Paul R. Smith
Teacher of the Jesus Path to Awakening

Eleven Points About the Jesus Path

1.	The Jesus Path is an approach to God found in the life and teaching of Jesus.

In the Jesus Path God is defined by Jesus but not confined to him. Jesus reveals God in an astounding new way and also models for us what being a liberated human being looks like. If something is not consistent with Jesus’ life and teaching, we do not embrace it. For instance, the prevailing idea (originating from the biblical letters of Paul and Hebrews) that Jesus died for our sins to appease the wrath of God is not consistent with Jesus’ teaching that “God is kind to the ungrateful and wicked,”¹ and that we should forgive others without retribution or attempting to extract a penalty from them. He forgave others without requiring anything from them and from the cross asked God to do the same.² Jesus, emphasizing the passing of the old sacrificial system, taught, “God desires mercy, not sacrifice.”³ It may have been inevitable for the early church, immersed in both Jewish and Gentile sacrificial culture, to interpret Jesus’ death as a sacrifice for sin, but we should not if we are going to take Jesus himself seriously. Jesus went about proclaiming persons were already forgiven without need of temple, ritual, sacrifice, or even repentance!⁴

So if Jesus is not an atoning sacrifice for us, what is he? The historical person of Jesus of Nazareth is a prototype of what it means to be awakened to our own humanity and divinity. The classic Christian creeds seem to get it right when they define Jesus as fully human and fully God. However, they are limited if they understand that the only expression of that is Jesus rather than including other great spiritual persons and, ultimately, all of us. Jesus is different from us only in degree, not in kind.

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¹ Luke 6:35
² Luke 23:34
³ Mat. 9:13; 12:7
⁴ Mat. 9:2; Luke 7:48

2.	This path assumes there are other authentic paths which go by many names.

3.	This is a way of infinite evolutionary development.

4.	*The Jesus Path invites us to experience God in the three ways that Jesus did as he spoke about* God, to God, and as God.**

Every known language recognizes the need for three perspectives in our relationships with others in the three pronouns “it,” “we,” and “I.” The way Jesus related with God was similar to these three perspectives of 3rd person (it), 2nd, person (we), and 1st person (I).

1) Jesus contemplated, thought, knew, and talked about God in the 3rd person. We do that, too, when God becomes a subject, an “it” that we study, talk and reflect about.

2) Jesus related, listened, prayed, and surrendered to God in the 2nd person. Jesus pointed beyond himself to God as a larger spiritual reality when he said that God was greater than he was.⁶ He prayed not to himself, but to the One whom he strikingly called “Father.” We, along with Jesus, bow down before the ego-humbling Divine Transcendent Other and say, “Not my will but yours be done.” The Scriptures of many religions, including Christianity, demonstrate the need for numerous images and metaphors for this Almighty Other. While God as Other can never be limited to a definition, we may reasonably and insightfully speak about and to God as Goddess, Higher Power, the Source, the Ground of Being, Almighty Savior, Sacred Mystery, Cosmic Love, the Everlasting Light, Heavenly Father, Mother, Infinite Mind, Eternal Creativity, Brahman, Tao, Allah, the Great I Am, My Love, and many other terms which point to the “more” of life.

3) Jesus felt and knew himself as Divine, speaking and acting as God in 1st person. Most Christians are comfortable with speaking about God and to God, but the “as” part may be new or even threatening. However Jesus himself is our model and the prototype of the realized divine selfhood of all humankind. The Kingdom of heaven is the conscious awareness that we are one with God and all creation and that Kingdom is within us.⁷ Jesus, the Son, is the face of God who encompasses all humanity as divine daughters and sons of God. He is the image of our own participation in the Trinity as joint heirs with him.⁸ The destiny of the Jesus Path for all of us is knowing, embracing, experiencing, and expressing our own divinity.

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6 John 14:28

7 Luke 17:21

8 Rom. 8:17

5.	The Bible is an indispensable resource for the Jesus Path.

6.	Because the God of Jesus is love, no one will be left behind.

7.	Transformative spiritual practices can lead to experiencing our oneness with God and awakening to our own divinity.

8.	The supreme expression of loving God is loving others.

9.	Dying to our false self so that our True Self may flourish is an intrinsic part of the Jesus path.

10.

The self does not evolve in isolation but with others on the same journey.

Sometimes an excursion into solitariness is necessary, but normal life in the Jesus Path is with others who are moving beyond ego towards awakening. All of us need healing from the wounds and self-defeating behavior patterns of the past. We need help to move from ego-centered to egoless existence. When the authentic self emerges between people, we experience Spirit-filled fellowship.

When Jesus came to show us the way, the first thing he did was establish a community of those dedicated to his journey of healing and awakening. He could have spent most of his time teaching the crowds, or in taking on one single apprentice to train, or connecting with the power brokers in Rome, or in the wilderness praying for us. Instead, he spent an extraordinary amount of time and energy gathering, training, and commissioning a healing community - his traveling entourage of men and women with whom he spent his several years of ministry. The first Christians did not live in the world and go to church. They lived in the church and went to the world.

This healing community exists not just for the sake of its own healing but also for the healing of the world. The results of spiritual experiences are not just for our own personal benefit, but for that of the whole human race. Groups on the Jesus Path (and other authentic loving paths) become healers of the entire world as they are filled with awakened egoless passion, dramatically raising the collective consciousness of all sentient beings. Authentic evolutionary spiritual development begins to accept responsibility for the whole world, just as Jesus did. We share with him and all the great spiritual leaders of the world in that responsibility.²⁰ Healing community moves us beyond personal awakening to world awakening.

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²⁰ Phil. 3:10

11.

The innermost longing of the human heart is to live in union with God.

Different religions including Christianity have various ways of describing the nature of that union and how one attains it, but knowing, embracing, experiencing, and manifesting our oneness with God is the great treasure. This is God’s greatest gift to humankind and the goal of all existence. The Jesus Path describes this in the most daring language: the goal of salvation is to realize our own divinity. Jesus said it simply, “Do you not know that you are gods?”²¹ Our response has most often been, “You’ve got to be joking.”

His prayer was that we would realize our oneness with God.²² Paul speaks of it as Christ living in us.²³ Others speak of it as “participants of the divine nature,”²⁴ or being like Jesus - “He [Jesus] was like us in every respect,”²⁵ and “When he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.”²⁶ Eastern Orthodoxy boldly names it “deification,” and in Holy Thursday litany confesses, “In my kingdom, said Christ, I shall be God with you as god.” In the words of Athanasius, an early church leader, “God become human that we might become divine.”²⁷ Deification is part of all Christian traditions, although it has so receded into the background in most that it sounds unfamiliar, even unchristian, when clearly expressed, as in the early church’s words: God became a real man so that each of us might become a real god! St. Basil²⁸ wrote that humans are the creatures that have received the order to become gods. Jesus’ words were even stronger - not about “becoming” but about what is true right now - “You are gods.”

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²¹ Ps. 82:6, John 10:34
²² John 17: 20, 22
²³ Gal. 2:20
²⁴ 2 Peter 1:4
²⁵ Heb. 2:17
²⁶ 1 John 3:2
²⁷ Athanasius of Alexandria (298-373), saint and doctor of the Church.
On the Incarnation 54.
²⁸ Basil, 329-379, Bishop of Caesarea, ranking among the greatest figures
in church history and defender of the Oriental Church against heresy.