I grew up in the Christian tradition and I continue to appreciate the story of Jesus as it came down to me. In the simple version of the story I was initially taught, the first people on Earth disobeyed God and committed an original sin, leading to a world that was sinful, and that my human nature was tainted by that original sin, leading to great suffering in this life and after death.
However, God took pity on humanity (including me) and sent his Son to become a human being, live a perfect life, and then take on the sins of humanity, suffer, die, and rise from the dead. His innocent suffering, death, and resurrection was the sacrifice that freed humanity (including me) from original sin and my personal sins. Believing in Jesus and the efficacy of what he did showed the way out of the difficult place we inhabited, freed us from our suffering, and led to our being taken to heaven after we died.
The Story of Jesus
In the more detailed story of Jesus that I learned later from studying various books of the Bible and their interpretations by the Church, an Angel of God joined with Mary to conceive Jesus, who grew up in Egypt and then came back to the Holy Land. After John the Baptist baptized him and the Spirit of God descended on him, Jesus began his ministry preaching, performing miracles, taking disciples, and teaching them. The two teachings that I always found most powerful were: “The Kingdom of God is within you.” And, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind and love your neighbor as you love yourself.”
His charisma and his following were such that Jesus threatened the contemporary Jewish and Roman establishments, who arrested him, tried him, condemned him to death, and crucified him. He died and his Soul left his body, descended into Hell, and conquered the Devil. His followers buried his body in a sepulcher and rolled a stone across the doorway. However, after three days, his soul reinhabited his body and he appeared to his disciples various times.
In his resurrected body, he taught them that, if they believed in him and what he had done – that he was the Son of God, free of sin, that he had taken on their sins suffered and died, and that He had survived death – their sins would be forgiven, and their souls could survive their deaths and come to live with him in Heaven.
After he had taught his disciples for a few days, he commissioned them to go forth to tell his story to the world, and he ascended into Heaven. However, he sent his spirit – the Holy Ghost – to be with them to help them keep faith with him, spread his word, and live the kind of life he taught.
And, eventually, after a great battle on Earth called Armageddon, Jesus would return and preside over the resurrection of the bodies of everyone who had died, establish the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth, reign for a thousand years, and, eventually, take everyone who believed in him with him back into Heaven.
Subsequently, I learned that this story and these teachings, conveyed by the New Testament of the Bible that I received when I got confirmed as a Lutheran, were only one version of the Christian story and the Christian teachings. The Davinci Code by Dan Brown popularizes a version in which Jesus’ followers rescue him and he flees with his wife, Mary Magdalene, to France, where they and their children launch a movement. In King Jesus, Robert Graves weaves together various traditions to suggest that Jesus was an actual heir to the Jewish throne and, in the crucifixion, completed the traditional ritual from the Sumerian city states of the Sacred King being sacrificed each year.
A Metaphysical Theology
Over the years, I have thought about and meditated on Jesus’ story and come to my own understandings of some of his teachings. My understandings and speculations form what I think of as a Metaphysical Theology, which I invite you to consider with me now.
To begin with, as we have explored in the Philosophy of Spiritual Realism so far, I believe that our Souls emerge from the Creator and enter various Creations, made up of various Universes essentially to go to school in preparation for becoming Creators in our own right. Our souls, usually as groups, enter different worlds and proceed through a series of different incarnations to learn a variety of lessons in those worlds.
Many traditions, and some of my own glimpses obtained in Vision Meditations, suggest that, at death we are received by others in our group that have preceded us and then we review the life we have just lived to determine if we learned the lesson(s) that life had to teach us, and also we look at all the various versions of that most recent life that we might have lived to assess how close we came to living our best possible life.
Living with the continuing awareness that we will go through this review at death can be a helpful perspective that can certainly be bracing and furthering when we come up against a tough decision we have to make. Engaging in a version of the review we will go through after death while we are still alive can also help us make (much) better decisions.
