Blog posts took a serious back seat in order to finish this book. It’s honestly driving me nuts not having it done, but that’s an old perfectionist/addict thing—I want it done now. This book wasn’t the one I planned to write first. It was the one I had to get out of the way—to say what needed saying, to confront some things head-on, and to lay down a foundation I could finally stand on. It surprised me how deep I had to dig to find it. Right now, it’s in final copyediting, with a couple of friends giving feedback. A full rough draft is already on Patreon—free for members or $6.77 for anyone else. Once copyediting wraps, I’ll move into design and layout and get it ready for full release this summer (still debating whether to go Amazon or direct-to-print). What follows is an excerpt from The Son of Man & Its Mystic Awakening, which frames the heart of discipleship and this book: it’s about growing up, not checking out.
“Grace is not opposed to effort, it is opposed to earning.”
Dallas Willard — The Great Omission
“If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross daily, and follow me.” That wasn’t a metaphor. That was a line in the sand. Jesus didn’t ask for church attendance—he demanded a funeral. Discipleship begins at the death of the ego. Before the theology, before the mission, before the movement—there’s that cruciform moment where the false self starts to break. The call of Christ is not an upgrade to the self but the undoing of it. “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies…” (John 12:24). What dies isn’t your essence—it’s your illusion. It’s the curated version of you that’s been performing survival. The Gospel doesn’t ask for polish. It demands surrender. And what rises is something real.
Making the Main Thing the Main Thing
Dallas Willard (1935–2013 AD) framed discipleship not as teaching or today’s concept of evangelism (both ignore the literal definition of the word), but as a reordering of the inner self in alignment with Christ’s vision and teachings, emphasizing the importance of inner authenticity in the Christian journey.
Discipleship, when properly understood, is an eschatological journey—one that is less about adhering to past doctrinal concepts and more about becoming present Here and Now. Discipleship brings an end (telos) to our old selves and matures (telos) a new Future not formerly possible. Choosing to become a disciple of the historical Jesus commences when a person chooses to take up their cross, chooses to follow Him, and dies to self. Much like the model found in Alcoholics Anonymous sponsorship, true discipleship is marked by a way of life and perceiving, a spiritual transformation, and daily practice, not mere intellectual agreement. The “personal relationship with Jesus” often spoken of in Evangelical circles remains inauthentic and incomplete if it does not manifest in a life of discipline, intentionality, radical love, self-awareness, and integration. What we’re discussing here is getting really up close and personal with Jesus.
“Your True Self is that part of you that knows who you are and whose you are.”
Richard Rohr — Falling Upward
Let us suppose that the coming of the Son of Man signifies a maturation (telos) of humanity. In that case, discipleship must be understood as the very means by which that maturation unfolds, not as a prerequisite to a future event but as participation in an ongoing revelation. In contrast to dispensationalist thinking, which externalizes eschatological hope and psychologically extends our mortality responsibility until after our death, this view embraces the responsibility of the individual to engage in continuous transformation, rejecting passive waiting in favor of active spiritual embodiment.
N.T. Wright consistently frames Jesus’ death and resurrection—not as a mere legal transaction to secure personal salvation or exit from the material world—but as the pivotal inauguration of God’s new creation and a counter-cultural revolution, in which humanity’s original vocation and relationship with God are restored. In The Day the Revolution Began, he situates the crucifixion within Israel’s story of exile and renewal, emphasizing that Christ “recapitulates” Adam’s life, reverses idolatry’s distortion of humanness, and calls us into a covenantal vocation. In Paul: A Biography, Wright portrays Paul’s life and preaching as the propagation of that same new-creation reality: “believing obedience” that rescues and renews humanity to dwell forever with God, symbolized by acts of healing and implemented by the church’s mission.
“Paul discovered the true meaning of ‘faith’ (Greek pistis). It meant ‘believing obedience,’ and, in this way, Paul and others will be rescued and renewed so that they might enter the new creation and dwell with God forever.”
– N.T. Wright, Paul: A Biography
Wright, engaging with historical and eschatological frameworks, insists that Jesus’ vision was not about the end of the material world but the unveiling of God’s renewed creation, where humans fully embody their intended purpose. This perspective aligns with the biblical narrative of recapitulation—the idea that Christ, as the Second Adam, restores what was lost in Genesis, leading humanity toward ultimate wholeness.
