PATHWORK LECTURES FOR THIS FALL
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Greetings my dearest, dearest friends. Blessings for every one of you, and blessed be this new year. May it be crowned with success in your endeavors for spiritual growth.
People are often confused by apparent contradictions in spiritual teachings. We have discussed this a number of times, and I always point out the common denominator which brings together two apparent contradictions and thereby eliminates an either/or situation.
Tonight’s topic is a fundamental one for your approach to life. Every one of you can find substantial help in this lecture if you think deeply about my words. They will answer questions whether or not you were aware of these questions within yourself.
There are two philosophies about life and spiritual reality which seem completely contradictory. One says that the spiritually and emotionally mature person has to learn to accept the difficulties in life. In order to cope with life, people have to accept what they cannot immediately change, what is beyond their direct sphere of influence. It says that lack of acceptance breeds disharmony, anxiety, and tension, increases the difficulties, and destroys peace of mind. The ability to accept the inevitable — such as death, or other acts of destiny — is a gauge of maturity and denotes a well-rounded personality.
The other philosophy says that nothing negative need be accepted, that all hardship, even death, is unnecessary. It says that there is no destiny other than the one human beings mold for themselves, and that they, whenever they decide to, can mold a new destiny in which they no longer suffer. It postulates that true spiritual awakening is marked by the realization that suffering does not need to be accepted, that the universe is open, that immeasurable abundance is available for all human beings right here and right now.
These are apparent contradictions. Not seeing the absence of contradiction in these two approaches must lead to confusion in your mind, whether or not you are aware of it. You have undoubtedly found both approaches in all great spiritual teachings, as well as in my own lectures.
Now, my friends, why are these two approaches not mutually exclusive? Where is the common denominator that unifies them? The key is the element of fear. If you want happiness because you fear unhappiness, happiness remains unreachable. If you want happiness for its own sake, and not because you fear its absence, nothing will block its attainment. And this is an enormous difference.
As long as you have fear, it is sometimes inevitable that you experience what you fear in order to lose the fear. If fear can be shed by realizing the truth that there is no reason to fear, then it is not necessary to experience it. But you are often incapable of this insight, so you must familiarize yourself with the feared circumstances until they lose their threatening aspect.
As long as you want the positive mainly because you fear the negative, your fear barricades the way to the positive. The planet Earth, this sphere of consciousness, is characterized by the desire of the positive not for itself but for the fear of its negative opposite. Let us examine a few of most human beings’ fundamental desires.
We will begin with the great duality of life and death. This will give you a better understanding of a lecture I gave a few years ago, in which I spoke of life and death as being two facets of the same process.* I said that you must learn the ability to die, that you will do so by acceptance, and by that acceptance you will learn that there is nothing to be feared — in fact, that there is no death. I also said that the person who fears life must fear death, and vice versa.
It is impossible to truly love life as long as one fears death. This can be constantly corroborated when observing human reactions. The more a person lives with gusto and joy, the less he or she fears death. The more people shrink in fear from death, the more they cling to life, not because they enjoy life or because they are dynamically related to it, but in order to avoid death. Such people really do not live at all. Fear of death and dying prohibits one from living, and only by deeply living can you learn that life is one unending process, and dying is a temporary illusion. If one clings to life because of the fear of death, life will not be meaningful, nor can it be pleasurable. Needless to say, this is, as always, a question of degree. Since hardly anyone is completely free of the fear of death — otherwise they would not be incarnated in this sphere of being — there is hardly anyone who truly lives. But some are relatively free from this fear and therefore live meaningful and pleasurable lives.
Since it is almost impossible for the average soul to realize that death is not to be feared, it has to go through cycles and cycles of embodiments, one after the other, learning to die until dying is no longer a frightening experience. When the fear of dying is overcome, life eternal is possible; as long as it is feared, dying must be gone through.
Another great sin of the human being is the wish to be in control. Consequently, the person fears being out of control. While spiritual teachings postulate that death is unnecessary, they also claim that the truly evolved individual is master of the universe, and that he or she alone controls destiny. The human soul strives toward this goal. But as long as there is a fear of losing control, the individual must learn the ability to relinquish it, to flexibly adjust. The fine balance between steering one’s ship through the river of life and the ability to let go must be learned. The more one fears letting go, the greater the imbalance of the soul movements, and consequently the greater the loss of the final control over destiny. The tight control one grabs at is a pseudo-control that merely increases tension and anxiety. It prohibits peace and confidence in the self and in the life process. The only way confidence can grow is entrusting oneself to what seems the “unknown,” by giving up the tense holding. Such letting go eventually results in full mastery without the fear of losing it, for the person now knows that there is nothing to fear.
Human beings are not yet capable of immediate control over self and life. They still have to temporarily accept certain limitations within the self which create an undesirable destiny. Denying these limitations by sheer outer will that comes from fear, must make the situation worse. Acceptance of one’s temporary limitations and, consequently, of the results, does not mean resignation to tragedy and suffering. It merely means going through a phase of lesser expansion, comfort, and bliss, accepting responsibility for this state, and thereby overcoming the dread of it. Such an attitude will open the door further.
Because the human being is, in its highest evolutionary state, in control of his or her destiny, the ability to give over in trust to greater forces must be at least potentially present in every individual. In fact, only by doing so can a person become one with these forces. When one refuses to relinquish control, it is out of fear and distrust. Thus that which is most benign, which is power, liberation, bliss, is blocked.
A further fundamental human aim is pleasure supreme. All these aspects — eternal life, control over one’s destiny, pleasure supreme — are deeply inborn, instinctive spiritual aims. The psyche instinctively knows that these are both its destiny and its origin and therefore it strives to recapture them.
If you desire pleasure because you fear pain or the absence of pleasure, the door to pleasure remains closed. Once you have learned that the absence of pleasure is not an abyss of darkness to shrink from, fear will no longer prohibit your fulfillment.
Every aspect of living follows this principle. If you desire health in a spirit of fearing sickness, you prevent health. If you fear the aging process, you prevent eternal youth. If you fear poverty, you prevent abundance. If you fear loneliness, you prevent real companionship. If you fear companionship, you prevent self-containment. So it goes on and on.
The great enemy is fear, and the best way to meet and conquer this enemy is first to ascertain, admit, and articulate it. This approach will diminish fear to a considerable degree and open the way to further measures for ousting it. Of course, the desire to do so must, as always, be clearly expressed in one’s thinking and intentions. However, if you struggle against fear out of fear of fear, this will be difficult. Therefore, the calm admission and the momentary acceptance of it will do more toward its elimination than fighting against it would.
A long time ago we discussed that the three major stumbling blocks in the human soul are pride, selfwill, and fear. The more the soul is unified, the more it can reach the basic point of unification when encountering inner divisions. The same applies to this triad. Pride and selfwill are easily overcome when there is no more fear. If you are not afraid to have your dignity impaired, there will be no need for false pride. And if you are not afraid of being controlled by factors beyond your influence, you will have no need for selfwill.
Fear is the great locked door which prohibits you from entering, right here and right now, into all that is immediately available the moment fear is uprooted from your heart and soul.
