Cosmic Consciousness the Path

  “I am more than my physical body. Because I am more than physical matter, I can perceive that which is greater than the physical world”. –Robert Monroe 

Cosmic Consciousness, or what some call the universal subconscious mind, is beyond human perception. It could also be called metaphysical consciousness. Metaphysics represents the beliefs of Unity Church and Centers for Spiritual Living, founded by Ernest Holmes. They study what is possible when we understand the Oneness with God and all living things. Ernest Holmes defines the Cosmic Mind as the creative intelligence of the Universe. He says there is nothing supernatural about the study of this metaphysical viewpoint. He says what seems supernatural today will be understood in the future by many and will be part of the natural order. Many teach that we are headed to our next steps of growth as spiritual beings through an understanding of the cosmic realm.

Our ancestors lived close to nature. They lived in a dimension based on symbols and rituals, causing a trance state of consciousness and thus connecting them to the universal cosmic mind. Even though there were tribes of people all over the world, many of the same healing practices, values, and wisdom can be found in each of them.  As Howard Thurman says, "There is plenty of evidence to support the belief that the universal subconscious mind is the connecting link between the finite mind of man and the Infinite Intelligence of God. It is the intermediary through which one may draw upon the forces of Infinite Intelligence at will. It, alone, contains the secret process by which mental impulses are modified and changed into their spiritual equivalent. It, alone, is the medium through which prayer may be transmitted to the source capable of answering prayer.” In other words, we all can tap into universal creativity and intelligence. The more we use it, the stronger it becomes in our lives. I believe it is through Cosmic Consciousness that we can find the same path to our inner mystic, the path to the wisdom and healing of our ancestors.

For thousands of years, our ancestors on every continent used trance as a bridge to the subconscious. Mainstream groups such as Buddhism, Hinduism, and Sufi (Islamic mystics) also use trance as a spiritual journey. Psychological work for the treatment of PTSD and addiction uses the induction of trance for healing. Trance is defined as an altered form of consciousness in which a person is neither fully awake nor fully asleep. We experience a fleeting state of trance just before we go to sleep, and our conscious mind is winding down, and right before we wake up. Entering a trance state happens when we can bypass the critical chattering conscious mind. In a trance, we can communicate directly with the subconscious mind. A trance can help us access deeper states of awareness and experience mystical or Maslow’s peak experiences.

Defining a mystical or peak experience is difficult. I had one several years ago. It was an out-of-mind experience, I was full of awe and wonder. It happened when I was 30 years old, and it started my spiritual quest for truth. I remember it like it happened yesterday.

          I was a hospice volunteer, and I spent the day and evening with an elder man who was dying. He was conscious most of the time. He shared stories about his beloved wife and described how he felt so lost since she died a year before. He shared in vivid, colorful detail the gardens she planted and tended. He missed the smell of her homemade bread. He missed the sound of her voice. We were on a sensory tour through his life with his wife. He shared the gentle touch of their first kiss like it was yesterday.  Today, I wonder if that kiss was a mystical experience. 

When he first came into the Hospice that day, he joyfully proclaimed, “Today is the day I am going to die.” I didn’t believe that was true, as most people are there for several days before they die. And most people are not excited and happy about dying. He was excited because he knew it was the day he would be with his wife again. The energy around him was alive and joyful, but I just didn’t see how he could be dying that day. It did not fit the usual pattern I had witnessed many times. Several hours passed, and his energy became quieter. He slept on and off. For most of the day, I was there with him alone. He didn’t have children. As he told me, “It was just the two of us building castles in the sky.”

Around nine and after dinner, he was unconscious. He really was dying today! His pastor came to give him the last rites. It was the first time I was included in this very sacred ceremony. My body tingled with awe and wonder as the pastor’s gentle words cradled the energy in the room. Soon our patient peacefully took his last breath and was gone. 

After he died, I went out into the darkness and looked up at a sky full of stars. They twinkled so close; it seemed like I could touch them. I felt one with everything, and I felt loved by whatever everything is. I knew I would never again doubt there is a Presence some call God. The reality of an all-powerful Presence was a flash that felt more real than anything else in my life. Suddenly my sense of self was free and full of Love. This was the beginning of my spiritual journey. 

In his book, Three Magic Words, U.S. Andersen says when we connect on deep levels of consciousness, we are connecting with God. He defines, "God as the intelligence that pervades all times and places, the design and order and consciousness of all things. Man lives in this intelligence; he is part of it and the whole of it." Cosmic consciousness dwells within all living beings; it is all-powerful and in everything, everywhere. It is the path to our inner mystic. Our guides along the way are nature, poetry, music, and awakened senses, or a first kiss. Medieval mystics refer to it as an inner light. Meister Eckhart wrote: "There is a journey you must take. It is a journey without destination. There is no map. Your soul will lead you. And you can take nothing with you."  He says every great artist, poet, and songwriter describes how their performances come from a source beyond them. It flows without thought or reason. It sounds to me like they bypass thinking and reason to go deep into Cosmic Consciousness. Some say Leonardo Da Vinci was so completely connected that everything he touched was full of genius. He demonstrated the miraculous creativity of Cosmic Consciousness.  

