It is evening to you who are gathered at Mickleton in England, while for us here it is morning in the Chapel at 100 Mile House. The evening and the morning may remind us of the creative process. This creative process is now in effect and indeed always has been. It has emphasized itself in our consciousness to the extent that we have been willing to align ourselves with it. So we do have an awareness of the reality and the effectiveness of this creative process. For most, the fact of it has been almost entirely excluded from consciousness. Human beings in general have been so busy about their own affairs that they have had no time to entertain even the possibility of a larger creative process.
Of course, there has been some awareness that there must be something of this sort, because the earth itself, our habitation, moves in predictable ways: turning on its axis and moving around the sun in its orbit. The seasons of the year come and go. It appears that weather is affected by extraterrestrial influences, principally from the sun, as indeed human behavior may be. A certain amount of thought has been given to the sundry cycles in human affairs, such as the variations in the stock market, for instance, seeking somehow to correlate them with influences emanating out of the solar system, without too much success I may say. But there is in the background of human consciousness some sort of recognition that there are things on the move beyond the daily experience of human beings following out their sundry affairs; however, human affairs take precedence over all. We certainly would not seek to make any such correlations, because we are well aware that human affairs are not a reflection of this creative process; they, rather, evidence the failure of human beings to be aligned with the creative process. So there are troubles and tribulation.
We have concerned ourselves with coming into an alignment with the creative process, that we might be of some use on the surface of the earth in extending what would probably be looked upon as some sort of influence into the consciousness of mankind in general. There has been very little awareness on our own part of the vastness of the power that is available to be embodied when there is true alignment with the creative process. We know that something works, something does come together, there is creative movement. We begin to be aware of what it is that is happening in the experience of mankind. This awareness is present to the extent that we are aligned with the creative process. The awareness has been absent for most because of lack of such alignment.
There has indeed been a condition of formlessness in human consciousness insofar as the truth was concerned, together with a chaotic void also. Utilizing these words to describe the condition, we are immediately aware that it relates to possibilities in the creative process; for when the spirit of God, the creative power, moves upon the face of this condition, the result of that movement is the appearance of light. I am sure that we ourselves can testify to this fact. There is a certain level of what might be called enlightenment present, enabling a different view to come within the range of our awareness. On this basis we are no longer so thoroughly trapped in the arbitrary restrictions of the state of human nature consciousness. There is some light at least. And because there is some light there has been the creation, to whatever extent in our own experience, of a firmament which divides the waters which are above from the waters which are below. This firmament was referred to as heaven, and it is the proper dwelling place of man. Man belongs in this firmament, which, although it was described as dividing the waters from the waters, obviously also connects the waters to the waters.
Water is a very apt symbol of the substance which accommodates the spirit of Father God and Mother God: the waters that were above presumably relating to Father God, and the waters below to Mother God, with the heaven, where man properly is, in between to provide the means for the blending of these two aspects of spirit. This is something that occurs in man. The human view of things has produced a God, in the consciousness of many people, who is separate from human beings, more or less aloof somewhere. This of course is fantasy. Indeed all of human experience is present in this realm of fantasy. We have seen this realm as being characterized by the sense of separateness. There is separateness between people, between groups of people. Separateness is the basis for human function on earth, which minimally takes into account any larger cycles that may be at work in favor of concentrating entirely on human affairs. This state of separateness prevails, and it is also a state of darkness.
In the light there is oneness, and when light begins to be the experience in consciousness the fact of oneness emerges into experience. There may be many theories about this state of oneness in human minds and hearts in the present state of human nature, but theories are of little consequence. It is the fact that needs to be experienced. We have consciously offered ourselves to that experience, while at the same time hopefully maintaining the theory. The theory tends to dominate, rather than the experience. But at least in theory we know that the experience is important. If one could permit the theory to recede into the background of consciousness, then to that extent there may be room in consciousness and in experience in living to accommodate the truth.
The creative process is part of the truth. The spirit of the Father and the Mother seen in relationship to God is a part of the truth, but it doesn't mean much until it is experienced, and it cannot be experienced until there is the firmament, until there is a heaven. And that alone is not of much consequence until there is someone in it, until there is the experience of the heaven. Then there is a place in which the spirit of Father God and Mother God may blend in man, so that oneness is the experience—because the fact of the matter is that there is no aloof God sitting out there somewhere, as some human beings have imagined. And because this turned out to be seemingly a fantasy, a lot of people of course have rejected it. I don't know whether we should object at all to the rejection of a fantasy, or that we should feel badly about the acceptance of a fantasy. It's just what has happened, that's all. And people, including ourselves, have behaved the way we have on the basis mostly of living in a very fantastic world. I think most people looking at the world, observing it round about, are inclined to shake their heads a bit and say it's seemingly rather insane, it's a fantasy. But everybody goes on living there and behaving in fantastic ways, so the fantasy keeps increasing in scope.
