My beloved friends, the light of the Eternal One streams as a great blessing to all of you, and to all your endeavors that are sanctified by your commitment to serve God and His magnificent evolutionary plan.<\/p>\n
The hand of God can be recognized in many earthly manifestations.\u00a0 His presence can be keenly felt and so can His absence when you block it out.\u00a0 One of the earthly manifestations in which the divine creativity of the Eternal Spirit can always be seen is nature.\u00a0 You cannot help but marvel at the wisdom and foresight manifest in the smallest details designed to protect, sustain and maintain each species.\u00a0 The abundance, the beauty and the richness that all created entities manifest proclaim clearly and eloquently that only the greatest of all imaginable minds could have devised the many systems that maintain life on earth.<\/p>\n
It also has become clear to many human beings that the balance of nature is being disturbed through humanity’s thoughtlessness or greed.\u00a0 The recent growth of awareness in this area is most important.\u00a0 But there is also an aspect of nature that seems contradictory to divine love, an aspect that seems cruel.\u00a0 Nature’s destructive forces, the storms, the floods and the earthquakes do exist, but seen from another angle, they are only the necessary crises every entity must go through to reestablish inner harmony with divine law.<\/p>\n
Other manifestations of nature’s cruelty fall into a different category.\u00a0 For example, one species may depend on another to maintain its very life, surviving at the expense of the other, hence predators and victims.\u00a0 Although the victims are always equipped with specific defenses so that the individual animal can have what you may call a sporting chance, on a grand scale one species serves to sustain the other.\u00a0 These conditions contribute to maintaining an overall balance in nature.\u00a0 Yet one animal killing another for its nourishment appears cruel and seems to deny God’s presence.\u00a0 It is also true that animals can never indulge in the useless cruelty and destructiveness which human beings are capable of.\u00a0 It is precisely humanity’s more evolved consciousness that can always choose to channel human action into the direction of good or evil.\u00a0 Yet it does seem, and in a sense is, tragic that an animal needs to endure panic and pain in order to serve the total life process.<\/p>\n
I want you now to understand that this manifestation in nature reflects precisely humanity’s overall state of consciousness which is dualistic, being a combination of good and evil.\u00a0 Humanity’s beliefs are always characterized by this polarity.\u00a0 Since the totality of human beliefs creates your environment, the earth sphere reflects this polarity exactly.\u00a0 Its presence can be observed in the most remote manifestations which on the surface appear to have nothing whatever to do with humanity’s state of consciousness.\u00a0 While these manifestations appear to be given as facts created independently of human beliefs, attitudes, feelings and intentions, in reality this is never so.\u00a0 Every sphere, realm or world, from the lowest to the highest, is always a total reflection of the overall state of consciousness of the beings who have congregated in that sphere.\u00a0 It has often been said that heaven and hell are nothing but states of consciousness.\u00a0 This is true in one sense.\u00a0 However, the same people who make this statement often overlook that states of consciousness create even the physical conditions within and around them.<\/p>\n
If this world reflects the combination of both extremes creating this polarity, there must also exist other worlds in which one side so outweighs the other that the polarity disappears.\u00a0 Spheres of evil or of hell would therefore manifest only pain, fear and suffering and no beauty at all, while spheres of good would not have any pain, fear and suffering.\u00a0 Imagine a world in which the tiger and the deer lovingly befriend each other!\u00a0 In that world no animal needs the life of another to sustain its own life.<\/p>\n
Art sometimes reflects this blissful world because the soul deeply knows it and longs to return to it.\u00a0 Thus painters, musicians, poets and dancers reveal a small measure of this complete world of bliss in which nothing ever dies or wilts, in which life gloriously finds forever new expressions without any break in consciousness to blot out life’s continuity.\u00a0 Those of you who are ready for or are closer to this state of consciousness will experience such artistic expressions, or the beautiful expression of nature, as intensely healing and soothing, as encouraging and incredibly desirable.\u00a0 But to those who are still deeply submerged in darkness, such divine reminders and expressions are as painful as they are nourishing for the more enlightened spirits.\u00a0 This is why there is no light\u2014no truth, no love, no divine reminder\u2014in the spheres of hell.\u00a0 It cannot be borne.\u00a0 The entities there need to grow gradually into more evolved states until the light of these states can become a means to make further growth possible.<\/p>\n
