Disidentifying from Thoughts

For the past month or so I have enormously enjoyed and benefited from the recorded discussions between Eckhart Tolle and Oprah. More than a dozen hours of discussion can be found for free on Oprah's web site, focused on Tolle's new book, A New Earth. You can download mp3 audio files, watch videos, or read the PDF transcripts of the discussions. I highly recommend checking it out! Usually I do not follow the adventures of Oprah or the topics on her TV show. I haven't owned a television for years. But recently I learned she was following a 21-day vegan diet, and that really piqued my interest. If Oprah can enlighten the mainstream masses towards a more compassionate diet and promote a higher state of consciousness, then I am all for it! Gives me a glimmer of hope for humanity's future.

The following is just one amazing quote from A New Earth:

What you may be aware of as a voice in your head that never stops speaking is the stream of incessant and compulsive thinking. When every thought absorbs your attention completely, when you are so identified with the voice in your head and the emotions that accompany it that you lose yourself in every thought and every emotion, then you are totally identified with form and therefore in the grip of ego. Ego is a conglomeration of recurring thought forms and conditioned mental-emotional patterns that are invested with a sense of I, a sense of ego. Ego arises when your sense of Beingness, of "I Am," which is formless consciousness, gets mixed up with form. This is the meaning of identification. This is forgetfulness of Being, the primary error, the illusion of absolute separateness that turns reality into a nightmare.

So the trick is to realize that when we become so totally identified with our own thoughts, and the emotions that can arise from them, that we have lost touch with our true self, our authentic "sense of Beingness." We have confused our identity with our thoughts. Descartes' famous statement, "I think, therefore I am," really describes the ego, not the true self. As Tolle points out, the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre responded with, "The consciousness that says 'I am' is not the consciousness that thinks." Tolle interprets this as, "When you are aware that you are thinking, that awareness is not part of thinking. It is a different dimension of consciousness."

Any thought or opinion we hold dear can be ripe for examination. It reminds me of some wise words in the movie Fight Club:

You are not your job. You are not how much you have in the bank. You are not the car you drive. You are not the contents of your wallet. You are not your khakis. You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake.

We could add plenty of other common false identities:

• You are not your health problems.
• You are not your political affiliation.
• You are not your prejudiced viewpoints.
  
• You are not your religious beliefs.
• You are not your mistakes.
• You are not your successes.
• You are not your depression/anxiety/fear.
  
• You are not your hobbies.
• You are not your lack of hobbies.
• You are not your nationality/culture/race/gender.
  
• You are not the television shows that you watch.
• You are not your sense of victimhood.
  
• You are not the ideology you think you believe in.
  
• You are not the diet that you follow.
• You are not your face/body in the mirror.
  
• You are not the success/failure of your children.
• You are not the experiences of your childhood.
• You are not your family's history.
• You are not your opinions.
• You are not your perceptions.
  
• You are not your feelings.
  

So if you're not any thing, if you're not a collection of labels or roles or accumulated experiences and conditioning, then what ARE you? As Tolle suggests, your REAL you is that which observes your thoughts. The real you is in the stillness between what your body perceives with its senses and the thoughts that arise in your mind. The real you is the sense of aliveness or Beingness that is having this experience of being a human in this body at this time and place, in this present moment.

Now, this is not to say that the items in the list are not important or that you shouldn't care about anything or not deal with your feelings, opinions, or experiences, or not make an effort to improve the world. The problem arises when you get so absorbed into your thoughts that you confuse your identity with your thoughts. If you hold an opinion so strongly that you get terribly offended or emotional when someone attacks your opinion or disagrees with it, this would be one example in which you have mistaken your opinion, your thought, and made it into your identity. Your ego has decided that your actual opinion is YOU, your identity, and to have your opinion attacked is to be attacked personally. This is an illusion and a terrible cause of much unnecessary suffering.

Become the observer, the witness, of your own thoughts and feelings and see what happens. This is the beginning of disidentification with the ego, your artificial self, the mask that hides the real you inside. This is also the beginning of "salvation" or "enlightenment" which the great religious traditions attempt to lead us towards.

Lost Christianity

I just finished reading Lost Christianity by Jacob Needleman. The following is a quote from Father Sylvan, a mysterious, spiritually-advanced monk who crossed paths with Mr. Needleman. The author received the monk's journals, using them to explore the deeper levels of Christianity. From Father Sylvan's journal:

The idea of levels of Christianity may never again be known in the West. There is an intermediate level of Christianity which teaches the way that the higher level becomes distorted. We need the intermediate level. We need to observe how we lose Christianity, lose mysticism, lose the energy of God. Here lies the origin of sin and repentance, on the border between heaven and hell.

