Greetings in the name of God. I bring you God’s blessings. My dear friends, since some of you are pondering the subject of world-weariness -- an undefinable longing or a melancholy or sadness which at times may take hold of you -- I would like to choose this subject as the theme of this lecture.
Such feelings grow from several roots. Thus, there is a variety of possibilities that can cause world-weariness. Of course there is also the simple yearning for God and for perfection, whether it is conscious
or not, as well as the nostalgia for the real spiritual home, which dwells
in every human being. For here on earth you are only visitors, this is not your true home. But these are never the main reasons for those feelings. Their background is more complex, and this is what I want to talk about now.
When a person deviates in his soul from the divine laws in any respect –- and the more unconscious he is the more he will do this –- then such a vague feeling of sadness and longing can grip him at times. It is as
if his higher self would give him an answer or give him an impetus to help the individual sense that something within himself is not right. For instance, he doesn’t know how to open himself up to loving in the true sense of the word; or he cannot move out a feeling which is vital in the life of a human being. As a consequence, love doesn’t come back to him in the right and fulfilling way. Then such a feeling of weariness is the answer of his own soul. People think so often that they are capable of loving –- and they may even be –- but this capacity doesn’t go into the right channel because other distortions of the soul prevent it. These distortions can be of all varieties, such as fear that one’s ego is too much in evidence, etc. So one can see quite often that someone is really yearning for love and is even willing to give love, yet only on condition that he or she is loved first. Such a "safe bargain" not only locks the door, but it causes the kind of distortion in the soul of which I have spoken before and which then can elicit the feeling of world-weariness, since the person will remain lonely. The fear within says:
"If I give first, without being sure, then my pride might get hurt, or I might be injured, or I might be rejected." The fear of disappointment is a sign of over-sensitivity, and this over-sensitivity is a sign of a false sense of self-importance, for this whole inner process centers around the ego. This must hinder the stream of genuine love; it has a direction contrary to it. This is against divine Law and therefore the soul suffers. Again, the moment a person turns the "inner switch" in this respect and doesn’t take his vulnerability, his fear of what could happen, that is, his own self, so seriously, in the false sense, he can give his love pristine and unadulterated, because the "You" -- with everything that it misses having and therefore wants to receive -- will become more important than the "I", with its vanity and pride. Thus the feeling of unfulfillment -- of this vague yearning -- will disappear because man is fulfilling a vital function of human nature and is thus in harmony with God and his higher self, at least in this one respect.
Please do not misunderstand me, I don’t want to imply that a person who
has this particular misconception has to be selfish. He may even be less selfish than another who has already found the key to his problem. One should differentiate between selfishness and self-centeredness. Both are wrong, but their effect is not always the same. I don’t want to imply that such a person must be petty, that he doesn’t want to give. It is simply that out of ignorance certain genuine feelings are channeled through the sick lower self into a false direction.
It isn’t even that a person who fits this description cannot love at all. There may be a few people around him to whom he reveals all his love. Yet he will not be able to avoid these vague weary feelings. This is so because if
the energy of his feelings were channeled in the right way, even in respect to those few beloved people, then his love would not be concentrated upon just a small number of people, but would go out towards anybody in his environment
who can elicit positive feelings. Then he would be able to reach out with the totality of his feelings, not being afraid of taking risks, to the extent of giving from his heart just as much importance to the feelings of the other person as to himself. All this is not just a matter of course, my friends, for no matter how much you may agree in principle and intellectually, the actual emotional reactions are usually very different, except in very rare cases. Of course, this potential love for one’s fellow human beings would be different toward each individual. Different not only because you human beings take it as a matter of course that one indeed loves some people more than others – and as long as your state of development still keeps you in the cycle of reincarnation one can’t expect you to believe otherwise. Also, you know from experience that your love for your mother is different from your love for your mate, that your love for your sister or brother is different from your love for your child, your love for your father different from your love for a friend, and it even differs from friend to friend. There are so many varieties of love currents, and they all have substance and form in the spirit. These colors, shades, sounds, and fragrances are of a wide variety. And man’s capacity to love would be large enough to produce all these diverse energy currents if only the sick tendencies of his ego wouldn’t stand in the way. So it happens often that when a person loves someone very much he has the vague feeling that then he must be taking some love away from someone else whom he may want to love even more; and he has the same feeling about someone else’s love for him; it seems as if one person would have to be shortchanged in favor of another as if love is being divided. Yet genuine, healthy love is indivisible; it never diminishes; the more love you activate, the more does it multiply itself. This is according to eternal law, and man has to find this truth within himself. So it is with God, Who loves His innumerable children, Who always loves more, never less. (I don’t want to be misunderstood here either: I am not referring to sexuality.)
