Consciousness

Gregg’s Reflection

As a young man, I was haunted by the sad question, “Is this all there is?” I did not grow up in church, I came to faith as an adult. Viet Nam and Watergate broke my faith in institutions of government, education and the church. Why were we being disciples into consumerism, being lied to by our authorities.

And why were we ignoring epidemic issues of racism, injustice, hunger and homelessness, if we were a ’Christian’ country. Was life just about accumulating big houses, cars and toys, enriching yourself and family, and then you die? Drifting into the counter culture showed me a different path, and awakened my consciousness. Yet, for all the passion of my peers for deconstruction, I saw no vision of what would come after. I wanted more. And, as my spiritual journey unfolded, I found more.

Early in my spiritual journey, I stumbled across this image. I was completely drawn to it. It captured my experience. As I went through my ‘better living through chemistry’ phase, I came to see things that weren’t obvious to others. I felt like the man in the illustration, who had poked his head through the clouds and saw the universe beyond.

Science is now telling us why I experienced what I experienced with psilocybin as a young man. Recently, I stumbled across this article: What Psychedelic Mushrooms Are Teaching Us About Human Consciousness, Iris Kulbatski Discover Magazine. 10/ 9/2020

Psychedelic drugs like psilocybin are being tested to treat mental illness. They're also expanding our understanding about human consciousness.

Published in NeuroImage, their breakthrough study used real-time brain scans in humans to show that psilocybin reduces activity in the claustrum by up to 30 percent. This coincides with people's subjective feelings of ego dissolution and oneness with their environment while under the influence of the drug.

Variations in activity levels of the claustrum are associated with different states of consciousness. Neuroscientist Yoshihiro Yoshihara and colleagues of the RIKEN Center for Brain Science recently published a compelling study in Nature Neuroscience. They showed that increased neural activity in the claustrum mediates a global silencing of brain activity through resting state slow-waves. Barrett believes that listening to and playing music require a similar presence of mind to deep meditation, a connection to the here and now. Barrett says that “one of the unique anecdotal effects of psychedelics is said to be complete absorption in the present moment, and to this degree, I do believe that musical experiences can involve similar states of consciousness (albeit to a far lesser extent) to the effects of psychedelics.”

Once I had an experience of ‘oneness’, I began a search for a path back to this place. That search led me to Christ, to becoming a Christian, and for decades to seeking a deeper path. You can read more of this path in this post on Divinization.

Check this article: People Are Trying Magic Mushrooms for Depression – and Accidentally Meeting God

So, come along and see how the saints and mystics show us the path to deeper levels of consciousness, the discovery of true self and soul. The path of meditation and contemplation opened

the doors for me into the depths.

Journaling Prompts

Have you ever been plagued by the question, “Is this all there is?” Ever stop to think this might be holy discontent, a prompting of Spirit to look deeper? What would it look like to go deeper in your journey to God?

Scripture

Deep calls unto deep.

Psalm 42:7

In all thy getting, get understanding.

Proverbs 4:7

Son of man, you are living among a rebellious people. They have eyes to see but do not see and ears to hear but do not hear, for they are a rebellious people.

Ezekiel 12:2

Then Jesus said, “Whoever has ears to hear, let them hear.” 

Mark 4:9

Do you have eyes but fail to see, and ears but fail to hear? And don’t you remember?

Mark 8:18 

Then he turned to his disciples and said privately, “Blessed are the eyes that see what you see.”

Luke 10:23

Be transformed by the renewing of your mind.

Romans 2:2

I pray that God may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation as you come to know him, so that with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know what is the hope to which he has called you and the immeasurable greatness of his power for us who believe.

Ephesians 1:17-19

Let the same mind be in you that was in Jesus Christ.

Phillippians 2:5 

Ancient Writings

The more the intellect is stripped of the passions and purified through stillness, the greater the spiritual knowledge it is found worthy to receive. The intellect is perfect when it transcends knowledge of created things and is united with God.

