Using Nature as Divine Design Inspiration

Using Nature as Divine Design Inspiration


10-16-09
BIOMIMICRY
Using Nature as Divine Design Inspiration

Nature never fails to produce something new and interesting. Connecting it with your craft yields inspired solutions.

BY JOE DUFFY

We’ve probably all experienced that day in our childhood, lying on the front lawn, when the clouds overhead reminded us of something–a dancing elephant, Ben Franklin’s profile, or that ’52 Packard.

For many, finding form and function inspired by nature has played a significant role in creating brilliant design. For me, nature is at the heart and soul of nearly everything I do and create, and it often provides metaphors that have led to solutions that have subtle impact.

Several years ago, I was working on a project from hell in Paris and had just left yet another depressing meeting. I was walking down a boulevard back to my hotel when I happened upon some picture perfect leaves lying on the sidewalk. Call it divine inspiration or just a vision amidst a desperate need to be cheered up, but those leaves reminded me immediately of my kids. I still can’t precisely put my finger on it. I guess it had to do with how the seasons relate to generations–maybe a family tree? Something about those beautiful leaves triggered a connection that was powerful.

I picked up an assortment and brought them home. I knew they were to become an artistic element in the portraits I had been painting of my daughter, Bridget, and my son, Joseph. I love the textures they created and the unspoken layers of meaning they provided. To this day, I continue to design many portraits with elements from nature; these elements suggest the many dimensions and characteristics of my subjects.

To me, there’s nothing like a hike, run, ski, or ride through the woods to inspire new design ideas. I go outside to be inspired. It’s some of the most enjoyable “research” I can take part in, it’s literally good for my heart, and it always inspires and fills my soul. Nature never fails to produce something new and interesting. Connecting my love for nature and for being outdoors with my craft keeps me content, fulfilled, and grounded.

For this reason, one of my design heroes is Andy Goldsworthy; his work creating design in nature is nothing less than breathtaking. If you haven’t seen this, do go out and rent it. Better yet, buy it.

Last weekend I was hiking through the woods in Northern Wisconsin and I happened upon nature in a way I had never seen it before. This happens more often than you might think. The rhythms of the elements and how they interact to create totally new visual inspiration are constantly changing and playing tricks with my expectations. It’s why I have to constantly get out and see what Mother Nature’s cooked up for my hungry brain.

At any rate, this time out I was treated to a totally new natural color spectrum. It had snowed the night before, just enough to create this random patterning with the autumn leaves that were at peak color both in the trees and along the forest floor. I had never seen autumn colors so vivid before because I had never seen them mixed with a stunning, sun-lit, super sharp white before. I snapped a few quick pics that don’t do the scene justice and got back to the studio and started mixing paint–divine inspiration!

Lastly, I’ve selected a few designs–a few of ours, but mostly from others–and the imagery of nature that I suspect served as divine inspiration.

Enjoy…and get out there, be inspired!


[Cell cuff, David & Martin; Newton Sneaker packaging, TDA Advertising; Roses on the Vine table lamp, Swarovski; Loppet poster, Duffy and Partners; Bamboo chaise, Ezri Tarazi; Birdhouse, Azul Amuchastegui Bari; Thymes Azur packaging, Duffy and Partners]

Read Joe Duffy’s blog Duffy Point of View
Browse blogs by other Expert Designers

Principal and chairman of Duffy & Partners, Joe Duffy is one of the most respected and sought after creative directors and thought leaders on branding and design in the world.
Joe’s work includes brand and corporate identity development for some of the world’s most admired brands, from Aveda to Coca-Cola to Sony to Jack in the Box to Susan G. Komen for the Cure. His work is regularly featured in leading marketing and design publications and exhibited around the world. In 2004 he founded Duffy & Partners as a new kind of branding and creativity company, partnering with clients and other firms in all communication disciplines. Also in 2004, he received the Medal from the AIGA for a lifetime of achievement in the field of visual communications. His first book–Brand Apart–was released in July 2005 and in 2006, he was recognized as one of the “Fast 50” most influential people in the future of business by Fast Company.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Principal and chairman of Duffy & Partners, Joe Duffy is one of the most respected and sought after creative directors and thought leaders on branding and design in the world. Joe’s work includes brand and corporate identity development for some of the world’s most admired brands, from Aveda to Coca-Cola to Sony to Jack in the Box to Susan G
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theevol_DrBowling_2006.pdf

theevol_DrBowling_2006.pdf

The Divine Design

The Divine Design






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The Divine Design

“But the very hairs on your head are all numbered. Do not fear therefore; you are of more value than many sparrows.”

Luke 12:7

It takes a lot of arguments, facts and logical conclusions to convince modern people that there is a Divine Design, which gives direction to human life through certain laws. All thoughts, desires and actions are defined by certain laws. Sometimes, we incorrectly interpret the things that happen in life, which are strange to us. As a result of this, and as time and generations pass by, we have formed the strange philosophy that everything in the world is supposedly random, i.e. that there is supposedly no law and order, that the power belongs to the strong, the smart, the cunning, etc. Do I need to prove to you that this is a great delusion?

When we look at Christ’s life, we can see that Christ always paid attention to the small things. He told his disciples straight away: “Don’t worry, your life is secured,” and as an example, he says that out of five sparrows not a single one will fall to the ground without the will of the Father. Why did Christ use the number five and why did he not take one sparrow as an example? There is a law in place here, the law of the number five, and everyone who is under this law will not fall without the will of the Father. With the second comparison, Christ tells us: “You are provided for, the hairs on your head are all numbered,” and stops at that. We may think to ourselves, “Of what importance is it that our hairs are all numbered?” The fact is that if God has counted these hairs, if He keeps their number in his account, then they must be of some importance. Do you know how many hairs there are on the human head? Many have counted them to find out that some people have two hundred and fifty thousand, others have three hundred and twenty thousand hairs, and God keeps a count of all these hairs, much like a farmer keeps a count of his fruit trees by putting a number on each tree. We may pluck out a hair from our head and throw it away but this hair serves a purpose and it plays a very important role on our head.

If I now start talking about the meaning of hairs, I will get distracted from my topic, so I will go back to the example with the sparrows, instead. This comparison implies that our spiritual life is protected by the Divine Design. In turn, the comparison with the hairs on the head implies that our physical life, too, is protected by the same Divine Design. It is necessary that deep inside we build faith in this Design, because only when we believe in it, can we evolve correctly. Every suspicion, which penetrates our minds and hearts, that there is no Design in the world takes us away from the correct understanding of the order of things and makes us try and create another order and other rules that reflect our own views. When a man and a woman get married, they think that God has given them power over each other. The man says, “You lived a certain way in your mother’s home but now you will live under new laws in my house. I am a little touchy and I take offence easily, so watch out because if you insult me, I will apply this strict law.” The woman, in turn, says to her husband, ”I am very sensitive and delicate; I was not brought up to work, so do not make me do difficult chores. If you break this law, the situation will change right away.” As you can see, all people make up a set of their own laws, but what happens eventually is that the man and the wife end up fighting. Why? Because the position they take is false in its very foundation, for the truly good marriage is not something that was tied on Earth.

There are three kinds of marriages: one kind that is made in Heaven, another that is made on Earth and the third that is made in hell; one kind is made by God, another is made by people and the third is made by the devil. When one enters into a marriage arranged by God, it will bring Love, Peace and Joy into one’s home. There will always be understanding between the husband and the wife, they will never exchange a single bad word and will live a blissful life together. When a marriage is put together by people, it will be such that one will be able to perfect oneself through it. There will be conflict between the husband and wife, they will be grating on each other, which will help them smooth out the rough edges of their character, just as in the proverb which says that two sharp stones cannot grind wheat together. Such marriage is not a Divine work, but human, and as such, the work will only be as good as human thinking is. When God starts doing something, He, being all-wise, plans everything well. When people take care of things, they arrange them in such a manner that there is always conflict, there is always “grating” that helps the self-perfection, it helps people smooth out their character. However, when the marriage is arranged by the devil, there will surely be discord, lechery and all those bad things. In a home where people live like that, their marriage was arranged by the devil. Therefore, give each thing its precise definition and do not take God’s deeds for human deeds, nor for the devil’s deeds.

In order for us to think correctly and logically, we need to understand the source of things. If there is anything useful in modern science at all, it is that they have determined that certain laws exist in the world, which regulates the relationships between things, elements and bodies. There are clearly defined laws of physics, chemistry, of the human soul, and these laws regulate the relationships between things; no one can break these laws without suffering the consequences in one way or another. So, three kinds of people exist: one that understands things in a Divine way, another that understands things in a human way and a third that understands things in a devilish way. The first situation is when we understand things the way they are predestined by God from the beginning of time. The second is when one thinks that God does not have a hand in all matters; therefore, we need to interfere in order to straighten things out. For example, when God does something we say, “God couldn’t finish this, let us correct it.” The third situation is when one wants to become God oneself. Thousands of years ago, people used to perceive things Divinely, but in their fall they lost this understanding. When you are in a good mood, you, too, believe in God deep in your soul. If things are going well for you, you say, “Thank God, our Lord is taking care of us,” but as soon as some misfortune befalls you, you say, “God has forsaken us.” But on what grounds do you claim that God has forsaken you, and that He is the reason for your suffering? God says, “Because you have forgotten Me, I will forget about you, too.” If you distance yourselves from Him, He will distance Himself from you. Some think that God, who is unchangeable, and constant in His Love will have to follow them when they start distancing themselves from Him and that He will have to cry like a mother after her child, “Wait, my son, do not walk away from Me.” No, God stays in His place and when you say, “God has distanced Himself from me,” I take it to mean that you have distanced yourselves from Him, and not He from you. Some people travel around God on a correct path, with little variation; sometimes their path swerves a little away from Him, but then it winds back towards Him, just like the path of the Earth around the Sun. Others, however, move along a path like that of a stray comet - at times it moves too close to the Sun, then it stays away from it for centuries. The same way you, too, when you move away from God, say, “God has forgotten us.” Well, I am telling you this, in seventy-five years when you go near Him again, just like Haley’s Comet, then God will remember you again. It all depends on the orbit on which you travel around God - when your path nears Him, He will remember you again.

