My beloved friends in God. With much joy do we come to you again and again to give you what we can, to help you to the best of our ability on your noble road to truth, to unity, and to divine perfection. Blessings are always given when such a venture is undertaken with all one's heart and with all one's soul. These blessings fill you more than you know. Many of you find help, truth, inner wisdom, and clarification through my answers. May these answers activate your own inner knowing, so that the knowledge given truly becomes your own knowledge. For all knowledge is but one, just as all truth is but One.
QUESTION: (Bobbi Furst) Our world has recently been shocked by a mass suicide associated with a spiritual community. Many of us have been examining our own feelings about this event, and many workers have brought up their fears of being associated with our spiritual community in the light of this tragedy. Specifically, we have been examining the parts of our lower selves that wish to grab and then misuse the power and trust given to us, and then take it to that ultimate extreme of cruelty, harming others. It has occurred to me that this crisis presents the opportunity for all spiritually-oriented communities to look even deeper for further cleansing. It feels like a test for the New Age, and our ability to hold fast to the light and the ability to question everything that needs to be questioned in order to find the truth. Can you comment on this event and how it applies to us specifically, to the New Age movement in general, and give us further guidelines as to how we, as a community, can continue our task of self-purification as a group, especially where evil forces might exist, in the name of God and truth?
ANSWER: My friends, let us first of all distinguish what is a spiritual community and what is not. A group of people may call themselves a spiritual community, but this by no means implies that they really are a spiritual community. Has it not been said that many false prophets will appear? The fears that have arisen about your community because of this terrible abuse of power in the group you are referring to stem from a great deal of inner confusion and disconnectedness.
Many of you know that the spiritually and emotionally immature person fears
and therefore rejects self-responsibility, in the narrowest as well as in the widest sense: from fending for one's daily needs in the world, to the most subtle levels of moral accountability, including areas that no one sees and knows about. The constant quest for the inner, real truth of every single issue one has to deal with in life, with the self, with others, and with the universe establishes a direct channel to truth, in which your only authority then becomes God and His will. For those who fear this road and who wish to postpone it -- for one day all must travel this road -- there are also several stages of development. To simplify somewhat, let us begin with the lowest level, which is an outright refusal to grow and to be independent. Those will seek human leaders with power. The more those leaders abuse their power, the more they appeal to those who resist selfhood. The leaders make promises and the followers blame those who are supposedly the cause of their personal suffering. This is very appealing to people who refuse self-responsibility.
Next on the scale are those who already strive for a more independent state, for a certain autonomy, but who do not know how to reach it, because another part of them still desires to have the powerful authority give them
all that which their selfwill and shortsightedness desires. This aspect is active inside them without their conscious awareness. This attitude leads to
a constant rebellion against authority, a constant fear and distrust of it. I often spoke about this syndrome. I have said many times that the gauge for this conflict is to expose that part of you that resists autonomy and craves for an omnipotent human authority figure who automatically protects you from your karma; from the difficulties of your task; from the normal difficulty of coping with the reality into which you have been born; from the consequences of your imperfections; from the need to go through them in order to understand them,
to connect them, and to transform them; from the labor to do so; from the existential fear of dying, from the fear of illness, and from the fear of pain. In that hidden part, like those on the first level, you wish for a powerful ruler who promises easy answers and who blames others for your suffering -- suffering which only deepens as you resist the flow of life. Such rulers exist not only in spiritual, or quasi-spiritual communities, they can often be found in either real or concealed political movements. Your own fear and distrust of leaders and authority figures stems from your half-sensed need to abdicate autonomy to an untruthful ruler. This is then felt as a deep resentment for the true leader who guides you on the road toward autonomy and who brings you face to face with all those aspects of self-responsibility that I mentioned earlier.
In other words, if you are divided within yourself between yearning for selfhood and also yearning for a ruler who promises an easy panacea, then you will distrust both parts. You rightfully distrust the latter, and you project your childish illusory desire on those who can be trusted, and you resent and distrust them precisely because they wish to lift you out of your dependency and your weakness.
No spiritual community is truly safe from error and from some kind of distortion or from danger if the people involved in it do not probe to the depths; if they do not put a great deal of weight on purification processes;
if they do not foster autonomy. Is autonomy not the constant goal of this Path? Are you not always encouraged to refuse to blindly accept any dictates? Are you not constantly encouraged to ask "what is the truth?" in any matter that you encounter in your daily lives? Is there any other way to find out God's truth, to give up the stake of your selfwill, and to surrender to God's will and to God's truth? Is this not the only way you can establish self-reliance, integrity, autonomy, and your own channel to the divine? If you think logically about this, then you will have to come to the conclusion that there is no other way, whether you live in a community or by yourself. Your confusion in this regard needs to be confronted for what it really means. For there need be no confusion. It is all very clear.
As to the general lesson that all spiritual communities, as well as the world in general, could learn from this event, I have to say that the outlook is not too bright at the moment. The conclusions drawn here are so superficial, so off the truth that it is astounding at times. The general consensus is to distrust all spiritual groups, to distrust all leadership, rather than going just a little bit deeper and looking at specific goals and practices, as well as at their results. Unfortunately, most human beings do not want to think for themselves. This brings us around full circle, right where
we started from. The lack of clear thinking -- which results from the lack of the independent effort to draw logical conclusions -- is part of the laziness that leads to a neurotic need for abusive power structures, which is then simultaneously feared and distrusted, of course. The lessons that should be clearly seen are precisely what I expounded here in this answer.