Creating Sacred Space; The Return to Paradise

May 14, 2023May 14, 2023 / Church of the Harvest / Leave a comment

From a Sermon given at the Spring Equinox Worship Service on March 26, 2023.

In this community we’ve been talking a lot lately about time, about the importance of taking time into consideration to respect the body’s needs, about the importance of remembering that time as an illusion as far as spirit goes, and about the need to learn how to work with those seemingly contradictory perspectives.

I remind you that they are not in Truth, contradictory. They just appear to be so when viewed by the human brain. As human beings struggle to negotiate current events with the unfolding landscape changing far in excess for which many are prepared, what is required is a leap of faith, a commitment to not only growing beyond the glass ceiling imposed by the human central nervous system and its brain; but taking huge steps into territory previously left primarily to artists, prophets, saints, indigenous populations and others who have had the courage and/or permission to explore beyond what can be known through the five senses of the physical body.

I have been (largely) amused by all the individuals in our society who actually think they can stem the tide of these waves of new levels of spirit-driven human consciousness. Political and religious leaders in particular seem to be convinced that they can maintain their power and prestige by blocking those who are trying to unearth—i.e., bring up from the hidden caverns of the Earth—our collective history so we can reexamine and expand it to include others who have been marginalized or misrepresented.

But this expansion of perspective that society is undergoing, this debate about whether we are going to allow larger and more truthful representations of who we are as a collective entity is not really about our history. It is about our future, our future as a species on Planet Earth.

Let us get right to the point of how we go about further growing human consciousness, and what a leap of faith will require of us as individuals and a collection of individuals.

Leap of Faith by Lucy Campbell, Image used in accordance with Fair Use Principals.

I want to talk about two key aspects of this subject. First of all, I want to talk about the unchangeable aspect of that leap that will continue into the future irrespective of whatever else takes place. Second of all, I want to talk about the part we CAN and must change as we recast human history in a way that will help us make the transition into an unknown future.

So first of all, what is the existing part of the game plan here that is NOT subject to change over time? By the way, we have prepared ourselves for accepting that there is an unchangeable and a changeable aspect of reality as the path to serenity, a commitment to peace, through a widely-shared mantra. You have all heard the words: God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

What can’t we change? Simply put: God.

In our arrogance human beings have been very confused about God. We get lost to our lack of understanding of what is God and what is not God. Most or all of the evil done on the Planet has been in large part because we struggle with this question. Wars have been fought and genocide or enslavement of whole populations have been carried out by defining outside groups as “other”—the ones that are not of God or blessed by God by virtue of belonging to whatever group to which we belong. This is the “tribal thinking” human animals have done since day one. Horrific acts of injustice and other forms of persecution have occurred when policy-makers think they are speaking for or doing the will of God, when really, they are only speaking for themselves and those immediately around them.

To add insult to injury, those who have been victimized then often go through enormous further suffering as a result of their belief that if God is not “on their side,” they have been abandoned by God. Many who have witnessed these outbursts of evil played out in the world turn their back on the Creator-of-Us-All, choosing instead the desperate emptiness of atheism or harsh adherence to the misery of determinism. God is on everyone’s side, in a manner that often confounds our physical brain.

At the heart of all of these problems is a misguided dependency on the human brain as the decision-maker about our reality. Don’t get me wrong: the human brain is a magnificent miracle of the highest order. But it only processes what is brought to it by the body’s sensory systems. Compared to human consciousness, compared to that capacity that human beings have to access all the information in the entire universe, the brain is a tiny cog. A mere speck of dust in an endless ocean of energy.

God does not change. So, how do we make sense of a rapidly changing world that comes from a Creator that is everything and everywhere and everyone and is unchangeable? We don’t. Not, at least, with our brains.

When I am struggling to conceptualize everyday problems from a spiritual perspective, and I run into this perceptual dilemma, this conflict that my brain has with the world being both unchangeable and changing, I find a certain allegory useful. I like to think of God as the frame. And I like to think of human animals as the painters of the picture within that frame.

We can’t change the frame. We can, however, pick out whatever colors we want for the picture being created in the framework. We can leave the canvas white, infuse it with rainbow hues or paint the whole damn thing black if we want. We can use acrylics or watercolors or glue weird objects to the canvas. We can use delicate brushstrokes or splash colors on willy-nilly. We can paint in the nude, or totally encased in a suit of armor. We can share our resulting masterpiece with thousands of people on social media, sell it to a museum, or destroy it on the spot. All of that is up to us.

We can’t change the frame, though. That is why we don’t need to be much concerned most of the time with creating sacred space, not really. It’s already created. The framework that we know as Mother Earth is already sacred, every inch of it. Every person, every creature, every plant, every rock, every molecule. The Creator-of-Us-All is all and is in all in some form or another.

Image used in accordance with Fair Use Principals.

We can’t change the frame. That is also why Mother Earth will survive, whether or not human beings remain on it. Personally I believe it is in the framework, or you might say the destiny of the very planet itself that it will eventually be returned to its original state of Paradise. Whether or not human animals are a part of that renewed state, that remains to be seen. I may be wrong.

So, second of all, what can be changed? Pretty much the whole picture of life on Mother Earth. Human beings have been changing it in destructive, unaware ways for many centuries. Many fear that it is too late for human beings to be a part of the picture of life on Earth in the future. From a scientific perspective that relies almost exclusively on that which our brain can process, that may be true. From a spiritual perspective, though my truth says otherwise. It may be and very likely is quite late in the game for human animals to “come to our senses” and we may have only just begun to look at the possibilities for restoring the Earth to its natural state as a paradise, but it’s not too late. How do we create that sacred space, that return to an everyday Paradise?

To discuss this topic let us look a how human beings as a collective temporarily lost our sacred space. I would like to dive into our “origin story” as the cultural anthropologists call it. In anthropology each culture has a narrative of how it came to be. I want to read you the origin story that pretty much all of us in today’s service were raised on, irrespective of whatever religious tradition or lack thereof your family followed. This is from Genesis, Chapter 2, Verses 8,9, 15-17.

And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed.

And out of the ground the Lord God made to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food; the Tree of

Life also in the midst of the garden, and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.

And the Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and to keep it.

And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden you may freely eat.

But the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, you shall not eat; for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.

This is what we believe, or have been told to accept as the starting point for human civilization. Most of us have been HEAVILY programmed to see this starting point in pejorative terms. In other words, there is this stupid person who is given everything beautiful, nourishing and wonderful; along with one simple instruction. That same human willfully disregards the one and only suggestion; and brings death to people forever after. BAD human! Or, as you have probably been programmed to believe—SINFUL human, worthy of disdain, guilt and shame, all of which automatically gets passed along to all descendants.

One problem here. . .but it is a doozy. God never judges us. That is not a part of the frame. Only love is a part of the frame. Where there is judgment, there are only humans who have lost their way due to foreign energy and other forms of programming.

I am going to read you Genesis once more. This time, though I invite you to use that simple but profound meditation technique that we teach here at the Church of the Harvest. I invite you to seek out the center of your head. . .and see if you can hear another message this time, one that is not based on condemnation. One in which God simply gives us a choice.

And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed.

And out of the ground the Lord God made to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food; the Tree of Life also in the midst of the garden, and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.

And the Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and to keep it.

And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden you may freely eat.

But the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, you shall not eat; for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.

What I hear in this passage is the Creator-of-Us-All very lovingly and with detachment asking the human species essentially—do you want to do it the easy way. . .or do you want to do it the hard way? I personally do not hear judgment. To me, humans as a species were simply asked which trajectory we wanted to experience–one that was easy-peasy; and the other, more difficult. Each presented different kinds of challenges but also different levels of rewards. The hard way involves repeated death, as in death of the body, not the soul. The hard way also involves dealing with something called the knowledge of good and evil.

I don’t hear God saying humans are evil, or good for that matter, only that what we wanted to experience was going to result in the frame being set up in such a way to support that experience. Essentially, God was inviting us to cocreate with him/her/it, bless its soul. And for us mere human animals, for those of his/her/its creations most closely made in his/her/its image, what choice did we make? We decided to go for broke, so to speak.

The divine takes great joy in cocreation with that which it has created. But we have to bring our full selves to the table in order for the partnership to work out well.

I could easily do a whole sermon on what the full ramifications are of this version of Paradise as our origin story. Obviously there are a lot of interesting questions about why we chose the hard way, what we stand to gain. Perhaps we’ll talk about that another day. For now, we are running out of time this morning so I need to cut to the chase somewhat.

If we want to meet those advanced challenges to which we have agreed, and continue to agree by our very presence on Planet Earth, what do humans need to do?

Face death head-on squarely, with as much compassion and as little fear as we can muster. Realize more death is coming for many, but death of the body is not real death. It is a temporary transition, a shift in consciousness.

Let Your Heart Shine Even in Death by Myron Dyal. Image used by permission of the artist.

And finally, as individuals and as cultures, we need to fully explore that thing called the Knowledge of Good and Evil—from within the framework of Love. Recognize that dichotomies are what we signed up for. As a society we are just beginning to understand the importance of dichotomies. You can see this every day as the flurry of social media postings and mainstream media stories increasingly focus both on our “dark side” as a species; and the ability of everyday people to choose the path of light that takes us towards the loving framework around us.

Play jump rope with the dichotomies that show up in your life. Having fun with them deenergizes them. Image used in accordance with Fair Use Principals.

In the past, as a society we tended to try to hang out on one side of the dichotomy pretending everything was fine, unless the pretense was so ludicrous that we could no longer maintain it. Endorsing positions on an extreme end of a dichotomy is alluring, almost addictive. In part this is because one of the great dichotomies human animals face when they decide to incarnate on this planet is that we have to learn to give up expectations, aka perfect pictures, those deceptive thoughts and feelings that tell us the world is supposed to be a certain way.

As you have heard me say many times, the road to hell is paved with perfect pictures. Truly we cannot experience Heaven-on-Earth until we clear those pesky pictures, those expectations of self or others upon which we operate in a socially-accepted fashion. You know the ones. The rules about how we and others should live. Perfect pictures create anger, fear, disillusionment and confusion. They put us at odds with each other as we battle over the best way to judge each other. In short they cut us off from “the frame” where there is only peace and love.

A soul working to be a part of Mother Earth and thus embodied can strive for perfection or it can strive to be real. Generally it cannot do both in the long run. The latter requires experience and periodic failure. Image with words by Anna Quindlen used in accordance with Fair Use Principals.

How do we clear perfect pictures? One set at a time. Any way you can. Noticing them is often the first step, (but not always). Stop being fooled by them, and start disengaging from them by ceasing foolish arguments

By partaking from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, our perspective shifted from the natural neutrality of the spirit world to a consciousness that can involve neutrality but can also exclude it. With our free will we now get to choose what we want to experience. We also opened up a universe of societal expectations with which we grapple on a daily basis. (Apologies to legal professional viewers). Comic by Dan Piaro used in accordance with Fair Use Principals.

Suspect perfect pictures when you find yourself in judgement. Work on the energy behind them diligently, knowing they are what is between you and your personal sacred space. Find, that place of peace, the place of balance in-between. This is the part humans can change.

The return to Paradise awaits us in ways our brains cannot yet imagine, with the full blessing of Mother Earth.

You could say that humans are hardwired to divide the world and everything we see therein into “good” or “evil.” Our brains automatically does that for us. Finding the sweet spot in the middle of that dichotomy requires spiritual maturity, awareness and persistent choice. We are being called upon in the present time period to learn to see the bigger picture. In the eye of the divine all are important and sacred. Cartoon used in accordance with Fair Use Principals.

And finally, I want to get back to that leap of faith that is possible and needed if we are going to be a part of the journey back to sacred space.

Other life created by the divine is capable of great leaps into the unknown, consistent with its evolution. So too are human animals. Do not be afraid. Take stock of where you are, set your intention for the new space, and leap my friends! Image used in accordance with Fair Use Principals.

I want to finish today by rereading part of our invocation and adding a couple lines that were not previously included. This conversation by visionary Perdita Finn is about what Mother Earth wants to tell us right now. For now, while we wait to see how many individual humans are going to find sacred space within themselves, thereby making themselves a part of a new healthier Planet Earth as it returns to its mission of Heaven-on-Earth, keep this in the back of your mind:

The tapestry of the world is dyed with colors only a fraction of which you can see. There are designs you know nothing of.

So hold fast to that body and know it by the single name that I have written in your heart. Be neither fearful or fearless,

but rather keep yourself still within and simple without. And listen for the moment when I say, “NOW!”

Dancing on the Strings of Time; When it comes to Karma, payback is a bitch

January 17, 2023February 3, 2023 / Church of the Harvest

From a Sermon given Winter Solstice Worship Service on January 1, 2023.

It could be argued that American singer and songwriter John Denver did not completely master the time element of the time-space continuum. . .but he sure got closer to the Truth than many or most. Through his commitment to Mother Earth he accessed many essentially elements of the All-That-Is and used his clairvoyant abilities to forge a path for the rest of us to follow. It is no coincidence that he is singing here directly to the Russian people in 1985, as the contemporary world reels from the shock of the slaughter of Ukrainians. This battle has been generations in the making. It is a crucial healing opportunity for humans all over the globe as we decide whether to support violent or peaceful solutions to conflict.

Recently I had the opportunity to work in a healing clinic with a young woman in a great deal of torment who was seeking help in regards to her relationship with her family. This woman had a brother who had become the legal guardian of their mother and the mother’s estate; and was blocking contact between the mother and daughter and siphoning off family funds to his own financial benefit. As you could imagine, the woman was in horrendous pain, a big component of which was due to something in psychology we would label cognitive dissonance. She just could not understand what was happening, and it was rocking the very foundation of her worldview.

In these sessions there is a very limited amount of time, usually less than 15 minutes. For me it’s always a question of how I can make the best impact in such a truncated time frame. I watched the other healer in the room talk to the woman about society’s current collective energy space, in which the toxic male is coming out from the corners swinging to eradicate all that could become the sacred feminine. This was a framework the woman could understand somewhat. I could sense she felt a bit of relief from her pain as she recognized she was part of a bigger picture.

But her central disorientation remained. She wanted to know why the situation was happening specifically to her. On some level she knew that we all as individuals create our own reality, even when we do that in a group context. Spiritually she recognized that there was more to the story than just her family going along with how people are doing things these days. I could see her struggling with guilt and ongoing confusion, and more importantly, I watched her getting lost to the perspective that she was the victim here. This can be a problem in that many seekers after the Truth fall prey to the blame-others game that is so prominent in human cultures. Believing one is a victim can significantly slow down the ultimate resolution for individuals for many years in any one lifetime, or even many lifetimes to come.

So, what I talked to her about was the fact that she and the soul that is her brother have been in an escalating situation since Babylonia. For centuries they have been playing a kind of psychic ping pong game. I saw the two of them as part of a snowballing joint venture, where the actions of the one led to the next lifetime in which the other had the opportunity to respond in kind or add a different element to the story. They were drawn to each other like moths to a flame both getting burnt over time, without awareness of the full picture.

In other words, the elements of their cosmic dance were not confined to fun adventures. The “good times” were there, but they were increasingly overshadowed by the painful events. Brother and sister had had many mishaps in which they had harmed each other. The sense of betrayal and distrust from these wrongdoings built up and escalated to the point that it overwhelmed the real spiritual connection behind it all, such that in in 2022 the dance had became all about revenge.

In 2022 and now in 2023 I am increasingly running across folks like this sister and brother, in agony and screaming for help without knowledge of what is causing their distress. Given that we are living in the apocalypse, the time in which all that has been hidden is being revealed, many people are peeling their particular onion, weeping as they go. Individuals who have been victimized through criminal acts or dehumanizing actions are rightfully finding their voice in demanding an end to the abuse. Society as a whole has been working through layer and layer of excruciating heartbreak as we wrestle with the revelations and details of how various groups of people have done horrible things, seemingly inhuman things, to various other groups of people.

Lately I have talked with this community quite a bit about the need for folks to take the healing one step higher, the need to distinguish between justice and revenge. Today I want to add in an important consideration–the dimension of time. Unless you truly understand that time is an illusion, real justice is evasive. Unless you understand that time as an illusion, you are stuck on what some label the carousel of time.

So back to my story about the healee in a great deal of turmoil about the relationship with her brother. When I attempted to reframe her situation from what is happening in the contemporary moment to what had been happening over time, she drew a blank. My words did not appear to make sense to her in any immediate sense. I could hear the telepathic communication from her. Her response more or less was along the lines of “I don’t know if I believe in reincarnation, but if it is real so what? So what if we have been in relationship since the dawn of civilization, since when does what he is doing now make it OK?”

Thing is, it doesn’t. Nothing about the choices this brother is making to isolate and exploit the members of his family is OK. That said, what is going to permanently stop the abuse and is going to make possible a real level of healing for all is outside the boundaries of time.

Ironically, one of the main “tricks” to transcending time is to give yourself enough of it. This is because you as spirit exist independent of time even though your body can only really understand life in the present moment. It takes a solid relationship with its “owner” before a body will gracefully go to places it does not understand as life; and it often takes a lot of experience before an energetic spirit will learn to slow down enough to build that relationship. Ultimately, it is all about self-love, people. Image used in accordance with Fair Use Principals.

I’ve been at that place where she lives, the place where very little information about time and about how reincarnation really works can get through the massive amounts of societal programming to the contrary. I understand the mindset where the only thing that is considered real is what has occurred in the life experience of the body in which one is inhabiting. Decades ago as a seminary student I did over two years of reading hundreds of past lives in others. The only way I could make sense of what I was seeing was by setting aside the strident, outraged objections from my analyzer about how crazy what was coming out of my mouth sounded. I knew I had to be true to myself and the person I was reading in the sense of accurately describing what I was seeing. Disconnecting my brain from my mouth was the only I could figure out to not let my cognitive dissonance destroy what I recognized as my vital, emerging spiritual perspective.

Many Eastern religions that recognize reincarnation often talk about Maya the “veil of forgetfulness,” the energy that works to protect human beings by helping us forget our past life experiences, and thereby not get lost to all that we have thought, felt and done over sometimes millennia. But the thing is, the energy of this veil itself is shifting under the apocalypse, the great time of revelations. It is no longer universally protective for us to forget what has occurred through other of our physical bodies. We have more important challenges now. . .challenges related to finding entire new ways of making sense of the world around us.

As much as I get overwhelmed episodically like the rest of humanity, I have to say I am glad for the new challenges. I don’t know about you, but I personally do not want to explore the same lessons over and over and over and over and over and over again because I keep forgetting what I learned. Yes, the infinite Godhead who operates outside of time and space allows spirit who has incorporated into a human body to reexperience toxic relationships with ourselves, each other and the environment around us as much as we want, as many generations and lifetimes as we desire. But know this–some of us are figuring out that we no longer value chaos and pain as the price of our forgetfulness.

Mastery of time involves accessing the past with discernment, setting your intention for the future, while living as fully as possible in the present moment. Image used in accordance with Fair Use Principals.

In the present time frame, enough of us are saying enough is enough. Most are not aware that it is time we are attempting to transcend. We just know our individual and collective lives seem at best, like a hamster madly dashing-on-its-wheel-for hours-or-at-least-until-it-is-exhausted kind of thing, getting nowhere real; at worst a painfilled death-enhancing rat race with others. Many want to jump off the wheel, that carousel of time.

Folks in the Eastern part of the globe often recognize that the wheel upon which they are stuck has to do with time, or what is often referred to as karma. Before you get inundated with perfect pictures or illusions that those folks have it all together about karma though, let me assure you otherwise. As someone who has recently been binge watching dozens of Netflix series from Japan, China and Korea, most of which directly explore spiritual themes like the astral plane, ghosts, guides, demons and other spiritual players, reincarnation, and the afterlife, I can tell you this is definitely not the case. These cultures may have a significant heads up when it comes to openness towards considering concepts about karma. However, they are no farther along with fully incorporating how to work with it; how to resolve it from a place of neutrality. I would love to teach a few million people in Asia how to approach embodied life on Mother Earth from the center of one’s head.

Ironically, we do not have enough time in our short worship service today to explore much of what karma is and what it is not. So let me jump to a bottom line. If you think something bad that is happening to you or someone else needs to be met with some kind of payback; if you find yourself thinking some distressing event is due to your karma or some one else’s, you are still lost to the spinning of the wheel of time.

Both action and nonaction can create karma, as they can both lead to other events that at another time need to be resolved. In the current time frame, there is a myriad amount of hurt we are trying to purge from our individual and collective soul from our ignoring of historical social injustice played out between individuals, countries, ethic groups, and other human societies. Just be sure that whatever action or inaction you are choosing as a consequence for the past does not continue the strife. As Martin Luther King Jr. frequently reminded us, only love can resolve hate. Image used in conjunction with Fair Use Principals.

Whether you use the increasingly old-fashioned term “ego” to describe that stuck place where the hurt seems bigger than the solutions; whether you are now talking about the solutions for individual trauma or “complex trauma” for extraordinarily harmful events; whether you are focused on multigenerational transmission of limiting concepts like scarcity and hatred; or whether you are fond of working through a big-picture symbol such as Kali, the dark Mother Goddess–it’s all about time. After all, in the Hindu pantheon Kali is not only the ultimate energy behind both creation and destruction. She is also known as the Goddess of Time. Why? Because spirit cannot fully explore creation and destruction without also mastering time.

So, what did I do with my healee who did not understand the dance with which she and her brother have been engaged? I cleared the pain from her energetic body so she had the best possible chance at ultimately getting beyond the blame-game. I considered sharing something of my own story of my brother’s abject treatment towards me, which included stealing several thousand dollars of my inheritance. She might have felt less alone if I did, but I realized that she had already gotten some of that sense of connection. The next important step in her healing had more to do with other things. Rather, telepathically from soul-to-soul I thanked her profusely for bringing up my matching pictures in regards to my hate-filled brother. And then I planted what seeds she might find useful for a a new way to look at the situation. I worked with her future self for when she is ready to address what she has been creating with her brother for 4,000 years.

As to those of you here today and here at some point in the future, this is what I have to say about transcending time. Learn to dance. Give up the marching towards an endlessly-repeating cycle in which others are in charge of the reality you are creating over all eternity. Rather, tiptoe your own way through the tulips, lightly, with as much awareness and amusement as you can muster.

Image of the Solar Plexis or Third Chakra by Brenda Erickson used in accordance with Fair Use Principals. When the soul has cleared enough programming that says power over other people is useful or even needed, that soul can get to using the third chakra for what it was designed: locomotion through the physical world. As you move your body you make the choices of how to do so. You can do so by marching in lockstep or flail around seemingly randomly. You can move to the tune of others or make up your own music. You can dance gracefully nimbly around the veil of time or stick to a particular frame of reference. You can dance solo, in line with others, or in a highly interactive format like the waltz or tango.

Fox trot, do the Texas two step, swing your arms around madly in your private space, I don’t care. Just get out there and dance. Move that body. Listen for the beat of the music. Be in the present moment as fully as you can, and notice what sensations you get from your body where the past has perhaps dulled your aliveness. And then dance some more, lightly. Live that life, noticing the flow, changing steps as you need for your healing. Explore your essence to whatever extent you can. Let the rest play itself out.

You have all the tools you need. You know what to do if you falter or miss the beat. You have the life-affirming support of those in this community and in other spiritual and other kinds of communities, including in the spirit world. You have the blessings and full and ever-present support of your Creator to meet any and all stumbling steps and as-of-yet unmet challenges.

Dance on the strings of time like your life depends upon it.

(Pro Tip: Please feel free to listen to this beautiful song with discernment. In other words, absorb the intent of the song and save triggered thoughts and feelings either for or against the concept of God being presented as masculine, kneeling as a form of surrender, prayer as the major means to change, etc. for your healing meditations.) Thanks be to Reba and Lauren et. al. for this important reminder that we are seeking to return to Paradise.

Copyrighted by the Rev. Dr. Resa Eileen Raven, 2023.

Death of the Old World; Birth of the New

December 8, 2022 / Church of the Harvest

From a Sermon given Autumn Equinox Worship Service on September 25, 2022.

Here we are at the autumn equinox, a time harvesting and storing the summer’s fruits and vegetables, beginning to feel the seasonal Halloween effects as the intersection between the spiritual and the physical world gets thinner, for many of us transitioning into having more time at home when there are often longer periods of rest and recuperation from the days behind us and opportunities for dreams of the days ahead.

This year is a particularly poignant time for reflection, for the review of what we have individually harvested in our lives in 2022, as well as the hopes and the fears and the curiosity of what we may be sowing for the seasons in 2023.

There is more to be examined and discussed because collectively there is more going on than ever before in the collective space. The ending-old-cycles and creating-of-new-ones that individuals always go through at this time of the year, is currently being massively magnified by this also being played out in the world-at-large.

Human beings may arguably be in the middle of the most important transition we have experienced for at least 2,000 years. Endless discussion and debate are happening in the astral plane right now about what we want to be creating as a whole for human animals and other life on Planet Earth. More controversies are at play, some are at war. More of our mutual past is being reviewed, cleared or updated and/or resisted than most of us have previously experienced processing. And of course, our weary physical bodies feel the effects of all this on top of meeting our everyday challenges. The consensus reality these days is very busy trying to make sense of a physical world it no longer recognizes.

It is human animals who are the most at risk as a form of life, when we denigrate and destroy Mother Earth. Image used in accordance with Fair Use Principals.

In this community of healers most of you know that the tricky part of growth periods is almost always that intense final rush right before the completion of the cycle. This is the point where we start to really understand that the patterns that have carried us here no longer work and cannot and will not continue. Regrettably though, this is also the point in which we cannot see our way forward, since it’s all a new game. As Albert Einstein is said to have put it: We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.

Additionally, it’s at this point in the growth period that things can get particularly dangerous. Many human beings do not do well with fear, with uncertainty. Their resistance to change makes the changes much worse. Thus, they seek to escape a world they do not understand through substances, destructive relationships, illnesses, accidents, delusional ideation or impulsive actions. Many who are unwilling or cannot tolerate the changes human civilization is currently undergoing have already left. Many more will do so in the coming months.

We are truly at the tipping point. But not the tipping point about which climate activists talk. The tipping point we are experiencing right now is infinitely more profound. It is a spiritual tipping point. It is being felt and experienced by every individual on the planet, recognized by few. It is a preordained shift in human consciousness, taking many forms, leading us as the species on Mother Earth that currently determines the quality of life, to a place of decisions.

Photo used in accordance with Fair Use Principals.

You can frame this point in human evolution a number of different ways. I’m fond of talking about it as the shift from the toxic male to the sacred female that has been happening in people no matter the gender of their body. Worldwide society has been rapidly transitioning from the wars and competition for greed and power and exploitation of all life on Earth that is sick version of the male aspect in every person. . .to the cooperative, creative, nurturing version of the healthy female aspect in every person.

There are other viewpoints that are equally valid and useful in talking about this shift in human evolution. Some of those differing perspectives were mentioned in the invocation from the Gospel of Thomas, multiple examples of which can be seen any day one tunes into the news.

When Jesus was talking in this passage about the two being made into one, the reference here was from the shift in human consciousness of seeing others as outsiders to simultaneously seeing others as a different version of oneself. When Jesus talked about making the inner like the outer and the outer like the inner, he was validating our apocalyptic digital age environment in which everything that has been hidden becomes revealed, whether it be the genocide of indigenous populations in Canadian and North American boarding schools, or the theft aka “storage dispute” of top-secret governmental documents at Mar-A-Lago.

To understand Jesus’s reference to the upper like the lower, you need look no further than the culture wars that have blown up recently in the United States in regards to state rights versus versus federal rights; or the dictators around the world who are struggling to maintain their grip on the people beneath them as the energy moves downward.

We are tipping over into a new world.

Every quarter when it is time for another worship service, I usually tune into what this community says about what it sees as its next step, what theme people want to explore in our joint healing adventure. This equinox though, something happened that has only happened once before. The universe told me the theme: Death of the Old World, Birth of the New.

The Old World is dying but it still can offer solace to those who are attempting spiritual rebirth. Art by Alexandria Dvornikova used in accordance with Fair Use Principals.

It was a gift from the universe to this powerful group of healers. The universe wants us to prepare, not in the way of preppers who address their fears by building bomb shelters or storing dehydrated food. Not preparation in the form of surrendering to comforting but false belief systems like QAnon or other conspiracy theorists, or even belief in the rapture like those who participated in my dissertation study, bless their hearts, who were trying to manage their fear by assuming Jesus would whisk them away from a dying planet at some final hour.

The universe wants this community to prepare as we always do, by grounding, working in our individual space with our own energy system, healing our way to more completeness, growing closer individually to the God of our Heart, one step at a time. . .and thereby helping others as we go.

We are to get even more ready for a future we cannot yet see, get stronger, clearer, more integrated within ourselves, more physically and mentally healthy, and more able to work with each other in harmony and ease.

You see, the final battle being played out, Armageddon if you will, is within each one of us, the energy of which gets magnified and radiated externally into shared space. But as always, it starts with each one of us.

So how exactly does any one individual work through Armageddon? What do you need to know? What do you need to keep in mind?

The roadmap for each is different, although there will be common themes among us. I can’t tell you specifically what you are going to experience as you explore your own space, what keeps you still in conflict with yourself, unable to be aware of the dictates of the indwelling God, struggling to understand why others around you are reflecting back strife and unhappiness. But I can perhaps offer some clues by sharing one exploration of an Armageddon process that has begun to unfold in my life.

