This is from As of a Trumpet, an amazing little book by Martin Cecil.

You are divine. This is the truth for you, but it remains meaningless on earth until you know it. “Knowing” is the state of realized experience, and this occurs as your divine nature is given expression in thought, word and deed.

You are divine. In our human life there are many things that come after that awakening. When we awaken to our innate divine nature, we still have a life to lead. There are things that occur in our life. In the world the way it is, we have to fight for our awakening, meaning that to preserve our awareness with integrity and to embody it in our life takes focus and tenacity from us as a human being. We face challenges of all kinds; we undergo all kinds of experiences. And still we are divine.

I first read these words from As of a Trumpet many years ago. They are emblematic for me of my own spiritual awakening and my delight in that awakening. I’ve known such joy, and even relief, in receiving the message that my true nature is divine. It is divine love. What a relief from all the other ways of identifying myself up to that point. Today, for me, is a day that brings me right back to that initial awareness, as if time had not passed. Since that day, I have had the opportunity, as I believe anyone does, to celebrate and revel in the reality of divine Being and the truth that I am of that.

The realization that this impresses upon me is that I am not my human life. I have a human life, and I live my human life. There is a creative process and I am a creator, and I am creating a human life. But I am not my human life. My true nature is divine. And I don’t need all those challenges or all those experiences to be myself. I am myself. And I am being myself, I am embodying myself, in the creative process, ultimately for the sheer joy of creation, understanding that in a human life there is pain, there is challenge, there is effort—all kinds of things. Nonetheless, what is the reason to have a human life? It is for the sheer joy of it, for the sheer joy of creation. Truly, all of creation is for the sheer joy of the Creator.

In my life, as I would guess in yours, there is some drama. That drama is part of the human experience. There is the pushing and the pulling, all the dynamics of life. And still, I am not my human life. I am creating my human life.

Here are further words from As of a Trumpet:

You are a creator. It is natural for you to share the creative work of God by which divine purposes are achieved. All the essences of the divine state, as these relate to your own field of responsibility, are potential in you. The world of your environment is the creative field for which you are responsible.

It is our very nature to create, and we are not our creation. We are in our creation; our creation embodies us. But it is not who we are. We are divine. You are divine.

Here is a little of my own awakening story. As a seventeen-year-old, I conspired with four others in my high school to buy163 acres of land in Canaan, Maine. We moved there to begin an intentional community in the summer of 1970. My friend Will Carpenter and I brought with us a knapsack full of literature from Sunrise Ranch. I pored over that literature, loving it and taking it in. I read such titles as “The Longing of Your Heart” and “The Fountain of Life.”

Along with the literature from Sunrise Ranch, I brought along a book entitled The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, by Alan Watts. It was liberating!

Recently, I watched a video in which Alan Watts said this:

A guru gets you into trying ridiculously harder and more assiduously than usual. In other words, if you are in a contest with the universe, he’s going to stir up that contest until it becomes ridiculous.

He describes how human beings are so often trying to outdo the universe. Life unfolds in the present moment. And then, instead of being willing to embrace that experience, we often go out looking for something better. We decide that this isn’t it—that what the universe has given us may be all right but we could do better. We could improve ourselves, we could improve our circumstance, and therefore we set up a contest with the universe to improve on what the universe is creating. That is the nature of the contest. Alan Watts’ point was that, on a religious or spiritual path, a person may enter this contest to make a superhuman effort to improve their experience. Hopefully, it comes to the point of becoming so obviously futile that a person gives up.

Alan Watts spoke about Eastern approaches to this—he was a philosopher who brought Eastern religion to the West. But he had also been an Episcopal priest, and he spoke of the Judeo-Christian approach to defeating the universe. He spoke about the absurdity of a commandment that commands people to “Love the Lord thy God with all.” His point was not that loving God was a bad thing. It was that no one loves on command. You are either in love or you are not in love. Can you make yourself love?

He said that many religious practices rely on reductio ad absurdum—reduction to absurdity—and that almost all spiritual disciplines are ways of persisting in folly. But it is not only spirituality and religion that invites a person into a contest with the universe. There are many forms of self-improvement that do the same. Of course, you might say that Watts, himself, was offering a spiritual discipline, inviting people to listen to his lectures and read his books.

Ultimately, all true spiritual discipline is based simply on being—on being who you are, and then embodying who you are in the creative process of your life, and doing it with as much integrity as you are able. Or, to put it in other terms, spiritual discipline is simply about being awake and staying awake. What I have found is that I cannot stay awake while compromising my integrity. Have you found that? Compromising one’s integrity is not a good recipe for staying spiritually awake.

When one truly awakens and one knows the glory of what it means to be spiritually awake, there is a passion about being awake, about continuing to take in and experience the wonder of Being, the glory of what life is. With only a little bit of enlightenment and a little bit of wisdom, it dawns on one that to keep that experience, you have to have a way of being true to it in the way you live your life. Not so that you could be a success in the world or so that you could be approved of by somebody else, or so that you could be good or do the right thing in other people’s eyes, but to continue to know the glory of being awake and knowing that it would be hell to go back to sleep, and that if you compromised your integrity in anything, you would be diminishing your experience of what you have awoken to.

In a true spiritual awakening, we awaken to what is real. And what’s real is everywhere. That is what an awake person knows. The real is everywhere. The real is in the highest heaven above me. And what is streaming down from that heaven into me is all real.

What is in me is real. Reality is in this human body. Reality is in this consciousness. In the world as it is, humanity creates things that are a distorted manifestation of the real, and yet even in those distorted things the real is present. The real is present in me. It is present in you and with all people. A person may be in a deep spiritual slumber and still the real is there within them.

So the creative choice is not to base our relationships upon what is unreal in other people—their human drama, their limitations, and what is missing from the experience. Now I happen to know that there is all kinds of turmoil going on in people all the time. Maybe in you right now. So I know there is the drama of your life and all the things that people experience in their life. But I also know that there is the real in you and in all people. My choice is to notice the drama and the turmoil from the past that tends to show itself in the present in a person’s mind. I choose to relate to the real in you and all people, and to show you the real of me. Truly loving the Lord thy God is loving the real, wherever it may be… Up in heaven. Coming down here. In me. In you. And in the world.

Lloyd Arthur Meeker, the founder of Emissaries of Divine Light, made this statement:

What’s right with you is the starting point. What’s wrong with you is beside the point.

What is right with you is what is real. And that is the starting point for anything good. There’s nothing good that comes out of starting with what’s wrong with you. I don’t know how you build on something that’s wrong. It’s not exactly a solid foundation. You can have a spiritual discipline of addressing what’s wrong. It can be a helpful practice at times. It can be helpful to put one’s nose right into all the things that are wrong with you, because if you do it long enough you may get sick of it and realize that it’s going noplace and can bring you nothing other than to acknowledge what is missing and to bring what is real to it.

I have had times in my life when it was particularly important to find out what was wrong with me. And if someone else is interested in that for themselves, I encourage them. It’s a good discipline to plumb the depths of your own soul and in the end find out what the psalmist found out: that wherever you go, there You are. However horrible, however awful, there You are—the reality of love, present in the depths, in the heights, in the breadth of life. If I am there, reality is there. If I am present, if I have kept the integrity of my spiritual awakening, I am present in whatever it is.

You and I are not defined by our human experience.

You are divine. This is the truth for you, but it remains meaningless on earth until you know it. “Knowing” is the state of realized experience, and this occurs as your divine nature is given expression in thought, word and deed.