Written at the height of the cold war by Paul Brunton:
8.1.11
That man’s own free will has created so much of the evils and misery in the world, is obvious. That with his own moral improvement this deplorable situation would itself improve is equally obvious. But the situation itself could not have arisen except by the permission and within the conception of the World-Mind. Where is there more than partial freedom for a man when, at the very beginning, he is forced to accept and given no chance to select a certain race, a certain country, a particular family, a particular economic status, a condition of health or ill-health and an abundance or lack of energy, intellect, will and intuition? Thus, much of the course and something of the end of his life is dictated by nature, fate or God. No human entity can determine its own course with complete freedom. No human entity can deviate from the cosmic plan with complete independence. The freedom of all human entities is limited, as their power is dependent. Man has never possessed, does not now possess and never can possess absolute free will. Above his own fluctuating will there is the inexorable cosmic will. All his individual development is but part of, and controlled by, the evolutionary plan for the cosmos itself. It has not been left to his internal whim or external chance what the outcome of that development shall be.
8.1.12
If the whole cosmos is an emanation of the Divine Mind which, although mysteriously transcendent, is also significantly immanent, there can be no force and no entity within it that is not fundamentally rooted in the beneficence, the wisdom and the serenity of divinity. It may have its origins obscured, it may appear, think and act evilly, but it can do so only by the permission and consent of God. Therefore, it is not only man’s ignorant and wrongful use of his free will that accounts for human evil and human suffering but also the cosmic Idea itself. And this is something outside his control and beyond the operation of his will. The wrongs and pain that shadow his existence were sanctioned and included in the method of his inner development.
8.1.13
This is God’s world; it could not be anyone else’s. It must ultimately be an expression of God’s wisdom. Therefore if we find in it things and people, events and sights which offend us because they are diabolic rather than godlike, the reaction of instinctive repugnance is human enough but the shortcoming is in our faculty of vision, the unpleasantness is in our limitation of the understanding, and can be nowhere else. Everywhere there are signs that the divine power is working in the midst of us. But eyes that are not spiritually opened naturally fail to see them. We would do better to complain at the presence of our own blindness than at the absence of God’s activity. What we see in the world’s present state and past history depends on what we are in ourselves. If we are morally crooked, we shall regard most of the people we meet as being so too. If we can find no deeper meaning in our own nature, no higher purpose in our own lives, we shall see none in the world outside. The discovery of a divine self in our own heart will be a pointing finger to the presence of a divine mind behind the whole universe to which we belong.