by Sunburst Founder, Norman Paulsen • (Part 1 was posted on November 30, 2020)
What happens when we open the inner-dimensional door at the crown of our head, asking and coaxing the “sap” to flow from the divine Source into our tree of life? The divine Spirit begins to awaken into its all-pervading Christ consciousness! Christ Jesus stated that he came to bring us life and bring it more abundantly. The creative breath of life and consciousness of Christ is breathed into us and our immortality is realized.
Christ Jesus also stated: “Behold, I stand at the door and knock.” The pressure, or knocking sensation you may feel at the crown of your head while meditating, is the touch of the divine Christ-conscious Being, breathing the breath of life into you more abundantly. Let the breath of immortality take possession of you!
If we allow our little egos, our self-conscious selves, to desire this more than anything else, then I Am That I Am, the Christ, will come. By circulating the life force up and down our spines in meditation, as taught in Kriya Yoga, keeping the door on the crown of our heads open to the divine brilliance of the first creation of Light, that Presence will be attracted to come into us! We must open the door and ask with all our live, with all our desire, offering up our life force, our tithe to God!
We are living in these bodies and yet have no idea of the potential of the consciousness that created them. Even as God does now, in Christ consciousness all the geometrical patterns in nature could be understood and contained within this incredible computer mind that we have. We do not use the total capacity of the great higher brain. Imagine if we could! This upper stratum of the cerebrum is built to contain the messages of all the vibrating atoms in creation. It was created by God for God to inhabit in the sons and daughters of man.
We have the ability within us to understand everything that has ever been created—to literally be one with I Am That I Am, while here on this Earth, walking in these bodies. We are standing on the threshold of such a transition now for humanity. I Am That I Am wants to walk on this Earth, to be able to share our lives 100 percent.
We have been given free will to love or deny this great Being. We can destroy the worlds God has created, or we can caretake them and beautify them. We can become the true sons and daughters of God, the caretakers of creation. That is why we have been given the tool of Kriya meditation. Through it we can re-establish our connection, our oneness with the blazing Light of the face of God at the divine center of creation.
Yes, now is the time to open ourselves to receive that great Force, that Light, that Life, more abundantly. We are created in the image and likeness of this whole creation, God’s kingdom. It all exists within us. We have but to realize it. And what does it mean when we do? It doesn’t mean we’re special. It simply means we become divine caretakers of the creation. We become heirs, one with I Am That I Am, true sons and daughters caring for the creation with willing hands, accomplishing the divine will wherever we go, as best we can, every day.
by Heiko Wirtz • One morning my phone rang very early. When I answered, Norm, founder of Sunburst was saying “Heiko, I want you to drive to the ranch right away and go up on the mesa. Spirit showed me that one of the bull pasture gates is open, and the bulls are heading that way.”
Not anxious to jump out of bed so early, I said, “Really? How do you know this?”
In a matter-of-fact tone he said, “I was flying over there in my inner vision and saw it.” That ended the conversation.
I threw on my clothes and hurried off toward the mesa. Bulls are normally kept in a pasture by themselves. If the bulls got out of their pasture, they would wander into the 800 acre hilly pasture beyond. And they would quickly be mixed in with the cows and calves, a mess to sort out later.
Sure enough when I got there, the mesa gate was wide open and the bulls were only about 50 feet away. I ran to close the gate. Soon Norm showed up in his white Suburban. He had a big smile on his face, like the whole thing happened just to show me something about life. “God wants to be a cowboy, too,”he said.
Right then I realized that God is interested in everything we do. If we could only imagine what this means! What an ally we can have in our lives! Everything we do is observed by the Great Immensity. All we have to do in return is open our hearts, our desire, our thoughts, and allow that greater experience to be there with us.
When our consciousness is aware of Spirit’s presence alongside of us and inside of us, we magnetize Spirit with our desire, and we become witnesses and doers within this great divine creation.
I Am That I Am, Thank you for your ever-present watchfulness over us. Help me remember your presence every moment. May I go forth knowing that you are always with me Amen
by Sunburst Founder, Norman Paulsen • If the kingdom of heaven is within you, as the son of man from Galilee stated, then it can be known to you. But how do you find it? How do you perceive it? How do you get there? Through the ancient teachings of the Solar Logos, the Light of Consciousness, the living Christ, the way is always open!
The ancients described our spinal column as the Tree of Life, with the roots (hair) anchored in heaven, and the First Light of creation. Yes, each one of us is indeed like an inverted tree. This means that our great upper brain, called the upper chamber, exists inner-dimensionally in that region where Light originally first burst forth projecting the great expanding sphere of creation.
In each one of us, the tree of life carries the sap, or the Breath of Life that comes forth from the inner Cosmic Sun, the first creation of Light, the body of Christ. It enters into us through the roots of our hair, descending through the door at the crown of our heads—the place that was open and beating with each heartbeat when we were infants. Without that life coming into our bodies, our hearts cease to beat, our senses cease to function, our life in this body ends.
