“No Longer I Who Live, but Christ”
The Apostle Paul declared, “I have been crucified with Christ, and it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Galatians 2:20). This verse is often interpreted as a call to moral transformation or spiritual surrender to a distinct, divine being. From a nondual perspective, it points not to a new identity acquired by a separate self, but to the recognition that the separate “I” never existed in the first place.
When Paul declares, “It is no longer I who live,” this isn’t a statement of self-annihilation. Instead, it is the recognition that the separate “I,” the belief in being a separate person, never truly lived as a fundamental reality. It was an appearance, an activity within consciousness.
The “Christ who lives in me” can be understood not as a distinct person taking over a body, but as consciousness revealing its true, indivisible nature through and as the apparent individual. Christ, then, symbolizes the recognition that aware presence, the ever-present reality, transcends the illusion of separation. Christ represents the essence of being recognizing itself as the sole reality.
This can be interpreted as an existential “crucifixion,” a psychic death where the separate, limited “I” dissolves. It is the surrender of the belief in individual, egoic agency. This “death” of the ego is precisely what facilitates the experience of the eternal life in Christ, as the embodied reality of awareness.