that’s not our mindset going into action. We don’t necessarily use Jesus as a justification for our sins. But it plays into shame-blame-game of giving up our agency for the comfort of someone else handing us salvation and telling us it’s all going to be okay.  Within this story, when we sin, we feel shame. But the shame, despite how real it is, and it is very real, is rooted in the stories we tell ourselves. And it’s so easy to get caught up in the human-centeredness of our own stories. Our egos love mythology and larger-than-life tales. The creator of the universe happened to take one week to establish his domain fully. He happened to be on my planet, placing my species at the top. Oh, and by the way, that creator just happens to be a He; (something the writers of the story were all too casual about establishing as early as possible).  When we start making the stories of genesis and Jesus about humans and projecting human aspects into every facet of these stories, we are just projecting our egos into the world in a sort of confirmation bias of the fittest. The mightiest stories rule, and any objection to those stories is wiped away from the annals of history.  For this reason, any religion focusing on one man, including the trajectory of Christianity that places Jesus as the entirety of the faith, is doomed. Egocentricity seeks to divide and conquer, separate the self from the Kosmos and establish a pathological hierarchy of victor, villain, and victim. The egocentric religion of Jesusism has used its power to slaughter millions, establish unparalleled shame, and imprison countless individuals who didn’t subscribe to the same ideas.  Manifest destiny, slavery, genocide all in the name of a man who told his followers to love their enemies and find the kingdom of God within. How did this happen? How does it keep happening? We can begin to address that question with the idea of original sin.    What is Original Sin? Original sin is depicted as an implicit understanding that something wrong with humans prevents any individual from perfect action.  That on its own seems relatively harmless or at the very least rational and acceptable. No one is perfect and perfect action is impossible to accomplish. How could any action be perfect? But if we dissect the concept of original sin, we begin to see the worms burrowing underneath that till the soil of doubt and fundamental shame in our lives.  The idea of original sin comes from Saint Augustine and has to do with Adam and Eve in the garden. For Augustine, the events that transpired in Eden actually happened and yielded real consequences for the human race as a whole. Because of these two individuals, everyone is doomed. Because Even and Adam ate the fruit against the will of God, everyone is fated to repeat their mistakes.  Regardless of whether or not we believe in the story of creation or God or original sin, there’s still that implicit understanding that we are less than and that any individual is incapable of perfect action. This understanding doesn’t have to do with the fact that we’re all fucked up. Honestly, we are, whether we admit it to ourselves or not. It’s also not because of anything our ancestors did or due to the biological predisposition of our genes to replicate at any cost to ourselves or others.  The heart of original sin, or feeling less-than and shame, is the inherent belief that we are individuals and somehow separate from reality and infinity.  The message of Jesus, or Yeshua as he was known back then, let’s call him Josh; the message of Josh was that we are none of us separate. There is no point in time and space that we are apart from, nothing we are not a part of. Like waves in an ocean, we ebb and flow, but we are always the ocean. The ocean is All.  As wishy-washy as that sounds, it’s a truly radical statement. Another way of saying this is that none of us exist. This statement implies that reality is a sham, a matrix created of fleeting sense impressions, and everything we know is a lie. But that’s only if you implicitly believe that you’re a separate self to begin with. When Josh says we don’t exist, he’s not saying what’s objective is not real. He’s saying we don’t exist as separate entities apart from the Whole. The waves are still there, but they’re also a part of the entirety of existence. We don’t exist as individuals. We live in reference to everything that’s happening. We exist with reality itself. And thus, not only do we not exist, we are all of existence.  All well and good to say, but it’s challenging to wrap our egos around this idea in practice. Our egos, like our genes, are deeply invested in immortality, in conquering death and finiteness. Our egos exist more than anything else because separateness is a powerful survival mechanism for the ego. By creating an identity, subscribing to it, and perpetuating it, our egos maintain their delicate balance of staying alive even if achieving that version of immortality isn’t the most efficient way to do so.  Our egos overcome death by implicitly doubling down on the concept of a separate Me, and that Me, divorced from the Whole, is incomplete.  This incompleteness necessarily manifests itself as imperfection and shame. The part is trying to be whole but divorced from the whole it must confront everything that makes it finite and mortal or shove those feelings of inadequacy as deep as possible. The irony of it is that we are all the Whole. We are always already complete. But because we separate ourselves from infinity while still holding the intuition that we are infinity, any reminder of finiteness is jarring and terrifying.  Original sin is not that we are imperfect and less than we could be. Original sin is the inability to reconcile the belief that we are separate with the intuitive knowledge that we are independent.  That was the message of Josh, a Christ, who lived his life as an example to all of what fulfillment can be. Not immortality as a demigod worshipped by countless millions, but immortality as recognition that we are part of the Whole, that nothing, in reality, is separate or apart from anything else. Somehow, despite everything going on around him, Josh saw reality for what it was and found meaning by teaching the message that we do not exist as separate entities. We Exist as One.      