The Center for Spiritual Living strives to create a world that works for everyone. In a world that works for everyone, everyone has the opportunity to live freely, joyfully and live with love and knowledge about who they are and what they can become.
When it comes to the CSL living part of our vision, we strive to see all life honored as an expression of the divine and to live according to the spiritual truth. This vision also includes an emphasis on unity, not differences between one another. If we all understood who we are and our relationship with the divine, our world would be a different place. But in today’s world, most people don’t understand their connection to the divine. Many see themselves as limited, smaller, not connected to others – they see themselves as everything but the truth of who we are in the metaphysical experience.
We are all called to social action. Social action means understanding those things we want to bring into the world, not having social action against something. When it comes to wanting to bring things into the world, we often become focused on fighting against something. But fighting the other side is not the best way to manifest things. Some of the most successful movements took a different direction: they focused on providing others with what they needed, whether that was healthcare, shelters, support, and so on. Whatever that is in you pushing you to support a cause, take action and go do it! But do it peacefully.
There is an old teaching out there that motivates us to break out of our binary thinking. In this teaching we learn to transform consciousness to look above and beyond at something bigger. For instance, hot and cold are not two different things. Hot and cold are measures of the same thing. Light and dark are also the same thing, just different degrees of the presence of light. With this thinking, we are pulled to a higher idea of transformation.
With the idea of transformation, we’re not teaching what you should see, but how you should see. This teaching doesn’t want you to see one side or the other because both sides are necessary. There are dualities all around us, but when we look at them carefully we can rise to a different consciousness and see the duality differently. This idea of transforming dualities is so important because when we get stuck only seeing our way, that is when we get scared, love goes away and is replaced by feelings like aggression. If we can all move from binary to wholeness we learn to see wholeness in all things.
So how do we create a world that works for everyone? We start with building a beloved community. In a beloved community, there is a consciousness of wholeness and there are no victims. There is a consciousness of love and connection that is defined by each individual. Beloved community is all about mutual support, conscious contribution and a consciousness of responsibility and resilience.
To create a beloved community, we have to create the beloved self because we can’t love others if we don’t love ourselves. We start with us and those we love and then treat those as if they are the beloved community no matter how much we disagree with them. When everyone loves themselves and understands their connection with the divine, we can then have a world that works for everyone.
