What do we mean by a New Age? It can have very concrete meanings, just as sunrise has a very concrete meaning. For many people, the concept of the New Age has come into their consciousness because of astrology and modern interests in astrology. This is proclaimed to be the age of Aquarius. Drama, songs, dance serve to present this concept to modern humanity. And it’s become something of a catch phrase in many parts of the world to speak about the Age of Aquarius, the children of Aquarius, Aquarian this and Aquarian that.

For other people, the concept of the New Age is religiously orientated. It derives from one of the many prophecies that have been made in most of the world’s great religions: the return of the Christ; the return of Mohammed; the appearance of the next Buddha, the Maitreya Buddha; the appearance of the next incarnation of Krishna. Most of the great religions carry the concept of the reappearance of, or the remanifestation of the particular prophet, or the light and force behind that prophet, into our age.

In this series of lectures we will discuss some of these prophecies and their symbolic and non-symbolic content, and I particularly want to link the concepts of the New Age with our Christian tradition. Not to exclude the important material in other religious traditions, that of the Buddhist or the Hindus or Islam. But in many ways the force that is working through this Centre, and indeed through many centres, that are externalizing the New Age, is a force which in its last great appearance manifested itself as the Christ. And in some bridge between Christianity and what it has created in Western culture, the scientific revolution of the past three-hundred years, and what it has created in the past three-hundred years, and the concepts of the New Age, all need to be tied together.

But in this series we are not going to be considering the New Age from a surface point of view, as an event, or indeed, as a particular time in human history. What I wish to communicate with you is what lies behind the concept of the New Age, the timeless reality of the New Age. For the New Age vision is not applicable only now. It has been applicable throughout all of human history. And to the extent that we can free our consciousnesses from being tied to purely time-orientated concepts, to that extent we hold within ourselves the power to experience the New Age now, and to become builders of it and of its external reality. We are interested, then, in consciousness and what moves within consciousness.

I want to begin by going back in time to the writings of Sophocles, great Attic dramatist and poet. Of all of the tragedies of Greek drama, those of Sophocles are perhaps the most compelling in their human essence. All of Greek drama derived itself from a culture that was very much into the concept of the mysteries, a culture highly attuned to what has now come to be known as the esoteric side of life. And those who created the philosophies, the plays, the poems, that have come to us from that culture and which form such a large foundation for Western man were in one way or another directly involved in the initiate mysteries or were influenced by them.

Just as Shakespeare holds multi-levels of meaning and insight into the whole cosmic drama of humanity, the same is true for the ancient Greek plays. One of the series of plays is called the Theban Trilogy. It’s made up of three works of Sophocles: Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus and Antigone. I’m particularly interested in sharing with you the story of Oedipus Rex and Oedipus at Colonus. And you’ll see why this has bearing on the subject of introducing the New Age vision, as we go along.

Oedipus is best known to us as the man who had the misfortune of killing his father and marrying his mother. And the concept has come down to us in recent years as a description for a particular psychological complex, the Oedipus complex, in which the son is in love with his mother. But Oedipus represents quite a bit more than simply an individual who was cursed by the fates to experience and to weave a rather tragic destiny. For those of you who are not terribly familiar with his story, you will be by the time this tape is finished; and for those of you who are, this will be a refresher course.

Thebes was a Greek-city-state. And it was being bothered, one might say, in fact bothered a great deal, by a rather unique being called the Sphinx. This was a being that was half woman and half animal. And it had a habit of stopping people who were going to and from the city and asking them riddles. And if they could answer the riddle, then they were free to go; if they could not answer the riddle, then they were eaten by the Sphinx. The Sphinx grew very fat because no one could answer her riddles.

Then one day, Oedipus came on the scene, a traveller, and he was stopped by the Sphinx, and he was asked a riddle, and he successfully answered it. The riddle dealt with the nature of man. In essence it asked, “What creature is it that begins life on four legs, passes the middle of its life on two legs; and ends up on three legs?” And Oedipus rightly said that it was man: who begins life crawling as a baby, who stands upright on two legs as a man in his prime, but as he gets old, and the weight of years begins to drag down his muscles, and his legs become weak, he ends up walking with a cane, which is the third leg. And when the riddle was answered, it destroyed the power of the Sphinx, and the Sphinx was killed.

The people of Thebes were greatly pleased at this, and since their king had disappeared, and no one knew what had happened to him, they made Oedipus their king. And gave to him in marriage the widow of the former king and from that marriage there came two sons and two daughters. Oedipus proved himself to be a very wise, a very benevolent and a very just king, and Thebes entered a period of great prosperity. Then, all at once, it seemed that everything began falling apart, and in the words of the Chorus:

Earth’s blossoms blasted fall,
Nor can our women rise from childbed after pangs and cries,
But flocking more and more toward the western shore;
Soul after soul is known to wing her flight,
Swifter than quenchless flame,
Into the far realms of the night.

Crops were failing, animals no longer gave milk, no longer gave young. The women had become barren; and those who did give birth, died in childbirth. And a great plague had settled upon the city and the surrounding lands. And the question was, what had caused this? Obviously some god must be angered. And Creon, the brother to the Queen, and Oedipus’s brother-in-law, was sent to the Oracle at Delphi to inquire of the god Apollo what was amiss. And the message came back that the land was stained with blood, that the murderer of the king had not been found and brought to justice; and that until this deed was done, the curse would be upon Thebes and all her people. And Oedipus proclaimed to the people that he would not rest until the murderer had been discovered. And he pronounced a curse upon the murderer, saying that no man in Thebes would give him help, would speak to him; he would be an exile driven from the land, and the curses of the gods would rest upon him.

Oedipus sends for the wisest man of the kingdom, who happens to be blind, and asks him to tell him what this man can see of truth. An interesting concept – the blind man, blind from birth, is accounted as the greatest seer in the land. But what he tells Oedipus is that he is the murderer, and that he is, in fact, guilty of the crimes of patricide and of incest. And naturally Oedipus thinks the man a bit nuts and orders him out of his presence.

But as the play unfolds it becomes apparent that the reason Oedipus came to Thebes was that he was leaving his own country, the city-state of Corinth, where his supposed mother and father dwelt, the King and Queen of Corinth. For he too, had gone to Delphi to try and discover just who he was, for he had heard rumors that he was not the natural born son of the king and queen. But the Oracle, instead of telling him of his past, told him that he was destined to kill his father and marry his mother. And to keep this from happening, he vowed never to return to his home; and he set forth on this journey and came upon a crossroads. A man in a chariot ordered him to stand aside, that he had the right of way, and lashed out at Oedipus with his whip. And Oedipus, not being particularly obliged to being whipped that day, lashed out with his staff and killed this man, and then killed all those who were following him, about five in number, only one chancing to escape. It was then that he continued on his journey and met the Sphinx outside the walls of Thebes.

So when this accusation is made, it angers Oedipus greatly. However, the day proceeds, and a man appears from Corinth, a shepherd, who announces the fact that the King of Corinth has died and Oedipus is now the king of that city-state if he wishes to return and take up his new crown. But Oedipus says, “No, I cannot do that, because I’m afraid that even though the king has died, not from my own hands, and the prophecy is therefore obviously false, perhaps it is only half false. And if I go back to Corinth I will end up in some strange way marrying my mother.”

The shepherd informs him that he needn’t worry about that because the queen really isn’t his mother; that this shepherd had been given Oedipus as a baby when he was tending flocks on the hillside. That another shepherd in the employ of the King of Thebes had brought him this baby, saying that the Queen of Thebes had ordered this baby killed, for the Delphic Oracle had prophesied that if she gave birth to a son, the son would end, up killing the father. And when she gave birth to a son, to keep this from happening, she gave the boy to the shepherd and told him to kill him. But the shepherd took pity on this boy and instead gave him to the other shepherd, who took him to Corinth and gave him to the king. The king had no children and decided to raise Oedipus as his own. And the name, incidently, came from the fact that the Queen had had the boy’s feet pierced and thongs put through his feet and his feet tied together so that he could not run, and Oedipus means “pierced foot.”

At this time, Oedipus has sent throughout the kingdom for anyone who might have any news of the death of the former king; and he tracks down relentlessly this one surviving member of the king’s train. And it turns out that this was the shepherd who had been given him as a boy, as a baby, initially. And it all comes to light that, indeed, he was the son of the King of Thebes, and it was he who killed the king. And in fact, had returned to marry his mother, and the prophecies had been fulfilled.

Oedipus cries out. Having discovered this horrible fact, the Queen rushes out and kills herself; and Oedipus blinds himself, tears out his eyes And he says:

My curse on him who from the cruel bond
That held my feet in that high pasture land;
Freed me and rescued me from murder there,
And saved my life.
Vain kindness then to have died,
Had spared this agony to me and mine;
Then had I ne’er been proved a patricide,
Ne’er born the shame of marriage bonds incestuous;
But now I am god-abandoned, son of the unholy,
Rival of him who gave me being.

The play ends with Oedipus being led, blinded, back into the palace to be kept there until Creon, acting as regent, could decide what to do with him.

Oedipus at Colonus was written much later in Sophocles’ life. It carries on the story of what happens to Oedipus as an old man, and from our point of view represents the more important part of the Trilogy. Oedipus was kept in the palace at Thebes until his eldest son became king, and then his eldest son banished him from the kingdom.

Blinded, he was led from town to town, and from village to village, by his two daughters, one in particular, Antigone. Until, finally, a very old man, he arrives at a sacred grove outside Athens, in a small suburb called Colonus. And through some inner knowing he realizes that this grove has been his destiny all his life; that this is where the Fates have led him.

The Oedipus that we meet in this play is quite different from the first Oedipus, a man very noble, very much a kind and wise king, but cursed by this fate. The Oedipus in this second play begins as a rather querulous old man, who has suffered a great deal, but who has learned through this suffering a great patience where life is concerned. And yet, the bulk of the play concerns the efforts that he has to make to fulfil the final prophecies made by the Oracle at Delphi, and to avoid being used as a pawn in a power struggle that is occurring at Thebes.

For the youngest son, his youngest son, has led a coup d’etat and ousted the older brother, who in turn goes to another city and marries the richest girl there and raises an army and returns to lay siege on Thebes in order to regain his throne. And the Oracle at Delphi says that whoever can claim the body of Oedipus, alive or dead, will win this battle. But the Oracle also says that should Oedipus die in a foreign land, then Thebes will be cursed and will fall; and whichever city does receive Oedipus will be blessed and will rise to new stature, to new heights. The King of Athens is Theseus, and more about that in a moment.

When Oedipus arrives at this grove, he is blind. He does not know it is a sacred grove, except that he feels a presence there that impels him into it. And he sits down, and a number of the town folk come up and tell him he has to leave; it is a grove in which no human being is supposed to be. And when they discover who he is then they really do want him to go, for they are afraid that the curse that has followed him throughout his life will descend on them. But Antigone pleads with them, and Oedipus speaks that he is now a messenger of the gods and not a curse, the bearer of a curse. And in the end Theseus comes to see him. And Theseus recognizes that Oedipus is now the bearer of some strange spiritual force; that though he is blind, he has developed a strange new sight and is himself now somewhat possessed by the spirit of the gods.

Both Creon from Thebes, and Polynices, the older brother from Argos arrive, each one trying to claim Oedipus. Creon goes so far as to take his daughter, Antigone, prisoner – both daughters, in fact. But Theseus rescues them. And Oedipus curses both of them, Creon and his oldest son, and sends them away. And for those who are interested, the third play in the Trilogy, Antigone, describes what happens to them. They all end up being killed outside the walls of Thebes. But Oedipus, then, is left in this sacred grove, and what happens to him is most interesting.

It is the end of the play, and Theseus has protected Oedipus; he has put the power of Athens at his disposal, and now Oedipus is going to pay back this debt. He intends, then, to proclaim a great blessing upon the city, and he says to Theseus:

I will instruct thee now in rites
That shall remain an ageless treasure
To thy countrymen.
I will presently, with no man guiding me,
Conduct thee to the spot where I must die.
This is thy secret not to be revealed
To any one of men,
Or where ’tis hid, or whereabout it lies;
‘Tis for thee to keep inviolate while thou livest,
And when thy days of ending,
Breathe it to the foremost man,
And he alone in turn unto the next successively.
So shalt thou ever hold Athens
Unravished by the dragon brood.

(‘Tis a reference to the soldiers of Thebes)

Cities are numberless, and anyone may likely insult Even those who dwell secure;
For the eye of heaven though late,
Yet surely sees, when casting off respect,
Men turn to crime.
Let that be far from thee;
A warning needless to a man so wise.
Now we go, for this leading of the god is urgent,
To the place nor loiter more;
This way, my children, follow me,
For I am now thy guide as ye were mine;
Nay, touch me not, but leave me of myself
To find the holy sepulchre
Wherein this form must rest beneath Athenian soil.

The two daughters and Theseus follow Oedipus, who though blind can now see, deep into the depths of this grove. And awhile later a Messenger comes back – a Messenger is a convenient device used in Greek plays to help the story-line along – and the Messenger says to the Chorus:

Athenian citizens, my briefest tale were to say singly, Oedipus is gone;
But to describe the scene enacted yonder
Craves no brief speech, nor was the action brief.
(Chorus:) Then he is gone? Poor man!

And the Messenger replies:

Know it once for all,
He hath left eternally the light of day.

And the Chorus says:

Poor soul! What, ended he with peace divine?
And the Messenger replies:
Aye, there is the main marvel;
How he moved from hence thou knowest,
For thou too were here,
And saw that of his friends, none guided him;
But he they loved was leader to them all.
Now when he came to the steep pavement
Rooted with adamant foundations deep in earth,
On one of the many paths he took his stand,
Near the stone basin.
There opposite the mass of laurean ore,
Turned from the Hollow-Pear-Tree and the Tomb of Marble,
He sat down and straight undid his travel-soiled attire;
Then called aloud on both his children,
And bade someone fetch pure water
From a running stream.

(And Oedipus undergoes a rite of cleansing.)

When he was satisfied and nothing now remained undone
Of all he bade them do,
The god of Darkness thundered;
And the maids stood horror-stricken on hearing;
Then together fell at their father’s knees and wept
And wailed loudly and long,
With beating of the breast.
He, when that sound of sorrow pierced his ear,
Caressed them in his arms and said,
‘My daughters, from this day forth
You have no more father.
All that was mine is ended,
And no longer shall ye continue
Your hard ministry of labour for my life,
And yet, though hard, not unendurable,
Since all the toil
Was rendered light through love.’
Such was the talk, mingled with sobs and crying,
As each clung fast to each;
But when they came to an end of weeping,
And these sounds were stilled;
First, all was silent,
Then a sudden voice hurried him onward,
Making each man’s hair bristle on end
With force of instant fear;
Now here, now there, not once
But often times a god called loudly:
‘Oedipus, Oedipus, why thus delay our going?
This long while we are staid for,
And thou tarriest. Come away.’
He, when he knew the summons of the god,
Gave word for royal Theseus to go near;
And when he came, said:
‘Friend forever kind, reach thy right hand,
I pray thee, to these my children;
Daughters yours to him, and give thy sacred word
That thou wilt never betray these willingly,
But still perform all that thou mayest
With true thought for their good.’

Echoes of another being who said, “John, behold your mother. Mother, behold your son.”

And Theseus, with great calmness like his noble self, promised on oath to keep this friendly bond. And when he had done so, Oedipus forthwith, stroking his children with his helpless hands, spake thus:

‘My daughters, you must steel your hearts To noble firmness, and
depart from hence, Nor ask to or hear forbidden things. Go at once.
Theseus alone must stay, Sole rightful witness of these mysteries.’
These accents were the last we all might hear;
Then following the two maids with checkless tears and groans,
We took our way;
But by and by, at a distance looking round,
We saw, not him, who was not there,
But Theseus all alone,
Holding his hand before his eyes
As if some apparition, light unendurable,
Had dazed his vision.
By what fate Oedipus perished,
Mortal man, save Theseus, can not say.
The lower part of earth perhaps,
Where comes no pain,
Opened kindly to receive him in,
Not bemourned nor with a tearful end of sickness
Was he taken from the earth;
But wonderously beyond recorded fate.

And at the end, Theseus says to the daughters who are still weeping:

‘Come, lament no more;
His destiny has found its perfect end.’

Oedipus is an initiate heroic figure. Theseus is the same, but there is a subtle difference between the two. In these two plays, for those who held the keys to the historic symbolism involved, a great cosmic drama was unfolded, concerning the nature and destiny of man. What other being, in a cosmic sense, could be said to have killed his father and married his mother?

The answer to that riddle, like the answer that Oedipus gave to the Sphinx, is man. The destiny of man has been, through mind, to slay the link he knew with his father source; and taking to himself certain creative powers, to blend with his mother, or nature, or the creative primal laws, from which he sought to create his world.

Oedipus represents most clearly that level of consciousness through which man has passed, that is the mind. And notice how Oedipus gained his power. It was through answering the riddle of the Sphinx. The Sphinx, long used as symbol of the world and its hidden nature; and the mind of man, the analytical mind, the probing mind, the mind that riddles the mysteries of nature and seeks the answers to those riddles, has been a stage through which man has passed. In so doing, man has, of necessity in some cases, of unwitting destiny in others, placed himself often outside the sphere of attunement to his source. The mind is like that. The mind that can seek to answer the riddles of the universe is a mind that will turn away from that which cannot be answered by its devices.

Early scientists were most religious men, but set forth the initial pattern that the ultimate questions and mysteries of life had no place in science, for science could deal only with that which could be open to demonstrable proof, or the absence of demonstrable proof. For the scientific method is not an approach towards truth, as much as it is an approach to determining what is not true, what is false under the facts of empirical investigation.

Thebes – though undoubtedly this would not have been present as a concept that long ago – but Thebes is very much the equivalent of what Chardin calls the noosphere, that realm that is the product of man’s mental consciousness, of man’s creative thought. Man has taken unto himself the powers of the gods, without knowing his godliness. And like the ancient Thebans, we too begin to suffer the consequences: a polluted Earth, a world in which the products of the mind have outstripped the products of the heart, or in which the heart has been used to create separation and not unity.

In short, man has suffered blindness, and like Oedipus, has moved out of his father’s house, into a long pilgrimage upon the Earth, in which, though he has been able to see in physical senses, he has remained blind to the reality of the world and the reality of himself.

But Oedipus is not a tragic figure. He is an heroic figure in that his destiny is perfect. He is caught up, not in death but in translation. In the end, though blind, it is he who sees, and leads the others. Antigone, Ismene, his two daughters who represent the products of the human mind – knowledge, invention – not evil of themselves, by any means, but able to lead – if man will let them lead him to his destiny, but unable to participate in that destiny themselves. Man’s computers, for example, can lead him into greater knowledge and awareness of how his own mind works, but as man gains that knowledge, and his mind becomes transcendent, his computers cannot share in that transcendency. They cannot enter the sacred grove of man’s destiny, though they may help him attain it.

Oedipus is man, blinded because he has expressed his creative powers, not in unity with the source but as a separate being, and in that sense, lying incestuously with the nature that gives him birth. But Oedipus represents the destiny of man transfigured into light, and through the darkness of blindness gaining a vision transcendent greater than those who have not had that vision. And yet one being, one mortal, was able to share the destiny of Oedipus, and witness what transpired to him.

And that was Theseus. This is very interesting because Theseus became King of Athens through a similar heroic action. Oedipus was hero because he solved a riddle. He was hero because of his mind, and he reached the heights and then fell, for he was – his mind had an integrity and nobility that would not allow itself to rest with anything less than the truth. And the compelling tragedy of Oedipus Rex is that even though the audience begins to know quite clearly what is happening and at every step along the way Oedipus is told by the wise men, by the queen, to stop looking, stop looking. If you keep investigating then horror will be upon you and Oedipus would say, “No matter what the price, I must know the truth. I will know who I am.”

But Theseus is a different figure. He too is an initiate. He is the one who sailed with the captive maidens and young men to Crete, at that time a powerful nation, which held the city-state of Athens under its thumb, and demanded tribute. The tribute being young virgin lives to be sacrificed to the Minotaur in the Labyrinth. And Theseus is the one who entered the Labyrinth, winding his thread behind him as he went, and faced the Minotaur and destroyed it; and then following the thread, led himself and those who had been chosen as the sacrificial victims back into the light.

This drama has also been used to portray the destiny of man, the nature of man, but a different nature than that of Oedipus. For here is the being who descends into the maze of human emotion, wherein the virgin powers of the soul are sacrificed. The maze of separateness, the maze of thought and feeling so intermixed that one cannot distinguish between, them until there is encountered the destroyer, the beast man, the man that has not yet risen above the animal level, the instinctual man, the reactive consciousness, the lower consciousness. And Theseus, guided protected by the thread to the realms of light, destroys this lower self, and emerges the initiate being. The lower self overcome, the beastly part of man destroyed, and the king born. Theseus returns to Athens, the power of Crete having been destroyed, and is made the king.

Two kings meet in this sacred grove. One an initiate who has moved through darkness and has learned light through darkness, the initiate of the mind; and the other, the initiate of the soul who, too, also entered the darkness of the labyrinth, but emerged triumphant. And because symbolically he had proved himself master of himself, a transfigured being through his own efforts, he was allowed to watch the transfiguration of Oedipus. Oedipus was not transfigured through his own efforts. His transfiguration came through the product of fate. It was not through his doing, in fact, he makes a great point of this in Oedipus at Colonus, telling everyone who will listen to him that it wasn’t his fault that he killed his father and married his mother, it was just that his father and mother must have done something pretty bad that he was sent as their punishment. And therefore, no one should blame him, because after all, the Fates had made him what he was. And yet, he ends up a transfigured being, through the suffering of his soul.

What does this have to do with the Aquarian Age? We now arrive at the point where mankind stands in the sacred grove. Man as a whole is moving as Oedipus moved, seemingly a victim of fate, moving toward a destiny of light, but moving in blindness. Man who has, in many ways, killed his consciousness of his father, or of his source, or of his divinity, and has made himself, in the words of the dramatist, the rival of his source, and by so doing has taken the creative powers to be his bride and to create as man wants to create, not necessarily as harmony and balance would have things created. But through this man is learning, as Oedipus learned.

But now at this time, man comes out of the realms of Thebes, the lower mind, to the realms of Athens, the higher mind and of the spirit. Athens, the centre of one of the greatest inspirational outpourings the world has known, where for a brief hundred years, a light shown in human culture that rivals anything the planet has seen. Athens, the home of the initiate consciousness, and in Athens the king is Theseus, the man who has faced himself in the labyrinth of his being, has not waited upon fate, but has gone in plunging into the darkness, unravelling the thread of his faith and courage behind him and of his attunement; and there, has faced what he is and has known that that is not what he is at all, and emerges with the thought-form destroyed, a past redeemed, and a crown upon his head. The initiate consciousness and the human consciousness, moving together for a destiny.

Where do we stand at this point? We have the choice as human beings of continuing along the path of Oedipus, maintaining our blindness, yet knowing that out of darkness will come light. But we have the choice of calling in upon ourselves the powers of our higher nature, entering the labyrinth of our being, and emerging therefrom, the Christed soul. Both gain self-knowledge, but gained in different ways and providing different powers.

In this sacred grove of Time, the gods are calling: “Man, man! We have tarried alone and await your coming.”

Theseus, the Christ, the illumined mind, is there to guide humanity to answer that call, with vision, that man does not walk in darkness, but possesses within himself that inner light which can show the way more clearly than anything else, than any physical sight, certainly, or sight of mind. That through mind, emotion and physical effort the new is not created, but another force is needed. A force that can be bestowed upon man, if man waits long enough, but which man can invoke for himself through his own courageous efforts.

The New Age is a point of time when new energies pour forth upon the Earth to increase and to heighten man’s awareness. But it is also an intimate and individual point of timeless realization when we see that whatever our past, whatever our fates, whatever our nature has been, none of these things are what we are. What we are cannot truly be described by mortal man, nor mortal mind; but what we are is that which transpires when light reaches down to light, and the individual is transfigured, taken into a different realm beyond the sight of man. So many prophecies now speak of this, of people being moved in the twinkling of an eye into a different realm. But that realm is within us, and our translation into it is a matter of consciousness and of attitude.

In future talks we shall explore this in greater detail; and we shall see how, by releasing the powers of Theseus, so to speak, we can bring the Oedipus-like nature of man to the point of its perfect destiny; and at that point know that we are the New Age, and it lives within us and awaits its birth.

I want to begin by reading for you a passage from the New English Bible, the New Testament, the Book of Revelation, and its Chapter 6, Verses 1 through 8. The vision that Saint John has been having has described the Beings that have appeared before him, bearing with them seven seals:

Then I watched as the Lamb broke the first of the seven seals; and I heard one of the four living creatures in a voice like thunder, “Come!” And there before my eyes was a white horse, and its rider held a bow. He was given a crown, and he rode forth, conquering and to conquer.

When the Lamb broke the second seal, I heard the creature say, “Come!” And out came another horse, all red. To its rider was given power to take peace from the earth and make men slaughter one another; and he was given a great sword.

When he broke the third seal, I heard the third creature say, “Come!” And there, as I looked, was a black horse; and its rider held in his hand a pair of scales. And I hear what sounded like a voice from the midst of the living creatures, which said, “A whole days wage for a quart of flour, a whole days wage for three quarts of barley-meal! But spare the olive and the wine.” 

When he broke the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth creature say, “Come!” And there as I looked, was another horse, sickly pale; and its rider’s name was Death, and Hades came close behind. To him was given power over a quarter of the earth, with the right to kill by sword and by famine, by pestilence and wild beasts.

In this passage John is describing what has come to be known as the “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse”: conquest, war, famine and death. Down through the centuries since this revelation was given, writers and artists have found the theme of “The Four Horsemen” a very tantalizing and provocative one. Many people feel that John’s Revelations deal with the age in which we are now moving, and as a consequence there is a certain fear that in our time the Four Horsemen will be unleashed. Of course, it goes without saying that in history these Four Horsemen have already rode forth upon the Earth. Certainly the second World War was an example of this. But tonight I want to talk about four other horsemen who, in their riding out upon the planes of human consciousness, are having the greatest effect upon our lives and being in this time.

I want to begin to describe the New Age vision through the imagery of these Four Horsemen: four qualities of consciousness which are affecting us now. Last week we talked about Oedipus as man who creates his world through his mind, but through that creation and the invoking of certain powers without full realization and understanding of those powers sows the seeds for destruction. And we also spoke of Theseus, the initiate king who represented the man who enters into the labyrinth of his own being, and there comes face to face with his lower nature and transmutes it, and thereby becomes the new king. We shall call upon those images, as well, in our discussion tonight.

What then are the Four Horsemen of Aquarius. The first Horsman we may call, “The Horseman of Illusion and of Unassimilated Works and Energy.” When this world was created, the planes, the realms of thought and feeling, were as pure as any unwritten slate may be. Through man’s growth he has projected into these realms, he has manipulated through his own feeling and mental natures the energies of these realms, and has created therein various qualities which we call, “thought-forms.”

A thought-form is a complex of energy which has been drawn together about a seed point, the seed point being an image of thought in which it takes on the quality of feeling which is associated with that thought. A thought-form is like a robot. It is created; it is artificial, and it can only do what it is programmed to do. And it will keep doing that thing until it runs out of energy, or is in some way dispersed. Man has created many of these thought-forms. They are not visible except to those who are clairvoyant. But yet they have been seen, can be seen, by highly sensitive people.

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are such thought-forms, thought-forms which are built up by large numbers of people; whole nations or races tend to take on definite archetypal qualities. They take on universal qualities. They are not specifically related to any one person but affect all the people who are within that particular race, or nation or group. Many thought-forms of this nature have been created in the past. In so doing, man has created something else. Teilhard de Chardin speaks of the creation of the noosphere which is, literally of the realm which is built up of everything that man has thought or felt – all of his inventions, all of his ideas, all of his books, all of his cities – everything that he has built, everything that does not evolve naturally from the biosphere, the natural world, but which evolves because of man’s efforts is contained within the noosphere.

In similar fashion, man has created the astral plane. The astral plane really has no existence. It has come into existence because of qualities of energy which man has released and projected from himself as being extensions of himself – in other words, illusions. For example: I look upon an event, and I see therein not what is actually occurring, but what I think is occurring, what I would like to occur, what my reactions to this event may be, and so forth. A well-known phenomenon amply demonstrated in psychology classes in which events are staged for the class, and then they are asked to describe what has taken place, and the class is unable to do so; that is, the descriptions in no way tally with the event itself.

Such projection from within an individual which does not reflect clearly the reality of a given situation nevertheless has existence, that projection has existence; and its existence, its particular energy form, cumulatively throughout the centuries within the massed thought of humanity, has come to form what we now call, the astral plane. One of the reasons why it is suggested that people who are on the initiate path do not deal with the astral plane is because, in point of fact, it doesn’t exist. And in order to deal with it, you have to acknowledge its existence in such a way that you become, yourself, captive of it.

The great Initiates do deal with this plane, but deal with it obliquely, and I can give you a mythological legend that reflects this. No man could look upon the gorgon without being turned to stone. And yet, Perseus who slew the gorgon did so by gazing upon a mirror in which this woman with the serpentine hair was reflected; and in true marksman’s style, he slashed his sword while gazing through this mirror, and lopped off her head.

The astral plane is very much that way. The being who confronts it directly is turned into the matter of that plane; the being who confronts it obliquely from a mental level, from a higher level, is able to deal with it. The astral plane itself is the plane of illusion. I am not now speaking of a plane which deals with emotional energy except in so far as emotion itself is the source of illusion. Emotion, the twin of intuition, is unfortunately the distorted twin. Intuition sees and knows clearly what is, but not in a separate way. It is the essence of empathy, the true source of compassion and emotion. Emotion sees not what is, but the reactions to what is, one’s own internal state, and projects it out.

The Horseman of Illusion, then, comprises the astral plane and all the thought-forms which dwell thereon. Another way of saying this is that present man is surrounded with an excess of baggage which has no relevancy whatsoever to anything that he is doing, or thinking, or attempting to do. It is purely the product of the past, and yet it is highly active, and continues to condition man in various ways. This plane, until such time as the human race itself finally meets the test of it and dispels it, will remain as one of the great testers of humanity. It provides the test of discrimination, the test between emotion and intuition.

An example of how this affects us at this time is the existence upon the astral plane of a number of very powerful thought-forms born out of an event held within the racial memory of the Aryan race, which is the progenitor of the source of the Western culture as we know it. A thought-form that can best be expressed by the simple phrase, “original sin” the Fall, a concept which has no meaning whatsoever to the root races, the oriental races, that have preceded our own. Part of the reason for this is that the Aryan race is the first race in evolutionary progression of man to come into full grips with the power of mind. Perhaps I should say here that what I mean by the Aryan race is not the blonde, blue-eyed superman that Hitler was speaking of, or the Germanic races we’re speaking of. The Aryan race is a generic term that refers to that group of people which migrated millennia ago from Asia, and spread throughout Africa and Europe. It includes in its sub-branches the Semites – the Jews, the Arabs; it includes the Celtics, the Celts, and so forth.

