Adventing Christ Consciousness – Part Three

“In the humanity which is begotten today, the Word prolongs the unending act of God’s own birth; and by virtue of God’s immersion in the world’s womb, the great waters of the kingdom of matter have, without even a ripple, been imbued with life. The immense host which is the universe is made flesh.”

— Teilhard de Chardin

The question of consciousness is one of the enduring mysteries of both science and spirituality. Certainly no one has all of the answers about it, and we carry conscious and unconscious assumptions about its nature, particularly depending on our religious upbringing and cultural background.

Many of our presuppositions about the nature of consciousness, especially in the heavily-Platonic-influenced Christian tradition, are rooted in a separation of matter and spirit. Without going into the long philosophical and theological history of this split, it will suffice to say that this orientation is a more traditionally masculine and dualistic approach. As such, consciousness is often separated—implicitly and explicitly—into the realm of spirit and immateriality, detached from the physical.

The more feminine principle of life does not split knowing and being, awareness and presence, mind and body. It does not privilege the experience of reality from the objective and removed perspective, but rather lives enmeshed in the manifest, through the energy of imbued presence in the midst of the substance of things. Things like the trees, the soil, the cat, the baby crying, the dirty toilet, the grief of loss, the joy of delight, the lack of sleep, the sick, the hurt, and the pearls of irritation. And everything else that is alive and dead, growing and composting, here and now. All that has been and is yet to come.

This is where our consciousness lives while we’re on this earth. And it is not only present in our mental recognition and reflective human awareness.

We are learning more about the consciousness of animals, plants, and even fungi. While the nature of these other forms of awareness is still somewhat undetermined and being further discovered, we are seeing our human-centric assumptions and dominator attitude dismantling more and more. Escaping the confines of materiality (and spirituality rooted in similar fundamental assumptions, even when they are in opposition to it), we can come not only to see but also experience how all of life is animated in spirit. There is a mystical, fundamental—perhaps even quantum—presence of spirit/energy/consciousness in all things. This is the Cosmic Christ.

This is crucial to our spirituality because it anchors our sense of where we find God, where we look for the divine. If we are searching for heaven in an entirely removed realm and expecting spirit to appear only in an ethereal, ghostly haze—an immaterial, faint external object—we will continue to disembody and disconnect from “earthly” things (which is tellingly often used as a pejorative). And in so doing, we will further doom the earth.

The Christ principle, in its most cosmic sense, is rooted in the immanence and immediacy of the divine in materiality. In and through the physical, which is not divorced from spirit. Christ is the divine incarnated, enfleshed, and somatized. So Christ Consciousness is the living, embodied awareness from the divine entwined and present in us, coming in the energy and knowing through our very material element of being. This is God-With-Us, Emmanuel in the heart of matter, in the deepest substance of all things.

*“Our Lady Christ of the Earth 1” –* image by Dalmo Mendonça

The Feminine Christ Immersed in Life

“This recovery of the feminine divine is essential in correcting an almost exclusive emphasis on the masculine nature of God in the Christian tradition. In and through a scientific lens, sacred Wisdom manifests as the evolutionary intelligence inherent in all of Her creatures, including, but not limited to, the human ones.”
— Bruce Sanguin

This is why at ICN we practice Whole-Body Mystical Awakening. Because we are dedicated to doing the spiritual work of reinhabiting the fullness of our embodied divinity. We are seeking to cultivate the Christ Consciousness that lives within us, awakening to the energy and aliveness of spirit incarnated in us.

Many spiritual practices are centered in the mind, which is helpful insofar as that goes. WBMA most often starts in the heart, but it is centered in the whole body. And the body is rooted in material reality, which is grounded and present in and through the earth. We most directly enter into this awareness in our practice through our feet center, though we engage in the somatic presence and experience in all of our embodied centers—and everything in between.

Materiality goes beyond the human, of course, and therefore is certainly not bound to gender. Though there is a deep groove of the manifest world being linked with the feminine. We speak of Mother Nature and Mother Earth. Gaia is the feminine goddess, the soul of the earth. In Hinduism, Shakti is the feminine life force energy, which we’ll look at more here shortly.

