Greetings, divine blessings for all of you, my dearest friends. The topic of this lecture is entirely new. It is something I have never discussed before.
The universe is inconceivably orderly and organized. Every particle falls into its proper place. Infinitesimal little cogs and wheels mesh, interact, complement one another, and create an immense machinery that the human mind can never even remotely conceive. The harmony and the creative grandeur of creation could never exist if the underlying principle were not order. This exactitude and this mathematical orderliness must escape the human vision. Only your vaguest sensing can make you aware of a greater order. For in the fragmented vision at your disposal, where you see everything out of context, you may indeed see chaos and disorder.
Chaos and disorder in human life are a reality, being a consequence of distortion. But I am now talking about universal processes, such as nature. You may perceive chaos in nature -- or what appears as such. Some natural phenomena are apparently destructive. Yet, in that very occurrence lies a larger order.
Orderliness exists when human beings are totally conscious. In other words, when there is no longer any unconscious material in them. Since there is no human being of whom this could be said, then order in human life exists only
to relative degrees, just as every other divine manifestation can exist only
to relative degrees. Man can experience love, truth, wisdom, peace, bliss, and reality only relatively and to varied degrees. So it is with order. An entity who is totally conscious of himself and of the universe is no longer born into human substance and into material manifestation. His life and his whole being are in total order, with no loose ends.
Conversely, where there is lack of awareness -- in other words, a blind spot -- then there must be disorder. If you are not aware, then you cannot be in truth, you cannot be in a state of comprehension, and therefore things will slip away from you. You become confused. Confusion and disorder are mutually interactive. You grope in the dark, as it were, making the half-truths at your disposal into a patchwork with which you attempt to fill the holes and the gaps of your chaos.
Most people can recognize this state in themselves if they focus their attention in this direction. The disorderliness of the mind becomes frantic, and then it attempts to create a false order -- which only heightens the discomfort and the disorderliness. It is as though you shoved all the dirt under your furniture, where it cannot be seen. But the atmosphere reeks of
the hidden waste material. False opinions and obsolete behavior patterns are, literally, waste material that ought to be shed. If they stay in the psyche, then all your opinions, all your perceptions, all your actions,
and all your decisions are based on half-truths, on complete distortions, and on errors. The result must be chaotic and disappointing. Unless a person is willing to make order in all this accumulated confusion and psychic waste material -- by examining carefully every single attitude, every single belief, every single reaction, and every single feeling in him -- then he will continue this patchwork until the whole false structure collapses. Collapse exists in many different forms. The most radical is physical death. This always affords the possibility to start with a clean slate.
On the outer plane the same process exists. It is not only symbolic of the inner life, it is an expression of it. If a person accumulates old, obsolete material in his closets and drawers; if he never cleans out; if he just tries to establish a superficial order in his outer affairs, then he lives in the illusion of his false order at great expense. We shall go into this in more detail later.
So you must realize that there is a direct connection between harmony and order on the one hand, and awareness on the other. When there is disorder in the life of a person, then he always evades, he escapes from something. In other words, he pursues a policy of avoidance. Thus he creates the darkness of disorderliness. Now you can perhaps see another connection: avoidance and the lack of awareness are intimately connected. Avoidance fails to establish order on whatever level it exists. On the inner level this happens by not dealing with all the accumulated material of the mind and of the emotions. This means discarding old material, fitting valid mind and feeling stuff into the appropriate channels, thus being aware of the self and thereby instituting a harmoniously fluid operation within the psychic system.
On the material level this would manifest by going through the trouble and the effort of the same procedure as far as one's outer surroundings are concerned. This may apply to one's belongings and to one's things. It may apply to one's monetary affairs. Or it may apply to one's use of time. It may mean to overcome old habits of procrastination -- of postponing things to be done, rather than dealing with them as they come up -- so as to free one's life from the clutter of accumulation.
The principle is the same, whether it is the inner life or the outer life. In both instances, it is necessary to make a decision to devote time, effort, and care to the running of one's life and to a reorganization that affords one the possibility to have a smoother-running operation. The more there is accumulated because of previous avoidance, then the more effort will have to be expended so as to establish an orderly running of your affairs. But when this has been done and, in the process, new habit patterns have formed in which avoidance gives way to instant dealing with, focusing on, and giving attention to whatever it may be, then an entirely new inner peace is automatically being established. No matter how you meditate and pray, how much you devote your energies to great spiritual or artistic issues, this peace must be lacking if inner and outer disorder clutter up your life.
