I love Christmas, and always have. I was born exactly one week before the day, and it’s always been the happiest time of the year, for me. Particularly when I was a child, I recall feeling the “Christmas Spirit” as a very real, tangible presence that would come and dwell in my heart during this time of year, something I’m sure many of you out there have also experienced.

For some time, this feeling faded, as I questioned the religious doctrines of my upbringing, and the real meaning of Christmas became less clear for me. I still enjoyed the traditions, movies, and celebrations, and felt there was something special about them, but wasn’t sure quite what it was. Maybe you’ve gone through this, too.

More recently, as I’ve come to my own understanding of a deeper meaning of Christmas, it’s presence has grown in me, once again. 

You could say that I needed to develop a better understanding of Christmas in order  to fully allow it’s “spirit” into my experience. Perhaps it’s just my nature to need to know. But why is Christmas such a mystery?

If you were to ask 30 or so random people, “What is the meaning of Christmas,” I’d bet you’d get at least 4 or 5 different types of answers.

One type would say that it’s a celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ, another that it’s a Christianized pagan holiday, yet another that it’s a capitalist plot to create an annual 4th-quarter surge in profits, and still another might whisper esoterically that it’s an astrological allegory of the Winter Solstice. 

So, who has it right? Could they all have it right? Is there some deeper truth behind all of the various Christmas traditions, both secular and sacred, pagan and Christian? Personally, I think there is.

Origins and Evolution of Christmas

It’s no secret that the origins of many Christmas traditions are unrelated to Christ and Christianity. Our modern Christmas is a sort of patchwork of various traditions and mythologies, mostly from ancient Europe.

In fact, any culture around the world that’s far enough from the equator for the significance of the Winter Solstice to be obvious has generally always had some kind of tradition to mark the occasion, usually a celebration. Some of these practices later contributed to the development of our modern Christmas traditions.

Winter Solstice is the shortest, darkest day of the year in the Northern hemisphere, December 21st, and is also the point at which the return to increased light and warmth begins. So it has often been celebrated with light, warmth, and festivities to carry on the torch of happiness in this darkest of times.

For instance, the Roman celebration of Saturnalia was a wild festival of reckless abandon more reminiscent of Mardis Gras than our modern Christmas, yet it did include some traditions which were passed on when it merged into the Christ’s Mass, or Christmas. These included gift-giving and sending greeting cards, which eventually became Christmas cards. Perhaps the Romans were inclined to celebrate the Solstice in a less Wintery way, since they were not as far from the equator, and enjoyed relatively milder seasons.

The greatest contributors to modern Christmas traditions, however, were the more Northern Germanic peoples’ Yule or Midwinter celebrations. Most of the European Christmas traditions we’re all familiar with originated in these “Pagan” festivities, from caroling to the Christmas tree itself.

Similarly to Halloween, Midwinter/Yule was considered to be a time when the veil between the world of spirits and ordinary reality was thinner than usual. It was also a critical time for preparing for the coming “famine months” of January and February, when all there would be to eat was what was stored from the Fall harvest.

Because of the tremendous significance of the seasons for these northerly people, with Winter frost and starvation being a very real threat, preparing for the coming period was literally a matter of life and death. Yet, because much livestock needed to be slaughtered to save on feed over the Winter, it was also a time of celebration and feasting, where everyone would eat much more meat and perishables than they were accustomed to.

Not only was food plentiful, but the wine and beer from the Fall harvest would also be fermented and ready to drink about this time.

It’s easy to see how circumstances of the cycles of agriculture and seasons in the North all came together to produce a time of plenty, merriment, and also spiritual significance in the darkest part of the year.

Yule, or Yuletide, was the Norse/Germanic tradition of burning a very large log during this time, which gave both warmth and a convenient “timer” to determine how long the festivities should last. Some consider the Yule burning to be the precursor to the “12 Days of Christmas.” So, the Midwinter and Yule celebrations were all about eating, drinking, and singing by the fire, giving and receiving gifts, and preparing for the coming difficult times.

Some have even speculated that the tradition of gift-giving may have also had the double purpose of helping those less successful members of the community, so that they would have more stores for the Winter, a kind of ancient annual community welfare system, so-to-speak.

The Christmas tree and other indoor evergreen decorations have been traced historically to at least 400AD Germanic Europeans, predating anything resembling our modern concept of Christmas. This was likely their chosen Winter decor because of the symbolic significance of evergreens, which stay green throughout the Winter, and also maintain their color for a long time once harvested.

We can imagine how bringing this greenery into the home during Winter would be a convenient way to remember the promise of new life in the coming Spring, and maybe even an animistic way to get some of that evergreen Winter-survival spirit into the house and family.

