THE AWAKENING WAY

The Awakening Way is an invitation to awaken from sleep—to rise into a new way of seeing and being in the world. It is a call spoken in the ancient language of the Christian tradition: awake, thou that sleepest. You are invited to shift your perception beyond the sense of being a separate person and to awaken to what has always been true.

This is what I call Christianity without fear. It is a path that points beyond belief into revelation, beyond shame into dignity, beyond separation into union. It is an invitation to awaken to the revelation of the true Self—not the constructed personal self, but the deeper identity revealed by the mystics as the impersonal life. As the mystic Joseph Brenner described it, this is learning to live the impersonal life, where the illusion of separation gently dissolves.

In The Awakening Way, you are invited to explore and experience what Christianity names as Christ within you. For many Christians, Christ has been understood simply as Jesus’ last name, rather than the transpersonal state of consciousness awakened in Jesus and asleep within us. Yet this Christ is the state of KNOWING expressed in the words: “I am in the Father, and the Father is in me.”- John 14:10-11. This “I am” is not unique to one individual; it is the way in which you are an emanation of the One Life.

Christ-consciousness is a field of unified awareness. It is a way of seeing and being in which the divine and the human are not separate. It is the lived recognition that humanity and divinity are not two, but one.

We are already one. But we imagine that we are not. And what we have to recover is our original unity.

Thomas Merton

Christianity without fear introduces you to yourself as original blessing, not as someone born in original sin. The doctrine of original sin was articulated by Augustine in the fourth century, yet the opening chapter of Genesis offers a very different starting point. “God saw everything that was made, and behold, it was very good.” Humanity is revealed as created in a state of original goodness, prior to the later moral framing of good versus evil.

Before the teaching of Christian spiritual awakening can be fully understood, it must be seen that the experience pointed to by the word “God” is not without, but within. The word “repent,” in its original meaning, does not mean to feel ashamed, but to turn within. You are a creature who lives within the world of time (human), yet you are also rooted in the world of eternity (Being).

In this revelation—which is not a belief but a direct KNOWING—you come to recognize, with Saint Paul:

I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.

Galatians 2:20 (KJV)

This Christ living within is the state of consciousness in which you know that you and the Father are one. It is the realisation echoed in the ancient call:

Awake thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light.

Ephesians 5:14 (KJV)

Here, sleep refers to unawareness—the dream of being a separate self. To arise from the dead does not mean leaving the body, but awakening from the death of forgetting sacred unity. Awakening is coming home to the revelation of what is already true.

Christian Spiritual Awakening Core Principles

At the heart of The Awakening Way are six core principles that form the foundation for living a Christianity without fear and awakening from the dream of the separate personal self.

• Seek first the Kingdom of God

• I AM the way

• Be still and KNOW

• Give no thought

• Ask and it shall be given

• Go, sin no more

These principles are not moral commands but invitations to awaken.

The core message of Jesus is not about changing people’s moral behavior, but about changing their consciousness.

Richard Rohr

Together, these principles reveal that the root illusion is the belief that you are separate from God, have ever been separate from God, or could ever be separate from God. Christianity without fear shifts our understanding from shame to dignity, from redemption-from-failure to participation in Presence, and from obedience to infinite creativity. This is awakening to the blessing of being made in the image of God. Such awakening naturally leads to an embodied spirituality, where divine life is lived through ordinary human existence.

As one modern mystic observed, Jesus did not come to create a religion of believers, but to awaken Christ-consciousness asleep within humanity. Belief in this possibility may be the first step, but awakening requires participation. The Master’s invitation to take up the cross has long been misunderstood. The cross is not merely a symbol of suffering but a symbol of transformation. It is the place where the sense of a time-bound personal self willingly yields, and the timeless dimension of Being is revealed. This is the vertical axis of the cross: the dying into separation and the resurrection into union.

Christian spiritual awakening is where you awaken beyond the separate sense of the personal self and are resurrected into the KNOWING of your life as a whole, holy expression of the One Life. The question is simple and profound: are you prepared to allow the revelation of your true magnificence? Are you willing to awaken the imprisoned splendor within you? This is the invitation of The Awakening Way.