Goodwill is the touchstone that will transform the world.
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 theme for today is “World Goodwill.” The Lucis Trust organization has a World Goodwill newsletter, and we’ll be speaking about that today and some of the topics within it. I think that you’ll find it as exciting as I do. There are so many good topics such as freedom from fear—something that we would all like to experience. But world goodwill: I think that’s the first step toward a wonderful world, one that we all maybe fantasize about and that is genuinely in our hearts, generating the feeling of goodness and goodwill towards our fellow man. I like this thought from Alice Bailey—Alice Bailey is the founder of the Lucis Trust organization which sponsors this show Inner Sight. She wrote twenty-four volumes of literature and all of the dialogue on this show emanates from her books—and I quote, “Goodwill is the touchstone that will transform the world.” I think we’d like to explore that further and I’d like to ask both Sarah and Dale, what is goodwill? I gave kind of a superficial definition of it; let’s go into more depth.
Sarah: Goodwill is one of those words that we hear so much today and yet I think for a lot of people it has a rather passive, feel-good aspect to it, but perhaps may not strike people as something really dynamic and mobilizing, but in fact goodwill is a dynamic spiritual energy that, as Alice Bailey said, can transform the world. The organization called World Goodwill was formed in 1932 by Alice and Foster Bailey to give a platform to the work of people of goodwill and to show the public how widespread the men and women of goodwill are throughout the world; how active they are in their service to humanity. So, what we try to do through World Goodwill is to highlight the work of these countless, perhaps at this point, millions of men and women of goodwill who are actively engaged in working for a better world. The media gives us a lot of news about what’s wrong in the world, and they have to do that, that’s part of their responsibility, but at the same time it’s important to know that there are a lot of people, a lot of groups working with the energy of goodwill to bring about lasting change.
Dale: Right. And goodwill, as you said, has maybe seemed like kind of a passive energy or a passive idea but it’s really a dynamic idea. It’s really working with the energy of love. It’s said in the writings of Alice Bailey that an actual expression of goodwill is the first indication that humanity is beginning to express the divine Love of God. The energy of genuine goodwill is the first expression of what humans are really capable of at the moment.
Sarah: And I think it helps to point out examples to people so they get a sense of what we mean by goodwill, which can express through groups and through nations as well as individuals. One example: do you remember the earthquake in western Turkey last year?
Robert: Oh, certainly. It was tragic.
Sarah: Yes, many thousands of people died. Well, Greece, which is a long-time enemy of Turkey—as I think most of us know, they’ve been at odds with each other for decades now— as soon as Greece was made aware of the earthquake, they sent teams of people to help in the Turkish towns and villages and it was an extraordinary, spontaneous, unpremeditated response to real need. That’s an example of goodwill that can cross ordinarily separated divisions between people and groups. There are probably lots of other examples that we could think of that are not just from past history, but in current life where under extraordinary circumstances people will respond with genuine love. The basis of goodwill is love.
Robert: This reminds me of something I read once and I think it’s very pertinent to this and that is that if we’re going to change the world, it has to start with us. Both of you have used the word genuine and I think what you’re saying, too, is that it has to come from the heart. That we can actually look, not only at a friend or someone close or a loved one, but even a stranger and genuinely from our heart say, I wish him well and to really mean it. Is that true?
Sarah: Yes, it has to be a natural response. It can’t be forced or labored and still retain its energy. That’s why sometimes crises or disasters bring forth an expression of goodwill that might not otherwise be there.
Dale: Yes, it’s an expression of the heart, an awakening of the heart center and the love that flows through the heart, particularly when it comes as a spontaneous reaction. Then you know it’s genuine, it’s not planned, it’s not calculated—that I’m going to get rewarded if I do this and save this situation—but it comes as a genuine act of love. I suppose the most recent one, you might say, is from the September 11th experience here in New York. There was genuine goodwill and an outpouring of goodwill and love in the aftermath of that terrible tragedy.
