Near the end of the iconic horror film from 1941, The Wolf Man, the Gypsy, Maleva, says this to Lon Chaney, who plays the wolf man:

  The way you walked was thorny, through no fault of your own.

After being bitten by a wolf, he turns into a werewolf and kills other human beings when the moon rises. 

We live in a world where so much is transpiring that is not of our own invention. We were born into the world the way it is, with the circumstances as they were for us. This gets very confusing for us as human beings, as it can be hard to determine what has been created by others. For the wolf man, I imagine that the Gypsy was relieving the shame and guilt he felt over having been given his fate from the bite of a wolf. 

A noted course leader spoke to me at lunchtime one day several years ago at Sunrise Ranch. Having some awareness of what we were undertaking, she said these words:

You are pulling a long train.

It was a poetic way of acknowledging my life circumstances and life path. It was an expression of compassion, and it offered the opportunity for me to have some self-compassion. 

We undertake things in life by the simple fact of incarnation, the simple fact of being born into the human experience. We are taking upon ourselves a path that is not entirely of our own making. And yet what is of our own making is how we walk that path. 

In the process, we have to sort out what we are responsible for. We are responsible for the walking—not so much for the path or what might be on that path. It is essential to know the difference, because if the human psyche gets absorbed with a sense of responsibility for things that are not its responsibility, it is not free to walk the path. If a person has a sense of guilt and shame for what is happening in the world the way it is, they are not likely to walk their path with the sense of courage and honor that would otherwise be natural to them. 

It is always important to remember who we are. We are not the path. We are that one who incarnated into this human experience and who is walking the path. 

There have been people throughout history that we look up to that brought something profound into the world. Their path was sometimes challenging. We cannot attribute the creation of everything around them to them. It was what it was, but they walked the path that was theirs to walk. 

We are not here to judge the honesty of someone else. We are here to walk with honor and integrity on our path, to be ourselves. I give thanks every day that I am not responsible for figuring out what that is for somebody else. I have the responsibilities naturally given to me in life, as you have the responsibilities given to you. We have the path given to us to walk with honor, dignity, and integrity. 

Think of Mahatma Gandhi. What a noble soul! Was it his fault what happened to him? Or how his legacy was treated after he left? I would certainly not make that claim. 

You can think of others, like John Lennon. Was the way his life ended his fault? 

Perhaps the most epic story in human history is the story of Jesus of Nazareth. Was it his fault what happened to him? Did he not do what he did well enough? Should he have done something differently so that there would have been a different outcome? I doubt any of us would make that judgment. No, he walked the path he had to walk, and everybody else did what they did in his lifetime and afterward. Was it his fault that some of those who came after were not paying attention to what he brought, and took his teachings in a tangential direction? Is that on him? 

Within the range of the history of Emissaries of Divine Light, was it the fault of Martin Cecil, who led the Emissaries from 1954 to 1988, that key people who carried on after him lost the plot? Did he not do his job well enough? Did he not teach well enough? No. He walked his path with honor and integrity. What everyone else did is what everybody else did. 

And so it is for all of us. We are not accountable for what everybody else does. We are accountable for our own path, however thorny it might be. We have a natural, innate responsibility to act with honor and dignity. That, we can do something about. And the clearer we are about that, the clearer we will be as we take our walk.

When we walk with clarity, as people witness us, they are not watching us react to them or fret over our path. They just see us being ourselves. 

When we have this attitude and approach, we have the opportunity to bring the realm of potential and possibility and let it manifest in our life, bringing it through in our expression on our walk. 

What is the realm of possibility? Is absolutely anything possible? Anything we might dream up? A margarita on the beach? Winning the Lotto? 

There is an innate, underlying nature to things for every person, every form of life on the planet, and for the planet itself. There is a potential underlying it that is the very essence of who and what it is. It is not as if we could be anything and be in integrity with ourselves. We are someone. There is an underlying nature to who we are. There is an underlying pattern of who we are. Our potential is that truth and the opportunity to manifest it in the form of our life expression. And so it is for all people and all things. 

That truth is there, wanting to come out. It will come out inevitably, one way or another. That is the very nature of the truth of things. So, no matter what we do, while we can cover it over as human beings, at some point, what is true cannot be covered over. It is itself, and it is unalterable. Because it is true, it is real. And it is more potent than anything you or I could do as human beings. 

We could all mess it up here in the world in which we live. We could all distort the expression of who we are on the planet. That is possible to do—people do it. And yet, that is temporary. It does not change who we are. We cannot change who we are, and ultimately who we are will find expression, one way or another. And so it is with all things. 

That does not, or should not, make us passive. We have the opportunity to be facilitators of the realm of potential. We have the opportunity as co-creators to bring the underlying truth of who we are and the truth of all things, particularly those things that are in our sphere of creatorship. That is not a passive affair. As a creator, we bring the seeds of the underlying truth of things and the guidance born from that truth. For that to happen, we have to be open to perceiving the truth of things. Beyond that, we have to let the truth of things move and live through us. 

For me, and others who live there, we are vitally interested in the truth of Sunrise Ranch, which lives in the world of potential. When we tune in to the underlying truth of this place and this community, we bring that truth through, with courage and zeal, so that that truth prevails and any tendency for the thorns on our path to take over is overcome. 

We walk a thorny path. The world is a thorny path. There are so many thorny things in the world that encroach. There is so much that is not ideal. In so many ways, we passed the ideal a long time ago. But whatever the path is, it allows us to create what is ideal in the realm of potential now. 

Then that truth is not just “up there” or “in here.” The underlying truth of things lives in the world. 

For us personally, we don’t have to wait for another incarnation. We are here now, and the truth of us is present in the realm of potential, available to be manifest. We are here to let that truth live and let it have its way here and now—to let it have its way with us individually, for sure, and then collectively. 

In that process, how important do you think it is to sense that truth together? To celebrate it, to let the power of it move us in our shared field of consciousness and energy? Sometimes we call that “our shared heaven,” using that word heaven, not to talk about the place after you die or the place way up there, but to talk about the field of consciousness and energy that we are sharing now. Let what we perceive as true of us together, and what we perceive and know to be true of this sphere that we are responsible for as co-creators, intensify. Let our love for it intensify. Let it be known face-to-face, heart-to-heart, arm in arm with each other. Or would you rather quibble and argue about the little details of our lives? 

There are details of our life, and the details of our life have some significance. But what is it like to work the details out with someone when there is no meeting of minds or hearts, or spirit? No fun.

To create together, we have to build the heaven that we share so it is rockin’—so that there is no mistake about it between us. So it is strong and vibrant. 

I know you. You know me. We know what we are doing here together. 

We can feel it—we can feel the urgency of it, we can feel the truth of it, the power of it, and we are all about that.