Moralizing -- Disproportionate Reactions -- Needs

By The Pathwork Guide

Greetings, my dearest friends. God bless all of you. Blessed is this lecture. The last time I discussed the importance of becoming aware of your emotions. I spoke about mankind's neglect of emotional development. Now I wish to discuss a few important aspects of that which you may expect to find once you allow your emotions to reach surface awareness. These are prevalent generally, and therefore every human being will have all of them in some degree.

After repression is discontinued, you will find certain definite individual negative emotions, such as hostility, resentment, aggressiveness, and envy. But in addition to these negative feelings, you will also find certain entire conditions prevailing in the psyche. It is important to recognize that these conditions do exist, what they mean in terms of reality and maturity, and how they breed the negative emotions about which, either consciously or unconsciously, you feel so guilty.

Let me discuss three such conditions. The first one is a tendency to moralize with yourself, and therefore also with others. Often such moralizing does not appear outwardly at all. In fact, outwardly the very opposite may be true. But inwardly it exists to some extent with all human beings. We have already discussed this aspect in the past in connection with the idealized self image: with the excessive demands and expectations you have of yourself -- and therefore of others; and with the rigid standards that you think you should live up to. But we have not discussed this subject from the point of view of moralizing. For, if you expect impossible standards of perfection of yourself, then moralizing is a necessary resultant. And I wish to show you how such moralizing stifles the living spirit of the good and the true to which you aspire; how it makes you arrogant; how it makes you intolerant; how it prohibits the humility of self-acceptance, and therefore of liking yourself. Without that, self-respect is impossible.

All this should be found in your emotions. It is one thing to know and to understand these theories, but it is altogether different to live and to experience these conditions within yourself. Only this work of exploring the depths of your emotions and gaining clarity regarding their significance will make it possible to change these conditions that are so harmful. This aspect of moralizing may exist in many a subtle form, even with those who outwardly appear quite rebellious against all moralizing laws and rules.

Many of my friends have encountered this trend in their recent work and in subsequent progress. Regardless of the words used to designate this aspect, the finding of this element definitely shows your progress. Since some of you have come across this aspect, or are about to do so, I shall take up this subject in more detail and show you connections that you would not have understood without your progress in this work. This applies to the other two aspects I shall discuss later.

What is the meaning of such moralizing? Off hand, you may say "what is wrong about it? Are we not taught by all that is good and right, nor only in religion but in philosophies, the importance of goodness, of decency, and of righteousness? Should we not adhere to these rules? do we not need them? Without them, then we may not be such good people." It is true that humanity is still far too undeveloped to live without outer laws. When it comes to conduct and actions, then such laws serve as protection and are a necessity. But it is altogether different to expect of yourself to be quite free of negative impulses and emotions, and then to reject yourself because they exist. This non-acceptance of yourself as you are induces you to hide what you disapprove of. And whenever a crisis brings it out, then you have a stringent, rigid, moralizing attitude about yourself. It is one thing to know that something is far from perfect and it is another to forbid yourself to feel what you cannot help but feel at this time, and then to dislike the whole of yourself -- as is often the case -- even though you may not be conscious of it.

So long as your right conduct is motivated by stringent self-moralizing based on good or bad, then your goodness or your righteousness is not genuine. It does not come out of natural insight and inner growth, but it arises out of fear: the fear that you harbor about yourself, about your imperfection. Therefore, such goodness is ineffectual and unconvincing, both for yourself and for others. It is a compulsion. And you cannot be in reality, for reality cannot be evaluated in terms of either good or bad. When it ceases to apply to very crass issues, then the borderlines are subtle and hazy. Therefore, they cannot be settled by quick judgments in terms of good or bad. The truth can be found only deep within yourself and not from rigid laws and rules that you borrow because you are too insecure to delve into your own soul. Instead, you adhere to such ready-made rules. When you do, then you moralize.

Any kind of goodness that results out of this condition is always a poor and shallow imitation of the real. Because you are too insecure to trust yourself you believe that you need rules and regulations to govern you. And since you do so, you cannot lose this insecurity, but you actually become more insecure. This is so because the rules and the regulations are so inadequate that you are left with nothing to hold on to. This creates another vicious circle.