Avoidance, escaping from what is, automatically means that you do not know what is going on -- either inside of you or outside of you. You become confused and disorganized, no matter how much you try to hide this fact from your consciousness. You know that the path must always bring you to what you want to escape from. In your pathwork -- which is concerned with your inner life -- as you now face what you have previously evaded, you create more order and more light. You literally feel in you a sense of inner cleanliness and order which you had lacked before. When you do not know what it is all about, when you avoid the point, or the main points, in question, then you dwell in a dark mire that feels very uncomfortable.
A third aspect of order is reality. When you are in disorder, then you live in illusion. You are in the illusion that the evasion, the lack of awareness, the not dealing with what must be dealt with if you are to live in peace and comfort, will not have an impact on your life. You delude yourself that avoiding does not matter, that you will not be affected by it, that it
has no creative impact on your life substance. This is a very great illusion. For nothing that you do or that you not do, that you commit or that you omit, can be effect-less. It creates conditions and psychic substance, just as much as your doing something. This applies every bit as much to a person's outer habits and outer orderliness, or its absence, as it does to one's inner life.
The lack of awareness, avoidance, and illusion all create and are byproducts of disorder, and disorder, in turn, creates more lack of awareness, more avoidance, and more illusion -- unless the mind and the will decide to tackle the issue profoundly once and for all, and then sustain the order.
Awareness -- dealing with and focusing profoundly and completely on whatever the issue may be -- and reality -- facing the effects of one's manner of living -- create and are byproducts of order and of harmony. Order creates more awareness, more ability to focus and to bring order as life unrolls, and thus more reality.
You breed disorder out of your illusion that it does not count or that it does matter, that it will go away by itself. Then you suffer from it. You may manage to escape from this particular suffering, which is also due to your disorder. For your avoidance may still be in progress. So you may manage not to be aware of your suffering. You may try to ascribe the tensions, the anxieties, the discomforts, the pressures, the bad conscience, and the nagging discontent to other matters. But the fact remains that it is
your self-created disorder that is responsible for so much of it.
It matters little whether the neglect to create order applies to the important issues or to the unimportant ones. The smallest neglect -- thus disorder -- festers in the soul and therefore creates a lot of discomfort in it. This applies just as much to the person's outer habits and outer life as
to the life of the soul.
The outer life is always related to the inner life in some way. It is very important for you that you begin to pay attention to your outer life and to your outer habits from this point of view. So far we have dealt with this aspect only vaguely and not to its fullest scope. We have not yet dealt with it as a gauge of where the person stands inwardly. We have not paid attention to the fact that outer disorder diverts so much energy that the inner life must be shortchanged. You still fail to see that orderliness is a spiritual principle and that its manifestation, or the lack of it, reveals something about where the person stands inwardly. The truly spiritually unified person must therefore also be an orderly person in his outer habits. He is not only clean about his person, but equally clean about the handling of his daily life. He does not accumulate tasks by procrastination; he takes care of chores as they come up, even if this means to undergo some effort at the moment, instead of choosing to follow the line of least resistance. He then values the peace that follows. Creating order always means an investment of effort. The spiritually mature person knows this and he accepts it. He does not live in the illusion that the same peace of mind and the same comfort can be attained without investing this effort. He realizes that what he gains outweighs what he invests. The spiritually mature person has order both in his inner life and in his outer life. He has order in all matters. He relishes it and he would not want it any differently. But he pays the price for it. Thus he is in reality.
When man is disorderly in his outer life manifestation, disorderly in his personal affairs, disorderly in his money matters, disorderly in the tasks he has to fulfill, then a very insidious thing begins to happen. He is preoccupied with the disorder that he he created. This is often an ongoing process. It never occurs to him that it could be different. Often he falls into another illusion. It is the illusion that creating order requires energy that he does not have at his disposal. Nothing could be further from the truth. The ongoing disorder consumes your energies, it wastes them, it dissipates them. Since order is a divine manifestation, and therefore is a natural one, the moment energy is summoned -- perhaps at first with some effort in order to overcome your resistance -- then energy will
be released. Thus much more energy becomes available to you -- energy that hitherto was used to avoid reality and to keep your consciousness dim. When he is disorderly, then man is constantly preoccupied, whether he knows it or not.
