"Infinite Exchange"
What do you make of this "thing" that we call "life"?
Have you "found religion"... or enough religion to relax about your questions and hurts, and your occasional triumphs and your disappointing failures?
Do you need pot, booze, or any one of any number of possible sources of addictions, to make it through your days, weeks, and months?
Are you "happy enough"?
Or maybe, just maybe, have you found That Something that leans Itself, and you, into the proximity of bliss?
However you may have answered those introductory questions, this page, Infinite Exchange, is for you. Infinite Exchange is central to a New-Very Old Mysticism: and the themes that are essential to the mystic transformation that is required of us in this, holy moly, twenty-first century.
The Perennial Philosophy
"Aldous Huxley, following Leibnitz, has called the Perennial Philosophy because they appear in every age and civilization: 1) there is an infinite, changeless, reality beneath the world of change; 2) this same reality lies at the core of every human personality; 3) the purpose of life is to discover this reality experientially..." -- Eknath Easwaran (The Bhagavad Gita)
Or, as Rev. Ellen Grace O'Brian, puts it: "It is. We are it. We forget. We remember." (Living the Eternal Way, Center for Spiritual Enlightenment, San Jose, California)
"All things sacramentally exist in the sacred, and the sacred sacramentally exists in all things."
-- Hans Gustafson
"The kingdom of heaven is within you." -- Yeshua bar Alaha
My summary, philosophy, or if you will, my theology is as follows: Everywhere. Every moment. Everything. Everyone: always exists / evolves in a permanent condition of "Infinite Exchange". If it is your desire to somehow "exist" in a mind-numbing condition of mere consumption -- until, at last, you bite the dust -- you are really selling yourself short. If, instead, you only want to be "saved" from having to think, feel compassion, or confront your possibilities for self-transformation, well, that's what the religions are selling, right? But, if you already know that in your heart you are a mystic, let's put our heads together and see what might happen!
By now, most folks have heard of the word "OM". The poet, Gary Snyder, wrote in "The Real Work" that "OM" is a "magical seed syllable". "OM" has been in my vocabulary since my senior year in High School (thanks to Paramahansa Yogananda, Neem Karoli Baba, and Ram Dass). But, it wasn't until a few nights ago that it penetrated into my dreams: and it came as a new (yep) meditation technique called "The Flower Petal Drop Meditation": complete with simple instructions and practice (all while I blissfully slept). Here it is: sitting, standing, or lying down, breathe in "through the souls of your feet" (barefoot on earth): mentally say "OM" with your incoming breath, as you consciously draw up through your soles the Energy-Blessing of Mother Earth as if a flower petal: as you spiritually envision a flower petal rising up through your soles to your legs and on up your torso, then with the slow continuing sound of "OM", drop the flower petal into your heart (your heart is the sacred sanctuary of Divine Consciousness and home of every beloved): after the flower petal has fallen into your heart, mentally say, "AH" as you exhale and follow your breath back down into the earth... and then again... "OM"... inhale... and so on...
Now, mind you, this all arrived by means of a dream... still, I have since been practicing this, and you know what, each time I have felt what Fr. Bede Griffiths describes in his book "The Cosmic Revelation": "The divine essence, the Holy Trinity, is totally present in every particle of matter, every atom, and every electron; however you would like to divide the universe, the whole creation is totally pervaded by God..." and "Our mind has the capacity to embrace the whole creation." This divinization of matter, creature, and human is, fundamentally, the only solution to the climate crisis, which in itself, is a crisis of consciousness: politically, economically, culturally, and spiritually, we have hunkered down into religions of "Me-Myself-and I" which only too easily has been manipulated into systems of domination in service to the Unholy Trinity of Privilege, Profits, and Power. Domination inevitably crushes, while partnership always elevates...
There really is no way out of the mess of world power brokers without most of us falling in love with loving... Loving our Mother Earth... loving one another enough to ensure equality, justice, safety, and the means to live a fully human life... and loving the enduring evolution of humanity and life enough to be conscious about it...
Jesus Was Woke
"We are stardust, we are golden. We are billion-year-old carbon and we've got to get ourselves back to the garden." -- Joni Mitchell (Woodstock)
"I swear to you, there are divine things more beautiful than words can tell." -- Walt Whitman
"Only love interests me, and I am only in contact with things that revolve around love."
