In the process of Creation, there is a place for darkness and there is a place for light. As human beings, we have a place in that process. We are present to be the Creator in the midst of the Creation. We are here in human form to be present in the darkness and to bring the light.

Often people speak about darkness in their life in very negative terms. They complain when they enter a “dark period.” They dread “the dark night of the soul,” as if it is something terrible and wrong. The darkness can feel terrible. But it is there for a reason. It is part of the process of Creation, and we cannot have Creation in our lives without it.

Where does conception and gestation occur? At the commencement of a human life, it happens in the dark, and rightly so. There is a protection in that darkness. We don’t imagine that the embryo or the fetus is trying to shine a light on what is going to happen next. Apparently they are willing to be in that darkness and grow. But darkness isn’t limited to the physical beginning of human life. It is essential in all creative processes.

For us as human beings, a large part of our ability to navigate our own lives and navigate the process of Creation has to do with our ability to be in the darkness and to transform the darkness from something terrible into a womb of Creation. We do that by the way that we are being in that darkness.

My friend, Courtney Bohlman, is a singer-songwriter. This is from her latest song:

You can’t rush your healing,
Darkness has its teachings,
The beauty is
Love’s never leaving you,
No, Love’s never leaving you.

When we know that Love is never leaving us, we can know that we are never leaving the process of Creation. We’re here for that. We’re here for ourselves in the middle of whatever darkness may be present in the creative process. And if we can be here for ourselves we can be here for another person, providing the reassurance of the reality of Love.

The beginning of things involves darkness and it involves light. It involves seeds being sown in that darkness and something being activated in a magical way that we cannot produce solely by our human effort. But with a larger faith and a larger trust, we know that the Creator is with us, and indeed we are the Creator in that circumstance. We are sowing the seeds of Creation in the darkness.

There is nothing on earth that is closer to the Creator of all things than a human being who is in attunement with the Creator. Have you ever thought about that? Of all the marvelous forms of life on Planet Earth, there’s nothing closer to the reality of the Creator than a human being. And for you, there’s no human being who’s closer to that reality than you, and for me no one closer than me. Yet, for most people, they don’t have that experience. They find themselves so enmeshed in the darkness that is around them, and the darkness within their own soul, that they lose their attunement with the Creator. They become terrified by all the things that seem to be limited or wrong.

Can we be present in the darkness of our own soul, experiencing it, seeing it, knowing it, and yet know that we are shining light into that darkness? We are present in the darkness, in the reality of the Creator, content to be there, unmoved, unworried, bringing the profound power of Creation into that darkness.

How is it said in the Psalm? Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil. So often for us, as human beings, we look at ourselves and we look at another person, and we become identified with what we see as the shameful things that are present. That is truly a confused state. From the standpoint of the Creator that we are, what we see is the wonder of Being in all things. The wonder of the Creation! The magnificence of our own physical bodies! The power of our emotional experience! Wondrous indeed! Terrifying at times, but wondrous. And not so terrifying when we’re in the midst of it as ourselves, unidentified with what’s happening there, but owning it. Our human experience transmutes when we show up as the light of Being that we are in our human experience. In that attitude, we are owning our human experience and embracing it.

So many people are running in the opposite direction, trying to evade and ignore what is occurring in their human experience. If they are spiritual, perhaps they attempt to run to the light. It’s a weird predicament, trying to run toward the light. Did you ever think of this? If you’re attempting to run toward the light, you are identifying with the darkness. If you are running towards the darkness, what are you identifying yourself with? The light.

In the Creation story it says this:

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.
And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.

For many human beings it goes something more like this:

And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.
And the spirit of the human being left to find a better situation where it wasn’t so dark.

 But that’s not how the creative process works. The Creator moves on the face of the darkness. When we enter the darkness of our own life, we are identifying ourselves with the spirit of the Creator that we are, and then we’re moving into the human experience as it is, without improvement. We are not avoiding darkness and we are not looking for a pre-illuminated situation in which to operate.

We are commencing a seven-month Full Self Emergence program at Sunrise Ranch. It is not a program of self-improvement, at the end of which you can come into your human experience. It is deliberately named as a program of full self emergence—the full force and power of who we are as a Being is coming into our human experience, owning all the dimensions of it fully. We’re setting ourselves free. We’re welcoming the reality of who we are into our human experience, every nook and cranny of it.

Martin Cecil wrote a brilliant book in 1968, As of a Trumpet. On page 13 he says this: “You are divine.” Well, that’s a happy thought! That the reality of us, every human being, is divine. We are an aspect of the Creator, part of the reality of Being that creates everything. And yet we are apparently distinctive and unique and individualized. Here are more of Martin’s memorable words:

You are divine. This is the truth for you, but it remains meaningless on earth until you know it. “Knowing” is the state of realized experience, and this occurs as your divine nature is given expression in thought, word and deed.

One of the characteristics of this nature is creativeness. You are a creator.

To me, Martin’s words paint a picture of full self emergence: we emerge through our creative expression. We are born into the world out of the womb of our mother, and then we’re born into the womb of this world. We have the opportunity to be reborn in this worldly womb in which we find ourselves. We are born through our creative expression. In that way, there is the opportunity, for each of us, of a second birth.

