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Greetings, my dearest, dearest friends. God bless you. Blessed is this hour.
When I offer you blessings, what do these words mean to you? Do you hear them perhaps as mere words without meaning, without reality? Blessings have a very definite reality, my friends. If you were but free, really free of all your barriers, all the layers that prevent you from feeling, from living, and from experiencing life to the fullest, these blessings would be a reality for you. You would feel the actual stream, the current of love that flows to each and every one of you from a world of light and freedom, from a world of harmony and truth, a world of love. But this stream of love is often unable to reach and penetrate you. You may not perceive and experience it because the senses that are destined for such perceptions are dulled by your fears, shame, and urgent wishes, and by your defenses, all of them are based on error, confusion, and misconception.
How often have I discussed this in our times together! But all too often you merely hear but do not truly understand and experience my words. They can become real only if and when you find their particular truth within yourself. And, my friends, this cannot be done by intellectual deductions and findings, but only when you allow yourself to feel, to live through your emotions and thereby determine the specific misconceptions you have harbored all your life. Awareness of your untruth brings you much nearer to the love current coming to you from without and to the love current within yourself.
Within each individual there exists a well of wisdom and love. It is a treasure deep within you which can come to the fore only as you become aware of all those aspects of yourself that bar access to the treasure. You are accustomed to look for truth, guidance, and solutions to your problems outside yourself — perhaps through wise teachings, through a helping hand. But the most reliable and realistic answers come from inside yourself. In order to tap the well, outside help is necessary, but it is valuable only if it succeeds in bringing you to the inner source.
Apart from this path of self-confrontation, is there an additional way to help you tap the well? Yes, there is. You must seek calmness, outside and inside. Every day, enter into a meditation to become very still so that the inner noise that covers the well of wisdom and love makes itself precisely known to you. After translating this noise into concise thoughts, such meditation will finally bring out of that well of wise guidance warm feelings of love and affection and understanding, without your own urgent needs blurring the realistic perception of others.
If you want to disregard and bypass the inner noise of fears, shames, defenses, and urgent needs and come directly to the well of calmness, you will not really reach the inner treasure. You may think so, but this does not make it real. The momentary existence of the barrier and the noise has to be acknowledged in relaxed openness and then translated into meaning. That is the way, my friends. Such daily periods of becoming calm, so as to determine the meaning of the barrier to the calm, will help you greatly, and this practice most definitely must not be neglected.
We have discussed before how harmful barriers are. The emphasis then was on yourself and not on you in relationship to others. Yet, as you know very well, your unhappiness and confusion is always connected with the difficulty of coping with your fellow-creatures. Therefore we will now use the knowledge you have gained about yourself through your work on this path and apply it to your relationship with others.
When you calmly observe your reactions to others, you are bound to become acutely aware of an inner tension, a cramped closing up. This prevents you from meeting others freely and openly, without restrictions. Then you cannot reach out without grabbing and without urgent demands. You cannot give without fear. When you are willing to meet others with love, then, and only then, can your life be really fulfilled, no matter how worthy your various activities may be otherwise. The fear says always, “But what about all the people who take advantage of such warm, loving feelings? If I do not guard myself and allow myself to feel, I will suffer.” It is true that your inner well, with its wise guidance, its reliable intuition, cannot function when it is thickly covered with layers of untruth. By covering it even more thickly when you prohibit feelings, you do not open the well of truth within. So the remedy must be sought by allowing the layers that cover up this well to be penetrated by your conscious understanding.
When such profound communication with others, based on understanding your own blocks to the well of truth, does not take place, you are isolated. You cannot possibly be happy. We have discussed many aspects which prevent deep communication with others. Let us now discuss three further aspects which need deeper understanding, because they constitute an inner “no” to loving. As you will see, this inner “no” is not only due to fear of suffering, hurt, and disappointment.
The three aspects to be considered can be found in almost all human beings to some degree. Yet, one of these three aspects might be predominant while the other two may be of lesser importance. No matter how little you feel that they apply to you, look into yourself and closely watch your emotional reactions. When you translate them into meaning, you are bound to find that one or the other or all three of these aspects exist in you in various degrees.
The first aspect is a fear that you may be forced to do something you do not want to do if you allow yourself to feel as you naturally tend to. You fear that you have to sacrifice when you have no desire to do so or to give in when it is disadvantageous or inconvenient. You believe that the only way to safeguard yourself against the excessive, and perhaps even childish demands of others is by curbing your natural feelings, thereby cutting off the love current from within.
Conversely, you believe that if you were to allow yourself these natural feelings, you would be forced to give in. You see no other alternative. Hence, by seeing only these two alternatives, you undermine the organic process of emotional growth, manipulating your feelings in a most negative and destructive way, with grave repercussions in your psychic life and in your relationship with others. I name but two such repercussions: one is a deep-seated guilt for this deliberate prohibition to loving, and another is a subsequent lack of self-confidence and self-respect. To atone for not loving, one often does much more for others than one would ordinarily, and then as a consequence, one is really taken advantage of. Since all you do is done without love, as a substitute for the love withheld, your actions do not remove your guilt.
This proves, once again, how you cannot help but wind up in the very situation you strive to avoid by false and unrealistic means, based on wrong conclusions. All the emotions that stem from the misconception that your real feelings will get you into trouble — guilt, resentment for doing what you now do compulsively as a substitute for loving, lack of self-respect — create confusion and make you incapable of coping with close relationships. You are either constantly involved in a negative way, or you withdraw and live in bitter isolation which, in turn, breeds frustration. These, then, are the barriers to your well of wisdom, love, and intuition — the source of your true inner guidance.
How then does the situation look when viewed truthfully? It is very possible, indeed, to love without having to fulfill every demand, without having to give in. Is it not better to be selfish — if that’s what you wish to be — in your actions, while still loving and feeling? Is it not much better and actually much less selfish than doing everything possible, but without loving? It is much easier to assert your rights and wishes, whether they are right or wrong, selfish or unselfish, if you love. When you do not love, self-assertion becomes very difficult, because your gnawing guilt either paralyzes you, or, if you manage to voice your objections, they will come out in a very hurting way. Your refusal to comply with a demand cannot really hurt another, provided you love. Therefore to disagree or refuse to comply will no longer be threatening. You can do it in a relaxed, easy, and unproblematic way. Your ability to love will make you feel more lovable and so you will be able to say “no” outwardly, because the inner “no” to loving and feeling has been removed.
All this does not mean that you should artificially try to force love where it does not naturally exist. This would be useless, as you know. Strive to detect that fine and subtle current, often at first quite covered up, in which you withdraw from your organic, natural feelings, stunting them deliberately, as it were. Once you come across this current and become more aware of it, you can let it go. The knowledge and understanding that the two alternatives of either forcing love or withdrawing from your natural feelings are not the only ones will stop the prohibition. You will gain a new freedom with the most joyful, strengthening, and liberating results.
If there are no warm, loving feelings to begin with, just see what feelings are there. You will find all the negative emotions we have discussed. These have to be acknowledged and understood, not pushed away or suppressed. When you understand them sufficiently, the warm, natural feelings of affection are bound to come out eventually. For these loving feelings are already in you. They do not have to be given to you. They are only buried under the negative emotions which do not allow the positive emotions to come to fruition because you harbor the simple misunderstanding that your natural feelings should not be experienced. Since this misunderstanding is not out in the open, it is not amenable to correction. This is why the misunderstanding has to be made known first. You have to see clearly why it is a misunderstanding. Then you can proceed. If you truly experience the flow of feelings as they come up, you will probably go through the following sequence: The misunderstanding causes the deliberate cutting off of naturally arising feelings; this in turn results in guilt, fear, uncertainty, anger, resentment, helpless rage, and confused fluctuation between giving in too much and being too severe. You have to fully experience all these feelings and confusions before you can actually feel the reality of the love in you.