When I asked the universe how I needed to prepare, what came back was a handful of words from an obscure sentence in the Sermon of the Mount. What I mean by “obscure” is that I had personally had no interest in this teaching previously. I have had a minimum of interest in the Sermon on the Mount in general, and no interest in truly understanding this particular phrase. However, lately this phase has been ringing in my mind like the church bells on Sunday I used to hear when I lived in Europe. Loud, reverberating through every fiber of my body, seemingly never-ending until I heed the call. The phrase? The meek shall inherit the earth.

The thing is, Eashoa was a master of everything energetic. He knew how to transcend time and space completely, as well as how to dwell in it with others who were unaware of the spiritual realm. And so, he knew how to encode spirit into words on so many levels that people from various levels of consciousness in wildly divergent cultures existing in different time periods could get his meaning to the extent their individual embodied life experience allowed. It was and is of no great concern to him if a few individuals actually heard what he said at the actual occurrence of the Sermon of the Mount in real time, or if he was just planting the seeds for the people who would be able to receive his message two thousand years later.

Time is a universal social construct only in the physical world. Even then, it can be experienced by individuals in vastly unique ways. In the spiritual realm, time is an illusion. Successfully negotiating time everywhere is an advanced skill open to all but mastered by few. Image used in accordance with Fair Use Principals.

Have you ever had those moments–we often label them epiphanies–when something you’ve heard numerous times suddenly makes sense to you? This is simply when your consciousness has grown enough that it can finally contain the meaning of the words or the event.

Let me tell you my epiphany about how I personally need to prepare for the Armageddon of my soul. I want to read the words to which I am referencing in context. I’m going to repeat an expanded version here from Matthew, Chapter 5, Verses 3 to 8, translated from the Aramaic by George Lamsa:

Blessed are the unassuming, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are they who mourn, for they shall be comforted

Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice for they shall be well satisfied.

Blessed are the merciful, for they shall have mercy.

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.

I have heard many things in these words lately that I did not hear before. I hear the echoes of the Black Lives Matter, the Me-Too Movement and other waves of recent social protest. I hear the anguished cries of Ukraine, Sandy Hook and other mass shooting events, the flooding of Pakistan and Puerto Rico, the frightening despair of those who are working through ancestral memories of the internment of Japanese citizens during World War 2, the murders of forgotten Native American women and the Holocaust. I hear The Christ advising us to look these wrongs straight on, shed the seemingly endless tears, and work diligently to make our heart space big enough to contain it all.

In regards to those pesky words that have been haunting me recently, that stuff about the meek inheriting the earth–mostly, I had to clear some energy from folks who did not want me to learn from within my body what it REALLY means to turn the other cheek. I had to get beyond how triggered I was by the word “meek.”

Turns out meek is not about being passive. . .or silent. A translation of the concept that resonated with me that I eventually uncovered is that a meek person is one who endures injury with patience and without resentment, as in a mild-tempered child who does not respond to bullies by passing the hurt onto others but rather by taking on the hurt in their own space in a time-honoring pace. In other words, the meek are those who may respond to wrongdoing a number of ways over time from a place of neutrality, not revenge. This is certainly an area where I have more to learn.

Finally, the inherit the earth part. The reverberations here were easier for me to discern. Jesus talked about the upper and lower becoming one. The American Franciscan priest Richard Rohr talks about our need in the present time frame to “grow down.” Rohr uses the words Yin (down) with the Yang (up). He encourages us to be more human, to be embodied in a community of others who are working with the deeper levels of pain and confusion; and embrace the paradoxes.

As Rohr tells it: “Human consciousness does not emerge at any depth except through struggling with our shadow. It is in facing our conflicts, criticisms, and contradictions that we grow. It is in the struggle with our shadow self, with failure, or with wounding that we break into higher levels of consciousness.”

We have to grow down towards Mother Earth, enveloping whatever is a necessary correlation showing up in our physical body in the process. . .and then, and only then, the world around us becomes truly ours.

So, brethren, Happy Autumn Equinox. I am going to leave you with more words. These are from Henry David Thoreau.

Live each season as it passes. Breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influence of the Earth.

In doing so as you work through whatever it is you are working through, you will surely inherit the Earth; and help all of us birth the New World.

Copyrighted 2022 by Rev. Dr. Resa Eileen Raven

Freedom: The Language of Soul

July 6, 2022 / Church of the Harvest

From a Sermon given Summer Solstice Worship Service on June 26, 2022.

I have been interested in exploring the issue of freedom with this community for some time now. Freedom was always a big topic of the conversation in my family when I was growing up. Even when we talked about little else, in my particular family there was always permission to talk about cats. And as a military family in the cultural landscape around us there was always permission to talk about the freedoms that we were told were guaranteed by membership in the United States of America which were our duty to support. We would come together for huge fourth of July celebrations complete with fireworks, marching bands and parades of uniformed soldiers strutting their stuff in formation around fields.

Talking about freedom is as American as apple pie, as deeply symbolic as the selection of the fierce and high-soaring American Eagle as our national bird. We did not the choose the turkey as our national emblem such as it was rumored was suggested by Benjamin Franklin. (This is actually a myth, but a good story). We chose the Eagle. Every country has an energetic core, an agreement about the essence of what those who are a part of that land have come to explore. In the United States of America our collective agreement involves exploring freedom and social justice. And so it is fitting that our greatest challenges have been and continue to be learning what it really means to be free; what justice actually looks like.

Every country has its own energy. This depiction from Christian Chinese American artist He Qi depicts the essential essence of the United States. Picture used in accordance with Fair Use Principles.

In recent days all around the globe there has been a rude awakening for many who have viewed the United States as a perfect union, as the ultimate land of opportunity. You all know that energetically speaking, perfect pictures led to a great deal of disappointment, despair and other forms of suffering when the world does not live up to our flawed expectations. The American ideal still rings true for millions of people who live under greatly diminished social freedoms and horrible injustices in their own community, whether in the US or other areas. Intensifying environmental disasters mean that US borders are increasingly overrun by thousands of would-be immigrants fleeing from harsh economic and social injustice, violence, brutal repression and other terrible events in their home countries. Recently however, many who have always dreamed of partaking in the American dream are also changing their minds as the universe wakes us up to a greater version of its Truth, and it becomes more clear what is really going on in North America.

In the United States we have a citizenry whose social norms are rapidly breaking down, who are acknowledging more and more the gut-wrenching injustices of our past and present with no real understanding as to how to correct them. In their panic Americans are clinging tightly to false illusions about freedom. After all, the one thing upon which we all can agree is that freedom is a good thing theoretically. That’s part of our national identity, enshrined in our collective psyche.

But what is freedom? Really. What is it? What does it look like? What does it actually feel like? How does it work in a collective space when one person who thinks of freedom in a certain way clashes with another person who thinks their version of freedom is not only the correct version but the only one that counts?

If we require people who don’t want to wear a facemask or get a vaccine to do so are we taking away their freedom? If the government does not let people own assault weapons or do drugs, is it acting unjustly in defiance to the rights of its citizens? If the highest court in the country decides women can be subjected to involuntary pregnancies based on what state they live in, is it supporting state rights or is it attacking the rights of women? Unless a group can actually agree on a concept, it is hard to meet any challenges that arise with any integrity.

I’ve noticed that even people in this community, or in groups of otherwise-enlightened well-intentioned individuals working on healing themselves, are often still massively confused about what freedom really is. I watch said people just substitute the word “free will” with the word “freedom” like they are interchangeable. The energy behind using these words as a synonym is usually based on dysfunctional religious programming, by the way. Which, by the way, is the opposite of freedom. Pushing “free will” or accusing another person of violating it, is a sure indication that you have more to learn about what freedom actually is. Approaching freedom as if it is a static, binary thing, in which only the vaccinators or the antivaxxers or the people supporting or opposing guns have the truth, means you surely have not found your own freedom.

So, what is freedom? For most of us, the full answer to that question can only come about when we learn to love the question over time; and have the patience to know that our personal answer to that question will arrive when we are ready for it.

“Freedom” is one of those metaconcepts like the word “love” that is so huge, so packed with possibilities that is almost not worth trying to have a conversation with it. “Freedom” is big enough that it typically eludes words altogether. No real communication occurs when individuals with wildly different takes on the word, aka definitions, throw it at each other.

Words are symbols containing anywhere from a little bit of energy to almost an endless quantity. Words describing tangible objects can be simple. Words trying to encapsulate metaconcepts are profound, and often not worth using if your intention is real communication rather than argument. The current cultural warfare puts “freedom” in the latter category for now. Cartoon by William Boyd Watterson used in accordance with Fair Use Principles.

Meanwhile, there are a few people who have spent their lives in pursuit of freedom that can give us some clues on our own individual journeys towards freedom, often more through their personal stories than precise verbiage. I think the people that have the most to teach us about what freedom really looks like are often those that have survived its lack in the outer world enough to realize that freedom, ultimately, isn’t about the outside, or at least not solely.

As an example, the Austrian psychiatrist and philosopher Viktor Frankl has much wisdom to share. He discovered his freedom under the most horrific conditions possible, in a Nazi concentration camp. He led many people to a deeper understanding of how one can become free despite overwhelming political reality to the contrary.

In the United States, which is a country built upon the backs of indigenous peoples, immigrants, and African American slaves, there are many voices speaking with knowledge and grace about freedom. The thread that rings true through these sometimes widely diverse experiences is that freedom is something beyond just our bodies being constrained. True freedom needs to occur in a socially just physical world, but it does not end there. One can be free in terms of capability to make a great number of physical, economic, and social choices according to one’s own desires, and still be incredibly enslaved. One can be subjected to abject constraints in the material world and still be free in important, vital ways.

Marcus Garvey, the Jamaican-born leader of the Pan-Africanism movement had this to say to his fellow black Americans shortly before his death in 1940: “We are going to emancipate ourselves from mental slavery, for though others may free the body, none but ourselves can free the mind.”

The United States of America is moving towards freedom and justice. . .just maybe with baby steps when leaps are required. Lady Liberty 225th Anniversary US Mint coin

What is freedom? Freedom is communication. It is communication with the Divine within each of us. Within this communication there is only wholeness. There are no sides, no divisions that allow one person to be free at another person’s expense.

Freedom is something that we desire to the very depth of our soul, just as we all crave connection with our Creator whether we know it or not. Never let anyone stop you from seeking your personal freedom because that would be like intentionally dimming your light. Just like your true destiny is to love and be loved, to know peace and joy, you as a soul will never be fully satisfied until you are free. Especially if you live in the United States of America, because this is your collective journey as well as your individual one.

In order to fully understand freedom, you must first find your own place where there are no borders between self and other life. Art by Elsie Huther used in accordance with Fair Use Principles

That said, reveal in your desire for freedom but bring some humility to the table as you seek to understand both what it actually looks like in your life, and even more so, what it “should” look like for others. Let go of your need to find political solutions in the name of freedom as much as you can. . .less you get stuck in the endless loop of a false dichotomy.

Rather, free yourself, first and foremost. Free yourself from judgment by and of others, unaware social programming, out-of-date thinking, whatever binds you to a truncated worldview. Know that your best bet for advancing freedom in the collective space is to free yourself from that which limits your soul, which keeps you from truly knowing that your own freedom and the freedom of others as the same journey. Only then can you be present to the freedom of others.

As to the rest, trust the universe to rectify any injustices as surely it is doing increasingly these days, very rapidly.

Discerning what constitutes freedom for someone else is nearly impossible. It requires a 360 degree spiritual perspective through time and space. You will have your hands full enough just trying to figure out what makes you free! Cartoon by Man Martin used in accordance with Fair Use Principles.

Other people have very little to do with our own freedom, except as they reflect what is ours to correct.

Find what brings you alive.This is where your freedom dwells. Words by Simon Gawley, posted in accordance with Fair Use Principles

Ultimately, like everything else in the created order, freedom is from God and is meant to be in service of God. Or as it says in Peter, Chapter 2, Verse 16:

Live as free people, but do not use your freedom as a cover-up for evil.

Live as God’s slaves.

Happy Fourth of July to the United States of America and to every individual in the entire world.

It’s all about letting go of the fear. . .allowing oneself to fall into the loving arms of the Creator.

Passion for One’s Purpose: The Great Unfolding

April 12, 2022April 13, 2022 / Church of the Harvest

From a Sermon given Spring Equinox Worship Service on March 20, 2022.

Last time this community came together for a worship service during the Winter Solstice, we worked together on increasing our awareness that opening up to our own power in our individual energy system is vital in that it leads to greater possibilities in our unfolding life. At the same time, this opening up of your third chakra is only the initial step. Thereafter we have to decide what to do with that power, how to take your embodied energy into the world to make your most important dreams come true.

During today’s service I want to talk about the figuring-out-what-to-do-with-your power thing. Some people call this finding the meaning in life, discovering your life purpose or walking your path. As spiritual concepts go, this one is a doozy. Philosophers often talk about the meaning of life as if it is the same for everyone. Religious institutions are generally more than happy to tell you what your life purpose should be. New age adherents will spout lots of pithy sayings and typically offer one-size-fits-all bits of advice on how to discover and travel the pathway they think you need to traverse. And everyone is happy to sell you the books or other paraphernalia, have you listen to their podcasts or sign up for the programs they promote in placing you on a particular walkway. You can buy oracle cards or do a TED talk, hire a life coach, or I even ran into a YouTube video that offered to tell you how to know your life purpose in two minutes. (It was actually was an eleven-minute video, but clearly they were catering to the instant-gratification crowd).

Many of these folks are well-intentioned. What they often correctly understand is that for each of us, finding our path is an absolutely crucial journey. It is for this that we were born. It is why we are alive, and until we embrace our life purpose, until we are walking the path laid before us by our Creator, we are not fully alive. It is SUCH an important truth, this revealing of who you are to the depth of your soul, that only you and the God within you can locate that path.

Life purpose is sometimes addressed as an individual pursuit; and sometimes as the collective question for all humanity. This is the cartesian dualism that feeds our brain but not our soul. When one begins to acknowledge oneself as the lived experience of the Creator-of-All-That-Is you can then set out to discover your individuality within universality. Image used in accordance with Fair Use Principals.

However, notice my language here, if you will. Your life purpose is a journey. It is not a destination. In fact, when you fully arrive at said destination, some of you may discover that you no longer need to be here on Planet Earth. (That is a different story). For now, shed those perfect pictures about where or how far along you should be, or how long it should take you. Rather buckle up for the ride. Like all journeying in the physical world, you and only you get to decide ultimately if the path you take back to God is a fun adventure, the stuff of nightmares or any combination therein.

What is your life purpose? Its not a vocation, although certain tasks in the outer world may reflect it to a greater or lesser degree. Its not a relationship to a beloved or a child or an enemy that you are learning to vanquish, although any of these encounters can help you draw closer to your purpose. Its not even service to your fellow humans or other forms of life on the planet, even if surely some version of service will be a needed corollary of your purpose.

It may not even be something you can even put in words. You be not be able to find your life work using a rational thought process exactly. If your purpose is a true enough reflection of you on a soul level, it is possible that the spoken word cannot even contain it. But I am going to guess that most of you will know it when you feel it. Because the outpouring of joy from every cell in your body will be hard to miss.

If there is truth to be had in the conversations one hears in popular culture on the subject of one’s purpose, it’s the descriptions that one can find it by doing what you love. I have often appreciated the mythologist and writer Joseph Campbell’s version of this when he advises people to “follow their bliss.” I like that phrasing, although it has a down side to it in that it can confuse people who are already too confused by sexual programming. If you want to make a habit of pursuing your bliss, just try to stay aware that bliss needs to be about real love, not bodily pleasure.

This is an image used in accordance with Fair Use Principals which encapsulates how many see life purpose. Food for thought but take it with a grain of salt. Individual pathways to purpose vary enormously.

Please do not infer that I am dissing experiences that bring pleasure on a physical level. I am just saying that those are not necessarily related to love, or directly to your path. What is the difference you might ask? Love is the quiet stuff, the embodiment of spirit. Pleasure can be that to which the body often gravitates when it is feeling unloved by spirit.

This sermon is a result of a request that I speak about passion. . .so let me throw in a few more words along those lines. When a person has cleared a lot of limiting energy—programming, energy belonging to others, obsolete pictures etc.—from their third chakra and elsewhere, it typically frees one up to heal more deeply elsewhere.

Subsequently, it is common to move on to deep-rooted blockages in the other key areas closer to the Earth. That is why we started this worship service with an invocation that comes from Ephesians in which St. Paul talked about Jesus of Nazareth making possible a return of Heaven on Earth by both ascending to the Heavens and descending into the very Earth itself. Every soul who would follow the path shown to us by The Christ, that eternal being that called himself at different times the Son of Man as well as the Son of God, has to choose through our individual embodiment both our spiritual perspective and our physical body which was and is miraculously designed to manifest it.

Many religious belief systems are built on a foundation of sand in that somewhere along the way in their manifestation, they have erroneously adopted the dogma that says to find God, one has to at the very least ignore, if not subjugate and punish the body. These limiting belief systems have put Mother Earth in jeopardy, something not acceptable to the Creator-of-Us-All. Mother Earth is a sacred aspect of the Created Order. Those who are not willing or at this time capable of realizing that divinity, be they individuals or individuals acting in concert with others through political or religious groups, have outstayed their welcome.

To you who are listening to my message I would say–no doubt you have already successfully navigated through oceans of emotion and other bodily sensations arising from your second chakra to even be present at this service. No doubt you have many more trickles, streams, rivers, tidal waves of emotion and sensation yet to come, in order to find yourself more solidly on your path more of the time. The second chakra is potentially where much the dialogue about how our choices affecting the body in the physical world get played out. Some other energy structures are also involved but this key center is a primary conduit. The messages can be lost in translation for many people, but for those of you who are committed to bringing together Heaven and Earth at this point they will likely be loud and clear.

The second chakra, sometimes called the Sacral chakra, is a spinning source of information about how your body experiences the world around it. Image by Brenda Erickson used in accordance with Fair Use Principals. When operating in harmony with you and the rest of your body it can generate life-affirming vibrant energy. When clogged up it can lead to all kinds of disheartening states such as pervasive self-judgment.

Here is the thing, folks. One aspect of finding your life purpose that does not get enough attention is that it is ultimately an act of cocreation. In order to find your unique pathway through the physical world known as Earth, you must find your own unique space; as well as come to terms with the fact that you are also part of a bigger reality; and it is a part of you. In other words, you are universal spirit embodied in a physical form that belongs to you and you alone.

Co creating with the All-Mighty is a topic beyond the comprehension of many, all too often leading to erroneous and sometimes demeaning conclusions. Cartoon by Jim Benton used in accordance with Fair Use Principals.

The Creator-of-Us-All provides the framework. By agreeing to birth in the human form you also agreed to a contract to provide the Creator with lived experience of consciousness that requires individuation. Whatever gets you the highest and best use of your consciousness in the service of the Creator at any one point in time gets you the next step closer to your life purpose.

Another way to think about cocreation is to think of God as the Sun who bathes Mother Earth allowing human animals to cultivate crops and other plants and animals making it possible for life to go on and even evolve. Without the sun and earth there would be nothing, but humans are still largely deciding what grows within the framework of God’s world. Image of “Grandfather Sun Medicine by Leah Marie Dorian used in accordance with Fair Use Principals.

How do you know what is passion for your life purpose and what is old emotion to be released? You won’t, at least all the time. But if your intention is for healing and for finding yourself, and you stay sufficiently focused enough in order to do the day-by-day work, the real passion will grow as the left-over emotion from other adventures dissipates.

As far as emotions-to-be-acknowledged-processed-and-cleared goes, I do agree with Jungian psychoanalyst James Hollis who has offered useful words here about the key emotion we call fear. “Ultimately, to step into the larger, we have to go through our fears. I have to emphasize go through. There is no magic, no set of five steps to dissolve the obstacles, no pill, no narcotic to make it all possible. There is only the going through.”

You have to deal with the full range of your emotions. You have to face your fears. Descend with yourself into your body, your earthly realm. Let yourself know that any old wounding for your body with which you have not yet come to terms, is going to kick up dust at the process as you descend, and try to tell you it feels at risk. Listen. Don’t act, at least initially. The fear can be a really good sign. Listen from the center of your head, assess to what extent the fear is an accurate read on what is before you. Take further steps to protect your body on whatever needs to be cleared, confronted, or otherwise changed. Keep asking the God of your Heart for guidance in finding your highest service. And then carry yourself onward, in the direction you know to be truest.

Fear is such an important emotion requiring careful dissection. It can be the difference between life and death. If the fear is “justified” by a present time threat, ignoring or suppressing it can be deadly. However if you reside in fear associated with the past or future it can keep you from life. The trick is to learn to discern the difference. Cartoon by Dave Blazek used in accordance with Fair Use Principals.

Validate the fear as you descend into unknown territory. Do not let it stop you unnecessarily.

Earth becomes Heaven to the degree in which we can let God fulfill itself in our individual corporal experience. As It says in First Corinthians Chapter 6, Verse 20: Therefore glorify God in your body.

Watch as the fire from the belly of Mother Earth grows deep within you, a few embers at a time.

Valley of Fire State Park in Nevada, USA. Image used in accordance with Fair Use Principals.

Power: Pure and Simple

March 8, 2022March 8, 2022 / Church of the Harvest

From a Sermon given Winter Solstice Worship Service on December 26, 2021.

I’ve talked a lot about power over the years but not very directly. With folks that are sincerely trying to understand this concept, until recently I have primarily provided some hints. This is because the very word itself is so triggering for many listeners that the conversation does not typically unfold well or easily. Particularly in bringing up the subject of power with those in a female body, the nonverbal anxiety, confusion, shame, and defensiveness can be overwhelming for a speaker like myself who is sensitive to energy. The psychic cringing when I have used the word in the past has been almost palpable.

That said, it appears that the cultural times are shifting. As a society we are more in a position to look at power directly and still maintain a spiritual perspective. Some of the human-generated power imbalances that have been in place for hundreds or thousands of years, are becoming illuminated under the merciless light of the apocalypse, our time of great revelations. The apocalypse has been bringing environmental, social and economic injustice to the surface, much to the chagrin of many. So let us have that conversation today to whatever degree we can, shall we?

Image used in accordance with Fair Use Principles.

Power is just another word for energy. All power comes from the Creator-Us-All and is intended to be used in service to the Created Order. Its essential nature is both pure and simple. Every gift of life from our Creator is pure. Everything in touch with its essential nature as spirit is by nature simple. Irrespective of what experiences you personally have undergone in your time here on Mother Earth, try to keep in mind that power in itself is never wrong or for that matter right. It just is. The wrong or right stuff comes into play only as a result of the choices humans make in how we use power.

“Wonder” by visionary artist Alex Grey, used in accordance with Fair Use Principles.

Because human animals have free will we are given the choice to create whatever the Hell we want within our own body and energy system. We can and do routinely subvert power and quite literally create Hell-on-Earth for ourselves and others. We have all done this, and continue to do this. If you have been around the block more than a few times, no doubt you have started to understand that this is not a particularly useful, fun, or interesting way to conduct life. But if you are still here in a body, it means that you have more learning to do about power. Give up your perfect pictures and get on with the lessons, so you can grow that much closer to Heaven-on-Earth, that place in which power is used efficiently, effortlessly, joyfully, generating great wonder.

On an individual level, power has a lot to do with the goings on of your third chakra. That magical energy center is often called the “power center” for good reason. It contains the bulk of the information you need to operate in and through your physical body. In recent years I have been amused about all the fascination people have developed with the “gut microbiome.” Scientists have begun to validate how vital our stomach area and digestive system is to overall physical health; how much communication happens between our gut and our brain and other areas of the body.

Society has yet to make the discovery that these tissues and organs are reflecting a deeper spiritual truth. To frame this in scientific terminology, a good gut microbiome and good physical health are correlational, not causational. The underlying piece that determines both is a functional third chakra that is balanced and free of foreign energy.

When you have a third chakra that works in concert with the other parts of your energy system, body and spirit can have a lot of communication with each other and a respectful partnership in regards to movement. You know where to move energy around in your body and the space around it to maximum benefit; and your body knows how to move through physical space and time to accomplish that of which it is capable.

When students are first becoming aware of their energy system and learning how to regulate it, I tease people whenever and however I can to get them to kick out the energy that does not belong there and open up their third chakra. You have all heard me make lots of jokes about the burping that often starts to happen as people start releasing the energy from others. This clearing is an important beginning.

However, in order to address what you need to work through this lifetime, healing your third chakra enough to power your body as it moves around the physical environment is just the foundation. That is the initial step. Like a child that has to first learn to roll over, then to sit up, then to stand, we eventually are at a place to learn how to walk. Once we know how to walk, only then can we start taking concrete steps in the direction we want to go. Moreover we get to decide whether we want to saunter or hike, foxtrot, waltz or freestyle. . .or maybe simply stand still, smell the roses and admire the view.

Like everything else in your reality, how you move in the world is all up to you. Image used in accordance with Fair Use Principles.

For the folks in this community who have kicked out much of the foreign energy from your third chakra, and deenergized many of your most important pictures about working through a body, the next step looks a bit different. As long-term meditators, if you are in a female body you are probably less terrified of the very prospect of power in your own space than you used to be. If you are in a male body, you are likely more aware than you were previously that you don’t need to fight everyone else’s battles for them.

For you, the challenge about power now is more about taking the whole concept to the higher level. Unless you are a professional athlete or dancer or some such, all the power you need to operate your body is probably already accessible to you.

By now you probably have had enough experience with working with energy consciously to have a sense that certain choices regarding power can be counterproductive, can definitely set you back on your journey, or at least make it an uncomfortable ride. You will have made enough decisions using your power that have arisen from a foundation of fear rather than self-love and learned that power over the outside world does not result in a sense of security. No doubt you have indulged in the need to accumulate material goods, only to discover they did not bring lasting comfort or peace. What now?

At this stage of spiritual development the question becomes: how much power do you need to harness in what ways in order to fulfill your purpose? What do you need to power up your dreams, and which dreams reflect your truest spiritual goals? This is a qualitatively different question that extends way beyond your third chakra into the very ground beneath your feet and very heavens above your head. It is a question the successful answer of which requires a unity of purpose involving every one of your chakras, including the ones outside of your physical body. It is a question that necessitates taking into consideration your individual space as well as the collective space around you, weighing what is within you as well as outside of you. It moves the subject from what you need to survive, into the territory of what you need to thrive.

And it is a question that can be a quite tricky because the universe is infinitely abundant. Therefore the amount and kind of power that you can potential wield is similarly endless. With great power comes great response-ability. The challenges in terms of “getting it right” as well as “getting it wrong”–(not that either, in Truth, is even a possibility)–are much more profound.

You know I can’t tell you the answer(s) to these questions for you. That would be an abuse of my power. But I would like to offer this community some gentle reminders to keep in mind as you explore the question of how much power you as an individual need to wield in what manner.

First of all, remember that what you put out in the universe, comes back to you . . .often greatly magnified. This is the essence of the “Golden Rule,” a version of which underlies every major religious tradition. “Doing onto others as you would have them do unto you” is not about judgment and retribution. It is very practical advice that validates energetic reality.

If you use your power unwisely, it will come back and bite you in the ass. Maybe not right away. Maybe not in the exact same manner. Remember that for spirit there is no time and space. But ultimately there is no escaping the Supreme Justice of the universe.

Every day I watch folks get lost in their programming about this principle. In the current time frame when society is trying to root out the social injustices in which we have all participated, many well-intentioned people are massively confused about how justice really works. They frequently look at our cumbersome, flawed justice system, see the less-than-ideal sometimes horrible outcomes, and condemn everyone and everything associated with these cases. Often I feel tremendous sadness for these critics. I can validate their heartfelt desire to find justice but I also know almost exactly for what they are signing up with their judgment. The I-want-the-things-that-I-want-instantly and the I-deserve-it programming to which many in the United States have been highly indoctrinated is not helpful on a soul level.

One trouble with instant gratification from a spiritual perspective is that it is usually a form of magical thinking. That does not mean it is impossible to achieve or necessarily undesirable. It does mean that as a form of creativity goes, it minimally involves the body as a vehicle for that creativity. One might say that it can be ultimately unsustainable. Cartoon by Steve Moore used in accordance with Fair Use Principles.

Get real, folks. Only God is perfect. The rest of us flawed individuals are just trying to figure out how to live in the highest vibration of Truth, embodying the greatest quantity of Justice that we can muster at any one point. It takes time to correct power imbalances in our individual reality, and it requires us to give each other lots of space in our collective lives. Choose just words and actions in your own life. Speak up with fiery but neutral and loving language when you encounter injustices in the world-at-large. Take whatever respectful actions you can. And then step back. Leave it at that for now. You can’t force others or even yourself onto the “right” path.

Second of all, remember that you create everything that is going on in your life. This is the other concept about which even the smartest, most insightful folks are often incredibly confused, even those who prioritize spiritual development.

There are no villains, only people who are making bad choices who are giving you the opportunity to heal and grow. In the situations that the Supreme Justice of the Universe aka God presents to you that seem hurtful, unjust or just plain horrible, you still get to choose your reaction, including whether or not you want to energetically clear the pictures and end the cycles in order to move on in this lifetime or another.

It you want to take this concept into the time-space framework, keep in mind that you cannot change the past and sometimes certain aspects of the present; but you can change other aspects of the present, and thereby your future. In the New Testament of the Christian Bible, this theme appears many places but these words are from First Peter, Chapter 3, Verses 8-9.

Do not repay evil with evil, or insult with insult, but rather, repay them with a blessing, because to this you were called, so that you too may inherit a blessing.

