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Meetings with Christ

Tony Crisp

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In the early Seventies I became involved in a small peer group whose aim was to explore what happened if you stopped editing or controlling what you expressed physically or psychologically. This involved allowing, as far as we were able, any movement our body made without conscious direction, and any sounds, emotions and fantasies that arose unwilled.

The theory behind the practice was that the body tries to rid itself of irritants or poisons through such mechanisms as eyes watering, sneezing, coughing or vomiting. So this self-regulatory process would discharge trauma or stress if we did not constantly control or direct body and mind. We understood this could work at an emotional and spiritual level also, and involved the process of personal growth. We didn't feel this was a new technique, as there are many historical references to it in different cultures. We also felt, because of its historical mentions, that it might open previously unrealised potential or transcendent experience.

The First Meeting

Our group met weekly, and it was in this environment I experienced my first powerful meeting with Christ. I had been allowing the process for two years, with very satisfying results. A great many childhood events had surfaced leading to insight and integration of previously unconscious experiences or body tensions. For instance, one of the first was that I relived the experience of my tonsil operation as a six year old.

The process often took weeks to work through a particular theme or event. So it was not a surprise when one evening a new theme started that led me to feel I had blood on my hands. However, it was puzzling and slightly disorientating to have such a strong feeling that I had killed someone. The feelings were just as strong and real as any I had met in connection with verifiable events such as that mentioned regarding my tonsils operation as a six-year-old. So I was very curious to see what surfaced at the next meeting.

I was not in any way asleep, or in a trance. My evaluative rational self was keenly observing all that happened, but not interfering. Nevertheless, profoundly felt imagery and feelings flooded my awareness. I realised I was experiencing the New Testament story of the birth. But this did not seem to interfere with the flow of what poured into my feelings. My whole body felt the wonder of the baby and I fell to my knees before it. I knew as if intuitively, that all the cosmos had somehow come alive as this helpless vulnerable child. I was so overwhelmed, all I could say over and over, between sobbing cries was, 'A baby' - 'A baby.'

The flowing emotions and the opened intuitive sense informed me that what I knelt before in tears was not a particular child. It was every baby ever born. For the first time I had been allowed to experience the enormity of birth, the holiness of every baby.

Suddenly the scene changed again, and I was standing with others by the side of a dusty unpaved road. People were excitedly waiting for someone, and I was curious to see who it was. It was a man, and as he walked the road he saw me and came toward me. This part is difficult to describe, as I feel incapable of communicating the power of the event. The man was ordinary in appearance, but as he got near to me it seemed as if a great force surrounded him that penetrated me completely. The force was love, buffeting me like waves I could barely tolerate. The man stood before me and took my hands and said, ‘You are my disciple.’ At this, love so immense touched me that I fell backwards, the contact too painful for me to bear, and the man walked on.

I knew who he was. I also knew, because it was welling up from within me as sure knowledge that he was the man I had killed. It was his blood I had on my hands. It was his death I felt guilty of. But he, in some strange paradoxical way, was myself. He was the cosmic mystery I have been born as. He was the very best of myself I had killed, murdered. He was my youthful sexuality I had suffocated to death, helped by the tenets of a religion that was supposed to be teaching his way, the way of life, the way of recognising one's cosmic link.

The impact of that meeting was extraordinary. Unable to stop the emotions surfacing, I felt impelled to move to each person in the group rubbing my hands on them. It seemed to me that a magical influence had touched my hands and I wanted everyone around me to receive some of that magic. Even years afterwards, when describing the event, the wonder of it can penetrate me again, and I am overcome by emotion. One time, while sitting telling two women friends the story, I experienced an expanding of awareness, a sense of transcending my usual state of mind, and visible waves of movement ran up my trunk. These were like peristaltic movements of the gut, but they were moving up my trunk, obvious to my two friends and myself. I had never previously experienced anything like it, and have never since. It seemed at the time as if my being had become a conduit for an enormous energy that I did not understand intellectually. How it managed to create a wave like movement over different muscle groups and skin I do not know.

The meeting presented Christ paradoxically as something exterior to me, and at the same time something that was a fundamental and integral part of my own nature. As an exterior influence, Christ touched my awareness and told me I was his disciple, suggesting I could learn from him and co-operate in his doings. In fact many other people have similar meetings to my own. So Christ is not simply my own personal subjective experience. I remember for instance working as a therapist with a woman who was exploring issues to do with her marriage. The subject of Christ or religion had not been mentioned, but the woman, lying on a couch, went quiet during the session. I suddenly felt an unmistakable shift in the room. Without any prompting from me she said with great joy, ‘I feel the presence of Christ. I have sought this all my life but it has never happened before.’ I winessed a similar meeting with at least two other people. One, a man in a group I was leading in Athens came forward with tears in his eyes to tell me he had just met Christ for the first time in his life.