Now, all of you are moving along a certain path but not all of you can understand me equally. Why is that? Because you do not all move within the same orbit. I am not judging you; I am considering these things objectively, philosophically. “This is our path,” you may object. Well, the question is if your path was meant to be this way or if it was you who made it this way. I am telling you that your path was not meant to be this way. For example, between Sofia and Varna there are train tracks that break all the time, and require great expense to be repaired. Did God make these tracks? If he had made them, they would have been built very wisely, but it is because people made them that they were made in such an imperfect way. If you follow the laws of the Divine design, then when you build the train tracks no accidents will ever happen. However, the technicians’ understanding of the needs of construction is better than the Christian believers’ understanding of Life. The former ones say, “We need to do very precise mathematical calculations of the kinds of turns and slopes the train will take on its way, so that we can regulate the force of movement. If we don’t do this, there will be an accident.” The Christians, on the other hand, think to themselves; “God is good, He takes care of us, so whatever slope we may take, it won’t matter.” And when the car turns over they say, “Our things are not going well.” Of course your things are not going well, because when considering the turns of the train tracks, you have not taken into account the law of the Divine Design. Therefore, in some cases the spiritual people may need to learn from the worldly people; you may need to be their pupils. It is not embarrassing to be a pupil. And then, when it comes to the spiritual matters that are unfamiliar to the worldly people, they will become your pupils. You cannot be teachers in all matters of life - sometimes you will be teachers, other times you will be pupils.

The Divine Design has strictly defined all things and phenomena - there is nothing accidental. All events from whatever character they may be - physical, mental or social - are governed and ruled by one Supreme Being, which watches over their development. Just like there is an engine driver who watches over the train engine because the lives of the passengers depend on him, the same way our Earth, which travels in space, has its own driver who sometimes puts more coal in the engine, and at other times less. The path of the Earth has certain curves and bends; therefore, the Earth sometimes moves closer to a bigger planet that affects the Earth in a certain way. However, as these things are a little far-fetched, you will need to study them in the future in order to understand them.

Now I want to go back to the Divine Design and, since it is important for you to understand it, I will use a story as an example. You can take this story as a prehistoric legend because the events that are described in it are fantastic and allegorical. Some people date this story back to Solomon’s time, but the things that are mentioned in the story relate to a much earlier time in history. They say that once upon a time there was a very learned and wise king who could speak the language of all animals. He used to gather all the animals each year and at these gatherings he would teach them and preach to them, and at the end, he used to conclude all his speeches with the following words, “What God has done no one can undo.” At one of these gatherings, there were two big eagles called rockas. One of them said, “I can undo what God has done.” The king said, “Very well, prove this with facts,” and dismissed the gathering. In that same year the daughter of another king was getting married to a prince. After they got married they were walking back from the temple, rejoicing with each other, when one of the eagles swooped down, picked up the bride, took her to a far-away island, and dropped her into its nest in a big tree. The groom was left alone without his companion; he became desperate and set out to travel. He boarded a ship that was wrecked a few months later. The waves then washed the desperate traveller onto the same island on which his bride was taken to. Not knowing this, he started complaining to God, “Oh, Lord, was it not enough of a misfortune to lose my wife and now I am washed onto this deserted island. I wish I’d never been born.” His wife, who was in the nest on top of the same tree, heard a man cry and climbed down to see who it was. When she saw that it was her husband, she hid him in the nest. When the time came for the next gathering of all animals, the two eagles picked up the nest with the bride in it and took it to the gathering. The king talked again, and at the end he finished his talk with the usual words, “What God has done, no one can undo.” Then the eagle spoke up again, “I undid one of God’s deeds.” “Prove it,” the king told him. When the eagle told the story of the wedding, the king asked to see the bride. When the eagle called for the bride to step out of the nest, the groom appeared alongside her. When the eagle saw that he could not undo what God had done, he exploded with anger.

You should take the eagle as a symbol of the human mind. Sometimes we say that we can undo what God has done, and that we can change the form of things, but in the end, things happen the way they were designed by God to happen and we, like the proud eagle, explode in our anger.

The modern teachers teach at every step, “Be smart, stupidity does not make the world go round.” I say instead, be thankful for the stupid ones. It is because of them that God is still keeping the world. There are no smarter spirits than the devils in the world. Have you been in their kingdom to see how they live? You talk about human intelligence, but if you descend to these fallen spirits, you will find concepts of physics, of chemistry, and of spiritual manifestations; you will find a lot of knowledge on how to lie, cheat, and do so many things, but their knowledge cannot bring order and harmony because it is not based on those elements that can solidify Life. Knowledge needs to be solidified through Divine Love. Therefore, when someone talks about knowledge and facts, I ask, “Do you have concrete to solidify these things?” If you have concrete, you truly do have Divine knowledge, but if all you have is bare facts and no cement for them, they cannot be of any service. I am asking you, if you gather two hundred thousand or a million strands of sheep wool, but do not know how to tie them together, what good will they be for you? Only when you spin them and weave them together in a certain way will you be able to make clothes to dress yourself with. According to the same law, when we can solidify our thoughts and desires through this Divine cement, the Divine Design, only then will we be able to make a dress to cover our internal nakedness. Therefore, we need this Design in order to live and evolve.

That is why Christ says, “Do not fear,” and asks why the five sparrows do not fall. You use the number five in other ways, too: five senses, five fingers, etc. It is an emblem of human beings on Earth. The number five represents the human being - the wise, thinking person - and says that this wise person will not fall as long as he does not err. If you are wise and fulfil God’s Will, you will not fall. However, the day when you err, God will let one of these sparrows fall to the ground, and when it falls down, the hairs on your head will start falling off, too, which means that your life will start falling apart.

So, always keep in mind that the Divine Design will take care of you for as long as you move unswervingly along the path of its laws. If you move away, your life will start falling apart. If you want to start evolving again, you will need to turn once again towards the Sun of this Design.

June 6, 1915, Sofia


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Emissaries of Divine Light | Encyclopedia.com

Emissaries of Divine Light | Encyclopedia.com

Emissaries of Divine Light (Updated Mar 14 2020)

The Emissaries of Divine Light is an international spiritual community founded in 1932 by Lloyd Arthur Meeker, then a resident of Tennessee. He had for several years been giving focused consideration to the meaning of life which finally led him on an inner search and to a realization that he was responsible for the quality of his life experience. He came to the conclusion that humans were created to manifest the divine design. God is thus the focus of all beingness. Distortions in life appear when evil influences (fear, hate, anger, etc.) gain control of the mind. However, humans have the power to choose which influences they will allow to influence their mind.

Meeker began to write his conclusions under the pen name Uranda. He was soon joined by a young colleague, Lord Martin Cecil (d. 1988), who became head of the Emissaries following Meeker's death in a plane crash in 1954. Meeker had established the main U.S. center of the movement, Sunrise Ranch, in 1945 in Loveland, Colorado. Cecil opened the primary Canadian center at 100 Mile House in British Colombia.

The Emissaries now exists through 12 communal centers scattered around the globe, and in more than one hundred teaching centers, each managed by a small group of people affiliated with the movement. They offer classes and workshops that assist people in remembering their own divine nature. One method for doing that is "The Opening," a seminar/workshop experience that introduces individuals to their divine identity, the universal principles that govern life, and the nature of the invisible realm. Meeker also developed a unique healing process called Attunement, a non-touch healing technique that attempts to restore the spiritual element to the healing process. It begins in the harmonization of the healer, the patient, and the source of all being.

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The Emissaries may be contacted through its American headquarters at 5569 N. Country Rd. 29, Loveland, CO 80537. 

It has an Internet site at http://www.emissaries.org.

Sources:

Cecile, Martin. Being Where You Are. New Cannaan, Conn.: Keats Publishing, 1974.

——. On Eagle's Wings. New York: Two Continents Publishing Group, 1977.

Exeter, Martin. Thus It Is. Denver, Colo.: Foundation House Publications, 1989.

Layne, Laurence. Attunement: The Sacred Landscape. St Augustine, Fla.: The Florida School of Attunement and Natural Healing, 1998.

