In this Pulse of Spirit, we are taking the opportunity to do some essential work. We are offering a clear vision of our innate spirituality and penetrating insight into what tends to block the experience of it in the lives of people around the globe.

We are addressing what is happening spiritually for ourselves, individually, the world at large, and everything in between at every level of human experience, from the micro to the macro.

What would you say is the greatest gift you have received as a human being? There is something individual about that, unique to each of us. Each of us has been given our own mix of unique talents that are ours to develop. Part of our life journey is to find our own uniqueness and embrace it.

And then there is something that is the same, given to us all as human beings. What is that greatest gift we share in common?

The greatest gift we all receive as human beings has three dimensions. The first is the most obvious, the gift of Life. It does not get any greater than that, and without it, any other gift has no meaning. And then there is the gift of Love, without which Life has no meaning. Life without Love being shared among us turns to dust.

Love is the universal power of Life, the power of the universe. It is the magnetism of the universe, what holds the universe together, and holds us together.

The third dimension of the greatest gift that we all receive is Truth. I am speaking of the Truth of Love—the natural unfolding pattern of Love that allows Love to stay true to its nature and bring Life to the world. Truth is the wisdom of the universe we are blessed to be given.

Here is the greatest gift given to humankind, one gift in three dimensions: Life, Love, and Truth. So what went wrong?

There are the terrors of what happens in the human world. I don’t need to rehearse them here—just watch the evening news. Or reflect on what you witness in people you meet in your own life. Or perhaps reflect on your own experience. We are all given the greatest gift. What happens then?

This greatest of gifts is given to us from a level of Being that is physically invisible. You cannot see the source of it with your physical eyes. You can see the manifestation. When it is received and expressed, you can see the embodiment of it. So while the origin of the greatest gift comes from the Invisible, it comes through people, sometimes clearly and brilliantly. And sometimes in a blurred and even distorted way.

There have been people who have brought the greatest gift to humankind in the most conscious and deliberate way, in effect saying, Here is the gift! You can see it in me. You can feel it from me. And in seeing it from me, hearing it from me, you can touch this gift inside yourself.

This is what Jesus Christ brought to the world. He brought the greatest gift possible. He called it the kingdom, the power, and the glory. And he said, Here it is. But Jesus is not the only one who has brought the gift.

Seeing that this gift is given to us from within and from people who are a living demonstration of the gift, what goes wrong? What goes wrong in our world at large, and what goes wrong in the individual experience, including for us and our immediate sphere of Life?

I understand these are archetypal issues of global proportion. They relate to all of humankind. Yet we live in a holonic universe. Just as the genetic code within one cell of the human body replicates itself throughout the entire body, what is at issue for any individual human being is at issue for the entire body of humanity. And what is at issue for all humankind is at issue for any individual. So, when we see the gift we have all been given and how people can unconsciously reject it, we understand what is pivotal for us all.

So why is the greatest gift not received? Even when a person brings it lucidly to humankind?

Doesn’t it go like this? Someone gets in touch with the greatest gift. They come to receive it and know it themselves, and seek to share it with the people in their world. For them, it is an experience. But how else would they share it other than as a message and teaching? And then, people they have shared it with attempt to share it too. So the gift begins to be expressed as an idea, a philosophy, a belief, or a spiritual practice. And then, it can become a religion, a dogma, a spiritual or a religious community. It becomes something that embeds itself in human culture. We could look at that process in the macro and how it plays out over history. And we could look at these same factors in our own experience.

Before you know it, people are not having faith in the gift. They have faith in their beliefs about the gift. They have faith in the structures of culture. They have faith in their memory of the people who brought the gift. And the culture begins to own the gift as if it were a property of the culture or the property of an institution.

It degrades from there. Before you know it, a person believes in something that is not firsthand. A human institution adopts a belief and tells the individual that they ought to adopt that belief. So now people are trying to believe something that somebody else believes. So, it is not even their own original belief. They are trying to practice something others tell them to practice, associate in a certain way, or behave in a certain way somebody told them they should behave. There is perhaps a place for all that. But what if, in the whole process, the greatest gift is not received? This is what is happening.

Think of this in terms of Attunement. If the greatest gift is the source of Life, Love, and Truth within us, something happens when we attune to that gift and receive it. You can tune in to the greatest gift and receive something real. And something happens when you do because it really is the source of Life. And when we tune in, in heart, mind, and spirit to it, it activates us. It inspires us. It uplifts us. It has our back when we are tuned in to it.

What happens if you attune to a structure of human culture? What if you tune in to a belief or a practice? The belief might have some benefits, and the practice might have benefits. The culture that people establish around those beliefs and practices could have some benefits. But what is the ultimate result if all you tune in to is a belief and not something real that transcends culture?

Human culture can look oh-so-formidable, oh-so-important. The structures of religion can look that way. The cathedrals of Europe are magnificent. A church can look like it is going to last forever. It can seem to be stable. But it is not the stability of Reality. It is the seeming stability of culture.

If you have a belief, you can be fervent about it. You can have all kinds of passion and emotion about that belief. It can have some sort of effect when you attune to a belief. But it is ultimately not Life-giving. The only thing that gives Life is the source of Life. The only thing that bestows Love upon us is the source of Love itself.

Religion can bring a gift. It names the invisible source. It names Universal Being. We could use the word God or any of the many words for the source of Life that religion has given to the world: Allah, El Shaddai, Jehovah, Jesu, and many more. Religion has this gift of naming invisible things, speaking of them, and telling stories of them, allowing them to become more real to people. And there can be a sense of the Rock, of what is truly stable, what truly has our back, through religion. But then, what so often happens is that the structure of religion, which is a structure of human culture, deceives us; because before you know it, we as humanity find we are worshiping the structures and the beliefs and the dogma and not the Reality itself. So religion becomes opaque instead of transparent. It becomes a thing in and of itself that is now substituting for Reality instead of connecting to Reality.

