The Desire Path

by sublimity-001-main | Mar 13, 2014 | 2014, Emergence, Post

There’s an apocryphal story about a landscape designer who convinced campus planners at a major college to leave out the paved paths the first semester, and allow students and faculty to reveal where the paths should go. They resisted the idea at first, fearing that people would get lost, take all manner of shortcuts, create a maze of different routes with no order, and ultimately destroy the existing terrain. What’s more, they were sure to receive many complaints about people having to trudge through dirt and mud as they stumbled their way to classes. It would be chaos.

The designer reminded them that previous experience had proven that people take shortcuts and create their own paths anyway, often leading to redesign, repaving, and increased expense. They couldn’t deny that fact. So, following some debate, they relented and gave the designer a short time to prove his theory. After a few weeks, the results weren’t good.

As the planners had feared, the students did appear to be creating all manner of arbitrary routes, the grounds were in disarray, and the complaints were pouring in. The designer urged the planners to trust him. Finding the true path takes time and patience, he explained. But the result can save time, money, and create the optimal path – the Desire Path – which reflects a greater congruence with the surroundings, flows better with the natural gradient and weather, and gets people where they want to go in the quickest, most efficient manner. Again, the planners gave in, and gave the designer more time.

By the end of the semester, clear and distinct paths had emerged out of the chaos of choices, paths they couldn’t have predicted but which more elegantly and effectively served their purpose. The pavement was laid. The designer moved on…and the paths remain to this day.

THE PLANNING PARADOX

One problem with traditional planning is that it often comes from our limited mindset and historical perspective. We plan based on what we think we want and how we think it should be done. But just as designers can’t predict the best path for people to take in an area they haven’t yet walked, it’s difficult to plan a life – to predict where we should go and the best way to get there – if we haven’t been there yet.

What’s more, in true emergence fashion, the person doing the planning will not be the same person when the vision unfolds, just as the caterpillar is no longer there when the butterfly spreads its wings. The perspective, needs, and desires of a butterfly arise from a whole new world of possibility, beyond what the caterpillar could ever conceive.

The same is true as we emerge – so how can we plan for a life we can’t imagine? This is the planning paradox. We might visualize a superficial picture of our future, but the path that ultimately emerges out of the chaos of transformation is outside our knowledge—and is rarely what we expect. Like a butterfly, our future self will see the world from a higher vantage point, which will color what we want, how we move forward, what shortcuts we’re now able to take, and where we land.

So as you create or rework your plan for this year – or for anything – it’s important to keep two principles in mind: First, plan as if you are doing all the work, but live as if God (Divine Intelligence) is. This keeps you open to what really needs to unfold next. Second, remember that you control the actions, but God (Source) controls the results!

To Your Emergence!

The Soil of Your Soul

by sublimity-001-main | Jan 8, 2014 | 2014, Emergence, Post

There is a Divine Pattern within you. And, like the acorn, when the right conditions are created, it naturally, even effortlessly, emerges. But whereas the acorn is indigenous and, therefore, can only thrive in certain external conditions not within its control, human beings are endogenous, which means your conditions are internally derived or generated.

It doesn’t matter what external conditions you’re planted in, your soul is your soil, and if you generate the right inner conditions—mentally, emotionally, and spiritually—your seed will have the right nutrients to thrive. What’s more, whereas most seeds require external light to grow, human beings are self-effulgent, meaning you generate light from within (this is not only a spiritual fact discernable through meditation, scientific instruments have now detected that human beings ‘glow’ with a measurable light).

No matter how thick the clouds may be outside or how dark the night, the light is always shining within, ready to illuminate the seed of your true Self and nourish its growth.

Science is proving these ideas in rigorous studies. Research in cell biology, as documented in Bruce Lipton’s The Biology of Belief, shows how our genetics do not determine our mental, emotional, or physical outcomes; rather, it is the environment that the cell is in which dictates its health and growth. And this environment, as described by Dr. Candace Pert in The Molecules of Emotion, is created by the activity of our mind, which causes a cascade of electrical impulses and chemical messengers that speak to our cells, making them turn various functions on or off.

The scientific proof of the mind-body connection is irrefutable. And with the understanding that our consciousness, not our genetics, creates our outcome, the ‘sins of the father’ no longer have to be visited upon the son (or daughter).

Quantum physics has taken this further with ‘the Observer Effect,’ (also related to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle) which states that the act of observation changes what is observed. Taken further, it states that the observable phenomenon doesn’t even exist until it’s observed; it’s in what’s called a superposition, meaning it’s neither wave nor particle, neither here nor there, it’s just ‘a possibility.’ At this deeper level, our mind and emotions seem to not just impact—and even create—our body, but potentially our entire experience of the world.

In Genesis it says, “God created man in His own image.” This principle is stated in different ways by most religions, and it’s sometimes interpreted to mean that we have the same physical features as God. It’s like the metaphysical joke: God made man in His own image, and man has been trying to return the favor ever since! In other words, we keep trying to understand God in human, material terms, like some anthropomorphic being sitting on a cloud. But this is an overly literal interpretation of ancient teachings. Even the bible says, “God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth.” Or from the Tao Te Ching, “The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao; the name that can be named is not the eternal Name.”