“Jesus comes to sum-up the entire life of Adam including taking Adam’s sin and experiencing death to become the head of a new humanity.”
– N.T. Wright, The Day The Revolution Began
The convergence of these voices across centuries reinforces that atonement is not merely about escaping a wrathful punishment, but rather a realization and awakening to a fuller and truer spiritual reality—one that Jesus declared was already “in our midst” (Luke 17:20–21). Simply reducing it to a transaction without a divine human appointee, a position biblically no longer necessary, is a formula for human control and misinterpretation. It also ignores the feudal, Catholic, and European context from which the Reformation responded, and thus assumes the Reformation as the inspiration (and pseudo-awakening) of modern Orthodoxy.
It is significant to note that the Roman Empire never truly fell. It persisted through the Dark Ages, largely by co-opting and controlling the emerging popular religion: Christianity. In some sense, its ideas, influence, and intrigue are very much still alive and foundational to our modern way of living and thinking, especially in the context of religion vs. spirituality. A key marker between authentic spirituality and religion is control of narrative and culture. Change always feels risky to subjective people who are comfortable with control. While organized religion tends to be about control, organized spirituality is about authenticity, connection, relationship, and empowerment. At least, in theory.
“One of the main functions of organized religion is to protect people against a direct experience with God.”
– Carl Jung
A Side-Bar for Organized Spirituality
As an aside, it’s worth considering how organized spirituality fits into this narrative; organized spirituality is, perhaps, also intentional spirituality. A movie I watch every November 5 is V for Vendetta. The symbolism, dialogue, and concepts were juicy 20 years ago when I first watched it. After V and Evey have their character arcs and the story concludes, spoiler alert, V has died and is laid to rest on the bomb that will destroy Parliament. It’s a symbolic act, destroying an old edifice that stood as a symbol to spark a new season for the people. At the end, as fireworks explode over the also exploding Parliament and the people watch, Inspector Finch asks Evey who the masked man was. Her answer is, “Evey Hammond: He was Edmond Dantés… and he was my father. And my mother… my brother… my friend. He was you… and me…He was all of us.”
V didn’t dismantle a government using their tools – he used their tools against them: He spoke directly with the people and became the anti-message. He put things in front of people’s eyes that they couldn’t unsee and made them see with each other. He removed the mask and excuses people had to live as victims with the assumed comforts of a master. He rose up and became them. He knew a true idea couldn’t die. He made his mission a message and then a movement. It became a virus that spread horizontally, cutting through the vertical categories of control and comfort.
We’ve either deified or vilified government, as well as civilization, religion, and individuality. We need to stop being afraid of each other. For what it’s worth, watching V for Vendetta on November 5, 2024, the night of the Presidential election, had a whole different feel. American Christianity is fear-based, not faith-based. It’s time for a spiritual conversation in America, a horizontal movement, a conscious idea that spreads like a virus– a global pandemic. It probably looks a lot like what Jesus did 2000 years ago, and likely has something to do with discipleship.
There are some differences, though, between now and then: we have more people, information, and resources to work with. We fear each other, ourselves, and the entire globe, not just a single party. Either way, mysticism is coming, and institutions will not be able to contain it. Intentional, meaningful, organized spirituality is a threat to control. V was, in some sense, as shrewd as a serpent, but not as innocent as a dove. What I’m saying is that we can learn from the parable of the Shrewd Servant (Luke 16:1-15) and get serious about God’s Kingdom.
Discipleship as a Chosen Way of Life
Philosophy, in its original and richest sense, is not merely an academic discipline or a body of abstract knowledge to be studied; it is a way of life-a practical orientation that shapes how we think, feel, and act. Ancient philosophers like Socrates and the Stoics did not set out to teach facts or theoretical doctrines alone; rather, their primary concern was the transformation of the individual’s inner life and worldview. Philosophy was understood as an “art of living,” a skill to be practiced daily, aimed at cultivating wisdom, virtue, and tranquility amid life’s challenges.
What we now call psychology was once considered a branch of philosophy, as both sought to understand and guide the human. The sciences themselves emerged from this philosophical quest to comprehend reality through reasoned inquiry, but always with the implicit goal of improving how we live. The Stoics, for example, emphasized changing not external circumstances but our judgments and responses to them, teaching that true freedom and happiness come from mastering our inner attitudes rather than accumulating external goods. When people debate politics, mythology, spirituality, economy, or theology, they are debating philosophy.
