Hi, this is Against Everyone with Connor Habib, a podcast featuring my conversations with countercultural figures

and presenting complex, spiritual, political, and philosophical ideas in an engaging and accessible way.

Well, we are still in the series of episodes about esoteric Christianity.

And I was thinking that one thing that might surprise people about esoteric Christianity. And I was thinking that one thing that might surprise people

about esoteric Christianity, given what mainstream Christianity is about, is esoteric Christianity's

emphasis on the individual. And I don't mean the shallow capitalist concept of the individual

consumer,

but rather the insistence that we are all universes,

that we are all containing and contained by and evolving and involving God through Christ,

and that our individuation really matters. An individuation, it requires, from this view,

not an all oneness, not a we are all one thing. That's New Age, but rather an acute sense

of the separation that we all experience.

After all, I mean, if you think about the image of Christ on the cross, that is an image of

total separation in a way. Christ died and suffered, and he's not us, but we strive to meet him.

So in other words, you look upon Christ suffering on the cross.

You realize that you are not the one experiencing that suffering,

but you strive to understand and imagine that suffering because

the depth and profundity of the sacrifice is so important.

So in that activity of striving, but not exactly reaching, but in striving, that is in proximity to Christ.

It's as if our efforts, our striving, is a sort of river which Christ stands on the banks of.

Okay, maybe that doesn't make sense.

Let me put it another way. To acknowledge the existence of others, we must sense our separation from them. So, like, if I'm not to just say, we're all one or whatever, I have to see that I can't know you.

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