Wisdom from The Great Gift

Wisdom 

Wisdom has to start with our ordinary understanding of the term 'wisdom' which we know is a relative term, in the same way as we know the term 'beauty' is a relative term - relative to the attitude and the perception, as it were, within the eye of the beholder. And so wisdom also is relative to the perception and the eye of the beholder of actions and responses which are measured in terms of being more wise or less wise. But, behind the ordinary terminology of wisdom, we may suppose that there is a deep absolute form of wisdom which is in line with, and in tune with, the absolute level of our being and the absolute creative intention behind the manifestation of the universes at all their levels, from the most ethereal level, which we call the heavenly levels, down through the more and more dense levels to the most dense and concrete, which we call the earthly levels.

My understanding of this absolute form of wisdom depends on an ability I believe we have to resonate with the deep heart of our being into the deep heart of the Creator's being and feel, with that very deep sense of in-feeling, how the Creator felt towards creation before it began. In other words one can learn to feel what it was that the Creator was longing for, aspiring to, or simply desiring, from the great work and the great effort that he has engaged in in what is known to us as creation. Now, if we can feel with all our deepest understanding, our deepest intelligence and our deepest perception, what it was that the Creator looked for, above all else, in creation, then, and only then, shall we be close to the absolute point of wisdom which I believe is in the absolute point of deepest desire in the heart of the Creator's being.

As I myself attempt to do this, I come away with the understanding that the greatest longing that was in the Creator's heart before creation, and which brought about creation and brought into existence the individual beings, who each of us is in the Creator's eyes and to one another, was the desire to have real individual friends, in the deepest possible meaning of that word. Friends to share his understanding, his joy and his wisdom within the context of real friendship, which creates a vital relationship between each friend and the other friend, from which ever-renewing possibilities and responses can grow. My feeling is that the Creator first of all wished to bring into existence real and individual children, whose nature was based on a part of his own divine nature, but the characteristics of which were to be developed by each of those individual children as they grew up in the universes, or the universities, of his creation. They would develop in the nature of their own individual spirits, so that each of those children would become a unique individual child and then, hopefully, would become more than a child - would wish to grow into a mature condition which was not as a child to the Creator, but was as an individual being to the Creator. Thus all these beings could each have creative relationships of friendship and gladness with one another and with the Creator. Not with the Creator as a special 'God' individual, who was not approachable as other friends are approachable, but He himself wanted to be able to befriend us and have a creative friendship with us as we befriend one another and have a creative friendship with one another.

In the heart of the Creator's being we find all manner of wonderful things; but we find, above all, great love, great affection, great beauty, great sweetness, great gentleness and great strength. We find all the great qualities, such as courage and devotion, which to us become deeply valuable properties of our most valuable relationship. Now, the nature of wisdom as we will try to define it, is something other than the nature of love.

We can understand that the Creator's nature is, as it were, all love, but wisdom is the application of that love to the purposeful aspiration or desire which emanates from that love which, in the case we are talking about, was to bring into existence real individual children who have unique characteristics of their own and who were truly separate and autonomous beings. These would learn to live and grow amongst one another according to the specieshood of the divine nature, but within that specieshood, would develop the ability to express their own unique characteristics and express the initiative and spiritedness which emanates from any healthy spiritual being. Thus they would be able, as they gained more strength, to stand apart and upon their own feet, in a metaphorical sense, in order that each of these individuals could be a unique polarity to which other individuals could relate, and between which living polarities, new, ever growing, vortices of creative potentiality would develop.

Now wisdom, as I would understand it, is the appreciation of the value that comes out of the effort, and the means to bring about this great desire, as the means become available in terms of this created universe at all its levels. We understand that, after the universe was created and prepared, the spirits, the particles of the Creator's being, which were individual units of his own being nature, were sown into this universe as pupils are placed in a university. In it they work from the lowest level of the university up to the highest level of the university and, eventually, learn to appreciate the nature and value of the university as a whole, from the highest level to the lowest level. Wisdom begins by understanding that these potential children cannot become real, in any sense of that word, if they are prestructured or pre-programmed in such a way that their individuality and their sense of selfhood cannot be properly developed and appreciated by them.

If the Creator in any way subverts the processes which maintain the individual autonomy of each of these children as they grow and mature, then the Creator is allowing the desire and longing to slip away from the possibility that the universe contains for the bringing about of that great longing. So, from the beginning, the Creator had to work with wisdom to create processes which would allow for the potentiality of each of these Divine particles, who were individual children in a potential condition, gradually to become aware of the structure of values and relationships that it was living in with regard to nature and to other individual beings. And this had to be brought about in such a way that at no time was the individual overawed or over-dominated by the too great nearness or presence of the Creator's own personality. For, if that occurred, then the dominance of the Creator's personality would stamp itself completely upon the individuality of the individual child and prevent that individuality flourishing in its fullness; which it must do if it is to carry any real value as a real child in its own right.

So we can understand that, from the beginning, a great wisdom was needed which understood that, although the Creator was longing that each of his children should understand the value of, and the nature of, each of the Divine qualities, these children could not have an objective understanding of divine qualities if they were not able to experience them in a condition which would allow for the opposites of those qualities to be experienced at the same time. Thus to enter into the judgement of the value of the qualities which each of them must learn to apply for themselves. It would have been very beautiful and very happy for us all to have been born into a perfect and heavenly environment, perhaps close to the person and, shall we call it, the home of our Divine Creator, but this would not have produced in us the qualities which the Creator's heart most longed for; which was a longing for the quality of unique individuality which each of us longs for in a friend.

A friend is one who can stand apart from us in strength and values us in freedom as we would value them in strength and freedom. We value our friends not so much in terms of their cleverness or their special abilities, but for their profound uniqueness of characteristics which they exhibit towards us as completely separate autonomous individuals.

Now wisdom has to learn to discriminate between the lower forms of love and affection and the higher forms of love and affection. The lower forms of love are not true forms of love at all, but are the desire and the need for one another to supply the gratifications which are necessary to the outer forms of our being nature and the appetites which go along with the outer forms of our being nature. The deeper and real forms of love and affection are not based on the desire to use individuals as a source of gratification of needs, but rather we are very deeply glad about the existence of the other individual in an entirely undemanding way. The basis of the friendship is nothing other than the deep and instinctive recognition of the divine individuality in that other being, and all that divine individuality implies in terms of potentiality.

So real friendship and real love is a very creative, purposeful, ongoing situation, which desires that new things, new possibilities, new responses, should forever arise from that friendship. Wisdom is that knowledge which recognises the nature of true loving relationships and true friendships, and recognises the way that the individual children of God have to be brought in a very slow and gradual state to a condition of self awareness, through which their individuality will receive the greatest encouragement to grow and develop without being overshadowed and overruled by the potency of the Creator's own being and characteristics.

So we can see that wisdom is that understanding which realises the value of the means, and every moment that those means are striving to achieve the end, which was the initial desire for divine children and divine friends to share divine life with. We are saying that wisdom is that understanding which realises that you can only have a deep friendship with an individual who has a deep set of experiences and characteristics; who has deep awareness, which is supported by strength and integrity, of the objective significance of each of the divine qualities which are exhibited in the university, the universe, and which come to us through the activities that each of us play out for the other in the processes or life.

Wisdom will therefore be at great pains to draw out the potentialities and the benefits from the rich mixture of spontaneous responses that all of the individual children of God produce for one another. So far as those responses are unique and individual, then so far do they carry the possibility of producing some spontaneous mixture which did not exist before, and, upon which, other spontaneous mixtures and responses may be built, to produce new possibilities for new understandings and new growth, not only in creation but in terms of eternal purpose and eternal value.

So we can see then that wisdom is that ability in us that can stand back and, through its knowledge that you can only have a thin relationship with a thin personality, can appreciate the thickening of the characteristics of individuality which occur in a very rich and spontaneous and uninhibited form of existence, which is full of initiative and spontaneity. This is the spontaneity which makes mistakes and realises, through its own sense of responsibility, the fact that it has made mistakes, and, through its own sense of responsibility, wishes to put those mistakes right again and correct them. Now this sort of richness can only come to those individual children in a level of the university in which mistakes can occur. My own feeling is that these mistakes can only occur at the lower end of the university, and, as our nature gravitates to a more and more ethereal level of experience in the university, so does the possibility of creative spontaneity and endeavour become less and less.

Whereas, at the higher levels, the enjoyment and adoration of the beautiful divine qualities, that are not only in the Creator's being but present as potentialities in our own being, absorb our whole attention, the desire to use our initiative and the desire to enter into creative and exploratory forms of life, disappear. We can understand that if our educational processes at the lower end of the university were perfect as they are in the higher and more heavenly level of the university, then the initiative to make mistakes and correct them again may be lacking. We would be unable to experience the opposite of all the values of the divine nature, such as love being experienced against the quality of hatred, and kindness being experienced against the quality of cruelty, and weakness being experienced against the quality of strength, and beauty being experienced against the quality of ugliness.

