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Welcome! Waking Spirit provides resources to encourage personal and collective transformation. Personal transformation is the life-long journey of both embracing our humanity and opening to the awareness of our inherent union with the Divine. Everyone’s journey of personal transformation contributes to the transformation of the collective, as all individuals are a part of a larger whole. Waking Spirit affirms that each person’s individual transformation is an expression of love leading to the awareness that we all share a mutual belonging as members of the Body of the Divine.
Imagine, for a moment, a mountain with a sacred location situated on its top peak. Your greatest desire is to reach this sacred destination. You feel as if this unknown place calls to the core of your being, like it is beckoning you forward to a place you belong. There are a multitude of paths you can choose to take in your journey. There are many well-traveled paths available, and others that are yet to be explored. There are guides for individuals and groups who want to share the journey, or you can choose to travel alone. There are many ways to reach the sacred location; but, you must climb the mountain to get there.
Now, imagine you have reached the sacred destination because of your commitment to the journey. You experience waves of both exhaustion and bliss at the attainment of your goal. You are greeted by others who dwell in the sacred location. After an adjustment period, these individuals who are familiar with the terrain take you to the highest point of the mountain and reveal that this place is only one of many that sit atop an endless range of mountains. From this vantage point, you see for the first time that your journey has truly just begun. Those who dwell in the space invite you to stay and learn from their community. However, they caution you that at some point everyone must move on and continue their journey to another site atop a different mountain. In the stillness of the evening, you realize that there are millions, maybe even billions, of other travelers who are on their own journey up one of the endless stream of mountains or staying in the sacred places scattered across the mountain ranges.
The first half of narrative above is a way to understand the personal journey of transformation. Paths up the mountain represent many types of religion and spirituality. Some of the paths were established by well-known figures, like Abraham and Moses (Judaism), Jesus and Paul (Christianity), Muhammad (Islam), or Siddhārtha (Buddhism). The sacred space is not salvation or representative of reaching God/the Divine. Instead, it is a state of consciousness that most religions and versions of spirituality are designed to guide us towards. It is your authentic-self as an expression of Divine Love calling from the essence of your being. Entering the sacred space does not transform you, the journey itself does. You are transformed by the experience of sojourning up the mountain.
The second half of the narrative shows how the personal journey overlaps with the collective experience of transformation. As we reach new states of consciousness, we find others who have reached these states before us. Often, we are given new lenses which gift us with drawing new meaning from familiar teachings. The revelation that there are other sacred sites, with individuals who dwell in them and endless sojourners traveling up and down the mountains and traversing the valleys and plains points to a concept that is found within most mystical teachings – unitive existence. As Br. David Steindl-Rast so eloquently said the mystical experience is where we awaken to and embrace a worldview of “limitless oneness, limitless belonging.”[1] When we reach a state of consciousness that permits us to see that All is truly One, we begin to understand that we are connected to all of existence, interwoven into a web of being and belonging. The sacred site we once saw as a final destination is, actually, only the beginning of a life-long journey full of mountains, valleys, and communities. Throughout our life we will stay in states of consciousness long enough to learn, grow, and eventually continue to another sacred space.
Waking Spirit acknowledges that we are all part of this Collective Human Spirit that is stirring from our long slumber. Some members of this Body are awakening a little sooner and this is how it should be. Instead of criticizing our sleeping siblings, which would transmit more negativity and thus prolong the slumber, we find ourselves invited to get busy in building bridges between the various enclaves of belief systems and reality bubbles. Waking Spirit affirms that the best critique of the bad is the practice of the better, and thus, we privilege inclusivity by honoring the inherent unity of all things. Our guard against the loss of relevancy through unhealthy relativism is to use the metric of love. In other words, we ask ourselves before doing spiritual practices, posting our material, or engaging with others, if what we are doing generates more love, honor, and respect in the world. Intentions matter, and we intend Waking Spirit to be an agent of individual and collective transformation. Shall we walk together, then?