MONTHLY LECTURE(S)

Greetings.  Loving blessings are pouring forth for every one of you here.  Welcome, my dearest friends.  Let us continue with this specific series of lectures.  And keep in mind, my friends, that they are a sequence, one leading to the next, on the spiral of your evolutionary process, commensurate with your increasing awareness.

In this lecture, I will again speak about the phenomenon of consciousness, particularly in connection with the evolutionary process and the meaning of individual life.

All knowledge is in you.  I have often said this, but it is rarely understood.  Before you are born into this life, a process of anesthesia sets in.  There is a specific reason for this.  You awaken from it, as you come out of infanthood, with a limited consciousness.  The awakening is partial and gradual.  As you grow physically, mentally, and emotionally, you grope to rediscover your inner knowledge.  At first you do this in a limited way, with a focus on material life.  You learn to walk, handle objects, you speak; you learn reading, writing, numbers, certain basic laws of outer life, of physical matter that surrounds you and that you will need to handle.

Once basic material knowledge is mastered or reawakened, deeper knowledge is reacquired, provided that the growth process takes place as planned.  When a person is in an intensive growing process, this will happen in ever-increasing depth and scope.  If the person has stopped the movement of the growth process, his “life train,” that interruption will prevent the reacquisition of knowledge he or she possesses in a potential state.

Here you will have to ask inevitably, “Why does anesthesia set in?”  Actually, the anesthesia sets in well before the birth process.  In your spiritual reality, where the total entity that you are truly belongs, you decide upon a reappearance in this dimension.  That is when you are deliberately anesthetized.  After all plans for your life on the material plane are thoroughly discussed and assimilated, you lose consciousness.  A person who undergoes an operation goes through a similar process.  In fact the process of anesthetization is copied from the spirit life, remembered and rediscovered in earthly life.  On earth its purpose is to prevent pain during an operation.  In the case of the incarnatory process, the reason is different.

Before the spiritual self takes possession of the human body in the birth process, the entity is already in a sleeping state, anesthetized and unaware.  At birth, there is an awakening to a slight degree—slight in relation to its actual state.  The limited part of the entity that takes possession of the infant body finds itself awake to physical sensations and functioning, and certain limited perception and awareness; none of these can be properly assessed, interpreted, or assimilated.  That comes later.  The state of awareness after birth is increased, but is still very limited.  Becoming aware and awake is a gradual process.

The first years—roughly, the first twenty-two to twenty-five years, although this cannot be generalized—are primarily focused on acquiring outer knowledge.  Provided the process is meaningful and organic, the focus should then go to acquiring knowledge that transcends the physical reality:  inner, spiritual knowledge.  This can take place first on a psychological level.  I include psychological knowledge when I speak of spiritual knowledge, for it concerns itself with the laws and processes of the inner self.

Certain highly developed individuals with a capacity for spiritual fulfillment awaken to inner reality often, though not always, earlier, which can coincide with the outer learning.  You have children on your path who early in life begin to acquire and comprehend inner knowledge.  This can happen because the knowledge is near and deeply anchored into the soul; in previous lifetimes it had become such an integral part of the entity that it is easier to reawaken than in others without such previous development, who must still go through processes of growing, searching, and struggling before the inner knowledge penetrate every particle of the soul.  That is, of course, what life is all about.  And all of it is necessary:  the groping process, the process of trial and error, searching, often being confused and not knowing, dealing with the not knowing in a constructive way, finding the often precarious balance between patience and humility for the grace of knowledge to communicate itself on the one hand, and serious commitment, endeavor, focused will and healthy aggression on the other.  This process is the key.  When the lessons of these endeavors are absorbed by the soul, the reacquisition of knowledge comes more easily in a future lifetime.

Now I return to the question of why the temporary anesthetizing takes place.  Perhaps a part of the answer has already dawned on you.  It is not easy to convey these principles, but I shall do the best I can.

I recapitulate briefly:  The manifest personality does not know what it knows—whether the soul has already gone through the process described and thus spiritual knowledge, understanding, and perception are natural even in the limited state of the human embodiment; whether this has not yet taken place; or whether a soul continues within this process life after life.  Knowledge, to whatever degree it exists, is blotted out; it is “forgotten.”  Whatever state of development you may be in, you start off with a clean slate:  you start off knowing nothing, whether you are highly developed, or whether the process occurs still on a lower scale.  So, at first, the knowledge that is in you is, apparently, not in you.  Now, why must that be?

In a recent lecture about the evolutionary process, I discussed how the “mass” of consciousness spreads, filling the void.  As it does so, particles of consciousness lose themselves.  The essential divine consciousness, in its beauty, wisdom, and benign power, functions in a limited and distorted way.  The isolated particles must seek to unite again with the forward-rushing, spreading movement of the divine state of life that inexorably fills the void.  In this process the separated particles—which are individual entities—must find the way back on their own, by dint of reawakening the divine potentials always present, even in the most separated aspects.

I return to this analogy again and again to help you understand this topic:  the part of your soul that is still separated must forge whatever it has known in a more awake state in order for the undeveloped part to find its own way.

