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David Karchere recently spoke about "ersatz masculinity." Ersatz is defined as a poor substitute. It occurred to me that what's prevalent on the planet are ersatz humans—people who have forgotten who they are and have become a bad substitute for what a real human being is supposed to be and what a real human being, a loving human being, is designed to deliver into the world.
In a letter written by Nelson Mandela to his wife, Winnie, while he was in prison, he says this:
The cell is an ideal place to learn to know yourself, to search realistically and regularly the process of your own mind and feelings. In judging our progress as individuals we tend to concentrate on external factors such as one's social position, influence and popularity, wealth and standard of education. These are, of course, important in measuring one's success in material matters and it is perfectly understandable if many people exert themselves mainly to achieve all these. But internal factors may be even more crucial in assessing one's development as a human being. Honesty, sincerity, simplicity, humility, pure generosity, absence of vanity, readiness to serve others—qualities which are within easy reach of every soul—are the foundation of one's spiritual life. Development in matters of this nature is inconceivable without serious introspection, without knowing yourself, your weaknesses and mistakes. At least, if for nothing else, the cell gives you the opportunity to look daily into your entire conduct, to overcome the bad and develop whatever is good in you.
The qualities Nelson Mandela mentioned are a good starting point for being a true human being:
Honesty, sincerity, simplicity, humility, pure generosity, absence of vanity, readiness to serve others….
We have the opportunity to develop these things without being locked in a cell. We can touch what is real and magical in the Invisible by making space for it. Human beings distract themselves with things. They lose track of the mystical and the magical that is within them and become very concerned about the stuff that surrounds them. They don't want to lose anything, as it has become a part of their identity. Nelson Mandela didn't have any stuff to distract him. He chose to work in the realms of internal magic. These internal realms seem mysterious because they are not visible but they are very much present for anyone who pays attention.
We are surrounded by mystery and magic. We breathe and our heart beats without our conscious participation. Is that not a mystery? Seeds and bulbs are planted and grow into food and flowers and trees without our intervention. The mysteries that Nelson Mandela discovered while being in a jail cell are available to us. But we often aren't paying attention because we are awfully comfortable, and then we become awfully comfortable complaining about the things that we don't have; things we believe will make us whole and happy.
We also have created ways of measuring the world and ourselves that limit our ability to deliver the wonder and magic that is within us. We have cultural beliefs about what it means to be a real man or woman. These vary from culture to culture. How we look physically, how we share our feelings, what we do for a living, whether or not we have children. These things do not determine our value. What is important is how true we are to ourselves. Each of us has a unique gift to bring, a special way to love, to engage, and to create. This mystery, this love that comes from the Invisible directly to us, needs to be released into the world through us.
As this precious gift of love comes to you purely and generously, you have the privilege of revealing it to the world through your voice, through your spirit and through your smile. If you believe you are not man enough, not woman enough, not good enough, that gift is transformed into something that perpetuates a culture of lies. You engage in the ersatz human experience. The real experience is being yourself.
How invested are you in being yourself? Are all the things that are attempting to be born through you being filtered through the things that are not true?
Let's pay attention to the magic that is coming down to us all the time. How is it that the air on earth is in the right oxygen-nitrogen-hydrogen formula for human beings and for us to sustain life? How did that happen? The magic of life and love is keeping it so. It is keeping this entire planet, this entire world, working. It's allowing you to breathe, it's taking care of the bulbs that we plant, the seeds that fall, the smiles that we naturally can give.
Whether or not we see it, we are the perfect people and this is the perfect time for the delivery of the magic of life. This love is coming to you. For what purpose? For delivery into the world. And if you have everything in your heart and everything in your head skewed with erroneous beliefs about what it means to be a lovable human being, it has to go through all that misinformation, and what you are delivering into the world is not the joyous reality that is your gift to give. It's coming out in a way that isn't life-giving, and you become an ersatz human being. When you realize that the magical reality that's taking care of everything else is trustworthy, you can take a deep breath into being yourself, and ask, "What is mine to bring right now?" The world is hungry for your smile, for your gift, for you.
You have the power to change the world. The world is changed when the power of love comes to you with all your passion, all your life current, and all your wisdom—all that sunshine. It is coming to you to be delivered through a human being who knows who they are. And it is me and you and anyone who has woken up to the fact that they are part of the mystery; they are animated by the magic, and the magic coming through them brings the glory of life. It's glorious, what human beings can do. It's amazing what we can do together when we let the design and the mystery and the magic be revealed through us. There's a lot of things we can't see until they are manifest. And who is going to manifest them, if not the sons and daughters of the mystery?
There are ways in which we have become so closed to the possibility that things could be holy and wholesome that we really do need to be kick-started back into how wonderful this could all be. We do not need to meet the cultural criteria to have a fulfilled life. We don't have to be thin or strong, pretty or handsome, young or wealthy. This incredible magical mystery substance of love is coming into you, this gorgeous Being, wanting to be delivered into the world. Are you providing that blessing? Are you being kind, thoughtful, smiling, humble? Humble enough to be yourself, humble enough to know that you haven't been being yourself?
There can be pain in losing your old self when you start to become what's real. It can be difficult to stop playing the cultural identity game. It can be lonely. If you are honest, the current cultural way of living is already painful and lonely, as there is no place for the magic that is yours to bring. There can be pain in the loss of the acceptance of an old life, but there's the glory of life coming into you now. And as that life moves into the world, there is the returning cycle back to you.
This takes a little practice, to allow yourself to step out and be yourself. As Patrick Campbell says in his poem:
This, then, is the Pattern of Creation:
it is mysterious and as simple
it is as powerful and yet as effortless as gravity;
as a smile.
Let us start with a smile; a genuine smile from a genuine human being. We can stop looking for confirmation from the culture that is passing away and know this is the perfect day, the perfect time for the revelation of what it is to truly be a human being, animated and lit up by the magic and mystery of life.]]>
Have you ever been witness to something that someone else said or did, and just felt shame about how we can get as human beings? I have. There have been times I was ashamed of being a member of the human race as I witnessed another person's behavior.
Or have you ever, in your own experience, said or done something and thought, Ooh, that wasn't good…? Knowing that somehow, in what you had put forward, you hadn't expressed what is true of yourself. It's not so much an intellectual thing as it is an intuitive understanding and innate knowing of what is true of oneself.
In the world in which we live, there are all kinds of character displayed by human beings, through the media and then in our personal lives, some of which make you cringe. It makes me cringe, I can say. For me, as a man, I see what I would describe as ersatz masculinity, passed off as masculinity, with a certain amount of strength and vehemence, perhaps, and some kind of assurance that actually looks more like arrogance. And I think, Wow, that's not what I know to be what a man really is—certainly not the kind of man I want to be.
I look out at the world today and I see what is passed off as masculinity. And I try to understand how it could attain the degree of popularity that it does. There is a great yearning in the human heart to see the reality of masculinity, and in fact the world and the culture that we live in has a void of masculinity. And therefore, even some kind of ersatz masculinity that comes along is embraced. The root desire is for the real thing, but our culture seems to have a hard time embracing the real thing. And on the public scene, there is not much of the real thing to go around. And so we latch on to some kind of false masculinity.
Here we are, in the midst of things in our own life. And we are in the middle of the world as it is. When I look around, I see people, some of whom are pretending that there is nothing urgent transpiring in our world today. They are just looking to get ahead personally; to make some kind of personal advancement without any sense of the importance and significance of what's happening on the larger scene. Or perhaps they are just looking to survive.
And then you have some who do see that there is some issue to be addressed and are seeking their best way to address it. Yet so many who see that there is a profound issue facing humankind are, nonetheless, only nibbling away at the edges of the human experience, shifting and changing this or that, but so often not getting right down to the real core of what the issue is in this day for us as human beings.
It seems clear to me, and perhaps to you too, that with all the issues we face as humanity, and all the issues we face in our own personal lives, there is something at the heart of it all that is "the big one." It's something right at the heart and soul of who I am as a human being. It is what is happening at my core. It is what I am embracing as myself and what I am choosing to share with the world. And I don't mean just all the details of it, though the details are important. I am speaking of the very heart and soul, the core intent, the core vibration, the tone and the feeling of what I am expressing into my world—what I am committing myself to, and on what basis; what I am serving and what I am valuing. What I am worshiping in life.
I've had the privilege of meeting people who were a reflection to me of the truth at my core. They reflected what is right and true about me. Have you had someone like that in your life? What a gift!
I do believe that for any of us, to the degree that we have touched what is true of ourselves, no one can ever take it away from us, except us. In any moment, we have a chance to affirm it, to be it, to value it.
How do we value what we have touched as true through our own life journey? How do you hold it as precious?
One obvious way is simply that we give it attention. We listen to it, we tune in to it. We also have an opportunity in our life to value what we have touched that is of significance to us by giving it expression ourselves in the living of our life.
I heard the Ohio governor, John Kasich, speak this morning. I am glad there's a man like that on the political scene in America. I don't necessarily agree with all his politics, but I agree with his character. He is talking about the possibility of running for president, and he was asked what chance he had for success. Governor Kasich is a Republican, and it was brought to his attention that the current president has a 90 percent favorability rating among Republicans. His answer was this question: "At what point does somebody work and stand on principle? You want to be able to make a statement. What can I do to help my country?"
He had obviously touched a truth in his life that is compelling to him. And when you hear him speak, you feel the resonance of that truth.
In my own way, that is how it is for me. I value the truth that I know, in the words that I speak and the actions that I take in the world. That is how I worship truth. What I am writing to you now is my form of worship. You are witnessing me worship. This is me valuing what is supreme to me in my life. I hope it's valuable to you, and I hope it's valuable to the larger field in which I live. But actually, that's not my primary purpose for writing these words. These words are my worship.
I believe that all our lives are like that. All our lives are an opportunity for worship, every day and every moment, in what we express, what we exude, and what we embody. Our life can be a form of worship. It's a declaration of our valuing of the qualities of Being.
We could put names on those qualities. One of them is courage. Courage is the virtue of facing a situation, facing the unknown, and yet expressing what is in us and putting it out into the world. Courage is being ourselves unflinchingly. If we've been introduced to courage by how another person demonstrates it, and we value that quality, we have the opportunity to embrace it within ourselves. We worship that quality by being it.
And then there is the quality of truthfulness. Truthfulness comes with integrity. When we witness that in another person, we see the opportunity for truthfulness ourselves. We worship the quality of truthfulness in our own truthing, as Charles Eisenstein put it a few weeks ago. We worship truth by embodying the unfolding truth of Being and by speaking accurately in the current of that expression, saying and speaking what we know to be true, significant and important, what we know to be the basic structure of our own Being—what is true of all people.
