EACH NOTE by Rumi

Advice doesn't help lovers! 
They're not the kind of mountain stream 
you can build a dam across.

An intellectual doesn't know what the drunk is feeling!


Don't try to figure what those lost inside love will do next!


Someone in charge would give up all his power, 
if he caught one whiff of the wine-musk 
from the room where lovers are doing who-knows- what!


One of them tries to dig a hole through a mountain. 
One flees from academic honors. 
One laughs at famous mustaches!


Life freezes if it doesn't get a taste 
of this almond cake. 
The stars come up spinning 
every night, bewildered in love. 
They'd grow tired with that revolving, if they weren't. 
They'd say, "How long do we have to Do this!"


God picks up the reed-flute world and blows. 
Each note is a need coming through one of us, 
a passion, a longing-pain.


Remember the lips 
where the wind-breath originated, 
and let your note be clear. 
Don't try to end it . 
BE Your Note. 
I'll show you how it's enough.


Go up on the roof at night 
in the city of the soul.


Let Everyone climb on their roofs 
and sing their notes!


Sing loud!

Oh, to See God!

Scriptures reveal that the Ancients longed to see the face of God.  We too, have a longing to know God.  For most of us in New Thought, our understanding of God as anthropomorphic, the image I playfully call “the guy in the sky with the beard and the book,” has shifted  We’ve heard and studied and affirmed – even if it’s not been totally internalized, “There is one presence and one power, God.”  Our understanding of God evolved, though our longing remains as primal as ever.  In our fast paced, materially focused world, many of us are not quite sure what to do with our desire.  We still want to SEE God.

Do you see the face of God in your beloved?  In your co-workers?  In your children or grandchildren? Do you see the face of God when you gaze across the ocean, or stare at the night sky or view the mountains? Do you see God in the images of war and unrest?  In the moon? Do you see the face of God in the haunted eyes of someone begging?   In the wild flowers?  In a busy city street?  You get the idea.  If there is truly “one presence and one power,” is there any spot where God is not?  Yet we have this sense we are not seeing God and we have this longing. 

On our “Journey Into the Light,” let us honor and celebrate the longing to want more, to be more, to see more.  Perhaps if, rather than working so hard to get away from or stop that which we don’t prefer, we are vigilant in honoring that longing?  Won’t we, as the ancients say, “Pierce the veil,” and behold the presence of God – everywhere?  What if our “Journey Into the Light” begins with leaning into our longing until we see the thousands upon thousand faces of God?

Journey Into the Light: Eyes to See

In Unity we are taught to see beyond appearances. Ideally, we see the presence of God in all things. A powerful question to ask is, “How is God present in what I see?” What is the underlying meaning of what I see? Each of us must be highly attuned to spiritual awareness as we ask the second question as our intellect considers itself an expert on what something means. If we have a high level of certainty about something, that is often a clue that we are being fooled by our intellect and not looking deeply enough. The deeper we look, the more attuned we are to the mysteries of life. This journey facilitates a deeper relationship with spiritual principles and thus spiritual seeing. Do we see wholeness, beauty, joy, order, love, harmony and so forth? A better question than “Do we?” which can be answered with a “yes” or “no,” is “How do we see spiritual principle?” Do you see how this is an invitation to look deeper? And seeing, we might ask, “And what’s another way you see God in this?” God is everywhere present. Good is everywhere present. If we’re not seeing it, it’s not because God is not present. It’s because we are not seeing.

Practice: Today, look beyond appearances and invite the living Christ presence within you to attune your consciousness to see the light.

Bible reading: Matthew 13:1-11 The Parable of the Sower

Jesus teaches in parables, guiding his listeners to see beyond the appearance of things to a deeper meaning. In the parable of the sower, Jesus provides an image familiar to an agrarian culture. Planting seeds is an ordinary occurrence, and all planters realize the importance of the environment for the health of the plant.

