There’s a great outcry today about globalization and the misuse of money but I think behind the scenes there are workers trying their very best to bring about a new understanding of how to solve the economic problems of the world on an inner level and we have to support them with our understanding and our lighted thought.
Robert: Our topic for today is financing spiritual work. Why doesn’t Lucis Trust just charge for its activities, as most groups do? I’ve certainly enjoyed the activities that I’ve gone to.
Sarah: I know a lot of people ask us that question. It was a decision made from the very beginning of our work, which started back in 1921 or 1922. The decision was made that we could not and should not charge for any aspect of our work other than the books which we publish and sell, and even the publishing company that publishes the books by Alice Bailey is nonprofit. We receive income from the sale of the books, but no real profits are made. All returns are invested back in the reprinting of the books and the administering of the overhead of the publishing company. Beyond the books that we publish and a few videotapes that we’ve produced over the years, nothing else is charged for. Everything is on the basis of a voluntary donation. The philosophy behind that is that you cannot put a price on spiritual teaching. What price would you put on the impact that the writings of Alice Bailey have had on the lives of probably millions of people—because the books have been translated into dozens of the world’s languages and have been in distribution for eighty years now—what price would you put on their impact? A million dollars? A billion? How could you set a price? The same thing is true for the work of the Arcane School, which we’ve talked about on this program. It’s a correspondence school that trains people to learn to meditate and to apply the Ageless Wisdom principles to their lives and their field of service. What price could you put? The same applies to our activities of Triangles and World Goodwill and the monthly meditation meetings we hold and the special conferences and seminars. All of it is open to anyone who is interested. All of our work is offered at no charge, but we believe that people will give and give abundantly in terms of their sense of the value they put on the work we offer. We trust people to respond appropriately.
Dale: Yes, and I think the miracle is that we have kept going for eighty years now on the basis of voluntary donations. We’ve never had to charge and we certainly don’t intend to start charging now, except for, as you say, the books and certain videotapes that we provide. It’s based on the idea that, that which is freely given should be freely shared. The teachings in the Alice Bailey books were given out by the source, the master on the inner side. He didn’t charge any money for it. So, we think that these teachings should be provided as cheaply as possible and as freely shared as possible, and we hope to evoke the spirit of giving through this kind of work.
Sarah: The other point to keep in mind is that we wouldn’t want anybody to be denied access to our work because they didn’t have the money to pay for it. I personally and probably many people in our audience can recall times when we might have wanted to partake of some spiritual program or offering and we couldn’t afford it. That, in our opinion, violates the basic spiritual principle that no one should be denied access to the teaching for lack of funds. On the other hand, those who have must share and give, and we work steadily to educate people in the recognition of responsibility to share the resources they have.
Robert: What are some of the special challenges of raising funds for the work of the Lucis Trust?
Sarah: Well, there are many challenges. We have to work steadily and actually daily to magnetize the appeal of our work. For one thing, spiritual teaching—emphasis on meditation, on study of spiritual writings, and so on—can seem awfully abstract to people. We find that people tend to give abundantly to activities and projects that meet human need on a tangible level. For example, look at the response to the aftermath of September 11th, when people in the United States gave, I think, billions of dollars to the recovery and to the victims. They gave immediately and abundantly because the need was so tangible and one which anybody could identify with. When you are thinking about attracting money for more spiritual, more abstract purposes, such as the lifting of human consciousness, the educating of the human mind to recognize spiritual principles, or the promotion of a deeper understanding of the power of goodwill and right human relations, or when you are thinking about funding programs that train people in meditation as a service to humanity, the reaction might be that those things sound nice, but they don’t necessarily strike people’s sense of urgency and the need to give.
Dale: Yes, our appeal tends to be, as you say, more on the abstract level and the challenge before us, I guess, is to enable people—listeners in particular on this program—to identify with the kind of inner note that we are trying to convey in these discussions. One of the challenges is to find ways that present the teachings in the Bailey material in a relevant way and to everybody’s lives in a practical way. That’s what we’re trying to do here on these programs, and I think we are to a certain extent. We don’t have a church for people to give to, so our work tends to be more abstract, and it’s not something tangible you can give to.
Sarah: But we do have daily, ongoing expenses.
Dale: Oh, certainly. We do have an office that we have to pay rent for and we have to pay salaries.
Sarah: We have a payroll to meet every month.
Dale: Right, just like every other business there are a lot of monthly expenses that we have to meet. So, the real challenge before us is to keep the message of the teachings relevant to people so that they can have something to identify with and enable them to identify with us in a more tangible way perhaps.
Sarah: Some of the other challenges of raising money for our work are that a lot of people who are drawn to the spiritual teachings are not necessarily those who are most adept at making a great deal of money. I don’t mean that people who succeed in making a lot of money are, therefore, not spiritual, but when your focus is upon development of the inner life and so on, you don’t necessarily apply yourself with the same zeal to amassing a large fortune. So, a lot of the people who support our work are not necessarily those who have access to a great deal of money to give. Yet, we believe that the people who respond to our work and to its principles are those who are most responsible for and likely to want to support our work financially. So, we count on the contributions, large and small, of everyone who understands and identifies with our goals, and people do respond, they do support. On our end, we try to keep our expenses as low and as reasonable as possible. Our salaries are nowhere near what the normal marketplace offers. People who work in the headquarters groups in the three centers have voluntarily undertaken a real sacrifice to be able to do so. We watch all of the money we receive using it very carefully, very frugally, and with deep gratitude for often the real sacrifice that people make to contribute to it.
