Restoration touches on this sense that something more perfect, something finer, is in our past and needs to be restored, re-manifested on Earth.
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. All the dialogue that you’ll hear on this show emanates or is influenced by the works of Alice Bailey, as is 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. This is a continuation of another show that we did, but what more can we say about restoration?
Sarah: Well, restoration, just to define the term, means to bring back or to return to its original state. And in the idea of restoration, I think we have the expression of a sense in a lot of human beings that humanity has, well, in one way, fallen from grace or descended from a higher state into a lower, by coming into the world. There is that sense or that recognition expressed in a lot of the world’s cultures, and I think restoration touches on this sense that something more perfect, something finer, is in our past and needs to be restored, re-manifested on Earth. And that’s very much in line with the Ageless Wisdom which touches on ancient civilizations that apparently were of a much higher grade than our present modern world, but which disappeared through humanity’s own selfishness and lack of vision and overly emotional unintelligent way of living, and we’re in the process now of restoring those institutions and that knowledge which had been given to early man, this time earning it on our own merits through our own minds. I think we’ve said before that the word man itself means: one who thinks. Man is from the Sanskrit word manas, which means literally: a thinking entity or one who thinks. So, the restoration of the world, as is implied in that opening thought from Alice Bailey, is that it’s up to human intelligence and human minds to rejuvenate and rebuild the outer world and its forms along more correct and spiritual lines.
Dale: Yes, and the energy that we talked about last time—about the energies that are now available during this Easter festival season—are as they’re called in the Ageless Wisdom teachings, the “forces of restoration,” the energy that actually works upon the human mind, the creative mind, and enlivens it and makes it more creative. So, it does help stimulate this tendency to restoration.
Sarah: By creative, you don’t mean necessarily producing artistic or cultural creations, but all kinds of form building, right?
Dale: Right, yes. I think the whole idea of restoration is not a new thing to us. It’s been very prevalent in our psyche for thousands of years. You’ll recall the 23rd Psalm where it says, “He restoreth my soul, he leadeth me into the paths of righteousness.” So, it’s been in human consciousness for thousands and thousands of years and it’s very natural to us. I mean, we restore furniture and we restore houses and old paintings and we restore the environment, the land and the water and the rivers and the air. We restore anything which we see still has some value to it.
Sarah: In terms of the books of Alice Bailey, I think restoration was especially applicable at the time that her writing work was finishing, which was after World War II, when human psychological health was probably at its lowest point in generations. People were really worn out, wrung out, devastated spiritually and mentally as well as physically by the war. And this force of restoration was what was directed into humanity from more spiritual levels of life, as I understand it, to enable human beings to rebuild the world and to rebuild their own psyche, and it did happen. It did take time, and yet I think the process isn’t over because if you look at today and the relationships between nations, we are still living with the effects of the world war and the decisions that were made at that time. So, we’re still in this process.
Dale: It’s a process of restoration that we have to lift up and focus on other planes of our being, particularly on the astral plane, on our emotional nature, because that’s where there needs to be a lot of restoration too. We have to take these same skills of restoring an old painting; but there’s a need to restore the self so that it better reflects the higher spiritual qualities of intelligence and wisdom and selfless love of the soul. That’s the original source, the original archetype, which we’re trying to rebuild into the world.
Sarah: It gives such a creative view of life and human potential, which I find really encouraging: that we have the power via our minds to restore and revitalize our outer lives. If you think of people who might be stuck in what they feel are dead end jobs or in family situations that seem perhaps unredeemable or who haven’t gotten what they expected out of life, it can enable us, if we’re in any of those states, to realize that our lives can be restored and turned around by our own transformation of our minds and our own creative living. The books of Alice Bailey write often of creative living, and that doesn’t mean just painting a painting or writing a song or a poem. It means taking your circumstances and your relationships and rebuilding them, redirecting them through your own decisions and your own modification of the way you react and the kinds of values and choices you make. All of this is about restoration. You don’t just pick up and leave whatever situation you’re in, you redeem it, you rebuild it, because whatever little environment or circumstance we have, that’s our little garden to till and hoe. We can’t just run off from it; our restoration starts right where we are.
Dale: And related to that is what I was kind of hinting at before, the restoration of the emotional nature, which is part of that daily life that you just mentioned. We have to wipe away all the tarnish and the grime and strip it away from our emotional nature so that this emotional body becomes more of a translucent thing that will reflect the brilliant light of the soul more and more radiantly.
Sarah: There’s a lot that’s habitual, isn’t there, in emotional reactions where it’s just kind of a knee-jerk, lifelong habit that can be broken with awareness, with monitoring, with self-awareness.
Robert: Does restoration play a part in death also?
Sarah: Yes, it does. That might come as kind of a surprise, but it really shouldn’t. Doesn’t the Bible refer to ashes to ashes, dust to dust, which sort of implies a process of return and restoration? Yes, death is a restorative process. It’s the process of restoring the substance that makes up the form of a human body, an animal, a plant, a planet, or whatever, to the great reservoir of essential unmodified substance, you could say, that is the universe. And death is the ebb and flow of life, the ebbing of life. Life being born would be the flow, right? The ebb tide is the release from the form and the return to universal substance. I suppose the fear that’s associated with death comes from the excessive attachment to forms.
