This article by John Morton was first published in the New Day Herald in December of 2010
“That’s part of the openness of who you are, of being with the Lord — to come into a thanksgiving in your consciousness, to be thankful for what you have and who you are, trusting that who you are is perfect.” – John Morton
Are you closed ? Do you want to be more closed? Or would you like to open up?
If you were to open up, what would you present? Would you open your heart? Would you give more of your attention? Do you suppose others are ready for that? Can they handle it?
If you’re going to be open with somebody, let them decide what they do with your openness. That’s a great approach to allow who you are to extend to others and out into life. If you do that, you’re going to have a greater experience of who you are.
It’s sort of like Christmas. Santa has a bag of toys, and it’s a big bag and it’s open. So if you’re going to be open, just start opening up your bag and taking things out. And if they’re wrapped up, you unwrap them. You get to find out what each present is, you experience it, and you go on to the next one.
How big do you suppose Santa’s bag is? Supposedly it’s big enough so that everybody is taken care of. (Well, according to the song, unless you’ve been naughty.) But regardless of how you’ve behaved, the Santa Claus I know always has something for you.
If you’re going to get the gifts for you that are inside the bag, then you’re going to have to keep reaching in. And if you want to open up so that you experience who you are, you have to keep reaching in. What you’re going to find is a lot of presents. You could spell that a couple of ways—the presents that you receive and the presence of who you are.
When I was a boy, each Christmas for about three years in a row, I asked my father to get a BB gun for me. For two years the reply was, “Well, when you’re older then maybe you can have one.” On the third Christmas, I finally saw that there was a long narrow gift under the tree. It showed up about ten days before Christmas. I waited about three days and then I got this idea that I wanted to make sure what it was. So I very carefully unwrapped the gift and, sure enough, there was a box inside that said “BB Gun.” I wrapped it back up and did my best to put the tape back in the same place so it would look like it was freshly wrapped.
It was one thing to find out that the box said “BB Gun” on its label, but I wanted to see what it looked like. So a day or two later, I opened it up, and I took it out, and sure enough it was the one I wanted. I put the BB gun back in the box and I wrapped it up again, making sure I re-wrapped it very nicely. But the next day, I decided I wanted to find out how the gun actually worked. So I took it and unwrapped it again.
Usually when you’re doing something like this, there’s a rush because you might get caught. So I hurriedly took it out to see if the gun worked. It had a long narrow chamber in it. The BB guns I knew about had a little hole where you would pour in the BB’s . I figured that you probably open up the top of the barrel and pour the BB’s in there, because I’d seen Davy Crockett do something like that on a television show. I stuffed the BB’s in, and then tried to close it back up, and it just didn’t seem to work. I kept trying to press more and more of the BB’s down in there. And then the gun just wouldn’t shoot at all. I was a little more nervous at this point, but I decided I’d better wrap it up for the last time. So I did.
Of course, on Christmas day when we opened up the presents, I was duly surprised and joyous about the gift. But then I had to take it to my father and tell him it didn’t work. He tried to figure it out, and it turned out that the BB gun worked on air pressure through an air tube at the bottom. Apparently, in jamming those BB’s in there I had broken the air tube. So we had to go to the store where my father got the BB gun, and make up some kind of story about it, like, “It was really like that when we got it.” But the guy at the store just didn’t believe it. He said “I’m sorry, it wasn’t like that when we sold it to you, and we don’t take back broken merchandise.”
There I was, this poor little guy who asked Santa Claus for three years to get this thing. I finally got it, and out of my enthusiasm to have it, I broke it. That experience hurt a lot. That year I learned something about waiting for what I want, being patient, and being willing to work with the circumstances that don’t always come about in the way I want.
I would be willing to bet that the reason you’re here is because of something you want. It has something to do with who you are inside. And maybe you’ve been asking for it for more than three Christmases. So I ask you this question: Are you willing to be open? Are you willing to go in and dig deep inside for the presence of who you are? Are you willing to go past the hurt and the mistakes that you’ve made? Are you willing to go past the circumstances when other people didn’t do what you want? Are you willing to wait? I call it waiting on the Lord.
Deep down inside of you there’s an encounter with the Lord. If you don’t know about it, that’s okay. It’s in store for you. It’s on your dance card. It’s something that’s going to take place. And it is a relationship with being open, being willing to reach into the presence of who you are. We teach this in the Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness. We not only teach it, we do it. It’s an active process.
There are people here that have been active with MSIA for many years now. Some of you are just getting active in reaching inside. Some of you reached in and found some things that hurt, some things that you didn’t understand, some things that scared you. Often that can make you want to give up, to stop the process of going inside and being open. After all, what’s the use of being open if you’re going to be hurt? But there’s somebody in there, a loving presence to encounter, that’s past the hurt.
