The Luminous Web: Chapter 1 Part 2

The Luminous Web, Cosmic Love, and the Logos

Welcome to the Symbiotic Age Book!

If you are new, please visit the TABLE OF CONTENTS FIRST and catch up on your reading!

You are now in Chapter 1, Part 2, The Luminous Web, Cosmic Love, and the Logos.

Here are all the posts from Chapter 1:

• Chapter 1, Part 1 — Luminous Encounter and Growing up in a Culture of Separation

• Chapter 1, Part 2 — The Luminous Web, Cosmic Love, and the Logos

• Chapter 1, Part 3 — Activating the “Authentic Self” – and Metanoia

• Chapter 1, Part 4 — Aligning Society to an Ancient Blueprint
  
  Trying to figure out Where This is All Going? Read an overview of the Symbiotic Culture Strategy — embodying the Transcendent through the nodes of intersection within local, grassroots-empowered community networks.

Previously, at the end of Chapter 1, Part 1:

That’s when I first became aware that this Luminous Web is the underlying architecture of reality, an “ordered reality,” buried below and above the surface and hidden to everyone — and invisibly connecting everything.

Chapter 1: The Luminous Web - Part 2

The Luminous Web, Cosmic Love, and the Logos

Around that time, I became interested in astronomy. I mowed lawns to save up to buy a telescope. Every night, I would sit out in the yard looking at the immensity of the visible universe and feeling that I was a part of something much bigger than myself. I literally wanted to connect to the Cosmos.

A sense of purpose welled within me that I was here on Earth to do something particular — that there was a grand, cosmic plan, and I had a small role in it.

This sense of knowing that I had agency and was somehow participating in the world became stronger and stronger.

Several years later, as a young adult, I wrote a poem celebrating what the 7th-century orthodox Christian monk, St. Maximus the Confessor, called “Cosmic Love” — to me, the glue underlying and connecting reality, as the builder and sustainer of Creation.

I saw and felt it as an invisible power lying “behind” the traditionally understood four fundamental forces of the physical universe, which include gravity and electromagnetism.

Instead of an impersonal force, Love now started to gain a Voice — what I called the Voice of the Heart of Love began to speak directly to and instruct me.

Here is part of a poem describing how the Voice spoke to me.

Love isn’t sentimental but the glue connecting and binding the Universe. From the tiniest sub-atomic particles to the creation of life, to the flowering of plants, animals, human beings, planets, stars, galaxies, built into it all, Love is there.

The Voice of the Heart of Love nurtures me,
saying, “Can you feel my living presence inside and all around you?
Like a slow-moving stream through a thick forest on a warm day,
moving continuously, always there.”

After my family moved to Monterey, California, in 1975, I entered what now seems to have been the second phase of integrating the earlier experience.

Over the next few years, I began having recurring dreams. In these dreams, I was lying on a white sandy beach near the water beneath a vivid blue sky. The air and water felt pleasantly warm, probably both eighty degrees. The ocean water was very calm, and it would lap up so gently, barely touching my skin.

As I lay there looking into that deep blue sky, a warm golden light beamed from the sun and entered and enveloped me. I remembered the sun from my earlier experiences.

I could feel my heart open, and a golden light emanated and shot outward from within me and then surrounded it. The light kept expanding from right below my heart, now moving upward to include my head, so that the entire upper part of my body was bathed in a spherical halo of light.

Unlike my prior waking dream, where, in the end, I felt like I was going to die, this was a warm, protected state where I felt a deep peace the whole time.

The illumination from this soothing light filled me with joy, love, and bliss, as I had never experienced before. It was “joy within joy,” connected to an interior “well” with what felt like ever-flowing waters.

I could feel an all-body sensation, like a slow-moving stream running through me just under the surface. As I became aware of the “water” moving through me, I felt more alive than ever before, as if I had discovered the source of life.

I had the insight that what we see as life on Earth is just the surface. Beneath the surface, life is supported by “living water” from a deeper Source that moves through and sustains us.

Looking back, I am reminded of the wisdom literature of the Old Testament:
“When you find me, you find life, real life.” (Proverbs 8:35)

I was now starting to experience cosmic love more personally, reaching out to me and receiving love as two people in a relationship rather than me having to break through to an impersonal “It.”

Empathy and compassion for others heightened as I became more aware of the people in my immediate environment and worldwide.

Later, when I was in my early twenties, my experiences shifted once again. This time, it occurred while I was fully awake, and that inner golden light became “externalized.” Now, I began to see the light within and around objects in the world — the whole world was alive.

On one occasion, as I stood looking at a palm tree, I saw its “energies” in the glowing light emanating from and surrounding it. I felt inexplicably connected with that tree and recognized the light around it as an expression within creation, within nature, a “reflection” of the Luminous Web itself.

The direct experience and understanding would continue to deepen and be more fully realized in Chapter 2, where I describe how Nature’s Web and its
ecosystems reflect Transcendent power.

I’m sharing these experiences with you not because they are important in themselves — they are not. Having “spiritual” experiences can distract us from what is essential — becoming a transformed human capable of self-giving Love.

I am sharing these stories to chronicle how my experiences formed and guided my understanding of reality. This led naturally to a worldview centered on building a flourishing real-world community based on cosmic love.