If you do not trust yourself, then you have to borrow a rigid structure of morality in order to protect yourself from your own untamed instincts. The alternative is not either the living out of these untamed destructive impulses or in living according to these rigid outer rules. The healthy, constructive way is through inner growth that must eventually make you come out of your destructive impulses. But where this cannot be done as yet because you simply are not that far developed, then you need not live them out, but you should notice them. Then you can see their existence without falling into the error of picturing yourself as all bad, as all despicable, as all black in your own eyes. This exaggeration of your self-evaluation is connected with the second condition we shall discuss in a little while. One single imperfection has the power to color your entire emotional experience regarding yourself. This is not an intellectual conscious judgment, but rather your emotional reaction to yourself.

Due to this all-black view arising out of only certain negative instincts or feelings, you have an inordinate fear of them. The more you fear these imperfections, the more stringent the moralizing structure will be. The more demanding the standards of perfection in your idealized self image are, the more rigid will be the superstructure, which is not your real nature. Alienation from yourself and intolerance exist in you due to this condition. And this is often projected onto others.

Your idealized self image is created not only for getting love and approval from others -- as you believe it will -- but it also serves the purpose of protecting you from yourself.

Where there is immaturity and emotional disturbance, then there must be found a superstructure of rigid adherence to rules. This always brings moralizing in its wake. This aspect may often be difficult to detect. It may also exist in certain isolated areas and manifest in indirect ways, needing a keen eye for detection. My advice is not to labor to find this aspect by an artificial and intelllectual process, but to be aware of the fact that it does exist in you. Therefore, expect to find it at some time. Your work will lead you to this condition sooner or later. Then you will become fully aware of it and you will see in what way and concerning what aspects of your inner life this holds true. Verify how you despise yourself for not living up to perfection, how you do not accept and like yourself because unsuspected negative trends exist in you. Instead of trying to whisk such emotions away, learn to accept yourself in spite of them. Learn to see your real value in spite of the existence of these destructive trends. This must be the way. It is the only way. Because your attempt to magic away what still exists in you leads to repression, and therefore to a false image of yourself. It leads not only to self-deception, but to alienation from your real self in borrowing ready-made rules. This condition produces the moralizing attitude and all the rigidity that is tied up with it.

These rules and regulations -- in place of your real self -- may not always be general ones. They may vary according to personality, to background, to early teachings, to circumstances, and to temperament. General ethics aside, what one person may find wrong and prohibited, another person may not.

This structure actually takes the place of the self. Thus, you trust in rules rather than in yourself. And this is a very shaky security, for such rules may often be inapplicable to certain reality situations. You may often have to grope and find yourself confronted with a situation of not knowing what the right thing is. However, if you cannot accept yourself as a human being, fallible and often confused, then this unavoidable occurrence has the power to disrupt you completely. You attribute the disruption to the situation itself, but in reality it stems from your attitude to yourself in connection with the situation. You always want to find the final solution at once. And this urge is dictated by the false belief that you prove yourself unworthy if you admit that you do not know the answer; or that you simply have negative, undeveloped reactions. So the first thing to learn on this Path is the ability to accept not only your fallibility, but that you do not know the answer. If you learn that and, at the same time, you still like yourself, then, gradually but surely, your emotions will grow up and your reactions will change. Then a healthy trust in yourself -- in your natural, spontaneous reactions -- will follow. You will become more lenient with yourself and you will no longer need perfection as the only basis for respect.

If it is too difficult for you to let go of the superstructure of fixed rules, then it is so because you cannot accept your human fallibility. I purposely refrain from showing you how the healthy, mature, and flexible person will handle his confusions and his desire to do the right thing. For this would only produce a forceful, ungenuine inner action on your part, instead of first learning to accept your imperfection without losing faith in the whole of you. Once you are a little more advanced in this phase of the Path, then I will help you with further clues. As of now, most of you feel very unhappy whenever an issue is befogged and your known rules and regulations cannot be applied to a situation that bothers you. You first have to discover what bothers you most. This, of itself, is not such an unpleasant situation, but it is only the role you play in it -- falling short of your ideal of yourself, which requires that you always have perfect reactions and that you instantly know all the answers. When this proves impossible, then underneath your bitterness and your self-pity you do not forgive yourself for this imperfection. In other words, you moralize with yourself. You find yourself bad and wrong, even though you may not allow such opinions into your conscious mind.

