The Soul’s Curriculum with Josh Reeves

[00:00:00] Hey, so happy to have you here at our Mile Hi Church Podcast. Are you feeling some awe today? Well, we are and we're having the wonderful expert on awe, Mr. Dacker Keltner with us

[00:00:14] in one of our renowned speaker events on Friday, November 1st. He knows about it. He studied it. He's a scientist. It's going to be great. Early bird tickets are on sale for in-person

[00:00:25] sales right now through July 7th. Go to MileHiChurch.org to get your ticket. Love to have you with us. Have you ever asked the universe a question? Did you get an answer? It is central to our Science of Mind philosophy is this idea that the universe is intelligent,

[00:00:49] that the universe, if you'll listen, is talking to you all of the time, giving you messages of depth and of calling. And like it or not, the universe is listening to you too. So watch out what you ask for.

[00:01:08] Universe, what's the meaning of life? Universe, what does it mean to truly be loved and to truly be loving? Universe, does my butt make these pants look big? Be careful what you ask the universe. The title of the message today is the soul's curriculum.

[00:01:31] And the point that I want to get to is as much as we get caught up in everyday life being about fulfilling to-do lists and our busy schedules, that there's something deeper going on.

[00:01:42] That there's a curriculum the universe has created for our soul based upon our own intentions. And when we clarify a question for the universe, it snaps into action and answers us through relationships, popular culture, epiphanies in the silence.

[00:02:06] I want to ask the universe a question. The question was, whose eyes do I live in? Whose eyes do I live in? I think at the time my emotions were kind of up and down.

[00:02:20] And I had to pause and say, what is my self-image? What is the role of my self-image in this? Am I living in my own eyes or am I living in the perceived eyes of my father or an ex-partner or the eyes of the world?

[00:02:35] And I wanted to get clear and I wanted to really know deep down what does it mean to really see? What is the vision in which I live my best life?

[00:02:45] And this wasn't deep in prayer or meditation. I think I was watching Family Guy eating a burrito and I just let it, I just forgot about it. And this is part of the creative process too. Our little mind, what we often call the ego mind, our controlling mind,

[00:03:01] it can articulate these questions but then it forgets and lets them go. And this thing in the creative process called incubation happens. It's where the little mind lets go and the big mind takes over and it gets to work to answering our questions.

[00:03:18] It's that amazing and it's that magnificent. So I forget all about it and I go out to a bar the following Friday and I meet this character, Neal from Ireland. He could have been out of Lord of the Rings or something.

[00:03:30] And you know you are starting or already on an adventure when you meet a character. And this character shared many interesting tidbits with me but one of the things that was most profound is he shared that his favorite book in the world

[00:03:46] is a book called The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kanderra. It was written in the 80s. It's set in the 1960s in war-torn Prague and it's about these four individuals who express the unbearable lightness of being. And what is the unbearable lightness of being?

[00:04:04] It's that recognition that the most important aspects of life even when the world seems to be falling apart around you are those moments of laughter, those moments of romance and love, those moments of play and connection to recognize that as to embody the unbearable lightness of being.

[00:04:23] So the book I've heard of it sounds magnificent, note to self by this book, totally forgot it again. The next week I get a book in the mail from a friend and it's not The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kanderra

[00:04:35] but on the very first page is a quote from The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kanderra. Oh there it is again. Two nights later I'm at a restaurant and I pick up the menu ready to order food

[00:04:46] and you know what it says right over the top? The unbearable lightness of being. Must have been a new diet menu. I don't know why it was there but it was and then it puts and maybe you've had this experience too, I call it a spiritual uncle right?

[00:05:00] A spiritual uncle where the universe is kind of bending your shoulder and the next thing that's going to come is a two by four with the unbearable lightness of being written on it if I don't stop and buy this book.

[00:05:11] So I say uncle, I give to spirit, I order the book, it comes just in the nick of time for a flight to New York City and I'm able to read it on the plane right there and it's an incredible book

[00:05:24] filled with great stories and philosophy and what happens is I get to this passage in the middle and all of a sudden everything gets brighter and I realize the reason I've been called to this book

[00:05:36] is because that question I had asked many weeks before, whose eyes do I live in? And the book shares this. We all need someone to look at us. We can be divided into four categories according to the kind of look we wish to live under.

