Gaining Mastery Over Ourselves

Jesus’ disciples often referred to him as “Master.” The use of this title is worth considering, for it has implications for each of us on our own evolutionary journey. Its obvious implication pertaining to Jesus is that he was masterful when it came to certain spiritual life choices. He was a master healer, a master teacher, and a master prophet, among other things. But when we look more closely, we see that Jesus’ greatest display of mastery was not that of specific abilities; it was the mastery over himself—the mastery over life itself, the mastery over all that it meant to be a human being. And it was this mastery that made him the Christ—the first fully-realized Christ-man to live among us in this world of Adamic consciousness.

Jesus’ mastery over his genetically inherited Adamic makeup was not for his benefit alone. It was for the benefit of all of us too. For, it shows us that if this one descendant of Adam can overcome the binding qualities of Adamic life, so can each one of us. So let us look at exactly how Jesus accomplished this.

As part of the race of Adam, we have all inherited his state of consciousness—a state most dominantly characterized by the knowledge of good and evil (dualistic thinking) and the sense of separation. In this state our mental workings have become busy and complex to the point of distraction. Every perception that we experience through our five physical senses (perceptions that happen nonstop during our waking hours) is automatically processed through the binary lens of duality. For example, when we perceive an object of our love we always have in the back of our mind the thought that our love can just as quickly morph into hate. It is as if love and hate are two faces of the same coin. When we are subconsciously motivated by the gratifying of our own desires, as most of us are most of the time in our Adamic state of consciousness, the expression of our love tends to be manipulative, shallow, and insincere. It suits us for that moment, but should the object of our love do something that rubs us the wrong way we do not hesitate to turn on them and express hatred, based on the same self-serving motive. Thus, our dualistic perspective has turned us into cold calculating creatures whose only focus is self-expediency, using our dualistic awareness as a kind of grab bag for which behavior will bring us the best results and benefits.

We all operate this way now because the perspective of mental dualism has become deeply ingrained in the human psyche. It has become encoded in our Adamic DNA. So, if we are born as a descendant of Adam, we will most certainly inherit this mental condition. Furthermore, we now have the phenomenon of cultural-psychological conditioning inundating us from the moment we are born, adding a strong dose of validating umph to this agenda. Meanwhile, all of the complex deceitful behaviors that this mental condition tends to spawn have become natural to our species.

Then there is another problem. Having all become dualistic in our perception and thinking, we are constantly being overwhelmed by the choice of which side of the dualistic coin to act on. For, it is not just that we perceive both sides of the coin, we also have the ability to call forth the power inherent in either side, according to which one we believe will best further our agenda of self-preservation and gratification. Thus, we have become highly susceptible to the lure of temptation when it comes to employing a power that is less than upright and pure. If we think that acting on evil can do more to further our self-expedient agenda, we feel little compunction about taking that route. If we come to believe that expressing hate will do more for us in a certain situation that expressing love, we do not hesitate to choose that course. If we think that acting under the cover of darkness will be more expedient to us than acting in the daylight, we readily choose to wait for the darkness. If we think that lying will do more for us than telling the truth, we choose lying, etc., etc., etc.

And so, we see that dualism is far more impactful upon our experience than previously believed. It turns out to be more than just a mental process; it also has become a behavioral one. Through the faculty of choice and freewill each one of us has the option at all times to choose which side of the dualistic coin to act upon. This has made the responsibility of choice into one of the most determining factors of how our life unfolds. Why is this? Because while our dualistic perspective in and of itself may not impact our circumstantial life situation, our behavioral choices most certainly will. While we can effectually keep our thoughts and perceptions to ourselves, our actions always have repercussions. And the legal reality (according to created universal law) is that evil, dark, hateful, lying actions always carry repercussions that lead to suffering, both for others and ourselves. And that is one of the reasons that there is so much pain and suffering in our world.

At this stage of our evolution, we each have the thorough knowledge of good and evil. This means that the ways of evil have become well known to us, as have the ways of good. Thus, we are fully responsible for the choice to employ evil in order to accomplish a certain goal. It was for this reason that Jesus equated sin with seeing, saying that if we were blind, we would not be guilty of sin. But having seen evil and its ways, when we make the choice to indulge in it, we sin. It is we who choose. Therefore it is we who are responsible.

The problem is that our lives in this world tend to be hard and challenging—a reality that makes the temptation to choose evil irresistible at times. Even though we know that we should steer clear of evil actions we often succumb to the temptation to indulge whenever life throws a particularly tough challenge at us. The same goes for hateful and deceptive behaviors. If we feel like life has backed us into a corner, our instinct is to lash out hatefully, lie, cheat, etc. Thus, the bottom line is that in the modern human psyche desperation justifies sin.

All of this is descriptive of how we, the average human being living in this world, make our way through life. It is not pretty, but we deem it necessary. It is a reactionary, passionate approach to life that can just as easily destroy us as enable us. But we are so caught up in the drama that we don’t see any way around it. It is a gamble, but we have all become gambling fools. Thus, the knowledge of good and evil, through which God proclaimed that Adam had become a god in his own right, has become a reactionary snare that very few of us have been able to steer clear of. Tracing our plight back to the source of our mental dualism we rue the day that Adam ate from that tree in the Garden of Eden. And instead of viewing Adam as the pioneer of consciousness evolution that he was, we see him as a curse—one whose sinful choice caused the entire human race to fall into suffering and sin.

