The Christ Consciousness as Mastery of Time
by Patrick Paul Garlinger
In March 2016, a month into a kundalini awakening (when the dormant spiritual energy emerges from the base of the spine and travels up through the chakras), I heard very clearly a strong yet familiar voice in my head say to me, “We are going to write. And we are going to write quickly.” In the next six months, I downloaded three separate volumes of writing, the first of which, Seeds of Light: Channeled Transmissions on the Christ Consciousness, has just been published this past March.
I personally would not have used the phrase “the Christ Consciousness” nor would I have grappled with such a powerful spiritual figure who can be, for many people, something of a lightning rod. My previous work, When Thought Turns to Light (Epigraph, 2016), spoke of spirituality in terms of the Light or the Divine, and wove together contemporary strands of New Age wisdom on the nature of the ego and vibrational frequency to offer an accessible introduction to spirituality. This new work, which was channeled through me from a collective of higher beings who referred to themselves as simply the Council of Light, was remarkable both for its complexity and its Christian lexicon. In a series of interweaving chapters, they outline what the Christ truly stands for: a Divine model of consciousness available to all of us. Peeling back the illusion of our typical human consciousness, they reveal a novel, radical understanding of the Christ Consciousness that is really about our relationship to time.
The Collective & The Christ Consciousness
The Council of Light explains that we human beings relate to the world fundamentally through the axes of time and space. Time and space are what allows us to see every person and object as seemingly separate from us. The physical world appears to us as separate entities from one moment to the next. I am me now, I was me a second ago, and I will still be me a second from now. And you are you now, and you were you a second ago, and you will be you a second from now. This is how our minds construct the reality that we perceive around us. Our existence appears to depend on this separation. If you and I were not separate, then I wouldn’t be me, and you wouldn’t be you. My existence therefore depends on you being separate from me. If other people can leave my awareness, I continue to exist. Conversely, if I cease to exist, those other people will, presumably, continue to exist.
Our minds—what the Council calls the “collective consciousness”—then takes the unnecessary step and reasons that, because my existence is separate, other people can threaten my existence without jeopardizing theirs. As a result, our minds begin to evaluate others for how much they threaten or support my existence. We constantly assess whether everything around us on a scale of “good” or “bad.” We go through life looking at the world and saying “I like this” and “I don’t like that.” This is our human penchant for judgment. Even though we do not always regard everything as an existential threat, our minds are engaged in a constant evaluation of our world to ensure our relationship to it continues, precisely because as separate beings we can always be removed from the world.
The Role of Time in Human Consciousness
Time in particular is the essential way we relate to the world, from one moment to the next. Our sense of ourselves depends on a continuity between the past, present, and future. It is this search for our own constancy and continuity that generates our relationship with time—and the source of much of our emotional strife. Because we see ourselves as existing from one moment to the next and yet capable of not-existing, because our existence is separate from the rest of the world, we are obsessed with time: We constantly revisit the past and worry about the future. Ironically, it is precisely this need for coherence and continuity—at root, our fear of death—that we continue to see the present moment through the eyes of the past. Whatever we see, we relate to our past experiences of similar or different objects. That is how we maintain a sense of coherence from moment to the next along the axis of time.
The Council of Light further explains that our relationship to the historical figure of Jesus Christ is itself an example of how we relate to time. We continue to look to the past, in the hopes of deriving some sort of secure authority, rooted in the past, that can justify and explain our relationship to Jesus Christ, the person, in the present moment. We look to the past, to antiquity, for authority, to guide our perception of the present moment. As a result, we get bogged down in particular questions about the historical person—what really happened, what he looked like, etc.—that do nothing to inform how we can relate to the consciousness that the Christ embodied. In short, we bind ourselves the past, and we replicate it again and again the present moment, unaware of our ability to recreate ourselves anew right now.
The Meaning of the Christ Consciousness
The Christ Consciousness, then, is really about the mastery of our relationship to time. It is not about trying to emulate the historical figure of Jesus Christ as we have come to view him, nor to see Jesus Christ as a savior who will return in some kind of magical descent from the heavens. Rather, the “return” of the Christ is our collective realization that the Christ Consciousness is an awakening of our own minds and how we relate most fundamentally to time. Because we are engaged in a constant evaluation of objects and people in space and time—marking them as separate from us, and evaluating them as “good” or “bad”—we never really inhabit the present moment. Instead, we project our past views onto the present, seeing the world through our past experiences, to protect ourselves. This is fundamentally our approach to self-preservation: to maintain our sense of coherence, from one moment to the next, we recreate ourselves as we were before, from one moment to the next.
In truth, we are actually engaged in a practice of resurrection from one moment to the next: We constantly recreate ourselves in the same image from one moment to the next. That act of self-preservation, recreating ourselves as before, means we also carry with us the pains and burdens of the past; we accumulate judgments and fears based on our prior encounters as we evaluated them then in relationship to our own self-preservation as a separate physical being. In sum, we recreate ourselves with that same negativity from one moment to the next. The true meaning of Christ’s resurrection was the relinquishing of the ego’s relationship to time and space (the cross), which says that our existence requires us to see ourselves as separate from each other in time and space, and that our existence requires this constancy and continuity from one moment to the next.
Forgiveness Rewrites the Past
How do we let go of the past and reproduce ourselves in the present? How do we invoke the Christ Consciousness? We do so through the power of forgiveness. The Council of Light emphasizes that “I forgive” are two of the most powerful words available to us. They are a claim to existence that leaves behind the past, leaves behind a grievance that we have carried around with us and reproduced from one moment to the next. With these words, we reconstitute ourselves as someone who has let go of any belief that we were harmed. For when you experienced some moment of pain or grievance, you and the person who harmed you were co-creating yourselves in that moment. One of you did or said something to the other person based on your perception of separation from each other. One of you engaged the other through the eyes of judgment, and caused the other person harm. And you believed you were harmed; you felt some sort of pain as a result of that exchange.
Forgiveness is your power to resurrect yourself anew, without the pain of the past. It is your power to rewrite the past, by erasing the impact it had on you. Ultimately, the truth is that there is no separation between you and other people. This is a perception of the mind. It is the power to use language to constitute yourself now, without the injury or harm of the past still with you. By forgiving another, you undo the separation between you and the other because you recognize that you and the other person are no different: both of you are grappling with separation. You are both “Seeds of Light”—aspects of the Creator.
Undoing separation—and seeing yourself as no different from the other person—is the foundation for opening yourself to a new version of love. The Council of Light emphasizes as we do not see each other as forms of love, as Seeds of Light, who are all equally divine, because of our deeply entrained habits of judgment. Forgiving lays the groundwork for letting go of all of our judgments and evaluations of others, based on whether we “like” them or think they are “good” or “bad,” so that we can simply appreciate each other as human beings. Forgiveness, then, becomes the stepping stone to our true emancipation from our collective consciousness and to embrace all of our differences and diversity as infinite expressions of the Divine. Forgiveness is the portal to the Christ Consciousness, and it is available to all of us.
About the author:
Patrick Paul Garlinger first experienced the grace of awakening many years ago when he began to meet numerous spiritual figures and experience higher states of consciousness. While training under the renowned spiritual teacher, Mirabai Devi, Garlinger underwent a profound evolution of his inner world. Previously a professor of Spanish literature and a full-time attorney, he divides his time between working part-time as an attorney, writing works of spiritual wisdom, and providing intuitive guidance and healing services to individual clients and groups. He lives in New York City. He is also the author of When Thought Turns to Light: A Practical Guide to Spiritual Transformation.
For more information about his writings and services, please visit www.patrickpaulgarlinger.com.
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