What The Mystics Know About Christ
By Elizabeth A Wilson
What I have seen is the totality recapitulated as one,
received not in essence but by participation.
Just as if you lit a flame from a flame,
it is the whole flame you receive. —Symeon the New Theologian
Mystics are great examples of players in the Game of Enlightenment. They have remembered and embodied the mystery of Knowing, and faced the expansion necessary to be able to operate as an independent spiritual thinker. They have also discovered the relationship between mind and energy, and usually have a level of vibrational mastery. They can do magic and allow miracles. One of my favorites is Symeon the New Theologian (949‒1022).[1] He was a Byzantine Christian monk and mystic. Like all mystics who have tasted Truth, he knew we have the capacity to experience God’s presence directly [2], and his works attempt to describe this as a cosmic embodiment inside the “force field” that is the Body of Christ. It was considered totally blasphemous of course, because it ends the reign of Jesus the son of Joseph as an unreachable, divine godhead and places Him instead as the savior via precedent for human becoming: He was the One Who Did It, who truly embodied Life as both divine and human. Like the 4-minute mile, we can all do it now. It gives us all permission to be Christ.
Symeon’s “Hymn 15” from his Hymns of Divine Love [3] beautifully sings of the divine union that God is forever inviting us into. If Love is the fabric of Truth and all of creation is of the same source and substance [insert MOHC article link], then of course Christ is in the very same actualization of timescape as “me”. Symeon’s body metaphor brings the union out of the conceptual archives of spiritual intellect and into a sensual and immediate intimacy. He asks “do my words seem blasphemous?” forcing the player to examine their dogmatic principles around what Christ is. He continues “then open your heart to him,” giving the player the single-most important clue to winning the Game of Enlightenment.
We awaken in Christ’s body
as Christ awakens our bodies,
and my poor hand is Christ, He enters
my foot, and is infinitely me.
I move my hand, and wonderfully
my hand becomes Christ, becomes all of Him
(for God is indivisibly
whole, seamless in His Godhood).
I move my foot, and at once
He appears like a flash of lightning.
Do my words seem blasphemous?—Then
open your heart to Him
and let yourself receive the one
who is opening to you so deeply.
For if we genuinely love Him,
We wake up inside Christ’s body
where all our body, all over,
every most hidden part of it,
is realized in joy as Him,
and He makes us, utterly, real,
and everything that is hurt, everything
that seemed to us dark, harsh, shameful,
maimed, ugly, irreparably
damaged, is in Him transformed
and recognized as whole, as lovely,
and radiant in His light
we awaken as the Beloved
in every last part of our body.
This is what the Mystics know about the secret to Life: The Christ is returning as a rising heart beat between, through and in each of us. Our one Mind is remembering, and we are Knowing ourselves as who and what we are: Utterly saturated with the elixir of Life, made of nothing but Holy, Holy Spirit, unified in love as one body of seven billion beautiful souls, the Only Begotten child of God.