A pre-religious view of Spirit as life’s connection, with the added factor of healing to restore purity.
Now that Materialism has melted its lumps and particles into a quantum gravity spinfoam of curling strings, we human beings can breathe a sigh of relief and feel secure with each other again. No longer must we obey old-style scientists who tell us, in their lab-coated priestly garments, that we are only randomly moving aggregates of molecules moving with momentum. No longer must we see ourselves as matter bouncing off each other as our separated mental worlds collide. The horror movie of existential aloneness is at last ended.
The credits are rolling up the screen on that ‘Age of Enlightenment’. A greater AGE OF GLORY is opening up.
People can now reasonably see themselves as deeply connected into a pervading wholeness of profound movement. Let’s call this LIFE. The quantum physicist David Bohm called this depth life ‘holomovement’. This integrating type of movement has harmonised life throughout history in cultural arts, in religious callings, among early scientists and mathematicians, and in philosophical reasonings. Life’s relatedness is described in different languages using different imagery and terms. The metaphor is clear of blindfolded people taking hold of different parts of an elephant and generalising their local experience, as if it gives a complete picture of life – an ear is like a huge fan, the belly like a wall, the tail like a rope. Only by curiosity in conversational connection can we learn to live in the whole movement of life, benefiting from listening to those who differ from us.
Life is the depth holomovement connecting all energy-matter and mindfulness into a growing and adapting whole. The spiritual quality of relatedness behind space-time and substance has been intuited throughout history. Holy people and mystics, men and women in every culture, are sensitive through their inner hearts to this lived non-locality. The ‘thoughts of their hearts’ inform their locally-framed minds with remote intuitions and coherences. It is in this sense of guidance into wholeness that the religious use of Holy Spirit has come about, as a narrowing characteristic of the more general spirituality of positive and negative subtle energies. Holy can be interpreted to mean restoring purity to regulate power with grace and justice.
Releasing pure Holy Spirit from her religious bonds
Holiness is a trans-cultural concept. Its sense of purity transcends culture. Some follow spiritual practices to ascend towards purity; others believe that purity is a gift when holomovement restores and heals those who choose to reconnect into transcendent life. Humility then marks the path to receiving this healing grace.
Religions, philosophical, and political movements all fragment when their languages become a source of power grabbing. This has happened to Christianity. Devotees argue still about whether Holy Spirit is active in people’s lives today, or has been dormant for two thousand years after an explosion of miraculous events for a season in the Middle East. Unable to agree to differ while walking together in spiritual unity, they power grab, and fragments the movement of life. The same occurs everywhere. In Islam’s Noble Qur’an, the Prophet Muhammad cites Holy Spirit eleven times, but only the Sufi mystics allow a theology that celebrates the life born of Holy Spirit. Judaism, Hinduism, Baha’i, Zoroastrianism, and Gnosticism all have equivalent concepts of healing and life’s renewal to purity through holy spiritual engagement, but fall apart because of cultural differences.
The Age of Glory that I mentioned above, moving on from life’s fragmentation into materialism, will restore beauty to life’s renewal, but only by defragmenting those willing to mourn in humility. Holy Spirit is transcultural, and trans-religious. She is the call to wisdom associated with caution in life. Whatever cultural or religious background someone comes from, and whatever religious or spiritual language they were born into, renewal in Holy Spirit with deep curiosity can add value safely.
The feedback cycle of damage to life
The interface of nonlocal spiritual depth (David Bohm’s ‘implicate order’ of life) with everyday community and family living (the explicate order of life) is like a water lily flowering on the surface of a pond. This is not a static image. Growth, gentle movement, and turnover in roots and petals is its hidden gentle depth of holomovement. Every feature of every life is continuously reorganising in relatedness with all of life. A human being likewise, but with a greater power of choice over which values shape the movements of his or her visible relationships.
Every action has an equal and opposite reaction in the explicate order of life. This is a stretched out version of synergy in time. Synergy is the nonlocal relational substance of spirituality.
In the implicate, nonlocal depths below the surface of all we know, feedback from our local choices affects the probabilities of whatever will unfold next, but nonlocally! Up in the time-framed explicate order of growth and turnover, we may know this feedback as the flowering we see on the surface of the local pond where we rest.
If our chosen values damage life’s relational qualities in the local explicate order, the feedback into life’s implicate order also harms the nonlocal probabilities with which life’s implicate order of growth and turnover will unfold… This emerges in the quality of the land and the wider environments that support us all. Our values affect our wider ecology. It’s obvious really. The proof is unfolding now, before our eyes, in the news of conflicts and barrenness.
