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

No 188 / August 2002

Dear Friends,

Throughout the ages humankind, in all its many races, cultures and expressions, has sought release from restrictions and imprisoning limitations. Each time it dreams of release and each time it gains small ground as the new space into which it frees itself becomes imbued with the fears and desires it carries from its past. In effect the very prison bars that we seek to leave behind are often carried with us though we might deny it all the way. Thus "new" restrictions and oppressions can replace the old and the effect is not so different from what was left behind - only its appearances, its rationalisations, its apologists seem new. Yet progress is made as we break free at ever more subtle levels of knowing even as the same primeval force continues to hold sway, reborn again and again under newer and more subtle faces. Again and again through time the cyclic urge to freedom pushes against each "new" yoke.

The true freedom we seek may be represented by freedoms in form but these are only reflections of the original. We lobby, pressure and fight for each new "freedom" but it is yet with a view to escape some form and so by its definition is still inescapably linked to that from which we would be free. Our thinking, our feeling, our actions are all relative to the imprisoning forms rather than responsive to that all enlivening and inspiring Life which is freedom itself. Faint glimpses of this glorious reality touch us in inspired moments yet we close our eyes again to its truth and stay within our cage. One such glimpse of freedom is recorded in these stanzas by Emily Bronte:

Yes I could swear that glorious wind
Has swept the world aside
Has dashed its memory from thy mind
Like foam-bells from the tide -

And thou art now a spirit pouring
Thy presence into all -
The essence of the Tempest's roaring
And of the Tempest's fall -

A universal influence
From Thine own influence free -
A principle of life intense
Lost to mortality -

Thus truly when that breast is cold
Thy prisoned soul shall rise
The dungeon mingle with the mould -
The captive with the skies -

And so we protest our freedom from the imprisoning forms and would advise and direct others along similar lines - but what is our motive? To serve others by freeing them with us? Or to seek company and reassurance from followers because we are not yet so sure of the way and because we hope to find certainty in their trust and recognition? "This is the way," we say, looking back to a following - to time and the forms of space - rather than pouring our essence into the greater reality whose power is the only magnet that can draw us into the freedom of spirit, for it is whole, complete and undivided by the sectioning of time and space.

From here, from the point of wholeness and oneness, restriction in form and in perception either disappears or loses any power to hold and so becomes irrelevant to our sense of purpose and thence to our sense of direction in time and space. Then we can view the whole sweep of recorded history and see the pattern of Life in its cyclic impact on substance. The individual "lives" then have significance only in their willing participation in the greater pattern. The separate events of personal lives appear only random without the sweep of Life's purpose as it unifies with matter, creating its own great expression and conveying meaning to the parts. It is this purpose, this will, which dynamically returns souls to form life. The individual sense of importance and meaning within any particular form is but a temporary illusion. Individual achievement of any kind has no significance apart from its relationship with the whole. Driving desire and aspiration are but automatically generated seeds of the mighty and all-encompassing power that drives life in form.

The Tibetan Master, Djwhal Khul, explains: "aspiration provides a constant source of anxious questioning, of painful deliberations and of high voltage spiritual ambition, with their consequent limitations and moments of sensed failure and lack of achievement. The Master has left all this behind, knowing that even this so-called 'spiritual responsiveness' is a form of self-centred attitude. Eventually . . . all this agonising reaction to the spiritual urge will be left behind. The Master knows the Law and is entirely free from any consideration of the time equation, as far as He Himself is concerned. He only regards time as it may affect the working of the Plan in the three worlds."

Speaking of humanity's challenges He tells us: "This coming age will be as predominantly the age of group interplay, group idealism and group consciousness as the Piscean Age has been one of personality unfoldment and emphasis, personality focus and personality consciousness. Selfishness as we now understand it will gradually disappear, for the will of the individual will voluntarily be blended into the group will." He advises that group energies be "directed towards the fulfilment of the Plan (which co-ordinates and makes possible the divine purpose)" and speaks of "the necessity for the steadfast consecration of the spiritually minded to the task of developing the will-to-good on Earth and the absolute importance of fostering goodwill among the masses . . . [or] we shall have individual selfishness superseded by group selfishness, which will be consequently more potent in its evil dedication, focus and results."

Our past achievements have resulted in laws to encapsulate the expectation of goodwill between individuals. The world is now being challenged to understand how to regulate the interchange of goodwill between groups - between management and staff, business and community, indigenous and immigrant, government and people, East and West, between nations with different approaches to law and between great international movements with differing objectives - and through it all between those of varying degrees of understanding and of recognition of our interdependence with and within the One in Whom we live and move and have our being.

All these new relationships working out are effects, in time and space, of the emerging expression of the union of spirit and matter, life and substance. All proceed under the impetus of the realisation of the whole by the part within the whole. The realisation is of wholeness, completeness, oneness and of an encompassing purpose. The individual realisation embraces the whole just as the whole embraces the individual and so the illusion of separation is no more. ". . . it is realised that there is no identity apart from universality and no appreciation of the universal apart from the individual realisation, and this realisation of identification with both the part and the whole finds its point of tension in the will-to-be, which is qualified by the will-to-good and developed by the will-to-know."