Jesus taught two things that seem contradictory but end up being the same thing. He spoke about entering the kingdom of heaven.
Truly I say to you, unless you change and become like children, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven.
Matthew 18:3, New American Standard Bible
Clearly, he was not talking about dying. He was talking about a higher realm that is available to know now. It is present right here where we are. We have the opportunity to become consciously aware of it and walk into its Reality.
Jesus also spoke about the kingdom entering our world.
Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven.
Matthew 6:10
I cannot imagine how this could happen if it did not come into and through a human being, unless we are prepared to have it come crashing down upon us.
These are two things that end up being the same thing: entering the kingdom of heaven and allowing it to enter us and the world in which we live.
Recently, we have been considering the symbol of the torus and how the torus is the flow of Creation and the river of life. Shall we gather at the river? In modern science, the understanding is that at the center of the torus is the black hole, which for our Milky Way galaxy is Sagittarius A*.
We have been talking about what is on the other side of that black hole. In the flow of Creation, it does not just circulate in a circle. It is like a fountain in the shape of a figure 8. There is something that is coming from above that is circulating through the fountain and rising back up. And we have the opportunity to open to what is above, to stand at the crossover point so that what is above may come into consciousness, and flow through us into expression and action: thought, word, and deed on earth.
That is the joy of life, is it not? And then to live in what circulates in all Creation when we are in that flow. We get to be in the beauty and the wonder of it all and let it happen.
What is within the torus has been depicted as the Holy City. And I have been mentioning how, when Foster Gamble, who produced the movie Thrive, was here, he hypothesized one evening that within the black hole was a city. And he was not referencing that in a religious context. And still, in the last book of the Bible, John talks about the Holy City, the New Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven.
There it is! The higher realms coming in the flow of Creation. For that to happen in human experience, there has to be somebody there to receive it and pass it on.
As far as I can tell, that is what we are here for, individually and together. We are already in that process, to whatever degree. If that is how Reality works, it would be pretty hard to escape it. We can just be somewhat unconscious of what is going on. We can be unconscious, and there is something that comes, and it gets interpreted and understood as people generally understand it, and then we live in the world as it is and try to make the best of all that.
But then there is this inner Reality that is forever streaming. It is entering us if we let it, and as it does, we are entering it.
This inner Reality has its own pattern, it has its own logic, it has its own reason and meaning. The more we fiddle with it, the more we try to make sense of it from a human perspective, from the standpoint of the workings of our own mind, the less we know it for what it is. We can try to figure out our lives, but the more we attempt to figure them out, the more we are not open to the already existing pattern that is attempting to create coherence in our lives and in the world. Obviously, God is failing in the effort, given the lack of coherence in the world in which we live.
There is a religious expression: “finding yourself in God.” I understand it could have weird religious interpretations. But still, we find ourselves at the gates of the Holy City and what flows down from a higher realm. We do not find ourselves in our personality, the culture in which we grew up, our birth order, or whatever personality was ascribed to us as a child. We find ourselves in the Reality that is streaming through from, as Martin Cecil would say, “out of the nowhere into the now here.” And in that flow is our meaning.
It is interesting to think about how, even from an individual standpoint, any piece of that meaning all by itself is not coherent. It is just a piece of the whole story. We are not just that piece; we are the meaning of the whole thing.
Life is telling a story. A master storyteller has a unique ability to bring together words that tell a deeper meaning, a meaning that is larger than any of the individual words of the story. A good storyteller is open to that deeper meaning, and being aware of it, they find a way to convey the pattern of that larger meaning in the words that they speak or write. Any one word would not carry the whole meaning.
In the story of life, it takes all the words of the story to know the meaning that comes from the Creator of all things. The meaning is there, present in what is flowing through. It is for all of humanity and, for that matter, for every individual and for all of us together.
If we are words in that story, all those words add up to something — to a meaning and a pattern. But where is the ability on our part as humanity to tune into that larger meaning and find our place in it? What does it take for us to make our contribution as part of that pattern, which cannot ultimately be understood from outside of it? We cannot check out from the body of humankind — or from the body of Being that incarnated as humankind — and make sense of life’s story.
This community is a community of people who are waking up to these things and awakening to their role in gathering at the river — being at the crossover point where the realities of the inner realms can cross over and find expression in the outer realm in which we live. We have the opportunity to gather at the river all the time. And if we are not gathering at the river now as we meet for this service, what are we doing?
