Colossians: Consciousness and Inner Transformation

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Central Theme

The Book of Colossians announces a single, ruling principle of consciousness: the supremacy of the creative Imagination as the indwelling Christ, by whom all things are formed and in whom the soul is completed. This epistle insists that the reality you seek is never outside but within; the cosmic Christ is the psychological power by which the scattered self is reconciled, filled and made whole. The repeated affirmation that “in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily” is the declaration that the fullness (pleroma) of your being is the living power of imagination present now, waiting to be acknowledged and inhabited. The work of Scripture here is not the telling of events but the reawakening of recognition: that you are not a passive actor in fate but the imagining power who brought the world into being and can therefore redeem its every appearance by a change of inner assumption.

Colossians holds a distinctive place in the canon of biblical psychology because it marries cosmic theology with intimate practice: it names the universal creative principle and then gives concrete instructions for living from it. It refuses to allow doctrine to remain theoretical; what is true in the heavens must be actualized in the heart. By presenting Christ as both Creator and Head of the body, the letter makes clear that the individual’s imaginative act is the organ of reconciliation, the bridge between heaven and earth. Thus the book functions as a manual for inner sovereignty, showing that spiritual attainment is the simple, relentless occupation of imagining the fulfilled self until the outer world concedes to the inward reality.

Key Teachings

First, Colossians teaches that all reality is the product of an originating imagination and that the Christ within is nothing other than that creative human Imagination made conscious. When Paul declares that by him were all things created and that all things consist, he speaks of the same inner faculty which forms thoughts into experience. To be ‘complete in him’ is to recognize that your imaginings already contain the fulness; the felt sense of completeness dispels lack and moves consciousness from fragmentary desire to satisfied being. The teaching is radical in its simplicity: assume the consciousness of the fulfilled state and allow the outer senses to follow.

Second, the epistle unfolds the psychological drama of death and resurrection as an interior operation. To be dead with Christ is to abandon identification with the body of sense and with habitual thought-forms; to be risen with him is to be quickened by the new assumption. Baptism, circumcision without hands, burial and rising are not rites performed on the flesh but verbs of inner transition. The ‘handiwork’ of God is a change of attention: what you put to death within your imagination is the old story; what you assume and persist in is what will be yielded as experience.

Third, Colossians warns against substitute doctrines that would seduce the mind into worshipping form over substance. Philosophy, ritualism and angelic speculations are described as rudiments that puff up the fleshly mind. The antidote is the holding fast to the Head, an unbroken relationship with the sovereign imagining power. Being rooted and built up in this inward principle prevents fragmentation and protects the fruit of transformation from being stolen by persuasive error.

Finally, the letter transforms mystical union into moral method: the new man must be clothed with mercy, humility, patience, forgiveness and love. These virtues are not imposed as duty but arise naturally when consciousness rests in the living Christ. Speech becomes a sacrament when seasoned with grace; relationships are transmuted when roles are lived from the inner condition of oneness. Thus doctrine and deed meet: the Christ within informs daily conduct, proving the inward change by outward fruit.

Consciousness Journey

Colossians maps a clear journey from alienation to incorporation. It begins by diagnosing the human condition as estranged mind, asleep to the truth that the imagination is God and therefore asleep to its own sovereignty. This initial state is characterized by bondage to outward appearances, belief in separateness and the subjection to the rudiments of the world. The call of the gospel in this letter is an invitation to remember: to recall that you are not a contingent fragment but the body of the creative One who brought everything into being.

The next stage is awakening through revelation and persistent inner work. Prayer, thanksgiving and the filling with the knowledge of God are described as processes by which the mind is reeducated and the heart is knitted together in love. Being rooted and built up in the inner principle means cultivating a steady imaginative practice that changes the seat of affection. The circumcision without hands signals a surgical inward removal of identification with the old self; baptism is the deliberate acceptance of a new operating assumption. This middle passage is the crucible where outer ordinance is translated into inner event.

Once the new assumption takes root, the journey becomes one of embodiment. To be risen with Christ and to have life hid with him in God is to live from the secret place of imagination where the future exists as present fact. The believer is instructed to set the affections on things above, to mortify earthly members and to put on the new man. These commands are practical cues for sustained imaginative occupation: when your mind continually inhabits the fulfilled image, the outer world rearranges itself to match the inner pattern.

The culmination of the journey is communal and sovereign. Christ as head of the body shows that personal resurrection is never isolated; it unites diverse members into one functioning whole. The transformed mind now speaks with grace, acts with patience and ministers to others from the overflow of its inward plenitude. The final stage is the consummation of the mystery—Christ in you, the hope of glory—where inner realization issues in an outward life that proves the truth of the inward work and prepares the dreamer for further expansion.

