I would like to add my voice to the honoring of the young people who led the march in Washington, D.C., on March 24th. I honor the students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, who took the horror they endured and did something good with it. A commentator said that there are bad places to take anger that bring you down and make you cynical; and then there is a creative place to take the energy that comes up as anger. I thought their defiance and ferocity was a beauty to behold.

I noticed the great solidarity among them. Here were people speaking the truth and power of the human spirit in the face of big-money interests that are corrupting our politics and eroding our culture in this country. I notice how the young people spoke with great confidence and assurance, and great strength. Never again! Never again.

Couldn’t we each say that? We cannot control what everybody else does, but isn’t there something in our own life that we won’t stand for anymore, that doesn’t belong in our world? Something that must stop in our own attitude or expression? Never again! We have the power of ferocity that ends what should be ended and begins what should be begun. I give thanks that their voices are bringing healing energy to this country. Who knows where it will all go politically. But they injected the will that is at the heart of the human spirit, which is love; something transcendent, something powerful from within.

In our awakening process we come to a point of realizing that the only way to go for our own lives is the unconditional expression of the power of love that is within us. That all-forgiving power does not flow from our own intellect, although it can guide our intellect. The power of love is not judging the world around us. It is not deciding whether this particular circumstance is a good one in which to be loving. It is not deciding whether this particular person deserves it today. A person who radiates unconditional love has decided on a way of life. They know it is the only way to be, and they discover that when they are unconditionally loving they are liberated. They are liberated to be themselves and to express who they are. They are not checking to see if it is the right time or the right place, the right circumstance, the right person with whom to be expressing the most powerful energy on the planet. They are just doing it. In essence, they say, This is who I am and this is what I do. How about you?

When we make that choice, we are faced with the world around us and the patterns of the surrounding culture. Included in that is how we ourselves interact with that culture—how we relate to other people, what we create in our families and organizations, and with all the people that we know.

Having chosen to love unconditionally, we also have to come to terms with the patterns that are within ourselves, accumulated over a lifetime and even from before. Sometimes we think of these patterns as lodged within our memory, our subconscious mind or our emotional body. Here is this brilliant love that we have come to feel and are choosing to express in our lives. And yet there are these patterns from our childhood and the life that we have lived up till now. Somehow the expression of the love that we are seems to be blocked at times. It can get bogged down in all these internal patterns.

Or perhaps we find that, as we express the brilliance of the love that we are now experiencing, we are simply supercharging an old pattern. Do you ever have that experience? With a good intention, you might bring all the fire of that love and it ends up coming out crooked in some way, misinterpreted by another person, perhaps not even feeling right in yourself. And you are faced with having to do something about the hurt in your own heart, about your own accumulated sense of victimhood, and perhaps about the other end of the stick of victimhood, which is oppression, and your own tendency to be oppressive in how you act towards yourself and other people. If you simply raise the power of love that you are expressing without doing something about those patterns, all you are doing is lighting them up brighter than they were before, perhaps to be incinerated—that could be good. But we surely don’t want to be incinerated with those patterns, which can happen if we are clutching on to them to the very end. And in the meantime, we are doing damage to the people and to the culture in which we live; we are bringing the voltage of love through a dysfunctional pattern.

And so we find we have to do something to rework the channels of expression, to rework the channels of our own thought and feeling, and how we are reaching out to other people and to our world. What is inside needs some kind of healing. We need some relief from what has landed into our own heart, and the pain and the scarring from that, and need to let the light in, to let the patterns reshape and re-form according to the radiance of love, not the patterns of victimhood and oppression that are so rife in the world in which we live.

Yet I have come to see that it is not only the patterns within us that have to be reworked. The truth is that we as human beings have not only hurt and oppression and victimhood inside that we have internalized, but we have put it out into our world and into the culture all around us. The marches in Washington, D.C., in Denver and in many other places were an attempt to address that. The culture that we have created outside ourselves was being addressed at a national level, and even internationally, realizing that it does not do enough just to have thoughts and prayers and good intentions about something that has gone so terribly wrong in the culture. The pattern of the culture itself has to change.

