How Do We Get from Mental to Integral?
These days, we live beyond the age of science and reason – we are post-industrial revolution, post-enlightenment, post external authority. People alive today have grown up in a world that has been heavily changed by the extraordinary achievements of science and we continue t0 be shaped by a highly intellectual culture. People we know are walking around with heart and knee replacements and blood transfusions and joints treated with lasers. Our school systems teach our children’s brains while largely neglecting the needs of their physical and creative selves, as does much of the rest of our society.
Thanks to neuroscience and psychology, we know which parts of the brain generate emotions and which stimulate language or creativity and which are good at math (or we can google it, or anything else, and then remember). Science has even confirmed many things we may have long guessed at – our energy extends outside our physical bodies and our bodies hold our traumas. Thanks to nature and quantum physics, we know words like entrainment and entanglement; we remember that everything grows in cycles and seasons; we know that which we give energy to becomes matter, and matters.
We know really beautiful things like how atoms are literally embraced by molecules, and molecules are embraced by cells, and cells are embraced by the organism. And trees communicate and cooperate with one another.
And then there is something that even scientists have called a God Particle which seems to hold it all together. I like to imagine gravity as the personal magnet of my divine heart, holding me fast to the Divine heart. (Could science be collaborating with the divine?)
And yet, we also know with teachers such as Jean Gebser and Ken Wilber, that a problem created by the Mental Structure will not be solved by the same structure. We must evolve and transform. And of course we are already.
We are fortunate to live in a time of global awakening and global community. In this time of global pandemic, we can see and talk with people on the other side of the world in real time from our own homes. And not just on the news! We get to see how people on the other side of the world live and how they understand themselves and care for their children and their elders; and how they understand the Divine. In many ways, this pandemic is showing us more vividly the reality of the mystical body of Christ. More fully and intimately than ever before, we KNOW we are not really separate at all.
This is also a time of transformation in terms of where we seek and find legitimate authority. Gone are the days of hierarchy as the accepted symbol of wisdom and care and authority. We no longer blindly rely on institutions of church or state or family patriarchs to make decisions or determine the truth for us.
As David Bentley Hart says, "Don’t be brainwashed by people whose authority consists in a) repeating the same nonsense they were taught by rote and b) wearing strange clothes.”
The authority of the institutional church is beginning to fray. We have ‘grown up’ to the point we no longer need a pastor or priest to interpret scripture or the life of Jesus for us. We have come to understand the value of our own discernment and experience. We may have even experienced miracles and mystical and synchronistic experiences that defy the logic of the mind. These experiences are calling us to stretch and grow and open to the mystery of God that is beyond our understanding. I, personally, welcome this as wonderful and amazing!
Each one of us is always being invited into a deeper and more expansive way of KNOWING. Perhaps through kenosis (self-emptying) and toward gnosis, which is a Greek word for the knowing of spiritual truths. This is not the kind of knowledge that is necessarily logical or rational. Not even something we can get from Google or Siri or any book. Often this KNOWING is beyond what we can grasp with the mind, but when we dip into those moments we start to lose adequate language. We experience or see or sense something that is not easily translatable to words. This is the territory of mystical knowing. We have the opportunity to explore how to learn to develop this in our WeSpace practices - particularly during the Integral Prayer portion where we attempt to give voice to what may be emerging for one another. (The Christian church has generally discouraged this kind of knowing, because frankly, you might come to know something ‘they’ don’t. Quakers being one of a few beautiful exceptions.)
LISTENING FOR ONE ANOTHER IN INTEGRAL PRAYER
If you haven’t experienced Integral Prayer, it is a relational spiritual practice of prayer. Instead of traditional prayer, which prays TO a God somewhere out there, we practice learning to pray FROM our mystical knowing, WITH one another and God’s presence. Specifically, we focus on a particular person as we are learning to attune to our awakened, mystical knowledge, offering what is coming forth--which is often beyond what we “know” mentally.
