WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO THE SON OF GOD THAT HE DESCENDED SO LOW?
WHAT MADE HIM COME TO THINK THAT HE IS HIS BODY, A BODY THAT IS MERE DUST, AND DEFEND THAT DUST AS HIS TRUE IDENTITY AND BELIEVE THAT WHEN HIS BODY IS DESTROYED, HE IS DESTROYED.
By Ozodi Osuji Ph.d
The above question is a paraphrase of a passage from Helen Schucman’s book, A Course in Miracles. The question she posed is a necessary one because what she said the Son of God, all of us, is doing is what we are doing.
Look at yourself and see what you are doing. You believe that you have a self that exists in a body. Your empirical awareness tells you that your body is a sack of flesh. If you are at least a teenager, you know that bodies do die and decay. Dead bodies smell awful, so people hide them inside graves where their odor would not offend them.
In their graves, worms and bacteria eat them. A few weeks after the death of the human body, if not preserved in a mortuary, in a freezer, or embalmed, the body decays, and what will be left is a bag of bones, the skeleton that functioned as chassis to which flesh was hung.
In defending your body with food, medications, clothes, houses, and the sundry other things we employ in making our bodies survive, you are saying that you are a body. Really, you are a body. And you know what bodies are, don’t you?
So, you package your body and fancy that it is important, eh? You know that what you believe is important is food for worms? This is not said to denigrate your body but to state it as it is, not as it is hidden and fancied to have worth.
Now listen up, one of the reasons why people have low self-esteem is their awareness that they are bodies and knowledge that the body is nothing. They know that their bodies are nothing, but they hide their awareness in their unconscious minds. They hide the truth of their existential nothingness and then pretend to be important.
All over the world, you see people dressed in their Sunday best clothes and parading around as especially important people. They want other people to see them as they want to be seen, important.
Human society is a masquerade of sacks of flesh, nothingness pretending to be something especially important in each other’s eyes. It is a game where they must all deny what they know to be their bodily truth and pretend they are their opposite. They know that their bodies are nothing and pretend that they are especially important, and those who buy into their game go along with them.
Then comes the thief of the night who silences their pride-swollen heads. Six minutes, if their brains do not obtain oxygen, they are dead.
Upon death, the pretense of importance continues; in most cultures, people have a series of ceremonies designed to deny the reality of death and what happens to the human body. In some parts of the world, the dead are kept in mortuaries until enough money is gathered to undertake the expense of burial ceremonies.
In Alaigbo, the burial ceremony lasts two weeks; it is a time of merriment: cattle are bought and slaughtered, and all manners of food are cooked, and people come and eat; drinks are supplied to those who drink; musicians come and play during those weeks. It is a festive mood in the family that just lost a person.
All these hullabaloos are designed to impress on the mind of the living that despite death they are still important folks. Their illusion of worth has not been destroyed by the death of one of them. Thus, for a couple of weeks, people forget death and celebrate life. Months later, the living forget that the dead even existed.
Do a little research and look into your background. Count backwards: you, your father, your grandfather, your great-grandfather, and keep going. Most people do not remember who their ancestors were two hundred years ago. And we are talking about people in their lineage.
Now expand: do you know about the genealogy of those unrelated to you? If you are honest, you do not. When you die, those around you will miss you for a couple of days, weeks maybe, and then forget that you ever existed. Life goes on.
People do not look back but look forward. They move on with their lives. Indeed, if you had an excellent job and died, your fellow workers will immediately compete for your position.
If it is the death of a President, those in line to succeed him will not even wait an hour; the moment a medical doctor pronounces his death, the jockeying to replace him begins. Public sentiments are expressed, but in a month the dead president will not be remembered!
How long do you think that people will miss the narcissistic King of the USA? Tops, a week, and the show continues. A few try to be as pathologically narcissistic as he was, and if they do not have what it takes to do so, such as the ability to tell lies and believe in your lies to the point that folks think that you are telling the truth, well, you will not become the Liar King of the USA.
The point is that people move on; this is not something about the particular Liar King of your country but the nature of being on earth.
All of us, when we are honest with ourselves, know that we are in bodies and ego self-concepts, giant nothings pretending to be something especially important. We do so out of inner compulsions. It is exceedingly difficult for a human being to accept the truth he knows: that his body and ego are nothing.
And what exactly is the truth of human beings? At the surface level, people are nothing, literally, not figuratively. They are made of bodies, and bodies are made of matter, and matter is made of elements, and elements are made of different arrangements of electrons, protons, and neutrons called atoms. Atoms are made from energy transformed to matter. Energy itself is conjured out of nothing. This is literal.
Out of nothing, 13.8 billion years ago, something produced energy, and immediately converted it into photons, used photons to form electrons and quarks, and used quarks to form protons and neutrons.
These arrangements of matter seem solid and last billions of years in stars and planets, but in time will decay back to nothingness from whence we conjured them out.
Our bodies are made of matter and will decay back to elements that decay to energy, and energy returns to the nothingness we conjured it out from.
Look at your body, and all people’s bodies, animals, plants, planets, stars, galaxies, everything in the universe, and they seem solid and permanent; it is only a matter of time before all of them decay back to the nothingness they were conjured out of.
Our bodies and self-concepts based on bodies are nothing. If that is the case, struggling to make our bodies, self-concepts, and personalities seem important is a waste of time. Regardless of how many soaps you employ in washing the anus, it must still smell of feces. This means that things in the body are feces, are nothing regardless of what you do to beautify them and make them important (bodies are a whitened sepulcher).
It is in the awareness of the nothingness of the ego and human body that philosophy and spirituality enter the picture.
Throughout human history, all five thousand years of written history, there have always been certain individuals who look reality of death in the face, accept it, and then ask whether there is something more than that.
