Building From the Bottom Up and From the Top Down

In the process of creation, there are two kinds of building. There is building from the bottom up and there is building from the top down.

The building from the bottom up starts with the elemental components of the world in which we live, beginning with physical substance. For this kind of building to have meaning and value, it has to be born out of the invisible. Nonetheless, the work begins on earth, and it is carried forward with patience, one step at a time. Words of a song by Donovan, from Brother Sun, Sister Moon,describe the process this way:

 If you want your dream to be
Build it slow and surely.
Small beginnings, greater ends
Heartfelt work grows purely.

If you want to live life free
Take your time go slowly.
Do few things but do them well
Simple joys are holy.

 Our life as a human being begins that way. Certainly, there is the power of life that energizes the original human cell in the uterus. But from that beginning there is a patient building of the human capacity over many months, and then years.

This is the nature of our work as human beings. It takes perseverance, diligence and will at all levels. Human development for any individual takes that. And the collective work of any group of people requires the same thing.

Often, the work being done, either by an individual or a group, focuses on an external achievement—creating a family, an organization, an event or something else outside the people involved. But as Donovan’s song implies, the work outside always gives an opportunity for something to be created within the person:

 Day by day,
Stone by stone,
Build your secret slowly.

Day by day,
You’ll grow too,
You’ll know heaven’s glory.

What is the nature of what grows inside a person who is on a spiritual journey? In many spiritual teachings it is symbolized as a vessel. It is spoken of as a cup, a grail, or a golden bowl. While there is solid involved, the solid is used to create a space that can hold what may come into it from the Divine, and then flow out into the world. Without the patient building of this cup within an individual, or within a group of people, there is little capacity to let the invisible reality of Being have meaning on earth.

Taking into account the space between the atomic particles in our physical bodies, we are mostly space at a physical level. When you observe any group of people, there is more space in between them than there is physical mass. When you create a building, the whole point is the space within it, where people may live or work. All these things can remind us that the most important reality that we are building at a spiritual level, individually and with other people, is space. And if space is not the primary feature of whatever form is built, the form will never come alive. What is being built is not something that has value of itself. The value is its capacity to receive what should come into it and pour out.

Nature abhors a vacuum and seeks to fill it. When we create the right kind of space in what we build, it is begging for spiritual energy to come into it. Do we know what it is to create a vacuum, a space that is calling down the Holy Spirit, which is calling down the seeds of what is to be born in our world?

For spiritual people, building from the bottom up can seem like hard work. We want the spiritual experience, and we want it now. And there is something to experience now, but there’s a building to do for the larger fulfillment of a person’s life and of our work together.

For many who receive this weekly message, our collective work has been about this. I can tell you, we haven’t built any physical buildings of late here at Sunrise Ranch, but we are building at Sunrise Ranch. We are creating that container, that cup that welcomes Holy Spirit from above. It has taken patience. It always does. Someone could come along and look at the half-built cup and criticize it and demean it and say, “This doesn’t look like it’s coming to much of anything. It looks like more or less any other place on the face of the earth, or any other thing that is being undertaken by people. Let’s do something spiritual.” Here is something truly spiritual: the devotional practice that is about building the container, about building the vessel that receives Holy Spirit.

A life of service and devotional practice shows itself on the outside. There is something being accomplished on the outside, whether it is the building of a spiritual center, such as Sunrise Ranch, or something else. But all the while, the most important work is the work that is being done on the inside. There is something that is being built on the inside that is truly the means by which the wisdom and power from within is welcomed. We have to be up for that building.

Emissaries of Divine Light have been about that building since our inception in 1932. I am aware of the careful work that’s gone on, undertaken by all of us around the world, to create something collectively. It has many forms to it. It manifests in our centers around the world, it manifests in the small groups of the Creative Field Project and in the Creative Field events we have held, and in so many other ways, large and small. For this past seven years, we have been building from the bottom up; building patiently, creating a whole capacity that could receive the whole spirit.

There were those who might have liked to increase the spiritual voltage through what was present seven years ago. My view was that was about the last thing we should have been doing. If you increase the voltage through a frayed wire, you have a meltdown and a conflagration on your hands. No, you need a capacity that can receive the voltage. We have been building that capacity.

So I see the time to come as a time in which we will ongoingly be building our capacity, individually and together. We can’t build a capacity big enough for the spiritual frequency and power that is needed in the world today all by ourselves. But we can build one together. That capacity is essentially spiritual in nature. Yes, it is the flesh bodies of all of us; yes, it is the buildings and so on of Sunrise Ranch, and in other places. But it is, in its essence, a body of awareness and energy. We will continue to build that in the days to come. But it is time for something else to kick in and take priority—building from above down. That is the focus of our work in these next seven years.