We are all born once. We have to be born again to live a fulfilling life. Now the deeper reality of who we are is emerging on earth. Just because the physical flesh seems to be mature doesn’t mean that the self of who we are has fully emerged. That only happens because we let it out. And how do we let it out? How do we set free the divine nature that’s within? Is it not through self-expression?

Just as conception and gestation occurred in the darkness of the womb of our mother, if the rebirth is to take place it must be in the darkness of the world as it is. It must occur in the darkness of our own soul.

It takes a human life to give birth to the reality that’s within a human being. It takes all the facets of human expression to let out the reality that’s within us. Try living a fulfilling life on any other basis. Try to be happy while you keep who you are inside, unexpressed in the world. You could make all kinds of wonderful things happen out there, you could acquire all kinds of wonderful things; but if you haven’t emerged through your own expression, how are you going to be happy and fulfilled as a human being? I would submit to you that you can’t be, that you’re fulfilled only as you come forth. And all of the wonderful things that happen in a human life when a human being is born into their life only happen for real on that basis. There is so much that happens when we as a creator are showing up as that creator in full self expression. We attract all kinds of wonderful people to be with us when we do that.

When we are emerging fully, we are attracting to us what needs to come to us. For me, when I think about people who are close to me in my life—the people I live with, the people who I work with, the people who are my friends—I think: My favorite people! It is not that they are better than anyone else. It is just that I see who they really are and how they are meant to be a part of my life.

When we are emerging fully in our lives, we are creating what needs to be created. After all, we are a creator. We are creating something, we are constellating something in our lives.

We as human beings wreak such havoc when we try to get things to happen that look like a real life—when we try to constellate the circumstances and people in our life that we think would make us happy without coming forth in the expression of who we are. We end up doing all those controlling, manipulative things that we dislike in other people. We try to get other people to act like we think they should; we try to bring the right people to us; we try to avoid the wrong people; we try to bring the money that we think ought to come to us. After all, we are practicing the Law of Attraction. We try to have all the accoutrements of a fulfilled life without having a fulfilled life. It doesn’t work so well. We only have to look around the planet to see that happening. Humanity is trying to live a fulfilling life on this planet without doing the one thing that would allow such an experience to be real—which is to allow the reality that’s within all humanity to come out. Without letting there be Full Self Emergence.

When that occurs for all of us together, that is God, present and in action for Planet Earth. Individually, you are divine. All together, the reality of the Creator for this planet could show up through humanity. The divine Self, fully in expression. Yay! Aren’t we going for that? But we can’t make it happen for everybody else with the waving of a magic wand. We can allow it to happen for ourselves, in our own creative expression, in thought, word and deed, as Martin said it. Of course, for our thoughts, words and deeds to carry the spirit of the Creator who we are, they must be filled with the feeling current of Love.

There are the words and the music of our life. The words are the thoughts, words and deeds. The music is the feeling current and the tone and spirit of our life.

Full self expression takes both the words and the music. Love doesn’t show up just because you do the right thing. I had a father like that. He came from a background that gave him the belief that if you love somebody you have to demonstrate it to them. And he taught me that you don’t tell people you love them, you show it to them. Well, there’s something to that. If people are talking more than they’re showing and proving, that doesn’t work. It takes both the words and the music. It is both the act of love, the commitment of love, being love and showing up as love in your world, and it’s also the feeling of love. Love isn’t just a feeling, but it is a feeling. And we know that when we meet another person, if the words and the music aren’t matching, we’re trying to figure out what’s really going on.

From the standpoint of the expression and the emergence of who we are, so that we are living a happy and fulfilling life, we need to show up not only with the words, not only doing the right things, as we think of them. We have to find some way to express that deepest of loves that’s within every one of us. Is that not a challenge of a human life? To find some socially appropriate way of expressing the depth of your love to other people? You can’t usually just go around kissing them and telling them how much you love them. That usually doesn’t quite work. So somehow, in the living of a human life, there’s got to be a way to tell people how precious they are, how much you care for them, how wonderful they are, how much you are with them. There has to be a way to bring the music of that in the living of your life.

When I stumbled across my ability to write songs and to write music, it was a relief. I found that through that medium I could say things to people that I couldn’t express any other way. Isn’t that a challenge for almost anyone? To find the way that is unique to us, to say to other people that we care. That we have love to give to them. What’s on the inside of us wants to be shared, hopefully without it coming out weird.

Love is universal. When we’re expressing the love that’s within us, we’re reminding people not just of what’s in us but what’s within them and what’s within all people and within all things. When you express the Universal Love that is within you, you are evoking that same reality within another person.

It’s said that every moment is a beginning. But in a particular way, this time is the beginning of a cycle of Creation. At Sunrise Ranch, we are commencing our seven-month Full Self Emergence program. Sixteen people have joined us to participate in this program. As a community, we are deeply participating in this creative process. We are holding the space for Creation, the womb, for this program.

I invite you to attune with us in the process, to attune to your own experience of full self emergence. And to share with us the act of Creation that we are about.

I celebrate our beginning and say, I’m here for this. I’m here for the wonder of it. I trust the darkness of it, and I trust the light that we each have to bring to that darkness. And I trust the miracle of Creation in the cycle of full self emergence.

How about you?