Let me try to make this clear.  Suppose you were consciously to know, now, all that you deeply know.  Then the undeveloped aspects in you would not find, under their own steam, their innate essence.  They would be swept along, as it were, by the already knowing, already developed aspects.  They would therefore always represent an unreliable element.  They would essentially, although not necessarily manifestly, blur the beauty, vitality, creativity, and wisdom of the rest of your being.  They would be carried by the surge of the glory of God-consciousness, but they would not be totally infused with it.  Purification and evolution mean that every smallest aspect of all that is must be infused with its own essence.

Let us apply this somewhat metaphysical, philosophical, and general explanation to your present state, your everyday life and struggle on your path.  You may then not only understand better what I am saying, but will personally benefit from it.

On your path you constantly discover aspects of negativity, irrationality, childishness, selfishness, destructiveness.  You know that these aspects flare up, at an early stage of your development, by themselves, without provocation from outside.  These aspects are so strong that you activate them, initiating negativity, regardless of what the outer situation is.  As your development proceeds, this changes.  The negative aspects cease to manifest by themselves.  They need outer provocation.  You respond with them to the initiating negativity of others around you.  However, you do live in the world of matter, in which, under even the best of circumstances, life is not easy.  Matter obstructs and frustrates.  The very fact of living in this dimension of reality—which is your production, of course—is always a challenge.  Imagine that you lived under circumstances so sublime, favorable and bliss-producing, that even the worst in you would not find occasion to express itself.  Then the worst in you would remain dormant, unexposed, and would not go through its necessary process of purification.

You are often convinced, and partially rightly so, that if others did not do this or that, you would be fine, you would stay in a state of harmony and bliss.  The blurred areas in you would, however, continue to smolder, because without their manifestation you would not know of their existence.  They need exactly to be triggered off, they need the exposure and provocation.  By the same token, if you were consciously to know all you know, with no provocations from outside, the undeveloped aspects would not flare up and would not acquire their own ingrained knowing.  They would merely be affected by what the already developed aspects know.

On your path you have experienced that when you successfully work through those blurred areas, you become absolutely safe, no matter what others do or fail to do, no matter how they react.  You remain essentially whole, essentially unaffected.  I do not mean unaffected in the sense of being remote and without feeling.  I mean that the particular negativity in you that you have worked through no longer exists and therefore cannot flare up when others do wrong by you.  You may be hurt or angry, but in an entirely different way than when your own unresolved faults and flaws are triggered off by outside circumstances.  So you no longer depend on perfection in order not to face your imperfection.  The effect of others’ destructiveness will not make you lose your bearing or your center if your blurred areas have been clarified, purified, cleansed, and eliminated.

The same principle holds in the relationship between your own inner imperfections and your already purified parts.  If you were born knowing all you know, the uncleansed areas would depend on the cleansed ones and not become whole within themselves; if the wise, knowing, enlightened aspects of yourself are asleep, that sleep is necessary to allow the blurred areas to struggle through on their own, with the aid of the knowledge that is essentially in you.  Thus out of a lack of knowledge, knowledge is developed.  Out of the darkness light develops.  Even in the darkest, most ignorant part is the essence of knowledge and light.  That essence must express from within itself, not from an aspect outside itself already in possession of wisdom and light.  So when the knowledge and light are brought forth from within your own limitations, purification is thorough, reliable and real.  Then true independence from one’s surroundings is being established and thus, true freedom.  Then each particle, each aspect of consciousness has brought forth its own “minuscule Godness,” so to speak.  And that is the meaning of the anesthesia with which you enter into life.  It is your struggle for your essential light that gradually and surely diminishes the anesthesia and awakens you to who you really are.

You also experience on your path that the more courage you muster to face your truth, the more humility and honesty you bring to bear on your whole inner person, the more alert and awake you become.  This is an inexorable consequence that cannot fail to manifest.  Suddenly, or gradually, you understand and perceive others in a way you never could before.  You begin to recognize others’ negativities without being personally affected or disturbed by them.  You no longer struggle against others’ negativity in a blind, resentful way, without seeing clearly, only vaguely perceiving as through a fog.  Now you see clearly; you comprehend intuitively the connections that make the transgression no longer a personal annihilation.  You also begin to see and perceive others’ beauty in a way that doesn’t make you jealous but that fills you with awe, wonder, and gratitude.  You begin to perceive connections of interactions between yourself and others that eliminate the riddle of life—and the riddle of living with others—and that increases your security because you see and know the processes in human interaction.  As you go on in that way, dealing with your own impurities and eliminating them, suddenly, or gradually, a new focusing and awareness awaken inside of you.  A knowledge flows into you, apparently from out of nowhere.  It is not from the brain.  It is not from the outer knowledge you have acquired in the first two decades of your life, or later.  It has nothing to do with what you have learned.  It comes from a different source.

As channels open, a new focusing can set in.  You can begin very deliberately to listen into the inner universe, the place from which all wisdom flows into your outer being.  It is a gradual process, yet it can be sudden in its manifestation.  The process sometimes seems to be interrupted, because it often disappears at the initial stages, so that the experience can appear to have been a dream.  The state in which you hear the inner voice must be fought for in a positive, relaxed sense.  It must be gained and regained, for it is lost over and over again.

