How do you like that term, Primal Spirituality? It’s got a little grit to it, I think. The word primal is originally from Latin. It simply means first. So our Primal Spirituality is the spirituality with which we were born. And it is the spirituality behind all the world’s great faith traditions. Of course, other things have crept into those traditions. But we are talking about the original inspiration behind them and the original teaching.
I got curious recently about how that teaching shows up in traditions around the world, and we are going to incorporate some of what I found into our literature. It turns out that Primal Spirituality is taught around the world, and it’s at the root of faiths and spiritual paths across cultures.
Yes, we know that in the fourth century A.D.—something like four hundred years after Jesus lived—St. Augustine came up with the term original sin. But that is not actually what the Bible says. It is not what it teaches.
What does it teach? Primal Spirituality. We were made in the image and likeness of the Creator, male and female. That truth is at the root of the Judeo-Christian tradition. At the root of Islam is an expression, fitra, which means essentially the same thing. Fitra is the original pattern with which human beings were created, and it is forever available to us. And it is not only Islam and Judaism and Christianity that carry this root. You can go to Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, and other faiths around the world. This truth is everywhere.
So this is what we are speaking about when we speak of our Primal Spirituality. We are talking about how we are made and what is original in us. Here at Sunrise Ranch, we had the idea that if we could guide people into an experience of their Primal Spirituality, we could say, Look, that’s what we’re talking about—what you just experienced. Because if someone doesn’t have an experience of it, we can bloviate about it for days, but what does it mean? They have no ability to relate to it. It’s what you just experienced. That’s what we are talking about.
From the sound of things, that happened in Primal Spirituality 2. There was an experience. So now we can say, Yes, when we talk about understanding, that’s what we’re talking about. When we’re talking about heavenly space in consciousness, that’s what we’re talking about. When we’re talking about the waters of the heart being open—yes, that.
It is individual. We don’t initially experience things en masse. We have an experience that registers individually. And if we do, we know something that nobody can make us deny. You know it if you experience it. And yet there is something for people who have had that individual experience to know together that is of a collective nature.
This, too, relates to our Primal Spirituality. There is the primal nature of who we are together and what we are here for together.
As it’s described in Genesis, this is not just individual. It’s not just for ourselves. Yes, it is that. But it’s something that relates to all people and to the planet we are on. And so we are here for that.
If you are plugged into the Christian calendar, you may be aware that today is the Day of Pentecost. That word Pentecost may be familiar because of the Pentecostal church, which we associate with some kind of emotional and spiritual outpouring of the Holy Spirit.
The holiday goes back to ancient times. It was originally a celebration of the wheat harvest. What we celebrate about it was an event fifty days following the first Easter. A hundred and twenty people were gathered in an upper room in Jerusalem.
Imagine: this great spiritual leader who had been their teacher was no longer with them, and they were coming together to discern where to go next. It says explicitly in the text that Mother Mary was there. She had been present, witnessing what happened to her son, and fifty days later she was part of attending to what was going to happen next.
As is often the case—in our society and in ancient times—what transpired is described primarily in terms of what the men did. Peter leads the gathering. But the text very explicitly says that Mother Mary was there, along with other women. What part did they play in the events of that day? It is understated and underreported, I’m sure.
Those gathered experienced something miraculous—miraculous to them and, over the years, to many others.
There is a film that just came out this week, That They May Be One, released in theaters for two days only. Its subject is directly relevant to the Day of Pentecost and to our Primal Spirituality. You may recognize the words of the title from the Prayer of Intercession that Jesus spoke on the night before the crucifixion. There is another word in the prayer that the filmmakers left out: all. That they all may be one.
The film tracks a movement within the Christian church toward oneness, bringing a call for all Christians to come together as one. It follows that movement from the turn of the twentieth century. In 1895, Sister Elena Guerra—an Italian religious sister who would eventually be canonized as a saint—began writing to Pope Leo XIII urging him to encourage Catholics to open their hearts to the Holy Spirit. Over the following years she wrote him twelve letters. She said this:
Most Holy Father, only you can ensure that Christians return to the Holy Spirit, so that the Holy Spirit returns to us… I would like to ask you, for love of God, not to hesitate to recommend this common prayer.
The Pope took her request seriously. He published three documents on the Holy Spirit during their correspondence, including an encyclical on the subject in 1897, and he called the entire Church to pray a novena to the Holy Spirit each year leading up to Pentecost.
Remarkably, on the very same day that the Pope responded to Sister Elena Guerra, an American holiness teacher in Topeka, Kansas named Charles Parham prayed over a student for her to receive the Holy Ghost. She began to speak in tongues, and that event is seen as the initiation of the Pentecostal movement.
The broader launch of the movement came in 1906 on Azusa Street in Los Angeles, when a Black preacher named William Seymour drew people of all races and backgrounds and sparked a worldwide explosion of Pentecostalism that spread to every continent within a few years.
The film traces the movement to a high point in 1977 when fifty thousand gathered at Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City, Missouri, home of the Kansas City Chiefs—a massive ecumenical gathering of Christians across denominations.
The people who made this film were not looking past the Christian church. It was a call for all Christians to come together, transcending whatever denomination they were associated with—what is spoken of as the ecumenical movement. We are interested in something that can embrace any Christian, but which transcends Christianity. Our Primal Spirituality didn’t begin with Jesus. It is not limited to those who subscribe to the beliefs of a Christian church. It is how we are made. And Jesus himself wasn’t promoting Christianity as we know it today. We are here to bring an experience of Primal Spirituality to all people.
We have been considering the creative process, and the Primal Spirituality series takes people through an experience of it. Having that experience, we can think intelligently about it, instead of expounding forever around something we have not experienced.