Dale: Right. That’s inevitable given our present focus of consciousness in the world. But yes, it is like you say and not only does the physical substance return to its great reservoir, but the soul also returns and is restored to its original source as well, back to the soul on its own plane, as it is called sometimes in esoteric literature. So, there is a restoration that takes place on the inner planes too.
Sarah: I think if we really understood the restoration of the soul to some higher state, we would have the key to this ongoing debate over Buddhism versus, say, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, whether the Buddhists believe in the permanence of the soul or not. A lot of that debate has to do with a different perception of the soul, but that’s another program altogether. While you were talking about the restoring of the form or the body to another state, it reminded me of a very old lady I heard interviewed once. She was over a hundred. Just the day before she was interviewed, she had lost her daughter, her only daughter, through sudden death, a heart attack, I think. The daughter was about seventy-five. The mother, who was over a hundred, said she realized that she had to give her daughter back to God in the same spirit of love with which she had welcomed her when she was born. I was so touched by that because that’s how we have to let go of someone that we love. They are returning to some place from which they came into our lives, but we don’t possess them forever. If we could view their passing out of incarnation as a process of restoration, especially at this time as we deal with the death of so many innocent people in the war in Iraq, maybe we would understand that the death of the body is not the end of life. It’s a transformation or a transfer to another plane of life. The great illusion is that life only takes place on the outer plane of earthly living, and when that outer plane gives up the life of the body, we think the indwelling entity has vanished.
Dale: Yes. Death is not the worst thing that can happen to a person. I think the worst thing is probably losing your soul or the soul losing touch with its source and becoming so embedded in and ingrained into the material world that it doesn’t escape. And that’s probably worse than death to the soul because there’s never any release. It’s constantly forever bound by this physical existence. But for the average good person, then death happens over and over again and there is that release and the return and the restoration process continues.
Robert: Livingness is a word that Alice Bailey sometimes used. Does it apply to restoration?
Sarah: It does. It’s one of those curious words that appear in her books and I think a lot of people puzzle over it. Livingness, what on earth did she mean? At one point, the definition or a simile is given with vibration. Livingness is similar to vibration. It, I think, touches upon the inner spiritual vitality or life that dwells within any form, whether we’re talking about a human being or an animal, a plant, a planet, an institution, or whatever. Everything that has a form including ideas—ideas are forms—has an inner spiritual life within it and livingness is the restoration of that life aspect within that idea or that institution or that group or that nation or that person into outer display and manifestation.
Dale: It’s one of those words that’s rather hard to describe, because it does have to do with the life aspect. It’s related to the Christ’s statement: “I bring you life more abundantly.” It’s not life in the sense of, “this is the good life,” or “I’m going to live it up,” like life’s going to be one continuous party. It’s not that exuberant kind of emotional sense of life. It comes from a much higher source and has to do with pure life itself and bringing more of that, allowing more of that vitality into one’s daily life.
Sarah: Isn’t this what lies behind the whole story in the New Testament of Christ’s ascension from the tomb. He was crucified and buried in a tomb and a huge stone was rolled in front of the tomb but after three days the stone had been rolled away and he had vanished. He returned to life and appeared on the road to Emmaus walking with the disciples who didn’t recognize him and he said to them later, “I was among you and you knew me not.” I think this touches on restoration too, that we think life only applies to the person dwelling within the body. And what he tried to demonstrate by his presence on earth and his death was that life far succeeds or passes the life of the body, but that it is also our duty—those of us who live on earth—to redeem it and to make our lives and our institutions full of spiritual vitality. All of this talk about restoration has to do with the outer planes of earth and how we live, making everything that we touch and create more expressive of spiritual value, wouldn’t you say?
Dale: Right. It’s the restoration that’s embodied in the words of the Great Invocation to restore the Plan on Earth: “Let light and love and power restore the Plan on Earth.”
Sarah: On the outer planes.
Dale: And it’s that Plan that humanity is responsible for restoring, to bring back to a pristine time when humanity was less prone towards the path of evil. Somehow along the way we got off track and now it is the time for humanity to use the creative awakening powers of the mind to bring it back and put it back on track.
Sarah: It’s not just something that would be nice to happen to humanity, it’s actually humanity’s responsibility, because another stanza of the Great Invocation says: “From the center which we call the human race, let the plan of love and light work out.” It has to work out from the center which we call the human race. And in our cooperation with and manifesting of the Plan of God on earth—through human institutions and through the way that humanity relates to the other kingdoms of earth, the animal, vegetable and mineral— in that way the Plan is restored on earth. It is really up to us. That I think, is a pretty staggering and sobering thought: that so much depends on human recognition of the Plan of God and our ability to change the way we live so that we actually cooperate with that Plan.
Dale: Absolutely, and it all hinges on that contact again with the soul because that is the creative agent in the Plan.
Sarah: The three spiritual festivals that we’re observing now in the spring of the year, beginning with Easter, followed by the great Buddhist festival of Wesak and the third festival of Goodwill, all have to do with what’s called in the books of Alice Bailey, the “new materialism,” which I love, the idea of restoring the outer institutions of Earth into a spiritual radiance. That’s the new materialism.
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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