The Journey Continues – Chapter 9

The Journey Continues is a sequel to Journey of a Lifetime: A Group Story and continues the account of the group’s journey through more than thirty years’ work.   We continue to post a chapter each month.  Here is this month’s chapter. Please Note: Copies of the book are available from Sydney Goodwill. 

CHAPTER NINE – Understanding Patterns

Underlying the outer structure of our world are great inner thought patterns through which the evolutionary experiment upon our planet moves into expression. It is humanity’s role to work progressively with ideas and concepts and through time to build ever more truly to this great inner blueprint.

In our day we have entered into a time when group work and activity is in the forefront of developing the new ideas and concepts to lead into a new age of opportunity and growth. It will therefore be seen just how important it is that the groups become integrated entities in order to present a unified statement or presentation of their particular aspect or distinguishing contribution. It must be true to that which is in emergence with the evolutionary movement of the time and backed by the inner thought patterns.

Although the quality and capacity of each group member will enrich and enliven the total group expression there can be no focus upon individual personalities with the attendant danger of stimulating the personal aspect. In other words, all must relate to one another as souls and not as the personal, outwardly expressing human being. Well may the individual members of a group express within some individual and destined form of service in their daily lives but their group activity will be other than this. It will see the group integrated as a single entity in a united service. The group identity will be the ruling thought in the group consciousness.

When this stage is achieved then the group is able to work as one in the bringing through of the new thought and its useful formulations within their particular sphere of service.

This activity is greatly enhanced as the group develops the capacity to work consciously from the inner planes of awareness and expression. When intuition guides and minds are free from any sense of separativeness then there is unimpeded contact with the world of reality and inner truth.

Our understanding of the nature of patterns is a very useful tool. How often we may look back down the years of an incarnation and see a pattern emerging, which may not have been available to our perception when we were immersed in the living of it.

If we are conscious workers we may observe the unfolding of a life pattern, one in which we have addressed the work we incarnated to do. We may see the many contacts we have made. We note those who touched and moved on to other work and who may be destined to take up a co-working role either in ensuing years or in another lifetime. We see the path we have trodden, choices made, other possibilities that may have been developed, what we may have considered as mistakes but all combining in an ongoing movement within the work of our time.

In the ability to observe and to read life patterns lies the capacity to make the most of experience. Reaction is recognised as wastage of energy, which could more usefully be used in creating anew in line with present understanding and opportunity within the group work.

Also when we understand that our evolution upon this planet is governed by choices often and inevitably made between apparently opposing forces or ideas, then it is realized that if one choice proves to be unwise, to hinder progress, another can be made, another path taken. We need to leave behind ‘unworkable experiments’, and not hold them to ourselves, as increasingly we build according to spiritual values. There is nothing to be gained by raking through karma. Karma dies a natural death as we proceed upon the upward way. Onward, upward and through.

We may also consider patterns as they are seen emerging in the scheme of things. As we work from the inner focus, as we direct our lives from that point, we notice that we can say, “Things fall into place.” Or they create a pattern that best serves at any time to implement that which is in emergence and just which workers need to be together as part of that piece of work. It is seemingly as though there is an invisible hand at work.

We may venture to say that we are working within the principles of the New Day when we understand this method of operation. We are not working with oppositions, with battles; it is a matter of understanding the flow. This is the Life aspect, the natural flow of life. It may be seen how these thoughts on patterns fit within the discoveries concerning through ad the realization of identity within a unified or single state of being. The flow of energies moves without obstruction.

Within that area f natural movement we may see the patterns emerging, set off by the intent of the moment and what we are focusing, what we are flowing with. No doubt a magnetic attraction is involved here too because all that will support our intention seems to come together in a moment in time: the right gathering o =f the right people and the required resources at the right moment – availability without seeming organization – as against the method of commencing at the opposite end of organisation first and foremost.

We may look back at any time and see te patterns as they emerge through our lives. We may also see times of stress or difficulty when things were not flowing. But it is when we see that things were guided by Life itself, by standing within that area of focus, things seem to work out magically. This does not imply we will be relieved of hard work and commitment and the necessity to work for the resolution of world problems.

At moments of great crisis upon the planet we find the forces of change powerfully at work. The effect upon human consciousness serves to force us out of the habitual compliance with a way of seeing and expressing life that may have protected us within certain boundaries, within a well established pattern, while at the same time preventing our movement into a newer, freer, more inclusive vision of greater human unity and interdependence.