This is what your life is all about, my friends. This is what the human sphere of consciousness, with its repeated incarnations serving as schools of experience, is all about. And this is what our path here is all about: the discovery that fear is unnecessary.
When you hear the admonition that it is necessary to learn acceptance, you always interpret it as having to accept an ultimate fate of suffering and deprivation. The advice to learn to let go of control implies to you that you have to release yourself into an abyss of danger, pain, and hardship. This is why fear increases, and so does tense reluctance and stubbornness. You shrink more rigidly from your liberation, your life eternal, your bliss. In truth, acceptance must bring you to the realization that you are called upon to have that which is most desirable. Giving up control — the little selfwill — will finally prove to you that this step releases one into a new freedom, into something positive and desirable, so there is no longer any need to fearfully hold on.
When the soul is sufficiently experienced and deeply impressed with the truth that there is nothing to fear, the human personality suddenly comes to a point of realization in which acceptance is no longer a risk, for it embraces the entire benign universe. Then it is no longer a question of having to go through the fear in order to rise above it. Then one is prepared for all the fulfillment, the abundance, the bliss and pleasure supreme in a liberated life, and in the life eternal, with all its dynamic, joyful aspects. All that the human heart desires is immediately available when one has overcome fear.
When you realize this truth, it is the liberation your spirit has been waiting for. It is as though your spirit exclaimed, “Oh, that’s the way it is! Why did I not see this wonderful simplicity before? Why did I plague myself with all the unnecessary hardship?” And you step out from your confinement. The world becomes your own!
But where the soul is not yet ready, it still has to learn that there is nothing to fear. It does so through being involved in a world that expresses this ignorance — for only through such a real involvement can the ignorance of the truth that there is nothing to fear be broken through. The self must discover the truth that even what hurts is never quite what one fears.
You all have had this experience, my friends. When you anticipated a certain event, how many times did you find out that, after having gone through it, it was not half as bad as you had feared?
This leads us to the important fact that the main element of fear is not a particular undesirable factor or event, but the unknown quality about it. Now, it is possible to fear something one already has experienced, either consciously or unconsciously. But while experiencing something in a state of fear, all faculties and perceptions become dulled. The truth of the experience is not fully registered, assimilated, or perceived. The fear blurs one’s view and one’s capacity to evaluate it objectively. So it is very possible to go through an experience in a certain frame of mind and come out with the impression that this experience was not the way it really was, but rather as one had expected it to be.
That is why the soul requires so many repetitions until it can rid itself of fear, particularly in the experience of dying. Let me assure you, my friends, that the trauma of being born is an infinitely greater one than the one of dying. Yet a peculiar mass image exists about dying, which is deeply impressed on all souls who come, again and again, to the earth sphere. When an individual goes through the liberating event of shedding the material body, this mass image produces such fear that the person is too anxious to be able to register the reality of the event of dying in full consciousness.
In addition, the conscious intellect ignores the true facts of dying, but meets an unknown element, and the fear of it half-anesthetizes the act of perception. Hence the truth cannot impress itself upon the soul. What is experienced becomes hazy, due to a very low consciousness at the moment. The little that has registered is easily forgotten, for memory is also dependent on a free state of mind, uncluttered by fear, prejudice, and misconceptions. The little the soul does remember is soon blotted out by the strength of the mass image that again overwhelms the individual.
It happens frequently that an individual registers at the time of transition a feeling like, “Oh, is this what it is? How wonderful!” Yet the mass image cannot be blotted out unless the truth can be experienced in full consciousness, and fear barricades such a full experience. With each repetition, a little more of the truth penetrates until, slowly but surely, the soul rids itself of fear and becomes relaxed about the transition — as relaxed as you are about going to sleep at night, or about starting a new and as yet unknown phase of your life you look forward to without qualms. Dying is produced by the fear of it. It becomes superfluous and ceases to take place when the fear of it vanishes.
The same principle applies to many other aspects of living. Wherever fear exists, it produces the circumstances one fears. These circumstances are, at the same time, the only way to convince the self that the fear is unnecessary.
The more an event is known, the less it is feared. Although a vicious circle exists in which fear dulls the senses, every vicious circle can be broken. You may argue that actual pain can be very much feared. But, my friends, think about it: pain is inordinately feared only when one does not know where it will lead, when one suspects something dangerous in it, such as a serious disease and finally death. If you know that the pain will not threaten your safety, you can bear it in a relaxed state of mind and thus it ceases to be pain.
When you meet your fears and squarely acknowledge them, it is important to understand, and specifically ascertain, the unknown element about them. Then you have a chance of making that element a little less unknown. In certain instances, its unknown character may be completely eliminated, while in others you may consciously accept the fact that some element must remain unknown for the time being and yet simultaneously accept the fear.
Where there is uncertainty about what the future will bring, there is fear. Nothing one truly knows, even the greatest difficulties, are really feared. In order to make the unknown known, the feared unknown must often be entered into — just like the experience of dying. But this must, by no means, be construed to mean that you should be looking for negative, painful experiences.
When you open your whole psyche to positive experience, without a trace of fear of the negative, then the unknown must become more and more known; life becomes more and more fulfilling on all levels.
Now, my friends, are there any questions?
QUESTION: Is this the only sphere in which one goes through the experience of death as we know it?
ANSWER: This is so. In other spheres there are other experiences, equally important for the evolution of the soul.
QUESTION: Are only those who fear death incarnated in this sphere?
ANSWER: That is one reason for drawing souls into this particular sphere of consciousness. But if a person is afraid of dying, that fundamental fear leads to other soul conditions and is connected with a great number of other erroneous concepts. They are all interconnected. As I have said before, being afraid of dying is also being afraid of living — of the unknown elements of both. When such fears exist, there must be misconceptions and erroneous imprints in the soul.
When fear constricts the soul, the human being is incapable of entering into and becoming a part of the cosmic life force which gently guides to fruition and which wants to envelop him. He struggles against the cosmic force as though it were an enemy, but in reality the enemy sits within, a product of false fears, misconceptions, and unnecessary limitations. It is because of these limitations that people turn against themselves and, in spite of a part of their spirit continuously striving for their birthright of fulfillment, another part actually strives for nonfulfillment, pain, and deprivation. The great danger falsely believed to be unavoidable seems less threatening when it is quickly brought about by themselves. At least it is then no longer unknown. But avoidable negative experience has a bitter taste. Negative experience courted out of fear and error is much harder to bear than negative experience that is a result of still lingering limitations. One does not rush into the latter voluntarily. It requires deep insight into the mechanics of one’s inner life to even discover this, but only with such insight is it possible to stop the destructive repetitive process.
When you learn the rhythm of your life, when you no longer struggle against, rush into, forge ahead blindly, thereby disturbing the natural rhythm, you will become part of the great cosmic powers with which you can play, which you can guide, and thus you become truly master of the universe.
QUESTION: What do you mean by spheres?
