The Fourth Sacred School

The word philosophy gets a bad rap. It reminds me of my college professor droning on about Aristotle. But the root of the word is love of knowledge. Philo: love. Sophia: knowledge. And what is knowledge?

In our modern world, knowledge is guarded by the scientific and academic communities. Data collection, hypotheses, theories, and peer review build an ever-changing body of scientific knowledge. This is what the author Otto Scharmer calls third-person knowledge. It is a powerful process that is behind the technology of today’s world. But it comes at a cost—the tendency to negate what a person sees and experiences for themselves firsthand—first-person knowledge.

We have an educational system that discounts the firsthand knowledge of children, teenagers, and adults. What you see, what you come to know for yourself, doesn’t matter. What’s in the book, what somebody studied, is what’s significant. I’m not saying that scientific knowledge doesn’t matter. I’m just saying we should not discount what we see and know for ourselves. And that is the very essence of what philosophy is. It’s what we know, what we see, what we understand.

It helps to understand the path we are on. Doing so helps us walk that path. If we don’t see the path, we can get lost in the woods.

Uranda, who founded Sunrise Ranch and the practice of Attunement, called the education that he brought the Third Sacred School. We use that name for the 18 volumes of writings that are about that education. But the Third Sacred School itself isn’t just books. It has to do with what he referred to as the spiritual expression plane of being.

Throughout history, there have been spiritual practices that focus on the physical dimension of our existence. Codes of conduct, practices that relate to physical health, and yoga are all examples, knowing that there may be a dimension to these practices that goes beyond the physical.

Then there is another phase that is an approach to the mental level of things—what we see and know with the mind.

The spiritual expression plane approach acknowledges that there’s a spiritual dimension to our human makeup. Wonder of wonders! We are not just a physical body and not just a mind. We have this wondrous capacity to bring the spiritual into the world—into our everyday life and to other people. The art of living is bringing the spiritual into the everyday. We each have a capacity that is made to do that.

The Third Sacred School includes an everyday mindfulness practice, moment by moment, expressing the spiritual in the world in which you find yourself, knowing the great significance of the discipline of opening up to Spirit and letting Spirit express.

That was new and different as Uranda awoke to this in 1932. It still is today. Often, for people, there is little awareness of that range of our life experience.

As he, and Martin Cecil after him, spoke about it, there are seven sacred schools. Does that remind you of anything? If you have participated in our Attunement training, you are aware of seven seals—seven openings to spiritual reality embodied by the seven major endocrine glands. The seven sacred schools relate to those seven seals. The path of the spiritual evolution of humanity goes through those seven levels.

Naturally, the Fourth Sacred School follows after the Third. In terms of Attunement, this fourth level relates to the seal, which has its seat within the thymus gland beneath the top of the breastbone. In the whole system of endocrine glands, it’s halfway up the stairs and halfway down. It is a crossover point between the spirits released by the seals above it and the spirits released by the seals below it. So, the opening of this seal is vital for someone sharing Attunement.

Attunement is an energy medicine practice, and when we think of sharing Attunement, we often think of doing so with our hands. The spiritual connection and radiation moving through the hands are vital to the process. But is Attunement generated by the hands? The hands are connected to something else—the arms. And the arms are connected to the torso. In between our shoulders, where our arms connect to our torso, there is the thymus gland, the focus of the heart center in the human experience, with the physical heart right beside it. Attunement emanates from the heart center. And if nothing is happening in the heart center for an Attunement practitioner, there’s nothing happening in the Attunement because that is where the power originates. The hands are simply the delivery system.

Speaking of science, we know from the HeartMath people that you can measure the power of the energy emanating from the heart, and it reaches at least three feet from the body.

It is significant that the fourth seal is halfway up the stairs and halfway down. And all of what is above gets to what is below through the verticality of our makeup as a human being. It relies on an open heart. When the heart is softened to what is above, the silver cord of spiritual emanation from the higher centers can move down through the heart and find expression—spiritual expression, mental expression, and physical expression. But that process of Attunement requires something to happen in the heart—a softening, an opening—or what’s above can’t get in.

By the same token, what is below ascends in the human experience. All the energy of what we do physically, mentally, and spiritually moves up in praise and worship of all of life and for the Creator himself or herself. It rises through the system, and where does it move through? The heart center—the Fourth Seal.

There’s no heart bypass for this one. Spiritually speaking, you can’t bypass the heart and access what’s above. And you can’t offer your life up to what is above if the heart is shut down.

As we begin to reflect on it, these are critical factors. Thinking of it in terms of sacred schools, we might think of the spiritual evolution of humankind as moving through sacred schools. Historically, we have moved through the First Sacred School and the Second Sacred School. Here we are in the Third, and being ambitious human beings, we must be ready to move on to the Fourth and just keep moving on.