The second condition I want to discuss is the matter of your disproportionate reactions, your exaggerations. Again, some of this has been discussed in the past. I mentioned, for instance, how you often over-dramatize yourself. But in the way we discussed it previously, it applied to the crass outer manifestations of this aspect, particularly demonstrated by a certain personality structure. But this aspect also exists with those who are outwardly very undramatizing about themselves. In other words, it may not show. Yet, on some level of emotional reaction, it always exists. When you proceed with this work on yourself and you learn to allow your emotions to come to the surface of your awareness and you determine their meaning and their significance, then you will find not only negative feelings that you had been unaware of; not only this moralizing attitude; but you will also discover how you experience certain happenings, your reactions, and the reactions of others as disproportionate to their reality value. As a result of the work that you have done, some of you have already discovered that such exaggerated emotional reactions do indeed exist in you. You have begun to sense -- at least to some degree and in isolated instances -- how overly strong certain reactions are relative to reality. This applies not only to negative incidents but also to positive or favorable incidents.

This is based on the childish view of the world as either all good and happy, or completely bad and unhappy. You have not yet realized to what degree this attitude still exists in all of you, even in those of you who have made some discoveries along these lines. This either/or attitude is the basis for emotional disturbance, for immaturity, and for ill health as such. But it also particularly makes for the moralizing attitude, as well as for the disproportionate emotional reactions (note that consciously and outwardly this need not be apparent).

For instance, a little compliment, in itself unimportant, can save the day for you. A passing approval may make all the difference about your mood. By the same token, any little criticism or disapproval may completely spoil your mood. It may plunge you into depression and ill humor. The former disproportionately raises your self-confidence, the latter disproportionately lowers it. There are many other examples, but you will have to discover these reactions in yourself as you go along, learning how to take your emotional reactions out of hiding. In either case, you rise and you fall by one single aspect -- whether true or false -- as to how another person thinks of you or feels about you. In the former case, emotionally you feel yourself as being wonderful, good, perfect, lovable, faultless. In the latter case, a little criticism makes you feel as no good at all, at least in the eyes of the other person. This is hard to detect because intellectually you know that it is all nonsense, so that whenever such reactions appear, then you stifle your full evaluation of them. You either ascribe your strong reactions to other factors that are not half as responsible, or you simply ignore that which made you react that way. You quickly repress, and therefore displace, the true origin of your feeling, and so you move away from reality. You no longer see yourself in the light of truth in relation to the world around you.

The connection between disproportionate emotional reactions and self-moralizing is quite evident. Both are based on an either/or attitude, as well as on your own stringent standards for and demands of yourself, your non-acceptance of your being merely human. Thus, approval and compliments make it appear that you actually are living up to your expectation of yourself. In that moment the world is good, right, and beautiful. In such childish either/or attitude, this is it, this is final -- until your next disillusionment. And since the world is good and beautiful, then you can be what you think you should be. On the other hand, disapproval, criticism, failure is also final. Now the world is all black, and therefore all bad. You are unable to and are prevented from living up to what you think you should be. The one fault distorts your whole vision and now you are all bad, hopeless, and consequently crushed. Thus you are incapable of taking criticism in a constructive way. Yes, you may make the outer gestures and you may appear to do so, but your inner reactions belie the appearance.

One sign of maturity is the ability to take criticism and frustration in a relaxed, constructive way. I have often mentioned this in the past. The mature person is able to do so because he is in reality. He does not expect the impossible of himself. Therefore, he accepts himself as a decent and likeable human -- but without being perfect. Such a person knows that criticism does not make him all bad and all wrong.

The work on this Path now calls for the awareness of what you really feel, letting out your emotions and your true reactions. Without it, you cannot ever find the specific aspects that prohibit your true growth. It demands of you that you do away with the outer mask of appearance and that you muster the courage of admitting and owning up to such childish reactions. The more strongly you hold on to the perfectionistic ideals of yourself, the less willing you are to give them up, and the more you will resist displaying your emotions where it would be constructive to do so.