After reviewing our just lived lives, we go on to visit with spiritual teachers more evolved than we are, rest a bit, choose a next life in consultation with our spiritual teachers, and study it to determine what lesson(s) it has to teach us and to identify the best version of it to try to attain along with other members of our group who we will join with in that incarnation to support one another. Eventually we are born and go through the whole process again. We do not incarnate just to attempt to learn our own lessons and live our best lives, we also enter worlds to serve as allies of the Creator in helping to perfect those worlds.
We go through this process to strengthen our independent integrity as Souls. After we emerge from the Creator, we have to leave proximity with the Creator to acquire our own semi-independent integrity. When we are too close to the Creator, the resonance produced by the Creator is so strong that we cannot acquire an independent vibratory reality. We leave the Creator, enter Creations and Universes, and actually take on bodies in those Universes to establish our independent realities that are strong enough to return to proximity with the Creator and not be swallowed up, but rather come to be able to serve as semi-independent allies of the Creator.
Typically there are a set of lessons to be learned through a series of incarnations. But, since the essence of the Creator is love, the deepest lesson, running through all of the others, is how to love ourselves and other selves and the Creator as independent spiritual beings – essentially how to generate our own love not just embrace the love emanating from the Creator.
I Am a Christian
The version of Jesus’ story that I learned clearly does a pretty good job of presenting much of the essence of this Metaphysical Theology. Jesus was a Son of God and incarnated to teach the way of love and to teach that his soul existed independent of his body and survived the death of this body and that ours would too.
However, the orthodox version of Jesus’ story, established through centuries of doctrinal conflict, sometimes devolving into actual physical wars, leaves out an explicit presentation of some important other parts of the story according to the Metaphysical Theology we are exploring. These include: that we are all aspects of the divine, all daughters and sons of God; that we go through many incarnations with discarnate periods of assimilation and preparation in between; and that the point is to acquire enough spiritual power to be able to return to the Creator and still retain our spiritual integrity and freedom so that we can become collaborators with the Creator in new Creations that we cannot yet imagine.
Nonetheless, the orthodox version of Jesus’ story gets enough of the big story right that I can join in solidary with my young self and now proudly say that I am a Christian – as explicated by the Metaphysical Theology we are exploring – and affirm that I am doing my best to join with Jesus in the mission of manifesting love as a way of life and of exemplifying the goal for our souls to act through our bodies to be the vehicles of that love and to recognize that our souls will go on after our bodies die.
However, I also must say that I am a proud Taoist and Rosicrucian and practitioner of Yoga and follower of the Fourth Way and Kabbalist and Ritual Dancer, among other traditions. Primarily, I see myself as a believer in Spiritual Realism and a practitioner of Spiritual Democracy.
All right then, back to the thinking at hand. From the perspective of the Theological Metaphysics we are exploring, what is the sense that I make, as a newly reminted Esoteric Christian, out of some of the key aspects of Christian Theology – the ideas of Original Sin; of Armageddon; of Jesus’ Second Coming; of Heaven on Earth; and of the Resurrection of Our bodies?
Original Sin
Humanity used to live in hunter-gatherer bands in harmony with the natural and spiritual worlds consciously participating in the connection of everything with everything. Every human being was given a psychological imprint and tuned to some form of participation in the natural and spiritual worlds through learning the myths and participating in the rituals of their bands.
However, a few thousand years ago, we went through the agricultural revolution and then, a few hundreds of years ago, the industrial revolution, and then, a few decades ago, the information revolution. Along the way, by and large, our communities stopped offering initiatory rituals to provide us with psychological imprints and tune our consciousnesses to natural and spiritual participation. And, this took us further and further from our connection with the natural world, with the spiritual world, and with ourselves. For many of us, our myths and rituals lost their power to show us how to live and how to connect in the right ways with our souls, with other people, and with our world.
