From lecture 224, CREATIVE EMPTINESS:

Most human beings create an agitated mind, an inner and outer overactivity, because they are frightened that they may be empty, that there may be nothing within to sustain them. This thought is rarely conscious, but on a path such as this the time comes when you do become conscious of this fearful thought. Then the first reaction is very often, “I do not even want to acknowledge that I am afraid of this. I’d rather continue busying my mind in order not to face the terror that I am nothing inside, that I am only a shell that needs sustenance from without.”

This self-deception is obviously futile. It is of utmost importance that you face this fear and deal with it openly. You need to create an atmosphere within yourself in which you allow this emptiness to exist. Otherwise you perpetually deceive yourself, which is very wasteful because the fear is unjustified. How can you ever live in peace with yourself if you do not know what you fear and therefore make it impossible to find out that what you fear is not so?

As a result of a process that has continued for centuries humanity has conditioned itself to make the outer mind a very busy place, so that when that busyness ceases temporarily, the resulting quiet is confused with emptiness. It indeed seems empty. The noise will recede, and you must indeed embrace and welcome the emptiness as the most important channel through which to receive your innermost Godself.

There are several psychic and spiritual laws you need to comprehend in order to nurture this emptiness and make it a creative venture. Some of these laws seem to be contradictory. Let me put it this way: If you cannot let yourself be empty, you can never be filled. Out of the emptiness a new fullness will arise, yet you cannot disregard your fear. It must, like everything else, be gone through. My advice is that you challenge that fear, and at the same time welcome the emptiness as the doorway to your divinity. This seems contradictory, but it is not. Both attitudes are necessary.

Another apparent contradiction: It is extremely important that you be receptive and expectant, yet without preconceived ideas, impatience, or wishful thinking. This seems very hard to explain in human words. It is something you have to feel into. There must be a positive expectancy that is yet free from preconceived notions of how and what should happen.

Still another related apparent contradiction: You need to be specific, yet this specificity must be light and neutral. You must be specific in one way, but not in another. If this seems confusing now, ask your inner being to relay the comprehension to your mind, rather than trying to understand directly with your ego-mind.

The workings of the greater self so far surpass the mind’s imagination that specificity would be a hindrance. Yet the mind must know what it wants, be prepared for it, reach for it and claim it, know that it deserves what it wants and will not misuse it. The outer mind must make constant changes in order to adapt itself to the greater scope of the inner God consciousness. Your outer mind must become empty and receptive, yet it must hold itself poised for all possibilities. Thus it will be able to mate with the inner stillness and what appears at first as emptiness.

As you do this, in a spirit of patient, persevering, positive expectancy, yet empty in mind and soul, a new fullness can manifest. The inner stillness will begin to sing, as it were. From the energetic point of view, it will convey light and warmth. Strength you never knew you possessed will arise. From the point of view of consciousness, inspiration, wisdom and guidance will come for the biggest and smallest issues in your life.

The mind can be a hindrance or an aid to this process. You all know that your mind is limited only by your own concept of its limitations. To the degree you limit your mind, you cannot perceive what is beyond it. The mind is finite and it must aim to spread the boundaries of its finiteness until it measures up with the infinite that is beyond the mind and that is within yourself, right here, right now. Then the mind merges into the infinite consciousness of your inner universe, in which you are one with all that is, and yet infinitely your personal self.

As it is now, you carry your mind with you almost as a burden because it has become a closed circuit. Inside that circuit there is a certain leeway for ideas, opinions, and possibilities you have made room for in your life as a result of your education and the mores of your society. That circuit contains what you have chosen to learn and adopt as knowledge, both as part of the group consciousness and as your personal experience. To the degree you have grown and expanded, the closed circuit of your mind has widened; however, it is still a closed circuit. You are still burdened with limiting ideas about yourself and your world. It is therefore necessary, in order to elicit creative emptiness, that you visualize the boundaries of your mind by questioning yourself about all the things that you think are impossible for you. Where you are hopeless and frightened there must be an idea of finiteness that is simply locked into your mind; thus you lock out the great power that is here for all those who are ready to receive it honestly.

