Freda Bedi, by Wikipedia

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Re: Freda Bedi, by Wikipedia

Postby admin » Mon Apr 15, 2019 8:01 am

Grant Funding for the Tibetan Exile Community Thanks to USAID
by Tenzin Samten
Contact: A Digest of Tibetan Issues, News and Community Information
October 5, 2016

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

YOU ARE REQUIRED TO READ THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE AT THIS LINK BEFORE YOU READ THE FOLLOWING WORK, THAT IS AVAILABLE SOLELY FOR PRIVATE STUDY, SCHOLARSHIP OR RESEARCH PURSUANT TO 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107 AND 108. IN THE EVENT THAT THE LIBRARY DETERMINES THAT UNLAWFUL COPYING OF THIS WORK HAS OCCURRED, THE LIBRARY HAS THE RIGHT TO BLOCK THE I.P. ADDRESS AT WHICH THE UNLAWFUL COPYING APPEARED TO HAVE OCCURRED. THANK YOU FOR RESPECTING THE RIGHTS OF COPYRIGHT OWNERS.


The United States Agency for Information Development (USAID) has awarded a grant of US $23 million (£18m) to the Central Tibetan Administration (CTA). The grant is to strengthen self-reliance and resilience in Tibetan communities in South Asia and will be paid over the next five years (October 2016 – September 2012).

The funding originates with the United States government and is being routed through USAID. It will be used mainly to fund improved livelihood for Tibetan refugees, and for leadership development.

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Dr Lobsang Sangay, Sikyong or Tibetan Prime Minister

Dr Lobsang Sangay, the Sikyong, or Prime Minister of the Tibetan Government-in-Exile said in a press conference that for improving livelihood the grant will be used for, “integrated development projects, non-banking financial cooperation and maintaining cultural aspects of Tibetan communities which are very important”.

For the leadership component, Dr Sangay said, “It’s essentially building human resources and capacities of Tibetan people as a whole. Our focus is on CTA and staff at the moment”. He explained that the CTA has already started two to three week training courses for senior CTA staff and that this will continue.

Sikyong said the first year will be mainly for assessment and the remaining four years will be about actual implementation of the new initiatives. He requested that all Tibetans take part in the assessment programmes so that their concerns, aspirations and proposed projects can be considered.

In addition to support for developments for health and education and for the sustainability of Tibetan settlements, funds will be allotted to building community libraries with wifi, community workshop centres and playgrounds.

USAID is the lead United States Government agency that works to end extreme global poverty and enable resilient, democratic societies to realise their potential.
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Re: Freda Bedi, by Wikipedia

Postby admin » Tue Apr 16, 2019 2:14 am

Lucis Trust, Alice Bailey, World Goodwill and the False Light of the World
by Terry Melanson
© 2001 (Last Update: May 8th, 2005)

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

YOU ARE REQUIRED TO READ THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE AT THIS LINK BEFORE YOU READ THE FOLLOWING WORK, THAT IS AVAILABLE SOLELY FOR PRIVATE STUDY, SCHOLARSHIP OR RESEARCH PURSUANT TO 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107 AND 108. IN THE EVENT THAT THE LIBRARY DETERMINES THAT UNLAWFUL COPYING OF THIS WORK HAS OCCURRED, THE LIBRARY HAS THE RIGHT TO BLOCK THE I.P. ADDRESS AT WHICH THE UNLAWFUL COPYING APPEARED TO HAVE OCCURRED. THANK YOU FOR RESPECTING THE RIGHTS OF COPYRIGHT OWNERS.


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Lucis Trust Logo

Alice Ann Bailey, a leading disciple of the Russian theosophist Madame Helena Blavatsky, formed the Lucifer Publising Company in 1920. 1922 saw the organization's name changed to Lucis Trust though the advancement of the Luciferian beliefs remained true. Beliefs that in Blavatsky's words: “oppose the materialism of science and every dogmatic theology, especially the Christian, which the Chiefs of the Society regard as particularly pernicious.”

Lucis Trust promulgates the work of an "Ascended Master" who was working 'through' Alice Bailey for some 30 years. The Lucis Trust Publishing Company and their many fronts and organizations worship an "Externalized Hierarchy" of "Ascended Masters," who carry out the work of a Luciferian "master plan" for the establishment of a permanent "Age of Aquarius" ruled by one "Sanat Kumara", the "Lord of the World."

Lucis Trust is a powerful institution that enjoys "Consultative Status" with the United Nations, which permits it to have a close working relationship with the U.N., including a seat on the weekly sessions, but most importantly, influence with powerful business and national leaders throughout the world.

Through its founding of World Goodwill, Lucis Trust is "aggressively involved in promoting a globalist ideology":

Authors and participants in its various conferences read like a Who's Who of globalist insiders. Featured on its website, for example, is the Universal Declaration of Human Responsibilities, put forth in April 1998 as a companion document to the notorious UN Universal Declaration on Human Rights. Signatories to the World Goodwill document include: Helmut Schmidt, former chancellor of West Germany; Malcolm Fraser, former Australian prime minister; Oscar Arias Sanchez, former prime minister of Costa Rica; Shimon Peres; Robert McNamara; Paul Volcker; and Jimmy Carter.

... it is as much a political organization as an occult religious one.

- New Age Roots, by Steve Bonta


Lucis Trust is run through an international board of trustees whose membership is said to have included: John D. Rockefeller; Norman Cousins; Robert S. McNamara; Thomas Watson, Jr. (IBM, former U.S. Ambassador to Moscow); Henry Clausen, Grand Commander of the Supreme Council, 33rd Degree, Southern District Scottish Rite and Henry Kissinger. This would then tie Bailey's influential occult organization into the international conspiracy of elitists, including the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the Bilderbergs, and the Trilateral Commission.

I've been able to confirm some of these connections through Lucis Trust's involvement in the Windsor International Bank and Trust Company, where on its site, the Windsor Bank plainly states that its “a Member of, Advisor to, Affiliate of, Friend of, Benefactor of, or Contributor to, the following Organizations, to name several:”

• International Fund For Development
• The Hall Family Foundation
• The Rockefeller Foundation
• WHO/Habitat For Humanity
• The Lucis Trust (NGO); United Nations
• National Resources Defense Council
• Capital Missions Company
• Investors Circle
• The Coca-Cola Foundation
• Fellowship For International Education
• International Monetary Agency
• International Center For Educational Advancement
• Christian Children's Fund (Worldwide)
• BAMPAC (Black America's Political Action) • Fellowship For Reconciliation
• National Institute For the Advancement Of Science
• International Association For Environmental Cooperation
• World Wildlife Federation
• Council On Foreign Relations (CFR)
• CARICOM
• NAFTA
• MERCOSOR
• Council Of Emerging Nations
• Freedom Communications, Inc.
• The European Institute (Foreign Affairs Magazine)
• United Nations Association of The USA
• The NAACP (National Association of Colored People)
• The Royal Heritage Charitable Relief Fund

IMPORTANT DEVELOPMENT: After I posted this discovery, the Windsor Bank promptly changed their page and deleted all traces of the connections which I exposed above. As of this writing they no longer have a web presence. I've been able to salvage a copy – thanks to Google's Cache — of the page as it appeared when I wrote this Lucis Trust expose: Here is the original.

One disturbing aspect is the blatant targeting of children. Lucis Trust directs an activity called Triangles in Education, which is partnered with groups that "make some contribution to the task of laying the foundations for the new education." This, according to Bailey, is part of the overall work of the New Group of World Servers, "a band of obedient workers and servers of the WORD." The word being the teachings of her channeled Master Djwhal Khul, through her voluminous occult works. The word, has also been heeded by the likes of Robert Muller — former assistant Secretary General of the United Nations and winner of the UNESCO Prize for Peace Education in 1989 for his World Core Curriculum. He said, "The underlying philosophy upon which The Robert Muller School is based will be found in the teaching set forth in the books of Alice A. Bailey by the Tibetan teacher, Djwhal Khul."

The Overshadowing

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Alice Bailey

Alice Bailey was born on June 16th, 1880 in the city of Manchester, England. She was raised in an orthodox christian family which she would say later, made her very unhappy and a bad tempered little girl. "Life was not worth living," she said, and the feeling of worthlessness, and a certain amount of curiosity about life and death led her to attempt suicide three times before she was even fifteen.

At the age of fifteen her first mystical encounter occurred while her family had gone to church. While she was in a room reading, a man wearing a turban on his head suddenly entered her room. Startled, and not being able to say a word —an obvious out of place character in 19th century Manchester — this stranger spoke to her:

“He told me there was some work that it was planned that I could do in the world but that it would entail changing my disposition considerably; I would have to give up being such an unpleasant little girl and must try to get some measure of self-control. My future usefulness to Him and to the world was dependant on how I handled myself and the changes I could manage to make. He said that if I could achieve real self-control I could then be trusted and that I would travel all over the world and visit many countries, "doing your Master's work all the time" ... He added that He would be in touch with me at intervals of seven years apart.”

- Unfinished Autobiography, by Alice Bailey, 1951, Lucis Trust, pp. 35-36


This was to be Alice Bailey's first contact with her Master Koot Humi. These contacts with "Secret Chiefs"; "Familiar Spirits"; "Angels"; and "Ascended Masters" is a common theme in the annals of history and has been the origin of many religious, prophetic and occult movements throughout the centuries. Zoroaster, Mohammed, John Dee, Francis Bacon, Aleister Crowley, Helena Blavatsky, Joseph Smith, Edgar Cayce and Benjamin Creme immediately come to mind.

In 1917, after the breakup of her first marriage she moved to the United States, where she was introduced to the teachings of Theosophy. It was during this period that she had met, and married, her husband Foster Bailey (33rd degree Scottish Rite Freemason). She turned out to be a good pupil, Bailey soon rose through the ranks and became the editor of the American Theosophists' newspaper.

“For the last 125 years, New Age leaders worldwide have followed the false light of Theosophy; they now whisper sweet lies into the itching ears of the powerful — politicians, media moguls, UN officials, foundation grant makers, and Anglican bishops. As the West moves into a post-Christian era, the influence of the New Age movement grows.”

- A Comprehensive Expose of The New Age Movement, by Penn Lee


The encounter with her fated second "Master" — and soon to be writing partner for an international esoteric movement — occurred in 1919, while having a quiet time on a hill close to her house. She heard a note of music sounding everywhere which was followed by a voice (Djwhal Khul) that asked her if she was willing to write some books. Having refused, saying that she wouldn't engage in any psychic practices, the voice gave her three weeks to reconsider. Alice completely forgot about the subject when the voice made its appearance as scheduled. Agreeing to give it a try for a few weeks the first chapters of Initiation, Human and Solar were written. After about a month, Alice got scared; refusing to do anymore work the Master Djwhal Khul told her to discuss it with her Master Koot Humi. Koot Humi confessed that it was, in fact, him that told DK to contact her and he gave Alice permission to proceed — after giving Mrs. Bailey the proper technique for enhanced telepathic communication.

Between 1919 and 1949 (her death), she produced twenty-four books, including an autobiography, nineteen of these books were supposedly written by her Tibetan Master DK (Djwhal Khul). During the intervening years, Alice Bailey spent most of it working out what she referred to as "The Plan." The results of which, influenced the birth of many New Age groups: The Church Universal and Triumphant, Benjamin Creme's The Tara Center, the Robert Muller Schools and The Temple of Understanding, to name a few.

The Networks of 'Light'

Lucis Trust


Fifty years at the United Nations plaza. Currently located on Wall Street in New York. Lucis Trust provides worldwide financial support for the Arcane School, World Goodwill, Triangles, Lucis Publishing, Lucis Productions, Lucis Trust Libraries, and the New Group of World Servers. Maintains the UN meditation room.

The Arcane School

Founded in 1923, the school gives correspondence courses in meditation and the occult from its branches in New York, Geneva, London and Buenos Aires.

World Goodwill

Founded in 1932, the organization is recognized by the United Nations today as an NGO. World Goodwill works directly with the "world federalists," and is part of the work to "Externalize the Hierarchy" of "Illumined Minds," which will usher in an "Age of Maitreya."

Triangles

Founded in 1937, Triangles is the name of a global network of cells, whose members pray a "Great Invocation," especially on the full moon, when members of Triangle can be influenced by the astrological signs of the Zodiac.

We haven't even scratched the surface yet on the influence of Bailey and her Master's teachings. Let's look at a comparison by two writers who talk about Lucis Trust's World Goodwill, which when compared, illustrate both sides of Lucis' agenda; the manipulation of politics towards a New World Order, and the manipulation through occult means to manifest the "Plan" of the "Hierarchy".

From Dark Majesty, by Texe Marrs, pp. 139-40

The Secret Brotherhood has developed the social and political art of networking to a fine science. World Goodwill, in its newsletter of 1986, No. 2, listed a number of groups that have participated in its World Service Forum. Such groups include those that are connected with World Goodwill's centers in London, New York, and Geneva. The list is absolutely mind-boggling in its scope. In London, groups that have actively participated include the United Nations Association, the Teilhardt Center, the International Broadcasting Trust, the Buddhist Society, the Scientific and Medical Network, St. James' Church (Piccadilly), Emerson College , International Health Research Network, Habitat International Council, the Schumacher Society, the New Economics Foundation, World Health Organization, Peace Through Unity, the British Holistic Medical Association, the World Wildlife Fund, and World College.

In New York, World Goodwill gives credit to the following organizations for their involvement in its work: the Earth Society Foundation, Clergy and Laity Concerned, Waldorf Education, UNICEF, Emmaus, Hale House, the United Nations Association, the Peace Corps, the US Mission of the United Nations, the Better World Society (CNN founder Ted Turner's group), the Foundation for Global Broadcasting, Fellowship and Prayer, the Institute for Cultural Affairs, Physicians for Social Responsibility, the Bank for Social Responsibility, Habitat for Humanity, The Christophers, the Institute for Community Economics, Women's World Banking, Tibetan Buddhist Learning Center, Environmental Action Coalition, the Catholic Worker, the Nicholas Roerich Museum, the International Center for Integrated Studies, the Sri Aurobindo Society, and the Mead Institute for Human Development.

In Geneva, Switzerland, we find the following groups to be participants in the programs of World Goodwill: The International Commission of Jurists, Pax Christi International, Transnational Prospectives, Amnesty International, the United Nations University for Peace, and the Bureau for Affairs of Non-Governmental Organizations of the United Nations Organization.


From Target: Faith and Freedom

World Goodwill is a non-governmental organization (NGO) accredited with the United Nations while its parent, Lucis Trust, enjoys the prestigious "consultative status" afforded those non-governmental organizations on the roster of the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC). Increasingly, powerful deep pocket NGO's, which are neither elected nor accountable, are received as the voice of "civil society." Those NGO's, which the United Nations selectively elevates to "consultative status," are called upon by ECOSOC as advisors representative of civil society. Both World Goodwill and Lucis Trust are engaged in Earth Charter advocacy. World Goodwill's spirituality is patently pagan. The following declaration is taken from their promotional material.

"During both the full moon and new moon periods there is there is a similar emphasis on the work of energy distribution in meditation .... we consciously align with the rhythmic pattern of energy flow each month, we become a part of a planetary meditative process carried forward at all levels of consciousness and with great creative potential for anchoring the seeds of the coming the coming civilization and the germ of the new culture."

If World Goodwill so unblushingly advocates neo-pagan meditative practices, its overt promotion of an occult "plan" for the governing of the universe is nothing short of chilling:

"There is an inner government of the planet known under such different names as the spiritual Hierarchy, the society of Illumined Minds, or Christ and his Church, according to various religious traditions. Humanity is never left without spiritual guidance or direction under the Plan... The widespread expectation that we approach the "age of Maitreya," as it is known in the East, when the World Teacher and present head of the spiritual Hierarchy, the Christ, will reappear among humanity to sound the keynote of the new age.... There are millions of mentally alert men and women in all parts of the world who are on rapport with the Plan and work to give it expression. They are people in whom the consciousness of humanity as one interdependent unit is alive and active... These beliefs give a new dimension to spiritual reality .... They provide opportunity for cooperation with the spiritual evolution of humanity... there is no group so likely to ensure that humanity achieves this most difficult goal as the men and women of goodwill .... requiring only courage... to initiate action to prepare for the New World Order."


In considering the above information one can't help but wonder whether these organizations, which are aligned with Lucis Trust, believe in the "Plan", as World Goodwill put it, "to initiate action to prepare for the new world order." I believe that they do, and it is my intention to prove that conviction throughout this site. And specifically, that it is a spiritual plan — a plan that, if giving a thorough evaluation from their own writings, can be seen as nothing less than satan's attempt to implement a totalitarian demonic throne upon the earth, and humanity's forced worship through Luciferic Rites. For "when the Great One appears," Master Djwhal Khul said 'through' Alice Bailey, "he will take the Mysteries Religion preserved by Freemasonry and make them public."

Lucis Trust has truly become a powerhouse for the New Age ideal; the transformation of society by, and through, occult initiatory means. The respect that Bailey's teachings receive, and the reverence for her Master, is without equal. She has successfully pulled the wool over the eyes of many concerning the true meaning and source of her teachings. What exactly is the teaching and message delivered by her Master? This will be the subject examined in part two.

The Secret Doctrine

In the occult Satan (or Lucifer) has traditionally been associated with the sun, the harbinger of spiritual light. Esoteric philosophy teaches that it is this "great being", not the God of the Old Testament, that was the true redeemer and benefactor of mankind in the Garden of Eden.

There's a few works in the occult that have stood the test of time, and have become "bibles" in their own right. These are revered and studied by all seekers on "the Path". The works of Aleister Crowley, Alice Bailey, Gurdjieff, Ouspensky, Albert Pike, Manly P. Hall, Benjamin Creme, Castaneda, Kenneth Grant, Eliphas Levi and many others laying a foundation of pre-packaged self-enlightenment.

Some claim to be revealing great esoteric knowledge past down through sects, and orders long forgotten. Other works claim to be channeled from "Secret Chiefs" or "Ascended Masters." I offer these quotes from Blavatsky's The Secret Doctrine in order to show the, typical, reversal philosophy espoused. Blavatsky's philosophy also serve to illustrate where Bailey first encountered her heretical views in the first place. As we will see in part two, Mme. Blavatsky taught her pupil well - their spiritual philosophies are virtually identical.

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Adam and Eve, Serpent in the Garden

Once the key to Genesis is in our hands it is the scientific and symbolic Kabbala which unveils the secret. The Great Serpent of the Garden of Eden and the "Lord God" are identical ...

Stand in awe of him, and sin not, speak his name with trembling ... It is Satan who is the god of our planet and the only god ...

When the Church, therefore, curses Satan, it curses the cosmic reflection of God ...

In this case it is but natural ... to view Satan, the Serpent of Genesis as the real creator and benefactor, the Father of Spiritual mankind.

For it is he who was the "Harbinger of Light," bright radiant Lucifer, who opened the eyes of automaton (Adam) created by Jehovah, as alleged; and he who was first to whisper, "In the day yea eat there of, ye shall be as Elohim, knowing good and evil" -- can only be regarded in the light of a Saviour. An "adversary" to Jehovah ... he still remains in esoteric truth the ever loving "Messenger"... who conferred on us spiritual instead of physical immortality ...

Satan, or Lucifer, represents the active ... "Centrifugal Energy of the Universe" in a cosmic sense ... Fitly is he ... and his adherents ... consigned to the "sea of fire," because it is the Sun ... the fount of life in our system, where they are petrified ... and churned up to re-arrange them for another life; that Sun which, as the origin of the active principle of our Earth, is at once the Home and the Source of the Mundane Satan ...

- The Secret Doctrine, Volume I, page 414, Vol II, pgs. 234, 235, 243, 245


One has to keep in mind, where this heresy originated. Blavatsky claimed to have 'received' it from disembodied spirits called "Secret Chiefs." These "Inter dimensional", or demonic, beings seem to be appealing directly to the intellect. Our intelligence, after all, is a thing of great pride, isn't it? And where would we be, had it not been for the "benefactor," the Serpent of Old. Then the obvious conclusion would have Jehovah being the "Adversary." This twisted sensibility is very appealing to those who practice the occult. It also shows that in the end, when all the cards are laid on the table, its ALWAYS about that one selfish being, already condemned, and hell bent on bringing mankind with him.

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Alice Bailey & Master Djwhal Khul: A Satanic Communion
by Terry Melanson
© 2001 (Last Update: May 7th, 2005)

“Preparation too must be given to the developing of higher psychic powers...Hospitals and schools will appear under the direct guidance of the Masters; Teachers... will train the minds of the pupils to be responsive to direct inspiration from above. ”

- The Externalization of the Hierarchy, pp. 516-517


As we have seen in part one, Lucis Trust is, today, intimately connected with Elite Politics through its World Goodwill. We haven't yet, however, examined the occult teachings of Bailey as they were related by her Master Djwhal Khul. Her 24 books, combined with the Beacon magazine, Triangles, and the Arcane School indoctrinate students into what Bailey describes as the "Ageless Wisdom" teachings. The Arcane School, founded in 1922, boasted 20,000 graduates by 1954. This occult university is more active than ever and continues to be the main training ground for New Age disciples.

The bulk of these occult teachings, in Bailey's books, are from her channeled Tibetan master Djwhal Khul (DK); the "Plan" according to the Hierarchy of Ascended Masters. Through a series of group-initiations and group-meditative techniques the Hierarchy directs the "New Group of World Servers" to implement a "New World Religion" of which humanity as a whole can aid the "will of the planetary logos". "Emphasis should be laid on the evolution of humanity," so says Master DK through Bailey, "with particular attention to its goal, perfection. (The Externalization of the Hierarchy, p. 588)" The objective is "the helping of the Great Ones and the rendering to Them of that intelligent assistance which will make Their plans for humanity materialize." (Ibid., p. 516)

One way to "materialize" the Hierarchy's plan for humanity is through Lucis Trust's Triangle networks. Their goal is the practice of occult meditation "the science of energy flow and energy relationships." Lucis Trust states that "occult meditation is a means of consciously and purposefully directing energy from a recognized source to the creation of some specific effect." (Source) International participants "sit quietly for a few minutes and link mentally with other members of their triangle, or triangles. They invoke the energies of light and goodwill, visualizing theses energies as circulating through the three focal points of each triangle and pouring through the networks of triangles surrounding the planet. At the same time they repeat the Great Invocation." (Source)

Her 30 year telepathic connection to Master DK was what some would un-hesitantly call demonic possession. Her husband Foster Bailey said, "During the long course of the work the minds of the Tibetan and A.A.B [Alice Ann Bailey] became so closely attuned that they were in effect — so far as much of the production of the teaching was concerned — a joint single projecting mechanism." (The introduction to Cosmic Fire) The technique is called in the occult the "overshadowing" — a euphemism for demonic possession, or as Bailey liked to call it "the science of impression". Moreover, the Hierarchy has "overshadowed" many in the intervening years up to the close of the century — the growing modern practice of channeling and psychic astral projection bears out this prediction of a half century ago:

“These methods of overshadowing will largely be the ones used by the Great Lord and his Masters at the end of the century, and for this reason They are sending into incarnation, in every country, disciples who have the opportunity offered them to respond to the need of training men and woman to recognize the higher psych ism, and the true inspiration and mediumship, and to do this scientifically. In fifty years time, the need for true psychics and conscious mediums (such as H.P.B., for instance [Helena Petrova Blavatsky]) will be very great if the Masters' plans are to be carried through to fruition, and the movement must be set on foot in preparation for the coming of Him for Whom all nations wait.”

- A Treatise on Cosmic Fire, pp. 757-758


Ten Seed Groups

Early on, Master DK informed Bailey of the Hierarchy's plan for "The Ten Seed-Groups". These seed-groups were to infiltrate all sectors of society, and be "esoterically anchored" with "new approaches to divinity." I have no doubt that today's New Age Movement is the result of the Hierarchy's "scattering of the seed", as Bailey put it, and that today's, arguably, open pagan society can largely be traced to this occult "plan". The Ten Seed Groups were "embryonic, like germinating seed". Through their occult practices these ten groups would work directly "under inspiration from the Hierarchy via the focused minds of the group." From Alice Bailey's Discipleship in the New Age - Volume I, p. 35-40, The Ten Seed-Groups consist of, and carry out their mission in following ways (excerpts from THE NEW GROUP OF WORLD SERVERS, emphasis mine):

1) Telepathic Communicators

Summary of Work


Telepathic communication from soul to soul through: from mind to mind through integration; between humanity and Hierarchy (inner government of the planet) through Science of impression.

2) Trained Observers

Summary of Work


Dissipation of world glamour, illusion and maya through illumination.

3) Magnetic Healers

Summary of Work


Through "magnetic living". Through laws of life — laws of health and right human relationships. Through continuity of consciousness.

4) Educators in the New Age

Summary of Work


Education through inflow of the light of knowledge into "instinctual man". — Through inflow of the light of the wisdom into "intelligent man". Through applied knowledge, expressed wisdom and occult understanding in "spiritual man".

5) Political Organizers

Summary of Work


International understanding through communication of the divine (political) Will into races and nations, **linking the department of the Manu (the Ruler of the human race) with men.**

6) Workers in the Field of Religion

Summary of Work


Through transcendental mysticism. Through transcendental occultism. Through transcendental religion.

7) Scientific Servers

Summary of Work


Through development of new hypotheses to substantiate the next step forward. Through sensitive reaction to spiritual energies and forces. Through release of energy to relate spirit and matter and precipitate the divine Plan.

8) Psychologists

Summary of Work


Through relationship of the human kingdom to the sub-human and the super-human kingdom. Through a study of the divine Plan for the five kingdoms of nature.

9) Financiers and Economists

Summary of Work


Through a study of the nature of prana or etheric energy. — Through study of deflection of this form of concretized energy into constructive channels and "ways of light". — Through study of the law of supply and demand.

10) Creative Workers

Summary of Work


Through linking life and form. Through philosophical relationship of synthesis and the Plan.

Truly an occult conspiracy of the highest kind, and worrisome at the very least for anyone — both Christian and non-believers alike. When you factor in what I've shown in part one — Lucis Trust's influence over international elite politics — it's downright chilling! The most revealing part of the seed-groups is the fact that the political organizers link "the department of the Manu (the Ruler of the human race) with men". The Bible already tells us that "the ruler of the human race" is Satan (John 12:31 & 14:30; Ephesians 6:12; Luke 4:6-7; 2 Cor. 4), then it follows that "the department of Manu" must be but another name for the deceiver. This is indeed the case. In Frontier Science/Social Change, Paul Von Ward relates, "Hermetic Principles...comprise part of a body of knowledge allegedly given to humans by an advanced being more than 5,000 years ago. He has been known by various names, including Thoth or Seth in Egypt, Manu in India, Hermes in Greece, and Lucifer or Satan in the Judeo-Christian tradition."

Idolatrous Incantation

Invocation


a formula for conjuring

Mantra

a mystical formulation of invocation or incantation

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Oct. 1982. Full page advertisement in Reader's Digest

As mentioned before, the Great Invocation is sounded while the Triangle networks of "light workers" meditate to cause the "energy flow" of the Hierarchy to enter and influence humanity. The present version, giving in 1945 and shown above, was the third installment of a series of Invocations giving to Bailey by Djwhal Khul.

According to Lucis Trust, "The Great Invocation if given widespread distribution, can be to THE NEW WORLD RELIGION what the Lord's prayer has been to Christianity." The wording was intentional, so that Christians would not become suspicious. In Discipleship in the New Age II, p.165 we find, "I [Djwhal Khul] have so worded and rendered the Invocation [so] that the Christian world, through its churches, may not find it impossible to use." This represents a calculated deception on DK's part. On pp. 150 and 156, we learn: "It can be so presented to the masses everywhere, the general public, will be prompted to take it up and will use it widely... The meaning of this Invocation has been expressed in terms which are understandable, in a measure, to the average person because of its familiar wording, based on many Scriptural terms. But the true inner implications and significances are... not superficially apparent... They mean one thing to the ordinary man...; they mean another thing to the man upon the Probationary Path...; these words mean still another thing to the disciple...; to initiates and to the senior Members of the Hierarchy, they convey a still higher and more inclusive significance."

That is indeed the case, and the actual words used are giving a totally opposite meaning when examined under the light of Biblical Scripture, and compared point for point with Bailey's writings (she often quotes scripture — the interpretations of which are giving by her channeled Master). See Ph.D Robert A Herrmann's web page A Modern Manifestation of Absolute Evil for his paper called A Scientific Analysis of the Writings of Alice A. Bailey and their Applications for a treatment in DK's (Bailey's) deception. For instance:

• Light = Luciferian Enlightenment
• God = Satan
• stream forth = overshadow
• love = various forms of Scripturally defined evil or, generally hatred.
• Christ = Antichrist
• little wills of men = the claimed unintelligent, weak and inferior desires of individuals; especially those that follow conservative Judeo-Christian doctrine.
• purpose = to prepare for the appearance of the Antichrist
• Masters = demons or demon controlled individuals.
• race of men = "humanity" as ruled by Lucifer
• plan = complete domination in preparation for and after the appearance of the Antichrist.
• seal the door where evil dwells = violent, if necessary, eradication of those that follow Judaism, conservative Christianity, some liberal Christianity, and other similar orthodox religions. [note: this is so because of the "separativeness" of these religious views. Djwhal Khul calls this evil, and that it must be eradicated for the Hierarchy's plans of the New Age-New World Religion to proceed. In multiple passages DK identifies the Jews and Christians as the spirit of separativeness, i.e., John 14:6, and Exodus 20:3]
• power = often hideous and actual destructive forces.

The Great Invocation has now been translated into 50 languages and is the mantra of the New Age. It has even received the attention of world dignitaries at the UN where it has been sounded at many official conferences and during the opening ceremonies in 1992 at the UN's Earth Summit in Rio. During a talk given by Ida Urso at a Lucis Trust Arcane School conference in 1995, the connections between the UN and the Great Invocation were explained: "It is no coincidence that we are celebrating both the 50th anniversary of the Great Invocation and the United Nations. Both in different ways are pivotal to the Plan... let us together complete the triangle of light... let us contemplate that world body--'the hope of humanity'--which was conceived just 50 years ago under the impulse of the three spiritual Festivals (falling on March 28th, April 27th and May 26th)... It was on April 25, 1945 two days previous to the full moon of Taurus and the Festival of Wesak [note: the best time to recite the Great Invocation, according to Lucis Trust, as the energies of the Hierarchy are in alignment with the Earth] that delegates from 50 nations, met in San Francisco for a conference known officially as the United Nations Conference on International Organization... On this period the Tibetan Master tells us: 'Not for nothing is this conference being held during the five days of the Wesak Full Moon. It will be a time of supreme difficulty, in which the Forces of Light will face... the forces of selfishness and separativeness.'" It seems the dreaded UN was a spiritual undertaking in alignment with the luciferic light.

Whenever the Invocation is recited, according to Lucis Trust's booklet on the subject, that individual "allies himself with the spiritual Hierarchy," whether he knows it or not. And in Discipleship p. 156, Bailey writes, "it embodies the divine intent and summarizes the conclusions of the thinking of the planetary Logos."

Luciferic Initiation

Some background is necessary on Chakras and the Kundalini, in order to proceed further with this expose.

In Hindu occult practice (the main root of the New Age Movement) there are 7 major centers for kundalini energy. By occult methods using meditation, drugs, visualization, yoga and whatever means necessary, initiates seek to awaken the sleeping fiery serpent (kundalini) for a "higher" state of consciousness.

Image
Kundalini Serpent: Coiled Prana Energy of Kriya Yoga

This kundalini energy is visualized as an entwined serpent which rises from the base of the spine to "enlighten" and eventually dissolve the ego — to become a god incarnate, thereby preventing further incarnation on the physical plane. The New Age disciples believe in reincarnation and are taught by the demonic Hierarchy that this is the only way to stop the endless cycle of Karma — to evolve into Gods...(i.e. Gen. 3:5).

That is the goal and the techniques vary, but as one "ascends" through the 7 progressive chakras, each is an initiation unto a higher consciousness, until finally when you reach the point of union with "Sanat Kumara", "Shiva", "Vishnu", "Lord of the World" or what they most blasphemously call the "Christ Consciousness".

Satan's deception is that through each successive chakra the occult initiate actually does perceive a shift in consciousness, which to him it seems, is a progressive shift. The occultist now feels his contact and psychic telepathy with the Hierarchy getting stronger. As he continues, the initiate invariably reaches a point of no return. There is no turning back and all those doubts he failed to heed — being the "right" path or not — are finally revealed to him...it's too late. They're his! This is called the Luciferic Initiation.

Texe Marrs put it best when he wrote, "These feelings, voiced by so many who have received a Luciferic Initiation, are significant. They point to two inescapable facts: (1) The initiate recognizes that he is coming into close contact with dark, evil forces, and a spirit of fear engulfs him; and (2) after the initiation, his mind is patently altered. This is what New Agers call the Kundalini or Skaktipat experience, technically termed a Paradigm (World-view) Shift." (Mystery Mark of the New Age, p.39)

Bailey's Planetary Logos

For the Greeks the Logos was the divine pattern found in humans. The plural of logic. The Hebrews had a similar view, which they called Dabar. Dabar was also a representation of a divine pattern, and they thought that it could only be found in certain things. An example would be Moses receiving the Word(Logos) from God through the Ten Commandments. It was known as the means through which man can receive the wisdom of God. The Apostle John was aware of this concept, and he used it to appeal to both the Greeks and the Hebrews of his time. "In the beginning was the Word (Logos), and the Word (Logos) was with God...and the Word (Logos) was made flesh, and dwelt among us." (John 1: 1,14) It was a particularly forceful way of teaching the Divinity of Jesus as the Logos. Consequently, this plural aspect in the Logos was to be a defining factor for the Church's teaching of the Trinity.

Jesus has always been the Logos. So when Bailey's teacher and mentor, H.P. Blavatsky, wrote, "...actually the 'Serpent' was the 'Lord God' himself, who, as the Ophis, the Logos, or the bearer-of divine creative wisdom, taught mankind to become creators in their turn...", [1] Christians must have been horrified. Bailey's own "Planetary Logos" carries on in the Luciferic tradition...she didn't call her organization Lucifer Trust for nothing!

SHAMBALLA The Holy City / Will or Power, Purpose, Plan Life Aspect / Ruler: Sanat Kumara, The Lord of the World, The Ancient of Days, Melchizedek / Planetary Head Center, Spiritual Pineal Gland

THE HIERARCHY The New Jerusalem / Love-Wisdom Consciousness Group Unity / Ruler: The Christ, The World Savior / Planetary Heart Center

HUMANITY The City, Standing Foursquare / Active Intelligence Self-Consciousness Creativity / Ruler: Lucifer, Son of the Morning, The Prodigal Son / Planetary Throat Center


And so it is, Alice Bailey's "trinity". Notice that Lucifer is the Ruler of Humanity. He's also identified with something called the "planetary throat center." This is a clue that she is talking about chakras. Lucifer, or rather, luciferic energy is released when the 5th chakra (throat) is awakened. Notice how Sanat (Satan) Kumara is also identified with the "spiritual pineal gland" and "planetary head center", this would correspond to 7th chakra — chakras are also called "energy centers", so Bailey's "Planetary Centers" fits within the chakra teaching, and Bailey calls her Logos "Logoic kundalini."

What's more, each chakra is a Logos unto itself. Bailey says that the "Planetary Logos" is called the First Kumara, "the one Initiator," and "he came to this planet from Venus." [2] An allusion to Lucifer and his traditional association with Venus (Son of the Morning). Elsewhere, she writes that "the goal for the planetary Logos is God Consciousness",[3] and that the "illuminating light of the fifth Logos (Lucifer- 5th throat chakra) is felt at the third initiation." [4] And she makes another statement that the "Venus scheme" was "signalized" by the "Venusian planetary Logos on His fifth chain(chakra)". [5]

Image
Chakras, Throat Chakra, The Beacon

According to Hindu tradition, each chakra center also has its associated color. If you look at the drawing at top-right you can see that the 5th chakra (Lucifer) is given the color blue. Below it is a representation of the throat chakra bathed in its characteristic blue "light." Look familiar? It should! The Reader's Digest full page ad I've shown above also has a blue glow.

In part one I displayed the Lucis Trust logo and it too features this streaming blue light. The New Age Symbol invented by Foster Bailey has a plethora of symbolic imagery. The symbol, according to Lucis Trust, is "set in a limitless field of blue, which signifies the sphere of life expression of our solar logos...superimposed upon the triangle of new age forces is the five pointed star of [Anti]Christ. The Star is blue because it represents as much of the solar quality to which humanity can respond." You can see this symbol on the front cover of Lucis Trust's Beacon Magazine (bottom-right), which also displays the blue light of the "logos".

In Initiation, Human and Solar, Bailey mentions the five-pointed star as the final two initiations and "it descends upon him, merges in him, and he is seen at its center." The five pointed star "blazes forth" and "he enters within the flame." A perfect description of the Luciferic Initiation if there ever was one! This, she says, "puts a man in touch with the center in the Body of the Planetary Logos."

What made me realize the significance of Bailey's blue symbology was a short snippet, almost written in passing, in an e-mail sent to a list that I'm on: "Blue is Masonic Blue Lodge for Blue Light eyes of Horus the "Watcher". The United Nations has Blue Flags and Helmets. Blue is for the Occultic "Blue Lips of Death." It was sent by Pointman (some of you know him), so I knew it was an important part in their secret symbology. As I started checking into it, I realized he was absolutely right, and I had been working on these Lucis Trust pages at the time, which immediately brought the whole thing into perspective.

