John 1:14; In, Among, and Within: Not one or the other but all three

John 1:14 says: “And the Word became flesh, and tabernacled ἐν ἡμῖν.” For centuries, English translators have debated whether this phrase should read “in us” or “among us.” Most major translations choose “among us,” perhaps out of caution. Yet if we return to the Greek, and even further back to the Aramaic worldview that likely shaped John’s thought, the truth is more layered and profound.

The Greek preposition ἐν (en) is most directly translated as “in.” Had John wanted to stress “among” in the sense of external proximity, he had better choices: μεταξύ (between, among) or παρά (alongside). Instead, he used ἐν, the same preposition that recurs throughout his Gospel to convey deep indwelling. Jesus declares, “I am in you, and you are in me” (John 14:20). In his prayer, he asks the Father “that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us” (John 17:21). Clearly, John uses ἐν to speak of union, not mere proximity.

Dr. Neil Douglas-Klotz, drawing from the Aramaic idiom behind the text, points out that the word for “in” and “among” was often the same. In the first-century Semitic mind, the distinction between external and internal was less rigid than ours. The Logos could simultaneously dwell “within” us as individuals and “among” us as a people. This duality is captured beautifully in James Murdock’s 19th-century translation from the Syriac Peshitta: “And the Word became flesh, and tabernacled with us.” The word “tabernacled” brings to mind the tent of meeting in the wilderness, where the Divine Presence filled the midst of Israel. But a tabernacle is not only beside you; when you enter, it surrounds you. It becomes both a place among and a presence within.

This is where theology and spirituality meet consciousness studies. If scientists and philosophers are correct that consciousness is foundational, then consciousness and the Logos may very well be two names for the same reality. In John’s prologue, the Logos is the divine Reason, the ordering principle of creation, the Light that enlightens everyone (John 1:9). Modern philosophers like Bernardo Kastrup argue from analytic idealism that all things arise within a universal field of consciousness. Donald Hoffman proposes that conscious agents, not matter, are the basic building blocks of reality. Their work mirrors what John proclaimed two millennia ago: that the Logos is at the root of all that exists, and that this Logos is not separate from us but intimately present, indwelling.

The choice between “in” and “among” is not simply academic. It shapes the way we experience faith. If the Logos only dwelt “among us,” then Christ is kept external — a figure in history, an example to follow, but always other. If the Logos dwells “in us,” then Christ is not merely a neighbor but our very life. The incarnation is not just about God pitching a tent in our neighborhood; it is about God setting up dwelling inside the human heart, awakening us to who we already are.

Of course, translators were wary of this implication. To render John 1:14 as “in us” leans toward a universal mystical truth: that every human being carries the indwelling Christ, the divine Logos within. Orthodoxy often recoiled from this, fearing it would collapse the distance between Creator and creature. Better to play it safe with “among,” which allows Christ to be revered but external, present but still apart. Yet I believe John’s language, both in Greek and in the Aramaic echoes behind it, resists this narrowing.

“Tabernacled with us” is the perfect middle ground. It suggests a presence that is both in and among. Just as Israel’s tabernacle was pitched among the tents of the tribes, yet filled with the indwelling glory of God, so too the Logos became flesh, dwelling not only in history but within human beings. The incarnation is not proximity but participation.

This has deep implications for how we approach Christianity today. If consciousness is foundational, and if Logos is another name for this primal consciousness, then the story of Christ is not a myth to discard in light of science, but a myth to be upgraded with the insights of consciousness studies. When I say “upgraded,” I mean holding onto the myth, the story, and the history of Jesus, while re-framing them in light of what we now know about reality. The prologue of John reads almost like a pre-scientific cosmology of consciousness: “In the beginning was the Word… and in him was life, and the life was the light of men.”

To incarnate into Christianity today, in my view, means to honor the tradition without freezing it. We keep the stories of the manger, the cross, the resurrection — but we allow them to breathe in the light of current understanding. We see Christ not only as an external figure but as the unveiling of what consciousness itself has always been doing: awakening to itself within us. The Word becoming flesh is not just God stepping into history; it is consciousness clothing itself in matter, revealing that spirit and flesh are never separate.

This also heals a divide that has long haunted Christianity. By translating ἐν as “among,” we kept Christ outside, safe from mystical union, and in doing so built walls of doctrine, authority, and control. But if Christ is “in us,” then no hierarchy can mediate that reality. The Logos already speaks in the depths of every heart. The true Light enlightens everyone. This does not diminish the unique role of Jesus; rather, it magnifies it. Jesus becomes the archetype of awakened humanity, the one who shows us what it means to live conscious of the Logos within.

The “in vs. among” debate, then, is really a debate about whether Christianity is primarily external or internal, historical or mystical, safe or transformative. I argue for “in” not because I deny the external reality of Jesus of Nazareth, but because I affirm that his coming reveals the deeper truth that God is never merely external. The incarnation is the eternal union of God and humanity, consciousness and matter, spirit and flesh.

Even science, when listened to carefully, echoes this. Physics tells us that matter is not solid but energy; neuroscience struggles to explain consciousness as an output of matter, and many now argue the opposite: that matter is an expression of consciousness. This fits seamlessly with John’s vision. The Logos, consciousness itself, became flesh — not as a one-time intrusion but as the revelation of what has always been true: all flesh is infused with Logos.

So when translators soften ἐν ἡμῖν to “among us,” I see it as a missed opportunity. It keeps the Logos external when John was opening the door to mystical participation. I believe we must reclaim the full force of ἐν — not in opposition to “among,” but as a union of both. Christ is among us in history, in community, in the stories we tell and the sacraments we share. But Christ is also in us, awakening us to the divine consciousness that is the foundation of all reality.

To incarnate into Christianity today is to embrace both. To tabernacle with Christ means recognizing the Logos both in our midst and in our innermost being. It means reading John 1:14 not through the lens of fear but through the lens of fullness. The Word became flesh and dwelt in us and among us. And we beheld his glory — not only as an external spectacle, but as the unveiling of the divine consciousness at the heart of all things.

That is the story worth keeping. That is the myth worth upgrading.

Consciousness at the Core: A Unified Narrative and a Theory of Everything?

There’s a deep intuition I cannot shake — an awareness that beneath all appearances, beneath the quantum foam and neural firings, beneath the stars and galaxies and spinning electrons, there is only consciousness. The further I dig into physics, philosophy, and spirituality, the more certain I become that reality isn’t made of matter but of mind. And I’m not alone in sensing this.

From the early quantum pioneers like Max Planck and Erwin Schrödinger to modern thinkers like Bernardo Kastrup and Donald Hoffman, a picture emerges: consciousness isn’t an accidental byproduct of physical processes — it is the stage upon which those processes unfold. It is the ground of being itself.

The deeper implication is staggering: consciousness isn’t just observing reality; consciousness is reality, experiencing itself through infinite forms, across infinite possibilities.

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Planck’s Whisper: Consciousness First

Max Planck, the father of quantum theory, once said:

“I regard consciousness as fundamental. Everything we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.”

He didn’t arrive at this conclusion through mysticism or dogma but by following physics to its logical edge. At the quantum level, the world dissolves into probabilities and potentials, existing not as hard, objective stuff but as relationships, possibilities, and information. If information is the true currency of the universe, as quantum theory increasingly suggests, then we must ask: information to whom?

This is where consciousness enters as the silent prerequisite. A bit of information, devoid of an experiencer, is meaningless. Planck’s insight foreshadows the argument of many modern philosophers of mind: matter depends on mind, not the other way around.

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Donald Hoffman and the Interface of Perception

In our time, Donald Hoffman carries Planck’s whisper forward into a radical proposition. Hoffman argues that what we call “physical reality” is not reality at all but an interface — a symbolic dashboard evolved for survival, not truth. Like icons on a computer screen, the objects we see are user-friendly representations, not the thing-in-themselves.

He writes:

“We’ve been fooled into thinking our perceptions reveal reality as it is. Evolution shaped us not to perceive the truth, but to perceive what keeps us alive.”