Being truthful means that whether I consider someone my closest friend or distant from me, I am truthful. And no matter how untrue someone else is, I will see the truth of them. My way of valuing the truth of that person is to see it, to call to it, to relate to it, and not to accept what is false, no matter how many times it is put forward.
We could speak about many qualities of Being. All together, they add up to the wholeness of Being.
In the cycles of our growth and unfoldment, at some point we may realize we haven't been true to who we are—that in some ways we've been distracted and off the mark, and living a life that's been dictated by fear or by reaction to other people. Realizing that, we may open ourselves to something that is larger than who we have experienced ourselves to be. We crack open to the Divine, as we might think of it. That reality seems to be something other than what we are. And how else would it be if we have been identified with an experience of reaction and fear? It seems like this thing that we've touched that is so beautiful and so vast is something different from us, and it's a beautiful part of the spiritual path to open up to that and let it in. And yet, opening up to it, we have a different experience of ourselves to embrace. We experience who we are in a cosmic context. And before long, we have a changed sense of who we are.
At some point, we know it is self-betrayal to say that what we have touched is something different from who we are. It is a betrayal of who we are to identify ourselves as that reactionary person, that fearful person, that timid person, that withdrawn person. In fact, we are that person who has come alive, who has opened up to that larger reality. We are not a timid person; we are not a fearful person trying to be good. That's a recipe for constant reversion, it seems to me.
If you identify yourself as a timid, fearful person, trying to open up to the Divine, you keep reverting back to being the timid, fearful person. At some point you open up to the reality that I am that person that I experience myself to be when I am open to the Divine. I worship the Divine, I value it, I praise the Divine, when I am that, when I acknowledge, in all humility: This is me. Acknowledging that I am the Divine, I am acknowledging that you are too.
Here is the crux issue in human experience. I've known people who identified the crux issue for a person as a painful experience from their past. Daddy left home when they were seven, or Mother was emotionally distant, or Older Brother hit them when they were young. And therefore, according to this view, all the rest of a person's life is defined by that original wound, and if they want to go ahead and live a fulfilling life they have to deal with that crux issue. It's an intriguing idea. But a wound from out of the past isn't the crux issue in anyone's life. The crux is this: Who are you now? Because you can try to fix a wound that you believe is that crux issue, but if you don't fix who you experience yourself to be at your core, nothing else will make you happy or fulfilled. And either that crux issue that you thought you had won't go away, or if you think you have fixed it, you're liable to find another one.
What a person values, they worship. And what a person worships determines who they experience themselves to be. So the key question is, What am I worshiping? Not just when I show up at a synagogue or a church or a temple of some kind. What am I valuing in my expression every day? Am I worshiping the timid, reactive, fearful person?
We are all worshiping something—giving it credibility and substantiality. In the process, we are identifying ourselves with the object of our worship.
I choose to worship the ordering power of Love and its ability to create order in my own life, and in what I say and do. I worship the ordering power of Love by letting it move, no longer walking in the paths of futility, nibbling at the edges of reality. It's too late for that. It's too urgent, in your life and mine and in the world in which we live, to be nibbling at the edges. We need to go right to the heart of the matter and address the crux issue at the core of the human soul: What we are worshiping and who we are being.
The Angel's Call
This blue green orb turns and turns,
making another trip around the sun
on her path through the celestial sea;
Intrepid earth,
finding her destiny,
teaming with voyagers on board,
turning, turning,
Going 'round and 'round her source of warmth and light.
She sails through the deep
to explore territory unknown
of stars, of nebula and night.
And now, the curtains of heaven open,
just as she enters a new space
resonating with the frequency
of distant stars.
The face of the angel appears
through the parting of the telluric mist,
shimmering in heavenly light,
the hum of wings beating slowly, barely heard,
his presence felt more than seen,
his voice heard before he speaks,
we hear the angel's call.
All is well,
dear ones.
Your journey has just begun.
And while earth's fever
shall continue for a while,
peace is coming to the land,
entering you even now
as your human flesh transmutes
into robes of light.
Fly, angel of earth,
on this great journey
through the galaxy.
Keep coming, blessed one,
for you are becoming fully
what you already are,
a luminous star
in human form.
And so we continue
our precious earthly lives
now seen in the celestial setting
in which they take place.
And remember the angel's call
in all things,
large and small.
Aum-en. Aum-en. Aum-en.]]>
The process of Creation transpires over time. And fulfillment is an experience that happens over time, or at least we can look at it that way. We could also look at fulfillment as an experience in the present moment because, after all, when else are you going to experience it? It is something that happens now or it doesn't happen.
Many of us are familiar with the depiction of Creation in the shape of the torus. It is the shape of Creation. For those who haven't seen it, it looks something like an energetic donut. Creation emerges from the center of the donut, moving out into the field of Creation. And then something is coming back around to the middle. The torus is the energetic picture of a man, or of a woman. It is the picture of an atom, the solar system, and galaxies. It is a picture of Creation.
The torus brings us to the ancient teaching of the One Law of Cause and Effect. Sometimes it's referred to as the Law of Karma. Here are some quotations that address the Law of Cause and Effect. The first one is actually from Ecclesiastes:
Cast thy bread upon the waters: for thou shalt find it after many days. (Ecclesiastes 11:1)
Some of us knew Dr. Bill Bahan. He had a comical way of fracturing biblical quotations. His saying was: "Cast your bread upon the water, and it comes back sandwiches."
The tennis player Yannick Noah said:
I believe in Karma. If the good is sown, the good is collected. When positive things are made, that returns well.
Megan Fox says this:
I try to live with the idea that karma is a very real thing. So I put out what I want to get back.
Here's another quote, from the author Sol Luckman:
Contrary to popular misconception, karma has nothing to do with punishment and reward. It exists as part of our holographic universe's binary or dualistic operating system only to teach us responsibility for our creations—and all things we experience are our creations.
Edith Wharton said this:
People pay for what they do, and still more, for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it simply: by the lives they lead.
In spiritual paths around the world, there is this teaching: As you sow, so shall you reap. It is a profound and ubiquitous spiritual teaching, and an ancient one.
Sometimes the Law of Cause and Effect is distorted by some idea of goodness. That distortion goes like this: If you are good, good things will happen to you. For those of us who have made some attempt to be good, how disappointing! It isn't always very fruitful. You might be good in your own mind, doing the things that society or your parents might have told you are good. And then your life becomes meaningless, boring and confused.
What is truly good? Goodness is generative. It brings creativity and it yields abundance. That is the truly good. The truly good is purely creative energy.
In the context of Emissaries of Divine Light, before the ideas about the torus became popular, there was a related teaching of the flow of Creation depicted by the figure 8. The lower part of the figure 8 is a depiction of the torus. It shows what comes out from us and what returns to us. But there is the upper part of the figure 8. That is the part that goes into the Invisible. The teaching goes like this: We belong at the crossover point between the Invisible and the visible, right at that nexus point where the power of Creation comes out of the Invisible into the world. It comes down from God, out of heaven, out of the Invisible.
In my mind, I see a picture of us as human beings on the planet, in the midst of the visible world. As I look at nature it seems clear that the natural world has its own relationship with the Invisible. We have an opportunity to play a part in that, but as we witness nature, there it is: something constantly emerging out of the Invisible in the unfolding pattern of Creation. In the coming and going of the year and the seasons, we see that pattern being made manifest. Leaves emerge on the trees, and then the life within them goes back to whence it came. The whole natural world is participating in this process.
Where are we, as human beings, in the process of Creation? In my mind's eye, I see us coming along as observers of nature. If you picture Creation as a figure 8, there is nature doing its thing, relating to the invisible patterns of Creation. We come along, outside of this pattern, and say, "We would like it to be this way." And so we bend the process of Creation to our will.
Standing outside the crossover point of the figure 8, we mess with the natural processes of Creation. I think most of us live in the faith that Mother Earth knows what she's doing, and she knows how to handle herself. As the bumper sticker with the whale says, "Save the humans." In the end, it is actually us who are putting ourselves at risk in that whole process, while causing havoc in the creative field in which we live while we do it.
What would it mean for us, as human beings, to stand at the crossover point? That implies that we are not just imposing our good intentions and ideas on our creative field that is represented by the lower part of the figure 8.
To pretend that we're going to experience fulfillment by standing at that point within the torus, just looking out at the manifest world and deciding what we think it ought to be, is ultimately the great disappointment. My experience is that it's a recipe for unhappiness, because what else would you do in that position than attempt to bend Creation to your will? Of course, it's a good will.
In Brazil, a far-right candidate, Jair Bolsonaro, swept the recent presidential election. Christian Poirier, the program director of Amazon Watch, commented on the election results:
His reckless plans to industrialize the Amazon in concert with Brazilian and international agribusiness and mining sectors will bring untold destruction to the planet's largest rainforest and the communities who call it home and spell disaster for the global climate.
To Bolsonaro and the Brazilians who voted for him, it would be good to develop the resources of the Amazon for the people of Brazil. But without being in touch with the pattern of Creation that's within all things and within us, we lack wisdom in our movement in the world as individuals, as a culture, and then as a race. We ruin our creative field, which is ultimately our own undoing.
At this time of year, as we move into Thanksgiving and the winter holidays, there is a particular opportunity to find our place, first of all—not in the outer manifest world but relative to the Invisible and the Infinite that is inside us, above us, and within all things. It is an opportunity to come home in that sense. We are made to live at the crossover point of the figure 8, so it's not as if we can escape the manifest world into the Invisible. I suppose there are cycles in our life where one or the other tends to emphasize itself to us. But certainly it's impossible to find a sense of home, a sense of rationality even, in the world in which we live if we exclude our sense of relationship to the Invisible.
For any of us who stop long enough, becoming still enough and open enough, we find there is something there for us in the Unseen. It may be invisible, but it's not blank, and it's not nothing. There is the reality of Being, in the Invisible. And in fact, that is where Being is. Opening up to that within ourselves, we are at the same time opening up to the Beingness of one another. We are touching all of Being—the Being of all people, the Beingness of the manifest and the unmanifest, the Beingness of this world and of this earth. A person becomes wise when they are relating in that way, and there is the possibility of fulfillment.
Fulfillment is, in any moment, standing at the crossover point, between the two circles of the figure 8. It is being there and allowing to pour forth from oneself the forces of Creation that naturally come through us as human beings. It is allowing those forces to come into consciousness and through consciousness into the world, creating a world—our Creation. And it is being there and receiving what comes back out of the world with gratitude, from the perspective of the crossover point, lifting up what comes to us.
