Do you have any half-finished projects in your life, things that have progressed to a certain point but which haven’t quite fulfilled all of what you hoped for?

It is vital, when you’ve had a dream that is not yet fulfilled, to check in on that dream. You might decide that the dream wasn’t real. But if it was, it’s vital to embrace it, to recommit yourself to it, to tell yourself, “Yes, even though I’m just halfway through this process, and even though my dream isn’t fully manifested, it didn’t go anyplace. The dream is still the dream, and I’m still living that dream. I’m still fulfilling that dream. I’m not stopping.”

For this organization, Emissaries of Divine Light, our dream is embodied in a ten-year plan we developed in 2012. That plan anticipates growth which, if you graphed it, would look like a curve that mimics the path of a jet taking off. Here we are, two and a half years into that plan, and it feels like that jet. The landing gear is still down, the jet engines are rumbling, the flight attendants are in their chairs with seatbelts fastened, along with all the passengers, and we haven’t yet taken off. But takeoff is imminent.

It’s so important, as the creative process evolves, for us as stewards of that process to remind ourselves of what the dream is and what the true normal is. I was surprised to find that the origin of the word normal comes from an ancient tool that was a carpenter’s square. The origin of the meaning of that word normal has to do with the true design of things—not the average way that things go. It is a pity that the word normal has come to mean average. The truth of the word normal relates to the dream. The true dream for us as human beings is to accurately embody the design of how we are made. There is so much about our human world that is common but which is not normal; not according to our innate design.

Take a look at our human species for a moment. Is our species normal? If you look at the species of the animal kingdom, and then look at ourselves, the human species, do you know of another species that’s causing global warming? Is there another species that’s causing the decimation of most of the other species? Do we know of a species that’s invented a nuclear bomb? Do we know of any species that organizes itself into tribes that clash against each other until one of the tribes is decimated? These things are not normal for us as human beings, and yet we come to think of them as being normal. “Well, it’s our culture. It’s our civilization. It’s human nature.” No, it’s not normal.

We’re here to say that we have a vision of possibility for ourselves and for humanity. It isn’t a vision of something great that we’re going to evolve into one day. It’s about coming back to sanity and normalcy, coming back to the true normal of how we’re made and what we’re supposed to be about around here on Planet Earth.

What has gone wrong for humanity? At every level—between nations, cultures, religions, families—what’s gone wrong is fragmentation, a splitting apart. Shortly after one group splits apart from another, then within that group that split apart there’s more fragmentation. It certainly happened in Christianity: “We’ll separate ourselves from the rest of the world. We’re all better than everybody else,” and then Christianity itself has kept breaking apart over centuries into a multitude of denominations, many of whom don’t respect each other. But it’s not just Christianity. There is fragmentation all over the place.

I think we need to get down to the root of what’s gone wrong. Why is there fragmentation? And not only fragmentation between people. There’s fragmentation within people. Is your right brain talking to your left brain today? Are your thoughts talking to your feelings? Are they getting along okay? Are your feelings and your thoughts listening to your spirit? Is your body vibrant and alive, manifesting the spirit of life that’s within you? There’s fragmentation in the human experience. Where does that come from?

There’s fragmentation because the source of wholeness isn’t being known by human beings. There is a reality that’s already whole, that’s already one, and we’ve become split off from that. That is the first fragmentation, the primal wound, which is the fragmentation of the primal bond that binds us to what’s already one within us—so that we can be one with that—to the very source of our own creativity, the very source of our own life. Yes, we have life at a physical level, to whatever degree, though not nearly as much as we could. We’re talking about having life at a conscious level. We’re talking about being whole at a conscious level as a human being—one with the source of who we are. And because we’re one with the source of who we are as an individual, and because the source within us is the same source within all Creation and within all people, we very naturally find ourselves one with each other.

That’s normal. Oneness is normal. Wholeness is normal. But it only works when we connect to the source of that wholeness that’s within us. We can’t expect to be fragmented from Love—the power of Creation itself within us—and then expect to know love and oneness with another person.

We have beliefs about this from a religious standpoint. Some of those beliefs are more accurate than others. But the origin of all true religious and spiritual practices wasn’t a belief. Originally somebody had an experience. The Buddha had an experience—he came to know this oneness with the source of all Creation and with Creation itself. And we call it enlightenment. I say he got normal. He had an enlightened experience of oneness, and it became a teaching. But the teaching was born out of a truly normal experience. The significance of what he brought to the world is not about the teaching unless the teaching brings somebody to a knowing of what’s really normal for them and for everybody.