At first, the love will manifest only occasionally, weakly, not dramatically. When it does, be aware of it, let it flow, and see what a wonderful effect it has on you and on those around you. For instance, their excessive demands may immediately diminish when they sense a love current coming from you. For their demands are often an unconscious, blind plea for love. Their demands are a substitute for what they really seek. Once genuine love is given, the demands are bound to diminish.
The second aspect is this: As you know from our work in the past, almost everyone has the wish to be accepted and belong to a symbolic superior world. When this seemingly superior world happens to be unfeeling, undemonstrative, or even tough, you do not dare to let yourself feel your natural feelings, for fear of being despised by the people whose approval you seek. This fear is especially strong when you have natural, warm feelings for someone you are convinced you should reject according to the imagined, or real, code of this superior world. If you do that, the damage you do to yourself has the gravest consequences.
Chances are that those people actually feel very differently from the way you think. Perhaps they would respect, like, and accept you much more if you were a kind and loving person who does not deny and betray the best in yourself in order to get approval. They may not be aware of these reactions, but since the unconscious currents are a reality, their response would prove this to be so. Only when you have the courage to be yourself can you find out the truth. For some, it takes much more courage to be their loving selves than their self-assertive, “strong” selves.
But let us suppose the superior world of your aspirations is actually the way you think it is. Does this not mean that those people are just as immature in this respect as you are? To emulate such immaturity cannot ever produce self-respect and certainty in your personality. All it can do is create self-contempt and guilt, which must rob you of the firm ground under your feet that only being yourself can provide. To simulate strength by betraying your real self, withholding love from the weaker ones whom you are supposed to reject, produces the same self-hate you feel as when you lack courage and self-assertion, when you submit in evident weakness. This pseudo-strength is, in reality and essence, just as weak as submitting. Those of you who belong in this category deny the best in you for the sake of approval. You deliberately set up a process of self-alienation by the simple act of discouraging your natural, warm feelings and artificially producing toughness.
Again, all this is not conscious. You may not be at all aware of these inner processes, but if you look closely at some of your reactions, you may well discover that what I say holds true for you. Perhaps you are aware of it already to some degree, but have never quite thought about it in these terms. To do so, to carry the significance of these reactions further, is bound to give you a more comprehensive view, and thus change these very childish attitudes. When you have the courage to be true to your real self, when you dare to love a person the “superior world” decrees you should despise, you will discover that the whole division of a “superior world” and an “inferior world” is an illusion. This discovery will set you free and give you a strength you cannot envision now.
For those of you who have not yet delved deeply into the labyrinth of your being, what I say might sound rather far-fetched, or even silly. But for some of my friends these words will help to dissolve some very crippling misunderstandings about life and people.
The third aspect of the inner “no” against loving may at first sound paradoxical. People who have this aspect predominantly have such a great need for fulfillment and love that non-fulfillment presents a special fear and threat. Their “remedy” is a strong forcing current. Needless to say, this remedy is unproductive, even destructive. The forcing current prohibits a free giving of love. In its own devious way it causes an inner “no” to giving in a relaxed and calm way. It grabs and demands. Such a person wants to give, but does so compulsively, to have his or her demands fulfilled, not wisely and in sensitive awareness of what the other needs and wants. Therefore the giving is not free, nor is it genuine.
This type of person is often the opposite of the type I discussed before, who represses feelings. The two types often get into conflict with one another. The demands and the forcing current frighten away the other person, even if the demands parade under the guise of “giving.”
Those who are starved and therefore terrified by refusal are blind to others. All they feel is their own need. They have no room for calmly looking at the other person and sensing the other’s needs. The idea of being refused is devastating to them, yet they court rejection by their urgency. When it comes, all they experience is the confirmation of their worthlessness. Their distorted view prohibits a true evaluation of the situation in question, yet their defeat has nothing to do with their worthlessness. The other person’s fears and problems may be as responsible for it as their own blindness when the world and others appear to them only in terms of their worth or lack of it. The subsequent powerful forcing current, employed to dispel the dreaded worthlessness, becomes then the means of confirming their worst fears.
The true remedy for those who belong predominantly in this category is threefold. First they need to face their lack of belief in themselves and find out the real reasons for it, such as their lack of loving which is often disguised by an over-eagerness to give for the purpose of receiving love as a child wants to be loved. Second, they have to find the distorted concepts and understand why they are distorted. Third, they must allow themselves to experience all the feelings as they come up in the process of their self-search.
Chances are that underneath the conscious urgent need, they will find a reason for prohibiting their real feelings for affection and loving. This may be so hidden that, offhand, they may deny it utterly. All they feel is their need to be loved which they confuse with genuine feelings of affection for others. The latter are much less urgent, much calmer emotions, not at all self-centered, the way the need is. These mature feelings exist, but they have been prohibited from developing and this must be made conscious. Repeated unfulfillment hurts so much more than it needs to because of a childish inability to stand frustration. Before fulfillment can come, the various steps I have outlined need to be followed through.
All this takes time. More disappointments may come, but now they can be utilized for the work and serve as wonderful means for discovering more about the self. In the meantime, what one can learn, in full awareness, is to swim with the tide, not to resist it by a wild struggle of your soul’s forces. Maturity will come as you teach your soul to be able to stand frustration without repression or anger. This has the healing effect of bringing the pendulum into a more balanced position. Out of the overactivity of the forcing current, the wild struggling, a serenity is generated which brings the person closer to the state of being.
I cannot emphasize strongly enough that all the frustrated emotions, causing the urgency and the starvation, have to be allowed to simmer on the surface, and have to be translated into concise meaningful words. In individuals of the “love-starved” variety another reaction exists that also has to be brought to awareness and faced. Sometimes, when the needs are fulfilled, the “love” wears off. This should furnish proof that what they thought was love is not love, but a starving need — certainly a great difference! These people are as incapable of fulfilling other people’s needs as those belonging to the other two types. They feel infringed upon by others and back away from them. Recognition of this fact is of primary importance. In this hidden countercurrent, they are just as afraid to let down their guard as are the repressive and the “superior” types, only their fear is covered up by the manifest need. All they can see is what they want, or what they fear will happen to them, nothing else. They are torn between these two alternatives, interpreting every outer happening in terms of either needing or fearing. In neither alternative do they see the reality.
Now, my friends, this is food for thought and material for further work, for each and every one of you. I venture to say that with most people a combination of all these three aspects exists in some way, but with many one aspect is quite obvious and not difficult to verify. There is no one who is here, or who is reading these words, for whom one of these aspects is not immediately applicable. If you work with these aspects, you cannot help but register further results. These lectures are directed to those levels of your being where such irrational attitudes exist. They are not addressed to your rational thinking.
And now, my friends, let us turn to your questions.
QUESTION: Can you elaborate on the difference between pity and compassion? As one gets older and sees so many of one’s friends suffer, what is the proper attitude?
