Navigating Transitional Spaces of Evolutionary Consciousness

I recently had the good fortune to be able to take a Viking Danube River cruise from Passau, Germany to Budapest, Hungary with some members of my family. During our voyage, we passed through 13 locks, which increasingly fascinated me. The Gabčíkovo lock in the Slovak part of the Danube River near the border of Hungary was the last and largest of them, measuring 900 feet long and with a 70-foot drop. Locks enable ships to navigate rivers that would otherwise be impassable due to varying depths, by lifting or lowering them to the next section of the river. The Gabčíkovo Lock is a type of pound lock featuring a chamber with gates at both ends, which enables the adjustment of the water level within the lock. For a boat traveling downstream, which was the direction we were traveling, the boat enters the lock, and the upper gates are closed, making the chamber watertight. A valve is opened and the lock is then emptied by releasing the water downstream. Once the boat is lowered to the desired level, the lower gates are opened, and the boat smoothly exits the lock.

As the ship travelled through the locks, I found myself reflecting upon how we navigate transitions in our spiritual journeys, both individually and collectively, in our Christophany Groups. Whereas we may have been conditioned to think of our spiritual lives as ascending to successively higher levels, moving upstream, Ilia Delio tells us that the journey of evolutionary consciousness is not upward, but rather inward, going more deeply into the heart and psyche. In The Not-Yet God, she tells us: “The most difficult journey to make is the journey within. Without this journey, Christ is not born in us, God remains incomplete, and the world remains in partial darkness” (p. 130). She explains that seeking wholeness is a way of life whereby we become Christified. The way of the mystic entails entering a place of spiritual poverty where one relies only on the “the power of God and the infinite field of divine potentials that undergird the divine energies of love … To enter the place of unspoken love and to find oneself in love is the birth of the Christic, the New Person” (p. 207-208). 

As facilitators, we are tasked with the challenge of creating and curating spaces in which the group can engage in the journey inward together, moving downstream toward the divine within. Oftentimes our members come to us well ready to take the plunge, yet it must be done with utmost care so that we do not find ourselves collectively going over a waterfall. How might we incorporate care-filled ways of lowering and emptying into our group process so as to enable our members to navigate ever deeper transitions of evolutionary consciousness?

*Feel free to comment and discuss below.