Sir George Trevelyan: thoughts and writings

The Emergence of a New Humanity

The Challenge of the 1980s

A Mind-Body-Spirit Festival lecture by Sir George Trevelyan, 1983.

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By taking a step in conscious evolution we can transform ourselves and the planet of which we are stewards.


Dear friends. I have a feeling that a gathering like this is much more than just a lecturer holding forth with ideas to a captive audience... but that we are together doing a deed. That to think together on such a theme as this - the Emergence of a New Humanity - should do something to the world itself. How can we put it?... that the Earth should be spinning just a little faster by the time we finish. But the feeling that we are all increasingly getting is that man's role (and when I say 'man' of course I mean humanity... male/female... the role of the human species) is of paramount importance. There is an essential task that we are called upon to do... and an essential step that it is incumbent on us to achieve.

Let me open with a little poem by a friend of ours, a modern poet, George Griffiths:
    Darkness would seem to be
    our chosen cloak
    whose very warp and weft's composed
    of suffering
    and death...
    Yet he who knows the ebb and flow of tides
    within a tree,
    knows too the breath of planets
    in their pilgrimage.
    Also, in his compass, he would hold in view
    the rise and fall
    of circumstance
    where man, as nexus of two worlds
    stands poised at this mid-between
    on razor's edge,
    gifted beyond angels,
    benisoned in light
    and cast in the major role...
    could he but know it.
That little poem contains the lot. First the darkness of our world: "Darkness would seem to be our chosen cloak whose very warp and weft's composed of suffering and death". Seventy per cent of our News is about death in some form or another. And yet we are recovering the supreme knowledge that for the inner core of a man and a woman - for the 'I' in us - there can be no death because this is a droplet of divinity... a spark of the eternal fire incarnated upon earth. Therefore we are recovering the realisation that death is the great educator to teach us the great and supreme fact that for the real being - the kernel of humanity, the man or woman - the 'I' within us is an immortal and imperishable being which never can die under any conditions. And it is only through the experience of death that we come to this supreme thought which will lift from us the terrible anxiety that rests upon our death-ridden culture.

And he goes on: "Yet he who knows the ebb and flow of tides within a tree, knows too the breath of planets in their pilgrimage". We are learning now to grasp this supreme fact that the whole of the Universe is alive... is not a mechanism, but is mind. The holistic vision now takes hold of our consciousness. We realise that everything is life, everything is thought and guiding intelligence, and that matter is derivative from the world of creative idea. But yet we've gone through the experience of separation so that we stand over against that tree or these plants, separated from them, and have become observers - onlookers - to Nature, which enables us to control Nature - 'to conquer Nature'... terrible phrase! - forgetting that we are Nature, that we are that point in Nature where Evolution has become self-conscious... integrally part of the Whole. And with that we then recover the knowledge that the Earth on which we tread, and of which we are part, is truly a living creature... a being... an organism; and that physical matter is only the external expression - the passing expression - of the life within it... of the living idea behind it... is a picture of the world of creative idea. And therefore we see that the etheric world - the world of vital forces present in all Nature - is the real being: invisible, but more real than the visible image. "All that is transitory is but a parable", as Goethe says. Therefore "he who knows the ebb and flow of tides within a tree". 'Well a tree stands still! Hard bark! You can't see it flowing!' But you can! Look into those roots! 'But the roots are right underground - I can't see the roots!'

Yes, but you can! With the eye of the imagination you can look down and see the roots, and sense and experience the intelligence in the tips of the roots as they stretch down and grasp and lock themselves round the rock to take the strain of the moving branches in the storm. Of course you can see them... with the realer eye of the imagination, though it's closed to the physical senses. And the rising of the sap: of course you can see it... with the eye of the mind - this inner eye - that is one with the whole of the thought of the Universe. And there you can see the sap rising and you can realise what we normally don't see: that the whole of the tree is reaching out into a field of magnetic force... reaching right to the very periphery - the far periphery - counter to gravity. The field of levity, lightness, light, which reaches out into ethereal space: that is the tree. So, once you know "the ebb and flow of tides within a tree", you can also experience "the breath of planets in their pilgrimage". For we are seeing the wonderful thought that the whole Universe is Mind. That is the first of what is called the Hermetic Principles, the first Principle of the Hermetic Knowledge... the ancient, ageless wisdom recovered in our age. We are in process, in the apprehending of holistic knowledge, of grasping once more the Hermetic Wisdom forgotten for these centuries, and it is both a scientific and a mystical concept. In this wisdom, mysticism and science meet again. And the first Principle is: the Universe is Mind. And the second Principle is the Law of Correspondences: as above, so below; as in the great, so in the small; as in the macrocosm, so in the microcosm - with the realisation that this microcosm, the human body, contains the entire Universe... that this is a microcosm reflecting the Whole. Outside the Temple of Delphi was carved: "Man, know thyself, and thou shalt know the Universe". A remark which can mean nothing to the mere rational, materialistic viewpoint... but it's the clue.

