Movement, Consciousness, Experience: Pleasure, the Essence of Life

In this lecture there are one or more comments on homosexuality. The Guide’s words on homosexuality have been a source of controversy in the Pathwork community. These words can cause pain, especially given one’s sexual orientation and experience of historic and present-day bias. We remind everyone that on this topic, as on all topics, the Guide invites us to find our own inner authority (IPF Board of Trustees September 2022).

Greetings, my dearest friends. God bless all of you. Blessed be this path of self-realization and self-unfoldment. All of you who make serious efforts to overcome your inborn resistance to facing and changing what is unrealistic and therefore destructive in yourselves will begin to reap the fruits of this endeavor. You will notice an increasing awareness of yourselves, and an increasing liberation of vital forces and energies.

Tonight I shall attempt to link several points that we had previously looked at separately, because you then lacked the inner understanding to establish a linkage. The general progress of this group now enables me to go deeper. And, as you know, on the deepest level all cosmic and human aspects unify.

A long time ago, I gave a lecture about the life force.[1]  Let us look into this again with the greater understanding you have gained. The life force is a free-flowing energy current, manifest in the entire universe. Wherever an organization fulfills certain essential conditions, it tunes into the life force. The life force permeates and revitalizes it. It lives. A living organism comes into existence.

We previously defined life from various points of view. Let us now be very simple about it. There are three essential elements that determine life:  movement, consciousness, and experience. As you may have noticed from a number of topics in the past, as well as from other observations, there are many triads in the spiritual structures of life. If harmony prevails in the living organism, the triad forms a whole, in which one aspect of the triad blends, balances, and harmoniously combines the other two. If the organism is in disharmony with the universal laws, the three factors oppose one another. So it is with this triad.

Let us look more closely at the significance of each of these three aspects. Without movement, life does not exist. What lives must move; when movement goes out, it is because life goes out. The entire universe is in motion because it is alive. This principle applies equally to every aspect of the human entity. On the physical level it is easy to observe. When muscles are not moved, they atrophy. Part of the physical body is losing its life. On the mental or intellectual level it is also noticeable. The brain that is not trained to think — to move — stagnates. It loses the capacity for thinking. It atrophies, just as the muscles of a body do when the body does not move. Thinking is a movement.

On the emotional level movement is generally more difficult to observe, unless one is on a path of self-exploration. You, my friends, are becoming aware of inner conditions of your emotional life that show how repression creates rigidity. Rigidity is the opposite of life, which is always flexible, always in motion. Feelings are movement, too. When feelings are prohibited, or manipulated so that they cannot function according to their own harmonious law, they deaden.

Hence, to be fully alive as far as movement is concerned, all levels of the personality must keep on moving in a natural, organic way. Growing is moving. As I have said so many times, without growth there is no life. And since growth is a movement, without movement there is no life.

Movement contains the quality of reaching out. It contains the elements of relationship, communication, love, understanding. It reaches out to the other being. Union is unthinkable without movement, because union involves always reaching beyond the confines of the self.

The second element of life is consciousness. We have discussed this so extensively that not much has to be said about it now. It is self-evident that to the degree that an entity is conscious, so is it alive. There are many degrees of consciousness. The human being is the first creature in the upward scale of life that possesses self-consciousness, awareness of itself in varying degrees. People such as you, my friends, who pursue a path of increasing self-awareness, raise their level of consciousness in the fastest possible way. Increased awareness of self must, perforce, increase awareness of others, of the universe, of life as a whole. Awareness determines the measure and direction of movement and regulates it according to reality. Movement without consciousness is bound to lose itself in wrong channels. It may be too extreme, or it may give in to apathy and stagnation.

On this path, you often detect how your emotional life either stagnates or is uncontrolled. Your awareness gradually regulates this and brings harmony into your emotional life. Frequently, you neglect physical and mental movement. But much more frequently, it is the emotional movement that you neglect. And even your neglect of physical and mental movement is only too often due to emotional stagnation.

The effort to increase consciousness is itself movement. On the other hand, movement without consciousness — or a limited degree of consciousness — hinders the harmonious movement of all personality levels. If, for example, movement and consciousness are directed exclusively toward outer matters, or if self-understanding is neglected, the integration of all personality levels cannot take place. The body and the mind may develop, but the spirit suffers when the emotional level is not infiltrated with movement and consciousness. Blind emotions of which one is not aware are a consequence of the lack of consciousness on the emotional level. When the movement of searching, thinking, discriminating, evaluating is not directed to hidden emotional areas, the movement of the emotions is off balance — in part blindly wild, manifesting, for example, in uncontrollable hostility, and in part paralyzing the best faculties of the feeling-body.

