Reimagining Christianity: A Return to the Forgotten Center

My reimagining of Christianity is not a novelty, not a rebellion, and certainly not a whimsical spiritual remix pulled from thin air. It is, rather, a serious return—an excavation of a Christianity older than councils, older than creeds, older than orthodoxy’s carefully guarded walls. It begins with the simple yet radical claim that consciousness is foundational. Before there were words about God, before theology, before catechisms and punishments, there was awareness. What John calls the Logos and what Jesus calls Father is not a deity perched in the heavens managing sin accounts, but the very Source of existence itself—the ground of Being, the consciousness through which all things live and move and have their being. If God is anything, God is the field in which all awareness exists, and that consciousness, Scripture dares to say, is Love. Not judgment wrapped in love, not conditional acceptance disguised as grace, but Love as the very essence of reality.

If this is true, then the fruit of the Spirit is not moral effort, nor proof of allegiance to a religious system, but the natural outflow of awakening to the Divine consciousness within. Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, and self-control are not badges earned through discipline but the inevitable expression of union with the indwelling Spirit. Jesus stands in human history precisely as one who understood this with full clarity. What made Him unique was not that He alone carried divinity while the rest of us remained damaged, distant, and damned. His uniqueness lay in His consciousness—His knowing. He knew the Logos dwelled in Him, and, by extension, in all. His invitation was not to worship a solitary Son but to awaken to the shared Sonship of humanity. To be “born from above” is not to meet the membership requirements of a sect; it is to remember who we are at the deepest level of being: offspring of the Divine, participants in the same Spirit, expressions of the same cosmic Love.

This is why the Gnostics, despite the smear campaigns of later orthodox authorities, remain legitimate followers of Christ. They did not distort Christianity; they preserved its mystical core. Their writings, alongside the canonical texts, reveal a view of salvation as awakening rather than appeasement, illumination rather than doctrine, liberation from ignorance rather than ransom from wrath. They understood sin not as legal debt but as forgetfulness—a falling asleep to our divine origin. Their Jesus frees not by blood payment but by revelation: He comes to restore sight, not settle accounts. If we dare to approach the New Testament and the Gnostic texts as parallel witnesses rather than competitors, a coherent picture emerges: Scripture was never meant to be reduced to literal forensic logic. It is symbolic, psychological, mythic, cosmic. Mythic is not synonymous with untrue. Mythic means truth conveyed through symbol, story, and spiritual experience.

This reading is not foreign to the earliest voices of the faith. Paul was not a systematizer of penal transactions but a mystic of union. His language is not courtroom but interiority: “Christ in you, the hope of glory.” “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.” John, too, is no legal narrator of guilt and payment; he is the poet of abiding, of oneness, of divine indwelling. “I am in the Father, and you in me, and I in you.” Both apostles speak the language of consciousness, union, and transformation, not empire, law, and punishment.

The tragic shift came not through Christ, not through the apostles, but through Rome. When Christianity became the religion of power, it had to become a religion of control. Orthodoxy, in its imperial stage, was not born to guard truth but to regulate it. Creeds and councils did not arise from mystical contemplation but from political necessity. The empire needed a unified theological system, not a diverse mystical movement. Thus the living, breathing, experiential faith of Jesus and the earliest followers hardened into rules, boundaries, penalties, and eternal threats. Love became fear dressed in ecclesial robes.

In that climate, penal substitution grew—not from Jesus' lips nor Paul’s pen, but from Augustine’s anxiety and Anselm’s feudal logic. For the first three centuries, no Christian theologian preached divine wrath satisfied by blood payment. The cross was victory, healing, illumination, liberation from the forces of ignorance and death. Christ conquered the fear of separation, not the Father’s temper. Only later did salvation become courtrooms and cosmic accounting.

It is in this same shift that hell transformed. Jesus spoke of Gehenna—a known garbage valley outside Jerusalem where fires smoldered and decay was visible. He used it as symbol, as prophetic image of wasted life, ego ruin, and inner breakdown—not eternal torture. The early Christians understood this. It was the imperial church that needed eternal punishment to fuel conformity and obedience. Fear is the easiest tool by which to direct populations.

So when I speak of reimagining Christianity, I am not inventing a new faith. I am remembering an old one. I am recovering the mystical Jesus who reveals our divine origin, the Pauline Christ who lives within rather than above, the Johannine Logos who binds all consciousness in love, and the Gnostic insight that salvation is awakening from forgetfulness, not rescue from divine violence. This Christianity is coherent, reasonable, historical, and spiritually alive. It returns to the vision of a God who is not a monarch in the sky but the living consciousness in whom all things share their existence. It sees humanity not as depraved wretches awaiting rescue but as luminous beings capable of remembering their origin in Love.

To reimagine Christianity is simply to remove the imperial armor that has covered its heart. It is to remember that Jesus did not come to found a system but to reveal a state of being: the Kingdom within. It is to reclaim a faith defined not by threat but by transformation, not by fear but by awakening, not by debt but by love. In this sense, reimagining Christianity is not an invention. It is a return.

When Love Confronted Fear: Reclaiming the Preaching of the Cross

I’ve come to see the Cross not as the center of a divine transaction but as the center of a divine revelation—one that has far more to do with awakening than appeasement. The Jesus I know is not the Jesus of punishment, wrath, or cosmic bookkeeping. The Jesus I know is the Jesus of the Gospel of Truth, the one who steps into the world of forgetfulness to remind us of who we truly are. And because of that, the Cross becomes something far larger, far deeper, and far more beautiful than the narrative I was raised on. It becomes the moment when the fog begins to lift and the human soul is invited to remember itself again.

For most of my early life, the Cross was presented as a payment, as if God needed blood to change His mind about us. But that view never resonated with the God I knew within the quiet spaces of consciousness. It didn’t match the Father I encountered when fear dissolved and presence took over. It didn’t sound like the voice of unconditional love. And it certainly didn’t fit the Jesus who walked among us showing compassion, union, and divine identity. Over time—through reflection, mystical insight, study of early Christian diversity, and my own lived experience—I realized that the penal model was a later construction, shaped by empire and fear, not by the original heartbeat of the early Christian message. The earliest believers, especially in the mystical streams, saw the Cross not as an act of divine anger but as a victory over fear, ignorance, and the forgetfulness that had taken root in human consciousness.

The more I’ve grown, the clearer it has become that Jesus did not die instead of us—He died with us, as one of us, moving through the deepest layers of human vulnerability to show that none of it can separate us from the Source. The real enemy He faced was not His Father’s wrath; it was the fear that had ruled humanity since the dawn of consciousness—the fear of death, the fear of separation, the fear that convinces us we are unworthy, broken, and cut off from the divine. Hebrews 2:14 says that by dying He destroyed the one who held the power of death, which is the fear of death—not death itself, but the illusion around it. That illusion is what blinds us to the truth of our divine origin. That illusion is what keeps us trapped in egoic patterns. That illusion is what religions, empires, and systems have used to control people for centuries. And that illusion is exactly what shattered on the Cross.

When I look at the Cross now, I see Jesus stepping directly into the center of human suffering—not to pay a debt, but to expose a lie. He went all the way into the darkness we fear most, the place we assume God cannot be, and revealed that God had been there all along. He took on the full weight of human violence, human misunderstanding, human rejection, and even the machinery of religion itself, not to condemn humanity, but to unveil the truth that death does not define us and separation does not exist. His forgiveness from the Cross—“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do”—is not a statement of divine pity. It’s a revelation that humanity acts out of ignorance, out of forgetfulness, out of the sleep that the Gnostic texts describe so vividly. We wound because we have forgotten who we are. We fear because we have forgotten where we come from. We cling to dogma because we have forgotten the living God within us. And Jesus addresses that forgetfulness not with punishment, but with awakening.

