Sir George Trevelyan: thoughts and writingsThe Emergence of a New HumanityThe Challenge of the 1980sA 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:
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. 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:
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. 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:
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
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. 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:
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. 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:
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:
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.
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;...
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. 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:
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 intangible we touch thee Oh world unknowable we know thee Inapprehensible, we clutch thee.
For all its weary years of thought. The starkest fights must still be fought, The most surprising songs be sung!
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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