Posts in Mysticism
Healing & Transforming the World in Practice

The Vibrant Web of Spiritual Heart Energy

Heartful Attunement with Whole-Body Mystical Presencing


“To heal and change and the world through mystical activism, we need ways to purposefully and directly move from our ordinary consciousness to non-ordinary mystical consciousness... We believe the vibrant web of spiritual heart energy is a major factor in how Jesus operated and how we function also. It is transforming and what heals and changes both us and the world.”

– Paul Smith


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Do You Know Jesus' Mystical Plan for World Peace?

Can Praying Change the World? 
Mystical Activism:  Part Two   

Interestingly, Jesus’ mystical plan for world peace does not depend on everyone in the world becoming a Christian. If you consider the history of Christians clashing with other Christians, that would not seem to bring peace anyway! And besides, getting everyone into the same religion would not be a very mystical plan — and Jesus’ plan is very, very mystical. Let’s look at Jesus’ practice of “activism” for a better world.

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Can Praying Change the World?

Mystical Activism
Part One

Have you ever cried out to God or the Universe to do something about the horrible wars on earth or the increasing devastation of climate change? Maybe you have earnestly prayed about the starving populations around the world or the craziness of politicians today. Have you ever wondered if your prayer did any good? Maybe you’ve even given up on such types of prayer. 

Does the world change when we pray? If so, how does that work? Do we ask God to do something, and then God acts? I believe praying does change the world, but it is not us asking and then God acting. Nor is it, as some have said, us asking, and then we act.  

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Why We Practice WeSpace & Whole-Body Mystical Awakening

What is the purpose of our WeSpace groups? Why do we advocate Whole-Body Mystical Awakening practices?

At ICN, our stated purpose is “Gathering a global community of dedicated mystical practitioners for the loving evolution of Christianity and the world.”

We dedicate ourselves to our mystical practice because it takes us into the pathways of inhabiting and becoming this transformative presence in the world. Because it is how we become conscious participants in the divine, creative work of loving evolution.

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The Birth of Christ Consciousness in Us

In this series, we have been considering how we might participate in adventing—which is to say, actively engaging in the arrival of Christ Consciousness in this season. As Christmas is upon us, the time for birth may be drawing near.

Do you feel them? The contractions of a world in the early pangs of labor?

We all have our personal journey in the ways we bear and bring forth the divine in our lives. Individually, we might be more than ready for the birth to come. Or, we could still be in a place of early gestation. Perhaps we continue to wait for the gift of a new inner conception. The calendar says it’s time, yet we may be living in barrenness or miscarriage.

Sometimes, in the passage toward birth and new life, it will feel like death.

Wherever you are in this rite unfolding, we are all, at the same time—in this time, participating in a collective natal arrival. Christ Consciousness is not a possession to be attained by some but a flow of divine being we open up to and move with. And the current is growing. The tide is rising in a global awakening. A cosmic imperative for the advent of a new divine initiation.  

Do you see them? The angels among the expanse of stars in the sky twinkling with the celestial light of proclamation?

For unto us is born a savior, in the cities and stables of every part of the earth. In the fields and in the forests. There is no need to journey to Bethlehem, for Christ comes in ubiquity. She is all around us and before us. They are beside us and beyond.

Do you hear them? The voices of spirit declaring across the land: we are making all things new.

I bring you tidings of great joy, which shall be for all people. The divine life is born among you. Lo, behold, it is within you!

Come, taste and see.

Come, come with haste.

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Our Lady of Christ the Earth

Adventing Christ Consciousness – Part Three

“In the humanity which is begotten today, the Word prolongs the unending act of God’s own birth; and by virtue of God’s immersion in the world’s womb, the great waters of the kingdom of matter have, without even a ripple, been imbued with life. The immense host which is the universe is made flesh.”
—Teilhard de Chardin 

The question of consciousness is one of the enduring mysteries of both science and spirituality. Certainly no one has all of the answers about it, and we carry conscious and unconscious assumptions about its nature, particularly depending on our religious upbringing and cultural background.