[00:05:51] The first category longs for the look of an infinite number of anonymous eyes, in other words for the look of the public. The second category is made up of people who have a vital need to be looked at by many known eyes.

[00:06:05] They are the tireless hosts of cocktail parties and dinners. Then there is the third category, the category of people who need to be constantly before the eyes of the person they love. Their situation is dangerous as the situation of people in the first category.

[00:06:20] One day the eyes of their beloved will close and the room will go dark. And finally there's the fourth category, the rarest, the category of people who live in the imaginary eyes of those who are not present. They are the dreamers.

[00:06:34] And I'm not here to give a metaphysical explanation of that quote but to say that it set me off on the formation of my own spiritual philosophy around that question of whose eyes do I live in.

[00:06:45] And it inspired me to realize that for me there are three ways that people can see you. There are those who see you for who they want you to be. This can be good, this can be bad.

[00:06:57] Then there are those people who see you for who you've been. This can be good or this can be bad. But then there is a third category, the people who see you for who you are becoming.

[00:07:09] These are the most essential and important pairs of eyes in your life. And for ourselves when we can, yes see people for who we want them to be and see them for who they've been. But if we want a truly transformational relationship with somebody,

[00:07:27] we want to begin to see them for who they are becoming, for who they say they want to be. And it helped me to realize that the divine, God sees us in this way for who we are becoming, the whole damn acorn.

[00:07:40] Always holding a vision for our wholeness that if we could just choose to live in it would bear the greatest fruits of those wholeness and of that becoming in our lives.

[00:07:53] The soul's curriculum, it's got its own thing going but if we listen and if we ask our questions with clarity, it reveals to us the deepest of our divine truths and encourages us in our greatest and most thorough becoming. The soul's curriculum is our theme today.

[00:08:14] We're starting a kind of loose theme for many of our talks in the summer today called Summer School for the Soul. How does that sound? A little bit of summer school for our souls.

[00:08:24] And if you were here at the first Sunday of the year, I shared with you that many of us are already enrolled in a school. It's a philosophical school called the School of Hard Knocks. Anyone attending that school currently?

[00:08:40] I have at times been the valedictorian of the School of Hard Knocks. And here is what the School of Hard Knocks teaches us. Let's take a look at it. Life is unfair. There is zero concern for me as an individual. I am broken.

[00:08:57] There's something wrong with me that will never be fixed. There is not enough. Survival of the fittest, happiness, love, joy and especially spirituality are all coping mechanisms and most important let's say this one together. Life sucks and we're all suckers.

[00:09:17] Now there's validity to the School of Hard Knocks. I could defend this School of Thinking and have a lot of evidence for it. But I think that the schools of thought and thought are still regularly enrolled there.

[00:09:30] What I want to point out is that there's more than that. That there's something else. And when we embrace this idea of a soul's curriculum, we can graduate from the School of Hard Knocks and enroll in Soul University.

[00:09:45] Soul University which may, when we look at this list, look a little woo-woo and little foo-foo. In order to enroll, it takes immense courage, immense boldness and immense ability to let go of life as you've told yourself and been told that it is

[00:10:01] to step into the miracle of what it wants to tell you about what it is. Some tenants of Soul University, life is a blessing. Life not only knows who I am but it seeks to remind me. I am whole. I am a perfect child of God.

[00:10:15] There is enough. I am here to thrive. Spirituality is the key to living a whole and meaningful life. And let's say this last one together. Life is a miracle and I am a part of it. You are a miracle as well.

[00:10:31] You have everything you need in order to be your best self. There is nothing missing. With Summer School for the Soul, we have the opportunity right here and right now to enroll in our soul studies.

[00:10:49] What does your soul want to learn and embody in relationship with your becoming? What course might you want to enroll in? Living in the now. Deepening in trust. Learning to receive true forgiveness. Anyone else have one? Letting go. Being present. Speaking your truth. Letting go of fear.

