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Complete Lectures of the Pathwork: Unedited Lectures Vol. 2
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Start ReadingLength: 778 pages13 hours
- Publisher:
- Pathwork Press
- Released:
- Sep 29, 2013
- ISBN:
- 9781931589475
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- Book
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This volume contains The Unedited Lectures 51 - 100 given by Eva Pierrakos between 1957 and 1979 to Pathwork Communities worldwide. The teachings, profoundly concerned with self-knowledge, self-acceptance, and self-responsibility, are full of wisdom and love.
Book Actions
Start ReadingBook Information
Complete Lectures of the Pathwork: Unedited Lectures Vol. 2
Length: 778 pages13 hours
Description
This volume contains The Unedited Lectures 51 - 100 given by Eva Pierrakos between 1957 and 1979 to Pathwork Communities worldwide. The teachings, profoundly concerned with self-knowledge, self-acceptance, and self-responsibility, are full of wisdom and love.
- Publisher:
- Pathwork Press
- Released:
- Sep 29, 2013
- ISBN:
- 9781931589475
- Format:
- Book
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Complete Lectures of the Pathwork - Eva Pierrakos
Patterns
Pathwork Guide Lecture No. 51
An Unedited Lecture
May 8, 1959
WHOSE BLINDNESS? WHOSE OPINION?
Greetings, my dear friends. God bless all of you.
You all seek the kingdom of God, the kingdom of love. Yet you encounter innumerable difficulties, difficulties with other human beings in spite of the fact that you are so full of good will and are aware of the basic spiritual truths and the importance of love. These obstacles arise from your own blindness in which you are encased—not understanding the blindness of others. This blindness of the other hurts you while you, in your own blindness, are unaware how much you often hurt the other person. If you can keep this in mind, my dear ones, it will institute the necessary platform, the basic stepping stone from where to proceed further. For with that in mind, you will be aware of the danger of how your own blindness, not the other one's, causes you to remain in your misery, in your hurt, about a real or imagined injustice. True, something may be or seem unjust. But you will view it differently when you realize what I am saying here. Whenever you suffer because of other people, the other is no more blind than you are yourself—and often even less! With this understanding, you may begin to seek where you are blind. You always make the mistake of battling against the other's blindness—the lack of understanding of the other person—instead of trying to eliminate your own blindness. The idea does not occur to you because you see your own case so clearly,
and you continue to strengthen your own case by thoughts in the wrong direction. With this idea in mind, you will automatically begin to cultivate an objectivity which is one of the fundamental requirements of unselfishness and the capacity to love. However, the more you concentrate on how you have been hurt, the more difficult it will be for you to leave your own little ego out and to see the other person's point of view. The more difficult it will be for you to accept that which you cannot alter. The more you battle against all you cannot change—which is everything and everybody except yourself—the unhappier you will become, regardless of whether or not you are right
and regardless of whether or not you find an outlet in a real or supposed wrong done to you.
The unhappier you become because of other people's wrongdoing, the less you accept that which you cannot change. That does not mean you should accept wrongdoing in a sick and masochistic way—wanting to be tortured or wronged in order to satisfy your guilt feelings—but in a healthy attitude of realizing that the wrong of another person can never do you any harm in reality, or rather only as long as you prevail in the wrong attitude.
Every crisis, every breakdown is the result of a basic wrong attitude. There never need be a breakdown if the attitude is changed in time. If you truly want to realize this all-important truth, you can protect yourself from all such happenings, such as a crisis or a breakdown. It is never the outer circumstances that lead you to it, but your wrong attitude to such happenings. In reality and in principle, a breakdown is a childish temper tantrum in a stronger degree. Yet the basic attitude is the same. I discussed temper tantrums last time in connection with one of the fundamental vicious circles in the human being. When a breakdown occurs, the subconscious says You cannot do this to me; it is too much. I will be well again if the circumstances I abhor will change to my liking.
This is really and truly what it amounts to, my friends. But this is the wrong attitude. Self-will prevails to a strong degree when this emotional climate exists. The right attitude would be to turn about inwardly and to seek what can be learned from this painful situation. You all know well enough by now that no painful situation can come into existence from which an important lesson cannot be learned.
An entity going from one incarnation into another with this wrong attitude in which self-will and self-pity prevail tries to force the world to his own liking, and when this cannot be done by power, other means are sought, such as sickness or a breakdown. Such an entity violates his own soul currents to such an extent that finally in the incarnation in which this attitude culminates, a predestination for insanity will be the result. This is one of the basic reasons for insanity. I do not say it is the only one, but I might add that all other conditions creating insanity are, at least to some degree, connected with the condition cited here. We wish that this truth about the background of insanity would be more fully recognized in your world.
The less you adjust to the world around you, to conditions you cannot change, the more your life force goes into the wrong channel, becoming destructive instead of creative and regenerating; and therefore the unhappier, the more disharmonious you are bound to become. It begins with very disharmonious and rebellious moods, encasing you more and more in a wall of separateness, ego centeredness and blindness. This will make you commit deeds and thoughts, bound to bring unfavorable results to you. This in turn might increase this particular vicious circle, and you will rebel even more strongly against the world around you, being blind to the fact how these results were caused by you. The next step might be continuous tantrums in one form or another and finally a breakdown with the hidden hope this will change people and circumstances. And when you come back to the earth plane life after life in order to learn how these results were caused by you, but you do not, insanity will finally be the result.
