We tend to think that law is imposed by society or by the police or by the court system or by the legislature of our nation. And these are all law-making, law imposing bodies but gradually I think we learn as human beings that the strongest law of all is imposed from within ourselves.
Robert: Welcome to Inner Sight. 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 spiritual law-part 2. We were speaking last week about how there are spiritual laws in this universe; I like to think they were set in motion by God. We were speaking about how so many of us — especially, I guess, in times gone by — were looking upon the only laws that were relevant, laws that were man- made, that were maybe a consequence of things and actions that we could see, touch and feel. But as Sarah said last week, take a look at the law of gravity for example. If you don’t believe in it because it’s not tangible, try to defy it and demonstrate your belief and you’ll certainly discover that the law of gravity indeed does exist. Well, we feel that there are very profound spiritual laws that are just as valid, perhaps more valid, than any laws that we respect on this earth that are visible. “In the recognition of these four laws, — of Rebirth, of Love, of the group, and of the Land, — we shall see the salvation of the human race.” That’s a quote from the founder of Lucis Trust, Alice Bailey, and she speaks about four very major laws that are written about in her literature. Alice Bailey, by the way, is the author of twenty-four volumes of literature, and all of the dialogue that emanates from this show Inner Sight is a consequence or in some way relates or is tangential to the writings of Alice Bailey. We’re going to continue with this discussion that we had last week on spiritual law, and I’d like to know why it’s so important to educate the general public in these particular laws?
Sarah: To repeat the four laws that Alice Bailey said would bring about the salvation of the human race, they are the Laws of Rebirth, of Love, of the Group, and of the Land. It seems to me that these laws — maybe this is true of all laws, but these laws in particular — we learn to respect in the violation of them first. In other words, by ignoring these laws for untold eons, humanity learns gradually that the only happiness, the only salvation is to start obeying them. So, they are very fundamental basic laws that every human being, regardless of place or position on the spiritual path, can begin to grasp. I think that’s the implication of her statement.
Dale: They’re important to the general public, I think, because a realization of the existence of these laws extends human consciousness deeper into the inner planes of life and consciousness and it gives one a deeper and a more broad appreciation of their place in the world. Everybody is subject to these laws and they can’t avoid them so it’s just another way of learning more about ourselves.
Sarah: Most people think of law as something that’s imposed from without, as you said in your opening remarks. We tend to think that law is imposed by society or by the police or by the court system or by the legislature of our nation. And these are all law-making, law imposing bodies but gradually I think we learn as human beings that the strongest law of all is imposed from within ourselves. I think maybe that’s what you are implying, Dale, in your comment: that the soul, the inner being has a sense of law, of justice, of right and wrong, that it spends eons trying to impress upon its outer instrument via the mind. The soul, as I understand it, is the source of all of these Laws — of Rebirth, of Love, of the Group. It causes the instrument through which it incarnates, the personality, to suffer by the violation of the laws, and gradually learn and correct itself.
Dale: Yes, and if we realize these laws emanate from inside ourselves, then it’s easier to accept them, I think. If a law is imposed from outside by some higher authority, then there is a tendency to rebel against it, but once you realize that they are operating through you and the source of these laws is divine, then there is more of an acceptance and the willingness to work with them rather than oppose them.
Sarah: And I think this idea that law is imposed from within by the soul is something that parents and perhaps teachers could begin to instill in children from a very young age, because — maybe we talked about this in our last program — but there’s a particular age where children become very conscious of the law. I don’t know if it’s four or six or seven or what, but child psychologists have identified a particular stage in the child’s development when the child becomes really conscious of law and is very quick to point out the injustice and the basic rottenness of life when somebody gets away with something. (laughter) And we’ve all gone through that stage and we can all understand it perfectly. Some of us remain in that stage forever. But children have a natural understanding of law and the need to impose order, so I would think this idea of internal law could be evoked in a child at a very early age maybe starting with the idea of the conscience; that’s the first indicator that we violated the law. Our conscience tells us if we learn to listen to it. We don’t feel at ease with ourselves, we don’t feel completely at peace, or we’re spending a lot of time trying to justify something we did or said and make it right. That tells us that we know, undeniably, that we’ve violated a law.
Robert: What did Alice Bailey mean when she wrote that this Law of Rebirth, when understood, will help rectify problems of sex and marriage?
