Tag: consciousness

THE UNIVERSE IS YOUR SPIRITUAL DIRECTOR

Like Paul Tillich, Raimundo Panikkar saw God

as integrally connected to concrete reality –

no cosmos without God/no God without cosmos –

God’s utterances and actions depend on there being

a universe – what could God say or do with nothingness?

 

the quantum theologian’s basic affirmation

is a very old yet radically new principle:

“Love is an interdependent life-force

ranging from subatomic interactions to divine grandeur –

it is the origin and goal of our search for meaning”

 

“The serenity of Jesus came not from knowing mysteries

but from observing the cosmos –

if God cares about the sparrow – feeds it/nests it –

and the lilies – clothes them in grandeur –

surely God cares about you – God’s finest creation”

– John Dominic Crossan

 

infused contemplation – contemplation whose Source is God –

births a new consciousness

of visions/voices/mystical experiences

but there is also danger because of deceit by demons –

Saint Teresa of Avila

knew she needed a prudent guide in mystical theology

which she found in

Saint John of the Cross

 

Thomas Merton became weary of fame as a writer

and knew why the Rule of Saint Benedict says

“True monks work with their hands as the Apostles did –

the fields/sun/rain/mud

are our spiritual directors”

 

all good theologians/saints/mystics know

that the Uni-verse – the One Verse

constantly changes and evolves

and to keep up we must constantly evolve our selves –

if we do not accept the insecurity

that is the price of change

we become rigid/stagnant/lifeless water

like a life-sucking demon

rather than an ever-flowing/life-giving Stream of Love

like God.

 

LOVE AND SOCIAL RENEWAL

Maslow’s growth hierarchy of needs operates like this:

physiological needs must be met before we can pursue

safety/belonging/self-esteem/self-actualization/

self-transcendence needs – the need to move beyond self

into ever-expanding circles of care/consciousness –

this is the transpersonal/spiritual level

 

but the Enlightenment emphasis on separation

of religion and state made Christianity captive

to the financial values of the middle class

which then used religion to justify those values –

so we got stuck

at the physiological/financial safety need level

 

the middle class version of Christian joy

then became the synthetic “happy-making”

of going on a vacation cruise

whereas true Christian joy

takes you from the limitations

of what you had no choice to be born into

to the freedom of creatively loving

those who are strangers to you

 

for the soul this is all or nothing –

either we see God’s image in all people

or we don’t see at all –

love of enemies makes no logical sense

but absolute soul sense –

we can no longer exclude anyone

 

sometimes the “enemy” is the one you are married to

but conjugal love could become highly regarded

and bring about psychological/social/cultural renewal

if Christian couples focused not on money

but on committed/harmonious love –

divine love would shine thru everything –

 

“Seek joy in God/peace within yourself/love in relationships –

seek to rest in the good, the true, and the beautiful –

this resting is then God within you

loving God all around you – this is authentic social renewal.”

– Richard Rohr

 

 

LIGHT IN A DARK AGE

Thanks to the 18th century philosopher David Hume

we have made believing into a technocratic thing

having to do with true or false opinions:

“I believe (or do not believe) in climate change” –

belief now has nothing to do with trust/relationship/heart

“Believing is a modern concept and the great heresy

of the church today” – Wilfred Cantwell Smith

 

blasphemy is usually thought of as taking God’s name in vain

but it could include priests blessing nuclear weapons/

imams indoctrinating youth into political martyrdom/

religious leaders like Joel Osteen living in palaces/

being multi-millionaires/with private jets –

just like Jesus

 

we can only grasp the meaning of Christ today

and what is heresy and blasphemy

thru the lens of the evolution of human consciousness

to a new level thru technology/television/the Internet

facilitating world-wide consciousness

 

for example, Afro-American theology finds solidarity

with liberation theology/liberation movements

in Asia/Africa/Latin America

 

God is always connected to humans/the world/the cosmos

and in medieval times anthropology/theology/cosmology

were all one

 

however, since Copernicus and Galileo’s heliocentrism

the cosmology has changed and traditional ideas

of humans and God have been marginalized

to the point where we now live on an infinitely small dustmote

called “Earth” spinning in a vast godless cosmos

 

but there is light at the end of the Dark Age –

marks of a coming Interspiritual/New Axial Age:

  • friendships between many in various religious traditions
  • promotion of world-centric consciousness thru climate change
  • a vision of humans as one life form connected to all others
  • widespread receptivity to meditation/contemplative practices

 

The Cosmic Christ is not done with us yet.

