Wanting to Want – Rev Linda Jackson
This video features the Sunday “talk” only. Watch the full service on our YouTube channel.
DESCRIPTION
Michael Beckwith tells us that most of our urges and desires are rooted in a deeper longing to feel connected to Source. When we look outside ourselves—through consumerism or the habit of “wanting to want”—we’re left unfulfilled. Join us this Sunday to explore how desire points us home—back to the Self, back to the Divine–and opens the way to presence, purpose, and peace.
SUMMARY
- Our unfulfilled desires and longings are actually a call to remember our oneness with the divine. True fulfillment comes from connecting with our spiritual nature, not from seeking external gratification.
- Through spiritual practices like affirmative prayer and visualization, we can transform our limiting beliefs and consciousness to align with love and our higher purpose.
- We are all called to be “creatively maladjusted” – not conforming to a world out of alignment with truth, but actively co-creating a more just, equitable, and awakened world through our inner transformation.
- Our true purpose is simply to express the love and divine nature that is already within us, in our own unique way as a beneficial presence on the planet.
TRANSCRIPTION
This transcription was auto-generated, please excuse typos, errors and omissions.
Rev Linda Jackson (00:01):
All right. I am wireless today, so I hope I don’t do a lot of extra hand gestures or anything. So thank you again, Paige, Greg, and Nora, that song bring me a Higher Love. And those lyrics, the good news is higher love. I don’t think it’s somewhere out there that someone has to bring to us. I think it’s within us, and that’s really where we’re focusing today. And I would ask you, what if every desire or urge of your heart is really a longing for your connection with the divine? Think about that. Every desire is a longing to remember your oneness with the divine. So we’re using Michael Beckwith’s book this month, Spiritual Liberation, and the subtitle is Fulfilling Your Soul’s Potential. And that is our theme.
(01:19):
I wasn’t sure if I was tracking there. It looks like I am. So there’s so much in this book. You know how some books you read and there’s one concept that they kind of repeat of a hundred different ways over and over again. And I mean, that’s great. You can learn it different ways. And then there are other books that are a fire hose of information. This one’s sort of like the fire hose for me in a good way. But it causes me to have to really hone in here because I’m someone who feels I need to tell you everything. But I’m going to kind of hone in on a couple of things. And Michael Beckwith says that our unfulfilled desires tell us that we’re seeking fulfillment outside of ourselves.
And I often hear myself saying that everything out here is temporal. It’s time reality with a small R. So it’s always changing. And if we’re seeking fulfillment out here, even if we get it, it’s going to be temporary fulfillment, right? Because it’s going to change again. So if I think I’m going to be fulfilled when I get the new job or the new car or the new relationship or fill in the blank, whatever it is, it’s going to be temporary and then I’m going to be seeking again. But our spiritual nature exists in a timeless reality with a capital R. We are changeless eternal, and we are one with divine, the divine source of all life, the source of love, freedom, peace. And if we can take that clue from our unfulfilled urges, we can get pointed back to ourself, back to our oneness with the divine. We can transform the cycle of wanting to want. We can transform to presence, to peace to purpose.
So then desire is sacred. And he says, I mean, Beckwith says it’s the soul wanting to wake up. Divine discontent is our soul remembering something greater, the deeper urge to remember who we really are. Every desire is a longing to remember your oneness with a divine. If we hit a wall or when we hit a wall of, excuse me, frustration or heartbreak, we’re being invited not to shut down to transform. And transformation involves raising our consciousness, raising it above the human experience what we’re experiencing out here, right? To know the truth in here, the higher idea of what’s possible. So we transform how we’re being in order to have a different experience. We get it confused sometimes and think we have to change stuff out here in order to feel the way we want to feel. But it starts in here.
(04:49):
So back in 2013, I had surgery on both of my feet. I had bunionectomies and they were pretty bad, or I wouldn’t have been entertaining surgery. I mean, it just had gotten to the point where I was finding it really difficult to live the way I wanted to live. So I had also neuromas on both feet and something cleared out of the big toe joint. I mean probably way more information than you want, but it felt like a big deal to me. Although the doctor made it seem like no big deal. He was a very progressive surgeon. He was the doctor for the White Sox. He had perfected this procedure and in his world, this is no big deal. And it meant that I was going to have to not walk for two weeks and then I had my feet like this. It was very weird, but I went for it. I really needed some relief. And I think God is in the medicine too, right?