How can genuine, healthy love be attained? Not by trying to force yourself to love: this doesn’t work. It can be reached only indirectly, by starting with yourself, that is, by thorough self-examination, without self-deceit. Find the extent of your ego, your over-sensitivity, your vanity, your pride and how they play their part. Whoever has made these recognitions has taken the first step toward the goal to attain true, genuine love, and also toward the lifting of those feelings of longing, sadness, nostalgia, or whatever you want to call them. Only you can look into your own soul, and if you find that not everything is all right within you, then you know also that your soul needs to be healed in this respect.
When someone concentrates all his love on one person and, as I explained before, he does this in the wrong way so that his soul is not healthy in this area, then his love for this one person will weaken. He may be so afraid to lose the love of this other person that he can’t be true to his own self, and thus he will indeed humiliate himself and be humiliated by the other person. But this will happen in the unhealthy way, out of weakness and fear, not out of strength. Actually people often believe that this is the sign of real, great love; however, they are deceiving themselves. Others are so afraid of just this – being humiliated -- that they cut themselves completely off from too strong emotions. When you love in a healthy and genuine way, you never compromise your dignity. You may well have to give up insisting that you have to preserve your dignity at all costs, but exactly because you give this up can you win that which you were ready to give up. This is an immutable spiritual law. Thus you will be clear in your soul that what you have to give up is your pride, the importance of your ego, but not being true to yourself. This may be difficult to understand at first, but meditate on it and you will perceive the difference. Truly, he who can love in a genuine way, by not being afraid that his little pride might be hurt or that he may encounter some disadvantages, but who guards against betraying his own integrity out of fear of losing the love of his beloved, will never be “treated badly.” He may be disappointed, but he will not be unduly humiliated. Real love will never make you lose your dignity. You will always be able to stand up for yourself. Such healthy way of loving will bring you respect, and not humiliation or exploitation. Healthy love will open your eyes instead of making you blind, will make you strong instead of weak, and always true to your own self, just because through giving up the little ego you will no longer attach so much importance to the fulfillment of your own wishes. Genuine love is healthy, and as such free from masochistic or sadistic, egocentric, or any other tendencies that violate your personality. I want you to observe that there are always two opposing unhealthy currents. Think about it, my dear ones.
Fear – this undercover agent in man’s soul – is a major obstacle to attaining real love; and the fear can be present only when you love yourself too much in some respects, when you make yourself self-important, when you cling instead of letting yourself flow. He who makes himself too important must be in fear; he who doesn’t give himself that much importance doesn’t have to be afraid that something bad will happen to him if he lets himself love. And fear covers your eyes with a heavy veil, so that you become blind. You can neither see yourself nor others. Genuine love is not blind, for it can come only out of a fearless soul. And it will have the strength to react in the right way, while the wrong kind of love is weak and weakening, and will thus make you react in the wrong way. As I said, real love creates a natural dignity, and it is very different from false dignity, which is based on pride and vanity. Such wrong currents in the soul then produce warning signs in the form of those feelings of world-weariness.
Another source of world-weariness can be found in an attitude of withdrawal, in which a person retires into a lonely world which is self-created. Again, he does this out
of a fear to give up anything or risk anything, or perhaps in some cases out of an ego-centeredness which can be quite effective. This withdrawal into his own self-created world may yield him certain momentary advantages in freeing himself of responsibilities for others and in living his life exclusively and uncompromisingly for himself. Yet this kind of a person pays a higher price than he is initially aware of. He acts contrary to spiritual laws and his higher self contradicts him in its own way by causing him to feel such world-weariness. Thus this kind of person will, from time to time, experience great dissatisfaction with life and feel himself alone, isolated, and abandoned.
Every man strives, in his soul’s core, to give, to fulfill, and even to sacrifice himself. Yet where the blind, sick, or immature parts of his soul resist this striving, two opposing currents come into existence, which tend to cancel each other out. One part of the soul wants to love – and therefore also to receive love, because whatever you give comes back to you in an eternally returning cycle (of course you have to start the cycle by giving first and not waiting that the other should start by giving to you). This part of the soul wants to surrender the ego in order to fulfill itself, to sacrifice itself, and will drive with all its strength to abide by the spiritual laws with every single current of feeling. It wants to forget its selfishness, vanity, and pride, and will minimize the importance of personal advantages. Such an emotional current comes from the higher self that knows where true fulfillment, happiness, harmony, and perfection are to be found. This emotional current exists even in less developed souls, but in them it runs underground, so to speak, and only rises to the surface on rare occasions during a lifetime.
