Fresh Thinking, Inspiration, and Vision on the Process of Spiritual Transformation
Last week David Karchere was speaking about the Master and the temptations he faced while being in the desert for forty days. In speaking about the third temptation, where the devil takes him up to a high ground and offers him all the kingdoms of the world, he says:
“There is another place to live from that claims for ourselves our birthright as a sovereign human being. In our sovereignty, we know that who and what we are has it all already. ‘Oh, very interesting! You’re going to give me the whole world? I already have it! It’s already mine….’”
How is it we get fooled? We get swindled into thinking we need to serve something other than what is true to be happy, to have the whole world available to us. But it doesn’t work. You are already beautiful; you’ve already got it; you are already in heaven. You know it and experience it when you surrender to the design that is already present.
One of the reasons that Sunrise Ranch was created was that people wanted to be together saying, “I want to do that.” I want to come together consciously with bunches of people who already say, “This is what’s most important to me. On this day, this is what I’ll serve.” When we’re in the midst of that spirit together, let’s see what we’ll create. And let’s remind each other that we all made that commitment. Let’s remind each other by saying, “I already see you are so beautiful. Come back here. Let’s be in heaven together. Create with me there.”
Choose this day who you will serve, and the place from which you will serve. Do you serve from the place where you’re beautiful? Or do you serve from the place of feeling “I need someone to give me the whole world before I can do anything”?
I received one of those mass e-mails about an elderly woman who planted a huge field of daffodils. They were breathtaking. A girl wanted to take her grandmother to see them and she kept coming up with excuses: “It’s too rainy; it’s too foggy; I don’t want to go.” And when the grandmother finally goes she can’t believe she might have missed this beautiful experience. In the story they ask the elderly woman who planted them how she did it. Her reply was, “Every year, I just planted a few daffodils, and it just grew.”
The story is about refusing to wait. “Don’t wait until your car or home is paid off. Don’t wait until you get a new car or a home. Don’t wait until your kids leave the house. Don’t wait until you go back to school. Don’t wait until you’ve cleaned the house. Don’t wait until you lose ten pounds. Don’t wait until you’ve gained ten pounds. Don’t wait until summer. Don’t wait until spring….” And the list goes on and on. Don’t wait until things are a certain way to see that you are beautiful, that you can come together in agreement about what you love and serve and create: a field of daffodils, or heaven on earth.
It doesn’t take anything more than showing up, remembering you’re beautiful, finding the people who know they’re beautiful, and creating together. Let’s see what we can create. Let’s see what happens when we say yes to the most important thing that we’re about. I want to serve, you want to serve—let’s do it together. Let’s keep reminding each other that this is what we want to do together. Let’s keep saying yes, yes, yes.
We need to hold each other in love, and remind each other why we are together, because issues will show up. Issues showed up in the story of the Master in the desert. Do you think those tempting voices were really some entity with cloven feet, a black cape and a red head, saying, “If you are really the Master, change these stones into bread”? I don’t think so. I’ve had the voice come to me, saying “You really shouldn’t step forward until…” and a long list fills in the end of that sentence. It’s the same voice—it just has a little more of a New York accent when I hear it.
Haven’t we all heard the voice that says, “So who do you think you are?” And when you have had the experience of delivering the goods, of staying in heavenly agreement and creating, then another voice comes in and says, “That really didn’t happen. Don’t you believe it. It was an accident. You had nothing to do with it.” That’s as much the voice of the devil as the belief that you can’t do it to begin with.
Have you ever had the most glorious sense of communion, of being in heaven with someone, and you’re carrying it in your heart, and another person will say, “That couldn’t have happened to you with that person, because they’re an idiot. There’s no way that person shared that heavenly experience with you. You don’t know them very well. Let me tell you the dirt on that person.” Ever had that happen? I have. I’ve had it said to me and about me.
The magic of passionate creation is true, and no one can take it away unless you give it away. Transformation, the creation of heaven, will not continue if you believe that lie. And there’s a whole world that will tell you the lie is true, because if they believe you, THEY have to change.
This place, Sunrise Ranch, this ministry, Emissaries of Divine Light, was created because there was a vision that something could happen when people are in sacred agreement about serving something higher than the human condition.
People are in agreement all the time in a way that gives weight to the issues that arise, and they continue to manifest from that place of agreement about what they deem to be wrong. They believe they cannot manifest heaven on earth until their list of issues is resolved. The biggest issue is the belief that I can’t create until other people change. This ministry takes the stance that that is a lie.
It’s such a privilege to find people who will remind you that on this day I’ve chosen to serve, and the magic I’m feeling is true. I feel it. I know it. And guess what? We’re creating it together.
