Before anyone called it Christianity, they called it the Way. The book of Acts uses the phrase again and again: people “belonging to the Way,” persecutors hunting “any who were of the Way.” It was a road before it was a set of beliefs, and the people on it were recognizable by how they lived.
This guide is an attempt to return to that. The churches hold and pass on the story; what can get lost inside them, and is almost entirely absent outside them, is the practice of Jesus. What he did with his mornings. How he ate, how he fasted, where he went to be alone, and what he said when people asked him how to pray.
What Christ consciousness means
The phrase is not in the Bible. But the thing it points to is everywhere in it.
Paul writes to the Philippians: let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus. To the Corinthians: we have the mind of Christ. To the Galatians, in the most startling line in his letters: it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And Jesus himself, the night before he died, praying for everyone who would come after: that they may all be one, as you, Father, are in me, and I in you — that they also may be in us.
Christ consciousness is a name for that mind. It is the awareness Jesus lived from and taught from, and it has a few recognizable features:
- God is not far. The kingdom is within you and at hand. The Father sees in secret and knows what you need before you ask. Whatever else is true, distance is not the problem.
- You are already loved. Not once you improve. The sun rises on the just and the unjust; the father runs to the prodigal while he is still a long way off. Love is the ground, not the reward.
- The neighbor is yourself. Love your neighbor as yourself, and the mystics have always heard a second meaning under the first: the neighbor is yourself, the same life looking out of different eyes. What you do to the least, you do to Christ.
- The self must die to live. The grain of wheat, the cross, not my will but yours. The small, defended self is not destroyed but outgrown, and what is found underneath it is life.
- The light is in you. You are the light of the world. The eye that becomes single fills the whole body with light. Awakening is a change in how you see, not an idea you accept.
What it is not
The phrase has carried a great deal of freight, so here is what this site does not mean by it.
It is not a claim that you are God, or that Jesus was only a man who had a good idea. The way this guide reads him, Jesus is the one in whom this consciousness was complete: the vine, of which the rest of us are branches. Whether you believe more than that or less is between you and God, and this site will not argue with you about it.
It is not a technique for feeling good. Jesus fasted forty days and was hungry. He wept. He sweated blood in a garden. The way passes through the wilderness and the cross before it arrives at the empty tomb, and a version of it that skips those is not the way.
And it is not private. Every mystic who ever went into the desert came back out, and what they brought back was mercy. The measure of whether a practice is working is how you treat the next person you meet.
The pattern of his life
Read the gospels for what Jesus did rather than what he said, and a pattern appears.
He fasted for forty days before he began, and he spoke about fasting as something his followers would do as a matter of course. He prayed, and went to specific lengths to do it alone: before dawn, on mountains, in gardens, in deserted places. He ate simply and often with the wrong people. He touched the sick. He was silent before his accusers. He said very little about doctrine and a great deal about the heart.
The three practices this guide is built on come straight from that pattern:
- Fasting, because the body is the first doorway, and an empty body makes a quiet mind.
- Prayer, because he told us to, told us how, and did it himself constantly.
- Stillness, because the deserted place before dawn is where everything else came from.
Underneath all three is how you eat, which is why there is a chapter on it. You cannot fast well if you eat badly, and you cannot sit still with a body full of sugar.
How to use this guide
Read the four practice chapters in order: Fasting, Eating for stillness, Prayer, Stillness. They are short. Then begin the forty days, which will take you through all of it one day at a time, and keep the Teachings nearby for when you want to sit with his words.
You do not have to be anything in particular to start. You do not have to believe anything in particular. He said follow me to fishermen and tax collectors, and they got up and went. That is the whole entry requirement.