Humankind is acknowledged as the crowning jewel of God’s creation: the only creature made in the image and likeness of God-nature. This is by virtue of the fact that man can self-realize individuality whereas animals cannot.

Col 1:19 puts it “For it was by God’s own decision that the Son (Christ within) has in himself the full nature of God”.

This scripture makes it abundantly clear that humankind is indeed made in the image and likeness of God, and, more specifically, expression of image and likeness.

But two vital questions remain. How is the immensity of God’s full nature accommodated physically in humans, and through what mechanisms?

Let us attempt to unravel both of these intriguing questions.

When we say God is love and that God loves us, many cling to an intellectual concept that because God loves us, everything is fine, that we do not have to do anything further in knowing His love. In settling for intellectual concepts or belief systems, deep down we’re making God responsible for the knowing of our own indwelling image of God nature. The reality is, knowing God is a personal decision — an act of will — where we choose either handing our lives over to God fully or choose remaining intellectual on God, in other words, remaining on the side-line of non-commitment to the necessary work required for knowing His image or nature.

And, while positive, only intellectualizing biblical words can also lead to rigid belief systems which we feel will reunite us into his image and likeness. But intellectual knowledge does not alter the state of the soul, does not bring God-nature or divine consciousness to us. The Bible in essence is instructional and not a collection of belief systems to be learned and verbalized over and over. Ideally biblical phrases require translation from their literal presentation to esoteric or hidden meaning, thereby making the wonderful scriptures relatable and practical in carrying-out. In the absence of proper translations, we’re inclined to form our own understanding, or relate to other’s views which tend to binding us even more to non-soul serving belief systems.

Making A Start

Let us consider an innocent raindrop. The raindrop is potential awaiting ocean-realization, in that, it exists as ocean-nature but has not realized this. To evolve from ocean-ignorance into direct experiencing, the sun evaporates the raindrop into a cloud where it eventually localizes to form an individual raindrop when it then falls back into the ocean fully realized in ocean-nature. And, while in the cloud as a raindrop — awaiting unity with ocean — it still retained all the qualities of ocean.

Similarly, a room full of precious wealth which no one knows is there, is valueless until an awareness or consciousness enters the room.

An analogy I love is the prodigal son. The younger one asked the father for his inheritance of the estate (the kingdom of heaven) before setting out in becoming spiritually lost in the material world, and the ensuing transformational journey back to the father. Similar to the raindrop’s ocean potential, the younger son’s inheritance was, of course, full image and likeness of the father’s status. In other words, all the qualities, nature and potential of the kingdom of heaven.

With this in mind, each soul thus is an individuated aspect of God, or Spirit, and, as such is not made, but that it’s the body which is made, or created. For, similar to Spirit, the soul always is, was and always will be. And gloriously, in making the human body, God genetically encoded each of us with mechanisms thereby to come upon His image and likeness nature.

God operates the cosmos through the innumerable laws of Nature. Through impulses beyond ordinary human perception — biblically put, the Will of God made manifest — God carries out the daily functioning of the universe to perfect precision. Therefore, the status of God and the multiple intricacies of His operational nature, is beyond human comprehension. And while the human mind cannot comprehend such multiple permutations of laws, this is counteracted by God providing the ability of attuning the consciousness with all the laws of Nature, with the cosmic impulses, with the Will of God without having to comprehend the mechanics of the innumerable laws of Nature.

Moving Beyond — Taking Action

Action purifies, therefore, for any realizable evaluation of image and likeness of God, the position has to move beyond merely reading and verbalizing on it into implementation, or action, of Genesis 1:1“in the beginning was the word and the word was God”. Without action, nothing changes. Esoteric understanding of these words reveal that we can enter into direct experiencing of God nature within consciousness. For, as was said earlier, intellectual knowledge alone will not produce His nature, rather it inflates the mind with information only, which information requires acting upon.

Let us briefly evaluate Genesis 1:1 and how by directly experiencing “the Word” we’re fulfilling this wonderful scripture perfectly. The Word, which is Aum, is the triggering sound — of the genetic encoding — by which human consciousness gets to know or experience God-consciousness. Therefore, at practical level, image and likeness has to do with the after-effects, the reverberation qualities and resonances of this cosmic Word value in our consciousness. In other words, the sound of Aum initiates or stirs vibration, thereby is divine cosmic nature triggered as direct experience within consciousness.