The other part of the personality wants comfort, convenience, and will offer nothing of itself. It shies away from the light of happiness and prefers to exist in a grey, solitary, risk-free world (such a world seems risk-free to this blind part in man).
It is impossible to do justice to both currents at the same time, since thy desire directly opposite goals. These opposite currents then give rise to many other conflicts that extend much further than man is immediately aware of. When man can no longer bear the burden of these conflicts, which are really the symptoms of a deeper split in himself, he goes to a psychiatrist to become aware, in time, of these opposing soul currents. Only when he knows of their existence can he make the inner choice to clearly follow either one or the other current (since he cannot follow both at once), in full knowledge of what he has to give up and what he stands to gain as he decides for one of them. In this case man has at least the intellectual knowledge to say to himself: “If I go in this direction, then I cannot at the same time go the other way; therefore I must make a choice.” This is an example of an inner decision, which I have talked about to you previously. Yet such inner decisions can only be made when man has become aware of these hidden emotional currents and can put his finger on the spot where these currents run into the wrong channels so as to cancel each other out. Such cross-currents create not only psychological and spiritual obstacles, but also physical manifestations in the body: tiredness, weakness, and even sickness can come from these emotional “short circuits.” The more often these opposing currents clash within the soul, the more the person will lose strength, which would otherwise work productively in a healthy channel and thus renew itself all the time. Man usually knows much more in his intellect than in his feelings, but since the unhealthy feelings cannot follow the healthy conscious knowledge so long as they are hidden in the unconscious, they need to be brought up into consciousness in order to follow the intellectual knowledge. And the simplest truth, quite apart from all spiritual verities and divine lawfulness to which all human souls that wish to live a healthy and harmonious life are subject, is the proposition, evident to any minimally reasonable human being, that he cannot move simultaneously in two opposite directions. Therefore it is absolutely necessary to make this inner contradiction conscious, even if inner resistance has to be overcome, since most people really shy away from squarely recognizing the issue. You often say that the emotionally ill person is immature, at least in those areas where his soul is unhealthy. Such immaturity is often childish because, like a child, it wants the impossible. It does not have enough reason to recognize that each action or non-action brings with it the corresponding consequences, which the mature person is able to distinguish, whereas the emotionally sick and immature soul would insist on having the advantages of both the opposing alternatives and none of their drawbacks, thus having his cake and eating it too. When he has to face the fact that this is not possible, his inner rebellion increases and with it his conflicts. For such a rebellion against the unalterable is in itself a sick emotional current. Such inner conflicts can increase to such a great extent that they begin to be reflected and manifest in the person’s outer life.
There are many kinds of such cross-currents, not only those I mentioned. Such short-circuits can, along with other symptoms, cause this undefinable longing and sadness, and anyone who is haunted by such feelings frequently should search in this direction. Of course, it is not easy to uncover such deep and often unconscious currents, and he will need all his will power to conquer the resistance. Although the longing for God and for one’s spiritual home does not completely explain the feelings of world-weariness, it is true that this unsatisfied longing is for God, but in a different sense than you commonly assume: only when man lives in perfect harmony with God’s laws can this longing for God be stilled. When man comes close to God in this way and removes all the obstacles that prevent him from living in harmony with God, he can satisfy the longing for God already in his life on earth. Whoever fulfills completely, in accordance with God’s plan, his earthly life, his individual task, which corresponds to his state of development, will
also be free of any kind of inner disharmony: there will be in him no torment, no bitterness, no tension, nor any sadness or world-weariness.
Going back once more to inner decisions, I would like to mention that even when you make a negative decision in the full knowledge and acceptance of all its consequences and related renunciations of whatever has to be given up, you are better off than if you were to insist simultaneously on two possibilities by desiring only the advantages and none of the drawbacks of both alternatives. With such a clear choice your mind will shift in the new direction and your emotions will adjust to it.
