Commusings: The Mystic Jesus by Marianne Williamson
Dec 21, 2024
Dear Commune Community,
What does it mean to have a mystical experience?
It is the transformation from the feeling of being a separate, isolated self to the sensation of being completely interconnected with the universe.
This evolution in (non)self-awareness goes by many names: samadhi, moksha, unity consciousness, and Christ consciousness — among others.
We get glimpses of this state in meditation, in prayer, and in altered states of consciousness and ecstasy (sometimes incited by hallucinogens).
We often associate Abrahamic religions with the cultivation of faith in an external, omniscient creator. Mystical Christian traditions, however, stress an inward, contemplative, and experiential approach to spirituality.
New Thought Christianity – as modeled in A Course in Miracles – is a modern take on gnostic and mystic Christianity. It views Jesus as a spiritual teacher and model for humanity's capacity to realize divine potential.
This is the mystic Jesus that my friend Marianne Williamson describes in her book of the same title. She’s been generous to share an excerpt with us today.
This week, we celebrate Jesus’ putative birth. Whether you believe that he was an enlightened teacher, God incarnate, or both … the themes he delivered from the Mount of Beatitudes are more applicable than ever: humility, forgiveness, and love of thy neighbor. May we look inward, find these qualities in ourselves, and walk in the footsteps of the ascendant host.
Hear my sermons on the mount of IG @jeffkrasno.
In love, include me,
Jeff
P.S. Marianne will also be gracing the stage at our upcoming event in Los Angeles. Come hear her magnetic wisdom in person at Luminescence: A Women’s Health & Longevity Summit.
• • •
The Mystic Jesus
by Marianne Williamson
Excerpted from The Mystic Jesus: The Mind of Love.
Many years ago, I went through a painful ordeal. It was a very rough period of my life. During that time, I had an odd experience. As I lay awake night after night unable to sleep, I began to sense a strange energy—a shadowy presence like that of a very thin, tall man, sitting upright at the end of my bed perpendicular to how I was lying. He was simply there. Not doing anything. Not looking at me. Just there.
I had been a student of A Course in Miracles for a while at that point, and I was familiar with feeling God’s presence. But I hadn’t had any specific sense of relationship to Jesus. Now, seeing this figure at the end of my bed, I began to wonder...
During that period, I knew I was in trouble psychologically; I could see it on the faces of my family and friends when they looked at me. I experienced what today would be called a nervous breakdown. I didn’t realize it at the time, but what I was going through was something that most people feel to some extent, but which many have grown adept at covering over. The gap between the world we’re living in and the world our hearts are calling for is growing into an increasingly unsustainable stress point.
Today, almost forty years later, we are living a life so at odds with who we are. Cracking under the strain of it all feels more like the rule than the exception. Our society calls it a mental health crisis, but in fact, it’s a spiritual one. There is a profound disconnection between the love in our hearts and how we are living on the earth. The truth of our being is not reflected in the world we see around us; instead, it is contradicted, obscured, and even violated by the world. The realities of the modern world do more to bruise than to heal the wounded soul, and the purpose of our lives is to repair the damage.
My mother didn’t know what to do with a daughter who couldn’t stop crying, and she told me she would send me to therapy. “My friend Buzz says you need to see someone,” she said.
I responded, “Ya think?”
“But none of that crazy California stuff you do!” she said. (I had been living in New York, but she labeled anything nontraditional “California.”) “I want it to be a medical doctor. A Jewish psychiatrist.”
Fine, Mom, I thought, just try to help me, please. And when I walked into the psychiatrist’s office, one of the first things I said to him was, “Look, I’m a student of a set of books called A Course in Miracles, and you need to know that. If you’re going to tell me that’s crazy and delusional and what I need is serious psychiatric help but that’s not it, then this isn’t going to work.”
To my amazement and eternal gratitude, he leaned over in his chair and said, “I just finished the Workbook.” He was a student of A Course in Miracles.
It was during that time that I felt the presence at the end of my bed. And it was also during that time that I proposed a kind of deal to God. In a moment of despair, I told Him that if He would help me put my life back together, then I would dedicate the rest of it to Him.
