A Whole New World…

I sat down a bit ago to start a review.  A review of my past months blogging and seeing where I have been and where I am going.  Being completely interruptible – or maybe just a bit ADHD – I ended up on Deepak Chopra’s blog reading an article.  I started following his tweets last week as I get my PracticeJoy account up and running…and have to say I was very skeptical that I would ever read anything I would agree with him on.

Yet, that was a complete judgement of him, I admit.  And as you know I am trying to rid myself of this attitude in my heart…so I challenged myself to subscribe to his tweets and then today, when I saw the title of this article…I challenged myself to actually read it.  “Perhaps,” I thought, “just perhaps I do not know it all…if the last 12 months have taught me anything.  Perhaps I DO have something to learn from others that might not see Jesus as I do…but have great insight and openness in their hearts.  Perhaps I need to be more open to looking for Truth outside the Church walls…see where else God is working…”

I am so glad I did…for his article resonates deep within my soul as it pretty much summarizes where I have been this past year and in which direction I am going.  Perhaps my lil’ experiment with Practice Joy is some how going to fit into the New World he says he sees on the horizon…

I offer this challenge to you: Read this article, being open to what he is saying and seeing where you can learn from this man, what truths you might glean from him and if you too perhaps see a Whole New World on the horizon…

A New Year, And Possibly a New World

Category:  Consciousness

It’s fascinating, as time turns another small corner, to think of how worlds shift and collide. There is no evidence that a person as brilliant as Shakespeare understood that Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo had already revolutionized the human mind. The same thing may be happening now, and many brilliant people seem unaware of how our present-day world –meaning our conception of reality– may undergo a seismic shift.
I’m not thinking of fossil fuels and Arab uprisings, not even of the 99% as against the 1%. Upheavals in the outer world are secondary, in the long sweep of history, to inner revolutions. We may be on the verge of such a one. What makes me think so is a trickle of medical articles, now greatly expanding, that are proving troublesome to mainstream medicine. These articles sometimes deal with cancer, sometimes with antidepressants, sometimes with the dashed hopes for gene therapies that seem constantly out of reach.
What these articles have in common is that treating the body like a machine isn’t panning out. The next breakthrough in cancer or psychotherapy or genetically-related disorders may come from an entirely different angle than the workaday materialism that “of course” looks at our bodies as physical objects like any other. That “of course” is the mark of a settled worldview. A thousand years ago, God “of course” created the world in seven days and the soul “of course” was more important than the body, which was a temporary shell while the soul worked its way through this vale of tears.

When settled worldviews crumble, we have to reinvent the world. So far, there have been only three categories from which to construct reality from the ground up.

1. Dualism, which separates mind and body.
2. Non-dual materialism, which considers only physical things and excludes the spiritual, mystical, and supernatural.
3. Non-dual consciousness, which traces reality back to mind and beyond mind to the very potential for mind.