Experience is the third element of life. The fuller the experience, the more harmonious must be the interplay between movement and consciousness. Shallowness is lack of experience. When your feeling-body is paralyzed, your ability to experience must suffer. When your feelings are distorted and one-sided, it is because you misinterpret reality. In short, it indicates faulty awareness, insufficient consciousness. The ability to evaluate an experience determines the maximum of pleasure and the minimum of pain. For the former, feelings must be moving; for the latter, consciousness must function.

The higher the overall development of an entity, the greater its bliss and pleasure, and the less its pain and suffering. This is due to correct evaluation and realistic perception, and free-flowing movement unhampered by fears, inhibitions, and paralysis. In short, the experience of bliss results from the harmonious blending of movement, consciousness, and experience.

Experience contains the pleasure principle. The possibility for utter bliss is contained in the life force. It is your inborn longing to partake of this experience, which becomes possible when your entire organism is in harmony with reality, when you no longer fight against it because of misunderstandings.

When the deepest layers of the psyche are reached, it becomes apparent that the raw, primitive instincts are concerned only with the experience of pleasure. Behind the superstructure of moral standards, laws, and rules lies the craving for pleasure supreme, regardless of the consequences. In the immature creature, the pleasure principle would like to function, but insufficient consciousness creates a discrepancy between the creature’s capacity for pleasure and its environment. Hence, intellectual maturity frequently hinders the pleasure principle, which is repressed when consciousness does not penetrate the levels. Therefore, the ability to experience pleasure is unable to develop. It remains childish and self-concerned. If it does manifest, it is patently destructive. If it is prohibited from manifestation, the inherent destructiveness is not eliminated:  it festers underground while kept in check, so that no real fulfillment can be experienced. This is so because consciousness does not penetrate the hidden layers. Movement, which should direct the search for pleasure, is checked, so that the pleasure principle cannot unfold in the life of the individual. Thus the faculties for experiencing maximum pleasure are thwarted.

Human beings are meant to experience maximum pleasure, but when you experience pleasure at the expense of harming either others or yourself, you have not attained a harmonious balance between the three elements of life. Harming oneself also arises from unjustified guilt feelings and eventually is bound to harm others also.

One of the most damaging factors in the general development of the personality is the influence of deeply ingrained prejudices and misconceptions. This world is so filled with generally accepted “facts” that even the most enlightened and independent spirits blindly accept certain postulates about why certain things are supposed to be right and good and others wrong and bad. The sense of wrongness about the free development of human faculties to experience universal bliss combines with personal fears and negative experiences so that the personality may remain crippled for many an incarnation until it has the courage to free itself. Fear and shame of disapproved instinctual drives cannot possibly mature them so that they integrate. As a consequence, many people develop in a lopsided way. The farther someone develops in a limited direction only, leaving other parts of the personality untouched, the greater the crisis and conflict of the personality must be.

Society’s taboos regarding the erotic and sexual forces contained in the life force have resulted in intellectual and technical overdevelopment compared with the ability to love. The love force cannot grow if it is arbitrarily separated from the erotic and sexual forces. They are all one stream. If human consciousness fearfully watches over every stream of feeling, anxiously cutting out of the life stream that which it believes to be wrong, the capacity to love must suffer — not only love between the sexes, but every kind of human love. The great spiritual love force knows no such divisions, and its cultivation is impossible if a continuously watchful eye tries to pull out what is supposed to be wrong. It is as though people attempted to play a symphony while eliminating certain essential notes. At first, some notes may ring false, but eventually, after sufficient practice, the notes will harmonize and form an integrated whole.

A misconception of long standing, which has only been eliminated in the last fifty years or so, was the idea that infants do not experience erotic or sexual pleasure. The truth is that infants experience physical pleasure more strongly than the average adult human being. The infant is not burdened with guilts, shames and misconceptions. Therefore, the instinctual drives manifest much more intensely. However, experience of the pleasure principle is naturally self-centered and undeveloped — which does not make it wrong or sinful — because consciousness and movement are as yet hindered. Thus, in the child’s early years, its pleasure is directed to its immediate environment — to the parents. This phenomenon is completely natural, and only traditional misconceptions stamp it as wrong. Generation upon generation of inherited prejudice halts the growing individual’s natural development. Fears of perversion, homosexuality and incest play a role.