Modern people do not understand that the Christian ideals to which half the world attempts to conform comprise a description of the results of a specific inner act and inner inquiry. Mysticism is a result, a great result perhaps, of the inner inquiry; but everything is corrupted when I confuse inner work with the results of inner work.

To experience love for God or my neighbor, even for an instant, is no less a result than mystical experience. To be virtuous is a result. To have faith is a result. Similarly, wisdom and compassion are results.

All corruption of tradition begins with the confusion and mixing of inner work with the results of inner work. Jesus saw that the Judaism of his time had fallen into this confusion and that no one was practicing the inner discipline free from the expectation or assumption of results.

And another quote from Father Sylvan:

In a certain sense, the problem of Christianity is not that something has been hidden, but that not enough has stayed hidden.

Fascinating stuff! I think this connects very well with what Maurice Nicoll explores in The New Man:

The idea behind all sacred writing is to convey a higher meaning than the literal words contain, the truth of which must be seen by Man internally. This higher, concealed, inner, or esoteric, meaning, cast in the words and sense-images of ordinary usage, can only be grasped by the understanding, and it is exactly here that the first difficulty lies in conveying higher meaning to Man. A person's literal level of understanding is not necessarily equal to grasping psychological meaning.

And this, also from The New Man:

The Gospels are from beginning to end all about this possible self-evolution. They are psychological documents. They are about the psychology of this possible inner development - that is, about what a man must think, feel, and do in order to reach a new level of understanding. The Gospels are not about the affairs of life, save indirectly, but about this central idea - namely, that Man internally is a seed capable of a definite growth. Man is compared with a seed capable of a definite evolution. As he is, Man is incomplete, unfinished. A man can bring about his own evolution, his own completion, individually. If he does not wish to do this he need not. He is then called grass - that is, burned up as useless. This is the teaching of the Gospels. But this teaching can be given neither directly nor by external compulsion. A man must begin to understand for himself before he can receive it. You cannot make anyone understand by force, by law.

So if we take what Father Sylvan and Maurice Nicoll have said, we get an impression that what we think we know about Christianity could be only a very simplistic and superficial understanding, maybe even a grossly distorted understanding. The depth of truth concealed in the Gospels has probably been beyond the comprehension of the vast majority of humanity for centuries, let alone much of the hierarchy of the Church which has tried to convey those truths. Contrast this with Ken Wilber's concepts of the states and stages of development in Integral Theory. Western civilization has only recently started to emerge from the mythic/ethnocentric stage of development in the past century or two (perhaps as much as 70% of humanity is still at the mythic stage today). If the Gospels are read and comprehended from a mythic, ethnocentric stage of consciousness, then it would make sense why much of humanity has failed to grasp the deeper meaning of the Gospels. This is not to criticize people at the mythic stage. All humans and societies and civilizations progress through stages of development, from lower to higher. But what do we do with this situation, if anything? How do we help that 70% move up to a higher stage of consciousness? Should they be helped or not? Can the "lost Christianity" be rediscovered and be a catalyst for humanity's spiritual development?

Eudaimonia

There's a wonderful little article on the Oprah web site about five traits of happy people. Here is a quote from the article:

Cobbled from the Greek eu ("good") and daimon ("spirit" or "deity"), eudaimonia means striving toward excellence based on one's unique talents and potential—Aristotle considered it to be the noblest goal in life. In his time, the Greeks believed that each child was blessed at birth with a personal daimon embodying the highest possible expression of his or her nature. One way they envisioned the daimon was as a golden figurine that would be revealed by cracking away an outer layer of cheap pottery (the person's baser exterior). The effort to know and realize one's most golden self—"personal growth," in today's lingo—is now the central concept of eudaimonia, which has also come to include continually taking on new challenges and fulfilling one's sense of purpose in life.

I think this is such a wonderful concept! I hadn't heard of eudaimonia before but it really resonates with me as encapsulating something I have been seeking since childhood. I think part of the path of becoming a fully conscious and enlightened human being involves this innate drive towards perfection and fulfillment; of striving towards the best that you can be and fulfilling your life's purpose.

The idea of the "baser exterior" that hides "one's most golden self" can also refer to the way in which our ego, desires, appetites, and attachments, can obscure and block us from getting to know our true inner self (part of the classic conflict between the animal nature versus the rational mind). It makes sense that if you begin to crack apart that false outer layer that you start to tune into that authenticity of knowing your true self, which in turns directs you toward following your life's purpose, which in turn brings real happiness. I am reminded again of Joseph Campbell's famous statement, "Follow your bliss."


