I think it is time for some good news, don’t you? I mean, all you hear anymore is not just bad, but awful news. I have heard so many Armageddon scenarios in the past few years, I have lost count. The other day, I received a long, rather bleak and disturbed piece from an astrologer called "The Summer from Hell." She was referring to the August Grand Cross. There is a difference between knowing about potential problems and being terrorized about them. It seems that almost any event of negative proportions—be it a war, an economic or political crisis in a country, a tidal wave, tornado or earthquake, too much rain, snow or sun, not enough rain, snow or sun—almost anything that is reported becomes grist for the planetary doomsday mill, which now seems to be running of its own momentum.

One of the most frequently encountered of these doomsday scenarios is the one which sees the planet plunged into some sort of terrible pit because of the collapse of the world financial structure. Not far behind, however, is the fabled Y2K doomsday scenario which sees the complete collapse of literally everything, including elevators and my electric toothbrush. True, the Y2K thing seems to have quieted down at the moment, but the financial thing is gaining in hysteria momentum; and I would not be surprised to see the Y2K thing whipped into a frenzy again before the end of year. The undulations of these two issues, strangely reflecting the undulations of the international stock markets are clearly driven by dense and potent emotional forces. We all know that the Forces of Light do not work in this kind of stuff. It seems, however, that some folks just have to have something to be worried—or more accurate, freaked out—about.

Now, to be honest, hard times are coming, for sure. But, tell me something new; I mean, tell me something really new.

My personal experience also includes at least one additional mini-depression; several stock market crashes; uncountable natural disasters including hurricanes, tornadoes, major earthquakes; and an equally uncountable number of unnatural disasters including, from my point of view, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, The Exxon Valdez, Bhopal India, Love Canal, AIDS, and tons of other stupid and shortsighted-generated stuff, like the nicotine poisoning of untold millions by the major drug cartels called tobacco companies, mass starvation and malnutrition, illiteracy and child abuse. From this perspective, which is admittedly narrow, my question is, "When haven’t there been hard times coming?"

Lest we forget, friends, this is Planet Earth. We do it the hard way on this planet. I have read in the Ancient Wisdom teachings that life on Planet Earth is painful, but evolution is fast. If you want slow and easy, you have to go somewhere else. I understand Jupiter is a pretty laid back place. You might try Jupiter.

Anyway, the current hysteria around the supposed—and sometimes, one thinks, hoped for—collapsing financial systems and the Y2K issues and the problems in the Balkans and Kosovo and dozens of other places on the planet (which, as most of us know, are not new at all, but only the current edition of ancient human problems generated by the illusion of separation and fed by the polarization of the self-conscious personalities involved) ... the hysteria around these issues is, to put it mildly, really dense. These problems, ladies and gentlemen, will not be solved on the level of emotional hysteria that created them. The solutions require the cool and loving concern of wide-minded people, of group conscious people who are able to see the interrelatedness of all human life.

The hysteria around these issues wears out the sheath. It is debilitating, tiring, and is also rather shortsighted and unserviceable. I do not mean that these are not real problems, serious problems to be dealt with, but what I do mean is that these issues do not signify the end of the world. Hysteria, fear mongering, alarmist scenarios, whip up the clouds of the astral plane. They obscure the light of reason, the inflow of love—which alone will solve the problems—and play right into the hands of the Forces of Retrogression.

It is a time of the edge, friends, a real serious edge, but it is not new to us. We have been here before. One might say, looking at humanity’s history, we have been here forever. We have looked at problems this bad and even worse and triumphed. Humanity is at its best when it is at the edge.

Nothing is set in stone, of course. We could lose it. We have lost it before. It seems that losing it has been one of our favorite ways of learning. We could be so lazy and stupid that we will not rise to this opportunity, but I do not think so. I think that we have, at long last, at long, long last learned the lessons of our really bleak history, and will not be forced to—once again—repeat them.

