What Is The Path?

By The Pathwork Guide

Greetings and welcome, my friends. Blessings for every one of you. In this lecture I would like to discuss what this path is and what it is not.

First, I should like to say that this path is not new. It has existed in many different forms for as long as human beings have lived on this earth. The forms and the ways must change as humanity evolves, but the fundamental path remains the same.

Before I begin to explain what this path is, I want to ask you not to be concerned with the phenomenon of this communication as such. The only thing important to understand at the beginning of such a venture is that there are levels of reality which you have not yet explored and experienced, and about which you can therefore only theorize at best. Theory is not the same as experience. Letting it go at that for the moment will be so much better than trying to force a definitive conclusion. Do remember that this voice does not express the conscious mind of the human instrument through whom I speak. Furthermore, take into consideration that every human personality has a depth of which he or she may as yet be unaware. At this depth everybody possesses the means to transcend the narrow confines of his or her own personality and to gain access to other realms, and therefore to entities endowed with a wider and deeper knowing.

This brings us to the whole question of what this path is. Let us first state what it is not.

This pathwork is not psychotherapy, although aspects of it must necessarily deal with areas which psychotherapy also deals with. In the framework of this pathwork, the psychological approach is only a side issue. It is a way of getting through the obstructions. It is essential to deal with confusions, with inner misconceptions, with misunderstandings, with destructive attitudes, with alienating defenses, with negative emotions, and with paralyzed feelings, all of which psychotherapy also attempts to do, and even posits as its ultimate goal. In contrast, the pathwork enters its most important phase only after this first stage is over. The second and most important phase consists of learning how to activate the Greater Consciousness dwelling within every human soul.

Often the second phase overlaps with the first phase, which is concerned with overcoming the obstructions, because the second phase of the pathwork is not only helpful but essential for executing the first. The first part of the work cannot be successful unless contact with the spiritual self is cultivated and used regularly. However, when and how this may be varies greatly. It depends on the personality, on the predisposition, on the prejudices, and on the blocks of the individual entering this path. The sooner you can activate, you can explore, and then use the inexhaustible fountain of strength and inspiration within you, the easier and the faster you will deal with the obstructions. Thus it is clear in what way this path differs from psychotherapy, although some of the emphases and even the methods may be similar at times.

Nor is this path a spiritual practice that aims, a priori, at reaching higher, spiritual consciousness. There are many methods and practices which attempt the realization of the spiritual self. Through using valid methods to forcefully reach this goal, many spiritual disciplines do not pay sufficient attention to those areas of the ego self which are steeped in negativity, and therefore in destructiveness. Any success thus achieved is always short-lived, and is really an illusion, even though some of the experiences may be genuine enough. But a spiritual state reached in such a one-sided way is not solid, and therefore cannot be maintained, unless the total personality is included. Since most human beings shy away from accepting and dealing with certain parts of themselves, they often seek refuge in paths which promise that one can avoid facing these problematic inner areas. If you think of a spiritual path as the practice of meditation for its own sake, or for the sake of reaching blissful cosmic experiences and cosmic consciousness, then this path is not your way.

The temptation to use spiritual practices to grab happiness and fulfillment, and to avoid already existing negativities, confusions, and pain is great. But this attitude defeats the purpose. It comes from illusion and it leads to further illusions. One illusion is the false idea that anything that exists in you can be avoided. Another illusion is the false belief that what is in you needs to be feared and therefore has to be denied. The truth is that no matter how destructive it is, any inner aspect of you can be transformed. Only when you avoid what is in you does your illusion truly become detrimental both to you and to others.

Let me recapitulate what I have said so far. This path is neither psychotherapy nor a spiritual path in the usual sense of the word. At the same time, it is both. It will be helpful if you remember the following three points as you consider the possibility of entering this particular pathwork.

First, the phenomenon of this transmission -- whether you are interested in it or not, whether you believe in it or not -- should be considered of secondary importance. Keep your mind open for the manifold possibilities which you do not yet understand. Understanding and enlightenment will come to you as you go deeper into your own depths and as you experience both your inner wealth and your connectedness with the universe.

