This is World Unity Week. There are many wonderful events happening online. Rachel Morrison is very involved in the events. I have the opportunity to make several offerings during the time. We have an opportunity to speak about the origins of world unity, what the truth of it is and what the formula for it might be.

There is an underlying code of unity within all people and within humankind. But so often we don’t access that code, and other things take over. We recently heard the deep-hearted response of Atlanta Mayor Keisha Bottoms after the recent murder of yet another young black man. She spoke about how she feared for her own sons—she is a black woman. Her love for her city was so evident. She spoke about how much Atlanta has done right over the years. It is the home of Ebenezer Baptist Church where Dr. Martin Luther King preached. They have had black leadership in the city for decades. Andrew Young was their mayor in 1981, almost forty years ago. There is so much that they have done right in Atlanta. They were hoping that the violence that has happened elsewhere wouldn’t come to their fair city, and yet it did. The murder was a grievous event for the Mayor as it was for the City of Atlanta and the country. She took swift action to avert such a thing from ever happening again.

We can pass laws and we can change our politics, but there is an underlying code within culture that people live from and revert back to. And no matter how much culture seems to change on the surface, somehow, we as human beings can revert back to things that are so dysfunctional and so destructive.

World unity is a spiritual issue, by which I simply mean to say that it relies on something we cannot see. And really, isn’t that what the spiritual is all about? Living a spiritual life is learning how we can relate creatively to things that we cannot see. And there is something unseen, behind culture—an unseen code that America particularly keeps reverting back to. There is a code of racism, prejudice and malice that our culture keeps relating to. And no matter how much we think we might have moved past it, we keep reverting back to this hidden code.

Some years ago now, the management consultant Peter Drucker made this statement: Culture eats strategy for breakfast. He was speaking to people who were attempting to create change within organizations, and he was speaking to all the good ideas behind strategizing a new future and made that statement. Culture eats strategy for breakfast.

But it’s not only strategy that gets eaten for breakfast by culture. Culture eats policy for breakfast. Governments and organizations enact new policies. We do that from time to time where I live at Sunrise Ranch. But I have found that culture eats policy for breakfast, meaning that you can say that something will be so, but if a contrary culture prevails, then all the policy in the world won’t make a difference.

Culture eats laws for breakfast. There are laws on the books in America against murder, and there have been for centuries. But where the prevailing culture is violent and racist, there can be a lynching. The law doesn’t matter. Culture eats laws for breakfast. And in America today, we are seeing the same thing in the highest seats of power. There is something hidden within the outer forms of culture, and the culture keeps reverting back to those hidden codes that are creating the culture—codes of self-serving separateness, not world unity.

I invite you to envision with me a cord that is the entire lineage of all humankind. It is a cord of many strands—strands of culture, ethnicity and race, moving from out of the distant past, right up unto this present moment. The outer parts of that cord have strands filled with the code of separation—separate cultures, separate ethnicities, separate races, separate religions. And yet that code is on the outside of the cord. It is like a sheath that is covering the inner code. There is a code within that sheath that is the golden cord that binds all human beings. That golden cord is our common lineage. It lives in the unseen, and it is our unity. It is what unites us. And yet how seldom it is, for us as human beings, that we pierce through the sheath that holds the code of separateness, and then relate to the code of unity within it. It is this inner code that tells us who we are as human beings.

Today is Father’s Day. I want to congratulate fathers all over the world for being fathers. There is a word that relates to fatherhood, which is paternal. Within that word is a more ancient word, pater. That word pater is the origin of the word pattern, suggesting that true fatherhood is responsible for the pattern of life—for the code, for piercing through the sheath of separateness. The father of the family is there for the unity of the family. The father of a family is responsible to know that unifying element. And so it is for all of us, as men, and truthfully all of us as human beings: we are responsible to find the pater, the code of unity.

So often we try to change the outer elements of culture, some of which I’ve named. I want to add to all my permutations of Peter Drucker’s original quote and say this: The code eats culture for breakfast. In other words, anything we try to do in culture is going to be changed by whatever code we’re relating to. If it is a code of separateness, all the outer things that we’re doing to create unity are to no avail. We just keep reverting back to separation in all its forms, in all its guises, and bluntly, in all its lies. And yet, for someone who has found the code of unity, the golden cord eats all separate culture for breakfast. We don’t believe it. It can happen and happen, but no matter how much it happens in the culture, we don’t believe it, and we are living out of something else. We are bringing something else. We know something else. And the culture is not going to convince us to relate to and live out of a code of separation.

Both the code of separation and the code of unity are invisible. Our physical DNA is invisible too, except with a microscope. But this is spiritual DNA. You can’t see it with your naked eye, nor with a microscope, and yet there it is. And when we touch it, everything changes. I mentioned Dr. Martin Luther King. He touched the code of unity, he gave voice to it and embodied it in the culture that formed around him. God bless the extraordinary people down through history who knew the code of unity.

