How God Sees is His Name

“If then there is any encouragement in Christ, any consolation from love, any sharing in the Spirit, any compassion and sympathy, make my joy complete: be of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others. Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,

who, though he was in the form 

of God, 

did not regard equality with 

God 

as something to be exploited, 

but emptied himself, 

taking the form of a slave, 

being born in human 

likeness.

And being found in human 

form,

He humbled himself

and became obedient to the 

point of death–

even death on a cross.

Therefore God also highly exalted 

Him

and gave Him the name 

that is above every name,

so that at the name of Jesus

every knee should bend,

in heaven and on earth and 

under the earth,

and every tongue should confess 

that Jesus Christ is Lord,

To the glory of God the Father.” 

This is from Paul’s letter to the Philippians. When I first read this scripture I realized how wrong I had been in my own spiritual journey. In my introduction I said that where one begins is how they arrive. The intention is set here with the aspiration to come to union with God through putting on the mind of the Khristós. It is said that the more one tries walking the path the more they become it.

You cannot seek that which you are and the journey of the Christian is becoming the Way.

This is one of my favorite verses, integral to my understanding of the Christian life and the engenderment of the evolution of Coyote Witness. So, it shall rest here at the threshold, sort of a long-winded way of hanging “γνῶθι σεαυτόν” over the doorway. 

Now, I appreciate that the church at large is responsible for its own congregation to walk away hurt, bruised, and perhaps even traumatized. It has become a symbol of so much pain that church steeples may well induce nervousness or eye rolls depending on how one was raised. It might be appropriate to say that nervousness is the least of some people’s reactions to the edifice of the body of Christ.

It is not the job of this writer to convince you of anything, convert you, or even to ask for your forgiveness on behalf of the church—if they wronged you then that is between them and God. Most importantly it is between you and God.

We all drive our own car and you’re free to drive in a lane you can align yourself better to, however before you decide which direction might be best I would like to extend an olive branch in the way of quoting the bishop of my diocese as he gave his opening speech to the rest of my fellow discerners, “The first thing you have to know before we begin our journey together, is that God loves you.”

It is not my job to make you appreciate the truth in this statement, it is not my job to help you understand that the bishop ain’t lying. It’s your job to come into right relation with his opening remark and as much as the opening verse of this piece is written on my heart I hope that knowing that God loves you might one day be written on yours, “What shall we then say to these things? If God be for us, who can be against us?”

As it is written, so it shall be and following these lines from Paul’s epistle we meet the evocative working thesis that shall act as our first seed sown in the garden we’re cultivating: “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?”

Non nisi te.

 “He that is not with me is against me; and he that gathereth not with me scattereth abroad.

Wherefore I say unto you, All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men: but the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven unto men.

And whosoever speaketh a word against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him: but whosoever speaketh against the Holy Ghost, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, neither in the world to come.” 

This verse, taken from Matthew, chapter twelve (also found in Mark, chapter three; Luke, chapter twelve) is known as the “sin unto death,” it is the unforgivable, eternal sin which cannot be forgiven by God, will not be forgiven.

I grew up with fire and brimstone breathing heavy steam on the back of my neck, every single thing you could think of was in some way a sin, it seemed the only thing that could keep a follower of the Word on the straight and narrow was sitting in alone in a quiet room until judgement day lest you be taken by the devil.

In hindsight, the Christian community that raised me gave all the power to the devil and saved none for God, it was as if God was an auxiliary figure in the teachings. It was not stated specifically, but as a child you pick up on what is not explicit as much as anything else and all these teachings about God, sin, and the devil implied just by being born we had all participated in some sort of betrayal of the Khristós.

“Woe unto that man by whom the Son of man is betrayed! it had been good for that man if he had not been born.”

We were all Judas. And now with older eyes, I see that they were sort of right, but we’ll get to that later. 

As a teenager, I committed the unforgivable sin by blaspheming against the Holy Spirit by rejecting It in my attic bedroom, separate from everyone, isolated, and depressed.

