Greetings and blessings, my very beloved friends.\u00a0 You are bathed in the love of God, in the Christ force that awakens in your innermost being.\u00a0 This love and strength reaches into your very being.\u00a0 You can feel it if you open your inner gaze and your inner hearing to the sound and the beauty and the aliveness of this new force that is awakening all over the universe.<\/p>\n
You have journeyed into your inner being on this path.\u00a0 You have become aware of many obstructions and negativities that you did not know existed.\u00a0 Only as you know them do you also make the connection that it is with those negative attitudes that you create negative experience.\u00a0 Tonight I wish to give you a new realization about a special kind of attitude that I will call the superstition of pessimism.\u00a0 Once it is conscious, it will aid you tremendously in eliminating further obstructions to realizing your divine being.<\/p>\n
When you reach a certain level of awareness you will come across an attitude that says, “If I believe in the positive, I will be disappointed, and I may chase it away by my very belief in it.\u00a0 It may be smarter to believe that nothing good can happen to me, that I cannot ever change, that I cannot ever grow out of my obstructions.”\u00a0 This is a game, a kind of deliberate but destructive playfulness, which is based on nothing but superstition.<\/p>\n
The obvious kind of superstitiousness is on a much more primitive level and most of you do not adhere to such beliefs.\u00a0 But a much subtler superstitiousness does exist in all of you.\u00a0 Find within you the voice that says, “I dare not believe in the good.\u00a0 It may not happen.”\u00a0 It is sufficient to ascertain no more than this voice, this “word” you speak into yourself.<\/p>\n
The superstition of pessimism begins as a superstitious destructive playfulness, but then you get lost in its very painful effects.\u00a0 You may really believe in what you first assumed as a safety measure.\u00a0 However, denying the positive and believing in the worst to appease the gods, as it were, is destructive.\u00a0 You do not know the power of such thoughts.\u00a0 There is no playing with such power without grave consequences.\u00a0 There is no such game that does not have a grave effect.<\/p>\n
The power of this game needs to be made conscious.\u00a0 It can apply to many things in your life.\u00a0 When you have an illness, it may apply to the healing.\u00a0 When you find yourself alone and unloved, you may playfully\u2014safely, as you think\u2014express the belief that it will always be that way.\u00a0 When you lack funds or a fulfilling profession you say into yourself, “I had better believe it must be that way, so maybe then it can come to me unexpectedly.”\u00a0 It is as though you hoped for some idealized parental figure to assuage your doubts, to come forth and tell you, “No, no, my child, it is not that bad, it is all going to be wonderful.\u201d<\/p>\n
Without knowing it, you dictate into your soul a belief creating circumstances that prove it.\u00a0 You then “forget” that you had started this game in a spirit of superstition or perhaps in a spirit of emotional manipulation.\u00a0 You become so involved in what you have unwittingly created that you really begin to believe that the negative is the reality. What started out as a superstitious safety measure gradually becomes belief on another level of your consciousness.<\/i>\u00a0 The belief creates the reality and you stay in exactly that position.<\/p>\n
This, my friends, is a subtle attitude that you previously could not see in yourself.\u00a0 However, the work you are doing and the progress you are experiencing have made many of you capable of pinpointing this particular kind of superstition.\u00a0 All such trickery of the mind is very dangerous.\u00a0 The danger lies in the misuse of the power of the word, the power of your thinking, the power of your self-indoctrination.<\/p>\n
When you encounter this self-deception in you, my dearest friends, halt and question yourself about its effects upon your life.\u00a0 Distance yourself from your life and observe what you are doing.\u00a0 Connect with the level of intentionality behind it.<\/p>\n
The next step will be:\u00a0 “I want to stop this kind of self-trickery.\u00a0 I cannot trick life.\u00a0 I choose to be honest.\u00a0 What I say to myself must be what I really mean on the deepest level of my being.\u00a0 It must correspond to the truth of life.”\u00a0 As you thus counter the habitual trickery of the superstition of pessimism, where it may exist in you, you challenge it with your decision to find a new pathway to your mind’s activity.<\/p>\n
