These teachings by traditional Christianity seem cute and quaint. Few intelligent fourteen-year old youngsters find them believable. Generally, adolescents dismiss these teachings as fairy tales. Some leave the Church and others find ways to reconcile themselves to what seems to them mythologies. I left Catholic Christianity at fourteen and thought whoever believes in the myths described in the Bible ought to have his head examined by psychiatrists and treated for psychosis.
However, this does not mean that there is no saliency to the teachings attributed to the Jewish carpenter called Emmanuel Ben Joseph, whom the Greeks called Jesus Christ. I believe that if properly understood it is correct to say that we all live in sin and need salvation from sin. Specifically, I believe that I live in sin and need salvation from my sins. How so?
I tend to bear grudges and grievances against those I see as having done me wrong. I do not easily forgive any one for the wrong they did to me. I have not forgiven white folks for enslaving black folks. I tend to study history, the past, and dredge past injustices done to those I identify with, blacks, and seek vengeance. If you push me, I will tell you that I want white folks to be punished for enslaving and discriminating against black folks. I want them to burn in hell fire for degrading Africans. Closer to home, I have not forgiven extended family members who did not financially help me when I was in college. I was so angry with them for leaving only my poor parents to support me when they could have helped, that I never wrote any of them and did not care, one way or another, when I heard that some of them died. As far as I was concerned, they were evil and I swore them off and wanted nothing to do with them. I distanced myself from these folks to the point of not even wanting to see them physically. When I completed graduated education and felt that white controlled universities discriminated against me, I swore to have nothing to do with them. In fact, I refused to step into a campus that I felt discriminated against me.
You get my point. I am capable of great anger and hatred; I tend to bear grudges and grievances and seek vengeance and punishment for those I see as having wronged me.
As long as I bear grievances and seek vengeance for my presumed enemies, I tend to be angry, fearful, tense, and unhappy. In fact, as long as I bear grievances and seek punishment for my supposed detractors nothing tends to work out well for me.
Bearing grievances and seeking punishment for others, I believe, is what living in sin means. The unforgiving person lives in metaphoric hell: in pain and tension.
Forgiveness for the wrong others did to one, on the other hand, tends to give the forgiving person the gift of peace and joy. If you look those who wronged you in the eyes and truly forgive them, you benefit from that action: you feel freed from anger, fear, hatred and tension; you feel like a heavy weight has been lifted from your head.
To forgive and love people is metaphorically to live in heaven, while still here on planet earth.
To forgive is to see an apparent injustice which ones ego sees as real and overlook it. Forgiveness is an act of choice. It is looking at what has occurred in the empirical universe and overlooking it as if it has not happened. It is a choice not to look at the past as a guide for the present.
To truly forgive is to overlook the world and what is done in it, good or bad, and love the people in the world. To forgive is to see a man who has enslaved blacks, a racist, a murderer, a rapist, and any one who, to ones thinking, has done something egregiously wrong and overlook what they did and still love them.
To love other people is to join with them and become one with them. To forgive, that is, to love and join people, gives one a sense of oneness with people.
In the state of oneness one feels peaceful and happy. In separation from other people (we separate from those we do not genuinely forgive) one feels unconnected, tense, anxious and unhappy.
I believe, in fact, I know, that to forgive those who have done one wrong, to forgive the world, all of it, is to join the world in love. Forgiveness gives one a sense of belonging to those one has forgiven and in that sense of oneness one feels peace and joy. Forgiveness, therefore, gives one the gift of peace and joy.

I believe that forgiveness and its gifts of peace and joy is what salvation is. To be saved is to forgive all people their hurtful activities on this earth. To forgive is to truly love all people, and to love all people is to join with them, to become one with them hence to be peaceful and happy.
The forgiving person is a saved person (and he lives in peace and joy and material abundance).
The unforgiving person is not a saved person; he lives in anger, fear, hatred and tension, all of which are hellish. The unforgiving person is in hell, a hell of his own making.

