July 22, 2002
The God whom you refer to as Lord is indeed a part of the lives each of you shares collectively and individually. There is a sense of meaning of “lord” as you use it—one who looks over, who looks out for what is important and beneficial to those around. The presence of God is a manifestation of love. It is very much like the lord looking down upon those who toil.
You, each of you, toil in your lives. Each of you pursues goals that are important to you. Sometimes those goals are beneficial to you individually. At other times, those goals benefit the collective reality. But whatever your goals are, whatever nature of your toil, you are looked after, you are cared for, you are nurtured by the loving presence, the reality, the truth that is God. We, your guides, also toil, but our work is not so close to yours. We do not share the same immediate goals but we do share the ultimate goals, and it is these goals that we wish to speak of.
From our perspective among you, we see human life as both frantic and fragile—frantic in its activity and fragile in its temporal nature. Your lives are so short. They seem long to you but they are indeed but a brief moment. The fragility that we are aware of is enhanced because we see both the past, as you define it, and the future. All are actually one, namely the present. The present is constant and we are aware of that, but human beings are not so aware of the present. You fret about the future, you are concerned about the implications of the past, you wonder what your goals are. So much of your energy is spent in anxiety or regret or fear. It is understandable that your experience of life takes on these characteristics, whereas our experience of life cannot share those characteristics for there is no past, there is no future, there is only now. We are fully in the present.
Each of you is seldom in the present. It is true you are aware of what is happening on a daily basis, on a momentary basis, and you identify that as the present and you can be preoccupied by those concerns. But that view of what is present is actually miniscule. It is extremely limited, both in scope and in consciousness. We don’t for a moment suggest you ignore the meaning of human presence, for you are human beings and your concept of now and its contrast with yesterday and tomorrow are important components of the human experience. We don’t therefore suggest that you ignore this, but we do believe that it is important for you to understand more about what the present really means—what it means to have goals that are worthy of your human lives, of your spiritual selves; which goals are important to you in the “now” timeframe, as you experience it.
The goals that are important are goals that affirm the lives of all. The goals that are important are goals that work for compassion, for understanding, for equality, for unconditional love. These few goals can worthily occupy your entire human lives. How do you live your life to affirm others? One way that we have instructed you is to be good listeners, to be present, to just be there, to be available, to show a loving countenance to another, however that countenance is expressed. That is being affirming, that is acting in a manner that is spiritually uplifting. You affirm life, you support life, you affirm the value of another human being, you affirm the strengths of another human being, you affirm the gifts of another human being.
To affirm the value does not imply that you must always say “you are important.” Affirming value means your relationship to another must be construed by another as being affirming. The loving touch is affirmation. The purposeful eye contact with another is affirming. Taking time to listen is affirming. You are not telling someone else what to do, how to think, which way to behave, which decisions to make. Those actions very often are not affirming. They can be interpreted as being controlling. No one who feels controlled is affirmed.
To affirm others is to free them. Your goal is to free others—free them in spirit, free them with a sense of value. The freedom that we speak of is not a political freedom. It is a personal freedom, it is a spiritual freedom, it is a freedom that allows one to spread one’s wings without fear, without threat.
You spend your lives so often in pursuit of your own particular gains. There is nothing wrong specifically in acknowledging that there are gains that are worthy, but the acknowledgment of such worthiness does not belong in the pantheon of what goals should be pursued. They are a kind of by-product of the pursuit. If you affirm others, you will in turn be affirmed, for you will recognize that your relationship with another has served to strengthen your relationship to yourself. When you feel discouraged, when you are distraught, when you are angry, when you experience self-pity, when you experience alienation, you must find ways to strengthen and affirm even one other person. You will of course feel the gratification that comes from acting in a loving manner toward another, and that is reward enough.
Everything that you do that empowers another, that frees another, comes back to you many times. The rock that is dropped in a pond from shore creates not only waves that expand outward, but the reflections of those waves hitting the shoreline are sent back toward the rock. The love, the affirmation, the strength-giving that you participate in will also benefit you, for your actions work in both directions.
The goals in life are not for money or prestige or power or influence or strength or cunning. None of those goals in themselves have value, and yet humankind seems in a tireless pursuit toward those objectives in one form or another. These goals are frantic. Life indeed becomes a kind of rat race, as you call it. But such wild pursuit is not why you were given human lives. You know that your lives were given to you for the benefit of your souls. You live life in order to experience it fully, but in the end it is not the living of life that is important. It is only the means toward the end. The end is growth and therefore the goals that you seek must be goals that promote growth—your growth and the growth of others.
