Let’s look at our own experience in the context of the trends of the world in which we are living, because all we are experiencing is happening in that context. Those trends are, on the one hand, impacting us, and on the other hand we have a responsibility relative to those trends. I’d like to track two trends that are relatively familiar and obvious.

The first one is nuclear weapons. Lloyd Arthur Meeker gave a talk at Sunrise Ranch in 1953 in which he spoke about the advent of the atomic bomb. For decades the nuclear threat has been in the minds of people who live here at the Ranch, and others who are connected with us, from the standpoint of having a sense of spiritual responsibility to bring an influence that would help keep us from blowing ourselves up. We hope that humanity awakens before it blows itself up.

So with the work done by spiritually awake people around the world, and by people in government who were responding with integrity to the awakening of consciousness around the world, there has been a diminishment of the nuclear threat. There was treaty after treaty and a decrease in the stockpile of nuclear weapons from a high of about 70,000 to about 15,000. With that decrease there has also been a decrease in the level of anxiety in the public psyche. I remember, as a young boy in the 1950s, hearing a plane flying overhead and being worried that it was a Russian plane coming to drop an atomic bomb. For those who are younger than me, you may not have a memory of such things. So I think it is fair to say that the sense of nuclear threat has diminished over the last decades, so that with all the worries that we have in the world, the nuclear threat has not been as high in consciousness over the past few decades as it was previously.

And yet, in this current day, the nuclear threat is reasserting itself. In the past week the news has been full of the issue of nuclear proliferation in Iran and in North Korea. The threat of nuclear war and the potential of first strike coming from the United States or another country has been in the news. So the nuclear threat has reasserted itself in the public psyche in a new way.

On December 5^th of this year, Barbara Marx Hubbard’s brother-in-law, Daniel Ellsberg, is publishing The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner. The blurb publicizing the book says this:

Here, for the first time, former high level defense analyst Daniel Ellsberg reveals his shocking first-hand account of America’s nuclear program in the 1960s. From the remotest air bases in the Pacific Command, where he discovered that the authority to initiate use of nuclear weapons was widely delegated, to the secret plans for general nuclear war under Eisenhower, which, if executed, would cause the near-extinction of humanity, Ellsberg shows that the legacy of this most dangerous arms buildup in the history of civilization—and its proposed renewal under the Trump administration—threatens our very survival. No other insider with high level access has written so candidly of the nuclear strategy of the late Eisenhower and early Kennedy years, and nothing has fundamentally changed since that era.

I had the privilege of hearing from Daniel about his book. He confided to me how close we have come to nearly total nuclear annihilation, and not only during the Cuban Missile Crisis, despite all the good work done by so many people at all levels of society. According to Daniel, we face a daunting challenge to which there is little answer. His contribution is to make the ongoing nuclear threat public so that it is clear to us all.

The other trend I want to touch on here is the proliferation of knowledge, intelligence and, with that, the proliferation of computing power. The development of knowledge, intelligence and computing power does not necessarily lead to wisdom. You could have a lot of computing power, a lot of human intelligence, and a lot of knowledge, and do some pretty awful things.

Moore’s Law tells us that computing power doubles every two years. Meanwhile, the accumulation of knowledge (data) is so rapid that we hardly know how to measure it. We have access to it more and more through the Internet, and we have huge databases of knowledge of all kinds that are more and more publicly available. So there is this great explosion of knowledge and computing power, and intelligence of a certain sort. All of that has a relationship to the nuclear threat because, after all, it was human knowledge and human intelligence that led to the development of the atomic bomb.

Now I want to present to you something that you may or may not have difficulty in accepting. I have no visible proof for it. I am only inviting you to reflect on the possibility that it is true based on a rational view of our own human experience. What I am presenting takes more than the kind of intelligence and knowledge that has created the technological threat that exists in the world today.

What I am presenting here is that there is a headlong development of human knowledge and computing ability and that this is virtually inevitable. While we may contribute to this development, nothing you or I do is originating it, nor is there anything we can do that will stop it. It is happening, and it will happen. We can do something about how it is happening and how this fantastic power will be used.

What I am suggesting is that there is something happening in our spiritual experience as human beings that is the crux of the matter and that will determine whether or not we blow ourselves up or do something else that ends this great experiment we call humanity—or whether we will come into a newfound wisdom that tells us how to use this amazing knowledge that is coming to us. I am suggesting that that kind of wisdom comes one way, and one way only. The kind of wisdom that it takes to be inheritors of the tremendous knowledge and intelligence that is coming to us as a species only comes as a wisdom of the heart.

The other kind of intelligence—the computing power and the proliferation of knowledge—is a matter of intellect, and that is happening inevitably. What I am saying is that the only way that kind of intelligence is used wisely is a matter of the heart and that what is really at stake for humanity is something that is a matter of the heart. It is a matter of humility and kindness—or, as the Pope says, the issue is a “revolution of tenderness.” A revolution of tenderness is a matter of the heart. The Dalai Lama talks about kindness as being a cornerstone of what is called for in the human experience. Others speak of living in a Care First World. There are people of wisdom who are calling to the essential matter facing humanity.

