Personhood

I want to speak a blessing over all those who contributed to this conference, Re-Membering Our Shared Future, at the Monkey Valley Resort in Chapman’s Peak, South Africa. I speak a blessing over Orland Bishop, a wondrous man with a wondrous message for the world. I speak a blessing over Charles Eisenstein, who, with great courage and great faith, brought an uplifting message to the world, and over all the people who organized the conference, and most of all to Anna-Lise Bure and her friends who held this intergenerational conference in the field of anthroposophy. Please join me in the spirit of blessing for all.

As we were gathering tonight, listening to Michael Gaeta’s piano, and then listening to Patricia Gursu’s wondrous invocation, I felt tremendous comfort moving in this space that we are sharing. Comfort. The word has to do with strengthening. And there is a soothing quality to comfort.

Jesus said he would send another Comforter. I give thanks for Lloyd Arthur Meeker, who was a living embodiment of the Comforter, as are we. We are the Comforter. It is so apparent that we are bringing the Comforter into the world, the Spirit of Truth.

What day is it? We can mark the day according to the calendars of human culture. What time is it? We can look at our watches, or these days, our phones. What time is it?

We are those who mark the calendar according to heavenly cycles and our awareness of what is moving in the cycles of Creation. We mark time according to our knowledge, in the now, of what time it is. This is the time for all things to be made new. This is the time for the recreation of consciousness, which is transpiring now. This is the time to be a sun.

So, we enter the human calendar and the human world from the perspective of what is above human time, which is cosmic time and the cosmic calendar.

This conference was about remembering our shared future—remembering that we come from the future. We come from the future to meet what is coming from out of the past into the present moment. We bring the future of this world into the present, that there may be the evolution of what is present to allow it to become all of what it is meant to become.

We are here for this. We do not deny our human roots, our human soul, and our presence in this world with feet planted firmly on the ground. And we would not deny where we come from. We come from the future to bring the future to humanity, starting with our own humanity.

Humanity is on an evolutionary journey. There are many dimensions to that journey. We are particularly interested in the spiritual evolution of humankind, which is so obviously necessary. In that evolution, there is a healing of something that broke. If we look around at the natural world, it is not broken in the natural world, though it is degraded by human presence in many ways. The primal bond with the Creator is not broken in the natural world, but it broke for us as humankind. And therefore, there is a need for spiritual evolution and, in that, a healing of the primal bond for humankind and for every member of humankind.

We are here to foster that evolution and that healing. That takes a path that begins at the most basic level of physical experience, where there is a physical embodiment and representation of our divine potential. As it is represented at the physical level, that is the most obvious. You can see it after all. You can hear it. It is right there in front of you at a physical level.

As spiritual evolution continues, there is a movement of the creative cycle for us as humanity. And so, the level at which all of this comes into focus in the now ascends in the human experience so that the philosophy that is rightly our understanding of Reality is brought forth at a mental level. As the cycle is moved on, it unfolds at the level of what we call spiritual expression—in other words, the spiritual nature of a human being. Something has been brought through the spiritual nature of humanity and is presented at that level of things. We are, right now, in the process of doing exactly that: introducing a rebirth of the human spirit.

That does not ignore our mental experience. So there has to be a rebirth of thought, and the rebirth of spirit inspires the rebirth of thought and the rebirth of the physical experience and the physical manifestation of us as humanity.

There is an ascending quality to our spiritual evolution, and necessarily so, to put the whole picture back in place. That process of evolution has been transpiring, and it continues. The challenging thing about it is that the higher it moves, the more difficult it is for humanity to relate to it. Humanity, which tends to be looking down at the outer factors of the world in which we live, tends to be buried in the past. And so, humanity finds it more and more difficult to relate to where the cycle is moving.

I think that is something for us to be aware of, because it becomes incumbent on us to be in the now, bringing the future to humanity, and then express that future potential at all levels of the human experience so that at a mental level, the ideas, the thoughts that are born out of the spiritual evolution that we are knowing, can be shared and can be related to.

At a physical level, there are manifestations of where we are at another level. We are not just ascending on out of here. We are deliberately grounding what we know at all levels of the human experience.

I think of the story of Hansel and Gretel. What did they leave along the path as they were walking through the forest? Breadcrumbs to find their way home. What we express and embody, mentally and physically, are breadcrumbs that lead to something else—what is being reborn in the human spirit.

And it doesn’t stop there. That is not the final level in this process of spiritual evolution. There is an opening at the level of the heart that is absolutely necessary in this process, so that the heart becomes a sea of glass, and higher levels of experience can come through that sea of glass and then fire the human spirit. Ultimately, what has to happen is that there is the Presence of Spirit that is known by human beings—the Presence of God, by whatever name.

That word, Presence, is interesting. It could connote many things. It is said that God is a spirit. We could well say God is an energy. We could say God is consciousness. God is all those things, just as we are all those things. But there is something more than that which the word Presence begins to name. But even the word Presence can be somewhat amorphous, conceived as something vaporous.

But it is the Presence of Being. And I want to use another word only because it is the best word I have for what I am naming—personhood. The universe is not just filled with energy and matter, and not only filled with Spirit.

All of this brings us to something even more fundamental. The universe is not just something. It is someone. This Planet Earth is not just something; it is someone. It is the expression of someone. From an angelic standpoint, it is an expression of collective selfhood. The Earth is the expression and embodiment of someone, not just something.

It is not typically thought of this way, but one of the magnificent teachings that came out of Jesus’s life and ministry is in his relationship to God, not just as some supreme power, but as personhood: Abba. Father. The Father is not just a power. He is not just a Spirit. The name refers to someone. Jesus related to the personhood of Divine Being.

And something happens for a human being when they acknowledge the personhood of the Divine. They are given their personhood. It is reciprocity. It is divine justice. We are given back our personhood when we acknowledge the personhood of the planet on which we live.

Humanity is largely unaware of the personhood of the Planet and lacks respect for it. How else could we live on this planet as we do? And then that lack of acknowledgment and honoring of personhood comes back to us, and we end up not honoring the personhood of each other and not having our personhood known, even by ourselves.

We are here to change that. We are here to acknowledge and honor the personhood of Divine Being, the personhood of this planet. That personhood is characterized by Spirit. And most essentially, as Patricia so beautifully referenced in her prayer, by the Spirit of the Highest Love. That is the character of this planet and the focus of the beingness of this planet and the beingness of humankind—the spirit of Supreme Love.

We can acknowledge such things without attributing human personality. I think you know that is not what I am talking about. I am not talking about making God over in our own image and likeness, in the image and likeness of human personality. That has been done for millennia. I am not talking about that. I am talking about an acknowledgement of the personhood of Divine Being that is what it is and is who it is, not limited by human definition.

Anne-Lise Bure: Thank you, David. One of the aspects we honored today was the personhood of the One who gave everything to Abba and for us all on this Planet as one family. We are all willing to do that, I am sure, because we are stepping into a new cycle altogether. Thank you.

David Karchere: He honored the personhood of the One he called his Father. And thus, he came to know fully for himself his own personhood without any doubt. And then, he did something else. He told us who we are. But it cannot be received if we are not willing to accept the personhood of Divine Being. We cannot deny it for Divine Being and then try to grab it for ourselves.

We know our own personhood when we grant it to Divine Being and relate to Divine Being as that and then relate to each other as that. And then we come to know the reality of personhood for ourselves.

Blessings on everyone who is in my home, Sunrise Ranch. Blessings on us all around the world. May we continue to bring the Comforter into human experience. It is so clear to me that that is what we are doing.

Thank you. Thank you.