Practical Framework

Colossians offers a simple but disciplined practice for daily consciousness work built on imaginative assumption and steady attention. Begin each day by entering a quiet, affirmative state and claim inwardly the reality of Christ in you: feel the fulness, accept completion, and imagine a scene that implies the desire already fulfilled. Persist in this felt experience during the day and especially before sleep, when the imagination most readily impresses the subconscious. Replace arguing with faith by refusing to feed the old tale; instead occupy the being of the new man until its presence becomes natural.

Rituals are reinterpreted as psychological exercises. Baptism is the conscious act of putting to death the former identification; circumcision without hands is the letting go of sensory authority; communion and the dwelling of the word are the practices of dwelling richly in the imagined word of Christ. Prayer is vigilance paired with thanksgiving: watchful attention guards the mind from being seduced by vain philosophy, and gratitude consolidates the new assumption. Speech must be seasoned with grace because words confirm the picture you hold within; gentle, truthful speech reinforces the inner state and coaxes the world into accord.

In relationships and responsibilities live from the new identity. Perform daily tasks as acts of service to the inner Christ—work heartily as unto the Lord, forgive readily, and clothe yourself with mercy and kindness. When difficulties arise, return to the imaginative scene of resolution rather than arguing circumstances. A practical exercise is to rehearse at night the day as you would have it be, revise the inner picture where needed, and fall asleep in the feeling of fulfillment. Repetition of this living assumption is the only law required: persistent inner occupation with the end will bring the outer to its knees and reveal the Christ within as the operative power of your life.

Awakening in Colossians: Inner Christ-centered Transformation

The epistle to the Colossians is a concentrated drama of the human imagination speaking to itself. From its opening salutation to its final admonitions, it reveals a single inner journey: the recognition, reclamation, and reign of the divine creative faculty within the believer. Every phrase, every image, is a map of consciousness. Paul, the apostle by the will of God, is the voice of the awakened self who remembers its authority. Colossae is not a distant city but the inner country where a particular state of mind dwells: a believing yet besieged imagination, tempted by the seductions of reason, ritual, and outward opinion. The letter reads like an initiation manual for the inner man, teaching the reader how the Godhead, which is imagination, appears, falls asleep, is recovered, and finally rules the inner kingdom with sovereign grace.

The opening chapter announces the core revelation: Christ is the image of the invisible God and in him all fulness dwells. Psychologically this is plain language. The Christ is the living imagination within you, the formative power that images worlds. To call him the image of the invisible God is simply to identify imagination as the one faculty that gives visible form to invisible ideas. Paul sows this seed of remembrance by acknowledging that all things are created by and for this power. Thus the drama begins with the recognition that the state of consciousness named Christ is primary, preexistent, and formative. The visible world is an externalization of this inner imaging. To be translated from the power of darkness into the kingdom of the Son is to move from unconscious dreaming to an active, waking imagining that forms purposefully.

The moral and spiritual problem the letter addresses is the alienation of the soul by wicked works and the seductions of the fleshly mind. This alienation is a forgetting of the inner Creator. The history of mankind in this epistle is not chronology but a psychological falling: a deliberate contraction from unity into multiplicity to enact experience. That fall, however, is not condemnation but a stage in the drama of expansion. The aim is reconciliation in the body of his flesh through death, an image of the imagination descending and identifying with form to bring the hidden into manifestation. The cross is the act of inner surrender, the willing crucifixion of self-concepts that keep the creative power enslaved to accident and limitation. By this death the old legal handwritings, the ordinances and judgments of the merely rational mind, are blotted out; imagination, having tasted limitation, can now reawaken with the authority to recreate the world it perceives.

Chapter two exposes the enemy of creative life by name: vain philosophy, tradition of men, rudiments of the world. These are not neutral intellectual pursuits but states of consciousness that misinterpret the God within. Philosophy, when it separates the imaginings of man from the living Christ, becomes a device of deception that will spoil you. The letter is mercilessly practical: in the inner economy there can be no supremacy of abstract reason over the imaginal life. The remedy presented is simple: remain rooted and built up in the living Christ. To be circumcised with hands that are not hands is to put off the old identity clung to by the senses. Baptism, burial and rising are inner acts of faith — the imaginative death of the limiting identity and the resurrection into the creative self whose life animates all things. Being ‘‘complete in him’’ means there is no deficiency in the waking imagination; you already possess the fulness when you stop identifying with the limiting evidence of the senses.