Slowly but surely, and with the help of that amazing psychiatrist in Houston, I healed. I felt as though my head had exploded into thousands of little pieces, sending shards of my skull out into the outer regions of the universe. It took time, but when my skull came back together, it felt like something had entered my brain that hadn’t been there before. My perceptual framework was somehow rearranged.
As the months passed, I forgot about that moment when I had proposed a deal to God. In fact, I started feeling like my old self again. I didn’t sense a presence at the end of my bed anymore, but I still felt something that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. It was as though I had been accompanied in my grief. Now, however, what had felt so comforting before began to feel kind of weird. What had felt like a reassuring presence began to feel like a bit of an intrusion as I was going about my day.
In fact, I tried to shoo it away.
“Look, I’m extremely grateful to you. But I’m fine now, really. I’m sure you have many, many other people to help, and I think you should go do that! Thanks so much. Really. Bye-bye!”
I was trying to blow off Jesus.
Then not long afterward, an interesting thing happened at a cocktail party I attended in Houston. The party was at a big house filled with smaller rooms. The party sort of floated from one room to the next.
At one point, I entered a room and saw about three or four men dressed in tuxedos, drinks in hand, standing around talking to each other. And in what must have been a waking dream—ancients would have called it a mystical experience, perhaps—one of the men turned his head and looked at me. In that moment, I gasped. For I knew who he was.
He simply looked at me, saying without any emotion whatsoever, “I thought we had a deal.”
And that was it.
I have found over the years that I’m far from alone in having had a strange introduction to Jesus. The prepackaged religious Jesus doesn’t work for everyone, including some Christians. For many, he has become like a fossil enclosed within a glass case, displayed in a museum but somehow lacking spiritual force.
The world needs help—few are doubting that now—but religious dogma seems like an inadequate response to the challenges of our time. People long for a sense of spiritual immediacy, not some promise of a vague and far-off heaven. Nothing narrow, rigid, or inauthentic grabs the modern soul. If there’s something that bears witness to our horror at the pain of living, that speaks to our yearning to escape the trauma of simply being in this world, and delivers us to realistic hope that things could actually get better, then we’re definitely open. But not to stultified notions of an otherworldly benefactor who stands by while humanity suffers. Nope. Too late for that. There’s a sense among millions that that might have worked for others at another time, but it won’t work for us.
In turning away from the dogma of organized religion, however, people don’t necessarily mean to be turning away from God. Many are scanning the landscape now for new, more vital spiritual experiences, including a revelation of Jesus that is more relevant to their lives. They’re finding this revelation both inside and outside the Christian religion. Surely there’s something beyond the false choice between a calcified notion of a “Son of God” and the modern de-juiced assignation of “a great teacher.” We’re looking for a deliverer not just from our individual sins but from the world’s insanity. And nothing less will do.
We understand that the problems of our world cry out for something deeper than either the shallowness of institutional religion or the bromides of popular culture. The quest for that something deeper relates to every collective challenge we face now, and people know it. This book is an exploration of the role of Jesus in helping us find what that is.
Just as Jesus two thousand years ago came to speak not only to Jews, the Jesus of today comes to speak not only to Christians. The idea that he belongs only to Christians, or to practitioners of any other religion, for that matter—who therefore get to determine precisely who he is and what he should mean to us—is an idea whose time is passing. While Christianity claims a kind of monopoly on Jesus, there’s a growing sense that he belongs to no one and yet to everyone.
The mystic Jesus is a universal Jesus, an aspect of nature itself. I experience the sun, but no one owns the sun. I experience the breeze, but no one owns the breeze. I experience love, but no one owns love. Natural forces can neither be contained nor proprietied, and Jesus is a natural force.
The mystic Jesus is a path of consciousness, an understanding of how the universe operates and how we can mentally align with its purposes. The contemporary mystic is guided by an internal radar that exists within us all, literally a gift from God. Whether we call that guidance conscience, ethics, our covenant with God, the voice of the Holy Spirit, or Jesus, its wisdom and illumination is the salvation of the world.
When Jesus said, “My kingdom is not of this world,” that is what he was referring to—that his kingdom is not an outer but rather an inner domain of existence, what today we call the psyche. His is a mindset of love, which he shares with us when we ask him to. The only thing to be saved from is our own misguided belief that we are separate and alone in a random and meaningless universe—for that is the source of all fear. The reason Jesus can be called savior of the world is because he saves us from our sick thinking about the world. Jesus is a guide to another way of thinking—thus the builder of another kind of world.