Such a moment of extreme crisis has been experienced upon this planet in the year 2001. Asa a result we have observed the effects moving ever outward, encompassing the whole world and the awareness of nations and their people. Dramatic changes are occurring, not only ion outer affaires but also in human consciousness and the definition of how we relate to one another, person to person, nation to nation. The outlines of new patterns can be seen emerging affecting all areas of human expression through politics to economics to diplomacy and beyond, reaching into the very core of our living and into our everyday lives. No one is untouched and the vision of the one world and the one humanity hovers on the border of awareness awaiting human recognition and expression.

At such a critical time it is imperative that all true servers of humanity assess their own life patterns and assure that they are in accord with that which life is now making possible, in fact demanding.

At this point of writing a timely phone call from a co-workers in another country picked up on this theme as he spoke of an experience in his group as follows:

“Every individual must not only stand in their own truth but their speech and actions have to be a true reflection of that inner knowing. When the inner and the outer are synchronous then you cannot engage in any life relationship in the old way because the dynamic shifts, the pattern breaks and transforms the outer circumstance in accordance with the greater truth.

“As the individual engages in this new way not only is the individual pattern broken but a group pattern is forced to change. If an individual stands steadfastly in their truth then they can no longer be shifted into a line of least resistance. This forces the group pattern to change as well.”

A group member comments

“How often are the opinions on which we base our daily life decisions really considered, thought through and tested against that inner ‘knowing’, the intuitive sense? True, most of us read the newspapers (or whatever preferred media) with a somewhat cynical eye – but we may still accept the proffered views as an interim opinion until we learn otherwise or until we ‘get around to’ thinking about it for ourselves.

“Similarly we might believe views out forward by friends and colleagues who appear to have thought the matter through and so present a pre-prepared logic.  But we may never quite get around to testing or disproving their logical pathways against our own life observation and frame of reference. Thus trust and judgement may appear to be in conflict when we view life from the outside and in terms of habitual personal loyalties.

“Such a carry-over from the Age of Authority subtly steers our thinking and life response away from our responsibility (as divine agents in the world) to view the moment’s opportunities unencumbered by the distortions of a view that we have grown beyond. The pattern of a presented logic can seduce us into its acceptance without questioning our true compatibility with it.

“How often when we have delayed too long to register something that has been subtly pressing for consideration, but is eclipsed by the parade of external events, do we later think to ourselves: ‘I knew something wasn’t right with that’ or ‘I knew I should have checked up on this’ and so on. What is it we knew? What is the source and process of this knowing? What frame of reference has its anchoring point within us – so deep and sure that it seems it requires a crisis to draw it forth?

“If this knowing is the true gauge of reality, why do we continue to succumb to the incomplete and superficial ‘take-away’ rationales dispensed by those who, on investigation, may be right but may equally be beguiled by an exclusive selection of details designed to serve a separate and personal motive? When opinions are offered in a definitive self-referencing logic why do we lazily allow our minds to become passive prisoners of their thought-patterns?  Of such stuff is prejudice made.

“This do lawyers prepare the presentation of evidence in court in order to steer the mental associations along their intended direction. There is a power in formulation, in woven pattern, and we can become cut off from reality by a clever turn of phrase or an authoritative dissertation if we don’t check the source and the implied assumptions behind the logic.

“In  fact our true guide is our own inner being which is that true essence that is part of, and therefore in touch with, the essence of all thing and the cause of those formulations that are true to reality.”

* * * *

We may understand the opportunity and the challenge we all face at this critical moment in time and just how imperative it is that we respond to and from the inner sense of awareness, recognising the soul in all and no longer assessing or reacting in the old, separative terms of reference. The progress of the planet depends on it as we proceed with the unavoidable task of building a greater and more harmonious world pattern, working towards an understanding of a new synthesis of all peoples.

* * * *

An Essay on Patterns by a co-worker

As anyone realises who has travelled by train, bus or plane; attends meetings, appointments or interviews; produces crops or other primary goods; works in shifts or business hours; responds to traffic lights and obeys road rules, regulations and laws; our world operates by schedules and seasons. The natural world is ordered by the cyclic rhythms of life breathing into matter in its ordered sequence, injecting more and more of its inspiration into the constantly diversifying and adapting forms.

Life flows, but it does so according to design within the universal dance of spirit and matter as they move together into that marriage which is the expression of the underlying synthesis of all that is. This underlying pattern permeates through all scales and dimensions- even the atom coheres through its own innate dance. So the great design is reflected through every particle individually and in its coordination within larger and larger wholes. And in fact every dimension of our life operates according to pattern – individually and in co-ordination with larger and larger wholes.

