Growth

But why is the emotional nature generally neglected? There are good reasons for that, my friends. To gain more clarity, let us first understand the function of the emotional nature in human beings. It includes, first of all, the capacity to feel. The capacity to experience feeling is synonymous with the capacity to give and receive happiness. To the degree you shy away from any kind of emotional experience, to that extent you also close the door to the experience of happiness.

. . . . This will give you greater understanding and a wider vision of the relationship between the individual and the totality of all individuals. It will enable you to visualize that humanity as a whole is an entity, governed by the same laws as the individual who is a part of the bigger body — humankind. There are aspects within the individual that you do not fully understand and therefore cannot control, thereby destroying union, peace and integration of the personality. This also applies to humankind as a whole.

We were discussing the unitive and the dualistic principles. Human consciousness, perception, and experience are generally geared to the dualistic principle. This means that everything is perceived in opposites — good or bad, desirable or undesirable, life or death. As long as humanity lives in this dualism, conflict and unhappiness must persist.

Tonight’s lecture is a sequel to all the lectures I gave this year and can be fully understood only in that context. It will deal with the topic of dynamic growth, the spontaneous unification inherent in the process of growth. All life is to some degree a growth process, either quite deliberate and committed or haphazard and unconscious, obstructed by blind opposing forces that pull toward a state of stagnation.

Humanity consists of different levels of consciousness. Each level of consciousness represents a conglomerate of attitudes, beliefs, and feelings. These levels of consciousness are often at total variance with each other, expressing different states of development in the evolution of the person.