In such meetings one has a distinct impression that Christ is a disembodied influence of great stature, who touches and moves many individuals, and is certainly alive and active in today's world. A Christian might define the experience I had as a meeting with the living Christ, who was calling me to him. Jung would probably say I came face to face with an archetype, and was being enlarged or healed by its influence. But there are, of course, many other ways of defining it. The philosopher Carl Popper says that our reality has three levels or worlds. World One consists of physical objects, such as a hand, a stone, or a cat. World Two is the many states of mind or awareness we experience. World Three is thoughts, feelings, with their many products, such as stories, ideas, and concepts.

From this point of view of Christ might be a dweller in World Three, and Richard Dawkins has given the name ‘meme’ to World Three objects. Anything that can be transmitted from one mind to another Dawkins calls a meme. He says that memes are alive, because they can propagate themselves, passing from one person to another. Ideas, beliefs, theories, reproducing themselves in other minds, actually create physical structures by forming connections in the brain. Like a virus, it may positively or negatively alter the individual it inhabits. In fact some religious sects treat ideas that might destroy their own possessing memes as if they were virulent bacterial or viral attacks. A meme, idea, or legend, such as that regarding Christ, can outlive the individual and survive for thousands of years, even going through processes of evolutionary change.

The other aspect of this paradoxical meeting, Christ as a fundamental and integral part of myself, is easier to understand. This was recognisable, even in the meeting, as my own potential. It was a potential that had been thwarted or ‘murdered’ in its flowering. But the portrayal of this potential was dramatically shown as transcending the limitations of the body and its senses. Christ as the core of myself, was eternal and unbounded. The experience has been a constant reminder for me not to completely identify with the limitations, sensibility and frailties of my body.

The Second Meeting

I do not have my journals with me as I write this, to check the correct sequence of the meetings that followed in the 25 years since the first. But each of them appears to be more about instruction or education than the first. Though each one was a reminder or reconnection with transcendence. As with the first, the subsequent meetings were not sought, but arose as spontaneous events connected with my own attempted growth toward wholeness.

Because the murder of my own sexual feelings in adolescence, already mentioned, was such an important feature of my own self-acceptance, two of the meetings were a further unfolding of this issue. In the first of these, amidst other feelings and insights, the sense of the enormity of the presence of Christ suddenly arrived. I use the word enormity because the experience is often one of meeting someone or something so huge, so beyond the apparent limitations of human life that I, and others, are often overwhelmed by awe. At other times the awareness of Christ brings with it a feeling of communicating with a knowledge, or base of information, that seems to be all knowing, or all inclusive. Sometimes this means a penetrating insight that strips away one's own lies and reveals unconscious motivations in a gentle way.

Having grown up in a Christian culture that at the time (1937) disseminated a sense of guilt, dirtiness and shame about sex, and in a culture in which open sexual feelings were largely taboo, this was an enormous shift in perspective for me. But the instruction went on. Christ showed/told me, in this lightning fast dialogue, that the very sexual urges I had killed in myself, were the most powerful energies of transcendence open to me. He told me, in a way that let me to experience for myself, that every sexual act, no matter how base, or violent, had in it the actual move toward another person. It was an opening of oneself to another being, however degraded that might be in a situation such as rape. That opening, that need, if allowed and nurtured, can lead toward transcending one's own personal boundaries, and allowing another being into one's most intimate and guarded self. It was not a condoning of rape, but a way of showing me that the sex drive has in it the urge toward transcendence, toward going beyond oneself. Beyond this too, I was shown how the sexual drive in both genders, transcends all the boundaries that can keep people apart. Boundaries such as racial differences, skin colour, religious beliefs, political ideology, personal temperament, and even age. I saw that if the flower of sex is allowed to open in us, then we can move toward giving ourselves to our partner and or children, and receiving from them, in a way that makes us more than we were. We might even experience the melting of our personal fears and boundaries to the extent of experiencing a merging or oneness with the person we love. This, in turn, can open us to knowing our existence as an integral and undivided part of the cosmos.

In this meeting with Christ there was also the message that sex is not confined simply to genital contact. Any form of giving or receiving is also a form of sex, if something in the giving or receiving enters a person and bears fruit. Parents give themselves in this way when they feed their children, or work to support them. Teachers can enrich and be enriched in the same way. Because of this, each of us are an integration, or partial integration, of thousands of people, and the cultural or personal gifts they gave us. Also implicit in this message was the view that because what we give to others lives on in them after our death, and is even passed on to others, this forms the basis for our spiritual life, that continues after our own death.