Mystics from all over the world, from different religions and traditions at different times in history, describe their soul journeys. Teresa of Avila wrote “Interior Castle” in 1577. She describes the journey of the soul going through deepening stages of spiritual development to union with God. We can find the same themes in the writings of John of the Cross (1542-1591). The twentieth-century mystic, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, echoes the concept of the unity of all, including all of creation. Celtic tradition from 354-418 saw creation as a connection to all and the reflection of God’s very being. There is a strong sense of the goodness of creation because one can get a “glimpse” of God. Celtic mystic Pelagius says, "by looking at the animals roaming the forest, God’s spirit dwells within them. Look at the birds flying across the sky: God’s spirit dwells within them. Even the tiny insects crawling in the grass have God’s spirit dwelling within them." He saw God’s spirit in the great trees of the forest and the wildflowers. He believed the presence of God’s spirit in all living things is what makes them beautiful. Pelagius saw God as present within all that has life. The writings of all mystics explain how everything is connected to everything.

As we journey to our inner mystic, we will notice a deeper understanding of ourselves and others. It is often described as a state beyond the limitations of the ego to the higher self. It is a place of inner wisdom and intuition. 

The Call of the Mermaid

The Call of the Mermaid 

"It is very important to go out alone, to sit under a tree, not with a book, not with a companion, but by yourself and observe the falling of a leaf, hear the lapping of the water, the fishermen’s song, watch the flight of a bird, and of your own thoughts as they chase each other across the space of your mind. If you are able to be alone and watch these things, then you will discover extraordinary riches which can never be destroyed." ~Jiddu Krishnamurti

Legends say sailors heard haunting singing from mermaids echoing across the seas, calling them to the unknown. Some say it was a seductive force that meant danger, uncharted waters that could swallow them into the vast seas. It touched a longing deep in their souls.

The mermaid's call symbolizes a longing impossible to ignore; we can define it as our wish for happiness. Could it really be something much deeper and more profound, like a call to go deep within our inner self to find the mystic, our connection to the divine?

Are our fears like the sailors of being swallowed up by a vast sea of the unknown? The mermaid is a metaphor for the longing for something we don’t fully understand and something dangerously mystical. It is the call to explore something beyond the ordinary, dangerous, and yet very enticing. 

In psychology, water represents the subconscious mind. It is a place of nightmares and fantasies. A place where we store hidden thoughts, intuition, and instinctual knowledge. It is the scary part of our souls, not in our awareness. It is like where mermaids live, dangerous and frightening.  Sometimes we experience a magnetic force pulling us toward the possibilities of what is beyond our everyday ordinary routines. A path into the unknown.

Divine truth cannot be measured and logically explained; it must be experienced. Magic doesn’t come from our rational mind. A great example is an experience psychology calls a peak experience. It happens when you are overpowered by your senses. Maslow defined it as, “unusual moments of heightened joy, serenity, beauty, or wonder.” He reports that these experiences have happened across time, culture, and religion and are indescribable. If you have had one, you know it, and you know when somebody else starts to try to describe theirs. During a peak experience, you feel an overwhelming sense of being one with the world. There is a heightened sense of wonder, awe, and ecstasy. There is a sense of losing track of time. 

A peak experience can lead to significant changes and serve as a turning point in living a deeper or more meaningful life. It is usually a fleeting experience. You can’t make it happen again even though you wish you could. It creates a longing for a feeling of oneness and love like you experienced. It can be scary and wonderful at the same time, like dreams and whispers from the unknown.  

How do we find the mystic within? How do we satisfy longing? 

We try to satisfy our longing with a new relationship, car, house, or clothing. We often find misery instead, as attachments to things and people lead to a reliance on other people's opinions of us. We rely on outside sources for what it means to be spiritual. We live a busy life, ignoring the whispers from dreams. Busy people don't remember dreams or take the time to imagine. They don't take the time to notice the messages from their senses, where we find the magic and wonder in everyday life. 

Some describe going through life as becoming a block of marble with layers of defenses we accumulate to survive. Inside the marble is a beautiful soul hidden. Spending time alone in meditation, in the forest, or by the river, begins the process of removing all the excess rock, piece by piece. The world of cultural expectations, rules, and borrowed beliefs is stripped as we go deeper into the self. Sometimes we meet scary memories, nightmares, past mistakes, and the truth about our delusions. Thankfully, these things are revealed when we are ready to see them in the light of self-love. The Universe uses gentle nods and subtle whispers to light our path. Love never judges, and we learn to do the same.

