Author and biologist Rupert Sheldrake says that the universe operates largely according to a morphic field of habit and memory. Our human emotional body is very connected to that field, particularly as it relates to humanity. Feeling patterns are imprinted on the memory of our emotional body and then repeated, often without knowing from whence they came. Sometimes they came from our own direct experience in the past. But those patterns can be passed on from person to person—from parents and other elders as they entrain us in their own mode of thinking, feeling and acting. Our own life is not separate from the life of all humanity, so there are patterns in that larger field that bring all kinds of experiences to our own emotional body—joy and triumph but also the experience of misery and anxiety and depression, anger and pain. If we are unconsciously attuned to a morphic field that contains these patterns, it can lead to discouragement and a sense of impossibility and futility in our life.

What is the answer to that discouragement? Ultimately the answer comes from the realm of potentiality that is always present for us and for our lives. That realm of potentiality is the spiritual dimension of Being. But how do we bail out our own feeling realm from the experience that it has of discouragement that shows itself in so many horrible ways? It is through the power of conscious thought, turned to the realm of potentiality, that we change our emotional experience. Because within our Being, within who we are, is the potential for the expression and manifestation of who we are. So when our thoughts turn to that potential, we are in the process of bailing out our emotional realm from its discouragement. Start to ponder the potential for your life—who you might be with, where you could go, what you might create—and before long your emotions will be engaged in the process. You will feel the joy of Creation as you ponder these possibilities.

I’d love to say that this process happens in an instant. But there are patterns and habits that can be deeply ingrained. So to bail out the emotional realm, it takes the courage to think about what’s possible in your life, and to continue to ponder it no matter what current discouragement you may be experiencing. And then you have to act on what is possible. It does take courage to do that in the face of what may be blinding anxiety and discouraging experiences that lead to depression or deep grief. It takes courage to think a brave thought about what is possible in your life and what is valuable in your life, and to embrace that, and to keep embracing it in the face of those feelings.

Ultimately, courage is about pouring your heart into your life. It is, ultimately, the courage to know and fulfill the potentiality that is contained in who you are, and then embody that potential in all you think and feel, say and do.

Courage expressed takes place in the context of the morphic field in which we live, which relates to our own personal experience accumulated over a lifetime but also the experiences of our family and forebears, our culture, our nation, and ultimately the entire human race. That morphic field is riddled with shame. Shame comes in all flavors, but any shame is an attack on selfhood and the creative potential of expressing who you are. It is the absence of an experience of Being, and of being oneself.

Shame shows up in all kinds of ways. We can have shame about our body and our body type. We can have shame about something that we have done or haven’t done. We can have shame about something we have thought about. I have friends who grew up in a church that had them confess the “near occasion of sin”—in other words, they were instructed to feel shameful about even thinking of something the church deemed to be evil. We can feel shame about our character. We can feel shame about things we feel. It’s all an attack on selfhood.

Shame is present in the morphic field, and therefore it visits our feelings because of the close connection of the emotional body with the morphic field. It would be one thing if shame came to us just as words, as a conscious thought that was bright in our mind so that we could see it and deal with it, like the thought: “You are a bad person and you did a bad thing.” But often it doesn’t quite come like that. It comes as a vague mist that wafts into the feeling realm. It comes as gloom, or it comes as some kind of anxiety about something and you’re not quite sure what. And then you put a name to it; you attribute it to something. But it’s actually part of this morphic field that is riddled with shame, and it moves into the emotional body.

When it does, it can affect our thinking. We can start to think in a way that absorbs that shame and is thinking out of it and is justifying it. Then our conscious thoughts go to trying to fix things within us or other people, or in the circumstances of our life, while unconsciously clinging to the experience of shame. We try to make things better but those attempts never alleviate the shame.

So where is the courage to think in a different way, to stand up to the feelings that come out of the morphic field in which we live and to open up to the possible, open up to the potential of life itself and the glory of it? Where is the courage to see through to the root of what the problem is? We don’t fix the problem by trying to fix ourselves or other people, or by trying to fix the circumstances. An unconscious person fails to notice what is really going on, so they attribute the cause of their unhappy feeling state to the forms of their experience. We address the problem by opening up to the reality of the potential that is present with us, that is present in Being itself. That presence of Being is the presence of selfhood. Our potential is inherent in our selfhood; it is inherent in who we are.

