Let It Rain

It’s been quite a week in the world. There is a war in the Middle East. There has been the assassination of political leaders in the United States. Yesterday, there was a military parade in Washington, D.C., and over 2,000 No Kings protest rallies across the country.

Grief is a rational response to what is transpiring in our world. If we don’t acknowledge the sadness of it, perhaps we’ve gotten numb to it.

One of the saddest pieces of literature in the English language is Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. It is a story of love not being able to live in the world. In the play it is about the love between two young people. But the theme is larger than that. It dramatizes how hard it is for the truth of what love is to blossom in human culture.

These lines are spoken by the Prince of Verona in the last verses of the play:

See what a scourge is laid upon your hate,
That heaven finds means to kill your joys with love,
And I, for winking at your discords too,
Have lost a brace of kinsmen. All are punished.

A glooming peace this morning with it brings.
The sun for sorrow will not show his head.
Go hence to have more talk of these sad things.
Some shall be pardoned, and some punishèd.
For never was a story of more woe
Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.

The play is a tragic depiction of human culture. And behind it all, we can rest assured, is love. Yes, there’s love at work. And yet in some sad twist of human fate, love prompts people to do things that are irrational and destructive.

I have no doubt that the mullahs in Iran are full of love—love for their country, their culture, and their vision for humanity. They are full of love. So is everybody else. And yet something is tragically missing. There is a tragic lack of the ability to ground love in practical, rational, wise action. And so, love is corrupted.

People can aspire to the highest ideals, including things divine. They can touch the reality of Allah or God, by whatever name. They might have some perception of the angelic realms. But there is no guarantee that what they have touched will become creatively relevant in their lives. There is no guarantee that it will lead to anything but tragedy.

In 1960, Martin Cecil gave a talk on the subject, The Organization of God-Beings Composing God. In it, he made this comment:

What I’m talking about now is just a theory at the moment, insofar as you are concerned, but it needn’t remain that way if it is true.

Martin encouraged people to apply what he outlined in principle in the living of their lives. It is vital that the principle be true. But even if it is perfectly outlined and believed in, that is not enough to avert the tragedy faced by human culture. For tragedy to be averted, human culture has to correlate with the truth being outlined. And the reality of what is true has to penetrate human experience in the land of the living.

There is a key distinction to be made as to how we love our lives. It applies to the closest elements of life—our own thoughts and feelings, our physical body, and our personal life path. It also applies to how we relate to others and to the world, especially to what we might consider to be our own.

In spiritual teaching, it is often said that we shouldn’t be attached to our life, including what is closest to us. Jesus taught Whoever loves his life loses it. In writing about victory in human experience, John writes this in Revelation: They loved not their lives unto the death.

There’s a way to love your life that is not life-giving. If you idolize your own thinking, you can become obsessed with your thoughts. And the same is true of emotions. Have you witnessed people who say, I feel it so deeply. It must be true. Or perhaps you have thought that yourself.

It’s possible to love life in a way that a person is controlled and dominated by the factors in it. Those factors could seem to be external to the individual. Or the individual could be dominated by their own thoughts and feelings.

If you haven’t noticed, the human mind can be a brutal dictator. If you love your own thinking and allow it to guide what you do without a higher wisdom, it’s brutal. It’s cruel to you. It’s brutal to the people around you. The human mind is a hard master. And there is a way of loving your own thoughts that makes you subject to them. The same is true of the thoughts of another person or the feelings of another person.

Don’t love your life unto the death. But this teaching is only part of the story. Having learned not to love our lives in a way that makes us subject to all the facets of human experience, we have to learn to love ourselves and our lives in a way that transforms us. We have to learn to penetrate our lives from above. Otherwise, we become aloof and disconnected, without the ability to penetrate human culture with love. This is what is sometimes referred to as a spiritual bypass. And no matter how much you love the theory you believe in, and regardless of how accurate that theory might be, until you apply it thoughtfully, wisely, and deeply, the patterns of human tragedy remain unchanged.