Another World is indeed possible but you will have to give up your need to “fix” others to find it. Picture by social activist and artist RIcardo Levins Morales based upon the 19th Flammarion engraving, used in accordance with Fair Use Principles.

Third of all, you can safely access and use all the energy you need to fulfill your spiritual mission, your purpose for being. You can work with a TREMENDOUS amount of power, a quantity and quality beyond your wildest dreams and not get in any trouble with the universe under one condition. You must work with that energy from within your own space. Have you noticed how obsessed the world is with images of superpowers and superheroes recently? That is us, trying to remind ourselves that we each individually have what it takes to work with a huge amount of power. The solutions are endless.

Remember that power is not good or bad. It just is. The universe has an infinite quantity of it set aside for your personal benefit. As long as you are trying your best to abide by the one law the Creator gave us, the law of free will, ultimately you do not have to be concerned about anything coming back to “haunt” you.

Quick reminder: What is free will? Again, this is a concept most people have trouble identifying accurately through all their programming. Technically speaking though, it is actually simple. You have to create from within your own energy system. If you do not like what is happening outside of yourself, you need to change something within yourself. That is the trajectory. That is the only one the really works. The tricky part for most people is that to follow that trajectory, you have to have gotten enough in touch with yourself to sense where you end and where others begin. So back to the kicking-out-foreign-energy thing.

If you try to create your life in someone else’s space, this misuse of power at the very least will set you back, as well as the other person; and keep you spinning on the carousal of karma.

Fourth, respecting free will means you operate from the viewpoint that you are totally and 100% responsible for you; and 100% not responsible or at least not solely responsible for anyone else. (It gets a little tricky with children). Everything that happens in the collective space between individuals requires the agreement of all involved for it to be a pure unadulterated form of power, rather than the misuse of it. You can help friends and family all you want. . .as long as they agree they want your help. However, you need to give up the habit of trying to require others to change. Sometimes even if someone else wants your help that does not mean that you should provide it, if doing so is not a good choice for you.

People are at various stages of awareness about various aspects of the world, according to the timing of their own spiritual journey. One cannot force another to see what is true. But you can open your own eyes and thereby shine more light onto others. Image used in accordance with Fair Use Principles.

Respecting the energy space of others means YOU and all those in your sphere of influence, that is to say all embodied as well as unbodied spirit you are channeling through or through whom you are channeling, need to honor agreements. And yes, you are doing some form of channeling if you are human. This includes whatever saints, spirit guides or other heavenly buddies with whom you are working, whether or not you work with them consciously or unconsciously. The universe will eventually call you out if you are pretending to yourself that your hands are clean while an unconscious part of you is asking others to do the dirty work of forcing others to your will. You are 100% responsible for you, even in those dark places where you have given away your power.

Many or most people are so unaware of what is going on within themselves that they are under the illusion that everything internal is themselves. In truth, we all channel the energy belonging to others, particularly family members and people with whom we otherwise share a closeness. Your body was made just for you! Reclaim it, step and step. The initial lessons for people often involve learning to be amused by how much we give away our power. Image used in accordance with Fair Use Principles.

Again, a quick reminder: You can freely ask for help for others from the divine as well as some select beings such as the ones we often label angels who are doing the bidding of the divine. These forces do not invade free will. Be prepared, however, if the Creator-of-Us-All or its helpers declines to provide the type of assistance you deem necessary.

Finally and Fifth of all, Keep in mind that each individual soul has a different mission for their life. Consequently, the amount of power each of us must learn to safely operate can vary hugely. . .and this has nothing whatso ever to do with worthiness. We are all equal in the eyes of God, even as we all have a unique and vital role to play, however it might appear on the surface. Some roles do not require a lot of power.

Clear your competition pictures if you find yourself envying the power of another, whether it comes in the form of wealth, social status, opportunities, amount of information, skills or talents, whatever. These pictures are not only setting you up for ongoing suffering, they are also a sure indication that you are on a detour whereby you are essentially procrastinating about finding your own path, your own joy, your own peace.

Peace of mind and heart comes to those who learn to live within their own God-given space; and let go of any need to force others to a path created by their wishes or desires. Image used in accordance with Fair Use Principles.

As the Christ has told us in John, Chapter 14, Verse 27:

Peace I leave to you, My peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid.

This song is perhaps a little “darker” than necessary for many–full of Old Testament vibes. But perhaps consider it’s essential truth. Used in accordance with Fair Use Principles.

Consciousness & Unconsciousness in Uncertain Times

November 12, 2021 / Church of the Harvest

From a Sermon given Autumn Equinox Worship Service on September 26, 2021

This morning I want to talk a bit about consciousness, and nurturing the kind of consciousness this community would benefit from in the days ahead. We’ve been talking about living in the end times for a quite awhile. Now let’s shift the focus to what we need in order to live in the beginning times.

I continue to be amazed about how many people in our society want to perpetuate the narrative that we must “return to normal.” It is SO unhelpful to think along these lines, because it is SO untrue. Human societies are not just going through a different frame of the same story. Rather, we’re going through a doorway into a different reality. There is no “new normal.”

Sunflower door, Prague. The sun is recognized in many spiritual traditions as the domain of the All-Mighty. It is no “coincidence” that the current crisis on Mother Earth fueling our present evolutionary leap is adjustments to the balance between Sun and Earth screwed up by human animals, aka global heating, climate change or global warming. Photo used in accordance with Fair Use Principles.

In psychological terms we are going through a paradigm shift, a massive change in the way human animals think and feel and experience the world. We are undergoing a revolution if you want to use political terms; or a transformation if you prefer a more holistic perspective. If we want to talk about this change from a spiritual perspective using metaphysical language, we would be and are going to be talking about a change in consciousness.

Everything in our physical world changes over time. El Olam, (the name for God used in Psalms to describe God’s unchanging nature as the God of All Eternity) alone does not change. Everything in our human universe is in flux, whether we are talking about rapid changes like those we can see taking place in front of our naked eyes such a butterfly emerging from a cocoon; or changes in matter that we can barely comprehend like a mountain being ground into dust over millions of years. Energy is always in motion.

Included in the changes that shape our species is how human animals think about our world, and therefore how we interact with it and help co create it. This includes how we imagine and experience our relationship with the divine and the embodied divine known as Mother Earth. God never changes, but we do. As such our ability to create has us shaping the natural world in different ways, some helpful, some not so much.

Certain massive shifts in the worldview of our species were woven into the fabric of the Created Order. As such that patterning is encoded in the very genetic material of our physical bodies. These are the changes with which we are dealing in 2021.

These fundamental and gargantuan shifts are often labeled by science as the “evolution” of a species. Unlike other life forms however, human animals have free will so if we so choose we can ignore and work contrary to how we need our lives and the very physical form that we inhabit to change. The danger is that when we work in opposition to the change process embedded in our design, the vehicles in which we are living cannot keep pace with externalized environmental shifts, making possible what in science would be called “an extinction event.”

Human Extinction by Stefan Roth. An accurate description of our present day challenges. Used in accordance with Fair Use Principles.

We are undergoing an evolutionary leap. Whether it ends up being an extinction event for human animals largely remains to be seen. As part of our role as cocreators we can shift the current Created Order. However this requires a tremendous “leap of faith,” the core of which necessitates an evolution of human consciousness.

It could be argued that the last time human beings went through an evolutionary shift of the magnitude we are currently undergoing was around the late 15^th and 16^th century when Western society came to terms with the idea that the Earth is not the center of the universe, the Sun is. The hubris of human ego broke down our collective societies until we could move towards a more divinely-oriented direction. It was major chaos for several generations until we shifted egotistical thinking to permit a more accurate perspective on our place in the universe. Eventually this led to the cultural milieu we now label the “Age of Enlightenment” with all its various gifts made possible by the more expansive viewpoint.

We are now at a similar crossroad involving an evolutionary jump. Once again our ego is taking a massive hit as we are forced to surrender our view that humans are in complete charge and can control everything on Earth. However, because the vibration of Planet Earth itself continues to go up, the upcoming transition will be more rapid, potentially involving months, years and lifetimes; rather than centuries.

Intuitive people have seen this jump coming, and have been preparing for a long time to take on its challenges, particularly folks from indigenous societies and marginalized cultures. One such person that I have been appreciating lately is Wangari Maathai. Wangari was a biologist and zoologist from Kenya who in 2004 became the first environmentalist and first African woman to win a Nobel Peace Prize for her work towards democracy, unity of purpose and peace, in part through her contributions to reforesting Africa through the Green Belt Movement.

It is all about shedding fear and bringing hope to bear. Image used in accordance with Fair Use Principles.

What do those of us who want to help this evolutionary shift happen as seamlessly as possible in our own lives and in the lives of those around us need to keep in mind? Many of the elements of this unfolding story have yet to be decided and therefore are unknowable at this point in time and space. Some factors are knowable; and we can actively prepare for them. One of the latter is changing the way we think, changing our individual mental life

So let’s start by discussing consciousness. About what do we need to be conscious? And more importantly, what is consciousness anyway? What is it not?

Primarily this morning I want you to learn to better distinguish your mental energy as spirit, and your physicality. Consciousness is a spiritual event. Most people are under the delusion that their consciousness is all about their brain. In actuality your consciousness, sometimes known as your awareness, is not housed by your brain nor is it a creation of your brain. Humans tend to validate the physical side of our world and invalidate everything spiritually based. We have built whole civilizations, particularly since Rome and Hellenistic Greece on a false belief system that idolizes the brain and its functioning.

The brain is a tool. It’s an important one but only a tool. It’s an organ like your lungs or your liver. The brain is a majestic tool with wondrous capabilities that never cease. It is said that with its estimated 100 billion neurons the brain has a network that rivals the stars in the Milky Way. If your brain doesn’t function well it can cause no end of misery, like most people with epilepsy or mental illness or dementia can teach you. But it is only a tool. It is not the end in itself.

Neurons firing as viewed through an electron microscope. Those amazing bits of life are communicating with each other via the use of chemicals and electromagnetic pulses. Photo by Heiti Paves used in accordance with Fair Use principles.

I can’t tell you how many spiritual seekers I have met over the years that have lost their way because they have mistaken their brain for what gives them life. They are like people who spend a fortune on a gorgeous shiny new Tesla car that they program to drive itself, as they themselves go to sleep. Sometimes they crash and burn; and sometimes they just miss the scenary along the road. One of the quickest ways to a spiritual impasse is to get “lost in your analyzer.” When you do that, the tool becomes in charge of your life, and you treat everything like a nail, thinking you are simply a hammer.

The brain likes to convince us that it is the most important organ. It wants us to believe that as the premier organ it is your source of consciousness and therefore decision-making. I almost never recommend people who are seeking to develop their spirituality read books on the subject until I think they have a fighting chance of developing seniority over their analyzer.

The brain is also why many people have such a hard time learning to meditate on their own. Most westerners have been far too programmed to confuse the firing of the synapses in their brain with real knowledge. We actually have a whole educational system in this country that is largely dedicated to stuffing as many bits of data into the brain as we can, thinking that quantity of data is what makes people smart. That’s like believing that your computer or your television is a God because things routinely appear on the monitor. From that vantage point, somewhere somehow some other animating force has done the keystrokes or manipulated the remote to get those images to appear. If you envision the firing of synapses as the endgame, and take no responsibility for what you input, you end up with an insanely busy brain that won’t shut up.

Many people experience their thoughts as heavy, which they can be in when the brain is in competition rather than in affinity with the rest of your physical and spiritual structures. This piece entitled “The Weight of Thought” is by sculptor Thomas Leroy and is used in accordance with Fair Use principles.

Again, don’t get me wrong. Your brain is a truly miraculous machine. Taking care of it is every bit as important as taking care of any other part of your physical anatomy. Here I mean caretaking not just through things like good nutrition and sleep but also exercise in the form of the right kind of stimulation. It is estimated that it takes about 400 repetitions to build one synopsis. To use your brain in the service of your goals, you must learn how to input data by exercising it appropriately and with discernment.

Beyond the basic caretaking tasks involved with the physical aspect of the brain, we also must learn how to work with it by developing what in psychology we call “metacognition.” This is where we go from allowing our brain to dictate our reality to simply using it as a tool. We, the real owners of that marvelous machine we call a body, need to learn to step back, observe what is going on, and make appropriate adjustments. Regular meditation is a tried and true process for doing exactly that.

Have you wondered why there is such a debate in this country about critical thinking? There are a lot of ego-based individuals who have given up responsibility for the functioning of their thinking to others and feel threatened by those who are committed to learning to think for themselves.

In this country and in most others we are in a world of hurt in large part because we lack even the most basic skills in terms of metacognition, aka learning to work with data. Many American don’t even know the difference between a fact and an opinion. Most Americans can’t reliably distinguish between an emotion and a thought, much less which emotions and which thoughts are their own versus which ones have come from other people which they have adopted without examination as their own.

Best case scenario is when an individual allows many glimpses into the big picture, many of which are seen in passing, and then doubles down to focus on what one seeks to create in one’s own life. This way you see both the pattern or cosmic framework within which you function, as well as the best place to grow your individual contribution. “For Granted” by Gabriel Andreas with art by Matthew Andreas used in accordance with Fair Use Principles.

Highly educated people and those with great political power are not at all immune from this systematic ignorance. Many have not learned to use epistemological processes different than their own and sometimes even their own. We have a society which largely thinks faith and science-based belief systems are contradictory, rather than that both are flawed parts of a greater truth. It is scary to me to watch national policy makers sometimes talk about the pandemic as if the scientific process was either a competing religion or an established set of objective facts. Both perspectives lead to suffering and death.

Folks with other advanced cognitive skills who lack that commitment to step back and examine their own belief systems also miss the mark. Metacognition requires that thoughts need to be regularly examined and culled as needed, not just debated by a few similar-thinking colleagues.

Bottom line: Consciousness naturally evolves. Brain functioning does not, at least not on its own initiative. An evolving brain needs to be seeded with new data and purged of the old in order to have the ineffective and/or obsolete give way to a more holistic viewpoint, much like a computer needs to be cleansed of old files and out-of-present-time applications. Without regular updates, improvements and repairs, a neglected computer will slow down and eventually fail altogether. Left to their own devices the brain’s neuronal pathways do eventually wither when they are not used. However, if these changes are not intentional but rather just a result of disuse, it’s like a muscle in the body that simply loses its effectiveness and becomes flab. In many cases the spirit who owns that body simply loses access to it.

Unchecked the brain can take on a life of its own, including housing the energies from many other people and disembodied spirit. Image of “My Brain and Beings Within” by Myron Dyal

Metacognition requires learning to recognize the data to which we are exposing ourselves and making decisions about it. When you get good at observing your thinking processes you can be in charge about what information to bring into your system, what to do with it and when to destroy it when you outgrow it. This applies both to belief in religious concepts like the nature of the God, as well as to scientifically-based ideas. Anything that has your brain maintaining control will ultimately limit you and allow other energies to use you like a doormat. If you do not want to just be a hammer, take charge of your brain.

So, if our brain is only a tool, what is it a tool for? Short answer: you, of course. For you as spirit. The real you–the eternal being, the individual and ever-changing aspect of the All-That-Is.

The brain is a brilliant command center for our physical structure that allows each one of us as an eternal being to create through physical matter. The brain contains some amazing energetic components like our analyzer, that helps translate back and forth between body and spirit visa vie your brain, central nervous system and beyond. But you as spirit need to be in charge of the translation projects.

And what of unconsciousness? How does it play a part?

As spirit you have a consciousness, some of which is contained within your body, the VAST, VAST majority of which is not. The totality of you is so much more than you could possibly even begin to bring into that brain of yours and the rest of your body, no matter how grounded you are and how many growth periods you have undergone. Grounding allows you to be in much greater charge of the learning experiment that we call life. Growth periods help you and your body work towards a mutually beneficial partnership to experience what you are here to experience. However, until you are ready to return to your Maker for all eternity, you will never have access to the totality of your consciousness at any one particular point in time.

Have you heard about spontaneous human combustion? It is a phenomenon that occurs when someone tries to bring more of their energy or a higher vibration of their energy into their body than their body can handle. The body can literally burn up. Be patient with yourself even at those times when you are chomping at the bit because you sense you are unaware of something vital. You do not want to burn yourself out. Seek greater consciousness but give yourself time to get there.

To the ultimate question at hand. For those of us with boots on the ground, how do we best prepare our evolving consciousness to meet the challenges before us? Here are my cliff notes:

1. Get really good at discernment. By this I mean both figuring out to which information you want to expose yourself, and with which people you want to have the experiences that allow you to process it.

The trick here is to make sure that the choices you are making are expanding your universe rather than making it smaller.

Many people in our society right now are lost because they are attempting to protect themselves by shutting down the new information, new experiences, new people with whom they can explore new pathways. That never worked very well and it is kind of deadly in the current time frame. In the digital age we can’t hide anymore from information that disturbs us by shaking up the status quo.

The evolution of human consciousness is requiring us to seek Truth in a different fashion than pretending it doesn’t exist, or asking someone else to define it for us. Read and view and discuss with others as much as you can tolerate of perspectives that differ from and especially those that are contradictory to your own. If you are trying to stem the incoming tsunami of new data by throwing up dams, all you are going to get is flooding on a destructive level. The flood waters are just going to rapidly overtake the banks anyway, and the world of other solutions will simply wash away to nothingness. Alternately if you make judicious decisions about which tides to navigate, when to float and when to paddle–you get my drift–your swimming skills will steadily improve.

Keep in mind that only you can choose what comes to the aid of your learning in what order. If you find yourself uncomfortable with what you are viewing or discussing, then pull back and look at what is going on for you. Time to go within.

Calvin and Hobbes have been a major cultural force in the national conversation for many, although this particular strip may be beyond the understanding of even some of its most die hard fans. It depicts how uncomfortable it can be for individuals to struggle against competing data when their brain is stuck in old patterns Here, rather than dealing with his own discomfort Calvin simply shuts down emotionally and projects onto his dad his emotional distress and his own fear of stupidity. In scientific terms we might label this “cognitive dissonance.” Bill Watterson’s work here is used in accordance with Fair Use Principles.

When you are being triggered, it may be that the new data to which you are exposing yourself is exactly what you need and is just bringing up for clearing the old stuck places.

It may be that the information is wrong for you or even toxic to you.

It may be you are exploring an important subject using the wrong process.

This is where going within is critical. To whatever extent and in whatever way you know how, work through the feelings, the obsolete belief systems, the pain pictures, etc. Get out of your analyzer and into the center of your head. From there look at what you are stirring up, what is REALLY going on, and MOVE that energy out.

2. Open yourself up not only to new information but to new ways of acquiring and processing it. Cognitive processing is a skill set. It must be practiced. It can and should be practiced from various angles but it cannot just be acquired through superficial exposure. i.e. rational thought, despite what your brain may tell you. You can’t just think. You have to do something.

If you know how to read energy clairvoyantly, do a LOT of reading of others so you can expand your universe by releasing matching pictures. That is a great way to purge maladaptive data of which you are not yet conscious.

If you have been exposed to the social psychology literature, you can have fun catching your brain in the act of distortion as it tries to trick you into seeing the world from a limited place of bias.

If you know how to find the center of your head, clean it out in your meditations several times a week and operate from there on a daily basis as much as possible which will increase its reach.

Read magazines with which you are unfamiliar or study a new language. Learn to do something you do not normally do like dancing or singing, or playing an instrument. Develop a relationship with an unfamiliar species of animal, hang out with kids or old people, folks with a major mental illness, culturally diverse groups or anyone with whom you do not normally interact. Watch television shows that make you cringe a little, talk to “strangers,” or even drive down different streets than you normally would.

And then identify what brings you the most joy, and do that A LOT.

3. Recognize that consciousness is the goal and recognize the goal will be largely unobtainable.

Awareness is a great thing.

So, at times, is unawareness.

I can’t tell you how often if I had known what I was getting myself into I would have stopped myself. That is to say my ego would have stopped me as spirit, go down certain roads that it was absolutely critical that I explore.

It is also true that I have caused myself a lot of unnecessary suffering because I did not let myself know what the likely outcome of my choices was going to be. As one’s ability to discern grows, the suffering and self sabotage decrease.

For now just realize that both consciousness and unconsciousness are important at different times. Leave the perfection to God.

And on that note, my major piece of advice to this community is this:

The Holy Spirit, that aspect of the divine that is possibly the most mysterious and impossible to understand through rational brain processes, is available to all human animals irrespective of gender or sexuality. Art by Megan Wagner entitled “Awakened” used in conjunction with Fair Use principles.

4. Be ready to receive the Holy Spirit. Her wisdom is coming to those of us who survive the next period.

This is the evolutionary shift at play. This is the kingdom and the power and the glory that awaits us when we are ready. You do not have to know what I mean. Get out of your analyzer. Just set your intention to receive what has been promised.

Harmony in Times of Chaos

June 30, 2021July 1, 2021 / Church of the Harvest

From a Sermon given Summer Solstice Worship Service on June 20, 2021

Today we celebrate the beginning of summer, strawberry season, the time when Mother Earth begins to bring forth the fruits of her bounty; and we human animals who are her caretakers see what we have created in the spiritual realm the previous winter; what we have dreamed of, agreed to, and begun to manifest into the physical world in regards to some of the first major waves of new blessings. Fruits and vegetables are ripening, but in a deeper sense so too are our fears about the Great Balancing, as I like to refer to the current time in history.

In the last three or four years I have been struck by how many people were using the word “chaos” to describe their worldview. More recently many people have now decided that we are settling back down, we are no longer living in a pandemic, and that we can now return to “normal.” That clearly is not the case and is not going to happen.

There is still a tremendous amount of chaos in our collective lives but I think some of us have gotten a little more acculturated to it. It’s gone underground a bit, become less apparent for some. A few of us have worked through enough resistance to the changes within us and around us to have a temporary respite. As you know, resistance always makes changing more difficult. Global changes however, are ongoing and profound, with many more to come.

The drive to return to normal is an indication that many people still suffer from resistance to change. Get real, folks. Life on Planet Earth has irrevocably altered, thanks be to God. Image from Green Peace New Zealand used in accordance with Fair Use Principles.

This morning I want to remind you that chaos has its place in the universe, some might even say a beloved place of honor. I want to impart some hints about how to not only “weather” it–(pun intended)–but maybe even begin to learn to enjoy it. Chaos is what happens when you need to make huge shifts, when you need to destroy things but have little or no permission to destroy.

Seattle-based mythologist Michael Meade embraces the deep spiritual truth that threads through the stories of all cultures. Image used in accordance with Fair Use Principles.

Chaos is a precursor to great creativity. Out of chaos arise enormous possibilities. The birth process can be smooth, joyful and full of wonder; or it can be painful and disheartening; or anything in between. Humans still have lots of decisions to make, but the threshold upon which we are currently teetering is nothing less than miraculous.

At one point billions of years ago our planet was poised on another foundational threshold. Our universe was a swirling mass of gases and Mother Earth was simply water. Then the Creator brought to this chaos its abundant endless creativity, and thereby fashioned a framework that spurred a paradise of life forms.

In our ignorance and ego-driven desire, humans have largely decimated that paradise, causing a kind of retreat to a state of primordial chaos, at least emotionally-speaking.

So here we are. We get to begin anew, each one of us individually with our own free will, and decide whether we are willing to learn to co create with the divine as his/her children, to begin to access our corner of that abundant endless creativity, or continue to fight a losing battle against the inevitability of needed changes for the good of the whole.

I want to talk a little bit now about individual creativity. What does it mean to be a chip off the cosmic block? For those of us who are working with our own individual energy systems and trying our best to do so in junction with rather than opposition to God’s will, how do we actually go about harnessing our creativity in the service of the divine?

And what do we need to create?

Here’s a thought. How about a whole new relationship with ourselves, each other, and Mother Earth?

Let me start by reminding you that everything outside of you is a reflection of what is inside of you. It’s not the other way around. If you look at the political and economic structures around us you will see a tidal wave of people that want to convince themselves and each other that other people are the problem. The blame-game is HUGE at this time.

Unfortunately this perspective is not only incorrect, it is dangerous. A lot of the souls that are choosing to leave their physical body right now, are doing so because they cannot see a pathway to healing themselves which will allow them to remain on the Planet.

Great spiritual leaders around the world have attempted to teach us that our true life resides within, and therefore changing anything disharmonious has to addressed from within. We engage in group creativity by interacting with others and the entire world around us but it is up to us ultimately how we experience that interaction. Image used in accordance with Fair Use Principles.

We’ve all been so tremendously programmed to believe our answers are outside of ourselves, and therefore our problems have to be solved by others. Then there is a whole cadre of folks that understand theoretically that creating a full and rewarding life for themselves is possible and up to them. . . but they don’t know how to make the changes they seek happen.

In this community I would say that most of us have a lot of the basics down about our individual creativity, but are maybe missing a few important pieces of the puzzle to take things into the collective world.

So let me talk about putting those puzzle pieces together by talking about your individual chakra system.

You all know that there are seven major chakras in the human body, kind of like little powerful spinning hard drives that contain a humongous amount of information, all the information you need and then some.

Many people sort of have their favorites, areas upon which they tend to focus because that is where they feel the need to do the most healing. Other people are under the impression that certain chakras are intrinsically more important than other chakras. For example, it’s common for people to assume that the upper chakras, the fifth, sixth and seventh, are more important than the lower chakras, the first, second and third. That is often because they have gotten lost to the dichotomy that “up” is more important than “down.” Lots of folks have been programmed to believe the “higher” chakras are associated with “Heaven” and therefore of greater value than the “lower” chakras associated with the Earthly realm.

Actually, what is ultimately important is that your chakras work in harmony. They are a system, one designed where every cog of the machine is important for the smooth functioning of the entire machine. When you have even one chakra that is really screwed up, really dysfunctional in terms of what you need to use in your life, the information that is supposed to be in that center will go elsewhere. It can be absorbed by other people, gumming up their energy system. It can bleed into other of your own chakras and screw those up. It can end up enervating and throwing off balance any of your body’s organs, muscles, nerves and other physical structures and systems. Like a river in a flood, information–a form of energy–simply overflows onto other pathways when dammed up at its natural flow site.

In a society where we are not taught how to work with our own energy system, and accordingly have done a rather substantial amount of damage to ourselves for many centuries, our energy system is typically hugely fragmented to the point that it is essentially at war with itself. For example, one part of us wants things to go a certain way while other parts want to take us in a completely alternative direction. We sense or feel we should stay away from a person or a substance like alcohol or the situation that we know to be toxic; we may have second or even third thoughts as to where we are going but we still find ourselves drifting into a maladaptive universe anyway. Part of us wants to rest more, eat healthy or exercise regularly but somehow “something” gets in the way of our following our intention. Much of the time we are even unconscious or unaware of what is driving our life choices.

This is the internalized chaos to which we are all prone. We all do this until we have cleared enough from our energy space for the different pieces of our information to be compatible rather than contradictory with each other, for our chakras to work together in the service of our higher good.

Then of course, this chaos gets projected outwards. Don’t get me started on the wars, violence, social injustice, environmental disasters and so on that are made possible as our individual internal warfare combines with other individuals at war with themselves, increasing the conflict exponentially in the collective space.

Collective chaos can lead to places of great suffering. Art used in accordance with Fair Use Principles.

So you all are on the journey towards wholeness. You have committed yourselves to cleaning up the mess inside you from years in this body and centuries of neglect in others. You have been kicking out the energies that don’t belong to you or no longer serve your purpose to live in wholeness. Congratulations! Mazel tov! Keep up the good work!

But how do we get the individual pieces of our life into a even more complete (although by definition, changing) picture? You all know what my answer to that is: one step at a time. Meditate daily. Run your energy frequently. Cultivate humility and patience. Ask for help from the divine and its helpers whenever you need it or just want it. Commit yourself to God’s service including devoting yourself whenever you can to the wellbeing of others, not at your own expense but rather because all cogs of the machine are ultimately important for our world to work. . .and because what blessings you impart will return to you in kind.

And here’s a little tip. . .or preview of what is to come for the members of this community, including those who participate energetically but not with their physical presence. Every chakra is important. But if your goal is living in harmony, pay attention to your fourth. There is a reason why medieval paintings were so obsessed with portraying the burning heart of Jesus.

The Christ understood that the heart chakra was the bridge between the lower chakras that regulate more of the energy system’s responses to the Earth; and the upper chakras that regulate more of the energy system’s responses to the Heavens. He modeled for us someone who crafted complete unity in his own space irrespective of the enormous personal cost to him, and by doing so, embodied unconditional love with all of God’s created order.

If you want to experience Heaven-on-Earth. even if for brief periods of time . .if you want to be a soul that helps bring paradise back to Mother Earth, pay attention to this important piece of your individual puzzle board.

The fourth chakra is all about setting one’s identity in relationship to everything there is, everyone and every aspect. It is about the peace that occurs when the free will of the individual soul chooses to dwell in unity with everything inside its body and energy system and thereby extends that unity outside.

A well-defined fourth chakra in harmony with all within and outside of an individual soul is a thing of great beauty. Image by Alpha Channel used in accordance with Fair Use Principles.

In other words, learn to love all the parts inside of you, even as you change those that are no longer useful. Don’t go down the rabbit hole of thinking that your yucky parts are the responsibility of others. Others can help you but they cannot do your work for you. Don’t compound your problems by giving away your power to change. Whatever part others played in the creation of these bits of discordant energy is no longer relevant.

Also avoid the major detour of thinking you can achieve wholeness by adopting the false illusion of perfection. Stare your faults, your dark places, your sins, your shadow, your wounds/thorns, whatever you want to call it/them straight in the face. And wink back as you say goodbye.