The principle of the mild tantrum is the same as insanity. The basic attitude is the same in both from a spiritual and psychological viewpoint. Only the degree varies, but the direction of the soul currents, the thoughts, emotions, and mentality are the same in essence. Sanity and emotional health depend largely on the ability and the willingness to take any undesired condition and adjust to it by finding out what can be learned from it, by giving up the battle against it and relaxing inwardly, but concentrating on the cause in you that has brought the unwelcome condition about. This requires a certain humility and flexibility. It dissolves rigid self-love that cannot take life as it is and ignores the fact that you have molded your life. You often seek the answer in yourself too in spite of the fact that, at the same time, you still do not adjust in the right way. This is because you seek in the wrong way. Subtly you seek self-justification, and you go too far in looking for the answer. The real answer is much closer than you think or are willing to look for.
So the only solution is a turnabout and the basic realization that first you change before you expect life to change for you. If you are truly willing, the answer will come to you. And perhaps the best answer will be given to you by the very people who have hurt you. If you, my dear friends, who are all so sincere, try this whenever these words seem to apply, you will reach the inner freedom you are striving for. You must reach it in that way. If you can give up the slight satisfaction in being hurt and wronged—yes, there is a satisfaction in it, added to the pain—exchanging it for the attitude described above, a much greater, fuller, and more durable satisfaction will be yours without the pain and disharmony. Thus you will have freed yourself of the chains of blindness. In this way, you will automatically increase your understanding of others, and this must eliminate your pain and hurt! Such words have been said many times. But they need repetition for many of my dear friends. I say them with all the love I have for each one of you. I can promise you relief, clarification, liberation if you try.
We shall now discuss the subject of your opinions. It becomes increasingly important on this path to find out just what your true opinions are. Many of you are completely unaware that you have opinions which you accepted at one time ready-made,
so to speak. You have accepted them without asking yourself whether they are really yours and why. The human personality is often so blind, so involved in his own emotional problems that he is unaware that he holds opinions not his own and why he does so. In the first place, it is beside the point that the opinion you hold may be valid in itself according to objective truth. If it is not your own, arrived at through mature deliberation, it is more harmful than a wrong opinion you have honestly gotten to. This may surprise you, but I will try to show you why it is better to have a wrong opinion if it is really your own, than a right one if it is not. In the first case you may be mistaken. Why not? You are a human being and therefore fallible in judgment. An honest mistake, as I always say, is much better than a lack of courage and all the other sick and weak reasons that make you hold on to an opinion not honestly arrived at.
There are various possibilities why you have opinions not your own. One possibility is simple laziness and inertia. Anything that does not touch you personally is not important enough to make an effort for—in this case the effort to think independently for the sake of truth. Hence you adopt opinions of others quickly. It is one thing not to have an opinion at all about a subject that is neither important nor interesting to you, but another if you hold other people's opinions.
Another reason for not having your own opinion is inferiority feelings. You are so certain that other people know better than you that you rely on their opinions rather than on your own. You do not realize that by going on in this way, you can never break this particular vicious circle. The more you hold on to opinions not your own, the more you despise yourself for it unconsciously. And the more you despise yourself, the greater the need
to adopt other people's opinions. Thus you see how every wrong inner condition creates a vicious circle, apart from the great vicious circle I discussed last time. The only way to break this circle is to have the courage to examine the subject, to review it freely and independently. If you then arrive at a different view and have the courage to live up to it at the price of differing from your environment, you will automatically respect yourself a lot more and thus begin to break this particular vicious circle. On the other hand, if you arrive at the same opinion all over again, but this time it has really become your own, the same effect will result out of the labor and courage to make yourself free from the yoke of influence, not of others, but of your own weakness.
Another motive or reason for holding opinions not your own is a desire to conform. This also holds true to the above, but often something else enters into it. There are a few subdivisions for this desire for conformity. For instance, the child or the immature person feels different from his surroundings; there is always this feeling of not belonging, of being isolated and being unique in a negative sense. This is why all children want to be like other children in many respects and feel deeply ashamed about their imagined difference.
The general maturity process of the soul will change this. Due to this circumstance, a person will be inclined to hold on to opinions not his own.
Another motive for conforming and therefore not daring to seek one's own opinions is the areas where you still rebel against authority; this we discussed already. Since you still crave to belong and your rebellion is not only hidden but does not concern all realms of your life, you want to make up for this rebellion by conforming to your environment in other ways.
Another motive for opinions not your own is often that thereby you cover up the exact wish you deny yourself in the opposite opinion you adopt. Because your desire does not conform to public opinion, you are convinced of the wickedness of your desire. Added on to this is your general guilt feeling, resulting from the main vicious circle. Hence, you are compelled to have an opinion that is not in harmony with your emotions and unconscious desires. Whether these emotions and unconscious wishes are in your opinion desirable or undesirable is not under discussion here. But under no circumstances are possible wrong desires eliminated by adopting the opposite opinion out of fear and weakness, conforming outwardly. In such a case, opinions are often particularly rigid, and even violent.
In all these instances, you violate your personality, you lack the courage to be yourself, to arrive at your own conclusions. And you sell truth for an imagined personal advantage. In all these cases, it amounts to just that, if you look at the problem from this angle. This increases your self-contempt even though this is usually quite unconscious.
