Do You Believe in God Being You?
Integral Prayer – Part 5: Enacting God in our Being
In Integral Christianity, we boldly claim and own the 1st-person reality of God-Being-Us, that we can identify as divine expressions of God. This is not us trying to become God through any kind of ego movement. It is a movement of awakening into the already present reality of God being us, into Christ consciousness.
In Integral Prayer with the Three Faces of God, we even seek to enact and speak from this divine consciousness. This is learning to take the step from divine identity to divine participation (2 Peter 1:4).
Learning to pray from God-Being-Us is something of a big step for a lot of us. And we may have a few mental hurdles that we need to leap before we can begin to attempt praying from God in our very own embodied being, from our own awakened Christ consciousness.
So this week, we’ll go through a little Q&A around some of those pesky skeptical thoughts we might find arising in our minds when we begin to speak about living out our divine participation in our knowing. And then next week we’ll look more specifically at how we experience this from within our own bodies.
Is praying from God the same as hearing God?
Not exactly. While we can hear from God in 2nd person communication, our divine participation is God talking as or from us. Or rather, we are “hearing from” ourselves—from our deeper self as the interior expressions of our divinity. It is a form of intra-personal communication, an opening into the consciousness of sensing and knowing from our awakened divine consciousness.
So what we “hear” or sense are not just our normal thoughts, but the arisings of our deeper divine consciousness “speaking” to us from each of our centers of spiritual knowing. In this way, we are praying or communicating with the divine in and as ourselves.
Another term for this being and knowing is Christ consciousness.
Christ is Christian symbol for the integration of divine and material reality. The divine subsists in all of material reality. That includes you!
This Christ consciousness is not external to or withheld from us. It is not only attainable after years of spiritual practice and stripping away of our false or constructed self. We can awaken to it in a variety of ways and often with a degree of suddenness.
At Pentecost, the consciousness of divine indwelling came to the followers of Jesus. They were ecstatic with the energy of God’s spirit. It poured out from each person in expressions according to that person’s gifting.
While this spirit outpouring is often pictured as coming upon them from outside, the “tongues of fire” much more arose from the awakening of the spirit/consciousness within, from our very bodies as part of the body of God. Both the apostle Paul and Jesus in the book of John tried to communicate this, saying “you are all the body of Christ” and “rivers of living water (spirit/consciousness) will flow from your womb.”
Awakening to our Christ consciousness is to embody the interior awareness of the divine in your full physical self—your body in the body of Christ. This is the incarnation which was in Jesus and is in us as well. This is the at-one-ment of the unity with God.
And God is not just a passive force that energizes the universe. Sometimes we functionally relate to God in this way, and therefore become a sort of panentheistic deist—that God is present in all but doesn’t “speak” or relate in/from that presence.
The Christian story is all about God at work within the world, through all things, with all things, in loving communication and communion. We embrace our participation in that active presence by moving into our participation in divine consciousness, knowing from God within and learning to enact it or speak forth in the world.
So now I can speak with the voice of God?
In a way, yes. But it’s important to remember that we are not speaking for God, as a way to try to claim special authority and power. The clincher for this is that Paul says that others will decide, not us, whether we are speaking from God or not (1 Cor. 14:29). That’s why we encourage feedback from others.
One reason we may shy away from claiming this reality is that we certainly don’t want to fall into the errors of traditional religious pride that took on this claim hubristically, as a sign of authority to try to justify oppressive domination or as a marker of superiority and separation. That is not divine participation, but simple ego inflation.
The fear of this abuse or misuse need not keep us from claiming our participation and expression from our divine self. And we need not take a purist view either, that we must be fully free of one before we can live in the other. As long as we are seeking to live in it with humility and love, we are free to explore and discover the ways of being from this divine consciousness.
How do I tell the difference between Christ consciousness speaking and my own thoughts?
This is a process of discernment that grows with time and practice.
Moving into this state of consciousness is opening to receiving from the emergent arisings beyond our normal, everyday consciousness.
At first, they mostly come in the form of receiving emergent (or new) “thoughts.” These are not just our typical rational thoughts in our head, but have a different tenor and quality to them. And they certainly do not come only in the form of words—the “thoughts” from all our embodied centers arise in many different forms.
These messages of awakened consciousness still sound like you, but they are somehow fuller and richer. They often have a sense of significance or a compelling energy behind them. While they may appear as fleeting impressions, in time we can learn to be sensitive to receiving and distinguish them from random or distracting thoughts.
When moving into this state of receptivity, almost all of us will have some things coming up from our shadow, projections or messages that are more related to our own stories and wounds.
These arisings tend to feel more constricted and heavier. They are also important and can be addressed through shadow work and other forms of “cleaning up.”
Here the words of Jorge Ferrer might also help:
“It is important here to distinguish sharply between the modern hyperindividualistic mental ego and the participatory selfhood forged in the sacred fire of spiritual individuation. Whereas the disembodied modern self is plagued by alienation, dissociation, and narcissism, a spiritually individuated person has an embodied, integrated, connected, and permeable identity whose high degree of differentiation, far from being isolating, actually allows him or her to enter into a deeply conscious communion with others, nature, and the multidimensional cosmos.”
This consciousness will lead us into communion, whether that be with nature or with others. Its nature is to expand us in this way.
As such, one of the best ways of discerning comes by practicing in a collective context open to experimenting and discovering together, such as a WeSpace group. Here we can receive feedback from others that can often be very affirming as we seek together to learn this way of divine knowing, of praying from Christ consciousness.
While outside encouragement and affirmation is helpful, ultimately the best step we can take is learning to trust our own experience. When we are in the deep flow of this consciousness, we just know that there is truth and value in what is arising, whether we receive affirmation that appeases our rational mind or not.
Why do I need to claim that what I am knowing is divine?
Not to feel special or to receive praise, as we believe anyone can participate in this divine consciousness. Not for special authority or a feeling of superiority, as divine consciousness arises for the giving of love and life, not the taking.
We claim our divine identity because it is part of the process of remembering who we are. It is claiming our nature as children of God, living in the divine nature that is our birthright.
Distancing ourselves from trying to live from our Christ consciousness is not humility, but a denying of our given divine identity.
And so to truly embrace this identity, we seek to live and speak from it—not just as an underlying, background reality. But as a choice to embrace and enact our life from the core of our deepest nature.
The nature of this divine being is always rooted and sourced from love.
By embracing our participation in our divinity, we step into the empowerment to live and give from our whole incarnated being. Therefore, our energy, words, and actions can come from this Christ consciousness. It is embodied in our entire being, not just our mind.
We discover this within by moving into the states of awakened consciousness, which is exactly what the Whole-Body Mystical Awakening practice seeks to help us develop. It moves us into the practice of paying attention and sensing from each of our centers of spiritual knowing within: heart, feet, spiritual womb, and head.
We’ll look at divine participation from each of these centers next week.
Do you have other questions? Ask in the comments and Paul or I will give you an answer to the best of our ability!