Now this ability for us not only to see and feel and experience the qualities which we come to value most deeply in terms of their opposites, but our ability to get into situations, through the use of our own initiative, which have to be corrected and thoroughly understood before we become clear of those situations again, does not occur at any other level than that of the most concrete and separate forms of creation, which the physical level of creation represents. It represents the most crystallised form of the Creator's spirit in action and therefore, at this level as in no other, are we able to define the specific significance of all the divine potential qualities which exist in our nature and in the Creator's nature; through perceiving them and understanding them, being involved with them, having to use them, having to use them correctly, and correct them when we use them incorrectly.

This sort of experience produces true wisdom and true understanding, and produces in us a deep awareness of the significance of the Creator's great work on our behalf. This attitude towards the significance of wisdom helps us to understand why it was, in the allegorical sense, that the Creator allowed us to eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and yet, at the same time, warned us that it would be a thing which would cause us pain. The Creator knew that in order to fulfil the great longing in his heart to produce craggy, leathery, strong individuals, who had deep characteristics of individuality in them, we would have to enter into a level of experimental living in which mistakes occurred and which pain would be felt as a result of those mistakes occurring. As the source of love and affection, the Creator himself could not force us into that situation; he could not place us in that place in which pain must come to us. But on the other hand, he could take us close to the door which led into this field of experiment and pain, and hopefully wait for our initiative to become strong enough to take us through that door. So that we, from our initiative, entered into the realm of pain and suffering through the spiritedness of our spirit and the desire to know all things; to register the true value of ourselves in a deep sense and to register a sense, which is very strong in us, of being the arbiter of our own actions and the carrier of responsibility for those actions.

In other words, it was the deep, instinctive sense of the godlike creative experimental and responsible individuality which led us through that door into the world of the knowledge of good and evil, and caused us to be engaged with good and evil in a way which we were not engaged with them before. Because, before we entered that door and experimented unwisely with the forces of our own being, we were not engaged with the processes and the qualities of evil, we were only engaged with the processes and the qualities of good.

Although we may have chosen to remain on the good side of that door and not pass through it, if we had done so we would have lost the potentiality of growth and development which can only come to us through the deep, tragic, heroic and painful experience which comes to us through the misuse of our godlike abilities, but which also registers in us the godlike remorse and the godlike desire to correct the mistakes we make as we make them.

So that great wisdom, whereas it will not force people into situations which it knows are incorrect and painful, at the same time will learn to wait for the individual to work out the results of such wrong engagement in life. Because wisdom knows that it is only through the wrong engagement in life that some greater value than obedient perfection can arise, which is not an ability to be in perfect harmony with all the beautiful qualities of the divine nature, but is, in fact, the ability to know on its own account, to know for itself, to know objectively within its own experience, why the divine values are divinely valuable, and what the values are which detract from and destroy those divine values.

From that type of knowledge arises a great strength and a great wisdom and a great love, which cannot arise if that spirit has not passed through the gate into the world of knowledge of good and evil. It is only on the other side of that gate that great strength will be required to recover from mistakes, and it's only on the other side of that gate that great mistakes will be made and great understanding developed in order to recover from those mistakes.

So we can see that great wisdom is not engaged in interfering with the processes of life in order to tidy them up, in order to do away with disharmony, in order to do away with the crosscurrents of life which stir the pot of experience and produce a rich soup of opposing currents and values and desires and attitudes. Yet, at the same time, wisdom is certainly not indifferent to suffering, and it is not indifferent to the fact that continually the experiences produce a stumbling and a faltering, and mankind has to be rescued and brought back to a reasonable level of buoyancy again from which further movements and further experiments can be made.

In a sense, although wisdom does not interfere, wisdom is always on the lookout for a situation which has gone too far, and become so negative that nothing of value can arise from the situation anymore. Then wisdom will try and suggest to an individual who is stuck in such a situation that there is a way out which that individual hasn't yet seen.

Thus, the way out will produce a form of recovery which will lead to the individual realising why he has fallen, why he has got stuck in a situation which has stopped life happening to that individual, stopped experience growing and developing, stopped understanding and awareness growing in the individual.

Wisdom, while it will stand back and allow people and individuals to make mistakes, will equally engage in rescuing people from mistakes and from over-stressed situations, from which those individuals cannot rescue themselves. We can see that wisdom is a very deep awareness which is continually balancing out all the processes engaged in building deeper and deeper characteristics into the individuality which exists in each of the divine children of the Creator.

Wisdom is encouraging each of those divine children to grow into a level beyond childhood, which is more mature than childhood is, which is a level of growth in which divine friendship can occur between the individuals and their Creator.

Wisdom will forever be observing the balance occurring in experience, particularly at a physical level, in order that this absolute value can be extracted and made use of in every situation. So that wisdom is not so much engaged in easing the burden of life, as it is engaged in the harvesting of the fruits of the burdens of life. Wisdom develops an ability to see that the harvest in life is not at the level of ease, happiness, bliss and joy, but exists in a level of beingness in our nature which is at a very deep level of strength and integrity and selfhood which, while it is being autonomous and highly individual, is also becoming aware of its unity and loving relationship with all other forms of selfhood.

So we are saying that the deep wisdom which exists in the Creator's nature, and which we can learn to understand, is a deep wisdom which values not only the individual who is a friend to each other individual, but values the depth of character and strength and integrity, the leathery, craggy, strong, warrior-like toughness and individual responsiveness that each individual can develop in their own right. And wisdom recognises that individuality which doesn't have strength and doesn't have deep experience, is less valuable.

Although all the divine qualities of heaven are something we must have an experience of, and a taste of, wisdom recognises that, if these qualities are not understood arid lived at this outermost physical level of the universe, they are not fully appreciated in terms of their opposites, and therefore do not produce the deep understanding, the objective valuation, and the deep strength which can support them and which is needed in any true individual.

Wisdom recognises that there are three things that we need to achieve. First of all our unique separate beingness, then the objective understanding of values, which produces the ability to understand the real quality and value of all things, and then the strength and integrity which is necessary to support the being and the understanding; and it is on earth that these experiences have been made available for us, to a degree which they may not be available for us in any other form of experience. That is why there is a wisdom that is able to grow from the earth which is so valuable.

Reality from The Great Gift

Reality

This deep attitude which carries a concern for everything is not a superior attitude, but of course, from the lower level of reality, or a lower level of understanding, one uses the word 'God-like' in a derogatory manner because one is implying that it is a stupid and impossible attitude for a human being to take up. What you are, and I am, and many other people are, discovering is that it isn’t as stupid as we at first thought it to be.

Most of these impossible qualities and realities that people have talked about when they are trying to describe our spiritual reality, most of these impossible things, eventually, are discovered to be possible, but it does take a long time, sometimes, to adjust to them and to find out for oneself how they become possible.

I am often with people in my being because I delight in being with them. I really feel for them and with them, and it is their soul that I sense and am with. I continually feel the difference between their soul level responses and their outer personality level responses, when these come as two different things from the same person; that means, before the person has reached a reasonable amount of integration between those two levels.

It is quite often painful to me to be in the soul level at one minute, and suddenly being thrown into the personality level the next minute, but it’s one of the hazards that I am prepared to put up with, because I enjoy fishing for, and hunting for, the soul in people and bringing it into communication with my soul, whatever that word means – deepest level of being, most valuable valuer that I know about myself.

Now, when it comes to understanding what reality means, we have to observe together that you live in an area of awareness which is a valuing awareness; that is its chief activity. It is an activity which is learning how to increase and define its ability to value; it’s learning how to build a structure of values, which it carries around with it. That is your reality; you are essentially an observer and a valuer.

Now, out of your observations and valuations come responses and communications, but they only come if you’ve already observed and valued, so you are most essentially an observer and a valuer, and secondarily then a responder and communicator. You actually live in that valuing existence. Even if you were suddenly translated into heaven, your reality would be your continual awareness and valuing of heaven.

The essential nature of your being, and the most real thing about you, is your ability to value qualities. So, reality, so far as you and I can understand it, is most essentially a world of values. The word 'world' is quite inept; there isn’t a word which is suitable: it’s an existence of values; it’s an existence in values.

Your reality is made up entirely of values, but they have two distinct orders, and the lower order of values is built around a secondary valuing process which has become detached from the primary one. The secondary one is concerned with the personality keeping its end up and acquiring for itself the needs which come from its perception of itself in that way, and if one looks carefully into that perception, we find that it is a mistaken perception. But this mistake happens because the world conditions us to become susceptible to it.

In other words, the world conditions us to identify with this more outward level of our communication mechanism, instead of the most essential levels of those communicating mechanisms. Now the world does that to us, and gradually, because it does that, we build up an outpost which becomes the personality self – becomes an ego in its own right if you like – and it develops a valuing system around itself which is quite different to the essential valuing system of the essential valuer, which is in a more interior level, a more subtle level of your awareness. So you have to live in your universe of values, and l have to live in my universe of values.

Within your universe of values you have to discover and find for yourself this more essential and more valuable level, and to learn to separate it out from the less essential and less valuable level, which is your outer personality self fulfilling its needs. The inner, spiritual, essential self is working to fulfil its higher needs, but often it is being prevented from doing that by the activity of the outer personality self, which is grabbing all the attention in order to fulfil its own level of needs. Maslow spoke very clearly about this situation, so if you’ve had the chance to read Maslow’s books you will know exactly what I am talking about.