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Encyclopedia of Occultism and Parapsychology

Attunement - Wikiwand

Attunement - Wikiwand



Attunement
Connected to: Energy medicineNational Center for Complementary and Integrative HealthSeven Spirits of God

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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This article may present fringe theories, without giving appropriate weight to the mainstream view, and explaining the responses to the fringe theories. Please help improve it or discuss the issue on the talk page. (September 2018) (Learn how and when to remove this template message)
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Attunement was the early term adopted by practitioners of energy medicine, originally developed by Lloyd Arthur Meeker (1907 – 1954) and his colleagues.

[1] Meeker taught and practiced Attunement as a central feature of his spiritual teaching and ministry, Emissaries of Divine Light.[2] Attunement is taught as a personal spiritual practice and as a healing modality offered through the hands.[3] Emissaries of Divine Light believe that Attunement is a pivotal factor in the conscious evolution of humanity.
[4] Like Qigong, Reiki and Therapeutic touch Attunement is a putative practice as defined by the United States National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH), lacking published scientific study of its effectiveness.
[5] Attunement practitioners and clients rely on personal and anecdotal experience to promote it.

History
Beginnings

Lloyd Arthur Meeker shared the first Attunement with Rudolph Plagge in Wichita, Kansas, in 1929, and developed the teaching and practice of Attunement with colleagues until his death in 1954.[6] From September 14 to 16, 1932, Meeker had a spiritual awakening experience that he described as a “heavenly ordination.”[7] He marked that experience as the initiation of Emissaries of Divine Light.[8] That same year he instituted a series of energy medicine experiments. Meeker reported that he could stand across the room from the client and the client could feel the intensification of life force.[9] He also reported excellent results when his hands were one to six inches from the client.[9]

Lloyd Arthur Meeker wrote and lectured using the name Uranda, which was how he was known to his followers.[10] From 1935 to 1945, Meeker traveled across the United States and Canada, establishing centers for healing and spiritual teaching for varying periods of time in Atascadero, Oakland, Burbank and Long Beach, California; Buffalo, New York; Grand Forks, Iowa; and Loveland, Colorado.[11] In December 1945 Meeker established his headquarters at Sunrise Ranch in Loveland, where Attunement continues to be taught and practiced.[12][13]

The Role of G-P-C Chiropractors

The G-P-C movement played a significant role in the development of Attunement.[14] G-P-C stood for God – Patient – Chiropractor.[15] It was a no-fee system of service that George Shears created in the late 1930s after he, himself, had a severely debilitating ruptured disk, and vowed to offer his services on a donation basis. Shears had been a Major League Baseball pitcher in 1912, and then a graduate of the Palmer School of Chiropractic in 1917.[16] He experimented with "no-force" chiropractic adjustments in which he believed it was the healing energy through his hands that brought positive results, shown through x-rays.[17] The G-P-C movement saw the relationship between the chiropractor and the patient as the base of a triangle with God at the apex.[18] Meeker eventually embraced this model for the healing relationship.[19]

In 1949, Albert Ackerley, a G-P-C chiropractor in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, was introduced to Lloyd Arthur Meeker’s writings.[20] In June 1949, when Ackerley was preparing to offer an adjustment to his patient, he saw that the patient’s spine had aligned before he had given the adjustment. He believed that this result was a consequence of the flow of subtle energy between himself and the patient, rather than any physical intervention.[20] Ackerley met Meeker in July 1949 and began to practice Attunement under his tutelage. Up to this point, Meeker had referred to Attunements as “treatments.” It was Albert Ackerley who named those treatments “Attunements.”[21] With Lloyd Meeker’s urging, Ackerley began to experiment with long-distance Attunements in which the person receiving the Attunement was not in the physical presence of the practitioner.[22] Albert Ackerley and G.P.C. President, Virgil Givens, were both prosecuted legally due to their practice of energy medicine, but continued to practice nonetheless.[23]

In May 1950, Lloyd Arthur Meeker met George Shears. Meeker’s meeting with Shears was followed by G-P-C meetings at a Chiropractic Convention in August 1950 in Davenport, Iowa, and then a G-P-C conference in Huntingburg, Indiana, which was attended by Meeker.[15] Following these events, about twenty-five chiropractors attended a G-P-C Convention from September 2 through 8 of that year at Sunrise Ranch.[24]

The prospect of joining with Meeker and Emissaries of Divine Light raised suspicion and concerns among the G-P-C chiropractors. Nonetheless, at the G-P-C Convention in the home of George Shears in Huntingburg, Indiana, on February 24 and 25, 1951, the G-P-C board of directors voted to cooperate with the Emissaries to establish a G-P-C Servers Training School at Sunrise Ranch.
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[25] Lloyd Arthur Meeker led three six-month G-P-C Servers Training School sessions at Sunrise Ranch from 1952 to 1954. His classes from the 1952 session were transcribed and published as The Divine Design of Man, # 1 and # 2.[26][27] The audio recordings and the transcripts of Meeker’s classes from the 1953 and 1954 sessions are still extant. The sessions included Attunement technique, nutrition, psychology and a broad spectrum of spiritual teachings.[28][29]

In August 1954, Lloyd Arthur Meeker, his wife, Kathy Meeker, Albert Ackerley and two children died in the crash of Meeker’s small plane in San Francisco Bay.[30][31] A close associate of Meeker’s, Martin Cecil, assumed the responsibility for the leadership of Emissaries of Divine Light and for carrying forward Meeker’s Attunement work.[32] With assistance from G-P-C chiropractors, James Wellemeyer and Bill Bahan, and from Roger de Winton, Alan Hammond and others, Martin Cecil continued the Servers Training School at Sunrise Ranch and the teaching of Attunement.[33][34][35] George Shears eventually moved to Sunrise Ranch in 1968 where he practiced Attunement until he died in 1978.[30]

Development

As Emissaries of Divine Light grew in the 1960s, '70s and '80s, so did the teaching and practice of Attunement. Martin Cecil emphasized in his teaching of Attunement that the basis of it was a spiritual practice.[36] While many of the early Attunement practitioners were chiropractors, lay people became increasingly active in the practice.[37] Building on the early work of Lloyd Arthur Meeker, Attunement evolved to include groups of people practicing it together.[38] In 1993, a World Blessing time was established for practitioners to share a time of collective Attunement and healing prayer. In the '80s and '90s, the teaching and practice of long-distance Attunement was developed further.[39]

Following Martin Cecil's death in 1988, his son, Michael Cecil, become the Spiritual Leader of the Emissaries.[40] In 1996, Emissaries of Divine Light formed an Attunement Guild, which established standards for the teaching and certification of Attunement practitioners.[41] A group of Attunement practitioners, including Chris Jorgensen and Andrew Shier, formed the International Association of Attunement Practitioners (IAAP) in 1999. IAAP developed and taught the practice of Attunement separate from the organization of Emissaries of Divine Light.[42][43] Roger de Winton continued his Attunement trainings through Attunement Intensives offered at Sunrise Ranch. He also continued his work of long-distance Attunement until his death in 2001.[44]

In 1996, Michael Cecil left Emissaries of Divine Light to continue his own work, which includes Attunement through The Ashland Institute.[45] A group of trustees assumed the leadership of Emissaries of Divine Light with Michael Cecil's departure.[46] In August 2004, the trustees of Emissaries of Divine Light named David Karchere as the leader of the global network.[47] Since becoming the leader of the Emissaries, Karchere has developed programs, including Life Destiny Immersion and Journey into the Fire, that are designed to assist people to transform the spiritual and emotional factors that block the experience of Attunement.[48] In 2010, with other Attunement practitioners, David Karchere founded the Attunement School at Sunrise Ranch.[49]

Philosophy

Attunement is based on Lloyd Arthur Meeker's vision that the human body is designed to be the temple of God.[50][51] The foundational principle underlying Attunement is what Meeker named as The One Law, or the Law of Cause and Effect.[52] Emissaries of Divine Light teach that the causative factor in spiritual regeneration is the universal power and intelligence within all people, and that through response and opening to that power and intelligence, people experience healing.[53] Attunement practitioners believe that positive shifts in consciousness release a healing energy through a person’s body, mind and emotions. Traditionally, the Attunement practitioner is referred to as a server and the recipient is referred to as a servee.[54]

Attunement servers believe they transmit universal life energy through their hands to the servee.[55] The primary connecting points on the servee are the endocrine glands.[56] Attunement servers teach that the endocrine glands are portals for universal life energy that operates through the physical body, and through the mental and emotional function of the individual, and that the servee has the opportunity to open more fully to the life energy within them through receiving an Attunement.[57]

Emissaries of Divine Light hold that the origin of universal life energy is divine in nature and that the core reality of all people is divine.[58] The goal of Attunement is to increase the energetic flow while removing blockages to that flow so that a person’s core reality can emerge.[59]

Lloyd Meeker taught that the human connection to universal life energy relies on pneumaplasm, which was his name for the aura of subtle energy, or etheric body surrounding the physical body.[60][61] Attunement practitioners believe that pneumaplasm is generated when the universal life energy flows through a person, and that the clarity of the pneumaplasmic body depends on the clarity of that energy flow.[62] Attunement practitioners focus on clarifying and enriching the pneumaplasm associated with the endocrine glands and the anatomical systems of the body.[63]

Practitioners believe that the endocrine glands translate seven aspects of the universal life energy into the human experience. They name these as the Seven Spirits.[64]

