Pulse of Spirit

Have you ever noticed how some of the most profound spiritual messages are poetry? Or perhaps not literal poetry, but highly poetic? Think of the Sufi poets, Hafiz, Rumi, and others.

Change rooms in your mind for a day.
All the hemispheres in existence
Lie beside an equator
In your heart. 

Hafiz

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
There is a field. I’ll meet you there. 

Rumi

Or the Psalms.

He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters. 

Psalm 23:2

Why is this so? Why do we need metaphors from the physical world and the rhythm of speech to convey a spiritual truth?

When you think about it, the answer is simple. Spirituality is about becoming aware of a range of experience that is largely unfamiliar in contemporary culture. So there is a limited knowledge base to refer to when attempting to speak of the spiritual. It’s like describing the color blue to someone who can’t see. Perhaps there are words like truth, love, the Tao, or Christ that people are familiar with. But for most people, even those words alone do not fully evoke an awareness of what they represent.

People are familiar with the physical world around them. And because there is, in truth, no separation between the physical and spiritual, a person who knows both, to whatever degree, can speak of the physical in a way that evokes an awareness of a reality that transcends it. Good poetry does that, even though there is a lot of popular poetry today that does nothing more than portray human tragedy and angst. Good poetry connects to the heart and to the soul and communicates something that we intuitively understand. It reminds us of things that we know already, but have often forgotten.

You might call poetry the art of spirituality. There is, as well, the science of spirituality—statements of foundational principles of how life works. As above, so below. The Law of Cause and Effect. The Law of Attraction. But without poetry—the art of spirituality—it is hard to come to any real understanding of spiritual things.

This is a factor in why spiritual teachings and religion around the world seem to be speaking about different things. Everyone is using a different metaphor—different mental and physical symbols for a spiritual reality. So, if you don’t know any better, you might think they are contradicting each other. But they aren’t. There is only one Reality to speak about, and it doesn’t change just because you use a different metaphor for it, or a different name.

Even within the Bible, there are different patterns of symbology used. There are numerous names for God, from the Lamb to Jehovah-Jireh, to Father, to Christ, and many more. Each name emphasizes different attributes of the Divine, and yet they all name Divine Being.

Here is a metaphor that extends through the Old and New Testaments, even the Book of Revelation at the end of the Bible, which includes a prophetic depiction of events to come. To turn, and to return. These two words are related in the physical world and in our spiritual life. It is couched in somewhat different terms in different places. Yet a metaphor that denotes the physical action of turning and then returning shows up throughout.

In last week’s Pulse of Spirit, I wrote about the Hebrew word teshuvah. It means “return,” and it appears in one form or another nearly 1,000 times in the Torah, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible that also appear in the Old Testament.

It seems highly likely that Jesus’ gospel referenced the same idea. Return. It has been translated this way from Aramaic:

From then on, Yeshua began to preach and to say, “Return to God, for The Kingdom of Heaven has come near.” 

Peshitta Holy Bible Translated

He was echoing the words of his cousin, John, who was baptizing followers in the Jordon River. I can imagine John the Baptist wandering through what’s called a wilderness. In actuality, it was north of the Dead Sea, a barren part of the world. I can picture him calling out to people, Return, for The Kingdom of Heaven is here.

The beloved disciple, John, put it this way in the Book of Revelation:

I was in the Spirit on the Lord’s day, and heard behind me a great voice, as of a trumpet… 

And I turned to see the voice that spake with me. 

Revelation 1:10,12

John turned to face the source of the voice, which he described with another bit of poetry: as of a trumpet.

The 23rd Psalm says this:

Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies:

Psalm 23:5

Partaking of the food at the table requires turning from the enemies to the table of food, another metaphor for turning.

The feast on the table and the “voice as of a trumpet “are the same thing, portrayed by different metaphors. If you turn to the table you can ingest the feast. If you open yourself to the “voice, as of a trumpet,” the vibration of it can enter you.

We live in a world where that tone has been sounding since time began. It’s the tone of Creation that is the power of Creation. Apparently, it has not stopped. We’re here. The world is here. The tremendous and awesome power of Creation is present.

From one perspective, that power is atomic energy. It’s the energy of the atoms of this planet, including our own atoms. At that level, there are fantastic amounts of atomic power at work. It constellates at higher and higher and more and more complex forms of life—minerals, vegetables, animal life, and human life. It’s all constellated from atomic energy, which is the power of the universe at work here.

And yet that power of the universe has constellated into a voice that speaks that power and the truth of it into the world through people who have awoken to it—people who have turned and heard the voice. They opened to it. They experienced it and then they spoke it.

I want to offer a way of looking at human history. It’s largely the story of human beings being unconsciously activated by this vibrational power of Creation. The power is at work in everybody’s atoms. Nobody’s exempt. Take the person you might consider to be the most evil person in the world. The atomic power is at work. In some cases, it’s driving them crazy. And so you might say they are crazy.

All human civilization has been activated by this power. In fact, there is nothing else by which to be activated. So people are activated by it, sometimes bouncing off the walls, not really knowing what direction to move. This is the great majority of human history, up to this very day. There is a gradual evolution of consciousness and culture as people react to the creative vibration they are feeling. They are in the world of effects being activated by the Creator.

Few there are who hear the vibration as it is constellating relative to human consciousness. So people don’t turn and they don’t let it in.

The vibration of Creation contains the source code for a human being and for Planet Earth. It is the vibration of the Divine, the vibration of the Creator. When we let it in, we receive its power at a level that empowers our human soul. Letting it in, we receive the knowledge it contains for us. This is not the level of atomic power that fuels a nuclear reactor or an atomic bomb. It is a configuration of atomic power that renews and enlightens humankind. So, we become a human embodiment of the “voice as of a trumpet.” When we are, we become part of a lineage of awake human beings through the ages. We are no longer predominately living in the world of effects, being activated unconsciously by the vibration of the Creator. We have crossed the threshold to live in the world of Cause—the kingdom of heaven where the Creator is.

We turn, we hear the voice as a trumpet, and then we sound the trumpet. We are that trumpet in the world. And so we become part of a different kind of history, the history of Creation. We join that lineage. The creative vibration we touch into and express has an impact on human consciousness, unlike the unconscious reactions to the creative vibration that has characterized the history of human society for millennia. I am not diminishing the efforts of anybody or the significance of what is happening in our world at large. And still, everything changes when there are conscious people who sound the clear tone of the vibration of the Creator in the middle of it all.

That clear tone contains the truth for humankind. Not just the truth of Emissaries of Divine Light or Sunrise Ranch. Not a Christian truth, a Jewish truth, or an Islamic one. The vibration of the Creator heard and expressed by a human being, contains the truth of us all.

This atomic power, configuring at the level of human awareness, is the Spirit of God, the Spirit of the Creator, at work in human experience. Let us give voice to that Spirit. Let us be that voice as of a trumpet.