But there is a creative process, and for whatever reason—we do not need to try to figure it out; the human mind couldn't anyway—there has been an intensification of the spirit moving in the creative process and it's affecting everybody. It has produced an increase of fantasy, but it has also begun to emerge in some—and I trust that we might be included in that number—as a consciousness of the creative process, because there is somewhat of an alignment with it, so that our living is not merely a reaction to external affairs, external events and circumstances, which is the usual condition of human nature. But there is something of a yielding—we might call it repentance—in the heart and a willingness of the mind to agree, so that there could be space for the experience of heaven. We wouldn't even consider it, it wouldn't even enter consciousness at all, if it was not for the fact that there was a little light.
Light is always the first order of business in any particular cycle of the creative process. As long as it is allowed to work the way it works everything emerges as it should. It doesn't matter that there is darkness, chaos, provided that there is space to permit the movement of the spirit of God, which is internal—it's not somewhere else—upon the face of this present state of affairs. Then there begins to come light. It is your experience of the movement of this spirit, a focused movement of this spirit on the face of the substance of chaos in you, that has permitted the dawning of light, so that something might be seen that wasn't seen before. And this first seeing relates to heaven.
We begin to understand the pollution that has been present in the heaven. Obviously it's reflected in external form in the atmosphere around us. We exist these days in a very polluted atmosphere. Why do you think that is? Oh, it can be explained very neatly by saying it's all the emanations out of the automobiles and acid rain and all this sort of stuff, all consequent upon the behavior of human beings. But why have human beings behaved the way they have? We can trace it back a little further, and of course their behavior is based in the maintenance of separateness. One might say that most people don't know how to let it not be the case, because everybody feels isolated from everybody else. They get together in packs, in cities for instance, trying to nudge up against each other to make themselves feel as though they were not so separate as they know they are. But it doesn't work; there is more aloneness in cities than anywhere else.
The pollution in the heaven must be allowed to be dissipated. I am not speaking at the moment of the atmosphere of the earth. Human beings are trying to do something about that, not very successfully. Of course not, because the first order of business is to clean up the atmosphere inside the person, in the heaven there. And that comes, of course, by the continuing movement of the spirit of God. It was the spirit of God, after all, which initiated the cycle in the appearance of light, so that one could begin to see something. Now we begin to see that the heaven is absolutely essential. And it's a personal matter. It's a personal matter in the initial stages, as we well know, so that there might be a true heaven, clear, clear as crystal in one's own experience, in one's own heart and mind.
For this to happen, to get it in shape so to speak—which would be the usual human approach—then presumably there would need to be walls and battlements erected, defenses against all the pollution that is coming in. Well, I suppose in a sense this has been what has been attempted. Even from the standpoint of our Emissary approach it has been translated in consciousness all too often as the necessity of vigilantly opposing the various…what?—evil spirits that might come in to pollute the heaven, things like resentment for instance, judgment (of course there couldn't be any resentment if there wasn't judgment), fear, jealousy, all these things. “Oh, we have to fend off all these evil spirits.” That is a most futile undertaking. It's like the so-called defenses that the nations erect around themselves to fend off these hostile incursions by evil embodied in other people. Well, if it's embodied in other people, it must be embodied in oneself too! So here is evil defending itself against evil.
This has nothing to do with the creative process. It's a human invention, which has produced all the ills that there are in the world. But now we are not so much concerned with vigilantly opposing those opportunities to become subject to fear and resentment and judgment and accusation and criticism and all these things. Heaven doesn't exist on that basis. Heaven is a reality already. An unpolluted heaven is a reality already. But it isn't a reality in our own experience, that's the point. We can accept the reality without opposing anything. The reality is available.
We have learned something about maintaining a heaven. The heaven is maintained because our thoughts, our feelings, our actions, are stimulated, produced, from the impact of the spirit of truth, not from the environment. There is a vast distinction here, because we have all known what it means to be subject to the environment, and I am sure we still are, in the sense that it stimulates what we think and the way we act, the way we behave. It certainly engenders a lot of emotion—all this as long as that is the state of polarity in which we find ourselves. We could call it ex-polarity: polarity in the things around us, the things, incidentally, over which we rightly have dominion. Of course this has been the effort of human beings: to get dominion. They never have. As long as that is the polarity, then there is nothing but trouble. That has proven itself out. But the polarity becomes in-polarity when the stimulation—and actually the base, the foundation—for any thinking we do, any emotions we have, any action that puts in an appearance, springs out of the spirit of truth. That is in-polarity, and there is a vast difference in behavior then.
