Repressed Needs -- Relinquishing Blind Needs -- Primary & Secondary Reactions

By The Pathwork Guide

Greetings, my dearest friends. God bless each one of you. God bless this lecture.

We began discussing needs, but we touched upon only the surface of this all-important subject. So let us go into it a little more thoroughly. First the awareness and then the understanding of the significance of your needs will be more than mere enlightenment and insight. It will show you that in connection with your unawareness of your repressed needs you will find all the twists and the unresolved conflicts within your soul, and therefore in your life. So this phase of your work carries you a great deal further and deeper than the work on the images, with their all wrong conclusions.

Basically, there are two kinds of needs: the instinctual needs and those of the idealized self image. Instinctual needs derive from the two basic instincts of self-preservation and of procreation. These needs can be healthy and normal. However, if they are repressed, then they will turn into potent forces of destruction. Therefore, it is not merely the false and imaginary needs that are destructive. A need which in itself is healthy and normal can be destructive where awareness of it is either repressed or non-existent.

Among the needs of the idealized self are the need for glory, the need to triumph, the need to satisfy vanity or pride. In order to understand this particular process, you have to review how the idealized self image came into existence.

These two kinds of needs often intermingle and fuse, so that you are no longer aware -- even unconsciously aware, if I may use this seeming paradox -- of what is a healthy and legitimate need and what is not. They intertwine and overlap. Not only do the superimposed, unhealthy, and artificially created needs of the idealized self create guilt feelings, but just as often the healthy, normal, and legitimate needs of every healthy human being cause equally strong guilt feelings. Often this is due to the influence of the environment, to distorted mass images, and to mass misconceptions. Your ignorance, and the ignorance of educators and parents, has created a distorted view that induces you to repress and to subdue what should be encouraged in a constructive way. This overall ignorance fails to recognize that which is intrinsically human, and even necessary.

Once you free yourself of resistance and repression, then it will be a great relief to recognize that often that which you felt most guilty about is not only normal and healthy, but that it is most creative. Because of these misconceptions you have deliberately starved your needs. Due to such starvation, they cannot disappear but, by a process of displacement, they reappear in a destructive way, so that you unconsciously try to gratify their insistent claim in a manner that cannot do justice to their real demands. The driving force to still your hunger is misdirected. Proper direction and adequate striving to gratify your real, legitimate needs can occur only if full awareness exists, so that intelligence can combine with the instinctual forces.

Your misconception about this subject produces repression and subsequently a defense mechanism which is very destructive. Some of my friends have had occasion to get a glimpse of it. You may ask: "What does the defense mechanism have to do with this?" The answer is: Your repressed needs cause you to act contrary to your own best interests so as to gratify these needs. Therefore your actions produce experiences that starve these needs even more. Since this hurts, you produce a defense against such hurts that is even more contrary to the fulfillment you crave.

This shows the direction of your work now. This entire process has to be unrolled and brought into awareness. Only then will you be able to develop a more adequate behavior pattern that promises to bring the result you wish and which is nothing to be ashamed of merely because it brings you happiness and fulfillment.

Thus you may see that your defense mechanism exists not only because you fear the risk of life, the risk of love, and the risk of involvement, but also because of your mistaken idea that certain needs are wrong and therefore forbidden. So you also defend against the needs in yourself. I am not only talking about what is already commonly known in this respect -- sexual needs. It goes a lot further. By now humanity has learned that sexual needs do not have to be repressed. They are not, in themselves, harmful and sinful. But it has not as yet realized that many other needs also exist that have experienced a treatment similar to that put upon the sexual needs. These other needs, reaching into a deeper realm of humanity, have to be brought out, acknowledged, and properly directed, as has already been done, to a degree, with the sexual needs.

As I already stated, if your needs are repressed, then the urge for gratification becomes much stronger. This is logical because the awareness of a need -- the clear knowledge of it, will enable you to cope with it in the manner most appropriate under the particular circumstances. It will enable you to make a choice: to relinquish one thing in order to eventually obtain what is more rewarding for you. The ability to relinquish in that way indicates maturity. On the other hand, repression -- causing blind needs and the blind pursuit of them -- makes it impossible to see the issues involved. Therefore you cannot act for your own best interest. Where it may be necessary to relinquish in order to receive greater fulfillment, you cannot do so in certain circumstances because you do not see it. The pressing need causes you to hold tight to that which you can get, but which often is utterly inadequate. This unawareness, this blindness encourages the childish greed of attempting immediate fulfillment all along the line. If this proves impossible, then frustration is unbearable and you find yourself trapped, caught in your own vicious circle of continuing to do what is against your own interest. Only awareness of your needs will enable you to stand temporary frustration, if it is necessary, if it cannot be helped. You will be capable of relinquishing the urgency for immediate gratification in the far-sighted knowledge that in so doing you will serve the interests of your healthy needs. If not now, then at a future time. You make this choice freely, due to your awareness.

