From lecture 203, INTERPENETRATION OF THE DIVINE LIGHT SPARK INTO THE OUTER REGIONS — MIND EXERCISES:

Creation “started” — and of course it never really started, so when I say “started,” I am again squeezing a concept into human language, a concept for which there is no other word. Try to feel this truth! Creation “started” with the divine spark. The spark may have been tiny in an immense vacuum. Yet in this tiny spark was the utmost divine reality, comprising everything that is conscious within the most powerful creative energy, the most incredible wisdom and love. The infinitely good divine Creator aimed to fill this vacuum, a vacuum of nothingness, with the spark of the all. Gradually, the spark began to spread and slowly penetrate the darkness and nothingness of the vacuum. The spark had incredible light and glowing aliveness and allness. The vacuum formed an infinity in the “outer” regions; the spark, an infinity in the “inner” regions. Here a contradiction may appear in dualistic human terms. How could there be two infinities? It is truly impossible to convey this to the human consciousness — how it could be true that there is an infinity, but it is both vacuum and inner spark of eternal light, the later filling the former.

The eternal spark spreads inexorably its inner infinite regions. Perhaps you can visualize its form in a picture: imagine a thick, golden, sparkling liquid, teeming with energy and glorious creative potentials, containing within it all seeds. Brilliant, effervescent, alive, intensely conscious, it is endowed with every conceivable and inconceivable power to create worlds and beings. It slowly spreads, aiming to fill the apparently infinite nothingness. This is the All, in its infinity and eternality, inexorably filling the vacuum, until there is no vacuum.

Since the All is such vibrant consciousness and powerful energy, it cannot help but penetrate the entire vacuum. The outer region will be entirely filled with the inner world of light and life.

In the process of spreading, particles of this All, this divine spark, seem to get lost and “forget” the origin of their wholeness and connectedness. These particles believe themselves to be isolated dots of consciousness, thrown into the outer darkness and struggling against being swallowed up by it. This struggle is an illusion; the fear is an illusion. The apparently isolated dot is not really isolated. The connection always exists, but in the process of penetration, the advancing, spreading life and allness is partly diminished in its manifestation. In this diminished state there are “times” when the outer darkness seems nearer and more real than the inner life of the spark.

The outer vacuum is not evil, for evil is not nothing. Evil comes into existence when the particles of the divine spark lose their memory, and have not yet regained the knowledge of their connectedness and struggle against the vacuum. The ferocious struggle against giving up being, existing, aliveness, distorts divine reality and energy. The temporary transition creates a state that may be called evil. But it is temporary.

This temporarily and apparently separated aspect of divine reality must inevitably be drawn back into the ever-spreading All. That is, it is not really drawn back. Rather, the ever-growing fullness of the spreading spark catches up with the aspect that has moved ahead in a diminished form. All of nature, with its various life forms, is part of this great, slowly advancing wave that fills the outer regions.

Your own life, your struggle and your development, should be viewed in this light. Feel yourself as you bring truth and divinity into your whole being. This is the spark in you pushing to penetrate the outer regions. The more life on earth progresses in spirituality, justice, love, truth and oneness, the more it fulfills this creative process.

All this explains your resistance to giving up your negativity, your evil. If the isolated aspect has lost sight of its connection with, and its purpose in, the whole scheme, it can no longer identify with the all-consciousness of which it is a part. Thus, giving up the negative attitudes that express the struggle against the dark vacuum seems to threaten the individual with extinction. Giving up evil seems like voluntarily going into the dark nothingness — which is confused with physical death. Since the divine reality must ultimately fill everything that is, all particles must reunite themselves — or, rather, discover that they have always been united with the All.

The fear that the vacuum will engulf the apparently separated divine spark is what you experience when you meet your innermost terrors. For, what I say here, philosophical, metaphysical, and remote as it may sound, is not a remote event, unrelated to your present life. When you go deeply into yourself, you will find that this fear is ongoing in your inner and outer life. You will find the terror of the vacuum, and you ultimately will find the eternal consciousness, the all-consciousness, which is you and can never die, and which must slowly interpenetrate the vacuum.

The sooner you make room for these verities and openly respond to them, the sooner you will experience the true state of your being. But when your consciousness is steeped in the separateness as the only “reality,” when it mistakes the momentary state for the ultimate reality, your mind blocks off the experience.

