What we are facing in the body of humanity is the experience of a psychic break. I suppose there are many things that a person might mean by such a phrase as psychic break. But I want to be very specific about what I mean. I mean that the human experience has gotten split off from a knowing of identity—from the knowledge of who we are and the knowledge of the larger body of selfhood to which we belong. We are an individual self, yes, but we belong to a body of selfhood. And all of that knowing has gotten split off in the human experience. So, we are on a path of allowing that psychic break to be healed.
As the body of humanity, we have been walking this path for millennia. We have religion, which comes into the picture. The Latin origin of the word is religare, which means to bind back. So, the truth of religion is not doctrine and dogma. It is about healing the psychic break, allowing the human experience to be bound back to the origin of it, which is the presence of the Self.
While there are elements of religion and spirituality that deserve to be discarded, the need for that binding back has not gone away. We need an evolved spirituality that heals the psychic break and allows us to be whole as humanity.
None of us have to take this personally, because while we are part of this body of humanity, however enlightened we might be individually, we are having a collective experience as well.
What was the attempt in our Judeo-Christian religion to heal this psychic break? The history of the break is there, and the attempt to bring healing to it is also there. The origin of the break is recorded in many stories, especially in what is referred to as the story of the Fall. It’s the story of Adam and Eve, the forbidden fruit, and the serpent. It is an ancient symbolic story, full of great meaning. There is a telling of what caused the Fall. But what I want to focus on here is the result.
This is from the story:
And they heard the voice of the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool of the day: and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God amongst the trees of the garden.
And the LORD God called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where art thou?
And he said, I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself.
Genesis 3:8–10
Therefore the LORD God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken.
So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.
Genesis 3:23, 24
It is hard for contemporary ears not to hear this as a story of morality. We’ve come to think of it as a portrayal of original sin, even though that term wasn’t invented until St. Augustine coined it in the 4th century AD. But reconsider the passage as a story of two people experiencing a psychic break. And consider the possibility that those two people symbolized the entire body of humankind.
The story has to do with shame and hiding. The Lord God in the story represents the selfhood of the people involved and the belonging they knew to a body or community of selfhood, what you might call the Family of Souls. The shame of the couple was so overwhelming that they hid themselves from the presence of the selfhood they had known. Consequently, they excluded themselves from the wonders of life that a person knows when they know who they are.
When we break off from who we are, we’re hidden from it. It’s hidden from us. And there’s an experience of a lack of selfhood. And how does that register for us as human beings? Does it not register as shame? I don’t know who I am. I am not being who I am. I’m not being true to who I am. Who I am is hidden from me. That’s shame.
It is a story of a psychic break. The ancients were saying to us, Look, something has happened to you. If you met somebody who had a psychic break, how would you tell them that they’re in the middle of a big problem? They’re broken off from that thing that would make them whole. So, it’s not in their awareness. You can hardly talk to them about it because they’re not aware of the reality that is missing.
When you think of selfhood, it’s this elusive thing. It’s invisible. Where do you find a self? And so it is for humanity as a whole. The reality of selfhood is elusive. It’s an invisible matter. It’s not to be found in the outer flesh. And the whole pattern of selfhood to which we belong is something invisible.
We’ve recently been using this term, Family of Souls, to name the collective selfhood to which we belong. We’re not just an individual self. We belong to an invisible body of selfhood. Yes, we are a part of the body of humanity in visible form. But the experience of selfhood involves more than the manifest physical body. It involves something invisible that seems elusive but is nonetheless foundational to human experience.
Biblically, there is this story of this psychic break, and then there are many tellings of how it happened and the repercussions of it—the stories of Cain and Abel, Noah, the Tower of Babel, and more. Then there is a lot of the Bible that tells of the attempt to bring a remedy. One of the most prominent figures in the story is Moses, whom we speak of as the Lawgiver.
Reading the story, he was a fierce man, dictatorial even. He had instructions for practically everything, it would seem, some of which have been passed down to this day. Foremost among them were the Ten Commandments.
The reality is that Moses was leading quite a rabble. There were the Hebrew children, coming out of Egypt. But they brought along many other people too—a mixed multitude. All of them were looking for something new. And yet there was chaos as they wandered through a desert to the Promised Land.
What would you do if you were leading such a group of people? In the story, you can practically see Moses tearing his hair out: What do I do?
As you read the Ten Commandments, it’s clear that Moses was addressing very basic issues, attempting to establish foundational patterns of order. No, you can’t murder your neighbor. You can’t steal, etc. So, Moses is known as The Lawgiver. But he was far more than that. He was a man who had an experience of the healing of the psychic break in himself. He had a mystical encounter that brought that healing.
And the angel of the LORD appeared unto him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush: and he looked, and, behold, the bush burned with fire, and the bush was not consumed.
And Moses said, I will now turn aside, and see this great sight, why the bush is not burnt.
And when the LORD saw that he turned aside to see, God called unto him out of the midst of the bush, and said, Moses, Moses. And he said, Here am I.
And he said, Draw not nigh hither: put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground.
Exodus 3:2–5
The voice that spoke with Moses identified itself as I AM THAT I AM, and as I AM. How much clearer could it be that this was the selfhood from which humankind had separated?