Now that is your reality; you can’t get out of that, unless perhaps it’s possible to destroy your own ego. I think what some Eastern religions, some forms of Buddhism, do is to take away the separate stance of the ego, which is one of the gifts which the Creator has given to us, and it unifies its own reality with the greater reality, not in the form of becoming a friend of that reality, but in terms of neutralising its own ability to be separate.

This attitude combines its attention and energies with the attention and energies of the bigger system of creation, which we could call the system of the Supreme Being, and, in this way, it seems to destroy its own separate existence and become a part of the Creator’s existence, but I don’t believe this is what the Creator wishes of us, or wishes for us, and if you believe in a system rather than a Creator, I don’t believe it’s the best way of making use of the system.

In the deeply religious sense, I believe that the Creator stands outside the system, and we can have an understanding of his Being in that way. We can make friends with him in that way if our own reality remains a strong and separate reality while we are becoming aware of the nature of that Being we call Creator.

I think it’s also possible to become a part of the energies which are the most ethereal level of creation, and this would be a sensation of continuing bliss, if you like. One would then bask in the rays of the Creator’s creative intention, just like a physical person would enjoy standing under a warm shower, and one could lose one’s reality in that way, in the enjoyment of standing under that warm shower and enjoying its warmth and its activity, and letting go of every other form of reality, every other form of responsibility, every other form of identification.

In that way, one returns to the womb of one’s being, but I don’t think one has actualised or accomplished the purpose of the potentiality which has been given to our being. But on a smaller scale, we have to deal with the overcoming of the outpost of the substitute personality ego if we want to become established in our proper essential higher reality; which is to say, our own essential divine being.

In order to achieve the awareness and the ability to be with our true self, to be according to our true self, to respond with the nature of our true self, we have to learn to eliminate the activity of the outer self, which has taken over the activity of living from our bigger, whole self. But this is a difficult thing to do, and everyone who is trying to do it will tell you the same thing – that it is a difficult thing to do.

How long it will take is not in anybody’s ability to say, because everybody does it in a different way, and takes a different time to do it. But we have to be careful that in the overcoming of the ego sense, of the outer self, we don’t deal with it in a way which is simply destructive, rather than integrative. We want to integrate the experience of the outer self and gradually make that outer self a proper continuation of our inner essential self. We don’t want to destroy that outer self, we want to make it a part of an integrated whole self. We want to be able to use it and live with it as a proper part of our whole being. We don’t want simply to destroy it. That means to say that we have to alter its nature and its attitude in such a way that it remains fully alive and active, but it alters its patterns of responses and refers them continually to its essential real nature and doesn’t handle them itself, in its own right, thus cutting life off from the essential self.

Now the sort of reality we run into in our every day activity feels to be a quite different reality to the one I have been talking about. It’s a reality we get into when we have been driving our car to work for ten minutes and become thoroughly irritated by the whole process. We are then in a mood of the outer self. We are in irritation, our reality seems to be the stupidity and the irritatingness of other people. Now this is the sort of reality which a lot of people refer to when that word is used, and it is real for them so long as they are identified with it.

I can’t make you choose which reality you identify with, and I can’t make you choose which reality you believe in, but, as I understand it, you must eventually come to separate out the world which you experience from the place that you experience the world from. And you must learn to notice the difference between the reality which is the observer in you, and the reality which is the artificial outer self in you (but still observes in its own right), and the reality which comes to you as a process of experience brought about by identification with the activity which is going on in the outer physical world around you, such as the irritatingness of other people, meeting deadlines, doing your work, fulfilling your obligations.

These are three different levels of reality. The outer ones are the outer world of events; they are a form of reality. The secondary ones are the secondary responses of the secondary personality-self, supplying its own needs and looking for ways of supplying those needs continually, and this is often what we refer to as the selfish self, the self-seeking self. It’s more concerned about its own self than other people’s selves. Then there is the most essential higher self, which values properly (values the most valuable concepts and qualities that we know of) which exists, and learns to know that it exists, in a reality which is completely concerned with valuing and a higher form of beauty, and a higher form of purpose, which is concerned as much with the fulfilling of its fellow beings as with its own being.

Those are the three levels of reality which we are living in. This outermost reality of events is changed very much, and seems to become a totally different form of reality, when the higher self lives in it. When that occurs, then you get a sensation that the outer world of events has suddenly altered. When the ordinary secondary self lives in the outer world of events it creates one type of physical world for you to live in, but, when the most interior, higher self lives in that outer world of events, it is as though that outer world is suddenly transformed, and carries a set of values and meaning which is completely different to the one you are normally used to living in.

So, there again, that adds another complexity to the problem of your reality, and this living of the higher self through the outer world also applies to the secondary self. The outer self can be lived in fully and properly by the inner self, and that transforms the outer self too. So that makes a total of five worlds of reality for you to live in. That means two forms of outer reality, lived in by self one or self two, two forms of the outer ego self to live in, which is conditioned by whether it is living in it in its own right for its own ego, or being lived in by the higher self for the right of the higher self (with the needs and the purposes of the higher self being lived out in that outer personality). So that’s two forms of outer worldly events to experience; two forms of outer personality self and sense of ego to experience. And fifthly, the experience of being in the 'beingness' of the true essential divine self, or spiritual self, in such a way that you are being it in its own reality, quite separately from the reality of the outer personality self, or the outer world of physical events.

So there are five forms of reality that you probably have experienced already, but you would find, as we all find, that it is very difficult to separate out clearly one form of reality from another, and we may eventually discover that, even in this higher level essential self, there is more than one form of living in that self, which is very subtle.

We could say that, even in that spiritual reality, there is a reality of the spiritual nature living in the created universe as a part of that created universe, as though the created universe was a whole in its own right, like a plant is a whole in its own right, working out its own biological function. And then a higher form of being, in that higher being again, is recognised in that the essential element of that higher form of beingness is in the 'absolute', outside this biological function of creation, of the created universes.

Here we belong to an order of reality which is the same order that the Creator Himself belongs to, but the difference between those things is very subtle, and we need not concern ourselves with them until we wish to, but they have resulted in two different forms of religious activity, and two different forms of spiritual activity which I’ve noticed in people. The one is becoming part of the whole, and is only concerned with becoming part of the whole, and the other is becoming its own individual divine reality in its own right. It is concerned with its relationships with other individual realities and is concerned very much, very deeply, with its relationship with the Creator’s reality.

This may gradually become a concern with the friendship which exists between ourselves, in this higher sense, and the Creator’s self; our divine friendships with one another and our divine Creator, who becomes our very great friend. In this way you also have two forms of reality to choose.

The Creator is not going to push His friendship on you, and is not going to force you into a friendship with your other fellow beings. This is something you have to take up and value as a possibility, but not as a 'must'. You can return to the oneness of the Creator’s emanations, if you like, without discovering the value of your own separate reality, or the Creator’s separate reality, or the wonderful possibilities that exist between those realities and the realities of your brothers and sisters. This you have to discover for yourself, and to take up yourself, and to choose to take up for yourself. The Creator cannot thrust it on you any more than we know we can create friendships at will. They have to happen, and they have to happen from both sides of those friendships.

So, for me, when I use the word 'reality' in its biggest sense, it is usually signifying the process that is going on in accord with the Creator’s longing to bring about the existence of our own separate individual realities, and helping those realities to grow in understanding and strength in their own right. It is a continuation of the Creator’s reality which He has chosen to expand in such a form that individuals can arise from His nature, and become established in their own right and appreciate the treasures which the Creator’s nature has stored up for them. They can also take part in creative living and creative friendship in such a way that they can come to a form of living which can enlarge the Creator’s own understanding, and bring in the possibility of harvesting further values and greater treasures in the future. That’s the significance of reality which I generally refer to.

Then there is a form of reality which is beyond our comprehension, and that is the reality which belongs to the comprehension of the Creator. That must be the reality which the Creator Himself exists in, or has come from, and that is not in our ability to understand until the Creator wishes to show His understanding of it to us. That would be a totally 'beyond' form of understanding of reality, because it is the reality from which our reality has arisen, and the reality from which the Creator’s reality has arisen. That we don’t know about. I feel our common sense says we should not know about that, until we know virtually all there is to know about the other reality, which we have talked about and which is more available for us.

So the difference between all these forms of reality, which we have drawn attention to, are very great indeed. It’s like looking down at your own fingernail and comparing the size of that with the size of the physical world we live in, the size of the solar system that the physical world lives in, the size of the galaxy which the solar system lives in, and also that system of galaxies which is the cosmos, then realising that that is only the physical cosmos and not the ethereal cosmos, or the spiritual cosmos. There is a vastness in the reality and the forms of reality which are available for us to perceive and to understand and relate to, which is on that scale, but the Creator has given us an ability to cope with that scale of reality and understanding, even if it takes us quite a while to exercise that ability of our nature.

REF: Abraham Maslow – Towards A Psychology of Being, Van Nostrand, 1968.