The Shadows that Betray: Choosing Love in Times of Evil

June 7, 2021 / Church of the Harvest

From a Sermon given Summer Equinox Worship Service on March 21, 2021

It is springtime, the point in the natural cycle of Mother Earth of regeneration and renewal. Further it is spring of 2021, a time when many people are breathing a sigh of relief as things, at least in the United States, have an air of emergence from the dark days of winter and the darkness of the past year. Most of us in this community seem to understand that we have been given temporary reprieve from the challenges set before us; and that there are more to come. For now, however, we can rejoice in our successful perseverance, give thanks for the bountiful assistance we have received along the way, and recommit to the Creator-of-Us-All in weathering the days ahead.

This morning I want to talk a lot about dichotomies, and working with them successfully. I was asked to speak about evil which certainly is a relevant topic given how it seems to be lurking at every turn in the road these days. In these apocalyptic times the heat has been turned up and the creepy crawlies have come scurrying out of their corners, and creepy they are indeed!

Many segments of the world may have come together rather quickly to take on the COVID-19 virus, but we are only beginning to even look at, much less address the energies that made its entrance into our collective lives necessary. Essentially we have ripped off the bandage that was covering the wounding of our shared world. There is going to be a period of bleeding, hopefully followed by some genuine healing of the underlying disturbances that caused the injuries in the first place. The lack of balance, the inability to negotiate dichotomies can be seen as the source of the injuries. So let’s talk about evil and its place in that imbalance.

The evil in the world has been so plentiful and profound, that many have chosen to shut down their own world in a vain attempt to avoid the pain it causes them to view it. Limiting one’s perspective in order to avoid working through what is triggered by viewing the truth may work in the short term. . .but it typically causes even more damage in the long term. This image of suitcases taken from Nazi concentration camp victims in Poland is used in accordance with Fair Use Principles.

What is evil? I could easily offer an entire sermon just trying to define this term. Given that it is a hotbed of thoughts and feelings comprised of a seemingly endless myriad of social programming there are probably as many meanings to this word as there are people on Earth. All words are symbols to some degree or another, and words that have been used to contain the cognition, affect and behavior of those that use them over centuries, words that are used to convey religious concepts, words that reflect deep fears and other debilitating sensations are particularly chock full of energetic bits that snag and ensnare the matching pictures with which humans communicate.

On these fronts, the word “evil” checks all the boxes. Just about anything a human being says, does or is can be and has been labeled by another human being as “evil”.

Perhaps a commonly-held meaning upon which many could agree is what it is not. Evil. . .is not good. The concept of “evil” is often captured by its juxtaposition on the opposite end of the dichotomy of good and evil.

For some people, the word “evil” is reserved for something they see as profoundly not good, i.e. people and events that live out their experience on the extreme edge of the good-evil continuum. You will hear me on occasion talk about evil as someone who is so disconnected from themselves, so ungrounded as to cause greater suffering; or someone who is so lost that they attempt to force others to their will by violence or other horrific means. I try to bring as much neutrality and compassion as I can muster to the discussion of even these extreme attempted transgressions against God’s created order, but my analyzer sometimes has me tripping awkwardly when I am trying to talk about those playing out the extreme end of the evil side of good and evil. At those times I try to step back a bit, or maybe I should say, step up in my viewpoint.

So what exactly is “evil” from a spiritual perspective?

In the Bible, which is the foundational document for the Abrahamic religions followed by approximately four billion people on this planet there is the tale of the creation of the natural world. The Book of Genesis says our ancestors were told by the Creator that they could eat any of the abundant fruits of paradise with the exception of that which grew on the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. They were informed that if they ate from that particular tree, they would experience Death. And of course, you know what happened then.

Pay attention to the message there. Like any sacred text, the Bible is symbolic yet purposeful. We are being taught about one of the most, if not the most primary dichotomies with which we struggle on Planet Earth. Good and evil have been right there with us from day one. What is more, human animals were given the choice from the very start about whether or not we wanted to play out this dichotomy. Apparently we decided to go for it. We could have made a different choice. We did not. We choose to experience dichotomies.

Also take note the use of the word “knowledge” of Good and Evil. God was not advising us that there would be no good and evil if we did not partake of feasting from the Tree bearing its name. He was telling us that the choice was between “knowing” about good and evil and presumably not knowing about it. What I hear from this is that the choice was about what we were going to undergo in our lived experience, in other words in our embodied form. Because we choose the option that included experiencing good and evil with our physical bodies, subsequently we signed up to experience death.

Most organized religions and spiritual traditions recognize death as an illusion, an artifact of the physical body which has little to do with real life, aka as eternal life. This image of Life and Death by Liliflor Arte is used in accordance with Fair Use Principles.

So here we are in the springtime of 2021 having just experienced a global pandemic that killed thousands. with many more to come. We are living currently in a world dying of “natural causes” so to speak, as the environment around us crashes and burns. Death is everywhere, as is life. The stories of individuals and groups of individuals rapidly coming together against all apparent odds to support each other during these times of crises are as plentiful as the stories of disaster, betrayal, and loss. Full-blown evil is clearly staring us in the face, but I would argue so is full-blown good.

We are playing out the dichotomy of good and evil accompanied by death, as we have chosen to do.

What is in store for us now? Are we stuck on a dying planet? It might feel like that at times, but that can’t be the outcome for the planet as a whole. God created the world as a whole and only God can destroy it as a whole. We can destroy pieces of it, including our own individual and collective lives, our happiness, etc. but the world in its entirety doesn’t belong to us. So what now? To answer this question I refer you back to the invocation used to start this service, a famous but pretty much universally misunderstood passage from John, Chapter 14, Verse 27.

Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.

I believe the Christ here is talking about a kind of peacefulness that has heretofore been absent on the planet in the lived experience of human animals. He is NOT talking about the absence of conflict, which is how most people think of peace. He IS talking about having transcended dichotomies.

He surrendered his entire being to the All-That-Is, the Father, the Mother, Allah, God/Goddess, the source, the divine, however you want to call it. As an individual soul, he made the individual choice of his own free will that allowed him to transcend the need for dividing the world into body and spirit, good and evil, or any other seeming opposites. There is a different kind of peace that awaits those who transcend dichotomies. He experienced this different kind of peace. The rest of us have yet to explore that territory.

Rumi is talking here about a very subtle but profound shift of consciousness. When spirit in body lives this Truth in every fiber of its being, there is no longer any separation from anything on Planet Earth. Image used in accordance with Fair Use Principles

As we work through the pictures that divide us from our true nature as spirit, as we work to deenergetize the projections onto others of these pictures, we find ourselves drawn closely and closer to the sweet spot in the center of the dichotomy. As we do so, the extreme edges, those that reflect the transgressions almost all of us would be tempted to label as evil, fall away of their own accord. But also as we do so, we have to confront the shadows. We shine our light as brightly as we know how to do at any particular point in time and space, and because we are not yet a part of the All-That-Is, our light creates a shadow of sorts. The irony is, the larger our light, the larger the shadow.

Remember though, that darkness and light is itself is an illusion, a dichotomy which our brains use to maintain domination. We are still floundering in a landscape that we cannot yet see. So we continue to project what we cannot see in ourselves onto others as a means to heal as we stand in our own way. The healing often become easier on our bodies as we retreat from the extreme edges, but our myopic vision remains until we no longer choose it.

Light and darkness is just another dichotomy, a trick of our human animal brains to try to make sense of our world by prioritizing the physical body’s viewpoint. Spirit knows no such bounds. Image used in accordance with Fair Use Principles.

Is there a reason for hope? Absolutely! The Christ and others have shown the way. As one continues to work through the pictures that divide us from our true nature as spirit, the sweet spot increases and eventually the “sides” between good and evil shrink until eventually they disappear entirely. Then there is only wholeness. This is the transcendence of dichotomies. It is herein lies our peace. Therein lies our salvation. It is here that Heaven-on-Earth awaits us.

I’d like to start wrapping up my sermon this morning by talking about the message about good and evil embedded in the Lord’s Prayer.

I want to read you from the version of the Lord’s Prayer translated by scholar and Sufi mystic Neil Douglas-Klotz from the original Aramaic text. This is the line that in the King James Version of the Bible is read as “And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.” I’m going to focus here on the “deliver us from evil” part, which in the Aramaic is “Ela patzan min bisha.”

Don’t let surface things delude us; but free us from what holds us back (from our true purpose).

Don’t let us enter forgetfulness, the temptation of false appearances.

Rather, break the hold of unripeness that prevents good fruit.

From the evil of injustice—the green fruit and the rotten—grant us liberty.

Deceived neither by the outer nor the inner—free us to walk your path with joy.

Keep us from hoarding false wealth, and from the inner shame of help not given in time.

What I hear here is something completely missing in the KJV of these important words. I hear Jesus talking about time. According to most abrahamic versions of Genesis, when Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil they committed an evil act and are “sinners,” perhaps particularly so on Eve’s part. This false belief system has resulted in untold pain and suffering not only for human animals but for nonhuman animals. In this translation I hear rather that the introduction of good and evil into our physical world has resulted in humans forgetting where and who we are.

From a spiritual, perspective, time is an illusion. From a body perspective it is a potent reality. Simultaneously holding both of these perspectives as truth is the work of God. . .often requiring tuning into energetic sources of information through meditation or symbolic representations. Image used in accordance with Fair Use Principles.

The solution? Heartfelt desire to get beyond the delusions . . .and time.

Remember if you would, that spirit exists outside of time and space but our bodies understand only the present moment. By talking about the importance of acting neither too soon nor too late, Jesus is talking about the embodied spirit on Mother Earth. The Christ is telling us that we are prone to deluding ourselves; and teaching us that the trick to finding wholeness again is in the knowing that we are going to be groping around in the dark for awhile, but also having the faith that we will get there entirely when we are ready to be there.

In other words, this time around, we have to take our bodies with us into salvation. We have to make all the parts of us conscious, even the ugly ones, until they are no longer needed. We have to learn to love our own shadow, as well as those who bless us by reflecting back to us the pictures about which we have remained unconscious, no matter where they are on the “bad” part of the spectrum. That’s what we signed up for when we ate that damn apple!

Do you want to know how to overcome evil? One growth period at a time.

Ancestors and Young Ones: Seeing the Old with New Eyes

March 12, 2021 / Church of the Harvest

From a Sermon given Winter Solstice Worship Service on December 27, 2020

Winter is traditionally the time of the year when life on Planet Earth slows way down, shifts into resting mode and begins to engage in the process of regrouping for the new seasonal growing period ahead. Human animals usually use this time to engage in reflection about the events of the past few months; and to dream about the new directions we would like to take in the next phase of our cycle of evolution.

2020 has been quite the year, hasn’t it? A year for the history books. A year when our lifestyles, events taking place in the outer world and our society slowed way down. That is not to say that events in individual internal lives slowed down. For some it did. For others it actually sped up, as people experienced confusion, acute anxiety and other busy, often chaotic emotional states.

The pandemic and all with which we are dealing, has many of us in hiding. Image used in accordance with Fair Use Principles.

As the calendar year known as 2020 comes to an end, many are still lost to their fear, unable to believe in anything other than scarcity. And of course, that belief in scarcity is mirrored everywhere around us by the society we have created. . .which then further feeds the fear. For many people there is a frenzied dynamic interplay going on right now, a feeding frenzy, if you would. Intense emotions are being triggered in their bodies which are then reinforced by irrational belief systems that are then surfacing in their bodies even more pockets of unresolved emotions that then cascade into greater distorted beliefs and on and on. The amount of hysteria and totally weird conspiracy theories that are being promulgated right now by our national leadership as well as many of its citizens would be funny if it weren’t so tragic.

As the foundation for life on Earth vacillates wildly between conditional and unconditional love, transitions from separateness to unity of purpose, from fear to faith in the enduring, unending presence of our Creator, many of us are suffering from acute motion sickness.

Here in this community known as the Church of the Harvest we’ve been working to keep our head above the waters, in order to swim to the new shorelines; and help others who don’t know how to swim at least dogpaddle or float their way to safety.

We’ve been doing this in these services most recently by talking about the nature of Truth. In other words, that Truth is the sole domain of the All-Mighty. That for those of us human beings who are made in its image, it is in our nature to seek it, like sunflowers that turn their head towards the Sun, but not to know it in its entirety. Those who adamantly insist on the Truth before they are actually prepared to hear it, typically scorch and burn up.

Truth for us is a becoming. . .not an end product. As such we need to constantly set our intention on staying humble and being open to cultivating as many ways to receive a greater version of Truth from the source of our being as we can.

As a process truth-seeking also greatly benefits from engaging with as much of our physical reality as we can. This is because the Sun that we seek shines down on our beloved planet and wants to illuminate all on Earth that can be activated and nurtured by its light and coaxed into growing.

Right now the universe is telling us that we must learn not only the disembodied truth that can be accessed by our minds but the larger truth, that aspect of the Sun that has been embedded in the very rhythm of our breath and the coursing of our heart as the Sun’s energy flows through the structure of our organs, muscles, nerves, tissues, and bones. In other words, we have to not only be in touch with emerging truth with our mind, we have to learn to experience it in our entire individual body.

In my role as someone who tracks the energy of the collective unconsciousness, as well as the consensual reality–which is the part where we have made agreements on a soul level about what we are going to bring into the physical world–I have been watching closely as America collectively embraces a larger version of the truth about our country, its history and its place in present time. Like an amphibian or reptile, we have been shedding our old skin and moving into raw, vulnerable new containers with astonishing speed. This new version of the truth, this embodied vision, comes at a price for many. As greater energy flows through our individual and collective bodies, it often lights up old wounds to be acknowledged and cleared. Thus the pain and agony for many these days. It’s shock and awe time.

The interesting part to me has been that the emerging deeper levels of truth are just that. Contrary to popular opinion, for the most part they are not brand new concepts or ways of approaching life but very old ones that are being re-imagined, re-contextualized, like beautiful old paintings that are suddenly seen as richer, more nuanced because they have been taken out of dirty old frames and instead, surrounded in gold so as to highlight their glory.

Whether its adding 3,400 Negro League players to the statistics of the Major League Baseball such that their contributions can be honored, taking down monuments to white supremacists, renaming military bases and sports teams or starting the annual New York City Macy Thanksgiving Day parade with a land acknowledgement to the native tribes that lived in the area before being deprived of their homelands, the shifting of perspective is phenomenal.

Those who are trying to swim against the tide are framing their truth as the USA “rewriting history” or “cancelling its culture.” We are indeed rewriting the history books by including the stories of marginalized individuals and groups that were previously excluded. We are realigning less expansive cultural stories from center stage to their proper new place on the outskirts. Unfortunately or fortunately depending on your own version of the truth, some who oppose this opening up of historical perspectives are getting swept out to sea. The abruptness of the tidal waves of changes with which we are all now engaged, is shocking to us all. For some, it is jolting us awake. For others, it is just jolting. Many of the latter are attempting to lighten the load for themselves by closing down their world vision, something dangerously at odds with how the collective energy is moving.

The robust national conversation about the best multigenerational approach to the pandemic was no “accident.” (Can grandparents hug their grandchildren? Should young people be concerned about infecting older people even if they themselves are at minimal risk? Etc.) As the sun shines brighter on our natural world, humans are having to shift their perspective to acknowledge that time is an illusion to spirit. It will take all of us, young and old alike, to step forward into a greater truth. You are the dream of all your ancestors, art by Monica Fernandez. Image used in accordance with Fair Use Principles.

2020 is soon to give way shortly to 2021. Collectively we have planted a few seeds to begin the growing season ahead; and we still have many more months of dreaming and resting and regrouping before we will have the entire new landscape seeded for the upcoming spring and summer.

Normally at this point in my sermon I make a number of suggestions. This year I have one brief further commentary and one major piece of advice.

Many spiritual seekers debate about the question of pain and suffering. Is it necessary? Is it inevitable? Like many other experiences, this depends on the individual’s path. For most, pain is a “useful” learning tool,, one that becomes less relevant as healing progresses, but most of us need to learn to tolerate and eventually transcend it. Image used in accordance with Fair Use Principles.

The commentary is about pain. For those of you who follow American mythologist Michael Meade’s wisdom, he has been talking about pain a lot lately as well. I was struck by a posting he did recently that I will quote:

“The pain we feel comes from the cross-wise energies that

keep curving back and canceling the wise self and the good

word that waits to be expressed from within us. Persistent

pain is usually the indication that we have become trapped in

a life too small for our true nature.”

Because on a soul level we are learning to come more fully into the physical world individually and as a whole, most of us will have more pain to clear as we go through the transformative process. Don’t be afraid of this. We’ve got the tools we need. The universe has our backs. And this community has your back as well, should you need and desire our help. As 13th century Persian poet and Sufi mystic Rumi tells us: “The cure for the pain is in the pain.”

You are, as always, the architect of your own journey. Use this time wisely. Image used in accordance with Fair Use Principles.

And speaking of Rumi, here is my biggest suggestion: Stay open to new ways of understanding, ways that are beyond your present understanding. They are coming, waiting for us to receive them. As Rumi said long ago:

“The Truth was a mirror in the hands of God. It fell and broke

into pieces. Everybody took a piece of it and they looked at it

and thought they had the truth.”

We are beginning to see the natural world with new eyes. Earth has always been a planet whose “destiny” involves paradise. It’s just that the human species who right now are the co-creators with the divine, and therefore have a pivotal part in validating the master plan, have chosen heretofore to be largely out of sync with it and its creator.

Open your heart to the bounty and the beauty of creativity in the truest form it shows up in your life, but do so while acknowledging that only God contains the whole picture. Make your vessel ready to receive as much of it as you desire.

Justice, Mercy, Kindness and Karma in the Days of Reckoning, Part II

October 25, 2020 / Church of the Harvest

From a Sermon given Autumn Equinox Worship Service on September 27, 2020

Last time we met as a community for our quarterly worship service to honor the Creator-of-Us-All I was drawn to talking about Justice, a topic that has exploded onto our cultural scene. Of course the subject of Justice is not a new one for folks. It’s pretty much been a central topic of discussion in human society from day one on Planet Earth. The new element is the Universe has chimed in on the debate, telling we humans as the dominant species on Earth that if we don’t get on the right page now, another set of caretakers will be found. In my last sermon I talked about it now being the days of reckoning, the days when people are often required to deal with very unpleasant situations that they have heretofore avoided, in order to settle old accounts.

Now, as Mother Nature moves from the season of harvesting what we have sown in the past. . .into the wintertime of rest and recreation, I want to do more of a deep dive into the topic of Justice. I want us to rise above the petty squabbles of individuals and groups fighting with each other over dominance; attempting to force their energy on others. I want us to take the next steps towards looking at life from a spiritual perspective, one that acknowledges thoughts and feelings; but does not stop there.

To do that, to find that place that brings all individuals and groups together in the incredibly beautiful, intricate field of unity that is our God-given heritage, what is required is for us to try to free our imaginations from the bounds of time and space.

The people in this church know a lot about space. We’ve all been meditating, grounding, centering, learning what is us and what belongs to others, employing the basic techniques that help us operate from our own energy field rather than trying to control others, in many cases for several years. In this discussion today let’s focus more on transcending time.

As you know, spirit is eternal and operates outside of the time-space continuum. Our physical bodies on the other hand, very much live in the world of time and space. That is all they understand.

As people develop spiritually, we learn the very tricky skill of walking the tightrope between knowing that on a soul level everything in the universe is happening simultaneously. . .but that our physical form requires us to divide our experience into segments that allows the ability to heal within the framework of matter. Tricky indeed. . .and if you do not yet “get this,” give yourself time! Image used in accordance with Fair Use Principles.

This basic dichotomy, this difference in perspective between who you really are, and what your body wants and needs, is a source of tremendous tension for most people. When an individual is not working from within their own unique physical space, they often will not take into consideration and indeed, may not even notice their body’s needs. On a soul level, they will remain unfulfilled in a certain kind of way. This conflict, this disconnect, this lack of balancing between spirit and matter can lead to a great deal of suffering, disease, and outright warfare–an imbalance that then gets projected onto everything and everyone around us.

We all do this at least occasionally. To various degrees, at various junctures, we all get thrown off balance. We all are seeking to come into harmony with ourselves, to find and live in that sweet spot, that internal state of harmony between body and spirit, whether or not we are aware of it. We’re all here on Planet Earth to learn to create as spirit through physical matter and our physical body is where the action gets played out.

Some of us are a little farther along in the learning process than others of us. That’s not a statement of inequality. It’s only recognition of the fact that what you pay attention to becomes more of an issue in the unfolding of your life. So if you have been paying more attention to working from within your own space, and taking the body’s orientation towards present time more under advisement, you will be doing more of that harmony thing, that living-from-a-place-of-balance thing.

When we talk about reckoning of accounts, the old ledgers that require a balancing act right now are the things to which you have not been paying attention, if only because you have been paying attention to other areas. Maybe some of those other areas are worthy pursuits. Maybe some have been distractions, detours, and a waste of precious time. It does not matter to the universe. Contrary to our personal beliefs based on that incredibly HUGE amount of programming we have absorbed from our friends and relatives, schools and churches, neighborhoods and communities and countries, you are not being judged by the universe. What DOES matter at this juncture in our collective story, is that you pay your dues. Some people have a LONG way to go before they will achieve an ongoing sense of internal balance. Others have been working on themselves for longer, so the reckoning process for them right now is less treacherous.

This is the time of the Great Balancing. Image from Dr. Seuss is used in accordance with Fair Use Principles.

So let’s talk about karma.

Funny thing is that when I realized that Justice was the topic on our minds and that to pursue this topic, we would need to talk about karma, I was not a happy camper. Personally, I don’t like to talk about karma. For one thing, an authentic discussion about karma requires people to accept the reality of reincarnation. I know what I had to go through to release programming that had me rejecting the concept of reincarnation. I’ve never particularly wanted to ask anyone else to make that difficult journey. I’ve always opted to follow the lead of one of my early spiritual teachers. That individual found himself being cross-examined in a court of law regarding his belief in reincarnation, as a means of trying to discredit another part of his testimony. With a great deal of patience, amusement and neutrality he said to the people in the courtroom something to the effect of “It doesn’t matter what you currently believe about reincarnation. You’ll find out about it when you pass.”

The proof is in the pudding, so to speak. And I’m usually interested in leaving it at that.

Young ones are often aware that this is not their first time on the Planet, but are typically subjected to considerable pressure to see things in a more socially acceptable light. Cartoon by Dave Coverly used in accordance with Fair Use Principles.

The other part of the problem with talking about karma is that the word itself has gotten corrupted by the need of human beings to judge themselves and each other. Even in parts of the world like India where karma is a widely accepted idea, the meaning behind it has gotten distorted.

So let me say this really loudly for those in the back. KARMA IS NOT ABOUT THE UNIVERSE GETTING BACK AT US for our transgressions, for our stupidities, if you will. Karma IS about a simple cause and effect movement to energy. Like a boomerang, what you put out in the world inevitably comes back to you.

Nearly all spiritual traditions acknowledge this circular movement. In Western culture karma is often labeled the “Golden Rule.” The title is no coincidence, given that gold is the color associated clairvoyantly with the divine.

In the Christian tradition Jesus of Nazareth talked about the path cause and effect energy takes with his usual simple, profound language. Many have not been able to hear his real message through their own judgment of self/others. They assume Jesus was talking about God giving us a commandment, then condemning us if we do not follow it. What they do not understand is that he was talking about the essence of Justice and Wisdom; and simply advising us that if we do not choose to act wisely in accordance with the natural flow of energy, we will be worse for the wear, all Hell could break out, so to speak.

Matthew, Chapter 7, Verse 12 of the Christian Bible:

So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets.

Straightforward, that. What you get is what you sow. Period. End of story. It’s not more complicated than that.

The only “complication” per se, is that from a spiritual perspective there is no set time frame to factor in. I remind you that spirit is not defined by time. You can choose to act in a certain way, and the effect of that action can practically be simultaneous. For example if a person in a heated encounter shoots a gun towards someone else who is also holding a weapon pointed at them, there is an obvious possible immediate cause-effect sequence.

Then again, you can shoot a weapon and kill someone that no one witnesses and no one finds out about in this lifetime, other than the deceased person. That encounter is magnetized and sent into the ethereal plane; and that person or someone who is similar in some key way to them, someone who is in possession what we call around here “matching pictures,” can kill you or harm you or impact you in some other related manner a hundred years or a century later.

It’s not a matter of judgment. It’s not a matter of who is right or wrong. . .or somebody being a bad person and other individual being a good person. It’s also not about being in the wrong place at a particular time, and it certainly is not an accident. It’s not even about victimizer and victim despite the fact that in any isolated event, there is typically one or more of each. It just is. What you put out into the universe with your God-given free will comes back to you.

So. . .when you read in social media that some pastor who has rallied his parishioners against wearing face masks is now in the hospital deathly ill from Covid; or a senator in Oregon who left the state in order to block passage of a bill on climate change just had his home burned down by wildfires, you can label this karma if you want. You can even be thankful that those individuals are likely distracted enough by their personal suffering to not inflict further damage and suffering on their communities. But please refrain from the I-told-you-sos, or the snarky glee at someone else’s misery, regardless of how much misery others may have generated in your world to date. And for heaven’s sake, don’t choose to respond in a revengeful manner from a place of hatred.

Another way of looking at karma without using that “loaded” phrase is through the lens provided by Swiss depth psychologist Carl Jung. He discussed the unsuccessful balance of dichotomies within individuals that occurs when the individual rejects the parts of themselves of which they are not aware. Quoted in accordance with Fair Use Principles.

For your own well being, choose your reaction wisely. Acknowledge and be careful about how you are processing any emotional reactions. Live your life from the center of your head where you can be in neutral about all that you see within and around you, and thereby not project into the airwaves that which you do not yourself want to experience. Because you will. What I am giving you here is practical advice, not a moral reckoning.

The funny thing about karma is it is correlated with intention. You can feel whatever you feel including hatred and anger and other maladaptive emotions. Left unchecked they will certainly be corrosive to your body but they will not necessarily generate “bad karma” for you. You can hold whatever opinions you want, including prejudices and delusions. Again, these can be very harmful to your well being, your relationships and your inner and outer life, but they may not kick you in the teeth in a future incarnation. However the minute you combine negative emotion and maladaptive thinking into a desire for others to be hurt strong enough to become concrete, whether or not the other person seems to “deserve it,” eventually that harm will find its way to your doorstep. What counts here are words and actions based on your intent.

All human animals feel so-called “negative emotions” at times, although many have learned to heavily repress what they are experiencing. What matters is not what you feel. . .but what you choose to do with the feeling. Image used in accordance with Fair Use Principles.

I guarantee you that all of us have done far more selfish and stupid things in our learning process here on Planet Earth.You will not find it comfortable to have the universe have to strike you down with a deadly disease, take away your residence, or destroy some other aspect of your creativity in order to try to remind you of that fact.

Right now, in the twenty-first century, we are balancing the books. We are reconciling all those unresolved karmic balance sheets, the ones with debits as well as the ones with assets. Why? Because we need a clean sheet for a new world. As a whole, human beings have made enough self-serving bad choices that Mother Earth itself is endangered. That is not acceptable to the universe and it will not be allowed to continue. Our brightest path forward involves the cultivation of mercy.

Angel of Mercy, Photo by Robin Hill. Used in accordance with Fair Use Principles.

Mercy is created when someone chooses compassion and/or forgiveness towards someone else who has wronged them, even when the person wronged has the power to do harm. This breaks the cycle of karma. It is one of the highest uses of the gift of free will from our creator.

Mercy is a statement of profound strength. Our society often tries to convince us it is a weakness but it is far from that. Do you think that when Jesus of Nazareth was crucified he died because he was weak? As the anointed one, the son of God, he could have leveled all around him, indeed all of Israel, with a single breath. Rather he chose to not fight with the ugliness around him and in doing so, quite literally embodied mercy towards all of humanity.

The crucification of The Christ may be one of the biggest mysteries and least understood events in human history. Image used in accordance with Fair Use Principles.

Without mercy there is no freedom for human animals from continuing to experience ages old karmic cycles that lead nowhere useful. Before The Christ, in the collective consciousness people only understood the Old Testament tribal thinking of an-eye-for-an-eye. After Jesus, a new foundational energy as reflected in the gospels was given form for human animals: love for all, irrespective of our sins. The Christ did not dismiss sin as nonconsequential. From a place of non judgment he eschewed it. Neither did he allow his crucifixion in order to do our work for us by having our transgressions go away magically based on belief in ideology. He simply showed us under the most horrific possible circumstances that we can transcend the cycle of retribution by living fully in the energy of mercy.

More than ever right now we need to choose the path laid before us by Jesus of Nazareth and other saints and spiritual leaders. We need to actively and consciously cultivate mercy. Jesus showed us the way forward, but only we can take it. Without mercy there can be no real justice. Any choices that answer wrongful actions with further wrongful actions are simply retribution. Revenge/retribution keeps us stuck on the unending carousel of karma which as I have mentioned is really not an option much longer.

Many people are leaving the Planet right now because they don’t know how to bring mercy to the table they have set before themselves. Many, many more will be doing so before we get through our transition period. In your world, allow the compassion of The Christ to infuse your life and your choices as fully as you can.

Have compassion for African-Americans and other individuals from ethnic minority communities, indigenous cultures, etc that have suffered horrible systemic racism, including some of whom are temporarily lost to their wounding by going after those they consider to have harmed them. Do this even as you take all the tangible actions to end racism that you can imagine. Follow the lead of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, the NBA’s all time leading scorer and a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom who recently remarked: “What I want to see is not a rush to judgment but a rush to justice.”

