I am happy to announce that the High Park Fire in Northern Colorado is one hundred percent contained. Thank you to each one of you who very deliberately brought blessing and protection through your prayers for Sunrise Ranch. This sacred land was spared from that fire, and many participated in holding us in loving protection.

The founder of Sunrise Ranch, Lloyd Arthur Meeker, wrote these words in his book Seven Steps to the Temple of Light: “Let love radiate without concern for results.”  That attitude toward the people and events of our world takes a person from an experience of being small and powerless to an experience of wisdom and joy. It takes a person from reactionary human awareness to cosmic consciousness.

There is such power in being identified with what is grand and cosmic in nature, versus the overwhelming awareness of what is small and parochial. Of course, we are made to be aware of the immediate circumstances of our life and to act wisely within them. But if that awareness of the most immediate world around us invades the place within us that is made to be a house for cosmic consciousness, we are lost.

One definition of the word confusion is this:

An act causing a disorderly combination of elements with identities lost and distinctions blended.

The predicament in which humanity finds itself is this kind of confusion. It takes discernment to find our way through that predicament. A person has to welcome shifts in consciousness that make a place for cosmic consciousness.

On this basis, the holy of holies within a person is a clear place of worship. Reactive thinking and feeling doesn’t get in there and cause confusion. That is what prevents real cosmic consciousness. We might have weird ideas about what God looks like, but we also have weird ideas about what we are supposed to look like and what our world is supposed to look like and how things are supposed to be working out. And so all this cosmic energy is moving through a person and it keeps bumping up against their great ideas—great ideas about themselves, great ideas about the people in their world. Even great ideas about how the High Park Fire should go.

For many people, their mind works like a gerbil wheel. You probably know the experience, when there is confused energy moving through you and it runs in a circular pattern that leads nowhere. It may begin with these thoughts: “This would be a lot easier if… I would be a lot happier if…” The gerbil wheel runs on ifs. And yet, we all have within us the power to take that gerbil out of the cage, kiss it and love it and send it on its way.

The recent movie The Help tells the story of black maids in Mississippi in the 1960s. It was a time when segregation and race relations were much different and more strained than they are now. Most of the white children in Mississippi were being raised by black nannies, and the nannies were also the maids and did just about everything in the house. Viola Davis plays Aibileen, the black maid in the story. One of the most touching parts of the movie is her way of blessing the children she raises. Aibileen puts her hands on their faces and she says to them, “You is kind. You is smart. You is important.” At the end of the scene, when she is being fired for having told some true stories, she says to the daughter, “Remember what I told you.” And in her three-year-old voice, the daughter responds, “I am smart, I am kind, and I am important.”

There are a lot of negative thoughts, feelings and beliefs that people have absorbed, which then reside in their holy of holies. “You’re not good enough. You’re a brat. You cry too much. You’re needy.” All those things that well-intended, loving people did while putting their hands on our heads—virtually or for real—are the things that have gotten into the place where the holiness of who we are should reside in ease and with breathing and great excitement and joy and ecstasy. Three simple things: You are smart, you are kind, and you are important. And with that, you are divine, you are beautiful, you have everything you need. You are needed; you are loved. All those things belong there. From the place of knowing these truths, it is very natural and easy to be radiant and to deliver who you are into the world, knowing you may make mistakes, and it’s okay.

Usually, a child’s mistakes are occasions when the negativity goes into their holy of holies: “You did it wrong. You embarrassed me. You’re a bad child.” I’m not really speaking only about parenting. I’m talking about the human condition and the confusion that is present, defined as “an act causing a disorderly combination of elements with identities lost and distinctions blended.”

Cosmic consciousness is an awareness of who we are as Eternal Being incarnate in human form. But for humanity as a whole, that awareness of true identity has been lost by the confusion that is present. Humanity has had toxic human thinking and feeling invade the place within us where the reality of who we are would naturally dwell and thrive. And so the cosmic reality of who we are hasn’t been able to get out. It has to bump up against all this confusion, and then little pieces of cosmic power do come out, but often without the wisdom and clarity needed for us to thrive. But we are designed to be a force. Weare a force. That’s another quality you could add to what we tell each other: “You are smart, you kind, you are important, and you are a force of life.”

If confusion is an act that causes identities to be lost, then this is the end of confusion. Confusion ends when we embrace the truth of who we are and express it, and when we bless the people around us by knowing who they are.

I give thanks for all the blessed states of desperation I’ve had to face in my life, when my life got very difficult and I decided it needed to be different. So I set on a new path, saying, “I’m not living my life that way anymore. I’m going to choose differently. I’m not just running away from something that’s not working. I’m choosing to create something different.” It is in the desperation that you realize things aren’t working. So while no one goes looking for it, desperation is a wonderful place to be in. Celebrate your opportunity!

If you feel desperate, welcome home. Welcome out of hell. Embrace the truth of who you are. Desperation is usually what is essential to get yourself moving out of something that is not working. For me, I can feel desperate about the elm tree seedlings growing in my yard. There’s not much I can do about them, but there is a lot I can do about the state of feeling desperate about them. I can allow an internal state that lets nothing stop the cosmic reality of who I am.

What I have discovered is that when I am part of a group of people who are letting their confusion come to an end and letting cosmic consciousness be present through them, we discover we are all together, because cosmic being is together. There is one life force and it is animating all of us. So when you are out there, transparently expressing the cosmic reality you are, you are part of everything that is part of the cosmos. That is a really powerful place to be.

These words are from Martin Exeter’s Prayer of Being:

I am in heaven. 
The revelation of myself is holy.

We are in heaven when we say we want to be, and we reside there and reveal the holiness and wholesomeness of who we are as cosmic reality in human form. You are beautiful. You are perfect. You are loved. You are needed. You are wanted. You are necessary for the completion of the work we came to do together.