Human consciousness is designed as a womb that receives the seeds of Creation. Those seeds carry the pattern of the world to be created around us.

The womb of consciousness that we hold together as humanity has been seeded by spiritually awake human beings down through the ages. At this time of year, we celebrate the truth of love that Jesus brought, which are the seeds of a new humanity and a new world.

Because of that, we as humanity are carrying his child. As far as we know, he didn’t have a physical child. So I’m not speaking about a physical child, obviously. I am speaking about the birth of a new life for humanity that he seeded two thousand years ago. Jesus is not the only one to have done so, but he is one who stands out as we scan the ages of human history.

He made this statement: “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.” (Matthew 24:35) I understand the “heaven and earth” that he was speaking of to be the heaven and the earth of the world as it is—a heaven that has feelings of love but which is also filled with fear. It’s a human heaven, and a human earth, which is the world in which we live. It has many wonderful, creative and artistic things in it, but also has elements of disaster. This heaven and earth shall pass away, but the seeds of Creation that have been sown shall not pass away, and they are with us now.

The statement that we are carrying Jesus’ child may seem like a wistful piece of poetry. While it’s a poetic statement and a metaphor for something, it is a truthful statement. I invite you to ponder it for a moment. Wherever the seeds of love have been sown, they have conceived something in the mind and heart of human beings that doesn’t go away. Nothing can erase it. No war, no holocaust, no assassination, no hatred, no fear can erase it. The seeds of love are still present, still gestating.

If not for Christmas, and all it represents, humankind may not have made it this far. Of course, we don’t really know what would have happened if Jesus had not been born and if his coming into the world had not been celebrated through the centuries. But there is, at this time of year, a sense of what has been conceived in human consciousness that persists and, with that, the opportunity that is present today for humanity to wake up to its own spiritual reality.

At this time of year, we have dreams and visions of great love that is universal in its dimensions. Those dreams and visions enter the human heart in very familiar terms, as familial love. And there’s something beautiful about familial love and something possible in it that’s wondrous. If it’s limited to a me-and-mine kind of love, it proves elusive. We could have the most wondrous Christmas Day planned with family and friends, but it can go so wrong if it’s all about me and mine, and if it’s not filled with a Universal Love, with the love that rings throughout humanity, the love that is no respecter of persons, the love that says, “I don’t love you because I like you or I think you did well. I love you because it is our nature to love.” However we have behaved or whatever has happened, that is true, and that will not pass away. Heaven and earth shall pass away, but this truth shall not.

Here we are, wherever we are, present at this Christmastime when we are more keenly aware that the seeds of the truth of love are with us. It is a time of celebrating a birth long ago, but also a celebration of a new birth today.

This is a birth that doesn’t happen all at once. I suppose any birth is a little bit like that—it doesn’t happen all at once, but seemingly almost so, even if labor is prolonged. This is a birth that happens not just in the form of a baby. This is the birth of light through humanity, through you and through me.

That birth is an emerging light. And I suppose we could imagine that there’s some culminating moment when we, as humanity, could look from sea to shining sea across the landscape of the world and witness a culmination of this birth of light emanating from human beings. But the birth of light doesn’t happen all at once. And as a matter of fact, I would suggest to you that if we’re waiting for the all-at-once experience, it will never happen. It happens because today, here and now, wherever we are, something opens up in us that’s universal in nature. It is available in the here and now, it is available in the familial. It is available for me and mine, but it’s not limited to that. It is universal. It’s being born now, and I’m allowing it to be born now. This is Jesus’ child.

It is a white Christmas here in Colorado. Are these the perfect conditions for the Christ light to be born through us this morning? From some perspective, the conditions never seem to be perfect. For most people, their past doesn’t seem perfect—in some cases, far less than that. It’s easy for us, as human beings, to believe that we came from some imperfect past, however we conceive that to be; that we ourselves have been far less than perfect, that our family has been far less than perfect, and so has our nation.

There’s an amazing message in the Christmas story. Things then were far from perfect. In looking back now, the events of the Christmas story have a halo of perfection about them. After all, the wise men were coming and the angels were singing and the shepherds were eager to greet the newborn babe. Were angels singing for you this morning when you got up?