For that to occur there must be the heaven in which to dwell, an unpolluted heaven. And we have learned something about that because, to the extent that we have been willing to accept this type of internal stimulation for our living, we have found the pollution clearing. We have found that it clears not only for oneself as an individual but the same thing is happening with respect to others. We begin to find ourselves associating in a clarifying heaven. Today we have this grouping of people here gathered and another one in England, you folk over there and we folk over here. The distance doesn't matter because we find ourselves, to whatever degree, in a mutual heaven. It's the same there as it is here. What does that testify to? At least some measure of oneness.
Oneness cannot appear on earth until it first is known in heaven. The fact of the matter is, as we well know, that nothing appears on earth until first it is present in whatever the heaven may be in which the individual is living—or existing, as a rule—usually a very polluted heaven. And there is a very polluted earth. Of course! It's the way it works. To try to clear up the pollution of the earth without letting anything be done about the pollution of the heaven is utter futility, a waste of time. Nothing ever happens on that basis, no matter how many rules and regulations are made. Human beings live in a polluted heaven and they spew that polluted heaven into the earth. They can't help but do that as long as they live in a polluted heaven.
So we are willing, I trust, to allow this pollution to be clarified in our own individual heavens. When we do that we find that others are doing it and we begin to have a collective less-polluted heaven. It is out of this heaven that the fact of the union, the oneness, of Father God and Mother God may come into experience. Nobody knows what that means, because they haven't let it happen. The only way to know anything is to let it happen in one's own experience. One may have intellectual ideas about this, concepts about that, beliefs about the other thing, but it's all fantasy, it's all theory. And human beings live in this state of fantastic theory, knowing nothing. The fact that they know nothing is constantly being demonstrated by the insistence upon searching to find the answer. They don't know the answer, of course partly because there isn't any insofar as the state in which human beings exist is concerned, because it's fantasy. What answer is there for fantasy?
I suppose we have all dreamt dreams in which we have endeavored to act in a rational manner, but we have found it was very difficult because everything was so fantastic. There is no solution there. One may spend what seems like a whole night—it probably isn't—endeavoring to solve the problems of the dream, ultimately failing to solve the problems. But wonder of wonders, there weren't any problems anymore when you woke up! This is exactly the same thing insofar as the state of mankind is concerned. Wake up! Let the light come on.
People are inclined to wake up when the light begins to shine. There are those who don't like the light, of course; some creatures of darkness burrow further into their self-centeredness, their darkened state, when the light comes on. But there are others who notice it. Very often, to start with, they don't believe it: “No, it isn't really there.” And there are so many things in the dream state that come up to convince you it isn't really there. The dreaming has become so customary, it has become an addictive habit, that people don't want to let go of it, because there is always success—whatever success is—just around the corner. Did you ever have a very successful dream? I don't know what success would be. I think success is just to wake up, and that is the success. Wake up! Become aware of the light. And because there is an awareness of the light, a certain enlightenment in one's own consciousness, the necessity for the heaven comes into view.
There must be a heaven, an unpolluted heaven, unpolluted by all the things that govern human nature. Judgment is the main thing—accusation, blame, criticism, all these things, because they are so easily justified: obviously one has to accuse someone of doing something because they did it! Well perhaps that's supposed to be logic, but if it kills you it might be better not to do it. And that is the fact of the matter; it has been regularly killing people every generation for thousands of years, millennia. And everybody still goes on doing it because they can justify it. So one of the pollutions in the heaven has been this matter of self-justification. Let it dissolve in the light, in the light because you see how stupid it is. Finally you wouldn't do it for anything. You know it's destroying you. There is no sense to being destroyed, not if we are present on earth for a reason. Of course heretofore nobody has known what the reason was, so they have invented their own. And we have all done that.
But now in the light we begin to become aware of the reason why we are here: to provide this blending point for Father and Mother God in our own experience, that the truth may be known. Merely to say “the blending point for Father and Mother God” doesn't mean very much. One has to have the experience of it to know what it is. That is the experience of the truth. And the truth frees the individual into being man, male or female, not separate from anything. If you are not separate from anything, why do you need names to indicate it? We necessarily talk about God perhaps now because separation is still a fact; but if there is oneness, that is the experience. There is nothing to compare it to then, except of course this miserable state in which we have been existing. Then we wouldn't wish to have anything more to do with that, except insofar as we may be in position to provide what is necessary to transform it, to let those who are present in that state have the opportunity of rising up into an unpolluted heaven. They could either choose to do that or not; that's up to anyone.
But for ourselves, surely, it is our business to do it. If that is what is done, one can speak from the standpoint of heavenly authority. And the power was said to be almighty, wasn't it?—almighty but not available for human use to promote their affairs. It takes a lot of sweat of the brow to continue in that mode. The earth, amongst other things, has to be raped to keep human beings going in their miserable human nature condition. The atmosphere consequently is polluted, and all the tribulations of the flesh are present, all because of this failure to allow the light to be received and to be the basis for one's living experience.