Second, by entering this pathwork, you do not enter therapy. You embark on a voyage leading you into the new territory of your inner universe. Whether you have had therapy -- satisfactory and successful or not -- or whether you are deeply troubled and therefore need help in order to live your life in a fulfilling way, for quite a while you will still need to pay attention mainly to those areas within yourself which are in error, and therefore are negative, hence destructive. You may not like to do so, but if you truly wish to find your real self, that core of your being from which all good stems, then this focus is necessary.

"How long will it take?" you may ask. The time is indicated by your inner state -- your state of mind and of feeling -- and by your outer life manifestation. When your inner negativities have been overcome, then this state will be expressed in your life: there will be no doubt. Your path will organically bring you into other emphases and concerns. The aim of this path is not to cure you of an emotional illness or of a mental illness, although it does this very well, and it is bound to do so if you do the work. But you should not enter this path for that purpose.

Third, do not enter this path if you expect that it will make you forget your sadness and your pain, or to let you gloss over those aspects of your personality that you like least or that you even dislike outright. Your self-dislike may not be neurotic in itself. In other words, you may be right to dislike these aspects. But you are not right in believing yourself to be hopelessly bad because of them. So this path must teach you to face whatever is in you. For only then can you truly love yourself. Only then can you find your essence and your true Godself. But if you wish to find your essence, yet you stubbornly refuse to face whatever is in you -- perhaps under the guise of following your spiritual inclination -- then this is not the path for you.

Let us now go into a fuller description of what this path entails. Every human being senses an inner longing that goes deeper than the human longing for emotional fulfillment and the human longing for creative fulfillment, although these are part of the deeper and more essential desire. Perhaps the most accurate translation of this longing would be a feeling or a sensing that a more fulfilling state of consciousness and therefore a larger capacity to experience life must exist.

As you translate this longing into conscious terms, then you may become involved in some confusion and contradiction. Confusions and apparent contradictions come from the dualistic consciousness permeating the state which the human mind is in at this time. The dualism is always present. For humans perceive reality in terms of either/or. In other words, either good or bad, either right or wrong, either black or white. This way of perceiving life is only half true at best. In this way one can perceive only fragments of reality. The full truth can never be found in the dualistic way. The truth always comprises more than what the dualistic way of seeing reality is able to grasp.

One confusion might be the following. "Am I longing for something unreal? Would it be perhaps more realistic and more mature to give up this longing and to accept the fact that life is just this flat, dismal, gray place? Do we not hear over and over that acceptance is necessary in order to be at peace with oneself and at peace with life? Therefore, I should really abandon this longing."

The way out of your confusion can be found only when you take a step beyond the dualism implicit in this dilemma. It is true that you must accept your present state. It is true that life as it manifests cannot be perfect. Yet this fact is not what truly makes you unhappy. Rather, it is your demand that life should be perfect and that it should be handed to you in its perfection. If you go deeply enough, then you will inevitably discover that there is a part of you which denies pain and frustration. It is a place where you are angry and spiteful because there is no loving authority present who will eliminate these undesirable experiences for you. Thus it is true that your longing for this utopian kind of happier state is unrealistic, and therefore should be abandoned.

But does this truly mean that the longing per se stems from immature, greedy, or neurotic attitudes? No, my friends, it does not. There is an inner voice telling you that there is much more to your life and much more to yourself than you are capable of experiencing at this time. Then how can we find clarity about what is real and what is false about your deepest longing?

The desire is false when your personality wishes love, wishes fulfillment, wishes perfection, wishes happiness or pleasure, and wishes creative expansion without paying the price of the strictest self-confrontation. The desire is false when you do not assume the responsibility for your present state, or for the state that you long for. For example, let us say that you feel sorry for yourself because of your unfulfilled state. If you then blame others for your present miserable state, no matter how wrong those others may be -- whether your parents, your peers, your associates, or life as a whole -- then it means that you do not assume responsibility for your life. If this is the case, then it means that you wish to receive the new and better state as a reward. As a result, you may try to be the obedient follower of a powerful authority figure in order to be rewarded. But since in reality the reward can never come from the outside, no matter what you do, you must feel disappointed, resentful, cheated, and angry. Therefore, you will resort once again to your old destructive patterns -- the ones that are actually responsible for the very state that creates your unfulfilled longing.

