Our ability to observe beauty in a place such as this gives evidence that there is a beautiful purpose revealed through all this proliferation of nature. How unfortunate it is that human beings have tended to produce so much ugliness, not only in the sense of what they build -- I suppose some of the architectural gems of this civilization could be considered to be beautiful -- but more from the standpoint of the lives and the experiences of people. There is so much ugliness, so much destructiveness, so much with which to find fault, to criticize and complain about. Most people spend a good deal of their lives -- I don't know what the percentage would be, over fifty percent anyway -- involved with complaint and objection to what is conceived to be unjust or unfair circumstance, or painful circumstance, difficulties of all kinds. So much of the expression through people, then, is occupied with all of this, and there is no time left for the revelation of the true nature of life, which is beautiful, something which is harmonious and blends together... yet, in the natural expression of life everything blends together harmoniously. There is no need to fuss about it. If we feel that we have to fuss about it, what's wrong with us? In other words, something is being expressed by us which is out of harmony with what may well be called life, or what is truly natural.

What is truly natural is always harmonious, always fits together... Things fit where they belong, and the nature of the consciousness of those different levels of creation, levels of life, is not the same as the nature of our consciousness. But from the standpoint of the whole, everything does fit together. The balance is maintained.

People see this to some extent, and they say nowadays, ?Well, we have upset the ecology of the world,? and that's true. We pollute most everything we touch. Wherever we go we mess things up and destroy and kill -- sometimes inadvertently, but this is the habit of human beings. There is this upsetting of the ecological balance. So the idea then is that we should let everything get back into the supposedly normal pattern of nature. Let us promote wilderness areas -- as though that were the answer.

There is a true balance, but the true balance includes man. A wilderness area is a delightful thing to the extent that man is excluded. He comes in there as a visitor; that's about it, isn't it? He doesn't really belong there. He just comes in to look at the beauty that there is around. He is a stranger in a strange land. He doesn't fit in the pattern. Therefore, merely to establish a wilderness concept is not the answer, because whatever the right design is in this regard, it would include man; man would be a part of it. Man has a place. He has certainly not known what that place is, because he has been busy trying to make a place for himself as though he didn't have a place.

This is the point, isn't it? We all tend to try to build something as though there wasn't something already here into which we might relax, into which we might fit. As long as there is this sweat-of-the-brow effort to try to make something be so, we are interfering, necessarily, with the true pattern, the natural pattern. On the one hand we have people trying to make a purpose for themselves here on earth, and on the other hand others saying, ?Well, all this has upset the balance, so we have got to get back to nature, to the wilderness.? But the true answer is ignored. These are two extremes. The true answer is in the middle where man once again finds that he has a place which relates to everything else.

We have a beautiful tree here, growing. We like to look at it and we hope it bears some fruit so that we can eat it, but how much of a relationship do you feel with this tree? how much of a sense of belonging to the same design? Yet, with respect to everything there is a design, a design in which we belong just as surely as anything else. In fact, because of our greater capacity, we have more potential in this design than does anything else. We have a potential of what might be called leadership, a potential which would allow some specific direction to be given to what is occurring here on earth. I am talking about something quite apart from what people are trying to establish for themselves. After all, presumably there was an earth here long before there were people.

The earth has a purpose, and everything that is here has a purpose. Everything but man seems to have adequate consciousness of what its purpose is. Man doesn't. He thinks he has no purpose unless he makes one for himself. As soon as he starts to make one for himself he disrupts the true purpose, the true purpose of the whole into which he should fit, in which he belongs.

Now, this can be recognized, I suppose more or less logically, and seen to be so; but what can we do about it? because, obviously, man following out his own purposes finds himself in conflict with himself and in conflict with everything around him. He sees everything around him as being hostile. This is his attitude. Of course, if you are hostile you will find that everything in your environment is hostile. This is the reason why it is supposed that nature is hostile...

The true state is not hostile. It is merely man's attitude that has become hostile because he has lost his position, and so he finds himself contending with everything around him. If we find ourselves in contention at all with anything, we are out of place; there is something wrong with us.

Of course, the usual habit of observation is to say, ?Well, there is something wrong with this which is contending with me.? We think we have to contend with nature -- weeds, all over the place! We have them growing in masses down here in the garden. We must contend with this. Really? Is there no purpose to weeds, do you think? Do weeds not have any rights, I wonder? Or do we just have rights? I noticed a question in the 100 Mile Free Press the other day: ?Do mice have rights?? A number of people were asked what they thought. Most were inclined to feel that possibly mice do have rights -- they belong in the ecological scheme of things -- but no rights in my house! But this earth belongs to the mice just as much as it belongs to us -- or just as little.

