Religion -- True And False

By The Pathwork Guide

Greetings, my dearest friends. Welcome back, all of you. Blessings for all of you. Blessed be this coming working season and every facet of it.

Before I turn to the lecture, I should like to address a few words to those of my friends who are on the real path. That is, those who really search diligently within themselves, who undertake this intensive program of first finding and then knowing themselves, and who thereby are able to change and to grow into happier human beings. For those of you to whom this applies this promises to be an exceedingly important year. How much you can accomplish will depend on you. The time now is ripe, after all the previous work, for giving you better tools to work with. If you do your utmost to encounter yourself in utter candor, then you can derive the maximum benefit in this coming year. Particularly beneficial will be the combination of group work and private work. This new activity of the group work, developing steadily and growing according to your needs and to your capacity, will prove more and more indispensable.

For those of my friends who are on a less intensified self-search, but who nevertheless strive to some degree by reading these lectures, by thinking about some portion of what they learn, and by trying to apply it to themselves, they too will also find this a fruitful year. Certainly not to the same degree as the others who work regularly and with help, but they may nevertheless gain some insights and some clarifications, provided they are truly willing.

So let us all together generate the intent to cooperate with one another, the intent to understand one another, the intent to understand ourselves, and the intent to really make this year provide a crucial stepping stone on the path. The material that you have already absorbed and the work that you have accomplished in the past will make you ready for what is to come.

This first lecture of the season will deal with the topic of true religion and of false religion. Some of what I say will not be altogether new, but now you will be able to understand it better and to apply it on a deeper level. However, most of what is not new for you -- which you have read before -- you still know only in your intellect, while your emotions still deviate to a great extent from the outer knowledge that you have. To determine this deviation will be an important part of the work to come.

Divine effort throughout the ages of mankind's existence has always gone into the direction of conveying and bringing true religion to man. But along with that endeavor there came into existence the unavoidable counter-reaction. This is not so much anti-religion, as you may believe, but false religion. The distortion of the truth comes under the guise that the falsity is the truth. If you follow the history of religion, then you will be able to determine a very obvious trend -- though with many a relapse -- gradually, yet surely, from the false into the true. Particularly in recent times -- in spite of, or maybe because of, all the upheaval and the confusion -- the trend is more strongly than ever toward true religion.

What are the main differences between true religion and false religion? One of the main determinants is the following concept: in false religion obedience to authority is one of the great strongholds. In all religions -- in some more and in some less -- the concept of obedience plays an important role. True religion does not obey. True religion is free. True religion is a willing process. It is a free, self-determined action derived out of one's own understanding. It makes the person act out of his own full conviction, and never out of fear, nor out of the desire to please and to appease a more powerful person, being, or authority.

Obedience to authority has been encouraged by exponents of religion under the half-truth, and only partly valid argument, that mankind was too undeveloped in its passions to let it be free. Hence, in order to protect society, the concept of obedience had to be introduced and stressed.

Superficially, this may seem right. In reality, it is not. For although it is true that the general, overall development of mankind is not advanced far enough to be free of destructive impulses, the laws to prevent such destruction need not be combined with religion. In other words, religion would not have to convey the idea of a stern, severe God-authority in order to prevent crime. There are other means for that through human law. Religion need not be distorted, and thereby truth prevented, by encouraging man's weakest, sickest, and most immature trends. Those trends are exploited in order to maintain false religion .

Due to your work on this path, by now you know that one of the great struggles which your consciousness has to go through in opposition to your unconscious tendencies is the unconscious desire to remain a clinging, protected child. In other words, to refuse the apparent hardship of adulthood. And therefore to refuse self-responsibility and independence. To the child in you it seems a much better arrangement to remain helpless so as to force either the powerful adult world or God, or any substitute for these two, to take on the responsibility for your life that you yourself should carry. The tremendously damaging effects that this hidden attitude has on the personality can be discovered only as this process attains full awareness. But unconsciously you battle against this awareness out of the the unconscious wishful thinking that the so-called disadvantages of adulthood can be avoided by retaining the wish to be a child, while refusing to face the tragic disadvantages of enforced and prolonged childhood. This soul-crippling attitude finally succeeds in really making you helpless and weak, while the God-authority that you desire to take over your responsibility simply is not there. This, in turn, causes bitterness, rebellion, and a deep feeling of injustice, because you feel cheated. After all, you have obeyed, often to the letter. But in obedience of this sort there is always the wrong motive: "If I obey, then you will protect me. You will make decisions for me. I will not be held responsible and I will be rewarded with happiness for being an obedient little child." Since God does not reward such unhealthy attitudes, then you must feel cheated. You cannot help but feel that there is injustice in the world.