The next step is the most crucial one.\u00a0 It may sound very simple and it actually is<\/i> very simple, however, it may seem to require a tremendous amount of courage\u2014the courage to believe in the good<\/i>.\u00a0 This is truly one of the abysses of illusion.\u00a0 Without assurances of the outcome you will have to venture into an unknown land where you believe in the positive.\u00a0 Assert your faith in the ever-benign universe.\u00a0 Express the truth that all possibilities exist<\/i>.<\/p>\n
It is your choice which one of the many roads you wish to travel, the road of defeatism, denial, negative expectation, or the road of faith in the beautiful unfoldment of limitless possibilities that is the innate nature of life.\u00a0 These possibilities are anchored in your own soul.<\/i><\/p>\n
There is nothing that you cannot realize.\u00a0 There is nothing you cannot experience if you truly give yourself to it.\u00a0 Remove the anchor that holds you back from this flowing expansion.\u00a0 Allow the involuntary processes with their limitless creative possibilities to carry you and bring you to ever new shores of fulfillment.\u00a0 Assert your courageous faith in the best of your inner spirit.\u00a0 The courage lies in bridging the gap between the assertion of the faith until it bears fruit and is realized.<\/p>\n
The temptation to lean on the old superstitious negative beliefs is that you need not invest in a waiting period of uncertainty.\u00a0 You speak the negative belief and it occurs.\u00a0 You have the questionable certainty of immediate results that you are so keen on.\u00a0 On the other hand, the journey to faith in the possibilities of positive unfoldment requires a growing period, a ripening.\u00a0 This is necessary simply because your mental processes, which have been so accustomed to negative beliefs, they have to readjust themselves, so they can take root in the new land of beauty and abundance.<\/p>\n
You are changing from one land of inner being into another, establishing new roots and new growth.\u00a0 A period of gestation is necessary that requires the same kind of faith inexperienced gardeners possess, sowing seeds and waiting for plants to sprout, without ever having seen the process work.\u00a0 It is the same with you.\u00a0 Your courage lies in believing in the best your innermost being has to offer and in what life has to offer.\u00a0 That assertion of faith is a substantial step that needs to be reinforced.<\/p>\n
Now, my friends, here is a pitfall I wish to warn against.\u00a0 The courage to believe in positive life unfoldment can very easily be confused with wishful thinking.\u00a0 There is a subtle and yet very distinct difference between wishful thinking and a virile faith in the positive.\u00a0 You all indulge very easily in wishful thinking.\u00a0 Then, to be “realistic”\u2014because you already know the disappointing results of wishful thinking\u2014you revert into the superstition of pessimism.<\/p>\n
Let us be very clear about the difference between wishful thinking and the realism of positive belief.\u00a0 There is one very distinct, clear, simple, and important factor that will simplify matters for you in order to distinguish between them.<\/p>\n
Wishful thinking is spinning dreams of fulfillment without having to pay a price:\u00a0 without any change of personality or attitude or approach or thinking or feeling or acting or being.\u00a0 You daydream that this or that desirable fulfillment will magically and gratuitously come your way without any investment in life and the process of creation, without contributing to the evolutionary process by committing to your purification.\u00a0 Wishful thinking is a passive dreaming in which you hope against hope that something will happen to you that is desirable and that does not require you to remove the very block that prevents the desirable event or state.<\/p>\n
The less you invest in the effort that could make desirable events or states a reality, the less you believe in their actual manifestation.\u00a0 The more you justify the superstition of pessimism, the less desirable your life becomes.\u00a0 Increasingly you wish to escape from it by spinning daydreams that substitute for reality.\u00a0 This consumes a lot of creative energy that could be invested in real living and fulfillment.\u00a0 Daydreams are just the other side of the superstition of pessimism.<\/p>\n