Many of our presuppositions about the nature of consciousness, especially in the heavily-Platonic-influenced Christian tradition, are rooted in a separation of matter and spirit. Without going into the long philosophical and theological history of this split, it will suffice to say that this orientation is a more traditionally masculine and dualistic approach. As such, consciousness is often separated—implicitly and explicitly—into the realm of spirit and immateriality, detached from the physical. 

The more feminine principle of life does not split knowing and being, awareness and presence, mind and body. It does not privilege the experience of reality from the objective and removed perspective, but rather lives enmeshed in the manifest, through the energy of imbued presence in the midst of the substance of things. Things like the trees, the soil, the cat, the baby crying, the dirty toilet, the grief of loss, the joy of delight, the lack of sleep, the sick, the hurt, and the pearls of irritation. And everything else that is alive and dead, growing and composting, here and now. All that has been and is yet to come.

 

This is where our consciousness lives while we’re on this earth. And it is not only present in our mental recognition and reflective human awareness.

We are learning more about the consciousness of animals, plants, and even fungi. While the nature of these other forms of awareness is still somewhat undetermined and being further discovered, we are seeing our human-centric assumptions and dominator-attitude dismantling more and more. Escaping the confines of materiality (and spirituality rooted in similar fundamental assumptions, even when they are in opposition to it), we can come to not only see but also experience how all of life is animated in spirit. There is a mystical, fundamental—perhaps even quantum—presence of spirit/energy/consciousness in all things. This is the Cosmic Christ.

This is crucial to our spirituality because it anchors our sense of where we find God, where we look for the divine. If we are searching for heaven in an entirely removed realm, and expecting spirit to appear only in an ethereal ghostly haze—an immaterial, faint external object—we will continue to disembody and disconnect from “earthly” things (which is tellingly often used as a pejorative). And in so doing we will further doom the earth.

The Christ principle in its most cosmic sense is rooted in the immanence and immediacy of the divine in materiality. In and through the physical, which is not divorced from spirit. Christ is the divine incarnated, enfleshed, and somatized. So Christ Consciousness is the living, embodied awareness from the divine entwined and present in us, coming in the energy and knowing through our very material element of being. This is God-With-Us, Emmanuel in the heart of matter, in the deepest substance of all things.

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Christ Sophia Dances in Her Many Forms

Adventing Christ Consciousness – Part Two

This advent season, we are not waiting for Christ’s birth 2000 years ago. We are adventing Christ today through owning our own birthing journey as a rite of passage into our divine participation. 

Giving birth is a feminine process, though it is not limited only to females or those physically capable. It is a mystical process we are all capable of in our spiritual womb. To do so, we embrace the Great Mother and receive our own impregnation with new life. 

In this mystical journey, the new life growing is our own divine becoming—Christ Consciousness within and among us—expressed in many forms

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Adventing Christ Consciousness

Part One – A Divine Birthing Journey

Growing up in church, advent was my favorite time of the year. I loved the music, the pageantry, the decorations, the candles, and the sense of waiting and preparing for something wonderful.

Looking back, I think to a large degree what made it so special was that it tapped into the quiet longing I had deep within me. Not just for Christmas Day, which, while always a delight, did not fulfil the longing with material gifts and family time. I craved a deeper communion. It was more truly a longing for a real experience of Emmanuel, God-With-Us. 

It wasn’t until many years later I learned “advent” did not mean “to wait.” As I evolved through the early stages of my faith, I have had many of these somewhat embarrassing “epiphanies.” I have called them “fundie moments,” when I suddenly realize what I was taught isn’t true at all, but was a subtle or not-so-subtle indoctrination to particular (usually limiting) teaching or belief. 

Of course, “advent” actually means “arrival.” We only come to think it’s about waiting if we don’t believe the arrival has occurred yet. Sure, Jesus came 2000 years ago, but much of traditional Christianity is still waiting for Christ to come again. For their longings to be met in thee tonight. To know and see God here and now. And still so many wait. 

In years past, we have entered this season in ICN as a time of being mystical mothers, bearing the divine and growing up into our Christ-being

What would it look like to truly live into the arrival? If we turn advent into an action rather than a season. This year, how about we advent Christ on earth today?

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