We tend to think that there are certain sins that are unforgivable. I, for example, believed that slavery and racial discrimination are unforgivable. My whole life was dedicated to a time when black folks would seek vengeance for the wrong done to them by white folks. I wanted blacks to acquire nuclear weapons and reduce whites to slavery, so that they experience the pain they inflicted on black folks.
What I am saying is that it is difficult to truly forgive those who wronged one. However, forgiveness is possible if one reinterprets the wrong done to one. There are essentially two modes of interpreting the events of this world, the ego’s mode and the mode of love, aka the Holy Spirit. The ego is self centered and urges one to punish those who hurt ones interests; the Holy Spirit, aka love, urges one to forgive them.
According to the Holy Spirit’s (where I employ the word Holy Spirit, you can replace it with love, for both terms stand for union, which is what God is) mode of thinking, those who wronged one were merely acting out ones script. As it were, one wrote a play, a script and placed people into it and had them act out its parts. Those who did one good or bad were mere volunteers acting out roles that ones play, drama, called for people to act for one. One, therefore, ought to be grateful to them for acting out the roles they acted in ones play.
In effect, one asked those who did right or wrong to one to do so and they merely obliged ones request.
Those who did not help one financially when one was young did so because one asked them not to help one. One wanted to go it alone and suffer and feel like one is responsible for ones education. Those who discriminated against one did so because one asked them to do so. One did not want to work for them. One wanted to be independent so as to be free to do ones own thing. To operate within the box is to be a conformist, which, more or less, is to live a stunted and warped life.
If one is fired from ones job, one asked the person who did so to do so, so that one might be out of the work place and go find out what one likes doing and have the courage to do it. Simply stated, one asked all those who did what the world calls good or bad to one.
One asked people to do these things to one with certain objectives in mind. The first objective is ego. Here, one feels wronged, feels like a victim and feels angry with those who did one wrong. (As a young man in my twenties, I was furious at white folks for discriminating against blacks and wanted them destroyed.)
This initial response to perceived injustice is later reinterpreted with a more adult response. One gradually realized that one asked the people to do what they did to one, so that one would learn ones true identity as not a separated self, not an ego housed in body.
We came to this world identifying as separated self, the ego, but later want to learn that our true identity is unified spirit, a self that is outside matter, space and time and cannot be hurt by what hurts ones body.
Ones body is a dream figure, not ones real self. The whole point to other persons attack is for one to learn that one is not a body that can be hurt, that one is spirit and that nobody can hurt spirit.
This is the lesson of Jesus. He was attacked by people and was physically hurt; he forgave those who hurt and eventually destroyed his body. He did not feel angry with them. He forgave them, that is, he overlooked what they did to him. In overlooking what they did to his body and ego, he remembered his real self, unified spirit, Christ self. He identified with Christ, unified self and detached from ego and its body, so that what was done to his body did not concern him. Of course, to the extent that he identified with body and thought himself his body, he felt pain when his body was attacked, but when he recognized that he is not body and did not defend his body when it was attacked, he no longer felt pain. He overcame the ego and its chosen home, the human body and awakened to the awareness of unified spirit world.
Jesus wrote a script in which he had some of his friends seems to betray him and others crucify him. They did what they did for him to seem to die and from death resurrect. In resurrecting from death, he proved to himself and to the world that death is not final, that our tendency to fear death is misguided. He wanted to teach us that there is life after death, hence teach us to stop fearing death.
We tend to be unforgiving and punitive primarily because we feel that this world is all there is to human existence. But if we accepted that there is a world other than our empirical world, we would be forgiving and less punitive. In fact, if we knew that there is life after death, we would be totally forgiving of those who wronged us.
Jesus taught us that there is life after death hence that we must forgive those who made a mistake in wronging us. His lesson is that we must totally forgive whoever seemed to have wronged us. Jesus taught us total love for all people.
To be a Christian is be totally forgiving and loving. If you were totally forgiving, hence loving, you would live in peace and happiness, whereas if you were unforgiving you would live in pain and tension, in hell. To forgive, love, is therefore to live in heaven, for heaven is peace and happiness; and to not forgive is to live in hell.

Considering the blessing of forgiveness, peace and joy, to forgive other people is thus to bless ones self; to give yourself peace and joy, to put yourself in heaven.
Considering the consequences of not forgiving other people, lack of somatic and psychological peace and happiness, to bear grievances and not forgive other people is to give ones self pain and conflict, to put ones self in hell.
I was an unforgiving man. I bore grudges and grievances. I wanted punishment for those who wronged me. All you had to do is not acknowledge my presence, ignore me, and I felt humiliated by you and wanted to punish you.
(Objectively, no one can ignore one, no one can humiliate one, no one can belittle one, no one can disgrace one, and no one can say anything to detract from ones worth, for ones worth is not given to one by other people. The individual’s worth was given to him by God. It is not up to other people to give or withdraw worth and dignity from the individual. Of course, if one thinks that other people can detract from ones value, they can do so. They will seem to do so, for one has given them the power to do so, and one would feel degraded by them. But if one knows that no other human being can degrade one, just as one cannot degrade another human being, then no one can degrade one. People do to one as one wants done to one.)
Do you want to be saved? Do you want to live in peace, joy and happiness? Do you want to live in material abundance? If your answer to all these questions is affirmative, then you must do what they require; you must forgive all people, not a little bit, you must forgive them all the time. You must have one hundred percent love for all people; you must forgive the wrongs that you believe that people have done to you, all of it.
You cannot have a bit of unforgiveness in your life if you want to be peaceful, happy and live life more abundantly. If there is any human being you have not forgiven, you have kept him or her in hell and you are there with him.
The person you have not forgiven is in hell and you are in hell with him. If you do not forgive a person who wronged you, he fears your vengeance and is; therefore, always defensive, trying to protect himself from your anticipated vengeance, attack on him. A defensive person is an anxious and unhappy person and, therefore, is in hell. You placed him in hell by not forgiving him. Forgiveness makes him less defensive; forgiveness makes the forgiven person relaxed and happy, hence in metaphoric heaven. To forgive people is to give the forgiven the gifts of peace and joy, which is to give them heaven.
What you give to others you give to you. If you forgive others, you forgive you; if you love other people, you love you. If you hate other people, you hate you. Giving is receiving; what you give to the world is what the world gives back to you.