ANSWER: I will be glad to give additional help on this question, if I can, although this topic has been repeatedly discussed in the past. However, if I were to say what the right feeling should be in theory, it would not help you at all. All you would then do would be to further manipulate your feelings and superimpose attitudes that are not genuinely yours. You know that this cannot possibly be a healthy procedure. It is important for you to acknowledge what you really feel, whether right or wrong.
In addition to what I said about the difference between pity and compassion, I now want to present an explanation indicating why one feels pity instead of the much more productive feeling of compassion. Whenever you are crushed by the devastating emotion of pity, which inhibits your strength and the help you can give, you can be quite sure that you are somewhere negatively involved. For instance, pity may be a projection of your fear that the fate the other suffers may come to you. Or you may feel guilty about something you are not aware of.
A universal attitude is that of feeling a certain satisfaction at another’s misfortune, not only about not having to bear that same fate, but also about the other being punished and having difficulties. This is, of course, entirely irrational, but the attitude contains considerations such as this: “If others have hardship too, I am not so bad, I am not the only one who suffers, therefore I am glad that others suffer too.” This reaction often produces such shock and guilt that it is entirely repressed and overcompensated by a weakening, unproductive pity. The pity, then, makes you feel absolved because in pitying you suffer with the other person, though in a destructive way.
If you can discover and experience your genuine reactions, recognizing that you are a human being with many unpurified emotions, with many childish, selfish, and shortsighted attitudes — and learn to accept them without condemning, condoning, or justifying yourself — then you can understand what misconceptions are behind these unreasonable attitudes. Then they will gradually dissolve, to the degree you truly understand them. Pity will transform into compassion, and to give constructive help to suffering people will be possible, whether through action, or just by communicating your true feelings.
QUESTION: In the past you discussed the close connection between cause and effect. Are we then to believe that we are living in a world of causality where identical effects stem from identical causes?
ANSWER: Of course this is a world of causality. As for the identical causes producing identical effects, that depends on what exactly you mean by identical. What may appear identical causes may, in reality, not be identical at all. The act may be the same, but the individuals are different. Let us take a crass example, like murder. Let us assume that two people commit murder, even for the same motive. Yet, their backgrounds that led to these feelings, that led to this action, as well as their overall development, their personality and character traits may be different. Their reactions after the act may not be identical. Consequently the effect — not necessarily the outer effect, but the effect upon the two individuals in question — may not be at all identical.
But if you mean that this law of cause and effect is to the finest detail an organic, infinitely just and harmonious process, a balancing factor in the entire universe, so exact in its workings that error or injustice is utterly impossible, in that sense identical causes stem from identical effects.
Why it should be so hard for human beings to accept that they live in a world of causality is not easy to understand. When you really look at the world and the events in it, you are constantly confronted with the living reality of cause and effect. In the smallest daily issues cause and effect operate, but you are so used to it, it is so much part of your daily life that you take it for granted. You have lost the ability to see the operation of cause and effect with the newness that is necessary in order to derive deeper understanding.
Were humans able to see what happens constantly, it would not be so difficult for them to realize that the same law must exist also in a wider context. They would not assume that a different law operates merely because in one case cause and effect are close together, while in other cases they are separated by time. Time has no bearing on it; it only discloses the cause or the effect to you. Sometimes human beings can see both. Sometimes they can see only one or the other. If people were to follow through logically and see the ultimate consequences of this phenomenon, they would realize that their inability to see either cause or effect does not change the fact that cause and effect are interdependent.
When you uncover cause and effect sufficiently in your own personal life, then what is called faith, but what in reality is an experience of a truth, comes into being. Then it is no longer a question of superimposing doctrines or postulates. Various happenings and results have puzzled you when you saw no cause for them. By getting to know yourself better, you discover causes for many effects. You discover the connections as indisputable facts. This gives you not only freedom and strength, but also shows you causality in its true light. You then know that the same law of causality must hold true also where you cannot know the causes whether in your own life, or in the lives of others, or in the world, or in creation generally.
My dearest friends, may these words fall on fruitful soil. May you all come a tiny little step closer to seeing your own barriers that shut out truth, love, and reality. For that is the most constructive step toward removing them. The human error is always that you want to deny the barrier’s existence and push against it, which only strengthens the block. You want to remove it without seeing what that obstacle really is. Once you become aware and understand what it is made of, you realize that it cannot be pushed away by force. It can dissolve only gradually, depending entirely on the degree to which this barrier is understood.
Again a warm stream and current of love is reaching toward each one of you. Make yourselves inwardly calm. Detect your fears, your guards, your shames, your embarrassment, your resistance against feelings. As you do so, this stream will be able to reach you much better. It will send some aspect of its force into your hearts where it will fill you with a light, a strength, a hope. Be in peace, be in God!
In the course of giving these lectures, the Guide has often referred to spiritual laws. In February 1969, Eva decided to compile some of the basic laws to give us further understanding of these very important concepts.
The Law of Personal Responsibility
This is the primary principle that guides the pathwork. At first glance, this principle is sometimes hard to accept. It seems so much easier to accept even defeat if only one can blame the circumstances or bad luck or other people’s faults. Accepting the law of personal responsibility wipes out self-pity, resignation, passive endurance, smoldering resentments against the injustices of life, and the masochistic game of harping on one’s case against life.
Yet this apparently hard law is the most hopeful, encouraging, liberating, and strengthening truth of all truths. It enables you to resolve whatever problem you may have. It opens up life with all its rich possibilities. It forces you to see things in their true light and, uncomfortable as this may first seem, it leaves you with a lot more self-respect, integrity, and hope than the helpless resignation to circumstances life is supposed to bring about without your doing. It makes defeat unnecessary because it also removes, among other things, your childish illusion of omnipotence, which is just as unrealistic as the illusion of being life’s passive victim. Accepting your own limitations and the limitations of others increases your power to direct your life meaningfully.
The law of personal responsibility is the guiding principle in the search for the root of your obstructions. Contemplating the fulfillment or the lack of it in your life gives you a blueprint of the areas where an inner corresponding attitude is responsible for either. This approach is diametrically opposed to the usual way, but it is indeed a reliable and truthful one that must always lead to results, provided you go deeply enough and are truly honest in the endeavor.
Whenever you arrive at a juncture on the path from which there seems no way out, or where you cannot see how to change, how to resolve the problem, you can be quite sure that you have not yet found an important tool to unlock the door, no matter how profound previous insights and changes may have been. A total insight always shows the way out. Thus, recognitions can be differentiated. Are they of the kind mentioned here? Or are they merely leading to them? The former always give a sense of joy, liberation, hope, strength, light. They infuse new energy into your system. The latter may have a temporarily debilitating effect on the personality. The former enable you to recognize the most unflattering facts about yourself without in the least diminishing your sense of worth and integrity — on the contrary, this sense increases. The latter type burdens the insight with guilt.
When you have experienced the difference between these two types of recognition, you can protect yourself from hopelessness, or at least realize that the hopelessness is in itself a sign that the way out has not yet been found. Rather than weakening you, the hopelessness can then be an incentive to surge on with all your vigor until the real way is open.
When you finally see that an unfulfilled longing or painful conflict of long standing is the result of an inner attitude with concomitant behavior patterns, you are no longer a helpless tool in the hand of fate. If such an attitude is completely seen, observed in action, and accepted for what it is, you may still be unwilling to give it up — for whatever reasons and misconceptions — but at least you see a vitally important connection between your inner life and the outer manifestations of it. It is then possible to embark on a special search for the reason why you so stubbornly hold on to a destructive attitude.
