PP 297537/00068
PO Box 627
Caringbah NSW 1495
Tel: (02) 9540 2391
Fax: (02) 9524 0025
www.sydneygoodwill.org.au

No 172 / April 2001

Dear Friends,

Much has been said, written and complained about regarding the pace and pressure of "modern" life. The more generally available opinions seem to focus on the apparently negative impact it has on our personal living and comfort. At the same time there is a growing recognition that personal comfort can be sacrificed for something more rewarding: "no pain, no gain" or even "life wasn't meant to be easy"!

Sacrifice is a constant part of living and it is initiated under a sense of purpose operating just beyond the current perceived "self" yet somehow having a place for a new "self" it is possible to become. It stretches and extends us into new possibilities that are more meaningful and transcend previous limitations. The process is one of realisation - making real through our experience an expanded identity expressing in ever larger scale. What was our previous "self" is sacrificed (not lost) within the new sense of being which is more real than the past and which is more invigorating, inspiring and alive.

The movement can only be forward. Quinn Pawson, director of counselling and education at Relationships Australia, is quoted in the Sun Herald newspaper: "I think often people will revert back to traditional values when they are not sure of the steps forward. We can't go backwards. Nobody would suggest that we go back to the days without a telephone. We've just got to learn new skills." Like all maturation processes it is not possible to go backwards in understanding. We may forget, but all memories are recoverable and that is what living is - remembering who and what we truly are as the most complete Self so that it expresses in the world.

As a species we choose to work harder, faster - more driven by purpose and objective. We take on more responsibility, have more tools and appliances, enjoy more sophisticated and complex pleasures, deal with more information from more disparate sources, have opinions about an increasing range of topics beyond our next meal, our health, our home comfort. And in the midst of this exploding complexity and diversity find we have a common human response to it all - that we ourselves, we human beings, are causing it all to happen. Our very freedom to diversify, to make our own mark, opens up the realisation of our oneness, our common being, our common purpose and our common approach to its expression. Only the forms change; only the expressions vary. The principles emerging in consciousness are the same and operate as though we are interdependent whether we yet realise it or not, whether we experience it or not.

The great multinational software companies are an example - originally trying to competitively "corner the market" by making their offerings unique and unable to integrate with those of other companies. They eventually gave way to produce applications for platform integration and interconnectivity because the buying public required it. People and businesses did not want to be forced to invest in only one product supplier. Universality is being demanded and, at the same time, the right to unique expression unconstrained by another's competitive, exclusive ambition. Relationship within and between businesses is beginning to express flexibly as partnerships, cooperatives and agreements rather than as take-overs, mergers and destruction of opposition.

Our living system, our very being creates the checks and balances that drive us towards true purpose. In this way divine will, through its reflection in each human atom, works out its purpose through our agency and through the living flame reflected in varying measure in all living things - element, plant, animal, human, superhuman and beyond. What we are both experiencing and causing (through our readiness and demand) is an intensification of life. As this expresses through us we experience both an intensification of a sense of purpose and an intensification of the urge to express which leads to creative diversity. But - it is the same purpose reflected in each and the same urge to create the forms through which purpose can manifest.

We are learning by consciously being and doing - learning experientially - about creation, purpose and life. Not only that, we set up our own learning situations. We always have a choice. We always have outcomes that lead to further choices. No one choice is ever isolated and self-contained - it flows on inevitably and inexorably to the next. After a while it is not the individual choices that are important so much as the driving purpose eventually making itself obvious. To be caught up in the surface of life is to be at "cross purposes". On the other hand to have a sense of oneness with that great heart beating through all things is to be truly purposeful in our living.

With this in mind we might re-consider what "success" and "failure" are. Are they even relevant? Life flows on - there is no fixed point, no snag, that lasts for long against the flood. In the words of St Paul (who learned the wisdom of his words through his own experience): "Forgetting the things which are behind, press forward." The Tibetan Master reminds us of this and then addresses a disciple's concern about failure: "Why stay overwhelmed by failure for year after year and remain with your eyes concentrated on the lower self that failed? All have failed and will again along some line. E'en the Masters fail at times. . But the failure is scarce recognised; the effort is made to register what caused the failure. . for all effects emanate from some ascertainable cause."

Success and achievement are just as fleeting as any other personal moment. Only what is learned and stored from the experience is of use to the individual and to all with whom he is connected for we are never really alone. We are always a representative of the human species and of our world as a whole. If we are comfortable there is no growth, no expansion, no joy, no purpose. A Master helps the neophyte by removing his comforts. In this new age of universality, freedom and the intensification of Life, the human species is initiating the process itself. Yet the purpose and the principles remain some of which are expressed in this explanation from the Tibetan:
"The major task of the Master in the early stages of training His disciple is to bring to an end the period of the disciple's intense preoccupation with himself, his service, with his reaction to the Master or the promise of future contact with the Master, with his own ideas anent discipleship and his personal interpretations of truth. The Master takes a group of people with fixed ideas (which they are entirely sure are correct, being the best and highest they have been able to grasp to date) and with the conviction that they have reached a point where they have registered certain spiritual values and concepts, where they have evolved their own formulations of truth and where they are eagerly demanding the next step. The first thing, therefore, which He has to do (using a strong and perhaps strange phrase) is to blast them wide open, give them a deep sense of insecurity as to the formulas and symbols of the lower concrete mind and so prepare them for the reception of newer and higher approaches to truth. This is frequently brought about by forcing them to question all the conclusions of the past.

We have all - disciples and initiates of all degrees - to enter the secret place of initiation with a sense of blindness (or loss of direction) and with a feeling of complete destitution. The disciple needs to bear in mind that he has become a "moving point and hence a line"; he ascends towards the (spiritual) Hierarchy and assumes the correct spiritual attitude but, at the same time, he descends into what he erroneously regards as the depth of human difficulty and iniquity (if necessary), preserving always his spiritual integrity but learning three important lessons:
1. The recognition that he shares all human tendencies, good and bad, and is hence able to serve.
2. The discovery that the thing which he most despises and fears is the thing which exists most strongly in him, but which is yet unrecognised. He discovers also that he has to explore and know these despised and feared areas of consciousness so that they become eventually an asset, instead of something to be avoided. He learns to fear nothing; he is all things; he is a human being but he is also a mystic, an occultist, a psychic and a disciple. And - because of all these acquired states of consciousness - he becomes eventually a Master. He has "mastered" all stages and states of awareness.
3. The uselessness of past attitudes and dogmatic ways of looking at life and people (based usually on tradition and circumstance) when they separate him from his fellow-men.
When he has really learnt these three things, he is initiate."