Emissary Servers Council Sunrise Ranch Loveland, Colorado
Greetings and welcome, everybody. Good to be here together this morning, in the room and online, good to see friends old and new.
We've had a remarkable week here in the Servers Council, following up on Trustee Sessions the week before. It was glorious in the room here, what we got up to and with people online, and I'm happy to report that people online had a very engaged experience. And Sece was our head of online engagement. Thank you, Sece, for helping to make that happen. Thanks to everyone who participated, contributed to what occurred, which is culminating in this hour, and then in the service expansion period at 1:15 here.
I’d like to continue with a theme that we were on in the Council that I was speaking to yesterday afternoon. I'd like to see where we can take it together. To me, it is provocative. As I first began to think of this in this way somewhere in the last week, it struck me as highly provocative for myself. I don't know how it will strike you, but we'll give it a go here, and see where it goes.
So, I want to start with this. The indigenous peoples of the world look at postmodern humanity and they see a sickness of the heart. And you can look it up, you can research it. It's prolific, meaning throughout many indigenous peoples around the globe, this is how they see it. And of course, it concerns them. There are the Kogi people in Colombia, some of whom came here several years ago. They live high up in the peaks of the mountains, peaks that go to 18,000 feet. And they've been isolated from the rest of the world until recently. And then recently they came down out of the mountains to express their concern and bring their teaching to the world. And on their world tour they came here. They see themselves as the elder brothers, and postmodern humanity as the younger brother, and they came down the mountain to address the sickness in the heart of the younger brother. So that story has proliferated around the world.
Oftentimes, the sickness of the heart is associated with humanity's relationship with the Great Mother, however expressed. The Great Mother and the Earth that is the embodiment at one level of the Great Mother. So, there's a concern expressed about something out of integrity, something off in the relationship with the Great Mother. And that relates to something off in the heart.
There's the story of what goes wrong for us as human beings that's at the very beginning of our Bible. When you think about it, would you say that that story was written by indigenous peoples, a First Nations people? We don't look at it quite that way now. Now it's some kind of icon of Christianity or Judaism. There was no Christianity when it was written. There was no Judaism when it was written. No, this is a First Nations people, whatever that might mean. As I think about this story, actually, I thought about it this way for some time. It is the story of what goes wrong for us as human beings, and especially what goes wrong in the heart and the consequences of that.
So, I don't intend to read the whole story. But it is, as we know, the story of Adam and Eve. It's hard to know exactly what the author had in mind when they wrote it. Undoubtedly, there were circumstances that they were seeing, yes, when they spoke about what they did. And there was the symbology of the story that related to those circumstances, not all of which we can really know. But here's what we can do. We can intuit for ourselves the significance of this story, the potential significance, in terms of our own life experience and what's happening for us. So, I'm inviting you to see it a certain way, to try it on, and see if it illuminates something for you. I'd like that to be the test here, not whether it's accurate to a past that we don't really know for sure anyway.
What I want to suggest to you is that in the story, Eve is the human heart. She is the human heart. And Adam is a representation of the human mind. It's a story of what happens between heart and mind, and not only between themselves, but in relationship to the highest order of identity.
Portrayed in the story is the Lord God, the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day. So, what happened? The idea came to Eve that there could be wisdom and it would be good for her to gain the wisdom, as it was put, of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. What would be good and what would be bad? We might imagine, what would be good for her? Instead of allowing that tree to be in the hands of the Lord God, in the hands of the Creator, so that the unfoldment of creation happened according to its own times and seasons, its own direction and purpose and pattern, that she could eat of that tree, meaning that she could change the cycles of unfoldment of creation around her in a way that would be good for her.
And the story is of a collusion, the collusion between heart and mind. And the heart says, “Hey, mind, I got a great idea here. Will you collude with me in this great idea to make things better and to make me happy, the heart happy? I would be happy if you, the mind, helped me arrange the pattern of life around that would be pleasing to me.” In a way, a logical thing to do, right? Why not? Yet we know how the story goes. The way the story goes is that in doing that, in that act of collusion, what was cut out of the picture was the Creator, the presence of the Creator, the wisdom of the Creator, the wisdom of life itself, the wisdom of how to create, the wisdom that allows human beings and the planet and all life to prosper got cut out of the picture.
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There's something so remarkable in this story, I'll say remarkable to me—you can see what it is for you—that only just became glaringly evident to me in the last little while. And it is that the story is a story of the volition of the heart. Volition, not a word we use that often. Volition has to do with will. And in the origin of the word is also the word wish, the wish, the will, and I believe in there also is choice. And so, the story is a story of the volition of the heart, of the choice of the heart, what the heart chose to do. And the mind went along and then blamed it on the heart. That's in the story, too. So why is that significant? Why is it significant to recognize that the heart makes a choice? It is for this reason: that if the heart could make one choice, it could make a different choice.