I think this is the point, isn't it? There are some wonderful verses in the beginning of the 24th Psalm: ?The earth is the Lord's, and the fullness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein.? That leaves nothing out. Everything belongs to something other than man, in other words.

Everything belongs to something other than whatever it is that inhabits the earth. Now, that something may be defined by the term ?the Lord.? This means different things to different people, nothing to many. But here we may recognize that there is a purpose underlying and back of all that occurs here on this planet; and, obviously, if there is something that is occurring here on this planet it is occurring because this planet has a certain position in the solar system. So what occurs must relate to the solar system. And the solar system is not isolated. There seem to be some rather large distances involved, but it's part of a vast galaxy. It has a relationship to that. There are other galaxies, so presumably the galaxies have a relationship to each other. There is a vast design here which is seen as being related to these little things that are around us. Our connection is here on earth with all this. There is a purpose to the whole thing. There is something back of the whole thing. There is a reason for it.

Because man is so unreasoning, thinking himself to be a reasonable creature, he tends to look at the universe and say, ?There's no reason for it.? Because man himself has had no consciousness of any reason for being here he looks around and he sees that reflected everywhere he looks: no reason for the universe, just a haphazard state of affairs that occurred by chance. If anyone can honestly look at the intricate design that is observable all around us, even in our own physical bodies, and say that all is happened just by chance, I would say there is something wrong in the head! We do live in an insane world, that's true. Why? Well, because of insane people, I suppose. Do we need to be insane, or is it our choice in the matter? May we come out of the state of insanity into a state of true sanity, where we find that we fit and where we discover that we do have a reason for being?

This reason for being is not unrelated to the reason for this tree, or anything else that may be in our immediate environment. All that is in our immediate environment has its reason for being, based in what is included on the greater scale, in the solar system and the galaxy and the cosmos as a whole. It is all one thing, and we are a part of that one thing, except that we have deceived ourselves to such an extent that we think that everything around us is hostile and we have to battle to stay alive... That's totally unnatural. The natural state is to fit where we belong. If we fit where we belong, there is no need to be hostile. We find that everything else plays its part in our harmonious world. But we may only experience this to the extent that we do recognize that ?The earth is the Lord's, and the fullness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein.? As people we can't really possess anything.

As I mentioned before, there is a great deal of talk about rights these days, as though we had rights as individuals. The only rights we have as individuals, really, are those rights which fit us into the whole.

If we try to segregate ourselves from the whole and say, ?I have this little environment around me which belongs to me,? we remove ourselves from the experience of life, because life spreads through everything. Life is one. Life holds everything together in oneness. Yet the whole human approach tends to be this matter of claiming, either as individuals, or as groups, or as whatever: ?This belongs to me.?

We say of our own bodies, ?This belongs to me.? There is a great cry nowadays, particularly among young people: ?This is my body; I can do with it as I please.? Oh no, it isn't! The body doesn't belong to the hostile person. It doesn't belong to a person who has no consciousness of being a part of the whole. We don't possess our bodies. We can't possess anything, really. We deceive ourselves if imagine that we can. We hold everything in trust, everything in trust for the Lord. But what does that mean? We could say, ?...everything in trust for the true purpose of life.? We all experience this animating principle of life. It has a purpose in its expression through us. This body was built by it. It certainly wasn't built by your bright intellect, was it? Your bright intellect didn't exist until after the body was built.

So, ?The earth is the Lord's, and the fullness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein.?

There was something in operation before man was even thought of, or before each one of us here as individuals was even thought of. Unless we can find and experience a consciousness of this which is already present, already a fact, already in operation, we cannot discover our relatedness to the whole. As long as we are so busy about our own affairs, we have no awareness whatsoever that there is anything else but our own affairs. Look at TV, read the newspaper, listen to the radio, and it is all about the important affairs of men; tremendously important these things are. Not really at all!

Not really at all, because they have nothing to do with what is occurring from the cosmic standpoint, what the earth is here for. It wasn't put here so that we could try to snatch it out of the solar system and say, ?This is ours!? How long would it last if we could snatch it out of the solar system? Even though we can't actually do it, we do it in imagination; and because we do it in imagination we find ourselves ready to experience destruction; we simply destroy ourselves. We belong as a part of the whole; and unless the finding of our relationship to the whole becomes more important to us than anything else, we will naturally be eliminated as worthless; we have no further value. Mankind is putting itself in the position where it does have no value, no value to the whole. What's the use of it then? Let's get rid of it!

