SYDNEY GOODWILL NEWSLETTER PP 297537/00068
PO Box 627
Caringbah NSW 1495
Tel: (02) 9540 2391
Fax: (02) 9524 0025No 162 / May 2000
Dear Friends,How often when observing, from a safe and insular distance, do we identify the destructive limitations of self interest at work in the world. We see it, we know it for what it is, we understand its inappropriateness within the greater pattern of life on our planet. We apply the theory of our understanding to that which is outside our individual experience and then, later, within our own sphere of life we can be surprised to find that we, too, can be guilty of the same self-centred response to environing conditions as that we abhor elsewhere and in others. It is a great advance to be able to observe and know from a distance but it is still not a living reality until our theoretical understanding is forged out in our own living experience.
We have always looked up to great human beings - accepting and revering them and, by so doing, separating their achievements from our own possibility. We may even work assiduously at behaving "like" them but with a sense of inferiority and limitation. Despite the fact that many of these lives were offered as demonstrations of what is possible for us to achieve: "Greater things shall ye do." Despite this we see them and our own potential still from within the illusion of separation, from within the distinctions that form life expresses, rather than from the point at which we are at-one with these demonstrations, with all-inclusive Life.
We are still succumbing to some of those deeply embedded response patterns which have been established through eons of the race's identification with the animal nature and its imprisonment in form life. These patterns can be activated under stress situations which draw on the basic "survival instinct" responses - bypassing the layers of re-identification that may have only been established in the mind but not experientially within the integrated personality as a whole.
The increased pace of modern living has generated such a constant level of stress that these deep seated patterns are being brought more readily into play and are thus exposed for recognition as illusions that are no longer relevant to our new identification. A new problem of integration arises until the new identification controls the coordinated personality response.
As a race we are reaching, understanding and beginning to operate under the new idea of our interdependence with each other and with all that forms part of our world - both visible and invisible. The discipline and the forcing process of experience have taught us this. They have also taught that the living outcome is in human heads, hearts and hands. We are responsible for much more than our (apparently) separate lives. The old methods of arduous striving for individual achievement are now obsolete for those who participate in the new idea and the new consciousness. The Kingdom of God is manifesting on earth - not one by one (or even two by two!) but as a kingdom - carried within the conscious living experience of more and more of the human race.
The illusory barriers to this realisation are being dissolved. The June Triangles Bulletin reminds us that "When the Christ last worked openly among the people, his life and his physical presence broke down many barriers within the established order. He related to people in every walk of life and was not held back by the established doctrines of his time and faith." Great new leaders, executives and primary representatives are emerging who guide their own organisations and institutions yet recognise the validity of all other approaches to our common purpose of manifesting divine will on earth through the human spirit. They recognise that the real objective is not the creation of any exclusive form but the way any new or existent forms are used to express our divine nature.
In the process of this new phase in divine manifestation we must re-see and re-define what achievement is. In our new vision everything is subordinated to (and part of) Life manifesting. We begin to see through a different consciousness. And it is through human consciousness that Life is realised or made manifest - the outer forms we create or operate through are products of our realisation. Consciousness is where unity exists while diversity exists in forms. Here is our point of "isolated unity" and from here a whole new vision, culture and civilisation are being born in response to the impact of divine will on earth. In a commentary on the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali we read:
"This state of isolated unity must be regarded as the result of the attainment of a particular state of mind, rather than as a separative action. . . all moments of reflection, . . all hours of recollection of one's true nature are means employed to detach the mind from the lower reactions and tendencies, and build in the habit of constant realization of one's true divine nature. . . The isolation referred to is the detachment of the self from the field of knowledge, the involving of the refusal of the self to seek outward-going sensuous experience and its standing firm in the state of spiritual being. The man becomes conscious of himself as the knower and is no longer primarily concerned with the field of knowledge . . . He does this . . while functioning as a human being on earth. He participates in earth experience; he involves himself in human activities; he walks among men, eating and sleeping, working and living. Yet all the time he "is in the world, yet not of the world," and of him it can be said as it was said of Christ: "Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God."
" . .This involves patience, the capacity to go on after failure, to persevere when success seems far away." This St Paul understood when he gave the injunction to disciples to "Stand therefore . . and having done all, stand." " . . It is the going on when the point of exhaustion has been reached, the taking of another step when the strength to do so seems gone, the holding steady when there seems nothing but defeat ahead, and the determination to endure whatever may be coming, when endurance may be taxed to the limit . ."The one whose consciousness is unified with Life finds no deterrent in worldly setbacks - as we read in the book, Agni Yoga: "Let the spirit strive freely, taking responsibility for its own failures. . . Just as the stream finds its way through the rocks, unconcerned about the structure of the stones, so does the Agni Yogi make his way through the customs of his own national culture. On one's way to the heights of consciousness, neither boundaries, nor limitations, nor prohibitions exist for the one who has ignited the light of his consciousness. . . Just as fire knows no boundaries, so does the consciousness of an Agni Yogi proceed without obstacles."
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The Wesak Festival in Taurus will be celebrated at a meditation meeting to be held at 8pm on Thursday, 18 May, at the YWCA, 5 - 11 Wentworth Avenue, Sydney. The theme for reflection is:
"I see, and when the eye is opened, all is light."
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Intuition in Service. As part of their ongoing service Jan and Steve Nation have established a new website at the address: www.intuition-in-service.org. Friends are invited to access the site which has two dimensions - one on the Intuition, which offers quotes and articles from servers in different fields who demonstrate intuitive perception, and a second which provides information on the United Nations international 'Years' and the special 'Days' on the UN calendar throughout the year.
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