Meditation and the Evolution of Cosmic Consciousness: Toward a More Loving and More Caring World

But from the spiritually awakened perspective, reality is more complex than this. The essence of our being transcends our brain and our individual identity. In the sleep state we have a strong tendency to identify ourselves, to give ourselves labels in order to enhance our fragile sense of self. We like to define ourselves in terms of our religion, ethnicity, nationality, and political affiliation, and also by the labels of our careers, achievements, and qualifications.

Defining ourselves in these ways gives us a sense of belonging, and bolsters our egos. In spiritual awakening experiences this need for identity and belonging fades away. People no longer feel affiliated with any particular religion or nationality, just as they no longer feel defined by their careers or their achievements. They no longer feel that they are Americans or Jews or scientists or socialists.

They feel that such labels are superficial and meaningless. Another sign of a spiritually awakened individual is that they often have a similar attitude toward different spiritual traditions , too. As a sign of spiritual awakening, they have an open and ecumenical attitude, and they recognize that different traditions are simply expressions of the same underlying truths. As a sign of spiritual awakening, awakened individuals have a wide sense of perspective, a macrocosmic outlook. This means that they have a spiritual awareness of the wider impact of their individual actions.

For example, they may decide not to buy or use goods that are produced by exploited workers or oppressive regimes. This wide perspective that occurs as a common symptom of spiritual awakening also means that, for spiritually awakened individuals, social or global issues are as real and important as their own personal concerns.

This wide sense of perspective has moral implications. As we have seen, awakened people tend to be more ethical and responsible, more compassionate and altruistic.

But awakening also fosters a more all-encompassing and unconditional type of morality. For spiritually awakened individuals, justice and fairness are universal principles that transcend laws or conventions. They may even break laws and potentially sacrifice their own well-being — perhaps even their lives — in order to uphold moral principles. In the sleep state, the process of familiarization that switches off our attention to the phenomenal world acts on our conceptual awareness, too.

It switches off our attention to things we should ideally feel grateful for. Rather than appreciating what we have, we want more. But awakened individuals do feel grateful after a spiritual awakening. They appreciate the value of their health and their freedom, the beauty and benevolence of their partners, and the innocence and radiance of their children.

They have the ability to count their blessings, no matter how long they have had them. They feel a profound sense of gratitude for small and simple experiences, which is one of the primary signs of spiritual awakening.

This sense of appreciation also leads to curiosity and openness. They are the fruits of those inner changes, expressing themselves in terms of new traits, habits, and ways of living. Spiritually developed individuals are commonly believed to be detached from the world and not particularly concerned about what is happening in it. Their spiritual enlightenment supposedly makes them indifferent to the trials and tribulations of ordinary people in everyday life.

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We imagine them sitting on mountaintops or in monasteries, basking in their own self-realization. The following signs and symptoms of spiritual awakening are often present: We have a strong idealistic desire to change the world for the better, an impulse to serve other people and contribute to the human race in some way. We may feel a sense of mission , to help the human race move through our present phase of chaos and crisis into a new era of harmony. Awakened individuals love doing nothing. They relish solitude, quietness, and inactivity.

In humania, which is equivalent to a state of sleep, people find it difficult to do nothing or be alone with themselves because this means facing the discord of their own being and the turbulence of their thoughts. This is another one of the signs and symptoms of spiritual awakening.

Rather than fear quietness and inactivity, we enjoy them deeply because they allow us to touch into the radiance of our own well-being. In wakefulness, the impulse to accumulate falls away. In sleep, the urge to accumulate is a response to our sense of incompleteness and fragility. We try to bolster our sense of self by adding possessions, achievements, and power, in the same way that an insecure king continually builds up a castle and reinforces its walls. Similarly, we become overly attached to preexisting aspects of our identity, such as our appearance or our intellect. We derive a sense of specialness from them, which also serves to reinforce our fragile sense of self.

But these efforts are no longer necessary when we wake up because that sense of incompleteness and vulnerability no longer exists. Awakening brings a shift away from accumulation to contribution. The energy that people invested to try to alleviate their own psychological suffering is now redirected to try to alleviate the sufferings of others.

However, his all-encompassing theory of evolution, perhaps better described as a cosmic vision for the whole universe and crafted in his various writings published after his death, now seems to have much to offer religion in general, and Christian theology, spirituality and ecology in particular, in spite of its complexity and specialised terminology.

His ideas have been quoted and used by Pope St.

