Are you ready to change the world? I am. There’s so much going on in the world in which we live. This week the president of the United States backed out of the Paris Climate Accord and, in so doing, dashed the hopes and dreams of people around the world. I’m sure that what he said sounded reasonable to many people. The only problem is that it was based on erroneous assumptions.
That is the nature of the egoic world in which we live. Sometimes, parts of it sound reasonable. But so many of the underlying assumptions upon which it is based are not true.
We’ve been speaking here at Sunrise Ranch about hierarchy, much to the fright of some of the people who live here. It raises the fear that they are going to be subjected to a demeaning human hierarchy. But nonetheless, we’ve been speaking about the truth of what hierarchy is and how all of Creation is in a hierarchy, as if it were a set of Russian dolls with smaller dolls held within larger and larger ones.
The human hierarchy is clearly out of integrity with the natural hierarchy in which it exists. The Paris Climate Accord was an attempt to come to terms with that fact. It was a beginning step—not a solution of itself but a beginning step of acknowledgment, coming out of the ostrich-with-its-head-in-the-sand phenomenon that we’ve been living in. Meanwhile, there are people around the globe who are attempting to wedge themselves into the human hierarchy—or perhaps even attempting to find advancement within the human hierarchy—while ignoring how they fit into the larger hierarchy of the natural world.
Considering the hierarchy embodied in nature, or even the human hierarchy, we are looking at the outer form of reality. But there is another dimension to this pattern. Before you ever start thinking about how you fit in any human hierarchy, or even in the pattern of nature around you, there is the very pattern of Being. There is you as a being and me as a being, and how we relate at that level. And then there are all the other beings to whom we relate. How you and I relate as beings is altogether different from any human hierarchy. It feels different. It is different. It’s unique between any two of us. It’s not affected by position-itis. If I’m willing to just show up unashamedly as who I am, and you do the same, then we discover that there is a natural affinity between us, a commonality, and then something unique that we have to create in the world together, at whatever level. It’s unique to you and me, and we can each say that to all the people we meet. You are unique and I am unique, and in being together, even logic would tell you that we’re sharing something that only you and I can share. We are doing something that only you and I can do. We are playing some kind of duet that no other two human beings can play.
When we take our unique place as a being, we are finding our affinity to all of Being. We are feeling and knowing that. We’re not trying to wedge ourselves into a human hierarchy. We are coming into a knowing of the being that we are, and we are connecting with all of Being. It’s a grand discovery. It’s cosmic dating, being-to-being. It’s an opportunity to discover the untold wealth that’s within all beings and then all of Being. Some of that wealth appears as people in our lives.
So if the ego structures in our psyche crack open enough for you and for me, we can just be present as who we are and have a creative relationship. Wonder of wonders! But of course there is more to it than that. There is the animal kingdom and the plant kingdom and the planet itself, which people sometimes think of as just dead stuff with some energy within it. That kind of thinking leads to the decimation of species and global warming.
As I watch my dog Malachi run around, it is clear that there is some kind of being in there. He’s a someone—he’s not just a something. This planet is a someone altogether, and a symphony of someones. It has being to it. It has a soul. Being isn’t exclusive to people.
Just as there is a structure within which the forms of the natural world exist, there is a structure to Being. We wonder what happens with those beings who come and go. They were born into the world and at some point they pass on. Where did they come from? Where did they go? Poof! They’re gone. Their place in the human hierarchy is gone, but there is a sense that they are present. That’s hard for us to figure out as human beings.
If you’ve been with someone when they pass on, it all becomes very plain and obvious: at a physical level they were here, and now they’re not here. Their body remains for a time, but they are no longer in it. At another level they didn’t go anyplace. They are present, and we can invoke their spirit at any moment.
There is a perceptible presence of being that isn’t just in the flesh. We can make up stories about that—religious stories, myths, channelings of all kinds, all of which is an expression of our perception of that dimension of Being that isn’t physically present with us.
The dimension of Being that isn’t currently incarnate in the flesh is the same dimension of Being that is present relative to all beings who are incarnate in the flesh. We can access it in ourselves. We can access levels of our own being that aren’t defined by our personality or our upbringing.
There is creativity that enters our human experience physically, mentally and emotionally. It was a thought, a feeling, an urge to act that was bigger than me as a human being; an impulse that isn’t defined by personality.
Within us, there is a grand call to take our place—not just our place in the world but our place in Being. There is a call to belong to that reality, to know that we’re loved by it and that we love it. We are naturally, as a being, in love with all of Being.
Trying to love is a strange thing when you realize that we actually love all of Being to begin with. And then we went through some kind of amnesia with regard to our love of other people; and with that amnesia, there is a breakage of the primal bond between us. Maybe it looks like terrorism, but it looks like many other things too. And then, having that amnesia about the fact that we do love each other, we try to love. It’s a little weird. When we just wake up to who we are and we are willing to be who we are, we realize that love between us is natural. It’s already existing. It’s innate.
