Fresh Thinking, Inspiration, and Vision on the Process of Spiritual Transformation
for all the sons and daughters
who walk the earth
looking for the way home.
like the concord grapes I have eaten
on the banks of the Saugatuck,
and the sun as it rose
over the hills of Jordan.
will be the sweetest love
like fairy dust on a young boy’s pillow
so that it may fill his head
even as his growing strength
fills his bones and biceps.
this poem will tell a story
as it never has been told,
of courage and vision
and of the strength of ordinary people
who have touched something great;
a story of how they carried through
no matter what,
and how life is like that
if you want to know the gold at its core,
that victory that you have
when you have given all,
and having given it,
know you belong to the One you serve,
and then to those dear ones
who walk this life with you.
We have clarity, destiny and a great calling to share with the peoples of the world. It is a calling to move past the din of confusion in which so many people find themselves, and in which humanity as a whole finds itself. If you are like me, you can barely stand to watch the evening news and the craziness that’s portrayed; the lies that are told, the self-servingness, and the obvious aberration of human character that is displayed. And while important things hang in the balance, the confusion continues, and there is a protestation around values that aren’t worth anything.
It’s easy to look at the evening news and to read about the politicians in Washington, D.C., and to have such thoughts. It takes something else to be willing to see with clarity and honesty what is happening in one’s own backyard, and what is happening in the thoughts and feelings of one’s own consciousness. You can call it what you want—introspection, looking into the jadestone, or simply self-awareness. Whatever you want to call it, certainly we cannot come to a place of maturity and mastery personally without looking inside and being honest; without rising above the shame that might come up and acknowledging whatever limitations have been present. The truest reality of who we are lives high above all that we might observe around us or in us.
I spent the past week at Glen Ivy, in California, and had the pleasure of spending time with Jim Root, CEO of Glen Ivy Hot Springs. He tells people there that it is not so important what you know or what you don’t know. What is important is that you ask the right questions. And of course, a person has to be open to the answers that come. I have noticed that the wise people that I meet are the ones who are humble about what they do and don’t know, and who are open to learn, open to see where the answers will come from, and not so quick to spout an answer off the top of their head. Because if you really want to know what the answer is, you have to be in a place in which the answers are available, a place of openness and a place of reception, whether the answers are coming from within or from the people around you.
There is wisdom and intelligence available if we will take time to stop and think—seemingly a rare quality in the world today. It could be easy to listen to a politician in Washington and wonder whether the person has stopped for a moment to think through the situation with some modicum of intelligence. My experience is that when I stop and think, I have a lot of knowledge already available to me. But knowledge, of itself, doesn’t bring intelligence. Wisdom and intelligence come because we are willing to stop and think and utilize the knowledge we have, and ponder how what we know is factual can be used for the highest values and the highest purpose.
Therein lies the rub. We become intelligent for the highest purpose when we answer the calling of the highest purpose. When the highest purpose in our life and the fulfillment of it means more than anything else, we will stop to think about how that purpose might indeed be fulfilled, and not settle for the short little political slogans and sound bites that are so far short of what the truth is.
I am making reference to Washington, but I am also making reference to our lives—to all those little things that people say that might sound smart but which lack a depth of understanding and a depth of thought, a depth of care, a depth of real openness to the highest purpose. We might not think of those half-truths that people speak every day as political statements. For some people, they may think of such things as spiritual.
Let’s not settle for half-baked ideas, thoughts that sound spiritual on the surface but lack a depth of understanding. Whether the idea comes from Emissarydom or from some kind of New Age notion, a spiritual path from East or West, or from a religious teaching, contemporary or ancient—it doesn’t really matter. If it’s half-baked, it’s half-baked. If it is not true, it is not true. It does not matter how many people you get to agree that the idea holds water, if it isn’t true it isn’t true. If the emperor has no clothes, he has no clothes, even if the whole empire pretends he does.
Let us be people who are truly willing to think, truly willing to allow the divine within to move through consciousness and put it all together, to take all the factors that are present and allow them to be used for the highest good, not just for the glitziest slogan, not just for some half-truth, not just for some fanciful human spirituality. Let our thought and feeling go to depth so that we may authentically allow the highest reality to be present; so that we allow the factors that are present in the cosmic whole to come to focus here and create the most beautiful, the most glorious thing that could be created, in a way that allows us as people to move with power and authority in our world. In authenticity and in truthfulness, may we give the gift that is ours to give personally.
That can’t be given without coming to a place of quietude and openness. It doesn’t happen unless we are willing to let ourselves be worked at depth in heart and mind by the spirit that’s within us. Every person has to face that experience one way or another. And there are essentially two ways to be worked by spirit in heart and mind: with your back toward what is working you, or facing it. A person can turn their back on the spirit that’s working them, and ignore it and try to hold it off, and do all the “important” things that they think their life is about, and all the while be plagued, as it seems to them, with the spirit that calls them to something else. Or a person can choose to allow that spirit to work them, face-to-face, consciously, and say, “I am here for this. I am here to be worked at depth in thought and feeling so that the words of my mouth and the actions that I take in my world don’t come out of a half-baked, knee-jerk reaction that’s glossed over by slogans. They come from the depth of communion in consciousness with the deepest and most authentic truth within me.”
When we answer that call personally and individually, we find ourselves among the sons and daughters of the world, but we also come in the name of the spirit within us which has owned us in heart and mind, in feeling and in thought. And so that spirit within can be living fully through us, as us, speaking to the world.