_______________

Notes:

[1] The Secret Doctrine Vol. 2, p.215
[2] http://www.netnews.org/bk/astrology/astr1264.html
[3] ................../bk/fire/fire1008.html
[4] ................../bk/fire/fire1178.html
[5] See note [2]

“The new world order must meet the immediate need and not be an attempt to satisfy some distant, idealistic vision. The new world order must be appropriate to a world which has passed through a destructive crisis and to a humanity which is badly shattered by the experience. The new world order must lay the foundation for a future world order which will be possible only after a time of recovery, of reconstruction, and of rebuilding.

In the preparatory period for the new world order there will be a steady and regulated disarmament. It will not be optional. No nation will be permitted to produce and organize any equipment for destructive purposes or to infringe the security of any other nation.

The new world order must be appropriate to a world which has passed through a destructive crisis...

We are concerned with only one subject, the ushering in of the new world order.

...the present world order (which is today largely disorder) can be so modified and changed that a new world and a new race of men can gradually come into being. Renunciation and the use of the sacrificial will should be the keynote for the interim period after the war (WWII), prior to the inauguration of the New Age.”

- Alice Bailey: Quotes From Various Works (all 24 books have been electronically indexed and are searchable here)
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Part 1 of 5

In Resonance with the Living Earth: Newsletter 2019 #1
by World Goodwill
https://www.lucistrust.org/world_goodwill
Accessed: 4/15/19

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About World Goodwill

People of goodwill are those who think and act with a measure of loving understanding and of concern for the well-being of all. The energy of goodwill is potentially a powerful force for social change – yet its power remains largely unrecognized and underutilized. World Goodwill fosters understanding of this energy and the role it is playing in the development of a new humanity.

It is the thoughtful, planned action of networks of goodwill that is driving the response to all the problems of our age: from poverty, poisoned race relations and environmental destruction through to sentimental spirituality, despair in thinking about the future, and the crises of materialism and selfishness. People of goodwill from all cultures, faiths and professions are creating, through their words and actions, a new world where sharing, cooperation and right relations are taking root and spreading. Never before in the history of the planet has goodwill been so active.

The diversity and variety of initiatives means that the people of goodwill can never be organized into one unitary movement or network. Every community has its people of goodwill. It is goodness and love, in their most basic human expressions, that are driving the momentum of change, challenging all of the habits of separative thinking and action. Recognition of the sheer abundance of goodwill action as it exists today and the countless movements drawing on the energy of goodwill changes the way we see what is happening in the world. It is empowering and it gives us grounds upon which hope and faith in the future can grow. Truly, goodwill has the potential to become the keynote of a new civilization of wholeness.

To bring in the new day and the human well-being which is our spiritual birth-right, we need a deeper sense of reality based on spiritual values, and a new perception of humanity as a unit of divine life within an ordered and purposive universe. The following six recognitions can provide a basis for this deeper understanding:

1 Humanity is not following a haphazard or uncharted course – there is a Plan. This Plan has always existed and is part of the greater design of the Cosmos. The Plan has worked out through the evolutionary developments of the past, and because of the special impetus given it from time to time by the great leaders, teachers and intuitives of the human race. This leads to the second key recognition.

2 There exists an inner spiritual governance of the world led by enlightened beings whose ideas inspire all forward-thinking evolutionary progress in human consciousness. They are known under such different names as the spiritual Hierarchy, the society of Illumined Minds, or Christ and His Church, according to various spiritual traditions. Humanity is never left without spiritual guidance or direction under the Plan.

3 There is a widespread expectation that we approach the “Age of Maitreya”, as it is known in the East, when the World Teacher and present head of the spiritual Hierarchy, the Christ, will reappear among humanity to sound the keynote of a new age.

4 There are millions of mentally alert people in all parts of the world who are in touch, either subconsciously or consciously, with the Plan, and work to give it expression. In them, the consciousness of humanity as one interdependent unit is alive and active. They regard the many differing national, religious and social systems in which they serve as modes of expanding human consciousness and ways by which humanity learns needed lessons. Through their living example, they give humanity a new and better vision of what life should be.

5 The heart of humanity is sound. Our era is notable for the growth of goodwill and altruistic endeavour. All the crises, wars and catastrophes of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have been unable to crush the human spirit.

6 The Plan for humanity is based on the principles of sharing, co-operation, practical brotherhood, right relationships between all people and between nations, and goodwill in action.

These recognitions give a new perspective on spiritual reality and place our present crises in a wider context. They provide opportunity for co-operation with the spiritual evolution of humanity and increase our capacity for freedom.

There is no group so likely to ensure that humanity achieves this most difficult goal as people of goodwill. Provided they can overcome inertia, they are in a key position, requiring only courage to express goodwill, and to initiate action to prepare for a new global civilisation.

Organisation

Founded in 1932, as an activity of Lucis Trust, World Goodwill programs and publications are administered by an international group operating through headquarters in London, New York and Geneva. There is no membership and programs are available to all people of goodwill without charge. The work is funded entirely by donations.

Alongside countless other groups, World Goodwill is an accredited Nongovernmental Organization with the Department of Public Information at the United Nations. It maintains informal relations with a wide range of national and international nongovernmental organizations. The Lucis Trust is on the Roster of the United Nations Economic and Social Council. World Goodwill strongly believes that the UN should be supported as the main hope for humanity’s future.

Objectives

In promoting recognition of the power of goodwill in our time, World Goodwill has three primary objectives:

• To help mobilize the energy of goodwill through education, and through subtle action with programs that draw on the power of thought. At the heart of every human being there is a reservoir of goodwill accompanied by deeper warrior-like qualities: the will to good and the will to love.
• To foster a universal spiritual perspective on the future, centered on the idea that all faiths throughout history have anticipated an age of peace and justice, ushered in by a World Teacher Who embodies divine principles. The rising tide of goodwill in the world today is a sign that the appearance of such a teacher, expected by different traditions under such names as the Christ, the Kalki Avatar, the Bodhisattva, Lord Maitreya, the Imam Mahdi, and the Messiah, is now imminent.
• To study the causes of major world problems in such a way as to reveal universal principles, spiritual practices and actions that contribute to the healing, transformation and resolution of the problem.

Mobilising Goodwill

Focussed enlightened public opinion can be a major factor in world reconstruction, but it has been little used up till now. The major need today is to educate world public opinion in the significance of goodwill as a powerful creative energy and way of life; and to mobilise people everywhere to establish goodwill as the keynote of the coming new civilisation. World Goodwill aids in this task by:

Advising individuals and groups on how to increase their effectiveness in service.

Co-operating with the world service activities of other groups

Supporting the work of the United Nations and its Specialised Agencies as the main hope for humanity’s future, including a blog and Facebook page on World Goodwill at the UN.

Meditating on the energy of goodwill (Goodwill Meditation Group); the Cycle of Conferences (helping create a positive mental climate for conferences taking place on specific world problems); and the Twelve Spiritual Festivals (focusing on the spiritual energies available within the annual lunar cycle)

A Worldwide Educational Program which includes:

A Website and Publications in many languages presenting the principles underlying right human relations, and the fact of a divine Plan as a spiritual reality working out in crucial areas of human affairs, including education, religion, economics, politics, etc. Publications are available for distribution.

The World Goodwill Newsletter, Commentaries and World View articles, highlighting the energy of goodwill in world affairs. A universal spiritual approach is presented to topics of current concern.

Study Papers dealing with some of the world’s major problems.

World Goodwill Seminar, an annual meeting in London, New York and Geneva. Through meditation, talks and discussion the work of groups and individuals actively meeting world need is highlighted. Broadcast globally on video.

The Reappearance of the Christ

This is a time of preparation not only for a new civilisation and culture, but also for the coming of a new spiritual dispensation.

At the end of an age human resources and established institutions seem inadequate to meet world needs and problems. At such a time, the advent of a teacher, a spiritual leader or avatar, is anticipated and invoked by the masses of humanity in all parts of the world.

Today the reappearance of the World Teacher, the Christ, is expected by millions, not only by those of Christian faith but by those of every faith who expect the Avatar under other names – the Lord Maitreya, Krishna, Messiah, Imam Mahdi and the Bodhisattva.

Distortion and mis-understanding surround this central fact of divine response to human need. This is inevitable but unimportant. The fact of transition into a new age is important. Preparation by people of goodwill is needed to introduce new values for living, new standards of behaviour, new attitudes of non-separateness and co-operation, leading to right human relations and a world at peace. The coming World Teacher will be mainly concerned, not with the result of past error and inadequacy, but with the requirements of a new civilisation and with the reorganisation of the social structure.

World Goodwill distributes literature on these themes. A world prayer, the Great Invocation, is distributed on a world-wide scale in many languages and dialects.

World Goodwill also co-operates in organising the annual World Invocation Day, with special focus on the use of the Great Invocation worldwide.

Problems of Humanity

The problem of establishing right relationships between people and between nations is of urgent concern in a world in crisis. The immediate spiritual problem is that of offsetting selfish separateness by the technique of trained, imaginative, creative and practical goodwill.

World Goodwill provides a series of study papers on the major problems of human progress. Emphasis is placed upon underlying causes and emerging trends rather than on a factual survey of events. The use of the trained mind in reflective thought and meditation is encouraged.

The problems dealt with include:

• The Psychological Renewal of the Nations

• Children, Youth and Education

• Capital, Labour, and Employment

• The Racial Minorities

• The Churches and Organized Religion

• International Unity

There are many lesser problems but these are the major ones with which humanity is at this time confronted and which must find solution. This will be done by the establishing of right human relations.

The formation of study groups is encouraged so that through study, discussion and meditation a “thoughtform of solution” may be generated and local forms of service activity initiated.

Practical Aims

To encourage people of goodwill everywhere to establish right human relations between races, religions, nations and classes

To assist people of goodwill in their studies of world problems, and in the effective application to these problems of goodwill, co-operation and sharing for the common good.

To co-operate with other organisations in constructive activities contributing to world unity, stability and right human relations.

To make available up-to-date information on constructive current action in the main areas of human life through regular publications on issues of world interest.

To aid in establishing goodwill as the keynote of the new civilisation.

To create a worldwide contact list of people of goodwill.

To support the work of the United Nations and its Specialised Agencies as the best hope for a united and peaceful world.

World Goodwill is an activity of the LUCIS TRUST, which was founded in 1922 and is a registered educational charity in Great Britain. (Charity Nº 216041)

***

GOODWILL IN WORLD AFFAIRS

Exploring world events through the lens of goodwill, via our newsletter, commentaries and World View articles

NEWSLETTER 2019 #1 - IN RESONANCE WITH THE LIVING EARTH

In 2018, the World Goodwill Seminars in London, Geneva and New York focused on the theme In Resonance with the Living Earth. Over two days, speakers from diverse backgrounds shared their experiences and insights on how humanity can bring itself more into resonant harmony with the other kingdoms of nature, both spiritual and material. The positive significance of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), as practical guidelines for humanity to become a more responsible steward of the animal and plant life and the minerals of the planet, received special attention at the meeting held in UN Headquarters in Geneva.

Hylozoism – an unusual word for an ancient concept: that all matter is alive. When we take this thought seriously, then the idea emerges of the Earth itself being alive, and the life of our species being an integral part of this great Life. And we can expand the thought still further, seeing humanity as an active participant in a Kosmos thrilling with the energy of Life, evolving purposefully towards states of increasing perfection. This vision has always been part of the ageless wisdom tradition, and is also held, in varying degree, by a number of religious faiths.

As noted in New York, it is humanity’s responsibility to help raise the vibration of the lower kingdoms, through sympathetic resonance, as part of this Kosmic perfecting process. Unfortunately, over the last few centuries, we have been neglecting this responsibility, and the results of this neglect are now imperilling our own survival.

Recognition of this fact, and intelligent, compassionate responses to it, informed the presentations at the meetings. In Geneva, the key importance of the will qualified by good was recognised, and it was observed that as “the dynamic energy of the soul, will can lead us to realise our purpose based on a fraternal vision of humanity. It is then that competition will give way to collaboration, and sharing will offset any selfish attitude.”

If we ponder how the future of our relationships with other beings might look, we could conceive of it as a vast collective meditation upon other beings as co-participants in the great web of life. If the mentally focused insights of a more patient and humble science can blend with the heart-filled connection with other beings that has always been available, then a truer cooperation among the various kingdoms of nature, mineral, vegetable, animal, human and spiritual, can arise. In this future, where diversity of form and function is not just accepted but celebrated, we should be able to develop ways to sense and cooperate with evolutionary purpose.

One Theme, Three Locations, Many Presenters

In order to contain the material within the space of one issue, this year we have opted to give a short extract from each speaker’s presentation, staying as close as possible to their original words, so that their energy will hopefully be conveyed. As previously, there is biographical information and a link to the full video of each presenter in the article.

Vita De Waal reflects on the importance of sound as a harmonising element and how this was already recognised in ancient times in the design of sacred spaces.

Jeremy Dunning-Davies warns of the danger of placing too much faith in mathematics as a guide to understanding the physical universe.

Marco emphasises the importance of international cooperation, and how cooperation can challenge us to radically shift our perspective.

María Crehuet Wennberg notes the need to bring an end to our obsession with economic growth, and to build a new culture based on personal responsibility and interdependence.

Giles Hutchins shares his thoughts on how to learn from living systems, and use these insights to help build healthier systems and organisations which are life-enhancing.

René Longet explains the emergence of the key concept of sustainable development.

Jen Morgan considers the ways in which diversity, a central aspect of living systems, can strengthen groups and societies.

May East points out the interdependence of the SDGs, and speaks about the next step on from sustainable development, the regenerative approach, which designs for evolution.

Takeo Inamura & Takeshi Muranaka discuss how their objective in creating a card game based on the SDGs is to help individuals recognise the interdependence of the goals, and their own personal responsibility in helping meet the goals.

Mary Stewart Adams invites us to reflect on the wider cosmic relationship of humanity with the starry heavens and how this connects with our responsibilities to the natural and spiritual world.

In Resonance with the Living Earth – Past, Present but... what about the Future?

Vita de Waal is the founder and director of the Foundation for GAIA and the NGO Alliance on Global Concerns. She chairs two NGO Forums working with UN programmes and is on the Board of an ICOMOS International Scientific Committee on Places of Religion and Ritual. Video at worldgoodwill.org/video#vw

Everything in our three dimensional universe is subjected to movement. All movement generates sound and resonance which has oscillations, waves, frequencies, speed and direction. Movement can create turbulences, currents, orbits, time, sound, harmonies, rhythms, colours, diversity, continents, regions, root races, seasons, days, nights, and everything in between. Movement can be upward or downwards, inner, outwards, spiral clockwise or counter clockwise, be yin, yang, hot, cold, light, dark, creative, separative, generative, degenerative, attraction, opposition, birth, decay, sickness, health etc.

In the three dimensions which we inhabit, change is the norm, change is law, because there is sound and movement all the time. Therefore, if we want to stop something, keep something as it is or was, that is completely unnatural.

Adolf Zeising wrote in 1854 of a universal law... in which is contained the ground-principle of all forms... in the realms of both nature and art, and which permeates, as a paramount spiritual ideal, all structures, forms and proportions, whether cosmic or individual, organic or inorganic, acoustic or optical; which finds its fullest realization, however, in the human form. In that sense, for him, the human form was the pinnacle of this coming together.

The human dimension is important. While there is a unit in time, it is how we use it. Take the monkshood plant (aconite) that can be used to heal but in too large a dose can kill, or sound itself, which can be used to heal or to torture. Free will is a human prerogative and the use of it determines if we use this in harmony , in resonance, with universal law or not.

It is said that Pythagoras pondered for several years upon the laws governing consonance and dissonance. Since it seems that there are immutable constants in all of reality, there must be immutable laws that govern these. Therefore, to Pythagoras, music was related to the divine science of mathematics, its harmonies regulated by mathematical proportions.

The basic belief that geometry, proportion, mathematical ratios and harmonics were found in music was already known by ancient civilizations and used in the building of prehistoric sites. This re‑discovery has opened up a new field of study, archaeo‑acoustics, which analyses the acoustic properties and use of ancient megalithic sites and Neolithic caves.

The prehistoric El Castillo cave in Spain was already used by hominids 40,800 years ago. Sound was recorded within this cave at a position where individuals would have observed the ritual by a shaman. Subsequent analyses identified a frequency‑dependent amplification of recorded sound intensity for frequencies approaching 100 Hz, with the greatest effect observed at 108 and 110 Hz. This frequency range around 110Hz stimulates a certain electrical brain rhythm associated with intuition, creativity, holistic processing and inducing a state of meditation and tends to induce trance‑like states.

Pythagoras created his musical scale starting with note A that resonates at the frequency of 111Hz. Recent findings of MRI research shows that the brain switches off the prefrontal cortex, deactivating the language centre, and temporarily switches from left to right-sided dominance. Today, mindfulness meditations are not only used for relaxation but also for healing and a study showed a lengthening of telomeres (strands of DNA) that tend to shorten with age, leaving chromosomes vulnerable to deterioration. Telomeres are shorter in people with chronic disease and high stress and longer in young, healthy people. Researchers correlate a lengthening of telomeres with meditation.

Archaeo‑acoustics show that sound at Newgrange in Ireland which was built during the Neolithic period more than 5,200 years ago and the 5,000 year‑old Hypogeum in Malta resonate both at 111 Hz. Bone analysis on location showed the Maltese to be a healthy population. It is likely that many more discoveries will be made about living in resonance with our Living Earth!

***

What’s Wrong with our Present-Day Scientific Thinking?

Jeremy Dunning-Davies is a retired senior lecturer of Hull University in the departments of mathematics and physics. Video at worldgoodwill.org/video#jd

I initially went to University to do pure mathematics but became more interested in Applied Mathematics. As a young research student I remember a Professor giving me a problem to look at which I took home and really worked at, neatly underlining the final answer in red. I brought it in the following day very pleased with myself and gave it to him. He studied it for a while and then suddenly looked up and said “This is fine but what does it mean physically?” I was completely taken aback. He said “What’s the use of a mathematical equation if you don’t know what it means physically?” This was a turning point for me and I think it summarizes what’s wrong with a lot of modern day science where the focus is on trying to make physics fit the mathematics rather than the other way around.

The problem goes back quite some time. In the 19th Century, most activity in physics was going in the direction of electromagnetism. People like JJ Thompson were all working on it, and we had a theory of Relativity by Lorentz that included the ether. Then came Einstein’s papers of 1905 on Special Relativity although nobody took much notice at the time. However, around 1920 his work suddenly came into vogue and Lorentz’s theory was pushed into the background. At this point, science suddenly dispensed with the ether and you could no longer mention it. Then the problems began.

Recently, the CIA released one or two documents containing material possibly linked with Nikola Tesla. I’ve got together with Rich Norman, Scientific Advisor of Thunder Energies Corporation in Florida, and we’ve been talking about an ether in connection with this newly released work and there seem to be possibilities that we can rewrite at least some results without recourse to quantum mechanical ideas by simply using the properties of an ether. It seems you just don’t need quantum mechanics, which is a lovely theory even if people are a bit uneasy about some areas of it. Einstein of course, was very worried about quantum mechanics right to the end of his life.

Our work on the ether and electromagnetism is in harmony with Wal Thornhill and the Electric Universe movement. This group stresses the importance of electromagnetic fields and electric currents present in space, which takes us back to the Scandinavian scientist Kristian Birkeland who used to go out and observe the northern lights and then conduct his own experiments. These were called the Terella experiments and he could actually recreate the aurora in a scaled down form in his laboratory.

Birkeland came up with the theory of how the sun and the earth are linked through a flow of charged particles. But at the same time a British geophysicist, Sydney Chapman, came up with a lovely mathematical theory whose conclusions were the exact opposite of what Birkeland’s experiments showed. Birkeland’s work was totally dismissed in favour of this mathematical theory. It was only in the 70’s that they were able to verify that in fact Birkeland was correct and Chapman wrong. A fact that has never really been made public. Unfortunately, this sort of thing is happening all the time.

The electric universe movement is coming up with explanations of phenomena that orthodox astrophysicists cannot explain but which they seem reluctant to discuss. However, there’s lot of research going on at NASA now that links up with Electric Universe theory. And it may surprise you to know that General Relativity is not used very much at all. Organisations like NASA use Newtonian mechanics – they don’t need supposed corrections from General Relativity. So is General Relativity correct? Is it necessary? It’s a lovely theory. Relativity is what I loved best in my final year as an undergraduate at university but why was I attracted to it? Put simply, I loved the beautiful mathematics!

With Special Relativity, not only did Einstein get rid of the ether, but because he used this mathematical transformation called the Lorentz Transformation, he brought in all those peculiar anomalies such as the Twin Paradox, Time Dilation etc., and yet if look at the work of James Paul Wesley, an American theoretical physicist, you don’t need the Lorentz transformation. If you just accept that E =mc2 which is an experimentally provable result, you can derive theoretically every useful result that comes from Special Relativity. I know this because I’ve done it. Wesley is a name not known to many though.

I don’t want to decry mathematics. It has its place, but when you study physical phenomena – maths should be secondary to the physics – you use it as a tool. No more; no less. A result from maths that makes a prediction should be examined observationally and/or experimentally to see if it matches up with the physics: – the maths shouldn’t dictate! You don’t force some physical phenomena that has been witnessed to conform to some mathematics that has been dreamt up in separate circumstances.

So if you ask me what’s wrong with science today I would say too often the physical end result is being made to link up with some theory rather than the theory being secondary to the physics of the situation. There are plenty of examples – I’ve just mentioned a few. Beautiful mathematics in isolation from physical reality is the thing from which we really have to get away.

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International Cooperation: an added bonus, a duty, a necessity or an unstoppable natural tendency?

Marco has worked for over twenty years in international service organizations, in the field and at headquarters. Video at worldgoodwill.org/video#mr

We all have experienced those moments in life when we need to make sense of things in our own world. Those moments are indeed quite interesting. And we know that we cannot make sense of things all the time. To be successful we need to have that urge, the moment needs to be ripe.

When we make sense of things, we give them focus, purpose and direction. We give them meaning both as pieces and as a collective. It is quite an important moment of synthesis. Normally a cycle closes and a new one opens. It is a foundational moment.

It seems to me that this is one of those moments, but on a planetary scale.

Over the past 73 years a few spectacular and unprecedented things have happened:

• the forging of a planetary plan based on an agreement, i.e. based on an expressed manifestation of will – that is the UN Charter and the SDGs;
• an incredible development of international law to address complex issues, as the basis of the existing world order;
• the number of sovereign states has almost tripled;
• the number of associations and private entities and companies has exponentially grown;

My impression is that over the past 73 years there has been, and is still happening, an explosion of will! Let alone the fact that from 2.5 billion we have now become over 7.6 billion and growing – that's a lot of individual wills to engage with! A lot of will and thus force at disposal!

That is not a small thing.

The world has become, to say it with the political scientists – multipolar. A multiplicity of centres of will, active and pursuing their interests.

This may mean that traditional ways to use will, exercise will, may no longer be applicable, nor useful.

We witness the challenges that a multipolar society is representing for our conception of democratic government and exercise of power, as it has been developed over the past roughly 2500 years.

That will require, probably, the search of a new paradigm to channel and use constructively all that will energy that is entering into manifestation through the growing numbers of individuals and organisations.

The test we are facing is one of the use of collective will, group will. How to forge a truly collective will out of individual wills.

Is cooperation the tool to find a new paradigm for the collective use of will toward the continued evolution of the planet?

Yet, are we familiar enough with cooperation?

Indeed, how can we expect nations to cooperate if we, as individuals, even well-intended individuals, do not cooperate, or do it with difficulty? How can we expect our nations to cooperate with others if we, as people and citizens, do not give the right guidance to our governments through carefully thought-through and heart-born models and ideas based on our daily testing and divine instinct?

There is a need to speak more about cooperation, and not just as a beautiful thing, but also the challenges it brings to us, as individuals and as groups, in order to identify ways to overcome them.

Cooperation by default goes beyond the consciousness of an individual and requires the individual to cross that border and enter into the other's shoes. It is about entering an unknown space which can be discovered and mapped only together with others... indeed in cooperation with others!

As such cooperation is not necessarily a means to an end... rather a means to discover ends. In other words, it is important to appreciate the difference between: cooperating to get something done vs cooperating for the sake of it in order to allow and then figure out what to get done.

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A New Ethical Culture: Values and Alternative Projects for a Finite Planet

María Crehuet Wennberg is responsible for the Energy Policies of the Associació de Micropobles de Catalunya and is vice-president of CMES (Collective for a Sustainable Energy and Social Model). Video at worldgoodwill.org/video#mw

"In the near future the knowledge society will make place for a society of a new ethical culture, a place where we will all be in a position to host the seed of generosity, the only engine capable of positively transforming everything we know."

What do we need to become that new society? Where are we now?

In mid-September, European scientists and politicians met in Brussels under the headline: Last call. Europe, the time has come to put an end to dependence on growth. These scientists raised the point that: Growth is becoming increasingly difficult to achieve due to falling productivity gains, market saturation and ecological degradation. If the current trend continues, there may be no growth in Europe in a decade. Right now the answer to this problem is to try to activate growth by expanding debt, dismantling environmental regulations, extending working hours, and social cutbacks. This aggressive pursuit of growth at any cost fragments society, creates economic instability, and destroys democracy.

They propose four actions, to start slowing down:

1. Set up a special committee in the European Union Parliament on the future of Post-Growth.
2. Incorporate alternative indicators in the macroeconomic frameworks of the EU and its member states, indicators that should have greater importance in decision-making processes than those currently held by GDP.
3. Transform the Stability and Growth Pact into a Stability and Welfare Pact.
4. Create a Ministry for Economic Transition in each of the member states. A new economy that focuses directly on human and ecological well-being could offer a much better future than one that is structurally dependent on economic growth.

There are already many organisations working in this direction. Yet ideas of all these movements that are penetrating the minds of a part of society are also being manipulated by big lobbies taking over the discussion in order to continue selling whatever it may be. It is trendy to do so under labels of ‘ecological’, ‘green’, ‘sustainable’, ‘alternative’... Do we fall into the trap? Do we see the signs that warn us of danger? Or do we continue to drive carelessly and at full speed towards the abyss?

This new culture must change many things – for example:

• the social framework in which we move from a system based on individualism to one based on engaged and active citizens;

• technocracy must give way to real democracy;

• the secrecy that hides so much corrupt behaviour must perish in the face of real transparency;

• the ‘hard’ economy that lives at the expense of the weakest must be replaced by a ‘soft’ economy that knows how to share;

• that attitude of only thinking about this generation needs to make a turn towards a deep respect for the environment and to think that any action has an impact, and that this must be beneficial for many generations (Native Americans said that we should think at least until the 7th generation before deciding on an act);

• we must also rethink globalisation which, although in itself a good idea, has only served to benefit the big lobbies by impoverishing local economies, so we must rethink producing and consuming 0 km products;

• the laws that, necessary in the beginning, have become a rigid corset that oppresses us and that we should learn to accept flexibility, yet being strict at the same time;

• change the monologue of a single actor that is the State for a choral work whose actors are the entire society.

To build that kind of society it is essential that its components, all citizens, be responsible and inter-independent.

This new culture must be based on individual change, knowing and understanding that no change is really strictly individual: if a person changes, that change ends up influencing the family, the neighbours, the neighbourhood, the municipality, the region, the nation and the Planet, until it reaches the entire Universe.

Nothing is impossible.

***

Sensing Evolutionary Potential: Co-creating Magnificence with the More-than-Human

Giles Hutchins is a keynote speaker, adviser and executive coach at the fore-front of a [r]evolution in leadership consciousness and organisational development, stimulating head-space and heart-knowing for forward-leaning leaders and organisations to become vibrant, purposeful and future-fit. He is the author of three books, and his latest TEDx talk is entitled [R]evolution: Separateness to Connectedness. He blogs at http://www.thenatureofbusiness.org Video at worldgoodwill.org/video#gh

There are three levels of learning from nature, three levels of activating the logic of life. The first one is living systems design, (which Jen and Dominic have already explored a little – for example, permaculture). Living systems design involves ways in which we can look at the patterns and life principles that we find within the living systems that we operate in, and apply these to our ways of designing products and processes. So this is biomimicry design, this is permaculture, this is closed-loop economics, circular economy, waste equals food, industrial ecology, biophilic design in our workplaces. There is a lot of really interesting work going on in this area at the moment, lots of innovations, very exciting.

Then there is applying living systems logic to our human cultures and our organisations. This recognises that our organisations aren’t machines, that they are actually living systems. When we can see that there are essential life dynamics that we can apply to our own ways of approaching life, we can see that there is an essential dynamic of divergence – opening up; convergence – bringing together; and out of that tension of the two comes emergence – the way in which we find our flow, the way in which we deal with our evolutionary potential.

So divergence in business is in terms of diversifying: distributing decision-making, decentralising it to empower people to make change happen at the local level, as mentioned by Jen. Also, as Jen said, this involves embracing diversity, but not just diversity of age, creed, culture and gender, which is very important, but also in terms of perceptual horizon – how we see things. This brings in different parts of the system, people from different silos, people from different parts of the stakeholder ecosystem, so the organisational membrane permeates more readily. This increases the relationality of our organisations, making them come alive, moving out of the mechanistic, soul-sapping cultures that we’ve got caught up in.

Now, divergence needs to be balanced with convergence, otherwise the organisation becomes too chaotic, too amorphous. That convergence has traditionally come through power-based hierarchies of control, because of the patriarchal, ego-explosion, scientific management thinking that we talked about earlier. That approach doesn’t help, because it undermines the divergence. So instead, we want convergence to come through a sense of purpose, as Jen discussed. And when we say a sense of purpose, we don’t mean rejigging the mission statement, or putting a new values charter on the wall: we mean deeply developing a resonant sense of purpose within the organisation. Extraordinary things happen when people resonate with the organisational sense of purpose, but for us to deeply resonate, for this sense of purpose to touch our humanity, it means that the organisational sense of purpose has to be, in some way, enhancing life. It needs to be life-affirming, because that is what turns us on. And sociological studies show that it can take as little as ten to fifteen percent of people in the organisation deeply resonating with that sense of purpose for a shift to happen: it becomes easier to let go of those power-based hierarchies of control, and allow more divergent ways of operating to happen. The organisation comes alive, and we find emergence flowing.

Finally, we come to the third level, living systems being…

***

Human Values and Sustainable Development in the World of Today

René Longet is the President of the Fédération genevoise de coopération, and the vice-president of SIG, specialist on sustainable development. Video at worldgoodwill.org/video#rl

What gives Sustainable Development to us?

In 1987, the notion of Sustainable Development was born: A development that “meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” Two concepts are inherently present: 1) the “limitations imposed by the present state of technology and social organization on environmental resources” and by “the ability of the biosphere to absorb the effects of human activities”; 2) “Sustainable development requires meeting the basic needs of all and extending to all the opportunity to fulfil their aspirations for a better life. A world in which poverty is endemic will always be prone to ecological and other catastrophes.” (http://www.un-documents.net/our-common-future.pdf § 27)

Economics: We need an inclusive, utility-oriented economy that can nurture the common good. In 2011, the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) defined a green economy as: “one that results in improved human well-being and social equity, while significantly reducing environmental risks and ecological scarcities.” 1

Cultural: Sustainability is finding the right balance between needs and means, being and having, today and tomorrow, North and South, humanity and nature. We need to modify the concept of progress, become involved ourselves to make the best choices as well as speak about responsibility and the long term.

Political: The World needs an inclusive governance, as well as a rebuttal of the neo-liberal viewpoint that the economy needs no regulation. Such a theory is false, as it fails to account for numerous environmental and social costs which are not reflected in the actual price. Thus markets are daily misrepresented; we cannot consider markets without regulation or regulation without markets.

So the State ought to be: accountable for equity, provide help to the weak in their relation to the strong, informative and vitalising, transparent, efficient, supporting engagement and determining priorities. The great challenges concerning the territorial dimension require global regulations, since financial exchanges, migrations, climate, oceans, biodiversity all transcend national boundaries.

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From Concept to Action

In 2000 the Millennium Declaration2 and the 8 Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)3, to be reached by 2015, included the elimination of extreme poverty and hunger, a pledge for primary education for all, the promotion of gender equality as well as women’s autonomy, and the reduction of infant mortality.

The June 2012 UN Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20) concerned two principal issues, the contribution of green economy in the elimination of poverty and the institutional framework for sustainable development.

The final document, called “The Future We Want” 4 proposed the replacement of the MDGs by the goals of sustainable development; they “should be action-oriented, concise and easy to communicate, limited in number, aspirational, global in nature and universally applicable to all countries, while taking into account different national realities, capacities and levels of development and respecting national policies and priorities.” (§ 247)

In September 2015, the UN General Assembly adopted the document Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (or Agenda 2030 5), including 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), “with 169 associated targets which are integrated and indivisible.” (§ 18).

The proper orientation of financial flows as a function of human needs – as defined by the SDGs – will enable us to fulfil the assigned tasks. The economy will be sustainable or it will not be, and conversely, sustainability will be economical or it will not be.

Towards a Sustainable Economy

A lot of goodwill is manifested through the social and solidarity economy6, and fair trade7, these being two forerunners in the present world of what the future economy should be. Innovative producers who propose services or goods of ethical, environmental, or social quality remain in the background, being too much ignored by markets and consumer choice. This has to be changed.

Orient financial fluxes in the right direction

A noticeable proportion of the investments are engaged in non-sustainable, unethical or even a destructive manner, as is the case with coal, nuclear energy or agribusiness. There is also the Dark net of economy absorbing yearly about $35'000 billion! In order to realize the whole of the 17 SDGs, i.e. to bring the world towards sustainability, we would have to invest between $5’000 and $7’000 billion yearly. Therefore, we cannot claim that this money is not available!

Replace the universally used but misleading GDP

The GDP basically ignores anything which has not some monetary function… and adds apples and pears together: anything involving consumption being welcomed. It is time to replace it with indicators of sustainable development, of human development or – as the example of Bhutan8 shows, of national happiness, or the notion of ecological footprint9, an approach developed during the second half of the 1990s by Mathis Wackernagel. It does not include social aspects (“a social footprint”) but the link is evident: exploitation of resources leads to a deepening of inequalities and a sharpening of conflicts concerning access to resources. In a sustainably managed community, social cohesion increases, the ecological footprint decreases, and the economic web becomes sounder.

_______________

Notes:

1 Towards a Green Economy, UNEP, Nairobi 2012, p. 9 https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/c ... sis_en.pdf

2 http://www.un.org/millennium/declaration/ares552e.htm

3 http://www.un.org/fr/millenniumgoals/background.shtml

4 http://www.un.org/ga/search/view_doc.as ... 288&Lang=E

5 http://www.un.org/ga/search/view_doc.as ... 0/1&Lang=E

6 Laville J.-L., Cattani A.-D., Dictionnaire de l’autre économie, Coll. Folio Actuel, Gallimard, Paris 2006

7 http://www.fairtrade.net

8 http://www.grossnationalhappiness.com/w ... ressed.pdf

9 http://www.footprintnetwork.org

***

Reflections on Earth Stewardship

A small selection of thoughts which were collated into a booklet for the seminar. To obtain a copy, please go HERE or download the PDF.

If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration. Nikola Tesla

I, the fiery life of divine essence, am aflame beyond the beauty of the meadows, I gleam in the waters, and I burn in the sun, moon, and stars .... I awaken everything to life. Hildegard of Bingen

This is one of the greatest challenges of our time: to convert ourselves to a type of development that knows how to respect creation. Pope Francis

The whole order of nature evinces a progressive march towards a higher life. Helena Blavatsky

There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places. Wendell Berry

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Relationships for Change: A Path towards Resonance with all of Life

Jen Morgan is a strategist/entrepreneur working to ‘co-design and co-create strategies that can help accelerate human evolution and the thriving of all life on the planet.’ Jen is the Co-Founder of the Finance Innovation Lab – a globally recognized organisation for social innovation, and is currently Executive Director for The Psychosynthesis Trust. Video at worldgoodwill.org/video#jm

So let’s talk about Nature’s quality of diversity. Going back to the earlier example of the lake in New Hampshire, the lake survived for many hundreds of years, it evolved, it adapted, and it was perfectly working in balance and harmony. Till one year, there was a human intervention, when the local town wanted to attract as many fishermen as possible, so they over-stocked the lake with bass fish. In less than one year, the lake was dead: when I lay on the dock, there was no movement, no life. And it was almost what it feels like now: we have these mega species dominating our financial system, or the energy supplies, or the high street retailers. When I walk down the high street now, I don’t feel like there’s much life, it’s rather dead.

So what does diversity mean in groups? What do I mean by diversity? While I think that in groups and organisations in our society, diversity of race, age and gender is important, I think we are at risk of getting caught up in diversity of appearances rather than diversity of qualities. What I think is important in groups – and especially when we speak about vested interests – is to bring in diversity of thought, of capacities, diversity of emotions, diversity of energies. And this is what I think is important in social change.