So he said, in six weeks you’ll be able to run. And I was like, that’s amazing. I never ran before. All right? Kidding aside, six weeks turned into six months for me. And every morning I would wake up and the blankets on my feet hurt or my feet hurt from just the weight of the blankets I should say. And I was just getting so dejected about this. And as a practitioner of this teaching, I’m thinking, how do I change my mind about this? How can I believe something different? How can I actually believe this is going to get better when every day I feel the same thing and it’s just not changing? So I had to turn within, I had to turn within for the solution instead of trying to do it out here. And in my practice, what came to me was this insight of using the pain as a signal to have a different thought, to choose a different thought. So every time my feet would hurt, I would say to myself, oh, they’re getting better. They’re healing. And lo and behold, within a month or so, they were better.
(07:26):
I had to rise above the pain in consciousness. I had to transform my thinking about it and speak it into existence. So A Course In Miracles says everything is either love or fear. And fear is not real. Love is the path to healing and freedom and fear is an illusion that comes from the belief in separation, the belief that we need to rely on ourselves. So me thinking I had to do something to make my feet better – the only thing I had to do was change my mind. The truth is reality, again, capital R reality, love is the natural state of our soul. And the key to overcoming fear, separation struggle, pain is to see and embrace and choose love.
(08:32):
Maryanne Williamson, a teacher of A Course in Miracles says, the way of the miracle worker is to see all human behavior as one of two things. Either love or a call for love. You can’t be loving and be in fear at the same time. Every act word or feeling is either an expression of love or a cry to be reconnected to it. If we look from this view, it invites compassion.
We can ask the question, what would love see here? And when I wrote that sentence, what would love see here? It kind of flashed me back to the nineties and “what would Jesus do”? Does anybody else remember that or am I the only old one in the room?
(09:33):
Well, there was this resurgence of the “what would Jesus do” thing in the 1990s for anybody who doesn’t know, there were popular wristbands that people wore. I think there were games created about it was a whole thing. And I had such an aversion to it. I’m going to unpack that just a little bit. From my earlier childhood, I developed a sort of discomfort with my spiritual upbringing after a playmate that I really loved, made fun of me and my family about going to church. And she made fun of me in front of other kids.
(10:17):
And I didn’t understand it. I really didn’t understand it. But my coping strategy was to tamp down my spirituality. She must be right. This is weird. How do I fit in? And the fear of being ostracized stayed with me. And there’s definitely enough evidence in our history that shows there are negative aspects of religion. So you could even say that I gathered evidence to validate my coping strategies.
And I can tell you even now, and you’ve probably heard me say this before, if you’ve heard me speak before that I wouldn’t recommend putting minister in your dating profile. And I also suggest that you don’t have your friends introduce you that way at a party unless you want to clear the room. So I mean, you can hear the fear, the separation, and the lack in that belief, right? I’m poking fun, but as my brother used to say, all kidding is half serious. That’s why it’s funny. And these internal tyrannies as what Beckwith calls them, tyrannies, the limiting beliefs, the fears, our cultural conditioning that dominate our thoughts and our behaviors, that tyranny of the ego keeps us stuck in the fear and the separation.
In ego, we play roles and we invite others and enroll others into our drama, and we participate in our own oppression. When we do this, like my dating example, if I don’t tell people my spiritual views, it’s less likely I would find someone who was a match. So it’s like a self-fulfilling prophecy when we don’t reveal our authentic selves because of these ego profiles that we’ve created out of survival.
(12:28):
But spiritual practice dismantles the false identities so we can wake up to our true nature, remember who we really are, and when we commit to spiritual principles and practices, we can see how we are part of our own oppression. So that liberation, that freedom comes from within through discipline of practice or blissipline, as Michael Beckwith calls it. Well, discipline has kind of like a punishment sort of vibe to it, right? For me, like if you’re disciplined… but he calls it blissipline, being consistent and active with it and with practice, the ego falls away and you can rise above your false narratives and step into the truth of who you are. You have to be willing to look through the eyes of love, right? And pain, fear, longing, they’re the spiritual compost for our awakening – every breakdown is a potential for a breakthrough.
(13:44):
Remember, every desire is a longing to remember your oneness with the divine. So Beckwith says, our social conditioning has been to fit in to fulfill society’s expectations. We develop coping mechanisms, defense mechanisms, compulsive behaviors and addictions, and drown out the cry of the inner spirit seeking to be freed within us. Every desire of your heart is a longing for your connection with the divine. I’m going to say that a few more times today. He invites us to move from victimhood to empowerment. We have to let go of the illusion that life is against us and realize that we are co-creators with the universe and he’s inviting us to see where we’re operating under the tyrannies of our unworthiness, conformity, fear. And let this point us back to love. Point us back to our inner work of transformation.