Ramana Maharshi, a Hindu boy, at age sixteen, evaluated life as we did above and recognized that it is nothing. He then asked, is there more to life other than the masquerade of people pretending that they are something important to deny the unimportance of their bodies and egos?
To find out, he simply left his family and disappeared (in Joseph Campbell’s categories, he embarked on the hero’s journey to find out the truth of who we are). He went to the Arunachala mountain that has a cave, entered the cave, and lay down and accepted death. This is not suicide, just realism. He said to himself, if I am a sack of flesh that will eventually die, after years of suffering and aging, I might as well die right now. There is no use prolonging the inevitable: the existence of nothingness.
The man lay there and meditated. In meditation, he cleared his mind of all ego-based thinking, all the delusions we employ to make us feel like we are important selves. He did this for several days and finally experienced moksha, broke through the delusions of the ego, and first saw himself in the astral world, a world still in forms, albeit light forms, and he automatically understood that whatever is in forms must decay.
Light is composed of particles, so if you use light to form your body and things, that light will eventually decay to nothingness. So, he is determined to transcend the world of light forms, for that too is an illusion.
A few days later, he transitioned from the world of forms, dense or light, and experienced himself as one with what Hindus call Brahman, God.
In Hindu cosmology, there is one Brahman, God, and each of us is a part of it, called Atman. Brahman and Atman are one; they are not separated.
As Jesus said in the Gospel of John, chapter fourteen, where you see the Son of God is God because God is in his son and his son is in him; they are one and are inseparable; there is no space and gap between them.
Upon coming out of this experience of oneness (Samadhi), aka Self Realization, Ramana Maharshi was filled with joy and peace and began talking to those who, for some reason, had traced him to where he was.
He taught them about God with authority, not speculation, and people from all over the world came to listen to him tell them the simple truth he taught.
What did he teach? He said that we are not our egos and bodies; we are one with God. Don’t just accept this intellectually; verify it by denying that you are ego and body and then see what happens.
This was exactly what happened to Gautama Buddha. The man, 2500 years ago, was disgusted by life on earth, its lies and pretenses, and after studying the various Hindu religious paths and not finding what he was looking for, sat down under a Bo tree and refused to get up unless he was shown an alternative to what we call our life on earth.
He entered meditation. Like Jesus Christ, he was tempted by Mara, the ego/ Satan; Mara promised him all the wealth of the world, all the beautiful women of the world, worldly positions such as kingship, etc. To each he dismissed them by reminding himself that ultimately, he would die and return to nothingness.
After forty days of being tempted, as was the case of Jesus Christ, he finally escaped from the world of separation- you and not you, space, time, and matter, subject and object- and broke through moksha and experienced oneness (Nirvana) with formless intelligence that people call God.
Upon that experience, his entire body transformed into radiant light. People who had gathered saw him as pure light in form (as was Jesus Christ when I first saw him). He had discovered that our lives are more than ego and body; we are part of a formless nonphysical self; call it what you like, but in it you know that you are eternal, permanent and changeless, and while always in it you go out, to nowhere and use your mind to invent wherever you think that you are.
There is only God and his sons in existence, but the sons go on trips to nowhere, which they made to seem outside them, and go explore the world that they made.
Eventually, all of them will return home. The universe will exist for trillions of years, for all sons of God exiled from their true self to remember their true self and end the journey without distance, a journey to nowhere.
For this paper, the point is that people have absolute worth in formless God (please do not try to define God, for you cannot, because to define him is to limit him; God is beyond definitions).
The God experience convinces you of your absolute worth; thereafter, you smile at clowns like white racists, sacks of dirt, pretending to be superior to other sacks of dirt in different colors; you know that all people, regardless of their race and gender have absolute worth in God; this is not up to people to debate, it is a fact that you can experience if you are willing to do what Ramana Maharshi did, voluntarily die to the ego and body to be reborn in your true Christ self.
The ego (a wrong concept of who you are, belief that you are separated from God and his sons) must die for the Christ (the correct concept of who you are, knowledge that you are unified with God and all his creations) to come a second time into your life.
God created you as his son, Christ; you died to the knowledge of that real self (that is, you forget it), Christ, and currently live as a false ego-separated self.
The ego and its body are masks covering the Christ in you. You will decide when you will remember your real self; there is no hurry.
You can choose to live on earth for the 120 years that those in flesh can live and seem to die and reincarnate back to earth in another body and do this for thousands of years, but at some point, you will choose to return home to your father and real home.
No one can make you do so. All that folks can do is do what I am doing here: write about the issues and leave it to you to make the choice that only you can make; Buddha and Jesus Christ cannot make that decision for you.
If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him (Sheldon Kopp wrote); only you can save you; no one outside you can save you (no one is outside you); Buddha, Jesus Christ cannot save you. Eventually, you will decide to resurrect from the death of living as nothing, ego and body, which pretends to be something important, and reclaim your real self, Unified Spirit Self, the Holy Son of God who is one with all his siblings and God.
• This afternoon I decided to go to my favorite park, Kelly’s Point Park. I drove for about thirty minutes to get to it. Parked the car, got out of the car, walked on the trail by the side of the Columbia River, and went to where the Columbia and the Willamette Rivers joined (Confluence), and both continue as one river to the Pacific Ocean, at Astoria, Oregon. I sat on the beach gazing at where the two great rivers of the Western USA meet; between them is an island called Sauvie Island. I just sat there looking at the Island and the two bodies of water surrounding it. The above thoughts entered my mind, and at 6:30 (in the summer, it does not get completely dark until almost 10 PM), I walked for about twenty minutes to get back to my car, drove home, and typed this paper. Make of it what you like. I am doing what I am here to do. I do my part, and it is for you to do your part. Cheers,
Ozodi Osuji
August 6, 2026