Eudaimonia might also correspond to one of the major ideals in Freemasonry, represented by the metaphorical stone of one's self. Through inner work and right conduct the stone is transformed and perfected. What was raw, wild, and unfocused, given to us as a gift by God and nature to carve into being, becomes something beautiful, real, and perfected. The challenge and the path for all human beings is to recognize that this work needs to be done. To leave one's stone, one's self, undeveloped and unknown is to abandon the great potential that we have been given. To only see the "outer layer of cheap pottery" and to mistake it as our true self is to waste our potential and only live within a superficial experience of being.

Goal & Activity Log

The above image is a snippet of a spreadsheet I use to keep track of my progress on certain goals. The overall purpose is NOT to try and accomplish each goal every single day. Instead, it is an observation tool to see how much balance I'm creating in my life. Making a little bit of progress each day on a few goals is better than very sporadic or infrequent progress or no progress at all. Consciousness and awareness of one's actions is key. After a period of time the chart shows me if I have neglected any goals or if I have spent too much time on certain goals but not on others. A balanced life leads to fulfillment.

A summary explanation of the goals:

• Exercise - about 10 minutes of bicycle and then some strength training and back exercises.

• Holosync - my meditation program on audio CDs. Usually a half hour or hour long.

• Journal - keeping my handwritten diary up to date.

• Catholic Formation - this includes going to church, studying with a private tutor to become a Catholic, spiritual reading, learning, and prayer. There are some really great online study groups at CCEL.
  

• Big Mind or Shadow - these are practices from Integral Life Practice. You could say that the Big Mind meditation helps you experience god-consciousness. Shadow work (i.e. the 3-2-1 Process) involves dealing with difficult people, emotions, memories, situations, etc.

• ACIM Lesson - study of one of the daily workbook lessons from A Course in Miracles.

• Learning - listening to audio or viewing videos from the Integral web sites, Gnosis.org, Theosophical Society, Speaking of Faith, Eckhart Tolle with Oprah, LibriVox.org, and anything else I find interesting that adds to my knowledge. It helps to use my pocket MP3 player so I can listen and do chores at the same time. The Internet is really a treasure trove for learning!
  

• Write my book - progress towards writing my book on esoteric Christianity.

• Compose music - progress on writing about 20 minutes of music for a small string ensemble.

• Blog post - writing posts for my blog, like this one!

• Morse Code - now that I've got my ham license, I want to learn the code before I get on the air. I'm still mastering the alphabet.

• Special Projects - this relates to a list of various special chores around the house, such as organizing all my photographs into albums, cleaning out closets, redecorating, etc.

• Volunteering - time spent helping my condo association; and eventually I would like to volunteer at a nearby hospital.

• Friends & Family - hanging out with people.

• Dining out - not necessarily something I want to do too much, as it can get very expensive very fast. By monitoring my activity I can help to avoid excessive spending.

• Library, Park, Museum - free fun activities that get me out of the house. With 6 months off from a day job it could be easy for me to become a hermit at home. I have to watch that I make sure to get outdoors, enjoy the weather, and socialize.

Mindfulness

The older I get, the more I find that my level of mindfulness determines my level of happiness. I would also include related qualities, such as having clearly defined goals, self-discipline, mental clarity and concentration. Without mindfulness (i.e. the awareness of one's own thoughts, feelings, and actions), the mind can just wander off all over the place, skipping from one association to the next, one fear or memory after another, a tendency that Buddhists vividly refer to as "monkey mind". Without mindfulness you can feel as if your life is passing you by, as if you have no control and time is being "stolen" out from under you. And everything starts with the mind first - if the mind is a mess, then the feelings and actions that result will also be a mess (and vice versa).

When I was a teenager and had unlimited free time during summer vacations, I found that if occupied myself with working on my goals and interests that time would just fly by very joyfully. My mind would be so wrapped up in accomplishing goals or learning something new that I didn't wander off into other thoughts or concerns. My mind kicked into gear and focused on one thing and that was the happiest time of all. Such experiences are often described as being in a state of "flow".

