I hope you have a euphoric experience reading this Pulse of Spirit. The word euphoria is from the Greek. It means “the power of enduring easily.” The root of the word literally means “bearing well.” We’re here to share the euphoria of life itself, the euphoria of knowing and being who we are. Euphoria can endure through all things, through any pain and through any suffering, through any human experience.

That is the Easter story. It is the story of a man who endured in his euphoric experience. We don’t usually use that word to describe Jesus. But nonetheless that was what was happening. We have that same opportunity to know euphoria in our own lives. You can’t get there with a drug. You can’t get there through any form of stimulation, though it’s natural for us to live a stimulating life in the world. The experience of euphoria is the experience of the creativity within us flowing through us.

I received an Easter message this morning from a Christian pastor. It started with this: “As we celebrate the death and resurrection of our Lord and Savior….” I stopped reading. The human world has been caught up in a celebration of death. Death isn’t to be celebrated in any way at any time. It is sad that even though there was a man, Jesus, who came to move out of the human karma that is death-oriented, many who remember his life fall into that same death-oriented karma that he transcended, and then laud the significance of death. I say his coming celebrated the significance of life itself and the unconquerable nature of life in his own experience and in the experience of anyone who lets it be so.

We’ve just completed an Education Summit at Sunrise Ranch. The first part had to do with our Attunement education and the second part had to do with the broader scope of our spiritual education. We came to see and know that these are two parts of one thing.

In our sessions, we had a chance to look at karma, and particularly the karma of our educational program. Of course, that dips into the karma of humanity, which has been in play for millennia. There is plenty of evidence that the human experience has fallen into a rut. As a race we have gotten woefully off track and out of the experience of euphoria, which is the experience of unconquerable life. We have fallen into a karma that carries a conviction of death and our own undoing.

The fact of death seems obvious enough. For most people, the fact of life is not so obvious, and the opportunity that we have in this present moment here and now to participate in eternal, everlasting life—which is, by the way, the only kind of life there is.

Life finds new forms. Life continues and forms pass away. But life is always alive. There is no such thing as dead life, only living life. And we get to live that here and now. It’s the only experience of life that there really is. And we have the opportunity to know that it persists through whatever human pain and suffering we may go through. Through it all, unconquerable life prevails.

This is from the Easter story in the Book of Mark.

And they led Jesus away to the high priest: and with him were assembled all the chief priests and the elders and the scribes.

 And Peter followed him afar off, even into the palace of the high priest: and he sat with the servants, and warmed himself at the fire.

And the chief priests and all the council sought for witness against Jesus to put him to death; and found none.

For many bare false witness against him, but their witness agreed not together. 

And there arose certain, and bare false witness against him, saying,

We heard him say, I will destroy this temple that is made with hands, and within three days I will build another made without hands.

But neither so did their witness agree together.   (Mark 14:53-59)

Apparently there was a cacophony of judgment. How familiar in the world in which we live! There is a cacophony of judgment. Most often, that cacophony doesn’t seem to agree with itself. And yet it is the undoing of the human experience.

And the high priest stood up in the midst, and asked Jesus, saying, Answerest thou nothing? what is it which these witness against thee?

But he held his peace, and answered nothing. Again the high priest asked him, and said unto him, Art thou the Christ, the Son of the Blessed?

And Jesus said, I am: and ye shall see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven.

Then the high priest rent his clothes, and saith, What need we any further witnesses?

Ye have heard the blasphemy: what think ye? And they all condemned him to be guilty of death.

And some began to spit on him, and to cover his face, and to buffet him, and to say unto him, Prophesy: and the servants did strike him with the palms of their hands.   (Mark 14:60-65)

Quite a story. I’m most interested in that very central point of the accusation: “Art thou the Christ, the Son of the Blessed?” We could ask that same question today: Art thou the Christ, and the son or daughter of the Blessed? Art thou? The true answer to that question is this. I am. I am that I am. I am that reality. I celebrate that reality. That’s why I’m euphoric.