The world is a reflection of our thoughts; therefore, the primary thing to be saved from is our own misguided thinking. The salvation of the world lies in the correction of the thinking that dominates this world, a kind of thinking that is rooted in fear and leads inevitably to fearsome consequences. The problems of the world as we know them are simply symptoms of a deeper problem: us, and the ways of thinking that trap us in the hell of our own making. It is thinking based on fear, positing us as separate from everything—from anything larger than ourselves, from each other, and from the world at large. This thinking is deeply untrue and deeply insane. It wounds the world because it breaks the heart. It causes inevitable suffering because it is so at odds with the truth of who we are. We need to correct that thinking, and then we will correct the world. We need to heal our wounded souls, and then we will heal the world.
It is imperative that we stop behaving in ways so violently destructive to ourselves and to others and to the planet on which we live, or humanity will not survive itself. Our violent behavior stems from our violent thinking; it is our thinking, therefore, that is killing us. Yet how do we change at this point? Is anyone seriously thinking that traditional psychotherapy, or psychopharmacology, or theology is going to save us?
“A universal theology is impossible, but a universal experience is not only possible but necessary” (MT-77), says the Course.
And what is that experience? What is the shift in thinking that will lead to a change in behavior that will lead to a different kind of world? The spiritual path is simply the journey of the heart, and as the world embarks on that journey, then our world is going to change.
There are many guides on that journey, and Jesus is one of them. The mystic Jesus is not a theological construct; he is a spiritual force. He is a presence within us through which we forge an intimate relationship with God, ourselves, and each other. He becomes a lived experience as we practice the principles that are the core of his message to the world. He is an intercession from a thought system beyond our own, a master healer of the human race.
Jesus is a bridge to another kind of thinking, better thought of as a living inner guide than as a stained-glass icon. He is a reminder of who and what we truly are. He stands in the breach between the neurotic, weak, fearful, and judgmental you and the strong and powerful, forgiving, and most glorious you. He can lead you from one to the other. His mind, joined with ours, can shine away the fear-laden sense of self that plagues us.
That is the revelation of the mystic Jesus. He will lead us through the darkness in our mind to the light that God placed there and that cannot be erased. The mystic Jesus is not an idol. He is an evolutionary Elder Brother, not forcing himself on anyone but available to everyone. The subject of this book is who he is, and who we ourselves become when our thoughts align with his.
In 1992, I published a book called A Return to Love. In the chapter on forgiveness, I told my readers I totally understood that forgiveness could be hard. Why? Because I had once been stood up for a date to the Olympics!
I kid you not. In fact, not only was that the most extreme example I could come up with at the time for how hard it could be to forgive; I even remember others telling me that that was their favorite section of the book!
Oh my, what innocent times those were. I had not yet been deeply deceived in life, and I had not yet deeply deceived myself. I was giving myself kudos for forgiving someone who had merely stood me up for a date. I really had no idea—yet—how hard forgiveness could be.
Over time, life did to me what it does to everyone who lives long enough: it showed itself to me. And I’ve learned things I could never have learned had I not come to experience the harshness of the world. I’ve learned that behind my mistakes, and behind the mistakes of others, lies a corrective mechanism that some call grace.
As life got tougher, I began to realize that the cliché is true: you get bitter or you get better. If our habitual reaction to the lovelessness of the world is to toughen up, to wall ourselves off, then we will only experience more pain. For we actually create what we defend against, attracting to ourselves the very thing that we fear might happen. But we can choose a better way; we can replace our fears with love.
Our safety lies not in defensiveness but in defenselessness. Perfect love is inviolable: we were not created to be vulnerable to the lovelessness in ourselves or others. It’s not a mantle of attack but a mantle of forgiveness that will protect us from life’s storms. Instead of trying to fight the world, we can realize the victory has already been won. We need not get more haggard and more weary as the years go by.
Accepting the Atonement, seeing that only love is real, we come to understand that we might as well calm down. In any instant, we can accept what’s true. And there we are released. That is the mindset of enlightenment, the gift of the mystic Christ.
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