September 12, 2019

• Previous lifetimes

• Community compared to school of fish

• The flow of spiritual love

• In substance, all human beings are equal

• Do not serve out of obligation but out of love

It is the strength of presence of the Spirit Center that permeates the lives of all. Each of you is filled with that spirit presence. It is an energy that permeates everything that exists. It is a permanent energy, and it is a loving energy of which we have spoken.

In time, all human beings learn something of what it means to be loved and to become loving. The transition from receiving love to giving love is different for each of you, and that is appropriate. As you have discussed, you bring to your life’s table experiences, insights, lessons if you will, from a previous life. We say a previous life because each human life builds upon the previous stage.

For some, there are many lives; for others, there are fewer. There are those who have had a single human life prior to the current one, but even that single life is a product of an ongoing spiritual life. As you know, life exists beyond just what you experience, and that spiritual life may sometimes be associated with a prior human life, but it may also be associated with the experience of spiritual life associated with other types of knowing beings, knowing beings in that they in their own existence are aware of at least the possibility of a spiritual component. Those types of knowing lives are vastly different from the human form of life.

Human beings have a good understanding of the beginnings of life that preceded human beings on your earth. You know that the creation of a human life was not spontaneous but was the result of many layers of evolution. The Bible, as you know it, speaks of creation in a way that seems to imply human beings were created as human beings, that they did not evolve from something else. While that reality is not reflective of the complete truth of your own existence, it does serve an important purpose because it points to a deeper truth, that you were created because of the reality of the Spirit Center, the reality of God. The immediacy of that creation is itself, in terms of faith, less important. What is important from those more traditional teachings is that your life is the result of the presence of God, whether there were a thousand stages that must be traversed before the existence of a human form or whether there were just a few stages. Even the spontaneous creation of human beings is not so important.

You were created as a result, as a consequence, of what God has created, what belongs to the Spirit Center. It was not some individual decision of “well, let’s have a human being.” Your life as a human being is only because of the presence of that Spirit Center. You exist, as we have said often, because God exists. We have also said God exists because you exist. The entity that is God, the entity that is the Spirit Center, exists because of all that belongs.

If we return to the analogy of the school of fish, the school of fish cannot exist without the individual fish, and yet the school is evidence of its own reality. The school depends upon the fish. The fish depend upon the reality of the school that provides a shape, a rhythm to the lives of all within that school. The relationship, therefore, exists in both directions. They are not equal relationships, but both depend upon one another.

Each of you, in your sense of life’s purpose, depends in some ways upon the existence of others. Your lives are given meaning, not just by what you do, but by your interaction with those who share your life. Community does not exist without individuals, and individuals lose a sense of direction and rhythm without community. Your individual lives, therefore, depend upon your combined corporate lives.

It is a sacred relationship which is experienced by us as well. We exist as a part of the Spirit Center just as you, but our meaning and purpose is two-fold. We grow and learn, but we also love. We, as spirits, love one another, but it is because of that love that we are engaged in the expression and outreach of that love to you.

You begin to sense that love even though it is only a small part of that relationship with you. It is the part that you can be aware of, and acknowledging that, you are given strength and direction and rhythm to take that love and expand it to reach outward, to use what you have been given by the act of giving it to others. This is a very natural flow, a receiving of spiritual love and a giving of spiritual love. You are not the initiators. You are channeling the love from a source outward.

The question was raised about whether God feels and experiences what you would call disappointment when human beings are not responsive to what is already known. The answer is an emphatic “no!” This rhythm, this motion of love from the Spirit Center through guides, through you, shared to others, who in turn are enriched by their own spiritual awareness and your presence in their lives, is really an unbroken flow. It is an unbroken energy. This energy is transformed from the Spirit Center, from us, from you, from others, but it is unbroken. Being disappointed would mean that somehow that energy is lessened or stopped or interrupted in some way, but this flow of energy is not stopped. It is not lessened. It is not interrupted. It is a natural, unending, continuous and steady flow of that energy. There is nothing you can do to interrupt that flow. Even if your behavior is counter to your understanding, that flow of love, that flow of spirit energy, continues unabated.

The Spirit Center is an energy center. Imagine that energy to be a light source. The light continues. There is nothing that stops that light. You may close the shutters in the house so that it is more difficult to be aware of the light, but that light is still shining whether you see it or not. That sense of disappointment doesn’t exist because that flow from the Spirit Center, from God, is absolutely constant. With no interruption, there is no room, no space, for disappointment. There is no room or space for judgment. There is no room or space for punishment. God’s love is simply there.