The focusing must be done quite deliberately after a certain stage of development and purification has been reached.  The focusing will yield to connections, to listening and “hearing.”  Now, the state of consciousness in humanity as a whole, because of mass conditioning, makes such focusing virtually impossible.  Many of those who are developed enough and could succeed don’t even try.  Their still unresolved problem may be fear of ridicule and disapproval from the world around them; they lack courage to establish the inner self as the true center of individual life.  The whole of humanity is conditioned to focus only on certain phenomena, outside and inside, at the exclusion of other aspects of reality, until only that which is in their focus seems real.  A whole world exists around you which you do not see or experience; it seems like a fantasy when you hear it discussed.  This limitation of perception is the result of a conditioned reflex in focusing, which, in turn, is the result of anesthesia.

At the beginning of such a path, if you listen into yourself, you probably hear nothing and may become convinced that there is nothing but emptiness.  Or, perhaps, you hear occasionally the voice of the childish, demanding, negative self.  Then, of course, you are convinced that this is your final reality, which frightens you, and so you avoid facing the negative self even more, until later when, perhaps, you learn to make room to listen deeper and so can contact levels of unimagined inner reality.

Question and challenge your negative voice.  Confront it.  Identify it without being identified with it.  Learn not to allow it to control you, not to act it out—even as you acknowledge the existence of this voice of selfishness and meanness.  Only as this attitude becomes consistent, as confrontation between the lower self and the conscious, reasonable, positive ego-self takes place constantly, will you eventually find your focus on another level of consciousness, which as you will suddenly discover has always been there.

The voice of God has always spoken to you.  It continues to speak to you—always in a new way, always adapted exactly to what you need most at any given moment in your life.  It is the voice that you overlooked and kept out of focus so that you were left with the illusion of silence.  When I say “you” I mean, of course, humanity as a whole.

It is impossible to refocus on this beautiful voice by skipping over the confrontation with the lower self that also always speaks to you.  Your ego has to learn to distinguish between them.  The voice of the lower self says, “I want it for me.  I do not care about others.”  That part of you believes in a mutual exclusivity, in a division of interests between you and others, and that it must triumph at the expense of others.  That part is not connected to the reality that you can have all without depriving others.  That negative voice must be confronted, it must be questioned.  Question the voices of meanness and malice, your stake in seeing others as bad, and not wishing to make room to even doubt this.  Simultaneously see that you—or a part of you—doubt the beauty and trustworthiness of the universe.  Question the voice of fear, question its lack of faith, and confront it sincerely.  Then the ongoing voice of God will be heard.  And you will recognize it.  You will rediscover that it has always spoken to you, clearly and beautifully.  You simply could not hear it before, because it could not push itself through as long as you deliberately focused away from it.

Focusing is deliberate, both in a positive and in a negative sense.  In a positive sense, you had to be born in anesthesia, having forgotten what you know, to purify totally all aspects of the self.  Had you always heard the divine voice, purification could not have taken place.  You would not have been able to focus on the negative, or deal with it.  It would have been quieted down and swept along.  In a sense, focusing away from the divine voice is the anesthesia that your self deliberately chooses for the incarnatory process.  In the negative sense, deliberate focusing away from the divine voice is due to the power you give to the negative self that rejects any rule but its own.  The negative self does not want to know itself.  Yet the divine voice leads the negative self to know itself.  That is the first step for the negative self to purify itself.

Many of my friends on this path can perhaps begin to take deliberate steps toward distinctly hearing both voices.  What is the negative, lower self?  It may manifest under a clever disguise.  And what is the divine voice?  You can learn to deliberately shift your focus, and you can spend time in your meditation practicing this differentiation.

For a long time the main goal in our meditation was what I called impressing.  In one of the basic lectures about meditation I spoke about both aspects:  impressing, that is, instructing, claiming, conditioning, re-creating; and expressing:  that is, listening, hearing, and receiving.  The time has come when you can safely focus on expressing.  You can learn to listen to the whole, wonderful universe, an ongoing, alive phenomenon.  You dwell in this universe and it dwells in you.  You can discover it by focusing on it.  You can awaken from your dream state, your anesthesia, my friends.  You can become truly alive and know the aliveness that is in you.

Are there any questions?

QUESTION:  Yes.  Most of my life I have been listening to my negativity.  The negativity has been conducting me.   This negativity is excessive control and contempt.  Going from that lower voice, which has been such a large element in my personality, to trying to listen to the other part, let’s say the sweet part of myself, the child’s voice that was squashed, I am afraid that I will then not deal with the negativity, that I will go overboard and be false.

ANSWER:  That is always the danger, the difficulty in the groping.  The wishful thinking that the positive voice is the self’s only reality must be taken into consideration, and then self-deception will no longer present a danger.  It is possible to hear the divine voice in many areas, yet the negative self still exists.  The ego’s block against recognition of the negative makes it impossible for the divine to come through.  If the ego specifically requests wisdom from the divine part of the self to find the best way to deal with unpurified aspects, the divine voice will be heard and its wisdom can be applied to where it is most needed.