Mystically understood, being ‘created in His own image’ doesn’t mean we ‘look’ like God, it means we posses the same constituent qualities — which have been described as Spirit, Truth, Love, Beauty, Power, and Intelligence, among others — just as the wave contains the same elements as the ocean. Psalms 82:6 says, “You are gods, children of the Most High.” So put another way, we’re just chips off the Old Block.

This divine inheritance includes our ability to decide what we focus our awareness on (free will) and the creative power of our consciousness. And because our focus determines what’s in our consciousness, and our consciousness determines our experience, we ultimately have a godlike power over our world!

As the powerful poem Invictus by William Ernest Henley states, you are “the master of your fate, the captain of your soul.” No matter what side of the tracks you were born on, what kind of childhood you had, what current challenges you’re slogging through, or what race, color, creed, or age you are, when you create the right inner conditions, the great purpose for which you were born must emerge.

To Your Emergence!

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From Cause & Effect to Grace

by sublimity-001-main | Nov 11, 2013 | 2013, Emergence, Post

World religions, when interpreted from a literal perspective, sometimes teach that we’re at the whim of an external God who rewards or punishes us for good and bad deeds, like Santa’s naughty or nice list—or just acts in capricious, mysterious ways that we’re not intended to understand.

But a more spiritual or mystical interpretation of the Christian teaching “as you sow so shall you reap,” the Buddhist teaching of karma, or the metaphysical law of attraction suggests that there is no external power; it is the seeds we sow in our own heart and mind—the overall quality of our consciousness—that cause us to reap the rewards and punishment we experience.

While this is a liberating truth, it can be an overwhelming realization. If all the things we’ve thought, said, and done in the past, over this lifetime and possibly others are creating our present and, ultimately, our future, won’t it take the rest of our lives (or many more lifetimes) to undo the mess we’ve created? A lot of causes (karma) have been set in motion—how will we ever reverse all their effects?

Mercifully, there is a higher law: Grace.

The law of Grace says that no matter what has come before, no matter what you’ve set in motion, in a moment of Grace, you can wipe the slate clean and start anew. From this consciousness, your past does not determine your future—neither past mistakes nor past lives. The bad seeds you’ve sown are uprooted no matter how deep they’ve dug in, and the good seeds you’ve failed to tend take root and bear fruit.

Under the law of Grace, the things you’re struggling with lose their power; cause and effect, karma, even Newtonian physics, which once operated as absolute, immutable laws and masters of your fate, become the servants of your destiny.

The discoveries of quantum physics have begun to reveal how, rather than living in a linear, material world that reacts in a logical cause-and-effect fashion (as provided in Newton’s third law of motion, which says that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction), we exist in an indivisible Unified Field, out of which all creation arises.

On the surface, things appear separate and solid—and at that relative level, there appears to be cause and effect—but as we dive deeper, we discover that the “solid” world is in fact completely made up of invisible energy and information; the atom, once believed to be the building block of all material reality is, in fact 99.999% empty space.

At this subatomic level, reality doesn’t operate the way it does at the grosser material level. Things are not linear or bound by space and time. This underlying intelligence seems to be simultaneously everywhere (omnipresent), with a knowledge of everything (omniscient), and is the only power there is (omnipotent).

In short, it could be described as an omni-active intelligence with infinite organizing power in a field of unbounded potentiality. That also happens to be how many mystics, prophets, and, to some extent, religions have described God—and how many cutting-edge scientists are now describing what they call Consciousness.

Rather than there being interactivity among all things—the basis of cause and effect—there is an omni-activity, One Action. Einstein must have been aware of this when he said, “Our separation from each other is an optical illusion of consciousness.” At the deepest level, Something is emerging—and as it breaks into time and space, it appears as if things are causing other things to happen, but that’s a trick of the senses.

Here we arrive back at our central idea of Emergence: inside the seed of you—indeed the seed of the whole world—there is a design for its fulfillment.

Things are not unfolding by chance. You’re not the effect of other causes—there is an underlying order or pattern that is already perfect and is seeking to emerge from within your soul, waiting for the right conditions. And everything is conspiring to create those conditions, regardless of what you’ve been through or where you currently are. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “The dice of God are always loaded.”

And this is where Grace comes in.

Grace is the realization that no matter what appears on the surface of life, no matter what has come before, or what appears to be lost, when you tap back into this perfect seed pattern It will emerge again, fresh, vital, overflowing with new possibilities.

Whereas the rules of karma say you’re destined to live out the effects of your previous causes, the realization of Grace is that, in a “Holy Instant,” as A Course in Miracles calls it, your life can be made new and “though your sins are as scarlet, they will be as white as snow.”

Furthermore, whereas the rules of cause-and-effect say you are limited by the causes you can personally set in motion at a human level, often determined by external conditions seemingly beyond your control, when you align with this Source within, and the perfect pattern seeking to emerge, It will unfold as the next stage of your evolution—not just moving you personally into right action, but moving your entire world where necessary to reveal your greater purpose.

To Your Emergence!