ART by OLI ROGERS

 

"Die no more, dinosaur."

 

It is likely that the seeker will immediately apprehend that this is an image of Christ. However, it should be made plain that, despite this, it is emphatically neither a depiction of a messianic figure, nor of the mythological individual known as Jesus described in the Christian Bible. Rather, what is referred to here is Christ consciousness. This is the consciousness of a higher Self, of transcendental reality, of the God that is within us: the highest state of intellectual development and emotional maturity.

 

Though they are by no means common, ancient knowledge traditions describe the appearance of many avatars of Christ consciousness besides the man-God of the Christian faith - from Thoth of ancient Egypt (known as Hermes Trismegistus to the Greeks) to Rama, Buddha and the Maitreya who is yet to come. The Ascended Masters or Mahatmas of Theosophy are others who have attained this state of being. Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, pioneering interdisciplinary occultist and the co-founder of the Theosophical Society, describes the appearance of such an ascended consciousness thus:

 

“By that higher intuition acquired by Theosophia - or God-knowledge, which carried the mind from the world of form into that of formless spirit, man has been sometimes enabled in every age and every country to perceive things in the interior or invisible world.”

 

Thus the avatar of Christ consciousness here appears as a dinosaur manifested in a contemporary urban setting: he symbolises the potential for the attainment of this mode of being at any point that sentient life exists. This is a very different matter to the status of divinity being a thing conferred upon a single, mythological personage by a vicious, malignant creator deity, an individual thereafter to be worshipped as a soul-destroying god of unassuageable guilt. As a triceratops bearing a ‘trinity’ of horns, our saurian avatar also represents the tripartite structure of substance, essence and nature which is central to this concept.

 

This Dinosaur Christ is nominated by the kanji above his head, and his love for humanity is denoted by the Sacred Heart that he bears upon his breast. With his right hand he makes the sign of benediction, an invocation for divine help, blessing and guidance, and in his left hand he clutches a knife. The knife is an analogue of the upward-pointing triangle symbol that surrounds him, representing rising energy and thereby the spiritual nature of the human being. In this configuration the triangle also represents maleness, and so is counterbalanced by the femininity of the moon which can be seen rising over the city.

 

The attainment of Christ consciousness is no mean feat, but a glimpse of its mysteries may perhaps be afforded by the use of entheogenic substances.