Time is an interesting concept, because it is an incremental system that came about with what is called the Age of Enlightenment. It was then that we began to categorize. We began to create increments. We began to manage. We moved into an incremental way of experiencing things. For the Age of Enlightenment did indeed take us out of a relationship with wholeness, and into a relationship with increments. We have talked about this from another standpoint with the development of consciousness and the movement out of the right hemisphere and into the left hemisphere, which was very purposeful. It also moved us into a relationship with the seasons, with a sense of community and working with a rhythm. This focus became the way in which we controlled, dominated, took charge of, evaluated, assessed situations, and then reached a conclusion. And we were quite pleased with ourselves.

Then we moved into another place beyond that, and this was what was called the Post Modern Age. It was a time in which we took a step beyond the ability to control and define, and what we started finding is that those things that we controlled and defined changed within a few months. So even the paradigm of our science and the absoluteness of our conclusions that we could dominate, control, and take charge, changed into a realization that this would change every few months. Our absolutes became imperfect and because we had progressed out of a sense of wholeness and, purposely, into a sense of fragmentation, that left us in an awkward place without a sense of wholeness to connect to. We adjusted our minds, our realities, our experience into a place of categorizing, a place of fragmentation, and as a result we have now moved into another place where we say that there are no absolutes.

So what does that mean for us as human beings? Where do we hang our hat, so to speak? We don't have the connection with wholeness and we don't have a sense of continuum. Our self-righteousness at being able to categorize, define, and therefore control, has been uprooted by our own process of advancement where the absolute, for instance, of Newtonian science, can now no longer be absolute. We are now into quantum physics, and we know that is not absolute.

My observation is that we are seeing this dilemma reflected in the world around us, and we tend to take one of two positions. We either seek to regain control by categorizing and separating. This is where we get into what we would call name-calling, the "them versus us," and of course "us" is always right. We get into the absoluteness of "They are wrong and I am right," of seeing things as black or white. We are seeing this reflected in our world situation. Depending on what your perspective is, you are either the devil or you are a God-loving person. You are either politically correct or politically incorrect. So we have this first position which comes from that inherent feeling of emptiness, because we have nothing to stand on from our internal sense of self. Even that place in which we could stand with our fragmented conceptualization of the universe has been uprooted, because it changes every couple of months. So we stand over here with that sense of the absolute, black or white, good or bad, right versus wrong. Some would call this fundamentalist, and I don't mean fundamentalist in the religious sense. I mean fundamentalist in the sense of an absolutism that is defined by a set of laws and rules that can be defined by me, or that can be defined by the group that I identify with.

Or we stand over here in the place that some would call nihilism. It is the place where there is nothing that is important. Nobody is right. Nobody knows what's going on. I don't know what's going on, and there's nothing I can do about it anyway, even if I did know what was going on, so what's the point. Now a lot of people are smiling and agreeing with me. But realize that with this position comes a profound, deep cynicism, and it creates what I would call the negative hero. A leader emerges on the horizon who looks good, but the attitude is, give him a month or two and we are going to find some dirt on him and we're going to prove he is not worthy either. This inherent cynicism separates you. You are able to disconnect because of your belief that nothing worthwhile is happening, nobody is what he appears to be, there is nothing to aspire to. You are not connected to anything or anyone, including yourself. It is a form of flight.

In another languaging, we have fight or flight. We have fight over here where it's them against us, I'm right and they're wrong, they are the devils and I'm speaking for God, I'm politically correct, they're politically incorrect. The other position over here is just as destructive, which is that it's not about anything anyway, there is nothing that is meaningful, and it's all fake, I'm not a part of it, and whatever God is, changes on a whim and I have no connection to it anyway. I may go to one group for a month and then I bounce over here to another group, all the while looking for someone to prove to me that there's something or nothing meaningful in it. "They gave me a manifestation formula and I've been doing it for six months and I haven't manifested squat, so that tells me they are not with it anyway. Let me go someplace else."