I want to remind you once again that you inhabit an in-between sphere, in which one side of the polarity does not exclude the other, and this reflects exactly your own state of mind.\u00a0 Perhaps you can best understand the state of those who cannot bear the light when you think back to a time when you were experiencing the fullness of love, light, and bliss and yet your thoughts were drifting to certain discomforts you might occasionally experience.\u00a0 Negativities, dissension and destruction still give you at times a certain negative pleasure and excitement.\u00a0 For beings in the lowest, darkest states of consciousness, or worlds, all light is unbearably painful.<\/p>\n
Now, why am I telling you this at this time?\u00a0 The emphasis of your next work is clearly on overcoming and transcending duality, after first thoroughly understanding it.\u00a0 You must therefore recognize that your present sphere of life and consciousness can only be a combination of what also exists in other combinations and in different distributions on the total spectrum of consciousness.\u00a0 And if such variables exist at all, which is reasonable to assume, then spheres of consciousness must also exist in which there is no duality\u2014either in the positive or in the negative sense.<\/p>\n
When consciousness first meets the void, the darkness is so great that a negative unity comes about temporarily.\u00a0 Only as consciousness gradually expands does the other positive polarity appear on the horizon and creates duality.\u00a0 In that phase, duality is already a forward movement in the evolutionary plan.\u00a0 Only when consciousness reaches its full potential does the unity become totally positive.\u00a0 In that completed state there is no longer any pain, strain, or death, be it ever so temporary.\u00a0 There is no conflict any longer.<\/p>\n
It is my task now to open to you more and more approaches to comprehend and overcome duality so you can see the pitfalls and mental difficulties that assail the human mind in its present state.\u00a0 Duality always spells conflict and strain.\u00a0 In the last lecture I expounded on one very specific aspect of this strain.\u00a0 Now I shall broach another topic that is extremely important for all of you.\u00a0 When fully grasped, it will aid you further in overcoming another aspect of the ever present, painful polarity against which you constantly battle.<\/p>\n
You often use the word “surrender.”\u00a0 You sense that this word contains an important aspect of spiritual fulfillment.\u00a0 Yet there is also a great deal of confusion attached to this word which needs to be explored.\u00a0 Human beings who are incapable of surrendering cannot find their core, or their divine nature, cannot love, and cannot truly learn and grow.\u00a0 They are very stiff, defended and closed.\u00a0 Yet the ability to surrender is an essential inner movement from which all good can flow.<\/p>\n
You need to surrender to the will of God; otherwise you will always remain attached to your very shortsighted self-will, which brings you pain and confusion.\u00a0 Surrender means a letting go of the ego, of cherished ideas, goals, desires, and opinions\u2014all for the sake of truth.\u00a0 For God is truth.<\/p>\n
You also need to surrender to your own feelings.\u00a0 If you do not, you will always impoverish yourself and shut out your feeling nature.\u00a0 You will become an automaton.<\/p>\n
You need to surrender to those whom you love.\u00a0 This means trusting, giving them the benefit of the doubt, being willing to yield, as long as this serves the cause of truth.<\/p>\n
You surely need to surrender to a teacher in any field you wish to learn.\u00a0 If basic surrender is lacking, no matter how much the teacher is capable and willing to give you, you can receive very little, if anything.\u00a0 This applies also to a spiritual teacher.\u00a0 If you constantly withhold your trust and maintain reservations, you do not allow a most important dynamic to develop.\u00a0 You may assume that you can absorb mental knowledge from a teacher from whom you inwardly keep aloof, and this is true to a degree.\u00a0 But in true learning much more is involved than outer mental processes.\u00a0 You have an inner, emotional, spiritual, and involuntary level that needs to learn also.\u00a0 On this level nothing can be absorbed unless you surrender to the teacher.\u00a0 This rule applies to the most mundane things you wish to learn.\u00a0 A process learned merely as a mental deduction is not truly absorbed.\u00a0 It has to become an inner reality before it can become your own.\u00a0 How much more does this hold true for spiritual growth!<\/p>\n
