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.

What map will help us find our way home?

God honored even the miscreations of His children because they had made them. But He also blessed His children with a way of thinking that could raise their perceptions so high they could reach almost back to Him. The Holy Spirit is the Mind of the Atonement. He represents a state of mind close enough to One-mindedness that transfer to it is at last possible. Perception is not knowledge, but it can be transferred to knowledge, or cross over into it. It might even be more helpful here to use the literal meaning of transferred or “carried over,” since the last step is taken by God. T-5.I.6: 1 - 6

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

Human beings have separated themselves from the nondual Oneness. They are drops of the ocean which have split themselves off from the whole. They yearn to return to that from which they have come. The Holy Spirit can help us by making us aware of what it is that we desire and helping us up the ladder to the top, and then God, the non dualistic Oneness, takes the last step and welcomes us home.

In Unitarian Universalism we join together to nurture each other’s spiritual intelligence by affirming and promoting our search for truth and meaning. UU draws on six sources to help us navigate the way. There are many maps which depict detours, distractions, and wrong turns but with persistence we can reorient and eventually find our way.

Today, as we consider the various maps to determine our route home, we can ask the Holy Spirit to guide us.

Are you searching for Enlightenment?

But what if that which we have since learned in the past thousand years, even the past fifty years, would actually affect how, for example, a person would directly experience Enlightenment or Awakening? What if we have discovered aspects of human awareness that most definitely determine how humans interpret any and all experiences that they have, and what if these interpretive frameworks, which will determine the different ways we directly experience Enlightenment, not only exist, but actually grow and develop through over a half-dozen well-documented stages during a human’s overall life—and that they continue to develop during a human’s adult years? Awakening or Enlightenment is traditionally taken as being the unity of the individual self with ultimate Reality—what the Sufis call “the Supreme Identity”—resulting in a Wholeness or Nonduality, which, including all of reality, conveys a sense of utter Freedom and total Fullness to the individual. But what if these interpretive frameworks actually govern how individuals see and experience “Wholeness,” and thus directly determine how an individual experiences Enlightenment itself? That would change the nature of the Paths of the Great Liberation profoundly, with, in effect, a different “Liberation” being experienced at each of these different stages of growth and development. But the evidence is already in: those framework stages definitely exist—they have been found in over forty cultures (in every culture checked so far, in fact)—and they definitely alter how one experiences Enlightenment, or any other experience, for that matter. The very ground has shifted under the Great Traditions, and they don’t even know it.

Wilber, Ken. The Religion of Tomorrow (p. 5). Shambhala. Kindle Edition. 

People, increasingly, say these days when asked that they are not religious but spiritual. What do they mean? Are they trying to express some relationship with a Higher Power whatever they conceive that Higher Power to be? And is this relationship going anywhere?

It is the function of the church to nurture and enhance spiritual development but in our post postmodern age they are failing at the job and people no longer find churches and their religions helpful in nurturing their spiritual intelligence. So where do the people turn for this assistance? They often flounder and stagnate. And yet the maps are there. We have the knowledge about spiritual development but it is rarely taught even if it is recognized and acknowledged.

Ken Wilber lays this information out in his book, The Religion of Tomorrow. We will be reading it and studying it. Join us.

Do you seek the ways of the ego or the ways of God?

The Holy Spirit is the Christ Mind which is aware of the knowledge that lies beyond perception. He came into being with the separation as a protection, inspiring the Atonement principle at the same time. Before that there was no need for healing, for no one was comfortless. The Voice of the Holy Spirit is the Call to Atonement, or the restoration of the integrity of the mind. When the Atonement is complete and the whole Sonship is healed there will be no Call to return. But what God creates is eternal. The Holy Spirit will remain with the Sons of God, to bless their creations and keep them in the light of joy. T-5.I.5:1 - 7

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

When homo sapiens separated themselves from the nondual Oneness at their incarnation and the ego was born, the Holy Spirit came with us to remind us from whence we came. Some listen, and some don’t, but the Holy Spirit, the Christ Mind is with us until the Atonement occurs, healing comes, and we rejoin the Life Force from which we were separated.

In Unitarian Universalism we join together to affirm and promote the free and responsible search for Truth and meaning which is best done with the assistance of the Holy Spirit which will come if we ask.

Today, ask the Holy Spirit for help to drop the ways of the ego and become more aware of the ways of God.

Awareness of the evolutionary trajectory of humanity provides great hope.

 

Homo sapiens is on an evolutionary trajectory which people at lower levels of cultural maturity are not aware of. We have moved from the pre-traditional to traditional to modernistic to postmodernistic to, now, post postmodernistic, and on to integral levels. 

The evolutionary progress has been uneven and variable from culture to culture until the birth of the internet which made tangible what deChardin called the noosphere. With the global communication we have now human consciousness has been raised significantly and now humanity knows within days things going on in various cultures around the globe which previously took centuries, then decades, then weeks, then days, and now hours to become aware of.

We are living in a truly miraculous time of spiritual awakening and slowly are becoming aware of it. Part of the cultural distress that people are experiencing in this post postmodern age is the forced awareness of our shadow side as human beings. This distress of our shadow side provides motivation for significant positive change.

Keep the faith moving forward,