Bridger of Worlds
The Bridger of Worlds podcast is an in-depth walkthrough between the world of matter and world of spirit. I struggled with porn addiction for close to fifteen years, and all of this led me to discovering some very crucial and beautiful things about not only the physicality of my existence, but the spirituality of it as well. Since then, I‘ve been building bridges that have served me in feeling more whole and well-integrated. I’ve now made it my mission to share with you whatever it is I’ve learned.
Themes, topics and healing modalities such as spiritual embodiment, psychosomatic practices, Shadow Work, Masculine/Feminine energetics, conscious sexuality and archetypal meanings are brought to the forefront in order to raise awareness around what is out of sight because it is only from there that new life can ever emerge.
The greatest paradox of the human condition is to live amongst duality as we seek unity. This is a podcast honoring both and in doing so, creating the loving connections and honest-to-raw conversations we so desire in our lifetimes.
Bridger of Worlds
Exploring the Cosmic Christ: Life, Death, Rebirth & Eros
In this thought-provoking episode of the Bridger of Worlds Podcast, host Ioannis Kokkinos delves deep into the concept of the Cosmic Christ and its profound connection to themes like life, death, rebirth, and erotic energy. Drawing on spiritual archetypes such as Shiva, Dionysus, and the Christ energy, Kokkinos highlights the unifying power of these forces and how they reflect the deeper spiritual truths of the universe.
Kokkinos explores the esoteric and symbolic meanings behind key moments in Christian tradition, including the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ. By integrating ideas of Masculine and Feminine energies, he offers a fresh perspective that merges traditional Christian teachings with a more mystical, spiritual understanding—one that emphasizes erotic energy and spiritual unity.
This episode encourages listeners to engage with spiritual concepts in a new light, inviting reflection on how these teachings can shape one’s personal spiritual journey. Whether you're exploring esoteric Christianity, mysticism, or archetypal symbolism, this conversation provides valuable insights into the interconnectedness of all creation.
Hi everyone. Welcome to another episode of the Bridger of Worlds podcast. I'm your host Ioannis Kokkinos. Thank you so much for joining me. If you're on one of the podcast platforms, thank you for tuning in and if you're on YouTube watching, thank you for tuning in as well. So today is a big episode. It's an episode that I've been looking forward to.
It will be touching upon themes and topics that we've already discussed in some of the previous episodes, but I do highly, highly recommend touching base with last week's episode, the Shiva and Dionysus episode where I talked about Shiva and Dionysus and how these two archetypes are connected. Uh, basically one in the same, and also with the April 17th episode where I talked about the Holy Fire, and the Christ energy from a much more symbolic and esoteric perspective.
Connecting Christ with Shiva and Dionysus
Today, I am actually going to be talking about the Christ. I want to talk about the Christ as an energy, and I want to bounce off of the previous episode because the energy of Shiva and the energy of Dionysus, this energy of death, rebirth is basically the energy of Christ. Now, there is a phenomenal expression that Matthew Fox, I believe, came up with because he did write a book called The Coming of the Cosmic Christ. I do love this expression because it's not an expression we hear, you know, when we go to sermons and when we go to church, so a lot of the expressions we already hear is, you know, as far as like the Holy Spirit is concerned, even the Holy Fire, um, saying Jesus Christ in general, right?
There are a lot of deep, ingrained beliefs and ideologies already surrounding these words and expressions. So I do believe Cosmic Christ is a very nice, much more fresh interpretation of what this energy can symbolize and today I want to talk about that energy. I wanna talk about it more and basically last week's episode as far as what Eros is, Thanatos, the dance, right? Like ecstatic dance, even love making, moving through Eros and the creative life force that is creation, death, and rebirth is basically the energy of Christ.