Shine mercy upon both those that support and those who oppose the tyrants, dictators, lobbyists, corrupt politicians and other political figures around the world who are actively destroying the natural world in pursuit of money and power, even as you report, speak out, vote, organize counter measures and take any definitive steps to honor Mother Earth that you can.

“The Throne Within,” poster by Ricardo Levins Morales with quote from Khalil Gibran used in accordance with Fair Use Principles.

Forgive the trespasses of individuals involved with civil unrest in our cities, whether they are protestors, agitators, vandals, law enforcement, or whomever else you see as contributing to the mess, at the same time you do whatever it is you can personally think to do to stop the violence and bring forth peaceful resolutions.

Correct the horrible injustice of our economic system when it shows up in your environment and choose the righteous path of nonjudgmental action towards those at the top who would steal what belongs to those below them. For example, bear strong witness against the three multi-billionaires who for no particularly valid reason own more resources than one half of all other Americans but pray for their salvation. Educate others about inhumane financial injustices like the fact that in the last forty years, compensation for the heads of corporations in the United States has increased in many cases one thousand percent in comparison to the other people who are a part of those companies. Advocate and provide for those without adequate shelter or food and confront those who would exploit or abuse workers. Do what you morally can to confront this egregious inequality without adding further to the evil forces in play here.

Above all, be kind to yourself. I’m not talking about self-indulgence. I’m certainly not talking about that weird set of rules that pass as making one a member of “polite society.” I’m talking about real kindness. Mercy towards yourself, so to speak. To whatever extent you can, acknowledge your flaws, your ignorance, all those multiple times in this lifetime and others where you have actively hurt others as well as those times you have chosen unawareness because it was more comfortable or convenient than the truth.

This statue of the Buddha contemplating a lotus blossom–the universal symbol of spirit in the Eastern part of the world–appears to reflect the peacefulness that can be achieved when one brings balance to life. Image used in accordance with Fair Use Principles.

See yourself as you really are, and choose to love yourself anyway. Forgive yourself even if you are impatient and judgmental towards yourself and not yet good at forgiveness. Maybe you don’t even yet know what I’m talking about when I talk of mercy towards yourself. You don’t have to understand me with your mind, only with your heart. Embrace mercy towards yourself and others because that will pay some karmic debts and open the right doors for your salvation.

Julian of Norwich was an English mystic born in 1342 CE who understood that Justice is another name for God. Image used in accordance with Fair Use Principles.

As we are reminded in Isaiah, Verse 30, Chapter 18:

The Lord longs to be gracious to you, and exalts himself to show mercy to you. For the Lord is a God of Justice.

Blessed are those who wait for him.

Justice, Mercy, Kindness and Karma, Part I

July 18, 2020 / Church of the Harvest

From a Sermon given Summer Solstice Worship Service on June 22, 2020

Hello. I’m glad to see you all at the 2020 Summer Solstice Service of the Church of the Harvest. My job as Presiding Minister of this spiritual community is to tune into the energy of the group, and do whatever I can to bring it to the next higher level. I offer my personal perspective as a way of doing that, hoping to awaken the truth that is contained within your heart and your mind. Today my topic is broad-ranging. Please know that each of you absolutely has my blessing to use any of these words that resonate with you, and discard the rest. Above all in this Church we believe in free will. By that I don’t mean freedom to act however you want to act towards others around you. What I specifically mean is freedom to feel whatever you want to feel, believe whatever you want to believe; and act in accordance with other people in a manner that also honors their essential freedom.

It is always a challenge for me to write and deliver these sermons. Spiritual reality is never fully explored through the medium of words, but under the best of circumstances we can dance with words in a way that allows dancers to sense the melodies within their eardrums and feel the rhythms in their bones. So please forgive me if I dance around our topic. . . because it is too big and too rich to be fully captured by words. You are invited in as I try to encapsulate what I believe is true about the spiritual journey upon which we are engaged in the present moment.

Image used in accordance with Fair Use Principles.

Let me start by talking about why I am framing this sermon as occurring in the “days of reckoning.” Most of you present today know that I have speaking for many months, several years even, about the end times, and as well as the apocalyptic times. If you heard me, you will also likely remember that I do not believe the end times necessarily mean the end of the physical world, only that the world as human beings have known it is ending. The word apocalypse comes from the Greek. It translates simply as the unfolding of things not previously known.

For most people, there is a lot of scary energy on the phrase “the end times” as well as on the word “apocalypse.” Likewise, there is a great deal of fear for many people when they hear the phrase “the days of reckoning.” That is because for most people these three concepts are all firmly associated with religious dogma, mostly in regards to the abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. As such, these phrases are fraught with the assumption that we are sinful, about to be judged and most of us found horribly wanting, soon to be condemned to deep, endless amounts of suffering.

In my meditations I have spent considerable time stripping away religious programming from my energy system. For me, these ideas are no longer a source of anxiety. I am happy that the Creator-of-Us-All is dissolving our illusions through the apocalypse. I was never very good at living the lies with which most people seem to be content. The end times for me personally seem to be bringing an end to my suffering, the completion of a journey of many lifetimes of brokenness in which my sense of living in the hell-of-my-own-choosing far outpaced those few moments of heaven-on-earth that I could manage to create for myself.

In the world of energy there is no time. We are all going to the same place but our individual journey towards that place depends on the choices we make along the way, including our sequencing and timetable. Image used in accordance with Fair Use Principles

As to the days of reckoning, let me just say that it is very clear to me that our God is a loving God that does need to judge. We humans do a more than adequate job of that all on our own.

What happens when you put all these ideas together? What are the days of reckoning. . .if they are not the time after death as Muslims and Christians are told in which one has to account for one’s actions before God in order to determine whether you go to heaven or hell? Stripped of religious programming, a reckoning is simply a time when people are forced to deal with unpleasant situations which they have avoided until that day. A reckoning is a settling of accounts.

When are the days of reckoning? Typically they occur when an entire people are forced to deal with that which previously they as a group have avoided confronting. You know. . .like what is currently happening with a lot of white people who were previously not really required to notice that they had certain resources and opportunities largely unavailable to people of color. Or what is happening for the more economically privileged around the globe who previously could pretend that destruction and exploitation of the environment was a problem for other people until the entire climate of the planet began to crash and effect them as well. This is the apocalypse at work, the dying of illusions. These are the true end times, the end of centuries-long chapters of human evolution.

I want to jump now to another concept, one that is currently consuming the national conversation and saturating the energetic airwaves. Let’s talk about justice. If you watch any news broadcast, participate in any social media, interact with the public in almost any context, you are going to be having conversations about justice. Suddenly everything seems to be about social justice.

One of the things that interests me about these conversations that people are having on the streets and in the media is how closely the concept of justice is being paired with the idea of people speaking up. Over and over you will hear people say how vital it is, how important for people to speak up. Many times folks don’t really even know what they want to say. . .as they busily extoll each other to speak their minds. We are searching for our collective voice, even when we don’t know what we want to do with it.

The emphasis here is on the collective part. Previously some individuals have been vocal. Whether or not they were truly heard is another matter but they had the opportunity and/or the desire to express themselves. But as a collective body human beings have usually only come together as a group to express themselves in opposition to another tribe. The human brain has always overwhelmingly done an us-versus-them kind of thing when expressing group norms.

This is what we are changing. What is new here and now is our coming together to express unity rather than division. We may not know what true unity really looks like as of yet, and we’re not very good at it so far, but we’re doing our damndest to try to figure it out. The implications for this shift are enormous. The result of this task will be to create a new world order.

Justice, aka a place in society for all. is always inclusionary. One can see from the heated debate going on in the United States right now that what is or is not every person’s right is a topic upon which we still significantly lack agreement. Our collective political, religious and other systems need to “catch up” with the “golden rule” aspect that is fundamental in all world religions. Image by Mary Engelbreit used in accordance with Fair Use Principles.

Those present today will understand some of the ramifications of what I mean when I say that human beings all around the globe as a group, are attempting to bring into their physical bodies the highest vibration of energy which is founded on all of us being connected. Last year the consensus reality, that is to say all of us on a spiritual level, made the decision to rewire the world into one based on love. Right now we are taking the first real step in bringing that commitment into the physical world, right down through our emboded individual energy systems as we talk to ourselves and each other about what that real unity will take, what that will look like.

In recent history we had the first major wave of this new commitment to collective expression when gay men and lesbians were given the political green light to come out of the closet, the oppressive cloak of invisibility they had endured for centuries. More recently the #MeTooMovement encouraged women to explore their truth and men were told to take a back seat, listen and learn. Those conversations involved communication. . . but they weren’t yet contextualized in the intention of unity. The latest cultural shift, this spotlighting the stories of black people and other people of color is a double whammy. It is shifting both the message and the medium.

Huge assemblies of people are marching together through our urban centers, often without clarity about why they are marching. They walk under the banner of “Black Lives Matter” and articulate that they want justice in the form of an end to racism, but it is clear that there is so much more to their message.

There is accompanying conversation about the police which is framed using a variety of filters such as police tactics, accountability, reform, brutality, etc. The police are the boots-on-the-ground highly visible reminder of the justice system. Law enforcement serve as the tangible symbol of law and order, an order that is seen by most as overdue for an update. The interactions between police and protestors vary widely as a result not only of the personal experience of the individuals and communities involved but also the meaning those individuals and communities read into the symbol.

Which brings us to the other aspect that fascinates me about the vibrant national dialogue we are having in the United States these days centering around justice. Journalists and other witnesses have commented upon, but I have not seen them really able to interpret the significance of the fact that the public protests are largely leaderless. These events typically have initial organizers of sorts and periodic visible key players pop up and often disappear again but the groups are essentially coming together and going about their business with a degree of spontaneity and fluidity between huge, divergent elements not usually seen in protest movements.

Mass movement without direction from a handful of individuals is consistent with the top-down shift of energy I’ve been talking about for awhile. I’ve been watching the energy move downward, closer to Earth, not only in the protestors but now in the police. Even a year ago it would have been unthinkable for police officers to publicly disagree with each other. The code of silence subscribed to by those in that line of work was rock solid as a result of the perception that such group solidarity was necessary for the welfare of all, to protect members of the profession from a challenging and dangerous job. Suddenly all over the country, individual and small local groups of police are “breaking ranks” to take differing and sometimes contradictory positions in the discussion about justice.

The energetic shift from power being welded from the top levels to the lower levels, specifically from national and international forces to state and local forces, is the tidal wave of the future. It is consistent with and necessary for the huge shift of consciousness going on currently for human animals. The universe is moving us from being dominated by tribal thinking to each of us finding our own individual truth as individuals within collective society.

Many people are emotionally and cognitively devastated by this change. The anxiety and outright paranoia is enormous as people discover they can no longer rely on the religious, political and social figures and organizations they have always used to tell them what’s up. We have to break down our reliance on others to tell us what to think and feel and do. . .so we can develop the skills and abilities to manifest our own individual creativity. . .and join it with the creativity of others for common goals required to meet our present world-wide challenges. It has been and will continue to be a really rough ride for those individuals to make sense of the changing world who do not have the experience and lack basic skills on finding their own truth.

But if you think confronting and ending systemic racism is an overwhelming task, wait until you see in the days ahead what we have to do in order to end systemic economic injustice; and what is going to be required to keep the planet from continuing to slide into a terminal tailspin.

In human society justice is truly a concept whose time has come due. People around the world are calling for it in increasingly passionate voice. This image of Justice used in accordance with Fair Use Principles is from Palestinian artist Malak Mattar who is currently a refugee. She first started painting at age 13, during the 51-day Israeli military assault on on her homeland in Gaza in 2014.

The protests around the country are often described as “passionate” and I hear a lot of participants talking in rather vague but deeply-held language about desiring change. As a people we are trying out new abilities to speak in one voice from different life experiences. The universe is speaking within us and through us even as few understand as of yet what is being channeled. What is uniting those on the streets and those participating by their witnessing right now is not message or even motive as much as something much more profound and fundamental.

To focus on what I believe is the energetic core to these demonstrations; I’d like to return to invocation used at the start of this service. Let me repeat it. This is the statement from the Christ speaking about the end times in which we are living. This is from Verse 10 of the Gospel of Thomas:

“I have cast fire upon the world, and look, I’m guarding it until it blazes.”

Elsewhere in both Luke and Matthew of the Christian Bible, Jesus talks about a time of turbulence that would bring division to households, between father and son, mother and daughter, etc. Jesus was all about applying the love of his father to everyone, no exceptions. He understood that this would take a burning away of social norms. He was always the social revolutionary when it came to modeling for others and urging them to follow him as he challenged tribal thinking that held tightly to the domination of the many by the few. As he blazed a trail for us, he made clear that it would be a fiery one. So here we are, folks. Welcome to the reckoning.

I like the Thomas citation because to me, it also speaks to the emotional passion of the protests. Our world is on fire right now, both literally with periodic wildfires breaking out all around the natural world. . .and metaphorically. Individuals and our society as a whole are experiencing the bonfire of the vanities, a holy fire, if you will.

Image by Elise Huther used in accordance with Fair Use Principles.

We are burning away the essential impurities that must be released it we are to survive. The passion of these crowds that are protesting around the globe in the name of justice is a kind of collective rage built upon a foundation masking deep, deep sorrow. We have a lot of thoughts and feelings to process, an ocean of rage against the world we have created as a species. This is the same righteous anger that had the Christ overturning the tables of the moneylenders in the temple. We tend to think it’s about others but at its core, this anger is the natural consequence of having defiled the sacred with our profane need to exploit each other.

For some of the protestors and many of the politicians and others commenting on them, this fire quickly loses its essential heat and illumination, and devolves into the petty squabbles of the blame-game. Lots of folks are getting stuck on an old testament vib of guilt and shame and punishment. At its spiritual essence though, this righteous anger is paving the way for everyone to have a seat at the table, not just the powerful, the elite, the privileged.

Benjamin Franklin, that iconoclastic rascal of an American founding father talked about the importance of passion igniting true change Let the outrage play out its part.

Welcome these fires of transformation, and let them burn through your life.

The world is in a 5^th chakra growth period. It does not matter that most do not really understand the nitty-gritty of what they are protesting.

Spirit communicates through images. Learning to add words to the mix is an acquired taste that takes skill development. This is true both for individuals and groups of individuals. Image used in accordance with Fair Use Principles

The first stages to owning the upper three chakras in our collective energy system has to be with opening them, and letting whatever they contain spill out. It doesn’t matter that we don’t yet know what we want to change into. We can figure that out as we go. It’s enough for now that we are open-hearted as the universe moves us, like crucial chess pieces, into the right positions to be available for its mercy.

I want to remind the people here today as well as those tuning in at a later time, that we each have a part to play here. There are no coincidences. The protests are showing up in your life because you also have fifth chakra movement to make. Take inventory of your communication ability and find out where you need to grow. If you are one who has spent time in the language of emotion, help others learn to regulate theirs. Model for others as you identify your own emotions, separate what is yours from what belongs to others, express your genuine emotions without using them to attack, and maybe even help people learn that the emotional system is simply a means of communication between the individual soul and its physical body. On an spiritual level it is not really about other people.

Speaking One’s Truth by Myron Dyal, used in accordance with Fair Use Principles.

If you are one who is cautious with your words, typically expressing your true thoughts and feelings only to a few or only to those who will agree with you, take a few calculated risks and expand your repertoire of experience.

One of the most powerful means for healing yourself and others requires no words. The witness is an underappreciated, often incredibly profound agent of change. Image used in accordance with Fair Use Principles.

If you have no trouble speaking up, maybe you need to learn to listen more or more effectively with people from a different cultural experiences than your own.

And pretty much all of us need to learn to be more gentle, more kind. . .even as we hold feet to the fire for ourselves and any of our brethren who are resisting a more just society.

Used in accordance with Fair Use Principles

In 1968 Martin Luther King spoke to an elite section of Detroit about nearby riots going on in the city. He was nearly drowned out by the heckling when he dared to put into words the fact that the economic and social plight of African Americans had worsened in the previous years and promises of justice from a white culture were not being met. He told the crowd that “a riot is the language of the unheard.” He was assassinated three weeks later. We are listening now, Martin.

As spirit we move through the natural world that includes time and space. Our bodies, which are a physical manifestation of the natural world require time and space. The universe has grown weary of our tendency to kill each other when we disagree with one another even if the battle being fought needs to happen. We are being called right now to both address injustices and to do so in a way that honors life.

For many thousands of years, human animals have equated survival with domination over other groups of humans. It is time to update our thinking. Cartoon by Man Martin used in accordance with Fair Use Principles.

That is the essence of leaving behind tribal thinking in which one group tries to overpower another group. Getting to a higher plane is going to take many new experiences starting with new levels of interactive communication.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not at all saying that we stop at the communications level. Just speaking up about racism and other forms of social injustice is a good start but is entirely insufficient by itself. It is no more appropriate to just mouth apologies and epiphanies about systemic racism then it is to offer thoughts as prayers as a solution to gun violence. Having the necessary discussions is just the first part. Translating thoughts and feelings into action is the end game and it can’t come soon enough.

The world is in a great deal of turmoil in part because human animals keep trying to use our limited brain capacity to negotiate an increasingly complicated path. To survive we area going to need to learn new ways of processing issues, develop new epistemological strategies and cultivate humility. Image used in accordance with Fair Use Principles.

We need to fix the obvious and immediate problems as quickly as we can; but not rush to judgment about complex actions and policies that require careful dissection and extensive public discussion. Knee-jerk reactions are not helpful.

Now is the time for a new kind of diversity, not just one of basic role equality and opportunity but diversity of thoughts and feelings. But be careful . . .because true change does not arise from a place of judgment. The medium has to match the message. Otherwise you are just swapping one illusion for another. If you are demanding justice, it is likely not justice you are seeking. It is revenge.

In this assembly we will talk at a later date about developing our other collective upper chakras including folding in mercy and kindness and stepping off the carousel of karma. But for now, let us join people all around the world in the direction gracefully captured by these words from the great poet Maya Angelou:

If you’re not angry, you’re either a stone or you’re too sick to be angry. You should be angry. You must not be bitter. Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. So use that anger. You write it. You paint it. You dance it. You march it. You vote it. You do everything about it. You talk it. Never stop talking it.”

Listening to the Mountains; Honoring Mother Earth

March 29, 2020 / Church of the Harvest

From a Sermon given Spring Equinox Worship Service March 22, 2020

In Greek mythology there is a story about how the seasons came to be created that is worth retelling this morning. According to early Greek culture, Demeter, the Goddess of Harmony and Fertility, had a child with Zeus, God of the Sky, King of all the Gods. Their daughter Persephone was a beautiful young woman, if somewhat naïve. Demeter was overprotective and usually kept her daughter very close.

One of the other Gods, Hades, who ruled the underworld, fell in love with Persephone. Zeus had promised Hades that he could wed one of Zeus’s daughters but Hades knew that Demeter would never allow the marriage. . .so one day when Persephone was in a field picking flowers by herself, Hades showed up, kidnapped her and took her to his kingdom beneath the earth.

Demeter didn’t know what had happened to her daughter and was extremely distraught. She spent all her time weeping and searching endlessly. As the months went on, all the plants and animals on Earth withered and died because Demeter completely neglected her duty to tend to them. In order to save humanity who depended on the plants and animals Zeus realized he had to intervene so he brokered a deal between Hades and Demeter.

In this classic 1891 painting from Frederic Leighton entitled “The Return of Persephone,” the Goddess is returned by Hades to the arms of her mother so that spring and new life can come again to the Earth. Painting used in accordance with Fair Use principals.

From then on Persephone lived with her mother six months out of the year which is when the Earth experiences spring and summer; and with the husband she eventually fell in love the other six months, which is when we experience fall and winter.

Origin stories are always rich conveyers of spiritual truth, using symbols to remind humans of what we need to understand to act as spirit in the material world. Greek and Roman mythological tales are particularly important to those of us in the United States since they reflect the thought forms upon which Western civilization was founded.

There are many important messages imbedded in the story of Demeter and Persephone but the one I want to direct your attention to this morning is the theme of the Earth dying; and being resurrected again when fertility in the form of the Goddess of Spring returns after a period underground.

We are indeed loved by thousands. Not only do we “stand on their shoulders” in regards to any movement we make forward, we also have them always with us and accessible to us if we know how to tune into the spiritual world. Spirit knows no time or place. Image used in accordance with Fair Use principals.

Persephone spent time in Hades but Hades was not an evil place like we Westerners might assume. To the Greeks, Hades was simply a resting place for the dead. Death itself was not resisted and rejected in the same way we approach it in the “New World.” Hades was a place for the ancestors and also for the unseen. From a psychological perspective, one might say that Hades was the residence of the collective unconscious, a place where thoughts and feelings reside until they can be acknowledged and brought back into the light.

So here we are on Planet Earth. In the calendar year 2020 we have just entered springtime. This isn’t the usual springtime of daffodils and baby bunnies, though, because in this calendar year we are also beginning a new phase of human consciousness.

Many are still in Hades, struggling to find their way out of the depth of unconsciousness represented by that formidable location. Those who have been working to become aware of and heal uncomfortable aspects that in our guilt and shame we previously buried, have a heads start on emerging from the underworld into the fertility that is Gaia.

Many of us have even been focused on our healing long enough that we are beginning to effectively work more consciously with the ancestors, angels, saints and other non-embodied spiritual presences that have always lived alongside of us, been available and been waiting for our invitation to join us in the abundance that is Mother Earth. Some of us are even on the threshold of learning to bend time, a necessity for the human race to persevere.

One of the ways I find myself thinking about the world right now is that our illusions are being forcefully stripped away so we can find our way back to Mother Earth if we so choose. For many this is a violent and painful process, in part because their individual foundation for changes of the magnitude of this kind is not yet in place.

Many people are finding it very emotionally difficult to shelter-in-place, a key component of physical safety right now. It has been a wake-up call for them to discover how much they have depended on busyness to distract them. Loneliness is one of the most painful kinds of intrapsychic pain. The good news though, is that it is also one of the biggest lies on Planet Earth. You are never alone, even if you live by yourself. Loneliness is one the illusions that is being stripped from those who have been avoiding turning within.

For some the resistance to change is too entrenched, and/or the pain is too great and the choice is being made to leave the Planet altogether, in hopes for a new beginning at another time.

People who are waiting to be rescued by others are learning they must find the creativity within themselves and their immediate surrounding community to withstand the ongoing forces of hurricanes and tornadoes, fires and floods and famine and the like. Some folks like those of us in the Pacific Northwest who have been privileged to avoid the worst of climate change are discovering that we don’t get to fail to connect the dots to other people and retreat into “life as usual” mode when things get overwhelming. We might not yet have the same level of extreme weather events, but we are increasingly impacted by what the rest of the world’s population is going through.

The “new normal” is that nowhere is there normality. Nor is there going to be when the coronavirus crisis is handled. Our old way of life is toast. Our new way of life involves a vastly different lifestyle.

People like the professionals in our health care system who are used to casting themselves in the role of rescuer are learning that to survive, we must all dig deeper into our soul to find those parts of our psyche and prioritize rescuing ourselves so we may re balance in a new place. Additionally we must learn to serve others under the direction of the divine, rather than ego.

I guarantee you as we move forward into this year nothing substantive in our physical world is going to ever look the same again. The corona virus pandemic is giving many a taste of what is further to come. Don’t hold your breath waiting for vaccines or whatever to eliminate it; and then expect your world to return to the way it was previously.

Human history has had multiple times in which viruses and other smaller forms of life break down our man-made defenses when we become seriously out of balance with Nature. The Bubonic Plague that killed 200 million people in the 1300s, smallpox that disseminated 56 million in the 1500s and the Spanish flu that killed close to 50 million in 1918-1919 are just a few such episodes. These figures of “Plague Doctors” were done by Susan Reisner and are used in accordance with Fair Use principals.

This “novel” form of a biologically-based organism that has been around for years is only the tip of the iceberg. Technically it may have been named after its shape as a virus but it is no coincidence that energetically it reflects a “new crown” chakra tying together all of humanity, which in some people is attacking the part of their physicality most closely aligned with their fourth chakra—the energy center that at its best, connects us with ourselves, each other, and the God/Goddess within each of us.

Even as the virus currently isolates us, so too is it going to demand that we abandon our ways of working in isolation from each other and from the environment. Humans are no longer going to be allowed to live cut off from ourselves, from each other, from other life forms and from Mother Earth itself.

Earth is ever the planet of dichotomies and paradox. The ironical dichotomy here is that response to the pandemic is requiring us to separate ourselves from others aka “social distancing” and at the same time is bringing us into the awareness that “we are all in this together.” In the external material world we are working through a seeming conflict between the fact that we are all of one spirit and at the same time we each have a physical body that separates us from all other spirit. As embodied spirits evolve, we come to realize that these are not incompatible truths for the All-That-Is. Image by Jennifer Wagner is used in accordance with Fair Use principals.

Get real about this. The universe has just given us a cosmic slap down, a means to slow down, look around us, and smell the roses. Use your time wisely. The corona virus will be contained eventually, but the main impact of the economic tsunami associated with it will be arriving shortly; and there are lots of other challenges laying in wait for human animals, including some much more dangerous ones in the long term, should we continue to try to bury our awareness in Hades as we have been doing for such a long time.

What does “use your time wisely” look like? Of course it will be different for each of us. Here are a few “practice tips” to help you brainstorm what that might look like in your life:

1. Ground. Persephone aka in Greek as Kore, she who became the Goddess of the Underworld, was sometimes referred to as the Goddess of Rooted Things.

Persephone is sometimes referred to as the Goddess of Rooted Things. This nomenclature not only reinforces the mythological storyline but also reflects the underlying spiritual truth of Mother Earth being a safer haven for life when we connect the spiritual and material dimensions. Image used in accordance with Fair Use principals.

Grounding to Mother Earth itself allows you as spirit to manifest yourself in the physical realm as safely as possible; and as a bonus round, gives you a relatively painless means to release what you need to release right now. If you do know how to ground your energy system from your first chakra, do so with awareness several times a day. If you don’t know how to ground from your first chakra, find someone who can teach you how. If you can’t find someone, go sit among big trees and ask the universe to help you match them.

2. Rest/Recharge. We are in a lull between storms of change. The universe answered our prayers and pulled the emergency break. Thanks be to God. The corona virus is not something to be battled, shunned, ignored or feared. It is something to be thanked and gently but firmly put back in its proper place in the created order. Show as much gratitude as you can muster. Consolidate whatever gains you have made in your spiritual awareness to date and prepare for the next round of wake-up calls. Help those who are ill and/or terrified and rest up for the next challenge. Have as much fun as you can right now not from a place of escapism but from a desire to follow the divine’s lead into the place of joy, peace and abundance that is our birthright, should we choose it.

3. Prepare for a Global Economy. Here I am not talking about prepping. Prepping is just an extension of the same obsolete thinking that consumerism will fix everything. It’s hoarding on steroids. What the universe has in mind for humans is not something that can be waited out with a few months or even years of dried food. By all means, stockpile some supplies for those inevitable times when our old infrastructure is not useable for while. But don’t stop there.

I’m talking about making the deep economic transitions that we can expect after a global monetary system that has been dependent on fossil fuels comes to a grinding halt abruptly and permanently, not just because of a temporary health threat. The illusion there is value based on domination over nature has been destroyed. The world is currently downsizing to make room for a place where nothing is real unless it is grounded in human kindness.

The “All-American buck” has no intrinsic value. It is simply a symbol of a transactional agreement containing energy from a monetary system heavily based on profits from fossil fuels and the combined experience of many to use said system for greed and domination. Like all symbols its underlying meaning can be changed but not quickly or easily. Energetically, the world-wide economy based on “dirty” energy, i.e. energy that has been so harmful to Mother Earth has been destroyed. Greed and exploitation are also on their way out, but on an individual rather than a collective basis. The most likely scenario at this point is that some paper money will be around for awhile, but in increasingly smaller quantities as societies all around the world return to more life-affirming methods of exchange.

What would you do if overnight all the money that normally comes to you and all the money that normally you pay out to others disappeared? What kinds of goods and services would you still really want to have in your life; and what kinds of activities would you engage in with others? Figure that out and then make it happen NOW before the choices around the transactional nature of real relationships is made for you.

What I am talking about is MUCH more difficult than just buying a few extra supplies.

One critical component of the world-wide growth period that is going on right now is in regards to action versus contemplation. Many well-intentioned people have been sorely out of balance with this dichotomy. Effectively being spiritual in a material world in the present time frame requires both body and mind. Action without direction from the indwelling divine is busy work. Focusing one’s mental energy on spiritual goals is very important but not sufficient. We are being called to act in conjunction with and at the behest of Mother Earth and our fellow inhabitants. Image by Brian Andreas used in accordance with Fair Use principals.

This is the time for ACTION. And the action involves changing your entire lifestyle to suit the new economy in which money will be stripped of its illusionary nature. Don’t misunderstand me. There is ENOUGH FOR ALL that engage in real relationships. There is just not enough of frivolous purchases based on ego. Find out what makes the God of your heart really sing and let go of the other unnecessary temptations offered by your now-out-of-present-time materialistic urges.

4. Listen to the Mountains, the rivers, the oceans, the trees and other plants and nonhuman animals. There is a reason why people have always sought to connect to our Creator by immersing themselves in the natural world; and have often gone to the highest terrain on Mother Earth for our deepest conversations with God. There are many other sacred areas as well.