But why is it so hard to maintain mindfulness? Without self-discipline to put mindfulness into practice, one can fall into a lesser passive state - sitting for hours watching TV, browsing the Internet, playing video games, drinking alcohol, etc. After wallowing in the passive state you can end up feeling like you didn't accomplish anything. The time flew by with little or no benefit and you might as well have been asleep! Now, this is not to say that mindless leisure and relaxation do not have a valuable purpose. I am all in favor of a little daydreaming or mindless fun activities once in a while to recharge my energy level. The problem comes when you realize that copious amounts of time escaped into nothingness! Weeks, months, years!

Here are a couple of nice quotes from Finding Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi:

To control attention means to control experience, and therefore the quality of life. Information reaches consciousness only when we attend to it. Attention acts as a filter between outside events and our experience of them. How much stress we experience depends more on how well we control attention, than on what happens to us. The effect of physical pain, of a monetary loss, of a social snub depends on how much attention we pay to it, how much room we allow for it in consciousness. The more psychic energy we invest in a painful event, the more real it becomes, and the more entropy it introduces in consciousness.

And this:

The only way to take over the ownership of life is by learning to direct psychic energy in line with our own intentions.

And this fits in well with another life-changing book I love, The Success Principles by Jack Canfield. A quote from the very first chapter:

If you want to be successful, you have to take 100% responsibility for everything that you experience in your life. This includes the level of your achievements, the results you produce, the quality of your relationships, the state of your health, and physical fitness, your income, your debts, your feelings - everything!

One part of my daily mindfulness practice now includes a spreadsheet in which I monitor the status of my current goals. Every day I check off whether or not I spent some time working towards each goal. This has really helped me tremendously to see where my time has been going! In the past I would create "to-do" lists or schedules, which invariably always seemed to fail. I would not do what I told myself to do, leading to guilty feelings and further procrastination; a vicious feedback loop of failure. But this is different! It is simple self-observation of one's actions and use of time. If you can simply observe yourself, without judgment, you can see what you have been doing with your time and then make adjustments or changes as you go along. It helps to create balance in your use of time, which in turn helps to facilitate the "flow" experience, leading to a higher quality of experiencing life itself.

Tomorrow I will share with you a screen shot of my spreadsheet chart and goals.

Gratitude of Former Paid Employment

Today was the last day of the “day job” and it still doesn’t seem real. Maybe because it has been yet another week of sleep deprivation, making me feel like a zombie (a lamentable condition of unreality). It feels like I have been going to the day job, day after day after day, since forever. Hard to believe that when Monday morning comes along I will not have to get up before the crack of dawn, jump on a bus, hike many a block of Minneapolis skyway to fill a chair in a cube farm, and stare, glassy-eyed, at a computer monitor for 9 hours straight. Now I have the leisure to stay at home and stare at my own monitor for as many hours, days, and weeks on end as I can tolerate (hopefully NOT – I am getting tired being chained to computers! Especially with the tantalizing edge of summer emblazoning the sky with warmth and electrifying the grass in hues of vivid green!).

I am so grateful to have met my coworkers. Lots of really excellent people, and the best supervisor anyone could possibly ever imagine. I feel a twinge of regret that even after spending about a year and a half with these people that there always remained a few fascinating characters that I never really got to know at all; and even the ones I thought I knew, still left me wondering how much more was hidden in their hearts that I would never know. Our lives intersected these many months and now I am moving on to other things; and, in turn, each one of them will be moving on and inhabiting their own realities as well, going about living their individual lives, intersecting with other people in an infinite web of connections. It is so true that you don’t realize what you have until you’ve lost it. Now that I contemplate this latest turning point in my life, I feel immense gratitude that my life intersected with all of these beautiful, genuine people. I hope I can keep in touch with them in the future, or at least keep them in my thoughts and prayers from time to time, wondering where they are, what they are doing. Bless them all!

If only life were long enough and deep enough that we could know other human beings in more authentic ways, in their souls. How many times do we pass by our co-workers, people with whom we spend an enormous portion of our waking life, making idle chat that only touches the surface of lived experience, when each person holds within himself or herself an unfathomable world of consciousness, memories, perceptions, and potential greatness? It is impossible for any of us to know what it is like to be another person, to be inside their eyes and minds and perceive the outer and inner worlds from their unique viewpoint, as well as vice versa. When I think about this, I am awestruck by the immensity of life! Each human being a self-contained universe, known only unto itself! Such a wonder!

I passed the test

A shiny new copy of a Morse code key, similar to one used by my great-grandfather as a telegraph operator for Western Union. This is the famous Vibroplex "bug".

I took the exam for the Technician class license of Amateur radio this morning. I passed it! In about 15 days I should be able to find out my callsign from an FCC website. This is so exciting! I've been thinking about joining Ham Radio since I was a kid. Getting a callsign will be like getting a new name or identity.

