The Spiritual And The Practical Meaning Of "Let Go, Let God"

By The Pathwork Guide

Greetings and divine blessings for all of you, my dearest friends. With joy and love do I resume a new working season, to give you all the assistance and guidance you could possibly require. Our growth process is a continuous one, to the degree that you truly desire it. It has already borne wonderful fruit, and it will continue to do so.

Everyone of you may find in the words that I am privileged to speak what he needs most now. If you try to listen with your inner ear, to see with your inner eye, to feel with your innermost being, and if you let the doubting mind rest -- at least for now -- then you will find exactly what you need most for your development at this point.

I have often spoken the words, "Let go, Let God." And you, when you meditate, also occasionally utter these words, "Let go, let God." In this lecture let us examine the true meaning of this saying. What is understood by these words? There is a lot more to them than meets the eye, my friends.

Letting go obviously means letting go of the limited ego -- its selfwill, its narrow understanding and conception, its preconceptions, if you will. It means letting go of the fears, of the distrust, of the misconceptions, and of the suspicions. But it also means letting go of insistence, of the attitude that says, in effect: "I can only be happy if so and so does thus and thus, or only if life responds in no other way than I determine." This often appears as not wanting to give up something precious, something that is, in itself, legitimate and that you should indeed have. Then does giving up the selfwill, letting go, mean having to settle for unhappiness and for unfulfillment? Is the striving for fulfillment that falls under the category of "letting go" wrong? These questions are important and we shall deal with them in this lecture.

To let God from the center of your being, from your heart, from your innermost self, where God speaks to you if you wish to listen -- that is truly the ultimate aim. Before this highest, this most blissful, and this most secure state can exist, obstacles and dualistic confusions must always be removed.

It is usually much easier to comprehend a philosophical concept, a spiritual premise, in general terms than in its everyday applications. Your mundane reactions often seem too puny and insignificant to connect with the greater issues of life. Yet, it is exactly in this "insignificant" area that the key can be found to the confusions and the conflicts which make it impossible to actually apply the great spiritual truths to your daily life.

We shall now try to deal with the confusion I mentioned. As in all things, the great truths can be distorted and then they express themselves in a false way. Thus many people are aware of the fact and the truth that the universe is benign and giving, and that they are not required by Divine Law to suffer. But it is their selfwill that attempts to bring about the fulfillment that they so ardently desire. To tell them that they must let go seems to imply that they must resign themselves to emptiness, to suffering, to pain, and to unfulfilled longing. Thus they hold on in a tight, squeezed way. This prohibits the influx of the greater world, of the deeper reality that is light, love, abundance, and all imaginable fulfillment. The divine influx can flow in its own harmonious rhythm only when it is let loose. Energetically there must be no hard knots. Selfwill, anxiety, insistence, forcing currents, and distrust create an energetic climate that is antithetical to the divine flow. The state of consciousness that produces the tight, untrusting, insisting attitudes is antithetical to the Divine Consciousness. An imbalance of trust exists: the little, limited ego is trusted, while the greater Divine Self is negated. This does not mean that the ego should be denied. But it must be expanded in its creativity and its wisdom precisely by allowing the divine influx to occur.

All attitudes create energy systems. The tightness of holding on -- the not wanting to let go -- creates a closed energy system. This can be easily observed on the outer level of existence. Where tyranny and domination exist, where the will of a few power-driven individuals imposes itself over others, stemming from fear and creating more fear, then the creative spark is squelched. A closed system always creates resistance, even though outwardly some may temporarily submit to the force, due to their own fears and weaknesses. But the time must come when every last fearful individual will stand up and throw off his shackles. History has always borne this out. In the confusion of the human mind this healthy movement is often confused with a general rebelliousness that is coupled with and nourished by a childish selfwill to refute genuine authority. Again, an imbalance may exist. On the one hand, the person gives in where he should not: he submits, he appeases, he sells out. On the other hand, he rebels where he should not.

The person rebels inwardly against the momentary uncertainty of stepping into an apparent vacuum after he has given up the tight selfwill -- after he ceases to hold on -- and he begins to let go. Instead of trusting that process, he trusts false gods, whatever that may mean in each individual instance.

