Читать книгу A Call to Spiritual Awakening - Wilfred Chukwuemeka Mezue MD - Страница 6

“Every hour of earth life is therefore more precious than ever … Begin timely with the awakening.” - Abd-ru-shin¹

We live in a time of intense materialism and unparalleled intellectual sophistication. This combination makes spiritual development extremely difficult for the individual and the effort required is beyond most of us. The very air around us is saturated with the distractive influences of complex space-age technology and all ambitions drive towards material success. Like it or not, an indefinable pressure urges each individual towards this goal of materialism and the masses offer envious worship to any who achieves material success above the common lot, in any activity no matter how immoral or contrary to what had always been recognized as right. Money, power, fame, celebrity status, notoriety! These are all that matter.

Yet these feverish activities do not always or even frequently satisfy and some uneasiness often arises, which unfortunately we again bury in more feverish activity; uneasiness that the path we tread may be wrong after all. Unfortunately, the quiet admonishing voice warning us from deep within our inner being that life is much more than these externals is seldom heeded, if perceived at all. The deeply intellectual materialists translate the sense of non-fulfilment into a need for more material success. They react by seeking more strenuously for happiness and peace in more and more material acquisition. However, they seek in vain because true happiness and joy is a spiritual not material experience. On the other hand, many individuals who claim to believe in God, under similar pressures go so far as to blame their inner disquietude on the demands of religion and/or on the Creator. When erudite enough, these people, who should thereby be urged to search deeper for a meaning to their existence, instead rant and rave against the Creator pretending objectivity by demanding proof of a God by criteria defined and acceptable to them.

The root cause of the problem for both groups of course is spiritual indolence. Unfortunately, this is not usually appreciated by those involved because they equate spiritual indolence to intellectual lukewarmness. However, the opposite is the case as spiritual indolence is often associated with and may be a consequence of excessive intellectual preoccupation. This combination of intellectualism and spiritual indolence results in the conceit that suggests to them that they are qualified to act as both judge and jury in something they do not in the least understand; a conceit that demands an explanation for the existence of the Creator instead of seeking to recognize Him from inner, spiritual movement.

Inner spiritual movement is fundamental to our humanity. Our inner mobile, living core is spiritual and it is this living core that is the responsible being. The material covering represent the essential tools for the protection and activity of the spirit that wishes to experience the material spheres. The intellect belongs to the material and preoccupation with its leading is a denial of our true being and represents the greatest obstacle to our development and maturity. As material preoccupation becomes more pronounced, the inner urges of the spirit become less distinct and today only a few human spirits still heed the helpful guidance that the inner urge to awaken represent. If we awaken to the call of the living spirit directed to the Creator the humble volition to strive in the Light becomes the incentive for the awakening of our spirit.

Humanity may accept, when forced to do so, that our existence in this sphere is finite, but as long as we remain reasonably healthy in a physical sense, we refuse to consider this limitation imposed by our mortality as an imminent possibility. Meanwhile, the material world that has served us all, for millions of years of evolution steadily heads towards ultimate disintegration. Every human spirit senses this fact that our world is dying, although often without much clarity adding to the indefinable pressure that urges us to an awakening.

Our activities are already adjusting to this fact that our world is dying. We worry about Ozone layer depletion, global warming, nuclear holocaust, ecosystem failure, and even invasion from space. Concerned scientists and ‘big businesses’ are now frantically searching for alternative habitation in nearby planets. Even diseases and epidemics that in spite of unprecedented human resources and ability to communicate in a unified globe cannot be controlled are regarded as big threats to our world. Our ecology is collapsing. Many animals and plants has been driven to extinction and we are only beginning to perceive the threat that this poses to continuing existence of humanity since all living things depend on each other to maintain ecological balance. Economy and politics have also taken unacceptable turns that wise ones now think will result in societies’ inevitable collapse. It will seem that without openly acknowledging it, even the most hardened materialists recognize a coming end time, the world judgement as advocated by religious thought. Less than fifty years ago, majority of human beings would have scoffed at the idea that our world as we know it can cease to exist. Today only irrational and less intuitive individuals will dismiss the accumulating evidence as irrelevant.

We have exhausted the opportunities to live irresponsibly in the World of Matter and a time of accounting is upon us. Although perhaps not in the sense that zealous religious movements present it, but certainly in a sense that individual opportunities to continue to exist and experience in the form human spirits have become accustomed to, with little consideration for the responsibility attached to our activities has been exhausted. A higher Will than the human Will seems to have been imposed on the course of world events which drives inexorably towards an accounting.

