Tony Crisps Writings - Meetings With The Christ

I Am One of the Undying

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I am one of the unborn, being born two months premature at a time prior to intensive care and antibiotics - 1937. Because I was premature and born dead – not breathing – the doctor threw my lifeless body aside and told my mother that I would be a weak child and wouldn’t live long and she could have more children. However, my grandmother witnessed this and carried my body off and bathed me in hot and cold water and got me breathing. I owe her my life she was my resurrection. The name of that resurrection was love. My grandmother had given birth to 13 children, some of whom died. I have a sense of her bearing an old and deep wisdom passed on through generations of women.

What I missed out of the story was that the gap between my thrown aside body and my grandmothers resurrection was that I had a near death experience. That because my lifeline, my umbilical cord, was cut early and I was not breathing, so the delay led to my sense of dying. I know many people cannot believe that a baby can remember such things. Well true they cannot remember as we do with words and images, but all life forms have enormous emotional responses and are known to experience a conditioned reflex. Whatever it was caused my baby self to remember, the experience left me with the desire to share the experience, to communicate to others about the wonder that we all are, about health of our body and amazing world death reveals to us. See The Baby that Became Tony - https://dreamhawk.com/.../lumpkin-the-baby-who-became-tony/

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It took ages to realise that I was born a runt – a small or weak person – that could not function as normal healthy people can. I didn’t realise the extent of its influence until I journeyed to Australia and had to have a full medical examination to enter. The woman doctor, a very efficient and straight-out person, asked me did I know I was born prematurely? I said I did and asked her how she knew. She said, look at the roof of your mouth, it shows your body never completed its growth.

I am one of the unborn. I have maintained a level of awareness that is natural in the womb, but that most people leave behind before they are born. This enables me to experience things that are not easy for other people. The so called religious seers are freaks, people like me who maintain unusual levels of awareness. They look at life through different perspectives. I often look at life through the eyes of the afterlife, or the preborn, but it mucks up my ‘normal’ life quite extensively.” See The Secret Life Of The Unborn Child

?In fact it enabled me to experience what comes next.

David Bodella wrote that “Tony Crisp writes of the transpersonal and existential significance for him of his encounters with the figure of Christ, in imagery, in deep feelings, in states of self-transcendence, and heightened awareness; and how these illuminated his understanding of birth, sexuality, death, and the extraordinary within the ordinary.”

Tony Crisp points out that the figure of Christ is a personalisation of the essence of human existence, is nevertheless culturally determined, and that for the Hindu such a vision could be experienced as a meeting with Krishna, Vishnu, or for a Buddhist, as the discovery of his Buddha nature. One does not therefore need to be a Christian to appreciate the richness of experience and expression evoked by Tony Crisp in the account of his experiences, and his inner journey.

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Christ is not the only historical figure with this god like associations. Krishna and Shiva in the Indian culture, Mohammed in Islamic culture, and Quetzalcoatl/ Kukulkán/ Gukumatz in the South American culture, all have the same sort of power. Some aspects of the Buddha are approached for redemption and there are many saviour heroes from other cultures such as Anansi in Africa, Cúchulainn in Eire, Osiris in Egypt and Hercules in Greece. Apollonius of Tyana is also recorded as living a sacred life. But Christianity is simply a new expression of an ancient theme.

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Meetings with Christ

In the early Seventies I became involved in a small peer group whose aim was to explore what happened if you stopped editing or controlling what you expressed physically or psychologically. This involved allowing, as far as we were able, any movement our body made without conscious direction, and any sounds, emotions and fantasies that arose unwilled.

The theory behind the practice was that the body tries to rid itself of irritants or poisons through such mechanisms as eyes watering, sneezing, coughing or vomiting. So this self-regulatory process would discharge trauma or stress if we did not constantly control or direct body and mind. We didn’t feel this was a new technique, as there are many historical references to it in different cultures. We also felt, because of its historical mentions, that it might open previously unrealised potential or spiritual experience. See?Life’s Little Secrets

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The First Meeting

Our group met weekly, and it was in this environment I experienced my first powerful meeting with Christ. I had been allowing the process for two years, with very satisfying results. A great many childhood events had surfaced leading to insight and integration of previously unconscious experiences or body tensions. For instance, one of the first was that I relived the experience of my tonsil operation as a six year old.