In that sense, the Cross becomes the moment where the “demon of religion”—the egregore of fear, control, and literalism—is finally exposed. Religion in its lowest form thrives on fear: fear of hell, fear of judgment, fear of not measuring up. It tells you you are separated from God unless you perform, believe, or conform. But the Cross undermines that entire structure. Jesus did not come to reinforce the fears of the religious ego. He came to break them. And so the Cross becomes the moment where religion meets its limit. It cannot intimidate Jesus. It cannot manipulate Him. It cannot bind Him through shame or guilt. He passes through the machinery of religion and reveals the emptiness of its fear-based system. The Resurrection then becomes the divine “No” to every authority that ever tried to enslave the human spirit through fear.

When I see the Cross now, I see the Hermetic pattern of descent and ascent written into cosmic history. As above, so below—Jesus descends into human form, enters the polarity of this world, and lifts it up by showing that consciousness is never extinguished. He embodies the eternal cycle: birth, death, rebirth—not as punishment, but as the structure of reality itself. In that way, the Cross is not an interruption of the divine order; it is the unveiling of it. Reincarnation, resurrection, awakening—these are all different languages pointing toward the same truth: consciousness cannot be imprisoned by matter or by fear. The Cross sits right at the center of that revelation.

And then there is grace—Romans 5, the heartbeat of everything I’ve come to believe. Grace is not something God gives reluctantly after a payment is made. Grace is the eternal flow of divine love that has always been present, always been unconditional, always been transformative. The Cross does not create grace; it reveals it. It demonstrates that God is not drawn to us because of our performance but because of His own nature. God is love, and love is not a transaction. Love is a revelation. Love awakens. Love transforms. Motivation by fear may reform a person temporarily, but it cannot transform the soul. Only grace can do that. Only unconditional, radiant, unearned love can awaken the divine spark within us. That is why the Cross is not about the law being satisfied—it is about the heart being awakened.

And this awakening is not merely individual. The Cross reveals the cosmic truth that all of creation is on a journey of remembering itself. The world of forms, the material density we inhabit, the experiences of joy and sorrow, love and loss—these are the classrooms of consciousness. We incarnate not to escape but to experience, to learn, to awaken. Jesus enters this cycle not as a distant God peering in, but as the highest expression of what we are meant to become: awakened humanity, divine consciousness embodied. He shows us that death is not a wall but a veil, and that the human journey—across lifetimes, dimensions, and layers of awareness—is held in a field of unimaginable love.

So yes, the Cross matters to me deeply—but not because God needed it. It matters because we needed it. We needed to see that fear has no final word. We needed to see that the divine is not separate from our suffering. We needed to see that consciousness cannot be killed. And most of all, we needed to see who we truly are: children of the Divine, bearers of the Christ within, destined not for fear, but for awakening. The Cross is the moment the world was invited to remember itself. It is the revelation that the Divine has always been for us, with us, and within us—even when we forget.

 

Reflecting on the film: The Age of Disclosure

After watching The Age of Disclosure, I found myself sitting in a quiet space, letting the weight of its implications settle over me. The film didn’t just revisit familiar stories of UFOs or resurfaced government programs—it stirred something deeper, something I’ve spent years sensing beneath the surface of this entire subject. What I realized, as the credits rolled, is that the phenomenon we are all trying to name is far larger, older, and more intricate than the modern conversation allows. This piece is my attempt to gather those reflections—shaped by the books I’ve read, the spiritual path I’ve walked, and the worldview I’ve come to embrace—and lay them out in a coherent way. Watching the film didn’t simply inform me; it activated a synthesis of everything I’ve studied about consciousness, spirituality, history, and human experience.

The more I explore the phenomenon—whether we call it UFOs, UAPs, USOs, non-human intelligences, visitors, angels, or something older and stranger—the more I realize that the topic has never been about hardware in the sky. It is, and always has been, about the nature of reality itself. Watching The Age of Disclosure only amplified what years of reading, reflection, and personal intuition have already shown me: the phenomenon is not merely a question of craft and occupants—it is a mirror held up to consciousness, history, spirituality, and the metaphysical fabric of the universe.

I’ve read Skinwalkers at the Pentagon, Super Natural, American Cosmic, Vallee’s Passport to Magonia, and countless others, and what emerges is not a tidy narrative but a mosaic—one that refuses reduction. These books, like puzzle pieces from different centuries and traditions, reveal a multifaceted reality that cannot be understood through any one dogma, institution, or worldview. And perhaps that is why so many systems—military, scientific, religious—have fought so hard against disclosure. It isn’t simply secrecy. It’s existential protection. Because true disclosure does not disrupt only national security—it destabilizes metaphysical security.

As I look at the phenomenon through my own spiritual lens—one shaped by Christian mysticism, Hermeticism, Gnosticism, reincarnation, consciousness studies, and a lifelong awareness that our world is far richer than materialism allows—I see the same pattern repeating across the centuries. Humanity has always brushed up against the veil: shamans stepping into spirit realms; prophets having visions “in the heavens”; medieval encounters with shining beings; ancient stories of gods descending; angels, watchers, sons of God; and yes, biblical “chariots” that look suspiciously like technological metaphors for transcendent contact.

Jacques Vallee understood this decades ago. In Passport to Magonia, he reframed the phenomenon not as extraterrestrial hardware but as a control system interacting with human consciousness across eras—shapeshifting, adapting, evolving. When shamans in Siberia speak of portals and beings of light, when the Navajo describe skinwalkers and reality-bending trickster entities, when medieval Christians wrote of luminous messengers, and when modern pilots see structured craft violating the known laws of physics—we are meeting something that plays at the edges of our perception. Something that may not be literally “from space” but instead from the deeper structure of the cosmic psyche.

This resonates deeply with my understanding of consciousness: that we are fragments of a divine Source, experiencing polarity and incarnation across time, learning, awakening. If reality itself is participatory—if consciousness is not produced by the brain but filters through it—then the phenomenon may be an interface, a crossing point between states of consciousness. A reminder that the universe is layered: physical, subtle, psychic, and transcendental.

The military, for all its intelligence and reach, sees only one layer. Their instinct is control, classification, threat assessment. They can capture radar returns and track anomalous objects, but they cannot penetrate the metaphysics. Vallee himself said the phenomenon will not fit in a Pentagon box. The problem is ontological, not technological.

Evangelical Christianity resists disclosure for similar but doctrinal reasons. Their worldview demands a closed universe with one God, one history, one plan, and one set of spiritual beings—angels and demons. Anything outside that controlled taxonomy threatens the fragile scaffolding they’ve built. To admit that the universe is populated by intelligences with their own histories, cultures, and evolutionary trajectories would blow apart centuries of theological gatekeeping. The irony is that the Bible itself is filled with encounters that modern evangelicals would call “aliens” if they appeared today—fiery craft, beings descending in clouds, voices from the sky, wheels within wheels. But when orthodoxy ossifies, it can no longer see the mystical truths within its own scriptures.

Scientific materialists resist disclosure for the opposite reason. Their dogma isn’t theological—it’s metaphysical. The belief that consciousness is accidental, that life is meaningless, that reality is only matter and energy, is a comfort disguised as skepticism. If the phenomenon forces them to admit that intelligence may precede biology, that space and time may be porous, that consciousness might be fundamental, their entire worldview collapses. Materialism is a religion that masquerades as neutral observation. The phenomenon exposes that illusion.

And so disclosure is resisted not because of national security, but because of the security of worldviews.

But the phenomenon itself refuses to be constrained. It appears to shamans in power spots. It interacts with meditators, mystics, abductees, whistleblowers, and scientists. It adapts to the observer. It plays with our perception of time. It manifests in dreams, visions, and waking encounters. It blurs the line between physical craft and psychic experience. It dissolves the rigid boundary between the inner and outer world.

It is as if the phenomenon is telling us:

“You will not understand me until you understand yourself.”

This is what Super Natural hinted at. This is what American Cosmic explored—how the phenomenon intersects with belief, faith, destiny, and consciousness. This is what Skinwalker Ranch continues to reveal: a trickster intelligence that can mimic, misdirect, or enlighten depending on the observer. Something that knows when you are watching it.

