Part 1: Getting Under Your Skin: What We Really Are

“Ten years ago…

I turned my face for a moment

and it became my life.” - Manager at AT&T

“The unfolding of your words gives light; it imparts understanding to the simple.”  - Psalm 119:130

DISTRACTED BY DESIGN

We live in a world distracted by design. We turn our face for a moment, then another, and another, and the next thing we know, should we become conscious of our unconscious, for a moment, we realize we’ve become distracted from the essence of our life. This distance can feel like years, maybe even centuries, and deeper still, it feels like we don’t remember our beginning. How do we become present, not just to the discomfort of our lives, but to the comfort deeper inside us, standing beside us, that will cause us to remember that from which we fell, that from which we turned aside?

“I have written to you…because you know him who is from the beginning. Do not love the world or the things the world offers you. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not yet realized in him. For all that is in the world—the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride of life—is not from the Father but is from the world. The world and its desires pass away, but whoever discovers the will of God lives forever.” - 1 John 2:15-17

TURNING ASIDE AGAIN: Making The Right Turn

“I will turn aside to see this great sight, why the bush is not burned.” - Moses

What do we seek to justify our blindness?

Will we turn aside to see the burning bush?

To see the world is on fire?

Who is the One in the fire, standing between two trees? Standing beside you and me?

When we seek that One first, beyond all else, all things begin to make sense. Our deepest sense and longing returns, finally in its completeness. Keep your eyes fixed there, on the Author and Finisher of our journey.

“I was formed ages ago, at the very beginning, when the world came to be. I was there when he set the heavens in place, and when he marked the foundations of the earth. Then I was constantly at his side, and was daily his delight, rejoicing always in his presence, rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the children of man.” - Wisdom

QUESTIONS and ANSWERS

How could I tell you the answer when the answer is invisible. Notice, the answer does not have a question mark. Yet your questions can guide you, beyond language and words, to the answer freely given, the Word already speaking deep within you, that was covered by the turning away, heard just before your turning back from the question:

“Did God really say?”

God did say, proven by your very existence, protected and covered by your flesh, until you are ready to let it go, to lose your life to find it, and see the invisible.

Oh this world of words and images, distracting us from the very Image we are made in! In that Image we see.

I see the invisible You, the Real You, you’ve sometimes seen in the images of your dreams. In their meaning, not the images themselves, you wake up from your sleep, no longer to slumber by the thoughts that kept you asleep. 

Behold I tell you a mystery. We will not always sleep. We will be changed, in the twinkling of an eye. So now I will teach you in the hope that the eyes of your heart begin to twinkle with the Light that wants you to know more than you do. 

Onward to the Resurrection

Of who you really are.

Onward to Remembering

In a beginning…

“Everything exposed by the light becomes visible, for everything that is illuminated becomes a light itself. So it is said, “Wake up, O sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine in you.” Pay careful attention, then, to how you read…” - Ephesians 5:13-15

LIGHTER THAN SKIN

Behold I tell you a mystery, a mystery of how you and I came to be human beings with skin, along with the journey of what we are designed to become. This mysterious light is full of hope and seeks to guide you in making sense of life on earth with its beauty, suffering, limitations, and invitations from the heavens. It seeks to raise your senses to perceive the great mystery of our being that leads to genuine freedom. 

Maybe you’ve heard the story of beginnings before? Without getting into all the details, it goes something like this. God created the first humans, our original parents, named Adam and Eve. God, who is Spirit and Light (John 4:24, 1 John 1:5) created Adam and Eve in God’s image. God then, is really our original parents, our original designer, of that which is deepest about us.

Our deepest essence, our deepest being, was and is Light and Spirit. It is how we were originally made, before we had skin.

We all know the limitations of being flesh and blood (skinned) creatures, and many have believed this is our only reality, the only thing that is concrete and real. As we are beginning to see, this is a veil that must be removed in order to see what is under our skin. To see the essence of what we really are. Some of you have seen this by looking at a dead body. The light, spirit, and essence of that person is no longer there. 

Where did it go?

We might first need to ask, where has our essence gone?

While we cannot get into all the details, the story of our original parents is that God set Adam and Eve in a garden of delight. There were many trees they could eat from, but there was one tree known as the knowledge of good and evil they were instructed not to. God was in the process of creating them in the image and likeness of God, who is Light, and to eat from that tree would cause them to descend into a world of darkness and shadows, a world of types and symbols, a world of veils, of skin and flesh. They ate of that tree after being deceived that doing so would make them like God, the One whose image they were already like. At this point, they literally fell from the spiritual world made of light into a denser and harder world full of darkness, which would now need flesh (skin) to help them with their own shame (Not God’s) and the consequences of their now blinded eyes. 

“And the God made for Adam and his wife garments of skin and clothed them.” - Genesis 3:21

Welcome to our world. 