Do I want peace, happiness and abundance in my life? If the answer is affirmative, then I must forgive all those who I believed wronged me. I must forgive all of them. I must forgive my relatives who did not support me financially; I must forgive whites for enslaving blacks, I must forgive Africans for selling blacks. (I hated my ancestors, the Osuji-Njokus for selling their own people into slavery.) I must forgive the world the evil I see it do.
Each act of evil is perpetrated for a purpose; the purpose is for those it is done to, to forgive and love its perpetrators. The abused asked the abuser to abuse him. The enslaved asked the slaver to enslave him. Why? So as to feel angry and abandoned by God, and to learn forgiveness and love and live in heaven.
The person who undertakes to abuse other people learns his own lessons; he, too, is in hell…look at white Americans, who is living in more hell than them?
I must forgive all people. I must forgive my parents whom I perceived as caring more for my brothers than for me.
(I used to think that my mother, Teresa, loved my senior brother, Eugene, more than she loved me. When Eugene went off to boarding school, Hussey College, Warri, mother cried for weeks. When I went off to boarding school, Anglican Grammar School, Port Harcourt, it seemed to me that mother did not miss me for a second. I certainly did not receive the type of pocket money that “Boy” my senior brother’s family name, received. The same mother I thought did not like me sold all her belongings to send me to America. She did not even want me to work in Nigeria and sent me off a few months from taking my secondary school exams. At any rate, to the extent that attention was not lavished on me, I believe that folks did so in compliance with my request for them to leave me alone. I wanted to feel not loved hence feel angry and subsequently learn love via forgiveness. There can be no island of un-forgiveness in my life if I want to be peaceful and happy.)

Forgiveness does not mean condoning evil. The best-lived life is a life of love and giving. If you, therefore, see a person abusing another person, you must speak out against it. You must tell the abuser and the abused that their dance is foolish, you must tell them that the abuser is in hell and the abused is in hell with him; both can live in heaven only when they love and work for the welfare of each other.
The abused and abuser choose their dance, but they chose it out of foolishness (ego dance of victim and victimizer), they chose it to learn from it. But there are better ways to live. You tell them what they want to learn, love and forgiveness and ask them to practice it right now and stop inflicting unnecessary pain on each other.

Consider Christians and Moslems. They fought during the crusades and that war is resumed with the Arab terrorist attack on New York on September 11, 2001. Actually, the war between Christians and Moslems never ceased, it was fought in other forms and has now resumed in overt forms.
Question: are Westerners Christians? If Christians are those who love and forgive those who wronged them, as Jesus Christ made crystal clear in his teachings….see what he told the man going to worship God and remembered that a neighbor had done him wrong; he told him to first go home and forgive the neighbor before he prayed to God, see the implication of the adulterous woman: let him who has not sinned judge her a sinner and since we are all sinners we have no right to judge her a sinner or stone her; see the “Our Lord’s prayer…God, forgive us our sins for we have first forgiven those who sinned against us”…and Jesus walked his talk by forgiving those who destroyed his body: “father forgive them for they know not what they are doing”…simply stated, Jesus taught the gospel of forgiveness of sins as path to salvation…can any one describe Americans as forgiving people, hence as Christians? They are not Christians; in fact, they do not even know what Christianity is. How can those who enslaved blacks be called Christians? At best you call them criminals.
Are Arabs Moslems? Didn’t Arabs, too, enslave Africans? Those who enslaved their fellow human beings obviously cannot be practicing love. God is love and only loving persons are exhibiting the characteristic of their father, God.
There are no real Christians in the West and no real Moslems in the Middle East. What we have here are two sociopathic people attacking and counter attacking one another. What we are witnessing are two sets of aggressive egotists fighting one another for the control of the world. Neither is right.

So what to do? Teach both sides and all humanity the true meaning of Christianity: love and forgiveness. This teaching is best done through individual example, not just by talking about it. Jesus taught his gospel of love and forgiveness by loving and forgiving people. The followers of Jesus must, therefore, teach by example, by totally loving and forgiving those who wronged them.
With regard to political policy, Americans, obviously, need to stay in the Moslem world and teach them democratic principles. Arabs need to learn democracy. America and the West will be in the Arab world for a long, long time performing that historic duty. While helping to establish democratic institutions, Americans must forgive and love Arabs, as Arabs must forgive and love Americans, for their mutual hurtful pasts.
At the individual level, each American and each Arab must learn forgiveness and love as a means of attaining salvation, that is, as a means of attaining peace and happiness.

