“The Logos Within: From Philo and the Hermetica to Paul and John”

The question of how to translate John 1:14 has haunted my study of scripture and philosophy, not only because of the grammar but because of the implications that flow from the choice of words. The Greek phrase reads eskēnōsen en hēmin, which in its plainest sense means “tabernacled in us.” Yet almost every major English translation, beginning with the King James, has opted for “dwelt among us.” At first glance this may seem a minor adjustment, a matter of idiom, but in reality the difference is profound, for it is not a matter of textual variants—there are none—but of interpretive and theological orientation. To translate “in us” is to suggest a mystical indwelling, the Logos entering into human beings and making them its dwelling, whereas “among us” locates the incarnation strictly in the external, visible sphere of history. The difference exposes what translators and theologians are willing to affirm. Jerome in the Vulgate chose the literal sense, writing habitavit in nobis—“dwelt in us.” Raymond E. Brown, in his Anchor Bible commentary, admits that the Greek literally means “in us” but still prefers “among us,” reasoning that the context emphasizes public manifestation: “we beheld his glory.” C. K. Barrett likewise stresses that the prologue of John presents the incarnation as an event to be witnessed in history, something seen, touched, and heard, not merely experienced inwardly. Yet I cannot escape the question: if John only intended “among us,” why did he not use one of the more common Greek phrases for that meaning? Why use en hēmin, which everywhere else in the New Testament carries the more direct force of “in”?

The stakes of this choice become even clearer when compared with John 17. There Jesus prays that believers may be one “just as you, Father, are in me and I in you, that they also may be in us.” Here the preposition en is retained by every translator, for the language of indwelling cannot be softened. To render it “among” would destroy the meaning. The Father cannot be merely “among” the Son, nor the Son merely “among” the Father; this is mutual indwelling. Jesus then extends that same indwelling to his followers: “I in them and you in me.” The same vocabulary appears as in John 1:14, yet translators make different decisions because they sense different theological emphases. In John 1, they prefer to stress the historical, visible manifestation of the Word; in John 17, they recognize the relational and mystical union at stake. Both readings are grammatically possible, but the translator’s theology determines the choice.

Here the larger question of the Logos emerges. John’s prologue is not an isolated invention but a profound adaptation of intellectual traditions circulating in the first century. The Stoics had long spoken of the Logos as the rational principle that pervades the cosmos, the seed-bearing reason (logos spermatikos) that orders and animates all things. They believed that this Logos was immanent in every human being as a spark of the divine fire, the reason by which the universe lives and breathes. For them, to live according to nature was to live according to the Logos within. Philo of Alexandria, steeped in both Jewish scripture and Platonic philosophy, described the Logos as the mediator between the transcendent God and the material world. He called it the “first-born of God,” the instrument of creation, the high priest standing between the Creator and humanity. The Logos, for Philo, was both the pattern of the world and the means by which God could be known without compromising divine transcendence. Meanwhile, in the Hermetic writings, particularly the Corpus Hermeticum, the Logos is identified with the Nous, the divine Mind, which emanates from the One and implants itself into the human soul. The Poimandres describes how the Nous, after the creation of the world, entered into human beings, awakening them to their divine origin and reminding them of their kinship with the eternal. The parallels to John are unmistakable: the Logos, which in these traditions is the rational structure of reality, the mediator, the divine voice, has now, according to John, become flesh.

What is radical in John is that the Logos does not remain abstract, nor does it hover only at the cosmic level—it takes on human flesh in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. And if we take the Greek seriously in John 1:14, this Logos does not only dwell externally among humanity but actually “tabernacles in us.” The verb skēnoō evokes the imagery of the tabernacle in the wilderness, where God’s glory dwelt in the midst of Israel. But now the tent is not pitched in a camp outside of us; it is pitched within. The divine presence has moved from the stone and fabric of the tabernacle into the living temple of human existence. This is precisely the theme that Paul makes central in his letters.

