Colossians 2

Hidden in the Root: The Inner Drama of Spiritual Wholeness

Read as a psychological drama, Colossians 2 is a staged confrontation inside consciousness between two rival governments: the living Kingdom of Imagination (the Christ) and the small, rule-bound principality of the senses and inherited beliefs (the rudiments). The apostle’s voice is the reflective center of awareness — the part of you that observes the struggle, carries concern, and issues instruction. The places and persons named are not external geography but states of mind: Laodicea is the lukewarm, half-awakened attitude; philosophy and vain deceit are the persuasive, opinionated theories that would reduce interior reality to outward facts; circumcision made without hands and baptism are internal rites enacted in feeling rather than external ceremony. Reading the chapter this way reveals a consistent psychological map for inner transformation.

The opening confession of ‘‘great conflict’’ describes an inner war of care. This is the higher self’s vigilance for those who have not yet seen their own face — beings who mistake outer circumstance for identity. The longing to have hearts ‘‘comforted, being knit together in love’’ is the wish that fragmented parts consolidate around a single, coherent identity: consciousness recognizing itself as the source of creative life. ‘‘Full assurance of understanding’’ is inner certainty — the emotional knowing that the mystery of God, Father, and Christ refers to faculties within: awareness (Father), imagination (Christ), and their mysterious union which manifests life.

The phrase ‘‘in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge’’ places treasure in the creative faculty. The treasures are latent qualities — intuitive guidance, symbolic intelligence, inventive perception — that reside in the imaginal or Christ-state. To be ‘‘hid’’ means they are intrinsic and accessible only when one turns inward; they are not acquired by facts or doctrine but discovered by identification with the imaginal center.

‘‘Lest any man should beguile you with enticing words’’ is a psychological caution. Words and theories can be seductive; they flatter the intellect while emptying the imagination. The chapter insists that absence in flesh does not mean absence in spirit: the living power is present whenever imagination is assumed. ‘‘As ye have therefore received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk ye in him’’ translates into practice: once you have caught the felt-sense of the Christ-state, remain there. Rooted and built up implies planting the mood and nurturing it. Rooting is the initial assumption; building up is the steady maintenance of that mood until it informs perception and action.

‘‘Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit’’ distinguishes two ways the mind will try to steal interior authority. Some philosophies reduce the imagination to mere fancy, others to morality that denies imagination its power. ‘‘After the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world’’ names the repetitive, automatic beliefs inherited from culture that function like default programs. The ‘‘rudiments’’ are elemental thought forms — worry about scarcity, judgmental standards, habit-bound identities — that masquerade as common sense but actually imprison the creative center.

The book then makes its most decisive psychological claim: in this imaginal center ‘‘dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily’’ and ‘‘ye are complete in him.’’ Read psychologically, the ‘‘fullness’’ is the fullness of consciousness realized in imagination; the ‘‘bodily’’ presence points to the felt-sense embodiment of that center. To be complete here is to drop the notion of lacking and to accept that the imaginative faculty contains, within itself, the power to furnish inner wholeness. Completion is not waiting for outer evidence but taking up an identity as the creative source.

‘‘Circumcised with the circumcision made without hands’’ is a surgical image of inner surgery performed by attention and feeling rather than physical instruments. It names a shift from identification with the body of sense to the consciousness that slips away the ego’s claims. This ‘‘cutting’’ is the removal of the outer claim of sin, guilt, and the flesh’s insistence; it is an interior detachment from those stories that define you as less than a creator. It is not punitive; it is liberation from the old script.

Buried with him in baptism, and risen with him through faith of the operation of God: this is the dramatized process of imaginative enactment. Baptism is the act of entering an assumption — a symbolic plunge into the wished-for state. Burial describes the death of a worn identity; resurrection describes the rebirth of perception in which the inner truth now rules outward experience. ‘‘Faith of the operation of God’’ names faith not as mere belief but as operative assumption — the sustained imaginal act that changes inner content and, consequently, outer effect.

The ‘‘handwriting of ordinances’’ that is ‘‘blotted out’’ and ‘‘nailed to his cross’’ maps as the ledger of limiting beliefs and moral accounting kept by the ego. These are the internal contracts — you are too little, you are guilty, you are undeserving — which, when confronted by the imaginal surrender, lose their authority. To nail these ordinances is to fix them in the imaginative crucifixion: their governing power is ended because the consciousness that had given them life has changed. The ledger remains as memory but it no longer compels.

‘‘Having spoiled principalities and powers, he made a shew of them openly, triumphing over them in it’’ dramatizes the exposure and displacement of ruling thought-forms. ‘‘Principalities and powers’’ are those invisible rulers inside — inherited fear, social conditioning, ancestral narratives — that exercise dominance simply because we have given them attention. When the imaginal center takes sovereignty, those rulers are stripped of authority; their motives and mechanics are revealed as fabrications. Triumph is not annihilation but demystification: you see their smallness and refuse to be governed by them.

The counsel to ‘‘let no man therefore judge you in meat or drink or respect of an holyday’’ criticizes external judgments and ritual dependence. These ordinances are ‘‘shadows of things to come; but the body is of Christ.’’ Shadows are the symbolic practices that point to inner realities; if one holds the shadow as the real thing, the inner life is neglected. The ‘‘body of Christ’’ is the lived, felt experience of the imaginative center. The text elevates inner reality above ritual: rituals are useful signposts but they are not substitutes for the felt fact.

Further warnings against ‘‘voluntary humility and worshipping of angels’’ speak to the psychology of false modesty and the worship of intermediaries: to mistake a psychic impression, a vision, or a doctrine for the presence of the living creative center is to worship secondary images rather than the source. ‘‘Intruding into things which he hath not seen, vainly puffed up by his fleshly mind’’ describes inflation borne of unanchored mental constructs. Pride that rests on secondhand visions is still egoic and separate from the Christ-center.

The call to hold the Head is the chapter’s strategic practice instruction. The Head is the imaginal center; from it the body — the manifold faculties and outer life — receives nourishment and coherence. When attention is kept on the Head, joints and bands (habits and mental linkages) receive proper nourishment and the whole system grows according to divine increase. Discipline here is not legalism but consistent attention.

‘‘If ye be dead with Christ from the rudiments of the world, why…are ye subject to ordinances?’’ This rhetorical question is an inner wake-up call: if you have enacted death to the small self by immersive imaginative practice, why return to the very habits and rules that fed it? ‘‘Touch not; taste not; handle not’’ are the mechanical injunctions of an uncreative mind that believes restriction will save it. The chapter exposes their futility: they ‘‘perish with the using.’’ The energy of restriction exhausts itself; only the imaginal renewal generates lasting change.

The closing portrait of rites and humility that ‘‘have indeed a shew of wisdom’’ but lack honor to the flesh’s satisfaction points to the gap between surface piety and inner transformation. True honor to the body, here, is not neglect through asceticisms but enlivenment by inhabiting the imaginal center. Psychological health is the result of the imagination’s sovereignty being embodied.

Practically, this chapter maps a program: recognize the imaginal center as the place where ‘‘all treasures’’ dwell; assume its feeling; perform the inner rites (circumcision without hands, baptism of assumption) by deliberately adopting and maintaining the mood of the wished-for state; watch the ledger of old beliefs lose authority; refuse substitutional doctrine that keeps you in the shadow; keep attention on the Head so the body reorganizes; and interpret every fear, rule, or ritual as a potential shadow to be transmuted by sustained imagination. The drama resolves when the inner witness sees that what was thought to be external and limited was always a play within consciousness — and that imagination, rightly assumed and felt, is the creative agent that turns private mood into public fact.