On this morning’s news, a police chief was asked about the terrible incident in Memphis, where police beat a young Black man to death. The interviewer asked the police chief to explain why it happened. He gave a wise answer: I don’t know.

We might be able to look at some historical antecedents to what happened and explain it this way or that way. And yet, the bottom line is that there is no rational explanation for what they did. It was human malfunction of the grossest kind.

We can find various degrees of human malfunction in many places. Sometimes, what is happening in the world around us looks normal. But all too often, behind the apparent normalcy, people live quiet, desperate lives that boil over from time to time. So, the dysfunction can menace other people, while it is self-destructive to the individual who participates in it.

The dysfunction we observe is not in accordance with how we are made or how we are designed to function. We are designed to be spiritual lightning rods, grounding the power of the heavens in the living of our lives, and returning the voltage we experience to the heavens.

When most people think of lightning, they picture it as a one-way exchange—an electrical charge in the atmosphere that strikes an object on the ground. Even Greek mythology pictures Zeus as wielding lightning bolts that strike the earth.

According to the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), lightning moves up and down. In fact, the lightning we see is a charge moving from the ground up. It happens so quickly that it appears to us to be moving from sky to earth.

This physical phenomenon mirrors what happens for us as human beings. The voltage from our human energy field can come to focus in us and ascend in our love connection to the source of our Being. That is the lightning moving upward. Then the voltage from above can descend into us, empowering our life.

In the physical world, a lightning rod focuses the ascending energy from the earth and attracts and grounds the descending energy from the atmosphere. Without that focusing ability, the power of lightning can be destructive.

The way lightning works can demonstrate for us how energy can work creatively, or it can work destructively. It can go either way, depending on how the current moves. Or it can come to more or less no avail, not really doing any work. Static energy can be like that—it creates static but no powerful current.

What has to happen for us to be powerful spiritual lightning rods?

In a book he wrote in 1936, the founder of Attunement, Lloyd Arthur Meeker, wrote about these principles in his book Seven Steps to the Temple of Light. He wrote using the pen name Uranda.

The book contains this statement: Let Love radiate without concern for results.

The spiritual lightning we carry moves through our heart and mind and through our collective energy field. Our current is not lighting the lights or powering our stove. This current is moving in the field of thought and feeling that we know for ourselves and that we share with others. It vibrates in consciousness and through the human energy field.

Ultimately, it is a field that all humankind shares, and something happens when spiritual lightning comes into it. As I wrote about in the Pulse of Spirit last week, just as lightning grounded into sand by a lightning rod transmutes the sand, when spiritual lightning enters the field of human consciousness, consciousness transmutes. Our own consciousness changes when that happens for us. And when we are a conduit of spiritual lightning into human consciousness around us—in our family community, or any collective group of people—it transmutes that conscious field. That is the purpose of this Pulse of Spirit.

While we are made to do this work, it takes conscious attention, or it does not happen. If one moment we are inspired to be creative but mentally and emotionally scattered the next, there is not a sustained transformative power capable of changing consciousness. And if we are full of static and bringing static to other people, do we think we are a cause of creative transmutation for another person? Not really.

To allow transmutation to occur, we must follow Lloyd Arthur Meeker’s simple instruction: Let Love radiate without concern for results. 

Knowing that Lloyd Arthur Meeker was an intelligent man, we have to believe this was not some unreasonable call to action. So, to let love radiate is not to be unconscious about how it radiates or where, or with whom. There is consciousness involved, and there is deliberate action. If we are going to grow something, we do not go out into the middle of the desert, let love radiate and hope it grows. We are conscious of what we are doing.

So what was he saying? What was the meaning of that statement, and what is its significance to you and me?

If we are concerned about results in a way that overtakes us and makes us uncertain and unassured about what we are bringing or about the energy with which we are bringing it, we are not likely to bring the full measure of the current that is ours to bring. We could become so obsessed with how it is being received and how things are going that we don’t deliver what is called for in the situation. And in that case, we probably wouldn’t sustain the current long enough for it to do its perfect work.

There is a cycle to be fulfilled before the creative current through a person completes its work. If a person is so concerned about the results of their work that they stop paying attention to letting Love radiate through them, the cycle aborts.

If I was obsessed with worry over how you might receive this article, I’d never finish it!

The spiritual voltage we carry is meant to penetrate the field we are in long enough to transmute it.

I am not looking for a halfway experience for you or for me. Even though my experience of writing this article has been wonderful up to now, there is a transmutation possible through the completion of it.

Whatever the creative activity is, we want to be here for the whole thing, to let the entire cycle unfold, and to let the spiritual current do its perfect work through us. Whether it is cooking a meal, painting a picture, singing a song, or counseling somebody, there is a cycle to it, and there is the full measure of Love to come through.

Love is the power of Creation. It is capable of transmuting the field of consciousness in which we live. But only if it penetrates that field. And for that to happen, we have to let it radiate at the level called for and for the time period called for, without distraction.

 Let Love radiate without concern for results.

Chapter 4 of Seven Steps to the Temple of Light is titled Assurance. How can we be spiritual lightning rods without it?

Without assurance, a person may be full of self-doubt. There can be internal wavering, anxiety, and a lack of their full presence.

It is hard to let the full current of what we have to bring come through if there is a lack of assurance.

This is from Chapter 4: 

Absolute Assurance is ever known by the Blessed One who abides in the Presence of the Wonder­ful One, but it cannot be known by such as have not Realized the Presence. In such Assurance, every act is in accordance with the Perfect Law which cannot fail, and every word expressed in such Assurance will surely accomplish that whereunto it is sent. He who has entered into Assurance knows what Faith is, but he who has not entered in knows not the Spirit of Faith but the letter only, and this is of no effect.

There is a power, Presence, and wisdom available to us all. It is the Presence of the Wonderful One within. And just as the earth reaches up to the heavens and brings its charge to the heavens, allowing the lightning to come down, when we, as the outer man or woman, allow thought and feeling to rise up and touch the Presence and power available to us, and receive the wisdom of the heavens, it comes into us. This is the source of assurance.

…without concern for results.

We are not looking for results to be assured. Results go this way, and they go that way. There are the ups and downs, comings and goings, the coming together, and the falling apart. If we are looking to that for assurance, good luck!

We may be lucky enough to have someone close to us who is steady and loving, someone we can look to who offers assurance and comfort. And still, do you not want to know that from within yourself, from the Wonderful One within who is the reality of who you are?

Chapter 7 of Seven Steps to the Temple of Light contains this statement.

Love bargains not because Love has need of nothing.

At the usual level of human interchange, there is a back-and-forth and a negotiation of human dynamics. This facet of relationship with others can be a very normal and healthy part of life experience. And still, the statement from the book calls for something that transcends that level of interchange.

Love is the lightning that transmutes the field of consciousness. But how will that ever happen if our sole focus is on negotiating human dynamics? The absolute nature of the power of Love has to be present through a person if the field of human consciousness is to be transmuted. When we are ready to bring that vibration without negotiating it away, the world is changed.