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Responding to the Call

The ethers are humming and teeming with messages and something or someone is always attempting to call and attract our attention to make their needs known. We receive a constant and broad-spectrum stream of incoming signals – ranging from the call of the Soul that seeks to guide and enlighten us during our sojourn on Earth to the desperate cries of pain and anguish from human hearts immersed and enmeshed in a world of suffering.

We are being asked to register and respond to the harrowing emergencies as well as to the hopeful signs of emergence and regeneration. The most obvious and compelling voice is the cry for help whenever natural disasters strike and human tragedies occur. Our society is organized to act swiftly in times of distress with teams of first responders providing aid and comfort. However, as well as these skilled and willing hands who can tackle wildfires, rescue people from collapsed buildings and tend to the wounded at the scene of an accident, there is also a real need for those who are equipped to offer spiritual first aid.

The recent massive earthquakes in Southern Turkey and Northern Syria come as a stark reminder of the fragility of life on Earth and need for us to act out of compassion. How do we provide immediate aid and comfort to our sisters and brothers in any part of the world whose lives have been severely disrupted by a natural disaster? It is one thing to supply the population with food, medicine, shelter and the basics of life and yet, who is able to provide the deep spiritual aid to those who have either lost their lives or lost their worldly possessions and their loved ones? This is where the Spiritual First Responder team enters the picture.

We are living in times of great transition and turmoil as old models of thinking and behaving are found wanting and begin to break apart. In addition to mobilizing our resources to address this all-systems breakdown, a spiritual aid worker responds to the urgent request of the Soul to generate a new narrative and construct a more just and joyful society that reflects the innate goodness and potential of the human spirit. If we don’t sow the new seeds of fiery hope and possibility in the soil of today, then nothing different will grow tomorrow in the Garden of Gaia.

At Meditation Mount, we are committed to building more soul-inspired forms of collective living upon the solid foundation of spiritual principles and values of caring and sharing. These tense times of emergency, no matter how painful, can also be windows of emergence for the new shoots of a preferred future. Are you and I ready to become spiritual first responders? Do we have what it takes to answer this call?

Let me share a personal experience which happened over 40 years ago while living in the Findhorn Community in northern Scotland that impressed itself indelibly upon my psyche and opened my eyes to the necessity of having a skilled band of Spiritual First Responders on-call and available to serve our communities.

I was teaching a day-long course on Esoteric Philosophy that included a section on Death and Dying and during the lunch break decided to walk down to the town and pick up a pair of shoes that were being repaired. Coming out of the store with my package, I waited to cross the road and an elderly woman came and joined me at the curb. Suddenly, she stepped out into the road and a motorcycle hit her and sent her flying. She was sprawled on the ground bleeding and the motorcyclist was thrown from the motorbike and lay in agony nearby.

A local nurse witnessed the accident and immediately rushed over to the motorcyclist to help because that was her specific skill. I immediately knew my place was with this woman. Cradled in my arms and bleeding, she died almost immediately. My task as an aspiring responder was to help her leave – to help her understand that she was no longer alive. My role was not to preserve her earthly form as she’d already died. As the accident happened so quickly, the woman was in shock and most likely not aware she was now deceased. She didn’t know what hit her. I spent the intervening time until the ambulance arrived holding her body and reassuring her that she was safe. Even though she no longer possessed a physical body, her Consciousness remained and I sensed that she would feel safe, comforted and reassured in this knowing. Equipped with a basic understanding of the death process, I offered a few simple directions on how to let go, move on and begin the journey into the subtle realms.

It was one of those days to remember because death was in the air – not as a morbid cloud hanging over the town – but as a clear reminder of the impermanence of form. All temporal forms are born, develop, grow and then die at the end of their cycle. Nowadays we have people who are very skilled at helping people die and make the transition. A woman visiting Meditation Mount recently gave me a business card describing herself as a Death Doula – someone who assists with ‘exiting’ and graceful transitions – in a similar fashion that midwives come to help with natural childbirth as a graceful entry into the temporal realm. Our visitor was therefore a natural spiritual first responder meeting a particular human need.