Paul speaks explicitly of Christ dwelling in believers in several key passages. In Romans 8:10, he writes, “If Christ is in you, though the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness.” Galatians 2:20 offers the classic affirmation: “It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me.” In Galatians 4:19, Paul describes himself laboring “until Christ is formed in you.” In 2 Corinthians 13:5 he challenges the community: “Do you not realize that Jesus Christ is in you?” And in Colossians 1:27 he declares, “the riches of the glory of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.” Only here does he explicitly call “Christ in you” the mystery itself, the hidden plan now revealed. But the idea pervades his writings. Ephesians 3:17 speaks of Christ dwelling in hearts through faith. John’s Gospel resonates with the same theme in the language of abiding: “Abide in me, and I in you” (John 15:4). And the First Epistle of John adds the assurance: “He who is in you is greater than he who is in the world” (1 John 4:4). Again and again the language of indwelling recurs, reinforcing that the incarnation is not merely about external revelation but about an internal transformation—the Logos in us.

Paul’s use of the word “mystery” underscores the weight of this teaching. The Greek term mystērion occurs twenty-seven times across the New Testament. In the Synoptics it refers to the mysteries of the kingdom of God (Matt 13:11; Mark 4:11; Luke 8:10). In Paul it becomes a central category. Romans 11:25 speaks of the mystery of Israel’s partial hardening, while Romans 16:25 refers to the gospel as a mystery long hidden. First Corinthians describes God’s wisdom as “in a mystery” (2:7) and calls the apostles “stewards of the mysteries of God” (4:1). Paul links mysteries to prophecy, tongues, and even resurrection: “Behold, I tell you a mystery, we shall not all sleep” (15:51). Ephesians repeatedly uses the word, describing the mystery of God’s will (1:9), the mystery revealed to Paul by revelation (3:3), the mystery of Jew and Gentile together in one body (3:6), the “profound mystery” of Christ and the church in marriage imagery (5:32), and the mystery of the gospel itself (6:19). Colossians develops it further, culminating in 1:27, where the mystery is identified as Christ in you. Elsewhere the word refers to the mystery of lawlessness already at work (2 Thess 2:7) and the mystery of godliness (1 Tim 3:16). In Revelation it surfaces again: the mystery of the seven stars (1:20), the mystery of God fulfilled (10:7), and the mystery of the woman and the beast (17:7). Out of all these, only Colossians 1:27 dares to equate the mystery directly with the indwelling of Christ. This suggests that Paul understood the climax of God’s hidden plan to be precisely this: the Logos dwelling not only among but within believers.

At this point, the resonance with Stoic, Philonic, and Hermetic thought becomes striking. The Stoics spoke of the logos spermatikos, the seed-bearing Logos planted in every soul, giving each person a share in divine reason. Paul’s language of Christ being formed in believers and living in them sounds remarkably like this tradition, except that for Paul the Logos is not a generic rational principle but the specific person of Christ, crucified and risen. Philo insisted that the Logos was the image of God by which humanity was created, the divine presence imprinted in the rational soul. Paul’s Christ in you carries that imprint to its fulfillment: the image of God is not merely an idea but an indwelling reality. The Hermetic Poimandres speaks of the divine Mind descending into humanity, awakening memory of divine origin. Paul’s mystery echoes this but anchors it in history: the Christ who indwells is the one who lived, died, and rose. In each case, the mystical intuition is the same: humanity is not cut off from the divine but contains the divine within. The New Testament boldly proclaims this mystery unveiled in Christ.

The translation decision in John 1:14, then, is no small matter. To say “among us” is to emphasize the external and historical, which is true enough, but it risks obscuring the mystical depth. To say “in us” is to affirm the incarnation not only as revelation before our eyes but as transformation within our being. Both senses are present in John’s Gospel, but translators, wary of theological confusion or doctrinal controversy, have often chosen the safer “among.” Still, the literal words stand, pressing us to consider their full weight: the Word became flesh and tabernacled in us. This aligns with Paul’s insistence that Christ is in us, the hope of glory, and with the entire tradition of mystery language in the New Testament.