Now obviously the traditional teachings in the Bible don't talk about sex don't talk about sexuality. In fact it is quite shamed and condemned, especially in the Old Testament. There's not much to say in the New Testament as far as sex is concerned. Yes. When a man and a woman love each other and they come together in union through love and marriage, this is when sexual union is to take place. But if we look at the teachings across the globe, and if we especially relate the Hindu Tantric teachings of the reunion of Shakti Shiva which symbolize, yes, sexual union, but really spiritual union. And as I talked about on the April 17th episode, a lot of the symbolism does come into the Christian teachings as well, but very much through allegories, metaphors and it's not at all literal, descriptive, um, explanation of, you know, Tantric Union or Divine Union when it comes to Christianity.
Exploring the Concept of Cosmic Christ
The Christ energy, however, is the energy of life, death, and rebirth. There's no denying that, right? Like what Jesus went through, what Jesus taught. Um, obviously no Eros involved, no sex, but when I say no Eros was involved, yes, there was no Eros involved with a literal woman, but Eros is present in life. Eros is the physical act of universal love: Agape so because universal love exists and everything here is a manifestation of some form of union, we can definitely say that Eros exists and where there is Eros, there is also Thanatos. So what Jesus did as far as death and rebirth is concerned, and when I say did; what he moved through, the carrying of the cross, walking the path that every human basically is to walk, symbolically die through the ego, die as crucifixion and return as the ascended Self, as the higher self, as the spiritual self is very much an erotic act. We need to look at the symbolism, right? We, it's like literally we can say yes, he carried the cross. He did the walk. He was crucified. He died. He came back. He returned as the father. Yes. That was like the literal act of it, but the symbolic act of it was death and rebirth and Eros is death and rebirth. Eros and thanatos.
Symbolism and Esotericism in Christ's Teachings
So whatever it is I said about Dionysus, whatever it is I said about Shiva in the previous episode is very, very much related to cosmic Christ, the Christ of the cosmos. So in modern day Greek, the word cosmos translates to population. The people. When we, talk about a nation or we talk about a specific country, or when we talk about people out in society, out and about, we say, cosmos. But in ancient Greek cosmology, cosmos actually means the different parts of the universe, the different pieces of the universe coming together to basically create harmony. Harmonia. Harmony is the manifestation of different pieces and parts coming together, to work together.
Synergy, harmony. So we can basically say that yes, there are a lot of differences, that there's a lot of separation in the world, right? There's a lot of coming apart. But in those differences and in all that separation, unity is still possible because everything is to work together. And we see this in nature. We see this through our ecosystem, right? Like, think of all of the different parts in nature working together, all of the different elements, all of the different compounds. So when we say cosmic Christ, that's what we mean. We mean the energy of Christ, bringing all of the different pieces, all of the different aspects of creation together. And Christ, as I talked about in the April 17th episode, translates to Fire.
Now of course, this fire is not literal. It is energetic. It is symbolic. It is spiritual. So cosmic fire basically equates to holy fire. So we have the holy fire within us, but the holy fire, of course, exists out in the cosmos, out in the universe, and this is cosmic Christ.
Now the traditional teachings don't necessarily talk about like dance, ecstasy, right? I talked about ecstatic dance last week. I talked about Shiva as the world dancer. But again, symbolically, this different pieces, different parts coming together as cosmic Christ basically represents the dance of life. 'cause that's what dancing is. That's what dance the symbol of dance represents.
The Role of Eros and Thanatos
It's different movements coming together as one entity, right? We have one body, we are one person. We are one self. And when we are dancing, it seems random. There are a lot of moving pieces, there are a lot of moving parts, but all that is fitting and synchronizing very wonderfully with the music, of course, with whatever it is we're dancing to.