When you worry about the present, you reduce your ability to see a greater present. In your terms, by concentrating on the present, you lose all sense of the future. By concentrating on the past, by concentrating on all that has taken place, you lose sight of the present. For you, for each of you, your goals are really to expand the present. Your goals are to increase the view, to broaden your peripheral vision so that you are more aware of your total surroundings. To have such an awareness, you must eliminate the dominating influences of anxiety and fear and desperation. It is true, all humans experience anxiety and desperation and fear, but some individuals can progress through life experiencing these moods, these characteristics less intensely. For others, these traits, these characteristics become dominant. And when they are dominant, you lose your vision. You are unable to take in the real present.
We have said before that time does not exist. It is only humankind’s attempt to understand the enormous breadth of time that such concepts as past, present and future have evolved. There are philosophies, there are ways of viewing life that eliminate past, present and future, allowing only for the present. When you view your lives totally in the present, you are much closer to our view from our own spiritual lives. Think back to moments in your childhood that seemed particularly important and come to a place where you recall an event that occurred over what seemed a long time. From the perspective of your adult life, that event from childhood, although important, occurs in a much smaller fragment of time, as you view it. It was something that happened for a moment. It may have been experienced as something taking a great amount of time, but ultimately it is seen as a moment.
This is the way we see human life. Each of us experienced human life. We know what it feels like, but we also know what it is like within the context of eternity. Eternity is not an emptiness, a black nothingness with no sense of life. Eternity is filled with life energy. We are aware of each other as we are aware of you. We are aware of our life-form as you are aware of your life-form and as we are aware of your life-form. From our perspective having experienced human life, we see the difficulties that you encounter in their true light. Time has absolutely no meaning whatsoever. Certainly there are deadlines that you all meet. You cannot function in your society without an agreed upon scale of placing events synchronously. That we acknowledge. But the time we keep referring to is the time of the past or the future.
Your anxieties about the future are really anxieties about the present. Each of you has been given the tools that are necessary to function effectively in the present. For that reason, the future, as you call it, presents no justification for anxiety. It is of course easier for us to emphasize this than it is for you to experience it, but you should know that anxiety has no real beneficial purpose. There is nothing gained by being anxious, there is nothing gained by worrying, there is nothing gained by being fearful. How are your lives enhanced by such experiences, by such goals? Being anxious is allowing anxiety to be a goal in your life. If you did not feel that anxiety was important, you would relinquish it. You are anxious because anxiety has a place for you. It belongs somehow to your lives. Worry about the future is a goal. If worry were not important for you, you would not worry. We tell you that those goals have no benefit. Your lives are not strengthened by those goals. You must discard them. You must allow yourselves to be free of those goals for they just encourage more activity that is contrary to your soul’s growth and the enhancement of your human lives. It is not easy to disband any connection of such negative characteristics, but a goal that you should pursue is the attempt to weaken their influence. Yes, you will experience fear. Yes, you will experience anxiety, but their presence will no longer have a domineering effect on your chosen path that you exercise in human form.
Life is not easy. Life will always have challenges for you. The way for spiritual and human growth is not made easier for you by the elimination of events that produce such emotions. Your lives are given character and meaning, not by those negative goals, but rather by how you approach challenges. It is the approaches that affirm, that are the goals that give your life meaning, purpose and value. And it is for that reason that your affirmation of others is also so essential, for through your affirmation you are reducing the effects of difficult challenges on others when those effects serve to darken the life of another.
You must live your lives in the present. It is all you have. Your past is a part of the present. The future will become a component of the present in due time. Therefore, embrace the present. Allow your lives to be nurtured by the present. Seek those goals that bring meaning to your lives through your interactions with others, and you will find that your experience of human life will be strengthened, will be filled with more love. You will become more loving and you will become more receptive to the love that is around you. In so doing, you will become a vessel for God’s love.
Live life to the fullest. Grab hold of the challenges. Choose your goals carefully and abide by them. Such lives become not only a gift to the soul but a gift to all souls. They become a gift of God. Rely on that gift and let it guide you in the days and months and years ahead. You are blessed by the presence of that gift. You are blessed by an increased understanding of your lives. Look out around you and see the face of God!
Amen.