Just as philosophy invites a reorientation of thought and being, discipleship calls for a radical transformation of one’s inner posture and actions in following Jesus. It is not about acquiring religious knowledge or joining an institution but about embodying a new worldview that shapes every aspect of life. Recognizing philosophy’s original role as a guide to living helps us appreciate discipleship not as mere belief but as an integrative, ongoing practice of aligning mind, heart, and behavior with the Way of Jesus.
A Personal Relationship with Jesus
Jesus’ words “If anyone would come after me…” ring out less as a sermon title than a personal invitation, and echo His warning to “count the cost.” The conditional “if” is no membership slip; it is a covenantal call to a way of life. To come after Christ is to embark on a path – a radical reorientation of one’s inner posture and worldview – not merely to adopt a label or join an institution. The call to “deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me” is offered to anyone who chooses, implying a personal step into transformation. What can be missed is that Jesus doesn’t tell us to pick up His cross, but our own. This summons underscores that discipleship is about embracing the Way of Jesus in our souls and actions, not checking a box on a church roster.
The subjective invitation of the Gospel is not a sentimental appeal—it’s a scalpel. Jesus doesn’t call us into someone else’s discipleship program or demand we measure ourselves by another’s holiness curve. He offers a path that begins with our own eyes, our own wounds, our own choices. That’s why the command to “remove the plank from your own eye” must always be viewed first from our own eyes, not theirs. Not because others aren’t broken, but because the transformation Jesus calls us to doesn’t work at a distance. It is interior. It is honest. It’s not about how right we are—it’s about how ready we are to see ourselves clearly. The moment we reduce it to a system of performance or correction for others, we betray the very nature of the thing. That’s why the Gospel—when it’s real—always starts in the dark, personal, embarrassing places of our own soul.
This is also why Jesus tells us to pray in secret and why he warns against piling up empty words for public approval. Discipleship is hidden. It’s anonymous. It’s supposed to be between you and the Mystery. “Let your yes be yes and your no be no” isn’t a bumper sticker—it’s a call to interior coherence. To integrity. To be the same person when no one is watching. The Sermon on the Mount isn’t some elevated morality—it’s a declaration of inward transformation. We are not asked to follow Jesus into applause. We are asked to follow him into the wilderness of self-awareness. The Kingdom of God begins where honesty takes root.
The same thread runs through “love your neighbor as yourself.” So, here’s a haunting question buried in that command: What if we don’t really love ourselves? What if we confuse ego-stroking with love? What if we’ve never been taught to differentiate our True Self from our image? That single command forces us to ask: what version of “self” are we loving? The Gospel dares us to confront our shadows—not just our sins, but our survival mechanisms. And only through that confrontation can genuine love—both for self and neighbor—begin to emerge. The Lord’s Prayer echoes this dynamic: “forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone who is indebted to us” (Luke 11:4a). We are the standard of forgiveness by which God grants us forgiveness—put that in a Penal Substitutionary pipe and try to smoke it. It forces the subject into accountability. It ties divine mercy to our own interior practice of mercy. The pattern is the same: you cannot fake this. Discipleship doesn’t outsource responsibility. It drags it inward, every time.
And yet, the scandal of the Gospel is that this subjective transformation is available to everyone. The priesthood of all believers, drawn from Exodus and radicalized by Christ, says that every person is a potential conduit of divine presence. You don’t need a priest, a pulpit, or a platform. No gatekeeper owns the sacraments of awakening. You are already justified in existing, because you do exist, and the Divine has not revoked that permission. We are all mediators now, whether we accept it or not. Right now, we’re all mediators with the Divine and the rest of Creation, we’re all Christs, shamans, and buddhas waiting in potential. Discipleship is not elitist—it is universal. It doesn’t mean becoming religiously useful. It means becoming real. Because the Gospel is not a rulebook. It’s an invitation to reality. And reality, when seen through grace, becomes sacred.
For most of history, organized religion grew as a means to manage the masses, prioritizing control, order, and conformity over personal change: from the Colosseum in Rome to the Crusades and modern politicians exploiting Christianity. The key marker between authentic spirituality and religion is control. Organized religion tends to be about control; organized spirituality is about authenticity and intentionality. Religion rewards cultural compliance and gives people a false sense of belonging while their inner lives remain unchanged. Authentic spirituality is active, empowering, and releasing, and can never be contained within an institutional name.
