Greetings, my dearest friends. God bless every one of you. Blessed is this lecture. Blessed are your efforts. Since you have many questions prepared, the short lecture I had planned will be incorporated into the answers. This lecture is really an extension of the last two, so that a deeper understanding of them will be made easier for you, so that you may have the material you need in order to proceed and overcome certain stumbling blocks. Now, let us begin with your questions.
QUESTION: How do faith in God and hope tie in with this Path of self-recognition?
ANSWER: Do you see any contradiction between our Path and faith in God and hope?
QUESTION: Well,particularly after the last lecture, when you talked about the different stages, there was a time when there was very little talk about God.
ANSWER: As I have repeatedly said, the reason for that is that people invariably use God so as to get away from themselves. In reality you can find God only if you come back home to your real self. I said so many times, and I have to repeat it here, that so many true concepts, ideas, and principles or attitudes can be distorted and become untruth, although they parade under the flag of their true version. This may be very subtle, but it is nevertheless a self-deception. You can have true faith in God only to the extent that you have faith in yourself. If your lack of faith in yourself is substituted by a faith in God, then God becomes a parody, an opiate, a falsity. And faith in yourself
is possible only if your real self is liberated and if you have removed inner conflict and strife, as well as the illusory crutches that the psyche has built up as a substitute for true self-confidence, and if you have freed yourself from real, as well as false guilts. If faith in God hinges on all these unrecognized aspects and facets, then such faith is without foundation and is therefore not genuine.
This ungenuine faith may appear very much like its genuine counterpart on the surface, yet the one is based on escape from unpleasant truth about the self, while the other has nothing to fear. The one kind of faith comes out of genuine conviction and inner experience; the other covers fear, insecurity, and childish needs. In order to establish the real experience, all falsity has to be removed; and that which in itself seems desirable has to be questioned and examined, whether it be faith in God, unselfishness, or love for others. Every one of these aspects can be either genuine, or it can be an evasion, a crutch, an illusion. In other words, a substitution under which fear, uncertainty, and many other negative aspects slumber. All this you know, at least in theory. Is it so difficult to understand that to find oneself it is necessary to question every aspect? If it is genuine, then it will not suffer. If your faith in God is utterly healthy, then it will not crumble. If it is only partly so, then only that part that is an obstruction to your real God experience anyway will crumble. Is it so difficult to understand that only the real self is capable of productive true experience? And hasn't this work so far shown clearly that to find the real self calls for all one's efforts, concentration, and will power? How then is it possible to suspect, even if only vaguely, that our pathwork is opposed to faith in God and oposed to hope? Does talking about God determine the inner attitude? Is that a yardstick for one's nearness to God?
In the course of the individual work every one of you has times when you encounter a streak of hopelessness. I have often said that this has to be treated as a problem in itself. It indicates important factors about the unconscious attitude. It often reflects, in reality, a fear of relinquishing one's false solutions, destructive attitudes, and defensive walls -- all of which supposedly serve as a protection. To give up this protection induces fear. To be called to do so induces hopelessness, because the person cannot as yet see how to operate without these crutches, how to cope with life without what seems to be so indispensable. This same attitude is responsible for an inner unwillingness to change. All this exists within the soul, even before it is brought out into daylight. Only it was covered up with a superimposed hope just so as not to be aware of the inner hopelessness which says, as it were: "If I let go of my illusions and false crutches, then I have no way of living; therefore my whole life is an illusion." This is what it amounts to. Is that superimposed hope a reality? Is it not much better to
face the underlying hopelessness until hope -- as well as faith, or any other productive attitude, feeling, and trend -- can grow on a firm foundation, without any falsity? To talk about productive attitudes and feelings as long
as they are artificial and cover up the opposite would serve only to strengthen rather than destroy the false counterparts. Faith in God, hope -- just as any other divine aspect -- can be well rooted in the personality only if the hidden opposites are faced, understood, come to terms with, and thereby dissolved.