But we may, if we will, discover our relationship in the whole, first of all when we recognize that ?The earth is the Lord's, and the fullness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein,? including each of us and everything else. It all belongs together. It all fits together. It all has a purpose together, a purpose which is completely incomprehensible from the standpoint of those who have invented human purposes, because they put value in human purposes and this blots out completely anything else that might have value.

If something can't be related to human purposes they say it has no value. Nonsense! The things that relate to human purposes have no value. Everything that is used to assist with human purposes becomes valueless. That is why we find pollution. That is why we find the world being raped in every direction, so that it becomes a desert, a wilderness.

If we see something of this, then we may be conscious of our own responsibility. We can't take responsibility, after all, for anybody else. We may recognize that there is something that we are here to do, but it cuts right across all the human endeavor to which we are accustomed. Most people are unwilling to relinquish their human endeavors. Oh, some of them perhaps. If they are really pushed into a corner, some people will. But to recognize that it is the relinquishing of the human purposes that makes possible the discovery of the reality of what life is, surely would put value where it belongs, and we might begin to recognize that anything that we do in the pattern of human purpose only has value to the extent that we recognize that ?The earth is the Lord's, and the fullness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein.?

This orchard here, according to the Land Registry Office, belongs to the Emissaries, I guess. That is what it says. But it doesn't! It belongs to the Lord. It belongs to the purpose of life. We have to discover how this, here, can be integrated in the purposes of life, and share the responsibility of letting it be so. This is our concern with this place. It should be the concern, individually, with our own physical bodies: How can these be integrated in the purposes of life?

So, we begin to see what is required of people if there is to be any remaining value on earth, any remaining life on earth, because as long as we try to extract ourselves and the earth where we dwell from the control and the design, the purpose, of the cosmos, we only succeed in eliminating ourselves and everything over which we should be extending control and blessing. This is the state of affairs. So here we are this afternoon with this vision, to whatever degree, and in this setting. Do we belong in this setting, or do we have no business here because we don't fit with what is here?

If we find ourselves at one with life, if we experience this within ourselves, or to whatever extent we do, then we begin to belong. If we actually begin to experience the belonging, we have a sense of belonging and we are not frantically trying to get it. We can relax and enjoy something beautiful because we are contributing to that beauty, because there is something expressing through us that enhances all that is around us.

In such case we have meaning and we have value in this setting. What greater meaning and greater value we should have remain to be seen, but no one could ever find out without moving into the experience of it. It is no use trying to sit as an observer and discover what that meaning would be. The only way we can find out is to have the meaning, to have the experience of the meaning, as we share the responsibility of letting life include us, instead of trying, as we have been, to exclude ourselves from everything else, as though nothing existed except man and his desires, his happiness, his fulfillment. His desire, his happiness, his fulfillment are only known, only capable of being experienced, in the whole, in the cosmic whole.

This afternoon I feel it is fitting that this aspect of the matter should be particularly emphasized because we share this most marvelous setting together and have a special opportunity, in consequence, to make it an even more marvelous setting because are here. This is not usually the case in human gatherings in nature, is it? There are usually beer cans and cigarette stubs and everything else scattered around -- the setting is spoiled because man is present. What an indictment this sort of thing is on man, when he has the greatest capacity of anything here on earth to enhance the setting, to make it even more beautiful and wonderful.

So we have this particular opportunity today, and I trust our gathering now, our sharing in these moments together considering these things, has added a spirit and an atmosphere of beauty, harmony, friendship, love, to what was already here to start with in spite of us -- now perhaps a little more so because of us.

?The earth is the Lord's, and the fullness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein.?

When we have an opportunity of sharing in a gathering such as this there are always, when we are out of doors particularly, many apparent distractions. There is a tendency for attention to wander here or there to the sights and sounds that are around us.

Yet, you know, it is really our responsibility not to be distracted by nature but, as I have indicated, to enhance it. We enhance it not by letting nature control us but by giving something that we are into the expression of the nature that is around us. In the situation such as we have here, that, for the moment, is mostly the generation of a spirit, of an atmosphere, of something which is harmonious and peaceful and beautiful and vibrant, so that this is released, and all that is around us is blessed. We have some animals here that drew close, and I noticed the pigeons sharing in our meditation, and other creatures. How beautiful to be together and to know these things!


Martin Cecil