From lecture 235, THE ANATOMY OF CONTRACTION:

Tonight’s lecture is about the anatomy of contraction. Many years ago — in your earthly time dimension — I gave a lecture about the principles of expansion, contraction, and what I called static principle. It will be important for you, my friends, to remember that lecture, or to reread it, so that tonight’s lecture will have more meaning for you. I will specifically concentrate on the principle of contraction because there is so much misunderstanding, so many misconceptions, about this principle in your world of duality. You imagine that contraction is negative, bad, while expansion is positive and good. While this may be true on certain levels, it is not true in itself. There is a specific spiral configuration that applies to the development of your soul in this respect.

In the very early stages of the development of a human consciousness, the states of expansion and contraction are both equally painful and negative. As the soul begins to evolve and grow, it enters a new spiral phase or round. On that level, expansion may become positive and contraction negative. Gradually the movement changes again, and on a different level, or even simultaneously, this can be reversed. Expansion can then have a negative manifestation and contraction a positive one. In still further evolutionary states, both expansion and contraction become positive.

Let me show you how expansion and contraction can be both positive and negative. This is something that you do not understand yet. You do understand quite clearly that in the positive manifestation of expansion the outgoing movement is reaching, giving, making yourself available for further beautiful states of consciousness. It is highly volatile creative expression, it is active and aggressive in the best sense of the word. It means penetrating into new realms of being, giving forth from the inner riches, and eliminating walls of separation. It implies courage and strength. It is an active force that propels itself outward. On the universal level it is the force that penetrates and enlivens the void.

What would be the negative facets of expansion? When expansion manifests as negative aggression, as a hostile, conquering force that disregards others, it creates more separation rather than less, and thus contrasts with positive expansion.

Contraction is negative when there is a tight holding back, a cramp, a refusal to flow and give out. This form of it is very familiar to you. It is a seeking of safety through isolation and separateness. It is a movement reaching inward that is motivated by fear, distrust, ungivingness, and false ideas about what is safe and what is not safe. It contains itself in one’s own inner world, but not for the purpose of bringing out the riches of the inner world so as to spread them out, as is the case with positive contraction, but rather in a refusal to move, reach, love, trust, and give out.

Contraction in its positive form has a beautiful, beautiful meaning. It is an in-gathering of all the forces; what has occurred in the expanded state is being gathered back into the self. It is being digested, assimilated. It means reaching into the depths of your infinite divine reality to bring out the treasures of the deepest aspects of the self. Expanding means letting this flow out into the world, but to be able to do so, positive contraction must occur first. Expansion means gathering the riches of divine creation in the inner universe and then bringing them into the outer universe. Contraction means gathering the riches of the outer universe and then bringing them into the inner.

So you see, my friends, two movements are involved here. The expanding outgoing movement brings out what has been collected and ripened in the positive contracted state. The positive contracted state means bringing to fruition what has been gathered in. It is a renewed delving into the deepest layers of divinity. In this state, that which was brought into the soul during the expansive period merges with what is ready to come out next. It is a meeting of two movements within the soul, simultaneously digesting and assimilating the former period and preparing the following one.

The in-gathering movement in its positive manifestation bears no resemblance to the negative contraction. There is no fear or distrust, no ungivingness, there are no false safety measures. It contains much rather a love just as pure as does the positive expansion. It is a going into the self for the purpose of serving the universal creative process harmoniously and bringing it to fruition. Could this possibly be designated as negative?

In positive contraction you gather from without, like a wave that rolls back into itself, so as to reach in and bring out, only to move outward again. This is the ever-present pulsation of life, to be found in all creation, in every creative process. Nothing can be created without the threefold interaction of the expanding, contracting and static principles, be it a small object of the simplest form, or the creation of worlds and universes, material or spiritual realities.

Of course, it is all one universe — without as within. But the movement must make the exchange. From the human vantage point the inner universe offers different kinds of riches and states than the outer. The inner universe offers the material that has to be utilized and brought out into the outer universe so that the outer universe can be given form. The outer universe only repeats what exists in the inner universe in an as yet undifferentiated form. Then the outer universe recreates itself, duplicates the inner forces and the manifestations of the inner universe, and brings back these forces to nourish the inner. Thus the inner and outer universe nourish each other, back and forth.

