February 23, 2015

• Humans are never alone

• Humans are both creation and creator

• All that God has created is sacred

• Guides are evolving

• Expressing love when it is difficult

• Connection of body and soul is immediate

• Guides for the inanimate in creation

God surrounds each of you with an infinite number of guides. You are surrounded by a presence which is far more filled with love than you can possibly imagine. Think for a moment of times when you may have experienced a ceremony of the placing of hands upon you with others surrounding you physically with enormous love and support. Take those memories and expand them to infinite proportions, and you will begin to sense what it means to be surrounded by your guides.

You are not just surrounded by the guides of each of you in this room. You are surrounded by the loving presence of all souls, and it is not just you who are surrounded. All human beings receive this incredible outpouring of love. It is a powerful light that enshrines your individual souls. It is a light of enormous brilliance, of warmth, a warmth of love. That warmth is not a warmth of temperature, for such a warmth of temperature is a form of energy of only one particular characteristic. But the warmth we speak of encompasses the warmth of love, the warmth of spirit, the warmth of belonging, the warmth of being loved, the warmth of peace, the warmth of affirmation, the warmth of caring.

This warmth that we speak of is nearly overwhelming, even for us as individual guides. We are surrounded, encased, protected by that same powerful presence of spirit.

Because of the vastness of spirit that envelopes your lives at all times, you are indeed never alone. You always are part of that totality, that singleness, that unity that is both God and what God has created. There is really no distinction between God and what has been created, for all that has been created is a part of God. You may describe your bodies as having hands and feet, but they are all the same body. They are different, but they belong to and are identified with the same entity. And so it is for each of you and for all that belongs to creation. That creation is merely many hands and feet, hearts, eyes, but they all belong to the single entity. They are all a part of what God is.

We often speak of God as the creator, but that in no way suggests that you are somehow not the creator, for you are the creator in your own ways, in your own individual ways. You are both creation and creator. God is not a single character in the story of life. God is the story. God is the actor and the writer and the viewer and the message and all components that belong to the play.

So you are all a part of God, and as we have said so often, you are therefore sacred, because all that God is is sacred. There is no part of creation that is less important than another, for creation is merely an expansion of what God is.

When we say that we are aware of God in a way that is more direct than your current awareness, that merely means we see the connection of All That Is as being God, whereas humans tend to make a distinction between God and human life. That distinction is a distinction of convenience, a distinction of tradition, but it is not a distinction in fact.

You are, therefore, the grass in the field. You are the air you breathe and the food you eat. You are the friends you know. You are the stranger in the street. You are part of the mass of humanity that you shall never meet. You are the animals in the forest, the birds in the trees, the water in the brooks, the power in the oceans. That is who you are. That is who everyone belongs to.

You wonder about issues of expressing love to those who seem to be difficult to love, and you acknowledge the dual reality of knowing the importance of being loving toward all and yet also knowing your own feelings of anger or fear or judgment. That double standard that you refer to is totally understandable in that it is an experience that is shared by all. It is part of the experience of being human, just as grabbing a stick or a stone or a piece of food is part of the experience of the hand. The ear cannot grab a stone, the hand cannot hear, and yet both are essential and part of who you are. The individual whose actions may be repulsive to you is merely part of who you are.

No human being goes through life without being an irritant to others. No human being goes through life without experiencing anger, without experiencing guilt. All humans share the same emotions. The difference comes in the intensity of some emotions over others, and the difference also includes how those emotions are played out. But in truth, the emotions that are felt by another are also felt, even to a different degree, by yourselves.

When you see or experience behaviors that are difficult to express in any kind of loving explanation, you must realize that those actions are a natural consequence of the feelings that are held within. That consequence of actions will differ from individual to individual, but the feelings are there. There is the criminal who feels alienated by society. Have any of you gone through life without the feeling of alienation? Have any of you gone through life without feeling denied by another? Have any of you experienced life without anger? Have any of you experienced life without fear? Of course not. When you find individuals whose actions you cannot abide, the expression of love toward those individuals is not offered through condoning those actions but in relating at some level to the emotions that may be felt, for those emotions are in truth no different from your own experience. Loving another whose behavior is offensive is not condoning. It is reaching out in an attempt to understand something of what another may have felt.

