If we take Jesus seriously as a Jewish mystic, it also affects how we think about God or the sacred. It means that we need to think about God not as a personlike being out there separate from the universe, a long way away, not here. But it means we need to think of God or the sacred as the encompassing Spirit that is all around us and that is separated from us only by the membranes of our own consciousness. A mystic like Jesus is one in whom those membranes of consciousness become very thin, and one experiences God or the sacred. Jesus invited his followers into a relationship to the same
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