🌌 Week 1 — Intuition / Imagination: The Spark of the Spiral
(The Christ-ing Process through the Church Mind)
“At the center of our being is a point of nothingness… It is the pure glory of God in us. It is in everybody.”
— Thomas Merton
“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”
— Marcel Proust
“Once you taste the truth, you cannot untaste it.”
— Adyashanti
“You take the blue pill — the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe.
You take the red pill — you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.”
— Morpheus, The Matrix
The Christ-ing Moment: Three Keys
Every great journey begins with a spark — that first whisper, image, or sensation that says: “There’s more to me than I’ve been living.”
In the Universal Oneness Process (UOP), we call this Intuition / Imagination. It is the spark of Spirit that touches the heart before the mind can explain it.
Before we step into this Spiral, we need to see Christ’s words in their original frame. Three threads run through his teaching that give us the context for everything we’ll explore through the Churched Mind perspective.
1. The “I AM” Thread
When Christ said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life,” the Greek records:
ἐγώ εἰμι (egō eimi) = “I AM.”
In ordinary Greek this means simply, “I am.” But for his hearers, the resonance was unmistakable. In the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), God reveals his name to Moses as:
ἐγώ εἰμι ὁ ὤν (egō eimi ho ōn) = “I AM the One Who Is.” (Exodus 3:14)
Hebrew: Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh = “I AM WHO I AM.”
So when Christ says egō eimi — “I AM the light of the world… I AM the bread of life… Before Abraham was, I AM” — he is not speaking merely about his personality. He is revealing the I AM of Origin itself.
Here is one of the great challenges of current Christianity…the conversion of the Universal principle of I AM into a personality principle pointing at egoic individuality.
As long as one believes in the egoic Christ, it is off limits for the individual to access the Universal Christed Self in each of us.
2. Psuchē vs. Zoē — Two Kinds of Life
English Bibles use one word — life — but in original Greek there are two. This reveals deep wisdom completely missed in the English version:
ψυχή (psuchē): ego-life, the individuated ego self, the breath of personality.
ζωή (zoē): divine life, the uncreated vitality of Origin, eternal and inexhaustible.
Christ’s teachings of paradox is cleared up when we insert the Greek words in their proper placement in English scripture:
“Whoever wants to save their psuchē will lose it, but whoever loses their psuchē for my sake will find it [as zoē].” — Matthew 16:25
“I am come that they might have zoē, and that they might have it more abundantly.” — John 10:10
“I AM the way, the truth, and the zoē.” — John 14:6
The spark of awakening often begins here: the sudden intuition that your life is more than psuchē. That zoē — divine vitality — has been present all along, beating your heart and breathing your lungs.
3. Christ-ing — The Anointing Process
Christ also declared:
“(They) that believeth on me, the works that I do shall (they) do also; and greater works than these shall (they) do…” — John 14:12 (this is a genderless teaching)
This is not exclusivity; it is invitation. Christ’s life was not meant to be set on a pedestal, but to reveal a pattern of awakening that others could follow.
The word Christ comes from Greek Χριστός (Christos) = “Anointed One.”
Behind it stands the Aramaic/Hebrew מָשִׁיחַ (Mashiach, Messiah) = “Anointed One.”
This was never a surname. It was a title, a state of being: one permeated by the Spirit of I AM.
So when we speak here of Christ-ing, we are naming the process by which the human psuchē yields to zoē, allowing the I AM to permeate mind, body, and soul.
Christ-ing is not a status achieved, but a spiral lived.
From here forward, we will sometimes call this journey the Universal Oneness Process (UOP) and sometimes the Christ-ing Process. They are two ways of describing the same reality.
✨ With these three keys — the I AM, the psuchē vs. zoē paradox, and Christ-ing as anointing — we are ready to begin the Spiral at its first step: Intuition / Imagination — the spark of awakening.
The Awakening Experience — A Taste of Zoē
The spark of Intuition is not a product of analysis. It is not the left-brain calculating a better philosophy. It is the right-brain opening into mystery — a sudden eruption of zoē that cannot be explained, only felt.
