Each life crisis can lead to extended vision or to a separating wall. That’s really where the decision is made in a soul crisis.
Robert: Hello and welcome to Inner Sight. Inner sight is simply seeing that which is always present but not yet fully recognised. 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. The thought that we’ll start today’s show with is from the works of Alice Bailey, who wrote twenty-four volumes of literature, and all of the dialogue that emanates on this show comes from the works of Alice Bailey, as does this thought: “We grow by the presentation of moments of crisis.” I think that in life we’re either going through a storm, entering one, or coming out of one, and if we are the type of people who wait for the calm before the next storm to start enjoying life, we won’t really discover the joy of existence. The trick is to enjoy life during the storm and perhaps look at the storm as a tool given to us by the universe for our growth, and to really face ourselves as we face life’s storms. Last week we mentioned the crisis of the soul. How is that different from a personality crisis?
Sarah: I think the difference lies not in the actual circumstances of the crisis, but in how one responds to it. You could take two people experiencing the same circumstances and one might react to it in a way that makes it a personality crisis and the other person might transform it into a genuine soul crisis. What I’m getting at is, I think it depends on what level of your being you respond to the crisis from. If you respond physically to a crisis, probably you’re referring to a health crisis, a major illness, perhaps an accident. Those can be quite tumultuous in terms of the outer physical life, but they’re not really a soul crisis necessarily. Many people think of crises in terms of emotional events. That’s probably the most typical view of a crisis—something that you experience that disturbs you emotionally, that causes great upset and upheaval in the emotional life, a lot of unhappiness, a lot of anxiety. That’s probably the traditional view of a crisis, but those are really crises of the personality, because the personality can pass through them, suffer, be delayed in its enjoyment of life and yet come out on the other end relatively the same person as he was when entering into the crisis, not really changed in any sense. But a soul crisis transforms the basic character or nature. I think the most devastating crises are mental crises. As we talked in one of the earlier programs, we said that sometimes a real soul crisis can be ongoing over a period of time and be so quiet, so subtle and subjective that even one’s closest friends and family might not know that one is going through a crisis. There’s nothing devastating happening in the outer life, no major change in physical circumstances, maybe no emotional display of temperament and yet mentally and spiritually one is really confronted with a barrier, a seeming wall. I think that’s probably an indication of a soul crisis when it leads one to a barrier, a wall that one has to overcome in order to move beyond the crisis. The writings of Alice Bailey say that each life crisis can lead to extended vision or to a separating wall. That’s really where the decision is made in a soul crisis. Does it lock you into your own isolation as a personality, separate from others, isolated and feeling distant and alone? Or does it reveal more of a sense of relationship to humanity and more of a sense of one’s future destiny and path? That would be, I think, an indication of a real soul crisis. What do you think?
Dale: Yes, in the opening thought, I think the keyword there is “grow.” We can grow by the presentation of moments of crisis, and growth is for the soul. The real objective here as far as the soul is concerned — and we’re talking about the soul on the inner side, the soul that sees the lifetimes over a long span of time — the concern of the soul is with the larger picture, the larger patterns and ideas that are working out over many lifetimes, when the person undergoes a major expansion of consciousness which results in expanded vision or a greater sense of inclusiveness. The soul is always concerned with growth and expansions of that individual consciousness.
Sarah: I think one of the most important things to understand about crises is that although they are often preceded by a period of darkness and of seeming aridity, they are in fact very productive. This is something that I think is not very well understood by our society. We are really indoctrinated to avoid crisis, to maintain an equilibrium in our personality life, to keep the lid on, so to speak, maintain that even keel. Everything about our educational system, our society, our culture, encourages us to maintain that even keel, and certainly that’s understandable, but oddly enough, crises often come about through the upheaval of the known and familiar, and we should embrace that, because when everything is thrown up in the air, it comes down often in new patterns. That’s the creativity of crisis that we can rearrange not only our circumstances, but more importantly, our response to circumstances. It can give one the feeling of being more in control of life, of being more at the helm of one’s destiny when you have come through a crisis. I would think many of our audience could think of very testing events they have lived through, periods in their life when they were really at their limit, and they might be able to look back and say yes, I really grew from that experience. It wasn’t very pleasant, but I really developed my spiritual muscles as a result.
