Recently, driving in the car, I was listening to a country music station playing Christmas songs—songs like “All I Want For Christmas Is a Real Good Tan,” “Leroy The Redneck Reindeer,” and “Christmas Isn’t Canceled (Just You).” What does this have to do with Christmas? I thought. It is not about baby Jesus, and it’s not even about Christmas trees or Santa Claus. Then I got it. This is about the human experience at Christmastime, not Christmas itself. There is so much of the Christmas holiday that is like that.

There is a reality that is the very heart and essence of Christmas. Entering the experience of that deeply, it is easier to enjoy all the rest of the holiday.

Christmas celebrates the Supreme Soul of the human family. As the words of Handel’s “Messiah” proclaim, he is the Prince of Peace, King of kings, and Lord of lords.

He brought royalty, honor, and love that is not of this world.

In the hermetic tradition, it is said, As above, so below. This principle implies that what we experience in the manifest dimension of our human experience corresponds with dimensions of Reality at a higher vibrational level. If a spiritual tradition or religion espouses belief in something that is nothing like what we know in the human world, it becomes irrelevant.

As above, so below.

Humankind is, in essential ways, like what we call God. The human world is, in essential ways, like heaven.

We know that our human world is often not heavenly. And we know that we, as human beings, often don’t act in godlike ways. So this statement of principle is an ideal that is not often lived up to.

So, when we think of divinity, when we think of God by whatever name, a good starting point is that God is like us as human beings, except up there. It’s a higher version, if you will, a higher version of what physical reality is where we live, except at a higher level.

However, we would probably all acknowledge that we as human beings are flawed embodiments and expressions of the perfection of our potential. We are not a full expression of that potential, so we have to adjust our lens when we conceive of the Divine, realizing that we can’t assume the Divine is just like us.

As it said in Genesis, God made man in his own image and likeness in seven days. For the rest of time, man has been returning the favor, creating God in our image and attributing human characteristics to God.

Our thinking process as human beings takes the stuff of our physical experience and turns it into thought forms. So when we think of spiritual things, the ideas we have come from our experience of the physical world. So God becomes an old man with a beard—only up in the sky. Reason tells us that is not what God is. Nonetheless, that is how we think. And perhaps that is not so bad as long as we realize that our human thoughts are not spiritual reality. Still, they might assist us to find a spiritual knowing we wouldn’t otherwise have. They might help us discover how our human life corresponds with what is above.

In this process, as best we can, we have to adjust the lens through which we perceive the Divine to take into account the ways that our vision is distorted by human experience. We have to correct for the fact that humanity tends to attribute our human limitations to the Divine.

These factors relate to Christmas and our ability to participate in the spiritual event celebrated by the holiday. We have to adjust our lens of consciousness to see and know the essence of Christmas.

Unsurprisingly, we tend to see Jesus through a Christian lens. After all, the stories of his life and birth have been passed down through the Christian tradition. But the truth is that anything anyone has said or done after Jesus lived on earth doesn’t change who he was or what he did. The best it might do is communicate who he was and what he did. But it can also distort it.

Christianity has attempted to own Jesus as if his life purpose was to found the Christian religion. This began with the Romans. After crucifying Jesus and violently persecuting followers of Jesus until the year 313 A.D., in 380 A.D., Rome adopted Christianity as its state religion. The Romans put their own stamp on who he was and why he came. And they forbade anyone in their empire from relating to Jesus other than in the way they prescribed.

Today, Christians tend to look at Jesus as the leader of their religion. But he is and was so much more than that. I offer this statement for your consideration, not asking you to believe it is so but to perceive if it might be. Jesus was the embodiment of the Supreme Soul for all humankind—East, West, North, and South; all races, all nations, all ethnicities, regardless of belief.

As the Christmas angel proclaimed, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. Not just the Jewish people of Jesus’s immediate culture. Not just the people of his day. Not just people who call themselves Christians. Not just Western Civilization. All people. 

The angel’s proclamation echoed the promise given to Abraham from the Supreme Soul:

In thee shall all families of the earth be blessed.

The Soul Family operates under the principle of focalization. As the Soul Family for Planet Earth, we are not a random group. We are not a mob of angels. We are constellated in a beautiful pattern of relationship that has a center. Just as the Milky Way galaxy revolves around Sagittarius A* at its center, and the planets are held in their orbits by the Sun, we, as a Soul Family, constellate the head of this family—the Supreme Soul. The Supreme Soul is the white light that focalizes all the colors of the rainbow. So we are part of the Supreme Soul, and the Supreme Soul is in us.

As above, so below.