As you know, there must be a momentary pause between every alteration of expansion and contraction. We call it the static principle for lack of a better word. Static must not be thought of in the sense of stagnation. It is static rather in the sense of allowing to rest, allowing the process to ripen, so that after each contraction that restful ripening phase must set in.

This threefold principle exists in every phase of creation. Creation is unthinkable without all three aspects. Yet in your consciousness you associate the expanding principle with the creative movement, while you perceive the contracting principle as destructive. You ignore the existence and importance of the static principle. This is a mistake. So your mind becomes fixed and closed to the truth. When the contracting principle expresses itself, you judge yourself according to your preconceived idea that contraction is something undesirable and bad and should not be allowed. Consequently you prevent yourself from going through the total creative movement in a state of loving comprehension, welcoming what unfolds, going with it, aiding it with your mind and will. Instead, you obstruct the process with your ideas and your attitude. For as you believe, so must you experience. If you believe contraction is bad, you will experience only its negative facets and will fail to see that these very manifestations you consider negative have a tremendous meaning and sense, most necessary and beneficial for you and, indeed, most positive.

Your false idea that contraction is negative makes you misjudge one aspect of the threefold creative principle. You focus only on what is negative, which is often a most superficial facet, disconnected from the whole. This limited focusing eliminates the possibility to experience anything other than what you already see and believe. You lose sight of its regenerative, benign nature and meaning. The same is true, in reverse, for the expanding principle: you seldom recognize in a negative aggression the negative manifestation of the expansive movement.

There are many overlapping, intermingling spiral movements within the manifestation of this principle. One level of your personality may need, in any given phase of your development, to expand. But for the expansion to be truly meaningful and cohesive with the overall plan, a simultaneous contraction on another level has to take place. This may seem complicated at the moment, but you will understand, you will see that this is extremely important. If you do not fully give yourself, in the most positive spirit, to the contraction of one aspect of your personality, the expanding on the other level cannot be wholesome. The expanding movement can manifest harmoniously and in a meaningful pattern on one level only when the other level gives in to the contraction and derives most benefit from it.

Until you have reached a certain state of self-awareness through the process of purification and transformation, you are totally unaware of this simultaneity of two levels, where on one level expansion, on the other contraction exists. You only connect with the level that is most on the surface and ignore any other ongoing movement and reality within you. But as your consciousness increases, you become aware of this double, and apparently contradictory, manifestation. When this happens, it is indeed a wonderful awakening that indicates a connection with more levels of reality. It also means that you can perceive and trust these other levels, which makes the level of manifestation so much easier to deal with. It sheds a new light on everything you experience. A true balance will be established in that way.

It is necessary therefore that you cease seeing your contractions as bad. You hinder yourself in that way, you blind yourself, and then really make it into a negative manifestation. In this blindness you contract about your contractions, as it were, and then it becomes a self-perpetuating contraction. And that of course is indeed undesirable and unwholesome. But when you derive the full meaning from your contracted state, it will no longer be a negative manifestation. It will be a harmonious in-gathering in which something new prepares to come out of you, in which the receptive principle alternates with the active principle.

Here is another idea for you: You think in terms of the active principle always being the active principle and the receptive principle always being the receptive principle. This is not so. What is on one level of manifestation the active principle must then reverse itself, if it is to be harmonious, and become the receptive principle, and vice versa. When you sense the flow and the meaning in the spiral movement of the contraction and the expansion harmoniously, you will see what was, in one moment and in one phase the outgoing, the active principle, become in the next moment the receptive one, and again, vice versa. This is then harmony, the harmony of life.

Contraction is as necessary as expansion. It is part of the pulsatory movement that infiltrates all of life. Without this, creation cannot exist. I invite you, my friends, to sense deeply into yourselves, where and when and how is your contraction part of your creative process, how can you encourage it, and how you can then utilize it for the next expanding movement. Sense in yourself how both create, and are necessary to unfold your innermost being. You want to bring out your innermost being, for it is the ultimate reality.