|
Letter
From A Father Continued
I have always heard you ask why I allow the
terrible things to go on in the world between man and man and between man and
nature. You not only wonder why hatred and anger and fear should lead people
to do unspeakable things to one another, but you have wondered why the
universe seems to be indifferent to your very existence and to be unconcerned
which way you act. Indifference is one of the worst responses to feel coming
to us; we would quite rightly prefer praise or blame to this cold and empty
feeling.
The value of my answer to you will only increase
as your understanding increases, so you must try very hard to see the problem
from my end or you will never understand it at all. I hope that all of you,
when you were children, remember a time when your parents acted for you in
such a way that it infuriated you, when they acted as though you were not
there, or as though you were only an extension of themselves. Perhaps they
apologised to someone on your behalf instead of letting you do it yourself,
or they got you out of some trouble by using influence which you knew was
unfair and left you, as a person, out of the reckoning. You knew that, when
you were not allowed to carry the consequences of your own actions, you lost
some vital essence in your own being.
These consequences may be good or bad, but carry
them you must, or you cease to get the feeling that you matter, or really
exist at all. And this is the truth of it, and you were quite right to
consider it to be a devaluation of your nature. Now, I have to see to it that
this does not occur at the level of your true being, your soul, as you feel
you must not let it happen at the level of your personality or outer self. So
I have made your school in such a way that it becomes real to you and does
not remain a game.
I and your mother have hidden ourselves away
amongst you in order that you should not escape too easily your lesson in
responsibility. This lesson in responsibility must not be in half measures
for it is just as important to your understanding of our highest qualities as
the lessons in sympathy, affection and beauty. Responsibility and integrity
are your strength to appreciate the significance of loving kindness and
beauty. For kindness and beauty are nothing if they are not wedded to
strength, and strength is nothing if it is not wedded to kindness and beauty.
Such is the beginning of my answer. However, another big hurdle will be
facing you and that is how you are going to find enough time to do what, you
now know, you have to do.
In order to help you to understand my attitude
towards time I must explain what time is as a part of the carrying out of my
undertaking for you. If you can imagine that what I have to say to you and
teach you were written down in a book, then time is that interval of
consciousness which is necessary for the contents of the book to be read and
understood by you. Since you realise that each one of you is a little
different to the other, you will also realise that some read quickly and
others slowly, but also some assimilate what they have read quickly and
others more slowly.
You see here an infinite number of requirements,
and you also see that to read quickly is one thing, but to fully understand
the significance of what you have read is quite another. To put you all
together in the same situation, and expect you all to respond in the same way
and in the same time, would be completely contrary to my hopes and
expectations for you. So what I have done is to design a curriculum which
allows each of you to grow and respond in your own time, and in your own way,
and thus the complexity of time is as the complexity of this condition of our
collective engagement in the use of consciousness. Or shall we say it is in
fact a meal that we all eat but which we all differ in the way we eat and
digest it. So time is not what it appears to be, it is only what you require
it to be to receive into yourselves its content.
Now you ask me how you can do this in one
lifetime, and you also show me the unfair positions that some of you start
from, and you doubt if I can possibly say anything that can help you on this
score. Well, I can help you, but only if you will pay very close attention to
me, and do not let the essence of what I am saying pass you by.
You must realise that you see my creation from
one end of it only. You discover yourselves to be born of a mother into the
physical body of a baby, and you grow in body and understanding from the
position of that young child, but you know nothing about the work that went
into my creation before this birth of yours occurred. While understandably
you take the world and the universe for granted, the familiarity of your
surroundings causes you to forget that they are neither fully perceived nor
fully understood by you. You become involved in trying to survive as a
personality, and you forget that the stage on which you are acting is not
only made by me but also has to be continually maintained by me and my
helpers.
This stage on which you act is a schoolroom in my university, and as
you would not expect one of your children to learn all that the university
had to teach in one day of attending class, so I also never expected you to
spend but one day in the classroom. From where I now speak to you, one
lifetime on earth is but one day in your classroom in my university, and,
when the evening comes, I look for you to come home, where you will be nearer
to me and where I can give you rest and refreshment to make you ready for the
next day at school.
Now you understand how I see you and how I
created you. You realise that I am asking you to think of yourselves as
essentially fragments of my own being. But the nature of your being is given
to you as a growing potentiality, and not as a ready-formed thing, so that
you can weave and wander a pattern of your very own through the classrooms of
the universe, and in doing so weave a pattern of your very own into that
being which I have given to you as your own.
