November 12, 2007

• Seeking is more important than knowing

• Respond with love in challenging situations

• Pray for guidance

• More about conception and spirit attachment

• Spirit, energy, and light

• Tear down walls of mistrust, suspicion, fear

God continues to speak. What is said is always the same, but it is expressed in ways that are appropriate for those who are open. God seeks peace. God seeks the expression of love among all people. All of you are part of that expression, and there are countless others whom you do not know who share in this same effort, same destiny.

You are asked to question. You are asked to doubt. You are asked always to seek. A life devoted to the search is a life whose direction is more secure than a life built upon an insistence upon absolute knowledge. You are asked not to know all but rather to seek all. It is in the seeking, it is in the questioning, the doubting, the hoping that your growth is assured. But in that seeking, you must never exercise your concerns as isolated individuals, for to truly benefit in the search, you are rewarded, enriched, strengthened through the support of others who share the same search and yet may arrive at different conclusions. The conclusions are always tentative.

You seek knowledge of the spirit, but you will never fully know the spirit in your human lives. You seek the capacity to be loving, and as you recognize, you must be loved first, but you will in your seeking never be fully love itself within your human existence. One individual will express a loving relationship in a different way from another, so what is found in the search for being loving is never the same among human beings. The conclusions that are reached are always based on what is best for the one who is seeking. In learning to be loving, you function from your own position of experience. You become loving because of the love you have experienced, and no two people have an identical experience. For that reason, the expression of that love will be different.

There is much to be said about human pain connected with love and with loving. It is always a challenge to be loving. It is easy when it is directed toward a path with little resistance, but your lives are not paved by such smooth surfaces. Being loving requires a response within an environment that may be challenging, that might be threatening, that might be accompanied by some painful experience. When you are criticized by another, it is most difficult to feel loving toward that person, for the natural reaction is to build up your own defenses to withstand the criticism. But it is precisely at times such as those that the strength to be loving is tested most severely, and it is in the exercise of attempting a loving response that you experience the greatest growth of soul, of spirit, of spirit center.

You are never asked, nor are you expected to be, perfect, making no false moves or incorrect decisions. But you are asked to seek guidance before making important decisions. The presence of your guides is never denied. You are never left with no help, for God provides so many forms of guidance that can be drawn upon to nurture and sustain your journeys. Every human being who is aware of the potential for such guidance wonders how to be sure that guidance is present, and how to know which way to turn, how to act, how to react. You can always be assured of making the appropriate decision merely by asking to be guided and having faith that somehow that help is present.

Sometimes what you pray for is not what is best. But when you pray for guidance, the best decisions are the only decisions. Your choices are not so much between a good decision and a bad decision, but rather whether or not you choose to ask for the guidance. You can always be assured of traveling along the appropriate path after asking and praying for openness to that guidance.

There is more to be said about the spirit joining or attaching itself to the human physical life. It has been suggested that perhaps conception, as we refer to it, is not so much a physical conception but spiritual. There is a difference between conception that takes place within the human body and what you refer to as in vitro fertilization. In both cases, the potential to begin life is present, but the conception that we refer to is a conception, a growing of life, within the human environment.

Spirit has no space; spirit merely exists. But as life begins to grow within the human body, that life is in a sense surrounded by the spirit that is attached to the parent. The spirit provides a form of life that is different from merely the multiplication of cells. Spirit is a part of all life. Spirit is a part of life whether animate or inanimate, but the soul that is attached to the human form is a different kind of relationship than the spirit that is part of all that has been created. You cannot fully understand the nature of the attachment, the connection, the conjoining of spirit and body, for such attachment is at a different level than what you perceive to be physical.

Your soul, your individual soul, the soul that is attached to your human life, is a part of your entire reality. It is a part of your existence. It informs the existence and it draws from it. The sense of conception, of the spirit joining the physical form, is an action that occurs in its own plane outside of the concept of time. But we, in an attempt to explain this union of spirit and body, feel it is most helpful if you understand that joining to be an event that occurs at the point of life attached to life. You are each given a soul to accompany your journey. Your journey begins at conception, it begins with a physical connection to the parent, and it blends with the spiritual component of the parent.