[00:11:29] There are so many courses we can enter in and I invite you not to take a full load. But just to take some time and set that intention, what do I really want to learn this summer? What do I want to greater embody?

[00:11:45] Who is it that I am becoming and can I feel a sense of that now so I can align with who that is so I can start bringing it forward into my everyday life?

[00:11:54] And I want to share just a few tenets of the soul's curriculum to let you know that the answering to your questions and your becoming is in motion. That the universe is indeed working for you.

[00:12:07] And the first, we've all heard this before, is that when the student is ready, the teacher will appear. How many of us honestly really believe that in our lives? When the student is ready, the teacher will appear. Yoda is going to show up. Isn't that miraculous?

[00:12:24] Isn't it an amazing thing to look back at your life and to say the moment you got an inkling of who it was that you were becoming, even if it wasn't something that was conscious but it came through a song or through seeing someone being a teacher.

[00:12:36] All of a sudden the exact right persons or people showed up for you to help initiate you into who it was that you were going to become. I remember a little note I got from my seventh grade English teacher and she said,

[00:12:50] Josh, I'm just so interested to see how you turn out in twenty years. It was a simple statement but it helped me realize that I could make my own path. That life wasn't about choosing the path that were available to me, it was about making my own.

[00:13:05] And then all the difference. Think about those individuals who have been demonstrated for you at that perfect right time for your becoming. I want to share just about one, just one of those people with you this morning. Her name was Barbara Charles Wood.

[00:13:21] I talked about her briefly a couple of years ago when she passed away. This is her in 2019 meeting Nancy June and she was just a few months old. Whenever a new baby was born, she would always say, my new teacher, my new teacher.

[00:13:35] And I met Barbara when she was eighty years old in 2004. It was the first ever accredited science and mind class I taught. I taught it in Seal Beach. This was years before I became the senior minister there. And Barbara just took a liking to me.

[00:13:50] And she'd call me on the phone afterwards and she'd check in and see how I was doing as I was moving early through ministry with failures and ups and downs and all over.

[00:14:00] She would always send me books and she wouldn't just send books but she would highlight and mark the areas that she wanted me to read. Do you ever have anyone like that in your life?

[00:14:10] And so you wonder why did Barbara give me this following statement from Tian Dayton? Attempting to control the outcome of events sets me up for disappointment. Thank you Barbara.

[00:14:22] It makes me want to manage people in events so that they will not do anything that threatens my idea of how things ought to go. When I attempt to manipulate and manage people, I set up attention in the dynamic between us.

[00:14:34] I make the event as I see it in my mind more important than the people who are participating in it. I drain myself, others in situations of their spontaneity which inhibits all of our connections with spirit and soul.

[00:14:47] Creativity and spontaneity need to flow freely in and out of reality of time and space so that they can breathe life and energy on to the stage of life.

[00:14:58] As a young man in my 20s, I formed the story in my mind that I was a good boy who was supporting this nice old lady.

[00:15:09] I would listen to her, I would give her attention, I would share with her, I would pick her up and take her to classes when she couldn't drive anymore. But looking back now I realized that I had my greatest teacher in how to be a minister.

[00:15:24] That I had set this intention to become a minister and the person I demonstrated was someone who was 80 years old and grown up in churches all her life

[00:15:33] who probably could have been a minister herself but because of her gender did not have the same opportunities that I had in that moment.

[00:15:40] And she had worked and supported ministers for decades and so she knew everything there was to know about how to run and not run a spiritual community. So she taught me that spiritual community runs not on control but trust.

[00:15:54] She taught me that it never serves you to be someone that you're not, to always be who you are.

[00:16:00] She taught me to always have the patience to not see everything as a reflection on yourself but to seek to be the best representative of your community that you can.

[00:16:07] Still learning all those lessons now but boy did her teachings to me sure saved me a lot of pain and sorrow along the way. Barbara was incredibly funny. She would always leave messages hoping my soon to be spouse, April would listen to them.