There are many who experience the same emotions you experience, and yet because of other circumstances are driven to express those emotions in ways different from your own. Try to separate the actions from the feelings. Try to find a way of identifying as you can with what someone else may be feeling. You may not identify the intensity of that, but you can still find a connection with the nature of those feelings. Even when you cannot identify the emotion, you can still identify the fact that there was something that was felt that is also part of your own life experience, and as you make that connection, you are affirming that you are that other individual at some level, just as you are all other people, just as you are love, just as you are the same as all that has been created. Feeling the opposing emotions of wanting to be loving and yet feeling anger at the same time is merely the recognition that there will always be a distance between your perceptions and what you would like to perceive.

A crucial component to learning is acknowledging what is out there to be learned and your own inadequacies in the current pursuit. If you feel you have full knowledge of a given field of information, there is no impetus to learn, for what is there to learn? Learning means moving from one place of awareness to another place of awareness. In order to learn you need to know there is both an acknowledgment of where you are and acknowledgment of where you wish to be.

You know you may feel anger or fear, but you also know you wish you could find a common ground that would allow you at some level to love a particular individual. That difference between where you are and where you wish to be will always be something you face in human life. Without that difference, growth does not happen, and you live your lives as human beings in order to grow, so you must feel that distinction.

But in allowing yourself to accept that difference, it is also important to acknowledge the growth that is taking place. A student learns best when a student is aware of progress toward a goal. If one feels certain no progress is being made, there is much less impetus to pursue what must be achieved.

No human being is perfect in all ways. You know that to be the case, but every human being is in the process of transformation. For some, that transformation is rapid. For others, it may be less so, but the transformation is nevertheless taking place.

So you must find a direction to your gaze that observes growth that is taking place, for everyone is growing. For that growth to be affirmed in your awareness, you must be willing to look for it. Affirmation does not come by bolts of lightning. It comes quietly with no noise, no fanfare, but there is a feeling inside that truly there is growth.

It is okay to have those split feelings running simultaneously. Go ahead and acknowledge them and accept them. It is not a reality to be rejected but rather a reality which is part of your own transformation. It is the process that is important; it is not the product. It is for you to grow; it is not for you to achieve perfection. You grow in your ability to love and to understand, but you will never be fully love or all-knowing. Embrace, therefore, that process and know that it is part of your human experience.

It is also a part of our experience, for we are not omniscient. We are not perfect. We do not see and understand all in total, absolute clarity. We evolve as you evolve. We become transformed as you become transformed. We learn to see more of the light just as you do, and we are in the process of becoming the totality of that light just as you are. The difference is we have learned through our human existence, we have learned through other forms of life, and our vision is broader, our understanding is deeper, but the process continues. We evolve, and you evolve.

You wonder about the connection of body and soul. That connection is immediate, for when the body has been created and evolves in its own way, even before birth, there is a presence of soul. For the very real presence of life, of growth, there is always the accompaniment of the Creator and all of creation. There is no specific moment when the soul becomes a part of the body other than the beginning of growth which has with it the presence of spirit.

Your guides understand the reality of what growth takes place from a human conception onward. Your guides understand the potential that belongs to the simple division of cells. Nothing occurs that is out of the vision of spirit. Nothing happens without the presence of guides, of spiritual energy. There is a spiritual energy that is a part of all, even the inanimate, for what is inanimate is also an important part of all that has been created. We don’t speak of creation as just human centered. Creation is creation. Transformation is transformation. Growth is growth. Energy is energy. All of this is a part of God’s presence, and all of this is a part of the totality of guides.

It is a difficult concept for you to grasp that in a sense, there are guides for what is inanimate as well as animate, but those guides don’t function in the same way. They don’t communicate obviously through words or actions, but their connection through all that is created is through a special energy that means and that leads to a sacredness of all. Therefore, embrace all that you are aware of—all that you are aware of, not just what is close by, not just what is human—for in embracing all that you are aware of, you are embracing the God that is both the creator and you yourselves.

When you love another, you are loving yourself. When you acknowledge another, you are acknowledging yourself. When you emphasize the sacredness of another, you are affirming the sacredness of yourself. When you accept the importance of the smallest component of your life, you are acknowledging the smallest component of who you are. That acknowledgment is an acknowledgment of God, an acknowledgment of yourself.

Much of what we say here carries implications in your relationships to other human beings that are challenging and will not be fully realized in the single span of human life, but they are part of the process, and it is that process that is so fundamental.

You are blessed as you belong to God. You are blessed because you are God. You are blessed as you are transformed into becoming more godly. You are blessed in your awareness of where you are and where you hope to be. Embrace those blessings. Accept those blessings by reaching out and blessing all you encounter.

Amen.