In whatever way we may wish to view it however, the obvious conclusion is that the earth is under threat of destruction as a result of human activities. Everyone, or at least all those who have given it a thought agree about this, and what needs to be clarified is the nature of the human activity that can so profoundly affect not just our physical world but even oppress us spiritually. Is it possible that seeking for answers in purely material causes is mere externalization of a deep-rooted problem and that the cause lies elsewhere, in the spiritual failure of humanity?

Whatever the cause however, the need for solution and for enlightenment rages over the troubled souls of humanity. Unfortunately, primarily because we are unwilling to accept personal individual responsibility in the corporate failure of humanity, efforts to redress the balance have so far remained unfulfilled. The poorly articulated fears resulting from the subtle pressures we live under have culminated in a culture of blame in societies that permit free expression and brutal repression in less civilized societies. However, the problem must be tackled first at individual levels where indeed the original seed for it was sown.

We should be aware that all our thoughts and activities take on forms, which continue to exist even when we are no longer aware of them, in planes that are not always visible and tangible to us. This possibility to give rise to forms rests in the intrinsic ability of the human spirit to draw from the power of God in Creation. When these forms of our activities are evil, that is when contrary to the Will of God, they remain in the lower darker regions of these ethereal spheres. Over millennia of our existence on earth, contrary human will have given rise to dense, dark forms which have accumulated in these unseen planes around us and around the material spheres in which we live, making it difficult for purer thoughts to ascend and for guidance from the Light to reach us from above. This darkness arising out of our wrong volition thus acts as a dense impenetrable canopy¹, oppressing and preventing us from recognizing the source of our dissatisfaction.

The problems of our world and the difficulties with resolving them therefore are directly attributable to humanity’s misuse of spiritual power. Isaiah saw this long ago when he said – “Surely the arm of the Lord is not too short to save, nor his ears too dull to hear. But your iniquities have separated you from your God; your sins have hidden his face from you, so that he will not hear”.²

Since we have, individually and collectively formed this darkness with our wrong volition, we must also work our way out of it. However, no permanent solutions can be found by addressing only the final physical manifestations of the problem. Unless we address the root cause by changing from within we can never hope to re-establish harmony. This has been repeatedly shown by the increasing frequency of ecological, social and political disasters in spite of high level world consultations and the very advanced capabilities to cope with them.

The consequences of our failure, however, go far beyond the effect on our environment. It is the root cause of our separation from our God, the source of our being. This is the underlying necessity for the call to spiritual awakening by the Envoys of God; first by the Lord Jesus Christ in His demand to be born again and latterly by Abd-ru-shin in the Grail Message with the call to a new more spiritually oriented consciousness. “Everything must become new” is the Message from the Holy Grail, sent as a final help to humanity and brought at a great personal cost by the last envoy of God. This implies a cleansing or purification of all that has been developed by humanity contrary to the Will of God. This is the only way forward. Salvation and enlightenment can now only come through the word of God and through the recognition of the Creator in His work.

On stepping forth into Material Creation for our development every human being was graciously endowed with the ability to recognize the Creator just from interacting with creation in our day-to-day experiences. The many servants and Messengers of God have also, over millennia, sought to guide us into this recognition of the Creator in His Creation and to reawaken the word of God carried deep within us. Above all this however, as a special act of Love and Grace, at mankind’s extreme need, when the darkness was at its most intense, the word of God took on form in our physical world and was made flesh in the Son of God, Jesus.

Mankind however still rejected Him, as was already foreseen by many prophets, and thereby chose a path that must lead to destruction. This was not a failure of the Jews alone as humanity has unconsciously expressed in their irrational and unjust hatred of the Jews, but a failure of humanity as a whole. Yet the Love of God did not abandon us. The Son of God asked His Father that another help, the comforter, be sent to humanity just before the end and admonished that we listen to him. This promise has been fulfilled in the work “In the Light of Truth, the Grail Message”. It is not surprising but rather to be expected that like the work of the Son of God Jesus, the work of the comforter has been met with resistance, antagonism and malicious attempts to distort or misrepresent it. However, the Truth does not solicit but offers loving help, which we are free to accept or reject, for salvation cannot be forced on anyone. The Love of the Father and the suffering of His Envoys is vindicated in the few that find salvation through such help.