ANSWER: Spheres of consciousness, spheres of being. Where entities with a similar state of consciousness flock together — and they do so according to immutable law — their overall consciousness can be referred to as a sphere. From the point of view of space, a geographical area may be indicated in this way. From a spiritual viewpoint, time, space, and movement are all expressions of particular states of consciousness. This is why it is difficult for an entity geared in three-dimensional thinking to comprehend utterings of a consciousness that comprises more dimension, and also unifies these dimensions into one greater consciousness.
Therefore, when spiritual spheres are discussed, the danger is that people begin to think of them in oversimplified terms of geographical areas, located somewhere in outer space. Although it cannot be considered untrue that the entire physical universe is inhabited — all space, all time, all planets, all stellar systems — the real universe, with all its myriads of spheres, is within the self. This does not make the existence of many more spiritual worlds an abstract idea, however. They are reality, just as each planet is a reality and exists both within and without.
Now, when I speak of entities with comparable overall development, this must not be taken literally. It cannot be denied that there is considerable difference in development among human beings, and so of course among entities of other spheres of consciousness. Yet they all have certain points in common, in spite of great differences in perception and comprehension between older, more developed spirits, and younger ones, relatively new to this state. But they all can fulfill themselves better by flocking together; this is why they are drawn to make up a so-called sphere.
QUESTION: I can’t visualize a sphere. Could you give an example of another sphere?
ANSWER: In a different lecture, I explained that conditions on the earth sphere are an exact expression of the sum total of the consciousness of all human beings inhabiting it. This also comprises, of course, individuals who do not at this moment reside in a body, but belong to this sphere by their overall development and who will reincarnate again here. I explained that all the beauty on this earth, in nature, and in that which is created by man and woman is a direct expression of those inner qualities which are in harmony with the universe. Conversely, all strife, such as war, poverty, quarrels, difficulties of all sorts, sickness and dying, are the expression of humanity’s confusions, its state of consciousness which clings to destructive emotions. In other words, the earth, with its conditions, favorable and unfavorable, the greatness and the pettiness, is a direct result of all the consciousnesses which inhabit it. All that can be called a “sphere of consciousness.” Other spheres express the sum total of all consciousness, too. If the overall consciousness is higher than this one, conditions are accordingly more harmonious and less difficult. In a sphere where the general level of truth-perception is higher, it is inevitable that the circumstances that arise will be less limiting.
QUESTION: Do we reincarnate into the same sphere?
ANSWER: Yes, until you have learned to overcome whatever disharmony and error the present state of consciousness expresses. From all I have said in the past as well as in this lecture it is obvious that as long as consciousness is not raised to a higher degree of truth-perception, a new sphere cannot be created for a particular entity. For an entity’s environment and inner state of consciousness are one and the same.
You are not reincarnated into the same sphere because any deity “sends” or “commands” you to do so; this is accomplished by a process of attraction and repulsion, according to law, that is like the laws of chemical bonding. You must not imagine that first the sphere exists and then the entity is incarnated into it. It is the other way around. The sphere is a result of your thinking, feelings, attitudes, and general state — the sum total of your entire personality. The sphere expresses you. If you express different qualities, you are no longer drawn to this sphere, but to the sphere where the majority of beings also express your stage of development.
QUESTION: Are other spheres also physical?
ANSWER: Human beings make too arbitrary a distinction between physical and non-physical. A human being consists of many layers, and each is matter of a special density. The higher the consciousness, the finer the consistency of the matter. But this does not make them formless or their existence less real.
According to people’s beliefs, they will be drawn into spheres of more physical — that is, denser — matter, or finer vibrations. If the entire thinking is still geared to a very superficial and materialistic plane, the matter the entity produces for the vehicle of its spirit will vibrate accordingly. The denser the matter, the greater the ignorance, error, misconception, prejudice, limitation, and darkness — hence, the greater the suffering.
When humans realize that their real self is not just in the body, their perceptions will widen and the matter of their entire soul substance will become much finer and more sensitive to truth. The result will be a greater sense of reality.
It is extremely important for all of you who work on this path to find where you fear the negative and therefore grab for the positive alternative. When you find the areas of fear, and see how you want the positive for negative motivations, you will be able to accept the rich abundance of life with a raised head, as a free person. It is this soul movement that makes all the difference.
The soul condition of fearlessness produces the conviction that nothing negative is ever necessary and that the human entity’s fate is bliss, unfoldment, and dynamic life. And where such conviction exists, outer facts must follow suit. Shrinking away from a feared alternative and wanting the positive alternative because of that, makes the latter an unreachable illusion. This may explain to many of my friends why a number of doors have remained closed for them, in spite of much progress and insight. However, it requires an extended awareness to notice the existence of fear, and to be aware of the fine differentiation between wanting happiness for the sake of happiness, or wanting it in order to avoid unhappiness.
I have discussed general aims, but your specific desires, with the fear of their opposites, have to be ascertained in your personal work. Nothing is too big or too little, important or unimportant, when it comes to the human psyche. For anything that may appear to be an insignificant aspect is, in the last analysis, connected with the great questions of life. When you find these elements, new doors will open to you, my friends. Even before you can shed the fear itself, ascertaining it and knowing what it means must make a great difference in your attitude to yourself, to life, and to the particular desire that has remained unfulfilled because you have overlooked the shift in motivation. This is an all-important key.
Don’t overlook either that the presence of a fear of the negative does not necessarily annul a healthy wish for the positive for its own sake. It is absolutely possible — in fact, it is frequent — that a healthy wish exists simultaneously with the distorted motivation.
Once you put your finger on the fear, you can directly treat it in your meditations. This will make a great deal of difference on your path. It can be a solution to many problems that have remained stubbornly locked so far. The mere realization, “I cannot step out into freedom because I want freedom not for itself, but because I fear to be imprisoned,” will bring liberation a great step closer. If you realize that you cannot be free because you fear unfreedom, in that realization greater freedom is yours. This may sound complicated and quite paradoxical, but if you deeply think about it, you will understand how true it is.
Blessings for every one of you, my friends. May these words lift your spirit and bring you nearer to the light of truth, to the reality of love, to the unending bliss of spiritual existence. Be in peace, be in God!
* Lecture #81
Greetings. Blessings and love are pouring forth for everyone here, wherever you need them most on your journey through life.
Many philosophies agree on the importance of experience. They postulate that the true meaning of life is experiencing it in all its facets and variations, in its full depth and breadth. A being who enters this sphere of life, the material earth, is drawn into it because of his or her limited state of consciousness, in which true reality is blurred to a large extent. The only way the consciousness can be expanded is by experiencing life to its fullest and from all its facets. This requires that the being enter material life again and again, until all the blocks against experiencing life are eliminated and he or she has savored, tasted, and assimilated all of life.
Usually, when humans hear the word “experience,” they think of outer experience. This, however, is not the meaning of the word. The real meaning is the inner experience. You know that you may experience all things outwardly, but if the inner experience is inhibited, the outer experience will mean little. You can travel all over the world. You can be in many different situations and experiment with every conceivable “experience” under the sun. You can approach life in all its different facets: art, nature, science. You can do all things, learn everything your brain can master, but if your capacity for inner experience is dead, all outer experiences will add little, if anything, to your conscious life. Often a full outer experience without the inner experience even increases despair, because one does not understand the causes of the experience, and that is very disquieting. Having everything they ever wanted, people still cannot remove a nagging dissatisfaction. The faster they run, the more they grab, the more elusive life seems, because the capacity for inner experience has not been cultivated or, worse, it has been inadvertently eliminated.