-- Marc Chagall
"Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus." -- St. Paul (Philippians 2: 5)
"Our problems stem from our acceptance of this filthy, rotten system." -- St. Dorothy Day
"The kingdom of heaven is within you!" -- Jesus
"Come and see!" -- Jesus
Can any sleeping man see anything other than the dream-workings of his own mind? Of course not. Yet, there are American politicians lusting for the power to augment their already privileges and profits, by prancing around this country decrying "wokeness"... Unable to seriously define their meaning, they settle for the "them" of their own dream-workings: as if any of that is of the least bit of importance. On the other hand, there is Eberhard Arnold who wrote the Christian treatise "Why We Live in Community" in the 1920's: "We live in community because we are stimulated by the same creative Spirit of unity who calls nature to unity and through whom work and culture shall become community in God."
To be "stimulated by the same creative Spirit of unity" implies the spiritual condition of awakening to something more than the meanderings of one's dream-mind in deep sleep. And by "awakening" I mean something like what Fr. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin wrote in "Hymn of the Universe": "... the incorruptible principle of the universe is now and forever found, and that it extends everywhere: the world is filled, and filled with the Absolute. To see this is to be made free." Jesus said that "the kingdom of heaven is within you" and "the kingdom of heaven is at hand". This new-sight in-sight is foundational to the teachings of Jesus: he may have been a part-time winemaker, but he was full-time woke!
I oftentimes comment to Michelle how she "flows like a river"... to the degree that we can awaken, (no doubt through the availability of abundant grace), we begin to recognize this "flow like a river" reality as the imprint of the Mystic Tao, the I Am, the kingdom of heaven within you: within every human being, within every thing and all things: indeed, the Universe is pregnant with diaphanous grace in-filling everyone / everything... "flowing like a river"... And this diaphanous grace would have us awake for every possibility of an encounter -- to the point of no remaining-defined-separation between Divinity and Humanity, and between Any Human and Every Human. Listen listen listen for the magical voice and pregnant moment of Limitless Love...
Wokeness is the growing condition of the kingdom of heaven, right here, right now...
Now, mind you, this all arrived by means of a dream... still, I have since been practicing this, and you know what, each time I have felt what Fr. Bede Griffiths describes in his book "The Cosmic Revelation": "The divine essence, the Holy Trinity, is totally present in every particle of matter, every atom, and every electron; however you would like to divide the universe, the whole creation is totally pervaded by God..." and "Our mind has the capacity to embrace the whole creation." This divinization of matter, creature, and human is, fundamentally, the only solution to the climate crisis, which in itself, is a crisis of consciousness: politically, economically, culturally, and spiritually, we have hunkered down into religions of "Me-Myself-and I" which only too easily has been manipulated into systems of domination in service to the Unholy Trinity of Privilege, Profits, and Power. Domination inevitably crushes, while partnership always elevates...
There really is no way out of the mess of world power brokers without most of us falling in love with loving... Loving our Mother Earth... loving one another enough to ensure equality, justice, safety, and the means to live a fully human life... and loving the enduring evolution of humanity and life enough to be conscious about it...
Jesus Was Woke
"We are stardust, we are golden. We are billion-year-old carbon and we've got to get ourselves back to the garden." -- Joni Mitchell (Woodstock)
"I swear to you, there are divine things more beautiful than words can tell." -- Walt Whitman
"Only love interests me, and I am only in contact with things that revolve around love."
-- Marc Chagall
"Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus." -- St. Paul (Philippians 2: 5)
"Our problems stem from our acceptance of this filthy, rotten system." -- St. Dorothy Day
"The kingdom of heaven is within you!" -- Jesus
"Come and see!" -- Jesus
Can any sleeping man see anything other than the dream-workings of his own mind? Of course not. Yet, there are American politicians lusting for the power to augment their already privileges and profits, by prancing around this country decrying "wokeness"... Unable to seriously define their meaning, they settle for the "them" of their own dream-workings: as if any of that is of the least bit of importance. On the other hand, there is Eberhard Arnold who wrote the Christian treatise "Why We Live in Community" in the 1920's: "We live in community because we are stimulated by the same creative Spirit of unity who calls nature to unity and through whom work and culture shall become community in God."
