The Presence of the Family of Souls

Last week, I wrote about the existential risks humankind faces. And here we are with the scientific knowledge to face those risks and do something about them, but without the collective will. That is quite a picture of the body of humanity, facing climate change, the potential of nuclear war, and the specter of AI taking over, but with a lack of collective will to address these issues. Certainly, there are individuals who care about them, but individual will does not get us there.

There has to be something collective done. That seems practically impossible. What I was posing last week was that something has to change in the human soul. Something has to transform. And when you think of it, what could transform us as the body of humanity to allow us to face the issues of our day?

My answer to that is simply what is named by the word Love. Love transforms. We know that Love at work at the level of human relationship can be transforming. But I’m talking about something bigger than that. The reality of Love, however it appears in a person’s heart, transforms them. It has that ability like nothing else does. What could save us? Only that, really.

And so, if that’s true, is it not incumbent upon us to come to know Love for ourselves? To be it and then to bring it and embody it in whatever ways are open to us to do so, to expose the world to that transforming power. That is our epic story as humanity. It is the story of encountering people who did that, and then of what transpired after that encounter.

Love is a spirit. Love is an energy. Love is an eternal, invisible reality. But it is something more, even, than that. Love is a quality of Being, we might say a quality of God. It is not a disembodied energy. It is energy that comes with a Presence. It comes with Being. It’s a quality of Being. And when we touch a Being of Love, it transforms us. When we come to know ourselves as that, it is transformative.

In our literature, there is the remarkable statement that the only reason that in human culture there’s a need for the concept of God is because we’ve become separate from that reality. If we hadn’t become separate from it, we wouldn’t have to talk about it as if it’s over there, up there, in here.

In some sense, it’s a sign of human failure, a sign of our inability to know ourselves. Not that we all, by our lonesome as a human being, are God. That would be ridiculous. But the Being that we are inside, the reality of who we are, is part of that larger reality of Being we might refer to as “God.”

And so, on a journey to rediscover that for ourselves, we talk about that reality as if it’s something separate from who we are. What else would we do? We’re feeling separate, so we talk about it as if it’s something else. But ultimately, we are talking about ourselves. It is the reality of who we are, along with the Being of the whole planet, of the whole cosmos. We are part of that Beingness.

I think it’s good to remember that on our search to know the spiritual. That’s what Dorothy discovered in The Wizard of Oz, yes? She was looking for home and discovered that she was home all along.

I woke up this morning with a memory of something that relates to all this. It’s a story my mother told. My parents got married after the Second World War in Washington, D.C., at an unfamiliar church that they didn’t regularly attend. And there she was, a woman who had grown up in the Christian Science Church and attended university. My father came from a Jewish family. And the way my mother told the story is that the pastor, in conducting the marriage, said that the church was the bride of Christ.

For my mother, growing up as she did, that didn’t go over too well, enough so that she told the story of it years later to me and my siblings. But I was reflecting on it because it is an interesting statement. I don’t really believe that a human institution is the bride of Christ. That doesn’t quite make sense to me. But we, as human beings, are the embodiment of a dimension of the Divine that, generally speaking, isn’t talked about much.

We are a living embodiment of Mother God. That is who we are. We could go looking for Mother God, for the feminine face of God, for the goddess—however we might refer to that reality. But again, we’re looking for something as if it’s separate and different from us, when it is actually who we are. We are made to be—hats off to the pastor—a bride of the Christ Spirit. I don’t usually speak of it that way, but nonetheless, the conception of the Holy Spirit is meant to take place in us as a human being, as a man or a woman.

The reality of Love is meant to come into us and conceive something in us so that the reality of life can be born through us. Life is an ongoing expression of Love in the world that transforms. Love transforms because it is the innate power within all people. And so, when a person turns to Love, they are turning to something that’s already inside themselves.

It is the power in all things and in all people. And when we know that for ourselves—not just as an idea, but as an experience—and when Love conceives the expression of life through us into the world, we become a living embodiment of Love. We are a reminder then to people of what’s already inside them. We remind people that they are already being loved from the inside, like they couldn’t believe. Meanwhile, when that’s our experience, the person is being loved from the outside too. Not because there’s some special effort. Sometimes it seems like special effort is required, human nature being what it is. You gotta really work at loving people. Here’s the key. There is something in most people that’s not very lovable, the part of them that is just an individualized embodiment of world culture. That’s not very lovable. At the same time, there is something within all people that is ultimately lovable. And you don’t have to try to love it. It’s the natural state of Being to love what is real about a person. So, when we see it—often hiding within a layer of human culture—it is lovable. And then that person is not only being loved on the inside by the power of what gave them life; they are being loved on the outside by us.

