Why Teach Spirit to be Spiritual? Let's Just Create!

By Rev. Brian Kirsch

We’ve heard spiritual guru’s say "We are spirit learning to be human". WHAT? If I'm spirit, then I create! I don't need to learn to be human. The humor in  believing we need to learn to be human is like Eddie Murphy, from his Saturday Night Live skit, where we think he had to learn to be Gumby! We ARE SPIRIT. Let’s act like spirit and do what we do, which is create. Soooo, let's just jump right in and start to create!

Now it's interesting that once we decide what we're going to create, we need to acquire specific knowledge. Let’s use our networking to find someone with the knowledge rather than taking a ton of time learning everything ourselves. Let’s see what value we are giving to this person in our creation network so that they want to align with our path. They jump enthusiastically aboard. Now we not only have the knowledge, we just expanded our network even further. Let’s take another step and gander at some possibilities!

Let’s hallucinate for a moment on the path of The Alliance of Divine Love. …and yes, I said hallucinate. Let’s look at that word and its meaning: Hallucinate, “experience a seemingly real perception of something not actually present.”

My vision for my ministry, and as an added bonus, some special features for the National ADL organization, is to have a vibrant, community engaged center. A place where people come together to hear, see and experience some uplifting ways of being. This is a place where guests can purchase some of their food for the week at the weekly Farmer Market set up right after the weekly inspiring invocation. Guests can also have a seat in our cafe to catch up with friends or to network for their own exciting creations! Imagine having the space to bring in nationally and internationally known leaders of the spiritual community. The outside community would want to visit our facility and while they visit, they just may be interested in some of the going ons that we have happening.

Let’s bring in the average Joe and/or Joanne. Why bring in the “everyday regular person”? An analogy that I use is the way Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP created by Grinder and Bandler) and Neuro-Associative Conditioning (NAC created by Tony Robbins, a NLP graduate) are alike, but different. Basically, it’s the same stuff. The difference, for me anyways, is that Tony Robbins puts it in terms for us regular people. Let me put it in another way. “Spiritual folks” create their seminars to teach people how to connect to their spiritual selves. Some teach ways to have prosperity by using affirmations or creating treasure maps.

A different approach is to use a homebuilder as the spiritual being. Introduce the idea that they are already spiritual AND notice how they are already prosperous. A home builder starts with nothing. They have the desired house drawn up on blueprints (a treasure map). They get the financing. The contractor then builds the house. TaDa!! Soooo, now we see that this mysterious miracle we call prosperity is not a miracle at all. It’s just taking certain steps to produce the results that you and I are after. Builders already create. Farmers already create. They are already spiritual AND they don’t use fluffy words! These are spiritual folks looking for a place to hang out with so they can experience a sense of community.

Yes, ADL has been around for over 50 years. It has a solid spiritual foundation coming from the Greatest Degree of Love. Why hasn’t the whole world grasped this? If what a person speaks of never forms in the physical world, people believe it is…just a hallucination. Let us come together in the Greatest Degree of Love and create the best selling book(s). Let’s create that successful business seminar where we can show concrete evidence that the techniques we are using produce earthly, tangible results as much as the feel good spiritual code. OMG, a vibrant, community engaged center could be that tangible result!

I found this snippet from an article in the New Yorker, written by Emily Witt about Marianne Williamson. The snippet is in the framework of politics which we’ll use as just an analogy. I invite you to ask this question at the end of the snippet: Where can we go and what can we do, to produce a vibrant, community engaged, ADL center?
“You know, one of the things that’s been very funny for me, in terms of my political campaign, is that the political establishment thinks of itself as mainstream and thinks of those who are more concerned with religion, spirituality, health and wellness, psychotherapy, personal transformation, yoga, A.A., as almost like some fringe over there,” she continued. “When, really, if they ever want to awaken from 1987, they will find this is America today. That’s obvious. If you look at all the books that are best-sellers, that’s obvious. If you look at all the business seminars. That’s obvious. If you look at integrative medicine today.” The world of self-help and New Age spirituality, she emphasized, were the new mainstream.

Marianne Williamson looked around at her people. “We have proven now that what we touched transforms,” she continued. “What do you call all those yoga mats? That’s from our crowd. What do you call all that mindfulness stuff? Our crowd. And the only reason politics hasn’t transformed is because”—and her voice dropped into its deepest register—“we haven’t been there yet.”

So I ask you again: Where can we go and what can we do, to produce a vibrant, community engaged, ADL center? Hint: this requires an action step!