The Powers of Creation at Work in the Human Soul

The Creation story in Genesis contains this statement:

And a river went out of Eden to water the garden; and from thence it was parted, and became into four heads.

Genesis 2:10

This is an unusual river. Most earthly rivers are formed by other rivers that join together to make one mighty river that ultimately flows to the sea. For instance, the Missouri, Ohio, Arkansas, Illinois, and the Red River join the Mississippi before it reaches the Gulf of Mexico. The Mississippi doesn’t divide to form those rivers.

We can imagine an ancient author telling this Creation story to illuminate the reality in which we live. Perhaps they were not describing a physical reality. Perhaps they were describing invisible dimensions of the world we can see and hear. If so, what is the possible relevance for our life? I will speak to this from my own learning and experience.

As human beings, we don’t receive the source of Life as one homogeneous activating stream. We, ourselves, have four facets of our human makeup: a mind, heart, body, and spirit. Each of the dimensions of who we are is activated from within by one of the four rivers referenced in Genesis. A stream from the One River going out of Eden enters each facet of our makeup to activate our thoughts, feelings, body, and spirit. So each facet is activated by a cosmic force of Creation. Potentially, they bring not only power but also intelligence, guidance, and Love into the human experience and into the world.

Those forces are throwing a party inside us, interacting with each other and bringing a never-ending kaleidoscope of creativity. At least, that’s what happens if everything goes well.

So what’s the issue? If the ancients’ description of Reality is accurate, what goes wrong for us as human beings in this process? Simply put, human beings generally are not receiving this download. Or if they are, only part of it. There are internal, self-active processes of mind—conscious and subconscious—and reactive emotional patterns that can keep a person from receiving the One River that divides into four.

Sometimes, religion steps in to repair humanity’s relationship with the River. There are myriad approaches to this. There can be an attempt to invoke an outpouring of the Holy Spirit. But whatever the attempt is, it is rare for each of the four streams of the One River to fully enter the human capacity.

Religious doctrine and teaching attempt to address humankind’s relationship with Divine Source. Sometimes these teachings contain at least a partially accurate depiction of Reality. Within the teachings of Emissaries of Divine Light, we have taught the working of these four streams as the four forces, given the elemental names water, air, earth, and fire. And so, many who have received Emissary teachings have a conception of those four forces. But just because a person has intellectual or academic knowledge about such things does not guarantee that they have welcomed the reality of them into their own experience and expression.

Fifteen years ago, it was an awareness of these issues that motivated us to begin to teach people to go beyond mental conception or belief to an actual experience of these four forces or four streams of the One River. What we noticed was that without an activation of this experience, spirituality lacked vigor, depth, power, or meaning. There could be a general belief in God, or even in the Spirit of God, but it could be a belief without knowledge. In such case, there could be a lack of penetration of human thought and emotion, leading to a lack of potent words and action.

The symbol of rainfall in Colorado comes to mind. Sometimes a hardpan forms, especially where there is high clay content in the soil. When that happens, the water to plants can be insufficient, even with ample rainfall. The rain just drains off the fields and doesn’t penetrate the ground.

We realized that human experience can be like that—hardpan. This realization was the motivation behind creating our Primal Spirituality course series, one through seven. These courses break up the hardpan and cultivate the soil of human experience. Then the water from the four rivers can flow and sink in. We wanted people to understand, feel, and know what it is like when the four forces move through each dimension of the human capacity. We wanted to assist people to have an experience, and then be able to say to them, Look! That’s what it feels like to have the four rivers moving in your life.

It is one thing to point to an abstract idea or principle regarding Reality. Things change when a person begins to track the powers of Creation at work in themselves.

On a farm, it is not really the farmer who grows the crops. That’s God’s work—the work of the sun, the soil, the rain, and all the other forms of life that support the growth. Nonetheless, the farmer has vital work to do to facilitate God’s work. The farmer plants the seeds, pulls the weeds, and cultivates the soil when needed.

Likewise in the human experience. The powers of Creation are not self-created. They come from someplace outside the immediate human experience. What we’ve come to realize is that it is our responsibility to create the conditions in which the powers of Creation can operate effectively. We have to allow the seeds to be planted. We have to plow the soil to break up any hardpan. And we have to let the sun shine on the depths of the human soul. We create the conditions in which the powers of Creation can be at work in the human soul.