Divine Purpose from The Great Gift

Divine Purpose

There are a number of matters which I would like to define which are matters that seem to cause a deep stirring in the heart of our being and which require some response from us. I will quickly go by the opinions of those people who do not see the need for a purposeful creative consciousness behind the manifestation of this universe. Such understanding must come to us as a simple observation beyond doubt, or it does not come at all.

We realise that there are people who are able to conceive of this manifest universe as an outgrowth from some haphazard life which is fumbling its way by accidents from one thing to another. I cannot sustain such a theory since I am aware that the organisation of matter has to reach an extremely high degree indeed before life can even begin a fumbling of any sort. Our time and attention is too valuable to remain in, what are for me, such unproductive fields. We must observe all things, but not limit them to the tangible and the 'scientific', particularly when we realise that our own consciousness is neither tangible nor 'scientific'.

My observations lead me to a purposeful God, a living responsive creative source, whose motives we may begin to discover in the way of our own nature and environment are formulated. Many of these qualities have become so clear to me that I would like to bring them to your notice in a direct manner. To you, my propositions may well be faulty and insubstantial, but I will endeavour to place them before you in an order which seems to me to have some relevance.

Let me start with a simple thing. You will have noticed that those people among us whom we sense to have gone furthest in the development and expression of their nature have shown clearly that they attach greater importance to qualitative matters than quantitative ones. (By this I mean that they can be seen to be concerned to do one thing really well rather than many things less well. They are people who for instance, would rather write one good book than several indifferent ones, who would choose one deeply valuable friendship rather than many semi-friendships.)

They are also concerned to be strong, but not powerful, concerned to add value to life and other people, never to take it away. They try to fulfil themselves in such a manner that they also fulfil others. They appear to gain as much satisfaction from the quality of experience they can afford to others as they gain for themselves. They seem to share their life with others while at the same time drawing out the possibilities of those others. In a word they endeavour to make all things freshly 'new' and thus non-repetitive.

If we call this manifest universe creation, then these people want to be creative within it. They would appear to be the ones who achieve real friendship and who also add creatively to the life about them. They see the value in their creative living in terms of adding to the significance of life, but not in any form of cleverness which may well detract from the significance of life. So they do not seek to be important, yet they have a clear-cut hierarchy of values which would enable them to recognise the best things in people and the best people among things.

Such individuals, if they do influence people profoundly, take care not to do it through any form of power which over-rides the individual wishes of those people, for, more than any others, they value the uniqueness and autonomy of individuals. Every individual is valued as another unique polarity of life with whom an endless variety of expressions is possible. The loss of any individuality is an absolute loss to all living potential, and the diminishment of any individual (in respect of the deepest level of that person’s being) the greatest of tragedies.

Now I have been making this point because what I want to observe are principles which I feel can take us a long way into the understanding of the creative impulse. If we, out of our experience, follow human nature up to its highest expression we get well into the nature we expect belongs to that of the spring of creation. If we then combine with this the situation of the family group, we already have a good motive and a good method of achieving that motive.

The workings of the family group can be observed closely by us, and can be seen to be an excellent way of developing the potentiality of an individual in such a way that the child takes on the reality of its separate existence in a gradual way, and then is encouraged to stand alone.

In the proper family relationship the child is instinctively aware that the ties of childhood must be broken and then, ideally, replaced with an entirely voluntary friendship. I say ideally because it is quite rare for the full cycle of the family to be fulfilled, for this requires a number of mature attitudes which do not often arise. The parents have to be wise, and the child has to be wise, and so too few children succeed in becoming real friends with their parents, certainly in the deep sense of their true being.

I observe that the friendship of true being can arise in our world, but I also notice that so few people are able to demonstrate the characteristics of true being, that it does not arise very often. I must then say that the true friendship of true being is a rare phenomenon and we have much to learn about the nature of this relationship. What we observe most often is the nature of secondary friendship, the character of which is different to the character of primary or true friendship.

Whereas secondary friendship is a situation in which the persona or secondary self alone participates, primary friendship can only be entertained by the primary self and does not exist in the values of the unspiritualised secondary self. When primary friendship is demonstrated we are able to say that the primary self is also demonstrated, and thus also the nature of the creative source and the motive of that source.

To put it in simple language, we shall obtain an illuminating insight into the nature and purpose of God if we look at the full nature of true friendship and the nature of the family as it should, but often does not, fulfil its natural function. If we see in a clearer fashion the nature of God, we shall also see ourselves and one another with fuller significance if we accept that we ourselves are the outcome of this God’s endeavour. We must practise an intuitive perception of God to know ourselves and an intuitive perception of ourselves to know God.

There is a vicious circle here which feels to me like a limit set upon our ability to understand true nature by our inability to enter into the full relationship of true friendship. We habitually mistake secondary friendship for the real thing, and we do not look upon this true friendship as a great art and a great achievement.

True friendship so forgets its self-interest in the absorbing experience of full communication with another, that it derives a great gladness in witnessing the fulfilment of the friend and the full expression of that individual. Similarly the individual in question is so absorbed in giving life and form to the values and concepts that mean most to his nature that he becomes equally forgetful of his self-interests. Thus we achieve a situation in which neither individuals are concerned to conform to any image they have of themselves, and, for a space, they live as though they did not know who they were. They are so concerned to 'be' themselves that they no longer need to monitor their self-image to feel safe. This freedom enables them to become aware of a much larger nature in themselves than is otherwise possible.

This attitude requires courage, confidence and faith in life, which is most difficult and is a part of the limiting circle which must be broken. If one true friend says to the other by his attitude, "From whoever I am, I am deeply glad about you, whoever you are," he gives to the other inner space, freedom and confidence which enables him to go beyond his previous knowledge. In going beyond his previous more limited self, this other gives back to his friend a demonstration of values which enable that friend to witness the quality of true being, and thus the quality of the potentiality within his own being. This at the same time reveals the motive of God who wished creation to have taken this particular form.

My own experience tells me that the nature of this God must have in it a bigness of heart and of mind which is greater and more poetically beautiful than that yet demonstrated by any man or woman. And my experience of people who have bigness of heart and mind is that they do not have, as so many of us do, deficiency needs which absorb much of their time and attention. Having overcome the deficiency needs of their personalities, they give all their attention to observing and 'being with' those people who confront them. They are quite naturally at pains to recognise the real individual in each person they meet, and in this way they draw out the real values in that person for they no longer have any interest in the secondary values which we play with in our games of ego-importances and ego-greeds.

If big natured people express the nature of our Creator then the fundamental 'desire' which must have been at the heart of God’s character and at the heart of that longing which is the inspiration and motive for manifestation, is to share creative friendship with other real individuals. Within this highest form of being are the divine qualities of love and affection, strength and integrity.

If my approach has seemed reasonable, we have now got a motive and a concept of God and of man which can satisfy many of the reasons for the world being the way it is. We can begin to understand God’s motives for designing creation as it is when we accept that a longing to bring into being other conscious individuals to exist creatively with, in highest friendship, was the greatest desire in His heart.

The bringing into existence of this physical world with all its mixed values, pains and joys seems, in the light of such a motive, the only way it could be achieved. If, for instance, this world had been kept in a pristine condition then there would have been no room for the fulfilment of the individuality and understanding necessary for true and creative friendship. For pristine environments are unspoiled by any quality opposed to those of perfection, and if we had been born and kept in an environment of perfection we should not have any means of discovering the meaning of any of the qualities of that perfection. We would have been 'imprisoned' in beauty, love, harmony, joy and all bliss, and we would then have had no chance of knowing about the opposites of these qualities from which to gain an understanding of their significance.

Since our life would have been one of perfect harmony and ease, and the nearness of the character of God’s nature so close to our observation, then we would have felt no reason or urge to express a character or individuality of our own. Such character as we might have, would have to be imposed upon us as a ready made thing.

In our experience of the world, the way it is, we find that our nature and expression suffers opposition at every turn. We find that we not only have to discover each of our possible characteristics one by one, but we find that we have to strengthen them one by one. We need not mistake this for a quantitative ambition since we come to recognise that a large number of acquired characteristics is the proper and only way of reaching a larger aspect of overall individual character. And we recognise that strength is not the same as power, but is the ability to maintain good values in the face of resistance. Without this ability we do not possess those values, for they do not truly belong to us until we have become unable to lose them. This strength is not acquired in order to dominate others, but in order to live out our true self for the sake of others.

As we learn to care more about this higher friendship we realise that it becomes concerned about what it can offer to others. The value of any friendship must also be a measure of the depth of character and understanding that each one brings to it. It can be said that only a small or thin friendship can be experienced with another whose character has not been developed or worked upon. In contrast, it is with people who have had much experience and had much character development that we can expect to have the most enjoyable and fruitful relationship.

So if we learn to care about one another, in ways which make us wonder how we can best be a friend to one another, we realise that we must concern ourselves with gathering as much character as possible. This will mean living in an environment which is not too easy, and setting ourselves tasks which are in line with our highest valuations, and consequently the most demanding and difficult ones to realise. It is then discovered that there is a fundamental change in our attitude towards growth; we discover that we do not want it to come to an end. We discover that our idea of perfection has changed also, for the perfect creative friend is a very different sort of person from the perfect being who lives only in a pristine condition, without pain or effort.