The unawareness of your needs, your unconscious guilt, and your belief that they are wrong freezes them into a hard knot. Therefore, the urgency for gratification makes it impossible to stand frustration. This is one of the marks of immaturity. The lack of gratification confirms to you the belief that you are wrong in having the need. This drives your awareness of the need into hiding even more and it causes you to be driven into the pursuit of its gratification. The result is that the urgency becomes even more potent and therefore more difficult to handle.

Now comes into existence the apparently paradoxical situation that the awareness of one's needs and of their legitimacy makes it possible to pursue their gratification. In order to do so, frustration becomes a factor that sometimes has to be endured. On the other hand, unawareness and repression create such an urgency that the immature, unconscious condition prevails in which you cannot stand frustration. You cannot relinquish even the slightest point, and you thereby sabotage the possibility of fulfilling your needs.

Off hand this may be difficult to understand, for it cannot be applied to specific factors. No general rules and regulations can be made. It can be understood if and when you find this process within yourself. In other words, how it manifests specifically in your case. As you allow yourself awareness of the raw needs, of their significance, of their validity, and of their desired goal, then you can proceed to observe what you have done in the past to sabotage them; how you have done so; what the defense mechanisms are that have caused such sabotaging. Finally, you will find one local point, deep within yourself, where you discover that you ferociously hold on. In other words, that you cannot relinquish. Therefore you are locked and enslaved in what is called, in your present day human terminology, a neurotic situation. All neurosis is built around such a nucleus of repressed needs and the inability to give up a certain point for the purpose of gratification. This causes the neurotic symptoms of helplessness, of dependency, of the inability to make a choice, of seeing only two equally dissatisfying alternatives. In this condition, you are torn in half. If there were not a part in you that disapproves of these needs, then you would not find it necessary to repress them. Hence, one part in you says No to them. And the more you say No, the more urgent they become, and the other part in you battles against the No, and it also battles against the world that does not offer gratification. Only your wholehearted support and cooperation can induce you to undertake the necessary actions and behavior patterns that will finally bring you a sufficient measure of fulfillment, even if not to the ideal extent of your childish fantasies. However, such actual, realistic fulfillment will produce much greater happiness, in spite of its lack of perfection as matched with your childish fantasies. This is in consequence of the strength and the self-reliance that you have acquired on the way. Moreover, of your knowledge that it is up to you and not up to others. And that will more than compensate for the difference between reality and illusion.

The point when you will find the place in you where thus far you have not been able to relinquish varies in time with each individual. Again, no generalization can or should be made. That would only mislead you and tempt you to seek the solution by an intellectual process, rather than, as I advocate again and again, by allowing your emotions to reach surface awareness and thereby finding the answers within yourself. Only by becoming aware of all this will you also find it possible to distinguish between the natural, healthy needs and the artificially created needs of the superimposed idealized self image. To the degree that you learn to maturely go about fulfilling your healthy, natural needs, to that degree you will become capable of giving up your false needs. You should not even attempt to forcefully stamp out these false needs. It would do no good. All you can and should do is to become aware of them on the one hand, while on the other gradually learning to do what is realistic and adequate in order to fulfill your real needs. This will automatically make your false needs disappear. First, their intensity will slowly diminish. But gradually they will disappear altogether as the fulfillment of your real needs comes to you out of your own healthy inner activities, and therefore also your outer activities. Even if gratified here or there, your false leave you empty and dissatisfied.

Where there exists this nucleus of division within -- of repression and therefore of self-destructive activities and undesirable results, of being caught in a trap of the inability to make a proper choice that would lead to constructive results -- there prevails in the psyche a festering inner condition that leads to a host of further conflicts which finally manifest in an outer situation wherein you cannot cope with what confronts you. You cannot determine and you cannot make a proper choice. In other words, you are driven. And since as within so without, you see only two equally dissatisfying alternatives. And you are torn between them. On the one hand, you bown down to your needs. By submitting, by appeasing, and by complying you become more angry with yourself and more contemptuous of yourself. On the other hand, you rebel against this need to satisfy your needs. None of these two alternatives will bring you a constructive result. In neither of these two alternatives have you found the point of relinquishing for the constructive end of eventually fulfilling your needs.

