This is an invitation to come down. Drop spiritual narratives of transcendence and be HERE. Come home to your body - the very body your soul chose - to live your intimate, wild relationship with nature, to truly connect with our very real world, and to know the real power and meaning of your love.
Consider with me for a moment that Life - the thing that moves through us and as us and that surrounds us - is God happening.
Consider that putting your attention on Life as God just might be the most sense-making, relieving, healing and evolutionary choice you could possibly make for your spiritual growth and for your purposeful participation in society.
Enter the world you were born into as though you belong here.
For millennia, our spiritual eyes have been looking anywhere but here to find the divine. Some have looked upwards, to a God above and a promise of a heaven beyond this life. Some have looked within to connect with the universe within - to yoke consciousness to itself in radiance beyond all form. But, there is another direction in this story. It's right here. We all belong to it. It’s the direction of the circle, the horizon, the network, the sphere. It’s the immanent, in-the-world, in-between flow of God-ness within each thing and between all things. This third face of the diving is a new and ancient stitch in our collective spiritual story. It represents an evolution in our dominant narratives about where to find the divine, and a refutation of the materialist worldview that imagines that only human beings are conscious and all other things merely manifestations of dull matter.
The experience of EnLifenment lives and breates and dances in this time-bound existence where we all live, eat, dance, rest and fuck. It includes pain, age, error and death. Life is intensely imperfect yet perfectly whole. Life offers the infinite right here: flowing through all the interactions that make life possible. To taste and touch and know life as divine, come down into your body and open into communion. Restore your natural, sensual capacity to see, feel, smell, taste, touch and love life. Recognize you are not an island. Offer your attention to life as though it is sacred.
For those who live through the lens of scientific materialism, I invite you to explore the possibility that your interactions - with yourself, with others, and with both living and nonliving things - engage flows of energy and intelligence that are greater than the material sum of their parts. There’s intelligence flowing through and between all things in an ever changing, entangled dance of consciousness-in-matter, and you are a collaborator in this dynamic choreography.
I invite you to become permeable and intimate. Come into immanence (in-the-world-ness). Consciously embrace change and choose to participate with the never-ending process of wholeness.
This life thing is sacred.
Divinity happens here.
Let go of perfection. Come into this messy, impermanent, heartbreaking, grief inducing plane of existence where bodies gestate, birth, mature, age and die, souls learn and grow, and life really happens.
Your awakening is to be lived. Yes, you are multidimensional. Yes, your soul is eternal. But, once you discover these transcendent dimensions of consciousness, you face a choice: dissociate from life in the name of spirituality, or dive deeper into your relatedness with everything. Offer the gift of your imperfect wholeness into the tumult and possibility of our shared world. The first is the path of one seeking refuge. The second is the path of a person willing to risk in order to fully live and love.
I call this way of being, becoming and knowing Enlifenment. It’s life’s way for us. It’s a path of remembering. To walk this path is a risk. You have to risk being fully human and bringing your whole self into the world. You have to dissolve the part of your identity that’s fixated on perfection. Enlifenment embraces the miracle of life as the centerpoint of practice and nourishes divinity in the world. It means living the “More Life, Please” prayer - the prayer to fully incarnate into your body as your soul as you bring your love into life.
Enlifenment is a path of intimacy. On this path, you are both sovereign and interdependent. You are a singularity and a field of relationships. You seek to move in alignment and attunement to your soul as you collaborate with the soul in each and all things. You are not alone. You are enough. Your life intention and prayer becomes one of stewardship and co-creation with all of your relatives - all the human and more-than-human beings and forces of nature - that co-generate your existence.
Enlifenment is more focused on remembering than awakening. It’s not that awakening doesn’t matter. It’s a pivotal stage in the remembering process. In awakening, you discover that you are not (just) the dense, time-bound, culturally constructed body and identity you’ve been taught to be. You are consciousness itself. Your soul and consciousness are greater than your body and identity. You exist free from body and identity. You and all things are multidimensional, and there is an ultimate, timeless, unbounded truth of Reality that you can know within yourself. Awakening is personal. It’s internal. You can do it (mostly) by yourself. It’s really important - it’s just not the whole story.
Remembering, in contrast, is relational. To remember is a choice you make about how to be in life once you know who and what you truly are. To remember means to “put the limbs (members) or parts back together,” consciously re-stitching the intelligence of your soul into the soul-fabric of the world. You bring your awake awareness into relationship with yourself, other people, seen and unseen beings, forces of nature, and that mysterious thing called God, Source, Universe or The One. Remembering is an act of communion. It’s detailed, specific. It synthesizes the polarity of limitlessness and limits to bring greater coherence into life. You learn to meet challenge, change, limitation and death with eyes wide open and to bring your full attention, grounded in your body and your consciousness, to the situation at hand. You learn that feeling fully is what life is all about. To remember is to let your soul be moved and shaped by your intimacy with life, and to shape life through your intimacy with it.
You remember by liberating and living your joy. You remember by grieving with all of your heart. You remember by learning to listen - not just with your ears, but with all of your senses, your whole body, your soul, and your spirit. You remember every time you say “thank you,” every time you tend the world through gratitude, praise, celebration, grief or wise co-creation. You remember through reciprocity - by giving back to the beings and places that nourish you. You remember when, thousands of times a day, you choose to shape your attention, choice and action according to life’s better way for you.
I believe we are at the beginning of a Great Remembering. This moment in collective evolution is a crucible for human consciousness. As the boundaries of ecosystemic limits enclose us, something is crystalizing within our consciousness - the capacity to know ourselves in oneness with our earth, each other and all beings. This implies a meta-shift in consciousness, how we understand humanness, and in how we DO civilization itself.
Organisms are, by definition, embedded in their environment. Despite all our sophisticated narratives about what a human being is, we are animals - cellular beings whose brains, bodies, senses and cognition co-evolved and co-regulate with the natural world we occupy. I believe our bodies and souls know what’s afoot in our world and are innately designed to respond. We are made of life’s intelligence. We can remember how to listen, how to collaborate, and how to play our collective role of the evolution and harmony of the whole. This innate intelligence runs deeper than culture. It is our nature. It dissolves culturally imposed ideologies and stories by attuning to a deeper, life-centric, soul-centric logic that is already in us.
To remember is to return to the story we are already embedded within - the story of life doing life and us being a part of it.
EnLifenment makes life make sense.