It can now be seen that the image of ourselves as well as of God is taking on a radically different look. For we can picture ourselves as being engaged in a process of experience which is preparing us for friendship and companionship, rather than a process in which we are simply trying to survive by turning ourselves into the image of someone else, even the perfect someone which God is. And this God is looking upon us with a longing for our potential friendship and companionship, not with an eye to eliminate our unique character, but to enhance it. In fact the weight of the character we take home with us at the end of the day will be taken by our God as a measure of our affection and appreciation of Him.

This gives us a view of God and of His initial love for us which to me is very much more beautiful and attractive than the one I get from the idea of a tricky God who gives us an obstacle course to struggle through before absorbing us back into his nature again in a condition of eternal bliss. Such an obstacle course must always seem like punishment for a crime we do not feel ourselves to have committed.

Now this idea, that we have been given our 'being' to make something of, leaves us with the realisation that initiative has got to come from us much of the time. Not only have we to take a full part in the development of our individual character, but we then have to choose those people with whom we wish to share it, and this has to include our Creator as well as our fellow men and women.

If the price of our ultimate eternal being depended on whether or not we choose God as our friend, then that friendship would have a very dubious basis, and it would seem to me to be a very wrong use of friendship. But if that same God arranged things in such a way that we could choose Him or not, as we wished, then to me this would be a most important factor in the whole structure of creation, and it would signify to me that all that is good, in my understanding of values, was being upheld.

Thus I see it as imperative that our God allows us to decide and to choose how we grow towards His personal being, and He must offer some other way, which is less personal and less friendship-based, than the one we have been looking at. Since each of us has, as a part of our nature and understanding, a quite impersonal area which is also full of interest, beauty and delight, I see no reason why we should not choose to develop this side of our nature; and develop it to a stage where it can be harmonised and integrated with a similar impersonal set of characteristics which I feel is a part of the Creator’s being also.

In this way we can propose that there is a full spectrum of the Creator’s nature offered to us, ranging from the most personal to the most impersonal, and each of us will find ourselves relating to different combinations of these two extremes. I am sure we have all come across religious understanding which expresses both of these ways of development. For instance, we know of the Buddhist who tries to eradicate all sense of individual existence from his understanding and who then blends 'his' nature with the one life; who has to identify himself with 'the Absolute'.

Then there is the follower of Jesus who describes to us a most personal and intimate way into the relationship we have with our God, so that we may become the child of this God if we wish. And, if we value the endeavour, we can grow past the stage of child with this God. But this further growth is not forced upon us, and we may return to this Creator as a child and enter our home again as a child, if we so choose.

What must be true, is that we discover we love many of the qualities of 'true being' if we are to become a part of the eternal life to which it belongs. It would be foolish to think that we can take any quality back with us to eternity, for qualities which are foreign to its nature must be rejected, and us along with them. Eternal life must be at pains to maintain its proper condition for all our sakes, but within this condition there will surely be a vast area in which our individual characters will be able to express and develop themselves.

We know that many people have reached an inner experience of profound oneness, completion and bliss which makes all the foregoing statements of no account. To me this is quite possible; they have become one with the nature of the Creator’s beneficent emanations, and the impulse to know the person of the Creator behind them has not been felt. This seems entirely proper to me, for I cannot imagine the nature of this Creator demanding that we love Him personally as a friend, before we become a part of eternal life. Such an attitude would be foreign to the meaning of love and affection, as well as to the concept of creative friendship, which I feel are the deepest motives in existence.

My feeling is that we must discover the nature of the Creator’s person to be so loveable that we try to read the heart of His being in order that we may delight and fulfil its longing. This is what real friends forever do for one another. It leads them into an ever growing and open-minded situation which seeks to be always new in its expression, endeavouring to surpass the quality and value which has already been reached.

How can a Creator be content with a static, satisfied condition? He must surely have an on-going attitude that will always seek to surpass itself, even if we do not see it or wish to become a part of it. For us, whose spirits are so often weary with the difficulties of the world the release from anxiety and frustration which comes to us if we enter any sphere of relative bliss, must seem to be enough. There must be few who would look back over their shoulder and observe that an element in their nature had not been properly read and understood, and thereupon give up such bliss to return again to the resistances of the outer fields of experience.

There are many people who have experienced this blissful aspect of their nature, so it is not out of place to ask why the Creator, or if they prefer it, the One Life, did not arrange for them to be born directly into this blissful state, if reaching it was the sole purpose of creation. Why should there be any physical manifestation, with all the accompanying effort, if blissful nature was only concerned to become blissful nature again, and paid no heed to individual characteristics to further its intrinsic purpose?

Such a reality would not support the demonstration and experience of values which we, as men and women, continually stumble upon. There is no room in such an enclosed system for the individual courage, integrity and affection which we know exists. Or if these qualities exist in our experience, they become in this reality only a dream and a game, and their significance is insubstantial. I should not choose to take part in such a game willingly, and the bliss of such a reality has for me already taken on a quality which devalues itself, as well as what I have unwittingly mistaken to be myself. And, furthermore, if it is thought that this blissful oneness is in fact furthering its purposes through the artificial manifestation of our human nature, it would still behove us to return to this world of experience rather than to remain in the completed state that blissful consciousness represents.

Such a system could be imagined to be collecting experience of itself through the experience of many different centres of being which each of us represents. These centres of being thus, not having a reality of their own, but being a series of differently placed windows for the collective consciousness to look out from. If we become aware of the trick, we then proceed to correct the sense of separate identity and re-become a part of the whole again. Thus, in becoming God, we cease to fulfil the purpose of this God, which is to continue to know itself more completely through 'windows'.

I feel sure that the picture we have just drawn is one which many people hold when they take up the pursuit of the spiritual path; and at the same time feel that the idea of a real God, to whom we can relate, is an immature and childish attempt to sustain the reality of our wishful thinking. They would say that an idea of a personal God is 'anthropomorphic' and, in our present climate of thought, this is expected to be automatically a damning criticism. The answer I would like to give to this is simply to state that the anthropomorphic condition can be taken the other way. That is, it can be taken as a supreme compliment on the part of the Creator who has endowed us with an image which conforms to His own image because He has such high hopes of us.

In a cynical age this simple and most beautiful attitude is the hardest of all to uphold. In a materialistic climate the human image is mistaken for the purely physical attributes of our personality; the higher and less tangible abilities of moral fervour, integrity and loving affection are overlooked, and the personal God very easily assumes the qualities of despiritualised humanity.

To imagine a God in the image of degenerate man is one thing, but to imagine man to be capable of living and upholding all the most valuable qualities of God’s nature is quite another. This gift to us of ourselves, as something which can sustain comparison with that of the Divine nature is exactly the gift which I believe our Creator is endeavouring to bring about. The gift is of such a nature that it cannot be handed to us on a plate ready made. It is a most subtle and difficult thing to give, and it can only be given if we can enter into the spirit of the process and consciously and creatively take it upon ourselves.

The gift is of such a nature that it contains a great burden within it, namely the burden of objective understanding and the integrity which such understanding requires of us. The weight of this burden is also an exact measure of the absolute value we carry in terms of the creatively understood friendship which we can offer one another and our God.

To know and to accept the gift which we are being offered is to know the nature of complete responsibility. For we cannot relate to each other, in the context of true creative friendship, until we carry the sense of responsibility for all qualities and thus the sense of responsibility for all people. We cannot relate to each other in complete friendship until we consciously carry the attitude which is at the heart of the nature of the Creator Himself. If this sort of affection is given the name of Divine Love then I am happy about that term, but I would loathe to settle for something less.

I do not want to give the impression that I am arguing against endeavouring to experience oneness with God. Very deep spiritual love and friendship must achieve a 'oneness of being' which is impossible to less spiritual orders of consciousness. I am trying to look carefully into the nature of this Divine oneness in order to understand more clearly the wonders that it holds, and to make the loveliness of its nature and its purpose more apparent by discovering the beauty of its motivation.

Whether we come to this oneness in a more personal or impersonal way, I would like to emphasise that our response to it is of the utmost value and that we can remain 'us', and It can remain 'It' if 'we' wish to make it so; or we can submerge our identity and cease to 'stand on our own feet', if that is what we choose.

I feel I am trying to point out, very specifically, that our God is a fully beneficent, loving, giving God who does not play tricks with us, and who is offering layer after layer of possibilities within the nature of His and our being. The measure of the gifts being offered to us is only limited by our ability to see them, understand them and receive them. The more we can accept, the more fulfilled is the longing of our Creator’s heart. But who are we, and how much are we confused in our spir

itual endeavour by the ambiguity of our sense of identity? If we have not achieved the integration of the separate interests and attitudes of our nature, we find we have many sub-personalities whose identity we become confused with. It is not possible to feel much value in the foregoing arguments if the strongly valuable aspects of our nature are diluted by lack of certainty. Conversely, deep and strong feelings of certainty often come to us gratuitously, and these have the ability to further the integration of our attitudes and enhance the sense of 'a centre of self' which carries our most valuable understandings and intentions.

