It is clear now to almost everyone that
that which we have been universally sensing and have been talking about as coming is
pulling into the dock (I guess terminal would be more apropos.) The entire planet in
practically every area of life is in a great state of flux or development. Some of it, a
lot of it, is quite painful, but there are also notable areas of advancement.
For those of us in the esoteric community
who pay attention to such things, it is crystal clear that these developments both the
destructive and constructive, are the physical effects of the current and prior impacts of
the Spiritual
Will which esotericists refer to as the Shamballa Force. The S Force in this current
incarnation has been flowing for some time. A number of people, myself among them, think
that the S Force has been coming in and gradually growing stronger for at least the last
decade. We think, for example, that it is this Force that has caused the idea of Peace to
be brought so forcefully to the foreground of human concern and to be re-examined
in a new light, the light of peace building rather than peace keeping. It is the Shamballa
Force that has given the impetus to the many Peace movements… peace being a fiery
condition. The Shamballa Force is also, I think, responsible for the concern and renewed
attention being paid to another ageless idea that I am going to try to deal with this
evening.
New, only in the sense that it can never
become old because it is ageless, this idea, although lost to human sight for the past
several thousands of years has always been with us. As a fiery quality of divinity, a
fiery aspect of the essential essential, it is in the very ethers. In the air, we breathe
it in with every breath. By alchemical processes that humans have as yet to discover, it
finds its way through the alveoli in our lungs into our blood streams, and thus it
interpenetrates all of manifested life.
So, although this idea, this life has, in
the past year or so, become a focus of the attention of many of the world’s concerned
citizenry, people like us for example, it is nothing new. It has always been there, in the
fabric of the One Life. It was an essential part of the abundance of the initial Breath,
of the initiating Sound. For-giveness, I mean. For-giveness has been and is eternally with
us.
We literally exist because at the
foundation of the world we were for-given by the Great Sacrifice of our Solar Logos. We
are in fact the For-given Ones, sent forward from the timeless, spaceless realms of the
Eternal One into the worlds of time, space and form. Sent forth on a breath of Will, the
first Sound, carrying a Purpose, far beyond our ability to ken, the First Sound which
manifested initially as a Great Light in the eternal void of the night which lies on the
other side of the eternal fullness of the Day and which together make up the One Life or
God.
These planets, these schemes, these
rounds, and all they contain, every Heavenly Man, all of the Hierarchies, every atom of
substance, are in the nature of a great unfolding revelation of majesty beyond our deepest
and most profound dreams and imaginings. And the essential building block of that Great
Unfolding was and remains the Divinity of the Builder who in a great cosmic act of
for-giving, we are told by what is perhaps the most ancient of all occult expressions,
pervaded the entire universe with a fragment of himself and yet remains.
That, eons and eons ago, for-given
Divinity contains within itself the seeds of renewal. In Humanity’s case, the case of
the Forth Kingdom, these seeds of renewal spontaneously and endlessly flow from the vortex
of the One Life through continuing acts of sacrificial for-giving tirelessly performed by
the re-incarnating or endlessly "returning nirvanis" who are ourselves.
For forgiveness lies at the core of the
most ancient of the Laws of Life that govern the Great Unfolding, the Law of Sacrifice,
which means "the impulse of giving." 7R2 p88. As D.K. has pointed out, "The whole secret of the doctrines of
‘the forgiveness of sins’ and of the ‘at-one-ment’ lies hid in this
simple phrase. It is the basis of the Christian doctrine of love and sacrifice. Hence the
emphasis laid, in the Piscean Age and through the influence of Christianity, upon just
these two things, forgiveness and atonement."
Forgiving is proactive. It is the first
impulse of the Creator’s Will. It is initiating, ongoing and without end. It operates
ahead of, before the fact of materialization. It means for-giving, totally and with out
reservations or conditions. It means investing, in the beginning, with joy and the
certainty of the eventual outcome, all one has or is in the will to the good of the whole.
This is, of course, not the way in which
forgiveness is commonly used today. As usual, the core aspects of this foundational idea
have been lost. I have often spoken of how the forces of retrogression strike at the core
of our synthetic existence. By weaving veils of distortion between us and the light of
truth, they seek to create the great illusion of separation and drive barriers of fear and
hate between man and nature and man and man. They murk up the glorious vision of our
unanimity with glamours, illusions, lies.
Many-- probably most-- of the words that
were generated to help us to learn and to understand how we are to act as messengers of
divinity and to find our way back to the Father’s house have been thus obfuscated.
