Monday, May 30, 2016


Many interpretations of Bible texts are alienating; do this, don’t do that. Often we reach superficial conclusions about the meaning of Bible texts.

More than ever, we need to crack the code and get into the Bible to see how it is relevant for our modern lives. Otherwise, the Bible is just a relic.

The Bible is certainly not a tool to moralize; it is a tool for personal development. Nor is it a means to fantasize about a God we know very little about. We will never achieve lasting personal development based on a skewed interpretation of sin and faith. If we unlock the true meaning of the words in the Bible, we will develop our capacity to think things through to the truth of the matter. The trouble is, we often find thinking painful, feeling is much more fun. Test this out by reading aloud the next sentence.
The single most important piece of information missing from our daily lives is an understanding of reincarnation.
There are texts in Bible that make much more sense if we apply the principle of repeated lives. I know that many people find the concept of repeated lives on earth difficult to understand. However, we have reached a point in our development where we can begin to remember snippets of our past lives. These are the déjà vu moments. Déjà vu, according to Wikipedia, is a French phrase meaning "already seen", and it refers to the experience of believing that one has witnessed or experienced a new situation previously.

Here is a brief explanation of reincarnation for those unfamiliar with the basic concept. Our actions in previous lives cause consequences in future lives – we can call this karma For example, if we stole from others in a previous life, people may steal from us in this life, not just possessions but stolen time, stolen effort, stolen ideas etc. If we looked down on others in a past life, in this life we might be short so that people physically look down on us. If we didn’t take in what we heard in a past life, now we may be deaf. Isaac Newton’s third law of physics, “For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.” echoes the ancient mystery teaching about reincarnation.

We can bounce around with actions and reactions or we can embrace our experiences and be in harmony with them.

The eighth Beatitude speaks about reincarnation.
“Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” Mt 5:10

This is not speaking about being a martyr, as we shall see when we look at the meaning of the Greek words. The ‘ones having been persecuted’, dediogmenoi in Greek, indicates the ones who are driven away. Who do we drive away from us? The ones we have difficult karma with, the ones who cause us to react.

If we think about reincarnation in terms of the age of the human race, then we have incarnated many times, so many that most of the people we meet have a karmic connection to us. This karma needs balancing. This makes sense if we think about the way friends can fall out and marriages can break down.

If we place the word dediogmenoi, driving away, in context with righteousness a very different story emerges. Righteousness is dikaiosune, which means justice or being just, balanced and in harmony. The scales of justice give us a good understanding of the meaning of righteousness. Justice is a continual series of adjustments to restore balance and harmony. This also means that we have the ability to judge when things are ‘just right’.

If we want to understand our own past lives we need to look for clues. One big clue is this: notice how we are attracted to some people, and repelled by others. There are so many clues in even the smallest events in our lives.

Another clue can be found in facial expressions. Some people have an uncanny resemblance to people who lived long ago. Obviously only the faces of famous people have survived, and not all of us were famous people in past lives, but the similarity can be uncanny.

When Prince died recently my friend Adriana Koulias discovered that his facial features were a very close match to those of the Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten who died around 1335 BC. She then looked into the lives of these two men and discovered many similarities - many actions and reactions.

Prince and Akhenaten: Tales of Karma and Initiation

If we act on these ideas instead of reacting, we can make a great deal of sense of world events as well as events in our own lives. This brings us peace and harmony and a deep respect for the wisdom of the universe - “for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

First published on Huffington Post

Wednesday, May 11, 2016

Becoming a Christ

The Bible is the story of the developing human spirit. The books of the Bible tell us where we came from, where we are going, and how to get there. From the very first words in Genesis, to the very last in The Revelation, the story of the human journey, in the presence of Christ’s activity, is told.
The ultimate goal is to become Christen-ed. I use this word purposefully because the being we call Christ is the human archetype. We strive to be like him.
In other words, we become a Christ. St Paul speaks about this often, particularly in this statement:
“I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me;” Galatians 2:20
Therefore, Christ is the model for what we are to become. This mighty Cosmic being who had never experienced this earth before, entered into the human being Jesus, to show us what is possible. John puts it this way:
To understand what this means in our lives, we must first try to understand what Christ is for us. This is not about being religious, nor is it about attending a particular church. Christ is a spiritual force present in the whole of humanity; this force is present in every human being, in nature, in this earth and in the universe.

In his highest expression we can call him the Cosmic Christ and find him as part of the Trinity; Father, Son and Holy Spirit. At the other end of the scale we can see him in the body of Jesus who lived on this earth. This spectrum from mighty spiritual being to human being is the story of the Son of God becoming the Son of man. His journey is revealed in the Bible as well as in the many myths and legends passed down through the ages.
The immediate question arising from this is why? Why would such a mighty being bother to come to earth? Surely not to save us from our sins - wouldn’t that be a bit of an overreach? Since sin, harmartia, means missing the mark [explored in a previous post] nothing should interfere with us perfecting our aim. Why would we let someone or something else shoot our arrow for us?
One simple reason this mighty Christ Spirit made the journey into the sphere of this earth was to save this earth, to give it a new lease of life, thus enabling us to continue to perfect our aim. His union with the body and blood of Jesus, and the subsequent gushing of blood from Jesus’ side when he was struck with a spear, enabled the spirit of Christ to literally penetrate this earth and hence every human being on this earth who eats food grown in the earth.
This is the basis for the Last Supper when Jesus explained that the bread, a product of the earth, was his body, and the wine made from sun-ripened grapes was his blood. While this event is celebrated during Holy Communion, we can also celebrate it each time we eat. We can think of the journey Christ made through the spiritual spheres of the universe to enter into us, because he entered into Jesus before us.
The reason he came is directly connected to a new phase in the development of the human being. He didn’t come to take something away from us (sin), he came to give us something which we could not access by ourselves - our Higher Self, our True Self, which is our I AM [discussed in this previous post].
We should not take this idea of Christ entering into a human body too lightly. It was not an easy thing to achieve. If we read the accounts of the crucifixion from the point of view of Christ’s difficulty rather than Jesus’ difficulty, we can have new and different understandings. What was it like for a mighty being who had no idea what it was like to live in an earthly physical body, whose consciousness had no limits, to be confined in Jesus’ body? We could liken it to a university professor suddenly having to use the mind of child.
To recap in very simple terms what I have come to understand and experience about this event over the last 33 years. Jesus was the most highly developed human being ever born, his purity exemplified by his mother, the Virgin Mary. His journey to the cross was a series of events that prepared him to receive into himself the Cosmic Christ. Jesus was a vessel prepared for generations through the Hebrews so that he could be the channel for the Son of God to enter into a human body. In so doing, he showed us how to follow in his footsteps and prepare ourselves to become aware of our True Self and awaken the presence of Christ within us.

Our immediate response might be to say. “I want that.” Yet, we have to be able to bear the powerful presence of Christ. Since Golgotha, Christ is within us as a potential, as a seed, to which we must give life. As we know, no seed can survive without being nurtured.

Image: Crucifixion by Giotto di Bondone
First published on Huffington Post