Your refusal to surrender has to do with lack of trust, with suspicion, fear, and with the misunderstanding that if you surrender you will lose your autonomy and your ability to make future decisions.\u00a0 The refusal to surrender creates an overdeveloped self-will which takes its toll on the personality.\u00a0 The person who refuses to surrender becomes truly impoverished.\u00a0 Surrender is such a movement of fullness, of giving over, of letting go, that enrichment must follow it according to natural law.\u00a0 Overdeveloped self-will always brings strife.\u00a0 You can see in your world how two self-wills clashing create war on a small or a big scale.\u00a0 To make peace possible, whether between individuals or countries, there has to be a yielding.<\/p>\n
Yet we cannot just state that surrender is the key.\u00a0 It is never as simple as that.\u00a0 Should you surrender to a person who is truly untrustworthy?\u00a0 Should you give in when the situation requires a fighting spirit to stay in truth?\u00a0 The need to stand up and fight for a good cause, to defend a right position, to assert justified claims, is indispensable in any productive, healthy life.\u00a0 The need to discriminate when to trust and when not is also indispensable.\u00a0 “And how am I to know?” you often ask yourself.<\/p>\n
A very great confusion arises right here.\u00a0 There are few issues in human life about which there is as much misunderstanding and displacement as about false surrender and false assertion.\u00a0 How do you become more aware of this very important aspect of living?\u00a0 How can you avoid capitulation and resignation under the guise of surrender?\u00a0 How can you avoid a false, stiff holding on when surrender would be appropriate?\u00a0 Let me show you a few important keys which will eventually enable you to find this fine balance.<\/p>\n
For a dependent ego that denies self-responsibility it is quite impossible to surrender.\u00a0 In such a case, surrender becomes a giving away of autonomy.\u00a0 This is why those who are secretly and often unconsciously most dependent, those who crave most for a perfect authority to take over, are also the most defended against all yielding.\u00a0 They vaguely sense that the giving away of self can only occur when the self is strong and healthy; then the self will grow even stronger and healthier through the very act of giving itself away.\u00a0 So, my friends, when you find in yourself or in others an inability to surrender, to trust, to give over, to yield, look for the undercurrent of dependency and the denial of genuine self-responsibility.\u00a0 The greater the rebellion, and the greater the show of “I must protect my autonomy, so I will never be told what to do,” the more desperate is the inner wish not to govern one’s own life, not to be made responsible for one’s decisions and their outcome.<\/p>\n
When you choose a mate, a friend, a teacher, or someone with whom trust and at least some degree of surrender is necessary, how often are you blinded by wishful thinking, by your self-will which demands that the other person be a certain way in order to accommodate some of your distorted desires and aims?\u00a0 Since a part of you knows this, your distrust is to a certain degree justified, even if the other person happens to deserve the trust in realistic terms.\u00a0 In order to trust and give over, you need to be free to a considerable degree of unrealistic expectations.\u00a0 Your gaze has to be clear and undistorted by childish or destructive motivations.\u00a0 When this is the case, your intuition will function; your observations will be clear and reliable; your channel will come through.\u00a0 You will know that the person you trust does not need ultimate perfection in order to warrant your trust.\u00a0 You will simply be able to yield where this is necessary.<\/p>\n
Surrender never means that you give away your ability to discriminate and to make independent decisions forever.\u00a0 It may perhaps indicate a change of course if that is appropriate.\u00a0 For life is in constant flux.\u00a0 Everything and everyone changes, and there is no fixed guarantee that what is right today will be so tomorrow.\u00a0 The greater your ability to surrender in the right way, the stronger you find yourself becoming, and the clearer your visions are.<\/p>\n