In interrelationships, it is easy to observe that the inner pressure -- the subtle forcing current that says, for example, "you must love me" -- creates exactly the opposite response. The individual feels that it is impossible to give up this demand because he cannot stand not being loved. Isn't he entitled to it? Doesn't the universe grant him this so necessary fulfillment? How can he give up the demand and therefore content himself with the bleak emptiness that he fears will result when he renounces this love? Yet, it is clear that the very demand, the very attitude of "you must," elicits everything but love from the other. Love cannot blossom in a closed energy system. A closed energy system stems from distrust, from non-love, from power, and from the distortion of truth. Thus it cannot breed love.

You who work on the path constantly encounter in yourself this tightness, this fearfulness, this holding. You may generally call it resistance, or give it many other names. Basically, the resistance is not against a specific human being, a helper, or a therapist, a teaching, or even against actual domination. For you do not need to be tightly holding on against actual domination.The tight holding, the not letting go, fundamentally always exists in regard to the inner spiritual struggle about what to trust, either the little ego or God within. In order to do the latter, then the interim states of consciousness which the mind has produced and wishes to avoid must be "travelled through," as it were. But only too often the self wishes to avoid what it has produced, whether this be a pain, a confusion, an emptiness, or a fear. Whatever the state, it must be embraced, so that it can be explored, understood, and thus dissolved.

There is an enormous difference between believing that this temporary state is the final reality that must be kept in abeyance and knowing that it is a temporary condition. As long as the belief in the former exists, then the self will either fight against letting go, or it will resign itself into a state of hopelessness and unhappiness.

This is why the resistance to letting go is so strong. You prefer the status quo in which you avoid falling into those other states of consciousness of your creation that must be traversed in order to let go and to create and expand your life. You prefer the status quo, even though the state of letting loose and of letting God feels wonderful, rich, light, joyful, and safe. Many of you have begun to experience this more often. In that way the resistance to letting go diminishes gradually. It can never be done in one single decision. It is a decision and a commitment that must be repeated many, many times.

The tightness that you feel is often traceable to the current that says: "I want it desperately." The desperation is, however, much more a result of the tightness that shuts out God than of not having what you want. The state of tightness -- stemming from fear, from distrust, and from a concept of poverty -- seems to justify your holding on. I repeat what I mentioned before: the giving up of the tight selfwill implies, first of all, to let loose of the insistence on the wish. The wish must be let loose for the moment, which is different from giving it up forever. The who, the where, the what, the when, and the how of the wish fulfillment must be temporarily given up. When you have let go, then you may even come back to the same "who, where, what, when, and how." But now it will take place in a different emotional and spiritual climate. But often your insistence to have your wish fulfilled in the one specific way that you now imagine limits the actual fulfillment. If you give the creative process rope and margin, then what you will experience in happiness and fulfillment will surpass by far your hopes and your visualizations. Since your mind is incapable of conceiving of the richness of the universe, then you must learn to make yourself empty at the moment and allow the divine process to reveal itself to you. This is what letting God means.

Sometimes you must give up the desire of your selfwill, which of course you do not want to let go of. But this is only true temporarily. If you have inwardly accumulated a negative image of your own life, one in which you can only suffer, then you must examine and oust this image so as to inactivate its energetic power. This cannot happen in a state of holding on and fighting against this same innermost negative belief.

If you send out currents of domination over others with whom you are involved in relationships and if you fight against their imperfections and immaturities that hurt you, then it is because you do not trust that your inner God can produce the fulfillment for you without having to impose your ideas over others, no matter how right these ideas may be in theory.

All of mankind is caught in this conflict. You either hold on against the bleakness, the pain, and the abandonment that you fear will be your fate if you let go, or you resign yourself to this dismal state in order to hold on. It is a universal conflict that is part and parcel of the dualistic state of mind of this dimension of consciousness. There are many other such confusions and conflicts in which mankind is involved -- and out of which it must laboriously find its way out. In this particular instance, he either uses a forcing current, or he resigns himelf to a negative state. As a result, he becomes hopeless and he harbors a negative concept of life. This seldom applies to all areas of life expression, but it always applies to some.