Diversity for me is a moral imperative, but it is really a strategic imperative. And by strategic imperative, there are two main things that I mean in that. So it’s a strategic imperative because it does provide more resilience: we can pool our experiences, our capacities, our skills together, to almost act as a buffer against some of the shocks to our human systems, such as climate breakdown, and being in the midst of the sixth mass extinction of species on Earth. We are just on the edge of what we are going to experience in terms of shocks to our system.

The second strategic imperative that I believe that diversity brings is around coming up with better solutions. When I was leading the Finance Innovation Lab we brought all kinds of people together: activists, bankers, psychologists, academics, grass-roots organisers, to think about how could we build collective intelligence, to really shift the financial system? So for example we would bring activists and entrepreneurs together with policy makers, and one of our successes at the time was to create national policy that really allowed new entrants to come in much faster. That, in itself, will hopefully soon disrupt vested interests, so that the financial system is more diverse.

Another example is where we brought together the policy makers with the activists to work with entrepreneurs who were creating brand new disruptive business models, new currencies and financial products. So what we can do with this diversity is to see more of the whole, and see what was more relevant, at all of these different levels, so they could be implemented faster.

So what does it mean for me, as an individual in a group, thinking about diversity? This is a lot of what we teach at the Psychosynthesis Trust – skills that I’ve had to learn as well, around holding paradox. When you are in a diverse group, there are many different truths, and there’s One Truth; and there’s all this multiplicity, and you want to bring Unity together. How do you hold paradox in the groups that you are in? The other skill that I’ve had to learn is around really embracing conflict: when you bring in diversity and have different perspectives, there is often tension and difference, and that often leads to conflict, so how do you embrace conflict as a generative source, and how do you really appreciate difference?

So in the groups that you are in, how diverse are your groups really? How could you bring in more diversity of quality in these groups? And how are you developing your skills to synthesise diversity in groups and in yourself? In psychosynthesis we teach about the sub-personalities, so what I’ve had to learn for myself is how different parts of myself can work together so I have more coherence – how can my mystic side work with my pragmatist side?

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Part 2 of 5

SDGs: Framing a New Regenerative Narrative

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May East is the CEO of Gaia Education and a UNITAR Fellow. Gaia Education, in partnership with UNESCO GAP Secretariat, has developed an educational tool – the SDG Flashcards – containing more than 200 questions introducing a whole-systems approach to the Agenda 2030. Video at worldgoodwill.org/video#me

There is an international consensus that our generation is facing a convergence of multiple crises in economics, society, ecology and so many other fields. Beyond this, there is a realization that the mindset that has created this convergence cannot solve it. We need a different mindset, a different framework.

At the Rio+20 conference in Brazil, world leaders agreed to try to define a global framework that would address the multiple crises and put humanity on a sustainable pathway. For three years there was the biggest consultation ever in human history. The Sustainable Development Goals that were the result of this process were heavily negotiated, involving uneasy compromises. They have a broad legitimacy amongst all parties.

For some the sustainability concept suffers from internal flaws. It fails to offer guidance on how to arbitrate between conflicting drivers of economic growth, planetary boundaries and social justice. As a framework it aims to provide a balance between humanity and the earth. Yet our presence on the planet has become so forceful and at the same time so disruptive that we need not just to sustain, we need to regenerate. The human quest today is bigger than the SDGs. Achieving the Goals requires a profound transformation in the way we live, think and act, to bring us into resonance with the living earth.

At a time of increasing global threat to the livingness of the earth, regenerative theorists consider that it is more important than ever to understand, not just how living systems survive and thrive, but how they stay on a progressive course towards increasing vitality, viability and potential. We need to regenerate ourselves and our thinking, re-designing our presence on the planet in such a way as to remain close to the planet’s living evolution. The question is, how can we do this as we unravel the convergence of multiple crises through the SDG process?

The regenerative approach understands the interdependent nature of living systems. It recognizes that judging the paradigm of increasing growth and wealth in a global economy by the speed with which we extract, produce, consume and throw away, is obsolete. We need to design revenue generating opportunities that create value in ways that make people and the rest of the natural world stronger, more vibrant and resilient.

When planning strategies and services we can think about the SDGs as nested interacting systems of intelligent activity, so that whenever one SDG is activated this becomes a catalyst impacting many other SDGs. The Goals were designed to interact like this. When making decisions about projects we need to think systemically, with intention, considering the impact on the good of the whole: the locality, the nearby proximate whole, and the greater whole. The mind goes together with the design. By setting clearly the intention to affect the good of the whole, we are already trying to address the convergence of multiple crises with new mind-sets.

The regenerative approach is about designing for evolution. The capacity for evolution is inherent in all living systems. It has been core to life’s ability to sustain itself for billions of years. Now we can design for co-evolution by designing and developing intrinsic and extrinsic conditions that enable living systems to become agents of their on-going evolution.

The case supporting the SDGs is incredibly compelling. We are asked to do something that has never been done before. Our role as forward looking world workers, regenerative practitioners, is key in seizing the SDGs framework potential. By understanding the interdependent nature of the Goals, we may gain this whole systems perspective, and become enablers of a vitality by which societies, ecologies and economies can co-evolve and thrive.

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Is the "2030 Agenda" a Game? Why did 30,000 People from Corporations, Government, Education and Civil Society Play the Game?

Takeo Inamura and Takeshi Muranaka are the founders of Imacocollabo, a Japanese NGO with a mission to inspire collaborative action to create a sustainable future, through their innovative 2030 SDGs card game. Video at worldgoodwill.org/video#tm

We heard from a UN staff member, that there was a discussion just before launching the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) about the icons, which are very colourful, but may be misleading. If you look at these seventeen icons, what might be a little misleading – can you see it? [Response from audience] Yes, that’s exactly it: these icons are separate from each other and it doesn’t look like there is a connection between them. That is the point that the UN staff member said would need change.

For instance, let me give you an example. Let’s say we are working with goal #4 [Quality education: “Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all”] and we set up a school in a developing country; but no children come. Why do they not come? Because this connects with goal #1 [No poverty: “End poverty in all its forms everywhere”] – the children have to work hard to support their families, who are in poverty, so they don’t have time to go to school. But what are they producing? This relates to goal #12 [Responsible consumption and production: “Ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns”]. So for instance they work hard to produce food products consumed by people in developed countries. And goal #12 affects goal #15 [Life on Land: “Protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, and halt and reverse land degradation and halt biodiversity loss”]. If we take Japan as an example, Japanese people consume a lot of palm oil, and a lot of that palm oil is produced in Indonesia, where rainforest has been cut down for palm oil plantations. So that affects #15, Life on Land, and that affects #13 [Climate action: “Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts”]. And #13 is going to affect #1 (No poverty) and #2 [Zero hunger: “End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture”] because climate change affects farms meaning that food crops cannot be grown there any longer.

So everything is connected, and we can’t pick one goal out of seventeen, we have to think of them all together. This explains why the SDGs are also symbolised by a coloured wheel, to show that the goals are all connected. So we believe that the SDGs reveal that the world is connected, and because it is connected, I, too, can be a starting point. If I change my way of purchasing products, my way of eating, that can also change the world. Another way of saying this is that, by transforming individual consciousness, people’s consumption and behaviour can be transformed; and also, by transforming businesses and social systems, we can transform individual consciousness. We are here to promote this cycle of creating more sustainable and fulfilled individuals and a thriving society. That is what we want to achieve through the 2030 SDGs card game that we are going to explain now.

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Now is the Time for Human Beings to Speak to the Stars

Mary Stewart Adams is a star lore historian who led the successful initiative to establish Michigan’s only International Dark Sky Park in 2011. She presents a weekly program on Interlochen Public Radio, The Storyteller’s Night Sky, and is a student of the Rudolf Steiner teachings. Video at worldgoodwill.org/video#ma

In December of 1922, Rudolf Steiner spoke of changes in our relations with the starry worlds in a verse given to his wife:

The stars spoke once to human beings
It is world destiny that they are silent now
To be aware of this silence can be pain for earthly humanity
But in this deepening silence
There grows and ripens what human beings speak to the stars.
To be aware of this speaking
Can become strength for Spirit Man.


This verse offers what I recognize as a three-fold step. First the stars were speaking to the human being. They were central to the attention of spiritual becoming and to what was happening on the earth. This idea flourishes as far back as the ancient Egyptians. It was the age of the Astro-Logos when the speaking of the stars could be heard as the beginnings of astrology. It wasn’t just looking to the stars to try to make a prediction about what’s going to happen in the human biography but reading the gesture of the stars as an expression of what’s coming to being on the earth.

Then, in the second step, we arrive at the 15th century, when the stars become silent. This is the Age of Astro-Nomia when Nicholas Copernicus writes that the earth is not fixed at the center of our planetary system, but like the other planets, is in orbit round the sun. It dramatically changes the way we think about our relationship to starry worlds. No longer do we ask of the Morning Star: “what might the goddess of love and beauty be speaking?” Our question becomes: “how far away is it?”; “What’s the chemical composition of its atmosphere?” “How can I figure out the periodicity of its orbit?” Rather than attempting to understand the gesture of the celestial world as an expression of the spiritual, we look for a definition of this starry world that’s rooted in the laws of the physical.

And now, in the third step of this verse from Rudolf Steiner, our time is seen as a World Destiny Moment. From the Astro-Logos to the Astro-Nomia we are entering what could be called the age of Astro-Sophia: the wisdom of our relationship with the stars. The relationship becomes defined by our conscious participation in the conversation. It’s not something being spoken to us from without, but our deeds, our activity, our dreams, our thinking, our intentions are informing the conversation. It is as though the natural world, the spiritual world and the celestial world, all wait on what the human being must bring. The destiny that is bound up in this relation is that we must be freed from the dictates of outer understandings so that the human being can be self-directing. The threat is that we will not remember our relationship to the living nature of the earth and its relationship to the celestial world, but that we will think of ourselves as being the single most important thing in what we do and what we say.

So, our task is to try to awaken a living relationship with starry worlds. For this we need a kind of active imagination which does not mean creating a make-believe imaginary world but trying to conceive of the mighty gestures of the spiritual world that wait on the human being to participate in the picture. In doing this we have a responsibility to awaken not only the mythic grandeur of these gestures, but to live as though we know it.

***

World Invocation Day 2019

To build a more just, interdependent and caring global society what humanity needs above all, is more light, love and spiritual will.

On Monday June 17 2019, people of goodwill from all parts of the world, and from different religious and spiritual backgrounds, unite in invoking these higher energies by using the Great Invocation. Will you join in this healing work by including the Great Invocation in your thoughts, your prayers or your meditations on World Invocation Day? Further information and videos at worldinvocationday.org

THE GREAT INVOCATION

From the point of Light within the Mind of God
Let light stream forth into the minds of men.
Let Light descend on Earth.

From the point of Love within the Heart of God
Let love stream forth into the hearts of men.
May Christ* return to Earth.

From the centre where the Will of God is known
Let purpose guide the little wills of men –
The purpose which the Masters know and serve.

From the centre which we call the race of men
Let the Plan of Love and Light work out
And may it seal the door where evil dwells.

Let Light and Love and Power
restore the Plan on Earth.

Adapted version

From the point of Light within the Mind of God
Let light stream forth into human minds.
Let Light descend on Earth.

From the point of Love within the Heart of God
Let love stream forth into human hearts.
May the Coming One* return to Earth.

From the centre where the Will of God is known
Let purpose guide all little human wills –
The purpose which the Masters know and serve.

From the centre which we call the human race
Let the Plan of Love and Light work out
And may it seal the door where evil dwells.

Let Light and Love and Power
restore the Plan on Earth.

* Many religions believe in a World Teacher Who is to come in the future (hence ‘Coming One’), knowing Him under such names as the Lord Maitreya, the Imam Mahdi, the Kalki avatar etc. These terms are sometimes used in versions of the Great Invocation for people of specific faiths.

***

WORLD GOODWILL AT THE UN

Highlighting the progress of goodwill action at the world body with regular blog and Facebook updates

In order to place a closer focus on the work of the United Nations, and in particular the Sustainable Development Goals, the blog World Goodwill at the UN provides up-to-date reports on important UN meetings and processes. The new Sustainable Development Goals for humanity set a transformative agenda for the fifteen year period 2015 – 2030. Never before has there been such a broad-based dialogue and negotiation between governments, civil society, business and academia to determine achievable goals and targets. A Facebook page provides shorter topical coverage. We encourage you to follow the Blog, Like the Facebook page and share them both with all your social media contacts.

SERVICE AND THE DIVINE PLAN

Connecting with the wider evolutionary purpose by recognising the deeper spiritual patterns behind politics, religion and culture

he time is long past when a line of demarcation can be drawn between the religious world and the political, economic, social or scientific. Spirituality as it is practised today in its many forms bridges between higher dimensions of soul and all that is human: it is essentially concerned with the establishing of right human relations. In seeking to live a spiritual life and express higher values through all relationships every sincere person of goodwill serves this wider evolutionary process. And so the server is organically connected with those great Serving Lives, the Rishis, Saints and Bodhisattvas of all faiths, the Spiritual Hierarchy.

In Alice Bailey’s writings the Hierarchy, is presented as one great community of consciousness. It is said to be immersed in a quest to understand the mysteries of Divine Purpose, and to hold that evolving understanding before humanity as a living reservoir of intelligent love - the Divine Plan. The working out of the universal ideas of the Plan takes place as humanity responds to higher impressions of the wholeness and sacredness of life and strives to intelligently embody these insights in all areas of thought, activity and relationship (economic, political, educational, legal, psychological, religious and so on).

There is today a growing intuitive response to the ideas and principles of the Plan as this living, universal field of ideas and principles. At the same time there is a natural awakening of the will to serve this vision and to take part in the Great Work of building, through time, a civilisation of wholeness and right relations. The articles below explore a number of insights about the Plan – directly quoted from Alice Bailey or adapted.

EDUCATION IN THE NEW AGE

Education has become of major importance today in all parts of the world. In this article certain ideas and concepts fundamental to education in all its aspects, and in the many different circumstances of the modern world, are presented.

Education has become of major importance today in all parts of the world. The requirements of education under modem conditions of international relationships and in the light of an emerging new civilisation, are occupying the attention not only of those countries now providing education for the masses of their peoples for the first time in history, but also of countries where a form of compulsory education has been in existence for some time. What should be the principles and purposes underlying new educational techniques? What should these techniques be?

In this pamphlet certain ideas and concepts fundamental to education in all its aspects, and in the many different circumstances of the modern world, are presented.

EDUCATION IN THE NEW AGE

EDUCATION PAST AND PRESENT


Education, up to the present time, has been largely occupied with the art of synthesising past history and past achievement in all departments of human thought and with the attainments to date of human knowledge. It has been primarily backward-looking and not forward-looking.

The values of modern education are still largely competitive, nationalistic and, therefore, separative. The child comes to regard the material values as of major importance, to believe that his particular nation is also of major importance and that every other nation is secondary. This has fed his pride and fostered the belief that he, his group, his religion and his nation are superior to other people and peoples. He becomes consequently a one-sided person with his world values wrongly adjusted and his attitudes to life distinguished by bias and prejudice.

Education has also concerned itself with the organising of the lower mind, (the purely rational as distinct from creative and intuitive faculties). To read, to write and to be able to do elementary arithmetic are regarded as the minimum requirements. The rudiments of the arts are taught to children in order to enable them to function with the needed efficiency in a competitive setting and in their particular environment.

The natural idealism of the child (and what child is not an innate idealist?) has been slowly and steadily suffocated by the weight of the materialism of the world's educational machine.

Little by little this disastrous state of affairs has been changing, so that today in many countries the welfare of the state itself, the need of the nation, is held before the child from its earliest years an the highest possible ideal. This is a definite step forward in the expansion of consciousness which the human race must achieve, for expansion of consciousness and the production of increased sensitivity and perceptive awareness to the larger whole are the goals of all evolutionary endeavour. A further step is to be seen in the fact that everywhere and in every country men are taught to be exponents of certain group ideologies. These ideologies are, in the last analysis, materialising dreams, visions, or ideas.

Leading educational thinkers and organisations today, including UNESCO at the world level, are increasingly emphasising the moral, ethical and spiritual objectives and needs of the educational process. It is, therefore, apparent that behind all the surface turmoil and chaos present today in the consciousness of humanity human beings are beginning to blend in themselves three states of consciousness: that of the individual, of the citizen, and of the idealist. Humanity's sense of world awareness is definitely growing.

The question now arises: what will be the next evolutionary development in the educational world?

THE TASK AND OBJECTIVES OF THE NEW EDUCATION

Education has three major objectives, from the angle of human development.

First, it must make a man an intelligent citizen, a wise parent, and a controlled personality, able to play his part harmoniously and constructively in the work of the world.

Second, the gap between the lower mind and the soul has to be bridged. The true work of education is to train the man in right discrimination and accurate sensitivity to moral and spiritual ideas and ideals, so that he can build true to the purpose of his soul and produce upon the earth that which will be his contribution to the whole. Curiously enough humanity has always recognised this and has talked therefore in terms of "achieving unity" or "attaining alignment". These are all attempts to express this intuitively realised truth.

Third, it must enable him to bridge the gap between the various aspects of his own mental nature.
This includes bridging between the lower mind and the soul. These aspects are:

1. The Lower concrete mind, the reasoning principle, the receptive mind, as dealt with by the psychologists. It is with this aspect of the man that our present educational processes profess to deal.

2. The "son of mind", the individualised mind, which we may call the ego or SOUL. This is the intelligence principle, known under such names as the Solar Angel, the Christ principle. With this, religion in the past has professed to deal.

3. The higher abstract mind, the illuminating mind, the custodian of ideas. This mind is the conveyor of illumination to the lower mind, once that lower mind is in rapport with the soul. With this world of ideas philosophy has professed to deal.

The true education is consequently the science of linking up the integral parts of man: also of linking him up in turn with his immediate environment, and then with the greater whole in which he has to play his part. This involves the process of acquiring facts, and then learning to infer and gather from this information what can be of practical use in any given situation. It involves the process of learning wisdom, as an outgrowth of knowledge. This is the power to apply knowledge in such a manner that sane living, and an understanding point of view, plus an intelligent technique of conduct, are the natural results. It is finally a process whereby unity or a sense of synthesis is cultivated.

The coming education, therefore, should cover training for citizenship, for parenthood, and for world understanding and could be defined in a new and broader sense as the science of right human relations and of social organisation.

The general trend of the new education should, therefore, be more psychological than in the past and educators should in the future lay emphasis upon:

1. A developing mental control of the emotional nature.
2. Vision or the capacity to see beyond what is, to what might be.
3. Inherited, factual knowledge upon which it will be possible to superimpose the wisdom of the future.
4. Capacity wisely to handle relationships and to recognise and assume responsibility.
5. The power to use the mind in two ways:

a) As the "common sense", analysing and synthesising the information conveyed by the five senses.

b) As a searchlight, penetrating into the world of Ideas and abstract truth.

Finally, education should present the hypothesis of the soul in man as the interior factor which produces the good, the true and the beautiful.
This interior factor, or soul, expresses itself in every human being as a peculiar quality to which one might give the name of "mystical perception". This quality of mystical perception is inclusive of:

1. The mystical vision of the soul, of God and the universe.

2. The power to contact and appreciate the world of meaning.

3. The power to love and to go out to that which is other than the self.

4. The capacity to grasp and intuit ideas.

5. The ability to sense the unknown, the desirable and the desired the consequent determination and persistence which enables man to seek, to search for and demand that unknown reality. It is the mystical tendency which has produced the great mystics of world renown, the large number of explorers, discoverers and inventors.

6. The power to sense, register and record the good, the beautiful and the true. It is this that has produced the writer, the poet, the musician, the artist and the architect.

7. The urge to discover and to penetrate to the secrets of God and of nature. It is this which produced the scientist and the religious man.

"Mystical perception" therefore is no more and no less than the power, innate in man, to reach out and to grasp that which is greater and better than himself. It is the power to appreciate and to strive after the apparently unattainable good.

The objective of education should, therefore, be the training of the personality mechanism to respond to the life of the soul. Creative expression and humanitarian effort will then be spiritually based and there will be a more realistic answer to the question, what is man? This will open up before the youth of the world the entire problem of leadership and of motive. The content of the student's mind will not only be enriched with historical and literary facts but his imagination will be fired, and his ambition and aspiration evoked along true and right lines.

UNFOLDMENT AND STUDY OF THE CHILD

There is an urgent need for the development of more adequate means of understanding and studying children and young people if the objectives of the new education are to be achieved. The future education can only be built on a comprehensive appreciation of man's nature and constitution, and the process of his unfoldment.

The sequence of the child's growth, based upon the process of unfoldment in a human being, can be briefly tabulated an follows:

1. Response to impact, the infant's senses awakened. He begins to hear and see.

2. Response to possession and to acquisitiveness. The child begins to appropriate, becomes self-conscious and grasps for the personal self.

3. Response to the instinct governing the animal and desire nature, and to human tendencies.

4. Response to the group. The child becomes aware of his environment and that he is an integral part of a whole.

5. Response to knowledge. Beginning with the impartation of informative facts, leading to interest, correlation, synthesis and application to life.

6. Response to the innate need to search. This leads to experiment on the physical plane, to introspection on the emotional plane, and to intellectual study and a condition of mental activity.

7. Response to economic and sex pressure and to the law of survival. This forces him to use his equipment and knowledge, to take his place as a factor in group life and to promote group welfare by some aspect of active work.

8. Response to pure intellectual awareness. This leads to a conscious free use of the mind, to individual thinking, to the creation of thought forms, and eventually to the steady orientation of the mind to wider and wider fields of realisation and awareness.

9. Response to the thinker or the soul. With the registration of this response the man enters into his kingdom. The objective and the subjective worlds are unified. Towards this consummation all education should tend.

10. Every child should be studied first, to ascertain the natural trend of his impulses. Are they towards physical expression? Is there a latent capacity for one or other of the arts? Is the intellectual calibre one that should warrant a definitely mental training in analysis, deduction, mathematics or logic? Then perhaps as life goes on our young people will be graded into two groups: the mystical, under which one would group those with religious, cultural and artistic tendencies; and the occult, which would include the intellectual, scientific and mental types.

By the time the child is seventeen the training given should have enabled him to strike his note clearly, and should have indicated the pattern to which his life impulses will most probably run. In the the first fourteen years opportunity should be given to experiment in many fields of experience. Pure vocational training should not be emphasised until the later years of the educational process.

The time is coming when children will be studied far more comprehensively than is at present the case. In particular this will be made possible through:

1. The growth, development and widespread use of the science of psychology. This is the science of the essential man. The various schools of psychology will each contribute its particular truth and thus the real science of the soul will emerge from this synthesis.

2. The growth and development of the science of the seven basic types of individual on which much Eastern psychological thought is based.

3. The acceptance of the teaching on the constitution of man, with particular reference to the nature, purpose and quality of the three vehicles or bodies of expression, mental, emotional and etheric-physical, and their relation to the soul.

4. In order to bring this about the best that the East has to offer and the knowledge of the West should be made available. In addition to the methods of studying the child outlined above, all children should be studied medically, with special attention to the endocrine system and the development of the response apparatus, and vocationally, so that later in life their gifts and capacities may find fullest expression. In time scientific astrology will be developed as a means of determining the life tendencies and the peculiar problem of the soul.

All children will also be studied spiritually--the apparent age of the soul and the place on the ladder of evolution will be approximately noted; mystical and introspective tendencies will be considered and their apparent lack noted. Coordination of all aspects of the individual will be carefully investigated so as to bring the entire equipment of the child into a functioning and united whole.

The word "spiritual" does not refer to religious matters, so-called. All activity which drives the human being forward towards some form of development--physical, emotional, mental, intuitional, social--if it is in advance of his present state is essentially spiritual in nature and is indicative of the livingness of the inner divine entity. The spirit of man is undying; it forever endures, progressing from point to point and stage to stage upon the path of evolution, unfolding steadily and sequentially the divine attributes and aspects.

If a true understanding of the seven basic ray types, of the constitution of man and of astrology, plus a right application of synthetic psychology is of any use at all, it must demonstrate itself in the production of a correctly coordinated, wisely developed, highly intelligent and mentally directed human being.

EDUCATION AND THE SEVEN RAYS

There are seven "rays" or qualities of energy influencing humanity and producing seven basic types of human being. It is with these qualities and characteristics and with their related traits and instincts that the future educational systems should work:

1. Will or Purpose, developed to the point where the manifested life is governed by conscious spiritual purpose. The right direction of the will should be one of the major concerns of all true educators.

2. Love-Wisdom. This is essentially the unfolding of the consciousness of the whole, including group consciousness.

3. Active Intelligence. This concerns the unfolding of the creative nature, of the conscious, spiritual man. The right direction of this already developed tendency is the aim of all true education.

4. Harmony, produced through conflict. This leads to balance, to release and to the eventual power to create. This is one of the attributes which education should deal with from the angle of the intuition.

5. Concrete knowledge, whereby man is enabled to concretise his concepts. The true work of education is to train the lower man in right discrimination and true sensitivity to the vision, so that he can build true to the purpose of his soul and produce upon the earth that which will be his contribution to the whole.

6. Devotion. Devotion grows out of and is the fruit of dissatisfaction, plus the use of the faculty of choice based on clearly held ideals. Through devotion and idealism man finally unifies himself with the ideal which is the highest possible to him. Educators are, therefore, faced with the opportunity of dealing intelligently with the innate idealism to be found in any child, and with the interesting task of leading the youth of the world on from one realised goal to another.

7. Order, and the imposition of an established rhythm through development of the innate faculty to function under directed purpose and ritual. Educators will have to work with this principle of innate attribute and this instinct to ordered rhythm, making it more creatively constructive, and so providing, through it, a field for the unfoldment of soul powers.

THE NEW EDUCATION

It is the production of some form of culture--material or spiritual, or material and spiritual--which is the objective of all education.

Civilisation is the reaction of humanity to the purpose of any particular world period. In each age, some idea must be expressed in the current racial idealism.

Culture is the approximation of two ways--feeling and mind; of two worlds--sensitivity and thought; and of the attitudes, relational in nature, which will enable a man to live as an intelligent, subjective being in a tangible physical world. The man of culture relates the world of meaning to the world of appearances and regards them as constituting one world with two aspects.

In the last analysis, civilisation concerns the masses and the racial consciousness, while culture concerns the individual and the creative, spiritual man.

SCHOOLS AND COLLEGES

In the schools of today, primary schools, secondary schools, and colleges and universities, there can be seen an imperfect and symbolic picture of the triple objectives of the new education: civilisation, culture, unification.

Elementary or Primary Schools might be regarded as the custodians of civilisation; they should fit the child for citizenship, teach him his place as a social unit, and emphasise his group relations.
Reading, writing and arithmetic, elementary history (with the emphasis upon world history), geography and poetry will be taught, together with certain basic and important facts of living, foundational truths, coordination and control.

High Schools or Secondary Schools should regard themselves as the custodians of culture; they should emphasise the larger values of history and literature and give some understanding of art. They should begin to train the boy and girl for that future profession or mode of life which it is obvious will condition them. Citizenship will be taught in larger terms, the world of true values be pointed out and idealism consciously and definitely cultivated. The youth of the world should begin to relate the worlds of objective outer living and of inner subjective existence.

Colleges and Universities should provide a higher extension of all that has already been done.
They should beautify and complete the structure already erected and should deal more directly with the world of meaning. International problems--economic, social, political and religious--should be considered and the man or woman related still more definitely to the world as a whole. They should be the custodians of those methods, techniques and systems of thought and of life which will relate a human being to the world of souls, to the Kingdom of God.

Fitting a man for citizenship in the Kingdom of God is not essentially a religious activity. It should be the task of the higher education, giving purpose and significance to all that has been done.
The unfoldment of the intuition, the importance of ideals and ideas and the development of abstract thinking and perception will be fostered.

Instinct--intellect--intuition--provide the keynotes for the three scholastic institutions through which every young person will pass. The first effort of education to civilise the child will be to train and rightly direct his instincts. The second obligation upon the educators will be to bring about his true culture, by training him to use his intellect rightly. The third duty of education will be to evoke and develop the intuition.

ENERGY RELATIONSHIPS

Education should be basically concerned with relations and interrelations, with the bridging or the healing of cleavages, and thus with the restoration of unity or synthesis.

There is a thread of energy, which we call the life or spirit aspect, anchored in the heart. It uses the blood stream as its distributing agency.

There is another thread of energy, which we call the consciousness aspect or the faculty of soul knowledge, anchored in the centre of the head. It controls the brain and directs activity by means of the nervous system.

These two energy factors, which are recognised by human beings as life and knowledge, or as living energy and intelligence, are the two poles of a child's being. The task ahead of him is to develop consciously the middle or balancing aspect, which is love or group relationships. A true balance will be brought about by the recognition that the way of service is a scientific technique for achieving this balance.

Educators, therefore, have three things to bear in mind during the present period of transition:

1. To reorient the knowledge, the consciousness aspect or the sense of awareness in the child in such a manner that he realises from infancy that all he has been taught is with the view to the good of others more than of himself.

2. To teach him that the life which he feels pulsing through his veins is only one small part of the total life pulsing throughout all forms, all kingdoms in nature, all planets and the solar system, and that, therefore, a true "blood brotherhood" is everywhere to be found. Consequently, from the very start of his life he can be taught relationship. When these two realisations--responsibility and relationship--are inculcated in the child from infancy, then the third objective of the new education will come with greater ease.

3. The unification in consciousness of the life impulse and the urge to knowledge will lead eventually to a planned activity, which will constitute service, and do three things for the child:

a. Serve as a directional agency, finally indicating vocation and avocation.

b. Draw out the best in the child and make him a magnetic radiating centre in the place where he is.

c. Make him definitely creative and enable him to spin that thread of energy which will link head, heart and creative action into one unified and functioning agency.

The meeting of these three requirements will be the primary step (made on a racial scale) to the building of the "antahkarana",* or the bridge in consciousness, between:

1. Various aspects of the form nature.

2. The personality and the soul.

3. The man and other human beings.

4. The man as a member of the human family, and his environing world.

5. It should be noted here that the bridging has to be done in the consciousness aspect, and concerns the continuity of man's awareness of life in all his various aspects.

*Antahkarana (Sanskrit): The word is derived from antah meaning inner, and karana meaning instrument.

THREE NEW AGE SCIENCES

Three major sciences should influence the field of education in the new age.

1. The science of the antahkarana (see above definition).

This is the new and true science of the mind, which will utilise mental substance for the building of the bridge between personality and soul, and then between soul and spirit. It concerns the substance of the three higher levels of the mental plane.

2. The science of meditation

This science can be applied to every possible life process. It is a subsidiary science preparatory to the science of the antahkarana.

This is the means of building between the personality and the soul. It is the true science of bridging in consciousness. It relates the individual mind eventually to the higher mind and later to the Universal Mind. It will eventually dominate the new educational methods in schools and colleges.

3. The science of service grows normally and naturally out of the successful application of the other two sciences. Service is the true science of creation and is a scientific method of establishing continuity.
These three sciences may be regarded eventually as the three major concerns of the educational process and emphasis will be increasingly placed upon them.

The tendency of the newer education should be to make the subject of the educational experiment the conscious possessor of his equipment; it should leave him standing clear-eyed before life, with open doors ahead of him into the world of objective phenomena and relationships; it should have brought him to the knowledge of a door leading into the world of soul reality through which he may pass at will, and there assume and work out his relation to other souls.

EDUCATION AND WORLD UNITY

An international system of education, developed in joint conference by broad-minded teachers and educational authorities in every country, is today a crying need and would provide a major asset in preserving world peace. The initial outlines of a world educational systern are emerging today particularly as a result of the pioneering work of UNESCO.

World democracy will take form when men everywhere are regarded in reality as equal. World unity will be a fact when the children of the world are taught that religious differences are largely a matter of birth. Right human relations will be established when the children of every country are taught two major ideas. They are the value of the individual and the fact of the one humanity. The value of the individual and the existence of that whole we call humanity are most closely related. These two principles will lead to the intensive culture of the individual and then to his recognition of his responsibility as an integral part of the whole body of humanity. Thus gradually our quarrels and differences will be offset and the idea of the one humanity will take their place.

It is bridging work that has now to be done. If, in the immediate future, we develop this technique of bridging the many cleavages found in the human family and in offsetting the racial hatred. and the separative attitudes of nations and people, we shall have succeeded in creating a world in which war will be impossible.

Is it not possible to build our teaching of history upon the great and good ideas which have conditioned the nations and made them what they are, and emphasise the creativity which has distinguished all of them? Can we not present more effectively the great cultural epochs which--suddenly appearing in some one nation--enriched the entire world and gave to humanity its literature, its art and its vision?

We should place emphasis on those great moments in human history wherein man's divinity flamed forth. These moments produced the Magna Carta; they gave emphasis through the French Revolution to the concepts of liberty, equality and fraternity; they formulated the American Bill of Rights and the Four Freedoms; and they have culminated in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. These are the great concepts which must govern the new age with its nascent civilisation and its future culture.

A growing idealism is fighting its way into the forefront of the human consciousness in spite of all separative enmities. It is largely responsible for the present chaos, and for the establishment and growth of the United Nations and its specialised agencies. It has produced the conflicting ideologies which are seeking world expression. These conflicting idealisms are a wholesome sign, whether we agree with them or not. Out of it should emerge a tolerant and inclusive attitude of mind and a tendency to synthesis. This the soul of man nurtures and expresses.

The sense of responsibility is one of the first indications that the soul of the individual is awakened. The soul of humanity is also at this time awakening en masse, and hence the following indications:

1. The growth of societies, organisations and mass movements for the betterment of humanity everywhere.

2. The growing interest of the mass of the people in the common welfare.

3. Humanitarian and philanthropic effort is at its height, alongside the cruelties, hatreds, abnormalities and separativeness in the life of all nations.

4. Education is rapidly becoming a mass effort.

5. The growing recognition by those in authority that the man in the street is becoming a factor in world affairs.
It is difficult for modern man to conceive of a time when there will be no racial, national or separative religious consciousness present in human thinking. It will be obvious that very many decades must elapse before such a state of affairs will be actively present. But it could be decades and not centuries.

Much greater care will have to be given in selecting and training the teachers of the future.
Mental attainment and knowledge of their particular subject will be of importance, but more important still will be the need for them to be free of prejudice. The educator of the future will need to be more of a trained psychologist than he is today. He will realise that his major task is to evoke out of his class of students a real sense of responsibility. No matter what he has to teach, he will relate it all to the science of right human relations.

Cooperative goodwill is surely the first idea to be presented to the masses and taught in our schools.

Loving understanding, intelligently applied, should be the hallmark of the cultured and wiser groups.

World citizenship, as an expression of both goodwill and understanding, should be the goal of the enlightened everywhere and the hallmark of the spiritual man, and in these you have right relations established between education, religion and politics.

Enlightenment is the major goal of education. It is in this statement and region of thought that the distinction is to be found between the work of the Buddha and the Christ. The Buddha achieved "enlightenment", and was the first of our humanity to do so. Christ, because of the attainment of the Buddha and because of His own point in evolution, inaugurated the "age of love", and gave to the people an expression of a new divine aspect, that of love.

The Buddha culminated the "age of knowledge". The Christ began the "age of love". Both ages embody and express two major divine principles. Thus the new education has been made possible by the work of the Buddha. The new religion has been made possible by the work and the life of the Christ.

In the future, illumination will be viewed primarily from the intellectual angle and the whole subject will be approached mentally, and not so definitely (as is the case today) from the angle of religion. Illumination, mysticism and religion have gone hand in hand. One of the major contributions of the present age to the unfoldment of the race has been the growing recognition that spirituality is not to be confined only to the acceptance and the following of the precepts contained in the world scriptures.

The keynote of the new education is essentially right interpretation of life, past and present and its relation to the future of mankind. The keynote of the new religion must and should be right approach to God, transcendent in nature and immanent in man, whilst the keynote of the new science of politics and government will be right human relations. For both of these education must prepare the child.

Those working in these three groups must eventually proceed in the closest cooperation, and it is for this planned understanding and this intelligent activity of mankind that the new education must prepare.

CONCLUSION

1. The new education will primarily be concerned with the scientific and conscious bridging between the various aspects of the human being, thus producing an increased expansion of consciousness.

2. The task of the new education is, therefore, the coordination of the personality, eventually bringing about its at-one-ment with the soul.

3. The new education will deal with, analyse and interpret the laws of thought.

These laws are the means whereby:

a. Ideas are intuited.

b. Ideals are promulgated.

c. Mental concepts or thoughtforms are constructed, which in due time will make their impact telepathically upon the minds of men.

4. The new education will organise and develop the lower concrete mind.

5. It will teach the human being to think from universals to particulars, as well as to undertake the analysis of particulars.

6. The new education will make a man a good citizen by developing the rational aspects of his consciousness and life, teaching him to use his inherited, acquired and endowed equipment for the evidencing of the social consciousness and attitudes.

7. Above all else, the educators in the new age will endeavour to teach man the science of unifying the three aspects of himself:

a. The lower concrete mind--the receptive mind or common sense.

b. The son of mind, the soul, the self--the individualised mind.

c. The higher, abstract or intuitional mind--the illuminating mind.

8. The educators in the new age will deal with the processes or methods to be employed in bridging the gaps in consciousness between the different aspects.

9. The extension of this concept of bridging will be developed to include not only the internal history of man, but also the bridging between him and his fellowmen on all levels.

