Born into the Flow of Your Mystical Body
Discovering Your Mystical Body – Part 8
Integral Wholeness & Fullness
On Christmas, we celebrate the birth of Jesus, the coming of the human embodiment of the divine into fullness. This initiation point, the birth of the divine in the human, is not limited to one person, to one place, to one time. It is the celebration of the ever-always arrival of the cojoining between creation and creator, between divine and material, between spirit and matter.
Just as we celebrate someone’s life on their birthday, we can today celebrate this Life of wholeness which has a common birth for us all. While we focus it on Jesus, he always pointed the way back to us, back to our participation in the divine life.
One time I went out to dinner with a group to celebrate a friend’s birthday. I remember it distinctly because of what happened at the end of the evening. Usually, some of the people there would seek to get the bill to pay for our friend’s dinner to honor his birthday. But he got ahold of the server earlier and arranged to pay for not just his own dinner, but the whole table as well.
This is how Jesus is with his birthday. It’s not about him, but about sharing the Life of joy and love with all those around us. And even more, sharing in the generous spiritual reality that he embodied so fully in his being. The wholeness and fullness of divine and human presence, together in one, flowing into and as our life.
And so today we can celebrate that life as well—in him as it is in us. Into the sacred wholeness of our entire mystical body, living in us, born again today and always already.
Living in the Flow of Holistic Presence
Our whole body is participating in this divine/human nature – this is God-Being-Us flowing forth in the holistic presence of our sacred and incarnated being.
Do we feel that reality in ourselves?
Do we live that truth in our bodies?
It is always there, but we have to learn to live in it. Well, “learn” isn’t exactly the right word. There is a shift. An awakening. Being “born again” in a sense, despite the connotations that phrase might evoke for many.
This is the shift from “ordinary consciousness” into a fuller consciousness. It is why we have looked in each center at processes for moving from an entry state into our awakened state—and then at times as well flowing into the unified state.
In some sense, we can make this shift in each of our centers individually, opening up to the awakened field of knowing from each of these embodied structures of consciousness, these ways of knowing and being. The process of coming to this openness can come forth differently for each person, with some centers opening more easily than others. We can be patient with ourselves, trusting in our body’s capacity and timing—and having faith in God-Being-Us to shine through whenever it may be that dawn comes this day. Or for the grace as well to breathe in the goodness of the divine darkness.
Over time, the shift becomes more holistic, more free-flowing as we open more immediately to each of the centers and to the movement through and among our whole body. We welcome the energy and awareness wherever it is drawing us—we are less directed by our mind on where to place our attention. Our awareness simply finds itself coming forth in whatever part of our body, whatever structure of consciousness, whatever form of knowing is becoming present in that moment.
In Christian terms, this could be called “being filled with spirit” (as long as we remember that spirit is less of an external force and more a facility of our evolving consciousness). Some may find it helpful to think of it as flow.
Being in a flow state is that place where everything is working in natural harmony and ease, doing the “work” of the moment in a sense without struggle, without debilitation, without anxiety. There is still effort, but without the tension of the common snags and hiccups that come when we’re too “in our heads” or in disharmony with the others—those we are working with or the terrain of our action. It is invigorating, focused, joyful, and usually altruistic. It has a timeless quality as well. Some experience this flow in artistic work like making music or visual imagery, in physical activity like skiing or swimming, in creative work for a job or personal project.
Most experience flow states in relation to something task-oriented, given to a singular point of focus. In the flow state of our mystical body, our “task” or central focus of attention becomes reality itself. It becomes the moment before us. The immediacy of what is not only before us, but what is present through us. In the fullness of our entire embodied being and becoming.
Spiritually, we experience this more fully to the degree we have come into the openness and participation of each of our embodied structures of consciousness. Into the integration that makes possible new ways of being. That brings forth our emergence into integral consciousness.
Which “seems possible only if we are willing to assimilate the entirety of our human existence into our awareness. This means that all of our structures of awareness that form and support our present consciousness structure will have to be integrated into a new and more intensive form, which would in fact unlock a new reality.” – Jean Gebser
The Integral Structure of Consciousness
“Consciousness mutations are completions of integration.” – Gebser
When we awaken and open to each of our centers within, as portals of awareness from each of our structures of consciousness, we then are able to cultivate a transparency to integrated presence in our embodied being (as we explored last week).
Differentiation precedes integration, and once we have opened into the awareness of each structure alive in us in each center, then we are able to come into the flow of wholeness in our entire being. This is the embodied presencing of the integral structure of consciousness.