In the fulfillment of Creation possible to anyone, they realize that while their own nourishment is being provided for, what comes to us is for the all of Being. What comes is lifted up in puja and in worship.
I know that some of what comes to me is meant for my personal nourishment—spiritually, emotionally, mentally and physically. But far more is meant for the field in which I serve—for the entire flow of Creation. And so I offer it up to the creative powers that are bigger than me, for creative use. And so it is when we're standing at the crossover point with all things that come to us. That is fulfillment. Fulfillment is not dictating how our needs are to be met or what should happen in our world. It is simply bringing the creativity that is in our heart to bring, that is pregnant within us and within all of Being, and then using all things to feed the flow of Creation.
This teaching of karma can go so wrong. Getting some glimpse of how all this works, people can get into spiritual engineering: How to make a million dollars with our spirituality. Eek! How to tweak what you are expressing into the world so that it will make money, make you satisfied and happy, bring you fame and fortune. I'd rather be a pauper. We are meant to know fulfillment, but on Love's own terms, on reality's own terms, not our own.
This was Uranda's beautiful statement on the Law of Karma:
Let love radiate without concern for results.
Fulfillment involves results; it involves manifestation. And we'd have to be a fool not to be aware that what manifests in the world has a relationship to what we radiate. But what Uranda was calling for was an innocence of heart in the process, so that our fidelity with the Invisible can be total and unrestrained; so that our openness to what truly wants to be born can be total. We are not sitting there trying to engineer our love so that it's making us money or bringing us the results that we want.
I'm just open, I'm just passionate, I'm just responsive. I'm just giving myself to what has ultimate value. I'm giving myself as an instrument of expression of that, in service to it, with the aim that the way that it comes through me is as clear and transparent and as powerful and potent as it is meant to be, as fertile as it is meant to be, as loving as it is meant to be, on its own terms—not trying to extract the resources of my own personal Amazon River, whatever that might be.
Fulfillment is found in the willingness to be consistently present at the crossover point, in the now, letting the stream of Creation flow more and more powerfully. It is doing that together with others at the crossover point. I want to be there with you. That's fulfillment. Does it have practical results? Yes, of course. This is the process that created the world, after all.
I love this quote from Isaiah on fulfillment and the Law of Karma. It is among the most profound and beautiful poetry in all of sacred scripture.
For as the rain cometh down, and the snow from heaven, and returneth not thither, but watereth the earth, and maketh it bring forth and bud, that it may give seed to the sower, and bread to the eater:
So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it.
For ye shall go out with joy, and be led forth with peace: the mountains and the hills shall break forth before you into singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.
(Isaiah 55:10-12)
Spiritual Practice
This week, through the day, bring yourself back to an experience of relationship to the Invisible with this simple thought: "The fact that I am alive is proof of how much I am loved."]]>
These words are from Pat Humphries' profoundly inspirational contemporary folk song "Swimming to the Other Side."
We are living 'neath the great Big Dipper
We are washed by the very same rain
We are swimming in the stream together
Some in power and some in pain
We can worship this ground we walk on
Cherishing the beings that we live beside
Loving spirits will live forever
We're all swimming to the other side
The song acknowledges that we each move through life in different ways, "Some in power and some in pain." We are each having an experience of our own level of conscious awakening to the universal. We can easily have compassion for it all.
Through it all, there is the very urge of life—the urge to thrive, the urge to live, the urge to love that's within all human beings. And there's the reality of the Divine that is present in all people. We speak about that individualized aspect of the Divine that is within a person as "the angel"—not just an angel with a harp in heaven someplace, but the reality of Being that is present in each person.
Would you agree that the reality within every person on this planet is doing the best that it can? We might question whether the human personality is doing the best it can. Sometimes it seems like it's doing the best it can to make a mess!
If experience is bound by personality—a less kind word for that is ego—we look around and see the ego world in which we live, which is evident enough. But then we may be living in that ego world and none other. We don't see what is happening in the bigger picture, so we end up living in our own personality-defined existence, and we see other people in that context.
We might notice that some are in pain; they are living within the confines of personality, in a very local sense of themselves. So we can see that, but we don't have to limit how we're relating to somebody according to that. We can see the angel that is present and have compassion for the angel that is there, doing all that they can to awaken the human experience, to awaken a person to love, to awaken a person to their true nature as a creator.
We might describe the human journey as moving on a path from seeing oneself as a victim of circumstance, full of self-concern and self-protection, to an experience of creatorship, where we realize that we are not just a victim of the world that we're living in—we are creating the world that we are living in. That might come with an oh-my-goodness when we look at the world as it is and what is happening in the world and realize, "I'm playing a part in creating all this." Or we could be like the ostrich, who is said to put their head in the ground, and fail to acknowledge that we are contributing to global warming. But who else is creating war on the planet? Or poverty? It's us, as human beings.
Here is a fresh view of what the awakening process looks like for us as human beings. You can reflect on it from your own experience and your witnessing of others.
An unawake person exhibits unconscious behavior and is unaware of what is happening in their own experience and what's happening around them. There is gross darkness. An awakening person begins to see that there is something wrong in the world around them. And then they might begin to realize that there is also something wrong within themselves—that through their upbringing and their culture they have sustained some kind of wounding and unnatural limitation.
What they are seeing might be truthful as far as it goes. There has been a wounding to the human psyche through history that has left scars in human culture. And we each sustain various degrees of emotional wounding. However, that awareness alone doesn't get the person into creatorship. They are left with a problem: What do I do?
Wounds to the human psyche and to human culture are difficult to heal. I've watched people attempt to heal their wounds. It can seem never-ending. Often, just when it seems there has been a healing, the wound reappears.
How does the healing of the human psyche come? How does an awakening person become whole?
A person finds their own wholeness when their awareness of the human wound transforms from a noun to a verb. The most obvious reality is that a wound or a scar at any level of human experience is a thing. It is something you have that is a result of something that happened in the past. But if that is the only way a person sees it, the wound is difficult to deal with. After all, you can't change the past, even if it is only five seconds ago. More than that, the problem is not just that the person has that wound. The larger problem is that the experience of the wound has unconsciously affected who the person is being and how they are acting. When the person sees the wound as a noun, they are unconscious of how it has become a verb.
In the awakening process, a person has the opportunity to see that while a wound is something they have—it's a thing that is the result of something that happened—it is also something they are doing and being. They don't just have a wound. They are wounding.
That might be a bitter pill to swallow. But it is ultimately self-empowering. Because when you realize that the wound is not only something you have but something you are doing, then you are empowered to act differently. You could be different. You realize that the wound you have does not define who you are being and what you are expressing.
People tend to be unconscious that they are wounding—they are self-limiting and self-sabotaging, self-criticizing and self-shaming. And if they are doing those things to themselves, they are inevitably imposing those same things on others.
When we are coming into our creatorship and out of victimhood, we are realizing that while the wound is a noun, it's also a verb. We see what we are doing and who we are being, and then realize the opportunity we have to be a creator. And to create.
There's good news in all this: if your wounding is something you are doing, you can stop doing it. That's the empowering thing. If wounding is a verb, it's an action you are taking and you could simply take a different action. One of the most powerful things I ever heard through Emissaries of Divine Light was simply this: You know what you express. What an empowering statement! If you express self-wounding, you know self-wounding. You are self-sabotaging, self-limiting, self-criticizing and self-shaming. And if you are doing that to others, you are inevitably doing it to yourself.
And if you express the universal creativity that is in all people, if you express the Divine Being that is present in yourself, you are at the same time confirming that reality in all other people. How is it said? Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. And it's even more profound than that. What we are doing unto others, we are doing to ourselves. And what we are doing to ourselves, we are doing to each other.
The word angel is familiar from religious iconography. It refers to an individual aspect of Divine Being. While the word can relate to a disincarnate reality, it can also refer to the individual aspect of Divine Being that incarnates in every human being. For many people, they are unconscious of that reality of themselves. Others have awakened to the awareness of the angel. As the song says, some live in power and some in pain.
An awake person has the consciousness of the angel. They see what the angel sees. And they relate to the angel in others.
If we relate to the angel in another, it evokes compassion, because what we see is what the angel is dealing with. We have compassion for the angel. I've known hardly anyone in my life who is living their life under ideal circumstances. When I witness the people in my life, I witness huge needs that are not being met. It is sad when you see the situation for what it is. Most people are living on an island: isolated, feeling separate, perhaps buried in their iPhone, laptop or television. The currents of love that would naturally flow in a true community of spirit aren't present for the person, and they're enduring life as best they can. Underneath that experience, the angel is present. And the angel is doing everything they know how to do to assist the person to come to a different state of awareness and to create something different in their life.
Witnessing other people and their unmet needs, there is a natural inclination to think about how we could play a part in meeting their legitimate needs. How could I help? It is a natural question to ask. And sometimes we have a part to play in meeting the needs of others. But there are limits to how much you can do in somebody else's life.
For ourselves, as we mature spiritually, we learn to live with the unmet needs, not because they don't legitimately need to be met but because we know that attempting to take matters into our own hands and force the fulfillment of our needs leads to disaster. It is the source of addiction of all kinds. We learn to live with our unmet needs and the vacuum they create. Nature abhors a vacuum and tends to fill them where it can. And so we take the attitude:
I will let this need be filled in its own time, in its own way, knowing that if I try to take that thing into my own hands in some arbitrary way, no good comes of it.
When we live in a way that accepts and transcends the immediate needs that are actually present, and we live into our creatorship, what rightly needs to come to us in the flow of Creation does come in its own time, in its own way.
Knowing this, if we feel a void, what are we to do? Complain about what is coming to us? Initiate the flow of Creation as the angel. We realize that we know what we express, and so we allow to radiate from ourselves the positive creative expression that is natural to us as a creator, as the angel.
And we always have that creativity to give. Faith in your own generosity allows Creation to continue, and allows what can be fulfilled in one's own life to be fulfilled.
Compassion for another human being is wishing this for them. Compassion is the desire that they awaken to their opportunity to move into their creatorship and allow fulfillment to come. And certainly, compassion may lead us to directly meet the needs of another human being. But, as it's said, Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.
A wound has to do with unmet needs, and injury in the face of unmet needs. When a person allows a wound to define them, they are denying the creatorship and embracing victimhood. They are being a victim instead of the angel. And fulfillment never comes to victims. It comes to the angel, incarnate and in conscious expression in human form.
I pray for the fulfillment of the angel in your life and in mine.
Spiritual Practice
This week, practice being aware of the angel in the people in your life, even if they seem weighed down with their human experience. Find an appropriate way, however subtle, to affirm their angelic reality for yourself and to them.]]>
We are showing up for the birth of a new day for humanity. We want it to happen, we are excited about it happening, but how does it happen?
