You are all one.
November 19, 2020
You walk, all of you walk, on a path that belongs to the creation of God. This path is not a physical path, of course, but it is best understood as a kind of physical path. It is a kind of journey of the soul. The journeys that each of you pursues do have markers. Your journeys have a sense of identity. It is not the kind of journey in which you find yourselves in the midst of a great emptiness with no direction, no understanding of where you’re headed. Your spiritual paths do have a character to them. There is an identifiable element that distinguishes each of your paths, one from another. You may, of course, live on the same spiritual globe in different locations, but you’re all in one way or another drawn to the center. Think of your journeys, not so much one of traveling the surface aimlessly, but rather one of moving more deliberately from wherever you are on the surface toward the center, to the gravitational center of all that is.
In cosmic terms, your earth is a part of an enormous constellation, and your constellation is one of countless other constellations, and those constellations have a path. They move. They are not static. They traverse a kind of course within your identified universe. But your universe is part of many, and each universe has a path, and that path is identifiable. It progresses. It evolves. There is a change to each path.
That sense of pathway, that sense of movement, therefore, is a property that is shared by virtually everything that exists. Even the smallest particles that have been identified are comprised of movements. Nothing remains motionless. There is a sense of progression.
As you know, we have said there is no real time. The concepts that human beings have of space are only in the earliest stages of understanding. The reality of all that is eclipses all to fully grasp, but we can say despite the enormity of all that is, that motion, that progress, that a kind of traversing in one sense or another is always occurring.
We speak of these examples of physical journeys, but the laws that belong to the physical journey are also part of the reality of the spiritual quest. You may not think of your soul as moving from point A to point C, but in a very real sense your soul is progressing in its understanding, in its strength, in its capacity to be loving. So, there is a movement of sorts that is taking place. We could also say that the process of learning, all learning, is a kind of movement. So, our use of the term “movement” can apply physically, emotionally, spiritually. When we speak of spiritual growth, we speak of spiritual movement, and yet there is no true sense of place associated with that spiritual life anymore than there is a physical place that you arrive at when you have achieved some insight, for that insight, that knowledge, is not place oriented. It is oriented in a very different method of measurement.
Your spiritual growth is motion along a kind of pathway. We spoke so often of The Now. It may be helpful to think of The Now as the condition of movement. We spoke of change being constant. That change can be seen as growth. It takes place. It occurs. It’s the growth, it’s the change, that is The Now. We could also substitute the word now for reality. An understanding of reality differs from one person to another. Each of you brings your experience to your perceptions, but your understandings that come from your experience are never static. They evolve. They continue to broaden. It’s that continuation of the evolving, it’s the condition of evolving that is The Now, that is the reality. What is real is that change occurs. The Now is the reality of that change. It is not a Now measured by clocks or calendars. It is not a Now measured by who you were as children and who you are as adults. All of this belongs to that condition of change, of movement.
The motion of the planets, the constellations, the universes are what is happening at the moment, for what is happening is only change. It is an evolving of sorts.
You have the same soul as an adult that you had as a child. The soul is not a specific entity that you can draw a circle around and say, “This is the soul and everything else is the body.” The soul is a kind of spiritual awareness. It is an energy center. It is a presence. It evolves in its understanding, evolves in its ability to become loving and accept love. But this soul, although being the same energy source, changes throughout your lives. We would say that the soul that you demonstrated as a child has a different color to it than the soul that you reflect as an adult, for the soul has changed. The process continues, but the process was also present at the beginnings of your life, and the process will continue at the end of your life. The process is just simply there, and it is that process that is The Now. It is always present. Even in its change it is present.
However you translate these principles to your lives that you experience, we always emphasize the oneness of all that is. Recognizing in principle that oneness is very different than living that principle. You are not expected to live a life that is perfect in its reflection of principle, but you are asked and challenged to find ways of applying whatever you sense of that spirit in your relationships with others and especially in your relationships with yourselves. We often urge you to acknowledge that to love others you must first love yourselves. That is not an egocentric suggestion, but unless you can find something in yourselves to love, you can never find something in others to love, for in order to recognize in another something to love, you must be able to find something in yourselves. You will grow to know another as you know yourselves.
Start with finding something that you know about yourself, that you truly believe is a sacred stone on your path. What is it in your life that shows you beyond a doubt that there is something spiritually central in your life experience? Find it, love it, nurture it, and it becomes the fuel that energizes the ways that are made known to you to be loving towards others.
Loving oneself often begins with recognizing and acknowledging the love you have received from others. Try to begin each day with thoughts of gratitude, thoughts of thanksgiving. Ask yourself, “What can I look for in my search for the God that is within me?” Then you can respond, knowing and experiencing the God within that you are strengthened to be the outreaching God. In living a life that acknowledges the God within, you will feel more capable of reflecting that vision from the heart outward.
As you encounter individuals whom you find most challenging to embrace as sacred, step back from that difficulty and ask yourself to identify what in the other is truly shared with what’s in you. Try to find that common bond, for that’s what unites you to them. Recognizing and acknowledging that bond allows you to embrace the spirit of another, and in so doing, you are reflecting the God within.
It is never easy to turn to those for whom you feel animosity and find something that you can identify with as belonging to you. You don’t reflect God by telling another how to behave or what to think. You reflect God that is within you when you can find that common thread that connects you. That thread then becomes the first thread of the tapestry that ultimately produces a love that is totally nonjudgmental.
Nonjudgmental loves does not mean approving all that everyone does or says or believes. Nonjudgmental love, rather, is the recognition of how you and another are the same. These connections between individuals create enormous difficulty to discover, and yet it is precisely these threads which find a pathway that unites your journey and the journey of another. Your paths and their paths are different. They are located, so to speak, in a different place on the surface of this spiritual globe, but all paths, regardless of where they are located, are being pulled constantly toward the center, toward that spot where all of you are truly one. Allow the changes of Now to bring with them a greater awareness of self and a greater recognition of what truly you see in another that you also identify in yourself.
You are all one. Yes, of course you see your differences, but those differences are not what’s important. What’s important is the thread that connects you to another and then to another and then to another. It is a network of spirit, and this network is a direct reflection on what is sacred and what can be truly cherished.
Be fully in the present. Be willing to accept that it is part of the present to be active in the change, and accept fully that it is the condition of change that is The Now, that is reality. You are one with the earth. You are part of the constellations. You are part of the many universes. You share the condition of change. You share that true reality. You share that spark of the divine that connects all that is to all you are.
Amen.