Aloha Dear Ones,

It’s Christmas Eve, the most sacred night of the year for the Christian community.

If you’ve read my last couple posts introducing evolutionary spirituality and evolutionary relationship, you might be wondering, “What does Jesus have to do with it?”  For me, coming from a conservative Lutheran home, Jesus Christ is an essential part of the divine mystery.

Exactly what part of the mystery Jesus plays has been a central question of my spiritual journey.  As a child, there wasn’t a question about the role of Christ on Sunday mornings. Nor was there any question of Jesus’ role in our home on a daily basis, as my devout mother reminded the family to show the love and forgiveness demonstrated by our savior.

I remember my first questionings of the fundamentalist interpretation of Bible scripture.  It was one of the Sundays our small mid-western church had a visiting missionary.   As he earnestly shared stories of victoriously converting the poor heathens, thereby saving them from eternal damnation in the fires of hell, I experienced an unfamiliar sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach.  I had heard these stories before, but somehow, on that morning, there was a malaise that gripped me, an awareness that was encroaching upon six years of the best-intentioned conditioning (yes, I was only six).

I accepted that God so loved the world that He sent Jesus to show us how to love each other. My parents tried to follow Christ’s example, and they were very loving towards my brother and me, and to our neighbors.  God must be happy with them, and me, I assured myself. Maybe God would be happier with people from other countries if they followed Jesus, too–but would God, who loved us so much, really send them to hell forever if they didn’t?

I just couldn’t buy it anymore.  The veil of separation from those who had appeared to be different from me was in place for six years, and then simply had to lift.  I remember sitting in the pew, watching the missionary’s face increasingly flush as he admonished us about the torments of hell waiting for the unconfessed, and thinking to myself, “he’s trying to be good, he just doesn’t understand that God and Jesus love everybody, no matter where people live or what kind of church their parents go to.”

So, there you have it.  I cannot pretend differently, my dear friends who subscribe to the orthodox doctrine of the exclusivity of Christ Jesus.  The condemnation of those from other religious traditions that I could not stomach as an innocent child, I cannot accept now.

Yet, my relationship with Jesus continues, grows in depth and breadth.  My capacity to understand and appreciate the miracle of his birth, his living example of  divine love in human form, his sacrifice, his promise, increases as I experience my own heartbreaks and joys along life’s path.  I identify as a Christian.  I often find myself in between cultural/ spiritual groups, not enough Jesus for some, too much for others.

During the first year of my immersion in the Evolutionary Life Transformation Program (ELTP), an online, global, evolutionary spirituality community created by Craig Hamilton (IntegralEnlightenment.com), I helped create a small, “Interest/Learning Group,” for Christians within the larger group of students. Together, we explored our relationship with Christ, and the impact of the evolutionary perspective on our personal experience of Jesus.  All of us were passionate about embracing the evolutionary impulse urging us to expanded our identity as, “We,” aligned with sacred deep care, God, and becoming responsible for living as that.  All of us discovered an even deeper, realer connection with Christ throughout this process of inquiry.

What does Jesus have to do with evolutionary/integral spirituality?  He is the best evidence of it I have found.  How, exactly, it all works, I don’t pretend to know.  I only know that on the eve of his birth, my heart rejoices.  I believe that Christ is God’s love made manifest.  My life is more aligned with his teachings now, than ever.  Even though I tremble with the enormity of that not yet known, I can tenderly, fiercely, look into the eyes of my little six-year-old self and say, “You were onto something, sweetie–keep asking, keep finding.”

Happy Christmas Eve.

Love and blessings,

Dr. Julianne

Aloha from Maui, Hawaii!

Aloha Dear Friends,

Hope you enjoyed the introduction to evolutionary spirituality.

The two years I’ve been studying with Craig Hamilton, IntegralEnlightenment.com, have been rich and rewarding. Evolutionary spirituality/enlightenment is the single most thrilling human consciousness movement I have discovered in all my years as a seeker.  I’m developing a passion for applying the evolutionary perspective to relationships, both in my own life, and as a transpersonal psychologist working with people who believe more is possible in their connection with others.

Much of the writing on evolutionary enlightenment is in philosophical, and/or integral, language.  I’m thinking of Ken Wilber’s brilliant book, “Integral Spirituality,” and the writings of other integral thinkers.  Ken Wilber is probably our foremost post-modern philosopher, the father of all things, “integral.” Integral theory views human experience as a synthesis of knowledge that evolves in stages of consciousness, each stage including and transcending the next.

You can see how this perspective lends itself to an exploration of the evolution of our spiritual awareness.  If one does not, “speak integral,” and most of us do not (I am far from fluent), it can be challenging to understand the evolutionary conversation.

I’m getting more clear that part of my passion for creating an evolutionary frame for relationship involves discovering the language that communicates concepts steeped in philosophy and theology in a practical way.  Hmm.  Pray for me.:)

Let’s look for this together.  Whenever any of you find something in this ballpark that really speaks to you with powerful, simple clarity, please share it as a comment, or send it to me at my email drj@mauispiritualcounseling.com.  We need all the help we can give each other.

As I read over my last couple posts, I realized that most of us have only heard the term, “evolutionary,” refer to biology, and the cultural debate between the scientific and religious communities about the origin of life. There is bitter controversy around this debate, people finding themselves in camps with ideological lines fiercely drawn.  So–please let me explain the way I’m holding the evolutionary point of view, and what it has come to mean to me.