Numerous analogies arise from this metaphor, and the listener is invited to apply them to his/her life. At one level the listener is the soil. When a seed of a new idea is planted for you, are you open and receptive or do you dismiss the idea in some manner? Jesus distinguishes between ignoring the idea (lands beside the road where it birds eat them) and discounting it (thorns come and choke the idea). When you share ideas, do you realize that many of your ideas will not be received? It’s just the nature of sharing new ideas. Are you willing to continue planting idea seeds?

There are many ways to interpret this scripture; however, what we are looking at today is that Jesus spoke in parables. He is pointing to deeper meanings. Spiritual messages are invisible and too deep to be readily articulated. He recognizes that the interpretation is dependent upon the consciousness of the listener.

To “Journey Into the Light,” we must look to the deeper meanings of things. We are to have “eyes to see.” In Unity, we teach the importance of looking beyond appearances. Only then will we see beyond the “things of this world” and glimpse the divine.

Today’s message is an invitation to “Journey Into the Light” by simply realizing that what you think you see may not be what is really present and that what is really present is divine.

Profound Integrity

During times of rapid change, we are called to a deeper spirituality - to connect with that within us that is profoundly true. It is the essence present within each of us. This document from the Maliwada Human Development Training School in Maliwada, India was first introduced to me in the late 80's. It ratchets up the presumed meaning of the age old adage, "to your own self be true."

Profound Personal Integrity

We are going to visit the arena of Profound Humanness called "Integrity". Sometimes "integrity" is reduced to mean a kind of moral uprightness and steadfastness, in the sense of saying, "He has too much integrity to ever take a bribe."

But profound integrity goes far beyond this. Sometimes, in order to distinguish it from more limited popular usage, it is called "secondary integrity". This is the integrity which is not constrained by limited moralities, however well-intentioned. The integrity that is profound living is the singularity of thrust of a life committed and ordering every dimension of the self towards that commitment. Thus the self is in fact shaped by the self, and focused towards that commitment. You can say that an audacious creation of the self takes place in integrity, without which you are simply the creation of the various forces impacting you in your society.

Thus the basis of integrity is a destinal resolve - a resolve that chooses and sets your destiny and out of which your whole life is ordered. The object of that resolve is the ultimate decision of each person, and each person makes that choice, consciously or unconsciously. To do so with awareness is the height of man's responsibility. It is incarnate freedom. It is what real freedom looks like. When man has thus exercised his freedom he realizes that to be true to himself ever thereafter he has a unique position to look at the values of his society. He is no longer bound by the opinions and codes of his fellow-man, but reevaluates then on the basis of their impact on his destinal resolve.

Thus the man of integrity is continuously engaged in a societal transvaluation, a moving across the values of society and reinterpreting them in line with his life's thrust. It does not give him the liberty of ignoring his society, but his obligation transcends the conformity of living within the codes and mores of his society. Thus the man of profound integrity always seems to not quite fit with his fellow-men, but his actions always are appropriate for him, even to those who oppose him.

No matter how odd the man of profound integrity appears to his neighbors, he experiences himself as securely anchored. While he is very clear that this world is not his home, nevertheless he experiences himself as having found his native vale. He experiences an eternal at-one-ness, not so much with the currents and waves of activity around him, but with the deeper trends of history itself. Amid the flux of wavering to and fro that is so evident in others, he experiences an inexplicable rootedness, as though he has sunk a taproot deep into the foundations of the earth itself. Though he experiences his life as a long journey, even an endless journey, towards the object of his resolve, yet he never senses himself as a stranger on the journey It's as if he'd been there before. Original integrity is experienced primarily by this sense of at-one-ness.

Kierkegaard once wrote a book about this kind of integrity that he titled, "Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing". An ancient philosopher focused his wisdom around this integrity with the advice, "Know yourself, and to your own self, be true.""This document comes from the curriculum of the Maliwada Human Development Training School in Maliwada, India, which is a former program of ICA InternationalThey are not certain of the year, so there are no further details that they could provide for a citation."Above quoted from an email dated 13 Feb. 2008 sent to me by the Director of Development and Communications at The Institute of Cultural Affairs International (ICA) in Quebec, Canada. Give a gift that gives again at Working Gifts"