Many of the following laws deal more specifically with this same basic principle.
The See-Saw Law or Law of Compensation
Wherever a misconception exists, your balance structure has been disturbed, and an opposite misconception must also exist. Each attitude has an opposite, which can be either a healthy complement or a distortion. Thus, a distortion in one respect creates a distortion in its opposite. When your self-work has made you conscious of only one side of the “see-saw,” it is impossible to resolve the problem, no matter how hard you try.
For example, let us say that a man has a tendency to assume too much responsibility for others. He may come to understand clearly and in detail that he does so, what the ramifications are, where the tendency comes from, what other attitudes in him contribute to it and are affected by it, and so on. Still he cannot leave other people’s responsibilities to themselves, where they belong. Either he cannot recognize what he is doing when he assumes responsibility for another, which may happen in a subtle way, or he feels extremely uncomfortable and strongly compelled when he refrains from assuming the false responsibility. Such a forced act would be unnatural and incompatible with organic development. Its effects might be worse than giving in to the compulsion.
Real growth leads to effortless, spontaneous change that comes so naturally that it may at first even go unnoticed. This ease will come once he sees the whole see-saw — in this case that there is an area where he does not want to assume self-responsibility and thus uses others as a substitute for his own conscience or authority. The abdication of responsibility may happen in a different area and so subtly that it is almost imperceptible at first. It may be a purely emotional manifestation. For example, the individual may assume responsibility for others in the sense of feeling guilty when his reason tells him he need not feel guilty. At the same time, he may sell out his integrity to obtain approval and affection from others. He thus makes them responsible for what he must give to himself. Blaming life for one’s unhappiness is another way of negating self-responsibility, as mentioned before. Such blame always incurs an opposite, compensatory attitude of accepting burdens not one’s own. The interconnection between these two attitudes must be recognized in order to resolve the problem.
The healthy version of these opposites is a harmonious balance of proper self-responsibility and a freedom from assuming the burdens of others, which has nothing to do with a free and loving act of wanting to help.
Another example might be a woman who is too self-effacing and unable to change this tendency without going to the equally destructive opposite extreme of rebellious, hostile defiance. She will be able to change effortlessly when she finds that, perhaps in a concealed way, she is too demanding. She may never openly express these silent demands; she may not even be clearly aware of them or of her seething resentment when they are not fulfilled. Healthy, openly expressed self-assertion and flexible giving in constitute a balance, which is disturbed by immature self-centeredness. The balance will be effortlessly achieved when the see-saw law is deeply experienced.
Too much ego on the surface often indicates an inner weakness of ego. Conversely, a weak ego on the surface always means that under the surface the ego is too rigidly upheld.[1]
The Lever Law
This law is related to the See-Saw Law. The difference is that the latter deals with opposite sides of the same basic principle or attitude. The Lever Law applies when a particular distortion can be relinquished only when a completely different attitude is found and changed. Changing the latter attitude becomes the “lever” the person needs to open the locked gate.
For example, a person suffers from loneliness and lovelessness. It may have taken considerable effort to uncover these feelings, which might have been denied and masked by apparent certainty, contentment, sociability. Such a revelation can seem like a major recognition, for it comes only after battling a great deal of resistance. It is nevertheless not the major recognition needed. Yet the See-Saw Law may not apply, for the willingness to love may exist — at least to the extent that love is possible when distortions tie up vital energy. The lever may be found elsewhere: a violation of integrity may exist, for example, in any number of ways that seem to have little to do with the problem of loneliness, but the violation of integrity gives the person a sense of not deserving happiness and love. The vague feeling of being undeserving that may surface when confronting the self deeply should not be glossed over lightly as irrational. One should search where there may actually exist such a violation of integrity. The violation is not necessarily in overt action; it may lie in emotional attitudes, such as an expectation to get more than one is willing to give. When this violation is fully recognized and the person can give up the attitude that removes self-respect, a new sense of self and of deserving will ultimately remove the lack of fulfillment.
Misconception-Split-Vicious Circle
Every misconception creates duality and inner conflict, which in turn create a vicious circle. An examination of any inner problem and conflict must reveal this sequence. The sequence must be worked through, both in intellectual understanding and in emotional experience, before the process can be reversed; a truthful concept creates unity which creates a benign circle of pleasure and happiness.
For example, a young man recently discovered his insecurity about his masculinity. He had to overcome considerable resistance to penetrate the mask of false security he had been assuming. He now finds that he has unconsciously held the common misconception that sex is dirty. The resulting inner split was that either he gave in to his masculine sexuality and felt adequate as a man, for which the price was guilt and a feeling of being sinful and unclean, or he was clean and decent according to these unconscious standards, but had to forsake being a man. He constantly tried to compromise between these two undesirable alternatives. A tug of war was going on in him. He could not commit himself wholeheartedly either to being a man or to being a decent human being. This unnecessary division resulted from a simple, unconscious misconception.
The misconception that sex is dirty led to the above-mentioned conflict, which led to the following vicious circle: the more he tries to be masculine and thus feels guilty, the less love feelings he can express in his sexuality. Therefore, the sexuality produces real guilt, as any loveless action must do, as well as false guilt for being “dirty.” The cut-off sexuality becomes therefore more and more permeated with hostility and rage. When people are subtly infused with such emotions but cannot face them, all their feelings are affected. The frustration and hopelessness that result from such conflicts increase hostility, which compounds the justified guilt feelings. The loveless, hostile sex makes the taboo against it seem justified — and this is the worst of the problem, because it makes such people go around in circles. The more entangled a man becomes in this apparently insoluble conflict, the more he must hold back his natural, spontaneous feelings. The more he holds back, the less he can love. The less he loves, the less real masculinity he has, and consequently the more insecure and inferior he feels. He must hide his insecurity and sense of inferiority from the world and himself, which increases repression and pretenses. And on and on it goes.
False Guilt Produces Real Guilt and Vice Versa
The case history demonstrating the law of Misconception-Split-Vicious Circle also demonstrates the interdependence of false and real guilt. A childish misunderstanding often produces false guilt. The false guilt produces emotions, defenses, and pretenses that lead to justified guilt because they violate a spiritual law. Misconception is unreality, and unreality cannot help but produce negative emotions such as anger, hopelessness, and distrust. Moreover, misconception must lead to unfulfillment and therefore frustration and disappointment — which, in turn, produce resentments, bitterness, anger. The sense of futility inherent in all conflict arising out of misconception leads to a feeling of helplessness and the passivity that prevents the individual from doing what is necessary to attain what she or he needs and wants. The helplessness and the feeling of being victimized are themselves misconceptions. The false blame launched against the world makes the world responsible for the unhappy state.
The real self sends the message into the consciousness, “You are wrong to be so resentful.” The consciousness of the person is usually unable to interpret such messages correctly, only sensing vaguely that something is wrong about his or her self-pity, accusations, and anger.
Whenever you find false guilt in the course of self-confrontation, you must never let it go at that. Somewhere a real guilt is concealed behind it. It is as though your personality, unwilling to face up to the real guilt but pressed by your conscience, produces an unjustified guilt to mask the real one. The false guilt also may be hidden at first, but when you discover it, you can say to yourself, “See I have discovered it. I don’t have to go on looking for what makes me feel really bad about myself. See how honest and conscientious I am that I feel so guilty, even about unreal issues.” When discovery does not lead to lasting relief, change, and greater inner and outer freedom, you can safely assume that some guilts have not been faced.
