THE YIN -- DAVID SPANGLER
At first glance it may seem that David Spangler,
a modern-day mystic and one of the cofounders of the famous, Scotland-based,
intentional spiritual community, Findhorn, in the 1960s, is suggesting something almost diametrically opposed to what might be perceived
as the [sometimes] drama of the spiritually transformative, tinsel-on-the-tree events, or
potential
EHEs, as Rhea A. White calls them. He describes
incarnational
spirituality as "an affirmation of the spirit innate
within our world, our humanity, our physicality, and our personal lives. It sees
each person as a source of spiritual power and radiance." He speaks
of how we can discover the sacred in the very ordinariness of our daily
lives or bring the presence of spirit to bear within any given moment, or
continuously. But in terms of outcome, he and White,
who puts this in more secular terms, "the MORE that it means to be
Human," arrive at the
same place: our becoming incarnationally more aware and better enabled to
live directly, consciously out of who/what we are, our true
selves as embodied spirit. Spangler says,
Through
incarnation, we participate in a fundamental process of "selfing,"
the act of particularizing in ourselves the presence of universal Identity. We
also participate in supporting this same process in others and in all the
things of this world, even when their manifestation of "self" is
very different from our own. Incarnation is not just a personal event but our
participation in the process of emergence from which the universe is
unfolding.
Spangler makes this point to contrast it to these events as such perhaps also to
remind us not to get caught up in the wowie-ness, the glamour-and-gosh of
them, at the expense of the
ultimate, sought outcome, which is consciously to bring more of our eternal Beingness
/ Consciousness into expression in
the moment-by-moment of this apparent physical existence. In essence we come to experience
the
so-called physical and the so-called spiritual as one unified whole.
David Spangler
himself speaks of such a moment of Awakening when he was five years old, a cosmic
consciousness experience in which he became one with the All In All, that altered
instantly and forever his view and understanding of this world and his
relationship to it. What followed that instance as a young child was a
life of enhanced awareness that was capable of being present to and with
Spirit on an essentially every-day or possibly uninterrupted
basis. Apparently his parents were also very committed to their
personal spiritual lives and provided important grounding and guidance
as people who recognized and could well relate to his spiritual
unfolding from early childhood. Within this holistic and
spiritually nurturing environment,
supported by understanding parents and by his inner experiences, he was able to integrate
these events and his multidimensional awareness into his life in a way
that brought him to the realization of how we / anyone can be
continually present to and aware of Spirit in all moments of our
everyday living. This is the life he has lived.
AND
THE YANG -- RHEA A. WHITE
Rhea White, on the other hand, had a dramatic near-death experience
as a young adult who had a quite different upbringing without the
groundedness steeped in spirituality so integral to all of David's life.
For decades she referred to this life-changing event as "her
accident." She had no
one she could immediately turn to in the outer world who could help her
come to terms with what she had experienced. Nor did she have the
developed kind of relationship or interface with the meta-physical
dimensions as Spangler had continually been present to nearly all his
life. Her need to understand what had happened to her,
something she had never heard anyone else speak of, certainly not in the
way she had experienced it as a totally life-changing and very other
perspective on what LIFE is and is about, drove her into
the realm of science and parapsychology. The slowly maturing understanding she
derived from the integral role she played within that professional arena
was
that scientists were so wrapped up in the idea of repeatable laboratory
experiments, controls, and data-data-data, they totally overlooked
the jewel beyond price, the individual experiencers and their
experiences -- and the meaning and life transformation they gained (and
also gained for all of us!) as a
result of these triggering events that initiated what White came to call
the EHE Process.
Through decades of a brooding immersion in the conceptualizing of what
she eventually referred to as the EHE
paradigm, and living out of her
own evolving [EHE] process in this context, as well as studying and working
with numerous other EHEers and their post-EHEerly lives, also, by the
way with various ecumenical [usually scholarly] organizations, White came to
an understanding much as Spangler suggests. That is, these
experiences may visit us for an instant, may come and go.
But only as
our lives and sense of self grow to reflect the greater Wholeness of who
and what we are as evolving spirit beings and as a unity of being
-- in short, as we move through the "EHE
process," seeded by the experience
itself -- can we bring to fruition
in the here, now and everyday the potential and promise of these
extraordinary encounters with Life-Writ-Infinitely Large. In her
necessarily more secular terms [and those of William James], the ideas
of "selfing" and "presence" are mirrored in their
"MORE
that it means to be human" and "the Self we all
are."
In
her article, "The
Import of Individual Exceptional
Human Experiences for
the Species--and Beyond,"
notice the clear
parallels to Spangler's perspective:
EHEers of all
types also come to realize that to the extent that they explore their
inner worlds they become connected to the outer world and to other
humans and to life. Eventually, it seems that most, if not all, EHEs
awaken the individual's species consciousness, so they feel united with
humanity, past, present, and future. This sense of unity, as already
mentioned, can extend to other species as well, even as the American
Indians had special totem animals. Once one has developed a special
interest in other species, whether domesticated animals or frogs or
snakes or spiders or koala bears -- that person can't help but think
differently about all species. A reverence for life develops that
enhances one's own sense of well being because one is connected to all
life, and knows it. This connection gives rise to an awareness of the
"fitness of the environment" on this planet Earth, which has
fostered all the life forms, and many EHEers become more
ecologically-minded and aware of the importance of helping the planet to
survive, and certainly of developing ways of not destroying it any
further than humans have already. And, having sensed this unity with
Earth itself, one cannot help but turn next to the other planets in our
solar system, and beyond that to our own galaxy, and beyond that to the
most distant stars. Ultimately, one unique individual exceptional
experience that proved to be authentic because it sparked an exceptional
human experience, when honored and worked with and developed, can lead
the experiencer to realize his or her connection with the entire
creation. Beyond that there is the creator, and at that point, the
experiencer has a pretty good idea who that is. This, then, is the
import of exceptional human experiences for the species-and beyond.