Thus is your value to yourself and to all other
selves built up, but, while you weave an individual pattern into your own
essential nature, there is much that we will find that we have in common with
one another. For my responsibility was that you should grow into the sort of
person who could appreciate the very things that I hold most dear, and wish
most deeply to give to you, so I could not let you grow into just any sort of
person; I could not allow you to develop your nature in such a way that you
would become alien to the basic qualities that I know to be good; I could not
give you total freedom, and you would not thank me if I had, for you are
beginning to realise that such a freedom is not freedom at all but is
licence, and can lead to degeneration and self-destruction. For you can
destroy yourselves if you persist too long in attitudes that neither your
being nor your outer nature were designed to withstand.
Our alikeness to one another comes from the fact
that, although we are all weaving different patterns into our nature, the
warp and woof of that nature is already given, and the wools and cottons you
weave your designs with are provided by me, and are of my nature. So, whether
we arrive at a personal or impersonal relationship eventually, we will always
be able to rest in this perfect harmony which is already present in our
separate individual beings.
If you do not accept that you are a piece of my
living being, temporarily inhabiting a physical body, then I will not be able
to take you much further in understanding your position in the universe, but
if you begin to perceive that you are essentially an inhibitor of a body, as
a diver inhabits a diving suit, then you and I will be able to make headway
together, and I will be able to draw you closer into the beauty and aptness
of the scheme I have chosen for you. For you will also accept that, when the
diving suit is worn out, you leave it behind, together with the element it
has been operating in, and you will return to the surface of the ocean where
the air exists that has been pumped to you down the life lines of your diving
suit. This is a cumbersome and heavy thing, but necessary if you are to start
by exploring the lowest levels of creation before climbing to the mountain
tops.
The diving suit is helping you in ways that I
have not yet explained. It is restricting your activity and behaviour while
you are still learning to do it for yourself and by yourself. This heavy
restriction and resistance of the diving suit, and the weight of the water of
the oceans, is slowing you down so that you can witness and observe in slow
motion the meaning and value of what you are doing. If you were suddenly to
be transported to a free and more responsive condition, you would be unable
to maintain your balance or self-control. You would miss the slow but most
important introduction to all your classes in my school, and you would not be
able to follow through the meaning and significance of the lessons that are
being taught in higher classes.
For you are learning the lessons of integrity,
affection, kindness, beauty and honesty. You are learning to differentiate
between the outer nature, that you experience the world with, and the inner
nature that considers what it has experienced and which make a structure of
values out of this experience, and you are then learning to try and live by
the best of the values that you have discovered against the resistance of
their opposites. Thus you are becoming strong, but strong in what you deem to
be good. When you have become strong enough in this way, then the heavy
opposition you feel will no longer be necessary for you, and you will be able
to move on to less restrictive and less basic lessons.
This separating out of the inner attitude of your
being from the outer attitudes of your personality can be quite dramatic, and
is spoken of in your religious language as being saved or 'seeing the light'
or 'finding oneself’. When we behave badly, we say we forget ourselves and
this is a good analogy of the deeper condition that exists all the time.
When the inner nature is perceived, and believed
in, it immediately brings us close to the essential nature of my being where
we find all those pleasing things that have the most fulfilling effect upon
our nature, and help us to feel that we are being more fully ourselves. I
know you think you are searching for happiness. But really you will find that
this is not so. What you search for is fulfilment or the exercise of your
whole being nature; this produces the condition of happiness but you will
then be too busy to notice. If you try to capture happiness for its own sake
you will find it illusive, for it only exists as a by-product of your success
in living most fully and truly the values and responsibilities of your own
individual nature.
If you identify yourself with your outer
personality only, then the fulfilment of these outer needs and ambitions will
not satisfy you, but if you link the outer with the inner, so that you work
hard in the world to fulfil in the best way you can the ideals of your inner
nature, then you will not only make great progress in understanding, but you will
also know that you are doing so. This certainty is most helpful in
building up your confidence in the delicate and more ethereal side of life
which you find is hard to hold your faith in.
This faith in what you know to be good, in the
face of harsh opposition, is the only way I can strengthen the roots and
foundations of your being, and it is only upon this strengthening that you
and I can build together something that will last, and which will be your own
unique self, but do not think that I am asking you to feel that the physical
world experience is in any way unfortunate or lacking in importance towards
the total aim of my endeavour. If you will bear with me further, I will try
to explain to you why the contrary is the truth of the situation.
I would like you to consider that, in your own
experience, if you intend to manufacture something which has not been done
before, you do many calculations and drawings on paper, and you have many
consultations with your helpers before you consider starting work on the
material object itself, and you know that, however careful and accurate you
have been in your planning stage, that the problems of putting the ideas into
actual physical working condition are always great and always contain some
unpredictable elements. You know well that to carry an idea about in your
head is one thing, but to make that idea an actual physical reality requires
the effort and focus of your whole attention, craftsmanship and art.