Seeing people sorting through the rubble and pulling the dead and injured, who had been buried in the earthquakes in Turkey and Syria, reminded me of the need for a global core of servers. As we have witnessed, during a devastating earthquake there is an urgent need for immediate support to help rescue those trapped in collapsed buildings, to bury the dead and to tend to the wounded as well as deal with the emotional trauma that accompanies such events.

If we are to help others who are traumatized and bewildered by what is occurring, then we first must ensure that our response to Life comes from a place of deep understanding and acceptance and that all fear has been overcome.

Even if we are not there on the ground, we can still be of great assistance because ‘energy follows thought’ and love travels instantaneously to where it is directed by the compassionate mind. We need to remember that death is a natural gateway and a reabsorption into the continuous flow of the One Life. Where there is no fear or doubt present in our mind, the Soul knows intuitively how to leave gracefully.

We can help create and hold a peaceful atmosphere for those departing the temporal world with rituals of transition. For example, the Buddhists have a wonderful process of accompanying the soul as it travels the forty-nine days through the Bardo and the Jewish tradition has a caring practice of mourning by sitting seven days of Shiva with the departed.

As a spiritual first responder we embrace the full spectrum of life from emergency to emergence – from death to rebirth – and are called to show up and provide aid and solace to the suffering and encouragement to those carrying the seeds of new possibilities. At the deepest level, we are being asked to respond to the call of the Soul as it issues a compelling invitation to imagine and craft a new world based on heart-centered qualities and spiritual principles. One of the most powerful acts of healing and hope must therefore be to build an ‘up-cycled’ society based upon caring and sharing – one that manifests the innate goodness of the human spirit where the pain of inter-personal and inter-national conflict and separation is greatly diminished.

Acts of loving kindness take many forms and Albert Einstein reminds us they all originate from an expanded heart that understands the interdependency of Life.

“A human being is a part of the whole that we call the universe, a part limited in time and space. And yet we experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest – a kind of optical illusion of our consciousness. This illusion is a prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for only the few people nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living beings and all of nature.”

Birthing a new way of living together on Earth that is in harmonious relationship with all Life is our collective and urgent assignment if we are to break the current closed circle of suffering and separation and move upwards onto the next turn of the virtuous spiral of evolution. At Meditation Mount our Mission is to promote and live the Principles and Pathways of the Realm of the Soul. These are the Principles of Essential Divinity, Goodwill and Unanimity with their attendant Pathways of Spiritual Approach, Right Human Relations and Group Endeavor and they are the true cornerstone and foundation upon which to build. https://meditationmount.org/who-we-are/#mission The way we construct a preferred future is through the agency of Creative Meditation. It is the ancient art and science of fashioning the dreams of a better world together through the power of the focused mind and a compassionate heart. Through this generative practice, we craft and code ‘thoughtforms’ made up of a dynamic fusion of thought, feeling, will, and imagination that contains the vibrant promise and magnetic ideas of greater possibilities. These inner seeds are then transmitted and broadcast into the subtle realms surrounding Earth so that the ‘spiritual bio-sphere’ is infused and charged with new possibilities. This is how we ensure that our deepest dreams and highest aspirations are realized and manifested as a new Reality. https://meditationmount.org/about-creative-meditation/ As the fires of destruction burn and release old and worn-out societal structures and systems that no longer serve the Good of the Whole, we represent the Phoenix rising from the ashes of an old world. Spiritual First Responders function as a Power for Good in the world and act as reliable agents of the Forces of Regeneration and Reconstruction on Earth.

The natural urge of the soul is to give of its gifts willingly and lovingly in service to others and the Teaching gently reminds us: “To those that give, more shall be given so they may give again.”

Please sign up today and register your willingness to give and your availability to serve by simply saying YES to Life with all your heart.

Michael Lindfield

Board President Meditation Mount

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