So you see, my friends, the superstition of pessimism and the daydreaming are very closely interrelated and not at all mutually exclusive.\u00a0 You may on the same day or even within one hour indulge in daydreams and then perhaps in a matter of minutes indulge in the superstition of negativity.<\/p>\n
You could accomplish the very thing you daydream about\u2014consuming a tremendous amount of energy and mischannelled creativity\u2014if only you made a total commitment to life and self, giving your best to both, which are one.\u00a0 When you fail to realize the daydream, your disappointment reinforces the superstition of pessimism.<\/p>\n
What was begun as a game then reinforces the negative belief.\u00a0 The vicious circle accelerates, and you find it ever more difficult to extricate yourself.\u00a0 You swing back and forth from the superstition of negativity to the wishful daydream.\u00a0 The more you indulge in the wishful daydream to escape from the negativity, the less you can truly experience beauty, fulfillment, abundance, love, joy, peace and excitement.<\/p>\n
Wishful daydreams are often spun by a diminished ego rather than by the desire that comes from your higher self, your inner spirit.\u00a0 In these dreams a diminished ego seeks a false medicine against its own underdevelopment.\u00a0 For example, rather than visualizing yourself in a productive vocation, joyfully and meaningfully contributing to life, or visualizing your success and abundance for the sheer enjoyment of the fruits of your labor as a valid expression of life, you dream of yourself as a great person in order to impress others, perhaps your family or those who have slighted you.<\/p>\n
Even in these ego gratifications, however, the original facets of true value are contained.\u00a0 Your dignity is a reality that you look for and often displace, confusing it with the petty pride of the limited ego.\u00a0 The true value of your inner spirit aims for rich fulfillment of love, abundance, friendship, communication, even for recognition and respect.\u00a0 But in a daydream it all comes in a fairy tale manner that does not really convince you, so of course you cannot believe in it.<\/p>\n
Many of you may have observed in the course of your pathwork that at the beginning of your path you still had the habit of indulging considerably in daydreaming.\u00a0 Perhaps even without really noticing it or intentionally trying to stop it, you lost the desire for it.\u00a0 The more you deal with the reality of your being, the more real life becomes.\u00a0 The temptation to manufacture wish-fulfilling daydreams diminishes.<\/p>\n
Yet many of you still indulge in it, at least in certain areas of your life.\u00a0 Where this is the case, look deeper.\u00a0 Find the level where you also still indulge in the superstition of your negative beliefs.\u00a0 You can pursue this thought and discover yourself hoping, in a very subtle way, that someone will come along and give you fulfillment gratuitously, without any effort on your part, without your removing the obstructions to the fulfillment or even attempting to see that they lie within yourself.\u00a0 You hope that a super-authority will reassure you that it will happen just like in your daydreams, you don’t have to earn or acquire it, it will be given to you.<\/p>\n
Just ascertaining these random fleeting thoughts and making them concise will allow you to see their absurdity and help you to give them up.\u00a0 You will realize that abundance is available only to the degree you wish to squander yourself into life, giving as generously of your inner riches to this whole process as you wish to receive from life’s abundance.<\/p>\n
You encounter the difficulty of sustaining happiness and pleasure so many times.\u00a0 You have begun to open the road to it through working on your purification.\u00a0 As the results begin to stream into your being\u2014both outwardly and inwardly\u2014you shrink back.\u00a0 This is not simply an old habit.\u00a0 It is the result of still being committed to the imaginary safety measure of the superstition of pessimism and, simultaneously, to wishful daydreaming.<\/p>\n
The very thing that is your inner richness can create myriad kinds of fulfillment.\u00a0 You withhold your inner richness and yet strive for results through the superstition of pessimism and wishful daydreaming.\u00a0 You ignore the inexhaustible wells of yourself which could enrich every minute of your life.<\/p>\n
