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

No 197/May 2003

Dear Friends,

All around our globe, our Earth, human beings are motivated by a variety of impulses to think for themselves about the issues which their leaders have previously taken as their own mandated prerogative. A new, thinking, humanity is emerging and the perspective from which it views the world is moving towards a central sense of being human, what that means and how it should express through all its member individuals, groups, nations, cultures, religions and ethnicities without losing any of the true richness of expression in the world. From this point of view we see much happening that does not flow in the same direction as our vision.

Even the leaders we have previously elected, respected and admired and to whose judgment we have deferred, while we indulged in our personal concerns, even these leaders we now see as having limited vision and no longer appear to measure up to our increasing expectation of them. As the searchlight of humanity's mind passes over the world much is now clear that was previously unseen or more easily ignored while we assumed that much of the suffering was somehow the fault of the sufferer and the perpetrators were excused because of their social standing or prominence on the world stage.

We have been forced to re-think the meaning of "responsibility" and in the process to expand our understanding of what "freedom" means. We find that these concepts and the energy that they unleash work differently depending on our "point of view". This point of view has in the past been from a separated individual sense of identity, defensive and fear-driven, inspired by a desire for freedom from fear and expressing either in isolationist alternatives or the attempt to dominate and control all would-be threats to its existence. This is the "law of the jungle" that holds sway only while we view life from a purely material perspective. And yet we have long been inspired by those causes and principles that are worth laying down our physical lives for. Defense of family or country have been served as worthy causes yet it has really been a love of these or what they mean rather than the material forms themselves - values and a way of life we hold dearer than form.

The great experience of the 20th century was the taking up of the new cause of humanity as a whole, the acceptance in human consciousness that we are one humanity and that whatever diminishes any one human being diminishes the whole. This new breadth of vision is at the heart of the great world movements, the humanitarian agencies, the international financial systems, the United Nations and its many agencies and networks supporting the whole. Issues are no longer unique to individuals but become representative of universal principles of human rights, freedoms and responsibilities.

Freedom from want, or from a sense of exclusion from Life's eternal supply, requires an identification with the one life that pours through all. Responsibility means our inherent "ability to respond" to the whole of life and its expression. From this perspective a force flows that brings a new culture to Earth under the auspices of the Spirit of Peace. This is very different to the past pattern of living based on the reactive response of the fearful, defensive/aggressive consciousness clinging to a sense of self-importance, careless and ignorant of anything outside its own scope.

We have established constitutions that enshrine basic human rights and freedoms and, though we have then applied them with exclusivity, yet it was a beginning. We have espoused spiritual principles and, though we have then applied them only to those taught to worship God in particular, exclusive ways, yet it was a beginning. Clear thinking now reveals that these freedoms, principles and laws are universal because they emerge from the human spirit and not from any temporary form that houses it. They are not the prerogative of any one person or group but emerge with diverse expression through all races and religions. It is the eye of the human soul that sees through the illusions and glamours that material forms create. It is the vision it beholds that organizes the free flow of energy into appropriate forms of expression.

We cannot be casual about our thought. It is the most powerful tool we have for creating our future. It creates the blueprints from ideas (or spiritual impulses) and thence the forms that represent them. We have ever been taught that "energy follows thought" and that "the eye, opened by thought, directs the energy". Indeed what we see is what we get! What is the vision that directs our thinking - is it the eternal reality of life or the temporary illusion of death? How much lies within its scope - the whole or an exclusive part? Who is the custodian of our vision - worldly authorities or our own inner being? In the final analysis we are free to see what we will. We are responsible for what we see. Everything within the scope of that vision is sacrificed or made sacred to the purpose reflected through it. Sacrifice means the spirit takes over rather than gives up the material form.

It becomes clear why "without vision the people perish" for without an envisioned purpose to organise the flow of life there is left only confusion, chaos and death. Aimless, disempowered and hopeless people have no organizing principle to connect them to spiritual intention. While some might congratulate themselves on not being amongst those forced into this state by world events, we might remember that to the degree that anyone is diminished through want or lack of sustenance for body, emotions, mind or soul, to that degree is all life diminished including ourselves. We are interconnected in ways we have only begun to explore and it is imperative that we continue to open up the vision of where our world, our global culture, is heading to ensure that the forces of a greater, all-embracing reality are allowed to guide it through the agency of human vision.

In the early years of this new millennium, initially invigorated with such hopes for our global future, we have seen many national governments appearing to wind back time to an approach in world affairs that we could have outgrown by now. A new organizing principle of peace rather than conflict was beginning to emerge after the horror of the wars of the first half of last century and made amazing progress in the aftermath of those events. National self-interest had been revealed as the true danger to our shared future. Recent events have shown clearly that it is time for public consciousness to take up the responsibility for the freedoms it enjoys and to use them to serve the whole. This means that we all, each in our place in the great hierarchy of life, share that freedom and responsibility and we cannot wait for someone else to think the vision and then tell us what to do.

This is a shared task and, through sharing, it becomes a joy and a revelation of something even beyond our current dreams. How far we have come since the early man-beasts walked the earth. What great civilizations have come and gone yet none of them had the massed power of human thinking, aspiration and will-power that we have available today. What an amazing future we can project when we expand into that new consciousness that is our real being and our true role in planetary achievement. Let us loose the ties of parochial thinking and see. Let us use the creative imagination and focus it on the greater reality, the greater light, and let it clarify our next steps. The days of painful trial and error are well nigh ended and the new era of clear vision and subsequent manifestation is at hand.