Power of Oneness Spiritual Center

March 2007 Theme: “PRACTICING THE PRESENCE”

March 4, 2007 Topic: “You Must Not Know About Me”

Our theme for this month is Practicing the Presence. This comes to us from Brother Lawrence who said: “There is not in the world a kind of life more sweet and delightful, than that of a continual conversation with God. Those only can comprehend it who practice and experience it."     

Today’s Topic is “You Must Not Know About Me.” Beyonce is beautiful, creative and talented and I’m very glad that she did the song, “Irreplaceable.” Because, although she sings to someone (with whom she obviously has an issue and the relationship seems to have come to an endpoint) telling him he must think you’re irreplaceable. Well, yeah. Each one of us is irreplaceable. The part I agree with is that there isn’t a need for a codependency in relationship. What I disagree with are the lyrics that say, “I can get another you in a minute.” No she can’t. There’s only one you. And you are irreplaceable. You see we each come into each other’s life for a reason, a season or a lifetime. Some people aren’t meant to stay forever, but each person brings us a message for our lives. Each person brings us a lesson about ourselves. A lot of times we may not like that lesson, but that person was necessary in order for us to learn it.

Spiritual consciousness is the realization of truth and we come to know truth from the inside and from the outside. We come to know truth through our outer vision as well as our inner vision. But the song goes, “You must not know about me.” And I must apologize to some of you. I made the presumption that you know God. And I still know that you do – at the level of the absolute. But the presumption is not an assumption because I knew before you did that at the level of consciousness, you know God.

The Upanishads tell us of manifesting God as Satchidaananda, one being, one consciousness and bliss altogether, which exists at the very height of creation. It is still free from time, space and causality – spaceless, timeless, causeless – it exists as if in itself, the beginning of things – Parabrahman – out of the unmanifest waters, the one giving himself form so that he may know himself.

We begin to understand the poise of Brahman (or God) which is Vijnaana, interpreted by Sri Aurobindo as the super mind.

The divine Satchidaananda through the action of Vijnaana, forgets itself and makes a beginning, as it were, where there is entire opposite of the consciousness, existence and bliss out of which it came. The experience of manifestation is one where we start with pure matter, unconsciousness, broken up into fragments, separated rather than united, subject to transience – death, mortality, not immortal, subject to movement in time and space, limited by these, pushed from event to event by a chain of causation, harassed through the emotions by some necessity that we cannot see, an invisible necessity.

This is a form of the Brahman which takes a certain position as the divine creator like a great supreme Shakespeare, it marshals forth out of the contents of the infinite causeless, eternal consciousness of which it itself is a part – incidents, events, characters, and splashes them across the screen of time and space, and creates stories with them, stories that last from life to life, and go from the beginning of history to an end which is unforeseeable.

And this creation by the super mind becomes the play in which our souls find themselves, and immersed in this creation, we know only it. We see that the characters as in the supreme Shakespeare’s play, move around, strut about on the stage, as he says, knowing only their immediate circumstances, a little bit more perhaps, plot or plan their lives, have accidental, coincidental meetings, and develop up certain elements of experience, inner and outer, that propel them through the unpredictable waters of their destiny.

But behind it all is this Magus, this supreme author, and the supreme author knows what forces she chuckles and brings them into existence, plays with them. Our experience, due to the immersion into the play, is one of ignorance. It is an ignorance which is a deliberate forgetting, a deliberate forgetting which is also a form of bliss, a form of bliss which is the joy of growing up in time.

This existence, the lower half as it were, of the supreme existence, yet harbors in itself a form of the divine. It is all again the Parabrahman, the parabrahman who has chosen to forget himself, given independence to his own self forgetting, and marshaled by the power of the super mind above, to evolve consciousness in a supreme play that leads through inexorable yet incalculable means, to a supreme harmony of all the souls recognizing that they are the one, the one at play. It is a play in which the author does not partake as a character except in very special moments, and in those special moments, he is known as the Avatar, to give a special direction to the play, to the cosmic play, and lead it towards the knowledge of itself.

The Brahman has three poises or three locations in our experience. They are the transcendent, the universal and the imminent. If we look at the image of the author once again, we see this in operation. Shakespeare stands outside of his creations and therefore he is transcendent of his creations. There is much more to Shakespeare than what enters into one of his plays, or into all of his plays combined. By knowing his plays, we do not know all of Shakespeare, however the whole play of Shakespeare is full of Shakespeare. It is enveloped by, embraced by Shakespeare inner atmosphere. Every word in it is a vibration out of Shakespeare. Therefore there is a universality to the play which is Shakespeare himself.

Within the play, there are characters who undergo various events in their lives, and each one of these characters is a living entity identifiable by themselves, their own movements. However, they are all creations of Shakespeare, and therefore deep within the character, there is an aspect, an emanation, each one of them is an emanation of that divine author, Shakespeare. Maybe distorted, maybe abusive of the character, the divine, the author from which they came, yet they are emanations out of that one being, and in their flow through the plot, they reveal in moments the truth of the nature of the author himself. This is the imminent aspect.

At the level of awareness, I came to discover that most of us are unaware that God lives within us. I had forgotten. I forgot what it was like before I knew what I know. It may be that a great deal of time has passed since you last knew and I need to give you a mental equivalent. And to understand what mental equivalent is, I will tell you about the mental equivalent I had to rediscover about heat. Although I lived in Los Angeles for 30 years, I had no idea how to pack when I was preparing to go to Miami this week. I had no frame of reference because I had been in cold for so long in Chicago. I had forgot in 3 months what I had known for 3 decades. So when I was standing by the pool on Friday saying that I hadn’t brought a swimsuit, I realized that it hadn’t occurred to me that swimming in the sun was even an option. And although I had somehow adjusted to the cold, I lost my sense of what it is to live in the warmth. But in sunny Miami, I was able to revisit the warmth and remember.