Christification of the Winter Solstice

As most people know by now, the Christian church adopted many elements of pagan beliefs and rituals into their own, in order to make it more appealing to their converts, and Christmas is certainly no exception. Our modern Christmas is a blend of these ancient Pagan traditions with elements of Christianity, of course primarily the story of Christ’s birth, with secularized elements like Santa Claus added later.

Since most people know by now that elements of the Christ story are also mythological, I don’t want to spend too much time laying it all out. Anyone who has watched Part 1 of Zeitgeist, for instance, already knows that there were many mythological figures with practically identical elements of their stories matching the story of Christ, including his birth.

Many of these figures, such as Mithras, Apollo, Horus, Osiris, Heracles, Dionysus, and Adonis, were also said to be born around the Winter Solstice, for instance, often under circumstances that would sound familiar to us from our traditional Christmas story. Most of these are also solar deities.

The Indian Vedic tradition’s figure of Krishna is probably the most similar to Christ of all. Krishna is believed to have been a God in the form of a man, the second person of a divine trinity, prophesied by wise men and stars to be born of divine conception to a (possibly virginal) member of a royal lineage, a performer of miracles, one who cast out demons, and was killed by being hung on a tree, then died and descended to Hell before rising again to visit disciples and ascend to heaven, as witnessed by many followers.

However, I disagree with the makers of Zeitgeist and others that these correlations should necessarily lead us to believe that the man Jesus didn’t exist. Rather, we should simply understand that elements of his story were mythologized in order to make him fit an archetypal pattern, and not without good reason. The mythology itself is extremely meaningful.

The same is true of the Christmas story. There are many other mythological figures said to be born of a virgin under impoverished or covert circumstances, whose birth was predicted by wise men or astrologers, etc. Rather than seeing this as disillusioning, I recommend seeing these elements of the story as conveying something deeper than mere historical facts.

So, What Is Christmas?

You might be wondering, where is all this going? Does this really help us understand Christmas, just to know that it’s an odd patchwork of ancient traditions eventually merged with Christianity, and then secularized in the modern age?

I believe that it does. In the same way that we can come to a greater understanding of universal spirituality by studying the various world’s religious traditions, so can we also derive a more objective, universal meaning behind Christmas by studying all it’s correlates and precursors in the world. 

Although this Winter Solstice holiday has manifested in a variety of ways in different cultures over time, I believe there is perennial truth in it. 

For starters, this time of year mythologically represents the birth of the solar deity, whether in the form of Mithras, Apollo, Horus, Osiris, or Krishna. This birth takes place not in the bright brilliance of the Summer Solstice, but in its opposite, the deepest darkness, at which the fading luminosity turns again from its lowest point, is “reborn,” and begins ascending once more.

How fitting, then, that this be the time of the birth of the promise embodied in the warm light of the Solar Child, the Christ Child, a promise of salvation from the cold darkness.

However, lest we fall into the mistake of believing this myth is merely a metaphor for the seasons, I would argue that even the seasons themselves are merely a metaphor for an even more significant inner reality. The true significance of the Christmas story, I believe, lies within.

A Light in the Darkness

The archetype of Christmas is an archetype of Light in the Darkness. Not only are most mythological iterations of Christmas about a solar deity being born in the darkest time of the year, but we can see this very plainly from the entire theme and aesthetic of Christmas.

We hang bright lights and colorful ribbon and tinsel, so that the longer nights are aglow with an outer manifestation of brightness and warmth, in spite of the increasingly dreary Winter landscape of nature. The conical Christmas tree, bedecked with ornaments and lights, reaches up heavenward, to an angel or guiding star illuminated with divine Light. We sing carols, often holding candles in the night.

Practically every Christmas story you’ve ever come across is a story of light coming into dark situations, love being rekindled in the most hopeless moments, through the intercession of either some divine hand, the force of love acting through the human heart, or often both.

All of the old pagan festivities are more or less about this, as well. The yule log burning brightly, fireside festivities, singing and feasting, all are outward representations to remind us of joy, love, and light in the darkest time. Even the debauchery of Saturnalia can be seen as a way of finding cheer in the drear, and certainly the tradition of gift-giving is a way of conjuring joy and gratitude, and even helping the needy in their darkest hour.

By observing all of these common patterns, we circle closer and closer to the central meaning. Still, these are surface manifestations, beautiful though they may be. Is there something even deeper that they represent?

What is this Divine Light, and what is this darkness which it comes into, and transfigures?

Since we’re talking about a mystical Christmas here, I think a great way to approach it is to see how this Light is defined in the most mystical part of the Christian Gospels, the first chapter of John.