The result has been the world we inhabit now, a world in which humanity threatens to so disrupt the crucial conditions for life – manifesting as the climate crisis (with the Earth’s average temperature rising by 2°F and sea level rising by 8-9 centimeters since 1900 with the rates rising rapidly in the last decade and with the attendant dramatically increased weather and fire disasters) the extinction crisis (losing up to 150 species per day according to some estimates), the poverty crisis (44% of the world’s population lives on less than $6.85 a day) the infant mortality crisis (with 13,800 children under 5 years old dying ever day according to UNICEF), and on and on. If we continue in this way, we are in serious danger of, essentially, committing suicide as a species.
Humanity’s external crisis is reflected internally. The typical human psyche consists of warring self-fragments struggling with each other for control of our consciousnesses and our bodies, making it impossible for us to live healthful, productive lives in harmony with those around us. Because of our internal crisis, we are much less able to address our external crisis effectively.
That is original sin, the breaking of our harmonious participation in the natural and spiritual worlds and the failure to acquire coherent healthful psychological imprints, which resulted in our original sin and is manifesting now as our current sins.
Armageddon
Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection shows us the way to salvation, the way to overcome our sins. By manifesting the Christ sense within us, we can reestablish harmony with our natural world, with our spiritual world, and with our psychological worlds. But first, we have to fight the battle of Armageddon.
In the classic telling of the prophecy, the Battle Armageddon takes place as a final, decisive confrontation between the Forces of Good and the Forces of Evil. The conflict is depicted as involving nations and peoples from all across the Earth.
At the crucial moment in the battle, Jesus Christ returns to lead the forces of Good to victory and to initiate a thousand year reign of Heaven on Earth.
Over the last couple of thousand years, since we have progressively lost our harmonious participation in our natural worlds, our spiritual worlds, and our psychological worlds, our outer wars and the inner wars have steadily increased.
Until now we have arrived at a crescendo of war. We had two World Wars and a Cold War in the last Century and, this Century at this writing, our wars include:
- Russia-Ukraine War.
- Israel-Palestine Conflict (Gaza War).
- Sudanese Civil War.
- Myanmar Civil War.
- India-Pakistan Conflict.
- Syrian Civil War.
- Yemeni Civil War.
- Conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
- Insurgency in the Sahel Region between Jihadist groups and government forces in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger.
- Ethiopian Conflicts, particularly in the Amhara and Oromo regions.
- Haiti Gang Violence.
- Insurgencies in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the Philippines.
In the classic recounting of the story of Armageddon, the Forces of Good win the battle of Armageddon because of the Second Coming, because Jesus Christ returns to guide the Forces of Good to victory. So, according to the Metaphysical Theology we are exploring, what might the Second Coming look like and how might it come about?
The Second Coming
I believe that Jesus’ Second Coming takes place in our consciousnesses first and then, guided by our transformed consciousnesses, in our actions in the world. Jesus, the Christ, was someone whose Soul came awake, while his body was awake, establishing connection with a Higher Self that acted through his body in such a way that he generated a constant flow of love and manifested the power of love.
By paying attention to our consciousnesses, perhaps through the Mindfulness practice of paying attention to our breathing or the Observer practice of paying attention to our awareness, we can wake up our Souls while our bodies are awake to constitute our Higher Selves. We can come to rise above the war of self-fragments within us to engage with our Higher Selves who then can serve as author and director of the plays that constitute our lives. We can come to transform our self-fragments into personas that we can bring on stage to perform as needed, all in the service of love for ourselves, love for the people in our lives, love for humanity, and love for the Earth.
That is the Second Coming of Jesus in each of us. Through the Second Coming, we acquire the Christ sense, and we are able to stop our self-fragments from committing sins and we can come to act in ways that truly make things better in our personal lives and in the life of the Earth.
With the Second Coming, when our Souls wake up enabling us to engage with our Higher-Selves, we can come to recognize that we are not shut up within our bodies. Our minds are able to open to the vibratory reality of the Earth and life on Earth and experience the whole with empathy for the whole that we are part of and partake of.