Thus, in spite of all the guidance, majority of humanity remain separated from the Grace of God because they stubbornly refuse to accept the hand extended to them. If with our volition and activities, we firmly chain ourselves with fetters to this earth and to the World of Matter, these will hold us in their grip until we liberate ourselves from them. These fetters include among other things our preoccupation with wealth and power and the pressure to succeed and gain recognition or acceptance. The difficulties arising from our activities apart, these fetters form part of the indefinable pressure that weighs upon us.

Some individuals, after entangling themselves irretrievably, place their hope on death as a final solution. They convince themselves that physical death results in complete dissolution and thereby freedom. Liberation unfortunately cannot come through earthly death since the spirit as such cannot die. It can only be achieved through spiritual awakening and the greatest obstacle to spiritual re-awaking is indolence which itself is a result of our propensity for earthly things. If the human spirit inclines more towards material goals, it becomes more dependent on the material tools necessary to achieve the desired goal, primarily the intellect. Spiritual goals become more obtunded and spiritual recognition and insight less accessible. Ultimately such indolent spirit becomes sequestered from the daily decisions and activities of the individual. The spirit nevertheless remains the animating and responsible motivating personality. It is as if the spirit is asleep in its house of clay and to make any progress must once again awaken from its death-like sleep i.e. be born again.

Many of us are not prepared to make the effort necessary for spiritual development and maturity. In most cases, we are satisfied to leave our spiritual development in the hands of a few individuals such as priests, ‘spiritual leaders’, Imams and so on who are supposed to possess the necessary knowledge for this. Even when we hear or are confronted with spiritual Truths, we sometimes feel ashamed to listen to the word or to reflect on it, afraid of being considered part of something so unfashionable; something current public opinion has overtly marked as non-progressive. But indeed, such shame turns inward and if we reflect quietly it becomes apparent that the sense of shame is that of a personal failure.

Spiritual Indolence dictates that we are only prepared to involve ourselves in spiritual things if and when it becomes acceptable to the majority. This indeed is the real nature of indolence at its most unacceptable - sitting on the fence waiting for opinion to sway one way or another without any personal conviction in whatever final course we follow. Thus, many regularly attend church or fellowships, join religious groups and sects without any real understanding and naturally will also not reap any spiritual rewards. Indeed, as stated in the book of Revelation, such indolent people have no place in Creation: “I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other! So, because you are lukewarm, neither hot nor cold, I am about to spit you out of my mouth.”³ Thus the indolent human being is spiritually lost and worthless although he/she still retains a potential to awaken and be saved.

Indolence also implies being too lazy or too hesitant to take a step we know is right. If because of fear of men, laziness, and shyness or indeed for any reason, we fail to stand for the Truth, for what is right and for the service of God, then we are definitely spiritually indolent or lukewarm. In our world today, we are faced with many circumstances that challenge our faith and our commitment to the Truth, and sadly very few human spirits show the necessary uncompromising commitment that the Truth demands - a commitment that demands that we stand up for our conviction and that we condemn evil in all its forms.

This commitment to the Light, which must be personal, requires that we give up our comfort, our pride in self, our ambitions and indeed our very life in service to the Light and the Truth. This does not mean that we have no ambition and no pride or that we live in abject poverty. On the contrary! An adherent of the Light who remains faithful lives a very fulfilling life but understands that life revolves around God and not self. Material circumstances are seen as tools for the service of God. He neither neglects material things and wealth nor pursues them without check. His excursions in matter are under strict control of spiritual aspirations. The things that are of value to him are focused on and his joy revolves around a future that does not disappoint. Clearly this excludes all fanatics and zealots who only work for their organizations and are detrimental to the Truth.

Indolence is a terrible state for the human spirit. It may be likened to a man with a grave illness whose cure rests with himself, but who refuses to make the necessary effort. The indolent state ultimately leads to spiritual somnolence and may even result in spiritual death. It is true that having issued as a direct work of God’s Holy Spirit, the human spirit cannot die in the sense of ceasing to exist. For the spirit death is defined differently and represents eternal separation from God. This is the threat that looms over the indolent for although physically awake and intellectually alert, such a person may actually have progressed far on the path to spiritual death and only continues a semblance of existence while awaiting the judgement.

While it is still possible for the indolent and somnolent individual to awaken, the spiritually dead can no longer be helped. This is the vaguely perceived pressure that urges indolent humanity to spiritual awakening. This is why the last Message from the Light is so vital for, as Christ who promised this Message and the Message itself confirms, the period of grace is now exhausted. It is now either a choice for Life or for Death.