Abba Philemon, The Philokalia Vol 2, Bernard McGinn, Essential Writings of the Christian Mystics, p. 127

Apatheia: a mature mindfulness, a grounded sensitivity, and a keen attention to one’s inner world as well as to the world in which one has journeyed. 

Laura Swan, The Forgotten Desert Mothers: Sayings, Lives, and Stories of Early Christian Women, p. 25.

In the contemplation of God, where love is chiefly operative, reason passes into love and is transformed into a certain spiritual and divine understanding which transforms and absorbs all reason.

William of St. Thierry, Flowering of Mysticism, McGinn, Essential Writings of Christian Mysticism, p. 82

All paths lead to God. For God is on all paths evenly for the person with transformed knowledge.

Meister Eckhart, Matthew Fox, Christian Mystics, p. 128

God is delighted to watch your soul enlarge.

Meister Eckhart

This path of self-knowledge must never be abandoned, nor is there on this journey a soul so much a giant that it has no need to return often to the stage of an infant. Along this path of prayer, self-knowledge and the thought of one’s sins are the bread with which all palates must be fed no matter how delicate they may be; they cannot be sustained without this bread.

St. Teresa of Ávila

To the dull mind nature is leaden. To the illuminated mind the whole world burns and sparkles with light.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Modern Writings

Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the flimsiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence.

William James, Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 388

The world fears a really new experience more than it fears anything.

D. H. Lawrence

An Orthodox Christian with a Ph.D. from Harvard, Michael Pravica suggests that we all might have the potential to interface with higher dimensions when we engage our brain in certain ways, like while creating art, practicing science, pondering big philosophical questions, or traveling to all sorts of far-flung places in our dreams.

In those moments, our consciousness breaches the veil of the physical world and syncs with higher dimensions, which in return flood it with currents of creativity, Pravica claims. “The sheer fact that we can conceive of higher dimensions than four within our mind, within our mathematics, is a gift ... it’s something that transcends biology,” he says.

Stav Dimitropoulos, Human Consciousness Comes From a Higher Dimension, Popular Mechanics, 9/18/24

Patient Trust

Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new.

And yet it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through some stages of instability
and that it may take a very long time.And so I think it is with you;
your ideas mature gradually let them grow,
let them shape themselves, without undue haste.
Don’t try to force them on,
as though you could be today what time
(that is to say, grace and circumstances acting on your own good will)
will make of you tomorrow.

Only God could say what this new spirit
gradually forming within you will be.
Give Our Lord the benefit of believing
that his hand is leading you,
and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself
in suspense and incomplete.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Hearts on Fire

The human person can be understood as the cosmos come to consciousness of itself.

Karl Rahner, Foundations of Christian faith, P. 188-189

Human beings appear as the moment in which the unfolding universe becomes conscious of itself.

Thomas Berry, The Dream of the Earth, P. 132

There is a window in my consciousness where I can look out on eternity, or rather where this eternal reality looks out on the world of space and time through me.

Bede Griffiths, Return to Center, quoted in Essential Mystics by Harvey, p, 215 

How can I get to know myself? Not by thinking, for thinking only reflects my conscious being, but by meditating. Meditation goes beyond the conscious mind into the unconscious. In meditation I can become aware of the Ground of my being. I can experience my solidarity with the universe, my solidarity with every living thing, with every human being. I can get beyond all these outer forms of things and discover the Ground from which they all spring. I can know the birth of all things from this Ground.

Bede Griffiths, Matthew Fox, Christian Mystics, p. 261

Not to accept and love and do God’s will is to refuse the fullness of my existence.

Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, p. 33

In silence we face and admit the gap between the depths of our being, which we consistently ignore, and the surface which is untrue to our own reality.  And this flight from the self is, as the Swiss philosopher Max Picard pointed out, a "Flight from God."

It is in the depths of conscience that God speaks, and if we refuse to open up inside and look into those depths, we also refuse to confront the invisible God who is present within us. This refusal is a partial admission that we do not want God to be God any more than we want ourselves to be our true selves.

Thomas Merton, Essential Writings, p. 75

We only know Him insofar as we are known by Him, and our contemplation of Him is a participation of his contemplation of Himself. We become contemplatives when God discovers Himself in us.

Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, p. 39

Faith brings man into contact with his own inmost spiritual depths and with God, who is present within those same depths.

Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation p. 139

The Truth is One whom we not only know and possess but by whom we are known and possessed. He reveals Himself to us in our total gift of our lives to him.

Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation p. 148

The utter simplicity and obviousness of the infused light which contemplation pours into our souls suddenly awakens us to a new level of awareness. We enter a region which we had never even suspected, and yet it seems familiar and obvious.

Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, p. 226

Walter Brueggemann, one of my favorite scripture scholars, brilliantly connected the development of the Hebrew Scriptures with the development of human consciousness. Brueggemann says there are three major parts of the Hebrew Scriptures: the Torah, the Prophets, and the Wisdom literature.

The Torah, or the first five books, corresponds to the first half of life. This is the period in which the people of Israel were given their identity through law, tradition, structure, certitude, group ritual, and chosenness. As individuals, we each must begin with some clear structure and predictability for normal healthy development. That's what parents are giving their little ones—containment, security, safety, and a feeling of specialness. Ideally, you first learn you are beloved by being mirrored in the loving gaze of your parents and those around you. You realize you are special and life is good and thus you feel “safe.”

The second major section of the Hebrew Scriptures is called the Prophets. This introduces the necessary suffering, “stumbling stones,” and failures that initiate you into the second half of life. Prophetic thinking is the capacity for healthy self-criticism, the ability to recognize your own dark side, as the prophets did for Israel.

Without failure, suffering, and shadowboxing, most people (and most of religion) never move beyond narcissism and tribal thinking (egoism extended to the group). This has been most of human history up to now, which is why war has been the norm. But healthy self-criticism helps you realize you are not that good and neither is your group. It begins to break down either/or, dualistic thinking as you realize all things are both good and bad. This makes all idolatry, and all the delusions that go with it, impossible. My mother could give me prophetic criticism and discipline me and it didn't hurt me in the least because she gave me all the loving and kissing and holding in advance. I knew the beloved status first of all, and because of that I could take being criticized and told I wasn't the center of the world.

If the psyche moves in normal sequence, the leaven of self-criticism, added to the certainty of your own specialness, will allow you to move to the third section of the Hebrew Scriptures: the Wisdom Literature (many of the Psalms, Ecclesiastes, the Song of Songs, and the Book of Job). Here you discover the language of mystery and paradox. This is the second half of life. You are strong enough now to hold together contradictions, even in yourself, even in others. And you can do so with compassion, forgiveness, patience, and tolerance.

Thomas Keating, Intimacy with God

Five types of thoughts coming down the stream of consciousness:

The wanderings of the imagination

Thoughts with an emotional attraction

Insights and psychological breakthroughs

Interior purification: Intense feelings arise from unloading the unconscious.

Important not to repress these thoughts. Let them pass through awareness, accept them, let them go, as part of the healing process of divine therapy

Resist no thought, retain no though, react emotionally to no thought.

Thomas Keating, Open Hearts Open Minds, p. 122

As your sensitivity to the spiritual dimension of your being develops through the daily practice of contemplative prayer, you may begin to find awareness of God’s presence arising at times in ordinary activity. The quality of your spiritual sensitivity is developing and enabling you to pick up vibrations from a world you did not previously perceive.

Thomas Keating, Open Hearts Open Minds, p. 23

You are to coincide with the subjective act of being conscious, not to reflect on the fact of your being or your being conscious.

Beatrice Bruteau, Prayer and Identity, p. 102

Theology has made it complicated to trust your own spiritual authority.

Kathleen Singh, The Grace in Living, p. 236

May we undertake the contemplative practices that will nurture our deeper and more inclusive consciousness in the midst of our lives rather than at its edge, and allow ourselves to be offerings of love and hope for those who live contracted in suffering.

