In this letter, Roberto Assagioli addresses his friends in a time of global crisis and offers spiritual guidance.
By: Roberto Assagioli, Original Title: Lettera agli Amici[i]. Translated And Edited With Notes by Jan Kuniholm[ii]
Abstract: In this letter, Roberto Assagioli addresses his friends in a time of global crisis and offers spiritual guidance. He emphasizes the importance of understanding the deeper meaning behind current events and the purpose of life. Assagioli encourages individuals to detach themselves from the old ways and embrace the new era with courage and faith. He suggests that war, although destructive, can also serve as a catalyst for spiritual awakening and positive change. Assagioli urges individuals to cultivate inner strength, practice forgiveness, and work towards unity and cooperation. He recommends the use of prayer and invocation to promote peace and harmony. Assagioli concludes by emphasizing the role of each individual in becoming pioneers of a future civilization characterized by synthesis and spiritual values.
In this age that is so grave for humanity, I feel impelled to address you in a brotherly way. It is good to try to help each other to see clearly and thus to act rightly. There are attitudes and decisions to be made that can have much spiritual significance and on which our external activities depend. The present situation tests us, raises problems, offers opportunities and imposes tasks on each of us. I will tell you in a simple and sincere way what I think, and be glad if my words can bring you some light and be of comfort and encouragement.
Let us first try to understand the spiritual, that is, the real meaning of what is happening. In order to get there — albeit within the limits of our present development — we must not let ourselves be disturbed by the immediate events, but frame them within a larger whole and penetrate them with deeper insight. It is necessary to go back to the basic principles of any spiritual worldview.
In the tumult, travail — and even moments of personal fulfillment — of earthly life, we too often forget that this life is not an end in itself. Its main purpose is to promote the development of consciousness, by means of a series of experiences, lessons, training and “trials.” Individual and collective cycles follow one another with alternating fortunes: we are born, live on earth and then our bodies die; civilizations and cultures arise, have their period of greatness and glory, then decay and end; continents emerge from the oceans and then sink again. But all this is not in vain. Through the appearance and disappearance of forms, souls awaken, develop, and become liberated. Humans thus ascend from their primitive semi-animal state, through various stages of physical, emotional and mental evolution, to the superhuman level, about which the Prophets, Heroes, Saints, and Geniuses give us testimony and promise.
In all this is revealed a wonderful Divine Plan that cannot fail, because it is inspired by Love, arranged with Wisdom, and actuated with Power. We certainly cannot, with our “short range of vision,” comprehend it in its entirety, but with the help of spiritual conceptions and our intuition we can and must try to glimpse at least its closest and most accessible aspects.
Current life seems chaotic, contradictory and frightening to us. This is because we are in a period of transition: a civilization, a culture — the one which we have belonged to and which has nourished us — is in rapid decline: its forms are wearing out, or collapsing thunderously, covering the ground with wreckage. At the same time we are witnessing the disorderly and confused beginning of a new era, which has rough, violent, sometimes almost barbaric aspects. The dust rising from the rubble mixes with that produced by the feverish activity of the workers, so that our vision is blurred and our breathing becomes labored. Not a few people have an impression of regression, of decay, and out of their mouths come heartfelt nostalgia for the “good times,” bitter criticisms of the present, and gloomy predictions for the future. But this negative attitude is not right, much less spiritual. It is not right to compare the best products of the present culture with the first outlines and tentative steps of the new civilization.
In any case, it is futile to cling to the past: we must be persuaded once and for all that the old forms have had their day and must now perish, or be transformed, to serve as a base for the new building, as a trunk on which to graft the new plant. For those who have a spiritual conception of life and who aspire to “live it,” it is easier (or, perhaps it is more accurate to say, “less difficult”) and at any rate more appropriate, to set to work decisively to disengage themselves from the old and to welcome the new spirit into themselves, fostering its best manifestations and its “incarnation” in suitable forms.
The most bitter and violent struggles that are taking place now in every field — not only in those on the battlefield — are mainly due to the fact that people, both individually and collectively, through selfish attachment, through fear, or through ignorance, refuse to loosen their hold on their material, emotional and mental possessions. In the outer world this is unfolding before our eyes with dramatic evidence; but in a less visible way it is happening in so many other ways: parents who love their children with possessive affection are doing it; all those who do not want to leave old habits and ways of living, who do not want to change their ideas are doing it — in fact, it is these ideas, doctrines, preconceptions that possess people and hold them captive .