The Tree of Life is a symbol of Creation. It is a powerful icon present in cultures around the globe.
The Tree tells us many things. You might imagine a mighty oak wishing for progeny, hoping that they would come. But they don't just materialize, do they? Through the course of a year there are acorns that are dropped. They drop onto the ground in the fall and they gestate through the period of the winter, to sprout and grow in the spring. Not all acorns become oak trees, but many will.
What does that tell us about us as a living Tree of Life, as a human being? Or, together with others, composing a Tree of Life that is a source of new birth? We might want it to happen, but it doesn't happen just because we want it to. Just like the oak tree, we must harmonize with the way Creation works in our field. We're not here to produce acorns and oak trees per se. And we have our own human experience of the proliferation of our species. But we are not talking about biological birth, even though the birth of a baby, too, tells us something about the work that we are about now. In biological life there are processes of Creation that must take place. The woman who longs to have a baby generally has to meet somebody first. There is a process. It isn't instantaneous. There is something to do now, but the processes of life transpire wonderfully and magically over time. We have to harmonize with those processes to give birth to the new.
The oak tree doesn't determine the seasons. It moves in the seasonal patterns. It moves with the cycles of life and accommodates those cycles—the sun and the wind, the temperature, and the snow. So we must harmonize with the cycles of life that we don't determine ourselves and are bigger than us. Harmonizing with those cycles, we bring forth a new reality.
The field for the oak tree is the forest and the soil upon which the acorn falls. And children are born within the field of a biological family. What is our field? And exactly what are we bringing forth? The field in which we are working is the consciousness for humanity. We are bringing the DNA for a new world to the field of consciousness. This is the spiritual DNA for what we are becoming as humanity. We allow that DNA to fall from us as the acorn falls from the tree. It comes in the ideas that inspire the mind. It comes on the current of love that moves through the heart. It comes as love-inspired acts in the world.
We let in the love that's bigger than we are, just as the sun is bigger than the oak. Like the oak tree, we didn't make the sun. We didn't make the love that is available to us. But we acknowledge it and we let it in. We let the light of a new reality infill consciousness. And it tells us that the world does not have to be the way it is, that here is the new world; and when we open to it, it paints pictures in the mind of what that new world is. And we pass on the vision that we are inspired to see.
Those pictures are not just some kind of fantasy. It is the light of reality coming into the instrument of consciousness that we are. We are the tree in the middle of a field of consciousness. And so we become passionate about bringing the DNA for a new world—the ideas, the pictures and the feeling essence of a new reality.
Do you have the illusion that just because you sow the seeds for a new world today—an inspiring idea, an inspiring word, an inspiring poem, a book, or a song—that the world is instantaneously changed? Of course, there is a cycle to any birth.
We are the sower of those seeds, and we are also the field into which they are sown. Those seeds are being sown in the field of consciousness. And just as the earth is the womb for the acorn, holding that seed to sprout and to grow, in this field of consciousness we are the womb of consciousness that is holding the seeds of a new world so that they might sprout and grow among us and bring a new culture, a new reality experienced by us.
We have the opportunity to do that in this spiritual community: to receive the seeds of a new world, not expecting them to create that world instantaneously. We have instant breakfast and microwave ovens in the world in which we live. But the seeds of a new world have to be held safe over time so they can sprout and grow. We are holding the seeds of a new world in consciousness. They are precious. Somebody else's inspiration is precious because it contains the seed of a new world. Our own inspiration is precious to us.
The greenhouses at Sunrise Ranch were afflicted by disease and by pests of different kinds—perhaps a symbol for the field of consciousness in our world. We got through the year; we had tomatoes to serve to ourselves and to our guests and to bring to the farmers markets in nearby Loveland and Fort Collins. But now that the year is over, Ignacio and his crew have emptied the greenhouses of everything. They've been washing it all down so that they can start anew with good soil, and so that we can take good seed and plant it in that soil.
In the work we are doing, we need good soil in which to plant our seeds. What is that good soil? We are working in the field of consciousness. This is a conscious birth. The soil is the soil of consciousness—our consciousness, our mind and heart, fertile, open, with just the right conditions in which the new birth can happen. We hold the seeds of a new world deep in the dark of consciousness. We can't let any unhealthy states of consciousness make it impossible for the new seed to germinate and grow.
For Emissaries of Divine Light, we mark our year as beginning and ending on September 16, which was the birth of Emissaries of Divine Light in 1932. We gather with people from around the world at about that time of year. We sow seeds for the coming year and beyond, seeds that are not going to sprout instantaneously. But in those seeds is the pattern of what will be born in this field of consciousness, in this spiritual community, and with our friends around the world.
In our context, we carry the seed of new life to be born as living forms in consciousness. Those living forms bear new life themselves. The oak tree drops an acorn for a new tree. And what does that new tree provide? More acorns! We are interested in growing those trees in our field, which themselves sow more seed, more DNA for a new world.
These are principles of Creation. We are here to be creators, truly, but we have to harmonize with Creation and not expect Creation to bend to our will. There is a process of Creation. We are here to be creators who harmonize with that process, and therefore we become very potent, very powerful. We have a huge impact in the world because we harmonize with that process—not because we try to invent something on some arbitrary human basis.
I am excited by the opportunities we have to sow the seed of a new world into the field of consciousness—a new song, a new poem, a new chant, a new word, a new idea, a new vision. Your words, your poems, your inventions, your seeds for a new world. Our seeds. We are the sower of those seeds, and we are also the fertile ground for those seeds, cherishing them. They are precious.
Some of those seeds are coming without all the bright advertising of GMO seeds that you could buy at the local ag store. Some of our songs might not win America's Got Talent or Britain's Got Talent. They are precious, not because they are flashy, not because they meet some commercial media standard. They are precious because they are seeds of a new world. It could be a quiet conversation with a friend. Those seeds are precious because they are the seeds of a new world. When you plant those seeds in someone else's heart, they might grow. The seeds might grow and the person might grow. Their world might grow. You have an opportunity to sow seeds of a new human experience, a new human world. It's not going to happen instantaneously.
We could be distracted with all the rot and all the disease. The whole world is doing that, is it not? We could have spent our whole time trying to deal with all the pests of the greenhouse. We are more interested in simply providing the right condition and the right seed for something to happen. We could be so distracted with the rot of our culture that we never provide the fertile soil for the new seed and we never bring the new seed into the world. So many are doing that, never seeing the opportunity they have to be the Tree of Life in this field of consciousness, this human field.
Let us sow the seeds of a new world—the seeds of the truth of love. Not my truth, not your truth. The true pattern of a new world that brings life. The truth of love brings life.
And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.
Spiritual Practice
This week, express something in words or artistic expression that you share with at least one other person. Let it represent your vision of what is possible for a human being or for the world.]]>
At the commencement of our service here today, I'd like to consciously join people of goodwill around the world to claim our humanity, to claim our kindness, to claim our oneness and our solidarity with the good people of Squirrel Hill in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, who are hurting today following a tragic shooting. And we say, "Your pain is our pain. We are with you. We bear this together as humanity. And we bear it in strength and courage and love and determination, and with the knowledge that things don't have to be this way. And as far as we are concerned, the truth is that things are not and will not be this way."
Join me in a moment of silence as we offer our hearts in solidarity for the people of Pittsburgh.
* * * * * * *
I was fascinated to notice that the name of the synagogue in Squirrel Hill is the Tree of Life. There is the irony of this horrible picture of death in the Tree of Life Synagogue. Yet the Tree of Life prevails. The Tree of Life is a universal symbol from all around the world; from the Judeo-Christian tradition, from Mesopotamia, from Native American traditions, Buddhism, Norse traditions and more. The Tree of Life relates to the very process of Creation and evolution.
We are being born into the consciousness of the field in which we live. And we'll go big in a minute with that, but I want to start local. For those who are part of the Sunrise Ranch community, I'll talk about Sunrise Ranch. But the same applies for anyone anywhere.
Consider this possibility. The consciousness that you have is not just your personal consciousness. You are walking around with the consciousness of Sunrise Ranch. You are Sunrise Ranch made conscious. You are this field of humanity, and the thoughts and the feelings that arise for you, the awareness you have, is of this community of people becoming conscious of itself. It's becoming conscious of itself through you.
The evolution of this community is constellating in your awareness, and you are feeling the urge of evolution for Sunrise Ranch. You're feeling the hopes and the desires of this field—what it wants to become. That is moving in your heart and mind. And while you may be taking it personally—and there is a personal dimension to your experience, no question—actually what you are aware of is the entire field in which you live. And that field is not just the people who live here. There are all the people around the world who are connected with this place, all the people who visit, and all the people who come to our websites. Your conscious awareness is of that field.
This is just the human part of our field so far. We have about fifty cows on the property. Is it possible that you are being aware for those cows? There is wildlife galore. Do you think you are becoming conscious of that field of wildlife? How about the rocks—the granite boulders on Green Ridge and the red sandstone of the rimrock? Do you think their solid presence lives in your consciousness? Is it possible that you are Sunrise Ranch made conscious?
We'll take it out beyond there. Are you America made conscious? All the human experience, all the strands of intelligence, all the heart of America—the heart of immigrants, the heart of Native Americans, the heart of black Americans from Africa? Is it possible you are America made conscious? If America hurts, you hurt? If America thrives, you thrive? Because you are the mind and the heart of America. You are this creative field becoming aware of itself through a human being.
And we'll go global. Is it possible that you are the heart of the planet aroused? The heart of the planet that's beginning to become aware of itself through a human form? We hardly know why we feel what we feel, and we personalize it. And then we attach those feelings to things in our private lives. We attach them to personal experiences, we attach them to each other, with all the human drama. That personalization is happening for people around the world. So as human beings we sometimes function as if life were a soap opera or a reality TV show. But that's not what's really happening.
What we are becoming aware of is not just happening at a personality level. That's the old paradigm of consciousness. The planet is becoming aware of itself; the field is becoming aware of itself. The field wants to become something.
Our planet has a fever. We call it global warming. Do you feel that fever? It is a process of healing and becoming. If a hurricane comes through, it is understandable that someone might take that personally. But there's something that's happening that isn't just personal, even though it impacts us as human beings. We are participating in that larger event, and yet humanity as a whole hardly knows what's going on. When we awaken to what is actually transpiring, we can see the perilous things that are happening, and they certainly are perilous in many respects. But we also feel the joy of the planet, which is becoming something.
What is the Tree of Life? It is what is at the center of the field. In the midst of the Garden was the Tree of Life. It is in the middle of the field, whatever field it is. In the middle of the field of the solar system is the sun. There is a center to the Milky Way galaxy, and at the center of the atom is a nucleus. In every field there is a center. For Sunrise Ranch, there is a central heartbeat, and there is the Tree of Life.
