The Text - Section 114
114. STRUGGLE: HEALTHY AND UNHEALTHY
Greetings, my dearest friends. God's blessings for each and every one of you. Love and
strength are pouring forth. Open your hearts so that you may tune in to this force.
Not one of you ever has to encounter a difficulty that you are not strong enough to surmount.
Do not doubt the resources of strength that exist in your soul. Reach for these inner resources.
They will give you more strength than depending on help from an outside source. Blessings and
divine help are possible only through the strength that already exists within you, but lies dormant.
This force that flows from within, never from the outside.
Learn to depend on this inner strength, which you have the power to liberate. You reach so
often for outside intervention instead of realizing that nothing can come to you from life when you
do not have the inner equipment to use it and become thereby stronger and wiser. When you
depend on your inner resources, your self-confidence and self-respect will, indeed, be strengthened.
Outside help might be momentarily pleasant, but it will not increase your self-confidence, your self-
reliance, your independence, and your self-respect. So reach inside. Realize that the universal laws
work in such a way that nothing whatever could possibly be beyond your capacity. If it sometimes
seems so, it is only because you doubt or ignore the resources that exist within you.
People often say that life is difficult and painful, that it is a confusing and puzzling ordeal, that
there is no meaning to it. They believe that they are separate from life, but they are not! Regardless
of how your life appears, it is an exact facsimile of how you experience yourself. Your personal life,
as it manifests for you, is a conglomeration of all your attitudes and traits. It is the greatest error
possible, and one of the most fundamental, to believe that you are one thing and the life you are put
into is another. This is not so. When these words have an inner meaning and reality for you, you
will have reached a stage of development where you no longer have to fear, where you no longer
feel like a helpless straw in the wind. As long as you separate yourself from your life, you are not
only in illusion, but you are in fear and in disharmony. Whatever confidence you have in yourself, in
your capacities and potentials, you can have in life. The joy in your heart and your ability to
experience that joy will be your life. As you experience your capacity to cope with setbacks and
disappointments, to relinquish your will if need be, the possibility that life will frighten you will
decrease. Once you examine yourself and your life from this point of view, you will have taken a
further step toward the integration of yourself and your life that is our goal.
Life, of course, is also struggle. But there is healthy and constructive as well as unhealthy and
destructive struggle. Various philosophies and religions ask that you "give up struggling." This is a
true teaching, but it is often understood as meaning giving up or giving in, not asserting your rights.
You feel you must become passive and apathetic and no longer try to fulfill yourself and your goals.
This leads to indifference and sloth, to stagnation and even masochism. It leads to the cruelty of not
caring to better conditions that can be bettered -- in yourself and in the world around you.
Healthy struggle never exhausts your energies. It is never futile, though it does not always
directly reap success. Healthy struggle is characterized by relaxed activity and the ability to accept
defeat, by well-defined aims with healthy underlying motivations, by being concerned with an issue
itself rather than with using an issue to cover up hidden psychological deviations. In healthy
struggle you never fight against yourself. Overcoming impurities and immaturity does not mean
struggling against yourself, but rather allowing these aspects reach your awareness so that you can
understand and come to terms with them. This is the way to overcome what is disturbing and
destructive, not by struggling against it.
Healthy struggle will always make you stronger. You will not swim against the stream, so the
struggle will not consume you and leave you depleted. No effort is required to allow what is in you
to surface. In fact, you waste a great deal of energy preventing this inner material from coming up
and then you wonder why you are so tired. After having reached a certain age, one no longer
possesses sufficient energy to cope with life, but if this energy-current were reversed, life would
become very different. You fight with all your might against awareness of what is in you and
constantly block the flow of your emotions. This is unhealthy struggle. If only you would give it up,
you could easily put the energy where it is useful, meaningful, and productive. Whenever energy is
used in its proper channel, it replenishes itself automatically. But when it is used in a channel not
designed for it, it does not. So there is not enough energy left to defend yourself against being taken
advantage of, to develop your potentials, or to work toward your aims. The ability to take care of all
this will come as a natural byproduct of ceasing the futile struggle to keep your hidden negative
attitudes from surfacing, in the false belief that they can be eliminated by ignoring them.
