I have some news dear friends! I’m going to branch out in a new direction. It’s been in the pipeline for some time, but due to unavoidable circumstances it has not been able to come to fruition until now. On Sunday February 18 I am being ordained as a Spiritualist minister. Ah! I know what you are thinking… You are thinking that, “He’s only just announced that he won’t be working as a medium anymore, and now he’s being ordained”! Well I can understand how this looks on the surface of things. However, this is something I’ve had in the pipeline for over three years, and even though I have to do around half and hour’s mediumship as part of my ordination, I have no intention of going back on the circuit. No, there are other reasons for me taking this step.

I have no intention of retiring. But I’m realistic enough to understand that I’m not getting any younger. So being ordained as a minister will enable me to carry out weddings, funerals and naming ceremonies. I will be offering spiritual (non-religious) and non-spiritual ceremonies, tailor-made for the client. Being a minister will allow me to continue working in a capacity that will add value to people’s lives; which for me is what it is all about.

For the ordination, apart from having to do the mediumship, I will have to make a declaration (which is a kind of pledge or promise), I will have to give an address and I will have to do three readings. Originally, I chose my readings from Conversations With God – Book One by Neale Donald Walsch (2 passages) and one passage from The Yoga Of Jesus by Paramahansa Yogananda. But having given it a bit of thought, I decided to write my own readings, which I am going to share with you here. I have tried to cover as many angles as possible without making it too complicated, so I hope the following will do the trick. Comments are appreciated!

Reading One

Nothing exists except Consciousness; Consciousness is all there is. All experience, all-knowing, takes place within Consciousness. Indeed, even our physical bodies, which are incorrectly believed to be a housing for the spirit, are contained within Consciousness.
There are many names for Consciousness; spirit, the Self, bliss, knowing, awareness, God; to name but a few. However, the truth is that Consciousness has neither name nor form, neither birth nor death; it transcends pleasure and pain, joy and grief and it is what we are. There is never a single moment that each and every one of us does not exist in eternal bliss as infinite Consciousness. In truth there is nothing to do and nowhere to go, all we ever need is to Be.
So, what then is the point of this physical life; what purpose does it serve. The answer is very simple; the physical life exists so that Consciousness may know itself in its own experience.
Consciousness simply existed as itself in all-knowing infinity. It had no way of experiencing this infinite knowledge, so, using the power of its will, it created the illusion of the three-dimensional physical world, which is subject to relativity, cause and effect and other natural laws. It modulated itself into billions of seemingly separate pockets of intensified energy, thus creating the illusion of the individual soul, existing independently of everything else. Consciousness created certain conditions that went hand in hand with this, which meant that the super-conscious mind was temporarily suppressed and apparently replaced by a finite mind, limited by logic.
Another name for the logical mind is the ego; the bane of the human race, which prevents the individual soul from realising its true nature. The ego causes the individual soul to identify with the body as the reality, thus rendering it oblivious to its underlying truth.

Reading Two

The cause of most of the pain and misery suffered by human beings whilst experiencing a physical existence, is the lack of understanding of what constitutes the ego and how it tricks us into believing we are something that we are not. The easiest way to explain it is as follows:
At any given time here in the physical we are experiencing one of three states of being. The waking state, the dream state and deep sleep state. It is during deep sleep state that we return to source in order to replenish our energies. Upon awakening from deep sleep state, the first thing that happens, quite often even before we open our eyes, is that thoughts start to rise up in the mind. However, it is necessary to elaborate on this in order that we may gain a complete understanding of the process.
Firstly, what is known as the “I” thought, or ego, rises up. This is the thought that says, “I am this body”, “I am this mind”, “I have got limitations”, “I am going to die”. And it is from the “I” thought that all other thoughts rise up. The ego wants us to focus on objects in the world, because it wants us to believe that the world is the source of lasting happiness. The five senses also play their part, in that they pick up information externally and feed it back to the mind. The information is then reviewed. It is this review by the mind, of information received from the senses, that determines whether we experience happiness, sadness or indifference. What the ego does not tell us is that the world is subject to relativity, so any happiness that we find in the world cannot last; indeed, we realise in time that the source of our greatest joy is also the source of our greatest pain.
When we succumb to the tricks of the ego, we get sucked in and taken on a roller coaster ride; often a ride of pain and suffering. Having said all this, it is not wrong, neither is it a mistake to lose sight of who we are.

Reading Three

The great adventure of life is the experience of awakening and realising the truth of our being. We may go through many trials and tribulations en route, but this is exactly how it is meant to be. Life as we know it is nothing more than an elaborate game, played out in a theatre, a theatre of dreams; literally! Everything in the entire universe and beyond is never not in Divine and perfect order; and the play of life too is acted out in a state of absolute perfection. So how does it work?
Well, there has already been mention of the three-dimensional nature of the world; and this is how it has to be in order for experience to be whole and complete. Here are two examples. Firstly, the example of forgiveness. There is the one doing the forgiving, the one being forgiven and the actual process of forgiveness. Secondly, the example of joy. There is the subject (i.e. the joyous person), there is the object or the cause of joy (possibly receiving some good news) and there is the process of joyousness. Everywhere you look in the world you will see the three-dimensional nature of subject/object/process.
Paradoxically, it is by having these three-dimensional experiences that we eventually awaken to our true nature of Consciousness. Until we do, we look at the world from a dualistic perspective; dualism is the illusion that objects and people exist separately and independently of each other. The Indian sage, Ramana Maharshi was once asked the question by a devotee, “should I care for the needs of others”, to which he replied, “there are no others”. Of course it goes without saying that our true nature is also that of Love, and we should always be ready to give a helping hand where it is needed. The Maharshi simply answered the question from the perspective of absolute truth. In Consciousness there is no dualistic or three-dimensional nature and therefore, there are no others; there is only One.
What we can see in the world is Consciousness projecting itself into form, but all form is transient and will eventually sink back into its source. When we look out of the window and we see a tree, the tree does not exist as a tree; it actually exists as vibration. What we see as the tree is nothing more than our mind’s interpretation of that vibration.
Consciousness is that in which all experience appears, all experience is known and out of which all experience is made. When we eventually awaken, we realise that there was nothing to awaken from, that all the time we were awake; we just couldn’t see it. Rather like the sun being obscured by clouds. When the clouds eventually move away we say that the sun has come back, but it didn’t go anywhere, we simply couldn’t see it. We are Divine, we have always been Divine and we will always be Divine.
There is a Zen saying that is thousands of years old. “Be as a hollow bamboo”. That is all we need, to allow ourselves to simply Be (as a hollow bamboo), in order that the higher power may work through us. When we give up all ideas of having to “Do”, and simply allow ourselves to Be, then magic happens and life becomes Heaven on earth!

© Richard F Holmes 2018