It is a tool of the unconscious negative intentionality to create both inner disorder and outer disorder. (With inner disorder it is obvious. I no longer need to emphasize this for you. But it may be a new way for you to view outer disorder). In whatever respect disorder exists, it fulfills the purpose of resistance to harmony, of resistance to truth, of resistance to health, of resistance to wholeness. Disorder creates tensions
and preoccupations. It consumes valuable creative energy that could be used otherwise, namely to find God within. I must repeat: man may not be conscious of the anxiety that this disorder creates on any level.
But he must be anxious about it. It means that he leaves his affairs unattended to, that life is constantly slipping away from him, waiting to be lived and fulfilled in the morrow.
It is easy to see that if you accomplish your tasks on time, if you do not accumulate old waste, if you deal with the necessary issues at once, if you do not avoid, if you do not procrastinate, and then delude yourself that it does not matter -- both inwardly and outwardly -- that you have control over your life. This is a healthy control that is necessary. It is the function of the ego to do so. Disharmony and distortion create imbalance. As a result, a false lack of control exists where control should be. This always creates the opposite, the split-off, distorted condition: false control compensates for the false lack of control and vice versa. The over-control on the feeling level will be easier to relinquish when control is exerted where it is functional. To put it differently. If you hold yourself together in the right way and in the right place, then it is easier to abandon yourself and to relinquish your control where it is right and thus be able to give in both to your feelings and to your involuntary processes. If a person has right ego control, then he is more capable of abandoning himself than when he lives in chaos and in false abandon. The latter state makes it virtually impossible for him to let go of any of his controls because then -- unless the ego has been strengthened through self-discipline first -- he would drown in his
own chaos. So, you see, self-discipline is a prerequisite -- one that cannot
be avoided -- both for spiritual fulfillment and for wordly fulfillment. Only then can abandonment to the involuntary processes be safe. The self-disciplined person can give in to his spirituality, can give in to his sexuality, can give in to his deeper feelings, can give in to his inner processes. He is safe. He stands on the firm ground of reality. He fulfills the functions of his ego, rather than dispensing with it altogether, which is a false approach.
Order always means discipline. The immature person refuses discipline in any form because he associates it with parental authority against whom he still wages war. This, too, is among the obsolete waste material of soul stuff. The more you want parental authority to take care of your life for you, the more you rebel and the less do you adopt the attitude that would make you capable of fulfilling your life with ease and with peace. Thus you misinterpret self-discipline for deprivation. What an error this is! Actually, the more you refuse voluntary, self-chosen self-discipline, the more do you unavoidably deprive yourself. You deprive yourself of the peace and the comfort that are the products of self-discipline and of the deep pleasure and bliss of the involuntary life stream that you can allow to come through you only when your ego stands on the firm ground that you have built by your self-discipline.
You need to create a new inner climate that facilitates your development, that facilitates your growth, that facilitates the solving of your painful problems, that facilitates the fulfillment of your real needs by learning
self-discipline. Then you will be able to establish order in your life on all levels and in all ways. For example, in the way you arrange your time, in the way you arrange your money, in the way you arrange your things, in the way you arrange your surroundings, in the way you arrange your personal appearance. Arrange your day in such a way that you -- at least most of the time -- take care of your tasks as they come. Organize the details in such a way that your day will run smoothly. Devote time and effort to creating this order and to cleaning up old disorder. But then sustain it! Consciously and deliberately meditate for the energy, for the consciousness, and for the guidance to follow through. If you experience a great deal of resistance to do so, then let your helper help you to express your negative intentionality and then deal with the meaning of it, as you do in all other matters. Begin to view your outer life as a reflection of your inner attitude and of your intentionality.
However, if the resistance to execute this new mode of life is not too great, then you will see what a difference it will make. You will recognize
that burdens begin to fall off your burdened shoulders. You will relish the peace and the comfort that will give you more clarity and inner peace so as
to be able to solve your inner problems and then to be able to give in to
your deeper self. When you have control where it is needed, then you
can relinquish control where it is not needed.
When there is outer disorder in a person's life, then it always reflects the inner attitude, the inner sense of false abandonment, the wishful thinking and the avoidance of something. It reflects your illusory state. However, if there is outer order in a person's life, then this does not necessarily reflect that this is an expression of inner harmony and of order having already been reached. It may be, and it often is, an indication of the exact opposite. In that case, the outer orderliness is not an expression of inner orderliness, but is a compensation for, a substitute for -- and therefore a false attempt to resolve -- the inner disorderliness.