Let us also remember that at the end of every [world] cycle there is a “reckoning,” the unloading of the effects of even (what seem to us) remote causes, together with a rapid flooding of the effects due to recent causes. If it were permissible to use joking words in such a serious subject, it could be like a “going out of business sale! — liquidation at any price!”
Let us now consider the most serious and most striking manifestation of this situation: war. It is natural that every good and sensitive soul deplores the incalculable destruction and terrible suffering it brings. But this should not make us close our eyes to the positive aspects it can have. One of these was pointed out by a Spiritual Teacher with an ingenious and illuminating analogy. Here are his lofty words:
Your vision is often distorted by the pain and suffering to which forms are subjected, both your own and others,’ both individually and collectively, so that you do not see clearly the purpose and urgency that animates the life within the form.
For many of you, for example, war is a supreme disaster, an agony to be avoided at all costs in the future, a terrible event denoting the wickedness of man and the incredible, blind indifference of God. For us who see things from the inner side, war is similar to a major surgical operation, done for the purpose of saving the life of the patient. Speaking symbolically, a virulent streptococcal infection threatened the life of mankind and the operation was done for the purpose of saving the life, not the form.
This operation had some measure of success. Certainly, the germ is not eliminated, and it makes its presence felt in various infected areas of Humanity’s body. Another surgical operation may be necessary, not to destroy the present civilization, but to overcome the infection and eliminate the fever.[i]
Therefore, the sense of dejection and discouragement that some who had most fervently worked for peace through prayer and invocation had in the aftermath of the outbreak of war is unjustified. It is not true that war constitutes a defeat for constructive forces: on the contrary, it is likely, by its very violence and the reactions it provokes, to hasten their advent. To take a right attitude toward war we must understand and always keep in mind that God — or Life — has and continually uses a wonderful alchemical power that transmutes evil into good.
The stimulating and awakening function of the difficulties and sufferings brought by war was indicated by the above-mentioned Teacher in the following words:
What matters is what is happening to humanity as a whole and “behind the scenes;” what matters to us, and what we are seeing, is the development of human consciousness, and this is being developed by reacting to the conditions that arise in each country, and I tell you, friends, that under the pressure of the conditions imposed by the present civilization — the mental preoccupations, the terror of marching armies, the thundering of so many voices, the oppression of economic conditions — human consciousness is rapidly awakening from its long lethargy; the great and fundamental reality you call “the human mentality,” is beginning to focus on things of value and express itself vividly. That is what is important, and not what is happening in one country or another.[ii]
It is on the basis of this recognition that those who think can best serve. They must learn to focus their attention on the awakening consciousness, and not on what churns at the surface. Forms may suffer, but humanity’s inherent consciousness is becoming, during this century, manifestly divine . . . Just as the farmer plows the soil of his field and turns over the clods, bringing to the surface what was underneath, thereby preparing the ground for sowing and for the new harvest, so it is now happening in the world. Everything that happens is preparation for a sowing and its effects. Such effects will build the culture and civilization of the future. In the light of these spiritual conceptions, it is not difficult to discern what our current duties, tasks and great opportunities are.
The first and fundamental duty of each of us — not least because it is the necessary basis for all fruitful action — is to stand firm inwardly, not to allow ourselves to be swept away by the individual and collective currents of worry, fear, despair on the one hand; and of antagonisms, accusations, hatreds on the other. If we give in to those emotions and passions, we lose spiritual contact, we no longer see clearly, and we cannot give help to others; on the contrary, we become a moral weight on them.
Therefore, first of all, let us work within ourselves: let us cast out all weak self-pity, all petty selfish concerns, that are especially unworthy now when there are so many who suffer bitterly and have lost everything dearest to them. Let us learn the admittedly very hard lesson of living without the props of illusory security, in the uncertainty of tomorrow, with a continuous act of courage and faith. And in our relationships with others, let us not succumb to the tendency to complain, to “blow off steam;” let us not pour out our burdens on others. Nor do we indulge in the impulse to lash out at those who may seem to be the perpetrators of the current ills, for they are but the agents and instruments of much larger forces, of circumstances and effects stemming from the mystery of the past, of necessary upheavals and transformations.
What is actually needed is a reversal of the whole customary way of feeling and reacting. Such a reversal is admirably expressed in the “Simple Prayer” that many know, but which I repeat because it can never be said enough until we live it:
SIMPLE PRAYER
O Lord, make me an instrument of Your Peace.
Where there is hatred, let me place Love,
Where there is offense, let me place forgiveness,
Where there is discord, let me place union,
Where there is error, let me place truth,
Where there is doubt, let me place faith,
Where there is despair, let me place hope,
Where there is darkness, let me place light,
Where there is sadness, let me place joy.
