​What does it mean to Awaken? Part Three.

Awakening to the Unseen Universe
 
I’m yet working with the article "What Does It Mean to “Awaken”?
By Patrick Paul Garlinger via MEDIUM.  Here is a summary from the article.  He writes:
 
Let’s look closer at four key stages of awakening: (1) awakening to the constructed nature of society; (2) awakening to the conditioned nature of the mind; (3) awakening to the unseen universe (what might also be called the realm of the Divine); and (4) and awakening to the natural world. There are no doubt other forms of awakening, but these four are often connected, and each one may inform or lead to another.
 
Awakening to the Unseen Universe is right on the cutting edge of awareness for me and for a growing number of people. That fact is important to awaken to in itself. More and more people are connecting consciously with an “Unseen Universe.”
 
After we have awoken to the constructed nature of society, and then to the conditioned mind, the next state of awareness to emerge is an awareness of that which is between and within all.
 
I’ve often wondered if St. Paul was dialed into this Unseen Universe/God/Christ when he wrote in Acts 17:28-29 - For in Him we live and move and have our being. As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are His offspring.’ Therefore, being offspring of God, we should not think that the Divine Being is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by man’s skill and imagination.
 
We are into the quantum field of energy when we speak of an Unseen God.  Within and between everything physical and metaphysical is an active energy field. 
 
My wife is a Master Reiki Practitioner and her bodywork practice, to which she has clearly been called, is organized around energy work.  She ordinarily sees people in her office, but she also works distantly because “Energy knows no bounds.” 
 
Our daughter is also a Reiki Master and she has her own work which she does entirely at a distance.  She is particularly adept at working with the attachments that have come from the distant past, and which have been conveyed to us though our genetic and energetic systems.
 
For years, seven years of seminary in fact, I worked at filling myself with the conditioning that was given by my society, my tribe, my family.  My mind was filled with maps of God.  Then, right at the end of my Doctoral program, I had a profound experience of the Divine.  From that moment on - my life turned, and I went down a road less traveled by me, and those around me.  At first, I was hugely disoriented. For about a decade I began to re-file the maps I had learned, searching instead for direct experiences of the territory, of the Divine.
 
An Incarnational Theology grew within me.  Everything is an Incarnation of the Divine.  Everything physically seen, and everything metaphysically unseen… all of it, everything is God.
 
Thus, Albert Schweitzer’s basic moral injunction made sense to me: Live with Reverence for Life.  The concept of the Kingdom of God (masculine and hierarchical) was replaced by the Kin-dom of God (no boundaries).
 
I recall a moment of awakening early in my evolution into an awakening of the Unseen Universe.  I was working with a university student who was a budding astrophysicist, and I asked him to explain energy to me. He held up his thumb and said, “Imagine the most basic element, a hydrogen atom.  It has a proton at the center and one electron circling around it.  If my thumbnail was the proton, the electron would be like an eraser head circling around my thumbnail at a distance of some miles out… and everything in between is pure energy.” Unseen energy everywhere.  There is no place energy is not. And, there is no place God is not.

Let me end this blog post with self-disclosure.  My socialized mind was taught to pray to an Unseen God that looked like the Santa Clause on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.  Today, I live in far more wonder and mystery, and in the subtle world of energy.  I, too, send healing Reiki energy to whomever, and for whatever is the highest good.
 
If your consciousness is yet at a pre-traditional or traditional stage, talk of this subtle energy level where an Unseen God is experienced as real, won’t make much sense.  Unless, of course, it does.