I’ve always been in awe of a musician who can play masterfully and offer passionate beautiful music. It is a discipline. I’ve had occasions to listen to the local high school band, and I could tell that many of the students who were in their junior and senior year had probably been playing since they were about ten years old. The expertise and the complicated music they were playing was inspiring. It’s been said the best time to plant a tree was thirty years ago. Well, the best time to learn how to play the piano or the flute was probably thirty years ago as well. And we can enjoy beginning a new adventure of learning how to play now. I feel I receive a huge gift from the disciplined masterful playing of a trained musician. It is the gift from someone who decided to stay at it and allow something grand to move through them and their instrument.

How about our instrument, our tone? Can we say that about our own expression? Are we paying attention to what’s coming through this instrument, and is it as grand as it could be? We have the opportunity to express that grandness, that mastery, every day. We have the opportunity to practice and increase our discipline. Many of us have had thirty years or more to hone the expression through our physical instrument. Some less but we all have had time to practice and improve.

Our expression is dependent on our consciousness. Our mind and our heart belong in the highest home. This is where creative thought and passionate feeling reside. Our magnificence resides there. The message expressed from that realm by one person can touch another person and result in them knowing that highest home in themselves. If you explore some reverse engineering, that message is an expression of the knowing, the philosophy of life, of the person speaking. It is connected to the resonance experienced, that which is felt and shared from a place of intimacy. That intimacy is initially known in the consciousness of a person with their inmost being. When that is touched it resonates with all of Being. From that resonance comes a knowing of how life works, a philosophy, and then there is the delivery of the message. It is all connected. People experience this connection through music that is beautifully played. It is also known through words passionately spoken.

When someone initially has that experience in the presence of another who is bringing that message, there is the opportunity to travel backwards to the intimate space from which the process began. When going in reverse, the intimacy can be known as it is encoded in the message. It takes some deliberate consideration, but I find the touching of the resonance of home piques the longing in every human heart.

I have seen children, and some adults as well, taking things apart just to figure out how they work. This also happens when a person touches something that intrigues them and they want to know “How does that person do that?” “How do they know that steady assurance?”

We all know words are cheap. I could stand here and read someone else’s passionate words. But if they don’t have my passion in them they will be dry and unmoving. They will not be connected to the intimate place of my home. The opposite is also true. I could fill written words with my heart and make them my own, filled with my knowing from that intimate home. A person does not need to be highly educated or trained as a speaker to reveal their heart and touch another. They only need to be in touch with their heart and share the resonance that is present in that sacred home. So the way it starts is in the intimate place, the most secret place of what I know is true. I end up being resonant with that, and with anyone and everything else that knows that. And from there, I know the philosophy of how everything works and, when I speak, my words carry that tone. That’s true for everybody. So what’s the tone that’s actually coming through you? And what do you know in your most intimate place?

Here is a quote from Lao Tzu that speaks about the power of this kind of discipline:

If there is to be peace in the world,
There must be peace in the nations.

If there is to be peace in the nations,
There must be peace in the cities.

If there is to be peace in the cities,
There must be peace between neighbors. 

If there is to be peace between neighbors,
There must be peace in the home.

If there is to be peace in the home,
There must be peace in the heart.

In the secret place of the most intimate knowing, there must be peace. I know many people longing for the experience of home but don’t know how to find their way to peace in their own heart. And so they keep seeking it elsewhere. They keep thinking if they find the right house, if they find the right partner, if they find the right job, etc., they’ll find peace in their heart. There’s a line from a Hafiz poem that says:

Should not all of our suffering and sadness
Be like this:

As just dropped from an infant’s palm
That is asleep against the breast
Of God?

Can you visualize that? A child falls asleep against the breast of his mother or father and just lets it go. That’s what happens in the intimate space in communion with all of Being. We just let go, our clenched fist that is holding all our confusion and judgment opens and let’s go.

There is such a longing in the human experience to know peace and to know joy. A longing to know home. And there is a longing to know how to create it. Yet we continue to do things that are not in resonance with how life works, and so our message to the world is “Life doesn’t work.” We keep proving it over and over again by not going to the place where life does work. We stay in the place where we’re fighting with how life works, and then putting out the message “See? See? I told you. See?” There is no peace there. There is no peace in the heart of that person. They’re spending an incredible amount of energy proving that they’re right, that life doesn’t work.

Last week I took a walk down the road at Sunrise Ranch and I went up to a place where there used to be a building called Foundation House. We ended up tearing it down many years ago. What I noticed is you can hardly tell that Foundation House was ever there. Life and the Earth and the design of this planet keeps creating in the design of the planet. It doesn’t really care that there was a house there once. It just keeps doing what it does, growing trees and wildflowers. Life keeps happening. The trees here in Colorado are declaring spring is on its way. The process continues from seed to bud to leaf and blossom. The leaves for my tulips are up, the daffodils are blooming, the crocuses are showing themselves. Human beings, out of sync with that reality, are continuing to deny life and destroy the world. Yes, we can do that! Why do we do that? You know, it’s been said one nuclear bomb could ruin your day. But there are a lot of things human beings do that can ruin your day. Every time a human being is deciding to do something out of sync with how life works, it continues to create hell and havoc and more of the same.

Hafiz says, “The earth braces itself for the feet of a lover of God about to dance.” I’m braced; I’m ready. Are you ready to dance? Just go to that intimate space and let go.

Go to the secret, intimate place within. Practice the discipline of going there on purpose. Breathe in and know that sacred place. That which is animating you is in total agreement with Universal Being; it is resonant with life. Live from there. Let those essences fill your body so that your flesh reveals it. See it all around you so that you can be in a resonant field with people who also are interested in knowing it more and more in the cells of their being. Create a way to live together.

Sunrise Ranch has been here for seventy-one years. Do you think that’s just luck? I tell you it’s not. No matter what, we have had a consistent group of people saying, “We will live in the intimacy of God and let that resonance keep this place sacred, no matter what.” And I’m here to say I’m doing it today. And I invite anybody who wants to do it with me to do it with me. Even if we have an argument, we can go back to that agreement. We can have challenging conversations about our thinking and look at things anew from the place of that inner resonance and that deep intimacy.

Let the truth be revealed because we have the wisdom to step into the conversation from the place of intimacy, and bring the resonance that will allow the truth to be known.

I have participated at Sunrise Ranch for over thirty years. There are people in this place who have been here longer than I have, some over fifty. I know the reason they’re still here, and the reason they are still vibrantly participating in their life is because they know the intimate place of the Most High, and they have decided to dedicate their life to resonating with it, protecting it, and inviting people to it. They have practiced the discipline of honing their instrument to make creative beautiful music.

You don’t have to live at Sunrise Ranch to know this intimate place. Some of you reading these words know exactly what I am talking about. I haven’t always lived in Colorado, but I found this inmost place when I lived in East Aurora, New York. I found it in Davenport, Iowa, and I made the decision that no matter where I lived, that intimate place that resonated with every other intimate place in another human being would go with me. That resonant field could be present and allowed to reveal the design of how life works wherever I am and wherever you are. And over time, it does.

If there is to be peace, there must be peace in the heart. Let there be peace in your heart. Let the struggling and suffering go. Let it go. No more waiting. I’m really thankful to be able to reveal where my heart lives to you, because when I’m there, I also know your heart. Our hearts belong in the highest heaven, the secret place of the Most High.