The forms of human culture can seem stable, as if they will last forever. But they do not. That is not the nature of the human experience. Things change. Human experience is mutable by its nature. You can dress it up to look like it will last forever, but it will not. Our lives do not last forever. Buildings do not last forever. Empires do not last forever. Churches do not last forever. It is all mutable by its nature. We can dress it up to look like the eternal God. But it is not. And so, on that basis, people are deceived. They are deceived about the nature of Reality, the nature of the human experience, and therefore disappointed and disillusioned.

We are here to receive and give the greatest gift. The human being through whom the greatest gift is given is ennobled. That human being becomes an expression of the greatest gift, to the point that there is no separation or distinction. They are a living embodiment of the gift. And we all have that opportunity.

And yet the instrument of the gift—us as human beings and all the structures of culture that we participate in—are mutable. Are we not here to delight in what is mutable? Not trying to be some icon of culture, not trying to be “as God”—not trying to be immutable God. Our humanity is an expression of God. That is different. We are an expression of Love, not the source of Love. And when we find that out, we have an opportunity to delightfully be the mutable. It beats being set in our ways and set in concrete. To be alive is to be mutable.

What does it take for us to receive and know the greatest gift and to pass it on? Is it not humility? And especially humility of mind?

Our minds are magnificent instruments. They can think all kinds of things. And I am sure we all have discovered we had better not act on everything we think. Our minds are thought machines. They entertain pictures and ideas, perhaps thoughts about the divine source or of what Love is. The mind is a remarkable capacity. But the moment we start worshiping a thought we have about the Divine, as if that thought was the Divine, we are sunk. We are deceived. And worse yet, if we accept somebody else’s thought about the Divine as if that is the Divine, we are sunk even deeper.

And yet a thought can transparently connect us to a reality. A feeling can too. Apart from your feelings, how do you connect to Love? If you had no feelings, would you experience Love? What a magnificent thing the human heart is. But that does not mean that the feeling itself is the eternal source of Love. Or that however we feel about the eternal source is the way it is; it is just how we feel.

Apparently, this is the way we are made. Our mind and heart are both activated by the divine source. Was that a mistake? Should we not see how we are made and accept it humbly as a blessing? We are made to tune in to the greatest gift. We have a capacity that is made to do that—consciousness. But is that what is happening? Or have the thoughts, feelings, and beliefs present in consciousness become God to us?

We are gloriously made to think and feel in a way that is transparent, so that the Divine can come into our awareness and express itself. That is the art of living. It is the delight of Life. And in that humility, we can experience the Divine and let the process work as it is meant to work. We can allow our minds and hearts to be that mutable instrument that transparently expresses the Divine.

Of course, we Love and appreciate the instrument through which the Divine expresses—we can Love our own human instrument and the human instrument of others. But we are not fooled to think that the outer expression of a person, with all their talents, is God. They are an expression of God, part of God, and not separate from God. But the human instrument is not eternal God. It is mutable.

What happens when people start worshiping their culture around spirituality instead of Universal Being itself? One of the things that happens is you have factionalism. Cultures break up and divide. A large church divides in two; the two become four, and on it goes.

We become divided as human beings. This is the parable of the Tower of Babel. The people attempt to build a massive tower to the sky, a human edifice to unite themselves, and it does not work. They end up being scattered across the face of the earth. They attempt to build God as a structure of human consciousness, and it fails.

We sometimes try to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. The interfaith movement gets up to this sometimes. If you take people and cultures that are all worshiping their beliefs and then stir them all up together in a big soup and try to get them to be tolerant of how everybody else is doing that, what does that achieve? Until people are humble about their own experience and they are more interested in relating to the Reality of what God is, instead of their ideas about God, there is no basis for human unity.

Emissaries of Divine Light participated in Human Unity Conferences in the 1980s. Did it create human unity? To the degree that people dropped their faith and belief in their faith and their belief, there was an experience of unity. But for those who didn’t experience that, the basis for unity was not there.

The purpose of Emissaries of Divine Light is to be a transparent priesthood. It is not our purpose to flog any dogma, beliefs, traditions, culture, or history. All of these things are perhaps part of Life. It is not that we have no history or culture. It is not that we do not think or believe things. And all the ways we have of clearly expressing the one real God are noble expressions to be embraced, loved, and shared. But the purpose of it is not to bring people into our brand of human culture. The purpose is Attunement with the invisible source of Life. Without that, as somebody unkindly put it, you can share some body heat with another person, but that is as far as an Attunement is going to go if there is no real Attunement with the One Reality.

These things I have spoken of are at issue for us individually and for any human being. They are at issue in the world. We could study history and culture and look at all the ways that has played out. And we could examine it for ourselves in our own individual experience.

This is at issue for us as Emissaries of Divine Light. We are here to be the mutable that allows the immutable to be expressed and embodied. We could call the immutable the Rock of Reality. We are here to delight in our mutability, to dance and sing before the Lord and, in doing so, to bring what all humankind needs and desires—the Rock of Reality. Not the rock of belief, not the rock of culture or tradition—the Rock of Reality.

The whole world is deceived by the structures of culture, believing that they are the immutable. And yet every day, every generation, we see that they are not. There is a Rock of Reality. We are here to be a transparent priesthood that introduces that Rock of Reality to the world and invites the world to find Attunement with Reality, so that that Reality may have their back and activate them at every level.

Is this your calling? If so, I encourage you to enter your own transparent experience of the greatest gift more deeply and bring it to the world.

Sunrise Ranch
Sunday Service
September 18, 2022