Pulse of Spirit

In shamanic traditions, people speak of walking between worlds. This can mean that a person is walking between the visible and the invisible. Sometimes it is thought that the role of the shaman in walking between worlds is to recover what has been lost.

The gateway between the visible and the invisible has been known by many names—the crossover point, the veil, the door, or the mountaintop. Each name carries different shades of meaning. But we shouldn’t be confused by thinking they are speaking of different realities.

In his prophetic folk anthem from 1963, The Times They Are a-Changin’, Bob Dylan wrote these words:

Come senators, congressmen,
Please heed the call.
Don’t stand in the doorway,
Don’t block up the hall.

I wouldn’t pretend to know what doorway or hall Bob Dylan was imagining. But he probably wasn’t talking about a physical place. I see the doorway as the place between the worlds. In other terms, it is the gateway to the kingdom of heaven, the place where a person enters an experience of the world of Spirit, and the place where the creative realities of Spirit emerge into the human world. It is the place between worlds.

Dylan’s verse perhaps reminds me of an ancient utterance. This was from Jesus of Nazareth at a climactic time in his life and his service to the world, 2,000 years ago. It’s clear from his language that he had reached a point of exasperation with some of the people in his world.

But woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye shut up the kingdom of heaven against men: for ye neither go in yourselves, neither suffer ye them that are entering to go in. 

Matthew 23:13

It sounds like there were people who were standing in the doorway between heaven and earth.

We might say that this is the human condition as a whole. While humanity has the potential to be an open door to the experience of heaven, it is not, in the world as it is. But for the average person, the matter is not sharply at issue. In fact, you might say that the average person is nowhere near the door. They are not aware it exists. And they are too busy with the affairs of the visible world to notice that there is an opportunity to enter into an experience of the invisible one.

Others have assumed a role of responsibility in the matter. They have been called to find the door and to enter it, and then to be an open door for others—to lead in that way.

Bob Dylan had senators and congressmen pegged for the role of leadership. While there have been a few politicians who have been exceptional leaders, most of us aren’t looking to them as shamans who walk between worlds.

The real issue is when people are called to keep the door between heaven and earth open, but end up standing in the doorway and blocking the way to the heavenly halls—when people deprive themselves of the heavenly experience and don’t make it available to others who look to them as leaders. Or who would look to them if they did, in fact, lead. They shut up the kingdom of heaven for anyone who is looking toward them to find it.

The spiritual journey is sometimes portrayed as ascending a mountain. At the mountaintop, a person can look down into the valleys all around. They are at the top of the world. At the same time, they are at the bottom of the heavens above—the sun, moon, and stars. Symbolically, they are at the connection point between worlds.

In that place, we touch the wonder and the glory of the source of love itself, the power of the universe that moves planets and stirs the human heart. There’s a wisdom that’s available to us there, a constant knowing of something that is leading us intelligently into greater and greater life.

Have you ever seen someone come to a high place like that and then lose their foothold? Lose their vision and their touching of the heavens? For those who have come to a high place, it’s possible, without even knowing it, to come to a place of complacency where the vibrant connection between what’s higher, the creative source of life, the wisdom of the universe that’s available to us at the mountaintop to fade. We can end up becoming dull, unaware, and wandering around, instead of allowing the ongoing flow of what comes out of the Invisible—that profound love, that knowing, which can come into us and flow into the world.

At the same time, at the mountaintop, we can allow the visible world to ascend through us—to be purified in our praise and thanksgiving and lifted up to the heavens. But hardly realizing it is happening, we can end up standing in the doorway and blocking the halls, with little ascending up through us to the Invisible.

You might say that the people of our world could enter the kingdom of heaven regardless of the scribes or Pharisees or anybody else. And that’s true. Nonetheless, when we are called to walk between the worlds and make what is of the kingdom of heaven available because we enter that kingdom in ourselves, and then we become apathetic about that—spiritually sleepy—we end up clogging the gateway that could be there through us for our culture and the world in which we live.

In the next to the last public talk offered by Martin Cecil, he spoke about this spiritual community, Emissaries of Divine Light, as a door.

A door has indeed been opened in heaven. I would like to say a word about this in connection with a name: Emissaries of Divine Light, or in abbreviated form, EDL. Many people talk about EDL without really knowing what they are talking about. I would suggest that EDL is a door. 

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A door is useful because it can be opened. It is most useful when it is scarcely visible. One can then move easily in and out through the doorway, which was previously blocked by the door. Would it be helpful if Emissaries of Divine Light changed its name to “The East Gate,” for instance? If a person really begins to recognize that EDL is a name given to a form that composes a door capable of being opened, then there might be less concern about the design of the door, if one accepted the fact that its value was in being open. And when it is open it is scarcely visible at all. It is only visible and therefore subject to human judgment when it is closed to the person who judges. There would be no judgment at all if it was open because there would be no door apparent, just the space through which there might be movement back and forth.

EDL: The Door, December 13, 1987

So if we find ourselves, in some way, standing in the doorway as a shut door, what are we to do? Dylan urged the senators and congressmen to get out of the way. That is a solution to the problem for anyone. But not a very satisfactory one. Isn’t it far better to open the door? Or to put it in other terms, to stop being opaque and become transparent? That happens for us when we enter the Invisible and allow it to enter us. And then our invitation to others to do the same is automatic.

When we walk between worlds, we are on a recovery mission. We are recovering our own soul and assisting others to do the same. Here is something else we are recovering—the Invisible Temple. It is a reality in heaven. It is a dwelling place, a vibrational home, where the inner reality of us all belongs.

It is the place from which we have come and the place to which we’ll go. But you don’t have to leave to know it now. All the feelings of a desire for home, for family, for love and friendship, for community, and even nationhood, are born from this reality. But without an awareness of the Invisible Temple, none of the world realities can reach a point of fulfillment.

Where do those desires come from? An awareness of the Invisible Temple, perhaps not vividly present in consciousness, but somewhere within us we are aware that there is a Temple that’s hovering. It is our rightful dwelling place in life, a place where we have our being, a place where we have our appointed place, where we know our citizenship in the kingdom of heaven. As someone who is walking between worlds, I am recovering the Temple.

I grasp for words to somehow try to capture our appointed place in that Temple. We are a priest or priestess, an honored king or queen, a knight or lady of that realm, an esteemed member of that royal family, a treasured child of the kingdom.

That’s how we know ourselves when we enter the kingdom and walk between worlds. I am not taken up with imagination about such things. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about a spiritual awareness of the presence of a reality that is normal and natural for us to have as a human family. And when we bring an awareness of that reality into this world, we do create friendships, families, communities, and nations, because they’re all implicit in the Invisible Temple in which we live. And so, knowing that Temple, it’s natural to come together as a community of people, or as a nation. It is very natural for people around the world to come together, as we are right now in this eternal moment, wherever you may be, because our togetherness is being constellated out of a higher reality that we are knowing and expressing, embodying, and allowing to manifest.

We are remembering—remembering in the sense of recalling, but then remembering in the sense of being members of something that is being re-constellated among us in life. That is what is happening in this community. There is a remembering going on.

And so we offer this proclamation:

People of the world! People of the Middle East! People of Iran! People of Israel! Wake up to this! Wake up to this!  

All people, wherever you may be! Wake up to the Temple which is the rightful dwelling place for us all. Dwell in that place inside yourself. And then, immediately begin to dwell in that place among us all. 

So may it be.