GlandSpirit

Pineal Love
Pituitary The Womb
Thyroid Life
Thymus Purification
Islets of Langerhans Blessing
Adrenal gland Single Eye
Gonads New Earth


Attunement practitioners relate these Seven Spirits to the Seven Spirits of God referenced in the book of Revelation in the Bible.[64] Some Attunement practitioners correlate the seven endocrine glands with seven chakras.[65]

Technique

At the core of the teaching of the technique is the establishment of an energetic circuit between the practitioner (server) and the client (servee).[66] Practitioners seek to establish that circuit by the radiant extension of life energy through the dominant hand of the practitioner to the gland or organ of the client, and the receiving of life energy through the opposite hand from a corresponding contact point in the body.[67]

Meeker taught that the first step in the Attunement process was the alignment of the cervical vertebrae by the radiation of healing energy through the hands on either side of the neck.[68] Contemporary Attunement practitioners continue to teach attunement technique that begins and ends with an Attunement of the cervical vertebrae.[69] Often, the cervical Attunement is followed by Attunement of the endocrine glands and some of the major organs of the body.[70]

Spiritual practice

As a spiritual practice, Attunement is intended to connect a person more closely to their spiritual source and to open the flow of life current.[71] The practice includes conscious attention to the quality of spirit expressing through the practitioner in the daily living of life, and specific periods of meditation in the beginning and ending of each day, taught as Sanctification in the Evening and the Morning.[72]

A central aspect of Attunement as a spiritual practice is referred to by Emissaries of Divine Light as spiritual centering, which they define as a daily practice of opening thoughts and emotions to the spiritual.[73]

References

1. ^ Wilkinson, Bill (1986). Attunement With Life. Loveland, Colorado: Eden Valley Press. p. 13. ISBN 0-932869-05-X.
2. ^ Van Duzen, Grace (1996). The Vibrational Ark. Loveland, Colorado: International Emissaries. pp. 171, 172. ISBN 0-932869-05-X.
3. ^ Layne, Laurence (2008). Attunement: The Sacred Landscape. St. Augustine, Florida: Health Light Publishing Company. p. 9.ISBN 978-0-9771193-2-5.[permanent dead link]
4. ^ Uranda (1986). The Third Sacred School: Volume 7, Health, Healing and Attunements. Loveland, Colorado: Emissaries of Divine Light. pp. 367–370. Archived from the originalon 2012-04-06. Retrieved 2012-05-25.
5. ^ "CAM Basics" (PDF). National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health. Retrieved May 24, 2012.
6. ^ Layne, Laurence (2008). Keepers of the Flame: A History of Attunement. St. Augustine, Florida: Health Light Publishing Company. pp. 14, 29. ISBN 0-9771193-3-5. Archived from the original on 2012-07-09.
7. ^ Uranda (1986). The Third Sacred School: Volume 7, Health, Healing and Attunements. Loveland, Colorado: Emissaries of Divine Light. p. 288. Archived from the original on 2012-04-06. Retrieved 2012-05-25.
8. ^ Uranda (1986). The Third Sacred School: Volume 7, Health, Healing and Attunements. Loveland, Colorado: Emissaries of Divine Light. p. 286. Archived from the original on 2012-04-06. Retrieved 2012-05-25.
9. ^ a b Layne, Laurence (2008). Keepers of the Flame: A History of Attunement. St. Augustine, Florida: Health Light Publishing Company. p. 17. ISBN 0-9771193-3-5. Archived from the original on 2012-07-09.
10. ^ Stein Henderson, Jaclyn (1998). The Healing Power of Attunement Therapy: Stories and Practice. New Delhi, India: Sterling Publishers. p. 255. ISBN 81 207 2442 9.
11. ^ Van Duzen, Grace (1996). The Vibrational Ark. Loveland, Colorado: International Emissaries. pp. 14–78. ISBN 0-932869-05-X.
12. ^ "Communities Directory". Fellowship for Intentional Community. Retrieved May 24,2012.
13. ^ "The Attunement School at Sunrise Ranch". Sunrise Ranch. Archived from the original on September 15, 2012. Retrieved May 24, 2012.
14. ^ Layne, Laurence (2008). Attunement: The Sacred Landscape. St. Augustine, Florida: Health Light Publishing Company. pp. 15–17.ISBN 978-0-9771193-2-5.[permanent dead link]
15. ^ a b Van Duzen, Grace (1996). The Vibrational Ark. Loveland, Colorado: International Emissaries. p. 149. ISBN 0-932869-05-X.
16. ^ Layne, Laurence (2008). Keepers of the Flame: A History of Attunement. St. Augustine, Florida: Health Light Publishing Company. p. 19. ISBN 0-9771193-3-5. Archived from the original on 2012-07-09.
17. ^ Stein Henderson, Jaclyn (1998). The Healing Power of Attunement Therapy: Stories and Practice. New Delhi, India: Sterling Publishers. pp. 255, 256. ISBN 81 207 2442 9.
18. ^ Layne, Laurence (2008). Attunement: The Sacred Landscape. St. Augustine, Florida: Health Light Publishing Company. p. 14.ISBN 978-0-9771193-2-5.[permanent dead link]
19. ^ Meeker, Lloyd A. (1952). Servers Training School: The Divine Design of Man, Volume 1. Loveland, Colorado: Emissaries of Divine Light. p. 12.
20. ^ a b Layne, Laurence (2008). Keepers of the Flame: A History of Attunement. St. Augustine, Florida: Health Light Publishing Company. p. 25. ISBN 0-9771193-3-5. Archived from the original on 2012-07-09.
21. ^ Layne, Laurence (2008). Keepers of the Flame: A History of Attunement. St. Augustine, Florida: Health Light Publishing Company. p. 26. ISBN 0-9771193-3-5. Archived from the original on 2012-07-09.
22. ^ Layne, Laurence (2008). Keepers of the Flame: A History of Attunement. St. Augustine, Florida: Health Light Publishing Company. p. 27. ISBN 0-9771193-3-5. Archived from the original on 2012-07-09.
23. ^ Layne, Laurence (2008). Keepers of the Flame: A History of Attunement. St. Augustine, Florida: Health Light Publishing Company. pp. 27, 35, 36. ISBN 0-9771193-3-5. Archived from the original on 2012-07-09.
24. ^ Van Duzen, Grace (1996). The Vibrational Ark. Loveland, Colorado: International Emissaries. p. 154. ISBN 0-932869-05-X.
25. ^ Van Duzen, Grace (1996). The Vibrational Ark. Loveland, Colorado: International Emissaries. p. 157. ISBN 0-932869-05-X.
26. ^ Meeker, Lloyd A. (1953). Servers Training School: The Divine Design of Man # 1 & #2. Loveland, Colorado: Emissaries of Divine Light.
27. ^ Stein Henderson, Jaclyn (1998). The Healing Power of Attunement Therapy: Stories and Practice. New Delhi, India: Sterling Publishers. p. 256. ISBN 81 207 2442 9.
28. ^ Uranda (1986). The Third Sacred School: Volume 7, Health, Healing and Attunements. Loveland, Colorado: Emissaries of Divine Light. Archived from the original on 2012-04-06. Retrieved 2012-05-25.
29. ^ Layne, Laurence (2006). The Spiritual Nature of the Physical Body: Anatomy and Physiology for Attunement Practitioners. St. Augustine, Florida: Healing Light Publishing Company. p. 9. ISBN 978-0-9771193-01.[permanent dead link]
30. ^ a b "The Sunrise Ranch Cemetery". The USGenWeb Project. Retrieved May 15, 2012.
31. ^ "Bodies of Plane Crash Victims Will Be Returned to Colorado". Oakland Tribune. August 5, 1954.
32. ^ Jorgensen, Chris R. (2002). Attunement: Love Made Visible. Kansas City, Missouri: Chris Jorgensen. pp. ixv. ISBN 0-9652997-0-8.
33. ^ Cecil, Hammond; Emery, Black; Wellemeyer, de Winton & Bahan (1979). Spirit of Sunrise. London, England: Mitre Press. pp. 45, 119, 133, 149. ISBN 0 7051 0271 8.
34. ^ Van Duzen, Grace (1996). The Vibrational Ark. Loveland, Colorado: International Emissaries. p. 272. ISBN 0-932869-05-X.
35. ^ Stein Henderson, Jaclyn (1998). The Healing Power of Attunement Therapy: Stories and Practice. New Delhi, India: Sterling Publishers. p. 11. ISBN 81 207 2442 9.
36. ^ Layne, Laurence (2008). Keepers of the Flame: A History of Attunement. St. Augustine, Florida: Health Light Publishing Company. p. 30. ISBN 0-9771193-3-5. Archived from the original on 2012-07-09.
37. ^ Layne, Laurence (2008). Keepers of the Flame: A History of Attunement. St. Augustine, Florida: Health Light Publishing Company. p. 41. ISBN 0-9771193-3-5. Archived from the original on 2012-07-09.
38. ^ Meeker, Lloyd Arthur (1985). The Third Sacred School, Volume 7, "A Group Attunement". Loveland, Colorado: Emissaries of Divine Light. pp. 365, 366.
39. ^ Cecil, Martin (1983). The Third Sacred School, Volume 5, "Vibrational Attunement". Loveland, Colorado: Emissaries of Divine Light. pp. 291–296.
40. ^ Foster, Chris (1989). One Heart, One Way: The Life and Legacy of Martin Exeter. Denver, Colorado: Foundation House Publications, Inc. p. 13. ISBN 0-921790-00-7.
41. ^ "Attunement Guild". International Emissaries. Retrieved May 24, 2012.
42. ^ "International Association of Attunement Practitioners". International Association of Attunement Practitioners. Retrieved May 24,2012.
43. ^ Jorgensen, Chris (2004). Attunement: The Energy of Being. Kansas City, Missouri: Heartland Attunement. p. 39. ISBN 0-9652997-2-4.
44. ^ Layne, Laurence (2008). Keepers of the Flame: A History of Attunement. St. Augustine, Florida: Health Light Publishing Company. p. 51. ISBN 0-9771193-3-5. Archived from the original on 2012-07-09.
45. ^ Todd, Douglas (September 29, 2003)."Leader left Divine Light behind him".Vancouver Sun. Retrieved May 15, 2012.
46. ^ "Trustee Leadership". Emissaries of Divine Light. Retrieved May 24, 2012.
47. ^ "David Karchere". Emissaries of Divine Light. Archived from the original on June 1, 2012. Retrieved May 24, 2012.
48. ^ "Programs". Emissaries of Divine Light. Retrieved May 25, 2012.
49. ^ "The Attunement School at Sunrise Ranch". Sunrise Ranch. Archived from the original on September 15, 2012. Retrieved May 25, 2012.
50. ^ Uranda (2010). Seven Steps to the Temple of Light. Loveland, Colorado: Emissaries of Divine Light. p. 19. ISBN 978-0-932869-08-1. Archived from the original on 2012-04-06. Retrieved 2012-05-25.
51. ^ Palombo, D.C., Anthony J. (2010). Sacred Anatomy: Where spirit and flesh dance in the fire of creation. Lake Charles, Louisiana: Anthony J. Palombo. pp. 2–17. ISBN 0-9763517-1-4.
52. ^ Jorgensen, Chris R. (2004). Attunement: The Creator's Magic. Kansas, Missouri: Heartland Attunement. p. 2. ISBN 0-9652997-1-6. Archived from the original on 2012-05-25. Retrieved 2012-05-25.
53. ^ Wilkinson, Bill (1986). Attunement With Life. Loveland, Colorado: Eden Valley Press. p. 11. ISBN 0-932869-05-X.
54. ^ Van Duzen, Grace (1996). The Vibrational Ark. Loveland, Colorado: International Emissaries. p. 200. ISBN 0-932869-05-X.
55. ^ Jorgensen, Chris R. (2002). Attunement: Love Made Visible. Kansas City, Missouri: Chris Jorgensen. p. 35. ISBN 0-9652997-0-8.
56. ^ Layne, Laurence (2006). The Spiritual Nature of the Physical Body. St. Augustine, Florida: Health Light Publishing Company. pp. 58–72. ISBN 978-0-9771193-0-1.
57. ^ Uranda (1986). The Third Sacred School: Volume 7, Health, Healing and Attunements. Loveland, Colorado: Emissaries of Divine Light. pp. 10–16. Archived from the original on 2012-04-06. Retrieved 2012-05-25.
58. ^ Aumra (1968). As of a Trumpet. Loveland, Colorado: Emissaries of Divine Light. p. 13.
59. ^ Cecil, Martin (1983). The Third Sacred School, Volume 5, "Levels of Being". Loveland, Colorado: Emissaries of Divine Light. pp. 432–437.
60. ^ Uranda (1982). The Third Sacred School, Volume 4, "The Principles of Pneumaplasm". Loveland, Colorado: Emissaries of Divine Light. pp. 168–174.
61. ^ Gerber, M.D., Richard (1996). Vibrational Medicine: New Choices for Healing Ourselves. Sante Fe, New Mexico: Bear & Company. p. 121. ISBN 1-879181-28-2.
62. ^ Layne, Laurence (2008). Attunement: The Sacred Landscape. St. Augustine, Florida: Health Light Publishing Company. p. 22.ISBN 978-0-9771193-2-5.[permanent dead link]
63. ^ Layne, Laurence (2008). Attunement: The Sacred Landscape. St. Augustine, Florida: Health Light Publishing Company. p. 33.ISBN 978-0-9771193-2-5.[permanent dead link]
64. ^ a b Jorgensen, Chris (2004). Attunement: The Creator's Magic. Kansas City, Missouri: Heartland Attunement. pp. 71–127. ISBN 0-9652997-1-6.
65. ^ Palombo, D.C., Anthony J. (2010). Sacred Anatomy: Where spirit and flesh dance in the fire of creation. Lake Charles, Louisiana: Anthony J. Palombo. pp. 24–25. ISBN 0-9763517-1-4.
66. ^ Layne, Laurence (2006). The Spiritual Nature of the Physical Body: Anatomy and Physiology for Attunement Practitioners. St. Augustine, Florida: Healing Light Publishing Company. pp. 31–32. ISBN 978-0-9771193-01.[permanent dead link]
67. ^ Layne, Laurence (2008). Attunement: The Sacred Landscape. St. Augustine, Florida: Health Light Publishing Company. pp. 77–92.ISBN 978-0-9771193-2-5.[permanent dead link]
68. ^ Van Duzen, Grace (1996). The Vibrational Ark. Loveland, Colorado: International Emissaries. pp. 218–223. ISBN 0-932869-05-X.
69. ^ Jorgensen, Chris (2004). Attunement: The Energy of Being. Kansas City, Missouri: Heartland Attunement. pp. 26, 33. ISBN 0-9652997-2-4.
70. ^ Jorgensen, Chris (2004). Attunement: The Energy of Being. Kansas City, Missouri: Heartland Attunement. pp. 26–33. ISBN 0-9652997-2-4.
71. ^ Karchere, David. "Meditation and True Freedom". Emissaries of Divine Light. Retrieved May 25, 2012.
72. ^ Cecil, Martin (1990). The Third Sacred School, Volume 11, "Sanctification in the Evening and the Morning". Loveland, Colorado: Emissaries of Divine Light. pp. 74–78.
73. ^ Karchere, David. "Spiritual Centering". Emissaries of Divine Light. Retrieved May 25,2012.