To really experience our potential, we have to have the courage to think for ourselves and have feelings that are an expression of the love within us. When we think the thoughts that come out of the Being of who we are, and we have the courage to do that in the face of what we are feeling that may be in conflict with those thoughts, it takes focus, steadiness and consistency to see ourselves through the storm of feeling, until the feeling comes around to follow and amplify the new thought we are thinking, a thought filled with potentiality.

Here are some of my thoughts that are filled with the potential for my life on this autumn day. Perhaps they will resonate with the potential and possibility for your own life.

• Eating the fresh tomatoes that have just been harvested, covered with olive oil, thick balsamic vinegar, with a layer of mozzarella cheese, basil and chopped purple onion
• Seeing my friends who I miss after ten days of travel
• Seeing my Xavi, my grandson, now eighteen months old
• Launching a new online course, Introduction to Primal Spirituality
• Writing to you now, and the thought of you reading these words

When we start to think about what we could be creating together, the beauty of it, the wonder of it, the glory of it; when we start to think about the love that we could share with each person we know, in a unique and special way; when we start to think about our destiny as human beings to know the true community of man, male and female; when we think about all of that possibility and it begins to take shape in our mind, it also takes shape in our feelings. We could not only think about the love that we could be sharing but we could feel that love and express that love to one another. We could live that love and let it land deep in our heart, and let it heal the shame that is present at so many levels.

The master teacher, Jesus, said this:

Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.

What does that mean, to love your neighbor as yourself? It does have the implication that we should be loving ourselves, not shaming ourselves, because how would you love your neighbor as yourself if you were experiencing yourself in a shameful way? It also has the implication that we can love ourselves by loving our neighbor—that the way the potentiality of our life, the things that we sense are possible to us in the Beingness of who we are, comes alive for us is by expressing our love to someone else. It then becomes real for us. It is hard to give love to yourself without giving love to somebody else. Call it enlightened self-interest, or just call it the way things work. When we love our neighbor as ourselves we are sharing the potentiality that is contained in that experience, and in that process we are giving that awareness to ourselves.

In so doing, we are re-sanctifying the human experience. We are altering the underlying template of consciousness that is present for humanity. We are embracing the human and all the aspects of our humanity. The most spiritual thing you could do is to embrace your humanity, because that is exactly what the spiritual in you is doing all the time. And if you are embracing your humanity, you are with your spirit; you are being your spirit who is doing that. Your spirit is loving you right now; it’s loving your mind and it’s loving your emotional body and it’s loving your physical body. And so if you are doing that, you are doing the most spiritual thing you could be doing.

In fact, you may be betraying yourself if you are trying to have a spiritual experience. Because the truth is that you are not a limited human being who might be trying to have a spiritual experience. You are a powerful and loving spirit who is doing all that you can do to love your human experience, only you have to get through a consciousness that is deeply in touch with a pattern that is riddled with shame. That is your problem.

So we call to our minds to open up to who we are and what we are here to do, to entertain the possibility of the grandness of what our life could be. And in so doing, we find that it’s not only our own Being, our own true selfhood, that we are bringing into the world, because we are a part of all Being. All Being, the Being of all humanity—we are part of that. And when we are bringing our own Being through our own humanity, we are bringing all Being of all humanity into humanity, and doing it for all humanity, in this holographic form that we refer to as me. And we are allowing all of Being, which we might name by the word God, to do its will in this human world, that this human world that is acting out of a sense of shame may be transformed, may be filled with a knowing of the true self, through and through, thus creating a new morphic field, a new pattern, and a new memory for humanity, so that a new world may manifest.

On my own behalf and on behalf of the Being of all who may read these words, to the humanity of each of us, I say: We see you. We love you. We’re with you. We empower you. We encourage you to be all of who you are meant to be and to manifest all that you are destined to manifest in this world. We are with you. May you do great things, even in small ways. May you think grand thoughts, even in little things. And may you entertain that most great and wondrous spirit of Love that is the very core and nature of who you are, and let that fill your heart and overflow into your world, so that your cup runneth over, and so that you find that all things that are meant to be are possible because you are present and allowing them to be so. So may it be for all our friends everywhere. So may it be. I invite you to say with me three times:

Aum-en. Aum-en. Aum-en.