What is your sense of urgency for what needs to be brought into the world today? I say that this world is in urgent need of the spiritual answer to its problems. And that spiritual answer comes from within people. But we know from experience that if it is left to what is coming from within people at large, without visionary and inspirational leadership and example, the spiritual answer that is within people will not come out. We need people who are themselves living teaching-and-demonstration sites for what the answer is. In short, there has to be a way shown. There have to be people who are spiritual teachers.

At Sunrise Ranch we are in the middle of a grand reorganization. We have Patty Minor facilitating this process that will involve a clearly articulated strategy. At the end of this, we will have clearly articulated objectives for 2014, a list of projects, a budget to go with them, and an organization chart with little boxes on it and people’s names in those boxes. So there will be reorganization and a remobilization. We are mobilizing to bring spiritual teaching to the world and to do it as a living teaching-and-demonstration site.

The organization chart we create will be useful. It will be important and significant to the extent that there are people who are truly organized—not just organized on the piece of paper or in the plan, but people who are truly together and in right relationship with each other in life. Any org chart is, at best, a map for what is to happen in reality between people.

For something great to be accomplished in the earth of our existence, it has to come from someplace. Such things do not just appear. They are the manifestation of something. For an individual, they are an expression of who that person is; and for any group of people, what they create in the world is a manifestation of something about that group. What is embodied in form is the earth of what is transpiring in the heaven for that person or for that group of people.

When I say “heaven,” I am not referring to a place we go to after we die, or to some faraway reality. I am referring to the invisible dimension of consciousness and spiritual energy at the vibrational level of our being. The degree to which we are free to powerfully embody the reality of who we are is the degree to which we live in that vibrational reality. The heaven of our being is a realm of cause for what is created in our life. When we are abiding in that place personally, we are coming from a place of awake consciousness and power. And so when we approach whatever it is we are creating in the earth, we have all the intelligence of that place, all that awareness, and all the power of that place of being to bring to what we are doing in the earth.

The reverse of that is true: If we are struggling in the earthly forms of our world and we are in the drama of that, and we have no insight, no awareness, no power to bring, no great embodiment of who we are to bring into that, what is that telling us? We are lost in the earthly form of things. In that state, we can look for the spiritual—and well we should. That is the solution for that kind of struggle and confusion. We can seek that place within ourselves where there is peace, where there is the reality of being, where there is awareness and power.

But let’s find it! Real seeking doesn’t go on forever. Real seeking brings us to finding something, and in this case finding the intelligence and power and wonder of our being, so that we have that to bring to all our creations, to all our hard work.

The English playwright George Bernard Shaw said this about living a creative life:

This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being a force of nature instead of a feverish clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.

I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the community and as long as I live it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no “brief candle” to me. It is a sort of splendid torch that I have got hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.

—from Man and Superman

The hard work that George Bernard Shaw makes reference to is not just hard work. It is joy when you have the power and the intelligence to bring to that work. It is a struggle when you are not in that place of being within yourself.

This is how it works personally and individually for all people, and that is where the life of community and the life of humanity as a whole have to start. We cannot somehow hope that it is just going to dawn on all of us together if we individually have not taken the step of entering into the peace and regal dignity of our being, the deep silence of our being, finding there our own power. If we have not taken that step individually, it’s not likely to show up in our experience with other people. But when you and I do take that step, we find ourselves together in another reality, so different from the one of struggle with what is manifesting in the earth. It is a reality of deep peace and regal dignity, of awareness, and the availability of power.

In the reality of that experience we then find others who are living in that heaven of being. We have the joy of being together with others in that place. And we create with those other people a living organization chart, a living pattern of relationship in which we can well say, “I know you and you know me. And I’m here for you, and I know you’re here for me.” And all together, we are here for the one big thing, and that is to bring the wonder of being into manifestation in the earth.

So how does a person take a step into this reality for themselves? Why does it happen for one person? And why doesn’t it happen for someone else? Why do some people seem to spend their whole life struggling with the world of what is manifesting in their life?—as they see it, what is happening to them and what other people are doing. Meanwhile, others are taking this step into the deep assurance of their own being, and finding that, living in that place, they have access to the power of creation; that in fact they are a creator in their life and in their world. They are no longer flailing around with what seems so out of control. They are no longer a victim of circumstance. They are a creator of what is manifesting. They are a birther of worlds.