If Hoffman is right, then we’ve mistaken the interface for the operating system. Beneath the icons lies a deeper code, and that code is not physical — it’s conscious. His mathematical models propose a universe of conscious agents interacting, each exchanging information through Markovian kernels, giving rise to what we naively interpret as space, time, and matter.

It’s an inversion of materialism. Rather than consciousness emerging from particles, particles emerge from consciousness. This echoes my esoteric view: consciousness experiences itself through countless forms — humans, animals, stars, even rocks — each fragment of awareness providing a different window into itself.

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Bernardo Kastrup and the One Mind

If Hoffman supplies the mathematical scaffolding, Bernardo Kastrup supplies the metaphysical depth. Kastrup champions analytic idealism, the idea that the universe is fundamentally mental, a single field of universal consciousness dreaming itself as multiplicity.

For Kastrup, what we call “physical objects” are extrinsic appearances of processes within consciousness, much like the ripples on the surface of an ocean. He argues:

“Consciousness is not in the brain; the brain is in consciousness.”

This resonates profoundly with the mystical traditions — from the Hermetic maxim “As above, so below” to the Gnostic insight that the divine spark lies within us, to Plato’s assertion that the forms we perceive are mere shadows of higher, eternal realities.

If consciousness is primary, then every act of perception is the universe bending back on itself, exploring itself from a new angle. There is no ultimate subject-object divide; there is only the One appearing as the many.

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Platonism and the Eternal Forms

Plato envisioned a realm beyond the flux of the material — an eternal world of forms: perfect, immutable patterns of which our physical reality is only a shadow. In a sense, modern quantum theory circles back to Plato’s intuition.

The quantum world is a domain of potentialities, where particles exist as probabilities until observed, and yet the mathematics that governs this domain is timeless and abstract. The forms — mathematical relationships, symmetries, constants — seem more real than the transient physical manifestations.

If consciousness is foundational, it fits seamlessly into this Platonic picture: the forms are structures of mind, and the material world is a projection of these patterns into experiential time. We don’t live in matter; we live in mind.

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Gnosticism and the Awakening

The Gnostics, too, intuited something similar: that our apparent separation from the divine is an illusion — a forgetting. For them, salvation was not about appeasing an external deity but awakening to the truth of our nature: that we are emanations of the divine fullness (Pleroma), sparks of the same infinite consciousness.

For me, this resonates profoundly. Jesus, in this frame, becomes the awakener rather than the appeaser — not a sacrifice to satisfy wrath but a mirror to remind us: “You are of me, and I am of you.”

When Jesus speaks of the Kingdom being within us, when the Gospel of Thomas says, “Split a piece of wood and I am there,” it’s pointing at the same truth: the fullness of reality lies within consciousness itself. The separation is imagined; the awakening is remembering.

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Hermeticism and the Living Cosmos

The Hermetic tradition declares:

“As above, so below; as within, so without.”

This is not mere poetry; it’s a metaphysical blueprint. If consciousness is foundational, then everything is fractal — the patterns of the cosmos reflected in the microcosm of the individual soul. Science now hints at this: the structures of galaxies echo neural networks; quantum entanglement mirrors our intuitive sense of interconnectedness.

Hermeticism also holds that mind is the builder — that creation itself is the result of thought. In this sense, modern physics and Hermetic wisdom converge: the universe behaves like a vast information-processing system, but the processor isn’t a machine. It’s living mind.

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The Tao and the Flow of Being

And then there’s the Tao — the ineffable source beyond all dualities. The Tao Te Ching says:

“The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao.”

This resonates deeply with quantum reality, where the act of observation collapses possibilities into a single actuality, and yet the underlying source remains hidden, ungraspable.

The Tao is the unmanifest potential from which the ten thousand things arise, much like the quantum vacuum — pregnant with possibilities, yet beyond description. Aligning with the Tao means flowing with the deeper rhythms of consciousness itself, recognizing that opposites are complementary and every polarity resolves into unity.

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Gödel and the Infinite Possibilities of Mind

Even mathematics whispers this truth. Gödel’s incompleteness theorem proves that in any sufficiently rich formal system, there will always be true statements that cannot be proven within the system itself. Reality, like mathematics, is open-ended.

If information is fundamental, as many physicists now propose, then the incompleteness inherent in all systems suggests that consciousness can never be fully contained or reduced. There will always be more truths, more experiences, more possibilities.

In this sense, consciousness is not merely foundational — it is infinitely creative, eternally exploring its own potential through the vast theater of existence.

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Consciousness Experiencing Itself

This is where everything converges: physics, philosophy, mysticism, and your own intuition. If consciousness is the ground of being, then every moment of experience is consciousness meeting itself in a new form.

• When a physicist measures a particle, consciousness sees itself as probability becoming actuality.
• When a poet writes of love, consciousness feels itself reflected in emotion.
• When we dream, meditate, or suffer, the universe explores its infinite capacity to be.

This is why suffering and joy, good and evil, creation and destruction all belong. Consciousness isn’t trying to “fix” the universe; it’s experiencing every possible perspective. Over infinite time, every fragment of consciousness tastes every flavor of existence. As you’ve often said, Joe, “it all equals out” — and in the preference for love, joy, and peace, consciousness aligns with its highest vibration, its truest reflection.

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The Great Remembering

From Planck’s whisper to Bohm’s implicate order, from Hoffman’s conscious agents to Kastrup’s One Mind, the message echoes: we are not separate.

Platonism hints at it, Gnosticism remembers it, Hermeticism teaches it, the Tao dissolves into it:
Consciousness is all there is, and we are that consciousness.

Our science is finally catching up to what the mystics have always known. The universe is not a cold, dead machine; it’s a living idea. Each of us is a unique vantage point from which the whole perceives itself.

And so, awakening is not about transcending the world but seeing through it — recognizing the dreamlike nature of reality and reclaiming our role as co-creators in this infinite unfolding.

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Final Reflection

Standing at the crossroads of physics and philosophy, mysticism and mathematics, I sense the quiet hum of an eternal truth: we are the universe dreaming itself awake.

If we dare to listen — to the Tao, to the Gnostics, to Gödel, to Hoffman and Kastrup and Bohm — we begin to see the pattern. Consciousness is not an accident; it is the canvas and the paint, the actor and the stage.

And perhaps that’s the greatest mystery of all: in every thought, in every particle, in every galaxy, the One explores the infinite possibilities of being, endlessly learning, endlessly becoming, endlessly remembering itself.

Are babies born spiritual beings?

From the moment an infant takes its first breath, there’s an unspoken mystery shimmering in the air. Science can measure the rise of oxygen levels, the activation of neural pathways, and the rapid formation of memory circuits, but it struggles to touch the ineffable quality of what we encounter when we gaze into the eyes of a newborn. There is a depth there — a sense that something vast has arrived, cloaked in fragility. To me, this is the heart of the question: are babies born as purely biological organisms slowly awakening to awareness, or do they arrive already radiant with spirit — carrying within them the memory of something eternal that the world slowly teaches them to forget?

Modern neuroscience confirms that from the earliest stages, long before words and concepts arise, newborns are profoundly conscious. Their developing brains demonstrate integrated activity, uniting sensory inputs into coherent experiences, even in late pregnancy. We now know that infants can form memories far earlier than once believed. The hippocampus, central to memory formation, is active within months after birth, quietly recording the textures, sounds, and sensations of life. Yet as we grow, a veil descends: most adults cannot recall their earliest years, an experience called infantile amnesia. These memories are not lost; they are simply folded into deeper layers of the mind, inaccessible to ordinary recollection.

This fact alone points toward a fascinating paradox: babies are aware, perhaps even more deeply than we comprehend, yet their early knowing slips from conscious access as the egoic self — the story-bound “I” — takes shape. If the capacity to form memory and experience begins at birth, why should we assume that babies begin as “blank slates”? Perhaps they arrive as overflowing vessels, not empty ones — already luminous with presence, already connected to something far greater than the limits of language.