We are talking about very real things, and we hope that for people who come to our services and take our programs, what we are talking about becomes real for them. To those 120 people on the original Day of Pentecost, what was happening seemed fabulous. They were speaking in tongues. There was a sound as of a rushing mighty wind. And there was an appearance of something as of fire descending upon them.
The author of Acts was careful to say that what he described in physical terms was not physical. There was something spiritual happening, for lack of a better way to name it. The words were a metaphor for what was happening spiritually.
What transpired seemed fantastic to people at the time and over the centuries. For people in the Pentecostal movement, it can seem like that. There is something fantastic happening—a huge emotional release and, to whatever degree, a spiritual outpouring. It seems astonishing, perhaps in a similar way to the way some of our programs can seem astonishing.
So what are we here for? On the original Day of Pentecost, those gathered had been instructed to tarry in Jerusalem until the Holy Ghost came fully upon them. They didn’t do that. They had this fantastic experience and then went out and got into all kinds of trouble.
So how about the programs we put on here? Are they for the purpose of having that experience and then—see you later?
Such experiences are an initiation into something. They are an initiation into our Primal Spirituality, an initiation into something we were born with already. In that sense, it is nothing new. But we haven’t been experiencing it. Humankind hasn’t.
In large part, as humankind, we are not experiencing how we were made and how we were made to be together. That’s true collectively, and it’s true individually. So if you get even a taste of it, it is amazing. It seems foreign to what a person has experienced up to that point: This is different. This is foreign. This is new. I’m really happy to touch into it.
What seems normal is the experience that person has had up to that point. And then they have an experience of the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, or however they might name it.
The word normal is from Latin, and its original meaning comes from a word for a carpenter’s triangle. Normal denoted the true, original pattern. Today we use the word to mean the same as everybody else, as if normal meant ordinary. But if we look at the world today, we could well say, this ain’t normal, folks. There is something else that’s normal—our fitra, the original pattern, the image and likeness of the Creator that is in us. Our Primal Spirituality. That’s normal.
If we are beginning to have an experience of it, we are being initiated into something that is normal. And the advice is, tarry there. Go no more forth. Go into that experience and don’t leave it. Live it and let it expand through you and express through you, be embodied through you, and become normal for you. That is a process.
There is an opportunity over a lifetime to ever more deeply enter that experience of Reality—knowing that what we are entering into is what is real. We are experiencing what is real so that it can become normal for us.
Then it is no longer initiation. Yes, there has to be an initiation, but as we step ever more deeply into the reality of that experience, we are becoming what we have been initiated into. We have been initiated into an experience of openness, of a heart cracked open, of spiritual safety. But the more deeply we enter the experience, we are that safe space. That is who I am. That is what I bring to the world. That is what I bring to other people.
That is the way we teach it. We don’t teach that Primal Spirituality is just something to be received. We teach it in terms of reciprocity, in terms of giving and receiving. Yes, you are receiving the safe space someone else has provided—the heaven, the firmament, the surround. But then, almost immediately, you are given the opportunity to provide that safe space for another.
In life, we can’t do too much about what kind of space another person offers to us. We don’t have control over that. We can look for the right people, the best people, but it is what it is. Where do we have authority and absolute control? In what we bring. And when we make the decision for ourselves as to the quality of what we’re going to bring into the world—as a fulfillment of our Primal Spirituality—nobody can stop it. Nobody can take it away from us.
We are receiving something that is real from within. And yes, we look for people who share a similar understanding, not so we can all lean on each other, but so that powerful people who know they have come into the world to serve can be together and do that together—knowing that being together is far more powerful than any one of us alone, or even all of us individually added up together. We are something else together.
Collectively, we have the potential to bring the force and the power of the Creator into the world. We are not waiting for the Holy Spirit to descend upon us. We are bringing the Holy Spirit into the world, to other people, to the world as a whole.
It is good to stand with people around the world who are having that experience—to come forth with other people in our own expression of our creatorship in a way that is unique to us, to play our part in this outworking, and to find the synergy we have as we bring it to the world together.
In the story of the Day of Pentecost long ago, they were with one accord in one place. They were in one place physically, 120 people in an upper room. We have used that expression here as something far more than being physically together. Yes, we all got our bodies into the room or online, but we are speaking of something more than that. Being in one accord, there is something resonant, consonant, and harmonious that we are sharing. We are then in one place vibrationally, participating in one thing collectively, each in our own individual way, wherever we are around the world.
If we are waiting to be initiated, we may be waiting for somebody to include us. I waited for people to include me for a long time. Have you done that? Waited for someone to come along and say, Yes, you’re a part of things. And here’s your part.
It’s not really how it works. There can be some of that. Part of being initiated can be people giving you the sense—maybe even telling you explicitly—Yes, you’re a part of things. You are part of what this is all about. You’re part of this community, part of this movement. But ultimately, if we accept our initiation—which comes from other people, but also from above—then we are not waiting to be included. We are bringing ourselves to this collective body. We are bringing the creative power, the creative gifts we have to give. We are not holding back.
I love where we are coming to today. Somehow, a couple of months ago, I had it in my mind that there was an experience for us to have of the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. People who know me know that I don’t usually speak in those terms—but that’s how it configured in my mind. And so I have been aware of us building toward this experience over weeks and months.
It is good to feel the outpouring of the Holy Spirit among us today. Not that we have reached the ultimate experience, but we come to a particular point of wading into Reality, being in Reality together, and letting the power of Reality—the power of the Creator that is in us and working through us—work in our field. Thank you for being part of it.