O Lord, let me seek not so much
To be understood, as to understand;
To be loved, as much as to love.
For it is in giving that one receives,
In forgetting that one finds oneself,
In forgiving that one is forgiven,
In dying that one is resurrected to Eternal Life.[iii]
However, someone might ask, “But how does you acquire the power to carry out this great reversal?” One acquires it through the fervent and constant use of all the well-known methods of inner spiritual development, through which we come into contact with our soul and with Spiritual Reality, with God, drawing Light and Strength from it. Among these methods, I especially recommend the regular use of meditation, by which we discipline our emotions and mind, and gain a growing awareness of our true spiritual I or Self.[iv]
Thus one can come to inwardly stay au-dessus de la mêlée.[v] This, it should be noted, does not constitute evasion or “spiritual egoism” at all. It would be so only if it led us to become uncaring of the pains of others or of the travails of the world by enclosing ourselves in a separative shell. But that is at the opposite end of all true spirituality, which instead gives a growing sense of union with all that lives, and arouses active love. On the contrary, rising above the levels of struggles, passions, and illusions is a necessary condition for exerting beneficial action on those levels. It is a general law of life that “to master a plane one must transcend it.”
But as we try to do this, we can also set ourselves other more specific tasks. The central one — suggested by what I set out earlier — is to become pioneers of future civilization. Therefore we must first try to catch a glimpse of what its characteristics, its qualities, and its virtues are; and then work hard to develop them in ourselves, and to live them, so as to radiate them around us and promote them in others. On this occasion I can only briefly mention that, according to various teachings and clear indications, the main character of the new age will be synthesis. This synthesis is to be implemented in two directions:
- In a vertical sense, with the integration of the three aspects — physical, emotional, mental — of our personality with each other, and then with the Soul. Thus the painful conflicts between mind and heart, body and spirit, that plague so many human beings are overcome and resolved. With this “psychosynthesis,” a person truly becomes one; and at the same time capable of discerning and feeling the essential unity of the grand life that animates the universe. In the field of culture, the trend toward Synthesis will manifest itself in an increasing reconciliation and integration of science, philosophy, religion and art.
- In a horizontal sense, with the overcoming of egocentrism, individualism, and competition, and with the development of increasing group unity and cooperation. The recognition of an ever closer yet more extensive interdependence among people, and of groups among them, will lead to a spirit of collaboration and a harmonious organization of society in which all interests will be reconciled according to a just ranking of values.
We cannot yet glimpse what new and superior forms of civilization and culture will be created by this spirit of synthesis, but we can see clearly what the lines of march are, and begin to tread them with joyful enthusiasm, feeling the dignity and value of our function as pioneers. This affirmation of spiritual values, this work of integration, understanding, and harmonious cooperation can be carried out in every field: in the family, in schools, in offices, in professional activities, everywhere.
It is everyone’s task to try to use the most suitable ways, which vary according to different persons and circumstances: one must combine a sense of expediency, tact, and wise discernment with fervor and momentum, meeting each person where he or she is, and helping him or her to take what is their next step.
There is, however, something everyone can do: it is the use of prayer, of invocation, and of spiritual affirmation to promote the coming of a future of Peace, of Union, of Human Synthesis. There is no need for me to go on at length to demonstrate the incalculable power of that inner action which puts us in touch with Forces, with Beings of the Higher Worlds, and with God Himself; which attracts and brings down upon humanity Their Light, Their Peace, Their Love.
We are all convinced of this, but out of a curious and (let me say it) deplorable moral laziness, we generally use this great beneficent power only to a small extent. Now, however, under the sting of pain, uncertainty, and danger, and because of the pity aroused by so much suffering, there is a growing revival of those spiritual practices. Among the beautiful and varied prayers and invocations in which the will for good and the aspiration for peace in the world are currently expressed, there is one that I consider particularly suitable and advisable for several reasons. It has an entirely universal character and therefore can be used as much by the most orthodox religious people as by those who have no definite faith.
It seems to me, then, that with few and concise sentences it touches the most essential points for the needs of the present hour. And also, it is already widely used. Its use was begun in 1936, and now it is repeated by hundreds of thousands of people all over the world. Those who, like us, know something of the laws governing the action of psychospiritual forces can gain some idea of the value and power of such a “chain of force” and the benefits to themselves and others of joining it, helping to increase its effectiveness:
INVOCATION
Let the Forces of Light bring illumination to mankind.
Let the Spirit of Peace be spread abroad.
May Men of goodwill everywhere meet in a spirit of cooperation.
