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Greetings, my very dearest, most beloved friends, brothers and sisters, sons and daughters. Again a working season draws to its end. But each end is a beginning, as each beginning is also an end. These are the endless cycles, the waves of the infinite flow of the river of life. If you are within the flow, you grow and expand more and more into universal oneness. If you obstruct the flow, you accumulate the force and energy which manifest as blocks of pain and suffering.
At each beginning and end of a working season I give something like a map or bird’s eye view of the phase you have left behind, to make you ready for the phase to come. These maps give you a better understanding of the progression. No new phase is possible without the preceding one. No step can be skipped. Year after year of our cooperation these maps have proven to be exact and timely for most of you, while others may catch up later. But that is all right. Always, of course, a few fear and resist so much that they deliberately obstruct their progression and natural organic movement and therefore experience unnecessary fear and pain. But on the whole, this is the way we work together.
At the start of this working season I announced that the winter would be dedicated to the beginning of “transforming work.” Transformation of negative consciousness and energy becomes possible after you finally allow your negativities to surface, accept them, and take full responsibility for them. A vague and general awareness of destructive and evil intents does not suffice for the transformation work to take place. The negativities must be fully seen, in all their details; fear and shame of them must be overcome; hiding and camouflaging or whitewashing must have stopped; exaggerated self-blame must be relinquished. What is necessary is to simply and honestly own up to the full force of devilish attitudes and to all their puny details. Only this act will free you. The act is by no means a morbid or self-negating process, however.
Some of you may still wonder why so much emphasis on the negative is necessary for genuine spirituality to be reached. Some of you may have tried other approaches, hoping to bypass this highly unpleasant task, but real solutions cannot be reached, nor can integration occur in those other ways.
The fruits of your hard work in this first unpleasant phase are beginning to be reaped. A number of you have succeeded this past year, after arduous work with negative matter, to effect true transformation. The founding of the Center has helped greatly in this particular aspect of the work.
The phases of transformation are not exactly divided. They overlap. In one area you may have faced the negative aspects, removed blocks, and be ready for transformation work, while in other areas there is grave distortion and destructiveness untouched so far by your conscious awareness. In still other areas you have gained full purification and are clear and free. This is why it is difficult to judge whether total self-purification has been achieved or not. Only complete dedication, watchfulness, awareness, readiness to dismiss wishful thinking and restrain pride will protect you from illusion—and the pain of disillusionment.
The specific manner of the pathwork offers wonderful protection. The closeness you have developed, the intimate knowledge of yourselves that you share with each other, the perceptiveness so many develop increasingly as a result of your progress, the greater honesty and courage that gradually become second nature—all that is indispensable help. One important gauge of the pathwork can constantly be used to determine your state: what is your life manifestation telling you? How rich and full is your life? How much are joy, peace, and abundance increasingly open to you? How much less are you afraid and reluctant to meet and expose the deepest regions of your innermost self? When you encounter inner blocks in momentary crises, how fully do you travel through them to find yourself more fully you? These questions when honestly probed, will lead you to the truth about your progress. They will tell you whether or not you are stuck, whether you deceive yourself—perhaps hoping that you can avoid dealing with certain unpleasant inner material.
On the whole, all of you have traveled far since last year. You are in a different inner place and you know it. Many of you find yourselves for the first time connected in a way you never believed possible and doubted could really exist, in spite of having given lip service to the words you have been hearing from me for years. Many of you believe truly and deeply for the first time that inner problems can indeed be fully resolved and the problematic self can become healthy, whole, and renewed in a vital way. The number of friends reaching these stages increases steadily and they help transmute the energies of new friends joining the pathwork. Momentum, courage, faith, proof and conviction are vital components, affecting those who witness what is happening to you and bathe in your environment.
When you reach stages which heretofore you have only heard described, you also gain courage to go deeper, into still hidden layers of covert evil. There is always the spiral configuration: level upon level, until the circles in the spiral become smaller and smaller. As they become smaller and gradually converge into one point, the way becomes increasingly simple. The simplicity at the final turn of the spiral is love. This simplicity means little when the circles in the spiral are still large. Then everything is complicated by the multiplicity of the ego’s separation from the oneness. In that state of separation, the word “love” is empty of feeling and experience, a word merely bandied about. Worse, it is misused and one speaks about love when many other things are meant that have little or nothing to do with real love. When you experience fully the inner meaning of love, you will know that everything is contained in that word.
To recapitulate briefly: previous phases of our work dealt with your ability to face negative attitudes, faults, distortions, destructiveness, impurities. Last year was the true beginning of transforming negative substance—both energy and consciousness—into positive substance. Both these aspects of the work will, of course, continue. The second phase, now increasingly possible, will lead to claiming your own: to claiming your full, total, unique self, your hidden greatness. Tonight’s topic is about claiming what is truly yours.
In a recent lecture I outlined some typical manifestations of states and experiences in which the little self merges with the divine self. I observed that there are many other such manifestations, some of which I would discuss at later periods. This is one of them.
It may seem peculiar, but it is a fact that human beings have a reluctance to let themselves truly be what they could be. Of course, an overgrown ego makes its claims constantly, overtly or covertly. But when it comes to your real greatness, you become inhibited, ashamed, afraid—you hold back what you could be, what you sense you already are. What is this strange wall that holds you back from being who and what you are, from being your best, your greatest, most wise, generous, loving, creative, self-assertive, unfolding, aware, courageous, humble self, with all its innate dignity and nobility? You are all of this and more. You have your own specific turn of mind, talent and intelligence; you have something utterly unique to contribute to life and creation. God manifests in and through you in a special and individualized way, totally different from all others.
Now what makes it seem so difficult to claim your greatness? When you become your full self, in the best sense of the word, you are apparently two opposites at once: you are unique and special, while at the same time you are not at all special. You are like everyone else in the sense that each one of you is a divine manifestation. All of you have fundamental divine qualities and also faults that obstruct them. The faults may vary in intensity and emphasis. You may differ in your development, in your openness and willingness to be in truth. But all of you manifest as egos and must go through the same fundamental struggle to transcend the ego. You are unique in the way God can manifest through you when you remove your obstructions, when you allow your specific greatness to come forth. Everyone is a genius, for everyone is God.
For the little ego that claims ego specialness this is not welcome news. The little ego wants to be superior, above all others. The Godself makes no such demands. What obstructs real greatness from flowing forth are the claims of the little ego which wants to tower above others, needing admiration; needing to compare and compete and subdue others to prove itself superior. This is the particular evil that has to be ousted. This particular evil brings a Pandora’s box full of many other attitudes which create shame, suffering, and many other destructive evil patterns.