The longing is realistic when you start from the premise that the clue to fulfillment must be in you. It is realistic when you wish to find the specific negative attitudes in you that prevent you from experiencing life in a fulfilled and meaningful way. Finally, it is realistic when you interpret the longing as a message from the core of your inner being sending you on a path that helps you to find your real self.

However, when the inner message of the longing is misinterpreted by the negative, greedy, ungiving, and demanding personality, then confusion sets in. Then the longing is put into channels of unrealizable fantasies of magic. You believe that fulfillment is supposed to be given to you, rather than attained by you through the courage and the honesty of looking at yourself as you are now, even at those areas that you would rather avoid. If your life situation is painful and you defend against cleanly experiencing this pain with rage, with complaints, and with other defenses, then you are not in truth about your present state. But if you just let the pain be and if you feel it without playing games like, "it will annihilate me," or "it will last forever," then the experience of the pain will release powerful creative energies which will then increasingly work for you in your life and which will eventually open the channel to your spiritual self. Feeling the pain that is in you will also yield a deeper, a fuller, and a wiser understanding of the connections between cause and effect. For instance, you will see how you attracted this particular pain. Such insight may not come immediately, for the more you force it, the more it will elude you. But it will come if you stop the inner fighting and the resisting.

Do not abandon the longing per se. Take it seriously. In fact, cultivate it and learn to understand it, so that you will follow its message and take the inner path to your core. In other words, you need to go through that part which you want to avoid, but which in reality is the real culprit, the one that is solely responsible for your less than fulfilled and joyful state.

Do not abandon the longing because that longing comes from the sense that your life could be more. In other words, you could live without your painful, tortured confusions and you could function on a level of inner resilience, of contentment, and of security. This new state is a state of first experiencing and then expressing deep feelings and blissful pleasure. It is a state where you are capable of meeting life without fear because you no longer fear yourself. Therefore, you will find life, even its problems, a joyful challenge. If your inner problems can become a challenge that gives spice to your life, then the ensuing peace will be all the more sweet. The tackling of these problems will give you a sense of your own strength, it will give you resourcefulness, and it will give you creative ability. You will feel your spiritual self flowing through your veins. You will feel it in your thoughts, in your vision, and in your perceptions, so that your decisions will be made from the center of your being. When you live in this way, then your occasional outer problems are the salt of your life and they become almost pleasurable. Then the times of outer problems will become less frequent, and peaceful, joyous, and creative living will become the norm.

Right now the saddest part of your life is that deep inside you know that at this time both your body and your soul are not capable of first accepting and then sustaining intense pleasure. Pleasure exists on all levels: on the spiritual level, on the physical level, on the emotional level, and on the mental level. However, spiritual pleasure separated from the levels of everyday functioning is an illusion, because true spiritual bliss encompasses the total personality. Therefore, the personality must learn to endure a state of bliss. But it cannot do this unless you learn to endure whatever is locked up inside your psyche now: pain, meanness, malice, hate, suffering, guilt, fear, terror. All of these must be transcended. Only then can the human personality function in a blissful state. Thus, your longing to experience more pleasure is a message for you to embark on a road that affords you the possibility of being in bliss.

The state of existence I described need not be given up as unrealistic or as wishful thinking. It need not be given up because you will earn it and you will make it your own by going through whatever in you now prevents you from experiencing it. This state exists already within you as a dormant potential. In other words, it is not something that can be given to you by others, nor is it something that you can acquire through learning or through effort. It unfolds organically as a byproduct of your going through the dark spots within you.

