Jesus Was a Mystic

 Alan Watts

Jesus himself, if we are to credit the Gospel of St John, was most undoubtedly a mystic, in the strict sense of one who has realized union with God.  But in becoming the religion about Jesus instead of the religion of Jesus, Christianity separated itself from the basic insight of its master, and regarded him as a bizarre deuce ex machina in the plot of history. In asking its followers to go by his life and example, it denied them access to the state of consciousness from which that life proceeded by insisting that Jesus alone was God incarnate, and that God cannot be in us in the same way as in him.

But a man so uniquely privileged cannot serve as an example for others. Christianity thus became an impossible religion which institutionalized guilt for failing to be Christ-like as a virtue. Only a few went on to see that this impossibility arises from and indeed, reveals a false sense of identity -- in that one who feels himself to be no more than a separate ego-soul cannot by any means realize union with God. The futility of the attempt should disclose the unreality of the feeling.

The Theologia Mystica of St. Dionysius, Introduction