Shoot the Dove!

Spirit as Consciousness in the Bible

During New Testament times, both in Jewish and other spiritual traditions, doves were very much associated with God and God’s Spirit. Early Christians began depicting Spirit almost exclusively as a dove. It is a beautiful symbol for those who are aware of this meaning. For others, not so much.

I was teaching a group of several hundred progressive Catholics who had gathered in Santa Barbara. Before my first talk, a man came up to me and said, “I hear you are going to talk about the Trinity. I hope you don’t tell us again that God is two men and a bird.”  I smiled and said, “I hope I don’t either.”  In this essay, I am suggesting we not only shoot the dove for those who don’t find it meaningful, but also update what we mean by “the Holy Spirit.”

Symbols, metaphors, and language that today obscure or hide a spiritual reality must be changed for the sake of that reality and those who seek it.

The Christian tradition talks about “spirit” a lot. The word “spirit” is prominent in the New Testament, found 385 times in the New Testament. The Bible is filled with numerous accounts of people having mystical experiences involving “the spirit.”

I put “the spirit” in quotation marks to signify that, in the Bible, “spirit” was never capitalized and, most of the time, did not have the article “the” preceding it. The traditional translation of Acts 2:4 reads, “They were all filled with the Holy Spirit. A literal translation from the Greek reads, “They were all filled with holy spirit.”  These are attempts by translators to be helpful but in so doing, they impose their traditional theological beliefs on the passages. They are trying to decide whether the passage is referring to the divine spirit or to the human spirit. I believe that not only is that not necessary, but a distortion of an important truth. The Hebrew word רוּחַ in the Old Testament and the Greek word πνεῦμα in the New Testament both mean breath, life, divine spirit, and human spirit—all at the same time. An integral approach does not separate those meanings but sees them as affirming that divinity and humanity are not separate. Let translators not separate what God has joined together!

And let artists not continue to only represent breath, life, divine spirit, and human spirit by a bird! Looking at those meanings and what happened when people were “filled with spirit” in the New Testament, we can conclude that the phrase which best describes “in the spirit” today is something like “in higher, mystical, or awakened consciousness.” The word and concept “consciousness” did not come into our vocabulary until the 17th century, so it was not available in Jesus’ day. (See my book Is Your God Big Enough? Close Enough? You Enough? Jesus and the Three Faces of God for the seven chapters which detail this.)

Being “in Spirit” Is Mystical not Mythical

Understanding “spirit” as higher consciousness can be especially helpful to those who grew up in a very modern, rational education system—both at school and church! It is too easy for rational minds to believe those Holy Ghost and spirit doves were best left in the pre-modern past because they couldn’t have really happened. Many, including a lot of churches, threw out the mystical and “the spirit” with it.

Thankfully today there is a broader acceptance of that which is transrational—that is to say beyond our minds. Even science itself is disentangling from dogmatic materialist reductionism. Consciousness is just much more complex than we can grasp. Culturally, there is probably more curiosity and acceptance of mysticism than there has been in quite some time.

Doctrines, Dismissals, and Dabblings

However, churches today often don’t tend to reflect this burgeoning mystical interest and experience. Despite all those passages about spirit—mentioned fifty-six times in the four Gospels and 112 times by the Apostle Paul—churches today, for the most part, haven’t made the connection to or even attempted to practice the experience of awakened consciousness together. Instead, we see a variety of approaches:

Mainline churches like Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Disciples of Christ, and Methodists tend to dismiss the biblical passages about spirit in favor of those that point to social justice and application of biblical principles to the important cultural issues of climate change, world peace, racial and other liberation work. Why not both?

Evangelicals such as Baptists expound endlessly in their academic circles about spirit but carefully avoid the actual experiences of spirit seen in the New Testament. They believe one “receives the spirit” when one becomes a Christian.

Roman Catholics consider “the spirit” to work in and through the Church, meaning the priesthood and the Mass. Catholics are believed to receive the spirit at their baptism. Except for the amazingly vital Catholic charismatic movement, they avoid experiences of spirit beyond the mystery of the Eucharist.

Pentecostals and Charismatics, paying more attention to the experience of “spirit,” believe we “receive the spirit” at a separate time from becoming a Christian. These groups have made being “baptized with the spirit” a central doctrine and a required one-time spiritual experience where one prays in “tongues.” “Tongues” is a way to pray while bypassing the brain’s speech centers. The reality is, many of those who have pushed past their mind-controlling speech to their heart speaking “sweet nothings” to God, actually have momentarily moved to a higher consciousness beyond the mind. The problem lies in seeing the goal is praying with these inner spontaneous sounds rather than accessing awakened consciousness that accompanies them in an authentic mystical experience. As a grateful but former charismatic, this seems to me now like “dabbling in the spirit.”