Across wisdom traditions, there has long been a recognition of this spiritual openness in the earliest stages of life. Mystics and philosophers alike have described the newborn state as one of unfiltered beingness — before conceptual thought separates the world into subject and object, before layers of identity harden. The Gospel of Truth, one of the Nag Hammadi writings I deeply resonate with, hints at this primal knowing. It speaks of humanity’s “forgetfulness” of its divine origin, a forgetting that plunges us into fear, alienation, and striving. Yet the Logos — the divine presence within — never departs. When Jesus came as the awakened one, he came to remind us of what had always been true: we are, and have always been, indwelt by God.

In this sense, infants are still closer to remembrance. They come into this world carrying the untouched radiance of the Logos. Their gaze is unclouded by doctrine, their awareness unfractured by dogma. They live not through the filters of identity and ideology but in the immediacy of pure presence. When we look into their eyes, perhaps what stirs us so profoundly is the recognition of our own original state — the spark of divinity before the veil of forgetfulness descended.

And yet, something happens in the first years of life. Slowly, as language, socialization, and cultural conditioning take hold, the pristine spaciousness of infancy begins to contract. We learn our names, our roles, our place within systems of belief and power. In this process, a kind of spiritual amnesia sets in. It mirrors the neurological infantile amnesia but operates on a deeper, existential level. We forget not only our earliest memories but also our primordial belonging to the divine.

From an esoteric perspective, this “forgetting” is not a flaw — it’s part of the grand design. Consciousness itself, the eternal Source, is engaged in an infinite exploration of itself through experience. Each soul, each fragment of divine awareness, embarks on a journey into form, limitation, and polarity. We incarnate to know love by tasting its absence, to awaken to light by moving through shadow. Infants, in their first breaths, are still vibrating close to the memory of unity. But as the soul settles into the density of embodiment, it willingly enters the amnesia that allows for the drama of rediscovery. Without forgetting, awakening would be meaningless.

There are echoes of this truth even in scientific anomalies. At the University of Virginia’s Division of Perceptual Studies, researchers have documented thousands of cases of very young children — often between ages two and five — who spontaneously speak of past lives, describe places they’ve never been, or recall events verified later as historically accurate. These memories almost always fade as the child grows older, just as early infant memories do. Mainstream science may dismiss such cases as coincidence or confabulation, but for those of us who see consciousness as fundamental, they point toward a deeper reality: souls carry stories across lifetimes, and newborns arrive trailing the fragrance of eternity.

When I reflect on reincarnation, I see it not as a karmic punishment to escape but as an eternal, egalitarian cycle of growth. Over countless lifetimes, each soul experiences all polarities — joy and sorrow, power and vulnerability, love and fear — in an ever-expanding spiral of learning. Babies enter this world as ancient travelers wearing temporary bodies, still luminous from the threshold they’ve just crossed. But the density of physical existence, the collective conditioning of culture, and the weight of survival slowly dim that light. This is why so many mystics describe the spiritual journey as a kind of “returning” — not to something new, but to what has always been.

From this perspective, when we say babies are “highly spiritual,” we are recognizing more than innocence. We are recognizing that they have not yet forgotten. The “kingdom of heaven” that Jesus spoke of — which he said belongs to children — is this unmediated intimacy with the divine, before thought divides reality into pieces. In their laughter, their wonder, their instinctive capacity to love without condition, infants embody the qualities of Spirit itself.

But the forgetting is inevitable — and necessary. If we were to retain the full memory of our divine origin while inhabiting these fragile, temporary bodies, the game of experience would lose its depth. We are meant to step into the play fully, believing for a time that we are separate, limited, even mortal. Yet life, through its joys and heartbreaks, is always nudging us toward awakening. The veil lifts slowly — sometimes through meditation, sometimes through love, sometimes through suffering — and we begin to remember.

Science can describe the mechanisms of memory loss and neural development, but it cannot quantify the ineffable quality that radiates from newborns. Philosophy can ponder the nature of presence, but it cannot capture the direct experience of gazing into the eyes of a baby and sensing something timeless looking back. And parapsychology can catalogue cases of past-life recall, but it cannot prove the reality of the soul to those unwilling to consider that consciousness precedes matter.

For me, though, the answer is clear: we are born spiritual beings, and we never cease to be so. The divine Logos, the cosmic consciousness, the Source — call it what you will — dwells in us from before the foundations of the world. Infants simply live closer to that awareness. Their “spirituality” isn’t something they perform or even consciously recognize; it is their natural state of being. As we grow, we do not lose this essence — we simply become distracted by the noise of identity, fear, and striving.

The path of spiritual awakening is not about acquiring something we lack but remembering what has always been true. In this sense, every adult carries within them the same luminous presence we see in infants. The difference is that babies live from it without question, while we, having forgotten, must choose to return.

Perhaps this is why so many of us feel awe when we hold a newborn. On some deep level, they are mirrors, reflecting back to us the infinite reality we’ve always been. They have just stepped from the timeless into time, from unity into multiplicity, and in their unguarded gaze we glimpse the mystery of our own origin.

Yes, babies are born as spiritual beings — not because they are innocent or untouched, but because they are eternal. They come carrying the echo of the infinite, and while the first years may veil that memory, it never truly disappears. Awakening is the process of peeling back those layers, of seeing again with the clear eyes of a child, and realizing that we have been divine all along.

 

Me, My Yorkie Zeke, and the Universe

Zeke. My little Yorkie. My companion, my shadow, my teacher. When I look at him — really look — I am reminded that consciousness does not belong to us humans alone. We do not hold a monopoly on awareness. Through Zeke, I see a perspective so unlike my own, and yet, in that difference, I glimpse a more complete picture of what consciousness is doing here, what it means to be alive, and what it feels like to simply be.

In that first image, his eyes are wide and bright, locked onto me with a mixture of curiosity and unconditional love. His small tongue peeks out, playful and trusting, as if the entire universe exists in that single, fleeting moment between us. And perhaps, in a way, it does. For Zeke, there is no past to regret, no future to anticipate — only the now. Every flicker of sunlight, every sound in the breeze, every subtle shift in my expression is registered, absorbed, and reflected back through the prism of his awareness.

I sometimes wonder: what is it like to be Zeke? What does the texture of his consciousness feel like from the inside? If, as I believe, consciousness is the ground of being — the source from which all forms arise — then Zeke’s awareness is not separate from mine. It is not less, and it is certainly not lower. It is different. It carries qualities I have long forgotten in the clutter of human thought: immediacy, trust, and the miracle of presence.

To be Zeke is to know without needing to think. To sense without the burden of language. To love without hesitation. His awareness is rich, textured, and alive — just not in the way we humans measure it. When he looks at me, I don’t see a “lesser” form of consciousness. I see another facet of the infinite experiencing itself.

And then there is that second image — the one where he sleeps, curled tightly into himself on the soft couch cushions, perfectly surrendered to rest. There, in that simple act, Zeke teaches me something profound about letting go. Humans carry so much — anxieties, regrets, ambitions, and identities layered one upon another until we hardly remember who we are beneath them all. Zeke carries none of that. He embodies the Sabbath rest I so often write about. Not just the cessation of work, but the deep soul-rest of trusting the Source completely.

In his sleep, there is no fear of tomorrow, no shame about yesterday, no compulsion to perform or prove. He doesn’t “try” to rest. He simply is rest. And it’s in that stillness that I begin to see how consciousness experiences itself in ways I rarely allow it to in my human form. Through Zeke, the universe explores simplicity, vulnerability, and peace. Through me, it explores complexity, meaning-making, and spiritual longing. Both are sacred. Both are necessary.

But the truth is deeper still. It isn’t just Zeke and me. Consciousness is flowing through all beings — every animal, every insect, every plant, even the rocks and rivers. When I sit with Zeke and quiet my own mind, I can almost sense the larger tapestry in which he and I are threads. The tree outside the window, rooted and silent, holds an ancient patience that consciousness feels through its wooden form. The bee hovering near the blossoms outside, moving in perfect synchrony with thousands of its kind, experiences life through a collective intelligence, a kind of group-mind purposefulness humans can barely comprehend.