RBP



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By Divine Design For Women

By Divine Design For Women

By Divine Design
is a holistic approach to life that looks at every aspect of you as a woman: your spiritual, mental, emotional and physical health.

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Discovering Divine Design | My Utmost For His Highest

Discovering Divine Design | My Utmost For His Highest


November 14

Discovering Divine Design
By Oswald Chambers


As for me, being on the way, the Lord led me… —Genesis 24:27




We should be so one with God that we don’t need to ask continually for guidance. Sanctification means that we are made the children of God. A child’s life is normally obedient, until he chooses disobedience. But as soon as he chooses to disobey, an inherent inner conflict is produced. On the spiritual level, inner conflict is the warning of the Spirit of God. When He warns us in this way, we must stop at once and be renewed in the spirit of our mind to discern God’s will (see Romans 12:2). If we are born again by the Spirit of God, our devotion to Him is hindered, or even stopped, by continually asking Him to guide us here and there. “…the Lord led me…” and on looking back we see the presence of an amazing design. If we are born of God we will see His guiding hand and give Him the credit.

We can all see God in exceptional things, but it requires the growth of spiritual discipline to see God in every detail. Never believe that the so-called random events of life are anything less than God’s appointed order. Be ready to discover His divine designs anywhere and everywhere.

Beware of being obsessed with consistency to your own convictions instead of being devoted to God. If you are a saint and say, “I will never do this or that,” in all probability this will be exactly what God will require of you. There was never a more inconsistent being on this earth than our Lord, but He was never inconsistent with His Father. The important consistency in a saint is not to a principle but to the divine life. It is the divine life that continually makes more and more discoveries about the divine mind. It is easier to be an excessive fanatic than it is to be consistently faithful, because God causes an amazing humbling of our religious conceit when we are faithful to Him.



WISDOM FROM OSWALD CHAMBERS


The great word of Jesus to His disciples is Abandon. When God has brought us into the relationship of disciples, we have to venture on His word; trust entirely to Him and watch that when He brings us to the venture, we take it.
Studies in the Sermon on the Mount



Bible in a Year: Lamentations 3-5; Hebrews 10:19-39

Divine Designs: Tracing the Lord's "Pattern in All Things" - BYU Speeches

Divine Designs: Tracing the Lord's "Pattern in All Things" - BYU Speeches

Divine Designs: Tracing the Lord’s “Pattern in All Things”
RICHARD H. CRACROFTProfessor of English at BYUDecember 10, 1996 • Devotional


Our lives are alive with patterns. Think about it: We are surrounded by patterns. In a sense we live our lives in discovering, identifying, tracing, or following patterns. We awaken in the morning to the sun’s diurnal pattern; our bodies function and malfunction in patterns suggested by our patterned DNA. Our education consists of learning and testing patterns. Our sciences and mathematics are centered in formulaic patterns, as are our works of art, drama, music, dance, and literature. Our games, from hopscotch and Monopoly to football, are patterned play. And every year, as the pattern of the seasons moves from fall to winter, the BYU Cougars follow a well-worn pattern to the Western Athletic Conference championship—but not without the 10,000 prayers of the Saints who see a clear providential analogy, parallel, or pattern between the Cougars’ gridiron triumphs and the triumphant progression of the restored Church.

