There’s a profound spiritual practice that has to do with beautiful, orderly thought. For a person who finds that their thoughts are going all over the place, it is very effective. It goes like this:

Pay attention to what you are saying so that it is as optimally creative as possible, both in the content of the words and in the way they are said.

The reason this practice works so well is that if you care about what you say, you have to think about what you say. There is a mental discipline that naturally kicks in to support your intention of creative speech. While it is true that you have to have creative thought to produce creative speech, if your focus is on your thought without respect to what you say, the process is far more difficult. Those errant thoughts are much harder to hear than errant words.

This spiritual practice can be expanded to include everything in life—not only to what we say but everything we do. There is a conscious awareness, probably on the part of all who read this Pulse of Spirit, that we have a great gift to give to the world—something important to say, something important to do, something important to manifest, and a message to bring. For you, what is that message? What is that living embodiment? What is that gift you have to give? And how could you best give it? And what is it for us together? Because we never give our greatest gift all by ourselves.

If you really knew that the gift you have to give is true, and it is significant for the world, and you began to reflect on what that gift is, what do you think you would come up with? What is your highest vision of that possibility? Looking at your world and the needs of the world in which we live, and considering the natural gifts of your own soul, what might be possible? We can reflect on what our highest vision of that possibility is. I encourage you to dream big, to think about what it might optimally be if you really went for it.

If we are in that kind of a process, we can also be thinking about what it would take from us to deliver that gift. There is the outer embodiment of that gift. But for most of us, there’s something that would have to happen inside for that gift to be fully given. Something would have to change. Something would have to blossom. Something would have to grow. There would have to be an opening of mind, an opening to the possibility so that the fullness of what is really possible might be seen and come through. And then an opening to the means by which it might happen—the wisdom that would allow it to truly manifest.

My experience is that if I give my mind that kind of job to do, it gets on it. Is that true for you? When you ask your mind to appreciate the possibilities present in your life, and to open up and work for you, there is a wisdom that comes from we-don’t-know-where, but which floods through the mind. The mind opens when we give it the job to do. So many people are bossed around by their own mind instead of being their mind’s boss, giving it work to do.

And how about matters of the heart? Are there feelings that are in the way of the highest vision of your gift? Some disappointment in your own life, some knotty problem, some repetitive pattern in your own behavior perhaps? Or perhaps disappointment in others? Oftentimes the shortcomings of others loom large in our minds. Somehow, in our heart, we have to do something about those things if our gift is to be given. We have to see them for what they are, and allow them to be melted away, allow our heart to be cracked open; because the gift that is to be given isn’t just an action per se, and not just a bright idea per se. It is a gift of a human being, after all. And the biggest gifts don’t come just with bright ideas. They come with a heart opening, they come with the power of Universal Love released through that gift and into the world. Without that awesome motivation brought by that Love, we are liable to falter by the side of the road when the giving of our gift is still incomplete.

When we have a great vision and we commit ourselves to that vision, our heart cracks open to fulfill that vision. You can’t buy that experience from any workshop or any book or any teacher or any practice, other than the practice of committing yourself to giving your gift with everything, and then asking your own heart and mind to open, reshape and transform so that you can actually fulfill that possibility. Because the sad reality is that if we don’t open and change and shift and accommodate the gift coming into us and through us, we cannot give it. And then we join many other people around the world who have had a flicker of possibility and set themselves to it, only to be disappointed by their own lack of follow through and their own lack of willingness to become all of who they need to become to give their gift. And so they go back to a life of limitation, and they do not have the joy of giving their gift.

Is there any greater joy, really? None of the good things in life are that good when you’re not giving your gift. Think of any friendship, any job, any fortunate circumstance, and you in it, not giving your gift. Not a happy situation.

As we give our gift, the world changes. The situation at hand is uplifted, and opportunities are found that wouldn’t otherwise be found. And we have the joy, even under difficult circumstances, of giving our gift.

The human journey is not a bed of roses. And even it were, if you lied down in those roses, they have thorns. And yet, when your gift is coming through you, that sustains you. When you’re committed to giving your gift, you have the opportunity to access something that is far larger than what you’ve thought yourself to be. And in fact, in exactly those times when there is a challenge, when there seems to be impossibility, you open up to something bigger than you’ve known yourself to be—to a wisdom you hadn’t previously accessed, to a love that overpowers the disappointment, and that takes you through the hard times.

In such times, what we are accessing seems like something other than who we are. We are contacting the reality of God, of Source, of the cosmos; something more vast, more wise than who and what we have thought ourselves to be. And so we open up to that, and whoosh! It comes in. We are strengthened. We are motivated. We are enlightened about the situation. We see more.

In religious circles, God is thought about as being something invisible, up there and far away. There are actually three dimensions to the reality of God. There is that reality which is beyond our immediate experience. That is God the Possible—the essence of what could manifest right here where we are. When we open spiritually we are opening to God the Possible. We are calling on that reality to be here in a world that has gotten impossible for us. God the Possible becomes real for us when we open up to it and let it in.

When we express God the Possible we become God the Means. We become the means by which the possible can flow through into the world, expressed and embodied by us. We find out that what was in essence, which was just a possibility, has now crossed over through consciousness.

And then, the possible comes out into the world of form. The gift is actually given and has its impact, and it creates a living form, or it fosters the growth of a living form. That living form is God the Manifest. And it is all the reality of God.

God is a creator, and so what we’re talking about is the creative process. We’re talking about our commitment to participate in the creative process, and in so doing find out that we are a creator. We co-create with God the Possible as a human being, and so we become a creator.