Practices to support our inner journey.

    1. Self-love

    2. Silence/ meditation

    3. Awakening our senses

    4. The mystical experience of hope 

    5. Contemplative practices

When we learn to be peaceful in silence and how to just be, we find the mystic within and the everyday miracles that nourish our soul journey. 

   

  

Patience Visted Me

 Patience visited me

And it reminded me

That good things take time to come to fruition

And grow slowly with stability

Peace visited me

And it reminded me

That I may remain calm through the storms of life

Regardless of the chaos surrounding me

Hope visited me

And it reminded me

That better times lay ahead

And it would always be there to guide and uplift me

Humility visited me

And it reminded me

That I may achieve it

Not by trying to shrink myself and make myself less

But by focusing on serving the world and uplifting those around me

Kindness visited me

And it reminded me

To be more gentle, forgiving and compassionate toward myself

And those surrounding meConfidence visited me

And it reminded me

To not conceal or suppress my gifts and talents

In order to make others feel more comfortable

But to embrace what makes me me

Focus visited me

And it reminded me

That other people’s insecurities and judgments about me

Are not my problem

And I should redirect my attention

From others back to me

Freedom visited me

And it reminded me

That no one has control over my mindset, thoughts, and wellbeing

But me

And love visited me

And it reminded me

That I need not search for it in others

As it lies within me.

Words by Tahlia Hunter

The true value of a human being is determined primarily by the measure and the sense in which he has attained liberation from the self. —ALBERT EINSTEIN (1879–1955)

This could also be explained as ego-self. Love self comes from a different place when it is doing good in the world.

Fruits of wintering:

1.    Yesterday's readings helped me to not judge myself or others for coming from ego good. It is a stage we go through to get to heart good. Wintering has helped me gain this insight. It helps me to let go of all judgment. The judgment I feel when I observe ego good deeds of my past and ones observed by others. I understand what I picked up as elitism, is really ego good deeds which is a stepping stone to heart good deeds done without or without others noticing.

2.    

retelling our stories

Reclaiming Our Power, Retelling Our Stories

“We are all longing to go home to someplace we have never been—a place half-remembered and half envisioned we can only catch glimpses of from time to time.” Starhawk, The Spiral Dance.

Crones' half-remember and half-envision a time when we had a powerful leadership role in our tribes. In the past, female elders were respected and had important and meaningful roles. They were the ones who held the myths and wisdom stories, the ones who knew where the medicine plants grow and what their uses are. They served as guides for younger adults, caregivers, and mentors for the community’s children.

Storytelling is a way of teaching that gives meaning and understanding to life. It began in ancient times with our ancestors who told stories around the campfires. Just like words, stories have power. They speak to our subconscious; they shape our perceptions and form a basis of cohesiveness within tribes and cultures. They also cause a natural exclusion of others, encouraging judgment and ‘othering’ of those who live outside of our interpretation of life’s meaning. Creation of stories and beliefs about what is right and wrong creates a duality of thinking; a framework of how to believe that is very subtle and often not in our awareness. It divides everything into good or bad, beautiful, or ugly, strong, or weak, evil, or saintly. It is what political and religious leaders use to control their people. It is how women lost their role as powerful elders in the culture. 

Why does this matter? It matters because how we think about aging women and thus ourselves, depends on the stories and images we hold in our heads. The images we hold today are not helpful. It is getting better due to the brave actions of some strong, wise women in the culture who are demonstrating what women can do. For the most part, older women in our culture today are ignored, encouraged to be inconspicuous or to try to look younger if they wish to be respected and noticed. You know, dye your hair, stay thin, have eyelid surgery, fake eyelashes, Botox to erase the wrinkles. The greatest compliment being, “Oh you don’t look your age, you look so young.” Older women are held up as objects of satire with late-night comedians who think it is funny to make fun of them. If they have more than one cat, they are victims of mockery. A cat lady who is sad and lonely and uses felines as a substitute for a man.

Ancient belief systems tell a different story.

While researching the best example, I found was Irish folklore and the female figure they call Cailleach. She is a power and fights the exploitation of animals and the land. Irish mythology is highly female-centered. Many of their stories tell of Cailleach’s closeness to the animals, both domestic and wild. In one folk tale she scolds a servant boy for setting out to turn hay on what will become a wet day. He asks how she can be so sure of her weather forecast and she tells him that the crow and the deer are reliable advisers. The stories tell us that the wisdom of the animals is to be valued as much as the wisdom of humans because animals have a way of being in the world which we do not. They understand things we do not. Below I share one of her stories because I love the image of a fierce elder woman standing up for herself. There are many stories like this one, including powerful creation stories that are very different from the Western Creation story we all grew up with. There are a couple I share at the end of this lesson.

