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No 246 / April 2008

Dear Friends,

In our part of the world, here in the South, Autumn is making its presence felt with the first cold nights, while in the Northern hemisphere Spring is arriving. Both are the seasons of interlude between the more extreme conditions of Summer and Winter. They are times of reflection and are a reminder of the return of the seasons with their renewed opportunity. This cyclic pulse reflects the benevolence of the great Life in which we live and move and have our being - releasing us from outworn modes and forms and freeing us into a new moment of divine emergence. But the most liberated point of being is between the major seasons, between the breaths of form life, when inspiration, life, direction and orientation are available to the advancing point of light to draw upon. The Tibetan Master, Djwhal Khul, instructs a disciple in the need and potency of these opportunities for abstraction:

"The point I seek to emphasise to you is the need…for the interludes. These interludes are… the growing times; they are essentially the 'epochs for storage' … and they are the 'seed of samadhi.' … those interludes in the initiate's life of service wherein he withdraws all his forces into a 'well of silence'-a well, full of the water of life. In this state of consciousness two definite activities transpire: Tension and Recognition. Without these interludes of abstraction, his work would slowly weaken as the tension, earlier initiated, weakened; his ability to attract and to hold others true to the vision would likewise slowly disappear, as his power to recognise became myopic. The initiate, therefore, …withdraws at the needed times. As he inhales the life of the (soul), and increasingly that of the (spirit) … and as he exhales the living essence into the 'world of serving lives,' he becomes steadily more and more dependent upon the 'interludes' wherein both these phases of activity cease and he becomes immersed in Being and in Consciousness-the intrinsic parts of the animating Whole. I use this phrase 'animating Whole' advisedly to indicate that the points of interlude are not related to form life at all, but to the life of Life itself.

"… your personality emphasis should be, therefore, upon this withdrawing. I refer not to the withdrawing from outer service but to an inner, constant, cyclic attitude of determined and planned abstraction …new phases of work… are initiated in the silence of the process of abstraction, released when the interlude of tension has completed its work, and become effective when the interlude of recognition has made a new refocussing possible. …These points of inner abstraction, of interludes in your subjective life, can be carried on without interfering with your objective life of service, of obligation and of duty."  [Discipleship in the New Age Vol II, pages 453-5]

The beneficence of the cyclic nature of Life is apparent from these words by Lama Anagorika Govinda:

   "Unbroken physical continuity is a characteristic property of the lowest organisms, the most primitive and undeveloped forms of life, because physical continuity fetters the organism to the rigid laws of matter and the dictates of once-established patterns, whose inherent repetitiveness prevents any deviation from the norm and thus becomes the greatest stumbling block in the way of development and further evolution.
   Death, on the other hand, is the characteristic feature of the higher forms of existence, which achieve the survival of acquired properties and experiences through a new form of propagation, that relies no more on division, but on integration, no more on a merely physical, but on a psychic, continuity, capable of building a new organism according to its own individual impetus -unhampered by the rigid accumulations of obsolete or worn-out material form-elements.
   … man … had already realised the importance of death as a key to the mysteries of a greater life. Out of this realisation grew the cult of the dead, the earliest form of religion. It stimulated man to build the first enduring monuments of architecture (in contrast to the frail and transitory dwellings for the living); monuments that were not the outcome of necessity and want, of momentary needs or temporal utility, but of a will towards eternity, a spiritual urge that pointed towards a reality beyond temporal existence.
   Thus the origin of religion was not the fear of death, but the recognition of death as the great transformer and initiator into the true nature of man's innermost being. The fear of death could only originate at a time when human consciousness had hardened into an extreme form of individualism, based on the illusion of being a permanent entity, a self-existing soul or ego that separates one being from the other, and living beings from dead things: thus drawing a line between life and death, a line that finally becomes a boundary, an impenetrable wall, towards which life rushes headlong-only to be annihilated in the impact.
   But at a time when human beings had not yet lost the connection with their origins and their surroundings, in a world in which man was still in touch with the subtle forces of nature, the spirits of the departed, the realms of gods and demons, in short: in a world in which there was nothing that could be conceived as lifeless, death was not the contradiction to life, but a phase in the movement of life's pendulum, a turning-point, like birth. The pendulum swings from birth to death and back from death to birth.
The movement of life's pendulum, however, is not confined to one plane only; it can swing on an infinite number of planes, move in all dimensions of consciousness, according to its inherent momentum or according to the conscious impetus that it may receive in that infinitesimally small fraction of timelessness at its turning-point, that is, between death and rebirth, or between one realm of existence and another. It is this timeless 'moment', in which those who have learnt to look inwards, who have practised introspection and developed their inner vision through sadhana and dhyana, will be able to perceive the realms of existence open or adequate to them, and to direct their mind consciously towards the plane that offers the greatest chances for the realisation of their highest aspirations…" [from The Way of the White Clouds, Chapter 6]

We are yet haunted by the spectre of death and brutality as meted out by the oppressive and deluded regimes around the world who, under the illusion that death and pain are the final powers, embrace them as their desperate weapons in the vain hope of ensuring their own physical continuity.  Yet naught can save them from the potent currents of the greater Life that brings all form expressions to an end when their season passes.  Thus the ordered unfoldment of the Cosmos proceeds and all temporal forms come to an end - however persistent they may appear. The destructive counter forces are vanquished by human recognition of this great and eternal fact - recognition which takes effect as our values shift into truer proportion with the greater Life expressing, and with a sense of the whole and every part's place included within it. The impermanence of temporal power is beautifully expressed in "Ozymandias":

"I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said--"Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert....Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings,
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."   [by Percy Bysshe Shelley]

So it is in neither of the extremes - heat or cold, power or powerlessness, form life or death - but in the narrow, razor-edged path stretching between them which leads us back to the source of all life and expression. The interludes draw us back into that well of dynamic life, that point of abstraction whence all can be seen clearly, in right relation and in right proportion as from a mountain top - or from the perspective of "divine indifference' which embraces all and is not bound by any worldly expression.

"In neither pain nor joy is liberation found.
In neither dark nor light will the spiritual sun appear.
The pairs of opposites distract the eyes of men.
Only the single eye directs the steps
Of the initiate upon the Way."     [Discipleship in the New Age Vol II, Page 664]