This is the first race that has dealt with the problem of mind; and in the great Vedic teachings, which are the first sacred writings of the Aryan race, and became the source for Hinduism, the mind is called, “the slayer of the real.” The mind, as we’ve been moving through it – not necessarily the mind in its totality, but the mind as we’ve been using it – pulls down, encases into form, spirit, and then chops it up into little pieces, hoping that by analyzing these little pieces it will come to understand the form; and by understanding the form, it will come to understand the spirit. The mind used in this way becomes the great discriminator, but at the same time it becomes the great judge; that is, it postulates the conditions under which it will discriminate, and this means that it – to use biblical analogy – must eat of “the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.”

The use of this mental energy did precipitate a form of fall for man, certainly western man; and interestingly enough, in its initial stages as the last remnants of the root race that preceded, the Atlantean race, attempted to capture this pattern of mind and to use it, it brought about the downfall of that race, the downfall of that culture and that continent. For mind, primitive mind, coupled with the incredible psychic powers of that race, opened the first doors upon the planet to the ingress of what has come to be called, the forces of evil.

Well, existing in the thought patterns of the world today, the astral realm, are the, still the, cumulative effects of that racial memory of the Fall, so to speak, racial memory of the destruction of Atlantis, racial memory of a certain shadow that pursues humanity. There is a book circulating in the Community called, “The Wizard of Earth Sea.” This book is highly significant in that it portrays in fantasy-form the story of a young boy who goes to a school of magicians and learns to be a wizard. He is actually one of the best wizards in this whole culture. He is a natural born wizard – so much so, that he can invoke powers that no other wizard can invoke; and in a fit of competition he does invoke a power through his native ability, but without wisdom, without training. He invokes a power from the dark realms which becomes his shadow and which seeks, then, to destroy him.

The essence of the book is how he has to eventually confront the shadow of his own creation because it pursues him throughout this realm. He cannot escape it, and he must confront it and in some way close the door from which it came. And in the great invocation that was given to the world by the Hierarchy a number of years ago, there is a line that says to seal the door where evil dwells.

So in the consciousness of man then, there exists this image of the shadow and of what man must go through to purge himself of this shadow. And much of the thought imagery that has become associated with this, with the concept of the Fall and with the introduction of sin into the world, is the kind of thought, guilty thought pattern, that is self-destructive. If I can only suffer enough, I will in some way purge this shadow from the land.

To me, this is the most powerful and the most menacing of the great ancient thought-forms that remain within the astral plane and are confronting man as he moves into the New Age. And what does this have to do with the New Age? Well, it means that we are now at a time in the development of our culture when we are on a higher level of the spiral to that reached by the Atlanteans’s race. We are ready to send forth into the world what will in future days become known as the Sixth Root Race, the race that masters intuition as our race, the Fifth, is seeking to master the mind. And we are at a point very similar to that reached by the Atlantean culture though utilizing different energies; what we now have in atomic power, they had in an incredible form of a psychic power far beyond anything that we know of today. Thank heavens! And as a consequence, this memory looms over the race – of forthcoming destruction. In some way, man is again going to teeter over the brink, almost like a lemming who desires to invoke fire and doom upon himself in order to purge himself of this shadow.

When I lived in California, it was an interesting experience, rising into the planes of higher consciousness and having to move through a belt that encompassed the whole State. And this belt, when passing through it, contained the most incredible images of the destruction of the State. They were right there in San Francisco, crumbling into the sea, and Los Angeles disappearing in a cloud of smoke, and so on. And once more these images were influencing consciousness, weighing on consciousness, creating fear; but more than fear, creating an impulse toward the creation of that very image. An image, a thought form, is a living being, after a manner of speaking. It will seek form; it will seek reality; it will seek externalization.

Rising above that barrier I found an entirely different set of images in which none of these things took place, but in which California, with minor earth changes here and there as part of the natural evolution of the planetary crust, becoming a centre, a powerful centre for the revelation of new light and new understanding of the divine will. Two images entirely opposed to each other in many respects.

So, the first Horseman that goes out is a very ancient being, the Horseman of illusion, the thought forms of the past which seek to make themselves real in our generation which, through every channel that human mind and emotion can provide, will seek to externalize themselves, and to in some way attempt to expiate, to cleanse what is considered to be an ancient sin, an ancient guilt, an ancient shadow.

The second Horseman is the Horseman of evolution, of progression. Now, this Horseman represents the natural energies of continuous growth following on from the impulses that we have already anchored. When we say we are moving into a New Age, the people who attune to the first Horseman perceive in consciousness a period of great destruction and cataclysmic change, a vast cleansing. In other words, the emphasis here is on cleansing, but cleansing with a vengeance, cleansing in the sense of crucifixion, cleansing in the sense of sins being washed away through blood.

And then – The chosen ones, the elite, those who in some way believe or in some way change themselves, whatever the particular metaphysical dogma of a particular group may be, will emerge into a New Age where, and I quote some things I have been told from leaders of groups: “All will wear robes, and we will know all things; there will be no sorrow, there will be no disease; there will be no necessity to work. We will simply think, and everything is there before us, and we will be as wise as the gods,” – the modern equivalent of an ancient fairy tale.

Those who follow the second Horseman see the New Age emerging in a different fashion, a fashion best expressed, or expressed well, by a recent book that has come out in America called Future Shock, by Alvin Toffler. In this book, this man, who is a – what’s called a futurist – is projecting and extrapolating from modern technological trends into what the future is going to hold. And obviously, we are definitely on the brink of a New Age. Not on the brink; we’ve actually toppled over!

With the development in nuclear technology; all the developments in the pure sciences, in genetics, in molecular biology; in the ability which is now coming ever closer to hand, through genetic surgery, to manipulate and determine the exact qualities of offspring; through computer science and the development of third-, fourth-, and fifth-generation computers which, each one of which, multiplies by several factors the capacity of the earlier generation, because the computers are designing themselves, you see; through enhanced communication; through space technology; through all of these things that science has brought – and science is the direct manifestation of the Fifth Root Race attempt to master mind and to use the energies of mind – a New Age is upon us. We have a technology. We have an energy. We have capabilities at our disposal to completely remake this world.

If the first Horseman has his way, this technology will destroy us; but the second Horseman is simply the logical progression of growth which is bringing to us constantly an acceleration of our knowledge of the physical universe, and abilities to manipulate that universe and to change it. There is no doubt but what this is creating a New Age. It is one of the prime moving factors behind the changes of consciousness, the pressures upon consciousness, now occurring. Man is stepping into a world altered by his science that is as unlike the world in which he has grown up as the Earth is unlike the Moon.

The third Horseman – I suppose I could call, “The Rider of the Purple Sage,” for his symbol is purple – he is the Horseman of Aquarius and represents, not the progressive energies of the old patterns – which are still good patterns, not saying that they are bad, but the patterns that were established over the
past few hundred years – but new energies, the energies of Aquarius, the energies of the Seventh Ray. Here we have impulses designed to bring people together in groups, small and large groups, and to enhance their ability to function together so that they work, not as individuals alone, but the group is able to function as a totally integrated and organic unit.

In order for this to happen, communication is required; and the communion of close communication is required; so the Seventh Ray is, par excellence, the ray of communication, for you cannot have ordered activity without communication. As a consequence, the impact of this energy upon human consciousness is to try and break down all barriers that prohibit communication, and to train individuals in establishing those bridges that enhance it. When this energy plays upon the energies of developing science it, of course, leads to the kind of developments that we have: enhanced transportation, air travel, rail travel, roads, ships; and enhanced communications technology, telephone, telegraph, satellite communication, television, microwave and eventually telepathy.

The impact of the Seventh Ray tends to break down forms which have stood by themselves so that the energy within those forms can learn how to blend with other energies and other forms into greater and more complex units. It also tends to work on an individual to try and break down individual tendencies toward isolation and separativeness. Now, this energy is symbolized by the zodiacal image of Aquarius, the outpouring of new life upon the Earth, vitalization upon the Earth; and it is a time controlled thing, it is a cyclic manifestation. The Seventh Ray is coming into prominence now. It began coming in about – oh, it’s hard to say, but roughly, five-hundred years ago. To small degrees, it won’t reach its peak for another thousand or so years. But it is definitely coming into prominence. And it will come into prominence and then will fade out.

This means that, just like in Jesus’ time when a Sixth Ray was coming in, we are now at a time when a new dispensation is upon us. So we have the concept of the new, that which has not been revealed hithertofore. So this is really where the whole idea of the New Age has come from, in a spiritual sense: the coming in of new energies, and the revelation of new wisdom, new teaching, new understanding, new insight, and so forth.

These three Horsemen – Illusion, Evolution and Aquarius – all have one thing in common: they ride the “steeds of time”; they are all in some way time-oriented; they are either the rotting phantoms of the past which yet exercise their fascination over modern consciousness, or they are the manifestation of what could be called “Father Time”, the chains of Cause and Effect, one thing leading inexorably to another. And they are the presence of a new being who is coming to the Earth for the first time, a being who is not a man or a woman but is symbolically a whole personification of new life, new energy and new vision. But all of these are related to time.

The fourth Horseman could be called the Horseman of Infinity, of Eternity, of the Christ. There’s no bearing on time whatsoever, and yet it is the true essence and meaning of the New Age. When man was created he was created to fulfil a divine plan. A more accurate Way of saying that, is to say: God exists, and within his being a dream exists; and man is an aspect of God, taking a certain kind of form to fulfil that dream. Man is like the Word; he is like the Christ. He was with the Father before time. There is no beginning to what man is; there is no end to what man is – and I speak now of man, not in his form but in his spirit, in his essence.

In that centre of man the New Age has always been, and ages yet to come, and ages that have already cast their treasures upon the Earth and have retired. Within man is this timeless quality, a quality of stillness, of silence, of beingness, which is infinite in its power. It is this divine centre that man is seeking to tap and to externalize. And the whole cosmic drama of humanity is simply the condensation into a time environment of the outgrowth of this divine manifestation.

What is a tree? Is a tree a seed? Is it the sapling? Is it the full grown plant? Is it the new seed? No. A tree is an idea that is living and expresses itself through many forms. We see these forms in a sequence that we call growth; and yet, the idea of tree does not grow. It only appears to grow. The tree has been there in its fullness all the time. Man is here now in his fullness. Throughout the ages and whatever kind of dispensation man has been given, there have been many individuals who have realized this. They have gone beyond the limitations of their culture and time, and have touched their divine centre and have entered into timelessness. And those of these beings who have chosen to remain behind, so to speak, to continue working with the evolution of Earth, we call: the Masters, the Initiates and the Adepts.

Let us not forget when we see passing before us the three Horsemen of Aquarius, who ride the “steeds of time”, that all of their work or all of their pressure is simply designed to enable us to realize our timelessness. The true New Age vision is not anything that can be related in terms of what is happening now that is different from what was happening a hundred years ago, a thousand years ago, or a thousand years in the future. If we see the New Age under those terms we will experience a certain kind of manifestation, but we may not touch the centre where our true freedom and our true power lies.

Oedipus, the mind of man, Aryan man, accomplished certain things, and the kingdom of Thebes prospered. The mind represented by Oedipus destroyed the Sphinx, the mystery that bred fear and superstition and death. The mind is still doing that in many ways. And yet, as we spoke of last time, Oedipus is best remembered for killing his father and marrying his mother, which is symbolically stating that you cut yourself off from the source, and you use your own personal power to blend with the creative forces that God has given to then create form. These forms may be highly advantageous; they may be very beautiful, but they are incomplete. They hold within them the seeds of blindness – and Oedipus did become blind. Yet through his blindness he eventually discovered light and was translated in the sacred grove at Colonus.

This is the drama of modern man. We are beginning to perceive as a Race that there really is something more we have to begin to deal with than the pure scientific method, the pure mental approach or the pure emotional approach. All of these are to some extent of the past, although they have a ways yet to go in the future before they reach their full peak. The development of man now reaches a point where he begins to realize certain blindnesses, and sets forth as Oedipus set forth, led by his daughters, the products of his creativity, to try and find the Truth, to try and find greater awareness, greater understanding. That whole thing involves the three Horsemen: the first Horseman which could be called the Fates, which will have their will as long as man surrenders himself to the power of time. The second Horseman is the journey, the natural outgrowth of man’s continuing experience; and the third Horseman is the bringing to man of yet another step in his evolution, that will show him a little bit more of the universe, and begin to unveil a little greater power than he has had before, a little greater insight.

But, it is still only a step. The Seventh Ray is just a step. It is not the wholeness. It is not the end. It is not the best of all possible Rays. It is nothing more than just what it is: the introduction of a certain kind of point of view which man must now cultivate, and a certain kind of directive action which man must now obey and follow through on and give embodiment to. Theseus who enters the labyrinth and discovers the centre of his being and slays therein the creations of his past, the Minotaur, goes directly to the fourth Horseman, the timeless state, the divine state, the state that is no more encapsulated within the New Age than it is encapsulated within any age. That being becomes the true Initiate who can then help Oedipus unto his end. It is Theseus who protects Oedipus and enables him to achieve his translation.

That which I wish to portray through these series of lectures is an understanding of the New Age in its time aspect; and there are things to be understood there; but much more importantly, an understanding of our potential as timeless beings, because man is going to enter a New Age whether he likes it or not. He cannot help it. The forces are there and moving, and man will just simply go along with it. And it will either be a pleasant ride or it will be a rocky one. But those people who can really grasp the vision, not of the New Age but of themselves, and of the centre that is within, and can begin to externalize that, have the power to truly direct and enlighten man’s transition into Aquarius, man’s movement through time, the timeless shepherd that guides the flocks through time.

All of us, then, feel this pressure, the pressure of the Four Horsemen of Aquarius: pressure of the past, pressure of modern society and its institutions and their development, pressure of the new energies; and the pressure of our soul, which demands that we take again the opportunity, the same opportunity that Jesus offered, that Buddha offered, that Muhammed offered, that Plotinus offered, that Pythagoras offered, that all the great Initiates have offered; that in this moment when things are in such ferment and such vitality, and such energy, to step out of time into timelessness, out of form into formlessness, out of one identity into the God-identity. That pressure of the soul, too, is upon us.

The Four Horsemen of Aquarius – if we deal with them creatively, then we shall close the stables for the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. If we miss the vision, then perhaps, the Four Horsemen of Aquarius will be followed by the other Four. It is really up to us. The great test is once again upon humanity. And we must be very careful of the insights, the concepts, the archetypes, the images we use to describe it; for if we are not careful, we will step into a new age of form but miss the opportunity of stepping into the freedom of timelessness. We will gain a new world but lose our souls until yet another opportunity comes, and the gates of infinity open wide to let that Horseman in our midst.

I wish to begin this evening with reading from the eighth psalm which should be quite familiar to all of you.

O Lord, our Lord
How excellent is thy name in all the Earth,
Who hast set to thy glory above the heavens.
When I consider thy heavens
The work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars
Which thou hast ordained
What is man that thou art mindful of him?
And the son of man that thou visitest him?
For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels
And hast crowned him with glory and honour.
Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands
And thou hast put all things under his feet
All sheep and oxen, yea, and the beasts of the field
The fowl of the air and the fish of the sea
And whatsoever passeth through the paths of the seas.
O Lord, our Lord
How excellent is thy name in all the Earth.

Last time we talked about the ‘Four Horsemen of Aquarius’, four qualities of life, of energy, of thought which bear down upon us, that these horsemen ride over the meadows and plains of the human heart and mind. And to know the course which they are going to take and are taking, we need to know something of the terrain over which they travel, the terrain that is man. So tonight our subject is Man.

“What is man,” the psalmist asks, “that thou art mindful of him? Thou hast made him a little lower than the angels and yet he is crowned with glory and with honour.” Man has his beginnings in nameless, timeless, spaceless wonder. The only way that we can approach the mystery that is man is in the same way as a child, curled up before a fire perhaps on a rainy cold night just like this one, listens to the words of the parent who is telling some marvellous tale, a tale of princes and princesses, of great soaring castles and magical lands, tales of wonder. And the child sits before the flames watching them sparkle and dance, and in the imagination of the child the images of the tale take form. Surely each of you at some time has experienced this sense of wonder, when you are transported beyond the confines of the concrete world, beyond the four walls that encompass you; and with a delightful feeling of warmth, a certain thrill of adventure, you allow your mind and your heart to travel.

It is in that spirit alone that we can approach the mystery of man and of his origins. For just as the fairy land is real to the child and yet quite different from its ordinary surroundings, so the realm of man’s true being, his homeland and his source, are real to us and yet quite different from the surroundings in which we presently perceive ourselves.

This reality plays an important part in our understanding of the New Age and of its externalization in our midst. For this age like any other is simply one stage upon a very long, in terms of time, processional of the unfoldment of the reality of man.

I have stated in these lectures that if one is to gaze upon a tree, where does one begin? Is it with the seed? Is it with the sapling? Is it with the full plant as it sends its branches out and grows? Where is the tree? The reality of the tree is present in all of these forms, and each of the forms represent simply another stage in the unfoldment of that reality. The same is true for man. The reality of man, approached only in wonder and a certain awe, is none-the-less unfolded through many stages and many forms of which we now approach yet another.

When this realm – physical, emotional, mental realm – was created vast energies were called into being and harnessed. Ancient Greek philosophers set forth the theory of the atom, that single particle which is indivisible, the smallest bit of matter. This concept has been adopted in modern physical analyses of our universe, and yet within the past fifty years, and certainly within the past twenty, the fields of nuclear research have demonstrated that we have yet to discover such a single ultimate particle. In fact what we are discovering are strange forms of energy that coincide with no known physical laws – qualities that are both waves and particles, both matter and energy at the same time; particles which can exist simultaneously in two different places; particles which can move from one point to another point without crossing the distance between. As nuclear science penetrates ever more deeply into the mysteries of what used to be called the atom, we are confronted with an incredible mandala-like concentration or convergence of force, of life, of energy. We can analyze it and analyze it. The particles can be bombarded and split and yet, we have not yet touched upon that centre point that is actually holding all of this together.

What is this ultimate point – this presence, quality, energy which in this most minute world has gathered together these forces and holds them in such a relationship that all the macrocosmic worlds with which we are familiar can come into existence?

Here’s a quality which is nameless and we cannot understand man unless we perceive that quality. A modern nuclear researcher is like a spinner of yarns of ancient times. He is a person who deals in fairy tales. I mean, after all, who ever heard of something like a particle that can exist in two places at the same time? Or, a something or other that is both energy and matter, simultaneously. It moves like a wave, like ripples upon a lake, and yet it moves like a ball that has been thrown through the air, and does so simultaneously. That is stuff of legend, of mystery, of wonder.

Consider the astronomer who, casting his nets of energy out into the universe, brings back to himself signatures of great radiating bodies, the Quasars, which also seem to obey no known laws; radiating bodies that are putting forth energy at an incomprehensible level, and which seem to be neither star nor planet nor anything that man has yet come across. Astronomers too, deal in fairy tales, in the stuff of wonder, and of magic.

Behind all this, surely is a presence which laughs at man who considers that the universe is essentially known, that he is dwelling within a room the confines of which may be very large and he may not have explored all of its hidden nooks and crannies, and yet for the most part he knows most of the interior decorating of that room.

The crisis of modern science, the discoveries of modern science, lie in the simple fact that we are revealing a universe that doesn’t conform to any known pattern of human thought and which may never conform to any known pattern of human thought; which if it obeys laws at all – and apparently it does – obeys laws that are beyond the comprehensibility of finite mind. So science is like the parent, spinning a tale before the child sitting in front of the fire. Whether we know it or not our world is opening out into wonder, yet that wonder has always been with us. It exists within each of us and is, as I have said, the reality of man.

Drawing our attention then from the brief look at the great yarn spinner of modern scientific research, we come back to our original question, our original proposition: that to understand man we must give ourselves again the quality of awe and wonder, to open out like a child opens out in imagination. And in your imagination we go back, as I mentioned, to the time when this realm was created and these vast forces held in the most intricate of relationships within atomic matter were drawn together.

Consider if you will what is actually involved in such a task, what is involved in binding these forces in such a way that the world as we know it can come into existence. Imagine if you will what must be at work within that invisible heart of the atom, working with laws which we cannot even begin to understand finitely, because they do not operate within finite dimensions. That which can exist simultaneously in several places at once is not operating within a finite dimension. That which can move from one spot to another with no passage through space or time is not operating in a finite dimension and yet that is the way the electron manifests itself.

What is at work there? What kind of intelligence? What kind of consciousness? What kind of understanding? In the immortal words of a great and mystic sage, “The mind boggles.” And yet what is at work there is the source from which we come, and the reality of it all is that marvel upon marvel it is our consciousness that is at work there. It is the seed potential of what is within us that is at work there.

When the creative forces were set into motion they were guided upon their way by a whole host of beings, on their smallest level fairy-like perhaps, but on their greatest level cosmic angelic beings for whom these laws both known and unknown are simply the rhythms of their own expression, the outworking of their breath. These beings, as we know them, are called angels, or devas. They are the builders. They are the intelligences that ensoul the energies which we find coming from the Quasars and which we find enfolding the smallest particles yet known to man which some scientist, obviously with a sense of humour, called the quark. Great and small, all this energy is alive and is the manifestation of some form of living being, intelligent, conscious, aware, yet manifesting that awareness, that consciousness, that intelligence in many different ways.

So the image I wish to place in your minds is that of a host of lives who have responded to a creative impulse emerging from creator, the source, and have acted upon that impulse. They have taken the basic note and have built infinite variations on its theme.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in his monumental works speaks of the processes of complexification of building greater combinations from very small and simple particles. Most of the life that we know on this planet is basically built up from three simple atomic structures: hydrogen, carbon and oxygen. And yet from those three simple atomic structures we gain the splendour and wonder of protoplasm and all that has been built from that simple yet amazingly complex substance.

So these beings move out and from a simple level, begin to act and to act and to build and to build, to take into themselves and to give forth again and to create many combinations which in turn can be used for further combinations, and the world as we know it came into being. The ancients spoke of this in very simple terms, when they referred to the four great elements, fire, water, earth, and ether or air, the four elements from which all material expression is built up, and all spiritual expression too for that matter, with the spiritual counterparts of these elements, and this great host of beings who work within the elements, the builders, who are called elementals, although we have come to use the term in slightly different fashion, a little more specified fashion.

In the midst of all this, in the presence of the host of Angels so to speak, the word ensouled itself as a living idea. This can best be visualized if we go back to the analogy of the plant and see the rhythm of this growing thing as it emerges from a seed, and from that seed it creates all manner of forms, specialized cells, in order to do specialized tasks that permit a complex organism to exist: cells to absorb moisture and nourishment from the earth; cells to absorb sunlight and energy from the sky, from the atmosphere; cells to absorb gas, cells to give off gas; cells to digest, cells to assimilate, cells to grow and so forth. And all of this fantastic complexity leads up essentially to one thing, a return to a very simple seed.

It is a statement that circulates among biologists and zoologists that all life as we know it, all animal and plant life as we know it, is simply a delivery system that allows the basic living matter of the germ plasm, the carrier of hereditary, of the genes, to propagate itself. And in a sense this is so. If we carry this analogy back into our greater dimension, then this idea that was created to ensoul the word, the seed, comes forward to be the seed for new creation, for a new God, for a new birth in future time and future space. And that seed is man: man as a living idea encompasses the heart and soul intent of the Creator who gave him form and carries that same ineffable, creative presence to a point where it can realize itself again, in increasing splendour, and power; man as a living idea encompasses far more than what we are at the moment. For we are a very simple stage along this processional.

And the universe, or at least the solar system, as we know it, will one day have to break open metaphorically, perhaps physically too, like a great seed pod before man reaches his fulfilment. And man, the living idea of man, known esoterically as the heavenly man, or the sum total of human lives, will move out from this solar system to create yet other worlds. Within this great unfoldment emerges man as we know him; two legs, two arms, a head and certain sensory pattern, certain system of organs, physiology and neurology, emerging from the animal kingdom and being – what?

Many people believe that the theory of evolution is incorrect where man is concerned, for they cannot reconcile the quality and nature of man with the concept that all of this has evolved from the animal kingdom. They point to the Bible and to other scriptures, but particularly to the Bible, to indicate that man was especially created by God. And as the psalmist said, to have dominion over the Earth. This is true, as we know him, the idea of man, is an idea that has taken incarnation into a body a long time ago, but a body that was prepared for him. When this occurred a link was established which had not existed previously, a link between three worlds, of matter, of form, physical, the emotional and the mental, and the realms of spirit or soul. The comparatively or relatively formless worlds, and that which linked the two, the quality of mind. The occult definition of man in whatever form he exists is that he is the being who links the highest heaven with the lowest planes of matter through the instrumentality of mind, energy of mind.

And yet that definition itself only expresses one stage of the living idea of mankind. We are beings who at one point co-existed in full splendour with that original host from which this world was created. We are in essence, in origin, devic beings, angelic beings; and yet like any seed, the quality of a seed, the quality of the germ plasm of any organism is that it contains the whole, the wholeness of that organism. It doesn’t contain just enough of the organism to make leaves, or just enough to make bark, or just enough to make flowers, it contains the entire genetic pattern of that species, so that it can reproduce itself as a full-fledge member of that species.

Man must be considered in terms of consciousness, whereas many of the angelic builders are specialized beings manifesting a particular skill or work within the divine body. Man is a whole being, a composite being capable of manifesting the wholeness of the divine pattern. What I wish to communicate to you, therefore, is that within you and within our collective wholeness is in microcosmic form wholeness of the Divine, of the Creator. To this extent, though at the moment we cannot function with the same power, the same love, the same attunement that many of the angelic forces are working with, we nevertheless contain within ourselves all that they are and more. In her class today Divina made the statement that to her the Devic consciousness summed up the New Age, was what we’re moving into. That is always what we are moving into, it is always what we are unfolding. It is our divine heritage, our angelic heritage that is being unfolded from us.

It is that consciousness, that life, which at the beginning of time as we know it, had the capacity, the ability, the absolutely indescribable and awesome awareness to harness all of those forces of which we were speaking earlier, to make them work as they work, to make a universe such as we know possible. Unless we can capture the vision of this wonder within us, we will be hampered in our ability to unfold the next stage of human expression. It is important that we move, not only with a vision of the next step, but with a vision of what we are in our wholeness, in our source, in our centre.

What is it that is actually making that next step and why is that next step being made? It is written that a little child shall lead them. In the context in which this is stated it is used to refer to a quality of consciousness which can perceive into the reality behind the apparent world, a quality of faith, and trust, and innocence and openness, and so forth. But I want to interpret that in just a little different way. It is the seed that uplifts the plant, that carries the plant to its fulfilment. It is that which moves and grows and progresses that carries the whole to its fulfilment. Here in this community are many buildings and it is located upon the soil of Scotland, yet through these buildings and upon this soil are moving beings, yourselves and myself, who are constantly changing, growing, living. We are not a static like these buildings are. We are not apparently immobile like the soil is. If we took all the people away from these buildings, off this soil, then where would this community be? The glory, the potential, the meaning of Findhorn is in its people, not its land, not its buildings. It is in the life that moves through these things. And yet these buildings, this land, takes on a special meaning, a special power, a certain significance, a certain holiness and wholesomeness because we are here, and we are using it to manifest a living principle; and through the release of that principle into our environment the many lives, the intelligence, the awareness, the consciousness that is at present locked within concrete and stone and wood and plastic, and fabric itself comes alive, itself unfolds, like in the old fairy tales where the magician makes the chairs dance and the dishes wash themselves, and various inanimate objects become quite animate. We are that magician. We call forth the life that is within apparently dead matter.

Man’s position in the scheme of earthly evolution is that by being a bridge between matter and spirit, he provides the means for the life force to cross and to link the two and return to its source. Man upon the inbreath has moved into matter, upon the outbreath provides the means for matter to return to spirit. This is not just metaphorical knowledge. I’m not spinning a tale. It is destined to come that as man himself transforms his being into its next stage, which could be called super-man, soul-man, man functioning not as a personality but as soul incarnate, so he then possesses the capacity, and will manifest that capacity, to change the very force acting within the heart of atomic matter to enable it to release greater and greater revelations of its inherent life and energy and light, until such time as all this world is spiritualized.

But for man to do this he must learn to be a good bridge. He must learn how to establish that contact, that centredness, that attunement with the whole, with his future, with his destiny. The seed must not lose contact with the vision of the reality that is behind it, otherwise it becomes just a seed. And the potency of a seed lies not in its seediness but in its wholeness, the fact that the living image of the whole plant lives within it, and acts within it.

Therefore man is asked to learn through physical form where he has the fullest contact with the results of creative expression, right here in the midst of a world, of an arena where creative law has its most tangible outworking, where cause and effect grinds on in its inexorable fashion, where everything is expanded in such a way that you can standing outside of it look at it and see the law in action and feel its impact upon your being. Here man must learn what it means to be a creator and the laws of his creativity which are the laws of his own being. The whole story of man’s growth is the story of his learning of these laws, and the various epochs that have marked man’s history are characterized by the way man has defined himself in relationship to these laws, in relationship to God. Has man seen himself as a child of nature? Has man seen himself as a child of God? Has man seen himself a servant of God? Has man seen himself as the lord of the world? However man has defined himself, has characterized the qualities of his own creativity that he has allowed to be released into his world, and has therefore, created the qualities of the ages through which he has moved.

Now, we say, a New Age dawns; which means simply that man is gaining a new awareness of what he is and can take yet another stage, another step, in the externalization of his seed potential. The New Age vision is at its heart, a restatement of the nature and beingness of man. In some ways it is definitely a restatement, it has all been said before. In other ways it is new revelation, because now man has the capacity to act upon the definition of his spirituality in ways that were not his before because of the incoming of new energies and because of the cumulative effect of evolution which has sensitized his vehicles and now brings him to the brink of being able to function in the realm of thought with greater potency than he has ever been able to do before.

How will man define himself? Can he re-define himself? Can human nature be changed? Well, it has been changed throughout history. Human nature has not remained a steady, constant thing, and it is about to change again. The qualities that will determine its change, the energies that make it possible are summed up in the concepts of the great religious and philosophical teachings of the past; love, wisdom, compassion, light, and are indicated by the qualities of the new energies that are now entering; energies which demand of man that he become aware of his true nature, which is not an individualized nature but a group nature, which is only another way of saying that the consciousness of the soul is universal. It is intimately aware of itself as an individual but that awareness embraces other points of individuality, so therefore group expression is important. And the communication that enhances group expression is important.

Man is to learn that he is part of a whole and only through that learning will he gain the dominion that God has promised; and also through that learning he will be able to unleash certain of the building forces which are his natural birthright. Man now is doing with his mind what once a long time ago he did with his psychic powers and which, in the future that is just now beginning but which will unfold through thousands of years, he will do with his soul. Man now manipulates matter. He taps the hidden forces of the atom, but yet he has always been able to do that through his soul, and now will begin to learn again how to do it, how to be once more a builder.