Pablo Neruda was a Nobel-prize winning writer and diplomat who is sometimes considered the national poet of Chile. He passed away in 1973. This image used in conjunction with Fair Use principals.

You don’t have to journey to a mountaintop or anywhere else to find your truth. You can just shut your eyes where you are and find everything you need there. All of Gaia is sacred and your body was designed to be an extension of that sacredness, a finely tuned instrument of access to everything you really need. Find the places that have absorbed the purest intentions of the human spirit both within you and outside of you.

Human survival, both individual and collective, is now in a furious evolutionary dance that requires us to match our inward essential nature with the outward physical manifestation of Nature. This self portrait by Cuban-born surreal artist Jorge Ignacio Nazabal is used in accordance with Fair Use principals. Butterflies are a universal symbol of inner transformation

Choosing the best natural settings helps expedite the optimal outcome. Go to the mountain or another sacred site nearby either in your physical or your astral form if you are so inclined. And then LISTEN.

Most people need to actually learn what it means to pray; and stop mistaking God for Santa Claus. It is the time to let go of the arrogance of telling God what we want done. Talk/dream if you want, but the real challenge right now is for all of us to up our skills at hearing from the Source as reflected in our gorgeous physical homeland. Many of the planetary changes that are occurring right now are beyond our imagination. Let the Cosmic Consciousness show us the way.

The Creator gives us the frame. We fill in the canvas. Any viewpoint that human animals have the only or the final word in the process of creating on Planet Earth is misguided hubris. Image used in accordance with Fair Use principals.

Gaia is screaming at us right now because we have forgotten how to listen to her. For all of our sakes, heed her call.

Will the Real Reality Please Stand Up? Shifting Perceptions/Changing Consciousness

December 25, 2019December 25, 2019 / Church of the Harvest / 1 Comment

From a Sermon given Winter Solstice Worship Service December 22, 2019

Years ago, when I was learning my craft as a Mental Health Professional—working with psychotic felons at our largest state hospital and going to graduate school at nights to become a licensed psychotherapist—one of my teachers taught me something that has guided my life ever since.

At the time I was struggling to find a way to reach my patients through the heavy layers of delusional thinking that surrounded them, and the rock-solid denial in which they lived to order to avoid looking at the horrible suffering they had endured and that they had carelessly passed on to others in the world. My teacher made one of those simple statements, those statements that come from a spiritual perspective, the ones that involve few words but embody an endless supply of ramifications. He said simply: “Resa, everything your patients tell you is true. Your job is to figure out what it is true about.”

These days I reflect on his words of wisdom frequently. As I watch our political systems degrade into a morass of vicious squabbling; as I listen to the national conversation charged with animosity with half of the country screaming at the other half of the country about what idiots the others are, what horrible people they are for thinking the way they think; as I watch the suffering increase exponentially for those who lack the resources or refuse to participate in the cultural wars that are being played out, I am reminded of what I learned from my patients.

Those who are committed to the spiritual path of manifesting their creativity in the physical world often understand that reality is a fluid construct. Each individual has a unique consciousness and each of us creates our own unique reality based on the imagination we bring to the world. Image used in accordance with Fair Use Principals.

Everything being discussed right now is true, in part. Every position taken by the Republicans and the Democrats and the socialists and the capitalists and the anarchists and the liberals and the conservatives etc. has a kernel of truth in it. For the healers in this room, it becomes our job to figure out what it is true about.

There are so many ways we could approach the subject we need to talk about during this absolutely critical time on Planet Earth. You all know me, though so you probably know that I usually go for broke, at least when I am in an audience where people are listening, when what I have to say has a chance of being heard. So let’s talk about the big picture here.

Let’s start from the premise that only God can know the whole truth. That God IS the Truth. That the Truth actually is a synonym for the divine. We are not the totality of God, but we are as aspect of it. So right off the bat that tells us we need to cultivate humility, know that we cannot know it all, and bend to the Truth as it repeatedly tells us what we do not yet know, in our pursuit of its glory. Or, as my mother would frequently remind my egotistical childhood self, you can recognize the wise man because they are the person who knows that they do not yet know.

“The Truth Coming Out of the Well” is a 1896 painting by Jean-Léon Gérôme reportedly based on the philosopher Democritus’s aphorism that “Of truth we know nothing, for truth is in a well.” This is a visual reminder that we are naked in our understanding of the Truth. Image used in accordance with Fair Use Principals.

Image used in accordance with Fair Use Principals.

That we are not in touch with the sum total of Truth, also tells us about that which my graduate school teacher reminded me. Each one of us, even the most damaged or broken, has at least seeds of the Truth within waiting to be discovered, validated, and explored. When one commits to cultivating that truth, that spark of the divinity, it sets out to burn away all impurities, perhaps slowly at first, but one way or the other, it eventually erupts into a blinding light that calls out all the shadows around us.

Depending on our individual choices, according to our free will and our own internal timetable, we can callibrate our energetic system to a slow burn step by step for many lifetimes or more actively nurture it until it is brought to a raging fire, seemingly overnight. We can even ignore that spark within us until it fades away and is extinguished by the coldness of our heart.

Those among us whose minds are dark and hearts have gone cold–to use the words from today’s invocation from St. Paul–still have some kernels of the Truth for us to discover. . . however small, however buried under the weight of their ignorance and maladaptive choices. And we risk adding to our own ignorance if we do not try and discern what part of their life is based upon Truth, not their truth or even our truth, but the Truth that is God.

Right now, the Truth-seeking that many in our society are doing is complicated for many reasons and it is terrifying for us. Right now many people are living in the “vanity of their mind”–alienated from the divine by their lack of knowledge and the closed nature of their hearts.

Many or most of our political, economic, religious and other leaders have effectively “lost their minds” to the physical pull of the Planet, to ego in the form of desire for power and wealth. These are the people we see every day on the news that brag about how smart they are and are quick to label others as stupid and/or present themselves as holy messengers of God and portray those who disagree with them as sinners.

The spiritual darkness in which they dwell is hellish, a hell they are interested in projecting onto others. They are caught in an endless vortex. In their fear and commitment to ignorance they condemn others and reject any other perspective than their own, thereby effectively cutting themselves off from gaining ground. The more they reject others, the more they create a environment of rejection by others and strengthen the energy around them of isolation and hatred .

We’ve all been there. We’ve all, at various times and to various degrees gotten stuck in the games our ego plays on us. In other lifetimes or maybe even this one, many of us might have just chosen to physically walk away from individuals who have closed their mind and hardened their hearts to an extreme degree. That is no longer an option for us. It’s the digital age; as well as the apocalyptic time foretold from the dawn of our human history in which all will be revealed. There is no physical place we can go to get away from toxic influences for very long. Our salvation lies only along the pathway of following the God of our individual hearts into an unfamiliar spiritual place that transcends the negativity, a place that has humans energetically rising above the tribal level we have operated from thus far. We get to grow up. Praise be to God.

In the invocation we used in this service St. Paul advises us to “put on the new man” created by God in righteousness and true holiness.

In his letter to the Ephesians St. Paul advises us to “live not as others who live in the vanity of their mind. . . who are alienated from the life of God because they have no knowledge, and because of the blindness of their hearts.” Rather, “be renewed in the spirit of your mind. And put on the new man who is created by God in righteousness and true holiness.” Image used in accordance with Fair Use Principals.

What does that mean? What I hear in these words is validation for the idea that now is the time for a shift of consciousness.

Consciousness is not a concept that is easily understood. Another famous quotation from spiritual leader Ram Dass who just passed from his phsycial body this week provides perhaps a good clue: “We are all just walking each other home.” Image used in accordance with Fair Use Principals.

Those of us who wish to leave behind the “vanity of our minds” must adopt a different worldview. I hear the notion that the required shift in consciousness, in how we think about and act in the world is so profound that adopting it will make us into an entirely new type of human being.

Perhaps we’ll talk about what this will look like at our services next year. For now I’d like to say a few words about some things that might help this community prepare cognitively and emotionally in the immediate time ahead as we deal with the unfolding chaos around us. Because trust me, the chaos will not be going away anytime soon. The death of the old systems will leave a gap for some time to come, before any new systems can be built.

Those of us healers who have been systematically going through one gnarly growth period after another after another after another will be called upon to share with others how to persevere in the world-wide growth period presently underway. Each of us is going to need to recognize and work with as much of our own truth as possible. Somewhat ironically, that will include looking for the bread crumbs of truth the universe sends us by way of the mirrors of who shows up in our life, not only those brilliant souls we enjoy but also those who have darkened their minds and let their hearts go cold.

So here are my “practice tips” on how to stay alive in a dying world, spiritually and physically.

Embrace the big picture. Learn as much as you can from and about others. Psychology has determined that there are five major aspects of what makes up our worldview. One of the most important is “openness.” An open-minded person seeks new experiences and enjoys meeting people from different backgrounds. This creates new neuronal pathways in our brains, makes empathy aka love more possible and allows us to learn from and enjoy life to a greater degree. Most importantly to this group of listeners, it also raises your overall vibrational level and invites in a new level of consciousness.

This meme came through Facebook from a stranger on the other side of the country, just as finishing touches were happening to prepare this sermon for publication. Coincidence? Broad band telepathy is a skill to which all human animals have access but not all use with awareness. It can be very useful in connecting with people all over the globe; and is the basis for the joke we often make that “great minds think alike.” That said, if you are not in control of this ability, it can control you. Many people express ideas and emotions that are not consistent with their own experience. It behooves all of us to expand our horizons so we can find our own truths and recognize when we are acting on the basis of programming from others.

Unfortunately, many religions, societies and cultures are stuck on fear-based pictures that have them believing their worldview is more “perfect” or “pure” if their members are not exposed to alternative points of view. Don’t buy it. In apocalyptic times it no longer works that way. If you suffer from any programming that invites you to stay safe in your own small world, get rid of it. Don’t think for a moment that you can hide any longer.

“Listening is Golden” by Ilona Lantos. Gold is one of the highest vibrations available to us, a source of much healing. Image used in accordance with Fair Use Principals .

LISTEN as much as you can, as deeply as you can, particularly to those with a point of view different for your own, as long as it makes sense.

Recognize that everyone has some of the Truth and is in your life to teach you. They might be expressing 99% bs and 1% truth, but if they are showing up in your life, you can bet that that 1% is pretty vital for you to learn.

On the other side of the dichotomy . . you don’t need to listen to anyone if it is a futile exercise. When people are talking at you rather than with you or at the very least to you, it’s not about anyone learning anything. It may be that the game is just about power and control. In those situations it benefits noone for you to get drawn into the drama. Give them a healing by walking away; and heal yourself remotely by looking in your meditations for what they are bringing forth in you, and search out the pattern of who else with a similar message keeps showing up in your life.

Image used in accordance with Fair Use Principals

If you determine that certain individuals around you are lost but are still seeking the Truth, engage with them when possible. Share those pieces of truth that are already in your possession, firmly if you must, but do so with much kindness aka neutrality as you can.

By the way, it often helps to cultivate patience. Be mindful of their timing and sparse with your words, as helping others up to the next level needs to be something based their needs as well as your own. If you find your body is angry or grief stricken as you observe the process, own it, run it and pay attention to these valuable clues of what in your energy system still requires healing. Let off emotional steam in private with your friends if needs be, but don’t act on your frustration by allowing it to overwhelm and thereby embitter you; or voice slander or malice towards the other, thereby hardening your own heart.

If the person is promoting evil, call it out. This is the righteousness Paul talks about that is a requirement of the “new man.” There is a world of difference–quite literally—between those who with their words or actions express disdain for the sacredness of God’s created order because they cannot recognize it; and those who recognize the Truth but have turned their back.

The former was the case with my psychiatric patients who had perpetrated great suffering because they had never experienced love. Their ability to cast further demons into the world as they struggled with theirs, had to be absolutely stopped in its tracks, while gently coaxing them into a higher reality.

“Melancolie” by sculpture Albert Gyorgy is a statement of the emptiness of life without soul. Image used in accorance with Fair Use Principals.

There are many in the world right now, including many among our national leadership who sincerely wish to know Truth and live in Truth but have little or no actual experience with the divine’s presence. In most cases, the healing of these individuals is best left to the heavenly forces. . .and the election box.

On the other hand, don’t let people who know better get away with glorifying ignorance and channeling hatred because that is an affront to God. When someone knows the truth and is not just “spinning it” because their mind is not open enough to contain the whole of it. . .but is rather consciously rejecting it in order to gain power over others or wealth, we all have to stop them any legal and moral way we can.

There is evil occuring in our world that cannot be tolerated; and must be dealt with not just by spiritual forces. It requires the action of embodied souls who must act in accordance with the indwelling divine. That said, because we cannot see into another’s heart, it is sometimes very difficult to tell what is truly motivating the actions of another person. One important foundation of effectively countering evil has to do with emotions. It takes a great deal of mastery over emotional systems before evil can be laid to rest since that level of sin can only be truly laid to rest from a place of love. Image by Horst Haitzinger used consistent with Fair Use Principals.

When individuals and groups actively work to destroy truth seeking, such as encouraging violence towards those with differing opinions; using deceit intentionally; shutting down truth-exploration systems like higher education and rigorous science; subverting communication systems like the internet and the media; destorying watchdog agencies that exist specifically is to counterbalance the various systemic biases to which human brains are currently prone, and pathways meant to bring justice into the world; etc. it is on all of us to notice these transgressions against the Truth; and stand up to them. Otherwise, your silence becomes a part of the rejection of the divine. There are karmic/heavenly consequences for that you are not going to want to experience.

“Our Calling” by Ricardo Lewins Morales School for Social Justice, Image used in accordance with Fair Use Principals.

And finally, Go for the heavens. What I want you to hear this morning is what I understand about the tao, nirvana, the creative blueprint, God’s plan for us, evolution, the master plan, whatever you want to call it. The times we are living in, these times for which many of us have waited our entire existence on Planet Earth, are all about creating Heaven on Earth.

It’s the time to bring the spiritual fully into the physical. It’s a real possibility, folks. It’s actually our destiny. . .but like any destiny, we still have to consciously choose to live it out, in order for it to manifest.

A shift of consciousness is about working from within. It requires a deep committment that few individuals have had to date. Many forces are at play in the present time frame to motivate us, support us and otherwise make possible such a tranformatival level of change. Image used in accordance with Fair Use Principals.

Recognize you can have an ever-deepening version of Heaven-on-Earth now. In all the political debates have you noticed how two people can be in the same environment exposed to the exact same information and bring to the discussion two completely different points of view about what is going on? Have you watched a person who defines themselves as pro-Trump and a person who defines themselves as anti-Trump talk about the Mueller report, the impeachment debate or the latest tweet but arrive at two diametrically-opposite seemingly-incompatible conclusions?

It has always been possible on Planet Earth for one individual to create a completely different reality than another individual. It’s just that right now with the light shining down on all the shadowy corners of the globe and the digital age giving all these different corners an opportunity to argue with each other in real time, we can and do live in and debate contradictory versions of our world. It is consciousness that has the last say in what we create in our reality. You can choose to bring to your corner of the world whatever level of consciousness through which you would like to live.

Do you want to live in the peace and prosperity and love that is God’s gift to all of us? Go for it! Don’t wait for your neighbor(s). Give them a step up as much as you can because among other things, this helps you get more rapidly to where you are going–to the peace and love that offered to all of us. Show them the way, as the way has been shown to us by various individual souls who have tread the sacred soil beneath us, including that humble carpenter from Nazareth who is with us on this winter occasion, as always.

Welcoming Scarcity in the New World

October 10, 2019October 22, 2019 / Church of the Harvest

From a Sermon given Fall Equinox Worship Service September 29, 2019

Over the years I’ve been blessed to have the opportunity to learn many things in my role preparing sermons for this Church community. Most of the time my words have been appreciated and gracefully received by people coming to the worship services. I have noticed however, that whenever I venture into talking about money or economics in general people often go into anxiety, resistance and on one occasion even outright hostility.

Rationalization is the norm any time the talk turns to money. Cartoon used in accordance with Fair Use Principles.

I can almost see the fear pictures flying through the air for the people with less resources; and the boredom aka resistance pictures for the people with a good amount of resources who don’t want to think about that it might ever be otherwise.

So let’s get something straight from the start, shall we? We are going to talking about the “new economic norm” that has been unfolding in stages and will now rapidly be manifesting in the United States right now.

Countries around the world have suffered from an inadequate amount of resources for day-to-day living for several decades and this inequality is exponentially increasing under climate change. This is an image of Bhatapur, Nepal after a quake. Picture used in accordance with Fair Use Principles.

We are no longer living in a time of shrinking resources. The resources have shrunk and many have shriveled up and are starting to be blown away with the same earthquakes and hurricane forces that have been ravaging our landmasses and oceans.

People, we are going to be experiencing some really lean times unlike anything we have known in our country in our lifetimes. Historically we’ve seen it before, like during the Great Depression, but not recently, not in the lived experience of the people in this room. It is going to be challenging for ALL of us, albeit in different ways. This time around, none of us will escape the consequences of our new way of living in the world, not even the rich folks.

There is no part of the planet, no underground bunker or gated community that will protect human animals from the effects of climate change, “Warming” by Shayla Maddox. Art used in accordance with Fair Use Principles.

Hopefully by the end of the service and in the next few days however, you will find yourself beginning to view this time of austerity as nothing to be feared, something that is necessary and maybe even in certain ways a good thing.

So let’s put on our big boy pants and see if we can raise the level of our awareness from the physical to the spiritual in how we view one of the last and most fear-provoking of the changes our world is undergoing right now. And when I say world I mean the whole world, but my emphasis this morning is on the United States. What is happening economically is certainly global in character, but in some ways we in this country have the most to deal with energetically because we have had the most.

After World War 2 the United States moved into the position of being the prominent peace-keeper of the entire world on the surface; as well as the most aggressive war monger out of view through our role as the world’s premier arms dealer.

Every country has its own energy. This depiction from Christian Chinese American artist He Qi depicts the essence of the United States of America as Peace and Freedom. Picture used in accordance with Fair Use Principles.

We amassed great financial wealth through participation with conflicts on every continent. This was our national destiny so to speak, and we played it out well, with the implicit energetic support of people everywhere. We set the energy but the world created the scenarios with us and followed our lead.

On the physical level the American dollar became “the almighty dollar.” Our lifestyle was the envy of the world. Everyone wanted to be a part of the American dream in which those with few resources could rapidly transverse into a higher socioeconomic class. Unfortunately, as we transformed ourselves into a country of great material wealth and political status, as a country we essentially did the collective version of getting lost to our ego, aka our perfect pictures.

In the last few decades people would occasionally engage in intellectual talk about the fact that the United States was consuming 80% of the world’s resources even though we were only 20% of its population; or the fact that we were competing with each other to waste much of this material wealth in lavish display of conspicuous consumption. There were a few conversations now and then about the fact that this level of consumption and waste was not environmentally sustainable. For the most part though, most Americans continued to buy stupid stuff and throw it away at the first opportunity for something better; worked very hard at not noticing the far-reaching effects of our individual and collective choices; and continued to ignore the cost of our lavish lifestyle on ourselves, each other, those in other countries and on Mother Earth.

Cat in the Hat by Dr. Seuss. Image used in accordance with Fair Use Principles.

These days one of my favorite synonyms for the Creator-of-Us-All is the “Great Equalizer.” It is the time of the Great Balancing when all will be called to task. The United States has been on the highest rung of the economic pedestal of the world for about 70 years now, so our fall back to Earth has the potential for being the most jarring, the most painful. Like everything else about how we create spiritually through matter however, it is up to us, up to choices we make through our free will.

To talk this morning about how we can cushion our fall and maybe even tumble in a manner that allows us to pop right back up, I’d like to switch it up and focus on spirit, and what we know about economics from a spiritual perspective. For this I’m going to use the Christian Bible.

To me, one really interesting thing about what Jesus of Nazareth says about money as recorded in the Bible is how much he says. As I understand it, other than the “Kingdom of God” he talked more about economics than any other subject. Even taking into consideration the fact that he lived in a time period where almost all human beings were still dealing with basic survival, this is an extraordinary amount of attention paid by a religious leader to economic status.

Keep in mind though, that Jesus knew everything there is to know about how energy works on Planet Earth. He certainly knew that money is just a symbol, a stand-in for power. As the master of parables, he talked with everyday folks using stories to which they could relate, stories about food and oil for lighting and heating and other basic necessities to keep one alive. In this way he also taught people about individual and group energy and where and how to focus it.

So let’s review the overarching Truth said by Jesus as quoted in Matthew, Chapter 6, Verses 24-33:

No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth. . . your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.

Since the time of the Christ people have struggled to hear the messages he embedded in his stories; and in typical human fashion have frequently projected onto those words their own wishes, desires and meanings. In my opinion biblical passages about economic matters are not only among the most prolific in terms of numbers, they are also among the most distorted in terms of interpretations.

Everyone wants to cherry pick the Bible to look for justifications for their own actions. On the one hand, you have the people who want to dwell on the words of Jesus that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than a rich man to gain eternal life. This passage is used by many and particularly I have noticed by people who are struggling with survival or jealousy and competition pictures, to conclude that all wealthy people are wrong and maybe even evil, who need to give away or have taken from them everything they own.

On the opposite side of the dichotomy you have the political and religious folks who want to dwell on Jesus saying the poor will always be among us. These are the people that say that all wealth is from God and interpret being wealthy is a sign that one has been rewarded or blessed by God. If they are more political than religious they may talk about wealth coming from hard work, good values or superior family; and demonize poor people as lazy, stupid, mentally unstable, morally corrupt, etc.

It’s all the same energy. Whether you attempt to use the words of the Christ or more secular language to rationalize economic oppression, it is all about marginalizing people without economic power. This is the injustice, the imbalance, this is the lack of righteousness that will be disappearing shortly, one way or the other, as a result of the master plan in which we are all living. This is the time and the place where the Great Equalizer will be doing its magic to help us come to our senses.

What do we need to keep in mind, to help this equalizing process go as smoothly as it can in our individual lives and the lives of those around us? Let me read this again:

No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth. . . your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.

Please notice two things here. Please notice that the Christ is not saying you cannot have both God and wealth. He is saying you cannot serve both God and wealth. One will invariably be the master.

Please also notice how similar this passage to what has been called the “greatest commandment,” the teaching of the Christ in Matthew 22, Verses 36-40.

Love the Lord your God will all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself.

Image of Scrooge McDuck from Carl Banks, in conjunction with DIsney, used in accordance with Fair Use Principles.

The point here is that FIRST you start with finding God, aligning yourself with God, committing yourself to God. And then you have the guidance you need to fully allow the Love that is God to flow outward to others. You get to have as much money and other resources as you need to fulfill the divine’s purpose; but if money is your master, you are in for a rude awakening .

In the coming days, the economic oppression that was such a major talking point for Jesus of Nazareth will be the focus of a world-wide turnaround as directed by his father. Everyone from the 1% that own the 30 trillion dollars of financial assets in the United States, as well as the bottom half of Americans who have less than nothing, in other words more debts than they have assets, will have to come to terms with what is the guiding principal in their life: God or ego.

Money as one physical reflection of energy, needs to flow freely and not become stagnant. An informed reading of the words of the Christ reveal that the real problem for people with economic resources results when people hoard wealth, in other words accumulate wealth beyond what they individually need or need to serve others.

Usually at this point in the sermon I would be starting to talk about the need for grounding, approaching the subject of your private economics neutrally by living in the center of your head and finding your own truth by seeking direction from the God(dess) within you in your meditations. Do that. Do all of that. But the meditators in this room know how to use these tools so I’m going to move on from here.

Because the topic of money brings up such overwhelming amount of fear and resistance for most of us, I want to share some personal cliff notes I have worked out over the years, in regards to part B, i.e. loving our neighbors as ourselves economically from a spiritual perspective.

If you fear you won’t have enough. . .work on your fear. . .because that is all it has to be. . .unless you empower it with your belief. Trust me, there is enough.

If your life purpose requires a great deal of resources to accomplish, if it truly is a spiritual-based calling, that is to say that if you truly are co-creating with God, the resources will appear. But then remember that they are not yours, they belong to the divine.

Gratitude by Linnea Tobias. Image used in accordance with Fair Use Principles.

Give thanks for being one of the few rich people that is privileged enough to “get it.” Continue to act frugally towards yourself and remember you are simply the caretaker of the remaining wealth. That means that you will be gifting the excess you don’t need directly to others or it means you will be using the resources to build something of more long term benefit to others.

If you catch yourself using any resources beyond basic levels on yourself, ask if you are threading a camel through the needle. . .and go back to those conversations with the God(dess) within.

You don’t have to be a Gandhi living only with a robe, food bowl and a book of sacred writings. Recent technological advances have made it possible for all of us to have a higher standard of living. Sometimes “discretionary” money spent on travel, beautiful objects, art supplies, even good but high-end food is needful for a higher purpose such as creating peace, joy, health or beauty; and sometimes it is done for escapist or prideful reasons.

We all fail prey to our ego at times. Only you and your creator will know the difference. If you find you have let your ego rule, no problem, just do a little mid course correction and renew your commitment to using collective resources for spiritual rather than material goals.

If you see others hoarding wealth that should be given to others, speak out and otherwise do whatever you can. By his words and his example, the Christ was quite clear that loving your neighbor as yourself means advocating for the oppressed, the marginalized and the poor. Unfortunately this will put you in the cross-hairs of most of our religious, commercial, governmental and other collective forces. . .but it’s the least you can do.

Understand that in the present time period things are unfolding in the manner that is needed. Do not give in to despair. We had to destroy our castles built on the sand of conditional love, no matter how painful, so that we have the means of rebuilding on the bedrock of unconditional love.

For human animals to continue our experience on this magnificent planet, for us to return to the garden, we needed to live the experience of losing our way so we had the possibility of choosing a more righteous path that recognizes that all life is connected.

Our bodies are experiencing a great amount of fear right now but if you tune into the spiritual reality you will know we stand to gain riches beyond our wildest imagining. Making it through the next stage will require that we grow up and leave behind our adolescent striving.

Image by Louisa Cannell, used in accordance with Fair Use Principles.

It will require more faith than most of us have ever had. It will require us to learn how to focus all our God-given spirit-driven abilities. But the journey can be exciting, the creativity awesome, and the resulting world truly humbling in its majesty.

It is for this reason that I entitled this sermon “Welcoming Scarcity in the New World.” Thanks be to the Great Equalizer for this marvelous opportunity.

Transcending Time and Space; An Exploration of Our Possible Future(s)

September 5, 2019 / Church of the Harvest

From a Sermon given Summer Solstice Worship Service June 23, 2019

Lately when the Church of the Harvest has gotten together as a community for our quarterly services designed to honor the divine and to help us move ever closer in the direction most pleasing to it, many of the services have been about time. Last year’s Summer Solstice Service was about the “Code-switching of Time; Flowing Gracefully Between Past, Present and Future.” The Winter Solstice Service was called “Dreaming of Things to Come.”

This was not intentional but neither was it coincidental. We are all here to learn how to create as spirit within the time-space continuum of this glorious Mother Earth of ours. Typically individuals who are developing themselves spiritually are first drawn to the lessons involving space. If we are successful enough with these challenges, we then move on to focusing on lessons involving time.

To understand the true nature of space, essentially we have to clear our individual energy systems from enough of our past experiences on the Planet and enough of the programming and other forms of energy belonging to other people–to our friends and family and community and society–to understand who we really are.

Mother and Child Twins by Gustav Klimt, Image used in accordance with Fair Use Principles.

Young ones fresh from the All-That-Is and basking in the spiritual glory of all being connected, come into this world through a physical body belonging to another human being, a mother. Even when we pass through the birth canal, even as we are born into a completely separate physical framework, and even when we take our first independent breath, we are almost completely dependent on many other human beings to maintain that breath, to prolong that life, for many, many years.

Humans are late bloomers. We take nearly twice as long as other primates to grow to physical maturity. As the species endowed by our Creator with the responsibility for life on Planet Earth, it takes a tremendous amount of experience to grow our brains such that they can encapsulate the consciousness required to make it all work. Scientists believe somewhere between 44 and 87% of the energy of our body (as measured by glucose levels) is consumed during infancy and childhood by our brain to bring us to adulthood.

Family by Diana Ong, Picture used in accordance with Fair Use Principles.

Until we become grown-ups we have to lean on others for our basic survival needs. In our contemporary societies that means we take on energy designed for other people and unfortunately as of yet, are not taught how to clear it when its usefulness is over.

As we grow we have less and less of a need to depend on information and other forms of energy from others, but unfortunately old habits are hard to break, particularly when you are not aware of them. Lots of people never get out of their pattern of depending on others, as opposed to interacting with others from a position of equality. It may be years, often decades, sometimes many lifetimes before we do.

In these faster-paced days though it is not uncommon for people to figure out that life on Earth only really works if one learns to create one’s life from one’s own space. When you try to force others onto the path you think they should go, when you attempt to force your will on the choices others make, then life always kicks you in the teeth, if not immediately, then eventually. It can look like a “good marriage” or a “loving family” or a “prosperous“ country for many years. Having your partner seek dissolution of your bonds, your children move out of reach, or your community no longer function can happen dramatically all at once or quietly over time but it will happen one way or the other. The song of our soul is one of freedom, and to have authentic relationships with other life we have to give others freedom, and we have to claim it for ourselves.

We have to put the pieces of the puzzle together to form a picture of what some people call our truest self, to understand the deepest desires of our heart. We have to let go of the dreams other people had for us, and even the dreams we had for ourselves that we have outgrown; and we have to acquire the skills to protect the remaining dreams, to nurture them, and begin to bring them to fruition.