Here are three operative principles of our creatorship:

1. I am a creator. I am not a victim of circumstance and I am not a victim of my life up to this point. I am not a victim of my wounds as a human being. There are circumstances in my life. And, like anyone, there’s a pattern of human wounding that I have. But I am not my wounds. I am not a victim. I am a creator.
2. I have responsibility for what I create. It is mine, after all, if I create it. I have responsibility for what I create. Victims don’t usually have a lot of a sense of responsibility. A creator does. And having had a vision of what I could create and manifest in my life, I am responsible for that vision, and I am responsible for its manifestation. As it manifests, I am responsible for its care and for its thriving. Committing myself to that keeps placing me back in the role of a creator. It keeps opening me up. It makes me smarter, because when I take responsibility I become smart because I care and I am thinking. I put my mind to work, thinking about my creation.
3. I have authority over what I create. It is true at any level. If you think about your creations, you have a natural authority over them, do you not? If you author it, if you create it, very naturally you know how it’s built, you know how it works. You might say it listens to you, it follows your direction. There’s a built-in authority, not an imposed one, that you have as a creator in your world.

So these are all things that happen when we truly commit ourselves to giving the gift that we have to give. We are called into our creatorship.

My highest vision of my creatorship changes as I move along, doesn’t yours? There is Highest Vision 1.0 and Highest Vision 2.0, and 2.1. It’s updating all the time. I’m seeing more. And not only is God the Possible updating the awareness of my life and my gift, but God the Means is updating too. I’m learning more and more about how I can open up and give the gift that I have to give.

I’m at an age where there are certain things that are breaking down a bit in my physical body. But the bigger picture is that there’s something that is opening up more and more—more possibility being seen, more capacity to give my gift; more eagerness, more joy, more wisdom and a greater capacity to love.

Have you ever reflected back on your teenage experiences of love? I have. It’s humbling when I realize that in some way I hardly knew what love was and I hardly knew how to love another person. Thankfully, we can grow and expand in our life.

There’s something that happens when some collective of people come together and commit themselves together to giving their highest gift. It could be in any creative setting—it could be people in a rock band. All committed. Whatever ego you’ve got going—check it at the door. Let’s all come together; we’re committed to make this as great as it could be. And when you commit yourself to the collective creation in any situation—it could be cooking a meal, growing a garden, or it could be changing the world—something creative happens.

So we come together and commit ourselves to the birth of the new human; to spiritual regeneration, kicking in at all levels on the planet. When we commit heart and mind and spirit to this great creative task, power kicks in collectively. We start asking the question: Realistically, right now, what is the highest intelligence we have on doing this together? That intelligence grows over time. We may come up with more ideas, and more possibility. But what is available right now? How do I need to be with other people in this band of angels? How do I draw out the optimal from the people around me? What distractions are present that are stopping me? Interestingly enough, our greatest distractions are often each other.

When it comes to the distraction of others, some part of us has got to say, it doesn’t matter. It can’t matter. The vision we have of what we could be to the world is too big to be distracted by another person. Maybe handled in some way, gotten over, and dealt with somehow. But the gift we have to give is too big for the distraction posed by other people to be a reason to stop or a reason to delay.

What is the process of manifestation for us? What are our best ideas about how we truly change human consciousness? And we need the most profound ones if we are to offer something that’s relevant and timely in the world in which we live. There is a great gift that has many facets to it, and many people around the globe are needed to play their part. But what is the essential nature of the gift we have to give? We could speak about what that is, but we could also simply keep opening to God the Possible to find out what is the most pivotal thing in the human world that needs to change. What is the most pivotal thing that has to happen in the human experience so we may meet our appointment with destiny?

That pivotal thing has to do with the very process we are speaking of right now: opening to a larger reality which moves us from victimhood to creatorship.  If you listen to the news—I’m not particularly recommending it, but if you do—you will hear even those who, from a worldly perspective, are most in charge claiming to be victims. Everybody’s doing it. It’s a picture of disempowerment. As long as we are in a consciousness of victimhood, we can’t move into the intelligence and wisdom and the profound love natural to God the Possible and therefore natural to us as God the Means.

The experience of wounding plays a part. In the victim state, a wound seems like a noun. It’s a thing that I have, it’s a thing that happened to me. And it’s quite understandable that we see it that way as human beings, and there’s some undeniable truth to it—things do happen to people. We have the scars to prove it, at whatever level—emotional, physical, or at any other level. So there is some reality to a wound as a noun. But as a defining reality for a human life, it stinks. It isn’t fun. And we all know people who allow their wound to define their life. And then we know and are inspired by people whose wounds are obvious enough, but who have chosen to be creators.

We can have compassion for ourselves and for what feels wounded in us. I’m not suggesting we shame ourselves, or shame other people because they feel those things. I’m simply suggesting that our fulfillment, our pleasure, and our joy is coming to see that the wound that we thought was a noun is not only a noun. It’s a verb. It is something we’re doing, not only something we have. And because it’s something we’re doing, it’s something we could do differently. So when our perspective changes and we see that a wound is not just a noun but it’s a verb, we move into our creatorship. And what we were doing that was wounding ourselves and often wounding other people—that we can’t see because we’re looking at our wound as a noun—has now been transformed to healing, to loving, to creating and to truthing. These are the verbs we want to be about, not ongoing self-wounding, or the wounding of others.

Now we are an instrument of creative manifestation. We are God the Means, recreating the world.

Thank you for being on this meditative journey with me. If this is only an essay, it begins and ends. If it’s a meditation we are sharing, it’s something flowing through us, and it just keeps on flowing.

Spiritual Practice

1. Practice care about what you say. Pay attention to the words you use. Notice the tone with which you say them. Care about the intention and energy that is encoded in your words.
2. Practice care about what you do. Be mindful so that what you do is truly giving the highest gift you have to give now. Fill your acts with the highest passion of your soul.