To me, the phenomenon is not alien in the simplistic Hollywood sense. It is cosmic. Interdimensional. Trans-conscious. Perhaps even ancestral. It is part of the same spectrum of reality that produces near-death experiences, mystical visions, poltergeist activity, psychic phenomena, and spiritual awakenings. Not identical, but related—expressions of a deeper field underlying the physical world.

This field is consciousness. The unified divine Source from which all beings emerge.

Humanity is standing at the threshold of a metaphysical awakening. The Age of Disclosure is not about revealing spacecraft—it is about revealing ourselves. Our nature. Our destiny. Our place in a universe alive with intelligence and meaning.

The phenomenon is not telling us that we are small. It is telling us that we are not alone—and never have been.

And if we listen with humility, courage, and openness, we may finally discover what the mystics, shamans, prophets, and experiencers have always known:

Reality is larger, stranger, more conscious, and more divine than we ever imagined.

Reimagining Isaiah 53 Jesus as the Suffering Servant

Isaiah 53 has always been read by many as a courtroom drama, as if God were a judge demanding punishment and Jesus were a victim absorbing wrath. But in the deeper, more mystical vision of this passage, it is not a legal story at all. It is a revelation of what divine love looks like when it enters a world that has forgotten itself. It is the poetry of incarnation, the song of consciousness choosing to step into pain, not to satisfy anger, but to dissolve fear. This passage speaks of a Servant who is not crushed by God, but who willingly enters the density of human life to awaken it from within.

The “man of sorrows” is not a cursed object; he is the embodiment of divine empathy. He does not suffer so that God can be appeased, but so that humanity can finally see itself clearly. He becomes familiar with grief because grief is the language of the world he enters. Rather than standing apart from human suffering, he walks directly into it, carrying it not as a burden placed on him from above, but as a love he chooses to bear from within. This is not substitutionary suffering, but participatory suffering — not someone suffering instead of us, but someone suffering with us, from the inside of our own condition.

When the text says he was “wounded for our transgressions,” this is not the language of divine violence, but of divine solidarity. Transgression, in this vision, is not moral failure demanding punishment, but spiritual dislocation — the forgetting of our origin, the illusion of separation. The wounds of the servant are not inflicted by God, but by a fractured world that strikes whatever reveals its own illusion. Yet it is precisely through these wounds that healing flows, not because pain has magical power, but because love that refuses to withdraw in the face of pain awakens the truth buried in the heart of humanity.

The idea that “the Lord laid on him the iniquity of us all” is not about God transferring guilt, but about God entering the full weight of human distortion. The servant absorbs, experiences, and transforms the collective suffering of humanity by walking through it without hatred, without retaliation, and without fear. He becomes the place where darkness is allowed to exhaust itself in the presence of light. The iniquity of the world is not paid for; it is exposed, embraced, and dissolved by compassion that will not abandon creation.

The silence of the servant before his accusers is not weakness; it is spiritual authority. It is the silence of one who knows the truth beyond illusion and therefore does not need to defend himself within the illusion. He stands like a lamb not because he is passive, but because he is surrendered — not to violence, but to love. His life is not taken from him; it is given freely, as an act of radical trust in the Source from which he came and to which he knows he will return.

Most traditional readings stumble over the phrase “it pleased the Lord to crush him.” In a mystical reading, this is not sadistic pleasure, but divine consent to the journey of love going all the way into human brokenness. The “pleasure” is not found in pain, but in purpose. It is the joy of the divine heart watching love prove itself stronger than death, stronger than violence, stronger than fear. The crushing is not an act of divine rage, but the inevitable resistance experienced by truth when it confronts illusion.

What emerges from this suffering is not satisfaction of wrath, but the birth of a new humanity. “He shall see his offspring” is not about biological children, but awakened souls — those who, seeing such love, begin to remember who they are. The servant does not die to change God’s attitude toward humanity; he dies to change humanity’s awareness of God. The resurrection implied in this passage is not merely the reanimation of a body, but the unveiling of reality: that love cannot be extinguished, consciousness cannot be destroyed, and light cannot be suffocated by darkness.

In the end, Isaiah 53 is not about God demanding blood. It is about God giving God’s own self in the form of vulnerability. It is a story of descent, not punishment; of awakening, not appeasement; of union, not separation. The servant “justifies many” not by balancing cosmic accounts, but by revealing the truth that has always been there — that we were never abandoned, never rejected, and never truly separate from the Source of love. This chapter becomes a mirror rather than a doctrine, a vision rather than a law, calling us not into fear of God, but into remembrance of our divine origin and our shared destiny of wholeness.

Reimagining 2 Corinthians 5:17-21: God Reconciling the World to Himself

 

God was never at war with the world, never standing at a cosmic distance with anger in His heart or judgment in His hands. The story of reconciliation is not the story of an offended deity finally deciding to be merciful, but of divine Love stepping into the very fabric of human consciousness to heal what had become fractured in our perception of reality. When the sacred text says that God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, it is not describing a transaction in the courtroom of heaven, but a revelation unfolding in the human soul — the awakening of humanity to what has always been true. God did not need to be convinced to love us. We needed to be awakened to the truth that we never lost that love.

In Christ Jesus, God does not stand outside of human experience trying to fix it from afar. He enters it fully. He walks in it. He breathes in it. He feels its fear, confusion, isolation, violence, and despair. The Christ does not come as a sacrifice to satisfy divine rage, but as a manifestation of divine union — a living reminder that the divine and the human have never truly been separate. In Him, God is not counting sins or recording failures. God is dissolving the illusion that we have ever been separate from the Source. The trespasses are not entries in a ledger; they are the symptoms of spiritual amnesia, the evidence of a forgotten origin.

Reconciliation, then, is not God changing His attitude toward the world, but the world being invited to change its awareness of God. It is not heaven moving, but humanity remembering. It is consciousness being healed, perception being purified, and the fragmented self discovering unity again. The ministry of reconciliation entrusted to humanity is not a ministry of fear, but of remembrance. We are not ambassadors of threat; we are ambassadors of awakening. We do not stand before the world with clenched fists and warnings of destruction. We stand with open hearts, bearing witness to the truth that the divine has always been near, always been within, always been moving through us.

When the text speaks of Christ being made “sin,” it is not saying that God turned His Son into a cosmic criminal or poured out wrath upon innocence. It is saying that the Christ entered the deepest layer of human distortion without losing divine awareness. He stepped into the density of fear without becoming fear. He walked into the illusion of abandonment without being abandoned. He carried the weight of human misperception, and in doing so, He revealed that even in the darkest corners of human consciousness, the light of the Source could not be extinguished. He did not become sinful; He entered the realm where sin seemed real and exposed it as a shadow with no substance of its own.

And in that divine act, we do not become righteous because a divine penalty was paid, but because our true identity is restored. We become the righteousness of God not by fiction, not by legal decree, but by awakening. By remembering. By returning. Reconciliation is not God tolerating humanity. It is humanity rediscovering that it has always lived inside the heartbeat of God, and that every step of apparent separation was only the long road home.

Father as Pantheism, Son as Panentheism: A Mystical Resolution

For many years, I felt tension between pantheism and panentheism as if I were being forced to choose between two visions of God: one that dissolved God into everything, and another that preserved God as something beyond everything. Over time, I came to realize that this is not a contradiction at all, but a living paradox that finds its harmony in a more mystical understanding of the Trinity — not as a rigid doctrinal structure, but as a metaphysical reality.

In the way I have come to see it, the Father is pantheistic in nature. The Father is not a distant deity standing outside of creation, issuing decrees from afar. The Father is Being itself. The ground of existence. The divine substance from which stars are formed, consciousness awakens, and matter takes shape. There is nothing that exists that is not, in some way, God. Not as a simplistic claim that everything is “God” in a naïve sense, but in the deeper mystical sense that all things participate in the divine essence.

This aligns deeply with Christian mysticism as I understand it — not the fear-driven frameworks of dogma, but the experiential mysticism of Meister Eckhart, the Desert Fathers and Mothers, and the hidden thread within John’s Gospel itself. “In Him we live and move and have our being” was never poetry to me. It is metaphysical truth. The Father is not separate from existence; the Father is existence’s very substance.