The Tree of Life is the conscious core of the creative field. It is known by many different names, each of which illustrate an aspect of its function. It is the heart of the hub of the wheel. The wheel is the field—all the facets of experience, all the dimensions of the field of creativity, the field that is evolving. And at the center of that field is the Tree of Life, the heart of the hub of the wheel.
Sometimes we as human beings picture ourselves as somewhere on the periphery of the field. Someone who lives at Sunrise Ranch, in a personalized state of awareness—not vocationally aroused—could toddle in to work every day and plop themselves down at a desk. Or go out and hoe a row in the garden, seeing themselves as a cog in the machine of Sunrise Ranch. I suggest that's not a fun way to be in any field. Come to the heart of the hub of the wheel, to the Tree of Life. There's consciousness there. There's awareness of the field. The heart of the field is there. The intelligence of the field is there.
When we come to the Tree of Life, we find life. There is something emerging, and it's beautiful. We feel the urge of the field, we feel the openness of it. We feel the Great Mother at Sunrise Ranch. We feel her emerging through nature and through the hearts of people. The Mother is holding those hearts and holding this field. The Mother is bringing fertility and she wants activation. The Mother wants her people to live, she wants the field to thrive, and she opens herself to what is bringing that field forward.
It is the activating energy of evolution that carries us forward. When we come to the Tree of Life at the center of the field, we are filled with the DNA of the world that is becoming. We are filled with the knowledge of that. It comes into our mind; we see it, we have dreams, we have visions, we have hopes. And as bad as things sometime appear to be, a seemingly irrational urge within tells us there is something great happening. There is something great that's appearing, and we are moving into something great together.
It's said, related to leadership, that it's lonely at the top. In the world in which we live, it has been lonely at the center of the field. But more and more, there are people who don't see themselves as just out on the periphery of the field. They see themselves at the center. They experience themselves as being the heart and the consciousness of the evolution of the field. They are conscious of the field. They are in the field and they meet at the center, at the heart of the hub of the wheel. They are an embodiment of the Great Mother and the Great Father.
This principle is demonstrated in theory, though often not in practice, in our United States Congress. We have people from the spokes of the wheel—from all the states, and even geographies within the states—going to the Congress that is, at least theoretically, the center place of governance for our country. And theoretically, they are meeting there not only to fulfill their pork-barrel issues (those things that they want for their state so that they can get reelected), but to be the Tree of Life for the nation as a whole. The Members of Congress are there so the nation can live—not just to take their piece out of the federal budget.
I don't know if any of you heard those who spoke this morning about the events in Squirrel Hill. It was amazing. They weren't in our capital, but they spoke from the heart of the nation. They spoke of oneness. They spoke of unity. They spoke for this field of America. I might have elected any of them president. They spoke of their brotherhood and sisterhood, of their unity, of their coming to comfort and support one another, and of their desire to find a way forward. They spoke of mutual respect and love, and of bearing a burden together.
We should stop looking for the Tree of Life in places where it isn't, and celebrate where it is, and place ourself there. It might not be in the United States Congress, but today it was in Squirrel Hill. Whatever else happens, let's be there in the capital city of consciousness, and let's find each other there. Let's not let it be lonely at the heart of the hub of the wheel.
For Sunrise Ranch, is the heart of the hub of the wheel a vacuous place? Or are there Beings that are coming together at that place of Creation, bringing the powers of the Great Mother—what comes up out of the field from the wisdom of the field itself? And bringing the powers of the Great Father—what comes down into the field from the Invisible. The field comes together when we come together in the capital city, which is a place of consciousness for Sunrise Ranch.
The capital city of America is the same. It could be in Washington, D.C., but it's not just a physical locality. The capital city is a place in consciousness where we meet, where we are the consciousness of the field together. You may have an awareness of a particular dimension of the field, just as a congressperson may have a particular awareness of how corn is growing in Iowa. But we come together not just as representatives of the place from which we come. We come to the center in the capital city of consciousness to be the heart of the field, to be the consciousness of the field, to be the intelligence for the field, not just a parochial, local intelligence for a human personality who is trying to work it all out.
When we are the Tree of Life, the intelligence of the field is available to us. And all of us together are joining genius to genius. It's the genius of the field; it's the genius for the field that's coming through us uniquely. Then we are all together joining genius to genius, and there is the intelligence for the field to move forward, to evolve and become what it desires to be. The great forces of life are unleashed from the center and radiate throughout the field.
The field is alive. By its very nature, Sunrise Ranch is alive. The planet is a living planet. But quite apparently, there's a role that we have to play as consciousness for the field, which activates the evolution of the field in a unique way. When we got here in 1945, this was a dryland farm. There has been consciousness here that's catapulted evolution forward at Sunrise Ranch, and we are only getting going.
Do you want to come to the center of the field, to the Tree of Life, and find each other there? Perhaps we try to get it together. Congress representatives try to get along, and people at Sunrise Ranch try to get along. We get along when we know our place at the center of the field. And when we know our place there, then our function in the spokes of the wheel has a place to meet. The great meeting place is the Tree of Life for the field.
The Creation story from our culture speaks about the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. There is a calamity that is depicted in that story. Essentially, that calamity occurs when we bring a very human kind of intelligence that isn't the intelligence of the field. It is not the actual intelligence for the evolution of the field, so we introduce creations that shouldn't have been created. The great intelligence that we are capable of is the intelligence of the field itself that we are now becoming conscious of, and the intelligence of evolution itself, as it is—not as we want it to be, bent to our will. The intelligence of the field is contained within the desire of the field to become what it has the potential to become. We become aware of that, and we become brilliant. We live, and the field lives.
Share with me this pattern of meditation:
Picture the heart of the hub of the wheel for Sunrise Ranch. What is this field? What does it want? Feel its urge to grow. Feel its heart. Be open to the intelligence of Creation for this field.
Who do you find with you? Are you all by yourself? Are there other Beings who are there too?
Now think of the field of America. Picture the capital city in consciousness—not Washington, D.C., but a place of awareness of this field where people of goodwill gather. Feel the heart of America, and what it's meant to the world. Feel the hopes and dreams that it has represented, the ideals of freedom and natural law. Think of how it is hurting and what it wants to become, for itself and for the world. Can you feel other people with you there, in the capital city of consciousness for America? Do you know that this is your country, this is your field?
Let's move to the globe. Allow yourself to be the heart of its people. Feel all the forces of life on this planet, swimming in the oceans and on its continents. Feel its evolving condition, what it is throwing off and leaving behind, and what it is becoming. Allow yourself to be the heart of our planet—your planet, your people, from wherever they come; whatever country, whatever race, whatever religion, whatever background. Allow yourself to be at the heart of the hub of the wheel for Planet Earth, and for this body of humanity that is undergoing this supreme transmutation, and out of which there is a new birth, the birth of a new human, Homo amore universalis.
I invite you to look around and see the world from this place. And as you have your own human experience, which we all do, I invite you to see those experiences as part of your field becoming conscious of itself through you.
Spiritual Practice
Several times a day, deliberately see yourself as the Tree of Life in the midst of your creative field. Ask yourself what your field is feeling, what it is thinking, and what it is trying to become.]]>
There's a profound spiritual practice that has to do with beautiful, orderly thought. For a person who finds that their thoughts are going all over the place, it is very effective. It goes like this:
Pay attention to what you are saying so that it is as optimally creative as possible, both in the content of the words and in the way they are said.
The reason this practice works so well is that if you care about what you say, you have to think about what you say. There is a mental discipline that naturally kicks in to support your intention of creative speech. While it is true that you have to have creative thought to produce creative speech, if your focus is on your thought without respect to what you say, the process is far more difficult. Those errant thoughts are much harder to hear than errant words.
This spiritual practice can be expanded to include everything in life—not only to what we say but everything we do. There is a conscious awareness, probably on the part of all who read this Pulse of Spirit, that we have a great gift to give to the world—something important to say, something important to do, something important to manifest, and a message to bring. For you, what is that message? What is that living embodiment? What is that gift you have to give? And how could you best give it? And what is it for us together? Because we never give our greatest gift all by ourselves.
If you really knew that the gift you have to give is true, and it is significant for the world, and you began to reflect on what that gift is, what do you think you would come up with? What is your highest vision of that possibility? Looking at your world and the needs of the world in which we live, and considering the natural gifts of your own soul, what might be possible? We can reflect on what our highest vision of that possibility is. I encourage you to dream big, to think about what it might optimally be if you really went for it.
If we are in that kind of a process, we can also be thinking about what it would take from us to deliver that gift. There is the outer embodiment of that gift. But for most of us, there's something that would have to happen inside for that gift to be fully given. Something would have to change. Something would have to blossom. Something would have to grow. There would have to be an opening of mind, an opening to the possibility so that the fullness of what is really possible might be seen and come through. And then an opening to the means by which it might happen—the wisdom that would allow it to truly manifest.
My experience is that if I give my mind that kind of job to do, it gets on it. Is that true for you? When you ask your mind to appreciate the possibilities present in your life, and to open up and work for you, there is a wisdom that comes from we-don't-know-where, but which floods through the mind. The mind opens when we give it the job to do. So many people are bossed around by their own mind instead of being their mind's boss, giving it work to do.
And how about matters of the heart? Are there feelings that are in the way of the highest vision of your gift? Some disappointment in your own life, some knotty problem, some repetitive pattern in your own behavior perhaps? Or perhaps disappointment in others? Oftentimes the shortcomings of others loom large in our minds. Somehow, in our heart, we have to do something about those things if our gift is to be given. We have to see them for what they are, and allow them to be melted away, allow our heart to be cracked open; because the gift that is to be given isn't just an action per se, and not just a bright idea per se. It is a gift of a human being, after all. And the biggest gifts don't come just with bright ideas. They come with a heart opening, they come with the power of Universal Love released through that gift and into the world. Without that awesome motivation brought by that Love, we are liable to falter by the side of the road when the giving of our gift is still incomplete.
When we have a great vision and we commit ourselves to that vision, our heart cracks open to fulfill that vision. You can't buy that experience from any workshop or any book or any teacher or any practice, other than the practice of committing yourself to giving your gift with everything, and then asking your own heart and mind to open, reshape and transform so that you can actually fulfill that possibility. Because the sad reality is that if we don't open and change and shift and accommodate the gift coming into us and through us, we cannot give it. And then we join many other people around the world who have had a flicker of possibility and set themselves to it, only to be disappointed by their own lack of follow through and their own lack of willingness to become all of who they need to become to give their gift. And so they go back to a life of limitation, and they do not have the joy of giving their gift.
