Originally, the idea of the study groups goes back, of course, to Billy, because, already in the initial years of FIGU, various core-group members, prompted by Billy, maintained diverse, little study groups which they led themselves. Thus, regular meetings, such as these, existed in Schaffhausen, Kloten, Winterthur, in Schongau, Konstanz und Munich, and not the least, in the Center itself.
In the past years, a series of FIGU study groups then came about worldwide which, in the beginning, only loosely worked together with the core-group of 49 at the Semjase-Silver-Star-Center. In part, overseas study groups existed with only a few persons, about whom, at the beginning, we were not even informed, and who got together sporadically, or regularly, in order to read and study the spiritual teaching together, in the narrower or broader sense, or to translate it into their country’s language. One of the first study groups which formed was the South German Study Group, which was founded by Günter Neugebauer und Andrea Grässl, however, before they made their way into the core-group. Soon followed, in Japan and the USA, the first official FIGU groups, which became “official” FIGU groups because of their federal laws, because they had to register as associations with their own statutes, in their respective countries. By and by, further little study groups, and study groups, came about, which began to make efforts – extending beyond the study of the spiritual teaching – to do publicity work in some form or other. These efforts then led to the first conflicts, because it was not understood that the spiritual teaching is not to be spread by missionising, rather that every human being’s personal freedom of opinion, and free right to to make a decision, must always be preserved. From these first efforts, the core-group then worked out initial, simple rules which the study groups had to bear in mind, because we recognised that the mission could only be helped towards the desired success through an appropriate order and an efficient structure, that is to say, an appropriate system.
Original article on They Fly