The poet Wallace Stevens describes as the “blessed rage for order” our inborn human need for orderly, predictable, and stable patterns to offset disorder and uncertainty (Wallace Stevens, “The Idea of Order at Key West,” The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, eds. Richard Ellmann and Robert O’Clair [New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1973], pp. 251–52). In fact, patterns order chaos, lessen our concerns with life’s mutability, identify progress, promote social happiness, and clothe our lives with a larger sense of continuity and meaning. Patterns help us to promote and maintain our individual and group values. Indeed, wo, wo be unto those who attempt, willfully or inadvertently, to shortcut, skirt, or flout the vital patterns of our codes of law, our social or moral codes of conduct, or etiquette. Such will pay a penalty. Wo be unto the member of Congress who gets caught ignoring the patterns, to the student who audaciously marries two independent clauses with a comma, to the foolish husband who installs a new roll of toilet paper so it unrolls from behind instead of over; and wo be unto those pattern-shattering fast Sunday visitors who invade my ward six minutes early and capture, occupy, and hold my pew in the center section, back row, right aisle, seats 1 and 2. We are indeed pattern-centered and pattern-driven beings.

I believe such an abundance of patterns reflects not only a divine ordering of existence but provides mortal pattern-seekers with yet another way in which the power of the Godhead can be present with us. I hope this morning to lift your vision beyond the multitude of mundane patterns that drive our dailinesses to more important spiritual patterns, which, though invisible, often become as surprising, clear, and instructive to the pattern-discerner as was the outstretched finger of the Lord to the brother of Jared. I invite you to become for a few minutes a spiritual pattern-tracer of a few of the many divine patterns that can become Liahonas in helping us to define our mortal errand, remind us of our place in the Lord’s plan, and enable us to walk through mortality with increased confidence, a clearer sense of purpose, and with deepening faith in the designs of our Heavenly Father.

Patterns

A pattern is a model, form, format, template, example, overlay, or paradigm of an object, process, or behavior or of acts or character traits that we deem deserving of imitation and that are arranged so as to enable you or me to follow, reproduce, imitate, replicate, trace, copy, or repeat the qualities or the spiritual characteristics of the original or prototype in a way that remains unchanged and unchanging.

Divine patterns, then, are the processes, fundamental laws, principles, and truths that the Lord seems to follow in ordering and organizing his heavenly and earthly realms. In revealing these divine patterns to his mortal children, the Lord reveals his patterns of truth and righteousness, which, if identified, understood, followed, traced, copied, or imitated, will give us additional motivation to cleanse our souls of earth-stain, crack through accumulated earth crust, and retrace the patterns to our heavenly home. The Lord showed the Prophet Joseph Smith, in June 1831, the importance he attaches to divine patterns. After revealing his pattern in a few things, he says, “I will give unto you a pattern in all things [in all things], that ye may not be deceived” (D&C 52:14).

As part of his grand design, you and I are taking our turns on earth. We come to these parentheses in eternity shorn of everything but our customized spiritual DNA, preset to assist us in transforming the human compromise we have become into the men and women of God we formerly were and will yet be. That spirit body within is intuitively analogical; that is, it helps us see similarities or analogies between things around us here on earth and things of the spiritual world—it helps us, in other words, to trace the divine “pattern in all things.” The search for divine patterns is grounded in the key pattern, which I will call the All Things Are Spiritual Pattern, for the Lord told the Prophet Joseph, “All things unto me are spiritual” (D&C 29:34). And that same Lord, speaking to Moses as Jehovah, explains not only that “all things . . . are spiritual,” but reveals that “all things have their likeness, and all things are created and made to bear record of me . . . ; things . . . above and beneath: all things bear record of me” (Moses 6:63). This world becomes, for the spiritual man and woman, a kind of Urim and Thummim that enables those who allow themselves to be schooled by the Holy Ghost to look at the earth and its inhabitants through spiritual spectacles. Gradually we begin to discern divine patterns everywhere, especially in the holy scriptures—God’s great pattern book—and in the words of his contemporary prophets, seers, and revelators—his divine Butterick, Vogue, or McCall’s compendium of patterns. It is for us to trace, cut, and test those patterns in the fabric of our own mortal experiences.

The Plan of Salvation: Journey Pattern

Although each of you has had similar experiences with divine patterns, let me share with you the continuing impact of such a divine pattern on my life. When I was fourteen, I stumbled, one long Sunday afternoon, into my own sacred grove, a mysterious book called the Pearl of Great Price. Intrigued by the delicious promise of the book with its strange hieroglyphs, and able to attach its teaching to the frame I had read not long before in Nephi Anderson’s early Mormon novel Added Upon, I read all afternoon, engrossed by an illuminating glimpse into the plan of salvation and redemption of humankind as told by the metaphor or pattern of a journey from eternity to eternity. Since that long-ago afternoon, my glimpse has expanded and deepened into a pattern in which I see myself trekking the plains of mortality as a heaven-directed pioneer or as a mariner on a heaven-bound voyage. I’m 61 years out, with a great mate and a fine crew; the sea is often rough, but I’m confident of the charts, certain of the polestar, sure of the location of our home port, and looking forward to seeing an increasing number of my fellow earth-farers who have already reached port.

Last July, as my wife and I visited in Ravensburg, Germany, with a long-on-the-verge-of-baptism friend, I began once more to sketch out for him this Journey Pattern of the plan of salvation. His wife laughed and brought him an envelope containing the felt cutouts we use so often in teaching the plan. She said, “It’s this plan that so attracts him to Mormonism; he uses these figures to teach it to all our friends.”

Clearly moved, our dryland Mormon friend looked us directly in the eyes and said, “Dieser Plan ist fantastisch!”

I warned him that such faith in the plan would soon bring him into the waters of baptism; and it will. The plan, made so vivid and meaningful when depicted as a Journey Pattern, is simply fantastisch!

The Plan of Salvation as a Journey Pattern

HOME

Preparation

Call to Mortality

Veil

Initiation

Experience

Adversity/Trials

Belly of the Whatle

Humility

Obedience

Sacrifice

Spiritual Refinement

Increasing Confidence

Accomplishment

Enlightenment

Continuing Trials, Final Tests

Enduring to the End

Veil

HOME

Journey Mentor: Holy Ghost

Reared in a heavenly home by the noblest of parents, we are called to leave our safe place and undertake a potentially dangerous mission to earth, where we will be tried and tested in the school of life to see if we can be, as Brigham Young put it, “righteous in the dark” (Brigham Young’s secretary’s journal, 28 January 1857 [LDS Church Archives, Salt Lake City]). Our spirits confined in a mortal body, the veil drawn across our memories of our earlier life, we are humbled and must place total trust in earthly parents. We undergo growth and development amidst hard-won experience, pain, adversity, and, occasionally, pleasure. We learn, test, and try principles and patterns. We plunge into the belly of the whale, from which most of us emerge only because of a helping hand from the Holy Ghost and from fellow travelers acting in his stead. As we heed the promptings of this divine mentor, we achieve a degree of faith as well as spiritual and intellectual enlightenment. In time, as seasoned pattern-readers and veterans of the journey, we reach a mortal maturity and enjoy a spiritual wisdom commensurate to our effort and to our response to the Holy Spirit. Our vision clearing, though still circumscribed, we become confident in our patterns. Then finals begin—the concluding mortal tests that may involve failing health and most certainly the grand test of enduring to the end. Withstanding the trials and overcoming the flesh, we turn at last into safe port, where we are welcomed as accomplished veterans who have been proven in a journey that has been customized to our capacities. At that reunion, the Lord himself will be the “keeper of the gate,” for “he employeth no servant there” (2 Nephi 9:41). We hope to hear the greeting “Well done, thou good and faithful servant” (Matthew 25:21)—but for me it will suffice if he simply says “fantastisch!“
The Awake and Arise Pattern

Just as seeing the pattern of the journey makes the far-reaching plan of salvation very clear and personal for you and me, so the Awake and Arise Pattern shows how God reaches out of eternity to call his prophets to the ministry. Note how this Awake and Arise Pattern, seen so clearly in the life of Joseph Smith, Jr., is wonderfully like the initiating call to the ministry traced out by Jesus of Nazareth some 1900 years earlier, although in a desert instead of a grove.



Awake and Arise Pattern

His Soul Hungered

Brokenhearted and Contrite

“Enter into Thy Closet”

Prayer of Faith

Enter Satan

The Belly of the Whale

The Cry for Helo

Release from the Dark Powers

The Theophanny

The Call

In tracing this pattern note how Joseph’s experience may parallel your own experiences and those of the prophets:

1. His soul hungered: Joseph, confused, seeks light and knowledge from the Lord.

2. Brokenhearted and contrite, he humbly acknowledges his dependency on God and turns to the Holy Bible, where he finds another pattern: “If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God” (James 1:5).

