walking the sacred spiral
walking the sacred spiral
Usually when someone asks you what you’re worth they’re talking about “net worth,” a figure that refers to financial assets and liabilities. I’m asking a different question–a question I asked this weekend when I spoke to a group in Southern California: What is your value? I wasn’t asking about their values–what qualities they value–either. I was asking how valuable they think they are.
The difficulty with identifying our own value is that our criteria are flawed. They are based on the changeable: our income, education, influence, appearance, accomplishments, position, power, age, gender, and so on. Every one of these can change.
Some of us are overvalued by our culture. Our celebrity, power, wealth or abilities have gained us attention and credibility. When we speak, people listen. Some of us are undervalued by our culture. Usually this is based on our appearance, age, income, or level of accomplishment.
Regardless, we can become confused about our value and link it to these changeable circumstances. Then, if we lose our health or our business, or if our marriage fails or our beauty fades, we might make the mistake of agreeing with the culture that we are less valuable than others who have what we’ve lost.
But our value isn’t connected to the changeable. Each of us was brought into existence to complete the expression of the Infinite in some way. Out of the infinite possibilities for human beings, we are here. So our uniqueness was important to the Infinite.
Thomas Troward said that one thing we need to remember about the Infinite is that an infinite cannot be divided into parts. We know that God isn’t limited by time and space. So all of God must be present at every point in space and time in entirety to actually be infinite. That means that all of God is right where you are at this moment. And the same is true for everyone else. That is what makes us valuable.
It is our changeless identity as expressions of the One Life that makes us valuable. We can’t change it, damage it, lose it or destroy it. We don’t have that ability. Our value was established when the Infinite Presence brought us forth into being. Or, perhaps we always have been, though the forms we’ve taken have continually changed, each one another way of the Divine to be expressed.
In the book No Boundary, Ken Wilbur reminds us that the I Am with which we identify ourselves is the very same I Am the person sitting next to us is using. There is only one I Am and each of us feels it as personal to us–as our very identity, which it is.
This is true of every being. It is challenging to grasp, and just as challenging to live from and to remember when we are uncomfortable around someone who is scary, or very different from ourselves in some challenging way.
But let’s begin simply. Let’s look into the mirror and accept that we have value always and at every moment because of who and what we are. Let’s see if we can remember once each day to look on another person with this awareness, even if only for a moment.
I shared this quote from A Course in Miracles in my book Coming Up For Air because it is especially meaningful to me with regard to this perspective: “The journey to God is merely the reawakening of the knowledge of where you are always, and what you are forever. It is a journey without distance to a goal that has never changed.”
So, my dears, your value has always been established, and never has been in question. It is the changeless wholeness deep within you that you have always been.
What Is Your Value?
Wednesday, January 21, 2015