White,
by the way, has also
bequeathed us with an excellent tool for cultivating that shift into
fully becoming this wholeness of being and purpose and meaning, which is
the EHE autobiography. Another
important instrument for nurturing the EHEerly consciousness together that we hope to see manifesting soon in a big way is EHE
Study Groups, so that we can better facilitate each other's
and our collective EHE Process.
BOTH-AND
These
two people, one a mystic, the other a scientist, have devoted their lives to the personally
gifting impulse that came out of their experiences, each deriving
hir own quite singular, yet somehow recognizably universal
work. Not unlike the yin
and yang of the eternal equation implicit in all life, each aspect --
potential EHEs and incarnational spirituality -- fosters and is nourished by the
other. To this purpose, Spangler writes,
Incarnational
Spirituality acknowledges and engages with transpersonal and transcendent
levels of being, but it puts its primary emphasis on the spiritual resources
emerging from our incarnate lives.* It sees our embodied, unique, personal self
as a source of spiritual energy and presence, manifestation and blessing.
It
seeks to draw out that spirituality within our everyday lives in a way that
honors our personhood, our individual sovereignty, and the sacredness of
physical existence. It explores in practical ways how our personalities can be
the focus of emergence for our spiritual and co-creative power.
ALL
TO SAY, ONE MIGHT WONDER ...
On first blush, the emphasis on ahhh-theLight.com may
appear to be these spiritually transformative events, as if almost for their own sake. In
part this is because the classic inspired words of so many experiencers
are almost invariably something like, "'These experiences'
are our greatest hope and promise for opening our eyes and hearts,
transforming us, and thereby saving us and our world from our
not-knowing."
This cryptic kind of one-liner sounds uncomfortably
similar to a laser-lean opener to win the interest of a possible
publisher for a book or a funding agent for a project. It is
necessarily short and only begins to hint at the larger truth it tries
to convey in order to get someone's attention enough for hir
to stop and take a
more thoughtful look at the fuller message -- and the lifelong process
naturally invoked by such experiences. Maybe this is partly
due to the fact that putting these experiences into words in the first
place is notoriously challenging. Also, we've been taught
largely to avoid this subject matter as a social taboo, as too
personal.
Especially if it is someone's first and
perhaps dramatically life changing event of this nature, there is
nothing that can begin to convey the total shock of, for example, having
lived a life of ordinary five-sensory earthly awareness and in one
instant suddenly being entirely immersed in another, extremely other and
greater [felt sense of] reality, and then to come back to this one
with that clear awareness of the other. And what's more:
realizing one natively belongs to or is sourced in that
other! And imagine doing that with either no interest in or a
decidedly antithetical perspective of all-things-spiritual! No
wonder experiencers have often felt like either they or the world was
crazy, or they felt like yammering idiots trying to convey what happened
to someone else something for which they had few if any fitting words or
concepts with which to do that. And no wonder many just have not
dared tell. Especially if they feel these personally sacred events
are the most important things that have ever happened to them, which
most do.
To lapse into an indulgent moment of
anthropomorphizing, imagine being a consciously physically aware nut on
a tree enclosed in a hard shell, and over the timeless time of the
progression of your development, this is all you know -- your experience
sealed within that opaque covering. But one day your little
worldly domain falls from the tree and a person or creature or the fall
itself cracks open
your shell to reveal to you [as if you could sense it as strongly as
humans do] this whole other .. well, world! Even if you as
the nut or some other being might figure out how to carefully put your
shell back together and to seal you in as before, you nor your world
could never be the same again, because that greater awareness totally
changes everything and would be with you always, in or out of the
shell.
How does one try to communicate something so much
greater and overwhelmingly other on this order of stupefaction and
insight? Where is the in-common understanding that can make this
possible? PMH Atwater, who has had at least three near-death
experiences has said that when NDEers first started getting together through the International Association of Near Death Studies conferences,
there was most of all this instant recognition they all shared, and
often in meeting each other there were few to no words spoken, because
they all knew. What further was there to say? All
they could do was embrace each other and share the tears and the joy of
this mutual knowing. But with non-experiencers, naturally, this
was not possible. Reaching for words, ideas, analogies, metaphors
or the arts from which to build even a tenuous bridge of understanding
was and still is a unique and nearly impossible challenge.
But more to the point, what is to be gained from
these events in the way of greater meaning and direction? How is
one's life altered as a result of these kinds of occurrences? That's the
real focus of wHeretwoworldsTouch.com and Ahhh-TheLight.com -- the
nearly universal shift in consciousness, the aftereffects, the exquisite
enrichment of meaning and purpose, the healing and wholeness-making, not
only in our individual lives, but in our shared lives and as a planetary
consciousness, and beyond that, as a universal consciousness.
The unfolding of David
Spangler's and Rhea White's very different lives, taking them
nevertheless to the same realization, demonstrates clearly
that this ultimate and universal Knowing is there for each of us to discover in our
own time and way, a most comforting, unifying thought for experiencers
and non-experiencers alike.
________
* * * *
* ________
* RR's note: which
could also be said to eventuate in the aftereffects, if the immediate reference
is the transcendent.