This microcosm is truly the temple, the outer picture of the divine archetype. The temple, in the sense of all temples, as the chamber - the structure - into which a spiritual being can descend in order to operate on a greater density... a heavier density; in this case on a solid rocky planet and therefore the temple has a hard skeleton but is truly the temple in which the spiritual being... the 'I'... the true higher ego, can inhabit and operate in this heavy density and heavy vibration of the physical Earth. So here we are: we're recovering this knowledge that what we are - each of us - is a spiritual being... a droplet of the great ocean of life and wisdom. Mind - our mind - therefore a pulse of the eternal mind, which being so there is nothing, but nothing, except ourselves to stop that mind expanding into the whole ocean of mind. We are living in this appalling illusion that we're stuck - buried - in the sarcophagus of our five senses and the body. But the realisation is that we are perfectly free to expand and move out, overcoming self-consciousness and its drastic limitation, and moving out into cosmic consciousness... into oneness with the whole. And so Griffiths goes on: "Also in his compass"... if once you've got the idea - if you're beginning to grasp - stretch the imagination out into the great whole:
    Also, in his compass, he would hold in view
    the rise and fall
    of circumstance
    where man, as nexus of two worlds
    stands poised at this mid-between
    on razor's edge,
    gifted beyond angels,
    benisoned in light
    and cast in the major role...
    could he but know it.
"Gifted beyond angels"... now get this idea: that mankind - humanity - is the great experiment of God. The Earth is the great training ground for a hierarchy of spiritual beings. We can call it the Tenth Hierarchy, 'a little lower than the angels, but crowned with glory and honour'. "Gifted beyond angels" because we have been given free will. Clue to the great experiment! It is as if the Almighty has sensed the need of having somewhere in His creation a being who can stand up to Him as a son and begin to create, himself. See what excitement if we dare have the impudence to look down with God's eyes at His creation. What a thrill to watch the part of His creation after aeons of evolution reaching the point when it can really begin in freedom to create, and in consciousness to overcome separation, egoism and desire... and once more enter into its inheritance as a Son of God, and consciously come back as co-creator with God. Realise this: that the angelic world is part of the will of God. It doesn't need freedom in our sense of the word. It is already part of the Will of God, and the delight of the angel on all its levels is to work with, and for, God... for the Divine Source. To obey It and serve It. But man, the Tenth Hierarchy, has been given the freedom.

Now we begin to see the marvellous, extraordinary gamble of the Heavens. Realise this: that a being which can see the angels - can see the elemental world working within Nature - cannot but respond and obey. If the Archangel Michael stood here and waved his sword, who wouldn't respond? Therefore the risk has to be taken of letting the Tenth Hierarchy go through the narrows - the difficult phase - of losing the spiritual worlds completely. It's part of the destiny, above all, of the West... above all, of the Anglo Saxon race, to lose the spiritual world and gain the over-masculinated intellect and thereby explore the world of matter. It was not an accident. It was not a misfortune. But it is a gamble because it involves the dying - the atrophying - of the organs of subtler perception associated with the right hemisphere of the brain... the feminine organs which can apprehend the Living Whole. We have in the last centuries overdeveloped the masculine left hemisphere of the brain and have achieved an extraordinary technology, but have lost the Living Whole and the World has died to us as a result. The result is that man has shrunk. Blake, that great seer, passionately speaking for the New Age (he's the real New Age prophet), saying among other things: 'Wake up, young men of the New Age!' Now listen to what he says:
    We have been the wrenching apart of the perceiving mind and what we perceive from their original indivisible unity to produce an externalised, fixed, dead nature and a shrinking of our humanity from the boundless being of the imagination into the mortal worm of sixty winters and seventy inches long.
That is what we've become. Shrinking from the "boundless being of the imagination" which is really us. And the result is that we lose Nature. Listen:
    The Stars flee remote: the heaven is iron, the earth is sulphur,
    And all the mountains and hills shrink up like a withering gourd.....
    .....the Sun is shrunk: the Heavens are shrunk
    Away into the far remote: and the Trees & Mountains withered
    Into indefinite cloudy shadows
We've lost the life in Nature... it's gone dead to us. And a lovely quotation of Blake's:
    "What", it will be questioned, "When the sun rises, do you not see a round disc of fire somewhat like a Guinea?" "O no, no, I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying, 'Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty".
Blake could see right straight through into the Spiritual Sun. For remember, we are recovering the knowledge - and I'm asking you to take this now as a living idea - that within every visible form is spiritual being. And the spiritual being - the ocean of life - is primary. The secondary condition is the visible form. And it's that world of living being which is wholly lost to us because the five senses can't see it. The senses have become nothing more than filters to protect us from reality. As Eliot put it, "Humankind cannot bear very much reality". And Martin Armstrong in a poem called The Cage puts this brilliantly, the sense - very important to get - that the senses are really filters to protect us:
    Man, afraid to be alive
    Shuts his soul in senses five,
    From fields of uncreated light
    Into the crystal tower of sight,
    And from the roaring songs of space
    Into the small flesh-carven place
    Of the ear whose cave impounds
    Only small and broken sounds,
    And to his narrow sense of touch
    From strength that held the stars in clutch,
    And from the warm ambrosial spice
    Of flowers and fruits of paradise,
    Into the frail and fitful power
    Of scent and tasting, sweet and sour;
    And toiling for a sordid wage
    There in his self-created cage
    Ah, how safely barred is he
    From menace of Eternity.
Now will you take it? What is happening now... now in our generation - in our time - is that we've reached the evolutionary point when we can take the step in consciousness beyond limited self-consciousness into all-consciousness... into cosmic consciousness. From being an earth-bound creature man is becoming in all senses a universal creature: Homo Universalis. A new type of man is appearing. We have, you see, dissolved solid matter into energy by our intellects. We've arrived at the knowledge which is that the solidity of matter is mere illusion and everything is on the move the whole time... everything is flowing... nothing is still... everything is interconnected... everything is alive. And this is the point where the most advanced scientific thinking is bridging back into the mystical in realising that that energy - being alive - is also thought... is part of the great ocean of intelligence pouring out from the Divine Source. Therefore if you can enter (we've heard this earlier) into the etheric within the tree - "the ebb and flow of tides" within the tree - you are instantly through into the Whole. Where does your vision end?

