Sydney Goodwill Goodwill is love in action
Journey of a Lifetime: A Group Story is an account of the journey of a group through more than thirty years’ work. Copies of the book are available from Sydney Goodwill.
CHAPTER SIX Cycles
The Life Cycle of the Soul
Once we identify with the soul we begin to recognise the greater life cycle of soul as compared with a single personality life cycle. In fact, the smaller personal cycle appears as a day in the life of the soul. These personality episodes are changed in importance. Whereas once the personality considered its gain from contact with the soul, now the roles are reversed and it is recognised that the soul is developing its capacities through the ‘days’ in its cycles.
We may only enter this understanding through realisation. The soul’s intention overrules the personality will and the group entity overrides the separate individual tendency while incorporating that individual into the group life. We no longer relate to the personality in its small life span as our true being but become aware of the entire life cycle of the incarnating entity (ourselves) cycling in and out of time and space, moving inexorably towards that divine completion of being.
Light is thrown upon our consideration of past lifetimes. The persona worn in any past time is no longer so important as those soul capacities under development and those essential energies or stored seeds which have become the possession of the soul and can be drawn on in one’s life expression in service throughout appearances in time. We need to remember that the soul is already divine and possessed of these qualities while in the process of becoming in time and space what it essentially is in the subtle world.
We find that in the challenge of group service in the New Era we can experience a real extremity of demand in the work that calls forth all our available resources. Knowing ourselves as the soul, the energy or capacity required by the work coincides with that which has been developed and stored by us in the past and the relevant energy is drawn forth, flows into our hands and is given expression and direction within the field of service. This is a vastly different way of working than when we may have felt any necessity to take training to serve, although that may have been an earlier stage of development and one in which our vehicles of contact were being refined and rendered more receptive to impression.
Our view of the nature of personal karma also takes a shift. When we observe life from within the greater cycle of soul we recognise that errors, made by the personality throughout time and the incarnating process, cast shadows into succeeding ‘days’ or incarnations. In the usual course of events we may feel trapped by such influences of our own creating and experience a need to restore, reform or transform such conditioning factors that restrict our freedom to express our total being in service to the whole.
However, when we view the scene with clarity we realise that many things we have created (or miscreated) in past times, if we but saw them now, would be insupportable in the light of present understanding. There is no way we could now make these ‘errors’. They are after all only incidents of our journey on the way to the perfecting of our equipment. These shadows, no longer having any supportive energy or our continuing acquiescence in their effects, can have no further expression and so die out of existence.
The Cycle of the Group Soul
When we become aware of the life cycle of the soul we also become aware of our soul group. Recognition stirs deep within us when we meet one another once again upon the outer way of life and there is the urge to continue our contribution together in service.
Just as the re-incarnating individual recapitulates or regathers the threads from the past that are relevant in the present, so we find the soul group does likewise. This is the nature of ongoing cycles. Even as we enter Aquarius we can be aware of the fact of the inflow of forces from its polar opposite, the Age of Leo. Here again recapitulation is seen demonstrating and we must be mindful to express these energies on a higher turn of the spiral and not remain immersed in any past expression. And so it must be within the expression of our group life. Those useful energies and capacities which are regathered into the group coffers are now expressed on the next turn of the spiral, consistent with the sound and colouring of the new note of a New Era. These energies are comprised of the sum total of the input of each individual plus those available energies flowing into our planetary life.
In the process of regathering these energies it sometimes happens that the phenomenal appearance of a past time may be observed by means of our subtle senses. As described in Chapter Three, a previous important incarnation that saw the development or deepening of certain capacities, or participation in some significant event, can reveal its detail in sharp relief to our sight. When this occurs to member of the Group, either as individual recollection or the appearance of a past group incarnation, there follows a deepening understanding of relationship and oneness within the work, while the attention is maintained upon the work in hand and upon the energies thus contacted and available. The phenomenal is not given undue emphasis.
Time
Let us consider further the value of understanding life from the expanded viewpoint. For a start, our understanding of the nature of time is vastly expanded if we can stretch our minds to follow the progress of the Sun through the signs of the zodiac. This period of 25,000 years reveals a correspondence to the life cycle of the soul. Rather we are inclined to follow the course of the Sun through the lesser zodiac, which covers a period of one year and corresponds to the personality life cycle and the illusions experienced therein.