Sometimes people come to where I live, at Sunrise Ranch, and they want to fit in. They see a human hierarchy and wonder what their position is in the hierarchy. Sometimes they get worried about that. Sometimes they are looking to move up the hierarchical ladder at Sunrise Ranch. For some of us it’s funny. For some of us, the great booby prize of life is your place in the human hierarchy. We have a president who, perhaps in the view of some, has reached the ultimate pinnacle of the human hierarchy. What does it mean? The position could mean something for somebody who knows who they are and their place in Being. That person can bring who they are into that position, just as they might with any role. When we know our place as a being, when we’re being ourselves and we know we belong to all of Being, then it becomes so easy to come into a role in the human hierarchy, whatever it might be, and to play powerfully there.
What does it mean when someone who knows who they are as a being incarnate in human form awakens to who they are and shows up in the world? They bring not only the usual tool kit of human expertise. They bring the power of Being, the power of awakened consciousness, into the world in which they live. That power, for lack of a better way to say it, is magical. It is magical because it is connected with what is already within all people everywhere. It is connected with what is in all of Creation already—Being. They say that “One with God is a majority.” That’s a way of saying that if you know the being that you are, and you’re being the being that you are, you’re connected to all of Being, at whatever level.
There is the dimension of Being that is not incarnate. One word for that is God. We got the human-in-the-flesh part for this stint on earth, however long the incarnation is here. What a delight! There are unique opportunities to be conscious and awake in the flesh and connected with all of Being that isn’t in the flesh.
As a human being, it helps to have a sense of humility in the face of all that isn’t subject to the human world. That’s reverence for God—the dimension of Being that isn’t defined by physical flesh. God isn’t affected by whatever happens in the human experience. God is not affected by the Paris Climate Accord. He’s not affected, or She’s not affected, by the terrorists in London. There was no erroneous concept of the mind that came into the consciousness of God, no animosity that came into God’s heart. And so, if God is the reality that isn’t at this time incarnate in human flesh, we can look to that reality and open to it as something pure and lovely and beautiful. We can crack open to it without restraint. The only thing to worry about is the strange concepts we get in our heads about what that reality is—not the reality itself, which is untouched.
Opening to it, we are opening to the power and the presence of what the very nature of Being is, what powers all of Creation. Our word for that is Love. We get to be inheritors of that Love in our life, so that we’re bringing it powerfully into the world in which we’re living.
There is the magic of that power. It takes someone who is a spiritual warrior to bring it—a spiritual warrior because anything less than that and we will be intimidated by the human hierarchy. We will be afraid about our place in the human hierarchy and therefore make a fool’s bargain and fail to show up with the courage required of the spiritual warrior to bring Love powerfully into the world.
By our very nature, we are bringing the power of the Love that we are. This is the power to change the world. It is that magical power that reaches out to another person, that reaches out to a family, that reaches out to a community or a nation. It’s that power that fills in the dark, desert places in the human heart, and by the virtue of its presence says things could be different. It’s that power that says, “Wake up! Don’t believe a lie. Don’t take the lies of another as if they were the truth. Come into your power, remember who you are, take your place.”
Can you really imagine another solution for this world in which we live, if we as human beings don’t take our place in this way? Do you think we can figure it out while trying to conform to the human hierarchy, with all of the battling that goes on in the egoic state, wondering who’s on top and who’s getting an advantage? It is hard to imagine it could ever work without an awakening in consciousness to our place in Being.
It could be that, in the end, the answer to all this horror of the world in which we live looks like one great celebration of awakening—some great happiness that just overcomes us as humanity when we realize who we are and who we’re with and what we’re doing here together. All the horrors of the human hierarchy disconnected from the natural hierarchy end when we see the joy and the possibility and the glory of it all—of this planet, of each other, of the very process of communion and Creation that we’re involved in together. The horrors of human hierarchy end when we let our mind open to the very pattern of Creation, so that we can be a steward of it in the world, seeing it for what it is. And it doesn’t look like coal-fired power plants!
This awakening is also an opening in the heart, letting it crack open. Oh, you mean we really have to love each other? Boy, that oughta be hard!
With this opening of the heart, we realize that this incarnation is a grand love story. There are times we have to stand our ground—fair enough. But ultimately, the world works when we wake up to what it is. It is a population of beings who incarnated in the flesh as part of something grand and glorious and celebratory.
There was a slogan popular in the antiwar movement of the 1960s. It was a question: What if they gave a war and nobody came? I’ll add to it, What if they were all at the party? And what’s the party? The party is life as it’s meant to be on this planet. That’s the big party. That’s the love fest, that’s the celebration of life that’s going on all around us that we’re meant to play in, if we will only take our place. Not our place in the human hierarchy. Certainly, if it is part of the fulfillment of who you are to be a president of a company or president of the country, go do it. It becomes meaningful as you take your place in Being.
What if the world entered a great dance of death, and nobody came? What if they were all at the party of life?
As terrible as the recent terrorist events in London are, and as disheartening as the move of the president of the United States to withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord is, our answer is to join the great party of life that is going on all around us. Connect in the great pattern of Being. Maybe the rest of the world will come with us.