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Welcome to OneLife Ministries. This site is designed to lead you prayerfully into a heart experience of Divine Presence, Who is Love. The writer is an integral-progressive-mystical Christian focusing on interspiritual work and understanding. Please share this ministry with others, and please return soon. There is a new offering daily. And to be placed on the daily OneLife email list, to request notifications of new writings or submit prayer requests, write to briankwilcox@yahoo.com .
Blessings,
Brian Kenneth Wilcox
MDiv, MFT, PhD
Interspiritual Pastor-Teacher, Author, Workshop Leader, Spiritual Counselor, and Chaplain.
You are invited to join Brian at his fellowship group on Facebook. The group is called OneLife Ministries – A Contemplative Interspiritual Fellowship. Hope to see you there. Blessings.
QUOTES
This Holy Communion is none other than
all things seen and unseen.
*Brian Kenneth Wilcox
The most beautiful and most profound experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the sower of all true science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their primitive forms - this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of true religiousness.
*Albert Einstein. The Merging of Spirit and Science
It must certainly be allowed, that nature has kept us at a great distance from all her secrets, and has afforded us only the knowledge of a few superficial qualities of objects; while she conceals from us those powers and principles on which the influence of those objects entirely depends.
*David Hume.
The notion that all these fragments is separately existent is evidently an illusion, and this illusion cannot do other than lead to endless conflict and confusion. Indeed, the attempt to live according to the notion that the fragments are really separate is, in essence, what has led to the growing series of extremely urgent crises that is confronting us today. Thus, as is now well known, this way of life has brought about pollution, destruction of the balance of nature, over-population, world-wide economic and political disorder and the creation of an overall environment that is neither physically nor mentally healthy for most of the people who live in it. Individually there has developed a widespread feeling of helplessness and despair, in the face of what seems to be an overwhelming mass of disparate social forces, going beyond the control and even the comprehension of the human beings who are caught up in it.
*David Bohm. Wholeness and the Implicate Order.
What is before your thought of God?
*Brian Kenneth Wilcox
SPIRITUAL TEACHING
Theism posits a God outside, above Nature. Atheism says there is no God, at least not a theist one. Pantheism posits God is Nature. Panentheism says both. Shall we just say we are each, and all, bathed in a Mystery the mind can never grasp? If so, we are speaking Mysticism. Then, “God” or “not God” is that Mystery.
Mysticism is the integration of consciousness that transcends in a harmony of all apparent opposites. All the above isms can be integrated in Mysticism; so, in Mysticism, I find I can integrate the two polar opposites of Theism-Atheism, in a harmony wherein I am both in their oneness, but not either in their resistance to each other. Here, in such harmony, is a Love-more-than-feeling.
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Pema Chödrön writes, in The Wisdom of No Escape, "The basic creative energy of life - life force - bubbles up and courses through all experience." She observes that the energy "can be experienced as open, free, unburdened, full of possibility, energizing." The same energy "can be experienced as petty, narrow, stuck, caught."
The intent of our Practice is to be trusting of this energy, be honest with what is, and live wholehearted lives. The direction of our will, itself an energy, is determinative. Entailed in the intent is to live realizing that we are part of this energy that we project outside us.
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The Jewish and Christian Creation Story begins in Genesis 1 of the Hebrew Scripture, "When Elohim began to create," and a beautiful array of form issues out of the basic energy of chaos. If you read closely the Creation Story, you see an amazing truth that pertains to life: Everything Elohim creates is formed out of the stuff – energy - already present. Nothing exists at the end of the Story that is not what was at the beginning of the Story. Formation occurred from Elohim seeing the forms inhering in the basic energy and utilizing the same energy to fashion the forms. I am not speaking that this Story is literally scientific, but mythologically it reflects the process of Life and how Life operates, and how we create, too.
In Hebrew and Christian Scripture, then, contrary to much teaching, creation is not portrayed as "out of nothing," but the formation of already existing energy with eternal-innate potentiality. The Scripture assumes the existence of the energy, and never seeks to give any scientific, historical, or theological explanation for it. Possibly, that non-attempt at explanation on origin itself is a teaching.
This Genesis Story teaches that we are part of this creation energy. We are one with the basic material of the Kosmos. We are part of the emergence, the flow of Life, of this energy that seeks shape. We are each a shape taken by Life – as is a rock, a bird, a speck of dust, a molecule, a sub-particle,a galaxy cluster, ... We are Life, and so is every other thing, from smallest to largest.
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Since we are part of what arises as the vitality of Life, we can take an optimistic attitude toward the possibilities inhering in Nature. We can use the energy to remain open and trusting. We can learn to appreciate that we are immersed in the universal Communion.
This is different from much religion. Many teach that there is an objective evil opposite good. However, mysticism teaches that there is one energy. In Spirit we discover the convergence of all the dualities of good and evil. We discover that while all is many, all is one. We discover evil is the result of the basic energy of Life being used in harmful ways – with my hand I can shake your hand or slap your face. The hand is not to blame, but the person who chooses to use the hand harmfully, So, we can take that same energy and make choices to bless.
With this realization we understand that beginning never ends. Life is always in process. We are part of the whole from chaos to order and back to chaos. Chaos and order are part of a single, divine drama, a Dance of Divinity. We find that we are observing the Dance and part of the Dance – we are, finally, the Dance; indeed, we are one with the Dancer. We find we can change the Dance at any point, for we are endowed with the Dance, and the Dance is never predetermined in advance, even if it is known in advance.
So, in mystical religion to trust in a Creator is to trust the goodness of the whole order of Nature - seen and unseen. We trust in the dignity and divinity of the whole Drama of Life. We trust that Matter to Spirit is part of a process of wholeness, and we trust that wholeness resides in what appears to us chaotic, even useless. With this view, we no longer walk around pessimistic or depressed about life and world events, while we talk of trusting God.
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Faith opens us to a non-problematical relationship with Nature and Life. With faith we see creation and ourselves as unfolding potentialities inhering in God eternally, but by Nature expressing in many diverse Faces of the universe.
We are part of the one Holy Communion. This Holy Communion is none other than all things seen and unseen. This never changes and, thus, is always able to encompass all change.
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*OneLife Ministries is a ministry of Brian Kenneth Wilcox, SW Florida. Brian lives a vowed life and with his two dogs, Bandit Ty and St. Francis. While within the integral-progressive-mystical Christian path, he is an ecumenical-interspiritual teacher, author, and chaplain. He is Senior Chaplain for the Charlotte County Jail, Punta Gorda, FL.
*Brian welcomes responses to his writings at briankwilcox@yahoo.com . Also, Brian is on Facebook: search Brian Kenneth Wilcox.
*You can order his book An Ache for Union from major booksellers.
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