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

No 185 / May 2002

Dear Friends,

Our current times have been spoken of as the "Information Age" but perhaps it might be closer to the truth to call it the age of communication. Everything depends on communication. Failures can always be traced back to miscommunication and then we require mediators and facilitators to reconnect or build new "lines of communication". Although physical force (bullets and bombs) is still applied, they are increasingly used as a counterpoint to the essential action of communication. Old fears and desires, the motivating energies of the past and passing ages which focussed on the physical life, still rise and obtrude through the flow of understanding, breaking it up like so much static in the transmission of truth that is the essential, living linkage. This static is the meaningless "noise" of seeming separation, of a clinging to a past "status quo" that in reality can never be revisited or reinstalled.

There are times when information rather than communication becomes the focus, when the communication becomes one-way rather than the expression of mutual connection. We may also speak derisively of "talk fests" that have no real outcome. And, indeed, talk for its own sake or just for appearances does not convey more than just strings of words or clever word play. Communication, however, is an expression of community and communing - it flows out of our essential togetherness, our oneness. To deny that oneness, (however subtly) is to deny our humanity, our human beingness. Talk that is designed (and motivated) to draw attention to a separate, personal demand or desire, to get attention for its own sake, is the counterforce to the emerging truth of our common being. It brings destruction as it siphons off energy designed for greater expression and, in its misuse, destroys those who demand and others connected to (influenced by) them.

Globally, we are still experiencing the rippling out of misused energy in the Middle East, the Balkans, Afghanistan and many other flashpoints. Locally, there are still conflicts and misunderstandings as our historical limitations flow down through time to meet, eventually, the understanding that can resolve them and give them place and meaning within the whole. And at the heart of all resolution lies the common goal of humanity, in its planetary role, and the communing, the communication (or making common to all) of the one truth and the one life we share. This is the Plan of our planetary life as it flows through the rich matter of our cultural, religious and philosophical diversity, growing humanity into the tree of its life. Human culture is still human expression whatever its colouring. God is still God however we might worship and commune. Thought is still the meeting point between divine inspiration and humanity whatever theoretical expression it takes in its evolution.

The painful process of birth, growth and evolution does have meaning, and therefore joy, when we live beyond the little life - and only through communication can we do this. In her book, "Tell Me I'm Here", Anne Deveson tells of her son who had schizophrenia and who died of a drug overdose when he was twenty-four. "After Jonathan's death I wanted to write a more personal book, a book about what happens when someone you love goes mad. The journey led me to question love's power, and out of the questioning to discover love's essence. . ." And finally the simple funeral: ". . And then it was over. Or I thought it was over, until I looked up and saw through the rain, standing on the other side of the grave, Ray Bourke and a collection of people whose faces I did not know. I saw the people who were homeless, who were crazy, who were sick. They had come from the Talbot, from the other shelters, from the Cross, and they had come to say goodbye. They were Jonathan's friends. With their coming they brought me peace, for they brought the knowing that within the tortuous journey of Jonathan's short life there had been meaning. The meaning was life itself, with all its paradoxes, its joy and its pain, its weakness and its strength, its anger and its love."

The great drama of human life discovering its purpose, and through that its meaning and significance, is played out through every life - not on its own but in the manner of its relationship within the whole, with Life itself. The relationship expresses through the flow and exchange of its communication with Life. And it is Love that makes the connection. Divine will carries out the purpose and, being divine, it cannot be contained or directed toward individual ends without dire consequences. It has therefore to be implemented through love, through the energy of right relationship and true communication within the whole. Every life is important in its interconnection within the whole and in its individual right to express that relationship unintruded upon by lesser demands.

The idea of exclusivity gives rise to demand, which eclipses the sense of true needs and the true economical distribution of life's resources, or the free flow of the planetary life. The human race, as a whole, has begun to have sufficient sense of its community to be able to identify points of need even though it contains elements that still vie for exclusive access to resources. False beliefs of exclusivity and superiority are gradually being displaced as the various units within the human family commune and communicate, sharing their common humanity and enriching one another with a new breadth of understanding. And so the limitations on our sense of being are gradually dissolved. We become one with each other, with our race and ultimately with the other centres of being that comprise our planetary life. Then a common knowledge and sense of being flows through all.

Each human unit is a portal to the universe of which it is a part. It is apparently small yet actually as immense as that which its awareness can embrace. This peculiar paradox is a doorway to an identity potentially far beyond the human unit's anchorage point on the physical plane. This identity is infinite in scope and possibility and is shared fully with every other "unit" within its embrace. While we may not yet have the developed capacity, the frame of reference, the sensitivity to wield the energy of it we can begin to move into this, our destiny, by being aware of the possibility and by a "preparatory sensitivity" to that which lies ahead. The Tibetan Master opens the door for us in his description: " . . that higher sensitivity which leads inevitably to cosmic perception. We have no adequate word for this quality or type of sensitivity, for it is not something that we can consciously understand, nor is it a form of conscious reaction; neither is it awareness as we use that term. It has been occultly defined as something akin to 'immersion in a realised state of Being,' because the initiate is a conscious aspect of that of which he forms an integral part."

So true communication is an affirmation of our community, our integral and complete identification with the immensity of life in all its glorious manifestations.