We will discuss this in much greater depth within our next two talks. Tonight my intent has been to focus our attention in on ourselves. The New Age, what we are talking about as the New Age, is – tends to be in human thought – largely a human experience. We are interpreting it in human terms: new society, new mankind, new consciousness and so on, and certainly this has its validity. But the energies that are coming in are affecting all the kingdoms of life. They’re having their impact in the plant kingdom, the animal kingdom, the mineral kingdom, the entire network is having its transformation.

But where is it all going to go? What is going to happen to it? How will it emerge into its fulfilment? Its splendour? It emerges through that being who in his fullness is man, more than what we are at the moment, and yet definitely what we are emerging into, and will become, and indeed are now in our true centre, our essence. Man is the focal point now, the test of the age is focused upon humanity. Humanity is the world initiate about to undergo, in fact now undergoing, the crisis of initiation. And all of this is placed upon man because he is the seed. Not that the other kingdoms do not contain the divine life in equal splendour, but because man is the only kingdom that has the capacity now to grow, to grow from within, to unfold from within, like a seed, and not to grow because of the impact of exterior forces. The plant waits upon the rain and the sun and the soil for its growth, but man has a centre within himself that is the source of his nourishment and he need wait not upon any external force. By unleashing that inner centre he will nourish the wholeness of his world in ways undreamed of.

This is why man, who has taken angelic powers and encapsulated them within a certain intensity of development so that something other than an angelic consciousness can be made manifest, is given dominion over the Earth, dominion he has yet to demonstrate. This is why man is crowned with the glory of his seedship, his sonship, and it is why God, who has created all of this, is yet mindful of man.

The full mystery of what we are I cannot begin to express. I only hope that it is indicated to you; and yet that mystery is important. The wonder is important.

So beside the fire hearths of your own imagination may each explore the great cosmic yarn, the tale of marvel and of splendour, and know that that tale is of you, and that the New Age, whatever form it takes, is simply the further unravelling of that majestic drama.

(Man, The Creature Of Definition)
Last week we were discussing man, and I want to summarize what I am seeking to communicate to you. Each of us is a seed. Man is a seed. He is a being that is in the process of becoming. He is a process. He is dynamic. He is unfolding. He is the future incarnated, just as a seed is the tangible evidence of the future.

Man in legend has descended from great realms of light and power; but man in reality contains those realms within himself as his inheritance and as the very life force which he is in the process of unfolding. If we think of ourselves as unchanging beings we are the summit of evolution. We are involved in attempting to work with human nature, but there can be no basic change in human nature, no fundamental alteration in the patterns that determine our behaviour. Then we are in any real sense dead.

And yet that is the consciousness that many people operate on as a basic premise for their life: that growth takes place during a certain period, roughly extending from birth to the age of twenty-five or so; and after that an individual has become fairly well set into his patterns and moulded by his society. He has become conditioned. You hear a lot about the impact of conditioning on a child between the first seven years. And like any good computer that’s been programmed and set on its way and the programmer has wandered off and gotten lost some place, there is nothing you can do other than unplug the machine, and death does that. The basic thought form under which so many people work and order their lives is one of death, of non-growth, of seeking form, of seeking a static, secure state.

Last week we discussed that man cannot be considered under those terms. We are going to discuss the human being. We can only approach that subject with a great sense of awe and wonder, with a sense that the human being knows no end. He is not a form – he is a process, he is a dynamic expression continually unfolding itself.

Again I will repeat: the tree is not the form, the tree is the seed, the sapling, the full grown plant and the seed that comes from it. Man is not the being that descended aeons ago into physical manifestation. He is not the animal form into which that spiritual life descended. He is not what we are now, nor is man what some people see as the super-human being, as exemplified by the Hierarchy. Man is all of these things and none of these things. Man is beyond the forms that temporarily encase him. Therefore we as representatives of man are beyond the forms that temporarily encase us. And that the true reality of our life is essentially one of limitlessness and of abundant potential, awaiting its tapping and its enfoldment. Chronological age, culture, nationality, past conditioning, really has nothing to do with it. There is no limitation upon what we can grow into except those that we create. Well, that was essentially our message of last week.

I want to carry this forward now with particular reference to the revolution, or the evolution, that we are calling the New Age. A great deal of research has been done in recent years to prove something that has been known in many ancient cultures and which has been part of our Christian heritage, summed up in the words: “As a man thinketh, so he is.” But the words of prophets don’t always carry the weight that one would like them to, and as a consequence we have had to prove this to ourselves mentally. And for those who care to investigate the annals of psychological and sociological research, the proof is there and forms the basis for a new kind of psychology which is becoming very popular in America, called self-image psychology.

Some of its earliest exponents were people behind the psycho-cybernetics movement, but it goes much deeper than simply re-programming oneself. It states that the way an individual defines himself determines how he will express his infinite beingness. At least that is my paraphrasing of what this states. To the extent that a person can respect himself, have a healthy esteem for himself, can in essence love himself, to that extent he can fulfil his divine potential. To the extent that he has a poor image of himself, he is burdened with unnecessary guilt – that is guilt that has no rational cause in real life, but guilts that are culturally induced through mass acceptance of certain thought-forms such as original sin. People who feel that because of actions that they have taken, or that their parents have taken, or that their culture has taken, that they are limited. A person with that image does not grow, cannot unfold the divine that is within and cannot move into a greater consciousness, because they don’t believe that they can. They’re not accepting it for themselves. They have a basic image of unworth, lack of value.

The greatest indication to me that we are truly entering a New Age lies in the fact that this basic thought pattern is being steadily challenged and destroyed, this thought pattern of limiting definitions of man. For example, it is a fairly wide-spread belief that man does not like to work, that man must be in some way threatened if he is going to grow or to move – the philosophy of the carrot and the stick, rewards and punishment, that man’s basic instinct is to seek security, is to seek safety, is to seek the known so that he is not threatened by the unknown, and that most people would much rather have someone else tell them what to do than decide for themselves. Needless to say, having made those assumptions about human nature many people have gone to work to validate them and we have but to look upon society to see many examples that would indicate that that is a pretty fair description of the human race. And most western business practices are based on that very assumption. As a consequence there are time clocks to see that people come to work. There are punishments if they don’t, there are rewards if they do. There are all various kinds of motivations and methods that are generally designed to coerce consciousness.

However increasing research indicates what has often been stated in the past, and should have been self-evident, that as soon as certain rigid definitions as to what constitutes work and play, fun, joy, etc., are removed we find that man is not like that at all; man has a need to work, a desire to grow, an actual inherent need for self expression, for self-actualization; that if a person is in tune with a vision, that person will give of themselves far more, work far harder, far longer, than a person who is simply punching a time clock, because a person who has a time clock consciousness knows that he is doing in work what he doesn’t really want to do. What he really wants to do is be out playing some place, and as a consequence his consciousness is always anticipating the moment when the clock strikes five or four or whatever and he can go and do the things he really wants to do.

Our definition of man, in other words, has created a weird economic state in which we work for a living in order that we can have the opportunity to play, rather than acknowledging a basic principle that work is love in action and nothing else; and for a person who is expressing that love, work and joy, become one and the same. Work and play become identical, and so you don’t hasten away from your desk in order to go out and find pleasure, because you are finding it in the very achievement that you are creating.

The revolution in re-defining what constitutes a human being is very significant, especially to people like ourselves who are entering the New Age from a somewhat more esoteric background; that is we believe ourselves to be in tune with presences and forces of a transcendent nature, and we have before us the example of individuals called the Masters or the Mahatmas or the elder brothers, who represent for us what human evolution can achieve in terms of unity with the whole. And the various books of the occult and of the esoteric are filled with descriptions of what these Masters are like.

Well, this evening I would like to read to you a few things from a book that is one of the standard textbooks for what is called Third Force Psychology and see if you don’t see some similarities. This is a book that is a text in most American universities, in psychology departments, it’s called Motivation and Personality, second edition, by Abraham Maslow. Abraham Maslow, who is now dead, was a pioneer in a field of research which was predicted a number of years ago by the Master D.K. when he said that increasingly within the next fifty years – this was stated in 1920 or 1930, somewhere in that decade – science would begin to prove the existence of the soul and would so re-orient the human consciousness that man would realize that his true identity is the soul. It is not the personality, it is not the body, the mind, nor the emotions. And Maslow was very definitely a pioneer in this work. He is the one who developed the concept of the self-actualized individual and laid the foundation for all later research in what is called humanistic psychology.

The basic premise that he works under is that in all forms of psychological research in the past we have studied sick people, as a consequence our image of humanity is based on the abnormal, which we have called the normal. Statistically we have called it the normal. By developing a psychology of non-integrated, non-whole, crippled personality, we have projected onto man a definition of himself which is equally non-whole, non-integrated and crippled. As a consequence, how can man grow? He is continually trying to balance himself within forces that are essentially themselves out of balance, so you end up with well-balanced neurotics.

I want to read a few things here from his description of what a self-actualized person is: “A self-actualized person has the following characteristics: a more efficient perception of reality and a more comfortable relation with it.” This means very simply that this person sees it as it is. He is not projecting onto the world his own desires of what he would like the world to be like, but he is actually seeing it for what it is and he is seeing himself for what he is. And Maslow says: “The consequence is that they live more in the real world of nature than in the man-made mass of concepts, abstractions, expectations, beliefs and stereotypes that most people confuse with the world. They are therefore far more apt to perceive what is there, rather than their own wishes, hopes, fears, anxieties, their own theories and beliefs or those of their cultural group.”

These individuals, whom he calls the healthy types, are generally unthreatened and unfrightened by the unknown, being therein quite different from average men. They accept it, are comfortable with it and often are even more attracted by it than by the known. They not only tolerate the ambiguous and unstructured, they like it. Quite characteristic is Einstein’s statement; “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all art and all science.” Echoes of Krishnamurti’s teachings – freedom from the known, being able to accept and trust the creative processes of the divine life, which so far transcend the mind that the mind cannot project forward and say: “This is the way it’s going to happen. This is what I will do. This is the way my future will manifest.” If that mind is going to be in tune with God, because the potentialities inherent in the divine are far more than the human mind can grasp. We have this experience in terms of having things develop for us when we trust the life process that generally are far more unfolding and beneficial than anything we would have predetermined for ourselves.

Another characteristic of a self-actualized person, a person who is living from the centre of the self, is that they accept themselves. It seems very basic. They accept themselves for what they are. They are not self-satisfied people, but they are realistic people. They are not up-tight about their physical being, their physical appetites, their emotional mental natures. They see them for what they are. They accept them and then they move to change them where they feel change may be required in order to promote growth.

What they don’t do however is to change themselves to suit society. They change themselves to suit the processes of inner growth and unfoldment. Such people have a great spontaneity and a naturalness, Maslow has discovered, and he says: “This does not necessarily mean consistently unconventional behaviour. If we were to take an actual count of the number of times that the self-actualizing person behaved in an unconventional manner, the tally would not be high. His unconventionality is not superficial but essential or internal. It is his consciousness that is so unusually unconventional, spontaneous and natural, apparently recognizing that the world of people in which he lives could not understand or accept this, and since he has no wish to hurt them, or to fight with them over every triviality, he will go through ceremonies and rituals of convention with a good-humoured shrug and with the best possible grace. Thus I have seen a man accept an honor he laughed at and even despised in private, rather than make an issue of it and hurt the people who thought they were pleasing him. That this conventionality is a cloak that rests very lightly upon his shoulders, and as easily cast aside, can be seen from the fact that the self-actualizing person infrequently allows convention to hamper him or inhibit him from doing anything that he considers very important or basic. It is at such moments that his essential lack of conventionality appears, and not as with the average bohemian or authority rebel, who makes great issues of trivial things and will fight against some unimportant regulation as if it were a world issue.

Findings have led ultimately to the discovery of a most profound difference between self-actualizing people and others, namely that the motivational life of self actualizing people is not only quantitatively different but qualitatively different from that of ordinary people. It seems probable that we must construct a profoundly different psychology of motivation for self-actualizing people: that is, a meta-motivation or growth-motivation, rather than deficiency-motivation. Our subjects no longer strive in the ordinary sense, but rather they develop. They attempt to grow to perfection and to develop more and more fully in their own style. The motivation of ordinary men is a striving for the basic need gratifications that they lack, but self-actualizing people in fact lack none of these gratifications. They work, they try and they are ambitious, even though in an unusual sense for them motivation is just character growth, character expression and becoming more mature in their development.

Such people are strongly focussed on problems outside themselves. They are problem-centred rather than ego-centred; and these generally are not problems for themselves and they are not much concerned about themselves as contrasted with the ordinary introspectiveness that one finds in insecure people. These individuals customarily have some mission in life, some task to fulfil, some problem outside themselves which enlists much of their energies, which is not necessarily a task that they would prefer or choose. It may be a task that they feel is their responsibility, duty or obligation. They have a keen and strong sense of responsibility to the good of the whole.

With a few exceptions we can say that our subjects are ordinarily concerned with basic issues and eternal questions of the type that we have learned to call philosophical or ethical. Such people live customarily in the widest possible frame of reference. They seem never to get so close to the trees that they fail to see the forest. They work within a framework of values that are broad and not petty, universal and not local, and in terms of centuries rather than the moment. In other words these people are all, in one sense or another, philosophers however homely. The tasks that they set themselves are non-personal or selfish, generally, concerned rather with the good of mankind in general or the nation in general or the few individuals in the subject’s family. People have a strong need for privacy and they are quite detached in their consciousness.”

Maslow says: “In social relations with most people detachment creates certain troubles and problems. It is easily interpreted by the so-called normal people as coldness, snobbishness, lack of affection, unfriendliness or even hostility. By contrast the ordinary friendship relationship is more clinging, more demanding, more desirous of reassurance, compliment, support, warmth and exclusiveness. It is true that self actualizing people do not need others, in the ordinary sense, but since this being needed or being missed is the usual sign of friendship, it is evident that detachment will not easily be accepted by the average individual. They generally are independent of their given culture, which simply means that they have the capacity to act as their own agent if the need arises. They are not conditioned by the culture in which they have grown up, although they may accept it and work within it, yet should the need arise they can just as easily work beyond it.

Deficiency-motivated people must have other people available since most of them may need gratification. Love, safety, respect, prestige, belongingness can come only from other human beings. But growth-motivated people may actually be hampered by others. The determinants of satisfaction and of the good life are for them, now inner, individual and not social. They have become strong enough to be independent of the good opinion of other people or even of their affection. The honors, the status, the rewards, the popularity, the prestige and the love they can bestow have become less important than self-development and inner growth.

These people have the wonderful capacity to appreciate again and again, freshly and naively, the basic goods of life with awe, pleasure, wonder and even ecstasy, however stale these experiences may have become to others. Thus for such a person any sunset is as beautiful as the first one, any flower may be of breath-taking loveliness, even after he has seen a million flowers. He remains as convinced of his luck in marriage, thirty years after his marriage, and is as surprised by his wife’s beauty when she is sixty as he was forty years before. For such people even the casual work-a-day, moment to moment business of living can be thrilling, exciting, ecstatic. They are given to peak experiences which in the past have been called mystic experiences and they’re given to them because they don’t deny them, they accept them, they’re not frightened by them, they are not terrified by a sudden expansion of their being into an oceanic blending with all of life.

They have, for human beings in general, a deep feeling of identification, sympathy and affection in spite of the occasional anger, impatience or disgust described below. Because of this they have a genuine desire to help the human race. It is as if they were all members of a single family. One’s feelings towards his brothers would be on the whole affectionate, even if those brothers were foolish or weak or even if they were sometimes nasty. They would still be more easily forgiven then strangers. When it comes down to it, the self-actualizing person, in certain basic ways, is like an alien in a strange land. Very few really understand him, however much they may like him. He is often saddened, exasperated and even enraged by the shortcomings of the average person and, while they are to him ordinarily no more than a nuisance, they sometimes become bitter tragedy. However far apart he may be from them at times, he nevertheless feels a basic underlying kinship with these creatures whom he must regard with, if not condecension, at least the knowledge that he can do many things better than they can, that he can see things that they cannot see, that the truth that is so clear to him is, for most people, veiled and hidden. They have what Adler has called the older brotherly attitude. They generally have deeper and more profound inter-personal relationships – relations – than any other adult although not necessarily deeper than those of children.”

And he says that a child is a very good example of such a person -not all children, but most children. They are capable of more fusion, greater love, more perfect identification, more obliteration of the ego boundaries than other people would consider possible. However there are certain special characteristics to their relationship. It has been my observation that the other members of these relationships are likely to be closer to self-actualization than the average. These people exercise a high selectiveness and generally have very, very few friends. The exclusiveness of their devotion to a very few people can, and does, exist side by side with a wide spreading love, benevolence, affection and friendliness for all of mankind. These people tend to be kind or at least patient to almost everyone. In a very real sense they love or rather have compassion for all of humanity but this does not imply lack of discrimination. The fact is that they can and do speak realistically and harshly of those who deserve it. But the face to face relationships that they have with those people who would deserve such things, do not always show signs of realistically low evaluation.

One such subject explained this as follows: Most people after all do not amount to much but they could do. They make all sorts of foolish mistakes and wind up being miserable and not knowing how they got that way when their intentions were good. Those who are not nice are usually paying for it in deep unhappiness. They should be pitied rather than attacked. Perhaps the briefest possible description is to say that their hostile reactions to others are: one, deserved; or two, for the good of the person attacked or for someone else’s good, that is, to say their hostility is not based against a character but is to enhance or to clarify a situation.

They are democratic, in that they make no distinctions as to class or nationality or creed or economic level. I have found none of my subjects to be chronically unsure about the difference between right and wrong in his actual living. Whether or not they could verbalize the matter, they rarely showed in their day-to-day living the chaos, the confusion, the inconsistency or the conflict that are so common in the average person’s ethical dealings. This may be phrased in the following terms: These individuals are strongly ethical, they have definite moral standards, they do right and they do not do wrong. Needless to say their notions of right and wrong and of good and evil are often not the conventional ones. Their humour, and most all have a sense of humour, but their humour is not hostile, more philosophical in nature. They are all creative, though the creativity is not necessarily that of genius. It is that of being able to get the fullness out of life. They can have as many imperfections as any other person. The thing is they’re not hung-up by them, and move to change them when such imperfections are an obstacle to the externalization of their greatest potential. Such people are occasionally capable of an extraordinary and unexpected ruthlessness, which makes it possible for them to display a surgical coldness, when this is called for, beyond the power of the average man. The man who found that a long trusted acquaintance was dishonest cut himself off from this friendship sharply and abruptly and without any observable pain whatsoever. Some of these people recover so quickly from the death of people close to them as to appear heartless to others,” That action, incidentally, is listed under the topic heading of: The Imperfections of the Self-Actualizing People.

“Finally, at this point we may allow ourselves to generalize and underscore a very important theoretical conclusion. It has been concluded that what has been considered in the past to be polarities or opposites or dichotomies are only so for less healthy people. In healthy people the dichotomies are resolved, the polarities disappear and many oppositions thought to be intrinsic are merged and coalesced with each other to form unity. These people are essentially holistic. They create unity within themselves. For example, the age old opposition between heart and head, reason and instinct, mentality and emotion, would seem to disappear in healthy people, and these two aspects become synergetic which simply means they contribute to each other, rather than antagonistic. The dichotomy between selfishness and unselfishness disappears altogether, because in principle every act is both selfish and unselfish. Our subjects are simultaneously very spiritual and very sensual. Duty can not be contrasted with pleasure, nor work with play, when duty is pleasure and work is play. And the person doing his duty and being virtuous is simultaneously seeking his pleasure and being happy. The higher and lower aspects of these people are not in opposition within themselves, they are in agreement and a thousand serious philosophical dilemmas are discovered to have no horns at all. If the war between sexes, for example, turns out to be no war at all for people who are mature, but only a sign of crippling and stunting of growth, then who, then, wants to choose sides.”

Maslow concludes: “Healthy people are so different from average ones not only in degree but in kind, that they generate two very different kinds of psychology. It becomes more and more clear that the study of crippled, stunted, immature and unhealthy specimens can yield only a crippled psychology and a crippled philosophy. The study of self-actualizing people must be on the basis for a more universal science of psychology.

Most of what has been described by Maslow is the same description that is given to a Master, with certain variations. It is also the description of what a human being truly is. This is incredibly important because it represents a break from the definitions of the past, at least the western definitions of the past, and in many cases some of the eastern ones too; an admission that what is walking around inside this fleshy skin on two legs is a good deal more than most people have ever given it credit for being. That is a fundamental premise for entering into the New Age.

How does one become a self-actualized person? Some of the techniques that Maslow describes might as well have been listed from books on meditation or yoga or the spiritual life. One means is through living each moment with as much awareness as possible. One means is by pouring love through that awareness into everything you do. Is that sounding familiar? One way that he gave to a group of psychologists, psychologist trainees, is to have the courage to face the unknown, the courage to be one’s self, courage to grow, to go within and determine what you really want to do and not what other people tell you you should do and then do it, work at it, work hard at it, discipline yourself and get into the rhythm that comes from such accomplishments and unfoldment.

But most importantly, the distinction between this kind of person and the other kind of person is brought out in the words that were used: One who is deficiency motivated and one who is growth-motivated. Here we say: one who acts out of lack and one who acts out of a sense of abundance. It is the basic difference between the old laws of manifestation and the new laws of manifestation. Do we perceive lack which we attempt to fill? Or do we perceive abundance which we seek to make manifest and to generate?

The deficiency person is just that. He is aware that he is deficient and sees his environment simply as a storehouse where through hook or by crook he can make up his deficiency. A growth-motivated person sees that all is within him, the environment is the arena, the helpmate, the midwife, the womb, the Beloved, that can help all of that to unfold in progressive measure.

Just a little change like that, a little realization, a little redefinition of what man is: that man is not a being who hates to work, who is filled with these lacks, who is condemned to a certain sinful position relative to the whole, but man is the seed presence of the infinite; that what is within us, what lives within us, is something that can only be approached in great love and awe and wonder, no matter what we do with it, no matter what mistakes we have made. If we’ve made them we can learn from them, and use them as stepping stones to further realization.

Maslow is very careful to point out that the self-actualizing person can at times be every bit as pigheaded and stupid as the ordinary Joe, and make errors of judgement. The thing is that he learns from that, grows from it and is not burdened by unnecessary guilt. They do have guilts but their guilts come from failures to enable themselves to grow. For example, if you know you have a talent and you know you could be expressing it, but you are too lazy to do it, that gives you guilt. Within the context of the New Age vision this image of mankind is what needs to be communicated, and it is communicated by example as well as through words. In fact, primarily through example.

The whole movement of humanistic psychology grew from the fact that Maslow as a student found himself in the presence of some very remarkable people and he suddenly realized that for all their uniqueness there were certain definite things they had in common, and he wondered if there were other such super-healthy people about. This started him on this research which engaged him throughout most of his life. He is describing not an aim, not a goal, like some people read esoteric books that describe the Masters and they feel, “well, that’s a nice goal, it’s nice to think that maybe those beings exist.” He is describing real people, everyday people he has met, he has worked with, people from housewives, with no chance to go beyond not even a high school education, to people with a long string of degrees after their names, who are leaders in various fields. He is describing a reality, just as Findhorn is manifesting a reality. The reality of the action and presence of God in human life.

The humanistic psychology movement in its highest form – it has its lunatic fringe but in the form that is being expressed by Maslow -is incredibly close, in fact it is nothing more than a restatement of the same things that the New Age movement is seeking to convey to people. But how much of the New Age movement is based on deficiency-motivation? How much of the New Age is being viewed as simply that which we lack, and that which by hook or crook we better get? – higher consciousness, the presence of more evolved beings, light, love, and all the rest of it.

What Maslow is saying is that those who are the true prototypes of the new humanity are those who do not see this lack in themselves, but know that in our terminology they are the New Age, and they’d better get up and start actualizing it, expressing it, bringing it out, growing, externalizing it, being it.

The great scientific revolutions of the past era, past few decades, are motivating man into a new society, but no revolution or evolution is quite as significant as this one which is taking place – the redefinition of the true nature of man. For centuries we have worked and struggled under a short-sighted view of what we are. We have set our sights at too low a level in defining the nature of man. Because man is as he thinks, we have fulfilled all too ably that inadequate definition, we have made it come to pass. Now with many opportunities about us we can make a new definition come to pass in our own lives and in the lives of the communities that we create and in our world. A new humanity from which can spring a new heaven and a new Earth.

Over the past eight lectures we’ve been discussing some of the overall concepts underlying the New Age, its historical antecedents in the work of Buddha and the Christ, some of the characteristics of consciousness which we are experiencing or about to experience, as evidenced by the qualities of energy which we call the Seventh Ray.

Tonight I want to talk about the way in which human consciousness, at least some elements of it, are attempting to bring about the externalization of the New Age civilization. The history of mankind may very well be expressed as the history of ideas. And when an idea catches fire, it’s like a diamond; many people see different facets of it and respond to the different facets. And quite often each individual or group that has perceived a facet may feel that what it has grasped of the truth is all of the truth, or at least the most fundamental or the most important part of it. If the diamond is not seen in its totality, then fragmentation can occur – a situation not unlike the splintering which happened to the Protestant movement during the late Middle Ages.

Each of us represents a different consciousness, a different quality of the Divine brought into manifestation. And as we come together in our groups, drawn together because of affinity, then our groups likewise represent different aspects. And it is important that this is so, for the New Age is not a product that can be created the way someone would turn out an automobile, or a painting. It is the sum total of the creative expression of many, many lives, not only human lives but angelic, superhuman, subhuman, many levels of consciousness all responding to a divine idea and unfolding to embrace that idea.

The idea of the New Age, as I have sought to suggest, is not a new one. Many of its characteristics have been discussed in the religions that have preceded our time. And in these religions, particularly in the Judeo-Christian heritage, we find prophecies relating to the end of the age. It is the fact that various individuals, catching the reflection of the divine idea as it moves down into human consciousness and begins to agitate our civilization, begins to break-up old forms, creating confusion, creating discontent, creating turmoil, look out upon the civilization responding to these impacts and say, “These are the latter days.” In fact, they’ve been saying, “These are the latter days,” for a little over a hundred years. This is very interesting because the force which is one of the initiators of the New Age civilization did indeed have its entry point into human consciousness a little over a hundred-years ago, approximately in the 1820’s.

It is interesting to look and see what has happened in that time. We’ve had the rise of the industrial civilization stimulated as never before. We’ve had the rise of a number of religious movements which claim to be revelations for the latter days. In America, there is the Church of Latter Day Saints of Jesus Christ, commonly known as the Mormon church, which is based on the revelations received by their prophet, Joseph Smith, in the 1820’s. Arising out of the East was the prophet, the Baab, the Gate, and his disciple who later became the prophet, Baha’u’llah, the founder of the Baha’i faith. The Baha’is claim to be the new universal religion, and one of their tenets, of course, is the universality of mankind, the universality of all faiths. As we’ve approached our century, however, everything has been greatly accelerated, and the existence of the energy of mind and of intellect is functioning on our planet as never before. Something like eighty to ninety percent of all the scientists who have ever lived in the history of mankind are alive right now.

All of this ferment seems to fulfil the ancient prophecies. And certainly we can look upon our world today and see that the prophecies of the Christ when he said there will be wars and rumours of wars; there will be prophets and messiahs arising claiming to be the Christ, and so forth. All of these can be seen as definitely working-out in our society. And this, of course, lends great impact to the conviction of consciousness that we are now going to enter a New Age. And in the West, probably in the East as well, there has arisen within the past seventy to eighty years what can only be called a New Age movement. I’m not as familiar with it in Britain as I am in America. And in America it takes many odd forms.

But what I am most interested in tonight is not the rather exotic cults and groups and messiah types that emerge from the cauldron of human longing and human aspiration, but to investigate with you what is needed to truly externalize a New Age; and what, indeed, though under the name of the New Age movement, may be hindering such a manifestation. Tonight we’re going to consider the hinderances; on Monday night we will consider some of the non-hinderances.

The first great hinderance, the first great facet of the jewel, which can be a hinderance if misinterpreted, is prophecy. The second facet is the energy that we spoke of last time coming in under the Seventh Ray, which promotes the phenomenon of spiritual birth, the relationship between the soul and the personality; that relationship which, occultly speaking, is called the birth of the Christ. Mankind, throughout his history, at least throughout his recent history, the past two or three thousand years, has been very, very form-orientated. As he has become less sensitive psychically, with the closing down of man’s mass psychic awareness in the days of very ancient cultures, such as Atlantis, his attention has naturally gone much more to the concrete form of his world, and the outer manifestation has become increasingly important. There are very good reasons for this in terms of the evolution of consciousness, because man must learn how to deal with form before he can truly be a creator.

What it has done is to give to most human cultures a value system that is firmly rooted in a perspective that says form is important, substance or the inner aspect is less important. This kind of value system is seen very much in our present society. Also, within the Western world at least, within actually fairly recent years, man’s consciousness, groping with the mystery and limitation of form, has become somewhat enraptured by death. Man has always been rather death-conscious since the days when he lost his awareness that death was nothing more than just an easy stepping from one level to another.

Death, in an occult sense, doesn’t exist. The closest thing to it is the entrapment in form, or any static state, any state which cannot grow, cannot move. The closest thing to it would be a frozen river, but a frozen river which was determined even in the presence of heat to remain frozen. Consciousness, doggedly determined to imprison itself in form. The Spector of death only exists in human consciousness because it is only the human mind with its power of free choice, coupled with his attunement to the forces of matter, which can create a condition in which we demand form above growth, a static state above a dynamic one. So man can create the true death, and by creating it experience it.

When the Christ manifested himself, he manifested life abundant. And yet what we remember him best for, as I have often stated in these lectures, is his death. And we become quite fascinated with his ability to overcome that death. And yet through that very fascination we keep our attention riveted upon death itself. And the Christian message became quite subtly distorted in that it became a message of survival rather than a message of life. We see this, as well, in certain modern movements, such as spiritualism, which hold in their highest aspects a great potential for illumining human awareness, but in their usual manifestation is simply prostituted to a search for assurance that, “I as a personality will survive after death.”

Now understand what this means. The whole concept of personal survival is based on a desire to die in an esoteric sense, because it means I am placing my personal identity, which is a form, a static state, which I want to persist through eternity, above change, above growth. I want to be assured that when I leave this body I will persist, and I will persist in a way that is indestructible, and that nothing can then harm me; I am not then subject to the ravages of time and of circumstance, and I will not be forced to change. But as far as the soul is concerned, that is death; that is non-life. So when we are talking about Christ as our personal saviour, what we may really be saying is, Christ as our personal slayer. The concept – we are attempting to use a concept of life to turn it into a state of death.

In the New Age movement, many, many people have decided that Christianity has ceased to “fill the bill.” It no longer meets the needs of modern humanity. Something else must take its place, perhaps theosophy, perhaps esotericism under many schools, the arcane school, perhaps one of the Eastern disciplines, and so on. Often what happens is, Jesus is simply replaced by another master, and no real progress as far as basic, fundamental, conceptual change has occurred for the individual. But there is this tendency to feel in the New Age movement that Christianity no longer is a viable proposition; because it doesn’t have the right language; it doesn’t talk about things like reincarnation, the New Age, the Hierarchy, and so on.