Again, the feminine is immersed in the substance of life, not in hard, inert materiality, but in the flowing, dynamic energy and soul of matter. Nature is not an object we subjugate and extract from. It is the body of God amidst which we dwell—not as separate beings but an intricate and intimate intrabeing. We don’t just connect to nature; we are nature. And in our growing Christ Consciousness, we can further evolve into our becoming nature. This integration is a crucial part of our incarnated divine participation, not only for our wholeness but also to have the grounding and strength to show up fully in the world.

Last week, we looked at the personal forms of the divine feminine we may encounter as guides and companions along our birthing journey. But that is not the only way nor the only place where we can encounter her.

“The universe is a communion of subjects, rather than a collection of objects.”

— Thomas Berry

In our awakening to Christ Consciousness permeated through our embodied being, we welcome the impersonal feminine energy that is the very life force of the universe. This is the Christ Energy, the sacred Wisdom woven in the fabric of all things. It is the evolutionary intelligence and vibratory energy that is the substratum of everything and is the potency behind all growth and change.

We can call it forth to arise in us and one another.

*“Our Lady Shakti” –* image by Paul Fryer

Awakening Shakti/Christ Energy

“When we engage these Shaktis, we touch into the deep structures of the cosmos and of ourselves. We touch the source code, the hard drive of consciousness itself.”
– Sally Kempton

In Hinduism, Shakti is the fundamental cosmic energy that underlies all things. It is a feminine power, embodied in goddesses but more prevalent as the dynamic force that permeates the whole universe. It is the active dimension of the divine, responsible for life, creation, and ongoing evolution.

This innate power in material reality is something that we can actively engage with—if we recognize its force and welcome its flow. We can awaken to the dynamic energy of this inner divine power. It can vitalize our embodied experience with a divinely energized and charged felt sense of physical presence.

Perhaps most commonly, Shakti is released in us through the unfurling of Kundalini, the hidden power of spiritual awakening latent within us. To awaken Kundalini is to bring alive the cosmic energy within us, to welcome the current of divine charge throughout our body. Her energy transforms our nervous system and rewires our inner architecture so that we can more consciously participate in our awakened divine consciousness as an embodied experience. She gives us the power to transform our consciousness in creative ways, personally and collectively. When we share with others in communal movements of divine energy, we engage in and create channels that make it easier for spirit to move in the world.

In our Christian mystical tradition, we might call this the cosmic feminine Christ Energy. In the Kabbalism of Jewish mysticism, it is resonant with their concept of “Shekinah,” the feminine dwelling of God in the midst of the people, in the embodied flow of divine energy among us.

The language and symbols we use are less important than the genuine experience of its reality. Whether we call it Shakti, Christ Energy, or something else, it is a signpost toward the mystical nature of embodied divine power that we can step into. That this experience is shared across mystical traditions—as a feminine experience—not only helps reinforce its reality but can also inform us of different dynamics taught and explored in various ways.

When I had my awakening experience of Christ energy, it was very helpful for me to learn about Kundalini and its experience. It was the best way I could describe it at the time—and in many ways still is. And learning about the experience more in-depth helped clarify and recognize what was going on and how to respond to it—in ways that weren’t covered by similar experiences in the Christian tradition, such as a baptism of holy spirit.

In ICN, we have drawn from the spiritual wisdom of various traditions and practices. Though we are rooted in Jesus and the Christian mystical tradition, there is much to learn and gather from other spiritual sources. Integrating these spiritual understandings and experiences across traditions is a gift and creative exploration we are free to engage in Integral Christianity. And we are discovering resonant aspects of Christianity that have been present from the beginning but were covered over and subsumed by empire and Greek philosophical/theological interpretations.