Is that how it works? Not really. How does it work? Do we keep going higher and higher? Not exactly. I think it’s a human tendency to be ambitious. If the Third Sacred School is good, the Fourth must be better. And then the Fifth and the Sixth and the Seventh. And there are probably sacred schools past that.

What really happens when you open spiritually and become aware that there is a higher reality, however you name it? What is the path of our spiritual evolution when we realize that we can know, express, embody, and experience that reality in our living?

At first, it’s wondrous. It’s magical, like Christmas. You encounter something, and then you have the big idea that you could sustain the experience of it and express it and live it in the world. At some point, I rather suspect that there was a collision that happened for each of us. And what was that collision? It was with our own current human experience and the human experience of the people around us. And so we realize that we have to do something with all that is present in the surrounding culture, the subconscious mind, and the emotional body. And if we don’t do something with that, what happens to spiritual expression?

I’ll give you my shorthand for it. It becomes dutiful. I should, and therefore I will. And I’ll be sure that, in all respects, I’m careful to have the right attitude, the right expression, do the right thing, come off in the right way, be loyal, mission-driven, and I’ll just stay at it. That’s dutiful. And dutiful is good, but by itself, it breaks down.

Without something else in the picture, being dutiful leads to burnout. It leads to being brittle in our life—spiritually brittle. We’re not here to be spiritually brittle people. We are here to be spiritually luscious, alive people. And how does that happen?

Some have had the idea that it happens because we progress. We progress spiritually, and we go on to the Fourth Sacred School, the level of the heart, and we just live there, and who knows where we go beyond that.

If a person leaves the imperative to open to spirit and express it in their life and thinks they are going to go on to something at the emotional level without that, all is lost. All is lost without the imperative of spiritual expression. All is lost without the Third Sacred School. It is lost for that person because they are losing track of something that is vital in their life—how they are showing up, how they are expressing themselves from a spiritual perspective, and how they are making a difference in the world.

Collectively, without the reality of spiritual expression, Sunrise Ranch and Emissaries of Divine Light become irrelevant and useless. We are useless if we are off having an emotional experience in the Fourth Sacred School, whatever that might be, or binging on endless amounts of emotional processing. That’s not how this life path works.

How does it work? What do we do when we reach that wall of dutifulness and realize there’s something brittle in our life experience—that we can’t continue the way we’ve been going, and that we need some kind of rocket fuel, some kind of juice, some kind of deeper experience of what is real, so that life becomes juicy and alive for us?

At that point, we have to realize that life is demanding that we allow our heart to crack open so there is an opening at the level of the Fourth Sacred School. And this has to happen without abandoning our place in the world, and without ceasing to express Spirit as a human being. Nonetheless, the walls in the human heart have to come down so that the sun can shine in and warm the heart and bring life to our human experience, so that the things of Spirit can become something beyond a belief, or a principle, or something somebody said—so that they become real. And how do they become real? How do we really have philosophy, a love of knowledge, and know something that’s firsthand, for ourselves?

The heart is involved. And I’m not saying our mind isn’t important in our lives and in our spirituality. But still, if something has not happened in the heart so that it breaks open and chooses to live life on a different basis, then we are stuck in the brittleness of an attempt at spiritual expression, but without the juice, without the reality, without the fulfillment of knowing spiritual things for ourselves and having a first-hand relationship with the reality of Spirit we are coming to love. Without a radical openness of heart, we are not transcending the shallow experience of life that comes without an open heart.

This is not a matter of going somewhere else. It’s a matter of being profoundly present where we are. When the heart cracks open, it purifies. The word purity might tend to connote something sanctimonious and moralistic. But in this context, it does not. It simply names that there are factors in the human heart that are obscuring the radiance of reality in the human experience and throttling our Attunement.

When the heart cracks open, two things happen. We are penetrated from above. We are exposing ourselves to all the forces of Creation that are above us and to the very Presence of Being that is above. And then something else happens. We become a part of that penetration. We are penetrating our human makeup.

This does not happen through dutifulness. It happens because of a breaking open, so that the light of Being—which we are coming to know for ourselves—is now shining upon our human makeup. For what? To shame us? We can feel shame when we see all those things in our human makeup. We see the brokenness of the human pattern. We see it in ourselves. We see it in each other. But with an open heart, we see it with the light of Being that’s shining from above. We not only have an open heart but open arms to hold ourselves in all our human patterns. We know that all those patterns relate to the patterns of life. And even if our human makeup has gotten bent out of shape along the way, all those patterns are there because of life. That’s the life of us. And collectively, it’s our life. That bizarre person who’s your neighbor? They are part of the pattern of life, however bent out of shape they have become.

