I once read that Deepak Chopra sleeps between 1 ½ to 2 hours per night. In the morning, his secretary tells him where he’s supposed to be, and what he’s doing. This author of over 42 bestselling books travels the world, gives lectures, offers workshops, and keeps a schedule that would exhaust most mortals. How does he do it?
I just co-led a workshop with Barbara Marx Hubbard in Chicago. She’s 82. She’s about to launch a TV show. She already has a radio show. Barbara has spent the last year training thousands of people to be Agents of Conscious Evolution. After the workshop in Chicago, she was flying back to her home in Santa Barbara, California, packing another suitcase and leaving the next morning to lead another workshop. What amazes people who experience Barbara is her seemingly inexhaustible energy supply. She shows no signs of slowing down.
Jesus kept a pretty amazing schedule himself. The gospel story for this morning depicts him healing Peter’s mother-in-law of a fever. The crowds are lined up outside the door waiting for their own healing. Jesus sneaks out before dawn to find quiet place. The disciples find him and tell him that crowds are waiting for him to return. But he’s ready to move on to other villages to carry on his healing work. His schedule would have also exhausted most people, and yet we hear him in another passage calling all of those who are weary and laden with burdens to come to him. He would offer them rest? How did he do it?
The author of Isaiah contrasts mere mortals, even youth in the high-energy phase of life, with God, the Source and Font of all energy. “Even youth will faint and be weary, and the young will fall exhausted”, but “God does not grow faint or weary” (Isaiah 40:28-29. God is the Source of all energy, who continually pours out energy without exhausting the supplies. God is the Supplier. So what do modern mystics like Deepak Chopra, Barbara Marx Hubbard, and ancient prophets like Jesus know that keep them going like the energizer bunny? Deepak Chopra meditates three hours every night. Barbara spends time every day tapping into the Creative Process of the Universe itself. Jesus was forever stealing away to a quiet place to drop back into Source he called the Father.
Yet it’s not their energy per se that interests me. It’s what this conscious dropping into the divine Source makes of the energy. By tapping into a deeper source their energy is sanctified and focused in service of a higher, sacred purpose. That higher purpose is differently defined by each of them. For Jesus it was the realization of Kingdom of God on Earth. A big part of the challenge for our fledgling species is that we haven’t collectively awakened to what it is we’re meant to use our energy for. Despite living through the most affluent period of civilization, Western democracies continue to use their energy for mere survival, for displays of status, as though we still lived in a jungle. We exhaust our energies playing the money game, chasing after the next big thing, converting natural, social, and spiritual capital into money—because money masquerades as a god. But it is not a source of energy. It is not the Supplier. In fact, we exchange our life energy for it. So we had better be clear what our life energy is for, if we’re going to break our unconscious confusion of money with god. As it is, many of us are exhausting ourselves, and inadvertently exhausting our planet’s resources, spending our true capital, life energy, on that which does not renew us. “Even youths”, cries Isaiah, “will faint and be weary, and the young will fall exhausted”.
But God does not grow weary. And those who wait upon the Lord do not grow weary, because they are in service to a purpose beyond mere survival. But how do you “wait upon the Lord”? What does that mean exactly? It doesn’t mean waiting for an external God to do something that we can’t do ourselves. It means to consciously align with, and be nourished by, the sacred Source of all energy. In doing so, we not only gain energy for survival, we gain energy for serving a divine purpose. And when we do this, our soul awakens because it finally has something to do that matters.
I want to suggest three fundamental pathways to this eternal Font of energy. The first is to spend time cultivating awe. Be in nature. Watch documentaries. Learn the story of the universe. Study science. Do whatever it takes for you to get stopped in your tracks by the sheer beauty, complexity, and intelligence that is coursing through life on our planet. I want our policy makers and our politicians to drop into the fragile beauty and intricacy of our ecosystems. I want us as a species to appreciate, in the words of the psalmist, how fearfully and intricately we are made (Psalm 139:14). Whoever penned the words to that psalm wrote without the benefit of science. He could have had no idea as to how elegant the human body is, how the adaptive striving and intelligence of all the creatures that preceded us on this planet forge it. If we are not familiar with the condition of awe, we have no business writing environmental policy. If we are not able to bow before beauty and elegance, we will inevitably end up serving the interests of money, because the ego serves only security, and money is security’s god. The great Jewish philosopher and mystic, Abraham Heschel, had it right when we wrote, “forfeit awe and the world becomes a marketplace.”