Dallas Willard famously lamented that “consumer Christianity is now normative”: many of us use God’s grace for forgiveness or the church for comfort, yet never surrender our everyday selves to the Kingdom. Willard adds, “Grace is not opposed to effort, it is opposed to earning” – true spiritual growth requires intentional discipline, not passive convenience. In such a landscape, it is all too easy to stay spiritually infantile. The apostle Paul scolds churches for still being “infants in Christ… needing milk, not solid food,” and elsewhere urges believers to no longer be “children” tossed around by every wind of doctrine but to “grow up in every way into Christ.” In other words, the gospel calls us away from childish faith toward maturity of heart.
This integrative vision finds resonance in Ken Wilber’s A Theory of Everything, which seeks to meld science and spirituality into one framework. Wilber proposes that human consciousness evolves through broader perspectives – from an infant’s egocentric view to ever-more inclusive worldviews, eventually reaching what he terms a “kosmocentric” or all-embracing outlook. Each step of growth naturally involves diminishing self-centered ego perspectives in favor of wider horizons. Crucially, Wilber charts reality in four quadrants – interior and exterior, individual and collective – to show that maturity spans our inner experience, our behaviors, our cultural contexts, and our social systems. In other words, personal evolution can’t be separated from science, psychology, and culture; all must be integrated. Wilber explicitly draws on Spiral Dynamics as the ladder of values that we climb.
An important concept in Wilber’s arguments is that of ego-decentralization during human development: in essence, from birth to adulthood, learning to manage and mitigate the ego is an essential task for every human’s development. Another way of looking at it is through the lens of mindful maturity as we continue the work of integration and becoming whole. Spiral Dynamics attempts to describe the levels of that climb. It uses color codes: from Beige (primal survival) and Purple (clan safety) through Red (power/egocentric), Blue (order/authority), Orange (success/rationality) – up into the postmodern and integral colors: Green (community/harmony), Yellow (systemic integration), and Turquoise (global holistic).
The ego-heavy stages are found in Red, Blue, and Orange – where power, rule-keeping, and competition dominate. Ego doesn’t end there, though. Our egos can not just wrap around the world but even blanket over God. Transformation means transcending those limitations. On the spiral above Orange, people begin to care for others and the planet (Green) and eventually learn to coordinate complex systems (Yellow, Turquoise). Eventually, people move to harmony with the community and a holistic global consciousness. This mirrors Christ’s teaching: we start self-focused and end up world-focused. In the end, Wilber envisions an ever-widening view in which the self is nested into family, community, and the cosmos.
Richard Rohr’s distinction between the “False Self” and “True Self” provides a contemporary spiritual framework that illuminates our psychological discussion of ego and shadow. The False Self—what Rohr describes as “the self that we create and present to the world”—corresponds directly to our definition of ego as “a constructed image of the Self.” Rohr’s True Self represents our fundamental connection to divine reality—what we might call our participation in Christ-consciousness. This framework clarifies the spiritual dimension of ego death: it is not self-destruction but self-discovery, not loss of identity but finding of authentic being. As Rohr writes, “Your True Self is that part of you that knows who you are and whose you are.” This knowledge emerges precisely through the integration of shadow material and surrender of ego defenses—the psychological processes central to mystical awakening.
Richard Rohr’s model helps map that growth. Rohr, who ironically uses Ken Wilber’s material, describes four stages: Cleaning Up, Growing Up, Waking Up, and Showing Up. Cleaning Up is the familiar realm of moral work, trying to straighten out behavior and meet outward standards. Unfortunately, as Rohr observes, most church teaching gets stuck here. We “preached about Cleaning Up the most, but… did this very poorly.” Often, this stage is bound to cultural notions of purity rather than Jesus’s deeper ideals. Growing Up follows: it is the inner journey of psychological maturation. This is when we confront our ego, shadow, and emotional patterns and learn to live with complexity beyond the childish self-centeredness. It is learning to think and feel like an adult, even as our community and culture shape us.
