Pure Consciousness

I have a love-hate relationship with Facebook. I won’t get into the hate part, but I met a friend on Facebook some months ago, and that’s been lovely. Her name is Audrey Williams, and she is a truth teller.

Audrey sent me something a day or two ago. It was a reference to a post that she’d entitled “The Power of Love is the Strongest Force in the Universe.” In that post, she addressed squarely the issue of our day. So, I asked her if I could read from what she wrote, and she said, “Yes.” And then I invited Audrey to join us this morning, which she has.

Welcome, Audrey, and thank you for this piece. And let me read from it with all the passion I feel about what you have said.

We will never return to the way things were—nor should we. What is too often
forgotten is that millions have endured injustice, aggression, domination, control,
and discrimination—forces that threatened our very existence and robbed us of the
quality of life every human being deserves.

And yet, you were silent. Many of you still are. That silence echoes like thunder in
the depths of my being. Our house is on fire, yet some remain numb, semi-comatose,
paralyzed with fear, or simply turning away from the suffering of the most
vulnerable—in Palestine, in Los Angeles, and here in Santa Barbara.

Has privilege—our elite educations, our high-yield investments, our financial
comfort—numbed our souls? Even as we proclaim that “we are all one family” and
that “love is the answer,” we stifle our emotions, severing ourselves from the ground
of our Being.

We will not survive this moment in history unless we recognize it for what it truly is—
a spiritual crisis. At its core, it is about our humanity: our capacity for radical
generosity, radical kindness, and our willingness to awaken. The future will be
shaped by our ability to remember who we are—our connection to our own souls, to
each other, to all living beings, and to the Earth itself.

This future demands that we relinquish our obsession with “I, Me, and Mine.” Our
assignment is clear: transcend race and cultural divisions, release our addiction to
partisan politics and rigid religious identities, and become citizens of the world.
To embody love in the everyday moments of our lives will cost us something—
nothing less than everything we have, perhaps even our very lives. While most of us
will never face the choice to die so another might live, we must live each moment
willing to give all.

There is no power greater than who we can become—together—in fearless,
wholehearted service to all.

Ase’
Aho’
Namaste’

The word “Ase'” (pronounced ah-SHAY) originates from the Yoruba language, spoken by the Yoruba people of West Africa, primarily Nigeria.

Thank you, Audrey, for these powerful words that cut like a knife through the confusion of our culture. Culture is a fascinating thing. I described it last week as a dog’s breakfast. It’s a mixed bag. There is so much that is beautiful in our culture. I believe that every enlightened thought, teaching, and experience from down through the ages is still present in our culture. The Buddha’s enlightenment is in the air. The words of the Christ reverberate in the culture. The awakened awareness of the ancients is still present. You can still touch it in the culture.

And still, culture is a mixed bag. It’s all that beauty, all that awakened awareness, and all that comes with it. We can find something that seems good and right and noble, and worth embracing. But along with it comes all the rest of what’s in human culture—all the corruption, all the I, me, mine self-obsession, as Audrey put it. All the self-servingness, all the fear.

So, if we try to live out of culture, we self-sabotage. Culture is not pure. At best, it can connect us to something that is pure, and in connecting to what’s pure, we can bring that through consciousness, allowing ourselves to become aware of it, to bathe in it, to drink it in. And then, letting in that tranquility, that pure love, that light, that truth, we can bring it into the world—express it, manifest it, and bring it into the culture.

The culture must be responsive to pure consciousness. We cannot have our consciousness responsive to culture and driven to fear, uncertainty, and anxiety by the factors of the culture. If we bring pure consciousness to the culture, we are bringing a powerful influence. We are facing squarely the spiritual crisis of our day. In a time such as this, we are giving special conscious attention to these things. But we can lay it down every moment of our lives. We can lay it down with each other. We can lay it down in the world in which we live.

Audrey’s words remind me of Jesus’ saying:

Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.

—John 15:13

Audrey said it so beautifully. Not too many of us are called to actually give up our lives, but we are called to lay down our lives, be the truth that we know, and live a life of service.

One of the presentations I attended at the Holistic Wellness Immersion was from Ed Goodman, a remarkable man who is part of the development team for Sunrise Ranch. Ed has had an incredible career. Among many other things, he was part of a thinktank for Disney. They conceived Disney projects from theme parks of all kinds, to ESPN, and more.

Ed learned from this imaginative process. From it, he and his brother Dave developed what they call Spiral Thinking, which is about imagining the future.

Ed inspires people to live in the future. I don’t think it’s actually possible to live in the future from the standpoint of physical time as we know it. But I believe he was pointing to the need to open up our awareness to the potential of our future for the essence of that potential to be born into the world in which we live.

We can fight with what is, or we can tune in to what can be. And when what can be is known and expressed, it is a challenge to what is.

We are opening up to something that is flowing to us, and at the same time, we are rushing to meet it. That’s an experience of pure consciousness. Pure consciousness is known when a person enters pure love.

Will you find pure love in the world? Love is there, but it’s mixed with other things. And so, it is not pure. But we can open up to a flow of pure love coming through us. That is pure.

We can open up to divine intelligence and, with that, have a clear mind, a mind full of the essence of potentiality. These are all elements of pure consciousness.

Biblically, it’s put two ways. This first one I’ll reference describes it in vertical terms:

And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven…

—Revelation 21:2

It pictures the essence of the future descending from above.

The story of Creation says it differently. It speaks about it in terms of time and the horizontal.

And the LORD God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed.

—Genesis 2:8

People have been looking for Eden for ages. But most significantly, this verse is speaking of the architecture of the spiritual reality in which we live, not geography. The east is the place of the rising sun, the place of our future.

Most people are waiting for a new future to come to them on the conveyor belt of time, only to find that it never comes. Ed talked about moving into the future and living in the future, not waiting for it to come. As I see it, this is not a matter of time travel, at least not in the usual sense. It is about deliberately placing your conscious awareness in a realm that is present here and now, and which holds the essence of future possibility. Then that essence can move through consciousness and into the realm of action that brings manifestation. This is how we become ancestors of the future, as Julia Butterfly Hill describes us.

This is not the common human experience. What tends to happen is people keep recycling the culture. And this is not a good form of recycling. People take in the mixed bag of culture, stir it up inside themselves, and express a new version of all that. But really, it is not new. It is recycled, perhaps with the person’s own special little sauce sprinkled on it.

If we are doing that, we are living out of culture and not out of pure consciousness. We are recycling the culture in which we live, perhaps reacting to things in the culture as we do. But that only empowers the elements we react to. We can be present with them, bringing something more powerful than the culture—pure consciousness.

So, let us be in that garden planted eastward in Eden. Let’s be there in heart. Let’s be there in mind. Let’s share that. Let’s express that to one another. Let’s bring it into the world. Let’s fulfill our destiny, the calling to be creators.