Waking up to the Truth of our Divinity
Published in Watkins Magazine
We are living through extraordinary times. Western civilisation seems to have lost its way and we feel adrift in an increasingly meaningless world. We long to find our way to the shores of stability, meaning and certainty but we’re not sure how to get there. Yet it seems to me that the first step forwards will be to lay a more stable foundation beneath Western consciousness itself.
Looking back to the origins of modern Western civilisation, which began in the Axial period 2,500 years ago, reveals that the root cause of today’s brokenness lies in the fact that our culture and consciousness was explicitly built on a founding narrative of separation. The creation story of our Judeo-Christian-Islamic culture was the story of the fall of humanity out of a primordial oneness with God. We began with this fundamental sense fracture in our collective psyche and self-identity and have continued to live from that fragmented mindset ever since.
This primordial sense of ourselves as broken, fallen sinners, fatally cut off from God, contributed to a domino effect of further ruptures between spirit and reason; matter and spirit; and religion and spirituality. It also led to a split in our natural relationship to nature, to each other and even within our own selves. This narrative of separation has shaped our consciousness, culture and civilisation right up to today and is an original cause of why we live these broken lives of radical disconnect.
In order to restore a sense of connection to the Whole, in order for us to start living in right relationship with ourselves, each other, nature and God, we need a new founding story that assures us that there is no separation between humanity and God and there never could be. If we are to heal our broken lives we need to believe in an overarching story of belonging and oneness in love. To find out how, we turn to the mystics.
The mystics are those who have had the experience of a higher knowing of their true belonging and essential oneness with the divine light. They know that at the deepest level there is no difference between the being of God and our being; and that there is not even the possibility of us ever being cut off from the higher power we call, God. Mystics know that there is a fundamental unity underlying all that exists.
Western religions perpetuated the mindset of separation by keeping mysticism, and even meditation, separate and apart from the everyday practice of faith for ordinary lay people. The mystics were revered as an elite, privileged few who by a special grace experienced their oneness in the blazing light of God. But what I now deeply believe is that we are all called to be mystics in the ordinary course of our ordinary lives. We are designed to wake up to the truth of our divinity and our inseparable belonging to the whole but we have forgotten how to do so.
It is my deepest belief, after ten years of research and reflection on my own spontaneous mystical awakening, that the natural trajectory of life is to move from the feeling of not belonging to belonging; of being lost to being found; of moving from darkness to the light; from chaos to order; from apparent separation to the joy of union with God – and all while we still live within this physical space‐time universe. I believe that the plan all along has been for us to wake up to our inherent divinity even while we still live in our material bodies.
The time has come for us to accept a new Story about ourselves: that we are all one in Love (in God which is Love).