The procedure is to let these emotions come out without trying to change them. For you cannot do so. Simply recognize their existence in you. While you do so, then learn to accept yourself with them. This will do more for genuine self-respect than all the forceful, ungenuine striving for a perfection that is simply not attainable through growth. By the mere fact of repeatedly observing your childish reactions, the strength of these reactions will lessen. You will become capable of observing such emotions without self-contempt, and therefore without repression and without self-moralizing. The nagging unconscious suspicion that you are incapable of being what you believe you should be will subside, because now you begin to accept yourself. Needless to say, this suspicion is well-founded. As this suspicion and your anger about yourself subside, you automatically build on real, safe ground, on that which is feasible. Therefore, your self-confidence will grow proportionately to your acceptance of yourself. You will base your often unconscious opinion about yourself on what is realizable, possible, and feasible. Thus you are secure. While in the old way you based your self-respect and your self-like on standards that are unrealizable, impossible, and unfeasible. Thus you will be insecure. You can be secure only if the expectation is in accord with that which is feasible.

In other words, when criticism comes your way, or the frustration of your will due either to your own failings or to the failings of other people, then you can take it in a relaxed way. You know that your whole being is not at stake because of this one aspect. In other words, you know that it is actually only one aspect of yourself or of your life. Then you will come to trust in yourself and to trust that you are capable of taking it in a flexible way and that you are able to learn from such an experience. Thus it will not crush you, but it will give you new insight and a new understanding about the self and about others. Hence, you will not fear criticism, you will not fear frustration, you will not fear failure like the plague against which you have to constantly guard yourself by setting up all your defenses. These defenses are destructive in themselves. Without these defenses your soul will be open and relaxed, always providing you with a perception and an inner experience of reality. With such a foundation established, then real, secure self-confidence and self-respect -- not its counterpart -- is the inevitable outcome. Rigid, perfectionistic standards result in the prohibition of making mistakes, in the prohibition of receiving criticism, in the prohibition of experiencing failure. Something deep down in you knows perfectly well that you are not perfect, and therefore that you are bound to make occasional mistakes, that you are bound to receive criticism, that you are bound to be frustrated from getting what you wish. If you deny this inner knowledge, then you deny the truth, and therefore you try to base your life on false strongholds. If you accept it, then you not only accept the truth, but you base your life on that which can give you real security. By the proper reaction to your humanness, with all its failings, you build on a rock. By denying it, then you build on sand. The question of security and self-confidence is based on these alternatives.

The observation of these emotional reactions means observing your immaturity. Only by being capable of doing so will maturity grow in proportion. And now we come to the third condition you will find in your observation of your emotions, and that is the subject of needs. This, too, has been discussed in the past to some degree. But with the evidence of progress in reaching deeper levels of self-understanding, I can give you a little more material on this subject and show you a few more links between these various aspects that in the past -- while the inner knowledge was lacking -- could only be discussed as unconnected trends.

First, let us briefly recapitulate and understand what constitutes a need. A need can be something actual and real and it can be something imaginary and unreal. Let me give you an example of a real need in the physical realm. If you have not eaten for a while, then you definitely need food. If you do not get it, then you cannot survive. So this is a real need. By the same token, you can have an unreal need for food. If your body has received all the food value it needs to remain healthy, but a craving for something not essential persists, then you have an unreal need. Although this unreal need manifests on the physical level, it comes either from an emotional disturbance, from a spiritual disturbance, from an inner mismanagement.

Both real needs and unreal needs exist also on the emotional level. The same holds true for the spiritual realm of the human personality. If a real need is neglected, due to inner disorganization and to mismanagement of the entire human personality, then an unreal need will appear somewhere. Unreal needs always have the form of compulsiveness and of craving. Mismanagement in that respect will make the person helpless, and therefore dependent upon others to have his needs fulfilled.