When orderliness becomes compulsive -- in other words, when you are tense, and therefore obsessed with it, when you are afraid and anxious when established routines cannot be met -- then that is a good gauge for you of the existence
of inner disorderliness under your outer orderliness. If orderliness becomes a burden in a person's life -- in other words, if orderliness exists
at the expense of feelings, of expansion, of relaxation, and of freedom -- then that means that the innermost being is sending a message to the conscious self. That message says: "Make order in you." But the message comes through garbled because the outer self is not sufficiently attuned to the inner self. The outer self is still too resistant to communicate with the inner self, still too resistant to trust in its guidance, and still too resistant to decipher its messages. Resistance to creating inner order is always strong. One person reflects this in his outer life; another type of personality misreads the message and applies it only to the outer plane. In such instances order always becomes compulsive, and therefore obsessive. The compulsive orderliness creates just as much trouble
and hardship in the person's inner life as his disorderliness does. The degree varies, of course. The strongest manifestations are wash compulsions, and the like.
This is important to understand so that you do not fall into the error of a blind, flat evaluation. You always have to look very carefully and sense the climate of the person's life. If that inner climate is relaxed and easy, and if the existing orderliness creates more ease in a person's life rather than more strain, then it is indeed an expression of the divine orderliness that you find in the universe.
You have another tool with which you can look at yourself in a new light and thus gain new understanding about yourself. Those who are helpers should first apply this tool to themselves and only then to those whom they help. Where you find disorder in your outer life, in whatever areas it may manifest, then begin to focus on your discomfort about it. Allow yourself to feel how much it disturbs you and how much it harasses you. You
may be surprised to discover how many of your anxieties and of your tensions -- that you had ascribed to insolubly deep inner conflicts -- vanish as you begin to discipline yourself. The resistance to self-discipline -- to the need to make order in your life -- is the expression of such deep problems. But it will help you greatly to also tackle it from the outside and to actually re-arrange your life in a new way. You may be advanced far enough by now to do so because you so choose. In other words, with an inner understanding and not merely as an outer obedient act. The latter would not be meaningful, because you would resent it and do it in the expectation of pleasing the parental authority who is supposed to give you what you demand. If you would fail to comply, then you would feel falsely guilty. All of this would only hinder you. This is why I waited so long to discuss this topic.
Therefore, pay attention to how disturbed you really are by your disorder. The resisting part in you knows that if you free yourself of the burden of your disorder, then your inner work will be much easier. And the resisting part in you wants to avoid precisely that. The disorderly person is never able to concentrate. The same applies to
the compulsively orderly person, who merely compensates for his inner disorder. Disorder makes both concentration and focusing impossible. The mind must wander because it is preoccupied with all the things that have been left undone, it is preoccupied with a disorganized life, it is preoccupied
with the chaos. The mind may not wander in the direction of the disorder. In other words, in the direction of the immediate disturbance that he has created by the disorderliness. Instead, it may wander to other topics. But if you really follow through the wandering thought -- the content of it and the climate behind it -- then you are bound to see how disturbed you are by the many little things in your life that you do not wish first to tackle and then to set in order.
Often people negate this whole area as an important aspect of living. They may even feel that it is pedantic to speak of order; it has nothing to do with the great, important questions of creativity, of spirituality, of life. But it is a fact that the great questions always rest on the many little ones. The little attitudes all fall into place, just as creation does in every tiniest detail. Then your creative expression will be much less hampered, much more free. So, I ask you not to underestimate this topic.
All of you are involved profoundly enough with the deeper levels of your negation and are aware of your destructive intent that there is little danger for you to use your outer orderliness as a false gauge and a false evaluation of your inner state. Those who have recently joined the pathwork are enveloped by the rest of you who are sufficiently aware of yourselves to avoid the danger of a glib judgment. This is also why I wanted so long to give this lecture.
I suggest as a task for all of you to look at your life from this point of view. Where and in what way have you created an order that affords you ease and relaxation? Where and in what way do you resist doing so? Where and
in what way do you suffer from your disorder? Are you aware of the fact that you do suffer from it? If you are not, then search inside and see the indirect discomfort. Suddenly many seemingly little actions and reactions in your daily life will be recognized in a new light, in a truer light. You will become intensely aware of how much you actually suffer from your existing disorder. You will see how it was always so and how your disorder makes you lose yourself in the wrong way, and thus prevents you from losing yourself in the right way.