Words we use to describe right human relations, that is the way that humans ought to
behave, the way we were literally designed to behave or to relate to one another and to
the rest of the creation have been overlaid… deliberately in many cases… with a
patina of misunderstanding, of glamour, and illusion so that these words do not mean in
common usage anymore what they originally meant as the embodiments, the forms of the great
ideas that make up the One Life.
In the case of forgiveness and its
inseparable companion "at-one-ment", the concept has been turned almost totally
inside out. First off the notion of "Before" has been largely lost to the idea.
The notion that the impulse of giving comes first, that the total sacrifice of all that
one has and is precedes any manifestation of any act is not part of the common usage. As a
result, the direction of the energy which the original concept contains has been reversed.
The entire concept has been turned into
an exercise of atonement which means to make up for, or to expiate a wrong. Thus the
magnificent and inspirational truth of the transfiguration and sacrifice of the Christ is
made to appear as a the demanded and bloody pay off for the sins that humans had
perpetrated against God. Atonement looks backwards at perceived wrongs rather than forward
toward the generating of new possibilities of at-one-ments. At-one-ment means the
reconciliation of oppositions into new and more stable wholes. At-one-ment describes the
cyclic spiral of evolution which we know as the Path.
In order to see this issue clearly,
however, we need to consider both sides of the equation, the wrong doer and the wronged
one. In both cases, forgiveness has become something that one seeks or that one extends
after the fact of an occurrence of an event that is deemed to be harmful. Seeking
forgiveness is equated with the willingness to recognize that one has done wrong and to
ask the wronged one to forgive, or more currently accurate, to excuse one for the
perceived wrong. On the other hand, forgiveness is something that the victim of the wrong
gives or grants to the one who has done the harmful act.
Ostensibly, the act of seeking and giving
forgiveness makes what ever the person did O.K. The victim is expected to give up any
resentment against or the desire to punish or exact penalty for the perceived offense. The
perpetrator is expected to be sorry for his act. In the case of the victim, however, the
notion of forgiveness still seems to carry the need for a certain necessary payment before
it is extended. The wrong doer has to convince the wronged one that he is sorry or
contrite and is willing to atone for the wrong… that is make a suitable payment of
some sort of materially measurable recompense to the injured one that will demonstrate the
genuineness of his contrition.
In recent history this concept of
forgiveness had become so warped that the selling of forgiveness, called indulgences, was
a primary source of income for countless members of the clergy. These people had somehow
become perceived as having the ability to intercede for the sinner with God who was
supposedly very angry with this guy for having been offend by him. The clergy could,
through their special offices, sort of negotiate with God and get God to forgo punishing,
or otherwise getting even with this guy. At the least, they could get a lighter sentence.
And for a price, called penance, they would.
If you happened to be poor, and the
offence wasn’t too great, the penance or "imposed satisfaction" as it was
called, might be a form of physically measurable punishment. There could be lets say so
many self administered lashes with a whip. For the run of the mill no big deal sins .. but
the un-forgiven accumulation of which would, over the long run, definitely give you a
problem when you attempted to get into heaven …for these little kinds of sins, called
in the jargon of indulgences, venal sins, the penance would be the recitation of a certain
number of specified prayers.
If you were rich, on the other hand, and
often no matter how heinous the crime, you could just pay a fee…or a fine maybe.
The overt, or blatant use of this
obviously crass application of the warped concept has been discredited. However, the
illusion of an angry, wrathful and vengeful God which was created and is to this
day being fed by the forces of discord, is so powerful that the fear of retribution for
having sinned is still a major force in the lives of many, many people, and, perhaps in a
set of new clothes, the specter of "indulgence selling", believe it or not, is
still making the rounds.
Today in the common parlance of the man
in the street, forgiveness is still something we apply to having either sinned or been
sinned against. In the case where we have sinned we still seek forgiveness, usually from
God, but often from the person we think we have harmed. In either case, we are sorry, and
what we are after is that God or the harmed one not be angry with us, to excuse us, to
shine it on, to let it slide, "just this one time, and we promise to not do it
again."
Having, all of us, at one time or another
participated in this activity, we are familiar with this sort of forgiveness. And we know
it from both sides, that is from the side of the wrong doer and the wronged one. From the
point of view of the wrong doer, we know that very frequently, rather than a real heart
felt sense of having harmed someone, our contrition is driven by fear of an exacted
retribution, or pay-back, of punishment and, in most cases, self pity. And from the side
of the wronged one, our granting of forgiveness, if indeed we really do, is driven by a
sense, not of charity and understanding of a brothers weaknesses, but by a sense of smug
self-satisfaction. Do not get angry, the statement goes, get even… We can see how
this attitude, which is a commonly held self conscious point of view, completely warps the
concepts of for-giving and at-one-ment.
