Are You Fully Human & Fully Divine?
Integral Consciousness Part 9
Inner Transparency to Wholeness
“Consciousness is the ability to survey those interconnections which constitute us: it is a continuous act of integration and directing.”
– Jean Gebser
As we cultivate permeability between the boundaries of our individual self and the “outside” world, allowing for greater interflow among the world and others, in integral consciousness we will also begin to come into inner transparency, to inhabit the sphere of wholeness “within” ourselves. This is the integrated person, a way of being that brings together in harmony the whole of our humanity and divinity.
As the early church declared of Jesus: he was fully human and fully divine. Can we be as well?
Yes! This is what it can mean to be Christ-ian, following in the way of Christ, the interfusion of the divine within the fullness of our humanity.
Humanity is ever-evolving. And every evolution of consciousness is a further movement of unfolding into becoming more fully human. What if to be Christian in this time and space entailed the meeting of the ever-present divine with the unfolding wholeness of humanity as it comes forth today?
To come into this new way of being, which we are calling integral consciousness, has been the subject of this series. Starting with the glimpses of divine reality in mystical moments, we began to explore how moving past the imperialism of the mind and into embodifulness opens us up to experientially participating in this wholeness personally. To bring the fullness of divinity into our person, as fully human.
So, what does it mean to be fully human today?
Healing Humanity to Wholeness – Embodying the Structures of Consciousness
“Our present state is one of exhaustion; that is, what was at the beginning of our structure its constituting strength or energy has become exhausted in the course of the exfoliation of consciousness.”
—Jean Gebser
Many today are living a truncated form of humanity. Alienated and dissociated from their fullness, they are plagued with an incomplete and insufficient way of being.
We see this in the modern self, trapped in the imperialism of the mind and suffering the revolts of the subjugated and suppressed mythic and magical within. We also see it in the postmodern self, seeking expansion and integration but so often at war with itself and others, caught in narcissism and isolating pride.
To be mystical healers of self, others, and the world at the deepest levels is to awaken into the fullness of being human, into an integrated way of being with all of the layers of consciousness that we contain within ourselves and our neighbors.
I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.
We cannot come into the fullness of our divinity without being in the fullness of our humanity. And so we must re-integrate and reawaken to these latent ways of being human that are embedded within. Through regular, integrated practice, we experience a resurrection of wholeness in our embodied being.
Here are some of the ways we might integrate more into our humanity in each of our embodied structures of consciousness:
1. Through our feet and body, we regenerate our experience of archaic consciousness through rooting to the earth, connecting into the web of life and the whole cosmos, coming home to our embodied, physical reality that is a material being, deeply and profoundly connected to nature and the whole biosphere of our world. Participating in the coming forth of life, always emerging into this now.
2. Through our spiritual womb, we revitalize into our experience of magic consciousness through welcoming the enfolding embrace of creative possibility. Awakening to our intuitive capacities and primeval generativity, we can come home to being makers once again, contributing actively to the bringing forth of more life.
3. Through our hearts, we rekindle the lived experience of mythic consciousness through embracing the love and connectedness that is vital to being human. Awakening to the relational field of intimacy and bonding, we come home to the story of our soul and the larger story of compassion and communion.
4. Through our heads, we renew ourselves into the healthy and efficient mental structure of consciousness through a clear and focused mind, integrated with our other ways of knowing from the wisdom centers within, in harmony with these structures of consciousness. Awakening to an open and discerning mind, receiving with and beyond acquired knowledge, coming home to the clarity of illumination and the gift of spirit wafting in with the wisdom of collective and divine knowing.
5. Through our whole being, integrated with all of the structures and the whole body, we resurrect anew into the experience of integral consciousness through an equanimous presence. Awakened to a way of being in wholeness, we live from a transparent participation in presencing each moment of our lives with the fullness of divine origin, the always-already “second” coming of Christ.
This is a summary of just a bit of what we might reintegrate into in our ways of being more fully human. Each structure is a whole arena of consciousness with endless exploration and possibility for moving more deeply into the way of being that includes and is clear to see and be from that way of consciousness. Not as a regression or loss, giving up the other structures, nor also just a movement among them—“but their embodiment as a whole” as Gebser puts it. The integrated potentiality of access to each and all of these ways of being—a full human experience.
“To live these structures together, commensurate with their respective degrees of conscious awareness, is to approach an integrated, integral life.”
