September 2009 Sydney Goodwill Newsletter

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Dear Friends,

United Nations International Day of Peace – Monday 21st September

Sydney Peace / Prayer Vigil - “Let Peace Prevail on Earth”
Martin Place Plaza, 6am to 8pm on Monday, 21st September

People of many different spiritual and cultural traditions will celebrate, meditate and pray for Peace on Earth – a giant screen will highlight a 4pm video link up with the Italian city of Assisi – special screening of Soldiers of Peace at 6pm. Please join in at any time during the day for meditation, prayer, presentation, music and dance.

Global Meditation Vigil for a Culture of Peace

Download an invitation or visit www.intuition-in-service.org/peaceVigil.cfm.

From every part of the planet there will be a pulse of invocative energy from meditators, a rhythmic call to divinity for the light, the love and the spiritual will needed to enable humanity to bring to birth a culture of peace. Remember this initiative will be just one small part of a much wider concentration of prayers and meditations for peace from spiritual and faith based groups in all parts of the world.

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The United Nations Special Days return us each year to a re-invigoration of the aspiration and striving towards the desire of the human heart, our future vision, and bring us closer to that divine intention which ultimately sweeps all into forward motion. On 21st September the annual heartbeat of the global day honouring Peace impulses a creative view of the coming culture of peace. At this time of the year we find half of the world entering the withdrawal into Autumn with its months of gestation for the re-birth of Spring; and the other half bursting forth as the life, nurtured through the darker months, springs into the world with renewed potency. Together they express the whole cycle of life and unfold the beauty and magic of the central Heart in Whom we live and move and have our being and by whose cyclic beat the world is constantly renewed. Re-birth brings freshness, purity and re-empowerment – as revealed to St John: “Behold, I make all things new.”

It may seem that we must first learn about peace by what it is not – moving down the blind alleys of life’s surface maze then retracing our steps in order to explore yet another direction until inexorably and in spite of all our miss-directions and misunderstandings we are guided towards the central heart from which we all find place in the common and shared purpose, intention and endeavour. There is constant return, constant re-birth and a purification through experience and the cyclic return to the purity of the divine source. In The Winter Vault, by Anne Michaels a character speaks of the cyclic recreation of the Ise Temple in Japan sacred to Shinto belief:

“…Two clearings lie next to each other in the midst of dense Cryptomeria; the forest itself is considered holy. One clearing is covered with shining white pebbles. In the other clearing stands the Ise temple. Every twenty years, for almost three millennia, the temple has been dismantled and burned and a new, identical temple erected in the clearing next to it. Then the empty site is covered in white pebbles and only a single post remains, hidden in a small wooden hut; this is the sacred pillar that will be used to rebuild the temple when its turn comes again, twenty years later. The temple is not considered a replica, instead it has been recreated. This distinction is essential. It is a Shinto belief that a temple must not be a monument but must live and die in nature, like all life, and continually be reborn in order to remain pure.”

We can be so conditioned to thinking of progress, of striving, as action or something to be done in a linear direction towards a known and desired outcome, but real progress or growth is a rhythmic expansion. It is a deeper opening out to perceive something greater, a listening that focuses beyond all we have previously known and yet which is there all around us, hovering just beyond the familiar, ready to emerge and so much greater than all that has come before. We might focus specific moments in time – minutes, days, years, generations, ages – and yet they are all present and interwoven in the now, the meeting point of the future with all that has gone before. Yet it often seems that a false sense of separation keeps building and maintaining walls in our minds or layers of limitation between things which, in reality, are interacting and intertwined through space and time.

Every interaction is an exchange with the whole of life no matter what the external point of connection might seem to be. Any particular moment we might experience is a moving point within a greater impulse containing many moments. We may think it has its own independent dynamic just as a compartment in a speeding train may appear to be a whole world in itself yet may emerge at the next station in a new context where apparently fixed relationships dissolve and reform with new and completely unforeseen connections.

When we realise that everything in time and space is a fluid point in the emerging perfection at its centre, judgment is no longer valid – there is only a sense of the unfolding life and of bearing witness through our own constantly expanding consciousness. In Agni Yoga verse 123 records: “Said Solomon, ‘I shall set thee at the crossroad and make thee silent and motionless. Before thee will pass the signs of events. Thou shalt restrain thy human curiosity, and thus shalt thou peer into the predestined flow of the current. For beyond human thought is borne universal thought.’ Thus, observe the flow of events as though you were counting sheep from the top of a tower.”

The future unfolds through the expanding consciousness we share. In Telepathy and the Etheric Vehicle the Tibetan Master clarifies: “We speak of an expanding universe; what we really mean is an expanding consciousness” (page 179). In Agni Yoga verse 122 addresses the creative power of thought:

“That a situation is without solution is only imagined by those who would rely on other people rather than upon the power of their own thought. Grief experienced by others flows like the ripples of a stream; but the images of Truth, which you call ideas, rule the karma of the world. It is astonishing to see how images of Truth participate in the spatial battle. While the multitudes disintegrate in a blind fury of ignorance and betrayal, the thoughts of Truth weave their heavenly nests, which for real evolution are far more vital than any worship by entire nations.

You understand both the work of reality and the work of Maya. Spatial thought is reality, while what people generally pay attention to is Maya. Bear in mind that each of Us could grieve over the low level of those on Earth; but this would have no effect on the evolutionary plan because it is thought that creates. Images of Truth provide to each body, whether it be evolving or disintegrating, new possibilities for flight to higher spheres. Each Teacher of life bases His power only upon images of Truth, and creates the future by His thought, not by the consciousness of the crowd.

The ashes of past fires may dim the vision, but the fires of new images of Truth glow in the Infinite. When we have transcended the narrow boundaries of ethnicity and nationality, is it not all the same to us which planet is nurtured by spatial thought? The only important thing is that the thought be filled with a realization of the Common Good. Then the crosscurrents of nations will not distract the eye that is directed toward the inevitable evolution.

Reverence for the dwelling place of the Teacher should not be reverence for the soil, or for temple rituals, but for the igniting of justice in space.

We often exhausted Ourselves in improving the condition of humanity, but do not regret having sent even one evolutionary thought. These thoughts take root and flourish like an enchanted garden; and as magically invisible are the workers in this garden. Know how to direct your thought to the Common Good and We will always be with you.

Let us end with a legend: "Let us look at the stars. We were told that the vessel of Wisdom poured its contents from out of Tushita, and the drops of the miraculous draft became aglow in space. But the Teacher said, 'Thus glow the tips of the arrows of thought, because thought pierces the radiant substance and creates worlds.'"

Creative thought, do not cease to adorn space with thy flowers of light!”

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