The Future of the Body

I’ve been reading another book that has much the same impact and deals with much of the same content as the Course, Michael Murphy’s, The Future of the Body. Murphy musters vast amounts of evidence from prehistoric times to the present, suggesting that evolution is going on within each and every one of us right now, and moving human beings in the direction of more frequent everyday manifestations of extraordinary metanormal capabilities. In other words, every person alive on the planet now and in the past, is, and has been, a vector for evolution, and can, with discipline, training, faith and commitment, tap into latent inner powers that have seemed supernatural.

Grace, for example. Murphy says that grace, the Buddha nature, Hasidic joy, Hindu moshka, etc, is not a supernatural gift dispensed by a supernatural, external deity for the deserving few, but a natural, ever-present inner reality, equally available to all. Wow!
Imagine, having the ‘blessing’ of grace as a constant reality. How cool, how good! How different our individual lives would be, how much healthier, peaceful, joyous and productive; and society, too.

Grace is one of the extraordinary ‘metanormal’ capacities that evolution is bringing into increasing daily manifestation. Again, we can’t sit back and wait for evolution to do it, but knowing that it’s there for everyone, and then ‘working’ and doing what it takes to allow it to shine through, is quite different and much more empowering than believing that it’s dispensed by some whimsical deity to the faithful few.

In other words, the gift is given, it’s there within each one of us, waiting to be opened. Our purpose is to open it, and the other ‘gifts’, to open it ourselves and help one another open it. Murphy quotes Philip Novak, talking about the Buddha nature as about “not so much on our attaining it, but on our not obstructing its continuous salvific activity…. Far closer to the truth than the notion that grace is absent is that it is always and everywhere present…. We remain blind to the graceful immanence…failing to draw on its power.”