Look, it’s raining!
A warm, July shower,
filling all the gullies
creeks and valleys
and soaking my body
to the bone.
It’s raining!
And I’m out the door,
down the street,
singing among the drops
and dancing in the puddles,
loving being wet
on every inch of skin,
deep into my parched heart
and cooling my fevered brow;
thoughts flowing as a river
of dark water down
the mountain of my soul.
I am now alive and strong
and vast like I’ve never known myself to be
in this life.

There is a rain of the spiritual falling within us. It is a rain of life, life-giving energy that’s coming into us. We have the opportunity to allow our heart to receive that, and then to allow all the rest of us to entrain with what’s happening through the heart.

This is from Ezekiel:

A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh.

The heart of stone that is present for so many people creates a ceiling that is present in the consciousness of humanity. There is a ceiling, and people everywhere tend to live under that ceiling. The ceiling has to do with what’s happening in the emotional body, because the emotional body ought to be a clear open channel for the rain that’s coming down. But for most people, the stoniness of their heart prevents them from receiving that rain fully.

When you hit that ceiling in your life, there’s only one good thing to do, and it is to realize that your humanity, all of who and what you are as a human being, was made to be a temple for the Divine; that you have the opportunity to allow the Divine to be embodied in and through your human experience. You are here to receive the rain.

There are very few people who have actually bumped right up against that ceiling. For most people, they are wandering around someplace in the room of their existence. They are wandering around in the room, never gaining enough altitude to bump into the ceiling. My wish for you is that you hit the ceiling, and you hit it soon, and you hit it hard, so that you know what the ceiling is and so that the issue of the ceiling is smack dab in the middle of your life, and therefore you have a choice as to what you’re going to do about that ceiling.

So I am describing my understanding and experience of what the ceiling is. And I’d like to describe what takes a person up to a place of bumping into it, and then what action to take when you do.

So what takes a person to the ceiling? It is spiritual passion, and enough passion and devotion spiritually so that you are truly on a spiritual path. That path takes you into an ascending spiral of awareness. You are coming out of an earth-centered way of being; you are coming out of a way of being that attributes value to your position in the world, your accomplishments in the world, and your place in the world, because what means more to you is the reality of Universal Love that you have touched—the rain. And your hungering and your thirsting after that experience is strong enough so that you keep moving on that path. Your heart keeps opening more and more so that you may receive more and more of the rain.

So it does take spiritual passion to ascend in consciousness to the point where you can hit the ceiling. The ceiling is the separation in human experience between heaven and earth. It is the separation between the reality of Divine Being and your own human experience. That separation is a stony heart, a heart that is something less than transparent.

Upon hitting the ceiling, which is the limit of where your passion for the spiritual can take you—it’s as high as you can go on that basis—there are two bad choices to make. Wouldn’t you love to know about them? You can bounce off the ceiling and go back into an earth-centered way of being; you can go back into the world at large and just decide that your spiritual journey was all a dream, and what is really important is to embrace the things of the world and make the best of it—to become earth-centered. So that’s a bad choice, but it is a choice, and people make it. They bounce off the ceiling.

There is another bad choice: It is to decide that one is going to ascend to lofty heights of cosmic awareness, that one is going to go where no man has gone before and ascend into the spiritual and achieve heaven, nirvana, ascension, by whatever name. It never actually happens on that basis. A person can amuse themselves with flights of spiritual fantasy and imagination, and they can keep it going for at least a time. I suppose the more imaginative of us might be able to keep it going for a lifetime. But it is ultimately, on that basis, an experience of imagination, because the human experience never ascends into heaven, despite whatever theories are advanced by the religions of the world.

So what is truly possible, and what would it mean truly to move through the ceiling? When you hit the ceiling in your life, there’s only one good thing to do, and it is to realize that your humanity—all of who and what you are as a human being—was made to be a temple for the Divine; that you have the opportunity to allow the Divine to be embodied in and through your human experience.

There is a catch. For that to really happen, your heart has to crack wide open, in every sense. You have to trade in the heart of stone for a heart of flesh. All the habitual places in your life have to crack open if the Divine is to live there. And probably not only the places you might be thinking about right now—not just the places where you’ve been bad, or you should have done it better. The good places, the bad places, it doesn’t matter—it all needs to crack open so that the rain can come in, so that you can know that the Divine that looked like it was something separate, to be touched, to be somehow attained, is meant to be embodied through you; that the biggest part of who you are is up there, if you will, or in here. And that biggest part of who you are wants to live through your body. It wants to take you over.

That might seem like a horrible thing, to get taken over by an alien being from someplace else, until you realize it is actually You who wants to take you over. It is the grandness, the divinity, the eternality of who you are that wants to be here now through you. But it can’t do that fully through all your habitual patterns, some of which you think are good and some of which you think are bad. It can’t do it through all those limited patterns, because it is so much bigger than that, it is so much more majestic than that. The grandeur of who you are can’t abide all that, and therefore has to crack open if it is to be present—if you are to be truly present in this life, and if you are truly to bring your heavenly home here on earth and know that that heavenly home and this earthly one are meant to be one place; that you are meant to move and live in all the familiar earthly places in which you inhabit your life, knowing that you are not just moving through earthly space but that you are moving in heavenly space. You are moving and dwelling in your heavenly home.

On a spiritual path, we can use symbols of the heavenly home. The symbols end up being symbols out of our earthly life and earthly reality, because there are no other symbols to use. My poem took advantage of an earthly symbol, the rain. When we live in our heavenly home within the earthly one, then all the earthly forms of our life are transformed and become symbols of the heavenly home, embodiments of the heavenly home.

There are people who will try to talk you out of that experience; people who try to persuade you to look at others and at the world around you as only earthly. I’ll give you a good example. It is very likely that you have people whispering in your ear, telling you things about other people, and in essence telling you that the other people in your life are merely flawed human beings—they are not inhabitants of the heavenly home. And you may listen to that and believe their report and their judgment. The evidence is in, the case has been made, the jury’s made its decision, and we agree. And at some level they may be right—but at another level they are oh, so wrong.

So what would happen for each of us if we reserved a place in consciousness for the judgments of others, but relegated it to some corner of our lives, just in case we really needed that kind of advice about other people? But then we deliberately chose to let our relationship with every person in our life be primarily based on our direct, one-to-one knowledge in our relationship with them, and simply experienced that? And in that, we can know that most people are doing what we have probably often done, which is to live out some habitual pattern of thought and feeling and way of behaving. But far more importantly for us, that couldn’t be all there is to this person. That’s not what is keeping them alive. That’s not what gave them birth. That’s not all there is to them. They are an inhabitant of the heavenly home. The spiritual rain is falling from within them. I believe that this simple practice of setting aside the judgments of others in favor of our own direct connection with another at a spiritual level is of great assistance in allowing us to penetrate our own humanity as ourselves and truly inhabit our heavenly home right here and now.