Childhood Trauma Not Directly Responsible for Neurosis
A childhood trauma produces deprivation, unhappiness, destructive feelings and behavior — in short, neurosis — only indirectly. It is not in itself responsible for all that. The healthy soul also experiences early unhappiness but throws off the effects without deeply imprinting negative patterns. It is these negative patterns that are directly responsible for the unhappy experience in the present. You must understand this point clearly and work through the negative patterns to overcome that which holds you back from life. Your parents are not finally responsible for your misconceptions. Resentment against them violates the law of self-responsibility. Similarly, you are not responsible for the neurotic patterns of your own child. Excessive guilt for your child’s problems is based on a misconception, although you are responsible for your own distortions that might affect the child. Thus, dwelling on the childhood experience alone can give at best a partial understanding; it cannot produce vital and significant change. The latter is possible only when you profoundly understand your destructive patterns and drastically change them.
Stepping-Stone or Stumbling Block?
Personal freedom is at once relative, limited, and total. Since we must experience the products of our past attitudes and actions, we cannot avoid hardship now when our past attitudes and actions were based on illusion and thus were destructive. As long as we are oblivious of them, we are blind to the causes of current hardship. But we do possess the total freedom to choose our attitudes to our self-produced fate. We can dwell in self-pity, resentments, and helplessness and thus increase our weakness, paralysis, dependence, and destructiveness. Or we can decide to want to make the best of the experience, learn the utmost from it, grow in awareness through it. When we choose such an attitude, the apparent stumbling block assumes a new meaning and becomes vital, strengthening, and liberating. When we see that the stumbling block was the direct result of our distortions, we prevent similar — perhaps worse — experience in the future. We make the result of the past a stepping-stone.
Outer Situation Reveals Inner Reality
No matter what we consciously believe we want, our life situation, in its negative manifestations, reveals a contradictory unconscious desire. Life cannot be cheated, and whether we like it or not, a person’s life is exactly what the conscious and unconscious personality produces. No matter how undesirable the result is, it nevertheless is what we childishly, blindly, or fearfully express into life. Not knowing this principle — or not wanting to know it — will produce bitterness and the sense of being victimized. Choosing to feel victimized only increases blindness and makes us retain the destructive attitude that produced it in the first place. Or we can choose another attitude, which is at first more difficult: even though one does not see how the undesirable life situation is self-produced — this notion may even seem preposterous — we can choose to probe this possibility in a spirit of openness and humility, with the wisdom that knows the human soul is complicated and many-faceted. This latter course will bring amazing new vistas and freedom.
If we use the outer life situation as a gauge to what may be amiss within the personality, we have found a significant shortcut. One may even discover that there are fewer hidden negative attitudes than overt healthy attitudes. But by virtue of being unconscious, the negative attitudes exert much greater power than the conscious positive attitudes.
It is therefore imperative to make the unconscious conscious. Vague emotional reactions or passing thoughts one usually ignores may reveal more about the unconscious state than seems possible at first. When we focus our attention on these vague reactions, the contradictory wishes, hidden fears, and negative desires will surface. When they are recognized, they can be reconciled with realistic conscious goals.
Recreating Soul Substance by Changing Negative Imprints to Positive Imprints
After you become thoroughly conscious of your misconceptions and actively experience your negative emotions without acting out the negativity, the recreating can begin. The courage and honesty that was necessary to become conscious of the misconceptions and negativity — and that will have increased with the new self-acceptance — must now be used to institute change.
You must formulate your desire and the intention to change in clear, concise thought forms. You need to create a clear vision of how the healthy, productive personality would function, as opposed to the past destructive patterns. Although the outer ego personality, with its will and intelligence, must initiate these steps, the ego must also recognize its limited power and invoke the universal self to guide, inspire, and help at every step of the way. Thus the function of the conscious ego personality is double: (1) It must initiate the change, strengthen its own will, formulate thoughts, impress the distorted soul substance with the truth, with the picture of benign circles; and (2) it must actively call upon the greater inner power and become receptive and listen. It must step out of the way for a while to let the inner power reveal itself — which often happens when least expected, since a relaxed attitude is necessary.
Balancing Ego Functions and the Involuntary Manifestations of Universal Guidance
It is not always easy to find the constantly fluctuating balance between inner action and the conscious ego-mind. You must learn to sense when to be active in formulating new imprints and when to step aside and keep the self calm and receptive. The feeling for this increases as you experience the reality of the universal self more frequently. One of the universal self’s remarkable attributes is that it can be activated even for the purpose of sensing more accurately how to perceive it, and for the inspiration and depth of feeling to meditate in a meaningful way. Each phase of your work may require a different kind of meditation, and thus you may need to invoke different aspects of the universal power. All this power can come from within when it is asked for. The mind’s limitations decrease as these limitations are recognized and the “vaster brain” in the solar plexus is consulted. The ego must learn to alternate between being active and passive, initiating and receptive. Gradually a harmonious, self-regulating integration will occur.
You Must Lose What You Want to Gain
This statement was made by the Guide in one of the earliest lectures. It has the same meaning as Jesus’ statement that you must be willing to lose your life to gain it eternally. Psychologically, it means that without the willingness to let go, there is such inner tension and fear that the good of life cannot come or be received. Only when one can lose without terror is winning possible: The one who is terrified of losing is never truly open to win.
The Unitive Law
It is never true that one opposite is good and the other bad. Each can be either. Each alternative may be healthy and productive or unhealthy and destructive. The following examples will help to illustrate the principle:
To live fruitfully, one must be both active and passive in a harmonious interaction. When one of the modes is assumed to be right and the other wrong, distortion and imbalance result. One end of the active-passive spectrum will be exaggerated which inevitably will affect the other end.
Introspection can be productive and growth-bringing or self-centered and separating. Its opposite, concern for others, can express genuine love, or it can be a means of evading the self. If introspection is healthy, a healthy concern for others will also automatically exist. Conversely, if one of the two is distorted, its opposite must be distorted as well.
Self-assertion can be an expression of healthy autonomy or of rebellion and hostile opposition. Flexible adaptability can be the manifestation of a healthy psyche, or it can be submission and a disguise for masochistic self-denial. Again, if self-assertion is healthy, the adaptability will be, too, and vice versa. Yet, how often do people say, “It is right to be self-assertive,” for example, when they merely cover up the unhealthy distortion of it. By the same token, how often does a person claim to be good-natured and loving by constantly giving in, when he or she is merely refusing to be self-assertive and independent and wishes to cling to another person, who must be “bought” through submission. Such people enslave themselves — with the secret aim of thus enslaving the other person.
Outgoingness, if genuine, is a spontaneous expression of a warm, loving personality who wants to connect with others and is capable of relating to others. Its negative, distorted version is pushiness, the manifestation of the inability to be by oneself. Being self-contained is the other side of the coin. In a healthy personality it is the basic self-reliance that enables the person to spend time with herself or himself. Only then is it possible to relate genuinely to others. In distortion, these two aspects become mutually exclusive alternatives, where one is accepted as good and the other as bad depending on the particular errors of the person. The unhealthy distortion of the self-sufficient person is the recluse who cannot cope with people and thus escapes into solitude, rationalizing the escape as healthy. Such a person will often denigrate all outgoingness — the healthy as well as the distorted version — as shallow.
