Thoughtline  February 1995

Sunrise

The sun is rising, driving darkness down.
The sun is rising in the heart of man.

Something is coming. Something is going to happen. It is hanging out there, pending, like a morning sunrise. You can feel it in the air. It has become an ambiance. Like most of you, my week involves participation with groups of people from an walks of life, race, class, occupation. They are all expecting something to happen. I am finding this air of expectancy just about everywhere.

Although many people are rather vague about what the "it" that is coming is, speculation is rife. There are the doom sayers, of course. How would we know we were on planet Earth if we did not have the doom sayers? However, the vast majority of the speculation I hear is that what is coming is something good. So hope is alive.

When events do occur, and we could make a list of 10 or 20 over the past 10 years, spectacular events, like the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the mutation of the Soviet Union, a number of volcanic eruptions and earthquakes, when events like these do occur, they seem to fuel rather than quiet people's expectations. People see these events as harbingers of even greater more awesome or more world shaking events to come.

Speculations I have heard range all the way from the crash of the stock market to the replacement of the system of econon-dc capitalism with a barter system, to the invasion of earth by Saucer people and the winning of the NBA title by the Clippers. One of my favorite doom sayer friends is predicting the total evaporation of the ozone layer and universal skin cancer, which, she claims, is a justly deserved reward for the way we treat the planet.

But everyone agrees that something is coming... When you think about it in a non-time-specific way, something is always coming, and has been for a long, long time. A number of things make the coming hard to see. In the first place, we are talking about periods of time that ah-nost paralyze the imagination. Even the prevailing materialistic view of history deals in ages and centuries, which are in them selves rather large hunks of time. The subjective, non-materialistic, and much more realistic view of the thinkers who down the ages have generated the body of work we call the Ageless Wisdom see history as an evolution of consciousness rather than an evolution of forms. When they speak of time or of the developmental events which occur and kind of generate time, they have a much broader and deeper view in mind. They too speak in terms of ages, ages of Brahma for example. One day and one night of a Brahma's age is equal to 8,640,000,000 of our years. There are 360 of these to 1 year of Brahma, and 100 years of Brahma make one Age of Brahma. (Treatise on Cosmic Fire, P39,40).

The first point here is that very few persons, when evaluating or analyzing a particular event bother to look at the event in the light of even a 10 or 20 year period let alone a one or two hundred year or one or two thousand year period. This restricted, myopic, view of the Great Unfolding, tends to blind us to what is really happening. The second point, which I will deal with later is that events are seen from the superficial perspective of the materialist.

The third point is that within these vast periods of time, there is a cyclical rhythm to the process of the unfolding Plan which is invisible to the short range view of the general population. The unfolding comes like a wave, and the waves come in sets, just like the waves in our oceans. There is a building and falling in the waves of the sets and periods of reaching and receding between the waves.

To the short sighted among us, the falling and receding aspects of this rhythm appear as if the forces of darkness are waxing as the forces of light wane. And it is so, I think, that the forces of retrogression work very hard during these periods of receding light. Thus we have phenomena like The Dark Ages and the rise of fascism and the Nazis. It is during these times we are most vulnerable to the debilitating force of the dark side, for we tend to become discouraged and slip towards despair forgetting or not being conscious of the inevitable return of the fight.

This may all sound rather cosmic and fanciful, but if one wants to get a rational perspective on II occurrences" a long view like this helps. And, just in passing, there is a significant relationship between rhythm and vision. People within whom rhythmic living is established are much more farsighted than are those who, like improperly trimmed candles, gutter and sputter in their rhythmic efforts. It is hard to see by a flickering light

Now, to the second point. The other thing, major thing, that makes the coming hard to see is the materialist's perspective. Nowhere is the shallowness of this view more evident than in people's identification with their physical bodies and the intense focus on themselves and their immediate physical environments. This superficial focus engenders a kind of intellectual myopia.

It is this intense physical plane identification that makes events that have been coming for decades seem so surprising. The apparent explosive or miraculous appearance of an event, like the recent emergence of the true South Africa, is in reality the result of decades, and in some cases, centuries of focused will. What we see as evolution is the implementation of God's Purpose through a carefully thought out unfolding Plan. However,

Imprisoned behind these bones.
Peering through pulpy eyes,
One level living and that the least,
Meat bound man
Cannot see the unfolding Plan.

Seeing the physical plane, seeing events that occur on the physical plane as the effect or result of more subtle forces and energies is not a real common thing. A primary requirement in the development of this kind of vision is self-forgetfulness. For it is with self-forgetfulness that we deepen our view and "gather what we need for the helping of our fellow men."

To do this, to endeavor to see to understand and work with the energies and forces that are causing the physical effects people call events is to be an esotericist. If one does this, or tries to do this, one is different than most of the people with whom one lives and works. This difference does not make one better than or more deserving than one's fellows. Rather it creates a demand on one's self for a higher level, a much higher level of responsibility for one's actions.