Josh Was a Christ, And So Are You Of course, no one knows what Josh did or who he was. We just have historical accounts. What we do know is the truth attributed to Josh, not in an abstract way but directly. We don’t see Christ as outside of ourselves but as ourselves.  It’s sort of like knowing you’re in love. When you know, you know. The problem with this “knowing” is that it comes across as another version of elitism, proclaiming to be the only ones with access to an esoteric and divine set of knowledge. This is true through the lens of duality. If you don’t know the truth, you’re not in with the club.  That’s all bullshit. The truth we’re referring to is the truth of this moment, the direct experience of now. Knowing that truth is a matter of being with what is and accepting it as it is. Knowing this truth doesn’t make you unique. Quite the opposite. This is a truth we know intuitively the day we’re born and never stop learning. Most of us just get distracted from the infinity of now because the allure of sense impressions very powerfully sways us toward the past and future.  Knowing this truth doesn’t make you or anyone special. It’s simply the deepest essence of who you are.  In many mystic traditions, Christ is a symbol of emptiness and pure Awareness. Not Josh, not Christ as a person, but Consciousness itself, pure Awareness. Josh woke up to infinity and said I am that Consciousness. I’m not what I see in the mirror. I’m vision itself. What often gets confused is that this extraordinary feat is not something Josh alone accomplished. It is the ordinary potential of every individual to drop their separate selves and become the all-encompassing Self, witness to All.  You are the Christ. Christ is the essence of each moment.  Josh, a Christ, but not The Christ, was an individual who went around and told people that they should love each other and that there’s nothing you need to do. His ideas were so preposterous then that he was tortured brutally for his beliefs and so outlandish now that the brand of J.C. is a justification for many brutalities that still occur.  And today, still, even in an honest effort, the obstacles are so profound. The greatest spiritual leaders never said it was easy or we would accomplish it tomorrow. They know that in the face of the ego, many power dynamics arise which distort and manipulate the truth of Now.  It truly is a struggle to let go and accept that truth. Our search for truth through the lens of ego is like so many rays of light shining on the clear reflection of water. While the beams remain constant and never changing, our egos ripple through the water, distorting reality and creating a murky image at best.  Again, we don’t know what happened to Josh or who he was. We just have symbolic and allegorical interpretations on top of the literal. The institution of the church and its agendas, based on ego-identified systems, are very different from the actual teachings of Christ.  When we try to make the church align with Josh’s teachings, there’s an inherent contradiction between those teachings and the church’s political agendas. In truth, there are many layers to Josh. Josh wasn’t necessarily the Christ, but he was a Christ, and there are many in all religions and cultures across time.  The nature of the ego, its survival mechanism, is to split reality into me and not me. This is the essence of duality. Because that separate self is incomplete and split away from the Whole, it feels shame, the original sin.  The power of Jesus Christ lies in his contradiction. He straddles both duality and nonduality. Christ is immortality, Wholeness, all of Reality, while Jesus was just a human like you or me. That humanness represents the essence of shame: being incomplete.  But Christ, or Wholeness, not the man, is an archetype of what we can be, immersed in and one with infinity, complete and shameless as a newborn baby. And like the infant baby, completion and Wholeness are always there but must also be discovered. We undergo trials along the hero’s journey to find the Self as the self, to become complete as a part of the Whole. If everything were already perfect and complete, there would be no journey. There would be no world, time, or events to realize nonduality if there was no duality.     Christ is Every Moment. Christ is Now In the story of Adam and Eve, in the creation, the metaphorical God cast his children out to be shamed, to discover that shame, and to reconcile it through themselves, not some other. If God is different and separate, he is a monster. If God is within us, he is a part of us and not a monster at all.  That is the reason Josh could say things like don’t worry about tomorrow, love the scum of the earth, and rejoice in this moment. Josh knew that God was everything and that everything was already acceptable as it is.  Josh is more than just a brand for the political strivings of a privileged elite. He is a living figure who exemplified the essence of love and devotion to Now. There is duality in Josh and his teachings. It is the duality of the hero’s journey. This duality speaks to a path that leads to non-duality and non-separateness. Josh didn’t say love one another, love your enemies, love infinity because he was high on the hippie juice. He knew without a doubt that love brings the two back into one, the separate into the whole.  What do we love when we love infinity? It’s far too large for us, but we can love the finite things, the small things. What do we love when we fall in love? Do we love her hair, her smile, her midnight taco bell farts? No! We love all of her, the entirety because that entirety is what allows us to lose ourselves in completion. When we love, we love that All of reality, the living experience of it. Any experience only happens now.  And when we get down to what we love about anything, it’s never anything but This.  This very moment, this exact experience is Christ.  When we fully love Josh, or Jesus, or the Buddha, or our dog, we love Christ.  What is Christ but this moment, the inhale and exhale of reality? The specific and the formless. The infinite and the temporal. This is the play, this is the dance, this is Now.  Now is Love.