The difference between children and adults is that a child is actually dependent for all its needs. It is incapable of supplying its needs by itself. The truly mature person can do so. If an emotional need is unfulfilled with a mature person, then it need not necessarily mean that this need is unreal. It may be a real need. But something in him must have made it impossible for him to obtain the fulfillment of this need. Everyone is endowed with the capacities he requires in order to fulfill all of his needs on all levels. If the personality does not function in a healthy way, then some of these capacities will be either paralyzed or put into wrong channels.

Since a predominant underdevelopment of man's emotional nature exists, then it is logical that there is a predominance of emotional unfulfillment. But such emotional underdevelopment may also result in manifestations on other levels, so that physical needs or spiritual needs may also originate from emotional disturbances.

Due to neglect in obtaining one's real needs, then illusory or imaginary needs appear. These should be regarded as symptoms of an unfulfilled real need.

You may say that an inordinate need for approval is unreal in itself. This need not be so. To a certain degree every human being needs occasional approval, let us say in the form of encouragement. If an inordinate, and therefore unreal, need for approval exists, then it is often because the person has unwittingly forfeited his real need for approval, his real need for encouragement, his real need for success. But instead of resenting the world for not supplying him with it, the growing person will try to discover how and in what way -- by what erroneous conclusions and destructive patterns -- he himself has short-circuited himself out of what he legitimately needs.

As always, the first step must be to become aware of your needs. Your Path, bringing out the emotions at this point, will help you to become aware of that. After you do so, after you concisely feel the emptiness of an unfulfilled need and you can pinpoint it, then you can set out to understand why you denied yourself what you truly need. You have to reconcile yourself to the fact that the awareness of your needs, both real and unreal, will not immediately fulfill them. You will see that it is possible to withstand such unfulfillment and that you can still be happy and still have self-respect. This is the ability to take frustration with the mature attitude that non-fulfillment is not an abyss. Only with this attitude can you then find the reasons why and how you yourself caused this unfulfillment. This is a slow way. If you approach it with the unpronounced attitude that an immediate change must occur in your life, then you will make it impossible to find what you need to know about yourself.

As you proceed in this direction, you will become aware of the needs as such. Then you will learn to distinguish between real needs and unreal needs by discovering that real needs can be born, while false needs have an excessive and compulsive force. You often repress them because they are so strong that they make you feel like you are dying just because they are denied.

Now let us find the link between the two aspects discussed previously and the unfulfilled needs. For one, you can see that all three conditions have the common denominator of the childish either/or attitude. It is impossible to withstand the frustration of an unfulfilled need if one regards it as a permanent state. In other words, if concerning what is actually a momentary situation it is felt that "this is it, forever." And your childish emotions, contrary to your mind, still feel that way. You exaggerate its importance. You are permeated with that momentary lack and emotionally you know of nothing else. For another, an unfulfillment points to your imperfection, to your vulnerability as a human being. The standards of your perfectionism do not allow this to happen, or even its acknowledgment. The more you are engulfed in this emotional deviation, then the more do you repress your real needs, the awareness of your unfulfillment, and the constructive search derived out of it. Therefore the unfulfillment increases, it regenerates itself, and it becomes more stringent.

Let us take the following example. To the extent that you are incapable of giving mature love and affection, to that extent you will need to receive love and affection. Or, if your need for approval is inordinately strong, then it is so in proportion to your disapproval of yourself. And why you disapprove of yourself we went into when discussing the subject of stringent standards that you think you should live up to. And because you cannot do so, you take to moralizing with youself.

It is of imperative that you become aware of your needs. You cannot do so through intellectual processing. You can do so only if you allow yourself to feel. As you learn to do so, you will be amazed to discover what needs you have. Then you will evaluate what in you caused this unfulfillment. The more you gain real understanding and insight about it, the less stringent the unreal needs become and the more you become capable of having your real needs fulfilled. Then this lessens your dependency on others. And to that degree, your self-confidence increases.

You will find trust in your own strength and in your own resourcefulness in the handling of your difficulties. But all of this necessitates, as a basis, your acceptance of yourself as you are. When you thus enter a benign circle, then such negative emotions as self-pity, as helplessness, as hostility, as guilt, and as resentment are bound to decrease, until they finally disappear.

These three aspects remain to first be found and then experienced through your feelings. You should experience the depth, the width, and the far-reaching significance of these emotions. Only after having broken a vicious circle will you enter into a benign circle.

