there are no private legacies
But there is only one river.
A living cosmology cannot happen from science and art alone. Mysticism too must be integral to this awakening, basic to this global renaissance. Indeed, the new science is demanding a mystical awakening as we saw in part II. Yet mysticism - which represents the depth of religious traditions the world over - has never been tried on an ecumenical level. I cannot emphasize this fact enough. We have no inkling what power would ensue for creativity, for employing one another, for exciting the young to deep adventures once again (other than that dated adventure called war) were mysticism to be unleashed on a global scale. Because it has never been tried, we cannot predict the consequences. Why have we never tried it? Because the West has been so thoroughly out of touch with its own mystical heritage. How could the West dialogue on mysticism with the East when it did not know its own mystical roots? What can Christianity say to native peoples whose mystical traditions are so rich when Christians don't know their own mystical experience? After all, the great encounters between Christianity and native peoples and between Christianity and the Eastern religions have occurred only in the past few centuries, i.e., during that exact period in the West when Newton and the Enlightenment extinguished the Cosmic Christ. The point cannot be emphasized too much: We have never attempted a rapprochement between the Cosmic Christ in Christianity and the Cosmic Christ in the universe and the Cosmic Christ in other religions. Yet the Divine One is present in them all, as Joanna Macy points out:
From Judaism, Christianity, and Islam to Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, and Native American and Goddess religions, each offers images of the sacred web into which we are woven. We are called children of one God and "members of one body;" we are seen as drops in the ocean of Brahman; we are pictured as jewels in the Net of Indra. We interexist - like synapses in the mind of an all-encompassing being.A year ago a young man from mainland China joined our Institute of Culture and Creation spirituality in Oakland. He was not a Christian and had in fact never opened the Bible in his life. He was a practicing Taoist in deep connection with his own mystical tradition. His grandmother had hid him in the basement during the cultural revolution in China and had taught him the ancient ways of chi chung and t'ai chi meditation. He had plumbed the well of his own tradition to reach what Eckhart calls the "great underground river" of divinity. What was the result? This young man wrote papers for me - comparing Meister Eckhart to Lao-tzu and Hildegard of Bingen to Confucius - that were as fine as any papers I have received in teaching these mystics to Westerners over the past twelve years.
How was this possible for someone not familiar with the Christian tradition? It was possible because mysticism is, like art, a common language, uttering a common experience. There is only one great underground river, though there are numerous wells into it - Buddhist wells and Taoist wells, Native American wells and Christian wells, Islamic wells and Judaic wells. A Sufi master of our day says:
Sufism is not different from the mysticism of all religions. Mysticism comes from Adam (God's Peace upon him). It has assumed different shapes and forms over many centuries, for example, the mysticism of Jesus (God's Peace upon him), of monks, of hermits, and of Muhammed (God's Peace and Blessings upon him). A river passes through many countries and each claims for its own. But there is only one river.The awakening of the mystic in our time means that many more wells are being sunk into the wet, creative, greening powers of that one underground river. The Cosmic Christ -the "pattern that connects" - can connect all persons in the context of the shared sacredness, the shared reverence and awe of our existence. I have seen this happen on a small scale with students and workshop participants I have taught over the years...Other personal stories abound regarding my experience of the deep ecumenical nature of mysticism...Courses in the mystics, and above all courses that bring out the mystic in each minister, rabbi, or priest-to-be must be taught in our seminaries
The question logically arises as to how ecumenical the term "Cosmic Christ" is. Can persons not of Christian heritage be at home with it, or is it an ever more subtle term for Christian prosthelytizing? Throughout the writing of this book it has become increasingly evident to me how the concept of the Cosmic Christ is pre-Christian. The image of God in every atom and galaxy is not exactly a property of Christians. The divine "I am" in every person and every creature is no particular tradition's private legacy. Indeed, many non-Christians and post-Christians have written at length and quite happily about the "Cosmic Christ" including Paramahansa Yogananda, Rudolf Steiner, and Carl Jung. Bede Griffiths has written a book on the Cosmic Christ in Hinduism. I have demonstrated in this book that the Cosmic Christ concept is deep in the Jewish tradition of wisdom and is also found in the Jewish prophets and apocalyptic literature long before Jesus Christ. Scientists, like Ken Wilber, who talks of the "isness of each thing-event" as being "the most fundamental and elemental starting point for all mystical traditions," are talking of the Cosmic Christ, of the divine "isness" present in every creature. Physicist David Bohm says that "the whole is present in each part, in each level of existence. The living reality, which is total and unbroken and undivided, is in everything." A name for this "lving reality" is the Cosmic Christ. Non-Christian people I meet do not tell of their displeasure at Jesus Christ, who they invariably believe was indeed an incarnation of the Cosmic Christ. Their problems lie with Christians.
The word christos or "christ" means in the original Greek, "the anointed one." Kings and priests were anointed in ancient Israel. The Messiah too was understood to be "Christ" or an anointed one. Is the Cosmic Christ not an archetype about how we are all in some way anointed kings, queens, priests, and messiahs? Are we not all called to do what D.H. Lawrence writes about, "to distill the essential oil out of his Judaic heritage? Are religious believers not called to do this today?