If I may dare, briefly, to throw in this rather amusing interlude: will you come with me now - I'm going to give you something which is quite childish - remembering that someone somewhere said that except ye become as little children you won't know what it's all about. Become as little children! A friend of mine, Douglas Harding - student of Zen - was hit by a wonderful thought: 'I haven't got a face! All these people I see here - human beings - all seem to have a lump on the top of their shoulders with hair on the top and seven holes in it. But I haven't got that. I am merely crystal space. Where does my face begin?' Now be childish! Don't let your intellect get in the way now. You may sometime have looked in the mirror, of course, and seen how many eyes you have, but forget that for the moment. Your real honest experience: how many eyes are you looking with? One? Or two? Or a thousand? As far as my face is concerned: outside here this is my green jersey thing... and then come you... and then comes the rest of the room. Where does it begin or end? Beyond that the clouds... beyond that the stars. He suddenly saw that 'I am unique!' But so are you! As far as you're concerned, I have this lump on the top, but you - be honest - each of you begin there, but where do you end? He discovered that the Zen people said, 'Cut off your head!' and then roared with laughter because nobody understood. They also called it 'your original face'. Your original face encloses the lot, but all our culture and even our bringing-up of children is all forcing you to 'save face'... to 'put a good face on it'... to count: this is the nose, this is the eyes, this is the ears and all this.

But the real truth is that this incredible design has created an organ which enables a spiritual being to inhabit the Earth and to be in touch with the Whole, entirely unaware of the mechanism unless scientific intellect is concerning itself... or unless you've got headache, eye ache, earache... then you're aware of your ears. It's a wonderful instrument. You see you know nothing - be honest - although the schoolchild will tell you about it: that light comes on, the image comes in as reversed and passes up into the mind through the retina. You can't experience that. If you're honest to your experience you have this crystal sphere through which you can look and which includes everything. Where does it end? It includes the stars... it's right for the tiny child to grope for the moon. Those lights above me could well be the Pleiades and they're just as much in my 'original face' if they're here, two feet away, or the Pleiades. In other words, I take from you today your faces and I give you the Universe, if you can but see it.

"Cast in the major role", that's what man is, "could he but know it". And this is what we are beginning to know. We're beginning to wake up to what our role is. Now what I'm talking is of course not so much academic stuff... so much mere theory. This is burningly relevant to our time, especially to the young. The younger ones in this room, if I may do so, I would congratulate on having chosen to incarnate at this time. Because you know what happens: before the soul comes down to Earth it is given a pre-view of the destiny it is taking on and given the choice of withdrawing. No-one descends except who chooses. Now it is not thinkable that when you were given a pre-view of your particular destiny which you were taking on that you would not be shown also the setting for that destiny... the world situation. In other words, you would have been shown what the last twenty years of the 20th Century is bringing upon the World. The smashing-up of the old bottles in order to create new bottles which can receive the heady new wine poured out from the great tubs of Aquarius into the Earth. For we enter this period at the beginning of the Aquarian Age when the new energies - the powerful, cleansing energies which are ultimately Love - are being poured into the planet to cleanse it. You will certainly have been shown this extraordinary thing: that it is necessary to cleanse the planet of its evil and its pollution in order to make way for the in-flooding of the forces of Light which can cleanse it and bring about a new world.

