There are cover-ups of all kinds all over the news. There are financial cover-ups, political cover-ups, and sexual cover-ups. And what I say about it is this: “Don’t you get it? All of human culture is a cover-up.”
What is being covered up? The epic. There is something epic happening. And human culture, as it usually goes, is covering up the epic, obscuring it from human awareness. Yes, there’s something epic going on.
The epic relates to the unfolding of a great story. I rather imagine that Nick and Lana are feeling something epic happening about now. This is epic! They’re getting married! Whatever might have been covering it up is gone, the epic is appearing, and it is a grand story. And there is a grand story for each of us, and for all of humankind. We’re in the middle of an epic story, for sure.
I was thinking of something else that’s being covered up by our culture: understanding that there are occasional glimpses of something more. There’s occasionally an opening in the atmosphere, so that the cover-up disappears for a moment in our culture or in an individual’s experience. But generally speaking, there’s something else being covered up. Yes, the epic story of humankind is obscured. So is the timeless reality that is behind that story—the Eternal.
We have a culture that’s highly involved with the drama of the moment, whatever it might be. It could be near or far. There are all the personal dramas, day to day, week to week, and year to year. We can become obsessed with such things. And such things can be a cover-up of something larger that our lives are actually about, that we’re really involved in. And so it is in the culture at large.
Sometimes, cover-ups are very deliberate. Often, politicians would like the public to be preoccupied with an issue that grabs people’s attention. Then, like a magician who distracts with one hand to do a sleight of hand with the other, they pull off something else while no one is looking. And so, there can be a deliberate manufacturing of cover-ups.
Something happens when we cease to be fooled by the cover-up and we tune in to the epic. We begin to tune in to the timeless, the Eternal. And that empowers us. The epic story that we’re part of is empowering. After all, we are each heroes of that larger story. Did we forget it? Each of us has a dramatic, significant part to play in letting that story unfold.
We remember that when whatever little obsession that’s covering it up is gone. We remember that larger story that we’re involved in, that we’re called to, that we’re a part of, that we came here to participate in.
Humankind has largely lost its sense of place in the epic story of history, a history that transcends what seems to be never-ending human conflict and distraction. We’re here for something else as we awaken to it. We are here for the story of Creation—our creating as humankind on Planet Earth, the opportunity we have to bring Creation through in our own individual experience. And right now, we have the opportunity to build an ark together.
As it’s told in the story of Noah’s Ark, it seems like something exceptional. That is how we picture it. Everything’s going well: people are thriving all around, getting on with culture, and there’s this man and his family building an ark. How exceptional!
Sunrise Ranch seems like an exceptional place—people living in community, hosting events, doing spiritual work together. We are building a vibrational ark, a field of high-frequency vibration in the energy field of Sunrise Ranch culture that sustains higher consciousness.
World culture acts as a cover-up of this natural state. It is a distraction from it, so that most people aren’t letting that unfold in their experience. They’re not sharing it with other people.
Living within a vibrational ark is the natural state. As human beings, we are not made to flourish in the low-frequency, low-pressure system that is world culture. We are made to live in a vibrational ark. And when we tune in to the high vibration of the ark, we thrive there. It seems exceptional because of the cover-up that is human culture. And therefore, people end up living in another kind of energetic bubble.
This is what Charles Schulz depicted with the Peanuts cartoon character Pigpen. He walks around with all kinds of dust and debris over his head, portraying a totally different kind of energy field—one that covers up the epic and the Eternal. It covers up the opportunity to be in a clear, strong field that’s made out of love.
We probably all love the syrupy, sappy kind of Love. I do. And Love is sweet. But Love is also strong. Love is uniting. Love is empowering. Love brings us together. Love makes us one. When we participate in a field that is powered by Love, we know one thing together and therefore know our oneness.
When someone comes along who is a beautiful expression of the power of Love, do you not feel drawn to it? It wasn’t hard to feel that with Megan Burkhart’s harp playing. I could feel myself in rhapsody over that beauty. I perceived others feeling that same thing, bringing us all together, drawn together by something we hold in common. It’s Love, and the expression of Love accurately, so that beauty is revealed. Beauty is Love revealed in artful expression, in form. How delightful! When any one of us brings that through, we are reminding all the rest of us what we hold in common.
We hold this uniting power of Love in common. And we feel it and touch it when it’s brought forth in beauty. That becomes a profound reminder of who we are. Do you feel committed to bringing that reminder yourself in some way? We each have that ability. We’re not all harpists—that’s for sure. But we each have an ability in our own way to be a clearing in the clouds to allow the cover-up of human culture to be dissipated so that the sun can shine through and be felt and known and realized.
Do you ever look around at the world as it is and think to yourself, This is impossible? I think a lot of people are saying that today. They’re looking at what’s transpiring in our culture and in politics, at what’s being done to the natural world, and just think, This is impossible. How could this ever change?
