Any Moment

Any moment of hating,
Any moment of lying,
Any moment of resentment,
Is a moment of dying.

Any moment of loving,
Any moment of giving,
Any moment of thankfulness,
Is a moment of living.

All our moments add together
Like the digits in a sum,
And the answer tells us plainly
Whether life or death shall come.

                       Martin Cecil

Whatever the human intention might be, the principles of manifestation determine the outcome of any endeavor according to the causative factors in human experience. So we are very interested in a study of the principles of manifestation, and most particularly the understanding of what it takes to bring the manifestation of life through the human form. As that is really happening, we have the basis for creating a thriving world.

Humanity has developed a strange relationship with its leaders, in which it is hoped that leaders will change the way the principles of manifestation work. It is hoped that all the moments of the lives of people at large will be caused to add up differently because of our leaders. In the United States, people look to the President and the Congress and ask that they do something so that the sums will add up to life, and there is anger when they don’t. That scenario shows itself in the national debt. You add it all up, and it just doesn’t add up; and it is thought that Congress or the President ought to do something about it.

Honest leadership requires a realistic accounting of what is going on. The realistic accounting says that you can’t keep hating and lying and resenting and expect to live. And there are certainly plenty of those qualities in the public square. There are principles of manifestation for a person, for any body of people, and for the world as a whole. When those principles are harmonized with, there is life. Loving, giving and thankfulness bring life. But for a person who hates, lies and resents, the same principles of manifestation bring death because they are absolute Laws that bring results according to the causative factors in human experience. We live in a just universe.

There are two life-giving factors that are available from within anybody: inspiration and blessing. Have you discovered that there is actually no lack of inspiration? You can fail to go to the well and drink the water of inspiration; you can become worried, distracted and preoccupied. But anytime you go to the internal well of inspiration, it is there. The well of creative thinking, of vision, of understanding is always available from within. It only takes an internal quietude and an openness to drink from that well.

There is something else that is available from within—blessing, which is a quality of love. Anytime a person stops and opens themselves to receive it, blessing is available. There is the opportunity to know that we are loved by the power within that made us in the first place. We have always been loved, and that has never changed. We can choose not to drink of that love; we can fail to let it flow through us and into our world; we can cut off the flow of it, just like we can cut off the flow of inspiration. But that doesn’t mean it is not there.

It is a happy person who drinks from the well of inspiration and blessing. When a person does that, it becomes available in their world, through them to other people, as night follows day. Where there is a body of people who are drinking from the well of inspiration and blessing, it flows freely among them—unless they start cutting it off.

But there is something more that has to operate, according to the principles of manifestation, if there really is to be life. It’s wonderful to be inspired, but that inspirational thinking has to be applied to bring life. We have to find a way of acting on that inspiration.

Some of you know that I am a songwriter. So this cycle of inspiration and blessing is very familiar in that context. For me, it’s like tuning in a radio station—I tune in songs from somewhere within. The inspiration of those songs comes through as if they have already been written someplace else and I am just being handed the song.

At some point, that flow of inspiration is over, and the message I get from that is “Go sing the song!” Go share the song; go perform it. Don’t be greedy; do not forever be tuning in for more songs. You’ve got a song—go sing it. Share it with the world. It’s not yours anymore. It is time to perform it, and that takes another kind of process. That takes action; that takes manifestation. It is a different phase of the creative process, and it is a fulfillment of the process of inspiration. If I heard the tune, the tune’s got to be sung. It’s got to be written on a piece of paper and somebody has to perform it according to how it emerged.

Inspiration has to take action. It takes action through the direction that we set for our lives—intelligent direction based on how we are inspired. To be creative, that direction cannot just be a knee-jerk reaction to the latest impulse that has entered our thoughts and feelings. It must be a well-thought-out direction, not something half-baked. Not just half the song, not just the melody and no chords, not without the ending. No, the whole song, chords and all. If what we are doing together is going to manifest something that is alive, we have to manifest the whole song, based on the inspiration we receive, so that what comes out still has the life that it began with. It’s not corrupted by our lazy thinking, our distracted or self-interested thinking. It is not altered beyond recognition with an “I’d rather have it this way” attitude. How was it born into consciousness, whatever it was? Did it stay what it was by the time the song was sung? Or did it become something else?

That is how a human life can get. In the actual singing of it, it can become something different from the inspiration that is ignited within us. The complete thinking that allows inspiration to take its true form is true philosophy, which is the love of Sophia, the love of knowing. True philosophy is thorough thinking founded upon inspiration.

And how about blessing? We can receive blessing from Source, but when it comes to what we are conveying to another person, is it still blessing? Is it still love? Is it encouragement? Is it an energy that brings life? Does it still contain the seed and essence of blessing? Or did something else creep into it?

Inspiration and blessing bring life, but only if they come to their natural fulfillment, only if they come all the way through in our thinking and in our feeling. All the way through—not just a moment of feeling good, but a dedication to living a life of compassion and a life of service to other people, so that what comes through is unaltered by whatever resentments and hating and lying we might fall prey to if we let ourselves. So the principles of manifestation require some hard work—the work of thinking things all the way through and acting on that thinking, and the work of allowing what we have received of blessing in our life to come all the way through, intact, to other people—as Jesus said, so that the people of our world might have life and have it more abundantly.