Once these things had been pointed out to me I could not help but see them as facts in everyday life. I could see that sex leads us to reach out to another person, and moves us toward including them in ourselves in some degree. It was obvious that the sexual response in humans does lead to transcending boundaries of class, religion, skin colour and divergent temperament. So what I received in that meeting has had a profound effect on me, leading to changes in the way I see and relate to sexuality.

Cosmic Sex

The second of these meetings connected with sexuality was possibly one of the most profound of any such experiences I have had the privilege to encounter. It began in a question I was asking myself regarding the causality of the traumas that had arisen in my life. I felt at the time that I could trace the sexual distress in my life back to events and relationship issues in connection with my mother. I had seen where my distress arose from, so that was no longer a problem. However, seeing how certain events linked with present-day problems, I wondered what causes lay behind the original events. I suppose it was rather like the question asked in the New Testament - Why was this man born blind?

My question was why have these events occurred in my life? Seeing adult distress causally linked with childhood events, made me wonder if the chain of cause and event ran back beyond my childhood and birth. After all, if causality is operative from the trauma onwards, why not from the trauma backwards? If I remember correctly, this is precisely the line of reasoning expressed in the New Testament. Was it he - the blind man - or his parents who sinned?

As I opened to whatever feelings, imagery or body responses might arise in response to the question, the first level of experience was a gradual intensification of felt pain. At that time it was unclear what was happening. In looking back though I liken it to giving birth. The process working in me was pushing at the boundaries of my ego, pressing against the limitations of what I could allow myself to experience, bursting through and breaking down barriers until what I could allow was bigger than anything I had experienced before. So there was much roaring and crying-out, like a hurt animal. But oddly, there was no pain in my body or emotions. It seemed to be some other subtle part of me that was being stretched.

As my awareness was taken more and more into this immense being, I was allowed to see things about human life, and my own personal life, that answered my question as to causality. Some of what I experienced went beyond what I could understand. But I will try to record what is still indelibly imprinted in my memory.

Firstly, Christ appeared to be a form of Shepherd, it's flock - for christ was neither male or female - being humanity. Christ's work is to penetrate the very existence and life experience of every person on earth - alive or dead. Everything each of us think, feel or do, is also experienced by that being standing beyond the limitations of time or space. Christ takes it all, experiences it all, with a love or compassion that stands above any form of condemnation or judgement. In some way human experience is the food of Christ. But this tolerance has to end at death. Then, Christ, or this process in nature, if you prefer to think of it as that, fully absorbs the entire memories and experience of the person. It seemed to me that without this there could be no personal survival of death. In fact, standing before the Christ, there seemed nothing in my own life that was fine enough, universal enough, to survive and become a functioning part of cosmic life. It was only this extraordinary being, winnowing through every act of each dying person, trying to find some deed, some seed of universal love and life that can be preserved, or taken as a basis for further growth, that enables us to continue, that allows us existence in the body of eternity. That extraordinary love tries to preserve and further the life of each one of us. Thus the parable of the lost sheep. I think this might also explain why many people who have a near death experience, meet a being of light, under the influence of whom they relive every detail of their life.

I said Christ was a shepherd. But equally I saw Christ as an Ark. The only way I can explain this is to ask you to imagine a being that has been able to develop a symbiotic relationship with all life forms at the level of sentience or consciousness. In our own view of life, such a being is incredibly highly evolved. But also imagine that this being does not have a physical body, existing outside the limitations of time and space as we usually know it.

As I witnessed this being, my mental processes formed images of it in an attempt to make it understandable to my own thinking. The image I saw was of an immense being standing in space by earth, absorbing all human experience. This being was an Ark because, from what was being shown me, even if humanity destroyed itself, all its experience would be preserved and expressed again in another time and place. Nothing of importance would be lost. Even such an apparently small thing as a child's love for its Grandma would be preserved and allowed to live again.

Something I saw, but did not comprehend, was that Christ not only linked with all human life through an extraordinary form of total acceptance of every type of experience, but also the whole focused openness or surrender of this being was on something beyond anything I was capable of experiencing or understanding.

