The Remembrance Codes

Reclaiming Yeshua, Buddha, And Magdalene As Living Mirrors

• Susan Sutherland

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What happens when a living teaching becomes so polished it forgets how to breathe?

In this episode of The Remembrance Codes, we explore how devotion can harden into distance—and how to soften it back into intimacy—by meeting Yeshua, Buddha, and Mary Magdalene as mirrors rather than idols.

We trace the shift from worshiping perfection to walking with presence. Yeshua returns not as a flawless savior but as a brother who stayed through fear and doubt, making love feel human again. The Buddha steps down from marble stillness into living awareness, where peace isn’t absence but the ability to hold life without clinging. Magdalene restores the body to the story, reminding us that tenderness is the bridge between divinity and earth.

You’ll learn how myths can serve as mirrors—revealing where you’ve projected your own light and where you’re ready to reclaim it. Together, we explore fascination and repulsion, inherited beliefs, and the quiet space between reaction and response—where remembrance begins.

If you’re ready to exchange worship for embodiment and rediscover the sacred in your own reflection, this episode is for you.

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We live in a world full of stories, saviors and sinners, and gods and gurus and villains and saints. But somewhere along the way, the story replaced the substance. We began to revere the form instead of the frequency. And today I want to talk about how that happens and how to use these myths, even the distorted ones, as mirrors for your own remembrance. Now, this conversation may stretch you a little. It is not to break belief, but to free it. Because the moment a living teaching becomes a myth, it begins to harden, it stops moving, and truth by nature must move. It breathes, it evolves, it lives, it moves through us. When we freeze a teaching or a person in time, Jesus, Buddha, Mary, even modern spiritual icons, we stop relating with them and begin relating to them. And that's the moment that our devotion becomes distance. A myth is born the moment that the living frequency of a teaching is turned into a symbol that can be controlled or monetized or worshipped. And as human nature, we crave something to look up to, something certain to hold. But in doing so, we unknowingly place our own divinity outside our reach. Yeshua's message was not worship me, but what I have done you can do also. Buddha's path was not follow me, but see clearly. Yet each of these teachings was codified and institutionalized and turned into dogma. And when that happens, the myth grows louder than the message. When we elevate a teacher beyond their humanity, we deny our own. We start chasing perfection instead of authenticity. We perform spirituality instead of living it. That's why every myth eventually collapses. Not because it was false, but because humanity is ready to remember the truth beneath it. You can see this happening now. The collective is losing faith in systems. There is the fall of false idols, the disillusionment with the performative like love and light, everything is love and light culture. It's painful, but it's also purification. Every collapse is a call to return to the direct relationship with the divine without intermediaries. I grew up with Jesus, the myth, the legend, the perfect son of God that performed miracles and saved me from my pitiful sinning self. I felt loved by Jesus, but I also felt little beside him. I first untangled him from the church's portrayal. I no longer saw him as the middleman, the golden robed savior. I saw him as a guide and a teacher and a presence to walk beside. But I still held him in perfection, which kept him unreachable in the most intimate way. But now I have renowned him. Even the name Jesus feels filtered and shaped by doctrine that created a religion about him rather than following the path of him. So I still speak of the church's guy as Jesus, but my walk is with Yeshua because it feels closer to who he truly was: a man, a mystic, a mirror. And I have found intimacy with him because I have found his humanity. So when I feel him now, it's not from a pedestal, it's in the space beside me. And sometimes I still cry when I feel him. Not because I'm unworthy, but because the love is so vast and so gentle. And because often it's in the moments of my deepest doubts that I hear him. Not as a distant God, but as a brother whispering encouragement to me. I doubted too. You don't walk this path alone. And I feel that. I feel that companion that wants to walk beside me and hold my hand and reassure me. Not embodied perfection, performing miracle after miracle in a way that makes embodied love feel unattainable. And that has been the real gift to no longer know him as flawless, but to know that he remembered who he was and he stayed. He stayed through the fear and he stayed through the resistance. Not to be worship, but to remind us that we are capable of remembering too, and still choosing love. We stripped her of having a voice at all, but we stripped him of his humanity. And what I find the most powerful in knowing his story in truth is that he experienced the whole span of emotion and still walked in love. I can't relate to perfection, to the myth of Jesus. But the Yeshua that sits with me in my doubt, in my heartache, and reminds me of his is the most comforting presence you can imagine. I no longer see him only as the embodiment of divine love. I see him as the embodiment of human love. He loved Magdalene, not just as a frequency, but as a woman and as a partner, as someone whose presence mattered to him. I see him as someone who did doubt his mission, his path, his plan, who questioned it, who wept, who got angry at injustice, who wasn't afraid to be disruptive when the sacred was being distorted. And that has made him more holy