We look back upon the Christmas story and of that Christmas morning, and think of how perfect it must have been for Joseph and for Mary and for the baby. Realistically, when you read the story, there are all kinds of indications that it was far from perfect. In one telling of the story, Herod was out to get the baby. But there was more to the apparent imperfection than that.

Now the birth of Jesus Christ was on this wise: When as his mother Mary was espoused to Joseph, before they came together, she was found with child of the Holy Ghost.

Then Joseph her husband, being a just man, and not willing to make her a public example, was minded to put her away privily.

But while he thought on these things, behold, the angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a dream, saying, Joseph, thou son of David, fear not to take unto thee Mary thy wife: for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Ghost.

And she shall bring forth a son, and thou shalt call his name Jesus….

(Matthew 1:18–21)

Whether or not you take it on faith that Jesus was conceived without the benefit of a human father, how do you think all this went down in Nazareth, realistically speaking? She was pregnant, and he was not the dad. And it was the Holy Ghost that was. Do you think the good people of Nazareth were buying the story that the Holy Ghost came and was the father of the baby? And you may be suspicious that there actually was a father involved, who apparently wasn’t Joseph.

Are those perfect conditions? Is that a perfect background? No, that’s the part of Christmas that we don’t usually tell. We tell the Christmas story as if it were all perfect. Perhaps we do ourselves a disfavor when we think of it that way. Perhaps we dismiss the truth that our own imperfect circumstances are perfect!

The Christmas story is an archetypal story as well as being an attempt to describe something that happened in the past. It is an archetypal story, and the archetypes that are in the story relate to us here and now. We, as human beings, each one of us and then all of us together, are Mary. The seeds of Creation have been planted in our hearts and in our minds, just as the Christ child was conceived in Mary’s womb. We are carrying those seeds whether we are aware of it or not.

How shall we carry them? Shall they come to term in our own consciousness? Shall they bear fruit? Shall the seeds of light that have been planted in consciousness be born in our life experience as the light that we have to bring to the world? That is how it happens. As human beings, we’re not like a light switch. You just don’t walk over to the wall and flip on the switch and turn on the light that you are. The reality of light in the human experience is a living, organic thing. It needs to be conceived and to gestate in mind and heart, and then be born through us.

It is a matter of carrying something in your heart that you treasure, that you keep safe, that you allow to mature in yourself and allow to be born in your own life expression in its season. Love isn’t something you just turn on. Love is something you hold and you cherish, whether it’s love for another person or love for the ideals that are present in your heart. We are Mary, holding the seeds of Creation.

We are also the Holy Ghost of the story. We are the seed of Creation, and we have that to bring to our own consciousness, constantly seeding our own awareness with a deeper knowing of truth because we allow the seeds of that to be planted in our awareness constantly, day by day, through our thoughts and through the feelings of our heart. These are the seeds of light and love. We are saying things to ourselves and through ourselves that are seeding consciousness with light and love, knowing that those seeds will bear fruit in their own time.

So we play the role of the Holy Ghost in our own experience, bringing the seeds of light and the seeds of love into our own experience. And if we can do it for ourselves, we can do it for another person. Jesus, in his life, ended up playing the role of the Holy Ghost for the people around him, sowing the seeds of Creation for them and for us. And likewise, we have the opportunity to sow the seeds of Creation. We can be the Holy Ghost for another person, saying something that’s true and beautiful, something that’s loving, something which, if they will receive it, will grow in them. They may not know why, on some given day, that seed is sprouting and they’re feeling lighter, and they’re feeling loving, and they know they have something to give. But it might be because you sowed a seed of light or a seed of love in that person’s awareness, and they let it in and kept it safe.

We are the Christ child, born new on this day. We are reborn today and every day. This morning, when you and I got up, we had a clean slate, did we not? Life was not holding anything against us, even though there may have been past experiences we held against ourselves.

The Christmas story is our story. It certainly has been a Christian story, but it is nonetheless a story of universal proportion. It doesn’t apply just to Christians. It’s a story of life for all people.