But the baby knows no such boundaries. Its sexual instincts thrive without these concepts and ideas. If guilt and a sense of sin do not drive these instincts underground, if the growing person cultivates mental and spiritual awareness and the entire personality grows harmoniously, the sexual drive changes. It undergoes the same process as general human development. The more the person grows, the more he or she reaches out, first from the self to the immediate environment and later to the world outside the family circle. The early adolescent is most preoccupied with companions of the same sex intellectually, mentally, emotionally — and also sexually, as an extension of the self and of the parent of the same sex. But as growth continues, he or she reaches out to the other sex.

Overt perversion is avoided not by the inhibiting fear of sin, but by the entire human organism growing up and out of itself. Fear of the sin of perversion tends only to drive undeveloped instincts inward, as is true of any other human reactions.

When a person is ashamed of hate and hostility, of envy and vindictiveness, these trends fester in the unconscious, too. You can grow out of these emotions only if you learn to face these feelings, to understand their origin and reason. If you do not, you may not appear to harbor such feelings, but you will harbor them nevertheless. They manifest indirectly through a general paralysis of creative functions, of the ability to have rewarding and meaningful relationships, and of fulfillment.

It is exactly the same with the “forbidden” immature sexual feelings. They, too, must be faced, reexperienced, come to terms with, if the personality is to grow harmoniously and fulfill itself.

These forbidden feelings are frequently on a layer below hate and resentment. Hostility and other negative emotions may have been difficult to face because they contradict one’s idealized self-image and bring disapproval and rejection. But they are often more acceptable than pleasurable feelings in connection with one’s own family. Therefore, such pleasurable feelings are kept even more securely locked than hate. Often hate is artificially fostered as an antidote to forbidden pleasure, and repression of hate and anger occurs only subsequently. Thus, you must unroll this entire process, layer by layer, until this most primitive area is reached. Then, and then only, can organic growth take place and the personality unfold in its full splendor. Whenever a life activity, no matter how useful, productive, or creative in itself, seems to hinder the unfoldment of your emotional depth in experiencing pleasure, your inner being is off balance. In a balanced, integrated, full personality, one activity will enhance the other. Creative endeavor never suffers by the full experience of the life force in all its aspects. Quite the contrary is true.

Before prejudice, fear, and misconception tend to prohibit the natural flow of an infant’s participation in the life force, its experience of the pleasure drive is acute. Every experience in infancy is influenced by the pleasure principle. This principle enters into all of the child’s activity. The child’s type of experience and the psychic condition with which it is born subsequently influence its attitude toward the pleasure principle. Hence, when the baby is caressed, fed, loved, it experiences acute physical pleasure in contact with its surroundings. If development proceeds naturally, as I said before, the outreaching movement induces the entity to direct the pleasure drive outward from the self to the immediate family environment, to the outer world, and to the opposite sex. As discussed in a previous lecture, this movement necessitates the integration of love, eros and sexuality, which in turn is a consequence of the equal development of movement, consciousness, and the ability to experience. The integration does not take place, however, if there are taboos, fears, and an artificial separation of instinctual drives. Their existence prohibits the natural development.

With growing maturity in this respect, perfect union between two individuals of the opposite sex becomes possible. Apart from the immeasurable bliss of this experience, the union enables the two personalities to function incomparably better in every other respect. Such healthy union does not exclude productive activities or rewarding relationships with others. On the contrary, the more the personality is integrated and therefore capable of experiencing its destiny — the utter bliss of the life force — the more it must include others. The realm of experience widens, with each experience perfect in its own uniqueness. Needless to say, this widened experience does not mean promiscuity.

The more you reach out, integrating all your faculties into a harmonious whole, the more you fulfill your spiritual destiny. Beyond the human sphere, this reaching out is infinitely extended, but this is beyond human comprehension. The concept of spiritual union is mostly a theoretical one for human beings, although at this stage it can be said that there is no arbitrary separation between the various facts of the great life stream that contain the pleasure principle. Life on earth is a preparation for this supreme pleasure, and therefore it is of utmost importance to remove the trouble spots within the psyche. The trouble spots mean that the pleasure drive was fixed in connection with negative, unpleasurable experience by guilt and fear, by misconception, and the faulty assimilation of experience.

This negative fixation of the pleasure drive may take two extreme forms, with many degrees between them. At one extreme are superimposed rules, taboos, and false guilts, which cause anger and rebellion. Such anger and rebellion are the result of fighting against what one partly accepts. They do not indicate real freedom, which derives only from awareness and comprehension. Outwardly, the rebellion may manifest in the living out of raw, undeveloped, primitive instincts in a spirit of defiance; or, you may harbor fear and guilt, thus preventing organic growth. Your instincts remain in the primitive childhood state, and what was once natural and organic becomes destructive later in life.