There is a way to love your life from above that does not idolize it and does not make you subject to it, but which penetrates your life with the higher spiritual truth that you know. That process begins with penetrating your own emotions and thoughts.

If we have the vision to love from above—to rescue our human life and the human world from above—we can penetrate our life and our world with the authority of who we are as a Creator. That’s a different way to love your life. It’s a different way to love another person, too. It’s a way of loving another person that isn’t subject to them and whatever they come up with as a human being. Yes, we can be blessed by the interchange. But there’s a way to love another person from above, just as you’re loving yourself from above. And if you ever have an experience of both of you doing that, then you are in for a profound creative exchange.

So often, a loving relationship between people can become combative. There can be a reactivity going on so that their love is subject to what is moving back and forth between them. That can be between two people in a personal relationship or between nations. Where are those who say, I’m here in this relationship to come from a higher place and bring something higher to the relationship, whether it’s seemingly more personal, work-related, or the diplomatic relationship between nations?

Here in Colorado, we have virga—rain that never reaches the ground. It can be so hot and dry that you can see the rain falling from clouds across the prairie, but it evaporates before it touches the earth.

It can be like that in the spiritual experience of the individual. There’s something up there spiritually. The person is beginning to be aware of it. They feel it. But it doesn’t come down enough to drench the person. It does not come all the way through and penetrate their human experience. So it doesn’t pierce their heart or inspire their thinking.

If your mind is like most people’s minds—including mine—it wants to be the boss of you. It wants to tell you what’s going to happen, who’s right and who’s wrong, and why life is impossible. But there’s something higher that can descend into the human experience that shouldn’t be like virga. That higher cosmic intelligence should be moving your mind and mine, so our thoughts are born from it. It can penetrate our mind from above so we don’t have to be subject to every foolish thought that our human mind might come up with.

We can just say this to those thoughts, I hear you. But we have something bigger we’re about here. And if we can do that for ourselves, we can do it for each other, so that we don’t have the experience of bumping into each other like bumper cars. Doesn’t that often happen in human experience? Can’t we become like human bumper cars just bouncing off each other? If that’s what is happening, there’s not an actual penetration spiritually between us, so there isn’t the spiritual flow that’s natural in life.

When there is a flow, you inspire me, I inspire you, and now we are creating together. We are no longer bumper cars—an experience that is going on all over the place, near and far. It happens up close in the interior spaces of a person’s life. You could probably watch that happen to other people, and maybe even yourself. And you can see it among nations. It’s the human bumper car phenomenon.

All are punished. All are punished. Near and far, it’s tragic, and there is no need for it. But human culture just keeps playing out the bumper car experience. It is the virga experience, where we’re not really penetrated from above with spiritual things. We’ve got all kinds of beliefs about them—the 70 virgins up there when you die, and all the rest, whatever it might be. We have all the beliefs about it. But an individual who is fully penetrated with the reality of what is above is rare. And then there is virga between people. The creative energies that could interpenetrate the field evaporate.

When the virga phenomenon ends and the rain comes, we know what’s happening up there, because it’s what’s happening here. And we make it real, spiritually, here between us. We have a real, live, honest-to-goodness spiritual experience between us as people that correlates with what’s up there.

As above, so below. And then, with the resonance of that, we can feel deeply and perceive deeply what it is that’s happening at a higher level of Being because what we’re doing resonates with it. We are relating to it and giving expression to the essence of that reality in form in our own lives.

This is what it takes to make spiritual things real. This is what it is to indeed live a spiritual life—not a pious life in the usual sense, not a religious life in the usual sense, but a life that makes spiritual things real in human experience, a life that allows itself to be penetrated by the spiritual. In the context of Emissaries of Divine Light, the founding leaders of this program did a remarkable job naming the spiritual energies that are available to us, that are looking to penetrate this human experience: love, truth, and life.

Today, we are no longer content with spiritual virga. We are no longer content with the human bumper car experience. We are in the midst of a full-scale spiritual downpour.

Let it rain.