Now, these are important concepts, and one day they will be the foundation stones of a greater human science than we now have. But they are not intrinsically important. They are not more important than an understanding of what lies behind them. Many people in the New Age movement use reincarnation simply as a substitute for the Christian doctrine of survival to indicate that some aspect of their being continues on unchanged. They speak about previous lives as if indeed they were the same being who is reincarnating; whereas esoterically that is not so. The doctrine of reincarnation is far more subtle than that, and the being which you are at this moment has never existed on this planet in the form in which it is. The soul may have re-embodied itself, but each re-embodiment is quite unique, and displays another facet of the eternal divine jewel of the being. And the laws linking one life to another are far more subtle and complex than has yet been determined by the rather parlour-room type of esotericism that is generally discussed.

Into all this consciousness of humanity which revolves around form, revolves around specific events, and specific people, and specific places, comes this fantastic enlivening energy, the idea of a New Age, of a new birth for humanity, of a transition. And also there comes as a result of this, various happenings in the phenomenal world which seem to reflect accurately prophecies of the past, and certainly encourage people to start making prophecies now. In fact, probably fifty-percent of the people in the New Age movement, who are leaders in the movement, are prophets. And the majority of their prophecies seem to me to revolve around the concepts of destruction.

There is a truth in this. When you have living water that has been iced up, at some point the ice has to shatter and dissolve for the living stream to move again. And there is moving – in fact, it’s been moving for over a hundred years – a force through our society which is a force of Divine Will, which as it impacts within human culture is highly destructive. It is destructive because the old forms, the forms in which man has encased his life, must be shattered so that new life can emerge. It’s no different than a snake shedding his skin or a lobster shedding his skin.

But the New Age movement postulates in many of its manifestations and understandings and teachings, the existence of a forthcoming event: an economic collapse; a war; the planet will tilt on its axis; something is going to happen which will release forces within the Earth which will transform the planet, and so on. Now undoubtedly there is a truth embodied in this. Part of the truth, however, is ancient memory rather than present reality. For when man existed in the rather instinctual state of primitive man, or more primitive man than he is now, such as in the Atlantean cultures, the only way in which man could undergo change once crystallization had set in was through planetary cataclysm. Cataclysm was the teaching method and the regenerative method which the guardians of the race employed. Simply because humanity was not possessed at that time of sufficient self-initiative to do anything on its own to change the conditions. Like a child who is caught into a bad habit, the parent may have to step in and do something to change the child’s environment to alter the habit pattern; because the child is not mature enough or understanding enough to do it for himself.

There is an interesting prophecy, or promise that was made, which is recorded in the Old Testament, when it speaks that after the flood, God promised that never again would mankind be wiped out by a flood, but that the next time he’d get it through fire. Well, you pay your money, and you take your pick. Most people who see me wearing sweaters on warm days figure that I would probably prefer to go by fire anyway. Now, this statement is being widely interpreted in the New Age movement circles as meaning that we’re wide open for a nuclear holocaust. The fire that is referred to obviously in the Old Testament is nuclear fire, fire descending out of heaven, and so on. But I suggest that that is too obvious an interpretation. If there is anything that I can say about the mind of God – and there are very, very few things I can say about it – it’s that, for my money, he tends to be rather subtle.

Fire, esoterically, is energy. And fire has always referred occultly to the energy of the mind, the energy of the soul. The fire descending out of heaven is quite literally the energy of the soul moving into the personality through the link which we’ve been talking about, the birth of the Christ, a fire that is not destructive but highly stimulating.

Well, it’s destructive too, as all of you who are undergoing personality changes can testify. It puts you through your paces, and demands the best of you; and at times on emotional and mental levels, even physical levels, you may feel as though you are burning up in one way or another. But this fire that is being applied to man is designed to stimulate his divine consciousness so that he himself initiates the changes which are required.

The three great divine centres of this planet are known as: one, Shamballa, which is not so much a place, although it is often spoken of as being a place, but it is really a state of consciousness which is omnipresent, a state of consciousness representing the will of God; two, the Hierarchy, which is the heart centre of the planet representing the love of God; and three, the mass of humanity, the collective human soul and consciousness which represents the mind of God.

Never before in the past has it been possible for these three centres to work in conjunction. Simply because man has not been developed to the point where humanity could work as a united whole, or at least sufficient numbers of people could work in unity, so that the latent creative energy within humanity could be harnessed for divine purposes. And for that reason when changes needed to be done, or initiated, they were initiated through other kingdoms, and man grew through responding to the effects – such as, initiating through the Devic kingdom certain extreme planetary states, earthquakes, floods, and so on.

Now man can begin to assume the mantle of his own divine creativity and forge the new world. And do not underestimate the transforming power of this, because the civilization we have created in the past is by no means a soul-oriented civilization. It is death-oriented. It is form-oriented. It is security oriented, security in the sense of clinging to form rather than clinging to spirit. And as the fire of the soul descends from higher consciousness and begins to work through the minds and hearts of people, it isn’t going to stand by and brook any nonsense. It is highly, highly destructive in the occult sense of that term, because it is highly, highly constructive and building; and it will reflect into the environment the qualities of the soul. And any aspect, any institution, any tradition, any culture that reflects only the aspects of the personality will be consumed.

But that’s an entirely different way of interpreting the prophecies than saying that something is going to occur, an event; and only those individuals who are, through meditation, through study, through learning, through knowing the occult jargon, through joining groups, and so on, have proved themselves card-carrying members of the New Age movement, are going to survive and move into the new. So many things that are published and put out, both from the inner planes, things that are being received, and things that are coming out from groups, and what not, stress, they seem to stress this factor of, “Let’s get with it, kids, because if you don’t, it is going to happen very soon, and you won’t make it!”

But that is nothing less than Christian survivalism dressed up in esoteric terms; because it is saying to people, “If you believe in the New Age, and if you join this group, or if you follow that master, or if you practice this technique, then you, you as a form, you as an identity, will survive.” But that’s nonsense. As soon as you open the door just a crack to the entry of your soul, you’ve signed your death warrant, because you as a personality will cease to exist. You will be consumed, and you will be transmuted, and you will be changed, and you will be transformed like a worm into a butterfly, into what you were designed to be, and into what you are at all times, anyway. You will become a living soul. You will become a Christed-being. And you will become yourself.

With this energy that is stimulating people’s contact with their soul-levels – it’s not a pure contact at first, or even for sometime after – because if I am suddenly able to make a transatlantic phone call to a dear friend of mine, and I talk with them, I still am here. I am in Findhorn; I’m surrounded with people I know, I’m surrounded with the environment I’m accustomed to. The fact of the phone call may make me very happy. It may give me news that I am pleased to have, but it doesn’t really alter anything, although it may. But it doesn’t have to. When I contact my soul, and it begins to make itself known, I can rise and say, “Oh jolly, happy day! What a splendid, beautiful experience!” And it can be exquisite.

But I’m still surrounded with thought patterns of my past, my conditioning, the thought patterns of other people in my environment, my culture, all of it. And I can then, once I get to thinking about it and intellectualizing the experience or emotionalizing the experience, go right into the whole glamour of the thing. The soul is Divine. When you touch it, you are touching God.

And the mind of man – we must understand that the mind is the link – the gap between the mind, the lower mind, as it relates to form and the soul, is an incredible gap. It’s like the gap between what the Christian thinks of as the individual and God. And when the mind first encounters that and experiences this onrush of Divinity, all kinds of things can begin to happen to that mind. If it is not careful it will begin thinking of itself as the Messiah, or as a leader, or as the one who has grasped the Truth, and has a mission now to tell the world.

Now, in a deep sense this is so. This is a valid thing because the Messiah is a universal consciousness; and at some point each of us has to take up the responsibility, the burden, if it is a burden, and the awareness of being a Christ unto our world. As long as we do it in perspective and with more than a good sense of humour about it, and realize that it is a group thing, we’re in the company of many Christed beings, or potentially Christed-beings. But at the same time this can be misunderstood, and out of it arises groups and cults and individual idiosyncracies; I have met people who have come to see me, or have sat in my office, or talked with me, and they are trembling, waiting for me to recognize that they are the Christ. They’ve come that I might be one of the first to realize and take advantage of their divine mission.

It is a tremendous amount of energy, of validity, operating here, but being utilized to create more form rather than dissolving the form, symbolically speaking, freeing the consciousness, so that it can become part of a group experience, a planetary experience, a cosmic experience. It can join the rhythm of life rather than setting itself apart from life and saying, “I am the One.”

This kind of thing, I feel, will balance out, however, as more and more people begin to experience. And as more people who are in the know begin to realize that the most important thing for any person to establish in their consciousness now, of what could be called the 3-D consciousness by which I mean: discipline, discrimination, and disillusionment. And if we haven’t become disillusioned yet, its high time we start – in the true sense, which means seeing things as they are, and not as we think they are. Not dealing with an illusionary world. Discernment and discrimination moves toward this. Discipline moves toward this, and these three qualities are essential for a person who would be a server of the Race at this time. And such servers are needed. We are all needed.

The birth of the Christ is occurring. The great event for which the past two-thousand years have largely been preparation, and about which prophecies have forewarned us, is happening all about us now, to me. Though I recognize that undoubtedly there will continue to be upheavals and changes in the natural order of things; and in point of fact, there is planned that at some date the continental structure of the Earth as we know it will undergo considerable change, but to the best of my understanding that’s another two or three thousand years in the future; when suddenly America and Asia as we know them will cease to exist and new continents will take their place.

But there will be these changes. The tragedy of the prophecies that are being proclaimed now is that again they are focussing consciousness where it has been focussed, on what’s happening in the world of form, and they are making people wait; and by waiting, they are not recognizing what is happening about them now – the reality of the New Age, the reality of the fire that is descending and transforming our world.

As time goes along, as magic and occultism and esotericism and astrology and all the various occult arts which are coming back into the fore, somewhat stimulated by the return of the Seventh Ray, the ray of ceremony and magic, among other things, more and more people will undoubtedly be jumping on the New Age bandwagon. This idea of the New Age is incredibly potent, particularly as increasing numbers of young and older people become disgusted with the civilization that we’ve created. But the potency and indeed the sacredness of this idea is not that it is suddenly saying, “Well, Big Daddy is now going to come and change things for us, and then we shall all be happy in a New Age.” Its potency is that it is a call to the highest within us to suddenly throw off the shackles of glamour, of illusion, of waiting, of inertia, of despondency, of not seeing ourselves as we are, of not defining man as he can be and should be, and begin to externalize the building qualities that we have. Begin to contribute through service, through awareness, through love, through wisdom, through right human relations, through more planetary consciousness, to the externalization of the new civilization.

Then the New Age movement will become what it is intended to be: the true vanguard of human evolution, the bridge building operation which will make it possible for man to move successfully from one level to another.

Another factor which is unfortunate about the prophetic word not properly understood, or properly utilized, is that it can be self-fulfilling and encourages people to think in terms of the death of the form rather than the life of the spirit. And it can also be utilized as a licence to change. Ian Flemming created James Bond, 007. It meant he had a licence to kill, a chap who could go around shooting anybody he wanted to, and he could get away with it. Ah, wish-fulfilment! And in some ways some of the teachings concerning the New Age and the new energies and the necessity to destroy old forms, can be interpreted in the same way: licence to destroy, licence to change without wisdom.

But we are asked to be bridge builders, creators, drawing the best of what man has created so that we can move on and create still better in the future. The concept of everything that evolution has created suddenly coming to a grinding stop and a New Order taking over is, in a fashion, true. Because evolution and form is only part of the story; there is such a thing as divine intervention, and we are experiencing it now. But it is intervention within the law and the downflow of the human spirit. By the same token, that kind of consciousness which sees an abrupt end and a new beginning encourages either a waiting attitude or a fatalistic attitude or an attitude of, “Well, none of it’s worth it anyway, so I am free to rebel, I’m free to knock down that institution, or destroy that tradition, or to get rid of that culture!”

One of the great hinderances that the forces of light and of building have to work with now is the well-intentioned but misguided people who are trying to usher the New Age in by knocking down everything in sight. Because as Sir Thomas More said in the play, “A Man of All Seasons ” when he was being counselled to go against the law, he said, “When in pursuing Satan you destroy all the laws, and you attempt to capture Satan; when you’ve destroyed all the laws, suddenly Satan turns on you; then where is your protection?” There is an incredibly thin line between what is a force of light and a force of darkness. Some levels the line doesn’t even exist at all; they are one and the same.

And the New Age movement if seen in destructive terms can, just as easily, become an instrument for the enslavement of man as a herald of his liberation. And people who see their task as being not one of building but of destroying, may be and in fact are serving a certain divine purpose, but at the same time they can lay themselves directly open to being utilized by forces which they think they are working against. The people who are willing to kill for peace, for example.

So, we are being blessed with the outpouring of an idea, an idea that has many facets. How we now grasp and utilize that idea will determine the ease or the difficulty of the transition that we are now making, and will make. There is no question but what we will enter the New Age. The question is, can we do it in a relatively shorter period of time with a great deal of ease, or are we going to put ourselves through the mill?

We are faced with the challenge that centuries of the past have conditioned us to see the world in certain ways. We identify ourselves with the body, with the personality, therefore we are interested in survival. We identify the values of our world with – again, with form. And so we are interested in either destroying the form if we don’t like it, or trying to save it if we do.

But the whole New Age idea is that we begin to see the reality behind form, and work with that reality, and let form adjust itself, which it will do. The black magician is the man that works directly with the forces of matter and form. The white magician is the one who works with the forces of the soul. The black magician invokes the elementals to do his will. The white magician works directly with the Devas and the Angelic kingdom. He works in co-operation with them; does not attempt to bend them to his will. And since he establishes a co-operative relationship, when a Deva moves toward an end that a human consciousness has established, all the elementals who are under that Deva’s control will move accordingly.

In this time, then, we come to the crisis of: How will we use the magic of the Seventh Ray? Will it be prostituted into what if not black is at least grey? Because we are using it to maintain the kind of consciousness that we’ve had for a number of centuries now, building a New Age on rotten foundations. Or will we turn and begin to learn the true meaning of magic, the white magic of the soul, the magic of that transforming fire which acts within the individual, first to change his and her life to make it more balanced, more wise, more disciplined, more discriminating, more loving, more open, more aware, and then to work in harmony and co-operation with the souls of others?

That is the idea that is moving. That is the New Age movement. Nothing that man creates is a New Age movement unless it is the soul of man from which it springs. That soul is now becoming very, very active. For the fire that was promised is descending upon us. And as this activity increases our potential, our magical potential also increases. And our potential for energizing this movement increases. And then we increasingly become faced with the choice of how we will use what we are being given.

Next time we will talk about the use of this energy in white magic, and what is needed within us now to be the Architects of Aquarius.

When we were together last time we were discussing some of the aspects of the New Age movement which are actually a reflection of the consciousness out of which we are emerging; and because of that, these aspects can prove to be a hindrance more than a help to the creation of the new culture.

A very, very brief summary would say that the consciousness that man has worked within for the past several thousand years has been very form-orientated. He has established his values for his life upon the basis that form is important, and particularly physical form. As a consequence death has attained a greater meaning for him than esoterically it should have; and as a consequence to that the concept of survival is very important to man, individual survival.

When this gets translated into New Age terms it means that a great deal of energy and focus of attention is given to ‘How can I survive prophesied changes or cataclysms and make it into the New Age?’ And I sought last time to illustrate how the two factors of prophecy misunderstood and interpreted from the standpoint of survivalism, and the factor of those individuals who are indeed beginning to awaken and to touch divinity, but are not terribly balanced within themselves and therefore begin to think of themselves as being ‘The One’; how this too can become a true barrier to the New Age because it isn’t just one individual saying “I am the Christ” it becomes several, each of whom attracts his or her own group and these groups then become separative in nature, each one feeling that their particular Messiah is the chosen way.

Tonight I want to talk about what is involved in properly dealing with prophecy and with the forthcoming first initiation, the birth of a spiritual consciousness, a Christ consciousness, and to emphasize that the New Age exists within us; and if it is going to exist in our world it will largely be because we have learned how to externalize the highest and the noblest that does live in our innermost self.

There are three major centres which affect evolution upon this planet, three centres of power or influence or energy. One of these is called Shamballa. And as I mentioned last time this is not a place, although it does have a rather spatial location in the Gobi desert, as much as it is a state of consciousness; that state, that awareness, that presence in which the will of God is known. The purposeful intent of the creator for this planet is known, and that intent is itself a living energy.

The second centre is what is called the Hierarchy or the Communion of Saints, or the White Brotherhood, or the Masters of Compassion and Wisdom. They have many names but they represent those beings both human and non-human, or devic, who have evolved out of humanity or out of the deva evolution, and have achieved a state of God consciousness, or illumination.

And the third great centre is the centre of Humanity. Always before in human history the will to change, and the energy that effects change, has emerged from the first two centres – will coming from Shamballa, love/wisdom energy coming from the Hierarchy. The mind or the intelligence aspect which humanity is destined to unfold and make manifest has not been so prevalently expressed. Quite literally man was not evolved enough to make the necessary changes all by himself to transform his world, but that condition is now changing. Man now is at a point where a significant number of the race can take onto themselves the burden, if burden it is, or the responsibility or the challenge or the joy of being the instrument of divine intelligence which blended with love, with wisdom and with creative will can transform the planet. No longer then does the burden lie upon the overlords of planetary evolution. It is at least partly shared, and perhaps to a great extent shared, by humanity.

And this is the most significant aspect of this New Age. Past ages, when transformation has occurred, or revelation has been given, have been inaugurated by an individual or by a very small group of individuals. This age is different. There may be individuals manifesting. There may be and probably will be another physical manifestation of an avatar, an illumined being, representing the head of the Hierarchy; but the significant manifestation of transforming energy is going to emerge from the corporate consciousness of humanity itself. That is both our destined glory and our opportunity. So we are being asked in this Age not only to be experiencers and observers of change but actual architects of change, those who can grasp the plan of the Master Builder and bring that plan down into externalization with the intelligence, with right use of free will, with wisdom, with love and with purposeful intent, or illumined will. Therefore we are asked to be Architects of Aquarius.

Now the ancient prophecies which tend to relate to our time, particularly prophecies dealing with destruction, emerge from an age and from a consciousness when humanity was not yet at a point where it could, all by itself, take on the burden of creative transformation. And it was primarily through divine intervention that transformation was brought about. Cataclysm was the method of change in those days, and it is only logical to realize that when the ancient consciousnesses sought to interpret the events as best they could perceive them within the mind of God, they interpreted them within the context of their understanding. We are now having to deal with their interpretation. And in some cases the way in which we deal with it will determine exactly how easily we can make the transition from one age to another. For prophecies have a definite way of being self-fulfilling, and if a greater number of people are convinced that the world will undergo certain kinds of changes in a certain specific fashion, then indeed the world will undergo those changes in that fashion.

The purpose of these lectures, this past series of lectures, has not been so much to tell you how we are going into the New Age as much as it is to give you the vision, some suggestions, as to what it is all about. In fact, I don’t think anyone could say how we are going to go into the New Age – at least no one person could. Because that is emerging now through the centre that we call humanity, in conjunction and cooperation with the love and will aspects of the divine.

However, there are some things that we can say. Last time I spoke about the three ‘D’s’ which every good disciple can learn, in fact must learn: discipline, discrimination and disillusionment. All I could think of was discipleship – oh, I am disillusioned! These three have been taught to man through the ages. Through Moses came the law of discipline, admittedly expressed in a negative fashion. It is a law expressed in terms of don’ts, but nonetheless Moses was the great avatar of the law, or one of the great avatar’s of the law. Through the Buddha we have discernment and discrimination, and he taught the way of balance and the noble eight-fold path. And through Christ, through the power of the love, wisdom and will aspects which he manifested, comes the potentiality for disillusionment, – by which I simply mean the ability to see clearly into the reality behind form. For example Christ supposedly demolished the great illusion of death by demonstrating his resurrection. And I say supposedly only because the majority of Christians still tend to believe that there is such a thing as death, and believe that Christ, and belief in Christ, is a way of surviving death. Whereas a person who really understands what Christ manifested realizes that there is only the transforming principle of the divine, that life itself is indeed eternal.

Our builders need to know the three ‘S’s’: silence, service, synthesis. These are three keys to the New Age consciousness. First silence. Silence means a good deal more than keeping one’s mouth shut. Silence is a state of consciousness, a state of inner rhythm. It is not necessarily a state of non-activity. A person may be very active but at the same time be very quiet and very silent.

Silence is the well-spring of creativity. It is the point of perspective. It is the centre where the will of God is known and from where man can draw the love and wisdom and intelligence required to externalize that will.

Silence is timelessness. It means in the press of daily events, the pressures of daily challenge, taking time to look and to listen and to see clearly and to hear clearly. Silence is essential to communication. In fact if you attempt to communicate to someone who is not silent, the chances are very little communication will take place. The person who is listening doesn’t just have to be quiet in terms of speech, but he needs to be quiet in terms of thought. For we’ve all had the experience of talking to someone who is not saying anything in return, but we can tell that their mind is a million miles away where he is carrying on some internal conversation with beings or being invisible.

So silence is where it all begins. And if we are to grasp, as architects, the plans, the blueprint that God is providing, then at some point we have to learn the discipline of silence, and the peace of silence. This may involve learning meditation. Different people meditate in different ways. That is why I have never taught a meditative technique. But it is important to seek out some kind of technique, or some kind of approach to timelessness, to silence. Something that you can feel comfortable with. It may be sitting quietly at a certain time of the day, each day, and establishing a rhythm. It may be through doing certain things that occupy your attention and allow you to focus on that activity and become silent in activity. Whatever rhythm seems right to you, it is still important that silence be understood and applied. All creative things emerge from silence.

And silence again is a presence. It is a state of Being. It is itself dynamic. It is not passivity necessarily. Silence also implies learning how to speak correctly. And we are told that one of the sciences of the New Age will be the science of sound and speech. This has always been an occult science, the use of sound, mantras, various kinds of chants, sacred words, to effect changes in the environment. That is one of the foundation stones of magic. The power of right speech which is one of the eight of the eight-fold path that Buddha taught, is directly akin to the power of creativity. In the beginning was the word, the word was with God, the word was God. God spoke and the things that he said took form. That is essentially true with us as well. We speak and what we say takes form, in one way or another. Even if that form is only in our attitude. Because, like it or not, we do listen to ourselves when we talk and since we are generally our own best listeners we also tend to believe whatever we say. So silence implies right use and understanding of speech, and when to talk and when not to talk, and what to say and when not to say it.

Service – Service is a keynote for the New Age. Service in the New Age is not an ideal. In the Piscean age men glamourized the concept of service and in fact sought to serve the ideal of service. Now this has been a very good thing, for out of this has come many great and philanthropic institutions. The Christian religion which holds forth the ideal of brotherly love and service has given to the world hospitals, schools, homes for the elderly and for the infirm and for orphans and so on. And men have joined societies, have joined brotherhoods, have joined institutions, dedicated to service because this was the thing to do.

But a great deal of service which is given is given because we feel it is right to serve, not necessarily because service is needed, nor even necessarily because we know exactly what is needed. It takes a great deal of true wisdom and discrimination to know exactly what kind of service is required in a situation or by a person.

And sometimes the best service that can be given is no service at all. Let that person get on with it. One of the tasks of a spiritual teacher, for example, may often be to promote into the life of a disciple a condition of great challenge which may bring suffering to the disciple, and the teacher then has to stand aside and watch that person suffer and not take steps to interfere. Now a teacher who understands, and who truly loves, can do this because after all suffering only happens to forms. It doesn’t happen to the soul. It doesn’t happen to the spirit. It doesn’t happen to the inner man. And the sooner the person wakes up to that fact, he stops suffering. It’s the great thing that Buddha taught and that Jesus demonstrated.

So service, though it is a keynote of the New Age, needs to be understood in terms of the New Age, in terms of using one’s mind, one’s intellect, warmed by the fires of the heart, filled with compassion, but not with sympathy, to determine how best to give right service. It requires discrimination. It requires true love. It requires often courage. But service nonetheless will become, and is becoming, the most important outflow of life to life. And we will see in the years ahead, as the New Age energies come increasingly into play, a greater and greater emphasis upon true service – not upon serving to meet one’s own need to serve, or one’s own glamorous ideal of what service should be, but because one recognizes the true need, and then opens oneself for the divine to flow through, to meet that need. Service thus proceeds from silence and from a state of quiescence, of balance, of perspective.

The third “S” is synthesis. And this too is a hallmark of the New Age. Synthesis is the reverse consciousness of analysis(Actually that isn’t quite the way I wanted to express that). Synthesis is the next higher manifestation of analysis. Man is an analytic being, or analytical being, speaking generally. His evolutionary path has been one to develop the qualities of emotion and mind in dealing with duality and in separation and diversity. But as we enter the Age of Aquarius, what we are asked to build demands unity, wholeness.

Now synthesis does not mean sameness. It does not mean conformity. It does mean the ability for disparate and separate elements to learn how to work harmoniously. A concept which is very much used now in a lot of social and political literature is the concept of synergy. And synergy simply means a state in which energy is produced through the union of many different elements. For example, a synergetic society is one in which all the elements of the society work together for the good of each element. A non-synergetic society is one in which each element of the society works for its own good at the expense of other elements; in essence, a competitive society.

An example of synergy at work would be to have four or five people with different ideas about how something should be done, coming together and instead of competing, their ideas competing, they blend their ideas and out of their synthesis together comes not a compromise, not a sacrifice on someone’s part, but a deeper, greater understanding which creates a new pattern in which no one loses. For that matter no one person wins. Everyone in a synergetic situation wins because everyone is benefited.

Synthesis is definitely seventh ray manifestation. It is built up out of communication. It creates ordered activity. It creates working together. It is the life blood of New Age group endeavour. In the past, groups have developed basically in two fashions: either around a strong centre point or individual and then what we really have is the master-group situation, or the leader-group situation; or the group has developed around an ideal in which you have the group as being all important and the individual units of the group are important only insofar as they are part of the group. This is the tyranny of the group and we see it expressed in certain manifestations of totalitarianism within our planet where the state is placed above the individual.

But the group consciousness in the New Age is one of synthesis and synergy. The group may collect around a crystal point, a seed point, an individual or a core group who embody the basic idea of the group, but that core group or individual is in essence no more important than any other individual in the group. The group consciousness is the united product of all of them, of each person blending his or her contribution to the whole.

But in order for this to be done each person has to unfold sufficiently to have something meaningful to contribute. So the synergic, or the synergetic group, the New Age group, is dependent upon the existence of self-fulfilling or self-actualizing, or enhanced, individuals. If one wishes to be an architect of Aquarius then he can look upon the world, must learn to stand in silence within himself, able to look upon what is happening and not react emotionally or mentally, with glamour, with illusion. He must be able to look upon the atrocities of Northern Ireland, or Viet Nam, or the Middle East. He must be able to look upon pollution, upon traffic jams, upon nine-to-five work shifts six days a week. He has to be able to look on all of it from a position of silence, because there is his strength. If the world makes him react, he is an extension of the world. He may be able to do good work up to a point, but his work is only in reaction to an apparent need, not in divine movement toward a true need; because the ills of the world that we see are only symptoms, they are not the cause.

So he must learn silence, non-reactivity, discrimination. Then he must see from that point where he can give service, and how it seems best to him to give it, and to open himself to a willingness that it is not he who shall give the service. It’s not “Oh boy, me now, who has a chance to fulfil this great role in the divine plan and give service.” But it is a divinity that is going to give the service. When a person really knows that he is divine, then that exercise is not important any more because then he knows that he is giving a service but he is selfless about it at the same time.

And you know when you’ve hit that point. There is no question about it. You know it because largely you’ve forgotten it and you are able to respond with love and with wisdom to what needs doing. And the individual must learn how to synthesize himself with others.

And here we come to the great meaning of the Seventh Ray as the ray of ceremonial magic. The White Magic is the magic of the soul and the soul is a manifestation of group awareness. For the soul is love without limit. It does not differentiate itself into the self and the not-self. On the level of the soul, the divine, there is only the one. No loss of individuality, but still just the one. The magic of the soul is the magic of making that oneness apparent in its affairs. Therefore, the magic of the New Age is the ceremony of right human relations, communication, communion, community. How can I best learn to relate to the people in my immediate environment? How can I build harmony, peace, understanding with them? Then perhaps I can learn how to build it on much greater levels. And this means awareness. How can I establish right relations with the tools with which I work, the environment in which I must work, with the things that I must use? For these things also have life, mineral life, plant life, animal life, and so on. How can I relate myself as a son of God to my world? That is the ceremonial challenge of consciousness in the New Age.

To be an architect of Aquarius means accepting one factor about the New Age and that is – it isn’t just happening; I am helping to make it happen. Yes, there are energies coming from the other great centres, the Hierarchy and from Shamballa, which will cause things to happen on the Earth. And we’re seeing a lot of these things happen, upheavals here and changes there, and so on. But that isn’t all by itself the New Age. The New Age now is a three-pronged effort, not a two-pronged effort. And if we simply wait for the other two builders to do their thing, then we will have missed the significance of what the New Age means. For it means the initiation of man out of a state of spiritual dependency into the state of spiritual maturity and Christhood, where he can, at long last, in significant numbers, begin to wear the mantle of responsibility to his world and to say, “I too am a creator on this planet and of this planet, and as a son of God I can fulfill my creative responsibility.”

So it is not enough to be aware of prophecy or to be aware of great energies moving from other dimensions as guided by the Hierarchy, or whatever. We must know what is happening to me as an individual. What am I experiencing emotionally, mentally? How can I transform it into that which is a blessing to my world? And let me not say, “Well, I don’t know how to do this,” because we’ve had plenty of training down the ages. Buddha taught us. Jesus taught us. It’s available in teachings of people now. It’s there if we choose to look for it but even more importantly, it’s there if we choose to act on it.

And that’s where the missing link has been, the lack of true intelligent, wise action. We have idealized the spiritual life and worshipped it. In the New Age we must utilize it as a tool and build with it. Spiritual life is our magical instrument by which we as divine magicians can transform our planet. This then is the New Age vision, and what man is capable of and what man will become because of his own self-initiated efforts in harmony with the aid that he is being given from other sources.

A New Age dawns upon the Earth. The call goes forth above the clamour and battle sounds of Armageddon, that now there will be peace on Earth and good will flowing between men, for now is the age of the birth of the Christ within the heart of humanity.

And as this call sounds, will we respond? The blueprint is unfolded upon the table of our hearts and of our minds. And all of our universe ask us this question: “Man, individually, collectively, will you respond and become an Architect of Aquarius?”

One of the keynotes of life at Findhorn is man working in direct harmony and communication with God. Many people when they come to this Centre find this a surprising if not, indeed, an unacceptable concept. Simply because their idea of God is such that they see themselves quite out of reach and out of contact, or out of the possibility of contact, with such a transcendental force. The hallmark of what we are calling the New Age is just that exactly, that man rediscover that conception and understanding of his own being, that he realizes his potentialities for direct and constant communion with God whom we are calling the Beloved.

