Violence - The Way of Self-pity

Mankind’s history is dark with greed, aggression and oppression. Bitterness still festers and erupts in many parts of the globe, siring fear in millions who wish to live in peace.

Silver Birch offers these words to the despairing.

* * *

Your world is in a ferment. It is partly due to the upheavals caused by two world wars. In a ferment sometimes not always the best comes to the top.

What you are really seeing take place is the dim outline of a new world. Birth is not always a beautiful or painless process.

Violence is a form of mass-emotion, a kind of hysteria born of inferiority, a self-pity that desires to draw attention to itself as the only means of making others aware of their existence.

It is not an easy life that you live in your world today; it is a very difficult one. You have violence on an ever-increasing scale. You have greed, selfishness, rapacity and all the other cancerous happenings that are a sore on the world body.

Millions have lost their way; millions worship false gods; millions have no idea of what life is all about, and what they have to do to fulfil themselves. It is not only true in your country, but of many lands which are far worse than the one in which you dwell. Greed and avarice, by-products of materialism, have taken command of people who worship this false god. They all desire the golden calf which they regard as the acme of all attainment.

They have no understanding of eternal verities. Their allegiance is to materialism, the festering cancer of your world, but it does not affect the whole of its inhabitants.

Do not let it trouble you unduly. There is nothing you can do about it, except to show an example in your own lives of how those who are the ambassadors of the spirit should comport themselves. You will not be harmed, but protected as in the days that have gone. I have said it before, “Lift of your hearts.”

Let others be fearful, and despair of what the morrow will bring. You have nothing to fear. No problem, no obstacle, no handicap will come your way that you will not be able to overcome. Call on the divine power within and the even greater divine power without, to which you have access.

It is difficult in the turmoil and turbulence, the strife, anxiety and trouble of your world to remember that these affect only the physical.

Your soul cannot be damaged. Your body may be, but the soul will always be ready to perform its task.

“Will man ever live a life of peace with his fellows instead of warring?”

That is very difficult to answer. What you must appreciate is that the Great Spirit endowed man with an element of free will. Human beings could have been created as puppets. That free will provides man with the opportunity of helping what I call the infinite processes of creation.

Man has the chance to make the world in which he lives a garden of Eden, a paradise, a heaven, just as he can make it a dark, desolate and grim forbidding world. That is the measure of his choice.

You have war, violence, greed, cupidity, selfishness, because materialism predominates.

Materialism exists because the vast majority of people in your world do not realize there is a life beyond physical death, despite the teaching of the many religions.

Millions do not accept the fact of an inevitable afterlife which is really tangible, where there is compensation and retribution. They believe that earth is the only life they will ever have. So logically they argue that if the physical is all, let us have the best it has to offer. This is the cause of war. This leads people to hate, to subjugate, to imprison and even to kill one another.

That is not the whole of the picture. I have paid tribute to the infallibility of the natural law which also places a restriction on the havoc that man can wreak in your world.

We are engaged in the mighty task of helping to bring an understanding of spiritual realities wherever we can.

Mediums demonstrate that man is a spiritual being with a spiritual destiny. Man makes or mars his destiny according to the way he conducts himself. The law is unfailing in its sequence of cause and effect, of sowing and reaping.

Whatever good you do, you are the better for it. Whatever selfishness you practice, you are the worse for it. You cannot cheat the natural law. You cannot say on your deathbed that you are sorry for what you have done, and automatically obliterate all the effects of the causes you set in motion.

As this truth gradually is accepted by an increasing number of people, so wars will lessen and peace obtain a greater hold in larger areas of your world. That is the only answer I can give. It cannot be done overnight.

Play your part. Do the best you can. Help those who come to you. Be kind, tolerant, compassionate. Serve where the opportunities come. And that is how you will help.

* * *

“Does the anguish that we sometimes find around come not from without but from within?”

It can be both. What you must appreciate is that earthly life provides a polarity which is not available in our world. In our world people of the same stage of evolution are in the same spiritual sphere or plane.

In your world you are mixing all the time with people of varying stages of evolution. You get opportunities for all the opposites to be encountered. Thus you can have light and dark, heat and cold. All this is the purpose of earthly life. It provides the means by which the soul comes into its own.

It is the school where you learn the lessons which fit you for that larger world which one day you will inhabit. If you have anguish, it is because by so doing you will be able to appreciate joy, its opposite.

There is a saying, which I have often quoted, that things can be equal and opposite, the two sides of the same coin. It is in the variety of experience that the soul finds itself. This is the equivalent to the process of the hardening of the steel, the emergence of the gold after being crushed from its ore.

“I perceive in many people what I believe to be a mental revolution. I believe this is a natural sequence which our spirit friends are organizing, and the timing is now.”

Your world is in a melting-pot. You are seeing the war between good and evil, similar to the story told in the Bible. You are also seeing the unfortunate results of the worship of mammon, the pursuit of greed and avarice, the desire for material power, the subjection of all that is noble, elevating, spiritual; the selfishness that I call the festering cancer of your world.

