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

No 180 / December 2001

Dear Friends,

As anyone realises who travels by train, bus or plane; attends meetings, appointments or interviews; produces crops or other primary goods; works in shifts or business hours; responds to traffic lights and obeys road rules, regulations and laws; our world operates by schedules and seasons. The natural world is ordered by the cyclic rhythms of life breathing into matter in its ordered sequence, injecting more and more of its inspiration into the constantly diversifying and adapting forms. Life flows, but it does so according to design within the universal dance of spirit and matter as they move together into that marriage which is the expression of the underlying synthesis of all that is. This underlying pattern permeates through all scales and dimensions - even the atom coheres through its own innate dance. So the great design is reflected through every particle individually and in its co-ordination within larger and larger wholes. Every dimension of our life operates according to pattern - individually and in co-ordination with larger and larger wholes.

Mankind is the conscious reflection of this divine dance. From our primitive beginnings rhythm and music have been the abstract expression of our sense of the patterns of life. They have guided the emotional life through ordered patterns to motivate, celebrate or cohere individuals into common relationship. Our mental life has followed patterns of thought expressed as ideas, ideals and ideologies. And as nature is constantly diversifying and expanding the divine expression, so does the life flow demand constant movement and constant emergence of an increasingly divine manifestation.

However - pattern can become imprisoning where we are consumed by the status quo, by current known life expressions and where we cease envisioning the next, improved patterns to emerge from the divine inspiration. A computer programmer in determining how to fix a "bug" in a program must identify the pattern of errors that leads him to the missing or conflicting elements in the program's logic. In the meantime the users of the program work out ways around the problem - a new pattern of use - until it is fixed. Despite the bug, creative activity continues but it becomes centralised around the error and can continue that way for some time. This is the pattern of an external view and gives us such expressions as "Well, life isn't perfect", "We're only human" and all the other trite admissions of a defeat that will only happen if we acquiesce in it. They are excuses, not reasons, for lack of vision and purpose. They proclaim loudly that we have looked only to the external world for inspiration instead of to the source it obscures.

We are confronted by this circumscribed mediocrity in our daily lives and then see it reflected in the policies of our governments until a shock event shakes the system and enables true leaders to emerge with vision. Tony Blair's speech to the Labour Party conference following the catastrophic events in New York and Washington during September, recognises the opportunity and identifies many of the essentials for new vision:
"There is a coming together. The power of community asserting itself. We are realising how fragile are our frontiers in the face of the world's new challenges. Today conflicts rarely stay within national boundaries. Today a tremor in one financial market is repeated in the markets of the world. Today confidence is global; either its presence or its absence. Today the threat is chaos; because for people with work to do, family life to balance, mortgages to pay, careers to further, pensions to provide, the yearning is for order and stability and if it doesn't exist elsewhere, it is unlikely to exist here. . . . We can't do it all . . But the power of the international community could, together, if it chose to. . . . The kaleidoscope has been shaken. The pieces are in flux. Soon they will settle again. Before they do, let us re-order this world around us. Today humankind has the science and technology to destroy itself or to provide prosperity to all. Yet science can't make the choice for us. Only the moral power of a world acting as a community, can."

Patterns perpetuate by their own dynamic if we do not recognise them and direct them according to life's purpose. They can become destructive of that purpose when allowed to run their own course. One of the most obvious and also most subtle aspects of the legacy of the Piscean patterns of the past is a sense of exclusivity. With the growth of the intellectual power of the race this sense of exclusivity may be rationalised as merely "difference" but there can also be an underlying sense of "better", "more deserving", "more valuable" than others. The familiarity of the patterns of thought and feeling (which often sustain us in our times of weakness) can distract from the hidden prejudices and separative motive and then a plethora of rationalisation rises to their continued support. Whenever a single model or pattern is the basis for comprehensive application, it must be questioned if it does not answer for all within its area of application. Whenever current solutions are not working this reactive dynamic is at work. True vision and solution can flow only from the central blueprint of life itself.

We are told that "simplification proceeds rapidly as we near the goal of spirit" - but that simplification is from the perspective of spirit not from the perspective of "rationalising" or "regimenting" the external detail of our living expression. What are we and What are we expressing are the first questions rather than How are we expressing. Self or soul expression will make obsolete the exclusive expression of the little self. The human soul is then in a position to truly reflect the divine human spirit into the world. In a more worldly rendering of the more immediate realisation Tony Blair states: "The critics will say: but how can the world be a community? Nations act in their own self-interest. Of course they do. But what is the lesson of the financial markets, climate change, international terrorism, nuclear proliferation or world trade? It is that our self-interest and our mutual interests are today inextricably woven together."

Every aspect of our living universe is ordered by pattern and rhythm. Music, mathematics, geometry, art, architecture, the investigative and social sciences, philosophies and theologies are all patterns of disciplined activity as we identify and make manifest the essential patterns of life. But where is the source of the inspiration that breathes life into them, through them? Are we merely reacting to form life and so creating "more of the same", going in circles, or are we responding to new waves of inspiration, creating new forms that are expansive enough to house our growing realisation of that life more abundant that flows through all from the point where spirit and matter are one. Life and movement are synonymous and the moment we cast our lot with the status quo we have opted for death. Life brings destruction to old forms as new ones are birthed but death clings to forms, separateness and exclusivity.

Ultimately all is enlivened by the living power of the universe no matter how temporal. When life directs the patterns through time and space we live according to the divine Plan, described for us by the Tibetan Master as: "the production of a subjective synthesis in humanity and 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."

With the cyclic return of the Christmas anniversary we extend to all our friends and co-workers this special greeting with its promise of future greatness: Peace on Earth and goodwill to all men.