There is a difference between looking and seeing. There is a difference between listening and hearing. A lot of people can look but they don't see. A lot of people can listen but they don't hear. When you look and listen you're an observer to a process. You're standing apart from the process. And you're merely observing some kind of phenomenon.
When you see and you hear, you're a participant in the process. You're not just an observer on the outside. You're engaged and there on a totally different level. This is what Christ has in mind. He's not asking us to be observers. He's asking us to participate in our faith, in our total trust in the Father.
So, he's asking us, "Can you completely align with this? Can you realize that when you really know how to look and when you really know how to see and hear you're surrounded by Spirit?"
It's like we're walking through air right now and totally unaware of it. And right now there are hundreds of TV and radio stations beaming their way through us. But we can't pick them up because we don't have a transducer to translate electromagnetic signals into visual or auditory formats.
We're walking through this field of information and we're totally unaware of it. The deeper field of information is Spirit itself. We're walking through Spirit and unaware of the existence of Spirit. It's like fish in the ocean being aware that they're wet but demanding proof that the ocean exists.
And this is what Christ is talking about. When we really "see" and really "listen", we're aware that we are in a sea of Spirit, that Spirit is all around us. And then we can't be anxious. We can't be upset. We can't get angry. We can't be fearful of the future. When we see that we are surrounded by Spirit, we realize that we have a Father in Heaven who provides for us.
A YouTube video of my original homily appears below. I've also included everything in the drop-down panels at the left of this page so that you can read at your leisure.
May God continue to hold you tenderly in the hollow of Her hand.
Namasté,
Seán
Fr. Seán ÓLaoire, PhD
We often misunderstand and don't even know how to define life. Most of us think that life is what happens between birth and death. And that is not life at all. Life is not what happens between birth and death. Life is what happens between emanation from Source and merging back with Source. There is only one life in that theory. Life goes through six phases. The initial phase of all life is that it emerges from Source, that it emerges from God. Everything is actually emanating from God's "Isness". And it comes into physical manifestation or different kinds of manifestation.
The second phase of life is a pre–incarnate existence. Having emanated from Source we find ourselves as discrete souls. But we have yet to incarnate. The third phase of life is an incarnate experience. We put on our "spacesuits". And we go to Planet Earth, or some other place, and have an experience there. The fourth stage of life is a disincarnate, post–incarnational experience. We shuffle off this mortal coil. And we find ourselves back with our soul pod, reviewing the life we just lived and preparing for the next one. The fifth stage of life is a reincarnate experience where we re–engage with "spacesuits" in order to continue the lessons of limitation.
The sixth stage of life is the final stage. This is when we realize that we've learned how to love unconditionally in all circumstances. And there is no need for a separate, discrete ontologically different experience or existence. Then we merge again totally with Source. And then there is only Source again. There is only God again. All life goes through these phases.
No matter where you look at it and no matter what manifestation you see, there is only one life: "Source". You have 50 trillion cells in your body. But, every one of those actually came from a single zygote that divided into two and four and eight and sixteen and so on. And then in this process some groups of these cells specialized and became eye cells. And some became kidney cells. And some became saliva. And some became neurons. Basically every cell has the ability to be anything that's needed. And so, even with our physical bodies, which have 50 trillion cells, it's only one life, one single cell, that has given birth to all of these. That's true at the individual biological level. And it's true at the global, planetary level as well.
Of all the millions of species that have evolved over the last 3.7 billion years, they came from a single cell, a single protozoa, that gave birth to all these life forms. For the first 1.5 billion years, there were only single–cell creatures that replicated themselves. Then at some stage, they created communities of multi–cellular organisms. The great fish in the seas. Then the amphibians. Then the reptiles. Then the mammals. Then the hominids. And then, homo sapiens sapiens. But ultimately, it is only one life breathing through all of these, all coming from a single cell. So, even at a global level, there is only one life. We often ask ourselves. "Where did life come from on Planet Earth?" It's not like "The Source of All That Is" just took one tiny little planet in one solar system in a ho–hum galaxy in one Universe and decided to make life happen only there.
Most scientists would believe, at this stage, in a process called "Panspermia", that life was seeded from elsewhere in the Universe and either came down here on asteroids or collisions of comets, or was seeded intentionally by some kind of an extraterrestrial society that actually brought seeds down here and made a little garden of Planet Earth and tended it and came back and genetically modified it and sometimes weeded it. Life here came from elsewhere.
And no matter how you cut it, there is only one life in its distinct phases. And every life lives and breeds and exists in any dimension — whether it has physicality, or doesn't have physicality. And, whether it's pure Spirit, or pure intellect, it's still one life form that has emanated from Source. So, when Christ says, "Life is more than food," he's trying to impress upon us not to get confused and think that life is this little thing that we have to guard preciously because we might get knocked down by a double–decker bus or we could starve to death or that life is coterminous with the birthing process and the dying process.