So, as esotericists and disciples, we tend to see not only the cyclical continuity which underlies these events, but the events themselves as outer manifestations of inner occurrences. And what I want to do for the remainder of this talk is to point out some occurrences that are sort of off the beaten path, not that spectacular in terms of their explosiveness or headline quality, but which are much more accurate predictors or harbingers of what is really coming. I will conclude, of course with my speculation of what the "it" is that is coming, bottom line.

To start with, it is the esotericist in me that sees the fact that there are so many people who are not esotericists who sense the approach of something coming as a very significant event and in itself evidence of the something that is coming.

What is coming? In the big picture, It is the mental plane.

Humanity is, at long last, very long last, moving on to the mental plane in large enough numbers to be very effective. Humans are meant to be mental beings. We are, after all, "mind born sons of god." If, by the way, you ever ponder on the meaning and significance of the Law of Right Human Relations, you might want to take that into consideration.

To illustrate this point, we could look at a one or two hundred year span of time, but just to make it more manageable, lets start with Women's Suffrage. What we find behind most of the really spectacular social events that have occurred in the past 75 years, is that people are thinking. It is the presence and growing emergence of the ability to think and to see and understand abstractions that account for the major strides we as a race have made in the area of human relations which is the area that concerns our interface with the rest of the system in which we live and move and have our being.

Lets look at some of these giant steps. There are the child labor laws, and the child abuse laws. 20 years ago there were no laws governing child abuse. Then we got some laws but they were unenforceable. It has only been in the past 10 years that we have been able to really start dealing effectively with child abuse. There are the voter rights laws, the Social Security Act, civil rights legislation of all kinds. These are just a few local examples of the effects of this major happening. The rent which was made in the veil separating humans from their minds by the Christ at the time of the Crucifixion is, under the impact of the past two thousand years of effort growing very wide. These advances in right human relations are the results of the light energy pouring through that rent.

The mental plane is beginning to emerge into consciousness on a very large scale. The effects of this cannot be over estimated. As more and more people begin to think instead of feel or emote about their lives and the conditions of living, vast changes in all departments of human living will result. For longer, very much longer than the current myopic version of recorded history mankind has been "afflicted" you could almost say with something called kama-manas. This is a Sanskrit term that translates roughly into desire-mind. What it means is that our mental efforts have been mixed up with our emotional selves and are consequently feeble, inaccurate, confused, clouded, personal and so forth.

For many, many thousands of years, Humanity has been shifting its focus out of its emotional body into its mental body. This has given us access to the higher reaches of the mental plane and a mentally focused apprehension of the plane of no thought or intuition which is called the buddhic plane in the literature of the Ageless Wisdom. Consequently humans are gradually becoming kama-buddhic.

As you might expect, the forces of retrogression are not in favor of this development at all. They depend very much on the obscuration of ideas by emotional matter. They count primarily on emotional forces like fear and hate and anger to generate vast storms of feeling which inhibit clear thinking and cloud the vision. But they also use mushy stuff like sentimentality and pity.

Emotional stuff of any kind, if it gets too heavy, tends to clutter up the thinking processes and get between the light of the mind and the brain. The forces of retrogression, feeding on glamour and illusion, spend most of their energy whipping up anger and frustration. As Djwhal Khul indicates, (The Rays and T1w Initiations, p190-2) "using the voices of lying propaganda, the Word of death and the sound of the densest aspect in manifestation-the sound of the mineral kingdom," they work to block the light and seek to mend the rents.

So, the force that is driving the events of moment:

and many others, is the force of human thinking.

Before it is assumed that I think we are totally out of the woods, let me point out that one of the things one has to do to become an esotericist is to give up wearing rose colored glasses. Esotericists cannot see selectively. They are required to see the whole picture. Everything is not rosy. Anyone who pays attention to the daily news knows that the forces of retrogression are a very real and very serious threat to world harmony and to Humanity's effort to move into the much discussed new age. Thev are extremely active just now, very loud and, if you know what to look for, very visible. (As far as recognizing the agents of these forces, we have been advised to watch out for the "almost white ones.")

An esotericist would look for the cause of this growing cacophony, would wonder about what is behind the generation of all this confusion and noise. I think it is the approaching sunrise. I think that the forces of retrogression feel it too. I think that all of this frenetic activity, which is approaching hysteria in many instances, is indicative of their sensing of the coming sunrise. They sense it, and they are terrified by it. They are doing everything in their power, which is a considerable power, to stop it, turn it, hold it off. I think they are exceedingly concerned about their own (The Rays and The Initiations, p188-89) "safety and status," for where the light goes, the Black Lodge must fade out and disappear."

I hesitate to use terms like Armageddon and such, but two things are of moment here.

1. These closing moments of the century are undeniably very important to Humanity as a whole.

2. 1 do not recall reading anything that said Armageddon had to be on the physical plane.