Is there any greater joy, really? None of the good things in life are that good when you're not giving your gift. Think of any friendship, any job, any fortunate circumstance, and you in it, not giving your gift. Not a happy situation.
As we give our gift, the world changes. The situation at hand is uplifted, and opportunities are found that wouldn't otherwise be found. And we have the joy, even under difficult circumstances, of giving our gift.
The human journey is not a bed of roses. And even it were, if you lied down in those roses, they have thorns. And yet, when your gift is coming through you, that sustains you. When you're committed to giving your gift, you have the opportunity to access something that is far larger than what you've thought yourself to be. And in fact, in exactly those times when there is a challenge, when there seems to be impossibility, you open up to something bigger than you've known yourself to be—to a wisdom you hadn't previously accessed, to a love that overpowers the disappointment, and that takes you through the hard times.
In such times, what we are accessing seems like something other than who we are. We are contacting the reality of God, of Source, of the cosmos; something more vast, more wise than who and what we have thought ourselves to be. And so we open up to that, and whoosh! It comes in. We are strengthened. We are motivated. We are enlightened about the situation. We see more.
In religious circles, God is thought about as being something invisible, up there and far away. There are actually three dimensions to the reality of God. There is that reality which is beyond our immediate experience. That is God the Possible—the essence of what could manifest right here where we are. When we open spiritually we are opening to God the Possible. We are calling on that reality to be here in a world that has gotten impossible for us. God the Possible becomes real for us when we open up to it and let it in.
When we express God the Possible we become God the Means. We become the means by which the possible can flow through into the world, expressed and embodied by us. We find out that what was in essence, which was just a possibility, has now crossed over through consciousness.
And then, the possible comes out into the world of form. The gift is actually given and has its impact, and it creates a living form, or it fosters the growth of a living form. That living form is God the Manifest. And it is all the reality of God.
God is a creator, and so what we're talking about is the creative process. We're talking about our commitment to participate in the creative process, and in so doing find out that we are a creator. We co-create with God the Possible as a human being, and so we become a creator.
Here are three operative principles of our creatorship:
So these are all things that happen when we truly commit ourselves to giving the gift that we have to give. We are called into our creatorship.
My highest vision of my creatorship changes as I move along, doesn't yours? There is Highest Vision 1.0 and Highest Vision 2.0, and 2.1. It's updating all the time. I'm seeing more. And not only is God the Possible updating the awareness of my life and my gift, but God the Means is updating too. I'm learning more and more about how I can open up and give the gift that I have to give.
I'm at an age where there are certain things that are breaking down a bit in my physical body. But the bigger picture is that there's something that is opening up more and more—more possibility being seen, more capacity to give my gift; more eagerness, more joy, more wisdom and a greater capacity to love.
Have you ever reflected back on your teenage experiences of love? I have. It's humbling when I realize that in some way I hardly knew what love was and I hardly knew how to love another person. Thankfully, we can grow and expand in our life.
There's something that happens when some collective of people come together and commit themselves together to giving their highest gift. It could be in any creative setting—it could be people in a rock band. All committed. Whatever ego you've got going—check it at the door. Let's all come together; we're committed to make this as great as it could be. And when you commit yourself to the collective creation in any situation—it could be cooking a meal, growing a garden, or it could be changing the world—something creative happens.
So we come together and commit ourselves to the birth of the new human; to spiritual regeneration, kicking in at all levels on the planet. When we commit heart and mind and spirit to this great creative task, power kicks in collectively. We start asking the question: Realistically, right now, what is the highest intelligence we have on doing this together? That intelligence grows over time. We may come up with more ideas, and more possibility. But what is available right now? How do I need to be with other people in this band of angels? How do I draw out the optimal from the people around me? What distractions are present that are stopping me? Interestingly enough, our greatest distractions are often each other.
When it comes to the distraction of others, some part of us has got to say, it doesn't matter. It can't matter. The vision we have of what we could be to the world is too big to be distracted by another person. Maybe handled in some way, gotten over, and dealt with somehow. But the gift we have to give is too big for the distraction posed by other people to be a reason to stop or a reason to delay.
What is the process of manifestation for us? What are our best ideas about how we truly change human consciousness? And we need the most profound ones if we are to offer something that's relevant and timely in the world in which we live. There is a great gift that has many facets to it, and many people around the globe are needed to play their part. But what is the essential nature of the gift we have to give? We could speak about what that is, but we could also simply keep opening to God the Possible to find out what is the most pivotal thing in the human world that needs to change. What is the most pivotal thing that has to happen in the human experience so we may meet our appointment with destiny?
That pivotal thing has to do with the very process we are speaking of right now: opening to a larger reality which moves us from victimhood to creatorship. If you listen to the news—I'm not particularly recommending it, but if you do—you will hear even those who, from a worldly perspective, are most in charge claiming to be victims. Everybody's doing it. It's a picture of disempowerment. As long as we are in a consciousness of victimhood, we can't move into the intelligence and wisdom and the profound love natural to God the Possible and therefore natural to us as God the Means.
The experience of wounding plays a part. In the victim state, a wound seems like a noun. It's a thing that I have, it's a thing that happened to me. And it's quite understandable that we see it that way as human beings, and there's some undeniable truth to it—things do happen to people. We have the scars to prove it, at whatever level—emotional, physical, or at any other level. So there is some reality to a wound as a noun. But as a defining reality for a human life, it stinks. It isn't fun. And we all know people who allow their wound to define their life. And then we know and are inspired by people whose wounds are obvious enough, but who have chosen to be creators.
We can have compassion for ourselves and for what feels wounded in us. I'm not suggesting we shame ourselves, or shame other people because they feel those things. I'm simply suggesting that our fulfillment, our pleasure, and our joy is coming to see that the wound that we thought was a noun is not only a noun. It's a verb. It is something we're doing, not only something we have. And because it's something we're doing, it's something we could do differently. So when our perspective changes and we see that a wound is not just a noun but it's a verb, we move into our creatorship. And what we were doing that was wounding ourselves and often wounding other people—that we can't see because we're looking at our wound as a noun—has now been transformed to healing, to loving, to creating and to truthing. These are the verbs we want to be about, not ongoing self-wounding, or the wounding of others.
Now we are an instrument of creative manifestation. We are God the Means, recreating the world.
Thank you for being on this meditative journey with me. If this is only an essay, it begins and ends. If it's a meditation we are sharing, it's something flowing through us, and it just keeps on flowing.
Spiritual Practice
I have been thinking about my own spiritual practice. I was noticing how heartily and lustily I throw myself into life and into the things that come to me. And there are specific things that are way high on my list in terms of what my values are. Then I have roles and functions that have come to me in my life that are important to me. My realization was that, while all that is true, there is something more significant to me than all of those specific things.
I asked myself something that I would invite you to ask yourself, if you would like, and it is this:
What is it that is important to me in all the facets of my life that is the same? What is it that I'm doing that's universal—in every relationship, in every role and every situation?
This reflection makes it really clear to me that what is most important to me isn't about any of the specific circumstances or any specific projects. It is not even about certain relationships. It is not about any outer role or responsibility. My spiritual practice is being me and living into truth. To make it a verb, truthing.
I can't do that with another person without being keenly interested in the truth of them. It doesn't work to try to live into the truth of who I am and be uninterested in the truth of another.
That's true of the world in which I live as well. I am interested in its truth. There are facts, and I believe in the sensibility of facing facts. But the world in which we live is fast becoming a reality TV show made flesh. And facts do manifest in the world because of what people live into, whether it is a reality TV show story or whatever other myth they have going on.
What does it mean to live into the truth of what is present? I think it's more than living into whatever state of consciousness is present in another person or whatever is prevailing in the culture around us.
There is no creative direction to my life unless I'm about my spiritual practice, which is living into the truth of who I am and being that. And then living into the truth of who you are and relating to that. And then I have to find some way to make less relevant whatever has manifested in your experience or mine, or in the facts of the world around us, that isn't born out of something truthful.
So, as a spiritual practice, what is the same about your relationship with all the people you know and all the circumstances you find yourself in? I suppose we all have a particular affinity and a particular fondness for certain people and certain circumstances and certain projects. And it seems to me that's natural enough. But how do I want to be, in all things, with all people? I think that would be a powerful way to be with any one person, even a person I might seem to have a greater affinity with, or even with those special things that seem to come to me to do. I want to be in those things the way I would be in anything.
There's an implication to this, which is that in some fashion I have to come away from what is not true of me and what is not true of you. I think that's an important part of the spiritual practice. I notice it. But then, what do I do? It might be hard to describe the difference between coming away from what is not true and then living into what is. Yet it makes all the difference.
If we live into the reality of another person, there's a process of knowing that transpires. And just as truth can be a noun and can also be a verb, knowing can be a verb or a noun. The noun is knowledge; the verb is to know. In this case, we're talking about knowing truth, knowing reality. It's an underrated process.
We tend to think we either know or do not know. I know you, or I don't know you. If you think about it, if another person really is fully known by you, it's over and done with, isn't it? You know them. Isn't that "end of story"? There's nothing more to know.
The reality we seek is a verb; it is a never-ending process:
I am coming to know you. I'm always coming to know more of you—greater scope and breadth, more depth of who you are, more of the height of who you are, more of the wonder of who you are. I am knowing you.
There's always something more that's unfolding. And when we are knowing another person, discovering them more and more, at the same time isn't it true that we are changing them? If I am knowing more and more of the truth of you, do you think you're staying static in that? And likewise, if you are knowing more and more of the truth of me, isn't that changing me?
This is the tremendous power of consciousness, the tremendous power of knowing. Knowing isn't just witnessing from a distance. Knowing is bringing the powers of awareness to our creative field. The more I'm discovering about you, the more I'm knowing of you, the more interested I am, the more my own creative spirit is being conveyed through consciousness. Consciousness activates. Pretty soon I may be doing something. I may be saying something to you. I may be inviting you to be part of a creative project. So there are physical actions that are born from the discovery process.
The same is true of any reality. Living into the truth of this world, we discover something, we activate something, we create something. But we have to be living into the truth we are discovering. If we're living into an inauthentic manifest culture—that is some kind of nightmarish experience made real in the factual world—we are part of the downward-spinning spiral of humanity. It seems to me that is what has been happening, and that's how we got here, facing existential risk. Perhaps that is our global emergency—what we are knowing and what we are living into. What would happen if there were enough of us living into truth, living into reality? When we do, we align ourselves not with what is descending in a spiral, going down, but what is ascending in a spiral, going up.