Our human choice is between these two things: euphoria and shame. In the biblical telling of the story of the fall of human consciousness, it is said they began to be ashamed. It was the first negative conscious state to enter the human experience and it is the last to go. Shame is a very poor substitute for euphoria.

There are many dimensions to the human karma; there are many emotional states that are part of the human karma: fear and hatred and envy and greed, and it goes on. There are many dimensions to the prevailing human experience, all of which are death-oriented. Humanity has a conviction in death, and an orientation in death. And then humanity becomes a perpetrator of death, both the large acts of death, such as war and murder and execution, and also the smaller, more gradual acts that erode the life of other people and which bring the decimation of species.

There are many dimensions to the human karma, and there is the result of it. How was it put in the Creation story: “In the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die”? (Genesis 2:17) At the root of that experience is the shame of denying the truth of who we are and the truth of others. This shame becomes the substitute for the euphoria of life that is available to us and that we’re meant to know as human beings.

Shame is both something that we experience for ourselves and something we perpetrate. Was not the Easter story about the perpetration of shame? As soon as Jesus claimed for himself his own reality and the expression of it, that was it. He was shamed to the point of being sentenced to death for doing so. They began to spit on him, and to cover his face, and to buffet him, and strike him with the palms of their hands. Well, it doesn’t usually come to that in the circles that we move in, probably. But in essence, that goes on in the human world all the time.

So I’m here to shame you for shaming. Not really. And I am not really writing this to correct or direct, to command, or even to instruct. I am writing this Pulse of Spirit to share the euphoria that I know and to suggest that it is available to anyone. There is a way by which that euphoria is known, and it is by coming through the experience of shame, out the other side, personally, and celebrating the victory of life that’s present now in this moment.

The quotation that follows is from one of my favorite stories in the Bible, a story of King David. The context for the story is that the most precious possession of the nation of Israel, the Ark of the Covenant, had been stolen. King David has reclaimed it, and he comes back into Jerusalem, celebrating and dancing in the streets. He is spoken of as being naked, but he is, at least, wearing a linen ephod, which is a sleeveless garment, so I don’t think he was totally naked, after all. But nonetheless he was celebrating in the streets, and that’s the setting of the story.

And Michal the daughter of Saul [who was his wife] came out to meet David, and said, How glorious was the king of Israel to day, who uncovered himself to day in the eyes of the handmaids of his servants, as one of the vain fellows shamelessly uncovereth himself!

 And David said unto Michal, It was before the Lord, which chose me before thy father, and before all his house, to appoint me ruler over the people of the Lord, over Israel: therefore will I play before the Lord.

And I will yet be more vile than thus, and will be base in mine own sight: and of the maidservants which thou hast spoken of, of them shall I be had in honour.

Therefore Michal the daughter of Saul had no child unto the day of her death.   (2 Samuel 6:20-23)

I love the succinct nature of the writers of some of these stories. We could read this last verse in two ways. One, David wasn’t having sex with Michal anymore; and the other is that she became barren because of her attitude. There certainly is an attempt to perpetrate shame in this story, and then a casting off of shame, and a celebration of the victory of Life.

That is the Easter story. There was terrible suffering involved—we could have no doubt about that, and in no way should we minimize that suffering. In the middle of that, there was the desertion of someone who was close to him. Yet unconquerable life prevailed.

I am writing today to celebrate the victory of life when there’s an appearance of something else. How often in our human experience does it go like that; how often does it seem that this will come to nothing, whatever it is. How often does it seem that we’re at some kind of low point in our life, that we’ve suffered some kind of setback, that there’s been some kind of onslaught of shame, either by force of circumstance and then by the mechanisms of our own thinking and feeling, or assisted by the cacophony of judgment that’s around us. That is, unfortunately, the nature of the human experience, that we as human beings become surrounded by a cacophony of judgment. Our victory is in the middle of that cacophony.