In healthy struggle there is no anxiety, no fear, no uncertainty, no doubt. Whenever you
struggle for an apparently healthy aim but register negative emotions, you will know that an
unhealthy struggle must also be going on. In some hidden way you must be struggling against
yourself -- perhaps against a doubt or against selfishness or some attitude that hides a lack of
integrity -- for otherwise these negative, depleting emotions could not be there. When you feel them
it is time to stop struggling and allow your hidden emotions to reach the surface.
All human attitudes and feelings can be compared to streams. They move in a cycle in which
inside and outside forces influence one another. But the controlling factor always lies within the
self. When one is trying to shift the control to outer circumstances in the hope that the damage can
be repaired from the outside, and expects help to readjust the disharmonious flow of the self and
life, one prevents the free flow that brings awareness. The outer focus separates one more and more
from the real control one has at one's disposal -- the only meaningful control: complete awareness of
the self.
When you do not like, or even fear, certain feelings and attitudes in yourself, you block
awareness of them. This amounts to obstructing the stream of feelings that should flow freely. Use
the analogy of the stream, though it is not new of course, as a fresh approach, so that you can
visualize the damage done by repression. You need a new impetus in order to be inspired to remove
the barricades. So, my friends, try to visualize each emotion, each attitude and response as a stream.
If you barricade a stream, what happens? It is possible to dam up a river. The water will flow to the
dam and will then be stopped. But the more water accumulates behind the dam, the greater the
energy of the accumulating water will become until it bursts the dam, overflows, and destroys not
only the dam itself, but all the natural and healthy vegetation and structures alongside. Destroying
the barricade in such a violent way is not necessary. The dam in your soul never needed to be
erected, but since you chose to build it, it has to go. You can make gradually and systematically
remove it by your own efforts: this is the conscious process of self-confrontation. Waiting until
nature takes its course means that the barricade will be swept away by the force of the waters. When
life handles you roughly, when the accumulated destructive attitudes whose origins lie behind the
barricade finally break loose, you experience crises and breakdowns of different kinds and degrees.
By not damming up the river, you let the dirt and residue float freely to the surface to be
eliminated. The ever-regenerating water in its purity and freshness will finally sweep the river free of
the debris. Is this not a fact in nature? The same applies to your soul-currents. By fearing and not
looking at the debris of your past hurts and their subsequent destructive tendencies, you accumulate
them behind the barricade, and they are bound to swamp you one day when you cannot control
what happens. But there is nothing to fear when you allow the debris to reach the surface. When
you begin to remove your blocks you will start to experience negative emotions unlike any you have
felt before. The temptation is then to put the lid on again. Beware of this temptation. The warm,
positive, generous, loving, unselfish feelings must follow eventually, and the negative feelings will no
longer be detrimental to you. Not wanting to see the negative does not eliminate its existence.
When you struggle against your insecurity, denying its existence, it rises up behind the dam,
like swelling waters. As long as the dam holds, you will feel a vague discomfort. You will feel
inhibited without understanding why, and you will sense that some of your best potentials are under-
utilized. You will not have a grasp of the situation, nor will you feel the full force of the insecurity
that becomes stronger as it builds up behind the barricade. One day certain outer events will swamp
you with all the despair of helplessness and insecurity you had never dared to face. So by struggling
to repress your insecurity, you actually increase it. By denying its existence, you make it bigger and
stronger than it otherwise would be. The same holds true for any other emotion or attitude -- fear,
doubt, hostility, or whatever -- the principle is the same. The natural laws apply to all created forces,
whether they be actual rivers or the rivers and streams of feeling.
