The Cosmos Being Born

It’s been an active week at Sunrise Ranch. Gary Goodhue led the one-day Primal Spirituality 2 program. We enjoyed a Memorial Day barbecue. Last weekend, Lisa Wimberger led Mind, Movement, Magic. There were over a hundred people dancing all day and, according to the kitchen, eating massive quantities of food.

Patrick Padden has been irrigating the junipers he planted along the road out front. Brooke Knight has been blowing through the garden beds like a hurricane. Michael Rodriguez and his team have painted Mountain View, the Tea Room, and the Aspen Room. New carpet is going on the floor and new art on the walls.

We are installing a new fire hydrant at Sunrise Ranch near the Sanctuary. And as often happens, even though we tested to find any underground cables or pipes, we busted a gas line and had to turn off the gas for much of the Ranch for a time. Nonetheless, the fire hydrant is a thing of beauty with a great practical purpose.

All kinds of things are happening at Sunrise Ranch, and I’m sure in all of our lives. Life is on the move. Maybe we feel it in a particular way here with the onset of summer. Yes, the season is getting into full gear here. Life on the move.

On the national sports scene, the New York Knicks are out of the basketball championship. So, for all of us New Yorkers, that’s hard to take. They have an incredible player, Jalen Brunson. He’s about 6’2″, so he’s like a sapling among tall trees. He can do it all—shoot from the three-point line, sink a mid-range jump shot, and drive to the basket. But despite his best efforts, the Knicks lost their series with Indianapolis. So, another year without a championship.

There was an interesting comment by Charles Barkley— Sir Charles. If you follow basketball, you might know him as a Hall of Fame player and a commentator. It doesn’t take long to find that almost all of his predictions are wrong. And still, he can be insightful and amusing. The other day, speaking of Jalen Brunson and the team, he said this:

Why is the rest of the team so much more aggressive when he’s not in the game? They can be aggressive when he’s in the game. He should be closing—meaning he should close out the last minutes of the game. But they are so unaggressive when he is in the game, it drives me crazy.

Isn’t this how it can go for us as human beings? We see someone who is starring in some role, whatever it might be, and there’s a tendency to be spectators—to stand back and watch, even when we are on the field of play. With the Knicks, when Brunson goes out of the game, everybody else’s game rises. When he’s on the floor, they’re watching him, expecting him to do it. And only when he comes out of the game do they rise to the occasion.

There’s a very practical reason for Brunson to come out of the game, as is usual for basketball players. If they played all 48 minutes of the game, they’d be exhausted. But there’s another reason for Brunson to come out of the game—to let everybody else rise up. And so it is, in the work we do.

As it happens, I’m about to take a vacation. And like Brunson, I need a breather. Take me out, coach! But more than that, being out of the immediate scene is an opportunity for others to rise to the occasion. And that is how it goes, yes? There has to be space for others to rise to the occasion.

Making space for others’ creativity is a quality of leadership. You could always carry the flag yourself. But there’s a time to stand back and let others carry the flag. And, hopefully, that could happen when Brunson’s in the game, or it could happen when the person who is the designated leader is still in the game. They don’t always have to be carrying the flag.

Jesus said something about all this to his disciples:

It is expedient for you that I go away.

John 16:7

There was a reason for him to create some space and let something else move through the people who were with him. Ideally, it would have moved through those people with him there. In many ways, it didn’t. And so, he left a gaping hole. In many ways, it stayed a hole, and in other ways, over the centuries, there have been those who began to fill the hole that was left by his departure.

For those who’ve been associated with Emissaries of Divine Light since before Martin Cecil left us in 1988, we experienced a similar dynamic. It seemed to me that he had been saying Come on, everybody! Come on! And when he passed on, it became Okay, it’s up to you. There was shock. Up to us?

Of course, there was an opportunity all along for anybody who was with Martin, just as there always is, to rise to the occasion, to lift him up along with everybody else. But there’s a human tendency to hold back from letting what’s to come through us come through in all its glory.

Gary Goodhue made a remarkable comment last week. He said that not only are we in the cosmos, but the cosmos is in us. As Joni Mitchell says, We are stardust. The cosmos is in us. What else are we but that? We are the cosmos appearing as a human being. We’re a living human embodiment of the cosmos. It’s in us. And we’re here on earth to let it out­—to let all that brilliance come out through us into this world.

Jesus’ way of saying it was this: The kingdom of God is within you. For those of us who knew Dr. Bill Bahan, we would always follow that with the saying, “Let it out!” The Kingdom of God is within you, and the art of living is allowing all those cosmic energies that are in us to come out into the world—love, wisdom, cosmic intelligence, and power.

Ultimately, it is that inner reality itself—the kingdom itself—that is to be born through us. When it is, the kingdom is not just crumpled up deep inside. It is out there, in the world. That is the whole idea of Sunrise Ranch. But it doesn’t work unless the people who are here let it out.