I was with a prolific hatred of God.

Read that again, I was with hatred. Hatred was not a part of me, it made me feel that it was a part of me, but it was only with me just as it can never be a part of you, only with you. It is transitory yet it is so addictive that it becomes a filter through which we view reality. When we are with emotions we are, in a way, possessed. 

I was walking with and this defined my the reality I saw, it shaped who I was and my actions. I can look back and appreciate it was all apart of something greater, if I had never found myself destroying God, denying His presence and role in my life I wouldn’t be here right now, “Deep calleth unto deep…”

This way of walking is like being in a tunnel (remember this) and everything we say and think comes back to us, the world mirrors the reality we walk with.

The Greek word ἔχω, pronounced echo, means to hold, to have, to possess. In addition it means to hold oneself to a thing, to cling to something. When we hold onto ideas and emotions we are allowing a separation between us and God. This is because ideas and emotions are transitory, they are not nor can ever be God.

An echo is an imitation or a degraded reflection. These feelings mimic wholeness, these lenses that we view reality through, they are a reproduction of true reality. When we remember things, we are reproducing a specific image that, due to decay and interference, is missing accurate information. When we look at the world through a lens—when we are living in an echo—we are fooling ourselves into assuming everything is accurate. 

Terence McKenna made note of how coffee consumption, in this modern world, is like being a fish in water. No one even recognizes they are inundated by an external substance keeping the gears of capitalism churning and hearts panicking worldwide. This is an example of how this works not a judgement, if you drink copious amounts of coffee you’d still probably be concerned with how much I pack in a day.

The other term for this is δαιμονίζομαι, pronounced “daimonizomai” and it is the state of having a devil, walking with—it is demonization, where one is so far from God that they begin exhibiting qualities of an inhuman nature. It manifests as pride on one end of the spectrum and on the other it is indicated by a feeling of worthlessness. This is demonic, because without humility or worth one averts their affection from things above, and places them on things on the earth. This is how these entities work: they divide us, they isolate us, and they make us feel different than other people, separate. 

This is called “Othering” and is a state of being led by the demonic. Not only does it split us up from one another, it creates division within, separating the heart and mind and is central to the most passed around spiritual teaching of the Khristós: “Judge not, that ye be not judged.” 

“Judge” in Greek is κρίνω, pronounced krinō, meaning to separate, to approve, and to be of opinion. 

Verse two of the Holy Tao reads, “When people see things as beautiful,

ugliness is created.

When people see things as good,

evil is created.

Being and non-being produce each other.

Difficult and easy complement each other.

Long and short define each other.

High and low oppose each other.

Fore and aft follow each other.

Therefore the Master

can act without doing anything

and teach without saying a word.

Things come her way and she does not stop them;

things leave and she lets them go.

She has without possessing,

and acts without any expectations.

When her work is done, she takes no credit.

That is why it will last forever.”

The Master, the Khristós, is telling his disciples to move beyond the normal level of consciousness that reflexively separates. He is saying go beyond that—to see the whole. He is telling us to move outside of our narrow-minded ways, cease sowing division and our habitual attachment to the world through offering our opinion on it.

He is telling us how to be of His mind, “That your faith should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God.”

When we are “with the enticing words of man’s wisdom” then we fall into judgement of things, which is an echo of creation—or mimicking God—thus it is a corrupt form of creation.

This mode of awareness is reflexively divisive rather than our attentive nature seeing things as God does and allowing them to be.

Judas judged God, by putting a price on betraying the Khristós, and we’re still working toward that. But you know how that separation ends.

As we continue toward understanding Judas’ role in the ministry of the Khristós and our own lives we’ll be taking a closer look at walking with transitory emotions and getting to the bottom of what Jesus meant when he said that “whosoever speaketh against the Holy Ghost, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, neither in the world to come.” 

Si comprehendis, non est Deus