On this path you have a number of good tools to prevent you from the danger of overlooking the undesirable aspects of yourself, even as you begin to awaken the wisdom and splendor of your divine reality.  You learn again and again that one does not eliminate the other; you learn to deal with apparent contradiction; you learn to keep a record of your disharmonies in your daily review; you learn the power of repeated impressing in meditation that you do want to be aware of every aspect your inner path wants you to be aware of at any given phase.  By using these tools you can strengthen your determination to observe the undesirable and get to know the glory of God in you.

Another good tool is to heed your reactions.  Assess your feelings.  If you are truly in joy and brightness, free of anxiety, in a happy state, then in that particular moment you truly are in touch with your divinity.  And your inner path does not invite you, at that particular time, to deal with anything else.  Maybe the next day something blurs the picture.  Some unhappiness comes to you, doubts, heaviness, anxiety.  It is a sign that you are overlooking something.  Your life manifestation is a reliable gauge, it shows whether you are living in self-deception or truly following your path according to your plan.  Examine your state of fulfillment in your relationships, partnership, work, pleasures, your inner state of joyousness and peace, and your outer state of fulfillment and abundance.  These are gauges.  Where there is unfulfilled longing, there is something you do not focus on.

The divine voice will not lead you astray.  When you lose focus or seem to, notice the ego’s intentionality.  The divine voice will not tell you beautiful stories about your already purified state or speak in generalities.  It will point out with love and firmness exactly where you have to go.  But your ego-self must want and ask for this guidance.  If you want the truth, open yourself, and humbly ask:  “What do I need to see in myself?  Where am I still blind?  What can you tell me?”  The divine voice will instruct you in the most marvelous way.  Nothing can strengthen your faith in the truth of God’s existence more than this connection with God.  Then you create a unification.  The teaching you receive from within will be a strengthening and unifying experience.  Listening to the beautiful voice will not get you away from the unpurified part; it will bring both parts together, the negative energy transforming itself to become part of the Godself.  The manifestation will be exactly a result of your intention.  If you want to use the voice of beauty in order not to deal with the ugliness, you will hear only beauty.  You will hear what your ego-consciousness is ready to receive.  The divine voice cannot manifest in any other way.

QUESTION:  I have difficulties in interpreting the messages that I receive and in believing in them.  I receive messages, but only later do I realize that I did.

ANSWER:  That is the learning process I spoke about.  By experience, by trial and error you can learn to understand the laws.  There are certain rules.  Those who have gone through the process extensively can be helpful, as, for example, the instrument through whom I manifest.  However, even that is limited.  For every person is different, has different leanings, different weak points of wishful thinking.  And you will be tested as to the extent to which you have to question yourself and learn.  The most valuable treasure a human being can possess—the connection with the divine voice—cannot be handed out ready-made.  It must be earned through the groping process.  You must learn to question yourself about the extent to which wishful thinking may be coloring the reception.  Beware also of the opposite danger:  To what extent does fear of wishful thinking color the reception and obstruct the truth that would only be too welcome?  If the voice says something so desirable that you do not dare believe it, it may still be true.  You must test it out and explore your inner self.  Do you sense any desire to cheat, or to avoid?  Only deep, inner experience will teach you and give you security.  Try again and again.  Listen, give it attention, take it seriously.  Also, do not be gullible.  Realize that tests must come for you to learn what you need to learn.

If you discover the voice only after the fact, that, too, is all right.  It is then up to you to rethink the way that you heard it.  You can meditate for enlightenment, slowly you will learn the process.  If there were hard-and-fast rules, that security would not come.  It can come only through the process of groping, learning, making mistakes.  Eventually the inner knowing will come.  You will have the feeling deep in your center:  it will feel right and good and you will know that this is it; you will learn to trust it.

Now, my dearest friends, I bless all of you.  Divine love and wisdom are here in abundance.  You who work on this path create so much blessing for yourself, so much light.  More and more you will awaken from your sleep, so that you will never have to fall asleep again.  Rest will not impair the awareness of a joyous, peaceful, exciting, blissful universe in which you lie and which lives in you.  You are blessed.

Greetings and blessings for every one of you here.  Welcome to new and old friends searching for their inner path.

I will speak tonight about the human capacity to create, an astoundingly underestimated potentiality.  Your creative ability is infinitely greater than you and your scientists, psychologists or philosophers realize.  With the exception of a very few enlightened ones, most people do not know of their dormant capacity to create and recreate their lives.  Some may believe in it in theory, but few have truly experienced it.

When you adopt a human body and the ego state in this three-dimensional world, you automatically close off the memory of other states of consciousness.  These forgotten states are much less confined, much freer, much more aware.  In them you were completely capable of molding your life, to a degree that the human consciousness cannot possibly comprehend.

The power of thoughts, feelings and attitudes is enormous.  This power exists just as much now, in your present state, but you do not see it.  You do not know that you have molded what you experience in this moment in such a precise way that there can be no mistake concerning it.  As I have often said, the sum total of all your conscious, semi-conscious, unconscious, explicit and implicit thoughts, beliefs, assumptions, intentions, feelings, emotions and will directions—conflicting as they may be—creates your present experience and the way your life unfolds for you.  Your present life expresses your inner state exactly, like a faultless mathematical equation.  Thus you can use your life as a map into your inner regions.  This is, after all, part of the method of the pathwork.