You may outwardly tend more toward one of these manifestations, but the other also lives within you, concealed even from your own awareness. Let us say that you are outwardly forceful, aggressive, and temperamentally suited to get away with overriding others, either by sheer force, by clever persuasion, or by dishonest manipulation. In that case, you use some of your resources in order to cover up your resignation, your despair, your hopelessness, and your distrust in life -- always in certain areas only. Or, you are outwardly a personality type who wants, above all, to get along with others, who wants to depend on them and not to antagonize them, then underneath there must be the desire to dominate. Often such domination is obtained by submission: "I will do what you say, so that you are bound to me and therefore you will have to obey my wishes. You will be too guilty to offend me when I have proven to be so obedient to you." I venture to say that you must have found such hidden attitudes in the course of your pathwork.

Whatever the outer manifestation of these two ways to react in life may be, the opposite of the overt manifestation must also exist in you. You may have become aware of the manifest attitude, but you may still be deluded by thinking that the opposite does not exist in you. He who is outwardly dominant will find it difficult to deal with his inner hopelessness. He who is outwardly negative, dependent, weak, and submissive will find it difficult to deal with his covert dominant, manipulative traits. They are inevitably two sides of the same coin.

At the beginning of the path of self-exploration you may not even be aware of the overt personality aspect. I say this for the number of new friends on the path. But little by little, as you observe yourself, you will become aware first of the overt and then the covert side of the unit.

When the personality is very adept in its chosen way of dealing with the world, then he finds it difficult to recognize the hidden aspect. If an individual is forceful by nature, if he has aspects of strength that he puts partially into the service of the forcing current, then for a long time he may get away with this solution so as to ward off the disaster that he secretly believes in. If the individual is soft and pliant by nature, but he uses these assets in order to manipulate others and to hide the domination that he would wish to exert, then he may find it extremely difficult to give up the former and face the latter. If you seem to get what you want through your chosen way and your personality predominance, then it is much harder to see what you miss. Only when life finally brings home to you that your "succeeding" is an illusion and that you are actually fighting against an already-existing state of emptiness, which is the result of your chosen solution, will you be sufficiently motivated to deal with this struggle.

You may seem to get what you want, or you may even actually get what you want. But you do not get what you really yearn for. You do not get the real fulfillment that you continually make impossible by the use of these solutions. Let us assume that you wish love and closeness with another human being, but you feel uncertain that you will obtain the fulfillment of this desire through his or her own free will. Let us suppose that then you rule by possessiveness, by domination, by jealousy, by coercion, by making demands. (This can occur either in the overt way or in the covert way. For example, you can rule just as much by weak dependency and by guilt-producing games like "poor me.") If the other person partially truly loves you, but partially neurotically either needs you or wants to exploit you, then he or she will submit to your rule. But then he must resent you, blame you, hate you, and defy you for it, although he becomes party to the arrangement. Thus, even when you do succeed, it means little, because you are constantly fighting against those reactions for which you are co-responsible. These negative reactions in the other only strengthen your negative image of life. And so it goes on and on. But what will happen if you have the courage and the integrity of letting the reins go, notwithstanding the fear that you might lose this person? If you lose, then what have you lost? But if you win, then you experiense the immense joy that comes from discovering that the other person wants to love you freely. In other words, without your coercion, without your manipulation, without your domination. That is the true richness that you long for. And even if you do lose that person, does this mean that you must be alone forever? Or does it mean that what you hope for from a specific relationship cannot come otherwise? Certainly not. But you may temporarily have to dip into your bleakness so as to dissolve its power to present an obstruction. In that way, you can let God.

Divine creation wants you to have all the bliss imaginable. If you can confront your doubt in this respect -- that the best could be yours -- then you can establish trust. But trust and faith cannot be built over the rotten foundation of distrust and lack of faith. If all the energy that you now use in order to coerce and to bend your environment would instead be used to establish genuine faith in the abundance of life, in the richness that your life could have, then you would create such a rich life. Covering up your lack of faith, your distrust, your negative outlook, and then covering up the means that you use in order to overcome them, consumes valuable energy that is essentially creative.

I suggest that all of you look at both the overt and the covert manifestations of this struggle in you, and in what areas of your life they exist. Look at the lack of faith that must exist when you do not let God, when letting go seems to connote resignation into an unfulfilled state. Feel the inner movement in you when you cease grabbing and then visualize yourself in a confident, patient, humble state of mind in which the universe can give you its best.