When this entire process reaches surface awareness, then it is one of the most important steps on your road to freedom. Once you understand how you enslave yourself in this way, then you will also become aware of your self-contempt. You unconsciously shifted this self-contempt onto the existence of your needs. Once all this reaches your consciousness, then you will find out that in reality there is no need for self-contempt because of your healthy needs. You will see that the real reason for your self-contempt is your inner unwillingness to relinquish. And as you learn to do so, a new strength and a new self-respect will evolve that will be a great experience for you. At the beginning it will appear only occasionally. But with each victory it will stay longer and the relapses will become weaker and less frequent.

As you find this subtle point of relinquishing, you will no longer be a slave to your needs, because now you are conscious of them. Moreover, because now you can go about finding the best way to bring fulfillment for yourself. The inability to relinquish is the most basic factor of your feeling of inferiority and of your feeling of inadequacy. The ability to relinquish will give you strength, self-confidence, and a healthy self-respect, which nothing else on earth could give you. As this strength develops within, then you can (a) give up your false, distorted, superimposed, artificial needs and (b) you can go about doing what is necessary to obtain gratification for your real needs. But this self-respect must be established first. Without it you are blocked. The destructive defense mechanisms, trying to do justice to two mutually exclusive drives -- for and against gratification of the needs -- is largely a product of your self-contempt due to your inability to relinquish.

But beware of finding a quick answer as to what this point of relinquishing is. Do not take a particular surface desire and sacrifice it in the mistaken idea that here you have found it. This may be misleading and it may simply encourage false self-sacrifice, defeatism, and self-destructiveness. Finding this point of relinquishing evolves only after a great deal of awareness of this process. When it comes, then you will feel right about it. There will be no doubt in your mind. Most of all, there will be no sense of loss, of giving up something precious. You will not feel how good you are in doing so. But you will do so in the full knowledge of what you are doing and why you are doing it. You will want to do it because you will understand fully that this serves your own interest, yet without being selfish. Only when such feelings accompany the point of relinquishing have you truly found it. Until then, you have to plough along in exploring your emotions; in bringing your repressed needs to the surface, and in unrolling this inner process, while observing your subsequent outer actions and your reactions.

When it comes to the subtleties of the human psyche, then misunderstandings and misinterpretations are even more apt to occur than on the more superficial levels of human life. So beware of the false sacrifice, which often substitutes for the real relinquishing, which is never a sacrifice. It is intelligent expediency, arrived at through fully facing a reality situation. If you relinquish something that is not yours to begin with anyway, then you do not "sacrifice." Hence you will not be led into the dangerous illusion of relinquishing something that could be yours -- and then feeling false self-satisfaction as opposed to real self-respect. The point of relinquishing means the discovery of where your will power has no jurisdiction, and adjusting to that which is, while gathering your strength to do that which you can do. In other words, it means giving up only an illusion, an illusion which you cling to out of your pressing unconscious needs.

Do not let it bother you if most of you are completely at sea when I talk about this point of relinquishing. It will come, slowly but surely, as you proceed in this work. For those who are not doing this work with the help of another, then it may be difficult to even understand what I am talking about.

A further factor of this condition of repressed and mischanneled needs -- with all their consequences that sap your strength and your self-respect -- is the ability to relate and the ability to react. If you think about it, then it is obvious. For, the more urgent your needs are -- and while being unaware of them, the blinder you must be -- then the less capable you are of being alive and the less capable you are of being free in a reality situation -- and therefore of responding to the situation in an appropriate and adequate way. Such inadequate response cannot fail to set negative chain reactions in motion.

In this connection we may speak of primary reactions and of secondary reactions. The healthier a psyche is -- in other words, the more free it is of the condition we just discussed -- the less enslavement exists, and therefore the more it will be capable of having primary reactions. By this I mean the following. You will react originally and spontaneously either to another person or to a situation only if you are not caught in the trap of your repressed needs, with the ensuing negative condition we discussed here. If you are unable to stand frustration -- and therefore are unable to relinquish, because you do not dare to face an unwelcome reality situation and cope with it -- then you cannot be spontaneous. You do not dare to consult your intuitive impressions, which are so valuable. You are encased in your dependent waiting, and therefore your responses and your reactions will be secondary ones. They will be based on what you think the ractions of others towards you are. This prohibits truth, it prohibits spontaneity, and it prohibits reality. In secondary reactions, you focus your inner -- often unconscious -- attention solely on responding to what you believe exists, not to what actually exists. In primary reactions -- as a result of having freed yourself of the illusion that it is possible to bring gratification for your repressed needs -- you are capable of seeing what actually is.

