Ideal Suggestion Through Mental Photography · 12 of 34

IV. Christ is Within

Christ is the name given to the divine human ideal. It represents the type that was manifested through the personality of Jesus. The highest inner consciousness is the Christ. He is already within, but remains undiscovered so long as we think of our selves as flesh. He is found when we recognize the true spiritual ego, which is, humanity filled with divinity. Blood represents the inmost quality and character,—not the death, but the life. The resurrection is the lifting of consciousness from the physical to the spiritual. The “mind of Christ” is the Saviour of humanity. It knows neither sin, disorder, nor death. It manifests the perfection and divinity that before have been only latent. As we embody the Christ-mind we become “sons of God.” With Him we are crucified in the lower self and “made perfect through suffering.” We rise from the tomb of mortality set free from its error and corruption. The “mind that was in Christ” gives us dominion over the dreams and illusions of mortal sense. It breaks our bonds and sets us free. It heals, restores, invigorates, and harmonizes. In its name and by its strength I am healed. I am perfect—every whit whole.

Insight

Christ as the name given to the divine human ideal — the type that was manifested through the personality of Jesus — is the precise New Thought Christology, and Wood states it more cleanly here than in many of his peers. The doctrine traces back through Emerson's Divinity School Address (1838), which read Jesus as the supreme demonstration of a humanity that all souls share, and further back to Eckhart's preaching on the eternal birth of the Word in every soul. The risk in the formulation, which the older Christian traditions kept their eye on, is that the historical Jesus can become merely illustrative — Logos-in-general with the actual Galilean dispensable. Wood does not go that far; he keeps the Jesus-shaped specificity. But the line is worth holding in view as you read.Emerson Divinity School Address (1838); Eckhart Sermon 1 on the eternal birth; period New Thought Christology; cross-ref wood-gods-image-in-man.json ch4.