In this article on the spiritual meaning of Christmas, I want to talk about the evolution of Christmas, the psychology that underlies the common expressions of Christmas, and the higher, spiritual, post-rational view.
I hope to help you view Christmas in a different light, to reconnect to this holy festival, and see Christianity differently. The more people who recognise this, the more we help to usher in the new, post-rational expression of Christmas.
Faith Development & The Spiritual Meaning of Christmas
To understand the spiritual meaning of Christmas and how it fits into the zeitgeist, it’s crucial we touch on the stages of faith evolution.
I want you to hold as a principle that fundamentally all our conceptions of Christmas are the result of our level of faith development, both culturally and individually, which James Fowler famously documented in his book Stages of Faith.
Jean Gebser called the major stages of human development “mutations”, which I think is a fascinating term.
Though I can’t possibly dive into all the stages, their characteristics, and why their characteristics appear as they do, we’ll cover the key information for the two stages we’ll discuss here: Mythic and Rational.
As babies, we experience mind, body and environment as one. We literally cannot tell the difference between our body, the room, people, or sounds around us. We live in a “primordial matrix”. Everything in our experience is one giant soup with no “others” or causation, just pure process.
This isn’t enlightenment or non-dual awareness, but a basic, ground-level awareness that corresponds exactly to the mental and physical machinery (or lack thereof) that we possess at that age. Think of it as the empty map in a sandbox game, upon which all future development occurs. This is called the Archaic stage.
The Mythic Mind
After one or two more major stages of development, we reach the Mythic stage (in the West, it usually dominates in pre-teenage years). It still cannot fully distinguish imagination or myth from reality in the way that the Rational mind does. It’s highly ethnocentric, monoperspectival, submissive and insular. It evolved during the pre-scientific period.
Its explanation of power, action and cause is in Mythical, omnipotent beings, which are present in every single world culture, and first appeared during roughly the same historical period.
It interprets everything literally, as-is. Hence when it reads the Bible or the nativity scene, it reads in Mythic terms. It ascribes antropomorphic traits to any source of action or power. Jesus is literally the son of God. He literally died for our sins. He was literally crucified. He was literally born to a virign.
It is largely unable to understand matter-of-fact explanations for things, especially life’s big questions, like morality, the origins of life, the meaning of life, and so on. It needs a Mythic explanation, and you cannot force it to think in terms of cause and effect, because it cannot comprehend them. Contradictory information is simply intolerable, threatening, downright wrong, even blasphemy.
The Rational Mind
As we continue into adolescence and early adulthood, our thinking complexifies. We develop formal-operational thinking: we can reflect on our thought processes, actions, and decisions. We have a full sense of linear time and our life as a story composed of seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months and years. We can fully perceive cause and effect and the workings of the physical, mechanistic, 3D world around us. This is the Rational mind.
This mind developed on a large scale during the Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution (Newton, Galileo, Kepler, et al) the Industrial Revolution (Ford, Bell, Watt, et al). It’s decoupled from the Mythic mind and starts to question all its claims. Was Jesus really born to a virgin? That makes no sense: we need a spermatozoid, an egg and a womb to make a human!
We realised that our world wasn’t created in seven days by some omnipotent, magical power. Instead, a cloud of hydrogen spontaneously appeared from a dimensionless nothingness 14 billion years ago and has been evolving ever since.
Since it loses the Mythic perspective, it starts to simply destroy all the mythic stories and explanations. The entirety of Christianity is thrown under a bus. We “lose our religion”. Christ is no longer the wizard-like son of God, but a bearded man that possibly lived in the Middle East 2000 years ago. Why celebrate if it’s a load of nonsense?
Now you have a good idea about two of Fowler’s seven levels of faith development, let’s talk about how they view Christmas.
Mythic & Rational Christmas
Mythic Christmas
As you might expect, people at Mythic view Christmas in mythic terms. They believe in the literal meaning of stories and Christian truths like the nativity, the Three Wise Men, and that Jesus is the biological son of God. They explain it all in terms of beings with magical abilities, e.g. Mary, Jesus, and Santa Claus. That’s their only option!
Christmas is a celebration of Christ’s birthday, the day he was sent by God to deliver the Word. It’s a holy day when traditions and rituals must be upheld. That’s what good Christians do.
It’s really no surprise that, if historical dates are trustworthy, Jesus lived during humanity’s great mythic era. He is the mythical being, the ultimate mythic explanation for all of Christianity, the figure that undergirds the entire mythic enterprise.
I want you to really understand the Mythic mind. Try to comprehend that it doesn’t choose to “believe” these things. It doesn’t weigh up the evidence and logically decide that the Bible is the truth. It’s not “ignorant” from its own perspective. It simply cannot comprehend the world in any other way. Its only recourse is mythic explanation, much like the rational mind’s only recourse is rational explanation.
Rational Christmas
Let’s talk about what the Rational mind does with Christmas.
As we said, the Rational mind wants quantifiable evidence for everything. Its view of the world is linear, solid, measurable, reducible, and it is certain (to a Mythic degree) that only explanations, theories and truths from the rational paradigm are valid.
As such, it’s no surprise at all that it dismisses all the great religious myths. Christianity is nonsense. God is a fabrication, about as believable as the tooth fairy. The world needs no divine force to guide it: it is a “blind watchmaker” (Richard Dawkins), a self-organising physical system with no real underlying purpose intention, or meaning. There is no great man in the sky.
This mind appeared on a broad scale (largely in developed countries) during the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, when scientific knowledge showed its power, religion began to decline, and our thinking changed from mythical to practical, based on facts, goals, evidence and measurement. Technological advance meant that production and consumption exploded, and holidays (read: holy days) and festivals went from celebration to having a good time.