Dale: That’s the learning that comes about by these crises that everybody experiences in their lives. They are learning experiences, and if we look back at what led to this point of tension, this point of crisis, we might see that it’s been brought about by a certain habit of mind, as it says in the Bailey books, which has developed over a period of time. We fall into the pattern of repeating these same habits of thinking over and over again which continue to get us into trouble and result in some kind of pain and suffering, and so to counteract that what we have to do is adopt a more fruitful and more soul infused, soul qualitative pattern of thinking that will help us transcend this old pattern of thinking that got us in trouble in the first place.
Sarah: But how do you awaken that new pattern of thinking? What is it that dislodges the old habitual reactions? I think a lot of us can think of certain circumstances that we have repeatedly undergone and when we find ourselves going through repeated patterns of testing, I think we should be able to say to ourselves quite honestly that we must be slow learners and not getting the point or we wouldn’t have to repeatedly go through these experiences. So, like you say, we have to change our pattern of thinking. But what exactly does that mean?
Dale: I would think that there needs to be a recognition on the part of the person that something is not right here, there’s a certain discontent that comes up with this old pattern of thinking, and they keep following the same pattern all their life, and they keep getting into these jams, into these troubles, and keep making the same mistakes over and over. Pretty soon they would just step back and say enough is enough and begin to look at the problem objectively.
Sarah: With more of a sense of responsibility, don’t you think? That’s probably a key factor in producing a soul crisis: that you take responsibility for your circumstances. You say, this is happening to me because I am creating the opportunity for this, I am setting this up and getting myself into it. That’s not meant to be a means of self-denigration because, again, coming back to the idea of the productivity of crisis, these can be very fruitful opportunities for the soul. We shouldn’t think that the successful spiritual life is always lived on an absolutely even keel. In fact, a really spiritually creative life might be one where periodically the person is tested to their limits. Everybody knows that when you learn something, you go through a period of testing to see how well you learned it. This is how education occurs, and the same is true of the soul. It tests the learning by being brought to a certain pitch, a certain arduousness where its spiritual muscles, its values, are really tried out. If we had just an easy, comfortable rhythm in our life we wouldn’t have to summon up that kind of soul energy. So, these crises are good, but they do have to be seen as something that we have brought on ourselves and it probably should be seen as a stage of growth.
Robert: Someone once said, that “Not everything faced can be changed, but anything needing change must first be faced.” What Dale mentioned before reminded me of that thought, and also the idea that I’m picking up is that crises can serve as a catalyst or springboard into a higher consciousness which we can remain in once we achieve it.
Sarah: Yes.
Robert: Alice Bailey said something that I really don’t understand that I wish you’d clarify for me, because I certainly don’t go looking for a crisis. She said that a spiritual person makes his own crisis. How is this different from the traditional view of crisis.?
Sarah: Well, as we’ve been saying, the traditional view of crises is that something’s gone wrong in the life. If you aren’t proceeding on an even keel, something has run amok and everything within you wants to get back on track and return to the old equilibrium. But Alice Bailey said the spiritual person makes his own crises, and elsewhere she said that if you aren’t having a crisis, to create one.
Robert: (laughs) I don’t know if I want to do that!
Sarah: What she was saying or implying is that you don’t know what strengths, what wisdom lies within you until you are brought up against the testing of a real crisis, and that’s absolutely true. I don’t think we need to debate that, do we? It’s obvious.
Robert: I don’t think so, and I think perhaps also what she was saying too, is that you can test yourself, and as a result of the crisis, you can discover your shortcomings as well and work on them then.
Sarah: Yes, because crises, as a fundamental factor, generate light. Maybe that’s the most predominant characteristic of a soul crisis: it is caused by inpouring light. There’s a statement that I came across just today in opening my morning mail where someone wrote in and said, “Anytime the Earth gets tilled, rocks come to the surface.” The Earth being a metaphor for the personality, anytime the personality gets tilled or challenged in a crisis, rocks come to the surface. But they were there all the time. Rocks beneath the surface are what causes a boat to go down, so you can’t say that if they’re hidden everything is fine, but bringing them to the surface is the first step in getting rid of them. So, light reveals and light is what generates a crisis. If we weren’t growing, we wouldn’t be becoming aware of the ways in which we are not yet perfect. The recognition of our imperfections, of our flaws, is actually a very productive creative moment. It’s painful because we want desperately to be perfect as our Father in heaven is perfect, but we aren’t, we’re works in progress, and it’s an aspect of the soul that it casts light on the unredeemed nature. This is part of the pain of the spiritual path, but it’s also a sign of real growth, because when you see something as it is, then you can change it. If you don’t see it, if you’re not aware of it, not feeling responsible for it, then you can’t change.
