Dear Friends,

With Live8, G8, Olympic fervour and then mass condemnation of the attack on London peak hour commuters, humanity begins to express from the point of our shared livingness. It is a time of mass gatherings, global focus and united responses and initiatives that bridge across individuals, groups and nations. There is a mighty alignment of opposing forces but they are not to be neatly categorised by any specific geography, race, culture, religion or political persuasion. The forces of light, expansion and inclusiveness are permeating and transforming all the behavioural patterns, belief systems and ideologies wherever there is a ready response. And where there is no response the forces involved are being highlighted and eventually swept away by mass public realisation and condemnation.

In the book, "Love Without End", Belinda Green writes: "Our one spirit is a subject of grandeur, impossible to define conclusively. Moreover, if we consider that one spirit connects all things, sustains all things, and is the indivisible oneness of all existence, then from what vantage point can we objectively describe it? Since the very nature of definition is to objectify, contain, and establish that which is and is not, how could we even conceive an absolute definition of our oneness without reducing innocent perception to shaky pretension? It cannot be done. Therefore, we will honour the treasures of awareness which have been given to us, and humbly create with them a mosaic for greater understanding. If this evokes an intuitive connection for us with sacred truth, then we are richly blessed. Regardless, we can marvel at the simplicity of infinite inclusion. There is no place where spirit is not. That is the beauty and glory of our oneness."

The events of the past few weeks may indicate that humanity, as a whole, is yet far from that realisation. But the human response reveals an explosion of understanding that is unifying our consciousness. Those who have devoted lives and those who have sacrificed them for this moment will not have done so in vain. They are made sacred in the expanding revelation. The lines are being drawn ever more clearly now between darkness and light, the unreal and the real, death and immortality. It is a matter of time only before the illusions, the glamours, the veils drop from our eyes and we meet truth face to face. Here is where human will and decision enter in - with readiness and choice of time.

Time is in its way also a grand illusion because the reality to be revealed, through time, already exists. It waits only to manifest through human consciousness. In the context of the whole, both time and space are merely constructs for the realisation (by the component parts) of the one, indivisible whole of Life. Time and space have meaning only in the process of this revelation. Through them we weave the connections, the bridges and the relationships that are the preliminary steps which eventually become utterly unnecessary in the final conscious immersion in and identification with the whole of Life, the One in Whom we live and move and have our being, our Father, our Spirit, our very Being.

While words, constructs, concepts and symbols are our medium - the threads which connect - it is only the living experience of oneness that can open the way into the divinity that is the essence of our being. It may begin with the sacrifice of oneself for another ("in as much as ye do unto the least of these ye do unto Me"), for a group, a nation, an ideal, but always and eventually it is a giving up and giving in to the greater life which sustains, which ever is and from which nothing is lost and all is given. St Paul recognised this supreme moment of realisation in the words so often quoted: "having nothing yet possessing all things" - if we go beyond the familiarity of the words to the revelatory power behind them.

Crisis ever creates tension which brings about the emergence of the new. A point of tension is a storehouse of power - the power of human consciousness to break through from mass consciousness to group awareness. We are witness to this momentous transition as we observe the events of our time. And it seems that we have indeed entered the "Dawning of Aquarius" with its "universality and its sense of 'general distribution'". Certainly it is the dawn of a New Day in the life of the "One in Whom we live and move and have our being" when it is no longer just great individuals leading but great gatherings of peoples unitedly indicating to their leaders the direction in which their consciousness is focussed. This is no easy transition. As with all births there is a breaking through, a reorientation and re-integration of the new. The Tibetan Master (writing in the late 1940's) speaks of:
"… the state of group consciousness towards which humanity is, at this time, tending. It is difficult … to distinguish accurately between mass consciousness and group consciousness. Human beings stand today at a midway point, generally speaking, between these two states of mind, though perhaps it might be more correct to say that a fairly large minority are becoming group conscious, whilst the majority are emerging out of the mass conscious stage and becoming self-conscious individuals. This accounts for much of the present world difficulty and for the clash of idealisms. The two groups bring a different approach to the world problems as we now find them."

He also points us to the coming age: "The great spiritual achievement and evolutionary event of that age will be the communion and human relationships established among all peoples, enabling men everywhere to sit down together in the Presence of the Christ and share the bread and wine (symbols of nourishment). Preparations for that shared feast (symbolically speaking) are on their way, and the preparations are being made by the masses of men themselves, as they fight and struggle and legislate for the economic sustenance of their nations, and as the theme of food occupies the attention of legislators everywhere. This sharing, beginning on the physical plane, will prove equally true of all human relations and this will be the great gift of the Aquarian Age to humanity."

Great potencies are now recognisably flowing through and uniting human consciousness however diverse their expression may be through human activity. The principle of sharing has found expression in surges of human response everywhere - and, despite all the pulls against it and bids to destroy it, there is an expanding human realisation of the life-sharing process throughout the whole of our planetary life. We are that life. We have only to shift our sense of being - from the imprisonment of the separated part to the endless freedom of the whole of which we are a conscious aspect.

In the light of the many life sacrifices made on the part of humanity and our planet as a whole the following words are offered. They were written by Apollonius in a letter to a father who had lost his son:
"There is no death of anyone but only in appearance, even as there is no birth of any save only in seeming. The change from being to becoming seems to be birth and the change from becoming to being seems to be death, but in reality no one is ever born nor does one ever die. It is simply a being visible and then invisible; the former through the density of matter, and the latter because of the subtlety of being - being which is ever the same, its only change being motion and rest."

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The books quoted in this newsletter which are available from Sydney Goodwill are:
Esoteric Astrology - by Alice A Bailey (Pages 311-312)
The Reappearance of the Christ - by Alice A Bailey (Page 80)