You may well say, “I only wish to be more than others because I feel less than nothing.” But how about trying to reverse this premise? Would you really feel less than nothing if you did not need to be so superior? I venture to say, no. Would you be envious, jealous, petty, self-serving, spiteful, manipulative, malicious, denying others their own Godself—in short, loveless—if you did not wish to set yourself above others? Your God-consciousness and the other person’s God-consciousness are never in conflict. Only the ego, in its separated state, is in conflict because of blindness and limitation. The ego is not one, it is divided, and often in conflict and contradiction. The God-consciousness in you is One. The Godself does not push for recognition. It recognizes itself and is sufficient unto itself.
Another obstruction to the realization of your own ultimate unique beauty, greatness—your genius—is your fear of still existing evil within yourself. All fear is ultimately the fear of that. When the real nature of this fear is denied and projected onto other persons, outer events begin to manifest that seem to justify one’s fear of others. The nearer you come to transcending fear the more you have to meet the self—and overcome your reluctance to do so. The fear creates a tremendous wall and is a much greater obstruction than the evil itself. I have said this many times. This kind of fear has much to do with wanting to rise above and shine in the eyes of others. The claim of the little ego, translated into words, cries out: “Admire me, I am so much better than you. Love me for it.” Which, of course, is the ultimate folly.
The fear of evil within is superfluous, because the evil is really distorted beauty and love. The devil that resides in everyone was initially an angel. How can you confront this devil? All of you have made substantial progress in this respect. You reveal, you expose, you admit, you acknowledge, you take responsibility to an ever greater degree. This is why transformation occurs and the deepest, most persistent problems become resolved with ever greater frequency. But wherever there is still fear, ego-pride is always partially responsible. This ego-pride is connected to your ignorance of the nature of the devil in you. Not only do you believe that this devil is the final, real you, but you also believe that the devilish part of the self is intrinsically foreign and other than divine. This is ignorance.
I would like to invite you now, my friends, to make room in your consciousness for the idea that this very same devil, with all its cruelty, malice, dishonesty, pettiness, hate and fear is essentially an angel. Allegorically and symbolically, Lucifer was an angel of light. He turned into Satan. It is the evolutionary task of all separated entities to bring about a re-transformation: from Satan to Lucifer, from darkness to light. This process takes place within your psyche, my friends.
The devil is your fear. The fear is guilt for the hateful, malicious, cruel ways of the mind, for feelings that always in some way are expressed also in actions. Only when this guilt is faced, when the pain of it is fully experienced, not rejected but traveled through, can guilt and fear dissolve. Then the angel reveals itself. Then you are infused with warmth, love, confidence, soft flow, joy, and creative expansion. This process takes place, again and again, until all evil matter is transformed. You will then no longer believe that you give up anything—except the struggle when your mind still wants to hold onto being negative. The illusion is that you lose something. I often have said that so much energy is trapped in evil, an energy that you do not wish to be without, even though you do your utmost to squash and deny it in its present state. When you go through the process of the genuine transcendence of evil, you gain back all the forceful vitality that you had to inactivate in order to avoid the evil. You lose nothing; the gain is enormous.
If you can learn to open wide your arms, your consciousness, your positive will to the devil in you, in faith and fearless confidence in the inner guidance, you will in reality dispel all fear. There is no illusion here of escaping and cheating. You do not overcome, you do not oust or separate yourself from anything in you. You meet your demons full face. Then they will dissolve and their original nature will be revealed. Fully embrace this devil in the idea that the devil is an angel. The power and vitality of this devil can indeed, by your own turn of mind and consciousness, become a glowing light force of beautiful creative verve, love and energy, of supreme wisdom. The puny, jealous, separative consciousness of the devil, constantly battling against the beautiful laws of life, will spread wide open. And I say to you: the stronger the devil, the stronger the angel. For the strength in essence is the same. Allow this thought to take root in you, and you will fear much less. You will be less inclined to hide and whitewash and be a-tremble of your own evil or devil.
Approach your devil with the ultimate of courage and faith and crystallize out of it your beautiful angel. This is the transforming work. It will take place in ever-increasing measure. No one can claim his or her birthright and genius, and make a unique contribution to life, who does not fearlessly meet the inner devil and expose it.
Only in this way can you reconcile opposites, transcend dualities. Each duality, each mutually exclusive opposite you meet as an obstruction, is a sign that you are still divided. You are split off from your deeper consciousness, split off in fear, pride, selfwill, ignorance, greed, and hate. These same aspects can be reversed: fear becomes faith and trust; pride humility; selfwill a supple, resilient, flexible giving-in, going-with attitude; and a finely attuned flexibility to flow with your rhythm of life. Ignorance becomes awareness, perception, understanding and wisdom; greed a special kind of trust that lets you reach out and know there is abundance for you in every way. And you will have abundance, so that greed will be ludicrously superfluous. Most significantly, your hate will turn into your power of love.
No one finds peace and inner fulfillment, joy, wholeness, security, and the intrinsic genius to add to creation who is not dedicated to a cause outside the self. This is not therapeutic ploy; you must not force yourself in a dutiful way to be dedicated and selfless, in order to collect desirable rewards of glowing health and fulfilled living. But it is something you ought to understand clearly and use as yet another signpost to where you are.
Once again, you should admit honestly whether you still see fulfillment in life as a totally selfish and self-serving enterprise in which everything is supposed to be geared to suit you. If you explore your fantasies in this respect you will see exactly where you are. It is important that here, as in all other matters, you be completely honest. If you see that there is no genuine desire in you as yet to serve a larger cause, to forget the little self-interest, at least some of the time, for the sake of larger issues, then you should understand your loneliness, your disconnectedness, your fear and guilt and inability to realize your talents.
You must know that you have the innate capacity to be self-forgetful, but that your little ego thwarts this natural state. Maybe you hold onto misconceptions that will prevent you from wanting to go beyond yourself. Perhaps you believe that dedication to a cause beyond your little ego implies masochistic suffering and deprivation, poverty, and frustration of personal fulfillment and needs. As a matter of fact it is the other way round. Only when you can truly give to creation, when you make your unique contribution in a selfless spirit, can you also feel entitled to be fulfilled, to experience abundance in all ways. If you feel inhibited and reluctant to claim this full self-expression, it would be good to look at your selfishness, your lack of interest to add to the universe. You may conceal this inhibition under a pseudo-selflessness which may, in fact, be more selfish than overt selfishness. It may be part of your mask, your need to appear good in the eyes of others.
Many of you have begun to dedicate yourselves to a greater cause. It is an organic process that develops as you face the self-serving opportunism and vanity of your little ego. You grew into a more developed state and now feel the fulfillment that comes from giving to creation or serving a spiritual cause. You may not have specifically connected your increased peace, joy, liberation, creativeness, with the fact that you are more interested in giving something of yourself to the cause of helping other souls advance to higher states of inner truth. Perhaps by making this connection now, you will be further encouraged in the right direction.