to me, not less. I need to know him not as perfect, but as present, present with the ache, present with the fire, present with the unbearable tenderness of being both human and divine. I did not grow up with Buddha in the same way. He was more concept than companion, the symbol of peace, the image of stillness, a man who sat beneath a tree and found enlightenment. He became the poster child for detachment, for serenity and silence, the one who transcended desire and emotion. But that image is also a myth. It is a sliver of truth hardened into perfection. In our longing for calm, we turned him into the absence of motion. In our hunger for peace, we made him the absence of passion. And in doing so, we lost the pulse of what he truly carried. Buddha's path was never about escaping the world, it was about seeing it clearly. Not withdrawal, but awareness, not numbness, but neutrality born of understanding. His enlightenment did not erase his humanity. It illuminated it. He wept when others suffered. He felt the ache of impermanence and the sweetness of breath. He walked through craving and confusion until compassion became the only possible response. So when we elevate him to untouchable perfection, a marble statue of stillness, we create distance between ourselves and the peace he discovered. We imagine enlightenment as an achievement instead of a remembering. We start to believe that awakening means being unmoved by life rather than being present with it. But the true frequency of the Buddha is spacious awareness, the silence that holds every sound, the witness that feels every drowning, the heart that can rest in the middle of a contradiction. When you touch that space within yourself, that breath between reaction and response, the pause where understanding blooms, you are touching the same field he touched. So perhaps the invitation is not to become Buddha, but to recognize that the Buddha is the part of you that can sit beneath the tree of your own life, seeing everything and resisting nothing. That's the liberation he modeled. Not disconnection, but deep participation without attachment. Not absence, but profound presence. And when we meet him there, not as myth, but as mirror, we discover that peace is not the lack of emotion, it is the full embrace of reality held with compassion, breathed with love. I have shared quite a bit about Mary Magdalene and my walk with her, though I will not write her out of this episode because of that. Her story was rewritten not because she lacked power, but because her power could not be controlled. She has been many things across time: a saint, a sinner, a whore, a wife, a goddess, a myth. And each version says more about the storyteller than about her. For centuries, her voice was edited out and her gospel buried beneath layers of interpretation, and yet her frequency never left. It has moved quietly through generations of women who knew, even without proof, that love could be both holy and human. The distortion of Magdalene was not only the erasure of the feminine, but the dismembering of wholeness. When her story was stripped from his, the teachings of Yeshua lost their embodiment. Without her, the word remained disembodied. Without him, the embodiment lost reflection. Together, they were the union of heaven and earth, the sacred mirror through which the divine remembered itself in form. To meet Magdalene now is to feel the ache of separation and the beauty of its return. She comes not to reclaim a title, but to restore the balance of love and wisdom, and to remind us that the body was never the enemy of the spirit. And like every great teacher, she asks not to be worshipped, but to be remembered, to see her not as mythic perfection, but as a living mirror of what happens when love refuses to leave the body. Her gospel is simple. Be the bridge. Hold heaven in your bones. Let your tenderness teach you. Let your embodiment speak. That is her resurrection. Not a story told about her, but a truth relived through us. Each of these figures, Yeshua, Mary Magdalene, the Buddha, they held open the doorway to direct experience. Each revealed in their own way that God is not somewhere out there, but within the human heart, waiting to be known. And yet, as centuries passed, even these teachings of liberation became enclosed, first by religion and then by ritual, and then by the quiet weight of secrecy. That light that was meant to illuminate became filtered through hierarchy, and the path of remembrance became something to be earned, not simply lived. That's why later, when I encountered the work of Pirmahanza Yoginanda, I felt this deep beauty of his transmission and the ache of that same pattern. Truth offered with one hand and protected with another. His words were luminous, they still are, but I began to sense that the next evolution of his teaching is asking to move without walls. That this wisdom that was once passed quietly from guru to initiate now wants to be breathes in open air in living rooms and in conversations like this one. When I first discovered his work, something in me like exhaled. It was new and alive and current and resonated. There was a sweetness and a purity and a remembrance of God that felt both cosmic and personal. And his words that God could be felt as joy and as love stirred something in me. And I began walking his path of self-realization, believing I had found the bridge between the East and the West and the body and the spirit and devotion and discipline. But over time I began to feel the edges, or as I would say, the cage. The structure was beautiful, but it was enclosed. The teachings were to be received in private, passed from guru to initiate through a program and not shared. And there was a contract to say as much. And while I understood the reverence behind that, the desire to protect what was sacred, it began to feel out of resonance with the world that I'm here to help birth. Because truth doesn't need guarding