Greetings and blessings for all of you, my dearest friends.\u00a0 In order to finally discover your divine center, it is necessary to go through all the layers that separate you from it.\u00a0 The misconceptions, false images, negativities, illusions, pretensions, defenses, unexperienced and therefore unassimilated feelings and confused thoughts are one thick crust.\u00a0 This crust is the most difficult part to penetrate in the voyage to your innermost core. It contains many aspects that you have to learn to recognize, approach and accept in the right way.\u00a0 Once you have penetrated all the layers, you will gradually have to dissolve and assimilate the accumulated blocks.\u00a0 When you have learned the right approach to these aspects of yourself, which you would rather not know, then you will come upon other levels of your being that still separate you from your innermost divinity.\u00a0 Or, to put it differently, other tasks are waiting for you on your path to total self-awareness, which is the absolute prerequisite to unification with the central divine core.<\/p>\n
One such task is to achieve clear perception and connection with the soul movements.\u00a0 You can also call them the energy streamings of your feelings and attitudes\u2014the positive as well as the negative ones.<\/p>\n
Every attitude, every expression, every feeling creates an energy movement in your system\u2014a specific soul movement.\u00a0 I spoke of this a long time ago and I will now do so more specifically.\u00a0 We will discuss the energy movement of wanting, wishing, desiring\u2014its meaning, its significance in the total expression of the human personality, and its importance in the self-creating process.<\/p>\n
Self-awareness, whether it concerns awareness of inner problems, confusions, one’s faults and negativities, or the awakening of the ever-present ongoing divine voice inside you, requires the art of focusing within.\u00a0 You must also practice focusing to detect the presence of those soul movements even to know what you really feel and think at any given moment and which soul movements those feelings and thoughts create.\u00a0 Such focusing implies, of course, some ability to concentrate, but this is not too hard to learn.<\/p>\n
Every now-moment is an expression within you and creates a specific soul movement.\u00a0 Observe these movements.\u00a0 Do you feel a tightness?\u00a0 Is the movement blocked and stopped completely because of the tightness, or is it absent in its expression?\u00a0 Is it hard-edged, pointed, disharmonious and raw?\u00a0 Is it a smooth, enlivening, soft flow?<\/p>\n
When you feel good, happy, open and alive, the soul movements are very smooth and soft, yet in this very softness lies an enormous strength.\u00a0 When the movement is stopped, you feel dead.\u00a0 When the movement is hurtful, raw, edgy or pointed, you feel anxious, upset, apprehensive.\u00a0 Every soul movement is the result of specific feelings, thoughts and attitudes, and you must focus your attention on them, too.<\/p>\n
Let us now deal with the soul movements of wanting, wishing or desiring.\u00a0 Everything that exists in human expression can harmonize with the universal forces and creative laws.\u00a0 Your soul movements can be healthy and therefore creative and thus further creation, or they can be distorted, sick, life-defeating, and thus cause further destruction.\u00a0 Desire in itself is never either right or wrong, good or bad, desirable or undesirable.\u00a0 It all depends on its expression.\u00a0 Therefore one cannot always say that having desires is a hindrance to spirituality.<\/p>\n
Eastern philosophy expounds on desirelessness as a\u00a0 necessary state.\u00a0 This is only partly true.\u00a0 It is untrue in the sense that if desire is absent, it is impossible to create.\u00a0 You create by visualizing a new state of being.\u00a0 To do so, the desire must exist.\u00a0 How you express this desire will determine the outcome.\u00a0 If the desire is too strong, too tight, if it evolves out of a misconception that implies any kind of a “must,” the desire is no longer a desire, but a demand, a threat, a forcing-current that says:\u00a0 “I must have or else I will perish, will suffer unfairly and unbearably, will be unfairly treated.”\u00a0 This voice indicates a threat containing the message that if life does not yield the demanded result, it is bad and unfair, which you proceed to prove by the dismal results you are about to create.\u00a0 This can hardly be called a desire, but it often parades under the guise of being one.<\/p>\n
Positive, real desire is a prerequisite to the self-creating process.\u00a0 For example, if you do not want a new and more loving state of being, you will have no motivation to attain it, no incentive to overcome the often apparently insurmountable resistance, not even a visualized possibility of such a state.\u00a0 To create a new state of personality, soul movements must flow forth.\u00a0 Like the wind they carry the creative seed.<\/p>\n