Tonight, I want to discuss with you this process of attunement which is often called Revelation. For in its own way revelation is the corner-stone of all New Age activity. But to understand the New Age and to understand revelation, we want to go back in time somewhat and consider this concept from man’s earlier days.

Each of us in our life has at some point come in contact with a religion. We may not at this time in our lives be members of any particular church or followers of any particular creed. But yet it is a rare individual who has never at some point in his life had contact with one of the major religions, or perhaps a minor one. All the religions are based on one primary characteristic: a revealed word. At some point, some level of consciousness greater than the human, and generally speaking, a level that is regarded as the supreme level of life, the creator of all that is has spoken to man, has revealed himself to man. And out of that revelation has developed a religion. A religion – the word religion, itself, derives from a root that means, “to bind back,” or “to turn back.”

The concept of religion, initially, essentially, is that it represents that process by which an individual’s consciousness is returned to union with his source – something like the prodigal son returning to his father’s household – represents that process, whether through worship, through action, through meditation, whatever outer manifestation takes, that enables that soul or that consciousness to return or relink itself with its divine qualities. And the process by which it does this is generally based upon something that has been revealed by that source – a road map, something like a telegram from father telling the prodigal son the route back home. We take this for granted that at some point in man’s history God has spoken to him and has revealed himself so that man could have certain information, certain knowledge, certain awareness, that would assist him in fulfilling his purposes on Earth.

But all the revelations that we usually think about are revelations that have occurred in the past. This by no means invalidates them, but it does create a rather comfortable situation in which we can view these revelations from the safe distance of time. Many of us, I’m sure, like to think that if we lived in the time of Jesus, or if we are Buddhists, If we lived in the time of Buddha, or in the time of Mohammed, or whatever prophet appeals to us most, and had the opportunity of encountering that prophet or that revealer of the word, we would have accepted him. We would in some way have responded. But of course, that is looking at it with the virtue and value of hindsight. Because from our standpoint, we can recognize the value of what these individuals had to say, of what was revealed. If we didn’t recognize that value, then there would be no religion based on what they said; if we did not at some point recognize that God or some greater level of being revealed itself through these people.

But the chances are, if we are completely honest with ourselves, that we, or at least many people, confronted with the actual living presence of revelation would not recognize it at all. And indeed, if they did recognize it, might flee from it in some form of terror because of what revelation appears to demand from us. The truth of the New Age -that is, one of the concepts which the New Age seeks to demonstrate -is that we are faced with constant revelation each moment that we are alive, and that we – though we can escape from it, yet it is all around us. If we are a true devotee of a particular religion, then we accept without question the fact that through that religion and its prophet, or prophetess, or combinations thereof, God revealed himself.

Now what is revelation, anyway? In terms of its form it can come in many ways; and, historically, it has come in many ways. Some people have heard a word, a voice speaking to them out of the silence of a desert night. Some people have seen visions; some have had combinations of both. I must admit I have never heard of anyone that smelled a revelation, or tasted one, although it is true that in many of the recorded visions of history there was often scent that accompanied it. For example, the scent of roses is often communicated, especially by Christian mystics. So revelation is some means by which man is reached through his senses and made aware that he is in contact with something that is customarily or apparently beyond those senses.

Man conceives of himself as being in a position separate from the divine Source from which he has sprung – a little bit similar to a raindrop conceiving itself to be separate from the ocean from which it arose. And I suppose if we look at it spatially, the raindrop is indeed separate from the ocean until it goes through a long process and eventually, through various rivers, ends up back in the embrace of the sea. But in point of fact the raindrop contains within itself all that the ocean contains, it is the same essential quality which we call water. If the raindrop decides that even though it is water, it is still separate from the ocean, it may forget about its essential wetness and need to be reminded. It needs to have its water-like qualities revealed to it. Of course this happens as soon as it splashes itself against something.

It may be that revelation is that process by which a human consciousness suddenly comes to a point of contact with the reality that always surrounds it. Like the raindrop falling from the heights and splashing itself upon the ground, a human consciousness splashes itself against the reality of the divine world, and in that contact realizes that it has something in common with God. And even if it realizes that for only a fleeting second, in that second the gap of consciousness has been bridged. And man and his Beloved have become one. And whatever is manifested in that moment of oneness is revelation; it is the truth, the only truth, which is that God and man are one; that there is only one life, one being, one essence, and creation is that truth made manifest. Then, as the raindrop collects itself and runs off down drain pipes and gutters and on its way back to the ocean, it may once again forget that it is part of the ocean, as it seeks to return. But it will always have these contacts which will remind it until such time as it needs no more reminder.

Man has placed God at a distance from himself. He has done this in several ways: one, just by deliberately putting him there so that he is not much troubled by divine presences; and another is simply by seeing himself in such a pattern that he cannot recognize the light that shines within his own being. Jesus said, “Ye are Gods.” But man consistently has forgotten that fact, because he identifies himself completely with the body in which he resides, with the mind and with the emotions that he generates. The revelation represents that process by which man is reminded that he is part of a single life and, therefore, the inheritor of a magnificence and a creative power beyond anything that any human potentate or dictator can ever dream of.

I said that man likes to see his revelations in the past because it puts them at a comfortable distance; he can accept them or reject them more easily if they are simply something he can deal with with his mind. And if a revelation is only that which we read of in a book, no matter how holy the book is claimed to be, if a revelation is only that which we hear about from the words of some other individual, then it has no living reality for us, and we can in the privacy of our consciousness decide whether we will accept it or not. But when we are confronted with the living reality, when we ourselves come right up against the divine presence in our life, the mind is hard put to accept or reject. In fact, the mind ceases to function in the normal fashion, and it has nothing else that it can do but blend, again, if only for a fleeting second; but out of that blending will come a realization, will come an awareness or at least the beginnings of an awareness, that I am more than what my previous consciousness had accepted that I was.

So there is no telling what will create these revelations, and they often happen quite spontaneously. And for anyone who is library-minded and likes to do research on things of this nature, there is a marvelous book written a number of years ago and published at the turn of the century called, “Cosmic Consciousness,” a study in superconscious revelation, by a man named Bucke, which he documents a number of incidences throughout history, both ancient and modern; for people have suddenly experienced oneness, and often for no reason whatsoever, and then again, at other times, as the product of certain disciplines and techniques. The point I wish to make here is that man moving through his individual life forgets the greater life of which he is a part, and becomes so identified with his separated self that he forgets his whole self. That makes it very difficult for the whole self because there has been a chasm between it and its own creation. And revelation is that process, whatever form it takes, through which that chasm is bridged.

A revelation is a living contact. I must stress this because our tendency in many areas of life is to be second hand citizens. We learn from other people’s experiences; we are students of life rather than livers thereof. And Jesus said, “Be ye doers of the Word.” -not only hearers of the Word; and thereby express the key to receiving revelation in one’s own life. We tend to feel that revelation is the property of rather special people. Again, in Bucke’s book “Cosmic Consciousness,” there are a number of instances of extremely ordinary people suddenly finding themselves at one with the universe – which is why it’s called “Cosmic Consciousness,” for want of a better name.

But we often feel that the privilege of talking to God is something that is relegated to a few, and often the few who have to go through rather arcane and esoteric practices to be worthy of that privilege. But there is no flower that I know of that gets up out of its soil and begins sitting cross-legged and undergoing various yogi postures. And I have yet to find a tree wearing a hair shirt, or a bush that is starving itself. All of these different manifestations of life accept that they are part of life; that they are living and being, and therefore they are capable of revealing the divine presence in a most natural and creative fashion. In fact, any consciousness that can lose itself, lose its – well, its fixation upon itself and is able to – and here words are very misleading, but I will say – submerge itself into the wholeness, become part of the greater self, then is able to manifest the revelation or the reality, the unveiling of the divine presence most naturally.

Man has been blessed by those men and women who should rightly be honoured, who have given to him the Word of God in various forms and at various times in human history. Without that, man might have sunk completely into the oblivion of his form-consciousness. And at times, the revelation of the Word has had to be rather harsh and disciplinarian in order to counteract the – well, the rather psychotic fixation that man has developed on his physical state. By physical state I do not necessarily mean his body which is a divine temple, and therefore a thing of great beauty and purity, but I mean his fixation on being limited into a particular form and unable to express anything outside of that form.

These beings who have given us these revelations have in many cases, indeed in most cases, been very lively people, childlike in many ways, extremely simple, not stupid; some of them can count among – we can count among some of the mystics some of the greatest intelligences in history. But simple in their ability to see themselves wholly and completely as part of creation, as part of the divine whole in much the same way that a flower or a tree or a bush or an animal can see itself as part of the whole; see itself as part of a divine ecology.

Now let’s look at revelation in another way for a moment. Let’s use the concept of ecology. In nature everything manifests a wholeness, a complete cycle. The plants take energy from the sun and combine it with carbon dioxide through a process called photosynthesis, and create carbohydrates. Plants can be eaten by animals and human beings, and the energy locked within the carbohydrates release to power our physical bodies. The process by which we release this energy, which we call digestion, requires oxygen because it’s a process of combustion, just like your fire burning. And it releases carbon dioxide which the plants then breathe, in turn. Marvelous blending. Man can only digest so much; what he cannot digest, returns to the soil. It turns back into the natural cycle as what to man are waste products but what to the plant is food, because it’s rich in nitrogen and other minerals which nourish the soil. And eventually man himself, when he has completed with the physical body, gives up the ghost, so to speak, and the physical body returns into the natural cycle of life. So there is a single wholeness of life. Everything that is in nature is part of a cycle, a complete process.

Then man comes along and starts making things that has no place in that cycle – certain plastics, for example, which cannot be degraded into anything. They cannot be assimilated. Therefore, they are waste products of our civilization of which the environment cannot handle; therefore they will just pile up. But man tends to do this in other ways as well. There is what we could call, “spiritual ecology.” And the process of revelation is simply the demonstration of a spiritual ecology.

Revelation is man giving forth through his life those qualities which attune him to the whole: love, peace, wisdom, joy; and because of that attunement, he becomes more aware of the whole. As it was said in the message this evening, “Look at how wonderful it is to be with someone who is filled with the joy of living. That is a person who makes us joyous ourselves.” His joy is not contained within him; it radiates out, it becomes part of us, and we radiate it in turn. And to the person who is joyous, creation begins to manifest back this same joyous atmosphere, so there is a cycle. And as man becomes aware of this joy coming back to him, he can say, “This is God smiling upon me.”

We speak about the blessings of God in our life; but those blessings had to come from some place, and they have essentially come from us. Again we can harken back to the words of Jesus, “As ye sow, so ye shall reap.” The seeds that we plant in consciousness bring us the harvest of our life experiences. But man creates certain things through his thinking and feeling which cannot be assimilated by life and have no part of the whole. They are spiritual pollutants: hate, separation of any kind that is of a negative quality, distrust, jealousy, fear, fear especially, because they are creative things that cannot be assimilated; there is no cycle. Actually there is. The individual gets the impact of all his negative projections back on himself. But that’s simply because creation can’t assimilate it. So his garbage piles up around him, mentally, emotionally, and often times, physically, through psychosomatic disease.

That which creation can assimilate, it will assimilate and return to the individual a thousandfold. That which it can’t, it won’t, and it just sits in the individual’s environment until he does something about it. So revelation, if we say that it is the whole speaking to us, it is the divine life speaking to us, making us aware that we are part of the whole life, is the demonstration of a spiritual ecology. Because it is the impact upon our being of our particular, our personal wholeness with all of life, with all that is.

There are different ways in which man can bring about this process of revelation; different ways in which he can come in contact with God, and feel and perceive and know the divine presence active in his life and in his environment. One way, of course, is to go after an image of God, directly: through worship, through meditation, through prayer, through inner silence, to close out the world, to retreat inward; and there, in inner contemplation or prayer or meditation, become aware of that which transcends the world; to move our consciousness away from the realm of form and into the realm of formlessness.

A person who follows that route may indeed carry it to the point of renunciation of all form; and you have many, particularly in the Eastern paths, who do this very thing and become lifelong yogis, meditators, hermits, so forth, living in complete renunciation of the world except for what little bit is required to keep the barest spark of life going in the body. But another way of approaching this is to meet God’s revelation, God’s own revelation, head-on. Well, what is God’s own revelation? Creation is his revelation. Creation is the Word of God, continually resonating.

The Word that though born in silence and uttered in silence is itself never silent because it is all about us. We can experience it. Everything in creation that is now form – nature, the stars, the galaxies, the life upon the Earth, and so on – all of this is God revealing himself in form. We can either renounce this and go after the formless aspect of God, or we can move directly to meet the form aspect and see it in its full reality and say, “This form is real, therefore I will deal with it as a real thing.” Now we may think, “Well, for heaven’s sakes, that’s what I do all the time, anyway. If I see a car coming at me down the street, I am obviously not going to ignore it and say that it’s unreal. When I sit down in chairs, I feel them. I feel the floor beneath my feet. I feel people whom I touch. Obviously I am aware of this reality.” But, in point of fact, we do not accord it that status.

If we examine our thought processes during an average day, I am sure we would discover that a good part of our time and energy is spent denying the things that are going on about us. Now, this may not be a denial – an out-and-out denial in the sense of: “That isn’t there” -it may be just something like, “Boy, I wish that weren’t there,” or, “Here I am working away, but my thoughts are engrossed in what I’d like to do on my date tonight, or when I go to the cinema, or the argument I had with my brother or my wife or my father two days ago, or something.” My mind is everywhere but being aware of what I’m doing in the moment. And if that isn’t denying the reality of the moment, then I don’t know what is. It is man attempting to play vacationer from the realm of God. Just like the business man who’s always watching the clock, waiting for the time when it strikes five, and he can go home. And when he gets home, he finds himself waiting for something else. Always we are waiting, always we are anticipating, always we are fearing, always we are being guilty of things in the past, we are remembering; we are everywhere but right now, with our consciousness brought into a realization of the creativity of the moment in us and about us.

There is a classical story of a young man in university who had a big exam the next day and also a very special date that night – a date with a girl that he had been trying to take out for two months – it was his first date. So he decided he’d go back to his room, and he would study for three hours, and then he would go out on his date. But when he got to his room to study, he spent the whole three hours thinking what he would do when he went out with the girl. And when he was out with the girl, he spent the whole time worrying about the exam for which he hadn’t studied. So, in point of fact, he missed out on both ends. By meeting reality head-on, it means to me neither not rejecting what has happened, not particularly accepting it necessarily, in terms of saying, “I agree with it,” but accepting it in the sense of saying, “This is the reality of what is happening to me and about me, and I will deal with it.”

Well, certainly we do this. There are times when we have to do it. And we find that if we are involved in something that we love to do, we do not have this problem of the mind wandering. When we love to do something, we’re right with it. We are so much with it that time becomes annihilated; there is no time. When you’re with someone that you love and that you enjoy being with, “Golly, the hours pass like minutes,” as some famous love song goes. And when you’re doing something that is enthralling to you, it is something you have interest in – again, time just seems to slip by. You can give up meals, you can give up sleep; you can give up all kinds of things that we normally think we need for energy, and find ourselves receiving energy from apparently unknown or untapped sources.

Love is the key to revelation. And love is the key to that which enables us to meet the reality of the moment and embrace that moment, which is one reason why in my particular way of expressing things, I speak of embracing the Beloved. I like to think of God, which to me is the whole, it is everything, as the Beloved. Because that makes me think of very loving terms and encourages me to embrace it as one would embrace anything that one loved very much. Love is the key to revelation, and, therefore, love is the key to the New Age.

If that sounds very old age to you, it is. It is the same message man has been given for a long time but has yet to start accepting. Again he has not accepted the reality of what revelation means. But there can be no real New Age until revelation is accepted. And revelation is accepted when we can look out on our world and see God’s presence in everything.

There is another very famous story – though I don’t know where it comes from, at the moment. I think it is by a Russian author, but I am not sure. No, come to think of it, it was written by a man in America, named Manly Palmer Hall – about a man that wanders throughout the world looking for the Christ. And he wanders till he is a very old man. And he meets this magician who gives him a potion, and he tells him if he drinks the potion he will see the Christ. And he drinks the potion, and suddenly everything that he sees has Christ’s face. The people on the street all have Christ’s face. The trees all have Christ staring out at him; the snowflakes drifting down all have the face of Christ on them. And all these things suddenly begin to merge into one big face which suddenly dissolves into pure light. And the story ends with the man actually being found frozen in the snow, but it doesn’t end with his death. It ends with him moving into pure light, where everything he sees is this one life, and he is part of it. Therefore there is no death. He has triumphed over death.

That to me is the only revelation that is there. Everything else has been fragmentary. A word, a vision, taken out of time and out of context of the totality of life helps us to realize that the totality is there, but is still only a signpost on the way to realizing that fullness.

But revelation is a living experience, which means it has to happen right now. We’re not living yesterday, and we’re not living tomorrow yet. We’re only living right now. And it means, in practical fact, being able to meet an individual and to see that that individual and myself are one. Different, yes; unique, perhaps, but none the less part of the same life, the same being. It means seeing that a situation that I am involved in is its may not be pleasant; it may not be one that I like, I may wish to change it, but I can still accept it for what it is. This is good psychological sense. If I can’t accept something, but I try to run away from it, then I can never really deal with it. But no matter how unpleasant it is, if I can accept it and give thanks for it, then, I am then in a psychologically strong position to deal with it, because I have proven that it is not stronger than I am. This to me is revelation.

Revelation is the unfoldment from within, of the knowledge and the reality of our divinity, the fulfilment of Jesus’ promise that not only are we gods, but that just as he demonstrated his oneness with the whole, so we can do the same thing, and even to greater degrees than he was able to do in his time and in his place. Man can only recognize revelation to the extent that his consciousness can perceive it and understand it.

There is a unique condition in which a person who has been blind since birth, but with a kind of blindness that can be cured through surgery. When that is cured and the person can, technically, see, he is still blind; because the areas of his brain that have learned to correlate visual impressions coming from the optic nerve with the correct interpretations have never developed. You can show that person a cube and a sphere and a pyramid, but he cannot visually tell the difference between them. He cannot look at a page of print, for example, and see the print; he cannot distinguish the black lettering from the white page. Man cannot really perceive something that he is not equipped to interpret or to understand, so we have to build this equipment. And in this time, in this age, that equipment is being built, which is why we are calling it a New Age.

Science has demonstrated to us that there is no such thing as solid matter. Everything is the manifestation of energy and motion, and all that we see is only an illusion. The solid chair that we sit upon actually has more space in it than solid matter, and it is simply a combination of rates of vibration that are complementary to our own. If we can accept that – and actually we have no choice because that’s what the atomic bomb is based upon – then we can see that perhaps the universe is indeed nothing but a single spirit acting throughout all things. And if we can see behind the apparent solidity of our separateness to the reality of this single spirit and life, then we are prepared to both witness and experience and demonstrate revelation. And one thing about the New Age is that it is not a spectator’s sport; it is built upon personal revelation within an individual’s life.

Now we are all revealing something every moment that we are alive. The great American philosopher, Emerson, said, “What you are speaks so loud I cannot hear what you say.” But we can reveal our wholeness, our divine potentials, and we can do this by becoming aware that such potentials exist; and by moving boldly ahead to meet life with love, with acceptance, and with deep insight into what life can offer us in the way of wisdom and experience. Because, then, we unfold from ourselves the courage and the wisdom and the love that is the only revelation that truly counts. Because that is the presence of God. And it releases for us our creativity.

The title of this talk was, “Beyond the Dawn – Revelation and the New Age.” Why beyond the dawn? We speak much about a New Age dawning. This can be considered scientifically in terms of a number of inventions and the acceleration of our technology, and so on, which is certainly bringing a New Age upon us. After all, fifty-five, sixty years ago, man couldn’t even fly, and now he is driving around the moon in little buggies. We can look upon it socially; we can look upon it in terms of the impact of communication on our world, which has made it a global village. Or we can see that, indeed, man is poised at the brink of a spiritual breakthrough unlike anything that for which we have historical precedence; because in the past, revelation came through single, separate individuals appealing to a mass of humanity to wake up and listen. This time, revelation is coming through a mass of humanity. Maybe not a very big mass at first, but it doesn’t take much yeast to get a loaf of bread going.

We say, then, that we are in the dawn; but a dawn has one characteristic, it is made up of light, and it is made up of shadow. It is indeed the ending of the night, but yet the shadows are still quite strong. The dawn of a New Age is characterized by that condition in which, well, we think there’s revelation, and we’re pretty sure that God’s around and able to work through us and with us, but yet we have our doubts. I mean, we’re not really all that sure. There are a shadows of old consciousness left. There is still a sense of separation from time to time. But as soon as the sun’s fully up and reaches a certain level in the sky, then the shadows go. And there is nothing but light, and the realization of the reality of the light, the realization of the reality of revelation.

So we are asked to go beyond the dawn; and if we are to be revealers of the Word, we must be total revealers of the Word, not half-revealers. We must know our flow and embrace of love to the world, which places us in a context of ecological oneness, spiritually, physically, mentally, emotionally, with all that is. And therefore, that places us, not only in the historical tradition of revelation, but places us in the cosmic tradition of revelation, which is the expression of life itself, which is the uttering of the single creative Word, which we are.

I am feeling a trifle mischievous this afternoon, therefore I am going to entitle this talk the “Loins of Aquarius,” for reasons that will become apparent. In the Old Testament, quite often God speaks to the prophets, and he says to them, “Gird up thy loins and go here or there or some place else to carry out his will,” and generally he sets them off into the desert or to some city that is having a great time in sin and despair to preach repentance and what not. But it’s a very common phrase throughout the Old Testament, to gird up one’s loins and to set forth.

Well, we are each of us latter-day prophets who are being asked to do that: to gird up our loins and go forth into the world and to become architects of Aquarius. I find that this is a very fascinating phrase, very symbolic. It means more than just putting on one’s trousers and getting ready to sally forth into the desert or to the cities; it really means to harness one’s creative powers, to bring one’s creative energies to a peak of accessibility and of focussing so that they can be released in service, released in building. We are each of us the creative potential inherent in the world, a creative potential that is now being asked to be released that a New Age can be born.

When we begin to build something, it is often with a very special kind of consciousness. Suppose, for example, that you were given a piece of land, and you were asked, or told, that upon this land you could build your home. You would go to an architect and you would enlist his service, and with his help you would draft out a plan for your home; how you wished your rooms to be arranged, how you wished your garden to be landscaped. And all of this is very exciting, and you are filled with a sense of anticipation and pleasure and joy, and as the home begins to take shape, especially if you are privileged to take part in the actual building of it, then this enhances your sense of joy and creativity. The consciousness of a builder is a consciousness of anticipation and of excitement and a sense of accomplishment.

In the Middle Ages during the Renaissance when people were seized in Europe by this great creative fervour, they would go forth and begin to build these mammoth works of art that were the great cathedrals. These were tasks which no one man could hope to see completed in his lifetime, but whole generations would be involved in a given area of work, a given skill, a certain skill of masonry, or of stone sculpture, or of woodworking, would be passed from father to son, and where the father had worked on the scaffolding the son would take his place and work on the scaffolding, and this tradition of building was passed on through generations. Imagine the consciousness involved knowing that I will not my work completed but my son, and my son’s sons will. They will carry on after me. And yet even though I will not the finished product, I still have enough pride and joy and pleasure from my work that I will give my all to it. I will gird up my creative powers and bring them to this point of consecration to accomplishing the task at hand.

Within us each lies that which is timeless. It was present before the foundations of the Earth. It was present when, within the creative imagination of the Divine, the image was formed and held of this planet and all of its destiny. It was present when the first bits and pieces of cosmic dust began to coalesce. It was present when molten rock heaved in great seas of geologic upheaval and then cooled to become the mountains and the plains. It was present as the rains fell and the oceans were created and as life emerged from those oceans. And this consciousness will be present when the Earth has accomplished its task and falls spinning back into its molten source and becomes again one with the Sun.

In our everyday consciousness we see with the eyes of a vastly reduced time scale. Our vision is narrowed and is measured not by light-years, not by mega-years, not by eons of time; it’s measured by minutes, and by seconds, and by days, and hours and years. We say that we shall live for threescore year and ten, and then we depart to penetrate what, to man at his present stage of awareness, remains the great mystery of life beyond form. Yet throughout this life, with its narrow focus of vision, there remains within us that timeless consciousness which has grasped all the seasons of the Earth and which knows of the seasons yet to come; and because of that grasp and that knowledge, cannot be affected by change that is born of minutes but can only respond to change which spans the eons.

Our source centre, our divinity, which in my last lecture to you I said we would call the soul – I was asked, “Is the soul and the spirit the same?” Fundamentally speaking, no they are not, they are two different levels of consciousness, but for our purposes I am lumping them all together and simply calling it the soul. It’s our conference shorthand – within that level, within that consciousness, the plan is known. It is not known in the same way that one would read a book and from that handbook what it is that must be done. For example: how to build a fire or how to read a compass. It is known because the soul IS the plan.

When you are facing your first bit of land and have the opportunity to build your home upon that land, you may go to an architect to have the plans drawn up. But where do those plans come from? They are coming from you. They are coming from your concept of what a home is. And that is born from many things. It’s born from your past experience of a home, the home you had with your parents, perhaps, a home that you have dreamed of through the years, the home that you have conceived of as being that place in which your creative ideas could find fulfilment. When you plan your rooms, you plan them in terms of your hopes and dreams, your expectations – this will be my study where I can relax, and read and write, or this will be my sewing room, or this will be my art studio, this will be the family room where I can create an environment of peace for my loved ones, this will be the kitchen where my love can pour into the creation of nourishment, and so forth.

Plans take shape, but these plans emerge from a complex centre within you that is itself combining many levels of experience, past, future, present, in order to come up with that abstraction that you call, home. And from that abstraction you plan your physical form and hope that, to the best of its ability, that physical form will be a suitable vehicle through which that abstraction can take form.

And so it is with God. And so it is with our own divinity. That which is the source of man’s future, the source of the plan, is not a blue print, it’s not a set of ancient tablets on which the whole thing was pre-written. It is something which is beyond words, beyond form, but none the less real because of it.

When you sit down to plan out your future, you plan your future on the basis of what you’ve been taught, of what you’ve been led to expect, what you hope to see; and yet if you really think about it, you can trace your planning, again, back to a centre within yourself which seems strangely divorced from physical-plane experience. Where do your hopes come from? What is the fountainhead of your dreams?

We stand at the beginning of a New Age, and the call comes out to us to gird ourselves and to become the creators of this New Age. For many people this is a thought filled with bewilderment and trepidation because we are accustomed to relying upon experts to show us how to do things or to show us the way to go. We are accustomed in building our homes, for example, to go to an architect, and on a physical level this is quite right. Because I don’t have the information concerning stress and engineering tensions and the relationship of various forms and building materials that would be necessary to insure that once I put up my roof it doesn’t come crashing down on my head again.

But when we come to the matters of the spirit, there is only one expert and that is the Divine, and the divine is essentially within us each. Certainly he is more apparent, or the divine is more apparent, within some than within others. There are individuals who come into life with the mission to be points of focus around which great creative energies can coalesce and take form. But how do they take form if it is not through the lives of individuals who themselves respond to a call more penetrating than time and more powerful than individual hesitancy and limitation?

Can you believe that the New Age, its patterns, its forms, its destiny, lies within you? If you can believe this then you’ve taken the first major step toward insuring that the New Age will be made manifest. You’ve taken the first step in girding up your loins and going forth to fulfil the Will of the Divine. For the first step, really, in any journey is knowing where to look.

There is a little booklet called: “One Solitary Life,” which is generally circulated about Christmas time, which is the story of Jesus. The theme of this booklet is how this one individual who, according to historical records at any rate, never travelled any further than thirty miles from the place of his birth, and who only contacted comparatively minor number of people in his lifetime; whether that is actually historically correct or not that can be debated by people. But that’s what the exoteric records tell us – how this one individual who had such restricted contacts with life in terms of vast communication and travel and so forth, completely transformed the world.

But how did he transform the world? Imagine a Jesus coming to Earth, and no one listening to him, not even one person: Suppose that he had said to Matthew, “Follow me,” and Matthew had said, “Well, I’d really rather not. I don’t think I will today.” Or suppose he’d said to Peter, “Go forth and be fishers of men,” and Peter had said, “Well, but men don’t fetch a very high price on the market; I think I’ll stick to carp or cod or mackerel,” or whatever one gets from the Sea of Galilee. I’m sure it isn’t mackerel.

Jesus himself expressed this in his parable of the sowing of the seeds. Some seeds fall on rocky ground, and some fall on areas where weeds are growing, but a few seeds fall on fertile ground. Well, suppose he didn’t have any fertile ground. Someone has to respond. An avatar, after all, can only do so much. He can only be a point of focus through which certain energies can be released, certain truths enunciated; and then it takes, astonishingly enough, ordinary, everyday run of the mill people – what is so often called the mass, as if the mass had any existence – to respond, to provide the fertility of consciousness, to actually seize upon a message, to hear the word, to gird up their loins and to go forth and do something about it.

The brain can send messages to the body, but unless there’s a backbone, a spinal cord, to carry the messages to the various appropriate centres, the brain can holler and scream all day, and nothing is going to happen. Humanity is the backbone of Earth. Humanity is the salt of the Earth. There is no such thing as an ordinary person. There is only God, life, the one consciousness manifesting through many, many forms: physical, emotional and mental forms; and it is this one life in its many forms that must respond to itself and reveal itself.

The New Age is here. The new dispensation is upon us. For that matter, the Second Coming is upon us. For the light and life and spirit of the Christ, of the divine, is moving through human consciousness in revelation.

But its movement must be within human consciousness through people who realize their affinity with the divine, their attunement to God, and people who can begin to grasp this wondrous fact, that the birth of the New Age is springing forth from within me. I have the choice to be fertile ground or non-fertile ground. I have the choice to be open to the teachings of the new, as and when they come, and the teachings of the past as they have been given; and I have the choice to make those teachings real, to externalize them. In other words, I can be an architect of Aquarius. My life can help to set the pattern, can reveal the plan. For the plan is not something that I have to read; it is something that I must be, that I can be, to some extent, if only a minor one.

In our age, since it is a transitional age, and all transitional ages tend to manifest the spirit of the destroyer, that a great divine energy which sweeps through affairs in order to cleanse and to remove forms which have served their purpose and therefore clear the way for new patterns to take shape. It’s easy to look upon this process as it manifests within our world and to become convinced that, in some fashion, nothing seems to be going right. The world instead of responding to the great messages of truth and light and love and wisdom, which are man’s spiritual heritage, seems instead to be responding ever more powerfully to messages of separation, and hatred, and destruction, fear, torment, anxiety.

If we are to be architects of the New Age, then let us have the consciousness of the builder. The individual who says, “Yes, my life is a creative adventure,” because it is! Your soul is creating itself. Your soul is creating its part and rhythm in the divine plan, and like any builder I can view this with joy, with anticipation, with excitement, with love. And just that kind of consciousness alone adds so much to one’s world and one’s environment.