You might even feel that about your own life in some way, as if you’re at a dead end. There’s no way through this. What is the answer to all that? What is the answer for yourself? What is the answer for us collectively? What could change it?
They say we have all the technology we need to avert the human-created existential risks that seem to be in the offing. Whatever you look at—climate change, nuclear war, artificial intelligence, or anything else—we have the technology that’s needed to address these things. What’s lacking is the elevation of the spiritual knowledge at the heart of the human soul. And with that, there is a lack of collective will to address the issues of our day.
Individuals in the body of humanity have the will to fight each other, apparently, and the will to get what we think we need and want. But there is a lack of will to save ourselves collectively. Sure, everybody’s trying to save themselves individually, but the collective will isn’t present in harmony and unity to save humanity. It’s not hard to do. The issues at an outer level are nothing we couldn’t solve as human beings if we had the collective will. But there’s something inside that prevents us from accessing the wisdom and knowledge to do it.
So, what could be the remedy? What is the way through this? There is only one remedy, and we are at a time when we have to embrace that one remedy as a race or face disaster.
There is one thing that would be a game-changer in the human culture cover-up that has weakened our collective will and is making us impotent to address these existential risks. And it is what we’re talking about here—a transparency that reveals the Love that we hold in common, that’s behind the epic story of humankind. Love is our origin, our present reality, and our destiny. The remedy for humankind is the introduction of that eternal reality into human experience so that people are exposed to it through the high expression of that Love in beauty. But who will administer the remedy? And who will drink it in?
Love changes you. Love changes us like nothing else can. You can try to transform yourself with willpower. Even more futile, you can try to transform another person with willpower.
If I were giving marriage advice to Lana and Nick—which they have not asked me for—I would say, “Don’t do that!” It’s not will that transforms us. It’s not our ideas about what somebody else should do, what we ourselves should do, or even what we should all do collectively.
It’s not that which transforms us, ultimately. Yes, we need creative thought and inspiration, for sure. But it’s to no avail if we are not transformed by what’s within all of us—if we don’t get through this cover-up. And what is being covered up? I described it as something epic, something eternal, something timeless. It is Love. Love is the ultimate value.
Love finds expression in a relationship, so I’m including that. And yet, it transcends relationship.
Love is beyond definition. We could say things about it that suggest the nature of it. But you can’t define what Love is. And yet, if it lands in you, you know it. If you feel it and feel the urge to bring it into your world in whatever way—to another person, to whatever field you’re in—you know what it is. It’s intrinsic to who we are.
It is funny that we can be off looking for Love, but looking out beyond the place where it resides, which is right here inside ourselves, waiting for us to tune in to it, to know it, to let it reverberate through our being, let it guide us, let it express and radiate through us.
Sunrise Ranch is dedicated to the purpose of being a place where the cover-up is over, and this deeper reality is known and expressed, and radiated to the world. We have people who come through here week after week, month after month, year after year, who touch elements of a culture, the basis for which is not a cover-up but something else. And why? How did it get this way? It got this way because there were spiritual pioneers who came to this place in 1945 and knew what it was to live from the place of the Eternal and dedicated themselves to creating a culture built from that knowing—a culture that was not a cover-up. There have been people here down through the decades who’ve been dedicated to that ever since.
Is that the only thing going on here? As I like to tell people who come to Sunrise Ranch, people are people wherever you go. You don’t have to be here very long to figure that out. And so, people do what people do, and people come through this place over the years. And most, if not all, touch this transcendent culture that’s built out of what is timeless. All too often, the clouds come back in, so the cover-up continues for them.
Speaking of the ark, there is the outer shell. Presumably, Noah’s ark had planks, apparently sealed with pitch. Holding the planks must have been the internal framework—the ribs and the keel running from bow to stern at the bottom of the hull of the ark.
The vibrational ark is built in exactly the same way, except it is made out of vibrational form. There must be the internal framework to hold the field of energy and consciousness. That framework must be sturdy and incorruptible under stress, or there is nothing to hold the field.
We are that structure if we awaken to it. We are what holds the vibration of the ark in this culture, allowing eternal Love to live here. It is our tenacity to make it so that allows the ark to be a reality in human experience. Wherever you are, I invite you to know this to be true for you.
Good to share in this process together, to stop covering up, and to reveal the Eternal to each other. That’s what it means to be in deep relationship with another person and to be in spiritual community. Whatever is going on with that other person, however you might judge them—forget all that. If you are about to say something negative, bite your tongue. Change it. Reveal something beautiful. Show them something they haven’t seen before, in whatever way you might do it—through a word, a simple act of kindness, or some kind of creation, through a meal, through assisting with something. Part the clouds and end the cover-up.