I recently wrote a paper for the Unity Institute’s Lyceum 2013 held in early April at Unity Village. My topic was the poet Wordsworth and his influence on the Transcendentalists and so to New Thought and Unity. It was the first academic paper that I’d written in quite a while but I enjoyed the process, especially when I finally reached the finishing touches!
It was interesting to revisit a poet I had studied in high school and University and especially to look at poems like Tintern Abbey that have their setting very close to where I grew up. And here’s the thing: in the poems of Wordsworth, the writings of Emerson and the teachings of Unity we find the same unitive spirit that runs as a golden thread through all of history. It is the inspiration of mystics and masters but it is our inspiration too. It speaks of the Presence of God in all things and all people.
I feel our readiness to embody this consciousness of oneness in our lives. We are tired of the same old dualism rampant in national and international politics, in the media and in the old paradigm of might is right.
There is a new way and it is upon us. It comes slowly, a person or a group at a time. Yet its voice is insistent and will be heard. I truly believe that this is the way forward for our world. A few years ago meditation and alternative therapies were peripheral to mainstream health and wholeness. Now physicians are recommending meditation for stress reduction, heart problems and other ills. The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle is included in the bibliographies of mainstream books and Oprah recommends Unity as her spiritual community of choice. This is exciting!
Let me conclude with a few lines from Wordsworth’s poem Tintern Abbey that captures, for me, the unitive vision and calls us to remember that everything is connected and everything is one:
“And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things”
With Blessings,
Paul