This is the plan of creation, this is evolution, this is the aim. Can you see how you, every one of you, are a part of it? You have a task, for you are God. The ultimate in you, the All in you, sends you forth, sends an aspect of itself forth, which then manifests as an apparently separated ego-consciousness. It is the task of this separated aspect to probe its own depths and potentials to find the infinity of life, power, wisdom, love, beauty, and eternality. For all the whole is also contained in the part. It is your task indeed to make your whole conscious being aware of this, so that you can consciously and deliberately spread your being into the vacuum, filling it with your real nature.

From lecture 216, CONNECTION BETWEEN THE INCARNATORY PROCESS AND THE LIFE TASK:

To begin with, I have to recapitulate some aspects of creation that I have discussed previously in different contexts. Creation is the attempt of divine reality to fill the void with life and being. I dedicated a whole lecture to this and I recommend that you reread it in order to fully understand the topic. Fragmented consciousness is a result of the total consciousness spreading and filling every nook and cranny of “space.” I use this term for lack of a better word.

The human structure itself represents this picture very well. Deep inside your nucleus is an infinite essence. This inward essence is eternal life, eternal reality, eternal beauty, limitless wisdom and love, but although your outer consciousness is connected with the essence, it ignores this fact and seems to be disconnected from it. You seem to be an isolated piece of consciousness. This is what makes life appear so frightening and why your outer consciousness is blindly groping its way back to its connection with the total self. Your outer consciousness will eventually gain awareness of this connection, because the connection was really never broken. It only seemed broken from the vantage point of the limited outer consciousness.

The task of every fragmented, apparently disconnected aspect of consciousness is to realize its true identity and connection with the real self. This happens through an often laborious groping search, through attempts of the mind to expand its own narrow limitations. The mind holds this potential for expansion; even in its disconnected state it contains every aspect of divine reality. Using this potential depends only on which way the mind turns, which way the will directs it, which thought the mind chooses in any given instant. This is an important key, my friends, and we shall return to it later in this lecture.

The fragmented aspects of consciousness, of divine light, which seem to have lost their connection, float around in space. These aspects become personalities. Such personalities develop problems because of their apparent disconnection. The word “problem” is in accord with today’s vocabulary. In other periods of history different words were used, like “sinfulness,” for example. Whatever word you choose, the fragmented aspect of consciousness needs purification on many levels, such as feeling, understanding, knowledge. It needs to spread its awareness to its full capacity. Spreading means to realize that the connection exists, has always existed, and will always exist.

A total entity — a complete entity — is one that is completely aware of its divine nature, that is in total possession of divine wisdom and energy. You are all total entities, but your manifest consciousness, with which you identify, is an aspect that your total entity seeks to reunite with. This can happen only when the fragmented aspect of your manifest consciousness makes itself compatible with the nature of the total consciousness.

Life, in its broader sense, is greatly concerned with the process of spreading divine consciousness and reuniting apparently disconnected aspects. There are many different terms that designate this process. It is often called the divine plan, the evolutionary plan, or the Plan of Salvation.

It is an ongoing process, a ceaseless movement, a flowing energy that seeks to spread out and, at the same time, to reunify itself. In this spreading out the connection is sometimes apparently lost. So the movement is one of spreading out and moving back to its source for reunification, forever advancing in this back-and-forth flow. Each reunification movement back to the source follows a spreading out process, so that the unified substance has meanwhile become enlarged. Just visualize it: spreading out and coming back to the source, each time making the unified substance wider, extending it ever more. This is, in different terms, the great plan.

From lecture 165, EVOLUTIONARY PHASES IN THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE REALMS OF FEELINGS, REASON, AND WILL:

To extend your understanding, it will be helpful to view humanity’s spiritual history and evolution from a certain vantage point. At one phase in this history, human beings were godlike, moved entirely by the creative, cosmic forces. They expressed a universal consciousness in every breath and every move of their eternally living existence. At a certain point this human-divine consciousness removed itself from its divine kernel. A chain reaction set in and humanity’s striving away from the innermost kernel has led to erroneous ideas, destructive reactions and feelings; spiritual blindness, unhappiness, and suffering followed. Each successive distancing from the divine kernel created a new layer of consciousness, covering the previous one and thus thickening the wall around the kernel. Rather than being nourished by the source, the newly separated layer of consciousness functioned by itself, nourished by the error that brought about the overlayers in the first place. This is why you, and people in general, often feel as if you were going around in circles. Yet the freshness issuing from the source is indivisible and unifies all splits and conflicts. This, in very broad lines, constitutes the spiritual history of humanity that has brought it to its present state.