Why? It’s all based on this one simple thing: the passion of your heart. You either have passion for the human drama in your life—for the experience of being a victim of your circumstance, with all the deep feeling about that—or you have mad passion for being the creator of a world, a mad passion to be of service to your community and to this world. You have mad passion about living in the wonder of being, about what your life is about as you are in that place. And not only mad passion but consistent passion, day in and day out, that brings you to a place of knowing you have nothing better to do in your life. Nothing else matters to you. And all the things that have been so overwhelming mean nothing, because you are a creator. You are here to bring wonder and magic and beauty and power, to bring life.

And you can’t be stopped by what stops most people—all the ups and downs of how things are going, your wins and your losses, as you count them. It is a mad passion about what is really true for you, and bringing the truth of that reality, the truth of that heaven into the world with power and insight and penetration. It is mad passion about being with the people that you are with in that, knowing that the last thing you want to do in your life is let those people down.

This is from an ancient spiritual text, the Bhagavad-Gita:

 The sovereign soul
Who lives self-governed and at peace,
Is centred in himself, taking alike
Pleasure and pain; heat, cold; glory and shame.
He is the Faithful and Illumined One, glad
With joy of light and truth; dwelling safely
In the Central Way, with senses subjugate.
By this sign is he known:
Being of equal grace to comrades, friends,
Chance-comers, strangers, lovers, enemies,
Aliens and kinsmen; loving all alike,
Evil or good.

Within the Hedge he lives; 
Restraining heart and senses, silent, calm,
Let him express Reality, showing
Pureness of soul, abiding on the Rock,
Tranquil in spirit, free of fear, intent
On Me, expressing thought of Me.
That Faithful One, so devoted, so controlled,
Comes to the peace beyond — My peace, the peace
Of highest Heaven!

Someone who abides in the heaven of their being—the sovereign soul—has the same experiences of pleasure and pain, heat and cold, glory and shame that anyone else has. But as the man who founded Sunrise Ranch, Lloyd Arthur Meeker, would say, the attitude of the sovereign soul is “It matters not to me.” The human drama does not loom large to the sovereign soul, because this is everything to me—being the creator in my world and honoring the reality of being. That matters to me so much that this over here is just how things are going. And as tragic as it may look or as wonderful as it may look, it is just how things are going.

I have mad passion about being in the heaven of being and bringing what is in that heaven into this world. And I have mad passion about the people who are doing that with me and being with them, and them with me.

The great spiritual teacher whose birth we celebrate at this time of year put it this way: “Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt….” He was talking about exactly what we are talking about this morning. If your values are all about what is happening in the manifest world around you, there is going to be moth and rust, there will be rotting and a passing away. And you will find that your life will be carried into that and characterized by that; it will be wrapped up in what is coming apart.

His instruction was to “lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven.” Of course, from the perspective of the Christian religion, which we have to keep reminding ourselves was not created by Jesus, the “treasures in heaven” are found after you die. True spiritual teaching is focused on what happens in life, not in death. Give value to what is present in the heaven of your being now. Treasure that, love that. Love the deep peace of being. Love the deep assurance that is present in your being. Love the wisdom that’s available to you there, and love the power of love that is yours to bring into the world. Treasure that. Treasure it in yourself; treasure it in all people, in all creation. Within all creation is that heaven. Within all people is that heaven. We have the opportunity to be in that heaven right now, together. Love that.

This is the difference between someone who spends their life struggling with what is happening to them, as they see it—someone who is all caught up in everything that is happening in the soap opera of life—and the person who is bringing life, who is bringing the power of creation and the wonder of love into the world, who is bringing an answer to the problems that this world faces. And particularly that one big problem that this world faces, which is the human heart in the wrong place, with its values confused.

So this is the end of 2013. In 2014, let us be like the phoenix that dies and is reborn from the ashes of the old. For we precious few who abide in the heaven, here is what I know. We will create beauty. We will bring enlightened spiritual teaching to the world. We will invite this shift in human consciousness in all the people that we touch. We will bring mad passion to the embodiment of the wonder of being in the creation. We will inspire that same mad passion from everybody we touch if they are open to know it for themselves. Let them feel that for themselves in their own belly, in their own heart. Let them be inspired to take that step because we have taken it so fully and so completely that for us it is done. And we are no longer fooling around with the human drama. We may be in the midst of it, but we are not enmeshed in it.

Thank you for sharing my mad passion.