Inner experience is possible only when you can feel. If feelings are blocked, no inner experience is possible. Lack of feelings deadens all of life and makes it impossible for you to fulfill yours. You will have to come back, over and over, until you learn to savor experience to whatever degree this is possible at your particular stage of consciousness. To savor life in its fullest, you must eliminate your defenses against feelings. You must go through your fear of unpleasurable, painful feelings. That which is feared must be accepted, experienced as it is at this moment. The way it is at this moment may well be the result of feelings from the past that have not been fully experienced and thus lie stagnant, forming a block in your system. When you fear a feeling, you block the experience. You anesthetize yourself. Numbing and denying often seems the only protection against unbearable pain and suffering. And yet, as many of you on the path have begun to find out, it is the fight against what you fear that creates your real suffering. No matter what is inflicted upon you from the outside when you are helpless and defenseless, it cannot become a detriment in your life, it cannot cripple you when you learn to receive it in the right and healthy way. This is the only way you can truly eliminate what is undesirable. When you dare experience inwardly what comes to you, it will cease to be a threat.
In this lecture I shall point out further the ramifications and the significance of inner emotional experience, and what happens to the human entity when such experience and feelings are blocked. As I have often said, fear is the most destructive emotion imaginable. Fear that is not met and therefore transcended becomes poisonous, toxic energy. Fear that is not even conscious and therefore appears indirectly is that much more debilitating. The fear of feelings is perhaps the most insidious of all, for if you fear a real danger, it is something you can overcome. Even exaggerated fear of an outer occurrence would not be so harmful, except that such an unrealistic phobia must be an expression of unrecognized and unexperienced feelings. Anything outside of you can be dealt with on the level of outer action. Feelings can be dealt with only as they are being experienced, not when they are denied.
When you are afraid of pain, loneliness, or of a hurt to your pride or a rejection, or frustration of your will or desires—in all these cases, your primary feeling is fear. Only when you experience what you fear—say, rejection—will you experience the pain of it. So we are dealing basically with the fear of pain. When you go into the fear, you can experience the pain. Only then will the pain genuinely dissolve, and you will have mastered a slice of life that you no longer need to avoid.
When you blindly avoid your fear of pain until you no longer know that you fear a specific pain and are not aware why you feel numbed and deadened, you create a magnetic energy block within your psychic system. This magnetic block is a powerful force that inevitably draws to you the very experience you wanted to avoid. The pain you avoid must come to you from outside, again and again, until you can no longer avoid it. This is a law of life. If you come into this life with such a fear, your life circumstances will bring forth the very condition that you avoided previously. I have said this many a time. When life circumstances in your early childhood again inflict pain and deprivation upon you, and you again protect yourself by denying the pain rather than experiencing it to its fullest, later life circumstances will replicate those early conditions until you open up to what you fear and let the experience be in you, so that it can dissolve. When you fully savor the painful experience, then you are truly overcoming it. Then the energy of the magnetic block dissolves, entering into the general flow of life within you, and the previously feared experience will no longer come to you.
You may temporarily avoid the feared experience because your inner defenses shut off life so successfully that nothing touches you. And your willpower may build an eventful outer life that fills your inner void to a degree, as long as you do not hold still. However, this is but temporary peace before the storm. Crisis must come to you eventually to give you another opportunity to overcome your fear. The more you run from what you fear, the more energy you invest into blocking off the feared feeling, the more potent the magnetic energy block becomes, and the more certainly you attract the crisis that could be the healing agent whenever you choose to change the direction of your focus to inner living.
Only a fearless soul can experience bliss, pleasure, joy, and peace. You can fulfill your potential for creativity and expansion of your spiritual being only when you are fearless and relaxed. If no part of your inner being has anything to cover up, defend, or protect, then the full potential of your creativity and capacity for pleasure can manifest in your personality. But if you guard against one expression of life in you, against one type of inner experience, it is logical that all other types must be equally hindered. This should be easy to see.
In protecting yourself against your fear of pain, or any other undesirable experience, you put yourself in a state of tension. Guardedness is tension. Pleasure and creativity can thrive only in a state of relaxation. You cannot express yourself when you hold tight against a movement in your inner life. You separate yourself from a vital part in yourself. No wonder that you lose touch with yourself and no longer know who you are or what you are doing! You live in a constant state of guardedness—unbeknownst to your conscious mind. Therefore, the first task on your path is to explore yourself deeply, so that you become conscious of your defenses. Only then can you explore the next question: What is it precisely that you guard against? In the last analysis it is always a pain you have suffered.
You cannot, of course, go further back than this lifetime. But this lifetime is all you need. Your early pains in this life are essentially those you have suffered in previous lives. Your accumulated residual energy block not only attracts the same events over again, but also makes you incapable of meeting new feeling experiences in a free and spiritually hygienic way. The new feeling that cannot live in you is added to your residual reservoir. On the other hand, once your residual reservoir is emptied and you have fully experienced the past accumulations, the flow of your being will deal with new pains in a very different way.
First of all, you will remain open and vulnerable, experiencing the pain softly, gently, without inner fight, and fully knowing why you are in pain. This integration of your experience will make the wave of pain pass slowly or quickly, according to the nature of the experience, and the pain will dissolve into the stream of life within you. This open, relaxed state also makes available inspiration and resources that are otherwise inaccessible. You will be guided from within to find new ways of action that will be effective in your life and your environment. A new, ever-increasing vibrancy will fill your being when you live in this way. You will be filled with the joyousness of knowing that all is well in the universe.
When you use your will to avoid feared feelings and try forcefully to produce the joy that you cannot have unless you live in an unguarded state, your will must again and again be smashed by life, which cannot be manipulated by the fearful, small, controlling mind. When you substitute a forcing current—”I must not experience that and I must experience this”—for a relaxed stream of consciousness, a flowing soul substance, you bring on crisis and more pain.
The duality that characterizes human consciousness results primarily from fear that is not fully lived through and therefore dissolved. By saying, in effect, “This I must not experience,” you create a duality. Your fear creates both a Yes current and a No current, and that split current is the entire basis of the painful state of duality. Such duality can thrive only in a state of avoidance, a state of being closed to one thing, which creates a tense, urgent grabbing movement in the opposite direction, which in turn prohibits the real flow of life.
When strong inner denial exists, rage and violence follow. Rage dissolves when the fear of pain is given up and the pain fully experienced. The pain dissolves into its original nature, the blissful, peaceful vibrancy of the river of life that flows through you and of which you are a part.
Your fear of feelings therefore not only blocks bliss and the expression of creative life through you, but also splits you into a state of disunity. You can achieve a higher unified state of consciousness only by going through what you fear, never by avoiding it.