10. It will include also the training of the human mechanism to respond to life impacts and to the soul. The soul is essentially intelligence, vitally used on each plane (used on mental, emotional and physical levels). This intelligent activity is always used from the wisdom angle.

***
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Part 3 of 5

THE NEW GROUP OF WORLD SERVERS

Working in all the main fields of human activity and in all countries everywhere in the world, the New Group of World Servers acts as a synthesising factor within humanity and lays the foundations for right human relations and ultimate world unity.

Let us drop our antagonisms and our antipathies, and think in terms of the one family, the one life, and the one humanity.

Humanity is not following a haphazard or uncharted course--there is a Plan.

Humanity determines the speed of its own evolution and the fulfilling of its own destiny under the Plan.
The success of the Plan depends upon the intelligent co-operation of all men and women of goodwill everywhere in the world.

Men of goodwill who co-operate form part of the New Group of World Servers which is working to implement the Plan.

The leaders of the New Group of World Servers are those who initiate and carry forward activities which benefit humanity as a whole. These leaders are known by their harmless, constructive and inclusive qualities. They provide the vision and mould public opinion.

Behind these leaders and the co-operating men of goodwill are the Custodians of the Plan, "the inner spiritual Government of the Planet."

Working in all the main fields of human activity and in all countries everywhere in the world, the New Group of World Servers acts as a synthesising factor within humanity and lays the foundations for right human relations and ultimate world unity.

The New Group of World Servers needs a more widespread recognition, co-operation and support in its work for humanity. Every one of us, therefore, can share in the action of the New Group of World Servers and in the working out of the Plan.

THE NEW GROUP OF WORLD SERVERS

THE FACT OF THEIR EXISTENCE


Out of the medley of ideas, beliefs and systems in the world-political, economic, social and religious-two emerging patterns can be recognised. First, those people who, clinging to reactionary methods of finding and expressing truth, prefer obedience to authority to clear thinking and the self-imposed guidance of their own soul.

Second, those who, while affirming the fundamental truths by which humanity has evolved, are sensitive to soul impression, and recognise that response to human need and spiritual unfoldment are the determining factors which will lead humanity into a new age of peace and plenty. These are the New Group of World Servers whose outer expression are the men and women of goodwill. They belong to no one race, colour or creed and realise that separative, competitive methods cause conflict and prevent the establishing of right human relations.

The New Group of World Servers is not an organisation. It has no headquarters, president, list of officers or members. It has only servers of humanity in every country occupied with the task of discovering and aiding all men and women of goodwill.

WHO ARE THEY?

Every man and woman in every country who is working to heal the breaches between people, to evoke the sense of brotherhood, to foster the sense of mutual interrelation and interdependence, and who sees no racial, national or religious barriers, is a part of the New Group of World Servers, even if he has never heard of it by name.

The New Group of World Servers are gathered from all branches of human enterprise. They will be found among the creative workers, the industrialists, in ordinary homes, and in the ranks of labour. There are scientists who, although repudiating violently the unproven, are giving all they have of scientific ability and knowledge to the service of humanity -- each in his chosen scientific field; there are men of financial stature who regard money as a responsibility to be dispensed wisely in the service of others; there are educators, preoccupied with wise formulations of knowledge and with an encyclopaedic understanding of the garnered wisdom of the ages, which they seek to utilise in fitting the younger generation to live beautifully, constructively and creatively; there are churchmen and religious leaders; in all of these the spirit of light is found and they intelligently love their fellowmen.

These world servers are the men and women who have an international vision, which in no way interferes with their good citizenship in the country which claims their allegiance, and which in no way militates against their active participation in the religious faith which may appeal to them and claim their service. They are found working today in every country in the world and in many organizations--religious, political, scientific and racial. Above everything else, they are distinguished by their ability to work along constructive lines.

These workers emphasise the points of contact and not the points of difference. They foster no sectarian divisions and they work to end racial hatreds and the many class distinctions. They call attention to the good and true and enunciate the principles of brotherly understanding, mutual goodwill and the fatherhood of God, upon which all true brotherhood must be based. They represent an attitude of mind.

When active in the field of international politics, they do not forget that each nation may have something of value to contribute to the family of nations; the idea governing their activity is therefore world service. When active in the religious field, they heal differences and recognise the universality of truth. They attack no people, classes or systems, and under no circumstances do they ever condemn or criticise any race or nation. Thus they seek today the foundation of the international understanding which will bring in a world of peace and they point to that spiritual relationship to God and to each other which will bring our religious differences to an end.

The New Group of World Servers are not, however, a band of impractical mystics. They know exactly what they seek to do; they are discovering and bringing together the men and women of goodwill all over the world. Their united demand is that these people of goodwill should stand together in complete understanding and thus constitute a slowly growing body whose interest is shown on behalf of humanity and not primarily on behalf of their own immediate environment. The larger interest will not, however, prevent them from being good citizens of the country where their destiny has cast them. They will conform to and accept the situation in which they find themselves, but will (in that situation and under that government or religious order) work for goodwill, for the breaking down of barriers, and for world peace. They will avoid all attack of existing regimes and personalities; they will keep the laws of the land in which they have to live, but they will cultivate the spirit of co-operation, utilising every opportunity to emphasise the brotherhood of nations, the unity of faith, and economic interdependence.

These are the broad generalities governing the conduct of people of goodwill co-operating in and with the work being done by the New Group of World Servers. They can be regarded as the embodiment of the emerging kingdom of God on earth, but it should be remembered that this kingdom is not a Christian kingdom or an earthly government. It is a grouping of all those who--belonging as they do to every world religion and every nation and race and type of political party--are free from the spirit of hatred and separativeness, and who seek to see right conditions established on earth through mutual goodwill among all men everywhere in the world.

THE IMMEDIATE WORLD PROBLEM

The ferment in the world has now permeated to the very lowest depths of humanity and all fields of human thought are involved in the divisions and in the confusion. Our strifes today are based primarily on our economic needs and, secondly, upon great and differing ideologies. For this there are obvious objective reasons. Over-population, trade barriers, the inequalities of supply and demand and the uneven distribution of wealth are responsible for the upheaval, plus our unco-ordinated higher education and the ambitious and the well-intentioned experiments of influential individuals.

The immediate causes are generally recognised, though the true reason is deep-seated and not so easily grasped. The world thinkers today, however, are beginning to see the outline clearly. This reason is the conflict between certain great ideals, all of them based on spiritual ideas, but all of them prostituted to ends which lead to separativeness, hatreds, party strife, widespread economic distress and to fear of the possibility of another general conflagration.

Men are dedicating their lives to the defence of some principle which to them seems of paramount importance, or to the overthrow of some principle which to their brothers seems equally important. Attack on personalities, defamation of character, the imputation of motives and the stirring up of hatred are a recognised part of the technique of those who (frequently with good intention) are attempting to salvage the world, to bring order out of chaos and to defend the right as they see it.

Fortunately there is a demand for a solution which is not negative but is wholly positive. The demand, on every hand, is to change the old order which has failed and to bring in a new era of economic comfort and peaceful living. There is a desire to discover what is basically at fault and thus release mankind to a new life of liberty and happiness. It is clear that success rests primarily on two things:

First, efforts hitherto wasted in dealing with effects must be directed towards the underlying causes. The negative approach to expose evils, to blame individuals or governments, and to attack organisations, groups, parties, religious and national policies, has led to a futile expenditure of time, strength and money.

Second, more effective world-wide effort must be made to find and blend into one unified body the people of goodwill, of peaceful, loving intention, intelligent kindliness and goodness in the world, so that they can act together in their vast masses in right and specific directions. They have watched the relative futility of the organised groups which have sought to end war, and the apparent helplessness of the various groups dealing with the economic situation, and they are beginning to realise that only in their massed strength and goodwill lies the attainment of world betterment and human good.

WHO IS TO SOLVE IT?

People in the world at this time can be divided into four groups. This is of course a wide generalisation and there are many bridging groups intermediate between the four major divisions.

First the uninformed masses. These through poverty, illiteracy, hunger, lack of employment, without leisure or means for cultural advancement are in an inflamed condition. They are, however, enough developed to respond to the mental suggestion and control of more advanced people.

Second, the middle classes--both higher and lower. These constitute the bulk of any nation--intelligent, diligent, often narrow-minded, enquiring, essentially religious; they are torn by economic and ideological conflicts and, because they can read and discuss and are beginning to think, they form the most powerful element in any nation.

Third, the thinkers everywhere. These are the intellectual, highly educated men and women who sense ideas and can formulate them into ideals. They utilise all the known methods to reach the general public. They stir the middle class to activity and, through them, arouse the masses. The part they play is of paramount importance. They are steadily influencing world affairs--sometimes for good and sometimes for selfish ends.

Fourth, the New Group of World Servers. These are the people who are building the new world order. They are all of them definitely serving humanity, and are, through the power of their response to the spiritual opportunity, tide and note, emerging out of every class, group, church, party, race and nation, and are therefore truly representative. They speak all languages; they embrace all religions, all sciences and all philosophies. Their characteristics are synthesis, inclusiveness, intellectuality, and fine mental development. They say nothing and write no word which could feed the fires of hatred and thus tend to separate man from man and nation from nation. They own to no creed, save the creed of Brotherhood, based on the One Life. They recognise no authority save that of their own souls. They make no clamour about their own ideas, discoveries and theories, but because they are so inclusive in their outlook and so wide in their interpretation of truth they see the hand of God in all happenings, His imprint upon all forms and His note sounding forth through every channel of communication between the subjective reality and the objective outer form.

Behind this four-fold division of humanity stand those Enlightened Ones whose right and privilege it is to watch over human evolution and to guide the destinies of men. In the West we call them Christ and His disciples. In the theologies of the East they are called by many names. They are also known as the Agents of God, or the Hierarchy of liberated souls, who seek ceaselessly to aid and help humanity. This they do through the implanting of ideas in the minds of the world thinkers, so that these ideas in due time receive recognition and eventually become controlling factors in human life.

In the aggregate of this playing with ideas and in the constant impact upon the human consciousness of the great concepts which lie back of our evolutionary process, the human race is developing the power to think, to choose, and to build a sure foundation for human living. Through the evolutionary presentation of ideas, there is a steady march towards a liberty of thought (through the method of experiment, of discard and of renewed effort with ever newer concepts) which will enable mankind to build true to the great thought patterns which underlie the outer structure of our world.

THERE IS A PLAN FOR HUMANITY

The world structure emerges from and is built upon certain inner thought patterns, and it is these patterns which are producing the present flood of governmental experiments in every nation. But today, there is no training in the art of contacting the world of patterns and in the true interpretation of ideas, and hence the problems. Later, when humanity sees its problems with greater clarity, it will act with wisdom, and train its observers and communicators more carefully and perfectly. These men and women will be those in whom the intuition has awakened at the behest of an urgent intellect; they will be people whose minds are so subordinated to the group good and so free from all sense of separateness that their minds present no impediment to contact with the world of reality and of inner truth. They will not necessarily be people who could be termed "religious" in the ordinary sense of the word, but they will be people of goodwill, of high mental calibre, with minds well stocked and equipped; they will be free from personal ambition and selfishness, animated by love of humanity and a desire to help the race. Such a man is a spiritual man.

The determination of the spiritual Hierarchy of the planet to train the minds of men more rapidly and to build towards a more synthetic unity brought about a decision which involved the formation of group units, and the emergence of those groups of workers and thinkers who, through their activities, have so largely governed and moulded our world for the past three or four centuries. We have, therefore, dating from the fifteenth century, the inauguration of definite and specific group work along clearly defined lines, with each group standing for some peculiar presentation of truth and for some aspect of the knowledge of reality.

These groups fall generally into four major divisions, cultural, political, religious and scientific. In the more modern times three other groups have definitely emerged; they are the philosophical, the psychological and the financial groups.

Through these seven groups we now have a humanity in close relation, though not at one, a humanity characterised by three things:

1. An amazing interrelation and intercommunication of which the radio, the press, modern transportation and the telephone and telegraph are the servants.

2. A widespread philanthropic enterprise, and the growth of the sense of responsibility for one's brother, which was totally unknown in the year 1500. Movements such as the Red Cross, educational foundations, hospitals, and the present economic relief measures to be found in every country are its exoteric manifestations.

3. A division of the entire human family, consciously or unconsciously, into the basic groups which can be identified as conservative and progressive.

IMMEDIATE OBJECTIVES OF THE PLAN

The immediate objective of the plan might be stated as follows:

1. To raise the level of human consciousness so that intelligent thinking men and women will be consciously in touch with the world of ideas and the realm of intuitive perception. This means that they will be oriented towards reality.Average men and women will then be led definitely to shift their attention from the world of the emotions in which they have hitherto lived, and will begin to live more in their mental natures, and to think clearly and wisely. They will find their living conditions so ameliorated and wisely ordered that the present state of fear and of intense competitive struggle for existence will be superseded by a real measure of stability and security. A more leisured life will consequently be possible and this will enable men to unfold their powers--mental and spiritual--normally. This is no picture of an immediate Utopia.

2. The clarifying of the international situation. It is necessary that each nation should realise two things:First, the importance of attending to its own business and its own internal problems which are those of beautifying the national life by the production of order, stabilisation and, above all, freedom. This must be done by the wise consideration of the needs of the entire people, excepting no part of the national life.Second, the prime importance of each nation realising its responsibility to all other nations, and the interrelation of all parts of the life of our world. This realisation will bring about a reciprocal interplay in the field of economics on which are based practically all world problems and differences.

3. The third objective is the growth of the group idea with a consequent general emphasis upon group good, group understanding, group interrelation and group goodwill.

FUNCTIONS OF THE NEW GROUP OF WORLD SERVERS

To hold the vision of the Plan before the eyes of men, for "where there is no vision, the people perish."

To act as an intermediate group between the Hierarchy and humanity, receiving light and power and then using both of these, under the inspiration of love, to build the new world of tomorrow.

SUMMATION

All true servers everywhere belong to the New Group of World Servers, whether their line of service is cultural, political, scientific, religious, philosophical, psychological or financial. They constitute part of the inner group of workers for humanity, and of the world mystics, whether they know it or not.

This group gives to the word "spiritual" a wide significance; they believe it to mean an inclusive endeavour towards human betterment, uplift and understanding; they give it the connotation of tolerance, international synthetic communion, religious inclusiveness, and of all trends of thought which concern the integrating development of the human being.

It is a group therefore without a terminology or bible of any kind; it has no creed nor any dogmatic formulations of truth. The motivating impulse of each and all is love of God as it works out in love for one's fellowmen.

The materialising of ideas, which have hitherto remained theoretical, is the prime function of the New Group of World Servers. They have to remove the whole theory from the realm of sentiment, of idealism, and of mystical aspiration and must bring the question, as a concrete demonstrated factor, before the public.

They must place the emphasis upon the expression of goodwill and the fulfilment of the law of love and not upon affiliation with organisations, with their labels and their doctrines.

The power which the New Group of World Servers will eventually wield, will be drawn from two sources: -- first, from that inner centre or subjective world government, whose members are responsible for the spread of those ideals and ideas which have led humanity onwards from age to age. This inner centre has always existed and the great leaders of the race, in every field, have been connected with it. The great idealists and world workers (such as the Christ and His great brother, the Buddha, and those lesser workers, such as Plato, Spinoza, Abraham Lincoln, or Florence Nightingale) have all been associated with this centre. The range of these associates is tremendous and the grades of these workers are many, but self sacrificing work for the betterment of human living and love of their fellowmen have distinguished them all. These great souls are primarily distinguished by the fact that they know no mental limitation, and their inclusiveness is such that for them there are no racial distinctions nor any religious differences.

The second source from which the New Group of World Servers will draw its power will be from the men of goodwill in the world at any given time. They will be able to swing into activity at any moment such a weight of thought and such a momentous public opinion that they will eventually be in a position definitely to affect world affairs.

***

THE SPIRITUAL HIERARCHY

Wisdom teachings throughout the ages affirm the fact of an intelligent spiritual direction, a chain of being, underlying the evolution of consciousness. The name given to that guiding purpose varies in different traditions. Some refer to it as the spiritual Hierarchy of the planet, or the great White Lodge.

The text of this booklet contains quotations (with slight adaptations in some cases) from several books by Alice A. Bailey. Although these books were written during the period 1919 – 1949, their presentation of the perennial philosophy’s tradition of the Spiritual Hierarchy as a major link in the Great Chain of Being, and as actively involved in the spiritual evolution of humanity, is as relevant and important today as it has ever been.

Many sense that there is a new universal religious spirit alive in the world. Yet what is often lacking amongst intelligent, spiritually inclined servers is a sense of the reality of that group of beings on the inner planes who are the intelligent forces of nature and who guide the evolutionary process. The active cooperation of human creativity, ingenuity, love and will are needed in the creation of the new; yet evolution proceeds in accord with the Plan of God.


Hierarchy: That group of spiritual beings on the inner planes who are the intelligent forces of nature, and who control the evolutionary processes.

Intelligent Spiritual Direction

Wisdom teachings throughout the ages affirm the fact of an intelligent spiritual direction, a chain of being, underlying the evolution of consciousness. The name given to that guiding purpose varies in different traditions. Some refer to it as the spiritual Hierarchy of the planet, or the great White Lodge.

I assume that my readers recognise some intelligent or spiritual direction of humanity. I care not by what name they call that guiding Purpose. Some may call it the Will of God; others, the inevitable trends of the evolutionary process; still others may believe in the spiritual forces of the planet; others may regard it as the spiritual Hierarchy of the planet, or the great White Lodge; many millions speak of the guidance of Christ and His disciples. Be that as it may, there is a universal recognition of a guiding Power, exerting pressure throughout the ages, which appears to be leading all towards an ultimate good.

Some definite direction has led from the stage of primeval humanity to that evolutionary point where a Plato, a Shakespeare, a da Vinci, a Beethoven can appear. Some power has evoked the human capacity to formulate ideas, to produce systems of theology, of science and of government; some inner motivating power has given humanity the ability to create beauty, to discover the secrets of nature; some realisation of divine responsibility lies behind the philanthropy, the educational systems, and the welfare movements throughout the world.

Planetary Evolution

Our planetary Hierarchy is part of a greater Hierarchy governing the evolution of the Solar System.

The entire Hierarchy of spiritual beings represents a synthesis of forces consciously directed for the furtherance of planetary evolution. These forces link those great Personalities Who compose the Hierarchy with the greater Hierarchy. Our Hierarchy is a miniature replica of the greater synthesis of those self-conscious Entities who demonstrate through the sun and the seven sacred planets, as well as the other planets, greater and smaller, of which our solar system is composed.

The Result of Human Achievement

The spiritual Hierarchy is the result of human activity, aspiration and achievement; it has been created by and of humanity.

This Hierarchy is composed of those Who have triumphed over matter, and Who have achieved the goal by the very self-same steps that individuals tread today. These spiritual personalities, adepts and Masters, have wrestled and fought for victory and mastery upon the physical plane, and struggled with the miasmas, the fogs, the dangers, the troubles, the sorrows and pains of everyday living. They have trodden every step of the path of suffering, have undergone every experience, have surmounted every difficulty, and have won out. They have experienced the crucifixion of the personal self and have known the utter renunciation of all. Herein lies Their right to serve. Knowing the quintessence of pain Their methods can be exquisitely measured to the individual need.

These Elders of humanity are characterised by a love which endures, and which acts ever for the good of the group; by a knowledge which has been gained through millennia of lives, in which They have worked Their way from the bottom of life and of evolution to the top; by an experience which is based on time itself and a multiplicity of personality reactions and interactions; by a courage which is the result of that experience, and which can now be placed at the service of humanity; by a purpose which is enlightened and intelligent, fitting in with the purpose of the Planetary Logos.

Masters of the Wisdom

Senior members of Hierarchy are Masters of the Wisdom.

A Master of the Wisdom is One Who has undergone the fifth initiation. That really means that consciousness has undergone such an expansion that it now includes the fifth or spiritual kingdom, the kingdom of souls. Having progressed through the four lower kingdoms:—the mineral, the vegetable, the animal and the human—the Master’s centre of consciousness has, through meditation and service, expanded till it now includes the plane of spirit.

This means that through successive incarnations, the Master has transmuted lower mind into mind pure and unalloyed, has transmuted desire into intuition, and has irradiated consciousness with the light of pure Spirit. The discipline of meditation is the only way in which this can be accomplished.

Masters of the Wisdom choose to stay upon our planet and limit Themselves for the sake of men and women who are pressing forward on the wave of evolution. They serve the evolutionary process through meditation, or the manipulation of thought matter, and by work on the mental bodies of humanity.

The Hierarchy works only with the spiritual nature or with the soul of humanity, and—to the Master—the form is regarded as relatively of no importance.

Custodians of the Plan

The Hierarchy directs world events, as permitted by human free will, so that the evolving consciousness may express itself through adequate social, political, religious and economic forms.

The Hierarchy works constantly at the task of awakening the consciousness aspect in all forms, so that it is awakened, expanded and intelligently employed.

The Hierarchy directs world events, as far as humanity will permit (for the free will and free decision of humanity may not be ignored), so that the unfolding consciousness may express itself through developing and adequate social, political, religious and economic world forms. They give direction; They throw a light; They impress those who are in contact with Them, and through the inflow of ideas and through revelation They definitely influence the tide of human affairs.

The Hierarchy directs and controls, more than is realised, the unfolding cyclic cultures and their resultant civilisations. These can then provide adequate forms, temporarily useful for the emerging soul of humanity. The format of cultures and civilisations receives special attention.

There is a Plan for humanity and this Plan has always existed. It has worked out through the evolutionary developments of the past ages and through that special impetus which has been given it from time to time by the great intuitives and teachers.
The immediate objectives of the Plan might be stated as follows:

1. To raise the level of the human consciousness so that intelligent thinking men and women will be consciously in touch with the world of ideas and the realm of intuitive perception. This means that they will be oriented towards reality.

2. To clarify the international situation. Each nation should attend to its own business of beautifying the national life, by the production of order, stabilisation, and above all, freedom; at the same time realising its responsibility to all other nations, and the interrelation of all parts of the life of our world. The providing of adequate food, clothing and housing facilities to populations everywhere will bring about a changed world psychology, which will be constructive and sound, and which will usher in the deeply desired era of peace and plenty.

3. The growth of the group idea with a general emphasis upon group good, group understanding, group inter-relation, and group good will. These four are the ideals of that subjective group, working on the physical plane, which we call the New Group of World Servers.

One Great Ashram with 7 Divisions

The Hierarchy is one great ashram, the Ashram of the Lord of the World. Headed by the World Teacher, it radiates light, understanding and power in service of evolution. This one ashram consists of seven divisions, seven ashrams, or centers of consciousness. Each of these seven main ashrams includes subsidiary ashrams, which focus on a specific department of human evolution while contributing to the purpose of the whole.

This Ashram is a community of souls who are swept by the desire to serve, urged by a spontaneous impulse to love, illumined by one pure Light, devotedly fused and blended into groups of serving Minds, and energised by one Life. Its Members are organised to further the Plan which They consciously contact and with which They deliberately cooperate.

The entire planetary Hierarchy, though cognisant of the present endeavour and therefore participating in the plans of the Council, are not all occupied with the problem of humanity in this present moment of crisis. There are many other lines of activity and of evolutionary expediency and undertaking which must parallel the present endeavour. Work in relation to other kingdoms in nature (both subhuman and superhuman), and work in preparation for the period which must succeed this present time of crisis must be continued as usual. The great Ashram is likewise magnetic in its effect, and through its magnetic potency “units of life and devotion”—human beings—are brought into the Ashram as disciples in preparation for initiation.

It is this magnetic potency, this dynamic active and energising will, which produces cohesion among the various Ashrams, and is one of the sources of hierarchical unity. Putting it in other words, it is the service of the Plan which binds the seven Ashrams, with their subsidiary Ashrams, coherently into the one great Ashram. The Plan is the expression of Divine Purpose or the Will of God, the Lord of the World.

The Hierarchy receives that esoteric “Fire of God” which brings to an end cycles, ideologies, organisations and civilisations when the due and right time comes. This They do in order to make place for that which is better and which will prove adequate and not limiting to the awakening consciousness and the emerging life.
The Hierarchy prepares men and women for initiation by:

1. Receiving them into the Ashrams of the Masters.

2. Offering Their disciples opportunity to serve in relation to the emerging Plan.

3. Inaugurating through the means of the disciples of the period those new presentations of the training needed for initiation. Each major cycle receives new forms of the same ancient, yet basic, teaching.

Christ as World Teacher will Return

The Christ, the Master of the Masters and the Instructor of the Angels, is the World teacher. He is known by other names in other religions, such as the Imam Mahdi, Maitreya, and the Kalki Avatar. He is in process of returning.

The Christ is the World Teacher and not a Christian teacher. He Himself told us that He had other folds and to them He has meant as much as He has meant to the orthodox Christian. They may not call Him Christ, but they have their own name for Him and follow Him as truly and faithfully as their Western counterparts.

The Christ Who will return will not be like the Christ Who (apparently) departed. He will not be a “man of sorrows”; He will not be a silent pensive figure; He will be the enunciator of spiritual statements which will not necessitate interpretation and receive the wrong interpretation, because He will be present to indicate the true meaning.

He has been for two thousand years the supreme Head of the Church Invisible, the Spiritual Hierarchy, composed of disciples of all faiths. He recognises and loves those who are not Christian but who retain their allegiance to Their Founders—the Buddha, Mohammed and others. He cares not what the faith is if the objective is love of God and of humanity. If people look for the Christ Who left His disciples centuries ago, they will fail to recognise the Christ Who is in process of returning. The Christ has no religious barriers in His consciousness. It matters not to Him of what faith a man may call himself.

The Son of God is on His way and He cometh not alone. His advance guard is already here and the Plan which they must follow is already made and clear. Let recognition be the aim.

The Externalisation of the Hierarchy

The Spiritual hierarchy is in process of externalizing, so that in time the masters will again walk on Earth, amongst us.

We are working and living in the initial stages of the period wherein preparation is being made for the emergence of the Hierarchy. This emergence is at present purely on mental levels, but when the thoughtform of exoteric existence is created by Humanity itself and the invocative cry is intense enough, then the Great Ashram will slowly make its appearance upon the physical plane.

In the meantime the Hierarchy is orienting itself to a much closer rapport with humanity, and to an interior reorganisation which will make it possible to admit disciples in large numbers into the great Ashram.

The members of the Hierarchy are already—one by one—entering into outer activity upon the physical plane. They are not recognised for what They are, but They work on implementing the Plan, demonstrating goodwill, seeking to enlarge the horizon of humanity, and thus prepare the way for the One Whom They serve, the Christ, the Master of all the Masters and the Teacher alike of angels and of men.

World Servers

The Masters work through seven major groups of thinkers and workers in the world.

In preparation for the Reappearance of the Christ and for the coming in of the Aquarian Age with its distinctive energies and amazing opportunities, members of the Hierarchy have been forming and training those groups of workers and thinkers who, through their activities, have so largely governed and moulded our world for the past three or four centuries. These groups fall generally into four major divisions; cultural, political, religious, and scientific. In more modern times three other groups have definitely emerged; they are the philosophical, the psychological, and the financial groups. Philosophers have, of course, always been with us, but they have been for the most part isolated units who have founded schools characterised by partisanship and separativeness. Now there are no outstanding figures as in the past, but groups who represent certain ideas. It is of profound importance that the work of these seven groups of thinkers be recognised as part of the hierarchical programme, designed to produce a certain situation, to bring about certain preparatory conditions, and as playing a definite part in the work of world evolution as far as humanity is concerned.

Distinguishing the Real from the Unreal

As more attention is given to the existence of the Hierarchy it becomes increasingly important to distinguish between astral reflections of the Masters and the reality.

The fact of the existence of the spiritual Hierarchy and of Masters is being brought to the attention of large numbers even if it is being done by those who are confusing the reflection and the thought form with the reality.

How can the mystic avoid this error and confusion? How can the real be distinguished from the illusory? The only rules which I can give you are so simple that those who are occupied at this time with teaching and proclaiming that which they have astrally contacted may not like to follow them. The attitude of mind which will guard the mystic from astral delusion and error is:

The cultivation of a spirit of true humility. There is a spiritual arrogance which masks itself behind a cloak of humbleness and which is very prevalent at this time. It leads people to regard themselves as the chosen of the Hierarchy to save the world; it leads them to look upon themselves as the mouthpieces of the Masters or of the Christ; it tends to make them separative in their attitudes to other leaders and teachers, refusing to recognise the many aspects of the one work and the many methods which the Mind of God has devised for reaching a wide audience.
The refusal to accept any contact or message which has personality implications or which sets its recipient apart, thus tending to the development of a Messiah complex. A true contact with the Hierarchy and the true accolade of service carries with it the conviction of the existence of the many servers in the one Service, of the many messengers carrying the one message, of the many teachers of the many aspects of the one Truth, and of the many and various ways back to the Heart of God. When this all-embracing revelation accompanies the call to service, then the spirit of inclusiveness is developed and the person can be sure of being truly called to cooperate and convinced of the reality of the vision.
The freedom from emotional appeal. The true disciple and mystic is ever mentally polarised. Vision is free from the deluding reactions of the solar plexus centre. This vision awakens the heart centre and evokes the response of personality energy (focussed in the ajna centre) and produces eventually a “centering in the place of light”. This indicates the growing activity of the head centre.

World Religion

The fact of the spiritual Hierarchy, and people’s growing ability to work in cooperation with Them will be part of the new religious spirit.

In the coming world religion, life and not death will be proclaimed; attainment of spiritual status through spiritual living will be taught, and the fact of the existence of those who have thus attained and who work with Christ for the helping and salvaging of humanity will be the goal. The fact of the spiritual Hierarchy of our planet, the ability of mankind to contact its Members and to work in co- operation with Them, and the existence of Those Who know what the will of God is and can work intelligently with that will—these are the truths upon which the future spiritual teaching will be based.

The fact of the existence of this Hierarchy and its supreme Head, the Christ, is consciously recognized by hundreds of thousands today, though still denied by the orthodox. So many know this truth and so many people of integrity are cooperating consciously with the Members of the Hierarchy that ecclesiastical antagonisms and the belittling comments of the concrete minded are of no avail. People are moving out from under doctrinal authority into direct, personal and spiritual experience; they are coming under the direct authority which contact with Christ and His disciples, the Masters, ever confers.

Practical Work is Needed

Disciples, aspirants and all people of spiritual intention intuitively share a sense of responsibility for serving the Plan. This is not a time for visionary dreaming. It is a time for Work.

It will be obvious that a great spiritual movement is under way—perhaps the greatest of all time. Humanity is deemed to have reached a point in evolution where much can be done, because the minds of people—for the first time on a worldwide scale—are sensitive to spiritual impression; the opportunity of the moment is unique, because minds everywhere are becoming superlatively receptive to both good and evil. Men and women are not today governed so much by blind impulse as by considered thought , although the line of least resistance for the majority is the selfish impulse. There have always been small groups and rare souls who have demonstrated the capacity to respond to spiritual impression.

The totalitarian powers have always realised and exploited this capacity of human beings to be responsive to good or bad impression. By impressing certain doctrines, certain principles and certain beliefs on their people, and by withholding the truth or the facts and ignoring the realities, they contrive to swing their people into an acceptance which means—for the controlling initiators—immense power.

Other nations, the so-called democracies, are in a state of great confusion, split into political, religious and social parties, listening to the teaching, the dreams and the plans of every person who has an idea and thrusts themselves forward into the public consciousness, having no true or good policy, tainted by selfishness (personal or national, and sometimes both), and demanding the settlement of material affairs with small attention—if any—to the recognised spiritual goals and values.

There is fortunately a growing body of those of all faiths, or of no religious faith, to be found in every continent and nation who are aware of the stirring of this spiritual movement—linking humanity and the Hierarchy. This is due to their reaction to spiritual hope, to the expectancy and to the curiously widespread belief that divine intervention is possible and at hand. As the momentum of this spiritual activity develops, so will the responsiveness among people develop, and if the reaction is that which is hoped for, it will be the masses everywhere who will slowly unite to bring about the conditions needed for the reappearance of the Prince of Peace. The number of these semi-enlightened people is growing fast; desperation is hastening their response to help from on high, and in due time their numbers will be so great that totalitarianism, as well as chaotic democracy, will not be able to stand against them.

This is no mystical or visionary dream with which I am presenting you. It involves hard business sense on the physical plane, a practical commonsense, a cessation of the constant presentation of a beautiful future in a mythical heaven of idleness and uselessness. The bringing in of the Kingdom of God, the preparation for the coming of the Christ and the salvaging of humanity demand courage, organisation, business acumen, psychology and persistence; it needs trained workers and much money; it calls for carefully considered programmes, possessing long range vision, plus sensible modern procedures. It is to this that all with true vision and a love of humanity are called today; it means the spreading of an intelligently cultivated goodwill and the fostering of those conditions, attitudes and points of view which will inevitably bring about right human relations.

A Point of Balance

The task is to create a point of balance in the world between those who stand for separateness and materialism and those who stand for the freedom of the human soul.

I would call your careful attention to one most important matter. The moment that a point of balance is reached, the moment that those who stand for separateness and materialism, for totalitarianism or for any imposed regime (and consequently an evil unity), and those who stand for the freedom of the human soul, for the rights of the individual, for brotherhood and right human relations, are equal in force, in position and in influence, then the doors of the Hierarchy (symbolically speaking) will open, and the Christ with His disciples will come. This balance has to reach a point upon mental levels; it has to be reached by those who can think, who can influence, and in whose hands lies the responsibility for what the members of the public below the mental level know and believe.

***

THE CHALLENGE OF INTERNATIONAL UNITY

“Unity and right human relations — individual, communal, national and international — can be brought about by the united action of the men and women of goodwill in every country.”

THE IMMEDIATE TASK
SPIRITUAL LEADERSHIP & FREEDOM
GUIDELINES FOR ACTION

“Unity and right human relations — individual, communal, national and international — can be brought about by the united action of the men and women of goodwill in every country.”

Throughout the world people are increasingly thinking in international terms and increasingly recognizing the oneness of life. This is the guarantee of a more unified world and a stronger global community which only become possible to the extent that people think along these broader and more inclusive lines.

The spiritual life of humanity is now so strong that it has disrupted the old forms and everywhere we see them in process of disintegration. The difficulties of the present transition period can be recognized as the birth pangs of a new civilization struggling to be born.

For too long spiritual impression has been interrupted leading to interference with the divine circulatory flow. It is the task of world servers and creative thinkers to restore this flow and to stop this interference.

THE IMMEDIATE TASK

The immediate task facing all nations is to gradually offset hate and distrust and initiate new techniques of trained, imaginative, creative and practical goodwill. Goodwill as it is truly practiced by political, religious, educational and economic groups within and among the nations, is already revolutionizing the world and setting us on the path towards right and peaceful human relationships.

The key to humanity’s trouble over the past two hundred years has been to take and not to give, to accept and not to share, to grasp and not to distribute. This is contrary to all accepted standards of behaviour in an increasingly interdependent world. International unity will increasingly emerge in areas where global objectives are mutually agreed upon and systematically implemented.

Peace, security and world stability are primarily tied up with global economic factors. Where there is uneven distribution of the world’s resources and where some nations and a few individuals within those nations monopolize a large portion of the world’s wealth there is a basic imbalance. While a few experience extreme wealth many others lack even the basic necessities of life. In an interdependent age this must change.

International unity has become a necessity. National selfishness and a fixed determination to preserve national status interpreted often in terms of boundaries, military power and the expansion of trade must gradually fade out.

All nations still have much interior house-cleaning to do and this they must carry forward along with their larger efforts to bring about a better and more habitable world. Yet humanity is growing up and demonstrating a wider sense of responsibility, alongside an ability to handle its problems and to think in larger terms. A world consciousness, motivated by the idea of the general good, in which higher values than individual and national gain are emphasized is being developed by all who are fostering an enlightened public opinion.

SPIRITUAL LEADERSHIP & FREEDOM

The corruption and selfishness of so many in positions of power continues because men and women of spiritual intention and goodwill have not assumed leadership. People in every land are beginning to realise that they are largely responsible for what is wrong and that their inertness and lack of right action and thinking has led to the present unhappy state of affairs. They have permitted the selfish and undesirable to lead. Now, recognition is growing that true spirituality is that which properly relates us, as free and responsible human beings, one to another.

The Four Freedoms (as outlined by Franklin Roosevelt) provide a clear vision for a more spiritual world :

• freedom of speech and expression — everywhere in the world

• freedom to worship God in one’s own way — everywhere in the world

• freedom from want — which means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy, and peaceful life for its inhabitants — everywhere in the world

• freedom from fear — which means a worldwide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough manner that no nation or group will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any other people or nation — anywhere in the world.

The changing of the old order, the awakening of humanity to new possibilities and the purification of the political and economic arena, are today the factors of the greatest spiritual value.

GUIDELINES FOR ACTION

There is no counsel of perfection, or simple solution which will bring immediate change. Yet for spiritual leaders and people of goodwill, certain lines of action seem right and useful:

1. The United Nations, through the General Assembly, specialised agencies, and its various councils, commissions and committees, and through its mutually agreed goals for sustainable development, must be supported; there is, as yet, no other global organisation to which we can hopefully look.

2. The general public in every nation must be educated in right human relations. Above all else, the children and the youth of the world must be taught to practice goodwill to all everywhere, irrespective of race or creed.

