Thinking as a Spiritual Practice

David Karchere

I celebrate the irrepressible nature of the urge of Love. This is the urge of Creation, which is the evolutionary urge. It can’t be stopped, can’t be held down, and it is ultimately more powerful than any human limitation. We are enjoying the opportunity we have to know that urge and to give it expression.

In the Pulse of Spirit last week, I spoke of the significance of consciousness and how the urge of Love moves through consciousness and gives birth to intelligence. The thought born of that urge carries the pattern of unfolding Creation. I am interested in a deepening understanding and experience of how that works.

As human beings, we often try to understand things that are beyond the usual level of human experience in very human terms. We anthropomorphize God. Voltaire put it this way: In the beginning God created man in His own image, and man has been trying to repay the favor ever since.

But to cut ourselves some slack, how else would it be, really? How else would we see things beyond our own immediate experience, except through the prism of our immediate experience? And so perhaps—in times past at least—people have looked at God as an old man with a beard. They have seen the Divine in very human terms, from the gods on Mount Olympus to the pantheon of Hindu gods.

It might be said that the universe is created out of the mind of God. That is a very human way of understanding it, seen through the prism of our human experience. And we know there is a great mystery to all that, which we don’t understand. But nonetheless, if we understand that we are creating our own world through thought, perhaps that puts us in touch with what’s happening at a cosmic level.

Coming back to ourselves, if it’s true that our world is being created out of our thought, which can carry the pattern of universal intelligence, then thinking must be a very significant factor in the human experience. And that’s what I am speaking to. I’m considering thinking as a spiritual practice.

True creative thinking transcends the personal and the self-preoccupied. True creative thinking is opening up to what the Creator is thinking in the field in which we find ourselves. It is realizing that there is an unfolding order in the world in which we live that we are a part of. Real thinking is an active awareness of that unfolding pattern.

It is at the same time our awareness of what is transpiring and an awareness of ourselves as an active agent of Creation. For instance, in being aware of what’s unfolding for another person, we become empowered to be an active agent of that unfoldment. I am pretty sure you have had some experience of that. In your compassionate awareness of another person, you have become not only an honorable witness but an active agent in their creative process. The same is true for us: as we become aware of what is unfolding in our life experience, that awareness makes us not only an honorable witness to our own life experience but also an empowered creator of it, consciously participating in our own unfoldment through our awareness.

In Uranda’s original description of the principles of reality, he spoke of this. He said that Love and Truth together give birth to Life. For many of us, that principle is very familiar. It is beautiful, and yet perhaps somewhat abstract. The principle relies on us to make it real. So what does it take to bring that abstract principle to Life? It is the realization that the urge of Love, together with the intelligent awareness of the unfolding pattern of Creation in the world in which we live, gives birth to Life.

I want to share some of my recent awareness of this in my own personal experience and share my reflections on what is happening for me personally in this area, believing that you might be aware of something similar in your own life.

Recently, as I began to reflect on my immediate world at Sunrise Ranch, where I live, I realized something about the way I had been in that field. I realized that I hadn’t allowed myself to understand as deeply as was possible what was happening for that field. I hadn’t allowed myself to think as deeply as needed about the evolution of that field to become aware of the part that I might play in its unfolding reality. And to that degree, I hadn’t been as present as was possible. To that degree, I had taken a laissez-faire attitude—a let’s-just-see-what-happens attitude toward life—without seeing the degree that my presence as a conscious, active agent of Creation called for.

I realized how I’d been playing small when it came to my own thinking—that I was actually capable of much more than I’d allowed myself to experience. I began to have a vision of a lucid, penetrating awareness as to what was happening, and why, and what wanted to happen, and what could happen. So I’ve begun a path of deepening my lucid awareness and conscious thought. I found that I have had a tendency to shuck off my creative abilities and dull down my own brilliance.

I don’t believe I’m unique in that regard. I deeply believe that we are all, at least potentially, brilliant thinkers. We may not have a Ph.D., we may not do scientific study or write books, though some of us do. We might not teach at a university. Yet each of us has a brilliance to bring to our own immediate world and beyond. And it’s possible we have sold ourselves short and so not entered that brilliance as deeply as we might.

In my own reflections, I looked back on my life history. How did I get to this place? I remembered a time in my youth when I was known as a smart kid. I hung out with the eggheads. And I came to a point of realizing that I didn’t want to grow up to be just an egghead. There was more to life that I wanted to know and experience and allow to become real for me. And so I turned aside from book learning. But in doing so, I turned aside from my own brilliance.

