Light, love -- all that is good and holy -- already exists. All the wisdom you and I will ever need already lives within us. It's just that we are not where the wisdom is. Why? Because we want to know, to prove, to get. We want to be seen as something special. All of us with that mindset are set to suffer ourselves until one day we see, "This doesn't work." In that same moment the epiphany comes, and suddenly we can see what we have been. We can see what was in the dark in us. By the light, we can see the darkness.
But we lend our hearts and minds all the time to a world that is beneath us -- which, by the way, is the soil out of which we have come. There is tremendous energy there, but that life must be transfigured, it must be acted on, and it must die so that something can live that already is in this timeless realm.
This whole process means that we are just like a tree. The blossoming crown of the tree collects the light, doesn't it? It sits in the radiance of the sun, and it drinks it in. But if the tree with the crown above didn't have exactly the crown beneath it in the darkness of the soil, the tree couldn't do anything, because it draws what it requires out of the earth to transform it through the energy into what becomes a heavenly peach, a beautiful apple, or a flower of some kind.
Does the light have to explain its actions? Or does the light, by its very nature, change whatever it touches? So when I am explaining and justifying what I "know," making excuses for myself, guess who's talking in me for me that I think is me? The root ball of the tree! Something that lives in order to ensure that it remains intact and that nothing changes it.
We want to be in a relationship with life so that we can be in agreement with it at all times. But how do we act to be in agreement with life at all times? By understanding that the purpose of the light is to act upon the darkness -- that the parts of me that are regretful, angry, resentful, that are always trying to figure out what's wrong, how to fix it (that part of me that's on its own mission) are meant to be changed. This nature, this in-the-dark part, is what has to be changed through revelation, and if I want revelation, something has to be revealed.
What is it that has to be revealed? That which is concealed. Hidden. In the dark. And what's in the dark doesn't want to be in the light. It likes being in the dark. Have you ever turned a rock over? Do the little bugs underneath go, "Oh, light!"? What do they do? They scatter and look for another dark spot. That's what the part of us that explains and justifies ourselves does. The light came, we could have had a chance for something to change, but instead we dive for the dark. Why? So we don't see ourselves as wrong.
Can you learn without seeing that you don't know? No! The only way you learn is when you see that you didn't know. Do you want to go through life not knowing? The spiritual life is a life in which a new knowing is being given to you, and it isn't your knowing. It is a knowing born out of the revelation that light produces on the part of you that's meant to be transfigured. Then you "die" moment to moment. Then you have a different order of life because you're not trying to carry anything forward with you.
But what takes place in the moment where, by the grace of God, even though we don't "get it" yet, He's brought out his pruning shears? "What! Are you kidding me? I don't want to be pruned!" Do you want to be pruned? Where something comes along and lops off the dead wood, that which can't bear fruit? If you ask a typical human being, they're the living tree of life itself even though they're hanging there with dead wood. And how do you know it's dead wood? Because they have to drag themselves around!
In that moment, when reality seems to collide with what we're clinging to, the problem isn't reality. The problem is that we're clinging to something that, by the appearance of a new order, shows us that we have outgrown this; we have outlived this. This no longer can serve us. What makes us suffer from our past, from some pursuit, cannot serve us.
So instead, we are going to agree with life. Why are we going to agree with life? Because we know there is reason to be of good cheer: Something that wants more for us than we can imagine (let alone give to ourselves), is never ceasing in its effort to reveal to us that which lives in us as an innate possibility.
Within us exists the Kingdom of Heaven. And just as the oak lives in the acorn, we live within the tree of life. Little by little we can recognize that this timeless life, this timeless truth, this timeless knowledge -- our Father's Kingdom -- exists.
The task (and the exercise) is that you must cease from defending yourself, not because you think it's a good thing to do, but because you understand that only darkness defends itself from what the light reveals. We must use our attention in the moment to remember that.
Remembering myself, being in the light, is coming back to myself and realizing, I am in my Father's kingdom. I choose the light. I use my attention to remember that I'm never outside what is revealing me to myself. And in that very moment of standing in the light, do you think that the part of you that doesn't want you to know you are always in your Father's Kingdom is going to say, "Oh good, now we're in the kingdom; I have no more authority over you"? Or is it going to do everything it can to ensure that you remain someone believing that you are all alone and by yourself through eternity?
That is the nature that must be sacrificed, and you don't do it. You being aware of the light that shows it to you produces the sacrifice. This is dying to yourself -- the agreement to choose the light of the Divine to reveal, and to stand in the revelation. And in the revelation, there will be a passage. What is revealed is transfigured. But nothing is born without something dying. Only now you are going to be the instrument of that entire movement. And every time you agree to go through that, you realize that the only thing life ever brings you is an opportunity to be reborn a new human being.