When we think of world service, we tend to think of: what are we doing to help world problems like Ireland, or Viet Nam, or the Palestinian crisis, and so forth? But I am a world problem, and you are a world problem, and your neighbours are world problems. The world is that which surrounds us. So the place to begin solving world problems is in our own consciousness and, then, in our immediate world and affairs. And then if necessary, the paths will open for us to have influence, conscious influence, knowing influence, over what we usually call world affairs.

Those individuals who worked upon the great cathedrals in France, Germany and England, some of whom knew that they would not live to its completion, nevertheless did not allow that sense of personal termination to deter them from the full application and release of their creative power. In other words, they didn’t say, “Well, it’s too late for me. This cathedral is for younger people, people who can start at an early age and its completion.” The cathedral of the New Age, the temple of man, the temple of God-man is being built now. The corner-stones have been laid. We are now in the process of building the superstructure.

Since most of you whom I am addressing at this point are what is commonly known as the older citizens, and it is quite often stated to me, “Well, I’m not really sure how much I can do in the time that is remaining, but you are fortunate because you are young, and obviously the New Age is for you.” I wish to make it very, very clear that the New Age has nothing to do with time-age, as I mentioned yesterday. The New Age is not a time-thing. It is a condition of attunement. The New Age has nothing to do with how much time you can put in; because the temple that we are building, we are building always. We have been building it for millennia. We will continue building it. The few years that you are encased in physical form simply means that you are working on a different level of the scaffolding. When you leave physical form, you are still working on the same building; you are just on a different level. Your work doesn’t cease. Your creative opportunities do not cease, and your growth doesn’t cease. That which you learn, even if you learn it five minutes before unfolding into a higher dimensional existence, is not lost nor is it a wasted time.

The New Age is the product of the release of collective attunement, of people affirming the principles of goodwill between men, of light released upon the Earth, of the promise of man, the heritage of man, the glory of man united with his Beloved. The New Age is not for a particular generation, though the forms of it may be, but it is for humanity. And whether you are in this dimension or any other, you are part of humanity.

In the past, whenever great changes have taken place upon the Earth, mankind was not in a position always to help initiate those changes. Generally, he simply suffered through them. The changes had to be initiated for him by external forces, divine forces; and the transition points between past ages have quite often been marked by catastrophe, for example, the flood. But now man is at a point where he himself must be the agent of the creative change. Not simply endure the change or pass through it, but he must create it. He must cause it. He must co operate with the Divine in bringing the New Heaven and the New Earth to birth.

How may man co-operate with the divine? He needs to return in consciousness to the concept that he and God are one, not necessarily the same, but they are one. There is God immanent within us each and God transcendent within all of creation and beyond creation. Unless man can have a consciousness that he can attune to the divine, that like Jesus, he can say “I Am one with the Beloved,” then he is licked from the start.

It is important as human beings that we begin to redefine ourselves, redefine what we are, and through that redefinition come to appreciate this timeless divinity that lives within us, the source of the New Age, and know that no matter what our personality life may seem to have been, or to be, that divinity is still there, and it can be contacted through openness and trust. As Peter says, through a willingness to transform one’s personality life into the divine life, to surrender to God, in other words. That’s difficult for many people because they think of God as an authority external to themselves rather than seeing him as the rhythmic universal life within. Some people have difficulty surrendering to something outside themselves and often rightly so. But you shouldn’t have difficulty surrendering to that love that is within.

What I would like to do at this point since I’m feeling quite informal, is to stop lecturing, and I want to open this to questions. There will be a later time, too, when I will want to answer questions in a later talk on “Revelation.” But I would now just like to ask for questions from you and to respond to what is moving in your consciousness.

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Question: I want to make sure that I understand you, David, because you made a statement that is incomprehensible to me. I can understand God within us and God transcendent, but what is God beyond creation?

David: Yes, the question is: The questioner can understand a God immanent within us, and God transcendent within creation, but what would we mean by a God beyond creation?

Creation is God in form, form on some level. But behind that, beyond it, is that which is the source of that form. It is itself not created, not conditioned, not even expressible through words. It is that aspect of the divine from which all things proceed but which itself has not entered into form. We think of this, perhaps, in a linear fashion – or as creation like a huge balloon, and God standing outside of it.

Audience: But I don’t see how this can be…………………..

David: Yes, but what I wish to express to you is that there is that aspect of the divine about which all that we can say is that it is the source; but it is not itself dynamically involved in the processes of creation. It is standing behind it, maintaining it. For example: There is that which is one; it is indivisible, it is simply one. It does not have any dimension to it. It’s not big and it’s not small. It’s not here and it’s not there. It’s not yesterday, it’s not tomorrow. All that we can say is that it is – that It Is! From that, at some point, emerged a dynamic process, and this dynamic process manifested itself as duality, most simply expressed as the positive and negative poles of an electric field, or as male and female. And from those two points which could then relate was born a relationship, the union of the two, the dynamic process of the two relating. And out of that relationship a third force was born. And from that third force everything in creation has been fashioned. Creation is God in the process of creation. But behind it all remains the One.

I don’t want to get very theological here. It’s a highly abstract concept, but let’s see. If you paint a picture, there are three facets of you connected with that picture. There is the facet that is involved in the actual technique and the detail of the picture. And that’s the facet of you that knows how to put this bit of colour here and that bit of colour there, and where to put red and where to put blue, and so on. Then there is the part of you that is concerned with the overall picture. It has the whole concept of what it is you are trying to paint. Perhaps I am trying to paint a picture of this audience. That part directs. It embraces the entire picture. The first part that I mentioned becomes specifically focussed at different points of the picture as required when I’m painting it. Are we clear to that point? Call that the overall vision and the technique; the consciousness of the creator, the consciousness of the technique, the artist. Then there is the third part of you. And that’s the part of you which has nothing to do with the painting at all. It’s the part of your consciousness which is involved with all the rest of your life. It is that which brought you to the point where you can create the picture. It will take you beyond the picture, perhaps to greater pictures yet to come. It is the part of you which is far more transcendent even than the picture.

So there are three stages of transcendency: There’s the focus on the technique. There’s the overall concept of the picture itself. And then there’s the life of which the artist is only a part. That artist may also be a mother, or a father. He may be a businessman; he may be a politician like Churchill who paints in his spare time, you see. If the painting had awareness, it would have two kinds of awareness. It would have the awareness of the paint and how it is arranged, and the thickness of the individual droplets of paint, and so on – the layers of paint. Then it would have the awareness of the picture itself. What is the paint intended to convey? What do all these splotches of colour ultimately mean? And that’s it. The painting would have no more awareness of the politician or the mother or the father, because that aspect of it is beyond the awareness of the canvas.

Okay. Each of us, this wood, everything that we see as form, is like the paint and the technique and the layers. But, then, behind it and uniting it all there is one total self or vision, which is God transcendent. The divine spirit that embraces all of creation. Call it the soul of creation. It has the overall meaning of the whole process. It is the consciousness of the whole picture of creation, and we are the consciousness of the individual paint-layer. But then, there’s that life, that self, which has nothing to do with the painting at all, except that the painting is one small fragment of it. And that is the God that is beyond creation – the inexpressible, the true source, the self, the life which is beyond the soul of the universe. It stands behind it, as it were. The universe springs from it, just as the painting springs from the consciousness of the creator. But the painting is not the whole consciousness of the creator. I wonder if that expresses it

Very good analogy, yes.

David: Very abstract concept. Are there any other questions? Well, then, I commend you on to the rest of the program.

This conference is dealing with expansion of consciousness; and not just dealing with it, but experiencing it. The speaker who preceded me spoke most admirably on expansion in one direction, that of beyond the physical up into the truly limitless realms available to us in the capacity of our eternal being. I want to tread with you and explore with you, at this time, a little different kind of expansion and yet one closely connected. Together we want to explore a most sacred and important quest that each of us has been engaged upon since time immemorial on this planet.

What is man? That is the supreme question for us on this planet. I don’t believe that there is a final definition, but we ourselves are creating that definition. The universe awaits with bated breath to know what is finally going to spring forth from this planet and add its quota of light, glory and immeasurable service to the universal whole. Perhaps we know within ourselves what the answer will be; but if so, it has been our task and our continuing quest to externalize that knowledge, to give it form, to give it meaning, and to give it a reality that lifts us from this planet and into an endless expansion of being.

I’m going to use with you today the concept of man’s journey from Eden, as man has sought to delve deeply into the mystery of his own being and expand his consciousness of what he is and what he can contribute.

In Eden, so the story goes, man lived in a most simple state. Initially, he was only one. And then God took pity upon him and decided that he should have a companion, and so he became two. The primal oneness split into the creative duality, the polarities of male and female in this particular instance.

This garden was a most beautiful place, as indeed most simple places are. No complexities, nothing to task an individual, simply movement within the sheer bliss of a continued state of oneness. Somewhat like the most simple atom that we have knowledge of – the hydrogen – nothing more than a single proton and a single neutron – a single electron, rather – moving around this nucleus. A state of great tension, a state of great expectancy. Something is bound to occur once that primal division of duality has been created. And something did occur. And as a result, man was expelled from the garden of Eden. He left the simple state and began moving forth on a most magnificent quest.

But there weren’t just two people who were expelled from Eden. There were three: a man, a woman, and the incredible potential for creativity that lies between them; a third entity at that time unformed, existing only in, shall we say, a metaphorical etheric – a potential, but a potential of unlimited creative expression. And to keep them from returning to this happy spot where life was simple and pleasant, an angel stood at the gate and held a flaming sword.

Man himself is that angel. Man himself is that creative, divine being; but the sword is what prevents him from returning. And yet the sword is also what indicates the direction of his return. The sword is that power which man alone on this planet embodies, the ability to separate. This is a primal creative force, because unless you can separate, you cannot create. Think of this for a moment. Examine this creative world. Examine out the window, and you will see that you have a sense of “out the window” because of a sense of separation. And indeed, no matter how high an individual goes, as long as he is within form, he experiences separation.

But separation does not necessarily restrict unity or oneness. Duality does not have to be an inability to come together. The separating power of man is the means by which he orders and expresses his evolution. But because it is a flaming sword, the hand that holds it must itself be careful; otherwise, it becomes cut and burnt.

And this has been the tribulation of man that he has turned his very creative power in against himself: Prometheus, who brought the gift of fire to man, chained on a rock, and his entrails eaten eternally by a vulture; man, released into beginning to learn of his creative potentials, his ability to manifest; but turning that energy in against himself, and his own Being being torn until the Liberator comes who will set him free. These are, then, the symbols that we want to work with this morning. These are the concepts that we want to use to explore where we are at the moment and where we’ll be tomorrow in the New Age, the very same new age that Sir George spoke of last night and which Teilhard wrote and proclaimed in his magnificent works.

So, man stood at the gate of Eden knowing that now he could not return because he had been given the knowledge of self. What do we mean by “self” in the context of this discussion? To me, it means a number of forces brought together and manifesting in a union. One of these is the power of the Logos, the ability to give meaning. The other is the power of separation, the ability to step back from that meaning and examine it, and also the ability to offer to the universe a unique meaning not offered by any other source.

Esoterically as well as physically, there are certain fields involved: for example, skin that separates us; my skin cannot become one with yours, and so there is that distinctness between us. And medical science, as well as esoteric science, has now proven beyond doubt that man is surrounded with electromagnetic, sound, heat, energy waves, the aura, extending out in many fields and directions, which is being produced by this unique core of being. Each of us is a universe produced by its own Logos, and this is the self, intimately part of us, and yet very much a separating action, because my self is different than your self as a manifesting reality.

On the other hand, the Logos of man, or his divinity, brought separation into being as a creative tool; and hence, it, in itself, is not separate but is universally present, omnipresent. So there is that aspect of our self, often referred to with a capital “S” which we all share; it unifies us. That is where our ability to create flows from. But if our ability to create and to manifest is left on that unitary level, then we fail in our purpose as human beings.

Rather, we have come here through ages past to move steadily from a simple state of union to a state of increasing complexity in order to manifest increasingly the majesty of the universe and the infinite possibilities of God. It’s really what you are attempting to do and are doing in all forms of education; attempting to increase your complexity: your knowledge perhaps, your information, your character, your ability to relate to people. Evolution proceeds by a motion moving from simple states to states of greater complexity, hence Sir George mentioned this last night.

If there is only one man on Earth, what he can manifest is limited. If there are two people on Earth, that ability to manifest has been expanded a bit, because the two of them can get together and explore. They can relate; they can each add to each other. Each as a source of meaning can blend their meanings and come to a greater vision than either of them could achieve as a single isolated point. If there are three people, why the possibilities are magnified even more; and if there are three billion people, then we have the possibilities for truly infinite development of consciousness and creative ability on this Earth.

But in order to have three billion people, you need three billion separate entities. And so the power to separate was given in trust to man knowing that eventually he would learn to use it rightly; and it would be his salvation and his glory, just as the times it is his pain and his degradation, as it were. Because I am separate from you does not mean I have to be polarized against you. We can be distinct, we are distinct. But this in no way means that we can never come together nor work together as creative beings. On the other hand, what it does mean is that the only way we can do anything is by coming together. The only way we can expand ourselves is by working with other people.

This, I feel, is a most important thought. We are entering an age now when the Christ manifests to us not in terms of an isolated being but in terms of relationships, in terms of what is being communicated between us: in love, in understanding, in sharing, or the opposite of those. This has always been true for man, but of course now with so many people coming onto the Earth, we’re getting to the point of crunch.

And there is an old fable about the man who was taken to Heaven and to Hell. When he was taken to Hell he was shown a long, long banquet room with the most magnificent food laid out for the people, but every person seated at the table was given a most unwieldy large spoon, and he observed them struggling, trying to eat this most tempting food with this unwieldy spoon. It was simply so big that, you know, unh-h, they couldn’t reach – the handle reach their mouths. So the food was spilling all over the place, and they were starving. He was then taken to Heaven and Heaven turned out to be identically the same place: same table, same room, same food, nothing different, same spoons; the only thing was that each person was feeding the fellow next to him, and it turned out the spoons were admirably suited for that. And so everyone was happy. This is the position that we’ve been put into.

Esoterically, separation has been looked upon in the past, and rightly so, as that which man must overcome. Simply because he has to stop using the sword against himself, which is in essence what he’s doing when he cuts himself off from other people and from his own levels of consciousness. For example, though we can say on one level it is true that we have a physical self and a higher self and subconscious mind and what not; on another level that is not true at all, we are a totally unified being. Two views essentially expressing the same thing, but one carries a bit more power with it for the age we are moving into. But in this age we’re moving into, new concepts need to be explored and new terms redefined.

The hand that holds the sword of separation, the angel that is holding that sword, is completely unified – a Being of Light. That is man’s natural state. But it doesn’t mean he throws the sword away. It only means that he uses it rightly. The power of our mind does this. Our mind has been used to analyze, to segregate, to classify and categorize, and that is a proper function for the mind; but when it is turned upon itself and exercises its dissecting abilities on its own unitary state and that of nature, man becomes swamped.

We are in an age of mind, but we are also in an age when out of mind is growing intuition or the intuitive ability to cognize through oneness. That is, I don’t look at you and examine what you look like from the outside. I am one with you in perception, through love, through sympathy, and from that kind of orientation I can separate all I want in order to explore together our own uniquenesses.

Two things man has that have not been fully explored – his uniqueness and his oneness. The reason they have not been explored fully is that they’ve been approached as two separate actions; that is, we try to surrender uniqueness in order to create oneness, or we go against oneness in order to manifest uniqueness. But man cannot do that; he is both at the same time, and he has to learn to manifest both in balance and in understanding.

We are now about, and are indeed, in the process of developing the technique to do this and the means with which this will be accomplished. One of these is something like we’re doing right at this moment. What we are each interested in here is expansion of consciousness, that is, how we are perceiving the world. We may think we’re all seated here together in the same room, but actually we are existing in several rooms. Some of us may be here all alone, and others may be here with a great many other people with them. The point is that we are each in a room of our own devising, according to our consciousness, as it is at this very moment. If you are saying, “Yes, yes” to what I’m saying, and the person next to you is saying, “No, no” you are existing in two different lecture halls. And both of you are right. Both of you are quite right in your unique expression that you have the right to be where you are. But the oneness calls us onward.

The Logos within us is not satisfied with partial meanings. I give meaning to my world through my own interpretations. I like reds; maybe I don’t like orange. I like sunshine; maybe I do not like rain, in which case it wouldn’t be too good for me to be in England, but fortunately I like rain, so we’re all right. I have my prejudices, my likes, my dislikes. These are the things that make me different, and they give meaning to my world. But that which is Logos within me, which gives me that power, is not satisfied with that. It wants to find out what other people think of the world, how other people examine the world. This is most vital because as a being of meaning I can not limit myself in what I understand of the Earth. I must expand and I do this by my ability to listen and communicate with others.

The Aquarian Age will probably at some point be called the Age of Communication. We see this externalizing itself in our technology. Perhaps we can even say that the Christ for our age is the ability to communicate. That is, that the Christ is made manifest through what we communicate together, rather than what we see objectively separate from ourselves in our private and isolated bonus of time. A very active age is what we are involved in. An age when we are asked to blend together and exchange.

Perhaps some of you have often heard this. When you are with someone whom you like very much, and you have to go away, one of the ways of consoling feelings is by saying, “Well, think how lovely it’ll be when we get together again.” Well, that is a very apt description of the human state. We have been given the gift of separation so that what we liberate when we come together again can be most powerful and most beautiful.

We are living in an age of the dignity of the human being. The time when the individual is exalted as he has never been exalted in the past. A time when we can throw off the rags of guilt, shame, fear, limitation, and see exactly what we are – as a being who has the ability to grow without limit. But
the exaltation of the individual in our age will come about, not through isolation, but through unity with others. It is said esoterically that one of the characteristics of this age is that it will embody the pattern of ritual. Well, that really doesn’t seem very new, because we’ve had rituals for a long time. But if we really examine what is meant by this, we see that we are indeed coming upon a new pattern.

For those of you who have had the joy to take the mile-walk here, at Attingham, as soon as you leave the house and enter into that walk, you enter into a ritual. You are surrounded by ritual. Everything in nature is ritual. Because ritual, simply stated, means co-operative blending of isolated units in a rhythm of perfect communication, manifesting a wholeness. That is, things working together in unison toward a given end. All the cells of your body are engaged in a ritual. Each one knows its part, each one exalts the dignity of its part, and each one knows that it has the ability to blend with all other patterns within the body, and therefore a oneness is manifested. Where disease is evident is where someone is fudging on his part of the ritual. Someone is not doing his thing. He is not co-operating properly on some level or other.

Rituals in the past have been different because they have been a means of imposing order, and all too often the individual has been subjugated to the ritual. The ritual has been made more important than the individual. But now we begin to see that in these clusters of human groups, that Sir George spoke of last night, the individual is brought to a point of peace with himself, glory in what he is, and therefore he is free to share with others.

One of the things that keeps us separate from each other and limits our consciousness is that we have such poor opinions of what we are; because we are terrified that other people will discover the dark corners of our being, the skeletons of our closets. Because we are terrified of seeing them plainly. We have magnified them. We’ve built up the dark corners. We’re afraid that if someone sees clearly enough what we are, he will verbalize and give back to us the darkness we fear is within us, and so we build all kinds of defences. And then the sword of separation, which should be our creative tool, is plunged suicidally into our own heart.

But when we can be – accept what we are, we do not fear other people, and then we can begin to move out in trust, not only to higher levels but to the levels that surround us here as human beings. And it’s all one. All the levels must work together in the great ritual of consciousness, as it were. The higher levels are not all powerful, they depend on what happens on this level as well.

I met a woman who, through no fault of her own within the particular church structure to which she belonged, had been unable to fulfil the sacraments of her church. As a consequence she was greatly ridden with guilt, and I said to her, “If you could pray, as you understand prayer, in a way that is meaningful to you, then you could release this to God and he would help you.” And she said, “No, I can not do this. I am unworthy to approach God.” The darkness that we conceive of in our consciousness limits us, not only from our fellows but from our own higher natures, our angelic structure, if you wish, the unifying action of our being. But it is this unifying action that is man’s necessity to manifest now.

Man emerged from Eden as two separate entities, plus a third, so that he could learn what it means to unify. If you are already unified it is rather difficult to learn that. So that they could become not just an instinctual knowledge, but a realization on all levels that could be used creatively, powerfully, anywhere in the Cosmos.

The salvation of man is his power to synthesize, or more simply and more beautifully, his power to love, within himself and with others. And all communication on all levels – physical, emotional, mental, spiritual between people, between levels – is simply and basically an act of love. If you have no love, you cannot communicate. It is as simple as that. But if you can communicate, if you can just haltingly begin to communicate, then you lay the seed and open the door for love to flow.

Invisibly from Eden came forth this third party, which at some point would draw man back into itself. Man only apparently left the unity, the unity went with him; but the unity itself had to be expelled from Eden to journey to that point where man could stand forth and say, “I Am!” Not, “I am this, I am happy, I am sad, I am hungry, I am exalted, I am laid down,” but, “I Am!” And within that, all things are possible -infinite being, because of the infinite powers of creativity.

If you are an artist and you approach a lump of clay, or a stone if you are a sculptor, or a canvas if you are a painter, your first task is to eliminate some things, add some things, to engage in a manifestation of form and limitation or separation; but out of that, like these paintings, out of the separation we see here – the body painted in one spot, the chair painted in another – comes a total impression that was not there when you had the total impression of a blank canvas. It is a different aspect of unity, but still unity, none the less.

That which is the Logos, the Alpha and the Omega, cannot be sliced up like a piece of cheese. But, in order to fully appreciate it, we approach it from many, many angles. And that is our glory as human beings, that we become many, indeed multifaceted, through that which we have learned and experienced on this quest from Eden.

Now in this New Age, the Beloved of man stands forth, this third party which is the unity that has always been with us. The inspiration that has walked with us and said, “All right, you’ve left that behind you, but I am following you forward to new patterns of unification, conscious unification, superconscious unification and creativity.” The expansion of consciousness, because consciousness has learned to reflect multifacets; it has become complexified, to use Teilhard’s term. Three-hundred million cells in the brain, three-hundred million people on Earth, billions and billions of stars and light forms in just the galaxy that we know of and billions of galaxies beyond. Complexification offering the chances for divinity to move from infinite angles and unite in infinite ways, because what we are engaged upon is immediate creativity.

We speak in our language of Earth that God created the heavens and the Earth, and then that was it. But indeed the raw material was set forth, and now we are elaborating upon that raw material without end. This to me is the expansion offered to us in this New Age. This is what it means; that each of us has this ability, now, to create in the moment, now, what has never existed before. This is God in operation. That there exists for us that universal canvas, as it were, or arena, which is utterly unqualified and awaits the creative power of man to say, “I am This.” And there it is. Think how exciting this is to God, for example. The potential is within his knowledge, but the reality not – if we can speak of it in that way – a reality undreamed of, exciting, before us!

We may think that we’ve come to culminations like, for example, a hundred years ago. It was said in the scientific world that the textbooks could be closed, because nothing more could be discovered – and at that moment all kinds of things were discovered. Within the past ten years, human knowledge has doubled; it will double again in five years, it will double again in two-and-a-half years. The only way man can handle this incredible acceleration of what is available to him is as his consciousness is expanded, and he begins to live vitally in his creative self.

I spoke earlier of ritual as a way in which this will be done, and I want to clarify this. Ritual means – well, I said that – ritual involves co-operation, communication which makes co-operation possible, and communication which is love, cycles or rhythm, and organization. Because if we’re co operating together, we are going to be organized. Now, it might not be a tight, rigid order; nothing in nature is a tight, rigid order, except the things that man has a tendency to create. Everything else is alive and growing. All natural rituals are open-ended, that is, they destroy themselves even as they perform themselves. They pave the way for greater growth, greater co-operation, greater unity.

When it is said, esoterically, that this is the age of ritual, it doesn’t mean that we’re all going to start wearing robes and dancing around pentagrams out in the forest, and what not. It means that suddenly we realize that the only way we are going to begin to really make this leap is by communication together, co-operation together, understanding together, and so forth.

And then there is built the ultrahuman groups; and within the group, because it draws upon the power of the group, the individual is exalted and lifted up beyond what he could be lifted up otherwise – like in the space program, the many booster rockets that are necessary to get man to the moon. Each of us is a booster rocket for each other, and we lift each other to the heights. This is the glory of what we can offer to each other, and this is the glory that man will explore in this age.

So we stand upon this vast expansion of consciousness in which man will know no limit to where he can draw this expansion from: from each other, from books, from nature, from music, from art, from – perhaps even from avenues yet unexplored, – as man opens himself in trust, in courage, to this new phase of this exciting quest.

Now the Beloved can stand forth, the third one who emerged from Eden, the unity that stepped forth with man and waited for man through countless ages to learn through duality, to return to the ability to have duality, to have separation, but to manifest unity. And we are at that time now.

So as we go forth in this conference exploring this expansion of consciousness upward, outward, let us not place any limits upon it or upon ourselves. We have come a long way from Eden and we stand on the brink of the I AM, the full, unlimited, creative power of man.

Two years ago a film was made, based on a play called “The Royal Hunt of the Sun,” and it was the story of the conquest of the Incas by the Spaniards. Tonight, for entirely different reasons, I want to call my lecture The Royal Hunt of the Soul, and discuss with you some of the adventures involved in such a quest.

The great Jesuit palaeontologist, Teilhard de Chardin, brought forward out of time and consciousness the concept which for very long has been part of the esoteric tradition, that of the inherent life and intelligence within all things. He spoke of the withinness of matter and the processes by which that withinness externalized itself and sought through form to achieve the realization of potential. That the full realization of that potential came about when there was a total merging of the consciousness within matter with the whole, or the essence of consciousness, which he referred to as the Christ, or the Omega point.

Just as he put forward this highly stimulating concept in terms that can make it acceptable, probably to many more people than the same concept expressed in esoteric terms would; just as he placed this before man as a cosmic drama, as the life inherent in form seeks after its own highest potential, so we can look upon this same concept with reference to our own individual universes. And this is what we can call “The Royal Hunt of the Soul.”

Within each of us is matter of various degrees and various qualities. Not only that which makes up our physical form, but that which makes up other forms which are subtler than our physical senses can distinguish, but which are none the less quite present and real as part of our everyday experience – the matter of our emotional nature, for example, the matter of our mental nature.

And if we think that emotions and mind or thought do not really come under the concept of matter the way the body does, then I would refer you to a number of different kinds of research being done now to indicate the purely physical power of thought and feeling to effect physical change, and the measurement of the energy that is put out by such levels of consciousness.

One thing that our modern physical researches have indicated to us is that there is no essential difference between energy and matter. Within ourselves, within our bodies, within our feeling nature, within our mental nature, are various forms of energy or matter, all of which contain a withinness, an intelligence of life. This is not necessarily the life which we consider to be our life when we talk about “my life”, as opposed to “my death.”

If we examine ourselves for any length of time we will see quite clearly that what we call our life is not a consistent manifestation. It is, rather, a collection of many manifestations, of many kinds of experiences, many kinds of relationships. And each one of these different levels, or different approaches – and let’s call them by more customary terms – each one of these desires and thoughts and physical impulses manifest a definite energy and quality all of their own.

And during the time that such a quality is dominant in our being, we behave as though it were the totality of our being. But as soon as that desire or thought or physical impulse is either satisfied or demonstrated to be beyond satisfaction in the moment, and our attention shifts, then we come under the control of a different set of mental, emotional, physical impulses.

All of this could create for us a tremendous welter of confusion, and indeed for many people this is exactly what is created. That which rescues us from confusion is the fact that somewhere within us, or about us, or somewhere in relationship to all these other states, exists a state of consciousness which is not matter, which is not divided, which is not even a level per se, but is an essence. It is what we will call the soul. It is the power or the presence of synthesis. It is what we could just as easily call the Logos, if by Logos we mean that which gives meaning.

An interesting form of therapy that has come out in recent years, is called Logos Therapy. It was developed by a doctor who was placed into a German concentration camp during the war, and was one of the few who survived. And out of his experiences, which were not of a particularly pleasant nature, he formulated this particular psychological approach. Because he discovered that those individuals who survived the concentration camp experience, and the tremendous dehumanizing pressures to which the inmates were subjected, were those individuals who never lost the sense of meaning for their lives, or for what was happening to them. In some way they were consistently able to project meaning into their experiences and relate them. This ability to perceive meaning gave them a strength, indeed a coherency, that counteracted the disinter-grating effects of the pain, the lack of privacy and, indeed, all the suffering that was brought upon them.

The particular theory that he formulated was that the dominant search within an individual is the search for meaning – far more powerful than the pleasure principle, or the Adler’s search for power, or what have you.

It is not my intention to discuss psychological theories with you, but I do want to indicate that that is what I mean when I use the term Logos; it is the source of meaning. And the power of that presence is what relates, what would otherwise be unrelated elements of experience, into some kind of wholeness. That to me is the soul, the power of the soul; and to me the soul and its power are one and the same.
It gives to us the ability to perceive experience with some kind of unification, some kind of wholeness. If this were not possible, then certainly society as we know it would not be possible. Most likely, development as we know it would not be possible. In fact, we can look upon this quality of the Logos as embodying just exactly what we mean when we talk about the divine love and the power of love to unite and to draw all things into wholeness.

When we enter upon Earth-life, we enter into a dimension which in its own terms is perfectly whole; the ecological cycles indicate this – the way in which life moves through a cyclic progression back to where it started from. The cycle of photosynthesis, for example, and of the return to the soil of the elements which the plants require in order to continue the photosynthesis.

But man comes from a different order of wholeness. Man’s essential being – and this is what defines man – is that he has developed the capacity to enter this dimension of experience and bring with him the power of synthesis, the power to see things in terms of wholeness. And from the moment man begins to express himself, he is out on a search to try and find that wholeness in some way or other. And it is usually a search that is conducted with the mechanism of possession.

If I own things then this gives me the sense of being more whole and more complete. And it doesn’t matter whether what I am owning are material things or people, such as lots of friendships, or being popular, or whether it is intellectual knowledge, or beliefs or emotional content. It doesn’t matter on what level. There is this tendency to reach out and to draw to ourselves what will give us the sense of being whole or more complete.

When the Spaniards journeyed to Peru and encountered the rather incredible civilization of the Incas, one indeed of the highest civilizations that man has yet produced on the planet – and, by the way, a total theocracy – they represented a band of individuals, adventurers really, quite disunited, because the European tradition has never been famous for its ability to bring people together, and they encountered a civilization that was totally unified.

In fact, perhaps more so than a modern consciousness would find comfortable, because it was a completely regimented state under the absolute rule of the Inca who was considered to be a divine incarnation, indeed the Sun god in human form. And every individual who was part of that culture was considered to be in some way an extension of that one life, and regarded the Inca, the ruler, the emperor, not only as a ruler in a temporal sense, but actually as the source of their life and well being. And it is interesting in this play that what the Spaniards are after is gold, the metal of the Sun; whereas what the Incas have is the unifying power of life, also expressed and symbolized by the Sun.

