We’re All Mystics Trying to Remember
Integral Consciousness – Part 1
A young girl who had lived in the city her whole life was taking her first trip camping. All along the drive she looked out the window and out at the sky. Her telescope was packed away safely among her things in the trunk. And she was quiet. She was already looking for the stars.
The late afternoon light was heavy on the sky and her eyes. She fought sleep as she imagined the canvas darkened yet glimmering with constellations and scattered twinklings. How many would there be? She pictured herself reaching out across the darkness, gently touching each point of light, each galaxy in a pinprick. She couldn’t wait to really see them for the first time.
But that night was completely overcast, and she cried herself to sleep in her tent.
Do you recall your first mystical moment? Or if not the first, perhaps the brightest?
We’ve all had them. Every single one of us. Be they grand or small.
Some may not have called them as such or recognized them in the moment for what was being offered. Many too easily dismiss them as a flight of fancy or a moment of imaginary interference. Forgotten, filtered out among our myriad perceptions and observations of a world full of challenges and problems.
Over time, we see more and more of what we’re looking for. And less and less of what we have filtered out. This holds true in all directions. Until eventually we’ve forgotten what we’ve chosen to no longer see.
A mystical moment is the inbreaking of enchanted reality into our perception. A flare piercing through our ordinary consciousness, reminding us of something we’ve forgotten. Not of a place or a time, but the deeper reality in our very midst.
Jesus called it the kingdom of God, though that translation doesn’t really paint the right picture for us now. He was trying to point us toward this “heavenly” realm of the now, the enchanted underpinning of spiritual reality in the midst of the world. The stars, the pinpricks of light through the veil. Some faint and some vibrant.
We may see them from time to time with our eyes—but often entering the experiential reality requires both an openness in our minds and an integration beyond the mental structure. It takes a cultivation of inner receptivity in our embodied being, in the depths of our heart and spiritual womb.
This becomes then a welcoming of not only the mystical moments, the glimpses of this deeper reality, but a movement into the dark night sky and the light of the stars themselves. Beyond the mental cloak and into the transparent participation with the enchanted reality that we have too often forgotten in our minds, but not in our depths within.
From Wonder to Delight
Reopening to wonder is often a first step in cultivating an openness in our minds to start seeing with wider eyes again. In this day and age, it’s quite a thing alone just to recover a sense of wonder. Cynicism abounds, and we’ve seen it all before. We get set in our routines and patterned loops of reality, repeating a day like every other day, seeing what we expect to see and preparing ourselves to do just so.
It may be a child that reminds us of the splendor. Stopping to point out the beauty in what we forgot was so extraordinary. Or perhaps a break from the mundane. A trip into nature and its cyclical time, offering its ever-changing brilliance amidst our sometimes drab and repetitive routine.
These can be similar to a mystical moment, a reminder to appreciate and to really see. To feel gratitude for what we often take for granted. And to do so is a worthy and worthwhile pursuit. Sometimes these insights transport us further, but in and of themselves, they don’t quite get us there.
This sense of wonder comes from a perspective of observation. We are seeing something out there that gives us a sense of awe or joy. We may even feel somewhat connected to it at times, though still as a separate, objective reality we are perceiving.
In our next step into the mystical, we do not just perceive, but are invited to partake. We are bidden into the delight of enjoyment. To taste and see. To participate in the enchanted reality not just as what may be at times visible outside of ourselves, but through what is already and always present deep within. In our own being, seen and unseen.
And so we must learn not just how to see, but how to savor. Not just how to perceive, but how to participate. Not just how to describe, but how to dance in delight.
Com-prehending, Re-Member-ing, and Under-Standing
Cultivating our receptivity then will include a process of going from external recognition—seeing or being drawn by that which we encounter outside and around us—to further welcoming and awakening to the inner knowing, the springing-forth of this reality from within.
In other words, what we often call consciousness. It is coming from inside of you rather than something that is observed, seen, or re-cognized. It just arises into our knowing.
