I’d like to add my welcome to everyone here in the room and to those online. For those who are online, just a little update about what is going on here. We have 24 friends from South Korea for a two-week program at Sunrise Ranch. We are attempting contemporaneous translation with AI, and that complication has baffled us a little bit here this morning. I’m sure we’ll get it down.
(Yujin Pak translated David’s words until the AI translation app began to work and show the Korean translation on a screen at the front of the room.)
We gather here in the room and online with people from around the world, from different cultures. To the degree that we are embedded in our culture, we are separated. As we live above culture, we know our oneness. That’s where I am coming from today, and I know we all are.
I had the privilege of being in Cape Town several weeks ago at our Gatehouse Center.
We had an interfaith afternoon at Gatehouse. It was an opportunity for people of different faiths and languages to meet in the context of a spiritual Reality that transcends culture. I ended up in a small group of five people with a woman from the Ahmadiyya Islamic movement. We had only been together about two minutes when she said very insistently, “You know, behind all religions and all faiths, there is one thing.” I agreed.
The story of Muhammad is interesting. He was in Arabia in the 7th century and looked at the problem of his people. Christian and Jewish communities were present in Arabia. In his life, Muhammad was exposed to people of many faiths.
As he sought a spiritual answer for the Arabian people, he brought a message that did not simply repeat what had come before, though he drew on elements of it as he recited the Qur’an. He rejected original sin, a concept that was not introduced into Christianity by Jesus of Nazareth but by St. Augustine in about 400 A.D.
Muhammad spoke about something that he called Fitra, which was the original pattern of the Creation of human beings. In a hadith recorded in Sahih Bukhari, Muhammad is remembered as saying this:
Every child is born upon Fitra, then his parents make him a Jew, a Christian, or a Zoroastrian.
He saw that pattern as perfect. He believed there was perfection in all people. Our name for that perfection is Primal Spirituality. It is the spirituality we are born with. That spirituality transcends culture.
In many cases, the religious institutions and the spiritual paths of the world have sought to own spirituality in the human experience. So, it looks like people have to either buy into their version of spirituality or walk away from it.
There are all the churches and temples and synagogues and cathedrals of the world, most often owned by and operated by some kind of spiritual institution. Many of them are very beautiful. But we are most interested in this church right here, this cathedral right here. (David pointed to himself.) No religious institution owns this church—not your church, or the church that we share collectively.
When we share it, there is a culture of sharing it. But our centering is not in the culture. We are not meeting at the level of culture. Culture is revealing something else that we are knowing. Even though in this room we speak different languages perhaps, come from different backgrounds, have different experiences, we are having the experience that we are strangely the same, strangely one, one people. We are remembering that we are one people.
We are each a member of one body of humankind. The world is struggling without a spiritual answer for the problems that it is facing. Yes, we perhaps need a philosophical answer, a technological answer, or a cultural answer. But those answers of themselves are no answer to the problems that we face. There is another answer to be known and shared by people who are having an experience that they themselves are a church, a cathedral, a temple of divine light.
Uranda wrote a beautiful little booklet that we have since illustrated. It was titled Seven Steps to the Temple of Light. In the end, the Temple of Light is not a building. It is you and it is me, and it is us together. We are the Temple of Light, and we are remembering that we are.
We have been speaking today about “looking up.” We look to the source of Being that we share in common, and as Gary Goodhue was saying, we tend to go to where we look to. If we look up, we rise up—we go up.
I don’t think any of us are going to ascend out of here today. We rise up in conscious awareness and function so that, from an elevated place, we can look down with perspective, understanding, and compassion for the human world. And from that place, we can bring the powers of Creation, which are the powers of the Creator that come to focus in Love, and we bring that down into the world.
If we are down—if we are enmeshed in world culture—we have no answer. We have nothing to bring from above. But when we are above it, we have the answer of what is above. We have the powers of Creation to bring into our own human experience. We could tell the powers of Spirit to come down into ourselves, to charge this human capacity with love and light.
When we do this, we become radiant beacons of light. We become Emissaries of Divine Light. We are talking about doing something that is for real. This is not just a philosophy or a dogma or a doctrine. We’re talking about allowing something real to happen for ourselves, and for us together. We rise up—we attune to the Spirit of God.
