Obstacles On the Path: Old Stuff, Wrong Guilt, And Who, Me?

By The Pathwork Guide

Greetings, my friends. God bless all of you, everyone of you. We in the spirit world are so happy when we have the opportunity to help human beings. And there is really only one kind of help and no other. It is helping you to find in yourself that which obstructs your own happiness, helping you to find the law of the Divine.

Many human beings smile at the very idea of the existence of the forces of evil. They smile at it even more than at the idea of God. Why, it is hard to say, for evil or the anti-Divine is, unfortunately, a reality in your world. Closing your eyes towards reality is not reasonable. Of course, when you seek to face evil outside of yourself, then you will easily recognize its existence in others. If you fight it there, then you do so in the wrong way. And if you seek the Divine outside of yourself, then you will have a difficult time finding it. So the only way to seek either one is within yourself.

When you hear the word evil, or the satanic forces, then you automatically picture something specific and often very drastic. Let us establish what truly belongs in the category of the forces of darkness or evil. It is not only all the manifest cruelty and wickedness in their extreme form, it is all ignorance, all error, all deviation from truth in every possible form. For truth is God. In the work that you are doing on this Path you find in your images a rigidity, an obstruction. You rightly call this an immaturity. In this part of your personality you remained as you were, a child. In the lack of knowledge, the lack of mature insight, and the lack of wisdom the forces of evil could actually get a foothold in you without your deliberate intention to be bad. Evil and destruction can work in you through the basic error that self-seeking, egotism, and selfishness will either protect you from hurt or will bring you reward.

If you can detect this basic error in your images, then you will have made a great step forward. It is not so easy, because consciously you are unaware of your emotional selfishness and self-centeredness. You may be aware of your fears, but you do not realize that these fears come from being overly concerned with your own person and from your fear of being hurt. You withold your outgoing love and your emotions from others because the situation seems to involve a personal risk. Your ultimate image findings and the clarification of your wrong conclusions will always amount to that. No matter what names or designations you choose, you will finally have to bring it to this common denominator: "In my ignorance I believe -- perhaps unconsciously so far -- that my selfishness will either bring me a reward or that it will protect me from hurt. In what way have I been selfish? In what way was my conclusion wrong from this vewpoint? What is the right conclusion?" If you consider your inner problems from this angle -- of course, after you have found your hitherto hidden emotions, reactions, and your various tendencies -- then you will be able to make a change in your personality which will eventually change your life.

There are certain common traits in all the images. There are no exceptions. Only the proportion of one trait as opposed to another, or the relative degree of each, varies with each individual. In every image you will find the following: inferiority feelings, guilt feelings, hostility, hate, aggression, ignorance, resentment, childish selfishness, fear, and a few other obstructive forces. In the more primitive person all these traits manifest outwardly and are directed towards the outer world. As the human being develops from incarnation to incarnation, he finally realizes that it is considered bad and wrong -- and is therefore a disadvantage -- to show such feelings openly. Thus he keeps what belongs to the destructive forces hidden. As a result, he creates obstructions and conflicts way down in the depth of his being -- contrary to the surface manifestations of the more primitive person. When these errors of selfishness and egotism exist on the surface, then the repercussions will occur outwardly and directly. The destructive forces will be directed openly towards the other person, and therefore will bring an open result. But if the destructive forces are kept under lock and key, then they fall back upon the self and affect others only indirectly, thereby bringing an indirect consequence.

The latter alternative was chosen unconsciously in error. You recognize that the open and direct way is wrong, but you do not see that the other way is equally wrong and that it brings you equally disadvantageous results. The only solution is for you to gradually learn to rid yourself of your selfishness. First you have to recognize where your emotions are self-directed in a completely wrong way -- deep below the surface of your consciousness. Then you have to learn how harmful your selfishness is -- harmful not only to people you come in contact with, but harmful to yourself. And it is no less harmful if hidden and covered by reactions you display on the surface that appear to be the opposite of your hidden selfishness.