Desire is the blueprint we act upon.\u00a0 To distinguish between the creative and the destructive desire currents it is very important to understand what I mentioned before.\u00a0 Whether the desire flows without a “must,” or whether it contains the forcing current can be easily ascertained in yourself, and even in others.\u00a0 As it is with many other spiritual verities, the concept of desire contains an apparent paradox:\u00a0 The right kind of desire must become so relaxed that it does not have<\/i> to be fulfilled.\u00a0 If you can strongly desire, without a trace of a “must,” but with an attitude of “I can<\/i> live without my wish being fulfilled, I can<\/i> go through the pain of not having it and not be annihilated, defeated, unhappy,” then the power of such a desire is truly limitless.\u00a0 The energy that is released through the absence of fear and of manipulation even on the subtlest of levels is enormous.\u00a0 In other words, your very desire must also be desireless.<\/p>\n
Now, how can this be?\u00a0 How can you come into a state in which what you want and consider desirable you can also readily give up?\u00a0 How can you deeply long for something and yet accept the pain of its unfulfillment?\u00a0 This seems a tall order, my friends.\u00a0 Yet all evolution of the human soul moves inexorably toward this state.\u00a0 The need for it is already evident on the outermost level\u2014the previously mentioned crust in which all the negativities reside.<\/p>\n
One of the main reasons for the existence of this crust is the refutation of pain.\u00a0 Evil resists what is and thus splits itself off from itself, forever fragmenting consciousness into “smaller,” or more limited, particles.\u00a0 They can all come together again through the great act of acceptance, or non-resistance in the right way.\u00a0 Such an act requires a methodical path, with help at every step of the way, for it is easy to veer off into distortions and misconceptions of truth.<\/p>\n
If you are frightened of pain, together with its derivatives, such as frustration, disappointment, rejection, and believe that you must not experience these feelings, then you will have an overly strong desire to have no pain, or you will deny the pain.\u00a0 A must-current is set up in you that says, “This I must have”\u2014no pain\u2014”This I must not have”\u2014pain.\u00a0 Any such demand is a creative block.\u00a0 It hinders the very fulfillment you insist upon most.\u00a0 The tightness, the saying “no” to something\u2014whatever it is in the universe\u2014the false, cramped “no,” creates a harsh, tight soul movement, a movement that is full of sharp, cutting edges which are pointed and hurtful.\u00a0 Both wanting and not wanting can be harmonious and soft or disharmonious and pointed.<\/p>\n
It would be a mistake to interpret acceptance of all feelings and experiences to mean that you should not refute certain experiences or actions that people commit against you.\u00a0 I wish to make this clear.\u00a0 For instance, if you insist on not having any pain, you will be so disconnected and tense that you will not even recognize, let alone deal with, others’ negativity and see when their machinations could abuse you.\u00a0 The very pain that this causes makes you blind to it, therefore you react blindly; you can neither feel the true pain, nor assert yourself.\u00a0 Conversely, if you do not fear pain, you can stand up for yourself and will not allow others to be deceitful, destructive, dishonest and abusive in their subterfuges and games.\u00a0 You cannot fear confrontation when you can experience pain.\u00a0 You will assert yourself if your pride permits you to be wrong\u2014if you can suffer that pain.\u00a0 So, you see, my friends, not only is it untrue that acceptance of pain implies a masochistic, sacrificial weakness and submission, but quite the contrary.\u00a0 True resilient strength and fearless self-assertion rest upon the ability to accept what is and to deal with it without manipulating facts and feelings to be what they are not.<\/p>\n
The conviction that pain and disappointment must not exist creates a very tight and pointed “no” movement.\u00a0 The “no” is not a decided, harmonious, firm strength that grows out of true dignity and self-value.\u00a0 It is a pseudo-strength that comes from the weakness of insisting on having it your own way:\u00a0 “This I must have, that I must not have.\u201d<\/p>\n
If you can proceed to the point of view that no experience on earth can come to you that you are not capable of handling, a great deal of tightness will dissipate, make room for creative movement, and also eliminate a lot of fear.\u00a0 The moment you decide this, the experience you are involved in begins to take on a different aspect.\u00a0 The very act of saying “no” with a weakness, a tightness, an unhealthiness prevents creative receptivity.\u00a0 By the same token, the grabbing, insisting, self-righteous “yes” equally prevents creative receptivity.\u00a0 Both yes and no can be healthy or sick, desirable or undesirable, good or bad.\u00a0 Desire is determined by the underlying attitude which, in turn, determines the nature of the soul currents.<\/p>\n
