Pulse of Spirit

The word home describes a reality at so many levels of experience. It can be embodied in a physical place. And yet it transcends the physical. We can be in a house we call home but feel alone and deserted. We can be in the middle of nowhere and know we are right where we are supposed to be, at one with the world around us.

When we create home, we are making something that is of a different quality than the surrounding world. We are creating an environment where our family, friends, or community can thrive—where life can continue and increase, where the creativity that’s within people can come forth and be welcomed.

In some sense, the whole earth is our home. And yet there are conflicting elements in the world. So our immediate home prepares us to meet those conflicts—to bring creativity to them so that they may shift and change, and flow in the cycles of Creation.

The quality of home is not just binary—either present or not. There are degrees to the experience of home. We don’t really know how profound the experience of home might be. We do know that the richer it is, the more it fosters the creativity and growth of the people within it.

Sunrise Ranch is like this. We are here to create a home that is not the same as everyplace else. It is a kind of environment where things can happen for people that couldn’t happen elsewhere. We are investing our spirit into making this home. According to the quality of the environment in ourselves or in what we’re sharing collectively, so is what can be created. If that environment is antithetical to creativity—if it’s not full of peace, welcome, and a surround of love—our ability to create is diminished.

Where there is an increase of appreciation, and an attitude of holding safe the atmosphere of home that we’re sharing, the best of people can come forward. This is what enlightened parents do when they’re creating a home, knowing that the way the child grows and develops depends on the surround of home that’s provided.

The same is true for us ourselves. There is an atmospheric context for our creativity. Any of us who engage in intensely creative activity, are about generating that atmosphere. We don’t just start out inventing, composing, designing, or whatever it is. We create an atmosphere, a context in our own thoughts and feelings, to prepare the way for something beautiful to be conceived in our mind and heart, and gestate. According to the nature of that atmosphere, so is what’s created.

There are many biblical ways of speaking about this. Jesus told people to go into their closet. I don’t know what closets looked like in Nazareth back in the day. But he invited people to leave the public world and go into some kind of private space so that something could happen for them in secret, as he put it. And in that secret place, something was conceived that could be born in the public space. But with no secret place for it to be conceived and gestated, it would have no opportunity to live in the world.

The 23rd Psalm contains the invitation to sit at the table in the presence of your enemies. We don’t like to think we’re in a world full of enemies, but sometimes it can seem like that. And if it does, don’t fail to sit at the table. Don’t fail to come to the place where there’s life and nourishment. That’s home, a vibrational place where you can receive spiritual renewal and inspiration. Because everything breaks down if that’s not going on. You face something in the outer that gets difficult, but then you don’t sit at the table? The more we are bringing creativity and regeneration to the world and facing what’s in the world, the more important it is to sit at the table, to be at home.

There are so many challenges that humanity is facing. I’ve spoken of the problem of loneliness now being recognized as a massive health problem around the world. They say that full-blown loneliness in somebody’s experience is the equivalent of smoking half a pack of cigarettes a day. Medical studies show a relationship between loneliness and declining cognitive ability, emotional numbness, and depression.

Today, more people are living alone than before, and there is a decline in friendships. In Japan, people are turning to hired actors as rental relatives to make up for social aloneness.

Society looks to many factors that might cause this manifestation of loneliness, and related problems. Could it be as simple as this: We are losing an ability to be spiritually at home, and to provide home for others?

The mental health of boys and young men is declining disproportionately at an alarming rate globally, with depression and anxiety increasing. I see in the public health statistics a dire need for real home, and a declining ability to provide a context where boys and young men can tap into their creative fire.

Home is a self-help solution. Anyone can access the reality of it within themselves. And once you do that, you can share that reality with another person. We create home because we are at home.

Do you ever notice a lack of being at home in yourself—a lack of ease, peacefulness, or a lack of enjoyment at being where you are, and being who you are? These are qualities of being, not qualities of achieving. We have to cultivate those qualities in ourselves if we are to know them. And we can cultivate them together.

How rich could home be for ourselves and for the people who come to be with us in our home? There is plenty to confront in the world in which we live. There is what is on the morning news and what’s in the world at large. You might want to pull your hair out sometimes just hearing what people get up to. Really? Really?

