The Inner resurrection: Embracing the Contemplative Christ
In the endless sea of noise that is our world, a quiet invitation echoes through the centuries. It is a call not to a distant historical figure, but to an intimate, indwelling presence—the Contemplative Christ. This is the Christ of the inner Galilee, the inner resurrection from ego to soul. The one who walks on the waters of our own chaotic minds and bids us to come along and awaken to reality, just as it is, without the cognitive distortions of the personality. Jesus had an energetic vibration higher than anyone else who has ever walked the earth and his power, wisdom, compassion and contemplative intelligence are still changing the world today – the world and everything that is in it! Many highly energetic world changers have taught us how we’re asleep to our human faculties and how an awakening is essential – Gandhi, Buddha, Moses and others.
His wisdom is a living stream that flows beneath the hard-packed earth of religious dogma, urging us to journey beyond the small, constructed self and into the luminous landscape of the soul. Christianity itself, just like everything else is being threshed out and resurrected as a massive shift in consciousness floods the world, awakening us to a new way of being.
The Shimmering Mirage of the Ego
So what is the personality and why do we need to wake up from it? The Contemplative Christ spoke so clearly we found it almost to difficult to comprehend. Give to receive, love an enemy, the meek will come out tops and teachings like he who is last is first stunned the egoic world and still do; enough to shake millions of us awake from the slumber of the nightmare we once believed to be reality. God is the ultimate therapist and everyone is invited to undergo some kind of cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) with Him. He knew therapy would be necessary for everyone. In other words the natural state of a human in to be shrouded in personality masks, shadows and deceit. Yes, the mind lies to you and hides things from you and no one is exempt. So an awakening, a kind of therapy process (which I call life) is necessary to allow us to become fully conscious, contemplative and aware of who we are and what is going on in our environment; the universe. Sayings like ‘love your enemy’ mean absolutely nothing to the personality we develop, which becomes our personal reality.
The myth of Narcissus is a tragic tale of mistaken identity. He was captivated by an illusion, a reflection he believed was real, and ultimately wasted away. We face a similar spiritual danger when we fall in love with our own persona—the personality we project. It is only a mask. To discover the Sacred Self within, we must turn away from the reflection. The Paradigm Process is the path to do so, systematically removing the 10 masks of personality to reveal the authentic soul.
We are born into a world that hands us a mask and teaches us to call it our face. This is the ego, the false self—a necessary costume and mask for the first part of life, but a gilded cage if we never learn to take it off. It is the self that lives by comparison, that thirsts for validation, and that builds its fragile kingdom on the shifting sands of opinion and achievement. It is a beautiful, shimmering mirage that promises water but can never quench the soul’s deep thirst.
The Contemplative Christ, our great way-shower, consistently pointed beyond this mirage. He came to earth, to physical form at exactly the right time in history. Not a minute too soon, nor too late. Too soon and we would not have grasped the little inklings of his teachings we are starting to understand only today. A moment too late and our need for war on our neighbours would have ended us all.
His mystical and contemplative parables are love songs to the soul, wisdom-bombs, revealing the profound folly of clinging to the disintegrating and deceptive masks of wealth, status, or righteousness. He taught with the authority of the elements, the wind and the rain—a selflessness, a humility, and a radical love that dissolves the boundaries of the small self; what I call the frightened personality. He invites us not to destroy the ego, but to gently set it aside, to see through it to the unadorned, essential beauty of the True Self that it was meant to protect. We then get to dissolve and include our personality that kept us alive in the first half of our lives into the divine, authentic souls we are revealed to be through time. This revealing of the self if the very meaning of birth, death and of course resurrection. A mystical kind of raising back to life but not of the body – rather of the mind. A mind that once conformed to its lower, instinctual, five sensory world-view becomes, or rather is transformed into a loving, communing, peaceful and beautiful being. I keep quoting Dostoevsky on this – “beauty will save the world”.
Saint Francis puts it better than I ever could
…to be understood as to understand,
to be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive,
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
and it is in dying that we are born (raised/awakened) to eternal life (contemplative seeing).
Contemplative intelligence, Contemplation and Christ
Contemplative intelligence (CQ) is our integrated capacity for meta-thinking—the awareness of one’s own thought processes to achieve wisdom, self-regulation, and compassionate action by combining one’s physical, emotional, psychological, and spiritual aspects. It involves deep reflection and mindfulness to understand one’s internal states and motivations, leading to more thoughtful decisions, ethical considerations, and a greater sense of freedom and authenticity. Practices like meditation, yoga, and journaling can help cultivate contemplative intelligence, moving beyond analytical thought to a deeper, integrated understanding of self and reality.
What is contemplation? Mark defines contemplation as the Sacred path to stillness and inner knowing, a practice that shifts perception to understand the Divine in oneself and the universe, fostering self-actualization and transformation from a limited mind to a truly awakened and intelligent state. He also describes it as seeing the Sacred in all things, a way to transcend the ego and rise above the limitations of the ordinary mind, leading to profound changes in physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual aspects of life.
Key aspects of Contemplation :
- The Sacred Path to Stillness:Contemplation is a journey into deep inner stillness, allowing for a communion with the Divine and a profound sense of inner knowing.
- Seeing the Sacred:It involves recognizing the sacredness inherent in all things and at all times, shifting perception to a higher awareness.
- Transcending Limitations:The practice helps to move beyond the dualistic and ego-driven aspects of the mind, leading to a transformation from a limited state to a state of true intelligence and spiritual awakening.
- Holistic Transformation:Contemplative practice can bring about physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual changes, fostering personal growth and healing.
