Part One: Spiritual Gifts as Windows of Wisdom

What is the goal of the Whole Body Mystical Awakening practices that Integral Christian Network advocate? Is it just to have mystical experiences? Or feel peace and bliss? The reason to do Whole Body Mystical Awakening is far bigger than just these things. Any reading of the Bible and the foundational writings of many spiritual traditions will find a stream of mystical experiences providing unique knowing, guidance, encouragement, and transformative transcendence. As Paul describes in detail, these mystical experiences often happened with one another in the early gatherings of Christians. They have continued down through history in the writings of the mystics.

These mystical experiences seem to take the three primary forms of (1) personal presences or guides (including God and Jesus), (2) gifts, and (3) transcendence or union with God. We’ve written several articles about guides recently, which you can read here. Next week we will explore transcendence. This week, let’s look at spiritual gifts from the standpoint of their function back then in the Bible and how they are emerging in today’s understanding.

MysticismPaul SmithDecember 1, 2019spiritual knowing Comment

WeSpace Whole Body Mystical Awakening

“WeSpace” is a new form of spiritual practice and community that is on the forefront of the evolving spiritual landscape of today. Recognizing the hyper-individualization of not only Western society and American culture, but also the individualization of the interior experience of the forms spiritual practice, many are seeing the need for a higher, more evolved “WE.” Various forms are emerging in many different places to more intentionally engage in collective wisdom and interconnected healing.

If you’re familiar at all with Integral Christian Network, you’ve certainly heard us talk about WeSpace. It is the heart of . . . .

WeSpace, PracticeLuke HealyNovember 24, 2019Mystical Comment

Gathered to the Transforming Heart of Jesus

Devotion for Cultural Creatives Part Four: Together

This is the final section of this six-part series that began with Why Christian Worship Doesn’t Work for Many Cultural Creatives—and What Might. We begin with a reminder about who cultural creatives are.

Paul Ray is co-author of The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing the World. He has been researching their values, lifestyles and beliefs for 25 years. He says that Cultural Creatives are the carrier population for the emerging wisdom culture:

Across the planet, they are innovators for the culture, not so much in technologies as in beliefs, worldviews, values and ways of life. They are the opinion leaders, and the participants in all the new social movements of the past 60 years who have time and again shaped others’ views, practices and adoptions of these new ways. Their Green values and lifestyles and their values of inner development both psychological and spiritual are the key to the emerging new culture. New Cultural Creatives surveys in Europe, Japan and the US all show the same trends.

The Cultural Creatives care deeply about ecology and saving the planet, about relationships, peace, social justice, and about authenticity, self-actualization, spirituality, and self-expression.

Practice, WeSpacePaul SmithNovember 17, 2019worship, WeSpaceComment

Devotion for Cultural Creatives: Part Three - The Elephant in the Room

There is an elephant in the room filled with cultural creatives who find some affinity for evolved versions of Christianity. And hardly anyone is noticing it. Or, if they do, it is either too embarrassing or too difficult to talk about. This elephant is the gigantic clash of postmodern rejection of all hierarchies and the obvious hierarchy of surrender to God. Even more distasteful is devotion to a personal Jesus as someone who is more advanced than we are and invites us to die to our constructed self and follow him.

PracticePaul SmithNovember 10, 2019worship, DevotionComment

Seeing the Divine Through Icons, Art, and One Another

Integral Christian Devotional Practices: Gazing Part 2

David, king, poet, and prophet, revealed his deepest longings when he wrote: “One thing have I asked of God, that will I seek after: that I may dwell in the presence of God all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of God” (Psalm 27:4).

Previously I said that the heart of spiritual devotion to God comes alive by gazing into the visionary or symbolic eyes of personal forms of God’s divine friendship. These can include God’s motherly-fatherly presence, the Living Jesus, Mary, other spiritual companions, physically present friends, and the beauty of creation itself whose cosmic eyes do indeed gaze back at us. We continue here to explore that theme.

Gazing upon the beauty of God in its many forms—deep, attentive looking—can be integrated into our lives as a spiritual practice.

PracticePaul SmithNovember 3, 2019worshipComment

Finding Freedom in Devotion for Cultural Creatives

Integral Christian Devotional Practices: Part 1 – Gazing

While cultural creatives often have mixed feelings about worship, many of them still long for something they can truly open up their hearts to. Many feel wonder at the vast, cosmic Mystery but perhaps have a desire (sometimes unconscious) to still connect personally to it in some way, to devote themselves to something—someone—beyond just than themselves.