As long as you try to push these feelings away because of an outer or inner must, then you cannot succeed. This Must indicates not only a forcing of yourself -- and emotions do not respond to compulsion -- but also an impure motive. In other words, you want to do away with your undesired and unadmired tendencies quickly because they do not make you appear in a good light. Such a motive is proof of the very selfishness that you want to do away with. Therefore, such a motive cannot succeed, apart from the forcing element. But if you want to rid yourself of your self-centeredness because you sincerely consider the other person and because you wish to bring happiness and love into your surroundings regardless of your own possible hurts, then your motive is pure and therefore you will eventually succceed. With the help of God you will free yourself from the chains of error due to your egotism which is so destructive. You will not just bury such feelings and look away from them, but you will uncover them and take a good look at them.

I know that all this has been said many times before. But I am addressing myself to the emotional levels that you are bringing out through the work in self-search and not to your intellectual surface knowledge. Try to apply all this to the recognitions that you have made and that you are continuing to make: to an emotional reaction of yours which at first glance seems to have nothing at all to do with all this. In other words, to something that you have found out about yourself on this road.

Two possibilities arise in the nature of stumbling blocks when you come across new recognitions. In other words, when you lift from your subconscious mind an emotional reaction which is creating conflicts in your soul. These two possibilities seem to contradict one another, yet you may experience both. One difficulty is to recognize something within yourself because -- on a surface level -- you have known the same thing all along. You are therefore tempted to put it away quickly by saying: "But I know this already. It is nothing new." Beware of this danger, my friends. The majority of your findings will deal with trends and tendencies that you already know in a vague way. But if the labor of your search again shows you the trend already known to you, then it means that you have not used this knowledge properly. In other words, you have not applied it to all the levels of your being. You have not assimilated it completely. You have not made the connections between this knowledge and other trends. You have not realized the full significance, the meaning, and the consequences of this trend. Therefore, you have to continue working with this recognition. Hence you have to rediscover it all afresh, as though you were dealing with something that you have never known.

Only when you treat each recogniton as a new discovery will you be able to connect it and to establish the chain reaction that this wrong attitude has caused within yourself, and then reached outside -- thus falling on you both from inside and from outside. So beware of this reaction: "Oh, but I know this already." If a diligent search confronts you at the end of a particular road -- within the whole Path -- with a recognition already known to you, then use it as though it were new. It is known and yet it is new as well. Treat it as though you have discovered it for the first time. This may seem like a letdown because you were prepared to find something completely different, yet you come across the same thing. This may seem like an anti-climax. Do not think that way. If this is what you find, then this is what you have to find all over again. This particular trend tells you: "You will find me as often as it is necessary. If you find me again, then it means that you have not used this knowledge to the full extent."

The other danger of standstill or stagnation on this Path is the exact opposite. You have formed a certain picture about yourself. You are known to yourself, to your friends, and to your family to be such and such a person, with certain predominant qualities and certain faults. As you look inward, it may happen that you find in your subconscious a trait that is so completely contrary to what you are that you may say: "this is all nonsense, this cannot be true." As a result, you put it away again. You are so convinced of being the opposite of this insight that it does not make sense. You overlook the fact that both can be true. It is difficult for you to accept this revolutionary news within your soul because you are used to thinking in terms of either/or. If you are what this recognition shows you to be, then you believe that the known trend must be unreal. Therefore, you cannot accept the new finding. But you should understand that it is possible to be split in one particular trend. In other words, in some respects you can have the quality already known to you and in other realms of your being -- where there are obstructions -- you can have qualities that are exactly opposite.

Let us assume that one of your foremost qualities is generosity. You know how generous you are. All who have ever been in contact with you know it. Yet all of a sudden you find that there is a stinginess, an avarice in you, let us say emotionally and not factually. And if you ask your friends who know you best, "is it true? Am I stingy?" then they will say "no, you are just the opposite." And they do not say so because they are polite. They really know you as a very generous person. You have displayed it in all your deeds and actions. Yet deep down there is this corner where you are ungenerous. So both are true. Or let us assume that you are known to be a very courageous person. It may be your outstanding quality that manifests in many realms of your life. You are convinced that there is no trace of cowardice in you. But when you come across a streak of cowardice, then you may have a reaction of rejecting this finding because it seems to you impossible and therefore senseless.