- Cultivating Contemplative Intelligence:This intelligence, also known as CQ, is a part of the brain that enables creativity, resilience, and the ability to solve problems by going beyond rational thought.
- Bridging Science and Spirituality: Lockwood’s work, “Contemplative Intelligence (CQ),” connects this practice to a “Contemplative Science” that explores the relationship between consciousness and subjective experience, integrating empirical studies with practical application.
Who is the Contemplative Christ? The Contemplative Christ refers to the dimension of Jesus that embodies a deep, mystical connection to the Divine, a state achieved through interior silence, prayer, and a non-dualistic way of seeing. Jesus modeled the contemplative path by frequently withdrawing to solitary places to pray (Luke 6:12), grounding his outward actions in profound inner contemplative communion. He taught us to see reality not through the fractured lens of the ego, which thrives on judgment and separation, but through the unified gaze of the heart, or the “single eye.”
This way of seeing reality is about perceiving the inherent divinity in all things and people, moving beyond superficial labels to recognize a deeper, interconnected truth. As Jesus taught, “The lamp of the body is the eye. If therefore your eye is good, your whole body will be full of light.” (Matthew 6:22). This “good” or “single” eye is the contemplative mind that sees with love and wholeness, illuminating our entire being and perception of the world. Thomas Merton believed that contemplation and action were inseparable, an idea he saw embodied in Jesus’s life. In the east people do less action and more contemplation in their monasteries. In the west we do vice versa.
Either way is no good. We need both 0 and 1 in the binary systems that are cosmology. We need to think and do. We need to put our money where our mouth is and walk the line of transformation – unlike most Christians that have gone before us shouting off with the enemies head. The enemy we were slaying was ourselves. We should have loved our enemy but were conformed, blind and incapable. Today through contemplative seeing and the birth of our contemplative intelligence, thank God, that is changing!
The Sacred Unfolding: A Renewal of Mind and Soul
How, then, do we accept this invitation to move beyond the ego and into the open field of the heart? It is a journey of tender renewal, an alchemical process of turning the lead of our conditioning into the gold of our true nature.
1. The Alchemy of Perception: Renewing the Mind
This is not an exercise of the intellect, but an expansion of seeing. Christ’s wisdom was a radical re-visioning of reality, a call to look with the eyes of the Sacred Self or the soul. It is the practice of Contemplative Intelligence, above lateral thinking where we learn to witness the frantic stories of the mind without becoming entangled in them.
- The Grace of Presence: The contemplative Christ was utterly and breathtakingly present. He was a radical non-conformist to traditions of selfishness, ego and pride who was and is wide awake, fully aware and gently insists you should be the same way. He was not subject to death, only death of fear in the frightened personality; ego-death. He did not live in the haunted houses of the past or the imagined castles of the future. He inhabited the holy ground of the Now. To practice this presence is to quiet the incessant chatter of the ego and arrive, finally, in the one life we are given. It is to offer the profound gift of our full attention—to a flower, to a loved one, to the feeling of our own breath.
- Dissolving the Inner Critic: The mind can be a courtroom where our ten ego-insurgents or masks of the personality play judge and jury, condemning us with thoughts of doubt, fear, and judgment. The Christ consciousness offers a radical amnesty: forgiveness. By consciously choosing to anoint our thoughts with compassion and grace, we begin to dismantle the ego’s iron grip and allow a deeper, kinder wisdom to emerge.
2. The Descent into the Heart: Renewing the Soul
This is the deeper, quieter work. It is the journey from the head to the heart, from the surface to the source. It is about remembering the part of us that has never been wounded, the divine spark that is our essence.
- The Luminous Silence: Christ so often retreated into the wild solitude of the mountains and the desert. He knew that in the Great Silence, we hear the whisper of God. This is not an empty silence, but a luminous and pregnant stillness where the soul is nourished and our true name is spoken. To find these moments is to come home to ourselves. Today these moments are essential for our sanity. End of story.
- Love as Overflow: The ultimate expression of a renewed soul is not a striving, but an overflowing. The unconditional love and selfless service we see in the Christ life is the natural consequence of a being connected to the infinite source of Love. It is not something we do, but something we allow to move through us. By extending this current of compassion, we participate in the healing of the world.
- The Courage of Surrender: The ego’s mantra is “I control.” The soul’s prayer is “I trust.” Surrender is not a passive giving up; it is an active and courageous letting go into the arms of a Love that has been holding us all along. Christ’s unwavering trust in the Divine Will, even unto the cross, is the ultimate testament to this profound peace. It is the final release that sets us truly free. The awakened self knows that all manner of things are well. The egoic personality spends all its time running, fighting, freezing.
Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will. Romans 12:2
This quote explains what the contemplative Christ taught us in a nutshell. If we conform to who we think we are, which is a five-sensory human being with a personality that is doomed to die and that carries very little meaning, we will suffer terribly. However, if we manage to break free from the patterns of the world and renew our minds or awaken to our contemplative intelligence—our ability to see with the eyes behind the eyes—we will have passed the test. We will have confirmed God’s will, which is to wake up at least once while we are still alive.
Walking the Path with an Open Heart
To embrace the contemplative Christ’s teaching on contemplative intelligence as a way of being, seeing and doing life is not to retreat from the world, but to inhabit it more deeply, more authentically. It is to bring a renewed mind and a softened heart to our relationships, our work, and our communities. It is to finally understand that our true identity is not in the fleeting story of our personality, but in the eternal, un-nameable essence of our being—a being inextricably woven into the fabric of God.
Let this timeless wisdom be your guide. It is a path that leads not to a distant heaven, but to the heaven that lies within, waiting with infinite patience for our return. It is a journey into a life of profound peace, unshakable purpose, and a joy that the world cannot give, and cannot take away.
