Friday, November 4, 2022

INTERSPIRITUAL MEDITATION -- 1

 WE NEED TO CHOOSE HOPE

+ My friend Mark Davidson, a fellow Presbyterian Minister, says that Hannah Arendt speaks his mind in this quote: 

"The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lies will now be accepted as truth and the truth be defamed as lies, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world - and the category of truth vs. falsehood is among the mental means to this end - is being destroyed."

+ I know this is true and we are in serious jeopardy but I do want to offer hope and even joy in the situation we are in. I do believe a critical mass of humanity has already figured out that we need to evolve rapidly into a new InterSpiritual consciousness, The New Faith for the New Earth -- #tnfftne -- and we are doing so even as we see the resistance to the truth these days. I often go back to the wisdom Brother Wayne Teasdale, who coined the term InterSpiritual, offered including this quote:

Humanity stands at a crossroads between horror and hope. In choosing hope, we must seed a new consciousness, a radically fresh approach to life drawing its inspiration from perennial spiritual and moral insights, intuition and experience. We call this new awareness interspiritual, implying not the homogenization of religion, but the recovering of the shared mystic heart beating in the center of the world’s deepest spiritual traditions.

My longtime InterSpiritual teacher, Ed Bastian, developed the Seven Steps of InterSpiritual Meditation as a way forward in this quest for "the rediscovery of the shared mystic heart."

I intend to focus on these seven steps in in these InterSpiritual Meditation posts because I simply can't think of anything more important than unceasing prayer and this process works to bring people together in meditation, contemplation and prayer from all the different wisdom traditions.

Here is how Ed introduces us to the Seven Steps:

The purposes of InterSpiritual Meditation are:

1. to help each of us to develop and sustain a comprehensive, satisfying, and sustainable process of meditation.

2. to help us co-create contemplative communities for people of diverse faiths and meditative practices. InterSpiritual Meditation is designed to provide a process around which meditators of diverse practices can build community.

3. to model a profound process for people of various religious traditions, and those without a tradition, to join together to create peace and to solve the critical challenges of our times.

The seven steps are:

(1) Motivation (May I be Healthy and Happy)

(2) Gratitude (May I be Grateful)

(3) Transformation (May I be Transformed in my Highest Ideals)

(4) Intention (May I be Loving and Compassionate)

(5) Mindfulness (May I be Mindful through my Breathing)

(6) Meditation (May I become Wise through my Meditation)

(7) Dedication (May I be in Service to All Beings)

SEVEN-STEP PROCESS – BRIEF DESCRIPTION

This contemplative process can be shared by people from many perspectives and traditions. It can be practiced alone and in community with others. It pulls together key elements of contemplation and meditation shared by many traditions. Quietly, each in our own way, we join in the following seven stages together. The sound of a bell leads us from one stage to the next.

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