It was a little awkward (and funny) for me at the testing site. I was the only female in a room full of about 30 or 40 middle-aged white guys, and probably one of the few under the age of 40. Once we were allowed to begin our tests, I zipped through mine in about 2 or 3 minutes at most, raised my hand, and had my test graded and reviewed by the examiners. One examiner made a humorous glance at another, bugging his eyes out, and then later giving me the thumbs up signal that I had passed. I was the first to finish my test. I didn't stick around to see how long the others took. Taking a zillion practice tests on this site made a big difference, but I already knew most of it just from playing with shortwave radios over the years. Plus the Technician exam is super easy anyway.

Now my next goal is to master the code this summer and save up for a key, antenna, and HF rig by the end of the year. The Vibroplex bugs look cool, and would certainly be nostalgic for me to connect with my great-grandfather, but I'm thinking an iambic key would be easier to use. These keys look pretty spiffy and are expertly-crafted works of art.

Theosophy & Morse Code

The past few weeks have been so hectic! Yet also so rich with possibilities and glimmers of joy and a vision for greater potential and endeavors in the next few months. May 9th will be my last day at "the day job," with six glorious months of freedom to pursue some old and new dreams.

This Saturday, May 3rd, I will take the exam to get my first Ham radio license. This has been a dream of mine since probably the age of 9 or so, when my Grandpa Martin gave me his old Zenith Trans-Oceanic shortwave radio and a clunky old crystal-powered police scanner. Ever since then I have been hooked to shortwave radio, scanner radio, CB radio, and amateur ("Ham") radio (with offshoots into astronomy and playing with electronic kits). For years and years I was either too desperately shy to pursue the Ham license or too busy wandering off into other hobbies (Taoism & Chinese, anyone?). One of my goals this summer is to master Morse Code thanks to a really nice guy's excellent resource, so I can chat with people around the world and exchange QSL cards. Sure, people are chatting 24 hours a day on the Internet, but there is still just something magical about stringing up some flimsy little piece of wire and tapping out an esoteric language through the atmosphere on a few watts of power. It is miraculous!

Speaking of esoteric, I have also joined the Theosophical Society and look forward to attending my first local meeting in a few weeks. I feel a greater urgency to expand my search after the deeper truths in life, something that can't simply be found from sitting around at home reading books all day. You can have lots of nice thoughts and philosophical musings, but a genuine, deeply lived experience of the Divine is the ultimate goal in life. I sense an inner expansion of awareness, a desire to get out and find fellow-seekers on the path to the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. Life is so much more than what we perceive so superficially with our physical senses. I'm not talking about psychic powers or auras or flying through the air or things of that nature (not that I'm against such beliefs; but such things really don't resonate with me). I'm referring instead to an inner knowing, a divine spark in which you just know, deep down in an intuitive-heart way, that there is so much more to life beneath the surface. As William Blake famously said,

If the doors of perception were cleansed, every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern.

In a way there is an overlap between the mystical vision, of seeing the world, everyone and everything, with a new perception, and using Morse Code to communicate through our globe's invisible atmosphere, zipping at the speed of light across continents. Both require a new awareness, a mental clarity or vision. Both are like a newfound world, a new language, a new sense of self and other. Damn, isn't life so kickass fantastic and exciting?! Let's live every moment!

What makes you excited about life? Do you ever wonder that if you should die tomorrow whether you had truly lived? Life is always here, right now, in this present moment. The question is whether we can wake up to it in the now-moment or whether time will run out before we can fully realize it. I believe that is why we exist - to seek and find that answer.

Time & Interiority

Our time is hungry in spirit. In some unnoticed way we have managed to inflict severe surgery on ourselves. We have separated soul from experience, become utterly taken up with the outside world and allowed the interior life to shrink. Like a stream that disappears underground, there remains on the surface only the slightest trickle. When we devote no time to the inner life, we lose the habit of soul. We become accustomed to keeping things at surface level. The deeper questions about who we are and what we are here for visit us less and less. If we allow time for soul, we will come to sense its dark and luminous depth. If we fail to acquaint ourselves with soul, we will remain strangers in our own lives.

