John Vs Luke and the Holy Spirit

When I step back and look at the earliest Jesus movement, I see not one single stream but a collection of conflicting visions, each grappling with who Jesus was and what his message truly meant. The Ebionites, rooted firmly in Jewish identity, believed Jesus was the Messiah for Israel. They saw him as a human prophet chosen by God, not divine, and insisted that his followers should remain Torah-observant. Their movement reflected a Judaism unwilling to let go of the covenantal boundary markers that had always defined God’s people. On the other hand, Paul, while often treated as the great liberator from Jewish Law, was still very much Jewish in his thinking. He framed his gospel in covenantal terms but stretched the covenant to include Gentiles. For Paul, the great dividing wall had come down, yet he still thought in terms of covenant fidelity, justification, and a new Israel formed around faith in Christ rather than the works of Torah. His vision was less about abolishing Jewishness and more about finding a way for Gentiles to enter God’s promises without becoming fully Jewish. In that sense, he was not abandoning Judaism but trying to reimagine it in a way that could accommodate the nations.

Peter stood caught in between these visions. In Galatians, Paul recalls Peter eating with Gentiles until pressure from the circumcision party made him withdraw. That hesitation is telling. Peter embodied the deep tension in the early movement: was this way of Jesus a reform within Judaism, a sect like the Pharisees or Essenes, or was it destined to break free as a message for the entire world? Peter’s waffling shows how unsettled the question really was. Luke, a loyal follower of Paul, wrote his gospel and Acts of the Apostles in part to smooth over these cracks. He parallels Peter and Paul, showing them both healing the lame, both enduring visions, both suffering for the gospel, as if to say there was never really a split between them. Luke’s careful narration works to make Paul’s mission seem like the natural and Spirit-led continuation of what the apostles began.

But Luke’s harmonization is strained when compared with John. In Luke 24:49, Jesus instructs the disciples to wait in Jerusalem until they are “clothed with power from on high.” This anticipates Acts 2, where the Spirit comes at Pentecost with rushing wind, tongues of fire, and the miraculous breaking of language barriers. For Luke, this is the moment the church is born, with authority vested in the apostles who waited in obedience. Luke’s theology pushes the Spirit into the future, tying it to an institutional launch and grounding authority in Jerusalem’s leadership.

John, however, tells a very different story. In John 20:22, the risen Jesus breathes on the disciples and gives them the Spirit immediately after the resurrection. There is no waiting, no centralized Jerusalem event, no public spectacle. The Spirit is not postponed but imparted as an intimate, mystical gift tied to resurrection life itself. These two accounts contradict one another—not in minor detail, but in the very heart of what the Spirit means. Was the Spirit a future empowerment for public mission and institutional order (Acts 2)? Or was the Spirit already present as an inward awakening given directly by Jesus (John 20:22)?

This contradiction reveals competing theological trajectories. Luke presents the Spirit as the foundation of a visible church, rooted in history and authority, with Pentecost as the cornerstone. John collapses the timetable and makes the Spirit universal and immediate—less about institutional birth and more about personal transformation. In Luke, the apostles are gatekeepers of the Spirit’s work. In John, every believer who encounters the risen Christ receives the Spirit without mediation. These visions could not be more different, and they shaped how early communities understood themselves: as an ordered body born at Pentecost, or as awakened souls already infused with divine breath.

But John doesn’t stop there. In John 20:21, right before breathing on his disciples, Jesus says, “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” Traditionally this has been read as a call to missionary activity or evangelism, but in John’s mystical register it takes on a deeper meaning. Jesus had come to awaken humanity to the indwelling Logos, to liberate people from forgetfulness of their divine origin. To be “sent” in the same way is not to march out with institutional authority, but to embody that same work of awakening. His disciples were to do as he did—breathing life into others, calling forth the divine spark already within them. The Spirit was not a tool of conquest, but the breath of recognition.

John 17:20 reinforces this vision. In his prayer, Jesus says, “I do not ask for these only, but also for those who will believe in me through their word.” Again, the language is not of institutional expansion but of the ripple effect of awakening. Those who experience the indwelling Logos share that experience, and others awaken in turn. The chain of belief in John is not about coercion, creed, or centralized church growth. It is about the light of the Logos passing from one awakened heart to another until “all may be one” in divine consciousness.