I might add that often you have opinions only because they represent the exact opposite of a hated and rejected authority, be it parent or others. In this case it is not conformity, but the exact opposite. It is defiance, rebellion, and hate—subjective emotional reasons—instead of mature judgment that make you hold an opinion. Thus you are just as much in bondage as by conforming. You are just as dependent.
You can surely see how harmful it is to hold opinions that you did not arrive at independently, free from your emotional involvement. It is therefore of utmost importance to examine your opinions from this point of view in the work you are doing on this path. Find out where you are thus bound, which of these motives apply to you. It may be that a combination of all these motives apply to you. In some instances one of these motives may be predominant, but the others may still be present.
The danger is that your intellectual rationalizations, the way you may succeed in justifying the validity of your opinion, may hide the weak and dependent motives. Do not forget that the validity of the opinion is not the point here. What you expound may be right, but why do you really have this opinion? How did you get it? What are the inner motives? This is the difficulty in the work. The validity of the opinion may be so strong that you cannot find the emotional, subjective, and personal reasons behind it. It requires the utmost self-honesty. And a little more than that. It also requires an understanding of all these subtleties and a deep-rooted good will to apply them to yourself, to detect in yourself the slight emotional flavor about how you react to certain of your opinions. By listening to
or feeling your reactions, you will be able to get to the roots of this question. Beware of your good reasoning capacity. The more successful you are, the graver the danger that you hide your true motives.My suggestion is that you take certain general subjects on which you have strongly formed opinions and examine them in the work you are doing—by yourself and with your co-worker. Take politics, religion, your idea about love and sex, or whatever it is that regards everyone to some extent. What do you really think about it? Why? Think whether you would have the same opinion if you had grown up in a different environment. Would you have the same opinion if different influences around you had prevailed; if your personal circumstances in life would be different? All this is healthy because it will give you a more objective outlook. One can always find justifications for almost any viewpoint. There is always a point in the opposite view. Try to see it. And then try to detect how subjective you may have been so far. It will already be a great progress if you succeed in admitting that you have a personal reason at stake by holding on to your opinion, that your reason for it is not solely based on objective deliberations. This self-honesty is of great benefit to the soul. Are there any questions with regard to this subject?
QUESTION: Yes, there is something I don't fully understand. It seems to me that time is so extremely limited that one could not collect sufficient data and analyze it sufficiently to arrive at an adequate opinion on many subjects. And therefore one is compelled, consciously, to adopt an opinion on an emotional basis.
ANSWER: In the first place, my dear, let me ask you this question. Are you really aware when you have adopted an opinion on an emotional basis? I doubt this very much.
QUESTION: Well, I am sure that there are many occasions when one isn't aware. But there are others when one is fully aware, for instance when the subject is not of sufficient interest to devote what little time there is.
ANSWER: The moment you are emotionally influenced, the subject is of importance. It is unimportant only when you cannot be emotionally touched. There are many questions that cannot touch you emotionally. If it is not important for you, you can say, I do not know.
Therefore you will have no opinion. Let us say, for instance, any scientific subject. In such a case, it will not be difficult for you to say that you do not know. It does not touch you personally. However, the scientist working in this particular field may be emotionally involved. But he may not, yet the subject is important for him. Therefore he has to study it. But you may say that you hold no particular opinion on the subject, except when you are too proud to admit that there is a subject that you know nothing about. In that instance, you become emotionally involved. And this would lead you to adopt an opinion you know nothing or too little about. For it is perfectly true that you cannot possibly study all subjects in existence. I did not say that it is necessary to have opinions on all subjects. I merely said that where you have opinions, they should be your own.
Furthermore, the moment one realizes that one's opinion is based on emotion and therefore subjective—even if it should happen to be objectively true as well—this is already a great deal! Many people are utterly unaware of this. In fact, this is the reason I spoke on the subject tonight so that you find out just that. For a long time, this will perhaps be the best you can do. You cannot become completely objective all at once. In order to reach this detachment, you have to go through the stage where you realize that you cannot be objective in certain areas of life. It is healthy to say, Here I am not objective for I am emotionally involved. For the moment, my opinion is such and such, but I realize it is subjective, and therefore I take it with a grain of salt. I do not take it too seriously.
The danger is when you are convinced that your opinion is completely objective, and you expound it with very good arguments while you are utterly unaware that notwithstanding all the good arguments, you are deeply and subjectively involved.
QUESTION: Did I misunderstand you then in interpreting what you said that one should have opinions on subjects one is not qualified on?
ANSWER: You certainly did misunderstand. There is nothing wrong with saying about as many subjects as you wish that you do not know. On the contrary, that is fine. What I meant is that you examine all subjects where you do hold strong opinions. You do not have to consider subjects that are of no importance or interest to you and you honestly admit that you cannot know. However, when you feel disharmonious whenever a contrary opinion is offered, when you feel angry inwardly, or when you feel the great need to convince others that your opinion is right, then you should examine yourself as to where and how you are involved. It would be very foolish if I were to advise you to have an opinion about every conceivable subject. Is that clear, do you understand it now?
QUESTION: What about the problem about being unable to form an opinion on a subject on which the majority seems to have an opinion?