Those who consider themselves Christian have sometimes attempted to own Jesus for themselves. Interesting that he was a man who lived his life right on the borderline of East and West in the Middle East. He was relevant not just for his own immediate world, and not just for the Western world. We tend to think of him as a Western character because of the way that Christianity has tried to put him into a Western box. But, like any man or woman who has come on earth and sowed seeds of Creation and brought Universal Love, he was a person of global stature. There are things you see and understand about him when you take him out of the box in which his followers down through the ages have put him.

I’m not suggesting that he is the only person we should see in a global context. The Dalai Lama is far more than a leader for Tibetan Buddhists. Nelson Mandela was far more than a South African politician. Moses was far larger than a leader for the Jewish people. They each brought the universal, so they were of a stature that transcended the situation that they were in.

I’m proud to be a leader of Emissaries of Divine Light, but I do not write to you only as the leader of a spiritual organization. I bring the seeds of Creation, which are the seeds of the Creator who is in all things and within all people. At the heart of all Creation is the Creator, from whom comes the seeds of Creation—from within you and within me. We, as conscious beings walking the planet, have this wonderful and unique opportunity to give conscious expression to those seeds.

Jane Anetrini and I hiked this morning, as we often do on Sunday morning. We hiked on the loop up on Green Ridge behind Sunrise Ranch. It takes about an hour. As we were coming down to the reservoir, we saw a golden eagle swooping low through the woods. So magnificent! I don’t know how big she was, but golden eagles can reach a wingspan of close to eight feet.

That eagle does not have to think about bringing the seeds of Creation into the world. She just does it. And all of nature around us rings with what is constantly coming forth from the Creator.

And yet we, as human beings, are in this precarious position that depends on our consciousness—our thoughts and feelings—for the seeds of Creation to be given expression by us. We cannot sleepwalk through this life and fulfill our destiny. The eagle cannot help but fulfill her destiny—she can’t stop. We are in the precarious position of being able to stop and being able to curse this day, seemingly as easily as we might bless it. We’re in the precarious position in which we could let the seeds of Creation grow old and our own heart can become more bound because we have conscious choice.

If we are consciously and deliberately expressing what’s being born through us from the seeds of Creation that are within us, those seeds are reseeding consciousness all around us and in the larger field of consciousness of humanity. As it’s said in Genesis, our seed is in ourselves, and we can be constantly reseeding the field that we’re sharing with others.

Practically speaking, how does this happen? The seed is sown in us and then by us through adoration. How is it said in the familiar Christmas carol? “O come, let us adore him.” Adoration is a strong, now slightly archaic, word. But it is a powerful experience. Adoration changes the old heaven and the old earth of human experience. Adoration of the birth of love and light through another person brings us home.

In the words of another carol, “Fall on your knees.” Adoration makes you want to fall to your knees at the beauty and magnificence of what you’ve seen, if you really have eyes to see the Creator in another person. But then you have to rise and stand, because the only creative answer to the adoration of magnificence is to be that magnificence yourself. That’s how we truly adore magnificence in another person. We acknowledge it and adore it, and then we stand in our magnificence. And that’s how we say to someone else, “I love your beauty. I adore you. And so I will be that, and I will reflect that back to you.”

Here is my poem, “A Forever Moment,” which speaks of my adoration of the seeds of Creation that have been sown in my consciousness:

I walked all the quiet night
through the snow to his home
with only the winter moon
lighting the path ahead.

Limbs of fir trees
hung low on each side
as carols sang in my head.
Silent night,
O Christmas tree,
Singing sweetly o’er the plains.

The crunching of snow
kept time as I trod,
one happy foot
in front of another.
Frost formed on my beard
as the broad brim of my hat
filled slowly with crystal flakes.

The smoke of burning pine
told me I was there.
And before I could knock
he let me in
through the heavy oak door,
polished from years of use.

I stood before him,
his back to the fire,
wearing a heavy wool cloak
down to his knees.
He seemed to know why I had come
and waited for me to speak,
gazing at me
with his blue-gray eyes.

“I never told you
how much I love you.
I didn’t tell you
how grateful I am
for all you did
that has made my life worthwhile.
I never said what you mean to me,
and how my whole life
has been saying thank you.”

He laid his hand on my shoulder
and smiled a smile
that lit up my heart
as it lit the room.

I smiled back,
and stood there
for a forever moment.
Then turned to enter a new morning,
and walked the long trail home.