THE MEANING OF BEING BORN AGAIN, REDEMEED, SAVED, DELIVERED, RESURRECTED FROM DEATH, THE SECOND COMING OF CHRIST TO THE WORLD ETC

Traditional Christianity is chockfull of metaphors like virgin birth, immaculate conception, being born again, redeemed, delivered, saved, healed, resurrected from death, the second coming of Christ and the last judgment. If you were raised a Christian, you probably heard these metaphors and if you are like me, as an oppositional defiant teenager, you probably thought them a whole load of nonsense and threw them to the garbage dump and went on to study what seemed to you realistic adaptation to the exigencies of this world, science and technology. But in retrospection, those terms actually stand for psychological truths that are empirically observable in people’s lives. Let me; therefore, try to explain their true meaning.
To make the ensuing explanation understandable, let me address some background noise. We, human beings, tend to believe that we are born in sin and live in sin. I think that this belief originated in how we came to be in this world.

A MYTHOLOGY

Here is a story of creation for you to ponder. It is not the truth but it approximates the truth.
Originally, all of us were unified as one spirit self. In that one unified self, we are infinite in numbers but are united, we are all the same and are equal; we are eternal and all knowing.
Somehow, we desired the opposite of our true self, our unified self. We desired to be separated from each other. Separation offered us an opportunity to seem to create ourselves, as opposed to the fact that the whole created the part and if the whole is called God, and the part is called Son of God, God created the Son of God.
The Son of God, the part, cannot create himself or create his brothers and their father; the part cannot create the whole for the whole produced the part; the whole is always greater than the sum of its parts. God created his children and though the father and his children are the same, the father is greater than the children.

The part wanted to create itself, create other parts and create the whole. The Son of God wanted to create himself, create his brothers and create their father. In effect, the son wanted to kill his father and become the father, become the author of reality.
In reality, the part cannot displace the whole; the Son of God cannot create his father and create himself and his brothers. But he still wished to do so. Unable to do so in reality, he forgot his truth and dreamed a different truth. We sleep and dream that the truth is not the truth; we replace the truth with our desired truth. The truth is union; we replaced it with separation.
The world is our dream of special ness and separation; the world is a place where what is eternally unified is seen as divided and separated from each other.
On earth, each of us invents a separated special self-concept for himself and for other people and use those to substitute for the unified self-God created us as. On earth, the dream of real self-forgetfulness, we assume ego separated personalities and defend them to make them seem real in our awareness.
Defense makes what is defended seem real even if it is not real. The separated self-housed in body and defended seem real but it is not real, it is a dream self.
The act of separation, in pursuit of special self, the act of splitting oneness into fragments and identifying with fragments, amounts to attack on unified reality. In truth, we cannot divide unified reality.
God’s will is union and we cannot really disobey his will, for to do so is to die and for God to die.
For the part to exist, the whole must exist, for God to exist, his son must exist, and for the Son of God to exist his father must exist.
God and his son desire to exist and do exist; they can only exist under one condition, union, so they are still unified.
The children of God merely dream that they are separated from their father and from each other, but in truth they are always unified.

THE ORIGIN OF A SENSE OF SIN

The dream of special ness (self creation) and separation makes people feel like they did something wrong. As long as people wish to be separated from their real self, they feel like they live in sin.
Separation from God, the unified self, is what Christians mean by the concept of Original sin. Since we came to this world through separation, we, as it were, committed an original sin. To be on earth is to have committed an original sin and to live in sin.

SINLESSNESS

But, in fact, we did not separate from God, our real self; we merely pretend that we are separated from the whole; the whole, even in physics is always unified. In as much as we have not separated from God and all of us, we are still as God created us, unified. To be unified is to be innocent, sinless and guiltless. The children of God are always as their father created them, innocent (lamb) and guiltless. To the extent that we see them as guilty, we made a mistake and must correct our misperception of the children of innocence.
Though still innocent and sinless, though still in union, if we believe that we are separated from each other and from God we feel sinful. Thus, those on earth, the realm of separation (space, time and matter) feel sinful. To be a human being, which is to believe in separation, is to be sinful, not in reality but in dreams.
To pursue self-interests at the expense of other people’s interests is to feel sinful. To seek social interests, to serve common good, is to feel sinless. To serve the whole is to feel sinless.
(But whether one knows it or not, whatever one does, good or bad, seen correctly, serves the interests of the whole, hence one is always serving social interests and, as such, is always sinless, innocent and guiltless. Consider the Second World War. Hitler killed people and destroyed Europe; in the process of committing evil, he weakened almighty Europe; because of his weakening of Europe, Third World countries were able to emancipate themselves from European control. Thus, Hitler’s bad produced well for Africans and Asians; he was, therefore, in spirit as sinless as any other human being.)