ANSWER: That does not matter. The fact that many people have opinions—often not their own—is no reason that you must have opinions on subjects that you did not study. There is nothing wrong in that. Only if it becomes a pattern, when a subject that is of importance to you and you cannot form an opinion, then you should look into it. If you examine the pattern, it will reveal something to you. You will find out why you are unable to form an opinion. What are the psychological reasons behind it? It could be a fear of committing yourself. It could be that a person constantly refrains from having opinions in order to avoid friction, or so as to be liked and respected, or in order never to differ from other people, or in order to avoid a certain responsibility. For, the moment you have a conviction, it entails a certain responsibility—that may be behind your being unable to form an opinion. And by a little and seemingly unimportant symptom, you may find something infinitely more important behind it. By doing this work and reviewing your life from this particular viewpoint, you will find certain clues, whether you hold opinions not your own or whether you are incapable—or I should rather say, unwilling—to form an opinion for psychological and emotionally involved reasons that are still hidden. Is that clear? Well, this is the purpose of this evening, my dear friends. Particularly those friends who do not have the regular opportunity to come for private sessions should have the possibility to ask questions here freely. There should not be any shyness even if a question has to be asked three or four times if it is not clear. Please, you should all feel free enough of all shyness to ask as much as you like.
QUESTION: After death, the physical body disintegrates. And after that, one of the subtle bodies does. Is that the etheric or the astral?
ANSWER: Well, my dear, this is unnecessary to go into here. There is enough data written about it in occult and esoteric literature. Besides, it is really not important.
QUESTION: That was just part of the question I had in mind. When the spiritual body is just one body, does that have any feeling and emotional personality?
ANSWER: Yes, but in a very different way. Certainly every spiritual entity, as created by God, is a personality and therefore has feelings, reactions, and opinions. But they differ greatly from the unpurified ones of the human personality. Your own higher self, the divine being living within yourself, registers, feels, and sees, but as differently as you feel from a child. Your reaction would be quite different from the reaction of a child in certain circumstances. If the child's favorite doll is broken, it will think the world has come to an end. The child cannot see that this is no tragedy. You, as an adult, will sympathize with the child. You will understand its sorrow, but you will not be affected by this loss in the same way. A similar relationship exists between your unpurified personality and your divine personality. The latter is watching and observing your outer personality. It often differs in the opinion of what is good for you. It tries to lead you on the right way; sometimes you let yourself be guided, but sometimes you do not. Your self-will and blindness stand in the way.
The fact that your divine personality does not feel and react in the same way as your outer personality does, does not mean, however, that it does not feel and react, too. But the feelings are refined and much wiser. The aim is much higher. It has an infinitely wider outlook with a longer range.
QUESTION: This question deals with the subject of love. We are told that love is something that grows. However, if we don't possess too much of it and we still wonder sometimes what is the right thing to do, we still feel we must do the right thing even if we are not quite ready to do it, we should do it because of love. Is it then right for us to do it as a must.
ANSWER: That depends. It cannot be generalized with a yes
or no.
It depends what the case is and how the must
is executed. A must
out of a compulsion is of course not advisable. But let us say on this path, in the course of your progress in self-recognition, you realize that a certain behavior on your part, being good and right in itself, was done without the feeling sustaining it. You have actually done the right thing out of weak and sick motives, bargaining for a reward, pacifying a guilt feeling, nurturing a desire for self-destruction. All this adds up to compulsion. Now, depending on the issue, in one instance it may be right not to continue doing this right thing until you are ready to do the right thing wholeheartedly. But in other instances, your desire is still so crude that to give vent to it might bring harm to others and, of course, to yourself. This you recognize. A part of your personality wishes to avoid this. Another part does not. So far, you have done the right thing out of mixed motives, partly out of the good ones, but partly you were afraid of the sick and weak motives, covering them up with the right action. By recognizing these facts, you will, of course, continue to do the right thing, but now you will be aware of your inner motives, not deceiving yourself into believing your motives are all good and pure. In that instance, compulsion will be gone. The act will remain the same, but the motive will have changed by the recognition even though you are still incapable of having a pure motive of love.
There is the danger when a person discovers that the former motives were compulsive and not entirely genuine, that he falls into the opposite extreme to give vent to the crude feelings. He had committed a right act out of wrong motives, and he thinks the proper change is the wrong act out of the right
motive, so to speak. When he thinks in that way, he is at least honest. You do not have to commit a harmful and selfish act in order to be honest. It is sufficient that you recognize that your motives are not yet pure, that you are incapable of having a pure motive of love. Besides, it is never your whole personality that wishes to commit the selfish act. It can only be a part of you. In the interim stage, after you cease acting in self-deception and compulsion and before you are capable of being one with your divine self, you may continue to do the right act, but with realizing how you feel, realizing that your bargaining for certain results should stop. This will bridge over the gap until you reach the perfection of letting your divine self manifest. That is the way to learn love. First, honesty with yourself and about your past and present motives, then the second stage is to continue the right act for itself even though you cannot yet love. To do the wrong act is no more true to yourself than to do the right act you do so far. Because as long as you are not pure in this respect, your personality is always divided. When you are one with yourself, you will be completely loving. Until such time, you should recognize where you fall short of this aim, but that does not mean to give up the right act. In this way, gradually something will grow and bloom in you. By doing the right act without self-deception, in the hope that one day you will be capable of feeling entirely at one with yourself in doing the act—this will develop the force of light and love in your soul. Do you understand?