We view the major Christian myths to be nonsense and life to be lacking a grand, all-embracing meaning, so we decide to just send presents, eat until we explode, and drink until we fall over.
Okay, I’m being a little crass and facetious, but let’s face it: when we think of Xmas, we think of alcohol, food and presents. Or we think of children, and how they still believe in the wonderful (but ultimately stupid) Christmas myths.
Whether we know it or not, I believe modern Christmas is a grand celebration of the rational, capitalist, pleasure-seeking enterprise. It is as though we were celebrating the birth of the modern world. We don’t worship Christ and the Virgin Mary, but capitalism, consumerism and comfort.
Notice that for businesses, Christmas is the most profitable time of the year. It’s the time of highest consumption, of highest calorie gain, of highest pleasure- and comfort-seeking. Instead of mustering all our Mythic religious fervour for the big day, we hoard up all our money and splurge it on booze, chocolate and PS5s.
Make no mistake, the Rational view is as embedded, as powerful and as all-encompassing as any religious trend that humanity has witnessed.
The Post-rational, Mystical View & The Spiritual Meaning of Christmas
Now we have all that clear, let’s turn to the spiritual meaning of Christmas.
Remember the Mythic mind can’t comprehend anything non-mythic, and the Rational mind can’t comprehend anything non-rational. People at these levels are simply too bound up in and hypnotised by their own worldview, a fate we’re condemned to at least until Fowler’s stage 5, called Conjunctive.
As such, if what follows seems like blasphemy, or a load of nonsense, or make-believe, then fine. I’ll let you have it. I know it’s near impossible to convince people of truths that lie outside their current conception of the world.
However, if it resonates in some way, I encourage you to follow that. You may be heading towards Fowler’s stages 5 and 6 if so:
The details of this post-rational, spiritual view are lengthy and intricate, so it’s tough to know where to begin. Let’s start with the name itself.
Christmas means “Christ’s mass”. That is, it’s a service, rite or celebration for Jesus Christ.
To the Mythic mind, it’s a celebration of the Mythical, all-powerful, miracle-performing biblical Jesus. To the Rational, it’s a celebration of a mere myth, and so is pointless.
Curiously, to the post-rational mind, it is once again a celebration of Christ. Not of the mythic Christ, but of the Christ that is our highest potential, our Christ-nature, both inwardly and outwardly.
The Christ we celebrate is actually ourselves: our own enlightened nature. This is not a narcissistic celebration. My enlightened nature is your enlightened nature, is that of everyone. It’s no longer a celebration of anything outside us, or just an enforced annual routine, but an actual participation, a reminder, a spiritual event.
As such, the figure of Christ is not a mythic being whose life the Bible narrates with consummate accuracy, not a mere man who lived 2000 years ago, but a symbol or pointer back to ourselves, much like the Christian cross is:
In fact, all the mythical Christmas characters are archetypes, from the Virgin Mary, to the North Star, to the nativity scene.
The Virgin Mary is an archetype for our true nature, our Buddha nature, our Allah mind. It “births” with no “birther”. It is indeed pure process. It is spontaneous, free, unadulterated, “virgin” awareness.
The birth of Christ is a metaphor for either our biological birth (Christ and its potential manifested in yet another human), or the fabled culmination of our spiritual journey to Christ, when we are reborn as a spiritual being, or the moment-to-moment rebirth we all experience as Christ and in Christ. I’m not here to define exactly what it does and doesn’t symbolise or evoke. These are just some ideas.
Like a rationalist, I firmly believe that the great Biblical myths are made up. In fact, I’m skeptical that Jesus Christ the man ever existed. And like a mythic believer, I find great truth in the biblical motifs, even if I see them as symbols rather than real events. Regardless, they are wonderful pointers to our spiritual power and our spiritual essence.
And I guarantee that once you know your inner Christ to some degree, you’ll connect to the spiritual meaning of Christmas, and will love it. It is, in ultimate instance, a celebration of who you really are and who we all really are. What’s there not to love?
The Spiritual Meaning of Christmas Includes Mythic & Rational
I also want to point out that the post-rational, spiritual meaning of Christmas incorporates the Mythic and Rational views.
Funnily, the Mythic view captures fantastic truth about our Christ nature, but it does so in black-and-white, oversimplified catchphrases that obfuscate a treasure trove of truth. It’s stuck in Mythic land.
The Rational mind successfully debunks the Mythic view but it understands neither the Mythic mind nor the mystical, post-rational truth of Christmas. It’s still stuck in Mythic land, because it does nothing but react to the Mythic mind. When it comes to Christmas, it doesn’t bring anything new to the party (pardon the pun).
This higher spiritual meaning of Christmas transcends and includes both of them. When your view is Post-rational, Mystical, you can connect with all the common Mythic symbols of Christmas, like gifts, prayer, church, tales, hymns, the Xmas tree, the North Star, the cross, Christ and the Virgin Mary, and yet not get trapped in their surface-level meaning.
You retain your Rational faculties, realising that none of the myths can be literally true. Yet you also realise that there is something deeply true and spiritual about Christmas that the capitalist, consumerist version cannot possibly encompass on its own.
Your focus is the inner Christ, the “radiant, transparent eyeball”, as Ralph Waldo Emerson called it.
You also realise that all religious festivals are really the same! Mythic sees festivals from other traditions as blasphemy, as the culture of sinning non-believers, while Rational sees them all as hogwash. The Post-rational, Mystical view sees them as cultural variations of one another. The spiritual meaning of Christmas is found in all festivals.
In ultimate instance, we’re all worshipping the same thing, whether you call it Christ consciousness, Buddha nature, The Great Perfection, God, Allah, or any other name.
Christmas is not a dated Christian ritual, but a whole-species, whole-world recognition and celebration of who we really are.
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