A contemporary interpretation of a Hebrew prayer, Ahavat Olam

We are loved by an Unending Love.
We are embraced by arms that find us
     even when we are hidden from ourselves.
We are touched by fingers that soothe us
     even when we are too proud for soothing.
We are counseled by voices that guide us
      even when we are too embittered to hear.
We are loved by an Unending Love.

We are supported by hands that uplift us
      even in the midst of a fall.
We are urged on by eyes that meet us
       even when we are too weak for meeting.
We are loved by an Unending Love.

 Embraced, touched, soothed, and counseled…
Ours are the arms, the fingers, the voices;
Ours are the hands, the eyes, the smiles;
We are loved by an Unending Love. 

                              Rabbi Rami Shapiro

 

We have been sharing a profound meditation on the Breath of Life and how that breath is spoken of in spiritual traditions around the world, going back through the ages, coming down to us from the ancestors of the great cultures and spiritual traditions of the world.

Like many other Creation stories around the world, the Judeo-Christian culture tells us that Creation began with the breath of life.

 And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.

These words in the second chapter of Genesis are a second telling of the story of Creation in the Bible. In the first chapter of Genesis, we find these words:

 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

This seems to be a very different telling of the Creation story. But wait…the word translated as Spirit in English is from the Hebrew word Ruach. And what does that word mean? Breath, or wind. And the origin of the English word Spirit is breath. So, while the symbology here seems to be different, actually it gets back to the same thing, does it not? Cosmic Breath is activating Creation.

Consider what is being said here. The earth was without form and void. There was no earth yet! Darkness was on the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God moved on the face of the waters—on the face of the waters, on the face of the deep.

What is the deep? What are those waters? Water is a symbol of the creative field of consciousness and energy that is activated by the Cosmic Breath. Physical form precipitates out of that field.

This principle, outlined by scientists and by the symbology of Creation stories from the ancients, is universally true. The Cosmic Life, moving through the field of consciousness and energy, is the basis for the creation of planets, stars, galaxies, and nebula. It is this breathing field that gives birth to Creation.

As beings who are consciously connected to this creative field, the principles of creation related to it are particularly relevant to us.

The word deep implies that there are layers to the creative field. There are layers to consciousness. And where does the Cosmic Breath first move?

Consider your own experience of spiritual awakening. If it was like mine, things were stirring at many layers of consciousness. But what broke through was at the surface layer of conscious awareness, on the face of the waters. Did it immediately move all the way down to the bottom? Presumably, something was happening down there. But the spiritual awakening began with the face of the waters.

At the time, I tended to assume that what I had become aware of was the whole thing. Of course, it wasn’t. From that time until now, what I initially became aware of has been moving more and more deeply into the layers of conscious mind, subconscious mind, and into my emotional body—into the deep.

This is how it goes for someone on a truly spiritual path. It is not as though we touch something wonderful, delight in it, and then spend the rest of our life skipping along the surface of things. If you have been living that life, you are living a different one than I am. For me, Spirit activated the face of my waters many years ago, and it has been going deeper ever since.

I believe that the spiritual path for any individual is the path of letting it go deep. It is the path of staying spiritually centered, open to the breath that is going into the deep, reaching deeper and deeper layers of consciousness—deep into the subconscious mind, deep into the heart, stirring us, shaking us, changing us. That is how we are changed.

This is not a self-activated process. It is activated by the Breath of Life. You might even say that it is an automatic process because, as we stay open to the Breath of Life, it enters us more and more deeply.

Sometimes, the attempt is made to go into the deep and stir it around, take the ideas and thinking at the surface level of our conscious mind, and reorder the deep. A person thinks, Let me get into that deep and find out what is down there. Let me figure out some of these structures in my subconscious mind that are tripping me up.

When it comes to conscious intervention into the processes of spiritual activation, a little goes a long way. If you were to attempt to reorder the deeper layers of the subconscious mind and emotion, according to what pattern would you reorder them? And what power would you use to do the reordering? People who attempt such things find out that the self-active mind is a cruel master and that they might’ve been better off leaving their consciousness alone rather than attempt to manipulate it.

Here where I live, at Sunrise Ranch in Loveland, Colorado, there is a tendency for the soil—which is full of clay—to form a hardpan so that when it rains, water simply drains away. And even after a real downpour, a day later the land can be dry. So farmers sometimes plow their fields to break up the hardpan. Sometimes, they plant large radishes or certain other crops to break it up.

And so it is with us as human beings. If we’re not careful, a hardpan forms. The underlying layers of consciousness become dry. And we feel it as vacancy or loneliness.

While the surface layers of the mind have no business trying to reorder the deep, they do have a part to play in breaking up the hardpan that tends to form over the human heart. And just as a farmer might plow their field to allow the rains to seep deep into the soil, we can take conscious steps to break up the hardpan on the surface of our human heart.

These are not only my reflections on the life of humanity and how the principles of Creation work in some kind of abstract way. This is my own personal report, and I wonder if it would not be yours too. There is the magic and the wonder of the breath of the Creator, breathing the Breath of Life into us so that we can truly be a living soul. Yes, we have the physical breath, but to be fully alive, from head to toe, a living soul all the way through, we have to allow that Breath of Life to come into us, bringing with it Unending Love.