The light from the sun is simply there. Whether the earth is pointed toward it or not, the light continues. If there is any element of that transfer of energy from God, it is your own temporary and sometimes intentional turning from the light, but that is of your own doing. You can turn your back to the sun, and you will still be warmed by it. You can shutter your house, but the house will still find energy from the sun. The sun is not changed in any way by the position of the earth in its rotation. The sun is its energy. The Spirit Center is its energy, and you are in that field of flow, as it were, regardless of your own activities. It is for that reason that we can say God’s love is constant. It is always there, and it is not diminished by God through disappointment, punishment, or judgment. It is never diminished. So, you are always in the light. All human beings are in the light.

We say to you that you can judge someone’s behavior but never their worth, never their spirit. That’s a human condition. That’s a human trait that does not belong to the Spirit Center, but it is through those human traits that you begin to learn, and your spirit begins to grow. There are consequences for your actions, and from the consequences you learn the appropriateness of those actions. But God’s radiant energy is not offered with the condition of consequences being experienced.

We have said that the life of the spirit, the life of your soul, is not a race. There are no winners or losers; there are only finishers. This energy ensures that there are only finishers. This energy from God ensures that there can be no judgment. There is nothing the earth can do to diminish the energy of the sun. There is nothing the sun can do that changes or diminishes the energy of the cosmos. The sun belongs to the cosmos as you. The sun may change in its nature, in the kind of energy, but it is as you are. You change, there is a transformation, but there is not a hindrance or obstruction. It is not a loss. There is just change.

When you encounter others whose behaviors or attitudes are in opposition to your perception and understanding of what is in this flow of God, you can certainly stand for what you feel to be right, but you cannot judge another as being somehow less containing of spirit than you. It is the human manifestation of that particular form of energy which differs, but the spiritual energy is not different between individuals whose actions and approaches are different from yours. There is no society, no religious sense of understanding that is of less value than another. What you observe are differences, but they are differences that are superficial. They are differences in style but not in substance. In substance, all human beings are equal. In substance, all receive the energy from the sun, the energy from the Spirit Center.

Your responsibilities and opportunities in human life are to find evidence of this constancy of spirit, because it is in the acknowledgment and recognition of the constancy of spirit shared by all that your own souls, your own spirits, find growth. That growth of spirit does not come from good deeds. It comes from the opening of heart, the vision of the heart of which we so often speak.

You may be the most generous person on the block and have no sense of the spirit connection between you and the recipients of that generosity. Your souls don’t grow through your giving. They grow through your being, and it is through your being that you are really giving. It is because of who you are that you can have the greatest effect on the lives of others. It is not what you do. It is who you are. That question of who you are is precisely what nurtures the soul as that perception becomes deeper and more accepting, more inclusive and more embracing. That is where your soul grows. It is in the exercising of that light, that energy from the Spirit Center. It is your enabling of that energy to expand that is the food with which the soul grows.

There are many who spend a life trying to do good deeds, and that effort is generated by obligation: “I must do something because it’s what I have to do…,” and you supply your own completion. Reaching out to others because you feel an obligation is very different from reaching out to others because you truly embrace them as equal fish in this school. Your own spirit is not fed by obligation. It is fed by love. Your lives are not enhanced in their importance through obligation but rather through love. If there were value in obligations, then there would be consequences for not acting upon those obligations, and with such negative consequences comes judgment, and the exercise of judgment is not the flow of spirit.

There is, therefore, a clear connection between the energy from God and what is essential for the growth of spirit. All that you do that is a natural reflection of your understanding of spirit is offered with faith with an embracing love of others. It is never clothed in obligation. You are not obligated to take the love that you experience and pass it on to others, for if you truly embrace the love you receive, it is natural to let the love pass through you and be given to others. Allowing yourself to be in the flow is allowing yourself to be, as you say, “the hands of God, the eyes of God, the heart of God.” That’s what it means to accept your belonging to this unending energy that is God’s love.

Open yourself to that love. Open yourself to that energy. Allow yourself to move with that energy, and you will be the fish allowing itself to move with the school, to have the shape, form, purpose, and rhythm that gives meaning to the presence. Reach out as you can reach out, but never serve others out of the sense of obligation that you have to do something. You may feel that you are strongly moved to serve others because of your sense of connection. That is okay, but it is not okay to feel that you reach out to others because you are just being required to do so.

The outreach is the natural outcome of the inflow of God’s love. Let it ever be so in each of your lives.

Amen.