One of the many names for God is The Creator. There is a reality within us that is looking to create. It is looking to create “out there,” in the manifest world of which we are aware through our senses, and the creation that we think of as being “out there” exists in our conscious awareness. In the way that it is to us, it exists nowhere else, actually. So consciousness is a vital part of the act of creation.

Scientifically, when any work is done, force is applied that moves substance. There is resistance in the substance to which the force is applied. That is true scientifically, but it is also true in personal experience. Is there any work you undertake that just happens without the application of energy through you and some resistance on the part of whatever it is that is the substance of your creation? There is the reality of resistance, and that is part of creation. And there is the creative power of the Word, or however else you would want to name the universal power that shapes, forms and energizes matter.

We don’t just wish something would happen and find that it manifests without the application of will and effort. There has to be the creative power of the Word through feeling, thought, words and action, brought to bear on the substance of whatever creative field you are working in for there to be creation. It is true with respect to physical substance, as it is for a carpenter pounding a nail into a board. The board resists the nail. It is true of mental substance, as it is for a politician changing the opinion of a nation. It is true when a great songstress not only vibrates the air with her vocal chords but stirs the emotions of her audience.

There is always some degree of resistance—push-back—on the part of the substance in the field of the creator. That is natural and necessary in the creative process. Inertia, too, is a law of nature. The problem is that there has been a lapse in human consciousness that has caused people to become not only aware of the resistance but identified with it. By the very nature of our human capacity, we contain substance at the physical, mental and emotional level. That substance has within it many properties, including resistance. So of course we are aware of the resistance that is present within us. And not only within ourselves but in other people and in the entire world around us. There is nothing wrong with that awareness. The problem is that the consciousness of humanity has fallen so that it is identified with the resistant factors in the substance of its being, and then has only a diminished awareness of the power of creation. And that power is generally seen as something other than who and what the person is.

Keith Anderson recently addressed a central theme running through the Bible that addresses exactly this issue. It is the story of separation from the creative reality within and the spiritual development of humanity, which has the purpose of ending this separation. Keith traced stories from the Bible, Old Testament and New, which tell of this spiritual development, including the story of Moses. Reflecting on the story of Moses’ spiritual realization—the story of the burning bush—it is the story of a man coming to terms with the wisdom and power within him, and then taking responsibility for being the expression of that wisdom and power in the living of his life.

While Moses was a great man, his own identification with resistance shows up in the story as he questions his ability to carry out his personal mission in life. He is initially inclined to attribute the wisdom and power within him to something separate from himself. He asks how he should name the One who has sent him. The answer he receives resonates with awe and power: “I AM THAT I AM…. I AM.”

For me, it is hard to read these words without a chuckle. It seems that in this ancient conversation with God, Moses is being tricked into taking personal responsibility for being the wisdom and power that is speaking with him. In essence, he is being told that if he is asked who sent him, to answer “I am.” I am now that force and power that compels the substance of my being to act. I am going down into Egypt to free my people because I am an expression of the Living Word, that spiritual compulsion that brings freedom and life to humanity.

This is the same message inside every man and woman on earth today. It asks us to stop identifying with the resistant factors in our own human makeup and in the world, and to own our own reality as the power of creation.

This is the right fulfillment of the conversation with God. Rightfully, conversations with God do not go on forever. The fulfillment of those conversations is us acting as the Creator in our world, bringing the power of the Creator into our world. We then have a different relationship with resistance. Resistance doesn’t go away. For people who aspire to enlightenment, they can become disillusioned when, after being on their spiritual journey for a time, there is still work to do and there is still resistance in their lives. The difference in an enlightened person is that their relationship with that resistance has changed. They’re no longer identified with it—they are the power acting upon it. But resistance has not gone away.

Resistance is natural—it is present by virtue of scientific law related to material things. There is resistance both internally, in ourselves, and with other people. Just because there is creative energy moving through us, does that mean that we are instantly healed? Everything in our body is therefore perfect? I don’t think so. It helps—there is a creative process at work when we are identified with the Creator. But it is a process, and there is resistance in that process.