This is why John’s gospel feels so different. It is not about waiting for a distant Pentecost event, nor about establishing institutional authority, nor even about traditional missionary outreach. It is about immediate encounter and universal awakening. The Spirit is breathed forth in resurrection; the disciples are sent as awakeners in the same manner as Jesus; and the prayer of Christ looks forward to a community of people who recognize their shared indwelling in the divine.

When viewed this way, the trajectory becomes clearer. The Ebionites tethered Jesus firmly to Jewish identity. Paul cracked open the door, making covenant promises available to Gentiles while still framing everything within a Jewish story. Peter oscillated, revealing the tension of the times. Luke stitched the pieces together to present a seamless narrative of unity, grounding the Spirit in Pentecost and institutional order. But John broke the frame. His Jesus was not merely a Jewish Messiah or even the founder of a new covenant community, but the living Logos who reveals the divine spark within all humanity. In John’s vision, the Spirit does not wait for Pentecost—it is breathed forth in the resurrection, present wherever the Logos is recognized. And when Jesus says, “As the Father has sent me, so I send you,” he is not commissioning evangelists in the traditional sense, but awakening liberators—disciples who, like him, would breathe forth the Spirit to call people into remembrance of their divine origin.

And so, the contradiction between Luke and John becomes more than a quirk of memory or tradition. It symbolizes two competing visions of Christianity itself: one of structure, order, and historical institution; the other of immediacy, mysticism, and personal awakening. Across the centuries, the church has swung back and forth between these poles—between Luke’s Pentecost and John’s breath—trying to reconcile authority with freedom, history with mystery, order with Spirit.

Today, that same tension remains. Denominations built on hierarchy, sacraments, and creeds echo Luke’s Pentecost model, grounding their legitimacy in apostolic succession and centralized authority. Meanwhile, charismatic movements, mystical seekers, and esoteric Christians lean into John’s vision, hearing in Jesus’ words a call not to conquest but to awakening: “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” In this light, Christianity is not about enforcing belief but about recognizing the Logos already dwelling within, breathing life into others until all realize their oneness in God.

 

When God Goes for a Walk: Discovering the Infinite in Everyday Moments

Today, as I sat in the park under the shade of a tree, I had an epiphany. It was a beautiful sunny day, warm but not oppressive, the kind of day that gently invites reflection. Before me stretched the walking and riding path around the lake. People were scattered along its curve—families, couples, children, joggers, and wanderers—all inhabiting the same space but living entirely unique moments. As I watched, something deeper stirred in me. I began to sense that what I was really witnessing was God, or consciousness itself, experiencing its own creation—not in some abstract theological sense, but in the immediate, ordinary, breathtakingly subtle unfolding of life around me.

There were geese gliding across the surface of the lake, their movements serene, synchronized, and effortless. In the tree above, a bird shifted on its branch and sang, its song carrying across the air. A little girl zipped past on an electric hoverboard, her laughter rising like sunlight, while lovers held hands and leaned close to whisper private words. Dogs tugged on leashes, eager to move faster, while their humans smiled and followed. Joggers’ faces glistened with sweat, a visible testament to discipline and movement. Families sprawled on picnic blankets, breaking bread, sharing fruit, and talking in tones of comfort and familiarity. Each of these was more than just an activity. Each moment was a distinct expression of being alive, a singular lens through which the great consciousness—the divine mind—was experiencing itself.

I’ve long believed that God, or what I often call consciousness, experiences creation through us. But today I realized something subtler: it is not only the broad strokes of life that matter, not only the grand events or collective moments. It is the nuances—the slight tilt of a child’s head, the unique rhythm of each jogger’s pace, the particular inflection of a laugh, the way the light filters differently through each person’s gaze. No two experiences are ever the same, and no two lives ever mirror one another fully. Within each human soul lies an infinite kaleidoscope of potential, and within each moment of experience lies a fractal of divine awareness. The diversity of experience is not incidental; it is essential. It is God’s artistry revealed through infinite brushstrokes of individuality.

As I sat there, I allowed my mind to stretch further. I thought not only of the joyous and serene experiences—the picnics, the lovers, the children playing—but also of the darker currents that run through human history. Wars, conflicts, grief, betrayal, sickness, pain—all of these too are part of the infinite spectrum of experience. They are not pleasant, nor do I glorify them, but they are real. And in being real, they too are absorbed into the infinite tapestry of consciousness. Just as a painting needs shadow to reveal its light, the human story seems to require its contrasts. The divine, it seems, is not confined to the easy or the joyful; it permeates the whole. Even the difficult, the tragic, the unjust moments are unique expressions of being, opportunities through which consciousness experiences yet another dimension of itself.

