What’s Missing in Many Spiritual Resources (including Gebser)

Part Six — The Magic and Mystery of Spiritual Healing

Jean Gebser’s unfolding of the structures of consciousness is so brilliant that I think of his ever-present reality, or Origin, as divine, meaning that it concerns supreme or ultimate reality. And Ever-Present Origin is also spiritual, meaning that it is filled with the intensely luminous presence of Source or Origin. However, with Gebser, those who write about him, and other spiritual resources, the missing element is an integral practice that effectively allows us to access structures of consciousness.

It appears that, perhaps, some do not need a regular practice. Gebser himself seems to have had several life-changing mystical experiences, including a transmission from being with Sri Aurobindo, that may have served that purpose. Last week, I wrote about my own experience of integrating the wisdom I’ve learned from Gebser with my own spiritual practice of Whole-Body Mystical Awakening.

This week I want to show how Gebser’s structures of consciousness, as well as other dimensions, are beautifully and effectively accessed by ICN’s core meditative prayer practice of Whole-Body Mystical Awakening. This is not only for mystical healing but for the larger transformation of our lives and the world.

Gebser refers to the practice of meditation in a positive way when he writes about Lourdes, “When the suppliant reemerges from the depths of meditation and returns to his rational wakeful consciousness, he brings along from the magic depths his recovery and health.” Here, we have “meditation” embodied in Lourdes’ magical ambiance, which is a very powerful way of meditating, indeed.

Later he refers to some meditation efforts in a negative way, writing, “The contemporary European can scarcely distinguish any longer between effort of will, intensive concentration, and true meditation, since he attempts to direct all of them by his rationality—an attempt that necessarily leads to unfortunate results.”   

Here, Gebser seems to be describing the limitation of meditation in its more common adapted Eastern and Christian forms as an effort by will and intensive concentration in the mental structure limited to the mind (and sometimes heart). Meditation and prayer that only involve the mental structure is, indeed, very limited.

I want to point out how Whole-Body Mystical Awakening is a fully integrated practice encompassing integral systems, science, spiritual practice, and theology. This includes not only Gebser’s structures of consciousness, but also neuroscience’s three brains, Wilber’s three faces of spirit, Ferrer’s four centers of spiritual knowing, and Panikkar’s understanding of Christ as the Christian symbol for all of reality. This is all correlated with WBMA because in personal academic research and experience, and collaboration with Luke Healy, we have intentionally merged these four distinct streams of understanding and experience in formulating the basic practice of Whole-Body Mystical Awakening.

An academic description of a WeSpace group:
“A primary ground for the practice of participatory-relational spirituality can be cultivated by collaborative peer-to-peer relations between persons engaged in fully embodied, multidimensional, transformative flourishing in and with their worlds.” —Jorge Ferrer

Three Brains

Neuroscience, over the last few years, has shown that in addition to our head-brain, we also have a heart-brain and a gut-brain. Each of these brains is a sophisticated system of sensory neurons, motor neurons, neurotransmitters, and ganglia. They are able to receive and process information, store it, and access it again when needed. They can sense, learn, remember, communicate, and change.

The head-brain has 86 billion neurons. It is the seat of language, cognition, and discernment. It recognizes, gives meaning, creates narratives. It says, “I think,” “I reckon,” “I understand.” Head brain waves seem to be correlated to the archaic, non-differentiated structure in Delta waves, 0-4 Hz, in deep sleep and babies. The mental, linear structure in Beta, 12-25 Hz, in alertness, activity, and thinking. The integral, transparent structure appears to be connected to Gamma, 25+, in unifying consciousness.

The heart-brain has 40,000 neurons that can operate independently from the head brain.

The heart energetic space includes the chest, back, arms and hands. It handles emotional processing, expression of values, and interpersonal connections. It says, “I feel,” “My heart is heavy,” My heart is full.” “I love you.” The mythic heart structure appears correlated to Alpha waves, 7-12 Hz, in awake resting with eyes closed.

The gut-brain has 100 million neurons, sending and receiving signals from the heart and brain that serve to hold a core sense of self, intuition, and gutsy courage. It says, “It takes guts,” “My gut tells me.” “Let’s do it!” The magical, synchronistic gut structure found in Theta waves, 4-7 Hz, is in sleep transition and young children.

Measuring Delta, Alpha, Beta, and Gamma waves doesn’t tell the whole story, but it’s a good scientific indicator of the different states in our body connected to these three brains.

Three Faces of God

Spiritual philosopher and friend Ken Wilber collapses his “four quadrants” into what he calls “The Big Three.” From there, he offers the 1-2-3 of God, where the seemingly innumerable ways humans conceptualize God can be broken down into three basic perspectives. These are the first person (I/we), the second person (you), and the third person (it/they). He then shows some of the ways these perspectives have and could inform modern spirituality and organized religion. I wrote about this in my book Integral Christianity: The Spirit’s Call to Evolve and my most recent book Is Your God Big Enough? Close Enough? You Enough? Jesus and the Three Faces of God. That entire book is an expansion of the Christian Trinity into this framework of the Three Faces of God.