False religion has encouraged this sick tendency in man and continues to capitalize on it. It has set up rules and dogmas, and it has distorted the law into such a rigid concept that man has easily fallen into this attitude which religious authority requested of him. It encouraged his fear, his dependency, his helplessness, and it fostered a humiliating -- though often very subtle -- tendency of appeasement. This has the additional crippling effect of causing self-contempt and shame which, in turn, often have to find outlets which become destructive both to others and to the self. Rebellion must follow this set of emotions.

When you see in a personality the predominant attitude of fear, of timidity, of non-assertion, of appeasement, and of obedience, then rebellion must exist in equal measure. It may not be on the surface, but exist it must. In other words, there can be no doubt about it. It will require quite a battle to find this level of rebellion, of bitterness, of hostility, and of aggressive tendencies. This battle is caused by the resistance to give up the cherished self-image of the good person. This need for such goodness is determined mostly by the above-mentioned hidden striving to remain a helpless child so as to make the grown up world -- God, or life, or human authority -- see the necessity of taking care of the child. And the child only deserves such benign care if it maintains its goodness.

By the same token, if you encounter in a human being a predominant rebellion -- an over-emphasis on independence to an exaggerated degree of separateness, of isolation, of hostile domineering tendencies, of toughness, of the denial of all laws and of all rules -- then you may be certain that to the degree to which all these emotional attitudes exist, to that same degree fear, cringing appeasement, and helplessness will also exist. But in this case the latter attitude is hidden from sight and from awareness. The shame of it is so great that the outer personality takes on the falsity of freedom and of independence, which is but a poor imitation of the real thing. Because the personality wishes strongly to avoid the struggle of life, he cringes, like the predominantly fearful and appeasing type, but he is ashamed of this desire, of this weakness, as well as of the disappointment of not getting his will. Unconsciously, he feels himself all alone. Of all people, he is rejected by God, or by life, or by human authority. And this shame has to be hidden at all costs.

Both these crass types -- often appearing in less crass mixtures and combinations -- represent psychological deviations which can always be traced to parental influences and to early experiences. However, it is also important to consider these manifestations from the spiritual point of view and from the religious point of view. The complete awareness of and the understanding of these attitudes, with all their chain reactions and all their byproducts, will show how you inwardly deviate from your conscious belief.

Therefore, where there is outer religious faith, obedience, and appeasement, try to find not only the clinging helplessness but also the hidden resentment that God has not come forth to provide you with what you need and with what you want, to lead you by the hand, to make life right for you, to eliminate from this earth cruelty and injustice, suffering and pain. Such general complaints are often motivated by the inner, subjective disappointment that results from not being taken care of.

When you find manifest rebellion and aggressiveness, a drive for over-independence, then try to find where there is, deep down in you, your wish for the strong hand of a leading authority that is utterly good to you, and your disappointment that you could not find it.

It will be an important part of your task in self-search to ascertain where false religion exists deep in your soul. In other words, where you borrow religious precepts under which you hide and with which you excuse the childish tendency of your refusal to grow up.

Your conscious right opinions are worth very little when you are not penetrated by these right opinions in your entire being. If you do not live, experience, and feel these right ideas, then your correct thoughts are powerless. In other words, they are like an empty shell. Only where belief and opinion are incorporated into the emotional nature, into the whole character structure, will these beliefs have power. When you wonder why a certain thing may happen to you, while you are convinced of the depth of your right thinking, of the spiritual laws that you know so well, then you can be sure that, at least in some respect, inwardly you must deviate.

It will be your task to find in what respect, in what way, and to what degree you deviate from your correct conscious opinions in your being, in your feeling, and therefore in your inner actions and in your outer actions. While you may know perfectly well that God is neither a benign authority nor a hostile authority, that God has left us free -- and therefore that it is up to us to develop -- underneath you may often find that your emotions completely deviate from such knowledge.

