The Mystery of the Resurrection

Throughout this age death has been an inescapable reality for all of us descendants of Adam. This has been an ironclad law of Adamic life—one that has also been shrouded in mystery, without any definitive knowledge about why we die or what happens to us afterwards. In other words, death has been like a monster, just waiting to devour each one of us—a cruel monster that even robs us of the dignity of knowledge. Thus in addition to our helplessness in the face of death, we also have our unsettling cluelessness about it to contend with. Even our greatest scientists have not been able to solve this riddle. From their biological perspective death is a natural part of biological life—one that all creatures upon the earth, including mankind, are subject to. And from this they have concluded that death is tantamount to the utter cessation of life—that it is simply an end to what we call life. Therefore there is nothing (zip, zero, zilch) for us after death. Like all other biological creatures, human beings simply become the proverbial dust returning to dust when they die. This is true even when considering the obvious fact that human beings seem to have a more intense and fulfilling life experience than other creatures. When it comes time for us to die, however, that fact carries little weight, thereby leveling the playing field at that point in time and rendering our human life experience as being not much different than that of an insect or a fish. We human beings then might be compared to flames of fire that burn more brightly while we are alive, but once that fire is put out our biological destiny becomes the same as the tiniest, quietest, most insignificant creature that lives upon the earth.

And so, the scientific community has taken this stance about death and decided that as far as they are concerned that is the end of the matter. But throughout the age this scientific conclusion has not always satisfied human beings from other walks of life. Science be darned, many people have chosen to believe other possibilities about death—not, of course, the possibility of escaping death (no one in their right mind has ever entertained that possibility) but the possibility that death is not the end of the line for us human beings—that it is not the end of the matter—has often been bantered about, almost as if in defiance of the scientific-biological conclusion.

Indeed, this matter of what happens to us after we die has been addressed by just about every other field of human intellectual endeavor (other than science). It has been one of the primary discussions of our philosophical, religious, and spiritual communities. And out of these lively discussions there has arisen a myriad of other possibilities, even though some of these possibilities require a bit of an indulgent, imaginative mind to take seriously. But that has not stopped otherwise intelligent people from swearing by them. The problem is (and this is where the scientific community gloats) that no one, not one credible human being has ever come back from the dead to tell us the truth about it. True, many people have had near-death experiences, from which they claim to have glimpsed the truth. Some of these have even been declared clinically dead. But unfortunately, their testimonies have never been convincing enough to be accepted as fact, not only by scientists but by lay people as well. In other words, no matter what people who claim to know say, we still come away thinking that what happens to us after death is simply not knowable. In this way we give death even more power than it already has. We give it the power of mystery. Not only this but our cultural conditioning has actually tried to dissuade us from trying to solve this mystery, labeling such a pursuit as futile, compulsive, and morbid, among other things.

Fortunately, there have been many great spiritual teachers that have graced the human scene during this age who have not succumbed to the pressure to let the mystery of death lie unsolved. Fearlessly, they have presented their versions of the truth about what death is, why it is an inescapable reality for us, and what happens to us afterwards. And though their voices might have gone unheeded and treated as the ranting of madmen by mainstream society, the subsequent embracing of their ideas by large numbers of followers has not only lent them legitimacy; it has in some cases made them too provocative to ignore. This is what happened in the case of the Christian teachings handed down to us by the apostles.

These bold apostolic teachings address almost every aspect of the human experience. They leave no stone unturned, including death. In fact, the subject of death in the New Testament is not only alluded to; it is a prominent one. The entirety of Jesus’ ministry was devoted to relieving human suffering, first by the healing of diseases and mental-emotional disorders, and then if things went too far and death came into the picture Jesus did not back away and act as though death always had the final say. Rather on several occasions he reversed death’s supposed finality. He looked death square in the face and said, “Be gone with you.” Those who had already died were routinely brought back to life, just as if nothing had happened. Then as his final curtain call, he reversed his own death. After three days of his body lying in a cold stone tomb he came forth in a new post-death body. And after presenting us with this almost unbelievable testimony, the New Testament goes on to make the claim that Jesus later, over the course of forty days, appeared to more than five hundred witnesses in his post-death body—witnesses who knew with certainty that he had, in fact, died and been raised.

Thus Jesus’ resurrection from the dead became one of the cornerstone doctrines of the Christian religion—a doctrine that carried with it the very real possibility that humankind could at last gain new insight into the human death experience. Through Jesus’ experience we could potentially learn what death is, why it happens to us all, and what happens to us afterwards. Unfortunately, the newly established Catholic Church robbed us of this potentiality. How? By putting forth the false teaching that Jesus was not really one of us after all—rather that he was God. So, of course death could not hold him. But that fact did not impact the death experience of the common man in the least. It did not stop death from still doing to us what it had always done. And so, we were back to square one about our knowledge of death. Since Jesus’ experience was exclusively divine, how could we hope to learn anything about it for ourselves?

No, even after Jesus rose from the dead, we were still just as much in the dark about these matters as ever. True, we could subscribe to the religion that grew up out of his experience and we could worship him, etc. But the questions about death that we have all faced and subsequently judged to be unanswerable were still there.

Despite the Church’s teaching about Jesus’ divinity it does not deny that he did taste of death, at least for a little while. In that sense he most certainly shared our experience. What separated his experience from ours was not therefore his sidestepping of death; it was his resurrection. And this is the true testimony of the Christian faith. Even Jesus could not escape death when it was thrust upon him, but the teaching of the resurrection is that death could not hold him. It turned out to have no power over him.