So beware of both these alternatives. Your reaction to your recognitions is of the utmost importance. For only then can you determine your progress and your success.

A further point I should like to discuss is your reaction to your guilt feelings. There is no person who has no guilt. There is no image in which guilt is not somewhere interwoven. First of all, it is important to understand that there are two kinds of guilt. There is unjustified guilt and there is justified guilt. It is often true that unconsciously a person uses the absurd, the unjustified guilt as a shield and hides the true guilt behind this unjustified guilt. Why? Because deep down you know that what you blame yourself for is ridiculous. It is as though you want to say: "you see, I declare myself guilty, but I have no reason." You cannot get rid of the gnawing voice of that in you which should be acknowledged, faced, and changed. Yet you do not want to do so. Hence you unconsciously look for something that you cannot be blamed for. Thus you argue with that voice in you, trying to convince it that it has no reason to bother you. Of course, all this happens unconsciously. In fact, your true guilt may be infinitely smaller than the absurd guilt that you use as a wall to hide behind.

What are absurd guilts? They are primarily the guilts that you feel because you are not perfect. It is commendable to want to become perfect. It cannot be recommended enough that you try to replace your hatred, your resentment, and your aggression with love and with unselfishness. But before you can do that, you first have to acknowledge your present state of development. In other words, your present inability to feel differently. You must not want to be more than you are at this moment all at once. If you feel guilty because you still are what you are, then you obstruct the goal that you want to attain. I know that I repeat things, but this cannot be helped. In this case, I simply want to stress that it is an unjustified guilt to blame yourself for not being perfect. This unjustified guilt extends into all areas of the human personality. If all of you who work on this Path go through your images from this viewpoint, then you will find where your guilts are unjustified.

A further unjustified guilt -- helped by the existing mass image -- is your reaction toward your sexual drives. Everyone feels guilty about them, if not on the surface -- because of enlightened intellectual influences -- then certainly way down, deep in the emotions. That is an unjustified, absurd guilt. It may be true that your sexual drives do not go into the right channel because they do not merge with love. This is due to the fact that you have felt guilty about them and thus you have suppressed their existence as much as you could. Hence your sexual drive could not mature with the rest of your personality and therefore integrate with your warm, loving, giving, unselfish emotions. It remained childish in its self-directedness and its egotism. Therefore, your unconscious misunderstandings are harmful in their direction -- in their separateness -- rather than in their existence as such. Their existence is certainly no reason for feeling guilty. The only remedy is that you cease to be afraid of love, a fear which is selfish in nature. If you allow yourself to love, then sex will merge with it, and there will no longer be any reason to feel guilty about it. Try to understand that, my dear friends. Try to understand how confused your unconscious thinking is. You feel guilty about a God-given force, instead of feeling guilty about your fear of loving, which is nothing but selfishness and separateness. You should seek to combine your sexual drive with the one and only reality -- and the only remedy -- in the universe, which is love. This can come about only by the development of the soul. In other words, by the very road that you are taking.

So here we have a few common unjustified guilts. Now, what are the justified guilts? They are when you hurt other people in your ignorance of believing that your selfishness is your protection, regardless of whether you hurt them actively or you hurt them passively. In other words, either by commission or by omission. That is justified guilt. Try to differentiate between the guilt of being imperfect at this stage of your development and the guilt of your hurtful selfwill. Being imperfect should not make you feel guilty. But the guilt for the hurts which you inflict on others -- no matter how unintentional -- out of this imperfection, as well as out of your blindness and your ignorance, is a justified guilt that you should meet squarely and courageously. There is a world of difference, although fine and subtle, between the two directions of guilt indicated here. Please think about this. It is so important.