Paul, especially in his letter to the Church at Colossae 1: Through him all things came into being, not one thing came into being except through him. It is not that we and God are one and the same person but that, while remaining distinct, God abides intimately within everyone He creates and they within Him. Every human being is thus essentially a divine spirit, inhabiting a human body for a while before transforming through death to be eternally and spiritually present with God. It is Love that holds the community together. The creation of the universe commenced, according to modern scientific estimates, around fourteen to 16 billion years ago.

According to Teilhard de Chardin it has been evolving from the very beginning in complexity, unity-in-diversity, inter-dependence and consciousness.

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Complexity is material complexity. Unity is the unity of matter and spirit into life, unity of inner-consciousness of the self and outer-consciousness of the fundamental relationship of self to all others and to the whole universe and finally to unity of intimate fellowship between Creator and all of His creation — the ultimate Omega Point of evolution. Teilhard de Chardin posited the view that the world as we know it has been, and still is, evolving and expanding onwards, outwards and upwards to Omega God, the cosmic Christ.

This point of convergence will reach perfection in the Parousia, the perfect realisation of the Kingdom of God, when Jesus the Christ returns to earth in all His glory, bringing forth the perfect unity of God and humankind, spirit and matter, sacred and secular, Creator and all that He created. Evolution, for Chardin, is not a blind or mindless process. He sees it as a divinely guided process of creation-in-progress rather than creation completed and now static.

His is a dynamic understanding of God. It is of a God intimately, continuously and lovingly involved with ongoing creation and humanity. The mystery of the incarnation is that in Jesus the spiritual and material dimensions of the universe co-exist in perfect harmony. Jesus of Nazareth, eternal and Second Person of the Blessed Trinity became the cosmic, universal Christ within all creation and for all time through His death, resurrection and ascension.

Those three acts gave universality, unity, freedom and complexity, powered by love and the indwelling Spirit, to the future trajectory of evolution. The evolutionary development of the world will bring all humanity and all of creation to recognition of that divine Presence and the power of love.

For Chardin, humanity is not a passive receptacle of evolutionary processes but an active participant in them. Where he alive today he might add that human beings sometimes seriously damage nature and thwart its divine purpose by their sinful greed and ecological ignorance or indifference. Chardin sees evolution as a dynamic movement forwards and upwards to Christ, and the whole of creation as being in a continuing process of evolutionary development — creation in process of becoming, of becoming again one-with-God.

It is deeply embedded in the material world he studied so carefully and in the God He served so faithfully. His knowledge of the Bible and his experience of the sacramental life of the Catholic Church were an integral part of that vision. At the incarnation materiality became the tabernacle of God Among Us. Within that presence God is eternally transforming and redeeming creation, increasing the spiritualisation of matter, the material grounding of spirituality and the deepening of human consciousness.

For Chardin, inner consciousness becomes integrated thinking, the conscious layer of creation which spreads or evolves around the earth like its physical atmosphere and unites people the world wide web? Human consciousness enables the whole of creation to become aware of itself. This is not pantheism, a belief that God and the created universe are one and the same thing.

It is a belief in God as soteriologically infusing the world with His divine presence. God is the ultimate reality underlying and supporting the whole of creation. Impossible to place Him as a focus at the summit of the universe, without at the same time diffusing His presence in the intimate heart of the smallest movement of evolution. When that complete convergence occurs, the Kingdom of God will have reached its full perfection on earth. The whole of creation is permeated by the active presence of God, its creator, whose Holy Spirit ultimately guides the evolutionary process towards completeness in God, its original and continuing Creator.

Chardin sees creation as it was poetically described by the Jesuit poet Gerard Manly Hopkins: For Chardin the expansion of the universe is not a geographical expansion into outer space but rather an expansion into an increasing range of as yet unknown dimensions, from the current five dimensions of time, space-length, space-breadth, space-depth and the still not universally recognised spiritual dimension of the universe, to other, perhaps more complex, dimensions.

Modern superstring theory posits ten such dimensions.

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These dimensions govern the universe and the laws of nature. Omega Christ is the Essential Unity holding all creation in all its dimensions and complexity together. For Chardin, mature spirituality is full engagement with the world, not hiding from it. It is engagement with matter, not despising it as sinful but as infused with the very presence of God. Humankind evolved from matter and it is through the consciousness of humankind that the universe observes itself.