3. Commanded to “enter into thy closet” (Matthew 6:6), Joseph seeks a solitary place where he can pray.

4. In the grove he pours out a prayer of faith to his God.

5. Enter Satan, to tempt and to try: “I was seized upon by some power which entirely overcame me.”

6. He is plunged into the belly of the whale and seized by the blackness of the darkness: “It seemed to me for a time as if I were doomed to sudden destruction.”

7. Then, from the darkness comes the cry for help and his surrender to the Lord. “Exerting all [his] powers to call upon God to deliver [him],” Joseph reminds us of Alma the Younger’s similar cry from a similar abyss: “Jesus, thou Son of God, have mercy on me” (Alma 36:18).

8. Then comes the release from the dark powers: “I found myself delivered from the enemy.”

9. Next is the theophany, the appearance of the Father and the Son, “whose brightness and glory defy all description.” The Son is introduced, according to pattern, with the echoing and familiar words: “This is My Beloved Son. Hear Him!” Then comes the call, and with it the flood of light and pure knowledge that will change his life—and ours—forever.

10. The boy, awakened from his mortal stupor, arises from his knees a man of God. He leaves the shelter of the grove to face the world and begin his ministry. (See JS—H 1:8–20.)

Hold on, folks! There is more. This Awake and Arise Pattern is a revelator rich with meaning. Not only does the pattern hold true for the call to prophethood of Jesus of Nazareth and Joseph Smith, but the pattern is almost exactly replicated in the callings of Enoch, the brother of Jared, Abraham, Moses, Enos, Alma the Younger, and Paul. And when we overlay the pattern on what details we can glean about the callings of Adam, Noah, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Samuel, Malachi, Lehi, Nephi, Jacob, Peter, James, John, and Wilford Woodruff, to name a few, it seems safe to assume they were likewise so called by the Lord to their respective ministries. And, given the responsibility of prophets and apostles to bear personal witness of the Lord, I believe we can assume that the prophets, seers, and revelators of all dispensations, including our present apostles and prophets, have traced the Awake and Arise Pattern in their lives.

There is yet another level to this pattern: Look in the mirror and you will realize that you and I and every soul born again to become a witness for Jesus Christ and the restoration of the gospel has been ministered to in our own sacred groves by the Holy Ghost, a member of the Godhead. Awakening and arising to our own calls to serve, we trace the pattern to find the results much as Alma described them some 75 years before Christ’s birth: “Behold, he changed their hearts; yea, he awakened them out of a deep sleep, and they awoke unto God[,] . . . their souls . . . illuminated by the light of the everlasting word” (Alma 5:7).

My colleague, Professor Bruce W. Jorgensen, captures in a moving folk ballad called “The Light Come Down” my own joy in the divine order and continuity of the Awake and Arise Pattern as it occurred in Joseph Smith’s experience and as it has recurred across the millennia:

Just a dusty country boy
Praying in the trees,
Knocked out flat and speechless,
Again up on his knees
And the light come down,
Lord, the light come down.

Sharper than suns he sweated in,
It slapped that April mud,
It withered the one that threatened him
And stunned him where he stood.
Yes, the light come down,
Lord, it did come down.

And he was just fourteen,
Mixed up, and read your book
And took you at your word
and asked—and Lord,
You let the light come down,
O Lord, a comin down.

Old Adam had a farmer’s son
And Abraham did too—
All made of mud but you made em good
And brought em home to you,
For the light come down,
It always did come down.

So Lord look down on country boys
That stink and puzzle and pray,
And strike the light to blind their sight
And make their night your day.
O let the light come down,
Yes, bring the light on down.

And bless you, Lord, for country boys,
Each hungry mother’s son
Treading the furrow his father plowed
Just like your single son
When you and him come down,
When you the light come down.

[Bruce W. Jorgensen, “The Light Come Down,” in Harvest: Contemporary Mormon Poems, eds. Eugene England and Dennis Clark (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1989), pp. 260–61]
An Evening at the Luzern Opera

With you, I have observed the Awake and Arise Pattern followed in the birthing process of those being born again. In fact, most of us have experienced this patterned process ourselves. The mission field is the great delivery room for the souls of men and women, and the mission field is all around us. When we are able to bring the pattern of our own gifts of the Spirit to the assistance of someone tracing the Born-Again or Awake and Arise Pattern, the convergence is memorable. I participated in such a divinely engineered convergence in the early spring of 1988 at the Luzern Opera House in Switzerland.

The office staff of the Switzerland Zürich Mission had taken the evening off to enjoy a performance of Verdi’s Rigoletto. We were the guests of LDS baritone Brian Montgomery, who would be singing the role of Rigoletto.

Following the first act, the manager of the theater made his way to our little group chatting in the foyer. Looking at my name tag, he asked if I were the “Herr Präsident of the Mormon Church.”

Bemused at my sudden elevation, I affirmed that I was indeed the “Herr Präsident of the Mormon Church’s Swiss Mission.”

He explained that Herr Montgomery had requested our services and then asked with some urgency that I accompany him, which I did, taking my assistants, Elders Steven McGhie and Scott Smith, with me. As we made our way backstage to the women’s dressing room, he explained that Miss Marina Jajic, the soprano playing the role of Gilda, had become seriously ill and would be unable to continue her performance. He had been about to call the house physician but was prevented by “Herr Montgomery, of your faith,” he explained, “who insists that the Präsident of the Mormon Church say a prayer over Miss Jajic and make her well—so, if you would be so kind . . .”

Suddenly apprehensive, we followed him into a corner of the dressing room where Miss Jajic—an attractive, heavily made-up, and deathly pale young woman—sat slumped in a corner chair looking like a Gilda who had already fallen victim to the assassin’s dagger. I introduced ourselves to her and learned from her labored and whispered responses in broken German that she was from Yugoslavia, spoke little German but more English, believed in Jesus Christ, and, yes, she knew he could heal her. She slumped back against the chair, and Elder McGhie anointed her head with oil from a key-chain vial.

It was a scenario at once strange yet familiar. Here, in a woman’s dressing room in a Swiss opera house, an American LDS mission president from Provo, together with two Mormon elders from Alpine, Utah, and Bettendorf, Iowa, were unexpectedly retracing the Lord’s pattern of the laying on of hands to administer to the sick in behalf of a deathly ill Roman Catholic soprano from Yugoslavia who desperately needed to be made well on this important evening of her musical career.

We laid on hands, anointed, and then sealed the anointing according to the ancient pattern, which I had traced several hundred times before. I had come to know my gift and what I might expect. I brought to that moment a confidence in a long-established pattern of blessing the Saints. As I began the sealing portion of the ordinance, I was unsettled by the distracting hubbub of the busy dressing room, for I feared that the Spirit would not come with the power I had been pleading for in the last few minutes. Suddenly someone turned off the hubbub switch, and I felt, moving through my hands and up my arms, a tingling faith flowing from this woman. Simultaneously I felt the old, familiar “Go”: the thrill up the spine, the electric flash across the forehead, the chill across my shoulder blades—signs I had known well and often. I knew my role; I stepped back and let the Spirit take command. From some recess in my soul the words welled up to give utterance and translation into English of those clear but ineffable impressions affirmed by the Holy Ghost in behalf of this lovely, talented, and deathly ill woman, who looked like one who ought to be on the way to the hospital and not into the rigors of act 2. Then I heard myself say, “It is the will of God, Marina, that you be healed, at once! Be healed!” And then: “You will begin to regain strength immediately; you will experience an amazing recovery; and you will not only continue your performance this evening, but you will sing and act magnificently.” Then, the words of healing pronounced, I suddenly saw on my internal video the implications of this evening; I saw that all that had happened, including our presence at that theater on that night, was also part of the Awake and Arise Pattern that, unbeknown to Marina, she was even now beginning to trace. The mission president reasserted himself, and I editorialized: “As you reflect later on the miracle of this evening, you will understand that this blessing comes by way of the power of God through his Son, Jesus Christ, whose representatives we are. And you will desire to learn about Christ’s purposes for you in mortality and will seek out his Church, which has been restored to earth for the purpose of blessing you and all mankind.”

I concluded the administration. Then someone turned the switch and the hubbub, which apparently had never stopped, flowed about us once again. Marina did not take up her bed and walk. Instead, she mumbled her thanks, her eyes still partially closed, her face pallid. As we turned away, the hand-wringing manager asked if I would be offended if he allowed the house doctor to treat her. “No, of course not,” I replied, but to myself I thought, still in tune with the Spirit and confident in the well-tried pattern, “She won’t need him; she’s going to recover—now.”

Then, like Peter, my stroll across the water was threatened by the storms of reality, and my spirit collided with my soul. I nearly staggered with the realization of what I—or somebody—had just promised. And the raised eyebrows of my two assistants said, “President, you just promised this woman that she will sing act 2. What have you done?”

As we left the dressing room, I said to them, “Elders, I said only what the Lord told me to say; let’s pray he’ll make it happen.”

We made our way back to our seats, reassured the others in our party, and requested their faith—right now—on Miss Jajic’s behalf. I began to pray—hard, intensely, and invoking the priesthood—that the Lord would honor at once the very specific promises I had made in his name and by his promptings. In a few minutes the manager appeared on stage to explain the delay by announcing that Miss Jajic had been taken seriously ill and that he had sent for her second; he requested our patience. I prayed harder, my weak faith warring with my confidence in the Lord’s proven gift.

