The words of Madonna come back to me, ringing in my ears:

I am a material girl… Living in a material world.

We do live in a material world. We live in a culture, as it is, with all the dynamics and values that are there. As I put it in the Pulse of Spirit last week, with people using each other. We live in a world of transactional relationships, where people keep score. You give me this, I’ll give you that.

In his book Leadership Is an Art, Max Dupree made the distinction between contractual relationships and covenantal relationships. For many years, Max Dupree ran a successful furniture company. So, he’s speaking about leadership in the context of corporate endeavors. And he was saying that what he sought to cultivate was something that transcended the contractual relationship that he had with people who worked for him. He sought to cultivate a covenantal relationship—something beyond counting pennies at every step of the way.

There is a right reciprocity in life. To establish that, there has to be faith and trust in life and in other people. And yet, whatever else we are, we are material people living in a material world, figuring it out as best we can.

The material world can loom large in the human experience. And yet, somehow, we know that life is meant to be lived in a way that transcends the experience of keeping score. There is something bigger going on that we have the opportunity to participate in, and that our heart yearns for.

That is at stake in any relationship. How are we going to be with another person, whatever the nature of the relationship? Yes, we need to keep track of our pennies. But surely, we want to be in a larger place than that. The more significant another person is in your life, the more important it is to be coming from a transcendent place.

I thought of a way to make the distinction between being relegated to the material world and living a transcendent life. One way to describe it is that we experience a life of achieving and a life of Being. Both are going on. There is the active achieving and becoming, which is part of the life we’re all engaged in. So, there is all that we are facing, and all the creativity we are bringing to it. On any given day, it might come down to some kind of confrontation or controversy—at some level, defending ourselves or perhaps challenging another person, or challenging the world the way it is. There are times for that. And yet if that is all that is going on, How dreadful!

There’s something that transcends that experience. Being. The experience of Being can get lost in the mix with all that we’re attempting to achieve. The more that happens, the worse life gets. And the harder it becomes to achieve, and the less you’re being yourself—the less you share the reality of Being with other people and the world around you. And the more frustrating life becomes, and the more you run out of gas. Because the reality is that our fuel comes from our experience of Being.

There is power in Being. It is not just a static experience. If life is creative, all our becoming and all our achieving comes out of a place of Being. That’s where we get in touch with the power of Being, which is Love. The power of Love is the power for achieving and creating.

Isn’t it remarkable that if we can open up to the great calm and stillness within us, even for a few moments, what comes to mind? And what enters our heart in those times, if we let it? There is a magic that appears when we stop being caught up in a world of achieving—when we open to what is beyond being a material girl in a material world.

You can hardly put words to the magnificence of what’s beyond a culture that is centered in achievement. Think of the most difficult person in your life right now. Even with them, there is the realm of Being that transcends what is happening for them, and for you in your relationship to them. They are part of the fabric of life. They are part of the whole constellation of humankind. They share the same deep desires, the same urges to experience Being in its fullest.

What has to happen for us as humankind is for Being to emerge—for it to rise to a conscious level and lead the way? When that happens, our actions and our creations are born out of that realm of Being. They are not ignoring our Being. They are not cutting across the realm of Being. For this to happen, there has to be an openness on our part to put other things aside long enough for all the factors that are in Being to emerge into our awareness.

In the current day, people speak about the feminine rising. Often, this implies that woman are going to achieve as much or more than men. I’m not here to advocate for or against that. Yet, what I feel rising is the experience of Being. It is rising through all the layers of human consciousness, up through the subconscious mind and the deep recesses of the heart, until it reaches the level of conscious experience. Let’s let it rise. Let’s allow ourselves to become aware of it.

Sometimes when people practice their spirituality, they approach it as a self-improvement exercise—they are working on themselves, trying to be a better person. While we can appreciate the motivation, where is the effort coming from? If the process of personal development isn’t coming from an experience of Being, it can lack power. It can lack authenticity. It can lead to an experience of not being yourself.

The deeper matters of spirituality are known firstly as a process of awakening. You simply awaken to them. Does that sound like a lot of work? It’s like getting up in the morning. You just become aware of Being. It rises in consciousness. And then you can begin to see the implications in your life of living from that place.

Another word for this process is remembering. Spirituality is about remembering. Yes? What was I thinking? What did I get caught up in? What did I get infatuated with? What did I get distracted by? What did I become fearful of that took me away from an awareness of Being, a remembrance of who I am, of who you are, and of who we are together?

 Remembering seems to imply something out of the past, and there are factors from out of the past that are involved. There are probably times in our life where there is a heightened awareness of Being. So, in that sense, when we remember Being, perhaps we are remembering that awareness that we had.

There have been enlightened cultures in humanity’s past where spiritual knowledge was shared abundantly and freely among people—a culture where Being was primary and achieving was secondary. Our remembering may be a recollection of that culture that is buried deep in the mass consciousness of humanity. And if we get caught up in the processes of achieving, being a material person in a material world, it is in conflict with that memory.

But spiritual remembrance is not just about the past. It is remembering who we are now and how we are made. It is remembering that we are hard-wired to be spiritually connected, and to co-create with all of Being. As Genesis puts it, we are made in the image and likeness of the Elohim. We are made to live in Eden.

Sometimes it is said of someone that they have lost heart. Perhaps they have forgotten who they are. If we look at the culture of America today, we might ask, Where is the heart of America? Have we lost our heart? Where is our common center and where are our common values?

It is sad for any group of people, any culture, to lose its heart. That’s not how we are made. We are each made with a heart. And we are made with a collective heart that is innate to who we are as humankind. That heart is intrinsic to our collective Being.

Sometimes you can feel the beating heart of humanity. When Princess Diana died, the whole world mourned. In our grief, you could feel the one heart of all humanity that treasured this kind, caring, loving person. She represented our collective heart, and with our loss you could feel that heart shared by us all.

Anybody could give expression to that collective heart. Anybody could embody it and in effect say, Remember. This is who we are. Remember. Here is our beating heart, our beating center.

There’s another kind of memory, and we call it vertical memory. Vertical memory carried by the axis mundi, the central spiritual axis for a human being and for all of humankind. It connects us with the invisible realms and with cosmic powers of Being. That connection is touted by religion—or at least religion makes some reference to it. But all too often there is disappointment when religion doesn’t deliver on the experience. It’s not actually offering the relationship with Being, allowing the axis mundi to be fully in place and vertical memory to be restored.

Certainly, there is something larger than us as humankind on this planet. There’s a larger sphere of reality for us to connect with. And then there is the embodiment of Being right here among us. Without that, there is no fulfillment of our life as human beings. Just having some kind of cosmic connection, while there is chaos amongst us on earth, brings strife, not fulfillment.

It’s tantalizing but frustrating to touch all this cosmic wonder and then not embody it, live it, share it. Memory is about all of that. It’s about recalling all of Being, the invisible higher dimensions of that reality and the dimensions we know and embody right here and now.

My wish for myself and for you, and ultimately for all of us, is for us to speak as the heart of the world, and be able to say, Here it is. Here is the heart of the world. I am that beating heart. I am a living expression and embodiment of that heart, because I am Being. Share this one heart.