To the Church there was no great mystery about Jesus’ resurrection, for if he was God it makes perfect sense that death could not hold him. But what if that doctrine is actually false? What if Jesus was, in truth, like us in every way? In other words, what if the fact that Jesus was subject to death was not the only aspect of his experience that we share? What if we also share with him the potentiality of the resurrection but we just have not realized that potentiality yet? For two thousand years the Church has disseminated the doctrine that the resurrection from the dead is an attribute of God alone. But what if the resurrection is actually an attribute of humankind as well? Surely such a potentiality would have some bearing on our up-until-now helpless approach to death. It could, in fact, completely demystify death for us.

But the Church has opposed this demystification, arguing that since we have no record of any other human being (other than Jesus) rising from the dead, the resurrection cannot be an attribute of the common human makeup. And while that seems to be a sound argument, what the Church does not tell us is that the Bible itself speaks of the resurrection as being a potentiality for many, not as a testimony of past events but rather as a prophetic reality. In fact, it speaks of there being a mass resurrection from the dead at the end of the age. Thus the Bible seems to indicate that the resurrection from the dead is a potentiality for all human beings, but it is a potentiality that has yet to be realized. This not only debunks the Church teaching about human death; it also debunks the doctrine that Jesus was exclusively divine, and therefore his experience can never be ours. Furthermore, it sheds new light on the created makeup of man.

It may well be true that Jesus was divine in his makeup. But where the Church has erred is in its view that Jesus was exclusively divine. In other words, it is the Church’s view of the common man that is erroneous.

The created makeup of human beings is not limited to our biological givens. Like Jesus, we are spiritual beings, created with an endowment of undying spiritual consciousness. This is how we were created in the image of God. God is pure limitless consciousness, and He created us with an endowment of consciousness like his to complement our biological makeup. But for the vast majority of us in this age our endowment of consciousness has been stuck in a lower evolutionary state, which the Bible calls Adamic. And it is this state of our endowment of consciousness that brought death into the world. This was made clear by what God told Adam in the Garden of Eden: “You will certainly die.” (Genesis 2:17). And so Adamic man became a mortal creature, despite retaining his created endowment of undying spiritual consciousness.

Amazingly, however, the Bible also teaches that man has the potential to evolve in his state of consciousness—out from the Adamic state and into a new, higher state that it calls the Christ. This is who Jesus was. Like us, he was a man with a created endowment of spiritual consciousness, but unlike us, he was not stuck in the Adamic state. Rather he had evolved out from that state into the Christ. And one of the attributes of Christ consciousness is the realization of eternal life. In other words, death belongs to Adam, but eternal life belongs to the Christ. And it was for this reason that death could not hold Jesus. Based on his biological makeup he could be put to death, but based on his state of Christ consciousness death was shown to have no power over him.

This also explains the Bible’s prophetic teaching that one day there will be a mass resurrection of the dead. For, the true mystery of the resurrection is that Jesus was raised because he was Christ-realized, not as a miraculous sign or a sovereign act of God. And if Jesus was raised based on this evolution of human consciousness, it logically follows that any of us who share in that evolution will also be resurrected. If it is our state of consciousness that determines our destiny in regards to death, then the key for us to overcoming death through the resurrection is to change our state of consciousness—out from the Adam man and into the Christ. If death belongs to Adam and eternal life belongs to the Christ, the key to the resurrection is to become the Christ.

This was one of the main reasons that Jesus meekly submitted to death on a Roman cross—a torturous, very public form of death at that time. It was to show us the power of the resurrection inherent in human consciousness. In other words, he wanted to show us that the resurrection not only belongs to the Christ; it is literally unstoppable even in the darkest, cruelest death experiences. This was, in fact, one of his main motives for living among us—to show us our full potential as human beings.

Jesus was a fully evolved Christ man. It is even possible that he was the first man to ever become the Christ. But first or not, he labored with all his strength to show us the Christ. Why? Not so that we would worship him; rather because he wanted to show us our own potential to become like him. This was the basis of his teaching. He was not separate from or above us. He was one of us—the firstborn of many brothers (Romans 8:29). He was a human being, created with a divine endowment of spiritual consciousness housed within his psyche, just like us. But whereas we have languished in the lower state of consciousness called Adamic for the past six thousand years, he had freed himself from that state through the scientific process of consciousness evolution and raised up the Christ within him. Whereas we all have been wallowing in the ironclad grip of mortality and death, he had put death behind him forever and laid hold of eternal life.

For this same reason Jesus brought to light the resurrection from the dead, showing us that it too is a scientific attribute of Christ consciousness. So from Jesus’ point of view the resurrection was not mysterious. But for us who are still stuck in the Adamic mindset, we see it as a great mystery. Why? Because we also see death as an inescapable, irreversible reality—so much so, in fact, that we have superstitiously surmised that Jesus must have been God in the flesh. That is what our Adamic consciousness has done to us. It has boxed us in to a hopeless, superstitious, death-obsessed reality view—a reality view that simply cannot include the potentiality of overcoming death. And whatever we cannot include in our own reality view, we label as mysterious. But when we expand our reality view through the evolution of consciousness, one by one the mysteries that once befuddled our minds are brought into the light of knowing and dissolved. And the mystery surrounding the resurrection from the dead is surely one of these.