Once again we can observe two circles, one vicious, the other benign. When you stay in fear and hide from the inner evil, you cannot claim your total, wonderful egoless self. You remain selfish, concerned only in a negative way with little ego interests, puny advantages, and unwillingness to give to life. Thus you become more and more impoverished, unhappy, embittered, and feel justified to withhold, give nothing—and the vicious circle continues.
As you transform the vicious circle into a benign circle, almost inadvertently you are led naturally to an attitude of selfless giving. It is never a sentimental giving in to neurotic and unhealthy demands. It is true giving. And in giving to others, you cannot escape giving to the self. For in reality, as you find out increasingly, the attitude to the self can be no different from the attitude toward others, and vice versa. Thus giving to a larger cause is the greatest self-enrichment imaginable. Life cannot be cheated. Your life speaks the truth to you about this and other matters.
Giving to a cause beyond the little ego is the supreme satisfaction. Deprive yourself of that and you cannot know peace, joy, fulfillment, self-esteem, the deep sense of deserving the best that life has to offer. The correlation is exact: to the degree you offer generously and trustingly the best you have to give to life, allowing God’s will to be done, to that degree will you feel entitled to open your arms wide to receive the best life has to offer. To the degree you hold back in puny fear that this might damage your self-interest, to that same degree must you hold back from receiving life’s riches. There can be no mistake. A finely calibrated mechanism in the deepest regions of your psyche works in absolute perfection. When your giving to life becomes so whole that you are deeply willing to forgo the little vanities for the sake of the greater truth, with the sense of responsibility that this is necessary, then the abundance of your life will surpass your present understanding.
When this group came together, you were all separate islands, each one concerned with his or her own little suffering, completely walled off from your inner self and consequently, of course, also from each other and from life. You were unwilling to give to life. Only recently do many of you find that this still holds true to some extent. But you make this discovery as you are already devoted to giving of yourself to a cause beyond. You are engaged in the most noble cause an entity can be active in, the purification and healing of souls. In this way do you contribute in the most vital way possible to the great evolutionary plan.
Every single soul who comes nearer to the threshold, who finally passes this threshold, releases untold energies of beauty, wisdom, strength, love, truth, creative resourcefulness, entering into the experience of oneness, and thus affecting, directly and indirectly, zillions of other entities. Just try to figure out mathematically how each changed attitude in you profits those around you. Each attitude of constructive giving is an immense, beautiful and vital living force in the universal scheme, affecting endlessly what is. I once gave this analogy: if an object is thrown into water, waves form in circles spreading wider and wider. These waves never end. They only seem to end where the body of water ends. But if the body of water were as endless as the universe, these waves would never end. So each idea, intent, and thought you form, motivated by unselfish devotion to universal truth, love, faith, expressing a desire to contribute to life according to the will of the All-Consciousness that permeates all life, is an endless wave that never never ceases; that has its effects long after you have lost any remote inkling of it in your conscious mind. You activate new creation, you set new psychic events in motion, which have an inexorable effect on life and on you.
It is therefore of utmost importance that you know what tremendous effects your thinking and intentionality have, the positive, as well as the negative. Your loving thoughts to the universe, your surrender to the divine creative intelligence in you is as real and effective as your spiteful withholding in lack of trust.
The venture you are now engaged in gives you a wonderful opportunity to help others. The work of purification you do must in some way be transmitted to others. Your giving can take many forms. You will do it in your own unique way. Your inner creative intelligence must make the decision for you, for only you know how you are best suited to contribute. What you can determine with your conscious mind is the intent, the wish to surrender your will, the desire to activate that in you which is greater than your ego, in order to increase the strength of your group and add to the light it already is. The more honest you are in this respect, the clearer will the muddy waters become. If you are honestly aware of your self-serving, you are a step nearer to truly selfless giving.
Why can you not claim your greatness? Because the little self is constantly on the lookout for its own little advantages. These personal gains may be material; they may manifest in pride, the need to show off and gain admiration from others; the need to look better than you secretly believe you are. When you free yourself of these attitudes, it will be easier for you to claim your true self with all its capacities, potentialities and uniqueness. You will allow yourself the abundance that you now may experience only in limited ways and at the price of guilt. You will be appreciated, simply because it is no longer your aim to be appreciated. You will no longer be ashamed of being the best you can be. Holding back from being your best will loosen as you detach from self-serving, as you release the stingy withholding from life, the spiteful non-givingness, as you come out of the hypocrisy and hiding of the little ego. You will lose your fear of the evil inside, aware now that the feared evil contains the essence of the good. Within every devil slumbers an angel that wants out.
If you lack humility you cannot allow your greatness to come forth. But in humbleness there will be no need to restrain your greatness. There will be no pushing, no proving, just a quiet inner knowing. It is then entirely unimportant and unnecessary that others recognize you. They will come to recognize you when you no longer need it and insist upon it. It is the little ego that needs recognition and has no sense of proportion. It is the little ego that gropes in the dark and fights in all the wrong directions.
This series of lectures is coming to a close—which does not mean, of course, an interruption of our contact, now that your Center offers such wonderful opportunity for work. What I suggest to you, my friends, is that you visualize for yourself a new state of greatness in humility, without ego, without needing to prove anything, without comparing yourself positively or negatively with others. Visualize yourself as unafraid of the worst in you, knowing that the worst will transform into the most beautiful, wise, strong, loving force. It is in hiding that the worst in you becomes puny and dangerous. By exposing it, you make it possible to envisage your new potential.
In the next Question & Answer session, we will discuss many important subjects. Prepare your questions about the two topics: children’s upbringing, and the prospect of making a sanctuary for animals and plant life in the Center. The answers will be important beyond the present scope.
I bless you now and tell you once again that your work and your growth is an ever-increasing beautiful energy form in the spiritual world. If you could see the beauty you would be astounded. If you could truly perceive the value and significance of what each one of you is doing, you would know a deep joy.
And you will know it, sooner or later, even while you are still in the body. You will inwardly experience it and it will make you stronger and more responsible. You will become more conscious instruments, each in your own beautiful, perfect way, each being a little piece that completes the whole. In this whole one does not function without the others, rather, each individual makes his or her own unique contribution. There is no need for jealousy. Self-proving is never necessary. When you know that, you will also know your unique greatness, beauty, and wisdom.
Love permeates all your undertakings. Every step of the way is meaningful and significant. Your life is very valuable. You are all blessed. Be in peace!
Greetings! Blessings and help are given to you. Love and strength are pouring forth. The divine kernel is in every one of you. The aim of living is to realize this, to know who you really are, to remember. Once you know your true self, which is divine heritage, you will no longer fear or suffer. The pathwork in which I guide you helps, by its various approaches, to eliminate the obstacles to finding out who you are.
These are mere words for most human beings; only after you have overcome certain obstacles can you occasionally experience your true identity. In tonight’s lecture I should like to discuss one of the experiences you may have when you begin to glimpse your true identity. I want to prepare you to understand the meaning of this experience so that you do not reject its magnificence by trying to fit it into the mold of the usual human experience—that would destroy it and make its reoccurrence more difficult. The purpose of this lecture is also to help you attain your true identity sooner and to eliminate the purely mental obstacles.