QUESTION: Yes, that is very clear insofar as it goes from one to the other. We are told in one of the past lectures that no human being can love completely, nor can he be perfect. Then how much love can a person expect to receive from another person? Can he expect to be loved with all his faults?
ANSWER: The expectancy of love may be a basic key to the hindrance of having it. For what does that mean? It means that there is still a bargaining going on in the person. It means that deep down you actually say, Yes, I would be willing to love, provided that it is safe. And it would only be safe if I am sure to be loved as much as I love.
It takes a great deal of searching until one comes to understand that many people are capable of many different kinds of love. By understanding this, you will come to the point when you can love without expecting it back from the same source and when you can recognize that a little gesture may have a greater meaning in one person than a great gesture in another. It is so relative, and your sense of this relativity will be cultivated. You mentioned can we expect to be loved with our faults?
Perhaps the best attitude to take would be that you expect to be loved with your faults as much as you love others with their faults. This is the way it will be, my friends, just exactly that way. This may sound disciplinarian. But it is not. This is the way the magnetism of the soul currents work. In the measure that you are intolerant of the other person's faults, in that measure you will be judged yourself—and reap love to exactly that degree. There is no other way.
QUESTION: On the subject of right action, how can a person who is so bound that he or she is compulsive know a right action from a wrong one?
ANSWER: In many instances he cannot. In many he can. There are many instances when it is quite clear that one alternative is right and the other is selfish.
QUESTION: We have learned by now that very often what we think of as love, in our terminology on earth, amounts in actuality to hatred.
ANSWER: In cases where the alternative is not so clear, when a person is in that stage, he cannot and should not take any major decisions anyway until he becomes much more clear about himself. I was speaking of the little acts of every day where a person is confronted with the alternative of an obviously selfish or unselfish act. In this sense, I discussed the problem. The other problem you bring up is a different subject altogether. I suggest that we take it up next time. I would like to go into that more extensively. They are two different questions.
And now, my friends, be all blessed in the name of God. Go on your path, continue and God's strength and light must always come to you even though at times things may look hopeless and bleak. But do not ever forget that as long as you are willing, God's light comes to you again. The sun will shine again. So I bless all of you here. Be in peace, my friends, be in God!
Pathwork Guide Lecture No. 52
An Unedited Lecture
June 5, 1959
THE GOD IMAGE
Greetings. I bring you blessings in the name of God. Blessed is this hour, my dearest friends. In the Bible, it is said that you should not create an image of God. Most people believe this statement means that you should not draw a picture or make a statue of God. But this is by no means the entire sense. If you think about this statement a little more profoundly, you will come to the conclusion that this could not be all that is implied in this commandment. With what you have learned so far on this path, you will now understand that this refers to the inner image. Most people are still so involved in their own wrong conclusions, in their irrational impressions, that they are bound to have an image about God, as well as on other subjects. You are bound to have images on those subjects that are most important in your life.
At an early age, the child experiences his first conflict with authority. Recently I talked at length about this. The child also learns that God is the highest authority. Therefore it is not surprising that the child projects his own subjective experiences with authority onto his imagination about God. Hence an image is formed, and whatever the child's and later the adult's attitude toward authority is, his attitude towards God will, most probably, be colored and influenced by it.
A child experiences all kinds of authority. When the child is prohibited from doing what he enjoys most, he feels authority as being hostile. When parental authority grants favors to the child, allows him to indulge in his desires, authority will be felt as benign. When there is a predominance of one kind of authority in childhood, that will be the unconscious attitude towards God. In many instances, however, children experience a mixture of both. Then the combination of these two kinds of authority will form his image about God. In the measure that a child experiences fear and frustration, in that measure will fear and frustration unconsciously be felt towards God. God is felt to be a punishing, severe, and often even unfair and unjust force that one has to contend with. I know, my friends, you do not think so consciously. But in this work, you are used to finding emotional reactions that do not at all correspond to your conscious concepts on whatever subject. The less the unconscious concept coincides with the conscious one, the greater is the shock when one realizes this discrepancy.
Practically everything the child enjoys most is forbidden. Whatever gives most pleasure is prohibited, usually for his own welfare; but this the child cannot understand. It also happens that parents do so out of their own ignorance and fear. But the child is thus impressed that everything most pleasurable in the world is subject to punishment from God—the highest and sternest authority.
In addition, you are bound to encounter human injustice in the course of your life, in childhood as well as in adulthood. Particularly if these injustices are perpetrated by people who stand for authority—and are therefore unconsciously associated with God—your unconscious belief in God's severe injustice is strengthened. Hence your fear of God is strengthened.
All this forms an image which makes, if properly analyzed, a monster out of God. This God, living in your unconscious mind, is really more of a Satan.
You yourself have to find out in this work how much of an image, or variations thereof, hold true for you personally. Is your soul impregnated with similar wrong concepts? If and when the realization of such an impression becomes conscious with a growing human being, it is often not understood that this concept of God is false and does not mean that God is actually the way in which He is experienced in the psyche. Then the person turns away from Him altogether and wants no part of the monster he has discovered hovering in his mind. In most cases of atheism, this is the true reason for it. But it is overlooked that this alternative is just as false. The new concept is just as erroneous as the opposite extreme of fearing a god who is severe, unjust, pious, self-righteous, and cruel. He who maintains unconsciously the distorted God image rightly fears him and has to cajole him for favors. Once again you have a good example of the two wrong opposite extremes in which both lack truth to an equal extent.