School children are meant to live in an atmosphere of that. That is what transforms. A child is meant to be loved not only on the inside, which they definitely are. They are meant to be loved on the outside, too. They’re meant to live in a culture that’s an embodiment of what’s on the inside, a transparent culture. No more cover-up.

Most young people rail against the cover-up of what is within all people. How about you? Did you have that experience growing up? I did. Just this week, someone sent me a microfiche report of a protest I led in 1969 from my hometown paper, the Westport News. I don’t remember seeing it before. This is from the article:

Peace proponents mass downtown          

The largest crowd ever to assemble outdoors in downtown Westport joined with tens of millions of other Americans yesterday… Close to 2,000 people, according to police estimates, gathered in front of the YMCA shortly after noon.

David Karchere was Staples (High School) student chairman for the day…

With a small group of friends, I led a three-mile march of about 1,200 students from the high school to the rally.

I had the opportunity to speak at the rally. I don’t remember what I said, but I remember what I felt. Something in me just said, No, no, no. The human cover-up was absolutely intolerable. It took the form in that day of the Vietnam War, an unjust, nonsensical war if there ever was one. In those days, young men were being drafted into that war. There is something inside us that knows the cover-up of our intrinsic divinity is intolerable.

At the time, I didn’t know what to do other than protest. That’s what young people tend to do. They rail against the culture. At some point, if there is some wisdom, the person realizes that doesn’t get them very far. You can rail against the machine as much as you want, but that doesn’t stop the machine from being a machine. It is the machine of human culture. For there to be creativity and real purpose in someone’s life, something else has to happen. The person has to undo the cover-up for themselves and get down to the root of what is true.

That takes some work when you realize, as I did, that not only was human culture around me, I was infected with it. My psyche was invaded by it. And I realized that there was work I had to do if that cover-up was to be dispelled, if the primal reality within me was going to be known by me and shared with my world.

Did that ever seem like a challenge to you? How are you going to unearth, express, and embody the living reality within yourself so that it is not covered up any longer, so that the loving Being who you are shows on the outside? For someone who is awakening to the cultural cover-up in our world—and what it is covering up—I can’t imagine that this would not seem like a tremendous challenge: “How do I take the Reality that’s in me, that in our culture and in my psyche has been covered over, and unearth it? How do I let it become real, alive, in expression, embodied, and felt?” That’s the challenge, first of all, not “How do I change everybody else?” How do I till the soil of my own soul so that the seeds that are in there can grow and the spirit who I am can be liberated in the world in which I live?

Do you not face that same challenge that I face? How do I let the people around me feel and know Reality in a world culture that is gaslighting us, pretending that the cover-up of who we are is normal. And that we should just continue to create a human culture that is a cover-up of the internal reality that we all know for ourselves deep inside.

How about ending that today? How about declaring we’re not doing that anymore? We’re going to create a different culture, a transparent culture that reveals the fact that there’s a Being of Love within us all, and we are a collective Being of Love, and that who we are collectively lives inside each one of us. How about that kind of collective agreement? We’re going to end the cover-up. End it.

We’re going to live in a culture of one that ends the cover-up. And then, if you’re doing that and I’m doing that, we’re creating a collective culture of transparency. There are all kinds of ideas about what transparency is, demanding it from the government and everybody else. But how about the transparency of the Presence of a Being of Love? Not as something separate from who we are.

That’s the Being that I am, the Being that you are. And it is not just you or me as individual Beings. There is the Being of the entire Family of Souls. So, there is otherness in all of this. It is not just us as individuals. There is a collective reality that we’re all a part of. As part of the body of humankind, we are members of a body of incarnate Beings. Acknowledging Beings who are not incarnate, we are a member of one Family of Souls.

That body is a body of the Presence of Love and the Presence of the One Family of Souls. Turn on the news—total denial that that even exists. In so many ways, our culture is a denial of that reality. And then people look to God as something other, whether they think of Father God, Mother God, or something else. They go looking for something when what they’re looking for is right here. It is them. It is us.

The world needs the Presence of that God reality through you and through me, and through us collectively. It’s wonderful to feel and know the agreement among us that that’s what we’re doing. And we know that in some way it takes work when the culture around us comes crashing in on us. It takes a big fat no from us.

But even more importantly, when the culture of one that’s inside us—known as human personality, or the human psyche—asserts itself with all its fears, sense of separation, desires, and resentments, to make this real, there has to be something in us that says, “I’m not having it. It’s over. Over.”

We’re here to do something so significant it can’t be taken over by human culture, whether it’s the culture out there or the culture of one in here, which is, I think you’d probably agree, the greater enemy. It’s not only out there. We might realize at some point that human culture is living—rent-free—in our own mind.

Let us know and say, “The Presence of Being is in command.”

Let Love command. Let the Presence of Love that I am a part of command.