S Y D N E Y   G O O D W I L L   N E W S L E T T E R

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

No 243 / June 2007

Dear Friends,

Have you ever driven a car through familiar territory but behind a tourist driver who may have understood his map but is finding the reality difficult to navigate? Whilst we need to exercise tolerance in this situation, it is also a reminder of the vast difference between theory and the living reality. In such small ways we can see how our civilisation seems to be reaching a peak in knowledge and information where we are ready for a critical shift into the application of that knowledge wisely to our shared living on this planet.

Wisdom comes from a true and deep knowing that arises out of a sense of the whole of life – or of the whole of the situation of a specific moment. It transcends the hidden assumptions that can direct our mental, emotional or physical reactions and comes from complete knowledge and understanding. Until we attain that understanding we are guided by values based on compassion, sacrifice, gratitude and reverence for all life. These qualities reflect the point of that knowing and lead us to it. Judgement and prejudice on the other hand are based on limited understanding and a sense of separateness, competition and false assumptions about our own capacities and wisdom.

If we see events as opportunities to move beyond our limitations and to see others as being also at a point in growth then the power of compassion enters and growth and expansion become possible. But the process requires a release of our old sense of self and an acceptance of a greater, more inclusive, expanded and shared sense of being that responds to divine intention – submerging all else in that inevitable, unavoidable and awesome force that brings whole planets and species into being.

We can sense a critical point in human history – with the move into a new millennium, a new global focus and the Aquarian Age of universality. And helping to bring this to the fore is the sheer explosion of populations. There are so many more people in the world – in incarnation – than ever before. The human eye, mind and spirit reaches into all corners of the earth and into every part of the human expression. Everything is coming out – materialism and its dire consequences, competitive ambition and its destructive effects but also the power of love and compassion to create miracles of healing and growth even in the midst of what we are increasingly able to recognise as blind greed and narrow understanding. As Adam and Eve found in the Garden of Eden there is no place to hide from the eye of God or from the fast developing sensitivity and clarity of vision of a new humanity and a new human consciousness.

With the explosion of population we are also brought face to face with the immense diversity of expression – human diversity begins to rival that of the natural world itself. How do we deal with this? The automatic tendency to look for the familiar in order to make sense of new things draws us to the essentials shared behind all outer differences. That journey, from the familiar to the new, takes us through stages of misunderstanding – where we judge the new in terms of old values – through trial and error until we can open to the true and leave behind old illusions. What we leave behind are limitations of understanding, man-made barriers of prejudice and value. This essentialising process takes us behind the plethora of outer detail to the awesome power of that single life which brings all into being and whose agents we are – just as the cells and parts of our own bodies work under our coordinating will.

To essentialise at the personal level we run into the limitation of prejudice where we can judge all by the narrow frame of reference of the personal and familiar – if it’s different it’s bad – such can be the effect of the fear of the unknown. This leads to the simplistic rather than the true simplicity of that essential reality behind the outer diversity. It is a way of creating an artificial simplicity, an illusion of simplicity, by categorising so that we feel less overwhelmed by unfamiliar detail. The truly essential is the basic heartbeat of Life itself beyond the personal experience.

New ways of approaching the growing complexity of our society are raised in the latest World Goodwill Occasional Paper, “Closing the Great Global Divides”. Dr Don Beck describes a new approach to the major problems that humanity faces. He says: “…human nature has an amazing capacity to reinvent itself, and has done so many times in its history….The irony and the paradox today is that we are more fragmented than ever before. There are pieces of everything everywhere….And today, because of immigration patterns and travel, the internet and so forth, every single human experience is represented in virtually every neighbourhood….At the same time we’re more interconnected: email, CNN – we can’t escape anything. Every day on television we get instant reports on what’s happening anywhere else on the planet. We have simply outgrown our concepts to handle this kind of diversity.”

He recalls a famous Einstein quotation that “we can’t solve today’s problems using the very same thinking that produced these problems.” ….”solving one set of problems creates a new set of problems which require solution from the other side….we’re looking at life conditions that are the driving force that causes new levels of consciousness to emerge on the planet.”

Gradually the new and more truly Human is emerging as we learn the essentials of inclusiveness, shared living and the underlying oneness of life through which we are connected. This is revealed through the developing modes of communication. The Tibetan explains:

“…already the nature of speech in relation to embodied ideas is being somewhat understood. … May it not be possible that under the modes of activity employed by the advertising agencies and the constant training given to salesmen in the use of the spoken word as a means of approach to the public in order to sell an idea, we shall find the first distorted indications of the emanations of those mystic phrases which will bring into being the creation of the soul in all fields of creative enterprise? …..The training of public opinion, the utilisation of catchwords and slogans, the tendency to embody the concepts of campaigners in trite and apposite phrases are part of the growing realisation of the magical work. …..All these means are employed blindly and without true realisation; they constitute a part of the emerging activities of a humanity which is on the verge of real creative work, the principles of which are not yet understood and scientifically applied. But they do point the way, and under the simplification which marks the return to synthesis, we shall have the cessation of speech and the utilisation of simpler forms. Under the evolutionary urge, we have had the Sound, the Word, Speech. The latter, in its turn, has been differentiated into words, phrases sentences, paragraphs, books until we now have the era wherein the differentiation is at its height, and we have speeches at all hours of the day and night; we have the utilisation of the public platform to reach the public ear, and of the radio to reach all classes and races of humanity in an effort to mould public opinion and bring certain ideas and concepts into the public consciousness. We have the publication of books literally in their millions, and all playing their part on the same great work, and we have as yet both methods of communication being prostituted to the selfish ends and ambitious purposes of those who speak and write. Yet there are a few true creators who are endeavouring to make their sound heard, to speak those mystical words that will enable humanity to see the vision. Thus will be dispersed eventually the thought-forms which at this time shut out the clear light of God.

   …Out of the present welter of speech and words, of lectures and of books, a few clear concepts will surely emerge which will find an echo in the hearts of men. Thus also will men be led on into the new age, wherein ‘talk will die out and books come to naught’ for the lines of subjective communication will lie open. Men will recognise that noise acts as a deterrent to telepathic intercourse. The written word will not be needed either, for men will use symbols of light and colour to supplement through the eye what the subjective hearing has recorded. But that day is not yet even though the radio and television are the first steps in the right direction.” [A Treatise on White Magic p476-477]

 

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The Christ’s Festival and World Invocation Day in Gemini will be celebrated at a meditation meeting at 8 pm on Thursday, 31 May, at the YWCA, 5-11 Wentworth Avenue, Sydney. The keynote for reflection is:

I recognise my other self and in the waning of that self I grow and glow.

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