This is springtime here, and the reminder of the magic and the perfection of a seed is so present with us. You can plant a beet seed right next to a carrot seed, and they draw to them all they need to be either a deep, luscious, red round vegetable or a long, bright, sweet orange one. If you have ever planted anything, you know that unless you’re using good fertile seed, the seeds of the plant will be useless to you. We have changed and dishonored the way life works so much, wanting bigger, sweeter, more abundant crops that produce seed that’s useless. It can’t produce more in the next planting season.
So we have the chance in our relationships to produce incredible seed. Do your conversations create a fertile atmosphere? Or are they self-serving and supporting the lie that we can’t really start to create now? Sunrise Ranch was created for the purpose of creating fertile seed.
Most people feel the atmosphere when they walk into a room. I’ve walked into someone’s house when they just had a fight. At times I’ve even said I’ll come back later. The atmosphere is different from when the people are lovingly preparing a space for you to come into. I feel it’s important to acknowledge the difference. Some people interpret the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights as the freedom to say whatever you like and it’s okay. It is probably legal; you have the right to say whatever you like, but what occurs to me is that I have the right not to agree—I have the right not to engage. I have the right to say no.
I had a patient in my office yesterday whose son has a tough time communicating—he has some disabilities. When his friends come up to him and want to talk badly about other friends, he becomes very agitated because he doesn’t know what to do. So we were practicing with him, using me as an example—“Jane is my friend; I will not talk about her that way; I’m walking away.” Three simple statements. It seems pretty innocent and childlike. Adults often feel it’s rude to do that when something is happening, where people are gossiping, to actually say thank you very much but I don’t really want to participate in that. I’m walking away. That spirit doesn’t belong in my house.
It’s an interesting experience, having been here at Sunrise Ranch almost twenty-two years, that when new people come, others will come up to them and want to tell them the “dirt” about this place. How do we welcome new people here? We can let them know through our living that that’s not what this place is about, that’s not why I’m here. That’s not how I am with my friends. To actually face that temptation of gossip and ill spirit and say no. “That’s not okay with me.”
The freedom to say no to a lie—it’s a powerful place to live. When you see the beauty, when you see what’s possible, the lie is so easy to see. It doesn’t fit; it’s not true, and it makes your gut hurt.
I was reading something about sacred sites the other day, and many people have said Sunrise Ranch is on a sacred site or it IS a sacred site. The article I was reading was talking about the fact that sacred sites weren’t created without people there living sacredly. It didn’t just happen to be a power point. Human beings were essential in making those sites sacred.
We have the power to make our homes sacred, to make this site sacred, to make this site sacred [gesturing to her body), and to serve there. To have a fertile place where the potential is high, the soil is so rich, the seed is so good that one person comes in and a whole new crop starts. A whole new thing happens because we didn’t have that seed before. We have a carrot, we have a beet, and now what do we have? We have a parsnip, right next to the beet and the carrot!
I want to hold the place of the fertile field with you to see what wants to be born on this day because we are serving together.
As David was saying last week, when you stand in the place already having it all, the fun is in giving what is yours to give. It’s not in searching for it. Life is about giving it all, so that you get to experience it all. Can we laugh at the swindling voice that says, “You don’t really have it—I’ll show you how you can get it”? People make a lot of money telling you that.
As a chiropractor, every month I get something in the mail that claims it will cure everything. It’s sometimes a fungus—put this fungus in a jar and it makes a nice tea and it will cure eczema, headaches and cancer. The next week I get something that’s from the bottom of the ocean, found in rare clams.
I have patients who bring in the article and they’ve already bought the product because they’re so convinced that life does not work as it’s designed, so they need to find someplace to get the answer that confirms for them that what makes life work is very hard to find, and you have to pay a lot of money for it.
The world we live in is convinced that the lie is true, and you can make a lot of money because people want what they want without honoring the source and design of it all. The only way in which you really know the truth is when you say yes to the way the design of it works.
It’s all present in you when you know who you really are. It doesn’t show up once you’ve lost ten pounds. It doesn’t show up once you’ve dyed your hair and gotten rid of the gray. It’s in you because it IS you.
You have the chance to share it and deliver it and know it and love it. And you have the freedom to say no to that. You have freedom of speech, the freedom to deny it, the freedom to choose to live a different way. But you also have the freedom to say yes and to engage at that level with your friends who say, “On this day, this is who I serve.” On this day, as for me and my house, I will allow man to be restored through my living. I will stay in heaven and let the revelation of myself be holy and sacred and true.
When you do that, you see it in others. Thank you for the chance to be together as we all say yes to service, we all say yes to being true to who we are. We hold the place for more of us to show up.