I’m not saying that as a matter of belief. I just witness that this is how it goes. For anybody, in any field, who accomplishes something of significance, it is inevitably in the face of those who shame that person, and in the face of all the naysayers. So if you have that experience, you are in good company.

For humanity, there are two kinds of karma. There is the karma of victory. Thinking of Jesus on this Easter Day, there is the karma of his victory, covered over as it may be with crucifixes around the world, as if he died on the cross to appease an angry Father who demanded his sacrifice. Nonetheless, there is the karma of his victory. There is the karma of his love, there’s the karma of his right example. It is the karma of a man, because whatever else Jesus was, he was a man. And he was a man who knew euphoria, which is the flow-through of the spirit of God through oneself in spite of the shaming of him by the world around him.

That shaming is the second kind of karma present for humanity. It originated long before that first Easter and it has persisted to this day.

Relative to our educational program, there is the karma of the brilliant teaching of spiritual educators in the context of Sunrise Ranch and Emissaries of Divine Light down through the decades. I couldn’t be prouder than I am of those who are responsible for that karma, most particularly of Lloyd Arthur Meeker, who wrote and taught under the name Uranda. His teaching and the teaching of Martin Cecil, who followed him, was brilliant. And by the way, Uranda’s teaching of Attunement and his teaching of the rest of his spiritual education was unified. That is the karma of victory that is present related to our work.

But we also have a very human karma, rooted in shame. It is a karma that leads nowhere. This karma comes from people claiming little islands of education and not talking to each other. It is the karma of people who are doing, in essence, exactly what the high priest was doing: carrying forward the teachings of a previous time according to the interpretations of their own intellect, and using that as a baseball bat to hit somebody over the head. It is a common practice; it has been done for a long time. It was done in Jesus’ time relative to the teachings of Moses and it’s done in the Common Era. It was done to Uranda, it was done to Martin—to Uranda about Jesus, to Martin about Uranda, and then to me and us around all three of them! A common sport, apparently, when it comes to true spiritual education. There’s always somebody who isn’t enlightened enough to make the distinction between the truth that was previously brought and their beliefs about it, and then there is the personality of the person. So they set in stone vibrational factors that relate to opportunities in the past and shame the fresh emergence of spirit in the present day.

I say that we know the teaching of the ages when we ourselves are in our euphoria, and when the truth is coming through us now. When the truth that was coming through Jesus is coming through us, we know that truth, and no other way. We can celebrate the words that come down to us from out of the past, as I have here this morning. But in doing so, we can never forget that it is that same flow through us, through consciousness, in action, in life, that is our knowing and our fulfillment and our euphoria.

A bit of our karma was created twelve years ago in the last Education Summit we held at Sunrise Ranch. Towards the end of our time, there were spiritual educators, very wise sages, sitting together. It included Trustees of Emissaries of Divine Light and others. Someone spoke up, apparently worried about what was going on. They looked at us with furrowed brow and said, in essence, Well, you do know that none of us here really have the ability to bring the Word as Uranda and Martin brought it. And therefore we have to rely on their words if we really want to bring something of high vibration that is very much needed in the mix. I looked at this person and I said, “You will not sit in front of the leadership of Emissaries of Divine Light and say that about them.”

This person was convinced of their own shame. They were living from their own shameful state and their belief about themselves, and about what they could bring into the world. They had shame about the quality of vibration that was coming through them; about their ability to bring truth into the world and inspire others. And so they sought to inflict that shame on others. I wouldn’t stand for it.

Shame is something we experience for ourselves but then, being in a shameful state, we end up perpetrating that state on others. We cannot help it. You might say that the high priest couldn’t help it. We can easily imagine that he believed he was being true to the teaching of the God of his understanding. He thought he was doing the noblest, truest, most integrous thing. He wasn’t, but it seemed that way to him.