I wish to discuss a very specific feeling, a feeling that is rarely recognized because it transcends the usual human being’s experience of feelings. Within the spectrum of human emotion there is none higher and closer to divine reality than love. The feeling I wish to discuss is beyond love. Since it is a generally very rare human experience, except to the few people who reach full self-realization, it has no name.
I have spoken about many manifestations that accompany self-realization. I have spoken about how the channel opens to receive increasing wisdom and intelligence of such magnitude that all problems can be resolved. The solutions come forth in an all-inclusive way. No loose ends remain. I have discussed how you find within yourself a new creative power that can supply you with any fulfillment, any self-expression, any joy you wish. They are all close at hand, ready to be realized. I have discussed the beauty of the universe that you automatically discover: a universe in which all is well and nothing needs to be feared, in which you will find a sense of wholeness and of eternal life, the power of healing and emotional fulfillment on the deepest possible level. But I have never discussed one particular feeling, though it is implicit in everything else I said—for in your true being all is one: your experiences are no longer separated and fragmented, just as you are no longer an entity separate from God. As your outer, hitherto split-off little intellect will become one with the greater intelligence that dwells within, so will all experiences be one and merely have different facets.
In your present state of development, you can think one thing, feel another, will something else, and even act in yet another way. This terrible fragmentation is the most painful and confusing state imaginable. Its cure lies wholly in your innermost self where you will find the eternal presence of God.
The feeling I am describing might be called, for lack of a better name, the cosmic feeling. This cosmic feeling is not merely a theoretical understanding, or a feeling about the cosmos or creation. It is a physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual experience. It encompasses the entire person. I shall try to describe this experience as best I can within the limitations of human language. Then I shall explain the prerequisites for attaining this cosmic feeling, the four keys which make it possible.
The cosmic feeling is an experience in which feeling and thinking are no longer split. It is feeling and thinking in one. This is hard to imagine when one has never had such an experience. But some of you have occasionally experienced the oneness of feeling and thinking. It is an experience of bliss, of the comprehension of life and its mysteries; of all-encompassing love; of the knowledge that all is well and there is nothing to fear. The total absence of fear is something that is very hard for the average person to imagine, partly because you are so unaware of your fears and partly because you are so used to living with them that it does not occur to you that life could be otherwise. When you know that there is no death, no real suffering other than the temporary manifestation of your errors, illusions, and intentional negativities—which could end whenever you so desire—and no real passing of time since time, too, is a production of illusion, then you cannot fear. Fearless love and joy is a feeling-experience that transcends your little, personal self. It includes everything—and you feel the oneness of all in the universe.
Your failure to distinguish between what is real and what is false creates apparently endless confusion and pain. While you believe in illusions, you usually reverse the true order of the universe: you think that what is real is nonexistent. But knowing what is real and what is illusion is part of the experience of the cosmic feeling. This experience lends an immense security, a knowledge of being truly safe, which in turn releases much energy that is felt as bliss in every part of your being. Relaxation and excitement, peace and pleasure you then experience as interconnected aspects, rather than mutually exclusive opposites as you do ordinarily. This oneness contains every particle of you—body, soul, spirit.
Needless to say that in this state no worry or anxiety can possibly exist. Nor is there a tight pulling within drive you and make you restless. Restlessness is an expression of the inner urge to seek the path of truth toward full self-realization, but before you have found it, the drive can be painful and can temporarily make you search in the wrong direction, leading you even further away from what your innermost self seeks. The pull may be subtle or strongly noticeable. It has its function, but it uses energy that will later be available for the blissful knowing-feeling of the presence of God within. The immediacy of this incredibly powerful presence is at first shocking. The good feeling is shocking. It is as if an electric shock went through you. Therefore, the ego must grow sufficiently strong and healthy to bear the high vibrations when the inner presence of God emanates into the outer person. This presence is then experienced as your eternal reality and state—your true identity. The moment you find yourself in this state, you will know in a most profound way that you have always known what you now rediscover, that you have always been what you now experience yourself to be—that none of this is really new. You had only temporarily cut yourself off from this state of feeling and knowing, of experiencing life as it really is. The experience becomes possible the moment you can bear the immediacy of your divine kernel’s presence, its consciousness, its energy, its sparkling reality, its all-permeating wisdom, its all-inclusive love, its creative power that is yours to use as you see fit.
This description is, of course, extremely limited, for the words cannot convey the experience. To gain an inkling of the reality of these words, pray, in this very moment, to be able to perceive a taste of it. Open your inner faculties, my friends. Observe in yourself how much you fear this experience even while you long for it, and how you consequently close yourself to it. Then, at least, you will know that something does wait for you; you will not fall into the trap of an ego trick and sit in doubting judgment, flattering yourself that the doubting attitude is intelligent because it is not gullible. To distinguish between what is real and what is fakery or escape or illusion, you must be open and evaluate with your feelings and intuitive faculties, as well as with your discriminating mind. If fear governs you, the discriminating mind is being used and perverted. If the feelings are open in honesty, the discriminating mind will be the servant it is supposed to be, not the master. If you cannot honestly admit that you are still too afraid of this feeling, that is all right. You can calmly go to work on the obstacles, without self-deluding tactics that remove you further from the real goal that will be reached one day in time and space.
Now I shall discuss the four keys or prerequisites for becoming strong enough to bear the power that you are, and the wisdom embedded in you, and the love hidden inside you, ready to flow out. Everyone of you, without exception—every living thing in the universe, organic or inorganic—is permeated with this power and intelligence; all that varies is the degree to which the power and the intelligence become manifest.
The four keys are aspects of the pathwork. But they must also be seen in the context of the cosmic feeling. They are the following:
1. True understanding of cause and effect in your life. Understanding cause and effect in your life is essential for self-realization, for the realization of your divine identity. It is essential merely for good health, for being centered within and reasonably integrated, for meaningful functioning and satisfying experiences. The moment you can see the level in you where your concepts, intentions, and attitudes create your life circumstances, you have your key to create a different and more desirable life. But when you are disconnected from the creating power in you, when you create unconsciously, you are powerless, that is, ignorant of your own power, and you get involved in a chain reaction of error and distortion. You are then in a state where you constantly make others—people, circumstances, life as a whole—responsible for your misery. This brings further chain reactions. This inner state—whether you are conscious of it or not—makes you blame, accuse, and feel victimized. In turn you feel justified to hate, resent, and take revenge.