anymore. It doesn't belong to a select few who are deemed ready. It belongs to the human heart. And it is awakening everywhere at once. Yogananda opened a great door for humanity. He reminded the world that God could be known through direct experience, not through dogma. And that remains true. But now the next evolution of that teaching also is for it to be lived in openness. The teacher and the student and the guru and the initiate are becoming one continuum, each awakening the other through remembrance. So the age of hidden truths is ending, the temple walls are dissolving, and what once was reserved for the few is flowering in the many. The essence of Yogananda's message still holds. Union with the divine is possible here and now. But this new frequency says that's possible for everyone. No veil, no secrecy, no separation, only remembrance. So I want to tell you how you can use these myths and the countless others as mirrors instead of idols. The first step, da-da-da, is always awareness. When you feel yourself drawn to someone's brilliance, ask, what is this reflecting back about my own potential? When you feel repelled by someone's distortion, ask. What unintegrated part of me is being shown here? These figures that fascinate or frustrate us are never random. They are energetic mirrors, just like I explained in the archetypes. They allow us to witness aspects of consciousness within ourselves. That was their job to mirror your own divinity. And some people come to these myths not out of devotion or doubt, but out of habit. They were born into the belief, wrapped in it like a family heirloom. It's worn and it is familiar, but never questioned. And when something is inherited rather than chosen, it sits on the surface of the soul. It becomes tradition, not transformation. Many walk through the path repeating words that they have never weighed, or bowing to symbols that they have never decoded. They profess truths they never personally touched or probably don't understand. The mirror has been hanging there all along, but it is covered by a cloth of comfort and familiarity. To use a mirror consciously, we have to be willing to look beneath the inheritance. To ask, did I choose this belief or did it choose me? Was it handed down to keep me safe? Or to keep me small? Do I believe this because I've experienced it as true? Or because it was expected of me? Or because I believed in consequences if I don't. These questions aren't about rebellion. They're about relationship because a belief unexamined becomes a script, and a script lived without awareness becomes a cage. But when you hold the mirror to your own faith, when you trace the lineage of your beliefs back to their root, you create the space to either keep them with reverence or release them with love. Either way, at that point, they become yours, consciously chosen, consciously lived. That is the true invitation of the mirror, not to destroy what you've inherited, but to awaken within it. The myth of perfection might be showing you where you still chase approval. The myth of martyrdom might show you where you still confuse suffering with service. The myth of the savior might show you where you've forgotten your own agency. The moment you claim the mirror, you dissolve the distortion. And distortion plays a role. It's easy to demonize distortion to say that's false light or that teacher is misguided. But distortion itself is sacred. It is the shadow that reveals contrast. Every distortion shows us what happens when truth loses embodiment. It's like light refracted through a cracked vessel. The pattern it creates can still guide us home if we know how to read it. So when you see the distorted archetype in the world, the false prophet, the performative healer, the manipulative guru, instead of shutting down, observe with discernment and curiosity. What was the original truth trying to express here? And then bring that essence back to your own embodiment. That's how the myth becomes the medicine. We can witness how the world turned Yeshua into a symbol of guilt instead of grace. And how Buddha became an icon of detachment instead of presence. Or how the goddess became a brand instead of a mystery. These distortions aren't failures. They're mere showing us how humanity still struggles with its own power. Each time we reclaim the essence, the unconditional love, awakened presence, embodied sovereignty, we restore truth to the collective field. We don't need to destroy the myth. We just need to see through it. You can begin this week noticing who or what you've placed above yourself. Where have you made someone else's truth more sacred than your own? Where have you dismissed a teacher because their shadow triggered yours? Both reactions, worship and rejection, are forms of disempowerment. The middle way is seeing clearly, honoring the reflection and integrating what it reveals and releasing the rest. Try this reflection. What myth am I ready to outgrow? What mirror am I ready to finally look into? See what comes up. Sit with it. Let the story soften. There is a guide for working with the myth and the mirror for all in the Remembrance Codes collection in the Keeper's Garden. I'll put a link in the show notes. Remember that the purpose of the myth was never to create distance from the divine. When we stop worshiping the mirror and start looking into it, we remember the Savior, the teacher, the mystic, the mother, they all live in us. So as you move through this week, let every story you encounter, the sacred or the ordinary, remind you of yourself. Let every distortion guide you back to truth. And let every myth become what it was always meant to be a mirror for remembrance. Until next time, walk gently, see clearly, and remember that the divine has always been wearing your face. Have a good week. I love you.

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Susan Sutherland

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