Much of our day is lived out with that truth, that we are light. How often we forget it coming to the end of the day? Ask yourself how often did I remind myself I am the light? How often this day did I remind somebody else they are light? It's not a judgment for me when I ask that question, it just expresses to me how I walk through life. Hello, oblivious. I am what's going on around me and inside of me as well. How far away my mind can be from the truth of who I am.
I am going to ask you to do something this morning, just use your imagination a little bit, along with your mind, and your heart. I'd like to suggest that you imagine you're in this rather theoretical space. Sometimes we call it heaven, but it's really not an end point. It's a space of consciousness. You're there getting ready to incarnate here on planet earth, which you've done before. This is not something new, it's just a new trip. You gather together all of your guides and your angels, all those people who are helpers in the world beyond, and you all sit down and you map out what you're going to learn, what you're going to do. n this particular lifetime, what lessons are you going to learn? What stuff might you need to clean up from other lifetimes? You work out kind of a blueprint. The events are not chiseled in stone. How they come about is going to happen in different ways for different people. But each one is going to fold away exactly where it's supposed to.
So here I am making this plan. Before I, before I decide to incarnate, before I take physical form, guess what I do? Pick out my parents. They're going to be my first teachers. In fact, they're going to be the ones who probably teach me the most, this time around, not only what to do, but what not to do.
What happens is that I inherited from my parents, not only this huge gene pool of physical attributes, but also strength and weaknesses, psychological difficulties with anger and fear, being lighthearted, being overly serious, my nationality, and all that carries with it. My financial circumstances, my religion of origin, how I express, love, how I take in other emotions, how I express my emotion, how I express my feeling. What's right. What's wrong. What's good. What's bad. All of those things are wrapped up in that package. What happens is I start thinking those things are who I am, because the moment I take physical form, I forget what that is. I've become all of those things that I'm not. I fall into forgetfulness.
You know, I heard this story years and years ago repeated by a number of other people. I was very close to the sources of this story. It was about a little boy who was about four years old, and mom and dad were having another baby. The little four year old said, you know, I want to spend some time. I want to talk to my sister, but I want to do it alone.
All of these thoughts of sibling rivalry and all this other stuff started coming up in the mother and father. They said, we've got a little baby monitor in there, nothing bad is going to happen. They said okay. They hear the pattern of these little four year old feet walking up to the crib in silence. This little boy says to his sister, tell me about God, because I'm starting to forget.
Have you ever looked in a little baby's eyes and seen that infinity shining back at you? Sometimes it's difficult to recall that you were like that once. We go into people training, but one of my teachers likes to call it somebody training. We come in and all of these people are telling us who we are, but they don't know who they are, but for most of us, we don't have any other recourse to go.
I guess what they're saying is true. It seems rather unfair that I would forget what I need to know so deeply and would spend probably the rest of my life, trying to rediscover something that I think I had lost. But you know, it's not unfair so much as the forgetfulness is also part of the journey. Hide and seek would be no fun at all if you knew all the hiding places. Charades would be no fun at all if we knew all the costumes. How are you going to learn and grow? If you don't take the curriculum how are you going to find out what you don't know until you discover what you do? How do you discover what you do know when you realize what you don't? It's realizing that I'm just doing this whole thing all over again.
Well, here I am back on planet earth learning the same thing that I forgot last time: God, and the universal not careless of senseless. The soul always knows that it is being stretched in its capacity for love. It's giving the ability to give and receive and expand each moment of consciousness. It's like Scott Peck's definition of love. He said, "Love is the ability to stretch oneself for one's own spiritual growth or the growth of another." This is not about repeating the same lesson. It's about stretching and moving into a higher consciousness, a higher way of doing things. By the time we become conscious of the path we are on, we begin to realize that all of the situations that show up in life, whether it's a spilled cup of coffee or a sickness or an illness, no matter what end of the spectrum might happen to be our, in some ways, things that have been planned by the soul for us to be able to work on, to learn from. It's all there, nothing is by chance.
And again, it's not chiseled in stone, but anything that shows up in my life, I know exactly why it's there. It is for me to learn from. It's for me to grow with. And I might refuse to do that for a while. I might say, I enjoy being angry. I enjoy being judgmental because you deserve it. Or I enjoy whatever lower vibrational thought that I'm holding onto because somehow or another, I get some juice out of it. That's okay. That's part of my freewill. Eventually what's going to happen though, is I'm going to begin to ask myself, what does this event, this person, this situation, this relationship have to teach me?
These are the circumstances of my life that I've created. What am I supposed to learn from them for me? A central piece of my learning is this huge chunk of insecurity along with this sort of blank spot where my identity should be. I was always trying to discover who I was. And I was always afraid, kind of like the wizard of Oz. I was always afraid somebody was going to tear open the curtains and see this little old man with all these levers and gears and stuff, trying to manipulate what was going on around, and didn't have a clue. I've kind of gotten past that one. But it was with me for many, many years in this lifetime, waiting for somebody to open the curtains and say, I got you.