Change from the Ground Up

“Recognizing your Shakti as it expands and empowers your inner gifts lets you flow at your growing edge and can also give you profound confidence that you are supported from within, and even from the universe itself.”
– Sally Kempton

It’s hard to overstate how important and vital the need is for us to come into our experiential participation with this embodied Christ energy. The realms of the mind and transcendent spirit, while liberating in many ways, will not be sufficient for the evolutionary calling that is before us. We desperately need to grow up as a species, and to do so we need to grow down into our rooted and substantive presence on, with, and through the Earth.

If humans are to have a future as part of the Earth, we will need to reintegrate our lived experience as a part of nature. Not a separate part, but an intraconnected whole. A conceptual understanding of this will only take us so far. It will really come alive in our being when we intimately engage with the life force and energy of materiality as a fabric of our very own being. When we are deeply grounded in the divine energy of matter, the Christ energy of the earth, the Shakti of the cosmos.

“Nature and consciousness are correlative, interdependent, relational. And the observer is fundamentally entangled with the universe it witnesses.”

— Physicist Nicolas Gisin

This will not only give us the embodied understanding we need to recognize our true nature, but it will also link us to the physical wisdom and resources that flow throughout Indra’s Net, that move in the mycelial mesh network, that dance in the quantum substrata of non-locality.

From this rich and substantive base, we will find the energy and strength to live in empowered presence. To have the grounded stability and power to participate in affecting social change without being subsumed by despair, fear, or anger. To engage in mystical activism with the spiritual power and capacity to affect change in the subtle realms. To transmit this strength and cosmic force into one another and our local and global environments.

We might even go so far as to say that the second coming of Christ will appear in this way, not from the clouds in the sky but through the deepest substance of incarnation in materiality—the universe made flesh. Imbued with life immersed in the world womb. Growing with the divine power to rise into being all around us. Illuminating the New Heaven in the New Earth in our midst.

Joy from the World

“God irrupts in the center of your being, as that fountain of living water that makes you to be . . . this energy irruption . . . pours out like a sacred libation.”
— BEATRICE BRUTEAU

There is another component to this Christ energy that I haven’t spoken of quite directly yet. This divine force and Shakti energy is not only full of immense power and vitality. It is also charged with bliss.

This is not the cheap, modern call to “follow your bliss” and pursue what makes you happy. Rather, it is a grounded and embodied blissful joy. An enlivened ecstasy that vibrates through the marrow of our bones. It doesn’t come from an external circumstance or situation. Rather, it abides in the deepest substance of our physical nature when we are awakened to its spondic energy—that is, the unending sacred libation that irrupts and pours into our being continuously, as the mystic/scientist/philosopher Beatrice Bruteau describes it.

There can be an airy and ephemeral bliss that waves over us and passes by, but that is more of a passing ecstasy than an authentic experience of abiding bliss that comes from Christ energy. This bliss is a spiritual phenomenon that resides in our heart and body. It is a hearty and steady joy, substantive and solid. It is less from what we see outside us than what we feel permeated in the strata of our soma.

For many, Joy can be hard to come by. In the pursuit of happiness, we often find it elusive and transitory. Life is filled with many hardships and struggles. Personally and globally, there are ever-present many causes for suffering. Nearly everywhere we look, we can find a reason for despair.

While it may be hard to see, through the awakened heart will we feel joy. And that joy will not come to the world, but from the earth. From the innate power and cosmic force of divine life arising into being, God is being birthed in unending and unyielding ways. In the form of you and me. And much more.

For it’s not all up to us. The earth is held in the great womb of God and is gestating into a new becoming. Our Lady of Christ the Earth is alive and well. And while she weeps for all that is destroyed and desecrated, she is also charged with the greater joy and bliss of the divine present that runs deeper than what we can now see. Her vision is grand and great, and she sees far beyond what we can even imagine.

What’s more, she not only sees it, but is the creative and enactive spirit at work within us and the world to bring it about. The divine Shakti. The Sophia Christ energy.

Let heaven and nature sing, repeating the sounding joy of wonderous love imbued and arising in the whole of creation.

Our Lady of Christ the Earth
singing with joy
from the divine world.