- John O'Donohue, from his book, Beauty: The Invisible Embrace

I am starving for free time; for simple, basic, unstructured and open-ended free time that allows the mind to wander into secret uncharted territories. Our society is too obsessed with keeping busy and doing rather than being. Every minute has to be somehow "productive," as if we are our own mini factories of industriousness. Even after all these years without a television to devour my few free hours, I'm still catching myself being a slave to the clock and judging my use of time. There should be a law against the 40-hour work week. Supposedly the people of the Medieval ages could get by just fine working for 20 hours a week to sustain life. How is it we have become so much more uncivilized today than those people back in the "Dark Ages"?

Silence, daydreaming, and stillness. These things are as vital to me as air and water. If I go along for too many days, whisked away into busyness and socializing and chores, without a chance for my spirit to catch its breath and my mind to find stillness, my inner sense of sanity starts to crumble. I get anxious and frantic, like a trapped animal. It is hard for me to imagine how others can constantly be on the move, or socialize for hours day after day, or find quiet alone-time to be lonely and scary. If I could get away with living as a hermit in some far remote place I think I could do just fine.

Here is a tip from Full Catastrophe Living by Jon Kabat-Zinn:

The essence of mindfulness in daily life is to make every moment you have your own. Even if you are hurrying, which is sometimes necessary, then at least hurry mindfully. Be aware of your breathing, of the need to move fast, and do it with awareness until you don't have to hurry anymore and then let go and relax intentionally. If you find your mind making lists and compelling you to get every last thing on them done, then bring awareness to your body and the mental and physical tension that may be mounting and remind yourself that some of it can probably wait. If you get really close to the edge, stop completely and ask yourself, "Is it worth dying for?" or "Who is running where?"

View of Catholicism

I submitted a response to a survey from the NPR program, Speaking of Faith, on a potential future radio program on "The Humanness of Catholic Identity." Here were the questions they asked:

If you are or were Catholic, we'd like to hear your perspectives on what anchors and unsettles you in this vast tradition. We're also interested in the hopes and concerns you have for the church, now and into the future. What do you take solace in and find beautiful about this faith of nearly two millennia and more than 1.3 billion members spanning all the cultures of the globe? What hopes, questions, and concerns are on your mind as you ponder the state of the Catholic Church and its future?

Any my response:

I find solace and beauty in the esoteric dimension of Catholicism. The focus by the media, and the overall public perception, seems almost exclusively centered on the external, dogmatic aspects of the Church (i.e. prescriptions on behavior, morality, arguing over "right" versus "wrong", etc.). There is a place for dogma and rules, but, to me, the heart of Catholicism is experienced in its inner truth, its mysticism, esotericism, and contemplative practices; it is about coming to the realization of a genuine, lived experience, within one's own being, of God or Christ-consciousness, an experience far beyond following rules or commandments on pieces of paper. I find solace and beauty in the Liturgy, contemplative prayer, Gregorian Chant, the rosary, architecture, and art. I find solace and beauty in the saints and writers like St. John of the Cross, Thomas Merton, Teilhard de Chardin, Meister Eckhart, the Desert Fathers, as well as contemporary theologians like Thomas Keating and Willgis Jager. Through centuries of tradition I find a deeply profound connection to my European cultural background and ancestors; I can participate in the Mass and experience a realization that I am part of something larger than myself; a connection to Spirit that binds me to God and to my human family in the past, present, and future.

Yes, there are both good and bad aspects to the Church. Yes, there has been much evil done in its name, all of which should be recognized and atoned for and learned from by the Church’s members and leadership. Like a family, there have been and always will be segments of the Church that don’t get along, with skeletons hiding in closets, and areas begging for reform or healing. Yet somehow the Church keeps going strong, accepting and integrating diversity, differing cultures, and differences of opinion. I find beauty and solace in the miracle that such an institution has lasted for two millennia. My hope is that the Church, in moving forward into the future, will be able to look at itself honestly and address any neglected issues it needs to face.

We live in an age that is terribly polarized, and that polarization has infected the Church as well. My hope for the Church is that we will find the patience and wisdom to step back and examine ourselves deeply; to look at where we have come from and where we are going. In the words of the American philosopher, Ken Wilber, the Church might find a way to move forward by "transcending and including" those aspects of itself that have become polarized or marginalized. We can include and integrate the liberal and conservative expressions of Catholicism while still recognizing and validating those differences. We can include and integrate the rational and mystical minds, finding value and meaning in both, moving forward holding both. My hope is to one day see a healthy, holistic, "integral" Catholic Church, comfortable in both its dogmatic and mystical aspects. A Church that is proud of its traditions, practices, and cultural expressions, yet mature and honest enough to learn from its mistakes, take what is good, true, and beautiful, and throw out what does not serve Christ’s ultimate message of "love one another as I have loved you."