Kathleen Singh, Grace in Dying p. 273

A wellspring is the source of a stream, the fount of the precious waters of life. From the invisible depths, cool, clear elixir percolates, astonishing us as it flows into our perceptible world, nourishing and sustaining everything. Our deeper life is like a wellspring-welling up from below invisible (unconscious) at its source but rippling into our palpable existence, galvanizing our imagination and endeavors.

Bill Plotkin, Nature and the Human Soul, p. 303

One of the great surprises on the human journey is that we come to full consciousness precisely by shadowboxing, facing our own contradictions, and making friends with our own mistakes and failings. People who have had no inner struggles are invariably superficial and uninteresting.

Richard Rohr, CAC Morning Devotion, 9/8/19

Scriptures do not offer rational certitude. They offer us something much better, an entirely different way of knowing: an intimate relationship, a dark journey, a path where we must discover for ourselves that grace, love, mercy, and forgiveness are absolutely necessary for survival in an uncertain world. You only need enough clarity to know how to live without certitude! Yes, we really are saved by faith. People who live in this way never stop growing, are not easily defeated, are wise and compassionate, and frankly, are fun to live with. They have a quiet and confident joy.

Richard Rohr CAC Morning Devotion, 12/1/19

The first principle of great spiritual teachers is rather constant: only Love can be entrusted with Wisdom or Big Truth. All other attitudes will murder, mangle, and manipulate truth for their own ego purposes. Humans must first find the unified field of love and then start their thinking and perceiving from that point. This is the challenging insight of mature religion. 

Richard Rohr CAC Morning Devotion, 2/21/20

Sometimes we meet people who are free from themselves. They express what moves them, and then they take a step back. They play an active part in things, but they don’t think they have a corner on the truth market.

Without this kind of “inner work,” of simultaneously putting ourselves forward and taking a step back, community is doomed to failure. Learning this is really hard. It’s the work of detachment, self-emptying, and “fasting” from the need to be right” the disciplines taught by all great religions. This is what makes someone “conscious.”

Richard Rohr CAC Morning Devotion, 3/1/20

Most Christians were trained to think that we would be punished for our sins, but I’ve come to believe we are punished by our sins. The Enneagram helps me to recognize the punishment I’m inflicting on myself when I remain unconscious of the fears and judgments that drive my behavior. When I am not in honest relationship and present to my whole self, I am much further away from the Divine Presence who forgives everything.

The work of spirituality is to make our presence to Presence possible by keeping the heart space open (through love), the mind space right (through contemplation), and the body resting in the present moment. Those who are alert and awake in all these three centers of Intelligence at once can experience Presence.

Richard Rohr CAC Morning Devotion, 3/8/20

To change people’s consciousness, we have to find a way to reach their unconscious. That’s where our hearts and our real agendas lie, where our mother wounds, father wounds, and cultural wounds reside. The unconscious is where it all lies stored, and this determines a great deal of what we pay attention to and what we ignore.

We can’t get to the unconscious logically, literally, or mechanically. We have to fall into it, I’m sorry to say, and usually by suffering, paradox and the effective use of symbols. Until our certitudes and our own little self-written success stories begin to fall apart, we usually won’t touch upon any form of deeper wisdom.

Richard Rohr, CAC Morning Devotion, 4/28/21

I call contemplation the tree of life that promises access to eternal things (see Genesis 3:22). It accesses the deep ground of God and the True Self. The contemplative, nondual mind is a tree of continual and constant fruitfulness for the soul and for the world. We might also think of the diverse methods of contemplation as a tree of life as well. They are the many varied, fruitful, and life-giving practices and ways of praying that are nourished from the same root—the Sacred Presence.

Prayer is indeed the way to make contact with God/Ultimate Reality, but it is not an attempt to change God’s mind about us or about events. It is primarily about changing our mind so that things like infinity, mystery, and forgiveness can resound within us. A small mind cannot see Great Things because the two are on two different frequencies or channels, as it were. The Big Mind can know big things, but we must change channels. Like will know like.

