An Insight about Christmas that Will Change Your Life Forever

Daily Spiritual Insight from the Story of The Little Prince

The Little Prince is going to trigger a massive change in the life of the pilot who has crashed in the desert. He will accompany the pilot on an inner journey that will totally transform how he understands himself, how he feels about himself.

But first the Little Prince is getting a clear picture of what inauthentic humans look like—what the false self that’s the ego produces as a sham version of humanity.

The king on the planet the Little Prince is visiting is the primary image: the ego is inflated in its grandiosity, mindful only of its own interests, utterly incapable of connecting with anyone else in a meaningful way.

The king sees himself as God, just as the ego sees itself as God. He imagines he rules the entire Universe.

The irony of this is that while the ego isn’t God, human beings in their essential being actually are divine!

And, of course, there’s a wider sense in which everything is divine, in that it’s all sourced in God. But we are talking here in the sense of our personal awareness of who we are.

The ego likes to think it’s God. However, when we become aware of our true nature, we realize we really are expressions of the divine—the self-manifestation of God, which is the meaning of the statement the early disciples of Jesus made that we are “offspring” of God.

When the disciples of Jesus realized that his presence among them had shed a new light on their own being, it took them into territory they had never traversed before.

In that culture, the idea that a human is divine was for the majority blasphemous. Most thought of God as so “other,” so not human—rather like the king on his throne.

How were they to express this new sense of themselves that had arisen in them? What words could they use?

The Roman Caesar was thought of as a god. Throughout the empire it was said, “Caesar is lord!”

The disciples of Jesus responded, “Jesus is lord.” And what they meant by this is that an ordinary human being, a carpenter turned teacher, contains all the fullness of the divine nature.

But Jesus is representative of all humans—and in this he differs from the Caesar. The Caesar was considered a god, whereas the rest of humanity were mere mortals.

But in the case of Jesus, it’s just the opposite. To say that Jesus is divine is to say that all humans are intrinsically divine. That’s the stunning revelation that came upon the disciples.

It came as a revelation from within their own deepest being, not as a piece of head knowledge.

The insight was so groundbreaking, changing utterly how they felt about themselves, that for a time they didn’t know what to do with it in terms of their mental understanding.

The Jewish tradition as most practiced it had no name for what the disciples were experiencing. However, their experience was described in their ancient writings—the idea that humans are the “image and likeness of God.” But this wasn’t in the everyday awareness of the people of that time.

Jesus evoked in people a sense of the reality of God. Not just God all around them, the Presence of God in creation, which he called “the kingdom.” But God as that infinite being in which our human beingness participates.

Which is why St. Paul said that “in God we live, and move and have our being.” And also why he called us divine offspring, daughters and sons of our divine Source.

So the Little Prince, on this first stop of his journey, is getting a clear sense of what humans are not. We are not individuals in our own right, independent like the Marlboro Man. We are not the ego inflated and writ large in the sky as if we were the source of everything.

But what we are is the opposite of all this—expressions of ultimate being, manifestations of God in countless forms, and therefore all intrinsically one.

In other words, unlike the king who thinks of himself in such an isolated way, superior to all else, our individual existence is entirely contingent on the beingness, the oneness, of our Source, with which we are all equal in terms of our inherent divinity.

Now that's something to ponder this Christmas season. Once see this, and the manger, the shepherds, the magi from the East all become symbols that have to do with you.

Christmas is about the birthing of who we really are in a world that's been in darkness about our true nature.