And it's breathing through all our brothers and sisters, which makes us all siblings. No matter what life form we encounter, in any dimension and on any planet, it's brother and sister to us. And it's the same one life breathing through all of us. When we get this realization we know that every phase and every manifestation of this life is precious. We know that we have to protect each other and love each other and care for each other. And we have to honor and celebrate and love our own bodies as a manifestation of this gift of God. There is only one life breathing through this entire process. And it's eternal. There are different phases. And there is neither a beginning nor an end to the process. This is what Christ is talking about in impressing upon us that life indeed is much much more than the food we eat.
The body is one of these terms that Western Science has radically impoverished. In Western Medicine we are taught that the body is merely a jumble of flesh and blood and tendons with endocrine, immune, nervous, and cardiovascular systems wrapped up inside a skin–encapsulating ego. And, of course, it's not. That is an extraordinarily impoverished notion of what the body is. Other traditions have a much more in–depth understanding of what the body really is. In ancient Egypt there were two levels of body, "Ka" and "Ba". Ka is the physical articulation that we can see and touch. Ba is the field, the energy template, upon which the physical body came into existence. And modern vibrational medicine, or energy medicine; homeopathy and acupuncture recognize treating a level of body beyond the physical, the etheric template. The Egyptians got that concept thousands of years ago.
The Greeks went one better. They had three words for the body, "Sarx", "Soma", and "Pneuma". Sarx was the flesh–and–blood body that the West talks about. Soma was the Etheric Body that the Egyptians spoke about. And Pneuma was the Spirit Body inside us. So, there were three levels to body in the Greek understanding. And when you read the New Testament you can't make sense of Resurrection or Eucharist unless you understand this distinction in Greek. In St. Paul's "First Letter to the Corinthians", Chapters 11 and 15, where he talks about Resurrection and Eucharist, you can't understand what Paul is saying unless you appreciate that he is using the word "body" with three different Greek words. Sometimes Sarx. Sometimes Soma. And sometimes Pneuma.
So, when Paul says, "Flesh and Blood do not inhabit the Kingdom of Heaven," he means Sarx cannot inhabit the Kingdom of Heaven. Resurrection is not about the molecular reconstruction of a decayed corpse in order to inhabit an afterlife in Heaven. Instead, it's the Spirit Body that inhabits that level of reality because it has the appropriate vibrational frequencies. This is necessary to understand Christ's Resurrection and your own Resurrection. Also, to participate in Eucharist, to eat the body and drink the blood of Jesus Christ, is not to bite into his kidney or to chomp on his big toe. Eucharist is about encountering a totally different level of Christ's body.
So, Resurrection and Eucharist can only be understood when we understand what "body" really means. And although the Greeks did it well, the Hindus did it much better. They have seven different levels of body. There's the "Physical Body" that we identify with in the West. There's an "Etheric Body", vibrating at a higher frequency, which acupuncture and homeopathy address. There's an "Astral Body", the dream body that you use at night when you're traveling inter–dimensionally. It's the place where, according to Hinduism, you download all the information from an incarnation. There's a fourth level of Body, the "Mental Body", which is the place of ratiocination. It's the place where you download all of the great ideas. The "Causal Body", the fifth level, is where we experience our psychic abilities: clairvoyance, clairaudience, clairsentience, precognition, psycho–kinesis, etc. And that's another level of who we really are. The sixth level, "Atma", is the individual soul. The seventh level, "Brahma", is Cosmic Consciousness. So, as you can see, many other systems and traditions have a much better understanding of what the body consists.
Let's take, for instance, a soul who decides to incarnate. At some stage of the mother's pregnancy, the soul docks with an embryo or fetus, depending on what stage of the mother's pregnancy it decides to come in. So, it docks with this embryonic figure. And it has to learn how to manipulate and use this strange kind of mechanism that we call the Physical Body. It has to learn to stretch into the arms and stretch into the legs. It has to learn to adopt physicality, how to make the "machine" work. Then at some stage after it's born, it has to learn the emotional aspects of this machine. And, at some stage, it has to learn the intellectual aspects of this machine. And, at some stage, it has to learn the sociological aspects of how to be in relationship using this machine. It takes time for a soul to grow into that realization and manipulate the machine successfully.
Just as a soul learns to inhabit all the levels of the spacesuit — the physical, emotional, intellectual, and social — "Souls on Safari", people who are serious about their incarnational mission to become enlightened, have to learn to maneuver, control and inhabit all levels of the Metaphysical Body. We have to learn how to access and be in partnership with our Etheric or Energy Body. We have to learn how to have out–of–body experiences when we're dreaming at night as part of our spiritual journey.
And we have to learn to use our mind, not just to learn data, but to access wisdom. Data is knowing how the physical world operates. Wisdom is understanding how the metaphysical Universe operates. We have to learn to use our Causal Body to experience our psychic abilities. We all have them. How often have you thought about someone who hadn't come into your mind for three years? And just as you're thinking of them, the phone rings. And it's that person! So, all of us experience psychic properties. And growing into them is part of the journey.