Humankind is the conscious reflection of this divine dance. From our primitive beginnings rhythm and music have been the abstract expression of our sense of the pattern of life. They have guided the emotional life through ordered patterns to motivate, celebrate or cohere individuals into common relationship. Our mental life has followed patterns of thought expressed as ideas, ideals and ideologies. And as nature is constantly diversifying and expanding the divine expression, so does the life flow demand constant movement and constant emergence of an increasingly divine manifestation.

However, pattern can become imprisoning where we are consumed by the status quo, by current known life expressions, and where we cease envisioning the next, improved patterns to emerge from the divine inspiration. A computer programmer in determining how to fix a ‘bug’ in a program must identify the pattern of errors that leads him to the missing or conflicting elements in the program’s logic. In the meantime the users of the program work out ways around the problem – a new pattern to use – until it is fixed. Despite the bug, creative activity continues but it becomes centralised around the error and can continue that way for some time.

This is the pattern of external view and gives us such expressions as “Well, life isn’t perfect”, “We’re only human” and all other trite admissions of a defeat that wil lonely happen if we acquiesce in it. They are excuses, not reasons, for lack of vision and purpose. They proclaim loudly that we have looked only at the external world for inspiration instead f to the source it obscures.

We are confronted by this circumscribed mediocrity in our daily lives and then see it reflected in the policies of our governments until a shock event shakes the system and enables true leaders to emerge with vision. Tony Blair’s speech to the Labour Party following the catastrophic events in New York and Washington during September 2001, recognise the opportunity and identifies many of the essentials for new vision:

“There is a coming together. The power of community asserting itself. We are realising how fragile are out frontiers in the face of the world’s new challenges. Today conflicts rarely stay within national boundaries. Today a tremor in one financial market is repeated in the markets of the world. Today confidence is global; either its presence or its absence. Today the threat is chaos; because for people with work to do, family life to balance, mortgages to pay, careers to further, pensions to provide, the yearning is for order and stability and if it doesn’t exist elsewhere, it is unlikely to exist here…. We can’t do it all … But the power of the international community could, together, if it chose to…. The kaleidoscope has been shaken. The pieces are in flux. Soon they will settle again. Before they do, let us re-order this world around us. Today humankind has the science and technology to destroy itself or to provide prosperity to all. Yet science can’t make the choice for us. Only the moral power of a world acting as a community can.”

Patterns perpetuate their own dynamic if we do not recognise them and direct them according to life’s purpose. They can become destructive of that purpose when allowed to run their own course.  One of the most obvious and also most subtle aspects of the legacy of the Piscean patterns of the past is a sense of exclusivity. With the growth of the intellectual power of the race this sense of exclusivity may be rationalised as merely ‘difference’ but there can be an underlying sense of ‘better’, ‘more deserving’, ‘more valuable’ than others.

The familiarity of the patterns of thought and feeling (which often sustain us in our times of weakness) can distract from the hidden prejudices and separate motive and then a plethora of rationalisation rises to their continued support. Whenever a single model or pattern is the basis for comprehensive application, it must be questioned if it does not answer for all within its area of application.  Whenever current solutions are not working this reactive dynamic is at work. True vision and solution can flow only from the central blueprint of life itself.

We are told that ‘simplification proceeds rapidly as we near the goal of spirit’ – but that simplification is from the perspective of spirit not from the perspective of ‘rationalising’ or ‘regimenting’ the external detail of our living expression. What are we? and what are we expressing? Are the first questions rather than how are we expressing? Self or soul expression will make obsolete the exclusive expression of the little self. The human soul is then in a position to truly reflect the divine human spirit into the world.

In a more worldly rendering of the immediate realisation Tone Blair states: “The critics will say: but how can the world be a community? Nations act in their own self-interest.  Of course they do. But what is the lesson of the financial markets, climate change, international terrorism, nuclear proliferation or world trade? I tis that our self-interest and our mutual interests re inextricably woven together.”

Every aspect of our living universe is ordered by pattern and rhythm. Music, mathematics, geometry, art, architecture, the investigative and social sciences. Philosophies and theologies are all patterns of disciplined activity as we identify and make manifest the essential patterns of life. But where is the source of inspiration that breathes life into them, through them? Are we merely reacting to form life and so creating ‘more of the same’, going in circles, or are we responding to new waves of inspiration, creating new forms that are expansive enough to house our growing realisation of that life more abundant that flows through all from the point where spirit and matter are one?

Life and movement are synonymous and the moment we cast our lot with the status quo we have opted for death. Life brings destruction to old forms as new ones are birthed but death clings to outmoded forms such as separateness and exclusivity. Ultimately all is enlivened by the living power of the universe no matter how temporal. When life directs the patterns through time and space we have a divine Plan.