What is a progressive, non-traditional Christian to make of this maze of doctrines, dismissals, and dabblings “in the spirit”? A deeper, more direct, discriminating, and durable path is Whole-Body Mystical Awakening. This meditative prayer practice is designed to release our consciousness from its ordinary confines into the awakened realm. This allows us to access God’s presence, the presence of the Living Jesus, spiritual guides, and spiritual knowing. This is what the New Testament calls “being in spirit.”

A detailed account of this is found in the book of Revelation.

John sees and hears in spirit

Most everyone in the West, whether they have read it or not, has heard of the seemingly strange last book in the Bible, the book of Revelation. It was written by a man named John almost two thousand years ago on the island of Patmos, a small Greek island in the Aegean Sea. He wrote:

I was in spirit on the Lord’s day, and I heard behind me a loud voice like a trumpet saying, “Write in a book what you see and send it to the seven churches. I saw seven golden lampstands, and in the midst of the lampstands I saw one like the Son of Man, clothed with a long robe and with a golden sash across his chest. His head and his hair were white as white wool, white as snow; his eyes were like a flame of fire, his feet were like burnished bronze, refined as in a furnace, and his voice was like the sound of many waters. In his right hand he held seven stars, and from his mouth came a sharp, two-edged sword, and his face was like the sun shining with full force.  Revelation 1:10-16

This book is full of visionary symbols, some of which are explained by John such as seven stars, seven lampstands, the great dragon, seven heads of the Beast, and 666. Some are from the Old Testament like the tree of life and the four horsemen or from the New Testament, especially the life of Jesus. Some are from ancient Jewish literature and the culture of the day which would have been easily understood by his first readers. Not so much today.

Theologians who don’t have mystical visions tend to interpret John’s writing as him sitting down and figuring out what symbols would communicate what he wanted about the Roman Empire and the future destiny of the world. Since I have somewhat similar but less grand visions almost every day, I simply take it as John reported—this is a record of what he saw in extended visionary experiences.

We can too

In almost every WeSpace meeting there are similar visionary experiences directed in a more personal way to individuals and the group that communicate the same kind of “comfort, encouragement, and strengthening” (1 Cor 14:3) that John’s more global visions did for the early Christians.

It’s very important to stress that visionary experiences are not just seeing something, or even primarily seeing something. Rather, they more commonly include seeing, hearing, and bodily sensations such as smell, taste, tingling, inner movement, warmth, pain, tremors, and being touched. One of the most common “visionary in spirit” experiences is simply sensing the presence of a spiritual being such as God, Jesus, or a guide. They can range from fleeting impressions to vivid experiences that appear to be physically real.

Here are some of the visionary experiences of awakened consciousness or being “in the spirit” that have occurred recently in our WeSpace groups:

Vivid sensation of oil being poured on one’s head directed to another person as what was happening to them.
Golden globes floating around a person who later revealed a significant healing involving a golden globe.
Seeing the swirling energy field of the group.
Seeing swirling colors around others.
Glowing light visible in the midst of the group or around another person.
Column of fire
Cave or darkness in womb space
Roots going down from feet
Music heard as a song of life for a person who later revealed the importance of music in their life.
A vivid image of vast movement behind a person, melting into a great cloud of witnesses behind that person
Musky smell identified as Jesus
Cold or warmth on hands
Sensing the presence of Jesus standing by group members.
Seeing the presence of spirit companions.
Feeling the vivid presence of God in various forms

Let me repeat what I began with: Symbols, metaphors, and language that today obscure or hide a spiritual reality must be changed for the sake of that reality and those who seek it.  So I am suggesting we update both the metaphorical dove and the vague religious terminology of “holy spirit” in Christian spirituality. And then update our own mystical experience of it too!

I experience “in the spirit” as awakened mystical consciousness, and it is a big deal! That altered consciousness may be called by other names, but it is not a dull theological belief about two men and a bird to be endlessly theorized about. It is a vital and life-changing non-ordinary awareness of the presence of the Great Mystery, the Living Jesus, and other spiritual realities to be experienced and lived out in our lives. The Apostle Paul said the results of this higher consciousness (“fruit of the spirit”) is “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control” (Gal. 5:22-23). Who wouldn’t want more of that good stuff!