CHAPTER NINE
The "Dangerous Forties" in the Life-Cycle of Humanity - 6

It is always possible for anyone to take the first steps on the way of vertical relatedness to the Earth-being. These steps have to be taken in the concreteness of the opportunities and challenges of the state of personhood. We are all concrete persons. We are concrete individual solutions to ancient failures, reawakened as karma in the consciousness and activity of the Earth-being. But in the facing of this karma, what was at first only a karma-neutralizing possibility may engender the clear realization of the place and function that each autonomous human being, in his or her individual selfhood, already potentially occupies within the planetary Pleroma. This place and function is the individual Soul of the human being as it could operate within the whole planet's Commonsoul, thus fulfilling the archetype once created by Hierarchies of the divine Mind. It could operate in this way. The place and function are here. The potentiality is present Why does the process of actualization seem to require "so much time"? The reason is that it is time. It is the waiting. Yet, even more, it can be the doing — one step after another. We may refer to these steps as a series of lives, incarnations; but it is one process.
      Of this process we, as embodied persons, should ask nothing. No profit is involved — only to "walk on" with the rhythm of the Movement of Wholeness beating within our heart and mind, peacefully, in uttermost simplicity. This rhythm may be difficult to hear, yet it can absorb the many raucous or exalting sounds of personal relationships into the vibrations of a silence in which Wholeness experiences itself, always and everywhere.
      The crisis all human beings face is a crisis of belief. Ineluctably, crucially, even if imprecisely, one great question arises out of the challenges of one situation after another: what is possible? Sooner or later, anything is possible which a focused, resolute will starts without demanding of any situation that it, and no other, actualize the potentiality. The presence of Wholeness is implied always and everywhere, at whatever level of reality a whole situation operates. But it has to be the whole situation, not merely "I" assuming the role of the experiencer and asking for profit or "spiritual" growth.