I’ve always been in the third, “camp,” those who believe a sacred mystery, God, set the evolutionary process in motion.  I experience the unfolding of life as a divine process, occurring within a matrix of deep care–that life has, as its blueprint, the innately loving nature of that mystery.  Our human consciousness is a part of that unfolding–just as all species learn, adapt and progress, so does our awareness.   What might our evolving consciousness enable us to understand?  How does a greater awareness challenge us?

Albert Einstein is quoted as saying, “A human being is a part of the whole, called by us Universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest-a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole nature in its beauty (spaceandmotion.com).”

A spiritual interpretation of the evolutionary process invites us to free ourselves from that, “optical illusion,” of separateness, to have an actual, living experience of being, “all God’s children,” of being one life, one heartbeat, evolving from the very DNA of the creator, “made in God’s image.”

The essentially hopeful message is that no matter how dark things appear at any moment in time, humanity is on the right track.  Choices made by individuals that harm others create chaos and despair.  Yet, these acts are not supported by our divine blueprint, and cannot be sustained across time. Our consciousness, our capacity for lovingkindness, is evolving.

What is passionately and relentlessly honed and expanded is our innate goodness, our evolving capacity to dissolve perceived differences between us and the hatred and violence that come from those beliefs.  The evolutionary impulse urges us to dissolve boundaries not only between ourselves and others, but between ourselves and our creator, to become aware of our sense of being separate from God as a false construct of an earlier stage of consciousness.

Mercy.  I experience a deep and abiding resonance with truth as I take this in–and an almost overwhelming challenge.  Here’s the encouraging news–our personality selves, burdened by defensive patterns, our human minds at their current capacity, are not expected to meet the evolutionary call of the future.  There is a power beyond us, within us, that is moving us forward, regardless of our individual choices.  As we become awake to the call of the good, the true, the beautiful, the holy, we are responsible for acting in alignment with it, to do the right thing.

As a humanity now evolved enough to be aware of being conscious, we can choose to actively support the sacred process of becoming more like the creative, loving power, the mystery of God, that caused everything that exists to come into form.  Let us ponder what choice we can make today that will bring us into greater alignment with that divine love.

Love and blessings,

Dr. Julianne

 

 

Aloha Dear Ones,

Tonight I’d like to begin sharing with you the essential dynamics of evolutionary relationship, as I have come to understand them.

For the past two years, I have been immersed in the study of evolutionary spirituality with Craig Hamilton, a teacher based in Northern California. Craig’s site is IntegralEnlightenment.com.  He studied for many years with the best-known proponent of evolutionary spirituality, Andrew Cohen. Andrew’s new book, “Evolutionary Enlightenment,” available on Amazon, is a great resource for those seeking to understand the evolutionary perspective.

One of the most fascinating and hopeful discoveries of evolutionary community has been the emergence of a, “We space.”  This, “We,” is an experience of mutual inner knowing between people that seems to be beyond personality conditioning, a visceral awareness of something that was previously a spiritual metaphor of unity, of us being, “all God’s children.”  There are updated metaphors referring to humanity as, “one life, ” or, “one heartbeat.”

Evolutionaries speak of the, “evolutionary impulse,” or the active face of God, the forward-moving divine intention that Mother Teresa called upon us to embody, because, “God has no hands but ours.”   My background is Christian, and my purest experience of what my ministers would call, “The Holy Spirit,” is how I experience the evolutionary impulse. For me, there is no difference in the spiritual power to which these terms seek to give expression. There is the same ever-present mystery, the quality of deep care, a sacred fire urging us to recognize each other as brothers and sisters, holding us responsible for doing the right thing, motivating us to act for the higher good, in the name of love.

Craig Hamilton has written, “Principles of Evolutionary Culture: How you can create a microcosm of Heaven on Earth.”  These 10 principles, written with inspiring clarity, offer practices relating to each other as the We beyond individual egoic conditioning, responsive to the evolutionary impulse’s call to a more passionately conscious, sacred life, to more powerfully creative, loving, mutual relationships.  The principles were intended to facilitate groups–I will paraphrase the principles as a framework for relationship.  Visit IntegralEnlightment.com to view Craig Hamilton’s original, “Principles of Evolutionary Culture.”

The first of the 10 principles is, “A Wholehearted Intention to Transform.”

Bring all of yourselves to this relationship.  Recognize that this is a place where your own deepest longing for a greater life, a holy life, can be engaged and expressed.  Have the love, trust, and courage to give your heart and soul to the way you will be learning to relate with each other, and with all others.  Do this in the knowledge that the single most transformative power in the world is the power of our intention.  If you want your life to change in a profound way, it will.  If you want your relationship to change for the greater good, it will.  With that kind of intention behind you, your relationship  can be a powerful catalyst for waking up together, for experiencing a deeper, higher love that will inspire the world.

Wow.  What a pure, powerful, righteous intention.  I feel my heart bursting open with hope for something better than I’ve ever known before when I read those words.   What would happen if you committed to relating to your partner in this light?  How would your life be different if you related to everyone with such a sacred intention?

Something to think about, to feel into, to let in.  Just receive this as a gift. Consider embarking on an amazing adventure towards the real thing, together.

Love and blessings,

Dr. Julianne