Make no mistake, this is not an easy path. But the difficulty is not a fixed reality, it is not a given fact, it is not an immutable condition. The difficulty exists to the degree to which the personality has a stake in avoiding aspects of the self. Thus, to the degree that the commitment is made to be in truth with the self and to face every particle of the self, to that degree the difficulty vanishes. As a result, what at first had seemed to be a difficulty now begins to become a challenge, an exciting journey, and a process that makes life so intensely real, so wholesome, so secure, and so fulfilling that you would not want to give it up for anything. In other words, the difficulty exists as a result of a false belief. It is the belief that facing one single area of the self implies a verdict about the whole self that cannot be tolerated and accepted. For example, you might conclude that if a certain negative attitude is true, then all of the self is bad. Such a belief makes facing the self not only difficult but actually impossible. Hence it is necessary to ferret out the underlying belief behind the strong resistance -- and sometimes even revulsion -- to going into the dark areas of the self.

This path demands from an individual that which most people are least willing to give. It demands truthfulness with the self, the exposure of what exists in you now, the elimination of your masks and pretenses, and the experience of one's naked vulnerability. It is a tall order. Yet it is the only way that leads to genuine peace and to wholeness. Once the investment in your pretense and the investment in your hiding is given up, then it is no longer a tall order, but rather an organic and natural process.

So this path is simultaneously the most difficult and the easiest. It merely depends on the point of view from which you look at it and choose to experience it. The difficulty can be measured in terms of your truthfulness with yourself. To the degree that you want to be in truth, to that degree the path will appear neither too difficult, nor will it appear as if it dealt with -- in the words of some of its critics -- too much with the negative side of life. For in essence the negative IS the positive. In other words, negative and positive are not two different aspects of energy and consciousness, they are one and the same. Whatever particles of energy and consciousness in your self have turned negative must be reconverted into their original positive way of being. This cannot be accomplished without fully taking responsibility for the negativity in you.

The reluctance to be truthful with oneself applies even to the most honest of people. A person may be noted for his honesty, for his truthfulness, and for his integrity on one level, yet there can be deeper levels where this is not so at all. This path leads into the as yet concealed more subtle levels, which are difficult to pinpoint but certainly ascertainable.

How can you gauge whether or not this untruthfulness on a deeper level exists in you? It is really very simple. There is an infallible key which will give you faultless answers if you choose to use it. This key is to ask yourself: "How meaningful is your life? How fulfilled is your life? How rich is your life? Do you feel secure with others? Do you feel comfortable about your most intimate self in the presence of others, or at least with certain people with whom you have a goal in common? How much joy are you capable of feeling? How much joy are you capable of giving? How much joy are you capable of receiving? Are you plagued with resentments, with anxiety, with tension? Or are you plagued with loneliness and with a sense of isolation? Do you need a lot of overactivity in order to alleviate your anxiety?" Actually, the fact that you do not consciously feel anxious does not prove that you are without anxiety, that you are free of it. Many people start out on the path without any awareness of their existing anxiety, but they feel dead, numb, listless, and paralyzed. This may be a sign that the anxiety was overcome through an artificial deadening process. This path cannot skip the necessary step of first making you feel your anxiety and then of making you feel whatever the anxiety hides. Only then can real aliveness come.

Exhilaration, enthusiasm, joyousness, and the unique blend of excitement and peace which connote spiritual wholeness are the result of inner truthfulness. When these states are absent, then truthfulness must be absent. It is as simple as that, my friends.

If you demand of your life -- and therefore of any path that you contemplate entering -- to bypass feeling your anxiety and feeling your pain, to avoid opening up to your dishonesties, opening up to your cheating, opening up to your spitefulness, opening up to your games, and opening up to your subtle pretenses, then it might be better for you not to even start on this path. But if you expect a real effort and if you are prepared to embark on the journey into yourself so as to find, to acknowledge, and to bring out whatever is in you -- in other words, if you summon all your inner truthfulness and all your commitment for the journey, and if you find the courage and the humility not to appear other than you are even in your own eyes -- then you have every right to expect that this Path will help you to realize your full life and will help you to fulfill your longing in every conceivable way. This is a realistic hope. You will know it to be so.

