2 Corinthians 12:2 Meaning I Know a Man in Christ

The man in Christ is not another person but your own being, the self hidden in the awareness that says I am. This is your spiritual biography, not a report about someone met long ago. The uncertainty over body or no body is honest, because awareness can be lifted out of the flesh and set wherever imagination places it, and in that state a person cannot say where his body was. What was caught up was the attention itself.

The third heaven is a raised state of consciousness, an inner height reached when awareness detaches from the senses and rises into vision. A person enters it not by travel but by shifting what he is conscious of being. Christ here is your own imagination lifting you above the room and the year and the name you answer to. The one caught up and the one telling of it are the same being, and that being is you, discovering that the self within is the God who knows.

The rising of the body's own energy through the stages of consciousness is the whole account here, told as a man carried upward past the levels of ordinary awareness. The third heaven is the highest reach of that climb, the current lifted from the lower centers up the spine into the right side of the head, where the crown and its inner chambers open. Being unsure whether in the body or out of it is the honest report of that state, where the sense of the flesh thins and awareness stands free of it. Christ names the condition of the one in whom this current has already begun to rise.

What looks like a story about travel to a far-off heaven is the plainest possible map of energy moving up through a living person.

Third heaven: the highest station of consciousness, the awakened current arriving in the right hemisphere and its hidden chambers The number 14: the doubled 7 of the body's centers, one full round of the current completed twice over