Many of you have verified that hidden, feared, guilt-producing and denied thoughts and feelings are more powerful in their negative creation than anything you deal with on the conscious level.  Fear and guilt are potent creative agents.  They contain a great deal of energy.  On the positive level, enthusiasm, joy, vitality, interestedness, stimulation are also potent energy agents.

A path such as this must therefore be intensely concerned with exploring what you believe, feel, assume and intend on layers of your personality that are not immediately accessible.  Your unconscious motives often create what you do not wish to experience at all because you do not know what you bargain for and what side-effects are attached to your unwise wishes, false assumptions and negative intents.  Also, you ignore the potency of such psychic material and do not see how infallibly it translates itself into the creation of matter, of events and circumstances, and of life experiences.

When humans adopt the limited ego state, they do so for very specific purposes.  You manifest and express yourself in this limited state for the purpose of purification and unification.  It would not be possible to do such work as quickly and as effectively if you were in full possession of your entire consciousness and your faculties, my friends.  For your ego personality, as it expresses itself now, is but an isolated aspect, or several isolated aspects, of your total personality.  A much larger, fuller and more purified part of your total personality, or real self, does not manifest overtly.  As I have often mentioned, that personality consists of aspects of consciousness.  The manifestation of certain aspects in an isolated form—which consists of the three-dimensional reality and the ego—affords possibilities of a focused awareness that is lacking when these unpurified aspects are submerged in the largely purified personality.  Your purified spirit can easily overlook small but significant distortions that nevertheless act as hindrances to further developments surpassing the scope of human consciousness.  Such developments proceed in spheres of reality that you cannot comprehend now.

It is, however, possible to activate the capacities of the larger self, to focus on it and be receptive to its ever-present inner voice.  Similarly, it is possible to focus on and be receptive to negative aspects of your personality that lie deeply buried and that need to be purified on your evolutionary road.  This path teaches you to contact all these hidden layers and deal with them appropriately.  In other words, some parts of you are more developed and others less.  The latter are not manifest, but they are still you.  The manifest, more developed part has the means to explore, bring out and unify the other parts which you cannot yet see.

When you undertake this exploration as your main task in life, all restlessness disappears and a deep sense of meaning and fulfillment comes into your soul.  Slowly but surely life’s frustrations begin to disappear and rich fulfillment begins to take their place.  For only when you focus your attention on the reason for coming into this plane in the first place can you find your place in life.

Conversely, there are the many who arbitrarily make a split between what they call “living” and their spiritual development.  They do not want to give too much to the latter because they foolishly fear that this shortchanges the former.  The more they concentrate on outer material living without bringing it into a cohesive, meaningful connection with wider and deeper considerations, the more restless and depressed they become.

Whatever divine laws and attributes exist in the universe, the moment they express themselves in the isolated ego state, disconnected from deeper inner reality, they become distorted and destructive.  Let me give you an example.

A small child believes that it is omnipotent.  Psychology designates this very obvious expression of the infant’s claim to omnipotence as immaturity and destructive egocentricity.  It is that, but it is also much more.  The feeling of omnipotence is a memory of another state, a state of consciousness in which, indeed, thoughts become things and events the moment they are formed.  Time and distance are part of the three-dimensional illusory state of consciousness, so they do not exist in a realm of much more expanded consciousness.  The consciousness of the infant is still partially tuned in on the state of its total personality.  However, as the memory is translated into the confined and limited ego state, it comes out jumbled.

Since the ego state is a concentration of the less purified state—in combination with already purified aspects which come to the aid of the personality in the task of this life—the power to create takes on a distorted, undesirable form.  The ego always lives in the illusion that it is not only separate from others, but that others are essentially antagonistic to its well-being.  Everything the ego does is always either against or in competition or in comparison with others.  This is what creates its destructiveness and egocentricity.  The ego makes power a dangerous weapon, as you all well know.  You experience power as something you fear in others and feel guilty about in yourself.  Power is thus always exclusive of love and joy, for it is an intensely separating expression.

But when you conciliate your ego-split with the real self and thus discover the unitive principle, you discover that your interest is never in opposition to the interests of others, although on a superficial level it may first appear that way.  You also discover that power and love need not be opposites.  You can then begin to use your innate power to create and recreate your life.  You may now understand better why knowledge of your power to create is dangerous as long as you have not purified the distorted aspect that has found expression in this body and in this life, and as long as you have not discovered the eternal inner realities, which are much more real than what you consider outer reality.

The infant’s frustration when its thoughts and wishes do not instantly become fact is obvious.  The immediacy of cause and effect—cause being the thought or wish, effect being the experience—is a constant “given” in the state of consciousness that goes beyond the ego.  One of the tasks of most humans as isolated ego aspects is to learn trustful patience, flowing with the stream, unwillful receptivity.