Richard Rohr, CAC Morning Devotion, 7/11/21

The phrase spirituality of subtraction was inspired by Meister Eckhart. He wrote that the spiritual life has much more to do with subtraction and with addition. Yet, I think most Christians today are involved, in great part, in a spirituality of addition and, in that, they are not very traditional or conservative at all. The capitalist worldview is the only one most of us have ever known.

We see reality, experiences, events and other people, and things, in fact, everything-as objects for our personal consumption. The nature of the capitalist mind is that things (and often people) are there for me. Finally, even God becomes an object for my consumption. Religion looks good on my resume and anything deemed spiritual as a check on my private worthiness list. Some collect spiritual experiences with this worldview of consumerism. It is not the gospel. Richard Rohr, Yes, and, p. 306

If we want to go to the mature, mystical, and non-dual levels of spirituality, we must first deal with the often faulty, inadequate, and even toxic images of God with which most people are dealing before they have authentic God Experience. Trinity reveals that God is the Divine Flow under, around, and through things. Jesus tells us that God is like a loving parent who runs toward us while we are ‘still a long way off’ (Luke 15:20), then clasps and kisses us. Until this is experienced, most of Christianity does not work.

Richard Rohr, Yes, and, p. 65 

Nine Levels of Development from Richard Rohr’s Naked Now, p. 163-166

My body and self-image are who I am. Leads to a dominance of security, safety and defense needs. Dualistic/polarity thinking.

My external behavior is who I am. Needs to look good outside and hide or disguise the contrary evidence from others; I become so practiced at this game that the evidence is eventually hidden from myself too. This emergence of the shadow is very common among conservatives.

My thoughts/feelings are who I am. Development of intellect and will to have better thoughts and feelings and control them so others do not know, and so, finally, that I do not see their self-serving and shadowy character myself. This education as a substitute for transformation is very common among the liberal and educated.

Normally a major defeat, shock, or humiliation must be suffered and passed through to go beyond this state. 

My deeper intuitions and felt knowledge in my body are who I am. This is such a breakthrough that many become stymied at this level. Leads to individualism, self-absorption. And inner work as a substitute for any real encounter with otherness.

My shadow self is who I am. The dark night. My weakness comes to overwhelm me, as I face myself in my raw, unvarnished state. Without guidance, grace and prayer, must go running back to previous identities. Time is of the essence here.

I am empty and powerless. “God’s waiting room.” Any attempt to save the self by any superior behavior, morality, or religious devotion will lead to regression. All you can do is wait and ask and trust. Here is where you learn faith and discover that darkness is the much better teacher. God is about to become real. 

I am much more than who I thought I was. Death of the false self, and birth of the True Self. But because you are not at home here yet, it will first of all feel like a void. “Luminous Darkness,” as John of the Cross would call it. 

“I and the Father are one.” (John 10:30). Henceforth there is only God, or as Teresa says, “One knows God in oneself and knows oneself in God.” All else is seen as a passing ego possession, and I do not need to protect it, promote it, or prove it-to anyone. 

I am who I am. “Just me.” Warts and all, enough to be human, no window dressing necessary. This is the most radical critique of religion possible, because now you know religion is just a finger pointing to the moon, but not the moon itself. There is no need to appear to be anything but who I really am. Fully detached from self-image and living into God’s image of you-which includes both the good and the bad. The serenity and freedom of the saints. Total non-duality. The goal is to keep people moving deeper into faith, knowing they will receive any and all information and experience at their level.

Being Conscious or Aware means:

I drop to a deeper level than the passing show

I become a calm seer of my dramas from that level

I watch myself compassionately from a little distance, almost as if ‘myself’ is someone else

I disidentify with my own emotional noise, not letting it pull me here or there, up or down

I stop thinking and ‘collapse into’ pure consciousness of nothing in particular. You don’t ‘get’ there, you ‘fall’ there, objectless consciousness

Richard Rohr, Naked Now, p. 135

We’re spending our time trying to change people’s ideas or doctrines without changing their level of consciousness.

Richard Rohr

Ironically, change of consciousness largely means contact with your unconscious! Only some form of the “prayer of quiet” seems capable of opening and touching your unconscious, where most of your hurts and motives lie hidden.