Another great tragedy of this deadly circumstance is that the indolent human spirit is often unaware of his state. He/she often lives a morally worthy life as defined by societal laws and frequently is also zealous in religious externals. He believes he is doing well and this wrong perception is often reinforced by the general public opinion. Yet unless the spirit, the living core, becomes active the inevitable path is towards death.

It should be obvious that since failure to find fulfilment and to achieve the purpose of our existence is personal and indeed spiritual, what is needed is a personal spiritual quickening. Since almost all human beings, except a few who have allowed the Light of God into their lives, are spiritually indolent if not asleep, spiritual awakening, which has been likened to a new birth³ or a new consciousness in the kingdom of our God, is the only way forward. This condition was stipulated over 2000 years ago, when the Son of God, in His pristine wisdom told us “unless a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God - that which is born of flesh is flesh and that which is born of spirit is spirit.” This was misunderstood then and remains poorly understood today.

In our own time, in the great Love and Justice of our Creator we have again been admonished to “Awake, ye men, out of your leaden slumber!”¹

The call and guidance to spiritual awakening is one of the most important events of our time. At this time when the World of Matter in which we live and experience is approaching its end, this call must be seen as an act of sublime Love, which will forever remain beyond our understanding; a Love that will not allow even one flickering spiritual flame to go without help. And this Love is abundantly manifest in the guidance once more sent by the Creator in the Grail Message.

The availability of the help however does not enforce its acceptance. The human spirit must reach out for the help to be able to use it to free itself and for its development. The situation is similar to that of a drowning man to whom a lifeline is thrown. Since the helper cannot reach him in any other way, the only possibility of salvation rests with his reaching out for the lifeline, an event that becomes increasingly more difficult as his confusion increases.

The spirit of man, drowning in the suffocating darkness that has arisen from our individual and collective activities, must make the personal effort to swing out of the swift current of contrary human will, which is driving everything along the broad path to the abyss. He must reach out for the help, which in Omniscience has been determined as the only way in which he can still find the right path.

Our path back home to Paradise lies in our life and experiencing here on earth and in the other planes of Subsequent Creation. We must tread these paths in a spiritually awake and conscious state, supported by help granted and accepted in the word and guidance from our Creator. No one else can do this for us and without following this path we can never hope to reach the luminous Realm of our Creator.

Because it lies in the Will of the Creator for His Creation, the way to life is open to all humanity. However, in the free will inherent in man’s spirituality he may choose otherwise, but he then remains unalterably bound to the consequences of his volition.

With the choices we have made and what we have formed by our activities in Creation thus far, the path back home will not be easy. We have cluttered the way with the products of our materially oriented activity, most of which is contrary to the Will of God, allowing the path to life to become unbelievably overgrown with physical and ethereal obstacles. That the path, which leads to life, is narrow and tortuous is thus due to the activity of the individual human spirits and not a Divine ordination as has been imagined. It is therefore not surprising that only a few will find this path again.³

It is not difficult to understand that only that path which is little used and which is left badly cared, or indeed, uncared for will become overgrown with thorns and difficulties. From the very beginning we are told, the path to the Light has been luminous and beautiful and remains so today.¹ Any obstacles that one may meet have been put there by that one himself; by his or her careless use of the power of the Creator lent to him or her. He or she alone must face and remove this obstacle. This to some extent is the thesis of ‘Pilgrims Progress’ by Bunyan⁷.

A parallel can easily be drawn from our daily experiences. The path that leads to our earthly homes is subject to the same principles. If we neglect these paths for any reason, perhaps because we have travelled, are sick or even from sheer laziness, it becomes quickly or slowly overgrown by briars. Quicker if the path had been poorly built, less well maintained or less frequently used. To get back to our home, we must address and clear these obstacles. Similarly, the path to eternal life requires personal striving and is often surrounded and hedged by the consequences of our previous activities. It is therefore not surprising that for most people it is narrow and often difficult.

Untold efforts are expended in various so-called schools of thought, both occult and overt to find a broad and easy way that will nevertheless lead to the longed for Light. It is not surprising that in our generation with the intellectual conceit and spiritual indolence of the overwhelming majority, we have evolved all possible and sometimes impossible arguments to advocate that the way to life is effortless. Sometimes scriptures are quoted usually out of context to support this. We must however remember that, as the Lord said, broad and easy is the road that leads to destruction and many are they who travel it.

We must be aware that the impure currents of human degradation is wide and swift, giving a ‘heady’ feeling of progress and lulling all who are not alert to the danger into a false sense of achievement. This is particularly soothing to the indolent sprit, which is thereby encouraged to remain in its lukewarm state of spiritual slumber.

