What does the belief that Jesus rose again from the dead mean to an integrally-informed Christian? We have doubtless given up the traditional belief that Jesus is the world’s only Savior. We have also likely rejected the conventional theology that the resurrection of Jesus “proves” that he was the one and only Son of God. And we have probably discarded the idea that Jesus’ corpse was resuscitated and brought back to life.
On the other hand, it takes more faith than I have as a life-long Baptist to believe a group of disheartened, frightened peasants got together to concoct a lie about Jesus coming back from the dead. And then were willing to die for it to keep the false story going. It would all fall apart when the pressure was on just as the Watergate cover up did in our day.
What do reasonable, integrally-informed people today on a spiritual path do with the resurrection of Jesus? Let’s explore.
It appears the writers of the four canonical Gospels (or perhaps their later redactors) interpreted the first experiences of Jesus returning from the dead as in the physical realm. He seemed to appear as real to these early Christians as he had been when he was with them before his death and burial. Both before and after the resurrection they reported that they saw him, talked with him, and touched him. Pretty real stuff!
It is also evident that they were aware that in some way he transcended the ordinary reality of their physical world when he “appeared.” He was difficult to recognize at first in some settings. He suddenly showed up in a closed room and then just as suddenly disappeared. One time he said, “Don’t touch me!” Another time he said, “Touch me.” At the Ascension, he simply faded away from their sight. This didn’t fit with ordinary physical reality, and they didn’t seem to have a category for it.
On the other hand, the Apostle Paul did have a category for it. He also knew and experienced the risen Jesus but in a way that he clearly distinguished from the physical realm. The earliest written record of the resurrection of Jesus is Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, written around two decades after the death of Jesus and at least two decades before Mark, the earliest canonical gospel. Paul says that Jesus appeared to him as he also appeared to his first followers after the crucifixion. He distinguishes the body with which we are born from the body with which Jesus and others are “resurrected.” He uses the word “physical” to describe our space-time bodies and the word “spiritual” to describe our “resurrected” bodies.1 He says that the physical body is “perishable” but the spiritual body is “imperishable,” and that “flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom of God.”2
In Paul’s thinking, this was not a physical Jesus rising from the dead and ascending into heaven. Rather, when he “saw” the resurrected Jesus he interpreted what he saw as being in the “spiritual” or non-material, mystical realm. He was familiar with “visions” and wrote of his experience with Jesus and other spiritual beings while he was in what he called a “trance.”3 The Apostle Peter also had “trance” experiences.4
One difficulty we have is that the words “vision,” “spiritual,” “trance,” and “mystical” do not seem to be about what is “real” to the modern mind which tends to be limited to thinking only in the space-time terms. This, in turn, does not do justice to the apparent reality of Jesus’ presence as experienced by the early Christians. We tend to think that the spiritual and mystical are less “real” than the physical.
Wilber’s integral map gives us an amazing framework with which to think about these things. It finds that there are four dimensions of reality – that which is “real”: (1) the gross body of physical objects, (2) the subtle body of thoughts, dreams, images, feelings, and subtle energetic forms, (3) the causal body of formless emptiness and (4) the nondual witness of the merging of the gross, subtle, and formless realms.
Before the resurrection, like all human beings, Jesus had a physical body along with a subtle and a causal body. When his physical body died, he seems, in my understanding, to have appeared again to his followers in his subtle energetic form. This “spiritual” form may look as real at times as his physical form to those open to such phenomena.
Remember that Jesus freely operated in the realm of subtle level energy. He was at home with psychic intuitions, visions, and channeling healing energy to those in need. Jesus’ healing ministry came from the transmission and awakening of subtle level energy, and Jesus trained his first followers in how to engage that in others. So his first followers not only lived in proximity to Jesus’ own powerful energy field, but they also experienced a transmission from him that awakened them to a new level of subtle visionary experience. If this is true, then this may have been a possible setting for an entire group of people energized to have the same visionary experience at the same time. These kinds of events have been reported to occur today in devout religious settings such as with the six children involved in the “apparitions” in Medjugorje in 1981.
If one is not personally familiar with these eyes open visionary experiences, then it may not make much sense to say that they seem “real.” I have personally been rather challenged in terms of spiritual “experiences” since I am so much of a “head” person. I also always hesitate to share my own experience. One can get personally stuck at subtle level phenomena and not move on to also experience causal and nondual liberation. Not everyone will or needs to have these experiences. Also, those who publicly share deeply personal spiritual experiences can also get disparagingly clobbered by others! However, I believe the risk in reporting my own experience is worth it because of the encouragement it may provide to others to move on to their own.
After decades of prayer practices, I eventually began to have these kinds of visions several years ago. I have found that I sometimes have to put my hand out to tell if what I am seeing is in the gross physical dimension or the subtle one. If my hand hits a hard object I assume what I am seeing is real in the gross physical dimension. If my hand goes through the image, I figure what I am seeing is also real but coming from the subtle level of energetic form.