When fear of your feelings induces you to block off your capacity to feel, the impoverishment creates the need for a substitution. The mind then becomes this substitution. In order not to feel your deadness, the impoverishment of your inner being, and to have a sense of existing, you use your outer mind much more than is natural. If you cannot exist through your flowing, feeling being, your intellect and will take almost exclusive charge of your deadened feeling part. They temporarily give you the illusion of being alive. But the aliveness is precarious. It is, in the long run, not even convincing, because consciousness without feeling lacks the spark of the spirit that puts a glow on life. Such incompleteness is dry and sterile. You may arrive at the most brilliant formulations with your mind, but if your mind is not unified with your inner feeling experience, you will, in secret moments, doubt your aliveness, the reality of your being. In this stage of evolution, in this civilization, humans frequently find themselves with highly developed minds, but unable to live fully. What is usually called an identity crisis is the condition of being split off from the feeling self, which in turn exists only when feelings are avoided and repressed. A person can never know who she or he is when the mind substitutes its so-called “life” for the inner, feeling self.
Let us now look at what happens to specific feelings when they are denied. Let us take sadness. When something in you says, “I must not be sad, I should not be sad,” you rebel against a feeling that exists in you. This rebellious attitude soon creates the misconception in you that being sad is catastrophic and that, if this catastrophe befalls you, you must perish. This unspoken, unarticulated assumption creates fear, and often, as the assumption becomes exaggerated, fear turns into terror. The terror of sadness creates a compulsive urge to avoid sadness. If life finally forces you to feel your sadness through the circumstances you inevitable attract, your terror, arising from your conviction that you must perish, produces such strong inner turmoil that you may indeed break down. You may be utterly unaware of the rebellious anger in you that fuels your terror and of the misconception that makes you struggle so arduously and painfully against the sadness. When you then experience sadness in this mental and emotional state, the experience is indeed unbearable—but not because straight sadness cannot be borne.
Any straight, clean feeling can easily be borne, no matter what it is and why it exists. What is unbearably painful, frightening, and hopeless is the inner struggle that the misconception creates. This is the real meaning of the scriptural saying, “According to thy belief it shall be done unto thee.” It does not mean there are magical intercessions from heaven, reward for faith and punishment for doubt. It simply describes the dynamics I discuss here. The overactive mind—not necessarily conscious—produces the image, “I will perish if I have to be sad.” You build mental concepts that sustain the belief that sadness is unbearable and even dangerous, and thus you justify your refusal to feel sad. You may do this by building cases against people who make you sad. Your mind attempts to justify why you should not have to endure this feeling. Thus you build illusions. And it always seems most difficult to abandon one’s cherished illusions.
Whenever an original experience—say, of sadness and pain—is denied, it becomes displaced. It will be reexperienced in subsequent situations. Displaced and denied sadness becomes self-pity, hopelessness, depression. These emotions are indeed debilitating and destructive, whereas the direct, original feeling of sadness, if fully experienced and consciously connected to its origin in this life, will dissipate. When you let it happen to you, without manipulating it by exaggerating or denying it, it will run its natural course. This is extremely important to remember and to practice. If the original, clean experience of sadness is denied in any way and thus becomes distorted, it will form part of a vicious circle, from which it is always difficult to extricate oneself. Another part of the vicious circle is the denied anger and rage for being made sad by life and by others.
Now let us consider the feeling of anger. If it is cleanly experienced when someone perhaps damages or hurts you, it will resolve itself. Other people’s denial of their inner truth, their real feelings, inflicts pain on you just as much as you inflict pain on others by not allowing yourself to experience what is—whether or not you intend to do so. This pain can be inflicted every bit as much by omission as by commission. The climate of omission in a child’s life is indeed often more difficult to cope with because there is no actual occurrence to which one can connect the pain, so that it is harder to acknowledge and feel and thus eliminate it from your psychic system. Your initial reaction to pain with anger is totally normal and healthy. If you can understand that such a reaction does not require you to act destructively against others, you will accept the anger without judging or justifying yourself or others. If you let yourself feel it and follow it through to the pain, it will dissolve, it will liberate you. If you deny it, it will turn into cruelty and hostility, which in turn, as you well know, need to be covered up to conform with society’s standards. Thus you become further alienated from what you really feel, and the original feeling becomes more distorted.
Let us now see what happens when the original feelings of despair and loneliness are denied, when the inner person says, “I should not have to feel this ever; I should be spared this experience of despair.” By this denial you turn your feeling of despair into bitterness, isolation, faithlessness—the apprehension that there is no way out for you. If the original despair is experienced directly, without conclusions and mental concepts, the feeling will dissolve relatively quickly. If you allow yourself to feel it, without making something more of it, and are attuned to what is happening in you, you will come out of yet another tunnel into the light of the life stream. When I speak of the clean experience of momentary despair, I do not mean the subtly forced hopelessness that results from a forcing current. The forcing current is a manipulative process that expresses into life and toward everybody whom one substitutes for those who caused the original hurt in childhood: “You must now give me all I ask for, and you must protect me from all unpleasurable feelings. My hopelessness will convince you that this is what you must do for me.” When such irrational messages of the hidden self can be deciphered and admitted, the manipulative, artificial hopelessness—which is always unbearable—will give way to a new insight which will lead back to the clean, original feeling one has avoided.
If you can so discern your hidden messages, you will make a great step toward self-awareness, which then will enable you to experience original feelings and go through their tunnel, at whose end you will find the realistic good tidings of spiritual reality—that life is ultimately benign. And when I say “ultimately,” I do not mean in a faraway beyond; I mean that whenever you have the courage and the faith to truly feel and explore what is in you; when you let happen what is in you; when the hardened armor plate of your defense against unpleasant feelings is loosened up and you feel and you cry, you tremble and you writhe, and you experience directly and cleanly the original feeling, then all residual feelings will dissolve. The new experience of everyday living will be a wave of life as it comes to you. You will not live behind a wall through which nothing can come to you and nothing can come out of you. That state is the true isolation of the disunified, fearful being, who issues a forcing current into the world saying, “I must not feel this, I say no to it,” and is therefore in a state of tight denial and defense.
Let us now take the feeling of fear. When you deny it, it becomes vague anxiety that is infinitely more disturbing because you have nothing to focus on and cope with. By facing the fear directly, you proceed into other feelings, such as pain, despair, anger, and so on. Thus the way out becomes possible. Anxiety is displaced fear and, as such, offers no way out.
If you feel vaguely disturbed or irritated, without really knowing what has happened to you, do not gloss over it. That will create further layers of disunity and disorientation. Focus on your sensations, trust in the fact that something more tangible, something that you can deal with, waits for you to take it out of hiding. This will lead you to a fuller experiencing of your present and past feelings. And when you empty out the past accumulations, the present will truly be the present, rather than the illusion that you react to the present when you really react over and over to the past you keep avoiding.
Anyone of you who truly decides to go into the nucleus of your being can do so at any time. It requires your decision to look, feel, and experience, to no longer project what is in you. When you can let a feeling—pain, fear, disappointment—happen to you and go to its very end, its energy current transforms itself into its original life flow. Thus, when you no longer fear a feeling, then that feeling can no longer come to you.