With these sobering thoughts in mind, let me share another aspect of the "coming." Although it is hard to see and hear it given all the noise being generated by the forces of retrogression, one of the more subtle things that I sense going on right now is a coalescing of the forces of light. There seems to be a mobilization, a calling together going on. There seems to have been an inflow of spiritual force that has kindled a blaze in the esoteric community. This is new. It is a keen kind of fresh energy. It does not register the same as it did 25 years ago. There is also an air of hope and a lot of joy Joy is not an emotion, friends. "Joy is a special wisdom" and a kind of condition that results from a whole lot of hard thinking.

I draw a lot of energy and great hope from this, but I really see the emergence of the forces of fight, which is the other side of the merging of man with mind, in many areas. There are those I mentioned above, the social, economic and political arenas. There are the areas of medicine, which in spite of its present very materialistic slant is making great strides in improving the health of people. I think that the field of medicine in general will be one of the earliest to be transformed under the impact of the new light that is coming in. Men and women will once again be motivated by spiritual forces rather than materialistic forces. They will want to be physicians so that they can heal, and help. Compensation or rewards will not be such major factor in their decisions to become healers.

In spite of the noise and confusion being generated by the "voices of lying propaganda" I could make a similar case for every arena of human concern. The externalization of the forces of light is universal. It will cut across every aspect of our lives in ways we can't even imagine.

One of the most interesting aspects of this merging/ emergence (Remember, when we reach toward them, they reach toward us.) can be seen in the field of electronics, specifically in the development of computer technology and the proliferation of the personal computer. When I say emergence of the mind, I mean exactly that. As any esotericist will tell you, the entire area of electronics from the light bulb, the telephone and telegraph to the present day television and now computers is only the externalization of mankind's lower mind into form.

In its present incarnation, the Pentium processor from the Intel Corporation is capable of processing 112 million instructions per second. An instruction is a mathematical computation like 1+1. It is expected that the next incarnation of the Pentium will process 250 to 300 million instructions per second with 1000 million being reached before the end of this century These developments will utterly change the way we live. Through the use of video and sound they will put everyone on the planet in "virtual" touch with everyone else. Presently, anyone who can afford a $1000 computer can connect to the World Wide Web and converse with anyone almost anywhere on the planet. In the first 6 months of 1994, the number of worldwide servers (Very simply, a "server" is a computer which is dedicated to the storage and maintenance of specific kinds of data bases and to the receiving and transference of messages between users.) jumped from about 30 to 300. It is expected that by 2000 this number will be in the tens of thousands.

If you think about the ramifications of this phenomena the ancient saying regarding the proliferation of the light and the revelation of evil may have some new meaning for you.

Again, we need to realize that the entire "explosion" of computer communications only appears that way to those who do not see the big and the subjective picture. This "occurrence" has been a long, long, long time in coming. It is the latest manifestation of humanity's mental body into form. In the near time, secrets, as we know them now are going to be virtually impossible to maintain. Witness the recent embarrassment of the Intel Corporation. Also, I expect the entire concept of someone owning an idea, the absurd notion of "intellectual property rights," will eventually have to go away.

As I said, the Pentium processor from the Intel Corporation is capable of processing 112 million instructions per second. The speed at which the human brain processes instructions is the same as the speed of light. (The higher mind, and the intuition, of course work at "no speed" . . . They simply know.) And, the mental plane, of which the most complex World Wide Web you can imagine is only a dim reflection, is brain accessible. All one needs to access the mental plane is the brain we were born with, a half way decent diet and some basic training in how to think. You can see why the forces of retrogression target the food, education and cultural supply systems first. It was not an accident that reading and writing were kept locked in the monasteries for centuries or that education was denied to females for more centuries. The current assault on the corporation for Public Broadcasting is a prime example of how they try to mend the rents in the veil. But in the face of the indefatigable pressure of the spiritual will, these efforts eventually failed; and the present efforts to hold back the sunrise will also fail.

A number of friends with whom I am working are putting a plan into effect that will result in the creation of a "room" in cyberspace within which we can hold conversations and exchange information on the spiritual or life side of important issues. Rooms of this sort already exist in all areas of scientific endeavor and in numerous other areas of human interest. Could this real-time electronic communication be an early externalization of the subjective telepathic condition which already exists among disciples and initiates?

As the sun proceeds to rise, Humanity is going to become a more and more lighted place, and all these noisy dinosaurs of retrogression who are not comfortable living in the light are simply going to have to go away. This is what evolution is about, friends. The wise ones have been calling it the evolution of consciousness for ages and ages of Brahma.

So, bottom line. All of this current stuff is the result of group work. The major developments in any arena one would like to look at are the result of groups working together. In my mind the major developers of computer software and hardware, like Microsoft and Intel are in the forefront of the development of group conscious as well. Groups are working quietly in most other areas of life, notably in politics where the going is slow, very difficult and very dangerous, conservation and the hard sciences. All of this group activity is indicative of the externalization of the group conscious Spiritual Hierarchy.

So, when one boils it all down, there is one thing coming. It has two major aspects, the re-emergence of the Light and Love of God. Some people refer to these as the Hierarchy and the Christ.

This is what is coming. It is coming even as I speak. You may have to be blind to see it, but there it is.