This is the operation with which we are concerned. I may say that I wrote a book which I called Operation Redemption... if you want it that is my statement about it. But that appears to be what is happening. Now look at the scale of our time. The world looks awfully bad: "Darkness would seem to be our chosen cloak whose very warp and weft's composed of suffering and death". And, as we've said, the News spends all its time on talking about that breakdown. The breaking-down may well be, and I'm perfectly convinced is, the sweeping away of the products of our egoism in order to make way for a new humanity. Now we are recovering a tremendous concept... no not recovering... ours is the first generation which can see, through first hand experience, that humanity is one organism... is one being. Stretch this Divine gift of imagination that Blake talks about, now. Wrap up the planet... stand outside the planet and look at it... you have no difficulty in doing so. Look at this beautiful orb of blue and silver... and realise humanity - the noosphere - the human sphere, the human layer, covering the whole planet. Remember that Teilhard was so delighted at overpopulation. He said, 'Come on over-population! When we're jostling shoulder-to-shoulder over the whole planet we will wake up to the fact that we are one humanity'.

Now take that thought... put your imagination into it. We are each of us a cell of the one organism that is humanity. Got that idea? Ours is the first generation that could grasp the concept of humanity as one. Now, cells in the body... what happens when those cells choose not to work with the programmed pattern, but to follow their own willful way? You get cancer. That is what cancer cells are. In the body of humanity many, if not most, of the human cells - because they've been given free will - are choosing to spend their time following egoism, desire, greed and all its outcomes, getting for self, fighting to get more power and get what they want and ultimately war. In other words they are cancerous growths in the body of humanity. But now what is happening? We've been given free will. We're each of us free to choose and until now have felt that the purpose of life was to get more things, get more comfortable, get more what one wants, get more power, and so forth... even fighting other egos... bashing at each other like that! Now what happens is that cell after cell stops and reorientates, and begins to do what Teilhard called 'homing upon the Omega point'; pushes up through the obscure cloud of egoism around the Earth and pushes its head out into the great dome of the heavens... and looks around and sees, 'My God! I belong! This world of light is where I came from and what I belong to'. And it sees the others that have pushed their heads up and recognises them as brothers and sisters. One cell after another begins to do that: to grasp what we call now 'the holistic world view'. And may I just mention that wonderful word which has come into common parlance in the last five years is spelt h-o-l-i-s-t-i-c implying that the Whole is holy. And healing is restoring relationship to the Holy Whole.

Right!... what happens when a cell sees that? It begins consciously to align with the Divine programming once more. So great is this concept that inevitably it must offer itself to be worked through - to cooperate with - the Divine programming, and ceases to be cancerous. This is the change that's now taking place. Human clusters are coming together, dedicated to serving the living Whole. It's an extraordinary process that is now happening, for realise this: if once you see the holistic picture and see what man is - if you can accept this picture - it is not just academic knowledge. It becomes - to put it at its lowest - wholly inappropriate to blow each others' brains out and all the other nasty things we can do to each other. Do realise that we are all cells in this one body of humanity, and as it's the same divinity in me that is in you, I begin to see the meaning that those who kill by the sword shall perish by the sword. And I begin to see the real meaning of that great human maxim which is basic to all the great religions, or rather the secret esoteric knowledge in all the religions. Every one of them says in almost the same words that the real human maxim which is the Law of the Prophets is: 'Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Do not to others what you would not have them do to you.' And every one of the religions has almost the same words. Look at human history and think how much that has been put into action. But this vision that we're getting - this new esoteric secret knowledge... this vision of holism... this vision of what man really is - restores to us the necessity to live by that. Once you have seen what you really are and know that you are this immortal droplet of God - part of the whole - that is the first thing. Grasp the idea... then apply it. You then have got to do something about it. And the emergence of the alternative lifestyle is what is happening now. The cluster of human cells coming together to live a lifestyle which truly serves the organic living being of Mother Earth... Gaia, the Goddess of Earth. Inevitably this thinking - being alive - results in a change of living... a new right livelihood... a new way of living. And we are watching this form and we are taking part in it.