—Jean Gebser
Mystical Baptism into Transparent Lucidity
Baptism is the Christian symbol and ritual of coming into a new consciousness. Although it’s not always been seen this way.
For many in traditional expressions of church, which are largely dwelling in the mythic structure of consciousness, baptism is seen more as a tribal initiation ceremony. There is nothing too terribly wrong with that, affirming a sense of belonging and spiritual commitment—unless it is turned into a necessary ritual in order to “receive salvation,” while those without it are lost and doomed.
And it can be so much more.
The traditional symbolism of baptism is submergence into purifying water, being washed clean and reemerging from that “death” into a new life.
The mystical symbolism of baptism can be the participatory initiation into the wholeness of our full consciousness, divine and human.
There are the baptisms of water, of fire, and of breath/spirit—all as corresponding expressions of consciousness from magic, mythic, and mental structures (spirit as efficient mental, in its previous integration with magic and mythic). The baptism of resurrection is the submersion down into and integration of all our ways of being, then the resurrection of a whole new consciousness.
When we reemerge with this new consciousness, integrated and whole, we become present with a new lucidity. A new seeing through. A crystallization of the spiritual nature of our human - being.
“It is this spiritual present which elevates wholeness to transparency and frees us from our transient age.”
In this mystical baptism, we have become initiated not into a religious tribe, but into the fullness of divinity and humanity coexisting in living consciousness of an awakened, incarnated Christ-ian—whatever religious background or spiritual tradition we may be coming from (not that they all need be called “Christians;” other traditions will have their own language that speaks to this reality).
Also, in the traditional symbolism of baptism, as it was for Jesus, the divine came in the presence of a dove. That symbol is perhaps best retired, as it places divine consciousness as something that is received externally.
So, if no dove is coming down to us, how do we come into our divine consciousness?
A Divine Wholeness
First is to recognize and own our full divinity, what we call in Integral Christianity the Inner/Incarnate face of God-Being-Us.
This is not something we can receive externally, though a mental opening to this truth can help us feel it deeper. We can come into the sense of knowing from the wellspring, flowing into our whole embodied being.
It is the original blessing of the divine breath which gives us life. We all have this divine life within us and as us—the Christ energy in our physical body and the divine source in the spiritual womb center, the unity of the magic structure of consciousness.
And as we come into further participation in that divine life through awakening to divine reality within us, we live in the mutual indwelling of divine consciousness (which will be the topic of next week’s article).
There is also then still the Infinite Face of God-Beyond-Us, the mystery that is always expansive and transcends our limited expression of the divine. In this way, we are never the fullness of the divine, because we are not God. But God is always being and becoming us, and so we enter into the fullness of our own divinity. That doesn’t quite make sense, does it? Exactly. That is God-Beyond-Us. Always just a bit further past what we grasp in our minds with the mental structure of consciousness.
And then quite importantly, we don’t lose our engagement with the Intimate Face of God-Beside-Us. The personal presence of God who is close to our hearts in the mythic structure of consciousness. The very real forms of living presence with us, like God’s motherly/fatherly presence, the Living Jesus, Mary, or other spiritual guides. Their love and support always communicate the vital component of the relationality of God, the God who speaks, who cares, and who is always with us.
When we live in divine participation with each of these Three Faces of God, we come into greater fullness of the divine—meeting the integrated fullness of our humanity.
As Jorge Ferrer puts it, “In short, a complete human being is firmly grounded in spirit-within, fully open to spirit-beyond, and in transformative communion with spirit in-between.”
All of this is a taste of the integrated seeing we have in the transparent, illuminated diaphaneity of integral consciousness.
It is through this transparency that we will illuminate the divine in our human reality. Permeability helps cultivate our divine participation in material or cosmic reality. And then we will be able to live fully in the mutual indwelling of divine consciousness throughout all of reality, which we will get to next week.
Divine participation in the immanent, integrated wholeness of being: Cosmic, Human, Divine. I, We, All.
“The spiritual form of being of man [sic] and the world, perceives the whole, the diaphaneity present ‘before’ all origin which suffuses everything. For him there is no longer heaven or hell, this world or the other, ego or world, immanence or transcendence; rather beyond the magic unity, the mythic complementarity, the mental division and synthesis is the perceptible whole.”
—Jean Gebser (emphasis mine)
I’d like to give a special thanks to friend and WeSpacer Tim Weidman for his insights and contributions to the explicit and underlying content of much of this week’s writing, and this series.