I don’t regret the path I’ve walked, because in doing that, I was seeking a deeper encounter with Reality. I didn’t have a name for what I was looking for then. I know now that I was aching for a deep encounter with the highest Love and with the urge of Love in myself.

Over my life, I’ve gradually come to reclaim my brilliance. Perhaps there is something parallel for you in your life. Something to be reclaimed about the brilliance that we are all called to, which is ultimately the brilliance of bringing divine light, the intelligence of the Creator into the world.

On the topic of intelligence, this is from a class at Sunrise Ranch on April 19, 1954, titledThinking”:

What do you think that you would think that you should not think if you did think? Do you realize how much lethargy in the human mind is established and maintained on the basis of the excuse, inside excuse, more or less subconscious—a person hardly dares let it come out where he can get a good look at it, but it is still there—of being afraid that he will think the wrong thing if he allows himself to think? What do you think that you would think that you should not think if you did think? I have heard people say, “Well, I am just afraid to think.” Well, they are in a bad way. When a person is afraid to think, he is in a bad way.

 Now we are interested in learning to think, and thinking is one of the primary factors in relationship to control. You cannot have true control without thinking, because if the intelligence of God is working through His spirit into your life, that movement will be made manifest through the processes of the mind in you—true thinking.     ~ Uranda

Perhaps you might consider with me your own immediate field of creativity—your own life and your own immediate world. Consider the possibility that your world and its unfoldment is relying on you to be aware of what is unfolding and to be a guiding light in its unfoldment. But in order for that to happen, you have to be willing to think the thoughts of that unfoldment. Your world can’t just do it all by itself. There’s probably plenty that it does do all by itself in which you play a more or less subconscious role. But there are key things in the unfoldment of our world that rely on our conscious awareness and guidance. We have to think the thoughts of Creation for that to happen. If we don’t think the thought, if our world is waiting to unfold in that respect, it can’t. And then what happens for us as a human being, functioning that way, if we are there in that world that is waiting on us to think the thought that is its unfoldment, but we won’t think it? If we are frozen in our thinking our world cannot unfold the way it wants to because we won’t play the part that we are meant to play in that unfoldment. We haven’t learned that our consciousness is not solely our own. It is the consciousness of the field in which we are living.

And what does that create for us, as a human being, if our thinking for our field is frozen? There we are, waiting for the world to unfold in a creative way when actually it is waiting on us. Perhaps if we are religious, we are praying to God for some kind of answer; or perhaps in the middle of a pandemic, we hope the government will help. If that is the scenario, it is possible that we ourselves haven’t thought the thought that we need to think, only because we haven’t been willing to be as brilliant as we’re meant to be. We haven’t given our capacity of conscious awareness to the consciousness of the field we are in.

When a person is inert, waiting for someone or something else to come up with the path forward when it is the person, themselves, who has the role of allowing that path to emerge through their own consciousness—that produces fear. If we are willing to think the thought, then life has a chance to flourish in the world in which we live.

That is a picture of what happens at the individual level, related to our own individual worlds. But is that not what is happening collectively for us as the body of humankind? There is a new world seeking to be born through consciousness. Are we willing to think the thought?

If a group of people is self-preoccupied and self-absorbed in some kind of xenophobic, nationalistic collective experience, then that field of consciousness is not available to think the thought of the world that is looking to be born.

Of course, it’s not all about thought. The creative thought is born out of Love. It is the urge of Love within us that causes intelligence to flow so that that urge of Love within us can be fulfilled in our life and in our world. The thought that is born out of Love serves Love. Love returns the favor and serves a beautiful thought.

Love serves Truth. And Truth serves Love. We know this as human beings in a very human way. When there is a beautiful thought that is the potential of what our world is becoming, our Love naturally rushes to that thought to allow for its fulfillment. Love rushes to the thought, and thought is in service to Love. Ultimately, it’s part of one reality, not separate things. And here we are as human beings, so incredibly made, with a mind and a heart, as instruments for the Creator, bringing life to the manifestation of the world in which we live.

Love and Truth bring Life.

What are the thoughts that you have yet to allow yourself to think? What is the thought that is in the mind of God that is ready to be born into our collective awareness, if we would but let it?