The true Spiritual Sun hidden by a disc of Golden Light

As we progress through life, and memory lengthens with the years, we are able to plot the amazing growth and development of the human mind within our own living experience. We can track through our own lifetime the journey into these modern times where we live in a virtual sea of data and mental stimuli – still accelerating with the expanding availability of education and information through a growing proliferation of media. We have grown in mental capacity and dimension, and have expanded our mind’s grasp to a point where we come up against the previously unforseen barriers at the threshold of a whole new world. We are discovering the limits of our previous evolutionary impetus. Old modes of thinking and approaches to resolving problems no longer provide the solutions they once seemed to do. And solutions from earlier times are failing.

We are a different people now. Our minds are sharper, more confident, determined. Our creative imagination is collectively seeing a very different future and a newer vision. Many dynamics seem to be arriving at their “logical conclusion” and faltering. The limitations of past thinking are becoming increasingly clear with the converse that we are also more clearly seeing the world we’d rather be creating and nurturing and so begin to draw it into being.

Albert Einstein famously said: “No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.” And if we think through the surface turmoil of accelerated change we may realise that we are stepping through a threshold into a new level of being, seeing and living – one which transforms how we see the world and hence how it is and will be. This moment, this realisation, is happening so quickly that it is not just a step in a gradual unfoldment so much as a great transference out of the long history of the past and into a new sense of shared Being. The significance of the shift we are engaged in may be equivalent to the shift that brought self-consciousness into animal man at the very beginning of the human journey.

Perhaps it’s part of the effect of this shift that we seem to be entering an extended period of public upheaval – whether through lobbying, demonstrations, petitions, blockades, social media pronouncements and revelations, or (when opposed or oppressed) through civil unrest, uprisings and even civil war. A sense of universal solidarity is empowering not only new ideas but a new sense of identity that takes responsibility for change, for making a difference. Those still living the old illusion, cushioned by comfort, convenience and familiarity, are gradually diminishing despite their last loud and desperate efforts to hold on to the old dream. What mighty inspiration has been let loose through human minds and hearts to meld the many individuals and groups into such a force for fairness, freedom and empowerment?

The public mind is demanding a new transparency in the way we manage our shared group affairs – local, national and global. Light is pouring in on revelations of misconduct and mismanagement up to the highest levels through royal commissions, anti-corruption agencies, investigative journalism and an increasingly informed public mind. It is throwing light on past value trajectories so that we see more clearly what needs to either be brought to a close or redirected towards a better world for future generations in the human journey. It is as though there is a subtle call, echoing out through the human voice and resonating with the ancient prayer we know as The Gayatri:

O Thou Who givest sustenance to the universe,
From Whom all things proceed,
To Whom all things return,
Unveil to us the face of the true Spiritual Sun
Hidden by a disc of golden Light
That we may know the Truth
And do our whole duty
As we journey to Thy sacred feet.

There seems to be increasing tension and pressure to live as though a participant part of a Greater Life – valuing it, responding to its needs and caring for it so that all parts may live in harmonious and fruitful relationship. A new depth of compassion is sensitising more and more of us to the finer realms where we are met by the Guides of the race, those who have proceeded further along the journey into our true being. In the Agni Yoga writings we read of their compassionate understanding for those who strive:

      Urusvati knows how the Great Pilgrim directed and guided human consciousness toward the Highest. He understood that people were not yet ready to go by the Middle Path. Thus, even when someone attempted to utter the unutterable the Great One would allow him to address the Highest, rather than let him lower the process of his thinking.
The Great One taught people to pray within their hearts, upon the mountain, amid inspiring summits. It is impossible to grasp the full depth of meaning of the Sermon of the Great One, because He gave instructions for the whole of life in the simplest words. The key to this greatness was in His simplicity, which not only allowed Him to more easily communicate with people, but was a beautiful way of expressing the Highest in the simplest words. One should learn to make the complicated simple, for only in simplicity is kindness reflected. Such was the work of the Great Pilgrim.
Great is His luminosity in the Subtle World, and He loves to descend into the lower spheres so that His prana may purify the dark realms. It is not easy even for Him to descend, and one should appreciate all the more this example of His selfless healing of those who suffer there.
It is customary for Us to visit the lower spheres of the Subtle World where a compassionate heart can save multitudes.” Supermundane I, verse 150.

The simplicity that leads to spirit is found in the underlying principles and forces at work throughout the One Life which flows through all life cycles, great and small, short and long.

Often, in our efforts to simplify the complexities of life into manageable and conceivable order, we may run into the danger of categorising simplistically according to surface appearance and image. There can be such subtleties of prejudice woven into our lives as part of the heavy carry-over from less illumined times.  A truer view sees everything in its appropriate place within the Whole. In Alice Bailey’s writings we read:

Simplification proceeds rapidly as one nears the goal of the spirit.  Will ever concerns itself with the essentials and not with the details of manifestation.  Love concerns itself with transitional, evolutionary fundamentals, whilst intelligence concerns itself with the detail and its coherent coordination in response to the impulse and attractive force of divine love and the dynamic impulse of the spirit.” The Rays and the Initiations, page 185

And so we journey out beyond the surface of living and, losing all lesser identities, become at one with Life. As Merle Stubbs wrote in Journey of a Lifetime:

There is no technique or method such as we may have constructed in the past to direct our steps a little further upon the Way. Perhaps the only technique or conscious process available to us may be called ‘transference’, a reversal of our viewpoint from partial or sequential movement to a concentrated focal point of identification within the Whole making available to our conscious usage all that is contained therein.
As products of the past we have extensions of thought scattered all over the place. We feel a need to relate this with that, get from here to over there, and we focus on the space between and see separation. Our need is to gather our focus of attention into a point of tension while at the same time extending our awareness in acknowledgement of that greater Whole and the inevitability of our residence within it.
Our perception of life shifts dramatically with this transference of viewpoint. Let us consider. Within the Great Totality are contained all beings, all other selves (now seen as one), all knowledge, all faculties, capacities, powers, the sum total of past, present, future – our true home. We no longer relate to the personality and 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 place, moving inexorably towards that divine completion of being. And we know ourselves as directors of this present incarnation or particular day in the long life cycle of that being that we essentially, and actually, are. The outer life is illuminated, reactions cease.” Journey of a Lifetime by Merle Stubbs, page 47-48

When we see through the surface ripples to the deeper currents of life, we see them reflected in everything. Any embodiment is really a reflection of something far greater. Nothing is a containment, complete and isolated in itself but is a momentary expression of something finer and more pervasive – infinite and eternal. Words, with all their past associations, do not readily express the formless though the poets may, at least momentarily, free us from all that veils that exquisite livingness.

Only a bell and a bird break the stillness…
It seems that the two talk with the setting sun.
Golden coloured silence, the afternoon is made of crystals.
A roving purity sways the cool trees,
and beyond all that,
a transparent river dreams that trampling over pearls
it breaks loose
and flows into infinity.”

translated from:   Hora Inmensa by   Juan Ramón Jiménez (1881-1958)