The Rainforest Outside the Garden: Reclaiming the Cosmic Christ
An exploration of Ethiopian mysticism, the 'lost' scriptures, and the science of a living universe
Ethiopian Church of Saint George, Lalibela
With this new year begins a new era of spiritual consciousness. As a follow-on to my previous exploration in Finding the Fractal Christ, my new spiritual “pilgrimage,” the Era of Cosmic Christ Consciousness, will lead me deeper into the mystical heart of Christianity. To navigate this expansive spiritual territory, I have chosen the framework of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, a tradition that has faithfully preserved ancient Christian mysteries and scriptures lost to the Western world for centuries. This essay outlines the structured path of research, study, and spiritual practice I will undertake to model a contemporary initiation into mystical Christianity.
The Foundation: Understanding the Unified Christ
From Fractal Quest to Tewahedo
In my 2024 work, Finding the Fractal Christ: An Integrative Spiritual Quest, I explored the repeating, infinite patterns of the divine through an integrative lens. I look toward this new journey not as a detour, but a natural and necessary evolution.
If the “Fractal Christ” helped reveal the divine pattern through its parts, the “Cosmic Christ” invites us into the ancient, unified heart of the whole. To facilitate this expansion, I will embark on a customized but structured spiritual curriculum to learn essential teachings of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church (EOTC)—a tradition that has preserved the “secret” mysteries of Christianity for nearly two millennia.
The Rainforest Outside the Walled Garden: An Analogy for Understanding and Accessibility
Think of Western Christianity as a well-pruned but “walled garden,” beautiful but strictly bordered. The Ethiopian Tewahedo tradition is like a vast “ancient rainforest” nearby. It contains the same original seeds (essential sacred scriptural frameworks), while allowing every vine and “secret” flower to grow organically—without hybridization, cross-pollination, or ornamentation—for two thousand years. To find the “Cosmic Christ,” we must step out of the garden and into the rainforest.
Return to the Enchanted World in an Expanded Universe
Disenchantment
The timing of this profound shift is hardly random. We are living through a quiet crisis of “disenchantment.” In the West, Christianity as a religion is in decline, often reduced to dry moralism or abstract systematic theology—a faith of the head, severed from the weird, wild reality of the spirit. Clerics, commentators and practitioners have analyzed the garden so thoroughly that we have forgotten how to smell the flowers. Newer generations yearn for more.
The Ethiopian tradition never severed that expansive spiritual link. It held on to the “Narrower” and “Broader” scriptural canons that the West discarded, preserving a worldview where the veil between heaven and earth is gossamer-thin.
This matters in 2026 because the spiritual hunger of our cultural moment is not for more cultural arguments, but rather for experiential encounters. We are seeing a massive resurgence of interest in the “lost” books of the Bible—texts like 1 Enoch and the Epistula Apostolorum (Epistle of the Apostles)—precisely because they speak to a cosmos teeming with angels, watchers, and direct revelations from the Risen Christ.
The EOTC is the only major Christian tradition that kept these “secret” post-resurrection teachings at the center of its life, not the fringes. This tradition offers us a glimpse of the Epistula Apostolorum, where the Risen Lord instructs his disciples on the mysteries of the end times and the nature of God before Christ’s Ascension. This is the “Cosmic Christ” not as a modern invention, but as an ancient memory and living spiritual Truth.
As the center of gravity for Christianity shifts to the Global South, we are finally ready to listen to an African Christian theology that predates Western colonialism from the only part of Africa that never was colonized. We are ready to learn that the “secret” teachings, though culturally distant, were never really hidden. They were just waiting for us to have the eyes to see them.
Disclosure
Our yearning for more “encounters” as experiential truth also happens to coincide with a growing demand for public disclosure of the truth about what are now called Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP, aka UFOs). The non-human intelligence of UAP serve as the current form of angels, watchers and source of revelation in this new era of spiritual consciousness.
A growing catalog of documentaries includes numerous highly-credible testimonies of former government employees involved with the U.S. government’s cover-up of UAP retrievals of both technologically advanced craft and their “biologics”—beings associated with those craft—dating back to the end of World War II and the Roswell incident. According to these accounts, the government and covert private organizations with no accountability have been involved in reverse-engineering retrieved UAP technologies as well as ongoing communications with UAP for decades.
In his recent book, Imminent: Inside the Pentagon Hunt for UFOs, Luis Elizondo, former head of a secret Pentagon program collecting information about UAP, states unequivocally, that we are not alone, “they” are here, and have been for some time. Elizondo writes that, “Some, in the theological communities,” may view the topic as requiring “imminent dialogue” as a new paradigm emerges for humanity, while others may view UAP as the beginning of a new imminent world view about our place in the universe.
In this context, the timing of famed director Steven Spielberg’s latest anticipated UFO movie, Disclosure Day, cannot be coincidental. Clearly, we need new frameworks now to accommodate the “imminent” revealed truth about UAP and its implications.
Synthesis of Science and Spirituality
Recent scientific breakthroughs are finally dismantling the “clockwork universe” of materialism, offering a startling validation of the ancient Ethiopian worldview. Theories like Panpsychism and Integrated Information Theory (IIT) now suggest that consciousness is not a lucky accident of evolution but a fundamental property of the cosmos—implying that the universe is not inert or “dead” matter, but a vibrant, living, interconnected web of awareness. This resonates profoundly with the Tewahedo concept of a “sacramental universe,” where nature itself is alive and responsive, validating the Enochic view that the created order possesses its own form of agency and “proto consciousness.”
Simultaneously, quantum physics and neurotheology are bridging the gap between the mystic and the mechanic. Sir Roger Penrose’s Orchestrated Objective Reduction (Orch OR) theory proposes that our brains operate at a quantum level, connecting us to the fundamental geometry of the universe—a modern echo of the ancient Logos, the divine “Reason” that holds all things together. Furthermore, neurotheology has shown that the ascetic practices preserved in Ethiopia—such as the rhythmic chanting of St. Yared—are not mere superstitions but sophisticated technologies. They predictably quiet the brain’s ego-centers, allowing the “nous” (spiritual intellect) to perceive the unified reality that science is only just beginning to map.
The Path Ahead: A Self-Education Plan
My Substack publication, SoBlest, will serve as the living journal of my self-education plan. Over the coming months, I will be moving through three distinct phases of research and study, and I invite you to learn alongside me:
The Foundation (History & Canon): We will explore the “Broader Canon” of 81 books, looking at texts like The Book of Jubilees and Meqabyan to understand the Ethiopian worldview.
The Secret Teachings: We will dive deep into the “Testament” literature—teachings Jesus gave to his disciples after the resurrection. This includes the Epistula Apostolorum and the Book of the Covenant (Mäshafä Kidan).
The Language of Mystery: I will be sharing insights as I study the basics of Ge’ez, the liturgical language that unlocks the root meanings of these ancient concepts.
This journey is not just a study of religious history, but a retrieval of the “Cosmic Christ Consciousness” for the modern seeker, and the start of a new practice for an expanding revealed reality about our dynamic Universe.
Are you ready to step into the spiritual rainforest?