It is not only those problems that you carry with you through many incarnations, it is not only the life circumstances of your childhood environment and of your parents which are instrumental in bringing these conflicts to the surface, it is also the general trend of religion, which encourages the misleading concept of obedience -- often even of blind obedience. This takes the effect either of predominant helplessness, false goodness, and appeasement, or of predominant over-independence, rebellion, and false toughness, or of a combination of both. In both instances you hide something and you ardently try to prove both to yourself and to others that what is hidden does not exist. In one case, you hide the rebellion and the hostility, in the other case you hide the helplessness and the desire for protection. In other words, this tendency to appease and to be good.

By finding, tracing, understanding, and resolving these distortions, you not only grow up and become strong and an infinitely happier human being, but you also contribute, much more than you can possibly perceive at the moment, toward the elimination of false religion and the growth of real religion in the world at large.

This obedience concept, that false religion encourages and teaches, could not possibly be compatible with the idea of a free human being, who alone can reach divinity. If blind obedience is taken out of the soul of religion and of the individual, then the rebellion against that which is truly good, wise, and loving will cease, because it will lose that tinge of hypocrisy, of goody-goodiness, and of falsehood which it so often seems to have for a number of individuals. True religion, genuine spirituality, has as its primary aim to make man free, to make him strong -- not weak and helpless -- to make him self-responsible by not waiting for justice to be dished out to him, but by making his own justice. In the wrong attitude, you not only do not eliminate your self-imposed helplessness, but you encourage it, and you also encourage false religion -- even if helpless weakness and clinging to authority happens to take a consciously non-religious form. Thus you must see that such immaturity and soul deviations play hand in hand with false religion. And anything false always brings an equally false counter-measure and extreme.

So find in what subtle, deeply hidden recesses of your soul you expect God to live for you; you expect God to make decisions for you; you expect God to bring desired results for you; you expect God to give you what you could get for yourself if only you decide to become a free, mature human being. See this element in you, which is more harmful than you can possibly know at this moment. With this hidden attitude, you cripple yourself, and you make a false crutch out of the truth.

Religion in its falsity is more harmful than complete atheism and materialism because it makes a farce out of the truth, of the dignity of a free human being, and of the divine strength in man. It puts a right argument into the mouth of the anti-religionist. So it becomes very important that you find wherein you persist and go on clinging because you are afraid of standing on your own feet. You may at first wonder how to go about finding this element in you. It does not matter where you begin, provided you focus your outlook on the goal. Take any negative emotion: envy, bitterness, fear, helplessness, and, most indicative of all, self-pity. Once you ascertain these feelings, then it will not be so difficult to find the persistence keeping you in spiritual and emotional infancy. Set out to search in this direction, even if you happen to be convinced that it does not apply to you. If you really want to find it, then you will. You always have. Once you have found this element of the unconscious insistence to remain a helpless child, then you will soon come to see that this is responsible for your weakness, for your helplessness, and for your thus ensuing fear of life. But you combat this by making yourself even more helpless, even more fearful, and even weaker. Once you truly see and understand this, then you will begin to change -- and the strength will grow out of you. You will no longer hope for God to give you what you should and could be strong enough to obtain for yourself. This will give you self-respect and security. But while you cling to a stronger authority than yourself in order to avoid effort and responsibility, then you cannot help feeling self-hate and self-contempt. You only become weaker and more helpless.

This authority can take the form of a vague sense of the world at large which has to be appeased; or of life in general, or of fate. Emotionally, it can apply to certain people; or it can actually be your concept of God.

This leads to the God image, which I discussed quite a while ago. The very outcome of false religion, on the one hand, and your unconscious insistence on remaining an infant on the other, produce this God image.

In the transitory state between false religion and true religion there comes a phase of nothingness. It is a difficult phase. It is a phase in which you feel all alone because the false god is dissolving and the true God could not really have taken hold of your being. In this phase all your faith may begin to crumble. You may be full of doubts about the existence of God altogether. This is due to having eliminated the false security, the escape, and the crutch which are all part of spiritual infancy. Since your childish concept of God does not exist, then God seems temporarily not to exist at all.