Again we have an apparent contradiction. On the one hand, it is necessary that this limited mind open itself up to new ideas and possibilities, as you have already learned to do in your meditation. You have seen infallibly that where you have made room for a desirable new possibility, it has indeed come into your life. You have also seen that when it does not come into your life, you deny that it can for whatever reason. It is therefore necessary that you begin to puncture that closed circuit. You cannot immediately dissolve it; you live with a mind and you need your mind. But where you puncture your mind, the flow of new energy and consciousness can penetrate. Where it is not punctured, you stay locked within its narrow confines, which your spirit is fast outgrowing. On the other hand, your mind must rest, not hold opinions, be neutral, in order to be receptive to the great new force sweeping the inner universe of all consciousness.

But let us return to the process of puncturing the limited mind. How do you do that? First tell yourself that you do hold limited beliefs, instead of taking them for granted. The next step is to challenge them. This requires taking the trouble to walk through, in the well-practiced attitude of self-observation and self-confrontation, your limited beliefs and to truly think about them. Sometimes it is not just that you have a false belief, the possible negative intentionality in holding on to it, you can see how you keep the circuit closed and deprive yourself of the inner plenitude you yearn for.

Another law of great importance for this purpose is that the opening to the greater universal consciousness must not be approached in a spirit of magic that is supposed to eliminate the growing and learning process. Now, this ultimate power is supposed to fill and sustain you, however, your outer mind must go through the steps of acquiring whatever knowledge is necessary. You all see this in the arts and sciences. You cannot be inspired as a great artist, no matter how much genius you have, unless you learn the craft and the technical dexterity. If the childish lower self wants to use the channel to the greater universe in order to avoid the initial tedium of learning and becoming, the channel will remain closed. For this amounts to cheating, and God cannot be cheated. When you cheat, the personality may become seriously doubtful that anything beyond the mind exists, because no inspirational response comes forth when using “magic” to coddle your laziness and self-indulgence. The same is true of science or any other field.

Now how about this same law with respect to inspiration for your personal life and decisions? Here, too, you must not fail to go through the work that the outer ego-self has to do in order to become a proper channel for the God consciousness. You do this in pathwork. You need to truly know yourself, your weaknesses, your lower self, where you are corruptible, where you are dishonest or tend to be. As you all know, this is hard work, but it needs to be done. If you avoid it, the channel will never really be reliable and may contain a lot of wishful thinking, stemming from your “desire nature,” or it may reveal “truth” that is based on guilt and fear and is thus equally unreliable.

Only when you work in this fashion on your development will you come to a point when you no longer confuse gullibility and wishful thinking with faith, or doubt with discrimination. As a great pianist can be a channel for higher inspiration only when he goes through the finger exercises and the hours of practice that make his playing finally effortless, so must God-inspired people work on their purification process, on deep self-knowledge and self-honesty. Only then does the receptacle become commensurate with higher truths and values, fit to be influenced and used for higher purposes to enrich the world and the self.

At the same time you need to cultivate a neutrality. Your devotion to fulfilling the will of God must include an attitude that whatever comes from God is all right, whether you desire it or not. Too much desire is as much a hindrance as the absence of all desire, which manifests as resignation and hopelessness. The refusal to endure any kind of frustration creates an inner tension and defensive structure that close up the vessel of the mind and maintain the closed circuit. In other words, you, as a receptacle, need to be neutral. You need to give up the strong, tight, self-willed yes or no to make way for a flexible trust guided by your inner God. You need to be willing, pliable, flexible, trusting and forever ready for another change you had not contemplated. What is right now may not be right tomorrow.

There is no fixedness when it comes to the divine life that springs from within your innermost being. This idea makes you insecure, for you believe that security lies in fixed rules. Nothing could be further from the truth. This is one of those beliefs that need to be challenged. Envisage that in the idea of forever meeting every new situation by being inspired anew there lies a new kind of security which you have not found as yet. What is right in one situation may not be right in another. This is one of those laws of the new age that is opposed to the old “stable” laws according to which what is fixed and unchangeable is secure.