In the temporal universe, each of us feels separated from the whole, God, and from other parts, other people, and from his spirit self; he, therefore, feels sinful.
In pursuit of his separated interests, each of us does hurtful things to other people and that reinforces his sense of guilt. To be on earth is to feel sinful and guilty.
Feeling guilty and sinful, each of us needs to be redeemed, delivered and saved from our sin. How is this done?

A person is redeemed from sin by recognizing that he has not done what produced a sense of sin. A sense of separation produced a sense of sin. But in truth one cannot separate from union, for reality, the universe, even at the material level, is always unified. Separation is an illusion, union is the eternal truth. Thus, one has not separated from union. One is always unified, while dreaming that one is separated. Since one is always unified, therefore, one is always sinless, innocent and guiltless.
God has only one Son, one Son that is simultaneously infinite in numbers; all God’s sons are the same to him; where one son of God ends and another begins is no where and where the Son of God ends and God begins is no where; there is no space and gap between God and his children; God is in his children, as they are in him and in each other.
The Son of God is always as God created him, unified with his father and brothers, he has not separated from God and his brothers and sisters and is therefore always innocent.
Forgive the belief in separation; overlook the things done in the world of separation and you experience the world of union. Forgiveness is the path to the awareness of union.
Forgiveness is not an ego moral statement; it simply means recognizing that what is done on earth is done in a dream and is not real; hence despite what we do here, we have not done them and are still as God created us, hence we are still unified, innocent, sinless and guiltless. No matter what you have done on earth, no matter what other people have done earth, we are still innocent. Even those who do what some of us consider horrible, such as homosexuals, pedophiles, rapists, murderers, racists, enslavers, criminals etc are still innocent, for they have not done those things. They did them only in dreams, not in reality; they remain as our God created them holy, unified with all, hence innocent, guiltless and sinless.
To be saved, healed, redeemed and delivered from our sins is to recognize that despite what one and other people do on earth that one has not done those things and is not separated from ones real self, is not separated from other people, is not separated from God and is always unified with all people. This awareness of eternal union is what is meant by salvation, redemption and deliverance from sin/separation.

FIRST CREATION, CHRIST

God extended his one self to each of us. God gave all of himself to each of us and remains himself and is in us. This is the first creation. God created us unified with him. The creation of each of us is the first birth of Christ. Christ is the Son of God who is unified with his creator and his brothers.

CHRIST DIED

Christ died means that the Son of God forgot union and believes himself separated from God and his brothers. In separated state, in ego, self-concept, self image, human personality, one is metaphorically dead. To be in the dream of specialness and separation, to be on earth is to be metaphorically dead.

RESURRECTION

When one recognizes that one is forever unified with God and all people, and lives as such, one has resurrected from death. Ego is death; Christ is resurrection; separation is death, union is rebirth.
Jesus was the man who first voluntarily died to his ego self conception and resurrected to the awareness of his Christ self. He recognized that he is not a separated self but a unified self. While seeing himself as separated, he knew that separation is impossible and that he is always unified with God and creation.

BEING BORN AGAIN

The act of accepting that one is always unified with God and all creation is what is meant by the term being born again. One was born first as unified spirit and one rejected it and sees ones self as separated ego self housed in body, now one is born-again as unified, that is, accepts unified self as ones true identity. One has resurrected from ego death and now lives as Christ unified self.

THE SECOND COMING OF CHRIST TO THE WORLD

The second coming of Christ to the world is the day one relinquished identification with the ego and embraced the Christ as ones true identity.
The seconding of Christ is not some fanciful thing like Jesus coming from the sky to rescue his followers (see Christian concept of tribulation and eruption). It simply means that one has changed ones identity, from separated, ego, to unified Christ. One, of course, still sees ones self as separated but now knows that separation is an illusion.

THE LAST JUDGMENT

The act of judging separation as false and union as real is what is meant by the last judgment. The individual performs the last judgment on the ego and its world, and decides that the ego is false and Christ is real and lives accordingly, lovingly and forgivingly.
The last judgment is not going to happen in a future time for all people, it happens when each individual changes his mind/thinking and rejects the ego self (which is what Christians call Satan, and his ways, the world), and accepts Christ and his ways, union. When we accept union and its requirement, that we love and forgive all people, we now obey the will of God, for the will of God is that we love him and love each other.

LIVING IN THE GRACE OF GOD

When we obey the will of God, that is, love and forgive each other, we live in the grace of God. In grace, this world becomes a comfortable place to live in. Ones life is now like one is being carried along by cool breezes on a cool summer evening. One lives a life of material abundance and whatever one wants that is in accord with the will of God, love and forgiveness, is given to one. Doors open for one, for those one loves in an unconditionally positive manner tend to bend over backwards to help one obtain what one wants from them. Those who love and forgive God’s children obtain peace, happiness and, yes, material abundance. They live in God’s grace, guided by the Holy Spirit.