***

QUESTION: In connection with moralizing, what would you call righteousness?

ANSWER: It depends in what connection this word is used. It is a matter of interpretation. This word is often used, for instance in Scripture, as doing good and being good, as doing the right thing. But in more recent times this word has taken on a different meaning with many people. When they use it, then they think of self-righteousness, of the very moralizing character I have discussed. In fact, it certainly comes from the fact that righteousness is indeed often self-righteousness due to the wrong attitude that we considered in detail here. It is just a different way of saying that a false goodness -- a forceful, ungenuine one -- produces a moralizing that many people rebel against. Genuine goodness -- that comes out of real growth -- will never have this effect on others.

QUESTION: What about the people who don't go according to morality, but who let their emotions guide their lives without recognizing the ethical laws?

ANSWER: I must say that I expected this question. In the first place, let us distinguish between morality and moralizing. These are not the same. In the second place, I never promised that people should live out in action and conduct what their destructive impulses dictate. It is one thing to be heedlessly and ruthlessly destructive and another to want to be a saint. In other words, to request of yourself that you be a super human being and not accept your undeveloped side. Accepting does not mean approving of it, or living it out. Accepting merely means that you know that these negative aspects still exist in you, but without anger that you are not above them and without disliking yourself as a whole for them. And this self-contempt -- for you as a whole, not just knowing about a certain negative side -- is connected with expecting too much of yourself, and therefore moralizing.

I might add here that the very people who fling morality into the face of the world -- perhaps because they cannot distinguish between true morality and self-righteous moralizing -- are often most strongly afflicted with a sense of guilt. It may not show, they may displace their guilt feelings by even stronger acts of immorality. It would lead us too far astray now to go into this question in detail. Perhaps at this point the question can best be summed up by saying that your still existing, actual immorality, which you are unwilling to face, makes you moralize with the self and therefore with others.

It is very difficult for you to judge what another person's state of mind and state of emotion is in this respect. You cannot look into it. But the more developed your intuition and your sense of perceiving are -- as a result of having freed yourself of your obstructions -- the more you will sense it. But this cannot come by judging out of intellectual knowledge, because you can never have sufficient information about another human being. You may perhaps sense it by relaxing about these things. You feel a certain ease and a certain lack of anxiety about the wrongdoings of the self and of the wrongdoings of others.

As you develop this aspect of yourself, then you will perceive intuitively where others really stand. You will finally come to the point where real morality is alive and flexible in you, and then you will dispense with the practice of false, rigid moralizing. Whoever thought that my discussion contained the message of doing away with moral codes has not yet understod the meaning. But in a state of health and of maturity then these existing codes become your own. By following them blindly and self-deceivingly, you take the spirit out of them and therefore you make them into something lifeless and untrue. Do you follow what I mean?

QUESTION: No. I don't. It seems to me that you used in your lecture, before the question came up, the word "moralizing." Now you used morality. It also seems to me that what you termed "moralizing" now had a different flavor from what you previously called "moralizing," or self-righteousness, and so on. I do not see or understand where the link comes in in what you said now in answer to the question. How can I know when something is right or wrong if I do not compare it with something like, for instance, the Sermon On The Mount, or the Golden Rule? Is that too rigid a rule?

ANSWER: In the first place, in answer to the question, I distinguished between living morality and lifeles moralizing. Moreover, I explicitly stated that all the truth of that which is good and right that has been brought to mankind by the great ones in history remains true. Whether or not it is genuinely so or falsely so depends on man's inner state of being. In other words, the state of his emotions and of his mind. The mere fact that a person lives according to these great truths neither indicates false moralizing nor true morality -- which is based on inner growth, which is based on the real self. The underlying motivations and the emotional forces at work indicate that. In many of the sayings of Jesus, as well as in the words of other great teachers, you will find indications and words in support of this lecture. They used their own terminology, fitting their time, but the basic meaning remains the same.