We don’t think clearly in the shameful state. When we are buying into that reality, which is so widespread, we don’t know truth. Looking back at the high priest and that list of the people who were with him, it is easy for us to say that. But can we see with perspective now? And I say no, we can’t—not as long as we’re sitting in the shameful state. We only see the truth in the euphoric state. Euphoria is the truth; life is the truth.

The most profound truth seems as nothing to the average human being. Given the audience, I could get them excited about connecting to God, being blessed by God, experiencing the reality of God in their life or coming through them. Or I might be able to get somebody excited about channeling. They could channel some entity from the Pleiades or someplace. I might get people excited about a belief in something absolutely fantastic. I could gather a following around an essentially death-centered religion. But when I start talking about the divine reality of who you are living as you, as a human being, in your life exactly as it is—blank stares. It seems like a nothing.

Yet the antidote to shame is in the experience of so yielding one’s own outer human capacity to the indwelling reality of Being that that indwelling reality is allowed to come into you and express through you. But you might say that’s only the beginning. Because the highest reality of your Being doesn’t just want to express through you as a hollow reed, leaving you undisturbed and unchanged as a human being. It wants to be you, coming into you, being in you, owning you, living in you, thinking in you, feeling in you, acting as you, experiencing life as you in this world. We’re talking total takeover by the highest reality of Being.

And we’re talking about a yielding of a separate egoic identity to such a degree that any sense that we have of who we are as something separate from our highest reality dies. So if there is a death, that’s it—the death of a separate experience of self. I am nothing separate from that indwelling reality, and it’s living through me, and it is me! And if there’s something shameful about my human state, that’s fine, because it’s not me. I am not that. I am that I am, that reality of Being. I am that, and I am being that in the world.

Art thou the Christ, the son of the Blessed?

And Jesus said, I am.

This is how the body of the Living God is formed on earth. It is formed first at an individual level. Something does have to be experienced as an individual—a totally new state. That new state cannot be known until all our beliefs about it are allowed to pass away. Now, we may need some beliefs about it as a crutch to get there, but you can’t get there in the belief of it, and you cannot construct it with human hands.

This statement in the text is so interesting:

I will destroy this temple that is made with hands, and within three days I will build another made without hands.

We as human beings are totally incapable of fashioning the body of the Living God. We cannot do it with the brightest of our thinking, either from the modern world or from the ancient world or from anything in between. No matter how true that bright thinking might be, no matter how true the principles of it, we cannot do it of ourselves. The body of the Living God is made without human hands. It’s fashioned from within. It’s fashioned by the Creator, and only when the Creator shows up in and through us is it fashioned on earth. Then there’s the reality of it, and that reality can be known individually and personally. Then it constellates among us collectively as we’re having that experience.

The body of the Living God is constellating according to its own form—not my brilliant ideas, or yours, about how it should constellate and who should be part of it and who shouldn’t, and how everybody should relate to each other. It’s constellated by people who are in place, allowing the euphoria of Being flowing through them, and knowing that euphoria, and then connecting with each other in that flow. It is formed by individuals who take their place and then see, easily, others who have taken theirs.

The body of the Living God is not formed by attempting to take someone else’s place or by trying to take some place that the person wants, but by taking the place that is God-given to them. Then they can easily recognize another and say, “Thank you for taking your place.”

Having taken your place, and me having taken mine, we are in right relationship with each other and there is the formation of the body of the Living God on earth.

To play, you have to acknowledge the others who are taking their place. And the minute you attempt to deny someone else their place, you only deny yourself your place. And when you witness someone who has taken their place and you acknowledge it, instantly you’re in right relationship to them, and you are in your place.

Do you think we have an ability to work out our human relationships on a creative basis any other way? Otherwise, it is such a limited thing. We acknowledge the place in which another is standing, and we find our place. That is the magic of the truth of spiritual education. The truth of spiritual education works on this basis: If I am truly in my God-given place, knowing my euphoria, in your acknowledgment of that place, you are taking your place. And together, we are constellating the body of the Living God.