This is a talk and guided meditation I presented for Unity Church of Albany on June 27, 2021.
Transcript
I’ve been looking forward to this talk and this opportunity to bring you a message ever since Roger reached out to me several weeks ago, and invited me to speak to you all and he shared with me the vision statement that you adopted last summer, “a world transformed through spiritual awakening of all.”
And when I saw that, that vision statement, I knew that. something’s afoot here. Like this is meant to happen. So it’s really my delight and my honor to be with you all today to talk about the promise of an awakened world.
And let me begin by sharing my own, a little bit of my own personal story, my own context if you will, for what’s going on on the planet right now. And I know that some of you have read my book, my memoir, Beyond Jesus, so you know this story and I’ll be very succinct, but I just want to share that this was back in the summer of 2002, and it was about a year after a very close friend of mine died and her death opened up something in me, a resolve in me to discover a dimension of my being that I had never known before.
I had the sense that there’s more to me and there’s more to reality than I have ever known. And so I really made this firm resolve. I aligned my intention, my will, with, with this desire to really know more fully who I am and what is this world and what’s going on here, what is reality.
So it was a little more than a year afterwards and I started experiencing all of these synchronicities, like a tsunami of synchronicities that my worldview at that time simply could not accommodate and I felt like own reality, my own world, was sort of cracking apart.
And I knew that whatever was happening in me. I needed to surrender to it. And that I think is a key point, because things are happening on the planet right now, a great transition and transformation is happening on the planet right now, and what we do is we surrender to it, we surrender to what wants to happen.
So I went to the woods here in Philadelphia, an area of woods that I love to go to where I go and meditate sometimes, and I sat down on this rock. And I didn’t know how to respond to this thing that was happening, whatever it was, except that I knew I needed to give thanks for the people in my life, because I had a sense of whatever was happening was happening because of my web of relationships.
And so sitting on this rock in the woods on that hot July afternoon, I simply started saying thank you for Sara, thank you for Susan, thank you. . . . I just started reciting the names I started naming the people and giving thanks.
And in that moment, in that very moment, I had this sudden very profound realization that I am not a separate self. I could see through the fallacy of separateness in that moment, and I could see that what I am is not the separate self that I’d always thought myself to be. But I am the manifestation or the expression of infinite influences that are all interacting, like the ripples on a lake that come together into these patterns. I was simply a region that was expressing all of these interactions, that reality is interconnected.
And in that moment, with that Aha, the energy channels of my body opened up and I had this Kundalini kind of an awakening. And it was very powerful and in the midst of it I I was sobbing and I felt like something in me was dying, and something in me was being born. At the same time.
This went on for a while, and after the energy subsided, I opened my eyes and I saw a world that I had never seen before. I saw a world that is completely sentient. I saw a world that is the expression of Love. I saw a world in which everything is everything. And I knew that judgment is an illusion, that everything is Love.
And I had this profound hope, I was filled with this profound hope for the planet, because I knew that if enough of us can open to this reality of Love. The Earth can be healed. There was absolutely no doubt in my mind.
And in the aftermath of that experience for several days I was in this heightened state of consciousness and receiving what felt like downloads, and that we are, humanity is living in a story. We are in a dream. And we are acting out the story in our minds, and it is that story of separateness. And that story becomes enacted, it becomes lived out in our political systems and our economic systems. It is that story that we are living in, that story of separateness, which is simply an illusion in the human mind. It is that story that has given rise to an economic system that is plundering the planet, that is leading to obscene inequities of wealth, that is causing and creating suffering among so many people and so many beings on the planet.
And in this one moment, it was like, I just got this download this message, “transform story!” Now is the time for humankind to transform our story.
So, this is what I see is happening on a global scale right now. We are in this moment of transition between these states of consciousness. This egoic consciousness, this story of separateness, and this rising consciousness of oneness, of the recognition and the realization of our interdependence and the interconnectedness of reality, and that Love is the essence of all that is.
And so we are in this amazing, amazing planetary moment where we are making an epic shift, a historic shift on this planet. And we happen to be alive, to be witnessing it, and to be participating in it, and to be surrendering to it.
So that’s where I come personally to this question, and globally we see it playing out. We see it in the climate crisis as Roger and Carol and others mentioned earlier, the temperatures, the extreme drought, the fires. We are in this moment where this transformation is being demanded of us. We, humankind, are in our moment of initiation. And we each have a role to play in that.
Because I became so aware of how everything that we see—all of the injustices in the systems that we see, all of the suffering that we see, all arise out of this soil of that story of separateness.
And so I am so delighted to be with you all today and to be able to speak with you about this, and to just cheer you on with this vision that is so very, very important and timely.