From the standpoint of a person whose heart is broken open, it is easy to say, I get it. I understand where you’ve been and what has happened. And even though you have a hard way of being in the world, I get how it got like that. Underneath it all, I get the unique Being and the unique pattern of humanity that you are. Come home to who you are. Welcome home to who you are.

When there is this openness at the level of the Fourth Sacred School, relative to us, staying where we are in the world, responsible for the expression of spirit, we have an uncommon capacity to serve other people. Serving other people might look like a lot of things—sharing an Attunement, coaching, teaching, speaking, and much more. But the essence of it isn’t any of those things. Here is the essence of it: A person whose heart is cracked open to what’s above, and sees you from that perspective, holds you with arms of love. Have you ever had somebody in your life see and hold you that way? What kind of difference did it make?

We inherit that Presence, that ability, when something happens at the level of the heart in human experience. Dangerous territory, yes? Matters of the heart are a dangerous territory. The path of spiritual evolution is perilous, and there are a lot of places to go where you just end up wandering in the woods. You can wander around in the woods of emotionality, losing track of the fact that it is your responsibility as a being to show up and be here for your world. A person can get lost in some kind of emotional tumble if they let themselves.

The other perilous part of the path is, for the more determined among us, being true to the spirituality that we’ve adopted and deciding to tough it out without an open heart. That is a recipe for burnout, frustration, and a lack of fulfillment. Then the person ends up asking, Why is my life like this? It doesn’t feel so spiritual right now.

I have sensed these things intuitively from my life experience. My first book was Becoming a Sun, with the subtitle, Emotional and Spiritual Intelligence for a Happy and Fulfilling Life. I put it that way because I saw a huge connection between our spiritual experience and our emotional experience. I also observed a tremendous tendency in human culture around the world, including for Emissaries of Divine Light, to forget the emotional intelligence part of it. But it isn’t just us. It gets forgotten all over the place, East and West.

At the root of our tradition in the West is a recognition of the imperative of the heart’s involvement in our spirituality, even though it is largely ignored. It is addressed again and again in both the Old and New Testaments of the Bible.

And thou shalt love the LORD thy God with all thine heart…

—Deuteronomy 6:5

Keep thy heart with all diligence; for out of it are the issues of life.

—Proverbs 4:23

A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh.

—Ezekiel 36:26

Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.

—Matthew 5:8

…prove me now herewith, saith the LORD of hosts, if I will not open you the windows of heaven, and pour you out a blessing, that there shall not be room enough to receive it.

—Malachi 3:10

And what are the windows of heaven? The chambers of the heart. The open heart lets the higher frequencies of Creation enter the human soul. And blessing is the spirit of the Third Sacred School.

As the heart opens, a person realizes that they are here to be penetrated with spiritual powers from above and to penetrate their world with those transformative powers. We incarnated in human flesh to let this happen. The more this awareness is present, the more we are aware that we did not incarnate alone. We incarnated with others who came to play a part in this process.

I had a vivid experience of this. I was traveling in Asia on business. I was in Tokyo for two weeks, and I had agreed to meet Yukio on the Friday night of the weekend in the middle of the visit. Yukio was a professional translator I was meeting for the first time, and I was to take the bullet train with him to Nagano. I was told there were two or three people who had taken an Emissary course and wanted to meet me.

Immediately after sitting down on the train, Yukio informed me that about 24 people were gathering for a weekend introduction to Emissaries of Divine Light, and he would translate for me. He seemed to have ultimate confidence that I could deliver what he expected.

It was late winter, and when we got to Nagano later that evening, there was snow on the ground. The women who had gathered walked the path from the house to the bathhouse that Jin, the owner, had built. When they exited, Jin led Yukio and me to the bathhouse to share a men’s bath (my first).

We were sharing our life stories, and I shared with them that I was born on January 25, 1953. Yukio shared his birth date, which was only several days before mine in the same year. Then Jin shared his. It was only several days after mine, also in 1953. I told them, I know we incarnated together for a reason. And if I am going to pull off this weekend, I am going to need you with me. They assured me they would be.

The weekend was glorious. But here’s my point: Whether our birthdays align or not, we did come very deliberately into the world for a purpose with the people that we are with. And we either stay in the shallows and never become aware of that, never fulfill that purpose, and live some kind of dutiful life, or we become aware that we are here for a reason. I am, and so are you.

We have something majestic and significant to bring to the world if we will only open to it, receive it for ourselves, share it among ourselves, and bring it with power and glory to the world in which we live.

I’m here to do that, and I know you are too.

We are not entering the Fourth Sacred School. It is opening above the level of our current service to the world if we let it. And as it opens, all that is above is streaming through it and entering us.

 …prove me now herewith, saith the LORD of hosts, if I will not open you the windows of heaven, and pour you out a blessing, that there shall not be room enough to receive it.

—Malachi 3:10

This is my philosophy. This is what I know.