To be "stimulated by the same creative Spirit of unity" implies the spiritual condition of awakening to something more than the meanderings of one's dream-mind in deep sleep. And by "awakening" I mean something like what Fr. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin wrote in "Hymn of the Universe": "... the incorruptible principle of the universe is now and forever found, and that it extends everywhere: the world is filled, and filled with the Absolute. To see this is to be made free." Jesus said that "the kingdom of heaven is within you" and "the kingdom of heaven is at hand". This new-sight in-sight is foundational to the teachings of Jesus: he may have been a part-time winemaker, but he was full-time woke!
I oftentimes comment to Michelle how she "flows like a river"... to the degree that we can awaken, (no doubt through the availability of abundant grace), we begin to recognize this "flow like a river" reality as the imprint of the Mystic Tao, the I Am, the kingdom of heaven within you: within every human being, within every thing and all things: indeed, the Universe is pregnant with diaphanous grace in-filling everyone / everything... "flowing like a river"... And this diaphanous grace would have us awake for every possibility of an encounter -- to the point of no remaining-defined-separation between Divinity and Humanity, and between Any Human and Every Human. Listen listen listen for the magical voice and pregnant moment of Limitless Love...
Wokeness is the growing condition of the kingdom of heaven, right here, right now...
How It All Began, A Story
In English, many fables begin with "Once Upon a Time", but since we are going back to the "when" before time was invented, we'll begin with a simple "Gee Whiz, I'm happy that you are reading this!" And so we begin...
Arising out of the Void of Nothingness, or perhaps, falling into the Void of Nothingness, there was a First Thought. We cannot say for certain that there was "a someone or a something" actually thinking: but, there was that First Thought. It went like this: "What if?" We might say that eons went by, but again, there was, as yet, no such thing as time... Nevertheless, at some distant point, there was a Second Thought...
Now, this Second Thought was both the Real Beginning and the rEvolution, it went like this: "Why not?" And so it was! From within the Void of Nothingness, there was a wild coherence: Nothing gave "birth" to Something! How crazy is that? Coherence was the attraction between "What if?" and "Why not?" Out of the Void came the idea of an atom and out of the idea of an atom, well, one might just say that idea-took-form and what a myriad of forms they were (and continue to be)!
It would be only too easy say, "And here we are!" But, that would actually be only the beginning of our story, for there followed a Third Thought, "What next?" And this is where we really are. This Third Thought is the Big Thought (as if the first and second weren't big enough!). Third Thought is "evolution", or better still, "consciousness rising, higher and higher, into a deeper and deeper coherence": into a brand new "What if?"
"Consciousness must be regarded as the ground state of existence." -- Deepak Chopra
"The universe is a living intelligent being." -- Allan Combs, PH.D.
"The cosmos is an infinite and eternal intelligence. The infinite and eternal intelligence brought into being a finite domain of space and time: the universe." -- Ervin Laszlo, Author, "The Intelligence of the Cosmos (Credo Propositions One and Two)
In English, many fables begin with "Once Upon a Time", but since we are going back to the "when" before time was invented, we'll begin with a simple "Gee Whiz, I'm happy that you are reading this!" And so we begin...
Arising out of the Void of Nothingness, or perhaps, falling into the Void of Nothingness, there was a First Thought. We cannot say for certain that there was "a someone or a something" actually thinking: but, there was that First Thought. It went like this: "What if?" We might say that eons went by, but again, there was, as yet, no such thing as time... Nevertheless, at some distant point, there was a Second Thought...
Now, this Second Thought was both the Real Beginning and the rEvolution, it went like this: "Why not?" And so it was! From within the Void of Nothingness, there was a wild coherence: Nothing gave "birth" to Something! How crazy is that? Coherence was the attraction between "What if?" and "Why not?" Out of the Void came the idea of an atom and out of the idea of an atom, well, one might just say that idea-took-form and what a myriad of forms they were (and continue to be)!
It would be only too easy say, "And here we are!" But, that would actually be only the beginning of our story, for there followed a Third Thought, "What next?" And this is where we really are. This Third Thought is the Big Thought (as if the first and second weren't big enough!). Third Thought is "evolution", or better still, "consciousness rising, higher and higher, into a deeper and deeper coherence": into a brand new "What if?"
"Consciousness must be regarded as the ground state of existence." -- Deepak Chopra
"The universe is a living intelligent being." -- Allan Combs, PH.D.
"The cosmos is an infinite and eternal intelligence. The infinite and eternal intelligence brought into being a finite domain of space and time: the universe." -- Ervin Laszlo, Author, "The Intelligence of the Cosmos (Credo Propositions One and Two)