Creating a Pathway of Return

Watching the news recently beamed to us through the global media, one can detect a new era waxing in human hearts as the old dissolves in disarray. Here and there we catch glimpses of a strengthening and expanding hope and joy, such as the royal wedding coverage. This was a burst of joy eclipsing the backdrop of the passing era stumbling through its final moments of unjust wars, precarious international relations and abuse of innocents. The cradle of the passing civilisation of material progress may have been identified as a physical location, but the cradle of the new civilisation is the human heart. This is where the new world is being born – in a heart which nurtures all parts of the great Life we share and is not limited by exclusivity. The true heart is inclusive and draws all magnetically into its embrace. It knows that every part of Life is a distributive point of shared livingness.

Grand events can usually lift us momentarily out of the entrenched patterns of daily living, but the recent royal wedding has had a continuing and intensely uplifting effect – globally. Something new and fresh has entered in, carrying the note of a new era of inclusiveness, sharing, and of appreciation and care for all parts of society and the world in which it organises itself.

Here was a global opportunity for a new energy to enter the world – lifting us out of ourselves into an identity which will be more the daily norm in the coming era. It swept around the globe with the magic of a whirling Sufi dance of ecstatic joy, radiating and shared by millions. Those of us who participated and watched were uplifted from our ordinary selves into a kind of shared Self, focussed in the marriage of two radiant young people with glowing hearts. It was as though we had entered the Kingdom of Souls, fleetingly perhaps but touched forever with possibility.

And the essence – at the heart of it all – was love, a new powerful and inclusive Love emanating through the central theme of the event and expressed movingly in the sermon which explored this prophecy:

Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.” ~ Teilhard de Chardin

This new fiery and all-inclusive love is the wave on which the Coming One will arrive. It sweeps through the world and through each responsive heart, washing away the debris of a passing era now more clearly seen in the light of the Heart’s mighty beacon. The Tibetan Master foretells:

It is the Fire of Love which He will bring; it is the message of the purificatory fire which He will sound; He will not teach anent the waters of purification, as has hitherto been the symbolic imparted truth; He will impart the fire which burns and destroys all barriers in man’s nature, all separating walls between individuals, between groups and between nations.” Discipleship in the New Age I, page 722

The fiery seeds have been planted in millions of fertile hearts. We have now to nurture them into growth. As the Fire of Love sweeps through and burns those tinder-dry aspects where Life has withdrawn, we come to a point of joyful surrender and enter a new sense of being. As the poet Rumi expresses:

You and I have spoken all these words,
but as for the way we have to go,
words are no preparation.
There is no getting ready, other than grace….
Inside each of us, there’s continual autumn.
Our leaves fall and are blown out over the water.
A crow sits in the blackened limbs
and talks about what’s gone….
There’s a necessary dying,
and then Jesus is breathing again.
Very little grows on jagged rock.
Be ground. Be crumbled, so wildflowers
will come up where you are.
You’ve been stony for too many years.
Try something different.
Surrender.
A Necessary Autumn Inside Each by Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī

The balance point is shifting as the new day brightens throughout the world and we can be caught tipping backwards into vertigo unless we lean forward into a new centre of identified being. Who we think we are is changing as we recognise more clearly what we are not. We are walking a fine shift between the worlds and holding steady to a point of balance that is moving at increasingly greater speed. And there is now a mutual flow between our point of being in this current world and our sense of identity in the coming world which resides in the human heart where truth is the core of our integrity. In the whirl of spin, fake news and distorting partial truths, what we deeply know is true is the still point from which we see and apprehend the truth behind the outer seeming.

Everything in the world, and between the worlds, is in a relationship of mutual exchange. What is exchanged may vary as to quality and constructive usefulness but there is automatically a give and take, even in situations of conflict. In this constant flow both ways – something is offered or asked and a response comes, backwards and forwards. It is the rhythm of the Life in which we live, move and have our being and is the essential dynamic of the created world. A subtle radiatory exchange and substitution is going on at all levels, whether physical, emotional, mental or spiritual, and in all spheres. Our world is humming with the flow of life like the blood pouring forwards and back again through our hearts where it is purified each time for a new life-bearing cycle.

The exchange pulses between the kingdoms – mineral, vegetable, animal – and then at the human kingdom a new element comes into the flow: free will. We have the power to consciously invoke all that is good, true and beautiful into our world. And so the reappearance of the Coming One, by whatever name He is known, becomes a collaborative process in which the invocative call of true hearts can be focussed into the very Kingdom of Souls to create a pathway of return that resounds with a love so powerful, magnetic and fiery that it opens up the way between the worlds. Then we may once again live in harmony, guided by the loving understanding of the Enlightened Ones. The Tibetan Master tells us that:

…when He comes Whom angels and men await, and Whose work it is to inaugurate the new age and so complete the work He began in Palestine two thousand years ago, He will bring with Him some of the great Angels, as well as certain of the Masters. The angels have ever been active in Biblical history, and will again enter into the lives of human beings with more power than has lately been the case. The call has gone out for them again to approach humanity, and with their heightened vibration and superior knowledge unite their forces with those of the Christ and His disciples for the helping of the race.” The Externalisation of the Hierarchy, page 508

In the coming new world our previous understanding of power is turned inside out. The Great Lives nurture the little ones with their radiant Grace so that all may progress in the One Life.

 

Drops of Grace fall into the chalice of heart’s joy. Could there be a greater joy than that during the fulfillment of a Mission of the Brotherhood? Thus must it be understood for those who go forth or remain guarding the Ashram. Very important is the vigor which grows out of the Power of Grace.” Fiery World II, 393

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