After an interminable five-minute wait, the manager reappeared. “I am pleased to announce,” he beamed, “that Miss Jajic has recovered and will be able to continue in her role as Gilda.” The curtain went up, and Marina swirled onto the stage as the vivacious Gilda and sang her way into our hearts. I sat all amazed and thanked the Lord for his gracious intervention. As we applauded her performance, I was cheering our Father for his class act in stretching his welcome finger into our little scenario and repeating his patterns. For her part, Marina performed marvelously, as did our Mormon baritone, but I thought she looked a trifle too convincing in her death scene. We learned later that she went home to bed and collapsed for several days.

The encore to that evening was just another everyday miracle of just another child of God tracing the Awake and Arise Pattern. Marina, soon recovered and very much aware of the miracle that had occurred, began to ask Brother Montgomery during rehearsals exactly what had happened that Monday evening. Unwilling at first to attend church, Marina agreed to accompany the Montgomerys to a ward dinner at the Luzern chapel. Impressed by the Latter-day Saints’ welcome and by the Montgomerys’ deep faith, she continued to ask questions during rehearsals, when there was little time for him to respond. So the next week Brian and Jenny invited Marina to dinner, where, he promised, “We’ll answer all of your questions about Mormonism.” That Friday at dinnertime, two sister missionaries “just happened by” and were persuaded to stay for dinner and teach Marina the gospel. In June 1988, two months after that very special night at the opera, Marina Jajic awoke and arose to membership in the Church of Jesus Christ.

The One Step into the Dark Pattern

One of the patterns that has guided me in exercising personal faith first smacked me in the right eye as a young missionary. Only later did I understand that the One Step into the Dark Pattern recurs often in the scriptures and in our daily lives. President Harold B. Lee named it best when he taught us to “walk to the edge of the light, and perhaps a few steps into the darkness, and you will find that the light will appear and move ahead of you” (quoted by Boyd K. Packer, The Holy Temple [Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1980], p. 184). That step into the dark is the start-up key to an act of faith. Thus the brother of Jared prepared 16 stones and, from the darkness of mortality but with the brightness of faith, asked, “Touch these stones, O Lord, with thy finger, and prepare them that they may shine forth in darkness” (Ether 3:4). And the Lord flooded Mahonri Moriancumer and his people with light. It is a pattern: Faith precedes the miracle, just as it did when Peter forgot himself and stepped out of that ship and into the darkness to walk upon the sea (see Matthew 14:29).
The Contact Lens

So it was, in a much diminished but no less important way for me, when, on a rainy summer afternoon in 1958, I unwittingly traced the One Step into the Dark Pattern while tracting along a gravel road on a hillside above Baden, Switzerland. As we walked from home to home, I was suddenly laid low by a speck of dust in my right eye. I learned, as one who had worn brand-new contact lenses for only five days, that a mote feels like a beam. I quickly extracted the lens, cleaned it, and prepared to reinsert it. As I held my finger at the ready, a gust of wind swept the lens from my fingertip. My lens was gone with the wind, and I was aghast—and virtually blind, being plunged instantly into 20/600 vision in one eye, which had been miraculously corrected only a week earlier to 20/20.

Elder Neil Reading and I began to search on hands and knees in the wet gravel, sweeping an eight-foot radius about my point of loss; we searched unsuccessfully for twenty minutes. Half-blind and half-despairing, I suggested that while we were already in position, we should pray. I reasoned with the Lord, told him about my need to see; about our need to meet our three investigator families that evening; about my feeling that there was more to be gained by finding the lens than by my learning whatever I was to learn from the loss. As I concluded the prayer and stood up, I received one of those Joseph Smith “flashes of intelligence.” It surprised me, but I reacted at once. Explaining the plan to my startled companion, I stood on my feet in the same place I had stood earlier, squeezed out my left contact lens, and was plunged into the distorted virtual blindness of 20/600 vision. I had begun my step into the dark.

Assured that my companion was on his knees and at the ready, I put my left lens in my mouth, extracted it, and, mounting it on my finger some six inches from my face, I waited—but not for long. A slight breeze caught my left lens, and it was gone: my step into the dark was now complete. I stood stock-still, heart in throat, until Elder Reading said, “I see it. It’s still in the air.”

“Don’t lose it,” I pled.

“It’s still up,” he whispered, now 10 feet away. Then, from even further away, he exclaimed, “It’s starting to fall!”

“Keep your eye on it,” I pled again.

“I see it! I see it!” he said. There was a long pause and then, “Oh my gosh! Oh my gosh!”

I braced.

“Oh my gosh,” he said, “it’s landed, and”—pause . . . pause . . . pause—“it’s landed almost right on top of the other lens!”

“You see the other lens?” I shouted.

“Yes, it’s right here!”

Unable to see a thing, I crawled over to him. Slowly, he planted in my palm, in order, my left and right lenses—my seer stones. I wet the lenses and, with my back to the wind and sheltered by my companion’s hovering frame, I implanted them: “And there was light, and it was good.” And we knelt, and full of gratitude I thanked our God for tender mercies. We pressed on to the next house, filled with wonder at a God who knows each sparrow’s fall and the exact whereabouts in Switzerland of Elder Cracroft’s right contact lens.
The Bread Cast Upon Waters Reverberation Pattern

There is more. (There always is.) The test of a divine pattern is this: An act of divine intervention, when acknowledged as such and testified of, will, like the proverbial bread cast upon the waters, come back after many days to testify, bless, and re-bless, for it witnesses an eternally re-greening and re-blossoming truth. It is a pattern. So Christ becomes alive in us as we bear witness, in any age. So this little contact lens story has reverberated in at least two ways and surprised me both times.
Reverberation One

On the Sunday after the event, I told the contact lens experience to the members of the Wettingen Branch, over which I presided. The Saints, who had witnessed my visual difficulties up close and shared my joy in my newfound vision, reverberated with the larger meanings of the incident and apparently told it to others. In 1986, 28 years later, I returned to Switzerland as mission president. As President Peter Lauener introduced Janice and me to the Bern stake conference, he surprised us: “We all have known about President Cracroft for many years,” he said. “He it is, brothers and sisters, who as a young missionary here in Switzerland exercised faith and found his lost contact lens.” Many in the congregation nodded in recognition.

I was dumbfounded. He turned to me and said for all to hear, “Over many years, that story has been told and retold in all our meetings as an illustration of the necessary steps to faith.” Suddenly I understood that young Elder Cracroft had unwittingly cast his burden on the Lord by taking an inspired and faith-impelled step into the dark. I wondered if President Cracroft, at 50, still possessed that same simple faith.
Reverberation Two

In January 1994, on the day after our 25-year-old daughter and bride of one short year died suddenly, naturally, and without warning—and my wife and I were plunged into the belly of the whale—I received a letter from a former Swiss-Austrian missionary living in Salt Lake City. He knew nothing of our sorrow, of course. He said he had recently read my name on an article and was writing to inquire if I was the same Elder Cracroft he had known briefly in 1958, at the beginning of his mission and near the end of mine. He said he had been deeply impressed by a story I had told at a missionary conference about losing and recovering a contact lens. He had related the incident often over the years and hoped he had told it accurately. He then repeated the story as he recalled it. Although I had not told it in a long time, I was amazed that he had captured it exactly as I recollected it and as I just told it.

The reverberation resounded in my ears. In his letter I read my own story in tears of joy amidst my tears of grief. His retelling us that story 36 years later, at the darkest moment of our lives, was no coincidence. Janice and I had received a message from the Lord reminding us that he was there with us at the fall of our dear sparrow, just as he had been there with me on that long-ago hillside. He was reminding us that this was merely another obstacle on our salvation journey; that all things, including our daughter and ourselves, were in his hands; and that we should press on, confident that, as Lehi says, “All things have been done in the wisdom of him who knoweth all things” (2 Nephi 2:24). Who knows, perhaps this twice-told tale may take on new life in the soul of someone in this congregation who needs to hear that message.

Conclusion

The few patterns we have traced this morning suggest yet other patterns, for they are to be found everywhere, all related to each other and founded in eternal truth. Recently, while reading 3 Nephi for Gospel Doctrine class, it occurred to me that the coming of the Lord to the Nephite survivors retraces on a larger scale the Awake and Arise Pattern with its trials, Satanic intrusion, and belly of the whale nadir, culminating in the appearance of the Lord. But as I traced this pattern among the Nephites, it occurred to me that the pattern of the Lord’s appearance in the New World foreshadows, clarifies, and orders what we know about the second coming of the Lord as it will occur. Knowing this Appearance Pattern as described by Nephi will strengthen us in the day of Christ’s coming, when we who trace patterns will be able to comfort our families and cry out to our neighbors in the great dark like a television weatherman: “The worst is over, folks! We’re calling for three days of darkness, for voices to begin soon, for the light to return, for our God to introduce his Beloved Son, as he always does—and then the King of Kings will appear and wipe away our tears.” It is all in the Lord’s pattern book.



The Parallel Pattern:

Christ’s Appearance to the Nephites and the Second Coming of the Lord

A Voice of Warning

The Great Sign

Irrefutable Signs Witnessed