Waking Up is the spiritual breakthrough. This stage is about mystical realization – a direct experience that the apparent self is not separate from the One, a union of heart and mind with God. Rohr emphasizes that the goal here is not personal achievement or perfection but “surrender, love, and union with God.” It is a falling-awake to the divine reality that Jesus embodied: a shift in consciousness from ego to love. Finally, Showing Up means carrying that transformed presence into the world. To show up is to let one’s renewed heart and mind engage real human suffering and need. As Rohr puts it, this means “bringing our heart and mind into the actual suffering… of the world” – being at work for justice, healing, and peace. Without people in this stage, he warns, spiritual life is incomplete. This active love-in-action is the culmination of discipleship: God’s finished “work of art” (cf. Eph 2:10) built from all the previous stages.
Rohr goes further: the coming of Christ itself inaugurates a global awakening of consciousness. He and others describe the “Cosmic Christ” – the divine presence pervading all creation – as the key to a major shift in awareness. In this vision, Jesus’ incarnation and resurrection are not just historical events but an unfolding cosmic revolution. Spiritual maturity is then participation in that universal movement, not a private prize. We are being invited into a larger narrative of world-renewal. The Gospel message becomes a collective call to wake up as one humanity, rather than an individual escape plan.
Intentional growth is needed: without formation, faith becomes shallow and self-indulgent. We cannot stay “spiritual infants” on milk forever when the Scriptures beckon us to solid food. The biblical narrative itself is meant to be entered, not skimmed. We are all Jacob, wrestling with God; Sarah, laughing in disbelief at God’s promise; Nicodemus, stumbling in the darkness, looking for the Light. Each was part of the story, asking hard questions rather than accepting easy answers. We are invited to join them in the unfolding drama of God’s Kingdom, not as passive bystanders but as characters whose own questions and struggles propel the narrative forward. In so doing, Scripture stops being a mere text to analyze and becomes the life we inhabit – a life that, like them, is continually shaped and transformed by the God who meets us in the mystery.
It’s About Growing Up
Mark Manson himself has joined this chorus of insight. In Everything Is F*cked, he argues that our malaise isn’t rooted in politics or technology but in a failure of personal development. In the richest, safest era in history, we nonetheless suffer “a crisis of character, of virtue, of means and ends.” We remain “childish and impulsive,” he notes, behaving like adolescents who never learned to tolerate loss or responsibility. The widespread anxiety and culture‑war fury are, in his view, symptoms of this arrested development. It’s not that we need a new ideology or gadget – we need to grow up. As Manson bluntly puts it, you “can’t skip stages” of maturation – “you can’t go from a child to an adult without being an adolescent in between.” In other words, the modern crisis is developmental: we have built enormous power but not enough wisdom to wield it. No amount of political tinkering or faster software will fix that.
This analysis echoes what many spiritual teachers have long maintained. Dallas Willard insisted that true discipleship is inner transformation, not a set of creeds – and that the “Kingdom of God” is a present reality, breaking into human life. Richard Rohr likewise reframes the coming of Christ as a change of consciousness. He says we have “spent centuries worshiping the messenger and ignoring the message” – the real Christ is the awakening to divine presence already at work within and among us. Ken Wilber puts it even more tersely: we must “wake up, grow up, clean up, and show up.” In short, the spiritual path is one of maturation, integration, and service, not of retreat or blind faith. As we noted earlier, modern mystics and psychologists agree that awakening involves integrating all levels of our being and outgrowing egoic shadows.
Viewed this way, the screaming culture wars become less a sign of ideological clarity than proof of collective immaturity. Fanatics on both left and right demand easy certainties, but Manson observes that extremists are, by definition, childish – stuck in black‑and‑white thinking and emotional reactivity. Their certainty is a façade for fear and insecurity. The louder we shout about which party or dogma is “right,” the more we expose our inner confusion and pain. Our task is not to build higher walls but to develop inner stability – to “enshrine grown‑up virtues into the design of the system,” in Manson’s words – and first of all, into our own hearts.
Simply, the coming of the Son of Man we have been describing is that collective maturation. The Son of Man is a symbol of global awakening – “an ongoing, collective awakening” – not an escape hatch from reality. Rohr’s insight captures it: Christ is “already here, always coming, and perpetually inviting humanity into divine participation.” The “return” of the Son of Man is not a UFO pulling us off Earth or Cosmic gavel, but the arrival of a fully‑grown human spirit. In other words, the end of the age is the dawn of adulthood for humanity. The hope of our time is not to flee our struggles, but to embrace them with wisdom and love. The Son of Man calls us not to relief but to responsibility – to die to our childish egos and finally live as mature, compassionate people.
