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 248 / November 2007

Dear Friends,

How sensitive we have become to our environment and to each other and how subtly that sensitivity is being tuned through constant exercise and experience with mass media, film, music, education, urbanisation and socialisation. There are so many experiences to choose from, but what motivates our choice? We can immerse ourselves in the individual, group, mass or universal experience but what breadth of scope do we reach for? And all the while, whether we consciously experience it or not, we are swept by larger forces than those we initiate ourselves. Our choosing is also a choice of what we allow to sweep through us, what we transmit and transfer. Whatever we open ourselves to will inevitably be transferred to all around us.

A simple thing like laughter can ripple instantly through a group - it is so infectious and few can resist its uplifting effect. It is also a uniquely human gift which in an instant can detach us from a too separate and isolated sense of identity. In a moment we can be free - from care, from pain, from the weight of the external world, from the burden of personal identity and of self-consciousness - from all self-fulfilling patterns that hold us in thrall. It distracts our attention and in that moment we are available to lighter, subtler energies and to the upliftment and connection they bring. Like a child's delight at flying a kite and soaring with it, we can transfer our consciousness out of the ties of the mundane world and can open the way to the freedom of the soul on its own plane beyond the illusion of personal boundaries and within reach of divine inspiration.

Such simple everyday experiences can reveal the profound simplicity of those mighty principles that operate through our lives. They demonstrate a point at which energy shifts and a redeeming process becomes possible and discernable if we are willing to look more deeply into events. The Tibetan Master wrote the following to elucidate the cataclysmic changes of the 1940's. In 2007 we are still riding that wave of change.

"…all basic and fundamental changes taking place upon the physical plane are necessarily the result of inner subjective causes, emanating from some level of the divine consciousness, and therefore from some plane other than the physical … This world war and its inevitable consequences-good and bad-are looked upon as concerned primarily with humanity, whereas that is not basically so...

… There is … a line of descending energy which has its origin outside our planetary life altogether; the inflow of this energy, its inevitable effect under cyclic law and its consequences, as they work out upon the physical plane, has produced and is producing all the changes of which mankind is so terribly aware at this time. This swings into immediate conflict the past and the future…

… These descending energies, as they pass through any of the major levels of consciousness … produce reactions and responses, dependent upon the state of the conditioning consciousness ... the point of lowest descent of the energies has now been reached, and the nature of the present opportunity is therefore changing. These energies have now passed what we might call the turning point and have reached their point of ascension, with all that that phrase implies. As they descend, they produce stimulation; as they ascend, they produce transmutation and abstraction, and the one effect is as unalterable as the other. It is upon this inevitability of the ascending energies, and the effects which they will bring about, that the entire hope of the future depends; nothing can arrest their return or their progress through the planes and back again to their source. Upon this dual process of descent and ascension the whole cyclic panorama of manifestation rests, and upon the inflow and activity of new and higher energies the whole fact of the evolutionary process depends… the descent of energy brings with it-under the cyclic law-certain new 'inspirations,' certain new 'seeds of hope' for the future, and certain active Agents as well, Who are and will be responsible for the task of preparation, of fertilisation and of all the coming new age enterprises." [The Rays & the Initiations pages 12-14]

We are so symbiotically part of our milieu that what flows through it moves through us also. We emanate thought, feeling and action into our living context and respond to that which radiates back from it - through us. Yet this immersion experience comes through a pattern of identity and purpose which filters what we perceive/receive and transmit. This pattern can change as new experiences (and even crises) test its validity down to its essence. Our life objectives form and draw us on from one accomplishment to the next goal and unveil our essential purpose a little more each time as we move deeper to the heart of our living. At this essential level we are all moving forward together and as one humanity - only the outer details differ, "only the names are changed…" It is the truth behind things that transcends the apparent differences of its multifaceted reflection. The task of redeeming the truth, and our world, is not a burden to be born single-handedly but is carried out through the many hands of humanity. Kofi Annan in his Nobel lecture of 2001, sounded this note for the New Millennium:

"Today's real borders are not between nations, but between powerful and powerless, free and fettered, privileged and humiliated. Today, no walls can separate humanitarian or human rights crises in one part of the world from national security crises in another…

…A genocide begins with the killing of one man - not for what he has done, but because of who he is. A campaign of 'ethnic cleansing' begins with one neighbour turning on another. Poverty begins when even one child is denied his or her fundamental right to education. What begins with the failure to uphold the dignity of one life, all too often ends with a calamity for entire nations…

…We have entered the third millennium through a gate of fire. If today … we see better, and we see further - we will realize that humanity is indivisible. New threats make no distinction between races, nations or regions…In this new century, we must start from the understanding that peace belongs not only to states or peoples, but to each and every member of those communities.…. Peace must be sought, above all, because it is the condition for every member of the human family to live a life of dignity and security…

… Today … even amidst continuing ethnic conflict around the world, there is a growing understanding that human diversity is both the reality that makes dialogue necessary, and the very basis for that dialogue.

…We understand, as never before, that each of us is fully worthy of the respect and dignity essential to our common humanity. We recognize that we are the products of many cultures, traditions and memories; that mutual respect allows us to study and learn from other cultures; and that we gain strength by combining the foreign with the familiar….Each of us has the right to take pride in our particular faith or heritage. But the notion that what is ours is necessarily in conflict with what is theirs is both false and dangerous. It has resulted in endless enmity and conflict, leading men to commit the greatest of crimes in the name of a higher power….It need not be so. … We can thrive in our own tradition, even as we learn from others, and come to respect their teachings."

The newer and truer distinctions are emerging. They are between the unreal and the real, between darkness and enlightenment, between death and immortality. The sword of the true warrior is the sword which cleaves between them - not between ourselves. It is the sword of Spirit and of the One Life that dispels the artificial or expedient divisions and the discriminations of smaller, lesser and limiting views. The living experience and understanding of our oneness enables us to see more clearly what our next steps might be as a humanity and as a world. In the area of Law a potential is envisaged by Peter Gabel in his contribution to the Imagine project of 2000, published as World Goodwill Occasional Paper June 2004:

"The most profound definition of justice is Martin Luther King Jnr's: 'Love correcting that which revolts against Love.' Its power comes first of all from its affirmation that we are first of all connected, that as individuals we are but unique incarnations of a spiritual force that unites us, and that justice is the making manifest of that love by correcting, through the inherent ethical call that this love makes upon every one of us and all of us, the spiritual distortions that revolt against love and seek to deny it. It was to this inherent ethical understanding emanating from the very essence of our social existence, pulling upon the conscience of the oppressor as much as giving courage to the oppressed, that King always addressed himself. Injustice is as self-evident to us as the presence of justice … and it is the necessity of love that both enables us to tell justice from injustice and calls upon us to move from the one to the other.…Law ought to be the particular temporal embodiment of our effort as a real historical community to move from the one to the other. Law is not a body of rules or any other such thing-like entity… legal culture ought to be a spiritual practice through which the community calls upon love's evolving wisdom to heal the spiritual distortions that continue to alienate us from love itself as the realization of our social being."

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The Festival in Scorpio will be celebrated at a meditation meeting at 8 pm on Thursday, 25 October, at the YWCA, 5-11 Wentworth Avenue, Sydney. The keynote for reflection is:

Warrior I am, and from the battle I emerge triumphant.

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Visit the rest of our New Website at www.sydneygoodwill.org.au for information, literature, books, meeting dates, etc!

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