At present, many of you find yourselves in an interim stage where the self is not yet complete and whole enough and your vision is not objective enough for you to truly let go into the inner yielding attitude without which it is quite impossible to become a whole person.\u00a0 Therefore you need to attempt, very consciously, to further self-responsibility in every possible way\u2014overtly and subtly, on the inner and outer levels.\u00a0 At the same time, you need to pray consciously and deliberately to be able to trust those who deserve your trust, to follow their leadership, and to surrender your self-will.\u00a0 This surrender of self-will is always an act toward God.\u00a0 His will alone must replace your self-will, but sometimes His will can function only through others before it can manifest directly through you.\u00a0 It is God’s will that you also surrender to the spiritual leadership he has guided you to.\u00a0 It is God’s will for you to surrender to some of the most beautiful involuntary processes within yourself\u2014your love feelings, for instance, and your deepest intuitions.\u00a0 It is God’s will that you become capable of yielding as well as that you become capable of fighting and standing firm.\u00a0 As you grow in autonomy and self-creation, you will sense very clearly that there is no contradiction or duality between surrendering and standing firm.\u00a0 In fact, it will be clear to you that one presupposes the other and is not possible without the other.<\/p>\n
Your human struggle is tragic.\u00a0 You long so deeply for a fulfillment that is indeed possible and not as unrealistic as you sometimes suspect.\u00a0 Yet you make the fulfillment of this longing impossible by blocking your soul’s natural inclination toward surrender.\u00a0 All truly good things can come only when you surrender to the greater forces of the universe, both within and without, whether it be to the Creator, to another human being, or to being a follower.<\/p>\n
Yet you also need to fight for these fulfillments by relinquishing your passivity, your irresponsibility in wanting an ideal authority to do it all for you.\u00a0 You need active, positive aggression to never allow the dark forces within you to conquer you, or make you believe that all is futile, or convince you to give in to their whisperings of hopelessness and false surrender.\u00a0 Here you must stand firm and realize the power embedded in your thought processes, in your inner will, in your ability to choose faith over fear, courage over cowardice.\u00a0 For what requires more courage than believing in God’s truth and your power to live and demonstrate it?<\/p>\n
There is a finely calibrated balance between the active movement of the personality\u2014whether in action, thought, or attitude\u2014and genuine surrender.\u00a0 Genuine surrender never weakens the personality.\u00a0 It makes the positive ego healthier and stronger.\u00a0 It enables you to be more autonomous and active.\u00a0 Genuine positive activity and self-affirmation renders you sufficiently strong and resilient so you can dare to let go of self, to give over, and to allow yourself to flow with a new movement stemming from sources as yet unknown.\u00a0 These forces, as I mentioned before, may come from within you; they may ask you to risk following a teacher or loving a mate.\u00a0 This never means closing your eyes to reality.\u00a0 Quite the contrary; you should always open all your faculties and observe objectively, without personal motivation.\u00a0 Check whether you may want to see the other person as more perfect because you still wish to abdicate self-responsibility, or whether you want to be always armored against any kind of yielding, following, or surrender and want to justify it.\u00a0 You may wish to see the other person as worse for the same reason.\u00a0 Then you can say, “No one should be trusted.\u00a0 I must always be on guard.”<\/p>\n
You all have surrendered in some areas of your lives, otherwise you would not know the fulfillment and positive states you now enjoy.\u00a0 The growth you have experienced on this path is in part due to having allowed yourself to trust this process, your helper, your leaders, me.\u00a0 All of this has helped you to open up a little further and to give your trust to God.\u00a0 This trust may not yet encompass all areas of your being.\u00a0 But to whatever degree trust does exist, you are liberated, free, strong, and self-confident.\u00a0 So what I am saying here sounds indeed like a great paradox:\u00a0 only when you give yourself over can you find your real strength and autonomy.<\/p>\n