An atomic bomb is a kind of fire, is it not? It takes the very energy and power of Creation that lies within all things and all people, and uses that fire on a destructive basis. Only a change of heart in the body of humanity can cause the fire of Creation within us and within all things to come through on a creative basis.

At Sunrise Ranch, we held an event last weekend called “Gathering the Tribe.” My friend Laurence Gawronsky, from Cape Town, South Africa, wrote to me about the word tribe, making it clear that there is an old tribalism that we are not talking about when we talk about gathering the tribe. We are talking about a cosmic tribe. There is a new pattern of coming together as human beings, because if the old tribe has atomic power, we have a problem. We have North and South Korea, and we have the United States and Russia, and so on. There is a tribal mentality that is present at a national level with nuclear bombs.

So we are talking about a new kind of tribalism, a new kind of belonging, a new state of consciousness and a new state of heart in which there is a miracle happening, and it must be so. There is a miracle of the heart that is happening in you and me as we awaken to it. And as quaint as it might sound, it is a miracle of love. And as religious as it might sound, it is a miracle of God’s love, if that word God is a word for the Beingness that is within all things, that is within you and within me. That Beingness is in love with itself. All Being is in love with itself and it is in love with all that it creates. As a being, I am in love with Sunrise Ranch. I am in love with the cows that I was chasing with Derik Lane this morning.

There is an old, tribal kind of love; it is a me-and-mine kind of love. That kind of tribal love is an old crystallization of the heart that leads to nuclear weapons when given the intelligence of gods. How does that work? The intelligence of gods with a tribal state of the heart? It does not work very well. What we need, and what is happening, is a combustion in the heart so that there is an awakening of the heart.

That combustion, that fire, is far more profound than a nuclear explosion. It is a strange comparison to make, but when you think about it, the power of love is what is released destructively through an atomic bomb. All that power, the power of Creation, which is the power of love, that is locked up in those atoms, is released destructively through nuclear fission.

But through the fusion of Being, that same power can come together as it does on the sun. If you think of fusion on the sun, how powerful is that? A couple of nuclear bombs on Planet Earth pale in comparison to solar fusion. In the same way, when you and I are in love, the power of a nuclear bomb pales in comparison to our love. All the creative power that is coming up through the human psyche has a place to go, which is fusion instead of fission. I suggest to you that the reason it is manifesting as fission in a nuclear bomb is because it is manifesting as fission between you and me, out of tribal mentality, because of a state in the heart in which there is separateness. This is a tribal kind of love, which is a me-and-mine-against-you-and-yours kind of love, without a knowing of our natural affinity as Being.

Being is, in reality, in love with itself. The reality of every human being on Planet Earth is madly, deeply, passionately in love with every other human being on the face of the planet. So what happened to the human mind and heart, that it does not know it? How dumb are we? How ignorant are we of what is happening already for the inner reality of us that is looking to manifest in our human experience? This is a matter of the heart, because the knowing of the reality that I am speaking about is known first through the heart.

I have no mathematical equation to give you for this. It is a matter of the heart that we know through the heart. There can be a surrendering to that knowing in the combustion of the heart.

One of the things that we have been speaking to over these past two weeks together, in various configurations, is the pattern of how we are made as Beings. As an individual human being, there are all the parts of us—mind and heart and spirit and body—that fit together and are held together in dynamic, creative relationship with each other. And so it is with you and with me in the living of life. There is a pattern to that relationship, set in the reality of Being.

A friend of mine says, if all you have is oneness, there is nothing happening. I know oneness is a reality and it is good to know it is. But within the oneness of reality, there is the excitement of creation and combustion that happens because there is also plurality. We get to be together in the plurality of who we are as human beings, and we get to feel the creative spark that flies between us. If we were a homogenous soup of human reality, I do not think there would be a creative spark. But we are not. We are a plurality of Being.

Do we have any idea that our plurality gives us the opportunity for the fire of fusion and all the regenerative power that fusion creates? There is a special place for Koreans on this planet that is unique to them, and Americans have a place that is unique to them. This is not to say that it is all about our nationality, but if we are going to look at the national features of our existence, I believe that is the way it is—that there is something beautiful that Koreans bring into the world and that Americans have to bring in relationship to them, and the same thing is true between you and me. We are different. You and I are really different, and all people are really different. That difference, when we see it as part of a oneness and we see it as part of a dynamic engagement with each other, brings the potential for fusion and for creation. When we see that, we are seeing a different picture. We are not seeing the old tribal picture. We are seeing the reality picture.