Yet the Son — the Logos — represents something different. Not a different God, but a different mode of God. The Son is panentheistic. The Son reveals that while everything exists in God, God is more than what appears. The Son stands as the bridge between the infinite ocean of divine being and the differentiated expressions within it. This is not about blood appeasement or transactional salvation. It is about revelation. Awakening. Remembering.

This is where Gnostic insight resonates so deeply with me. The problem of humanity was never that we were “too sinful” for God. The problem was forgetfulness. We fell asleep inside our own divine origin. The Gnostics understood this — especially the Valentinian stream that saw Christ not as a legal substitute but as a revealer of divine memory. To awaken was to be saved. To remember who and what we are was to be redeemed.

Hermetic thought amplifies this beautifully. “As above, so below” is not a metaphor to me; it is a spiritual law. The Cosmos is not broken. It is patterned. It is intelligent. It reflects itself at every level. The Father, as pantheistic Being, saturates all planes of existence. The Son, as panentheistic Logos, gives pattern, meaning, and relational structure to that Being. The divine mind does not stand apart from matter — it breathes through it.

This is why I reject the common Gnostic idea of the demiurge as a villain. I do not see creation as a tragic mistake by a lesser, ignorant god. I see creation as intentional expression — the Father experiencing form. The Source exploring itself through limitation. The divine tasting contrast, texture, polarity, beauty, and even pain — not as punishment, but as participation in reality on every level. Without form, there is no experience. Without incarnation, there is no story. Without polarity, there is no movement toward love.

Here is where Taoism quietly speaks the same truth in a different language. The Tao is not a being you worship. It is the Way that cannot be named, the flow behind all things. When I read Taoist wisdom, I hear echoes of both Father and Son. The Tao is the Father — the nameless Source that precedes form. The manifested harmony of yin and yang is the Son — the dynamic balance that makes relationship and experience possible.

Taoism never demonizes the material world. It doesn’t call it fallen. It calls it fluid. It understands that light and dark, empty and full, movement and stillness are not enemies but dance partners. This resonates more deeply with me than doctrines of corruption and total depravity ever could.

In this framework, the Father is the ocean. The Son is the wave that reveals the ocean’s nature. The Spirit — if I were to complete this vision — is the breath that moves the water, the energy that animates the entire field of existence.

Christian mysticism affirms this through divine union. Hermeticism affirms it through cosmic law. Gnosticism affirms it through awakening. Taoism affirms it through harmony. They are not in opposition; they are speaking different dialects of the same truth.

What orthodoxy calls heresy, I experience as coherence.

The Father as pantheism means I cannot despise the world. I cannot see matter as evil or spirit as imprisoned. The soil is holy. The stars are sacred. The human body is not a prison — it is a temple of experience.

The Son as panentheism means I am never confined to appearances. There is always more than what is seen. I am within God, yet God is larger than my limited perception. Christ is not a gatekeeper to heaven; Christ is the divine whisper inside my consciousness reminding me that I was never separate from Source.

This is not rebellion against Christianity. It feels like its fulfillment. It feels like returning to the deeper current that existed before councils, creeds, and control systems tried to flatten mystery into manageable doctrine. The Trinity was always mystical — it was never meant to be reduced to logical diagrams.

Pantheism and panentheism are not opposites in my view. They are Father and Son in eternal conversation

. One is the vast, infinite field of being. The other is the relational awareness blooming within that field.

And in that sacred paradox, I feel closer to God than I ever did in certainty.

Reimagining the tongues of men and angels

I did not grow up in a church environment that welcomed speaking in tongues. In fact, the denomination I was raised in rejected it outright. Tongues were seen as emotionalism, foolishness, or something that belonged to other fringe expressions of Christianity that we were warned to avoid. Glossolalia had no place in my theology, my church, or my religious vocabulary. And yet, something was happening in me long before I had words to describe it.

Beginning around the age of eleven, I started to experience something that felt completely natural and completely uncontrollable at the same time. I would chant. Not sing. Not speak English. But chant — rhythmic, repetitive vocal expressions that felt ancient, familiar, and strangely comforting. I couldn’t stop myself when it began. It would rise up from somewhere deeper than thought. Not emotional hysteria, not imagination, not play-acting. It felt like something older than me moving through me.

What always puzzled me is that the sounds felt structured, intentional, and deeply meaningful, even though I did not consciously “know” what I was  . It wasn’t random noise. It had rhythm. It had cadence. It felt like language, but not a language of the mind. It was something of the body and the breath and the soul.

Years later, I learned that my father’s mother was half Chippewa. That detail landed in my spirit with far more weight than it probably should have according to the modern rational mind. I don’t claim that genetics carry spiritual memory in a simplistic way, but I also do not believe consciousness is as shallow or as mechanical as modern materialism insists. Something in me recognized that rhythm. Something in me felt at home in that sound. Whether ancestral, archetypal, or spiritual, I can’t reduce it to a neat explanation.

What is striking to me now is how closely that childhood experience aligns with what scholars later described as glossolalia. When I finally encountered Paul’s words in Corinthians — “my spirit prays, but my mind is unfruitful” — I felt seen by a text written two thousand years before I was born. I recognized myself in that sentence. I recognized the experience.

At the time, I could not have told you what glossolalia was. I wasn’t taught about it. I wasn’t encouraged toward it. In fact, I was shaped in a world suspicious of exactly that kind of thing. And yet, the experience found me anyway.

I now understand that what I was doing might not fit neatly into the category of biblical tongues as many churches define it. It may align more with what anthropology calls “ecstatic utterance,” what indigenous cultures have used as sacred chant for millennia, and what modern spirituality sometimes calls light language. I don’t feel the need to force it into one box. Spirit does not move in boxes. The divine does not respect our categories.

Indigenous chanting, especially, feels like a meaningful framework for understanding what was happening. In many native traditions, chant is not about aesthetics or performance. It is about connection. It is about entering a different layer of reality. It is about calling the unseen into presence and remembering who we are in the web of life. That feels much closer to what I experienced than the ideas I was taught in church.

I was not trying to summon anything. I was not trying to perform for God. I was not trying to impress anyone. There was no audience. It often happened alone. It was raw. It was intimate. It was unfiltered.

If there is any theology I can honestly assign to it now, it is this: it felt like my soul remembered how to breathe before my mind learned how to doubt.

There is something deeply important about pre-rational spirituality. Before doctrines, before creeds, before church splits, before religious gatekeeping — there was breath. There was rhythm. There was sound. There was vibration. The first humans did not write theology; they danced, chanted, and looked at the stars. Something about indigenous chant feels closer to that original human posture before the Mystery.

I don’t claim that what I experienced was a “native language” in a technical sense. I wasn’t speaking fluent Chippewa vocabulary. I wasn’t channeling a tribal dialect. But I do believe I was moving in a sacred pattern of sound that predates Christian and modern religious frameworks. Something older than religion and closer to Spirit.

And perhaps that is where glossolalia, indigenous chant, and what is now called light language meet — not as competing traditions, but as expressions of the same human-spiritual capacity. The ability to let sound become prayer. To let breath become bridge. To let vibration become communion.

Looking back, I see that my childhood chanting was not rebellion against my religious upbringing. It wasn’t defiance. It wasn’t confusion. It was my soul’s way of speaking when the church offered me silence.

It was my spirit refusing to be flattened by doctrine.

It was the Logos finding a way to hum through flesh and breath.

I don’t feel the need to label it anymore. I don’t need to prove it was this or that. I only know that it was real. It was sacred. It was mine. And it was a gift that arrived before I had language to explain it.

Maybe that is the deepest truth of all: some forms of prayer cannot be taught, cannot be controlled, and cannot be explained. They can only be surrendered to.

And sometimes, they come to us before we even know we were searching.