It is equally correct to state that all of you still withhold a part of yourselves from this movement of completely giving over.\u00a0 There always remains a little corner of your soul which you hold in reserve, protecting it from the beautiful movement of merging with the all.\u00a0 The more you hold in reserve, the greater the problems will be, the more fear, pain, and conflict must exist in your life.\u00a0 The irony is that you believe exactly the opposite.\u00a0 You believe that you are safe only when you hold yourself separate, suspicious, and stiff.\u00a0 The truth is that by total surrender to God you not only find true safety and security; you also become capable of surrendering to others if and when this is appropriate in your life.\u00a0 Only when you totally surrender to God is your channel clear enough to recognize truth from falsehood, to see who should and who should not be trusted and followed.\u00a0 Then you can shed your selfhood in safety, as your soul demands, without the danger of losing yourself.\u00a0 Or perhaps I can state it differently:\u00a0 only when you can lose yourself can you find a more complete and real you.<\/p>\n
The ability to give yourself over, to lose yourself, is tantamount to being a healthy and whole person.\u00a0 First, you should mentally fully comprehend the importance of surrender so that you will be motivated to set the further process in motion.\u00a0 Next, you need to make the decision on the voluntary level.\u00a0 It is not difficult to see how you, quite consciously and deliberately, deny this movement.\u00a0 The conscious decision, to deliberately let go of self and give over, will at first seem frightening, but after you have summoned up the courage to do it again and again, you will discover the great safety and security that arises from it.<\/p>\n
Then you will have to deal with your involuntary levels that hold you back from surrendering.\u00a0 You may first recognize the existence of this reluctant aspect of yourself only indirectly, by manifestations rather than by direct awareness.\u00a0 You will need the usual honesty and stamina to explore some of the less pleasant manifestations before you can recognize your hard inner nucleus that withholds and denies.\u00a0 This involuntary part needs to be approached somewhat differently than the conscious part.\u00a0 The conscious part can respond directly to your will direction, but the involuntary, hidden part does not.\u00a0 What you need to do is ask the Christ within to make this change possible.\u00a0 Pray for that part of yourself that does not directly respond to your positive intentionality and your goodwill.\u00a0 Be fervent on the conscious level in your desire to unify all of you in your desire for a total giving over to the Creator.\u00a0 You also need to cultivate the ability to yield to other human beings.\u00a0 But realize that this involuntary part of you will at first lag behind, as it were.\u00a0 It cannot immediately respond and often stubbornly holds on despite your conscious power to effect any change.\u00a0 Make room for a process within the greater process, in which a hidden corner of your soul catches up with the rest of you.<\/p>\n
You have no idea how strong your own spirit is.\u00a0 You constantly underestimate and believe yourself to be much weaker and much more ineffectual than you actually are.\u00a0 Since you must experience according to your belief, it is difficult to find out how strong you really are.\u00a0 You can create anything, for you have all divine creative forces at your disposal.\u00a0 And of course you do exactly that.\u00a0 Some of your creations are undesirable, springing from negative beliefs and distorted notions.\u00a0 If you could only see the immense power that dwells in your thoughts, your beliefs, your attitudes, and your desires!<\/p>\n
The power of your own living spirit still needs to be discovered.\u00a0 There is a block to this discovery.\u00a0 You often wallow in the notion that you are helpless and beaten by adversity.\u00a0 Even the popular belief in God can contribute to the notion that you are helpless.\u00a0 Again it is not contradictory to say that all the power is with God.\u00a0 He is the source of everything.\u00a0 Yet this by no means excludes your own potential to unite with this divine power and allow it to flow through you.\u00a0 You are capable to become receptive to it and become an active agent of this greater power.\u00a0 You have the inborn ability to be a relay station of creative forces, if only you knew this and used it wisely.<\/p>\n
