1 Corinthians 15

Rehearsing Resurrection: The Inner Drama of Renewal

Read as a map of consciousness rather than as a chronicle of events, 1 Corinthians 15 is a staged psychological drama in which Paul, speaking as the inner teacher, describes the movement from the dream of separation into the awakening that imagination makes possible. The chapter is not primarily about corpses and tombs; it is about states of mind that call themselves dead, the appearances those states produce, and the one creative Principle that relieves the dream and brings the sleeper home.

The opening assertion — the gospel that was received and in which one stands — names the ground of the drama: a conviction planted in consciousness that functions as salvific orientation. To 'stand' in this gospel is to inhabit an assumption about reality. Salvation here is not a forensic transaction but a psychological orientation: keeping in memory the imagined certainty of resurrection is to maintain the inner posture that rescues perception from the sleep of literalism.

When Paul says Christ 'died' and 'rose again,' he is narrating an internal event of transformation. 'Death' is the interior acceptance of limitation — the conviction that finite senses and material reports define all that is. 'Burial' is the immersion in that conviction; 'rising' is the imagination reclaiming its creative birthright. The appearances of the risen One to Cephas, the Twelve, five hundred brethren and to Paul himself are not historical roll calls but accounts of inner witnesses and corroborations that attend an awakening. These witnesses are distinct registers of awareness: the intimate witness (Cephas/Peter), the relational covenant (the Twelve), the crowd-sensed conviction (the five hundred), and the late but catalytic inner voice (Paul). Their combined testimony represents how different powers and facets of consciousness validate an emergent reality when imagination brings it into being.

The chapter's argumentative hinge — that if there is no resurrection our faith is vain — is a psychological principle: if imagination cannot change the experienced world, then faith in imagination is meaningless. Yet the chapter asserts the opposite: imagination does change habitual experience. The 'resurrection' is the creative act in human consciousness that transmutes the deathly conviction of separation into the living awareness of unity. To deny resurrection is to remain hypnotized by external facts; to affirm it is to exercise the imaginal faculty that re-forms perception and yields new outcomes.

Paul's paradox — that death came through Adam but life comes through Christ — becomes a taxonomy of inner states. 'Adam' names the primal self-identification with the senses and with inherited conditioning: the ego-state that confuses form with identity. That 'in Adam all die' means that identification with appearance leads inevitably to diminishing, to loss and to the suffering born of believing form is final. 'Christ' names the consciousness of imagination and the power to quicken: to apprehend oneself as creative, as cause, and therefore to make life where earlier there was only decay. 'Christ the firstfruits' is the prototype of imaginative victory; the one who rises is the precedent by which others can follow. The 'order' in which the risen come — Christ first, then those who belong to him at his coming — sketches the progressive stages of inner transformation: a pioneering creative assumption that, when inhabited, produces a cascade of changed states in the inner community.

The chapter's meditation on bodies — natural versus spiritual, terrestrial versus celestial — is particularly useful when read psychologically. 'Natural body' names the persona bound to sensory evidence and to habitual meanings; it is sown and subject to corruption. 'Spiritual body' names the quality of consciousness that imagination gives: not some nonmaterial ghost, but a new way of being — incorruptible, glorious, powerful — which appears when inner assumptions are revised. The seed metaphor shows the imaginal process precisely: what is sown (a belief or image) must 'die' as an old orientation for a new form to be produced; the seed does not carry the outward stalk, but the potentiality that unfurls as a different expression. In psychological terms: you must abandon an identity's factual claim for imagination's possibility to mature into lived reality.

Questions about 'how the dead are raised' become questions about how fixed, fossilized patterns are altered. The chapter's blunt 'Thou fool' cuts to a practical instruction: in psychological creativity, literal-mindedness is the obstacle. The resurrection does not transpire through better logic about the past; it transpires when the inner artist (imagination) receives and clothes potential with living feeling. Different 'glories' — sun, moon, stars; terrestrial, celestial — signify differences in qualitative states of consciousness. The resurrection does not erase difference; it upgrades it. Each faculty, relationship, and role appears in a transformed mode commensurate with the imaginal assumption that now governs the field.

When Paul speaks of 'we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye,' he gives instruction for practice. Sleep here is the trance of believing in limitation; the 'change in a moment' is the instant shift that imagination effects when a new assumption is sustained. The 'last trumpet' is the symbol of a decisive internal signal — a reorientation that punctures the hypnotic narrative and allows inner sight to register a new world. It is not a public auditory event but a psychological pivot, a resolute assumption enacted in feeling that reorders perception.

'Death is swallowed up in victory' is the climactic psychological claim: the last enemy is not literal mortality but the belief in separation and the law-bound ego that enforces it. The 'sting of death is sin' — sin here signifies the habitual misuse of imagination; the 'strength of sin is the law' names the rigid rules by which the ego defends scarcity. Victory is granted through the conscious use of imagination: by assuming the truth of the desired state until it expresses in experience, the power of the law-bound ego dissolves and the living reality of freedom appears.

The odd, forensic lines — baptisms for the dead and 'I die daily' — are unmistakably inner practices. Baptism 'for the dead' points to rites of revision meant to release past identities that continue to haunt the present. Ritualized acknowledgment of what once seemed final is an imaginal practice aimed at freeing consciousness from antiquated claims. 'I die daily' is the habit of surrender: a daily crucifixion of egoic certainties so that the creative I can be reborn, again and again, into fresh expression. This is not morbid self-negation but disciplined revision — the consistent reimagining that breaks the wheel of repetition and lifts the individual onto a spiral of ascent.

Finally, Paul's closing exhortation to be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord translates into a psychological mandate: remain committed to the creative assumption, do not be sidetracked by contrary reports, and keep imagining until the new world consolidates. The labor is not wasted because imagination is the cause; the inner practice has observable consequences. The gospel in this chapter is thus a method: recognize which state you currently inhabit (Adam-like, sleep-bound, factual), intentionally adopt the resurrected assumption (Christ-like, imaginal, living), and persist until your inner witness corroborates the change.

Read this way, 1 Corinthians 15 becomes a manual for inner transformation. It teaches that what appears as death is a belief state open to revision, that imagination is the active Principle that quickens, and that the 'resurrection' is an ordinary psychological event when we take seriously the creative faculty within. The drama moves from entombment to emergence, from multiple interior witnesses to communal confirmation, and from law-bound limitation to the liberated reign of imaginative consciousness. The senses show a world of endings; imagination reveals continuity and increases the measure of life. To practice resurrection is therefore to re-script the inner narrative, to cultivate the assumption of life, and to watch as the world conforms to the new inner seeing.