The Christmas story, as I’m sure you already all know, is a metaphor; an extended metaphor that tells the story of each and every one of us. It’s not a story of someone else—it’s not history or even herstory, but your story—but it’s told as a historical metaphor with various symbolic meanings that must be reflected on, and made of immediate significance in your life, in order for the story to have the transformative value that it was intended to produce in those who hear and grok the meaning of the story.
So in the first place, Christ, the Godself, who is being born in you as yourself, is born in a manger. What is a manger? It’s a realm of animals, where animals live, and animalistic egos—so it’s a world that has become dominated by egos and has become a place of filth—not of divine order, and cleanliness, and beauty—as our world has alas become.
And the Christmas celebration comes only near the very end of each year—meaning it comes only once at the end of each kalpa, each cycle of time, when the God-Self descends upon earth into all of those souls who have surrendered, in joy, to be carriers of the Light of God, and bring the light into the darkest time of the year and begin from the birth of the sun of wisdom, of power, of beauty, of joy, of purity, of goodness, to shine into the world with that Light, and relight the dying Tree of Life.
Now, the Virgin Mary, she also represents you, you as the soul, because the soul is a virgin; the soul has not yet consummated its blissful union with the God-Self, but this is to occur during this season. It is called the Advent. And after that blissful union the Self is born, and when the Christ-Self is born into this phenomenal plane, the noetic field, the morphogenic field, is lit up with the vibrational frequency of Divine Presence, and that ignites the presence and the awakening of the Holy Spirit and all the souls who have faith and yearning to return to God, and to discover the reality of God within as the Self.
And so this is that moment in which the story becomes reality, and it’s because the story becomes reality that in the next kalpa the reality again becomes story. And every culture has equivalent stories—we saw the Ramayana as a very ancient version of the story, but Osiris and Isis and Horus are another example of that same nativity story. And the same story is there in Adonis and Bacchus, and in Zarathustra, and in many, many other cultures of Avatars and of the story of the conquering of darkness by Light at the end of time.
But the divine warriors of Light who must be filled with the Holy Spirit in order to become fearless—because the problem is fear: fear of death, fear of life, fear of transmigration and being born again in Kali Yuga; fear of pain, fear of karma, fear of suffering of every kind, and fear of infinity, fear of God. Because to the ego, God signifies death. And so we must overcome that fear, but we can overcome it only in that willingness to surrender to the will of the Absolute and to separate our consciousness from the animal level, from identification with the body, and with the body’s mortality, so that once again the deathless consciousness can be fully realized in the stilling of the mind on that silent night in which God is born within you.
But the silence must be total, must be absolute, the stillness of any egoic agitation, and all that can be present that brings about the grace of the divine birth is the adoration of that Supreme Beauty, that Supreme Love, that Supreme Power, that Supreme Revelation of your true nature that will overcome the attachment to the false. And when that happens then, that revelation is the first present we are given under the Tree of Life that is lit up again thanks to this willingness to die and be reborn. And the second gift is redemption, and the third is the Kingdom of Heaven. And others will receive many other gifts in the form of divine virtues and siddhis, and powers to face the apparent adversities of the final phase of Kali Yuga, and bring the good news, bring the joy of God’s Presence in you to the world through your willingness to shine with that Light.
And to shine with that Light one must be free of maya, one must be free of all obstructing mental chatter, one must be free of all the habitual patterns that cause one to forget who one is, and fall back into the animal nature of the ego. And so the recognition and remembrance that can only become total and consistent when there has been a true fusion of being in which you realize that you have always been none other than the one Self, because there is nothing else you could have been, because the one Self is all, the single Intelligence that has manifested this entire Theodrama of the ages, and who is the Rock of Ages. That power is who you are. And that power enables you to become a rock, a sustainer of the world in the future cycle of time, an avatar, a sage, a bringer of wisdom, a keeper of the Dharma, an upholder of nobility and righteousness for as long as possible, so that time itself becomes a temple of divine beauty and joy, and the world fulfills its function as a sacred place of the play of all of the archetypal images of God and Goddess, in every kind of grand adventure—in the glory of the hero’s quest to recover the jewel, the Pearl of Great Price, of this Supreme Knowledge once more, to finalize and put the period, the full stop, to every kalpa with the stopping of mental chatter, and the cessation of maya, and the opening of consciousness to union with God, who will then come fully into the form and unite with the mind and the heart, and bring the fulfillment of total delight as the truth, the essence, and the overflowing joy of living in every moment.
And when that happens, we are anointed; we are anointed with the Nectar of Immortality, and our souls drink in that Nectar and are filled with that realization of our eternal Presence beyond time, and time and eternity become one.
This is the moment of the realization of the nonduality of transcendence and immanence, of the phenomenal and the noumenal and the Absolute Intelligence saturates every point of space and time, with the miraculous powers of that extraordinary presence that brings every consciousness into awareness that the world is a vibrant living dream, that all of us together are co-dreaming, and bringing to the climax of turning the world of apparent matter back into energy, and the energy into spirit, into the purity of infinite Light from which we have all come, and to which all shall as one soon return.
It is the glorious privilege of Sat Yogis to be aware of the true meaning of this story, and to have made yourselves ripe and ready to take your places, to play the parts of the highest roles that God offers at the end and beginning of time to serve as angels both here within the bodily form and some beyond in the supernal Light, saving souls everywhere with the power of the intervention of the divine vibrational frequency that brings revelation and peace to every heart.
It is the joy of this final act that is our graduation, our valedictory performance, as we emerge from the larval stage of egoic consciousness into the angelic butterfly, and then beyond to become one with the Sun of infinite eternal power of creation.
And this is the moment of the fulfillment of our own great dream, our own sweet story, for no one else wrote the Christmas story but ourselves. And we ourselves are the elves who serve Santa in that North Pole bastion, where the secret transformation takes place in the core of the heart that thaws out from its mighty efforts, and becomes a tropical paradise in which the world itself can be reborn in the rebirth of Mother Nature herself as a glorious garden of fecundity, and absolute perfection of eco-systemic intelligence. And we are part of that system. We are the stewards and shepherds of the system. It is our function to sustain it and then, at the proper moment, to enable it to end in glory, in light, in joy, in love, in peace, and to overcome the apparent flames of suffering that will be occurring in the matrix of the manger. But that matrix we know is not real, and so we are able to enter into it fearlessly with the power of saving those who have fallen into darkness and despair, back into the luminous clarity and delight of our true nature as the Transcendent Self, forever untouched by pain or suffering.
May we all be willing to fulfill this highest function which we have been offered, by making use of this day itself as that moment in the ritual of Christian recognition in which that sacrament of truth becomes realized, and God is born within you, now, here, tonight, as your conscious Self.
There are no obstacles other than your own resistance to that surrender that is itself mastery, and the grace of the descent of avataric Consciousness is yours for the taking, for the accepting, for the willingness to take responsibility for the upliftment of the world, and the shepherding of all souls back to the Father and the Mother, and the abode of eternal peace.
May we join together—those who are here physically, those who are in other physical locations with their forms—but may we join in a vibrational resonance that brings that redemptive energy in the form of an encounter with your innermost Being, that enables the light to shine so brightly that all darkness of sanskaras are removed forever from the ego and the soul.
And may we know that grace and share it as a superorganismic whole with such power that it spreads like wildfire through the planetary noetic field, and completes that dissemination of power that enables all to become free.
May Christ be risen tonight in every soul.
Namaste,
Shunyamurti
