An Integral Christian Mystical Lineage

The Evolution of the Integral Church
Part Two
The Influence of Three Contemporary Mystics

We find that conscious integral evolution in the mystical Christian path occurs when we take the best of the past and transcend the worst. If we then add what our contemporaries in the developmental path are finding, we greatly widen our horizons.

While there are many men and women offering wonderful contributions and insights to the evolving church, we are highlighting four mystics who we have found particularly influential and visionary. We began with Ken Wilber last week, and this week add Jorge Ferrer, Ramon Panikkar, and Teilhard de Chardin.

Jorge Ferrer

Jorge Ferrer (1968 - ) is a US-based Spanish psychologist and participatory thinker. He is best known for his work bridging participatory theory with transpersonal psychology, religious studies, integral education, and sexuality and intimate relationships. He is professor of psychology at California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, where he served as chair of the department of East-West Psychology. 

The Four Centers of Spiritual Knowing

Our practice of the four centers of spiritual knowing is based on Ferrer’s research, and incorporation of it into the California Institute of Integral Studies graduate school supervised embodied spiritual inquiry practice.

Numerous energy systems work with the three centers, head, heart, and hara (gut). Jean Gebser, an academic and phenomenologist of consciousness, correlates the lower center in the body with the waist on down. He says this is the vital center associated with the earth and our unity with it. With Christianity’s emphasis on incarnation, we think it’s helpful to join with Gebser, Ferrer and others, to add a fourth center: the feet. The feet serve as an anchor point to material reality, grounding with the earth and moving into our incarnated embodiment.    

For me (Paul), Ferrer’s brilliant writing has served to both apply and critique Wilber in ways that I’ve found particularly helpful. As an example, Wilber is a perennialist, a perspective in philosophy and spirituality that views all of the world’s religious traditions as sharing a single, metaphysical truth or origin from which all esoteric and exoteric knowledge and doctrine has grown. A more popular interpretation argues for universalism, the idea that all religions, underneath seeming differences, point to the same Truth. It is commonly expressed as there are many paths up the mountain to God. They all lead to God, just by different paths.

Ferrer believes this distorts the essential message of various religious traditions and favors certain spiritual paths over others. This raises serious obstacles for spiritual dialogue and inquiry. Instead, he suggests that “spirituality emerges from human co-creative participation in an always dynamic and indeterminate spiritual power. This participatory understanding not only makes hierarchical rankings of spiritual traditions appear misconceived but also reestablishes our direct connection with the source of our being and expands the range of valid spiritual choices that we as individuals can make.”

Ferrer proposes, instead, that there is an ocean of spirituality which has many shores. The shores are all different, yet they border on the same ocean. This means that, while the God of Christianity is quite different from the God of Hinduism, they both are in touch with the ocean. The path of Buddhism has no God, yet it also has a shore on the ocean. That means, while I find Christianity more true and valid for me than any other path, I let other traditions hold that same viewpoint about themselves and refuse to turn a list of religions into any kind of universal hierarchy. We are neither better or worse, but different — one more shore on the ocean of spirit. Nor do we elevate the nondual state of union with God over loving communion with God in subtle state. However, within any given religion, there is certainly that which is more true and less true. Hence, the more evolved stages of any path are more true, complex, and holistic.

Another prominent theme in Ferrer’s work is what he calls our “participation in the Mystery,” or what we call co-creation with God. He believes that spiritual participatory events can engage the entire range of ways of human knowing (rational, imaginal, somatic, vital, aesthetic) with the creative unfolding of the Mystery in the enactment—or “bringing forth”—of a plurality of ontologically rich religious worlds. By this, Ferrer seeks to avoid both the secular postmodernist reduction of religion to an entirely human construct and the religious seeing a single tradition as superior or representative of the whole.  This means we work with the Mystery to shape and interpret our spiritual path.  Therefore, for instance, in Christianity, spiritual realities are always a creative combination of God and us. This does not mean they are any less real or something like the  virtual reality of computer-generated simulation. The spiritual realities co-created by us and God actually exist.

Raimon Panikkar

Raimon Panikkar (1918-2010) was a Spanish Roman Catholic priest. He held a doctorate in philosophy at the University of Madrid, a doctorate in chemistry, and a third doctorate in theology at the Pontifical Lateran University in Rome. I guess he liked to study!