The spiritual path for many of us is essentially a way of intensifying the values and attitudes of our nature and learning to recognise, through this intensity, the unified self who is present to all of them, and who understands all of them. This self who is common to our best responses and aspirations, and who wishes to leave nothing of value out of its world, is our real self.

Since we have a physical, emotional and mental nature, and since each of these natures has a masculine and feminine aspect, we should expect to find that we have many sub-personalities. When these are integrated, we have a true personality which is an expression of, and a vehicle for, the true self. This is the self that can feel and know and enter into the divine life and choose to relate and respond to our Creator as 'Friend' or as 'God'.

It seems to me that, in either case, the blissful nature of our encounter is one of great 'gladness'. This is a special sort of gladness that is love, and yet an on-going love which takes it into a creative condition, and which results in what I have already described as the highest form of friendship. Here the nature of creation is continued in an open-ended, ever widening potentiality for which the polarity of 'me' and 'thou' is absolutely necessary. If either polarity, or individual Being, 'gives up', then the creative tension or vortex between the two vanishes, and the possibilities for endless living experience vanish with it.

I am afraid that I have to use the term 'personal' in trying to describe this Divine relationship and this may cause a confusion of understanding. The higher meaning of the term 'personal' refers to the nature of the individual Divine Being that is the reality of the Creator as well as our own reality. The Creator, it is suggested, has given us all a 'chip off the old block' or a 'spark of His Divine Flame' to be the basis of our separate individual identity. Between this chip, or spark, and God, who is the giver, can grow a divine friendship. This comes through a response to what I have called the personal end of the spectrum of possible Personal and Impersonal options. We will all respond to a different mixture of these two extremes.

In talking about God as a person, it is not necessary to picture Him/Her as having head, arms, legs and trunk, and sitting on a celestial cloud. If we picture God as a beneficent point of ambient light, we may still feel the personal response of this centre as being a real, sensitive, affectionate awareness, which can take on any form and be anywhere as He may wish. But God can communicate the nature of His love and the many sides of His beneficent nature, by taking a form which acts as a language. A beautiful face that is smiling at us with loving eyes will probably carry more meaning for us than a bright light and atmosphere of love. So while this is true, God may well choose to use a form to make Himself known to us. When such a form becomes a hindrance to communication, then no doubt it will cease to be used. If we do not wish to know God in that form, then it is likely that He will never confront us in that form.

It is not possible, then, for us to know the real nature of friendship until we act from the nature of our real Self. Secondary selves can only know the quality of secondary friendship which is largely a situation in which the one is supplying the deficiency needs of the other. When the supply stops so does the friendship; dislike and resentment take its place, and thus prove that it was not real in the first place.

The love of real friendship can never diminish. It makes no demands and can never suffer resentment. But it is sensitive, so it must be able to be hurt, but I would think that this was confined to the formative stage, after which the divine resonance between the individuals would be so complete that even hurt would become less possible.

When we know we are being our real Self, we may notice that at that very instant we are aware how much of that Self is unfamiliar to us. As we may expect that God’s nature is like a mansion with many rooms in it, so is our own nature. We are mansions within the mansion of God and learning to understand and appreciate the content of our rooms and His/Her rooms. The thing that we notice and enjoy about the rooms of God we duplicate in the building of our own mansion. It is possible that we may make some little thing of our own which God also duplicates for the furnishing of His mansion. I like to think that there is a keenness on the part of God to delight in so doing.

Creative Friendship from The Great Gift

Creative Friendship

We observe that we exist as independent individuals, and that our independence and individuality become an intrinsic part of our understanding of living values. We come to recognise clearly that we would have virtually no value for one another if we resembled each other completely. In fact we find we have more value for ourselves and others the more our individuality grows and develops. But growth produces a series of changes in our understanding in such a way that our idea of valuable individuality becomes naturally governed by parameters which are initially not apparent to us. For growth produces an ability in us to become aware of, and to use, our creative imagination. This means that we are able to choose how we behave and do not have this behaviour dictated to us by the conditioning effects of the environment or the conditioning effects of the lesser, undeveloped nature that our growth commenced from.

If we achieve the ability to observe clearly from the ground where this imagination is free and relatively unconditioned we can begin to ask ourselves the question, "What is the greatest and most valuable gift I would like to be given?" We should take a long time to delve into our whole private universe to come up with the best possible answer. I think that the answer we would find we arrived at would be that the greatest and most valuable thing we could ever wish for is 'Ourself'.

We would find, I believe, that, when we had become satiated with all the immediately beautiful and delightful things that our imagination first of all thinks it would like, such as 'the heavenly life' with all the attributes of peace, beauty, serenity, love and bliss, then, and only then, might we begin to realise that there was something we might learn to value even more. This deeper value, I feel, would be based on our realisation that we were not able to use and develop our independent creative and responsible faculties in such a heaven.

Now these independent creative responsibilities require all our integrity and effort to function properly because, if we look at them, we will discover that there is only one thing which they want to be engaged in, and that is the discovery and expression of 'the impossibly beautiful and valuable thing'.

Our real independent spirit is not truly interested in doing the possible beautiful things, although it does them as a proper part of its natural and responsible behaviour. This spirit is more truthfully always preparing to take a deep breath and try to do some wonderful thing that it can only aspire to and cannot already achieve. This is a fact which stems from the truth of our Being which reflects the nature and attitude of the Creator.

I shall now turn the tables and say that, if we next use our independent imagination and put ourselves in the place of the Creator, there is nothing we will be able to come up with as a more worthwhile thing to create than a means of bringing into existence some other real independent beings with whom we could enter into creative living as friends and sharers of one another’s experience. And then we can look at what we consider the nature of friendship to be, and find out why it becomes such an important part of our experience.

We have a deep desire to share our independent imaginative and creative living with other independent beings. To bring an impossibly beautiful thing within the scope of our expression is a very desirable achievement, but to be able to share the values of the achievement with other independent sources of appreciation and valuation, such as another person who is your friend, is even more desirable. We feel that to get the greatest benefit from our creative endeavours we must share the fruits of the endeavour with others.

Another cannot be another unless he or she is truly independent too, and they cannot be valuable 'other people' unless they have achieved a degree of growth in their own private universe which is able to give attention to and appreciation for the qualities which you yourself have valued so much. They do not have to agree about the value of what you have found, but they must have reached a level of understanding from which their reasons for not agreeing with you are as valuable as the treasure you are showing to them. This begins to enable us to understand the astringent and virile side to the creative aspect of true friendship, and it also points out for us the difference between true friendship and artificial friendship.

Artificial friendship is the activity of the preliminary self, the selfish self, which bases friendship on the use people have for its relatively small and self-centred desires and needs. It is a perfect parody of the higher true friendship, but its order of behaviour is not based on the free independence of the spirit but on the fear and anxiety surrounding the selfish nature of a personality divorced from its true spiritual identity.

The artificial friendships of the selfish self are based on the ability of its so-called 'friends' to boost and support its artificial and substitute existence. Its 'reality' is a substitute for its spiritual reality, and its 'values' are a substitute for its spiritual values. In every way it parodies the proper activity of its spiritual counterpart. It also parodies the sense of purpose and achievement, and this ultimately leads to its downfall, for the individual eventually becomes sickened by the lack of real satisfaction its artificial substitute behaviour brings to it. It then begins to look about for an alternative life which does not consist of a sense of futility and emptiness.

After many mistakes the perception of the spiritual self and the artificial self begin to overlap and integrate, but only if the pain of vanity continues. If it is successful, the individual person is able to begin to value and express the qualities of the spiritual understanding and live them out through its physical personality. It can also begin to understand the nature of true friendship which can only belong to the higher spiritual nature and cannot properly exist at the lower level of the selfish personality self.

Only the true Self, which carries with it the attitude of the Creator, can enter into the feeling and nature of true friendship. This true friendship has an attitude which we can call that of 'gladness' towards its friends. Now this use of the term gladness is trying to draw attention to a forward-going, non-clinging, non-dependent attitude. This gladness contains what we understand of the word love and affection, but it also carries a zest of joy and livingness which results in a paradox which can only be expressed by a phrase like 'careless caring' or 'unconcerned concern'.

I do not wish to suggest that there is any hardness or lack of sympathetic support in this friendship, but there is a wisdom in it which knows that we destroy one another with too much comfort and support and sympathy. This friendship also recognises that the creative impossibly beautiful aspiration can only be enjoyed and worked on between two independent friends who are able to stand firmly apart in order to become two polarities which are different from one another, and yet whose concern is unselfishly for the greater fulfilment of the other. In such a friendship a creative vortex can arise between them, from the play of forces between them, from which can come the impossibly beautiful thing. In this way the higher spiritual friendship assists each friend in their ongoing, never ending livingness.

The true spirit of man does not want to arrive at an omega point that is an ultimate point. Any omega point is only considered to be a point of new departure for a greater endeavour. There is of course an omega point in the growth of man’s spirit, from which he takes his first steps into his true life, and that is the point at which he consciously and deliberately enters into the Divine spiritual family of friends. This is also the proper species to which he must belong if he is to enter into eternal life and within which his individuality will be developed to its limits.

