Two thousand years ago, a new message arrived in the western world: God doesn’t live in a temple or church, God lives in you. The “Kingdom of God” wasn’t just a metaphor: We are each our own Kingdom, carrying our own piece of the Divine spark of Creation, the world just waiting to see what unique expression of God-ness will come through us.

To the culture wherein he ate, slept, walked and taught, this was a new kind of idea. The dominant religion of his place and time measured one’s relationship to the Divine in terms of devotion to specific rituals and donations to a religious institution. Jesus brought in the idea of a personal relationship with the Divine as the equal and shared birthright of every soul, regardless of how that soul happened to incarnate – nation, ethnicity, gender, etc. – regardless of what formal religious practices one did or didn’t follow. A personal relationship, needing no intermediary, no one who allegedly “understood these things better” – or, God forbid, was “closer to God” than you; no one needing to manage the paperwork connecting you to the Divine.

We humans have had a couple of millennia now to run with that concept and see what we could make with it – with mixed results. The organized religion founded in His name has oftentimes been as much a force against what Jesus taught as for it – and despite that has infused the earth with the beauty and truth of His message. The message is in the air, in the water, in the ground beneath our feet… and now the time has come for the next chapter, the deeper integration of this teaching into every thought of our minds, every action of our lives.

Many religions predict the arrival – or return – of a Divine prophet who will bring in the new Millennium of peace, justice and goodness. Christians call it the Second Coming. I say that there is no separate Millennium for different faiths, that all of these predictions concern the same Divine arrival – and that Jesus is returning within you, me, every one of us, right now. The Kingdom of God. Guess what, it’s been there all along, just like Jesus said two thousand years ago! The new part is the deepening and integration of the message, the greater awakening to ourselves as Divine beings.

Why now? Well, maybe now because we are close to exhausting the Earth’s capacity to carry billions of human bodies without a more advanced consciousness about who we are, an understanding of how we belong to everything that there is – and not the other way around¹. Maybe now because we have had the military capacity to obliterate ourselves, and all other life forms with us, for many years now and miraculously haven’t done so, because Someone Up There not only likes us but loves us enough to protect us from our own worst tendencies: But as you can only protect a child for so long before it needs to grow up and be responsible for itself, we need to grow up spiritually so we can handle and heal the dark side of our own capacity for creation. And so we are being helped – or maybe I should say Helped, as it comes from a Divine source – to awaken to who we truly are. We really are stardust, really are golden, and we really do have to get ourselves back to the Garden. But how to get ourselves back, we can’t figure out with our minds, powerful as they are, but only by surrendering to the deeper reality of what we are, and humbly accepting the Help being offered.

And so the purification begins. I once believed there would be a Divine intervention, a great pulse of enlightenment coming to the Earth, and we would somehow, suddenly, all just wake up. Now I see the grueling and often discouraging work involved in trying to become a better kind of human being – more loving, more humble, more willing to put aside personal desires in the interest of what is right and what is needed. God did not give me a free pass to enlightenment (He never does, really) – but did plant an idea, a possibility in me that was so beautiful that it was worth going through anything to keep walking towards it.

And now such a “planting” is about to start happening on a mass scale. For many of us, much of the time, it’s not going to feel like a beautiful, serene vision arriving on a wave of peaceful contentment. It’s going to feel miserable, because it’s going to bang up hard against all the habits of self-protection and self-involvement that have brought us to the collective mess we find ourselves in. We are going to want to argue with everyone about everything, to avoid facing the abyss of self-doubt that has suddenly appeared inside us. We’re going to take everything personally, because our emotional nerve endings will be perpetually raw from the increased voltage pouring through them. Whatever demons have been your unwelcome companions in this lifetime – fear, jealousy, anger, depression – are going to balloon into monsters, just when you think you’ve finally come to terms with them. And a lot of the time it will feel like an undeserved punishment, why me? It won’t be readily apparent that it’s all happening for any purpose at all. But if this happens, then in whatever moment of quiet and rest you can grab, see if there is a place deep inside you that knows what a beautiful world we can have if we can just get down to the truth within each of us, and express that truth in how we live our lives, how we treat each other, what decisions we make and what motivates them. And if there is such a place, know that it can come about only by each of us walking this walk to our individual truth: Seeing, acknowledging, ultimately embracing and releasing the demons, burning away what obscures the pure and beautiful us. Know that NO ONE can do this for anyone else, but you have lots and lots of company with others doing it for themselves, so we may as well support each other as best we can. And know that that this is the Second Coming of the Messiah… and you are part of it.