June 4, 2009
God reaches out to each of you according to the needs that you have. Some of those needs are unrecognized by you. Others, you are only too aware of.
How is it that you are unaware of needs, your needs, what gives strength to life? Every human being is consumed at some level with concerns about health, self-preservation, the balance that we often speak of, the sense of meaning and purpose to what is pursued. All human beings at some point wonder about the meaning of their own individual lives, even when they acknowledge the value and importance attached to all life, all creation. This consumption, this need to feel stabilized, to feel in balance, colors in its own way your views of the life you live. When you are in great pain, you tend not to see the world around you as a reflection of perfect balance. You may be aware that such balance is a part of the lives of others, but you do not actually feel that balance, for you are surrounded by your own needs as you perceive them.
When we say you have needs that you do not know, we are saying that there are those needs in your lives that are beyond your current awareness: needs of patience, needs of understanding, needs of compassion, needs of giving to others, needs of listening. When you feel that you are completely inundated, when you are challenged beyond your capacity to respond, you therefore lose sight of the essential, critical needs that are shared by everyone.
We say you are united with all human beings. Part of that unity is the unity of shared needs, but those needs are not self-directed. Those needs always are directed toward others. There is the human need to become compassionate. That is a need directed beyond the self. When you are in pain or in considerable anxiety or are consumed by anger, compassion is far from your view, and yet it is the fear, the pain, the anxiety which is directed to the self.
All people experience pain. All experience frustration, but what really unites all human beings is the need to become something beyond what you currently experience. What you become is compassionate, is unconditionally loving. That compassion, that love, is expressed in many different ways, of course. But one way that is too often neglected is to listen. Your compassion can be expressed through silence. Compassion is not something that can only be expressed through action. Your very silence, your ability to listen, is itself the act of being loving, of being compassionate. All human beings ultimately achieve that state. It may or may not be within the time frame that you perceive as human life. Human life may just be a chapter in that development, in that transformation.
The needs that are beyond your awareness are needs of where you are to evolve. They are needs of direction. They are needs of a trajectory that leads ultimately to the center of All That Is which you call God. The needs of which we speak are not the needs that are directed toward the self. Your spirit grows not merely by ministering to yourself, but by responding to others. Your tasks in the human framework are always tasks of expansion, of broadening, of deepening—broadening and deepening your understanding of life, your understanding of others, your capabilities as being loving.
You are not given life specifically for the purpose of fighting your own demons, whatever they may be. That is part of the experience of all, but that is not the function of your lives. Yes, you are given lives to experience discouragement and pain, anxiety, anger, but you are given lives for the purpose of overcoming, of rising above, of becoming more than the momentary pain itself, for human life is a life of growth. It is not a life of merely repairing, responding. You’re given life to become something that you are not already. Interpreting life as securing what you are or what you feel you should be misses the point. A life that is successful, you may say, is not a life filled with the accoutrements of physical things. A life that is successful is a life totally different from what was seen at the onset to be its purpose.
You live to grow. You live to become loving, and in the process of becoming loving, ultimately you become Love itself. It is at that point that you are in complete union with the Spirit Center, God. You must allow yourselves the opportunity to reach out, even if it means you fail in the process, as you define it. It is the reaching outward, it is the extension to others that is the food bringing nourishment to what is, for each of you, all that is permanent.
For all of us who serve as your guides and the guides of countless others, we are identified one to another through our light. This light is the consequence of that reaching out, for light never contracts. The nature of light is to expand, and all that expands belongs in turn to that light. The light from the sun is not absorbed by the sun. It radiates outward, and it provides all that nourishes the universe as you know it. Light expands. The energy that light is, is transformed. It is transformed through its particles. It is transformed into many forms of energy, but it is transformed, and that impact is the natural tendency of light.
It is exactly the same with your spirit. The natural tendency of the spirit is to reach out, whereas the tendency of many human beings is to turn inward. Your lives therefore are the same as the activity of light. It is that activity of light that we use to identify each of us. No spirit, no guide, exists in a self-contained location, just as you cannot say the light from the sun exists in an area fully contained, beyond which it cannot expand.
Human life is in reality one component of the totality of life that we see, that we feel, that we understand. It is not the beginning, and it certainly is not the end. We know of the great tragedies that befall the human condition. We know the lives lost through war, through accidents, through disease. We know the lives lost through anger, through recklessness, through crime. But what is lost is only a small component of what is. You know the body is temporal, you know the spirit lives on, but it is important to fully embrace that reality. You grieve for those who have passed on whom you have known. You grieve for those who have passed on whom you have never met. But it would be helpful to your own spirit and to the spirit of those for whom you grieve if you encounter those losses as a freeing of what is eternal.
Human life is like a coat that is discarded. It is like a layer of clothes that merely covers, merely conceals, and sometimes deceives. The beauty of human life is in reality that very part that is experienced by humans, but is in itself, not human. When you love another, you are loving not what is seen, but what is permanent. When you love unconditionally you accept what is permanent. It is natural to grieve at loss, for grieving is also a kind of love. It is an expression of love. You grieve for what you miss because you valued what was there, but in a more significant sense, what has been taken away is only the surface. It is only that jacket. What is loving, what is enduring remains and expands.
Each of you is challenged to love what is permanent in another. You may love what you see, but you must direct your love to what it is that you do not see. That becomes unconditional, for you are responding to the need to become loving, loving of all that is permanent. And when you find yourselves consumed by self-doubt, by worry, by pain, anxiety, fear, anger, you are removing yourself from the potential of seeing what is permanent and realizing your own place in that permanence, for you are not separated from what is permanent. You are joined with all human beings equally in that shared need to become loving, and in the ultimate need to be transformed into Love.
Your lives are blessed because they provide you with all that is needed to respond to these real needs. Accept the challenges. Accept the losses. Accept what gives pain. Accept your view of eternity when it is revealed through the generous, uncompromising, nonjudgmental love of another.
Amen.