Moses had an experience. It was an experience of oneness. He had a profound encounter with the true normal, with the source of oneness within himself and within all of Being: I am. I am that I am. The story pictured this experience as a burning bush. He came face-to-face with the one Love, with the one God, the one Truth, the one Reality. He came face-to-face with the normal, and he was profoundly changed. That experience motivated and inspired him to lead others to oneness. It looked like a political movement: “Let my people go!” It is true that people have to do something in an outer sense to embrace their oneness. But the heart of what Moses brought to the world wasn’t a political movement.

In this day, here we are, with the opportunity to know oneness in ourselves in the face of fragmentation. One of the most devastating experiences for me as a young person—after looking around and seeing the horrible fragmentation in the world around me, and seeing the insanity of it—was to realize that I’d been infected with that same fragmentation within my own soul. I didn’t know my connection to what was normal, and I hardly knew what normal was. We face a world that’s been so infected with what isn’t normal, so infected with fragmentation, that we have to face it in ourselves and face it in each other. We are a race split apart, and even the best of us have been infected. Our good intentions and our religious beliefs don’t save us from that. We have to experience something different. We have to embrace what appears to us to be a dream to return to normal.

The dream has to be an experience that is so powerful that, in the face of the fragmentation experienced by people around us, we are in wholeness, we’re in normalcy. We’re a power for true normalcy in this world. And it’s so powerful in us that it has the chance to overcome the fragmentation in another person. It has a chance to turn their mind around, their heart around, so that they begin to see something else and experience something else and know something else; so that in the living of their life, as fragmentation comes up that looks like it’s out there, they do what someone who knows the true normal knows to do, which is to say, “I am in oneness here, no matter what anyone else believes, says, feels or does. It is whole and it is one here in me.”

Recently, I’ve been speaking about becoming a sun. I wrote a book on it. Becoming a Sun is about bringing the power of oneness into the world. There’s a formula to it. I’ll share the beginnings of that formula. It is simple and powerful: Focus. Agreement. Solidarity.

The first part of the formula is all about focus. It is letting the oneness within you come to focus in you and be known by you. It is allowing yourself to be focused in it, and then be it. Be the focus of oneness yourself in consciousness.

The experience of focus is touching the oneness that’s in you and within me, touching the Creator, the one God, I Am. You can’t even say that name for God without taking responsibility for it: I am. Focus is touching that reality and loving it, and it’s about becoming it, taking responsibility for being the Creator in your own life and loving the Creator in anybody else.

Humanity has become so abnormal that many people don’t know that focus in themselves and we don’t know it all together. We are on earth to let the focus of the one God come to focus among us, to know the naturalness of that, to let it happen, so that we stop looking at each other with such suspicion and we come to know that we each are a focus of the one God, the One Reality. In knowing that reality for myself, I know that it is true for you.

When we both know the true focus for ourselves and all people, there is harmony between us. Between me and you there’s harmony when we know oneness. No oneness, no harmony. Know oneness. Know harmony.

In music, harmony implies some dissonance. Harmony without any dissonance is horribly boring. Dissonance is part of Creation and it is part of harmony. The creative process begins with resonance, goes into dissonance, and then comes back to resonance. That’s all part of harmony. When we are one and know our oneness, we can do that dance. And we can stand some dissonance—it’s exciting. But it’s part of the harmony and it’s part of the oneness. It’s not part of destruction. We’re not going down in a ball of flames because there’s some dissonance between us. That dissonance can be very normal.

Of course there is an abnormal kind of dissonance that is part of the discordant human state as it is. That abnormal kind of dissonance doesn’t resolve back to resonance. It just keeps being discordant.

There is harmony and a state of agreement between you and me when we know oneness. This is true friendship. I know who you are, and you know me. You know who I am. We are one. We are friends. When we affirm that friendship together on earth, in harmony, we have things to do. So that’s step two: harmony and agreement.

Step three in the formula for oneness is taken by people who know focus and love the focus within themselves and who take radical responsibility for being a focus themselves—I Am. And then, because of that, those people know harmony with each other. At that point, they have the opportunity to come together in solidarity. Solidarity becomes a reality when there is a constellation of us who know love, friendship and harmony; who are called to higher ground together, and therefore called to solidarity. We are called to serve as a sun ourselves, personally, so that the focus of love within us radiates through us. We’re called to do that as friends, and we’re called to do that in solidarity as a radiant body of people who have something profound we are bringing to the world.