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

No 181 / January 2002

Dear Friends,

As we enter the Christmas and New Year holiday season the annual pattern unfolds - commemoration of the past followed by celebration of the new. There is first a return to old connections, a re-uniting with old friends and family, a resurgence of tradition and historical connection and, for many, a reminder of our spiritual heritage. Timeworn rituals are observed in the present. Then an expansive focus embraces all families, groups, nations and religions when they celebrate, as one, the promise of a new year. At this point we step beyond the reflective, backward-looking nostalgia and are freed into a new day and a fresh page on which to write the unfolding story of the divine nature manifesting in the world. On the one hand we are submerged in tradition and on the other we meet the future free of past care. We retain the essentials of our long history but a new vision replaces the burden of surface detail. The trauma of the past drops below our focus and a new future expands before us, redolent with promise and solution.

This magical moment has been portrayed dramatically in movies where the heroes, following some calamity such as shipwreck or road accident, suffer amnesia and forget who they have been up to this point - whether they are married, have children, were rich or poor, of honest or wicked bent. Yet they retain their sense of being in the world - they can speak and act appropriately and appear to retain all knowledge except that relating to their personal identity in the world. In many of these stories they are set free from past ill deeds and consequences. They are able then to live from a set of fresh and true values that seem to be automatically present despite the loss of many worldly layers that have been cultivated up to the moment of the trauma.

This new being they have become is unresponsive to any claims of the past and sees clearly and truly what is unfolding in the moment - wholly open to what life brings moment by moment and with a deeply inherent sense of truth. This new being is without prejudice, partisanship, preference, fears, doubts or debts. He stands at a point as though between incarnations, between worlds, where past experience is essentialised but does not veil insight into the next. This is a clue, perhaps, to that mysterious injunction: "Except you come as little children, you will not enter the kindom of Heaven"

The New Testament story of the rich young man not yet ready to "pass through the eye of the needle" also points to the requirements of a new phase. The Tibetan Master explains that: "This rich young man was rich in his range of awareness, rich in his personality equipment, rich in his aspiration and in his recognition; he was rich as the result of age-long experience and evolutionary development. He is told by the Christ that . . he must now prepare for the unfoldment of the monadic consciousness . . (and) . . the causal body, the body wherein the soul experiences and reaps the fruits of experience, must be and will be destroyed. This has to take place before the initiate can enter into the Council Chamber of the Most High and express the will-to-good and the will of God in fulfilment of the purposes of God."

These injunctions point to a revelatory new moment of essential truth - a truth that cannot be changed or stripped away - the moment when spirit expresses in the world. The niceties of cultural, national, religious, social or familial convention and dogma are stripped away and things are seen for what they are in truth and in the eyes of God - terrible, awesome and wonderful. How then shall we be and act in the world?

At the traumatic impact of the attack on the World Trade Centre the human world as a whole stood in that moment of shock, in amnesia, jolted out of the burden of past loyalties into a moment of clear sight unaligned with worldly expectations. Before the old familiar world began to flow back in to cloud vision once more everyone had been changed - many irrevocably. And it was said, "The world will never be the same".

So what is different? What touches us deeply that was previously unknown? What have we left behind? What new identity is revealed? The imagery and rhetoric with which we have described and circumscribed our view of the world is no longer able to define or contain our new experience of it - and yet language is our tool to anchor this shift in our experiential life. We are using old words but must re-define them even though they carry the danger of old understanding. Words such as business, war, economy, shares, military, religion, democracy, are being used in new contexts but can be dangerously misused allowing old prejudices and rationalisations to poison the metamorphosis. Yet there are new words ringing the changes with increasing resonance - unity, global, cooperation, interdependence, rights, human, mutual, freedom, responsibility.

In the moment between the past and a very different future, through this space between the worlds where only essential truth can be known, let us allow this liberating and empowering energy to do its beneficent work. We, in truth, have nothing to lose. We, in essence, are completely unencumbered. There is nothing real (or really nothing) that need drain away the living force, the enlivening energy that flows freely and equitably through all things, all people, all creation in the world. It is a matter only of recognition, of realisation of the whole dynamic pattern and allowing a flow-through of the facilitating energy to draw out the best in all, for all. How simple! The new energies carry such a freedom for the individual potential and in harmony with the freedom of others' talents as well. The possessive acquisitiveness of the personal "bottlenecks" or "eddies" in the current are contained and bypassed by seeing them clearly and allowing the flow to bypass them and move on to its destined greatness. They will either realise or collapse under the pressure of the increased current - and ultimately come closer to their own realisation.

At this moment of the "parting of the ways" we can be in danger of being sucked down by the undertow of the tide pulling back into old habits of living, thinking and feeling (and like the "rich young man" turn sadly away) unless we, in our new objectivity, clearly distinguish them from the empowering energy of the new living water of Life that is pouring into a world thirsty for freedom. True discrimination is crucial. The forces that would retard can be very close, even intimately so or integrally within otherwise "worthy" activities with which we may be involved. We can be blinded by a mystical faith rather than knowing with a clear penetrating insight that will not balk at naming what it sees in order to empower what serves the whole or to refute a separative motive. A personal inclusiveness can be dangerous in the outer world of form where we can embrace a Judas and open the door on disruption and evil. Rationalisation may call white black and vice versa and so turn the key to evil. It can be a tool for good or evil and is no sure ground for confronting malign forces. The true difference lies at the point of motive and purpose behind the outer seeming and acts.

From the perspective of spirit we can differentiate between the old disciplines of good character values that a personality may pride itself on (be recognised for) and that new clarity of knowing what is true from the perspective of the whole. Glamour, untruth and evil have facility in the world of form and so, if we allow, can exploit our apparently "good" qualities against us such as the blackmailer relying on a victim's love and loyalty, the ambitious man gaining position through good people's unwillingness to criticise, or the tyrant exploiting pacifism to speed his destructive course. For humanity harmony is through conflict and not by avoiding the necessary confrontation to identify, name and refute what is untrue. Harmony can only exist in truth and only in truth can there be freedom, empowerment and life.

Christ told us: "I am the Way, the Truth and the Life. No man cometh unto the Father but by me." We have also been addressed as "Christ in you, the hope of glory." This Christ aspect, this soul, this way to the immortal spirit, lives in the world through us. Such is the future fast approaching.