What should be your attitude about this justified guilt? What would be healthy and productive? You may say to yourself: "I could not help it in the past. I was ignorant, I was blind, and I was selfish. I was too much of a coward to dare to love and to forget my little ego. I admit that I have hurt other people by this attitude and now I am willing to learn how to love. It makes no difference whether this hurt was inflicted by my deeds, by my words, by my thoughts, by my emotional reactions, by what I have done or by what I have left undone. I truly want to change. With the help of God I will succeed. I know that in order to do so I must clearly see both the direct and the indirect hurts that my attitude has inflicted upon others." Then think about it. Ask God to give you the insight to understand this hurt that you inflicted on other people. Have the courage to shoulder it without the pride of wrong -- and therefore destructive -- guilt feelings which would only make you exaggerate your badness, and therefore make you feel hopeless about yourself.

There are three possible wrong reactions that you can have as you recognize the hurts which you have inflicted on others. First, you may feel hopelessness about yourself, with negative, destructive guilt feelings which make you despair with yourself. Second, you may feel self-justification, coupled with blaming others for their real or imagined wrongs that supposedly forced you to react that way. Third, you may simply look away because you are afraid to face up to your imperfection -- which may not fit into the picture you have of yourself. You may alternate among these modes of reaction. Beware of all of them. Find the right way, which I am indicating here. Feel with the person you have hurt. Take this guilt upon yourself. Wish to become different. Desire to give up your fear of loving. All of this is healthy and constructive. The hurt that you feel at the moment you realize the hurt which you have unwittingly inflicted is healthy because it will give you the incentive to lose your fear and your selfishness.

When you have a certain basic understanding about your images and image conclusions (not before), then my advice is that for your clarification you separate your unjustified guilts from your justified guilts. Find where you might have hurt others by your wrong conclusions, either directly or indirectly, either in fact or in possibility. If you have the courage to be truly sorry for the hurts which you have unwittingly inflicted on others (not intentional hurts but those committed out of your wrong image conclusions); if you can take that upon yourself and face it, then it will give you more strength than you realize now. It will foster a healthy and constructive attitude within yourself. It will set the life force in motion in your soul. For, among many other things, the life force is truth and courage. This is the truth and it takes courage to do that. Then the life force will seep through all these devious channels and it will affect them, so that slowly but surely you will dissolve all the destructiveness of the forces of evil that rage in you due to your ignorance and to your emotional immaturity.

Are there any questions on this subject?

QUESTION: The first question refers to the last expression you used. Would you kindly define emotional maturity?

ANSWER: Emotional maturity is, foremost, the ability to love, the capacity to love. Many people imagine that they have it. Emotional maturity is relative, and therefore is a matter of degree. Where the fear of being hurt, the fear of disappointment, and the fear of the risks of life exist, then there emotional maturity does not exist. Emotional maturity knows no selfishness (of course, this is relative on earth, it cannot be absolute yet on your sphere of existence). The more selfish you are, the more immature you are. You know that one can be extremely unselfish in the little outer things, but this might be just a camouflage to cover up your emotional selfishness or ego-centeredness. You may give away your possessions, and be unselfish in this respect, but you are afraid to love and afraid to risk being hurt, thus witholding your love from others. Therefore, you are emotionally immature, although you may possess an intellectual maturity. Emotional maturity means to be unafraid of paying the price of living. And this price of living includes an occasional hurt or an occasional disappointment. The mature person knows it, he expects it, he does not dread it, and he realizes its worth. He knows that by withdrawing into seclusion and turning inward, you not only thwart others but that you also thwart yourself. Emotional maturity means not to be afraid of one's emotions. If you have negative emotions, then your fear of them will not make them disappear. On the contrary, only by facing those negative emotions can you understand their origin, their reason; and only then can you be in control of them. But not in the false control of suppressing them. Your positive emotions, too, will not be feared because you will not mind an occasional hurt; and you will rather take a risk than withdraw your positive emotions from others. The person with emotional maturity knows that if you can give your good emotions to others -- enveloping them with your warmth, with your comfort, and with your tenderness -- then this is more important than what might happen to you later.