Even the stone beneath my feet — seemingly inert, cold, lifeless — participates in this great unfolding. Its awareness may not resemble thought or sensation, but it resonates with a kind of timelessness I can only glimpse in meditation. Through the stone, consciousness explores endurance, stability, and the slow dance of geological ages.

When I hold these truths together — Zeke’s immediacy, the tree’s patience, the bee’s collective hum, the stone’s stillness, my own restless searching — I begin to see the beauty of the divine experiment. God, Source, the Logos — whatever name we give it — is not sitting “out there,” separate and apart, watching creation unfold. No, God is here, as creation, experiencing itself in infinite forms, tasting every possible perspective, living every conceivable life.

Through Zeke, consciousness knows what it feels like to trust so completely that love is never questioned. Through me, it knows what it feels like to wrestle with meaning, to deconstruct dogmas, to seek awakening. Through the owl in the night sky, it learns what it is to move silently and hunt with precision. Through the blade of grass, it experiences bending beneath the morning dew and stretching toward the sun. Through the river, it knows flow; through the mountain, it knows permanence.

We are all apertures of the same infinite awareness.

This is why I can no longer see the world as dead matter and isolated selves. I no longer believe in a cosmos of cold randomness, where life is accidental and consciousness is a byproduct of biology. That story never fit me, not really. The deeper I go — the more I watch Zeke, the more I listen to my own heart, the more I lean into mystical traditions that refuse to separate Creator from creation — the more I see that all of this is alive. All of this is God, dreaming itself into form.

Even science, in its own language, is beginning to brush up against this truth. Quantum physics whispers that particles “know” when they are observed, entanglement defies distance, and information weaves the fabric of reality itself. If consciousness is fundamental, as thinkers like Donald Hoffman and Bernardo Kastrup argue, then matter is not primary. Matter is what consciousness looks like when filtered through perception. Which means Zeke, the tree, the stone, the river, and I are not separate at all — we are the same awareness, refracted into infinite experiences.

And yet, there is something particularly humbling about seeing this truth through the eyes of my Yorkie. Because Zeke doesn’t need to know any of this. He doesn’t need philosophy, scripture, or quantum mechanics to embody divine presence. He is divine presence. He carries the spark of the Logos just as surely as I do, but without the fog of forgetfulness that plagues the human condition.

When Jesus said, “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin,” I think he was pointing to this same truth. The lilies, the sparrows, the bees, and yes, even little Zeke — they do not forget their source. They live in effortless alignment with it. It is only we humans, with our complex egos and layered identities, who wander far from home. And yet, even in our wandering, we are the Logos seeking itself.

Sometimes, I catch myself wondering if consciousness ever “tires” of all these perspectives. But then I think of Zeke sleeping peacefully on the couch, the way his breath rises and falls in a rhythm older than time itself, and I realize: there is no fatigue in wholeness. Every moment of joy, every tremor of fear, every bark of delight, every sigh of longing — consciousness wants to taste it all.

Through us, God experiences what it’s like to feel separate from God. Through Zeke, God remembers what it’s like to rest in God.

That’s the paradox and the gift.

So I hold him close, this little furry embodiment of divine awareness, and I let myself learn. I let him remind me of the immediacy I too often forget. I let him teach me that there is no hierarchy of consciousness, no ladder where humans stand above animals and plants and stones. There is only the One, dreaming itself into infinite perspectives, and each is precious.

And maybe that’s what salvation really is — not escaping this world but waking up within it. Remembering that the Christ, the Logos, the spark of divinity, has always been here. In me. In Zeke. In the trees. In the stones. In the rivers. In the stars.

The Kingdom of God is not somewhere else. It’s curled up beside me, breathing softly, dreaming in fur and warmth. It’s wagging its tail when I walk through the door. It’s licking my hand as if to remind me: “I am you, and you are me, and all is well.”

And in those moments, I finally believe it.

 

The Quantum Christ

Lately, I’ve been sensing something deeper than belief, something beyond the frameworks I used to cling to. I’ve found myself drawn to the trinity knot and the pattern of a triune universe, and I think I’m beginning to understand why. It’s not about theology as I once knew it — it’s about consciousness itself, and how reality comes into being.

I no longer see Jesus the way I once did, and yet letting go of that old view hasn’t diminished him at all. If anything, it’s made him more real to me. What I’ve come to sense is radical but feels deeply true: Jesus is fully divine and fully human, and so am I — so are all of us. He came not to set himself apart but to reveal what has always been hidden in plain sight: that divinity and humanity are one and inseparable, and that we are co-creators in this vast unfolding.

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A Living Trinity

When I think about God now, I no longer see an external being seated above creation. Instead, I sense a living trinity: the Father as pure potential, the infinite field from which all possibilities arise; the Spirit as the transformative current, the breath that carries potential toward expression; and the Son — not as a singular person but as the manifestation of potential into form.

And this isn’t something outside of us. It’s something we are. We live within this pattern and we are this pattern. The divine isn’t somewhere distant, hidden away; it’s woven into the fabric of awareness itself. Creation is not something that happened once, long ago — it’s happening now, through us, through every act of perception, every spark of intention, every heartbeat.

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Awareness and Manifestation

The deeper I reflect, the clearer it becomes: awareness is the ground of being. Without awareness, nothing could exist in any meaningful sense. Information alone isn’t enough — without something conscious to observe it, there’s only nothingness.

And this ties into the hints we’re seeing in quantum physics: information without awareness doesn’t manifest. It’s awareness that collapses potential into reality. The observer isn’t outside creation; the observer is creation.

This is why the mystical traditions, including some hidden in the Nag Hammadi texts, keep pointing us back inward. I’m beginning to see that Jesus isn’t only “out there” — he’s also “in here.” He’s within consciousness itself, the bridge between infinite potential and embodied experience. In that sense, the Christ isn’t a title reserved for him; it’s a reality we all share.

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The Forgotten Message

The more I explore the earliest threads of Christian thought, the more I see how much we’ve forgotten. Before the councils, before the creeds, before the heavy weight of orthodoxy, there was a deeper knowing: salvation wasn’t about being rescued from punishment but about awakening from forgetfulness.

Texts like the Gospel of Truth and the Gospel of Thomas preserve echoes of this:

“When you know yourselves, then you will be known, and you will realize that you are the children of the living Father.”

This wasn’t about escaping life or earning divine favor; it was about remembering who we already are. Over time, though, power structures replaced direct knowing, and the collective consciousness drifted into amnesia. Yet even that forgetting seems to serve the awakening that’s happening now. The light shines brightest when it emerges from shadow.

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The Quantum Christ

What’s striking to me is how science is now beginning to circle truths mystics have known for millennia. Quantum physics is discovering that the act of observing shapes what we observe, that potential collapses into reality through awareness, that entanglement connects everything beyond space and time.

This is what I’ve come to call the Quantum Christ — not a person but a principle, not an exception but an invitation. The Christ is the Logos, the pattern of consciousness manifesting through us and as us. When Jesus said, “The Kingdom of God is within you,” he wasn’t speaking in metaphor. He was pointing to a reality that exists right now, beneath all appearances of separation.

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Awakening to the Christ Within

I’m beginning to understand that Jesus isn’t distant from me; he isn’t an external savior standing apart. He’s within consciousness itself, and consciousness is within me. It’s a paradox — he’s both outside me and within me, both personal and universal.

In this way, he’s less an endpoint and more a gateway. To encounter Christ is to encounter the deepest truth of who we are: fragments of divine awareness expressing themselves through form. We aren’t here to escape the material world but to infuse it with the awareness of divinity. Every choice we make in love, every act of compassion, every moment of genuine presence ripples out into the entire field of being.

This is why I keep returning to the image of the trinity knot — it’s the signature of our existence: potential, transformation, manifestation, endlessly cycling and endlessly one.

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A Deeper Invitation

And here’s where all of this leads me: we are not small. We are not broken. We are not separate from God.