You must understand, my dearest friends, that anything undesirable that happens to you comes to you only because you say, “No, I must not experience that, and what can I do to avoid it?” Indeed, most people are motivated to start spiritual work like this because what they really seek are better ways to avoid the undesirable feelings. When it finally dawns on them that exactly the opposite direction must be taken, many leave the path, unwilling to accept the truth that avoidance is futile. They insist on their illusion.
It is therefore of utmost importance that you ask yourself to what degree you are afraid of a feeling in you. What feeling is it? For nothing outward can in itself be so frightening—only what it will do to you, what unpleasurable feelings it will elicit in you. By going into the undesirable feeling, you will see the miracle happen as a stark reality, not as a principle you hear expounded: that the acceptance of pain makes the pain pleasure. The less you block pain, the more and the sooner will pain turn into pleasure. Thus you witness the process of unifying duality.
From this point, we shall go more and more into the deepest, most direct experiences of your residual feelings, alternating with your present feelings. By learning to give up the fight against them, you will, for the first time, lose fear. I will help and guide you, as usual. Start now—all who listen tonight and all who read these words. What are the feelings you fear? Really face that. And then try to open yourself to the feared feelings and to let happen what you thought would be unbearable.
You will see that many of the concepts I have discussed over the years are not mere faraway philosophies. They have a concrete and immediate meaning you can verify if you truly follow through. Quite a number of you have done this already and have found that what appears first as a black, frightening abyss turns out to be a tunnel at whose other end you come into light. Everyone can experience this. It is never a bottomless abyss, for the true nature of life is not darkness—it is light. It is not destruction—it is construction.
The evil, destructive, and demonic forces of life are rooted in the fear of experiencing what is in you, your feelings. Out of that fear, you build your destructive defenses. That is the only reason why any destructiveness sets in. The fear of feelings, of painful experiences, makes you arrogant and isolated, cruel and greedy, selfish and life-denying. It makes you untruthful on the inner and most vital level of your being. For if you deny what you feel, you are not in truth with yourself. All of this is evil, if you wish to use this word. Destructiveness lies exclusively in the walls you build against experiencing what is in you. You thus convert constructive energy into destructive energy. The inner lie of denying experience of the feeling self creates a falsification of your real self. It falsifies you until you no longer know who you really are. It creates the false hope that you can eliminate any undesirable feelings by avoiding them, and it creates the false hopelessness that the tunnel of painful feelings is a bottomless pit of horror and annihilation. Thus you waste your life energies by stemming against the truth and so create unnecessary pain.
The negation of your original pain in this life leads to greedy, insatiable demands, such as to be spared all frustration, to never be criticized, to be always loved and loved your way. Until you recognize and abandon these demands and go through the original pain, you will be caught in the see-saw of submission and rebellion, which is another vicious circle. You submit to another’s equally insatiable, unreasonable demands and join in a power struggle for control so that you can finally have the other do your bidding. You rebel because you are ashamed of and hate yourself for your submission, and believe you must prove your “independence.” In both instances you violate the interests of your real self. In neither are you aware of the blind drives that lead you into submission and rebellion. You can truly be independent only when you cease making the demands. This will happen when you are willing to experience whatever comes to you, knowing that you have produced it and that it exists within you.
Current psychology often says that a child is incapable of reacting differently to pain than by building its numbing defenses. This is true only when in previous lives residual pain was not experienced fully and thus eliminated. To the degree that a human being has done this, even in childhood the severest of circumstances will be experienced in an undefended way. The pain will be endured and gone through until it naturally ceases, without leaving a mark, just because it was fully felt. Feeling pain directly and fully strengthens resilience and the ability to live fruitfully and productively, and it certainly increases the capacity for experiencing pleasure and deep feelings. It is the living principle of “Do not resist evil.” It requires blindness not to see that children actually have this capacity to a great degree. They can cry bitterly in one minute and laugh genuinely in the next, just because the pain has taken its natural course. It is only where pain has not been experienced that defensive numbness occurs—and hence neurosis, destructiveness, deadness. It is false to generalize that no child can help but react in this self-numbing way to all traumatic and difficult situations.
May the power that is within your own inner being be allowed to fill your whole substance, your whole organism—your spiritual, emotional, mental, and physical being. The full experience of your feeling self is spiritual hygiene and prevents the stagnation of your soul. It is the metabolism of your total organism. Just as the accumulation of physical waste that is not expelled and eliminated creates disease in the body, so does unassimilated, unexperienced feeling matter cause disease of the soul. Your full commitment to everything you can possibly feel; your observation of feelings you fear and the events that bring forth those feelings; and your commitment at last to try to face and experience them constitute the healing process that will unify your entire being. This will make your life the fullest experience possible and will permeate you with the realization that you are using your life to its fullest and best, with its deepest meaning.
A lot of love is pouring forth for all of you. May you be able to feel it!
Greetings in the Name of the Lord. I bring you blessings, my dearest friends.
Tonight I will discuss the life force in the universe. The universal life force is contained in every sphere or world, all inanimate objects, abstract ideas and living human beings. Nothing can exist without it. I will not discuss its manifestation in other realms, in high spheres outside your reach and understanding. There would be no point in that since you could not grasp it, my friends. In my discussion I will use terms that you can apply to everyday life.
An inanimate object is petrified life force. A beautiful idea, a truth, is flowing life force. Life force is eternal and therefore all life is eternal. Death is but an illusion. An inanimate object you call dead is only so temporarily. All life, in whatever way it manifests, must exist eternally, for non-eternal life is no life and therefore a meaningless contradiction. The life force contains all divine attributes. It is, it has not come into existence, it does not do, it does not work or have. It simply is. Try to understand the significance and the distinction of these words. Life force is all around you and within you.
A human being living in complete and utter harmony with the life force would not die, yet would not remain in the physical body either. For your matter is petrified life force and exists only where the field of the life force is disturbed in some way. As you have heard from various sources of teaching, death is not necessary in principle and one day death will be eliminated. Fully self-realized people will gradually transform their bodies to a spiritual form. This is so, although its realization lies in a very distant future measured by earth time. But in principle it certainly is possible.
Wherever the life force has not been violated, happiness—that is, complete harmony and peace—can be yours without the trepidations and fear of losing it again that accompany temporary happiness for you human beings.
You all know from the teachings you have so far received that you violate spiritual law constantly within your soul—if not in deed, word or thought, at least in your unconscious emotions. Whenever such violation happens, you twist the life force that could flow through you. You prevent the life force from reviving you. What I am showing you on this path of self-finding is a gradual, slow way—and there is no faster way—to dissolve all the walls, rocks and petrifications within yourself and so allow the life force to work in you. Whoever has experienced even a slight victory has overcome a resistance, found a truth or made a recognition, even an unpleasant one—or rather exactly these—has experienced a feeling of peace, strength, and a sense of being vibrantly alive—until the next obstruction is tackled. These rare moments should be a living proof to you that what I say is not just a beautiful story or a remote and abstract theory without any bearing on the now. It is utter reality, accessible to you any time if you choose to turn inward.