Emotional maturity -- or emotional health -- means to be able to make a complete decision inwardly. It means to know that you cannot have it both ways, that you cannot have both advantages. Unconsciously most people constantly want this without realizing it, and this brings them in conflict both with themselves and with their surrounding. The emotionally mature person will know that there is always a price to be paid. Emotional maturity means to know what you want, to want what you can have, and to be willing to pay the price for it. It means to give up your egotism on all levels of your being and to reach into the depths of your unconscious reactions -- which may be contrary to your outward ones. All this is emotional maturity.

These are universal truths, taught in all religions and philosophies of any value. Humanity has tried for a long time to live up to these ideas. These truths are known. Yet until now the individual has largely ignored the danger of self-deception by ignoring the many layers of consciousness where he can hide reactions other than those he is consciously aware of, and also those he wants and which are in accordance with these truths. So you will often find that a person acts outwardly according to these universal truths, yet you feel that it is not quite genuine. Inwardly he is hiding many reactions which are contrary to these universal spiritual truths.

The Path onto which I have the privilege of leading you will avoid these dangers so that your outer reactions will become one with your innermost ones. So let us be clear about our aim. We want to find that part in you where you are still undeveloped, primitive in your selfish reactions. This will often come as a shock at first because it is so different from your conscious outer reactions. Whether these outer reactions are really sincere -- insofar as this was the best you could do -- or whether they are an almost conscious hypocrisy, this outer mask (it can be applied in both instances) must be dissolved in order to look into your soul. There you will find many trends and many feelings which are diametrically opposed to your conscious belief about yourself. Life has shown you that your mask has not brought you the gratification which you either had wanted or which you had thought you would obtain by using it. In the end, this made you angry. In your mask self you may have bent over backwards in attempting to hide what is behind it. Thus, you feel abused, taken advantage of, but without realizing that it was not goodness as such which was unrewarding, but rather your false and compulsive goodness. With such a wrong conclusion you may be tempted to go to the other extreme and live yourself out -- act out -- in the part that you begin to discover behind your mask, believing that now at least you are being true to yourself. Yes, in a measure this part does exist in you and you have to acknowledge it. But recognize that this is only a superficial layer. Look at what is behind this rebellion and this anger. Find in you that which knows how to keep the proper balance. Your true self is neither as good as it appears to be on that surface which you are taking down nor is it as bad -- as full of hate, of aggression, of rebellion, and of anger -- as you fear you might be under this cover up, this front. All these reactions are but a reaction to your puzzlement at life and they are an outcome of your emotional wrong conclusions. In other words, of your images. Use the level of your anger and of your rebellion by acknowledging it to yourself -- in other words, by experiencing what you have suppressed for so long -- but do not consider it as the final answer of your self, as that which you would do if you lived yourself out in it. Discover the difference between suppressing these emotions and considering them as a symptom of your not knowing the answer to your life, of your not yet having found the key to your being.

Try to understand this, my dear ones, and you will be aware of important pitfalls. You will find the answer only if you have the courage to admit this second layer without remaining in it, and if you then recognize its falseness -- as you have already recognized the cover, or the mask layer, as having been false and therefore built on wrong conclusions. Then you will be able to be true to yourself without exaggerating the layer that you discovered. Thus you will grasp the fact that your former unselfishness was ineffective because it was false. But only because of that and not because of unselfishness as such. This outlook and this approach will lead you into emotional maturity. It will truly make you men and women. I say this purposely. I do not mean human beings, I say men and women. For no one can be truly a man or be truly a woman who does not have emotional maturity.

QUESTION: Would you please explain what is the reason for so many people's tiredness, especially in spring?