Richard Rohr

As we learn to speak from our deeper selves, we open others to speak from their deeper selves.

Richard Rohr, The Universal Christ 

Human beings come to consciousness by struggle, and most especially struggle with God and sacred texts.

Richard Rohr, Yes, and, p. 14

Prayer is a total-life stance. It is a way to be present in the world in which we are present to the presence and present to the presence in all things Once you recognize that it’s all right here, right now, then you carry that awareness everywhere else. This is what Paul means when he says ‘Pray Always.’ (1 Thess 5:17)

Richard Rohr, A Spring Within, p. 378

We can dismiss a new idea, but a new experience changes us.

Richard Rohr, On the Threshold of Transformation, p. 50

Great love has the potential to open the heart space and then the mind space. Great suffering has the potential to open the mind space, and then the heart space. Both need to be opened . The mind that divides the world into deserving and undeserving has not yet experienced the gratuity of grace or the undeserved character of mercy. The lack of in-depth God experience leaves many judgmental, demanding, unforgiving and weak in empathy and sympathy, locked in a prison of meritocracy where all has to be deserved.

Richard Rohr, A Spring Within, p. 245

We are just a little tiny flicker of a much larger flame that is Life itself, Consciousness itself, Being itself, Love itself, God’s very self.

Richard Rohr, A Spring Within p. 348

When in honesty we accept the evil that is in us as part of the truth about ourselves and offer that truth up to God, we are in a mysterious way nourished. Even the truth about our shadow side sets us free (John 8:32).

Richard Foster, Finding the Heart’s True Home

We have subtle subconscious faculties we are not using. Beyond the limited analytic intellect is a vast realm of mind that includes psychic and extrasensory abilities; intuition; wisdom; sense of unity; aesthetic, qualitative and creative faculties; and image-forming and symbolic capacities. Though these faculties are many, we give them a single name with some justification because they are operating best when they are in concert. They comprise a mind, moreover, in spontaneous connection with the cosmic mind. This total mind we call “heart.”

Kabir Helminski, Living Presence, p. 157

How do we put on the mind of Christ? How do we see through his eyes? How do we feel through his heart? How do we learn to respond to the world with that same wholeness and healing love? Jesus says, “The Kingdom of Heaven is within you. The Kingdom of Heaven is really a metaphor for a state of consciousness; it is not a place you go to, but a place you come from. It is a whole new way of looking at the world, a transformed awareness that literally turns this world into a different place.

The hallmark of this awareness is that it sees no separation, not between God and humans, not between humans and other humans. And these are indeed Jesus’s two core teachings, underlying everything he says and does. . . When Jesus talks about this Oneness, what he more has in mind is a complete, mutual indwelling: I am in God, God is in you, you are in God, we are in each other.

Cynthia Bourgeault, CAC Morning Devotion, 11/18/20

The heart’s job is to look deeper than the surface of things and to beam in on that deeper, ensheltering spiritual world in which our being is rooted. As the heart becomes strong and clear you are able to follow its promptings reliably, you come into alignment with Divine Being and are able to live authentically out of your true self.

Cynthia Bourgeault, Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening, p. 164

Awakening is an increasing ability to recognize and transcend the suppositions that frame our basic perceptual field (Mental Models)or in other words, to be able to look at the filter that heretofore we have only looked through. 

The real source of wisdom lies in a higher or more vivid realm of divine consciousness that is neither behind us or ahead of us but always surrounding us.

Cynthia Bourgeault, Wisdom Way of Knowing, p. 25

As we learn to open ourselves deeply to the mysterious source, help will always come, for the source “leans and harkens towards us” with a tenderness of love that is both the medium and the message.

Cynthia Bourgeault, Wisdom Way of Knowing, p. 26

The heart is an organ for the perception of divine purpose and beauty. It is our antennae, given to orient us toward the divine radiance and to synchronize our being with its more subtle movements. The heart is not for personal expression, but for divine perception.

Cynthia Bourgeault, Wisdom Way of Knowing, p. 34

We are downloading the eternal into the now. There is tremendous exchange between the realms.