The marches were on the macro level of a nation and the worldwide experience. But it is also true that in the individual worlds in which we live, we have each created a culture. We have created a way that we relate to each other. Much of that is influenced by the culture at large, which has infiltrated not only the human heart and the human psyche but also the immediate culture in which we live—the culture of family, community, organization and whatever circle of friends we are a part of, which becomes infected with dysfunction from the mass culture.

We can amp up the power, but what is going to happen to all the patterns of culture in which we participate? Are we simply going to conform to those existing patterns of culture and relationship, and repeat the old syndrome of oppression and victimhood? In so many ways, human culture comes down to that. And if you have been victimized by oppression, you are very likely to turn around and be oppressive.

There was a program on Dr. Martin Luther King that aired recently. He called people to free humanity, and not just trade places with their oppressors, which only perpetuates the cycle of victimhood and oppression. He called to all people to be liberated by agape, Universal Love, and to be the expression of that. He called to both people who saw themselves as victims and those who were being oppressive. And that is why we remember him with such love. He spoke of a liberating kind of love, a love that could reshape culture.

So how about us? Are we ready to take responsibility for our culture, both the immediate culture and the mass culture? Apparently, addressing the mass culture can be easy to do because you can blame its creation on other people. We can point to somebody else and say it must have been them who caused it. It must have been our ancestors who created it, or the people in power. But how about the patterns of culture that we ourselves have created in the world in which we are living? And are we ready to take them apart and rebuild them, based on Universal Love?

And what would that be? Before we leap to some kind of conclusion as to what a culture based on Universal Love would look like, we should simply pause and take a look at the world in which we are living—not only the world at large but our own immediate world. What are those patterns of culture and relationship that we have created and participated in? To what do we need to say, “Never again”? And can we pause long enough to look with an attitude of forgiveness, of surrender, of letting go? Knowing that love is no respecter of persons. And if we are to be an expression of love, we are no respecter of persons. We can appreciate people’s differences, loving their individuality without letting their differences become the cause of our oppressiveness or victimhood, without deciding that they are unworthy of our expression of Universal Love.

Can we pause long enough to start again with the people in our lives and with our whole approach to how we are working together with those people, how we are creating with them, how we are relating to them? So that we can weave a fabric of culture that is life-giving.

The mission of Emissaries of Divine Light is the spiritual regeneration of humanity. At all levels we are interested in that, from the deepest recesses of the human experience, in the heart of hearts in the human soul, to all the facets of culture. We know that regeneration begins when a person comes to know that their life and the world in which they live has to be built on universal and unconditional love in order for it to make sense and come alive. And then, with that regeneration, we can look at all the patterns of culture and ask ourselves, How do we re-create culture in a way that is generative, that is powered by the love that we are expressing and embodying in our lives? What can we do that is in integrity with that love?

The word regenerative might conjure for some the idea that we are re-creating something that was before. In some way, that is true, because there are precedents of creativity down through human history and before. But the reality is that what is being born through humanity has never transpired before. We have never done this with 7.6 billion people on the planet. We have never been at this point in our journey through the galaxy, or at this point in the unfoldment of human history or the evolution of life on Planet Earth.

If you take the re off the front of regenerative it becomes generative. This word has roots in common with a number of other words in the English language: genes, generosity, genius, and generation, to name a few. In Latin, there is the word generare that has to do with fruitfulness—with bringing forth, begetting and producing. That word originates from an even more ancient root, gene-, which meant to give birth.

Generare. The word seems adequate to cover the entire range we are addressing, from the spark of Universal Love in the most intimate regions of the human soul to the creation of a culture that expresses that love with integrity.

It is hard to think about how a gun could proliferate Universal Love in the world. I am not making a political statement here. I am just saying that there is culture and there is technology, which does not diminish the expression of love but which allows it to be embodied accurately in the world. It generates and proliferates Universal Love in the world through culture and technology. Let’s find that culture and that technology. Not the culture and technology of victimhood, oppression and destruction.

We have the opportunity to be a living laboratory for that in our lives, wherever we are.