"...the real meaning, the real medicine of what is to be celebrated at Christmas is about opening ourselves to the love that we are,..."

 

Dearest Relatives, I share with you this night, some thoughts on Christmas Eve... Long, long ago in the Middle East three wise men were guided by spirit to follow a star leading them to Bethlehem where they came upon a newborn child. There lay Yeshua ben Joseph, whose life and death was destined to reignite the light of faith, hope and love in a dark time of human suffering. Years after his death Jesus came to be called “Christ”, a word that comes from the Greek word Christos, meaning “anointed one.” Hundreds of prophetic passages in the Old Testament refer to a coming Messiah, a savior, an anointed one, who who would come to redeem the Jewish People and usher in the Kingdom of God. Ancient Israel thought their Messiah would come with military might to deliver them from decades of captivity to Roman rule and pagan kings. But the religion of Christianity that grew up after the death of Jesus in its New Testament offered a different kind of deliverance — a spiritual deliverance based on what Jesus taught and how he lived which is all about a consciousness of infinite, unconditional love. So while Jesus was Jewish, a rabbi who knew nothing about Christianity because it did not exist while he was alive, a radical rabbi whose teachings about love upset both the Jewish power structure of the time and the Roman rulers of the land of Palestine, and the celebration of his birth, Christmas, is a Christian holy day, what Jesus was all about is for all of us, all of humanity, Christians, Jews, atheists, all people. It is about a consciousness that knows “the Kingdom of Heaven is within” and that “ the way to the Father is through me”, meaning not Jesus the man but the function of living in and from infinite unconditional love that is for giving and that is the essence of our being. In other words, Christ Consciousness refers to a function of consciousness whose only focus is love and only love, love that is for giving, freely to all, with no conditions or strings. There came a time in my life, a Jewish man brought up in a secular family for whom the only meaning of Christmas was about the exchange of material gifts to family and friends, that I was to learn about Christ Consciousness in a very personal way that changed my understanding of Christmas. When I was twenty years old in a second story Victorian flat three blocks away from the corner of Haight and Ashbury I swallowed a tab of LSD dissolved in a glass of water. Shortly thereafter my mind dissolved into a visionary state that blew out the fusebox of my understanding of reality and of my own identity. In my vision I saw Jesus being crucified calling out not for vengeance but for love; “Forgive them Father, they know not what they do!” For the first time in my life I consciously experienced unconditional love, love that was being sent out to the perpetrators of his pain from an understanding and compassion that they were asleep in a dream of separation and should be forgiven for what they were doing, not punished, but instead filled with love. Fifteen years later sitting by a fire with Huichol Indian People in an all night ceremony in the high desert of backcountry Mexico another vision of Christ emerged in a visionary state. Again I saw Jesus being crucified on the cross. This timei saw that each time I or someone else made a negative judgment about their being or the being or someone else, another spike was driven into the body of Jesus and he cried out in pain. The vision continued. It showed me that each time I, or anyone else, caught the negative judgment in awareness and made the decision to let it go, to release it, a spike fell out of Jesus’ body and a beatific light burst forth from his being that illuminated the desert night with blissful gratitude. To me, more than fifty years after that first reality-dissolving vision, the real meaning, the real medicine of what is to be celebrated at Christmas is about opening ourselves to the love that we are, releasing negative judgments about our own being and the being of others, and living the love that we are as Jesus in his life demonstrated with the consciousness that I witnessed and felt in the visions I was gifted by grace to experience. Christmas is about remembering, rebirthing and honoring and loving the holy wholeness of ourselves and “all our relations”, seeing and raising the spark of divinity, the seed, the son-light of the Father Sun within us all as Children of the Starlight Ohana, to Fullest Blossoming and Greatest Good for All with Peace on Earth. My wish and prayer for you, for all of us on this Christas Eve night, is to do what the three wise men of old did, follow the shinning star to birth within ourselves, and out into the darkness of the world, the Christ Consciousness of Infinite Light and Love whose only function is to Live Love Now. May we all do the inner polishing work that allows for greater shinning of the Divinity that we are helping to create a new “Kingdom” of Heaven on Earth", a peaceful, just, harmonious, beautiful, healthy and happy Win Win World For All. Merry, joyful Christmas Medicine to All and to All a Good Night.