Robert’s Frost’s poem “Mending Wall” opens with this line:

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down. I could say “Elves” to him…

In the Pulse of Spirit last week I addressed The End of Loneliness. Loneliness is caused by the walls that have been erected in the human psyche.

Loneliness has a great impact on the physical, mental and emotional health of the individual. Dr. Sarvada Chandra Tiwari says this:

The pathological consequences of loneliness are found more among those adults who develop personality and adaptation disorders, such as overconsumption of alcohol, loss of self-esteem, extreme forms of anxiety, powerlessness, and stress. Loneliness predisposes a person to physical diseases too as it has an adverse impact on immune, cardiovascular, and endocrine systems.

A study on loneliness, conducted by the Cigna Corporation, included the following conclusions:

• Generation Z (adults ages 18-22) is the loneliest generation.
• Loneliness is the health equivalent of smoking fifteen cigarettes a day.

Around the world, loneliness is exacerbated by global social dislocation: people moving within and between countries, refugee crises, and younger generations moving to cities to find work, leaving the more senior population isolated and alone.

These words are from a talk given by Martin Cecil, published years ago. He entitled it “Willing to Be Found.”

We are concerned here with what is spoken of as the subconscious field, because there are very few human beings who are aware, in the direct sense, of this shame.

There are a variety of what are called guilt complexes, but this is something much deeper and universal…. It stands as a barrier to this process by which what is inside from the divine source of being may begin to be experienced by the individual and come forth. Virtually all of the conflict—I suppose we could say all of it—within human beings and between human beings is based upon this sense of shame. As long as it is there, human beings are endeavoring to maintain themselves and uphold themselves, afraid that they are going to pass away or be overwhelmed, because fundamentally, underneath, they know there is something wrong, so wrong that they feel they are in the process of passing away. And it is a sort of delaying action, all centering in this subconscious attitude caused by shame.

Martin goes on to speak about what it means to be found by the Divine. We have these words in one of the most beloved gospel songs, “Amazing Grace”:

I once was lost but now I’m found.

When you sing those lines, even if you don’t subscribe to all the Christian beliefs it embodies, it somehow rings true that it is a healing for us as human beings to be found by the Divine. Being found brings healing to the human soul. It dissolves the wall in the human psyche.

The walls that we see all around us and the necessity we see for them is because of the walls that have been erected inside. And the walls that we erect outside ourselves are a reflection of what we have erected inside to wall ourselves off.

So I am a champion for bringing down walls to end loneliness, letting ourselves be found. The creative powers of the Divine that are natural to us flow largely through the subconscious mind and heart. The power is ultimately the power of the highest love, which is certainly a matter of the heart. And yes, there are thoughts that go with it, and there are attitudes and beliefs that either wall love off or let it in. But ultimately, the power of love moves primarily through the heart and the subconscious mind. All the powers and forces of what activate us as a human being move through the subconscious mind.

That’s not a physical thing. We could tell a story about it, we could act it out, we could talk about it; but the reality of it is invisible in the human experience. But just because it’s invisible does not mean it’s not real. What is happening in the invisible dimensions of the human heart and subconscious mind causes people to act as they are acting. And what is present in that part of our human experience ends up being the cause of things that become conscious and become manifest—like physical walls. The invisible dimension of the heart becomes the cause of what is said, and words have power in the human experience. The words that are based on the walls that are inside create walls outside.

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
       That wants it down.

There are three streams of the Divine from within us that get walled off. These are primary elements of our human experience. The first one is Life. The creative imperative is to let life find you. Don’t run from your life. Let it find you. Say, Here I am. I am facing my life and all the elements in it. And as I’m facing the life outside myself, I’m facing the life that’s within me that wants out. I’m welcoming it. I’m allowing myself to be found. I am here.

Here is a verse from Phil Ochs’ folksong “When I’m Gone.”

There’s no place in this world where I’ll belong when I’m gone
And I won’t know the right from the wrong when I’m gone
And you won’t find me singin’ on this song when I’m gone
So I guess I’ll have to do it while I’m here.

We’re here to take our place in the world while we’re here. It is a divinely appointed place. We are appointed by life. When we take our place, we belong to the life that we are living. We belong to the very impulse of life that is within us—the desire to live, to express and to know joy and celebration.

Let life find you. It brings the end of loneliness.

