A Common Sense Approach to Understanding Christ Consciousness: Reimagining Christianity

There’s a growing backlash against the term Christ Consciousness, especially on social media, where ideological lines have hardened and conversations are too often shaped by reaction rather than reflection. The critics seem to come from two main camps—fundamentalist Christians and hard-nosed materialists. Ironically, while these two worldviews often consider each other diametrically opposed, they find common cause in dismissing the idea that Christ represents anything more than either a singular historical person or a myth woven into an outdated worldview.

Let’s start with the fundamentalists. For them, the phrase Christ Consciousness triggers a defensive response rooted in dogma, not discernment. It doesn’t matter how rich or theologically nuanced the term might be; if it isn’t found in their tightly sealed canon—especially not in the King James Version, with its 17th-century English and 4th-century theological scaffolding—they see it as a threat. Their understanding of Christ is largely limited to the atoning work of Jesus of Nazareth as the blood sacrifice demanded by a wrathful God. Their entire framework hinges on penal substitutionary atonement, personal salvation, and the inerrancy of the Bible as they interpret it.

To such a framework, Christ is not a state of being, not a universal reality, and certainly not a consciousness. He is a man—historically located, doctrinally defined, and monopolized by their theological system. The Christ is Jesus and only Jesus, and the rest of the world—some 7.5 billion people—is either saved through this narrow formula or damned. Any attempt to broaden this view is, in their eyes, heretical, New Age nonsense, or worse—demonic.

But what they miss, or refuse to consider, is that Christ is not Jesus' last name. Christos is the Greek word for anointed one, and in deeper esoteric understanding, it refers to the anointing of divine consciousness—Logos-consciousness. The New Testament itself introduces this cosmic dimension when the Gospel of John opens, “In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God.” This Logos is not limited to first-century Palestine. It is the creative, ordering principle of the cosmos, echoed in Greek philosophy and Hermeticism as divine reason, or Nous—consciousness itself expressing itself through form.

On the other side of the debate, we find the materialists. They reject Christ Consciousness not because it threatens religious orthodoxy, but because it threatens their reductionist view of reality. For them, Jesus—if he even existed—was just a Jewish mystic or apocalyptic prophet speaking exclusively to the sociopolitical situation of ancient Israel. They reduce Paul’s writings to early Christian sectarian politics, locked in their own time and place. Anything that smells of spirituality, metaphysics, or transcendence is dismissed as woo—irrational, unverifiable, and therefore meaningless.

But materialism itself is beginning to crack under the weight of evidence. Quantum physics, neuroscience, and even branches of cosmology are forcing serious thinkers to reconsider the primacy of consciousness. Bernardo Kastrup, Donald Hoffman, and others are mounting persuasive cases for consciousness as the bedrock of existence—not as an emergent property of matter, but as the ground of being itself. If we accept this—and many are—we are suddenly standing on metaphysical ground that makes Christ Consciousness not only plausible, but deeply resonant.

Christ Consciousness is not about ignoring history, or bypassing the ethical and prophetic dimensions of Jesus’ life. It is about realizing that what animated Jesus is available to all—that the Logos is not confined to a single man or a single religion, but is the divine template within each of us, the imago Dei awaiting awakening. It is the part of us that remembers—not with our brain, but with our soul—who we are and what we come from. It is what the Gospel of Truth, a Valentinian text, calls our forgetfulness of the Father and the return of that memory through Christ.

Both the fundamentalist and the materialist critiques fail because they do not address the spiritual reality that most people live with daily. They do not account for the overwhelming human longing for meaning, for transcendence, for connection with something greater. Nor do they adequately address the mounting evidence that consciousness is not produced by the brain but localized through it, as light is focused by a lens. They do not explain near-death experiences, mystical visions, or spontaneous awakenings—because they do not want to.

The fundamentalists cling to a brittle orthodoxy that makes God small, petty, and tribal. The materialists cling to a brittle rationalism that makes consciousness an illusion and love a chemical. Neither of these is satisfying to the spirit. Neither reflects the boundless presence of the Christ, who said, “Before Abraham was, I AM.” That is not history; that is eternity speaking through a man fully awake.

We must remember that Christ Consciousness is not a call to abandon Christianity. It is a call to transcend the limitations placed on it by those who confuse the wine with the wineskin. To be in Christ, as Paul often said, is to be in a new state of awareness—a new creation. But this awareness is not exclusive. As the Spirit was poured out on all flesh, so is the Christ available to all consciousness. Some may call it the Logos, others Buddha-nature, others Atman, but the essence is the same: divine awareness within, urging us to awaken, to love, to remember.

In a world of 8 billion people, with less than a third identifying as Christian and only a fraction of those as evangelical fundamentalists, it is absurd to imagine that God’s work is confined to one theological lane. The Logos speaks all languages, wears all faces, and reaches all hearts. The Christ is not the mascot of a religion. The Christ is the anointed awakening of divine consciousness in humanity—and we are all invited.

It is time to reclaim Christ Consciousness not as an alternative religion, but as a deeper reality. It is time to stop arguing with dogma and start living from presence. It is time to remember—not just intellectually, but spiritually—that we are of God, that we are not separate, and that the Logos is the animating force behind every act of love, every moment of grace, and every whisper of awakening in this fractured world.

That, to me, is the gospel worth sharing.