Praying Into All of Unified Reality
“Your life is now hidden with Christ in God” Col. 3:3 — Artwork by Chris Powers
Integral Prayer – Part 8: Whole-Body Transcendence into God-Beyond-Us
In the third movement of Integral Prayer, we are addressing the 3rd person, infinite face of God-Beyond-Us. This is not the remote “God in the sky” who is unreachable and inaccessible, but rather the great Mystery who is always beckoning us onward, who is inviting us into the participation beyond the usual boundaries that we experience within the confines of our small self.
We don’t pray at this distant God, but rather we move into the Mystery in all its facets of reality. This is not an act of moving out of ourselves, because we are a part of that reality. Rather, it is to expand beyond while still being rooted to our own fullness. It is not separate from our being.
Praying into unified reality is a movement of holistic transcendence. We can experience it in each of the four centers, each in its own unique form—and each providing a crucial element to the fullness of an embodied expansion into the all.
Sometimes transcendence gets a bad rap because it is seen as an act of escapism and disassociation. While this can be true of less healthy forms, holistic transcendence into all reality will actually be a movement of much greater connection, much greater presence, and much deeper being. It is, in many ways, an immanent transcendence.
As much or more than ever, today we are so often experiencing constriction and enclosure in our lives. You may even feel this contraction in your body, perhaps in your chest or gut.
Praying into unified reality opens us from our constricted self-sense and into the freedom and joy of the expanse of the mystery beyond ourselves. The mystery of embracing all, embodying all, being all, and going beyond all.
So let’s go on that journey, let’s explore a movement together into all of unified reality.
Into the Unified Field
I open my shoulders. My chest stretches, and I feel the flow begin to stir. My radiant heart is there. Always there. But now I feel it again, the sting of bliss.
Open. The radiance emanates out beyond my body, free of its confines, into the natural flow. The light shines all around. The Sun in my chest, the Sun in yours.
A hand on my cheek.
The love expands. I feel it soaking over my surroundings, out and beyond, further and further. The love is everywhere, and I cannot see all it holds. In my radiant center the bliss burns to a finer and finer point. The deeper it centers, the more I sense its expanse. It feels almost as if it might crack for all that it holds.
It seeps into my heart around it. This immense care.
My arms outstretched, welcoming the universal communion, encompassing the eternal fire that burns in each one, Embracing All.
I feel my roots growing into the earth from my feet. My body grounding into the presence of my being here and now, in this moment, in this place, in this time. I am here.
And as my roots reach down further, they dissolve, permeating into the filaments of the earth and the matter of the cosmos. The energy of material substance shooting the circuits between the stars.
A blade of grass on my toe.
My cells tingle with the jolt of being in my bliss body. Deeper than the cells, I feel the quantum fibers of the great web in the multitudinous touch-points in every sinew of my self-form.
I am entangled in the wave-being of the body of God, the dance of nonlocality permeating among the incarnation of all things in the seamless materiality of all life. I am the one, and the one is me. Embodying All.
Centering into the core of my belly, I find myself being wrapped up in the gentle stillness, the warm embrace of the enfolding into my vital being. I am enveloped inside my spiritual womb.
And now a flow. A bubbling up from the deep source into a swirl of current. We are being made. Ever and again in this moment and the next. There are some with whom I’m sharing this womb. A spiritual family.
The sound of a small gurgle below.
The swirl reverses as I sink into the wellspring, into the darkness. In the primordial deep. The womb of eternity. The unification of all things in the common core of the before. The source oneness before form, before manifestation.
Before the great birth. The inbreath of infinity. The preconceived sparkle of I AM. Being All.
Shot out like a burst of the big bang, I leave my body and my being into the vast expanse beyond my mind. I am still rooted and grounded in the embodiment of myself and all. I am still centered in my being and the common core. I am still emanating and enfolding in the radiance of the universal embrace. And I am beyond.
But not me. The eye of the I. The great seer of awareness itself. Pure Consciousness from the formless beyond, perceiving the infinite eternity of all. The great cosmic witness, Beyond All.
There is nothing to say, nothing to do, nothing to be. All is well. All is already. Boundless release in the bliss of emptiness, the ultimate freedom of the beyond.
A flash of lightning.
A return to being. A call to be. Given to this age. For such a time as this. The gift of this. This right here. This right now. All that you are and ever have been, now in this moment. As one.
As All.
———————
“Participation in the divine life, whereby each individual will find, by conscious union with a Supreme Personal Being, the consummation of [their] own personality.”
-Teilhard de Chardin
My experience here is just one expression of the movement into the all, into the embodied expanse of holistic transcendence into unified reality. While I discover many of these elements each time I move into this practice, some here are also emergent and surprising. It can and will look differently for you.
From our awakened consciousness, we give ourselves over to the release of our expanded being, into the wholeness of that which we are. We let our center of awareness flow beyond our individual self, beyond our normal confines and limitations of our body, our sphere of care, our sense of identity, and our singular perspective.
We can do this from each of our centers to get a sense of the multiplicity of the dynamics of unified reality, as paradoxical as that may sound. It is one reality, one unified Mystery the Ultimate Reality, the infinite face of God-Beyond-Us.
And there are many doors.
You don’t have to do them all at once or all together. You can enter through any door you are being invited into.
When we enter the all—especially through the heart—you may find in your experience that it brings before you not just the bliss, but the pain of the suffering of the world. This is part of the bliss. Another paradox for us to welcome.
As Sri Aurobindo puts it, “Transcendence transfigures; it does not reconcile, but rather transmutes opposites into something surpassing them that effaces their oppositions.”
We are not separate from the earth. We are not separate from all material reality, the whole cosmos. We are not separate from the unified reality of all.
We are one. We are all.
And now, if you like, you can practice your own movement into all of unified reality with this guided meditation:
“In Remote Eons I was shaped, at the start of the first things of the earth” Proverbs 8:23 — Artwork by Chris Powers