| SYDNEY GOODWILL UNIT OF SERVICE |
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PP 297537/00068 No 221 / June 2005 |
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From the perspective of Spirit our role in the world might be seen as God's "undercover agents", infiltrating the animal nature and form life of the planet - often so convincingly that we, ourselves, come to believe that the forms are what we are! Yet if we believe we are these undercover "identities" we're in danger of forgetting the glory from which we have come and to which we are supposed to help guide our little spaceship, Mother Earth, and all that travel in her. We are then in danger of becoming "double agents" and of losing our way in the mire of self-interest. And yet the very forms and nature we assume as our undercover personas are created according to greater laws and forces - according to the Life that breathes through our planet. Our task (or our mission should we choose to accept it!) is to strengthen that life and to reveal or "uncover" it through the "identities" we assume from incarnation to incarnation as we serve divine purpose. In this way we participate in the unification of spirit and matter, Father and Mother, in the divine marriage which is consecrated by Life that pervades all. This union expresses in the whole of creation as all dualities in union create wholes - even the on/off electrical impulses of the binary operation of computing has created vast processes and industries that sustain and direct our lives. Everything is reciprocal and reciprocated! Because it is the one system of expression, every part affects all the other parts in the way it serves the whole life. We might consider the vast implications of the injunction: "do unto others as you would have them do unto you" when what we essentially emanate into the whole returns to us many times over, such is the beneficence of this life we share. It might recycle back perhaps in different outward guise but essentially how we see life and react is how it comes back. What we see is what we get!. Thus might fear and blame beget fear and blame but living the reality of joy and achievement leads eventually to its complete restoration throughout our world - and eventually to supreme enlightenment as illustrated in this beautiful tale about the Buddha:
'Stay', mused the Enlightened One, 'the state of perfection I am entering is but perfection of myself, a unique perfection, my wholeness is a unique wholeness; not yet then am I being universal. Other beings still suffer imperfection, existence, and resultant death. Compassion unto these still awakes within me when I contemplate their suffering. The way of life unto perfection I have, in truth and in deed, illuminated for them: but can they tread that way without me? The unique perfection of myself I dreamed, the perfection of my own character and personality is but imperfection while one other being - one single gnat - still suffers imperfection of its identical kind. No being may reach bliss alone: all must reach it together, and that, the unique bliss proper to each. For am I not in every other being and is not every other being in me?' With still small voice in every self thus speaketh the Buddha, by its inspiration to inner character, its aspiration to outer personality, perpetually transmuting this self into not-self, each reality dependent on the other, an everlasting way of life to tread to perfection of each, of all." We are never separate or isolated from the whole in which we "live and move and have our being", the living organism which is our planet. We are constantly evolving through our living interaction with it - physically, energetically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. The Philosophy teacher in "Sophie's World" shows the reflection of this in Hegel's understanding that "there was an interactive, or dialectic, relationship between man and nature. When man alters nature, he himself is altered. Or, to put it slightly differently, when man works, he interacts with nature and transforms it. But in the process nature also interacts with man and transforms his consciousness. … You could say it is an interactive relationship between hand and consciousness." The new frontiers of science and physics have also confirmed that what we observe (or bring our consciousness to focus on) can change as a result of our observation and that our consciousness is also changed by the discoveries that result. In these forays into the greater life in which we "live and move and have our being" humanity strengthens the flow of that essential life within all forms and becomes transfigured by it. When pioneers break through into new areas of discovery others begin also to open to its possibility. The new breakthrough has a magnetic appeal because it calls to the potential in each. This is a reflection of the magnetic impact of those who show the Way to the subtle realms of Life that pervade and substand all outer seeming - expressed in Christ's words: "I, if I be lifted up will draw all men unto me". The essential nature responds ever more potently to the greater life and eventually begins to radiate through the evolving forms. The inner life resonates and radiates with increasing power and overcomes all obstacles and ultimately overcomes all that stands in its way, even by destruction when necessary. "This is not the destruction of forms by force such as we have seen imposed upon the world, but a destruction brought about by the greatly strengthened life within the form." (As the Tibetan Master Djwhal Khul, explains). The inner life radiates. Radiation has been described as: "the result of the inner positive nucleus of force or life reaching such a terrific rate of vibration, that it eventually scatters the electrons or negative points which compose its sphere of influence, and scatters them to such a distance that the Law of Repulsion dominates. They are then no more attracted to their original centre but seek another". We are approaching the centre of Life itself. The radiating emanation of Reality comes from within rather than from an imposition of an external authority - for we are transiting out of the age of authority and into a new age of the shared experience of the one life and the laws that then control. The Tibetan explains:
As the inner life and conscience is strengthened, the rules emerging through the experience of those who have gone before, of the great World teachers, help to guide us and are accepted in free will according to the inner response of each - life responding to life. They attract through the magnetic quality of the one life within all. Such a far cry from the infant misunderstanding of desperate and oppressive regimes or approaches (in any guise). These are doomed eventually to fail as they breed only the same oppressive response in return. We have been told: "Resist not evil, but so organise and mobilise the good, and so strengthen the hands of the workers on the side of righteousness and love, that evil will find less opportunity". While we exhaust all resources in doing battle with what we consider evil, the good may wither through lack of that enlivening focus that we can bring to it and the creative expression that life can inspire through us. Evil is, after all, only the result of illusion - it is not based on reality - and to varying extent we are all in thrall to some illusion or other. But the greatest illusion is a sense of separateness. This is what breeds exclusivity, fear, partisanship, prejudice and oppression. Our task as "undercover agents" is, as infiltrators in all forms (both our own vehicles and the forms we create: physical, ideological, institutional, representative) - our task is to recognise the one life in all forms and by so doing strengthen it and see it into expression. In the first and final analysis it is not the temporary form that is the eternal, underlying power - it is the Life flowing through all, through time and space. And it is in this we find our true identity, out true being, and the relief of a heavy load of illusion dissipated by the joy of Life. * * * * * * The
books quoted in this newsletter and available from Sydney Goodwill are:
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* * * * * * World Invocation
Day and Christ's Festival in Gemini will be celebrated at a meditation
meeting at 8 pm on Monday, 23rd May at the YWCA, 5-11 Wentworth Avenue,
Sydney. The keynote is: *
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