Memory of the power to create must be temporarily cut off so that you can learn what you came here to learn.  Through the very learning of this lesson the deeper connections establish themselves again spontaneously.  However, it does not seem to be rediscovered memory.  Instead, connecting thoughts, wishes, intents, feelings and attitudes with experience seems to be a new discovery that establishes awareness of the power to create.  Then there is no longer the danger of using power against others.  The illusion that self-interest must be against the interest of others is pierced.

I hardly need to mention that not only actual infants make egocentric and antagonistic claims to omnipotence.  Undeveloped, immature and destructive people do too, and they often act them out.  Evil does not exist as a reality in itself.  Evil is always a distortion of divine truth.  Every destructive, negative attitude can easily be explored to find its root manifestation.  It can then be seen that only in its ego manifestation, in its separateness, is such a distortion destructive or evil.  The very same basic trait has an entirely different effect and meaning if it manifests in the depths of unified consciousness—in the larger, wider reality of the inner planes.  This is why the isolated, incarnated aspect of the total personality, manifesting in a body and an ego, must temporarily forget its full capacity and its experience in a state that can only be wholesome when the whole self is involved.

Wherever there are misconceptions, ignorance, false ideas, and withheld emotional matter—spite, stubbornness, rigidity, inertia—stagnant energy exists that must create disturbance and negative experiences.  It is very potent energy.  Only when you release it directly and honestly can you transform this energy.

You, my friends, who follow this path have often experienced the tremendous energy that permeates you when you release the stagnant matter of pent-up negative feelings.  When you physically, emotionally and conceptually express rage, hate and fury, you make new connections about yourself that give you a new understanding of your role in life and why you are where you are.  This very released energy is also highly potent creative stuff.

The time has come when you can convert negative energy and consciousness into positive manifestation.  To some extent you have actually begun to do so, but you are not yet sufficiently aware of the power of the energy as it is released.  If, at the moment the negative energy is leaving your system and begins to flow, you can reconvert it and direct it into a positive channel, you can indeed bring new creation into your life.  This practice will make you understand how much creative power you have.

These words will not be enough to convey the truth to you in a real way unless you have overcome certain attitudes of separateness.  Otherwise, this knowledge would be dangerous for you and for others.  But totally committing to the path into your own inner regions with all its apparent hardship of self-revelation and self-confrontation will make you increasingly aware of the spiritual reality of your own state of eternal being that cannot die.  You will also become aware of the power of your thoughts, your intent, your feelings.  You will learn to be careful what thoughts you think without either repressing or suppressing undesirable and destructive thoughts.  This does not help.  You will learn to deal with such material, to challenge its accuracy and be open for other alternatives.  Learn to understand what it is in you that makes you want to think that way and what price you pay.  Begin to see creation as the relationship between the causes and effects that you have always seen as unrelated.

As this growing process proceeds, re-creation takes place.  It is not a reward for good behavior.  It is a simple act, instituted by the self that is now in a much increased state of awareness, that now knows what it is doing and why.

Many of my friends on the path have begun to experience this process as an ever-increasing living reality that can be absolutely trusted.  It is unfailing in its lawful process.  But recreating or creating must never be a willful act.  It must never be used while bypassing anything within your psyche.  There are metaphysical and spiritual orientations which know of this creative thought power, but overlook the danger of skipping steps within the psyche.  They become hypnotized, as it were, by a truth they have discovered—the truth of self-creation.  And they can create and recreate wherever the psyche is relatively free from obstruction.  But where the psyche is stuck, self-creation is blocked.  Stagnant energy becomes even more potent, creating a conflict that tears the soul apart.  The soul does not develop harmoniously when the personality works on that which is already free and neglects that which needs attention.  In that state the use of power—even if it is not overtly expressed against anyone—becomes so dangerous that it may sooner or later lead to a personal crisis.  Such crisis would be avoided if the personality would focus on the undeveloped part.

This is the reason why this specific path requires a lot more courage and honesty than most other orientations in practice today.  But it is a safe and truly unifying path that leaves nothing limping behind.  It creates real harmony of the soul, precisely because the process is slow and there are no quick, magic results.  For a long time, the focus must be on the dark areas.  That is for your own protection, my friends, because in this way you avoid a splitting off process that would defeat the task for which you have come into this life.  You have come to fulfill your task by concentrating on those very aspects you feel least inclined to deal with.  That is the very reason you squeezed yourself into this narrow, uncomfortable, confining and often painful state in which you temporarily dwell.  Only aspects of you are here, to be sure, but that which identifies with these narrow aspects must suffer when the total reason for being in the human ego state is not yet conscious.

You need to know why you came and what it is you have to do here.  What is the weakness you have to bring out?  What is the ugliness you do not want to see?  These are the obstructions that keep you from creating freely.  Even now, you could create infinitely more than you do, and do it consciously, wisely, beautifully and satisfyingly, although not to the same degree as when you are free from the ego-body state.  That is, you do constantly create, whether you know it or not.  The trouble is that you do not know what creations you produce unwittingly.  You create with every breath you take, with every thought you think, with every attitude you display.  These are powerful agents, my friends, and you need to know what you are doing and how you create.  Your disconnection from the creative seeds you plant and their results causes unnecessary pain and frustration.  Often you see the result only much later, without the slightest awareness of what in you has produced it.  The awareness can be recaptured if you so desire.