In many ways, in this day, it doesn't seem like the ascending spiral has been strong enough in the awareness and the experience of people to draw many facts to itself. And yet there is the creative evidence of people who are living into reality in so many ways around the world. And still, there has to be a thought leader someplace. The phrase thought leadership takes on a whole new meaning, does it not? Thought leadership has often been seen to be clever ideas around a subject. That's included. But isn't the ultimate thought leadership simply the courage of people who are living into truth, living into reality? Instead of the unreality of the culture in which we live?
Part of the culture of unreality is a myth of helplessness on the planet. There's nothing we can do. The myth of victimhood strips away the awareness in people of their own creative power. Living into truth could seem to be abstract, airy-fairy, "spiritual" in the worst kind of way—in a way that mocks the one who is truthing. I say living into truth is revolutionary. It's empowering. It is acknowledging the power that is present in the people. Power to the people! Of course, the people have power already, seven billion of us. We don't think we do, and we are tricked into living into unreality, which is victimhood. So we've been stripped of the powers of consciousness that we hold as a people. If you interviewed the man or the woman on the street and asked them about the state of the world, that's what you would find. And so they grasp at imitations of power in the culture at large. They settle for the images of power outside themselves instead of accessing the power they hold in their own hearts and minds.
How does that state of affairs change? If we are right that the problem is that people have been tricked into living into unreality, hopelessness, disempowerment and victimhood, would not the only answer to that be the reversal of the process by which they found themselves in that state? And how does it get reversed, if there are not people with the courage to live into truth and to do that in the face of what doesn't look like it's going in that direction?
How would everything that is going in a destructive direction go in any creative direction if somebody didn't have the thought leadership to go in a different direction first? And so we are coming face-to-face with our weak-mindedness as human beings on the planet today, as it manifests in ourselves and then in the world around us. We are willing to be among those who go first.
Sometimes people worry about their friends coming to Sunrise Ranch, where I live. They're afraid that they're being weak-minded and will be taken over, presumably by the strong-minded people at Sunrise Ranch. We live in a world that has managed to turn almost everything in life on its ear, including this. In fact, Sunrise Ranch is all about being strong-minded people. Not strong-minded in the way of human will and intention. That doesn't seem to go very far. But strong-minded simply in living into what is true. And truth is powerful.
What is true, by another name, is the nature of things. And by another name it is what is happening. What is true includes the destructive part of what is happening—what doesn't work, what is past its sell-by date, what is disintegrating. That happens in nature and it happens in our human experience, and certainly it's happening in the world. What is true includes disintegration. And what is true includes what is being born. What is true includes extinction, apparently, but it also includes birth. It also includes evolution; it also includes moving forward. It includes what survives, and what is created.
There is power to the nature of things. And when we are living into truth, we are living into the nature of things, accepting the nature of things and becoming a positive expression of the nature of things.
I have two pictures in my mind of our world, and how I relate to the people in my world and how it goes for people.
Here is the typical picture. There is some kind of unreality that people experience, composed of culture and personality, disturbed emotion and a sense of separateness. People relate in a way that is not really relating at all. It is as if they are throwing stones over a wall. And there's a lot of that that goes on at every level—at the level of nations, at the level of political parties, and at the individual level.
Here is the emerging picture for me and many others around the world. What if there were some number of us who adopted the spiritual practice of knowing the truth of who and what we are, and of being that more fully all the time, with anyone we were with and with any project? What if it wasn't firstly about the specific project or the other person? What if, for us personally, life was firstly about Shakespeare's admonition: "To thine own self be true"? What if we were truthing as we express and embody ourselves in the flow of life? Revealing more and more of what is at our core and knowing more and more of ourselves.
There is a never-ending reality to be expressed of who I am, as is so for anyone. If that's my spiritual practice and that's your practice, what happens? Add to that practice the process of knowing more and more of each other, and then we are truthing together. There is a constellation of truth on the planet.
My best word for the nature of things is Love. The truth that I'm interested in is the truth of the nature of things, which is the truth of whatever that word means—Love. The tragedy of the world in which we live is simply that we're experiencing that. We have an opportunity to live in a constellation of reality, where the points of light are you and me, and we're living into the reality of each other. And we are living from our own reality, revealing more and more of ourselves to each other.
I realize, as I meditate on these things, that I have committed my life to this spiritual practice. This is the name of the game for me: to be myself as truly as I can be and to know the truth of others. There is something that is created from people who are together that way. Consciousness brings activating energy, not only to each other but to the world in which we are living. We give birth to a new world out of that knowing.
In fact, the world is being re-created by a constellation of people who are exploring the truth of themselves and each other. That is the grand experiment of Sunrise Ranch. That is the grand experiment of Emissaries of Divine Light. It is the grand experiment of awakened people around the globe.
My simple invitation is for you to ask yourself whether this is a spiritual practice worth adopting—not out of human will but out of an authentic urge to move into what is true, and to know it more and more. And if your answer is yes, my invitation is to simply allow that authentic urge to direct the course of your life.]]>
A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in pictures of silver.
So said Solomon. We have the amazing ability, through the words that we speak, to give birth to something beautiful in the world and to let something beautiful live in the world. I sometimes picture words that a person speaks that truly bring regeneration to the world as little balloons coming out of a person's mouth. When they pop they release the joy that is inside that balloon.
Our words can be invested with love. They can be like presents to be unwrapped by another person.
I've been meditating on the process of speaking. It begins at least someplace in your diaphragm with your breathing. Words are spoken on the breath. But then it's not just the physical breath. Words are spoken on the ascending current that comes from the solar plexus and deep within the roots of our power. Somewhere that breath and that energy meet what descends through the mind from above. There is a heavenly potential that we can tap into. Through a magical alchemy of the mind that shapes our words.
It is a magical process. Words can be invested with divine intelligence and love.
Here we are, with this amazing ability to affect the space-time continuum through our words. We are planted right in the middle of that continuum. We are planted as a center of power. During the weeklong sessions of Emissary Servers from around the world, we spoke about the power of the Shekinah presence, Shekinah being an ancient word for divine presence on earth, in the space-time continuum. At the center of Shekinah, I Am, a still point in the space-time continuum.
From that still point emanates the Fire of Love. The very fire of Creation is in our atoms, in our cells and tissues. It seeks to constellate in human awareness so that it can emanate from us consciously. But all too often, people are running from the fire. The flames lick them in the behind as they try to avoid the fire of Creation. But it is in you and in me. Let it burn.
Out of that fire at the core of Being is the Light that Glows, an emanation of creative power and the presence of awareness. And then there is the glory—the pleasure, and the pleasantness of what life is. We are made to be some kind of heat pump, a generation of Shekinah in the middle of the space-time continuum and in the middle of the field of human consciousness, with all that goes on all around us—all the nonsense, all the words unfitly spoken that bring death and destruction. And here we are, planted in the middle of the field of human consciousness and in the center of the field of Creation.
What does it take to offer a word fitly spoken? You might say that it takes conscious attention and care and desire—a desire to speak the word that is like a balloon of joy, of insight, and of awareness. It takes some understanding that it's more than a moving of lips and tongue—that there is a power of life that rises in us, and that power can be invested in the words that we speak. The urgency of life can be in our words, in effect saying to our world, "Live! Live! Stop your discouragement and your silliness and your distraction and your judgment. Live! Feel the urgency of life that is on your breath. Live."
We had an opportunity in the sessions of Servers Week to contemplate what is most precious to us. It was named by many, using the name "Love"—Universal Love. Universal Love is a quality of Being that is invested in all things and gives all things meaning and value, and without which nothing has any meaning. We have an opportunity to meditate upon that Love, to touch it in ourselves, to worship it, acknowledging its value to us. And then we have the supreme privilege of expressing and embodying that in our life, taking the care in what we say and do to channel it, to invest our words with that Love, so that they might be unwrapped by another. When they are, those words land in the heart and the person fills with a warming fire. All because someone gave conscious attention to investing what they were expressing with the love that they knew inside.
It's a very simple idea but, when it is practiced consistently, we find that there is a stream of never-ending love within us. It doesn't stop. And it's a growing love, not a diminishing one, and not a depleting one. And sure, we get tired, and there are cycles and rhythms to life. But nonetheless, that Fire of Love is always there, and the more you access it, the more it flows through. And the more it flows through, the more it creates a field of energy and a field of awareness. Awareness of what? Of that Universal Love that connects all people and holds all of Creation together, and that gives it all value.
The sad state of affairs is that humanity doesn't understand that it belongs to Love—that we are Love's children, and Love is calling us home. Love is calling us to itself to be that in expression. When we walk through the open door that words born of that Love open for us, what do we find? The Fire of Love. In embracing that Love for ourselves, we don't shut the door behind us. We leave it open to let the stream of Love fill the world.
Do you ever find yourself reacting to all the words unfitly spoken around you? The world is full of them. You can turn on the news, if you like, but you don't have to turn on the news to hear them spoken. They are all around, like balloons filled with hate and lies, resentment and fear, spreading those shadow states in the world. Those words are constantly polluting the field of energy and consciousness of the world. They are vacuous, sucking life and hope out of people.
This field of consciousness that we share as humanity is designed to be Shekinah—the conscious presence of the Creator surrounding and holding this planet and guiding the processes of Creation in the space-time continuum. And yet that field that has the potential to be Shekinah is constantly being polluted with words that carry something else.
And so, what do we do?
Nothing. Until we learn to do nothing about it, we have no ability to speak the word fitly spoken that is like apples of gold in pictures of silver. We just join the cacophony of words that pollute the field of human consciousness, and we become one of so many people around the planet who are constantly doing that, perhaps momentarily disrupted by clarity on a bright and beautiful morning.
We are here to do nothing about all that; to tune in to what is coming down from God out of heaven in ourselves and to let it come down, and to let the urgency of life come up and meet it, and use human experience for what it is meant to be—a tree in the midst of the space-time continuum, creating a field of conscious awareness, a field of Love, a field of Life. And if you have to do it alone, do it alone, because nothing is worth compromising that reality in your own experience, as is true for me. As we commit ourselves to this and we are consistent in doing it, the bubble of awareness and presence we create touches the bubble of another, and another, and another.
And now the urgency of life, the power and Fire of Love, the Light of awareness, are on the move, repatterning all of human consciousness. And there is someone on the other side of the planet who is hearing some kind of distant call. Perhaps it is somebody in a desperate place in their life, and yet they are perceiving the Light of awareness, hearing the resonance of a word fitly spoken, and they are wondering where that is coming from. And they are trying to find it, probably outside themselves. And one day maybe they wake up to the reality that what they are touching in the resonant field of the consciousness of humanity is also within themselves, and they will get the big idea that they themselves were created to be a tree planted in the midst of the space-time continuum. They are created to be the consciousness of the Creator. They themselves have the magical ability to allow the Creator to drop in a thought in their consciousness, and the power of their life can energize that thought, and the love that they have touched isn't just someplace else but can be in their world because of them. Their words can carry the transforming power of that Love.