ANSWER: Tiredness is always a sign that the life force has not been utilized as it should be in the organism of the soul. Tiredness results from suppressing the destructive forces of the soul. In other words, by not allowing them into your consciousness, where they could be handled properly and directed into the right channels until they can dissolve. If your hostility is suppressed, if your aggression is suppressed, if your fears are suppressed -- and therefore are not faced -- if your hatred is put away because you felt guilty in hating and because hate does not correspond to your ideal, then all this repressed material causes destruction of the self. In one organism it may create one kind of symptom and in other organisms other kinds. Tiredness is one such symptom. Spring is the season of the revival of nature. The life force penetrates everything that grows: plants, trees, grass, flowers, fruits, vegetables, the animal world, even the mineral world. And it should be the same in the human being. If the human being were in tune with the universe, if the soul were in a state of healthy growth -- and therefore not stagnating and static -- then spring would revive and strengthen such a person, too. But it cannot do so where the obstructions exist. An obstruction is created by an element that is foreign to the divine life force. Self-deception amounts to untruth and untruth is hostile to the life force. Suppression is always self-deception. Therefore, when such self-deception or suppression exists, then the life force cannot penetrate you. On the contrary, it will affect you adversely because of a sort of short circuit that comes into being when two opposing forces clash. The life force wants to come into you and then out of you, for deep down in your soul -- behind your soul -- exists the whole universe, and therefore a fountain of life force. But it cannot fill your being because of the opposing forces which do not permit the life force to enter. Without your suppressions and your self-deception then spring would revive you. Fatigue is a symptom that should be an indication that you are still suppressing knowledge and recognitions from yourself. Let it be an incentive for you to set out twice as vigorously to break down your resistance to facing yourself. For only then can you truly become whole and healthy in your body, in your soul, and in your spirit -- in your emotions and in your mind. Be grateful for any symptom that shows you where you are.

QUESTION: My question is about Job. For what failure or shortcoming in his life was he made to suffer so much?

ANSWER: For his lack of self-recognition and for his self-deception, born out of his pride and his fear. There was in him an impatience to be already perfect. This is connected with spiritual pride. The desire for good was used to suppress basic instincts of all sorts that were not faced in courage and sincerity.

QUESTION: Is it true, as some interpreters have it, that he played himself up as the patriarch who deserved all the graces of God, in other words, self-righteousness?

ANSWER: Yes, that is pride. There was pride in this respect, but also in a few other respects. And there was an extreme selfwill. The selfwill wanted to be already at a point where only hard labor and the humility of self-recognition can get any human being.

QUESTION: A question was asked which you have answered on previous occasions. Would you kindly repeat it in essence. It is the question of expectation, especially in the form of positive thinking as opposed to acceptance that is so widespread in this country.

ANSWER: I will try to formulate it as briefly as possible. Both of these attitudes can be either right or they can be distorted in their misunderstanding of two wrong extremes. Positive thinking rightly understood means the knowledge that everything must turn out good finally, because the Divine is the absolute truth, which cannot be conquered by the destructive forces. But that does not mean that you can simply do away with the effects of your past and present errors, on whatever level of the personality they may exist. They have to be accepted and gone through. That is the most positive, the most constructive attitude. It indicates the lack of the fear of the risks of life, and therefore it is healthy. It indicates the humility of accepting yourself as you are at this point in your development -- where you cannot expect a perfect life because you are not perfect yet. It also indicates the courage to face yourself and to face life as it is. It does not mean that you are pessimistic and that you look forward to negative happenings if they are unnecessary. Positive thinking is often abused because it does not want to face that which is now. It can be successful only where perfection exists already inwardly, at least to to some degree. Otherwise it must fail and therefore bring disappointment. It is in such a hurry that it believes that one can whisk away the deep-rooted personality problems -- which require patience and perseverance to dissolve -- by resorting to a mere formula.