I was recently interviewing a man, his name is Alan Seale and he’s the founder of the Center for Transformational Presence, and he has trained and coached people internationally on how to be present in moments of transformation and transition. And he always asks, three fundamental questions when he’s coaching people or groups. His first question is, What wants to happen? What wants to happen? And to ask that question not at the head level or the level of of the thinking mind, but to go deeper into the heart, into the intuition, to ask what wants to happen.
And as I do that on a planetary basis, I can see that what wants to happen on planet Earth is for Christ Consciousness, unitive consciousness, Buddha consciousness, to become anchored on this planet and to become played out in the world of form, so that all of our systems, our ways of relating to one another, and the earth and ourselves, they are all expressions of that Christ consciousness that knows our interrelatedness with All That Is.
So that’s what wants to happen. And the next question that Alan has people ponder is, Who is it calling me to be? Who is it asking me to be?
As I ask that question, if what wants to happen is for Christ consciousness to become anchored in the world of form on this planet, then it’s asking me to be a place where that can happen. It’s asking me to open myself to that consciousness, to become, if you will, a host for it, to allow it to be in and to live through my life.
So the third question that he asks is, What is the next step? And when we are in these moments of great transition we know that we cannot see how it all plays out. We can’t plan for it, we can’t strategize for it, because we are entering into this unknown world that we have never experienced. And we can’t even begin to imagine it, let alone, map it out.
But we can begin to intuit, What is the next step. And I would just invite you each to ponder that question for yourself. What is the next step?
Now another aspect of this transformation of consciousness has to do with, as A Course of Love talks about, that we are entering into the time of Mary, and the way of Mary. And more broadly into the feminine principle. The feminine principle is on the rise, and it is the key player in this transformation of consciousness that can bring about an awakened world.
I had a dream, some years back, I actually share the dream in some podcast episodes that I did a while back, but in this dream, I went to sleep that night and I asked what would it be like for us to live in a world where that consciousness is present?
And that night I had a dream, and in the dream I can sense how things are coalescing, that synchronicities are on the rise, that things are coming together. And there’s an image in the dream that helps me see that there are different levels of dream or different levels of consciousness.
And then I’m standing outside of a church, and I’m not sure if it’s in Bethlehem, although it may have been, but I’m standing outside of this church. And I can hear that inside the church, they’re singing O Little Town of Bethlehem. And as I’m standing there, I realize that I can paint with my hands with light. I can wave my hands and and I’m painting with colored light. And these shapes are coming forth of these colors and patterns of light. And I can see that this is a new way of creating a creating, a creation in partnership with light.
As I worked on that dream, the song that I could hear seemed very significant, O Little Town of Bethlehem. And I understood that this earth is Bethlehem. This earth is the place where this consciousness, this Christ consciousness is being born. And there’s this one line in that song that says, For Christ is born of Mary. Of Mary. Of the feminine principle.
And what is the feminine principle? What does Mary represent? She represents the willingness to join with what wants to happen. She represents the willingness to allow it to come through her. She represents this willingness to receive and to embody.
And that is what we are called to do, to be. To join with this magnificent thing that wants to happen on this planet. To make ourselves available to receive it, to allow it, to embody it.
So at this time, I would like to invite us into a time of meditation, in which we will do exactly that. We will offer ourselves to receive and to embody that consciousness. So I invite you to make yourself comfortable and to close your eyes and to take a moment to just become fully aware of this moment.
Take a moment to pay attention to your breath,
feeling the breath as it moves in and out of the body.
Recognizing that this breath, this air, has traveled across this planet for eons
Recognizing that the oxygen that your body is taking in has been breathed out by rain forests, by prairies.
It has been breathed in by every living species, by every species that is no longer here on this planet.
In this simple act of breathing, you are united with all life that has ever existed on this planet.
Now bring your awareness to the heart center, allowing that breath to move in and out of your heart center,
allowing that heart center to open more fully with each breath.
In the infinite void that contains all possibilities, there is a world, an earth, in which humanity has awakened to its true nature as one with Love.
Allow your being to open to that possibility, to that world.
This is a world in which all life is flourishing.
This is a world in which humans are in right relationship with one another. With this planet
with themselves, with our source.
Allow this world to reveal itself to you.
Notice what you see.
Notice how the people interact.
Notice what is happening in the forests.
Notice how the people are relating with the forest
relating with the water,
relating with all life.
Notice how this world feels to you.
Notice how it feels in your body to open to this world.
And if you are willing, offer yourself. Offer your mind, your imagination, your body, your heart to be a place where this world can take on form, where this world can become manifest
this world that has been transformed through the spiritual awakening of all.
Now bring your awareness back to your breath.
Back to the space in which you find yourself
back in this time that we are sharing together.
And when you’re ready you can open your eyes.
Namaste.
Like what you read?
Leave a Reply