The laws that pertain to this new venture into your inner creativity and life need to be studied very carefully; you must work with them. These are not just words to listen to; you need to make them your own. These laws are apparently full of contradiction. You need to acquire knowledge, the mind must be expanded, it must be able to conceive of truthful possibilities, and yet you must make your mind neutral and empty. This seems contradictory from the point of view of the dualistic consciousness, but from the point of view of the new consciousness that is spreading through your inner universe, these are not contradictions at all. For years I have tried to show you in many areas how this principle works: something that is in truth and commensurate with the higher laws of life conciliates opposites that are mutually exclusive on the lower level of consciousness. What is conflict-producing on the lower level is mutually helpful and interactive on the higher level.

More and more you will discover the truth of unification, where dualities cease to exist and contradictions no longer contradict; where you experience two previous opposites as valid aspects of the same truth. When you begin to comprehend this principle and apply it to your own life, your outlook and values, then you are indeed ready to receive the new consciousness released in realms far beyond your own.

When I say that you must not approach your divine channel with the attitude that it should save you the work of living and growing, I am not contradicting the necessity of being passively receptive. It is simply a shift of balance: where you have been overactive with your mind, you now need to quiet down and let things happen; where you insisted on taking the controls, you must now relinquish them and let a new inner power take over. On the other hand, where you before tended to be lazy and self-indulgent and looked for the line of least resistance and therefore made yourself dependent on others, you now need to take over and actively nurture the principles that help to establish the channels to your inner God. You also need to actively express its messages in life. Thus activity and passivity need to be reversed.

Your mind will thus become an instrument. It will open up, puncture its limitations, and acquire new concepts — lightly, not tightly — with which to “play around” for a while. This attitude of lightness in your perceptions, of flexibility, of motility of mind will make you the most receptive to your apparent emptiness.

Now, my friends, as we approach this emptiness, how does it feel? What is it all about? Again, the human language is extremely limited, and it is almost impossible to squeeze this kind of experience into the context of language. I will try my very best to give you some tools, however.

As you listen into your inner “chasm,” it seems at first to be a black gulf of emptiness. What you feel at this point is fear. This fear seems to fill you up. What is this fear? It is as much a fear of finding yourself to indeed be empty as of finding yourself with a new consciousness, with a new being evolving within you. Although you yearn for this, you also fear it. The fear exists in both possibilities: You want the new consciousness so much that you fear disappointment, and yet you also fear finding this consciousness because of all the obligations and changes that this might impose on you. You must travel through both these fears. On this path you have received the tools to deal with such fears by questioning your lower self.

But the time comes when you are ready, notwithstanding the fear, because you have already made the connections. You know, for example, what your lower self wants and why you have negative intentions. The time comes when, in spite of the fear, you decided calmly and quietly to go into the emptiness. So you empty your mind in order to meet the emptiness deep within. Lo and behold, very soon that very emptiness will feel, not full the same way you are used to, but it will contain a new aliveness that the old artificial fullness of your mind made impossible. In fact, you will soon find out that you made yourself artificially dull by packing yourself tight: tight in the mind because of its noise, and tight within your channel by contracting your energy into hard knots of defense. You had killed your aliveness with this artificial fullness. So you became needier because without your inner life you could not be fulfilled in a real sense. A vicious circle was established as you strove to get fulfillment from outside, since you refused to go through the necessary steps to make fulfillment first manifest within.

In one sense you fear the aliveness more than the emptiness. And perhaps you had better face that. When you make yourself sufficiently empty, the first initial response is an inner aliveness, and you tend to immediately shut the lid tight again. Yet by denying your fear you also deny that you are really very unhappy about your lack of aliveness. But lack of aliveness comes from fearing it. You can make the fear give way to aliveness by letting yourself be creatively empty.