Why I Reject the Demiurge While Honoring Much of the Gnostic Ideas

I have long felt a deep kinship with the early Gnostics, especially those of the second century. They were not afraid to ask the hard questions that polite religion often avoids. They looked honestly at the world and asked: How can a reality filled with both beauty and terror come from a God who is said to be pure love? That is not a rebellious question. It is a sacred one.

Their answer was the myth of the demiurge — a lesser, ignorant creator who fashioned the material world as a flawed imitation of divine fullness. In their telling, salvation was not about embracing the world, but escaping it. Awakening meant remembering one’s divine origin and fleeing the trap of matter.

I understand why they went in that direction. In a violent and chaotic world, where empire and suffering were constant, it made sense to assume that something had gone wrong at the level of creation itself. But while I honor their courage, I cannot follow them there.

I do not experience the material world as a mistake.

I do not experience embodiment as a punishment.

I do not experience the soul as trapped in flesh.

I believe the Source — call it God, Logos, or Divine Ground — created the material realm intentionally. Not as a prison, but as a place where consciousness could touch texture. Where love could be felt. Where individuality could emerge. Where contrast could make meaning possible.

To me, spirit without matter would be potential without story. Matter without spirit would be form without meaning. Together, they create experience. Not accident. Not catastrophe. Experience.

Orthodox Christianity approaches the problem from the other direction, but in a way that also feels incomplete. Rather than rejecting the world, it often sanctifies suffering. It teaches that creation is fundamentally broken, that we are fallen, and that salvation is rescue from this damaged condition. The world becomes something to survive rather than something to inhabit. The body becomes an obstacle rather than a teacher. Desire becomes danger rather than fuel for transformation.

While it does not demonize matter the way extreme Gnosticism can, it still treats it with quiet suspicion.

I cannot fully live in that framework either.

I do not believe God created a broken world that must be tolerated until escape. I do not believe we were thrown into a cosmic disaster zone. I believe we were sent into a divine classroom.

Not as prisoners.
Not as victims.
But as participants.

Where the Gnostics saw a trap, and orthodoxy saw a test, I see a stage.

The divine did not lose control of creation. It entered it. It did not fear embodiment. It embraced it. There was no cosmic accident. There was a cosmic choice.

This is why I reject the concept of the demiurge. Not because I think the Gnostics were foolish, but because I think they stopped just short of the deeper truth. They sensed that the world was strange, paradoxical, and painful, and they assumed that meant it was flawed at its root. I look at the same world and conclude that it is intentionally paradoxical, designed for growth, transformation, and awakening.

I don’t believe in a lesser god who botched creation. I believe in a greater God who was brave enough to experience limitation.

I don’t believe salvation is flight from the world. I believe it is awakening within it. I don’t believe the body is an enemy. I believe it is a language the divine uses to know itself.

We are not here to escape matter.

We are here to become conscious inside it.

We are not here to abandon the world.

We are here to redeem it by learning how to see.

The Gnostics spoke of remembering where we came from. I agree with that. But I don’t believe remembering means leaving. I believe it means learning how to live here with open eyes and an open heart.

Not as prisoners.

Not as slaves.

But as divine beings having a human experience on purpose.

Paul as Awakener, Mystic, and Cosmic Revealer

 

There are few figures in Christian history as debated as the Apostle Paul. For some, he is Christianity’s greatest theologian. For others, he is the one who distorted the simple message of Jesus into a complex system of doctrine. Modern scholars are deeply divided over him. Some see Paul as a faithful interpreter of Jesus. Others argue that Paul created a religion about Jesus rather than preserving the religion of Jesus. I understand these competing views, and I find truth in many of them. But I also believe most of them miss something essential about Paul’s true nature.

There is the traditional Orthodox view of Paul, which presents him as the architect of Christian theology and church structure. This Paul is the builder of systems, the defender of doctrine, and the man who transformed a small Jewish movement into a global religion. In this view, Paul is harmonized with the Synoptic Gospels, and tensions between Paul and Jesus are minimized or explained away. While this view gave the church stability, it also flattened Paul into something manageable and institutional.

There is also the modern critical view, advanced by many scholars, which argues that Paul fundamentally diverged from Jesus’ message. This camp believes Paul replaced Jesus’ message of inner transformation with legal metaphors of justification, sacrifice, and substitution. According to this view, Paul hijacked the movement and turned a Jewish wisdom teacher into a cosmic object of worship. I understand this critique, and I believe it contains real insight. The tension between Jesus’ lived parables and Paul’s legal arguments is impossible to ignore.

There is also the Jewish reclamation view of Paul, which sees him as remaining fundamentally Jewish, arguing within Jewish categories, never intending to start a new religion at all. In this framework, Paul is viewed as a reformer within Judaism rather than the founder of Christianity. This perspective helps us understand how deeply shaped Paul was by law, covenant, and tradition.

All of these perspectives help illuminate aspects of Paul. But none of them, in my view, fully captures who Paul really was.

What I see in Paul is not a hijacker of Jesus, nor merely a theologian, nor simply a misunderstood rabbi. I see a man torn open by mystical encounter. I see two Pauls living within one soul: Paul the rabbi and Paul the mystic. Before Damascus, Paul was a serious religious intellect trained under Gamaliel. After Damascus, he became something else entirely — not merely a convert, but a mystic who had tasted something beyond conceptual religion.

When Paul spoke of being caught up into the “third heaven,” he was not crafting theology. He was describing mystical rapture. He had encountered what I would call the Cosmic Christ — not merely Jesus of Nazareth, but the Logos behind creation itself.

I do not believe Paul simply inherited his gospel from Peter or the Jerusalem apostles. Paul insisted that his message came by direct revelation. I take him seriously. I believe Jesus revealed something universal to Paul because the inner circle of disciples remained tethered to national, covenantal categories. They thought in terms of Israel and law. Paul began to see humanity, cosmos, and consciousness.

This is why the Valentinian Christians resonate so deeply with me. They understood salvation not as legal pardon, but as awakening from forgetfulness. They understood Christ as revealer, not appeaser. And this is where I believe Paul truly belongs — not in the later structures of orthodoxy, but in the mystical stream of early Christianity.

I also believe Thomas, John, and Mary Magdalene were entrusted with deeper layers of Jesus’ teaching — teachings too destabilizing for a religion that was slowly moving toward empire and institution. Paul stands beside them in that inner circle, whether officially recognized or not.

In my understanding, Paul was chosen precisely because he could not stay inside inherited religious structures. He had to be broken open. His blindness was not punishment. It was initiation. Only someone psychologically and spiritually dismantled could receive a universal revelation. His so-called “different gospel” was not an error. It was the deeper stream of Jesus’ true mission.

To me, Paul is not the architect of control. He is the awakener of sleeping souls. Not a lawyer of doctrine, but a mystic of revelation. Not the master of religious systems, but the revealer of the cosmic Christ.

This is the Paul I believe we are meant to rediscover.

 

The Easy Yoke of the Awakened: When Spirit Remembers Itself

 

When Jesus said, “Come to me, all you who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest,” He was not offering people a religious escape hatch. He was inviting them back into alignment — back into coherence — back into remembrance. This was not about temples, doctrines, or systems. This was about consciousness returning to its natural rhythm.

Matthew 11:28–30 is not a promise of relief from life, but rest within it. It is not about avoiding suffering, but about ending the inner war. The weariness Christ addresses is not the fatigue of work alone, but the spiritual exhaustion of trying to live from a false self in a fractured world.

And this is precisely what the Gospel of Truth illuminates: the human condition is not fundamentally sinful — it is forgetful. We did not fall from God’s favor. We fell asleep to our own divine origin. And from that forgetfulness rose fear, violence, dominance, shame, and institutionalized religion.

We started trying to earn what we never lost.

We started trying to fix what was never broken.

Jesus did not come to manage our morality — He came to restore our memory.

The rest He offers is not heaven after death. It is Sabbath within the soul.

This is where Hebrews speaks in language that sounds eerily mystical when stripped of dogma: “There remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God.” That rest is not future-only. It is not just a reward after struggle. It is a state of being that can be entered now. Hebrews does not describe inactivity; it describes cessation — not from action, but from striving.