The enormous change and growth that has already occurred in so many of you has brought results that you still dare not believe.\u00a0 Much more fulfillment, happiness, pleasure and abundance exist in your lives.\u00a0 But in those areas which are still blocked you reject pleasure because it feels uncomfortable.\u00a0 At least you are now fully aware of this, which is obviously immeasurably important.<\/p>\n
This message may help you to make further connections, so that you will eliminate all further obstructions to real happiness rather than dream about gratifications.\u00a0 If you use the material in this lecture, observing it in you and applying what I have said, it will make a difference in your transformational work.\u00a0 You will truly become capable of transforming a negative belief because you can see it as a trick on a very subtle level.\u00a0 Give up that trick.\u00a0 Have the courage of positive belief in your own richness and of the positive intentionality to give of this richness to the best of your ability.\u00a0 You will create the courage necessary to have faith in the best that life can ever be.<\/p>\n
My dearest friends, you in this community of human beings are fulfilling an all-important noble task.\u00a0 The creative processes of the universe depend on every individualized entity.\u00a0 Every tiniest step of goodwill within you, every intent to be in truth, to face the truth, to confront the worst in you and to transform it into its original best adds to the great reservoir of creative forces that flow and push themselves forever more as manifestations into all of life.\u00a0 Each step in your growth aids not only your own happiness and fulfillment, important as this is, but is also a powerful force akin to nuclear energy, generated by your community and other such nuclei, that spreads and multiplies, so that the Christ force gains an ever-greater impetus.<\/p>\n
QUESTION:\u00a0 This lecture seems to apply to my life very much now.\u00a0 It seems almost miraculous.\u00a0 The business venture I’ve started looks as if it’s going to be a success.\u00a0 I have blocked so much of the positive, yet something very good is happening.\u00a0 Now that it’s happening, I feel that I’m going a lot into my ego.\u00a0 I find myself thinking that I’m better than others.\u00a0 I would like you to comment on this.<\/p>\n
ANSWER:\u00a0 That is of course how you destroy.\u00a0 What you can do when you discover yourself in that way of thinking is to very simply and firmly\u2014yet without pushing effort\u2014formulate another thought.\u00a0 The thought might be:\u00a0 “I do not wish to set myself above others.\u00a0 If a part of me desires this, I do not want it.\u00a0 I pray to the divine forces within me to help me create another kind of attitude and therefore another reality.\u00a0 If I want to be better than others, I must also feel undeserving to get the slightest fulfillment.\u00a0 I am not better than others and I am not worse than others.\u201d<\/p>\n
All human beings are wonderful manifestations of divinity.\u00a0 One flower is not better than another flower.\u00a0 One bird is not better than another bird.\u00a0 The mountain is not better than the sea.\u00a0 The pine tree is not better than the oak.\u00a0 Think of yourself and other people in those terms and assert your goodwill to let others be their best.\u00a0 Then you can let yourself be your best so you can truly enjoy the fruits of your efforts and feel deserving of them.<\/p>\n
QUESTION:\u00a0 All my life, it seems I have done exactly what the lecture was all about because I didn’t want to deal with disappointments.\u00a0 But I also felt that I must have it, I can’t bear not having it.\u00a0 I was afraid not only of failure, but the meaning of failure.\u00a0 Is it something that I was not meant to have, or what?\u00a0 I found this superstition safe but I see how it has limited me.<\/p>\n
ANSWER:\u00a0 It has.\u00a0 The most productive attitude about the possibility of not getting the wish fulfilled in this particular form would be somewhat like the following:\u00a0 “If such and such a desire is not fulfilled now, I have the courage to confront myself and find out the meaning.”\u00a0 The meaning is not something bad nor does it imply that you are undeserving or that there is something terrible that you need to fear.<\/p>\n