He had a deep encounter with that self that he’d been split off from. And with that experience of healing, he began to bring healing to his people. But not just his people. Ultimately, it was something for the whole world.
What was Moses’ brilliant cure for the psychic break? In my own words, it went like this: Knowing that you’ve lost the experience of who you are, and knowing that who you are and the body of selfhood to which you belong seems foreign to you, and like something other than you, and knowing your feeling of shame, and that what you see as worthy and honorable is something other than you, here’s the remedy. Love what seems separate from you. Love the truth of yourself and the body of selfhood that seems separate from you. Be true to that love.
This is how Moses’ remedy is represented:
Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD:
And thou shalt love the LORD thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might.
Deuteronomy 6:4, 5
Love what seems separate from you.
Jesus came along to reemphasize that remedy to the psychic break. He echoed what Moses said in almost the same words.
The first of all the commandments is, Hear, O Israel; The Lord our God is one Lord:
And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength: this is the first commandment.
Mark 12:29, 30
Notice how specific the instruction is. It is not just a command to love. It is to do so specifically with all four dimensions of the human experience.
But Jesus taught something else. He not only taught people to love something that seems separate from themselves, but to live and embody that which seems separate.
Love thy neighbor as thyself. Love one another.
So, he was teaching another step in the whole process. Ultimately, he taught oneness.
I and my Father are one.
John 10:30
That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us: that the world may believe that thou hast sent me.
John 17:21
I came across a remarkable teaching of Martin Cecil recently in our literature. In my own terms, as I understood what he said, it was that our use of the word God is evidence of human failure, because we wouldn’t even have to talk about God if there hadn’t been a psychic break.
God is our word for the reality of selfhood and the belonging that we have to a body of selfhood—The Family of Souls, we might call it. But we use the word God because the body of humanity has broken off from that reality of selfhood and we need a way to name something that seems separate from us. If we hadn’t gotten broken off, we wouldn’t be using that word.
Fast-forward 2,000 years from Jesus to Uranda, who founded Emissaries of Divine Light. And what did he teach? He taught what Moses taught and what Jesus taught. And yet, he taught it so explicitly and so rationally. And he talked about it as the working of the One Law, which goes like this: radiation, response, attraction, union, unified radiation. That’s the formula for oneness. That’s the healing of the psychic break. You receive something that seems other than you. And responding to it, you’re attracted to it, and you join with it. You have union with it, and you become it. You know yourself as that. What a brilliant formula!
It was Moses’ formula. We think of him as The Lawgiver, but he was a brilliant spiritual teacher. He knew what he was doing to bring healing, and he initiated something magnificent.
And then Martin Cecil came and spiked the ball. He presented something that he called The Prayer of Being. And he took what we speak of as the Lord’s Prayer and put it in the first person. Blasphemy!
I am in heaven.
The revelation of myself is holy.
My kingdom comes because I am here.
My will is done in earth because my will is done in heaven.
I give the bread of life in each moment of my living on earth.
I forgive, and that forgiveness is received by those who share the spirit of forgiveness.
I lead no one into tribulation, but deliver all evil into the creative cycle.
For mine is the kingdom present on earth because I am present on earth.
Mine is the creative power of the Word.
And mine is the glory which results, shining round about, to be reflected by the world which I create.
How brilliant! As I see it, this prayer epitomized his ultimate teaching, which was that the Creator you have been worshipping from afar is you. You are a Creator Being. Own it.
He never would have said it that way, but that is certainly what I got from what he taught. For those of us who knew Martin, we know that he would not have had a lot of tolerance for people who made claims about their divinity. That was not his style and not what he was encouraging. Because in fact, it doesn’t do any good to start making claims about yourself. I’m this or that, or I’m the reincarnation of so-and-so, or whatever it is. The claims don’t do any good. It’s only realized experience that matters.
It’s only the actual healing of the psychic break in oneself that has meaning. And as that actually happens, someone could say words such as the words of this prayer, and they have meaning. Or perhaps the prayer could be read aspirationally, an expression of what we desire to know for ourselves. But not because we’re claiming something for our human capacity. No, because the Father within me, the God Being within me, the reality of the Creator within me, that I am, is saying these words. And therefore, the words have authority. They are words of truth.
In light of all this, do you think we should be criticizing or mocking people who are worshipping a God that they see as separate from themselves? I say No. That’s a beautiful step along the way, and in a very real way, a step we never outgrow. Do we ever outgrow allowing our human capacity to love the truth of itself, and to the degree that it goes wandering off the path, do we ever go beyond having that human capacity come back to center and back to a place of love and response and reception for the Divine, so that we can know ourselves as that? I don’t think so. Perhaps we outgrow some kind of repetitive pattern of sinning, being forgiven, and worshipping something from afar, only to sin again—just going through a routine that is not actually the working of the One Law.
There are broken, repetitive religious patterns that involve dogma and tradition. I’m not here to be a proponent of those things. But still, I applaud the process by which any human being is coming to know and love something that, at least at first, seems separate from themselves. I say, Love it. See where it takes you. Keep loving it all the way. Don’t stop. That love, if it’s genuine and if it’s allowed to go deep, will take you to union. It can’t help but take you there. Are you open to that?
We need an evolved spirituality, a spirituality for today—one that is real, one that takes us home, one that heals the psychic break. Let’s bring such a spirituality to the world.