(15:05):
And just like we can’t find lasting fulfillment outside of us, true freedom doesn’t come from external rebellion, it comes through inner liberation. When we transcend mental patterns through spiritual practice, we take care of our inner world. So the toxic thoughts, unresolved emotions, spiritual neglect, all these things that can pollute our consciousness, spiritual practice stabilizes us and transforms that illusion of separation, right? We remember our divine nature, but it doesn’t happen just from reading about it or talking about it. We have to actually do the work within. It changes our experience of the world. Now, I’m not saying that there aren’t people who are actually victims of things happening to them that shouldn’t be happening to them. And I don’t want to confuse that. We’re talking about being a victim in our consciousness, and this practice can support us in both areas, right?
(16:27):
He offers various spiritual technologies like the affirmative prayer that we do, visualization, visioning.
We are vibrational beings and through intention and awareness, we’re capable of shifting our energy. We don’t need to be trapped in old patterns. Transformation is always possible. What if I had given up on my feet after those six months? I thought it was no way. I had to dig deep and find the belief that something could be different. How we carry ourselves in thought, in our emotion, in our energy, how we are carrying ourself, how we are being that is a living prayer. You’ve heard the saying that worrying is like praying for what you don’t want.
(17:32):
When we live from love, we’re tuning ourselves to the frequency of source, the frequency of the divine. You reshape your life by reshaping your energetic frequency, by raising your to raise above what you’re experiencing out here to become a conscious creator, a co-creator. By managing your vibration as Abraham Hicks suggests, you can just choose a slightly better feeling. If you can’t get all the way from here all the way over to there, choose a slightly better feeling, a slightly better thought, a kinder word. You lift your frequency, and after all those slightly better moves, you find yourself where you wanted to be.
(18:32):
So Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Once said he was proud to be maladjusted to injustice, meaning he would not adjust to injustice. And Beckwith reclaims this idea in the book with the term creatively mal adjusted. He says, creatively, maladjusted individuals become the distribution centers of the highest potential that is seeking to emerge during their time in human history. Your life’s successes may not be recorded in the pages of history. Your name may not be emblazoned on a marble wall, but the vibrational imprint of your elegance of character will be a legacy in every corner of the cosmos. He’s saying, you must not conform to a world that is out of alignment with truth, not conforming to materialism, violence, racism, genderism, greed, all the collective illusions, not conforming is a spiritual act and it serves collective transformation.
(19:53):
He calls us to embody higher principles, to reshape the world, to use your consciousness and your creativity to build a new world. It’s not through resistance. In fact, resistance gives power to what you’re resisting. It’s about actively creating new ways of being rooted in love, compassion, equity, and wisdom. Our inner transformation is social action. As we awaken, we naturally become agents of transformation in the world around us. It requires courage and the willingness to stand for truth even when it’s unpopular and to hold a vision that transcends the fear. We are being called not to adjust to a broken world, but to co-create, adjust and awakened one. And that starts within.
(21:04):
So back to the reading from spiritual liberation, fulfilling the soul’s potential. All inner urges that do not find their fulfillment in the self, in its oneness with the universal self will be left unfulfilled. These urges are meant to be fulfilled creatively through expressions of generosity, love, oneness, wholeness. You get the idea. Otherwise they will seek fulfillment in consumerism. Are we looking for our fulfillment out here? It creates an ongoing unmet craving of wanting to want, and he quotes Earnest Holmes saying, the very urge for personal gratification is incomplete until it finds a universal outlet. And Beckwith continues. What one has to do is turn within and ask, what is the reason for my existence? Ask sincerely. Ask deeply. Ask, wanting to genuinely receive a response as to what is in your highest spiritual interest and the highest and best spiritual interest of all concerned. It’s not really freedom if we’re not all free, it’s not really good if it’s not good for everyone just saying.
(22:36):
He says, when you do so, you discover the meaning of a universal outlet in those qualities and subsequent actions that lead to being a beneficial presence on the planet. So for us to be universal outlets of the divine, we are being a beneficial presence on the planet, not adjusting to a broken world, but co-creating a just and awakened one like the CSL, global vision, creating a world that works for everyone. And I think sometimes that sounds like lip service, right? But it’s not. We need to actively co-create a just and awakened world, and it starts within each of us in the science of mine. Earnest Home says You already have within you a potential for greatness. You do not need to become something different. You only need to recognize and accept the divine nature that already exists within you. You’re not separate from the divine. You’re the channel through which divine intelligence expresses itself.