And how about the things that are troubling in thought and feeling, personally? Where there is spiritual openness, one’s relationship with those things changes. Isn’t that true? Have you ever opened spiritually and not found that how you felt was dramatically affected? Opening spiritually does change both thought and emotion. But it does not mean that we will never have a disturbing feeling again in our life. That is not what the story of Jesus portrayed. Yes, he was an enlightened human being, but that did not make him immune to an experience of the resistance that was present in his life. There came a time when the pressure he was under was so severe that it was said that he was in agony, and his sweat was like great drops of blood.

What’s really needed is a person through whom the Creator can come transparently into the world, so that the awesome power of creation can be at work within the realm of human awareness and in the human world. That takes spiritual transparency. We are designed as human beings, individually and together, to stand at the energetic portal between the power of creation and the affairs of this world, so that we allow the power of creation to be at work—first of all through human minds and hearts, starting with our own, and then through all the rest of creation. We are designed that way and we are functional as human beings when that is the way we function. In fact, everything about us—physically, mentally and emotionally—is made to be a gateway for the things of heaven to be operative in our world.

How do we know that is true? Because when we live on that basis, the rightness of it reverberates through every aspect of who we are. It may not always feel comfortable, but it feels good. And anytime we are doing something other than that, we find ourselves identified with resistance; and it doesn’t feel good, it doesn’t feel right, because we are not making right use of our human capacity, which was meant to be a heavenly portal.

Several years back, we began to name what we are doing here at Sunrise Ranch and through Emissaries of Divine Light as the formation of the Priesthood of the Sacred Veil. That veil is between heaven and earth, and it becomes sacred when it is transparent. The nature of the veil has a lot to do with what is happening in the human heart. So a priest or priestess of the sacred veil is one who has transparency and sustains transparency of heart themselves, and therefore is in position to assist other people to allow their own hearts to turn transparent. The heart goes through a process of being nearly opaque, to translucent—where light can come through but you can’t really perceive what’s on the other side—to transparency, when the forms and shapes energetically at a higher vibrational level come through easily and quickly and powerfully.

Sometime after we named what we were doing here that way, it was called to my attention that Uranda, who founded this Ranch and this program, Emissaries of Divine Light, had used a very similar naming. I can’t really tell you if I’d heard it before and it was sitting there someplace, deep in my subconscious, to be brought up in some way—probably I had heard it. His naming was this: the Council of the Golden Veil—gold relating to love. The Council of the Golden Veil. So we call people today to be members of the Council of the Golden Veil. This is a sacred naming of spiritual function.

There is a lot we do at Sunrise Ranch and all of us do many things in our lives, which have value if approached from the right standpoint. Here we raise cows, cook food and publish literature, among many other activities. We all have the things that we do in our lives that have value. And for us, the most central thing is to participate in and to convene the Council of the Golden Veil.

So, interestingly enough, Uranda had a seal that he used on official documents, and that seal contained this naming. A number of years ago, the seal was lost. Shareen Ewing was very aware that there had been one; it had been used for many years. It is understandable that such a thing would happen, because there was a time here when the light didn’t shine as brightly as it had or as transparently. When such things happen, the manifest forms of our life that are sustained by the shining of the light somehow just leave. And this was one of those forms that left.

Recently we have been clearing the accumulated stuff in some of the buildings at Sunrise Ranch. Adam Castle and Soma Hunter came across this seal in the old granary and brought it to Shareen. So we are reclaiming our legacy, and this seal is a symbol of that legacy. Not only the legacy of Emissaries of Divine Light but of an ancient lineage that has been about the work of healing humanity—The Council of the Golden Veil—men and women down through the ages from around the world, from all walks of life, who have devoted themselves to the healing of the separation that is present in human awareness and which keeps people from knowing themselves as the wisdom and power of the universe that activates the substance of their world. And in claiming our legacy, we are also embracing our destiny to let this work be fulfilled.