I’d like to make some distinctions between the dysfunctional code that brings separation and the holistic code that brings unity. I’ll start with separateness itself. When you hear somebody living out of the dysfunctional code, they are speaking the words of separation: us and them and you vs. me. And when somebody is speaking out of the holistic code, they are speaking words that relate to everyone. These are the words of Universal Love because the holistic code is the code of Universal Love, constellating a new culture.

When someone is speaking out of the dysfunctional code, they are speaking out of a win/lose mentality. There is going to be a winner and there is going to be a loser. This is often the code between nations. What nation will lead the world? Who’s going to take over a territory? Somebody’s going to win, somebody’s going to lose.

Today, the dysfunctionality of this code is so apparent. How does it work if one nation is out ahead, but we are all suffering from global warming? Global warming isn’t a local phenomenon. It is a we phenomenon. People speaking out of the dysfunctional code are speaking of win/lose. People speaking out of the holistic code are speaking about the progress of the whole. If for nothing other than enlightened self-interest, you would think that national leaders would see that the good of their people is tied to the good of all people.

The dysfunctional code is a code of oppression, victimhood, and rescuing. Sometimes we don’t see the whole pattern; we just see the oppressive parts and want to be the rescuer, and then we want to sympathize with the victims. The holistic code speaks the language of creatorship for all. We are all here to be creators—we are creators. We are powerful. We are creating our reality. We have the powers of Creation in consciousness and in our spirit. And if I am to claim that for myself, I must at the same time claim it for all people. I claim it for you as I claim it for me.

If we claim our creatorship together, we are then claiming our co-creatorship. If I am a creator and living in my creatorship, and you are too, we have the opportunity to create together, not only in the outer dimensions of who we are as human beings but with the forces of all Creation and in the pattern of all Creation. That’s very different than seeing you as a victim and trying to rescue you. No, I empower you as a creator. And while I realize that people suffer and there is oppression in the world, which I decry, that doesn’t mean I think you are a victim, even though you might have been victimized. I see you as a creator.

In that way, we are all the same. We’re not living out of a code of oppression, we’re not living out of a code of victimhood, and we’re not living out of a code of rescuing. We are living out of the code of empowerment, the code of creatorship and co-creatorship. As long as we are living out of the old code, we just keep replicating it through our culture. We think we are trying to do good, and we think we’ve gotten past it, but we’re actually living out of the old code. And as long as it’s the old code, it’s a code of dysfunction and separateness, and we are perpetuating what that old code brings.

We have to live out of the holistic code that is at the core of our lineage. We have to pierce through the sheath that keeps us from it and go right down to the golden cord that is at the core of all people. This is the universal pattern. We are on earth to live out of that pattern, to call attention to it and to embody it, and to speak for it. Only so, can we ourselves get over the horrible human habit that we keep reverting to as human beings: living out of the dysfunctional code of separation.

Living out of the dysfunctional code brings discouragement and disillusionment. If we are finding ourselves discouraged, if we are finding ourselves disillusioned, we can know we’ve been tricked into living out of the old code. Living out of the holistic code, we have an experience of vision. We can see the way forward. We have optimism and hope—not that we’re going to get our way, not that we’re going to win in some kind of win/lose reality. I’m not talking about that kind of optimism, not that kind of hope. Just the natural optimism of life itself that is ongoing, that is thriving, that persists and prevails, and the natural hope that we have when we’re living out of that.

When we’re living out of the dysfunctional code, we fall prey to malice. In its most egregious form, it is conscious and deliberate. Yet most often it is unconscious and not deliberate, but present, nonetheless. When we stop relating to the dysfunctional code, we can see the malice that’s present in the world, but it doesn’t make our hearts malicious. We are relating to the holistic code which is a code of kindness. That is what is at the depth of the human soul—kindness. And if someone tries to tell you different, do not believe them.

The dysfunctional code leads to compromise and corruption at all levels—at the individual level and at the collective level. A holistic code brings us back to the intrinsic integrity of humankind—the intrinsic integrity of the pattern of the code itself.

Let us be keepers of the code. We are keepers of it when we know it, not because we have it enshrined someplace. Bless Moses for doing a good job of trying to remind people by calling attention to the code, engraving it in stone and putting it in a wooden box. But the code itself is invisible. That does not mean it is not real. If you touch the code, you know it’s real. There’s nothing more compelling and real than that. And when you touch the real code, you see the corrupt human code as unreal and destined to fall of its own weight, not because we have to push it over the cliff ourselves, but simply because we are living the true code.

What if they gave a war and nobody came? People have been giving their life force to the dysfunctional code for millennia. In this generation, we are withdrawing our life force from the dysfunctional code and we are living the holistic code that brings world unity. I am so proud to be with people who know the code; who are living it, breathing it and sharing it with one another.

So may it be.