HOLY SPIRIT

When we separated from God and dream that we are in this world, God entered our world, our minds as the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the immanent God, whereas God the father is the transcendental God. Thus, there seem three persons in one God: the so-called Holy Trinity, God the father, God the Son (you and I) and God the Holy Spirit. God the Holy Spirit urges us to love and forgive one another, whereas God the Son is sleeping and identifies with the ego and enjoys seeking only self interests and not forgiving other people.
The Holy Spirit is the correction principle; it corrects the mistake of separation; it takes us home and, as such, is our guide to our real home, unified state, aka heaven; he is our comforter in the distresses of this world; he is the link, the bridge between heaven and earth; he is part of God and brings God’s will into our sleeping minds and takes our wishes back to God, where they are reinterpreted to suit the will of God; he reconciles heaven’s will and earth’s wishes, via forgiveness; Jesus identified completely with the mission of the Holy Spirit and taught that gospel of forgiveness as the true meaning of love.


VIRGIN BIRTH, IMMACULATE CONCEPTION

Jesus was born of virgin birth does not mean that his mother Mary did not have sex. She had sex all right and, in fact, lots of it. You got to have lots of sex to have the many children she had. Thomas was one of her children.
Virgin birth means that God crated one as unified with him and all people hence innocent.
This is the same meaning of the concept of Immaculate Conception. Immaculate means pure, sinless and guiltless. Each of us was conceived by Immaculate Conception means that we were created sinless; each of us was given birth to by a virgin, meaning that we were created sinless. We were created by love and in our true self love. Whatever loves is purified for love purifies whatever it touches. Love is purity and immaculate.

CHRISTMAS

(Jesus), Christ, unified self, was born on Christ-mass day. That is, God created his son unified. This is done whenever each of us is created.
Christmas is not any specific day in the year; it is whenever the individual’s real self, the unified self, is born, that is, is remembered by him. So, December 25 or January 28 makes no difference.

GOOD FRIDAY, EASTER

Jesus died to his ego identification on Good Friday (it is good when we forget the ego and do not defend it) and resurrected to his Christ self on Easter day. Ones Easter day is the day that one gave up identification with the ego separated self and now identifies with Christ unified self and does what that requires, loves and forgives all people.

THE PRODIGAL SON AND HOME COMING

The prodigal son is all of us who left the state of union and see ourselves in the state of separation. We came here to seem separated from each other and from God. We think that we can be independent of God and of each other.
In separation, while on earth, we suffer. The prodigal son eventually recognizes his mistakes and learns that union is reality and that separation is impossible and goes home. This means that he now lives in the awareness that he is always unified with his father and brothers.
He did not have to make a journey, for there is nowhere to go. God is everywhere and where you see the Son of God, you see all his brothers and his father, for all of them are one person, one self in infinite persons. Where you are, where I am, God is. Our stay on earth is a journey without distance, a journey to nowhere, for wherever we think that we are is in God.

You are here on earth. You see yourself as in a world of space, time and matter. You believe yourself as separated from other people. These beliefs constitute what folks call sin. All you have to do is recognize that you are right now in union, in God, in all people; that there is no space and gap between God and his children and his children and each other; that you are always in union while dreaming that you are separated from it.
Accept that truth and behave accordingly, love and forgive all creation, and you are now sinless, guiltless, and innocent. Despite every thing you have done in this world, things done in the illusory world of separation, you remain as God created you, unified.
You are right now in union, hence saved from the sin of separation. To know this truth, however, you must love all people, for love is union. Love does not judge and love does not condemn any one; love only forgives all.
To love is to forgive all people the wrongs you see them do to you; I mean all wrongs for to not forgive one wrong is to say that separation is real, that illusion is real. You must forgive all wrongs; this means that you must overlook the world of dreams.
If you forgive all, now, you experience oneness, holy instant, mystical union, call it what you like, for in truth, it has no name. This is experienced now, not tomorrow. In this experience you feel joined to all things, know that union is truth, know that in our true state we are formless, spirit and are eternal.