So I pulled out the World Card from the Rider- Waite Tarot last week, and here I have the World Card from the Byzantine Tarot. I hope you can see that. So in the Byzantine Tarot, the World card is Cosmos. The Byzantine Tarot deck is basically the Rider-Waite with Byzantine influenced art and scripture. So where I talked about last week, right, like the world is the World dancer, Shiva, dancing on top of the World at the End of the Fool's Journey, Dionysus as an expression of ecstatic dance, to go through an experience of death and rebirth, as we can see here, and as the creators of the um, Byzantine Tarot so brilliantly concluded that the world, the world dancer, the energy of bringing heaven on earth together is through the Christ, is through Cosmos, the cosmic Christ, and in the card we can actually see Jesus Christ in like an almond shaped image. This is the Mandorla, which translates to almond in Italian, and this was a symbol for the bridging of heaven and earth.
I think a lot of the conventional understanding of like how to reach Christ. It is very much about moving away from the material experience, and this is why I love Esotericism and mysticism in general.
So obviously that translates into esoteric Christianity, but Esotericism exists everywhere. It exists in all religious schools of thought. And esotericism existed before any organized religion ever existed. It and Esotericism contains archetypes. It contains symbolism, and as I keep saying, these are the original patterns and the original meanings of the specific symbols in question that keeps showing up.
So to say that the Cosmic Christ is actually the bridger of heaven and Earth, it goes without saying that we cannot get there 📍 without our sexual creative, erotic spiritual energy. In the traditional texts you won't find what it is I'm talking about. This is all through symbolism because the main message of Jesus Christ's teachings was love.
And to make love is to come through union with another human being. I am not at all talking about the distorted experience of an expression of sex. When I'm talking about sex and sexual energy, I'm not talking about one night stands. I'm not talking about, you know, friends with benefits. Okay. That's a little bit that could be, that could be talked about.
I'm not talking about the experience of sex as a highly unconscious act because as I said already, sex is probably the most unconscious act we can move through. The idea here is to make it conscious. The I, the idea here is to bring in consciousness. Where the unconscious resides, Wherever the unconscious is, is also where consciousness is, and consciousness is the Christ.
When we're talking about the Christ as energy, when we're talking about Christ consciousness, that's what we mean, and we need to go into the unconscious to get to the consciousness. And symbolically, the unconscious is dark. Consciousness is light. We need the dark to get to the light. Dark does not equate to evil.
Yes, it's messy. Yes, it's volatile. Yes, it's primal. Yes, it's the animal, but this does not make it evil. We need to move through those energies and aspects of our nature and our life and our psyche to get to the good stuff, to get to the higher emotions, to get to freedom, forgiveness, love, joy, dance, Eros.
Christ as a Universal Archetype
When we think of Jesus Christ as far as Christians are concerned, and those of us who have been raised with the Christian teachings, we think of the man that taught of love and community and forgiveness and compassion, who beared the cross, who beared the sins of humanity, who died through a very painful ordeal and came back resurrected in order to showcase that this is not all there is and ascended and became the father, became God became the light. If we look at that all from the symbolic perspective, of course, this is what we all have to do.
And why I very much connect this to the erotic experience is because of Eros and Thanatos, is because of creation and destruction. So, Dionysus was the prominent resurrection archetype in ancient Greece. Shiva is a resurrection archetype in tandem with Kali Shakti, Shiva, the destroyer, the destroyer of the ego, AKA crucifixion in the Christian teachings, so as energy, Dionysus is Christ. Shiva is Christ. And there are many, many, many more symbols and archetypes and deities in mythology and in cosmology that contain Christ energy.
It's fascinating to me between this war of polytheism and monotheism, right? So polytheism is the, uh, worship and idolization of the many gods. So obviously, when the ancient civilizations transitioned into monotheistic religions like Christianity, Judaism and Islam among others, there was a lot of war and strife and persecution and suffering because polytheism was regarded as something bad, evil, wrong, and monotheism was the way.
For me and my, you know, spiritual understanding and moving through my own healing slash spiritual journey, it's all one and the same. All of these cosmologies and mythologies are basically talking about one God and every single mythology and cosmology put a different face on this one god, Christ is an expression of that one God, Christ is the energy, is the life force basically. That is the in-between, between the spiritual and the physical. That is my understanding of it, because the Christ very much is the bridge between heaven and earth.