How many of you can picture a beautiful work of
art in your imagination, often in great detail, but you do not begin to put
it into painting or musical form because you know you lack the ability, and
you feel that you would destroy the very beauty of the thing if you tried,
and that would be hurtful to you. You know that you can live and be creative
in your imagination, but that you only really get to grips with such a
creation when you try to put it into its most objective and concrete
condition, namely in that slow, resistant and demanding world outside you, the
physical world.
Now the same situation applies to your mother and
me and our sincere and affectionate undertakings on your behalf. We have
planned and calculated in the freedom and responsive condition of our
imagination, and then we have gradually and carefully transferred the results
of our least restricted imaginative consciousness down through more and more
solid and resistant forms, and conditions of manifestation or manufacture,
until we reached your physical condition, which was the most demanding and
most difficult that we could achieve. For we could not go beyond that which
we could safely manage, but we had to go to the very limits of our ability in
order to draw out the greatest benefit and treasure from our endeavour. Your
individual reality is the benefit, and your eventual gladness in it is our
treasure, so you see that the very difficulty and opposition of the physical
universe that you are in is also the very measure of your value to us.
If we had not cared so much about the reality of our gift to you we
would have spared you and ourselves the pain and difficulty of this extreme
form of concrete and differentiated experience. As it is, we very often stand
outside the railings of your playground and weep over the bullying that goes
on amongst you, and we are tempted to interfere when we know that we must not
do so. For, if we did interfere at the wrong time, we would immediately
detract from the essential condition of individual responsibility which you
must be taught to take up for yourselves and know to be an essential part of
your reality. For, if you do not accept this responsibility, then you cannot
accept or receive the gift of your own individuality.
This is our gift to you, and understandably you
feel more inclined to hate us for it than thank us, for its birth in you must
be painful as well as joyful. This you will shortly understand. The fact that
you would have to experience pain and joy in order to know good and bad, and
better and worse, was known to us from the beginning, but many of the details
and consequences of this remained for us to resolve as they occurred.
You can be sure that the physical universe is my
greatest handiwork, and in it I achieve my most valuable and creative work,
and, if this physical condition is where I do most of my work, you can be
sure that it is here that I am giving you my very closest attention, even if,
as I have said, I hide myself from you and do not interfere with you.
At this point of my effort, every aspect of my
nature comes together in its most concentrated and differentiated condition.
To put it another way, my more adaptable and responsive stages of creation,
which you call heaven and paradise, do not contain the earthly condition, but
the earthly condition does contain the other conditions of my manufacturing
process, from the most heavenly and tenuous, down through the intermediate
stages of formation, to this, my most highly defined and slowed-down
condition. Although you only gradually become aware of the presence of these
more delicate stages of my work, they are nevertheless all around you, so it
is here that you can get the greatest understanding of my nature in its
detailed significance, and it is here that I continually learn things about
you and about myself.
Only here are you in the best position as
spectator to judge and value the qualities of being and consciousness as they
work out amongst themselves in practical situations, so here also is the best
position to learn wisdom, but I do not wish to make your work and my work
sound easy. The situation is such that it can demand and absorb our very best
efforts all the time. This means that, if you or I do not respond to our
position as teacher or learner sufficiently well, then troubles and
difficulties set in which demand special remedies.
For instance, I know you wish to ask me why there
should be so much illness and disease in your world. One answer is that the
collective feelings and thoughts, as well as actions of the people of earth,
have for so long been contrary to those of kindness, affection and sympathy
that the physical and psychological atmosphere has been contaminated by them,
and weakened from my true intent by them, but, as I have told you, even if it
takes a long time you must as far as possible live out the consequences of
your activities.
Now, if the atmosphere of your world contains the
energies of your wrong thoughts and feelings, these energies, as any
scientist will explain to you, will have to go somewhere and cannot be
immediately dissipated or neutralised. Their effect is therefore to cause
pockets of inharmonious imbalance in that delicate scheme which we call the
balance inherent in all creation. Without this balance there would be no stability,
and without this balance the inter-related and complex activities of living
cells and organs become disorganised, and produce contrary results to those
that they should produce, but I want you to understand that disease and
suffering is not a thing that I would wish on you, and, if you will believe
me, I suffer these pains with you and for you although I cannot just take
them away from you since they are part of that context of responsibility that
is your essential burden.