Continuum of Lives

What then happened, or what I was shown, was personal. I could see that the difficulties in my life, the causes of sexual struggles, had their roots in the past, in the life of a man who was rigidly authoritarian, and had killed love in some of his children. This was done by tearing them away from marriage outside their own religion. They were therefore pushed into loveless relationships. The being of Christ so interacted with human affairs that a birth, and the life that follows, is woven out of such past threads. Thus my own inability to love had arisen as a way of learning what a tragedy life without love is, and what pain it brings. There was a statement made that the present life arises because it expresses the highest common denominator of the past. This made sense at the time, but does not mean much as I write because my awareness is not expanded as it was. What was and is clear though, is that there was no suggestion of punishment, only an offering of situations from which we can learn. The life of that past man, and others I saw, did not leave me with any feeling that I, Tony, had been that man. What was clear was that the experiences and attitudes that constitute Tony, flowed from those past lives and are an intimate part of who I am now. This seemed as matter of fact, as anyone involved in, for example, nursing, expressing something of the attitudes and skills lived by Florence Nightingale. But I did sense that what is called my spirit was the thread connecting my life with that past man.

As I experienced this I felt as if a resolution between science and religion had taken place in me. For here was something like the cosmic egg science suggests preceded the ‘big bang’. But what had been left out, I realised, was this consciousness, this immense being.

In retrospect, it also suggests to me the difficult question of Elohim being many beings and yet one. For all life had here found a unity in one immense being beyond my comprehension. It was, in fact, difficult to grasp because I was overcome by emotion as I witnessed this.

As I opened to this enormous perception, there was a deepening of understanding, in which Christ aided my comprehension. For I realised that the oneness or unity of this being was unbroken. It was everything, and nothing could exist outside of it. Even if it were to create anything, that thing would not have existence outside of the one.

This condition of ‘all-one’ had led to a form of aloneness. This was as near as my human understanding could grasp. Christ in fact said to me – ‘You must understand, this is your perception of it.’

Love is the Greatest Thing

Out of this aloneness, this great consciousness had longed that other beings might exist. But in its present form this was impossible. Then I understood something that tore my heart to pieces, as it still does today when I dwell on the memory of the experience. This being purposefully went about destroying itself so that our present universe - we - might have existence. It was such a wondrous action for it was done in such a way, with such skill, with such love and self-sacrifice, such art and science, that its very death was a magnificent creative act. In other words its death struck into action forces and effects that created the universe in all its variety. This death is what we know as the ‘big bang’.

As I experienced this, I realised that everything that exists is a part of that wondrous being. There is nothing that is not of its love. So that whatever arises in the universe arises out of, and as, THAT. The human sense of God is a realisation of the very substance of our own existence. The awe we might feel is from an intuition of what has been given us as our own being.

And as that great unity of energy and consciousness died, its very last impulse was for those new beings who might arise from its death. The impulse that flashed out we call love. It flashed through the universe permeating its every particle, in a way that we cannot yet perceive, but which is like a touch upon the pulsating chaotic movements of particles and lives.

We are the seeds of that love. We are God. And in our small portion of the universe, we face a particular lesson through the shortness of our bodily lives. We face death. Yet that is the greatest of things. For that is the heart of everything, the very act of love out of which our lives have been formed. If we discover the secret of death, we discover our creator and eternal nature.

Back to My Beginnings

A very different aspect of the Christ was encountered at a time I was experiencing massive emergence into awareness of material connected with my premature birth. I had been born two months premature prior to the time when such baby's were placed in intensive care. The memories arising showed me how vulnerable I felt, how unprepared to breath or digest, how much I rejected life outside the womb. These experiences led me to feel that my vulnerability caused my mother to feel anxious about me, and not to give me the confident holding and emotional support I needed. This apparently disturbed my grandmother, because she took over caring for me. Unfortunately she died before I was two. So I lost my ‘mother’ at an early age, leading to conflict about where my home was, where my grandmother had gone, and who could I find love with.

I saw, as more and more of this painful material arose, that having lost my love and support externally, having rejected external life at birth, I turned inward for consolation and unconsciously created or found someone or something to get love from within myself.

To quote from an entry in my journal made at that time:

For instance nuns in a convent will not live out their ability to get married or have a child. They may use the figure of Christ as a compensatory symbol for this, in that they marry Christ and their passion is through meditation on his being. In this way people might use a hero/ine figure to compensate for what is missing in their own life. They can live their own unlived soul through the passion of Christ for instance.

A figure such as Christ can represent our own wholeness and complete potential. To compensate for our own unlived areas we might look to this figure and have a taste of what we are not expressing outwardly, through identifying with the hero/ine. Meditations on the figure might produce great feelings of love, pain, wonder, recognition - in fact whatever is missing in everyday relationships. The Christian festivals appear to be a way of living out, via the image of Christ, the passions of life that we might not meet fully in our everyday life. The birth, the struggle, the love, the death, can all be partaken of. We can share the passionate experience of living in this way, even though in our own actual life we might not be able to live such a passionate and eventful existence. And I suppose television does this for many people today.