The heart of devotion comes alive by gazing into visionary or symbolic eyes of God. This is the personal, 2nd person presence of the divine as expressed in the tangible other. While experiencing God as 1st person spirit is a vital part of our journey, devotion is awakened through “seeing” such personal forms of the Divine Mystery as God’s motherly-fatherly presence, the presence of the Living Jesus, the spiritual and physical beings around us, and the beautiful presence of creation itself whose cosmic eyes do indeed gaze back at us.

PracticePaul SmithOctober 27, 2019worshipComment

Taking Christianity back from Institutional Religion

Why Christian Worship Doesn’t Work for Many Cultural Creatives—and What Might - Part Two

The challenge today for culturally creative followers of Jesus is to wrestle the heart of Christianity from the powerful grip of institutional religion. We need to take Christianity back from the theology and practices of institutional religion including what is commonly referred to as “worship.”

Many postmodern or integral “post” Christians no longer identify or connect with a religious group or church. Many also have mixed feelings about using the word “Christian.” For some it can carry too much baggage. However, they may not yet have given up on Jesus or a core reality of deep spirituality experienced in their native tongue of Christianity. But often the traditional churches no longer tap into that reality for them.

What do they do with what today we traditionally refer to as “worship”? Where do they go to experience this? They may have even given up on the whole idea, since the very word “’worship” may also carry cultural baggage and bad memories. For many, it may even be too difficult to think in those terms. Underneath the baggage, worship is a deep human longing for something transcendent, something worth devoting ourselves to. Everyone has this need in some way or another.

PracticePaul SmithOctober 20, 2019worshipComment

Why Christian Worship Doesn’t Work for Many Cultural Creatives —and What Might - Part One

WHAT IS A CULTURAL CREATIVE?

In The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing the World by sociologist Paul H. Ray and psychologist Sherry Ruth Anderson, the authors introduce the term "Cultural Creatives" to describe a large segment in Western society who since about 1985 have developed beyond the standard paradigm of progressives versus conservatives. In 2001, Ray and Anderson claimed to have found 50 million adult Americans (slightly over one quarter of the adult population) who could be identified as belonging to this group. They estimated an additional 80–90 million “cultural creatives” exist in Europe. Those numbers have almost certainly increased since then.

The Awakening by Kimberly Kirk

Here are some of the characteristics Ray and Sherry Anderson found in cultural creatives:

PracticePaul SmithOctober 13, 2019worship Comment

Gazing at Jesus in the Devotional Visionary Realm

Opening to your Spiritual Guides Part 2

The experience of devotion to Jesus in the mystical visionary realm is the doorway to accessing your own spiritual messengers. Others, such as Cynthia Bourgeault call the mystical visionary realm “the imaginal realm.” Ken Wilber calls it “subtle consciousness.” I prefer “visionary realm” because that is the language the New Testament uses, and the word “vision” is commonly understood today in the mystical sense of seeing things that are not in the physical realm.

Visions include the sensed presence of another spiritual being, a picture, thought, feeling, bodily sensation, or an intuition that arises from your luminous interior. These can range from a fleeting moment to a dramatic journey in a deep trance state.

We find visions throughout the Bible and some specifically occurring in in what the New Testament refers three times to as a “trance” state. Christianity’s most vital originating moments occurred in a series of mystical visions by . . . .

Guides, MysticismPaul SmithOctober 6, 2019Jesus, Heart Path, Mystical, subtle realm Comments

Jesus and Danu: My Personal Presences of Divinity

I have to admit, when I first read Paul Smith talking about spiritual guides, I was a little put off. My spirituality had become a little too sophisticated for something so New Age-y as that. Ok maybe Jesus. I mean, sure I had a relationship with him early on in my faith, and if I was honest with myself, I still often felt his presence—when I happened to think about him being with me. Or was that just my imagination? And that “personal relationship” buddy Jesus stuff, wasn’t that all a little, immature?

In the course of evolving forward, we all need to go through processes of differentiating and integrating, of transcending and including. As I disentangled myself from a limited, narrow evangelicalism, I was left with many triggers and scars. Many of them still remain, but I was fortunate enough to also have had some pretty powerful experiences of God that always stayed with me. Navigating through what was real and what wasn’t was a difficult task, especially without knowing where to find guidance. Many people end up throwing everything out, and for many of them that may be the best thing to do, at least for awhile.

Fortunately for me, I didn’t get . . . .

GuidesLuke HealySeptember 29, 2019Jesus, WeSpace, Mystical, subtle realmComment