Focusing constructively—which is very different from doing it in a maudlin way—on the undeveloped aspects in you means that you fulfill the task for which you came into this particular world.  It means that you unify yourself so that you can actualize your potent creative power and use it consciously and deliberately in your life now.

The creative process and the specific techniques to learn are given to you slowly.  I have shown you some techniques of meditation.  When you meditate, you create.  In this concentrated, relaxed state, energy and consciousness focus in such a way that powerful creative seeds are released.  But meditative and other creating techniques must be a secondary preoccupation for the reasons just mentioned.  However, when a certain foundation of inner self-purification and self-awareness exists, these techniques can be expanded.  It will then be safe, from the point of view of this spiritual path.  Your being will then truly be grounded in reality and in a unifying process, so that you will not ignore any aspect you have come to fulfill.

The organic process of learning creative meditation, recreating life experience, will come as an intuitive, spontaneous expansion of your consciousness.  Just as you will intuitively understand cosmic reality from experience rather than theory, so will you learn to avail yourself of your innate powers and resources.

There is an inner mechanism that is extremely important for you to understand that I would like to elucidate for a minute.  My friends, working on this path you must have experienced quite frequently that your helper may suggest a specific meditation and commitment in meditation to a positive self-expression that you deeply desire because you miss it.  Yet as you pursue that self-expression, you experience an inexplicable resistance to follow through.  Something in you seems to stop you or you forget to do it on your own.  It simply does not occur to you.  Perhaps your thoughts have no energy, conviction or clarity.  They are diffuse and you feel that they have little effect.  At times you may even consciously experience an outright resistance to meditate for the very thing you most desire.  What is this block?

Let us suppose you are lonely.  Let us suppose you long for a full and fruitful partnership—an abundance of joy, of exchange, of sharing, of mutuality on every level.  You do have the birthright to experience this and other fulfillments, for the universe’s abundance is there for everyone.  No one is excluded.  Nevertheless, it may hardly even occur to you to actively sow the seed in meditation—which means creating it—by a clear, definite thought in that direction, by a commitment to wanting it, to experiencing it, to realizing and bringing this experience into actuality.  You may be perfectly aware of the principle of such meditative practice, nevertheless you desist from employing it.  What is even more significant is that when, upon suggestion, you do formulate the creative thought pattern, you find a strange and inexplicable reluctance in you.  It is as though a wall in you prevented you from the clear, concise commitment to what you most ardently yearn for.

Have you ever thought about the meaning of this resistance?  You want something desperately.  You intrinsically believe it could exist for you.  Your mind accepts the principles of creation.  Yet you will find your mind strangely paralyzed when it comes to truly letting go of your thoughts, to sending your thoughts into the fertile soil of the creative substance, or what I call the soul substance, where any seed will grow to fruition.

The reason for this reluctance is very simple.  It is the same self-protective, finely calibrated mechanism that knows that something in you is not yet ready for this experience.  You yourself have put obstructions in the way.  Perhaps there is an unwillingness to give and to accept reality on your level.  Perhaps there is a concealed negative attitude toward the other sex you are not prepared to resolve.  Whatever the obstruction is, confront it, explore it, understand and dissolve it.  If you do not, and you still create with a strongly focused mind and will, the superimposed outer will must have its effects accordingly.  A “willpower construction” conflicts with the inner denial and obstruction.  The inability to meditate and create is meaningful and should be heeded, for it will reveal the nature of the obstruction so that you can eliminate it.  Otherwise you create willfully on an ego level, which cannot satisfy your heart and soul.

The ego mind has the power to create.  It does so continually.  But if it creates separately from the inner being, the results must be disappointing.  Willpower, the outer will, can indeed be effective up to a certain degree.  It creates matter, sub-matter and experience, but not to your blessing.  It creates with a willfulness that lacks wisdom, understanding, vision and depth.  It lacks inner connectedness and wholeness, so that what it constructs is often more painful than desirable.  In the example we have chosen this would manifest in creating a partnership in which those areas in the self that have been neglected would color and affect the relationship, poisoning it as if from underground.

When you find your inner voice resisting the creative thought process, this should be a sign that there are steps to take in self-exploration.  You must shift the focus of creation to exploring the meaning of your reluctance to create what you long for.  Find out what stands in the way.  Instead of the desired experience, you must create the awareness and comprehension of your obstruction to it.  This will then eventually dissolve the reluctance, so that you find yourself wholly free to plant new creative thought material into the rich soil of your soul substance.

You cannot create anything that does not already exist in the universe, my friends.  Everything exists within you already.  All the answers, all the knowledge, all the power to create, to feel, to enjoy, to experience—all worlds exist within.  For the true universe is inside, while the exterior world is but a reflection like a mirror image.  Everything you ever need to know about yourself and your life exists within.  You can actualize this knowledge if you learn to focus, to want it, to aim for it, to commit to it, to create it.  Some of the answers exist on more superficial levels, in the so-called subconscious.  Some are on much deeper levels.  All is accessible if you undertake the exploration.

