Yesterday I was speaking with a Richmond circle member after our Monday meditation about some issues in our shared service to our church. I expressed my desire to use this work, like much of my other activities, as a study in collective governance: a way to inch towards social memory. He is wise enough to acknkowledge the loftiness of the goal and the hubris of tying my gripes with the details and inefficiencies of the roles to this goal.

Indeed, I was reminded that, for yours truly, the struggle for freedom, justice, and equality has always been motivated by more than mere idealism. In many ways, it is scratching an ancient itch for conflict, to have the kind of decisive confrontation that tends to settle the matter one way or another. It might even be described as a death drive, a craving for finality, and thereby a way to scream out in my rejection of the shackles of that for which we settle. And yet, here I remain – not in a collective utopia, no martyr to a glorious cause, but lingering in this fallen and troubled world as fettered as any.

Reading this passage from Hatonn this morning helped clear my head tremendously. Freedom is not out there. At the top of the pyramid of wordly power, if one is not oneself, one is a slave. But if one languishes in a cage as one’s authentic self, there is no greater release. It is a release from the burden of having to manufacture and reproduce a self that responds to the world. This is the power and promise of the instrumental human: one who has gone beyond the yellow ray identity to tap into that endless spring of love.

A person can only truly serve in love once they discover for themself precisely how little they have to offer as a person as such. But if one’s freedom arises from abandoning the responsibility of footing the cost of freedom oneself, it nevertheless confers a greater responsibility to yield one’s service to the power that does pay the bills. In surrending the self, the personality, even the worldly ambitions to the Creator’s inscrutable ends, one gains everything. In the Creator is freedom precisely because in the Creator there is infinity, and the nickle and diming of the world can be transcended.

Let us also set aside this idea that we cannot let go of the personality because others need help. Others need the Creator. They don’t need us personally. We don’t even need our ego identities except as an instrument, not as a conductor. Far from a surrender in abject poverty, it is a relaxing into the authentic wealth of existence, one in which a greater end comes into view not as a result of looking further so much as of letting our heads be turned slightly to see what is already before us.

I am Hatonn, and I greet you in the love and the light of the infinite Creator. It is a very great pleasure for us to be with you again. We have missed our chances to speak with you very much. But we are afraid that at your present level of planetary intensity of political feelings we may well be absent from time to time, as you would say. We come to you upon the winds of love and are very honored to take a small part in your meditation. This evening we would talk to you of freedom, my friends.

There was once a young man who desired freedom, for he was a young man of great sensitivity. And when he saw the poverty, the hunger, the suffering in the world about him, he could not understand how these people could be bound to their suffering. This young man spent years working actively to alleviate suffering and promote personal freedom for his brothers and sisters, wherever he found the need. But ultimately he was betrayed by his own bitterness, for he knew that no matter what he did, it would never be enough to alleviate prison, which hunger and poverty had caused for so many upon your sphere.

And so he set all his daily work aside and went upon a journey, to seek an understanding of the reason why men must be bound by suffering, and why they could not be free. And he asked many people and received many answers. For there are those who believe many different things upon your planetary sphere, my friends. And each of those believes that they are the percipience of the truth. Some believe there is no such thing as freedom. Others believe that some must pay a price and are bound by their own previous errors. But with none of these answers was he satisfied.

One day he stopped upon an isle, for his ship needed supplies. And he was free to roam about this small tropical place. And he saw poverty again and conditions which were not conducive to health. And he found a native upon the island who spoke his language. And he told this native of his great dilemma. The native was a large man and his laugh was equally loud. And his laughter rang through the small room in which they sat. And the native man tapped his forehead, “Freedom,” he said, “Here is freedom, nowhere else.” And the young man cried, “But what about all of those who are starving, or ill, or poor?” And the big man reached out and tapped the seeker upon the forehead, “Their freedom is in your head,” he said, “You must let them go, then, their freedom will be in their heads.”

My friends, you do not live in an objective universe. All those things which you see about you are in fact not what they seem, as you are well aware. Any limitation which you might experience is a limitation only because of your perception of the way things should be as opposed to the way things are. If you desire to be what you are, and if in that being you discover that you seek the truth by nature, then, my friends, you will have achieved a type of personal freedom that is not known by those who are swayed by their perceptions of what should be but is not.

If you are fully grounded in your knowledge of who you are, then, my friends, you are free to fulfill your desire to know the truth and to express that truth in any way that you may need. There are as many different works as there are people. The great secret, my friends, is that there is only one spirit, and that is love, that provides all works for all people who dwell in love. If you try to change the world, if you try to help others, if you only modestly try to help one person, and try to do it upon your own, thinking and puzzling and perception, you will almost surely fail. For your perceptions are not their perceptions. And indeed, my friends, unless you allow yourself to flow into the channel of love, your help will often be unpalatable to the ones you seek to help. You are free only when you snap the cords of your own desire to be somebody in this world and to do things in this world as your own person. When you have accomplished the dismantling of your desire for reputation, then, you have no more bonds or limitations and you are free.

There are still those who are hungry, who are poor, and who suffer. This is so, my friends. We would never attempt to cause you confusion by stating that we do not know that your planetary influence is a difficult one. But each man is free if he desires to be. And you yourself are free of whatever limitations you may chose to have brought upon yourself [in] the moment in which you allow yourself to be one who desires to know the truth, one who seeks to know the love of the Creation, for this love, my friends, is a very powerful thing. Those who need you will be drawn to you, for you are not responsible for the world. You are responsible for yourself and in yourself dwells the world. Those who are drawn to you will ask and as you open yourself to love, you will know that which is of help. We urge you never to volunteer esoteric information to those who have not asked, nor to withhold it from any serious student.

But pay attention, my friends, always, to the only person who can be free, and that is yourself. A desire for freedom is an impossible desire, for you dwell in the prison of a body, of a gravity well, of an illusion that is heavy. And yet, you are willing prisoners of the catalyst of the experience of this planetary sphere. The way to freedom lies in accepting the conditions of your particular incarnation and in asking to know the truth. It is written in your holy works, my friends, “Seek and know the truth, for the truth shall make you free.” Freedom does not come without a commitment, not to self, not to what you would call ego, but to the truth and to service in the name of that truth.

We are aware that you have a great desire to be of service and that you feel a responsibility to your kind, especially in these days that you face now in the unfoldment of your planetary experience. But, you must work on yourself, and know that as you achieve a state of true desire to know the love of the Creator, a burning desire to feel the spirit of that love which created you, you will then find all else that you seek added unto you. It is not an easy path, my friends, but it is a fruitful one.

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Therefore, my friends, we ask you to be at peace with the world as it is, knowing that it is in each man’s grasp to perceive his world in any way in which he sees fit. This is difficult for you to imagine, for you have never starved or suffered in the way some of your brothers and sisters have. But you must take stock of how you came to be where you are, what advantages this has given you as a channel for the love and the light of the Creator. And then you must seek to do the will of that love that created you, and set you in this particular place at this particular time. We all, my friends, have work to do. Ours is to be available to you and to those upon your planet who desire or require our love. Yours is whatever you make it. For indeed, my friends, you are free. You have only to break the tiny chains that keep you from your desire.

- Hatonn via Rueckert: May 25, 1980