 

 

THE POWER OF PENANCE

The major challenge to Immanuel Kant’s view of religion

as morality came from Friedrich Schleiermacher

the greatest theologian of the 19th century

who conceived of religion not as morality or belief

but as an immediate awareness of our absolute dependence

on God – religion is thus pre-moral and even pre-cognitive

and expressed everywhere in different ways

 

we are absolutely dependent on God

but in human relationships co-dependency is a betrayal

of wholeness because co-dependent people

have no personal center

 

whereas the enlightenment we seek already dwells within us as our center

like a mustard seed/treasure buried in a field/pearl of great price

 

when Jesus said “if you call another ‘fool’ you are in danger

of hellfire,” he did not mean “if you get angry, God will condemn you

to hell,” he meant that “unjustified and indulged anger

is hell” – you put yourself in hell and hell in your self

 

to break through into nondual consciousness

we need to overcome the domination of ego and reason

and forgive ourselves and reality

for being exactly what they are: a mixed bag

of goodness and darkness –

we are all simultaneously sinners and saints

 

even proto-saints like Thomas Merton

who never wanted to be a plastic saint

on the dashboard of someone’s car

finally realized after nine long years as a monk

that penance is pleasing to God

and “enables God to take undisturbed possession

of the soul” because in penance

your ego is reduced to nothing

 

unlike the Pharisee who thanked God “I am not

a sinner like that tax-collector” who at the back of the synagogue

beat his chest and cried out “Lord have mercy on me

a sinner” – Jesus said it was the latter not the former

who went home justified in God’s eyes – for penance tells you

“the old sinful self is not dead”

but absolution tells you

“God’s love is greater than the old self.”

SUCCESS AND THE TRUE SELF

The highest norm of human life is the divine law –

objective/universal/eternal – by which God

governs the whole universe and the human community

with a plan conceived in wisdom and love.

 

But Bernard Lonergan’s greatest criticism  

of the old/dogmatic theology

was its exaggerated notion of the objectivity of truth

and its corresponding neglect of the subject, the self

particularly since in the recent history of thought

Hegel/Kierkegaard/Nietzsche/Heidegger/Buber

emphasized the importance of subjective truth.

 

According to Carl Jung, “individuation” is the process

of continually finding parts of our subjective self that were lost –

this refinding of the whole self/True Self

is what the parables of the lost coin/lost sheep/

lost prodigal son were really about –

Jesus was way ahead of modern psychology.

 

The “prosperity gospel” sees success as the sign

of God’s blessing, but success is never what your True Self

is really about/never the real goal of the journey of life –

success only feels good/right temporarily

and then it is gone – all things must pass – except God.

 

After the Second World War everyone wanted to blot out

of their consciousness that disaster which pointed out the lie

of the liberal ideology of eternal progress

by highlighting our capacity for total depravity –

so everyone got into success and upward mobility

and to accommodate this we developed a culture

of choice not obligation – there were no longer any

religious or social obligations – there was no longer any pressure

from others to be religious – it became a choice not an obligation –

and many chose to be spiritual but not religious.

 

Once we were old enough to make conscious acts of love

our life became a never-ending series of choices

between our false self with its selfish ambitions for success

and our True Self with its loving consent to

God’s Mercy

despite our lostness and total depravity

which the True Self includes and transcends.

INTEGRATING POLAR OPPOSITES

In some mythology and theology

all contradictions/opposites/polarities

emanate from Providence: good and evil/life and death/

pleasure and pain/prosperity and destitution –

God is everywhere and in everything –

God is with us/for us in all things – even dark things.

 

“Meister Eckhart, more than any other thinker

knew how to integrate opposites:

biblical theology and spirituality

prophecy and mysticism

faith and reason

art and life” – Matthew Fox

 

Asking questions in search of integration

can help us with polarities –

asking questions was the basic method of Thomas Aquinas

in his monumental Summa Theologica

in which he integrated all medieval theology –

in his search for Truth/God, he kept asking questions

and turning over in prayer the profound mysteries of

philosophy/scripture/church teaching/the universe.

 

Thomas Merton also used questions to find Truth/God –

he questioned how can we integrate polarities like

Church as Beloved Community versus

Church as Institution of Individuals under Church Law?

 

If you use questions and search hard enough you will find

your True Self/your ground floor spirituality/an absolute

reference point that is at one and the same time

utterly within you

and utterly beyond you.

 

If you are aware of your True Self’s original blessing

you can handle your original sin/

if you are aware of your True Self’s ultimate security in God

you can handle earthly insecurities/

if you are aware of your True Self’s original dignity

you can handle insults easily/

if you are aware of God as your heavenly Father/Mother

your earthly father/mother

cannot hurt you too much.

 

A NEW AGE OF LOVE/JUSTICE/HEALING

“The fear worldview and the love worldview

do not know each other” – Marianne Williamson

 

Early in the 20th century a new Age of Love began

in the consciousness of Pentecostals/liberal Protestants/

progressive Catholics as they grew in awareness

that the Holy Spirit is the Motivator of Justice.

 

Justice is based on God seeing and loving God’s Self

in all things, and it is this seeing and loving by God

that gives all things their innate value and goodness.

 

The basic divine energy is to be

in relation to others – “I am because you are” –

and “I am because Creation is” – these ancient African

and Indigenous sayings show the lie of western philosophy

based on Descartes famous dictum “I think therefore I am.”