A great part of your question is already answered by the foregoing and when you study it quietly, then you will see it. I do not want to be repetitious now. Let me only repeat this. The more you need the existing rules, then the more it is a sign that you do not trust yourself. Because all the truth ever proclaimed and outwardly taught lives in you. If you do not dare to go deeply enough into your real being, then you will never come to that part of you where you discover it for yourself and thus make it a living reality. You will be independent of the observation of outer rules. No matter how true and how beautiful they are in themselves, they will not be alive and true in you. In man's insecurity -- in the fear of and the denial of that which he still is -- he borrows that which was alive at one time, and which could be alive for him once again. He needs the courage to become himself, the courage to let go of the rigid structure of that which could and should be alive in him. Do you follow what I mean?

QUESTION: Yes, I do, and then I don't. For instance, if I steal apples, how can I know that I steal if I have no way of comparing this act with another act of not stealing?

ANSWER: My dear child, if you would never in your life have heard that stealing is wrong, then you would still know, as the adult person you are, that you take something that belongs to another, and you would know that this is unfair to the other person. Even a human being who is not on a path of self-development and growth would know, provided he goes into himself and questions himself on his actions and how they affect others. This taking account of oneself in relationship to others is bound to bring the knowledge of what is right and what is wrong. This is exactly what I am trying to say: awareness and taking account, thinking further about cause and effect, will always yield that which is right and that which is true.

QUESTION: But about moralizing, you said that everything is a rigidity.

ANSWER: There is a deep misunderstanding here. You now seem to believe that I implied that every moral act is moralizing and rigid. All I invited you to do is to find where these aspects exist in you. You now believe that you should abstain from right actions. This is not so. What you should do, however, is to find where there exist in you super human expectations, standards that you cannot really live up to in your emotional being; and then your non-acceptance of yourself as a whole because of your disapproval of these trends as such. This is the moralizing. Moreover, such moralizing seldom applies to crass issues, but applies only to the subtleties of human interrelationships where matters cannot be evaluated in terms of good or bad. Moralizing also manifests when -- at least emotionally -- everything is experienced in such terms of either good or bad, either right or wrong.

The fact that you disapprove of the anti-social or immoral instincts that you still harbor induces you to deny their existence in yourself. Your confusion exists because you feel that awareness of them must mean living them out. It also exists because you think that disapproval of them means disapproval of yourself as a whole. Now, you may certainly be unaware that you do this, yet it is true with every one of you. Your stringent need to be free of any imperfection, to be free of any immoral instinct makes you hide their existence. You feel: "I should not have this." And when it trickles into your consciousness, then you do not forgive yourself. You hate yourself and you punish yourself. All this may be unconscious to a considerable degree, but that does not mean that it is not so. Therefore, you should find this condition. But this does not mean letting go of all moral standards out of new motivations, out of new desires, and out of new reasons. Then this will have an entirely different effect both upon you and upon others. It will make for a different climate, so to speak.

Your approach to this subject brought the entire question into a different area, into the area of doing. I was not discussing action. When it comes to feelings, then your own emotional attitudes to yourself -- the prerequisite of inner truth, and therefore of real self-respect -- can only be based on truth. The truth is that you are not as perfect yet as you want to be. If you cannot accept yourself as you are, in spite of the instincts that you disapprove of, then you cannot grow out of them. This is the nature of the last lecture. I might sum up the inner process in the following way: "If I have destructive instincts, then I am horrible. Therefore, I can neither like myself nor can I respect myself. Since this is too painful to bear, then I must look away from their existence. I only hope that by looking away, they become untrue." Do you now understand a little better?

QUESTION: Yes, I do. But I still do not see where moralizing comes in.

ANSWER: When one judges a whole for only one part, then moralizing occurs. When the whole becomes black due to trends which are only partly black -- or only partly white for that matter -- then moralizing occurs. When issues are experienced in terms of either good or bad, then moralizing occurs. There is so much leeway, so much else that has nothing to do with either black or white.

Save your other questions for next time. I have given you much material lately. If out of this material you have sufficient questions for discussion, and you so wish, I shall gladly put in a question and answer session next time.

Be blessed, each one of you, in your body, in your soul, and in your spirit. May the renewed strength that you receive, mainly due to your efforts, enable you to know yourself, to accept yourself, and to like yourself. Be in peace. Be in God.

October, 1961