When conception occurs in a loving environment, the energy is very different than when it occurs in tension and strife, hatred, violence, selfishness. Spirit is closely associated with energy. As we have often said, God is a kind of energy. You know that God is not a human being, and yet it is often easier to perceive of God as a human life- form with human-like emotions. The history of all religions is filled with accounts of God responding in human-like ways, but the truth remains that God is a kind of energy.

When you are loving toward another, you manifest an energy outward from your place, and that energy influences the energy of those around you. It is not something you necessarily say. Even regarding someone lovingly does not require any activity. It is a sending out of energy. And so it is that your spirits are a kind of energy, and when that energy is loving and positive, the energy itself multiplies and grows. This you know: in being loving, love expands.

Your spirit that is attached to human life is an interaction of two energies—one spirit, one human—and the energies that are created are immediately recognizable by us as light. This you know, but light is only a manifestation of something more profound. The light that we see is a manifestation of the energy of the spirit and the energy of the human presence. It is for that reason that we see your light changing as your energies change. Your conscious efforts have a profound effect on the energies that surround your lives. You can control that. You cannot control directly the energy of your spirit/soul, but the combined energies you have great impact over. Your spirit is the primary energy source for your human life, and because of that your place in the world of energy exchange is important.

You wonder about the value of self, if the purpose of love is always what is best for others. The self is central. The self is like a refiner’s fire that treats and shapes and softens and molds what is then offered beyond. It is essential that each of you experiences what it means to be loved. That is very central in its focus, but the purpose of being loved is not ultimately served just by being loved, but rather those energies that are received by being loved are then subsequently spread outward. If those energies are not contained in the individual, they cannot be spread upon others, so the self is important. What we caution each of you against is feeling that self is the ultimate level of importance.

You live your lives for the purpose of learning to be loving, but you cannot be loving without having experienced being loved. So there is a natural, understandable concern about expressing the need to be loved, and out of that concern can come the question, “What is it that I need,” and that is perfectly acceptable. You are not constructing your lives on the basis of what you individually need, but you are acknowledging that you do have needs that need to be met, and in meeting those needs, you then have the means of taking what you have been given and offering it outward.

Again, we come back to the importance of being loving. In a sense, you learn in order to teach. You receive in order to give, but just as the teacher cannot teach if nothing has been learned, the giver cannot give if there is nothing that has been received. You are therefore, each of you, essential both to your own spiritual growth and to spreading the energy that is love outward. Resentment, suspicion, hatred are all the products of barriers that have been constructed. These are not necessarily physical barriers, but personal ones. If you seek peace, you must strike down the barriers that you place in your own lives. If you seek reconciliation, tear down your own walls. You cannot reach out when your spiritual arms are tied to the side.

How do you break down those walls? You destroy them through trust. You destroy them through faith in the goodness of others. Of course there are opportunities that confront you when the faith that you offer is not returned, and rather it is twisted and turned into something seemingly negative. But you cannot resist tearing down those walls out of fear that at some time in the future, the wall might be needed. If what you seek is reconciliation, peace, and to becoming loving, you must nevertheless take those personal barriers and completely disassemble them.

You must learn to live more with trust, not with suspicion. You must live with confidence, not fear. You must live lovingly, not defensively, and when you do, what each of you seeks will come closer to the reality. If you wish to be more loving, tear down the walls so that you can be loved by others who are loving toward you, for those personal walls are effective in two directions: they prevent what is inside you from getting out, and they prevent what is inside others from reaching you.

You are asked to live with faith. We say this so frequently, and we mean by that to live without walls.

Everyone is a brother or sister.

Everyone shares much in common.

Everyone needs to be loved.

Everyone has the potential for being loving, regardless of their culture, regardless of their mental capacities, regardless of their physical limitations. All human beings share that need and that potential.

No one is alone.

No one is isolated.

Everyone is special.

All are equal.

So live your lives without the personal barriers and go forward in the faith that there is much more that is gained without those barriers than is risked by constructing them.

You have eliminated those barriers by being willing to accept our reality, and we are able to communicate with you because those barriers have been taken down. Be comforted by your vision of light, the spirit light that is shared by all.

Amen.