But as the false religious concept -- with its God image -- vanishes, even while you find yourself in a temporarily painful state of aloneness, an inner force begins to grow in you, long before you become aware of it, provided you are not thrown by this temporary state but you go on working with renewed effort. You have to be willing to take it upon yourself to become whole, to become strong, and to become self-reliant. You have to determine not to allow this temporary state to crush you and, consequently, to abdicate life and all your struggle. If you fall into such a state, then you cannot come out a free, strong individual, but you may fall back once again into the misleading shallow comfort of false religion. If you develop your own strength for the very reason that you feel alone, then you will be victorious and the road to true religion will be paved by your own attitude and by your own effort. Only in that way can you let go of the phantom hand and the phantom god and then develop the real God and the real freedom within, after you have gone through this lowest point on the curve: that of accepting aloneness. Such acceptance of the right kind will strengthen the independence and the self-responsibility which are essential to the God-creature that you wish to become.

If you really understand these words, not only intellectually and superficially, but after you have worked for a while and have come across corresponding currents, trends, and reactions, then you will understand two things a lot better than before.

One is the lecture about duality: the acceptance of death, of the unknown, with all its facets, this being the only prerequisite for the acceptance of life and of happiness. Not the acceptance of death with a wishful thinking spirituality of avoiding the facing of your fear and of your doubt. Not by using religion as a crutch to whisk away this fear and this aloneness, but by bravely encountering it. In other words, by taking it out of repression. Only then can true religion and true knowledge replace the false religion of escape and the vague belief serving to cover up your fear.

Accepting death, and therefore the unknown, is connected with the acceptance of independence and self-responsibility. Both indicate spiritual and emotional adulthood, freedom, growth, creativity, strength, trust in the self, and real security. In false religion the emotional climate is the following: "I am a weak, helpless sinner. Therefore, I can do nothing without God, without an authority who permits me to be happy. This god has the right to be either good or bad to me. But if I obey him and appease him, then chances are that he will be well disposed toward me, or so I hope."

From humiliation, you will develop a humility. From the clinging appeasement and the blind obedience -- often without understanding -- you will develop into a strong, self-responsible being, trusting in your own capacity to obtain what you need in life. You need the courage of letting go of the illusion of the false religion, of the false consolation. If you go through this transitory state, then the strength will come out of the truth.

The second point you will also understand better is the reason why the emphasis of my lectures for quite some time was more on the psychological rather than on the spiritual. And this will still occur quite often. For, none of you is free of the role that spirituality plays in the distortion of your being, namely escape as a substitute for your own weakness, as a consolation for your fears, as a hope of appeasing God so that He may give you what you could easily obtain by your own efforts if only you find that which paralyzes them. When religion is a substitute, then it may be a help for a while. For it may assuage some unreasonable fears. That is why I sometimes have to stay away from the truth, because your subconscious would misunderstand it and therefore misuse it. But the more these problems become resolved, then the safer it will be to give you truth without the danger of weakening you. Then true religion will come out of your own strength, not out of superimposition. It will come from within and not, as you now unconsciously expect, from without. The fact that you develop your own resources and your own strength, instead of obtaining them from a being outside of yourself, does not make it any less divine. Quite the contrary. With this understanding, you will not mind to return sporadically to periods of a more psychological approach. But we will return again and again to the spiritual approach to see where the psychological deviations, the images, the distortions, the wrong conclusions, and the false solutions are in direct contradiction to the spirituality that all of you aim for. Only then will you fully understand that these are not two unrelated subjects, but that the one is an integral part of the other.

QUESTION: Could you explain what is true religion, as compared to the wrong attitude? Where does the belief in God come in if you don't feel He is a help. I just don't quite follow this.

ANSWER: You will feel that God is a help when you come to true religion, after abandoning the crutch, but in a completely different sense. Now you need God's help because you make yourself helpless. Then you will feel God's help because you will perceive the perfection of the universe and its laws; the strength of them, of which you are an integral and contributing part. Then you will feel that you are the driving force of your life. You can help yourself if you really want to, if you are ready to sacrifice something. Let us say that you want a happiness in a certain direction -- and this is not some vague feeling, but a clearly defined goal. You will first seek and then find in what way you so far have prevented this happiness. Then you will determine what you can do now to obtain it by your own endeavors. You will understand what this demands of you and it will be up to you to either fulfill these demands, because you decide that it is worthwhile, or you will abstain from it. But then there will not be a gnawing feeling in your soul that you are a neglected and unjustly treated child. This is spiritual and emotional maturity, and it is true religion. God's role is not to provide you with things which you do not wish to obtain yourself. But the God Consciousness is that His world is so wonderful that you have much more power than you have heretofore realized, if only you set it in motion and if only you remove your own obstacles and your own blocks: your greed, your laziness, your cowardice.