He famously wrote, “I left Europe as a Christian, I discovered I was a Hindu and returned as a Buddhist without ever having ceased to be Christian.” 

For us, his incisive understanding of the word “Christ” is fundamental. Panikkar states, “Christ is the Christian symbol for the whole of reality.” He sees reality comprised of three irreducible, inter-independent dimensions: the Divine, the Human, and the Cosmic, in thoroughgoing relationality. The divine, the human, and the cosmic material go together with neither confusion nor separation.

This has a very practical value for us as it forms the theological framework for the four centers of spiritual knowing in Whole-Body Mystical Awakening:

(1) Our Divine Reality is primarily accessed is our spiritual womb.
(2) Our Human Reality is richly connected with all human beings in our heart.
(3) Our Cosmic Reality is imbued in our embodiment and material reality, which finds a touch point in our feet.
(4) We can observe all of these forms of the divine, the human, and the material as we see from the mind.

Although the divine, human, and cosmic seem to have an initial or primary place of access in our centers of spiritual knowing, we also find all of these in the others. Divinity, humanity, and materiality are not separate even while not being the same.

Panikkar writes of the Christ triad of divinity, humanity, and matter as; 

Gods, angels, and spirits,
present here & now—
Human beings, and every living thing,
attending here & now—
Benches, walls, stones, and sacred spaces,
abiding here & now— 

May my words be in Harmony
with the entire Universe,
contribute to its Justice,
enhance its Beauty,
and be spoken in Freedom,
so that Peace may draw
closer to our World.

 Amen

Teilhard de Chardin

Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) was a Jesuit priest and paleontologist, and one of the earlier pioneers of a Christian evolutionary spirituality. He served as a stretcher-bearer in World War I, was part of the team that discovered the Peking Man, and lived most of his life seeing his ideas and writings suppressed by the Catholic church.

I (Luke) have been especially impacted by Teilhard—as you may have noticed in many of my writings—both as a guide and a writer. While his visionary writings cover a number of illuminating and insightful ideas and principles, we find a few in particular that have especially influenced and inspired us.

One of the central things that Teilhard comes back to again and again is the primacy of love. He says, “Love alone is capable of uniting living beings in such a way as to complete and fulfill them.”

This is a vital gift and offering of the Christian mystical path today, bringing to the forefront a higher and deeper expression of the energy of love in, with, and for one another. While so much of our culture fixates on romantic love (and religion often on rejecting it), Teilhard calls forth the recognition of its cosmic and evolutionary power:

“Driven by the forces of love, the fragments of the world seek each other, so that the world may come to being. This is no metaphor; and it is much more than poetry.”

Drawing on his training as a scientist, he sees the principle of radial energy as the driver of evolution, the energy that draws together and transmits greater complexity and inclusivity. For Teilhard, this is eros love of a higher order and purpose—the evolution of humanity.

In many ways, that’s what we are seeking to do in our WeSpace groups.

Teilhard sees this love as needing both a universal, cosmic expanse and a deeply personal and particular expression. He sees this expressed in both the Universal Christ of the Cosmos and the very intimate person of Christ, the heart of Jesus, speaking and present in his life and ours.

And like Panikkar, he deeply embraces the material world and the divine presence within it. As a paleontologist, he had a love for rocks, even penning a “Hymn to Matter.” In this way, he not only embraces Christianity’s gift of incarnation but helps illuminate that it includes all of creation and the whole cosmos. The divine in all things.

Teilhard’s insight into “the matrix of spirit” in the material world was a mystic’s movement into the deep web of life. His words convey a felt sense of the quantumly entangled incarnated embodiment of awakened consciousness with material reality.

He holds forth a glowing rock, recently unearthed, amber and burgundy. It is for you. It is for your body, your physical being. Feel its subtle vibration; hear its soft voice. Hold it close to your heart, to your womb. 

What does your body know that it’s trying to tell you?

“If we join the head to the body—the base to the peak—then, suddenly, there comes a surge of plentitude.”

Many Voices 

Perhaps these voices speak to you as well, or maybe you hear from others. There are many wonderful mystics writing and living out a more integral church—including you! We can all learn something from each of them. Sure, some more than others. We all have some of the true-but-partial vision of what a new church can look like and become.

So we seek to integrate what can be gained from the visionaries of the past, the present explorers and pioneers, and also from our own journeys and experiences. Next week, we’ll tell more about how we have been shaped by our own mysticism and life experiences.

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