Whether you experience your outer holding, or whether you experience your outer hopelessness -- that results from your fear that you can never have the best of life -- try to get in touch with its hidden opposite. Both facets should be on the surface. You have to become fully conscious of both aspects. Only then will you be able to find the key, which I will give you now. However, reading about this key can never be sufficient, although it will surely help you to find the right direction. It requires a great deal of inner work for you before you are able to use this key.

Before speaking about this key, I would like to say a little more about this topic of "letting go, letting God" as regards your interactions with others. I already mentioned the apparent conflict of wanting to be loved, wanting to be respected, wanting to be appreciated and your pushing for it. I spoke about your dilemma about apparently having to give up this wish and your confusion regarding whether you are entitled to it or not. I must repeat, for it is so important, that whatever rightful claim you make into creation, the universe cannot accommodate you when your condition is a cramped, forcing, hopeless, negative one. Nor is the "you must love me" an expression of genuine love on your part. Love and must are antithetical. Forcing does not allow freedom to the other. An open energy system always functions in freedom. The attitude of such an open energy system would, in effect, be somewhat like this: "I would like you to love me. You seem to be the person I would like to share myself with, to whom I would like to give all of myself. If you are such a person, then I know that you must come to me in freedom, freely, out of your own volition. Even if my forcing could really affect you, I would not want it this way. I trust the universe to give me what is my fair due. If you do not wish this freely, then I can let go from deep within and wait in faith that the person who will appreciate me and freely want what I have to give will come to me." This reflects an open energy system and is an attitude that is compatible with the available abundance. This abundance constantly floats around you. But a clogged energy system erects a wall that closes you off from this ever present abundance. The same principle applies to all other kinds of relationships: to wanting a specific job, to wanting friends, to wanting people who buy what you have to sell, to wanting people who take from you what you have to give, or to wanting people who give you what you look for.

A closed energy system, an attitude of tightly holding on, is really your false and inefficient weapon against a negative vision of the universe that you live in, a vision of what life is -- at least what life is life for you, if not generally speaking. The weapon is wielded with ever stronger forcefulness as it proves itself inefficient: you become more forceful, more possessive, more demanding, more jealous, more dominating. Thus your energy system closes more and more tightly and thereby shuts out life's riches. Thus your illusion of life's negative nature is strengthened. Then, instead of letting go, you fight against this illusion, this negative vision, so as not to fall into the pit of what you believe will be resignation and giving up.

You must live in an open energy system in order to reach out into life and to comfortably and confidently claim its riches. In other words, you must be rich yourself in order to be energetically compatible with the riches of the universe. But in a closed energy system you believe yourself to be a pauper. Therefore, you never avail yourself of your inherent riches. In order to know of your riches and to be able to make use of them, the first step is to become strong enough, generous enough, humble enough, and honest enough not to exert force over others, no matter how subtly this force may be acted out. Not letting go is a forcing current. And forcing, no matter how concealed, amounts to stealing, because you know that you would not have to enforce anything if it were freely given to you. The irony is that often what wants to be given to you freely becomes inaccessible when you force. Thus not letting go must violate your integrity on a deep level, which then causes you to doubt both yourself and your right to be happy. Not letting go can be equated with being a stealing beggar. Letting go can be equated with knowing one's ultimate riches, and with the willingness to establish this fact in your consciousness. Thus letting go implies a hard, honest look at your illusions, at your pretenses, and at your dishonesties.

Thoughts and energies constantly create. There is an enormous difference between creating a closed system by manipulation -- the manipulation of others, of facts, of events, of the creative energies around you -- and creating an open energy system by trust.

The key that you have to learn is letting go into trust. In order to trust, you must first establish certain intermediate links. They cannot be skipped. Those links form the bridge to a state of genuinely positive expectation of life. In this state there is no pressure, there is no anxiety, there is no doubt. There is deep faith that the universe is benign, and therefore that you can have the very best on all levels of existence. This is the key that we are concerned with here.

An open energy system, one in which you can positively create fulfillment and enrichment, requires that you discover your inner richness. In other words, you must become rich. If you start from your poverty, then you can never create an open energy system. At best, you can create a closed energy system in which -- either directly or indirectly -- you rule, you coerce, you pressure, you command, you demand, you manipulate, and you cheat.