There came a juncture when all this pain, with no apparent way out, induced violence, rage, greed, separateness, and other destructive emotions. This still exists in the soul: suffering, blindness and hopelessness produce loveless feelings, selfishness, and often the most violent and evil reactions toward the world and others. At the dawn of humankind, when human beings were little more self-aware than animals, they freely acted out these destructive feelings. Primitive humans knew no inhibition and no conscience. They were too disconnected from their fellow creatures to sense others’ pain as their own. Their suffering made them too blind because their blindness led them into suffering. Thus, they indulged their destructive impulses.

At later stages, humans learned that acting out their destructiveness brought them into conflict with their environment. Gradually, life experience expanded people’s consciousness and the first reasoning processes showed the individual that letting out blindly what he or she felt would eventually produce more pain. Thus a social conscience developed from the instinct of self-preservation. But mere expedience dictates this kind of conscience. It is still far removed from the inner experience of oneness with one’s fellow creatures. But eventually the individual comes to the threshold where he or she learns to keep the urge to destroy in abeyance. Through many life experiences, through millennia of living under varied circumstances, each entity learns to develop the faculties of reason, seeing the causes and effects of one’s actions and will, using self-discipline to keep from giving in to primitive impulses. You will appreciate the importance of this step in the entity’s evolution.

The realm of feelings is, at this point, predominantly a seething mass of denied pain and, therefore, of violence, hate, and malice. Yet the realm of feelings is the most alive and creative faculty. It is also self-perpetuating. As long as the feeling world is predominantly negative and destructive, its self-perpetuating nature creates highly damaging impulses and compulsions. This is why it is so feared. It is held in check only by the power to reason, to use the mind, and by the willpower to hold back, to discipline all spontaneous impulses.

When this consciousness grows and the negativity of the feeling world becomes obvious, people do their best to deny, cover up, and inactivate their feelings. In the process of denial the spiritual self also becomes further removed. For the spiritual self resides directly within the realm of feelings. The creative mass of feelings is the divine, even if it now manifests in a destructive way. So, when reason and will erect a barricade around the realm of feelings to stay safe from its self-perpetuating negative creativity, they also erect a barricade around the divine kernel, the self-perpetuating positive creative source. Nevertheless, each entity must go through this phase before its direction can be reversed.

This is why you fear the realm of feelings. You have indoctrinated yourself with the safety measure for so long — and now you must unlearn it. You fear the realm of feelings because it is still, in part, primitive. You are still imbued with the self-command you have learned throughout many existences: “I must keep the destructiveness under control.” Yet the more the destructive feelings are denied, the less they can transform themselves back into their original state. Thus a consciousness builds itself based on reason. For a long time, in the history of evolution, reason and will have seemed to be the saving grace that controls, prevents and dominates the realm of feelings.

An untold number of entities now find themselves in precisely this stage. They have sufficiently developed reason and will to keep the realm of feelings under control. They identify and experience themselves almost entirely as the so-called ego — that part which wills and reasons. This was not a wrong turn, my friends. It was necessary. But now another way must be taken. This new way seems threatening; it seems to conflict with all past endeavors. Every challenge to change direction appears to your unconscious as an enormous threat. Activating the realm of feelings seems entirely too dangerous, baring the most primal, selfish, destructive feelings, which seem bottomless and final. This explains, in the deepest possible way, the enormous threat all individuals experience when they come to a certain crossroads in their development. With some, the threat may be so great that they go on and on overdeveloping their faculties of reason and will, so that their personalities become lopsided.

Humankind as a whole is arrested at exactly this point. This is why your technological and scientific development is out of proportion to your feeling qualities and your capacity to experience spiritually. Your emotions seem far more negative than positive. Even your preaching about love and spirituality generally has little to do with true emotional experience. More often than not, these are ideals and theories, a philosophy you adhere to in principle rather than feeling it. The feeling self still appears to be a great enemy and is accused of being unreliable and even dangerous.