In this connection, I want to come back to one of the aspects I raised before, and that is avoidance. Avoidance exists all along the line, all across the board. You want to avoid seeing your negativity; you want
to avoid seeing your destructiveness; you want to avoid seeing your dishonesty;
you want to avoid seeing the little thoughts about how you wish to cheat, even if you do not actually do it. This can be easily overlooked, and is therefore
glossed over. Those invisible secret thoughts and secret attitudes seem harmless to you. Therefore, you delude yourself that they have no impact on you. You want to avoid the feelings that are inconvenient.
The price that you pay for avoiding is literally insanity, because if you go into what you avoid, then there will suddenly appear the golden point in the middle, the wonderful point of truth and reality. Deep within the dreaded area, and through the dreaded area, you will find the golden point of light, of truth, of unification, of God.
Every area of avoidance bears within itself that golden point. Every dreaded point bears its golden center. Go toward it and all woe will dissolve. Conversely, go away from it and you only increase your suffering, your confusion, and your darkness. You may think that there are areas that cannot be faced, that have no golden point at their ground: the area of your terror, the area of your horror, the area of your evil. This is not true. As long as you avoid it, then the terror, the horror, and the evil live in you as phantoms. These phantoms create disaster and chaos. But turn around one hundred and eighty degrees, as it were, and instead of avoiding and going away from it, go into it, no matter how bad it may feel at first. If you persevere and if you summon your courage, your honesty, and a minimun of faith, then you will penetrate your darkness and you will will come to what I may designate as the golden point in the center of your being, in the center of the dreaded area.
Each dreaded area bears the seed of the golden point. There is no evil, there is no horror in existence that does not bear the golden
point within itself. There is no death that does not bear the golden point of brilliant light. There is no evil in you that does not bear the golden point
of your goodness. If you can hold to this truth -- and it is indeed the truth -- then it will become much easier for you not to avoid, but to go through: To go through the tunnel of darkness into the golden area.
This is my message for you. As we terminate this lecture a particular blessing is given for all of you. It is another step in creating the earthly place where such wonderful work, unfoldment, and love can exist. You have special blessings for this meeting, and a great deal of guidance. I ask all of you that you meditate specifically for giving something of yourself to this venture: your positive attitude, your positive intentionality, your good will, your good thoughts, your intention of giving your good feelings to it. The more you do this, then the more this wonderful venture will grow. What will take place at the Center will be something that cannot take place in exactly that way when you are all in different places in the city where you cannot focus in the same way and by yourselves. What will increasingly take place is the transformation from negative energy to positive energy and from negative consciousness to positive consciousness. We have already begun to do this to some extent. It is not coincidental that this new movement I had announced for this working year comes at the same time as your Center in the country is being established. There it will best take place. Your ability to make this transformation, your ability to sustain it, and your ability to feel comfortable with positive feelings, with positive energy, and with positive consciousness will grow as a result of your having owned up to -- and your continuing to own up to -- the negative in you.
This work will go on constantly in these two ways. It will alternate between the exposure of your negativity and the transformation of the negative into the positive. You will learn more techniques and new approaches as you become ready for them in your progress. You will have the means, the peace,
the privacy, and the surroundings in which this will be possible to execute. The work will go on constantly in these two ways.
You have an indicative gauge. Where the positive is unbearable, and therefore cannot be sustained, it is an exact indication for you of the fact that even with all the recognitions you have made you still have not accepted yourself, you still have not exposed yourself, and you still have not faced
and then understood the negative attitudes in you. They may not be different from those which you already know in principle, but your knowledge is not sufficiently deep and not sufficiently wide. The acceptance is still absent. You are still submerged in it and therefore are half blind. You are not really cognizant of the way and the strength with which you perpetuate them. So your inability to bear good feelings, your inability to bear intimacy, your inability to bear love, and your ability to bear pleasure are all exact indications of that. The work in the Center will help you particularly for the transforming aspect of this twofold task. Everything that will come this year will go toward that direction. This is a wonderful thing to look forward to. Just think of the meaning of it. You will no longer need to take refuge in your negativity, which appears more comfortable than love, more comfortable than closeness, and more comfortable than pleasure. Love, closeness, and pleasure will be the most comfortable and the easiest state to live in. This is the natural state and therefore that is what you will attain.
Blessed be every one of you, my dearest friends. Feel and accept the love that pours from the spiritual side. Be blessed, be in peace.
November 17, 1972
Copyright 1972 by Center or the Living Force, Inc.