This world is hard when we think what we physically see is the highest reality. When we bring this understanding to the scriptures, we are blind to the spiritual (actual) meaning beyond the physical types and examples that fill its pages. For example, many who are familiar with the scriptures immediately ask, “But wasn’t Eve made from the side of Adam, mainly his rib? Was that not a real boney rib?” It is here we show our understanding is still very much earthly, fleshly. It is based on what we see and know of the physical world rather than the Spirit through and by which all things were made. A helpful example is when God says Adam and Eve shall leave their father and mother and become one flesh in marriage. When you look at marriages on earth, do you see two married couples literally walking around as one body, maybe becoming a 4 legged creature since they are so closely joined? No. This is speaking of a spiritual oneness, the understanding we are after in recovering the essence of what we are and made to be.

The Spirit then, is the essence, not the flesh.

It can be helpful to at least understand that being made of the dust of the earth, even if was originally a kind of flesh, would have been a very light dusting covering the essence of who Adam and Eve were. They were more like light beings, that is, living beings breathed into by God taking on a transparent form. The formation was a process, now hindered by the descent into flesh and blood, yet became part of a redemptive process that is still ongoing with you and me. 

“We are all partial images slowly coming into focus, to the degree we allow and filter the Light and Love of God.” - Richard Rohr

So then, to get closer to the truth, we might see Adam and Eve as more translucent beings with a thin veil of dust creating a form of a newly created living being. They would have had light skin, not the thick skin we now have. Once they “fell” from this state by thinking they could know good and evil to become like God, God gave them thicker skin to protect them from the elements of a heavier state of being, a denser harder world where we would live “by the sweat of our brow” until our flesh returned to the ground, and deeper still, until we return the the ground of our being hopefully, while living in these bodies. (Gen 3:19) It must be noted this was for their protection, even if it appears by the struggle of earth, that it wasn't. God then placed them outside the spiritual garden into this world of hardness, by which they would journey with the rest of humanity to remember, or become, light beings once again, but not without frustration. The frustration you and I know so well.

Ask yourself:

Have you ever been frustrated with life on earth? Are you frustrated right now? If not with yourself, with others?

Frustration is a catalyst to remember who and what we all really are. It is a process by which we learn to choose Life, rather than that which appeals to the desires of the physical eye and what distracts us from our original essence in the world.

If this all seems too mystical for you, it’s because it is. To the degree our hearts are hardened, that is living in accordance with the rules and perceptions of this “harder” world, we struggle to perceive the Reality from which we, and our original parents, were made from. But this is the human journey. And despite its struggles and frustrations, there is good news and beauty when we discover the meaning of our journey through it. 

When Adam and Eve fell from the realization of their being made in the likeness of God, from their state of having light skin and made as beings of light in God’s own image, it was known as “The Fall.” This fall is from a higher world of Light into a denser darker world. They fell from their realization of their oneness with God and became divided in their attention and affection. This is the literal reason this world on earth often feels “hard.”

“Come to me…my yoke is light.” - Jesus

“But the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, open to reason, full of mercy and good fruits, impartial and sincere.” - James 3:17

Our fleshly parent’s new knowledge of good and evil, much like ours, was in fact similar to God’s knowledge of good and evil, but vastly immature and incompetent to understanding the heart of God. This immature knowledge will only eventually produce death and so it was God’s kindness to remove them, and us, from that garden where they could have also eaten of the Tree of Life in a darkened state that would cause us to forever miss the point. To miss the heart and essence of who God really is and who we really are. This is the same today when people feed off this tree of knowledge thinking they know good and evil, right from wrong, apart from an actual life lived in oneness with God.

Oneness with God is where we belong, it is where we come from, where we are designed to be conscious of, and where we are going.

To not be conscious of this Oneness is what it means to be outside the garden of delight. It is this unconscious state that feeds off of the knowledge of good and evil, rather than the imperishable Tree of Life.

“Flesh and blood cannot inherit the Reality of God. These dying bodies cannot inherit what will last forever. The perishable must put on the imperishable.” - 1 Corinthians 15:50

Our perishable skin, flesh, and blood, is not something “bad” all together as we see God designed these skins for our protection, but they are a body given to contain the essence of what we really are and are to become. Our bodies are like a cocoon in preparation to becoming a butterfly. To the degree we misunderstand this, will be to the degree we wrongfully harm our bodies, or another’s, and to the degree we will live as a slave to earthly passions, not realizing where our deepest passions come from and what they point to. 

So let’s make some things clear:

Before “the fall”, Adam and Eve were living beings, not human beings with skin, more akin to beings of light, possibly with a light dusting revealing a form. 

After the fall, God put skin on them, skin like you and I currently have. 

We are all on a journey to learn what these bodies have to teach us, what they are temples of, in order to remember who we are, as beings being formed in the image and likeness of God. God is Spirit and Light.

In Part 2 we will explore this deeper in the revealing of the Last Adam and the process in which God became flesh to show us what we were missing, and to awaken us to who we really are.

Much Love,

-PH

“Who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has been his counselor? For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen. Who has ever given to God, that God should repay them? Therefore, I urge you in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is your true and proper worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discover what is the will of God, what is good AND perfect.” - Romans 11:334-12:2)