[00:16:27] Josh this is the other woman in your life. I don't know why you're not calling me back. One time she invited me to a very fancy restaurant I didn't know why and we've ordered our very expensive meals and we're waiting for them to come and she says,

[00:16:43] Josh do you need to use the restroom? That's a strange question to ask but I happened to need to heed that call and so I went to the restroom and I came back and things are quiet for a while and she just starts giggling, giggling.

[00:16:57] And she says did you see it? Did you see it? And I said what she said the sign on the wall and yes I had seen it and here it is. Let's say it together men to the left because women are always right.

[00:17:11] She always got a kick of that. I have to say that loud for those listening on our podcast. Who would be your one person today that you would think about the impact that they had on your life?

[00:17:28] I have a theory it sounds a little strange that your life is the greatest story ever told.

[00:17:35] If we would only give it the reverent attention that it needs, it would reveal to us all of the support that we received all along and open our heart to receive that new support that we may be calling for.

[00:17:52] So when the student is ready the teacher will appear. Second watch out for spiritual sleight of hand. You know what I mean by that? I'll explain. Spiritual sleight of hand.

[00:18:06] See we've got this thing called a little mind I definitely do and it loves to live in the illusion that it's right and it thinks it knows exactly what I want and what I need.

[00:18:14] And so the big mind that that little mind releases ideas into is much smarter than my little mind and yet it has to work.

[00:18:22] And sometimes twist things around to trick my little mind into following the right path so I can learn what I meant to learn and become who I meant to become. And I call that process a spiritual sleight of hand.

[00:18:34] Perhaps you've heard of the story of the woman from North Carolina who met the man of her dreams who lived in LA, moved in with him and he dumped her two weeks later.

[00:18:43] Only two weeks later find the job of her dreams meet her best friends for life who would introduce her to the next man of her dreams.

[00:18:54] And one of the things about life is we can sometimes get so caught up in the little mind stories about the dramas that do harm and hurt us over time that we forget what the big mind has working for us and it's trying to lead us to.

[00:19:09] Early in my ministry as many of you know I had some failures and I was down.

[00:19:14] I had a crisis of faith, I was broke and I met a minister who was a wonderful minister, had a very successful congregation and they shared with me that they were thinking of retiring

[00:19:24] and this would be a great opportunity for me to come and be their assistant minister and maybe take over the pulpit. And you see my little mind was so egotistical at the time that it probably wouldn't have taken an assistant minister's position.

[00:19:36] So I said yes and in about two months either this person realized I was not the right next senior minister for them but I think more than likely they realized they just needed someone like me working there so that they could focus more on what they wanted to do

[00:19:50] and they're still a thriving minister today. But the first instinct for me from that little mind was to be so mad about that, so engrossed in the drama about that.

[00:20:01] But when I step back and see it from that more panoramic view I see how much healing I went through during that time. I got back to my practice, I took better care of my body, I had money in my savings account again.

[00:20:15] That time was so instrumental in preparing me to step into ministry in a greater way and so that story as much as it made me angry at the time I'm so grateful for that spiritual slight of hand

[00:20:28] that led me somewhere I wouldn't have gone consciously that gave me everything that I needed to grow. So watch out for those spiritual slights of hand. Lastly, this is a little complex but it's the idea that we have everything we need. We have everything we need.

[00:20:50] See, when we get caught up in these attachments to drama, the things that didn't work out our way without realizing they maybe were in our best soul's interest, we lose touch with the soul's curriculum in our life.

[00:21:06] We begin to think something has wronged us and is keeping us from growing. The great Carl Jung he put it this way a little long so bear with me though.

[00:21:14] I have frequently seen people become neurotic when they content themselves with inadequate or wrong answers to the questions of life. They seek position, marriage, reputation, outward success or money and remain unhappy and neurotic even when they have attained what they are seeking.

[00:21:31] Such people are usually confined within too narrow a spiritual horizon. Their life has not sufficient content, sufficient meaning. If they are unable to develop into more spacious personalities, the neurosis generally disappears. For that reason, the idea of development was always of the highest importance to me.

