Living in Integrated, Unified Reality
Integral Consciousness – Part 7
The Universal Body of Christ
“For all the stars flow through your veins” – Jean Gebser
We began our series on Integral Consciousness with a journey seeking the stars, remembering into our mystical moments and how they give us glimpses into a deeper reality, into a new way of being.
In many spiritual approaches, this is where we keep looking. We pursue transcendence. We seek to rise above where we have been and find a new, higher way. We try to move out of our small selves and beyond the limitations of our “false” or constricted self. We transcend into the vast beyond, into the emptiness outside of form, into the cosmic witness.
While this can certainly be a helpful movement (we do it in our Whole-Body Mystical Awakening practice), it alone is not how we will find and live into a new consciousness.
Discovering a new way of being will come from living beyond the confines of our limited and separate reality—which we know is not the ultimate reality. We are not simply our individual selves apart from all others, living solely in the I. We experience this in the loving We, in the sacred communion among others.
And we experience it not only by going, at times, beyond All, but more primarily by entering deeply into the All, into the immanency of all reality in the universal Body of Christ.
We think we want to live amongst the stars, but in reality, what will transform us is for the stars to live in us.
I dreamt to dance among the stars
And it was the dirt between my toes
—That ancient stardust—
That whispered through the grit:
“You are.”
Reorienting Our Spiritual Movements
In a consciousness trapped in by the mental structure, under the confines of our thoughts and the calculations of our questionings, we often find ourselves seeking a little relief. We try to “get out of our heads” through a variety of methods and activities.
Spiritually, this state of affairs can spill over into some meditation practices and approaches. There are either processes which try to train/tame the mind or practices that essentially help people “escape” from the prison for a little while. Trying to clean the attic or go on a short vacation.
Vacations are great, but living into all of unified reality will take something more. Not an escape from ourselves, but a continual and ongoing inflow of the divine source into our being and becoming.
In this way, we are not going to anywhere. Rather, we find ourselves participating in the primordial springing forth of ultimate reality into our being.
When this happens, it’s better conceived less spatially and more of a quality of experience. A different sort of time. Gebser calls this the intensification of consciousness.
And it is an embodied consciousness participating with and into a more holistic, integrated reality.
Embodied Participation in Unified Reality
Integral consciousness is a transparent participation in the reality of all our structures of consciousness. These come forth into our lived experience in unified reality through particular manifestations in each of our embodied centers.
Our minds are what allow us to go beyond our immediate lives and into the mystery, accessing transcendent reality beyond all, not as a final escape from the mental structure, but as the starting point, flowing into a kenotic movement of participation with all of lived reality.
We discover the universal love and bliss in our hearts already embracing all in the mythic structure of consciousness, no longer in a polemic journey against others with protagonists and antagonists, but one heart of love at the heart of humanity, the heart of God.
We find unified reality in the magic structure in the primordial wellspring deep within our spiritual wombs. This divine source oneness is being all before the outflow. The common fount as the shared point of origin, springing forth into your particularity in generative creativity and life.
Our feet bring us into the physical reality of the whole of the material universe. Not confined to our physical boundaries, we move into the experience of embodying all in our incarnated entanglement throughout the seamless materiality of the entire cosmos. The archaic structure of the underlying web of life.
Encompassing our entire body and all of the structures of consciousness is the universal Body of Christ that we dwell in fully in integral consciousness. Divine participation in the whole of our being and becoming.
This is one of the primary reasons why we engage in the spiritual practice of Whole-Body Mystical Awakening, both individually and in WeSpace. It is not the only way to help open our whole being up to the embodied awareness of integrated participation in unified reality, but it more directly oriented toward this and integrates more elements of our being than many other spiritual practices.
Incarnating the Cosmic Body of Christ
All this is thoroughly present
and despite being intertwined at all times
is also completely differentiated
with every breath.
—Jean Gebser
All of these ways of participating in unified reality bring us forth into greater immanency in our lives. It is the nature of God-Being-Us to incarnate, to flow forth in generative creativity into the particularity of our lives. From the all of unified reality, we come forth as the body of Christ in divine cocreation into manifestation.
The really great thing is that this reality is not dependent on our reflective, mental awareness of it. The body of Christ is always coming forth, always living, moving, and present among us—because the spirit is breathing and arising in a bigger mystery than we can possibly know.
