So when Christ says I am the Life, I don't think he means life the way people normally think of it as being either animate or inanimate. He doesn't say I am life; he says I am the Life. What is the Life? The Life is the Absolute, the ultimate Truth, becoming living. The Sufis actually say that one of the names of God is the Living. The Life is when the Absolute, the ultimate Truth, manifests as a living existence, a living conscious existence. You can't say the Absolute is the Life. You can't even say the Absolute is conscious. But as the Christ, as the Logos, as the first manifestation, it is Life, it is Living. So the Christ is a Cosmic Life, a Universal Life. And the life that we know is a particularization of it, a very specific perception of it, a development of it.

Jesus, however, does not say we experience God. He says the pure in heart shall see God. He does not say you are with God or relate to God or will be God. He says you see God. What is significant is the matter of seeing God. You are not with God because you are not; there is only God. You do not relate to God because there is no other than God. You are not part of God because God has no parts. You see only God. You are not created by God because there is only God. God doesn't create anything else.

That's the paradox to which Jesus was referring. If you become poor in spirit you will be in the kingdom of heaven. If you are completely poor, you get nothing absolutely, which ontologically is the same thing as having everything. The switch point, the transition, is the sense of the existing self, the feeling that there is a me who has or who doesn't have. The transition is that sense of self goes. Before that goes, you have things or you don't have things. That central sense of self who is going to have this, who is going to be enlightened, who is going to experience God, who is going to get rich, who is going to have pleasure is what ultimately goes. Everything else will be left. God will be left, pleasure will be left, fun will be left, everything will be there without you. Then everything will be experienced purely. Pleasure will be pure pleasure because you are not there to contaminate it. As a separate self that possesses things, you are an impurity. Without that self, when there is love, there is pure love. It is not you who says, “I love you.” Sometimes when you feel love you can actually sense a little, dark, murky cloud sitting somewhere and looking at this ocean of love. When you feel, “I'm loving and I'm going to save the world,” the world needs to be saved from you. As long as there is a you that wants to save the world, the world needs to be saved from you. You are just making trouble for people by pretending to save them when in fact you are asserting your own deficiencies.

So being both the Way and the Life is important, but being the Life is the specific contribution of Christianity that's not talked about much in other traditions. Christ’s message is the redemption of the totality of all existence, seeing the Logos as the Cosmic Logos, as the Cosmic Christ, giving existence a true value. Christ happened to be a complete embodiment of that level of consciousness in being a person. So you could say that the Logos itself, true nature as a dynamic creative active living indivisible presence of realness, got incarnated as an individual. And that’s the sense in which Christ is the son of God, because the Logos is what first comes out of the Absolute. The Logos is the first radiance, the first light, the first intelligence. Think of the resurrection as happening all the time. The Logos is the first born, the first emanation of the Absolute. Christ the Logos is the oldest of the old.

So we understand the teaching of Christ when we realize that the individual, separate, bounded soul is a belief in our minds, and we relax and realize that soul becomes continuous with the rest of reality. That soul continuous with the rest, as that totality, is then the Logos or the Christ or the Word. This is an exact and specific resolution because we don’t simply let go of our boundaries and become pure consciousness, pure awareness, or the Absolute or something like that. We let go of our boundaries without losing our sense, our uniqueness. We continue to be a soul, to be an individual, but are continuous with the rest. We are an individuation then out of a totality. So it's a very specific resolution.