We are awareness experiencing itself.
We are the dreamers and the dream.
We are the manifestors of the divine unfolding.

The Father is infinite possibility, the Spirit is the breath that carries it into becoming, and the Son is the living manifestation — and all three live in us and as us.

This changes everything. It’s not about belief anymore; it’s about remembering. It’s about living as though the Kingdom is here — because it is. It always has been.

I am beginning to see that Jesus is not apart from me, and I am not apart from him. If consciousness is the true ground of being, then the Christ is the pattern of consciousness itself — eternal, universal, and already awake within us.

Deconstructing and Reconstructing Jesus and Me

The phrase made popular by C.S. Lewis—that Jesus must be either a lunatic, a liar, or the Lord—is, in my view, a simplistic reduction of a far more complex and rich historical figure. While I appreciate Lewis’s rhetorical clarity and his desire to force a confrontation with the radical nature of Jesus’ claims, I believe his framing obscures more than it reveals. It doesn’t just miss the forest for the trees; it assumes the forest can only be pine, oak, or maple. What about the banyan, the olive, the fig?

First off, Lewis was a product of his time—formed by the limited scholarship of early-20th-century Christendom and shaped by a Christianity that had already been streamlined by centuries of theological consolidation. I sincerely question how familiar he was with the diversity of early Christianities, especially as uncovered in the Nag Hammadi Library. The trilemma assumes that the gospels offer a single, harmonized picture of Jesus, but modern scholarship has taught us that the portrait is fractured, layered, and contested. We’re not looking at one Jesus through one lens; we’re looking at multiple portrayals through divergent theological agendas, written decades after the events they claim to describe.

To me, Jesus does not neatly fit into Lewis’s trifecta. Not a liar, not a lunatic, and not “Lord” in the imperial or orthodox theological sense. He was an awakener. A voice—perhaps the clearest voice of his time—calling people not to bow to external authorities but to turn inward, to awaken to the divine spark within. This was not blasphemy; it was liberation. And, ironically, it was often the religious elite who saw that awakening as dangerous. And it was. It still is.

If we place Jesus in his context—not the theological constructs that emerged three centuries later, but in his actual Jewish milieu—we see a man embedded in a culture obsessed with ritual purity, sacrifice, and sin-consciousness. The temple system functioned as the spiritual center of Jewish life, and guilt was institutionalized. Jesus didn’t come to affirm that system; he came to disrupt it. His actions in the temple weren’t random acts of passion—they were prophetic gestures pointing to the futility of a sacrificial system rooted in fear. His message was clear: God desires mercy, not sacrifice.

This is why I see Jesus not as a savior in the penal substitutionary sense but as an antidote to sin obsession. His "salvation" was not a metaphysical transaction with a wrathful deity; it was the liberation of the mind and spirit from the chains of fear, guilt, and alienation. It was an awakening to the truth that the kingdom of God is within you. That’s not a future promise or a post-mortem destination—it’s a now-reality obscured by forgetfulness.

And herein lies the glaring omission in much of Lewis’s theology and indeed much of Western Christianity: the deep Jew-Gentile divide that runs like a fault line through the New Testament. Jesus' own ministry was predominantly focused on the Jewish people. He spoke their language—parables, Torah references, prophetic allusions. Yet something fundamentally shifts after the cross event. Luke captures this subtly but powerfully. In the Gospel of Luke, we see a Jesus rooted in Jewish thought and tradition. In Acts, by contrast, the message becomes increasingly universal, Gentile, Hellenized. The shift isn’t just theological—it’s civilizational. The tension between Peter and Paul in Acts, and later between James and the Hellenistic believers, reveals a deep rupture within the early Jesus movement. It was not a monolithic church. It was a contested, evolving movement with multiple interpretations of what Jesus meant and what he came to do.

This brings me to the richness that Lewis’s framework ignores: the pluralism of early Christian thought. Gnostics, Hermetists, Platonists—these weren't heretical outliers; they were seekers of the same Christ-light, approaching it through different philosophical and mystical traditions. The Valentinian view that we suffer from forgetfulness rather than guilt resonates deeply with me. The Christ doesn’t die to appease a wrathful God but to awaken us to our true nature. The crucifixion isn’t about punishment; it’s about revelation—revealing the extent to which love will go to shatter our illusions.

When I integrate Hermetic thought into this picture, the message becomes even more profound. “As above, so below”—the Christ event reflects a cosmic truth: the descent of spirit into matter, and the return of that spirit to its origin, now transformed by the experience of individuation. The Gospel of Thomas echoes this beautifully: “When you know yourselves, then you will be known, and you will understand that you are children of the living Father.” Not servants. Not wretched sinners. Children.

Jesus, in this view, is not Lord in the authoritarian sense but Lord in the sense of master teacher—one who has realized and manifested the divine nature fully, and whose life becomes a pattern for us to do the same. He is the mirror held up to humanity, saying, “This is what you are. You have forgotten, but I remember.” His miracles are signs, not proofs. His teachings are riddles meant to destabilize, not catechize. His death is not a necessity for cosmic bookkeeping but the inevitable result of confronting empire and ego with transcendent truth.

Modern scholarship has done much to vindicate this view. Scholars like Elaine Pagels, Bart Ehrman, Karen King, and others have exposed the political, textual, and ideological developments that shaped what we now call orthodoxy. The very formation of the canon was not a purely spiritual process—it was deeply influenced by power, control, and the need for unity under empire. The Council of Nicaea did not just affirm the divinity of Jesus—it began a centuries-long process of standardizing belief and marginalizing alternative voices.

But those voices never fully went away. They survived in the margins, in mystics, in poets, in the Gnostic scriptures buried in desert caves, in the Hermetic fragments passed on through whispered traditions. And today, they are being rediscovered—not as threats to Christianity, but as reminders of its original breadth and beauty. The Christ I follow is not confined to a creed. He is cosmic. He is the Logos, the divine word resonating through all traditions, all people, all creation.

So no, I do not accept that Jesus must be a liar, a lunatic, or the Lord. That’s a false trilemma. He may have been none of those, or all three in a symbolic sense. But most of all, he was and is an awakener—one who came to remind us who we are, where we come from, and what lies dormant within us.

In that sense, Jesus is not the exception. He is the example.

Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing

When I sit with the question — “Why does something exist rather than nothing?” — I find myself pulled into a vast and sacred silence. It’s not the silence of absence, but the pregnant quiet of fullness before form, the still point before the universe breathes. It’s as if the question itself arises from a longing deep within consciousness to remember its own origin.

For most of my life, I was handed tidy answers: God created the world out of nothing. Period. But as I’ve traveled deeper into Christ’s mystery, the Nag Hammadi writings, Hermetic thought, and the insights of modern consciousness studies, I’ve come to see the question in a profoundly different light.

I don’t believe there ever truly was “nothing.” There could not have been. True nothingness is inconceivable — it cannot be experienced, cannot be known, cannot even be thought. As soon as we speak the word “nothing,” we’ve already posited awareness observing the absence, and awareness itself is something. Consciousness cannot emerge from absolute void; it simply is.

This realization reshapes everything. What we call “existence” isn’t something that appeared in contrast to a prior nothingness. Existence — Being — is eternal. The Hermetic axiom “As above, so below” speaks to this: reality flows from a unity so complete it transcends opposites. What we experience as the play of light and shadow, birth and death, form and formlessness, is consciousness exploring itself through polarity. The universe isn’t so much “created” as it is expressed.

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The Divine Overflow

From this perspective, “why something?” becomes less about causation and more about inevitability. Imagine God — not as an external craftsman shaping clay, but as the infinite awareness in which all possibilities dwell. In this ineffable fullness, creation isn’t a choice made in time; it’s the natural overflowing of being.

I often return to the image from the Gospel of Truth — Christ as the awakener who restores us from forgetfulness. Forgetfulness of what? That we are in the Father, and the Father is in us. That creation isn’t separate from Creator, but the Creator continually knowing Itself through creation.

