The forces of restoration, we’re told, work through the human mind. They prompt the human intellect.
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 today is restoration and all of the dialogue that you hear on this show emanates from the works of Alice Bailey, the founder of the Lucis Trust organization and who wrote twenty-four volumes of books. As I mentioned, all the dialogue you’ll hear emanates from those twenty-four volumes, as does the following thought: “The forces of regeneration, of reconstruction, of restoration and of resurrection are making their presence felt in all the many groups which are seeking to aid and lift humanity. We see them in the efforts to rebuild the world, to restore stability and the sense of security, and thus prepare the way for the coming of the Christ, the World Teacher.” What exactly is it that needs to be restored?
Sarah: Well, to restore is to bring back or to return to the original state or to renew or reconstruct. I think when we think of the forces of restoration, we think of the supposed fall from grace that humanity endured eons ago. It pervades a lot of the world’s religions and mythologies. Probably most familiar to those of us in the West, the story of the Garden of Eden. And the perfection that early Homo Sapiens, early human beings lived in, that is somehow in the dim recesses of the racial memory without our really understanding what it is that we’ve lost. But in the writings of Alice Bailey, the forces of restoration are part of the energy that’s made available at this time of the year each year, a period that we’ve talked about on our program in the past. This coming cycle of two months is called the Three Spiritual Festivals, and they coincide with the Christian festival of Easter, and the festival or the holiday of Passover in the Jewish tradition is behind the festival of Easter, behind in the sense of earlier in history. There’s the festival of Wesak, which is the great Buddhist or Eastern festival and the Festival of Goodwill, which follows it. These are the three spiritual festivals. They’re the high point of the spiritual year, according to the Ageless Wisdom. And at that time, we’re told that certain extremely powerful, potent spiritual energies are made available to humanity. I don’t know if people are used to thinking in terms of energies that lift and aid and propel our evolution, but I find it very encouraging and reassuring to think that forces are directed toward humanity that can stimulate what is within us, that can’t impede human free will, but that can stimulate and empower human choice and decisions. The forces of restoration, we’re told, work through the human mind. They prompt the human intellect.
Dale: That’s essentially what this particular energy does, I guess. It doesn’t create anything by itself so much as it stimulates the mind into activity. It awakens the mind, and since human beings have free will, they take that awakening and use it more creatively. I think the evidence is seen in the world today and the new reconstruction and regeneration that’s taking place.
Sarah: The story of the Garden of Eden, I think, suggests a certain misunderstanding that we have: that we have fallen from grace, that we somehow erred and fell out of disfavor with God when Adam and Eve discovered the concept of sin. But the Ageless Wisdom looks at it quite differently. You could relate that fall from an early perfection to the journey of the prodigal son, who pursued the life of riotous living and found himself far from his father’s home, the Father being the representative of God. He had strayed far from God, and finally, he came to his senses and realized how dissolute and bereft he was. He realized his life was empty and meaningless, and he said, “I will arise and go to my Father.” And that’s the idea or the symbolism behind the forces of restoration that are humanity’s experiment with free choice in the world of form on earth, in material life. There’s an interesting concept in the books of Alice Bailey about these energies available at the time of the three spiritual festivals: that they have to do with the new materialism. People might think, well, materialism would be absolutely opposed to anything spiritual. But in fact, the new materialism is the coming ability of human beings to work rightly with matter and substance and forms, to create institutions and means of education and of health and of well-being that would express real spiritual values.
Dale: Yes, there are institutions and forms of life that actually are more refined forms, like new forms of government, or new institutions, or new living conditions in the world that actually express more light and more love. This is the way in which more of the divine nature of God is and will continue to manifest in the world, through these refined forms, even though material forms.
Sarah: It’s through these institutions, through these human creations that we demonstrate, or not, our responsiveness to divinity, to our own essential inner divinity. And that’s why these forces work through human minds, through the human intellect, because we are endowed with a mind and with free will. It’s up to us to decide how we will use our minds, what kind of planning and decision-making we will come to on our own accord, and how we will use our free choice, our free will. All of this is up to us, and the world as it is reflects our choices and values. Nobody did this to us, nobody from the inner planes or God didn’t do it. Extraterrestrial forces didn’t do it. The world today is a reflection of human choices and values.
Dale: And it depends on the level of human consciousness, because how we react to these energies depends on the focus of our consciousness and where we are focused. If it’s on desire nature and selfish grasping for oneself and aggressive actions like that, then those are the directions that the energies will follow. Because, as you say, we have free will and we have the free will to make bad choices and we pay for making bad choices. But nevertheless, we are allowed to make those bad choices because that’s how we learn.
Sarah: I think you can look at human history and show that we are learning, maybe too slowly for some people’s taste, but we are learning. I think the past century has shown real strides in the growth of the United Nations, which is under such criticism today. It’s imperfect, but again, it reflects human consciousness. It’s a reflection of what we are and what we choose. But the European Union, the growth of education on a mass level, these are examples of choices that humanity is making that are improving the world. All of this kind of thing is stimulated on a rhythmic level year after year by these in-pouring energies that foster the growth of the mind, that refine and prompt right decisions, right choices. That opening comment that you read, Robert, mentioned that people are seeking a sense of security, and that reminds me of something that was said in the books of Alice Bailey, that two things are tincturing human aspiration today, two urges, you could say: the urge to freedom and the urge to spiritual security. And certainly, if we look back at the last century, we can see that our spiritual security has been severely challenged by man’s ability to make worse and worse warfare, the growth of atomic weapons and the ability to harm ourselves and the planet. So, this urge to spiritual security really speaks to me.
