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

No 177 / September 2001

Dear Friends,

How conditioned we are by the mechanisms and processes we establish to manage the experience of form life. In business we have procedures and systems, plans and strategies; in sport we have rules and records and the examples of past achievement; in psychoanalysis we have techniques and programs; in government we have services and (the new "buzz-word") initiatives - and so we manage the form side of life with yet more forms! But how do we experience Life? How do we experience that which cannot be contained by form yet permeates the very substance of which forms are made?

Life is one, whole and complete. It is everywhere present and is contained only momentarily in any form, using the form for its own purpose - however obscured that purpose may be by the form's own small world view. Life's impact on matter in time and space creates form and order, diversity and interdependence. But it is a constant and eternal creative impact and so brings constant growth and change both in the shape of forms and their receptivity to and awareness of Life's purpose permeating, enlivening and drenching the fabric of existence and pervading all that is. Our growing awareness meeting with this impact moves through the phases of realisation - of knowing and living that "life is one and naught can ever take or touch that life". The implications work out through every individual life in unique ways but come to the same realisation, emerging in a unified vision of our future that draws it into a new present.

All around the world we can witness a questioning - about lifestyles, loyalties, liaisons - the questioning of youth against authority, peoples against entrenched governments, the questioning against anything that delays the free-flow of life. All make up a human questioning of identity with its concomitant trialing and testing of known options only to find that none are suitable because something entirely new is required. The youth of every generation have always questioned and rebelled but never with the same freedom to impact human thinking as they have today. We are transitioning from being directed to directing; from being handed defined boundaries to directing from beyond "known" bounds. There is a shift of the human consciousness from childhood to adulthood and it is being led by those "young" enough in worldliness not to be entrenched in old ways and modes of thinking. In this sense "the child is father to the man".

We are becoming sensitive to change but what we experience is really the evolution, through time and space, of forms as they grow to express more accurately the unchanging Life. Only the forms change and grow as they respond to divine purpose directing through its conscious agents. Form life clings to the status quo with subtle hooks that can bind us. By its nature it holds to a defined shape. Spirit has no shape - only being. It is the initiating spark for form to fill its role. It pervades all that is beyond and through time and space. It is not bound by any but its own purpose and both brings apart and re-shapes as it will. We cannot identify with spirit through form, though form is our medium of expression in the world - we use it to express but not to experience life.

We are told that "matter is spirit at its lowest point of manifestation and spirit is matter at its highest" but form (or that which is constructed of matter) is a construct to express something - it is not the "something". Beauty can flow through ordinary or even ugly forms and still express beauty. Many have experienced the transformative flow of goodwill or love in action transcending individual or international boundaries. Clarity flows when we interact with those who serve as its medium and so it is "shared" as it radiates through the interaction and thence affecting all in the chain of interrelationship. This is the expression of our oneness operating. It comes to us in many ways and often through moments of crisis when life is pressing the form to change and the form experiences the awful power of "life more abundant". One such crisis is experienced by a character in a novel by Elizabeth Goudge but the process can also be reflected in groups, nations and peoples:

"The mind has pits, and he clung above the abyss and swung there. The one man whom he had for so long and so intensely hated. The man so like himself that he might have been himself. It might have been he who had dropped bombs on Hamburg, murdering his own wife and children. It was he. The darkness was like the darkness of his prison days that had been lit only by the light of oneness. World suffering. Who was suffering most at this moment, himself or David? Had he killed David's children or David his? He did not feel very sure, but it was not important since they were together in what they suffered, caught in this lunatic age that was not of their making. Or had they made it? While one of them harboured one thought of hatred, hugged to himself one moment of self-indulgence, they were not guiltless of the misery of these times. Mutual guilt locked them together, as well as mutual sorrow. For one man to hate another in such a situation was sheer madness . . . What men felt to be the meaningless writhing of the whole interlocked surface of human affairs was a sort of mockery of what union might be; of what it was down in the depths where the selfless had union with each other and their God. A mockery and a signpost at the same time . . . 'It has not only explained my dislike but turned it into the exact opposite. I expect that's always the way when half-knowledge becomes true understanding. Half-knowledge is the breeding ground for error. I doubt if you can separate true understanding from love.'"

Where oneness is experienced the flow through opens the way for the glory of life to express. Immersion in being - not only in any one being but in Being itself - opens the door for humanity as a centre of life to realise its relationship both with the kingdom of souls and the centre where the will of God is known. The Master, Djwhal Khul, tells us:

"When this takes place, a revelation undreamt of will be manifested upon the Earth; a new divine quality, of which no knowledge as yet exists, will make its presence felt".

They contribute to this undertaking who can "walk humbly with their God". This injunction, we are told, "signifies the ability to view all life with a sense of divine proportion and from the angle of spiritual mathematics and . . with no sense of dualism. . . It involves the acceptance and comprehension of purpose, and this in such a manner that the consecrated personality. . walks the ways of Earth as a channel for the three divine qualities (love, will and intelligence), but also as a channel for that which these three qualities will enable him later to sense, know and reveal." - through his experience of "life more abundant".

No matter who we are, where we are, what we are doing, we are a part of the planetary network of relationship and of the life that flows through it - all the time and everywhere. We are an integral part of it and are therefore in touch with the eternal sources of supply flowing through the planet and therefore through us if our sense of identity can encompass it.. Thus the Christ has never left us and will reappear when we realise our immersion in that same Being of which He, each Master, each kingdom and each one of us is a part.