November 10, 2005
God illuminates your lives with peace. God illuminates your lives with love. God illuminates your lives with the brilliance of which we have spoken.
You are blessed, each of you, beyond your greatest imagination, for you have been given a direct awareness of the meaning of God, the potential of God, the power of God in the lives you live on a day to day basis. You know that your lives must ultimately be directed toward a nonjudgmental love that is directed to all that you encounter. We want to focus this time with you on the implications and applications of this nonjudgmental love for it is your ultimate goal. It is for what your soul strives in its attachment to your human lives.
Your soul is not fully developed as a nonjudgmental entity. Many feel that the soul is that spark of total perfection, that it is a small piece of the entirety that is God. These descriptions are true but to a limited degree, for God, as you know, is love, and you also know that your soul’s journey is a journey toward unconditional love that must be achieved in human form. Since your soul is not yet occupying a state of nonjudgmental love, it is not the equality of love that is truly God.
Your soul is in a state of becoming loving, but it is also your direct connection to God. It is your soul that provides the thread that joins the Spirit Center of God to the human center of your own lives. In that sense, your soul is divine, but no soul residing in human form is perfect. You are given life so that your soul may grow. You are not just given a soul so your human form can flourish. It is the human form that serves the soul, and it is the soul that benefits from its attachment to human life.
You are asked to become unconditionally loving. What does that mean in your human lives? Unconditional love is a profound challenge. You, as living human beings, are not yet experiencing unconditional love. You are growing in that direction, but it is yet to be achieved. To be unconditionally loving means that you fully acknowledge the part of God that is in each of you. It is in its nature an imperfect part of God.
Human beings strive to be godly, to be God-loving, to be God-fearing—there are many terms. But all human beings acknowledge that they are not in a complete sense a full reflection of God. By acknowledging this incompleteness, this lack of perfection in all human beings, it becomes easier for you to acknowledge the equality that you share with one another. No human being is more valuable than another, although the soul of one human being may be more spiritually advanced than the soul of another. The level of advancement of spirit does not indicate a difference in value.
Differences in spiritual development create no kind of “pecking order,” no sense of one individual being above another. A student who is 18 years old is more advanced in knowledge, perhaps, than the student who is seven, but although more advanced, the student is no more worthy than the less advanced student. Both students are equal. Both students are students. Both students are learning. Both students are growing. Both students make mistakes. Both have potential. The potential may differ, one from another, and that is of no importance, but acknowledging that both have potential acknowledges by definition their equality. They are equal—they are not the same. Equality and being the same do not have the same meaning. The two individuals are never the same, and yet they are always equal.
Too often human beings focus on the lack of similarity and lose total sight of the absolute equality. Nonjudgmental love is love directed toward the recognition and affirmation of their equality, not whether they are the same or different. A scientist and a newborn baby are in all significant ways equal. Acknowledging the equality of all human beings—regardless of age, regardless of background, regardless of sex, regardless of race—is essential in the journey of nonjudgmental love.
Nonjudgmental love can be also understood as a selfless love, for you cannot be nonjudgmental if you are preoccupied with self. Nonjudgmental love requires an abandonment of preoccupation with self. You must love self, but you cannot be preoccupied with self. To love another, you must love yourself, but in loving yourself you abandon the importance of self and embrace the value of another. Nonjudgmental love, therefore, requires this turning from all that is self-directed. As self, you become a part of another. You become a part of others. And in your joining with another, in your joining with others, you become nonjudgmental. You affirm all others. You do not necessarily affirm behavior, but you affirm the equality of that other individual.
You are equal because each has a soul. You are equal because each soul is pursuing the same journey although perhaps on a different road. It is the nature of the soul to seek perfection, the perfection of love, and that is selfless, that is unconditional. All souls pursue the same objective.
Where do you as human beings then fit into the journey of the soul towards nonjudgmental love? The human form of life provides the opportunity for the soul to learn what it needs to learn to become nonjudgmental. It means placing the soul in situations where being nonjudgmental is most difficult. When an individual responds toward another reflecting no love, the soul of the other grows through the experience of being challenged with the attitude that has presented itself. That attitude is the context within which the soul learns and is strengthened.
It is the actions of human beings that create the pain and suffering that many must endure. Certainly, the human being’s interface with natural forces creates at times enormous suffering, but it is the day to day interaction of one human being toward another, of one community toward another, of one nation toward another, of one philosophy toward another that is humanmade, that is the result of human choice, and that becomes the learning environment for the soul.
You cannot learn to be nonjudgmental unless it is in an atmosphere that would normally encourage, and may seem to require, judgment. On our side of life, those challenges created by the human characteristics interacting with one another are nonexistent. Becoming nonjudgmental requires more than just saying, “Okay, I now know I must be nonjudgmental.” Becoming nonjudgmental is akin to learning a skill. Achieving that state takes effort and courage in the faith, courage in the belief and knowledge of what God would wish for all. It requires practice and failure, and yet another attempt, followed by less failure, and yet another, followed by even less failure, until such time as the soul rises up, fully nonjudgmental and has truly overcome what the life of a human form has created. This is not to suggest that you should be callous toward one another because it serves the purpose of being a challenge, but your lives must always be characterized by an attempt to get beyond the judgment, to get beyond the expectation that all must be the same, and ultimately to embrace fully an understanding of the equality of creation.
God has not assembled life for the purpose of promoting chaos. The natural tendency of life is not to be chaotic. It is to be orderly. Life is to be balanced. Of course, it contains many imbalances, but your lives take on a direction when those imbalances are addressed, and in addressing them you bring about God’s purpose of balance.
The balance to be achieved within your relationships with other human beings is a balance that is reached by an acknowledgment of absolute equality. You must govern your lives blind to whatever is different, blind to the need to transform all to be the same. Those differences must be embraced. Indeed, they must be welcomed, for it is the differences that give character and beauty to life.
You acknowledge the color of autumn. The colors create great beauty. They are not just red or orange or yellow or purple. To enjoy and appreciate the beauty of this time of year, you must embrace and observe and appreciate the variety of colors. And so it is with human life. To achieve a love that is nonjudgmental, you must fully welcome what is brown, red, yellow, green, purple, orange, large/small, angular/smooth, comforting/challenging, hot/cold, light and dark, textured/smooth, friendly/unfriendly, supportive/threatening, healthy/life-threatening. All these differences create a pattern to life that provides you with an opportunity to suspend and ultimately relinquish all judgment, and to affirm and rejoice in the equality that belongs to every corner of God’s creation.
The fall of the year is a wonderful opportunity to see the beauty of differences. If you can bring that appreciation of such beauty into your relationships with all others, then the life of the human being becomes incredibly beautiful. Rejoice in what is different! Rejoice in all opportunities to learn the real meaning of love, for all those opportunities bring you closer to becoming sheer love. You are then fully what God would intend.
Amen.