No One Owns the Truth: Jesus Christ and the Revolution of the Heart

The Revolution Jesus Christ brought to the world is the revolution of the heart. Turning the tables on our own ideas of who we are is the core revolutionary act. The dramatic event of Christ in the Temple is the subject of this essay because it is about reclaiming the Body of Mankind from the contamination and rot that comes from indulgence in superficial matters and the neglect of the Sacred Heart of Life.

In this essay, I make the distinction between the real revolution Christ advocated and the patty-cake kid stuff that passes for progress in our culture. Playing nice music and re- arranging the chairs on the deck of the Titanic didn’t save anyone.

Jesus’ Original Gospel, his Call to live in the truth of our ecstatic unity with God, is the cutting edge of true revolution.

“Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.” Matthew 10:34 NIV

Returning to our Root, opening to the truth of unity with God, with all Life, shining as the freedom and happiness of our inherent nature, embodied love is the Revolution of the Heart Christ demonstrated so passionately.

We are not our ideas of ourselves. What we are is prior to all the ideas and names we give to Me. Our truest nature far transcends idea, belief, label, gender, race, nationality, origin, color and religion. Understanding this is where the radical, authentic revolution begins. All so-called divisions between humanity that we endlessly hear about on the Snooze are false dichotomies. There are no divisions. None. Distinctions? Yes. Divisions? No.

Proof: My head is wildly different from my feet. Two extremely different shapes and functions, same body. No divisions. No seams. Not in the human body, nor anywhere in Nature. Only seamless continuity between bodily organs and functions, plant and soil, horizon and ocean, part and whole, matter and consciousness, self and God.

This is already the case. Unity does not have to be achieved. In fact, it cannot be achieved because it already exists. It can only be recognized and enjoyed as the pre-existing Condition of all conditions.

Ego Extortion

The Lion of the Heart roars to uphold this most profound understanding of human nature, and calls us out of the ego syndicate. Christ calls for us to quit being a thug and a goon in the Mob of belief, perspective and labels and get a real job in context, essence and mutuality. No, it doesn’t pay as well as the ego-extortion racket but it’s not a crime either. You don’t have to bash anyone’s head in to make a living.

Refusing to play the ego-extortion racket takes courage, honor and personal integrity. You refuse to hold others hostage to your preferences; you turn away from the consoling but poisonous acts of self-pity, victimhood, domination and blame. You refuse to accept less than your real worth. This is an act of love and strength, the first essential step of the true revolutionary.

This first step is the recognition that we literally share the same being. It is the recognition of love as the nature of reality, starting with oneself, and the refusal to tolerate less. Real revolution requires the refusal to be subject to ego tyranny, our own, especially, and the false assumptions it imposes onto our inherent innocence.

Refusing to play the ego-extortion racket creates trust and respect. When we are responsible for, and to, what we are, the presence of love, Life works. It is this radical spiritual power that enables and guarantees transition into adulthood.

Childhood is about dependence. Adolescence is about rebellion. Adulthood is about self-ownership. If we don’t outgrow dependence, we will transfer it to others, to institutions; the church, the State, experts and politicians will become substitutes for the love we seek.

Functional Adulthood

An entirely new paradigm of functional adulthood is needed. Adulthood appears when the individual shows up as love and beneficial intent. The transition from child to adult is like caterpillar to butterfly, ego to essence, seed to fruit, content to context, perspective to Awareness, division to distinction, domination to collaboration, superiority/inferiority to mutuality, alienation to wholeness, confusion to coherence, wave to ocean, whirlpool to river. The adult can look back and see the continuity between his childhood and adulthood and is able to go from potential to actual in more and more ways.

Real revolution is the personal resolve that leads to functional adulthood. Real revolution requires that we open to and trust whatever it is that originated us. When we open to this wonder, to what we already are uncontrived love and openness, we see the whole picture, not just our character on a stage, but the intention behind everything.

We see Life’s relentless intention and power to bring benefit to every organism, every situation.

Claiming our deepest identity is really worth it. When I used to think of myself as a collection of ideas and beliefs and was very busy running around searching for God, I didn’t know that it was God running around searching for me. This was quite a shock to me and it came about as a result of seeing that this so-called subject/object thing is way more than it appears. Duality points to unity, not separation or fragmentation, as we have been told by scientific materialists.

Beyond any personal or social idea we may imagine ourselves to be is our living presence: vast, non-material, and already furiously free and ecstatically happy, your light and beauty radiating from your core. Everything arises within this happiness and is illumined by it.