May forgiveness on the part of all men be the keynote at this time.
Let power attend the efforts of the Great Ones.
So let it be, and help us to do our part.[vi]
* * *
The use of this Invocation succeeds most effectively if it is said aloud or in a half-voice, and not merely repeated silently. It is good, then, to take and create every possible opportunity to say it together with others. I need not remind you of Christ’s great promise: “For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of them.”[vii] It is appropriate to say it often: the effectiveness of repetition is immense. Those who do commercial advertising know this and benefit greatly from it. Those who work for spiritual and humanitarian purposes should certainly not be outdone!!! It is, therefore, recommended to say it at least twice a day, preferably at the beginning and end of the day’s activity in the world. If someone already uses other prayers for peace and for the good of mankind, it is appropriate for him to add the Invocation to them, without omitting those. Given the enormous need, one can never do too much in this area. But the most important thing is to avoid the easy danger of falling into a mechanical and habitual use of this, as of any other prayer. For it to be vitally effective, it needs to be said with ever-renewed fervor and ever-increasing understanding. The first requirement is obvious. The second, however, requires some clarification.
The Invocation is so simple and clear that it easily gives the illusion that we have understood it well and need not ponder its meaning. Instead, the spiritual realities it evokes, like any spiritual reality, have — even in their simplicity — almost unfathomable depths of meaning and boundless extensions of application. It is good, therefore, to take each phrase as the subject of careful and insistent meditation. If we do so, the questions and developments multiply in surprising ways:
Who are the Forces of Light? What is the Light they bring? What can be the effects of this Light on Humanity? What is really the Spirit of Peace? What Peace do we desire? (Recall the difference made by Christ between His peace and the peace the world gives). What does “cooperation” mean? In what ways and fields could and should we cooperate? How and with whom can I demonstrate the Spirit of Cooperation — me, now?
What is the real spiritual meaning of forgiveness? What effects can it have? How would the world be transformed if all or most people wanted to forgive? Do I really want and can I forgive? Who are the Great Beings? What does it take, and what can each of us do, for THEIR work to be powerful?
What is our part in this? How can we be helped to implement it?
As you can see, there is much to meditate on. In truth, let’s recognize that we usually remain on the surface of everything, and we do not even remotely suspect the treasures that are hidden in the depths of Life. In order not to lose what we manage to discover through meditation, to be able to process it, assimilate it and put it to value for ourselves and others, it is good to put it down in writing as it comes to our minds, or even to follow Father Gratry’s wise advice, “Meditez en écrivant.”[viii]
If we do this, the Invocation will become something alive for us and, like any living thing, in continuous development; it will become like an “Inner Presence” to which we will give the best of ourselves and from which we will receive more and more help and blessings. As we use the Invocation there will naturally arise in us the urge to spread it, to have others participate in this task of Good. One of the easiest ways is to enclose it in each of our private letters.
But each of our comments and encouragements, either verbal or in writing, increases the effectiveness of our dissemination. Such “soul-to-soul” transmission can reach unpredictable and unexpected proportions and effects. Let us remember again that the associated forces do NOT add up, but MULTIPLY.
In conclusion, I repeat that the essential thing (whether we use the Invocation or not) is to understand the significance of the present world situation, to feel the urgency of spiritual action, and to resolve to do our part with all our souls.
To the extent that we succeed, we will become Centers — more or less alive and strong — of spiritual radiation, and the good we can do is immense. I am convinced that the immediate fate of HUMANITY may depend especially on the number and the power of such Centers and their united action.
[i] Source Unknown. —Ed.
[ii] Source Unknown. —Ed.
[iii] There are several versions of this, said to be the “simple prayer” of St. Francis. The differences are slight. The version given is a translation of Assagioli’s own text, not one taken from other sources. —Tr.
[iv] Instructions on Meditation are found in various books. One of the most recommendable in this regard is From Intellect to Intuition by Alice A. Bailey. —Author’s Note. This book is available from www.lucistrust.org. —Ed.
[v] French: “above the fray.” —Tr.
[vi] This is the first stanza of the first version of The Great Invocation enunciated by Alice Bailey (in English) before the beginning of World War II, in 1936. A second stanza was added in 1940. In 1945 a final revision was made and that version is now translated into 70 languages and used world wide. —Ed.
[vii] Matthew 18:20 (RSV). —Ed.
[viii] French: “Meditate while writing.” —Tr.
[i] This document taken from www.psicoenergetica.com. A note there indicated that it was written during the final period of the World War II. —Ed.
[ii] Interpolations by this editor are shown in [brackets]. —Ed.
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