We’ve been taught that life happens to us and that we must find better ways to deflect, dodge, or dance with it. While learning to master this life aikido may have helped us survive as a species, we’ve evolved to a place where it not only limits our growth but may hasten our demise. Nothing can enter our experience except as an activity of our consciousness. Just as the seed already contains the pattern for the plant and the soil contains the raw material for its formation, the seed planted in the soil of our soul has everything we need to grow. But it must be cultivated with our loving attention and activated by the light of our focused awareness.

As individualized expressions of Divine Love and Intelligence, we didn’t come here to get anything but to release this imprisoned splendor. We really are God’s Gift to the world. Living otherwise—striving to get from the world—sets up a belief of lack that you will continuously experience and blocks the emergence of the gifts you came here to give. Played out to its extreme, this false premise leads to all of the horrible acts of greed and violence. We’re willing to lie, cheat, and steal for something that is already within us. We diminish or destroy countless relationships because they don’t give us the love, respect, and validation that only we can activate within ourselves. And we are willing to hurt, betray, or kill our neighbor—including our neighbor across the oceans—to get that which they can never give us.

In the West we have more abundance than at any time in history, yet we are some of the unhappiest people on the planet. Based on a study at the Legatum Institute that ranked the happiness of 142 countries, the U.S. didn’t make the top 10. And in the 2012 Happy Planet index from the New Economics Foundation, the U.S. didn’t even break the top 50. You can never get enough of what you don’t really need. In fact, you can never feed that insatiable hunger by ‘getting’ anything. Because you already have everything, it’s only through giving that you can experience having. Only through letting out the light within can your own life be illuminated.

In the Emergence model, giving is getting.

The great reversal is not only realizing that everything we need is within us, but that it’s spiritual. We have materialized the spirit instead of spiritualizing the material and that’s why we’re so attached to material things and think that someone or something out there has our happiness. No amount of material things can bring real peace or fulfillment, but when we connect with our inner spirit, it appears as the outward forms of fulfillment. The fruit tree illustrates this. A farmer doesn’t hoard the fruit crop, fearing that if he gives it away he’ll never have any more. He understands that the fruit is the effect of an invisible source of supply that is the real life of that visible tree. And when the tree is barren, the farmer doesn’t think it’s empty and cut it down.

In fact, the tree is as abundant as it ever was.

As long as the roots are kept healthy, the invisible principle that turns the raw material of the soil into the sap, blossom, and fruit will produce a new crop season after season.

Let your roots run deep into the soil of your soul and draw forth everything you need to produce a harvest of good in your life!

To Your Emergence!