Embracing our Higher Selves becomes the doorway into a Planetary Consciousness. We become able to join together with other human beings and, ultimately all of humanity, to form a coherent consciousness that can guide and unify all of us, while affirming our diversities, to the benefit of us all. This is somewhat analogous to the way our individual consciousnesses unify and guide all of our cells, while affirming their diversity of structure and function, to the benefit of all of them. In this sense, the Second Coming is the emergence of Planetary Consciousness.
When each of us engages with our Higher Selves and comes to participate in Planetary Consciousness so that we each come to act for the true benefit of each of us, the benefit of our communities, the benefit of all of humanity, and the benefit of the whole Earth – when we each come to act with love throughout our lives – that is truly the Second Coming of the Christ sense in each of us and all of us.
Heaven on Earth
As we engage with our Higher Selves and Planetary Consciousness, we can also set about forming communities that are righting the wrongs that have been committed by humanity on ourselves, on each other, and on the Earth. We can build examples of ways of life whereby people live in harmony with each other and the Earth, whereby people live the life of love.
These examples can help us get better at manifesting our Higher Selves and manifesting Planetary Consciousness. Although the conflict and strife is what gets paid attention to most, if we look hard enough, we can see the examples of Planetary Consciousness emerging pretty much wherever we look, and they are getting stronger, and we are being able to link them up to form even more powerful examples.
As a sidenote, it is clear from Quantum Mechanics that the Universe, at the most basic levels, is vibratory. And all vibration produces a resonance effect whereby more powerful vibrations tend to cause less powerful vibrations to vibrate at the same rate (or in harmony with) the more powerful ones. Everything is vibrating.
Therefore, each of us who manifests a Higher Self thereby manifests a powerful coherent vibration that tends to bring the vibration of those around us into harmony with us. Each example of a group of Higher Selves that we build manifests a vibration that tends to attract other people to it to vibrate in harmony with it. And the examples we build tend to have a similar effect of attraction on each other and to come together to form larger examples as the process continues.
That is the process whereby the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth is emerging.
The Resurrection of Our Bodies
And now let’s proceed to that aspect of the Christian doctrine that, for some time, I have found most mysterious – the Resurrection of the Body. However, based on the Metaphysical Theology we have been exploring, this doctrine becomes a bit less mysterious.
According to our Metaphysical Theology, we are each Souls that incarnate, live lives, die, remember our lives, assimilate what we learned in those lives, choose new lives to live, prepare for those lives by finding the best versions of them to try to remember post-incarnation, and then incarnate again.
However, it is important to understand that each of our lives do not disappear after we live them and assimilate their lessons. Each of them continue in our discarnate life gallery, where we can go and relive them.
From this perspective, I have come to believe that the Resurrection of the Body does not mean that, somehow, we get new minutes added on to an old life that has come to the end of its time. Rather, I believe that the Resurrection of the Body will happen as the Second Coming emerges and our Souls, one after the other, wake up while our current bodies are alive and awake to manifest our Higher Selves, enabling us to engage with some, later most, and, eventually, all of our past incarnations.
When this happens, I believe that our incarnations will emerge for us as living realities, as wholes, along a different dimension than our moment by moment existence. Each of their stories will manifest as a whole along that different dimension of time and we will come to be able to participate in that whole story and engage it as an ancestor and as an ally.
That is what I have come to understand as the meaning of the doctrine of the Resurrection of the Body.
The Dimensions
So, then, based on an understanding of the Metaphysical Theology we have been exploring, what is the trajectory of human evolution?
We start out living moment after moment with our moments filled with what our external and our internal senses bring us and the actions those senses spontaneously evoke from us. That is awareness of the first dimension.
When we pay attention to the stream of those sensations for a bit, we discover emotions that link experience and action in larger gestalts. Paying attention to that flowing emotional reality over longer periods of time, that is awareness of the second dimension.