(23:40):
The creative power of the universe is always expressing through you, always creating through. Are you doing it intentionally? Are you using it to be a beneficial presence on the planet, to be the universal outlet? That doesn’t happen when you’re contracted in fear or when you’re grasping out here for a fix in our fear-based personalities, it happens here from love, from knowing and living as individual expressions of the divine. Deepak Chopra wrote when your internal reference point is the ego. When you seek power and control over other people or seek approval from others, you spend energy in a wasteful way. When that energy is freed up, it can be rec, channelled, and used to create anything you want.
(24:41):
You ever feel that when you’re grasping at something, when you’re doing it from personality, it’s a lot harder, right? When you’re operating from fear, from ego seeking power control approval, you exhaust energy versus when your internal reference point is spirit and he goes on to say, but when our internal reference point is our spirit, our actions are motivated by love and there is no waste of energy. Our energy multiplies when your internal reference point is spirit. You harness the power of love. Things flow for you. Opportunities arise, new ideas, things that you couldn’t have come up with on your own.
(25:27):
When you operate from love, you are aligned with the infinite potential. We can stop striving, stop resisting. There’s nothing to gain, nothing to lose because you are already experiencing your oneness. And the idea of knowing your purpose can be tricky. It bugs a lot of people. I work with people and a lot of times people are saying, but I don’t know my purpose and let alone feeling like we’re fulfilling our potential. I’ve had people ranging from high school students preparing for college to college students preparing for career to folks in midlife, preparing for career change, all feeling afraid that they didn’t know their purpose. What am I supposed to be doing?
(26:23):
Michael Beckwith says, we all have the same purpose to express love. And like we said earlier, higher love isn’t somewhere out there. It’s already within us. Your purpose is not a certain job. Your potential is not limited to expressing only one way. Your purpose is to express love. It’s just a matter of the unique way that love is wanting to express through you, the unique way that the divine is wanting to express through you as that beneficial presence on the planet. The invitation is to dial into that, to do your work inside commune with the divine. Listen, last week Amy spoke of the red threads. I don’t remember the author’s name that she was referencing, but it reminded me of what Gay Hendrix calls being in your genius. The idea of when you’re in your purpose, which is love expressing through us, is time is standing still for you. You lose track of what’s going on, right? It feels like the divine is working through you. For some, it’s channeling while you’re writing. For some, it’s being in your intuition when you’re supporting a client. For some, it’s the way you play your music. For some it could be the way the numbers all make sense on the spreadsheet, there is not a right or wrong way for God to express through you.
(28:13):
Sorry, I just went off on a tangent. I have to find my notes. To have a lived experience of the divine expressing through us requires practice. And I’m inviting you to consider that every urge or every desire is an invitation for remembering your connection with the divine. Every task, every interaction. To ask, what would love do here, I’m going to take us into a brief practice before I close with prayer. So let’s take a moment to turn our attention inward in whatever way is comfortable for you. I like to think of this as my inner sanctuary, and if you’re comfortable allowing your eyes to close or taking a soft gaze and taking a few deep breaths in and slowly exhaling at your own pace, just to bring yourself present, letting yourself settle in to this moment.
(29:39):
There’s nothing to do, nowhere else, to be just being here. Bring your awareness to your heart center, the area surrounding your heart. Imagine a soft glow of light, the light of love that is all ready, alive within you. Divine love lives within. It’s not something you have to go out and find. It’s who you already are. Now, ask from the quiet of your heart, how is love wanting to express through me? It’s not something you have to figure out. Just ask and listen. Perhaps it’s a word or an image, a memory or a feeling that arises gives you insight or guidance.
(31:06):
Maybe there’s something you do or have done where you experience that quality of time. Standing still where effort falls away, where you feel like spirit is moving through you. This is the through line of how you bring love to all you do. This is love in action, allowing the divine to express as you, uniquely as you, the unique combination of all of your experience, skills, talents, and this divine presence that only you can express as you. This is your purpose, to let love express through you in the ways that only you can to be a beneficial presence.
(32:11):
You don’t have to see the whole picture right now, just listening for the next step, the next opening where love wants to flow through and just breathing that in. I speak a word of gratitude over all of the hearts and minds that are here practicing today. I speak a word of gratitude for us being the creatively maladjusted, those willing to do the inner work, to make the change within, to create a world that works for everyone. Not willing to stand by and allow things to go forward in ways that don’t represent love, that don’t show truth. We bring love. We stand for truth. We are the love and the truth, and we make a difference in all we do. I’m grateful for the good that is moving through each one. I’m grateful for the insights that come through this practice and that continue to flow through each one here, guiding them, supporting them to stand in the truth of who they are, as beneficial presence on the planet to be the divine expression that they are. And with so much gratitude, I let this go into the law that always says yes. I call it good. And so it’s.