The Universal Light

In the first chapter of John, Christ is described as the “Word,” which is a translation of the Greek philosophers’ Logos, a concept of the creative intelligence, or that which gives order to the universe. This Logos, John tells us, was both “in the beginning with God,” and simultaneously “was God,” meaning it is somehow both God and yet seemingly separate from God, hence God’s “Son.”

John 1 also states that “Through him all things were made,” thus establishing this “Son” as that part of God which is the Creator of this world, and perhaps most importantly, he asserts that this Christ-Logos-Creator was “The Light of all men,” which was later “made flesh” in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. Furthermore, it says that this Light “Came into the darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not.” 

The fact that Christ is described as the Light of all men before it was “made flesh” in the body of Jesus is an extremely significant statement sadly lost on most Christians today. It suggests that Christ was an embodied manifestation of a Light that is universal, and lives within all people, perhaps even all beings.

This understanding could completely change the interpretation of Jesus’s statements just two chapters later in John 3:16, for instance. In a sense, the entire Christian doctrine of salvation rests on exactly which “I” Jesus meant, when he said, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life.” I Jesus the man, or I the Christ-Logos, Light of all men?

From the mystical perspective, this all makes perfect sense. Many mystics encounter God as Light, and ultimately realize that they are one with that Light, that their separation from it is a kind of illusion, the result of being embodied in flesh and having an existence that is limited in space and time. This implies that there is only One Light shining in all of us, a Light of all men or beings, so-to-speak.

Near-death experiencers also frequently encounter a personal God in the form of Light at the end of a tunnel, sometimes wearing a form or “mask” of some religious figure like Christ or Buddha, but very often simply as a radiant Light full of love, intelligence, and indescribable wisdom. I can’t help feeling this light encountered by the dead is none other than the Christ-Logos-Creator described in John 1.

But how can it also be both one with and different from God, and the “Light of all men,” or all beings?

Infinite and Personal God

How this Light can be both the Creator of the universe and the “Light of all men” can only be understood when we approach the deeper truths of the mystical traditions, or “Perennial Philosophy,” to use the term coined by Aldous Huxley. That is to say, forms of religion and spirituality which are primarily based on mystical experience, or direct experiences of God, or Ultimate Reality.

The idea that the Logos-Christ could be both one with but also separate from God, and also the Light of all beings may sound confusing at first, but more mystical concepts of God can shed light on how this could be. For instance, in the religions and spiritual philosophies of India, in which mystics were seen as teachers or even embodiments of God rather than persecuted as they were in the West, God can and often is seen as both.

This is because in their traditions, it’s often understood that God exists at different levels of Reality. At the level of Ultimate Reality, God is infinite and transcendent, therefore “impersonal” in the sense that it wouldn’t make sense to pray to or have a relationship to such a Divine Reality.

However, this infinite transcendent God also “dreams up” this world of duality and manifestation, and then plays the dream roles of Creator God, lesser celestial beings, and Souls; even the material world itself is a manifestation of this one reality. Paramhansa Yogananda, who was keen on pointing out the similarities of Christianity and Vedantic wisdom, described how this mystical concept of God can apply to the Christian concept of the Trinity.

In this alternative way of understanding the Trinity, the Logos-Christ or “God the Son” is how God manifests in a personal form, within the illusion of the Dream of Maya, while the infinite Ground of All Being (God the Father) is entirely transcendent, being the Ultimate Reality behind everything, formless and Infinite, not so much a person per-se as the essence of all existence.

In this model, God takes on this sort of “cloak” of limitation to be a personal God, however grand it might seem to us, in order to exist within the Dream of Creation and relate to yet smaller dream-beings like us, who are also “God in drag,” as Ram Dass put it. This way God has of existing within the Dream of Creation serves as an interface between the truly infinite God the Father, and the Dream that God conjures into being, with all it’s Souls inhabiting it.

But what is it that God “cloaks” Godself in, in this model?

Because God the Father is ultimately infinity, which we can imagine as an endless ocean of luminosity, in order to dream all of this into existence, God first needs to create the fundamental backdrop template for all limitation, which is what we experience as space and time, or dimensions of limitation. This backdrop is the fundamental illusion of “darkness" or non-existence, which provides an environment in which God’s infinite Light may shine through in myriad ways, creating enumerable forms.

This Light shining through the cloak of darkness is not limited to the personal Logos-Christ-God either, but is also shining in us; it is the very awareness which illuminates our entire existence. Without that light, we would be merely a machine, an object; instead, our limited, embodied being is lit up by that divine spark of awareness, and ultimately it is what we most essentially are. Therefore, it makes sense to describe it as the “Light of all beings,” as John did.