Continuing on the path of awareness leads us to a voice in our minds talking to us, telling us how to make sense of our sensations and our emotions and how to act in response to the situations we find ourselves in. Paying attention to that mental reality is awareness of the third dimension.
At this stage we can begin to experience first one then another self-fragment, each unifying the three dimensions of the sensate, the emotional, and the mental into a one of a variety of the characters (self-fragments) that inhabit our internal dramatic landscape. Each self-fragment gets its brief time on the stage of our consciousnesses for one moment or one short string of moments and then that character leaves or is pushed out and another one comes on stage for another moment or string of moments. That is a deeper understanding of living in the third dimension, where our experience is largely the three dimensional reality that our senses bring us acted on by our emotions and our minds.
If we continue with this process long enough, a Self begins to emerge that can pay attention to the entrance and retreat of the various characters, the various self-fragments. Paying attention to the reality of that emerging Self is awareness of the fourth dimension.
If we continue even farther along this path, something very interesting happens. We acquire the ability to bring our Souls through into our incarnate existence. Another way to put it is that our Souls wake up while our bodies are awake
When our Souls wake up and begin to manifest through our nascent Higher Selves, we can say that we are entering the fifth dimension and that we beginning to experience the Second Coming of Jesus, the Second Coming of the Christ sense in us. Once we have attained the fifth dimension, our self-fragments truly become personas that we can choose to manifest them when we want them and need them, and we can stop our dysfunctional self-fragments from committing the sins of hurtful behavior and truly manifest love.
When the Christ sense manifests in us and we continue on this path, I believe that we will get to the Resurrection of the Body (in fact the Resurrection of the Bodies). We will come to be able to evoke the whole integrated assimilated lives that are our past incarnations, their whole stories, as powerful characters that we can call on and evoke to accomplish what we want and need in our lives.
Not only will we be able participate in our Souls while our bodies are awake and enable our Souls to guide our incarnate lives consciously, but also we will be able to evoke the discarnate theater where our incarnations live, somewhat like a multiplex theater where the movies of our incarnations are playing all the time and then go on to evoke our incarnations themselves as our spiritual allies. When this happens, we have entered the sixth dimension. (I should note that my discussion of the sixth dimension is based on only a very few actual glimpses, combined with my study of various esoteric traditions and my philosophical speculations.)
I believe a certain number of us need to get to the fifth dimension and link up spiritually and, perhaps, physically, for some of us to be able to enter the sixth dimension. We need to have made a certain amount of progress in creating Heaven on Earth for some of us to enter the sixth dimension.
And then, I believe, there is one final step we can take in this School called Earth. We can evoke the version of our Soul that is ready to graduate from Earth School. At this point we can experience our souls as manifestations of the Creator, souls who left communion with the Creator to learn the lessons of incarnation.
We can experience the Creator and our souls flowing from the Creator, completing our course of incarnation studies, and being ready to graduate and return to conscious communion with the Creator, yet able to retain our own independence and integrity and freedom – able to generate our own love. However, as our last task in Earth School, we can work as Co-Creators with the Creator to perfect this world where we are living now. And, clearly, there is a lot of work to do to accomplish this task and a lot we can learn doing this task.
This work of truly creating a Heaven on this Earth is essential in its own right, but it is also preparation for true graduation when we leave Earth School with our Souls having woven together the stories of all our incarnations into one integrated powerful story that is the story of our Souls learning all the lessons of Earth School, manifesting a powerful enough vibratory reality that we can return to the Creator, without getting lost in the Creator, and work together with the Creator to create together Creations of a magnitude and beauty we have yet to grasp, worlds without end, Amen. At this point we have entered the seventh dimension.
That is what I understand is meant by the Resurrection of the Body (Bodies), incorporated into the Metaphysical Theology that I have presented here and that can be referred to as a form of Esoteric Christianity and a manifestation of the Philosophy of Spiritual Realism. Let us go forth and manifest the Second Coming and co-create Heaven on Earth.