Now let us examine the case wherein a child experiences benign authority to a greater extent than he experiences fear and frustration. Let us assume the child is spoiled and pampered. Doting parents fulfill every wish of the child, indulge in his every whim. They do not instill a sense of responsibility in the child so that consequently he can get away with practically everything. The God image resulting from such a condition is, at first and superficial sight, more similar to a true concept of God. He is forgiving, good,
loving, indulgent. This causes the personality to (unconsciously) think that he can get away with anything in the eyes of his god. He thinks he can cheat life and avoid self-responsibility. To begin with, he will know much less fear. But since life cannot be cheated, one's own life plan cannot be cheated, the results of his own wrong attitude will be of such a nature that conflicts and therefore fear are an outcome of a chain reaction of wrong thinking, feeling, and action. Thereby an inner confusion arises since life as it is in reality does not correspond to the unconscious God image and concept.
Many subdivisions of these two main categories exist in one soul, as well as many combinations of them. Depending on the predominant authority of the particular kind in childhood, the image is likely to be stronger in one direction, although even this cannot be generalized. It depends also on the characteristics that the entity has brought into this life, and also on the development in this particular respect in former incarnations. The more that development has advanced in this area, the less are surroundings able to influence the psyche.
Apart from that, other factors play a role. It may well be that, for instance, hostile authority is the predominant factor. Let us say one parent is domineering, and therefore the atmosphere in the child's home is filled with fear of this parent. The other parent may fall under the second category. Although this influence is outwardly weaker, it may have a much stronger inner impression on the soul, and the image may be stronger in that direction. The same holds true in the opposite case. Although severity, injustice, and fear may have been the weaker elements in manifestation during childhood, the impression on the individual soul may be much stronger and has therefore created a stronger image. But almost always, both currents can be found. How, in what way, and why, what the attitude to the individual parent or parent-substitute was and is, all has to be found out and investigated in the image work. But do keep in mind, my friends, that both alternatives are to be looked for even if one appears stronger to begin with. The pampering and indulgent God image is not an additional factor to the monster image, but often the very reaction and compensation to it. The personality may grapple between these two false concepts (unconsciously) and can never come out clear in this battle because both concepts are false, while he unconsciously tries to find out which is right. In every child's life, both kinds of authority are experienced no matter how much stronger one manifests. You may have one indulgent and one hard parent. Or you may even have two indulgent parents, but a severe teacher who instills fear in you and has a greater influence on your inner growth than you realize. Or it may be another relative or a sibling. So it is never just one kind of authority.
It is very important, my friends, to find out what your God image is. It is basic and determines all other attitudes, other images and patterns throughout life. Hence you should all examine this attitude that may be deeply hidden within yourself. Do not be deceived by your conscious convictions. Rather try to examine and analyze your emotional reactions to authority, to your parents, to your fears and expectancies. Out of that, you will gradually discover what you feel about God rather than what you think. The whole scale between these two opposite poles is reflected in your God image, from hopelessness and despair in the emotional conviction of an unjust universe to self-indulgence, rejection of self-responsibility, and the expectancy of a God who is supposed to pamper you.
Now the question arises as how to dissolve such an image. How do you dissolve any image? First you have to become conscious of the wrong concept to the full extent. That is not as easily nor quickly accomplished as would seem. For you may be aware of it to some degree, yet you do not by any means recognize all its implications, effects, and influences in your personality. You may not have recognized its significance on all levels of your being. This must always be the first step. You may often be aware of an image—which is always false, otherwise it would not be an image—but you may not even be aware that it is false. Even in your intellectual perception you are but partly convinced that the image conclusion is correct. As long as this is so, you cannot free yourself of the enslaving chains of falsity. So the second step is that you set straight your intellectual ideas. It is needless to repeat that the proper formation of the intellectual concept should never superimpose the still lingering emotional falsity of a concept. This would only cause suppression. But on the other hand, you should not allow the wrong conclusions and images, rising to the surface due to the work you have done so far, to make you believe that they are true. In a subtle way, this is sometimes the case. Realize that the so-far-suppressed concepts and ideas have to evolve clearly into consciousness; nurse the awareness of them in your surface consciousness; but realize that they are false. In some instances, the right concept is easy to formulate. Then these two should be compared. You should constantly check how much you still deviate emotionally from the right intellectual concept. Check this discrepancy quietly, without inner haste or anger at yourself that your emotions do not follow suit as quickly as your thinking does. Give them time to grow. This is best accomplished by constant observation and comparison of the wrong and the right concept. Realize that your emotions need time to adjust, but do everything in your power to give them the opportunity to grow, which will happen by the process just stated. Observe the emotions despite the resistances and the pretexts they can muster. For there is always that part in you that resists change and growth. This part in the human personality is very shrewd. Be wise to these ruses. As I have said, some concepts are easy to formulate. They are obvious. It merely requires a little thinking through. The resisting emotions do not care whether the proper concept is obvious or not. In either case, they will find ways and means of trying to avoid a change of inner attitude. But as far as your intellectual understanding is concerned, you must differentiate between two kinds of concepts: those that are obvious if you think about them and those requiring development from inside—inner enlightenment that has to be earned in order to formulate the proper concept, even in your intellect, to begin with. Prayer for the recognition is an important part. Observe in times of prayer how sincerely you desire the answer! This is important. You may dutifully pray for the recognition, but inside there is a resisting block that can be felt if you set out to look for it. Then, at least, you know that not God, but you yourself obstruct light and freedom. Then you can begin arguing with that part in yourself that persists in being childish and unreasonable.