At first I had a strong feeling that people who are inadequate in some way used this sort of compensation. In this case it could be a path for the weak, and a path that I had taken myself. This suggested by inference that I was less capable of living a full life than most. I had a sneering feeling about how people use this as a crutch, but then realised I was judging once more.

The experiences could be explained as totally compensatory, in the Jungian sense of fulfilling some sort of psychic need or imbalance. They could be explained as extraordinary fantasy arising from fervent religious hopes or beliefs. But this is similar to compensation. They could be seen as expressing psychological or natural truths in emotive symbols. There might even be some suggestion of cultural pressures and norms struggling for some sort of balance in the psyche. They could, of course, as some believe, be the meaningless flotsam and jetsam of the dream state.

Regarding the last theory, based on my own sense of what happens, I believe the dream process is in fact involved. At least, I see the interpretative, image forming process at work. It is the same process the brain uses in interpreting sensory nerve impulses from our eyes, ears, nose, tongue and touch. In doing so it forms an integrated view of the world around us. I also believe that at times awareness can expand beyond our senses and touch things our senses cannot reveal to us of extra or para-sensory impressions. These para, or extra-sensory impressions are treated in just the same way visual impulses are - they are interpreted into images, emotions, ideas, understandable to the receiving personality.

I believe this is true of at least some of the experiences described here. This because before the experience itself, there is usually a sense of massive expansion of my field of awareness and flowering of mental/emotional energy and flow of associations. This is frequently painful at some level of my being, as if I'm being stretched, and previous boundaries burst. Also I have no doubt that what I experience is culturally determined. If I were a Hindu, I would most likely have a meeting with Krishna. Nevertheless, I still believe my awareness met, or touched, or was confronted by, a transcendent force or principle of some sort. It is a principle that can bring major changes in the person’s perspectives, their direction, their health even.

Considering that some research into human awareness suggests that nothing experienced is ultimately external to consciousness, then if I am right in suggesting there is a transcendent principle, the meeting is a meeting with myself. At times a merging of self with what at first feels like an immense otherness, takes place. At such times there is no sense of separation.

As for what might bring about such a meeting, I see this as quite simple. It can come from anything that expands awareness, as long as the person has a capacity to tolerate pain, pleasure, and mental shifts to an unusual degree. One has to become in some way like a responsive keyboard upon which the transcendent in you can play.

For myself this came slowly over years of surrendering my editing and controlling attitudes, as described in the beginning. Even so, during my first meeting the experience was still too painful, so I reeled away from it.

Others I have spoken to arrived at the meeting because of some great tragedy in their life that had torn down their usual boundaries. Great grief, great pain, cuts through the soul to bring the meeting. But great love alone can do it, expanding and introducing, all in the same moment.

When they started to arrive I didn't know what to say. How do you introduce somebody to God? But I needn't have worried. He knew them all by name as if they were old friends. They all talked and laughed so warmly it opened my eyes to something about Him I had never known before. It is that God is the light in our life that leads us to make friends, to be interested in each other’s lives in a caring way, to reach out in friendship after an argument, to know what it is like to be married and have children, and care for others. When we allow those parts of our life to grow in us we let God grow. It is all so everyday and matter of fact we overlook how wonderful it is. I have friends who look up at the stars to find meaning in life. But God is right here with me living in my house and saying hello to my friends by their first names.

All these feelings lived in me as I sat with the others in meditation. When I opened my eyes the people in the group were beginning to leave. One woman, sitting on my right, looked at me and said, 'I had the most wonderful meditation!' She looked at me as if I ought to know what she was talking about.

The next day, still feeling uplifted by the experience, I travelled to Athens airport to catch my plane back to England. As usual at the airport, there were people everywhere waiting for their flights. Some were sleeping on the floor. Others were sitting in various parts of the building. I found a space sitting on the floor with my back against a wall in the midst of many others doing the same thing. As I sat there thinking back on the events of the previous day, I looked up to see a Greek man walking across the open space in front of me with his small daughter. He was holding her hand, and it looked as if she had only recently learned to walk. Just as they were in front of me, about six or seven metres away, the child looked at me, let go of her father's hand, and ran to me with arms wide. She ran into my arms to be hugged. I kissed her and she ran back to her father and they walked on. The people each side of me were astonished and asked me if I knew the child. I told them I had never seen her before. But inside myself I felt sure the small girl had seen the love and the light that were living in my house.

See: Near Death Experience.

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