The first law of the universe is that whatever you put your attention on grows. The reason this is true is because your attention is a localized version of infinite consciousness and consciousness is all that exists. Therefore, when attention is focused on making a sand castle or baking a cake, that’s exactly what happens.

It might be sooner, it might be later, but it happens. You have ample proof that where you focus your attention affects your life. When you intend something and are persistent, a shift happens and momentum builds. Your will has power and where you focus your attention matters more than any other thing. Period.

That’s why Seeking first the Kingdom is so important. Either you are seeking self-fulfillment or self-transcendence. Entrance to the Kingdom requires the latter; the former is doomed to fail. Only open-hearted devotion to truth can unlock the door to Heaven. Service to the passionate purposes of a pure Heart is the life-blood of the Kingdom.

Seeking first the Kingdom means that we, as born beings, are willing to recognize and acknowledge a divine Condition within which we appear and disappear – a far greater context than conventional perception allows. When we open to the depth of our actual situation the love and power inherent to Self-Existent Being moves into the foreground. Its universal presence outshines who we thought we were; ego is not annihilated, it is illuminated and takes on a supportive role.

The Kingdom Rediscovered

Our primary fault as human beings is an innocent and deadly ignorance of our inherent beauty and grandeur. Such ignorance guarantees the spiritual destruction of individuals and societies; a destruction that we now witness everywhere in the world. Those howls and roars you hear late at night are the cries of your great heart calling you back to your true nature.

Seeking first the Kingdom is not some cheesy prescription for self-fulfillment; it’s the most important and valuable instruction we could ever hear. When Jesus of Nazareth instructed his friends and enemies to Seek first the Kingdom he set the stage for their liberation from dreadful and loveless lives. He said the Kingdom is not of this world: it is within you.

The Kingdom is the all-pervading, prior Condition of existence itself. Existence is made of conscious light. Its brightness and radiance appears as polar opposites, energy, and the manifest universe. It is ecstatic, but goes unnoticed in the same way the screen is not noticed when we watch a movie.
When we notice the screen and remember that it remains after the movie is over, it changes everything. In this metaphor the screen is eternal consciousness, you and I are the images projected onto it. The fact that the screen remains after the images are gone produces great relief and sets the heart free from fear and doubt.

In the Kingdom, the Heart sits on the throne, the mind is its servant. Everyone who enters the Kingdom understands that we all come from the same Place and that Life is divine.
Life is Love. Happiness is our actual state of being but we overlook it because it is so close to us. We may not see the forest for the trees, but the forest is still there.

An Illumined Life

As the Context of all contexts prior to, and senior to, all states of waking, dreaming and sleeping, infinite consciousness is spacious. It is where all perception and experience both appear, and disappear. Like the movie screen, it reveals the story of the universe, and the beauty of its presence is expressed as our very bodies and minds.

The sequence and natural progression of an illumined life begins by Seeking first the Kingdom: recognize that which is always true – One Light exists as all things without ceasing to be One Light. The ego, fabricated from a common but mistaken presumption, believes that this Light disappears when the body/mind dies. It does not.

We are the astronomically fortunate bystanders and eye-witnesses of this glorious spectacle: how light becomes matter and back again (E=MC²).

When infinite consciousness appears as the body/mind it looks through the five senses and seems to be limited to those perceptions, sensations and beliefs. Yet by Seeking first the Kingdom, the truth of our actual situation becomes clear: consciousness is what we are.

Our intimacy with the body/mind does not make us subject to its limitations. We are free from all limitations while simultaneously and profoundly intimate with them. This is extremely satisfying.
We develop into competent, self-owned adults of increased empathy and caring. No self-pity, blame or withdrawal. No dramatization of betrayal or abandonment. No poor me/fuck you. We stop projecting a false-self image onto Reality. We live from universal essence and instinct, not just personality and belief.

Through open-hearted surrender to the Greater Condition of Radiance in which we appear, we gain access to the divine realm, the Kingdom of the Heart: the Radiant Field of Infinite Intelligence Alive as Love and Happiness, the Sacred Trinity of God, Man and Nature.

The Kingdom of the Heart is the seamless unity between consciousness and matter – the always, already existing, ecstatic nature of Reality – God and self, consciousness and matter, whole and part. Who you are is not inside the body; the body is inside you as an expression of your true nature. This understanding restores our essential innocence: the Treasure “buried in a man’s field”.

The shocking truth is that not only does God really exist, ONLY God exists. No distance or separation is even possible. It’s also not possible to become that which we already are, because we already are it. The search for God reveals itself to be utterly pointless, as if God is absent or far away. This means spiritual life is about being responsible for what is true beyond doctrines or formulas.

Seek first the Kingdom. Focus your attention on the Reality of the One Light, the singular Intelligence that is alive as all things. The glorious good news is that the One who is alive as me is the same One alive as thee.