The obstructions within your soul can exist only because you have violated divine law in some way. When divine law is violated, the life force cannot work. Note that the word “law” has very often a wrong connotation for you. Most human beings, when they hear this word, react to it emotionally in a way that has nothing to do with the sense in which I mean it. Law means to you—often unconsciously—something you are forced, or compelled to obey, an authority that is stronger than you. I outlined this in a whole lecture recently. This kind of emotional association with the concept of law is completely opposed to its true meaning. Law in its real and divine sense has nothing to do with force or compulsion; quite the contrary. As soon as force or compulsion set in—whether from outside or from within your own self—at that moment divine law is violated. For divine law is inner freedom.
You can gain inner freedom only by liberating yourself from errors. As the first and inevitable step, you have to bring them into consciousness. Only after that can you free yourself from them. So instead of talking about violating divine law, it might be better to say that divine truth is violated. For truth is life force and truth is certainly divine law. You all know, my dear friends, that the path on which I lead you shows you the truth about yourself.
Life force is regeneration. Petrified life force means degeneration. In your images, your wrong conclusions, your conscious and unconscious ignorance and errors, you do not live in truth, and therefore you prohibit the life force which, though it has many other attributes, is always a healing force—for your body, your mind, your soul, and for your spirit. Thus you will readily believe that all physical sickness is only a chain reaction, a final outer manifestation of obstructed life force.
Whenever you have obstructions within your soul, the only way to cure the malady is first to prepare for the proper reception of the life force. The first step is to encounter the untruth and that, of course, is not pleasant. This leads many people to believe that our path cannot be the right one. They think that because the divine is beautiful, harmonious and blissful, to experience the very opposite is an indication that something contrary to the divine is taking place. What a misunderstanding, my friends! How can you believe that you can simply bypass all the disharmony you yourself have planted in your soul and then directly experience divine harmony!
You have to understand the wrong causes you have set in motion before you can truly understand divine truth. If you have planted a poisonous plant in your garden, spoiling all the good plants, can you get rid of the bad plant without getting hold of it and pulling it out? This work is not exactly pleasant, for the poison may even affect you temporarily while touching it, but this cannot be avoided. It is better than to leave the poisonous plant in your garden.
Pain has to be endured one way or another before you can get rid of that in you which causes and has constantly caused pain. You must learn to distinguish between two basic kinds of pain, my friends, the degenerating and the regenerating. You have that in the physical realm as well. There is the kind of pain of becoming sick, feeling the symptoms of an onsetting illness. One is then on the downward curve. And then there is a different kind of pain, often even more acute, which goes with the healing process: the regenerating pain. This is often—indeed always—necessary before complete cure or healing can take place. Such pain is on the upward curve. Before undergoing an operation, for instance, first you feel the kind of pain of becoming sick, often long before you know what is wrong. And then your physician finds out and he operates on you. In the healing process you endure a completely different kind of pain. You all know the wound cannot heal before the pus has been let out and, in the cleansed state, the tissues can grow together again. That is the regenerating pain.
The same holds true for the soul. You cannot escape this reality, my friends. You have the choice either of remaining on the downward curve, in the state where you suffer from the symptoms, refusing to go to the root of the evil, or of mustering up courage, approaching the problem, cutting open the wound, and thus allowing the healing forces of nature to take over. After letting out the pus—your errors, your wrong conclusions—you need to endure for a while the kind of pain that is regenerating. The operation itself would be the unpleasantness of facing what is wrong with you. It is the high point, or shall we say the low point, before the upward curve can begin.
By visualizing this, it may be easier for you to work your way out of the trap you now find yourself in. You do not need to endure blackness and despair. Turn around, my dear ones, and try to understand what I say here and approach the real affliction, instead of continuously paying attention to the symptoms only. Even my friends farthest advanced on the path are tempted to look at the symptoms of evil, rather than the cause, because of their unconscious fear of the sharper pain of the “operation.” Under stand that once you have the courage to go through the “operation,” the time of pain is very short. If, however, you stay on the downward curve, attaching yourself to the symptoms but turning away from their origin within yourself, the suffering will last. The pain will endure as long as you do not decide to face the real problem and decide for the “operation.”
This advice does not only apply to taking this path as a whole, but should be applied to every step on it. You may be on the path all right and still deliberately overlook certain sick points in your soul, seeking the remedy from the outer world. This again is attachment to the symptoms. The more you dissolve the inner obstructions, the petrifications, by facing your misconceptions, misunderstandings and the untruth that lives in your soul, the more you allow the life force to flow through you. The more you do that, the sooner you will revive on all levels of your being.
As I said at the beginning of this lecture, perfection is limitless and eternal, not only in the sense of time, but also in the sense of scope. You can sense and experience an infinitesimal part of all this, even while on earth. Whoever approaches the stony and steep road of self-finding will experience gradually, little by little, changes that are unbelievable, or would be unbelievable for anyone who does not invest in this. I do not promise you miracles, my friends. Miracles in that sense do not exist. Whoever wants to believe in that kind of salvation does so because it does not entail personal effort. Wouldn’t that be easy! But no, such salvation does not exist. This path is one of utter reality; there are no fairy tales. The reality I show you can be experienced by everyone, provided that he or she does not shy away from the labor and is willing to pay the price. Yes, miracles do happen on this path, but only if earned the hard way. That is the way it should be, the way you can safely believe in because it makes sense. And do not forget another thing, that the subtle changes in the personality manifest first inside, so that they are not noticeable by others or manifest in changed circumstances. The first manifestation must always be that you feel and react differently inwardly. The rest follows later.
So, my dear friends, let the life force into your soul. You cannot do so by simply willing it, by trying to get into a holy mood, though this may help a little. A prayer will give you the necessary strength to do your part. But the work has to be done. That of the living flow which you at one time or another have destroyed has to be regenerated by your own efforts in facing yourself, in overcoming your resistance and sluggishness and self-pity. You should never believe even for an instant that what you experience is unjust and unfair, no matter how much it may appear that way. In the last analysis, in absolute truth and reality, you have caused it. You have to find the cause and find a different way to come out of it than the direction you have taken so far, the state you have remained in too long. Think about this, my dear friends.
And now a little more advice for your work on image-finding. What I have said in the lectures on this subject has surely shown you that various overall general subjects and concepts play a role in the human psyche. Therefore general attitudes need to be investigated. An attitude to a general concept or idea becomes very personal in the human mind and soul because all human beings encounter personal experiences in their lives that apply to these subjects. The method I have presented so far covers, briefly speaking, the various lists which I need not again enumerate, the life story of the individual, and the practice of the daily review. With this material at hand, you can certainly be successful—and have been—in your findings. Now I would like to give you an additional item to add to the method. Some of you have used it anyway, without quite realizing it. But now this should be incorporated as an integral part of the work. It is this: Take all general ideas, concepts, and principles, and make a list of all those that are important in a person’s life. Some I have discussed already, such as love, eros and sex or authority; others I shall discuss in the future. Think of money, work, various emotions, human relationships, plus a number of other general subjects which you can examine successively, according to what is the person’s most pressing problem. Find out what is the attitude of each individual toward that subject. Let people tell you first their general idea, their concept on the subject they apparently have difficulties with. Then begin to question the person about his or her life from this particular point of view, covering childhood, adolescence, young adult life, and so on.