I do not think that the human souls who have forged the measure of freedom from the blood and sweat of countless generations, who have created the field of liberty and life that many, many millions on the planet know and enjoy, are either stupid or lazy. I do not think that we are so insensitive, so immersed in the comforts of consumerism and materialism that we will let the tides of darkness overwhelm our good sense once again. Do you?

But, as I was saying, I do have some real good news to share with you. And, not only is this stuff good, it is really news. That is, this news concerns something new, something that is moving into time, something that is evolving.

Let me clear that up a little bit. You realize, of course, that what we see on our TV sets or read in the daily papers is not the news at all. It is the olds. What we see on TV is old; it is about what happened and, because of the controlling forces, the majority of events reported on the evening olds are not good. The controlling thought form, sponsored and fed by the Forces of Retrogression, is that reports of good olds are hardly as exciting or interesting to most folks as reports of bad olds. Bad stuff, it is preached, sells more breakfast food or underarm deodorant or cars than good stuff.

Anyway, on this typically beautiful Southern California evening, I’ve got some really good news to share with you. This news is actually in two parts.

First is a real flash, like a "scoop." The esotericists in the world are aware of the fact that evolution concerns consciousness rather than form, but the percentage of esotericists in the world population is pretty small, so it is with some justification that I say that, although hardly anybody has really identified it or knows about it, the good news is that after a really, really long time of being dominated by self-consciousness and, therefore, materialism, humanity is beginning to show signs of a burgeoning group consciousness and, along with it, the ability to not only see, but recognize the reality of the spiritual worlds. This growing, but hard-for-some-to-recognize evolutionary development, is the really good news.

We have been talking about group consciousness for a very long time. It has been a major idea during my entire intellectual life. What I have come to understand is that all efforts to analyze group consciousness, to define it or segment it from an intellectual self-conscious perspective, have failed and will continue to fail to reveal its essence. Group consciousness cannot be analyzed. It can only be realized.

Analysis can and will, however, bring one to a point where the leap to realization can be made … providing one has the courage to let go of the forms and move into the world of being. Once the leap is made, one’s entire world undergoes what manifests as a gradual but unstoppable change. One comes to realize that, as a Hopi Elder recently observed, we are the ones we have been waiting for.

I think that humanity, with its incredible intellectual past, has, as a whole, arrived at that place. Human beings bearing the fruits of that long, long journey from the darkness to the Light, from the unreal to the Real, and from death to Immortality are beginning to be born, are beginning to incarnate in larger and larger numbers. This development was and is inevitable. It is called evolution, which is simply the working out of the Will of the Planetary Logos.

The vast majority of commentary on the emerging world scene overlooks, because it is not an accepted scientific fact as yet, the process of reincarnation. There are huge numbers of souls on the planet now, in all nations and at all levels of living, who are gradually, but more and more rapidly, merging their separative individual perspectives with the consciousness of the whole. People are becoming more and more group conscious.

Group consciousness does not involve psychic powers or the ability to fly or know about past lives. Neither is group consciousness something that suddenly turns on. No one has a group conscious switch. Rather, the sense of wholeness grows on one. It took humans an untold number of years to move from mass to self-consciousness. We have been working on moving from self to group consciousness for a very long time. Group consciousness is a developing sense of wholeness that is gradually growing in many millions of us toward an unshakable conviction that we are them and they are us, and "it" is all interconnected not as one big amorphous lump, but as an incredibly beautiful, diverse, yet harmonious unity.

The phenomenon of group consciousness is manifesting throughout humanity. Group conscious people seem to "naturally" understand the interdependence of all life. They are not separative in their behavior. They are willing participants in community. They expect political freedom as a natural state of affairs, and they see the attempts of dictators and other forms of controlling systems like some of the multinational corporations—not so much as evil but as unnatural, as out-of-date and backwards.

Group consciousness is not into punishment of wrong as a method of ensuring the peace. It is into implementing more inclusive systems that eliminate the reasons and causes of crime or antisocial behavior. It is into building systems that are cooperative rather than competitive, systems based on the principle of right sharing rather than special privilege, systems that are inclusive rather than exclusive.