The founder of Emissaries of Divine Light taught and wrote using the name Uranda. He taught the principles by which this happens. And he taught the process this way:

Radiation
Response
Attraction
Union
Unified radiation

He said that it all happens through the radiation of an Unending Love; our response to that; then attraction to it based on our response, and then it is penetrating us—we are joining with it in that process of attraction. And there is union—we merge with that Unending Love, becoming one with it. And then there is unified radiation. It is not just God up in heaven, breathing the Breath of Life into us. We are now breathing that Unending Love into our world through the conscious field, into the deep.

This is really where I want to go in this Pulse of Spirit. I want to explore with you how that process works, not only individually but collectively. The collective part does not work unless the individual part does. And yet, if there is something done individually that opens up something to be done together, does it not?

As conscious spiritual beings, all of us together right now are breathing into this collective field of consciousness that we are knowing and sharing together. We are breathing into the deep that we are entertaining in consciousness and sharing together. And then, together there is a process of unified breathing into the world in which we live, into the deep of the world.

There is no transmutation of the human experience for an individual unless that person stays centered long enough for Unending Love to change the depth of their experience. We are connected to the Breath of Life through all the layers of human experience, and they are all needed. Our connection is through the subconscious mind and heart. Unending Love has to reach those spaces of the human experience if there is going to be real change.

And so it is for all of humankind. We can skip along on the surface, as many spiritual people do, without allowing the penetration that achieves the actual change. And I can say categorically, that is not what Emissaries of Divine Light are about. We are here to allow not only a lasting change in our own experience but to let something go from the surface into the deep of humankind.

How does that happen? Let’s reflect on Uranda’s formula. It is relevant for us as individuals, and it is a profound instruction of how we change. We change because we respond. We receive the radiation and respond to it, and then we keep responding, and then we join it and enter into it and become it. That is how we change. But this formula applies to the world. I was thinking of how we could describe how it happens in the larger world. I came up with a phrase to describe this process: spiritual aggregation. By those words, I am naming a coming together in a field of consciousness that allows for unified radiation.

The origin of the word aggregate comes from an ancient word for a flock of birds. If you think of the word gregarious, those are people flocking together. So an aggregation is a coming together of individual entities, like birds in a flock.

So how does spiritual aggregation happen in a way that allows unified radiation to go to a depth in the entire collective human experience? It occurs by this very same principle: radiation, response, attraction, union, and unified radiation. And that unified radiation becomes the radiation for another cycle involving the same process: more radiation from a larger body, opening up response from those who receive the radiation, attraction, union, and a larger unified radiation. And so it goes.

We are consciously participating in that process. Yes, we are doing it for ourselves with the Invisible, opening to the Breath of Life and the Unending Love within it that is available to us individually. We are cracking open to that, letting it move on the face of our waters and then going deep. And now, together, we are finding ways to bring a focus of radiation, allowing our field of consciousness to receive and respond to that focus of radiation and be drawn to it, become one with it, so there is a larger body of radiation into the world, a unified radiation.

Do you think we would have received, as I believe we have, a divine commission to bring transmutation to the world and been given no way for it to happen? Go transform the world. Transmute human consciousness. But there is no way to do it. So just sit there and hope that it happens. No, there is a technology by which it happens. That technology is individual, and then it is collective. It is something we do together collectively.

As Uranda presented this formula, it seems a bit dry, does it not? It is abstract. Many of us could repeat it: radiation, response… Many of you know that I wrote a deck of Attunement Cards with forty-nine prayers in it. It was a remarkable experience. Of course, you don’t write prayers without being in prayer, so just being in prayer forty-nine times over was a remarkable experience. I would recommend it to anybody.

When I began the endeavor, I set for myself instructions for writing the prayers. I think that people who have heard them might be surprised at how specific the instructions were. There were numerous facets to them, but one of them was that every single one of those prayers traces that formula in the prayer: radiation, response, attraction, union, unified radiation.

What I found, as I wrote the prayers, was that in the poetry of them, the formula came alive. And in my own heart, I could not believe what happened as I followed the formula through in all those prayers and as I shared the prayers with other people. I have hardly been able to believe what moves in the human heart through them, because while the formula might seem, at first, foreign, academic and abstract, it is encoded in the human soul. We are encoded to have the Breath of Life breathed into us and to breathe it out—to become that breath. We are encoded to join with it, to receive and appreciate and love and evolve, and to have the field of consciousness that we experience and the energy of that field transmuted by this process. And in the poetry of a human life, that is what is happening—if we let it.

Just as we don’t transmute our own individual human experience because we take the activity at a surface level of consciousness and try to get in there and rearrange things, the same is true in the world in which we live. Most of us gave up a long time ago on trying to manipulate the world into better shape. It is not going to happen that way. We have our part to play, but our part is one of allowing the Breath of Life to do its work. Breathe it in and breathe it out to let the processes of spiritual aggregation work among us as human beings. And don’t try to stop them.

That takes noticing where we get off the bus, where we put on the brake or fall in the ditch; where our prejudices arise, and say, Oh no, I won’t do that. Not with them, not here. I won’t go there. I won’t let it enter here. I won’t be there for this.

We, as human beings, have so many unconscious ways of bailing on the process of transmutation. I think it could well be said that our biggest job is not to bail—to stay in the process, to allow it to continue to work, to be here for it, for ourselves, for each other, and the world.

Allow Unending Love to keep coming in and keep moving out. So good to be in that process with you.