Sarah: Well, they go together—sex, marriage, and rebirth—because as we’ve discussed in past programs, our closest relationships in life with our marriage partners, with our families, our relationships that have endured over probably countless lifetimes; they’re group relationships that recur as family units, and I suppose as deep friendships too, over many lifetimes. So, an understanding of rebirth and of its power as a law would help us understand why we’re in the relationships we’re in now. What we’re trying to put right as a marriage partner, what we’re supposed to learn, and I think most importantly of all, what we’re supposed to give to that other person. A lot of our suffering comes in our ignorance about how we could give or serve another person.
Dale: I think there’s another aspect and that’s looking at the sexual impulse in terms of energy, because that is also the working out of a law. The sexual impulse is very strong and usually in our earlier years, in our teenage years especially, that’s when the energies are flowing most dynamically. It’s a matter of bringing this impulse under control, where the mind and the mental body begins to exert a control over these very strong impulses. Then we’re actually applying the law to this energy, and if we can lift it up and redirect it, then that’s also applying the Law of Redirection.
Sarah: There’s another aspect to the Law of Rebirth: it’s the familiar saying that, “whatever a man soweth that shall he also reap,” or in the more popular saying, “what goes around comes around.” We have a sense that we receive in return what we have given out, and that lies behind or at the foundation of the Law of Rebirth. We are re-experiencing what we have set in motion in past incarnations. When you apply that to sex and marriage, you can begin to see how it should — if you understand the law — modify your behavior, modify your relationships, make them less selfish, have less of a tendency to use people for your own happiness. So many otherwise good and fairly decent people basically use others or approach them as objects that can satisfy their own happiness and their own welfare, rather than thinking of how they can serve those people.
Dale: Yes. And the point you brought up a minute ago about the Law of Rebirth or Reincarnation being a recovery of old relationships. This is, I think, a very important aspect to bring out here, because so often our lifetimes are just that: they’re opportunities for paying back old debts from previous existences, or they may be a chance to make a restitution and make progress in some way. We often come back and meet up again with the same family members or the same people that we worked with in previous existences. So, there is always a recapitulation that’s going on. I should say also, we meet old friends, but we also meet old enemies. Sometimes we come back and we have to patch up these old relationships that went bad in previous lifetimes. It’s a balancing out process and we have to create a balance and yet it isn’t a punishment. You shouldn’t see it as punishment. It’s as we’ve said once before on these programs about rebirth, a matter of bringing back into balance certain energies and forces that have gotten out of balance.
Sarah: Yeah, I think if you approach reincarnation, rebirth, as the process of perfection rather than as a process of punishment, it takes on a very positive implication for life. Nothing that we have done that was wrong or incomplete is ever left in that state. We always have a chance later to redeem it, to make it right, to bring it to a completion, to lift it up. I find this expresses the goodness of the laws of the universe. We always get another chance. We always have an opportunity to do better.
Dale: Yes. The word opportunity is interesting because in the writings of Alice Bailey, one of the other names given to the Law of Rebirth is the Law of Opportunity. That’s a unique way of seeing each lifetime as an opportunity to improve yourself in your position, improve and work towards this perfection. And I was also thinking how this information and knowledge of past experiences would help psychologists. If they could approach the problems that they have with their patients from the standpoint of perhaps these problems have recurred in previous existences. Then it may help them to explain and to know how to correct and bring back into balance these problems that seem to crop up in one’s lifetime.
Sarah: Well, apparently, whether or not psychologists accept the idea of rebirth, apparently large numbers of human beings do. I think it’s interesting that the writings of Alice Bailey said that the Law of Rebirth would be one of the laws that should be impressed on the public consciousness. People who have done research and taken polls of people have found that the vast majority of them do believe in some kind of rebirth. On some level they believe that there is a return and a picking up of the thread from lifetime to lifetime. So, it is very much a law that the public consciousness is ready for.
Dale: Yes, and many people, more and more people I think, are remembering incidences from these past experiences, probably more people than want to admit it. They may think they’re kind of weird if they do, but these remembrances are real because they’re brought into the next life.
Sarah: Except that there is also the kind of humorous tendency of people to believe that they were Cleopatra or Napoleon or whatever when most of us were carrying bricks and sweeping floors. (laughter)
Robert: And galley slaves and whatnot. (laughter)
Dale: Yeah, all of that.