The third-person (it/they) face of God is the Infinite Face of God-Beyond-Us. This is primarily accessed with the mental structure in the mind.

The second-person (you) face of God is the Intimate Face of God-Beside-Us, which is primarily accessed with the mythic structure or heart space. It is filled with symbols, metaphors, and stories that illustrate a personal relationship with divine presence.

The first-person (I/we) face of God is the Inner Face of God-Being-Us, which is primarily unfolded in the magic or mystical structure in the gut or spiritual womb.

For more about the Three Faces of God, see further description here.

Four Centers of Spiritual Knowing

At the California Institute of Integral Studies graduate school practicum, Jorge Ferrer has his students lay down on the floor while a trained guide touches their head, heart, gut, and feet. The student reports his or her inner responses while in a deeper state of consciousness. In our Whole-Body Mystical Awakening Practice, we do self-touching by using our hands, when helpful, to touch head, heart, and gut, with feet consciously touching the floor.

Ferrer says, “Spiritual knowing is a participatory process. Participatory alludes to the fact that spiritual knowing is not objective, neutral, or merely cognitive. On the contrary, spiritual knowing engages us in a connected, often passionate, activity that can involve not only the opening of the mind but also of the body, the heart, and the soul. Although particular spiritual events may involve only certain dimensions of our nature, all of them can potentially come into play in the act of spiritual knowing, from somatic transfiguration to the awakening of the heart, from erotic communion to visionary co-creation, and from contemplative knowing to moral insight, to mention only a few.”

Spiritual knowing is cocreative. We participate with God in bringing forth spiritual energies and realities. Spiritual knowing brings forth a transformation in us and others.

Spiritual knowing brings forth a pluralistic understanding of not only many different spiritual paths but also spiritual liberations, spiritual ultimates, and subtle forms of consciousness.

Spiritual knowing is what the New Testament refers to as “spiritual gifts” (1 Cor. 12-14). In today’s understanding of these gifts, it appears that we are surrounded by the energy field of the spirit or cosmic consciousness. When we wake up to those fields of spiritual knowing, we can access the encouragement, help, and guidance they contain. This can come through the specific messengers as personal presences or guides and through “gift” windows that are available to us with our unique personality and situation.

These energy fields that surround us appear to contain nearly everything we need to know spiritually in order to live our lives fully and creatively in loving ourselves and others. These “spiritual gift” fields may be related to what Rupert Sheldrake calls morphogenic fields, spheres of universal information. 

Ervin László, Hungarian philosopher of science and integral theorist, may be referring to something like this field of spiritual knowing when he posits a field of information that he calls the “Akashic field.” He says that this is the fundamental information-carrying field that informs not just the current universe but all universes past and present.

Christ, the Christian symbol of all of reality—divine, human, and material

Theologian Ramone Panikkar, says that Christ is “the Christian symbol for the whole of reality.” Panikkar further points out that the “whole of reality” consists of three seamlessly connected dimensions: (1) the divine (2) the human, and (3) the material. These three dimensions correlate with our four centers of spiritual knowing in this way:

Divine reality finds expression in the transcendent mind and our core identity in our gut.

Human reality finds both interpersonal and an all-inclusive unified field in the heart.

Material reality finds a vital, unified, embodied field in the feet and legs in our own body, all humankind as the body of Christ, and the material cosmos as the body of God.

Here is a way to picture them all together. Notice the profound connections.

Three Brains, Structures of Consciousness, Realities, and Faces of God

Whole-Body Mystical Awakening puts it all together

Many Christians around the world have spent years doing various forms of prayer and meditation that often connect primarily only to one or two of these spaces but leave out other vital aspects of our being.

In WBMA practice, we put it all together: the three brains, Ferrer’s Centers of Spiritual Knowing, Gebser’s Structures of Consciousness, Wilber’s Three Faces of Sprit, and Panikkar’s Christ, the symbol of divine, human, and material reality. It makes available endless wisdom and spiritual resources for our lives and for the world. This is a feast of spiritual help to nurture our lives over the long haul. You can practice it every day and never exhaust its limitless sources of energy and information.

I have researched a wide array of other spiritual practices and have found no other meditative prayer practice which encompasses in an embodied way such a broad array of resources, and makes available to us the fullness of who we are and what we contain within. That is not to say that other practices cannot be helpful, and many may find it beneficial continue to practice those in addition to WBMA.

These characteristics and qualities are further activated and even exponentially multiplied when we move into them in the relational field, in the WeSpace with others. We contain all of this within, while it goes far beyond the boundaries of our own skin.

In next week’s article, we will explore one way of moving into this through the dynamic power of enchanted, full-body embracing.