Time takes on a different significance from within the soul cycle and its subjective habitat. Past, present and future are not experienced as separate and divided as they are in the outer, personal world of life, but appear as an unfolding process within a single day of ‘morning, afternoon and evening’ – an ongoing movement in the experience of life. The soul sees the whole of its incarnating process as its ‘lifetime’.
Time is not a fixed state; it is movable. It is a realisation within a whole. We have taken a chunk of time – a cycle – within which to evolve. The Logos himself has a lifetime. Incredible through the extent of this may appear to us, it is nevertheless a period of time. It is said that the process of initiation has been instituted to allow for the required number of human units to achieve the goal in the required cycle of time. Within this whole this is seen from the beginning and we can ‘move around in it’ – everything is accessible to us. So, as we are working with energies at any point in time, an energy we have ‘touched’ or developed can coincide from anywhere within this whole. It is ours to use – it always has been.
Just as we use memory in our personal world to recall happenings, experiences or observations at various moments within a lifetime, whether from yesterday or from many years ago, and oft-times triggered by related or similar ‘sounding’ occurrences in the present, so within the soul cycle our ‘longer term memory’ can be employed to touch on previous ‘days’ in the cycle. It can likewise be triggered by related happenings in the present time or by meeting with others with whom we have interacted in the past.
We discover the nature of these relationships and light is shed upon present experience. Past causes behind any difficulties in working relationships are noted and the resultant understanding ahs the useful effect of freeing us from unnecessary repetition of those old personal mistakes or illusions. As a consequence our work can proceed freely without interruption or obstruction. We recognise those with whom we are destined to work closely within some shared field of the world work.
One may note the value and importance of this changed point of focus on life. Its recognition and effects release the individual and the group into a freedom to serve without the usual emphasis on getting over personal hurdles, adjusting personnel difficulties, misunderstandings, misgroupings, or laboriously searching out just where and with whom our work may lie.
There is also an increased clarity when stepping through the gates of death. Here we recognise those we have known or met before. Because it has not been usual to retain the memory of past life experience when we have re-entered incarnation, on our return to the subtle planes, through that we call death, we are invariably dismayed to note that patterns we have established appear to follow us through time and to influence our expression over and over from lifetime to lifetime.
We do indeed create our own world but the myopia of the personal world can and does obscure this recognition and hides the true being behind a wall of illusions. Soul identification dispels such deceptive forces and when our lives are focused again back out in the physical world we break the recurring patterns and build our world with greater enlightenment.
The more mentally advanced we have become with technological and scientific developments, the more powerfully have we focused our living in the outer world of things. This of course is a stage in our evolutionary growth as a human race. The next step and challenge is intuitional development, response to the inner world. However, such is our sophistication that we have greatly managed to deprive our world of the natural simplicity of life itself and readily identify with the artificial while obscuring a true knowledge of ourselves.
If we observe children from a young age we note how ‘uncultured’ and therefore how obvious is their behavior. Whatever characteristics they have brought with them into incarnation demonstrate quite clearly as they interact with their environment and the people within it. As maturity approaches they generally become adept at concealment and take on a self-made mask.
How much more may we see this human pattern in operation when we look at the incarnating cycles. Over a vast period of time we parallel the story. It is a simple matter to watch the children in our time, but if we observe the larger time span we all look very similar as we come down through time and manage increasingly to obscure from ourselves our illusions, along with our true selves, and with advancing sophistication.
As we stand on the threshold of a New Era it is time to explode illusions and enter the freedom of Life.
But let us expand the vision further. Let us consider what may be working out on our planet through the long, long cycles of evolution. We realise that we, the human race, are inevitably involved within this process; we understand that God’s purpose or design is working out into expression on the planet through the human race.
Down through the ages humanity has expressed something of this great design. Through human thought in its highest expression and the creative imagination, divine intention slowly unfolds upon the planet. We cannot as yet encompass the grandeur and beauty of this purpose but our recognition of our place and responsibility within this great scheme inspires us and fires our imagination.
We can no longer move unknowingly on the stream of evolution but cooperate consciously in the unfolding purpose and plan in our time, using the creative imagination, visualizing that which is seeking emergence, and initiating the necessary steps to bring it into form.