It is the presence of this kind of consciousness in sufficient and growing numbers that accounts for the major developments in all social systems, a prime example of which are the numerous relief agencies operational in the world at this time. It is the presence of this kind of consciousness which accounts for the worldwide spread of democracy which, despite its numerous flaws, is the most group conscious form of government humanity has as yet devised. It is the presence of this kind of consciousness in the various fields of science which, being led by the forerunners in the ecology movement, is daily demonstrating the fact of our physical interdependence, daily demonstrating the fact of the One Humanity. When a sufficient number of scientists who are beginning to live from a group conscious point of view have reincarnated—and that phenomenon will continue to accelerate—we will see scientific breakthroughs that make discovering the atom look quaint, rather like James Watt discovering the steam engine while watching the tea kettle in his mother’s kitchen.

So, that’s one part of the good news. The other part is that this is the Festival of Humanity.

You know the lore, you know the legend of the Three Linked Festivals: Aries, Taurus and Gemini. In Aries, we send our will to serve ahead to greet the coming inflow of God’s Will. At that point in Aries, the inflowing energy is so far beyond our ability to touch that all we can do is indicate our will to serve.

We did that right here in this room.

We did that right here in this room.

Since the Taurus Festival, the inflow of energy from the Central Spiritual Sun and Shamballa has been held in trust for the planet by the Christ. Tonight is the Gemini Festival, the Festival of Humanity. Tonight, Christ will release that held and conditioned energy into the waiting hearts of those among the human family who are aligned with the Plan, those who have dedicated their lives to serving the Light, those who do not flinch from the idea of saving humanity and the planet, to people like us all over the world.

The Hopi Elder I quoted a moment ago also said the following:

There is a river flowing now very fast. It is so great and swift, that there are those who will be afraid. They will try to hold on to the shore. They will feel they are being torn apart and will suffer greatly. Know the river has its destination. The elders say we must let go of the shore, push off into the middle of the river, keep our eyes open, and our heads above the water. And I say, see who is in there with you and celebrate. At this time in history, we are to take nothing personally. Least of all, ourselves. For the moment that we do, our spiritual growth and journey comes to a halt.

The time of the lone wolf is over. Gather yourselves! Banish the word struggle from your attitude and your vocabulary. All that we do now must be done in a sacred manner and in celebration.

Remember the power of faith, friends. Humanity will triumph. The light will prevail and the Plan will be restored on Earth.

Cancer’s energy, augmented by that of Jupiter and Neptune, is the instrument of evolution. If recognized and invoked, Cancer’s energy can create a cocoon for new forms, permeating them with more light and wisdom than previous forms could hold. More than just an automated dropbox for new arrivals, Cancer proffers special opportunity to expand what is new, to christen it with ever greater radiance and love. It also serves as a magnet to draw in those who can contribute to a form’s growth, having previously organized their group rebirth. This is welcome news for Arcana as we move to a new, larger home this month [July 1998], with better freeway access and closer proximity to the hub of Los Angeles, the heart center of the nation.

Speaking of our nation, it may be no accident that our country celebrates its birthday in Cancer, on the Fourth of July. The U.S. is a far-from-realized, but ongoing experiment in right human relations. Cancer played a vital role in the birth of this form, and in the group rebirth of our founding fathers who made our country’s independence a reality. Two of these founding fathers were John Adams, the pragmatic Federalist, and Thomas Jefferson, the visionary idealist. Though often at odds with each other during their public careers, they came to recognize each other as essential counterparts in manifesting and safeguarding the American dream during their lifetimes. As a final testament to their subjective link and common purpose in that incarnation, Adams and Jefferson both died on the same day in Cancer—the Fourth of July. Per Djwhal Khul, the date of their deaths ensures their next births will also be in Cancer where they will likely again serve humanity on a mass scale. Perhaps they are back with us already to help the U.S. step into Aquarian light. May we follow their example and allow Cancer’s spiritual matrix to draw us to our fellow servers. May Cancer then fan the sparks of our goodwill into the steady group flame of enlightened form building.