The Goldsmith reading tells us that even though we talk about God, pray about God, theorize about God, preach about God, the It that is God may not be within your memory senses. Your soul remains a witness. But you may not recall what it feels like to be unconditionally loving. Because your offspring is now a teenager or adult, you may have forgotten the unlimited Love and unspeakable Joy you had when he or she first came into your life as an infant. You may have forgotten about those days when your progeny was exploring life as an infant and could do no wrong. You may have forgotten that her or his touching those things you didn’t want him or her to touch was part of his or her discovery about life and his or her relationship to It. But the same thing is going on now that was going on then. It seems that it is different but it’s only the appearance. He or she may be taller, older, but the process continues.

Perhaps you grew up with hatred in your heart because you were oppressed in some way. And perhaps you’ve become accustomed to being angry and feeling disrespected and unappreciated. But something happens because Spirit is always making Itself known. That child you think has been causing you so much grief lets you know that she loves you, that he loves you. Or perhaps something happens to a relative’s health with whom you have been estranged, and you remember that you love him. And then you realize that you love him more than you are annoyed with him or disappointed in him. Even if you had an abusive parent, when that person makes his or her transition, something shifts in you.

Perhaps you saw Kadafi giving blood after 911 and you had more compassion for the Libyan leader and perhaps even compassion for any terrorist. Perhaps you cried when Princess Diana was killed or when John F. Kennedy was killed or when John-John, John Kennedy Jr. was killed, and you forgot that you really don’t hate White people. You really don’t hate rich people. Perhaps you saw something beautiful in nature, a sunset, a lake, or a rose blooming and you remembered that in the midst of all of the ugliness in the world, there is a tremendous amount of beauty. This is the Spirit of God that indwells you. But God will reveal Itself only when you welcome It.

Sometimes it takes us to be in vulnerable moments when our defenses are down and we are not inclined to fight, to see peace and to be at peace. Our Spirit is always present but we aren’t always aware of the presence.

In his book, Practicing the Presence, Joel Goldsmith reminded me that the value of any truth is in the degree of its realization. At the airport in Miami, I was halfway watching television, having changed seats a couple of times with the delays in planes and changing of planes yesterday. President-select Bush was on the television and I realized that he was into New Thought. Yes. He was telling the people how resilient and powerful they are. He was making affirmative statements and giving them a mental equivalent to step into – if they could hear it! He told them that they were supported. He told them that they could not be defeated by any storm. I don’t know. Maybe he got a hold of a copy of “The Secret” and wanted to try using the Law of Attraction to help out his reputation for being there for people. Maybe he was always like this and I just discovered it. Or maybe, I was simply willing to behold the presence and activity of God in him.

Maybe this is a stretch for you to see him this way. That’s okay. You’re not required to see what I see right now. That’s what makes me irreplaceable. You are entitled to come to yourself in whatever way is unique to your being.

The Prodigal Son took a journey when he left the father’s house. He knew adventure, abundance, indulgence, promiscuity, poverty and desperation before he came to himself and realized that he needed to return to the Father in order to realize Peace. And when he returned, he realized more Joy than he knew was possible. He had no idea when he asked for his fortune and left his father’s house that he was simply on a round-trip ticket back to himself. I have my journey. You have yours. But what we learn, if we strive to stay awake is that we have to release any attachment to doing the same things, thinking the same way, holding on to the same image of ourselves. I saw myself as an actress, as a writer, as a director, as a producer before I saw myself as a practitioner and a minister. For the first 20 years of my writing, I thought it was me alone who was doing the writing. I didn’t know that God was writing through me. I didn’t know that each time I moved fully into a character that I was letting go and letting God have Its creative way with me. I didn’t know the intuition and insight I was using in directing was God’s guidance. I came to myself and I realized that I was not in service to my ego, but to God.

I came back to my Self and I realized that the message of Love could be broadcast any where that I am aware of Love. And it didn’t require a theater or a network or a studio to accept it, approve it or sponsor it.

It did however tell me that I can do it in the most unique way by allowing It to use me as Its vessel. For each time I began to think that whatever I was doing required my efforting, God said, “You must not know about me.” And God let me know, I could get another you in a minute by changing me into an appropriate tool in Its kingdom- one that could be used for the highest and best of all concerned.

Jesus was in the wilderness right after his baptism. He caught his destiny in that instant. When he was tempted by Satan (crazy thinking) to command the stones to be made bread or to cast himself off of the pinnacle of the temple and to receive all of the kingdoms of the world, he was able to move out of crazy thinking and see Truth.

He told “Satan” God is who I serve. And the devil left. That’s what happens. Crazy thinking goes away.

If you are fearful, you might do all these things. You might make the stone into bread because you are afraid you will not eat. You may want to prove God’s angels will save you because you might fall. You're exploring your faith. You may want to make sure all of your needs are met. You need to know God, not just know about God, in all areas of your life.

They say God takes care of babies and fools. I am not an infant but I am a baby in God. You may be an adult. You may be an embryo. We all are ideas in the mind of God. Wherever you are, it’s time for a new growth. It’s time you woke up and realized whom you serve. You may get distracted by egoic things. You may start to feel your spiritual power and be tempted to show off. God’s going to shine through you anyway.

There’s no need to prove God, if you know Him. If you know the Mother-Father God is the allness, tests are irrelevant. If you know there is no limit to God’s good, you can trust that everything is in Divine Order.

Peace and blessings!