Little by little you will learn to function from your innermost center. This is a very different experience from that of functioning from your periphery. Now you are so accustomed to the latter that you cannot even imagine how else it could be. Now you are constantly dependent on what happens around you. You depend on appreciation from others, you depend on approval from others, you depend on being loved, you depend on being successful in terms of the outside world. Whether you are aware of it or not, you inwardly strive to make sure that you will obtain all of this so as to have peace and fulfillment.

When you function from your center, then security and joy spring from a deep well within you. This does not imply that when this happens you are then condemned to live without approval, without appreciation, without love, or without success. This is another dualistic misunderstanding where you think: "Either I experience my center and then I must forfeit all love and all appreciation from others and therefore be alone, or else I must forfeit my inner self because I cannot contemplate such a lonely life." In reality, when you function from the liberated center of your innermost self, then you attract to you all the abundance of life, but you do not depend on it. It enriches you and it is the fulfillment of a legitimate need, but it is not the substance of life. The substance of life is within you.

In the healthy life of every human being there must be exchange, there must be intimacy, there must be communication, there must be sharing, there must be mutual love, there must be mutual pleasure, there must be the giving and the receiving of warmth and of openness. Also, every human being needs, in healthy proportion, recognition of what he does. But there is an enormous difference between wanting this recognition in a healthy way and depending on outside recognition to such an extent that you are unable to do without it at all times. In the latter case, the self begins to sacrifice its integrity in tragic ways that cost much too much. Then the real self is betrayed and the seeking of recognition defeats itself. This Path is geared to finding this center -- this deep inner spiritual reality -- and not some illusory religious escape. On the contrary, this Path is immensely pragmatic, for the true spiritual life is never in opposition to practical life on earth. There must be a harmony between these two aspects of the Whole. Forsaking everyday living is not true spirituality. In most cases, it is merely another kind of escape. For many it is easier to sacrifice something or to chastise themselves than to first face and then deal with their dark aspects. The guilt for the latter is constantly atoned for by self-deprivations which are supposed to be doorways to heaven. Yet this guilt cannot be wiped out unless the personality deals directly with the darkness within. Then sacrifice and deprivation become not only unnecessary but even contradictory to true spiritual unfoldment. The universe is abundant in its joys, in its pleasures, in its bliss. Human beings are supposed to experience them, not to forsake them. No amount of forsaking will wipe out your guilt for avoiding the purification of your soul.

I would like to mention another specific feature of the inner obstructions that must be met so that they can be transcended. It is necessary to understand that all thoughts and all feelings are powerful agents of creative energy, regardless of whether the thoughts are true and wise or false and limited. Likewise, regardless of whether the feelings are loving or hateful, angry or benign, fearful or peaceful, their energy must create according to their nature. Thoughts and opinions create feelings. Both of them together create attitudes, behaviors, and emanations. These, in turn, create the life circumstances. These sequences first must be connected, then they must be fully recognized, and third they must be understood. This is an essential aspect of the pathwork.

The fear of your negative feelings is unjustified. For these feelings are neither terrible nor unbearable in themselves. However, your belief that they are bad and your wrong attitude toward them can make them so. This process is constantly being verified by those who follow this path. They find that even the deepest pain is a revivifying experience. It releases contracted energy and paralyzed creativity. It enables people to feel pleasure to the degree they are willing to feel pain.

The same applies to fear. To experience fear is not devastating in itself. Once experienced, then the fear instantly becomes a tunnel through which you travel, not letting go of the feeling of fear until it carries you to a deeper level of reality. The fear is a denial of other feelings. When the original feeling is first accepted and then is experienced, the knot dissolves. Thus, it is never the feeling itself that is unbearable. It is your attitude to it that can make it so.

The fear of your feelings makes you cut them off. Thus you cut yourself off from life. Your spiritual center cannot evolve, it cannot manifest, and it cannot unify with your ego self unless you learn to fully embrace all your feelings, unless you allow yourself to be carried by them, and unless you learn to take responsibility for them. If you make others responsible for your feelings, then you will be in a bind because you will either deny them or you will act them out destructively against others. Neither one of these two alternatives is desirable, neither can bring you any solution.