It takes two to tango. Love is the reality of oneness, but the beauty of love is the reality of at least twoness; two who are in love and then sharing that together, knowing it as one and yet as two. This relates to a romantic kind of love, but not just that. How much of what we think of as romantic love is actually tribal love—a possessive, boxed-in, us-against-them, me-and-mine kind of love?

That kind of love, lauded in stories and in movies and songs, is the stuff of nuclear holocaust. It is, if it is a me-and-mine kind of love, a you-and-me-against-them kind of love, we-will-come-together-against-them kind of love–a Yeah, I love you but I hate them kind of love. That is tribal. That is not Universal Love. It is some kind of distorted love, gussied up as romantic.

We are here to know profound Universal Love among us, as human beings, that is based on the already-existing love that is present in Being, and in the Beings that we are before we take on human flesh. Is that being too spiritual? Without some great sense of an eternal reality, we are defined by our tribalism. And yet, there is a reality of who we are that is bigger than that. When we release ourselves into being an expression of that through our human flesh, we find the natural affinity of Being and the love of Being that is already operative and that functions quite well in the process of fusion occurring amongst us as human beings as we surrender to it.

Through the surrender of our old tribalism, we are releasing and freeing the reality of the Being that we are into Creation. When I surrender the old in me, I free myself to come to you and be with you. Not in a possessive way, not in a me-and-mine kind of way, not in a you-and-I-against-all-them kind of way. I free myself into the naturalness of Being that loves itself in all its dimensions, that is in a dance of co-creation with itself that we get to be a part of.

Now let us go back to the proliferation of knowledge. Does it look different? Where there is the power of fusion known in the heart—known as kindness, tenderness and compassion—the proliferation of knowledge is not something that is going to overtake us in any one of a myriad of ways. We are not being overtaken by knowledge, science and technology. We have the wisdom to own it and steward it because we have become, together, conscious expressions of the power of Creation, which is the power of love, through a fused human heart—fused in me, fused between you and me, fused in us all together in oneness and dynamic creativity. Now we become masters of our technology. It is rather hard to see ourselves as masters of technology without being masters of our own soul. I suggest to you that if we, as humanity, are not masters of our own soul, our technology is going to master us, and that will not be a pretty sight.

We have another revolution on our hands, not just the revolution of the Information Age. This revolution requires our conscious surrender and our conscious participation. This revolution cuts close to the bone. It is about the depth of our own human heart. And what could be more intimate, what could be closer to you, than your own human heart? So this is a revolution of the heart that requires our conscious surrender so that knowledge does not overtake us but so that we become a conscious expression, in heart and mind, of Universal Love through our knowledge. We become a conscious combustion of that love. Between all that is afoot in our world—between global warming, nuclear threat, and whatever else is happening—we are becoming subject to some kind of combustion. How will it look if we consciously allow a combustion from within that gives us a different kind of power and authority over the factors that are external to us?

As many on the planet are aware, we are in a kind of race for time in all this. In 1954, there was another talk given at Sunrise Ranch that addressed this race for time, with the concern that spiritually awake people might not do their work fast enough to keep up with the Scientific Age. That concern has not gone away. There are control factors in consciousness that are brought by spiritually awake people into the world. Do you think that might be needed today?

In our sessions this week, the Trustees of Emissaries of Divine Light looked at a morning news show—not something we usually do in our sessions. We were looking at the reports of what is happening in the White House and the emotional volatility that is present. There is the emerging picture of some stability that is consciously surrounding that emotional volatility. I cannot speak for the spiritual awakeness of the people through whom that is emerging, but I do believe they are instruments of spiritual control, feeling a great sense of responsibility themselves, knowing how high the stakes are. And so there is a surround for the emotional volatility and a watching.

There are stories of those people having discussions as to what they would do if the U.S. president goes for the nuclear football, and how they might tackle him to avoid a nuclear first strike. You and I are not in the White House, having to think about those issues as our immediate practical responsibility. But we, as Trustees, said our prayers for those men who are doing that work, lending our conscious support to them and our fusion to them, our state of heart to them, and to any others of good will who are awakening throughout the world, crossing all tribal lines.

Awakening consciousness matters. A fused heart known for real by a person and among people matters. It is not just a matter of affection, although it is a matter of affection; and it is not just a matter of romantic love, although it includes romantic love. It is a matter of allowing the power of Creation to be operative through human consciousness to allow for sanity to come, to allow for wisdom to come, to allow for a state of heart in which right decisions can be made, so that in our use of technology, our use of science, our use of the intelligence that comes to us, there is wisdom. There is a context of fusion and oneness known for real. That is the power of love at work through consciousness. That power changes the future.

Love is a sweet and wonderful thing to which we surrender, and yet what is at stake is huge. We, as conscious human beings, have an immense responsibility in this matter, and we make an immense difference. I cannot prove it to you, though I know it to be true, and you can prove it to yourself. I know that spiritually conscious, loving human beings on this planet are what is holding this planet together and providing for its future. Let us live into that, and let us know the fusion that comes by love through a spiritually awake human being.