SYDNEY GOODWILL NEWSLETTER PP 297537/00068
PO Box 627
Caringbah NSW 1495
Tel: (02) 9540 2391
Fax: (02) 9524 0025No 164 / July 2000
Dear Friends,
How often might we categorise someone as a "control freak" and feel resistant to the imposition of their will over our own? Perhaps it is our own urge to control that rises up in response, recognising the same urge in another. How often have we participated in discussions where, from an observer's perspective, the participants seem more intent on "telling" than "listening"? The urge to control the direction of thought and action seems to bubble close to the surface. Attempts to control feelings may be discovered in less straight forward ways as they are manipulated through the application of emotional triggers. The commercial world of advertising and the political world of propaganda attest to this. Amongst animals too we can observe the instinctive urge to control different spheres of activity - the establishing of a dominant male over a herd; the delineation and defence of a territory for food and raising young; the subtle manipulation as parent animals train their young to survive on their own. Thus we participate in the inflow of will, as it flows into all applications and expressions through our planet.
What is really operating here? Will is the energy that drives towards synthesis, that sweeps all towards a purpose and sweeps aside that which does not align with it. If we consider each lesser application in isolation we will see difference, defence and conflict operating. But it is the urge to bring all into line with perceived purpose that is the same urge for all; the difference lies only in the extent to which the director of will perceives what the real purpose is. For human beings this underlying dynamic signals their destiny as directing agents in the larger plan for our world. And for this plan to work out there must be not just a sensitivity to it but an identification with the intent, the source of will behind it, because it is our nature to direct according to our own vision and interpretation, our own sense of meaning and significance. That is why we exist, our "raison d'être".
Those who come into touch with the greater vision, the greater life, are those who have been able to see and accord place to more modes of expression than their own external forms. Such men as Nelson Mandela show the way towards bringing conflicting elements into a co-operative union. Closer to home we find the Anglican Primate for Australia being confronted with similar challenges in his own scope of responsibility. The United Nations, as a composite body, are constantly dealing with the issues that arise as we journey towards the living expression of the One Life through the many expressions of it, no one at the expense of another.
It is only our narrow interpretation of life as merely the life of temporary forms that holds us back from unleashing the power of the underlying reality seeking emergence through our agency, through the recognition of our identification with it and through our participation in all being, in Life itself, that "life more abundantly" of which the Christ spoke.
Just as in the past scientists have identified the distinctive aspects of matter and mind, so now they use that understanding as a basis on which they can found the new discoveries of their interconnections - not in terms of their separate properties but in terms of the totality within which they exist. We have moved from the Newtonian physics, of separate elements interacting, to the latest startling discoveries of quantum mechanics where the distinction even between mind and matter is no longer clear cut. John Wheeler is quoted in the book, "Other Ways of Knowing": "May the universe in some strange way be 'brought into being' by the participation of those who participate? . . . The vital act is that of participation. 'Participator' is the incontrovertible new concept given by quantum mechanics. It strikes down the term observer of classical theory, the man who stands safely behind the thick glass wall and watches what goes on without taking part. It can't be done, quantum mechanics says."
The author explores the implications of this and deduces: ". . the quantum leap, being instantaneous, does not require time, thereby rendering meaningless distinctions between past, present and future. Nor does it permit the statement that a particle has continuous or ongoing existence. Because of the absence of observable intermediate states . ." Our mechanical sense of cause and effect is also undermined and scientists have been able to observe that: "The particles are at a distance from one another when the motion of one is altered, yet the effect on the other is simultaneous." John Bell describes this interconnectedness in these terms: "Non-locality means that we cannot discuss the different parts of space independently."
This brings us back to the participator, the controller in affairs. We are, whether we recognise it or not, collectively identified with the one life expressing. The differences are useful only in terms of expression - their only relevance within the total synthesis of the intent working out. This intent has been expressed for human minds in terms of an overall plan which has been described by the Tibetan Master, Djwhal Khul: "The plan as at present sensed . . . is the production of a subjective synthesis in humanity and of a telepathic interplay which will eventually annihilate time. It will make available to every man all past achievements and knowledges, it will reveal to man the true significance of his mind and brain and make him the master of that equipment and will make him therefore omnipresent and eventually open the door to omniscience. This next development of the plan will produce in man an understanding - intelligent and cooperative - of the divine purpose for which the One in Whom we live and move and have our being has deemed it wise to submit to incarnation."
Looking from the external world, scientists are confronted with further apparent anomalies and paradoxes. In "Other Ways of Knowing" we read that: "Faced with evidence of the creation of energy from nothing, quantum physicists have factored into their equation "virtual" particles, or antiparticles". Stephen Hawking tells us: "we know that every particle has an antiparticle, with which it can annihilate . . . There could be whole anti-worlds and anti-people made out of anti-particles. However, if you meet your anti-self, don't shake hands! You would both vanish in a great flash of light." - possibly putting a whole new relevance on the phenomena of the super nova !
When awareness has moved through external expression in order to know and returns, as the prodigal son, to its source the direction is set to further dimensions, beyond our ken now but available to all progressing points of light. The Tibetan tells us that "the goal ahead . . is the consciousness of non-separateness and the recognition of universal inclusiveness; the secondary goal is the ability to reveal the nature of that reality, Unity; the third goal is the ability to take those measures in the three worlds which will facilitate mankind's apprehension of these fundamentals. . . this last definition of the goal removes the factor of self-interest entirely. It might therefore be said that revelation is about Oneness and nothing else. . . The disciple . . must reveal . . the essential unity underlying all creation . . by acting as a clear sheet of glass through which all may see the reality of Oneness as it demonstrates in practising operation. . . When, therefore, sight has been attained and the light streams forth, revelation of the oneness of all life is a simple and immediate occurrence; it comes first of all to the disciple as a flash of wondrous informative and instinctive realisation and then steadies down, as progress is made, into a constant apprehension and appreciation; it eventually produces the motivating impulse of all action."
It is easy to say that life is one and there is nothing but unity. But this does not express until it becomes a living, participatory realisation in consciousness and all things are known in their place in time and space.
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The Festival in Cancer will be celebrated at a meditation meeting to be held at 8pm on Friday, 14 July, at the YWCA, 5 - 11 Wentworth Avenue, Sydney. The theme for reflection is: "I build a lighted house and therein dwell."Return to Newsletter main page