We have all had immense opportunity to see and to understand; and we have, at times, felt rather self-satisfied because we thought we saw and understood so much. But it means absolutely nothing until it is the experience. People talk a lot about that, but what is our experience? What is our experience in this moment? Do the things of the human nature state recede in our consciousness so that in this moment they virtually vanish away? What do you do when you go out again? It seems to be a habit to sort of drop them off outside the door as you come in, and then, when you go out, pick them all up again. And one is again in subjection to the devil, as it might be put—that's right, to human nature. That is the devil, intent upon destruction. It's rather stupid, really; it's going to destroy everything, but it can't do that without destroying itself as well.
So we stand together in the creative process, letting it work, letting the light come on, letting the heaven be purified, and abiding in the heaven with a great concern to allow the radiation of heaven to be the expression of our living, so that the heaven is protected that way. It is not protected by building bulwarks against the evil, so called. It is protected by being the radiance, by being the light. The heaven can only exist that way in the consciousness of mankind. You know very well that if you stop your radiant stance for a minute, something comes in and dissipates the heaven. “Oh, I was so peaceful and happy, everything was wonderful, and now it's terrible again.” Well who did it? One did it oneself. But the habit has always been to look around and say, “It was that person who treated me badly so that this heaven couldn't exist anymore; it was because of that person.” If the heaven ceases to exist for anyone it does so because of that one, him- or herself, only. No one else can dissipate it. One always does it for oneself.
So we may abide in heaven, and I rejoice in whatever extent of that purified heaven may have been present today in this configuration of unification, between those here in the Chapel and those there at Mickleton. Of course it's a little more personal even than that, isn't it? It's between you and the person sitting next to you. And it's a little more personal than that again; it's all inside oneself! Let it be clear. Let the heaven be clear because there is a radiant outpouring of spirit. Then the heaven is safe. But any little bit of human nature that gets in there destroys the heaven, just like that. The heaven has never been able to exist in human experience because of the coarseness of human experience. It couldn't accommodate the heaven. The heaven couldn't exist in that state of coarseness. Let it be purified.
So we share the processes of the creative process, which does purify when we let it. We rejoice to have had this collective opportunity of purification today. I would like to give opportunity to Lindsay to say a word to us from Mickleton.
Lindsay Rawlings — I look out, Martin, over a small sea of faces: those of the Mickleton unit and a sprinkling of friends, and a handful of representation from the London Emissary family—the faces of ones who are, to whatever extent, aligned with the creative process and very evidently increasingly aware of their own, our own, individual significance in the huge outworking in which we are all so intimately involved. And each of us is increasingly in position to allow the spirit of Father God and Mother God to blend. I think the evidence of this is that our collective experience—I know it’s true for me individually and I’m absolutely sure it’s true for everyone else that I can see in front of me individually—our experience is one of increasing lightness. We know what you have said is true, we know it in our own experience. And it’s iust such a privilege to be connected so very directly with you in this moment, and with those who are in your immediate realm of vision, waking up and rising up and ever so willing to stand beside you in the way. This comes with all of our love from Mickleton.
Lord Exeter — Thank you, Lindsay. Of course we may see this matter of standing beside each other as still being a state of separateness. There is an experience to be known that has not been included in the lexicon of the human-nature state—oneness. This is not known, of course, without what is defined by the word love. Love is the power of blending, of fusion. Then we do not find that we are all separate from each other and that we have somehow an ego to protect and preserve. This is the basic idea which has produced human nature. The human ego shall pass away! I say that with the greatest of confidence. It has done it in every generation. The human ego needs to pass away. But what shall remain? Thus far, apparently, only a corpse, a disintegrating corpse. What an evidence of abject failure.
The human ego is held to the bosom of one’s experience until the last gasp. Surely it’s better to let it go at this first gasp, so that it may be free to pass away, leaving the facility of heart and mind and body to be occupied in expression by the one who created it in the first place: the truth of oneself. And truth is not separate from truth. We are all included in the whole. We may have different functions, different evidences of character, but none of them contradict each other. They are all blended together in the one whole, just as all the parts of our own physical bodies are properly blended together as a whole. Usually they are not allowed this experience because of our maintenance of the state of separation in consciousness. And then the body falls apart. It should on that basis; it’s simply obeying the command.
Let us be sure that the heaven is pure within ourselves, there is no shadow of turning, certainly no self-justification or judgment to pollute the atmosphere. Let the atmosphere be clear, and the creative process which originates in what has been spoken of as Father God and Mother God may emerge to be known in our own experience, be known to be what we ourselves are. It may be interesting to talk about it, think about it, but it’s wonderfully fulfilling surely to let it happen. Then we really know what it is. Otherwise all we do is theorize, and we die in our theories. Let us live in the truth.