Well, in a way this drama can be used as a symbol for what is happening within ourselves. Because we begin life, or at least our cognitive life, in quest of the Golden Empire, however we may express this to ourselves: the state of happiness, the state of material security, a state of bliss; a state of a Golden Age, New Age, where everything is happy and joyous, and things flow to us as we need them – indeed, the proverbial land of milk, honey, and whatever else makes life comfortable and happy.

The adventurers that go on this quest are the various elements of our physical being, our emotional being and our mental being; and naturally, each one seeks to find this wholeness in its own terms. Just like in the play, as best as I recall it, although I’m sure this would be historically true in any event, each of the adventurers sought to find from the treasure house of the Incas what had meaning to them: one sought fame, one sought power, one sought money, one sought women, one sought something else, adventure.

Each level of our being seeks to find meaning in its own terms, and by so doing denies meaning to all the other levels. For example, our body seeks certain equilibrium with life; to be fed when it is hungry, to find an even temperature, to find satisfaction of its desire to propagate itself through sexual activity, to sleep when it is tired, to move when it feels the need to expand energy, and so forth.

But many times, the satisfaction of these physical impulses lead to dissatisfaction on other levels. As for example, the creative individual who is busily at work painting a picture, but his body is busily at work starving because he hasn’t fed it for two or three days. He has been so much a part of a creative flow. Or the singer who is trying to develop a new melody, and all that comes forth are stomach rumblings because he has not eaten for awhile. Certain bodily things that move us out into activity when we might prefer not to be in activity; and likewise, certain emotional patterns that move us into relationships with people or with events, when mentally or physically we would prefer not to be so involved: the actor who adheres mentally and emotionally to the tradition that the show must go on even though they may be physically quite ill.

The story of Caruso who sang his last aria even as he was haemorrhaging to death and collapsed twice on the stage, – I believe it was twice, I’m not sure – coughing up blood, and then got up and sang some more. Because he refused to let the show down. When he finished singing, they hauled him off, and he died. A case in which the mind is imposing a satisfaction on the rest of the levels of being, of certain meaning, of certain fulfilment, which is ultimately damaging to the other levels.

Each of these levels, as I started out saying, is composed of matter, though matter of successively finer degrees of expression; and as a consequence, each of these levels expresses finiteness. Now, nothing that is finite can ever be whole; simply because it has a beginning, and it has an end. And where it begins and where it ends represents the dividing line between where something else begins and something else ends. And in order for one form to express, often other forms have to give way.

Each of these aspects of matter within ourselves, or the life within that matter, seeks to unite itself with its wholeness, to find meaning for its existence. Each of these levels tends to see this meaning in its own term, under its own particular point of view. But having found that fulfilment, assuming that it does, having found satisfaction of its point of view, we then become aware of all else that exists yet to be encompassed.

So the life that is within us, within the various elements of our being, seeks to unite itself ultimately with what we could call God, or the presence of the Logos, or the presence of the soul. Because there is that instinctive knowledge that ultimately that is the only point at which true satisfaction, true fulfilment and true meaning, will be found.

Life about us is filled up with many separate and often contradictory elements, and this is true about life within us as well. And if we attempt to meet them on that level alone, often we encounter the same confusion, the same conflict, the same contradiction, and we despair at finding meaning in life, and we search for this meaning. In classic phrases: “What is my purpose, what is my mission in life, why am I here?” We seek for something which will relate, help us to relate, all of the different elements of experience together.

Certainly the mind does this because the mind knows that if it can relate them together it can control them. And one of the things the mind loves to do is to control, even if it is only the passive control of understanding or of categorization. But the level on which true meaning exists is beyond the mind, unfortunately for the mind. Which means that often the true meaning of things cannot be described logically, cannot be expressed well in words, cannot be fitted into any framework. But yet it can be intuitive, it can be sensed; it can be experienced if an individual has experienced within himself a sense of the rightness of life, or the meaning behind, or the Logos principle, or the power of synthesis.

Often times, the only way meaning of any kind can be extracted from our experience is by going beyond self. A particular series of events may have no relevancy to our own being except as we can give ourselves to them, to that sequence, or to that person. For example, a stranger that comes in, someone whom we meet casually for a few moments, may have no relationship to us, and we may wonder, “What is the purpose of this meeting, why have I encountered this individual?” Well, the only meaning that may be possible is what we can give to it through our ability, for that brief instant, to see that person as part of our wholeness and as integral to our well being; therefore, to release from ourselves an ability to love that individual.

Each of these levels of our being, like the Spanish adventurers, seek the Sun, the Logos, the point of synthesis, the Omega point, so that they can be delivered from their state of separateness. And all of our religious and spiritual searching is involved in this quest, that the disparate parts of our being can come together into some wholeness and unity.

And through the ages man has developed many different kinds of routes to get to this fabled empire of wholeness: some go up over mountains, some go through valleys; some kind of twist around a bit; some require a great deal of physical energy, some require mental energy; some say, that you shouldn’t put forth any kind of energy at all, which, I suppose in its own way, is a kind of energy.

When man desires something outside himself, or relates himself to it, he is performing, indeed, a primal function, a primal meaning for his being here. If I desire this pillow for some reason, in one sense I am performing an action of personal quest, because I feel in some way this pillow is going to satisfy a desire. I like its colour; I like the designs on it. It’s soft to sit on, and it’s much nicer than not having a pillow of this nature. In which case I am hoping to find that equilibrium through possessing this pillow.

But then this pillow has intelligence, consciousness, life, and it may have been lying here on the floor wondering, “Well, what in heaven’s name am I doing here?” It, too, is involved in a quest for meaning, a quest for purpose, a quest for being, in a manner of speaking. And as soon as I relate to it, I can draw it into my circle of meaning. I draw out the withinness of the pillow. I give it expression.

This, I feel, is why in the New Age much of the spiritual unfoldment of man will revolve around creative activity; that is, actually working with matter to make that matter as perfect as possible. Because in that way he is drawing out of it potentialities which are there. Now, I’m quite sure, just as well, that man will have to learn, and is learning, how to be able to relate more directly to what is within that matter so that he can draw it out in the way that it would like to be drawn out.

A truly creative relationship – for example, many writers experience the phenomena, and I imagine other artists do too, though I can only speak from the writing point of view, in which you begin with an idea but as you go along the thing takes on its own life. You become aware that you’re relating to something which has a will of its own, and your function as a creator is not to impose your will upon it but to give its innerness a chance to express.

A sculptor, for example, working with clay or with stone – great sculptors are those who have not imposed their design upon the stone, but have sensed the design within the stone seeking expression, and have simply given it freedom, given it release. That’s the difference between a person who is truly creative and a person who is trying to dominate through the images that he has, and simply make the world about him a reflection of himself. Because that is only the satisfaction of certain levels and not the achievement of wholeness.

When we have the experience of having created something, and we have related to it, and it is an experience of tremendous rightness; in that moment, wholeness fills our world. We may experience this as great exhilaration or joy or peace; but there is that sense that for once in my life I’ve done something right. I have really struck a balance, an achievement. I have accomplished something that is greater than what I am, and I can take a pride in it and a joy in it without in any way feeling self-involved, because I have been lifted beyond myself.

When we talk about achieving perfection in the New Age, making sure that everything is beautiful and right, this is really what we are saying: that man learns to relate from the centre of his Logos power, the centre of his soul to what is within matter; whether that is what we call inanimate matter, like stone or cloth, or animate matter, like vegetables, gardens, animals and people. And by relating in that way, by establishing these kinds of relationships, by doing the things that enable such relationships to be established and opening ourselves to them, we find the experience of wholeness coming to us.

It doesn’t have to be a totally inward search. In fact, many people find the inward search quite difficult, mainly because they don’t know just what it means to go in, to go within. They move through a maze of emotional and mental projections, and do not come to any point.

Various techniques of meditation are very good to help create that point, to establish it in consciousness. In fact, meditation, ideally speaking, is simply a process of digestion and assimilation in which we achieve enough peace in the moment to allow all of the whirly-burly of forces around us to kind of coalesce.

And it isn’t so much important to see what they are coalescing into but to see where they are coalescing. What is pulling them together, what is that point of synthesis within us, and it is something to which we can never put a word and have that word mean anything, really, but it is something that we can experience. And once having found it in our silences we can begin to find it in our activities.

But the role of, certainly a place like Findhorn, demonstrates the balance of such an inward meditation with achieving the same thing through relationship, because everything is achieved through relationship. Whether we are relating with inward states or outward states, it is essentially the same thing.

Our senses and our physical body is our greatest tool, our greatest asset in this Royal Hunt for the Soul, because it is the mechanism by which we can relate outwardly. And the whole physiological process that makes it up, the way we perceive, the way we are aware, the way we’re structured to function and to perceive, enables us to have certain kind of relationships.

And if we understand that functioning and that structure, we know the kind of relationships we’re likely to establish with things, with people and with events. And that’s a great tool because there’s no reason at all why we should not and cannot use what comes to us through our senses as a means toward experiencing the wholeness that can also be experienced through diving inward through meditation.

There’s no reason why these cannot be complementary. And indeed, until they are, and until we see that subjective and objective states are essentially the same thing, and that whether we’re going inward in meditation or going outward in activity, we are doing the same thing, we will never fully achieve the synthesis and unity of consciousness that is the hallmark of the New Age. I suppose this is why I see such promise as a spiritual technique in all forms of creative art as a means of educating man in terms of his spirit in the future. And everything that helps him to become more aware on a sensory level, not to lose himself in the senses, but to use the senses to discover himself.

The desires and the thoughts can be the same thing, because these establish relationships. All that we need to do, which is not always a simple thing, is not to allow those relationships to get caught on their own level, but to keep them so that they relate. That is, become totally involved in desire, or totally intellectual, or totally involved on a physical level. But all of these have to be able to relate together.

But none the less what we do relate to in a desire fashion – if I desire that pillow, it is not only because of something within me, but it is something within that pillow. It is a two-way exchange. Now, you may say that sounds pretty crazy; it conjures up pictures of walking past a boutique, and a pillow yells out and says, “Here I am! Take me.” Which happens all the time in American telly commercials. But if there is nothing in that pillow in its particular arrangement of energy and life that had any correspondence to something in me, I would not be attracted to it. Because there is something that has a correspondence, I can use that relationship to discover something about myself. And from that discovery I can move on to increasing awareness of why I function as I do. Which is very important if I want to clear the tangle of confusion and begin to find my way inward or outward to the wholeness.

All the spiritual principles we have – love one another, give of oneself, if you would find yourself you have to lose yourself, and so on – all express this principle of utilizing relationship, utilizing a giving and a receiving as means of discovering the experience of wholeness; unlike the Spaniards who destroyed the Inca civilization, and yet got very little from it. Although this can happen in the inner man as his mind and his desires take over the spiritual quest and rule them completely. In which case what we arrive at is simply either belief, or knowledge, or the will to believe a certain fanaticism, a certain emotional commitment to an idea or to a place or to a person; none of which represent the goal, none of which represent wholeness.

To believe something is not the same thing as to be something. Certainly the mind and emotions can conquer and appear to rule the soul, but in point of fact the moment that that happens, the soul withdraws and is not there. Just as the moment that the Inca structure was conquered and the Inca was killed, the Inca civilization ceased to exist – certainly in the way that it had existed before. So man’s approach to his higher nature has to be a gentle one and to realize that within himself these different levels are seeking wholeness, are seeking meaning.

There is this Logos impulse behind us and within us. And yet that meaning is there. We do not have to create it. We simply have to open to it and to give of ourselves to it. We demand that our meanings be permanent, that they be cosmic; but they don’t have to be. Why should something have any meaning beyond the moment? Why should a meaning that is – or an experience that is meaningful within two or three minutes be any less meaningful than something that has cosmic significance? There is no reason.

What is man looking for, when he looks for meaning, is permanency. That is exactly what he will never find on this level, because it is – this level – is not designed to manifest permanency. Why we look for our beliefs, and we commit ourselves to a belief – because if I believe in a Christian doctrine, or the Buddhist doctrine, or the Hindu doctrine, that gives me a sense of permanency. I can fit everything into it, and it all is very nice until something else comes along and challenges it with a new meaning. Then we have religious wars, wars of meaning.

It is only that we are able to relate creatively to what is happening, to give to it and to receive from it, and to derive understanding from it, that the meaning unfolds itself. I believe it was Steiner, pretty sure it was Steiner, who described the technique of: if you want to understand what a flower is, you just let the flower unfold into you. You don’t take it apart, and you don’t think about it; you let it talk to you very subtly.

It is this language of silence, this subtle language of meaning which everything is speaking; everything is expressing the Logos presence that we need to learn. This is the Royal Hunt of the Soul, the adventure of our various levels to come together and find wholeness. And all experiences that we have relate to this. There is no experience that we should condemn ourselves for, feel guilty about. But every experience should be sought to be understood. If we decide that it has created more confusion for us, then we simply don’t do it again. But it is not to be condemned but to be understood. That in the light of that understanding we may more quickly discern our individual route over the mountains, through the valleys, across the rivers, into our own fabled empire of the Sun.

When we meet together just once and only share a couple of hours, what has to be communicated is not adequately covered in words or even in concepts but in our presence together, and all that that can convey on many levels of communication. It’s been fortunate that there has been an opportunity on this trip to Portland to spend time with different ones that we’ve met. For those of you who have been part of the three-day sessions that have just finished, some of what I say tonight will be familiar to you, but we’re going to talk about the New Age.

I want to begin by defining my terms, but with this one thought: that the New Age, like man himself, suffers from too much definition and too much bringing down into concrete expectation, at the present time. So the definition I give you, and which we will elaborate upon this evening is, I hope, very loose and will not be a restriction on your thinking.

Many people wonder where the concept of the New Age comes from. It does have a scientific basis for those of you who may be interested in that kind of thing.. There is a phenomenon in astronomy called the precession of the equinoxes, in which certain relationships that the Earth forms with an imaginary circle projected into the heavens move according to time, and every two-thousand years this point, equinoctial point, specifically the spring equinoctial point, moves along this imaginary circle called the celestial equator and enters a new constellation or a new area delineated by a constellation or by a zodiacal sign. We’re moving out of the sign of Pisces and into the sign of Aquarius, so we get the term: the Age of Aquarius.

For those who have studied or have come through various of the esoteric or occult schools – theosophy, the arcane school, anthroposophy the New Age also has more subtler meanings. We see, according to these teachings, man as being on a centuries-long processional in which his very essence, his consciousness, his soul, goes through an individual and a collective process of development and from time to time is exposed to new energies of stimulations, new lessons, as it were, new opportunities. And every time one of these periods comes it marks the beginning of a new cycle or a New Age. So from that standpoint, the New Age is seen not as a physically measurable time-sequence, but it is seen as a very intimate soul drama, something happening in the subtler realms of man’s being, in the planetary being, but none the less real for that.

From another point of view, if we just examine things from the standpoint of our material civilization just in the past seventy years, man’s consciousness has accelerated incredibly; not necessarily his being, his total being, but his intellect and his technology and his knowledge of the world has accelerated. It’s only sixty years ago, fifty years ago, they were publishing in pulp science-fiction magazines the drama of man going to the moon. And my father, who is a science-fiction fan, has quite a collection of these old magazines – Wonder Tales, Weird Tales, Astonishing Tales, and so on. It is interesting to read in them how people were thinking just fifty years ago, projecting man’s step into space, but seeing it, say, projected a hundred or two-hundred years beyond their time. And just in that interval between 1920 and now, man has – several times now walked on the moon.

It is projected that human knowledge is going to double in the next ten years or so, and then it is going to double again after that in the five years following. So that is a quadrupling of human knowledge in the next fifteen years at the present state of the acquisition of that knowledge. Now that in itself is an incredible concept, and it means that the great – to me the truly great – threat to human consciousness does not come from ecology, or nuclear war, or rebellion, or a break down in race relations. It comes from simply an accumulation of too much knowledge and an accompanying tendency for man to become overly specialized and moved into particular niches of consciousness in which he loses his relationship and his relatedness with other people, and with other disciplines, and indeed with life itself and the world about him.

Man’s entry into this dimension, this physical plane, this Earthly sphere, has brought to his consciousness experiences which he could not have to the same degree from more subtle realms of being, experiences of great separation, or, I should say, distinction and uniqueness. Here he can experience the various polarities of being: heat and cold, good and evil, light and dark, which are not as open to his experience on subtler realms. And all of this distinction and uniqueness does not necessarily imply separation, that is the inability to relate or to be one in our ability to share and communicate, if we see communication as a form of a communion or of true coming together.

But yet that is how we experience the world. We have manoeuvred it into patterns of separation, and with the increase in human knowledge this separation is far more likely to become enhanced; because our tendency will be, faced by the immensity of what there is to be known, to pick out that little bit that we feel we can cope with. And of course, it is a tendency for most human beings to vastly underestimate what they are capable of doing, and capable of being. And so we select our little niche in life and settle down to doing one thing extremely well, but being unaware of all the other avenues of development which are going on, and this creates an increasingly splintered effect.

We see this happening in terms of our city life as more and more people are brought into less and less acreage, brought together. It could conceivably create in the complexities of relationships a deepening of understanding. Teilhard de Chardin points this out in his particular evolutionary vision, in which things move from simple to the complex; and through a process of complexification, greater and greater levels of consciousness are achieved. But we don’t actually see that happening in human experience.

We find that when we are brought into areas of great concentrations of people that our tendency is to become increasingly concentrated with in ourselves, to pull within ourselves, and to become pin-pointed on that particular bit of life which we can most easily deal with – perhaps some of the non-involvements that we hear about on the part of people – simply because we’ve reached a point where there is, simply, in our consciousness, in our awareness, too many things that could conceivably involve us to a point where we would become dissipated; so many calls upon our time and our attention, so many possible avenues to dissipate our energies and to call forth our inner resources, and perhaps even to dig deep into our core of being and expose it.

So up go the defenses, and up go our particular ability to focus ourselves on ourselves and on our separate patterns. And yet at the same time, I am sure all of us can be aware that within my generation, in your generation, within the generation following mine, are these motions toward greater relatedness. We say, “Let us do it together; let us pull things together; let us have a greater sense of oneness.” And yet some of the avenues we use for this oneness are in terms of causes. That brings us together up to a point, but a cause is not sufficient to enable us to make that final leap between soul and soul, between personality and personality, in which we see a person and unite with that person because of what they are and because of the fact that they are; not because of what they believe or what they don’t believe, or that they are shoulder to shoulder with us, manning whatever particular barricade seems important to us at the moment, but simply because they are part of the living whole. At some point we are going to reach that ability; we are reaching that ability to relate to people, not because of similarity of interest or similarity of function, necessarily, but because we are people, and we are alive.

Well, the New Age is a concept that has come to the fore very powerfully within the past five or six years. It has, of course, always been spoken about in occult circles, in esoteric circles, for roughly the past hundred years. Back as far as the early Theosophists they were writing in terms of man’s moving into a new cycle, a new unfoldment of human consciousness and the descent into human experience, or the unfoldment into human experience, of a new stimulus, a new awareness, a new relationship to man, to God, to life. But, of course, by the very nature of occult, esoteric knowledge and the protectiveness of many of those who were in the early movement, it remains just exactly what the words imply: hidden, secret, and for the few – until fairly recently when the concepts of the Age of Aquarius have been brought out and have become part of our general vocabulary in our music, in our culture.

But for many people the concept of the Age of Aquarius, the New Age, is in some ways synonymous with a process of, well, not exactly change – change, yes – but let us say, destructive change or complete overthrow of the patterns of the past. In many people’s minds the Age of Aquarius is something that young people do or believe in, and older generations tend to see it as a threat. And of course I imagine they have good reason. But the Age of Aquarius needs to be revisited and re-examined from that point of view, because if it is ever going to manifest, if the New Age is going to become something more than a concept that groups like ourselves get together and share, then we realize – we have to realize – that we ourselves must now become the architects and the builders of that age, and that new culture and that new society.

There is a tendency in the occult world – not only there, it is a human tendency in religion and in politics and in society, in general – to wait for the greater forces to show us the way, or to do the thing for us, or to provide the blue prints, whether that is the government or whether it is the scientists, or whether it is the theologians, or whether it is the Masters of the Hierarchy, or whatever particular figure or group of figures we have erected as our personal or collective authority point. That in some way all these great events and changes are going to be set into motion by some cosmic principle: God, or life, or evolution, or what have you. And certainly on one level that is true. I would be the last to dispute that. But let us go beyond the words and see that evolution and life and God and the Hierarchy are simply concepts that we have created. I do not mean by that that they do not have an objective existence, necessarily, but that our awareness of them is created daily within our consciousness.

I remember several years ago reading a delightful account. It was a book written by Cyril Scott, although he published it anonymously. It was called The Initiate. And it dealt with – it was his memoires – and it dealt with his experience, as a young man, with a man whom he called a master or an initiate; and a number of the chapters were devoted to this man’s deliberate attempts to go against the common theosophical concept of what a master and an initiate was, so that he could break down, in the minds of the people he was working with, the particular ideation that they had formed, a sort of saint like figure, meditating on a Himalayan mountain top and surrounded with vast auras of light. And instead, he would sometimes appear as a cigar-smoking, rough-talking, John Wayne-type character. And not so much to – out of a personal whim – but to shatter preconceptions that were, in this particular instance, with these particular people to whom he appeared in that regard, creating limitations for them.

That is what I mean when I say the Hierarchy and all these various concepts are man created; that is, we each have our own personal idea of what a greater force represents, and we don’t even have to go to that extent to see that happening. We each have our own personal idea of what we represent, and what our husbands or our wives or our next-door neighbours represent.

And yet man is so great. He is so dynamic. He is so infinite in his capacities for unfoldment and change that none of these ideas can complete or adequately encompass what each of us is. So that we may think that the man or woman we’ve been living with for a number of years is familiar to us, but they have depths and heights beyond our ability to cognize, to be aware of, if we approach them on that level of familiarity.

So to get back to the New Age, lest we get too far diverted. Is it something which is coming to us as part of an evolutionary pattern instigated and sponsored and directed by great forces, whatever they may be or whoever they may be, or is it something which is a bit more intimate and real than that? I suggest that the latter is the case. Within each of us lies that particular attunement and capacity upon which
the New Age must be founded. That is, either we do it or it doesn’t get done; either we unfold it from within ourselves in terms of our relationship with people, our relationship with life, our buildingness within life, or else it simply doesn’t get manifested, at least where we are personally concerned.

There is so much now being written and lectured about, concerning the New Age and what it will entail, greater love and greater light and greater brotherhood among mankind, and so forth – that we do not lack for definitions or ideas of what the New Age is here to manifest, what this new evolutionary step is here to manifest. We are not starved for information. Therefore it becomes, then our particular glory and our particular heritage and challenge to make all of that living within us, to realize that we are not.

I will rephrase this. The New Age concept does not call us to become members of a special group, or a special movement. It asks us primarily to realize our timeless relationship with life, to cease our role playing, in this case our spiritual role playing, and to get down to the basics that have always been true. What is our relationship with ourselves, with people, with things, with life?

Never mind higher levels of being and reincarnation and all of that. Even though it may be objective fact and has its place, it needs to be founded in our consciousness, on our personal realization of what we are and where we are. Up to this point, no one has yet been able to prove reincarnation. I am using this only as an example. A person may believe in it. I may believe in it, for example. I may have experiences that indicate its truth to me, but the very nature of the experiences make it somewhat difficult to convey them to you. But is that even important? Is the New Age and the people that are moving toward that particular concept made up of real people who believe in certain things? Are they card-carrying members of certain spiritual societies?

I suggest to you that the New Age is a continuing manifestation of the very life that we have always been leading and is essentially not a time phenomena at all but a timeless phenomena. It is, not a cycle, something existing from 1970 to 3070. It is not contained within 2000 year periods or 2500 year periods. It is deeper than that. We are asked to go deeper than that. We are asked to become aware through our experience in life through our openness to life and openness to ourselves and to people, of the timeless aspects of our being, because that is where the root and the seeds of all our tomorrows exist.

I am personally convinced that there is a blue print that exists for the New Age society, but it is within our hearts and minds as we free ourselves from an expectation outwards into an awareness inwards.
Now I do not mean by this a retreat inwards into isolation, because actually we cannot really know who we are fully except in our relationships with others and with people. We are not isolated beings. We are defined by our whole life process which involves my relationships with you, and your relationships with me and my relationships with all of nature and with the world as a whole, and so forth. So I cannot become isolated to know who I am, or to go within and to be aware. I require others. I require the flow of communication and love and experience between us to do this; but I also need to strive in consciousness, to work in consciousness toward a timeless state. It is where I am not burdened by the past and its memories, and I am not anxious for the future, but I am aware of what is happening right now, and what I am creating right now in terms of my thinking and feeling, in terms of my action and my relationships, so that I am an alive being.

Now we all have these experiences. In some branches of psychology they are called peak experiences. But a great deal of research now indicates that they are not only peak experiences but something a person can move into on an almost continual basis, rather than going up to it and coming down into the valley and up to the peak and back down into the valley again. And one of the characteristics of an individual, who for one moment, for that moment, for that experience, has suddenly become totally alive and totally functioning, is that he loses his sense of time. He is aware of the fact that he is right now.

This can be triggered in our lives by almost anything. We can hear a song, we can be with a person, we can be out doing some work, we could be reading a book, and all at once it is almost as if all of our cylinders switch on and were really functioning. We have a sense of being sure and confident and aware of the life moving within us, and in that moment past and future dissolve and become one into this tremendous surge of being; and it may last for just a few seconds or a few moments and then it moves out until the next time.

Of course, these particular awarenesses, or these peak experiences, may come on us unaware. That is, we don’t know what it was that caused them. But after awhile we become aware that they are caused by a sudden, or an awakening I should say, of interest and awareness in what is happening around us, but an awareness characterised by a quality that I could only call love, a quality of being one with it.

I am interested in it and in this experience, not for anything it has to offer to me. I am not approaching it from an economic stand point. What does this person or this experience have to give me for my total evolutionary benefit? But it is just that at that moment I am aware that I am, and it is, and I don’t want to say any more about it, although I perhaps could. We don’t want to dissolve into inarticulateness. It is not a primitive state we’re after, but a state which, at the moment, human vocabulary has not geared itself to, because people are very, very willing to talk about their sorrows and the things that have happened that have caused them pain, but the joys and the ecstasies of our lives we do not verbalize so much, do not share so much. We hold them close because they are so precious, and I suppose we are a bit afraid that if we – Well, we’ve had this experience and tried to share it with someone, and that person doesn’t quite grasp it, doesn’t quite see it in quite the way we’ve seen it. It may be because so many times the thing that caused this is not part of a logical cause and effect relationship. It is an irrational thing to verbalize it. So what! That daffodil looked pretty! I don’t quite grasp why it turned you on so.

But yet I feel as we continue to move, we have to do this if the New Age is going to become a real concept and not just something that we talk about: like in the Christian church they talk about going to heaven, in occult circles we talk about going into the New Age. And many times there is no difference. If we want to move it to a level of reality, we’re going to have to develop a vocabulary of joy and ecstasy.

I would suggest here that perhaps part of the reason that we haven’t fully done this is because we do not understand yet what joy is. We see it as the opposite of sadness, or we see it as a release from the pressures of life, or we see it as something that I must do something to achieve. But we have not fully identified it with life itself, or with the very fact of being and becoming. And so, we restrict joy or ecstasy in our culture to being a polarity. One end of a spectrum of experience, ranging from absolute agony to ecstasy.

I feel we’re going to have to change that. I know we’re going to have to change it. I don’t know exactly how we’re going to change it, because I feel each person is going to have to, this is work that each of us is going to have to do in the laboratory of our own being, in our own living experience.

So I just throw this out to you as a suggestion, that it has been said both in religious and occult circles that man grows through his suffering and that the greatest growth comes when something has shocked him and has pierced his being and has awakened him out of a complacency. Which of course is true. As soon as an individual becomes static something has to wake him up, something has to pierce that. But it does not have to be suffering. I feel the only reason that that particular philosophy has arisen is because man’s consciousness has become oriented in such a way that he has never fully on a mass basis understood what joy is or what bliss is, and so obviously he has limited it just as he has limited himself.

And yet the research that is being done, say in, what is called humanistic psychology by people like Maslow and Rogers, Carl Rogers, and others, indicate that man has an intrinsic, inherited, instinctual motion toward growth and expansion and toward joy. And it doesn’t have to be prompted by the environment. You don’t have to force someone to learn. You provide – you take away the things that would inhibit that person, that growth, that would limit it, and there will arise from within that being, from within that individual, its own natural response, its own desire to expand.

I see the New Age as a concept which is being presented to human consciousness, not to – not in the way of a prophesy, but as almost a call to arms, a signal to begin doing it or living it. Well, then we say ‘what does that mean and how now do I live it?’ That question arises because – will in the very nature of the problem itself that we have become external oriented, or oriented to external guidance to such an extent that we have failed to recognize the fullness of the potential for wisdom and insight that exists within us, as it merges with the wisdom of experience and the wisdom of the whole, operating through other people, within other people.

The place where Marie and I met is a community in Northern Scotland called Findhorn. Findhorn is rather remarkable because it exists in a, what we call, trailer park. It’s taken over a part of the land in a trailer park. And when you go to this place, it is in every sense of the word like entering into a different world. In fact there is even a definite physiological manifestation to it, there is a physical manifestation to it, when just in crossing a certain boundary line, an invisible boundary line, between the limits of this community and the rest of the trailer park, or the rest of the area around it. And some people, just within a twenty-four hour period of crossing over this boundary line, became quite physically ill for a period of time, or have various physical manifestations.

And yet all of this has come about – what they are doing – They have – Well, it is a little hard to put it in just a few words. It is an impossible place to describe. The easiest thing is to say that it is reminiscent of a kibbutz. It’s a community, but it is not a commune. People do not share things in common there, except their work and their dedication to each other and to establishing or anchoring or manifesting new patterns for human culture. In many fields, art and music and drama, in agriculture, in education, in human relations – all of these are seen as valid areas for change and experimentation. It is not a commune in the sense that each family and each person there is economically independent. He owns his own home. He has to take care of himself. He has to support himself. And yet within the life of the community there is this tremendous drawing together, truly a community and not just a group of people living in proximity. People who come in there, who are not accustomed to it, have a tremendous physical impact to the vibrations that have been established. It usually passes after a couple of days, and for many people it doesn’t manifest itself at all. The place is a place of great energy, but it is energy that has been created by the individuals who have caught a vision of saying: ‘If since the world as it is going appears to me to be moving in a non-creative direction, I will go within myself in working with other people to whom I am attracted, and I will draw forth from there a creative power, – creative power that is a power of life, of love, of community. And I will anchor this through my work in some way’.

The work they have been doing is basically agricultural, but now they are extending that into other fields, of art, as I say, art and drama and music and printing, and so on.

And this particular place has had quite an impact throughout Britain with a number of other groups, it’s the Sufi movement within Britain is aligning itself to a considerable degree with Findhorn, and the two are working in quite close cooperation. And I’ve had the great pleasure of meeting working with one of the men who is a leader of the Sufi movement in Britain. And their thrust is equally away from teaching, away from imparting spiritual information per se, and towards assisting individuals to become, right where they are, an embodiment of the principles of the New Age, inner relationships with people, to put it into action in other words, and to get that creative life moving within them.