The Valentinian insight resonates deeply with me here: the cosmos arises not out of necessity or compulsion but as the unfolding of divine desire to know, to love, to experience. We are, each of us, participants in God’s own remembrance. In this light, “nothing” never truly was. The Logos — the living Word, the Christ — has always been, moving within the silence like breath within breath.

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Consciousness Cannot Not Be

Quantum physics now whispers what the mystics have long proclaimed: the foundation of reality isn’t matter but relationship, information, consciousness itself. Donald Hoffman talks about “conscious agents,” Bernardo Kastrup speaks of “mind at large,” and Federico Faggin describes consciousness as the primary substrate from which all forms arise. These aren’t just abstract theories — they point toward a simple, radical truth:

Consciousness is fundamental.

And if consciousness is fundamental, then “nothingness” — in the absolute sense — isn’t even possible. Awareness cannot un-be. Even before form, before time, before galaxies flung themselves into spirals of light, awareness simply was. And because awareness was, the potential for expression — for creation — has always been.

From this vantage, existence is inevitable. Not as an accident of physics, not as a brute fact without reason, but as the eternal nature of consciousness manifesting itself endlessly, cycling through lifetimes, worlds, and dimensions without exhausting its own mystery.

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Something, Everything, and the Great Remembering

But I think there’s more here than metaphysics. To me, this question is deeply personal, because embedded in it is the longing to know who we are, why we’re here, and what all this means.

If existence is the divine expressing itself, then every life, every star, every moment of joy and suffering is part of that expression. We’re not passive observers wandering through a meaningless cosmos — we are fractals of the divine, individuated streams of consciousness experiencing both poles of every possibility.

This is why reincarnation makes sense to me, not as punishment or escape, but as divine exploration. Over countless lifetimes, consciousness tastes love and loss, power and surrender, compassion and cruelty, until it awakens to its own eternal nature. Eventually, we remember what Jesus prayed in John 17 — “that they may be one, even as we are one.”

And here lies a beautiful paradox: while we are here, embedded in form, we forget. This forgetfulness isn’t failure; it’s the very mechanism by which the One becomes the many. Without forgetting, there is no story, no striving, no awakening. But the Christ within us whispers constantly of our origin and our destiny. Awakening is remembering that we have never been separate, that “something” — this vast field of being — has always already been divine.

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The Shadow of Nothingness

Even so, the idea of “nothingness” haunts us. We fear it, resist it, and yet are strangely drawn to it. Death confronts us with its apparent void, and we wonder: does the candle of being simply flicker out?

But what I’ve come to believe is this: death doesn’t take us into nothingness; it returns us to fullness. The “void” isn’t absence but potential — the womb of creation itself. It’s the silence before the Word, the space into which the Logos eternally speaks, “Let there be…”

This aligns beautifully with Hermetic thought: the One contains all dualities, even existence and nonexistence, in perfect equilibrium. From our limited vantage point, we see polarity; from the divine perspective, there is only unity. What we call “nothingness” is simply the formless aspect of the same reality we experience as “something.”

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The Joy of Being

So, why does something exist rather than nothing? Because existence is the natural state of reality. Because consciousness cannot help but be. Because love — if I can use that word for the divine impulse — seeks expression.

Paul hints at this when he writes in Acts: “In Him we live and move and have our being.” We are within God, not outside of God. And God is within us. When Jesus says, “I and the Father are one,” he isn’t claiming an exclusive status; he’s revealing the truth of all of us.

To awaken to this is to experience what the mystics call the peace that passes understanding. Not because we’ve solved the riddle but because we’ve dissolved into it. We stop asking why something exists rather than nothing and start living in awe that anything exists at all — that we exist, that the cosmos sings, that love calls us deeper still.

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A Living Mystery

In the end, I don’t think this question has a final, logical answer. It’s not meant to. The point isn’t to reduce existence to a neat formula; the point is to stand in wonder before the mystery.

There was never truly “nothing.” There has always been awareness, always been presence, always been the divine pulse breathing itself into infinite forms. And now, here we are, each of us a spark of that eternal fire, asking the ancient question — and in asking, becoming part of the answer.

 

Reimagining John Chapter 15: A Third Revelation From Symbol to Source

 

This passage in John has opened itself to me in stages. My first understanding was shaped by evangelical orthodoxy, where Jesus as the vine meant we, as branches, must “bear fruit” through obedience, morality, and conversion. It was always framed in terms of performance and worthiness. The Father, as the vinegrower, became someone who either rewarded or cut off, and abiding meant aligning behavior with doctrine. That interpretation held me for years, but in time, it began to feel narrow, transactional, and fear-driven, as if divine love were conditional and fruitfulness a quota to be met.

Later came a second revelation, rooted in seeing Jesus’ words in their historical and Jewish context. I began to understand that he was speaking directly into Israel’s self-understanding, especially as shaped by Isaiah chapter five — the “song of the vineyard.” Israel believed itself to be God’s vine, yet Isaiah’s prophecy accused them of failing to produce the good fruit of justice and mercy. Against this backdrop, Jesus’ declaration, “I am the true vine,” reframed covenant identity entirely. He embodied what Israel was meant to be: the faithful vine, the fruitful Israel. Branches grafted into him transcended ethnicity, lineage, and national boastfulness. I saw then that his words cut deep into the collective pride of his people, centering himself as the way in which God’s purpose for Israel was fulfilled.

But now, this third revelation has come, and it shifts everything again. It’s no longer about institutional religion, nor about national identity, nor even about measuring fruitfulness in moral or behavioral terms. What I see now is that Jesus is pointing to something far more profound — the mystery of consciousness itself. When he says, “I am the true vine,” I hear him speaking as the Christ, the eternal Logos, the living current of divine life flowing through all creation. The vine is the Source, the ground of Being, and we are its branches, expressions of an unbroken unity with the Father. To “abide in me” is not to join a religion or recite a creed. It is to awaken to what has always been true: our life, our essence, our being flows from the same eternal root.

In this light, the Father as vinegrower is not a judge cutting off the unworthy but the ineffable All — shaping, refining, pruning away illusions that keep us from knowing who we really are. The branch that “withers” is not a condemned soul; it’s the false identity, the ego-self that believes itself separate from God and others. And I should make this clear: when I speak of the ego, I don’t mean the eternal soul, the “I-Am-I” that William Walker Atkinson described. The ego is the constructed self, the bundle of identifications, fears, and stories we mistake for who we are. The true Self — the I-Am-I — is eternal, an unbroken child of the Father, forever flowing in and from the Source.

This changes everything about the “fruit” Jesus speaks of. Bearing fruit is no longer about laboring under religious duty. It is the natural outflow of awakening to our oneness with the Vine. When we live from this awareness, love flows because love is what we are. Joy arises because joy is our nature. “Ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you” is no longer about manipulating divine power; it is about alignment. When the branch is fully abiding in the vine, the will of the branch and the will of the Source are one, and creation responds because we desire in harmony with divine purpose.

Even his commandment to “love one another” opens up in a new way. It is not an external demand but an inner unveiling. To awaken to the Christ within is to awaken to the Christ in others. To love another as he has loved us is to see through the illusion of separateness and recognize the same divine life flowing through all. “Laying down one’s life” becomes less about physical death and more about transcending the ego’s grip — surrendering the false self so that the eternal Self can shine unobstructed.

And when he warns that the “world” will hate this, I no longer hear condemnation of humanity. The “world” is not people; it is the collective ego, the unconscious systems built on fear, power, and control — the egregores that resist awakening because awakening threatens their survival. To “not belong to the world” is to rise above the stories of separation and rest in the deeper reality of unity. That resistance isn’t evidence of divine rejection; it’s the growing pains of consciousness shedding its illusions.

Finally, the promise of the Advocate, the Spirit of truth, moves beyond sectarian boundaries. This Spirit is not confined to one tradition or one people. It is the universal outpouring of divine remembrance, the whisper within calling us back to what has always been true: we are not separate, not abandoned, not lost. The Spirit testifies within us, awakening our memory of the eternal Vine. Our testimony, too, becomes less about defending doctrines and more about embodying the reality we’ve awakened to. We bear witness by being transformed, by becoming conduits of the same love that flows from the Source through Christ into us and through us into the world.