For instance, if a person would decide to withdraw and live a solitary life because he would not give love out of anxiety and over-sensitivity, then he must also inwardly reckon with the fact that he will stay solitary and will lack love. Certain joys and satisfactions must then be given up, not reluctantly but completely. Even such a negative decision, if it is truly meant to be carried out, is one step closer to health than the inner indecision and the feeling of wanting to have it both ways. For in this way man will at least unify himself inwardly and will no longer be torn by a contradiction within. In order to reach such a negative decision at all, he must take pains to honestly confront himself, bring the unconscious into consciousness, and commit himself to pay at least one price, even if for the wrong alternative. Such straightforwardness is already a help toward making the soul healthy, even if not the best possible help. Thus when a person chooses to cut himself off outwardly or inwardly from others (and often this happens only in the inner sense), he will understand right away what his choice implies. He prefers his selfishness, his anxiety, his over-sensitivity, and his pride to his longing for love, fulfillment, light, brotherhood, and for a melting with another being. He will tell himself: “I have chosen, I know the price and I prefer to pay this price rather than give up my negativities.” It will be precisely through the inner work of making this negative decision honestly that he will enable himself to come to a realization later that he would, after all, prefer to make the true choice and that it will be well worth his while to give up what he at first had found so difficult to renounce. Most damage is caused by not making either of these choices and allowing all these emotional currents to mingle in the unconscious, without an effort of really getting to know oneself. Such a state of indecision will wear out the soul and will lead to unavoidable conflicts, so that no energy will be left to fulfill life as best as possible in other areas – whether spiritual or material.
Such emotional cross-currents or short-circuiting are not equally strong in people: there are many gradations between them. Therefore it is not a matter of either/or. In some cases these opposing emotions clash with such fury that the waves of feeling completely submerge man, so that he cannot cope with life any more. And from a certain point of view it is much better that this happens because he will thus find the way to a freely chosen cure much sooner; without such an upheaval most people, except those few of a very high state of spiritual development, would not find the way to health. When the inner conflict is not quite so explicit and one current is more out in the open than the other, man will still feel counter-currents, at least from time to time. They will sap his strength and will prevent him from completely unifying the energies of his soul.
There are also other causes for feelings of world-weariness; all of them stem from some distortions in the soul, but I will not go into them now. I have given you enough, so that everyone who hears or reads my words has ample material for self-search. Whoever has such a longing should know that his unconscious emotional currents are not completely healthy and free. He should attribute enough importance to his soul and to his entire personality to really uncover what is hidden within himself. Such a self-discovery cannot be complete if he still insists in attributing so much importance to his pain, to his vanity, to his fears, etc., etc. Only by minimizing the importance of these can he find the courage to uncover what is hidden, to do away with pretenses, and to change his inner reality.
I want to touch upon one more thing because it is related to today’s theme of world-weariness. This is self-pity, which often strengthens these feelings of world-weariness. It is wallowing in woes, which you often delight in doing, and you convince yourself that such pain must be borne because it is your destiny. Yet in truth this is very often not the case; as I have explained to you, such woes stem from distorted soul currents, which you have the power to correct. Such sickly enjoyment of suffering – you call it masochism – is caused by specific tendencies: on the one hand it is running away from certain real problems you do not want to confront; on the other you find in such indulgence in woes a compensation for the poverty of your life experience. The latter may have karmic reasons, yet quite often courage and will power could correct this condition if only you would open your inner door. Regardless of the burden of your past lives, regardless of what you need to experience now on the outer level, you can, by meeting the inner conditions which I am showing to you again and again, heal your soul and bring your feelings – not only your thoughts and actions – in harmony with spiritual laws. As a result, your life must become richer emotionally, more harmonious, and more happy, completely fulfilling you wherever you are in your development. Last but not least, consider this also: by rebelling against something you cannot change, you throw your life into a state of disharmony. On the other hand, it will never harm a soul to accept an unalterable stroke of fate. Naturally, man will not, need not, and certainly should not be glad to accept such a burden, that would be impossible. Yet he can resign himself to it without rebellion and bitterness. The sadness that comes from undergoing such hardship will in some way help to free the soul. I believe that you have all felt this at one time or another. Whenever you wallow in self-pity, you are half-consciously remembering your reaction in a real situation when you had to undergo such a painful experience. By wallowing in self-pity you try to reproduce this remembered feeling, but in circumstances which are no longer the same; when the hardship was unavoidable, your surrender was the right response, but now you can change your attitude to your pain. Because of this difference, the same feeling can in the one case be right and healthy and in the other sick. Perhaps you will be able to understand this.
My words tonight are not easy to grasp and I ask you to think about them carefully.
April 22, 1957
Copyright 1957 by Center for the Living Force, Inc.