Cynthia Bourgeault 

Both Ordinary and Spiritual Awareness are necessary for functioning in this world. But the idea in spiritual transformation is to integrate and re-prioritize these levels so that our ordinary awareness is in alignment with and in service to our spiritual awareness (which in turn, as we have seen, is in service to the divine awareness).

In that alignment our being flows rightly, from innermost out. When something needs to be done in the outer world, we have sufficient ego strength to do it. But unlike ordinary awareness, which is always doing things to assert itself or fulfill itself, action grounded in our spiritual awareness merely flows out of the Divine abundance without regard to outcome or any need to draw attention to itself.

Cynthia Bourgeault, Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening, p. 14. 

Spiritual reading has the potential of becoming itself a prayer, the kind of event in which a true transformation of consciousness takes place.

James Finley, Merton’s Palace of Nowhere, p. xxi 

We can recall with gratitude that graced shift in awareness that occurred within us each time our meditation became a rendezvous with God's loving presence in our life. We can recall the renewed awareness of God’s loving presence did not vanish when our time in meditation ended. We were able to discern the ever-so-subtle ways our awareness of God’s loving presence continued to linger. This lingering afterglow is becoming a habitual, underlying, felt sense of God, sustaining and guiding us into contemplative living.

James Finley

How do we expand our minds? One way is through beauty itself.  Whether it is seeing the beauty of birds or hearing their songs; or the beauty of a blue sky or a sun rising or setting; or the ocean pounding its waves upon a welcoming shore” beauty is everywhere.  There is no shortage of beauty.  Only of our capacity to be with it and drink it in and make it our daily food even and especially when times are fierce.  So that the awesome trumps the awful.

We expand our minds by allowing the cosmos and the cosmology stories of our ancestors and of today’s science into them, thus moving us beyond anthropocentrism of the modern era (Descartes: “I think therefore I am”) to the truth that,“the universe exists, therefore we are.” We expand our minds by receiving the suffering of the world as a grace to open and expand our hearts even as they break.  Heartbreak can expand the heart and make it green again.  Tears can water the heart”and grow it.  “When your heart breaks, the whole universe can pour through,” says Joanna Macy. Silence too expands the heart and mind.  Practice it frequently. And in each, though differently, there emerges Joy.  “Joy expands the heart” (Aquinas).

Daily Meditations with Matthew Fox, 4/12/22

What is deeply felt and learned about ourselves is a reflection of the depths of others.

Matthew Fox, Christian Mystics,p. 211

Humans have a Christ-like spiritual healing potential, which stems from the fact that we are the only life form in which consciousness is able to be aware of itself. . . We are the only ones who think and know we are thinking. The more conscious we are, the more we will automatically produce harmony in place of disease. That is because disease and disharmony signify the absence of developed consciousness. A fully conscious person doesn’t have to do or think anything in order to create harmony. Their very presence is harmony. Our most important job now is to know what consciousness is and how we can become more fully conscious. 

It’s very important to stress that visionary experiences are not just seeing something, or even primarily seeing something. Rather, they more commonly include seeing, hearing, and bodily sensations such as smell, taste, tingling, inner movement, warmth, pain, tremors, and being touched. One of the most common “visionary in spirit” experiences is simply sensing the presence of a spiritual being such as God, Jesus, or a guide. They can range from fleeting impressions to vivid experiences that appear to be physically real. Here are some of the visionary experiences of awakened consciousness or being “in the spirit” that have occurred. 

Paul Smith, Spirit as Consciousness in the Bible

Everything becomes sacred when we walk with God.

Every leaf, every tree, every eye, and open heart.

The ground we work and plant.

The words we write and sing.

The ones we bless and honor...

Every person becomes Beloved

As we awaken in the vast wonder of God.

Bob Holmes #dailygrace

God sleeps in the rocks, dreams in the plants, is awake in animals and knows He is awake in humans.

Harvey Cheatham

Daily Examen of Consciousness: Reflect on moments in the last day when you were conscious of God’s presence, and moments when you were distracted.