Uranda’s beautiful formula for how this works may be familiar to you. He spoke of it as the working of the One Law. It started with radiation. That is an acknowledgement that from the invisible realms above, there is already a radiation. We don’t have to create it. There is a radiation—a creative power, a creative presence—that is radiating all the time.
The next step was response. For the most part, people are oblivious to the radiation. When we turn to it—when we look up—we receive it, and having received that power into ourselves, we can’t help but respond. We are alive, we are full of love, we respond. It’s our joy to respond.
And when we respond, the next step is that we are attracted to what we are responding to. We don’t just stay distant. No, we rise up. We’re attracted. And in the magic of this process, the next thing that happens is union. We join with what we are responding to, not content to be merely human and play no part in this process, except to receive as if we are just here to receive something. No, we are attracted up into it, and we join with it. We know union with the Divine.
When we have union with the Divine, we know the Divine. This is not belief. We are not asked to just believe. We are invited to know. When we join with something, we know it. We don’t have to try to have faith. We have the wonder of joining with.
Then the last step in the process is unified radiation. Having risen up and joined with, we are invited to radiate with the Divine into the world from that place. It is a unified radiation in the sense that we are unified with the source to whatever degree we are.
We are also unified with each other as this happens. We have the joy of not only knowing the Divine. I know you in that place. You know me. We know each other. We know each other as individuals. We also know us all together as a collective body of humankind. Each individual unique, each wondrous, and each a member of one unified body of humankind. We are knowing that in miniature among ourselves.
That is the promise and the joy of interfaith, by the way, and it’s the promise and the joy of a multicultural experience. We have the opportunity to see through the mirage of separation and find our oneness. We don’t find it because we try to believe it. We find it because it’s true and we know it. It is true that we are one body of humankind here for one purpose, which is to join with the Creator and be an expression of the Creator in the world.
When we do that, we become part of the Lineage of Light. (That is the name of the gathering of Korean servers at Sunrise Ranch.) We know ourselves in that lineage. There is what has gone before, and we are here now. And if we are here now in this Lineage of Light, there is what comes after. But that requires us to be here now, in the lineage, having the experience that I have described.
So that is what we are up to here at Sunrise Ranch, especially for these two weeks. There are many dimensions to it. There is much that the Koreans who are here are exploring and enjoying being a part of at Sunrise Ranch, knowing themselves as a part of this Lineage of Light. So, we honor those who went before, and we open the way for those who come after, and for what is to come. Such a joy to do that with you.
(David read Attunement Card 9.)
THE SPIRIT OF THE SINGLE EYE
Ancestors & Leaders
Card 9
Prayer
In my mind’s eye, I see the long line of those who came before me: my father’s father’s father and my mother’s mother’s mother, and so many more. I see those ones through history who have handed down to me their wisdom, their patriotism, their love and passion.
All these monumental people whose flaws fade into the oblivion of the past! In this moment, I see them looking upon me as I fulfill the lineage of which I am a part, knowing I am living the realization of their dreams. And so they understand me in a way that no one else can. I say to them, Your dreams are my dreams, made new in me today. May those dreams be reborn today. I am here for you.
I see those who are my elders, my teachers and leaders now. Sometimes so human. And yet, in all of their limitations, here for me in my life. Through it all, I receive their wisdom, their generosity and their strength. I receive all their virtues, and discard all the rest because it is not for me.
Most of all, I receive the burning love that motivates their lives, sometimes expressed in purity, and perhaps sometimes hidden or misshapen.
To all my ancestors and leaders I say:
I am here. I am receiving your gifts. I see you for who you are, as I want you to see me.
All that is true, I receive from you. I receive your knowledge. I receive your sight. I receive your love. And I pass on your gifts to all who follow me.
Please see me. Know me. Understand me and the true desire of my heart. I will not deviate from my path.
Meditation
Cross your hands over your chest. Close your eyes.
Allow to come to your awareness someone you look to as an ancestor or a leader. Expose the deepest intentions of your heart to this one. Bring compassionate understanding to this one, and be willing to receive compassionate understanding in return.
Stay with that person until the time with them is complete. Allow another ancestor or leader to come to mind. Continue this process until you perceive that it is complete.
Affirmation
I fulfill my lineage.