I have been abroad, most recently in South Australia. While in Gawler, I went to a public forum featuring five Aboriginal people. I found out from them that is how they prefer to be called, not First Nations people. It became clear that they valued their culture and were interested in preserving it. And it’s understandable, given the history of the Aboriginal people in Australia, that they would have strong feelings about that.
I would have liked to have had a conversation with them afterwards, but there wasn’t the opportunity. I wanted to say that it seemed to me their ancestors probably were not worried about their culture. They were probably too busy thinking about Reality and their part in it to be bothered about culture.
It is understandable how for us as human beings, it can become about culture. The culture itself is the booby prize. The experience of the Reality in which we are living is the ultimate prize.
We have spiritual paths, religions around the world, and spiritual teachings. The very best that any of that could be is an introduction to Reality. At its very best, that is what human spirituality is. It is not something of enduring value of itself. It is a doorway. But so often that doorway is chock full of religious culture of one kind or another—dogma, doctrine, and belief. We are here to offer an open door.
Imagine a temple, church, or synagogue. Imagine you decided to go to that temple to open up to Reality. And you found the building full of dogma, ritual, unconscious practice, and false belief.
Perhaps that is symbolic of what is happening in the human experience, except that the temple we are concerned with is the temple of the human heart and the human spirit, which has become preoccupied with the religious or spiritual culture of the world.
There are two possible bad results from that. Either people buy into the false culture that is blocking the door and accept the booby prize as if it was the thing itself, or they stop visiting the temple. That is literally happening in churches around the world. But here I am not speaking about the external world. I am speaking about that place in ourselves that is meant to be a temple for the Divine to visit.
And so, there is the secularization of society today.
We are here to reclaim that space of heart and mind, and of the Spirit that is made to be a temple of the Divine, and reclaim it as a place where there can be a knowing of Reality. If we can do that for ourselves, then we can occupy that space together and open up that space of Reality for others. And still, it is not the culture of our collective itself that makes the difference. It is the Reality that is available through that doorway of culture if it is open. So let’s allow what we share to be an open door.
I received a booklet from Sunrise Ranch in the ‘70s. It was from a transcribed talk of Martin Cecil. The name of the booklet was Look Up.
It was such great instruction. It certainly was for me at the time. Whatever is happening, look up. And what happens when you look up? Of course, here we are not just speaking about physical space, though looking up at the night sky can be a beautiful thing.
We are talking about a level of Reality that is higher than whatever muck we might have gotten ourselves into in the immediate life experience, if indeed we’ve gotten ourselves into some kind of muck. If we are in that muck, look up. Stop staring at the muck.
Something happens when you look up. When you find that Reality that is higher than your own immediate experience, you find that the higher Reality of who you are lives there and is intact. The reality of the Love that is at the core of who you are is there. Look up! And when you look up, you go up. You experience that higher Reality.
For each of us, part of our spiritual practice has to be finding the ways that work for us to look up. Put on that special piece of music, talk to that special friend, read something inspiring, meditate, pray, walk in nature—whatever it is for you that allows your heart and mind to look up. Do that. I do. Because I know what happens. If I look up, I go up.
That is such an essential part of our spiritual journey. The journey of our lifetime is a journey to grace, a journey of looking up and moving up.
We have an internship program here at Sunrise Ranch. That program is designed as a journey to grace. It is a journey that encourages people to look up and move up. The entire human journey is a journey to grace. Life has it worked out that way to teach us to look up and move up, to move into grace.
You have to take it that way though. Part of that is a No. Stop looking down. Stop being beneath all the factors that are present. That’s life’s teaching, and it’s teaching us all the time. Look up.
When we come to grace, something else happens, which is essential also. You get to look down. You can’t look down—you can’t see your human experience from a higher perspective—if you are enmeshed in it. You have to be up to look down.
So, the first part of the whole process is to look up and to go up, not so that you can just float around up there forever. But so that being up, you can look down and then act with perspective on what is below from that place of elevated awareness. And you can not only see from there, but you can act from there. You can bring an influence into your own human experience, and into the world you inhabit. You can bring an influence that is full of the powers of who you are, who I am—who we are in Reality as creator beings.
I spoke of that in Australia last week, and it came out in the Pulse of Spirit as loving yourself—not loving the muck, not trying to perpetuate whatever problems are going on and act as if those problems should exist forever. This is not about worshipping the dysfunctionality. It is about loving yourself from above.
Bring what is above into the human experience, and that is love. Not a reactive love, not a love in which you are polarized in your human experience. This is not loving whatever nonsense you might have gotten yourself involved in. It’s not that kind of love. True self-love is from above down, loving yourself from that perspective and bringing into yourself all of the powers of Creation, all the essence of Love that is the reality of who we all are.
Not long ago, I heard Uranda speak about this. In my own words, he was saying that on our spiritual journey, for a time we are meditating on what is above us. We are meditating on how we look up and rise up.
But then there does come a point when our meditations are on the factors in our human experience and in our world, and how we bring a creative influence into them—to sort them out, uplift them, and make something of them.
In Martin’s monumental Prayer of Being was his rendition of what we speak of as the “Our Father.” His rendition of it in the first person—a little gutsy, right, to put the “Our Father” in the first person—starts with this. I am in heaven.