All the so-called evil you believe that you did on earth actually was necessary for some one to experience whatever he wanted to experience, what is part of his script. Let me expatiate a bit how this works.
I had girlfriend. I had to leave her and that, apparently, broke her heart. I felt evil. But I knew that I had to leave her. She wanted to experience separation. She wanted to be a special, separated self and did not want any man to destroy her cherished independence, to swallow her. She found intimacy, physical and psychological, threatening. She found it difficulty to attach to any one. Though I was not really interested in sex but it seemed odd to me that she was not interested in sex. On earth, people tend to use sex as a means of joining each other. (That is pseudo joining, true joining is done at the mind level, via love.)
I eventually recognized that the lady psychologist came to this world to experience optimal independence and gave her space to experience what she came to experience. I left her. Her ego, like all egos, felt like a victim wronged by me. But at a deep level, she wanted me to leave, so that she would experience her ego cherished feminist independence. That is what she came here to experience and set it up to happen so.
When she gets over her anger and sense of being maltreated by evil men, she will eventually learn that union is reality and give up her illusion of independence. She might do so in this lifetime or in other life times, in other dreams.
Did I do wrong by leaving her, by breaking her heart? No. I did what she wanted me to do, to offer her the opportunity to experience what she wanted to experience. Am I evil? No at all.
By the same token, all the people that have done what my ego mind believes is evil to me did what I asked them to do for me, so as to forgive them and from forgiveness, overlooking of the past (see a purified present, stop coloring the present with the past), come to the awareness that I am always a unified self despite the appearance of separated self.
I should not bear grudges and grievances against anybody that did something wrong to me, for, in fact, they did what I asked them to do to me, so as to learn the reality of union, hence become enlightened to my true self, unified self.
I asked folks to do seeming bad things to me, thus, offering me an opportunity to choose again, to choose love and forgiveness, to choose union, over anger and attack and defensiveness; to choose union over separation. When I overlook the evil done to me and choose forgiveness, I have chosen salvation and I experience peace and happiness. In this sense, the person who did seeming bad things to me, hence offered me the opportunity to forgive him is my savior.
I tell you what, I was so furious at white folks that I wanted to destroy all of them. As a twenty eight year old PhD floundering about in America, I saw all whites as devil incarnate. The day I finally forgave them the sin of enslaving my people was the happiest day in my life. I felt peaceful and happy. I felt like a heavy load had been uplifted from me. I felt in metaphoric heaven. When I was an unforgiving person, I lived with tremendous tension and conflict; I was filled with fear, anger and hatred and was unhappy. My tension dissipated with the simply act of forgiving those I was angry at. (Choose the person that you believe did the worst imaginable wrong to you and forgive him and see how you feel. If, in fact, you forgave him or she, that is, loved him, you would feel unified with that person and feel peaceful and happy, blissful, in heaven.)
From that episode, I learned that I ought to be grateful to all the people that did me well and bad. I am grateful to whites that discriminated against blacks and me, for I asked them to do so, to offer me the opportunity to forgive them, to over look their apparent evil, so as to see the Christ in them and in doing so experience the Christ in me. Without them and their seeming bad and or good, I would not have recognized my eternal unity with all being, hence becomes saved.
It is when you look at a person who came to hurt you with love and forgiveness that you experience Christ vision; this is also called spiritual sight. This is literal, not figurative. Suddenly, that person becomes indescribably beautiful in your sight. He looks like he is made of pure light particles.
(When we invented our bodies, the Holy Spirit reinvented them in light bodies…bodies made of pure photons of light. The light body is still an illusion, still a dream self, albeit a better one, for it approximates heaven’s self more than the gross, dense self we currently identify with; the light body does not last long. Whatever is temporary is a dream self. What is real is a formless and changeless, the unified self that God created us as. Nevertheless, if you love and forgive all people, you will see you and other people in light forms. This is factual, not speculative. If you could understand these matters, I would explain them to you. For now, enough said for you.)

Separation has not occurred. What people are doing on earth are done in a dream state, therefore, people have not done what you see them do.
People are right now innocent, sinless and guiltless, for they have not done what you see them do in your and their dreams of separation, dreams of the opposite of union, dreams of the opposite of eternity, dreams of death. Love them no matter what you see them do. Even if they do dreadful things like engage in racism still love them. They do those dreadful things to see whether despite doing them you would still love them, hence love yourself despite whatever dreadful things you yourself do on earth.
Despite seeing separation, accept the fact of union; accept that you and all people, right now, are unified as one self, the Holy Son of God, the eternal Christ who has lived forever with his father.
Union is not going to happen tomorrow, it is already here, now. We live in union and dream separation; we live in the presence of love and dream that wee are hated by God and all our brothers and sisters.
(If you are into philosophy, my first love, some of the ideas propounded here fall under the categories of solipsism and idealism. Solipsism teaches that the world is in our minds. See George Berkeley’s Dialogues. You also might want to see Arthur Schopenhauer’s World as Will and Idea, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and William James Varieties of Religious experience. You could also study Hinduism, particularly Vedanta and Buddhism. I am not, however, writing philosophy. I am writing what I accept as truth, not some academic exercise to impress my “colleagues” so that they would give me tenure at some university. I do not need their damned tenure if I must tell lies to secure it.)