Our work can then begin. Those “lucky” few, if you want to see them as such, those privileged few or those sufficiently “blessed,” however you want to frame it, those who have acquired a sense of their spiritual purpose are then free to move into the second part of the challenge of living in time and space, making the time part congruent with your purpose. For many, learning about time is perhaps even a trickier lesson than learning about space. It is not uncommon for some to figure out that life on Earth only really works if one learns to create one’s life from one’s own space. It is less common for people to figure out that life on Earth only really works if one understands the real nature of time.

Why? Time takes focus.

You have to find your own energy aka power, and then you have to learn to focus it. Scattering your energy every which way ultimately just wastes it. I usually refer to this process of focusing as learning to “manipulate time,” but I don’t mean this is in the pejorative sense that one might assume. In this context “manipulation” just means consciously changing the vibration in situations that are yours to control. When you learn enough from a spiritual perspective about what and how you want to change the vibration of your own energy system/field, then you can concentrate on changing how your system/field interacts with the world around you. You can flow with time.

Time is not the stagnant, never-changing force that our brains as they currently function like to imagine.

Time is not static.

Everything in the universe is in motion, and so also is time. Time is a subjective illusive quality of experience as lived in a physical human body.

In Western civilization, Albert Einstein started us thinking in a new way about time fairly recently. It has only been in the last hundred years or so that the consciousness of most human animals has evolved to the point that it can even tolerate this more advanced understanding of God’s creative order.

Albert Einstein was not afraid to “think outside the box” in many regards. This rare photo from about 1950 shows him in his favorite fuzzy slippers.

In his explanation of relativity theory Einstein told people: “Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute.” (I also have talked about my personal experience of having time “freeze” before my very eyes in order to avoid fatal injury in a major car accident.)

So why is the world needing to learn about time right now. . .and what has this got to do with transcendence?

Throughout history people have been fascinated by time, and specifically by those individuals among us who seem to be capable of seeing through the illusion that it is. We have called them seers like Nostradamus or the Oracle of Delphi who was celebrated throughout Hellenic civilization, prophets like Moses and John the Baptist of the Judeo-Christian Bible, saints like Hildegard of Birgen,

Many artists who turn to the collective consciousness for their inspiration are able to see the future, whether or not that is their goal. Morgan Freeman’s book Futility was published 1898 describing an “unsinkable” boat called the Titanic with 24 lifeboats for 3,000 passengers that hits an iceberg on its initial voyage. In 1912, 14 years later on its maiden voyage the Titanic sank with 20 lifeboats for 2,207 passengers.

visionary artists like Leonardo da Vinci or Aldous Huxley, mediums or psychics like Jeanne Dixon or Edgar Cayce,

These individuals excite our imagination and give us hope that the world is bigger than what we can see with our eyes. They also sometimes engender fear or false hopes that the world is predictable or controllable by other people. The Truth is that each of us create our own individual reality including how it plays out temporally. Together we create a consensus reality that shares a common time framework. It is the latter of which I primarily speak this morning.

Right now the world is perched on a precipice, a cliff of sorts, and the only way forward for human animals remaining on Earth as its God-given caretakers involves a great leap of faith, Changes to every aspect of our existence are required including the time-space continuum within which we function. As the very cosmos above us changes frequency, Mother Earth itself runs more kundalini energy throughout the surface of the Earth and the magnetic field within the Planet itself shifts directionally, so too is the basic fabric of the time-space continuum changing. As co-creators with the divine, our job is to roll with the punches as much as possible even while we infuse those shifts as much as we can with good intentions for all and Love.

I am not going to make the mistake here of holding myself out to be the prophet of where these changes will take us in the upcoming days. What I am here to tell you is that we are all prophets, each in our own right, each over our own individual space. Piercing the veil of illusion is a spiritual ability to which all human beings have access. It might be one of the latter stages for those who are exploring our spiritual nature, one of the more advanced steps on the path back to our Creator, but it is open to all. Now is the time for you to explore your own abilities to “bend” time.

Yes, we are living in the apocalypse, the period that has long been predicted when all will be revealed. One of the aspects that will be revealed to those who can receive it is the greater ability to manipulate time. Yes, we are living in the “end times.” However in my opinion this certainly does not mean the end to all life on Earth; and it likely does not mean the end to human beings as a species of animal. Think rather of this as the end to a very long cycle of how we relate to the space-time continuum.

Some of you may remember 1999 when many people were convinced that our increasingly technological world was going to crash around us because computers could not change their Y2K code to recognize the upcoming new century? Many of you will remember when so many people were freaked out in 2012 about the Mayan calendar coming to an end because they saw this as the fulfillment of a prophecy about the physical world being destroyed? Some of you are aware of the approximately third of Americans who interpret many contemporary events as indication that we are about to experience the Rapture and/or the return of Jesus of Nazareth in his physical form? In each of these cases, there was/is a “kernel of truth” to what people were/are experiencing– hidden behind an ocean of fear. The colander of prophecy can sort the wheat from the chaff, but until people have found their own energy and are largely free from the troubling distortion of fear, partial truths can just contribute to the problem at hand.

As you explore your own version of space and time in your meditations and otherwise, I have three pieces of advice for you.

First of all as always, ground yourself as spirit to this physical planet so that whatever you create you can do so with the maximum amount of self control and safety. Be sure the light that is you has this built-in lightening rod protection to help you weather whatever changes come your way. And a means to let go of the fear and energy that doesn’t belong to you or is obsolete, so you can be who you really are.

Second of all, continue to work to uncover your truest self. Do the meditation and whatever other forms of healing you need to grow ever closer to the God(dess) of your own heart. This will strengthen you and help you discern your Truth and step-by-step transform you into a prophet in your own world. It will also protect you from false prophets, those who claim to speak for God. The only God(dess) you need to listen to is the one that speaks within you.

Third of all, cultivate humility. I’m not talking here about lack of confidence. I am talking about being slow to draw conclusions and open to the idea that by virtue of living through a body, even the best and brightest of us bring to this world a lot of distortion.

Every human being has the ability to be clairvoyant. It is part and parcel of our spiritual playbook, available to all. Clairvoyance is just a French word meaning “clear seeing.” However, if you have not already developed the skill set to separate your vision from the myriad of other sensations, biases, ego, projections, wishful thinking etc. it is best to be cautious about its usage. . .and be open to others who have enough love to challenge you. Cartoon used in accordance with Fair Use Principles.

Or as it says in Second Peter, Chapter 20 and 21.

Above all, you must understand that no prophecy of Scripture came about by the prophet’s own interpretation of things. For prophecy never had its origin in the human will, but prophets, though human, spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.

Stay open to feedback from others even as, or especially as, you grow closer to your own Truth. Even as you learn over time to create a fresher more constructive version of reality for yourself, let the Holy Spirit take you to places you currently do not even know exist. In this way you will become a prophet in your own life.

Turning the Other Cheek in A Time of Unremitting Violence

March 29, 2019 / Church of the Harvest

From a Sermon given Spring Equinox Worship Service March 24, 2019

Last year—2018—was truly a transformational point in time for all of us on Planet Earth. As spirit we human animals who share the physical world stage and who have been endowed by our Creator as the species with the right to set the energy for all life on this planet, made a MAJOR fundamental shift in our collective mind.

There are many ways to talk about the new spiritual agreement that we put into place in the consensus reality, that agreement that has dramatically shifted the consciousness of many folks almost overnight.

Hatred is a learned behavior. It is not “natural” to humans but it is common. It can and must be unlearned.

One way of talking about it is that we have decided to base our world on love, not hate, as asked of us, indeed required of us, by our Creator.

Another way of saying it is that we have decided to embrace inclusiveness, not exclusivity. Or we can talk about Truth. A “tipping point” of people decided once and for all that we are going to base our life on the Truth that all life is connected, all that is Created by God, is an aspect of God and is God and therefore worthy of respect.

One example of the emerging new way of thinking.

However you label it, in order to turn the tide, enough people in enough places all around the globe said, it ends now. I refuse to knowingly trespass against other people just because I can and because I am part of a group that thinks of people outside of our immediate selves as “the other.”

Humans have perpetrated great horror on each other as a result of our ability and willingness to divide the world into “our” social group and the “others.” The divine knows no such separation. This picture is of Australian aborigines “owned” by their enslaver under the “Flora and Fauna Act” which was finally repealed in the 1960s.

Energetically, we globalized. We made the commitment to get over the tribal thinking that has stifled us for decades. Ultimately, nothing will be the same in our world.

The ramifications of this newfound commitment to universal life is profound. The actual unfolding of our new reality though will likely take years or decades to fully manifest, if we have that kind of time.

Unfortunately, while white supremacy and other hate-mongering may be going the way of the dinosaurs, all us dinosaurs are still at risk from a meteorite strike to end it all. But now at least we have a fighting chance.

There have always been occasional individuals among us willing to reach across the divide that human political and religious structures have imposed. Graves of a Catholic woman and protestant husband, Holland, 1888. Now is the time for collective awareness

We are finally on the right road; and we ought to celebrate that fact.The truly great news is that this new human commitment to creating in the physical world from a place of Love is no longer just the pipe dream of a new advanced souls, an occasional side trip of a brave person here or there, or the intellectually-based statements of people who are willing to talk the talk but not walk the walk. It is the intent within our hearts and an intrinsic piece of the group mind that connects us with our God.

At the same time we cannot be complacent because we’re not out of woods yet. For one thing, in the immediate next period of time there will be ongoing massive amounts of suffering. The meditators in this room will recognize that periods of rapid spiritual growth can be confusing in a VERY uncomfortable way for individuals. Between the old ways that are no longer functional and the new ways that have yet to manifest there can be an ocean of chaos, disharmony, and even danger. Multiple this dynamic a hundred thousand fold and you might recognize our current society.

For another thing, there is this other little issue that has to be resolved immediately if human animals are going to survive on the Planet, if we are indeed going to avoid a meteorite, nuclear war, shifting of the poles, whatever.

Now the real work begins: Growing beyond our physically-based senses to embrace the All-That-Is

Now that the consensus is we must base our relationships on Love, we have to decide whether those Love-infused relationships extend not only to other humans but to non human animals, to plants and our waterways, and to Mother Earth itself. In some ways, this is the greater challenge in the sense that it requires the most insight and the greatest behavioral changes.

So here it is spring of 2019. The beginning of a new cycle. What can we expect from a world-wide growth period? Also, what can we do as individuals and as a community to facilitate a graceful resolution of our upcoming battles centering on the natural world. This morning I want to talk about how we might use our time effectively as we shelter in place, so to speak, as we wait for various parts of the world to catch up with the new consensus reality. And I also want to drop a few hints for this body of experienced spiritual seekers as to what we might expect in terms of the next growth cycle. (More on that at our Summer Solstice gathering.)

Let me start by talking about where we are coming from, our shared history.

Art by Dave Granlund. Image used in accordance with Fair Use Principals.

You may or may not have noticed a recent increase in the attention being paid to history. By nature human beings are story-tellers and so we often construct narratives about our past to help us make decisions about our present and our future. Individuals keep family photo albums and diaries; schools display trophies won by their sports teams and offer history classes about our culture; organizations have archives, cities have their statues and historical sites, churches have their relics, and so on.

Poem and illustration by Rupi Kaur. Shown in accordance with Fair Use Principals.

In the United States in the last few months there has been an ever-growing retelling of our history taking into account other perspectives than have previously been brought into view. I’m not talking about those who are resisting the change process of our world by trying to rewrite the existing history books in order to impose their distorted perspective, “whitewash” our collective narrative (pun intended). These are the people who say the holocaust was no big deal, the founding fathers enshrined the Christian version of God in our political structures, slaves actually liked slavery, that kind of nonsense. I’m talking about the larger majority of us who are trying to flow with the changes and expand our awareness of a greater Truth than previously contained in history books.

In the sixties, when I studied the history of African-Americans in the United States and the history of women around the world, the resources for these stories were few and far between. There were only a handful of books on the subjects, almost no sources of information in mass media. Most people would give me a blank stare when I would even mention that there was something called women’s or Chicano or African-American history. Even my most ardent friends usually believed I was being weird and eccentric in thinking it was important to know more about history from the perspective of marginalized groups.

In these digital days in the United States we just finished an entire Black History Month and in a few days will complete an entire Women’s History Month in which commercial breaks for nightly mass media programming on our screens have been awash in images of the women and ethnic minorities whose contributions to our culture were heretofore minimized or overlooked, who are now being celebrated as pioneers and heroes and reclaimed by our collective story.

For spirit we know that time is an illusion. The body, however, operates in time as well as space. So why is there this increased spotlight on history? Why now and why to this extent? And what has this got to do with spiritual growth?

My take is that in order to create a world based on love as we have decided to do, we have to bring up the energy of not-love in order to let it go. We can do this by creating more situations where we feel/think/act in a hateful manner towards ourselves and each other. We can suffer through many more experiences of what doesn’t really work and we don’t really want. I am certain many in the United States will continue to indulge in that type of painful way of healing. However, many of us are pretty sick of using this method to change the energy. So we have turned to an alternative method of healing ourselves.

When we tell each other that those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it, we are reminding ourselves that by viewing the past using the perspective of Truth we can break the karmic chains and grow beyond an outdated version of ourselves. As a society we can increasingly have love be the “new normal” by looking with new eyes at the experiences we have already created individually and collectively; and use those trips down memory lane to forgive ourselves for our trespasses, and forgive others who have trespassed against us.

Looking at human history however, can be tricky and potentially very disturbing unless your goal is changing rather than perpetuating problems.

Like everything else in the human experience, our brains like to dichotomize our experience. We fill our stories with heroes and villains and repeat a lot of myths that are very far from the Truth.

To use history as a source of healing, you have to look at the times we have been cruel and unjust, as much as the times we have been kind and brave. We have to tell the stories about our family or country or other group who have been mean and spiteful and stolen things as well as the times we have been generous and kind and produced great artists and interesting civic leaders for the benefit of our communities.

The Osage murders are said to be the FBI’s first big case. This picture is of tribal leaders, FBI staff and President Calvin Coolidge. It is from the Bettmann Archives and used in accordance with Fair Use Principals.

Recently there has been a rash of stories coming into the light on social media that have helped the healing of our national soul. One such is of the Osage Indians who originally were forced from their ancestral homelands in Kansas to a rocky, presumably worthless piece of land in NE Oklahoma.

When oil reserves were discovered in Oklahoma, the Osage became some of the wealthiest people in the country. Some 50 years later about 60 or so of the Osage were then systematically robbed and murdered so that their riches could be stolen from them again, this time their personal wealth rather than their real estate holdings.

The Tulsa Riot fire-bombings were also said to have been the fruit of years of resentment by whites towards the area nicknamed the “Black Wall Street.” Jim Crow laws and segregation resulted in African-Americans in this area amassing a great deal of wealth in a manner that strengthened their community bonds.

Another resurrected part of the American saga that of late is finally being talked about is the Tulsa Riot of 1921. After blacks tried to ensure that one of their community members would not be lynched, a 35 square block of an all-black-occupied section of Tulsa was actually fire bombed by private airplanes owned by white folks worried that they were seeing a “black rebellion.” Somewhere between 300 and 3000 blacks were killed, and at least 1500 homes were destroyed leaving thousands homeless, in what is now being acknowledged as the worst riot in American history. We do not know the actual body count with any precision because this event was systematically covered up by white authority figures and did not make it into the history books we use in American schools.

It bears emphasizing that this method of healing the present and future by reexamining the past is effective only if we look at stories from a place of neutrality with acceptance for all involved who played a part.

Your power to change your reality is in the present moment. View the past as needed, but do not let yourself get lost to it.

“Perfect pictures” is a term for a certain type of very common programming that we have accepted into our consciousness, often originally for very good reasons. Perfect pictures can be quite deadly as they can act like a invisible Plexiglass ceiling that interferes with our evolving spiritual growth. They are a rigid view of how the world around us is supposed to be. Since we and the world seldom measure up to these expectations, they become a source of ongoing invalidation and suffering.

You have to get beyond the false dichotomies with which we view the world, those troublesome perfect pictures to which we are so addicted.

In actuality all human society is pretty damn flawed. Evil is everywhere in our collective narrative.

I think most of us can all agree that the actions taken by National Socialism in Germany, i.e. the Nazis, during the last World War were evil. It is to our great credit in the United States that we were a big part of stopping that horror. But can we let ourselves know that we also had a role in setting up that history lesson? Why are we not talking about the fact that the Nazis recruited IBM to design the new punch-card system that allowed them to track Jewish lineages? Truth be told, the numbers tattooed on concentration camp residents were an extension of American technology.

How convenient that we have forgotten that when US soldiers invaded Europe in 1944 not only were they using tanks and jeeps produced by American Motors, they were battling an enemy also driving tanks and trucks produced by 100-percent GM-owned subsidies. The cozy relationship between US business interests and the Nazis was acknowledged by Hitler maintaining a portrait of Henry Ford on his office wall in Munich. Ford and the senior executive for the GM factories in Germany were awarded the Grand Cross of the German Eagles for “distinguished service to the Reich.” It is well accepted that Hitler would not invaded Poland and killed approximately six million people without the new synthetic fuel technology provided by GM.

You have all heard the saying that history is written by the victors. What you may not have heard is that many historians think that this saying which is usually attributed to Winston Churchill, was actually coined by Hermann Goering, one of the greatest criminals of Nazi Germany. If the Nazis and their allies had won the war, our history books would be accounts of their supposed glorious and righteous achievements.

Right now in 2019, you are seeing a lot of folks trying to reexamine the past, but too often from a place of judgment that keeps them stuck in their sense of entitlement or victimization, depending on what role they have most recently been playing. It heals nothing; it does no good to perpetrator(s) or victim(s) to continue to see their experience as one-sided. You HAVE to be in the center of your head, you HAVE to be coming from a place of detachment to benefit from healing through a historical review.

This is a humorous depiction of an all-too-familiar confusion in the religious thinking of many. We are here on Earth to learn to co-create with God. It is neither entirely up to us as some believe in their egocentric way. . .nor is it entirely up to the divine who honors our freedom to screw up as much as we need or want to learn our place in the universe.

None of us are perfect. Only God is perfect. All we can do is commit to bridling our own maladaptive impulses and approaching the world with the clarity of love, as best we understand it.

This message is conveyed in Mark, Chapter 10, Verse 18 as well as in Luke, Chapter 18, Verse 19 of the Christian Bible. A man approaches Jesus of Nazareth to ask him how to obtain eternal life, and in his approach the man addresses Jesus as “good master.” Before even answering his question, Jesus rebukes him by saying:

“Why do you call me good? Only God alone is good!”

So here we have the Christ, the embodiment of the divine on Earth, reminding us to get over our perfect pictures about human life, because the only wholeness is the All-that-This.

Sometimes one can find Truth in the most unlikely of places. Here comic artist Dan Piraro captures both the prevalence of humans dividing our world into good-and-evil; and its place in our learning curve as we seek return to the divine. Image used in accordance with Fair Use Principals.

Finally, I want to talk a bit about violence. This has to do with the road ahead, the next growth period, the next issue about which the consensus reality must come to terms.

Violence is a particularly harsh form of trespassing against life, one that promotes a great deal of suffering. Violence has always been on the planet.

We have MUCH work to do to stem the tide of violence against holy Mother Earth. In this image a man seeks to honor the Hindu god Ganesha through the incredibly polluted waters of the river Yamuna in New Delhi, India, Many of the life-giving qualities of our waters in the United States have also been destroyed by humans.

There are many forms of violence including what we are currently doing to other life on Earth, but let’s focus right now on killing and over forms of overt harm done to each other.

Human beings learn by doing for the most part, and so we have been at war in a multitudinous fashion for thousands of years. Being prone to violence is really almost a part of our DNA. Currently, the United States is the major source of direct violence around the globe, in part because of the role we assumed after World War 2 of being the peacekeepers of the world. According to a new report by Brown University since 9/11 the US has spent nearly $ 6 Trillion dollars in 76 countries or about 39% of all nations, resulting in the death of around 500,000 people. This does not include the nearly 500,000 people killed in Syria. In many regards those of us ins the United States have the most to do, the most we must change.

Because guess what? This need to kill and hurt others is going to change. It has to! Violence is not consistent with a world based on Love. Either we are going to be moving violence out of our human repertoire . . .or we are going to be moving on. The decision about which trajectory we will be using will likely be made this year by all of us on a spiritual level. Therefore, I want to mention another great teaching from the Christ. Some might argue this is greatest of Christ’s teachings, but one that is routinely misunderstood: Turning the other cheek.

In Luke Chapter 6, Verse 29; and Matthew Chapter 5, Verses 38-42 Jesus states that if someone slaps you on one cheek, you are to offer them your other cheek. If someone steals your coat, offer them your shirt. So what is that about? I’m not going to say much about this crucial piece of information that ironically, has been the subject of thousands of fierce arguments over the centuries and dozens of wars.

On the other hand, I cannot walk away without some commentary on what it means to choose nonviolence in the current time of unremitting violence. Violence is increasing exponentially in our world of overt hatred towards other groups in the world, compounded by the problem of shrinking resources as we battle over the scraps left available in our dying natural world. I think we are going to see more wars, uprisings and mass shootings before we see less. I believe that 2019 will be the year in which the consensus reality decides whether or not there will be nuclear warfare or some other form of extinction event(s) happens for human. So what Truth do each of us need to understand and build upon in our individual lives to be a part of the solution to the group problem that is violence?

The Christ is quoted as talking about turning one’s cheek and offering more clothing to someone who forcefully disrobes us, in order to not resist evil. When Jesus himself was disrobed and tortured and crucified he was largely quiet. I believe he did this not to model for us being passive. He was and is God on Earth. He chose to not fight back but he participated fully in the events surrounding him. He could have easily killed his tormentors with a single glance, a singular thought: Romans, Jews and everyone else. Instead, he chose not to even utter a harsh word. He did remind all present that the scene being played out was done at the will of Almighty God.

This Black Jesus image is from Ethiopia around the 17th or 18th century CE. Ethiopia was the site of one of the earliest and most robust of Christian communities. Jesus of Nazareth was of Mediterranean descent and not the “white guy” often depicted in Western culture.

The Christ did not model for us turning his cheek as some sort of sophisticated form of rebellion, as some religious types have argued. What he demonstrated for us is nonresistance to that which was asked of him by his Creator. In choosing to surrender to the All-That-Is even at the cost of excruciating, unimaginable pain that would have caused even the kindest of souls to act from hatred, he transcended physical boundaries, and demonstrated a spiritually-based reality that humans had to that point believed was not possible He refused to return evil with evil. Rather, he remained loyal to the word of God, which is Love.

Many of us are dealing with our personal crosses right now, and many more will be shortly. If you find yourself a part of a world awash in a sea of violence, whether you do this by coming to terms with your own past, having ongoing struggles with others in present time, or being the witness for others in various stages of working through or getting stuck in their own narratives, remember the end game is Love.

Whenever possible, view the world from the center of your head, that sweet spot of balance between dichotomies where you have the best chance of living a path of nonresistance and acceptance. Heal the blocks that keep you from knowing your truest self as much as possible. And above all, follow the ways that allow you to regularly communicate with the God of your Heart, that aspect of the divine that lives within you. Your answers for all the challenges facing you will be there.

Or as Stevie Wonder tells us in the song to which we are about to listen: “Believers keep on believing; Sleepers just stop sleeping. Don’t let nobody bring you down. God is going to show you the higher ground.”

Dreaming of Things to Come; Bring On the New World in the New Year!

December 31, 2018January 1, 2019 / Church of the Harvest

From a Sermon given Winter Solstice Worship Service December 23, 2018

Almost exactly one year ago today, this meditation community had its Winter Solstice Service here. We explored the topic of moving towards a world based on Love rather than the corruption of power. I talked about how corruption is a word that not only refers to political processes but at its essence just means something that is changed from its original intended use to something that is used incorrectly, and in doing so, is debased.

I talked about the fact that God is Love; and as the children of God we are meant to create our lives and the world around us through Love. . .but that too many of us had succumbed to the temptations of the material world, and forgotten that all true Power comes from the divine and all energy is meant to be used in the service of the divine.

So here it is a year later. I think we can all agree that it’s been quite a year. I imagine we could also agree that the year has been characterized by a society and a world absolutely awash in the vibration of hatred. In our country and around the world hatred has far too often been the key driver of our interactions with each other.

Many spiritual forces are praying that we get over our need to hate each other.

Hate has always had a big presence on Planet Earth, of course. But people saying and doing hateful things towards each other has never been more common.

The difference lately has been that it has taken center stage in the human drama. It was looking like hatred had become acceptable as a social convention, as a way for people to engage with each other. Acting in a hateful manner towards another person was no longer being seen as a maladjustment for a few aberrant individuals. It was increasingly being accepted as an open and unrepentant option for segments of our society to use in opposition to other segments.

This year women have moved into national leadership in a dramatic way but more importantly, the female energy that every human has, irrespective of the gender of their body has been moving into the foreground.

Fortunately, this year has also seen the rise of influences from other energy streams in human society to counterbalance the hatred, energy streams that are more prone to unification than the kind of disintegration that happens with the vibration of hatred.

Chief among these has been the amazingly rapid shift from the male to female perspective. Each of us is capable of allowing our sacred female to lead the way, no matter what gender body we hold; and vast numbers of us decided to do so, almost overnight.

We have also seen the phenomenally sudden stepping-up-to-the-plate of younger generations who have grown up in the digital age where diversity and inclusion are more the norm.

For many centuries human animals have labored under a tribal-based paradigm that had one group in competition with and striving for domination over other groups. This corruption of power has been breaking down as the digital age makes it easier for us to understand we are all in this world together. Posted in accordance with fair use principles

Again, children have always led the way energetically. We tend to forget our spiritual nature as we age so children have always quietly protected our rightful heritage, almost always in an invisible manner.

These children from Thailand reflect their more recent arrival from the spiritual world in many ways, but one of which is their joy in the natural world. Children everywhere are universally attracted to play which they recognize as one of the truest faces of the divine.,

This year, the younger ones among us began to step out of the shadows and told the adults to share the leadership of the material world. I can’t wait to see how this plays out.

So where are we now that 2018 is coming to an end? I know that most of us are still feeling a kind of vertigo as the vibrations continue to transform the air around us, the Earth beneath our feet and the very molecules of our bodies. Many of us are at best uneasy, at worst sick at heart at what is happening to our world. As I have mentioned previously, just in recent memory the planet itself has begun running kundalini energy in increasing amounts to help human animals wake to our true nature.

Lately I’ve been noticing how many people are physically getting sick and experiencing confusing and often painful symptoms in their body, symptoms with which medical professionals are having trouble understanding or addressing, in part because of this massive influx of kundalini.

The powerful healing of kundalini energy has been recognized for centuries, primarily in the Eastern parts of the globe and shamanic traditions. It is often depicted as intertwining snakes, as is seen in the caduceus symbol for Western medicine. Contrary to popular belief, one does not have to “work at” running kundalini. It runs on it’s own when one’s energy system is working well; and recently has begun to be triggered by the Earth itself as it enters the human body through the feet.

Most of the time people seem to just see their illness processes and discomfort as just their individual situation. A lot of people chalk their symptoms up to some ubiquitous process called “stress.” Many judge themselves as having made stupid choices about their health status, or being otherwise somehow flawed.

Little do they know that the “growing pains” that they are experiencing is a requirement, a mandatory edict from Mother Earth if you will. Kundalini energy brings to the surface all that has been contained. It’s not a judgment but it is a very high vibration that is hard for many physical beings to experience if they are not used to vibrating at such a frequency. In other words, it does require action to weather it in a way that minimizes suffering. It’s part of the kicking-us-on-our-ass that is happening worldwide. The universe is over it, in regards to the human learning curve. We will either be taking a huge leap forward in our consciousness, or we will be invited to go elsewhere. We will not be remaining the caretakers of this gorgeous planet unless we can do better by it.

But here’s the rub: many of us are indeed waking up. This year-2018—the year I have been calling the Year of Transformation–has done its thing. The energy has indeed transformed.

I’m not talking here about the chaos of our political and economic systems falling apart. That spectacular amount of destruction is ongoing, with plenty more to come. I’m talking about the underlying energy. I’m talking about the fact that in just the last few days, a scant few weeks, the energy of what is called the “consensus reality” has shifted dramatically.

The “consensus reality” is not an easy concept to understand, so I thought at this point in the presentation, we should step back and take a moment to review it.

This is the “Universal Mind Lattice” as painted by visionary artist Alex Grey, the organic human aspect of universal consciousness. It is the energetic field where all that is human and all that manifests in the physical connects to itself; and as such, can be changed by any shift created by any human being. The “consensus reality” is this field made manifest in a snapshot of time. Posted in accordance with fair use principles

Each of us as an individual soul creates our own reality. Ultimately we decide everything about our life. On a spiritual level we establish a game plan before we are born, and then we get here and see if we can carry it out. We learn lessons as we go, and may make adjustments as we need. This is the precious gift of free will that our Creator gives us.

Sometimes challenges look really interesting to us before we incarnate, and then when we get into the body, things look very different. Sometimes those same challenges don’t look nearly as interesting. We are like the kid who decides we want to be a doctor, a professional athlete or a famous musician when we grow up. And then as we grow older, we discover that it actually takes hundreds of hours of tedious study, cramping body parts and boring repetitive scales before our mind or muscles or fingers will produce the desired results. Creating as spirit in the material world requires much more effort and all-too often body turmoil than it would seem from a purely spiritual perspective.