Creative receptivity arises out of a soft, relaxed, flowing movement.\u00a0 The pain of taking in something undesired affords you the possibility of transcending this dark point and finding the light behind it.\u00a0 The pain of accepting the absence of something desired affords you the possibility of transcending the emptiness and finding the hidden fullness behind it.\u00a0 This is the law of life.\u00a0 Only when you embrace it do you set the creative movement into action.\u00a0 You must be careful to accept and\/or renounce in a spirit of trust, however.\u00a0 Doing so in bitterness and hopelessness is again not the right way.\u00a0 Then the harsh soul movement may not be on the surface, as it is when a strong, pushy, forcing current exists, but it is still there, hidden behind the surface acceptance.<\/p>\n
Everything seems to hinge on how you react to pain\u2014be it the pain of experiencing something, or experiencing the lack of it.\u00a0 Can you trust pain as you trust the rest of the universe, as the universe is supposed to be trusted?\u00a0 If you distrust pain you distrust the universe, for you cannot split off any single existing experience from the rest of creation.<\/p>\n
Both the movement of yes and the movement of no must become open and sweet.\u00a0 Even if the movement is firm, it can still feel sweet.\u00a0 It can be an expression of your trust or it can be an expression of your fear.\u00a0 It can be an expression of your love or it can be an expression of your selfishness.\u00a0 All these possibilities determine the nature of your movement, the nature of how you desire, and the nature of how you approach painful experience.\u00a0 Your approach to pain immediately and directly determines either creative receptivity and positive desire or greedy, distorted desire from a fearful rejection of life’s pattern.<\/p>\n
As your meditation practice grows in the course of your development, turn inward to detect the nature of your soul movements.\u00a0 Determine what they mean, what feeling and attitude they represent, what thought pattern and type of desire they express.\u00a0 This is a new dimension to your approach to your inner person.\u00a0 As you become more adept in recognizing these soul movements, such recognition will be effortless and quite natural, without deliberate focusing and concentrating.<\/p>\n
This new emphasis doesn’t imply that you are beyond your negativities, but that you are sufficiently aware of them.\u00a0 The very negativities that still exist will be seen in a new light and in another dynamic expression.\u00a0 For example, you may look into existing resistances and problems contained within your desire.\u00a0 How strong and firm is the desire?\u00a0 Does it flow smoothly or is it a tight, pushy current?\u00a0 If the latter, what does that mean?\u00a0 What does this way of manifesting your otherwise laudable desire hide?\u00a0 Or is the desire overtly weak and even absent?\u00a0 Can you feel a movement of this desire in you?\u00a0 How do you feel it?\u00a0 If the movement is right, there is always confidence and trust that it will come to pass, even if not right this minute.\u00a0 If there is an area in your life where a strong desire has still not been fulfilled, in spite of ardent attempts on your part, investigate how tight this current is.\u00a0 The very tightness may hide an important clue to what you need to know and eliminate before fulfillment can come, or the tightness of the current may reflect your lack of trust in the universal, creative process of which you are a part.\u00a0 Then you must deal with this attitude and see the meaning behind it.<\/p>\n
To follow through with this important work, to be able to tune into your inner movements, you have to cultivate the ability to concentrate.\u00a0 This is not as difficult as some of you may think.\u00a0 All it needs is some goodwill and a few minutes’ exercise daily.\u00a0 I have given concentration exercises several times over the years.<\/p>\n
Now I want to highly recommend a new approach to dealing with your negativities after they are expressed and after you learn to take responsibility for them.\u00a0 I see among you, my friends, especially when you are together for protracted periods at the Center, that there is still a good deal of acting out.\u00a0 This must be vigorously discouraged.\u00a0 There is no necessity for it.\u00a0 Not doing so need not lead back to repression and denial.\u00a0 Often you admit your behavior but simultaneously engage in it as if the admission invalidated the acting out.\u00a0 Don’t you see that acting out refutes self-responsibility as much as total denial does?\u00a0 You are all ready to assume responsibility for your actions and to choose the right action.<\/p>\n
