Many of us are in isolation right now, some with our families and some by ourselves. Our physical separation from one another can be a real trauma, taking away a vital human need: touch. Did you know you can experience the touch of God, holding you in a loving embrace in this time of uncertainty and worry? It’s a great comfort. How might we experience that?
Read MoreIt is dusk in the information age. The sun has already set. Its time has passed. With the amount of information generated increasing to an unprecedented degree, it is not the end of information, but the flooding of its darkness. It’s become increasingly clearer and clearer that the answers to our problems do not come with more information. And yet we keep going, passing far beyond the point of information “overload” and into a reality of information enslavement.
Information is frequently referred to as the food of the brain. We believe that we need a continual influx of stimulation, often in the form of new facts and findings, ways to perform better or know more, as if these new learnings will give us the edge we need to succeed, or the sense we crave to make meaning of our lives, or simply to feel like a more productive or better person. We buy another book, listen to another podcast, read yet another article, excited about the prospect of learning something we didn’t know before.
The trouble is, the more we learn, the more we realize how much more we don’t know. And on further down the rabbit hole we go. Is it possible we are feeding the monster who holds us captive? The mind that always seeks to acquire more and more? Have we become addicted to the stimulation, without asking where it’s taking us?
Read MoreDuring New Testament times, both in Jewish and other spiritual traditions, doves were very much associated with God and God’s Spirit. Early Christians began depicting Spirit almost exclusively as a dove. It is a beautiful symbol for those who are aware of this meaning. For others, not so much.
I was teaching a group of several hundred progressive Catholics who had gathered in Santa Barbara. Before my first talk, a man came up to me and said, “I hear you are going to talk about the Trinity. I hope you don’t tell us again that God is two men and a bird.” I smiled and said, “I hope I don’t either.” In this essay, I am suggesting we not only shoot the dove for those who don’t find it meaningful, but also update what we mean by “the Holy Spirit.”
Read MoreWriting of the work of God in continually creating an ever-evolving creation Meister Eckhart said: “St. Augustine says, ‘What does it avail me that this birth is always happening, if it does not happen in me? That it should happen in me is what matters.’ We shall therefore speak of this birth, of how it may take place in us. —Meister Eckhart (1260–1327)
Yes, let’s speak of this divine-human birthing that goes on in and through us. In the business world, co-creation is a strategy that brings different parties together (for instance, a company and a group of customers), in order to jointly produce a mutually valued outcome. It is a form of collaborative innovation where ideas are shared and improved together, rather than kept to oneself.
Add God to that definition and you have Spiritual Cocreation—partnering with God in the continuing creation of reality. Let’s see what Jesus, the Apostle Paul, Ken Wilber, and Richard Rohr have to say about this.
Read More“When the somatic and vital worlds are invited to participate in spiritual life, one’s sense of identity becomes permeable to not only transcendent but also immanent spiritual sources, turning body and world into sacred realities that can be appreciated as fundamental for human and perhaps even cosmic evolution.”
—Jorge Ferrer
In Whole-Body Mystical Awakening we are doing just that—inviting our bodily and energetic worlds to join in our spiritual life.
In Part 1 we explored inviting our heart and mind to participate in our spiritual life. The mystical language of the heart is the deep feelings that flow from our heart space. The mystical language of the head is the deeper thoughts, words, and images than come from a mind cleared of its usual constant chatter. Now we explore the mystical language of the other two centers of spiritual knowing—our gut’s vital energy and our feet’s energetic embodiment in the physical cosmos.
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 MoreThree primary outcomes of Whole Body Mystical Awakening are:
(1) Deep connections with God, Jesus, guides, and one another
(2) The emergence of our spiritual gifts
(3) Transcendent consciousness.
Transcendence is the loftiest and most difficult dimension to describe. It is, most simply . . . .
Read More“WeSpace” is a new form of spiritual practice and community that is on the forefront of the evolving spiritual landscape of today. Recognizing the hyper-individualization of not only Western society and American culture, but also the individualization of the interior experience of the forms spiritual practice, many are seeing the need for a higher, more evolved “WE.” Various forms are emerging in many different places to more intentionally engage in collective wisdom and interconnected healing.
If you’re familiar at all with Integral Christian Network, you’ve certainly heard us talk about WeSpace. It is the heart of . . . .
Read MoreThis is the final section of this six-part series that began with Why Christian Worship Doesn’t Work for Many Cultural Creatives—and What Might. We begin with a reminder about who cultural creatives are.
Paul Ray is co-author of The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing the World. He has been researching their values, lifestyles and beliefs for 25 years. He says that Cultural Creatives are the carrier population for the emerging wisdom culture:
Across the planet, they are innovators for the culture, not so much in technologies as in beliefs, worldviews, values and ways of life. They are the opinion leaders, and the participants in all the new social movements of the past 60 years who have time and again shaped others’ views, practices and adoptions of these new ways. Their Green values and lifestyles and their values of inner development both psychological and spiritual are the key to the emerging new culture. New Cultural Creatives surveys in Europe, Japan and the US all show the same trends.
The Cultural Creatives care deeply about ecology and saving the planet, about relationships, peace, social justice, and about authenticity, self-actualization, spirituality, and self-expression.
Read MoreThere is an elephant in the room filled with cultural creatives who find some affinity for evolved versions of Christianity. And hardly anyone is noticing it. Or, if they do, it is either too embarrassing or too difficult to talk about. This elephant is the gigantic clash of postmodern rejection of all hierarchies and the obvious hierarchy of surrender to God. Even more distasteful is devotion to a personal Jesus as someone who is more advanced than we are and invites us to die to our constructed self and follow him.
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