(Excerpt from chapter 15)
Forging a New Path to Immortality: Christ's Mission to Save the Human Race
For this reason faith came, it did away with the division.
—The Gospel of Truth 34:29
As good as it was, unfortunately the old path was not enough to solve humanity's problem. While it was effective on the level of the individual, the old path was a miserable failure on the level of the collective. It worked wonderfully when people tried it, but it was a path few ever started down, and fewer still completed. And even though generation after generation also produced healers who valiantly struggled to beat back humanity's ever-increasing division with various types of soul retrieval or soul-rescue techniques (whether shamanic, OBE, psychological, or ghostly), there have ultimately been too few of these spiritual warriors to make any meaningful impact on the pathology affecting our species. OBE pioneer Robert Monroe recognized this dilemma, as also does ghost rescuer Robert H. Coddington, who admitted: “We consider rescue of unaware souls a beneficent objective unto itself, even though aiding them, one individual at a time, may be like draining a lake one drop at a time.”
Alas, we may win a few minor battles now and then, but the real war seems all but completely lost. For every individual these soul retrieval specialists help, millions more slip by untouched, lost, and trapped in a merciless downward spiral of unconscious self-destruction. So, instead of getting closer to conquering the pathology that has gripped our species, humanity has kept inching inexorably closer to seeing
it finally conquer us. Day after day, lifetime after lifetime, we slice off more and more fragments of our-selves, endlessly indulging in insane acts of self-betrayal that violate our integrity and endanger our health and safety, ignorantly drop-kicking shards of our being into the garbage dump we call the unconscious.
Everything has a price, so we probably shouldn't be surprised that we now find ourselves standing together at the ultimate precipice, wondering if our divisions will now finally be the end of us. There seems to be every reason to assume they might. When cells don't integrate with the rest of the system in a biological organism, it is called cancer. Left to their own devices, such pathologies inevitably destroy the whole organism. As Luke (11:17) warns, “Any kingdom divided against itself will be ruined, and a house divided against itself will fall.”
At one time, the old path was believed to hold great promise. All the world once embraced it, believing it to be the answer to humanity's problems. People everywhere built huge monuments to it, but in the end it failed us. Despite the entire old path, despite all the binary soul religions, shamans, soul retrieval specialists, psychologists, and ghost-hunters, humanity is still imprisoned inside this pathology. Yes, from time to time a scattered few have been able to escape via the old path; but the vast majority of the Earth's tired, insecure, misinformed, and perpetually distracted population have never even tried to climb out of the trap on their own.
And that could very easily have been the end of the story.
Humanity needed help. Like an infant that had wandered into dangers it didn't understand and had no chance of coping with, humanity needed to be rescued. We had attacked the problem the best way we knew how, and had come up embarrassingly short. Despite a unified worldwide commitment to the old path, we failed in the end. Humanity came away from that sociological experiment as pathologically divided as ever, leaving nothing left to be done but humbly admit our inadequacy and hope for a miracle. We needed a savior.
The Ultimate Soul Retrieval
In The Division of Consciousness, I suggested that Jesus Christ not only mastered the old path (Ephesians 2:14), but figured out how to do something new, taking the old path one step further than anyone had ever done before. His perfect integrity made it possible for Him to delay the activation of His “Fire from Within” transformation until after His physical death. Thus, when He finally underwent this transformation, He did it out of the body, which released awesome, never-before-seen forces that catapulted His soul throughout space and time like the light of an exploding supernova, filling every nook and cranny of the universe with His presence. The Bible reports something similar: “He who descended is the very one who ascended higher than all the heavens, in order to fill the whole universe” (Ephesians 4:10)...
...Jesus is credited by Ephesians 2:14 with having “made the two one.” the same goal emphasized again and again in the Gospel of Thomas and other gnostic works, a goal that would have been extremely relevant and meaningful to the BSD-saturated cultures of the Mediterranean. For centuries afterwards, Christian art commonly displayed Christ making an obviously symbolic gesture—holding up two fingers held close together—as seen in this 6th century icon. Christian scholarship has long been divided on the original meaning of this gesture; some have maintained that it refers to Christ's double nature as God and man, while others have taught alternate explanations. But if this gesture dates from Christ Himself, perhaps it was not intended as a declaration of Christ's nature, but as a command to the viewer: “To those who have eyes to see, here is the whole secret: make the two one!”