These choices come from a deep sense of inner anxiety that can't stand the profound tension. This is described Kabbalistically as the Pillar of Mercy and the Pillar of Severity, and the choice to stand in the place of the Middle Pillar, the place of the Christ consciousness. Standing in that Middle Pillar means having the capacity to hold the tensions of both pillars and stay centered. And what does that really mean? As long as we look outside of ourselves, which is what we know, there is no hope, there is no connection, and there is not even a sense of self in relationship. I saw a quote that said that if you do not believe in something, then there is only you, because you have cut off the possibility of being connected with anything or anyone else. But what is even more dangerous is that if you put yourself at the center instead of something that is transcendent, then you bear the burden of that which is irreconcilable.

We are being called to a different relationship with our inner world, with our inner life, and it is one that we have not been encouraged to develop or consider. We are in a world where we are calculators, and in the Western world, we are fixers. We fix, we calculate, we read our angles, we decide how to schedule and how we are going to make things happen. We are paid and encouraged to do that. We spend a lot of our time calculating how we will fix something, and it's all about a process that manipulates and maneuvers the outer world to get a certain outcome. We are not encouraged to be in a place where we believe that there is inherent value in life itself. We are a market-driven economy. Value is based upon something that you can manipulate and change and do your angles on, and hopefully a month or two later, if you keep working the system, the value goes up. We calculate who is giving us the biggest output, what has got the highest market value, and which spiritual community is giving us the biggest buzz. We look outside of ourselves and ask, "What are they going to give me?" And depending on what they give me is what I give back.

It is said that those who have the capacity to change their own consciousness are able to change the world. I believe that in the extremes that we are seeing, we are being asked to move deep within our own inner world and to truly have a relationship with ourselves. And because we will be having a relationship with ourselves, we are indeed destined to change. As we know, true intimate relationships create profound change. Have an intimate relationship with self and at the same time have the courage to recognize that the self that you are having an intimate relationship with is not the center, but is part of a greater center. True change happens when we recognize that we are an intimate, integral part of a chain, but we are not the absolute. The whole world is affected because you have the courage to know self, and simultaneously know that in knowing that self, you don't identify with that level of self that is known. It is only through a connection with self and your inner world that you can then effectively hold your place on the Middle Pillar and identify with transcendent Self. We want to miss that step because it creates such anxiety to go to that place of tension. From the psychological standpoint this is known as the relationship with light and dark, with our shadow self and with our light self.

We are moving into the Resurrection moon energy. When I was thinking of the implication of regeneration, rebirth, new life, I wondered what it was that I was regenerating? That seemed an important question. Where was I standing? Was my
consciousness in the extreme of one side or the other of the polarities we have discussed? Was I having the courage to stand in that inner point of tension in the inner world to regenerate that which some have called the seeding of the Tree of Life that is interconnected with all life and knows itself as a part of life but not The Life? And by knowing itself as not The Life, it becomes The Life. That's the paradox, and that's part of what it means to stand in that center place. It is having the courage to stand with the paradox and not make absolutes of them. It is having the courage to open to new areas of consciousness and to stand in that place of knowing that there are no absolutes, but also not turning to nihilism, which is saying that because there are no absolutes that I can understand and hold in my consciousness, there must be nothing.

We have on the altar Our Lady of Czestochowa. She is from Poland. We went on a pilgrimage and we had the privilege of spending time in her temple. I was reading her history this week in a book that I picked up about her. She is called Our Lady of Sorrows. She has been a beacon of hope, of light, of potentiality in a country that has been torn apart by strife, that has been challenged by every form of absolutism from a dictatorship that commanded a certain belief to another form of dictatorship that commanded absolutely no belief. And there are stories about those who entered into her temple seeking to do harm. One story in particular is that during World War II the German soldiers went into the shrine and then dropped their guns and ran out screaming. They refused to reenter even to gather their weapons. One of the soldiers said, "I cannot stand the stillness." She invites us into the inner world with all of its anxieties, its paradoxes, and its hopes. She invites us into the womb of potentiality and encourages us not to box her or ourselves in. She asks us to accept and to have the patience and the compassion for life. I think that perhaps the reason that we step to one side or the other is because it is too painful to be in that inner place, because there are so many things that we see within ourselves or others or the world that seem so painful and uncertain. We want to fix them or we want to destroy them, and if we can do neither of those, then we want to run away from them and deny they exist. She offers us compassion, profound compassion, and in that compassion is our hope, and in that hope is our courage and our strength.

