Consciousness,” which, simply stated, is “the awareness within each and every one of us of our ultimate Oneness with God.”
Jesus does provide an important lesson on how to experience life as purposeful. In doing so, he gives a spiritual correction to our usual interpretation of the metaphysical thought medicine, “You create your own reality.” When Jesus and his disciples meet a blind man on the road, the disciples ask Jesus if the man’s blindness is the result of the man’s own sins or that of his parents. Jesus responds in the negative, dismissing the retro-consciousness of cause and effect, in favor of the proactive perspective of repurposing the circumstance to fulfill an agenda of Jesus’s own choosing, thus acknowledging his role in creation. Jesus says that he will dedicate this man’s blindness to demonstrating God’s healing power. Then Jesus goes on to demonstrate that his own hands and God’s healing power are one. When we use the idea, “All you meet is self—you create your own reality,” to explain a misfortune, and we understand it in the three-dimensional causal world manner, then we feel guilty for our failure. That is a misuse of the idea. The true healing power of the idea is released when we embrace the event and use it to discover our divinity by our choice of response.
Practically speaking, how are we to use the events in our lives in such a way that we come into consciousness of the purposefulness of life? We might learn how to ask ourselves a question, such as, “What is it that I can learn from this experience?” Or, “How can I use this experience to help someone else?” Another tier might be to even learn how to respond to adversity with a sense of gratitude, “I wonder what the silver lining might be?” Gratitude fosters a sense of abundance, confidence, and curiosity. Gratitude paves the way for experimentation, for ways to create a stepping stone from a stumbling block, for ways to make lemonade from a lemon. It is this tendency to put toward good use the circumstances that come our way, to repurpose adversities into strategies for innovation that reflects our divine spark of creativity. It is a creativity that has an evolutionary basis, a purposefulness that invites our awareness and participation.
Finding out for ourselves how life engages us when we engage it is a significant spiritual milestone. No longer are we separate, having to fight for our own survival. Instead, we experience ourselves as part of a team, a member of the divine network of learners. As we engage life as a purposeful encounter to create consciousness of our divinity, we can rest assured that the divine is helping out!
5
Learning Through Nature
IN BOTH THE PSYCHIC AND WAKING STATES, EDGAR CAYCE WAS A strong proponent of communing with nature. Nature allows us to witness the orderliness of the universe in that we harvest what we plant. It also enables us to experience an aspect of co-creation. The readings contend that nature is an ideal place to learn about God. It is a wonderful school that enables us to learn about ourselves and our connection with the divine, as well as the rest of creation. Cayce believed that personal awakening and consciousness growth occurred when one was close to nature. When once asked how young children might best learn about God, his answer was two simple words: “In nature.” On another occasion, he stated that within each blade of grass it was actually possible to see the Creator’s love.
Nature is God’s handiwork, of course, and we can perhaps perceive the Creator’s mind by studying the designs in nature. But there may be more to it than that. Whatever your own experiences in nature, it may not come as a surprise to learn that in surveys concerning spiritual or similar transformational experiences, nature is always the most frequent context for them. Clearly, nature has something special to offer that we don’t always encounter in a church or a classroom.
You may be one of those many folks who feel as if they can be in communication with the trees, like Joseph, a man who likes to lean against a pine tree in order to “exchange energy and healing vibrations.” When feeling especially troubled, or when seeking inspiration, Joseph explains that he will lean against his favorite pine tree and just begin to meditate or relax. He reports that inevitably he feels better and often has a sense that he has received “guidance” by communing with nature.
Mary is another individual who states that she experiences “feeling connected” whenever she gets to spend some quality time outdoors. She says that after sitting peacefully outside she begins to feel a special resonance, as if she were “vibrating in harmony with the scenery.” While taking time to be outdoors, she contends that she often feels the presence of God.
Chances are excellent that when you think of being outside in nature, it makes you feel good. Chances are almost as good that you can probably recall a very special nature experience, one that made a big impact on you. One thing’s for sure, since Edgar Cayce’s lifetime there has been a lot of research on the value of being in nature or even being exposed to the natural world.
Most of us enjoy a walk through the woods. Turns out, research shows that it’s actually therapeutic. In one study, for example, depressed patients were asked to go for a 30-minute walk. One group walked in the woods, while one group walked in the mall. All of those who walked in the woods emerged feeling better about themselves. Among those who walked in the mall, half felt better and a fourth of them felt worse!
Some explain the value of being in nature in terms of fresh air. As it turns out, however, research has shown that you don’t have to be out in nature to benefit, just being able to see it makes a difference. In a study involving at-risk young girls living in inner-city Chicago, researchers found that those girls whose homes had a room with a view of greenery had better grades and showed better concentration and less impulsive behavior than did those girls whose homes only had views of other buildings.
Simply looking at pictures of nature can also have a positive impact, changing a person’s value system in the moments afterwards. In one study, a group of participants viewed buildings, roads, and other cityscapes, while the other group observed landscapes, lakes, and deserts. Participants afterwards took a questionnaire assessing the importance of four life aspirations: “to be financially successful,” “to be admired by many people,” “to have deep enduring relationships,” and “to work toward the betterment of society.” The group examining the nature scenes showed an increase in valuing connections and community, while those observing the man-made environments preferred wealth and fame. In another test, those observing the nature scenes were more likely to share money won from a game than were those who viewed the man-made scenes. The researchers speculated that viewing nature helped each participant connect with his or her “authentic self,” whereas the man-made scenes reminded participants of the stresses of modern life.
Cayce would agree with these researchers that nature reflects our “authentic self”—our god-like self—more so than do buildings. It is worth exploring how that reflection process might operate. Modern brain research has discovered what scientists now call “mirror cells” in the brain that automatically function to stimulate an unconscious mimicry of the visual information the brain is processing. Updating in modern brain technology an old concept of “feeling into” or empathy, researchers now believe that there is a built-in mechanism within the brain for mimicry as a means of understanding. It’s as if the mirror cells build upon an old kindergarten truism: “It takes one to know one.” It’s as if the brain works on the principle. “To know something, become it.” That’s certainly a variation on using imaginative role-playing to become like whatever you wish to understand. Edgar Cayce calls it “attunement.” When we make an “attunement” to something we go through a subtle process of mimicry, of imagining that we are like that something or that quality of something.
There are a number of ways of intentionally creating attunement with nature. Research with students of the Cayce material has demonstrated the value of that attunement, and we’ll describe some of them here.
Meditation in nature would seem obvious. Letting the mind rest upon an ideal such as “harmony,” which is certainly one attribute of nature, would bring the meditator in attunement with a harmonic pattern of the creative forces circulating within the meditator’s own body. It would also place the meditator in attunement with the harmonic relations among the living beings in nature. Meditating in nature seems like such a