But those are able to fall silent before the sheer miracle of life will connect with the energy that is coursing through all life forms. And once you have genuinely connected with this pulsing energy, you will want to harness that power for the good of all creation. The LORD shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.
The second pathway that gives wings to the weary is to find your heart. Do whatever you need to do, first to find, and then soften your heart. “Waiting for the Lord,” means orienting from your heart center. It requires a commitment to feel what’s in your heart before acting, speaking, or committing to anything. Find your heart and allow it to melt and flow like warm lava. Hang out with people who love you unconditionally, and love them back in relationships of reciprocity that build the field of love. Find a community of love, comprised of those who have arrived at a point in their lives when they’ve tried everything else, and have come to realize that it pretty much comes down to love. Connect with love and you will connect with the power that gave birth to our universe.
The heart center or chakra is located midway along the line of energy centers in our body. This is where the energies of Earth and the transcendent energies of heaven meet. If we’re making decisions as a species without connecting to our hearts, they will be bad decisions. If we are creating new technologies from hardened hearts that technology will not be in service of life. It will be in service of money. But if our best minds are connected to our hearts, then our technology can serve the future of our planet and life itself. In the newly emergent human— doctors, lawyers, trade workers, clergy, scientists, inventors, engineers, politicians and philosophers are rooted in heart intelligence. Those who live from their hearts shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint. They will be in service to love, and nothing bad ever came of love.
The third pathway to eternal life—by which I mean access to the self-renewing divine energy at the heart of life—is to find practices that help you to overcome the illusion of separation. For the past three hundred years we have been making decisions as a species based in a belief in fundamental disconnection: of humans from Earth; of men from women; of heads from hearts; of matter from spirit; of Earth from a living, learning universe; of the divine and the human; of science and technology from spiritual wisdom; of economics from ecology; of body and soul; of socially privileged from the cast-offs. This list is endless. It is endless because the illusion of separation has turned difference into disconnection, and from disconnection into dissociation. Dissociation is a psychological state of dysfunction that leaves its victim feeling cut off from reality and life itself. It’s like living in a bubble.
The greatest spiritual masters of history and of our age share this in common: they know that Reality is One. Everything and everybody is a fruit of the single tree of life. We come from the same Source, we are nourished by that Source, and to that Source we will return, and then given a new form and a new consciousness. It’s a great recycling program, with Spirit assuming forms most glorious (to use Darwin’s phrase for diversity).
Sufi poet, Hafiz, intuited Spirit’s recycling program, this single, sacred energy, this one tree of life bearing much fruit. Note how in the middle of this poem, Hafiz asks the question, “What power is it within our sinew and mind that will not die, that keeps shopping for the perfect dress?” “Perfect dress” is his metaphor for diversity.
Look I Am a Whale
We live on the sun’s playground.
Here, everyone get’s what they want.
Sometimes the body of a beautiful woman,
Sometimes the body of a beautiful man,
Sometimes the body of both in One.
We used to play that kind of tag
In the animal world too.
Now a mouse,
Now a tiger,
Look! I am a whale—I got tired of the land
Went back to the ocean for a while.
What power is it in our sinew and mind
That will not die,
That keeps us shopping for the perfect dress?
We have all heard the Flute Player
And keep dancing toward Him.
Hafiz you have seen the Flute Player
and cannot help but
Whirl.
What is this power within us, and within all that will not die? Some call it God. Some call it Spirit. Others call it Mystery, or Life. It really doesn’t matter what we call it, but it doesn’t matter that we learn to dance to the music It plays, and even more than this, to become that energy which will not die—at least for the time we have on this extraordinary planet.
I think that this is what all great spiritual masters have discovered—that they are that splendid dress that Spirit has chosen to wear for this brief sojourn through life, and when they dance, they dance with the energy and eternal vitality of Spirit. And when the dance is over, they know that they return to that which will not die. There is no disconnection anywhere, just different forms and unique expressions of one Spirit, calling us to awaken and become the best expression we can be of the Oneness-in-diversity. Those who do shall truly.
Drop into awe, into heart, and into Unity. Be in service in your own radiant and unique way to this one blessed universe. This doesn’t take a lifetime of spiritual practice. Spiritual practice is just a response to the always already present wonder, love, and unity of this blessed power that gives wings to the weary, and strength to the faint. Let us mount up, friends, and soar into a new future for humanity, that is coming through us.