The block exists on the one hand because the limited mind’s self-will is often contradictory to divine will and law.\u00a0 Insistently holding on to your self-will, you become less powerful, because your creative forces are paralyzed.\u00a0 There is, on the other hand, a part of you that does not wish to be a fully grown, self-creating entity.\u00a0 It wishes to be given to and avoid the responsibility for your life-creation.\u00a0 This immature part weakens you in a different way.\u00a0 Neither of these weaknesses are inherent.\u00a0 They are unnecessary artificial constructions due to a false attitude and ignorance.\u00a0 Once you awaken to your inherent potential to create, to change, and to affect your own soul substance, as well as people and your surroundings, you will know who you really are.<\/p>\n
This new awareness unifies\u2014among many others\u2014the specific dualities I have discussed in this lecture:\u00a0 surrendering and standing firm, yielding and self-assertion, giving in and fighting for the good cause of truth.<\/p>\n
As you grope for the fine line of when and how to express both sides, you will find that they are not mutually exclusive alternatives.\u00a0 It is true that both attitudes are necessary ingredients of life, but it is equally true that the ability to fully give over strengthens you to fight for and in truth.\u00a0 Conversely, the courage to fight objectively for truth and to disregard self-interest and hidden agendas will give you sufficient strength to risk letting go and shedding your ego-self.\u00a0 You will create a harmonious automatic response that will be adequate and right for each situation.\u00a0 But it requires a great deal of deliberate awareness and groping while you grow into this state, until your responses can readjust themselves to the way they were originally and naturally meant to function.<\/p>\n
Surrender amounts to a certain kind of inner, involuntary relaxation.\u00a0 The involuntary process comes about gradually as a result of much voluntary work on the outer level, yet it seems to just happen.\u00a0 A phenomenon some of you may know may serve as a helpful illustration.\u00a0 When people go through extreme states of pain, there comes a point when the pain is no longer bearable.\u00a0 At that point the fight against pain is given up on the involuntary level, and total surrender to the pain, transcending the conscious, volitional mind and will, takes over.\u00a0 In that moment all pain ceases and transforms into ecstasy.\u00a0 This phenomenon is known to the devilish practitioners who torture human beings for political and other power reasons.\u00a0 When they see this transformation happen, they stop their torture, allowing their victims to regain once more a state in which they again begin to resist surrender.\u00a0 My point here is to show you how everything including pain can be transcended if the concept of surrender is properly understood and incorporated into the soul.<\/p>\n
Take in these thoughts and give them space and scope in your mind, my beloved friends.\u00a0 This will start a new process that will enrich your personality with new ways of self-expression.\u00a0 There will be room for firmness, for standing in self-affirmation, and for the ability to surrender whenever and wherever this is an appropriate and fruitful attitude.\u00a0 Surrender to God is always appropriate and fruitful.\u00a0 Surrender of all of yourself and your feelings to a leader, a teacher, a helper, a mate, and to certain conditions is often a necessary movement without which you cannot complete yourself.<\/p>\n
My dearest, most beloved friends, you are all so blessed, so richly held in God’s hands.\u00a0 Know the strength of your spirit that becomes manifest when you know your connection with the ultimate source of all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
You often use the word \u201csurrender.\u201d You sense that this word contains an important aspect of spiritual fulfillment. Yet there is also a great deal of confusion attached to this word which needs to be explored. Human beings who are incapable of surrendering cannot find their core, or their divine nature, cannot love, and cannot truly learn and grow. They are very stiff, defended and closed. Yet the ability to surrender is an essential inner movement from which all good can flow.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1821,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"lecture-categories":[13],"lecture_tag":[1842,1666],"class_list":["post-2721","lecture","type-lecture","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","lecture-categories-pathwork-lectures-1996-ed","lecture_tag-arteries","lecture_tag-surrender"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n