We are free from the belief that happiness depends on conditions or when my preferences are met. Happiness, freedom, love and Awareness don’t depend on anything; it’s the other way around. Everything depends on them and comes from them as expressions of Living conscious Light, the prior basis and structure of reality itself.

Reality is conscious light living itself as patterns, perspectives and relationships.

Awareness/love/happiness/freedom is like the sky in which clouds and weather patterns appear. Our Awareness has an infinitely stable existence in which all experience arises freely without the slightest disturbance of our basic free space. The natural openness of our Awareness is our superpower. It is always present; our challenges and ordeals are clouds and storms within it. They come. They go. We remain.

The sky remains. The Great Mother, holding and feeding her young.

Jesus in the Temple

12 Jesus entered the temple courts and drove out all who were buying and selling there. He overturned the tables of the money changers and the benches of those selling doves.
13 “It is written,” he said to them, “ ‘My house will be called a house of prayer,’ but you are making it ‘a den of robbers.’ ” Matthew 21: 12-13 NIV

Jesus’ scathing indictments had infuriated the Pharisees and this was the last straw. Jesus had been speaking passionately about the love of God and His contempt for blood sacrifices that amounted to nothing more than bribes masquerading as repentance. Now he was kicking respectable businessmen who supported the Temple out into the street. He was on fire about the truth of love and wasn’t about to tolerate any commercial substitutions. Jesus knew the value of commerce, but that it is secondary to the sacred and exists to support it, not replace it. That’s what compelled him to drive the moneychangers out.

One week later he was on the cross.

Caiaphas, the High priest of the Sanhedrin, convinced Pilate to convict Jesus of treason and to crucify him. Jesus Christ and his message of love and unity with God had become very dangerous to Judaism and the Laws of Moses. Heretics like him were condemned to death.

IMO Jesus hated blood sacrifice and never intended to be one. His message was unity with God, not vicarious atonement for sin through blood sacrifice. For three years he had been teaching that no one should delude themselves into thinking that slaughtering innocent creatures will get you off the hook for sins against God and your fellow man. Was blood sacrifice then an abomination to God? This was the accusation the Pharisees leveled against Jesus, who had no defense against it. God wants us to turn from the lie of being separate, and using the blood of innocent scapegoats, to absolve us of our trespasses.

His message was inflammatory, sacrilegious and revolutionary.

From Unity to Salvation

The Pharisees and Sadducees claimed God had banished humanity from Paradise which then required us to go it alone and “live by the sweat of his brow” and to obey the laws, or else. The people believed themselves to be condemned but Jesus said otherwise, that the Pharisees and Sadducees were sons of perdition, liars, thieves and hypocrites because they drove a false wedge of separation between God and mankind. Jesus realized that God was love itself, the Father who loved everyone, equally, and that there was no wedge, no separation from God. He wielded the Sword of Truth and cut down the Lie of Separation.

After his grisly torture and execution, an ecclesiastical formula for salvation replaced his radical message of love and the always, already existing unity with God. Orthodox Christianity began when Saul the Roman became Paul the Apostle. Saul’s understanding of his supernatural encounter on the road to Damascus with the resurrected Christ marked the turning point from “the Kingdom of Heaven is like a treasure buried in a man’s field” to Paul’s claim that “we must die in Christ to be reborn with him”, a reversal of Jesus’ Original Gospel.

“I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” Galations 2:20

Translation: It’s not enough to just stand in the rain of God’s love and get wet, we must believe in blood sacrifice first. This translation is exactly backwards. We are already awash in an infinite sea of love and are constantly being reborn into the experience of intimacy with God, not into a reductionist, mechanistic formula for salvation. The entirely false and artificially manufactured “need” for salvation is outshined by our always already existing unity with that which we call God.

Jesus’ liberating message of inherent love and freedom morphed into a salvation racket that shifted the truth of our birthright to a pie-in-the-sky, unverifiable belief system. It replaced the heartfelt joy of unity with God to obedience. It subjected unity to a salvation racket administered by tedious religious middlemen.

In 325 Constantine established the Council of Nicea, which selected the religious texts for inclusion as the Bible. This enabled the Vatican, also established in the 4th century AD, to solidify its authority and to wage war against infidels and enemies of Christ.

Rome salvaged its crumbling empire and moved from managing real estate to ecclesiastical dictate, a strategy far more lucrative and effective than conquering entire continents and then having to manage them. Rome achieved domination over western civilization through religious decree, not with invading armies.