I was reading of a Franciscan monk who spoke of this in relationship to the crucifix. In his languaging, in his belief system, he stated that we should not only be identified with the vertical. In other words, do not choose to look only outside of self, toward heaven, for then you do not accept the reality, the joys, the pressures and the tensions of the whole dynamic. On the other hand, do not become so focused on the horizontal, the worldly identity, that you forget the vertical. Have the courage to hold your focus right in the middle where the vertical and horizontal come together. It is here that we experience the suffering and fear of being part of those seemingly irreconcilable worlds. But it is out of this that new life emerges, the resurrection, and indeed, the hope for all sentient life.

And so we move into our Pathworking. I ask that the many faces, the many expressions of Spirit come to offer themselves in service, in love, and in compassion, as we hold this womb, this sacred space of humility, of acceptance of tensions, of anxieties, of uncertainties, of death and regeneration. I would ask that as you take your breath, that you would consider the use of breath. In the Bible there are 365 references to breath, and most of those are references to forgiveness of self, forgiveness of others, forgiveness of things are not what you think they should or could be, forgiveness of perceptions, forgiveness of lack, forgiveness of doubt. And so we take our breath and we offer this breath, and we bring this breath to ourselves, into our experiences, into our perceptions, into our hopes, our fears, and our judgments.

As we move this breath through our consciousness, we offer it to our doubts. We offer this breath to the outer world and to the inner world. Yeshua spoke of breath as the breath of God, of forgiveness, of compassion. It is not something you have to go outside of yourself for, for you carry the breath. You live with the use of the breath. You are a part of the greater breath. And so we connect breath to breath. And as we connect breath to breath, we become aware of the breathing of which we are all a part, of all forms of sentient life. For as we know, the trees breathe, the grass breathes. And even as we are aware of our own breath and the space between the breaths, we also are aware that we are a part of a greater breath, an everlasting breath, a breath that breathes us, both in life and in death. And in the space between the breaths, we know that we are being breathed by the everlasting breath, and that we can move into this space, this inner space, between the breaths. For it is a doorway into the inner world, the inner landscape, that place that is interconnected, that does not need to react, to draw absolutes, or from which we need to run in fear. It is content in being, at times, discontented. It knows joy, even in the experience of suffering, but it turns its back not on suffering, but in deep compassion and profound love, it holds suffering but does not identify with it as an absolute.

You may become aware now that this space between your breaths into which you have moved, has become deeper, broader, above, below and all around. And as you are in the space between the breaths, being breathed by the everlasting breath, there is a greater ease, a familiarity, for this inner landscape has never left you. It is a part of you, just as the breath is a part of you, be it in life, or in death, for it is your sanctum of sanctums. And as we are aware of the breath and the space between the breaths, we also become attuned to the expanse of our hearts. For in this sanctum of sanctums, our hearts as one heart is revealed, is nourished, is strengthened, is enlivened, is vitalized, is comforted. And this place has now become quite limitless, and is not bound by space, nor time, nor thoughts, nor feelings, nor uncertainties, nor grandiosity. This comfort is extending, is spiraling out. And let all those who are uncertain, who are fearful, who are hurting, who are bound by extremes, be comforted, nourished, strengthened, clarified, renewed.

You are aware of the depth, the height, and the breadth of this space. It is our prayer, our request, our intention, our evocation, that this inner world that is part of the everlasting, ever-continuing inner world upon inner world upon inner world, be regenerated, restored, renewed, revitalized, and resurrected. And again we are aware of our breath and the space between our breaths, and of being breathed by the everlasting breath.

I would invite you to continue to hold this space as we say the Mantram of Unification.

The sons of men are one and I am one with them.
I seek to love, not hate.
I seek to serve and not exact due service;
I seek to heal, not hurt.
Let pain bring due reward of light and love.
Let the soul control the outer form,
And life, and all events,
And bring to light the Love
That underlies the happenings of the time.
Let vision come and insight.
Let the future stand revealed.
Let inner union demonstrate and outer cleavages be gone.
Let love prevail.
Let all men love.

In this place of all potentiality, we do not need to draw absolutes, to categorize, to separate or even to draw conclusions. This is a place of freedom. But it is not the freedom that we would identify with as personalities. It is much greater than that. For it is not bound, and yet it is rooted in the deepest most profound way. For I would remind you that the Tree of Knowledge has branches that reach high, and it is vast and expansive, and it is also deeply, profoundly rooted.