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 to not only 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.