It is for this reason that our religions uphold a doctrine of the return to Eden or earning our way into heaven (a type of Eden) as the solution to the age-old human dilemma. They not only preach that Adam was the curse of mankind but also that it is up to each one of us to live in such a way that we reverse that curse—that it is our responsibility to undo the mess that Adam caused. And they cite Adam’s pre-fall state as the example of what we are to aspire to—his innocence, purity, and simplicity. In essence, they teach a doctrine that directly opposes the evolution of consciousness—a doctrine that promotes back-peddling instead of going forward, one that renders the discipline of gaining mastery over ourselves as inconsequential.

So, in Jesus’ case, which was it? We call him Master, but which direction had he mastered? Had he succeeded in going backwards and reclaiming Eden or had he moved ahead? Had he sought to undo and reverse what had happened to Adam in the Garden or to leave it behind and build something new?

The answer to these questions is clear. Jesus did not come to correct Adam’s mistake because in his sight Adam had not made a mistake. It is true that Adam’s choice in the Garden of Eden resulted in many difficult challenges for mankind. But this was not a fall.   It was a natural awakening to his endowment of consciousness. It was not a choice for sin. It was a choice for consciousness evolution, and the difficulties that came upon us are a part of that evolution. Meanwhile, Jesus did not come to render that choice obsolete. Rather he came to fulfill it, not just for himself but for the entire human race.

And how did he fulfill it? First, he learned the truth about our created endowment of consciousness—that it is a spiritual endowment created with its own inbred evolutionary impulse. Then he learned all the ins and outs about the Adamic state of consciousness—that is, the seed state that all of us must begin our evolutionary journey with. He learned which characteristics of this state came with the territory and how they impacted human life. And then, and perhaps most importantly, he went into his psyche and responsibly addressed these characteristics, facing them square on and thereby rendering their unconscious influence mute and void. In this way he learned which of these characteristics had become most defining and disabling to men living in the Adamic state and through the light of his awareness he also learned how to dismantle, disconnect, and disarm them. For he saw that only such an approach as this that could release us from the Adamic state and enable us to move forward into the Christ state. And until we each undertook this same responsible approach, we would remain stuck and our evolutionary instincts would be stifled.

This was how Jesus became the Master. First, he gained mastery over himself—over his entire inner field of consciousness. Then he went on to become the Way Shower for all the rest of us. It was as if he discovered a capacity for inner interaction that no one (in the western world) had ever discovered before. All other Adamic men lived their lives in a helpless reactionary reactive mode—without knowledge of what was going on inside of them and how those inner impulses then worked their way outward. They had no idea that such impulses existed and certainly could not imagine that they could exercise interactive control over them. As Jesus once described, they lived their lives in spiritual darkness—each one being blind from birth.

But Jesus blazed the trail of inner interactive mastery. He saw how each one of us not only perceives evil as the dualistic opposite of good; we also are given the freewill to act on it. And we do this with little awareness; we do it out of desperation. We do it instinctively and heap unnecessary suffering upon ourselves. We do it as if we believe that no such inner interactive capacity exists for us. But Jesus not only put this belief to the test; he also banished it from his psyche, so that it would never trouble him again. He shattered the stigma of helplessness, proving that human beings not only possess this inner interactive capacity; each one of us can become a master at it. It is, in fact, a God-given power of consciousness. But Jesus went even further. He overcame the temptation of evil.

Why was this necessary? Because when Adam came into the knowledge of good and evil, that knowledge was here to stay for the human race. There is no skirting around this—no going back to pre-Adam innocence. In the evolution of consciousness there is only one gear—forward drive. Through our awakening to consciousness, we brought evil into the world, and now it is here to stay. But there is something we can do to render it powerless—something that is so difficult that once we do it, we too become masters. And that something is the overcoming of temptation.

Poignantly, before Jesus could overcome the temptation of evil he had to deal with his own inbred sense of separation. Why was this? Because it is the human sense of separation in Adam that makes the lure of evil so irresistible. That sense makes us feel as though we are completely on our own and must make our way in life by our own calculated choices. And this entire process is so deeply ingrained in our psyche that it happens automatically—without our conscious awareness. And we cannot very well disarm a progression that we have no awareness of. So, what did Jesus do? He went into his own psyche and made the unconscious conscious. He saw his sense of separation for what it was, and then he countered that deeply ingrained Adamic sense with faith. He reversed the idea that each human being has no choice but to fend for his or herself. And he not only brought that choice to light; he acted upon it. He said no to self-preservation and desperation and yes to faith and trust. And when he did this, he discovered something amazing: It worked! He said no to the instinct to fend for himself, and he survived. And not only did he survive; he prospered. He had what he needed and he had the peace and purity that comes when one resists evil and renders it powerless over one’s experience. In this way he discovered the key to undermining the evolutionary roadblock that Adamic consciousness had become. He discovered the Christ.

Then after Jesus laid hold of Christ consciousness for himself, he turned his gaze to helping us do the same. He saw how lost all of us were in Adam—how stuck and prone to suffering and dysfunction. He saw that not only were we unconscious; we were also utterly faithless and deathly afraid of letting go of our human strength orientation. And it was for all these reasons that he willingly allowed himself to be hung on a Roman cross. For he saw that if his death could be tied to a doctrine of atonement and reconciliation and if we each could receive that doctrine as truth, we could then be free from the sense of separation and the desperation that it invariably spawns. Like him, we could each overcome the temptation of evil through our faith. And if we could do this we would soon find ourselves feeling the peace and purity of the Christ.