Be In The World But Not In The World -- The Evil Of Inertia

By The Pathwork Guide

What is the deeper meaning of the spirit of self-preservation? If the deep mind knows that there is eternal life, then why does this same deep mind hold on to life and instinctively fight against leaving the physical body? For it is indeed on the same level of inner feeling and knowing that man strives into physical life on which he also knows of the eternal life of the spirit. This seems a contradiction.

I shall talk about this very important facet of man's inner life and I shall attempt to give you a deeper understanding of it, so that you can utilize it in your search for unification. The longing for physical life -- in other words, the life instinct -- expresses the Divine Spirit surging forward into the void, thereby creating form, matter, material manifestations, and eventually animating these forms and irradiating them with life, with consciousness. In other words, with divinity.

The divine plan is exactly that, to push the spirit forward, outward, gradually filling the void. In the process of this venture evil comes into existence. The slow penetration of the Spirit allows the divine attributes to manifest only to a small degree at first. Therefore, the consciousness is fragmented, the concepts are split, the vision is limited. From this come error and ignorance. These, in turn, create evil attitudes. When the light meets the darkness, the vision is initially distorted. As a result, being is fraught with the threat of non-being.

On the level of your consciousness you exist in a world torn between the forces of good and the forces of evil. The more the spirit penetrates the void, the more do truth and love transform untruth, fear, and hate. The more life penetrates the void, the more does immortality become an experienced fact.

On the human level of reality this process creates a conflict. Man longs for eternal life. He knows that eternal life does not exist in the physical body. Yet he strives frantically to maintain life in the physical body. Those religious people who deny the importance of physical life, because they first sense and then inwardly experience the eternal life of the soul, either misunderstand or ignore the importance of the Plan: of allowing the spirit to infiltrate the void -- finally matter -- and thus spiritualize all that is.

Yet those who tremble at the very thought of physical death because they do not feel the reality of eternal life are equally misled. In my last lecture I spoke of the importance of working through the level of the fear of death and the level of the longing for eternal life. As a next step, it is important to fully grasp how the striving for physical life is not only an expression of this fear, but on a deeper level is also a valid expression of the great movement of creation, namely the fulfillment of the plan of salvation.

When this is first understood and then is experienced emotionally, even if only occasionally, then the important injunction "Be in the world, but not of the world" will become very clear. This emotional understansding will lead to an attitude of a joyous will to live in the body without a trace of the fear of physical death. The personality now realizes that on the more internal levels of infinity and of eternality a greater, fuller life exists. It is a life that is free from threats -- the threat of death, the threat of non-being, the threat of pain, the threat of injustice, the threat of insecurity, the threat of loneliness. Then the externalized life in the body, in spite of impending physical death, becomes a joyous venture for a greater cause. Then physical death itself is seen for what it is, namely as a transformation into the original state of fuller existence and of more capable well-being.

So a new unity comes into being. The personality knows of the eternal, fuller, deeper life, thus feeling very secure in physical life. Yet physical life is experienced as a deeply meaningful and important undertaking that must never be shirked. Even its difficulties become bearable and meaningful in the understanding of eternal life on the one hand and in the understanding of the purpose and the task of physical living on the other. In that way, "Be in the world, but not of the world" will have a new meaning for you. You will know that the world of material manifestation -- in other words, the earth -- is a temporary manifestation in which you can play a very important part and which you need to affirm with all your consciousness and with all your energies, but which you should never assume to be your only existence, and therefore your ultimate one.

My dear friends, do permit the meaning of these words to fully take hold of you. Allow these words to go deeply into you. Even if you are still far from experiencing the reality of eternal life, even if you have not totally experienced the fear of death and the longing for eternal life -- in other words, even if you still stand on the threshold of this new phase -- it will nevertheless be very helpful first to contemplate and then to try to grasp the deeper meaning of: "Be in the world, but not of the world."