I see the New Age as representing a reorientation of man’s vision of himself and of his relationship to the whole.

If we look back in past history we see that most of the great cultural changes and the cycles, the new cycles that have started like the one initiated by Jesus, or the one initiated by Buddha, or by Zoroaster, or by Sri Krishna, present to man new awarenesses of his relationship to the whole and yet in some ways the same relationship, the same awarenesses. That is what is happening now, except that it is happening not from a single source, not from a single world teaching, for example, but it is happening from many directions, from many sources, from all ages, from many people, even though they have no – do not – are not initiated into the jargon of the esoteric world; that there is a decided manifestation, or communication, of a new vision of man, which encompasses the following things: that he is an infinite being composed of great potential beyond what he is utilizing; that there are other methods for him to use to grow and to expand, other than fear and repression, punishment; that joy, that love, that self-esteem, that working together in communities based on self-esteem and each person contributing their uniqueness to the whole, offer more potential for man’s future; that man is part of an organic whole, part of a natural whole, is from the whole, but that his well-being, his survival, is dependent on the well-being of the wholeness, and that man himself contains the wholeness within himself.

We are not isolated fragments spinning through space and time. We are the wholeness, and our concept of evolution, of growth is, in one sense, nothing more than our deepening realization of the fact that we are the wholeness. We are not evolving into time, we are not evolving into space, or into distant consciousnesses; we are evolving into ourselves, or evolving from within ourselves. And that person who is at one and at peace and in wholeness with himself manifests that same wholeness with others in his environment, – not necessarily sameness, not necessarily even agreement, but the ability to manifest a sense of unity and create a disagreement if that is necessary.

In the travelling that Myrtle and I have done, and in encountering different groups and in talking with different people and in our own work we find that increasingly throughout the world the emphasis with those people who are now dedicating themselves in consciousness to the concept of being gateways within themselves for a new consciousness, a new light, a new evolution, to become active upon the planet, that the attention is moving increasingly toward the realization that the New Age, in its promise, in its reality, exists within us and must unfold from within us, through our awareness and understanding of our selves, in whatever way that understanding comes to us, and through our action and creative attitude and creative relationship with life.

So though there is the astronomical data that gives us perfect justification for saying we are entering a New Age, there is astrological information, there is occult information, various information coming from higher realms and subtler realms of awareness and consciousness, telling us of the changes that are upon us, there are prophesies that are made, dealing with forthcoming events, forthcoming changes; yet it all returns to that creative source, which for each of us personally, and for mankind collectively, remains the creative centre and that is our own consciousness, our own being and our own life.

I don’t have a title for a talk tonight. What I want to do is to share with you what could be called “a personal vision.” In your present college programme a great deal of emphasis is being given to previous lectures that I’ve made here and to the book Revelation. But what I would like to do is to share sort of an encapsulated version, the essence of what I’d like to try to communicate, and you can use that perhaps as a guide to wading through all the other lectures.

In fact a number of the lectures before were made with two views in mind: one was to communicate something within the community, and the other was with a knowledge that these were tapes that were going to be sent out on the mailing list. But while I’m here this time I feel there are some particular topics that I would like to try and cover, and to more specifically address myself to things happening in the community, or about to happen in the community, in the year ahead. But some of these talks might not be so suitable for a mailing list, but making best use of the time here.

There’s a sign-up sheet out on the bulletin board for the Sex and Identity series. I asked someone why they didn’t put up two sign-up sheets, one for sex, and one for identity; but unfortunately the tapes came together so you take them together. But I would like to give at least a talk and probably two talks next week on that topic and bring those tapes up to date a bit and address myself to some more areas of that same subject.

Tonight however, I want to give a more all-encompassing view, my world view. A centre like Findhorn exists because a planetary birth is taking place and men and women of many cultures are now in the process of becoming the instruments through which this birth can take place. Certainly things are happening in the realms of nature with the devas, the elementals, and probably in kingdoms that we are unaware of. But we are human beings. We tend to interpret things from the perspective of the human kingdom; and the birth of a new world, the birth of a New Age, is probably best considered as an action taking place within human consciousness. If changes are not made in human consciousness, the rest of the world and all the other kingdoms can undergo transformation and we would fail to recognize it; so we would fail to enter a new world. We might actually find ourselves not part of any world in that case.

So in a very real degree what we are asked to engage in is psychological change. The birth of a new planet is basically the personal birth of a new individuality. The birth of a new world is the birth of a new image of man, collectively and individually; and Findhorn, like many individuals and centres also striving to embody this planetary action, is a womb within which this birth can occur.

What are some of the characteristics of this birth from my perspective? And understand that you are receiving a point of view and an awareness and an attunement which is operating through a particular ‘vehicle. Any one of you in the course of time in your own unfoldment will most likely come to perceive and to embody, not a different point of view in essence, but quite likely more and more facets of this one vision taking birth.

We begin with man. Man as I see him is a being who stands in a crossover point in evolution. Man is straddling two dimensions of life. He is part of the natural environment, the ecological environment. He is part of those worlds which we call the worlds of form and matter. He has roots reaching back into the organic and inorganic history of the planet, and his body and its particular kind of native intelligence has evolved through the long processes of life’s evolution upon this planet.

Then there is an aspect of man which could be called extraterrestial. Not that it comes here in any kind of craft but only that it is not a product of earth’s evolution. It is a product of an evolutionary process which is beyond this planet, probably beyond the scope of any particular planet. It is cosmic. That aspect of man has in a sense been invoked by the earth aspect. When a certain point of dynamic tension was reached in evolutionary history, this invocation took place. The ancient texts say that the Lords of Flame descended upon the earth and kindled the spark and the flame of mind began to burn.

But then there is a third aspect of man, and it, to me, is the real aspect. When I talk about my identity, that is the aspect that I refer to. It is outside of an evolutionary process. It is certainly native to the earth, but it’s native to the stars. It’s beyond the cosmos, as we can astronomically perceive it, and it’s beyond time. It is dimensionless. This aspect could be called the divine self, It’s an aspect of man within which he relates in oneness to all other aspects of the universe. At that level man and deva are one, man and elemental are one, man and the stars are one, and we are probably one with kingdoms of life, as I say, of which we have no present knowledge.

The source identity – this source identity to me is what is seeking birth or seeking greater externalization through form, because it, and it alone, has the capacity to resolve the many dichotomies and paradoxes that are born in the realm of form, like good and evil, light and dark, male and female, spirit and matter.
When man emerged from this source consciousness he then began to take on – well, he required the creation of a state of dynamic tension which could produce energy. And in this case, this state was created through this intermeshing of a highly organized, highly evolved and highly intelligent material self, or earth self, and a highly ephemeral, highly refined, almost star-like high energy self which we could call the spirit, the spiritual self.

When these two come together, they are not in those two extreme states native; so they must work at relating, they must work at blending. But out of that work something is generated; and that which is generated is a new form of life, a new body, (It might be called a light body except that the way a number of metaphysical groups mean light body is that at some point the spiritual self amalgamates the physical self and that is not quite what I mean.) There is created a vehicle which is the synergetic blending of spirit and matter in such a way that that vehicle is neither spirit nor matter. Don’t try to think of it in terms of a body like a physical body. It can function through a physical body. A person can be in a physical body and yet, psychologically, psychically, spiritually, in all ways, be functioning through this transcendental form.

That transcendental form is the true form of humanity. It has, in the house of a parent, it’s the parent who holds ultimate authority, because the parent is ultimately responsible for what takes place in that household. But when the son or daughter becomes the man or woman and is on his or her own, they have the responsibility.

So this concept of the term “Beloved” to me conveys not just a nice, cosy, warm relationship with God, but rather the realization that life is placing upon myself a very intimate, and very intense, and very real kind of responsibility not the sagging shoulders, weight of the world, bow your head kind of responsibility, but one that is joyous and uplifting and exhilarating because it is a recognition of what I am. It is an opportunity to at least make a small step toward affirming my role, my creative role, in the world process.

Now if I define God as a presence of supreme life and creative intelligence, a source with which I may merge to also express source-like qualities, then my image of myself must undergo alteration. I cannot be simply a tool nor an instrument in the hands of a being separate from myself. I cannot be humble in the sense of seeing myself in an unrealistic perspective which casts me into a position where I am simply the recipient of life energies, things happen to me because of the forces outside my control. True humility is the sense, to my way of thinking, of a vision that enables me to see my responsibility to an evolving wholeness, and to recognize that I am a facet of a great organism, a great being. Yet at the same time I am also that being, not a fragment of it. I am the wholeness of that being, expressing in a very particular way; and if that wholeness is to be affirmed and realized then I must affirm your position in that being and see you in a realistic perspective, in a perspective of oneness and brotherhood.

The divinity that is within me is the most difficult thing, I’ve found, for people to come to grips with. We want to be divine, we want God realization, but yet our tendency is to play games with it, to perceive it in terms of phenomena, or in terms of becoming imbued with miraculous powers.

But there is something very commonplace about divinity that I think gets overlooked, except in places like Findhorn – one of the strengths of this centre. Somewhere in this world, after all, there’s a divinity that’s making little pebbles; and there’s a divinity working away at rocks with the tools of wind and waves; and there’s a divinity that grows little blades of grass and tiny little flowers that hide behind larger flowers; and there’s a divinity that makes mountains; and there’s a divinity that encompasses oceans; there’s a divinity that does everything that needs to be done to express itself, no matter how big or how small or how large or how minute. And it does it with a sense of: “If I’m an ocean I have to be an ocean; if I’m a pond I have to be a pond. I am what I need to be in this place, in this time, so that the whole can be made manifest.” Divinity is a sense of: “I love the place where I am at and what I can contribute to the whole.” Divinity is a sense of that awareness which strives for excellence in what it does. If I am cleaning the floor that is as divine, as God-involved, as being in meditation, or speaking to a hundred thousand people at the Houston astrodome.

Divinity is commonplace, but yet at that point the commonplace ceases to be such and becomes miraculous and spectacular. Divinity however, this third element, this impulse toward transcendency, demands that it will express itself. It demands that in some fashion spirit and matter will come together to give it birth; and its objectives do not embrace keeping spirit and matter comfortable. Its objectives embrace drawing out of spirit and matter that which will dissolve them as separate polarities but express them as a synthesized wholeness.

Therefore divinity in some ways means death as well as birth. It means courage to grow, courage to expand, to change, to be open to the forces within one that would lead out and transcend different stages of self-awareness . Yet, paradoxically, divinity is that which will seek to perfect the stages of self for it is through that balance and excellence of manifestation that this synthesis can best be achieved,

We seek after, in many cases, images of divinity, the symbols of divinity rather than the reality. We seek after that which we are not and forget that divinity is what we are, not as a form necessarily but yet as a form; not in our present psychological make up but yet in some way behind that psychological make up, So in our time in history an energy, and a world that manifests that energy, are seeking externalization and they will represent a world in which this third aspect, or this transcendency aspect, or this wholeness aspect can be more clearly discerned. This world is emerging not in opposition to the world that we presently may experience; it is emerging not as a New Age following an Old Age; it is emerging as something that has been behind all the ages and it is not going to totally emerge in the next two thousand years. It is a long term project.

But a significant, very significant, change, alteration in human consciousness is occurring now; what in one talk I called Birth Three – a change as important and as significant as when man first gained the power to think; because now he is gaining the power to do something for which we have no name perhaps to think beyond thought, to be beyond being, to will beyond will. Man as the beloved of the earth, man as the collective consciousness and therefore as the individual consciousness, has the capacity to transform the earth, because the earth is like the branch of a tree, or of a flower, of a plant on which the caterpillar spins its cocoon, and the butterfly emerges, but the butterfly has the capacity to pollinate that flower and to enable it to fulfill its destiny.

The earth has no future except through man’s capacity to be the instrument for its transformation. But first man must resolve through his own consciousness this ancient dichotomy of spirit and matter, God and creation, all the dualities, all the perceptions that we’ve worked with for so very long; and from a point of creative identification, of knowing his divine reality and identity and perspective. He will then be able to reach out and embrace the earth and all the other kingdoms of life, from the source from which they have come, and enable them to take their next step.

To make this possible then humanity must be transformed; and to make that possible there is required upon the earth a group of individuals, not an organization, not anything that could really be defined in human institutional terms, but a living organism composed of individuals who know their place, their perspective, their identity as part of a human whole, and a planetary whole; who know that just like I could take a cell from my body, and through a process known as cloning I could recreate my body. As all the cells of my body contain the essential genetic code from which the entire body is constructed, so each of us as a human being contains the entire genetic code from which this planet has been born and from which humanity has been born. It is theoretically possible through a kind of science to pluck any person out of this room and recreate the earth and humanity on all its levels. But together each of us experiencing the essence of the wholeness, seeing oneself as an agent of this planetary whole, – which in no way makes that self less but indeed makes it supremely more than it could ever be in an isolated position, – by taking that consciousness in, in that way one becomes part of this evolving brotherhood or humanhood.

Several times in my life I have had a very clear vision, not so much in form but in essence. It began when I was seven years old although at that time I didn’t really know what it was, had no way of relating it to anything. This was a vision of a sphere of life, enveloping the earth, merging into the earth, (and then) like a giant inbreath and then merging out again; and out of this reemergence, this outbreath, the earth being transformed. (I am trying to put this in pictorial symbols, although that’s not the way that I’ve seen it). In that process of transformation, it’s like watching a body take shape: a centre here and an individual there, becoming strong, embodying a new pattern as best it can, and then reaching out to link with a centre over there, or another person over there, propagating itself, until a momentum is built up, a tremendous energy field established, a chain reaction, with people beginning to recognize, to perceive that a way of change in the past has been through external action, the necessity to move man along because he did not have the awareness, or the capacity to move himself; but now possessing the capacity to at least begin to recognize a creative responsibility in our role with our hands of flesh and hands of time, to grasp the energies of time and of space, of psyche and of being, and to say “I will that these energies will now reflect the divinity that is within all things; I will that this energy that forms my world, as it passes through me, will become the flesh, the substance, the breath of a new world; and that in so doing I learn to perceive divinity as a participatory process of creative service, creative self-transcendence, creative awareness, creative life and light and love and wisdom, and communion with all others who can join me on that level, link with me in that way; and also become builders of the earth, seed points from which this new is emerging.”

And it will emerge. It will emerge very quickly, as a matter of fact, in terms of theological time, in fact in terms of human history. The crux of this evolutionary change through which humanity is moving will have passed, will be complete within the next fifty to seventy-five years, And in a sense the balance has already been tipped. Man will achieve this shift and in a sense the birth has already occurred. It’s now simply a process of divine embryology.

So my vision, then, that is behind all the lectures I’ve given, is this vision of each of us asked to make a supreme leap in imagination and in consciousness, to recognize not an image of God or an image of man, but the reality of the two of them; to be aware that a new Christ-hood is coming into being,

Christ is a term that means the annointed one. But what is emerging as the Christ of our time embraces that, just as the Christ Jesus embraced the prophetic traditions and the avatar traditions that preceeded him. But it will be not so much man being annointed by God, but man learning the magical process of giving birth to God and allowing divinity to participate in the on-goingness of evolution and of growth and of the excitement of creativity, which is after all divinity’s second nature; this image of man as son of God and yet in a subtle way the father of God and in all ways one with the divine, image of man now being asked to take responsibility, disciplined responsibility, for the energies with which he identifies himself, for the energies that he extends into his world. And man asked to learn the magic, (I use that term in two senses) the wonder and also the ritual of communion, how to work in group consciousness, how to be a point of focus through which a wholeness can manifest, both within a particular part and in a whole, in a group.

Of course this particular vision is what is Findhorn’s vision. And that’s what each of you are participating in. That’s why it makes what you are doing here so incredibly important, because this vision of man is subtle and in some ways it involves energies for which we have no terminology as yet. But it can be lived and demonstrated. It can actually be invoked because it’s present, around us, within us, but it takes a group to do it. It takes individuals with awareness, and with love to do it,

Now I will invite from you this evening questions. (We will have a little break for a couple of minutes – you can stand if you’d like, or stretch, or run up and down and express your divinity, and then we will have some questions.)

Q. What about guidance from God? What part does it play in the sense that it may convey the impression of dealing with an external divinity.

A. I am the kind of individual that carries on conversations in his head. I guess a lot of people do that, maybe everybody does it -talks to himself. And I suppose one could look at guidance from God as God talking with himself.

We each of us either do or will establish some kind of relationship with our divine centre and it can manifest in different ways. Sometimes the ways in which it manifests are specifically oriented to a given kind of work; and therein lies a challenge because the specific nature of that work can also convey the impression of a very specific approach to God. One of these strengths, as I mentioned before or last night, of Findhorn is the fact that it is God centered. Initially this God centering was demonstrated through Eileen and Peter. It’s a very powerful form of anchoring, to put energy into words. It leads to precision to write it down. Peter has always said that this is a centre where everything gets brought right down and manifested. And I’ve had many an occasion in three years of working closely with Eileen and Peter ( and I use Eileen, of course as an example) of seeing her attunement operate in the moment without the need for anything to be written down, without the need for any special meditation. It is there.

But for a specific work of anchoring a certain kind of concrete attunement, so that others can see it in a certain kind of a way, her direction has been to put things down into words and write them down; and I know that for many people this has and probably will continue to create a challenge.

The challenges used to be, “well who is she to be claiming contact with God?” I remember that used to be a rather common question that arose. Maybe it still does. But it seemed to phase out after the first year that Myrtle and I were here. But once more and more people began to live here and it became apparent that we were asked to achieve this contact with the divine centre, then that sort of diffused that objective or argument, objection.

The next was, “Well that’s still maintaining the form of communicating with an externality. ” And of course that’s true. It does give that impression. In fact there’s a lot of things about relating to divinity which when translated into action on a form level create strange impressions, because we see them only in the fragmented surfaces, not necessarily in the wholeness. I cannot speak for Eileen in terms of what she experiences in her inner Being, but I can say that the responsibility of whether guidance from God perpetuates the idea of God out there and me down here with my ears cocked but having no other responsibility than that really, depends upon you as a community. If you are dependent upon any individual for your contact with your divine centre then it is you who are creating the externality. But if another person’s contact, whatever form it may take, can inspire you to the possibilities of your own contact, then you can explore your oneness.

There are aspects of my consciousness, as there are of everyone’s consciousness, which are sometimes beyond my immediate conscious reach; but with a little meditation, a little being quiet, or a little concentration, they pop into view – subconscious material or super-conscious material, which normally is not part of my conscious functioning but with a little effort it can be. And so God is that way. He is normally not part of our conscious functioning but with a little effort He can be. And from our conscious point of view that might seem like becoming attuned to something outside of ourselves but it is only outside our own immediate sphere of conscious awareness. As we work with it and expand our awareness and our identity, and our resonance with that, then it indeed becomes an experience more like talking with oneself than like talking with someone else and it becomes something that takes place not just in meditation but all the time.

The proof of the pudding for true contact ultimately lies in the total life; but we may move through stages, in this time universe, where we are in and out until we reach the point where the inness and the outness become the same thing and divinity pervades all of our expression.

Would anyone else like to offer a question? I’m glad you’re not all rushing, oh yes, there we go.

Q. The question is: Can I say something about the concept of the twin soul which describes a process by which a soul allegedly splits into a male and female aspect for the process of moving through evolution, then on its return back into wholeness reunites itself.

A. I must speak of this from my experience, on the inner not on the outer so much, and say that I cannot say that that does not occur but it is rare. The true twin soul of an individual is an aspect of his own Being, because the soul in essence is male and female, actually it is either both or neither, depending on how you want to look at it, and it essentially never loses that completeness; but what it does do is it projects out of itself aspects which take on one or the other of the polarities for creative purposes. In a God ruled universe which has so many infinite possibilities there is no reason why a soul could not under a given circumstance actually split; but as I say it is not a customary action.

However, this faculty of projecting an aspect of oneself into incarnation, into a series of incarnations, accomplishes what is almost exactly the same thing, in terms of the phenomena of what is experienced; and there may be individuals who are so closely aligned that they are for all practical purposes mere images of that aspect of oneself, which is the true other half. So for practical purposes they are a twin soul.

There is another aspect of this. Souls are much like grapes. They travel in clusters and these clusters build up over many life times of experience together. They are affinity groups, organic wholes within the inner planes, and then these are part of still larger clusters. You can have as a soul moves, particularly if that soul enters into any one of the great spiritual esoteric paths, one or other of the brotherhoods, eastern or western, it takes on increasing identification with numbers of other units of divine life and in essence they are functioning as if they were a single being. Actually that is what they are evolving towards, is the manifestation of a group identity. And within that cluster tremendous bonds of affinity are created and you can meet a member of your cluster and you will have some kind of resonance, unless it is deliberately being cut off which sometimes it is, because a soul might be asked to move alone for an incarnation and not be part of a cluster. So that can also give a sense of this tremendous affinity.”

A third aspect is that a given work, like creation of Findhorn, has a life identity on the inner planes. Findhorn is in a sense a being, but the idea, the mission, the karmic destiny, is alive. Everything is alive on the inner planes. There is nothing that is not living, and intelligent and purposeful to some degree, even though its intelligence may be very much tied to a time cycle. So within the creation of this centre, within the fulfilment of a destiny, two beings may come forth who are absolutely essential to each other for its fulfilment, like Peter and Eileen, and they are in that case twin souls.

It is an involved subject. I mean it has different ramifications, because we’re also tied together the higher you go on different levels. And I know that the simplest way that’s been presented in the past is to say that souls have split into physical male and female aspects and then reunited, That is basically a symbolic representation of something else, although again I am not saying that it can not happen, probably has happened in the richness of creative manifestation, but it’s not a customary happening where earth evolution is concerned. You do have a twin soul, but ultimately that lies within you and could best be described as God himself. But you can have a great number of soul mates, or individuals who resonate so intimately with you in vibratory frequency, that you have the potential of functioning as one being. Does that help you there? But again bring it down to practical levels, you know Peter and Eileen are so very much fused and function as one that – the metaphysical name for it doesn’t really matter – the actual fact of it is that they are functioning as two aspects of a wholeness and that probably is the nicest way of seeing it, Yes?

Q. Since I’ve arrived here, I’ve picked up from several sources seemingly a bit of misunderstanding on the concept of shedding the personality, and I was wondering if you might shed some light on the aspects of personality, particularly the soul personality, and motivating factors and karmic patterns which definitely do have something to contribute to a group effort such as this that is a drawing force to such a group, or some people.

A. So your question is: Can I say something about the values of, and the processes of shedding the personality, what it is that’s being shed, and what it is that functions through that shedding and afterwards? The questioner seeks clarification between outer personality and soul personality.

Well, it is very much a matter of definition and words and in a group like this, where people come from different paths, words have been used to mean different things. For example, Peter comes through a path which very much teaches the overcoming of the personality and its becoming infused by the light of the soul, the personality falling away; and we talk about people functioning on personality levels in much the same way that people once talked about people living in sin. Myrtle and I – well you can draw your own conclusions – come from a path in which she, as a human relations counselor, our whole work, or her half of it at any rate, mine too, was to help people to function in their personalities more effectively. Reaching for the soul without having a balanced personality was for us the equivalent of living in sin, because it would mean not having a proper foundation to encompass that greater energy.

So when we first came Peter and I had to sit down and have a heart to heart to make sure that we had our words straight. Because when he said, ‘Shed the personality’, and I said ‘live it up fellows’-

In one sense the personality is simply an image that other people see. It is the way we reflect the world. To that extent we will always have a personality. A being in a physical form, attuned to the highest energy that this planet could withstand, could walk into this room and we would each see him as having a personality. We would probably each see him as having a slightly different personality. For those who are interested this marvellous book by Khalil Gibran, Jesus the Son of Man, which portrays Jesus as seen through the eyes of about fifty different people, is an illustration of this; but in a sense what we would be seeing is a reflection of ourselves from the mirror of that being’s consciousness. So what we would say is his personality is really a reflection of our personality. And to that extent, I am sure we’ve all experienced the phenomenon in which we see in others the things that we most dislike in ourselves – the things that are most apparent in ourselves. Not always, of course, but that is a factor of what we see. So on that level, no matter how spiritual you become, you always have a personality in the eyes of other people. So there is that definition of personality.

The next level is the actual mechanism of self-relatedness to the environment, relationship to the environment which we have formed over the process of time, which acts like a cocoon within which deeper energies are being merged and fused and metamorphosed into a new life. The whole process of this phase of human evolution could be described as individualization and the development of selfhood and self-awareness.

That requires a personality and what is meant in this case by a personality occultly is the combined energies of the physical, the etheric, the astral or feeling body and the mental body and the gestalt of these four plus the specific manifestations of each of them as four separate energy bodies. Those four separately and together make up what is called the personality from an occult sense. And that is a vehicle or combination of them.

It can reflect the divine or it can obscure it by manifesting divine fragments. It’s like one of these glasses which break up the light and you can’t see through them. A person who is functioning purely physically, purely emotionally, purely mentally, if such a thing were possible, (and it actually isn’t), would be manifesting more divinely than the state that actually everyone is in, in which we’re trying to function, manifest a oneness through a multiplicity of levels all at once. And it is this process by which these levels interact and split up this divine light like a prism, and reflect back its certain intrinsic qualities which we can experience in a myriad of ways from the spectrum of extreme pleasure to extreme pain. All this interaction makes up the personality. And each of these levels feeds itself, it draws energy from its own level, emotions feed on emotions and the mind feeds on thought, and the body feeds on physical substance and so on. This process of living interaction with the environment on all these levels creates the personality, but all of this can obstruct manifestation of that essential wholeness.

So the process of shedding the personality is a process of ceasing to function as the tool of a fragment of consciousness. I am no longer motivated by an emotional outburst or by a thought alone or by a physical need. I am able to get it together within myself. In a sense to fuse these so fully and dynamically that they become a single vessel. Quite frankly they become what esoterically or symbolically is called the Holy Grail, the cup of the last supper; because as soon as that infused personality is created the communion is experienced with a higher level and that communion shatters the personality.

That shattering can take many forms. Historically it has been called the crucifixion. But I want to say that in the New Age, I mean what is evolving, however long it takes, the shattering can take a different form of which the crucifixion may not be an adequate symbol.

When that is shattered, it is shattered because the content has become more real than the vessel, and the content is capable of being its own vessel at that point. It contains itself. In a sense the soul shines through without need for any intermediary because it has absorbed what it needs to know about how to relate to these dimensions.

But the soul does have its characteristics. It does have a certain personality, in a sense of, it has its own unique manifestation which may be different. Mine may be different than yours, for example. No two souls are exactly alike, but yet on that level there’s an intense capacity to blend. Difference is only a manifestation of distinction, not of separation. But I may express the energy of my soul or it may express in a certain way and your may express in another way and that distinguishes between us. Thus Saint Germain, for example, has a different vibratory energy when he is manifesting as Saint Germain than does, say Kuthumi, the Master Kuthumi. But if either of those two beings steps beyond the level of their soul to a still higher and more whole level, divine level, where the wholeness, the oneness is emphasized to an even greater degree, even that distinction becomes lost, and you could not tell the difference between the two.

Does that throw any light on your question? The personality is, as we use the term, as being that which limits us, I suppose we’ll always need a term for that which is our tester and personality is as good a name as any. But we need to be careful that we are precise in what we mean, because functioning on a personality level is only an obstruction when the personality is uncoordinated and in essence acting in different directions within itself and therefore it’s unable to blend with others; so it fragments. The personality in this sense has a mission. It has had the mission of drawing things in. It’s a womb.

In essence the personality is nothing more than a womb. It has as its mission pulling things into a centre and intensifying them. To use another metaphor it is like a greenhouse. It is that which focuses experience to such an intense kind of self-involvement until the being can’t stand it any more but yet with this understanding of selfhood it bursts forth and it can understand the meaning of the divine self.

But the personality looks inward. Its basic motion is inbreath. The motion of the soul is outbreath. The keynote of the personality is to take. The keynote of the soul is to give. When the personality becomes more and more attuned to the soul, it alters its takingness and begins to allow the outbreath to emerge. It’s when the personality is still acting in its womb state, pulling in, beyond the time when it should for that particular being, that it becomes an obstruction. In a centre like this, it can be an obstruction, because the task here is to infuse the personality with creative energy and to use it as a tool, but not to allow it to be the point of identity which determines the way in which energy is expressed or the way in which we relate.

Q. Peter asked about elaborating on crucifixion.

A. Well, the question is: What will replace crucifixion as a symbol of that initiation whereby the personality ceases to exist as a separate vehicle and in a sense the butterfly emerges from the chrysalis which that personality represented? I can’t answer that in terms of what the initiation will change into, because to the best of my knowledge, to my conscious awareness, if it’s been determined, it has not been externalized yet. am not at all sure that it can be externalized except through a group.

In some fashion I know it is group involved. We are moving into an age of group initiation as opposed to individual initiation.

Therefore it probably will take on the form of a level of intensive group work, by means of which each person in the ritual of the group life, in the dynamics of the group life, creates a point of energy within which the personality dissolves and a greater energy emerges – a love energy, a light energy, a wisdom energy.

In fact, in all cases, every expansion of consciousness which is an initiation, is essentially motivated by an increase in the love capacity of the being, on one level or another, and the ability of that love to manifest in different ways, as light, as wisdom and so on. So at this stage and in this cycle of evolution love is the great initiator and, in Jesus’s case externally, he was crucified but subjectively he sacrificed himself, or he expanded himself into a greater identity through love. That of course is why the crucifixion is such an important symbol in the past of human history, because it represents esoterically, not so much the shadowing of the personality but the giving up of a specific focus in order that a love might move out into identification with humanity, and therefore uplift humanity in very important ways.

An example which I think would be meaningful to you, Peter, would be the example of Liebe, who though outwardly would be seen to have gone through incredible suffering as her body literally disintegrated, inwardly manifested poise and peace and unchanging love and positive orientation. So, from her point of view, she was not being crucified, from someone else’s she was.

When I say that crucifixion will cease to be an initiatory symbol, it’s because the symbol has now obscured the reality, and it has become an emotionally charged, devotionally charged, symbol by which people invoke crucifixion to themselves without exploring other ways in which the same process of transformation could conceivably take place. So the process will remain there but the way in which we perceive it may need to change.

Q. The question is: It has been said that the earth is moving toward its polar opposite, by which I assume is meant another planet. How does this relate to what I said earlier about twin souls;

Now on this level any created system will tend to reflect the characteristics of polarity, because you get a force here and a force here and a tension is created between them, and it is that tension that generates the energy out of which the creative substance can be drawn. But yet those two points that have become polarized are none the less whole.

They’re playing a game as it were. That game is real, but other games are equally real which don’t involve polarity between them. Do you see what I mean? The earth may be moving toward its polar expression, let us say, but at the same time it is its polar expression. Otherwise it couldn’t move toward it. It comes back to the processes of invocation in which you can’t move toward something or draw something to you unless it also has a corresponding existence within yourself. I think we’ll stop there.