Robert: Why did Alice Bailey say that the first requisite of raising money for the spread of goodwill is courage?
Sarah: Well, I think it harks back to what I was saying a few minutes ago about the challenge of making abstract and spiritual goals seem urgent and real enough to elicit financial contributions. Physical need and even emotional need are more understandable to most people and they will support with their own funds the meeting of those needs. But mental and spiritual needs, the need for light, the need for understanding or greater wisdom, and the goals of creating right human relations and building bridges between the different segments of humanity and fostering an understanding and recognition of spiritual values and promoting goodwill, those are things that may seem so abstract as to be “pie in the sky” to some people, and so it takes courage. It’s a challenge to present these goals and concepts in ways that people can identify in a personal way. That’s part of the challenge of doing these radio programs for Dale and me, to take these teachings and present them in a way that makes them seem to be living, vital truths that actually manifest in a transformation of your own life, because that’s all ultimately that people can really identify with, I think.
Dale: Yes, I think it does take a certain amount of courage to start talking about the potency of goodwill, for example, the energy of goodwill, because until you’ve actually seen this energy begin to work and to build relationships in the world, can you then see something tangible there. So, as you say, it’s pretty abstract and it needs to be related to some tangible thing and that’s what people will tend to give money for. It’s the same thing with speaking about the ideas and spreading the knowledge about the Spiritual Hierarchy, which we’ve talked about before, and the Plan and the World Teacher and the reappearance of the Christ. These are all ideas that—well, they exist on the inner planes, on the inner side, and that’s what we’re trying to bring to light. It takes a certain amount of courage I suppose to speak about these things in a public forum, like these radio programs are.
Sarah: Especially in our society, where people are so focused on the so-called bottom line.
Dale: Yes, in a very materialistic society you tend to look for material, technological answers for problems and to find a “pill for every ill.” So, to begin to look inward towards the human soul as the factor for healing or for spiritual comfort or spiritual balance, let’s say, in your life is a whole different way of looking at the world and that’s essentially what we’re trying to present here.
Sarah: But these goals that we’ve described do require money. What I mean is that to educate the human mind, to uplift consciousness, requires the dissemination of knowledge and wisdom, and that requires a communications network via our website, via the books we publish, via pamphlets that we distribute worldwide in many languages. All of these things have a material cost. And the postage, I could go on for a great length of time about the amount of money that goes into the postal system. It’s just awful!
Dale: Yes, because we have a correspondence school. The Arcane School is by correspondence.
Sarah: We watch that money go right out through the postal meter every day. It’s incredible.
Dale: The postage costs keep going up. So yes, it’s a big expense.
Sarah: People may think, oh dear, this first-class stamp went up from thirty-four cents to thirty-seven cents, oh well. But for us, when we rely entirely on correspondence, it’s a very major thing. My point is that all of these programs that work towards education and the dissemination of spiritual values don’t happen on their own. Yes, thoughts can be communicated telepathically, and meditation is a real form of the distribution of energy. But we also work in a physical plane world, and we circulate literature, pamphlets, communications via the radio program. This is one splendid example of a cost. This program annually represents about a third of our budget, so that when we undertook this program, we actually increased our yearly budget by fifty percent without any money in sight to do so. How many sensible businesses would do that? We decided to try it in the hopes that the money would be made available to us. We always work with the law of extension. In other words, we begin a spiritual project when we think there is legitimate need and trust that the needed money will be made available. It takes real courage and some people might say a good deal of foolishness to work that way, but that is how we work.
Robert: Of course, Lucis Trust, the organization, sponsors this show and Alice Bailey is the founder of Lucis Trust. All the dialogue that we hear on this show emanates from one of the twenty-four volumes of literature written by Alice Bailey, but one of the topics that she writes about is a vast group of servers who have the responsibility of reorganizing the world’s financial resources. Could you say something about that?
Sarah: Yes. We’ve talked before about the various departments of the Group of World Servers. They work in education, government, religion, science, culture, and finance. My understanding from the Ageless Wisdom is that the Department of Finance was the most recently added in terms of the working out of the divine Plan for our time, but we can see these workers at work in the world in the redirection of financial energy, the great amount of attention that’s being given to the meeting of third world debt, the unclogging of the unjust lack of distribution of financial resources where so much is tied up in the hands of so few. One person in five lives on a dollar a day or less. Two people in five live on two dollars a day or less. They know real hardship.
Dale: And we’ve seen this growth of institutions like the World Bank that has been set up to help particularly third world nations to finance their needs. Even though there’s been a lot of controversy about the World Bank and the problems that have arisen because of it, I think they’re now trying new ways to distribute money more evenly to third world nations. So, these are the trials, these are the testings and the beginnings of a whole change in world finance I think, and that’s a very important needed step.
Sarah: There’s a great outcry today about globalization and the misuse of money but I think behind the scenes there are workers trying their very best to bring about a new understanding of how to solve the economic problems of the world on an inner level and we have to support them with our understanding and our lighted thought.
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 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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