Jesus Christ talked about coming into union with God. You know, doing, you have to do certain rituals, you have to do certain things here in the physical experience. So the physical experience is where we need to start from. As I said in some episodes ago, um, when I was moving through my healing journey with porn addiction, with sex addiction, wanting to understand everything I could about what this energy is and what this nature is, the conventional teachings were not feeding me, and I still stand by that, and I will continue to stand by that. But when I started to look at the symbolism of basically not just the historical figure of Christ, but the mystical figure, the cosmic Christ, the energy of Christ, which is basically death and rebirth, ego death, ego crucifixion, and ascension into the spiritual self, into the higher self.
That is when I started to really understand the true meaning of the Christ and that Christ is that sacred fire, the holy fire, the mystic fire. That, of course, is very much alive in the Hindu tantric teachings, as well as many, many other spiritual schools of thought across the globe. If we look through the ages, if we look through history, if we look through myth, if we look through cosmologies, we keep coming across fire as a source of creation and as a source of transmutation. But along with that, also spiritual realization.
In the tradition of alchemy, fire is synonymous with spirit. Water is synonymous with soul. Earth is synonymous with body and wind, air is synonymous with mind. So fire is spirit, right? And as I talked about in the breath work episode, um, Pneuma, Pnoi breath, fire chi, breath, fire, prana, breath, fire, and spirit from spirare in Latin, which means breath.
Again, this connection between breath and fire is very, very prominent and basically all around the globe. And to breathe is to have a body. So when we're talking about cosmic Christ, we're of course talking about it from the personal level because we are the microcosm reflecting the macrocosm. We are a small, tiny, little speck of the universe mirroring the grand design, the grand scheme, the grand everything that is creation. So Cosmic Christ exists outside of us, and cosmic Christ exists within us, and it's not just about, you know, sex and sexual energy...Eros. But because this is the energy that has created absolutely everything, how in the world can they be so mutually exclusive? Because many of the organized religions, if not all, very much condemn and shame sexuality. I get that.
I mean, sex can be very misused, very traumatizing. Right? We see how distorted it is in our modern day age. You know, how much it's been treated as just some form of escapism and misuse of power. I understand all of that. I totally understand that aspect.
And of course, with my history with porn addiction, I've basically experienced the hell of it. I've experienced the hell of sex and sexual energy, but hell is the means to realize heaven, and that is basically the path of the Christ. What Jesus experienced before he resurrected was hell. That's hell, right?
Like pain, suffering, shame, condemnation, persecution, ridicule, embarrassment, right? Um, fear, confusion. That's hell. Like we don't need to pass on, we don't need to leave our physical body to experience hell. So if we don't need to leave our physical body to experience hell, that means we don't need to leave our physical body to experience heaven because to move into the world of conscious sexuality, into the erotic, into that exchange with another human being, with ourselves and with life is to move into the heaven, into the heaven of sexuality and sex. So I don't accept that sex equals shame, condemnation, guilt, fear, misuse and abuse of power. It can, it most definitely can, but that's not its whole story. And I'm just very tired of like defending this aspect of us that is actually our source of liberation, transcendence, grounding, and really this feeling of returning home to ourselves.
And once all of that sets in, obviously within ourselves, this is how we can show up to partnership. This is how we can show up to friendship. This is how we can show up in relation to all those around us.
The Union of Masculine and Feminine
So even though Jesus Christ was not a deity and was very much a historical figure that taught what he taught and moved through what he moved through, the energy that he embodied, the energy that he evoked, the energy that he channeled was the Christ, was the same energy that Shiva represented, was the same energy that Dionysus represented, the same energies across the globe, across mythologies and cosmologies that represent life, death, rebirth.