The false religious attitude is when you first ask God to help you to overcome a hardship in your life and then you sit down and wait. In other words, you do not examine sufficiently why you have this hardship. You may do so peremptorily because someone else in an authoritative place has told you to do so. But even while you attempt this examination, there is always an inner direction of proving that in this case you have nothing to do with the hardship. In other words, it has just fallen upon you undeservedly, and therefore there is no way of getting out of it unless God commits an act of Grace. But there is no inner will and no stamina to find how you can really get what you want out of your own creativity. God is in you. The Divine Forces are in you, provided you mobilize them, rather than waiting for them from the outside. However, the mobilization of these Forces can happen only if you let go of some damaging attitude, of something destructive which, again, is up to you to find. The strength and the security coming from this attitude will give you an entirely different relationship to God, and an entirely different concept. Emotionally, both the concept and the inner climate will be different. The words may be often remain the same. The words are often the same for true religion and for false religion. But the inner experience is entirely different. In both false religion and in true religion you can say that God's grace exists. In other words, even though you are on your own, the grace of God also exists. But the understanding of this will not come before you put yourself on your own. As long as you expect God's grace to make up for your human laziness and for your greed, then you must be disappointed, whether or not you admit this to yourself. So you become hurt, angry, and rebellious. You then either turn away from God altogether, denying His very existence in the universe, or you consider yourself an isolated case of neglect, partly unworthy of His grace and of His help, and partly unjustly treated. So you thrive in guilt and in self-pity. This makes you more dependent and more helpless -- and so the vicious circle continues in atoning for your rebellion against God by appeasing Him even more with fearful obedience, which is now entirely on the surface and which is caused by the sickest motivations.

QUESTION: I understand. But how can we go about it? This God image is so imbedded in us since so many decades of false attitude. Wouldn't it mean that if we go away from this concept, then the prayer would change too? The whole attitude would change? Everything would change?

AMSWER: Yes, of course. But you see, my child, you cannot say, "Now I will go away from my God image." It is not something that you can decide in your mind. It does not work that way. The emotional impact of it would remain if you try to change it by a mere outer decision. In order to make the inner decision, the procedure has to be the same as it has always been in this work. The way to go about it is to find these attitudes and to understand them more deeply and fully. If this is really done, not just superficially, you will all have a surprise in finding to what preposterous means you have gone in order to forcefully maintain infanthood and for what specific reasons. Once you analyze and understand certain emotional behavior patterns, you will realize how preposterous they are, how incompatible with your conscious belief, how contrary to your own best interests and how logically impossible, because they are always mutually in conflict with contrary trends. After seeing and understanding all this, the change happens organically, by itself as it were. A certain length of time of self-observation is necessary in order to gain full insight and then be able to change. You cannot begin by saying, "Now I shall get rid of my God image." The only way is to find these subtle and unobtrusive emotional reactions. They are not obvious, nor strong. Nor are they completely unconscious. They are there, but so subtle, and you are so used to them that you do not even see anything amiss. To find them and analyze them is the first step, and then to see them in the light of this discussion. This will help you to eliminate and dissolve the God image, because your attitude will naturally change. You will, for instance, find what your expectations really are, how you inwardly complain. You will find what you yourself could do in order to make these expectations a reality; and you will get to understand why you did not do so. This should be the procedure.

The very fact that you are aware of this God image is extremely favorable for you, because many others are not aware of it at all. They are convinced they do not have any distortions in this respect. They do not connect certain emotional reactions with this God image, with the false religious attitude. They are filled with their conscious right belief, while their unconscious concepts are still too far away from their awareness.

QUESTION: One of the last words of Christ was, "Father, Thy will be done." Taken as an example, this could have been obedience, or it could have been freedom.

ANSWER: Exactly. As I said before, the words are often the same. Truth can be easily misinterpreted because the essence of truth is in the willingness and the capacity to understand. For example, by what I discussed here, you could easily say that there can be no grace of God. If man is supposed to be free and independent, then how does divine grace come in? He would not even need it. This is not true. Grace does exist. But no words can convey the truth of the concept of grace unless you first have reached this inner true religious experience. When you no longer need grace as a substitute for your own weakness, when you no longer make an asset out of your weakness, then you will become strong. At first you will live without any understanding of grace. But then the true concept of grace will dawn upon you. In other words, this interim state of aloneness has to be gone through first. The great mystics designate it as the dark night of the soul.

