Passages of a letter to Iris Skeoch Editor in Chief, Harpers Collins, Canada
From Fr Charles Brandt, 1992
A New Consciousness
This is really the heart of it all. The world as you
know is hungry for meditation either in the eastern
or western form, and they are surprisingly similar
and related. I am committed to a life of
contemplation. This goes way back, perhaps to my
early childhood, contemplation leads one to discover
the Ground of Love in all reality and leads one to
one’s sisters and brothers: it creates a social
consciousness; it leads to a deeper unity and love
with and for the earth.
I am deeply concerned with the earth, it’s
conservation. I look at the earth as Gaia and that
I wanted to live in that cloister of light’s silence
humans are integral with the earth. We are the earth
celebrating itself in conscious self–reflection, a great
celebratory event. To realize that we are integral
with the earth requires more than a conceptual
commitment. We have to experience this
relationship, so that we can make the return, make
the sacrifice. The small self sacrifices for the larger
self out of love. I see meditation, contemplation
(experiential awareness of communion with ultimate
reality) as a way to discovering this oneness with all
beings and hence the way for loving all beings.
When I was 13 I had an experience that set me on
the journey – at the Osceola Boy Scout Camp in the
Ozarks of Missouri. The initiation was to spend a
night in the forest, alone, make medicine, choose a
name, and make vows of love for my mother, God,
and country. To me country meant the earth. This
event opened me to the journey, gave me a deep love
for the earth, and gave me this hunger for the living
water of ultimate reality.
About that time I had a dream (vision) of standing
in a council ring. On the far side of a fire mound
were several figures, bearded and seemingly with
great wisdom. I was cut off from them by the fire
mound. There was this tremendous desire to be with
them, part of them. It was my first experience of
dualism. I wanted to be part of their wisdom and
life. It was something, I believe, like entering into
the collective unconscious, and returning with a
symbol of interpersonal love or communion. This
vision is as real now as it was then.
I can remember about that period of my life of
expressing to my aunt Hildred, a literary person who
reviewed books for the Kansas City Star, how I
would like to go to the woods, as Thoreau did, to see
what life is all about. Emerson and Walt Whitman
(“Stop this day, and I shall teach you the hidden
meaning of all things.”) played a great part in my
reading at this time.
I believe that humankind is moving to a new level
of consciousness, what Hugo Lasalle calls fourth
dimensional consciousness. This is a contemplative,
mystical consciousness, and what Teilhard calls the
Omega point. I think it is happening whether we
like it or not. It is part of the Dream of the Earth
which is unfolding. We didn’t choose to move from
archaic consciousness to rational consciousness.
It is a wonderful time to be alive, to be born at this
time, and in a sense to be chosen to be born at this
time. We have a tremendous responsibility. The
earth calls us to this, and the universe. We have to
make the return, to make the sacrifice, just as the
first stars made the sacrifice to bring forth the
universe some 15 billion years ago, so too we are
called.