What is it that friends of this sort have to offer one another in friendships? It is the depth and quality of their unique characteristics combined with their species characteristics. So a measure of the regard you have for your friends and for yourself, and for your species, is the amount of effort you have put into building experience and character into your own universe, into your unique individuality.

The more living of a productive sort that you have done, the more real substance you will carry round with you and be able to offer in creative friendship to all your friends. This is all that we ever possess for ourselves, or for our loved ones: our characteristics.

We cannot have a deep and productive friendship with an individual who has only a thinness of character in him; we can only have a deep relationship with an individual who has a great depth of character in him. Such ultimately real belongings cannot be gained easily; our instinct tells us so. Such depth of character is only hard won on the battlefields of the hardest forms of living experience.

These hardest forms of living experience can never be in a heavenly environment, as we understand the term, in an existence of spiritual ease and bliss. It must be axiomatic that these characteristics can only be won by an individual effort to live the highest quality of being in the most resistant environment. Such an environment is exactly that of earth, which is not too far removed from heaven, but far enough from the heavenly environment to be called unheaven.

It is here in unheaven that we can work on the possibilities of our nature in a suitably resistive situation, which can call out of us the very utmost of our integrity and endeavour as well as our understanding of peace, beauty, serenity and bliss. It is here on earth that man can become familiar with the great gift that is being offered to him, which is his own Self. There is no other gift we really desire, and this is a way of arriving at an understanding of the great and wise giver of this gift, our Creator.

Our God thus turns out to be our great friend, and turns out to want from us nothing other than our great friendship. He does not want us to continue in childish dependence on him or in servile or childish obedience to him; he wants to give us the whole gift of our independent reality. This requires us to untie the Gordian knot which causes us to remain in an obedient or childish condition, and, when we have untied it, and made a lot of mistakes in consequence, then, and only then, are we in a position to be able to make a real deliberate friendship with him, and this is his great reward.

If we achieve enough independence and growth to become his friends, we will be able to participate with our God-friend in creative, responsible, aspiring endeavour. We will also be God-friends to one another and we will taste the life which is never ending and never accomplished, which is always virile, creative and new. And therefore, when we look around the world and see the state it is in, and throw up our hands in horror, we should take thought for a little while. We can now face the proposal that there is no gift we would rather have than the one we are being given. There is no other way that the gift could be given to us than in an environment such as earth.

Rather than disbelieving in a God who is trying to give us to ourselves, we should notice that this God is doing exactly what a god must do in order to give us what we want more than anything else. He is offering us from a distance the great gift of our own unique individual divine reality, but this is such a subtle and great gift that we must enter into the process by which we receive the gift. Our own initiative, and only that, can enable us to develop unique characteristics.

There are three aspects to the great gift: the separate life given to us out of the Creator’s own life; then intelligent understanding of the significance of the qualities inherent in that life, and lastly the strength and integrity to carry and sustain it.

The more these facts are considered and realised, the more we come to realise the value of our earthly life, and the Creator’s thoughtfulness in not being present in a dominant personal form which would have prevented us knowing about and developing individual independent characteristics and identity.

How could we have gathered such an important part of the gift if the strong and dominant person of the Creator had been at our side in a form which we could have recognised? We would have been merged into duplicates of his own nature if our God had done that, and then what value could we have for him as friends? What value would we have had in creative friendship for one another either? But if we are being given such a great and real gift then there must also be a risk that we will not enter into the spirit of the gift sufficiently to take it. There must be a possibility that we will wilt and fade in our spirit.

If we can have real success we must also be able to have real failure, and I think this is why we sense that there is a beautiful heroic yet tragic element in life. We must become aware of its failure as well as its success. Only our Creator can know what is real failure, but we can share the grief which he must feel for his children that he nearly wins, but who then slip away from life and from his love.

The Nature of God - from The Great Gift

The Nature of God

First of all, I think we have to try and realise what it means to say that God is an absolute form of reality. If we can understand the numinous and ethereal quality of the highest Spirit, we have to say that God, the absolute God, is that from which this Spirit emanates. So there is no word for the substance of the nature of God other than life and consciousness, or life and awareness.

Life contains the vital, powerful, energetic and elemental qualities that we know in our own experience, and consciousness contains the attitudes that include Divine Love and Divine understanding. My own understanding is that the Creator, who is also God, is self sufficient in a sense. That is to imply that, although we need God, in every meaning of that term, God does not need us in the same way.

Against this we have to set the understanding that if God didn’t have a purpose which included us, no doubt He would not have gone to all this trouble of bringing us into existence. But to have a purpose in which we can play some part is quite a different thing from having an absolute need of us in the way that we have an absolute need of God.

In the way that a child needs its mother and father, we need God for sustenance and support of our own reality because our own reality rests upon the reality of God, and all our sustenance comes from that reality. But in quite a different way, I believe, our God wishes us to come to life, to come to a full expression of our potential, our Divine reality, and that must be for a purpose which is not essential to the Being of the Creator, but which may be essential to a particular longing and delight in the heart of the understanding of that Creator.

In simple words, I think that the Creator wishes to have other individual divine Beings who can be His friends with whom He can share the content of His own reality, with whom He can enter into conversation, understanding and discussion about possible experiments in living, in trying to go beyond the understanding that God has already, which to us, at our stage of development, seems infinite, but this is obviously only a relative term, and is not infinite to the Creator’s possible understanding.

Therefore we can suggest that it is within our understanding that the Creator wishes to go beyond His own highest qualities. It is not outside the bounds of possibility that this is a fact, and the Creator is aware of His desire, of His longing, not only to share His understanding with friends, but also to enter into life and living experiments with those friends, in such a way that their collective understanding can go beyond the qualities which the Creator has within His understanding already; qualities of beauty, of virtue, of character, which the Creator already knows about but which, in the depth of His spirit, He will never be satisfied to rest in.

There is something in our spirit, which we can all recognise, which never wants to come to an end of its living, of its growth and of its journey towards what we can only describe as the impossibly beautiful. It must be the impossibly beautiful, because immediately we describe a journey towards a possible goal, it implies that we know the way to that goal and we know what that goal is before we arrive at it. I think there is something in all our spirits which is a proper spirit of creative ongoing livingness, and it contains in it an element of delight in exploration and discovery. I think the Creator must feel in His spirit a desire to achieve impossibly difficult things.

I believe that it is in the nature of all healthy spirits, all healthy individuals, to want to achieve spiritual goals. And those goals, when we look at them closely, are always goals which are impossibly difficult to reach. They are goals which are endless goals; they are goals which are concerned with the ultimate perception of the most valuable and beautiful things which, when we reach them, will only incline us to look for more beautiful and more valuable things. So there is that creative, trans-logical, exploratory quality in human nature and in Divine nature.

Therefore I think the Creator wishes to have friends, not only to share the delights of friendship with, but also friends who will help Him with the sort of exploration, the sort of experimental living out of life, which will enable us all to stumble upon new potentialities within that reality which we call the Absolute Divine Nature.

We can suggest that the Creator is aware that there are potentialities in nature which have not yet been fully actualised. He also realises that He needs other beings to help Him to permutate, as it were, all the possibilities of the potentialities in that nature. That is why He wishes to share His nature with us, and give us a nature similar to His own as an outright gift for us to use in our own way; so that each of us actualises it in a uniquely different way. Thus each of His children develops a slightly different approach and attitude towards experience and reality, while sharing the same experience and understanding of reality and of qualities.

We can say that God is a Being whose nature rests on a subtlety of reality which we cannot fully comprehend, which is more subtle than the most spiritual nature of creation. He wishes to share His treasures with other individuals who are true, distinct, unique individuals and who are also His friends, but, before they can become His friends, they have to become His divine children.

After they have passed through the stage of being His divine children they can become mature Divine Individuals. Then they have to take upon themselves the understanding of this maturing process which the Creator is offering us all. They have to take upon themselves the maturing of their own Divine Nature. We don’t have to take upon ourselves the maturing of our own divine childhood in quite the same way, much of that is done for us. But when it comes to separating out from the Gordian-knot, which ties the child to its parents, then we have to start to initiate our own growth.

Our own self-becoming and our own uniqueness must be deliberate. We have to learn to develop the strength and the understanding to stand apart in our own nature, to stand apart on our own feet, as it were, in order that we can sustain and enter into a creative friendship with one another and with our God. This God is also our Divine Parents, in terms of being a father and mother, and longs to be a Divine Friend, a very great friend.

Now this creative friendship, which we can enter into with one another and with our Creator, depends on us being able to stand apart from one another. When we stand apart from one another, then between each of us exists a vortex where our unique differences meet. That vortex contains a supreme attitude of love and affection and creativeness, an ongoing longing to understand and discover. It acts out more and more beautiful qualities and beautiful aspects of living experience. Each friendship will form an area of potential discovery which could lead to a great discovery.

In this way we help each other to go beyond ourselves, to step into the impossibly beautiful new thing. We also help the Creator to go beyond Himself, to step into an impossibly beautiful new understanding too. It is the aspiration in our nature which is always trying to do the impossible; it can never be satisfied with the possible.