The saying just mentioned, "Thy will be done," rightly understood means: "I let go of my small selfwill, of my limited outlook, and I open myself so that the Divine can come to me." It will not come from without but from within, as a deep knowledge and certainty, but you will not disassociate yourself from this realization. It will not be a question for you of "either me or God." Both will be one. But this can happen only if you learn to let go. In other words, if you cease to be rigid. This is the true meaning. The false meaning of this saying makes man weak, stupid, and incapable, so that he needs another being to act instead of him, to decide instead of him. This other being then is often human authority, or Church authority which claims to act on behalf of God. "Thy will be done" does not mean obedience. It means opening yourself to the fullest possible extent so that the greater wisdom can become a part of yourself.

QUESTION: From what you say, it becomes clear that religion is a matter of the development of each individual soul to its optimum point through growth by way of search and self-realization. However, the churches have played a dominant role for many years. Therefore, it would seem that the church function will eventually fall away.

ANSWER: Yes, indeed, it will. When more people follow a path of self-recognition, of growing, and of developing their own resources, then they will no longer need authority. And for those who are not far enough in their development, then human law will suffice to protect society from the untamed and therefore destructive elements. The truly divine can only function in free souls, and this will happen. The whole trend of history points in that direction.

QUESTI0N: You told us about companionship and interrelationship. At times, one has to be alone. What is the right and wrong kind?

ANSWER: There is a simple answer to that, although not easily detectable. When you investigate your emotional reactions and you realize that you want companionship out of the fear of being alone, then the need for companionship springs, at least partly, from a wrong motive. If you want aloneness out of a fear to involve yourself -- a fear of people because the withdrawal aspect in you is rather strong -- then the striving for aloneness springs, again at least partly, from a wrong motive. In other words, both can be healthy as well as unhealthy. An integrated human being needs both, and he needs both for constructive reasons, rather than in order to avoid something that he fears. However, the answer which holds true can come only from an ardent self-examination.

QUESTION: I try to form words to express my inner conflicts. The words seem exaggerated. How can I keep my words level with that which I find in my search?

ANSWER: First of all, you will have to understand the reason for this exaggeration and dramatization of yourself. Once you understand that, then the need will lessen. There will be a more proportionate relationship between the one and the other. Again, the remedy is not to use self-discipline to stop it. Even if you should succeed, then another (perhaps even more harmful) symptom will come forth. Rather, use such manifestations as the useful symptoms they are.

QUESTION: Very often it is easy for one subconscious to talk to another. But there are times when there exists such a strong barrier that you cannot penetrate. The other person asks for the answer, yet he doesn't listen and you can't reach him.

ANSWER: The person who asks the question wants only a qualified answer. In other words, he does not want an answer that he finds unpleasant. This causes an inner resistance that is so strong that he cannot hear. So he cannot absorb what is being said to him. The attitude toward a person in this frame of mind is not to try to force the issue. The more inner force exists in you to penetrate the resistance, the more you will feel frustration and impatience. This is then bound to affect the other, and to increase the resistance even more. Moreover, it will be extremely useful to analyze the reason for your own frustration and for your own impatience. It may be more than the good will to help. In some way your capacity may seem to be involved. Or the acceptance of the truth may have an urgency for you which is not realistic. When such currents exist, then a mutually negative effect is established, which only worsens the inner problems in both. But finding what inner hidden role you play, so that this could become a problem for you, will be more than useful and beneficial, possibly even for both parties. If there were no negative or problematic tendencies in yourself, then you could accept another person's limitations. This is a general answer, applying to many.

If there is anything unclear regarding what I discussed here, I will be only too glad to elaborate on it next time.

May this first lecture of the year not only give you food for thought, but may it also be instrumental in bringing out certain feelings that as yet you have not been aware of. May these words cause emotional echoes in you. As you let this lecture take effect in you, then it will stir up so much. And this is good. I go from you with all our blessings for the coming year, for the work before you. Yes, help is given unto you, but try to recognize where you still somehow conceive of help as being an outside factor. In other words, as not having much to do with your own endeavors and your own strivings. Help is something that first of all you need to mobilize in yourself.

With this, my dearest ones, be blessed. Love and peace unto all of you. Be in God.