Can I Get (More Than) a Witness?
“Everything is Sacred”
Part One: Whole-Body Mystical Presencing
You are not a spectator.
One of the great spiritual evolutions today is the rise of the mystic. And by that, I don’t mean an increasing number of spiritual superheroes. The mystic is rising in us all. It is the longing for more than we have been given and coming to embrace the spiritual power that is naturally within us. It is moving from the spiritual sidelines and into the joy of the action.
Lest the word turn anyone off with associations of cloaks and cauldrons, the mystic today no longer needs to be veiled in mystery and shrouded in magical garb. The power of this re-enchantment comes from a rediscovery of the spirit within, an awakening of ownership and empowerment to each of us being participants in divine nature (2 Peter 1:4). It’s less spells and potions and more coming into the fullness of our divine humanity incarnated in the here and now. Living our Christ reality.
A mystic is simply someone who doesn’t depend on a spiritual mediator. They actively engage with God directly, living from the divine within, with the presence of God beside us, and into the ultimate mystery of that which is always beyond us.
This is the move from just learning about God and studying the lives of past mystics and saints to believing and enacting our own experiential partaking in these realities ourselves. We’re moving from being churchgoers to living members of the body of Christ becoming. We’re moving from being a fan of the game, a concertgoer who is there simply to listen to the music, to being a player and partaker in the performance (which is our lives).
No more do we simply “bear witness” to what God is doing out there, but we become what God is doing in our midst. We presence the divine in our lives and in the world.
Escaping the Matrix?
We can only do this if we have the orientation of embracing the divine in the material world, in the here and now.
In many parts of various religious traditions, this world is simply an illusion. It is the deception of the matrix, hiding you from the true reality that lies beyond and outside of this physical plane.
“This World Isn’t Real”
In the Christian tradition, we see this in the attitude of “This world is not my home; I’m just passing through.” Heaven is viewed as a “place” we go after death, far removed from this earth and separate from physical reality.
But Jesus spoke of the kingdom of heaven as “at hand,” which means right here. Within reach. He said it is within us. His teachings were not about life after death but living a divine life now, embodying love and changing how we live.
Our spiritual purpose is not an escape from this messy, material world. The foundational Christian message, the good news, is not that Jesus came to rescue us from this wretched plane but that the divine incarnates into this beautiful reality. That God becomes us so that we may become God, as Athanasius put it in the 4th century.
God is not some distant, cosmic being far away “out there.” We are not simply waiting until after we die to come into heaven. The mystic knows God is always near—and even closer. Divine life comes to dwell with and through us in the midst of this life, here and now.
“This World Is Sacred”
“In authentic mystical moments, any clear distinction between sacred and profane quickly falls apart. We don’t have to go to sacred places to pray or wait for holy days for good things to happen. We can pray always, and everything that happens is potentially sacred if we allow it to be.”
Everything is Sacred
Even if we know that the spiritual life is not ultimately about waiting till after death, we still may hold some carryovers of beliefs and practices from a similar orientation—that God is found primarily apart from ordinary and everyday life.
This comes from an idea of “holiness” rooted in a previous stage of faith where religion was about purifying and setting apart. One needed to be “cleansed” in some way in order to come into contact with God.
Jesus constantly broke through these purity codes and subverted the religious systems of the time that tried to separate groups from having access to God. He brought the temple of God from brick and mortar into flesh and bone—resurrected. He embodied the Christ presence as an elder brother so that all his siblings might do the same.
The divine is not separate from anyone, from anywhere. Everything is saturated with the sacred.
Yes, there are particularly sacred spaces and times. There are places we may need to go for a time to rejuvenate and connect more deeply with God in silence or beauty. Some retreat to a monastic enclosure or to the desert for a season—perhaps even their whole lives. This can be a particular vocational calling, but it is certainly not the only path to God, nor does it represent the “highest” or best way to seek after the divine.
Many feel tension with trying to live in the world as it is. The path of withdrawal is viable and, at times, perhaps even necessary, if even only temporarily. Crucially, let us not confuse these practices of “retreat” with a movement into a more holy place—for our everyday realities are not profane.
If we’re not careful, we might associate such movement away as where and how we find God.
Moving Away & Moving Toward in Spiritual Practice
“In the modern Western Christian tradition, a strong wind of objectivity has swept away the mystical consciousness, pushing it to the margins of Christian life.”