If you find the above difficult to grasp, you’re not alone. These mysteries have been puzzled over for thousands of years. Allow me to offer a simple metaphor which I think can help make it clear.

If you’re not really sure how all this relates to Christmas, hang with me, I promise I’m going to bring it all back home.

God’s Dream Blanket

Imagine that there is a large dome of light, and over that light you drape a blanket, covering the light. This blanket has holes in it which allow the light to shine through here or there, and sequins of varying shades to give the light color. These holes are not random, but are arranged to make forms such as stars, planets, clouds, flowers, and people; in people, the light shines out most clearly.

Let’s imagine you are one of those blanket people. Your whole existence is in this blanket that covers this light. Since you’ve always been a blanket person, you probably have no idea that there’s a light beneath; you probably just think that this whole blanket world you see all around you, and you yourself, are all there is.

As a normal blanket person, you would have no inkling of the true nature of yourself, the blanket, or that strange luminosity which gives everything in your blanket-world its existence. You would take it all for granted, and you might never question it.

Yet, let’s say that occasionally some blanket people have an experience which reveals to them the true nature of this one big light shining out from beneath the blanket, making all of these forms of this blanket-world, and shining most brightly in the form of what we call consciousness, or awareness. These would be blanket mystics, not unlike the mystics we have in our world.

These blanket mystics somehow managed to recognize the true nature of themselves and the whole of their blanket reality. They realized that in the highest sense, although there appear to be this and that thing here and there, with the darkness of blanket between them, the ultimate truth behind it all is just this One Light. The blanket only makes it seem like “this” and “that,” by creating an illusionary “space” in-between them, by selectively obscuring the Light.

Furthermore, they would also realize that the uniqueness of each thing or person in this blanket-world is purely a product of the limitations imposed on the light by the blanket; what defines their qualities as individuals is simply the peculiar ways in which the blanket limits the Light in each of their unique cases.

The Light giving all of them their very existence and awareness, however, is singular (one light beneath), omnipresent (behind the whole blanket), and transcendent (not the blanket).

All metaphors have their limitations, and in this case, we still have a fundamental duality between the light and the blanket. Still, I think it’s quite useful to illustrate how, within the illusion of God’s Dream, the universal Light could simultaneously be the transcendent infinite God, the personal creator God, and each and every Soul, all at the same time.

Now, simply take this metaphor and make it more 3-dimensional, to apply it to our world. Expand the Light from a dome underneath the blanket to an endless omnipresent, luminous backdrop behind everything, and make the blanket that covered the light into space-time itself, like a 3-D overlay or film, which limits this Light beneath, providing a backdrop for the Light to shine through here or there, as you or me, this or that, just like the blanket.

You could also say it’s like the way a film darkens the light shining through it selectively, to make the figures and scenes of a movie. This is another two-dimensional example that can help us have some idea of how all we experience is produced by selective limitation of the Ultimate Reality of Light, beneath, behind, and beyond it. The Light all of us truly are.

Finally, we can stretch the metaphor slightly, and imagine the Christ-Logos-Son as the first and greatest opening in the blanket that created all the other openings to make all the forms, the ultimate brightest point where the infinite Light shines through. I hope this metaphor is helping you to see how its at least conceivable that this Light can be the transcendent infinite “God the Father,” “God the Creator,” and the “Light of all men” that shines in every Soul, all at once.

Okay, so how does all of this relate to Christmas?

Illuminating the Dream

Going back to the theme of Christmas being a Light in the Darkness, the birth of the solar child in the deepest heart of the darkest day of the year, and the kindling of the Light of love and joy in the bleakest of times, hopefully the mystical meaning is starting to emerge. 

Just as the Light of the Solar Child and all it represents is born in the darkness, so is the “Light of all men” born into this Dream of darkness which “comprehends it not,” and which veils in ignorance the true essence of Light that makes up each one of us.

Actually, the term “comprehended” is considered by some an inaccurate translation, with a better one being, “and the darkness has not overcome it.” Both work, in my opinion, because the darkness of this illusion neither comprehends nor overcomes this Divine Light within us, at least not permanently.

What else is this dynamic, but every Christmas story we have ever seen? From King Herod trying to kill the baby Jesus, to the miserly Scrooge, greedy Mr. Potter from It’s a Wonderful Life, even right up to Buddy’s cantankerous workaholic father in Elf; all are cases of the darkness not knowing the Light, people who have become lost in the mental labyrinth of their identities, desires, rigidity, and delusion.