This emotional understanding can come only when the individual lives with a deep commitment to God to fulfill the task that he has come to fulfill. You already know that this task must be twofold. First it is personal purification and transformation and then it is giving over one's talents, one's qualifications, one's energies, and one's assets to the greater cause, to the plan of salvation, according to the will of God. When this commitment is made, then everything must eventually fall into place. But this may take time because in spite of this commitment blind spots and a deep unawareness may still persist in you. But time is only an illusory hindrance anyway.

The fuller is your commitment, the more sincerely you mean it, and the more often you put it into daily practice, then the greater your excitement and your joy of living will become. In addition, peace and security will grow accordingly in your soul. Conversely, the more the emphasis of your life is dedicated to the pursuit of selfish ends -- in other words, the more selfish you are -- then the greater your insecurity must be, accompanied by a frightening sense of the meaninglessness of life. This leads inevitably to the following vicious circle. If life is meaningless, then all you can do is to push selfishly toward at least minor fulfillments, which are divorced from the Christ. The greater this separation is, then the more meaningless all of life will appear. And the circle goes on and on.

Many of you have made this commitment only half-heartedly. In other words, you live with one foot in heaven and with one foot in hell, so to speak. Heaven is that part of you in which you sincerely dedicate yourself to the task for God, in which you become part of the great legion, the forces of good. It is heaven because you feel deeply content, because your life makes sense, because everything is tinged with loveliness, with meaning, with fascination, with joy, and with security. But where you hold back and you try to strike a bargain -- in other words, where you substitute your petty self-seeking for doing the will of God which you deny -- you live in hell. It is hell because your life appears meaningless, because it appears dull, because it appears boring, because it appears frightening, because it appears at loose ends, because it appears separate from all things and from creation. To live in heaven means to know that you are an integral part of creation.

The misconception that the dedication of your life to God's Greater Plan means suffering and pain is still prevalent in this respect. It this were not so, then the surrender of your will to the will God would be more complete, less fraught with resistance, and therefore more trusting.

The surrender of your will to God's will and the dedication of your life, of your talents, and of your attributes to the great plan not only will make you flourish in all the personal fulfillments of your daily life, it is also the key to the unification of your split. In other words, of the place in you where you are torn between belief and unbelief, between trust and fear, between hate and love, between ignorance and wisdom, between separateness and union, between death and life eternal.

One of the most important attributes in this great struggle is courage. The important role of courage is often underestimated. In fact, many people falsely assume that the spiritual person is weak and meek, which implies that he is without courage. For courage necessitates both strength and energy. The spineless are often assumed to be the victims of the aggressive, bold ones. Thus, on some irrational level of your emotional perception courage is often associated with evil, while the weak, cowardly person is associated with mildness, with gentleness, with goodness. Nothing could be further from the truth. I shall attempt to show you how cowardice is just as evil as the active perpetration of evil. Spiritual cowardice not only leads to the betrayal of the Best, of God, but to just as active and just as potent evil manifestations as does the aggressive acting out of cruel, self-serving, dishonest malice. It is important to be fully aware of this so as to liberate yourself from the illusion that your weakness and your cowardliness are really not so harmful, and perhaps even more spiritual than the fighting spirit of those who risk themselves and their personal advantages by aggressive goodness and by positive assertion.

What happens when you are weak, when you do not stand up to evil behavior, when you collude with it, and when you refrain from fighting for the truth? You encourage evil. In other words, you sustain the illusion in the person who perpetrates evil that it is not so bad, that it is all right, that it is smart, and that many are with him. This also perpetuates the additional illusion that by asserting the truth, by standing up for decency, and by exposing evil, you will be isolated, you will be ridiculed, you will be rejected. In other words, you foster the delusion that in order to be accepted, one has to sell out both one's integrity and one's decency.

All this happens constantly in human contact and human interaction. Such encouragement of evil is a subtle climate, therefore easy to push out of full awareness. Yet around the person who indulges in this kind of negative action and negative behavior there is a cloud of guilt, there is confusion, and there is an emotional climate of self-rejection. No matter how you try to talk yourself out of self-hate and into self-esteem on theoretical grounds, you will never succeed until you have gained the spiritual courage to be willing to sacrifice acceptance from others. In other words, this is the price that has to be paid.

