I have been thinking about my own spiritual practice. I was noticing how heartily and lustily I throw myself into life and into the things that come to me. And there are specific things that are way high on my list in terms of what my values are. Then I have roles and functions that have come to me in my life that are important to me. My realization was that, while all that is true, there is something more significant to me than all of those specific things.

I asked myself something that I would invite you to ask yourself, if you would like, and it is this:

What is it that is important to me in all the facets of my life that is the same? What is it that I’m doing that’s universal—in every relationship, in every role and every situation?

This reflection makes it really clear to me that what is most important to me isn’t about any of the specific circumstances or any specific projects. It is not even about certain relationships. It is not about any outer role or responsibility. My spiritual practice is being me and living into truth. To make it a verb, truthing.

I can’t do that with another person without being keenly interested in the truth of them. It doesn’t work to try to live into the truth of who I am and be uninterested in the truth of another.

That’s true of the world in which I live as well. I am interested in its truth. There are facts, and I believe in the sensibility of facing facts. But the world in which we live is fast becoming a reality TV show made flesh. And facts do manifest in the world because of what people live into, whether it is a reality TV show story or whatever other myth they have going on.

What does it mean to live into the truth of what is present? I think it’s more than living into whatever state of consciousness is present in another person or whatever is prevailing in the culture around us.

There is no creative direction to my life unless I’m about my spiritual practice, which is living into the truth of who I am and being that. And then living into the truth of who you are and relating to that. And then I have to find some way to make less relevant whatever has manifested in your experience or mine, or in the facts of the world around us, that isn’t born out of something truthful.

So, as a spiritual practice, what is the same about your relationship with all the people you know and all the circumstances you find yourself in? I suppose we all have a particular affinity and a particular fondness for certain people and certain circumstances and certain projects. And it seems to me that’s natural enough. But how do I want to be, in all things, with all people? I think that would be a powerful way to be with any one person, even a person I might seem to have a greater affinity with, or even with those special things that seem to come to me to do. I want to be in those things the way I would be in anything.

There’s an implication to this, which is that in some fashion I have to come away from what is not true of me and what is not true of you. I think that’s an important part of the spiritual practice. I notice it. But then, what do I do? It might be hard to describe the difference between coming away from what is not true and then living into what is. Yet it makes all the difference.

If we live into the reality of another person, there’s a process of knowing that transpires. And just as truth can be a noun and can also be a verb, knowing can be a verb or a noun. The noun is knowledge; the verb is to know. In this case, we’re talking about knowing truth, knowing reality. It’s an underrated process.

We tend to think we either know or do not know. I know you, or I don’t know you. If you think about it, if another person really is fully known by you, it’s over and done with, isn’t it? You know them. Isn’t that “end of story”? There’s nothing more to know.

The reality we seek is a verb; it is a never-ending process:

 I am coming to know you. I’m always coming to know more of you—greater scope and breadth, more depth of who you are, more of the height of who you are, more of the wonder of who you are. I am knowing you.

There’s always something more that’s unfolding. And when we are knowing another person, discovering them more and more, at the same time isn’t it true that we are changing them? If I am knowing more and more of the truth of you, do you think you’re staying static in that? And likewise, if you are knowing more and more of the truth of me, isn’t that changing me?

This is the tremendous power of consciousness, the tremendous power of knowing. Knowing isn’t just witnessing from a distance. Knowing is bringing the powers of awareness to our creative field. The more I’m discovering about you, the more I’m knowing of you, the more interested I am, the more my own creative spirit is being conveyed through consciousness. Consciousness activates. Pretty soon I may be doing something. I may be saying something to you. I may be inviting you to be part of a creative project. So there are physical actions that are born from the discovery process.

The same is true of any reality. Living into the truth of this world, we discover something, we activate something, we create something. But we have to be living into the truth we are discovering. If we’re living into an inauthentic manifest culture—that is some kind of nightmarish experience made real in the factual world—we are part of the downward-spinning spiral of humanity. It seems to me that is what has been happening, and that’s how we got here, facing existential risk. Perhaps that is our global emergency—what we are knowing and what we are living into. What would happen if there were enough of us living into truth, living into reality? When we do, we align ourselves not with what is descending in a spiral, going down, but what is ascending in a spiral, going up.

In many ways, in this day, it doesn’t seem like the ascending spiral has been strong enough in the awareness and the experience of people to draw many facts to itself. And yet there is the creative evidence of people who are living into reality in so many ways around the world. And still, there has to be a thought leader someplace. The phrase thought leadership takes on a whole new meaning, does it not? Thought leadership has often been seen to be clever ideas around a subject. That’s included. But isn’t the ultimate thought leadership simply the courage of people who are living into truth, living into reality? Instead of the unreality of the culture in which we live?