I think I tended to see choice as a matter of the mind, like a mental choice. That's easy to think about. But consider this. I invite you to ponder deeply that your heart has a choice to make, and that the choice of the heart establishes the basis for everything else that goes on. If the heart makes the choice that Eve made in the story, the mind is helpless. That's a strong word, yes? Helpless. The best the mind can do is stay steady. Stay steady and stay centered. But without the heart, the mind can't create. It can think. It can use its rational faculties but it is unable to create in alignment with, in attunement with the Lord God, because the means for the connection with the Lord God is through the heart.
The best, as I say, the mind can do in that case is to stay steady, undeviating, and the mind can also be, you might say, a coach for the heart. Isn't that true? Whether it's between us or have a little conversation with your own heart. Do you ever do that? Give yourself a little talking to, give your own heart a little talking to, and say, “Hey, it's gonna be okay. Hey, you could recenter here, you could open here.” And still, at the end of the day, it is the volition of the heart that allows all the rest of what is meant to happen for us as human beings to happen.
When the heart opens to the presence of the Lord God, to the presence of the Divine, there's all kinds of connection between heart and mind. Realms of the subconscious mind begin to open up and be available to the conscious mind. That happens within an individual. If the heart is frozen do you think very well? If the heart is frozen in fear we don't think very well. The subconscious mind is not ready to play its part to offer up what it should offer up. It's impossible to be intelligent on that basis, truly intelligent. And so, we have postmodern man. Tremendous intelligence at one level of things to build an atomic bomb, but incredibly, incredibly ignorant, incredibly ignorant. Only someone who has a sickness of the heart could do such a thing.
So, as I began to think about these matters and how all this goes, there is something incredibly sad in the story, and something incredibly sad in where we've come to as humanity. But there's also something happy portrayed in the story. And it is the simplicity of the path back to wholeness, to the healing of the psychic break, as we've spoken about it. The psychic break between the human psyche, between our humanity, and the higher reality of who we are, the simplicity of that healing. You might say, in its outworking, there's complexity to it. But at the root of it, at the beginning of it, is the volition of the heart, is a heart choice. And if our heart has made one choice, it could make a different choice. And when it makes that different choice, everything is set up for success in the human experience.
And the choice is so simple. It doesn't depend on anything other than finding the source of love, the source of identity and presence within yourself, within being, to find that and to turn to it with all your heart and love with all your heart and open with all your heart. That’s all. And then in that turning and in that opening to receive, to receive the river into the heart. And doing that, yes, there's something to think, there's something to do. I'm not saying that's the end of it, and I'm not saying we should be mindless people. I'm just saying that the road back to wholeness as a human being and as a human race begins with an act of the heart.
And so here this morning, we're speaking to the body of humanity and bringing this change of heart to the fore and calling attention to the opportunity for that simple act of turning the heart and opening the heart and letting in the spirit. And then the simple act of doing the most natural thing in the world when love comes in, which is you love back. And when you let love in and love back, then there's a generation of love in the human capacity that begins to burgeon and affect everything in the human psyche and then begins to flow out into your world, our world.
I want to cite a second story here in the Bible, in Genesis. There are a number of stories, as I've pointed to recently, of what goes wrong for us as human beings, just as there are in all cultures, yes? Maybe the most familiar might be the story of Pandora. Pandora's box, the role that curiosity plays, as it's put. Anyway, you go around to peoples around the world; they have what we think of as mythological stories or symbolic stories of what goes wrong for us as human beings. There are four or five of those right at the beginning of Genesis. And one of them is the story of the Tower of Babel. I've come to view it as a humorous story. It has a lot of humor in it to me when you get the symbology of it, and maybe I'll just read it here:
“And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech. And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there. And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar.” [Genesis 11:1-3]
What could be the significance of that? They had brick for stone and slime for mortar. So, what is slime? It's generally thought that slime is pitch. So, some kind of petroleum product. Can you imagine building a tower to heaven with gooey petroleum pitch in between the stones? Like that's destined for failure right there. And they didn't have stone. They didn't have like the real thing, which is they would want to build it out of, which is stone. They had this humanly manufactured thing, bricks. They had bricks and slime, right? It's a story of not building out of reality.
“And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name…” Let us make us a name. Any ego in there? “…lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.” So, you have a human effort to make something of ourselves and make something of even oneness. And so, the remainder of this story goes back to a superstitious view of the world that was so prevalent back then and even now. And in the superstitious view of the world, the gods are doing everything. There are supernatural powers that are at work. And if we screw up, we blame it on them, right? They're taking it out on us. So, it's portrayed exactly this way in this story. And I say that just because you have to understand that element of the storytelling and kind of filter it out, because it is this superstitious lens through which the author of the story, forgive me, was influenced. So, as it said:
“And the Lord came down to see the city and tower, which the children of men builded. And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they all have one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city.” [Genesis 11:5-8]
So, it is a story of misunderstanding among people, and division
There's a man who is a friend of some of ours, Etzion Becker, who writes about Genesis. He lives in Israel and speaks Hebrew fluently. And he says of the Hebrew language that it can't be translated. He says that the Hebrew Bible can't be translated because for people who truly understand Hebrew in the deepest sense, it is speaking to them at many levels—at many levels, and those levels aren't translated by a mental translation of the words. There is vibration.