This psychological Christ is the head of the body. The body is the assembly of faculties, thoughts, and feelings that move under direction. If the head is Christ, thought and feeling are nourished from the fountain of imagination; if the head is the reasoning ego, the body fragments into law, ritual, and fear. Therefore the danger of angelic worship and ascetic observance is described not as metaphysical error but as the soul looking outward and upward to false authorities instead of to the Christ within. Such worship is a dispersal of attention away from the source and so weakens the soul. The antidote is steadfast attention: hold the head. Food laws and Sabbath shadows are admitted as shadows — they point to the truth but are not the truth. The body of Christ, meaning the inner community of faculties, grows when the head is seen as the imaginative center from which all nourishment flows.

The third chapter is the liberation scene. If ye be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above. Here the human drama articulates the moral psychology of transformation. Rising with Christ means to identify consciously with the creative imagination rather than with the lower senses. When the self regards its life as hidden with Christ in God, it reorients desires, mortifies the members which are upon the earth, and puts off the old man with his deeds. The vices listed are not external crimes but inner attitudes: fornication, uncleanness, covetousness — the misdirected appetite for sensory validation. To mortify these members is to refuse the habitual imagining that keeps those forms alive. In their place one puts on the new man, renewed in knowledge after the image of him that created him. The new man is the conscious imagination at peace, compassionate, humble, forgiving, and above all loving. Love is described as the bond of perfectness because once imagination rules, all discord resolves into the unity of the image it pursues.

The household codes that follow are symbolic, not literal prescriptions for domestic order. Wives, husbands, children, fathers, servants, masters — each represents an aspect of inner life and how those aspects are to relate under the rule of the Christ within. The ‘‘wife’’ is the emotional receptivity, the ‘‘husband’’ the reflective will; the ‘‘children’’ are nascent tendencies; servants are the habits; masters are governing beliefs. The instruction to submit, to love, to obey, to do all heartily as to the Lord, is the call to reconfigure these inner relationships so that every faculty knows it serves the one imagination. When servants obey their masters not with eyeservice but in singleness of heart, habit serves purpose rather than tyrannizing it. In this way the entire psychic household becomes an instrument of creative imagining rather than a battleground of conflicting loyalties.

The tone throughout is not theoretical but experiential. Paul expresses joy in sufferings, a paradox that only the imaginative consciousness can understand. To bear sufferings and fill up that which is behind of the afflictions of Christ in my flesh is the willingness of the awakened self to remain identified with limitation long enough to transform it. This is the heroic element of the drama: imagination does not flee the human predicament; it enters and transmutes it from within. The apostle's bonds are the necessary constraints of embodiment chosen for the work of redemption. His labor is the operation of imagination that finds expression in action, teaching, and patient endurance.

The epistle warns again the believer to beware of judgments in matters of food and seasons, of voluntary humility and the worshipping of angels. These are the old mechanics of salvation that would enslave the mind to external measures. True spiritual maturity is inward and sovereign; it is not measured by observances but by the quality of imagination that governs life. The heart of the teaching is the mystery revealed: Christ in you, the hope of glory. This is not doctrine but discovery. When the living imagination is realized as present and active, glory is no future prize but a present condition. Hope is the confident expectancy of inner unfoldment. It is the persuasion that what is desired inwardly will be presented outwardly because imagination, being God, must inevitably express its image.

The closing chapter turns to the tools of maintenance: prayer, watchful thanksgiving, wise speech, a gracious conversation. To continue in prayer and watch in the same with thanksgiving is to remain attentively imaginative, cultivating a vigilant, grateful inner attitude that holds the chosen image. Prayer here is not pleading but faithful imagining, the steady persistence of attention in an assumed state until its experience becomes reality. Let your speech be seasoned with salt means speak with the savor of inward conviction; let your conduct toward those without be wise means administer your imagination so that it harmonizes with the communal dream. The sending of beloved messengers into the world of Colossae is an image of how parts of the psyche carry news to other parts, comforting, reporting, and consolidating the change.

Onesimus, the once-slave who becomes a beloved brother, is a vignette of transformation of habit. He is the servant aspect of the mind that, when converted by the living Christ, shifts allegiance from servitude to loving brotherhood. Archippus, told to take heed to the ministry received, is the latent assignment within the psyche waiting to be awakened. Epaphras, who labors fervently in prayer, is zeal, the affectionate relentlessness that refuses to allow the old state to remain. These characters are not persons at a distance but intimacies of the inner life, each playing its part in the drama of redemption.

The epistle closes with a gentle reminder: remember my bonds; grace be with you. It is a personal touch from the awakened self to the still-sleeping faculties. Bonds remind the reader that embodiment and limitation are chosen conditions for redemption. Grace is the ever-present creative power that answers the awakened intention. The whole letter, from beginning to end, instructs the inner listener in the art of imaginative sovereignty: recognize the Christ within, refuse the dominance of the senses and the dominion of external law, assume the new identity, and act from that identity until the outer world rearranges to its image.

