The world has changed. Today, the 1 percent who own global businesses pursue endless increase in products and profits and ride roughshod over the Earth, local communities, and workplaces. They reduce human beings to mere consumers. 

In modern culture you cannot go far without coming across some kind of reference to mindfulness. Whether it be a book in a store, a poster on the street advertising a class or a course, advertising on social media, or a Youtube clip, mindfulness seems to be everywhere. We hear the word so often that we assume we know what it means. But what DOES it mean?

Each person has a religion. Each person is a religion. A religion is a path to which you swear obedience over and over. A religion is a consciousness realm you inhabit. It is both a linear path and a point of awareness. This linear path circles on itself as you age, producing a spiral of continuity. At the core of the spiral is the ongoing point of awareness. The consciousness realm that you ARE is your religion.

Many of the Christian mystics had ecstatic experiences of the Divine within their contemplations and meditations. To name just a few, these include Mother Julian of Norwich, whose visions as she lay on her (almost) death bed inspired her to write her book, Revelations of Divine Love; Hildegard of Bingham, who often turned her ecstatic visions into beautiful choral pieces; Teresa of Avila; and the poet Thomas Traherne. Even Blaise Pascal, the seventeenth-century mathematician, inventor, and physicist, had a two-hour ecstatic experience one night.

I remember reading Frank Peretti’s novel This Present Darkness in the mid-1980s. The title for that novel came from the Scripture passage cited above, “our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against...the cosmic powers of this present darkness.” As an Amazon.com review describes it, “Nearly every page of the book describes sulfur-breathing, black-winged, slobbering demons battling with tall, handsome, angelic warriors on a level of reality that is just beyond the senses.” Looking back, the book seems maudlin; but when I first read it, Peritti’s Christian thriller provided a lens to view reality. Things happening in the world of the senses were linked with the doings of an unseen realm.

My Christmas tree this year is a beautiful Frasier fir, for which I paid a whopping $45 at Kodey’s Tree Farm on the first Sunday of December. It meets my late father’s minimum requirement that it scrapes the ceiling of my living room. But in honor of my Dad, there’s no way it could have come into the house until it was almost Christmas (my family followed a now-almost-extinct tradition that the tree did not go up until Christmas Eve because the preceding weeks of Advent were a time of spiritual preparation for the Big Day and very much NOT part of the Christmas Season).