Soul’s goal is to become love.
January 14, 2021
It is a God of justice and a God of peace as well as a God of love that surrounds and uplifts each of you. We who are your collection of guides hear, feel, and know of your deepest concerns, and we are here to respond to the concerns that are experienced by each of you in your own ways.
Society, as you know it, is continuing its torturous path of transformation. This path that you are aware of, although different in specific terms, is not unlike the paths upon which each of you walks in your own lives. There is not a human being who is aware of the recent events who has not experienced their own sense of anger, their own sense of loss. There is no one who has not experienced the belief that they are not being heard.
None of you have experienced lives free of the fear of loss. Each of you understands what it means to be angry, frustrated. Each of you knows what it means to take a stand and realize in hindsight that you were not fully informed. Each of you has events in your lives that you would love to take back, to undo. What you experience as individuals belongs fully to what it means to be human in your current form of life.
Life is not unlike a kind of schooling. You learn through your successes and failures, but you will always experience success, and you will always experience failure. Who has not paused for a moment and said to oneself, “I wish I had known ‘something’ for I would have responded differently”? No human being is perfect, that you know, but it is also important to acknowledge that society, whether the family, a community, a state or nation, experiences in principle the same struggles that human beings as individuals experience. Why should society be any different than the people who populate them?
Of course, there are those individuals who see life in very different ways, and that different view, that different perspective, can lead to changes in the perspectives held by many. Leadership, of course, does not presuppose a clear view ahead. Leadership is often characterized by great energy being exerted in destructive directions, but leadership in all cases means seeing life differently and having an ability to find others who are willing to take up the cause.
Society goes through changes as a result of leadership. When that leadership is short-sighted, when that leadership is self-directed, when it is consumed by self-interests, there can be many who follow such examples. Likewise, when there are leaders whose view of life brings others to a greater sense of being shared participants in what is meant to be best for all, societies move in that direction.
The history of spiritual leaders throughout humankind, even long preceding such leaders around whom religions have been built, have had enormous impact centuries earlier than what you know and understand. As long as there have been human beings, there have been leaders, and those leaders have influenced others in ways that are constructive and destructive. The history of human life on earth ultimately becomes a history of what was constructive because it is the constructive energies that are the real light. The destructive energies are in effect the darkness. Darkness never consumes light, but light always breaks through darkness.
When humankind and the countless societies that have evolved are viewed in their totality, there is a clear pathway for what is good and what is loving. Such a pathway is never characterized as a journey with no pain, but rather a journey that accepts the reality of the pain and yet has a vision of the light which exists, flourishes, nourishes, and loves far beyond the pain.
The challenges to your own society are many, all of which carry with them the specter of loss, of frustration, of anger. But these turnings in your path also provide their own opportunities for strength, for inspiration, and for a greater commitment to what is loving, what is affirming, what is respectful, and what honors others. Understanding that the curve of this path leads inexorably into a full recognition of God’s power does not take away from the pain, the anger, the loss that may be experienced within the short view of spiritual growth.
It is so easy at times like this to find justifiable grounds for judging others—judging behavior, judging words, judging attitudes. It is, so to speak, the low hanging fruit. When there is so much fear of loss, it is easy to see and feel the anger. The tendency for all is to recognize what is seen to be inappropriate and unhealthy as being a kind of total view, but such is not the case. You cannot be expected, much as you may wish, to find ways of placing yourselves in the shoes of another. That is impossible. You cannot live the life another has lived. You cannot experience what another has experienced, but despite your inability to place yourselves somehow in the lives of others, you can still be committed to that recognition that for all people, the layers of another’s life are countless and invisible.
We ask you so often to avoid judgment. It is that judgment that is the easiest response to what is observed or experienced. Such judgment is also part of the experience of being human. It is not something to be ashamed of or to feel guilty about but to accept that such judgment is an understandable part of living the lives you live. We don’t, therefore, ask you to deny the judgment but rather through the heart to see beyond it.
Finding success in going beyond judgment is a lifelong pursuit. It is a pursuit of your own souls. Your soul, your individual spiritual identity, is not perfect. It is not one hundred percent love. Your soul is in the process of being loving, recognizing its goal of becoming love. Your soul evolves, but for that growth to occur, it must share in your experience of being human. The soul is that spark of God within, but it is only a spark. It is not the totality of God, but that spark unites the fire of spiritual recognition, of spiritual bonding one with another, of a spiritual vision that clearly sees God’s presence, and it is a bonding that leads each of you on your paths, on your journey of becoming love.
We see your society. We see all societies growing through steps that are positive and learning from steps that are not, but in that experiencing of what is positive and what is good, and in the recognition of what is contrary to that, growth is achieved, individual growth, societal growth. And in those individuals, and in those leaders, in those multitudes of societies as they grow, humankind in the great arc of spiritual development moves ever more closely toward that totality of God that is love.
The events that lie before each of you are not the playing out of a scripted drama. They unfold. They are the response of leaders, those leaders in themselves responding to light or to darkness. As human beings become more sensitive to God’s presence, the shift of energies will continue to move away from darkness and toward light.
What is your role in that drama? For each of you, the role is to be committed in your thoughts, in your prayers, and in your actions to all efforts that lift up the sacred value, the sacred essence, of all people, whether or not those you lift up express themselves in ways that you feel reflect the presence of the Spirit Center. It is not for you to judge them anymore than it is for those who hold different thoughts and values than you to be judgmental of you, and yet recognizing the presence of that judgment that travels in all directions, you find ways to commit yourselves to what exists beyond those judgments. You don’t have full knowledge, and your judgments will be based on the knowledge you have. Accept that as part of being human, and when you can, step away and allow yourselves to stand beyond those judgments. Allow yourselves to exist beyond behaviors that you may feel are so destructive.
The events you have witnessed in recent days will find repetition throughout the course of human life in one setting or another. The peace that you seek is not the absence of that strife. The real peace is getting beyond the strife. Mitigate it when you can, but try to prevent what you see as a disintegration of sorts from incinerating your own commitment to spirit presence.
You are given human life to experience what happens in being human. You are given human life for the growth that takes place, the growth of spirit. It is through your exercise of commitment to God that your soul finds strength and direction. Your souls, of course, could evolve in their capacity to become love without the human experience, but such a growth that could take place would be diminished by that loss when separated from human life. Allow yourselves to experience what is painful, what causes fear, loss, and anger, and in acknowledging their place in human life, let them not cloud your perspective, your increased commitment to focus your energies to what lies beyond, what is good, what is loving, and what is the light.
You are blessed by that light. You are blessed when you acknowledge that even when there is darkness, the light is present, and that light brings an energy of its own that casts away darkness. The presence of darkness never casts away the light. It is in the darkness that the light shines most brilliantly.
You are surrounded by that light. You are surrounded by the sacred souls of all human beings. You are surrounded by the goodness that actually is part of all human beings, even when it is not seen, even when it is not exercised. That goodness is that portion of God that lives within each of you. Be comforted by that light. Let your paths find illumination as you open your heart’s vision to the brilliance of God that lies before each of you.
Amen.