The process often took weeks to work through a particular theme or event. So it was not a surprise when one evening a new theme started that led me to feel I had blood on my hands. However, it was puzzling and slightly disorientating to have such a strong feeling that I had killed someone. The feelings were just as strong and real as any I had met in connection with verifiable events such as that mentioned regarding my tonsils operation as a six-year-old. So I was very curious to see what surfaced at the next meeting.

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This started quietly, and at first seemed to have no connection with blood on my hands. Our group-room was quite large, and I stood with plenty of space around me. Unlike most of my previous sessions, I experienced a powerful subjective imagery of standing before large heavy curtains. It was like dreaming while awake. I moved to the curtains and pulled them apart. This revealed the immensity of a clear night sky, filled with brilliant stars. As I looked at this natural splendour, a star fell to earth, leaving me with a sense that something wonderful had happened that I must go in search of. As occurs in the dreaming process, there was a sudden shift, and I was a herder of flocks, a shepherd, looking for the star that had come to earth. Others were searching too, and when we found what we were looking for, I was astonished to discover it was a baby.

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A Baby

I was not in any way asleep, or in a trance. My evaluative rational self was keenly observing all that happened, but not interfering. Nevertheless, profoundly felt imagery and feelings flooded my awareness. I realised I was experiencing the New Testament story of the birth. But this did not seem to interfere with the flow of what poured into my feelings. My whole body felt the wonder of the baby and I fell to my knees before it. I knew as if intuitively, that all the cosmos had somehow come alive as this helpless vulnerable child. I was so overwhelmed, all I could say over and over, between sobbing cries was, ‘A baby’ – ‘A baby.’

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The flowing emotions and the opened intuitive sense informed me that what I knelt before in tears was not a particular child. It was every baby ever born. For the first time I had been allowed to experience the enormity of birth, the holiness of every baby.

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Suddenly the scene changed again, and I was standing with others by the side of a dusty unpaved road. People were excitedly waiting for someone, and I was curious to see who it was.

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It was a man, and as he walked the road he saw me and came towardAt this, love so immense touched me that I fell backwards, the contact too painful for me to bear, as he touched me he said, "I make you one of mine." And the man walked on.

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I knew who he was. I also knew, because it was welling up from within me as sure knowledge of. But he, in some strange paradoxical way, was myself. He was the cosmic mystery I have been born as. He was the very best of myself I had killed, murdered. He was my youthful sexuality I had suffocated to death, helped by the tenets of a religion that was supposed to be an expression of His truth. The impact of that meeting was extraordinary. Unable to stop the emotions surfacing, I felt a magical influence had touched my hands and I wanted everyone around me to receive some of that magic. Even years afterwards, when describing the event, the wonder of it can penetrate me again, and I am overcome by enormous feelings. One time, while sitting telling two women friends the story, I experienced an expanding of awareness, a sense of transcending my usual state of mind, and visible waves of movement ran up my trunk. These were like peristaltic movements of the gut, but they were moving up my trunk, obvious to my two friends and myself. I had never previously experienced anything like it and have never since. It seemed at the time as if my being had become a conduit for an enormous energy that I did not understand intellectually. How it managed to create a wave like movement over different muscle groups and skin I do not know.

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The meeting presented Christ paradoxically as something exterior to me, and at the same time something that was a fundamental and integral part of my own nature. As an exterior influence, Christ touched my awareness and told me I was his disciple, suggesting I could learn from him and co-operate in his doings. In fact, many other people have similar meetings to my own. So Christ is not simply my own personal subjective experience. I remember for instance working as a therapist with a woman who was exploring issues to do with her marriage. The subject of Christ or religion had not been mentioned, but the woman, lying on a couch, went quiet during the session. I suddenly felt an unmistakable shift in the room. ?

Without any prompting from me she said with great joy, ‘I feel the presence of Christ. I have sought this all my life but it has never happened before.’ I witnessed a similar meeting with at least two other people. One, a man in a group I was leading in Athens came forward with tears in his eyes to tell me he had just met Christ for the first time in his life.

?In such meetings one has a distinct impression that Christ is a disembodied influence of great stature, who touches and moves many individuals, and is certainly alive and active in today’s world. A Christian might define the experience I had as a meeting with the living Christ, who was calling me to him. Jung would probably say I came face to face with an archetype and was being enlarged or healed by its influence. But there are, of course, many other ways of defining it.?