Breathe into that presence. Just breathe into it. Be open. Let the Lord come in there and sit next to you. Let the Lord be in your face, even right inside you. Let the Lord be in your eyes. Would you let go so that the Lord could look through your eyes and listen through your ears? Smell what you smell? Breathe in and breathe out through you?
How do you do that? By being open, being patient, being willing to let the Lord be with you. It’s time to stop looking for more information, looking for another way. It’s time to be with the Lord, to be in that presence.
Did you know that when you judge yourself you stop the openness? And when you judge others, you stop the openness? Whenever you contract toward any aspect of your life, you stop the openness. What kind of openness would you suppose is necessary to be in the consciousness of the Lord?
It seems to me to be complete surrender, complete letting go into that consciousness that is without limit, without bound—so that which is greater than any aspect of me as a personal being can come in and occupy who I am. Do you have that willingness to let go of what you think is right, of what you want for Christmas, and of what you get for Christmas? If you don’t get what you want, you have to let go of it. And then if you do get it and it’s not the way you wanted, you also have to let go.
If you’ll bring the consciousness of the Lord with you to look through your eyes, to experience through all your senses as you make this journey, you’ll see the beauty and the majesty of the Lord’s creation. You’ll see through the eyes of understanding and the eyes of compassion. There’s no disorder in God. It’s all in order in a perfect state. As you see the beauty in how that process works, you’re brought to a greater state of openness.
This is the key as you move through the inner levels of consciousness: If you close down, then you assign that closed level to yourself. So if you think about it, you will see that the levels that really challenge you are the ones that scare the hell out of you. You don’t want to get stuck there do you? So you’d better stay open, especially to those parts. The worst parts of you are the most important to be open to. When you’re most likely to close down, that’s when you can make the greatest gains. The intensity of the challenge is the intensity of the opportunity to transcend, to release yourself from what has bound you and confined you.
This is soul transcendence. It’s overcoming your past. It’s overcoming the world, and the negativity that’s in the world. This is the way of the Christ—to overcome, to not allow one thing to be unforgiven. Being the judge or the one who condemns is not the way into God. So don’t pick it up as your mission unless you want what it brings to you. Those who judge are judged in like manner. And those who are judged in like manner perpetrate the judgment. They bring it upon themselves. It’s the way of error. It’s the way outside of who you are. It’s the way to darkness, to a closed state, a state of separation. It’s the way of forgetting God and not even knowing if God exists. If that sounds familiar to you, then open up yourself so you can release that contracted state and move on.
When you call upon God’s name, you’re calling yourself forward into the openness to see the face of God, to move your consciousness into God, to meet up with the Lord, and to have the Lord meet up with you. I don’t know if it’s occurred to you, but when you chant these names, ‘Ani Hu’, the ‘H-U’, or your initiatory tone, you’re calling for the Lord. That’s wonderful!
You might ask, “Do I call for the Lord? Does the Lord come to me or do I go to the Lord?”
Neither. You’re already totally with one another.
“Well I don’t know it,” you might say.
That’s your illusion. That’s your deception. It’s not real. Know in your heart that you and the Lord are with one another. Just be open right now to know that.
You’re not a stranger to the Lord, and the Lord’s not a stranger to you. You’re intimate friends, bosom buddies. You love having a great time together. Maybe you miss it. Maybe you ask, “Why does it have to be so far inside here? Give me just a glimpse, so I can know it more directly.”
How do you do that? Express the loving of your being out into the world as much as you can. Be as open as you can in your loving. Put no bounds on it, no stops. Don’t switch it off or try to do it at seventy percent because you think you might crash and burn if you go to one-hundred percent. Don’t think, “They might leave me, they might abandon me. I might have a broken heart.”
Love doesn’t break your heart. Your attachments do. Your expectation about what’s going to be there on Christmas day breaks your heart. Not the loving. Actually the loving is going to heal the hurt, so find a way to love.
We have a holiday in the U.S. called Thanksgiving. It’s a day where people choose to be grateful for what they have. That’s part of the openness of who you are, of being with the Lord—to come into a thanksgiving in your consciousness, to be thankful for what you have and who you are, trusting that who you are is perfect. When you reach in deep enough, the presence you’re going to get hold of is your perfection. There isn’t anything that needs changing about you. You’re in a reality that’s constantly changing, and that’s part of the perfection of who you are. There’s nothing to do. To be thankful is to know you are already blessed.
We say, “Baruch Bashan,” which means, “The blessings already are.” We say it at the time we’re closing a seminar as a way of sealing what we’re doing together, placing the blessing of the Lord, and claiming that the blessings already are. We are being open for those blessings to manifest.
Baruch Bashan
WATCH A SHORT VIDEO BLESSING WITH JOHN MORTON
Thank you Beloved John for the blessings your ministry brings to us. We love you.
Thank you John for the blessing.