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.
------------------------------ 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.
These other paths may differ in the outer dimensions of language,
imagery, rituals, practices, beliefs, and goals. However at the inner
level of the mystical experience of the sacred and humankind as
divine, they are amazingly similar. In relationship to other
approaches, Jesus is not the only model, but he is the determining one
for those in the Jesus Path. In a nonexclusive way, this is the Jesus
Path, not the Buddhist Path, not the Hindu Path, and not the Islamic
Path. We affirm the value of other authentic loving ways, while
embracing our way. A limited understanding of inclusiveness confuses
oneness with sameness. To give up the Jesus Path in order to be
“inclusive” would be to suppose that all others must give up their
unique paths to also be inclusive. This is not helpful or true. We
would encourage others to faithfully follow their own loving path,
just as we do ours. This recognition and respect for others is crucial
in today’s world where there cannot be peace among the nations of the
world until there is peace among the religions of the world.
3.
This is a way of infinite evolutionary development.
In a foundational truth, Jesus said that he had more to tell his
followers but they could not understand it at their current stage of
spiritual development. He said that the Spirit of truth was going to
guide us into all the truth.5
We are always growing in our understanding, and, therefore, these
eleven points are not final thoughts. They are just current thoughts
for now and should be changed, added to, and revised quite often! The
problem with us religious folk is that when we get a thought from
Spirit, we encase it in concrete and then dare the Spirit to teach us
something more. When a society has evolved to a more enlightened stage
and its religion has remained at a previous, lower stage, then that
religion is no longer redemptive - it is dysfunctional.
Cultures, churches, and individuals may be at any of nine evolving
stages: tribal, warrior, traditional, modern, postmodern, or integral.
See my book Integral Christianity for a full description of
each stage.
------------------------------ 5 John 16:12
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.
-----------------------------------------
6 John 14:28
7 Luke 17:21
8 Rom. 8:17
5.
The Bible is an indispensable resource for the Jesus Path.
The Bible is a fascinating story of the evolution of human
spiritual consciousness. It moves from early magical and mythical
stages to elevating prophetic insights, and then to the profound
wisdom and revelatory mystical levels of Jesus in the gospels.
Therefore the Bible reveals a progressive understanding of God and is
best understood through the lens of Jesus himself. Jesus embraced,
ignored, and rejected parts of his Bible. We must do the same. When
some parts of the Bible portray God as violent and angry towards
enemies, and Jesus portrays God as only loving towards enemies,11
we choose to follow Jesus and reject the other less than Christ-like
parts. The best of today’s scholarship is of great help in sorting
through the biblical texts.
However, this ancient collection of books is not our only resource.
Also of value are other ancient writings such as the amazing Gospel of
Thomas, the scriptures of other traditions, the experiences of the
mystics of every path both ancient and modern, other ancient and
contemporary teachers, and ultimately, our own experience of the
Spirit.
------------------------------ 11 Luke 6:35-36
6.
Because the God of Jesus is love, no one will be left behind.
There is no hell as conventionally understood, that is, an eternal
existence apart from God in which we are sent because we did something
wrong or did not do something we should have. The numerous passages in
the New Testament proclaiming the ultimate salvation of all far
outweigh the few that seem to teach the opposite. These few passages
can easily and correctly be understood in the light of Jesus and the
preponderance of
New Testament passages that teach that everyone is, in fact,
already saved.12
The Jesus Path holds that separation from God is an illusion - we are
not now, nor have we ever been separated from God.
------------------------------ 12 Col. 1:20
7.
Transformative spiritual practices can lead to experiencing our oneness with God and awakening to our own divinity.
They include prayer, meditation, study, healing prayer, ego death,
support groups/networks, private and group worship, Holy Communion,
spiritual gifts discovery and use, service, prayer in spiritual
languages, Spirit transmission, channeling Spirit (prophecy),
channeling high level spirit guides, mystical/psychic experiences, the
Enneagram, good teaching, caring touch, body movement, good
psychotherapy, energy/breath work, and other healing channels.
Emotional healing is especially important because the wounds and
self-defeating patterns of the past greatly hinder our ability to love
and awaken spiritually.
Some practices like channeling spirit guides may be dismissed as
sorcery or “new age.” However, Jesus not only communicated with Moses
and Elijah who had been dead for centuries, but he asked for their
help in his upcoming death.14 They knew the prohibitions
against channeling the dead and Moses himself may have written some of
them.15 But in this new age of the Spirit, those old rules
no longer applied. Christians and mystics down through the centuries
have appropriated the help that spiritual guides are constantly
offering. All channeling must be discerned. High-level spirit guides
are available for us in the Jesus path today, too.
------------------------------ 14 Luke 9:28-32 15 Deut. 18:11
8.
The supreme expression of loving God is loving others.
God is love.16 Jesus was Love in sandals.17
The guide to moral behavior advocated by Jesus was not a set of
ancient rules but the way of love. If it’s loving do it. If it’s not
loving, don’t do it.
It is NOT loving to:
• Discount one’s own inner witness.
• Remain silent about oppression in any form.
• Believe that men should be in charge of women.
• Treat homosexuals as less than heterosexuals.
• Confuse church and state issues.
• Neglect the poor.
• Ignore racism.
• Embrace anything less than radical self-acceptance.
It IS loving to:
• Speak out against oppression in every form.
• Treat men and women as equals.
• Affirm all sexual orientations as gifts from God.
• Work to end poverty and provide universal health care.
• Set good boundaries in order to take care of one’s self.
• Protect society from those who would physically harm others.
• Respect other religious traditions.
• Be compassionate toward one’s self.
------------------------------ 16 1 John 4:16 17 John 13:34
9.
Dying to our false self so that our True Self may flourish is an intrinsic part of the Jesus path.
Ego, the false self, is an imposter pretending to be you. It is
the ingrained, unconscious, compulsive need to remain separate and
superior at all times, in all places, and under all circumstances. Ego
takes everything personally, believes the incessant voices in our
head, and does not want us happy or peaceful. The ego is an emotional
swamp filled with its own fears and terrified of change. It is full of
unresolved issues and unfulfilled desires that keep our Christ Self
hidden. This illusionary self is negated, undone, and dissolved when
it is brought into the Light of the Christ Consciousness - the mind of
Christ18 that we share with Jesus.
All great spiritual paths of the world have two great functions: In
one, the self is comforted. In the other, the self is crucified. This
second function does not fortify our separate self but shatters it.
Jesus put it this way: “If you want to be my followers, deny yourself,
shoulder your cross, and follow me. What’s the use if you have
everything, but aren’t true to yourself. Can you put a price on being
true to yourself?”19 Jesus is speaking of the two different
selves which are on parallel tracks that never meet - the false self
and the True Self. The false self, the ego, must be left behind so
that the true Divine Self may flourish.
------------------------------ 18 Phil. 2:5, 1 Cor. 2:16 19 Matt.16, Mark 8, Luke 9
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.
------------------------------ 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.”
------------------------------ 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.
