I don’t think many people have ever understood—they understand the difference, but they don’t see—the connection between human free will and the Will of God, and that the one depends on the other.
Robert: Welcome. Inner sight is simply seeing that which is always present but not yet fully recognized. You have within you the ability to see yourself and the world around you in a new way, with new eyes, so stay with us and together we’ll look at the world and ourselves with inner sight. Our topic for today is the will as a spiritual power. All the dialogue that you hear in this show emanates from the works of Alice Bailey. She wrote twenty-four volumes of literature and either the dialogue emanates from that literature or is very much influenced by that literature, as is the following thought: “It is the will of God to produce certain radical and momentous changes in the consciousness of the human race which will completely alter our attitude to life and our grasp of the spiritual essentials of living.” So, it’s good to know that God is still working on us and perfecting us. Can we see signs of the will in evidence in the world today?
Sarah: I think it’s an energy that is increasing constantly and throughout the past century. I think it’s a power that has become really dynamic in the world. The will is, to begin with, a spiritual energy, as we’ve said before. We can understand easily that light and love are spiritual energies, but so is the will when it is expressed in a dynamic positive manner for inclusive purposes and not to implement a selfish personal wish or project. If we look at the world, we can see that, for example, the tremendous push over the last sixty years since the end of the World War has been an expression of the energy of the will in the ending of colonialism: the establishment of nations that had been colonies of the various European nations gained their independence. All of this is part of the expression of the will “to be” in that they were demanding the right to have a say and control over their own affairs. That’s been an ongoing project over the last sixty years, and still we see the vestiges of colonialism that have left a lot of problems in their wake. But it’s essentially a very positive and productive phenomenon, I think.
Dale: Yes, and another example of an expression of the will in the world, of course, is the United Nations: the founding of the United Nations and the formation of that world body. That is a perfect example of synthesis, which is the coming together of all the— right now, there’s about one hundred and ninety—nations of the world that are members of that organization. It provides an outlook for the greater will of humanity to express itself.
Sarah: Don’t you think another example of the will on the world scene today is the growth of human rights? Probably thirty, forty or fifty years ago, there weren’t nearly the number of organizations and groups dedicated to the protection and fostering of human rights that there are today. Human Rights Watch, which has its branches in various parts of the world, is just one example. This demand for and this sense of entitlement that every group and every nation and every person has to express their own rights and to have them honored and acknowledged is a phenomenon that I think is quite recent. The days of serfdom and slavery are not that far behind us, and in those times, it was just assumed as acceptable that certain groups and peoples didn’t have any rights. Some did, some didn’t, too bad. And that is an idea that’s been absolutely demolished today, even though the rights situation still needs a lot of work. The concept, I think, is clear to every intelligent, decent person.
Dale: Expressing the will in these terms through the United Nations or through the downfall of colonialism and human rights and all of that, I think most people probably don’t really associate those things with the Will of God so much. They see the Will of God more in religious terms or in spiritual terms.
Sarah: Intervening and stopping disasters. Why didn’t God stop something?
Dale: Right. But these aspects are the working out of the Will of God in the world through humanity. It’s the working out of the Plan of God in all its many, many aspects. So, God isn’t just involved in religion as such. He’s involved in world work and what humanity is doing on a daily basis throughout the world.
Sarah: I don’t think many people have ever understood—they understand the difference, but they don’t see—the connection between human free will and the Will of God, and that the one depends on the other. God’s decision to allow humanity free will is why God does not intervene and save us from ourselves. But in that decision on the part of God, humanity was given an enormous amount of trust and a very long leash to learn to express our own will, take responsibility for our affairs, and in time get it right. And I think what we are seeing working out in the world is humanity’s stumbling attempts to express the spiritual will—whether humanity knows it or not—in such a way that the good of the whole is served. And the United Nations is one supreme example. The many groups that work for welfare, for the protection of the more vulnerable parts of society, are other examples of human will, taking responsibility for the working out of the Plan on Earth. Another example is animal rights and the whole study of ecology. Those are examples of the human will beginning to acknowledge its responsibility towards the lower kingdoms. But sometimes it’s not always a pretty picture that the will plays on the world level. There’s an interesting view offered by the Ageless Wisdom of even the role of dictators. They can be in their way messengers or implementers of divine Will. I’m thinking of somebody like Tito, who held Yugoslavia with an iron fist and kept the country in what you could say a synthetic or unified state for many decades. It was after his death that the country fragmented into many parts. Some people might say, “Well, that had to be,” but a dictator can exercise enough will to hold a country in unified form.