At the other extreme, guilt and fear thwart the unfoldment of the pleasure principle, and the soul is prohibited this aspect of its development. It is frustrated and feels a void, for the deep longing for happiness is not wrong, but is in reality a spiritual factor. Overcompensation and mischanneling are further results until the soul ultimately follows its destiny and brings all its faculties into a growing process. Usually, there are stages between these extremes, either overt or unconscious, so that the personality battles blindly against both extremes, fluctuating but never being enlightened and freed.

Consequently, it is essential that everyone on the path investigate his or her primitive, heretofore untouched feelings in this regard. They must be lifted out of hiding and seen in connection with the personal experiences and conditions in the early environment.

It is often proclaimed that pleasure for its own sake is wrong. The truth is exactly the opposite. When the personality is harmoniously developed, the pleasure drive includes others, it gives and receives — and this is as it should be. In a mature individual, the pleasure drive is not self-centered and excluding. Hence, it cannot be antisocial. It is only antisocial and excluding if the adult manifests his or her sexual drive in a way appropriate for a child. Children are antisocial, self-centered, and therefore excluding. Emotions that remain fixed in the childish state are less sinful than indicative of a lag in overall development. Frequently an immature individual will use the pleasure drive for other needs — for example, to enhance the ego, to diminish feelings of inadequacy, to feel wanted and desired because one feels insecure and helpless. Often aggression and hostility are taken up by the pleasure drive and manifest, without the person’s awareness, in the sexual drive. It is then that one may truly speak of perversion, because the pleasure principle is used for something other than its true function. It should be fulfilled by greater self-awareness and the outgrowing of one’s problematic emotions. The pleasure principle becomes, at least partly, a substitute for emotional growth and awareness.

You need to find the entanglements among your guilt, repression, fear, early childhood fixations of the pleasure principle, its failure to develop, and the effects this lack of growth has on your life and interrelationships. You can find the entanglements only by looking deeply into your hidden primitive feelings in connection with your early environment. This is not easy; it cannot be done at once. Your psyche must be loosened up in earlier stages of the pathwork so that it becomes possible to reexperience these early emotions. This can be done if you do not resist this endeavor. The reward for the ensuing liberation is beyond words.

As long as the personality is unconsciously fixated on early experience, the soul cannot truly grow and expand its experience. The fixations cannot be given up unless awareness enters into heretofore closed areas. Then, and then only, can you come to terms with your inadequately assimilated early experience, and your psyche become ready to truly reach out. Fixation implies lack of movement, and therefore lack of growth. It implies lack of consciousness, for in consciousness, proper understanding could be applied, so that the movement of the life force could dissolve the fixation. Experience then could take place on the level for which the individual is potentially ready. Where movement, consciousness, and experience function harmoniously, the individual is fulfilled and essentially happy, regardless of occasional outer difficulties. In such a case, love, eros, and sexuality are one force, and there is no conflict between the intellect, the emotions, and the spiritual center.

Let us now look at certain basic conditions in childhood, which will help you in looking at your own childhood. As I mentioned before, the child experiences intense pleasure in contact with his or her parents. Whether or not of the same sex, each parent stands in the foreground at certain periods of the child’s development. This is normal and healthy for these limited periods. But such feelings are labeled sinful and perverse. The child soon absorbs these ideas, even when they are not expressed directly, because they permeate the atmosphere and the adults’ conscious and unconscious thinking. The result of these labels is precisely the opposite of the intended effect. The child would naturally outgrow these feelings, but guilt, shame, and fear fixate them in the unconscious psychic life; it becomes impossible to relate to others without the influence of these early feelings. Then layers of destructive, artificial emotions cover up the basic condition. In this process love, being combined with the pleasure drive, is turned into hate. Hate has to be covered with a sterile, false, pretended love. Hence, hate is due not only to rejection and hurt, but equally to what seems forbidden love.