There are pictures in the written language, all of which are conveying something of a spiritual nature. The little I know of the Hawaiian language is that there are vowels and an articulation of vowels that are conveying a meaning that is past the intellectual meaning that could be translated. Uranda said of the Motherland tongue, something similar, that it spoke in a different way. It conveyed meaning in a different way. The vowel sounds were far more important than the consonants were. And through those vowel sounds, the essences of spirit were conveyed.
Does it strike you that these things are related to a matter of the heart? That true communication among people involves the heart and the heart's ability to express essences of the Creator and essences of creation, to communicate at that level. So, what happens if the heart has made a choice not to open to the Creator, not to be a vessel for the processes of creation, for the expression of Spirit?
One individual makes that choice, another individual makes that choice, and then the basis for communication is undone, the basis to be speaking one language. And you could get all of the intellectual components of what is said and shared right, and there will not be oneness, and there will not be communication. Because without a communication of the heart, which brings the communication subconscious to subconscious, there's a Tower of Babel. And as it said, you can't put Humpty Dumpty back together again that way. That's not how it happens. It happens because there's something that's happened in the heart. And when that happens in the heart, there's something that happens in the mind, conscious and subconscious. There's a communication that’s possible, subconscious to subconscious, heart to heart, and then the mind can be brilliant.
One of the things that's portrayed in the story of the Tower of Babel is a quality of human bravado. Did you hear the bravado in it? “Let us make a name for ourselves.” And it was in Adam and Eve. This will be good. This will work well. We'll be happy. In the story that I know of, the history of humankind, it went like that, meaning that there was something that went off in consciousness. There was this psychic break that happened. And then there was bravado. “This is going great.” And for probably centuries, that bravado continued. The bravado continued. We'll build this. We'll build that. We think of Atlantis as being a place where there were all kinds of inventions, all kinds of technology. Bravado. We've eaten of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. We're doing this on our own. We got it going.
And then there was a looking to people who had not broken their allegiance, their alignment, their entrainment with the Most High. And we can only imagine that when those people were looked at, it's like, “You poor slobs. You have no idea what you're doing. You're so ineffective. You're not doing all this brilliant stuff that we've got going.” I think it had to go something like this. I can't claim to know. You look at the Kogi people. Who are they? Funny little men climbing down out of the mountains. But they know something. And the thing that they know is the thing that all people should know. I'm not claiming anything spectacular for them because I don't really know them that well. But that's the principle of it.
I do believe we've, as Western civilization—in fact, the whole world—totally underestimated this matter of the heart. It gets so overlooked. I can say not entirely, but in both East and West, there's a tendency to intellectualism. There are different brands of it, but a failure to recognize the matter of the heart that is so pivotal underneath it all.
I looked it up again last night, and in our King James version of the Bible, how many times over would you say the word “heart” is used relative to the word “mind”? Any ideas? Five times over. You know, we don't think of it that way. The Bible is often thought of as a moralistic book, a book of dogma and doctrine and so on. But within it is a teaching of the heart. “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart.” Not just of the heart, but a teaching of the heart is there. What do you think the Psalms are about and many other teachings? What was Jesus teaching? He was teaching something of the heart, you might say, in a spiritual context with vast spiritual consequences. And yet, what he was teaching was something that so challenged the human heart to do something different “as we're forgiven, we forgive those who trespass against us.” That's a radical teaching of the heart, and so it goes. I could cite many more.
In the Hindi tradition, the heart center here is Anahata Chakra. Here it is, halfway up and halfway down the stairs, with three centers above and three below. There is something here that is so vital, that is embodied right in our physicality—right in our physicality. And as there's a softening here, the higher centers within the human experience can descend and move into the lower centers, and what's from below can rise up. But it requires, then, that openness of heart. And yes, there are those two directions. There is our openness upward, we say, the openness of the heart to the source of Love above in the presence of the Lord, not as something separate from who we are. And then there's the descent down through the heart into the world so that we take heart-filled action in the world, not just mentally-based action, but heart-based action. We call that courage, “Coeur”—the heart. Courage. That's the Spirit of God in action that moves through the heart, not just the heart, but moves through the heart so that there's heart-filled action, there's courageous action in the world, and we need that courageous action.
Maybe like you, I've got nothing better to do than allow my heart to be centered in the One I love, the reality that I love, and then follow the path that is given to me, given to us, out of that reality, and just be with that, be with the Way of the River. And then as Robert Frost said it in his poem, “You go too. You go too.” We invite our friends to go with us. Let's do this. Thank you all.
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