The true Sabbath is not about stopping work. It is about stopping the illusion of separation.

It is the soul no longer trying to justify its existence.

The yoke Jesus speaks of is not bondage. It is alignment. It is the gentle re-coupling of Spirit, Logos, and Matter — the inner trinity of consciousness. Spirit as Source. Logos as Meaning. Matter as Expression. When these are in harmony, the grinding friction of existence disappears. Life does not suddenly become easy, but it becomes coherent.

This is why His yoke is easy and His burden is light — not because responsibility is removed, but because resistance collapses.

Now, when we bring Psalm 91 into this mystical lens, something powerful unveils itself.

Psalm 91 has been turned into a magical protection charm, a literalist shield against visible danger. But at its core, it is a psalm of conscious dwelling.

“He who dwells in the secret place of the Most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty.”

This “secret place” is not a geographic location. It is a state of awareness. It is the hidden interior sanctuary of consciousness — the same “rest” Jesus speaks of, the same Sabbath Hebrews promises, the same remembrance the Gospel of Truth unveils.

To “dwell under the shadow” is not to hide in fear. It is to live in resonance. A shadow appears only when light is near. This is not distance from God — it is intimacy with God.

In mystical language, the Psalm is saying:
When you live from Spirit instead of ego,
when you move in Logos instead of fear,
when you inhabit Matter instead of escaping it —
you are no longer haunted by terror.

Not because danger disappears, but because fear loses its grip.

The Psalm says: “You will not fear the terror of the night.”

The terror of the night is not only external danger — it is the fear of annihilation, separation, loss, unworthiness. The night is forgetting. The shadow is awakening.

The Gospel of Truth explains this beautifully when it says that error was not a creature that fought God, but an ignorance that did not know its root. Fear thrives only when identity is forgotten.

This is why Psalm 91 is not about preventing harm; it is about dissolving fear of harm.

This is the same Sabbath rest Hebrews describes. Not a day. Not a rule. A dimension of being.

The rest of God is the consciousness of God remembering itself through form.

And this brings us to the deeper truth hidden behind reincarnation and the Cosmic Christ. We do not return to bodies because we are being punished. We return because Spirit desires experience. Logos desires expression. Matter desires participation.

But without remembrance, experience becomes suffering. Without identity, embodiment becomes fear. Without alignment, incarnation becomes exhaustion.

The rest Jesus offers is not about ending the cycle of lives — it is about ending the cycle of forgetfulness.

Even across lifetimes.

This is why Paul’s language becomes so mystical when you stop forcing it into institutional boxes. He speaks of being “transformed from glory to glory.” He speaks about different kinds of bodies. He speaks about the inner Christ being “formed” within. Those are not legal terms — they are evolutionary.

And that is why Hebrews does not say, “You will earn rest.” It says, “There remains a rest.” It already exists. It is a reality that is entered, not achieved.

The only thing that prevents entry is resistance.

The ego resists because it survives through fear. Religious systems resist because they control through fear. Political structures resist because they dominate through fear.

But Spirit does not resist. Logos does not resist. Matter, when remembered, does not resist.

Jesus was not calling people to behave better. He was calling them to rest deeper. To stop striving toward heaven and start remembering they were never outside God.

This is the true protection of Psalm 91. It is not magic against accidents. It is the immunity of consciousness that no longer vibrates in fear. Not because nothing can touch it — but because nothing can define it.

You can live your life under the “shadow of the Almighty” and still grieve, still struggle, still feel pain — but you do not lose your center. You do not lose your identity. You do not lose the inner sanctuary.

And that is what the world rarely experiences.

The exhaustion we see in humanity is not from work — it is from misalignment. The anxiety is not just chemical — it is spiritual. The violence is not just social — it is metaphysical.

People are tired of pretending.

Jesus was offering an end to pretense, and religions turned it into performance.

The Sabbath Rest of Hebrews is not Sunday. It is consciousness at peace with itself.

The protection of Psalm 91 is not denial of danger. It is freedom from terror.

The yoke of Christ is not obedience. It is coherence.

The Gospel of Truth whispers what the systems tried to bury: You are not a mistake. You are not a failure. You are not a fallen being trying to claw your way back to God.

You are Spirit that forgot.

And rest is what happens when you remember.

Not escape.

Not perfection.

Not performance.

Just alignment.

The yoke becomes easy not because life becomes simple, but because the illusion of separation collapses.

And when that collapses, you discover that the secret place was never hidden.

It was always within you.

 

Polarity, the Eternal Soul, and Why Love Wins: Reconciling Evil Through an Esoteric Hermetic Lens

There are moments in spiritual reflection when the strands of seemingly separate traditions—Hermeticism, Christian mysticism, reincarnation, quantum possibility, even the quiet guidance of personal experience—suddenly reveal themselves as threads of one fabric. For me, polarity has become one of those threads. The more deeply I explore the nature of polarity in physics, metaphysics, and consciousness, the more clearly I see that the universe is stitched together by contrast, variation, and difference. But unlike the old dogmatic systems that make polarity into a permanent battlefield between good and evil, I have come to understand polarity as a movement of experience, a rhythmic oscillation through which the eternal soul learns, remembers, and ultimately awakens to its own divinity.

This realization has reshaped how I think about the so-called problem of evil. Instead of seeing evil as a cosmic flaw requiring the universe to be fixed or God to intervene, I have begun to view evil as one half of a necessary polarity—an experience allowed, not ordained, in a universe committed to freedom, growth, and the unfolding of consciousness. This does not trivialize suffering, nor does it deny the reality of harm. It simply acknowledges that an infinite consciousness exploring infinite possibility will inevitably encounter the full spectrum of experience. And in the end, because consciousness is eternal, no experience is final—every soul will rise again, heal again, remember again, and return to the Source that is Love.

Polarity Before the Kybalion: Emanation, Not Conflict

The ancient Hermetic writings have always struck me as profoundly sane. They don’t present a universe divided into warring cosmic factions but as a single living reality that emanates outward from the One—what I call the Monad, or simply God. In the classical Hermetic texts, polarity isn’t something to fight; it’s something to understand. The highest principle is unity, and from unity emerges duality only as a way to express creation.

Light and darkness are not moral categories—they’re ontological descriptions. Light is intelligibility; darkness is limitation, the womb of potential. The spiritual life isn’t a war against darkness but an ascent beyond it, an awakening to the fact that both poles are expressions of the One. The human soul participates in this duality because it stands at the intersection of Nous (divine mind) and Nature (material becoming). Every emotion, every fear, every desire, every noble impulse, every failure—these are not proof of separation from God but the conditions of existence in a world that is learning itself through us.

In this view, polarity is simply part of the architecture of reality. It is not a mistake; it is the blueprint.

The Kybalion: Polarity as a Tool of Inner Mastery

The Kybalion reframes polarity in a way that resonates deeply with personal transformation. Rather than focusing on ontological duality, it emphasizes psychological polarity. Opposites are not different substances but different degrees of the same thing—heat and cold are just vibrational variations of temperature, just as love and hate are variations of emotional intensity.

This principle reveals something profoundly empowering: we can shift our experience by shifting our internal alignment. We do not eliminate polarity; we transmute our position within it. The swing of emotion, the rhythm of thought, the fluctuation of mood—these are not failures but invitations to mastery. Through awareness, intention, and gentle discipline, we can “change the degree,” moving our consciousness from fear toward peace, from anger toward compassion, from bitterness toward gratitude.

The Kybalion does not cancel the ancient Hermetic view; it completes it. If ancient Hermeticism shows us that polarity emerges from the One, the Kybalion shows us that we, as expressions of that One, can participate in the creative shaping of our inner world.

