What would love have me do?

The Holy Spirit is the spirit of joy. He is the Call to return with which God blessed the minds of His separated Sons. This is the vocation of the mind. The mind had no calling until the separation, because before that it had only being, and would not have understood the Call to right thinking. The Holy Spirit is God’s Answer to the separation; the means by which the Atonement heals until the whole mind returns to creating. T-5.II.2: 1 - 5

A Course in Miracles . Foundation for Inner Peace. Kindle Edition. 

When we were separated from the nondual Oneness at our incarnation, God provided us, the separated ones, with the Holy Spirit whose job it is to facilitate the Atonement, the return of our minds to that from which we emerged.

In Unitarian Universalism we covenant together to affirm and promote the free and responsible search for truth and meaning which is a search for our wholeness, our holiness. Our search is greatly accelerated when we turn to the Holy Spirit for help. We know we are on the right track when we experience peace and joy, the Holy Spirit’s gifts.

Today, when we are making decisions, remember to ask the Holy Spirit for guidance by asking “What would Love have me do?”

How can the spiritual intelligence of human beings be improved?

But what these new modern and postmodern discoveries have found, for example, is that the stages of meditation themselves will actually be interpreted and experienced quite differently depending on the stage of development of the individual doing the meditating—and this has been happening all along; it’s just that none of the Great Traditions were aware of it.

Wilber, Ken. The Religion of Tomorrow (pp. 7-8). Shambhala. Kindle Edition. 

Ken Wilber makes the distinction between “waking up” and “growing up.” Waking up has to do with the levels of consciousness while growing up has to do with the level of worldview. The mystic elements of the world religions have been aware of the levels of consciousness, but the levels of worldview have only been described in the last 100 years as developmental psychology made the discoveries about the stages of cognitive, affective, social, and physical growth. Some theorists such as Charles M. Johnston adds cultural maturity as well.

It is unfortunate that most people are not aware of these levels of development and thus have no map to guide their growth and so they are adrift. These levels of development can be described in various ways. A simple model is egocentric, ethnocentric, worldcentric, integral, post integral. Egocentric is all about me. Ethnocentric is all about us. Worldcentric is all about everybody. Integral takes all these worldviews into account in an integrated way, and post integral moves on to a nondual appreciation of the interdependent web of all existence. People can oscillate somewhat between these levels of worldview but at any given time they have a center of gravity, a predominant stance, which governs their perceptions and interpretations of their experience.

The predominant stance of our society in the US currently is ethnocentric. Most people in our society  are polarized by race, political indeology, religion, social class, sex, and age. The “us/them” dynamic motivates most of our relationships and interactions. This observation denotes a relatively low level of spiritual intelligence, SQ. This low level of SQ in the face of the most technological power humanity has ever had at its disposal creates huge conflict, distress, and harm.

The question before us is how can we facilitate the rise in the SQ of the populations of the world? It is the thing that will save us as a species and improve the quality of life for all things on our planet.

What would love have me do? Choose it.

Your will is still in you because God placed it in your mind, and although you can keep it asleep you cannot obliterate it. God Himself keeps your will alive by transmitting it from His Mind to yours as long as there is time. The miracle itself is a reflection of this union of Will between Father and Son. T-5.II.1: 5 - 7

A Course in Miracles . Foundation for Inner Peace. Kindle Edition. 

Jesus taught His disciples to pray the prayer we now call the “Our Father” which in part is “...Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” When we bring our will into alignment with God’s will there is great peace and joy. The Course calls this a “miracle” because the separation has been overcome and union has been experienced. The Integral philosophers call this “waking up.” Waking up means that we experience the union of our will with God’s will and our consciousness has been raised to a nondual level.

In Unitarian Universalism, we join together to affirm and promote the free and responsible search for truth and meaning and this search will eventually takes us to uniting our will with the will of God, our Higher Power.

Today, we can ask ourselves many times during the day, “What would Love have me do?” and then choose it.

All there is is the eternal now.

This alteration of the time sequence should be quite familiar, because it is very similar to the shift in the perception of time that the miracle introduces. The Holy Spirit is the motivation for miracle-mindedness; the decision to heal the separation by letting it go. T-5.II.1:3 - 4

A Course in Miracles . Foundation for Inner Peace. Kindle Edition. 

As a person “wakes up” and experiences higher states of consciousness, they become aware that there is no time and space. In our everyday world of the ego, we sometimes say “Time stood still” or “where did the time go?” In the non dualistic Oneness there is no time and space and we experience this when we enter into the state of what the Course calls “miracle-mindedness.”

