Last December a poll revealed something encouraging about spirituality in America. When asked if they had ever had a religious or mystical experience, more responders said yes than no. This was a first in the 47 years that the Pew Research pollsters have been asking the question. A religious or mystical experience was defined as a "moment of sudden religious insight or awakening."
In the New York Times article covering the results, the headline read, "Paranormal flexibility," which may reflect common prejudice but is entirely misleading. Spiritual experience is normal. As a catch-all, "paranormal" covers fringe experiences like seeing ghosts and being abducted by aliens. For that reason, skeptics like to lump deeply meaningful religious awakening into the same basket. We would be better off leaving all loaded words out, including the words religious and mystical.
The other word in the headline, "flexibility," is the valid and important one. Believing Christians report, in larger numbers than before, that they have absorbed aspects of Eastern and New Age thought. Whenever I hear that narrow dogma and secondhand belief systems are being replaced with more expanded awareness, I feel encouraged. Expanded awareness is the whole story. Without it, spiritual experience isn't the only thing closed off; so are the deepest aspects of love and personal insight.
Consciousness evolves. This isn't a controversial statement, because we all accept that the awareness of a toddler is only the beginning of life's journey, leading to the greater awareness of adulthood. What isn't widely accepted yet is that evolution or personal growth -- choose whatever term you will -- becomes voluntary once a person reaches biological maturity. You must choose to grow into insight, wisdom, love, and compassion. Our brains can adapt to all these states. Experiments with Tibetan monks have proved that their brain functioning is different and more intense in the prefrontal cortex where higher thought is centered.
At the moment, such findings seem exotic, but they shouldn't. Our remote ancestors didn't speak complex languages (so far as anyone knows), do mathematical calculations, or delve into quantum physics, but as soon as modern humans wanted to pursue those areas of inquiry, the brain kept up and adapted to make math, physics, and every language in the world possible. The same is true of spiritual experience. If you want to have it and believe that higher consciousness is real, your brain will be able to allow the kinds of advanced spiritual experiences that traditionally belonged only to saints and sages.
I have never thought of saints as another species of human but rather as scouts into an unknown territory. The role of a scout is to show the way to others, not to ride back to camp and prevent anyone else to cross the frontier. Happily, we seem to have reached a spiritual divide. If more people are peering into the field of consciousness (that's how I'd describe it without using loaded words like religious and mystical), then the field itself is opening up. As it opens, more and more seekers will venture in. The great thing is that in the future, and hopefully the near future, there will be much less confusion, struggle, and resistance about consciousness. No longer stuck in outworn religious assumptions, expanded awareness will become something unheard of in prior generations -- it will become normal.
Published in the San Francisco Chronicle
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Energy animates Matter, Consciousness animates Life.
The significance of the One
becomes Another
when One and One
are One.
Step back from the rose and take a good look at the garden. All things in existence retain a memory, in their own way, from the eons in geological and fossil records, centuries echoed in tree rings to the aches and pains of our muscles' strains we carry day to day. When we look up at the sky at night, even the stars we see are but a distant memory.
Its miller time!
In spiritual journeys, if you see a path that is clearly marked and choose that one, you're probably going the wrong way.
are peering into the field of consciousness....., then the field itself is
opening up."
Reminds me of the time when 'there was a psychological barrier that
existed for many years about the impossibility of a human running the
mile in four minutes. But once one man had done it, many, many others
did it in the following years.' (smile).
Don't let up, Deepak!
That the average american is decidedly below average is not at issue, especially in the sphere of superstition.
All of the "facts" aren't in yet so please don't assume they are.
That many americans are below average in open mindedness
is a part of the issue.
That isn't a tiny rounding error.
Not sure what "facts" you think negate such monumental separations of time. If nothing else, the simple fact that no hominid fossils, let alone modern mammal fossils have ever been found with dinosaur fossils, seems to negate any argument you might want to bring up about carbon dating (not that they are ever intelligent arguments to begin with)
So your argument is breathtaking either way. Its like saying we aren't sure about gravity because something might defy gravity at any moment. Sure. When that happens, I'll give it consideration. Until then, it seems the laws surrounding gravity have rational reasons to be accepted.
Wow, a definition that does not define anything.
http://thefiresidepost.com/2009/04/18/the-stormy-marriage-of-jesus/
And isn't that what FREE WILL is all about: we get to choose if we will look out for another or just our-self.
All institutions are man made and the Bible was not FAXED in from heaven, it was written down by ANCIENTS after centuries of STORY TELLING and dogma and doctrines are only attempts to try to explain the ineffable Mystery of the Universe.
"You will recognize the believers in their having Mercy for one another, and in their Love for one another, and in their Kindness towards one another; like the body, when one member of it hurts, the entire body hurts."-Muhammad
And as saint John Lennon penned:
"The struggle is in the mind. We must bury our own monsters and stop condemning people. We are all Christ and Hitler...That what people call God is something in all of us. I believe that what Jesus and Mohammed and Buddha and all the rest said was right. It's just that the translations have gone wrong…Jesus was all right, but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It's them twisting it that ruins it for me...You're just left with yourself all the time, whatever you do anyway. You've got to get down to your own God in your own temple..."
http://www.wearewideawake.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1062&Itemid=211
were witnessing. They were confused because they weren't in
on the ploy of misleading the Roman soldiers to a wannabe.
They didn't twist the story for the purpose of creating a religion.
That was done much later.
I heard a lecture by philosopher Alan Watts where he postulated that Jesus had an awakening of expanded consciousness, but being a simple man of his time, he could only relate his experience through the prism of what he knew, which was Judaism.
These experiences of oneness with the Cosmos must go back to the first humans. The problem is that each generation filters these experiences through their cultures and existing religions.
As Deepak is alluding, perhaps one day we will be able to see these experiences without the cultural or religious baggage that normally comes with it.
Perhaps science, will show the way.
This indeed is one of the main problems with Mr Chopra's approach. Sure, let's just choose our terms as we will, regardless of actual meaning, in order to avoid any meaningful discussion.
by the sciences--definitions by associations.
"It seems, because of the definitions you have been taught,
that there is only one narrow kind of rationality, and that if you
forsake the boundary of that narrow definition, then you become
irrational, fanatic, mad, or whatever."
"You hold some basic assumptions that are also core beliefs.
To you they seem to be definitions. They are so a part of you that
you take them for granted."
"The fact is that man lives by those values that science ignores!"
Evolution is personal growth and personal growth is evolution.
They're both 'change' and even science can't deny that..
As a catch-all, "abnormal" covers fringe fantasies like quantum time travel and the Creator Consciousness “authoring” the Big Bang.
of actual meaning, in order to avoid any meaningful discussion"?
Eventually, over a great length of time, the natural law of this expansion of consciousness that leads to greater personal awareness will also lead to greater personal responsibility that reaches out to others in an attitude of giving, sharing and inclusion rather than the self-interest and exclusion of those out-dated, man-made belief systems.
I love your definition of a saint, for I think it reflects perfectly the fact that a true “spiritual” teacher only points the way home, never to him- or herself.