The Esoteric Christian Dimension: The Logos Within the Cycles

My own spiritual journey leans heavily on the mystical side of Christianity—a Christianity older than orthodoxy, older than the councils, older than the dogmas that hardened into systems of control. The Gospel of John, the Gospel of Truth, the wisdom of Valentinus, the metaphysics of Hermetic Egypt, and the quiet hum of personal experience all converge on one idea: the Logos is not a distant deity but the divine spark within. Christ is not simply a figure of history but the indwelling wisdom that awakens us to our true nature.

When I say “love wins,” I am not parroting a sentimental slogan; I am articulating a metaphysical necessity. If the Logos is the structuring principle of the universe, and if the Logos is love—as both John and the Hermetic texts insist in their own ways—then love is not an option or an outcome. Love is the ground of being. Everything else is temporary oscillation.

Reincarnation fits beautifully into this framework. If we are fragments of the divine exploring the infinite possibilities of life, then reincarnation is not punishment, not karmic debt, not a trap, but an engine of experience. We touch every polarity over the span of eternity: happiness and despair, wealth and poverty, health and sickness, joy and sorrow. These are not judgments—they are experiences within a morally neutral universe that invites the soul to learn, grow, and remember.

And because every soul is eternal, every soul will eventually awaken. There are no eternal victims and no eternal villains. There are only travelers at different points along the spiral.

The Problem of Evil Through the Lens of Polarity

This brings me to the heart of the matter: the so-called problem of evil. The question is always posed as if evil disproves God, or as if suffering is incompatible with a loving Source. But this argument rests on assumptions about the purpose of existence that I no longer share.

Evil is real in the sense that experience is real. Pain is real in the sense that consciousness feels it. Trauma can bend a life in ways that take years to heal. But none of these things are permanent, and none of them define the soul. If consciousness is eternal, then evil is contextual, temporary, and ultimately transmutable.

The way I now see it, evil arises from three fundamental conditions of experience:

1. Embodiment, which introduces limitation and vulnerability.
2. Ignorance, not as moral failure but as a condition of incarnation.
3. Freedom, which permits actions that cause harm.

These conditions create the possibility of suffering, but they also create the possibility of heroism, compassion, creativity, and awakening. A world without contrast would be a world without meaning. A universe without polarity would be static, inert, unable to generate experience.

Evil is not the opposite of God. Evil is the shadow cast by freedom in a world built on polarity. And because the soul is eternal, no experience of evil can ever be final. What seems catastrophic in one lifetime becomes part of a larger mosaic across many lifetimes, balancing out in ways we cannot fully see from within a single incarnation.

Why Love Wins

If polarity is the structure, rhythm is the motion, and experience is the curriculum, then love is the destination. It is the point toward which everything moves, not because the universe forces it, but because consciousness itself recognizes love as the highest vibration, the truest expression of its own being.

In a universe of infinite lifetimes, infinite learning, and infinite possibility, every soul eventually returns to the center. The pendulum swings, but the midpoint calls. The Monad remains, patient and luminous. We wander, we forget, we suffer, we rejoice, we awaken—but always we return.

Love wins not because evil is unreal, but because evil is temporary.
Love wins not because suffering is insignificant, but because suffering is not the end of the story.
Love wins because the divine Source is love, and everything that departs from love eventually seeks its home again.

The Hermeticists knew this. The mystics knew this. The earliest Christians knew this. And in my own way, after a lifetime of reflection, I am beginning to know it too.

Because when you see the universe as a school of consciousness, when you see reincarnation as egalitarian experience, when you see polarity as the structure through which the soul learns, and when you acknowledge the Logos within as the guiding principle of transformation—then the problem of evil does not disappear, but it becomes reconcilable. It becomes part of a pattern.

A painful part, yes, but not a permanent one.

In that realization, the heart finds peace.

And the soul remembers what it has always known:
Love is the beginning, love is the end, and everything in between is the sacred journey of remembering.

 

THE ETERNAL PARADOX OF NON-DUALITY: Why We Are Forever One and Forever Many

 

There is a strand of non-duality—especially popular in spiritual circles—that insists the ultimate destiny of the soul is to dissolve back into the One, into God, into Source, into what many traditions would call the monad. The argument goes that individuality is a temporary illusion, ego is a barrier, and spiritual maturity means disappearing back into a seamless ocean of absolute consciousness. Yet every time that idea surfaces, something in me remains unconvinced. Not from resistance or fear, but from a deeper, quieter knowing that senses incompleteness in the narrative.

Non-duality, as it is often taught, flattens the richness of experience. It leans heavily toward the One while ignoring the profound value of the Many. It tends to treat difference as illusion and individuality as a hindrance. But reality—especially spiritual reality—is far more paradoxical, far more elegant, and far more relational than that. The truth is not that we are only One or only Many. The truth is that we are One in God and Many in God, eternally and simultaneously.

This is not contradiction. This is design.

The Monad and Its Expressions: A Living Unity

I have been familiar with the concept of the monad for a long time, but the term resurfaced in a new way today, carrying fresh clarity and resonance. While I still comfortably use the word God, I recognize that “monad” captures a certain philosophical precision: the indivisible Source that stands behind all emanation, all consciousness, all being.

The monad—God—does not merely produce fragments. It expresses itself as fragments. A fragment is not less real than the monad; it is the monad in a localized, experiential mode. The soul is not separate from God. The soul is God experiencing from a specific vantage point.

And this is why the idea that individuality must be escaped or dissolved has always struck me as incomplete. Individuality is not a cosmic mistake. It is an intentional facet of the very structure of reality.

Individuality as Divine Exploration

If individuality is not illusion, what is it?

Individuality is the way the One explores itself.
The Many are how the monad knows its own depth.
The soul is how God tastes the nuance of creation.

Pure oneness contains infinite potential, but no relationship.
Infinite potential, but no contrast.
Infinite essence, but no experience.

Experience requires a vantage point.
Relationship requires distinction.
Learning requires multiplicity.

Individuality grants the cosmos movement.
Multiplicity gives consciousness texture.
Difference allows love to be known.

This is why creation exists at all—not as a veil to escape, but as a realm in which God experiences God through an infinite variety of souls.

The Ego as Instrument, Not Enemy

Many non-dual systems treat the ego as something to eliminate. But an ego is not an enemy; it is an interface. A lens. A focal point through which the soul interacts with the physical dimension. The trouble only arises when the ego forgets its origin. When the lens mistakes itself for the entire landscape.

The ego does not need to die.
It needs to be clarified.
Aligned.
Illuminated.

A distorted ego causes suffering, but the structure itself is purposeful. The ego is not the whole, but it is essential for navigating the world of form. It allows the soul to have a location in the unfolding story of God experiencing creation.

Eternal Diversity Within Eternal Unity

One of the most profound inner realizations I’ve had over the years is that multiplicity is not a temporary state that will one day be erased. The soul does not vanish into oneness. The fragments are not disposable. Distinction is not a brief glitch before we melt back into undifferentiated unity.

The Many are eternal expressions of the One.

Each soul is a permanent facet of divine consciousness—unique, specific, resonant, textured. Reincarnation, from this perspective, is not a treadmill to escape but an endless canvas for exploration. Each life adds dimension to the soul’s expression and therefore to the expression of the monad itself.

The Source wants to know itself through the infinite angles of experience. The monad desires expansion, contrast, discovery. God delights in seeing through many eyes.

The Esoteric Christian Resonance

Even within Christianity—especially in its mystical and esoteric strands—there is an acknowledgment of unity-in-diversity. Paul’s language about the Body of Christ is not an argument for dissolving identity but for seeing individuality as deeply interwoven with a greater whole. A body is not one cell. A body is billions of unique cells expressing one life.

The ancient Valentinian vision of God as the Pleroma speaks to the same truth: many emanations, each eternal, each distinct, each an expression of the divine Fullness. God is the monad—yes. But God is also the multiplicity that flows from the monad.

What looks like duality is simply the symmetry of being.

The Hermetic Understanding: As Above, So Below

Hermetic thought captures this paradox beautifully. The All is One Mind, yet this Mind expresses itself as infinite forms. “As above, so below” means the structure of the One is reflected in the structure of the Many.