Therefore creation and recreation are primarily a focusing.  If you create from the ego level, it will be a tense, anxiety-producing focusing.  If you want to create from your inner being, it must be a relaxed focusing.  It will be relaxed precisely because you do not skip any steps.  You listen into your inner self, and if you detect obstructions, you will heed and then deal with them.  Thus you create the condition in you to comprehend your obstructions.

This is one aspect of the creating and re-creating process.  It is a very important aspect that can be used not only by those who are already on the path but even by those who are just entering such a path.  All of you can listen into yourself and ask your innermost being where to go, in which direction to focus.  But learning how to listen is an art in itself and often comes only later on the path.  It requires some degree of self-knowledge.  This is not easy to summon up for the novice, but it is possible, at least temporarily, to lay aside selfwill and open up to whatever the inner voice sends forth.  It requires, for example, awareness of your wishful thinking, of your stake in wanting a certain answer and not another, of your fear of getting a different answer.  All these attitudes and feelings may be subtle and well concealed or rationalized, so that some degree of self-discernment is necessary for the voice to be truly free.  You will trust the voice only to the degree you have freed yourself.  Each time you consciously and deliberately lay aside your selfwill, you will become stronger and freer.  State how your selfwill manifests, what you want and don’t want to hear.  Then express your trust in the divine voice.  Then your faith will stand on a firm, realistic foundation.

To the degree you are aware of wanting one answer and not another, you will avoid confusion and diffusion.  Otherwise you delude yourself into believing you receive divinely inspired answers which are nothing more than your ego’s wishful thinking.  Only when you have attained a state in which you can be very clearly aware of the personal stake of the ego and of wanting a certain thing in one way and not in another can your own inner answers begin to be reliable.

But if you are already aware of your stake and inclination to distort rather than be impartial to the answer you wish to get, in that awareness itself you create a new channel of truth into your inner reality.  You may then perceive a deep, deep inner voice that speaks truth.  Then the focusing will be meaningful, relaxed, and yet concise enough to create new thought forms and therefore new, desirable experiences.

A second important aspect about re-creation is the time element that you, on the ego level, have to deal with.  Impatience is another distortion from a fuller state of consciousness, in which creation is immediate.  The thought produces the form the moment it is uttered.  Impatience is the memory of this experience, without the connectedness with the inner being, so that the lesson the ego has to learn is not comprehended.  Only on the ego level is everything separate:  effect from cause, soul from soul, form and experience from thought, inner from outer.  Life itself appears to you a static, “objective” fixed thing into which you are put.  It seems totally separated and disconnected from your inner processes.  These are the same illusions as your concept and experience of time, distance, and movement.  They are all byproducts of the limited, separated ego state.  Everything you experience seems to exist only in those seemingly objective terms of the ego.  The more you focus in that direction, the more it will seem that way to you.  In reality, your life is merely a subjective expression of yourself, not a fixed, objective, immovable reality.  Once you learn to be more focused into the inner reality, you will perceive much more this other, fuller reality, in which the separated aspects move together in a wonderful and meaningful web of interaction and wholeness.

Part of the creating process is the patience to let things be, learning to trust life to express back to you what you put into it.  That requires waiting for the seed to grow.  Do you wait in doubt?  Do you wait with impatience?  Do you wait in fear?  Do you wait in tension?  Or do you wait in quiet trust?  Or is your trust perhaps a gullibility and an expression of wishful thinking, so that you cannot possibly trust your trusting?  Do you want whatever it is so badly that you create a forcing current which prohibits fulfillment because its tension and its emotional mind-content defeat creation?  If the waiting is truly relaxed, you will have no doubts about the fulfillment.  You know that the seed will grow into a wonderful flower.

The recreating process unfolds forevermore when the ego personality unites with the other aspects of self that had previously not manifested on the surface.  The more this happens, the more joyfully you will create.  It may sound confusing when I say that you have to learn not to cringe away from pain, and then say that it is your birthright to be in a state of joy.  It may sound like a contradiction when I say you have to be willing to give up—at least for the moment, and in the right spirit—what you wish to create and that you must have faith in being able to create.  But these are contradictions only on the most superficial ego level where the duality of either/or reigns supreme.  In reality these are mutually interdependent principles that must unite in harmony.  As you cramp yourself into any desire that is too strong, you close the doors to joy and relaxed inner creation.  Cramp always indicates negation, doubt, a negativity that you must unearth and specifically deal with.

In the delusion of the ego, you perceive life as your enemy, foreign and antagonistic to you, while you are its victim.  In that delusion you cannot create.  So you will see, my friends, that your realization on this path of how you create your suffering will inevitably free you to create your happiness.

Let me close by saying that you are a great deal more than you can possibly believe now.  If you walk in the direction of finding your real self, of identifying with it through the layers of darkness, you must discover the unending beauty of the universe.  With every breath you take you fill yourself with its potent love and wisdom.  There is nothing that surrounds and permeates you that does not express the magnitude of a divine and benign creation.  The more aware you become of it, the more joy and gratefulness must spread in your heart.  The unending beauty of the universe can be experienced as reality rather than theory only when you work your way through your dark areas.

Be blessed, every one of you.  Feel the love that is extended to you from a realm in which you have many friends who have guided you here.  Be in peace.