One consequence of such an unprecedented maneuver was that Christ's unconscious soul became permanently conjoined to all other souls in the universe. He thus came to intimately and directly share in the psychological existence, experience, thoughts, feelings, and identity of every man, woman, and child throughout history, something that presumably only God Himself had previously done, something that would indeed earn Jesus the title “Son of God.” “On that day you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you” (John 14:20).
Such a forced universal mind-meld would have been just what the doctor ordered, providing a perfect solution for the problem plaguing humanity. Discovering our minds inside His own, Jesus would have found Himself in an unprecedented position of power, in the perfect position to single-handedly attack the whole pathology.
Our pain had become His pain. What we had collectively rejected, denied, ignored, and refused to experience consciously, He could embrace. He could now directly confront, and therefore finally release, all humanity's repressed pain and buried memories, everything we had stored up since the beginning of time (or at least since the beginning of the Division). “I remembered your tears and your mourning and your anguish; they are far behind us” (The Secret Book of James 10:9-10).
Jesus could finally release humanity from its ancient fear of this inner pain, a fear that had trapped and enslaved the whole species for millennia. He could finally integrate all the repressed pain and memories, finally fulfilling the evolutionary purpose to become integrated, integrating all the pain and memories by incorporating them all into His own conscious awareness. What we cowardly refused to integrate into ourselves, He bravely chose to integrate into Himself.
All this repressed material was essentially a debt we owed ourselves, a psychological debt that had grown so large it was threatening to destroy the whole human race. He paid this debt for us; or, as His followers put it 2000 years ago, He “paid for our sins.” With trepidation, and with faith, but most of all with love for His fellow human beings, He used the Fire from Within to “take our sins upon Himself,” just as the Christian Church has maintained for millennia.
What few realize, however, is that even if He did pay our debts for us, that would still not actually release us from our indebtedness. There's no such thing as a free lunch, even for Christians. When one bank takes over another, assuming all its debts, the accounts of the first bank's debtors are not wiped clean, but transferred to the second bank. In the same way, when Jesus paid our debts for us, we did not simply become debt-free, but now, instead of merely owing ourselves, we now owed Him.
He now had leverage over us.
We never imagined that such a thing was even possible. We didn't realize that we had this vulnerability, because we had hidden these debts from our own view. To be unconscious of a debt is to be unconscious of a weakness and a vulnerability. But He knew they were there, and realized that if He could pay off these debts for us, He would be, in effect, taking over the whole human race.
And once He did, the only choice we had left would be whether to look at it as a friendly bail-out or a hostile takeover.
Of course, I can offer little proof for this hypothesis other than a handful of ancient scriptural passages from the Bible, from the Gospel of Thomas and from other sacred scriptures (which many scholars now suggest are actually older and more authentic than the canonical texts). However, Jesus' solution, as described in such scriptures, fits right in with the pathology described by modern psychology and the binary soul doctrine. The expansion of Jesus' perfectly integrated mind throughout the universe, melding in the process to all other human minds, would have provided a perfect and elegant solution to humanity's ancient spiritual dilemma. His perfect integrity would have become our own. “Jesus said, ‘He who will drink from My mouth will become like Me. I myself will become he, and the things that are hidden will be revealed to him’” (The Gospel of Thomas 108). But instead of revisiting those arguments here, I will merely point the interested reader to my earlier work, The Division of Consciousness, which explores this hypothesis in some depth.
I will say here, however, that we all ought to hope mightily that this hypothesis is correct, for the old path is not enough.
The old path, which required us to individually achieve personal perfection and complete integrity, the path that Judaeo-Christian tradition calls “The Law of Moses,” or “The Law,” has plainly shown itself inadequate to our needs. Like communism, it seems like it would work if everyone followed it faithfully, but alas, that's the whole problem. We're not even faithful with ourselves, so how can we be expected to be faithful to anything else?
