To focus on Jesus as an energy healer is to assert that he is not just using his own energy but is so connected to God, that it is God’s energy within him, flowing out of him, that heals people. It is his expanded consciousness, that we refer to as being filled with the Holy Spirit. The term” Spirit-filled” expounds on the experience of a person being connected to and empowered by the energy of God.
Read MoreGod has been seen interacting with humans in human form. It is difficult to get away from personifying God, seeing God as human form. As we explore some images of God and Jesus, I invite you to ask: How do we see God this way? How would we interact with God this way?
Open your mind and heart to some new ideas, new thoughts, new images of God. See how we can understand God in new ways and, therefore, interact with God differently. Perhaps we can experience God in new ways since God is not limited by body, by time, by space. Consider these different images.
Read MoreExcept for progressive and integral Christians, along with the Eastern Orthodox tradition, the dominant theory among Christians today of why Jesus died on the cross goes something like this: All people are separated from God because of both original sin and our own sin. Because of this, we are destined for eternal punishment. However, Jesus came to provide a way out of this destiny by taking our place and dying on the cross to satisfy God’s wrath for our sins. Jesus was punished in the place of us so God could forgive our sins. Those who accept Jesus as their Savior are no longer separated from God and are destined for heaven.
This is a serious and devastating misunderstanding of Jesus, God, and our relationship to God. It is based on four interpretations which reflect previous stages of spiritual evolutionary understanding.
Read MoreDid Mary realize the baby she held to her breast was one that John would later write about as “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14)? Notice John does not say the Word came to live “in the flesh.” Rather, this profound prologue to John’s Gospel makes the astounding claim that the Word, God, actually became flesh!
The Christmas season is an excellent time to talk about bodies, flesh, and earthiness as we celebrate God with us in the body and person of Jesus. . .
Read MoreThe experience of devotion to Jesus in the mystical visionary realm is the doorway to accessing your own spiritual messengers. Others, such as Cynthia Bourgeault call the mystical visionary realm “the imaginal realm.” Ken Wilber calls it “subtle consciousness.” I prefer “visionary realm” because that is the language the New Testament uses, and the word “vision” is commonly understood today in the mystical sense of seeing things that are not in the physical realm.
Visions include the sensed presence of another spiritual being, a picture, thought, feeling, bodily sensation, or an intuition that arises from your luminous interior. These can range from a fleeting moment to a dramatic journey in a deep trance state.
We find visions throughout the Bible and some specifically occurring in in what the New Testament refers three times to as a “trance” state. Christianity’s most vital originating moments occurred in a series of mystical visions by . . . .
Read MoreI have to admit, when I first read Paul Smith talking about spiritual guides, I was a little put off. My spirituality had become a little too sophisticated for something so New Age-y as that. Ok maybe Jesus. I mean, sure I had a relationship with him early on in my faith, and if I was honest with myself, I still often felt his presence—when I happened to think about him being with me. Or was that just my imagination? And that “personal relationship” buddy Jesus stuff, wasn’t that all a little, immature?
In the course of evolving forward, we all need to go through processes of differentiating and integrating, of transcending and including. As I disentangled myself from a limited, narrow evangelicalism, I was left with many triggers and scars. Many of them still remain, but I was fortunate enough to also have had some pretty powerful experiences of God that always stayed with me. Navigating through what was real and what wasn’t was a difficult task, especially without knowing where to find guidance. Many people end up throwing everything out, and for many of them that may be the best thing to do, at least for awhile.
Fortunately for me, I didn’t get . . . .
Read MoreSo, how do we practice mysticism?
Once we’ve cleared up some of the common misperceptions about mysticism, we find that we can approach mysticism from a trans-rational perspective, believing that it is real and something we participate in, experienced in connection to our Higher Self, and deeply connective to others. You can read more in depth about those distinctions in Part One.
Getting past some of those mental hurdles, we now can step into our participatory practice. This is a co-creative process that we engage in with our whole being. While mystical experience can be received in many different forms and ways, we can practice our active engagement into the process by cultivating mystical awareness, learning to sense emergent mystical realities, then interplay dynamically with them and one another in convergent communion.
Read MoreTheologian Ramone Panikkar, says that Christ is “the Christian symbol for the whole of reality.” Panikkar further points out that the “whole of reality” consists of three seamlessly connected dimensions: (1) the divine (2) the human, and (3) the material. Here is a basic set of six Whole-Body Awakening practices leading to the immediate experience of all three dimensions of the Universal Christ. This week and next we present six practices to awaken the divinity, humanity, and materiality of the Universal Christ in us. The first three this week will focus on each center of our personal, individual movements, while next week will integrate these into our outward, communal movements.
START WITH YOUR HEART
Start with the heart because the heart leads. It holds the power to heal our self-centeredness—to open us to all people, our sisters and brothers in humanity. The heart is our body’s most powerful source of divine/human love, and the easiest to access. Here are the steps:
1. Drop down from your head space to your heart space. Most of us begin by thinking, just like you are doing in reading this. Therefore we must consciously move our awareness from head to heart. You can place your hand on your heart to help you aim for the target. If you need more help, you can tap on your head on down to your jaw, and then to your heart. Tap there until you sense you have moved to knowing from your heart felt-sense rather than your conceptual head thinking. This is not thinking about your heart, but dropping the awareness that was previously in your head down to your heart.
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