In your work on this path, it has become increasingly obvious that you relate to your parents in your other relationships, particularly with your mate. The more fixed your emotions are, the more they indicate that powerful emotions are involved. The most powerful feelings are those connected with the pleasure principle. If you now consider a number of previous lectures, particularly those dealing with the influence of parents and the behavior patterns deriving from the parental relationship, you will gain considerably deeper insight. This insight will enable you to reexperience what keeps you rigid, what prevents your complete organic growth. Do not be afraid of facing these feelings. Encourage them!  You have nothing to fear in facing them — on the contrary. Be alert, my friends, and you will truly liberate yourselves. Be particularly watchful when feelings seem problematic because there is too much blind adoration, or too much resentment — more than the occasion may warrant. Such overreactions indicate that you have not come to terms with natural phases of your past development.

When erotic longing in childhood was fulfilled to a degree, due to a demonstrative and affectionate parent, this does not necessarily guarantee healthy further development. Whenever the sense of guilt is too strong, the entity is incapable of coming to terms with the experience. The unresolved experience will later manifest in battling against love and erotic or sexual fulfillment. On the other hand, if the child did not receive the fulfillment it longed for, it became convinced that its longing was wrong, and again the adult will battle against these feelings. The healthy longing of the soul may occasionally counteract such conflict, but the longing is always diluted by the unassimilated original experience.

You may believe that only the experience of pleasure during childhood activates the erotic and sexual force in the growing individual. But often painful experience melts into the pleasure drive and fixes erotic and sexual pleasure to the painful experience. It is important to recognize this fact. Fear and pain are the essence of all negative experience. It is often the case that a human being functions erotically or sexually only in connection with fear and pain; when fear and pain are absent, the pleasure principle cannot manifest. I cannot stress sufficiently how important it is to look into your areas of negative pleasure and connect them with the childhood circumstances that produced pain and fear. Then you can find the fixation directly and without detour. It is obvious that as long as a person is fixated on negative erotic or sexual pleasure, it is impossible to maintain a fruitful, dynamic relationship. It must always end, and therefore such a person cannot experience what his or her soul longs for.

Nevertheless, this is not as negative a factor as you might think, because the child alleviates the pain by allowing the pleasure principle to influence the painful experience, which might otherwise have been unbearable for the child’s undeveloped ego. If painful experience is eroticized or sexualized, it permits the entity a limited experience of the revitalizing life force, which is better than the alternative of thwarting the pleasure drive altogether. In most instances, the person unconsciously combines these alternatives to deal with painful experience.

It is of utmost necessity to dissolve all these fixations and thus set the life force free. Frustration, every lack of fulfillment, self-dislike, guilt, disease, lack of energy or creativity, any negative aspect of creation must ultimately be connected with this facet of human development. All human beings contain within their psyches the infants they once were.  And the infant responds and reacts as it once did. It is concerned only with the simple wish to experience pleasure. Either this pleasure was given, or it was not. The parents had the power to give or to withhold. The basic struggle of the infant is to attain the pleasure and eliminate that which stands in the way. This simple, primitive struggle still exists within each individual. In itself it is not sinful, shameful, or wrong. As the psyche grows out of this primitive state, the flavor, emphasis, and ramifications of the search change.

One parent may have given more pleasure, the other more pain. Both parents may have given both. In any case, the pleasure and pain go on battling within you until they are brought out into the daylight of consciousness. Then the struggle continues in an entirely different way, in a healthy and constructive way that leads toward spiritual maturity.

All images, pseudo-solutions, misconceptions and inner conflicts arise from the infant’s struggle between attaining pleasure and avoiding pain. The infant’s fusing of pain and pleasure as a “way out” must not be confused with the unity between pleasure and pain when overcoming the duality of life on earth. The former is a blind attempt to overcome the duality and, as such, not real and productive.

On your further steps on the path, my friends, consider this lecture together with the last one. Working them through as one unit will facilitate matters greatly. Try to detect the hidden fear of your feelings that stems from humanity’s strong separation of general human affection from the erotic sexual flow. In reality they cannot be so completely separated. Your fear of your feelings cramps you and makes you manipulate them in a subtle but distinct way. You erroneously fear that your undeveloped, primitive instincts will lead you astray; in reality, becoming aware of these instinctual drives will merely attune them to the development that you have otherwise achieved.

Do not misunderstand my words, my friends. I do not advocate that you live out your childish instincts. All I mean to say is that all children have these instincts. And they still exist to some degree in each of you until you truly face them and free yourself from your self-imposed prison. When you do face and come to terms with these heretofore hidden primitive feelings, when you overcome your unreasonable fear and shame to do so, you will outgrow them and reach out further. Then you will truly relate. The new person will no longer be a substitute for the original parent you still seek. Then you will not only experience new fullness of living and bliss, but your productive activities will also reach a new height, being executed in peace and harmony. Tension, frustration, irritation — these constant companions that result from instincts you cannot accept in yourselves, and therefore fear and run away from — will leave your psychic system.

