In the most important field of religion for instance the combination of spiritual indolence in the majority and ambitious intellectuality in the few, especially the leaders, has spawned a dogmatism and religious fanaticism that is tearing the human race apart today. Where the accumulated knowledge of God should lead the human spirits to a higher, purer and more unified goal we find only dissent, distrust, disharmony and disaster. The high expectation from religion has only resulted in fanatic extremes that deny reason and encourage deprivation of individual freedom of choice in spiritual movement.
Purification is therefore inevitable because the Love of the Almighty Creator demands Justice. Love and Justice are inseparable, contrary to our concept of Divine Love as ever tolerant and weak, and both require that we now account for the use of the time allotted to us for our development. The Light of God now flowing into Creation, brought by the Envoy of God, brings purification and judgement. For the human spirit who can still be saved, a completely new orientation is needed which cannot be achieved by building on the existing structures. The existing foundation rooted in the shifting sand of earthly human intellect is too flimsy to offer any support to the Light and Power that is surging into Subsequent Creation at this time. The power of the Light of God awakens everything to new life, new consciousness.
The old system led by human will as directed by his intellect cannot be adapted to the new direction led by the awakened spirit. We have to drop all the old concepts and attitudes if we are to advance in the new direction indicated. New wine, as the Lord Jesus once said, must be put into a new wineskin3 to avoid the destruction of the vessel and wastage of the wine. The new knowledge of God in Creation is for the awakened spirit and it is impossible to experience God without a complete change.
For the individual who may overcome, the proper balance must now be re-established, the spirit leading and the intellect following. Our primary goal must be reordered and we must open ourselves to the Truth if we are to gain the much-needed freedom in the very limited time now available. This must of course start with a reawakening of the individual indolent human spirit in order, ultimately, to effect a change in the whole. This is why the Messages of the Lord have always been directed to the individual human spirits, as first from Christ and now in our own time from Abd-ru-shin.
The concept of religious brotherhood and communalism is essentially doctrinal and does not strictly accord with the Lord’s Messages. As far as spiritual goals are concerned we are entirely on our own, neither inheriting from our ancestors nor transferring to our offspring our virtues or sins. Nor are we connected with others even those of the same congregation or belief except for shared experiences that may bind, uplift or cast us down. Although we may learn and benefit from the experiences of others, especially those we love, we cannot blame our failures on them. Indeed, as the Lord Jesus pointed out, a major obstacle in our path to Truth may come from those we believe we owe allegiance to, for a man’s worst enemies may be members of his own family.3 The Grail Message emphatically tells us that the Truth does not link us with any other human spirits but if held in purity connects us only to steps of God’s Throne.
This does not imply that we do not owe one another Love and support. Love for all works of the Creator including each other is a measure of our spirituality. God is Love and those who serve Him must serve in Love. This is particularly applicable to those who have similar striving towards God, who show homogeneity in their striving. It is only by such Love for one another that we can be recognized as belonging to the Light, for as the Son of God admonished, it is only by loving one another that men will know that we are His disciples.
As individuals, we must learn again to live like children in the richness of our experiencing, with absolute trust in the Love and Justice of our God. This is another demand of the Son of God from those who wish to belong to him. Childlikeness and loving, undemanding service is the key to a fulfilled Christian life. If you do not become like a little child you cannot enter the Kingdom of God.
The intellectual and the childlike represent incompatible extremes and because most of humanity is dominated by their intellect, we have mostly bound our development to the excellence of intellectuality and thus entirely to Matter. We have lost the ability to truly become childlike and so the path to the Light has become that much more difficult. Conviction, which should have arisen from childlike trust, today must arise only through difficult, often painful experiences. Through experiencing Creation aright, we gain knowledge and knowledge in turn gives rise to conviction. As a last help for our maturity therefore, the knowledge of Creation has been granted in the Love of God and this gift of the Truth, which Christ admonished us to await with alert intuition, calls us to an awakening. We can no longer blindfold ourselves by empty claims of belonging to Jesus, claims that merely express the wish, without making any effort to listen or follow His admonitions. Indeed, many who claim Christianity including some of the religious leaders lack a conception of what Christ demands of His followers.
Those of us who have children and/or have observed children will recognize the quality of this trustful childlikeness, which does not pause to analyze where the next meal will come from, or even its nature and content; Trust that does not worry about what to wear or concern itself with permanent material acquisitions, but which lives simply in the experience of the moment. Dispensing and receiving joy, expressing its gratitude to its Creator as well as to its earthly parents in its joyful activity that we love to watch, and in the sunshine it brings to its home. Irrespective of the wealth or poverty of its own parents, the child remains satisfied and grateful until, in the process of growing up, social discrepancies and other prejudices are pointed out to it by the society as necessities worthy of its attention. No wonder we have been admonished to become as little children, for indeed we are children of Creation and must learn to live and experience Creation in the purity of our intuitive perception.
Unfortunately, the world system reaches out to touch the child even before it is ready for it in the permissive societies of today. The child is no longer permitted to be childlike and the adult no longer understands what childlikeness means. In the more ‘developed’ societies the protective boundaries between the child and the adult has been destroyed and the child, exposed too early to adult thoughts and habits, grows up too quickly into adult tendencies for proper balanced childlikeness. In poorer communities’ material necessities similarly often force the child to grow up too quickly. Innocence is sacrificed on the altar of progress and trust is a mere whisper in the forceful currents of distrust that are constantly sweeping over our troubled souls. Conceit has reached such proportion as to effectively question our need for a Creator. How glibly, pitiful materially bound spirits talk, sometimes with remarkable intellectual wit, about man not needing a Creator! How diligently we search in Matter for the origins of life, which in itself carries the story of its origin and evolution! Yet scientific conceit will not permit us to look inwards and seek the answers that only the alert spirit can find.
Today scientists love to talk about the big bang theory being the origin of all Creation. This concept was first proposed in 1927 and suggests that the universe began with the detonation of a “primordial atom”, as the origin of Creation. Yet when first proposed many scientists vehemently opposed it, perhaps because it assumed a specific moment of creation or because it begs the question of who or what sparked off the big bang and where the primordial atom came from.
If there is no Creator, how can there be a Creation? Could the car, train, computer and so many other amazing technological inventions have arisen following a big or perhaps a smaller bang? I am very sure that the same scientists and technocrats will be extremely wroth if their inventions were credited to mere chance, but no one scruples to discredit the glorious work of God. Is it the scope and magnitude of Creation that makes the concept of a Creator difficult to accept? For us lay persons the magnitude of scientific achievements is also great but we do not thereby deny the ingenuity of the scientists who helped form them.
It is tempting to consider that the opposition of science to the knowledge of God – a knowledge which we all carry as a part of our essence – is rooted in the recognition of the inability of man to ever attain Divine Power, in other words in envious conceit. Whatever the reason,