Another byproduct of your disconnection is your growing feeling of helplessness and powerlessness: dependency on others, with its inevitable resentments arising from unfulfilled expectations; fear and the consequent defenses that cut you off further from the source of life in you. And all the while you go on willfully ignoring how you create this miserable state yourself, because it suits you better to blame others and to wait for a salvation that will never come. It can only come when you realize your beautiful birthright to create. Just as you create negatively, so can you create positively. Just as you create willfully from the little ego, following the dictates of vanity, greed, laziness, and dishonesty, so can you create by letting God express in you and create honestly and beautifully.
While you are involved in the subtle inner game of disassociating yourself from the causes you set in motion by this or that attitude and will direction, it is impossible to use your creative powers to produce a life of meaning and fulfillment. So you wait—in vain—for some other power to take over. This makes your life miserable and hopeless. You then busily deny your sense of hopelessness and futility, and thus you go on ignoring that there is indeed a way out, but in exactly the opposite direction from the one you have chosen.
You are fortunate that the progress of your pathwork has brought many of you in contact with the level of your negative creation. You begin to see more clearly which attitudes, expressions, and intentionalities have produced manifestations in your life that you deplore and have complained about while passively waiting for some miracle to happen from outside—or in the face of which you have given up and adjusted to unnecessary deprivation and frustration. There is still much work to be done by each of you in searching out your negative self-creation. There are still many areas of your lives you gloss over and fail to give the scrutiny so essential for this discovery.
Uncover your vague sense of futility which makes you fear that your life is slipping through your fingers without your having realized its essence, its beauty, the creative joyousness that is here for you to enjoy. Missing out on it makes you very unhappy. For anyone who is involved in the pathwork, this state is less acute; but there are always some who come to this work with only a minor part of themselves and have no real intention to open up all the way. In that case, the despair remains. It is therefore foolish to indulge your resistances in the pathwork and to act as if not overcoming them would not really matter—as if your resistances were based on some valid reasons peculiarly suited to your “individuality,” or whatever other explanations you may concoct. Do not delude yourself that you can attain results without challenging your resistances. Understand that you can never connect with your creative level, you can never be truly secure, unless you are aware of cause and effect.
Once again, my friends, begin by asking yourselves: in what respect are you unhappy and unfulfilled? And then proceed, with the aid of your helper, to investigate your hidden attitude toward the specific unhappiness. I do not mean the conscious intent, I truly mean the hidden negative intentionality to get more than you are willing to give. All of this must be explored.
At first this is painful. You cling to the illusion that you are an innocent victim. But what unhappiness you buy with this illusion! And once you overcome your dishonesty, you will fully see and understand the negative creation you have produced and how your mental attitudes and hidden feelings have created the present conditions. These attitudes are all the more powerful when they are hidden and unrecognized.
I advise you not to let overwhelming guilt dissuade you from this course. Recognize it as yet another ego trick. By such devastating guilt you prevent yourself from lifting yourself up, from going through the one and only act that can truly remedy the situation, and from recognizing your beauty through the very exposure of your ugliness. Neither aggrandize the guilt, so that it keeps you cowering in repression and misery, nor belittle it. Allow yourself to feel the pain of your guilt, so that you fully see its whole impact, what you do to others and yourself, and how so. This awareness will motivate you to change your negative creating into a positive one.
When you can truly connect with your creative level, you will find such relief; you will find the world opening up. It will dawn on you that if you can create unconsciously, inadvertently, and erroneously such tangible events and states of mind, you can also create consciously, deliberately, and intentionally the circumstances and the state of mind that you desire.
For example, if you now feel that you cannot bear happiness and pleasure—if the current is too strong and disquieting—you can create this capacity in yourself by stating the desire and intent, by being willing to give up your dishonesty and negative intentionality, and by wanting to give honestly the best that is in you. How else can you find the endless wealth that is in you? By holding back your inner giving, your openness, and your commitment to life you increase your sense of inner poverty, your belief that you are empty and have nothing to give. The one who feels empty gives nothing. You can feel rich and full only when you wish to give. The moment you do this you create positively, and you will gradually see your creations grow. They may sometimes take a few years to fully manifest, sometimes less. They are never completed. Positive creations can be endlessly enlarged. By truly seeing the cause and effect of your negative creation and its manifestations, you become a creator. You realize your birthright of divinity.
Understanding cause and effect in your life is an incredibly important prerequisite for becoming whole, for being in reality, for true self-responsibility, for opening up a channel to your divinity. This divinity is nothing supernatural or mystical, my friends. It is nothing that comes miraculously or magically from far away. Your divinity is your power to create by your thinking, by expanding your vision, by impressing your intents into yourself, and by requesting the power of God within you to unite with your consciousness.
2. Learning the ability to feel all your feelings and to handle the feeling experience. It requires a bit of growing and groping before the personality can accept all feelings, experiencing and handling them constructively. I have said much about how to do this, so now I will discuss this topic only as it relates to the cosmic feeling.
If humankind goes through the depths of unhappy, painful feelings, it is because it has created them and can only grow beyond them by going through them. Many of you have already experienced the truth that by fully accepting and feeling your pain, you become commensurately capable of sustaining pleasure. By humbly and honestly admitting your hate and expressing it constructively, that is, assuming responsibility for it, your capacity to love grows commensurately. By willingly experiencing your fear, you grow fearless and secure. This is so because the apparently opposite feelings are one and the same energy current, appearing in different frequencies and degrees of condensation. The vibration changes as you discover the oneness of the opposites. The more you avoid a feeling, the less can you experience its other side.
The cosmic feeling is of the highest frequency of energy. If any feeling within the ordinary human spectrum is still apparently unmanageable, cosmic feeling is much too strong to bear. As long as you shy away from a feeling, it remains a wall, it remains your enemy, and you must remain frightened of your own feelings. By that dynamic you create the twice-removed alienation process that is so disconcerting and painful: fear of your fear; pain about your pain; hate for your hate. Your inner split widens until you start groping your way back.
There is no feeling in existence, no matter what it is, that cannot be fully experienced and dealt with in a constructive, beautiful way. If you air out your most negative feelings—hate, cruelty, anger, and rage, and their byproducts of envy, jealousy, greed, dishonesty, and so on—their clean and honest expression is beautiful. It is beautiful because you no longer pretend; you risk being truthful and thus become beautiful as you expose the ugliness. This cannot ever be harmful if you do not then use this stage of your self-work to stay stuck—you know that anything can be misused and put into the service of the life-negating ego tricks. If you have the courage and trust in the universe to truly expose a negative part of your consciousness—without pride because you overcame the shame—and if you ask for inner guidance to help you in this endeavor, you will experience the powerful energy contained in the previously hidden feelings. This energy is absolutely essential for creating your life, for expanding your life and consciousness, for feeling joy and pleasure. Tiredness, listlessness, lack of energy can be explained by many outer factors, but in the last analysis they are always a product of running away from feeling and thus of repressing your vital energy.