Dale: And I think another aspect of the will manifesting is this thing called planning, human planning, long range planning, because that’s what’s really required. When it comes to the United Nations, it takes a tremendous amount of planning to work out these great schemes and plans that affect whole nations and many, many nations of the world. So, this is also an aspect of the divine Will because it involves right direction for human energies.
Sarah: People always gripe about all the conferences that the United Nations holds, all the talk, all the treaties that are so laborious to get signed, but this is all part of that process of human will, getting into line, and sharing responsibility for a change in how it handles itself.
Dale: And it’s all working towards the greater whole, and that’s the key. Right now, quite often, there’s a lot of self-interest involved in the working out of these plans. But down the road, it will work out for the greater whole, for the greater humanity, the needs of humanity, and which is consequently the needs of the Plan.
Sarah: But this whole question of sovereignty—which is the personal will on a national level—is a very big issue within the United Nations, how much latitude to give to the sovereignty of each nation, and how much to demand the collective collaboration and cooperation for the good of the planet. When we look at the United Nations and see its failures, we have to see our own mirror image reflected, because all of us are a part of the problem when we demand our rights, our desires, against the intention of the larger whole. So, it’s just the human problem played out on a global level. It’s probably as perfect as it possibly could be at this stage, given all of us human beings, recalcitrant, blockheaded, thinking, willing, desiring humanoids that we are.
Robert: I’d have to admit I’ve been blockheaded at times.
Sarah: Oh, once in a while, yes. One sees that in oneself.
Robert: How can we begin to think of humanity as intelligently responsive to the will of God?
Sarah: I think we can. I mentioned earlier that this is quite a new energy that’s been available to our world, to our planet. It hasn’t always been an impact that humanity could sustain. This is a recent phenomenon of something like the last hundred years: this release of spiritual energy straight into humanity. But we can see that gradually humanity is beginning to respond to it. I think the best way to recognize it is to think of some individuals who I think of as expressions of the will as a spiritual force or a spiritual power. One that comes to mind is Martin Luther King, who sustained his vision of a right relationship among all the peoples of this country without ever giving in to the spirit of hatred or division or retreat. He held the line, you could say, under the ferocious opposition of the southern white mentality at the time, but also against the opposition of people within the black civil rights movement who thought he wasn’t forceful or aggressive enough. He had his vision of a real unity that I think took an enormous amount of spiritual will and a great deal of religious faith to hold. Another example that I think is a tremendous one is Nelson Mandela. How could anyone spend, what is it, twenty-seven years in prison pounding rocks on an island and come out of that experience inviting a couple of his prison guards to his birthday party or to his installation as president of South Africa? He held no bitterness in his heart. He was absolutely free of hatred and bitterness, and he said it was quite an effort to get to that state. That, to me, is the example of the will.
Dale: I think the key word in that question there is “intelligently,” and it takes intelligence, really, that level of intelligence of the mind to be the controller of this energy of the will. Otherwise, if the will is not under control, then it gets mixed up with all the emotional nature and all the hang-ups and attitudes that we carry around with us, and it comes out as aggression or as authoritarian or as just pure emotional harangue. But if it’s intelligently controlled, and if the mind is in control, then the mind is very likely aligned with the soul, and then you have much more of a perfect alignment with the energy of the soul and its more controlled expression of the purer Will of God.
Sarah: Don’t you think that these people who have achieved that intelligent expression of the will have an ability to retreat to some place in their consciousness that is not involved in the suffering of the civil rights struggle of Martin Luther King or in the misery of being imprisoned for 27 years? There is some part of them that their mental development enables them to retreat into, and that preserves the will in the face of suffering and opposition. Another example that I’m thinking of is the Burmese woman, Aung San Suu Kyi, who was under house arrest for ten or twelve years. She couldn’t even leave the country and go to England for the funeral of her husband for fear that she would be barred from returning to Burma. The amount of will and strength that her commitment to the liberation of her people has demanded of her, is to me, just awesome. And she has held that line for years and continues to. But there are other examples of the spiritual will that work out in different ways. Sometimes the ability to bear great physical suffering is an example of the spiritual will. I think of FDR, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was a paraplegic and people didn’t even know it, and he was president for twelve or thirteen years. Recently they released information on John F. Kennedy’s health condition, that in fact he was in pain every day of his adult life, great pain quite a lot of the time. Someone who knew him said that they never heard him complain. Well, if I catch a cold, I’m just beside myself with misery. He never complained. That’s, to me, an example of the will to persist and overcome real literal pain. Those are all examples. There’s the example of Christ in the face of the accusations of Pontius Pilate. He remained silent. That’s an example of the will. There are so many others. But humanity is increasingly responsive to the will, and I think our persistence in trying to overcome these great human problems, such as the Middle East, are an example that we’re expressing more and more of the will.