The open energy system -- which creates the richness that flows into you both from within and from without -- must come from your own richness that can afford to lose at the moment; that can afford to take the temporary pain of finding the real obstruction against the unfulfilled need and to ultimately remove it through a change of inner attitude. This is the way in which you can create richness from poverty.

There is a sequence of steps that must be undertaken in this process. Step number one. You must recognize the conflict that we have just discussed: your struggle between your underlying hopelessness and a pushing, holding, pressuring on top. Step number two. You must see that this conflict exists because you operate from the premise of an imaginary poverty -- from a conviction that you cannot have what you need if you give up the pushing, holding, pressuring struggle. You believe that you must be condemned to not experiencing what you long for, and what your personality needs in order to thrive. Step number three. You must be totally committed to working out the real reasons for the unfulfillment, in the usual way you learn on this path. This must be done in a spirit of honesty, of perseverance, of patience, of humility. By humility I mean that instead of blaming the universe for your poverty in a particular area of your life, you search for your own distortions that have created this poverty.

Most human beings have some areas in which they feel themselves rich and some areas in which they feel themselves impoverished, and therefore where they are needy. It is hardly all one way. So you must discover which is the area in which you feel rich and which is the area in which you feel poor. Perhaps you feel rich in certain creative talents, where you feel completely confident, at ease, and where you sense that you have this limitless abundance within you. There you feel like a well that never ceases to flow. But at the same time you may feel poor in regard to ever finding true mutuality. Another person may feel very secure in that area, but he may feel doubtful that he can ever have abundance and security on the financial level. You all know by now how to search for the inner reasons for such a condition, so I will not go into details about the how. You know that misconceptions, negative intentionality, and destructive attitudes must exist in this area. Now I only want to say this: you have to be clear regarding where you feel rich and where you feel poor. Where you feel rich, there you will always feel rich, because there you must have a giving and honest attitude. But where you feel poor, then you will continue to be poor until you establish richness within through your giving and through your honesty.

It would be helpful if you compared the feelings and the attitudes in yourself toward giving and toward honesty, so as to differentiate between your richness and your poverty.

In actuality the richness exists always, with everyone. But if you do not know that you already possess that richness, if you are blind to it, then you will truly believe only in your poverty, and therefore you will experience it. The poorer you believe yourself to be, then the more you must react as if you had nothing to give. How often have you found in the course of this path, both in you and others, that feelings are held in check because giving them seems to create an unendurable emptiness which can only be filled by others?

Let us see what happens when you believe yourself to be poor. I said before that every kind of pushing, of domineering, of forcing, of manipulating amounts to cheating. If we were to translate such an attitude into concise words, then these would say, in effect: "I want to force you to give me what you do not want to give me. If my straight power is not adequate enough, then I shall do so by trickery. I shall make you feel guilty for not giving me what I want from you. I shall accuse you and I shall blame you for victimizing me. I shall turn it all around and I shall accuse you of doing to me what I secretly do to you. For instance, I shall claim that you dominate me because you refuse to comply with my goal to force you into submission to me." It is obvious that this has nothing to do with love. Such an attitude is unfair, it is cheating, it is prohibitive, and it infringes on the other person's freedom -- or at least it attempts to do so.

The free, open, loving attitude -- according to the open energy system -- says: "I would be happy to have your love. But since I love you, then I shall give you the freedom to come to me if and when you choose. If you do not wish to love me, then I have no right to make you feel guilty by pretending that this devastates me." This is the honesty, the decency, and the integrity that creates richness. You are entitled to be loved. You are entitled to have money. You are entitled to have fulfillment. But if you go about it in any other way, then your means become prohibitive and, in the deepest sense, dishonest. Because you feel poor, you think that you have to steal, and because you continue stealing, you remain poor. For only the honest can feel deserving of riches. The energetic form of the forcing, holding attitude is that of a tight prison or of a short leash.

Stealing creates guilt and your guilt produces doubt that you are entitled to have freely. Right here you place yourself into a climate of impoverishment. In this inner climate you must doubt your capacity to create richness. And you violate spiritual law. It is extremely important to find out in what way you do so.