Humanity as a whole is so deeply conditioned by denial and acting out, with projecting and blaming others, that it seems at times impossible for the individual not to do that.\u00a0 Admitting the impulse but not acting on it requires inner prayer, commitment to the truth and the goodwill to let God within you fill you with the action and knowledge, even before the feeling can follow suit.\u00a0 When you act out, you must still believe that you need a scapegoat, and you are still too frightened to look fully at yourself.\u00a0 You are still threatened by what you may see.\u00a0 In the last analysis the fear is always unjustified, no matter how difficult it may first be to give up a cherished illusion about the self.\u00a0 No matter how ugly the traits may be that gradually ooze out of you, they are never the whole truth of who you are.\u00a0 You cannot fail to see objectively the temporary little ego in its ugliness without losing heart about your whole person.<\/p>\n
You cannot fail to become receptive finally to the beautiful, eternal you, if you fully commit yourself to seeing and accepting both the good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly, the divine and the evil.\u00a0 If you wish to own up to both, you will find both\u2014and will come to see that the good is real and eternal, while the bad is only a temporary aberration and not the final you.\u00a0 You must make up your mind to take in all of yourself, for better or for worse, whatever that may mean.\u00a0 You must ask for guidance to do so with a constructive and realistic attitude that leaves room for many possibilities and never denies life.\u00a0 If you so ask, this attitude will come to you from within.<\/p>\n
Begin to focus on both the ugliness and the beauty.\u00a0 See that the very fact that you own up to the ugliness comes from the beauty.\u00a0 For only the divine infiltration of the self makes the self capable of even wanting to be in truth, of having the courage to do so, of undertaking the wondrous journey into the inner world and learning the many difficult lessons.\u00a0 The very act of revealing all parts of the self deserves your greatest self-respect, which you can pay when you stop projecting the unacceptable on others or using the ugliness of others to hide your own.<\/p>\n
I suggest that you also help each other.\u00a0 When you are very tempted to accuse the other person, ask yourself, “What is ugly in me and what is ugly in him or her?”\u00a0 And then ask, “What is beautiful in me and what is beautiful in him or her?”\u00a0 But really mean these questions.\u00a0 Leave the questions open and wait for the answers until you are receptive enough for them to reveal themselves to you.\u00a0 Do not merely mouth such questions while you want to condemn others and yourself and find negative pleasure in doing so.\u00a0 If this is where you still are, then this is what you must own up to.\u00a0 Admit that you do not want to see the good either in the other or in yourself.\u00a0 Being right is really no substitute for seeing yourself as good, you know!<\/p>\n
But if you have worked your way through the mazes of your crust to where you can already genuinely want to know both sides, then you will soon witness the unitive principle unfold in you.\u00a0 You will discover what you now know in theory but still cannot practice, as is evident in your everyday acting out, when you get involved with others negatively.\u00a0 What I see happening is that even if you no longer blame others and exonerate yourself, even if you admit your own negativity, you often do so because this is how it is supposed to be now, but you do not emotionally experience this.\u00a0 Emotionally you still have a stake in blaming others and exonerating yourself.\u00a0 This always means that inwardly you totally blame yourself, but do not wish to see this self-blaming behavior.\u00a0 The more you blame yourself, the more you are hooked on blaming, and the greater your investment in doing so must be.\u00a0 In that battle it is always either the other person or you who is right.<\/p>\n
As you ask to recognize the good and the bad in you and in the other person, and open your heart to desiring that you see both the good and the bad in you and in the other, you will truly experience the unitive principle.\u00a0 You will understand how the negativities of both you and the other interact and how you both have beauty and goodness, as well as those negative, destructive traits.\u00a0 This acknowledgement will eliminate hate, either for yourself or for others.<\/p>\n
In spite of the great progress you have made so strikingly and often so visibly in the various life manifestations\u2014in the changing of your life inwardly and outwardly, the changing of your personality\u2014the acting out, the desire to blame, still exists quite strongly.<\/p>\n