The kingdom is to be born through us. A kingdom is a realm, yes? It’s a land, a country, a sphere. There is a realm inside us. It’s the cosmos, waiting to be born through us so that it can live in the human world.

But how? How is it born? Here’s another saying. It’s one of the ten principles of Emissaries of Divine Light that are framed and hanging in the Pavilion Dining Room at Sunrise Ranch. You know what you express. The kingdom is known by us and it gets into the world because we express it. We put it out there. It’s born through our expression.

As we teach in Primal Spirituality 2, thinking and feeling are involved in this process. The first thing that happens is that our emotions are activated from within. We are stirred by cosmic Love. I propose to you that this is what you are constantly feeling, perhaps not in its ultimate and purest form, but nonetheless, the essence of what you are feeling is what the cosmos is feeling. It’s the Love the cosmos is feeling that wants to express into you and through you, just as for me and everyone.

And so, the first step in allowing the cosmos within us to be born into the world in which we live is to connect with the depth of that Love—to accept the boldness and magnitude of it and then let it express. It is the courage to live a loving life.

When we do, we find that the world in which we live has shut that down so badly, compared to the greatness of the Love that’s within us. That Love is huge! But who dares to feel it, to know it, and live a loving life?

Doing that is the first step. You’ve got to open your heart, or nothing is happening from a spiritual standpoint. Through the emotional body, the Love of the cosmos can come through. But there’s more to the picture than that.

For this world to be transformed—to become the kingdom of God—the cosmos has to think through us. The cosmos wants to think through you and through me. It wants to think about Sunrise Ranch. It wants to think about what to cook for the meal and what to offer for the service. It wants to think about what is happening in your life.

The cosmos is thinking all the time. We see evidence of it all around in nature. All the patterns of nature are constantly changing. Every day, a new idea—endless ideas from the Creator and they are being born all around us. The cosmos is thinking all the time, and it wants to think through you and me.

Would you admit that, as human beings, we can be lazy thinkers? Oh, no, wouldn’t dare to imagine that. There’s nothing that could happen here. It’s just another one of those days. Just another one of those people. The cosmos wants to think through you and me, inventively, creatively, and voraciously. It wants to penetrate this world with awareness, thought, and ideas so that the world can reshape and reform. Because the Love of the cosmos coming through a human being is not enough. That’s power. But that power has to have intelligence to reshape the world, it has to have thought. The world needs not only the feeling of the cosmos, it needs the thought of the cosmos. And the thought of the cosmos brings a fresh pattern of Creation. And so, the power of Love is moving, but now it’s moving in a new pattern that reshapes the world in that pattern. But how is that going to happen if we won’t think? We have to be willing to think a new thought.

That can be the problem with religion. All too often, religion is about thought as a noun but not as something active in which the person participates—a verb. Thought as a noun becomes doctrine, dogma, and a creed. I’m not talking about that. This is about thinking as a verb.

We are here to be the cosmos, thinking and feeling. That is who and what we are. We are the cosmos birthing itself through consciousness into this world on this bright and sunny day.

Emissaries of Divine Light have taught for decades that Love and Truth make Life. True. It does. But the idea is a little abstract for most people. Yes, Love and Truth make Life someplace. But how about right here in me? In you?

Love can move through the heart, and Truth through all the levels of mind. But as long as thinking and feeling are separate, disjointed, and unengaged, they don’t have a chance to come together and bring creative action, which is Life, in a person’s experience and in the world. Through us, the loving, beating heart of the Creator and the brilliant thinking of the Creator come together and create life through a person.

In our contemporary world, people talk about transformation, so much so that our events director, Paul Bassis, doesn’t want Sunrise Ranch using the word anymore. But what does the word mean? Trans-form-ation. It has to do with a change in form.

For the form of human experience to take a new pattern, there has to be a new pattern for it to take. The truth of the cosmos is being born, and then there’s transformation. But for us as human beings, that involves thought. The new pattern is coming through thought, and if you never think a new thought, you can’t experience transformation, because there’s no new pattern to rearrange the form. And so the pattern of one’s life stays the same. You could be devout, you could be devoted spiritually, and you could be loving. But you can love as much as you want, and nothing is changing if you won’t think a new thought, because you’re running all of that love through all those old patterns. There’s no life in that. The love that’s within us is meant to live, and it comes to life when it’s in a new pattern.

But we’ve got to be open to thinking the new thought that would allow the new pattern to take shape in our lives. When that happens, the cosmos within us is being born. It’s born through us—through all that we say and we do. It is expressed in the world. Then it’s not only in here, it’s out there because we put it there.

The Creation story in Genesis speaks of the world in which we rightly live as a garden. It is another way to speak of the kingdom of God. But in this portrayal of it, it surrounds the man and the woman. Here is a portrayal of our natural state. But how does it manifest? Not because we find a garden provided for us somewhere. The garden manifests when we let it be born through thought and feeling into the world.