The more repressed -- and therefore the more urgent -- your natural needs are, the more will you be in blindness. as a result, the more limited your outlook is bound to be. Therefore, the more likely it is that you will misjudge other people's reactions towards you. For instance, you may take it for granted that you are hurt or rejected by another person, when in reality no such thing exists. The unawareness of one's needs distorts reality in either direction. Everything is either exaggeratedly good or exaggeratedly bad, either exaggeratedly favorable or exaggeratedly unfavorable. You are incapable of dealing with the situation properly and you are incapable of evaluating people corectly. You are only capable of experiencing secondary, conditioned responses. Even if they happen to be in truth, they are unreliable and therefore will never give you a feeling of security. Only the capacity to experience primary, original, direct responses brings out the reliable intuitive picture that is based on solid ground. It derives out of yourself, out of your own freedom, out of your ability first to face and then to cope with a situation, even if it is against your liking -- thus making you capable of relinquishing your illusion. Secondary reactions come out of clinging to illusion and therefore not daring to see what actually is. For example, if your need to be liked is so strong that you do not face the possibility that you may not be liked, then you are incapable of observing the situation objectively and freely, and therefore of finding out how it really is. You do not dare to allow yourself to like the other person until you are sure that you are liked. If a liking for you transpires, then you will like the other person. This is a secondary reaction. Your liking the other person may be in truth; but it may also be based on considerations that have nothing to do with reality. However, if you are free enough to cope with not being liked, then you will simply see what is and then react spontaneously on the ground of your own observations, uninfluenced by your needs. Thus you have relinquished the pressing need to be liked for the sake of the truth of the situation. Only when you deal with this truth will you be in a position to do what is called for in order to fulfill your needs. Either your free and spontaneous reaction will produce favorable circumstances for you, so that you will be liked, or in your spontaneous or primary reaction, seeing the truth, you will see that approval or liking by this particular person will yield you no gratification anyway, and you will be free to find a compatible person elsewhere. Whether this applies to a mate, to friends, or to general human contact makes no difference. Perhaps with this example, simple as it is, you will get a better idea of the process that I am describing here.

The ability to have primary reactions is of the utmost importance. The inability to have them comes from the repression of one's needs, from the clinging to illusion because of it, and the subsequent inability to relinquish the illusion and to see the reality situation. At the same time, the absence of primary reactions strengthens your enslavement. You become more and more dependent on others, and therefore you fear others. And the tragic thing is that your dependency is often based on completely illusory occurrences, on completely illusory factors, and on completely illusory conditions. So you battle against something that does not exist and thus you forfeit your chance of fulfilling your good and healthy needs. In order to do the latter, the freedom and the strength of developing primary reactions is a necessary prerequisite. It has to be tackled from both ends. By making your repressed emotions and your repressed needs more and more aware, you will uncover your persistence in clinging to illusion and your persistence in clinging to false hope; your not wishing to face reality; and your not wanting to relinquish a desired goal, be it only in the form of an illusion. This process will free you to develop primary reactions. On the other hand, by observing the fact that you respond conditionally and not originally, you will finally become capable of daring to react unconditionally, originally, and thus produce primary reactions. This will help you to face reality and to relinquish illusion, so as to be free for the pursuit of the fulfillment of your real needs,

I realize that this is not an easy lecture. For most of you it will take quite a while to truly assimilate it. The better you advance in your personal work on this path, then the sooner this will happen. I am happy to observe that some of my friends are very close. If now you gain even an inner realization, an inkling of understanding of some of my words, then it will be of great help. Once you come across this inner condition on your work on the path -- with all the various aspects described here -- it means more than another victory and it will be a great step forward. It means that you are close to resolving a sick, distorted aspect of your soul that has brought you much unnecessary misery and frustration.

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Are there any questions now?

QUESTION: How do you determine which is an artificial need and which is a natural need?

ANSWER: Let us suppose that you discover a need to gratify your vanity. You know perfectly well that this is not a necessity for living. One can live very well without this. However, such a discovery cannot and should not be used to moralize with yourself and to try to force the need away. This would only lead to further repression. It it necessary for you to find out why these needs exist. You are bound to find that a real and healthy need has been starved and that the artificial one has taken its place. The fact that certain needs are false should not be accepted just because I say so. The best way to determine the real need from the false need is to consider what the fulfillment of the need brings to you and to others.