When the lessons we are trying to learn require interactions with other humans, as most do, then free will dictates that we have to enter into an agreement with that other person or persons with whom we are trying to create. This process can be very complicated and take considerable time, particularly if the lessons involve large numbers of individuals. Luckily time does not exist on the spiritual level but some individual souls have to create a number of experiences in the physical world before they can sign on to a larger spiritually based group contract, and that does take time.

In the United States there were lots of individuals who knew right off the bat that we did not want to create a world based on hatred when we were encouraged to do so by certain political and religious leaders. But there were also lots of individuals who had to create some up-close-and-personal encounters with hatred in their personal life to make a more clear decision that this was not what they wanted to experience. Many knew better “intellectually” than to support the vibration of hatred. . .but old karmic influences or energy from traumatic childhoods still needed to be cleared before they could definitively opt out of creating a world based on hatred. Thus, it took nearly two years for the “consensus reality” in the United States to shift to an agreement that we were not going to choose hatred as a way of life.

The good news, the very good news in my mind, is that the energy of the consensual reality has shifted. As a group of humans who have been given seniority by our Creator, or what is called in religious circles dominion over life on Earth, we’ve decided something big. I’m not sure what it is. . .exactly. But I’m pretty sure it has to do with Love.

So congratulations, folks. Congratulations to all of us. Congratulations to those of us who were here a year ago helping the consensus reality shift by together imagining a world based on Love and not corruption of power. Congratulations to those of you who were not here a year ago but were part of getting the Church of the Harvest to that point previously or are creating a connection now to continue this critical work. (After all, spirit knows no time).

And congratulations to all the millions of other people in the world, particularly in the United States where the battle involving hatred has been at it’s most intense. Congratulations to the many Americans who may have had sufficient resources but who have nonetheless emotionally gone through a kind of virtual hell on Earth this past couple of years, in order to work through what they had to work through for all of us to make it to this point.

We all contributed to the place we are in now. We made a decisive, life-affirming choice. Now we just have to figure out what that choice is all about. And begin to shape it, fine tune it so to speak.

You all are meditators so you have had the experience of going through a particularly gnarly growth period or two. Growth periods come in all shapes and sizes. In the biggest growth periods though, the ones that involve moving to a higher level of consciousness there is often just confusion. The old ways no longer fit at all who one is, but the new ways have not yet shown up. The fabric of one’s most essential self identity changes and we become unrecognizable.

That is kind of where we’re at right now energetically in this country and in the world. But even though we don’t really know where we are going in this new direction we are taking, it’s probably a good idea to talk with each other about what we do notice, and share our thoughts and dreams and whatever insights we have as we stumble around in the new landscape.

So along those lines I have a few insights to get the dialogue going, to hopefully help us move towards creating a world based on Love and not corruption of the power God has given us.

First of all, Keep up the dreaming. If you run across a situation involving injustice, hatred, corruption, by all means take whatever action you can to stop it. But keep in mind that right now it is Winter. Its the season to prioritize resting our weary bodies.

Its the time for letting our minds wander in whatever direction they happen to go. Do puzzles. Make art and go see good movies. Build things and craft things and exercise that incredible God-given creativity of yours in everyday life.

The direction we ultimately will need to go is not going to be clear for awhile. In all of human history we’ve never been at this point before. We will be shown by spiritual forces we cannot even imagine the best path forward when it is time. Meanwhile, give yourself permission to give your imagination free rein. Creativity can be like a muscle that needs to be exercised. Enjoy where the dreaming takes you and watch.

Second of all, Welcome in the New World in the New Year! No matter what it is. Please don’t get lost to any perfect pictures. Its not going to be clear sailing. The destruction of our world is ongoing. Horrific pain and suffering abounds and may very well intensify. In 2019 we may feel like we just went from the pan into the fire. If humans survive at all, it will be months or years or decades before things are OK.

Unfortunately as a species, human animals are still largely addicted to suffering. However, until we reach a greater acceptance of divine love, we can draw upon other sources of strength. “The Human Spirit,” Photo by Vladsylav Musiienko. Posted in accordance with fair use principles.

But the worst thing we can do is resist. You get what you resist, in greater measure and with greater suffering. You know why we have been having so much trouble with hatred this year? Hatred is simply a particularly intense form of fear. Fear of change. Fear of death. The world is changing faster than the present level of human consciousness can process. Fear levels have gone up exponentially, and thus, so has the hatred. You can make a personal contribution to cutting down the hatred simply by not resisting whatever awful as well as wonderful things come our way.

As individuals and as a society first and foremost we need to learn to lean into the change. Lean into the destruction even. Ultimately it is far easier than digging in one’s heels about what is going to change whether we want it to or not.

Third of all, along the same lines: Love your enemies. Do good to those who hate you. Bless those who curse you. And pray for those who mistreat you. Why? Because the energy you put out comes back to you. Right now we are all needing to learn unconditional love. In the days ahead you’re going to want all the love and the good and the blessings that you can create; and you create them by giving them to others.

However, Fourth of all. Do not go gently into the night. I never really understood Dylan Thomas’s redemptive poem until recently. I thought it was about resisting death. Its not. Its about celebrating life by leaning into death. Thomas tells us to burn with life when we are near the end.

“Rage, Rage Against the Dying of the Light ….I will Never Give Up the Fight for Wholeness” by Myron Dyal. Used with permission of the artist.

We are near the end of human life on this planet. It still remains to be seen whether or not humans as a species will make it through the upcoming days. That part of things the consensus reality has yet to decide. Meanwhile, let us burn brightly as we decide where our Love will take us. Burning brightly is the way of Love.

So how do we not go gently into the night on a practical level? Astrologists tell us that we just are emerging from a very long cycle dominated by the energy of the Wounded Healer. As individuals and as a society we’ve all just gone through a deep cleaning of toxic energies. We are more poised to turn away from other people who are harmful to us. Do let’s not dirty ourselves up again with toxic people and situations. Yes, love your enemies but whenever possible from afar.

This meme is a bit on the snotty side obviously, but there is a valid point here. Maybe a few talented “jerk whisperers” can change the perspective of those who hate. . .but most of the time this is not a good use of time and energy for anyone involved

Do good for those who hate you but stop showing up for people who are indifferent about your presence. Bless those who curse you, but you don’t have to have conversations with people who deny you respect.

Enjoy the people around you with whom you can share your dreams. Be a willing vehicle through which the Love of the divine can operate.

Coming Alive, Words by Simon Gawley. Posted in accordance with fair use principles

Love God and glory in all of it’s manifestations: in nature, in plants and animals including other humans, in the rivers and oceans and most particularly in the divine dwelling within you, the God of your heart. Happy holidays everyone.

Following Your Heart; Choosing Integrity in an Increasingly Fractured World

December 1, 2018December 2, 2018 / Church of the Harvest

From a Sermon given Autumn Equinox Worship Service September 23, 2018

Today I want to talk to you about following your heart. It is actually much more complicated of a topic than it would seem on the surface. We extol each other constantly to follow our hearts. This is the go-to advice for the vast majority of human problems. Whenever somebody is having difficulty making a decision between different life choices, they are inevitably told that the solution to their dilemma is to “follow their heart.”

We’re very good at generating perfect pictures aren’t we? We’re not so good about actually defining what we mean when we tell ourselves to follow our heart. In other words, when it comes to the concept of following your heart, we often don’t get the conversation translated from the spiritual realm into everyday life on Planet Earth. My goal this morning is to provide a certain level of what I think of as “technical information.” In doing so, I seek to bring Heaven closer to Earth.

When you think about it, it is not so surprising that we usually don’t REALLY know to what we are referring when we tell each other to follow our heart. After all, in our country and in our world, we pay very little attention to what is going on within each individual. We are too busy trying to handle the trillions of bits of data coming at us from all around us at every second. What we process and understand of our world comes primarily from our physical senses. It’s what we see and hear that gets prioritized by our minds, as well as what we smell and taste. Even when it comes to what we often label as “feelings,” it’s those galvanic responses, those sensations that are generated by our nervous system associated with our outer skin, states like cold or hot, the comfort of a lover’s caress, the prickliness of an allergic response, the anxiety, surprise and pain if we step on a nail, that gets the most attention.

For every human being there are a whole slew of other possible internal states of being, states of consciousness if you will. And this is where the internal landscape sometimes can get very foreign for folks. Often people will refer to any sensation, anything going on within them as a “feeling.” If asked to describe the sensation further, maybe they can say more about what the feeling is and maybe they have no words for it. Maybe they can tell where it seems to be located, and maybe not. We are simply not taught to attend to what the Christ would call the “Kingdom of God.”

At best we may have learned from a particularly mature adult role model or in a school or counseling setting how to label and appropriately express basic emotions. We are rarely taught the finer viewpoints such as how to distinguish between emotions that are our own and those we have absorbed from others, much less what to do about the latter problem.

When we are not using our emotions for what they were designed–a communication system between the individual soul and it’s physical body, all kinds of distortions and conflicts become possible.

And emotional states themselves are really only the beginning. They are a statement of what our body is going through. They can have little or nothing to do with who we really are, that is to say, who we are as spirit.

Some lucky few are taught to listen beyond a “feelings” level to their own internal voice. Usually, however, they do so by revealing what is inside for the benefit of others. A great poet or painter or musician might express their true nature as a spiritual being through their art. But rarely do we validate the poet or painter who is dedicating unwritten poems to the universe within. I know I am not the only one who as a child constantly sang songs to myself with no real need or desire to share them with any other person. Eventually the chaos of the external world drowned out my musical encounters that were a reflection of lived experience of the divine within.

How many of us are taught to converse with the indwelling divine, something available to any and every soul on Earth? Anyone?

So in a world made blind to the internal, let’s define some terms, shall we? What do we mean by following your heart? The heart here is clearly a symbol.

Photograph of the heart muscle and the veins that support it. Posted in accordance with fair use principles

When we tell each other to follow our hearts, we are trying to tell ourselves to follow the lead of our fourth chakra. This key energy center, also known as the “heart chakra” is in the middle of your chest occupying the same space as your aorta, the main artery of your physical heart. I don’t imagine any of you really believe that you should be following the lead of your physical muscle, the organ that pumps blood. Certainly that part of your anatomy is an important player in allowing you to be alive, but so are many other components of the miraculous machine we know as the human body.

Just like there is an area in our head which we call the center of our head, that contains both the physical structure of certain parts of our brain as well as the energetic structure of our sixth chakra, we each also have an area in our chest that contains both the physical structure of a large part of your heart organ as well as the energetic structure of our fourth chakra.

The fourth chakra is usually one of the last to fully open because as the chakra that regulates attraction, it can become a major center for stored pain. Many of us are attracted to pain. We seek it out. It is what we have always known and we tend to recreate over and over different versions of the same pain. It takes a lot of experience in the world and spiritual majority to understand we can use the energy of our fourth chakra for an entirely different purpose.

Just as the center of your head was designed to be the main resting area, the seat if you will, of your consciousness, the area in the center of your chest was designed to be the main resting area or the seat of your connection with the All-That-Is, that aspect of the divine that is everywhere and is everything, that is all of life. Other names for this area include the “God(dess) of your Heart,” and the “indwelling-God or Goddess.” You can experience the Creator in a thousand different ways but it is in this sacred place of connection within your own space that should you choose this with “all of your heart” the felt presence of your Creator can be at its most pure.

So let me tell you a little about the fourth chakra, this “heart” that our instincts are telling us to follow. In classes I don’t speak about it very much because quite frankly, it is one of the last parts of an energy system about which most of us are capable of learning.

For those of you who are meditating on a regular basis, there is a natural progression that happens in your growing mastery of internal processes and your development on a spiritual basis. Development is unique to each soul but it follows certain common pathways. Just like the infant needs to learn to sit before it can walk, and walk before it can run, spiritual development often comes in stages. One sort-of-gross generalization that can be made is that individuals typically learn to clear out, balance and more effectively use their lower three chakras, the ones that contain information primarily related to manifesting on Earth through matter; as well as the upper three chakras, the ones that contain information primarily related to manifesting spiritually using the resources of the Heavens. . .before they put it all together.

The fourth chakra has many important roles to play in our spiritual life including helping us transcend our fear of mortality. It connects our physical body to other energetic bodies including our own. This piece is “Let Your Heart Shine Even in Death” by Myron Dyal, used by permission of the artist.

It is in these latter stages that one typically begins to concentrate on the clearing and developing of the fourth chakra. The fourth is the energy center that requires the most balancing of both physical and spiritual, the most about creating Heaven on Earth. You might work on an important fourth chakra picture here and there that is keeping you from otherwise progressing in other areas; but you are not likely to be very focused on your fourth chakra until you are fairly far along with your spiritual development. It is one of the last pieces of the puzzle.

I think it is fair to say that most of the people in this room (including myself, I hasten to add) are currently facing the challenge of learning to own their fourth chakra and employ it for that which it was designed. In fact I would venture to say that it is really the challenge facing most of humanity in present time. Think of it as we human animals trying to overcome a lack of integrity. Used here, I’m not talking about lack of “integrity” as some kind of character flaw. I’m simply talking about “integrity” as all parts working harmoniously together.

We are each of us an intricate work of art learning to create as spirit in the physical world. Sculpture is by Susan Beatrice of All Natural Arts and is posted in accordance with fair use principles.

To make something work well first one has to assemble all the parts, throw out the ones that do not function any more, sometimes manufacture new ones, get all the pieces that are going to be rubbing up against other cleaned up, greased or oiled, and assembly it all into working order.

Right now we have a civilization based on a bunch of parts, most of which are obsolete or rusted, crucial pieces missing altogether and everything slapped together with a bunch of duct tape, pretending to ourselves that it will now run. More to the point we have a bunch of individuals often with great intentions who are at war with the out-of-present-time parts of themselves who actually think that the war they are fighting originates from other people. It does not.

The fully activated fourth chakra understands that all is connected. Our physical bodies are not separate from the body of the Earth.

Since everything outside of you is in one-to-one correspondence with what is inside of you, all the conflict in your world can be resolved by working from your own energy system. (It’s not that the strife in the physical world no longer exists when you are fully integrated. It just does not exist in YOUR reality. You can be content, even as the world goes to Hell in the proverbial hand basket). From this vantage point there is only peace. The conflict of the outer world will wash over you but not be experienced by those with a different purpose in their heart.

Jesus of Nazareth knew all about the kind of profound peace that comes from within, the peace that comes only from true connection with God; and he knew it was not the kind of peace that many would even recognize.

The peace of the Christ arises from freely surrendering all of one’s being to Love, aka the All-That-Is. In that space there is no need for or even possibility of power games, only the realization that all of life arises from, reflects, and results in the Created Order.

In his words from John Chapter 14, Verses 27:

Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives to you. Do not let your hearts be troubled, neither and do not be afraid.”

If you want to be at peace even as the world around us continues to deteriorate into chaos and disharmony, keep up the good work of grounding and meditating and working to clear what presents itself as obstacles to your greater growth. Release those aspects of your past that are in your way of adapting integrity as your chosen state of being. Jesus is one of our greatest teachers here. Follow his lead and make your heart chakra a sanctuary place for your connection with the divine.

Resting on the Heart of Jesus

There is a reason why medieval pictures of The Christ frequently show him displaying a flaming heart. His integrity was complete, and so this Son of Man as he initially liked to refer to himself, became the Son of God, and showed us how each of us could achieve knowledge of the Kingdom of God within thorough the lived experience of the All-That-Is.

In my opinion you do not need to subscribe to what I like to call “the directional deficits” of traditional Christianity to follow the Christ. You don’t need to invite Jesus into your heart. The Christ is already there. You just need to turn within, pay attention and desire with all of your being the communication with and conjunction with the God of your own heart who awaits your presence.

The Code-Switching of Time; Flowing Gracefully among Past, Present and Future

July 6, 2018November 22, 2018 / Church of the Harvest

From a Sermon given Summer Solstice Worship Service June 24, 2018

Code-Switching is a linguistics term. It was originally developed to describe what happens for people who speak two or more languages. As the information age unfolds, the term “code-switching” has increasingly also been applied to the experiences people can have of moving suddenly between different parts of human society, such as what people of color sometimes experience when they go back and forth between their ethnic community and the mainstream world.

This morning I want to talk ultimately about code-switching in a different context. I want to explore switching between different parts of the time-space continuum. It strikes me as potentially very useful if those of us who are actively developing a spiritual perspective can add to our skill set moving through time with greater awareness.

The time aspect of the time-space continuum weaves throughout all of the created order, treasures to be discovered when we are ready. “Treasures” by Maggie Vandewalle of Maggie Vandewalle Watercolors. Used with permission of the artist.

So let’s start by talking about code-switching linguistically speaking.

Language is not as cut and dried as it might seem at first glance. Every language in the world is unique, not just in the way each sounds, but in the way each is structured. And what meaning it actually evokes. Each collection of human beings, every culture has its own energy. Each language arises from a different shared history, an idiosyncratic set of common experiences, what we around here would call a matching set of pictures. These create a unique set of values that guides how that culture operates in present time, and where it attempts to go in the future. These values also shape where the group focuses its attention, how and about what the individual members think, and therefore how its members express itself when its members communicate with each other, and with the rest of the world. The very neuronal pathways of our brains adapt to that to which we are paying attention.

We connect with the physical world primarily by expanding on what we already recognize. Awareness builds in an ever-expanding spiral of experience.

New neuronal networks that are utilized grow and expand, quite literally branching out. The parts of our brain we don’t use fall away, or to use the scientific language, the neuronal connections are pruned. We shape our bodies to a large degree with the help of our brains by the decisions we make in attention. Then often, too often really, our bodies shape us. On the surface, much of this drama gets played out by language.

When one learns a “foreign” language, it is much more than a process of selecting a word from English, and then simply substituting the equivalent word from the other language. If you want to tell a member of the Sami people of Scandinavia and Russia that it has begun to snow, you have to select between 170 words for snow. For these people, understanding the nuances of snow is critical to their survival. They pay a lot of attention to it. Consequently, they have one word for ice that lasts year after year, a different word for the layers of crystals that form when the seas first begin to freeze, and another for when the ice is filled with holes like Swiss cheese but is good for polishing sled equipment and so on.

It’s not just nouns that can’t always be exchanged. If you want to communicate with a native Japanese speaker, you are going to select between many personal pronouns that differ based on the gender, age, relative social status of the speaker and the gender, age and social status of the audience, as well as how formal the setting is where the conversation is happening. These choices are not surprising for a collectivist society with a large population who has had to learn to live together relatively harmoniously on a relatively small island. They have learned to pay attention to the subtleties of the social fabric in a manner that we Americans with our history of living on thousands of acres of land and our resulting “Wild West” mentality have not.

And what about nonverbal language? When someone from India engages in head wobble, how do you know whether they are saying “yes,” “no,” “OK,” or “never mind?” Do you know how many separate cultures, religions, castes, and other human groupings have found their way to the Indian subcontinent? Nonverbal language that can be transmitted between people who speak different verbal languages is pretty important in that part of the globe.

Successful code-switching involves understanding energy. You cannot become truly fluent in a second or third language until you pay attention to what is underneath the surface words. Linguistic code-switching involves understanding that words are symbols. Words point to possible meanings but you still need to understand the larger context, still need to look at what is under the surface if you want to accurately send or receive a message with another human. When you are exposed to the basics of the other group or person’s shared pictures your brain will then have what it needs to create enough similar neuronal pathways to become aware of the meanings beneath the words or gestures that other person or group is using.

Because we are talking here about reading energy, we are talking about a cognitive process that is VERY rapid, typically below the surface of one’s awareness. I like the term code-switching because the switching part is quite descriptive. It’s as if one is immersed in one worldview one second, and then suddenly a switch is thrown and you are part of an entirely different mental universe. It’s not just the addition or subtraction of a few facts here or there. It’s a major shift of consciousness.

God designed our bodies to be able to process a tremendous amount of information but at the present time, only a few individuals have ever mastered enough of their energy system to do what is required to create spiritually through physical matter to the degree necessry to access the broader perspective of which we are all capable. At this point in human evolution, it is enough that some people are learning to switch back and forth between to what they are generally paying attention and perspectives based on a different set of life experiences.

Typically in order to survive, ethnic minorities in the United States have had to pay attention to the values of the dominant society. By contrast, white people have not had to pay attention to the culture of other groups. We can if we want but we have not had to. Many white people have been very confused by the term “white privilege,” seeing it as some kind of intrinsic judgment. I don’t believe it is.

Words can have very different meanings depending on life experiences.

Look underneath the surface. Remember that words are just symbols, and the meaning of any symbol can be controversial. In my mind “white privilege” is just a way of saying that people with European ancestry have the option of not paying attention to the ways our particular history has shaped the national environment. Folks who do not appear European in ancestry have had a different history resulting in a different perspective that requires paying attention to aspects of our society we whites “take for granted,” i.e. do not even notice.

Once you can code-switch, whether it’s from one language to another, or from one culture that shares roughly the same language to another, you can code-switch in multiple situations. The essence of successful code-switching is looking beneath the surface at the same time as tracking what is happening in the outer world.

You all do that every time you meditate. The more time you spend in meditation, the more you hone these essential skills. Code-switching is truly a spiritual journey. Once you train yourself to be conscious of both the outside and the inside, you are on the way home. As Jesus of Nazareth said in Saying 22 of the Gospel of Thomas:

“When you make the two one and make the inside like the outside and the outside like the inside and the above like the below . . . then you will enter [the kingdom of Heaven].”

What I am asking you to do now, is consider extending your developing code-switching skills to Time itself. There is not really much of a difference between switching between your own worldview and that belonging to another person; and switching between your own history, your present and your future. Really, you are not the person you were in the past, nor are you the person you will become.

It all comes down to making choices about paying attention. What you seek becomes stronger; and that from which you turn away disappears temporarily or even withers. When it comes to code-switching the time-space continuum though, there are a couple of tricks to keep in mind.

Humans have been trying to understand time for as long as we have been here on the planet. This astronomical clock from Prague is about 600 years old.

This morning I want to go over two of them.

First of all, recognize that living in the present moment is the goal, the spiritual destination if you will. Many people who speak about spiritual development will stress the importance of learning to be in present time. There are literally hundreds of books on the topic. Present time is a foundational teaching in many religions, particularly Buddhism but many others as well. It is also an important concept in secular circles. The whole mindfulness thing which has become such a huge component of contemporary mental health counseling and indeed, popular American culture, is another version of this viewpoint. Some folks even advance the perspective that to be in the present moment is the whole point of living.

There is some truth to that perspective . . . but it’s not the whole truth. What is vital about the present is that it is where the body lives. Your body really only understands the present.

To the extent that you can.

Many of you in this room have had the experience that as you ground and work with your energy system, things that belong in the past and the future will often surface that need to be cleared. It can be very confusing when one runs across intense emotions that have no basis in anything going on around you.

Experienced meditators can also feel stark sometimes excruciating physical pain for which there is no reason other than you have triggered something that has been lying dormant which the body immediately assumes is happening at the moment it is triggered. The pain can be a trace memory from your past or a piece of energy you as spirit have put in place for future reference. If it is important enough to surface, one must learn to address the issue in present time in one’s meditations. One way of doing this is by recognizing that you are out of present time, then reassuring the body that the discomfort that is being felt is not real, i.e. is not really happening; and then using the meditation techniques you all know to clear what has you in the past or future.

The irony is that you have to be in present time enough to do that much. Otherwise you will just store the out-of-present-time experience in your energy system and any pain or emotion attached to it will come up a different time when you think you might be able to address it. We need to be at home with ourselves, present in our bodies, and slow down enough to notice how our physical form functions and moves around Mother Earth. Grounding is a great tool for helping you be present in your body, as well as giving you a means to release what you have brought up for healing.

There are whole medical diagnoses that fundamentally are about someone as spirit not being sufficiently in the body in present time, things like fibromyalgia, irritable bowel syndrome, many types of migraines, and various autoimmune disorders to name a few. These are real conditions with very uncomfortable physical symptoms, but like any underlying chronic illness or disease process they start as energy blocks when spirit is not working enough with its body, such that the body resorts to screaming at us to try and get our attention. Pretty much all of us have a lifetime or two (or three, or six, etc) like this.

The soul can crave the creation of “failure” in order to learn where it does not want to go and prepare for what it ultimately does want.

For spirit, it is not always a priority to notice what the body is going through in some lifetimes. Other adventures are more pressing. Remember that for spirit there is no time; and remember also that emotions and pain properly belong to the physical world and not the spiritual realm. Therefore, depending on what each spirit is attempting to learn, sometimes it would rather discard the body it has that round, and start with a new one rather than take the time to slow down and work with it.

I hasten to add no one should be criticized or blamed for having heath challenges and failing to recognize the energy component to them. Human societies, particularly in the Western world routinely marginalize and persecute those who attempt to cultivate awareness of energy. The jig is up, though. The time-space continuum is changing. Awareness of working as spirit through matter is becoming a requirement of maintaining life. We can’t keep trashing the bodies we are given. Too many human animals have been doing so compulsively for too long, resulting in an increasingly trashed planet. If we are to survive, we must all learn to be present in our bodies to a larger degree including bringing up and clearing the levels of energy we have stored in the past or the future, however painful.

This can actually be a fun exercise, if you let it. As they say in the New Age movement, there is a reason it’s called the present.

Second of all, and this may be the new part for some of you, recognize that living in present time is the goal, but PLEASE, pretty please, don’t make a perfect picture out of it. You know the drill. Perfect pictures aka expectations will always slow you down from learning what you need to learn, and get in the way of you going where you actually are trying to go. As long as you maintain the idea of being in present time as a full-time requirement for yourself, you will be beating yourself up every time you notice your mind is in the past or future, and thereby adding more garbage that eventually you have to clear from your system.

Present time is the destination but to get there, you have to make the journey. We’re not there yet, probably not even very close. Those that are fully in present time generally don’t need to be here on Planet Earth. We’d be learning something else in some other part of the universe; or we’re in our final resting place, having fully merged with the heart of God, like the Christ.

If any one of the amazing people in this room had even the majority of their energy in present time, the roof would probably blow off. Literally. Think about it. Present time is where your power is. If all that enormous amount of energy you have tied up in the past and in the future, was sitting at rest within your body as you sit there you could literally as the Christ pointed out, move mountains.

When people sleepwalk through life as most everyone does almost all the time, the experiences that you create as spirit are stored somewhere in your energy system until such time as you are able and willing to process those experiences and come to terms with them as the learning events that they are. We don’t get to just leave the past in the past and truly move on. We can only repress our awareness and pretend to move on until such time as our eyes are open enough to see a path through the learning.

The idea that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it has truth to it for both individuals and groups of people. You can certainly outgrow your history, and at that point, let it fully go. To do that though, you have to face it squarely, with all its pain and all its emotion, and all its glory. You have to milk all the experience for the learning that you set out to do when you created it. Very few people want to do this. Even fewer know how to do this.

Much of the world that human animals have created on a physical level that is no longer useful to us has simply been abandoned. Some has been reclaimed by Nature but most is just lying in wait for us to clean up at another time.

Most people prefer to repress the parts of their individual or collective history that is painful and/or that they don’t know how to handle and fall prey to the Maya. Unfortunately then one just recreates the essence of the experience over and over until one is forced to deal with it.

That is why we have so many ungrounded citizens and political figures right now acting out Imperial Rome at its most brutal, slavery of African-Americans in the early days of the United States, Nazi Germany, etc.

One of the main problems with political as well as religious leaders at this point is that most are quite out of sync with present time. When this occurs Mother Earth and its inhabitants are at great risk. Bizarro comic by Dan Piraro posted in accordance with fair use principles.

These people are caught in a horrific hate-filled purgatory of not having enough presence to actually release the past. Even as we block the spread of their hateful actions, those of us who “know better” need to bring whatever compassion we can muster to these lost souls.

Similarly living in the future can be a trap. Dreaming about possibilities, setting goals, making plans and all is important, but if you have too much of your energy in the future, those possibilities and goals just move farther out of your reach.

Bottom line: What’s a person to do? Be aware of past and future, but honor to the greatest degree the present moment. Visit the future and the past, but live there as little as you can. When you need to dream more, plan more or otherwise be in the future, read science fiction books or listen to TED talks from visionaries, go on travel sites that talk about the places you would like to visit, and immerse yourself in the many artists who expand our viewpoint through painting or other works of art.

Great art can reach below the surfaces and awaken spiritual truth but it does this using the physical senses, thereby engaging the body as well. This piece by Wassily Kandinsky called the “Deepened Impulse” from 1928 is thought by many to represent the Big Bang, the foundational act of creation in our universe as spirit in matter. Posted in accordance with fair use principles.

When you need to raise your vibration to the next step by pulling some energy from the past, look at old diaries or family photo albums, go to high school reunions, watch the history channel or historically-based dramas or listen to musicians that have accompanied you on your journey in life. Code-switch your perspective as much as you need step-by-step but keep in mind the goal is to be more present with yourself, your body and the indwelling God.

Be in charge of the process. You will know the difference between being a visitor and a resident of past or future if you just pay enough attention. Make conscious choices. If you find your thoughts going to the past or the future when you don’t want them to, get some help. Schedule a healing or a massage, see a therapist or someone else who can assist you to work through emotion, sing or draw or knit, watch a funny movie with your love or spend more time in Nature. It is your God-given body and you can learn when to be more fully in it; and when to take a break.

Do the sometimes-difficult work a little at a time, to find yourself and your place in the awareness of God’s miraculous universe.

Church of the Harvest

A Nondenominational Meditation Community

Author: Church of the Harvest