Colossians is therefore a manual for the transformation of consciousness. It teaches that reality is not a fixed tableau but the inevitable response to the prevailing image in the mind. To be complete in him is to know that every lack is healed when the imagination assumes the state of the desired end and persists therein. The processes set forth are simple: identification with the head, inner death to the old identity, resurrection into the new man, steady attention in prayer, and gracious conduct in the world. These are the movements of the inner theater by which the soul reclaims its divinity.

Read as inner drama, every injunction takes on urgency. Beware of hollow philosophies that would distract the creative center. Beware of pious humility that substitutes external show for inner reality. Cultivate the full assurance of understanding by being rooted in the Christ who is nothing other than your creative imagination. Rehearse the judgments of the mind in the light of imaginal truth until the body obeys. In this way the Colossian vision is fulfilled: the reconciliation of all things, in heaven and on earth, by the one who images forth reality from the invisible. The book is not a distant theology but a living map by which the sleeper may awake and reign as the God he already is within.

Common Questions About Colossians

Can Colossians ground daily imaginal routines?

Yes; Colossians can serve as a practical blueprint for daily imaginal routines by translating its language into brief, disciplined exercises that reorder thought. Each morning assume the presence of the creative imagination and mentally inhabit a completed scene for your day, feeling detail and certainty. Before sleep replay the end as already accomplished so the subconscious accepts it. Midday return often to a two-minute elevation to 'set your mind above' visible facts, refusing contrary moods by immediately replacing them with the imagined state. Use writing to note inner changes and small evidences, reinforcing belief. Over weeks these simple acts become habitual, aligning feeling, thought, and behavior so the outer life harmonizes with your inner assumption. Colossians thus grounds a steady imaginal practice that produces tangible change.

What does 'set your mind above' mean for assumption?

To 'set your mind above' is an instruction to inhabit the consciousness of the fulfilled desire, to assume mentally the superior state and abide there as the only reality. It means deliberately lifting your attention from the visible facts and dwelling in the invisible state that precedes manifestation. For assumption practice it becomes the discipline of imagining with feeling that the aim is already completed; your imagination must be elevated because only from that higher regard will the subconscious accept and recreate outward conditions. Practically, retire nightly to a scene where your desire is realized, feel it as true, and persist until it hardens into conviction. Daytime attention should be brief and returned to the higher scene when tempted by evidence. 'Above' is not a place but a mood, an authoritative expectancy that governs outcome.

Are there Neville-style meditations based on Colossians?

Yes; one can create meditations that echo Colossians by making its themes operative in imaginal form. Start with a short 'I am' scene: lie quietly and affirm the creative imagination within, then construct a vivid end scene where circumstances reflect that inner Christ. Use sensory detail and feeling of completion; inhabit it until resistance subsides. Another is the 'put off/put on' exercise: notice a limiting thought, quietly refuse it, then replace it with a concrete image of the desired state and act inwardly from there for several minutes. A third is the 'mind above' elevation practiced at midday: close your eyes, lift attention from current facts, and hold an authoritative assumption for two to five minutes. Repeat daily, journaling subtle shifts. These meditations translate scriptural phrases into repeatable imaginal acts that reshape consciousness and life.

How does putting off/putting on relate to state changes?

Putting off and putting on describe the conscious shedding of contrary identities and the deliberate adoption of a new self-concept. Psychologically, the garments are patterns of thought and feeling; to put off is to refuse identification with fear, lack, or the past, and to put on is to clothe yourself with the conviction of the fulfilled desire. This is not moralizing but a technique: imagine and act from the new state until your subconscious accepts the change as fact. Repetition of inner acts solidifies neural pathways and feeling-tones, so the 'new garment' becomes natural. When outward circumstances resist, persist in the inner assumption and adjust behavior to match the imagined self; your actions will soon follow the changed imagination. Thus the drama of put off/put on is the method of metamorphosis where consciousness rewrites its habitual scene and births a transformed world.

How does Neville read Colossians’ 'Christ in you' theme?

To read 'Christ in you' is to recognize that the Christ of Scripture is the consciousness within you, the creative imagination that brings worlds into being. When you are told that Christ is in you it means your inner witness, the I AM, is the active source of all experience. Practical reading turns the phrase into an operating principle: assume the presence of the creative imagination in your present awareness until it governs feeling and expectation. Every desire is fulfilled when you live from that center, not as doctrine but as felt reality. Practices include dwelling in the assumption that the inner Christ has already formed the desired scene and persistently living from that fulfilled state. The community and circumstances are reflections of that inward presence; change the inner Christ and the outer world rearranges itself to match the new tone of consciousness.