The fulfillment of a false need brings a shallow, temporary, short-lived gratification, often at the expense of another person, or at the expense of a more urgent need of yourself. On the other hand, the fulfillment of a real need produces something constructive for everyone concerned. Your gratification will also be constructive for others, and it will not hamper other important factors in your own personality. It is the outcome of growth and it produces further growth, aside from the happiness and the fulfillment.

When you discover a healthy need, then unhealthy factors must have come into it if your awareness of this need has been repressed. This then causes the healthy need to get out of hand and to become so strong in its intensity that it becomes even more impossible to face reality, to cope with frustration, and to relinquish illusion in connection with it. As you examine all these factors within yourself, you cannot help but become aware of which are constructive, healthy, real needs and which are not.

QUESTION: What about a strong need for harmony?

ANSWER: In itself it is a healthy need. But if it becomes so strong that in order to gratify it, you forfeit, for instance, your equally healthy and equally legitimate need for self-assertion, your need for independence, your need for success, your need for happiness, and your need for fulfillment -- all of which require a healthy fighting spirit -- then there is something wrong that is most harmful for you. You cling to the need for harmony, thus violating another essential part of your being, resulting in repression, in discontent, in anxiety, in a sense of failure, and in a sense of self-contempt. This is often exteriorated onto others. As long as your need for harmony does not interfere with other needs and you are capable of occasionally relinquishing your need for harmony in order to gratify your other needs, then everything is fine. Only you can be the judge of whether or not this is so. In your further self-finding you are bound to determine this -- and then you can go on from there.

QUESTION: When you touch upon these deep roots, when you are able to recognize what causes this complete twist in your psyche and how it manifests in many areas and then this area becomes very rampant, you become ill and you fight to survive this. How do you combat the severe reactions when you really get to these twists?

ANSWER: When there is such a strong reaction -- such a negative experience -- then something in you still fights against giving it up. This means that a part in you still believes that its existence provides you either with some advantage or with protection. Instead of forcing it away, you should set out to find in what respect you believe that an advantage exists for you in maintaining the twisted condition, and in what way you believe, in some part of your being, that its absence will be a disadvantage of some sort. Your battle -- manifesting in your severe reaction -- is partly due to trying to force it away without understanding the irrational belief of advantage versus disadvantage. As long as such understanding is lacking, then you must experience an extreme anxiety, because the twisted condition has a function in your erroneous unconscious belief. So set about finding it and your battle will cease.

Due to ignoring this, you are temporarily unable to change. This makes you even more impatient with yourself. You want to speed yourself up in order to free yourself, yet you cannot do so without experiencing extreme discomfort. This impatience at the delay engages you in a battle with yourself, which only heightens your fear of giving up a precious defense.

Your impatience is caused to a large degree by your unconscious misconception that you have to be perfect in order to experience happiness and fulfillment. But this is not true. Because of this misconception, you become frantic when you have discovered a distortion. Therefore, you are not able to let go of it because further understanding is still missing. In this frantic state, it is even more difficult to discover the imagined disadvantage that makes you hold on to the condition in question.

QUESTION: When you begin to realize this deep frustration, this deep aggression you have, which is caused by your neurosis, you become ill before you are aware of it on a conscious level. You unconsciously escape in many ways by not facing the very thing in you which you feel destroys your whole structure. Once you do recognize it, then it does go away to some degree, but then something else even deeper comes up, and you escape once more into this same illness. This is my problem. How do you break this pattern of escaping even into illness?

ANSWER: You mentioned that something even deeper comes up. In this instance, it is the answer of why you battle against giving up the sick, the erroneous solution -- whether it is illness or anything else that offers you an escape. As I said before, the imagined advantage of the false solution pushes to the surface, but the personality is afraid of facing it. Thus, the same process of overcoming resistance has to be gone through again. In this process, it often appears that one finds the same elements over and over again. It is the spiral movement of evolution and of development. As you proceed in this way, you will become aware of the escape and the resistance at the moment it manifests, while previouly you found it only retrospectively. Such synchronization is the only indication of true progress. The negative manifestations do not vanish after having been discovered just once. They will reappear again and again, as you observe them at work, with shorter and shorter intervals between occurrence and discovery, until the two synchronize and then finally vanish. This is the spiral that becomes narrower and narrower, until finally ending at one point. Ignorance of this process often causes distress because you may believe that you have relapsed, and this makes you even more impatient, even more frantic, and even more hopeless. But your understanding of this will enable you to relax and to observe further, so that answers which are still hidden will come to the fore. These answers not only make it easier to narrow the gap between the wrong reactions -- which derive from the negative condition and its subsequent manifestations -- but they will lead to finally giving up the twisted, damaging defense mechanism. Do you understand?