For each one of us, there is an event that wakes us up to this journey of consciousness. This journey of transformation could be a sickness, could be an illness, could be a divorce. It could be an addiction. It could be something less dramatic. It could be beginning to discover that my life from nine to five has nothing to do with my life from five to nine, or maybe asking the age old question, "Is that all there is, what else is there?" So here we all are.
There are times of forgetfulness for me, as well as for you. I forget the reality that I'm a beloved child of God, unconditionally loved. Then I'll remember, and I'll forget. And I'll remember, and I'll forget again again, again, again, and to my little personality self, it seems so sensitive. Why am I forgetting? Just so I can remember. He often described that as being stuck or being lost, but it's only true for the personality. The limited self, the soul has never been stuck, has never lost. It doesn't mean that the discomfort of life disappeara, but what it does, it reminds me that everything that comes along has a purpose has a meaning. In fact, everything that comes along is of God. Now the personality might be upset because many of the learnings that we have to do are not terribly clear. It might even be a little bit angry. Stretching doesn't always feel good. Sometimes when you begin to stretch, you notice, oh, I really needed to do that. It felt a little bit uncomfortable at the beginning. Let me see if I can just, just sort of work my way into stretch.
What would it be like to open your heart just a little bit more? We've all had this experience where we've gone through something difficult in life. We worked our way through it somehow or another, and got to the other side. And all of a sudden, somebody in our lives, a friend or a family member, we find that is doing or going through the same thing. Unbelievably, what we have now is the gift of compassion. I'm not going to tell you what to do, but I can help guide you through that, because I walked through that fire myself. I know when I say, I know what you're feeling, you can believe me. Because I do know what you're feeling, and people will know the difference between you just saying that wanting to be nice. But when somebody comes up to me or I come up to somebody else who's struggling with darkness is struggling with depression I say, I know how you feel; they know. I know sometimes we don't even realize we have grown until we're presented with a situation in life that we would have responded to one way. And we find ourselves responding to it in another way.
We were often like Gabriel or like Jacob with the angel. He said, I will not go and let it go until you bless me. That is such a marvelous truth in a marvelous story. That struggle I might have with uncertainty with, with self-esteem that's just one little piece. Can you imagine the thousands of people that move into and out of our lives? The thousands of encounters, we have, all of those people who have touched us who have, and we have been touched by and all of those people.
It's all part of this picture. I think one of the things we forget in Unity, because we live in Unity, we like to explain everything. We like to have everything make sense. But also over in the corner, there is this thing called mystery. It's stuff that we can't explain. It goes beyond the intellect. It goes beyond our human mind. The essence of truth of who you are and who I am. This unconditional love child of God surpasses all understanding. It can never be proven. It can simply be known. I remember Reverend Ray and I were having a talk one time before Sunday school. We were talking about giving sermons which we both really enjoy doing. I said, there's really only one sermon. It goes by a lot of different names, but there's really only one. He said, you know, I think you're right. What would you call it? I said the one sermon that we're all talking about all the time, even though the clothes we wear a different is, "Remember who you are."
Everything else is just commentary. You see beyond your personality self, beyond all the roles you decided to play, beyond all the characters and all the costumes in this moment of truth. You don't throw all that stuff away either. It doesn't disappear. None of that is a waste. You begin to recognize that this personality and ego structure that you spent a lifetime putting energy into and creating, instead of being something that we throw away and say, that's not who I am. What happens is in the truth of our being. We make that into the lens through which the divine light that you are shines through. That's why we can say each one of you is unique, because each one of us are the sum total of all of our life experiences. That is that lens through which the light shines through. Some lenses are clearer than others.
So Mother Teresa or Gandhi combined, I know you're a mother Theresa you're Gandhi, but you're really God in disguise because the veil between you and the reality of who you truly are, is so thin. I see right through it. And then there are others in life that are a little bit more challenging when we have a really difficult time seeing the truth of who they are. And yet that's where the lessons the lessons are. And Mother Teresa is always shining. It's very easy to see God in her. The challenge comes in seeing God in others that we have a real difficult time with. When my personality gets ensnared, in their personality, from my beliefs today in awareness, there's no end to all of this. You don't get there. That's only a premise that's held onto by the limit itself. The journey, the growth, the transformation is a continual one, God and love and truth and life are always evolving. They're never just in one place growing in ways that are mysterious. And yet in ways that we can be aware of every moment of every day.
Remember who you are. You remember the truth of all other beings are as well, no matter what they might look like, no matter what they might appear like, no matter what your personality might react to them. As beyond thought, beyond judgment, beyond feelings, remember who you are and know that this transformational journey we are on is not just the journey that we've taken any number of times before. We're doing the same thing, expecting different results. The journey we are on in this moment in time is going deeper and deeper and deeper into the truth of who you are. Because you can go deeper and deeper and deeper in the truth of who you are, you can go deeper and deeper and deeper into truth who others are. We are all united as one in spirit, in life, and love, grace, truth.
May all beings be at peace. May all beings be free of suffering and may all beings remember who they are.
Thank you.