As far as the proper concept about God is concerned, this is certainly one of the most difficult awarenesses to come by—because it is the most precious! Whatever your image is in this respect, this is where you have to begin. If you are convinced of injustice so that you cannot see even factually that this conviction is wrong, the remedy is that you find in your own life how you have caused happenings that seem entirely unjust. The better you understand the magnetic force of images and the powerful strength of all psychological and unconscious currents, the better will you understand and experience the truth of these teachings. The deeper will you be convinced that there is no injustice. Find the cause and effect of your own inner and outer deeds. So often, man concentrates unduly on the apparent injustice that has happened to him. He thinks and thinks again of how wrong the others are. This should and can be recognized. But try to find how you have helped to bring this about. If you use half the effort you usually use on other's faults towards your own, you will find the connection of your own law of cause and effect. And this alone will set you free, will show you that there is no injustice, will show you it is not God nor the fates nor any unjust order of a world wherein you have to suffer the consequences of other people's shortcomings, but rather your ignorance, your fear, your pride, your egotism that directly or indirectly caused that which seemed, so far, to come your way without attracting it. Find that hidden link, and you will come to see truth. You will realize that you are not ever a prey to circumstances and other people's imperfections but really the master of your fate. You will deeply understand, not only in theory but in practice, that everything happening to you is a direct or indirect result of your attitudes, deeds, thoughts, and emotions. As far as the latter are concerned, they are most powerful of all, and this is constantly overlooked even by my friends who have learned, and at times experienced, this truth. Your own unconscious affects the unconscious of the other person. This truth is perhaps most relevant to the discovery of how you call forth all happenings in your life—good or bad, favorable or unfavorable.
Once you experience this, you can dissolve your God image whether you fear God because you believe in injustice and are afraid of being the prey of circumstances over which you have no control, or whether you reject self-responsibility and expect an indulgent, pampering god to lead life for you, make decisions for you, take self-inflicted hardships from you. The realization of how you cause the effects of your life will dissolve either God image. This is one of the main breaking points.
One of the handicaps is your guilt feeling, or rather your wrong attitude towards guilt. In order to understand that, it might be advisable to reread my lecture on the subject of justified and unjustified guilt feelings and the proper attitude toward shortcomings. If your faults depress you so deeply that you are afraid to face them, then this wrong attitude has to be worked on first because it hinders you in coming out of your own vicious circle. The guiltier you feel about possible wrongs you may have to face, the more do you escape reality and thereby inflict harm on your soul. The proper and constructive attitude toward your own shortcomings is the key to the dissolution of this
— and all other—vicious circles you may be caught in. Understand that none of your faults are committed out of malice or because you wish something evil on other people. All faults, every kind of selfishness, is nothing but a misunderstanding and a wrong conclusion in itself. Your fear often makes you so paralyzed that your proper faculties cannot function; thus you do not see or react properly, and this brings effects into your life that you no longer connect with the origin of your fear and the then resulting errors in judgment, action, and reaction on your part. But so long as you shy away from facing your erroneous reactions because of a faulty attitude towards your shortcomings, you cannot find the breaking point.
This breaking point alone will bring you the recognition that you are not a prey; that you have the power over your life; that you are free; and that these laws of God are infinitely good, wise, loving, and safe! They do not make a puppet out of you but make you wholly free and independent.
In order to help you find the proper concept about God, I will try to speak about Him. But remember that all words can at best be only a small point to start with in cultivating your own inner recognition. Words are always insufficient, how much more so are they when it concerns God who is unexplainable, who is all things, who cannot be limited into words. How can your perception and capacity to understand suffice to sense the greatness of the Creator? Every smallest inner deviation and obstruction is a hindrance to understanding. We have to be concerned with the elimination of these hindrances, step by step, stone by stone, for only then will you glimpse the light and sense the infinite bliss.
One hindrance is that, despite the teachings you have received from various sources, you still unconsciously think about God as a person who acts, chooses, decides, disposes arbitrarily and at will. On top of this, you superimpose the idea that all this must be just. But even though you include the justice, this idea is false. For God is. His laws are made once and for all and work automatically, so to speak. Emotionally you are somehow bound to this wrong concept, and it stands in your way. As long as it is present, the real and true concept cannot fill your being.
God is, among so many other things, life and life force. Think of this life force as you think of an electric current, endowed with supreme intelligence. This electric current
is there in you, around you, outside of yourself. It is up to you how you use it. You can use electricity for constructive purposes, even for healing, or you can use it to kill. That does not make the electric current good or bad. You make it good or bad. This power current is one important aspect of God where it touches you most. This may raise the question that thus God would be entirely impersonal and therefore to be feared even more. It may contradict the idea of His infinite love. Neither is true. God, being All, is personal, as well, if He chooses to be, but His personal aspect has no bearing on the question we are now discussing and on one of the most important aspects of your personal life. His love is not only personal in God manifest, but also in His laws, in the being of the laws. The apparent impersonal love of the laws that are (understand what is implied in the words that are!