These and many, many other examples illustrate the illusion of partisanship, of judging one side or aspect of a wholeness as right and the other as wrong. A distortion that is very strong is relatively easy to recognize. But often it can be passed off as the apparently healthy version. The deeper one goes on this path, the less one is inclined to take one opposite and put it up against the other. One sees more and more that both form an integral whole. This demonstrates how duality must lead into the unitive principle in the course of this pathwork.
Many years ago, in a private session, the Guide said: If you do not want to be more than you are, you will never fear to be less than you are.
Greetings, my very beloved friends. Blessings for every one of you. Divine love reaches out to you, seeps deep into your heart and embraces you. Let it give you the peace of the ultimate reality that you can and will find within your innermost being if you go all the way with yourself.
In this lecture I wish to give you another vision of the growth process in which you as individuals, and the planet as a whole, are involved. Every seed contains the plan of its ultimate self-evolution and fulfillment. This plan always follows its own organic way. You have experienced some of this phenomenon in your pathwork. You have seen, again and again, that an organic process unfolds completely independent of your mind and conscious expectations. Such a plan fulfills itself in certain stages. Whenever new stages are reached, new energies are released.
Now let us look at this phenomenon on the most superficial, material level of manifestation. Let us take the outer growth of a human being. You can see very distinct phases in human growth. When the infant is ready to unfold dormant capacities to learn how to speak and walk, new energies must become available, otherwise the unfoldment cannot take place. This is the first major change after incarnation on the physical level. The next major phase of expansion occurs when the child is ready to leave home and go to school. This is not only a physical expansion, but also an inner expansion, a step out into the world. The child unfolds its inherent potential to cope with others outside the home. Such growth continues throughout its entire life span.
When full physical growth is reached, these phases are less noticeable than during childhood; however, they are just as distinct and real. These phases always mean change, growth, and higher levels of creative self-expression in dealing with the world without and within. Your physicians know that every few years changes occur in the cellular system. Actually, the chemical components totally change in the outer structure. Again, although this process is not noticeable, it is nevertheless very real.
The same stages of growth and change apply even more dynamically on the mental, emotional, spiritual and psychic levels of the inner being. Each stage is an orderly step toward the fulfillment of the seed plan. The seed plan automatically releases new energies. When the entity follows its plan, these energies become extremely beneficial. They aid the process of growth, of change, of expansion, of reaching into new dimensions from within, of moving outward and embracing more of reality—that inner reality whose aim it is to transform outer reality according to its own perfection, limitless beauty, and endless possibilities of expression.
When, however, the movement is hindered as the outer ego-consciousness resists the process, makes itself insensitive to it and ignores it urgings, then the energies are not allowed to unfold in their intrinsically harmonious way. The constructive power of these energies then turns destructive, though only in the limited light of human vision. Actually the destruction is always aimed at eliminating the obstructions, the untruth, the infringements on divine unfoldment. The blockages the consciousness sets in the way of the released energies need to be dissolved, and this manifests in the life of the person as upheaval, crisis, painful destruction. The individual needs to learn how to see and understand these happenings. They are not haphazard events.
Whenever the consciousness is open, in truth, in accord with divine law, the energies move organically and harmoniously. Wherever the consciousness is contrary to truth, the energies are inverted and turn, apparently, against the self.
This process embraces all being, all creation. What applies to the individual entity applies just as much to the planet. The planet Earth is an entity, and the same laws of growth, the same stages of unfoldment apply to it as to the individual. With both the individual and the planetary entity, each period of expansion is quite distinct. The energies that need to be released to make possible the expansion inherent in the seed plan must be strong. Hence the positive manifestations are extremely noticeable. Changes, unfoldments of new potentials, renewed creativity, new approaches to the self and others that reveal a much greater maturity, increased well-being and bliss, increased vision of new alternatives for self-expression, manifest when these energies are used according to plan. Crisis and destruction manifest when the new energies are not recognized as an influx of divine forces and are therefore resisted as if they were a hostile force. All regressive and reactionary attitudes, as well as radical revolutionary ones are nothing but blockages. The latter is a blockage no less than the former, being merely an outward projection of what emotions are held back with a misdirected emphasis.
How does this apply to the present new influx of the unfolding Christ consciousness in this New Age, which is one of the stages of expansion? If an individual is ready to reach adulthood but blocks it, the adult energies released into the psychic, emotional, and physical system will create a crisis. This phenomenon is widely ignored among your scientists and educators, and even among your psychologists. The same is true of the planet. Your planet is ready for adulthood and strives to unfold it. Yet the planet also harbors resistant elements that fear, resist and want to ignore the process. So you can recognize factions of people who are totally oblivious to inner processes. You can also see groups who sense some of these processes. And then there are those who are very keenly aware of the inner reality and see the outer reality for exactly what it is: merely a reflection, a manifestation.
The less evolved organization of consciousness, which is focused only on the outer manifestation, is in a state of separateness. It is unable to perceive the oneness of all being and therefore proceeds in ways that split off the self from others. Selfishness, greed, ruthlessness, unconcern, and cruelty are manifestations of this turn of mind. Since the precepts behind these attitudes are based on illusion, they must ultimately prove painful and unworkable and are being destroyed by every new influx of divine energy. This truth is not always understood in its true significance. It often requires a great deal of time and development before the inner meaning of such a crisis can become clear.
The blindness that is unable to perceive the oneness of all being is distinctive—it is based on the apparent diversity of interests between self and others. Such a personality can see no further than the immediate point and neglects, or even refuses, to see beyond this point. It remains unaware of the connecting links between the self and others.
In the age just past, which we can call the early adolescent stage of planetary consciousness, humanity had to learn to make a very crude kind of distinction between good and evil, between social and antisocial behavior, between constructive and destructive acts. This was a totally dualistic state, inevitable because the consciousness of the planet was not able to perceive anything beyond dualism. It was also a necessary preparation for the next age, the one you have now entered. You have to acquire the strength of character to withstand temptation before you can realize that nothing is being sacrificed by growing up, because your real interest cannot ever differ from that of others.
In previous ages this distinction could not be made. Humanity was then incapable of distinguishing good from evil, between what was constructive and what was destructive for others, even if it seemed advantageous to the self. In those earlier periods, people were governed merely by impulse and desire. What was immediately gratifying seemed “good,” and no consideration could be given to anything beyond it. Consciousness was then in its infancy. Only in the age that has now come to an end could the struggle be taken up to choose between interests that seemed divergent. The pain created by the blindness of the undeveloped state becomes its own medicine and lesson. I have often mentioned this divine law, which is so hard for humanity to recognize. If you give up what seems to be your interest because you recognize that not doing so would harm others, you prepare for the next stage of development, where you can have a fuller vision. This also applies to the planet as a whole.
The dualistic way of seeing reality is still very deeply embedded in the human consciousness, so everything seems to pose a choice between either the self or the other, and the conflicts of conscience that result are often quite severe. Needless to say, all human beings cannot always make that apparent sacrifice in order to preserve decency, kindness, and constructive behavior because such action is still so deeply experienced as being against the self. Therefore when you are sacrificing from a dualistic consciousness, you often do so to your detriment. Such sacrifice is illusory, and not an expression of divine love, kindness, decency, nor honesty. But if these attributes seem to extract severe sacrifice, sacrifice must be experienced, for you shall experience as you believe. You have all experienced in your purification process how resentful and deprived you feel when you refrain from destructive behavior, and also how guilty and self-rejecting you feel when you give in to the temptation of following the call of the immediate desire of the lower self.