Let that person tell you what his parents’ attitude, or apparent attitude, was on the subject. You may then find out that in nine out of ten cases the intellectual concept is completely different from the emotional behavior and attitude. This should furnish an important clue for the images and wrong conclusions. Incorporate this approach into the overall method and use it whenever the time seems ripe. Make it into a definite program. Yet there should be no rigid system; you know you have to work with your intuition and according to the personality. In one case one subject should be taken first, in another case a different one might be appropriate. And in yet another case it may be better to wait with this type of investigation altogether.
In due course we will discuss many general subjects of this sort from the viewpoint of the wrong interpretation in the unconscious, and what the right reaction would and should be.
And now, my dear friends, before we turn to your questions, I would like to make a proposition which should prove exceedingly interesting to all of you. There is so much friction among you—and this is unavoidable in any human group. You are also all full of goodwill and do not want any friction. The question always is how to eliminate it. There are various ways. Some you have tried, some not, or have forgotten.
Now let me make a new suggestion which should work out very well, if you use it. You all know that lawyers can defend a case from two entirely different sides. They can first represent the case from one viewpoint and be utterly convincing. They can then take the opposite side and be equally convincing. Any lawyer will confirm this to you. Many practice it as part of their training.
If there is friction between you and one of your brothers or sisters, my advice is that you become an advocate in his or her defense. Take the case and try to see how the other one sees it and present the case first to yourself. That will be the easiest. Then go to an objective third person, detached from the conflict, perhaps the person you work with, and repeat this process in her presence. This would be the second step. And if you really want to reach the highest step in this particular regard, go to the person with whom you have the conflict and be the advocate in his or her defense. Perhaps he or she will do the same. It takes courage and humility, the two attributes so inevitable to reach any success on this path. But if you cannot bring yourself to take the third and highest step, try the first and perhaps then the second.
Take up this task in seriousness; do not make a half-hearted attempt. Try to forget yourself. Try to act on your adversary’s behalf as though you actually were a lawyer and your reputation were at stake. By defending badly, because in a corner of your being you still want to prove how right you are, you have not fulfilled your job at all. Play a game, imagine your life depends on presenting a convincing case for the other person. The better you represent him, the better it is for you; and not, as you may continue to believe, the better you defend him, the worse you come out. After the other has heard you first, as your “client” he will give you additional material, so that you can succeed better. Listen to it so as to extend and strengthen the case for your “client.”
Do you know what this will do for you, my dear ones? It will open new vistas of understanding. You are so used to representing only your own case. There you are perfect. There you do not need further improvement and practice. Learn now to see the other side. Be the lawyer for the other one, instead of for yourself. That is my advice. It will be a very good exercise, the surest and fastest way to eliminate friction or to reduce it to a minimum, provided you follow it through. It may also be a good idea for group work. First state briefly your own case and then become the lawyer for the other. Let the others judge whether you are a better lawyer in your own behalf than in behalf of the other person.
And now, my friends, I am ready for your questions. Are there any questions on any of the subjects discussed tonight?
QUESTION: Science says that life is light and consciousness. Does that correspond to what you said tonight? Intelligence and light?
ANSWER: Of course. Only it is much more than that. Intelligence and light are only two details. The life force is everything that exists. Everything good. And everything negative or detrimental is petrified life force: divine truth or divine law that has not been adhered to.
QUESTION: What are the main qualifications and prerequisites for team-workers, and after how long a training and self-purification, generally speaking, should they start working as team-helpers?
ANSWER: This is, of course, quite difficult to answer in general terms. But I will try. One of the general qualifications is a certain psychological talent. That goes without saying. Who has this talent and who does not will show rather quickly. In most cases, even the person himself will be aware of whether or not he or she has this talent. There is certainly nothing to be ashamed of if one does not have it. Not everyone has the same talents. Everyone who is halfway honest with himself will know whether he or she has a number of qualifications that, all put together, are the talents required for this particular work. For instance: insight, intuition, power of deduction, observation, a very warm interest in other people, positive feelings, also a certain basic detachment.
The time element is impossible to fix. It varies. Some people may be capable of doing this work sooner than others. It depends on them. It is not a prerequisite that all images be found and dissolved before one can work with others. That is not necessary, although some discoveries need to have been made, some results of the search for images should have been achieved. But one absolute prerequisite is to have done some successful work on one’s path, felt the relief of the recognitions, and experienced inner changes.
Before this experience and sense of relief, one person would not be able to help another. You must have had that feeling to know what it is like; only then can you do your helping with conviction. As long as a certain relief and victory have not taken place, you would be so much in darkness, so ensnarled in your own difficulties, that you could never have open eyes for another. The necessary detachment and intuition would be missing. So that is the criterion by which you can proceed and judge.
Each one of you must know best whether you are ready or not when you ask yourself, “Did I have that experience? Am I completely convinced? Did I overcome certain basic problems in myself? Do I understand truly what in me is causing my main problems?” I repeat, the images do not have to be dissolved, but the relief that is the inevitable result of understanding certain causes and effects in one’s own life must have been experienced.
QUESTION: On rereading the last lecture, on “the wall,” it seems to me that when we are supposed to find “the wall,” we are also supposed to realize that this wall is almost physically present. Is that correct?
ANSWER: I do not know what you mean by “physically.” I meant that you should visualize it, you should feel it as a concrete something in your soul. After a while you will get to this point. But you cannot see it physically. It is just that you feel a hardness in you, something that prevents you from being completely empty and flowing.
QUESTION: I think that occasionally it can be seen in reverie and before waking.
ANSWER: That is possible. It can also be seen in a dream.
QUESTION: Is it only after “the wall” has disappeared that one’s spiritual rebirth can occur? Does this disappearance occur when you have become conscious of everything that was behind “the wall,” or only after you have actually purified yourself?
ANSWER: The spiritual rebirth can occur after you are completely conscious of everything that was behind “the wall.” Then the regenerating forces of nature can begin to work. But try to realize what it means to be completely conscious. It includes applying the findings at all times to one’s reactions, and that is certainly not so easy.
QUESTION: Can one be completely conscious of all one’s wrong trends?
ANSWER: The time must come. I do not say that it has to come in this life for all of you. Perhaps there are very, very few for whom this is possible, but eventually it must come for everyone. Until that point is reached, you go on and on incarnating. But you can reach quite a distance in this life—and thus you speed up all succeeding lives because your psyche becomes impregnated with the process of self-search. It becomes second nature and will remain in the soul, so that the entity will benefit by this habit in future incarnations.
I will retire into my world and leave all of you with divine blessings and strength. May the new friends who have found their way here take the trouble and patience to find out whether they can find the many answers this path has to offer. Let none of you be hasty. Receive at least particles of the life force that is contained in every blessing. How much you can absorb depends entirely on your own state of mind. Bitterness, anger, self-pity, all these block the life force. Remember that. So try to open your doors. Be blessed, my dear ones, be in peace, be in the Lord!