You will experience your whole inner being, including your body and your energy, as a vibrantly alive “inner tube.” Energy goes through it, feelings go through it, and something else is vibrantly coming to the fore that you cannot as yet name. If you do not shy away from that unnameable something, it will sooner or later turn out to be constant inner instruction: truth, encouragement, wisdom, guidance, specifically destined to your life right now, wherever you need it most. That emptiness, that vibrant alive emptiness, is God talking to you. At any moment of the day it is talking to you where you need it most. If you really wish to attune to it and hear it, you will discern it, first vaguely, later strongly. You need to condition your inner ear to recognize it. As you begin to recognize the vibrant voice that speaks in wisdom and love — not in generalities, but specifically to you — you will know that this voice has always existed in you, but you have conditioned yourself not to hear it. And in that conditioning you have tightened and packed up that “inner tube” that will fill you with the vibrant music of the angels.

When I say the “music of the angels,” I do not necessarily mean this literally, although that, too, may exist. But what you need more is the guidance for every decision about what opinion or attitude to adopt in a given situation. That instruction is truly comparable to the music of the angels in its glory. This fullness cannot be described in its wonder; it is a treasure beyond all words. It is what you constantly look and yearn for, but most of the time you are not aware of this searching and project it on substitute fulfillments that you expect to come from outside.

Refocus on what has always existed within you. Your mind and outer will have confused and complicated your life, so this new contact is like finding your way out of a maze — a maze you have created. You can now recreate your inner landscape without that maze.

Now, my dearest friends, I would like to say a few words about the new person in the new era. What is the new person? The new person is indeed always a receptacle of the universal intelligence, the divine consciousness, the Christ consciousness, that permeates every particle of being and of life. The new person is not functioning from the habitual intellect. For many centuries the intellect had to be cultivated to fulfill its role as an important stepping stone in humanity’s evolution. By now, the overemphasis has gone on too long. This does not mean you should revert back to the purely blind, emotional “desire-nature,” rather, it means you should open up to a higher realm of consciousness within you and let it unfold.

There was a period in evolution when it was as hard for people to find their ability to think, to weigh, to discriminate, to retain knowledge, to remember, in short, to use all the faculties of the mind, as it now seems hard to find contact with the higher self. The new person has established a new balance in the inner system. The intellect must not be left out; it is an instrument that must serve, become unified with the greater consciousness. For many ages people believed that the intellectual faculties were the highest form of development, and some still believe this now. So they make no attempt to journey further and deeper into their inner nature to find greater treasures. On the other hand, there are many spiritual movements that practice discarding and inactivating the mind altogether. This is equally undesirable because it creates splits rather than unification.

Both these extremes are half-truths, though they can have relative validity. For example, in the past, people were like beasts, undisciplined and irresponsible as far as their immediate desires were concerned. They were totally driven by emotions and desires, regardless of ethics and morality. So for that stage the development of the intellect fulfilled its function. And the intellect also fulfilled its function as a very sharp tool of learning, of discriminating. But when it ends there it becomes a farce. Humans who cannot become animated by their divinity become a farce. By the same token, the practice of leaving the mind temporarily inactive is advisable, and I recommend it myself. But to treat the mind as if it were the devil and to oust it from your life is missing the point.

Being in either extreme, people are not full; they need all their functions working in order to express their divinity. Without a mind, you become a passive amoeba; when the mind is deemed the highest faculty, you become a hyperactive robot. The mind then becomes a computerized machine. True aliveness exists only when you wed the mind with the spirit and allow the mind to express the feminine principle for a while. Until now the mind has been very much linked with the masculine principle: action, drive, control. Now the mind has to express the feminine principle: receptivity. This does not mean that you will become passive. In a sense, you will be more active, more truly independent than you were before. For when the mind receives inspirations from the God consciousness, they must be put into action. But this putting into action is harmonious, effortless, not like a cramp. When your mind is receptive, it can be filled with the higher spirit within you. Then the functioning becomes totally different, forever new and exciting. Nothing becomes routinized; nothing becomes stale; nothing becomes redundant. For the spirit is forever alive and changing.