No, no – “You think because the Creation and others are.”

 

Because God’s energy is to be in relation to others

there is a deep need for authentic ecclesial/sacramental

experiences that model for us how to be in relation to others.

 

And being one with other humans would be incomplete

without being one with the universe – humans are

an integral part of the greater community

of all living beings – the true Beloved Community.

 

Jesus came to show us the Eros of God –

the desire of God for total intimacy – total love-making with Creation –

Jesus never counselled the use of force or fear

just love of life and all its creatures

particularly the most vulnerable: children/the sick/disabled –

Christ came so all creatures might live this life

to the full – not just the afterlife.

 

Thus, bringing our most vulnerable/wounded parts

to God in prayer is essential to getting them healed –

suppressing our wounds out of shame

or lack of trust in God

keeps them out of our prayer life

and out of God’s healing.

 

RELIGION TRANSCENDS REASON

Life and religion are deeper than rationality

and Christianity is not the only seemingly irrational religion:

“The first/most elementary fact about Zen

is its abhorrence of the dualistic division

between matter and spirit – body and soul are one.”

– Thomas Merton

Many of the beliefs of Christianity can be fully understood

only by contemplatives who know nondual consciousness

and its paradoxes: “Jesus is fully human and fully divine”

“Mary is both virgin and mother”

“Bread is still bread and yet it is Jesus.”

No wonder this faith seems irrational to the secular mind!

  

Bernard Lonergan, a brilliant Canadian theologian

thought it was ironic that scholastics exaggerated

the objectivity of truth since Thomas Aquinas

the Father of Scholasticism thought truth

was in the mind of God and in human minds

so Lonergan spent his life’s work emphasizing

the importance of subjective experience –

the internal mental processes by which we discern truth.

 

The truth of most spirituality tells us

we have forgotten who we are

therefore the main task of religion is to remind us

that we are original blessings: daughters and sons of God.

 

“Without God, what am I

except a guide to my own self-destruction.”

– Augustine

 

Naskapi Indians have always been guided

by their “Great One” – their soul

who appears to them in their dreams

and instructs them about when to hunt or lay low.

Lies/dishonesty they have found

drive their Great One away

and honesty/generosity draw the Great One near.

 

This shows the Cosmic Christ like life itself

transcends rationality and can be contemplated and found

in the joy of everything/everywhere/everyone

all at once.

 

STORIES R US

Hildegard of Bingen’s famous visions

made her sick until she wrote them down

and communicated them to others.

God will not let us bury our talents/visions/stories

– they are given to us for the common good.

 

Carl Jung’s story about humans is that

we are all interdependent and interrelated

not just interpersonally but cosmically –

from this came his idea of the Collective Unconscious –

whereas Sigmund Freud atomized humans

seeing each one as an independent individual

Jung fits much better than Freud

in the quantum interconnected story of the universe.

 

A basic quantum theology principle:

ultimate meaning is embedded in stories not facts –

ideologies/mythologies/worldviews/religions

create our world more than facts.

 

The main components of the new story

of the emerging Interspiritual Age:

the evolutionary consciousness movement

the developmentalist movement

Spiral Dynamics/Integral Theory/Einsteinian physics

all these together create a new metaphysical story.

 

In the other major story –

the materialistic/scientific/rationalistic one –

Meister Eckhart’s spiritual concepts are hard to grasp –

the “God-beyond-God” and “praying to God

to rid him of the concept of ‘God’” –

since all our concepts of God are false idols.

 

Even simple Bible stories written for the common good

need interpretation: the meaning of John 3:16

changes radically depending on how you interpret

“everyone who believes in Jesus will not perish” –

does “believes” mean “intellectual assent 

that Jesus is the Third person of the Trinity”

or “everyone who trusts in Jesus” will be saved?”

Biblical interpretation is the story about the stories

that created western civilization.

 

TEILHARD VS AUGUSTINE AND MARX

In Teilhard’s view, eros, the longing for wholeness

is integral to the whole evolutionary direction towards

wholeness/complexity/consciousness/personalization/love –

the universe is personal not impersonal.

 

Ever since Augustine, western Christendom

has separated grace from nature

and so we treated nature with contempt and plundered it

and each time a piece of God died –

ironically, because of Augustine we have killed God

all over again.

 

Because of the theory of evolution, we know

everything is interconnected –

therefore salvation is communal more than individual

and we all can be involved in transforming

the whole cosmos.

 

Contrary to Marxism’s propaganda

alienation and conflict do not come from religion

but from the inevitable moral collapse

of the materialist worldview.

 

There is scientific/empirical research

that shows there are stages of religious development

from pre-rational/pre-conventional/narcissistic/childish

fantasy all the way to post-rational/post-conventional/

ego-aware/transpersonal awareness.

 

The contemplative non-dual mind

is like the Tree of Life in the Garden of Eden –

it provides continual nourishment

to the soul and world.