But what about the gospels stating that Thomas touched Jesus physically? My experience is that the subtle energetic level is also capable of being experienced as a touch or feeling. For the last two years I have experienced, as I interpret it, Jesus’ presence with me continually as a physical presence on my right arm. It feels just like someone is touching me there.
If any of this represents some level of reality, what we are finally left with is an enduring reason that the experience of the “resurrected” Jesus was crucial and vital to the early Christians and can be to us, today. It meant Jesus’ first followers could continue something of the relationship they had with him when he was with them in the gross physical dimension, only now in the subtle spiritual dimension. And both he and they were no longer physically limited to one place and time.
The Resurrection was not first of all a belief but rather an experience! In order to talk about it, it became an exciting story to be told. And then it became a reality to be experienced by those open to it in the early Christian community in worship and prayer
When the early Christians met for worship they experienced the presence of Jesus once again. They experienced his presence in the agape feast or “love meal” that reminded them of the last supper his initial small circle of men and women had with him.
Christian mystics down through the ages have experienced Jesus’ presence in subtle states of elevated non-ordinary consciousness. They have expressed themselves to God in the deep devotional mantra of prayer and praise that transcends learned languages. Like the first followers of Jesus, they have heard what they understood as the spirit of Jesus speaking and encouraging them through “prophetic” words that anyone could hear internally and share with the others. They have experienced paranormal mystical healing.
As with many original spiritual experiences, the “risen” Jesus was eventually reduced to a mere dogma to be held with no experienced reality at all. The “agape feast” in our religious practices is now often reduced to a ritual of symbolic food and symbolic presence. And finally, today, the resurrection is often seen as a strange and quaint belief that Christians cling to in order to help them have more faith.
In a previous post I have mentioned a well-educated friend in India who was raised in a Christian school there. Just as she was about ready as a teen-ager to decide to become a Christian, Krishna, as she interpreted her experience, in all of his blue-skinned glory, appeared in front of her. She felt incredible love radiating from him and gave her heart to him on the spot. Recently, years later, she had a similar experience, but this time, in her intuition, it was with Jesus appearing to her in her room. She asked Jesus if she could give her heart to him as well as Krishna. He said “Of course,” and so she did. She finds herself continuing to find great happiness and satisfaction in her spiritual journey. By the way, in our conversations I made no attempt to convert her but rather always affirmed her relationship with Krishna.
Wilber’s integral framework includes such experiences with “deity forms” at the subtle level.
“As your identity begins to transcend the isolated and individual bodymind, you start to intuit that there is a Ground of Being or genuine Divinity, beyond ego, and beyond appeals to mythic god figures or rationalisticv scientism or existential bravery. This Deity form can actually be intuited. The more you develop beyond the isolated and existential bodymind, the more you develop toward Spirit, which, at the subtle level, is often experienced as Deity Form or archetypal Self. By that I mean, for example, very concrete experiences of profound Light, a Being of Light, or just of extreme clarity and brilliance of awareness.”5
The resurrection holds three potential realities for those on an intentional spiritual path. First, if so desired, anyone can commune with Jesus as an icon of the Divine in 2nd-person surrender and devotion in a meaningful way that may have some similarities to that which the early Christians experienced after the resurrection. This does not mean we must relate to Jesus as some Christians insist. Jesus, in his own practice, framed the intimate face of the Divine Presence as “Abba,’ using the paternal name he called his own earthly father. Whatever the meaningful deity forms that may come to us in our I-Thou relationship with the Sacred Mystery, they are embraced in integrally-informed spiritual devotion.
Second, we may find reminders of the eternal existence of our Essence, our True Self, in Jesus’ resurrection appearances back then and today in a recognizable “spiritual” body form, revealing both our own universal oneness with God and also our own timeless, recognizable, unique selves.
And third, Jesus’ model and the practices of mystics of all traditions down through the centuries and today offer us spiritual disciplines and psycho-spiritual technologies where we can test these possibilities for ourselves. The scientific method of experiment, experience, and evidence is available as a laboratory for us to discover the reality of “resurrection” in own experience.
1 1 Cor. 15, also Acts 9:5.
2 1 Cor. 15: 35-50.
3 2 Cor. 12:2, Acts 22:17-18.
4 Acts 10:10, 11:5.
5 Wilber interview in Quest, 1994 Spring , pp. 43-46. Italics mine.
Paul Smith is an author, teacher, and minister at Broadway Church in Kansas City, Missouri. His most recent book is Integral Christianity: The Spirit's Call to Evolve, which Wilber says "is an absolutely superb application of Integral Theory in all its dimensions to Christianity itself."
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