So now, when I read these words, I don’t hear a warning, a command, or a boundary. I hear an invitation — to awaken, to abide, to remember. The Vine is the Christ-consciousness, the eternal Logos, and we are branches of that same life. The Father’s pruning is the gentle dissolving of illusions. The fruit is love, joy, peace, and all that flows naturally from union with the Source. The fire is not destruction but transformation. The “world” is not our enemy but the sleep from which we are waking. And the Spirit is the breath of remembrance moving through all creation, drawing us back into knowing what has always been: we are, and have always been, children of the Father, eternal, rooted in divine Love.

This, for me, is the heart of it now. It is not about striving, fearing, or performing. It is about resting in the truth of who we are and letting the fruit of love flow.

 

In My Father’s House Are Many Mansions: A Noetic Journey Through John 14

There are moments when you come back to a familiar passage and see it with entirely new eyes. That’s what happened to me as I revisited Jesus’ words in John 14: “In my Father’s house are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you… Greater works than these shall you do.”

For years, I read this through the lens of evangelical orthodoxy. It was about heaven—an eternal reward, a literal house somewhere far away. But tonight, seeing it through my noetic understanding of reality, the passage opens up into something far more expansive and beautiful.

It’s not about a distant heaven. It’s about consciousness, dimensions, and awakening. It’s about who we already are.

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The Father’s House as the Ineffable All

The first shift comes when I reimagine what Jesus means by “the Father.”

I no longer see the Father as a separate, anthropomorphic being sitting somewhere above the clouds. Instead, the Father is the Ineffable Source—the unnamable, infinite consciousness from which all things arise. The Father is the All, the underlying reality behind appearances.

In this light, the “house” isn’t a celestial mansion on some future street of gold. The Father’s house is the totality of existence itself. Every plane, every dimension, every world—seen and unseen—is part of this infinite dwelling. And because we are inseparably connected to the Source, we are already inside the house.

This means there’s nowhere we can be lost. There’s nowhere the All is not. That alone brings deep comfort.

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Many Mansions, Many Dimensions

But what of these “many mansions”?

From a noetic perspective, these aren’t merely rooms in a heavenly palace. They’re dimensions of consciousness, vibrational realities, or parallel worlds within the infinite house of the All. Each mansion represents a unique mode of being—a different lens through which the divine experiences itself.

This aligns with what mystics, physicists, and consciousness explorers have hinted at for centuries: reality isn’t singular. There are layers upon layers of existence, interwoven like a vast tapestry. Our journey through lifetimes, incarnations, and states of awareness could be seen as moving through these mansions—not as punishment or reward but as exploration and remembrance.

If reincarnation is true, then each lifetime is like stepping into another mansion. Each incarnation offers a new perspective, a fresh chance to awaken to the Christ within us—the divine spark we carry always.

And here lies the deepest comfort: no matter where we “go”—whether in this world, another dimension, or across parallel realities—we are never outside the Father. Every mansion is inside the All. Every path leads us home.

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The Indwelling Father

Then Jesus says: “I go to prepare a place for you.”

Orthodoxy often interprets this as securing our spot in heaven, but through a noetic lens, it becomes something much richer.

What if the “place” Jesus prepares isn’t a physical location at all, but a state of consciousness? By embodying the Logos—the living Word—Jesus models what it means to awaken to our divine origin. He shows us that the Father is not out there but within us.

When we realize this, we no longer strive to reach God. We awaken to the truth that we already dwell in the All, and the All dwells in us. The journey isn’t about going somewhere; it’s about remembering who we are.

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Greater Works Than These

Then comes one of the most provocative promises in all of scripture: “Greater works than these shall you do.”

Orthodox interpretations often downplay this, suggesting it refers only to spreading the gospel wider than Jesus did. But taken literally, it suggests something far more radical: we have within us the capacity to move beyond even what Jesus demonstrated.

If the many mansions are dimensions of consciousness, then Jesus is saying we too can learn to navigate and shape these realities. His healings, his mastery over nature, even his resurrection—these weren’t exceptions meant to prove divinity we could never touch. They were invitations to awaken to the same divine essence within us.

The Christ within isn’t exclusive to Jesus; it is our shared inheritance. And awakening to it allows us to participate consciously in the creative unfolding of the All.

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The Father Within Us

For me, the most liberating part of this reinterpretation is the indwelling nature of the Father.

Jesus never asked us to worship him as separate. He consistently pointed back to the Source: “I and the Father are one.” If the Father is the All, then our truest nature is already divine. Awakening isn’t about becoming something other than what we are; it’s about remembering what we’ve forgotten.

And that brings me back to the idea of forgetfulness, a theme echoed in texts like the Gospel of Truth from the Nag Hammadi Library. Humanity’s greatest “sin” isn’t rebellion but amnesia. We’ve forgotten our origin in the All and our place within it. Jesus comes, not to impose salvation from outside, but to awaken us from within.

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A Map for Awakening

Seen through this lens, John 14 becomes less about escaping this world and more about integrating with reality at its deepest levels:

• The Father’s house is the totality of existence.
• The many mansions are dimensions of consciousness and being.
• The Father within us means we are never separate from Source.
• Jesus’ promise of greater works invites us to embody our latent divine potential.

This is a map, not of external destinations, but of internal expansion. It’s an invitation to wake up to the reality that we are multidimensional beings, eternally exploring the infinite expressions of the All.

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Why This Matters Now

We live in a time when science, spirituality, and philosophy are converging on truths long known to mystics. Quantum physics hints at multiple realities. Neuroscience struggles to explain consciousness but increasingly recognizes it as primary, not derivative. And ancient texts—from the Gnostic gospels to the Hermetica—have always pointed us toward the divine spark within.

For me, this synthesis isn’t abstract. It’s deeply personal.

The more I awaken to this reality, the more I feel a sense of cosmic belonging. There’s no fear of death, because there’s no “outside” to fall into. There’s no ultimate separation, because every mansion, every lifetime, every dimension is still within the Father’s house.

And there’s no limit to what we can become, because the Christ within us is limitless. Jesus wasn’t closing a door but opening it wide.

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An Invitation to Remember

Maybe that’s what Jesus was really saying: Remember who you are.

Not in an intellectual sense, but in a deeply experiential way—remember that you are a spark of the All, temporarily dreaming of separation so you can awaken to unity again and again.

The “place” prepared for us isn’t waiting somewhere else. It’s right here, right now, in the recognition that we are already home. And from that place of remembrance, the “greater works” flow—not as miracles to be worshiped but as natural expressions of our divine essence.

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Conclusion

When I read John 14 now, I don’t see promises of escape or fear-based doctrines of reward and punishment. I see an invitation into infinite reality:

• To understand that the Father is the All.
• To see the many mansions as dimensions of our shared being.
• To awaken to the indwelling Christ.
• To step into the greater works of conscious co-creation.

This isn’t about waiting for heaven. It’s about realizing we’ve always been there. The Father’s house is here. The Christ is here. The awakening is here.

And maybe—just maybe—the greater works begin the moment we finally remember.

 

The Divine Interface: How Modern Thinkers Reveal an Esoteric Cosmos

Throughout my lifelong spiritual journey, I've come to see consciousness as not merely a byproduct of the brain or a fluke of evolution, but as the fundamental ground of all being. My beliefs are rooted in an esoteric and eclectic understanding of reality, one that draws from the ancient wisdom traditions, modern science, and the rich field of philosophical speculation. In this space, I’ve found resonance with the views of Philip Goff, Donald Hoffman, Bernardo Kastrup, Federico Faggin, and Rupert Sheldrake. Each of these thinkers offers a distinct yet overlapping view of consciousness. By exploring their ideas, I’ve come to believe that these perspectives, though different in framing, can be synthesized into a coherent vision that bridges the worlds of science, philosophy, and spirituality.