This is the moment when the ego-self (psuchē) is bypassed, if only for a flash, and the divine vitality (zoē) floods awareness. It is not imagined; it is lived as direct experience.
Paul’s language on the Damascus road tries to capture it: a light that shatters the old self, a Presence that speaks from within and without at once. For the mystics, it is the taste of Living Water — an inflow so complete it feels as though the soul is drinking from an infinite spring.
For me, in 1994, it arrived as three weeks of unbroken harmonic coherence with Self — the sense that everything was One, that the Infinite was not only around me but in me, breathing me. It was not earned. It was not the outcome of study. It was not a measure of worthiness.
It was pure grace, a gift of zoē breaking through psuchē.
🜂 Pre-Verbal Revelation of Origin
Oneness Awareness begins with the Pre-Verbal Revelation of Origin.
It is not taught. It is remembered.
It is not spoken. It is felt.
It is not apart from us. It is Us.
When You Can No Longer Look Away
To taste zoē is to cross a threshold that cannot be uncrossed. You may try to forget, you may even deny it, but something in you has seen the Real and knows it is truer than anything you were living before.
This is why the mystics speak of awakening as a kind of death and rebirth — the death of psuchē illusions, and the birth into the wider horizon of zoē. Once the veil has been lifted, even for a moment, you cannot re-clothe yourself in the old ignorance.
It is the red pill: once taken, the illusion loses its power.
The Crisis of First Awakening
And yet, this is not always comfortable. To glimpse zoē is to feel both the ecstasy of union and the revealed ache of separation at once. We get our first taste of the simultaneity of Being both One and other.
You may feel grief for all the years spent asleep.
You may feel disorientation as old frameworks collapse.
You may feel longing so deep it hurts — a hunger to return to what you tasted.
This is why so many, after their first taste of zoē, spend years or even decades seeking. The spark creates a magnetism. The ego cannot manufacture it, but once awakened, the whole being leans toward it.
The Permanence of the Spark
Even if the harmony flashes and fades, even if coherence has not yet been built that can hold the new/old frequency, the seed has been planted.
The yan-dot has shimmered into your awareness.
The memory of Oneness now awakens in your cells.
Your life becomes a spiral, consciously or unconsciously, revolving around that point of remembrance.
This is why Christ could say: “You must be born again.” The first taste of zoē is the spark of that birth. The rest of the Process is about growing into it — learning to build coherence so harmony can stay.
The Unshakable Knowing
What happens to the human who has tasted zoē?
They may stumble, but they know separation is an illusion.
They may resist, but they know love is the foundation.
They may doubt, but they cannot erase the memory of having once felt whole.
This is the paradox of awakening: once zoē has touched you, you carry both the ache and the hope. The ache of losing sight of it. The hope — the certainty — that it can return, fuller, deeper, permanent.
As Paul wrote: “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face…” Once you have glimpsed the face, even dimly, you can never again confuse the mirror for the reality.
The Message of Symbols
This spark of awakening is pictured in many symbols, but in my opinion, none so clearly as the yang-dot within the yin field: the Infinite I AM shimmering inside the vastness of our own unawareness.
Until we have this breakthrough moment, most of us have simply considered ourselves as the tiny Yin dot, unworthy darkness in the Light of God’s realms.
At first, this flash is experienced only briefly. But once recognized, we become more balanced as we recognize the simultaneous nature of our Being, both One and other.
Practice for Week 1
Contemplate John 14:12 daily. Not as a command, but as possibility.
"Truly, truly, I say to you, he who believes in Me, the works that I do, he will do also; and greater works than these he will do…”Contemplate John 10:10 alongside it. “I am come that they might have zoē, and that they might have it more abundantly.” — John 10:10
Hold the contrast: psuchē life is survival; zoē life is abundance.Sit quietly for 5 minutes. Imagine one “greater work” you would do if you knew without doubt that Origin lives in you.
Tap or speak aloud:
“I will to be I AM.”
“Harmony pulls me.”
“Love always feels right.”
✨ Step One is not about full belief. It is about letting the spark in. Because the moment you do, the Christ-ing Process has already begun.
🙏🙏