'cause we see this energy in nature. We see this in the cycles and in the seasons of life. The cosmic Christ is very much alive in our physical world. Because Cosmos is about bringing the different pieces and different parts together. There is a lot of separation in our world. There's a lot of distance and there's a lot of pain that can manifest with all this distance and separation because love is to bring together, love is unity, love is the returning toward each other. But within that coming together and within that unity also exists separation and distancing and death. Everything is encompassed within this cosmic Christ. And I think that's basically what Jesus portrayed through his crucifixion, through his death, through his suffering, and through this resurrection, all of that was encompassed within the energy of Christ within the cosmic Christ. So we have the historical Christ that experienced the literal thing, and then we have the mystical Christ that experienced or showed, portrayed the symbolism of the thing. And they're not mutually exclusive, obviously, they come together in harmony.
So this is where I'm at when it comes to the Christ and what I believe the Christ to be. It has helped me very much in understanding my sexual nature, my erotic nature, my creative nature, um, I know it's something still probably very triggering because we learned that these two have nothing to do with each other, right?
So like even the birth of the Christ, of Jesus Christ was by a virgin. This is symbolism. When we talk of Mother Mary as the virgin, we're actually talking about the void. We're talking about the emptiness and the nothingness of creation, right? The dark womb. The dark womb space that gives birth to life.
Because everything, all of creation, all of life came from this nothingness, this emptiness. That's what the virgin actually means. It's a symbol. So when we're talking about the great dark void, we're talking about the great dark womb and how everything came into life. But inside the womb was also the seed. The seed is the masculine, the womb is the feminine, and the seed in the womb come together to give birth to life.
It's very clear that those who wrote the Bible had a problem with women and sexuality, right? Back then when the Bible was being written, women were basically cleaners and cooks and just served men. If we look at the history before these times and how much women were involved in the sacred sexual mysteries and how the Divine Feminine was very prominent, right?
Like Mother Nature. We saw this in ancient Greece. We saw this in Rome, we saw this in Egypt. This praising and this praying to the Divine Feminine, which is basically Mother Nature, the Goddess. So obviously there was a lot of suppression and rejection and denial when it came to move into the monotheistic, more, very much male centered, you know, uh, guides, teachers, gods. So that was a big trauma that rippled into the collective. And I believe we're all still suffering very much from that trauma, men and women alike. Right? because it does speak to the separation of the Masculine and Feminine and as I talked about in one of my other episodes, this is like the symbolic sexual wound we're all suffering from. It doesn't mean we've all had a sexual wound, but the separation of the Masculine and Feminine is what we are all suffering from to some extent and our responsibility and what we are here to do as part of our human condition is to bridge them, is to reunite them. Masculine, Feminine. Feminine, Masculine. So. Obviously sex is the most symbolic act of bringing two polarities together. Bringing the masculine and feminine together because this is an echo, is an expression of the creative act of creation of the cosmos.
And cosmic Christ is the union of the masculine and feminine. Cosmic Christ is not just masculine and it's not just feminine. It's the union because to bridge heaven and earth is to bring two opposing polarities together, cosmos bringing different parts, different pieces together, and Christ is fire.
The sexual fire, the holy fire, the spiritual fire. It's all one fire.
Conclusion and Final Thoughts
So I think this episode touches base with quite a few episodes I talked about so I hope you enjoyed that. Uh, I think I will leave it here today. That's enough food for thought, for sure. If you're on YouTube watching, please hit that like subscribe button. I so greatly appreciate that. If you're on one of the podcast platforms, thank you for tuning in as well. If, uh, you feel like someone needs to hear this message, these words, please share the content, if you so feel called, that really, really, uh, motivates me and really helps me out a lot.
Also, all my socials are posted on the bottom if you're on YouTube, I'm on Facebook, Bridger of Worlds. And TikTok Threads and Instagram with my full name, okay, so I will be back next week with a new episode and as always, please remember that you are the medicine and I'm just the messenger. Thank you very much.