Spirit and matter, soul and body, are two dimensions of the one reality, two dimensions in harmonious relationship with each other, with others, with the whole of creation and with God. The spirit component infusing matter propels it towards ever greater integration and ever higher forms of consciousness towards Omega Christ. This division was later adopted by St. Augustine and had a dominant influence on the moral theology of the Church from the 4 th century onwards.

It permeated much Church ethics and spirituality, and still does. In that philosophy spirit and matter are seen as at constant war with each other within the human person; changing and inferior matter warring against unchanging and superior spirit. Matter bodily functions was seen as intrinsically evil, the source of all sin. It imprisoned the soul. Independent spirit mind, consciousness and soul , on the other hand, was the source of all goodness.

18 Unmistakable Signs and Symptoms of Spiritual Awakening

And our desire is of the truth. For the body is a source of endless trouble to us because of the mere requirement of food. Hence the material body and its functions, especially its feelings, emotions and sexual drive, were to be feared and despised and constantly disciplined, even to the point of flagellation. He sees matter and spirit as a dynamic unity of two elements in intimate relationship with each other, each infused with the divine and each contributing the grace of its own unique charisms.

Chardin, for example, would never have seen the bodily materiality of sexual activity within a faithful relationship as something verging on the sinful, as did St. Augustine, and hence ontologically inferior to virginity and celibacy. As men and women evolved in consciousness of their individual personhood, they also evolved into universal socialised beings. They evolved into needing each other in a way reflective of the divine Trinitarian community of Creativity Father , Love Holy Spirit and Relationship Son. These individual personal and universal community aspects of evolving creation and human consciousness will eventually converge into the Omega point of all evolution, into Christ Himself.

Look, I have engraved you in the palms of my hands. That was the love of father for his prodigal son, the love demonstrated by the redeeming death and resurrection of Jesus the Christ. Jesus the Christ is at the centre and apex of the evolving universe. A major result of Jesus the Christ being the Cosmic Christ is that every human being, in whom He resides and through whom He continues His evolving creation and universal redemption, is thus a cosmic and divine person too — a central and intrinsic part of the whole material universe while throbbing with divine life and the divine energy of the Spirit.

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More can be found out about Fr. It is inter-connected, a universe groping its way forward and upwards through trial and error, sin and grace. That vision has major implications for Catholic spirituality, theology and ecology human and environmental , particularly its view of the nature and purpose of Church, its view of Natural Law, the degree of prominence given to issues of justice and ecology and the way it understands its Sacred Tradition — a continuity that allows development, a Sacred Tradition that grows by incorporating sacred evolution of beliefs and practices through listening to the voice of the whole Church, in whom God resides.

Its too bad that too many in the church consider our teaching to be carved in stone. Thank you for this timely article in light of the much anticipated new encyclical on the environment. There is no room for evolving Christology. We are to keep the faith delivered once and for all to the Apostles, which was defined not invented not developed in answer to the heretics who challenged it. This caught my attention, Aidan. And does the doctrine of original sin depend upon the historical facticity of a first couple, Adam and Eve, who sinned exactly as described in Genesis? Recently Cardinal Pell in defending Genesis is reported to have described it as theological myth.

If this is so, surely an understanding of original sin as involving an historical act of deliberate defiance of a direct order of God must be abandoned? At such times I lapse into a state of foetal dependence upon the umbilical cord of prayer: As you know, the Vatican at that time was fighting Modernism. Early oral accounts of Genesis chapters date back to around the 10th century BC. These were later redacted in post-exilic times by the priestly class in Jerusalem into what we have today in our Bible.

The author s and redactors of Genesis adapted important aspects of the above Mesopotamian myths to fit what God wanted to reveal to humankind at that time.

Later times would see further evolutionary developments. That is an ongoing evolutionary process. I have self-published four times. It may make sense to you, the reader.

LIKE PUTTING IT IN A BOTTLE AND THROWING IT INTO THE OCEAN

My hope is always that we can always learn from one another. To my way of thinking, self-publishing is a little like writing a note and putting it in a bottle that you throw into the ocean. I first tried it in the 60s when I was teaching at the University of Manitoba to share my previous experience as a child and family therapist with my students.

The purpose of self-publishing — or at least, my purpose for it — is to reach out to people of like minds. I had to get a University grant to pay a printer and I ended up with boxes of books to distribute. I self-published again in …a series of booklets about peace. By then, it was in the early days of self-publishing on the Internet and it was much easier.

Again, I ended up with boxes of books but a summary of my position was picked up by Peace Magazine and was republished internationally. I self-published again on the Internet in