The significance of this cannot be overstated. If the Logos—the rational principle of the Stoics, the mediator of Philo, the Nous of the Hermetica—has indeed chosen to pitch its tent within humanity, then humanity is not merely a spectator of divine revelation but a participant in it. The mystery of the ages, hidden and now revealed, is that Christ is in us. The external manifestation among us and the internal reality in us are not contradictory but complementary, two facets of the same truth. The incarnation is both public and personal, visible in history and transformative in the soul. To dwell “in us” is to fulfill the philosophical intuition that the divine inhabits the human, but to fulfill it in a concrete, historical, and theological sense that the ancients only glimpsed.

Thus a single preposition opens up centuries of speculation and revelation. En hēmin—in us, among us—encapsulates the deepest intuitions of Stoicism, Middle Platonism, Jewish philosophy, and Hermetic mysticism, and yet it is reframed by John and Paul in the light of Christ. The Stoics sensed the Logos within reason; Philo discerned the Logos as mediator; the Hermetists proclaimed the Nous entering humanity; John confessed the Logos became flesh; Paul declared the mystery revealed as Christ in you. These are not disparate strands but converging lines pointing to the same mystery, the unveiling of divine presence in the human. That mystery is not simply an intellectual puzzle but the hope of glory itself, the promise that the divine Logos has not remained aloof but has chosen to dwell, both among us and in us, to transform us into its likeness.

It may well be that this mystery was not simply Paul’s theological discovery or John’s poetic insight but something Jesus himself taught, in words and ways too subtle for his contemporaries to grasp. If we take seriously the union language in John’s Gospel—“I in you and you in me,” “I in them and you in me”—then perhaps Jesus was already pointing to the indwelling Logos as the essence of his message. Yet this teaching would have been so anachronistic, so far beyond the categories of Second Temple Judaism, that even his closest followers struggled to understand. They could accept him as Messiah, healer, teacher, even Son of God, but the deeper truth—that the eternal Word would tabernacle in them—was not easily received.

Paul, for all his brilliance, seems at times to gesture toward this reality without fully embracing it, speaking of “ages to come” when the fullness of God’s plan would be revealed. Perhaps even he was still working within categories that kept the mystery deferred, unable to state unequivocally that what Christ embodied was not only among them but already within them. This suggests that the mystery of Christ in you, the hope of glory, was the heart of Jesus’ teaching all along—not the foundation of a new religion, not a structure of law and doctrine, but an awakening to divine indwelling. What was hidden for ages and generations was not hidden because God withheld it but because humanity was not yet ready to hear. Religion may have risen around Jesus in the centuries that followed, but the mystery itself transcends religious structures. It was not about creating an institution but about awakening humanity to the presence of the divine within. In this light, the tension between “among us” and “in us” is not just a matter of translation but a window into the unfinished reception of Jesus’ own message, a reminder that the mystery continues to unfold as human consciousness catches up with what was revealed in him from the beginning.

 

---

Citations

1. Jerome, Biblia Sacra Vulgata, John 1:14.
2. Raymond E. Brown, The Gospel According to John I–XII (Anchor Bible 29; New York: Doubleday, 1966), 14–15.
3. C. K. Barrett, The Gospel According to St. John (2nd ed.; Philadelphia: Westminster, 1978), 162–163.
4. Craig S. Keener, The Gospel of John: A Commentary (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2003), 1048–1052.
5. F. F. Bruce, The Epistles to the Colossians, to Philemon, and to the Ephesians (NICNT; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1984), 81–82.
6. G. K. Beale and D. A. Carson, eds., Commentary on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2007), 838–841.
7. Philo of Alexandria, On the Creation, Who Is the Heir?, On Dreams I.
8. Corpus Hermeticum, esp. Poimandres and Discourse on the Eighth and Ninth.
9. A. A. Long, Hellenistic Philosophy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 207–218.

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.