Your spiritual self cannot be free unless you learn to feel all your feelings and unless you learn to accept every part of your being, no matter how destructive it may be right now. No matter how negative, how mean, how vain, or how egotistical you may find a corner of yourself to be -- contrary to the more developed aspects of your personality -- it is absolutely necessary for every aspect of your being first to be accepted and then to be dealt with. No aspect should be left out or covered over in the wishful hope that it would no longer matter and that it would somehow just go away. It does matter, my friends. Nothing that exists in you is powerless. No matter how well hidden a dark aspect may be, it creates life conditions that you must deplore. This is one reason why you must learn to accept the aspects in you that create negatively. Another reason is that no matter how destructive, how cruel, and how bad it may be, every aspect of energy and consciousness in its original essence is both beautiful and positive. In other words, the distortions must be converted back into their original beautiful essence. Energy and consciousness can become creative in a positive way once again only when the light of cognizance and of positive intentionality is brought to bear on them. Unless you do this, then you cannot come into your creative core.

Basically, this is the pathwork. Therefore, this path is difficult only because people -- with their vanity -- have false ideas of how they should be already. The difficulty is your illusion about how you are and how you should be. The difficulty is your illusion that you should not have -- and therefore that you must not have -- certain inner problems and certain negative attitudes. Unless you first give up these illusions and you then take stock of whatever is in you, you must remain alienated from your spiritual essence. That essence is constantly renewing itself; it is constantly conciliating the apparently insoluble conflicts. Your spiritual essence furnishes you with all that you could ever need for living your life and for completing the task that you came to fulfill through your birth. It is your divine center. Thus you are an expression of all that exists -- of the All Consciousness. You remain disconnected from it because you are too afraid of giving up your little vanity. Therefore your longing can never be fulfilled, for no matter what is being promised you, there is no panacea that can give you what you need -- and what you rightfully wish for -- without taking the path into and through your darkness. Spiritual practices alone cannot fulfill your longing, no matter how much you sit in meditation and in concentration.

Such practices can be helpful tools only when they are used in addition to or in conjunction with the self-confrontation which most people want to avoid at all costs. Unless you accept that self as it is now, in its nakedness, with all of its ugliness together with your already existing beauty, then you cannot discover that you already are the beauty that you are not conscious of, but which you long to first connect with, second to realize, and then to express.

This is the pathwork, my friends. Very few people on this earth are willing to undertake this path and even fewer follow it all the way through. Most people wishfully think that they can find another way to reach fulfillment, a path that will lead them around their dark spots. They do not want to know -- and therefore do not want to be told -- that it is precisely those dark spots that render them unhappy and lonely. Some make a beginning, but when they approach those dark spots, then they pull back in self-revulsion and they turn all their destructive energy outward, against those who help them to find their way. They do not wish to take a chance on themselves, just as they do not wish to find the way by going through their darkness.

But for those who have the courage to go all the way, relentlessly and patiently, what glory awaits them in their innermost center!

Those who refrain from going all the way are usually obstructed by the specific fallacy that if they are not their illusory perfection, then they are hopelessly bad. This error should be examined, it should be worked with, and then it should be challenged. If you do this, then you will eliminate an important stumbling block. Make room for the possibility that these are not the only two alternatives. Be open to finding the way from within that enables you to be totally honest and that enables you to see the worst in yourself without losing faith in yourself. Though this seems like a miracle, it is really quite logical. It will come to pass that you will find your true value precisely because you have faced and admitted the worst in you.

Anyone entering this path should be prepared for this miracle to happen. You are not as perfect as you want to be. No matter how much lip service you may pay to the theory of your human limitations, you still have a personal stake in seeing yourself in a certain perfectionistic way. This tendency has to be questioned. Then you need to face the fear of experiencing certain feelings. This fear may be due to your implicit belief that you will perish if you experience some of your deeper feelings --which in reality are your lifeblood. This fear must be challenged. If you are both willing and prepared to discover all of yourself, then you are embarking on a journey of immense beauty. But not beauty in the sense that all is easy. The temporary pain and the temporary struggle will turn out to be your most valuable gateway to the light and to fullness of living that you deeply long for.

