Today there are an endless variety of teachings, techniques, and practices promising spiritual awakening to help us live happier, more fulfilled lives. While this is great, it can also be confusing. On what basis do we know how to choose what serves us? Without a unifying center, how does it all hang together? We want to walk our own path, but we also want to make sure we are going somewhere worthwhile. Our awakening is just the start of a road that no one before us has traveled.
THE TAPESTRY OF BEING is the first book of a planned series of four, subtitled Talks on Practical Mysticism. These teachings convey a way of relating to the mystery of existence that is broad-minded, paradoxical, and intensely individual. For those who may be looking for a non-sectarian template that you can use on your own or with others, this is an inclusive non-dual orientation that shows you ways to contact your inner guidance and develop in six essential dimensions:
1. You Are Freedom Itself
Awakening into our nature as the principle of Consciousness itself, our Transcendental Divine Identity, our Conscious life as emptiness or formless Awareness.
2. You Are a Multidimensional Field of Radiant Energy
This dimension is the experience of our nature as Radiant Being. Energetic Presence Identity, where you are radiance and vibration. The field of being and current of feeling that flows through (and ultimately is) you and all that you experience.
3. Discovering the Dignity of Your Divinely Human Nature
Embracing our humanity we meet the vulnerability at the heart of life and we contact the finiteness of our mortality. This dimension includes our personality, and our soul as well as our particular flesh and blood body-mind. It is about living in the subject/object world as the individual center of our lives. Here, we establish boundaries, acknowledge needs and desires and own the limited nature of our existence.
4. The Catalytic Magic of Awakened Relationships
The dimension of awakened relating where the multiplicity of the distinct otherness of every human (and every Other embodied being) is honored and respected. In relationships, appropriate ways of expression and letting in the truth of others is a continual challenge. Interacting with others in mutual sensitivity as we recognize both our unity and our uniqueness creates a safe container for transformation.
5. Unseen Help: Becoming Sensitive to Numinous Presences
Here we uncover and develop our capacity to know that we are never alone. Here, we reclaim our heritage as residents of a spiritual universe, becoming sensitive to the numinous, and able to contact unseen help.
6. Devotion: Your Unique Relationship with Your Unique Divine
This dimension is God (or Goddess) as you understand and experience that One in your life. This is the realm of devotion to the Divine Person in the particular way they reveal themselves to you. All forms of prayer and acknowledgment of synchronicities become reminders that there is only one Beloved with whom you are in a private dance. Here you open to and acknowledge the Source of Guidance in your life that is always present and personal to you.
The Tapestry of Being is far more than a collection of exercises, techniques, and practices. It is a way to hold the mutually contradictory spiritual teachings of the world in a universal context.