We don’t just live in interesting times, we live in positively fascinating times.
All around us, old structures are crumbling, and many of those structures are viciously resisting their demise. The possibility of environmental disaster, and a growing felt-sense of connectedness both to the environment and to each other, is beginning to bring humanity together in awareness of our social and spiritual, as well as environmental, interdependence. Technology is giving humanity God-like powers and we are invited to develop God-like wisdom in using those powers. And the world’s esoteric wisdom traditions are emerging from centuries or millennia of secrecy and not only inviting everyone to drink at their wells, they are in dialog with each other and often discovering that, unlike the conventional religions that spun off from them, they are actually more alike than they are different.
Religion as we have known it is fast losing its legitimacy. The ancient teachings of spiritual wholeness and authenticity, often given symbolically or in religious language, are being freed from the shackles of religious institution and offered in a clear and direct way for anyone who wants them — along with, unfortunately, increasing amounts of trendy, hucksterish mashups of magical thinking, low-level occultism, and pseudoscience.
There is a new paradigm emerging, a new way of being, one embracing all levels of what it means to be fully human and what that means for nurturing the immense, latent potentials in all of us. Philosophically, the “Eastern” sensibilities of holism and flow are meeting the Western tradition of precision and of scientific method. The world’s spiritual traditions are both leading this paradigm shift but are also challenged by it as old hierarchical (and often patriarchal) structures and viewpoints are dissolving in spite of themselves.
Untitled Image © 2011 Farishtah Saaqib
So spirituality itself is actually evolving. We are invited by the evolving Universe to live into the ambiguity of the emerging new view/new way as co-creators with the Divine. We are living into and creating a new integration of body, mind, society, and spirit. We are embracing the life of the body as a spiritual practice. We are releasing our centuries-old guilt and shame around our sexuality, and celebrating it, in all its myriad forms of expression, as the source of ourselves and of life. We are engaging our emotional wounds, not as barriers to spiritual progress (which they certainly can be) but as a means-whereby this integration is accomplished, as the fuel for the journey instead of something to be avoided. We are becoming engaged mystics, undertaking social action while being rooted in Spirit and making ourselves permeable to the movement of Spirit through us/AS us, informing not only our social action but our deepest felt-sense of identity and integrity. This is a spirituality that embraces the whole of human experience as its context and where no question is off-the-table.
We are, in the words of my teacher Pir Vilyat Inayat Khan, “making states of consciousness corporeal.”
Consciousness itself is Light, a light that is the source of visible light; it is the same Light that IS our consciousness, both individually and collectively. When this inner Light sees Itself while being refracted and focused through a human brain and nervous system, this Light awakens to its True Nature in the person and as the person. The soul is reborn and we become able to source ranges of meaning and fulfillment that make the banal, societal prescription for “happiness” look like peanuts. Our inner guidance and our perception of outer situations become very clear, because the obscurations of the personal ego (its clinging and its aversions) are greatly subdued or absent.
Hence the title of this site.
My purpose in creating this site is to share what I’ve discovered in the ongoing adventure of my own unfoldment, and to continue to explore what it means to be fully human while also ever-more-fully embodying the Divine. I hope you find something useful here for your own journey.
If you wish to make a donation to support this site and the work behind it, you can use PayPal, or contact me for a postal address. I will be deeply grateful for any and all donations.
Bronze kashkul (dervish begging bowl) from Kashmir, ca. 1900