This is a vibrational ministry, which is to say that it is a ministry based on resonance. The resonance is created by words fitly spoken. How much do you care about that capacity in you? How much are you using it for what it was designed to be used for? Or are you falling victim to the chaos of consciousness all around, and through some kind of unconscious negativity simply stirring the pot?
All of us sharing this Pulse of Spirit have been introduced to a wondrous possibility. That person halfway across the world hasn't yet been introduced to it. But you have and I have, and what will we do? Allow the power of the Highest Love to be activated through us and expressed through a word fitly spoken? Or fall subject to some careless, unconscious use of words? "Who cares? It's what I want to say—my opinion, my feelings, my reaction to you or to this world that matters to me." If that is what you choose, you sacrifice your golden opportunity to walk through an open door and leave it open to your world.
And so we embrace the gift—the gift that we have simply by virtue of being a human being. But also the gift that somebody came into your life, and came into mine, and said, Look! You have fantastic powers of consciousness, if you'll only use them for the purpose for which they were created.
Let's introduce those fantastic powers to the world because we use them ourselves, and in using them ourselves they resonate around the world.
A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in pictures of silver.
It is an important juncture in the year for Emissaries of Divine Light. We meet annually at this time with people from around the world, including many of us who live here at Sunrise Ranch, to set the course of our coming year. And thus, what we are doing here is important. There are matters of organizational governance involved, but most importantly there is a spiritual governance. What will we bring to the world? How will we bring it? What does the world need from us in this cycle? What are we up for? Who is up for it? Important questions are rightly asked at a time like this. And so we have met—about 40 of us—beginning yesterday and continuing today and through the week.
In our work we are interested in Divine Mind. And what does that mean? The presence of Divine Mind leads us to be masters of the pattern of Creation. It means that the pattern of Creation comes into mind and is translated into practical terms in the world in which we live.
We become masters of time and space when Divine Mind comes into consciousness. Of course, there is an attempt to do that from the vantage point of a human mind. Anybody able to report success in that regard? Have you mastered the universe with your human mind? It doesn't work too well because there is an already-existing order of things. There is an already-existing pattern for time and space. Living in Divine Mind is becoming consciously aware of that pattern, and then becoming a conscious instrument of that pattern to facilitate its unfoldment.
Divine design is relevant to the space in which we live: the physical space, the emotional space, the mental space, and the spiritual space. Divine control is relevant to the unfoldment over time in all those spheres. We are here to be masters of space and time. The only way that that ever happens is through a surrender of mind. When the mind surrenders, it opens to the inherent pattern of Creation. Most people demand that the world unfold on their timing, according to their conception of the design of things.
Ambition comes into the picture. A person can become ambitious about how they want to be themselves. Then they become ambitious about how they want you to be. Ambition breeds manipulation and oppression. It is hard to oppress yourself and then not oppress others. And the converse is true—it is impossible to oppress other people without oppressing yourself. It is personally oppressive to be oppressing others.
We are here to be liberated—to liberate mind, and to have a conscious understanding of the pattern of Creation. And in that conscious understanding, we become masters of it; not as a human being with self-will. We become masters of Creation because we allow the Creator, who is our inner reality, to be conscious through us in the world.
The origin of Creation is in the Creator. And when the Creator is conscious through us, the Creator has the opportunity to have responsibility for his or her creation. Obviously, the Creator is responsible for his or her creation, by definition. And the magic of it is that the Creator has authority over what he or she creates. There is a natural authority.
The word authority has the same root as the word author. The Creator is the author of Creation. We, ourselves, have a natural authority over anything we create. That is not an oppressive authority. As the Creator in our field, we have a natural ability to be masters of that field; masters of the unfoldment of things, masters of that space, masters of time related to that creation.
When our human mind surrenders, Divine Mind can come through. Divine intelligence can come through. Certainly the world we're living in needs that. The whole world needs that through humanity. It is looking for humanity to show up in a surrendered way and to become masters of Creation—masters of time and space for this world, bringing divine intelligence.
That might seem like a lot to take on. But we can start with the immediate field in which we are functioning. We can start by assuming the attitude of the Creator, which is: I am responsible for what I create. We all are.
Those of us in the Servers Week had the privilege of sharing a transcribed talk that Lloyd Arthur Meeker gave here in 1949 to a small group of people. There were three qualities to his message; all together, it had an impact. I know it did for me personally. It was incredibly loving. It was incredibly challenging. And it was incredibly respectful.
He was asking the people to search their hearts for what was yet there to transform and change and purify. He was asking them to see what didn't belong, and needed to go. For me, that's the most challenging thing that one human being could say to me—to challenge what's present in my own heart and governing my life experience. It was challenge to the max. But it was profoundly respectful because he wasn't standing in judgment of anyone. He wasn't telling anyone that their heart was impure. He was respectful of the natural authority that we each have for our own human experience.
Something happens when we are not respectful in that way with other people. We start telling them what to do. And then we adopt a culture in which some people are supposed to be telling other people what to do, and other people are waiting for someone to tell them what to do. We end with bystanding: people waiting around for someone to tell them what to do. And then, of course, the other side of that is they object when they're told. You have the bossy ones getting irate because people aren't doing what they tell them to do. That's a game that we play as human beings, all around the planet.
When are we going to wake up and assume responsibility for our own authorship?
This field is my field. I am the creator in this field. I have responsibility for what I express and for what I create. I have responsibility for what comes to me. It did come to me for a reason. I have responsibility to take it and do something creative with it. And the more I wake up to that responsibility, the more I am waking up to the creator that is within.
I am a living embodiment of the creator in my field. I have stopped denying that it's somebody else's problem and somebody else's fault, and somebody else's business to tell me what I should be doing.
How long do we trade on the kindness and generosity of life itself? Waiting for someone to tell us to do different from what we're doing. Not waking up to the natural responsibility and authority that we have as a living expression of the Creator.
We inherit incredible powers of mind when the mind surrenders.
Yet in speaking of Divine Mind, we are only speaking of half the picture. We are speaking about the truth channel, which is the pattern of Creation. But there is also the power of Creation, which is Love. To be a living expression of the Creator, it takes more than Divine Mind. It takes Divine Heart.
I'm grateful that we've begun to teach emotional intelligence here at Sunrise Ranch and throughout Emissaries of Divine Light, in recognition of the fact that it takes more than a bright mind, even a Divine Mind, to be a master of Creation. It takes the Divine Heart, and for that heart to be present it takes surrender, which is the first step in emotional intelligence.
We are here to be masters of love. Of course, that could mean all kinds of things. It includes, for sure, relationship between each other as human beings, but it means far more than that. It means that the highest Love is present through us and available in the world. It means that our motivations transcend the personal and the local. Our motivations are expressed locally and personally, but they transcend that.
Being a master of love means that we have surrendered to the One who loves; who loves with the highest love available. We've surrendered to that love—to be that love, to express it and to share it.
That was what Uranda was doing in his teaching in 1949. He was calling forth the tender heart of love in people at that time. There is no real intelligence and no real being a master of Creation without being a masterful expression of the highest Love.
Tell me, what is truth, if it's not the truth of that love? What other kind of real truth is there? The truth of what I want and how I can get it? The truth of how we can get ahead? The truth of how we can all work this out? The truth of Creation is so far superior to that. It is the truth of the highest Love. It is the expression of the highest Love in all things, which brings the ordering pattern of Creation.
We are here to be masters of time and space, which is to be a master of Divine Mind. But if we do not know the imperative of Love in our own heart, what are we doing? What are we doing with our lives and in the context of Sunrise Ranch and the context of Emissaries of Divine Light? There is a formula to Creation and a formula to a human life. The formula of a human life is the same as the formula of Creation. And when there is the right starting point, it all blossoms from there. It all blossoms naturally and easily, and unfolds in time and space. It unfolds easily in our own mind and heart with the right starting point. And what is the right starting point? It is the highest Love.
In the beginning was the highest Love. And beginning there as a human being, there are things that unfold in consciousness. There's an unfoldment in heart and mind, and in time and space, that makes sense and which is natural; which has a natural power to it.
Do you ever get tired, worn out, with no motivation? Maybe you need to go back to the right starting point, which is the source of all power and all motivation: the right starting point for all Creation—the highest Love. And from there, allow Creation to unfold. And if life has become confused, go back to the beginning. Go back to the origin of all things in Creation and in human life.
That origin is much better than almost anyone believes it is! It isn't a scientific equation. It isn't something technological or philosophical. It all begins with the highest Love. Imagine that! What better way to create a universe than with the highest Love, and to make everything out of that.
We are here to be priests and priestesses of the highest Love. I believe that's the only good reason for being at Sunrise Ranch or being associated with Emissaries of Divine Light. We're here to be that. So let's be it. Let's do it—for real.
Words from Bob Dylan's most famous protest song came to mind this morning:
Don't stand in the doorway and don't block up the hall…. For the times they are a-changin'.
Don't block up the highest Love. Don't come on earth to be that and not be that! Don't stand in the doorway and block up the hall with our human experience. Get out of the way! Let whatever it is that's blocking the doorway and the hall get out of the way so that the highest Love can come through. We all came for that. That is ever more specifically true of why we are here together at Sunrise Ranch and in the context of Emissaries of Divine Light. Don't come to be a priest or priestess and then not bring the highest Love to the people all around you.
Bringing the highest Love might seem like a radical idea, because Love is no respecter of persons. It is no respecter of fabricated human culture. Love is just itself. It is not trying to fit in. It is not trying to follow any old pattern. Love doesn't care. The Love within you just doesn't care. Love is no respecter of persons, in the sense that it doesn't respect the things of culture and of personality—whether it's in ourselves or within another.
That doesn't mean there is not a politeness and a courtesy. I'm not trying to push what I know to be true in anyone's face. And still, the highest Love just loves. That's what it is and what it does. And that's who we are and what we do, when we know who we are.
When we are that, we become masters of Creation. Not because we have some great ambition to be that. When we open to the pattern and the power of Creation, the Creator comes into us, and then through us, and into our world.
Then the Creator is present. If you're doing that and I'm doing that, what we find is that there's one Love and one pattern of Creation, and we are in it. We are each unique yet all the same. It's all one Love and it's all just one unfolding pattern—one beautiful pattern of Creation that we are masterfully participating in and stewarding.
But not without surrender—surrender to what is most true in our deepest heart of hearts. And not without responsibility and deep care as a creator for what we are creating.]]>