As long as we are alive, there is human work to do. The human work is from the bottom up. It is the application of body and mind and heart to the daily work of what needs to be done to build a vessel on earth. Now the focus is the angelic work to be done, because human beings, without angelic awareness, don’t know how to do the work from the top down. Calling all angels! We’re here to bring the spirit of who we are and of where we come from into this earthly plane, to build out of the heaven and into the earth; to invade the earth, as it was put recently by a friend, with what is in the heaven.

I have often been criticized for speaking in a special language that the average person couldn’t understand. The truth is, over the past seven years, and prior to that, I’ve done what I knew how to do to say what I had to say in the plainest English that I knew—to make understandable what it was we have been doing as we have been building a vessel for spiritual wisdom and power. It would be a fault to continue that effort to the exclusion of speaking in the tongue of angels, which only angels understand. And there is no translation manual, and you can’t look it up on Google.

But I do believe that there is a part of who we are that knows the language of angels and knows just what to do to build from the top down, to bring the potentiality of the place of our origin, our heavenly home, and to bring that into the world in which we live; to bring the confidence of that place, the knowing of that place, the wisdom of that place, and the awesome power of that place that gives us life. Together we come with one accord, from the four corners of the heaven, to be about this. For angels, this is easy work. It is the projection out of heaven, into the earth, of what is heavenly, so that the cup that has been built may be filled to overflowing; so that our cup, personally, could be full to overflowing, and that for all the people of the world whose deepest longing and desire is to know what is at the source of Being, that flow is easily available through our work.

I’m sure the building from the bottom up needs to continue. It seldom works to be lax about that. In fact, the quality and accuracy required in that work increases as we move forward, because what has taken us to this point surely will be inadequate for the future. So let us take all our accomplishments and throw them up in the air, and see where they come down when viewed in the light of what we are to do now. That is freedom, is it not? It is freedom to think of your life and everything that is in it, to think of our life together around the world and our collective work, and throw it all up in the air, taking a look at it with the eyes of the angel, and asking ourselves, “Hmm, what needs to happen now?”

I’ve been pondering this place, Sunrise Ranch, and wondering how I would describe it to people. I’ve got it down to three words: Magic happens here. And why? It is because of the vessel and the space that is held by those of us who live here. That is why magic happens anyplace. It has to do with the quality of the space and what the space is inviting. That’s true personally for you and for me. So when I think about what more needs to be built on earth, it is a quality of space in which more and more magic may occur.

Those who come to the magic of Sunrise Ranch, or anyplace Emissaries are, are coming into such a space. And if they haven’t known how to hold a space for magic, they can learn with us and be part of the space that we hold. Come into my space, hold it with me, and welcome what comes into that space as we hold it. Feel the magic of that. Feel the magic of Shekinah, the presence of the One Who Dwells. That presence comes into the space that is prepared and held when all the feelings and thoughts that have nothing to do with that are ushered out the door. There is then space that says, “You are welcome here.” There is a vacuum that welcomes the magic of Shekinah.

Our own vertical memory invokes potential for other people. You might well say that this experience is the supreme gift. It is the supreme gift, and it would be vulgar to be bragging that we have the supreme gift to give to other people. But it is not vulgar to actually give it. As it was said in the old Western television show, “No brag, just fact.” When the supreme gift is in fact given, it’s highly acceptable. No pretense, no claim, just the reality of the opportunity made immediately available.

This quote from Isaiah, Chapter 40, Verse 5 seems particularly appropriate. It is used in The Messiah, by Handel, often sung in the holiday season coming up:

And the glory of the LORD shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.

When there is a building from the bottom up and a building from the top down, there comes a time when the two meet and touch. Up to that point, the consciousness that is being built from the bottom up is largely unaware of what’s happening—maybe willing to participate but largely unaware of what is in the heaven. The glory of the Lord, as it’s put in the King James Version here, isn’t seen. Shekinah is not seen. But as there are those who build from the top down, who build out of the heaven the extension of the heaven into the earth, there comes a time when what is being built from the bottom up and from the top down meet and touch. That is the point at which the glory of the Lord is revealed. That is when what is in the heaven is seen by human beings on earth.

As it is said, the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord, the glory of what is in the heaven. That is magic. We are here to bring that magic together.

Thank you for being companions in this great work. Thank you for being pioneers and prophets and priests and priestesses. Thank you for being tenacious, because tenacity is one of the qualities of building from the bottom up, and the people who read this message are a tenacious group of people around the world. Thank you for holding this space of awareness and energy that is a welcoming space, first of all, for what is from above, and then for the people of the world who may come flocking to this space, in heart and mind and in body, for healing, for wholeness, and to hold this space with us, with the clear invitation that the whole body of humanity hold this space with us and invite the magic of the presence of the Divine.

David Karchere
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