At the same time religion, in its conventional sense, has lost its potency, influence and validity to guide and direct. Allegiances to false doctrines that make no sense to those who have intelligence means that an increasing number continue to turn their backs on what the conventional religions have to offer.

In addition science has started on the wrong road, with massive appliances that pose the crucial question mark of whether they will be used to benefit humanity or wreak destruction in your world. That is the crucial time in which you live, and it is the reason why we make a supreme effort.

This is to influence, to guide, to direct and to point the only way by which peace, harmony, amity, concord and co-operation can be achieved.

We are trying to demonstrate that all who live on earth are part of a vast spiritual family, that what you call God, and I the Great Spirit, is the supreme father of them all.

We will win this fight. You and others are part of the vast army of the spirit engaged in this battle. So you will be to be tried and tested to ensure that you will not fail in the great task to which you have been assigned.

Spirit is stronger than matter. There is no power in the world of matter that is greater than the divine power, which will triumph, though it will take time.

There is no room for pessimism or despair among those who have knowledge. The Great Spirit constructed man with the head at the top so that he could look up. Were he intended to look down, his head would be where his feet are.

Every soul engaged in the task of liberating humanity must go through the tests and challenges. They are essential parts of the spiritual development. There is no other way. When you come to our world and look back, you will thank the Great Spirit for all the difficulties, and realize they were most important parts of your earthly life.

Your world has had prophecies of disasters for a long time. Often dates have been given when your world would be destroyed. There is no second coming. The Nazarene accomplished his earthly mission - two thousand years ago. He continues his mission in the larger life which I inhabit. His is the guiding influence that directs our activities.

Your world will not be destroyed overnight. The Great Spirit, with infinite love and wisdom, has devised natural laws which provide for every facet of being, mighty or minute, complex or simple. The natural laws operate by evolution, not revolution. They ensure that the power of man is restricted. There are things he cannot do. He has a measure of free will, but it is limited.

“Do you think that the world, when it comes to the New Age, will have a much increased consciousness compared with what it has had so far?”

To me there is a constant process of evolution, development, unfoldment. It will not happen that overnight there will be a change and a new age will be ushered in. Gradually, as truth progresses, more and more people will become aware of it.

Once they realize that the whole of the universe is founded on spiritual realities that cannot fail, and as a result they begin to live these implications, so there will be higher states of consciousness and awareness functioning in your world, but it will all be a gradual process.

“Will the Age of Aquarius herald any real changes in our world?”

Your world is always changing, not only physically but spiritually. You must accept the fact that, as there is a law of evolution, there must be changes as it occurs. Evolution means the gradual development from one condition to another that is higher than its predecessor.

“Can you tell us something about the future of our world?”

Your world will continue to exist because there is no individual or combinations of individuals who have the power to destroy the whole of it. There is a limitation placed upon the harm that can be done and the means that you can use, or can be invented or discovered, to wreak damage on such a vast scale that the world would cease to be tenable.

Have no fear, the will of the Great Spirit must always prevail. Be positive, optimistic and constructive in your outlook, and play your part. Banish fear, worry, apprehension, anything that stops the rich power of the spirit from filling you and encouraging you to do the best you can. That is all we ask of you. Do the best you can. No-one can do better than his best.

Have no fear of what the morrow will bring. The morrow is the herald of glorious opportunities for you to unfold latent divinity, to enjoy life in all its fullness, physically, mentally and spiritually, becoming increasingly aware of that wondrous spiritual radiance that is always round and about you.

* * *

“Do you believe capital punishment will solve our problems like violence?”

You will not solve your problems that way at all. Love is the fulfilling of the law. Whatever you do must be an attempt to help, not to exact revenge.

Another murder does not excuse the first one. Killing by the State does not solve any situation. If you meet force by force you are not encouraging the powers of goodness, compassion and kindness to be exercised.

All punishment must be remedial and redemptive. The object should always be to try and enable the soul to come into his own. To send into our world souls that are unready merely increases problems. It does not lessen them in your world or in ours. Besides, you can make mistakes.

“Two points occur to me. Suppose persons were precipitated into the next world swiftly, with all their sins heavy upon them, you might say. It is often argued that in this state they merely come back and influence other people with like tendencies. Therefore they do more damage after they had been transported to the next world than if they had been allowed to remain.

Why can your side of life not deal with these who are in essence sick souls, take care of them just as we might, and so prevent them influencing others in the same direction?”>/b>

It is not easy. Every second there are coming into our world souls not ready for it. We don’t want an increase. All our efforts are directed to helping people to live on earth as they should, so that they are ready for life in our world.

The whole object of our coming back to your world is to teach love, which the Nazarene taught. You must love and not hate one another, or exact revenge.

A Nigerian chief asked Silver Birch for his assessment of justice.

“I ask because in human conditions we attempt to administer justice. We look at the two sides and say one will be guilty. Is there any divine limit to the human understanding of justice?”