There is no pain that, if you meet it constructively and without false ideas and projections, will not prove to be a tunnel through which you go comparatively quickly, releasing beautiful energy, love, and power. There is no hate so ugly, or negative intentionality so awful, that expressing it honestly—rather than acting it out against others—will not yield powerful energy and add to the beauty of your love and your environment. No hate, no pain, no fear is ever permanent, but love, pleasure, security, peace, and bliss are permanent conditions. Hate, pain, fear are but frozen energy, distorted consciousness. Every time you feel reluctant to go into a pain or into your rage, it is only dishonesty that makes you reluctant—the wish to appear different from the way you really are. When you overcome your imagined need to pretend, when you can be who you are, there is no feeling that cannot be a source of creative energy. Being honest includes challenging your conscious or unconscious assumption that if you go into pain, you will become lost in it and perish.
By exposing what you fear to expose, you learn to deal with it. Many of you already see that releasing the stagnant, sick energy of hidden, distorted feelings transforms it into a powerful agent for joy and creativity.
The whole spectrum of feelings must be thoroughly experienced: as I said, only when you allow and deal with negative feelings can you accept and sustain good feelings. By the same token, only when you can accept and sustain ordinary good feelings can your ability to sustain the cosmic feeling grow. It is important to understand this evolutionary process of your feeling nature; it will explain why you are so often incapable of holding on to good feelings. You see yourself contract again, right after you have opened up and experienced pleasure, love, the goodness of life. You know that this principle exists, but you still do not use it enough for the gauge that it is; it points to unrecognized, unaccepted, unexpressed negative feelings. And if occasionally a glimmer of the cosmic feeling comes and quickly slips away, it is a sign that your love capacity is not as developed as it can and will be. The strongest human love experience is only a lukewarm, mild shadow of the cosmic feeling that encompasses everything.
3. Developing positive intentionality. You must develop positive intentionality not superficially, not just to comply with some rules, but from the core of your real being, where you want truth and love for their own sakes rather than for what you wish to gain. It must exist on that deep level where you keep discovering the dishonesty and negative intentions toward life, which are the true causes of your unhappiness. The moment you can risk looking at your negative intentions and begin to really work with them on this deep level, your positive intentionality will express itself strongly. Then there will be love—love for the universe, love for yourself, love for others, love for creation. Your love lacks totality to the degree that negative intentionality festers in your psyche. And you cannot have cosmic feeling unless you have love.
The commitment to make a fair exchange with life must be made over and over day in and day out, searching for deeper hidden recesses where negative intentionality may still exist and then reversing it in a deliberate, creative act of expressing positive intentionality.
How can you gauge where hidden negative intentionality exists? You can gauge it easily by simply asking, “Where am I still unhappy? Where am I anxious? Where do I have problems with myself, with life, with others?” No matter how easy it may be to ascribe the cause to others—which may also be true—there is nevertheless something in you that you do not see. Your own unhappiness is your gauge, and you can use it every day. Nothing could be more reliable. In your daily review each night, ask yourself, “Is my life as fulfilled, as joyful, as rich and meaningful as I long for it to be?” Then you have your answer, and you can explore yourself further by asking, “What do I contribute to this situation? How do I create it?” Of course you cannot do this alone, but you have a helper.
Even if your life is fulfilled and happy, and you see it become increasingly richer—and the continued pathwork will bring about such a change without fail—you can still ask yourself, “Which are the areas in my life where I still do not feel the joy that I know otherwise to exist?” Your clue to look inside, into your heart of hearts. What do you really intend in this innermost place toward a certain aspect of your life? It is really very simple to do this, my friends, and once you focus in this way, you will see it as simple as a diagram you can draw with the simplest stroke. It is truly no mystery.
4. Connecting with your divine nucleus. The other three approaches are surely prerequisites to this. The fourth approach cannot truly be used successfully unless the other three have been put into practice. The fourth key is meditational. Listen into yourself, become calm and receptive, quiet the busy, loud mind. Start with the premise that there is a deep nucleus of knowing, feeling, power, and presence within you. Focus on it lightly, without the feeling that “I must experience it now.” Calmly wait. Learn to become inwardly relaxed. See your own inner rushing, driving, grasping. Observe it, until you can stop it. It may at first be a pain, but take the opportunity to feel the pain without resistance. Learn the great art of tuning in. Ask your innermost Godself for help in this. Persevere. Give your attention and your goodwill to the practice. One day the channel will open. Contemplate the possibility that there are faculties within you that you have not yet experienced.
There is an inner ear with which you will eventually hear; an inner eye with which you will see; an inner power with which you will perceive. These faculties are not yet in use, but they can be awakened. As you put to rest your thoughts and your doubts, which are a trick of the ego, and as you increase your capacity to see through the ego’s tricks and be attentive to your inner movements, again and again asking for inner guidance, you will awaken and develop a new inner faculty. It may appear in different realms for different people. With one, the inner ear will suddenly open and you will hear God in you. You will know it is not imagination—nothing could be more real. With another, the inner eye will begin to see—perhaps symbolic forms or pictures. It may see on an inner level, where seeing is knowing. It may see the light of truth and of love. That seeing will become understanding, for understanding must always follow to integrate the experience with the conscious ego personality. Still another may discover an ability to express the inner knowing in thoughts: “It” thinks in you, instructs you, or perhaps writes through you. There are many different ways in which new knowing, new seeing, new hearing, new experiencing come from the divine kernel within. The integration of this new faculty into the personality is the expansion I talked about in the last lecture.
Everyone can be helped by this lecture to understand where he or she is on the path, regardless of whether each person can actually put everything to use at this point. That may come only later.
To close, I would like to say once again that the power, the strength, the love, and the help invested in this group venture are so wonderful. The power grows steadily through your progress and liberation and the faith you gain through what you experience and see around you. You can gain so much by letting your heart feel the power at these gatherings. Do not allow the ego tricks to cut you off from your heart and feelings. If you recognize your own doubting, negating ego in the tricks it produces, and if you then doubt your doubts, you can open your hearts, my friends. You will then know I say the truth.
As I withdraw from this instrument, try again to use the powerful energy here. There are so many different ways to use it. Perhaps there are people here who do not love each other, who have had friction or misunderstandings with one another. Maybe they can use this powerful energy to come into the middle of the circle and honestly confront each other. Another way may be for one person who wants help to have the whole group give its energy to find the necessary clue in him or her. Ask in the meditation that follows, with which you generate more of this beautiful energy, for inspiration. Use the energy to move you where God in you directs you. Surrender to the divine power and guidance. Ask God in you whether you should come forward, and how. If you truly surrender to God’s will and guidance, wonderful things will happen. Allow them to happen. Enrich yourself and do not shy away from the risk and from the momentary resistance. Do not cut yourself off from it. Be blessed, my dear ones!
Greetings, my very beloved friends.
What is the deepest meaning of the spirit of self-preservation? If the deep mind knows that there is eternal life, why does it hold on to life and instinctively fights leaving the body? This seems to be a contradiction.