Sarah: But it is an idea that is in the public consciousness.
Robert: What is meant by the Law of Group Life? That’s another one of the laws that Alice Bailey writes about.
Sarah: It’s very closely related to the other law, the Law of Love, in that the Law of Love is essentially love thy neighbor as thyself, and the Law of Group Life is the recognition that no one lives on this Earth alone. We are not little universes unto ourselves. We live in relationship to the whole of humanity. If we can’t stretch our minds that far, we can at least imagine that we live in relationship to our family, our co-workers in our workplace, our community, our town, our neighborhood, whatever limits encompass one’s idea of one’s group. Everyone has some kind of a group, and the Law of Group Life is the realization that we live in relationship to others and therefore adjust our behavior, our speech, our thoughts, our responses, to the fact that others are affected by what we say and do and think.
Dale: Yes, and as you said, we’re affected by what others think and do and say and I think that’s another way of looking at this idea of the group, because when we hear the term group, we usually think of some physical, tangible group — you’re a member of some society or a group of workers or a family group, and it’s usually in terms of some physical group. But there is another way to identify ones sense of groups, and that is by patterns of thought, just by the way we think. We have relationships with people through our ideals, through certain ideas that are common to a group of people, we have advocacy groups and protest groups that form a relationship. So, that’s another way. I think more and more we’re already working this way and expressing ourselves this way through the group that is more dispersed. It’s not a family group or a working group, but where we identify with a group of people who think like us. It’s moving the identity and the relationship up to a higher plane.
Sarah: I think this idea of a more subjective basis to group relationships is taking hold in the public consciousness because we have a very common tendency to speak of networking, of wanting to establish links with a lot of people who may not be personal friends or acquaintances, but there’s a sense that you have something in common with them, some common interest, and the Internet is based on that sense of network; literally a lighted network. There are groups created on the network that meet together in chat rooms and so on to help each other solve problems, share information, so that’s a sign that people are taking the stage of group a bit further. There are also ideas of group relationships that are more subjective in the sense of the global nature of today’s world. We realize that, for example, we can’t just think of ourselves as one nation isolated from the rest of the world. This was one of the tremendous lessons of September 11th — that the United States might have become a bit too isolated in its approach to global affairs and it was soundly awakened to the realization that no one is spared from the world’s problems.
Dale: We’re talking today about law and I think this is another instance or another example of how the law is working out because the soul is by its nature group conscious. That’s simply the way it thinks, it’s simply the way it acts, and these impulses from the soul are working their way down into the personal lives. We’re beginning to express ourselves more and more as souls and that’s why the group idea is becoming so accepted. No longer just a collection of individuals, we’re actually coming together at the group level.
Robert: Seems to me that spiritual law is a lot more meaningful than man-made law in a sense, because with man-made law, we get the feeling that if nobody sees us and we don’t get caught, we’ve gotten away with it. But from what I’ve learned about spiritual law, what we’re really saying is that we always get caught in a sense (laughter) because it’s always there and nobody has to watch us commit a crime, it just comes back to haunt us. Is anyone above the law?
Sarah: No, I don’t think so. There are some who behave and act as if they are above the law and they might be for a certain amount of time. Despots and dictators behave as if they are above the law, but eventually it catches up with them. I think that’s because we are all a part of humanity and no matter how we might try to convince ourselves we’re an island within the sea of the human universe, we are connected and we do have to subject ourselves to the laws that govern the whole human race. This is something that is becoming more and more applicable because there’s more information circulating. People can’t get away with what they used to get away with. Things can’t be done in secret anymore. That passage from the Bible, that everything shall be shouted from the housetops — that’s certainly a phenomenon today.
Dale: Yes, people may think they’re going to be getting away with something, but the laws of God are right there and always the big eye of God is looking at you, so you can’t get away from it.
Sarah: And there is that sense in the Bible that you can’t get away from the laws of the land. That statement, “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and unto God the things that are God’s.” I think that was Christ saying that you have to obey the laws of the land, and you have to obey spiritual laws. Both need our attention and there needs to be a fine balance between the two. If you don’t agree with the laws of the land, you have to work to change those laws, but you can’t simply ignore them and evade them. That’s what that means to me.
Robert: Well, that’s about all the time we have for our discussion today. You’ve been listening to Inner Sight. Now we’d 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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