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 258 / October 2008

Dear Friends,

Just as the crisis of a fever heralds the tuning point towards healing of an illness, so crises ever bring opportunities for right balance to be restored and right relationship to be established between all parts of the whole. The imbalance in the distribution of essential life resources to address poverty, starvation and ill-health has been a growing stain on human consciousness bringing us eventually to the brink with the potential collapse of the world financial markets. The scales are falling from our eyes as the interconnectedness of our living resounds through all current events. And the planet as a whole is demonstrating the balancing impact of material greed – through global warming, climate change, rising sea levels and dwindling rivers and supplies of fresh water.

As we pass through this entrance into the new millennium and the new Aquarian Age of universality and experience, humanity is offered the opportunity to become the Aquarian water-bearer bringing the Water of Life to pour forth for the thirsty – to address need rather than greed – and to serve the exquisite balance of life in our world. As with the legendary hero, Hercules, who slaughtered the Amazon queen so needlessly since she freely offered what his task required, so mankind has plundered and exploited the planet out of greed for material energy when all the time that which we need has been freely offered by the sun and the free-flow of wind and water to produce the power which can serve the planetary life.

What do we really need? What do we really value? One of the interesting lessons emerging from the global economic meltdown is that true value is the value something has for the whole of a community, a nation and the planet. Perhaps it’s not a matter of “supply and demand”, with the loudest and most self-serving demand met first, but “need and supply” where need is assessed in terms of the balance of life which sustains the whole of this beautiful world which is our home. Our formidable creative powers can be turned towards creating the means to address need rather than creating clever “financial instruments” to trade on the illusion of debt in order to feed our greed.

As we recognise that we cannot live separately from the whole culture and civilization in which we live, we begin to realize that it is in all interests (for both short and long term – as things speed up) that we address the need of all peoples and kingdoms for the basic requirements of life. The life of even the smallest life-form is critical to the life of the planet because of the delicate balance of the ecology (and economy) within which we live and move and have our being. Our sense of scarcity is an illusion. The human spirit can transcend any loss or lack and has the power to fill with reality and truth what we might mistakenly feel is emptiness and loss. A co-worker writes:

Hole in Me

Be … in the words, heard-spoken
Be … in the words, read-turned on
Be … in the hurry, bustle, loud.
Everything in the world,
in life,
Be.

When we silence the “noise” of our mistaken identities – our images, glamours and illusions – communion with the finer essence of what we are becomes possible. Increasingly, even in the midst of a busy life, it is becoming essential to, inwardly, withdraw from the “grand illusion” and enter the point of sacred peace. The Master, Djwhal Khul, speaks of this need to a disciple:

“The point I seek to emphasise … 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 (Spiritual) Hierarchy, and increasingly that of (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. … ever the recognition of the essential demand of your soul for rhythmic interludes; 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.” [Discipleship in the New Age p453]

Our sense of fulfilment, of strength and abundance, stems from what we think we are and what gives our life meaning. The author, Doris Lessing, makes these observations:

“… I think it is likely that our view of ourselves as a species on this planet now is inaccurate, and will strike those who come after us as inadequate as the world view of, let's say, the inhabitants of (a lost tribe in….) seems to us. … we live in dreadful and marvellous times where the certainties of yesterday dissolve as we live. … the nature of the group mind, the collective minds we are all part of, though we are seldom prepared to acknowledge this. We see ourselves as autonomous creatures, our minds our own, our beliefs freely chosen, our ideas individual and unique . . . with billions and billions and billions of us on this planet, we are still prepared to believe that each of us is unique, or that if the others are mere dots in a swarm, then at least I am this self-determined thing, my mind my own. Very odd this is, and it seems to me odder and odder. How do we get this notion of ourselves? …It seems to me that ideas must flow through humanity like tides. Where do they come from?” [Preface to The Sirian Experiments]

Where do we come from? Who are we really? In the Beacon Magazine (2008) a series of articles on Advaita, the non-dual experience, offers the following:

“….It is by ceaseless enquiry that the thoughts are destroyed and the Self realized – the plenary Reality in which there is not even the ‘I’ thought, the experience which is referred to as ‘Silence’….In an Advaita statement , the Master Jesus said ‘I and the Father are One.’ ” [Part I, July-September Beacon]

“According to the Ageless Wisdom each of us is a Divine Being and as the teachings of Lord Buddha proclaim, the wisdom of enlightenment is inherent in every one of us. … Aziz Kristof (1962 –), author and contemporary Zen teacher,… saying that to go beyond the mind does not mean to stop the mind but to find a new location within your existence. This new location is called by many names: Father, Monad, Self, God, etc.…the Master Djwhal Khul has said in so many words that there is no becoming enlightened, only the stripping away of layers of the mind that veil the Self, What Is. The lessening of world glamour and illusion is effected every time another false belief or layer of the mind has been removed.” [Part II, October-December Beacon]

The articles also include these beautiful words of Ralph Waldo Emerson from “the Over-Soul” (1841):

“We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within Man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related. The eternal ONE. And the deep power in which we exist and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one. We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are shining parts, is the soul.”