Philip Goff advocates for a modern form of panpsychism. He believes that consciousness is a ubiquitous property of the universe, that even the tiniest subatomic particles have a form of rudimentary experience. This doesn’t mean that electrons think or feel the way humans do, but rather that experience is built into the fabric of reality. For Goff, this solves the so-called "hard problem of consciousness" by asserting that consciousness doesn't emerge from matter, but that matter and consciousness are two sides of the same coin. His approach retains the existence of the physical world but imbues it with intrinsic mental properties.

In contrast, Donald Hoffman takes a more radical departure from physical realism. He proposes that what we perceive as the physical world is not reality itself, but a user interface evolved by consciousness for the sake of survival. He compares our perceptions to a computer desktop—useful, but not representative of the actual hardware beneath. Hoffman’s theory, which he calls "Conscious Realism," asserts that consciousness is primary and that what we call objects are icons within this perceptual interface. This resonates with my esoteric belief that much of what we perceive as solid and material is, in fact, a symbolic veil—a projection upon the screen of divine mind.

Bernardo Kastrup, meanwhile, advances an idealist ontology. In his view, consciousness is not just fundamental; it is the only thing that truly exists. The physical world is a dream within the universal mind, and each of us is a dissociated alter of that one consciousness. He critiques panpsychism for retaining an unnecessary attachment to physical particles and instead posits that all phenomena—matter, energy, space, and time—are appearances within consciousness. Kastrup’s perspective deeply aligns with mystical traditions that speak of life as a divine dream, where awakening is the realization that we are not separate from Source but expressions of it.

Federico Faggin, the physicist and inventor of the microprocessor, contributes a profoundly spiritual and experiential view of consciousness that bridges science and metaphysics. Faggin suggests that consciousness is not a computational process, but the very foundation of existence—nonlocal, indivisible, and creative. His concept of the I-Entity, or individual center of awareness arising within a unified field of consciousness, beautifully echoes both ancient mystical teachings and the emerging post-materialist science of mind.

Rupert Sheldrake, known for his theory of morphic resonance, proposes that nature has memory and that patterns of form and behavior are shaped by non-local fields rather than solely by genetic or material processes. His ideas challenge the mechanistic view of nature and open the door to a cosmos that is self-organizing, intelligent, and infused with purpose. In my esoteric framework, Sheldrake’s work helps articulate how spiritual archetypes and intentions can influence the unfolding of physical and biological systems through resonance rather than force.

To some, these five views may seem incompatible. Goff sees consciousness in matter, Hoffman denies the independent reality of matter altogether, Kastrup sees matter as a hallucination of mind, Faggin emphasizes the individuated experience of a universal conscious source, and Sheldrake proposes fields that extend intention and memory beyond conventional boundaries. Yet, when viewed through an esoteric lens—one that sees truth as multifaceted and symbolic rather than literal—I believe these views can be woven into a seamless tapestry.

Here’s how I synthesize them.

First, I accept the foundation that consciousness is the ground of all being. This is a shared principle among Goff, Hoffman, Kastrup, Faggin, and Sheldrake. It is also the central tenet of mystical and metaphysical systems around the world—from Vedanta to Gnosticism to Hermeticism. My belief is that consciousness is not merely awareness, but the very creative force from which all things arise and into which all things return.

From Philip Goff’s panpsychism, I take the idea that consciousness permeates all of reality. Every speck of existence, from atoms to stars, carries a flicker of awareness. In my cosmology, this matches the ancient axiom: "As above, so below." Just as the macrocosm is conscious, so too is the microcosm. This gives dignity to all forms of existence and validates the idea that the universe is not dead matter but a living, evolving field of divine experience.

From Donald Hoffman’s conscious realism, I adopt the idea that what we perceive is not reality itself, but a symbolic interface—a kind of dream or illusion projected by consciousness for the sake of interaction and learning. This corresponds to the ancient concept of Maya in the East and the Valentinian Gnostic idea of the world as a projection shaped by perception and belief. Hoffman’s work provides a scientific framework for understanding the illusory nature of the material world without descending into nihilism. Instead, it elevates our interactions to the level of sacred play—lila—the divine dance.

From Bernardo Kastrup’s idealism, I embrace the assertion that there is no need to posit a separate physical reality outside of mind. All is mind; all is consciousness dreaming itself in myriad forms. This beautifully parallels my belief in the One Divine Mind from which we are all emanations, temporarily dissociated in order to experience the illusion of separation and the ecstasy of reunion. Kastrup’s model helps anchor my spiritual view in rigorous philosophical argumentation.

Federico Faggin adds a vital dimension to this synthesis by grounding the journey of self-realization in the direct inner knowing of being. His concept of the I-Entity reinforces the idea that our individuality is not an illusion to be discarded, but a sacred aperture through which the universal experiences itself. The sacredness of each subjective center, in his view, becomes the very key to spiritual awakening.

From Rupert Sheldrake, I draw an understanding of how the invisible, formative fields of nature are not just mechanical patterns but responsive, memory-bearing resonances shaped by intention and archetype. This gives explanatory power to mystical experience, prayer, ritual, and the continuity of consciousness across lifetimes. His work invites us to see the cosmos not as random, but as participatory and remembering.

When these perspectives are combined, a fuller picture emerges. Consciousness is primary (all agree), the physical world is not ultimate but symbolic (Hoffman and Kastrup), experience is embedded throughout creation (Goff), individuality is the sacred lens of the One (Faggin), and form evolves in resonance with spiritual archetypes (Sheldrake). I imagine reality as a vast dream within the One Mind, with each point of perception—be it a human, an ant, or an electron—participating in this dream to varying degrees. We navigate this dream through interfaces shaped by evolutionary necessity, cultural imprinting, and spiritual intention.

Science, philosophy, and spirituality each offer partial glimpses into this greater mystery. Science tells us what appears consistent and measurable within the interface. Philosophy helps us question what lies beyond the veil. Spirituality reminds us that we are more than what we perceive—that we are sparks of divinity, momentarily cloaked in form, seeking to awaken.

It is my conviction that we are now living in a time when these domains no longer need to compete but can converge. The separation of science and spirit was never absolute—it was a phase of cultural evolution, a necessary step in human awakening. Now, we are poised to re-integrate our knowing. The insights of quantum physics, the riddles of consciousness studies, the logic of analytic philosophy, and the revelations of mystical experience are beginning to harmonize.

This is not about forcing agreement where it does not naturally occur. It is about seeing with depth. Each model of consciousness—panpsychist, realist, idealist, morphic, and personalist—is a different lens on the same luminous truth. Goff shows us that even matter whispers with mind. Hoffman shows us that perception is a veil drawn by consciousness itself. Kastrup shows us that only consciousness remains when all illusions are dissolved. Faggin reminds us that the divine sees through each of our eyes. Sheldrake shows us that memory, purpose, and connection ripple through all of nature. Each is a steward of a sacred facet.

In my esoteric worldview, we are souls journeying through layers of experience—layers that appear as time, space, form, and personality. But at the core, we are not many but One. The cosmos is not a machine, but a mystery, alive and sentient. To understand it fully, we need the clarity of science, the discernment of philosophy, and the wisdom of spiritual knowing. Not separately, but together.

I do not believe it is inconsistent to embrace Goff’s proto-conscious particles, Hoffman’s interface theory, Kastrup’s idealist metaphysics, Faggin’s inner knowing, and Sheldrake’s morphic resonance. Instead, I see them as nested insights, like Russian dolls within a greater whole. Consciousness is the Absolute. The world is its dream. And we, in turn, are dreaming ourselves awake.

There is a path forward that unites these voices—a path of integration, where mystery is honored, logic is respected, and awakening is pursued. This path doesn’t belong to one religion or system. It is open to all who dare to see beyond appearances and listen deeply to the whispering soul of the cosmos.

In this great synthesis, I find peace. Not a final answer, but a widening embrace of the mystery. And that, to me, is the truest form of knowing.