Everyone has access to this Transcendent power, which can empower each of us and our communities to bring Heaven to Earth.

In retrospect, I can see that this series of unfolding, non-ordinary experiences was leading somewhere, part of a natural progression in the deepening awareness of what I’ve already called a nonphysical Transcendent Ground of Being.

You may notice that I use several terms interchangeably throughout this book—Transcendent, Logos, and Cosmic Love. The cosmic love I experienced felt like an underlying, unifying power that flowed both into and from creation and through it—and it seems as if it’s embodied within each of us.

I asked myself if this was the same power Jesus described when he asked us to Love God and Love others.

Love here is not a feeling—it goes beyond what we consider romantic, friendship, and even parental Love. It seems even more expansive than the idea of unconditional or Agape Love.

When St. Maximus called it Cosmic Love, he referred to an actual creative and sustaining principle, a real Power that binds all creation together. He said that humans are to “gather the Cosmos together in Love” to participate in this Divine creation.

St. Maximus elsewhere writes that love is the goal, source, and Highest of all Goods, and “all the forms of virtue are introduced, fulfilling the power of love, which gathers together what has been separated, once again fashioning the human being by a single meaning and mode.”

His insight from 1,300 years ago still rings true—as if he were a modern scientist accurately describing the very nature and architecture of reality.

In this book, I hope to show how being “rational” about Transcendent experiences is not an oxymoron — but two parallel yet complementary ways of experiencing and understanding Reality.

I am sharing this Ancient Wisdom to support your real-world success in building local communities.

I’ve been reflecting deeply on Jesus’ proclamation from the Sermon on the Mount about Loving God and Loving Others—a statement people commonly consider more metaphoric or poetic than literal and scientific.

And yet, it seems to me to be a fundamental description of Reality’s participatory and relational nature, like Einstein’s famous equation E=MC²!

Even now, writing this, I see how my early experiences of the true power of Cosmic Love implanted an idea that later would hold the key to unifying human society's fragmentation—“gathering together what has been separated.”

On a very practical level, nearly fifty years ago, I started to see that building bridges across the organizational silos of separation in society and communities might be the key to building a new culture and society — the breakthrough we need so badly today — what I would later call Cultural Symbiogenesis.

It may be hard to imagine this happening globally simultaneously in tens of thousands of local communities, but as I have said before, the Ancient Blueprint is as “old as the hills” and reveals the practical way to make it happen.

Why is that important?

Tribes and silos are a primary feature of our dysfunctional global political/economic system, from international affairs down to our local communities and, really, the street where we live!

I began to understand how leaders at all levels of government and politics use our innate tribal sensibilities to divide and rule us - what has been called “divide et impera,” going back to Julius Caesar and the Roman Empire.

I longed to find a way for human beings to build bridges across these “man-made” tribes and silos and work together for their own and the common good. Unlocking that power would become my mission and calling in life — a singular focus of the last five decades.

I wanted to mention another name for cosmic love, maybe less touchy-feely, that affirms the universality of the Ancient Blueprint.

Logos is a philosophical, religious, and universal construct that emerged over the last several thousand years, both in the East and West, in different religious and cultural contexts, but developing its most significant impulse within the West.

The Greeks and early Christians cited the Logos as a divine, rational plan or architecture, an order we can observe and experience—a universal intelligence governing all that is.

According to these shared views, the Logos is eternal, unchanging, and unifies everything. This means that it predates — pre-exists — all religion, all philosophy, and the human mind itself.

Early Christians practiced and lived in “community” in alignment with the Logos —who they saw as literally being embodied in Jesus Christ.

They applied the Ancient Blueprint in the real world — even within the brutal Roman Empire: everyone interconnected, interdependent, and building a non-materialistic counter-culture, a cohesive society based on universal principles and virtues.

They sought to embody what Jesus called the Kingdom of Heaven — bringing Heaven to Earth — that Jesus spoke of in his Sermon on the Mount.

They redefined the nature of power itself - from the dominion of empires to a beloved community of self-giving Love.

During my teens and twenties, as I processed the luminous experiences I could share with no one else, I knew nothing about The Tao (see Chapter 1, Part 1, middle page quote from C.S. Lewis), Logos, or Cosmic Love, at least not as concepts.

Again, I had no prior religious or spiritual training, so this experience was unburdened by theological framing or competing belief systems.

It was an experience of ultimate connection that transcended any intellectual concepts or theological distinctions. Not only did I feel like I was a part of something much bigger than myself, but I felt connected to EVERYTHING.

This was my first awareness of participation and agency. I could see — feel — my place in Creation.

I also sensed that these experiences were preparing me for a lifelong calling. Again, there was a feeling of absolute trust, faith, and guidance.

I knew I needed to continue listening to the intuitive guidance that comes from deep within and wait for “further instructions.”

Ready or not, I was on my way to an anything-but-ordinary life. The question I asked at the Passover Seder emerged from an entirely different place than the questions many of us ask, which, in our individualistic situation, are about “me” — what will help ME, or how will I or my organization benefit?

I began to hear a different voice, “The Voice of the Heart of Love,” the voice of what I have come to call the “authentic self.”

NEXT POST:
Chapter 1, Part 3 — Stay tuned to the next installment about activating the “Authentic Self” – and Metanoia

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