Dale: As you mentioned, that quote goes back to the original intent and why the restoration is so necessary now. It’s the original intent that’s actually in the mind of God, and what his intentions were centuries and millennia ago to bring about in the world. Somehow along the way we got sidetracked and now it’s trying to get back on track, to restore the divine intention that was in God’s mind originally.
Robert: What more can we say about restoration?
Sarah: Well, one thought I had about restoration that ties in with the idea of Easter and Passover too, that they come in the spring of the year in the northern hemisphere and so often we associate these religious holidays with the renewal of the earth. But this particular subject of the forces of restoration has more to do with a spiritual renewal. The planet takes care of itself, we could say. It has its own healing powers, I think. Humanity, too, has to restore itself through its own inner resources, and these forces of restoration suggest that we renew and restore ourselves through the use of our mind. There’s that wonderful statement in the Bible by St. Paul, “Be ye therefore transformed by the renewing of your minds.” The mind is our means for rebuilding our lives, our consciousness. It’s our means of redeeming ourselves from even the most dreadful past. That’s the real, I think, underlying significance of these forces.
Robert: There are several meanings to restoration, aren’t there?
Dale: Well, there are different things that have to be restored. The Ageless Wisdom teachings talk a lot about restoration of what they call the “Mysteries,” and this is another of the things that will be restored in the near future and in the longer future, you might say. This essentially has to do with the mystery of the energies and forces that make up the world and trying to understand how these energies and forces can be manipulated to work to our advantage, through the use of mantric sound and so forth. This is a vast science that will come up in the future. These are part of the mystery traditions that were known in the past, but were lost, and now they have to be recovered. But it depends a great deal on our ability to use these energies correctly and judiciously and safely.
Sarah: Yes, again, it touches on our sense—in our religion and in our mythology—that there was something that we lost. There’s reference to this that pervades world mythology, the “lost chord,” “the lost knowledge.” There was a wisdom that humanity once had that for various reasons was lost while humanity followed the long path away from the Father’s home, like the prodigal son. But it’s said that there are three major repositories of this mystery teaching. One is masonry, another is religion, and the third is esotericism, or the more hidden subjective spiritual teaching that underlies the major religions of the world. So, the knowledge is there, sort of preserved in aspic, as I understand it, and it’s up to us to seek it out through our own research and study and pondering.
Dale: And it’s been kept from us for good reason, as I was mentioning, because we’re not ready to handle these energies and forces yet safely. We’re still too selfish and prone to greed and because these are rather powerful forces and they’re not meant to be tampered with unless you know what you’re doing, unless you have the right sense of balance and knowledge of the heart and all of that within yourself.
Sarah: That reminds me of that story of Robert Oppenheimer, who was one of the major developers of the atomic bomb. When they completed their work and realized what they had created, he quoted that passage from the Bhagavad Gita which I cannot quote now, but he realized he had really unleashed a tremendous force.
Dale: That was when they set off the first bomb, he said that, yes.
Sarah: That’s in a sense what you’re implying, isn’t it? That there’s tremendous power in these mysteries.
Dale: I think scientists realized that from the very beginning, and that’s why some of them were even reluctant to make a bomb because I think Einstein was kind of reluctant to make the bomb because he realized we’re tampering with a tremendous force here and we have to use it correctly or otherwise we can destroy the world.
Sarah: In fact, Alice Bailey wrote that the true mysteries would reveal themselves through science and that’s obviously what has been happening. Science, like religion, contains great spiritual truth, and I think today they’re coming from opposite parts of the spectrum, but meeting more and more in the convergence.
Dale: Right. And just to pick up on that a little bit, a couple of things that she mentioned in her books about the future use of sound, for example; it will be used in levitation, to levitate heavy weights, heavy blocks, used in building, perhaps. Some people think that’s how they built the pyramids, by the use of mantric sounds. Also, there’s an interesting little tidbit I read in one of the books, that the same mantric sound will be used to fight fires in the future because fire is a substance that can be controlled by sound. So, you’ll think about that for a while.
Robert: That’s really thought-provoking. I so enjoy the prayer at the end of the show called the Great Invocation, and restoration is a key feature of the Great Invocation, isn’t it?
Sarah: Yes, it is. The final stanza, “Let Light and Love and Power restore the Plan on earth,” refers to this very power of restoration. Again, it implies that something perfect and precious and beautiful lies in our past and can be reclaimed, re-realized by humanity. To me that’s very full of comfort and promise. It’s also a challenge that we have our work to do. It will require the changing of human minds and hearts so that we live more unselfishly, so that we share and learn to establish right human relations. We have to demonstrate on Earth in the way we treat each other and the way we relate to the other kingdoms on our planet that we do understand God’s intention for us, which is to live with love and light.
Dale: And that’s why it’s embodied right in those words of the Great Invocation that Light and Love and Power restore the Plan on Earth.
Sarah: And that is what will seal the door where evil dwells, another line from the Great Invocation. The evil of human separatism, the belief that we are separate beings that exist apart from and independent from other human beings is behind all the great problems of the world. We don’t realize our oneness, and that’s what real evil is.
Robert: 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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