This is the great excitement of our time. And. furthermore, the emergence of the alternative lifestyle, though it is only clusters appearing who may hardly have grasped the scale of the picture, is part of a great impulse that is pouring into us from the outside. It is not - I repeat this strongly - it is not just somebody's plan to improve society. That has been tried, intellectually, often enough with greater or less success. This is something much more, for the Universe is dynamic, Operation Redemption is launched, the planet is being cleansed by the in-flooding of this Light and Love as a creative power. Breaking down the old forms, making way for the new. I remember a delightful little poem - a song - by Sidney Carter, the songwriter who wrote Lord of the Dance and so forth. It goes like this:
    Dig Michelangelo,
    Down in the marble,
    A wonder is waiting
    That no-one can see.
    Nowhere and never
    And now and forever
    I look for a thing
    That is looking for me.
    Over the water I
    Sail like a fisherman,
    Casting my nets in
    The dark of the sea.
    Nowhere and never
    And now and forever
    I look for a thing
    That is looking for me.
    Faith is a digger
    And hope is a diver
    And down in the marble
    Or under the sea
    Nowhere and never
    And now and forever
    I look for a thing
    That is looking for me.
This is what we are doing... this is the excitement. Now, the change that is coming is nothing less than the emergence of a new humanity. The emergence, dare one say, of what is virtually a new human species. Not a new race... for the new species is composed of people from any walk of life, of the cancer cells which have reversed themselves and are joining together in bringing to birth the new. Notice that what tends to happen is that if a species gets obsolete it is pushed out onto a limb by Nature and evolution, and allowed to bow out... and a stronger species takes over. This happened when Neanderthal Man, who was a fine fellow, met - what we call - Homo Sapiens who had developed the frontal lobe and was therefore able to organise in a way that Neanderthal couldn't do. So Neanderthal was pushed out and Sapiens took over and then developed his over-masculinated, patriarchal society: left hemisphere of the brain, unbalanced masculine, organising, controlling, developing the great culture that we have now. Unbalanced male/female: allowing the sensitive feminine right hemisphere organs, which can apprehend the living whole, to atrophy and go dormant.

Now in our time, with the holistic world view, with the way science has developed in discovering everything is alive and everything is on the move, a change is taking place and people are appearing who are really balanced male/female. It may turn out to be that actually there is a change within the subtle brain cells which creates the new balance. And it has been suggested that it is no less than what is virtually a new species which could be called Mulier Homo Noeticus. Mulier - feminine, woman; Homo - woman/man (androgynous); Noeticus - consciousness directed. Mulier Homo Noeticus: woman/man of developing consciousness. This is nothing less than an evolutionary change of supreme importance.

Peter Russell is lecturing in a day or two's time on his book The Awakening Earth and has there powerfully put forward the concept that something is happening in evolution which has never happened before, which is that the drive of evolution - instead of just shaping forms - has turned inwards into that most advanced form in the evolutionary pattern, namely man - man/woman - and thereby given us choice to look ahead. We are free to choose the way they're going to go. Evolution, instead of just shaping us, turning in virtually says, 'Right, now what are you going to do about it?' We look out into the world: it's not insignificant that the impetus has launched in the world called Planetary Initiative for the World We Choose. We are beginning to be able to look into the future and plan the future. We are beginning to see as Barbara Marx Hubbard, the futurist from America who's written a magnificent book soon to be published here called Evolutionary Journey in which she sees really that we are ceasing to be merely Earth-bound creatures, but are becoming planetary creatures. I give you just a couple of lines from her:
    The evolutionaries believe there is a predictable, progressive patterning process in the Universe. Intelligent energy at the core of the designing system counteracting the increase of entropy and disorder, the death of the physical universe. A planetary species is at the historical point of transformation from Earth-only towards its universal phase of development. We are no longer an Earth-bound species. We are able to change and therefore take responsibility for the direction of change. The peak experience involves the crossing of the great divide between the basic needs motivation and chosen function or self-actualisation. We are to work to further the rise of humanness out of our humanity.
This is the most tremendous point. She develops first of all that we are becoming space men in the sense that we are pushing our technology out in space and there is no reason why we should not really take space as our field for exploration. But realise this: that to shoot our rockets up, marvellous though the achievement is, is still physical... still gravity-bound. A more exciting thing that we are concerned with is the recovering of the lost knowledge that there is truly a polar opposite to gravity. But it's not a physical opposite. It's the passage through - into - what is rightly called ethereal space. This is what Blake knew and most succinctly put it. The task is:
    ...to open the Eternal Worlds, to open the Immortal Eyes of Man inward into the Realms of Thought... into Eternity ever expanding in the Bosom of God the Human Imagination.
Now we're recovering what really imagination means: which is the faculty of moving into the world of life and light, and discovering that we can instantly be in the whole of this ethereal space. We're moving into the realm of thought which is instantaneous, and therefore all this worry about light years which dwarfs us, as Blake said, into a "mortal worm of sixty winters and seventy inches long". We rediscover that we are everywhere... that light years don't hold good in ethereal space because it's the realm of thought. And we can move out instantly, which means again that it's possible for the human mind to apprehend all knowledge, and this is what the mystics, the visionaries, the great seers of the world, have succeeded in demonstrating. This concept of ethereal space out of Goethe... through Steiner... through Ernst Lehrs and George Adams... is a scientific concept, but bridging the science of the spirit which therefore mechanistic science hasn't found. But it's the real polar opposite of gravity.