You cannot limit justice. Being divine it will operate, just like nature, irrespective of what you wish, think or desire. You cannot make comparisons between divine and human justice. Human justice is fallible, makes mistakes; the innocent is sometimes guilty and the guilty is sometimes innocent. Being human you must err, because you cannot be infallible.

Divine justice is infallible. It cannot make mistakes, because of the law of cause and effect which is unfailing in its operation. You cannot interpose anything between cause and effect; the sequence is unbreakable, inevitable, unalterable. Were it not so, justice would not be divine and the Great Spirit cease to be perfect.

Being human, you will make mistakes. Your judges will give wrong decisions. Your man-made laws cannot apprehend and apply to every condition in your human society. New factors arise for which your laws have not made provision, because they did not foresee them.

The natural laws have foreseen every circumstance, because the Great Spirit is perfect. Nothing is forgotten, nothing is overlooked. All must operate within the framework of natural law. One day perhaps, when wisdom rules your countries, you will choose judges not only for their knowledge of law, but also because their clairvoyance has been sufficiently developed to enable them to see who is innocent and who is guilty.

“Could we say divine justice, which is the natural law, is infallible, but human justice is not infallible? Does that paraphrase what we have been talking about? It is not fallible because we are ordinary, sinful human beings without the full knowledge of the natural law?”

I call that a good paraphrase, but I do not like to call you sinful.

“The New Testament says, ‘Sin is lawlessness; not in operation’.”

We love you because you are human. If you were perfect there would be no point in our coming to you. Probably you would be coming to us to help us on our way.

A detective making his first visit to the circle remarked:

“In my profession I have seen many people destroyed and taken away before their time because of some ferocious act. I have often wondered if it were possible for somebody to talk to them to ensure that this could not happen again.”

Unfortunately too many of them become earthbound, and it takes a long time for enlightenment to come to free them from this self-created prison. It is a difficult problem on which I could enlarge. The true object of their treatment should not be revenge, which is a wrong emotion, but remedial, an attempt at rehabilitation. Justice is not revenge.

“I thought justice was prevention.”

But too often revenge takes priority. In the Old Testament it was “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” But in the New Testament the Nazarene taught not only loving one’s neighbour, but even loving those who hate you. The acid test is the motive all the time. If the motive is right, all things will work out.

* * *

A journalist sought the guide’s advice on her work.

“I have been asked to research and write about warnings that have come to mankind from the spirit world and from other worlds. One stated that nuclear power was evil and should stop, and also spoke about the selfishness of mankind. I would like your voice to be heard. If you have any particular warning, could you formulate it, please?”

I do not regard your nuclear power as evil. The use made of it can be evil. On the other hand, the use that can be made of it could be of tremendous benefit to your world. The decision lies with those who are capable of directing or misdirecting this tremendous power.

As to warnings, do not assume for one moment that we have the equivalent spirit Cassandras who are saying, “Woe, woe, woe,” because there are dreadful cataclysms coming to you.

The position is not simple. The Great Spirit has given His children a measure of free will within limits, so that they can either fill your world with radiance, beauty, glory and abundance or make it a hell on earth. It is man who has this choice.

The more that technology produces, and reveals tremendous powers which it can unleash, so the responsibility becomes heavier as to how these are to be used in your world. There is no other way, so far as I can understand, that the processes of evolution could be accomplished, except that man, a child of a divine parent, with all the divine potential, should be allowed to express that, and flood your world with all the beauty that it could have, and help nature to release its massive bounty for all to share.

That is the choice for man to have. But if he ignores it and worships the god of mammon, is greedy, selfish, avaricious, and cares not for his neighbour and nobody else but himself, then automatically he will fill his country and the world with all the darkness, difficulty, evils, pestilence and disease which are the fruits of a misused free will.

But having said that, we stress that no matter how much power man has at his disposal, it has no comparison with the infinite power which has set limits on all the destruction and havoc that man can wreak in your world. He cannot destroy the entire world or the universe in which he lives.

“So it is still God’s world.”

Yes, it is still the Great Spirit’s world and the Great Spirit must prevail. God is infinite, God is divine love and wisdom, and God provides all His children with the means of sharing in a heavenly kingdom on earth if they so desire.

If you were puppets, marionettes, robots, your life would be meaningless and purposeless. There would be no evolution, no gradual growth towards perfection. It would become a kind of eternal limbo of nothingness. That is not the object.

I who have lived much longer than any of you have learned to regard with awe, wonder, respect and admiration the universal framework that divine perfection has created. Nothing can destroy the operation of laws that infinite intelligence devised.

There is no need for those with knowledge, who are privileged to have a glimpse of the eternal principles upon which all life is governed, to have fear for the future. Despite your technological wonders, your scientific achievements, which can be used for good or ill, there is a limit to the havoc that man can wreak in your world. He has not unfettered, unlimited freedom to destroy the whole of your world and the physical bodies of those who dwell in it.

Love is greater than hate. Spirit is superior to matter. The mightiest power in the universe emanates from the Great Spirit of all life. The natural laws, created by infinite intelligence and governed by divine wisdom, will ensure that slowly and inevitably there will come a better world than the one in which you live.