[00:21:50] In other words, that commitment to the soul's curriculum broadens our horizons so that we can develop and meet the needs that our life is calling for us to fulfill. But we have to let go of the attachment to the dramas to fulfill it.

[00:22:06] And we also have to let go of this idea that something is missing. That's the soul's teaching to us is that it was all right there, all along. It doesn't mean there's not more to come in your life, more relationships, more epiphanies.

[00:22:22] But the whole thing is always perfect for each one of us to learn and embody the truth of who we are. T.S. Eliot, an epic poem called The Four Quartets, he has all these ideas that speak to that.

[00:22:40] He says things like, in my beginning is my end or home is where one starts from. As we grow older, the world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated. Or what we call the beginning is often the end and to make an end is to make a beginning.

[00:22:56] The end is where we start from. So many of us have lived so long thinking that something is missing or absent from our life that we haven't except the fullness of the layers of relationship and wisdom, the layers of understanding and opportunity that have always been there.

[00:23:12] We just have to look at what is. As many of you know, I'm a huge fan of the James Webb telescope. I think it's one of the greatest things humankind has created. People from a multiple number of countries contributed to it.

[00:23:27] We took this big machine and we put it further out in outer space than anything has ever been. And it's bringing us pictures and images of things that we have never seen before. And it's giving us potential answers to the greatest questions of life. It's an amazing thing.

[00:23:41] And it shows us images like the following. And it's an amazing thing to remember that what we're looking at is not the present, but our past, our far and distant past.

[00:23:53] That when we look at an image like this, we're not seeing necessarily just where we are going, but where we came from. To stare at that image and read a little bit more from Elliot today.

[00:24:06] We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.

[00:24:17] Through the unknown remembered gate when the last of earth left to discover is that which was the beginning at the source of the longest river, the voice of the hidden waterfall and the children in the apple tree.

[00:24:30] Not known because not looked for, but heard half heard in the stillness between two waves of the sea.

[00:24:38] Quick now here now always a condition of complete simplicity costing not less than everything and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well when the tongues of flame are unfolded into the crown and not a fire and the fire and the rose are one.

[00:24:57] The soul's curriculum is to look at an image like that and to realize you're looking in a mirror to realize that there's a cosmos that surrounds us and a cosmos that is within us.

[00:25:09] And so I invite you sometime today, sometime this week to have a little talk with the universe to get some paper and some pen even some crayons and to write out what it is that you really want to experience know and learn.

[00:25:26] And what you'll articulate is not only who you are becoming, but who the universe is calling you to be.

[00:25:33] So moving into an affirmative prayer just invite any of our beautiful practitioner prayer partners who are in the room to stand with me knowing that we are holding in consciousness every member of our community here or online and do know that these incredible practitioners are available for an affirmative prayer after service today.

[00:25:50] But becoming aware of our relationship with this thing called universe that some of us call infinite intelligence. Some of us call God, some of us call spirit. May it never feel like something alien unknown or out of bounds.

[00:26:09] But may our relationship with the universe feel so intimate that we could reveal the whole of ourselves and fully embrace whatever it may reveal to us about itself.

[00:26:23] In this deepest relationship, our relationship with the infinite itself are the whisperings of experience, the synchronicity of divine appointments, the stillness, the wordlessness that reminds us that all as well because there is a part of us that rest and lives and moves and has its being at the dawn of all creation.

[00:26:49] Knowing our truth in relationship with the infinite, I know that its byproduct in our life is greater healing, greater prosperity, greater meaning and depth, greater coherence, resonance, and the ability to live a relevant and powered lives.

[00:27:07] Knowing that as we choose to do this for ourselves, the magic of that is that it inspires people we love and people around us as well.

[00:27:14] Knowing that we are one life, one community, one people, may we commit to living that best life possible remembering indeed that we have everything we need to be the best who we are.

[00:27:26] I have everything I need to be the best who I am. Let's get to being just that. And so it is. The Mile High Church Podcast. This podcast is made possible by the generous contributions from listeners like you. To make a donation, please visit MileHighChurch.org.