Philippians 1:23 Meaning But I Am Hard Pressed Between

There is in you a deep longing to return home, to dissolve back into the formless source you came from. It can feel like being pulled between two worlds: the busy world of form, and the still, boundless presence that is your origin. That longing is not morbid; it is the recognition that you are more than this passing form.

To be gathered back into that presence is indeed far better than anything form can offer, because there the sense of separation dissolves. Yet you need not wait for the body to fall away. That presence is here now, beneath your thinking. Turn toward it while you are alive, and what you longed for is already found.

The tight place between two pulls is where every person lives who has begun to wake up. One pull holds him to the life his senses report, the plain facts of the day. The other draws him toward the wish fulfilled, the state he would rather occupy. To depart is simply to leave the first for the second. The move costs no death and no distance. Attention turns, and that is all.

To be with Christ means to dwell in the feeling of the thing already done, the ripened state a man wants to call his own. That is the better place, not because the present is bad, but because the ripened state is where the life he wants already stands as fact. A person moves house inside himself. He walks out of the fact he sees and into the fact he has chosen to feel, and there he stays.

The strait between 2 is the narrow pressure of the awakened person caught between the pull of the flesh and the pull of the risen self, wedged in the tight passage where the lower life and the higher life both draw at once. To depart is to release the hold of the outer body-consciousness and rise into the Christ-state within, the far better condition of full alignment with the higher awareness. The tension is the very sign of one standing at the threshold, no longer content below and not yet wholly above.

The pressure comes from being pulled in 2 directions inside one body. The relief spoken of is the turning of awareness fully toward the higher self, the state the person already senses is the better home.

The strait: the narrow, pressed passage of the divided self, squeezed between the flesh below and the risen self above. Christ: the higher self within, the awakened state that is the person's true and better dwelling.