QUESTION: Yes, but it just seems so endless.

ANSWER: No, it is not endless. The spiral movement becomes smaller and narrower, as I just said. But there finally comes a point when a change occurs within, almost as though by itself. A new reaction pattern becomes noticeable, which you started almost unknowingly, as it were. This is the result of a long struggle. But if you do not let up -- and if you go through the seemingly discouraging repetitions, each time finding the same thing anew -- then you will finally experience this automatic, spontaneous new reaction. It is never a forced and deliberate thing. If it is, then it is not genuine.

QUESTION: For instance, when you have a recognition that you cannot be satisfied with second best, while knowing this to be immature and unrealistic, but I can't feel different. It is impossible.

ANSWER: In this case, too, there is an underlying reason missing. You have to accept the fact that this distortion spoils things for you, rather than bringing you advantages. The more you observe and understand this, the sooner you will find that you maintain it because the child in you believes that it will provide you with more happiness. Only the calm observation of which is true and which is not, of which is more advantageous and which is not will finally enable you to relinquish and therefore to change. This change, too, will come as if by itself. The observation of this process -- the understanding of why the psyche retains it -- will produce results, whereas battling against it forcefully will not.

QUESTION: Besides the psychological approach, is it not true that prayer and turning to God, asking for help, is of great assistance to us?

ANSWER: The psychological approach is prayer in action. If you really analyze what happens here, then you will find that in all the distortions that you first find, then acknowledge, and finally understand -- but without self-moralizing -- you do the best thing you can possaibly do to purify yourself. The so-called psychological approach is not in contradiction to the spiritual approach. Of course, prayer is of help and is to be recommened. But I have to give you more than advocate prayer. And you have to do more than merely pray for help. You have to observe your attitude in prayer. This is a deep and subtle thing. If when you pray you find the hidden attitude that you expect God to do it all for you, then your approach to prayer is not only unconstructive, but it also indicates a deeply rooted wrong attitude about life and about your role in it. If you pray for help, but with the realization that you have to do it, that you have to face yourself and eventually change due to full understanding, that you have to want to see the truth, that it depends on your efforts and on your willingness, then prayer is useful -- provided this full intent exists in you. There is a fine distinction between this healthy and right attitude, and the false idea that you just sit and then wait for God to do it all for you. The latter kind of prayer will do no good whatsoever.

QUESTION: But the spiritual approach which you have taught and which has added so much to the psychoanalyitical approach -- I was just wondering?

ANSWER: I discussed in this lectures why it is healthy and good for you in this particular phase of your development to put less stress on the so-called spiritual and more emphasis on the so-called psychoanalytical. For us, it is all one and the same. They are merely different facets, different aspects, different approaches, and different ways to the same end. Emphasis on the spiritual maintained too long and at the expense of such self-finding only leads to escapism and to the false religion I discussed recently. It leads to the wrong concept of God. When you re-read this lecture, then you will understand what I mean. The idea that you neglect God by not discussing Him is utterly untrue. The idea that by focusing your attention on your distortions so as to be able to change them would lead you away from spirituality is also utterly untrue. Common sense will tell you so. If such vague ideas exist, then they could be due to the fear of first digging up and then changing what wants to remain hidden. It may be the expression of a childish hope that merely by speaking about God, about the spirit world, and about its laws you will be able to change without pain and without discomfort. This cannot be done. Further intellectual understanding about spiritual factors would not induce an inner change. But what you are doing now on the Path is bound to bring about an inner change that will bring you closer to true spirituality than all the words you hear in the world from religiour teachers, no matter how true and how beautiful they are. An outer belief is one thing, the inner capacity of living these beliefs is an altogether different question. It takes a great deal more time, more effort, and more pain to achieve the latter. Unfortunately, this is neglected by all religious denominations and by all societies. They still deal merely with the thinking process, which often contradicts and conflicts with the real inner life, the life of the emotions.

May all of you find in this lecture something that will bring a little more light into your darkness and help you in your work. May you find a further incentive, more hope, more strength, and an inner push, but without being either tense or anxious, so as to free yourself from your own enslavement, so as to make yourself whole instead of divided. Go in peace, my dearest ones, on this glorious road of self-realization and of freedom. Be blessed, be in God.

December 10, 1961