I venture to say that every one of you, at least to some degree, will find that your erotic response occurs only when there is at least a slight element of rejection, fearfulness, insecurity, or pain. When these negative emotions are completely absent, the erotic response may also be absent. It is often quite impossible to establish the proper climate in which to function erotically, because complete rejection is not possible either. Even if you feel beyond the need or wish for partnership fulfillment, because you have reached advanced earthly age, dissolved your fixation, or faced your original childhood conditions, it is equally important that the life force revitalize other areas in your life. When you fail to resolve fixations, you block the life force, and this blockage has consequences. The freer you become of blind fears, guilts, and misconceptions, the more you can choose freely with penetrating, realistic awareness, rather than being forced into patterns. Going with the life stream can only be right in every possible respect. Opposing it out of blindness, ignorance, stubbornness and fear is bound to cramp and hinder you where you least desire it.

When dealing with the pain and pleasure that are fused because you could not assimilate your painful experience otherwise, note that on the one hand, as long as this condition prevails within you, you shortchange yourself in the most tragic and unnecessary way. For by facing your condition, you can change it in a way that will give you and others immeasurable happiness. On the other hand, it is also important to see a wider view. Although the fusing of pleasure and pain in the conflicted psyche may be called perversion or masochism, it is still a blessing. The life force must enter into distorted areas, even when compelled to manifest in an erroneous, inverted way until you grow out of the conflict; otherwise, you would become more and more incapacitated, weak, and empty in all areas of living. You could not grow at all, nor could you enjoy any kind of pleasure. Think of the individuals who derive no joy from living. They are always those who have inadvertently stopped the enlivening stream. Humans often accuse this stream of being evil, because they arbitrarily divide it into acceptable and unacceptable categories, and see its primitive manifestation as unchangeable rather than a temporary stage.

The childhood phase must be reexperienced and seen in its proper light, my friends. Many of you are approaching the stage in which you can do so; some of you have already made considerable headway. Others are still too blocked and fearful. But even they will eventually muster the courage to discover that they really did not need to fear this phase, because it is natural. It is not shameful. It is in the scheme of universal development. I cannot tell you how grateful you will be to yourself for not shirking this vital part of your development. You all have seen in the past how exhilarating and liberating it was when you overcame your resistance to going deeper. The greater the struggle and resistance, the more meaningful was the insight and the more liberating the effect. It is no different in this respect, my friends.

This lecture may be interpreted as psychological material. But nothing could be further from the truth. In the last fifty years or so, humans have attained great insights in this area from a purely psychological point of view, which is concerned with personal happiness in this life. But I speak of something that reaches further. It opens the spiritual vistas of union. It includes all facets of your evolution. It is important to understand my message from this point of view. The aim of the spiritual unfoldment discussed in this lecture reaches beyond the personal pleasure you can experience. Although the latter is a result of overall, harmonious development and certainly does not oppose it, the development of the soul has even more far-reaching significance in the evolutionary plan.

The universal life force embodies greatness, beauty, and purity. It is human impurity that makes one facet of the life force seem impure.

Some of my friends may yet have difficulty understanding all this. Some of you may believe that I am being repetitious. But those of you who are really deeply exploring yourselves and are about to reach these areas will not find my words repetitious or impossible to understand.

This lecture should give you a great deal of material. If you truly pursue your inner development, not just in outer gestures, it must have a lasting effect on your psyche and the direction of its search and unfoldment. It must be food for thought; otherwise, you will continue to fear the element in you that paralyzes the best in you — until you summon the courage and effort to do what your spirit is waiting for you to do.

Since there is no more time for questions tonight, I will give you all the time you wish when we come to the discussion reserved for this lecture. I will then answer all questions and discuss all examples or problems brought to me.

I want to close this lecture with the statement that those of you who do not shy away from this deep and ultimate growing process in this life are blessed indeed. You can indeed rejoice!  Do not be put off by the crisis that is always possible when one unreasonably fears to face something that is hard to accept. The ignorant child, believing it has to hide, reacts very strongly before it is brought out of hiding. After this crucial liberation, you will no longer deal with little reliefs, small insights, subsequent relapses, and the repetition of the process. This step means a substantial and significant growth of lasting value, of lasting impact.

Be blessed, all of you!  Receive the vibrant life force, containing all that cannot be evaluated in terms of right or wrong, of good or bad. It is all one. Be in peace. Be in God!