It may mean many different things.\u00a0 It may mean that there are certain obstructions within you that you need to know about, not just for the sake of this particular fulfillment, but even more importantly for the sake of your total unfoldment as an entity, so as to become fully unified and whole.\u00a0 You have intelligence, openness and goodwill within you to learn.\u00a0 This can be a glorious experience.\u00a0 If what you desire does not happen now in this particular way, what will make you happy and whole will happen in another way that may possibly turn out better.\u00a0 Pursue the truth of your potential and state, “I can take a momentary disappointment and make it a stepping stone.\u00a0 I need not fear that it may not be now, in this particular way.\u00a0 There are many ways.\u201d<\/p>\n
With this attitude you will create a relaxed inner climate so that attaining the result will not be a question of do or die.\u00a0 Such a demand creates an unbearable tension that is often a direct block to the fulfillment of the desire.\u00a0 A relaxed and growth-producing attitude would let you off the hook and make it possible for you to believe in the best.\u00a0 You will open the doors to finding out a great deal about yourself.\u00a0 This will be infinitely richer than the mere fulfillment of your wish could ever have been.<\/p>\n
QUESTION:\u00a0 In reference to one word you used that I’m struggling with\u2014can you amplify what the elements of courage are and where courage might be felt represented in the body?<\/p>\n
ANSWER:\u00a0 Yes.\u00a0 The elements of courage are the ability and willingness to experience pain or disappointment and learn from it and use it as a threshold.\u00a0 That is courage.\u00a0 It is courage to risk all that rather than stand still and have the safety of a little back door open, never venturing forth completely into a new situation.\u00a0 That is courage.\u00a0 To love is courage because the loved one may not always respond according to your desires and selfwill.\u00a0 To give is courage because the petty heart in its negativity still believes that when you give you will lose and no one will give you anything in return.\u00a0 It is courage to risk finding out that your negative beliefs may not be true.\u00a0 It takes even more courage to not be discouraged.<\/p>\n
You feel courage in all of your body, as you feel love in all of your body, for courage is an essential part of love.\u00a0 Every cell and every pore vibrates and resonates with every divine attitude that you can possibly allow to express itself through your mind, your will, your soul, and so through your entire body.<\/p>\n
I will close this meeting with a prayer that the God in you expresses.\u00a0 As I have done once before, I ask you to listen to your inner God and hear the words that resonate within you.\u00a0 As I say the words pick up the echo within.\u00a0 This will help you to attune your listening inner ear to the voice of God, filling you with messages such as these:<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
I am working through you.<\/p>\n
I am in all your thoughts, if you wish to hear Me.<\/p>\n
I am in all you see, if you wish to see Me.<\/p>\n
I am in all the words you speak, if you wish Me to express through you.<\/p>\n
I am in all your actions, if that be your commitment.<\/p>\n
And as I am and as I manifest through you, you rediscover life in new terms.<\/p>\n
You will see that life is a glorious oneness in which there is nothing to fear.<\/p>\n
What need you fear if you discover Me?<\/p>\n
What need you fear if you identify with Me?<\/p>\n
Know that you are God.<\/p>\n
As such you can never die.<\/p>\n
Give that which is you now, in your thinking, in your being, in your<\/p>\n
perceptions to Me.<\/p>\n
As you give yourself to Me, so must you be eternal.<\/p>\n
Listen for a minute into yourselves while I stay with you.\u00a0 You are richly blessed, my beloved friends.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When you reach a certain level of awareness you will come across an attitude that says, \u201cIf I believe in the positive, I will be disappointed, and I may chase it away by my very belief in it. It may be smarter to believe that nothing good can happen to me, that I cannot ever change, that I cannot ever grow out of my obstructions.\u201d This is a game, a kind of deliberate but destructive playfulness, which is based on nothing but superstition.<\/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":[1242,1334,1614,1806,1807,1130,1808],"class_list":["post-2703","lecture","type-lecture","status-publish","hentry","lecture-categories-pathwork-lectures-1996-ed","lecture_tag-courage","lecture_tag-faith","lecture_tag-negativity","lecture_tag-pessimism","lecture_tag-superstition","lecture_tag-thought","lecture_tag-wishful-thinking"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n