Dale: Yes, and related to this I think sometimes that the soul in its own creative work actually designs certain lives, puts you in a certain place in the world, in certain categories that will bring about specific points of crisis. This is a definite soul impulse; to put you in a position where you’re going to face these crises and work through them and come out with growth on the other side.
Robert: I was just thinking too of that gentleman by the name of Frankel who you brought up several weeks ago, where one of the issues that was mentioned by him was the survival ability of the people in concentration camps if they were able to kick into the idea that life had meaning to it. Would that be an example of a soul crisis?
Sarah: I think so, because it’s saying that the circumstances, painful as they might be, can teach one something and are leading to some greater good. I think that’s behind the idea that life has meaning, that it is leading to a greater good than one presently realizes. So yes, I would think that’s what Frankel discovered in his research. Those people who were able to see the meaning in their circumstances lived and didn’t give up.
Robert: Why are crises such an unavoidable part of the spiritual path?
Sarah: Well, it’s as we’ve been saying, the way that the soul tests its strength, its grip on its instrument the human personality, by putting the personality into circumstances where the traditional coping mechanisms aren’t sufficient and you really have to dig deep into yourself and really search your understanding, your wisdom and your experience to come up with enough fortitude to not only survive, but hopefully grow. So, it’s a test that the soul periodically initiates. It’s not the same for everybody, and this is an interesting point about crises. We’ve talked in the past about the seven different psychological temperaments of human beings, the Seven Rays. We did a series of programs on those and for all of these different types, the crises are different. For example, a person who is fundamentally the power type, who is self-motivated, one who maintains his own center, that kind of individual often goes into a crisis that leads him to a greater inclusiveness in the way he views life and human beings. He is expanded in his ability to identify with others because of a soul crisis, whereas a soul who is along the line of love often is innately able to identify with many different kinds of people, but it’s more difficult for that person to find and maintain his own centre, and so the crisis that that kind of person goes through often has the keynote of centralization, you could say, teaching the person to become stable and complete within his own spiritual centre, while maintaining and fostering the capacity to identify with all human beings. So, you can see how there’s this constant fine tuning and balancing of the soul. A person who’s along the line of creative activity, who is capable of doing many different things, talented in many areas, for that person the goal is to achieve a kind of stillness in life that will allow the voice of the soul to be heard, because so often they’re so busy and so active, they create their own internal noise.
Dale: Yes, these characteristics that you were just referring to don’t really come into play until one does begin to step on to the spiritual path. I think why crises seem unavoidable on the spiritual path, is because one is becoming at that point more aligned with the soul, and there is more of an evocation and invocation back and forth. Alignment and energies are flowing more smoothly and freely with the soul, so that these crises come more and more frequently, and perhaps more intensely.
Sarah: Yet as you say, the soul energy is actually flowing more freely and smoothly.
Dale: The soul has always been there, but as one becomes more sensitive to the vibration of the soul, the higher qualities of the soul begin to pour in and influence what this person does and thinks and how they behave in life. Then these crises become more frequent because there’s a lot more influence that the soul can play in that life.
Sarah: Of course, those kinds of crises that you’re talking about are not the same as the kind of life that some people live, where we look at their life and say their life is an absolute mess. People who can’t really get themselves together, those are not people having a soul crisis, those are people who are still learning discipline and integrating their emotional and physical nature. You’re talking about something else.
Dale: Yes, it’s a little bit more advanced along the path, but I think even those people that, as you say, “can’t get their life together” are feeling something, that there’s some pressure there always, but it’s in the background more.
Robert: We’ve been talking about crisis concerning individuals. Can we relate this to larger groups such as nations?
Sarah: Yes, because nations are also the expression of the soul. A whole nation is an entity in itself, a people, and people have a soul. We can look, for example, at September 11th and see that all that has resulted from that is a crisis, not only for America, but for much of the planet. Look at how hard we’ve thought about trying to understand the origins of that crisis, trying to understand the hatred that was demonstrated, trying to fathom the love that flowed out of that crisis. It’s been enormously educational, I think. Devastating, but also beautiful in its own way.
Robert: That’s about all the time we have for our discussion today. You’ve been listening to Inner Sight. Now we would like to close with the 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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