Grace is the full-on experience of the Spirit of Love. It is the experience of all of us as a human being relating to all of what is there for us in the Invisible. It’s an encounter with something larger than we are as a human being. The first six chapters of my book, Becoming a Sun, portray the workings of the creative spirit within the human soul, and all the dynamism that is present in that. They portray the wild adventure of being a human being and all the interactive forces that create our experience. Often, from the standpoint of religion or spirituality, we conceive of ourselves as a human being who is receiving one reality, however it is named or thought of, as if it came to us premixed and homogenous. Oh, that it would be so simple! Because what really happens is that there are these dynamic energies being shot through our thinking and our feeling and our physical body and our spiritual nature.

It’s a little bit like going to Home Depot for paint. You step up to the paint department counter and you ask for a certain tint. The guy behind the counter takes the bucket of white paint and he puts it under a machine that injects a unique formula of different tints. And then he takes a rubber hammer to pound the top back on. Then, over to the shaker machine he goes to mix and blend it all together.

Isn’t that what it is like to be a human being? In every circumstance, we get shot through with a unique mix of energy. It doesn’t come premixed. You might have thought that they would have had that unique hue all blended together someplace else in perfect proportion to be received blissfully by you. But that’s not how it goes. The forces of Creation come separately into our human capacity. And then they want to play. We are shook-up in the process, just like that can of paint.

And that’s how it is in our human experience. There is a chapter of my book called “The Party Going on Inside You.” The Creator is throwing a party inside us all. And if we don’t get what’s going on, we’re a little bit like the title of that book Who Moved the Cheese? We might think we just got it all figured out. Perhaps we finally became spiritual. And then, Who moved the cheese? Who changed things?

Today is a new day and it is different. In the evolution of time, the creative forces that are coming to bear are different. So what’s going on now? Thankfully, there are some repeating patterns in it all, even though it’s never the same. Mastery in living is first of all facing that there is something wild happening here. It’s a wild ride, and there is all this creative energy, and you’re either with it or you’re against it. You’re either for it and part of it, or you’re trying to make it like yesterday and believing in some simplified reality, which is really not what’s going on.

So here we are, to be with what is going on and to enjoy the ride. And then, through all that, we’re getting a workout—physically I suppose; hopefully we’re all working out. But we’re also getting an emotional workout. Is anyone not getting an emotional workout in their life? We are being exercised. We are being challenged emotionally to keep up with what’s really happening. There is something happening, and every day there’s something else called for us in our emotional fluency. We’re getting in touch with new energies; they’re mixing in different ways.

When all that happens and we let it happen, we’re with it happening, we’re going for it. That’s courage. We have our own field of creative activity with an unfolding creative drama. And the question becomes, Do we have the courage to show up for that and to own our creatorship and welcome all the creative forces that are at work?

The story of Creation in Genesis speaks of it in several ways. The first chapter tells the story of The Seven Days of Creation and the Creation of humankind. Then Chapter 2 has a different telling of the Creation of humankind:

But there went up a mist from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground. 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.

And then Chapter 2 tells how Godhead splits into four parts, symbolically portrayed as a river that divides:

And a river went out of Eden to water the garden; and from thence it was parted, and became into four heads.

It was said in the story of the Seven Days of Creation that humankind was made in the image and likeness of God. So if you were a God with almighty powers of Creation who created the universe and decided to create Planet Earth and humanity, and if there were four streams to your creative power, might it not make sense to create a human being who had four dimensions to how they were made? I think that might have been a good idea, and I think that’s exactly what happened. So we have a mind and we have a human heart; we have a physical body and we have a spiritual nature. The four streams of creative power are pouring through those four dimensions of our human experience. And then, those four streams are interacting inside us. That’s the party going on inside each of us and then all of us together.

Spiritual people often aspire to touch the Divine as they conceive it to be. They want to be in the Tao, get to heaven, or reach nirvana. There is the desire to reach up and to allow our awareness to ascend into the heavens. And yet, the irony of our human life is that we’re called to be in our humanity, to live in our humanity, and to live in the world. So sometimes there’s this tension: we’re trying to be spiritual but the world is calling us and our own humanity is demanding that we show up for a human experience. Courage is about showing up for our human experience. For a spiritual person, that can be surprising.

Showing up for our human experience, we have the opportunity to be cracked open because what we find is that when we are all in for our life, something more is going on than just us. And there’s something more that’s required than who we’ve thought ourselves to be. Yes, our life requires that we show up for it, but then in showing up we are caught up into what is larger than what we are individually. And when we fall flat on our face, there is grace. There is always grace.

True courage leads to grace. So we find grace when we are all in with our lives, and then we find out it’s not enough. You never find that out if you’re not all in. If you’re all in, then you discover, No, I can’t do it all by myself. The universe is behind me. The universe is lifting me up, holding me up. And when I fall down, the universe is there, God is there, the Divine is there, my friends are there. There’s grace. And even in the pain, there is grace. Even when there is what looks to me like failure, there is grace.

Grace lifts us up, and grace powers us. And then we learn to live our lives in grace, to live our lives as an expression of that grace. We bring grace to all the phases of the creative process and all the dimensions of our human experience. And the more we experience that grace, the more we have it to bring to everything we’re about.

Grace is the wisdom that all is well, and it is all unfolding as it should. If we know that for ourselves personally, we know that the creative process that we are in is held in a larger creative process that is larger than us. We can bring grace to another person. We can bring the assurance that the process the individual is in is being held by us in the larger process of Creation.

And we still need to be all in to play our part, but it’s different when we know grace. And there is more and more assurance, more and more of the love that is shining through, more and more light, more and more unabashedness about being the light, and then about showing up as the One that we are, with the natural authority of the author of our own experience.