The second stream is Truth. Truth is a stream of the Divine from within us—the truth of who we are and the truth of what life is. To be found by life, we have to be found by the truth of what that life is—the pattern of life, the true nature of who we are. Let truth find you.

When a person runs from the truth, they end up telling a lie. There are the more obvious lies that are rampant these days—so innumerable we lose track. But there is another kind of lying that is related to the literal lies that are told, which is lying about who we are, or lying about who another person is. We wall ourselves off from the truth of what we are and from what the truth of another is, and then we tell some story that is a lie about that other person or about ourselves.

We can attempt to excuse our actions by characterizing ourselves in a way that is not true of us. The truth is, I am a beautiful person; you are too—wise, intelligent, noble and loving. I have no excuses for being anything less than that. That’s the truth. And I allow myself to be found by that truth. It dissolves the lie, and with that it dissolves shame. Be found by the truth.

There’s something else to be found by. The simplest word for it is Love. Be found by love. Show up for love so that love finds you from the inside. There are walls between people, and people go looking for love over those walls, without having taken down the wall inside that lets love in.

I am here to let love find me; to let love come into me and to admit how much I am loved. Pretty darn good life, I think we’d all have to admit. Right? Pretty good life! Hard bumps along the way, but pretty fantastic life. Somebody loved you enough to give you all that. There is a creative reality loving you so much that it’s keeping you going and waking you up every morning.

Let love find you. And when we let love find us, we admit how big that love is and that it is not only loving us, it is coming through us. It loves this world a lot and loves other people a lot. Trying to love is the silliest thing in the whole wide world when you realize that the love inside you loves you that much and loves your world and all the people in it that much—even the people you don’t like.

These three streams flow from the Wonderful One Within—from the reality of the Divine present within every person. This is the reality of who you are and the reality of who I am. So when you are found by life, found by truth and found by love, you are being found by yourself. Any shame about who you are? We attach who we are to all kinds of things—past deeds, limitations, shortcomings, what other people said about us, feelings we have, belief in our own limitation and lack, belief in some kind of person that we believe ourselves to be. And we attach ourselves to those things and then feel shame about those lies that we’ve attached to ourselves.

I want to end the epidemic of loneliness. Will you join me? I invite people to be found by who they are—to be found by the Wonderful One Within and allow that Wonderful One Within to come out. We are here to do that for ourselves and to be priests, spiritual surgeons even, for the world—counselors who see that process through in ourselves and others. We invite that process by our very presence. We tell the story of being found. We give to other people what we have received.

The sense of belonging that we’ve come to know for ourselves, we offer to others. When we have found our unique place, we offer a place to each and every person that we meet. We acknowledge that they have a divine appointed place in the work, just as we do.

The world in which we live is stingy about giving place. This shows up in the plight of refugees, but not only there. When you begin to know your place, you see the devastation that is happening every day between people when they don’t give another person a place. The further tragedy is that if you don’t give other people a place, you don’t have a place. You are denying your place as the Wonderful One Within who sees and acknowledges the place of others. And then we end up with a world full of homeless people—homeless people who don’t have houses, and homeless people who have houses. They are all homeless if they do not know their place and don’t make a place for others.

Bring down the walls! I’m not against political action, but this vibrational action that we are taking is the most powerful action on the planet. When we have been found, we then bring the desire within the heart of the Divine to find human beings. Where are you? I’m looking for you—not to punish, insult or put down. I’m looking for you with the sight of the Divine, with the heart of the Divine, and with the zeal of the Divine.

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
          That wants it down.

 Ultimately it is the Wonderful One Within that wants those walls down in us and between us. And as that One, this is our victory cry:

Walls ahead, rubble behind!

When Jesus was on earth, he is recorded to have said, Come unto me. Those are the words of the Wonderful One Within. Those are the words of love that we have the honor of hearing and the honor of speaking. As far as we know, Jesus isn’t present to speak those words today; and in any event, they were not the words of a human personality. They are the words of the Wonderful One within you and within me and within all people. We have the supreme privilege of knowing that reality for ourselves and speaking on behalf of who we are.

It’s not so much the words themselves. I don’t expect us to be walking around this week asking people to come unto us. And the invitation isn’t particularly a physical one. It is a spiritual one. It is the invitation to allow the walls in the human psyche to come crashing down; to allow the epidemic of loneliness to end so that we can, as a human being, know full union, being found by life, being found by truth, and being found by love—found by the Wonderful One Within.