) are made in such a way that they lead you ultimately into light and bliss, no matter how much you deviate from them. The more you deviate from them, the more do you approach them by the misery that the deviation inflicts. This misery will cause you to turn about at one point or another. Some sooner, some later, but all must finally come to the point where they realize that they themselves determine their misery or bliss. This is the love of the law. And they also realize the fact that deviation from it is the very medicine to avoid deviation, and therefore it brings you closer to the aim. The love of the law—and therefore of God—is also contained in the fact that God lets you deviate if you wish, that you are made in His likeness, meaning that you are completely free to choose as you wish. You are not forced to live in bliss and light. You can if you wish. All this means the love of God. It is not easy to understand, but those of you who have difficulty in understanding will one day see the truth of these words.
When you have difficulty in understanding the justice of the universe and the self-responsibility of your life, do not think of God as he
(although, of course, God can manifest as a person too, since He can do anything and is everything). Rather think of God as the great creative power at your disposal. Therefore it is not God who is unjust, as your subconscious may believe, but it is your wrong use of the powerful current at your disposal. If you go on from this premise and meditate on it and, from there, on to search where you have ignorantly abused the power current in you, God will answer you. This I can promise you. If you sincerely search for this answer and if you have the courage to face it without the wrong kind of guilt feelings—and you should all be big enough for that by now—you will come to understand cause and effect in your life that led you to believe (be it until now unconsciously but, because of that, all the more powerfully) that God's world is a world of cruelty and injustice; a world in which you have no chance; a world in which you have to be afraid and hopeless; a universe where God's grace comes to a few chosen ones, but you are excluded. Only this can free you of this fallacy that distorts your soul and your life.
I know, you do not think all that. But many of you feel it deeply hidden in your subconscious. Try to find that part in you where you do feel that way regardless of your simultaneously sincere love for God. Find out whether you do not fear God more than you love Him. If you do so, you can be sure this image of God exists in you, and you are living by a distortion and illusion since all images are just that. Enumerate the injustices of your own life—do not go into the lives of others or general conditions, for there you cannot find the answer—and then try to find where you have abused the power current and connect these instances with your injustices. If you cannot do so right away, I will help you, and further work will show it to you quite clearly, provided you truly desire to find the answers. You have no idea what this discovery will mean to you. The greater the resistance to it at first, the greater the victory! You have no idea how free it will make you, how safe and secure. You will fully understand the marvel of the creation of these laws that let you, with the power current of life, do as you please regarding your own life. This will give you confidence and the deep, absolute knowledge that you have nothing to fear.
There is a type of personality so negative in this respect, that he is deeply convinced of the futility of one's own life—perhaps only in the subconscious—and that the available life force can work only in a negative way. This may sound like a paradox, my friends, but it is not. Life force is energy. And the energy you have at your disposal, in a personality problem of this type, is used only negatively. That means, for instance, that the person becomes alive mostly in negative situations—in situations of fight, unrest, quarrel, and disharmony of any kind. Then something vibrates inwardly. Yet, when everything goes smoothly, although a part of the personality may enjoy it (usually the conscious side), another part feels deflated and lifeless. This comes from the fact that such a distortion about God has progressed to a considerable degree. To a smaller degree, most people have it at least occasionally. Examine your reactions with regard to feeling more alive in a negative situation and more dead in a quiet one. You will find therein the connection with your God image.
Are there any questions regarding this subject?
QUESTION: Could you give us some examples of abuse of the life force?
ANSWER: The abuse of the power currents of your life force is all actions, deeds, thoughts, attitudes, and all emotions deviating from divine truth, that are self-directed, that are motivated in a spirit of separateness. I discussed separateness in the past frequently. The separateness of the soul, briefly, is that a person withdraws inwardly, puts an invisible wall around his soul in the mistaken idea it is safe—for instance, people who are afraid of life and love, afraid of reality, afraid of self-responsibility. All that leads to separateness. All this actually means that the person considers himself as different than the other person. The bridge to brotherhood is eliminated. This may happen in all sorts of reactions that are not always obvious. Each human fault contributes to separateness and is of itself a wrong conclusion—therefore a falsity, an illusion, therefore away from truth. If you analyze each fault, you will find that it exists because it is thought to be protective and advantageous. In truth it is not. For nothing can be to your advantage that is to the disadvantage of another person. This is separateness, and separateness is the illusion of the world of manifestation.
QUESTION: In connection with our work, the word detachment has come up. Would I be correct in stating that detachment is just another way of expressing separateness?
ANSWER: Not necessarily. With words it is often a subtle and confusing matter. As you all know by your work, a word can mean one thing to one person and another thing to another. A word designates an idea, and you all know that each idea of truth can be distorted into an untruth by going into the extreme that must be wrong. This distortion usually happens quite deliberately, although quite unconsciously. Wherever the conflict lies in the soul, one seeks to find justification for it in the extreme of a right idea. This has been the trouble with all great religious teachings throughout the ages. Detachment undergoes a similar fate. People who are afraid of life and love often escape into the distorted idea of detachment. But this should not make you forget the real meaning, the right sense of it. The true sense of detachment is to be detached from one's own ego
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