Where the effects never end.

Something has always bothered me about the way I talk about being stuck. It’s has felt like it stirs something deep inside that is trying to call me out on my B.S..

I admit to saying that I am stuck in my finances. Stuck in a relationship pattern. Stuck watching the world do things to us. As if I am standing inside something I did not help build and cannot leave.

Recently, I was wondering if stuck is not the place that I am in, perhaps it is the direction I am looking.

Shel Silverstein wrote about a place where the sidewalk ends. Past the paved world. Past the smoke and the dark street bends. A place where the grass grows soft and white and the wind blows cool. Where the chalk-white arrows go. He said the children know it. They mark it. They have not forgotten yet that the sidewalk is not the whole world.

The children… I was a child once. I still feel him in there somewhere. What is it that makes us children.  As a child was I just a naive fool, and if so what was I naive to?  The more I ponder that part of me the more I think I was just free from the shackles of shame. Free to just be the light that I am in the world.

I have been living on the sidewalk for a long time. Measuring what is possible by what what I see along my route. Learning again and again to mistake the edge for the end.

Inside of all of us lives the faculty of wonder and awe.  The drive to explore what is just beyond the bend. This post is about considering what lives past that edge.

There is a chart that I busted out at our Thursday group this week called the Evolution of Consciousness. It maps the entire arc of life from the first building blocks of matter all the way to what it calls cosmic consciousness, the union of soul and spirit.

It starts on the left with latent potential, the first cause, the absolute, the one. Then it moves through six stages. Electronic. Mineral. Vegetable. Animal. Human. Cosmic. Each stage is a more complex expression of the same animating power. Particles attract and organize into atoms. Atoms into minerals. Minerals giving rise to plant life. Plants to animals. Animals to the human capacity to reason and reflect. At the top of the chart it says this:

Spirit is busy molding matter and consciousness so that both will eventually become a more perfect vehicle for perfect spiritual expression.

The nature of life.

I have to reread that last statement over and over until it hits, and when it does… Awesome.  It is a description of what is happening right now. In us, through us.  We are growing and evolving and learning to express more of the potential inside except now unlike when we were kids we often need challenging lessons to push us and teach us.  Moments of discomfort to remind us to lighten up into love.  Something that came naturally when I was “innocent,” a time when it was natural to just be.

The philosopher and Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin spent his life mapping this same arc. He observed that life has always met the demands put on it by the current moment. Every stage of this evolution was supported. The ground appeared. The next step was provided, that is how we arrived at here.

Particles organized. Life learned to move and adapt. Consciousness learned to reason, and every step of the way everything needed to pull it off appeared from the nothingness of the what.

As a human I developed the capacity to reason and project my thoughts into the future,  to compare what I have now to what I think I need. I look at where I am and conclude that there is not enough to get from here to there. That the power which has supported every single step of this entire evolution is somehow about to stop working, or run out of steam to carry out its mission of expressing more of the love that it is.

Since this power is my source, I am it, and yet I often think that the same voice that is telling me to wander into the unknown will all of a sudden stop being what it has always been. Limitless.  When I was a child I could really trust it and now I am relearning to fortify my faith in love by unearthing the heart from mountains of shame piled on top.  Old pirates, yes, they rob I.

Last Thursdee in our study group, something came up. Did I need to figure out how the particles were going to come together? Did I need to calculate how the sky was going to turn blue? Did I supervise the leap from mineral to plant life? This never once needed help running the universe. All of a sudden I am flowing through this human form and decided I have run out of ideas when all along, I am the idea.  Redemption song.

John Randolph Price asked me to look honestly at what I have been giving my power to.  To see where I have souled myself out to a lie.

He writes that if you look to any human person, place or condition for your supply, you are shutting down the flow. That the entire experience is an out-picturing of our beliefs, an effect of your consciousness. An image.

If what I am seeing is an outpicturing of what I am believing, then the place to look is not out there. The cause is not in the circumstance, it is in the awareness cultivating the circumstance.

Shifting the mind from effect to cause to emancipate myself from mental slavery. Redemption song.

I talk a lot about patterns. About the same thing happening over and over. What I am really describing is a limitless, generous consciousness that keeps outpicturing the same belief. Not because something is wrong with me. Because somewhere along the way that scared kid inside learned that the sidewalk was safe and the edge was dangerous. Because I learned to stay in the known. I learned to measure possibility by what was already visible, and this loving power gives me everything I ask for. So grateful.  Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Just learning to see clearly here.

This work, the 40 days, the Thursday gatherings, the consciousness chart, all of it is really just showing up for that kid that just want to play. Giving him the words he did not have. Letting him feel that the ground past the edge does not disappear, that it has always been there, that it was there before the sidewalk existed.

JRP gives us the first statement to sit with. Read it slowly. Let it move through you rather than just past you.

God is lavish, unfailing abundance, the rich omnipresent substance of the universe. This all providing source of infinite prosperity is individualized as me. THE REALITY OF ME.

Feeling the feels of actually dropping into that let that.  Working to let that feeling be the guid, the come from.

We meet every Thursday at 7:15 pm, in person in San Francisco and always on Zoom. If something in this landed, come sit with us.

The Abundance Book by John Randolph Price is available on Amazon for about seven dollars. We are reading it together. Come join us.

With love,

DN