That doesn’t mean we are passive—but it doesn’t depend on our mental understanding. It is not our “problem” to figure out. It does however deeply matter if we are able to actively participate further into the unfolding, becoming more open channels for the flowing forth of the spirit, particularizing each expression with and through our own beautiful gifts and abilities.
This is the vision of the body of Christ, the many parts operating from one whole. “Many parts, but one body.” The eye and the hand working together in mutual honor and respect, coming forth with the great gift of love for the world, as Paul first presented this metaphor and outflow in I Corinthians 12 and 13.
It’s important to emphasize that this body of Christ is not limited to the Christian church, or even just to Christians. It’s a metaphor with particular meaning and language that speaks to those in the Christian tradition, but it is not bound by any common belief system, particular language, or any other tribal distinctions. It is a cosmic vision for all of reality, the great divine body expressing in particularity all over across the world but coming from the fully universal source.
Other religious traditions have similar but different conceptions of the unified reality of all, such as Indra’s Net from Mahayana Buddhism, which describes a great net stretching infinitely in all directions. In each “eye” of the net there exists a single, perfect jewel. Each jewel reflects all the infinite others, while also being particular in its own way. It’s an illustration of the same unified, cosmic interbeing we are referring to here.
“When we reach experiential identification with Absolute Consciousness, we realize that our own being is ultimately commensurate with the entire cosmic network.”
—Jorge Ferrer
The Christian language and metaphor, our particular pallet of expression, is the Body of Christ. And we are that body. The body of us undivided, with distinction but without separation. Living in interbeing. With each enacting into the particularities of our lives, with our neighbors, with the world—in the love and the suffering. In service to cocreating a more just and loving world.
Making a Difference in the World
What if every human being is anointed, Messiahed, Christ? What if the most fundamental aspect of our identity is that we are each anointed and appointed by The Holy One, by Spirit—to preach good news to the poor, liberty to the captive, and sight to the blind? What if we take seriously being the body of the Christ—that we are the hands, feet, and heartbeat of the Living God? What if we are Word made flesh, Love made flesh, Light made flesh?
—Jacqui Lewis
Mystics of the world have long tried to tell us that we are interconnected through the unified reality of all. That we are all one. It’s a nice thought and a comforting idea. If we’re amenable, we can probably even get our minds to believe it.
But what does that really mean and look like in our lives? What difference does it really make if it isn’t changing how we live? How do we begin to live from that reality and experientially participate in a transformed way as a result?
The first major difference that comes from participating into and from integrated, unified reality is a liberation from being tossed about by the waves of the world, dragged along by the ebbs and tides of the greater, unseen forces. We are no longer submerged in the great swell of it all, because we are free from being just a small drop in the great ocean.
We are now more connected to and identified with the whole, we can feel its flow. We are liberated by a greater sensitivity to the synchronicities and secret work of spirit in the world. We are moving in conjunction with the larger body, attuned to the movement and direction of the body of God.
Being tapped into “the all” especially through our spiritual womb, into the divine source, will open us to a vitality in our lives that is unlike any energy we have known before.
When it’s all a little too much, when there is too much constriction or tension, we have access to transcendent release through our minds into the beyond, finding relief and perspective, giving us greater freedom to return to the immanency of the all.
And in our hearts we can deeply tune into our human participation in it all, more deeply enmeshed and immersed in the concrete reality of the love and suffering all around us, ready to make a difference. But rather than from our finite, bleeding hearts, we are now empowered with courage and universal compassion from the deep surge of love in the radiant center of our divine heart.
And so we find we are much more able to bring forth our giftings and creativity in tune with a greater purpose. We are now more actively cocreating with the divine work, participating in the world in a new way. We both are more easily able to find our place in that work, in that body, and then too have a greater capacity and force with which to bring it forth.
The body of Christ is not a completed entity. It is always coming forth in new, cocreated forms. It is a super-organism transforming and mutating with the movements and expressions of the changing times. And with our contributions.
That is our enaction in the world, flowing from the all, into our communities and persons in order to cocreate a new reality, a new way of being in the world, a new integral consciousness unfolding for no less than the salvation of the world.
The Body of Christ universal. Resurrected and enfleshed in us all, through the all, for all.
May we be so.
“Hear the call
—Like no other—
which comes to you from beyond the sky,
which now, since winter carefully brought
the lunar,
the earthly,
and even what is beyond them
brought them carefully to rest—
hear the call, which
from beyond the starry firmament
knows itself, and knowing, turns to you:
”
All Gebser quotes throughout the article are from “The Winter Poem” (Translated by Aaron Cheak)