Colossians 3:11 Meaning Where There Can’t Be Greek and Jew

In the awakened state the divisions the mind draws between kinds of men fall away, because they were never anything but labels the outer self pins on one undivided consciousness. Greek and Jew, the cut and the uncut, the untamed savage, the man in chains and the man at liberty: each is a mask the personality assumes, and under every mask runs the same living current.

That current is the Christ, the divine spark seated in each person, and it is the whole of what any of them truly is. When it rises and fills the man, the many sortings collapse into one, for the anointing self is present in all of them and is all of them.

Greek and Jew: 2 outward castes of the personality, the mind's habit of ranking men by tribe and origin Barbarian: the untamed, unpolished part of a person, still ruled by raw instinct Scythian: the wildest reach of that same untamed nature, instinct at its most unbridled Bond and free: the states of a self that feels shackled and a self that feels loosed, both only conditions the personality passes through Christ: the anointed divine spark seated within every person, the one life beneath all the labels

Tawḥīd: Oneness Everything traces back to one source. A person carries a quiet ranking of who counts more and who counts less, and that ranking loses its footing here, since both ends of it come from the same hand. Sorting people by birth and background runs almost on its own, and the habit loses its point when everyone traces back to the same place.

God does not look at your outward forms, but at your hearts: what gets weighed is inside A saying of the Prophet moves the measuring off the outside of a person and onto the heart. Someone proud of where they come from and someone ashamed of it sit in the same spot, both believing the label is what gets weighed. Once the weighing happens elsewhere, in what a person wants and does, the pride and the shame both go slack.

Fanāʾ: The self passing away The me that needs to stand somewhere above other people thins out until it stops running things. That me keeps score, and it feeds on every division it can find, because it needs someone below it to feel placed. When it fades, the comparing goes quiet, and other people stop showing up as marks on a scale.

Waḥdat al-wujūd: The oneness of being In Ibn Arabi's line of thought, one existence stands on its own and everything else borrows from it. Seen that way, the person across from you is running on the same borrowed life you are, wearing a different face. The differences between people stay visible, and they stop working as walls.

Wherever you turn, there is the face of God: no direction is empty A line from the Quran that Sufis come back to again and again. The line cuts against the private map most people keep, where some are worth meeting and others can be skipped without cost. Turning toward the one you would have written off, you meet the same presence you had been looking for somewhere finer.