We discover that the levity pole is the life pole, lifting life, light - as opposed to the grave of gravity - until our consciousness can move through into it. And this is the true space exploration: inner space exploration which is indicated in the baroque churches - a lovely thought! Outside you look up into the blue sky; inwards you move and look up, not at the ceiling, but you look through the painted ceiling and there are all the beings sitting upon clouds. Of course they've entered the world of levity, and there is some saint in apotheosis, and there is Jesus sitting on the rainbow, and the cross is disappearing into golden heights of the highest light. That is the real experience that Dante went through and that is opening to all of us in this counterpart to the physical space exploration. So we are really becoming - in a double sense - the space beings.

Right! I draw towards an end and I want to give you here a passage from Aurobindo, that great seer from India:
    The future belongs to the young.
    It is a young and new world which is now in process of development
    and it is the young     (or the young in spirit) who must create it.
Let me hasten to say to those of you in the audience, like myself, who are getting on in years: this does not exclude you. For youth is not a time in life - a number of years - but it's a condition of mind. And I would interpolate here Yeats' lovely sentence that:
    An aged man is but a paltry thing,
    A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
    Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
    For every tatter in its mortal dress,
    Nor is there singing school but studying
    Monuments of its own magnificence;...
Well! There you are, all of you who are getting on, let "Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing for every tatter in its mortal dress". We discover that we are young. I'm speaking for the old ones now... all these young people think they are their body (identify with it more or less). We with the body beginning to fade discover that our immortal being, housed in that body temporarily, is eternally young. It doesn't age... it's lifted out of age. So all of you: not only have I taken your face away and given you the Universe, but also to the older ones I restore you to youth because you realise that the 'I' in you is ageless or simply your choice. Don't identify yourself with the aches of your body.... and then the aches themselves may fade if once you get that attitude. But that was all in brackets in the middle of my quotation!
    But it is also a world of truth, courage, justice, lofty aspirations and straightforward fulfilment
    which we seek to create.
    Our ideal is a new birth of humanity into the spirit;
    our life must be a spiritually inspired effort
    to create a body of action for the great new birth and creation.
    Our ideal is not the spirituality that withdraws from life,
    but the conquest of life by the power of the Spirit.
    It is to accept the world as an effort of manifestation of the Divine,
    but also to transform humanity
    by a greater effort of manifestation than has yet been accomplished,
    one in which the veil between man and God shall be removed,
    the divine manhood of which we are capable should come to birth
    and our life should be remoulded in the truth and the light and power of the spirit.
    It is the young who are free in mind and heart
    to accept a completer truth and labour for a greater ideal.
    They must be men (and women) who will dedicate themselves
    not to the past or the present, but to the future.
    They will need to consecrate their lives to an exceeding of their lower self,
    to the realisation of God in themselves and in all human beings
    and to a whole-hearted and indefatigable labour for the nation and for humanity.
    This ideal can be as yet only a little seed and the life that embodies it
    is a small nucleus, but it is our fixed hope that the seed will grow into a tree
    and the nucleus be the heart of an ever-extending formation.
    It is with a confident trust in the spirit that inspires us that we take our place
    among the standard-bearers of the new humanity that is struggling to be born.
There! That is what we are about, dear friends. Hold this pause... Realise that we are part of the great organism of humanity... a human cluster. Realise that a gathering like this is not only 200 people. It is first of all one mind, part of the Divine Mind, and secondly that many, many beings from the invisible worlds will join in to help us and take part. Both the angelic world and also our friends out of the body who are deeply concerned with the spiritual awakening that is now taking on. In this moment of silence let us open our hearts and our minds with thanks - with gratitude- to all in the invisible world with whom we are now in touch. And having collected this power and ethereal light, let us send it out into the darkened world to be taken up by the angelic beings and used for the healing of humanity and the tormented Earth. This is the deed that such a gathering can achieve... Glory be!...


Now, I am going to call on my friend Baroness di Pauli to come up here. She has come back from America and has been closely in touch with Barbara Marx Hubbard, whom I also saw three or four weeks ago in America, whom I have quoted and who is the great force in America at the moment. And Edmee comes back from America with a piece of news which is highly relevant to this occasion. Edmee, will you take over and tell us what you have to say.