The wave is not separate from the ocean.
But the wave is not an illusion either.

The wave is real as an expression,
and the ocean is real as the essence.

Both truths are needed.
Both truths are sacred.

Why Dissolving Into Oneness Misses the Point

If individuality were meant to be erased, God would not have expressed it.
If the monad wanted only unbroken unity, it would never have emanated the Many.
Creation would not exist if distinction were a problem.

And so the common non-dual idea that our ultimate purpose is to dissolve completely into formlessness misunderstands the architecture of reality.

Individuality becomes distorted only when it forgets its Source.
Not when it exists — when it forgets.

The answer is not annihilation but remembrance.

Awakening as Integration

True awakening is the recognition that:

I am One with God, and I am a distinct expression of God.
I am the monad in essence, and the soul in experience.
I am Source and I am form.
I am eternal unity and eternal distinction.

Awakening does not erase the soul.
It sanctifies it.

Awakening does not destroy the ego.
It transfigures it.

Awakening does not demand the end of individuality.
It invites individuality to shine with the light of its origin.

Eternal Union, Eternal Distinction, Eternal Meaning

The One expresses itself as the Many.
The Many reveal the fullness of the One.
Neither cancels the other.
Both are eternal.
Both arise from the same divine Source.
Both are the nature of God.

And this is the heart of the paradox:

We are forever One.
We are forever Many.
And the truth of what we are lives in the harmony between these two realities.

My individuality is not something to escape; it is something to illuminate.
My soul is not destined to vanish; it is destined to expand.
My ego is not the enemy; it is the instrument.
And God—the monad, the Source—experiences Itself through the kaleidoscope of all our lives.

The monad is not diminished by its expressions.
It is revealed by them.

The One delights in the Many.
And through the Many, the One knows itself completely.

 

Reimagining Flesh and Spirit When the Two Become One

 For as long as humanity has been able to articulate its longings, it has been trying to escape its own skin. Nearly every religion that has endured—from the ancient Vedic hymns to the desert fathers, from Buddhist monks to medieval Christian theologians—has, in some way, elevated “spirit” and politely (or not so politely) pushed “flesh” aside. Flesh became suspect. Spirit became pure. Flesh was called weak, fallen, distracting; spirit was hailed as eternal, untainted, and ultimately real. And yet, the older I get, the more I recognize a profound flaw in this inherited dualism. The flesh is not some unfortunate garment forced upon the soul. It is not a lesser substance waiting to be sloughed off at death like a snake shedding worn-out skin. Instead, I have come to see flesh and spirit as complementary modes of experience—two ways through which the divine explores itself within creation. And I am convinced that the goal was never escape, but integration. Never rejection, but a marriage.

I find myself stepping back from the long lineage of theological frameworks that subtly (or bluntly) pit spirit against flesh. Even in Christianity—especially in Christianity—this divide runs deep. Much of it stems from a literalistic reading of Paul, as though “flesh” in his writings referred to skin, bones, and bodies, rather than egoic consciousness caught in forgetfulness. And because of these misunderstandings, Christianity inherited a nervousness about the body, sexuality, pleasure, sensation, emotions, and just about anything that makes us embodied creatures. But what if Paul wasn’t the enemy of flesh at all? What if he was speaking of something entirely different, and the Church fathers—shaped by Plato more than by Jesus—cast his words into a rigid dualism he never intended? What if “flesh” in Paul didn’t mean “your body is evil,” but rather “your false sense of separateness,” and “spirit” meant “your awakened identity as part of the divine”? Suddenly the whole equation changes. The conflict is not between spirit and skin—it is between remembrance and forgetfulness, between awakened consciousness and the illusion of isolation. And if this is the case, then flesh is not the problem. In fact, flesh becomes the very arena in which awakening happens.

This is why the Gospel of Thomas resonates so deeply with me. Unlike the later doctrinal structures built around dualism, Thomas preserves Jesus as a wisdom teacher who directly confronts the illusion of separation. His words are not about escaping the body but about bringing the divided self back into unity. When Jesus says, “When you make the two one… then you will enter the Kingdom,” he is naming the very process I have come to believe lies at the heart of spiritual transformation. Thomas expands this integration into multiple dimensions: making the inside like the outside, the above like the below, and even making male and female into a single one. This is not about erasing embodiment but healing fragmentation. It is the same teaching repeated in several sayings: “If two make peace with each other in this one house…” and “When you make the two one, you will become children of humanity.” These are invitations to an inner reconciliation—what I would call the marriage of flesh and spirit. Even though Thomas does not explicitly say “make the three one,” the layers in Saying 22 imply a triple integration: personal, cosmic, and embodied. That is, the self, the universe, and the body all participating in one unified consciousness. Thomas presents a Jesus who understands the human being as the meeting point of heaven and earth, not the battlefield between them.

This recognition that Jesus taught union rather than dualism reshapes how I see my own body—not as temporary scaffolding but as a sacred instrument. It reshapes how I view aging—not as decay but as transformation, a shift in the way consciousness expresses itself through flesh. It reshapes how I understand suffering—not as punishment but as part of the polarity through which soul learns compassion, empathy, patience, and the full range of human experience. And it reshapes how I view death, not as the abandoning of flesh but as a transition into another mode of perception. The flesh is not a problem to be solved. It is a lens. Spirit sees the whole; flesh sees a fragment. And that fragment, with all its limitations, becomes the microcosm through which the macrocosm examines itself.

Imagine, for a moment, the polarity of love and grief. Only embodied beings can feel grief the way we do. Only those with nervous systems, hormones, heartbeats, and memories shaped by time can experience love with such intensity that it breaks and heals simultaneously. If divine consciousness wanted to taste this, it could not do so in pure spirit. It needed flesh. This is why the mystics who embrace embodiment speak to me so deeply. Taoism teaches that the body is the vessel of the Tao. Tantra teaches that flesh is Shakti, the dynamic energy of consciousness. Hermeticism teaches that humanity is a cosmic hybrid, a child of the stars and the earth. Kabbalah teaches that matter is divine light in contraction, waiting to be liberated. Even the more esoteric Christian traditions—Valentinian, Johannine, and certain strands of early mysticism—teach that salvation is not escape but awakening within embodiment.

The more I explore these traditions, the clearer it becomes that my own evolving perspective stands in a line of ancient wisdom, one that was overshadowed by dualism but never extinguished. I see flesh and spirit as two vehicles through which infinite potential experiences itself. One is dense, tactile, sensory—the world of form and polarity. The other is subtle, expansive, formless—the world of pure being. But they are not strangers. They are lovers. And the human being is their meeting place. This realization transforms the very meaning of incarnation. It reframes Christ himself. Jesus does not come as a spirit trapped in flesh; he comes as the embodiment of unity. His transfiguration is not the denial of the body but the revelation of what the body becomes when spirit fully shines through it.

I reject the idea that we must escape flesh to find God. Instead, I believe we discover God in and through our embodied experience. Every sensation becomes part of the divine dialogue. Every breath is the ongoing marriage of spirit and matter. Every moment of awakening is spirit remembering itself in flesh, and every moment of compassion is flesh responding to spirit. This is the heart of the Thomasine insight: the Kingdom is not elsewhere. It appears when the two—or the three—become one.

When Jesus says, "If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you," he is describing this process of integration. What is “within” is spirit. What must bring it forth is flesh. Together they form the fullness of what it means to be human. We are not here to flee the body but to reveal the divine through it—not by rejecting our humanity but by sanctifying it. This is the ancient, forgotten teaching: that the human being is the intersection of heaven and earth, and that our task is not ascetic withdrawal but conscious embodiment.

This is why I believe the marriage of flesh and spirit is the true purpose of our existence. This is the work of awakening, the culmination of mysticism, and the heart of Jesus’ teaching in the Gospel of Thomas. To be fully human is to inhabit both dimensions—matter and consciousness—as one unified being. It is to become “a single one,” as Thomas says. It is to live as the harmony of flesh and spirit, two expressions of the same eternal presence, fully joined in one unfolding life.