And the same knowing, the same direct reality of lived experience exists not only in our minds, in our heads, but also in our other centers of knowing within—becoming more apparent the more we learn to re-awaken to them.
To move into awakened embodied consciousness is a process of re-integrating the deeper structures of consciousness that are latent within us.
To learn to comprehend once again from our heart, reawakening to our mythical, relational knowing. The loving truth within stories and the journey of life together.
To learn to understand again from our gut or spiritual womb, reawakening to our magical and mystical knowing. The intuitive and creative flow springing forth from our deep source.
To learn to remember again from our feet and body, reawakening to our archaic, inceptive knowing. The incarnated embodiment in the fibers of our being and our cellular roots into the great web of life.
We have this already within us. It is not learning something new. All of these ways of knowing and living are latent if not dormant within. But we have forgotten. To recover this holistic, integrated consciousness, our minds must be willing to open the door and give up its totalizing predominance (more on this next week).
Releasing into Trust
But how do I know what I am sensing, what is arising from within me is real?
Our minds so wants to know, to be correct, to be accurate. Our inner critic is ever the skeptic—and very often for good reason. We have learned the true need to be wise and discerning, to be wary of the unknown. It is our mind’s survival instinct.
What’s happened is we have so forgotten these ways of being, that they seem unknown and foreign to us—to our minds. But in reality, they are coming from our very self, from within us.
This is not about trusting some external authority or outside voice. But invited to listen to ourselves more fully and completely. This is the opposite of foreign, but rather what should be the most familiar.
If we’re honest with ourselves, we already know that these forms of deeper knowing and the energy within them are already coming up within us. They have already been present—we are just often unconscious of them. And when we’re unconscious, they hold power over us because we do not see or understand the strong influence they have over our actions and perspectives. We humans are not so rational as we might like to think.
What we’re doubting is our own deeper self.
And maybe we’ve been led astray before. Perhaps we’ve missed the meaning and lost the message. We’ve also discerned wrongly now and then. Thought the wrong thing. Misunderstood. This is part of being human—and no element of our inner self is immune from it.
We come into our own fullest inner coherence through the integration and collaboration of all of our forms of knowing, all of our modes of perception and wisdom that exist in the structures of consciousness within us, working in resonance together.
To do so, we must choose to trust ourselves. All of ourselves. It will take practice—which is why a spiritual practice such as Whole-Body Mystical Awakening that integrates in this way is so vital. And why we seek to do it together with others in WeSpace, to aide in discernment and benefit from the collective energy that not only holds us in the midst of that process, but also helps draw forth these dimensions in one another.
Continuously Renewed Immediacy
The main problem with our conventional way of remembering is that in our minds we think back to a previous time and memory, recalling what happened in the past. But that is not how we truly remember into this integrated consciousness.
The experience is not past, but always ever-present. These mystical moments we’ve had in our lives reveal to us a reality that is timeless and eternal. Not in that they will never end, but in that they always are. We don’t need to look back, because it still is. Or as Quaker mystic Thomas Kelly puts it:
“Continuously renewed immediacy, not receding memory of the Divine Touch, lies at the base of religious living.”
This is what it means to be truly present. To dwell in the timeless consciousness of mystical knowing and being. Awakened and available to sensing and drawing from the deeper reality, the wholeness of the all, ever beyond you but always within you. Living in the mystical reality that was previously only glimpsed. Now realized.
Her telescope was set by midday. She would peek in the eyehole, but knew it wasn’t much good to look for stars in the light of the day. But the sky was clear. And night was coming.
As dusk creeped in slowly, a few bright stars appeared. She recognized some of these, for they were those that overcame the city lights. She peered through her telescope, from star to star, as more unveiled. When suddenly she realized the sun was gone, and all was open. A thousand stars shining bright.
In the majesty of the full night sky and the glow of the milky way, there were more than she could ever have imagined. She walked past her telescope and its narrow portal. She could now see them all. She knew them all.
She had known them all along.