The complexity of the present time seems to demand a deepening of our nature if we are going to survive. Deepening requires exploration. And for all its byways, exploration leads ultimately to the spiritual source of our existence and to the quest for a faith that will support our continuing explorations. Not since the days of Plato and Buddha and Confucius, some 2500 years ago, has there been such an uprising of spiritual yearning. Though the varieties of contemporary religious experience may look or sound different, they share a core belief—that each human being contains a godseed, a divine essence that can be nurtured through spiritual practice into a fully matured expression of the god stuff within.
Moreover, belief in a divine essence as the basis of reality is not limited to explicitly religious paths. Scientists of a Nondual bent explain reality in terms that are not much different from those mystics use. Speculative scientists often use the metaphor of the hologram to explain humanity's place in the Universal Mind. Each part of a hologram contains an image of the whole. Break a hologram image up, shine a special kind of laser light though any of its pieces, and you get the whole picture back again. In spiritual terms, we might think of ourselves as fragments of the great hologram of Reality. Shine the proper light of consciousness through us, and we each reflect the whole—starfish and sequoias, the sap rising in the winter trees and the yearning of God for each of us. . .
This yearning to know our true nature is universal. When I have studied or talked with seekers who have had this experience, they have told me of a joy that passes understanding, an immense surge of creativity, a instant uprush of kindness and tolerance that make them impassioned champions for the betterment of all, bridge builders, magnets for solutions, peacemakers, pathfinders. Best of all, other people feel enriched and nourished around them. Everyone they touch becomes more, because they themselves are more.
