Cosmic Gardening in Space-Time

Something strange and wonderful is sprouting these days in the garden of spirit. As the membrane that divided and distinguished the world’s spiritual traditions breaks down, the depths are breaking through in sacred hybrids of unusual vigor, energized by the questing of millions all over the world for unmediated experience of the Source. In America alone, in the past twenty years the number of religious groups has doubled. We take new names, sit zazen, and become Sufis, Taoists, neo-pagans, devotees of Kali and Vedanta. Buddhism in all its varieties is the fastest growing American faith.

A new river of holiness flows through this landscape, a Ganges that carries on its floodtide all who have embarked on the contemporary spiritual voyage. A group of sophisticated New Yorkers dressed in expensive attire struggle up a mountain to study with a Peruvian shaman, who drums them into trances where they commune with totem figures never encountered on the streets of Manhattan. In a temple in Sri Lanka, a yellow-robed figure sits in deep meditation. The shaved head is expected, but then the adept’s eyes open, and they are Western and blue and belong to a woman journalist from Dayton who has become a Buddhist nun. Near Detroit, a small, fiery Jewish woman from Texas exhorts her New Thought congregation with insights drawn from the channeled revelations of A Course in Miracles as well as her own political primer for the healing of America. Behind her, a hot and holy gospel choir belts out spirit-quaking songs.

A community of elderly nuns in Montana integrate sweat lodges and other Indian ceremonials into their traditional Catholic retreat program. A Buddhist Vipasana teacher conducts meditation retreats for Monsanto and other corporate giants. An innovative Jewish Renewal Movement blends the wisdom traditions of classical Judaism with Sufi, shamanic, Christian, Islamic, Buddhist, and Hindu practices and good doses of transpersonal psychology, spiritual eldering, and human potential work. Catholic monks and maroon-and-gold-robed Tibetans share and compare meditative and contemplative techniques as they take turns leading morning meditation at an interfaith dialogue at Gehtsemani monastery in Tennessee attended by the Dalai Lama (who will be visiting next year in our neighborhood: Arlee, MT). One Catholic Brother said, “These other traditions do not contradict my own. Rather, they open the wells of the Waters of Life. When I meditate with His Holiness (the Dalai Lama), I feel as if the deep rivers of our respective traditions are meeting and becoming a mighty flood of spirit and renewal.”

The goal of some groups of Gnostics historically was to release the true inner spiritual man from the restraints of the false world so that he might return to his life in the realm of the transcendent God. Liberation requires “gnosis,” waking up to the knowledge of one’s divine origin as well as the counterfeit nature of this hostage world. A simple way out of our captivity is stated in the Gospel of Thomas where Jesus suggests: “Recognize what is before your eyes, and what is hidden will be revealed to you.” In other words, when we explore the fullness of who and what we really are, the truth of our situation dawns, and we wake up from our collective slumber.

What if, for example, we were to regard the brain as a personal virtual reality generator? Our problems and confusions, it then follows, have in large part to do with the different ways the VR generator works in each of us. What seem to be angles of grace to some may be, in another’s subjective virtual world, fearsome monsters. Perhaps, as mystics both East and West have extolled for many ages, neither perception is reliable in any absolute sense. All reality may be, we are led to conclude, virtual.

Then where, we may ask, above and beyond the illusory perceptions of our VR body-minds, does the Original Generator reside? According to esteemed international philosopher, Jean Houston, “It seems clear that part of our mind must be programmed and conditioned by our experiences in whatever world we inhabit, but part may not be. Insofar as we are a creation of the Original Generator, we are coded to be able to know and experience Original Mind – in other words, to transcend the limits of our historically conditioned selves.” That Original part is what has been termed by modern physicists “nonlocal consciousness”. Many of us have had experiences of nonlocal consciousness – knowing what will happen before it does, mystical experiences, telepathy, and clairvoyance. In such experiences, our everyday, “local” consciousness recedes, and nonlocal mind moves into the foreground. Then, as written in the Hindu Yoga Sutras almost 2000 years ago, we access all time and all information by “becoming it.”

Perhaps in experiences of nonlocal mind, when our mental noise is quiet, what is really happening is that we are jacking into connection with the Original Generator; into Eternal Nonlocal Mind. The drive to forge this connection belongs to the perennial philosophy of many times and places, but it is also, “newer than tomorrow’s child, more current than the latest theory of how the universe works,” according to Jean Houston in Jump Time. “This connection may be the ultimate goal of Jump Time, for it calls us to accept ourselves as beings of infinite scope, directly and dynamically connected to the flow of cosmic creation.”

In contrast to the Big Bang theory is the dramatic and spiritually potent perspective now current among visionary cosmologists such as Brian Swimme, Thomas Berry, Fritjof Capra, Michio Kaku, and others, that our cosmos is a living organism, recreated each moment by an unbroken flow-through of energy from the Original Generator, which some thinkers term “Metaverse”. In this view, the universe is perceived to be unified in all its parts. Moreover, as physicist David Bohm tells us, it is a holomovement, a dynamic hologram, in which everything that we experience emerges in each moment from the “implicate order” an energetic but unmanifest domain that harbors the patterns of all creation. Like a hologram, each part of the world we can see and name contains and is contained in each other part, every aspect linked in undivided wholeness in flowing movement. Fully involved and interconnected, this cosmic organism involves each one of us in absolute intimacy. Renowned physicist Erwin Schroedinger echoes this view powerfully when he writes: “Inconceivable as it seems to ordinary reason, you . . . are all in all. Hence this life of yours which you are living is not merely a piece of the entire existence but is in a certain sense the whole.”

We know ourselves, then, as resonant waves of the original seed, infinite beings who contain in our body-minds the design of creation itself, planted in the field of this particular space-time and sustained by a dynamic flow-through of cosmic energy. This experience is one of the supreme givens of our nature because the Metaverse in its operational mode is coded into every one of us.