The greatest spirits we ever know are those spirits who are always trying to achieve the impossible, valuable, beautiful thing. Therefore the Creator has created a school or a university in bringing creation into existence. Into that university he has sown the seeds of His own Divine Being, little sparks of His own Divine Being. Each of these is sown into the school as a potential individual entity which has not been pre-programmed. This is done in order that we should grow gradually into our own uniqueness and not become too similar to one another, and yet grow within a form which has been preordained by the Creator.

Click for larger imageHe puts us into the university in such a way that we are not too structured, not pre-programmed, a university in which we come gradually to the understanding that we need to grow into the right specieshood. We need to become a part of Divine Reality in terms of a species if we are going to survive in what we can think of as eternal reality. If we don’t grow into that correct species that can survive in eternal reality, we will be rejected by the substance of that reality. So within that very broad spectrum of the divine species, we are all expected to grow in our own way into a unique form of that species.

The university is encouraging us to develop a uniqueness and a difference which we can call our Divine Uniqueness and our Divine Difference. That makes us true Divine Individuals, and thus gives us true and endless potential value for one another. It makes our friendships real and unique in a way which they wouldn’t be if we were pre-programmed, or were not truly growing into a distinct and separate form of our common reality, but only growing into something artificial.

In order that the Creator could properly take up the position of a parent towards us, at the highest and most ethereal level of creation, the Creator personified Himself as father and mother. He personified Himself in a certain way similar to our human form. That doesn’t mean to say that the Creator has personified Himself with the limitations we normally associate with the human condition. The Creator, as father and mother, does not suffer the limitations which we normally associate with living as a human being on earth.

This human form, or the form through which the human being is similar to the form of the Divine Father and Mother, must carry a tremendous significance which we have not fully understood yet. Although we feel that it is a limited form, we are discovering that it isn’t as limited as we normally assumed it to be.

Limitation varies, and this is a way of saying that, within the human form which is living in the Creator’s school or university, the pupils are growing at different rates and developing to different degrees. The children who have fully actualised a lot of their potentiality are beginning to show that the human condition and the human form is not as limited as we normally take it to be. But those of us who have not developed very much of our Divine potential, and haven't developed very much of our individual understanding, will not be able to gather the significance of the potentiality of their Divine Spirit in this human form as we know it at the moment.

Only gradually, as we mature in our understanding, can we begin to grasp the significance of the Divine Spirit in our human form, and begin to grasp the reality of our Divine individuality which is slowly but surely coming to life within our own universe of reality. By this term, I mean the separate existence which is a universe on its own, because the Divine potentiality which each of us carries around with us is a separate potentiality and its uniqueness is gathered into its own separate reality. This is a part of the Divine specieshood yet, nevertheless, contains within itself its own universe of values and realities, and this is at a very subtle and deep level of understanding. Yet, gradually we are coming to be able to understand what that means.

We are beginning to understand that the university is succeeding in doing its work of bringing us to a stage of maturity in which we recognise a Creator who is longing for us to accept Him as our Divine Friend. He is longing to draw us to a level of understanding in which we can meet as friends with a mutual respect which exists between friends, even if one of those friends has far more knowledge and far more capability than the other. This difference in knowledge and capability is never a barrier to real friendship. Real friendship can exist between any Divine Beings and it is not based on special capacities, it is only based on divine auction which carries with it the deepest respect for the individuality of each of those Divine Beings.

Click for larger imageSo the nature of God is in a sense manifold. It is the Absolute being nature of the Divine Being, it is also the personalised nature of the Father/Mother Creator, and it is also the intimate loving friend nature of that father and mother, the man-woman Divine Being, who is longing for the day when we will take up a fearless and mature attitude of friendship with them. But these male and female friends are so close to one another that they are two aspects of the same single spirit, single unity of reality. So the Creator is one Being who personifies Himself in two aspects, as a male and a female Being, in order to develop the capacity of a parent and to describe the masculine and the feminine aspects of Divinity.

This helps us in our becoming, for it is also a part of a situation, which we know of as the family situation, in which the reality and the significance of the family is played out on earth as well as in Heaven. This is part of the teaching method of the Creator in His university, and gives us the possibility of having the experience of being a father and a mother as well as being a child. Hence we know what it is like to be a child in a father and a mother in relation to a child.

We can then develop the understanding of the total relationship of the family, and this leads to an understanding of the problems that exist for a father in bringing a child to its own reality, and the problems that exist for a mother in bringing a child to its own reality. We develop an understanding of how far we should control the actions of our child and how far we should let go of the control of that child and allow that child to use its own initiative and make its own mistakes, thus discovering the world for itself, and learn about its own separate reality for itself.

This, on the small scale on earth, is the situation that the Creator has to face on a larger scale in the universe and the nature of our whole Divine Being. There are levels up to which He is able to guide and control us, His children, and then there are levels at which He has to let us go and allow us to make our mistakes and recover from them. If He didn’t let us go, we would never enter into the gift of our own true reality. That is why, on earth, the experience we have is filled with misunderstandings. It is filled with pains and sufferings which are caused by people not knowing how to live properly, not knowing how to value themselves and other individuals properly, not having developed the full loving respect for one another that only comes when they have begun to absorb the teaching which the university is trying to teach them.

This is also why the university has to contain Heavenly environments, which are beautiful serene environments, as well as earthly environments, which are environments where pain is present and where serenity is often absent. If we were too close to the strength of the Creator’s Divine Personality, it would dominate our own personality, and we would find it virtually impossible to develop a uniqueness of our own or an individuality of our own. But the nature of the university is such that it is expressing and holding out to us information which contains what the Creator is trying to teach us. It is offering us understanding and experience just as fast as we are capable of assimilating it and understanding it. So the only limiting factor in our growth and development is the ability we have to assimilate the significance of our surroundings and of our own nature.

We know of people on earth who are at all stages of development. We know of people whose understanding is very limited indeed, even in terms of respect for the value of physical life. We know people who are beginning to respect the physical nature of the physical individual, and we know people who are beginning to respect the psyche of the person. We know of people who are beginning to respect and understand the spirit within the psyche of the personal individual, and we know of people who are beginning to understand the Divinity within the spirit within the psyche of the human individual. All these different levels of development exist in different human individuals on earth at this time.

The full understanding of the human condition is only brought to fulfilment when we become Divine Individuals living in a physical personality, and that is also the only definition of full humanness, so, until we are consciously living our divine nature in a physical personality situation, we are not exercising full humanness. Until we do that, we have not reached the understanding of the significance of full humanness, but, when we do reach an understanding of that significance, we will find it beyond anything that we can yet imagine. The significance of it is beyond the living of an angelic life in an angelic divine heaven for instance, because it contains difficulties and potentialities which are not present in heaven.

It is because of these difficulties and these potentialities, which exist on earth, that it is to earth that the Creator is looking for His potential friends, and why He goes to so much trouble, and labours so patiently, with the maintenance and the teaching of the university at the level of earth. He could give to us a less valuable present by simply translating us into a beautiful and easy environment, which we would call a heavenly environment, where our environment would respond immediately to the spiritual nature in us, and our spiritual nature would immediately respond to the Divine Nature which it felt was imminent, and where we would all be in a state of blissful harmonious happy loving joy, but this would not develop our potentialities, and many of our strengths would not be drawn out of us. There would be no resistance to draw out our strength, which is the strength necessary to carry all our unique individuality and the understanding that gradually comes to us through experiencing and living it.

So God can be many things in any number of places. He can be here on earth, very close to us, within our spirit, as a friend and as a helper or a teacher. He is also an individual in Divine Heaven who is a father and a mother, and longing to become a friend, and He is also that God who brought the whole of creation into existence, who is the Absolute God, the foundation of all reality and all existence. So God is many things, and between God and ourselves exists a Divine Potential Friendship which can and should be many things; in each of our cases, a uniquely different thing, just as each of our friendships on earth is uniquely different.

The Creator’s nature has such extremes of love and affection and beauty in it, that we have to be brought to this appreciation and understanding of these strengths of love and beauty in a gradual way, because they would overwhelm us if we were introduced to them immediately. My feeling, through my own experience, is that the Creator’s nature is breathtakingly sweet; it is breathtakingly lovely; it is breathtakingly affectionate, it is breathtakingly beautiful. It would fill us with amazement if we understood it, and that amazement would knock us off our balance, and we wouldn’t be able to assimilate the significance of what it was that was amazing us, so, very gradually, patiently and slowly, the Creator is revealing Himself to us, revealing the qualities of His nature to us.

The life of a person like Jesus is revealing to us the nature of our Divine Friend, of our Divine Mother and Father, and of the quality of their love towards us. We may ask ourselves, "Did the Creator expect all the seeds that He sowed into the university to become His children, and did He expect all those children to become His friends?" I think the answer to that is no, he couldn’t expect all of them to come to the same fruition, because the gift He was trying to give them was a real one, and it depended on each of them understanding the nature of the gift, whether or not they wished to receive it.

Because the gift is so subtle, we have to enter into the spirit of it in order to receive it. It can’t be fed into us like we feed a programming circuit into a machine, it has to come to us in a much more beautiful, more subtle, more real way, and that is something we understand in living our physical life with our physical children, in a physical earth family situation.