The principle of focalization is at work in the human world. But it often works in a self-serving way—a distorted way that corrupts the Reality of the Soul Family. We have presidents, prime ministers, CEOs, mayors, and parents. Sometimes, this principle works to reflect the perfection of what is true at a higher vibrational level. All too often, there are power-hungry leaders, and the population finds itself sleepwalking into human dictatorship.

So what happens when human culture attempts to relate to the Supreme Soul? The people of his day thought Jesus was there to be a political and military leader taking their nation into independence. After attempting to suppress him and his memory, the Romans found a way to fit Jesus into the culture of their Empire. To do that, they had to neuter the majesty and power of who he was and distort his liberating message.

When we turn to heavenly things and our awareness of our Soul Family, as much as possible, we have to tune out the corrupt way that people focalize fields of human activity. We have to tune out how people have distorted the vision of the Supreme Soul, either out of ignorance or out of corrupt intent. Only then can we begin to see and know the truth with the eyes of the Soul.

In Western culture, there has been a growing realization of the need to reign in the self-serving patterns of human leadership. So, in liberal democracies, there are checks and balances that limit the extremes of political leaders. The Magna Carta was an initiative to limit the divine right of kings in England. The framers of the U.S. Constitution created a government that depended on the balance of powers between legislative, executive, and judicial branches.

When it comes to Jesus—or the representation of Jesus by religious institutions—do you think there might be a fear of awesome power? There is a distortion in the lens through which the world has seen him. What would we see and know if we adjusted for that distortion?

We might come to realize that at the heart of us all is someone so beautiful, so wonderful, who doesn’t need checks and balances; who can love everyone and hold everyone easily in their Being because we are all in him, and he is in us. The truth is there is someone in our heart of hearts as the Soul Family whom we all love. And we know we are loved, and that love permeates us all and is shared by us all in Reality. And not just the Christian people, not just Western people, not only people who look like us—people around the world. This is a global matter that includes the entire Soul Family. And our family comes to focus at its center.

In the traditions of the world, the Supreme Soul, who incarnated as Jesus, appeared on other occasions. Melchizedek appeared to Abraham, apparently out of the blue. He was called the king of Salem. Salem is the Latinized word for peace, the same word as shalom in Hebrew and salam in Arabic.

King of Salem. King of peace. 

Jesus is called the Prince of Peace. Perhaps this is just a literary coincidence. Or a superstitious belief. Or perhaps it is true that the Supreme Soul has appeared on Earth before.

In Indian culture, there is the revelation of Krishna. In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna is the charioteer. Arjuna asks for Krishna to reveal himself.

O Thou Divinest One!
If this can be, if I may bear the sight,
Make Thyself visible, Lord of all prayer!
Show me Thy very Self, the Eternal God!

Here is Krishna’s answer:

Gaze, then, thou Son of Pritha!
I manifest for thee
Those hundred thousand thousand shapes
that clothe my Mystery.

Arjuna is so awed that he asks Krishna to again disguise his glory in his familiar human form.

Here are comments on Krishna from Martin Cecil.

Krishna can be seen as providing a focus point in the dimensional world for these highest essences. I suppose from a different approach, we might say here was the Christ, the Word made flesh, the essences brought to a particular point of focus. 

The Christmas story is of the birth of the Supreme Soul. The story has historical significance. It has great meaning to us because it is our story. It is the story of our awakening to the Supreme Soul as the shepherds of today. It is the story of the birth of the spirit of the Supreme Soul here and now.

This is the first verse from “O, Little Town of Bethlehem.”

O, little town of Bethlehem,
How still we see the lie,
Above thy deep and dreamless sleep,
The silent stars go by. 

Yet in thy dark streets shineth
The everlasting light,
The hopes and fears of all the years
Are met in thee tonight.

Like today, the world into which Jesus was born was full of hopes and fears. There were the hopes of the Jewish people and everyone else on Planet Earth. There was fear of the Roman Empire and of dominating powers around the world.

Like today, the manifest human world at the time of Jesus’s birth was created by all that human beings had said and done. And as Martin Cecil’s poem “Any Moment” says so clearly, All our moments add together, Like the digits in a sum, And the answer tells us plainly, Whether life or death shall come.

That is true now for us. It is true of the world at large, and it is true of our immediate personal world. All that we, and everyone else, have said and done has manifested what is present now. So in the dark streets of our life, we are here to shine the everlasting light. We are here to meet the hopes and fears of our world here and now.

So I urge you now to put on the breastplate of Eternal Love, made with gold, rubies, emeralds, and sapphires.

Put on the helmet of Everlasting Light and bring illumination to the world.

Meet the hopes and fears of all the years here and now.

Let the Christ be born now through you.