There are so many other things I wish to say to
you that I must allow you to carry this argument into all the practical
situations for yourself, for the effects of this sternness on my part, and
the painful savouring of them on your part, are unlimited and form the strong
and unflinching basis of my work with you on your own reality. If such
disease and pain, malformation and destitution were the end of things for
each of you, then it would be different, but, as I have tried to explain, you
do not know it but I keep you and cherish you in ways that would amaze you,
and I am not averse to repeating lessons and situations in your schoolroom on
earth until you understand what I have to say. And if those 'days' be very
many, and each day a lifetime in your sight, then try and understand my
purpose all over again from the very beginning, and realise that time and the
world are at my service and were formed by me to teach you the one thing that
seems to you beyond the bounds of your wildest dreams, which is my divine
affection and the qualities that go along with it.
Whether this divine quality of consciousness be
taken up on a more or on a less personal basis, the same loving concern is
shed from me and from your mother upon each one of you, and the personal
relationship we take upon us is between you and us individually, and no other
person has any say in what it is or how we make it, for there lies one of the
endless mysteries of our love.
One of the most important ways I have chosen for
you to learn what is vital for your understanding is to find yourself a part
of a family situation on earth, for here you are able to go though the
experience in one single lifetime, and with unbroken continuity, the
experience of being a child, a mature individual and a parent. In this
situation, if you will only learn to pay close attention to it, are all the
mysteries of the universe that matter to you. If you take the trouble to
stand apart and observe closely all the relationships that exist in your
family situations, you will be able to observe as completely as you will how
the problems of life arise, why they arise and how they are solved. The
family situation is a very special gift to you and one day you will be
surprised that you took it so for granted.
I have not yet explained to you that you are not
my only children, and that I have not brought you all up in the same way. I
explained that I have gradually brought the physical universe into being by
planning it and organising it at more ethereal levels of manifestation where
the stuff of manifestation is more responsive and mobile. These levels are
called by you more heavenly levels of being, for in them everything is more
in harmony and more expressive of the intense beauty which to me is so
valuable.
As these ethereal forms of manifestation were
brought into existence, so did I cause other of my children to be born into
them. They grew up and matured in these conditions where their attention was
filled with the direct and indirect presence of your mother and myself. We
wished them to become familiar with us in this way because we were going to
need them as helpers while our plan of creation grew outwards from us to more
remote and unconditioned levels where our personality also became less
dominant, and where other personalities, your own, would in future time be
able to grow up in a slower and more difficult environment but a more
independent one.
You understand that, at this very point in my
description, you are face-to-face with one of the great secrets of my work,
which, until now, has been kept hidden from you for the children of heaven
have never had that independence that you have had. They have been through
happier times, but they have had greater need of me and my strength, for they
were not weaned at the beginning on the strength and independence which you
have been weaned on. On the other hand, without their loving help which they
have given to me, I could not have undertaken this difficult outer classroom
work where I need them to guide and instruct, to maintain and repair the
classes, classrooms and playgrounds on which you thrive and on which your
reality and future depend.
Slowly you will come to understand that the standing alone and apart
in my universe, without being able to detect me directly, is a gift to your
development which my other children have not had. This gift is a painful gift
for much of the time, but the depth of the understanding it produces is far
greater than the understanding produced in the happy states of heaven where
the qualities of my being are dominant. For joy and delight fill the days of
these heavenly children, but such lessons are one-sided and do not teach them
the intrinsic values of such delights because they are not valued against the
experience of their opposites. You, on the other hand, value all these
opposites from the very beginning and in so doing gain an insight which is
beyond my ability to explain to you at this stage, but I can say that your
more detached and objective judgements will one day put you in a position
where the added depth of your understanding will show you the merit of my
endeavour.
My heavenly children help me to guide and teach
you, and some of them come to earth and join you in your present situation as
ordinary human beings; thus they come partly to give you a little of heaven,
and partly so that they can experience a little of this earthly situation
themselves, and so gain in wisdom and knowledge of me from another direction,
so be quite clear about the fact that, although they help you now to overcome
many of your problems, one day you will be able to give to them the fruits of
your experience, and you can be sure that when that time comes you will do it
very gladly.
Try to become clear in your own understanding how
you feel towards your own children of earth. When you feel clearly the real
depth of the attitudes you should properly find within yourselves towards
them, then nearly all of the questions you have about my attitudes towards
you will be answered. For, if you have not yet learned to love your own
children properly, then you are not yet ready to learn how I feel towards
you. If you are not aware that your responsibilities towards your loved ones
are an exact analogy of my responsibilities towards you then you have not
begun to understand why I have put you on earth.
|
