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

No 200/August 2003

Dear Friends,

Our history can be the motivation and the impulse for a forward view. But it is difficult to advance if we look exclusively to the past. Absorption in analysis of the past, indeed of anything, can lead to painful "analysis paralysis". We can lose the objectivity of the observer and become absorbed in past dynamics which have become superseded by the very learnings they provided. These learnings can transform and expand our view but ignoring them can leave us locked away from the very future for which our long evolution has been creating us - a future which is the true inheritance from the Father, from Spirit, to our life in the world. So rather than spiralling downwards in ever decreasing circles into exclusive minutiae long past their use-by date, let us re-see the entirety of our history within the expanded context towards which it has brought us.

As we strike out towards the future we are reaching towards the central cause of our past and only when we have arrived at that point will we truly know the significance of our long history on the planet. That history will be revealed as something quite different to current views. Already people are re-interpreting historical events in terms of a newer understanding of our world as a whole and of its humanity as a whole. Much of the strife in the world is caused by a clash between old narrow, static views and those newer views which have expanded to embrace the world as a whole system of interdependent lives held in space through its relationship with other heavenly bodies all looking to their centre, our sun.

An even greater context surrounds us when we hold in mind that our solar system then revolves around another central point, Sirius, which in turn brings our solar system with it in its revolution around an even more mysterious centre, Alcyone of the Pleiades. And at these centres in a far distant future we will find the cause, the beginning of our history here on this world. We continue to expand and travel from one centre to another onwards towards the centre of the great mystery of the Cosmos - a mystery which unfolds not just in the physical forms but through all the subtler dimensions which, by correspondence, must be as many and as great as the centres we will eventually hold in an expanding awareness. Just as the atoms in our bodies have more space than dense physical mass so the heavens, within which we live and move, exist in a great Space rich with the potencies of the many dimensions.

The Tibetan Master, Djwhal Khul, writes: " We speak at times of an expanding universe; what we really mean is an expanding consciousness, for this etheric body of the Entity, Space, is the recipient of many types of informing and penetrating energies, and it is also the field of the intelligent activity of the indwelling Lives of the Universe, of the many constellations, of the distant stars, of our solar system, of the planets within the system, and of all that constitutes the sum total of these separated living forms. The factor which relates them is consciousness and nothing else, and the field of conscious awareness is created through the interplay of all living intelligent forms within the area of the etheric body of that great Life which we call SPACE."

He explains that: "the entire universe is etheric and vital in nature and of an extension beyond the grasp of the greatest mind of the age . . . The glory of man lies in the fact that he is aware of space and can imagine this space as the field of divine living activity, full of active intelligent forms, each placed in the etheric body of this unknown Entity, each related to each other through the potency which not only holds them in being but which preserves their position in relation to each other; yet each of these differentiated forms possesses its own differentiated life, its own unique quality or integral colouring, and its own specific and peculiar form of consciousness."

Even our interpretations of divine inspiration have been made under the limitations of knowledge and experience current to the time. It is our persistent search for the central, essential truths that will carry us through successive forms of limitation towards the heart of all things, to the "heart of the matter", which is that spiritual essence that permeates all - but from which we are separated by the very forms we create to reach and interpret it. Each form of understanding and interpretation gives way to yet a newer, more inclusive one yet they are still forms separating the oneness of our union with the divine just as the steps along the way both separate and return the traveller to his destination.

They are the means to an end, an end which is a return to the beginning, no longer separated but at-one within a completed whole. Such is the revelation on the return of the prodigal son. Our centre is our sense of "home", our point of peace, and like a homing pigeon we circle that anchor in the heart, spiralling ever closer in orbit until we are "at home", at-one. While ever something seems strange, unknown, beyond our ken, it seems far from "home" and yet it takes the intrepid pioneer and explorer to seek out that new territory of the heart and make it part of home.

With each new sense of "centre" comes a new sense of identity and relationship. All previous experience of separateness disappears in an expanded sense of being. The race for space began as a competition between nations but, having arrived there, the astronauts passed back to an expectant humanity the reality of the one Earth whose exquisite beauty is shared by all as is the space within which it is held. This was then followed by joint missions where astronauts from various nations cooperated together under common purpose. We now experience our planetary life from beyond its boundaries or "ring-pass-not".

Many experiments in working out this shared sense of living have been conducted over the past millennia and new principles of understanding have emerged, though perhaps yet imperfectly applied. Even when not applied, when old approaches are still followed, there is an evolving capacity to recognize that they no longer serve and a new "ring-pass-not" begins to draw us on, to expand the scope of our living around a newer centre of being. Only those who fear the unknown frontiers they have not had the courage to explore, only those cling to the so-called "tried and true" when it is increasingly evident that such anchorages have been "tried" but found lacking. When the illusory scales fall from our eyes and we see that something is no longer "true" - then we can begin to explore and experiment with new approaches. Thus we evolve in understanding and in being. Thus we initiate the new - through our "mistakes", through one experiment after another, through one form or concept or structure after another until we learn that all these forms are but representations and reflections of our growing understanding but at particular moments in time.

The way that divinity sees it, as a complete whole outside the elongation of time and space, must be vastly different to what we see through the myopic lens of our current centre of identity. Yet the fact that we grow, in and of itself demonstrates that we can attain to those realms previously considered the prerogative of the Gods. The Christ and other world teachers have brought the message to us: "Ye are Gods". In this spirit we might recall the following words from Agni Yoga:

"Broadly has spread the praise of daring. The least of the disciples have turned to the path of searching and have approached Us. Each brought his dreams: "I will destroy all earthly temples, because Truth needs no walls. I will water all deserts. I will open all prisons. I will demolish all swords. I will blaze all trails. I will wipe away all tears. I will travel through all lands. I will inscribe the book of humanity."

But the least one of them turned to the shining stars and said, 'Hail to you, brothers!' And in this salutation of daring his ego vanished."