For Christians, Christmas is a season of hope, joy, and faith, with treasured traditions going back centuries. These are beautiful and meaningful for believers, yet of course, many struggle to believe or reject religion altogether. We all know that for some, Christmas is simply a secular holiday, about family time and exchanging gifts.
I have been reading an interesting book by Ken Wilbur entitled The Religion of Tomorrow. Wilbur offers ideas for making religion, faith, and ultimate truth understandable and relevant to modern day agnostics, as well as believers. Wilbur himself practices within the Buddhist tradition but speaks to all the world’s major religious traditions. He uses the concepts of growing up and waking up. Growing up is about the integral development framework, with people evolving into more complexity and inclusiveness in perspectives and world views. Waking up is about the process of awakening and enlightenment and having direct experiences of the Divine. “Waking up gives us direct experiential access to dimensions of Spirit itself, and growing up helps us determine how we will interpret those spiritual experiences”. He suggests that both are vital for the religions of tomorrow, and I would say for religion today. Through growth in both dimensions, humanity can train to be whole and integrated, not partial and fragmented and broken and stuck in shame.
All the major wisdom traditions started in premodern times and did not have access to modern, scientific information or advanced cultural systems or technology. All the traditions speak of human beings trying to understand, experience, and be in relationship with God. Upon reflection, we can see how our perspectives and understanding of God evolved over time. In the Bible we can see very different perspectives of God throughout the Old Testament as people were at different stages, such as tribal, magical, power and punishment, mythical, and finally the messages of Jesus in the New Testament about intimacy with the God of unconditional love.
Wilbur points out that much of Christianity remains frozen in premodern, mythical, ethnocentric world views, which makes it hard for modern and postmodern generations to relate to, reflected in declining church membership and participation. This is not true for all Christians or churches of course, and Integral Christianity provides for higher levels of development, and has also reopened Christianity to its mystical, waking up aspects, which are extensive, profound, and beautiful.
Western culture has, in general, lost track of its own history and sources of waking up and consequently has lost a sense of ultimate truth as a guiding north star. This is especially true within the postmodern perspective, where there are only relative truths, relative realities, and relative solutions. As Wilbur notes, ultimate truth is not something that can be rationally demonstrated or proven and has no opposite. It simply just is, and can be known only through direct experience and spiritual practices such as contemplation, meditation, centering prayer, and worship.
These spiritual practices have been around for thousands of years and even though the language is different, the experiences seem to be remarkably similar in the various religious traditions. Over time, people have attempted to describe and define these experiences of ultimate truth and have defined both states of consciousness and stages of the types of experiences they have had. For example, here is one way these stages have been defined:
- The gross waking state of consciousness
- The subtle dream state of consciousness
- The causal deep dreamless sleep
- The state of formless witnessing or ultimate awareness
- The ultimate nondual state
These states and stages are likely more familiar to those from a Buddhist tradition, but it is also part of the Christian tradition, and there are several modern-day spiritual teachers who have written about this aspect of Christianity, including names you may recognize such as Thomas Keating, Richard Rohr, Cynthia Bourgeault, and others. In my opinion, it is less important to focus on what stage or state of consciousness I am experiencing, and more important to focus on practices that help me to be still and awaken to the loving presence of God, here and now.
Through disciplined practice and some understanding of various states and stages of consciousness our faith and experiences of spirituality can deepen and become more alive. Some Christians, for example, focus on developing “Christ consciousness”. According to the website, bibleanalysis.org, founded by Anurag Rao, Christ consciousness has its roots in spiritual and metaphysical teachings and symbolizes a universal connection to divine wisdom. It refers to a state of awareness that embodies the qualities demonstrated by Jesus Christ, such as love, compassion, and forgiveness. Rao notes that the quest for Christ consciousness is not merely an intellectual pursuit; it’s a journey of the heart. The benefits extend beyond individual gain; they ripple outwards to create positive change in communities and the world at large.
However, Ken Wilbur points out that one can be wonderfully awakened to deep state development yet poorly developed in growing up intelligences. This shows up in people who are devoted in their faith and spiritual practices, yet they are stuck in ethnocentric or even egocentric levels and show up as authoritarian, sexist, homophobic, and judgmental. So, as noted earlier, if we want to be wholehearted in our faith and attempt to follow the path and example of Jesus in today’s world, we need to evolve into being more world centric and integral in our attitudes and structures of thinking, as well as being open to direct experiences of ultimate truth or Spirit of the Divine. For those who want to dive deeper and learn more about how to develop in the dimensions of both growing up and waking up, I recommend reading The Religion of Tomorrow by Ken Wilbur, even though it is long and he tends to ramble a bit as a writer.
Therapy Tip
While Christmas is a time of celebrating the birth of Jesus, it is also a great time to slow down, be still, and contemplate on his manifestation of Christ consciousness, and his emphasis on forgiveness and love without limits. We are reminded that all growth results from intentional focus, discipline, practice, perseverance, and faith. May you experience an extra dose of the peace of this special season.