From a mystical perspective, these “lost” souls are points where the brightness of the Light has been obscured by the illusions of space-time darkness and separation, have been dimmed by ignorance of their true nature.

Yet, into this darkness comes always the proverbial Light, eventually transforming or overcoming the darkness which attempted to snuff it out, revealing it’s divine and untameable nature. Christ is born safely in a lowly manger in the night, Scrooge realizes the value of love and giving, the Grynch’s small heart “grew three sizes that day.”

These are all a singular story, told in a thousand different ways. They are a story of a Light shining in the darkness, and that darkness attempting to limit or even snuff out that light, but the Light shines even brighter as a result, and the darkness does not overcome it. This is why the rebirth of the sun’s light on the darkest day of the year is just another outer, seasonal metaphor for this inner reality.

The reason we love this story and want to tell it over and over is because it is our own story, the only story there is. It is the tale of God Dreaming, struggling with the Dream, and overcoming it by virtue of the Divine nature shining through, in spite of all odds.

Each of us carry out this same struggle, the burden of despair, regret, hopelessness, anger, jealousy, and all the rest of it. All arise from our forgetting our true nature as the divine Light of joyful, loving consciousness. All are the ways in which the artificial darkness of God’s Dream seems to enclose around us and try to snuff out this Light that we are, yet we persevere and shine on.

Yet, just one question remains: Why love? Why joy? Why giving?

The Gift of Love

The key to understanding this, I believe, lies in the teaching offered to us by the Vedantic traditions of the three-fold qualities of the infinite Light, which is also our very own awareness: Sat-Chit-Ananda, often translated as Existence-Consciousness-Bliss. In a nutshell, it’s these ancient mystics’ realization that this Light of our consciousness is not merely a neutral awareness, but that it has these intrinsic qualities.

In other words, in a similar way to how water has qualities of transparency, wetness, and flowing, awareness is the essence of existence, consciousness, and bliss or happiness. When we feel more blissful in some moments, it’s because our awareness has expanded, and been freed from the delusions which normally constrict it.

Think about it, in joyful moments you’ve had, did you feel more aware, or less? I’m willing to bet you’d say more, a feeling of expansion and brightness.

That’s because when our Ananda or blissfulness expands, so do the other elements, “Sat” or existence, and “Chit” or consciousness, because they’re just three qualities of one fundamental thing, the very thing we most essentially are. They are qualities of the Light I’ve been writing about here, the Light that illuminates our every experience, which we call “consciousness.”

So, that means every experience of love, happiness, or joy we have ever had, or ever will, is simply a temporary experience of a greater fullness of our own essence, that Light. We just call it “Love” when it happens because of another person, or “joy” when it happens under other circumstances, etc.

You could say that each of these moments is like the clouds parting, allowing a sunbeam to shine through. Our true nature is the sun, and these moments only seem special because they temporarily liberate our true essence of Light from the clouds of delusion, allowing it to shine into the dream of this body and mind more fully, for a time.

Though we may call it by many names depending on circumstances, the reality is that joy, love, peace, and ecstasy are simply moments of liberation of the very Light that we most essentially are. 

Every time a person rediscovers the true nature of the divine Love which they are, the divine Joy of their very own being, they become like a sun, a solar child, and being “Lit from Within,” they radiate their Light freely. Realizing that they don’t need external things to enjoy this divine source of all happiness and goodness within, they are happy to serve others, to give others what they need, to be more loving, generous, and kind.

When we awaken to our true nature as this Light, we simply radiate love without requiring any conditions from others or the world around us. We become love, or rather realize it’s the essence of what we are and have always been, and therefore don’t require any outer experience to create it. We only need to release the self-imposed shackles of illusion, the false identity with these limited forms of body and mind.

I think that’s why the darkness can’t overcome the Light in all these Christmas stories, because the Light is its own source, just as it is within each of us.

Although it seems like the light is struggling in the darkness, and the darkness seems greater and more powerful, the “good news” and miraculous truth revealed by the mystics is that the Light is, in fact, the Ultimate Reality, and the illusion of darkness is merely a play-space or theatre set that infinite ground of Luminosity dreamed up, to shine into.

Our very essence is that Light, and the darkness of our bodies, minds, and lives can become illuminated when we liberate ourselves from the illusion of separateness. Knowing the Truth of ourselves and selflessly helping one another, we can encourage that essence to shine within all of us unobstructed, more and more. Then, together, like Christmas lights strewn about a universal tree, we can illuminate and transform the darkness of this dream.

Merry Christmas, may you know the Light of Love you truly are, and be a beacon and a warm hearth for all who struggle with the darkness.