“By integration we mean a fully completed and realized wholeness—the bringing about of an integrum, i.e., the re-establishment of the inviolate and pristine state of origin by incorporating the wealth of all subsequent achievement.” – Gebser
This is not merely a learning from the past and including the best of what’s come before. But a holistic inhabiting of all of what has and continues to be what makes us fully human—even as well the pre-human, our conscious participation in the material world, in the whole cosmos. This is our coming into the reality of our radical mutuality and oneness with all things. The presence of the divine in the body of All, encompassing the entire universe, including us. This is our participation in heaven, living in and from Origin in the time-free eternality on this side of the death divide.
As such, we are not bound totally to just this present moment. But rather than living in the past or the future, we are liberated to live in the fullness of eternity. Life-everlasting beyond the limits of time and space. A new dimensionality. A new reality.
The Origin-al Mystical Body.
“To reach the truly divine aspect via relationships among persons…the genuine bond between persons goes always through God…[where] the valid point of relationship resides.” – Gebser
With this flow of eternality in the All, we can also integrate into the expression of this structure in the We.
In a way, we find ourselves as a star in a particular constellation of consciousness. Or maybe even more than one. From a particular perspective or reference point, we may be part of what constitutes a certain collection—but seen from another galaxy, perhaps we make up a different picture entirely.
Or rather, another way to think of it is as our place in the locality of our particular ecosystem. We live into the synergy and symbiosis of our new tribe. Of our resonant and constituent neighbors that are working together with us to co-create the thriving of life in our community, which is not bound necessarily to a particular geographic location.
We find ourselves linked not just by locality or common mission, but bonded by the divine heart of love. We come to be through “the present of relationships to wholeness,” through the particularizing of the universal into a time and place, together—which is how love comes to be.
This to me is the heart of what the body of Christ is and was meant to be. The communal enfleshment of God in the substance of our lives. Born into our “home town.”
“This opens up the possibility of a mutation, and as a consequence of an actual and real mutation, the spiritual … can be truly perceived as the energy which effects itself transparently and diaphanously throughout the whole.” – Gebser
Our awareness of these aspects of the integral structure in our own mystical body appears not just as a vertical flow of all of the structures connecting within us, or even as that reality combined with the relational horizontal connections and loving relationality, but also in a new dimension.
Thinking of it spatially isn’t quite right, as it is perhaps better associated with a sort of quantum logic and nonlocality—but Gebser describes it as the sphere. And in the “sphere of Being” we perceive the whole from the whole.
Our mystical body is able to flow in and throughout the wholeness, not bound to a particular point of reference, to a particular physicality, to a specific time—though we manifest through all of those in our lives. We are living in the divine reality perhaps best described by Bonaventure:
“The One whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.”
If all this stretches your brain a little, that’s ok. We may need a little mind-boggling in order “to break forth from mentality into diaphaneity” as Gebser puts it.
As I said above, it is less something we learn by way of fully grasping in our mind, but something we embody in a vibrancy of spiritual reality that shimmers with the hope of something beyond what we can now fully comprehend. It’s not that we set our mind entirely aside, but we know that we will not discover the new consciousness by the means of the old.
In a way then, it is something into which we are born anew.
Embodied Fullness & Sacred Wholeness
So our sacred work is both to let go and allow this birth into a new consciousness, a new awareness of the fullness of divine life being born in this time. Through us.
And our work is to embrace and integrate further into this fullness by awakening to our latent structures within. In a sense, to grow down so that we can “grow up” into this new dimension. Into the new reality of holistic mystical embodiment—the coming together of wholeness with fullness.
The wholeness is always already. The fullness is our coming into greater wholeness through our participation in the divine nature in flow through our new ways of being.
Our wholeness is not a state of “completion” in the process of awakening, in the full-dwelling of our holistic mystical embodiment. We are always still evolving, developing, and unfolding. We do not attain wholeness. But we can live into our wholeness with varying degrees of fullness, of awareness, of presence.
We seek to dwell in the fullness of who we have become here and now, in openness and participation with the awareness we have been given and that we have cultivated through our spiritual work, open to whatever degree of transparency that we have now.
This is not a capacity of mind or even of knowing in any of our structures. It is our embodying of who we truly are. And who we truly are is not limited to our physical body, so it cannot contain it. But who we are is also not separate from our body.
Our mystical body is where it comes together.
Where we hold heaven and earth within. Where we manifest our divine nature co-present with our material being. This is what it means to be whole. This is who Jesus was. This is what it means to be Christ-ian. To be born of God and of human.
This is the sacred birthright of all.
It is our gift to celebrate. To receive and to give away. To embody. This day and every day.
How are you living into your fullness and embracing wholeness these days?
Where do you experience the flow of your mystical body most? How do you cultivate this consciousness?
Answer in the comments below or set the intention to have a meaningful conversation about it with someone you trust, with your WeSpace group if you’re in one, or join us for deepening engagement and co-exploration around these themes this Thursday, December 30th at 1:30pm CT. Sign up here.