Ideas and Principles

This is an exploration of Sir George’s ideas and principles. In his books and lectures he is inviting us again and again to think ideas relating to a new world view and to live by them to see whether they feel true to us.

Sir George’s primary teachings and the principles by which he encouraged us to live:

1.    Find Your Own Truth

Sir George often quoted famous poems to show that his ideas were not new; but actually exemplified ideas of respected poets. He was always clear that it is for each of us to decide their own truth; it being a matter for each of us whether this truth was something they shared with him or not. 

Follow ‘your life’s star’ as William Wordsworth would say.

Becoming our true Self is the purpose of our life’s journey.

2.   ‘Awaken’ and work for a better world

This is what Sir George believed was his main purpose -  to help people to awaken to their true nature and the truth that we are all spiritual beings and are beautiful and eternal.

He loved and often recited a poem called ‘The Sleep of Prisoners’ by Christopher Fry in which this teaching is expressed with the clarity that is so vital to his work. 

“The human heart can go to the lengths of God.
Dark and cold we may be, but this
Is no winter now. The frozen misery
of centuries breaks, cracks, begins to move;
The thunder is the thunder of the floes,
the thaw, the flood, the upstart Spring.
Thank God our time is now when wrong
comes up to face us everywhere,
never to leave us till we take
the longest stride of soul men ever took.
Affairs are now soul size.
The enterprise is exploration into God.
Where are you making for?
It takes so many thousand years to wake
But will you wake, for pity’s sake”

— Christopher Fry

3.    Everything is interconnected.

Nothing is separate.  All is connected energetically.  This is a truth which has been taught for hundreds of years.  However, it is fundamental and should be re-taught regularly.  Sir George loved these simple poetic extracts: 

“All are but parts of one stupendous whole,
whose body nature is and God the soul”

— Alexander Pope

“All things by immortal power
Near and far
Hiddenly to each other linked are
That thou canst not stir a flower
Without troubling of a star”

— Francis Thompson

4.   Beauty in Nature

Sir George believed that it was every teacher’s and parent’s duty to teach people and especially children, about beauty and in particular beauty in nature.

“Beauty is truth, truth is beauty, that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know”

— John Keats

5.    God is in each of us – like a ‘Droplet of Divinity’

“Do not look for God outside of yourself”

— Peter Deunov

 This droplet of divinity, which is in each of us, is eternal.  It cannot die.  Sir George refers to this as the ‘little I AM’; that part of human make up which is perfect and everlasting.

 The ‘big I AM’ being the universal and eternal essence of God.  

6.    Man is a spiritual being housed in a body which is his temple

It is up to us to look after our body, lift its quality of desire in such a way that it can be the receptacle for love, creative life and service.  George called this ‘right living’.

“Know ye not that ye are the temple of God,
and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you?”

— 1 Corinthians 3 v. 16

 7.   Earth is the training ground for pre-existing souls

Reincarnation (see the lecture Sir George gave at Geseke’s house under Articles/Lectures)

This idea is expressed by George as an ‘exploration into God’.  George was clear that Earth is a playground for the soul and that by experimentation in life the soul grows ever greater.  George believed that souls returned to live different experiences in different incarnations and that there was a Divine plan behind each life on Earth.  Many agree with this, including one of England’s great poets:                     

“Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The soul that rises with us, our life’s Star.
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar.”

— William Wordsworth

  8.     Our Earth is a living being

Sir George urged people to look after this beautiful living place. Recognition that the Earth is part of the oneness of us and that we live symbiotically, will lead to us treating the world with respect and gratitude, and in turn the world will be a better place.                                                                                                                                                                                    

“O Earth, living, breathing, thinking Earth!
On the day we treasure you
As you have treasured us
Humanness is born!”

— Evelyn Nolt

9.      Learning to live through our Inner Beauty

By working consciously with all aspects of love we are able to connect with our inner serenity.   Working with this inner resource will transform us.   This will enable us to move away from the uglier sides of ourselves; judging others, criticising, doubting, fearing and anger.

