Serendipity
As part of my duties as a hospital chaplain, I say prayers with the pre-surgery patients who request it. One day, I was on the prep unit, visiting someone, when I saw another man being prepped. There was nothing special about him, but somehow I felt he would want a prayer.
Still, he hadn’t asked for one, so I returned to my office. It wasn’t long before his name appeared in my inbasket for a visit. Returning to his bedside, I introduced myself. He was friendly, enough, but he didn’t seem to know why I was there.
“Did you ask for a chaplain?” I asked him.
He said he had not.
Turning around, the nurse said, “Oh, did I put in a request? I didn’t mean to.”
We laughed, and I prepared to go, but the man stopped me.
“No, it’s okay,” he said. “A prayer would be good.”
So I asked the normal questions—what’s your religion, what should I pray for?—and he told me his religion was Christ Consciousness. Not knowing what that was, exactly, I asked him if I should pray to Jesus.
He said that would be fine, but I could pray to whomever I wanted. The Christ he worshiped was bigger than Jesus. His Christ was as big as everything and more. His Christ was the consciousness of the universe itself. He explained that to worship this Christ was to merge with Him, and if we merged, then everything was okay. Nothing could go wrong, because there was no wrong. Whatever happened was simply part of the experience experienced by the consciousness, which was us. He had his god, so nothing could trouble him. He was at peace.
Awareness of Our True Nature
Often when serendipitous things happen, like the mistaken inbasket request for a patient I sensed I would see again, the resulting meeting is somehow memorable. Something significant occurs. In this situation, nothing particularly noteworthy happened. The man was content with or without prayer, though nice enough to make my trip worthwhile by giving me something to do.
Of course, worth cannot be measure by the tasks we perform. If some consciousness infuses everything, whether it be Christ or stardust or mitochondria, then every movement and every thought is part of the whole, without which there would be a tear in the tapestry. In other words, I didn’t need to pray for him to feel worthy.
Even so, I offered my blessing of words. When I finished, he said, “I felt that.”
Does that mean he gained something from what I’d said? Who knows? There may be a universal consciousness, and that consciousness probably knows what that man thought and felt, as well as what I did, maybe even more accurately than we know. But I was not keyed into that universal wisdom.
Therefore, I don’t know if my visit was significant for him, but it was for me, and perhaps that was the point, if there is purpose to these random events, for I learned something new. Christ Consciousness as a religion? I was curious. What was that?
What Is The Divine Mind?
From the website of the Institute of Christ Consciousness, I discovered that Christ Consciousness is the awareness of our “true nature.” It is a state of spiritual maturity in which we realize we are children of God. The point of realizing this is to then merge with an eternal and everlasting love of the Creator. If we can “blend” our human egos with the “Divine Mind,” we will be joyful. [1]
To learn more, you have to spend money on videos and trainings. These promise to help you access this divine mind, to move forward on your spiritual path. Other New Age churches or philosophies, Eastern religions, some tribal practices, Christian prayer are all designed to take you to the same or a similar place, to that deep and fervent connection to the holy.
That sounds similar to the Universal Consciousness described by Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme, who posit that the universe itself is creative and aware. Indeed, the universe is awareness.
At the recovery church service last week, we talked about what the possibility that we are made in God’s image, whatever God is, and whatever it means to be imaged as divine. Mightn’t this Universal Consciousness be the same thing? Everything made in the image of the holy, everything a kind of god?
The Universal Consciousness
The guru, Sri Aurobindo, wrote in his poem, “Comsic Consciousness”:
I pass beyond Time and life on measureless wings,
Yet still am one with born and unborn things. [2]
Sri Aurobindo, “Cosmic Consciousness”
Our oneness, then, is more than momentary. If we merge, the merging must be complete, so we become part of not just with what we see before us, but with all that was and all that is yet to be.
What does it mean to be part of the all, to pass beyond life, beyond time, and to be with? Simply be with? Does the awareness that fills my mind and yours also exist within every creature we see and smell, every rock, every piece of metal, plastic, dung. Or is the universal awareness something out there, a place where we will end up at the end of days?
If we can believe the mystics, this merging with the Oneness is our life’s task. If we can release the self and swim in the ocean of Universal Consciousness, we will know bliss. I think that’s what the patient in the hospital was trying to explain to me. He was perfectly happy, sick or not sick, under anesthesia or alert, alive or dead. Such contentment is not a bad thing. Whether we seek oneness in this life or are brought to it when we die, we are often comforted if we believe that our existence now and our existence later is part of an eternal consciousness. As much as we are one with that, we will never fade.
The Joy of No-Mind
Of course, I’m not sure that being one with such a mind comes with individual awareness. I suspect that in the merging, we lose the “I” we identify as us. Therefore, we won’t be around to experience the bliss of it. At least, we won’t have a personal mind to label what we feel as happiness.
Indeed, we probably won’t feel anything, for we won’t have bodies, and we need bodies to experience emotions. Though we can intensify our feelings by what we think, we still hold the ache and the triumph in our gut and our limbs and our bones. In the Universal Consciousness, none of these things exist. There might be the riding of the wave and the dancing in the current, but there will be no sadness, no hope, no fear, no craving, no exuberance. In that place that is everything and lies beyond time, we might settle into a joy that comes of knowing no separation, but we will also be lost in the not-knowing of no-mind. If all that exists is joy, that joy cannot know itself as such. It will simply be.
I suppose that’s why the Universal Mind, or Brahman, or Yahweh, or any number of great and small deities, created life in the first place. So there might be another to know it, and so that through that other, it might experience the joy that is its essence in the bliss of we creatures who are not.
So are we or aren’t we? That may be the question.
In faith and fondness,
Barbara
Credits
- “What Is Christ Consciousness?,” Institute of Christ Consciousness, https://www.institutechristconsciousness.org/what-is-christ-consciousness.html, 2018, accessed January 22, 2022.
- Aurobindo, Sri, “Cosmic Consciousness,” Collected Poems, c. 1947, https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/02/cosmic-consciousness#p4, accessed January 22, 2022.
Photo by Bryan Goff on Unsplash
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