Sarah: What World Goodwill has done for the last seventy years is, through its newsletter, which is quarterly, and through occasional special papers that we call commentaries and through the distribution of literature— all of which is offered at no charge because the work of World Goodwill is funded entirely by voluntary donations because we don’t have any endowment—has worked to highlight the efforts of people of goodwill to make people aware that goodwill is an energy that can bring about change. That goodwill is in fact, the only energy that can really bring lasting, constructive change. I think that’s something that the world is beginning to wake up to. You can have treaties and call truces and so on, but if there isn’t real goodwill, it isn’t lasting. And so, we’ve worked very closely with the United Nations Department of Public Information over the years to help publicize the work of the United Nations and its agencies—that’s one of the main objectives of World Goodwill. And we offer study courses on the problems of humanity with the idea of identifying the underlying causes behind the major problems; for example, The Problem of the Minorities, The Problem of the Children of the World, The Problem of the Religions. We try to help people identify the subjective underlying factors behind the outer problems.
Dale: And we might make the connection here too that World Goodwill is actually an activity of Lucis Trust. It’s just one of the activities that we’re engaged in. The Lucis Trust is kind of the overall umbrella for a number of activities and World Goodwill is one of them.
Sarah: It’s our work that’s most oriented toward world affairs, you could say, toward current world problems.
Dale: Our outreach kind of program.
Robert: The newsletter is wonderful, with so many interesting topics. One of the topics that I especially enjoyed was freedom from fear. We need a particular frame of consciousness to experience freedom from fear with all that’s going on around us, all the circumstances that might be negative. Can you, in line with the newsletter or the theme of freedom, tell us more about the Lucis Trust’s concept of freedom?
Sarah: Well, freedom is generally thought of as the liberty or license to permit a particular action or type of behavior and it releases you to do something that otherwise might be curtailed. I think that’s how the traditional viewpoint of freedom would be thought of: as personal liberty. And goodness knows the American psyche prizes freedom above all other values, I think; it’s a national value that’s deeply held and rightly so. But the spiritual component of freedom is something quite different. In the writings of Alice Bailey, which are brought out somewhat in the newsletter for World Goodwill, the view of freedom is linked to the ability to renounce or to sacrifice or to give up. That might seem odd, but in fact if you think about it, only when people learn to share what they have—whether we’re speaking of wealth, knowledge, experience, or material abundance—only when people learn to share and to give up their claim on a whole lot of anything so that others may have some—only then can we really think about having a society that expresses freedom in a way that doesn’t benefit some at the expense of others. Freedom is closely tied in with this ability to share and to renounce for the personal self. That’s a spiritual component of freedom.
Dale: Another thing that was written in the Bailey books was, freedom is really a state of mind. You have to really think about that and put your mind around that. It’s a state of mind. It’s a way of thinking and it’s not necessarily a condition of our beingness.
Sarah: There’s that wonderful book which comes to mind, and usually, as is the case, my mind goes blank. It was written by a psychologist who spent a lot of time in a concentration camp during World War II and who wrote about the freedom that he attained while he was imprisoned in this concentration camp; he died a couple of years ago. It’s a classic text. But you’re right, he found only in the most limited circumstances what real freedom is. [The book is Man’s Search for Meaning.]
Dale: Yes, because even in a prison situation where one can still have the freedom to think and to imagine and use your higher spiritual faculties, that’s where the true freedom really begins to be known.
Sarah: Freedom to think: That has nothing to do with outer walls or whatever.
Dale: You can transcend the walls actually if you sit quietly in your cell and use your mind to transcend.
Robert: You’re saying then that even in the freest nation in the world, that really the manacles of the mind, so to speak, are the ones that really imprison us. You can live in the freest country in the world, but if you place certain restrictions and certain limitations on yourself, if you have a self-image maybe that’s not so good, that restricts you from reaching your highest potential—that those are the true restrictions and handcuffs that we place on our own being.
Sarah: Well, they’re usually the hardest to identify. I don’t think most of us could identify where we are really restricted, where we really don’t have freedom to think. We don’t know how we are conditioned by our group, by our ideological viewpoint that we started imbibing at our parents’ knees and through our school system, through our culture. We don’t know where we are really constricted, do we? So that’s why it’s so hard to think freely and to get beyond those borders.
Robert: There’s a difference between freedom from things and freedom to things. How is that clarified in the works of Alice Bailey?
Sarah: Well, perhaps it’s related to the Four Freedoms that Franklin Delano Roosevelt posited in the 1940s, which are mentioned in her books. He said that every human being has the need for four essential freedoms: freedom of speech and expression, freedom of worship and then freedom from want and freedom from fear. There’s the liberty to attain, to achieve, that we all experience. There’s also the need to be safe from certain things happening. Both of them are a kind of security, I suppose. Freedom and security are very closely interlinked.