“If the sun and moon should doubt, they immediately would go out”

“We are put on earth a little space, that we may learn to bear the beams of love”

— William Blake

10.       We have free choice

One of the great gifts of life is free choice.  We must learn to use this well.  We can choose to live proactively; not reactively.  Living proactively is living through ‘initiative’.  Initiative is a gift from our ‘higher’ selves.  We can choose to listen and follow that initiative.  We can also choose not to do so.  That is one of the great gifts to humankind. 

“Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it
Until one is committed there is hesitancy
the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative there is one elementary truth,
the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and endless plans.
That the moment one definitely commits oneself then providence moves too.
All sorts of things occur to help one that would never have otherwise occurred
A whole stream of events issue from the decision, raising in one’s favor,
all manner of unforeseen incidents, and meetings and material assistance which no man could have dreamed would come his way.
Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it.
Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.
Begin it now.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

11.       Christ is the Heart Energy of God

When I speak of Christ I want to make it clear that the Christ is the Heart energy of God, who incarnated and took on incarnation in the body of Jesus 2000 years ago. The first time that a God experienced what it was like to be human. Now the real trouble in our Christian civilisation is that we have identified Christ with Jesus, Jesus Christ, born on Christmas Day. We have missed the profound truth, that the great occultists, like Sandow, have found, that what happened then was that the vehicle of Jesus was prepared to receive the God, not on Christmas Day, but at the baptism of Jordan when Jesus was 30. The Being that descended in the form of a dove and lived for 3 years up to the crucifixion, is the Christ, Jesus having stood back, so to speak. We are called upon to grasp the notion that the Christ is the heart power, the heart energies of God. Gods thoughts had first poured out the archetypal ideas of nature and the next stage, poured out the heart energies, which are simply love and He needed a being who could receive this (very high) energy of love.

Sir George Trevelyan - Lecture on 9th August 1991 in Warwick

12.       The Rising Tide of Love - The Second Coming

The phenomenon that really matters in our time is not Saddam’s wars or whatever, all the things that fill the newspapers with violence. The real news of our time, the secret news, is what I would call ‘a rising tide of love’, flooding, seeping and flowing through our society. This is the concept that from the great source, love is being poured out, seeping and flowing and running round and infiltrating, rejected and finding souls it can fill and then souls finding other souls who have been filled by it until a group like this comes together, in love; it is quite different from just falling in love, in the sense, but love as a force, flowing, a rising tide. To me this is the most exciting thing and I strongly get to the feeling that this is the chief phenomenon of our age, not all the violence, violence is old hat. We’ve done that forever, and it doesn’t mean that fellows cannot be noble and go and shoot, of course, we have to go and fight wars, in a society based on rivalry and getting property and holding, defending your nation or whatever it is. the absolute phenomenon would seem to be that the Christ, not Jesus Christ, forget that, Jesus is doing another job now. The Christ, in other words the heart aspect of God, is now being let loose to flood and flow through the earth and therefore may be picked up by any soul that is sufficiently skilled and has cleared itself of rivalry and hate and all that and become a vacuum that could be filled with Christ love.

The new incarnation, the second incarnation of the Christ after two thousand years, is not another Jesus, is not his coming to earth again in a chosen body, but it is a coming to earth as a flood of love. It is flooding the planet in a rising tide, and therefore free for any soul that has emptied itself sufficiently from rivalry, envy, fear, anger, greed etc. This isn’t a new plan or a new movement, but may it be a truth. It could begin to leap from heart to heart and it could be behind what in the whole youth world is bringing groups together in a new way. It could be a new love that fills and permeates our hearts and it could be making a human soul a receptacle into which the living Christ can flood. This is the present incarnation and it means that any of our souls could be filled with Christ. Christ is present everywhere, for Christ is the love aspect of the heart of God, flooding the world and being constantly rejected. Christ in that sense is flooding this room, not personalised as Jesus, but as a force of love and we can begin to see the wonder, that in so far as we have stilled ‘self’ and cut out as a primary motive, its desire for gain and power and readiness to be violent in order to get it.. it may be that a human change is beginning to take place.

Sir George Trevelyan, Lecture on 9th August 1991 in Warwick

Quotations & Excerpts from his Lectures

All quotations below are taken from Sir George Trevelyan.