Baroness di Pauli: I am most grateful to Sir George for giving me this opportunity. Barbara Marx Hubbard: it is a name that will be remembered whether she succeeds in what she's intending to do or not. Because she's the first person - and it's significant that it is a woman who is taking this step in our time - who is coming forward into public life to represent, and put before the American public, all our ideas and ideals that we have been propagating for many years. It is a tremendous step and she is going to do it in the form of hoping to be selected Vice President of America. It has been usual in America that the incoming President selects the Vice President, but there is nothing in the constitution that is against somebody running for Vice President in their own right, and this is precisely what she's going to do. I think, in this Old World here, all we can do is to support her with our thoughts. She's very well known in America. She has been lecturing all over the place, propagating just all the ideas about health, education, productivity, space, peace initiatives, community energy, organisations. She is a very, very spiritual person and she has grasped the idea and she is coming forward to put it into practice. I don't know if you realise that on the American banknote there is a pyramid and an eye over it... and there is written under it: 'The Order of the New Ages'. She is going to remind the American public of this very motif that was the original idea in the constitution, and I'm asking you to support her in your thoughts, in your prayers, and in your meditation. Thank you very much.

Thank you very much.

What do you want now? We have in fact just a few minutes more.

Audience Member: I would simply like to take a moment to celebrate and support your own poetic approach to your own living and to sharing your vision with those who come to be with you in such a setting as this. I appreciate, also, you calling us to be more and more aware, to an expansive approach of our own to everything we see. And, George, I simply wanted to say that we love and appreciate you.

Time being so short let me just respond to that in two ways. Just listen to this. This is not actually me, but is very nearly me:
    The dominant power of the Universe is not the shattering power of the atom. It is the power that lies beyond the material power of the atom in the unseen world of the Spirit... the power of Love. It is this power, and this alone, which can guard us and guide us as we move forward into the awesome new world of atomics and automation, rockets and space. The physical power of the atom is released by chain reaction: one atom explodes two, two explode four, four explode eight, until finally the wave of explosion is released : total shattering power. Today we need a chain reaction of the Spirit to release into the world a new power of Love. If only a few of us can have the vision and faith, and have it intensely, we can be a torch which would start a chain reaction to ignite mens' hearts throughout the world. We can open the doors to a golden future and as the dawn of day brightens we shall understand at last the meaning of the words 'the truth shall make you free'.
Again you see - go on seeing - the scale of the world that we live in. Dare I come to this point now? Over us hangs the shadow of the ultimate horror of the bomb... obviously. It is clear from all we've been saying that man having been given freedom, the higher world cannot, and will not, interfere to the detriment of freedom. That would destroy the whole Divine Experiment. But there is a certain condition which cannot be allowed: that this planet should damage the whole living organism of the solar system or, for that matter, the galaxy. Nuclear explosion is a form of destruction different from any other. This complete smashing up - breaking up - of forms. Our freedom is not interfered with by their allowing us: to bring a new ice age down, which we shall probably do; tilt the planet as a result of our wrong thinking; pollute the planet and bring about earthquakes; and the like. None of that interferes with our freedom... we shall suffer a good deal through the things that we're doing until we change our ways. But to destroy the whole life upon the planet... that I cannot but feel is simply beyond the limits of what can be freedom. It's just like as parents ultimately we have to say, 'Look, dear, you can't do that! There I stop you'. I mean you stop the child at a certain point... in certain things you have to interfere with the freedom.