We are here gathering at the river, collectively opening ourselves to what is in the inner realms — the intelligence, the power, the coherence, the meaning and purpose for why we are here that is inherent in the inner realm of being that is present right here and now. We are entering that world, and it is entering us, and we are allowing it to cross over through the crossover point at the black hole of the torus into the flow below.
We are gathering at the river in that sense, and at the same time, we know we live in a troubled world in all kinds of ways, at all kinds of levels. We are here at the crossover point with love and understanding for the people in our world, for the crises they face, for the crisis of the world in which we live. I am not trying to be overly dramatic, just accurate about what is happening, unless you are looking at a different world than I am. This looks like a crisis to me.
So, we are here at the crossover point to bring the power of what is above into the world in which we live. We began to speak about that last week as lightning from heaven. Lightning is a river of creative power, electricity in the literal physical sense. As we witness lightning, it appears to happen all at once. But actually, it is a process.
An invisible channel of ionized gas called a stepped leader branches downward from a cloud. As it approaches the ground, the intense charge on the surface reaches upward in response, sending out conductive channels known as upward streamers. When the stepped leader connects with an upward streamer, a complete electrical circuit is formed. This triggers a massive surge of current — the return stroke — that flows upward to the cloud. This generates the blinding flash of light and creates an explosive shockwave that we hear as thunder.
That is a physical phenomenon. And we are using it as a symbol for the potential that we have to bring spiritual lightning into the world.
There is another kind of lightning that stays in the clouds, which people sometimes think of as heat lightning. All heat, no power. You see it in Colorado on a summer evening. It never lands on earth.
Sometimes spirituality gets that way. Just heat lightning, nothing landing. We are not here to bring heat lightning. We are here to bring the real lightning that grounds in the earth — in our own physical bodies and in the world in which we live. We are here to bring that heavenly charge on through, knowing that in that lightning is contained all the things I spoke of: meaning and purpose, and the pattern of Creation. And unlike physical lightning, which tends to destroy, spiritual lightning brings transformation and Creation.
Spiritual lightning is a reordering power that changes our lives according to the meaning that is inherent in the higher realms. It reorders our own life, reorders the world in which we live, and creates coherence that we, with our own human minds, could not figure out by ourselves. It is the unfolding story of life that we are bringing through our heavenly lightning.
Maybe it does not come with a grand lightning bolt all of a sudden, and maybe it does, because there are certain times of intensity when the lightning needs to come from us. We are called on to bring the lightning. And yet it is a charge that flows through us as the river of life.
So, shall we gather at the river so that we are in position to bring the lightning? There is something to be left behind if we are to gather at the river — all the human fears, prejudices, beliefs, and ideas that end up short-circuiting the lightning. We do not think it should come this way.
Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him.
Job 13:15
If we are earthbound, we might think that lightning from the higher realms will kill us. Job’s way of overcoming that fear was simply to give himself without reservation to the lightning. Of course, the Creator does not have any intent to slay anyone.
If we welcome the lightning, there is that lightning response from us that comes back to the crossover point through the gates of heaven where the lightning originated.
As I was listening to Howard earlier — that is how it was for me, Howard. Feeling the lightning from you was electricity to my soul. How majestic, how wonderful to hear that from another human being, and to feel the lightning from them! Let us bring the lightning to each other and let us bring it together.
I would like to close the hour by playing my newest karaoke hymn, Open Wide the Gates. I do not expect you to sing along the first time through. But I want to warn you that it is about the coming of the Holy City, and the gates to the Holy City. And it is an homage to Michelangelo. So, there are religious images — angels with wings and streets paved with gold.
So, I want to make clear my understanding of such things. I do not believe that angels necessarily have wings. That is not the point. And I do not really believe in literal pearly gates. None of the imagery that I have used in the video do I view as Reality in itself. It is simply a pattern of symbology that helps us as human beings to sense what Reality is. We are not worshiping idols, images, symbols, as if they were the Reality, but we are using symbols to evoke our awareness of Reality.
So that is a deal I would like to make — that you understand that is where I am coming from. And I think it helps if we are all coming from that place, not taking a pattern of symbology to be the Reality. And I think it is important we know that about each other. If we do have that agreement, we can use symbology in a way that powerfully evokes Reality. Okay?
The song Open Wide the Gates was played.
Thank you. I hope it clearly came across that this is not about dying and going to heaven. It is about entering the kingdom here on earth and allowing the kingdom to be present in the world in which we live, being aware that it is already present in the world in which we live, that it takes our being conscious of it for it to have meaning to us and our world.