In Unitarian Universalism we join together to affirm and promote the interdependent web of all existence where there is no time and space because we become aware of the interconnectedness of everything when we realize there is nothing but the One of which everything is a part.

Today, when we practice mindfulness we can just be present and recognize that the past is gone and the future is not here yet and all there is is the eternal Now.

Waking up and growing up.

Healing is not creating; it is reparation. The Holy Spirit promotes healing by looking beyond it to what the children of God were before healing was needed, and will be when they have been healed. T-5.II.1: 1 - 2

A Course in Miracles . Foundation for Inner Peace. Kindle Edition. 

Healing is the undoing of the separation by the Holy Spirit remembering what human beings were before the separation and will be after it. The Holy Spirit helps us wake up beyond the identity with the gross level of the body to the level of what is beyond the soul, the absorption into the Oneness of the Life Force which some call “God.”

In Unitarian Universalism we join together to affirm and promote the free and responsible search from truth and meaning. This search is conducted by waking up, expanding our consciousnesses, and growing up, expanding our understanding and worldview.

Today, it is suggested that we ask the Holy Spirit to help us to further wake up and grow up. Waking up is facilitated by meditation and mindfulness, and growing up by study and reflection.

Waking up: With what do you identify?

The Holy Spirit, the shared Inspiration of all the Sonship, induces a kind of perception in which many elements are like those in the Kingdom of Heaven itself: First, its universality is perfectly clear, and no one who attains it could believe for one instant that sharing it involves anything but gain. Second, it is incapable of attack and is therefore truly open. This means that although it does not engender knowledge, it does not obstruct it in any way. Finally, it points the way beyond the healing that it brings, and leads the mind beyond its own integration toward the paths of creation. It is at this point that sufficient quantitative change occurs to produce a real qualitative shift. T-5.I.7: 1 - 6

A Course in Miracles . Foundation for Inner Peace. Kindle Edition. 

What is being described in this paragraph of ACIM is what Ken Wilber calls “waking up.” Waking up is the enhancement of consciousness. There are elements of this waking up which are described. First it is for everybody, and the more the merrier. Second, divisiveness, separation, exclusion are not practiced. Third, it brings the person past the body, past the soul, to the nondual cosmic consciousness of the Life Force. It brings the individual to the point where they are no longer an individual, but one with everything. This is hard for most people to imagine let alone experience.

In Unitarian Universalism we join together as in step one above to affirm and promote as in step two, a love for the interdependent web of all existence which is step three. The drop has rejoined the ocean.

Today, reflect on your experience of waking up. To what extent do you identify with your body, with your soul, with all of the Life Force of the universe?

I’m spiritual but not religious.

—only 11 percent of northern Europe, for example, is “churched.” That is, only one out of ten people have anything to do with institutional religion; nine out of ten find it unbelievable and useless.

Wilber, Ken. The Religion of Tomorrow (p. 6). Shambhala. Kindle Edition. 

There is a phrase for this that has become quite common: “I’m spiritual but not religious.” Polls show that some 20 percent of Americans identify overall with that phrase. And some polls have shown that, in the younger generation—those between eighteen and twenty-nine—this percentage explodes to an astonishing 75 percent!2 In other words, three out of four young individuals have a deep spiritual yearning that no existing religion is addressing.

Wilber, Ken. The Religion of Tomorrow (p. 6). Shambhala. Kindle Edition. 

There is a huge social transformation underway which goes largely unmentioned and that is the diminishment of religion as a major social institution in much of the Western world. This loss of the organizing and socializing function of religion in Western society has huge consequences for a shared meta narrative and shared umbrella for value consensus. What is to take its place and fill this vacuum? What we have seen is the rise of authoritarianism propelled by various ideologies and conspiracy theories.

If people are indeed “spiritual” even if not “religious” what form and practice will this spirituality take? How is spiritual intelligence to be recognized, acknowledged, and nurtured? What are the ways to think about this? Wilber and the integral philosophers call this “waking up” and “growing up.” Waking up is the development to higher levels of consciousness and growing up is the development of higher levels of world views. Waking up is done by the development of one’s interior spiritual life and growing up is done by achieving higher levels of cultural maturity.

What is your interior spiritual life like? From what worldview are you coming from?

Continue with us on our journey of study of the spiritual awakening of the world.