To live in God is to find Reality, Peace, and Life.
We can work for self or we can work for God. There is really no other choice to be made.
We can work to improve our lives or we can work for God. We can serve humanity or we can work for God. We can seek to establish universal brotherhood or we can work for God. We can seek enlightenment or we can work for God. These are real choices, for what we do for ourselves and for humanity out of self is different than anything and everything we might do for God. Many people today are allured by improving themselves, serving humanity, establishing brotherhood and seeking enlightenment. But all these choices are other than seeking and serving God. All these are living in the past Piscean era of the divinitization of self. All these are wandering around the base of the mountain rather than going straight to the top.
When we seek to improve our lives we are only seeking for self, and thus the self is strengthened. We seek money for ourselves, or love for ourselves, or power for ourselves. As the self is strengthened we become further removed from Reality, which is a realm that is free and devoid of all self and ego. And the path to God means the end of ego, not the strengthening of ego.
When we serve humanity — because we wish to serve humanity or feel it's the right thing to do — then we are fulfilling what we ourselves desire and not what God desires. For there is service that is done by a human being and service that is done out of divine impulse. Any honest server can easily tell the difference between service that is created by the mind in struggle and effort, and the service that flows from the Heart in an easy expression of God's Wisdom. This latter service arises not by human willpower but out of identification with the larger whole and in looking to God for direction. As long as we serve as an individual human being, and not as a part of a larger group and a larger Life, we are only strengthening the self. And if we go further and say that God wants us to serve, then we are only affirming that there is a "self" that is serving. We are only once more strengthening the self. And in truth, only God within us can effect real service.
When we seek to establish universal brotherhood, then the same conditions apply. As long as we seek to establish our own service, our own work, and our own result, we only really strengthen the self, we only wind up further from Reality, and we only wind up further separated from God. Universal brotherhood cannot be realized by egos who are inherently lacking in the quality that makes brotherhood manifest: unity in Spirit. Until God manifests in a human life, that life cannot feel nor sense that inner web of Life that unites all servers in Love and Harmony. When, however, that Love and Harmony is contacted, then the server realizes that Brotherhood is not something that is established — it is an eternal fact. Brotherhood cannot be created, but that Reality in which Brotherhood eternally exists may be entered, and the group life realized and known.
When we seek enlightenment we expect that there is some self that can be enlightened. Or we expect that there is some aspect of us, some higher soul nature of ours, that will be initiated and brought into the Hierarchy of Christ. But what is Real within us is not anything that can be identified by a name. What is initiated within us is not any self. The liberation that is attainable does not reveal a Monad that is separate from God. As the Buddha taught many ages ago, what keeps us in delusion is the existence of self and seeking for self. And as Christ added, what keeps us in self is our failure to seek for God, to work for God, and to live for God. As long, therefore, as we are focussed on the development of any part of us that is NOT God, we cannot live in God and follow God's will. The whole path of initiation, could people but see it, is the sublimation of the personal will in the divine Will. Initiation is the result of deciding to follow God, and learning to reject following anything else in the world no matter how alluring it may be.
This is the dawn of the age of Aquarius, and this is also the dawning of the age of group work, group life, and group service. And the group is united, not in theory but in living experience. In identification with the group life, a doorway appears, so to speak, to the divine Life. And it is a wide open door, as opposed to the narrow and difficult path of meditation, as has been taught in the past. The Aquarian age brings in new energies and new possibilities. Spirit leads us to respond to them and play our part in the One Work.
Thus rather than focussing on ourselves and our own progress, we unitedly respond to the Divine. In doing so, we turn not only towards the inner Light, but also turn outwards to bless the world, and sacrifice our time and energy in service to all those who are seeking to prepare for the great Planetary Transition
To work for God is the only choice without compromise. To follow the divine Will and not ones own personal will is the Path itself. To live in God is to find the group life and seek for the larger whole and not for self. To live in God is to find Reality, Peace, and Life.
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It is easy to see that the world has rejected this message. Almost everyone on earth has decided to live for self and not for God. People do not trust God to arrange the service that they do. People do not trust God to lead them to enlightenment. People do not trust God to guide their words and their actions — they think that they themselves can do better. They believe that their limited, fallible self — or that of some teacher or teaching — is better than God, smarter than God, and wiser than God. And as a result they reap the rewards of such false beliefs. How can anything good come of such outrageous concepts? But because the whole world believes it, almost everyone accepts it as truth.
Often those who are spiritually wise are often the ones most deluded. It is indeed those loving servers of humanity who fall for this belief the hardest, for they have been taught that they must serve, they must study, they must meditate, and they must perfect themselves. So they try to do these things to the best of their ability. But in doing so they have fallen for the Big Lie of the illusory world, that what the self does is better than what God does.
The self is incredibly subtle. The ego is sneaky. It will say to us, "Your service is for God and so you are living in God. Your efforts to seek enlightenment are a search for God and so you are looking towards God. You don't really need to change your ways." But in these cases we stand outside the door or Life, and are telling ourselves that we are opening that door without really doing so. For if we really choose to live for God and live in God, then we are no longer at all focussed on our own service, or our own work, our own development, or our own enlightenment. We are instead focussed on God, upon human need, and upon the group Life. We have been lifted out of concern for ourselves and have entered into a wider realm.
Whenever the self decides that it wants to improve the world, it draws its own conclusions about how the world should be improved. It says, "We should establish peace on earth. People should live in brotherhood. We shall establish justice for everyone." But each of these efforts to improve the world arise out of self. And because they arise out of self, the result must inevitably be colored by the limitations of self. The result is merely human in character, and not divine. The result merely continues the cycle of creating and re-creating this illusory world. We are therefore looking at the world with human eyes, and not the eyes of God, who would say, "Peace, brotherhood, and justice are already established in My Kingdom; why do you not enter?"
Thus servers today seek to awaken people to the existence of the Kingdom of God and to the surrender of self that leads to that Kingdom... and then of course the servers are accused of heartlessly ignoring world problems. But this condemnation comes with the territory, for the ego will defend itself to the very last.
There is no true service except action in obedience to the Will of God. There is no initiation outside of surrender to the Will of God. There is no enlightenment except in finding God's Will in our Hearts. It is God's Will that transforms us and the world.