I shall talk about this very important facet of your inner life and attempt to give you a deeper understanding of it, so that you can use it in your search for unification. The longing for physical life expresses the divine spirit surging forward into the void, creating matter and form and eventually animating these forms and irradiating them with life, consciousness, and divinity.
These words exactly describe the divine plan: to push the spirit forward, outward, gradually filling the void. As I have mentioned before in other lectures, it is during this process and venture that evil comes into existence. The slow penetration of the spirit into the void permits divine attributes to manifest only to a small degree at first. Therefore consciousness is fragmented, concepts are split, and vision is limited; hence come error, ignorance, and fear, creating, in turn, further evil attitudes. Light meeting darkness initially distorts vision; then being is fraught with the threat of nonbeing.
On the level of your consciousness you exist in a world torn between the forces of good and the forces of evil. The more the spirit penetrates the void the more truth and love transform untruth and fear and hate. The more life fills the void, the more immortality becomes an experienced fact.
On the human level of appearances this process creates conflict. Human beings long for eternal life. They know eternal life does not exist in the physical body, yet they frantically strive to maintain it there. Religious people who deny the importance of physical life because they sense and inwardly experience the eternal life of the soul, misunderstand and ignore the importance of God’s plan: allowing the spirit to infiltrate the void—and ultimately, matter—thus spiritualizing all that is.
Yet those who tremble at the thought of physical death because they do not feel the reality of eternal life are equally misled. Recently I spoke of the importance of working through the fear of death and the longing for eternal life. As a next step, it is important to grasp fully how the striving for physical life is not merely an expression of such a fear. It is, on a deeper level, a valid expression of the great movement of creation, the fulfillment of the Plan of Salvation.
When this is understood and emotionally experienced, even only occasionally, then Christ’s important injunction, “Be in the world, but not of the world” becomes very clear. It leads to a joyous will to live in the body, without a trace of fear of physical death. The personality fully realizes that on the more internal levels of infinity and eternality a greater, fuller life exists, which is free from the threats of death, nonbeing, pain, injustice, insecurity, loneliness. The externalized life in the body, in spite of impending physical death, becomes a joyous venture for a greater cause. Physical death itself is increasingly seen as a transformation into a primal state of fuller existence more conducive to well-being.
So a new unity comes into being. The personality knows of the eternal, fuller, deeper life and thus feels very secure in the physical life. Yet physical life is also experienced as a deeply meaningful undertaking that must never be shirked. Even its difficulties become bearable and meaningful in the understanding of eternal life on the one hand, and the task of physical living, on the other. In this way, “Be in the world, but not of the world” will have a new meaning for you. You will know that the world of material manifestation is a temporary one in which you can play an important part and which you need to affirm with all your consciousness and energies, but which you should not ever assume to be your only and ultimate existence.
Allow the meaning of these words to fully take hold of you. Even if you are still far from experiencing the reality of eternal life, even if you have not yet totally experienced the fear of death and the longing for eternal life, even if you still stand on the threshold of this new phase, it will be very helpful to grasp the deeper meaning of “Be in the world but not of the world.”
The deeper understanding can come only if and when you live with a deep commitment to God to fulfill the task you have come to fulfill. You already know that this task must be twofold: personal purification and transformation and giving over one’s talents, energies, and assets to the greater cause, the Plan of Salvation, according to the will of God. When this commitment is made, eventually everything must fall into place. This may take time, because blind spots and a deep unawareness may still persist despite the commitment. But time is only an illusory hindrance anyway.
The fuller your commitment is, and the more sincerely you mean it and put it into daily practice, the greater your excitement and your joy of living will become. Peace and security will grow accordingly in your soul. Conversely, the more your life is dedicated to the pursuit of selfish ends, the greater your insecurity will be, accompanied by a frightening sense of the meaninglessness of all life. Obviously, this leads to the inevitable vicious circle: If life is meaningless, all you can do is to push selfishly toward at least minor fulfillments, which are divorced from Christ. And the greater this separation is, the more meaningless all life will appear. Thus the vicious circle continues.
Still, many of you have made your commitment to God and your task only half-heartedly. You live with one foot in heaven and one foot in hell, so to speak. Heaven is that part of you in which you sincerely dedicate yourself to the task for God, in which you become part of the great legion, the forces of good. It is heaven because you feel deeply content; your life makes sense; everything is tinged with loveliness, meaning, fascination, joy, and security. But where you hold back and try to strike a bargain, substituting a little self-seeking for doing the will of God, which you deny, you live in hell because your life appears meaningless, boring, frightening, at loose ends, separate from all things in creation. To live in heaven means knowing that you are an integral part of creation.
The misconception that dedication of your life to God’s greater plan brings suffering and pain is still prevalent. If this were not so, the surrender of your will to God would be more complete, less fraught with resistance, and more trusting.
The surrender of your will to God’s will and the dedication of your life, your talents, and attributes to the great plan not only make you flourish in your daily life but are the key to the unification of your split, where you are still torn between belief and unbelief, trust and fear, hate and love, ignorance and wisdom, separateness and union, death and eternal life.
One of the most important attributes in this struggle is courage. The role of courage is often underestimated. In fact, most people assume that spiritual people are weak and meek, implying that they are without courage, for courage requires strength and energy. The spineless are often assumed to be victims of the aggressive, bold ones. Thus, on some irrational level of your emotional perception, courage is often associated with evil, while the weak, cowardly person is associated with mildness, gentleness, goodness. Nothing could be further from the truth. I shall attempt to show you now how cowardice is just as evil as active perpetration of evil. Spiritual cowardice not only leads to betrayal of the best, of God, but to as active and potent evil as the more obvious aggressive acting out of cruel, self-serving, dishonest malice. It is important to be fully aware of this, to liberate yourself from the illusion that your weakness, your cowardliness, are really not so harmful, and perhaps are even more spiritual than the fighting spirit of those who risk themselves and their personal advantages by aggressive goodness and positive assertion.
What happens when you are weak, when you do not stand up to evil behavior, when you collude with it and refrain from fighting for the truth? You encourage evil, you sustain the illusion in the person who perpetrates it that it is not so bad, that it is all right, that it is smart and that many people support it. This perpetuates the further illusion that by asserting truth, standing up for decency, and exposing evil, you will be isolated, ridiculed, and rejected. In other words, you foster the delusion that in order to be accepted one needs to sell out integrity and decency.
All this happens constantly in human interaction. Such encouragement of evil is easy to push out of full awareness. Yet around the person who indulges in this kind of negative behavior there is a cloud of guilt, confusion, and an emotional climate of self-rejection. No matter how you try to talk yourself out of self-hate and into self-esteem on theoretical grounds, you will not succeed until you have gained the spiritual courage to be willing to sacrifice acceptance from others—if indeed you believe that this price has to be paid.
