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The short answer is no and no.
This
work is not religiously based, nor does it strive to satisfy
traditional Western scientific expectations; yet there is much
on both sides of that 'coin' that is appreciated here. I
think of it as a Third Way in which everything merges into ONE
experiential Reality. Not religious or
scientific; not physical or spiritual; not here
or 'the beyond', ad nauseam. We are / Life is .. ONE SEAMLESS
WHOLE -- the entire and endless complexity of intertwined, mutually sustaining
"parts," inside-out, outside-in, from the ground of
being up, and as biologist Christian de Quincey says, from that
Universal Consciousness "all the way down" and in and
through and... Think amoebae, imagine quanta, a
granite mountain, perhaps a serious reconsideration of your
relationship with your long-lost pet rock ... And
not to forget one other most crucially important point, the HEART
of this understanding:
It's
all intimately, indescribably, unendingly RELATIONAL.
I
am you in another body.
Wave
co-exists, is at-one with Part-i-cle / Parts-I-Thou.
The
seeming difference is a matter of transitory perception.
We
share and are ONE in Eternity.
Not:
now or eternity.
This
IS Eternity.
We could describe this in
terms of honoring the Sacred in all life, the Sacred that is all
life, including all dimensions, much more congruent with
proponents of Western science today who are owning [at last!]
their self-created "problematic" shadow of Consciousness, only to
comprehend this shattering light of essential Truth in the
process "... that nothing has ever been real without [our]
beholding it." Interestingly, this last quote is from
a poem by R. M. Rilke [see Barrows
and Macy], created between 1899 and 1903, roughly 50
years before being 'discovered' by world-class physicists as the
so-called observer-participant conundrum. Physicist Amit
Goswami uses a delicious turn of phrase, referring to the
"demise of material realism." The hue and cry of
all "the consciously Shifted" -- among scientists,
religious, and other human beings who are Waking Up [into this
Shift] all over the globe -- for our mutual recognition of
Wholism [and Holism] has met with steadily growing
acknowledgement over the last several decades.
Ever increasing numbers of
people are coming to realize in their expanding awareness
through their EHEs that the resulting Shift in consciousness
fosters a personal commitment, passion, uncompromising
integrity, and discipline people may associate with a
scientific bent and intensity -- or a similarly focused
religious person or mystic. John
Heron refers to "lived inquiry" [and when
in partnership with others, "co-operative inquiry"] to
denote "the active, innovative and examined life,
which seeks both to transform and understand more deeply the
human condition [... such as] many spiritually-minded people
[who] are busy with their own version of lived inquiry, and ...
[who] constitute
a newly emerging self-generating ... culture."
[See "lived
inquiry" in Glossary for
more information.] The '...' in the above quote is the
word "spiritual." Another way to suggest the
same thing is, it's as if we are coming to live out of the
center of one great heart of meaning and direction, and we
instantly recognize this in each other. This is the
coming-into-being of a
whole new consensus reality
that is sprouting up so very quietly, yet pervasively across the
globe, person by person, Experience by Experience.
There is an innate and powerful sense of
purpose, from the EHE-stoked perspective inside
the Shift, a feeling Presence authors [Senge,
et al.]
relate to the directional pressure of "a future
trying to emerge," that drives the vast
energies of this world-sized Awakening Movement. A
fascinating relationship exists between that higher sense of
purpose and the increasing synchronicities and other types of
corroborative experiences that especially people who share this
Something common to EHEers delight in noticing. The
unitive and productively intuitive feelings associated with
these types of experiences and the harmony of living out of a
purpose and meaning sourced in something beyond the ego-bound
self inspire a profound sense of trust in this MORE that is
coming to life through increasing numbers of people, and has
even been noted in experiences with other species, even
plants! [See J.
Jaworski,
J.
Upledger,
Dorothy
Maclean,
Machaelle
Small Wright;
also noted in the life of George Washington Carver].
This is similarly true for nonexperiencers
["EHE Empaths"] whose lives are also deeply affected by such stories of
Experiencers. This "Third Way" is focused
exclusively on experience and our coming to terms with them.
In the past we might have been more disposed to think of such
things as "spiritual." Today there is an
increasing acceptance that each person has to contextualize hir
feelings, intuitions, experiences and beliefs, the best heshe
can, into terms that allow hir to continue exploring, making
sense of them, hopefully without just dismissing them out of
hand, based on any dissonance between one's experience and
others' terms (and inferred beliefs).
What matters is not so much what we call them or how we attempt
to frame them with labels -- spiritual, scientific, religious,
whatever -- but how we come to let these life-transformational
opportunities carry us forward in our transient and shared
Journey together, here. We need to let go our unintended
stranglehold on our differences enough for all of us together to
work toward a sustainable and healing future for our planet and
the life it makes possible for all of us.
A more unified languaging can only come from more collective
experiencing and more sharing of our stories. It is
inevitable that over time people will come to realize the truth
of genuine encounters that span dimensions and relational
possibilities more-than / other-than the
long-presumed Western-science conception of physical can
account for.
On the same subject, beyond this in-between phase of our moving
into a new consensus frame of reference, one other thing that is
helpful to acknowledge is that science and religion/spirituality
are clearly merging more and more. Even ten years will
make a big difference in this touchiness some people have about
our individual attempts to describe our experiences of this
nature. At that point, the "Third Way" will have
become the quintessence of that merger.
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Since the 1960s, with the improvements in medical technology and
emergency medicine, an eye-opening phenomenon began to surface and
just would not go away. More people were being brought back to
life whose monitored vital signs had flatlined. In other words
their condition during these moments, such as surgery or in-hospital
care, briefly indicated they had died, but through these means of
intervention they were revived. On a regular basis, some of
these folks came back with what they insisted were memories of
another, even 'realer than real' reality. Most were people who
were observed and known to be quite sane and normal. One such
person was Dr. George
Ritchie, a psychiatrist and professor at the
University of Virginia, who courageously revealed his memory of such
an experience to some of his medical students in the 1960s. His
story made a profound impression on one of his students, Raymond A.
Moody, who eventually gave us a name for these events -- near-death
experiences / NDEs.
What really got the attention of medical personnel was that NDErs also
sometimes came back with distinct memories of what was going on
physically within the setting of their medical crises, when they were
monitored as "dead." This could be ignored only so
long, and the short of it is, near-death experience has become a
nearly household word. Subsequently publicized research and
experiencers' stories have fascinated many of us ever
since.
As this phenomenon became more openly acknowledged through the annals
of science and medicine and the subject of much research, brave
Experiencers began to share their stories with a most receptive
public. I believe this has contributed to a pervasive
receptivity to the implications of such experiences and to an
increased if subtle spiritualization in many countries that was not
present before this began to surface.
In any case, this new open-mindedness grew to include other types of
unusual, paranormal, meta-physical, spiritual experiences, leading to
more research and even government experimentation [particularly with
out-of-body experiences and remote viewing] at least as early as the
1970s. The way this developed in the broadest sense, whether
they were researchers or people who shared such interests, including
Experiencers, people usually gravitated to a particular kind of
experience. For example, Robert A. Monroe focused on out-of-body
experiences. Religious scholars and contemporary mystics like
David Spangler naturally put their energies into mystical
experiences.
But
there's more ...
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