The Path is glorious when you have progressed beyond the initial stages where you battle with your false ideas that always create two unacceptable alternatives. When the Path opens up from within yourself, then you begin to experience -- maybe for the first time in your life -- your own potential way of being. In other words, your own divinity. You will feel your potential for pleasure, your potential for security, your potential for the awareness of yourself, your potential for the awareness of others. As a result, you will feel your infinitely greater power to relate to others and to comprehend them. In other words, to be with them without fear.

If it is to work, then the initial decision to enter a path such as this must be made realistically. Therefore, you need to ask yourself some important questions. "Are you willing to give up your illusions about yourself? Are you willing to give up your expectation -- which comes from your resistance to giving up your self-delusions -- of what others should do for you? Are you willing to shed your false fears about what feelings you should or should not, you could or could not experience?" If you make a commitment to yourself to fully accept everything that you are now -- and if you then proceed to get to know yourself where you do not yet know yourself -- then you will find that this Path is the most exciting, the most significant, and the most meaningful journey into your own depth. You will have all the help you can possibly need, for no one can undertake this journey alone.

When your spiritual center begins to manifest, then your ego consciousness integrates with it and you begin to be lived through by the spirit, as it were. Then your living becomes a spontaneous, effortless flow.

QUESTION: In what way was this path different in former eras and cultures?

ANSWER: Humanity's development in former times necessitated a different approach. For example, in the Middle Ages people were apt to act out their cruel impulses. They were not capable of separating themselves sufficiently from their impulses in order to identify them, to own up to them, and to assume responsibility for them. They felt compelled to give vent to them. As a result, they became wholly enveloped by them. Hence people required strict authority from the outside in order to keep their lower nature in check. Only when the human personality became capable of using self-confrol could the next evolutionary step be taken. That over-control now must be loosened up.

In former times the average person was too far removed from his divine core to seek spiritual life from inside; it had to be projected outside. This inability to assume responsibility for the self then led to the creation of an outer devil who would possess an individual and of an outside god who would help him.

Now all this has changed. Today humanity's greatest hindrance is egotistical pride. People have accomplished much with the powers of the ego. They needed to develop these powers so as to no longer be irresponsible, helpless children. But now these powers must be exercised from within by one's spiritual center and not be ascribed to the ego. But the pride of the ego makes this difficult. Questions such as these arise: "What will others say? Will they think me naive, stupid, or unscientific?" It is everyone's task today to overcome this pride and this dependency on the opinion of others. Many individuals betray their spiritual truth by mouthing what is supposed to be intelligent without ever daring to let their divine selves inspire them. These are the criteria for the path today.

Every stage in the evolution of the Spiritual Consciousness necessitates a different approach. But the aim is always the same. However, there is one exception. In every era there was always a small minority of people who were developed way beyond the scope of the average person. For them the path was always the same. These few people formed secret societies which were unknown and not popular movements. Therefore, a group such as yours cannot be a popular movement either, for even today there are very few people who are either capable or willing to follow such a path. But there are certainly many more today who could do so than in former times. Many could, but few will.

I will now withdraw from this instrument through which I am allowed to manifest. Know that a great spiritual power protects this group. This may seem incomprehensible or a primitive belief for some of you. Yet it is a reality. There is a whole world beyond the world which you know and touch and see. As you explore yourself and you go into your core, then you will meet this world. When you do, then it will reveal itself in its stark reality and in its utter glory. This world exists both within you and around you. When you reach out for it, then it will inspire you from its complete wisdom.

Be blessed, every one of you. Those of you who want to make the commitment to your inner being and who want to avail themselves of the help which this particular path can give are blessed and guided in all your moves. And those of you who do not yet wish to take this step or who are drawn elsewhere, you are also being blessed. Be in peace.

October 20, 1972