As you work in this particular area, you will find your lack of faith that the universe will yield to you what it actually wants to give you. You make it impossible for the universe to give you its riches because of the closed energy system that you have established. It is exactly the same in a relationship. Even the best relationship and the most genuine love will be automatically witheld if it is forced and coerced. Your demand for it will be resented, even by those who comply due to their neurotic motives. You do not allow yourself to receive either the existing love or the growing love because of the prohibitive energy form. When you grab, then an attitude of unfairness and of dishonesty must exist. In other words, when you do not let go and let God. Pressure creates counter-pressure. Letting go affords you the possibility to experience genuine divine law -- that is, to experience what is. And what may be there temporarily -- either darkness or negativity -- must be seen for what it is, so that what is there ultimately -- namely light and beauty -- can reveal itself. Only when you can let go can others be free to love you.

Let us say that you are entangled in a relationship where love does not come forth to you in freedom, freely. The reason it is so is because your distortions and your concept of impoverishment in this area draw to you someone who is incapable of giving you love. You may first have to let go of what you want from a specific person and accept the momentary state of impoverishment and emptiness. You must travel through it until you find -- through your increasing inner health, freedom and richness -- that what you want is being given to you freely. Once you have tasted the difference between what you get through pressure and control and what you get when you let free, then you will never desire the former anymore. The former is meaningless. It cannot enrich you because you extracted it out of your sense of poverty. Although it is a false sense of poverty, nevertheless it is a sense of poverty.

You can create the richness that is necessary for having what you want, for being, and for living in an open energy system -- in which people, love, and the richness of the universe come to you freely -- only when you give as fully as you wish to receive. These words have been spoken by all religions and philosophies of value. So they are surely not new. But often giving is a false mask. In other words, it is a ploy that only hides the stealing, the cheating, the bargaining, the dishonesty, the selling out, and the negativity that are present in the heart. Since the inner world of true interactions cannot be deceived, then you must reap according to what actually exists on this deeper level, and not according to what you wish to believe exists in you. This is why letting go at first often means to plunge into this inner negative world that you have created -- and that you have hidden both from the world and from your awareness. But you should remind yourself that this is not the ultimate you, to which you are either doomed or from which you must hide. By admitting its existence, you can change it.

The honesty of self-facing includes courage and humility. This never induces hopelessness, even if you first examine the world of poverty that you have created in your consciousness, and then you experience its pain as a tunnel through which you travel in the spirit of not avoiding what is your creation. But when you deny this process -- and you instead choose to feel victimized by life because of the pain that you yourself have created out of your ignorance, out of your dishonesty, and out of your negativity -- then you must continue to stay poor.

Out of that courage, then the attitude of letting go must grow. In essence this attitude means: "If others want what I have to offer, then I will gladly give it to them. If they do not want it, then I will let them go. If this is painful, then I will accept this pain and I will explore its origin in me. I trust in the benign nature of life to give me what I need, even if at the moment I am still not capable of experiencing it."

This meditation must be the final step in the sequence I outlined so as to extricate yourself from an incredibly painful and hopeless dichotomy which all of mankind is involved in. One person is more involved in it than another. Nevertheless every human being is trying to get out of this pattern, although some are caught in it only to a small extent. You create richness and an open energy system by seeing how your demands defeat your fulfillment; by seeing how your demands and your tight holding imply an insult to the universe. The demand says: "I do not believe that I can have what I want unless I steal it, unless I push for it, unless I pressure it to me, unless I cheat, and unless I manipulate. In other words, unless I force it to me instead of letting life give it to me."

When you undertake these steps, then you must first release the holding on and you must let go of what you have acquired through this forcing attitude. In other words, what you have acquired through selfwill and pressure. This means that you may not immediately obtain what you desire from the outside. You must first create the inner attitude in which you can accept not having what you want -- in other words, to take the frustration -- in good grace and still feel, or just because of it, your inner wealth. The capacity to do without what you want -- your ability to take frustration -- will enhance your self-esteem and your integrity. These will then begin to enrich you from within your own resources. Then the fulfillment from without becomes almost secondary. Perhaps "secondary" is not the right word. What I want to convey is that there is often a genuine need for the fulfillment of the wish you have. But such fulfillment must become a natural byproduct of your inner state. Also, it must not be something that you cannot do without. If that is the case, then you are centered in others and not centered in your own being. The outer fulfillment, important as it may be, is simply an organic development of your inner state. In other words, that inner state in you must be established first. It is the state in which you can let go of what you want to have, even if you feel empty, painful, and needy -- but always with a view that beyond this present state there is another state of consciousness into which you can flow by no longer resisting your present state. This is the only way to establish the inner state which is compatible with universal law and with a creation that is forever ready to give you whatever you truly need in order to be happy.

