Paul said “we have the mind of Christ” but he didn’t talk about it. We can infer, from the fact that the heart of Christ was drained empty, from the fact that, when the temple in Jerusalem was sacked, the holy of holies was found the same way: the mind of Christ is an empty mind. Contemplation is a temporary taste of emptiness, obedience is emptiness carried into action. Humility is emptiness that’s become an effortless default. “Christ” is the name for when emptiness eclipses identity. “I live,” says the scriptures, “but not I, Christ lives in me.” No sensation, emotion, thought or action is ours to build an ego story from. They belong to Christ: if you want to be freed from anxiety, say “always carrying in the body the death of Christ, so that the life of Christ may be made known in our mortal bodies also.” If what you can’t accept becomes Christ, there might be reason, in the end, to not only allow it, but be devoted to it.
Turning the grace of emptiness into a virtue is quite a task. The way to do this is “learning to focus and direct intention and attention.” Focus attention and intention on sensation until thoughts of self cease: as it is written, “keep looking, but do not comprehend, keep listening but do not understand.” The way to do this is to learn the mechanics of bearing aversions and attractions. Christ became the true nature of all things seen and unseen, and half of that is terrifically unpleasant. He became strangers, the naked, the homeless, the hungry, the sick, the imprisoned. All of those often need more than an individual can give. He became sheep gates, light, bread and wine–things that his audience would have interacted with daily–and he did not become only those few things so that he, or God, could be accused of absence from everything else. Where is God? God is everywhere. No thought, sacred or secular, can say otherwise without proliferating suffering.
When you can finally do, instinctively, what you could never have done for yourself, Christ has come to live with you. Turning your attention toward what’s joyful without reasons for sadness being eliminated, Steeling yourself to sit the lessons of aversion, learning to let go of the temporary enjoyments of attraction, learning to use sensation to focus attention and intention, learning to pay attention to subtle variances in negative and positive sensation, to direct focus toward negative space in the body–all of these are signs of the presence of Christ.
The Trinity within becomes the mental manifestation of the invisible evolution of your consciousness. With the Father, you learn to observe ego without identifying with it. You learn to create without controlling, to be still in insecurity until the energy shifts, to be fascinated with the opportunities of vulnerability instead of fearing them. With the Son, you learn to choose compassion and reframing. You reparent yourself, and join in Christ’s recapitulation of all things. With the Spirit, your character flaws become your gifts: you turn the trauma responses of hypervigilance and impulsivity into deep presence and obedience. You see what motivates choice, action, and emotion, and can care for it.
Students who have the mind of Christ have been made aware of, and sufficiently freed from ego, attachment and craving–such that they have been rendered basically voluntary. They will have sat next to gluttony greed sloth sorrow lust wrath vanity and pride until the long term costs of following those thoughts exceeds the short term benefits. They will have sat next to self pity, shame, blame, remorse, rationalization, resentment, self-aggrandizement and entitlement until the limits of their effectiveness at meeting needs emerges. If they have an attraction response, their enjoyment of it is not clingy. If they have an aversion response, their disgust with it does not forestall learning. They have let go of security and control, faced fears and vulnerabilities, developed inner and outer hustle.
None of this is a great revelation. It’s just claiming the space that is your own incarnate wonkiness. But where self help, the help of others, solutions sought in prayer have all failed, this has succeeded: not permanently or perfectly, but in a way you those who do it can truly bank on.
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