YOU CAN ONLY SAVE YOU, NOT OTHER PEOPLE

You are having your own self chosen dream and other people are having their own self-chosen dreams.
You cannot prevent other people from having their type of dreams, for they chose them before they were born on earth.
Those who will go to war and die there chose it before they were born. Those who will die of cancer will die of cancer for that is what they chose. Ramakrishna chose cancer and died of cancer. Among other things, he wanted to show that he could still be a man of God, identify with spirit despite the cancer ravaging his body. (See M. The Gospel of Ramakrishna)
Helen Schulman chose cancer and died of cancer, so Jesus could not heal her of her cancer. But she did not take ownership of her choice and felt like she was an innocent person unto whom bad was visited; she felt like she did work for Jesus by writing his book, A Course in Miracles, her book actually, and was not helped by Jesus and hence angry with him for using and dumping her. She identified with her ego to the end and did not see that nothing could happen to her without her choosing it. She was still an ego who blamed others. She did not learn that she chose her cancer to prove that she is spirit and that what could destroy her body could not destroy her spirit, just as destroying Jesus’ body did not destroy his spirit.

The lesson is that one must identify with spirit and love and forgive despite diseases that afflict ones body. One cannot wish away the diseases of ones body, for one chose them before coming to this world, but what one can do is overlook the diseases of the body and still see ones self as unified self hence be peaceful and happy despite the afflictions of the body. (We must, of course, study science and technology, and use knowledge garnered from them to heal the sicknesses of the body. I eschew Christian Science’s antipathy to medical intervention. We were given minds to think with, to study material phenomenon. Without choosing material monism, we can understand matter and device technologies to manipulate it.)
People die from the diseases they chose and will either interpret it from ego or spirit perspective. If from ego perspective, they see themselves as victims and are angry; they are not enlightened hence will come back to the dream world to dream some more, until they get it right, that they chose what happens to them, to learn that they are not bodies and not egos but unified spirit hence remain calm and happy despite it all.


CONCLUSION

In this paper, I have reinterpreted some familiar Christian concepts. I have given them the only meaning that could possibly make them acceptable to a mind bent on knowledge, Gnosis. I have, in effect, given the Bible Gnostic interpretation. I am a Gnostic Christian.
If you are interested in Gnosis, begin your studies by reading the Gospel according to Thomas, Platonus, my writings and Helen Schucman’s writings.
But be warned, the Catholic Church and, now, the Protestant Churches, would not like you to be a Gnostic Christian. The Church stamped out Gnostic Christianity during the fourth century, AD. The Church, that great egotistical institution (Elaine White, the founder of Seventh Day Adventist Church, called it the great Satan) likes people to remain in darkness and hides the unifying light of God from them.
As long as the Church keeps people in darkness, prevents them from awareness of the truth of our oneness, it controls, oppresses and abuses them, even subjects their six year old boy children to sexual abuse.
The narcissistic institution called the Christian Church, and for that matter, other religions, will probably persecute you if you try to think for yourself, if you choose Gnosis over the nonsense propagated as Christianity by the moribund church. Please be aware of what you are getting into if you choose truth over falsity.
The material world, Gnosticism teaches, was not created by a benevolent God, as the Bible seem to teach. (Actually the Old Testament God qualifies as a pathological narcissist, a psychopathic God that belongs in a psychiatric hospital for treatment, to heal his narcissistic rages and senseless punishment of those who did not gratify his narcissism by paying him unmitigated admiration and attention.)
As Gnosticism sees it, and I agree, the world was created by a malevolent God, which the Greek Gnostics call Demiurge. (In the Christian tradition, he is also called Lucifer, the proud angel that rebelled against God, and was chased out of heaven by obedient angels led by the archangel Michael, and came to the world to form his own kingdom in opposition to the will of God.)
The Greek Gnostics were mistaken, for they gave the creation of the world to an external force. I believe that we, in the collectivity, called the Son of God, invented this world. We did so in sleep, in our dreams, not in reality.
To me and to Gnostics, this world is a mistake that needs to be corrected and, indeed, has already been corrected by the Holy Spirit of God.
All we need to do is forgive the world, over look what is done in the world and we experience the corrected world. The corrected world has been called by many metaphoric names: purgatory, gate of heaven, happy dream, (the Iranian prophet, Bahaullah called it the lesser peace). Call it what you like, it is not heaven for in it people are still in still in forms, albeit light forms. Whatever is in forms is not real for it is transitory and ephemeral. Heaven, what I have called unified spirit state, is formless and is unified. Heaven is not a place; it is a state of thinking, a state of mind that accepts our eternal oneness and loves all creation. In that state, there is no you and I, no seer and seen, no subject and object, all is one. In that state of oneness is eternal peace and joy, bliss. This is not conjecture but fact. I speak from personal experience.
I am not interested in deceiving any one. I am a bringer of light into a dark world, a bringer of peace and happiness into a conflicted and unhappy place called planet earth. I cannot save you, only you can save you. My function is to explain the path of salvation and leave it to you to do what you must do to attain salvation: love and forgive all God’s children. Cheers, for there is good news; there is hope for mankind. There is light (union) in this sea of darkness (separation).

Ozodi@africainstituteseatttle.org