When someone in your presence maligns another, for example, your silence is not goodness, gentleness, peacefulness. Far from it. In a sense it is more destructive and insidiously negative than outright, active maligning. Maligners expose their evil and thus take the chance of being rebuked and having to face the consequences. Passive listeners cheat by trying to have it both ways: they derive as much negative gratification from the maligning as the active one, without, however, risking any negative consequences, and even priding themselves that they really did not participate in the act.
Can you see that silent collusion with evil is more abrasive than active evil? Active evil alone could never have led to the crucifixion of Jesus. It required the cooperation of the traitors, the colluders, the silent bystanders who were afraid for their skin and thus allowed evil to—apparently—win. But, of course, evil can never really win.
The same is true of the mass murders in totalitarian regimes, such as in Germany before and during the last war. The few perpetrators could not have gotten very far if they had not been aided by the silent collusion of the many for whom their own skin was more important than truth, decency, honesty, charity, love, empathy—in short, all that God stands for.
This leads to an interesting speculation, my dearest friends; namely, that the active principle in distortion, harmful and murderous as it may be, could never by itself wreak the same havoc as the passive, receptive principle in distortion. This is why many spiritual teachings say that the lowest quality on the whole scale is not hatred, but inertia. Inertia, on the energy level, is the freezing of the flow of divine energy. In inertia the radiant matter of divine influx thickens, hardens, blocks, and deadens. On the level of consciousness, inertia means exactly what I have been talking about. It includes primary and secondary guilt. The primary guilt is for cooperation with evil, permitting it, conveying one’s approval of it, no matter how subtly and indirectly. The secondary guilt lies in pretending and claiming that one is not participating in the evil, and even pretending to be good, when one’s cowardice and self-serving gives silent permission to the evil act. This is why Jesus Christ, in his life on earth, always stressed that the evildoer is nearer to God than the self-righteous, apparently good person.
Inertia refrains from action for the good. Laziness, nonmovement, passivity—in a negative sense—always support indifference, selfishness, nonparticipation, promoting stagnation and hindering growth and change in the self and the environment.
This is why you, my friends, in this community find yourselves in a very active phase. You sometimes feel that this should be tempered with more silence and receptivity, to establish more balance. But do not forget that an inherent wisdom and purpose governs the way in which the pendulum swings. In order to take you out of your inertia, which is an ever-present temptation, you need to use all the drive and active movement in you, even if this means temporarily more activity than receptivity. In the active movement of your soul, you build and create, you change and grow, and your soul becomes accustomed to movement as enjoyable, life-giving, and relaxing.
Inertia is believed to be restful, while activity is believed to be exhausting. This illusion is a distortion in the deeper mind. As long as this image prevails in you, you need to question your desire for more receptivity and quiescence. Is it not an excuse for staying inert, avoiding effort and risk? Only when you are very sure of this will the pendulum swing into a new balance. The overemphasis on activity now is the balance that you need in order to establish harmony in your soul.
Stagnation and inertia are indeed the greatest evil. They are of matter, resisting the enlivening power of the spirit, of the Eternal, which desires to penetrate the void that is totally stagnant and inert. False receptivity is masked inertia. The more false receptivity exists, the less real receptivity is possible. The inability to receive love, pleasure, fulfillment, and the compulsion to sabotage fulfillment come from not giving to God. When you give to God, you need to be active, to overcome inertia, to move and do and act, to risk and sometimes to fight against your own and others’ evil. Only then will you feel free from guilt and become truly receptive to what the universe wants to give to you. The grace of God is everywhere around and within you. It is always there; you are bathed in it. Your inability to receive it makes it appear unattainable.
Giving to God means to give over to the great plan, to His will, and to dedicate your life to this. Giving to God means activity, and at times even pushing through the inertia that wants to keep you from being active. The activity may be directed to many areas, apart from fighting the obvious resistance to your growth process. Such movement is necessary in the smallest details of daily living when you are involved in the noble process of creating a new society. You may have to deal actively with apparently menial, mundane issues. You may have to confront actively the resistance to changes that are so necessary in the process of being and living according to the principles of divine law. So, my friends, ascertain the exact nature of your inertia, and, even more important, how you rationalize it in order to indulge in it.
When you still feel weak, confused, self-rejecting, or unfulfilled in any area, when you are divided within yourself and fluctuate between submission and rebellion, you know quite well that you are divided. You are not yet autonomous. The only way true autonomy can be established is by your total surrender to the will of God. This must include the willingness to be temporarily hurt, rejected, or put at a disadvantage. It must include the courage to risk something or to sacrifice a selfish aim. It also includes the faith that this is truly in your own best interest, even from a very human point of view.
Before closing this message, I would like to talk about and help you with a particular phase on your path. Often you find it so difficult to change a destructive, negative attitude or fault even though you have become very aware of it. For this particular juncture, I have special advice. I suggest you take two approaches, both of which are necessary.
The first is that you focus with all your intention and acumen on the extremely painful consequences of this negative trait to yourself and others. You may be aware of the negative trait, but too often you resist recognizing its effects. When you do fully recognize them, you will experience the pain you inflict on yourself and on others, and thus be more strongly motivated to want to change.
This leads me to the second point. Only by praying for divine assistance and intervention, by turning to Jesus Christ and asking for his personal presence and help, can you influence the involuntary currents and attitudes, and change them according to the harmonious laws of God.
Your primary attitude in life must become dedication to God’s will and plan, your giving over in all things and putting God first. All other things then become the natural effects of this attitude and will be fulfilled accordingly. If you find yourself unfulfilled in your vocation, if you do not enjoy your work, or find it meaningless, if you do not earn enough to experience pleasure and comfort and material security, somewhere within you you are holding out on your surrender to the Creator of all that is. If you lack a relationship and are lonely, or if you are sexually troubled, blocked, and unfulfilled, somewhere within you, you are holding out on giving over to God’s will for you and to the task you are meant to fulfill. Perhaps you put emphasis on your profession, your mate, your personal fulfillment, rather than letting these other fulfillments flow as a natural byproduct of your dedication to your task for God, the task you are meant to carry out as part of the great army fighting for the forces of good. Meditate on these vast issues that fill your universe and are of utmost importance in the scheme of all things: the great battle between the forces of good and the forces of evil engaged in the gradual penetration of life into the void. When you perceive this vast, universal issue as the key to all other issues, you will begin to put first things first and see your private world in its proper perspective. This will bring a wonderful new balance and harmony into your life and lead you directly to the faith, the knowledge of the ever-living God and of your individual immortality that alone can still the deep existential longing I discussed in an earlier lecture.
With this I bless you, my most beloved friends. Let this blessing open your whole being, your heart, and your mind. Experience the Creator in whom you live all the time. Experience the utter safety and joy, the limitless fountain of creative possibilities that this entails. Give to your life a one-pointed direction to fulfill yourself. This can be done only with and through God.
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