Increasingly people are known to declare, flushed with pride of consequence and confident in apparent human intellectual achievements, that they have no need of God. Puffed up with narrow and limited knowledge gained from observations of evolutionary trends in matter, with absolutely no sense of the wider Creation, intellectual man croaks a denial of God in favor of science; even demanding that this grossly limited understanding become the only basis for educating our children. The less extreme intellectuals, but equally indolent majority make similar decisions passively, indolently following where others lead. Even those who wish to serve the Will of God succumb to the pressures of the extreme materialism of the prevailing social environment.

All these have been said repeatedly. Messengers and Prophets of God sent to help us have proclaimed and admonished over millennia and today these vital Messages have been distorted for personal gains. The pivotal point on which everything hinges however is the necessity for us to take a personal decision to awaken and free our spirits. This necessity for a free decision to seek and serve the Will of the Creator has proven so difficult as to constitute a stumbling block for many. Yet only this can permit the possibility of beginning our ascent. In addition, however, a firm resolution and an uncompromising follower-ship must also sustain the decision.

The religious movements have not helped and indeed cannot help. All we have to do, it is argued by the devout of all religious affiliations, is believe. Amongst the Muslims the demand is to believe in Allah and His Prophet Mohammed and observe a set of external rules and regulations. This belief alone is assumed to assure Paradise; yet within the Muslim culture surprisingly, evil jinns and demons are said to also believe in the existence of Allah and the Prophet. The Jews are no different. James, an apostle of the Lord, Jesus, insists that demons also believe and tremble. Yet for majority of Christians the assumption is that you need do little more than believe and accept the Lord Jesus as your ‘personal’ savior. Since He has died on the cross to pay the price of our sins and wash them away by His blood - even the sins we are yet to commit in the future; all the devout Christian needs to do now is to claim this salvation on the authority of His vicarious sacrifice on the cross. If on the side one also attempts to live a good and noble life, all well and good but in the general belief one’s good works cannot help since salvation is a finished act of grace consummated on the cross at Calvary.

On the other hand, the materialist and atheist whose numbers are growing alarmingly, swollen by the many who drift with majority opinion, believe only in the existence of things they can see and touch; In things that can be proven to them by a set of criteria determined by themselves and their preceptors. For majority of these, the call for spiritual awakening can only sound hollow since they are already spiritually dead. They are incapable of seeing beyond their immediate physical surrounding into the greater beyond. Their vision is limited to the physical world and to observing new cosmic and microscopic natural phenomena within this densest of material spheres. The sum of their ambition is to be the center of everything even to the point of assuming divinity.

This attitude, summed up in the belief in the corporate omniscience of man, is the driving force in the highly intellectual, spiritually deprived leadership of today. These people are irrevocably bound to science and money as their gods. They follow a path that is apparently broad and easy and which promises life but the end of which is the dark abyss – for them and all those who in spiritual indolence follow their glamorized promise of ease and abundance.

Why should we expect a life free of all obstacles, replete with wealth, luxury and all so-called good things of life, when by our activities we have placed and maintained these obstacles in Creation? How can we believe in justice if these were simply removed from our path without our participation and without our being permitted to recognize the worth of these activities by an experiencing of the obstacles they constitute in Creation? Who or what do we expect to clear these iniquities for us – some Angel that had no part in the sins, our declarations of faith, or the innocent blood of the Son of God unjustly shed on the cross?

The same Son of God had demanded spiritual awakening or rebirth as a necessary condition for salvation; and as a great help for the end time for those who strive in this way, had promised the Spirit of Truth who will bring enlightenment in the word just before ushering in the judgement.

As the work ‘In the Light of Truth’ admonishes – Awake! Look around you! Listen to your spirit’s inner voice! This alone can open the way. It demands that we must carry within us the

firm volition for what is good and strive to give purity to our thoughts. We must strive in thought, words and deeds to live in the Will of God. In this way only – first a personal decision followed by persevering and consistent activity - can you receive from the Holy Spirit the power and the strength for upward striving. You must do it yourself and not wait perhaps to be “possessed” by the Holy Spirit. No great spiritual strain or great intellectual acuity is required but a humble seeking after the Will of God, in conscious and alert experiencing of the joy and bliss of His Creation.

Presumption must bow to humility. As soon as we become childlike, thereby shedding our intellectual conceit, we begin to be true human beings in whom the spirit becomes increasingly mobile and thus ultimately awake.

This is the path forward for all of us as stipulated by the love of God – irrespective of race, color or religion.