From direct experiencing Aum’s impulses, it reveals that we’re each a microcosm of the Whole — Potentiates of Divine Nature with creative intelligence of all possibilities. Vibration thus is the starting point of fulfilling the soul’s quest for spiritual evolution into conscious harmony and peace – a life of full integration with Divinity. In achieving such, we’re each provided with the mechanisms and channels, with impulse-encoding for knowing His nature directly, for making His Reality into our Reality.

Let us look at the mechanisms or channels through which vibrational Aum is transported throughout the body.

The Human Nervous system

Imagine viewing beautiful scenery through mist-covered spectacles or radio orchestral music tuned between stations, or touching over well-crafted furniture or porcelain with gloves on. This is like how an impure nervous system experiences.

Obviously, this not a medical viewpoint on the nervous system but a graphic to help internalize the spiritual channels through which Being or Life expresses and reflects. Breaking it into component parts: the body is an extension of the nervous system, which is an extension of the brain, which is an extension of the mind, consciousness or soul, which is an extension of God. These basically are what constitute the physical elements which function to maintain the human body. These advance systems of creation — and their spiritual potential — are what sets humankind apart from every other species in creation. It’s through the brain / nervous system that consciousness vibrates, which vibration, when transcendentally experienced, equates as Divine nature.

As mentioned earlier, intellectualizing only on scriptural Image and likeness has to move to another level, into active participation of directly knowing His nature. This other level — of purely knowing — is achieved through refinement of the nervous system, the intended method of the body’s Creator. The nervous system needs to be made a reflective system capable of withstanding His nature, of directly experiencing image and likeness beyond words and belief systems.

Being the most advance among the species, the nervous system is the seat of consciousness, seat of the soul, or Self, and soul or Self existence is only in present time. When refined, or made pure, the nervous system reflects His form or nature as expanded awareness, harmony, peace, in the form of bliss-consciousness – biblically, Light of God. Genesis puts it “God said let there be Light (let there be divine consciousness).” Thus, to be enlightened means to be divinely conscious, and to be fully enlightened is to be fully awake in His consciousness as our normative standard of living.

God-nature cannot be experienced through a lesser state, thus the human nervous system needs to be re-calibrated, restructured to channel His nature. It’s through the human dynamic that divine consciousness gets to know itself, and by this covenant, reciprocally humankind gets to know God. In other words, while God is experiencing His form through the individual consciousness, thus are we directly experiencing His nature through our own spiritually developing form. As the forms are one and the same, so too the creative ability and manifestations, but, just to scale.

Continuous flow of spiritual nature, of natural happiness through the nervous system, is how His form or image becomes imbibed or established as permanent divine consciousness. Thus, establishing Divinity within is achieved by culturing the nervous system to withstand ever-deepening bliss-consciousness. In other words, for the mind to have an experience there must be a corresponding set-up or state within the nervous system. Therefore, by culturing or acclimatizing the nervous system in this manor, image and likeness becomes directly experienced and sustained – consolidated by activity congruent with this nature in our daily life.

Self-realization or realization of our true eternal nature, is the purpose and goal of each soul, but that the Goal is already in place, we do not create it. Realization of Self – eternal soul — is all that we need concern ourselves with. Each of us is already eternal Self and, as eternal Self or eternal Being, man / woman is inherently Divine Consciousness Itself. We are each the Awareness and not the container of awareness, nor the container of consciousness. We’re each already unbounded consciousness. That, by means of the nervous system, we can move beyond the limited boundaries of time and space, and know omnipotent consciousness — from singularity to unbounded awareness.

But how is unboundedness Actualized?

Transcendence and Silence 

Some years ago, I intended running a full Marathon — 26 miles or 40k. But, it soon became apparent that, in order to fulfill this aspiration, much training was required: many miles of running and jogging along cold, wet and windy roads, both days and nights. Happily, I completed the training task and went on to complete, not one, but three full Marathons. In other words, with meditation, we have to put in the training, meaning, regular sessions of acclimatizing the mind-senses, nervous system and physiology to withstand the inflow of bliss into the system, which we can agree is lot more enjoyable and less strenuous than Marathon training.

Col 2:3 puts it “Christ (pure silence) is the key which opens all the hidden treasures of God’s wisdom and knowledge”.

From this scripture we conclude that humankind is Potential awaiting direct realization as image and likeness consciousness.

