A New Wine Skin for Christianity

I've just completed a book, which I launched a few days ago. It’s called Finding the Fractal Christ: An Integrative Spiritual Quest. And for another 3 days, you can access it free on Amazon as a Kindle ebook. So, I’m going to disclose a few things here that I learned in the course of writing this book. And I’m hoping that you’ll find them useful. 

The context for the book is that I experienced a very unexpected vision, a revelation, in an altered state of consciousness late last year. That vision consisted of a segmented spiral like a cross-section of certain sea shells, with the spiral getting ever smaller as it disappeared into infinity. Each segment all along the disappearing spiral bore the face of a bearded man. Along with that visual, I “heard” the message, “Christ is a fractal.”

The further I sought to understand this message, the deeper I got. All along the path of what became a 10-month spiritual quest to understand the meaning of the revelation, new unexpected revelations would appear. That’s the story that I chronicle in the book.

The result, over time, was the unfolding of a deep personal spirituality that didn’t exactly align with any particular religion. I accumulated spiritual knowledge and depth outside of the cultural structure and institution of religion. At the same time, I discovered that various demographic and sociological studies were revealing a significant decline in the number of people who identified as religious. 

Interestingly, while those who claimed a religious affiliation were declining in number, an increasing number of people were identified as SBNR — that is, “spiritual but not religious.” While comforting and validating on one level, identifying as SBNR actually was identifying as NOT something. That made me feel even more marginalized in a way, though studies like these are, by definition, cultural.

Now, Christian mysticism is almost completely unknown let alone discussed and taught in Western Christianity. See, Christian mysticism teaches that God and the Kingdom of God are within each of us, and not only was Jesus the “Light of the World,” but that we ALL have it within us also to be the Light of the World. Jesus said those things. He even told his disciples they would do even greater works than he did. But modern Christianity doesn’t talk about that or teach about that, and its implications. 

As my quest unfolded, I discovered that new theories and models of consciousness based on principles of quantum physics, and fractal patterns, offer a compelling replacement for what used to be called mysticism. I’ll talk more about that in future episodes.