For the most part, we don’t have direct control over those things. We can end up fretting about them, and if there is something for us to do about them directly, let’s do it. I’m not against some kind of public action or political action. But if we’re fretting about things that we can’t do anything about and then ignoring what we can do something about, there is a problem. And home is within our power to create.

There came a time in late 1953 when Uranda had just finished a six-month Attunement course here at Sunrise Ranch. He was contemplating traveling around the country and to Canada to share what he was teaching. He sat down with people at Sunrise Ranch and said that what he would offer publicly would be no more effective than the quality of what was being shared spiritually in the kitchen at Sunrise Ranch, knowing that the kitchen was the heart of the home. He was absolutely convinced that he had no ability to go past what was happening in the home where he lived. And I believe that’s true for us all. It’s true of Sunrise Ranch today. We have no ability to project something into the world that goes past what we’re actually doing and sharing together.

But this isn’t just about Sunrise Ranch. It’s about all of us wherever we may be around the world. Whatever is happening there is the launch pad for what’s going forth from there.

The same applies to us as a global community. What we radiate into the world is not going past the quality of spiritual home we know together. What we’re sharing in our own individual homes is a vital component of it. Without that, there’s no integrity to our global community. The home that we know individually becomes part of a global spiritual home. According to the nature of that home—our connection with it, our participation in it, our contribution to it—so is our opportunity to bring spiritual regeneration to the world. When the reality of a global spiritual home is known by this community, we become a launching pad for a powerful radiation of Spirit in the world.

Years ago, when I was living in New York, Martin Cecil had been leading the Emissaries for decades. He was not a man of huge physical stature. But he was a spiritual giant. From week to week, he spoke words that came out in print, in videos, and on teleconferences. His words carried the substance of Spirit into the world.

I had the experience of those words, along with many other people, because I was on the receiving end of his communication to the world. The words themselves were beautiful and true. They carried spiritual power because he had invested his own spirit in those words—and not only his spirit, but the spirit of Sunrise Ranch and the entire community of Emissaries of Divine Light. So when you opened a mailing or listened to a recording, it was like opening a present. The gift inside was the spiritual energy being shared by a body of people.

Sadly, when Martin left, I noticed, along with others, a decrease in wattage. We didn’t have his own personal stature in the world anymore. But also, we didn’t have his leadership bringing the global community together, so the community’s energy level was not invested in the words at the same level. You received the words and wondered: Where’s the wattage?

It was a sad day for many of us, as you can imagine. And so, there were some of us who decided we had to do something about it. We had to become more conscious of what it was he was doing and learn how to do it on a deliberate, conscious basis ourselves. We had to invest our words with spiritual energy. We had to gather and focus the spiritual energy of this community and give it a voice.

When someone drives up to Sunrise Ranch, we can give them a good meal, a smile, say hello, and maybe give them a hug. With people who are part of our global community, those opportunities are not usually open to us. A meal doesn’t transport so easily over the miles, but a word does. And so, we invest our words with spiritual power—the power of inspiration, upliftment, encouragement and hope, and the blessing of home.

Words have a mental component to them, and the mental component is important. But if the words have value, it’s because they’re invested with the spiritual substance of the people who utter them, and that undergirds the words.

We are here for this, yes? We’re here to be at home, and to know home. It feels good to be at home. It’s healthy for us individually and together to be at home. But there’s something else that happens. Home becomes the launching pad for our creative radiation into the world.

We are here for that, I believe. We are inviting people to be at home with us. And then we are bringing into the world the message and the vibration that emanates from this home. It’s a message of victory, not because we fought a battle and won. It is the victory of creative living in the face of whatever nonsense is going on in the world in which we live. In the face of that, we’ve gone into our closet. We’ve sat down at the table. And so, we’ve known the victory, the nourishment, and the creativity that is ours to know and to bring to the world.

This biblical quote is about bringing the answer the world is unconsciously looking for. It’s from John in Revelation 15:2

And I saw as it were a sea of glass mingled with fire: and them that had gotten the victory over the beast, and over his image, and over his mark, and over the number of his name, stand on the sea of glass, having the harps of God.

I take particular note of the reference to victory over the beast. There is all the beastly stuff that goes on in the world. The victory over isn’t a vanquishing. I’m not interested in conquering the beast. I’m interested in having a victory in a world that has beasts in it—living the victory, being the victory, bringing the answer.