Some hold the view that, once we believe in God and read the scriptures then that’s all we have to do spiritually speaking. While of course this level of belief is truly positive, but at soul level it’s really an intention awaiting action on our part. Developing such belief or faith requires inner activity and outer action. This inner activity, being the process of gaining subtler and finer levels of silence, is when purification and integration of non-soul serving mind-sets takes place, and the outer action is expressing such as the normative living standard.

Usually we refer to two forms of silence: outer environmental silence and silence experienced by the absence of mental activity — achieved in meditation — which is transcendental silence. The reason meditational silence is vital is that this silence leads to transcendence. Transcendence is vital, for such is when the awareness rises above ego and beyond ordinary silence as we enter into a higher altered state of consciousness – the Light of God.

Matthew 23:12 puts it: he who exalts himself (unbowed ego) will be humbled, but he who humbles himself (transcends) will be exalted.

Transcendental silence is not inactive, rather latent spiritual dynamism. Some, when starting out in meditation practice, and not being properly trained in how to experience transcendence, resist the Transcendent fearing what is happening, that something is taking them over, not realizing their Savior has come to town. This experience is to be welcomed, for It’s by such regular transcending that God’s nature or image is gradually accepted and realized as form. Transcendence is an altered state of consciousness therefore cannot be experienced by just sitting in ordinary silence — thinking about our next TV program — which really is just the absence of relative sound.

Thus, personifying image and likeness is about creating a Gap in the incessant thought waves created on the gross surface level of mind by non-awareness. By means of the Gap — which is the Silence — transcendental silence becomes infused into the very nature of the mind, when a spiritual dynamic or nature begins taking form within consciousness. The process therefore is one of becoming mentally still, silent, of entering into meditation, and after meditation engaging in outer activity. This outer activity is what establishes silence in the nervous system and which is experienced within as separate from outer activity.

While physiologically we’re each encoded of image-likeness or God-nature, it’s transcendental silence which fires the human physiology into functioning divinely or cosmically; it’s when our bliss-nature soul is experienced as separate from the hectic market place – in other words, Presence remains through all activity. As life is experienced through the mind-senses combination, and as the senses are housed in the nervous system, this is why the nervous system requires purification. Through transcendental consciousness, creation, in all its diversity, reflects as Unity within the physiology as divine consciousness, thus the physiology is the expression of consciousness. In other words, the physiology and divine consciousness both co-existing simultaneously — relative life and eternal God nature cognized as our own Self, the Lord they God within, as the permeating bliss-force of our every thought, word and action, and within every cell of the body.

Only the Self is eternally silent.

To recap in an extended sentence: The process starts with experiencing meditational silence thus leading to transcendental silence, which silence integrates rigid subconscious, ego-patterned thought structures, thus neutralizing residual nervous system contamination’s of stress and tensions, thereby making the inner channels sensitive to withstand the surge-flow, the rapture of higher or pure energy, which further leads to expansion of conscious capacity of mind and to even higher states of consciousness.

And, finally…

Pure Consciousness

Pure consciousness is self-referral consciousness. In other words, due to the fact that nothing of the outside relative order can contaminate or penetrate His nature, pure consciousness interacts alone within its own transcendental status. Referring only within its own dynamic, its own eternal creative structure, pure consciousness lies beyond outer-world interference; thus God is always in heaven as in “our father, which art in heaven” – Lord’s Prayer. Also “where I (eternal awareness) go you (non-realized Self) cannot come but I go (meditation) to prepare a place for you (transcendental consciousness)”.

The opposite of self-referral is object-referral. Where our personal world and societal status is acknowledged without awareness of, or reference to, the spiritual dimension of our higher Self — without experiencing the Self as separate from the material world.

We’re familiar, I’m sure, with the words “give us this day our daily bread” – Lord’s Prayer. As we progress in meditation and the purification process — of awakening the hidden treasures of the eternal soul — we will see these words as pertaining to “give Him His daily bread” – as meaning feed Him transcendentally by our daily meditation. In bringing ourselves to be still, silent in mind, wholeness and calm pervade the offering thus our prayer is of pure silence, the highest offering or devotion we can express. But, in registering as pure silence, the intellect must become one-pointed. thereby knowing the silence of the soul, and in this way is made resolute and pure. Thus realization dawns that inner point and Infinity are equal – thine Eye is become single thus the physiology and consciousness are filled with light, realized in the eternal image and likeness of God. 

You may want to read Raymond’s article on The Mustard Seed of Faith which is a great addition on the subject.