There have been communications - many of them now - from high sources of intelligence in the Universe which imply that if we go into the final Armageddon - the nuclear war - they will have to neutralise it. Now you've got to understand what I'm now saying. I'm not saying we needn't bother because God is going to deal with it for us, but it has been said many times in different ways, 'Do understand that we, on the higher levels of intelligence, have not the remotest difficulty in neutralising any nuclear device... instantaneously'. Look at what this implies. I'm going to read you one quotation I included in my book purporting to come from the Archangel Gabriel. I don't know... I don't believe it... or disbelieve it. And may I just interpolate a sentence here. Nothing that I've been saying today have you got to believe. This is not doctrine you've got to believe... the New Age is not a proselytising religious movement. We're talking spiritual ideas and you are free to accept or reject them. If you don't like the ideas I've talked tonight... forget 'em! I'm not going to argue... it doesn't matter. But if you do like them, well I can't prove - you can't prove - the things I've been saying. But what you can do is to take the idea, put it in your thinking - put it in your heart - and choose to live for a month as if you believed it. Look at the world in the light of it. And if it's true, it draws an inner certainty to itself. And if it's not true, it fades away. Can you get that idea? It's a real technique for exploring into the imponderable worlds. And don't let the cold scientific intellect come in and say, 'Look you can't prove that and you may not think anything that you can't prove'.
    Oh world invisible we view thee
    Oh world intangible we touch thee
    Oh world unknowable we know thee
    Inapprehensible, we clutch thee.
You can clutch the idea for its very beauty out of the ether... you have that faculty. Put it in your heart and decide to live as if you believed. That's your clue. So I don't believe this... I don't disbelieve it. It's an exercise in holding your minds open. Desperately important in the coming time to keep an open mind. We've got to be able to face anything.
    Awake, awake, the world is young
    For all its weary years of thought.
    The starkest fights must still be fought,
    The most surprising songs be sung!
We've got to remain young, all of us, and flexible to all the new ideas. So, with an open mind, listen to what Gabriel says:
    If you go into your Armageddon the armies shall be stopped by a great natural cataclysm. The weapons shall melt in their hands. They will find finally that the Earth has reached the place where the vibrations will no longer tolerate an act of wanton murder on the part of its inhabitants. For centuries man has spilled blood upon the Earth. Now the vibration refuses to kill. In the great war when man raises his weapons against his fellow men, they will not function in the new vibration. Anything that will cause destruction will melt. If a man utters a destructive word, he will disintegrate. Everything negative will vanish...
Fantastic remark, but wait a minute, even that "If a man utters a destructive word, he will disintegrate". Remember this, there's a real truth. In a philosophy of Fawcett called Imaginism, God is imagining everything into being and sustaining it in being by his imagination. He's imagining you... and me. Well if he chose now to stop imagining me, like Frodo on the table, I would just disappear. 'Surely George was there wasn't he? Where on earth has he gone to?' One would just not be anymore if God stopped imagining. Well if he decrees that anyone harbouring destruction in their heart he won't think anymore... they will all just disappear. You see this is wonderful. Realise this... this is science fiction on its most gorgeous. And I would say this to you, dear friends: the world is so mad and so bad, and if the materialists and the rational people are right there is, we all know in our hearts, no choice but somebody pushing that damned button sooner or later. It's the ultimate folly, obviously. I am not now - repeat not - entering into politics about the question of CND and so forth. I'm talking something much bigger... and much more exciting. Since the world is rushing downhill to ultimate disaster at such a pace, I hugely prefer to think apocalyptically... this is immensely more exciting.

The implication to me is that I do not believe that the angelic worlds - the higher worlds - can allow the planet to be destroyed by a nuclear war. I believe also that in this age of the Second Coming, the Christ is present in the whole of the etheric body of the Earth and therefore in every nuclear centre. Do you believe that Christ... the Cosmic Christ... the Creator of it all... will allow himself to be the instrument to destroy the whole life on the planet? It seems to me much more probable that at the moment that the button is pushed that will be the signal for Him to release Himself upward in a vast manifestation of Light and Being filling the heavens, and not downwards in destruction. That manifestation cannot come until the ultimate moment of disaster: God must play the game of brinkmanship. He can't show His hand now, but it's in the moment of disaster that this terrific thing will happen and it could well be that, as the Apocalyptic passages say, when the ultimate despair - tribulation such as never was is on you - then at that critical moment then cometh the Son of Man upon the clouds in power and great glory with the trumpeting of angels... the great change will come. That may be allegorical or may be literally true as to what will happen.

The ultimate truth is that there is no defence except in Christ. I don't mean Jesus of the Churches, I mean the Cosmic Christ over-lighting all men of every religion: the Lord of the Spiritual Sun over-lighting the Earth and present in the whole etheric body of the Earth. And the real, ultimate science fiction - the marvel of the apocalyptic picture if only somebody will rapidly write a novel on this - will be (remember this) that when we get to the ultimate moment of disaster, look up "for your redemption draweth nigh". It may well be that at that moment the wonder will happen, and the Golden Age - the New Age - will begin to be brought in. And much will be swept away, and this is the importance (and I think I get my final thought here because I must stop) the immense importance now - while we're in the body now - of attuning to the forces of the Light, by whatever name you call them. It doesn't matter what it is - by whatever religion - they're all the same Light, and the esoteric branches of every religion lead through to the One Ocean of Light which is the Power of the Spiritual Sun which we call the Christos, but can be called by every other name. Well, the important thing is to be attuned to that and then if we are suddenly swept out by a tidal wave or whatever, well that tidal wave is much the quickest way into the New Jerusalem... we shall be straight through into the Realms of Light which are very, very close to us and present in this room now. And if you're still attuned to the forces of violence you also won't be dead, but you'll be gathered on some lower planetary level to be given your chance at another round.

So this is the kind of scale of the picture. Don't believe - I repeat - anything that I've said... but perhaps don't forget it all!
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