Awakening the Truly Human

When we see how human beings carry on and what kind of history we are creating, we might conclude that we are still an immature species. We are still largely caught in instinctive fight or flight and warfare mechanisms in our nervous and hormonal systems, even though our neuro-development long ago reached a point where these mechanisms can be transcended.

Our evolution has already provided us with the “hardware” we need for a more integrated and harmonious level of functioning, and for wider and more inclusive patterns of seeing. But the next step, by its very nature, cannot be unconscious. It requires of us mindful participation and choice, as we learn how to make more skillful use of the equipment we have.

Our prevailing culture provides little insight or instruction in the process of genuine and evolutionary human development. And it offers few models that aren’t expressions of our already outward and divisive modes of seeing. It will only evolve as we each evolve, and we each ourselves become the models. All areas of knowledge and human endeavor, especially in the field of psycho-physical behavior and well- being, must now concern themselves directly with understanding and promoting our human evolutionary capacity for integration and harmonious functioning at the most essential level.

The most elevated and non-dogmatic spiritual and wisdom teachings, and the models of our greatest teachers, presage the growing capacity of a greater number of our species to be able to understand and embody them – not just as ideals but as blueprints for personal responsibility and behavior. They are forerunners of a wider and more integrated seeing, in which we are able to recognize underlying inter- connectedness and wholeness.

Today we not only inherit the full ecumenical scope of wisdom teachings, but we are also at a new frontier of mind/body research that has parsed the neurological and neuro-chemical correlates of spiritual activity, and which gives us new insights into the actual nature of the heart, the brain, and the body. And the many spiritual wisdom teachings are contributing parts of a code – partly outdated, partly ever fresh – that can help us to practice those disciplines of the attention, and those disciplines of the heart, that enable us to find our way through the complex circuit board of the brain/body, and arrive at that integrated wholeness of functioning – psychological, emotional, spiritual – that allows us to relate to our world with a conscious and loving presence under all conditions. This conscious loving presence is our own mature capacity that transcends earlier and limiting patterns of mental and emotional reactivity, self-centeredness, and separation. Science and spirituality are becoming one, just at the time our species must come to fully understand itself for the sake of survival.

It is the underlying dedication of the path we are calling "The Blessing Way" – as it has been for The Whole Health Center for 43 years – to convey these skills, and this understanding, in a way that makes them employable and accessible in each of our lives. Both in community and individually, we can work to build that growing congruence and harmony of our mental, emotional, planetary, social, bodily, etheric, and super-conscious selves. It is the way forward, wanting to be chosen, learned, and practiced. And it is at our fingertips. Or as Jesus would say, “It is at hand.” When we understand that our own capacity to choose can awaken our capacities for consciousness and love, and that our consciousness and love can enable our capacity to choose, we are walking evolution’s edge.