In recent editions of the Pulse of Spirit, we have been exploring the nature of the human energy field and the flow of the torus within that field. And we have used the fountain as a symbol of that flow.

When you think of your own experience, what gets your fountain going? What creates an upwelling of energy in you? Isn’t it when you touch something beautiful and lovely? You touch it in another person, in nature, or you just feel it upwelling in yourself?

Maybe you think about a person that you love greatly, and you touch something that we call love, not really knowing exactly what we mean by that word. But whatever that word love means, it almost inevitably draws the waters of our Being upward. And so, if we want to allow the fountain that we are as an individual to flow, what do we do? We bring the waters of our Being in contact with the reality of love. And if you really do that, I defy you to keep the waters down. That’s not what happens! If you really touch love, it excites the waters of your Being. I know how that works for me. I bet it’s the same for you. I don’t think we’re made differently as human beings in that regard.

Martin Cecil had this to say on stone, which often blocks the flow of the fountain in human experience:

This stone centers in shame. Out of shame spring other evil spirits—fear and hate and jealousy, to name three. But all of these come from shame. Until the shame begins to yield, and consequently the stone be moved, the spring cannot adequately flow.

Do you ever feel the waters of your own Being getting stagnant? The world starts looking old, unexciting, and dull. You no longer roll eagerly out of bed in the morning. The waters of our Being can become stagnant, and this was Martin’s diagnosis of the root cause of that experience­—shame.

I suspect that none of the readers of this Pulse of Spirit consider themselves to be filled with shame. And yet, shame can be a sneaky fellow. It can be a spirit that creeps in without us knowing it when we begin to feel badly about how we’ve acted or where we’ve come to in our life. It can lurk in the background, and the result is that we don’t expose our heart to love. Therefore, the waters of our Being don’t rise up into exultation and joy in life. And when the waters in us don’t rise, the fountain isn’t flowing.

If the waters in us don’t rise, they can’t fall. The rain can’t come down upon us and we don’t water our world with the water of life. And then all of that flow can’t return to us, to rise once again.

The reinitiation of the flow begins when we roll back the stone of shame and open our hearts to this thing that we call love.

I did a little piece of research this week. It was curious to me that the King James Version of the Bible speaks of love, and I wondered where the word came from. Apparently, the word itself is of Germanic, Saxon, and Norse origin, coming to us from Old English. But much of the King James Bible was from work done by William Tyndale who, for the first time, translated ancient Hebrew and Greek biblical texts directly into English.

Tyndale found the words agape and phylia in Greek and translated them as love. Both were originally words for an experience among people. In Aramaic, the tongue spoken by Jesus, the word hooba found its way into the King James Version as charity. But Tyndale originally translated it as love. Hooba means to warm or set on fire. 

So, when Tyndale, and other early translators, wanted to talk about something spiritual, they took words used for something very human—love—and used it for something that transcends the merely human and the romantic. And they used that word love to name something ineffable, a quality that transcends the common human experience.

When we touch this kind of love, it activates the fountain of life in us. Love is always there, always available to touch. When we roll back the stone of shame, we expose ourselves to love and the fountain begins to bubble from deep within us. The water in the fountain begins to rise.

So in this moment, I invite you to roll back that stone of shame. Let go of any regret, anything about yourself that you think ought to be different, any residual patterns of seeing yourself as some kind of sinner, or someone who is less-than. I invite you to roll back the stone to stand now in total forgiveness, total openness, total readiness to touch the very essence of love and to let the waters of your Being rise up in praise and wonder in life itself.

We have the opportunity to praise not only the essential virtue of love but that virtue as it is embodied in the world around us. Praise the trees and the birds, the sky, the sun, and the rain. Praise all the weird and wacky people who are in our life, right? They may be weird and whacky, and yet there’s something about them that is worthwhile and beautiful. And so, we celebrate that. Amen, brother! Amen, sister!

With our praise and gratitude, there is a rising fountain. And when the waters of Being rise up in praise, they also shower down upon us, like rain from heaven. The very cycle of water on Planet Earth is a torus. Water rises up in praise to the heat and sun as it evaporates from the oceans, lakes, and rivers into the atmosphere. And then it rains down upon us to water the earth.

Like the cycle of water on the planet, when our energy rises up, then we have energy to come down and offer, like that rain. No rising energy—no water ascending in our fountain—no water to give. We can’t give a glass of living water to another person if we have no praise inside ourselves.

We are energized by our praise. We are filled to overflowing.

The fountain of life is not only an energy in our body but also a bubbling up of creativity through consciousness. I’ve been writing for this Pulse of Spirit almost every week for fourteen years, and speaking at services on Sunrise Ranch, where I live, for twenty-one years; and in New York before that. I have found, rather remarkably, that I can be blank on Saturday night, but sometime on Sunday morning I start thinking about things that inspire me. As I open myself to be inspired, a deep exhilaration fountains up in my Being in a way that thrills me. Powerful feelings become luminescent thoughts. And so, I have rain to bring. I have living water to share.

How does such an experience happen, for me or for anyone? It happens because there is a fountain of awareness at work through consciousness. When we roll back the stone of shame and expose the waters of our subconscious mind and heart to love, we make ourselves available to love, just as the ocean is available to the sun. We let love—hooba—set a fire. It sets a fire in our emotional body and there is a rising of feeling. Thought forms rise up through our subconscious mind. And now there is a fountain of inspired thought.

Isn’t that how it works? And before you know it, we’re thinking amazing things, not just about giving a service on a Sunday morning but about life itself; about our future, about the possibility for the community we are part of, and about the possibility for all humankind.

Is the fountain broken for humankind? Or perhaps for you? Is there a lack of inspired thought? If there is going to be that fountaining of thought that shows a way forward, we have to take the stone of shame away from the heart and expose the heart so that we can think again as humankind.

In some important way, humankind has to come into its ability to think. Real thinking is far more than calculation. And we are far more than biological computers. We have the opportunity for inspired thought—a fountain of thought that is never-ending when the stone of shame is turned aside and we meet this present moment fresh, open, and new.

So here we are as a spiritual community of people who are attuned to the Pulse of Spirit, each of us with a fountain of luminescent thought to bring. We have that to bring for ourselves and for this community we are a part of. Inspired thoughts become inspired words and inspired actions. As you know this fountaining in yourself, your thoughts matter. Your words light up the world. And your actions make a difference.

So let these waters rise! Let’s live in joy and exultation. Does that make us ignorant of all of the woe in our world? Not at all. We just know that that’s what all the woe in our world needs: living water, loving feelings welling up from deep within us, and luminescent thought that lights the way forward.