As we begin to identify with our soul, we realize that we're "Spirits in Spacesuits", "Souls on Safari", bite–sized pieces of God having human experiences. And then, ultimately, as we prepare to merge with Source, we realize that even the soul itself is the first illusion on the way out from God and the last illusion on the way back to God.
We need to play our parts as well as we can. We need to learn how to perfect our acting techniques — in other words, to learn how to love in these configurations and not to mix up and think that our body is this little clay vessel.
Here's another word that has been radically misunderstood by religion and particularly by the Christian churches. We think faith is making a creed or saying "Yes" to a creedal formation of made up doctrine. So, we think that faith is saying "Yes, I believe in the Virgin birth. Yes, I believe in the infallibility of the Pope. Yes, I believe that Moses parted the Red Sea and that the Israelites crossed dry-shod."
We think faith is subscribing to a list of dogmas or doctrines that the churches offer to us. And that is not what faith is. Faith has nothing to do with that. They have misunderstood the first word. The word was not "credo", which means "I believe". It was "cordo", which means "I give my heart to". So, cordo became credo. So, an affair of the heart became an affair of the head. So, faith is not really an affair of the head. It's not saying, "Yes, I believe." Faith has nothing to do with belief. It has nothing to do with intellectual assent. It has everything to do with trusting, with allowing the heart to move out towards.
Here's an example of what real faith looks like. Real faith looks like a newborn infant whose utter trust actually manifests a loving mother. When you have the faith of a newborn infant, you literally manifest a compassionate mother. It's the baby's faith that manifests the mother. The baby knows, as soon as it comes out of the womb, that it will manifest a woman who will take care of all its needs. The child is not waiting and calculating how he or she is going to survive at this level. The child has literally manifested his or her mother through faith. And that's what faith looks like. And that's what Christ is calling to us. He's calling us to that level of trust in the Universe that all our needs are provided for.
So, whatever "mother" looks like in that phase of life, that is what Universe provides for us; if we have that level of commitment and understanding. In medical literature that level of faith is called the "placebo effect". This is the realization that it is the mind that heals the body and heals the mind itself. Belief in an inert substance is responsible for 35 percent of the effect of any medication. The placebo effect is where innate trust creates a physiological effect.
When Jesus Christ was healing he would eschew any kind of praise. He was not the healer. He would say, "It is not your belief in me that cured you. It is your own faith that cured you." And of course, we insist in hearing "Oh it is my belief in Jesus that cured me". It's what happened inside the core of your being that created the effect. And if you get that, you realize that we are very powerful beings. If you don't get that, you're just slavishly following some guy in a white coat and asking him to give you a pill or for somebody to lay their hands upon you and make things better. You can trigger that in people by particular kinds of rituals. And certainly you can direct energy at people and help them to activate that energy. But the energy is within you.
It's not the procedure that's going to make the difference. It's your faith in the procedure that's going to make the difference. So all healing, in some sense, is "self–healing". It is the psyche or the soul healing itself from the inside out. And Christ is pushing us towards this realization.
New Age Terminology uses a slightly different phrase. They say, "You create your own reality". There are two senses to this phrase. One is always true. The other is sometimes true. It is absolutely true that you create your own reality in that your perceptions create your own experiences. Ten of us can be at a ballgame together and watch a particular play. And because of our perceptions each one of us would create a totally different story line. And the experience would be radically different for each of us. So, it is always true that we create our own reality, in the sense that our perception creates our experience of what had just occurred.
And sometimes, our thinking can actually manifest and bring into physicality that which it thinks about. I notice this regularly in our speech. You're constantly bringing thought form into physical articulation. Every word you speak was born of a thought. There's a physical reality, a thought that you give birth to and an acoustical event, a sound or words that you write down on a piece of paper. Everything you see around you was originally some kind of thought form. Benches in a chapel started as an idea in some carpenter's mind. And then he assembled a whole bunch of physical material and brought into being a bench or a chair or a bus or a car — or whatever. Everything you see in the physical world originated as a thought form. And when a lot of people have the same thought form, it becomes easier to bring stuff into existence.
Take, for instance, the deadliness of propaganda. If you invite or force a whole bunch of people to think similarly about any event, it creates that reality — whether it's to bomb Syria or to be prejudiced against the Jews. A whole bunch of people with the same thought form actively conscribed by propaganda manifests that reality. So, at that level we're bringing stuff into being together.
If enough people are taught by enough churches to create the notion of a Hell, then the possibility is that when we transition, that the people who believe in that system will experience that reality — not eternally — but as a stage in their process. And at some future time, when we've been punished enough, we will realize that there must be something more to this. When we begin to think outside the box and think of other possibilities, we begin to create them.
It's an infinite safari in which we think and dream and imagine greater possibilities of unconditional love. And to the extent that we can dream unconditional love, we can create unconditional love. And if enough of us put energy and intention into thinking loving thoughts and to speaking loving words and to acting lovingly, we can literally create Paradise on Earth.