3. An intelligent and cooperative public opinion must be developed in every land and this constitutes a major spiritual duty. If the men and women of goodwill and the spiritually inclined people of the world will become genuinely active, it can be done in a comparatively short time.

4. The world’s economic councils must set the resources of the earth free for the use of humanity. This will be possible when world need is better appreciated. Sharing and co-operation must be taught instead of competition and self-interest.

It is through the steady, consistent and organised work of the men and women of goodwill throughout the world that unity and right human relations are being brought about. At present, such people are in process of organising and although the forces arrayed against them are stupendous, there is a sense that the barriers of greed and hate that have for so long separated the world are at long last breaking down.

As public opinion is mobilised along the lines of goodwill it will become such a potent force for good in the world that leaders, politicians, business people and religious leaders will be forced to listen and comply. Out of this enlightened public opinion will grow a determination to collectively enact those measures that will usher in a new order in the world — not a standardized homogenous regimentation of policies that negate human ingenuity and creativity but rather an order that flows from alignment with the soul and which, when collectively harnessed by individuals and groups within each nation, will effectively evoke the soul of the nations.

UNIFICATION

The souls of all are one and I am one with them.
I seek to love, not hate;
I seek to serve and not exact due service;
I seek to heal, not hurt.

Let pain bring due reward of light and love.
Let the soul control the outer form,
And life, and all events,
And bring to light the Love
That underlies the happenings of the time.

Let vision come and insight.
Let the future stand revealed.
Let inner union demonstrate and outer cleavages be gone.
Let love prevail.
Let all people love.

***

WORLD RELIGION IN A NEW ERA

The truly religious spirit is more fundamentally alive today than at any previous time. Everywhere people are ready for the light and expectant of a new revelation. Only great and fundamental principles of living can really meet mankind’s need. Religion in the new age must be based on truths which are universally accepted.

(This text is adapted from two books by Alice A. Bailey—The Reappearance of the Christ and The Externalisation of the Hierarchy, both published by Lucis Publishing Co., New York and Lucis Press Ltd., London. Although these books were published before 1960, the ideas which they encompass, concerning the evolving spirit of humanity as it is expressed through religious institutions and movements, continue to be relevant. Indeed, these ideas have come into sharper focus, as traditional structures have come under increasing strain in the twenty-first century, and in response, people of goodwill in every faith have sought to build bridges to those of other faiths. The text was originally published under the title “The New World Religion”. This phrase, which appears a number of times throughout the text, is not intended to describe the emergence of a new institution or organisation, but rather a new, universal approach to the religious spirit, centered around three fundamental truths: the existence of a Spiritual Hierarchy; approaching divinity through the science of invocation and evocation; and that the starry heavens and planets are manifestations of great spiritual lives.)

Religion is the name given to the invocative appeal of humanity and the evocative response of the greater Life to that cry.

The truly religious spirit is more fundamentally alive today than at any previous time. Everywhere people are ready for the light and expectant of a new revelation. Only great and fundamental principles of living can really meet mankind’s need. Religion in the new age must be based on truths which are universally accepted. These are:

1. The fact of God, both transcendent and immanent.

2. Humanity’s relationship to God; we are all “children of the one father.”

3. The fact of immortality and of eternal persistence, arising from humanity’s essential divinity.

4. The Continuity of Revelation and the Divine Approaches; God has never left Himself without witness.

5. The fact of our relationship with each other, or of human brotherhood.

6. The fact of the Path to God, trodden down the ages by mystics, occultists and saints of every religious faith.

7. The source of all the great world religions and philosophies is the spiritual Hierarchy of the planet, whose members are called the custodians of the divine Plan.

Today another great approach of God to Humanity, a new revelation, is possible. Humanity awaits the reappearance of the world teacher, head of the spiritual Hierarchy, known as the Christ in the West and the Lord Maitreya in the East, and recognised by many names—Messiah, Imam Mahdi, Zarathustra—in the different world religions.

The concept of a world religion and the fusion of faiths is now a field of discussion. In the future world all people of spiritual inclination and intention will keep the same holy days, pooling their spiritual resources in a united and simultaneous spiritual invocation.

God works in many ways, through many faiths and religious agencies. The universal platform of the new world religion will be built by emphasising essential doctrines and the unity and fellowship of the spirit.
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Part 4 of 5

The New World Religion

Human beings everywhere are searching for spiritual release and truth, and the truly religious spirit is more fundamentally alive than at any previous time. The ferment and conflict in the world has permeated the churches; enlightened religious thinkers are seeking an end to age-old conflicts between differing sects, and are searching for the living reality behind the outer forms. Orthodoxy in the world religions is rapidly falling into the background, while we are undoubtedly approaching nearer to the central spiritual reality.

Some of the questions that are being asked by spiritual people, both within and outside the churches and in all faiths, can be expressed as follows:

• Why has the church been unable to arrest the overpowering expression of evil, as evidenced in the last world war?
• Why has religion proved inadequate to the need of humanity?
• Why have so many leaders of the religious world proved themselves incompetent to aid in the solution of the world problems?
• Why, as exponents of the God of Love, have Christian teachers been unable to arrest the unparalleled growth of hate in the world today?
• Why have eastern religious teachers, custodians of a spiritual psychology and the art of individual unfoldment, been unable to apply this wisdom to raising their peoples from starvation, poverty and degraded living?
• Why do so many young people refuse to go to church and lack interest in accepting the doctrines presented for their belief?
• Why do so many new cults arise and attract the people away from orthodox organisations of a religious nature?
• Why is there a growing emphasis in the West upon the Eastern theologies, upon the various yogas, upon Buddhist teachings and oriental faiths?
• What is wrong with our presentation of the spiritual realities and the truths of the ages?

Many answers can be given. The most important one is that the presentation of divine truth, as given by the churches in the West and by the teachers in the East, has not kept pace with the unfolding intellect of the human spirit. The same old forms of words and of ideas are still all too often handed out to the enquirer and they do not satisfy their mind nor do they meet practical need in a most difficult world. The enquirer is asked to give unquestioning belief but not to understand, and to accept the interpretations and the affirmations of other human minds who claim that they do understand and that they have the truth. He does not believe that their minds and their interpretations are any better than his.

It is not the evil rampant in the world today which is hindering the revelation and hindering the unfoldment of the spiritual life. It is the failure of the religious organisations throughout the world to preserve the truth in its purity and to avoid the fanatical idea that anyone’s individual interpretation of the truth must necessarily be the only and correct one. In the language of Christianity: The church today is the tomb of the Christ and the stone of theology has been rolled to the door of the sepulchre.

There is however, no point in attacking Christianity. Christianity cannot rightly be attacked; it is an expression—in essence, if not yet entirely factual—of the love of God, immanent in His created universe.

Churchianity has, however, laid itself wide open to attack, and the mass of thinking people are aware of this; unfortunately, these thinking people are still a minority within the churches. Nevertheless, it is this thinking minority which, when it is a majority, will spell the doom of churchianity and endorse the spread of the true teaching of the Christ. The question arises whether Christ would be at home in the churches if He walked again among men. The rituals and the ceremonies, the pomp and the vestments, the candles and the gold and silver, the graded order of popes, cardinals, archbishops, canons and ordinary rectors, pastors and clergy would seemingly have small interest for the simple Son of God, Who—when on earth—had nowhere to lay His head.

How can the starving children of the world be salvaged when pleas go out for money to build cathedrals and erect more churches when in many parts of the world the existent churches often stand nearly empty? How can the spiritual and intellectual needs of the people be met when the theological seminaries send out young men to guide humanity who are grounded largely in the past interpretations? Is it not possible that the Christ may regard the separative life of the churches and the arrogance of the theologians as wrong and undesirable—dividing (as they have) the world into believer and unbeliever, into Christian and heathen, into the so-called enlightened and the so-called benighted—and as contrary to all that He Himself held and believed when He said, “Other sheep I have which are not of this fold.” (John X:16)

The presentation of religious truth in the past has blocked the growth of the religious spirit; theology has brought mankind to the very gates of despair; the delicate flower of the Christ life has been stunted and arrested in the dark caves of man’s thinking; fanatical adherence to human interpretations has taken the place of Christian living; millions of books have obliterated the living words of Christ; the arguments and discussions of priests have put out the light which the Buddha brought, and the love of God as revealed by the life of Christ has been forgotten while thinkers have quarrelled over meanings, over phrases and words. In the meantime, people everywhere have agonised, starved, suffered, demanded help and instruction and, unsatisfied, have lost faith.

Today everywhere people are ready for the light; they are expectant of a new revelation and of a new dispensation, and humanity has advanced so far on the way of evolution that these demands and expectations are not couched in terms of material betterment only, but in terms of a spiritual vision, true values and right human relations. They are demanding teaching and spiritual help along with the necessary requests for food, clothes and the opportunity to work and live in freedom; they face famine in large areas of the world and yet are registering (with equal dismay) the famine of the soul.

We are surely not in error if we conclude that this spiritual dismay and this spiritual demand have assumed a paramount place in the consciousness of the Christ. When He reappears and when His Church, previously invisible, appears with Him, what can They do to meet this demanding cry and this intensified attitude of spiritual perception with which They will be greeted? They see the picture whole. The cry of the Christian for spiritual help, the cry of the Buddhist for spiritual enlightenment, and the cry of the Hindu for spiritual understanding—along with the cries of all those who have faith or have no faith—must be met. The demands of humanity are rising to Their ears and the Christ and His disciples have no sectarian scruples, of that we may be sure. It is impossible to believe that They are interested in the views of the fundamentalists or in the theories of the theologians upon the Virgin Birth, the Vicarious Atonement or the Infallibility of the Pope. Humanity is in desperate need and that need must be met; only great and fundamental principles of living, covering the past and the present and providing a platform for the future, will really meet that human invocation. The Christ and the spiritual Hierarchy will not come to destroy all that humanity has hitherto found “necessary to salvation,” and all that has met its spiritual demand. When the Christ reappears, the non-essentials will surely disappear; the fundamentals of faith will remain, upon which He can build that new world religion for which all wait. That new world religion must be based upon those truths which have stood the test of ages and which have brought assurance and comfort to people everywhere. These surely are:

1. THE FACT OF GOD

First and foremost, there must be recognition of the fact of God. That central Reality can be called by any name that may be chosen according to mental or emotional bent, racial tradition and heritage, for it cannot be defined or conditioned by names. Human beings must always use names in order to express that which they sense, feel and know, both of the phenomenal and also of the intangible. Consciously or unconsciously, all people recognise God Transcendent and God Immanent. They sense God to be the Creator and the Inspiration of all that is.

The Eastern faiths have ever emphasised God Immanent, deep within the human heart, “nearer than hands and feet”, the Self, the One, the Atma, smaller than the small, yet all-comprehensive. The Western faiths have presented God Transcendent, outside His universe, an Onlooker. God transcendent, first of all, conditioned humanity’s concept of Deity, for the action of this transcendent God appeared in the process of nature; later, in the Jewish dispensation, God appeared as the tribal Jehovah, as the soul of a nation. Next, God was seen as a perfected human, and the divine God-man walked the Earth in the Person of Christ. Today we have a rapidly growing emphasis upon God immanent in every human being and in every created form. Today, we should have the churches presenting a synthesis of these two ideas which have been summed up for us in the statement of Shri Krishna in The Bhagavad Gita: “Having pervaded this whole universe with a fragment of Myself, I remain.” God, greater than the created whole, yet God present also in the part; God Transcendent guarantees the plan for our world and is the Purpose, conditioning all lives from the minutest atom, up through all the kingdoms of nature, to the human kingdom.

2. HUMANITY’S RELATIONSHIP TO GOD

The second truth to which all give allegiance—no matter what the faith—is that of humanity’s essential relationship to God. Inherent in the human consciousness—inchoate often and undefined—is a sense of divinity. “We are all the children of God” (Gal. III:26); “One is our Father, even God,” says the Christ and so say all the world Teachers and Avatars down the ages. “As He is, so are we in this world” (1 John IV:17) is another Biblical statement. “Closer is He than breathing, nearer than hands and feet,” chants the Hindu. “Christ in us, the hope of glory” is the triumphant affirmation of St. Paul.

3. THE FACT OF IMMORTALITY AND OF ETERNAL PERSISTENCE

Third, is the sense of persistence, of eternal life or of immortality. From this recognition, there seems to be no escape; it is as much a part of humanity’s reaction as is the instinct of self-preservation. With that inner conviction, we face death and we know that we shall live again, that we come and we go and that we persist because we are divine and the controllers of our own destiny. We know that we have set ourselves a goal and that the goal is “Life more abundantly”—somewhere, here, there, and eventually everywhere.

The human spirit is undying; it forever endures, progressing from point to point and stage to stage upon the Path of Evolution, unfolding steadily and sequentially the divine attributes and aspects. This truth involves necessarily the recognition of two natural laws; the Law of Rebirth and the Law of Cause and Effect. The churches in the West have refused officially to recognise the Law of Rebirth and have thereby wandered into a theological impasse and into a cul-de-sac from which there is no possible exit. The churches in the East have over-emphasised these laws so that a negative, acquiescent attitude to life and its processes, based on continuously renewed opportunity, controls the people. Christianity has emphasised immortality but has made eternal happiness dependent upon the acceptance of a theological dogma: Be a true professing Christian and live in a somewhat fatuous heaven or refuse to be an accepting Christian, or a negative professional Christian, and go to an impossible hell. Both concepts are today repudiated by all sincere, thinking people. No one of any true reasoning power or with any true belief in a God of love accepts the heaven of religious thinkers or has any desire to go there. Still less do they accept the “lake that burneth with fire and brimstone” (Rev. XIX :20) or the everlasting torture to which a God of love is supposed to condemn all who do not believe in the theological interpretations of the Middle Ages. The essential truth lies elsewhere. “Whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also reap” (Gal. VI :7) is a truth which needs re-emphasising. In these words, St. Paul phrases for us the ancient and true teaching of the Law of Cause and Effect, called in the Orient the Law of Karma.

The immortality of the human soul, and the innate ability of the spiritual, inner person to work out their own salvation under the Law of Rebirth, in response to the Law of Cause and Effect, are the underlying factors governing all human conduct and all human aspiration. These two laws no-one can evade. They operate at all times until the achievement of the desired and the designed perfection, leading to the manifestation on earth of a rightly functioning child of God.

4. THE CONTINUITY OF REVELATION AND THE DIVINE APPROACHES

A fourth essential truth and one which clarifies all the planned work of the Christ is tied in with spiritual revelation and the need of humanity for God and of God for humanity. Never has Deity left Itself at any time without witness. Never has humanity demanded light that the light has not been forthcoming. Never has there been a time, cycle or world period when there was not the giving out of the teaching and spiritual help which human need demanded. Never did the hearts and minds of humanity go out towards God, but that divinity itself came nearer. The history of humanity is, in reality, the history of the demand for light and for contact with God, and then the giving of light and the approach of God to humanity. Always the Saviour, the Avatar or the World Teacher issued forth from the secret place of the Most High and brought to humanity fresh revelation, fresh hope and a fresh incentive towards fuller spiritual living.

Some of these Approaches have been of a major nature, affecting humanity as a whole and some of them are of less importance, affecting only a relatively small part of humanity—a nation or a group. Those Who come as the Revealers of the love of God come from that spiritual centre to which the Christ gave the name “the Kingdom of God” (Matt. VI.33). Here dwelt the “spirits of just men made perfect” (Heb. XII:23); here the spiritual Guides of the race are to be found and here the spiritual Executives of God’s plan live and work and oversee human and planetary affairs. It is called by many names by many people. It is spoken of as the Spiritual Hierarchy, as the Abode of Light, as the Centre where the Masters of the Wisdom are to be found, as the Great White Lodge. From it come those who act as Messengers of the Wisdom of God, Custodians of the truth as it is in Christ, and Those Whose task is to save the world, to impart the next revelation, and to demonstrate divinity.

A new definition of God was given us when the Buddha taught that God was Light and showed us the way of illumination, and when Christ revealed to us that God was Love through His life and service on earth. Today the knowledge aspect of illumination is being comprehended, but the inner meaning of love is only now dimly sensed. Yet light and love have been revealed to the world by two great Sons of God in two Approaches.

All the world Scriptures bear witness to the existence of this centre of spiritual energy. This spiritual Hierarchy has been steadily drawing nearer to humanity as people have become more conscious of divinity and more fitted for contact with the divine.

5. THE FACT OF OUR RELATIONSHIP WITH EACH OTHER

This fifth essential truth is as much a foundational spiritual fact as is God Himself, because it is linked with our knowledge of Him as Father.

This relationship we call “brotherhood” and it expresses itself, or it will eventually express itself, through human fellowship and right human relations. For this we work, and humanity is moving towards that relationship.

6. THE FACT OF THE PATH TO GOD

Awareness of this has been preserved for us down the ages by those who knew God and whom the world called mystics, occultists and saints. Opening out before aspirants stretches the Way. The history of the human soul is the history of the search for that Way and its discovery by the persistent. This is the sixth of the basic realities and truths which have conditioned the masses of humanity for aeons.

In every race and nation, in every climate and part of the world, and throughout the endless reaches of time itself, back into the limitless past, human beings have found the Path to God; they have trodden it and accepted its conditions, endured its disciplines, rested back in confidence upon its realities, received its rewards and found their goal. Arrived there, they have “entered the joy of the Lord”, participated in the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, dwelt in the glory of the divine Presence, and then returned to the world, to serve. The testimony to the existence of this Path is the priceless treasure of all the great religions and its witnesses are those who have transcended all forms and all theologies, and have penetrated into the world of meaning which all symbols veil.

These truths are part of all that the past gives to humanity. They are our eternal heritage, and connected with them there is no new revelation but only participation and understanding. These are the facts which the World Teachers have brought to us, suited to our need and capacity at any given time. They are the inner structure of the One Truth upon which all the world theologies have been built, including the Christian doctrines and dogmas built around the Person of Christ and His teaching.

Another great Approach of divinity and another spiritual revelation are now possible. A new revelation is hovering over mankind and the One Who will bring it and implement it is drawing steadily nearer to us. What this great approach will bring to humanity, we do not yet know. It will surely bring us as definite results as did all the earlier revelations and the missions of Those Who came in response to humanity’s earlier demands. A new heaven and a new earth are on their way. What does the orthodox theologian and churchman mean when he uses the words “a new heaven”? May these words not signify something entirely new and a new conception as to the world of spiritual realities? May not the Coming One bring us a new revelation as to the very nature of God Himself? Do we yet know all that can be known about God? If so, God is very limited. May it not be possible that our present ideas of God, as the Universal Mind, as Love and as Will may be enriched by some new idea or quality for which we have as yet no name or word, and of which we have no slightest understanding. Each of the three present concepts of divinity—of the Trinity—were entirely new when first sequentially presented to the human mind or consciousness.

For some years now the spiritual Hierarchy of our planet has been drawing nearer to humanity and its approach is responsible for the great concepts of freedom which are so close to human hearts everywhere. The dream of brotherhood, of fellowship, of world cooperation and of a peace based on right human relations, is becoming clearer in our minds. We are also visioning a new and vital world religion, a universal faith which will have its roots in the past, but which will make clear the new dawning beauty and the coming vital revelation.

Of one thing we can be sure, this approach will, in some way—deeply spiritual, yet wholly factual—prove the truth of the immanence of God. The churches have emphasised and exploited the extra-territoriality of deity and have posited the presence of a God Who is creating, sustaining and creatively active, but at the same time outside creation—an inscrutable onlooker. This type of transcendent Creator must be shown to be false and this doctrine must be countered by the manifestation of God in the human being, the hope of glory. It is this surely that the expected Approach will demonstrate; it will prove also the close relationship between God Transcendent and that “in Him we live and move and have our being,” because, “having pervaded this entire Universe with a fragment of Himself, He remains.” God is immanent in the forms of all created things; the glory which shall be revealed is the expression of that innate divinity in all its attributes and aspects, its qualities and powers, through the medium of humanity.

On the fact of God and of humanity’s relation to the divine, on the fact of immortality and of the continuity of divine revelation, and upon the fact of the constant emergence of Messengers from the divine centre, the new world religion will be based. To these facts must be added humanity’s assured, instinctive knowledge of the existence of the Path to God and of his ability to tread it, when the evolutionary process has brought him to the point of a fresh orientation to divinity and to the acceptance of the fact of God Transcendent and of God Immanent within every form of life.

As we look ahead into the world of tomorrow and begin to question what structure the faith of humanity should assume and what building the skill of the knowers will erect to house the religious spirit of humanity, three more fundamental truths appear to be emerging as necessary adjuncts to the revealed body of truth:
i. The demonstrated existence of a Spiritual Hierarchy, the life-purpose of which is the good of humanity. The Members of the Hierarchy are seen to be the Custodians of the divine Plan and expressions of the Love of God.
ii. The development of the Science of Invocation and Evocation as a means and method of approach to divinity.
iii. The realisation that the starry heavens, the solar system and the planetary spheres are all of them the manifestations of great spiritual Lives and that the interrelation between these embodied Lives is as real and effectual as is the relation between members of the human family.

Invocation and Evocation

These are the foundational truths upon which the world religion of the future will rest. Its keynote will be Divine Approach. “Draw near to Him and He will draw near to you” (James IV:8) is the great injunction, emanating in new and clear tones from Christ and the spiritual Hierarchy at this time.

The great theme of the new world religion will be the recognition of the many divine approaches and the continuity of revelation which each of them conveyed; the task ahead of the spiritually minded people of the world today is to prepare humanity for the imminent and (perhaps) the greatest of all the Approaches. The method employed will be the scientific and intelligent use of Invocation and Evocation and the recognition of their tremendous potency.

Man invokes divine Approach in various ways: by means of the inchoate, voiceless appeal or invocative cry of the masses and also by the planned, defined invocation of the spiritually oriented aspirants, the intelligently convinced worker, disciple and initiate — by all, in fact, who form what has been called “The New Group of World Servers,” that subjectively linked group which is leading humanity towards a new and better civilisation.

The Science of invocation and evocation will take the place of what we now call “prayer” and “worship.” We need not be disturbed by the use of the word “science.” It is not the cold and heartless intellectual thing so oft depicted. It is in reality the intelligent organisation of spiritual energy and of the forces of love, and these, when effective, will evoke the response of spiritual Beings Who can again walk openly among men, and thus establish a close relation and a constant communication between humanity and the spiritual Hierarchy.

In order to clarify, it might be said that Invocation is of three kinds: there is, as stated above, the massed demand unconsciously voiced, and the crying appeal, wrung from the hearts of men in all times of crisis such as the present. This invocative cry rises ceaselessly from all men living in the midst of disaster; it is addressed to that power outside themselves which they feel can and should come to their help in their moment of extremity. This great and wordless invocation is rising everywhere today. Then there is the invocational spirit, evidenced by sincere men as they participate in the rites of their religion and take advantage of the opportunity of united worship and prayer to lay their demands for help before God. This group, added to the mass of men, creates a huge body of invocative applicants and at this time, their massed intent is in great evidence and their invocation is rising to the Most High. Then, lastly there are the trained disciples and aspirants of the world who use certain forms of words, certain carefully defined invocations and who, as they do this, focus the invocative cry and the invocative appeal of the other two groups, giving it right direction and power. All these three groups are, consciously or unconsciously, swinging into activity at this time and their united effort guarantees a resultant evocation.

This new invocative work will be the keynote of the coming world religion and will fall into two parts. There will be the invocative work of the masses of the people, everywhere, trained by the spiritually minded people of the world (working in the churches whenever possible under an enlightened clergy) to accept the fact of the approaching spiritual energies, focussed through Christ and His spiritual Hierarchy, and trained also to voice their demand for light, liberation and understanding. There will also be the skilled work of invocation as practised by those who have trained their minds through right meditation, who know the potency of formulas, mantrams and invocations and who work consciously. They will increasingly use certain great formulas of words which will later be given to the race, just as the Lord’s Prayer was given by the Christ, and as “The Great Invocation” has been given out for use at this time by the Hierarchy.

This new religious science for which prayer, meditation and ritual have prepared humanity, will train its people to present — at stated periods throughout the year — the voiced demand of the people of the world for relationship with God and for a closer spiritual relation to each other. This work, when rightly carried forward, will evoke response from the waiting Hierarchy and from its Head, the Christ. Through this response, the belief of the masses will gradually be changed into the conviction of the knowers. In this way, the mass of men will be transformed and spiritualised, and the two great divine centres of energy or groups — the Hierarchy and Humanity itself — will begin to work in complete at-one-ment and unity. Then the Kingdom of God will indeed and in truth be functioning on earth.

It will be apparent that it is only possible to indicate the broad general outlines of the new world religion. The expansion of the human consciousness which will take place as a result of the coming Great Approach will enable humanity to grasp not only its relation to the spiritual life of our planet, the “One in Whom we live and move and have our being,” but will also give a glimpse of the relation of our planet to the circle of planetary lives, moving within the orbit of the Sun and the still greater circle of spiritual influences which contact our system as it pursues its orbit in the Heavens (the twelve constellations of the zodiac). Astronomical and astrological investigations have demonstrated this relationship and the influences exerted but there is still speculation and much foolish claiming and interpretation. Yet the churches have ever recognised this and the Bible has testified to it. “The stars in their courses fought against Sisera” (Judges V:20). “Who can withstand the sweet influences of the Pleiades?” (Job XXXVIII:31). Many other passages bear out this contention of the Knowers. Many church festivals are fixed by reference to the moon or a zodiacal constellation. Investigation will prove this to be the case and when the ritual of the new world religion is universally established, this will be one of the important factors considered.

Spiritual Festivals

The establishing of certain major festivals in relation to the moon and in a lesser degree to the zodiac will bring about a strengthening of the spirit of invocation and the resultant inflow of evoked influences. The truth lying behind all invocation is based upon the power of thought, particularly in its telepathic nature, rapport and aspect. The unified, invocative thought of the masses and the focussed, directed thought of the New Group of World Servers constitute an outgoing stream of energy. This will reach telepathically those spiritual Beings Who are sensitive and responsive to such impacts. Their evoked response, sent out as spiritual energy, will in turn reach humanity after having been stepped down into thought energy and in that form will make its due impact upon the minds of men, convincing them and carrying inspiration and revelation. Thus has it ever been in the history of the spiritual unfoldment of the world and the procedure followed in writing the world Scriptures.

Secondly, the establishing of a certain uniformity in the world’s religious rituals will aid men everywhere to strengthen each other’s work and enhance powerfully the thought currents directed to the waiting spiritual Lives. At present, the Christian religion has its great festivals, the Buddhist keeps his different set spiritual events, and the Hindu has still another list of holy days. In the future world all men of spiritual inclination and intention everywhere will keep the same holy days. This will bring about a pooling of spiritual resources, and a united spiritual effort, plus a simultaneous spiritual invocation. The potency of this will be apparent.

There will be three such major Festivals each year, concentrated in three consecutive months and leading, therefore, to a prolonged annual spiritual effort which will affect the remainder of the year. These will be:

1. THE FESTIVAL OF EASTER

This is the Festival of the risen living Christ, the Teacher of all men and the Head of the Spiritual Hierarchy. He is the Expression of the love of God. On this day the spiritual Hierarchy, which He guides and directs, will be recognised and the nature of God’s love will be emphasised. This Festival is determined always by the date of the Full Moon of spring and is the great Western and Christian Festival.

2. THE FESTIVAL OF WESAK

This is the Festival of the Buddha, the spiritual Intermediary between the highest spiritual centre, Shamballa, and the Hierarchy. The Buddha is the expression of the wisdom of God, the Embodiment of Light and the Indicator of the divine purpose. This will be fixed annually in relation to the Full Moon of May, as is at present the case. It is the great Eastern Festival.

3. THE FESTIVAL OF GOODWILL

This will be the Festival of the spirit of humanity — aspiring towards God, seeking conformity with the will of God and dedicated to the expression of right human relations. This will be fixed annually in relation to the Full Moon of June. It will be a day whereon the spiritual and divine nature of mankind will be recognised. On this Festival for two thousand years the Christ has represented humanity and has stood before the Hierarchy and in the sight of Shamballa as the God-Man, the leader of His people and the “the Eldest in a great family of brothers” (Romans VIII:29). Each year at that time He has preached the last sermon of the Buddha, before the assembled Hierarchy. This will, therefore, be a festival of deep invocation and appeal, of a basic aspiration towards fellowship, of human and spiritual unity, and will represent the effect in the human consciousness of the work of the Buddha and of the Christ.

These three Festivals are a part of the unified spiritual Approach of humanity, although they are not as yet related to each other. The time is coming when all three Festivals will be kept throughout the world and by their means a great spiritual unity will be achieved and the effects of the Great Approach, so close to us at this time, will be stabilised by the united invocation of humanity throughout the planet.

The remaining full moons will constitute lesser festivals but will be recognised to be also of vital importance. They will establish the divine attributes in the consciousness of man, just as the major festivals establish the three divine aspects. These aspects and qualities will be arrived at and determined by a close study of the nature of a particular constellation or constellations influencing those months. For instance, Capricorn will call attention to the first initiation, the birth of the Christ in the cave of the heart, and indicate the training needed to bring about that great spiritual event in the life of the individual man. This one instance indicated the possibilities for spiritual unfoldment that could be given through an understanding of these influences and in order to revivify the ancient faiths by expanding them into their larger undying relationships.

Thus, the twelve annual festivals will constitute a revelation of divinity. They will present a means of bringing about relationship, first of all, during three months with the three great spiritual Centres, the three expressions of the divine Trinity. The minor festivals will emphasise the inter-relation of the Whole, thus lifting the divine presentation out of the individual and the personal, into that of the universal divine Purpose; the relationship of the Whole to the part and of the part to that Whole will be thereby fully expressed.

Humanity will, therefore, invoke the spiritual power of the Kingdom of God, the Hierarchy; the Hierarchy will respond, and God’s plans will then be worked out on earth. The Hierarchy, on a higher turn of the spiral will invoke the “Centre where the Will of God is known,” thus invoking the Purpose of God. Thus will the Will of God be implemented by Love and manifested intelligently; for this mankind is ready, and for this the Earth waits. Thus the new world religion will be built on the basis of the fundamental truth already recognised.

The New World Religion

The definition of religion which will in the future prove of greater accuracy than any yet formulated by the theologians might be expressed as follows: Religion is the name given to the invocative appeal of humanity and the evocative response of the greater Life to that cry.

It is, in fact, the recognition by the part of its relationship to the Whole, plus a constantly growing demand for increased awareness of that relation; it draws forth the recognition of the Whole that the demand has been made. It is the impact of the vibration of humanity — oriented specifically to the Great Life of which it feels itself a part — upon that Life and the responsive impact of that “All-surrounding Love” upon the lesser vibration. Religion, the science of invocation and evocation as far as humanity is concerned, is the approach (in the coming New Age) of a mentally polarised humanity. In the past, religion has had an entirely emotional appeal. It concerned the relation of the individual to the world of reality, of the seeking aspirant to the sought-for divinity. Its technique was the process of fitting oneself for the revelation of that divinity, of achieving a perfection which would warrant that revelation, and of developing a sensitivity and a loving response to the ideal Man, summarised, for present day humanity, in the Christ. Christ came to end the cycle of this emotional approach which had existed since Atlantean days. He demonstrated in Himself the visioned perfection and then presented to humanity an example — in full manifestation — of every possibility latent in man up to that time. The achieving of the perfection of the Christ-consciousness became the emphasised goal of humanity.

Today, slowly, the concept of a world religion and the need for its emergence are widely desired and worked for. The fusion of faiths is now a field of discussion. Workers in the field of religion will formulate the universal platform of the new world religion. It is a work of loving synthesis and will emphasise the unity and the fellowship of the spirit. This group is, in a pronounced sense, a channel for the activities of the Christ, the world Teacher. The platform of the new world religion will be built by many groups, working under the inspiration of the Christ.

Churchmen need to remember that the human spirit is greater than all the churches and greater than their teaching. In the long run, that human spirit will defeat them and proceed triumphantly into the Kingdom of God, leaving them far behind unless they enter as a humble part of the mass of men. Nothing under heaven can arrest the progress of the human soul on its long pilgrimage from darkness to light, from the unreal to the real, from death to immortality and from ignorance to wisdom. If the great organised religious groups of churches in every land, comprising all faiths, do not offer spiritual guidance and help, humanity will find another way. Nothing can keep the spirit of man from God.

God works in many ways, through many faiths and religious agencies; this is one reason for the elimination of non-essential doctrines. By the emphasising of the essential doctrines and in their union will the fullness of truth be revealed. This, the new world religion will do and its implementation will proceed apace, after the reappearance of the Christ.

***

THE REAPPEARANCE OF THE CHRIST

Christ is nearer to humanity than at any other time in human history; He is closer than the most aspiring and hopeful disciple knows, and can draw closer still if what is here written is understood and brought to the attention of men everywhere. For Christ belongs to humanity, to the world of men, and not alone to the churches and religious faiths throughout the world.

By Alice A. Bailey

[The text of this pamphlet is taken from Chapter III of the book The Reappearance of the Christ by Alice A. Bailey, published by the Lucis Press Limited of London and the Lucis Publishing Company of New York. The book is also published in Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish and Yugoslavian editions.]

GOD Transcendent, greater, vaster and more inclusive than His created world, is universally recognised and has been generally emphasised; all faiths can say with Shri Krishna (speaking as God, the Creator) that "having pervaded the whole universe with a fragment of Myself, I remain." This God Transcendent has dominated the religious thinking of millions of simple and spiritually minded people down the centuries which have elapsed since humanity began to press forward towards divinity.

Slowly, there is dawning upon the awakening consciousness of humanity, the great paralleling truth of God Immanent--divinely "pervading" all forms, conditioning from within all kingdoms in nature, expressing innate divinity through human beings and--two thousand years ago--portraying the nature of that divine Immanence in the Person of the Christ. Today, as an outcome of this unfolding divine Presence, there is entering into the minds of men everywhere a new concept: that of "Christ in us, the hope of glory." (Col: 1.27.) There is a growing and developing belief that Christ is in us, as He was in the Master Jesus, and this belief will alter world affairs and mankind's entire attitude to life.

The wonder of that life, lived two thousand years ago, is still with us and has lost none of its freshness; it is an eternal inspiration, hope, encouragement and example. The love He demonstrated still holds the thinking world in thrall, even though relatively few have really attempted to demonstrate the same quality of love as He did--a love that leads unerringly to world service, to complete self-forgetfulness and to radiant, magnetic living. The words He spoke were few and simple and all men can understand them, but their significance has been largely lost in the intricate legalities and discussions of St. Paul, and in the lengthy disputation of theological commentators since Christ lived and left us--or apparently left us.

Yet--today Christ is nearer to humanity than at any other time in human history; He is closer than the most aspiring and hopeful disciple knows, and can draw closer still if what is here written is understood and brought to the attention of men everywhere. For Christ belongs to humanity, to the world of men, and not alone to the churches and religious faiths throughout the world.

Around Him--in that High Place on Earth where He has His abiding place--are gathered today all His great Disciples, the Masters of the Wisdom, and all Those liberated Sons of God Who, down the ages, have passed from darkness to Light, from the unreal to the Real, and from death to Immortality. They stand ready to carry out His bidding and to obey Him, the Master of all the Masters and the Teacher alike of Angels and of men. The Exponents and the Representatives of all the world faiths are there waiting, under His guidance, to reveal to all those who today struggle in the maelstrom of world affairs, and who seek to solve the world crisis, that they are not alone. God Transcendent is working through the Christ and the Spiritual Hierarchy to bring relief; God Immanent in all men is standing on the verge of certain stupendous Recognitions.

The great Apostolic Succession of the Knowers of God is poised today for renewed activity--a succession of Those Who have lived on Earth, accepted the fact of God Transcendent, discovered the reality of God Immanent, portrayed in their own lives the divine characteristics of the Christ life and (because They lived on Earth as He did and does) have "entered for us within the veil, leaving us an example that we too should follow His steps" and Theirs. We too belong eventually in that great succession.

The Buddha Himself is standing behind the Christ in humble recognition of the divine task which He is on the verge of consummating, and because of the imminence of that spiritual accomplishment. Not only are all those who are functioning consciously in the Kingdom of God aware of His Plans, but those great spiritual Beings Who live and dwell in the "Father's House," in the "centre where the will of God is known," are also mobilised and organised to assist His work. The spiritual line of succession from the throne of the Ancient of Days down to the humblest disciple (gathered with others at the feet of the Christ) is today focussed on the task of helping humanity.

The great moment for which He has so patiently waited has almost arrived; the "end of the age" to which He referred when speaking to His small group of disciples: "Lo! I am with you all the days even unto the end of the age" has come. Today He stands and waits, knowing that the hour has come when He will "see of the travail of His soul and be satisfied." (Is: LIII: 11.)

Right through the spiritual succession of the Sons of God, there is naught to be seen and felt but expectancy and preparation. "The Hierarchy waits". It has done all that is possible from the angle of the present opportunity. The Christ stands in patient silence, attentive to the effort that will make His work materialise on Earth and enable Him to consummate the effort He made 2000 years ago in Palestine. The Buddha hovers over the planet, ready to play His part if the opportunity is offered to Him by mankind. Everything now depends upon the right action of the men of goodwill.