The laws and mores of civilization in the age just past hinged on this basic duality, thus on a limited vision of reality. At the same time this limited vision was a much needed testing ground. All the manifestations of strife and upheaval, natural as well as artificial, expressed this conflict between the seemingly divergent interests of the self and others. Now this age has come to an end. Those who have sacrificed for the good of all, for the sake of a divine principle, will find that this is no longer necessary, that a deeper level of truth can be reached, for you now see that what harms the self, harms others, and what harms others also harms the self. Those who have acted primarily on the selfish and destructive level must come to a change of heart if the powerful energies that are being released on the inner plane of the planet are to be creative and constructive for them. Otherwise they will create unbearable tensions that will culminate in crisis.
The planet Earth has come to a stage of development in which the old structure can no longer be maintained. It cannot bear the tensions and restrictions of the old limited consciousness. A new vision must be gained in which the self and others are perceived as one. You have to look for this new vision beneath the limited vision to which the immediate consciousness is so accustomed. This new vision brings enormous peace, security, joy, and self-expression. It is not an illusory image of wishful thinking; it is stark reality.
You all know, my friends, that the distinction between people who are still steeped in the old consciousness and those who share the new perception is not always simple, for humanity is not cut from one cloth. Many human beings are on the brink of change and need help and guidance to pull them over into the new. Even those who are by and large ready to let the new consciousness express itself through them, whose personality already embraces the new Christ consciousness, find areas within where they still maintain the old, selfish, narrow vision. Those are the areas you call your “problems.” Perhaps we can now see this in a different and more comprehensive light. It is too simple to say that these are “problems.” They express a rhythm of growth and expansion.
Some people are already prepared for this New Age of consciousness, and in this sense this consciousness already exists. They are the pioneers. They create a new civilization. The beginnings have already been made, in various places all over the Earth. There are also a considerable number of human beings who are not quite yet in the new consciousness but are capable of reaching that state. This requires very intense work with guidance. The way to do this is being presented to you through this channel. More of this preparation is needed all over the world. And it will come. Your task is very important, for you are not merely concerned with those human beings who have attained the new consciousness, who are pioneers in creating a new civilization. You are also called upon to undergo your own purification work, your own growth process, so that your inner vision will be enlarged and your present state of manifest consciousness will alter according to your seed plan. Then you can help others, in many different ways, to accomplish the same. There need not be a very strict differentiation between those who are in the old and those who are in the new. There are a number of human beings who at this stage of development are not ready to undergo the necessary discipline of the work. But there are more than you realize who might be able to do it but unfortunately do not do so. There are also many human beings who can and wish to widen and deepen their consciousness according to their plan.
This work is not sufficiently spread on the earth plane and it needs more emphasis. This will happen. Your own nucleus here can and will play an important role in this task, in exchanges with other New Age centers that are willing to accept the process of becoming and do not just let everyone stay wherever they are. Work needs to be done. This work of preparing the inner consciousness of more and more individuals for the inner reality to unfold really means very plainly just one thing: liberating God within you, liberating God within the general consciousness of humanity.
The God consciousness that existed in previous ages was always projected outward, as you well know. Then, as a necessary preparation, the pendulum had to swing to emphasis on the self. The individual had to give up God outside to assume full responsibility for the self. But to make the transition from the God outside to God inside, and bridge that gap in time and space, a transitory period of atheism or agnosticism had to come to prepare the individual for full autonomy and selfhood. This had to happen first only on the outer levels, for full autonomy and selfhood on all levels can exist only when God within is liberated and when your oneness with God has been found. That is reality.
Now, my friends, wherever the planet Earth resists the powerful energies and does not follow its seed plan, its development has to proceed differently from the development of those aspects of the planetary consciousness that are ready to embrace the new. This division is necessary, organic, and inevitable. Individuals who are blind to the meaning of the crisis that was caused by obstructing the movement will feel victimized by it and will insist that everything is hopeless. But those in the know will be aware of the real meaning of the crisis and will not fear it. They know it is a change that may, at the moment, present some difficulties in the process of adjusting to new modalities, but they also know that this means welcome liberation and greater joy.
Exactly the same happens within the individual. Those of you who work on the path find out incontrovertibly, and without a shadow of doubt if you are willing to really look, that each crisis you experience means a negation of truth, a violation of your divinity. And that is why you are in difficulties, crisis, and suffering. You are in fact blocking the immensely powerful energy stream of your spiritual growth process. With this new awareness, you also gain a wonderful key, which helps you to recognize and open up those areas of consciousness where you have blocked and inverted powerful creative energies, so that they have turned against you. On this path you learn to harmonize the whole process by surrendering all of you to the Christ who is awakening within you, on your plane of inner reality. Exactly the same process applies to the planet.
You who have crated your Center and experience so much life and growth, pain and joy and true peace through this process, sometimes fall into the error of believing that the life you lead in the short periods you spend there is too beautiful and meaningful to be real. Reality could not be that way. It is too much, you feel. When you come into your ordinary surroundings, your outer life, you designate that as the “real” life. Nothing could be further from the truth, my friends. What you call the real life is the most illusory life, where almost everything is turned upside down. There, only the outer, most superficial manifestations are recognized and dealt with; thus life is being fragmented into a meaningless pattern. In the new civilization that you are beginning to found, you learn to make the connections between cause and effect, between the various apparently fragmented pieces of experience and consciousness. You learn to discover the deeper and more real life within you that creates the outer circumstances. You thus approach reality and, at times, gain it in a much more comprehensive way. Once you connect with this reality, the superficial, illusory outer appearance will become much easier for you to deal with, provided you do not fall back into seeing it as the only reality that counts. When you do so, you distort the truth.
I will say to you, my friends, that the new reality you are discovering will manifest in your Center. You already begin to see it happening. You will become a part of the new civilization and the new culture that is slowly growing. The forces building this new reality are, at the same time, destroying whatever obstructs this movement. For there cannot be growth and creation without also a destruction of destructiveness. Destruction of whatever is already obsolete and therefore needs to go must take place, but the manifest consciousness clings to it and opposes the purifying movement. These obsolete attitudes may have had their functions in a less developed state of consciousness, but to pursue them now makes no sense. You all know how true this is from your individual work. You find within your soul substance attitudes and reactions that were very understandable and even appropriate when you were infants and small children. But you hold on to them as if they still had reality value. To the degree that you are doing this, you create obstructions, unhappiness, strife, frustration, crisis, and finally destruction, so that the old may crumble and you can begin to build the new.
If you are willing to give up the old, obsolete attitude and adopt a new, more appropriate one, the painful crises and destruction are unnecessary. With willingness the change occurs most organically, harmoniously, and beautifully. Where you hold back deliberately, where you deny and choose to delude yourself that it is all right, that it does not matter, or that you cannot do it, that it is too difficult, you invite inevitable crisis and pain. Exactly the same applies to all of humanity as an entity. Each individual is to all of humanity as an aspect or an attitude is in relation to your total personality. Just as you find yourself in inner strife because part of you wants to grow and part of you wants to hold back, so it is with the planet. Parts of it want to grow, while other parts want to hold back and deny that such a conflict even exists. There are thus those who want change and those who resist it in the overall entity to which all of you belong.