— Raimon Panikkar
Many spiritual practices presuppose a distance from God. This can come in the most basic form of “message in a bottle” prayer that tosses requests out into the ocean, hoping God (or someone) will find them. But it can also be present even in very sophisticated and developed forms.
“The Great Witness”
These spiritual practices lead us out of our embodied experience, separating from the mess of the limited human experience, and move into a “witnessing” state. This gives perspective and allows us to dispassionately observe our present situation, the larger context, and ultimately all of reality.
It is helpful to disentangle from over-identification with our thoughts, our emotions, and the circumstances of our lives. In so doing, we find the freedom in recognizing we are participating in a much bigger story beyond our individual expression, beyond all our struggles, pain, passion, and love. We may, at times, get so caught up in our little orchestral part that we lose sight of the larger symphony, the bigger story, and eternal reality.
“Nothing here below is profane for those who know how to see.”
But that does not mean these specifics and particularities don’t matter. Far from it. They matter immensely, and God is in them. It is the divine movement to permeate more fully into them.
The witnessing state where we move away from the immanency of life is sometimes referred to as “pure awareness.” The subtle implication is that the highest form of reality, and therefore God, is found completely removed from the substance of embodied life.
In less healthy practice, this can lead to a disassociation from lived reality and an unhealthy detachment from love and suffering in this world. Staying in these higher spiritual realms as an “untainted” bystander. It can become a puritanical holiness cleanse of our interior experience, cutting off attachments and opting out of the tumultuous human-on-earth experience.
In a healthier sense, it can cultivate a nonattachment to being subsumed by the force of life’s challenges. It can open up a healthy capacity of transcendence, not as an escape—denying the presence of God in material reality (and within ourselves)—but as a movement of freedom into a more holistic and integrated being.
But we know now the observer is not separate from the experiment. Our quantum reality is enmeshed and entangled beyond our capacity to comprehend. At the deepest levels of reality, there is no separation.
“Embodying Presence”
Our healthy spiritual movements into the beyond, cultivating a higher perspective and liberation, must be complemented with practices of healthy integration and presence in the depth of the here and now.
We need more than a witness in our spiritual lives and practice.
We need to be willing to get in the muck of life, and to be those who bring heaven and earth together in every moment.
The practice of Whole-Body Mystical Presencing (and WBMA) is a movement toward, a movement into the marrow of life and the moment-by-moment permeation of divine spirit beautifully entangled with the “mess” of human life. This practice takes seriously the Christ reality, the interfusion of the divine and material in all things—and at all times. And that it is our spiritual calling—to bring this forth in our lives. To become Christ.
We need both a practice of witnessing and presencing, of moving away and moving toward. And the further we integrate both into our experience of lived reality at all times, the more we will begin to know and inhabit an everyday consciousness that is not ordinary but permeated with the mystical indwelling of divine being, of Christ consciousness.
“The spiritual deeply values the unique nature of the human, delights in co-creatively enhancing and expanding it, and does this in a way that sacralizes and exalts the embodied realm of individuated persons who are creatively interacting in regenerating their world.”
Spiritual Practice for Divine Participation
So how do we welcome, embrace, and become that divine presence dwelling within us? How do we live consciously aware and engaged in this reality?
For me, that is what spiritual practice is all about. To bring us into this consciousness so that we may be active participants in the divine nature, involved in the loving evolution and becoming of this sacred world. As such, it is essential our primary forms of practice don’t funnel to the margins the most essential and vital aspects of our humanity and generativity. But rather permeate and invigorate our lives with divine energy and loving presence.
This series will be about how we do this habitually through moment-to-moment spiritual practice, though it’s important from the start to remember there is no “practice.”
Fans come to witness a game or a performance. On the stage are those who have practiced intensely for this moment, to execute at a high level and channel all of the skill and training into a few hours of exhibition.
But in spiritual matters—that is to say, in life—there is no singular performance. Our entire lives are the main event. The concert is being played at every moment.
Just as we don’t want to only witness our lives, so too do we not want just to practice and prepare for a future “event,” which is actually already happening now.
We “practice” spiritually as a means of invoking and enacting this fullness here and now. Participating in our divine becoming at every moment.
For there is no time like the present.
“Into the Sacredness of All Things and Every Moment” – image by Paul Fryer