In 1302 Pope Boniface VIII’s Papal Bull proved this and vastly increased the power and authority of the Catholic Church. Known as the Unam Sanctum it claimed that the Holy Mother Church had jurisdiction over the Earth and all inhabitants because it was the sole administrator of the Grace of God through the sacrifice of His Son on the Cross. Unam Sanctum remains in effect to this day.

The Papal Bull further transformed freely-given universal grace bestowed of a loving God, into a methodically, packaged commodity marketed throughout the world. Theological opportunists and metaphysical mobsters turned unity and profound intimacy with God into a club, a goal, a journey and a destination, when in actuality, unity and intimacy with God is the structure and reality of existence itself.

Mobsters can’t bear the fact that love, freedom and happiness have no price tag. Theological strategists bottled the Water of Life and sold it back to us as if only they could provide it when in truth, each of us are the inheritors of the majestic and glorious beauty flowing freely into our hearts from the River of Life. Incredibly, the salvation racket has billions of paying customers even though the Water is free.

Out of the Bag

The days of salvation administered by middlemen are over. The second coming of Christ has arrived and this time neither the Church nor the State can stop it. The cat is out of the bag and it ain’t going back in.

The Cat I am referring to is the what everyone knows: the River of Life is wild and free and no one owns it. No one controls it. No one owns you either, unless you give yourself away, which you are free to do. There are many marketers who are all too willing to take your money and control your life.

All beliefs and doctrines about the River of Life are downstream from it. No priest, scientist or philosopher has exclusive rights over it, or is the ultimate arbiter of it. In fact, no one knows exactly what ‘it’ is, where it is, or why it is. Inherently free, it is beyond all descriptions and is un-caused, un-owned and un-ownable.

“For he maketh his sun to arise on the evil and the good, and sendeth rain on the just and unjust, alike.” Jesus in Matthew 5:45

If you believe you are disconnected and separate from the River of Life, your behavior will be like a refugee and a beggar whose only option is to lie and cheat your way through a dog-eat-dog world. But this is the biggest lie of all. We are not orphans born in sin. We come out of the Earth like the trees and the birds, out of our Mother; our original essence is Love and everybody knows it.

Only Love Exists.

The big sin, if there was one, is buying in to the belief of separation from God. Jesus’ radical teachings passionately brought to the world that God is our Father, our friend and intimate. He boldly declares that God is love. Not even his inner circle of disciples, John, James and Peter comprehended the significance of this. We still don’t. We turn Jesus into an idol because we can’t believe that what he said about himself is also true of us.

The magnificence of this love exists prior to everything and also includes everything. It is like the blank pages of a book that are prior to, and independent of, the words on them. The page is freely given to all the words, without restraint, judgment or censorship, as also does the River of Life with us.

The Real Revolution

The revolution Jesus called for soared light years beyond religion or politics. It is a call to every human being to recognize themselves as the presence and appearance of God’s love, unobstructed inheritors of grace with the power and ability to bring benefit and value to every situation in what we say and do.

The ideated self, the pile of ideas and beliefs I call me, cannot produce unity and so it suffers. But suffering leads to Wisdom. When our suffering returns us to love, to Awareness, to openness, we gain immediate access to real, actual, practical, and profound Wisdom. You won’t need priests, doctors and scientists to tell you what’s true, you will see that your nature is truth itself.

Everyone, without exception, has 100% access to what Jesus Christ, Buddha, Mohammed, and all the great Realizers of Mankind had. The only difference between them and us is that they used their access. They didn’t succumb to the illusion of divisions the world promotes; they didn’t overlook the core of love and its significance to themselves and others. They were true revolutionaries.

When we think we are a pile of all the content we have gathered in our lives we miss the context that contains and holds it all. We are also the Awareness of the pile of content, not just the pile itself.

Awareness is conscious, living, intelligent, all-inclusive love. That’s right. Our everyday, ordinary Awareness is infinite, unconditional love. That’s why shifting from content to context is the radical revolution we must ignite within ourselves: to light ourselves on fire and burn down the walls of fake divisions.

Knowing the magnificence of our true nature, and everyone else’s, is our superpower. That’s where the real revolution begins.

Jesus said the Father’s rain falls “on the just and the unjust, alike”.

Equally. No favorites. No middleman.

Direct. Here. Now.

That’s the Revolution we must engage, starting with ourselves, to overcome the lie by embracing the truth of love.