Putting the Christ back into Christmas

What does that mean? "Putting the Christ back into Christmas" What does that truly mean? Does it mean we should give up our tradition of gift giving and become grinches? Should we take some other external action that will prove we do really care about the Christ part of this huge celebration that inundates our collective consciousness and consumes our hard earned wages. Thoughts like "what should I get so and so" or "where, how and with whom shall I spend this holiday"?

This invitation to "put the Christ back in Christmas" has nothing to do with your external choice. Instead it is written to help magnify an inner desire to know first hand, Christ's True Teachings, however you choose to spend your Christmas festivities.

There have been those throughout history who have described experiences of higher states of consciousness. These descriptions have frequently been so different as to make us feel that different realities were being described. When followers hold rigidly to the words of their Teachers without sharing the experience of conscious absorption in the Ascendant, then confusion is inevitable. This is the tragedy of knowledge: to break into small shards on the hard rocks of ignorance.
If both are fully developed human beings, there is no difference between the enlightenment of the Sufi Muslim and the absorption in God of the Christian saint. A fully realized Hindu in nirvikalpa samadhi is not living in a different state of consciousness from a perfectly adept Taoist established in Nirvana or a Zen Buddhist in permanent satori. We may appear different on the surface, our beliefs and language-concepts may be so widely at variance that we can hardly understand each other, but the essential inner Reality of consciousness is the same.
Even in the common, everyday waking state, we are much more similar than we are different. What will be most useful to our understanding of the nature of the Universe and of ourselves is the simple realization of how alike we all are.
We are all vessels of consciousness, of the light of the perfect Ascendant Source of all that is. It is not particularly difficult to realize this intellectually; the good news is that it is not particularly difficult to realize this Reality as a continual, twenty-four hours a day conscious experience. This is what is meant by “Praying without ceasing.” (Praying without ceasing is most assuredly not trying to hypnotize the mind with continual verbal prayers and growing exhausted in the process!) The natural state of the human is to be established in continual experience of the Ascendant. This is the highest state of prayer even as it is the highest state of consciousness.
The simple truth is that it is far easier to be established in this state of permanent awareness of pure consciousness than it is not to be. It requires a tremendous amount of mental and therefore physical effort not to be enlightened! This wasted energy ages and ultimately kills the body; as we’ve already observed, this is exactly why we sleep so long at night and are so often sick and fearful during the days. We are struggling so hard to hold back the Infinite! It is actually much more difficult to deny inner awareness of the Ascendant than to experience it! Think about this. If it were possible this were true, would you not vastly prefer it to be so?
Ascension! - Maharishi Sadasiva Isham

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