From the Father's House (the "centre where the will of God is known" or Shamballa of the esotericist) that fiat has gone forth: The hour has come. From the Kingdom of God where reigns the Christ, the answer has been flung back: "Father, Thy will be done." Down in our struggling, bewildered, unhappy world of men, the cry is ceaselessly rising: "May Christ return to Earth." For the three great spiritual centres: the Father's House, the Kingdom of God, and awakening Humanity, there is but one purpose, one idea and one united expectancy.

It is essential that today there should be a measure of fuller knowledge concerning the "centre where the will of God is known." The public should possess some understanding of this highest spiritual centre to which -- if we believe the Gospel story -- Christ Himself was always attentive. Frequently we read in The New Testament that "the Father spoke to Him" or that "He heard a Voice," unheard by others, or that the words were heard, "this is my beloved Son." Several times, we read, the seal of affirmation (as it is spiritually called) was given to Him. Only the Father, the planetary Logos, the "One in Whom we live and move and have our being" (Acts XVII.28), the Lord of the World, the Ancient of Days (Dan. VII.9) can speak this final affirmative word. There are, as well we know, five crises or initiations which concern the Master Jesus--the Birth at Bethlehem, the Baptism, the Transfiguration, the Crucifixion and the Resurrection--but lying behind this obvious and practical teaching, lies an undercurrent or thought of something much higher and of greater importance--the affirmative Voice of the Father, recognising that which the Christ has done.

When Christ completes the work during the next two thousand years which He inaugurated two thousand years ago, that affirmative Voice will surely again be heard and divine recognition of His coming will be accorded. Then the Christ will take that stupendous initiation of which we know nothing except that two divine aspects will blend and fuse in Him (love-wisdom in full manifestation, motivated by divine will or power). Then the Buddha and the Christ will together pass before the Father, the Lord of the World, will together see the glory of the Lord and eventually pass to higher service of a nature and a calibre unknown to us.

I write here in no fanatical or adventist spirit; I speak not as a speculative theologian or an exponent of one phase of religious, wishful thinking. I speak because many know that the time is ripe and that the appeal of simple, faithful hearts has penetrated to the highest spiritual sphere and set in motion energies and forces which cannot now he stopped. The invocative cry of distressed humanity is today of such a volume and sound that--united to the wisdom and the knowledge of the Spiritual Hierarchy- it has given rise to certain activities in the Father's House. These will result in the glory of God, in the transformation of the divine will-to-good into human goodwill, and resultant peace on Earth.

A new chapter in the great book of spiritual living is about to be written; a new expansion of consciousness is an imminent happening; a fresh recognition of divine attentiveness is now possible to humanity and a revealing expectancy will prove the accuracy of the Biblical statement, "every eye shall see Him." (Rev. 1.7.) The religious livingness or spiritual history of mankind can be summarised for us by a series of recognitions--recognition of Those Who, down the ages, have constituted the Apostolic Succession, culminating for us in the great religious leaders who have come out among us since 700 B.C. and founded the great modern world faiths, and--above all else--in the Christ Himself Who embodied the perfection of God Immanent, plus awareness of God Transcendent; recognition of those major spiritual concepts of love, life and relationship which have hovered ever in the background of man's thinking and which are now on the verge of right expression; recognition of the true brotherhood of man, based on the one divine life, working through the one soul and expressing itself through the one humanity; recognition, therefore, of relationship both to the divine life throughout the world and to mankind itself. It is this developing spiritual attitude which will lead to right human relations and eventual world peace.

Today, another recognition is becoming possible. It is the recognition everywhere of the imminent return of Christ (if such a phrase can be true of someone Who has never left us!) and of the new spiritual opportunities which this event will make possible.

The basis for this recognition lies in the deep-seated conviction, innate in the human consciousness, that some great Teacher, some Saviour, Revealer, Lawgiver or divine Representative must come forth from the world of spiritual realities, because of human need and human demand. Always down the centuries, at the hour of man's greatest need and in response to his voiced demand, a divine Son of God has come forth and under many different names. Then the Christ came and apparently left us, with His work unfinished and His vision for mankind not yet consummated. For two thousand years it has seemed as if all His work had been blocked, frustrated, and of no avail, for the growth of the churches during the centuries is no guarantee of the spiritual success at which He aimed. It needed more than theological interpretations and the numerical growth of the world religions (including Christianity and Buddhism) to prove His world mission successfully carried forward. It all seemed impossible, necessitating three conditions; under these a test of His work could be attempted; today these three conditions are proven facts. First, as we have seen, a general planetary condition which has unfortunately (owing to man's selfishness) proved to be so catastrophic in nature that humanity has been forced to recognise the cause and source of the disaster; secondly, a spiritual awakening which would have its impulse in the deepest depths of man's consciousness and such is the case today as a result of the World War (l9l4-l945); thirdly, a steadily mounting invocative cry, prayer or demand, directed toward high spiritual sources, no matter by what name such sources may be called.

Today, these three conditions have been fulfilled and humanity faces renewed opportunity. The disaster which has overtaken mankind is universal and widespread; no one has escaped and all men are involved in some way or another--physically, economically or socially. The spiritual awakening of men everywhere (within or without the world faiths, and largely outside of them) is general and complete and a turning to God is to be seen on every hand. Finally, these two causes have aroused--as never before--the invocative cry of humanity; it is clearer, purer and more selfless than at any other time in human history because it is based on clearer thinking and a common distress. True religion is again emerging in the hearts of men in every land; this recognition of a divine hope and background may possibly take people back into the church and into the world faiths, but it will most certainly take them back to God.

Religion is the name, surely, which we give to the invocative appeal of humanity which leads to the evocative response of the Spirit of God. This spirit works in every human heart and in all groups. It works also through the Spiritual Hierarchy of the planet. It impels the Head of the Hierarchy, the Christ, to take action and the action which He is taking will lead to His return with His disciples.

The idea of the return of Christ is a most familiar one, and the concept of the Son of God returning in response to human need has its place in the teaching of the majority of the world faiths. Ever since He apparently departed to the sphere where the faithful have put Him, little groups of these people have reasoned themselves into the belief that on such and such a date He will come back, and ever their prophecies and expectancies have been deemed to failure. He has not come. Such people have been laughed at by the crowd and rebuked by the intelligent. Their eyes have not seen Him and there has been no tangible indication of His Presence. Today, thousands know that He will come; that plans for His coming are already set on foot, but they set no date or hour. The time is known only to the two or three, but "in such an hour as ye think not, He will come." (Matt. XXIV.44)

A truth hard for the orthodox thinker of any faith to accept is the fact that Christ cannot return because He has always been here upon our Earth, watching over the spiritual destiny of humanity; He has never left us but, in physical body and securely concealed (though not hidden), He has guided the affairs of the Spiritual Hierarchy, of His disciples and workers Who are unitedly pledged with Him to Earth service. He can only reappear. It is a spiritual fact that those who have passed from the cave of the tomb into the fullness of the resurrection life can be seen and at the same time evade the vision of the believer. Seeing and recognition are two very different things, and one of the great recognitions of mankind in the near future is the recognition that always He has been with us, sharing with us the familiar usefulness and peculiar characteristics of our civilisation and its many gifts to man.

The early signs of His approach with His disciples can already be discerned by those who note and rightly interpret the signs of the times. There is (among these signs) the coming together spiritually of those who love their fellowmen. This is in reality the organising of the outer physical army of the Lord--an army which has no weapons but those of love, of right speech and right human relations. This unknown organisation has proceeded with phenomenal speed during the aftermath of war, because humanity is sick of hate and controversy.

The general staff of the Christ is already active in the form of the New Group of World Servers; they are as potent a body of forerunners as has ever preceded a great world Figure into the arena of mankind's living. Their work and influence is already seen and felt in every land, and nothing can destroy that which they have accomplished. The spiritual and organising effect of expressed and voiced invocation has been also attempted since 1935, and the energy of the invocative cry of humanity has been directed into those channels which reach from Earth to that High Place where dwells the Christ. From there, it has been transmitted to those still higher spheres where the attention of the Lord of the World, the Ancient of days, the Father of all, plus the Creative Energies and Living Beings Who dwell there with Him, can be focussed on humanity and those steps can be taken which will embody more rapidly the Purposes of God.

For the first time in human history, the demand of the people of the Earth is so potent and so in line with divine direction, in time and space, that the end is inevitably sure; the looked-for spiritual Representative must come forth; this time He will not come alone but will be accompanied by Those Whose lives and words will evoke recognition in every department of human thinking. The symbolic prophecies found in all the world Scriptures anent this imminent event will prove their veracity; their symbolism will nevertheless elicit re-interpretation; circumstances and happenings will not necessarily be exactly as the Scriptures would appear to indicate. For instance, He will come indeed in the "clouds of the air" (Matt. XXVI. 64), as the Christian Scriptures say, but of what great interest is that when millions come and go in the clouds, each hour of the day and of the night? I mention this as one of the outstanding prophecies and one of the most familiar; it is, however, one which means little in our modern civilisation. The fact of importance is that He will come.
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Part 5 of 5

The Wesak Festival [see footnote] has been held down the centuries in the well-known valley in the Himalayas (if the faithful would only believe it) in order:

• To substantiate the fact of Christ's physical existence among us ever since His so-caIled departure.
• To prove (on the physical plane) the factual solidarity of the Eastern and Western approaches to God. Both the Christ and the Buddha are present.
• To form a rallying point and a meeting place for those who annually--in synthesis and symbolically--link up and represent the Father's House, the Kingdom of God and Humanity.
• To demonstrate the nature of the work of Christ as the great and chosen Intermediary, standing as the Representative of the Spiritual Hierarchy and as the Leader of the New Group of World Servers. In His Person, He voices their demand for the recognition of the factual existence of the Kingdom of God here and now.

Perhaps one of the major messages for all of us who read these words is this great truth and fact of the physical Presence on Earth at this time of the Christ, of His group of disciples and executives, of Their representative activities on behalf of mankind and of Their dose relationship. This relationship comes out at certain of the great spiritual festivals where the relationship demonstrated includes not only the Kingdom of God but also the Father and the Father's Home. There is the Festival of Easter, the Festival of the Buddha Who in physical Presence expresses the spiritual solidarity of our planet, and the Festival in June, peculiarly the Festival of the Christ, when He--as leader of the New Group of World Servers -- employs the new Invocation on behalf of all men of goodwill in all lands; at the same time, He gathers up the inchoate and unexpressed demands of those masses who seek a new and better way of life. They want love in daily living, right human relations and an understanding of the underlying Plan.

It is these physical happenings which are of moment and not the vague hopes and promises of the theological faiths. It is the physical Presence upon our planet of such recognised spiritual figures as the Lord of the World, the Ancient of Days; the seven Spirits Who are before the throne of God; the Buddha, the spiritual leader of the East, and the Christ, the spiritual leader of the West--all of Whom are brought at this climaxing time to our attention. The vague belief in Their existences, the dreamy speculations as to Their work and Their interest in human welfare, and the unconvinced, yet hopeful, wishful thinking of believers (and also unbelievers), will soon give place to certain knowledge, to visual recognition, to provable signs of executive work and to the reorganisation (by men of unusual potency) of the political, religious, economic and social life of humanity.

All this will not come as the result of some proclamation or some stupendous planetary event which will force human beings everywhere to say: "Lo: He is there! Lo: Here are the signs of His divinity!" for that would evoke only antagonism and laughter, resistance or fanatical credulity.

It will come as a recognition of potency in leadership, through dynamic but logical changes in world affairs, and through action taken by the masses of the people from the depths of their own consciousness.

Many years ago, [see A Treatise on Cosmic Fire, Lucis Publishing Co., page 756] I indicated that the Christ would come in three ways, or rather, that the fact of His Presence could be proved in three distinctive phases.

It was pointed out then that the first move which the Christ would make would be the stimulation of the spiritual consciousness in man, the evocation of humanity's spiritual demands on a large scale and the nurturing--on a worldwide scale--of the Christ consciousness in the human heart. This has already been done and with most effective results. Of the factual nature of this process, the vociferous demands of men of goodwill, of welfare workers and of those pledged to international cooperation, to the relief of the world distress and to the establishment of right human relations, are the undeniable expression. That phase of the preparatory work which is indicative of His coming has now reached a stage where nothing can arrest its progress or slow down its momentum. In spite of appearances, this uprising of the Christ consciousness has been successful and what may appear as reverse activity is of no importance in the long run, but is only of a temporary nature.

The second indicated move of the Hierarchy would be the impressing of the minds of enlightened men everywhere by spiritual ideas embodying the new truths, by the "descent" (if I may so call it) of the new concepts which will govern human living and by the overshadowing of all world disciples and the New Group of World Servers by the Christ Himself. This planned move of the Hierarchy is progressing well; men and women everywhere and in every department of life are enunciating those new truths which should in the future guide human living; they are building those new organisations, movements and groups--large or small--which will familiarise the mass of men with the reality of the need and the mode of meeting it. This they are doing because they are driven thereto by the warmth of their hearts and by their loving response to human distress; without formulating it thus to themselves, they are, nevertheless, working to bring into visibility the Kingdom of God on Earth. No denial of these facts is possible, in view of the multiplicity of organisations, books and speeches.

Thirdly, we are told that Christ might come in Person and walk among men as He did before. This has not yet taken place but plans are being laid which will enable Him to do so. Those plans do not involve the birth of some nice child in some nice home on Earth; they will not produce the wild claims and the credulous recognition of the well-meaning and the unintelligent as is so frequently the case today, nor will someone appear and say: "This is the Christ He is here or He is there." I would point out to you however, that the widespread appearance of such tales and claims, though undesirable, misleading and wrong, nevertheless demonstrates human expectancy of the imminence of His coming. Belief in His coming is basic in the human consciousness. How He will come and in what manner is not yet stated. The exact movement has not yet arrived nor has the method of His appearance been determined. The factual nature of the two earlier and preparatory moves, already made by the Hierarchy under His direction, are the guarantee that He will come and that when He does, mankind will be ready.

Let us summarise certain aspects of the work He set in motion two thousand years ago, because they hold the clue to His future work. Some of it is well known to you, for it has been emphasised by the world faiths and particularly by teachers of the Christian faith. But all of them have made His work appear difficult for man to grasp, and the undue emphasis laid upon His divinity (an emphasis which He himself never made) has made it appear that He and He only and no one else could possibly do the same works. Theologians have forgotten that He Himself stated that "greater things shall ye do, because I go unto my Father" (John XIV.12). He here indicates that this passing to the Father's House would result in such an inflow of spiritual strength, insight and creative accomplishment for man, that their deeds would surpass his; because of the distortion of His teaching and its remote relation to man, we have not yet done those "greater things." Some day, we assuredly will and--along certain lines--we already have. Let me relate some of the things He did which we can do, and which He will aid.

For the first time in human history, the love of God was embodied in a man and Christ inaugurated the era of love. That expression of divine love is still in the making; the world is not yet full of love and few there are who understand the true meaning of the word. But--speaking symbolically--when the United Nations has emerged into factual and actual power, the welfare of the world will then be assured. What is that welfare but love in action? What is international cooperation but love on a world scale? Those are the things which the love of God in Christ expressed and those are the things which we are working here today to bring into being. We are attempting to do it on a vast scale and this in spite of opposition--an opposition which can only temporarily succeed, such is the potency of the awakened spirit of man. These are the things which the Hierarchy, in its already successful procedures, is aiding and will continue to aid.
Christ taught Also that the Kingdom of God was on Earth and told us to seek that Kingdom first and let all things be of secondary importance for its sake. That Kingdom has ever been with us, composed of all those who down the ages have sought spiritual goals, liberated themselves from the limitations of the physical body, emotional controls and the obstructive mind. Its citizens are those who today (unknown to the majority) live in physical bodies, work for the welfare of humanity, use love instead of emotion as their general technique, and compose that great body of "illumined Minds" which guides the destiny of the world. The Kingdom of God is not something which will descend on Earth when man is good enough! It is something which is functioning efficiently today and demanding recognition. It is an organised body which is already evoking recognition from those people who do seek first the Kingdom of God and discover thereby that the Kingdom they seek is already here. Christ and His disciples are known by many to be physically present on Earth and the Kingdom which They rule, with its laws and modes of activity, is familiar to many and has been throughout the centuries.Christ is the world Healer and Saviour. He works because He is the embodied soul of all Reality. He works today as He worked in Palestine two thousand years ago, through groups. There He worked through the three beloved disciples, through the twelve apostles, through the chosen seventy, and the interested five hundred .... Now He works through His Masters and Their groups, and thereby greatly intensifies His efforts. He can and will work through all groups just insofar as they fit themselves for planned service, for the distribution of love, and come into conscious alignment with the great potency of the inner groups.

Those groups who have always proclaimed the physical Presence of the Christ have so distorted the teaching by dogmatic assertions on unimportant details and by ridiculous claims that they have evoked little recognition of the underlying truth, nor have they portrayed a kingdom which is attractive. That Kingdom exists but is not a place of disciplines or golden harps, peopled by unintelligent fanatics, but a field of service and a place where every man has full scope for the exercise of his divinity in human service.

At the Transfiguration, Christ revealed the glory which is innate in all men. The triple lower nature--physical, emotional and mental--is there shown as prostrate before the glory which was revealed. In that moment, wherein Christ Immanent was in incarnation, wherein humanity was represented by the three apostles, a voice came from the Father's Home in recognition of the revealed divinity and the Sonship of the Transfigured Christ on this innate divinity, upon this recognised Sonship, is the brotherhood of all men based--one life, one glory which shall be revealed, and one divine relationship. Today, on a large scale (even when bypassing the implications of divinity), the glory of man, and his fundamental relationships are already a fad in the human consciousness. Accompanying those characteristics which as yet remain deplorable and which would appear to negate all claims to divinity, is the wonder of man's achievement, of his triumph over nature. The glory of scientific attainment and the magnificent evidence of creative art--both modern and ancient--leave no room to question man's divinity. Here then are the "greater things" of which Christ spoke and here again is the triumph of the Christ within the human heart.Why this triumph of the Christ consciousness must always be spoken of in terms of religion, of church-going and of orthodox belief is one of the incredible triumphs of the forces of evil. To be a citizen of the Kingdom of God does not mean that one must necessarily be a member of some one of the orthedox churches. The divine Christ in the human heart can be expressed in many different departments of human living--in politics, in the arts, in economic expression and in true social living, in science and in religion. It might be wise here to remember that the only time it is recorded that Christ (as an adult) visited the Temple of the Jews, He created a disturbance! Humanity is passing from glory to glory and, in the long panorama of history, this is strikingly observable. That glory is today revealed in every department of human activity, and the Transfiguration of those who are on the crest of the human wave of civilisation is very close at hand.
Finally, in the triumph of the Crucifixion or (as it is more accurately called in the East) the Great Renunciation, Christ, for the first time, anchored on Earth a tenuous thread of the divine Will as it issued from the Father's House (Shamballa), passed into the understanding custody of the Kingdom of God and, through the medium of the Christ, was brought to the attention of mankind. Through the instrumentality of certain great Sons of God, the three divine aspects or characteristics of the divine Trinity--will, love and intelligence--have become a part of human thinking and aspiration. Christians are apt to forget that the crisis in the final hours of the Christ was not that spent upon the Cross, but those spent in the Garden of Gethsemane. Then His will-in agony and almost despair--was submerged in that of the Father. "Father," He said, "not My will but Thine be done." (Luke XXII.42).
Something new, yet planned for from the very depth of time, happened then in that quiet garden; Christ, representing mankind, anchored or established the Father's Will on Earth and made it possible for intelligent humanity to carry it out.
Hitherto, that Will had been known in the Father's House; it had been recognised and adapted to world need by the Spiritual Hierarchy, working under the Christ, and thus took shape as the divine Plan. Today, because of what Christ did in His moment of crisis hundreds of years ago, humanity can add its efforts to the working out of that Plan. The will-to-God of the Father's House can become the goodwill of the Kingdom of God and be transformed into right human relations by intelligent humanity. Thus the direct line or thread of God's will reaches now from the highest place to the lowest point, and can in due time become a cable of ascension for the sons of men and of descent for the loving, living spirit of God.

Let us forget distance, remoteness and vagueness and realise that we are talking of exact and literal happenings on our planet. We are dealing with recognitions and occurrences and with factual events which are the conscious possession of many. The Christ of history and the Christ in the human heart are planetary facts.

There is one aspect of this return of the Christ which is never touched upon and to which no reference is ever made. It is the factor of what this coming out again among men, this return to outer everyday activity will mean to the Christ as He faces it. How will He feel when the hour of His appearance arrives?

There is a great initiation spoken of in The New Testament to which we have given the name of the Ascension. Of it we know nothing. Only a few items of information are brought to us in the Gospel story; the fact of the mountain top, of attendant watchers, and of the words of Christ, assuring them that He was not leaving them. Then a cloud received Him out of their sight (Acts 1.9). There were none present who could go further with Him. Their consciousness could not penetrate to the place where He had chosen to go; they even misinterpreted His words and only in a vague and mystical sense has humanity ever understood His disappearance, or the significance of His persistent but unobserved Presence. The watchers were assured by two of the Knowers of God Who were also present that He would come again in like manner. He ascended. The cloud received Him; today the clouds which cover our planet are waiting to reveal Him.

He is now waiting to descend. This descent into our unhappy world of men can present Him with no alluring picture. From the quiet mountain retreat where He has waited, guided and watched over humanity and where He has trained His disciples, initiates and the New Group of World Servers, He must come forth and take His place prominently on the world stage; take His part in the great drama which is there being played. This time, He will play His part, not in obscurity as He previously did but before the eyes of the entire world. Because of the smallness of our little planet, and because of the prevalence of the radio, of television and the rapidity of communication, His part will be watched by all and the prospect must surely, for Him, hold certain horror, must present its tests and major adjustments, plus painful unavoidable experience. He does not come as the omnipotent God of man's ignorant creation, but as the Christ, the Founder of the Kingdom of God on Earth, to complete the work He started, and again to demonstrate divinity in far more difficult circumstances.

The Christ suffers, however, far more from those in His Own household than from those in the outer world; His work is more impeded by the advanced aspirant than by the intelligent thinker. It was not the cruelty of the outer world of men which caused the depths of sorrow to the Christ; it was His Own disciples, plus the massed sorrow--spread over the entire cycle of living--past, present and future - of humanity.

He comes to correct the mistakes and the misrepresentations of those who have dared to interpret His simple words in terms of their own ignorance, and to recognise those whose faithful service has made His return possible. He too is facing a major test, preparatory to a great initiation and when He has passed the test and fulfilled His task, He will pass to a still more exalted position in the Father's House or to some distant place of service where only the most exalted can follow Him; His present position will then be taken by the One Whom He has prepared and trained.

But before all this can happen, He must again enter the public arena, play His part in world affairs, and prove the scope of His mission. He will gather round Him, in the flesh, His chosen associates and advisers; these will not be the ones who gathered around in those earlier simpler days but those members of our human family who today recognise Him and are preparing to work with Him as far as in them lies. It is a different world to which He is now planning to return and this is largely due to the intellectual development of the mass of men. This presents Him with stupendous difficulties, for the intellects of men must now be reached and not just their hearts (as in the earlier days) if the Will of God is to be intelligently carried out on Earth. His major task is surely the establishing of right human relations in every department of human living. I would ask you to use your imagination and endeavour to think out what must be the implications of the task which confronts Him; I would ask you to ponder on the difficulties which He must inevitably face--the difficulty, above all, of mass intellectual wrong emphasis.

He, the Representative of the love of God, is asked to work again in the world arena wherein His earlier message has been negated, forgotten or misinterpreted for two thousand years, and wherein hate and separativeness have distinguished all men everywhere. This will plunge Him into a foreign atmosphere and into a situation wherein all His divine resources will be needed and will have to be tried out to the uttermost. The generally accepted idea that He will return as a triumphant warrior, omnipotent and irresistible, has surely no basis in fact. That He will ultimately lead His people, humanity, into Jerusalem is in fact, founded on a secure foundation, but it will not be into a Jewish city called Jerusalem but into "the place of peace" (as the word "Jerusalem" means). A careful consideration of the world situation today and a dedicated use of the imagination will reveal to the sincere thinker of how appalling is the task which He has undertaken. But He has again "set His face to go to Jerusalem." (Luke IX. 51). He will reappear and guide mankind into a civilisation and a state of consciousness in which right human relations and worldwide cooperation for the good of all will be the universal keynote. He will--through the New Group of World Servers and the men of goodwill--complete His association with the Will of God (His Father's business) in such a manner that the eternal will-to-good will be translated by humanity into goodwill and right relations. Then His task will be done; He will be free again to leave us, but this time not to return but to leave the world of men in the hands of that great spiritual Server Who will be the new Head of the Hierarchy, the Church Invisible.

The question now arises: In what way can we be of service? How can we aid during this preparatory stage?

What the members of the Spiritual Hierarchy are doing is much indeed; those disciples who are in conscious touch with the Masters of the Wisdom--or, if you prefer the term, with the senior disciples of the Christ--are working day and night in order to establish such confidence, correct attitudes and an understanding of the divine spiritual "push" or enterprise that His way will be made easier. They and their groups of lesser disciples, aspirants and students of the realities stand unitedly behind the Christ and can thus enable Him to accomplish His purpose.

Their major realisation is that of a cyclic crisis in the spiritual life of our planet; it is one which has been anticipated in the Father's House (Shamballa) for thousands of years. They have registered the fact that, for the first time in human history, all the three spiritual centres or groups through which God works are unitedly focussed on the same objective. Shamballa, the Spiritual Hierarchy and

Humanity (the Father's House, the Kingdom of God and the World of Men) are all striving in one vast movement for an intensification of the Light of the World. This Light will irradiate (in a fashion unknown before) not only the Father's House, which is the source of all our planetary light but also the spiritual centre from which have come all those Teachers and World Saviours Who have stood before men and said, as did Hermes, the Buddha and the Christ: "I am the Light of the World." This light will now flood the world of men, bringing illumination to men's minds and light into the dark places of human living.

It is light and--above all else--"life more abundantly" which Christ will bring, and until He brings it we know not what it signifies; we cannot realise the revelation which this will entail and the new possibilities which will open up before us. But through Him, light and life are on their way, to be interpreted and applied in terms of goodwill and of right human relations. For this the Spiritual Hierarchy is preparing. This time the Christ will not come alone for His co-workers will come with Him. His experience and Theirs will be the reverse of the previous one, for this time every eye will see Him, every ear will hear Him and every mind will pass judgment upon Him.

We can freely aid in the reconstruction work which the Christ proposes, if we will familiarise ourselves and all men whom we can contact with the following facts:

That the reappearance of Christ is imminent.
That the Christ, immanent in every human heart, can be evoked in recognition of His appearance.
That the circumstances of His return are only symbolically related in the world Scriptures; this may produce a vital change in the preconceived ideas of humanity.
That the major required preparation is a world at peace; however, that peace must be based on an educated goodwill, which will lead inevitably to right human relations, and, therefore, to the establishment (figuratively speaking) of lines of light between nation and nation, religion and religion, group and group and man and man.
If we can succeed in presenting these four ideas to the world at large, and thus in overcoming the intelligent criticism that all that is said is too vague, prophetic, and visionary, we shall have done much. It is possible surely that the ancient truism that "the mind is the slayer of the real" may be fundamentally true where the mass of humanity is concerned and that the purely intellectual approach (which rejects the vision and refuses to accept the unprovable) may be far more at fault than the anticipation of the Knowers of God and the expectant multitude.

The intelligence of divinity is vested in the Spiritual Hierarchy, and that Hierarchy is today composed of Those Who have united in Themselves both the intellect and the intuition, the practical and the apparently impractical, the factual way of life and the way of the man who sees a vision. There are also people who must be found in the market place of daily life; these are the people who must be trained in the divine recognitions which are essentially physical plane responses to the newer expansions of consciousness. The Christ Who will return will not be like the Christ Who (apparently) departed. He will not be a "man of sorrow"; He will not be a silent pensive figure; He will be the enunciator of spiritual statements which will not necessitate interpretation and receive the wrong interpretation, because He will be present to indicate the true meaning.

He has been for two thousand years the supreme Head of the Church Invisible, the Spiritual Hierarchy, composed of disciples of all faiths. He recognises and loves those who are not Christian but who retain their allegiance to their Founders--the Buddha, Mohammed and others. He cares not what the faith is if the objective is love of God and of humanity. If men look for the Christ Who left His disciples centuries ago, they will fail to recognise the Christ Who is in process of returning.
The Christ has no religious barriers in His consciousness. It matters not to Him of what faith a man may call himself.

The Son of God is on His way and He cometh not alone. His advance guard is already here and the Plan which they must follow is already made and clear. Let recognition be the aim.

Footnote: The Wesak Festival is the Festival of the Buddha and is held each year at the time of the full moon of May, or more correctly the full moon in the sign Taurus, (Approx.: April 21st to May 20th.)

***

THE COMING ONE

When people feel that they have exhausted all their own resources and have come to an end of all their own innate possibilities and that the problems and conditions confronting them are beyond their solving or handling, they are apt to look for a divine Intermediary and for the Mediator Who will plead their cause with God and bring about a rescue. They look for a Saviour. This doctrine of Mediators, of Messiahs, of Christs and of Avatars can be found running like a golden thread through all the world faiths and Scriptures and, relating these world Scriptures to some central source of emanation, they are found in rich abundance everywhere. Even the human soul is regarded as an intermediary between man and God; Christ is believed by countless millions to act as the divine mediator between humanity and divinity.

Right down the ages, in many world cycles and in many countries (and today in all) great points of tension have occurred which have been characterised by a hopeful sense of expectancy. Some one is expected and His coming is anticipated. Always in the past, it has been the religious teachers of the period who have fostered and proclaimed this expectancy and the time has always been one of chaos and difficulty, of a climaxing point at the close of a civilisation or culture and when the resources of the old religions have seemed inadequate to meet people’s difficulties or to solve their problems. The coming of the Avatar and the advent of a Coming One are the keynotes of the prevalent expectancy. When the times are ripe, the invocation of the masses is strident enough and the faith of those who know is keen enough, then always He has come and today will be no exception to this ancient rule or to this universal law. For decades, the reappearance of the Christ, the Avatar, has been anticipated by the faithful in both hemispheres—not only by the Christian faithful, but by those who look for Maitreya and for the Boddhisattva as well as those who expect the Imam Mahdi.

When people feel that they have exhausted all their own resources and have come to an end of all their own innate possibilities and that the problems and conditions confronting them are beyond their solving or handling, they are apt to look for a divine Intermediary and for the Mediator Who will plead their cause with God and bring about a rescue. They look for a Saviour. This doctrine of Mediators, of Messiahs, of Christs and of Avatars can be found running like a golden thread through all the world faiths and Scriptures and, relating these world Scriptures to some central source of emanation, they are found in rich abundance everywhere. Even the human soul is regarded as an intermediary between man and God; Christ is believed by countless millions to act as the divine mediator between humanity and divinity.

The whole system of spiritual revelation is based (and has always been based) on this doctrine of interdependence, of a planned and arranged conscious linking and of the transmission of energy from one aspect of divine manifestation to another—from God in the “secret Place of the Most High” to the humblest human being, living and struggling and sorrowing on earth. Everywhere this transmission is to be found; “I am come that they may have life” says the Christ, and the Scriptures of the world are full of the intervention of some Being, originating from some source higher than the strictly human. Always the appropriate mechanism is found through which divinity can reach and communicate with humanity, and it is with this communication and these Instruments of divine energy that the doctrine of Avatars or of divine “Coming Ones” has to do.

An Avatar is one Who has a peculiar capacity (besides a self-initiated task and a pre-ordained destiny) to transmit energy or divine power. This is necessarily a deep mystery and was demonstrated in a peculiar manner and in relation to cosmic energy by the Christ Who—for the first time in planetary history, as far as we know—transmitted the divine energy of love directly to our planet and in a most definite sense to humanity. Always too these Avatars or divine Messengers are linked with the concept of some subjective spiritual Order or Hierarchy of spiritual Lives, Who are concerned with the developing welfare of humanity. All we really know is that, down the ages, great and divine Representatives of God embody divine purpose, and affect the entire world in such a manner that Their names and Their influence are known and felt thousands of years after They no longer walk among human beings. Again and again, They have come and have left a changed world and some new world religion behind Them; we know also that prophecy and faith have ever held out the promise of Their coming again amongst us in an hour of need. These statements are statements of fact, historically proven. Beyond this we know relatively few details.

The word “Avatar” is a Sanskrit word, meaning literally “coming down from far away.” Ava (as prefix to verbs and verbal nouns) expresses the idea of “off, away, down.” Avataram (comparative) farther away. The root AV seems at all times to denote the idea of protection from above, and is used in compounds, in words referring to protections by kings or rulers; in regard to the gods, it means accepted favourably when a sacrifice is offered. With the result that the root word can be said to mean “Coming down with the approval of the higher source from which it came and with benefit to the place at which it arrives.” (From Monier-Williams’ Sanskrit Dictionary.)

All the world Avatars or Saviours, however, express two basic incentives: the need of God to contact and have relationship with humanity and the need of humanity for divine contact, help and understanding. Subject to those incentives, all true Avatars are therefore divine Intermediaries. They can act in this fashion because They have completely divorced Themselves from every limitation, from all sense of selfhood and separativeness and are no longer—by ordinary human standards—the dramatic centre of Their lives, as are most of us. When They have reached that stage of spiritual decentralisation, They Themselves can then become events in the life of our planet; toward Them every eye can look and all can be affected. Therefore, an Avatar or a Christ comes forth for two reasons: one, the inscrutable and unknown Cause prompts Him so to do, and the other is the demand or the invocation of humanity itself. An Avatar is consequently a spiritual event, coming to us to bring about great changes or major restorations, to inaugurate a new civilisation or to restore the “ancient landmarks” and lead humanity nearer to the divine. They have been defined as “extraordinary men Who from time to time appear to change the face of the world and inaugurate a new era in the destinies of humanity.” They come in times of crisis; They frequently create crises in order to bring to an end the old and the undesirable and make way for new and more suitable forms for the evolving life of God Immanent in Nature. They come when evil is rampant. For this reason, if for no other, an Avatar may be looked for today. The necessary stage is set for the reappearance of the Christ.

Avatars are of all degrees and kinds; some of them are of great planetary importance because They express whole cycles of future development within Themselves and strike the note and give the teaching which will bring in a new age and a new civilisation; They embody great truths towards which the masses of men and women must work and which still constitute an objective to the greatest minds of the age, even though as yet unrealised. Certain Avatars also express in Themselves the sumtotal of human achievement and of racial perfection, and thus become the “ideal men” of the ages. Others, greater still, are permitted to be the custodians of some divine principle or some divine quality which needs fresh presentation and expression upon Earth; this They can be because They have achieved perfection and have attained to the highest possible initiations. They have the gift of being these embodied spiritual qualities, and because They have in fullness expressed such a specific principle or quality They can act as channels for its transmission from the centre of all spiritual Life. This is the basis for the doctrine of Avatars or Divine Messengers.

Such an one was the Christ; He was twice an Avatar because He not only struck the keynote of the new age (over two thousand years ago) but He also, in some mysterious and incomprehensible manner, embodied in Himself the divine Principle of Love; He was the first to reveal to humanity the true nature of God. The invocative cry of humanity (the second of the incentives producing a divine Emergence) is potent in effect because the souls of men and women, particularly in concerted action, have in them something which is akin to the divine nature of the Avatar. We are all Gods, all the children of the One Father, as the latest of the Avatars, the Christ, has told us. It is that divine centre in every human heart which, when awakened into activity, can call forth response from the high Place where the Coming One awaits His hour of appearance. It is only the united demand of humanity, its “massed intent,” which can precipitate the descent (as it is called) of an Avatar.

To sum up, therefore: the doctrine of Avatars is paralleled by the doctrine of the continuity of revelation. Ever down the ages, and at every great human crisis, always in the hours of necessity, at the founding of a new race, or in the awakening of a prepared humanity to a new and wider vision, the Heart of God—impelled by the Law of Compassion—sends forth a Teacher, a world Saviour, an Illuminator, an Avatar, a transmitting Intermediary, a Christ. He gives the message which will heal, which will indicate the next step to be taken by the human race, which will illumine a dark world problem and give to humanity an expression of some hitherto unrealised aspect of divinity. Upon this fact of the continuity of revelation and upon the sequence of this progressive manifestation of the divine Nature, is based the doctrine of Avatars, divine Messengers, divine Appearances and Saviours. To Them all, history unmistakenly testifies. It is upon the fact of this continuity, this sequence of Messengers and Avatars, and upon the dire and dreadful need of humanity at this time, that the worldwide expectancy of the reappearance of the Christ is based. It is the innate recognition of all these facts that has led to the steadily mounting invocative cry of humanity in every land for some form of divine relief or divine intervention; it is the recognition of these facts which also prompts the order which has gone forth from “the centre where the will of God is known” that the Avatar should come again; it is the knowledge of both these demands which has led the Christ to let His disciples in every land know that He will reappear when they have done the needed preparatory work.