For example, when someone in your presence maligns another, then your silence is not goodness, it is not gentleness, it is not peacefulness. Far from it. In a sense it is more destructive and more insidiously negative than outright, active maligning. The maligner exposes his evil and thus takes the chance of being rebuked and of having to pay the consequences for his evil act. The passive listener cheats by trying to get it both ways. He derives just as much negative gratification from the maligning as the active maligner, but without risking any negative consequences, and even priding himself that he did not really participate in the act.

Can you see that silent collusion with evil is more abrasive than active evil? Active evil alone could never have led to the crucifixion of Jesus. It required the cooperation of the traitors, of the colluders, of the silent bystanders who were afraid for their own skin and who thus allowed evil to apparently win. But evil can never really win.

The same is true of the mass murderers in totalitarian regimes, such as in Germany before the last war, and other such happenings. The few perpetrators could not have gotten very far if they had not been aided by the silent collusion of those for whom their own skin was more important than truth, than decency, than honesty, than charity, than love, than empathy. In short, of all that God stands for.

This leads to an interesting speculation, my dearest friends, namely that the active principle in distortion, harmful and murderous as it may be, could never wreak the same havoc by itself as the passive, receptive principle in distortion. This is why many spiritual teachings say that the lowest quality on the whole scale is not hatred, but inertia. On the energy level inertia is the freezing of the flow of divine energy. The radiant matter of the divine influx thickens, hardens, deadens, and then blocks. On the level of the consciousness inertia means exactly what I explained before: it includes both primary and secondary guilt. The primary guilt is for cooperation with evil: permitting it, conveying one's approval of it, no matter how subtly and indirectly this may be done. The secondary guilt lies in claiming that one is not participating in the evil, and even pretending to be good, when in reality one's cowardice and one's self-serving give silent permission to the evil act. This is why in His life on earth Jesus Christ stressed that the evil-doer is nearer to God than the self-righteous. In other words, the apparently good person.

Inertia refrains from action for the good. Laziness, non-movement, passivity -- in a negative sense -- always supports indifference, selfishness, non-participation. It promotes stagnation and it hinders growth and change, both in the self and in the environment.

This is why you in this community find yourselves in a very active phase. You may sometimes feel that this should be tempered with more silence and receptivity, so that more balance can be established. But do not forget that there exists an inherent wisdom and a purpose in the way the pendulum must swing. In order to take you out of your inertia -- which is an ever-present temptation -- you need to use all your drive and all the active movement in you, even if this temporarily means more activity than receptivity.

In this movement of your soul, you build, you create, you change, and you grow. Thus, your soul becomes accustomed to movement as an enjoyable, life-giving, and relaxing manifestation. Inertia is believed to be restful, while activity is believed to be exhausting. This illusion exists as a distortion in the deeper mind. As long as this image prevails in you, then you need to question yourself when you proclaim more receptivity and quiescence. Is it not an alibi for giving in to the temptation to be inert, to the temptation not to move, to the temptation not to make the effort, to the temptation not to take risks? Only when you are absolutely sure of this will the pendulum swing into a new balance. The over-emphasis on activity now is the balance that you need in order to establish real harmony in your soul.

Stagnation and inertia are the greatest evils. They are matter not wanting to be enlivened with the spirit of the Eternal, Who desires to penetrate the void that is totally stagnant and totally inert. False receptivity is masked inertia. The more false receptivity exists, then the less real receptivity is possible. The inability to receive love, the inability to receive pleasure, the inability to receive fulfillment -- as well as the compulsion to sabotage your fulfillment -- come from not giving to God. When you give to God, then you need to be active, you need to overcome your inertia, you need to move, you need to do, you need to act, you need to risk. Sometimes you even need to fight not only against your own evil, but against the evil of others. Only then will you feel free from guilt. Then you will be receptive to what the universe wants to give to you. The grace of God is everywhere. It is both around you and within you. It is always there, and you are bathed in it. Your inability to receive it makes it appear as though it were unattainable.