So, like so many of the other principles
of life that we have been given as guides and sign posts of right direction, the warping
of forgiveness was made possible by the self conscious polarization of humanity over the
last 10 or more thousand years. However, I am happy to observe, there is a growing
frequency of instances in which people seem to be motivated to action by a genuine sense
of the divinity of the brother who was harmed or who has harmed us. This phenomena, I take
to be evidence of the growing general shift in humanity from a self-conscious polarization
to more of a group conscious realization and understanding. I also think, by the way, that
this shift has been greatly accelerated or helped along by the inflowing Shamballa Force.
Group consciousness, as you all know,
simply means the ability to register and identify with the divinity in our brothers,
indeed in all of the forms with which the One Life has chosen to clothe itself. The effect
this point of view has on the practice of forgiveness is transforming. On the one hand,
having registered the divinity in our brother, we have a real understanding of how we have
harmed him, how we have interfered with his unfolding and brought unnecessary pain into
his life. We accept responsibility for our harmful actions and experience a heart felt
need, in fact a driving urge, to make it better, to generate a balancing of the scales, to
achieve, not atonement, but at-one-ment with the soul of our brother who is after all only
another fragment of ourselves.
And not only are we thus driven by our
sense of justice and truth to balance the scales of life, but we are thereby enabled to
see ever more clearly the glamour or illusion in our own equipment that had ensnared us
and caused us to violate our brother’s light. Recognizing these subtle glamours and
illusions is a major step in eliminating them. For-giving enables us to see the error of
our behavior and to work on amending it.
None of these responses or actions, you
will note, requires that we seek from the injured one what is today called forgiveness.
Yet in each of these instances, we are engaging in the energy of for-giving. We, having
seen and accepted responsibility for the harmful act, become compassionate, pro-active
generators of that which will restore the balance or generate at-one-ment. Compassion, by
the way, is also always a proactive, outreaching, and synthesizing force.
On the other hand, having registered the
divinity within the brother who has harmed us, and being truly for-giving, we seek ways in
which to aid the brother to see the snares of illusion or glamour that have enslaved him
and are causing him to do harmful things. If the brother is not yet open to help or, one
might say, to the grace of realization, then we give him up to his own destiny. We are
secure in the knowledge that he too is a returning nirvanis. The Great Wheel will again
spin him out and the Lords of Karma will see that he is again faced with the opportunity
to harm or help and to grow as a result of seeing how he has either harmed or helped.
The for-giving ones who have come to the
realization that they are for-given do not harbor and nurse the nests of vermin called
anger and hurt feelings. The members of the human family in whom the shift in
consciousness is far enough long that they are able to see as group conscious beings are
living examples of magnanimity, they will never seek retribution. They know that the mind
numbing and eye glazing demand for retribution is the cry of the specters of death and
chaos. The Magnanimous Ones know that the insane and bloody demand for retribution is the
dark force behind all of the holocausts, of which there have been countless, that humanity
has endured, the mass murders in Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo and East Timor simply being a few
of the most recent. This dark and psychotic force has been consuming human minds and
hearts for millenniums. The for-giving ones know that revenge seeking, generated by and at
the same time feeding upon hatred and ignorance, is one of the most hideous and powerful
snares that have been woven by the forces of retrogression to block out the light of our
unity and to keep us from seeing the synthesis that is.
Forgiving has nothing to do with the work
of Justice and the dealing with criminal behavior. Karma and the laws of men’s
societies are adequate for that and must be honored and observed by all members of the
community. Forgiving is not something that we are called upon to do each time we encounter
harm. It is something that we have done… Ages and Ages ago. In this light we can see
that being forgiven, we are always facing the future and, as we are being impelled by the
Shamballa Force to finally realize, totally invested in the good of the whole. One does
not try to move into the future while looking backwards. One has no time for backwards
looking. The for-giving ones do not look over their shoulders seeking retribution and
revenge. Thus, unfettered from that which lies behind, we can strive toward, not just our
own higher spiritual possibilities, but the higher spiritual possibilities of the
collective, of the community.
The Magnanimous Ones who are the
For-given know well and honor constantly "the fact of the One Humanity and the
importance of the individual." Following M’s injunction, facing Infinity with a
smile of anticipation and joy, we let the dead bury the dead, and revealing what we are,
"… Lords of Knowledge and Compassion and of ceaseless persevering Devotion who
chose to die in order that lesser lives might live…." we become flames lighting
up the Path ahead.
Tom Carney