Part of the culture of unreality is a myth of helplessness on the planet. There’s nothing we can do. The myth of victimhood strips away the awareness in people of their own creative power. Living into truth could seem to be abstract, airy-fairy, “spiritual” in the worst kind of way—in a way that mocks the one who is truthing. I say living into truth is revolutionary. It’s empowering. It is acknowledging the power that is present in the people. Power to the people! Of course, the people have power already, seven billion of us. We don’t think we do, and we are tricked into living into unreality, which is victimhood. So we’ve been stripped of the powers of consciousness that we hold as a people. If you interviewed the man or the woman on the street and asked them about the state of the world, that’s what you would find. And so they grasp at imitations of power in the culture at large. They settle for the images of power outside themselves instead of accessing the power they hold in their own hearts and minds.

How does that state of affairs change? If we are right that the problem is that people have been tricked into living into unreality, hopelessness, disempowerment and victimhood, would not the only answer to that be the reversal of the process by which they found themselves in that state? And how does it get reversed, if there are not people with the courage to live into truth and to do that in the face of what doesn’t look like it’s going in that direction?

How would everything that is going in a destructive direction go in any creative direction if somebody didn’t have the thought leadership to go in a different direction first? And so we are coming face-to-face with our weak-mindedness as human beings on the planet today, as it manifests in ourselves and then in the world around us. We are willing to be among those who go first.

Sometimes people worry about their friends coming to Sunrise Ranch, where I live. They’re afraid that they’re being weak-minded and will be taken over, presumably by the strong-minded people at Sunrise Ranch. We live in a world that has managed to turn almost everything in life on its ear, including this. In fact, Sunrise Ranch is all about being strong-minded people. Not strong-minded in the way of human will and intention. That doesn’t seem to go very far. But strong-minded simply in living into what is true. And truth is powerful.

What is true, by another name, is the nature of things. And by another name it is what is happening. What is true includes the destructive part of what is happening—what doesn’t work, what is past its sell-by date, what is disintegrating. That happens in nature and it happens in our human experience, and certainly it’s happening in the world. What is true includes disintegration. And what is true includes what is being born. What is true includes extinction, apparently, but it also includes birth. It also includes evolution; it also includes moving forward. It includes what survives, and what is created.

There is power to the nature of things. And when we are living into truth, we are living into the nature of things, accepting the nature of things and becoming a positive expression of the nature of things.

I have two pictures in my mind of our world, and how I relate to the people in my world and how it goes for people.

Here is the typical picture. There is some kind of unreality that people experience, composed of culture and personality, disturbed emotion and a sense of separateness. People relate in a way that is not really relating at all. It is as if they are throwing stones over a wall. And there’s a lot of that that goes on at every level—at the level of nations, at the level of political parties, and at the individual level.

Here is the emerging picture for me and many others around the world. What if there were some number of us who adopted the spiritual practice of knowing the truth of who and what we are, and of being that more fully all the time, with anyone we were with and with any project? What if it wasn’t firstly about the specific project or the other person? What if, for us personally, life was firstly about Shakespeare’s admonition: “To thine own self be true”? What if we were truthing as we express and embody ourselves in the flow of life? Revealing more and more of what is at our core and knowing more and more of ourselves.

There is a never-ending reality to be expressed of who I am, as is so for anyone. If that’s my spiritual practice and that’s your practice, what happens? Add to that practice the process of knowing more and more of each other, and then we are truthing together. There is a constellation of truth on the planet.

My best word for the nature of things is Love. The truth that I’m interested in is the truth of the nature of things, which is the truth of whatever that word means—Love. The tragedy of the world in which we live is simply that we’re experiencing that. We have an opportunity to live in a constellation of reality, where the points of light are you and me, and we’re living into the reality of each other. And we are living from our own reality, revealing more and more of ourselves to each other.

I realize, as I meditate on these things, that I have committed my life to this spiritual practice. This is the name of the game for me: to be myself as truly as I can be and to know the truth of others. There is something that is created from people who are together that way. Consciousness brings activating energy, not only to each other but to the world in which we are living. We give birth to a new world out of that knowing.

In fact, the world is being re-created by a constellation of people who are exploring the truth of themselves and each other. That is the grand experiment of Sunrise Ranch. That is the grand experiment of Emissaries of Divine Light. It is the grand experiment of awakened people around the globe.

My simple invitation is for you to ask yourself whether this is a spiritual practice worth adopting—not out of human will but out of an authentic urge to move into what is true, and to know it more and more. And if your answer is yes, my invitation is to simply allow that authentic urge to direct the course of your life.