Giving to God means to give over to the great plan, to surrender to His will -- and to dedicate your life to this. This must mean activity, and at times even pushing through your inertia that wants to keep you from being active. This active movement may apply to many areas, apart from the resistance within your own growth process. Such active movement is necessary in the smallest details of daily living when you are involved in the noble process of filling the void and of living according to the principles of divine law. So, my friends, ascertain the exact nature of your inertia and, even more important, how you rationalize it in order to indulge in it.

When you feel weak, when you feel confused, when you feel self-rejecting, when you feel unfulfilled in any area, when you are divided within yourself -- and you therefore fluctuate between submission and rebellion -- then it means that you are divided. In other words, you are not yet autonomous. The only way true autonomy can be established is by your total surrender to the will of God. This must include the willingness to be temporarily hurt, the willingness to be rejected, the willingness to be put at a disadvantage. It must include the courage to either risk something or to sacrifice a selfish aim. It must also include the faith that this is in your best interest, even from the human point of view.

Before closing this message, I would like to talk about and help you with a particular phase on your path. Often you find it difficult to change a destructive way of life, a negative attitude -- a fault -- even though you have become acutely aware of it. In spite of this awareness, you still find it difficult to want to change it. For this particular juncture, I have special advice. I suggest a twofold approach, both parts of which are necessary.

The first part is that you focus with all your intention and with all your acumen on the harmful effects both on yourself and others of this negative trait. In other words, of the extremely painful consequences both to yourself and to others of your weakness. Often you may be aware of the existence of this negative trait, but you resist the recognition of its dire effects and of its painful consequences. When you fully take cognizance of the effects and of the consequences, then you must experience the pain that you inflict both on yourself and on others. As a result, you will be more strongly motivated to want to change this character defect.

This leads me to the second point. Only by praying for divine assistance and for divine intervention -- in other words, only by turning to Jesus Christ and by fervently asking for His personal presence and for His personal help -- can you influence your involuntary currents, your involuntary attitudes. Only by doing so can you first affect them and then change them according to the harmonious laws of God.

Your primary attitude in life must become one of dedication to God's will and to God's Plan. In other words, of giving over to Him in all things and putting Him first. Then all the other things will be the natural effects of this attitude and will be fulfilled accordingly. I know I have said this before, but it needs to be said again and again. If you find yourself unfulfilled in your vocation; if you do not enjoy your work, or if you find it meaningless; if you do not earn enough money to give you pleasure, comfort, and material security, then it means that -- somewhere within you -- you are holding out on your surrender to the Creator of all that is; you are holding out in giving over to His will for you; you are holding out on your dedication to the task which you are meant to fulfill. Perhaps you put more emphasis on your profession, on your mate, or on your personal fulfillment than on your task for God, rather than letting these other fulfillments flow as a natural byproduct of your dedication and of your commitment to your task. In this task you are meant to serve in the great army fighting for the forces of good. I suggest that you meditate on these vast issues that fill your universe, and which are of real importance in the scheme of all things: the great battle between the forces of good and the forces of evil in the gradual interpenetration of life into the void. When you perceive this vast universal issue as the key to all the other issues, then you will begin to put first things first and you will begin to see your private world in its proper perspective. This will bring a wonderful new balance and a harmony into your life that will lead you directly to faith -- to the knowledge of the ever-living God -- and to an experience of your immortaliy that alone can still the deep, existential longing we discussed in the last lecture.

Do collect your questions regarding the Scriptures. I would be so happy to answer them, so that you understand the world in which you live in yet another way. All these various angles make up the great puzzle -- or what still seems be to a puzzle to you -- until all the gaps are filled, and you are one in knowledge, one in perception, one in feeling, one in experience, and one in being.

With this I bless you, my beloved friends. Let this blessing open your whole being, your heart and your mind. May you experience the Creator in Whom you all live all the time. Experience the utter safety, the joy, and the limitless fountain of creative possibilities that this entails. Give to your life a one-pointed direction to fulfill yourself. This can be done only with God and only through God.

October 19, 1977