The Avatars most easily known and recognised are the Buddha in the East and the Christ in the West. Their messages are familiar to all, and the fruits of Their lives and words have conditioned the thinking and civilisations of both hemispheres. Because They are human-divine Avatars, They represent what humanity can easily understand; because They are of like nature to us, “flesh of our flesh and spirit of our spirit”, we know and trust Them and They mean more to us than other divine Emergences. They are known, trusted and loved by countless millions. The nucleus of spiritual energy which each of Them set up is beyond our measuring; the establishing of a nucleus of persistent energy, spiritually positive, is the constant task of an Avatar; He focuses or anchors a dynamic truth, a potent thoughtform or a vortex of magnetic energy in the world of human living. This focal point acts increasingly as a transmitter of spiritual energy; it enables humanity to express some divine idea and this in time produces a civilisation with its accompanying culture, religions, policies, governments and educational processes. Thus is history made. History is after all only the record of humanity’s cyclic reaction to some inflowing divine energy, to some inspired leader, or to some Avatar.

An Avatar is at present usually a Representative of the second divine aspect, that of Love-Wisdom, the Love of God. He will manifest as the Saviour, the Builder, the Preserver; humanity is not yet sufficiently developed or adequately oriented to the life of the Spirit to bear easily the impact of an Avatar Who would express the dynamic will of God. For us as yet (and this is our limitation) an Avatar is one Who preserves, develops, builds, protects, shields and succours the spiritual impulses by which people live; that which brings Him into manifestation is humanity’s need and demand for preservation and help. Humanity needs love, understanding and right human relations as an expression of attained divinity. It was this need which brought the Christ to us before as the Avatar of Love. The Christ, that great human-divine Messenger, because of His stupendous achievement—along the line of understanding—transmitted to humanity an aspect and a potency of the nature of God Himself, the love Principle of Deity. Light, aspiration, and the recognition of God Transcendent had been the flickering expression of the human attitude to God, prior to the advent of the Buddha, the Avatar of Illumination. Then the Buddha came and demonstrated in His Own life the fact of God Immanent as well as God Transcendent, of God in the universe and of God within humanity. The Selfhood of Deity and the Self in the heart of the individual became a factor in human consciousness. It was a relatively new truth to humanity.

However, until Christ came and lived a life of love and service and gave men and women the new command to love one another, there had been very little emphasis upon God as Love in any of the world Scriptures. After He had come as the Avatar of Love, then God became known as love supernal, love as the goal and objective of creation, love as the basic principle of relationship and love as working throughout all manifestation towards a Plan motivated by love. This divine quality, Christ revealed and emphasised and thus altered all human living, goals and values.

The reason He has not come again is that the needed work has not been done by His followers in all countries. His coming is largely dependent, as we shall later see, upon the establishing of right human relations. This the church has hindered down the centuries, and has not helped because of its fanatical zeal to make “Christians” of all peoples and not followers of the Christ. It has emphasised theological doctrine, and not love and loving understanding as Christ exemplified it. The Church has preached the fiery Saul of Tarsus and not the gentle Carpenter of Galilee. And so, He has waited. But His hour has now come, because of the people’s need in every land and because of the invocative cry of the masses everywhere and the advice of His disciples of all faiths and of all world religions.

It is not for us yet to know the date or the hour of the reappearance of the Christ. His coming is dependent upon the appeal (the often voiceless appeal) of all who stand with massed intent; it is dependent also upon the better establishment of right human relations and upon certain work being done at this time by senior Members of the Kingdom of God, the Church Invisible, the spiritual Hierarchy of our planet; it is dependent also upon the steadfastness of the Christ’s disciples in the world at this time and His initiate-workers—all working in the many groups, religious, political and economic. To the above must be added what Christians like to call “the inscrutable Will of God”, that unrecognised purpose of the Lord of the World, the Ancient of Days (as He is called in The Old Testament) Who “knows His own Mind, radiates the highest quality of love and focuses His Will in His Own high Place within the centre where the Will of God is known.”

When the Christ, the Avatar of Love, makes His reappearance then will the

“Sons of men who are now the Sons of God withdraw Their faces from the shining light and radiate that light upon the sons of men who know not yet they are the Sons of God. Then shall the Coming One appear, His footsteps hastened through the valley of the shadow by the One of awful power Who stands upon the mountain top, breathing out love eternal, light supernal and peaceful, silent Will.

“Then will the sons of men respond. Then will a newer light shine forth into the dismal, weary vale of earth. Then will new life course through the veins of men, and then will their vision compass all the ways of what may be.

“So peace will come again on earth, but a peace unlike aught known before. Then will the will-to-good flower forth as understanding, and understanding blossom as goodwill in men.”

This pamphlet is adapted from Chapter One of The Reappearance of the Christ, by Alice A. Bailey, published by the Lucis Press Limited of London and the Lucis Publishing Company of New York. Copies of the book are available from the same address as World Goodwill. The book is also published in Bulgarian, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Spanish and Swedish editions.

***

MEDITATION AND THE POWER OF GOODWILL

Using the principle of “energy follows thought” to vitalise the ideals of a new civilisation, including our Cycle of Conferences initiative

Many find that coming together for group meditation for world service on a regular basis is important to the inner strength and unity of group work. By working with spiritual energies and relating them to daily, physical life, individuals and groups help to condition the subjective atmosphere of the planet and create a climate for constructive change in the world and in our communities.

Most of the following meditations for world service have been used by groups around the world for decades. They are offered to people of goodwill everywhere:

Goodwill Meditation Group: Every Wednesday a meditation outline is used by group members to strengthen and mobilise goodwill in the world. Goodwill is a powerful and creative energy already present in every society. Solution of the urgent problems facing humanity depends more than anything else on the harnessing and empowering of this energy.

Twelve Spiritual Festivals: The time of the full moon is a period when spiritual energies are uniquely available, facilitating a closer rapport between humanity and the spiritual Hierarchy. The energies contacted at these twelve spiritual festivals can be grounded at the time of the new moon, when there is an opportunity to focus on how the Plan is manifesting; and on the many ways in which the "power of the one Life" and the "love of the one soul" are working out through the servers of the world.

Cycle of Conferences: A visualisation initiative using the power of enlightened thought to help create a positive mental climate for conferences taking place on specific world problems.

Problems of Humanity: A study course on the major problems facing humanity is offered for group or individual use. Through study, discussion and meditation, course participants seek to generate a "thoughtform of solution", contributing to changes in the climate of world thought. Effective and practical changes in world affairs depend upon new ways of thinking. Course participants are encouraged to combine their studies with participation in local service activities.

***

CONNECTING WITH THE GLOBAL NETWORK

Discovering service initiatives in civil society and supporting local serving groups

Recognising that “Energy follows thought”, World Goodwill engages with groups working subjectively with the energy of consciousness, as well as groups who are harnessing the energy of goodwill in more concrete ways to tackle urgent outer crises.

Subjective work – Units of Service

People from all spiritual and faith traditions are today working together in groups (large and small) to serve in the creation of a more lighted and loving human community. In the ageless wisdom tradition this vast network of groups are thought of as ‘Units of Service’. They often combine forms of meditation and prayer with study and practical service. Together all the Units of Service from every culture on the planet form a worldwide network of light and goodwill. As groups recognise their relationships with one another, they are blending and fusing into one great movement of goodwill, which is spirit in actual expression. Today we see this movement arising spontaneously around the world, a spontaneity which is characterised by a lack of central control. What is not needed is any super-organisation attempting to direct and enforce unity. What is needed is a multiplicity of living organisms held loosely together by cooperation, constant communication and an identity of goal and purpose.

Units of service, inspired by the teachings in the Alice Bailey books, often organise meditation meetings for world service at the time of the full moon as well as a range of other activities. Each unit is independent and free to serve in the light of their own understandings. A list of groups loosely associated with World Goodwill is available here.

Objective work – Civil Society

There are today millions of groups actively working to build a world of unity, justice and peace, from small local initiatives to multinational bodies. Each group that is in fact seeking to put principles of compassion, love and goodwill into practical action can also be thought of as a ‘Unit of Service’. These active serving units are a part of the “saving force” for the world. They deserve supportive and strengthening prayers and meditations alongside practical support where appropriate. A small list of groups is offered here as a symbol of the rich diversity of serving groups in the world.

***

CREATIVE THINKING ON WORLD PROBLEMS

The new world is built through creative responses to the fundamental challenges facing humanity

Today we are confronted by signs of turbulence, uncertainty and change on a global scale. The nation-state, the free market and traditional religions, which have proved adequate for so long, are showing unmistakable signs of strain as they struggle to deal with the new realities of a profoundly inter-connected world. All are suffering from a lack of vision. In fact, the crisis they face can only be described as spiritual, so far-reaching are its implications. Humanity is being called upon to mobilise its deepest resources of heart and mind, to respond to an era of growing integration and synthesis. Can we collectively learn to set aside, once and for all, the barriers in consciousness which have until now separated nationalities, religions, and social classes from one another, and learn to work for one humanity? On this question turns nothing less than the future of the world.

Concerned people of goodwill need a deepened understanding of the basic problems underlying the present world crisis, so they can contribute effectively to the transition into a new civilisation and consciousness. The challenge of establishing right human relationships between peoples and nations should be of paramount concern to these people, who are the hope of the future. Only they, in their millions, can create the enlightened public opinion that will turn the tide of world events.

These web pages are an online experiment in assisting people of goodwill to understand world events, and to contribute their ideas towards possible solutions. They have evolved from the Problems of Humanity Study Course, 7 booklets printed by World Goodwill which are freely available for individual and group study. The 7 booklets are:

Set 1. Introduction; Set 2. The Psychological Renewal of the Nations; Set 3. Children, Youth & Education; Set 4. Capital, Labour & Employment; Set 5. Racial Minorities; Set 6. The Churches & Organised Religion; Set 7. International Unity

These booklets are themselves based on the book "Problems of Humanity" by Alice Bailey.

Throughout the course, emphasis is placed upon underlying causes and emerging trends rather than on a factual survey of events. The use of the trained mind in reflective meditation is seen as a key factor, and is encouraged. World Goodwill also encourages the formation of study groups for the course. Through study, discussion and meditation we can generate a "thoughtform of solution", so changing the climate of world thought. By changing thought, we can produce effective and practical changes in world affairs, changes which we can participate in through local forms of service activity.

Read more on the importance of meditation in this work.

Read more on the deeper aspects of group thought-form building.

Would you like to form a study group? Then please read the guidelines and get in touch.

Are you interested in reading the printed Study Sets? Go to STUDY SETS ORDER FORM

***

PROBLEMS OF HUMANITY - THE BOOK

A brief description of the book "Problems of Humanity".

Alice Bailey does not state a political answer to humanity's problems. She does not suggest the forms of exterior social order humanity should impose upon itself. Nor does she suggest the form of the new world religion. The book and this course present a spiritual perspective on specific problems, and upon the world situation as a whole. The light of this inclusive view reveals the crisis of wrong attitudes and wrong values which lies at the heart of every problem. Greed, ignorance, selfishness and self-interest are the root cause of the distortion in human relationships which manifests as poverty, the arms race, racism or any other of our critical social ills.

Although this book was written as long ago as 1947, and the problems, in the interim, have changed in detail or emphasis to a certain extent, it is recommended reading because the principles for solution remain the same. To learn more about the book and/or purchase it, click here [Order online]

Go to STUDY SETS ORDER FORM

Home page - Introduction to the Problems of Humanity

***

GUIDELINES

Guidelines for working with the Problems of Humanity Study Course.

Some ideas for working with the Problems of Humanity Study Course

• Select a book related to the problem under discussion and designate one or more members of the group to produce a report for the group with a particular emphasis on the essential spiritual principles underlying the ideas in the book; consider doing the same for a periodical or a web site or a film, a work of art, or perhaps some recent scientific discovery/invention (for example, recent advances in genetics)

• Prepare a thematic list of web sites, mailing lists or discussion groups which relate to the problem in question; again, seek to extract the spiritual significance of the work, its relation to the world of meaning and causes and its possible connection with incoming energies

• Look out for emerging new terminology that is clothing new spiritual ideas on the verge of precipitation into public consciousness; seek to find correspondences between these terms and the language of spiritual and esoteric sources with which you are familiar, including the Bailey books

• Identify ways in which servers are impressing and expressing new ideas, so aiding humanity to understand the emerging ideals which must govern the Aquarian Age (cf. seed thought of the meditation Strengthening the Hands of the New Group of World Servers, available from World Goodwill)

• Discuss to what extent the ideas and activities of prominent serving groups and individuals resonate with the Laws and Principles proposed in Discipleship in the New Age Vol. II p.237 as characteristic of the new group; and also whether these groups and individuals are demonstrating the great energy of synthesis

• Seek to place the activities of servers within the context of the new group and of the Plan as a whole, thus developing a synthetic viewpoint; and at the same time, reflect upon their possible affiliation with one or other of the ten seed groups considered in A Treatise on the 7 Rays Vol. II pp.174 and The Externalisation of the Hierarchy pp.26 ff, so analysing the diversity which is united by synthetic purpose
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Spirituality at the United Nations
by Donald F. Keys, speechwriter for United Nations Secretary General, U Thant
Printed and distributed by the Aquarian Age Community [Lucis Trust]
1970s

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

YOU ARE REQUIRED TO READ THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE AT THIS LINK BEFORE YOU READ THE FOLLOWING WORK, THAT IS AVAILABLE SOLELY FOR PRIVATE STUDY, SCHOLARSHIP OR RESEARCH PURSUANT TO 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107 AND 108. IN THE EVENT THAT THE LIBRARY DETERMINES THAT UNLAWFUL COPYING OF THIS WORK HAS OCCURRED, THE LIBRARY HAS THE RIGHT TO BLOCK THE I.P. ADDRESS AT WHICH THE UNLAWFUL COPYING APPEARED TO HAVE OCCURRED. THANK YOU FOR RESPECTING THE RIGHTS OF COPYRIGHT OWNERS.


Such grandeur is ahead!
Such a great step awaits its fiery affirmation!
Our teaching and the affirmation of the Higher Principles
will reveal so much that is great to humanity!
A great period is drawing near. Thus do we create together.

-- Fiery World, Vol. III, par. 149


Recognizing the interrelated oneness of humanity, and indeed of all life, the Aquarian Age Community is a pledged point of synthesis, resonating to the Aquarian keynote, “Water of Life Am I Poured Forth for Thirsty Men.” Responding to the Aquarian energies of universality, synthesis and loving understanding, it recognizes the spiritual destiny of Humanity and the divine potential at the heart of every individual. In keeping with the resonance of the new age, the Aquarian Age Community is first and foremost a subjective community, seeking alignment and identification with all Spiritual Beings who inspire the evolution of life on planet Earth. All who strive to better understand the new spiritual energies pouring into our planet and integrate them into daily living are a recognized part of the community. As a not-for-profit educational community, it supports the restoration of the Spiritual Mysteries and the transformation of human consciousness.

The Ageless Wisdom tells us that we live in a time of unprecedented opportunity. The dawning of the greater and lesser cycles of Aquarius have been awaited by the Hierarchy of Light and Love—the Masters of the Wisdom, the Teachers of humanity—for untold millennia. It is a time when millions within our human family will have the opportunity to make a leap in consciousness, realize their spiritual potential and actively cooperate in the restoration of the Plan of Love and Light on our planet. That Plan includes the externalization of the Soul—the inner divine principle at the heart of all life, the product of the union between spirit and matter. When the Soul is freed or resurrected from the matter in which it is encased, then will we know without a doubt that all life is in fact interdependent, interconnected and whole. Then, will we truly understand and live by the spiritual values of liberty, fraternity and equality.

In support of that externalization process, the Aquarian Age Community:

• Cooperates and collaborates with the worldwide community that is actively preparing the way for the reappearance of the World Teacher—the Christed (Anointed) One, the true Aquarian.
• Cooperatively participates in the unveiling of the Spiritual Mysteries.
• Promotes the evolution of human consciousness by advocating such new age sciences as the science of meditation, the science of the Antahkarana—bridging consciousness, and the science of service.
• Encourages the activation and mobilization of the will-to-good as it sounds the Aquarian keynotes of JOY and RESURRECTION.
• Promotes the work of the United Nations as it seeks to uplift and improve all life on our planet.

The Aquarian Age Community is dedicated in loving service to humanity, the planet and the “Great Thinker.” It is inspired by the teachings of Master Koot Hoomi, Master Morya, and Master Djwhal Khul as these are set forth in the books of Helena Blavatsky, Alice Bailey and the Agni Yoga Society. These teachings seek to inspire and prepare human consciousness for the great opportunities and possibilities of the 21st century.

Belief in the Soul has become widespread during the last two thousand years.
Knowledge of the Soul is the promise of the Aquarian Age.


-- About the Aquarian Age Community, by The Aquarian Age Community


It is a challenge to discuss Spirituality at the United Nations. It is a challenge because most people will think that the UN is the antithesis of spirituality. I must report, however, that I regard the United Nations as the most spiritual place in the world today. The UN is the first planetary focus at the human level. It is the first place that the nerve endings of all humanity join. It is the first place where all the qualities, characteristics, attributes, and essences of all human groups merge and blend. It is truly, the first temple of humanity.

Of all the contention, of all the disputes, of all the struggles, I am fully aware -- much more so than bystanders, since I am in the middle of them on a nearly daily basis. That is, of course, one level of reality -- but it is not the most important one. We are on the verge of the meta-organization of the world -- by that I mean the reorganization of the world on a level higher than that of the participating nation-states. We have been stumbling toward this development for half a century, and of course it is only commencing -- it is not complete. We have also been moving toward it since the first day a human was born on earth, or perhaps since the earth itself was formed, 4 billion years ago.

A single species, the human, has indeed gained dominion over the earth, and having collapsed time and space, in communication and travel, to the speeds of sound and light, the humans have become a continuous and globe-uniting species. In this setting, the nation-state is dysfunctional, and states are facing incorporation into a world being, of which they will be subsidiary organs. When such a meta-organization occurs, there must be an organizing center, there must be an organizing energy, a synthesizing energy never before registered by the parts, and evoked by the coming emergence of the whole. This is true of the alignment of atoms into crystals, of cells into tissues, or of organs into a human form, and it is true of the subordinate elements of a society. Now we face the next evolutionary imperative. We are forming the world society.

The synthesizing energy for the world society is focussed through the United Nations.
It courses through the halls, through the meeting rooms, through the offices of the United Nations. Blessed are those who are fortunate enough to work there for they are in touch with a new reality in the process of descent and manifestation. Hundreds of thousands of applicants are turned away each year from those who want to work there -- why? Basically, because they have heard the sound of humanity becoming whole and because they have sensed the new reality and have touched something of the energy of human convergence.

It is wearying, it is disappointing, it is tiring, but it is also thrilling, rewarding, and meaningful. The UN has its free loaders, its empire builders, its easy riders, and its CIA and KGB representatives, but it also has dedicated and inspired builders of the new world, spinning the future out of their own spirit, out of their own souls.

We have an informal network at the UN, a humanity underground. It consists of those who are committed, aware, and striving to bring the New World to birth. It consists of people in high places and in low -- of the patient secretary who has been 30 years with the UN, but lives with the vision and the spirit; of the professionals, and undersecretaries and heads of departments who are acting out the imperatives that their own inner vision gives them. Some few are conscious of the sources of their inspiration; most are not. They are the Karma Yogis of our time -- those whose path of spirituality is to achieve through doing -- to grow through serving. They are found not only in the secretariat but also in the delegations to the UN, among the diplomats and their staffs, and also among folks like us, representatives of non-governmental organizations around the UN.

I want however, in my remarks today to focus on the three major spiritual figures related to the UN, and an artifact. Two of the figures were Secretaries-General. The third is a non-governmental person.

The best known of the three persons is of course, Dag Hammarskjöld. The degree of the intensity of his inner life became apparent publicly after publication of his spiritual diary, Markings, following his death when his plane crashed in the Congo. In his briefcase, at the site of the crash, incidentally were found an English edition of the New Testament and Psalms which was always with him when he traveled, and a copy of Martin Buber's I and Thou, which he was translating into Swedish. Buber was a person with whom he felt a deep relationship.

With Hammarskjöld's temporal achievements we will not deal, except to say that he stabilized the United Nations, solidified the notion of an international civil service and independent Secretary-General -- free of political pressures, and originated the modern concept of UN peacekeeping. His personal credo was stated on Edward R. Murrow's program, "This I Believe:"

"The world in which I grew up was dominated by principles and ideals of a time far from ours and as it may seem, far removed from the problems facing a man in the middle of the twentieth century. However, my way has not meant a departure from those ideals. On the contrary. I have been led to an understanding of their validity also for our world today. Thus, a never abandoned effort, frankly and squarely to build up a personal belief in the light of experience and honest thinking has led me in a circle; I now recognize and endorse, unreservedly, those very beliefs which once were handed down to me.

From generations of soldiers and government officials on my father's side, I inherited a belief that no life was more satisfactory, than one of selfless service to your country or humanity. This service required a sacrifice of all personal interests, but likewise, the courage to stand up unflinchingly for your convictions.

From scholars and clergymen on my mother's side, I inherited a belief that, in the very radical sense of the Gospels, all men were equals as children of God, and should be met and treated by us as our masters in God.

Faith is a state of the mind and the soul. In this sense we can understand the words of the Spanish mystic, St. John of the Cross: 'Faith is the union of God with the soul'. The language of religion is a set of formulas which register a basic spiritual experience. It must not be regarded as describing in terms to be defined by philosophy, the reality which is accessible to our senses and which we can analyze with the tools of logic. I was late in understanding what this meant. When I finally reached that point, the beliefs in which I was brought up and which, in fact, had given my life direction, even while my intellect still challenged their validity, were recognized by me, as mine in their own right and by my free choice. I feel that I can endorse those convictions without any compromise, with the demands of that intellectual honesty, which is very key to the maturity of mind.

The two ideals which dominated my childhood world, met me, fully harmonized and adjusted to the demands of our world of today, in the ethics of Albert Schweitzer, where the ideal of service is supported by and supports the basic attitude to man set forth in the Gospels. In his work I also found a key for modern man, to the world of Gospels.

Albert Schweitzer, (14 January 1875 – 4 September 1965) was a German and then French theologian, organist, philosopher, physician, and medical missionary. Early in his life he became acquainted with Annie Besant, who introduced him to Rudolf Steiner, who was still a member of the Theosophical Society (Adyar).[1]

-- Albert Schweitzer, by theosophy.wiki

***

Dear friend,

Much as I would like to, I cannot supply pieces that are not part of my normal program. That is why you have had to wait for my account of my experiences with Rudolf Steiner. Thank you for sending me all those writings about him. I have most of them in my library in Gunsbach, but it was easier getting them from you than having them sent to me from my library. The most valuable item was the autobiography. The reader really gets to know him. Too bad death took the pen from his hands.

I will write about our meeting in Strasbourg, where Annie Besant introduced us. I can still remember our conversations. They inspired me to keep dealing with him and to remain cognizant of his importance. What the two of us share is a desire to replace the uncivilized with civilization. In Strasbourg we both realized we had this rapport. He expected civilization to emerge from ethical thinking and from the insights of the humanities. In terms of my own character, I had to stick to having civilization come forth from an immersion in the true essence of the ethical. In this way I came to the ethics of the reverence for life which, I hope, will instigate the emergence of civilization.

I realize that Rudolf Steiner greatly regretted that I stuck to the old way of thinking, but we both felt the same obligation to lead people back to true civilization. I was delighted at what he managed to achieve in the world with his great personality and his profound humanity.

Everyone should follow the road that is his . . .

-- From Albert Schweitzer Letters 1905 – 1965, edited by Hans Walter Bähr, translated by Joachim Neugroschel (Macmillan Publishing Company, 866 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10022)


In primarily Protestant German Europe, theologians who were acutely aware of the antagonism between Christian theology and modern scientific knowledge strayed from the Scriptures and their accessory libraries of commentaries and concordances, and instead sought novel perspectives through the study of contemporary philosophy, history, and even medicine. These historical and comparative methods were first developed into a school by the theological faculty of Tubingen University in the 1860s, and as historian Roy Pascal observes, "this historical research exerted perhaps a profounder influence on theology than the more sensational challenges of Darwinism." [26] These "theological modernists," as Pascal calls them, set out on a Promethean task to steal the fire of divinity from Christ and from Judeo-Christian traditions: "The heart of the Tubingen school was its biblical criticism, and its studies in comparative religion dispersed the solid revelations of Judaism and Christianity into a nebula of pagan sources." [27] During the Nazi era Tubingen became perhaps the dominant center for theology, for it was the base of operations for maverick Protestant theologian Wilhelm Hauer and his German Faith Movement. An English translation of two of Hauer's essays contains an introduction with a section entitled, "Tubingen -- The Home of the Neo-Pagan Movement." [28] Hauer was a close associate of Jung's in the early 1930s and participated with him in a seminar on Kundalini yoga in 1934.

The search for the historical Jesus proved to be the turning point for nineteenth-century critical theology and European culture as a whole, for by the end of the century, widespread skepticism about the divinity of Jesus and the truth of the stories in the Gospels of the New Testament opened the way for social experimentation with alternative religious, neopagan, occultist, or atheistic life-styles. These new paths of social action in European culture were, in part, the result of the intellectual climate created by the widely disseminated researches of German critical theologians. These ideas were denounced from the pulpits of many a Protestant minister (and many more Catholic priests) and were debated at both formal and informal events in the highly influential social worlds of the Protestant clergy. For some Protestant ministers -- such as, perhaps, Paul Jung -- the compelling new image of a historical Jesus led to a secret, shameful loss of faith in Jesus' divinity that had to be hidden from family and flock....

It was indeed in the Germanic lands of the Teutonic hero Siegfried and of the maturing parson's son C. G. Jung that the most serious challenge to Christianity fermented. Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965) is not shy about his openly Pietist exaltation of the German Volk and their contribution to the world in the introduction to his famous 1906 volume summarizing the research on the historical Jesus:

"When, at some future day, our period of civilization shall lie, closed and completed, before the eyes of later generations, German theology will stand out as a great, a unique phenomenon in the mental and spiritual life of our time. For nowhere save in the German temperament can there be found in the same perfection the living complex of conditions and factors -- of philosophic thought, critical acumen, historical insight, and religious feeling -- without which no deep theology is possible.

And the greatest achievement of German theology is the critical investigations of the life of Jesus. What it has accomplished here has laid down the conditions and determined the course of the religious thinking of the future." [30]

-- The Jung Cult: Origins of a Charismatic Movement, by Richard Noll


But the explanation of how a man should live a life of active social service in full harmony with himself as a member of the community of the spirit, I found in the writings of those great medieval mystics for whom "self surrender" had been the way to self realization, and who, in 'singleness of mind' and 'inwardness' had found the strength to say 'yes' to every demand, which the needs of their neighbors made them face, and to say 'yes' also, to every fate that life had in store for them, when they followed the call of duty, as they understood it. 'Love" that much misused and misinterpreted word, for them, meant simply an overflowing of strength with which they felt themselves filled when living in true self-oblivion. And this love found natural expressions in an unhesitant fulfillment of duty and in an unreserved acceptance of life, whatever it brought them personally of toil and suffering -- or of happiness.

I know their discoveries about the laws of inner life and of action have not lost their significance.

-- Dag Hammarskjöld


The diary, Markings, was translated into English by Leif Sjoberg and W.H. Auden. Of it Hammarskjöld had written: "These entries provide the only true profile that can be drawn. ...If you find them worth publishing you have my permission to do so, as a sort of 'white book' concerning my negotiations with myself -- and with God."

This extraordinary document is surely one of the most revealing and profound journals we have of the strivings of the human spirit. How to be fair to Secretary General Hammarskjöld in a few excerpts from Markings is a difficult task.

To love life and men as God loves them -- for the sake of
their infinite possibilities,
To wait like Him,
To judge like Him,
Without passing judgement,
To obey the order when it is given
And never look back-
Then He can use you- then, perhaps, He will use you.
And if He doesn't use you -- what matter. In His hand,
every moment has its meaning, its greatness, its glory, its
Peace, its co-inherence.
From this perspective, to "believe in God" is to believe
In yourself, as self-evident, as "illogical", and as impossible
to explain : if I can be, then God is

* * *

You are not the oil, you are not the air -- merely the point
of combustion, the flash point where the light is born.
You are merely the lens in the beam. You can only receive,

Give, and possess the light as a lens does.
If you seek yourself, "your rights," you prevent the oil and air
from meeting in the flame, you rob the lens of its transparency.
Sanctity -- either to be the Light, or to be self-effaced in
the Light, so that it may be born, self-effaced so that it may
be focussed or spread wider.


* * *

The United Nations Meditation Room:

"The Uncarved Block" -- remain at the Center, which is yours
and that of all humanity. For these goals which it gives to
your life do the utmost which, at each moment, is possible
for you. Also, act without thinking of the consequences, or
seeking anything for yourself.


* * *

The road,
You shall follow it.

The fun,
You shall forget it.

The cup,
You shall empty it.

The pain,
You shall conceal it.

The truth,
You shall be told it.

The end,
You shall endure it.


* * *

Tired
And lonely,
So tired
The heart aches.
Meltwater trickles
Down the rocks,
The fingers are numb,
The knees tremble.
It is now,
Now that you must not give in.

On the path of the others
Are resting places,
Places in the sun
Where they can meet.
But this
Is your path,
And it is now,
Now that you must not fail.

Weep
If you can,
Weep,
But do not complain.
The way chose you-
And you must be thankful.


* * *

Hammarskjöld -- second Secretary-General, aesthete, man of letters, poet -- was also a modern Christian mystic -- a candidate for human perfection and graduation from this life school. In one of Alice A. Bailey's books, written in the 1930's, there is a statement that a leading Swedish disciple would soon be working in the world. A high Swedish initiate who was a friend of mine was once asked if the foretold one were he. His answer was "no, it is Dag Hammarskjöld."

Let us now turn to the artifact -- for it was Hammarskjöld's artifact. I am referring to the UN Meditation Room. The existence of the room was a hard won battle, not by Hammarskjöld who came later, but by the "Laymen's Movement For A Christian World." This movement, led by such persons as Warren Austin, Weymen Huckabee, Mrs. Pearce Drake, Frank P. Graham, Frank Laubach and J.C. Penny, strove mightily to assure that there would be a place in the permanent UN for prayer and meditation. The same group had worked successfully to assure that there would be a moment of prayer at the beginning and closing of each General Assembly, a tradition which is now well established.

"It will take an Archangel to find space for a prayer room in this building," one UN official told Mr. Huckabee, as construction was well along and no one had entertained the notion in the original plans. One was eventually promised but where to put it was a question. The approach to prayer by the Laymen's Movement was described by Mr. Huckabee as follows:

We were asking people to use prayer as a means of understanding and goodwill -- a substitute for criticism and fault finding, an expression of hope and confidence in world leaders ---a means of expanding the atmosphere of expectation based upon the assumption that peace with justice is God's Will. With the promise of the room I saw a canopy of goodwill and understanding being raised over the UN by the prayers of men and women of all faiths.


By the time the meditation room was finally realized, Mr. Huckabee was able to say:

My mission has been fulfilled. I had a wonderful experience. I had seen in a small way how God can and does use people to bring something about. I knew we had not begun to use or to be used by this great unlimited power which God desires to release through men -- men who remember to pray, to love, to understand, to forgive. I knew that Peace IS the will of God and I wanted to know how now to make it the will of man.


The room was opened on October 14, 1952. From then until 1957 it was a comfortable, reassuring place with arm chairs, member nations' flags, draperies, carpeting and as a non-denominational center-piece, a section of an African mahogany tree. On top of the section, a small potted philodendron grew, symbolizing perhaps, everlasting life.

In 1956, a cosmic north wind, named Hammarskjöld swept in and, gaining the stunned and somewhat uneasy cooperation of the Laymen's Movement, undertook the complete redesign of the meditation room. In November 1957 the transformed meditation room was finally reopened. And what a change! The room in dim light is an austere trapezoid, narrowing to a front wall covered by a fresco titled "Infinity" by Hammarskjöld's favorite artist, Bo Beskow. Ten cane-seated benches are arranged in the back.

In the place of dominance in the room is something wholly surprising -- a six and a half ton triangular block of crystalline iron ore from a Swedish mine. The polished top is lit by a single beam of light from a source hidden in the ceiling. It glistens like moonlight in water. Approximately 60 slabs were mined before this one was chosen.

Let us now turn to Hammarskjöld's own remarks about this room:

The Meditation Room is a kind of stepchild of the architects of this house; it was brought into being as an experiment, but now I am happy to confirm that it is a permanent part of the building and I am sure it will be of increasing importance. We had a very small space within which we sought to achieve a room of stillness. This house must have one room, one place, which is dedicated to Silence, dedicated to silence in the outer sense and stillness in the inner sense. We must do everything possible in creating such a room to create an atmosphere where people could really withdraw into themselves and feel the void.

We had one difficulty, that in a room of this kind in a house of this character we could not use any kind of symbols with which man has been used to link his religious feelings; we had to work on the basis of symbols common to all. In a sense, what I think we had at the back of our minds was something which is said, I believe, in one of Buddha's scripts -- that the significance of the vessel is not the shell but the void. The significance of a room is not the walls but is in what is framed by the walls; that is to say, we had to create a room of stillness with perhaps one or two very simple symbols, light and light striking on stone. It is for that reason that in the center of the Room there is this block of iron ore, glimmering like ice in a shaft of light from above. That is the only symbol in the Room -- a meeting of the light of the sky and the earth.

However, in a certain sense the symbolism goes one step further. I do not know whether there is anything quite like the arrangement of that Room with a big block of stone in the center. The original idea was one which I think you will all recognize; you will find it in many great religions; it is the empty altar, empty not because there is no God, but empty because God is worshipped in so many forms. The stone in the center is the altar to the God of all. At the same time, at least to myself it had strong associations with the cornerstone, the firm element in a world of movement and turmoil. In this house, with its dynamic modern architecture, there are very few things that give you the feeling of weight, solidity and permanence; in this case we wanted this massive altar to give the impression of something more than temporary.

We also had another idea which comes down to what, after all, we are trying to do here in this house -- we are trying to turn swords into ploughshares; and we thought we could bless by our thoughts the very material out of which arms are made. For that reason we felt that it was appropriate that the material to represent the earth on which we stand, as seen by the light of the sky, should be iron ore, the material out of which swords have been made and out of which homes are built. It is a material, which represents the very paradox of human life; the basic materials offered by God to us may be used either for construction or destruction. This leads our thoughts to the necessity of choice between the two alternatives.

You see therefore, that in the seeming void of the Room there is something we want to say. We want to bring back the stillness, which we have lost in our streets and in our conference rooms, and to bring it back in a setting in which no noise would impinge upon our imagination. In that setting we want to bring back our thoughts to elementary facts, the facts we are always facing, life struck by light while resting on the ground. We want to bring back the idea of worship, devotion to something which is greater and higher than we are ourselves. We want to do that by the form of our altar in such a way as to bring to everybody's mind the fact that every single one of us is faced, in his handling of the heritage of the riches of this earth, with the choice between the ploughshare and the sword.


I want to say just a few more words about the Meditation Room. It both gains and suffers from its position. It is one of the holiest of holies of the planet, yet it is easily accessible by the public, being located in the Visitor's Lobby. It is thus, a great open secret. Anyone can go there at any time. It suffers in that delegates do not use it much precisely because of its location.

But I have to say that in some way, its talismanic quality performs quite irrespective of who uses or does not use it. When I say it is a holy of holies, I mean that it is a focus for the energies of a unitary planet, for a unified humanity, and for right relations between all the kingdoms of life. Those energies use the room and the stone like a lens; and through that spot they course through the meeting rooms, through the secretariat, through the delegations and by that route throughout the world.

Let me share one anecdote. Recently I had the pleasure of guiding a representative of the traditional wisdom of the Hopi People through the UN, including the Meditation Room. He was not expecting anything in particular. But when he entered the room, he audibly gasped. Quickly and apologetically, he reached for his medicine bag, took out a leather pouch from which he made an offering on the spot in front of the rock while saying prayers.

"We have been told," he said, "that there are three most powerful places in the United States. This is one of them, and I am going home to report it to the Elders." Which he then did.

Also, a dynamite bomb was placed in the Meditation Room. The fuse went out.

U Thant was the third UN Secretary-General. This gentle Burmese Buddhist was regarded as unremarkable, which was exactly what most major powers, particularly the USSR, wanted after the lightening bolt of Dag Hammarskjöld. It is increasingly difficult to be elected Secretary-General. States would generally prefer a good housekeeper who does not initiate, innovate or otherwise threaten their equilibrium or the status quo. But, U Thant's self effacing nature belied his moral courage and inner strength. Those who voted for him were later to find themselves very surprised. He was never really understood by the West and probably not by the communist states either. He was, however, universally trusted -- with confidences and in his word and fairness.

I knew the man personally, and loved him. I had the pleasure of sitting with him in his home, working on statements and articles, which would become history. I sensed the reverential atmosphere filled with Buddhic qualities, and knew that this son of the East was dearly beloved of the guides and mentors of the human race. U Thant was an earnest Buddhist and meditated at home every morning before driving to the UN.

The two fullest statements of U Thant's belief's and practices are contained in his talk on "The Role of Religious Convictions" at the Third International Teach-In at Toronto in 1967, and his personal statement in his memoirs, View from the UN (Doubleday, 1978, pp. 20-25, 453-454). Dead from cancer upon its completion, he was unable to continue to his second volume, which was to have been much more introspective than the memoirs devoted to his role at the UN.