I’m up. I am in heaven. The revelation of myself is holy. I am revealing myself with holiness through human experience. I am bringing the holiness of the being that I am into my human experience. That is how I love this human being that I am.
And as I do that, I am loving you. As I am loving myself in that way, as I am revealing myself that way, as I’m bringing the holiness of the being that I am into my humanity, I am now loving you. I am loving every human being on the planet because we are truly all one.
We are all connected. We are all part of the same species, the same race, the same body of humanity. What happens for one happens for all. If one is chained, we are all chained. If one is set free, we are all set free. If one is loved from above, we are all being loved from above. And you feel that when you meet somebody who knows it. They don’t have to make a great display of how much they love you. You just feel that love that they are knowing in themselves and that they are sharing with you as the reality of Being. This is who we are. This is how we are made.
I am in heaven. You are in heaven. The revelation of ourselves is holy. And if there is something unholy that has crept in—and there certainly has in the human experience, as witness last night’s shooting—then we set it right, not by feeling guilty, not by calling ourselves sinners, and not by wallowing in shame.
We set it right because we acknowledge the truth. I am in heaven. And we move into that experience because we look up. And because we look up, we go up. And then we live from up.
I would like to consider with you the problem of humanity from the perspective of cosmic intelligence. It is a big picture, I know. But think about it from the standpoint of cosmic intelligence.
Cosmic intelligence created humanity, however you might conceive that to have happened. But nothing else could have happened, right? We were born out of the cosmic whole, out of some kind of fantastic intelligence that could make this planet and make us.
Cosmic intelligence made humanity and has been the inspiration behind our evolution as a race and as a species. And we are on a spiritual path, a journey to grace, and that has moved along over the millennia from the time of Moses and before.
It has been moving along starting at the ground level, at the level of the physical experience that people were embedded in at the time. The cycle moved on over the centuries with whatever success or failure it had along the way, and with whatever ability people had to keep up with the cycle.
So, it moved through the planes of human experience from the physical to the mental, and in this day to the spiritual nature of humankind. And something is happening at that level, and something is opening up at the level of the heart that opens us to Reality.
There is a marathon effect occurring, meaning that not everybody is at the front of that movement. There are stragglers along the way, and in this marathon, people are lost by the wayside. And yet the cycle moves on.
Our journey through space in this solar system didn’t stop. The sun is continuing to move through the Milky Way Galaxy circling Sagittarius A*, which is the black hole at the center of the galaxy. So we are constantly moving into new vibrational territory with new factors. There is an ongoing evolution to higher and higher levels that become the leading edge of human consciousness.
There is something problematic about all that. What do you do with the people who are left behind? The higher the cycle goes, the more difficult it becomes for humanity to relate to where the cycle is. Enmeshed in the physical, enmeshed in the mental, and now we are moving on to the level of the spiritual nature of humankind? And we are moving on to an issue of the clarity and purity of the human heart.
Somebody enmeshed in the physical or the mental world—the world of belief and philosophy— might find it hard to relate to the leading edge of consciousness today. That is the problem from the standpoint of cosmic intelligence. We inherit that problem as human beings who are conscious and awake. It is our problem. It is our problem as Sunrise Ranch and our problem as Emissaries of Divine Light. It is our problem as awakened human beings. How do we communicate to a world that is enmeshed in lower levels of human culture?
In this scenario, if we are only looking up, what happens to everybody else?
We have to descend into ourselves as an individual. The reality that we know has to come down into our entire human experience and then through it to be communicated at every level in the world, so that, like Hansel and Gretel, there can be breadcrumbs that lead people back to where the cycle is now. I don’t think we are ready for the attitude, Pull up the ladder, Jack. I’m okay. Leave everybody else behind.
There should be an expression that is relevant in the human world sourced from where the cycle is today. And so, it’s incumbent on us—if we see this picture and feel the responsibility—to lower a lifeline, to have something to say that is relevant to the human experience and the people that we meet, the people that we know, and the culture that we are living in.
While in Australia, a friend of mine, Kathryn Fennell, lent me a book entitled The Yoga of Jesus by Yogananda. If you are not familiar with the man, he is credited with bringing yoga to the Western world. And he lived in California for most of his life.
I opened the book to the first sentence of the first paragraph of the first chapter. It went like this:
For mere mortals to cope with a life of unsolved and unsolvable mysteries in an inscrutable universe would indeed be an overwhelming challenge were it not for divine emissaries who come on earth to speak with the voice and authority of God for the guidance of men.
Interesting that he made reference to our name, Emissaries of Divine Light, though he didn’t say it exactly that way. Incidentally, I’ve been told over the years that we should change the name, and make it Emissaries of Love or something else. But we have a beautiful name, and fitting for who we are and what we are doing.
Yogananda was recognizing the importance of people who are up and then can look down, not in a condescending way, but seeing with perspective and bringing what is up to what is below—into the world, into the culture, so that there can be an open door, so there can be a church, a temple that is present at the level of the human heart and mind.
Let’s go to that church. Let’s be there. Let’s be that church, that temple of light, as Uranda called it. And occupying that temple ourselves, let’s invite others in, in effect saying this:
I’m here at this place of communion with what is above, so that the power of what is above can come down into the temple and stream into the world, so that the Holy Spirit can move with power, Holy Presence can pervade the world in which we live.
And that’s what I want to talk about next week.