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

No 178 / October 2001

Dear Friends,

Still high in everyone's mind are the reverberations following the appalling events in New York and Washington that destroyed so many lives and continue yet to wreak havoc in the aftermath. This horrific experience has seen our humanity thrown into a new confrontation where the "enemy", or the entry point for evil, is not clearly represented by any existing structure - such as geographical boundary, political state, ethnic group or religion. We are called to look beyond the external to the sources of what manifests in the outer world. Just as these sources can have a point of entry within any structure of our living, so on the individual scale they enter wherever we hold back from our identification with essential being, with Life. Evil can become personified in our minds as specific individuals, groups or countries but in reality it is a human tendency that has its reflection in us all - and that is where the confrontation occurs, where the victory is won and where ultimately the door "where evil dwells" is closed.

What a moment for our humanity to be in - with its "lesson of the dual life of the man whose soul is functioning and whose physical brain is constantly aware of this fact". New dualities are being identified that make all previous ones irrelevant. The lines are being drawn between good and evil as the power of old principles of exclusive form survival give way to the universal life of the soul. The boundaries are within us - not "out there" or "someone else's problem" - as it is within us humans that spirit and matter form the conscious, creative relationship. The buck stops here! It is no wonder that this latest confrontation has been described as a "war like no other" for it is being fought in human consciousness as a whole.

We are experiencing the parting of the ways between that which is the next evolutionary movement for the race, the universal and inclusive identification with "life more abundant", and that which stands in the way, the old consciousness that places the survival of one aspect as exclusive priority over all else - the legacy of the old separate adherence to a single form of life's expression in the world that would destroy all other forms. Destruction of any part of the whole destroys part of the life in what remains. Wherever freedom of life expression is denied the remaining forms wither and we can see this most clearly in those parts of the world where conflict between exclusive views is still being waged - and we are all affected. This old limited and limiting consciousness is to be found in all peoples, nations and belief systems. Down the ages we have seen terrorist activity in the name of all religions and races. Who is there who is "without sin", without the taint of separatism? But this has no hold where the diversity of expression of the one life is celebrated.

In the totality of being our past actions have contributed to the reactive forces we confront today. The enemy is not just the momentary, external opposition but is the composite of forces attracted by our own past actions under a limited sense of reality. Would the problems in Palestine exist today if the then League of Nations had not supported the settlement of the Jewish refugees in the territory that has become Israel rather than accepting them into all nations? An exclusive national view, rather than a human view, has not resolved the issues of the time but has continued to generate new conflicts until we eventually "get it"! The current difficulties of Afghanistan result from the past involvement of many nations including Russia and the US. The funds that support conflict there and elsewhere come partly from the sale of oil to the "Western" countries. The arms used are more often than not manufactured in Western countries. Even in our daily living we purchase consumerables and this exchange contributes to the daily living of people all around the globe. No one can say in any sense that they are totally separate from anything happening anywhere in the world. As humanity we are everywhere present at all times and an increasing majority is coming into the living realisation that humanity is a unity, is a single being of which we are a part. And the essence of that being is Life itself.

From this perspective we can see "karma" as the counter-forces we set in motion whenever and wherever we act against divine will. It is the reverberation throughout the whole from any act against its wholeness and integrity. And because whatever we set in motion is within a system that is already complete (though not yet realised in expression) it can only turn upon itself, triggering force, counterforce and so on until we eventually cease to act from a separated awareness and identify with the whole of life.

This is the central identity, the point of light from which our awareness expands outwards to embrace whatever scope our intention encompasses - there is no limit! The limits are only the temporary garments of illusion and glamour as we explore the breadth of our being. Under the limiting constraints of these temporary "identities" we may act in a way that does not accord with who we are - and so we learn that we are more than we thought. Our effect in the world ripples through its whole fabric, touching and interweaving with other lives, other kingdoms, other dimensions of being. We can observe these effects as many and varied yet our sense of being, the point of initiation of effects, is in fact the same. And thus Karma is the great liberating force whereby we are freed into the flow of divine will.

We live through the world not in it - because we cannot be contained or limited by it. A character from a novel by Elizabeth Goudge experiences a sense of this power at work: "This quickening divine power that he had experienced could not be confined to this world, for cruel, sordid, ugly, devilish, can be this world, and by the nature of things that power could have neither source nor ending in it; only flow through it, around it, over it, under it, gathering up the gold into its eternal shining and burning the dross in its fire."

The events of the time are momentous and we are all living through them. There is no one person and no part of the planet that is not involved - nor could there be. The freedom of a unified human consciousness is both at stake and imminent. It is essential if the next powerful inflow of divine will is to rightly express - so that no life energy is wasted in preserving the illusions of separateness, but all flows into and through the great diversity of our living planet making it sacred. And none of the lives given up for this will be given in vain but shall be "made sacred" as part of that planetary life. The lines are drawn and the parting of the ways is imminent so that a new manifestation of deity can express in our world.