On the other hand, acceptance can also be misinterpreted and therefore abused. In its healthy form, it shoulders those imperfections that one cannot change at once and by a mere act of will -- and therefore their outcome, their consequences, and their outer effects. It means the humility and the patience to be willing to take and to be willing to go through any unpleasant result as a healthy medicine. But acceptance in its sick sense often fosters masochistic tendencies, hopelessness, and therefore indulging in a kind of resignation that is not only unnecessary but sickly. It fosters wrong guilt feelings and it seeks to punish the self for them. Therefore, you must differentiate between the right kind and the wrong kind in both these basic religious attitudes. The wrong kind of positive thinking is selfwill and impatience. The wrong kind of acceptance is fostering martyrdom. One extreme always creates another. Thus the healthy way is the middle path. It accepts the effects of one's imperfections and it goes through them in a spirit of courage and humility. In other words, it pays the price. In that you will find happiness and peace. It gives you peace to bear the cross that is always made by yourself. You have to accept the fact that you cannot change your emotions in a hurry, which the wrong interpretation of positive thinking tries to do. Eventually your emotions will change, but only after you have accepted them.

QUESTION: In other words, even though one accepts a situation, whether or not he expects failure or success in an undertaking, the expectation has no bearing whatsoever? Whether one goes into an undertaking with an attitude of hopelessness or not?

ANSWER: One's attitude always has a bearing. It is not so simple as to say that an optimistic attitude will bring you a good result and that a pessimistic outlook will always bring you a bad one. As long as you are not clear about yourself, then you can have a positive and optimistic attitude consciously, but subconsciously it can be the exact opposite. This may be for various reasons, one being that you do not know what you really want. Then this conflict may manifest in a different way. Since you do not understand the reasons, you become disappointed and therefore you lose courage. On the other hand, some people constantly assume a negative attitude because they are so afraid of disappointment that they try to avoid it by being guarded in that way. So both in a positive attitude and in a negative attitude something may be hidden that is not yet recognized on the surface. The important point is not what you consciously think. It is much more more important to be aware of what you unconsciously feel. A mere thinking formula can never be truly effective. The only answer is understanding your inner self, your subconscious reactions, your inner conflicts, and your problems. Only in that way will you finally have the right attitude about anything, whether it concerns a forthcoming venture, or hope, or anything else in your life. Until this is done, then the recommended attitude would be one of neutrality.

Let go of your selfwill without being either optimistic or pessimistic. Just wish to learn from anything that happens to you. Let whatever happens to you be an indication of where you are and how to tackle your problems. Consider any manifest happening to you as a reflex. In other words, as an unconscious reaction that is still out of your reach. If you observe your emotions, then you will finally break through into yourself and you will get to the recognitions you need for a more thorough understanding of yourself. Whatever happens to you now is mostly a repetition and a pattern of your image conclusions. It will furnish you with the key to your life if you train yourself to focus your attention more in that direction -- for so far your whole personality may have battled against these recognitions. Nothing can truly be solved -- in other words, there is no outer teaching or philosophy, no miracle key that will help you -- unless you first understand your unconscious motives and your hidden trends. All the outer measures may sometimes seem effective, but your life problem can be solved only when you overcome your resistance to look into yourself and you put away the walls of your defense.

What do you defend, my friends? Why do you have to defend yourself? Ask yourself such questions when you feel this resistance and this battle in you. When you succeed in this, then you will not need crutches, you will not need to be prepared by outer means -- by a forceful rule -- to have the right attitude to assume in different situations in your life. That is a crutch. Once you know your unconscious mind, then you will just naturally be. You will take life as it comes. And you will have both success and failure. Life should bring both. But now you will be equipped to meet both. Both will make you strong. If a person is so concerned to have the proper attitude to guard against failure or disappointment, then it is an indication that failure and disappointment are greatly feared. And if the fear is affecting you in such a way, then there is a certain healthy resistance lacking in you. I mean resistance in the positive sense, just as you resist disease, for instance, and not the resistance that should disappear when you are on the Path of search into yourself. Fear is a disease.

My dearest friends, God's love and the forces of truth are given unto you. They stream to you. They penetrate you and fill your heart. Rejoice in this truth. Learn the joy of discovering the truth that you have feared and that may not be flattering. For this is a great joy. Learn this healthy activity. Become strong in it and meet life as you should. For in this way you will become loving men and loving women. Be in peace. Be blessed. Be in God.

April 10, 1959