Let us apply what I said in this lecture about right or wrong desire to the topic of blaming.\u00a0 You desire to blame because you do not desire to see yourself.\u00a0 Such unhealthy, distorted desire, contrary to the truth of being, creates a constant threat that the untruthful, the unrealistic will sooner or later be exposed.\u00a0 Therefore a protective, defensive tightness is put into both desires, which influences the soul current.\u00a0 Approach the current of these desires, feel it.\u00a0 As you feel the tight, strenuous current of the need to blame, experience and observe this drama truly as an observer.\u00a0 You will then become intensely aware of the soul movement that is created by your desire to blame.<\/p>\n
As you take full responsibility for the desire to blame, open your heart in a relaxed, new way to welcome the desire not to blame.\u00a0 In doing so, you can see truth in you and in the other.\u00a0 Seeing truth never leads to blame.\u00a0 When you blame, you are never in truth, even if what you see is partially true.\u00a0 The others may actually do and be all the negative things you attribute to them but they cannot be totally bad, for if they were, you would not blame.\u00a0 The same applies to you.\u00a0 Seeing truth does not mean that either you or the other will be totally exonerated of all negativity.\u00a0 But a truthful understanding of the negativity is possible only when you are totally engaged in and committed to seeing yourself truthfully.\u00a0 The moment you do so all guilt, self-rejection and self-blame disappear.\u00a0 You know this, for you have all experienced this miracle.\u00a0 The same applies to the other person.\u00a0 The truth you fail to see may not be something terrible at all, but because you unconsciously believe that it is, you do not risk even wanting to see it.<\/p>\n
Seeing truthfully may elicit anger, but never blame\u2014and that is very different.\u00a0 Become attuned to this very special difference.\u00a0 Also, when you truly desire truth, you can wait for the truth to reveal itself.\u00a0 You can wait in a state of flexible desire, in a stream of soft trustful waiting, for the truth to reveal itself as a gift from your innermost being.\u00a0 For when it comes, it will feel like a gift.\u00a0 It is so revealing, so conciliating, it sets you free in all ways.\u00a0 You may experience pain, but the nature of the pain is very different from the pain that comes from the cramped space within you.<\/p>\n
Once you enter into this process, your desire can make room for the visualization and creation of a new state.\u00a0 Desire and receptivity, totally free from any “must,” do not refer to an expectation of external forces.\u00a0 Rather I am referring to an inner creative process of suddenly seeing reality in a new and sharper light.\u00a0 This sharp light is the grace of truth and love that is freeing and yet safe.<\/p>\n
So, I say, my dearest friends, create a new desire for a new inner state in which you let go of all “musts.”\u00a0 You can easily feel every “must” as a very definitive movement in you.\u00a0 And every “must” defeats healthy desire, therefore not allowing fulfillment.\u00a0 For a short period under certain circumstances, the “must” may appear to yield results.\u00a0 This is the temptation.\u00a0 However, the results are not only short-lived, but usually lead to a crash, to a severe disappointment whose origin cannot be pinpointed\u2014which is the worst part about it.<\/p>\n
The ability to tune in to the soul currents of desire, right and wrong, healthy and distorted, relaxed and creative or tight and uncreative, is a focus you need to concentrate on very specifically to expand into new states of consciousness and experience.\u00a0 As you learn to do so, the rewards will be like flowers blossoming within you.<\/p>\n
The love of the universe is in every cell of your being, in every particle of your psychic processes.\u00a0 Try to know and feel this.\u00a0 Try to tune in to this.<\/p>\n
As you grow on this path, my dearest ones, you will increasingly learn to concentrate and use energy in certain directions.\u00a0 This will come out of the organic process of your purification and will not be a superimposed attempt to direct energy willfully.\u00a0 You can entrust yourself to this organic process from the core of your being.\u00a0 Listen to it, become receptive to it.\u00a0 You are all blessed and loved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Every attitude, every expression, every feeling creates an energy movement in your system\u2014a specific soul movement. I spoke of this a long time ago and I will now do so more specifically. We will discuss the energy movement of wanting, wishing, desiring\u2014its meaning, its significance in the total expression of the human personality, and its importance in the self-creating process.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"lecture-categories":[13],"lecture_tag":[1725,1726,1123,1539,1589,1609,1727,1301],"class_list":["post-2672","lecture","type-lecture","status-publish","hentry","lecture-categories-pathwork-lectures-1996-ed","lecture_tag-blame","lecture_tag-creative-receptivity","lecture_tag-desire","lecture_tag-movement","lecture_tag-receptivity","lecture_tag-soul-movement","lecture_tag-wanting","lecture_tag-wish"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n