            The Story of the Old Woman and the Priest (A story from Southwest Ireland)

One day, a parish priest visited the Cailleach’s house to ask how old she was. He thought, as such men do, that he was a fine fellow, and very clever; he’d heard that she claimed to be as old as time, and he wanted to catch her out. Well, the old woman replied that she couldn’t quite remember her exact age, but every year on her birthday, she told him, she would kill a bullock, and after she’d eaten it, she would throw one of its thigh bones into her attic. So, if he wanted to, he could go up to the attic and count the bones. “For every bone you find up there in that attic,” she said to him, “you can add a year of my life.” Well, he counted the bones for a day and a night, and still he couldn’t make a dent in them. His hands, they say, were shaking as he pulled at the door handle and left.

The Power of Creation Stories

For two thousand years, our Western culture’s creation story is based on masculine domination over women and over all the creatures of Earth. Women were created from man’s body to please him because God saw that he was lonely. I remember as a young girl believing I had one less rib than my brothers. The first woman was blamed for causing all human suffering because she was seeking wisdom and knowledge. She talked to an evil serpent. She shared the “evil” fruit with her partner. God punished them by throwing them out of paradise and made women subordinate to men forever. For she could not be trusted. She may see the beauty of snakes and continue to seek wisdom and knowledge, both very bad things.

These messages formed a foundation of a culture where women are not to be trusted. Men have control over women and the natural world because only men can be trusted with wisdom and knowledge, not women and not crow and deer. The story justifies a world in which men have dominion over all the animals and plants. Our ancestors saw the plants and animals as our brothers and sisters and teachers. I believe the patriarchal push of a domination-based culture is the cause for climate change, decline of the nutritional value of our food, animal cruelty, and the cause of mass extinction of species, leading to the destruction of Mother Earth.

In western culture, women have been trained well not to share their gifts of intuition, their ability to connect to Universal wisdom, and their faith in Spirit, seeing on unseen levels what many eyes cannot see. Women were burnt on stakes, drowned, buried alive or incarcerated in cruel and dirty insane asylums if they did not comply to the teachings and rules of men. Today, there is still a subtle message to not shine, to dim our light so as not to upset the masculine power structure. We know agism and sexism directed at older women in our culture impact our physical performance, impair mental health, hasten the onset of dementia, and strip us of a feeling of belonging, thus causing loneliness in epidemic proportions. Isn’t it interesting that twice as many women are diagnosed with Alzheimer’s? There is a price to pay when we feel invisible, that we believe we don’t matter, when we do not know or share our gifts, and when we spend years under the dominion of the masculine culture.

Because words matter, and older women matter, older women will be referred to as elder women. It implies authority, ‘a leader”, a trusted figure that matters in her family, community, and country. I use the word masculine because it is not about men or women, it is about masculine energy, traits and characteristics. The fight against the patriarchy isn’t a fight between men and women. It is not a fight against men. There are masculine and feminine qualities in each of us. We have those qualities in different amounts that vary at various times in our lives. As a young mother I was happy to surrender to the feminine traits of nurturer. As the owner of a business, I valued developing masculine traits of leadership and reasoning. The fight is to put the world back into harmony and balance with respect for both the feminine and masculine. And to once again value plants and animals as our brothers and sisters and teachers. To share equally in reciprocity.

One of the most damaging results of the Western creation story is how it kept women from each other. The message that women are not to be trusted meant we did not trust ourselves or each other. Our ancestors shared daily responsibilities; they gathered food together, cared for each other’s children. They shared wisdom passed on from grandmother to mother to daughters. They shared insights, intuitions, and visions that benefited the entire tribe. My wish is to reclaim the respect for women and the natural world. I wish to reclaim sisterhood. We reclaim our sisterhood by meeting in circles and sharing in deep friendship. We replace archetypes and stories diminishing the feminine with the ancient ancestral wisdom that still lives within us. We can once again bring balance and reclaim our natural feminine role as elders. Elder women matter, we have dignity, and we embrace growing older as a gift to share. When we believe in the superpower of Love, we share the energy and vibration of love all around us. We lift up humans and non-humans with the energy of love. This is a purpose worth striving.

Some things to try:

1.      Begin to identify feminine qualities and see them positively.

2.      Are there aspects of being a woman in our culture you have buried?

3.      Do you see love-driven, receptive, relatedness as positive traits.

4.      Is there a place for intuition in running a business?

5.      Which feminine trait is your strongest? Which masculine trait is your strongest?

6.      Can you see the value of bringing both the feminine and the masculine traits in balance?

7.      If you want to know where you fall on the spectrum of feminine/masculine, you can find the Bem Androgyny Test online.