Understanding this lecture, my friends, should help you greatly to commit yourself to change on a deeper level of your being. For change is one of the byproducts of the New Age. I will now try to explain the importance of change in a very specific area.
Let us return for a moment to the concepts of good and evil, meaning by them that which is constructive and in accordance with divine truth and law, and that which is opposed to it. The rigid law that had to exist for the primitive consciousness of the past had to decree dos and don’ts, commands and prohibitions. The totally childish and self-indulgent consciousness does need such rules imposed from the outside. Without them there would have been chaos, and the most destructive impulses would have been acted out to a much greater degree. Such severity, however, also brought a certain rigidity and superficiality to human existence. Obeying rules blindly is a temptation to avoid thinking for oneself and struggling with the often more complex issues of inner morality. Blind obedience to rules enhances laziness of thinking, the easy way of not taking responsibility and avoiding the often necessary search that must precede true answers, enlightenment. This is why I so often stress in my guidance that your customary belief that one action is right and the other wrong is most of the time faulty. I have painstakingly shown you throughout the years that most of the time either alternative could be governed by the most sincere or the most dishonest motives. Only when you sort out the dishonest motives on both sides can you open the channel to your inner God and receive the guidance you require. This means labor, courage, search. Obeying the outer rule prevents this. So what I have shown you about how to approach such questions is truly an expression of the New Age consciousness that will spread much more over the planet as humanity develops.
I have also pointed out to you throughout the years how the dualistic approach creates confusion and distortion of truth in another way. Some people claim that a specific attitude to life is desirable, while its opposite is supposed to be undesirable. Others assert the contrary. Each group uses the distortion, exaggeration, and fanaticism of the other as a proof that their side is correct. For example, some say introspection is the only way of life, while outgoingness and extroversion are harmful and erroneous. Others claim the exact opposite. Still others believe only in active expression and reject all receptive, passive attitudes, and vice versa. Many other life attitudes are likewise divided. Whole philosophies are based on such divisions; painstaking treatises are written in which a lot of half-truths are used to present one side of the matter. Many issues meet this fate of rigid division. I have shown how the dualistic either/or is rigid, shortsighted and no longer applicable. However, this polarization was an inevitable byproduct of the rule system—rules which the primitive consciousness required in order to avoid destroying another human being willfully, blindly, and selfishly, in a state of emotional alienation where the other person’s pain was not experienced as real.
I do not say that humanity has now sufficiently progressed so that outer rules are no longer necessary. Obviously this is not yet true. There are always those who would still harm others willfully and selfishly, cruelly and irresponsibly, in spite of the rules from outside. But this applies only to the darkest, most undeveloped aspects of the lower self of the entity, individual as well as planetary. To an increasing degree the rules begin to make way for a new inner sense of morality and conscience. The Christ consciousness that evolves within brings humanity into a state in which sooner or later, little by little, outer rules will become superfluous. For the inner God knows what is truth, what is love, and what is divine reality, and the personality will act from that innermost center.
This can already be seen to a small degree. As you follow a psychological inner path in your emotional life, no rules are applicable—at least no rules from outside. But on your inner path you find the beauty of divine law working in utter perfection, as well as benign love and justice. The child, the lower self in you, may blindly rebel against the laws, but once you want to awaken, you must be overwhelmed by the grandeur of this divine scheme in which all is well, and there is nothing to fear, if you choose to see this plan and go with it. You know your inner truth; no one else can tell it to you. No one act is right or wrong per se, on that level. Yet it is also true at certain times that your inner plan, your divine self, wishes you, needs you to go into a certain direction and not in another. But this cannot be superimposed from the outside. Only when you go very deeply into yourself and transcend the rules, the adherence to public opinion, give up the facade and the self-interest that comes from the lower self, the need to please, as well as the need to rebel and to spite, will you find the ultimate truth. All outer help can show you only how to go deeply enough to recognize your investment in a false vision of reality. Those outside of you can often see the maze you cannot see and can therefore help you. But the ultimate realization is that of your own inner law, once you find your inner God.
The idea of the New Age points in this direction. The outer law is often parallel to the inner law. Many outer laws are manifestations of divine law, but have lost the dynamic connectedness with their divine origin and are therefore disconnected structures. When it comes to destructive acts of killing, stealing, or in other ways robbing others of their rights, there can be no question that the outer law is parallel to the inner law. But then we also encounter more complex situations, where the inner law is not that simple. This is where our new approach can bring forth the truth and reality of the divine law on an inner level.
At times you may find the outer law to be completely opposite to the inner law of God. A simple example on the crassest outer level of manifestation is the following: If you happen to live in a land whose government is corrupt and requires the individual to commit acts against humanity—that is, against God—to follow the outer law would be going against divine law. It requires a great deal of courage to stand up for the inner truth and defy the outer law. But people can lose themselves in a maze of inner confusion and can take refuge in the outer law, for that may be the easier way. By the same token, people could misuse the words I am saying in order to justify a lower-self trend to defy an outer law. Again, very close inspection of the real motives and attitudes is the only true answer. There are no rules about when to follow and when to break rules, or how to follow them.
The Christ consciousness is not rebellion and revolution; it is not, in itself, destruction of the old. It is reformulation and change, a new organization of eternal values which already existed in the old consciousness but which must be expressed in a new way in the New Age. The Christ consciousness brings a new morality that little by little wipes away the outer commandments, outer regulations and the outer written and unwritten laws. Laws are still necessary for quite a time in your terms, but the trend is in this direction. Where you act out your lower self, you need those laws to protect others. But where you have outgrown the lower self, you do not need to be told not to harm others, you know it, and you have no desire to do so.
In the more complex matters of personal relationships to self and others, the laws are already dissolving, for the new consciousness makes them superfluous. To the degree you allow God to awaken in you, outer laws will disappear. The laws of morality will be completely flexible. Each case is different. But for that you need the labor, courage and honesty of self-knowledge so that you cannot be corrupted by lower-self motives. You also need to take each individual issue separately and deal with it completely anew. That is the action of the adult, mature entity, and humanity is moving toward that goal. But you cannot do this when you resist change, for this flexible attitude requires a constantly changing world. Freedom and change are inseparable. Enslavement and rigidity are equally inseparable. If you want it to be all so simple that you won’t have to search and put energy and attention into whatever the issue may be, if you want it all handed to you, you need to deal with inflexible rules that confine and enslave. Only those who have overcome rebellion against authority because they are their own inner authority, because they have that honesty, can be free. That means embracing change. Each issue requires a new, different, very flexible approach. Situations that may appear similar may in fact be quite different and require an entirely new approach. So freedom is completely dependent on your ability to change.
Now, my friends, I have given you material to ponder; go deeply into yourself. Most of you are ready to use this material very productively, not only on the intellectual level, but also on an inner level. You can begin to institute true freedom by your willingness to change your mind, your beliefs, your attitudes, your assumptions, by your willingness to give up the obsolete that confines you and thus liberate your inner God and establish true self-responsibility. Then you no longer need the confinement of rigid rules.
Find that part within that can create an echo now to the words I have given you. Let these words nourish and strengthen you where you need it most. Make room for the ever more emerging new consciousness as it spreads on the inner plane and fully embrace the movement. Go with it! Trust that this can only enhance you and your life. You are all being blessed in truth and in love. Be your God.
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