The inner-dimensional tree of life in our spinal column is hollow, like a tunnel. The breath of life flows through the center of our inner-dimensional tunnel and outward into the causal, astral and physical dimensions of our being. The astral body resembles a vibrating electrical tree full of colors, like a rainbow at times.
Yes, in illumination, our body is a Christ-mass tree crowned with a star, the Cosmic Sun. The astral body supports the flesh, the physical body and the fruits thereof. Through the inner-dimensional tunnel in our spine the Light of Christ, as the breath of life, flows from the center of creation into us. This means that within us exists, inner-dimensionally, the totality of everything that I Am That I Am ever projected from the smallest of all places outward into the creation.
The kingdom of heaven is indeed within us to find, as Christ Jesus stated! We are made in the image of our God! Our bodies and our souls are divinely connected to that infinite Source, that life-giving Being, that consciousness, that unconditional divine Love. Yes, I Am That I Am is in each of us, dreaming momentarily that He or She is our little individual self-conscious ego. (Part 2 follows on Dec. 8. Fall photos of Sunburst Retreat Center are shown.)
by Valerie King • In meditation as we close our eyes and focus on the third eye, let us place our gaze on that screen in front of us upon which the star of Christ first appears. Let our eyelids gently close as we become conscious of our breathing.
Let us become conscious of our thoughts slowing as we move our awareness behind our thoughts. Let us look intently, as if we are diving deep into a beautiful ocean, diving as deep as we can to find that precious pearl that lies at the bottom in the depthless sea of Spirit. The quieter our minds become, the deeper we can dive.
That precious pearl, that star of light is our real Self. This body that we wear, this personality that we wear, with all its thoughts and emotions and desires, is just like a piece of clothing that we are wearing. It is not our true Self. I Am ThatI Am exists at the very center, the very core of our being. This is what meditation is for: to rediscover who I Am really is.
by Norman Paulsen, Sunburst Founder • We are all looking for love. Not just love that flares up and lasts a short time, but love that is enduring and ever new. It can only be found in knowing God. God’s love for us and our love for God is eternal and enduring. The most important thing we can do in our lives is to seek God. to feel that great love that God has for each one of us, to feel it take fire in our hearts and grow.
When the Creator set out to make this creation, divine Mother and Father filled it with beautiful sustaining law, the law of love and virtue. This virtue, or Life itself, has twelve universal facets. One of those virtues, continence, has many meanings, but one of them can be described as self-control. Paramahansa Yogananda once said, “Self-control is the key to a happy life.”
Sometimes self-control can bring to mind holding tight, but that’s not really what it means. Meditating more deeply upon it, I found that it means growing a finer and finer awareness of the energies that we exist in.
We each come forth from the one Pure Self, pure consciousness, existence, and pure joy. In venturing into this creation, we have been given a soul with an ego, a mind, a body, and a personality. Norm Paulsen, founder of Sunburst, used to liken these aspects of ourselves to having a horse that we need to learn how to ride, and hopefully not have it riding us.
There’s a word in Sanskrit, pranayama, that means life force control; or caring for life force. Our life force constantly flows outward through the five senses. Continence is our ability to become aware of that outward flow of our precious natural energy and then begin to conserve it.We begin by offering it up to the Divine for the purpose of our soul illumination, and awakening into divine consciousness.
Pranayama, in yoga, is often referred to as working with our breath. There is a simple exercise of paying attention to your breath without trying to change it in any way, to just notice what it’s doing for a moment. The magic of paying attention to it, of putting our consciousness on it, is that it changes.
Scientists of quantum physics discovered several decades ago that subatomic particles change if someone is looking at them. The same thing occurs when we observe our breath. We notice that the quality of it also changes. So conscious awareness is the key to awakening, to transformation. Consciousness is the Divine within us.
We can apply consciousness to our actions, our speech, emotions, our thoughts. Simply by becoming aware, we begin taking care of our energy. This is continence, true self-control. The more we apply it, the greater the space we find in between stimulus and our response. If some energy comes at us that’s hard, we can take a moment and observe it. And by that very observation, we transform the energy.
Norm Paulsen, in his book “Life, Love, God,” said that eventually we come to realize that continence is the caretaker of all the other virtues in creation. Continence, the simple act of paying attention, is the gift of life force riding upon the breath. From this practice, we gain great treasures which we can then bring out into our daily life—great treasures of love and peace, unutterable joy, and happiness.
O Great Spirit, You who shines forth from the very center of every particle of creation, You who shines forth from the endless sea of eternity, Filled with thy light, pouring into creation, Pouring into our bodies, minds and souls at this very moment, We offer our life force, our love, our desire, back to you, back to the source of all life. Touching you, we find the power of love; we find the power of virtue. We find the power of joy unending, and we bring it back to spread it across the Earth, To transform the Earth in the way that you created it to be in this very moment.