Dale: And I think as far as individuals are concerned, to be free from one’s own glamours is very important to consider too.
Sarah: What do you mean by glamours, Dale?
Dale: Well, all the hang-ups that we have, the illusions that we carry around with us. Most of us wouldn’t admit that we have any illusions but they’re distorted ways of looking at the world or distorted ways of thinking.
Sarah: Most people probably think they see the world exactly as it is.
Dale: Well, I think that’s part of the problem, that our perception is not always accurate. We carry around these misperceptions and misunderstandings that actually are a block on our freedom and they turn into what we call glamours. They’re referred to in the Bailey writings as glamours and illusions and to be free from those is not an easy thing but takes careful looking at oneself and being very honest with oneself.
Sarah: I was thinking about that very point—how would you know if your thinking is really liberated or whether it’s constricted—and it occurred to me that as we cultivate certain values, maybe we free up our thinking. One would be the cultivation of a real, genuine goodwill towards other people. In other words, when you form a judgment or an opinion— you read the newspaper, you listen to the news and you react with an opinion. We all do it. Is it biased toward any particular groups within humanity or is it expressing a real goodwill toward the fundamental nature of human beings, even as you look at wrong and even evil deeds? So, goodwill would be one liberating factor. Another would be a positive viewpoint of life. Believing that life is basically good and that human beings are good, rather than this very dark view of life that concludes the world is a scary, frightful and unfair place. And a third that struck me would be the cultivation of inclusiveness, the ability to think in terms of humanity as a whole and to feel a connection with groups and people who might be very different from oneself, to not see them as alien.
Dale: And what you’re describing seems to be the presence of the soul, the human soul, beginning to make more of an impact on the person.
Sarah: And the soul is what liberates the thinking.
Dale: Yes, it’s the directing element that directs us towards a higher sense of values, and freedom really comes when that soul begins to make an impact and begins to influence our lives, influences the way you think, influences the way you act and the way you speak. I think when the soul is present you can feel it in yourself; you begin to change your pattern of thinking.
Sarah: But most of us probably think of freedom as personal liberty, the free permissive expression of the separated self. “Don’t fence me in” is the cry of the personality. Let me do what I want when I want and don’t get in my way, buster. (laughter)
Robert: Isn’t the concept of harmlessness tied in with the soul and also goodwill in a sense, because since reading the Lucis Trust material I have become obsessed with the theme of harmlessness. Of course, Alice Bailey generates this idea that that’s the way we create a better world. So, everything I do now, will this harm other people is my question. But aren’t those three intertwined: harmlessness, the soul and goodwill?
Sarah: Yes—the soul on its own level, which all of us belong to, you could say. We are all souls in some stage or another of expressing our highest, best self. That highest, best self is innately harmless because it is one with all souls. There is no “my soul” and “your soul.” It’s simply “the soul” that unites us all, so how could it be harmful? And goodwill is the early stages, as you put it, of this fundamental love that unites people.
Dale: Yeah, I’m just trying to present a bigger picture here and if you think back, the idea of freedom, for example, is relatively new in human history. It’s only been two or three hundred years, let’s say, since the Enlightenment. The French Revolution and the American Revolution were definite expressions of the first indications of freedom and the desire for freedom in human life. Then the World Wars I and II and of course FDR’s great proclamations of freedom and Lincoln’s proclamation freeing the slaves, these are all indications of this idea. The urge to freedom is coming through in human actions and human ideas, and it’s leading us somewhere towards greater liberation. That’s the ultimate stage down the road: liberation.
Sarah: Yes, I don’t think we know where it’s leading us, but it’s safe to say that we won’t understand it until we really keep in mind that it’s a value and aspiration that is shared by every human being. You cannot think in terms of your own need for freedom, your own people’s need for freedom without realizing that everybody has that urge. For example, I don’t see how the conflict in the Middle East can ever be solved until all of the people involved and the rest of the world who stand by and observe realize that all of those souls want freedom. They all want the freedom for their children to grow up in peace and with a better life. When we begin to see this about our fellow men—even when we disagree with them, we know they have those same values—maybe then we can find some common ground. It’s a start. The other alternative of villainizing people hasn’t worked.
Dale: The common ground is the human soul. That’s where we all come together and that sense of oneness has begun to be realized.
Robert: That’s about all the time we have for our discussion today. You have 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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