Robert: Why does the spiritual will need to be expressed through a group?
Sarah: Well, that’s a concept from the writings of Alice Bailey that I think might cause some of us a kind of a surprise. We can grasp the fact that each individual has a will, but to think of a group of people being a means or a channel for the will is something quite new. And yet, these past few months, with the discussion of the problem in Iraq and the decision to invade Iraq and to go to war, all of that has been a debate worldwide that I think is an example of the group will, don’t you?
Dale: I think it has to do with the potency of the energy. The energy of the will, the pure Will of God, is such a potent energy that it has to be dispersed through a group so it can be held safely by humanity. If all of that great power was—it’s pure electrical energy, you know—and if all of that was focused through one individual it could literally destroy them perhaps. But if it’s dispersed through a group of people, then there is not so much damage, and it can be dispersed and worked out more easily and more safely.
Sarah: And nowadays, with the technology that’s in place, we can have this kind of group absorption of the spiritual will. I’m thinking of the internet and e-mail and the media that enable us to communicate and to rally together. In fact, demonstrations for protesting the war in Iraq were called almost on a moment’s notice via e-mail; people could be invited to turn out and mobilize on the spot. So, the present state of communication and technology enables human beings to come together, but there’s a downside in this, or a risk, in that it is so easy to communicate. Public opinion is becoming a force that can be mobilized in an instant, and it can sway decisions of government, and yet that tells me that people who participate in forming public opinion, which is all of us, have to do our homework, have to think, have to educate ourselves and not just react in kind of a knee-jerk way to our traditional ideals, our convictions, our beliefs that are so dear to us. We also need to think, reason, change our minds and inform ourselves.
Dale: That’s why we come back to that intelligent use of energy because even though you’re part of a group that may be demonstrating for a certain cause, yes, you do have a responsibility to find out all the facts and act accordingly. So, here again, even though you’re part of a group, you still have the responsibility of working by way of the soul: your own soul and the group soul.
Sarah: There’s an old saying—it’s Latin, and I never studied my Latin, so forgive me if I’m mispronouncing it but it says—Vox populi vox Dei, which translates as, “the voice of the people is the voice of God.” That’s a very high-minded and hopeful view of public opinion, and I hope it’s true. I believe it is, but there’s a part of me that wonders whether it’s too easy to take the lazy route of just hanging on to your cherished assumptions and ideals and not continuing to think deeply and to penetrate more deeply in a mental way into the real fundamental issues that are at work in the world today. And we are living in a time when there are some really tremendous questions and problems that we’re being presented with as a human species.
Dale: I think it’s a very hopeful sign; it’s a very difficult time to work through because there’s one crisis after another it seems, but this is all to the good. It’s said in the writings of the Ageless Wisdom for this particular time, peace should not be what we should be working towards. Change is what we should really be working towards.
Sarah: We got plenty of that.
Dale: We got plenty of change and there’s plenty left to do! What’s really on the horizon and the great potential that still lies within humanity is to not only work through these problems but come out on the other side all the better for it and ready to initiate a whole new age that will bring a period of true peace, not just this emotional desire for peace right now.
Sarah: I wonder if the outcry for peace has been a bit premature from what you’re saying. Certainly, we all long for peace, but it can also be a premature arresting of growth that has to take place. If change is what we should be aiming for, then we shouldn’t be looking for tranquility exactly. We should be looking for a deeper understanding of the Will of God, and that reminds me that Shamballa is the center where the Will of God is known, and that is the only true place of peace on our planet, which means that only as we are able to express and implement the Will of God, which is the will to good of the whole, are we really moving towards peace. So, all self-initiated projects, everything that works to strengthen the separated self or one’s group against the interests of the whole, is going against peace—true peace.
Robert: Right. You’ve been listening to Inner Sight. Now we would like to close with a world prayer called The Great Invocation. It’s a call for light and love and goodwill to flow into the world and into our hearts. Let’s listen for a moment to these powerful words.
Sarah: Closes the program by reciting the adapted version of the Great Invocation.
(This is an edited transcript of a recorded radio program called “Inner Sight.” This conversation was recorded between the host, Robert Anderson, and the then President and Vice-President of Lucis Trust, Sarah and Dale McKechnie.)
(Transcribed and edited by Carla McLeod)
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