I want to say a few words about guilt, which is very important, especially in connection with this topic. I want to discuss the difference between guilt -- or shame -- and remorse. I have occasionally discussed this in the past. I often refer to justified guilt and unjustified guilt. I have often spoken about the destructive nature of guilt. Guilt devastates the self and it prohibits the vision of the ultimate divine self. Let us now see in what way guilt or shame, and remorse differ from one another.

When you feel guilty, then you are saying: "I am beyond redemption. Therefore I deserve to be devastated." Since you are an integral part of creation, of the universe, of God, you insult yourself. You insult yourself just as much as when you do not trust life's abundance, life's goodness, life's safety, life's justice, life's richness, and life's beauty. No matter how negative, how destructive, how mean, how malicious, how spiteful, how dishonest, and how manipulative you discover a part of you to be, it is only one part. It is only a temporary aspect which the real you has brought into material manifestation in order to first recognize it and then to alter it. It never means that this is all of you. You must beware of this dangerous distortion, of the false belief that it is all of you.

There is a direct correlation between this guilt which devastates the self and the distrust of life. It is essential that you deal with this double-edged distortion and that you set it right. In this kind of guilt you inevitably cut yourself off from your divine streaming. Thus you have to go to the opposite extreme, in which you whitewash your actual failings and faults. In other words, those areas in you that need to be faced squarely and honestly. Thus the defense against your shortcomings is always correlated with a self-devastating guilt. And the self-devastating guilt is always correlated with a denial of the true nature of an all-giving, all-loving, all-fulfilling universe for all created beings. Beware of this quilt, my friends, for it does not lead to self-purification because it is not a realistic or constructive attitude.

Remorse -- in other words, true guilt -- has nothing to do with guilt or shame. It simply recognizes your shortcomings, your limitations, your faults, your impurities, and your negativities. It admits that there are parts in you in which you violate spiritual law -- and thus you violate your deepest integrity. To admit this, to feel regretful in a realistic spirit, to recognize that these impurities are useless waste and that they inflict harm both on others and yourself, to sincerely want to change them -- and not to shirk the patience and the hard work, the humility and the pain of necessary self-confrontation -- all of this is entirely different from self-devastating guilt or from shame. Remorse makes it possible for you to say: "Yes, it is true, I have dishonesty in me. I have pettiness in me. I have false pride in me. I have hatred in me. I have malice in me (or whatever). But this is not all of me. The fact that I can recognize it, that I feel regretful about it, and that I want to change it allies me with my divine self, which will ultimately win over these aspects that I have remorse about." The "I" that dislikes and that wants to change the destructive, untruthful, deviating aspects remains basically intact, even if it sees that this or that is amiss in you. So do make the distinction between guilt or shame, and remorse. And then see that your guilt is part of a lack of faith in all that is.

My dearest, most beloved friends, there are many spiritual helpers around you. They are around everyone who ventures on such a path of self-development. Some of you doubt the reality of the spiritual existence beyond the body, but whether or not you have these doubts, it is a fact. There is a whole world which is intangible for you, but which is extremely tangible in reality. In fact, it is much more tangible than the world that you know as real. The world that you know as real is a reflexion, a mirror image, an outer projection that your real self is thrust into in order to fulfill a task. Give the free gift of real love by letting others be, even if this means a loss at the moment. Let go in trust and have the faith that life wants to shower you with its gifts. Thus, the more you establish an attitude of trust in you, the more you will know the inner beauty and the inner world of reality that can never perish.

We are starting a new working year in which more progress and more expansion can be expected. You see this movement year after year in ever accelerating beauty precisely because of the difficulties that you have to master. This movement is bound to continue and to increase as long as you persevere on your path. Some of the manifestations are the following. Your growth becomes more tangible. You resolve your problems in a more profound way. Your experience of joy, your experience of security, your experience of peace, and your experience of pleasure becomes deeper, longer lasting, and less fraught with subsequent fearful contraction. You become more capable of fulfillment because of your honest investment in facing yourself. Divine blessings are with you. Be in peace.

September 19, 1973