Christ

There can be several felt associations with Christ or Jesus. The first might be whatever you feel about organised religion. In this sense Christ could depict the forces in you that create moral pressure from the norm lived by society. So it would be the pressure to conform to the norm.

Christ is also an internal sense of how your life measures up to the universal life you constantly sense around you. This would be a feeling of what your highest potential is, and how well or badly you have manifested it. Sometimes this is experienced as a meeting with truth, the truth about yourself. To properly connect and realise what Christ is, it is necessary to be able to put one’s rational mind aside and able to enter a different dimension of ourselves, our mind.

But more important Christ might be seen as a collective identity arising in the consciousness of humanity. This relates to us individuals much as our identity relates to the cells of our body. It survives our death and change, integrates our experience, transcends our function, and has a personal relationship with us. See: archetype of Christ.

Although people generally think of Christ as an historical figure, Christ is never that – even though pictures and paintings depict Christ as a human being. That is because we have been taught that Jesus and Christ are the same person. But it clearly says that when Jesus was baptised something immense happened to him. “Now when all the people were baptised, it came to pass, that Jesus also was baptised – of John in Jordan – and praying, the heaven was opened, and the Holy Ghost descended in a bodily shape like a dove upon him, and a voice came from heaven which said, ‘Thou art my beloved Son: in thee I am well pleased.’ (Luke 3:21-22).”

It tells us that the heavens opened and something from the cosmos entered Jesus and transformed him into having Christ Consciousness. For Christ was an aspect of Godness and had always existed. It is easier to see it rather like our growth. When we were babies we grew and entered another level of awareness and ability called childhood. Later another huge change entered us and we became adolescents – again with a different mental and emotional state. Many people have attained the change of Christ consciousness. It is a further stage of human growth. As an example Siddartha became the Buddha when he experienced such a great change. In different languages this change has different names such as Krishna Consciousness. It might shock some people to see Christ linked with Buddha and Krishna – if so you have a lot of growing to do and if you do you too can enter Christ consciousness.

As a dream symbol he depicts powerful influences acting upon your personality. For a start, Christianity is a huge social and political force in the world. Many of us as children are educated to accept its beliefs or we meet its influence in one way or another. Therefore Christ in our dreams often depicts this enormous influence and how we relate to it.

Christ can also be a very potent compensatory symbol. Events can be either pleasurable or painful. As children, and often as adults, we are largely at the mercy of events as to whether our life is experienced as painful or pleasurable. If we are lonely or depressed for instance, we may read a book, go out with a friend or watch a film, stimulating feelings that displace or compensate for the loneliness or despair. In many dreams the figure of Christ is used to compensate for what may be felt as crushing or defeating life circumstances or inner despair. Such compensation may be used to deal with things missing from your life, such as a sexual partner or social achievement.

But the hidden and miraculous power that caused you to grow, that heals and supports if you open to it, is also often shown as Christ. But the highest of these is that Christ in our dreams can be the Highest in us. It is the potential you hold within you that has not been allowed to flower. It is the very best of what you are, not some distant possibility that you have to get from outside yourself. See Meetings with Christ.

“Such a myth, however, consists of symbols that have not been invented consciously. They have happened. It was not the man Jesus who created the myth of the god-man. It existed for many centuries before his birth. He himself was seized by this symbolic idea, which, as St. Mark tells us, lifted him out of the narrow life of the Nazarene carpenter.” Quoted from Man and His Symbols by Carl Jung

The early Jewish Christian group known as the Ebionites taught that the Spirit had come as Adam and later reincarnated as Jesus. Other Jewish Christian groups such as the Elkasaites and Nazarites also believed this. The Clementine Homilies, an early Christian document, also taught many incarnations of Jesus.

My take on it is that just as many people can become Buddhas also many people can become Christs. That is because just as Jesus became the Christ, so can we by evolving to the level where we too touch a universal awareness, in which all human experience is synthesised and apparent.

Useful questions:

How do I relate to the image of Christ?

Am I in conflict with it because it represents organised religion?

Is Christ an image of all that is good in my potential?