Our Spiritual Charge in a Rapidly Evolving World
“Worlds Anew” – image by Dalmo Mendonça
Part Six: WeCreating the Future of Christianity & the World
The world is evolving. We are going through a time of great change, which is always disruptive and challenging.
The invitation in WeCreating is to take up the charge and step into our power to be an active part of making the future what it needs to become. Rather than be tossed about by the waves of tumult, we sink deeper into the underlying currents of spirit, with the divine flow in the greater movements of God, the work of evolution.
Perhaps it seems somewhat audacious to think that we can make a difference in evolution. After all, isn’t it is a cosmic, biological process expressing over countless years? How can we possibly make a difference in that as a singular human in a world of billions?
Evolution is not confined to the physical world, despite very often being primarily represented by science within the confines of materialism—and fought against by much of Christianity for so long. The integral tradition takes a more holistic approach, recognizing evolution happens in all areas of life, and most crucially in the evolution of consciousness.
How is consciousness evolving? And how do we participate in the process?
A Technological Revolution to the Rescue?
With the advent of AI, an extraordinary change is upon us. There is no telling the extent to which it will exponentially alter our ways of working, learning, creating, and more than we can even comprehend. Yet, this is not the revolution I am referring to.
The internet is what has been inaugurating a new age. It is not just giving us unprecedented access to information and perspectives, but now relationships of unparalleled possibility in all of human history.
Just as the printing press heralded a great change in religion in the 16th century that continues to this day. The internet—and specifically the communicative capacity now burgeoning to experience one another in direct, live face-to-face encounters is the gateway to a new revolution of spirituality.
The implications of the future of AI may be wide reaching and world altering. I might contend that our capability to dynamically engage in the living, experiential spaces of interbeing have the power to shape the future of human history in far greater (by which I mean deeper and more authentic) ways.
Our deep engagement in the authentic, divine humanity of our being—which is inherently relational and inter-related—will be a vital and necessary integration in the face of an extensive expansion of the artificial (which will only continue to appear more and more real).
As we give more of our power over to the literal ghost in the machine, grounding ourselves in our embodied relationality will be a more and more precious capacity. It may even be a vital aspect of our very survival.
It is only from the place of our genuine being we will find the ways of living that spring from who we truly are—and who we can really become.
The Spiritual Way of Evolution
The evolution of technology and systems of communication have created a new landscape ripe for unparalleled developments in our culture and society—both for ill and for good. We will utilize these tools in the manner and capacity we deem right and good from our current place of understanding, and to the degree we are consciously able.
As such, our spiritual charge is more crucial and necessary than ever.
An evolving, enlivening, integral Christian spirituality calls us to a fundamental orientation so much greater than individual salvation or personal attainment, more meaningful than tribal empire-building or religious primacy.
Our spirituality becomes so much more than just one an aspect of our life to which we occasionally attend. We are drawn beyond passivity, deferment, and projection onto others and into a vital, totalizing, and utterly inspiring call.
Our spiritual charge is to intensely participate in the divine unfolding of heaven on earth through the loving evolution of consciousness—which we co-enact and co-create through our spiritual becoming in ourselves, in one another, and even in the global and cosmic order.
This is why we embrace and engage so intently in the mystical, not because it offers lofty states and titillating experiences, but because it is the pathway by which we learn and grow consciously into more holistic engagement with the totality of reality—that which is and that which is still becoming.
“Mysticism is the integral, holistic experience of reality, life itself.”
This is why we practice embodied mysticism, because it is in the incarnated reality of our whole being where we truly inhabit the fullness of our structures of consciousness, into the completion of integration which capacitates us to the next mutation, as Jean Gebser would put it. And it is how we live into and from this new consciousness in the world, showing up to make a difference in our spheres of influence.
This is why we practice WeSpace, because the more real and holistic conscious participation in reality is more than our individual consciousness, it is an enlivenment of our true identity and being—which is not our separate and small self. In and through deep relationality and collective interbeing arises the emergence of the new forms and ways of evolution becoming.
And this is a deeper and fuller engagement with love, which we will explore more later in this series.
“Participants in the Divine Nature” – image by Dalmo Mendonça
WeCreating a Loving Future for the World
The values, intentions, and practices described above are what we believe leads us into greater consciousness capacity—both in a fuller participation in our current structures of consciousness and into the unfolding of the new, what is sometimes called “the integral structure of consciousness” or new stages of evolution.
This manifests in both the internal and external world—which are actually deeply interconnected.
Internally, we attend with great care and dedication to the evolution of our consciousness, personally and collectively. Through spiritual practice, especially in communion, the flow of spirit and divine becoming intensifies in our embodied experience of our way of being. We come into greater wholeness and fullness of being—which is different from amassing knowledge and just feeding our mental growth. We need to go much deeper than the computer model of knowledge accumulation and storage and further develop in our embodied, relational human aptitudes of spiritual knowing.
There are many consciousness capacities and spiritual aptitudes to grow into—many of which we may not even quite be able to recognize or name yet. We will discover them together through acts of WeCreating in the inner landscapes of spiritual discovery and divine innovation.
Externally, we live and suffer in the midst of systems of power that run antithetical to this way of loving evolution and creative becoming. We are under governments and immersed in societies with very different approaches to engaging with how with live and relate to the external world. And we may even be enmeshed in religious or spiritual systems and institutions that have not yet repented and are actively resisting and obstructing necessary evolutions.
For some, our loving evolution will be to challenge these systems, to put out fires, to protest injustice, to work for change in the midst of these structures.
For others, our place will be in the cracks and crannies of the predominant systems, seeking out and cultivating under-the-radar channels of life-giving goodness, beauty, and truth—while also creating micro-system alternatives ourselves. New wineskins still becoming.
As the old world breaks apart, we work for justice and healing. And we work to be a part of creating the better world that rises up to take the place of the old—which is falling away, as it must.
We will need all of these ways of WeCreative action and evolution.
They will express in the world in forms that affect and engage with any religious and spiritual contexts—Christianity and otherwise, but also go far beyond the confines of what we might categorize as “religious” or spiritual. What we create may find a home in “the church” or in explicitly “spiritual” expressions, or they might be in any setting of the world: in our work, our hobbies, our engagement with technology, and much more.
The sacred/secular divide is mostly meaningless in WeCreating. It’s all part of the vital evolution to come, which will necessarily be intensely spiritual—that is to say, full of holistic engagement with the totality of life and reality. It’s all spiritual and all sacred when we create from and infuse with divine power and loving presence.
The rest of this series will explore how we go about making that happen. We’ll engage with the forces that power this creative action. We enter into processes we can undertake together to further enact our WeCreating together. We’ll consider the values, virtues, and qualities we will need to cultivate to suffuse ourselves and others in this way of being. And we’ll dream into the divine aspirations that will further point the way ahead into the possible future, into our loving WeCreating of the future of the world.
“WeCreating the World Together”
All Images are open-source, used with permission, or created by ICN