I relate first to Integral Prayer from my experience as a spiritual director. The most important thing I do as an SD is listen - both to my client and for the Divine. I am listening to my client talk - both to her words and energy level and body language. I am also listening to what happens within me - listening for anything that may be FOR my client. (My curiosity and need to console and personal interest are not a helpful part of the process.)
It takes a lot of practice to do this type of listening well, years even. It is listening with the heart - but it is also more than that. I am listening for questions or words that do not come from only ME. These questions or words or images are true often when I do not have a reference point for why or where they come from. Or sometimes it is a question or word that does not go away when I let it go, but comes back as I continue to listen to the client. These are the questions/words/images I then proceed to offer. And then, sometimes, the words of God are spoken by my lips. I offer the words with - hopefully- no attachment to whether my client receives or likes them or even understands them in the moment. They are always an invitation and never offered as a direction or solution.
For example, if you are complaining about a relationship with a family member or co-worker and I commiserate with my own story or advice about my relationship, then I have taken your story and made it mine. The space between us has become smaller and more constricted. However, if my presence and perhaps my words help you open your own understanding or love in relationship to this person or yourself, then we have enlarged the space and it becomes more sacred.
This is quite like what we offer in the Integral Prayer practice. We are relieved from the urge to fix or figure out or offer advice or even console one another here. Our attention and presence are our largest gifts. Most of us underestimate how powerful our listening presence really is. We can feel we are not doing anything. Indeed, simply listening and receiving what another has said is a very important part of this practice. Listening is a loving and sacred offering.
Within this sacred space, we are invited to trust the divine with and within one another. We trust ourselves with the divine and the divine grants us the grace to speak truth into one another’s lives. Sometimes it is in the form of encouragement. Sometimes it is beautiful. Sometimes it may be confusing, ugly even. But if it is true, it does not come from my need for approval/affection/esteem (or my need to be helpful) It comes from love, just love!
It may feel silly to speak this way at first. It may be uncomfortable. It may feel more like intuition than knowing at first - and we may have been taught to dismiss this intuitive knowing. Yet many of us can remember a time when we acted on a feeling we could not just ignore, for a reason that may not have made ‘sense’, and can see only with hindsight the clarity we were acting on.
We are probably not used to offering this type of word or presence to others. It is often a more personal and internal experience. Or if we have done so, it may not have always been offered in full loving freedom, trusting the discernment and wisdom of the receiver. Yet in love we give our words and presence freely, as an offering, without expectation or attachment or explanation.
It may help to remember the person receiving the words is free to dismiss them. The receiver is always the one who gets to decide their relevance. We may be offering an invitation that has been issued many, many times before. Or we may be offering new light on something fresh. Either way, we offer the words freely and with love. And then we let them go. We offer that which we do not yet know.
When we listen for another in Integral Prayer, we are bringing our whole body into the process. Not just our minds. We may experience generative intuitions like I described above, which come from deep within. When we are open in this way, we may also experience sensations in our bodies, or images and pictures. Perhaps even smells or sounds. This way of sensing and knowing opens us up to a more integrated, integral way of being. Not just living solely from our mental consciousness.
A friend of mine was working with a Reiki master a few years ago and I was curious to experience this type of healing as well. His words to me before my first appointment were, “Okay, if you are going to try this, it helps if you put your rational mind aside for a bit.” His words were well advised. There are some things in life that are reduced when we try to make sense of them. Like a magnificent sunset. Or watching a hundred thousand cranes lift off the Platte River together at daybreak and how I can feel their lift. And God. Thank goodness, God is beyond my imagination. I would have made her way, way too small.
You are invited to enter the mystery. You don’t have to understand it. (Indeed, it may be better if you don’t!) Walk right into the cloud of unknowing. You don’t have to leave your brain out of the game, but don’t let it be the boss all the time. We have beautiful minds because we have been created so wonder-fully! Use your mind - but use your heart and your body as well. And then let them all go and experience the divine and let her have her way with you. And perhaps, maybe, come to KNOWING that the divine really is in you, and is YOU.
