“In the beginning….” says the writer of Genesis, “God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.” So begins the first chapter of Genesis. This is the grand cosmic movement — God giving birth. The journey of awakening begins, as history unfolds — one event, one era leading into the next — a continuous flow, marked by time.

But what is this “flow”? According to the dictionary,“flow” is “a steady, continuous stream of something.” This “something” might be a river in perpetual motion, or the movement of the sun around the earth — night becomes day, and day becomes night. “Flow” is the emergence of flowers, trees, fish, and babies from humble beginnings as seeds and cells. The very nature of thinking is flow, as thoughts, feelings, and sensations pass through consciousness. This organic movement, the “steady, continuous stream” of nature, is “flow”, the context through which all life breathes, shifts, grows, and dies.

David Bohm (1917 – 1992) was a 20th century physicist who was an early proponent of the idea that all physical reality is one undivided flow — that “flow” is the nature of being, the nature of life. In one sense this idea of reality as flow seems obvious, and yet Bohm was ahead of his time. Since Newton, physics defined “physical reality” in terms of particles — discrete bits of matter, fitting together like a jigsaw puzzle. Bohm suggested that these particles, the building blocks of physical reality, were not particles, and that they were not discrete. Rather, reality was movement, an all-embracing unity of flow.

Why is this important? When I look at a tree, I see a thing, an object — something that appears to be solid, not moving, and separate from me. Intellectually, I know that the tree is growing; I may even observe changes in the tree from season to the next, one year to the next. But my basic perception of the tree is rooted not in movement but in non-movement. I see the tree as a static object.

Bohm observed that our normal perception — not only of trees but of ourselves and everything in the world — is shaped in part by the structure of our language, which is rooted in “subject/object” form. “I” am the subject. Trees, animals, mountains, and other people are objects, and the objects are nouns. Bohm challenges this way of perceiving. Reality, says Bohm, is not a noun but a verb. Reality is not split into subject and objects. Reality is a continuous, undivided flow, more like a giant movie that we all participate in.

My husband and I were recently in Thailand. Everywhere we went, we were surrounded by tourists from all over the world, most of whom were recording their experiences in video on cell phones. Never before has a generation had such a voluminous record of human experience. The accessibility of video means that increasingly we record our experience not merely as a collection of still photographs but as a “moving picture”, a continuous stream, a flow.

This is a dramatic evolution of human perception that brings Bohm’s scientific theory up close and personal. No longer is the “stream of consciousness” a private activity that occurs interiorly. Widespread use of video shifts the “stream of consciousness” into a shared expression of embodied life; our experience is recorded and so reflected back to us, as movement, flow. The impact of video is to change the very processing mechanisms by which we experience life. Video allows us to perceive life flowing in every human interaction, as well as in every rock, stream, plant, animal — every aspect of human experience unfolding in time.

Theories are never born in a vacuum. One theory builds on another. Bohm’s work built on the foundation of another major western thinker, Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947). Whitehead was an English philosopher and mathematician who lived a generation before Bohm. He suggested that reality is a perpetual process of “becoming”; a continual movement, an undivided process through which all things are perpetually emerging from one form to another. Flow.

Whitehead, like Bohm, was also ahead of his time and his ideas were not well received in the west. However, Whitehead’s “process philosophy” — the idea that reality is an organic flow, a process of becoming — gained a receptive audience in Asia. Whitehead’s concept of “process” fit in well with the eastern concept of energy as the life-force, the animating principle, in all things. For thousands of years, eastern philosophy and medicine has been rooted in the study, examination, and techniques to work with this life-force energy. In China this energy is called “chi”; in Japan it is called “qi”, and in India it is called “prana”. Whitehead’s “process philosophy” seemed less foreign to the eastern mind than to his colleagues in the west.

Increasingly, disciplines from Asia such as acupuncture, shiatsu, martial arts, qigong and yoga are widely available in the west. This influx of eastern perspectives and techniques challenges our usual western way of approaching the human body. In the west, we tend to think of our bodies as objects made up of individual parts, each part assigned to a medical specialty, like cardiology, neurology, or psychiatry. We forget that our bodies are mostly fluid — water, blood and other liquids — and that tissues, organs, and even bones are living, breathing, flowing vessels of life, each intricately connected to the whole. When we look at the body from an energy perspective, as Eastern disciplines have done for centuries, we see the body more as a verb than a noun. We discover that, indeed, we are living in a house of flow.

Whitehead and Bohm suggest that we see everything — rocks, hills, trees, birds, and human beings — in terms of flow. They suggest that we learn to see ourselves and the world we inhabit more like liquids than solids; more of a unified field, than a machine with individual parts, or a jigsaw puzzle to be figured out.

It’s one thing to hear these ideas intellectually, and engage mental debates about the nature of reality. But something happened that shifted this material from being an intellectual exercise to an embodied experience — one that made a tangible difference in my life. The more I studied Whitehead and Bohm, the more I intellectually focused on the concept of “flow”, the more I noticed that my actual perception of myself and the world changed. As I absorbed the idea that reality is flow, I began to experience flow more directly.

To my surprise, the more I experienced flow, the calmer I felt. A deep sense of “well-being” spontaneously emerged. I was learning that the experience of “flow” was not neutral. Rather, the experience of flow provided a window into the compassionate presence inherent in all life. A journey that began in the realms of science and metaphysics led me directly into a spiritual experience. I had tripped into a state of consciousness that is cultivated in meditation, a realm that may be called by various names, a Loving Presence that exists in all things. Whitehead called this Presence the “subjective aim” or “lure” that is inherent in the “flow”, the unfolding of Life.

I continue to discover that exploring “flow” offers tangible experiences into this transcendent realm. As a practicing Christian, using religious language and imagery as a context for these experiences comes naturally.

Christianity tells the story of Jesus Christ who fully embodies the Loving Presence of God. Jesus lives a human life marked by great challenge, betrayal, and dies a gruesome death. The life of Jesus is also a life transfigured. This is a story infused with miraculous healings that transfigure human suffering. Jesus emerges as Jesus the Christ whose death is transfigured into resurrection, pointing toward the end of death for all. The path of Jesus Christ is the path of unconditional Love. This is the call to give unconditionally to others, to relieve suffering, and release the chains of slavery and injustice, whether these chains exist physically, mentally, emotionally, or institutionally. This is the path that the Buddhists call “The Way of the Bodhisattva”.

The life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ is the story of God’s love expressed through an outpouring of forgiveness, tenderness, and all embracing concern for others; Love that transforms all suffering and breaks open the human heart. It is the story that captures the depth of human suffering, joy, intimacy, and service, and ushers into being what Christians call the “kingdom of God”. “Stepping into flow” is the reorientation of mind, body, and spirit into this mystical path of Love.