By John Gray
Happy equinox, everybody! In Planet Earth’s Northern Hemisphere, it is early spring; in the Southern, early autumn. There are lights in the firmament of heaven, according to the Book of Genesis, which are “for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years.” We live and move and have our being in a vast orderly context. People recognize this to some extent and are awed by the heavens. Those with more heavenly awareness know they are part of it all and are not small. The purposes of heavenly bodies and of our personal human bodies are identical in essence: the self-revelation of deity.
The word “corporate,” both a verb and an adjective, is from Latin corporatus, past participle of corporare, “to make into a body” which in turn was formed from corpus, “body.” The etymologies of words are usually rooted in older languages, indicating that many of today’s English words grew or evolved from older rootstock. There was a reason that old root existed, and there’s value and use for words derived from it. A dictionary definition of corporation is “an association of individuals, created by law or under authority of law, having a continuous existence independent of the existences of its members.”
In the business world, large assets may be an indicator of impressive corporate size, and high revenues may be also, but it’s net cash flow that reveals the real health and vitality of an enterprise. Organizations struggling with cash flow may cut costs, go into debt to finance operations, and/or sell off assets in a desperate effort to assuage the problem. But sooner or later these “eating one’s young” approaches become self-defeating strategies. Cashflow is the lifeblood of a business corporation.
Let’s look at our spiritual corporation, the collective body. In the mind-made world, money is both symbol and substitute for pneumaplasm, the connecting substance between spirit and form. In the divine body corporate, vitality, effectiveness, and tonal accuracy are measurable by pneumaplasmic generation and the power of spirit accommodated thereby. As there is greater quantity and quality of spiritual substance, pneumaplasm, in personal experience, new ranges of perception open up. We recognize that the tone of love rightly sounds as words and music on the physical plane, and above that are overtones reaching well beyond the audible into the undimensional. There are also “over-words” continuously streaming from ranges far beyond ordinary language. Here is the true language of re-creation, the creative Word. The Greek term for this is logos, which translates into English as “Word.” Our hearts and minds are designed to express the Word; our bodies are the Word made flesh.
I note that a lot of us on this videoconference today are fairly senior with more years behind us than ahead. Many of us are of an age when not only our elders but contemporaries are reaching their exit ramps. How do you think about that? To lots and lots of people, mortality is a big issue.
How death looks depends completely on who’s looking. In solely human identity, death of the physical form is the demise of “me.” It can be numbing, depressing, scary, sad, mysterious, and more. In spiritual identity, we know death as a process of conclusion, yes, but a rather joyous one in which as much as possible of the outer is being absorbed into the inner. I am the One doing the absorbing. Quite a difference! Some more enlightened writings I’ve read about physical dying and death come close to describing something of the latter experience, but they’re all written from the perspective of the one dying (human) and not the one living (being).
A sense of the nearness of personal death is actually a sense of the presence of the incarnate Eminent One—the Angel Incorporate—making what, in many cases, may be a final effort to come through a hardened, stubborn human heart. In sharp contrast, we may know it as the coming forth of the angel. Perhaps we can also feel the impending death of the separated collective self of humankind, and at the same time sense the concurrent emergence of vast glory. Again, what we see all depends on the experienced identity of the one who’s looking. Human affairs loom large to human identity, often to the exclusion of all else. The “all else” is far more significant to those with eyes to see. We become more aware of larger signs and seasons.
Looking at the Zoom screen today, I think it’s safe to say that we share some sense of spiritual chemistry with one another, or we wouldn’t be participating in this call. Spiritual chemistry might become a foundation for real syntony, agreement, but chemistry is just a start. Enjoying one another’s company is great, but mutual admiration alone does not make a unified body. The value and effectiveness of any group of divinely conscious individuals depends upon meeting and remaining in the crossover point where divine identity is an experienced fact. As I know who I truly am and you know who you truly are, then we really see and know each other. We also know the greater corporation of which we’ve always been parts. Things like human foibles and individual personality traits fall away in importance until they’re scarcely noticed.
Noting the obvious, “individual” means “not dividable.” A challenge confronting a spiritually purposeful group is to be collectively indivisible—in other words, a single collective individual, one corporation. The One Body is far larger than any subset of itself. Small groups of angelic friends on earth make an excellently substantial contribution to the larger whole, as well as being valuable practice in unified function. For any group, it is simultaneously essential that it be defined and contained in its form and purpose while not in any way being exclusive. This may seem paradoxical to human minds but at the crossover point it is completely natural.
Last month Larry Krantz spoke of the incredibly complex and marvelous human body. “Our physical forms reveal the divine pattern, holographically; each part is a representation of the cosmic design. The brain has about 100 billion neurons. Our home galaxy, the Milky Way, has about 100 billion stars. So, we carry a miniature replica of the galaxy inside our skulls!” I read there are over 30 trillion cells in the typical adult human body—an astronomical figure. Some scientists estimate that we have more cells in our personal bodies than the number of all the galaxies in the observable universe. Our individual bodies are nevertheless one entity, a single whole, composed of myriad specialized and harmonized parts. None of those parts, whether as small as a cell or as large as an organ or the glandular, nervous or circulatory systems that connect it all, can function outside the corporate whole. When I was twelve years old my tonsils were removed and I was fine, but I’m happy to not have had anything more important taken out.
As I often do, I was reclining in our backyard hot tub yesterday morning, welcoming the first glimmer of day starting to spread on the eastern horizon. I’m always aware that it is the earth that is rotating to greet the sun and not the sun rising. My focus of attention was in my own Presence, usually sensed within my head or above it. I call it the place of mission control. Yesterday morning, however, my experience was of being everywhere in my body and beyond, all at once. I am present everywhere. I permeate it all and shine round about.
Many of us accepted the idea of divine identity years ago, at least conceptually. And we came to have some experience that there are not two of me. There’s no “me” over here and “my god being” over there. Initially, the human me must cultivate a full-hearted, aspiring, responsive attitude and behavior with respect to transcendent being; this is absolutely essential. And the time comes in the progression of things—and it’s now—to be the complete me. In other words, to know that I am One: a single being, incorporated. Heaven and earth are one.
The word assume can mean “to accept without proof.” But, to me, the word’s more important meaning is “to take upon oneself.” Assume angelic identity! We do this not in theory or belief; we actually take true identity upon ourselves and become one being in human form. The outer is absorbed into unity with the One I AM. I then know myself as a single self, humanly incorporated. And I recognize my angelic colleagues. On a collective scale I think of this as a divine merger and acquisition: the absorption of the global corporation into oneness in the creator.
The power and magic of God manifests through those who know, as the Master Jesus put it, that “The Father and I are one.”Being, Incorporated. This is our company, God’s corporation. It has been since before the beginning.