November 2009 Sydney Goodwill Newsletter

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Dear Friends,

We can understand that the thought of something must occur before it can be actualised into form. The architect must first gather an understanding of a client’s intention and needs, visualise how these might be met in a specific location, and formulate the plans and blueprint before the builder can create the actual form in space, assisted by the project manager who coordinates, in time, all the elements which work together to achieve the client’s intention. We know that the world is built from thought. So why do we often, without thinking, simply accept the flow of events, the outcome of old thought, even while complaining or reacting against them? We can spend much time in bewailing or “band-aiding” the effects of previously incomplete or fragmented thought when a more constructive effort might be to look into the future we can create, thoughtfully, with all the many powers that are increasingly available to us.

The world is not only how we perceive it – it is also how we create it with our directed thought. And behind our thinking is the creative spark, the inspiration or motivation that sets thought in motion towards its form expression. We can become prisoners and victims of time if our thinking succumbs to stress and the hyperactive reaction to the immediacy of momentary effects. How quickly one can rush to interpret, to assume and to judge! Yet time can be a powerful tool for intention.

If we live thoughtfully and intentionally we move into a place in consciousness from where we may control time and so bend it to our will. From here we can create the future world we intend and so leave behind the prison of the past. Instead of spending all our substance on mending the past, with its powerful undertow, we might put it towards the future we all wish to see – through an expanding empathy which moves outward to embrace the inner purpose guiding each part of the life we share. We can look forward to the revelations of a new civilisation of harmony, dynamic interaction through right relations and the nurturing of the constructive talents of each and every human, animal, plant, mineral and all the many forms that comprise the Life of our planet. No matter how great or small is the participant in that life, each in their own way carries the DNA of our beautiful Earth and is a custodian and an access point to the blueprint of this vast, complex synthesis that is the expression of a living planet.

Our planetary home is a living organism rhythmically swept with forces which are harnessed through patterns of intention to form the diverse expressions. Just so, in microcosm, our bodies grow, form, renew and develop capacities all of which absorb the coordinated living of the many different parts, cells, atoms of which it is made – living, dying, being re-made from the great reservoir of substance in response to intention and plan. In the early 1930’s the Tibetan Master wrote: “…during the coming Aquarian Age. Science will … have penetrated a little further into the field of intangible yet real phenomena; it will have discovered … that the dense and concrete do not exist; it will know that there is but one substance, present in nature in varying degrees of density and of vibratory activity, and that this substance is impelled by urgent purpose and expressive of divine intent.” [Esoteric Psychology Vol I, p xxiii]

Just as we have discovered a unified field of substance, so also we might find a unified field of consciousness and both directed by Spirit as it works out Its intention, evolving ever surely into expression through our planet. We may think of consciousness in terms of its content or what is held there depending on its context. And so we may speak of a human consciousness or an animal consciousness or a God consciousness but these are the colourings of different grades spilled into the limpid pool – spreading out, clarifying and refining until one might see through to the Life at the heart of all. The Tibetan explains:

“The two factors which are of major importance, during manifestation, are the evolving consciousness and the manifesting life. …each stage upon the way can be seen whole as a kingdom in nature. Each of these kingdoms carries the consciousness aspect forward to a greater stage of perfection, and demonstrates a greater sensitivity and responsiveness to outer and inner environing conditions, than does the preceding kingdom. Each manifests a fuller revelation of the inner and hidden glory. When, however, a unit of life is immersed in form, and when the consciousness is identified (in time and space) with any particular form, it is not possible for it to realise its divinity or to express it consciously. Its psychology is that of the partial and the particular, and not that of the universal and the whole. The greater and closer the identification with the form aspect, the greater is the lower unity and synthesis, but at the same time, the greater the darkness and, speaking symbolically, the denser is the prison. Such is the consciousness in the lower or subhuman kingdoms in nature. The more the unit of life is identified with ‘the one who is conscious’, the greater again is the higher, yet different, unity and synthesis. Such also is the consciousness of the three higher kingdoms, the superhuman. The tragedy, the problem and the glory of man is that he can identify himself with both aspects—the form and the life; and his psychological state is such that during the period wherein he forms part of the human kingdom (his kingdom) his consciousness fluctuates between these pairs of opposites. He can identify himself with the subhuman forms, and this he invariably does in the early stages. He can identify himself with the life aspect, and this he does in the final stages. In the midway stage of the average man, he is torn violently between both, and is himself the battle-ground. … Paralleling this development of the consciousness in man is the evolution of the instruments whereby that consciousness is brought en rapport with a rapidly expanding world of sensory perception, of intellectual concepts and of intuitive recognitions. … the consciousness shifts from one body to another and its range of contacts, therefore, steadily expands” [Esoteric Psychology Vol II p 248 – 250, 338]

And Then: “It is difficult for us to grasp the significance of the consciousness and the activity of the mineral kingdom, for it is so far removed from our own. It is hard for us really to understand, with our seeing consciousness, the fact that, for instance, our nails and teeth and bony structure have a consciousness and an intelligent awareness that is the same in kind, though differing in degree, as that of the eye or of a sensory nerve. But so it is. As we approach the forms of life which approximate the living tissue of our animal bodies, our appreciation of resemblance and of identical possibilities increases step by step. It is only by arguing from analogy that we grasp esoteric truth, and it might bring us some illumination if we realised that there are higher forms of life and consciousness in the cosmos who find it as difficult to throw their consciousness down into the animal forms of humanity as we would find it hard to project ourselves into the consciousness of an iron ploughshare. But again, so it is.” [Esoteric Psychology I p 232]

Thoughts are subtle forms and are therefore organic responses to intention through the receptivity of consciousness. They are created from the thought substance of the mental plane. As with other forms their quality depends on the sustenance with which we nurture them. It has been said that “we are what we eat” and the same can be applied to all aspects of our form life as we evolve into greater glory, beauty and beneficence. We are told: “‘Eye hath not seen nor ear heard’ the things which God will reveal to those who tread the way to the innermost centre, to those who love.” [The Rays and the Initiations p 328]

Let us keep holding the door open to the future and take the time to adjust our vision to the brighter light before unleashing the powerful forces of manifestation on briefly glimpsed and ill-understood phantoms of what might be, based on past experience. The new world is new in such vastly different ways that our field of consciousness, waiting to receive it, must be quite still in order to clearly reflect its image so that we can apprehend it. In the organic unfolding of our world all forms are transitory – temporary homes of a changing moment’s need – their substance recycling and carrying the gifts imbued by each life-cycle of learning, growing and relating. As Anne Michaels writes in Fugitive Pieces:

“It's no metaphor to feel the influence of the dead in the world, just as it's no metaphor to hear the radiocarbonchronometer, the Geiger counter amplifying the faint breathing of rock, fifty thousand years old. (Like the faint thump from behind the womb wall.) It is no metaphor to witness the astonishing fidelity of minerals magnetized, even after hundreds of millions of years, pointing to the magnetic pole, minerals that have never forgotten magma whose cooling off has left them forever desirous. We long for place; but place itself longs. Human memory is encoded in air currents and river sediment. Eskers of ash wait to be scooped up, lives reconstituted. How many centuries before the spirit forgets the body? How long will we feel our phantom skin buckling over rockface, our pulse in magnetic lines of force? How many years pass before the difference between murder and death erodes?…Grief requires time. If a chip of stone radiates its self, its breath, so long, how stubborn might be the soul. If sound waves carry on to infinity, where are their screams now? I imagine them somewhere in the galaxy, moving forever towards the psalms.”

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