What struck me most powerfully was the sheer inexhaustibility of it all. Just within humanity—this one small species on one small planet in an unfathomably vast cosmos—there exists an infinite potential for experience. Each individual is a center of awareness, a unique filter through which consciousness perceives creation. Even when two people share the same moment, like a husband and wife sitting together at a picnic, they do not experience it identically. One notices the warmth of the sun, the other hears the wind moving through the leaves. One reflects on the past week, the other anticipates the meal about to begin. The moment itself becomes doubled, tripled, multiplied infinitely by the uniqueness of perception. And when you stretch that across billions of individuals, across cultures, languages, histories, and lifetimes, you realize that consciousness has an unending reservoir of possibility. It will never repeat itself exactly, never exhaust its own capacity to experience.

This realization is both humbling and liberating. It humbles me because I recognize that my perspective, as rich as it may feel, is but one tiny thread in this infinite fabric. And yet, it liberates me because that one thread matters—it is irreplaceable. Without it, the tapestry would be incomplete. Every individual, no matter how seemingly small or obscure, contributes something vital to the whole. The homeless man sitting on a park bench, the executive rushing to a meeting, the artist sketching under the shade, the mother quieting her child—all are necessary facets of divine experience. Consciousness has chosen to wear their faces, to feel their emotions, to live their lives. And in doing so, God is enriched.

I find myself reflecting also on the question of meaning. If every experience is a facet of divine consciousness, then no experience is wasted. Joys are not only joys for us; they are joys for the cosmos itself. Sorrows are not only sorrows for us; they are part of the great unfolding story of consciousness learning itself. Each time we laugh, consciousness discovers a new shade of laughter. Each time we suffer, consciousness deepens its capacity for compassion. And perhaps, in ways we cannot fully see, our individual lives contribute to a larger arc, a story of the divine awakening more fully to itself through its creation.

Sitting there at the park, I realized that this way of seeing removes hierarchy from human experience. The jogger’s sweat and the child’s laughter, the geese’s floating and the soldier’s grief, all have value. None are trivial; none are meaningless. Each moment is a brushstroke, and every brushstroke contributes to the masterpiece. We may not always understand how the darker strokes fit in, but perhaps that is because we see too narrowly, too close to the canvas. God sees the whole. Consciousness beholds the totality, and in that totality, nothing is wasted, nothing is excluded.

This perspective also invites a shift in how we live. If each moment of experience is an opportunity for consciousness to know itself, then we are invited to bring awareness to those moments. To savor them. To honor them. When I see a family laying out a picnic, I can pause to marvel that consciousness has chosen to be that family today. When I see a man jogging, I can recognize that consciousness has chosen to feel the strain of muscles and the rhythm of breath in his form. When I encounter suffering, even in myself, I can remember that this too is consciousness exploring a new depth. That does not mean I glorify suffering or seek it, but I acknowledge that even it has its place within the infinite mosaic.

As the sun shifted and the light on the lake grew brighter, I felt a quiet gratitude. Gratitude for being alive in this particular body, with these particular perceptions, at this particular moment. Gratitude for the infinite uniqueness of each life unfolding around me. Gratitude that God is not far away, not abstract, not aloof, but here—right here—in every breath, every laugh, every tear, every gesture. God is the geese floating. God is the girl on the hoverboard. God is the couple holding hands. God is the jogger, the picnicker, the bird in the tree. God is also the soldier in the trenches, the refugee seeking shelter, the mother grieving her child. All of it is God, all of it is consciousness, all of it is life.

What I glimpsed today at the park was that we are not separate from this divine unfolding; we are the unfolding. Our uniqueness is the very means through which the infinite knows itself. Each of us is an irreplaceable expression, a singular angle of vision, a note in the eternal song. And when we learn to see the world this way, when we awaken to the subtle truth that nothing is wasted, nothing is duplicated, nothing is without meaning, then we begin to rest. We begin to trust. We begin to live with reverence for the ordinary, which is always, at its core, extraordinary.

“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.

 

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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.

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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.