He states:

As a Buddhist, I was trained to be tolerant of everything except intolerance. I was brought up not only to develop the spirit of tolerance but also to cherish moral and spiritual qualities, especially modesty, humility, compassion and most important, to attain a certain degree of emotional equilibrium. I was taught to control my emotions through a process of concentration and meditation. Of course, being human, and not yet having reached the stage of arhat (enlightened being) I cannot completely "control" my emotions ....

Among the teachings of the Buddha are four features of meditation, the primary purpose of which is the attainment of moral and spiritual excellence: meta (goodwill or kindness); karuna (compassion); mudita (sympathetic joy); and upekka (equanimity or equilibrium).

A true Buddhist practices his metta (kindness) to all, without distinction -- 'just as the sun shines on all, or the rain falls on all, without distinction. 'Metta embraces all beings impartially and spontaneously, expecting nothing in return, not even appreciation. Metta is impersonal love or goodwill, the opposite of sensuous caring or a burning sensual fire that can turn into wrath, hatred, or revenge when not requited....

Karuna ... the quality of compassion, is deeply rooted in the Buddhist concept of suffering. Human life is one of suffering; hence, it is the duty of a good Buddhist to mitigate the sufferings of others.

Mudita (sympathetic joy) can best be defined as one's expression of sympathy with other people's joy. The happiness of others generates happiness in the mind of a good Buddhist .... The person who cultivates altruistic joy radiates it over everyone in his surroundings....

Upekka (equanimity) connotes the acquisition of a balance of mind whether in triumph or tragedy. This balance is achieved only as a result of deep insight into the nature of things, and primarily by contemplation and meditation. If one understands how unstable and impermanent all worldly conditions are, one learns to bear lightly the greatest misfortune or the greatest reward. To achieve upekka, one has to meditate....Buddhist meditation aims at cleansing the mind of impurities, such as ill will, hatred and restlessness; it aims at cultivating such qualities as concentration, awareness, intelligence, confidence, and tranquility, leading finally to the attainment of the highest wisdom....


U Thant also writes that he was greatly influenced by the writings of Albert Schweitzer and his concept of "reverence for life," and by those of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. In stating his own concept of human society, he states:

I am always conscious of the fact that I am a member of the human race.... This consciousness prompts me to work for a great human synthesis, which is the implicit goal of the world Organization I had the privilege of serving.... Long before I was appointed Secretary-General, I used to dwell at some length on the oneness of the human community.


Indeed, as a result of these convictions, U Thant became a founding co-Chairman of Planetary Citizens, which, together with Norman Cousins, we originated. In the closing pages of his memoirs U Thant again called for "a new concept of citizenship."

I am making a plea, he said, based on these ten years of looking at the human condition from my unique vantage point-for a dual allegiance. This implies an open acceptance of belonging... to the human race as well as to our local community or nation.... I believe that the mark of the truly educated person facing the 21st century is that he feels himself to be a planetary citizen.


The third figure I wish to discuss in the context of spirituality at the UN is not a Secretary-General, nor an official of any kind. He has, however, led meditations twice a week at the UN for 10 years, nearly one third of the life of the Organization. Sri Chinmoy comes from the lineage of saints and sages of the East, in the line of and in the tradition of Ramakrishna and Aurobindo. Like them, he is a post-graduate human. In his case, he awoke to that fact when in his early teens, and spent the next 20 years perfecting his inner tools for his life at the ashram of Aurobindo in Pondicherry, India.

It is not surprising to me that such an exalted being would choose - or be asked from within, to assume responsibility for spirituality at the UN as part of his mission. Rather it would seem inevitable, because of what he is, and of what the UN represents and strives to become. If there is any place on earth which is appropriate to an Avataric being, and where he is needed, surely it is the fledgling world organization, struggling to unify humanity and carry it to the next level of awareness. Thus we find Chinmoy acting as invoker and intermediary for the vastest and most significant energies the world has yet received, with our meditation group of 60 or 70 people striving to serve as a lens and distributing agent for the light, love, and purpose he brings down into our midst.

We are attempting to bring together and assist in publication of the statements he has made at these meditations about the UN and its task, and about the world community, and I would like to share with you some excerpts from this increasingly significant material. Of course, he recognizes the soul of the UN as well as its present outer manifestation. He recognizes the future of the world organization as well as its present state. He offers solace and comfort, he brings inspiration and insight, and he generates enthusiasm and expectancy for an unfolding reality.

A spiritual Goal for the United Nations; Is it practical?

Without the least possible hesitation I venture to say that it is highly practical. It is not only practical, but also practicable. Something more: it is inevitable. We have to know what the spiritual goal for the United Nations is. Its Goal is to become ultimately the saviour of the world's imperfection, the liberator of the world's destruction and the fulfiller of the world's aspiration.

My heart tells me that the United Nations has a divine Ideal. My soul tells me that this Ideal is going to be transferred into the supreme Reality. Soulful concern is the essence of the United Nations' Ideal. Fruitful patience is the substance of the United Nations' ideal. Supernal fulfillment will be the essence of the United Nations' Reality.

Today's United Nations offers hopeful and soulful advice to mankind. Tomorrow's United Nations' will offer fruitful and fulfilling peace to mankind. Today's United Nations' feels truth, Light and Delight in its loving heart. Tomorrow's United Nations' will manifest Truth, Light and Delight with its all-embracing soul.

My aspiring heart has a soulful message to offer to all the nations that have formed, that have made the Garland of the United Nations. The message is this:

There are two stumbling blocks: doubt and insecurity, Doubt in the mind, insecurity in the heart. There [are] two stepping stones: faith and surrender. Faith in oneself and surrender to God's will, conscious surrender to God's constant Will...

The message that the soul of the United Nations offers to the world at large is for Eternity. Its message is that today's imperfect and unfulfilled man is tomorrow's absolutely fulfilled and supremely manifested God
. (Garland of the Nation Souls pp 27-28-29)


On another occasion Sri Chinmoy stated:

Needless to say, the world is still not perfect. Since the world is not perfect, the world opinion cannot be perfect.... There are many on earth who find fault with the activities and the dedicated services of the United Nations. But from the spiritual point of view, I wish to say that each action and each dedicated service is not a mere experiment, but an experience of God in and through the United Nations. ....This is what we see and feel in the heart of the United Nations.

From the spiritual point of view, the United Nations is struggling and striving for something meaningful and fruitful. What it needs, it has; Divine Compassion. The Compassion of God has been unceasingly descending upon the United Nations.

It is not in vain or without any purpose that the United Nations has come into existence. God's vision has to be manifested here on earth. The suffering nations need a place for consolation; the sacrificing nations need a place for appreciation. Here in the United Nations we see the message of fulfillment. Now it is up to the world. The world, the sleeping, unaspiring, unawakened world is not yet receiving the Light of the United Nations. There are many things that the world could get from the dedication of the United Nations: but if the world is not receptive, it is not the fault of the United Nations.

God is all Compassion, He is all giving; but if we don't want to receive His Light the way He wants to offer it, that is not His fault. The heart of this place is dedication, the soul of this place is concern, the body of this place is for the illumining expansion of human consciousness.

... When we go deep within, we see that a seed was sown here in the earth-consciousness and that seed has boundless potentiality. God's Light is here for humanity to receive on a practical level, in an earthly manner. God's Light is here to illumine us. Consciously and unconsciously the world is receiving this Light from the United Nations; but the United Nations is not being recognized, and this fact is deplorable. The human beings who have become instruments to offer the Light that the soul of the United Nations has, may not be fully aware of what they are doing. When they see the imperfections in others, when they see their limited capacity, at times they feel frustrated. But the Divine in each individual nation is all-wise. It has chosen the right place and the right instrument -- the United Nations.

... The United Nations is the chosen instrument of God. To be a chosen instrument of God means to be a divine messenger carrying the banner of God's inner vision and outer manifestation. One day the world will not only treasure and cherish the soul of the United Nations but also claim the soul of the United Nations as its very own with enormous pride, for this soul is all-loving, all-nourishing, and all fulfilling. (Garland, pp 66-68).


In speaking to the meditation group, Sri Chinmoy once said:

We are the most fortunate people on earth, for God has chosen us to be his instruments to serve Him in mankind. Please try to feel that the United Nations is not a mere building, but a place of worship, a place where all human beings can worship and pray to God. This place is a living shrine for the Supreme.


On another occasion he said:

This meditation is not only for the United Nations but also for the world at large. If we really love God, and if we really love mankind and consciously believe that we are responsible for mankind, then we feel that our aspiration and dedication to the soul of the United Nations and our inner pilot is of paramount importance. Please feel that it is your own aspiration that will expedite the vision for the United Nations. And when the vision is transformed into reality, the inner pilot will know our contribution whether or not the world ever recognizes it....


Sri Chinmoy had a particularly poignant and deep relationship with U Thant. I attended a performance of plays on the life of the Buddha by Chinmoy that were dedicated to U Thant and performed for him. Of U Thant at his passing, Chinmoy said:

U Thant was a chosen instrument of God. U Thant was a chosen instrument of man. God gave him Compassion-sky to offer to man. Man gave him his suffering-sea to offer to God. Earth gave him the responsibility. Heaven knew and saw it. Heaven gave him the authority, but unfortunately earth did not know it or did not care to know it. His heart of brotherhood was misunderstood. His life of sacrifice was not valued. But his vision and goal of oneness will eternally be pursued by aspiring humanity.


Is Sri Chinmoy properly appreciated by the United Nations? Not entirely. Both the present Secretary-General, Javier Perez de Cuellar, and the past Secretaries-General, Kurt Waldheim and U Thant, have appreciated his work and that of the UN Meditation Group. Selected delegates and many secretariat staff as well as some NGO representatives do. However, such overt spirituality is still a big step for many.

Spirituality at the United Nations? The UN is a place of contrast and contests. It is a place of contrast between selfishness and sharing. It is a place of contests between the narrow self-interest and the world community's good. It is the major battle line for the future of humanity's soul and collective well being. It is the locus for the emergence of higher values concerning humanity as a whole, and the rebirth of the race as a Planetary Entity, a Planetary Human Being. Therefore, from the inner side the wiring has been put in place, the energies of emergence are focused, the power for planetary transformation is available. It is even represented there by a conscious post-human intermediary of great power. It is too early yet to tell whether that promise will be recognised, accepted by humanity and acted upon or scorned. But rest assured that those of us who work there with the vision before us will continue to worship at the altar of humanity-become- whole, for you and for all.

1 Written in the early 1970s by Mr. Donald Keys, when he was a speechwriter for Secretary-General, U Thant and Founder/President of Planetary Citizens. Printed and distributed by the Aquarian Age Community with the kind permission of Mr. Keys.
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U Thant was the third UN Secretary-General. This gentle Burmese Buddhist was regarded as unremarkable, which was exactly what most major powers, particularly the USSR, wanted after the lightening bolt of Dag Hammarskjöld. It is increasingly difficult to be elected Secretary-General. States would generally prefer a good housekeeper who does not initiate, innovate or otherwise threaten their equilibrium or the status quo. But, U Thant's self effacing nature belied his moral courage and inner strength. Those who voted for him were later to find themselves very surprised. He was never really understood by the West and probably not by the communist states either. He was, however, universally trusted -- with confidences and in his word and fairness.

I knew the man personally, and loved him. I had the pleasure of sitting with him in his home, working on statements and articles, which would become history. I sensed the reverential atmosphere filled with Buddhic qualities, and knew that this son of the East was dearly beloved of the guides and mentors of the human race. U Thant was an earnest Buddhist and meditated at home every morning before driving to the UN.

The two fullest statements of U Thant's belief's and practices are contained in his talk on "The Role of Religious Convictions" at the Third International Teach-In at Toronto in 1967, and his personal statement in his memoirs, View from the UN (Doubleday, 1978, pp. 20-25, 453-454). Dead from cancer upon its completion, he was unable to continue to his second volume, which was to have been much more introspective than the memoirs devoted to his role at the UN....

U Thant also writes that he was greatly influenced by the writings of Albert Schweitzer and his concept of "reverence for life," and by those of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin....

Indeed, as a result of these convictions, U Thant became a founding co-Chairman of Planetary Citizens, which, together with Norman Cousins, we originated. In the closing pages of his memoirs U Thant again called for "a new concept of citizenship."

I am making a plea, he said, based on these ten years of looking at the human condition from my unique vantage point-for a dual allegiance. This implies an open acceptance of belonging... to the human race as well as to our local community or nation.... I believe that the mark of the truly educated person facing the 21st century is that he feels himself to be a planetary citizen.


-- Spirituality at the United Nations, by Donald F. Keys, speechwriter for United Nations Secretary General, U Thant


Planetary Citizens was set up in 1974 and no longer operates.

"PlanetaryCitizens.net's mission is to create, expose and nurture positive change in the world. We hope to give you pertinent information and relevant facts in the process. Donald Keys, speech writer for U Thant in the 60s, coined the phrase Planetary Citizen on the way to creating The New World Alliance. The Occupy Movement, a global announcement of dissatisfaction in leadership and a call for change, could be seen as a call for planetary citizens. Numerous groups and organizations are adopting the 12-sector model, illustrated here, as a means toward self-organization." [1]

In 1970 the UN held a "Conference on Human Survival" which was chaired by Lester Pearson with funding coming from the Kettering Foundation. With funds left over from this conference Planetary Citizens was initiated. [2]

Another collaborative project Planetary Citizens helped launch is “The Planetary Initiative for the World We Choose.” “The original inviters of the Planetary Initiative were the leaders of the Association for Humanistic Psychology, the Club of Rome, Global Education Associates, the United Nations Association of New South Wales, and of course, Planetary Citizens.” [3]

Board of Directors (October 1975)

Accessed May 2012: [4]

• Keith Alleyne, Alfred G. Brauch, Betsie Carter-Haar, Phil Gibbs, Matthew Haai, Anthony Hixon, Mark Horowitz, Jeff Kamen, Laraine Mai, Martha McDougle, Fred Rosenzveig, Stephen B. Shafer, David Spangler, Geir V. Vilhjalmsjon
• TREASURER - George A. Christie
• SECRETARY - David Genhon
• COUNSEL - Charles Teiry
• REGISTRAR - Donald F. Keys
• Honorary Chairmen - Norman Cousins, U Thant 1909-1974

Advisory Council (October 1975)

Accessed May 2012: [5]

• Saul Mendlovitz - chair
• Roy Amara, Richard E. Andre, Isaac Asimov, Archie J. Bahm, Richard Baker-Roshi, E. Alice Beard, Humberto Blanco, F. E. Boaten, Theodore Brameld, Noel J. Brown, William J. Butler, Peter Caddy, Sri Chinmoy, Andrew A. D. Clarke, David Steindl-Rast, Rene Dubos, J. Duncan Edmonds, Martin Ennals, Roger H. Evans, James Fadiman, Richard Fall, Jerome D. Frank, Johan Galtung, Denis A. Goulet, Alyce Green, S. Spencer Grin, Willis W. Harman, Robert J. Havighimt, Theodore M. Hesburgh, Richard Hudson, Ervin Laszlo, James D. Lenhari, Robert Jay Lifton, Mahavishnu, John McLaughlin, Edgar D. Mitchell, Henry E. Niles, Glenn A. Olds, Alan Paton, V. Madhusudan Reddy, E.F. Schumacher, Russell L. Schweickart, Philippe de Seynes, Salty Swing Shelley, Sir John Sinclair, Harold Taylor, William Irwin Thompson, Erling A. Thunberg, James G. Vargiu, Rene V.L Wadlow, Geshe Wangyal, Lucy Law Webster


First Endorsers

Accessed May 2012: [6]

• ARGENTINA - Raul Prebisch
• AUSTRALIA - Julius Stone
• AUSTRIA - Konrad Lorenz
• BELGIUM - Maurice Bejart, Paul Henri Spuk 1899-1972
• CANADA - Lt.Gen E.L.M. Burns, Marshall McLuhan, Lester Pearson, Maurice Strong
• SRI LANKA - T.S Fernando, Gunapala P. Malalasekera
• COSTA RICA - Jose Figueres
• CYPRUS - Archbishop Makarios
• FRANCE - Marcel Marccau, Darius Milhaud, Abbe Pierre, Jean-Francois Revel, Jean Rostand
• GREECE - Constantinos Doxiadis
• INDIA - Rajeshwar Dayal, C.D Deshmukh, Archbishop Angelo Fernandes, Arthur Lall, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, Gen. Indarjit Rikhye
• IRELAND - Sean MacBride
• ITALY - Giorgio La Pira, Aurelio Peccei
• JAPAN - Toshio Miyake, Setsuo Yamada
• LEBANON - Charles Malik
• LIBERIA - Angie Brooks-Randolph
• THE NETHERLANDS - HM Queen Juliana, Jan Tinbergen
• NEW ZEALAND - Sir Edmund Hillary
• NIGERIA - Chief Simeon O. Adebo, Sir Adeiokunbo A. Ademola
• NORWAY - Thor Hryerdahl, OddNansen 1901-197)
• PAKISTAN - Sir Muhammcd Zafrullah Khan
• PHILIPPINES - Carlos P. Romulo
• PUERTO RICO - Pablo Calais 1876- [973
• ROMANIA - lorgu Jordan, Ion Nicodim
• SWEDEN - Gunnar Myrdal
• SWITZERLAND - Salvador Dr Madanaga, Adrian Pell, Jean Piaget
• TIBET - The Dalai Lama
• UNITED KINGDOM - Sir Adrian Cedric Boult, Lord Ritchie-Calder, Lord Hugh Caradon, Christopher Fry, Philip Noel-Baker, C.P. Snow, Arnold Toynbee, Peter Ustinov
• UNITED STATES - Roger Baldwin, Leonard Bernstein, Eugene Canon Blake, Elite Boulding, Kenneth Boulding, Harrison Brown, Alexander Calder, Judy Collins, Luther Evans, R. Buckminster Fuller, Frank Herbert, Paul G. Hoffman, Robert Hutchins, Coretta Scott King, Ingrid May, Rollo May, Yehudi Menuhin, Arthur Miller, Morris Mitchell, David A. Morse, Isamu Noguchi, Linus Pauling, Victor Reuther, Pete Seeger, Leopold Stokowski, Alben Szent-Gyorgyi, John Updike, Kurt Vognegut, George Wild, Earl Warren, James Watson
• UPPER VOLT A - Joseph Ki-Zerbo
• WEST GERNANY- Martin Niemoller
• YUGOSLAVIA - Leo Mates

Contact

Planetary Citizens
Attention: Zen Benefiel
925 S. Sailfish Dr.
Gilbert, Arizona USA, 85233
Web: http://www.planetarycitizens.net/contact.html

Resources and articles

Related Sourcewatch articles

• Rene Dubos
• Robert Mueller (UN)
• Freed Schmitter [3]
• Gordon Feller - former executive director
• William H. Bahan
• Sara Catlin
• Martha Crampton
• Joshua Cutter
• Alyce Green
• Virginia Satir
• Thomas Pliske
• William J. Butler
• Carly Newfeld - UK

References

1. Planetary Citizens Home, organizational web page, accessed April 21, 2012.
2. Donald Keys, "Earth at Omega: Passage to Planetization" [1] (Branden Books, 1982) (published by Findhorn Press in 1984), p.95, p.96.
3. Donald Keys, "Earth at Omega: Passage to Planetization" [2] (Branden Books, 1982) (published by Findhorn Press in 1984), p.103.
4. United Nations Items-in-Secretary-General's Statements, organizational web page, accessed May 4, 2012.
5. United Nations Items-in-Secretary-General's Statements, organizational web page, accessed May 4, 2012.
6. United Nations Items-in-Secretary-General's Statements, organizational web page, accessed May 6, 2012.
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Re: Freda Bedi, by Wikipedia

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Earth at Omega: Passage to Planetization [EXCERPT]
by Donald Keys

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

YOU ARE REQUIRED TO READ THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE AT THIS LINK BEFORE YOU READ THE FOLLOWING WORK, THAT IS AVAILABLE SOLELY FOR PRIVATE STUDY, SCHOLARSHIP OR RESEARCH PURSUANT TO 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107 AND 108. IN THE EVENT THAT THE LIBRARY DETERMINES THAT UNLAWFUL COPYING OF THIS WORK HAS OCCURRED, THE LIBRARY HAS THE RIGHT TO BLOCK THE I.P. ADDRESS AT WHICH THE UNLAWFUL COPYING APPEARED TO HAVE OCCURRED. THANK YOU FOR RESPECTING THE RIGHTS OF COPYRIGHT OWNERS.




Chapter IV: Three Prophets of Planetary Unity

Whoever seeks to gain his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life will preserve it.

-- Jesus Christ of Nazareth


The third and final phase of our UN tour will be more subtle and subjective. It will try to convey something of the spirit of the place and the response it evokes, both from ordinary people and from extraordinary people. There is a very particular atmosphere in the UN compound. It becomes intermingled with the scents of aromatic tobaccos and espresso coffee as one approaches the delegates, North Lounge, but throughout the buildings the atmosphere is very exhilarating. My guest one day was David Spangler, new age writer and philosopher. After a few moments' quiet, David said, "It feels like home."

Yes, visiting the UN feels like a homecoming. There is something extraordinary about mixing together the essences of all elements of what we call humanity, and about their reuniting under a single roof. The whole, we are told, is more than the sum of its parts. And here is where you can sense that the whole of humanity is very much more than and something quite different from a mere collection of people with differing habits and customs, attractive as their uniqueness may be. I remember attending a Staff Day dance. The atmosphere was amazing. To be there was to participate in a joyous reunion of the species.

Quite apart from the surface phenomena of the United Nations -- the crises, conflicts, and confrontations which get headline treatment -- there is something else occurring which might hardly occasion comment. The UN is a place where we can sense the first intimations of what humanity really is, as an entity and as a species. Humanity as differentiated from this person, that person, from this group, that tribe or nation, is a quantum jump different from anything heretofore experienced. It is not uncommon for first-time visitors or short-term delegates to experience a sudden, overwhelming realization of planetary humanity, one similar to that which has struck moon-traveling astronauts gazing upon earth.

In the United Nations Secretariat staff we find many unsung heroes, persons who are unconsciously representing the energies of human unification. They are animated by it and act on it, but are not given to lives of contemplation or speculation. Their work can be equated with continuous meditation on human unification, not in the abstract, but in action. Among them are the grand Karma Yogis of the Age (Karma Yogis are those whose path of spirituality is to achieve realization through selfless and dedicated action), persons who are wholly invested in the effort to manifest the vision of planetary justice, freedom, equity and peace. The UN is more noted by the press for its freeloaders, its empire builders, KGB and CIA agents, but such people are, in the long run, much less significant than the dedicated Secretariat workers.

We have an informal network at the UN of persons who are committed, aware, and striving to bring the new world to birth. It consists of people in high places and in low -- of the patient secretary who has been thirty years with the UN and who lives with the vision and the spirit, of the professionals and undersecretaries and heads of departments who are acting from the imperatives which their inner vision gives them.

The full dimensions of the subjective dynamism animating the UN cannot be understood, however, without telling the story of three major figures at the UN. Two were Secretaries-General; the third is a non-governmental person. One was Christian, one Buddhist, and one is Hindu. All were extraordinary prophets of planetary unity.

Dag Hammarskjold

The best known of the three is Dag Hammarskjold. The intensity of his inner life became apparent only after the publication of his spiritual diary, Markings, following his death in a plane crash in the Congo. He went to the Congo trying to speech up the return to peace. At the site of the crash, incidentally, were found in his briefcase an English edition of the New Testament and Book of Psalms which always traveled with him, and a copy of martin Buber's I and Thou, which he was translating into Swedish. Hammarskjold felt a deep relationship to Buber and his work.

Hammarskjold's personal credo was stated on Edward R. Murrow's program "This I Believe." He states that his "never abandoned effort ... to build up a personal belief in the light of experience and honest thinking" led him to "recognize and endorse unreservedly those believes which once were handed down to me." Behind him on his father's side were generations of soldiers and government officials. From them he inherited a belief "that no life was more satisfactory than one of selfless service to your country or humanity. This service required a sacrifice of all personal interests, but likewise, the courage to stand up unflinchingly for your convictions." Hammarskjold's inheritance from his mother included the influence of scholars and clergymen, and it taught him that "in the very radical sense of the Gospels, all men were equals as children of God."

Hammarskjold found that these two ideals were represented fully and appropriately for "the demands of our world of today" in the ethics of Albert Schweitzer. The strongest influence in his spiritual life, however, was the lives and teachings of "those great medieval mystics for whom 'self surrender' had been the way to self-realization and who in 'singleness of mind' ... found strength ... to say 'yes' to every fate that life had in store for them when they followed the call to duty as they understood it." For Hammarskjold, "love" meant an overflowing of the strength with which the mystics were filled when living in true self-oblivion, and which found "natural expression in an unhesitant fulfillment of duty and in an unreserved acceptance of life, whatever it brought them personally of toil and suffering -- or happiness." (Edward R. Murrow, This I believe, Vol. II New York, Simon and Schuster, 1954).

After Hammarskjold's death, his diary, Markings, was translated into English by Leif Sjoberg and W.H. Auden. Of it Hammarskjold wrote: "These entries provide the only true profile that can be drawn ... If you find them worth publishing you have my permission to do so, as a sort of 'white book' concerning my negotiations with myself -- and with God." This extraordinary document is surely one of the most revealing and profound journals we have of the strivings of the human spirit.

Let us content ourself with three quotations from Markings (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1966 pages 205, 213, 214):

I.

I don't know Who -- or what -- put the question, I don't know when it was put,
I don't even remember answering. But at some moment I did answer YES to
Someone -- or Something -- and from that hour I was certain that existence
is meaningful and that, therefore, my life, in self-surrender, had a goal
From that moment I have known what it means 'not to look back', and 'to take
no thought for the morrow.'

-- Whitsunday, 1961.

II.


Tired
And lonely,
So tired
The heart aches.
Meltwater trickles
Down the rocks,
The fingers are numb,
The knees tremble.
It is now,
Now that you must not give in.

On the path of the others
Are resting places,
Places in the sun
Where they can meet.
But this
Is your path,
And it is now,
Now that you must not fail.

Weep
If you can,
Weep,
But do not complain.
The way chose you-
And you must be thankful.

-- July 6, 1961

III.

Have mercy
Upon us.
Have mercy upon our efforts,
That we
Before Thee,
In love and in faith,
Righteousness and humility,
May follow Thee,
With self-denial, steadfastness, and courage,
And meet Thee
In the silence.

Give u
A pure heart
That we may see Thee,
A humble heart
that we may hear Thee,
A heart of faith
That we may live Thee,

Thou
Whom I do not know
But Whose I am.

Thou
Whom I do not comprehend
But Who hast dedicated me
To my fate.
Thou --

-- July 19, 1961
Dag Hammarskjold

Briant Urquhart, Hammarskjold's associate and biographer, wrote of Markings, "It is an unusual record for a highly successful public man, and some readers have found its earnestness and frankness embarrassing and even unattractive. It is certainly an intensely serious book which makes no effort at all to play up the more human or charming aspects of its subject." He writes also, "The springs of Hammarskjold's sense of vocation ran deep. They were traditional, intellectual, and religious. His identification with Christian thought, was not messianic, but rather in the old tradition of the imitation of Christ in sacrifice and in service to others. He was a member of that small and lonely band who throughout history have engaged at the same time in trying to deal with the hard world of political and social reality and in searching endlessly for a spiritual meaning which transcends that world...." Brian Urqhart, HAMMARSKJOLD, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972 pp. 18, 23).

Urquhart remains as Under-Secretary-General in a vital post dealing with political disputes and UN peacekeeping.

There is a remarkable artifact at the United Nations which bears Dag Hammarskjold's personal stamp. It is the redesigned Meditation Room, off the visitors' lobby, surrounding a crystalline iron ore altar six tons in weight. The existence of the room we owe not to Hammarskjold but to Weyman Huckabee and other persons of the Layman's Movement for a Christian World, who fought a hard-won battle to set aside space for a meditation room after the UN building was nearly completed. The group included Warren Austin, Mrs. Pearce Drake, Frank P. Graham, Frank Laubach and J.C. Penny, who were insistent that there be a place in the UN for prayer and meditation. The same group successfully assured that there would be a moment of prayer or meditation at the beginning of each General Assembly, a tradition which is now well established. The room was opened in 1952, and until 1956 it was a comfortable, reassuring place with armchairs, member nations' flags, draperies, carpeting, and a section of an African mahogany tree as a non-denominational centerpiece. These furnishings are now in the meditation room of Wainwright House in Rye, New York, the successor to the Layman's Movement.

In 1956, a cosmic north wind named Hammarskjold swept in, and gaining the stunned and somewhat uneasy cooperation of the Layman's Movement, undertook the complete redesign of the room. The transformed Meditation Room was formally reopened in November 1957. The room is an austere trapezoid, dimly lit, narrowing to a front wall covered by a fresco titled "infinity," done by Hammarskjold's favorite artist, Bo Beskow. Ten cane-seated benches are arranged in the back. The polished top of the great block of iron ore is lit by a single beam of light from a source hidden in the ceiling. Approximately sixty slabs were cut in Swedish mines before this one was chosen.

Dag Hammarskjold commented about the significance of the room in the following way. Speaking of the stone he said: "It is an empty altar, not because there is no God, but empty became God is worshipped in so many forms. The stone in the center is the altar to the God of all. At the same time ... it has strong associations with the cornerstone, the firm element in a world of movement and turmoil.

"We had also another idea which comes down to what, after all, we are trying to do here in this house -- we are trying to turn swords into ploughshares, and we thought we could bless by our thoughts the very material out of which arms are made."

Many people comment on the strength and atmosphere of the tiny room, and are unprepared for its impact. Perhaps one story is not out of place. Recently I had the pleasure of guiding a representative of Elders of native American Indian people through the UN, including the Meditation Room. He was not expecting anything particular. But when he entered the room, he audibly gasped. Quickly and apologetically, he reached for his medicine bag, and from a leather pouch, he took out an offering which he made on the spot in front of the rock while saying his prayers.

"We have been told," he said, "that there are three most powerful places in the United States. This is one of them, and I am going home and report its location to the Elders." Which he did. I am sure Dag Hammarskjold would have been gratified.

U Thant

U Thant was the third UN Secretary-General. This gentle Burmese Buddhist was regarded as unremarkable, which was exactly what most major powers wanted after the lightning bolt of Dag Hammarskjold, and what in fact they had sought in Hammarskjold as well. They were twice fooled. It is difficult to be elected Secretary-General. Many States would prefer a good housekeeper who does not innovate or take initiatives. Those who voted for U Thant were later to be very surprised. He was never really understood by the West, and probably not by the communist States either. He was, however, universally trusted with shared confidences, in his word and in his fairness.

I knew the man personally and loved him as did his many associates. I had the pleasure of sitting with him in his Riverdale home, working on statements and articles that would become history. I sensed a reverential atmosphere there, one filled with Buddhic qualities. U Thant was an earnest buddhist who meditated at home every morning before driving to the UN to shoulder the problems of the world.

The two fullest statements of U Thant's beliefs and practices are contained in his talk on "The Role of Religious Convictions" at the Third International Teach-In at Toronto in 1967, and his personal statement in his memoirs, View from the UN (New York, Doubleday, 1978, pp. 20-25, 453-454). Dead of cancer upon its completion, he was unable to pen a second volume, which was to have been much more introspective and anecdotal than the memoirs devoted to his role at the UN. He states:

"As a Buddhist, I was trained to be tolerant of everything except intolerance. I was brought up not only to develop the spirit of tolerance but also to cherish moral and spiritual qualities, especially modesty, humility, compassion and most important, to attain a certain degree of emotional equilibrium. I was taught to control my emotions through a process of concentration and meditation. Of course, being human, and not yet having reached the stage of arhat (enlightened being) I cannot completely 'control' my emotions....

"Among the teachings of the Buddha are four features of meditation, the primary purpose of which is the attainment of moral and spiritual excellence: metta (goodwill or kindness); karuna (compassion); mudita (sympathetic joy); and upekka (equanimity or equilibrium).

"A true Buddhist practices his metta (kindness) to all, without distinction -- 'just as the sun shines on all, or the rain falls on all, without distinction.' Metta embraces all beings impartially and spontaneously, expecting nothing in return, not even appreciation. Metta is impersonal love or good will, the opposite of sensuous craving or a burning sensual fire that can turn into wrath, hatred, or revenge when not requited ...

"Karuna the quality of compassion is deeply rooted in the Buddhist concept of suffering. Human life is one of suffering; hence it is the duty of a good Buddhist to mitigate the suffering of others.

"Mudita (sympathetic joy) can best be defined as one's expression of sympathy with other people's joy. The happiness of others generates happiness in the mind of a good Buddhist ... the person who cultivates altruistic joy radiates it over everyone in his surroundings ...

"Upekka (equanimity) connotes the acquisition of a balance of mind whether in triumph or tragedy. This balance is achieved only as a result of deep insight into the nature of things, and primarily by contemplation and meditation. If one understands how unstable and impermanent all worldly things and conditions are, one learns to bear lightly the greatest misfortune or the greatest reward. To achieve upekka, one has to meditate ... Buddhist meditation aims at cleansing the mind of impurities, such as ill will, hatred, and restlessness; it aims at cultivating such qualities as concentration, awareness, intelligence, confidence, and tranquillity, leading finally to the attainment of the highest wisdom...."

U Thant writes as did Dag Hammarskjold that he was greatly influenced by the writings of Albert Schweitzer and his ethic of "reverence for life," and by the writings of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. In presenting his own concept of human society, U Thant stated:

I am always conscious of the fact that I am a member of the human race ... This consciousness prompts me to work for a great human synthesis which is the implicit goal of the World Organization I had the privilege of serving ... Long before I was appointed Secretary-General, I used to dwell at some length on the oneness of the human community."



Indeed, it was as a result of these convictions that U Thant became a founding co-chairman of Planetary Citizens. In the closing pages of his memoirs U thant again called for "a new concept of citizenship." "I am making a plea," he said, "based on these ten years of looking at the human condition from my unique vantage point -- for a dual allegiance. This implies an open acceptance of belonging ... to the human race as well as to our local community or nation.

Sri Chinmoy

A third figure who represents the subjective side of the life of the UN, although a friend of U Thant and an acquaintance of statesmen, diplomats and popes, is not a Secretary-General, nor an official of any kind. Sri Chinmoy has closely identified himself with the spirit of the United Nations, and has led twice-weekly meditations there for more than ten years, nearly one-third of the life of the Organization. Chinmoy comes from the lineage of the saints and sages of the Hindu East, in the line of and in the tradition of Ramakrishna and Aurobindo. The formative twenty years of his spiritual life were spent in the Aurobindo ashram in Pondicherry, India.

It was not surprising to me to find Sri Chinmoy conducting meditations at the UN. Rather, it seemed correct and inevitable that a person of his stature should be and would be serving in his particular way at the headquarters of the world's first universal organization. Thus we find Chinmoy acting as invoker and intermediary for the energies needed to advance what U Thant called "the great human synthesis." His talks at the United Nations are the most profound literature available on the meaning and significance of the UN, and are very simply stated.

Speaking of the purpose of the United Nations and its relative non-acceptance, Chinmoy declared:

It is not in vain or without any purpose that the United Nations has come into existence. God's vision has to be manifested here on earth ... The world, the sleeping, unaspiring, unawakened world is not yet receiving the light of the United Nations. There are many things that the world could get from the dedication of the United Nations; but if the world is not receptive, it is not the fault of the United Nations. God is all compassion. He is all-giving; but if we don't want to receive His light the way He wants to offer it, that is not His fault. The heart of this place is dedication, the soul of this place is concern, the body of this place is for the illumining expansion of human consciousness...

the United Nations is the chosen instrument of God. To be a chosen instrument of God means to be a divine messenger carrying the banner of God's inner vision and outer manifestation. One day the world will not only treasure and cherish the soul of the United Nations, but also claim the soul of the United Nations as its very own with enormous pride, for this soul is all-loving, all-nourishing, and all-fulfilling." (Sri Chinmoy, Garland of the Nation Souls, Lighthouse Press, 1972, pp. 66-68).


Sri Chinmoy had a particularly poignant and deep relationship with U Thant. Thant attended a performance of plays on the life of the Buddha by Chinmoy that were dedicated to him. Of U Thant at his passing, Chinmoy said:

U Thant was a chosen instrument of God. U Thant was a chosen instrument of Man. God gave him His compassion-sky to offer to man. Man gave him his suffering-sea to offer to God. Earth gave him the responsibility. Heaven knew it and saw it. Heaven gave him the authority, but unfortunately earth did not know it or did not care to know it. His heart of brotherhood was misunderstood. His life of sacrifice was not valued. But his vision of oneness-goal will eternally be pursued by aspiring humanity.


Persons who have thought of the United Nations as a bastion of atheism, as lacking in spirituality, devoid of morals, empty of belief, had better think again. They had better wipe their feet and bow their heads to enter this First Temple of Humanity.

Thus, we conclude our three-phase "tour" of the United Nations, seed-crystal for precipitation of the Planetary Age. In this time of transition, the UN is a place of contrasts and contests. Of the contrast between selfishness and sharing. Of contests between narrow self-interest and world community good. It is the major battle line for the future of humanity's soul and collective well-being. It is the locus for the emergence of higher values concerning humanity's common future. At present it is too early to tell whether that promise will be recognized, accepted and acted upon, or scorned, derided and forgotten. "Too early" means that the trends of the present are not set in concrete. The future is not foreclosed. It is an open future which will bend to human aspirations and designs.
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