Is it not much wiser to remove the barricade? Waiting until nature breaks it down will render
you helpless. The feelings will swamp you and you will not understand their meaning because their
accumulated momentum has become too strong. Do not wait until such times. All too often one
waits for a crisis before one is willing to take stock of oneself.
It is our aim in this work to avoid futile struggle. For this purpose we have to remove the
barricade before it removes itself, allow the flow to bring out what is inherent in it, and face those
feelings that you would rather evade -- doubts, aggression, jealousy, possessiveness, self-
centeredness, and self-importance -- in short, everything in you that belongs to the hurt child in you.
Why do people resist becoming aware of these emotions? Let us be very clear about what
resistance really means. It does not merely indicate that you do not want to do this work. You
would not mind the work if it did not require your removing whatever barricades the stream. There
is not just one stream in you. Since you consist of many attitudes and feelings, there are many
streams. A few of them, fortunately, are not barricaded; they create a healthy and constructive
attitude toward yourself and toward your life. There are other streams where the barricade is not
too strong and the resistance is not too difficult to overcome. But there are a number of streams
that you have deliberately closed off because you thought that doing so would protect you.
When you start the work, the conscious self does not realize that this "forbidden area" has to
be touched, because its existence has been totally ignored. Only when your work approaches these
areas, without your even realizing what they are, will the resistance manifest. This happens with
some people at the beginning of their self-search. With others, the work may have progressed for
some time and minor barricades may have been eliminated, freeing some streams, before the
forbidden areas can be touched.
The areas you do not want to look at are not necessarily ugly or wicked. In the final analysis,
arrested growth is always life-defeating and self-centered, but the emphasis may not be on
selfishness, but rather on false self-preservation. Putting it differently, the resistance is a defense
against exposure, hurt, and vulnerability.
It is of the utmost importance to become aware of your resistance. If you look at certain past
stages of your development from this point of view, you will recall that every major liberation was
always preceded by a resistance to looking into yourself. No matter what form the resistance may
have taken, you always had to overcome it, summoning your will to look at yourself in truth. This
had to be the strongest, the most important aim, otherwise you could not have succeeded. But do
not for a moment believe that because of these past efforts you will not have to go through the same
struggle again. This is the healthy struggle to overcome the unhealthy struggle against self-
awareness.
Learn to discover the signs of your resistance to removing the barricade. The signs may be
manifold, but once you focus your attention on them you will not miss them. You will learn to take
seemingly legitimate excuses with a grain of salt.
Resistance exists not only because your idea of yourself does not correspond to the reality you
find beyond the barricade; nor is it sufficient to say that the barricade serves as a supposed defense
against the hurts of life. This is too general. One hidden reason for maintaining the barricade is that
deep in one's soul one hopes against hope that it is possible to remain a child. Children seem to
have the advantage of being given what they need to be happy and secure. They can avoid the effort
of obtaining it themselves. The illusion is very tempting: to be entitled to receive without having to
stand on one's own feet. The recollection of this advantage of childhood combines with the fear of
touching the afflicted areas where the past hurts are. Because the psychic forces have tended toward
deliberate helplessness, the ego has remained weak and therefore now it cannot trust itself. This in
turn furnishes an excuse for depending upon others for one's needs. One does not want to give up
the belief that happiness, fulfillment, and security can come from others, so one clings to this hope.
This is a main reason for resisting removal of the barrier.
Once you remove it you will know that you have been clinging to an unjustified hope, and
that you did not wish to acknowledge this. You will know that you did not want to go through all
the effort of becoming responsible for your life, and that up to now you did not want to shoulder
the burden of having failed in this respect.
Depending on others for one's needs may take many forms and apply to many different
aspects of outer and inner attitudes. You have to find out how this applies to you.
As a child is helpless, so is an invalid. Both depend on others. The resisting psyche is
therefore not only the child that has not yet grown up, but is also a deliberate invalid.
On the one hand, you are afraid of your helplessness and do not give yourself the chance not
to be helpless, nor to test whether or not your helplessness is real. On the other, you are afraid of
the opposite: that you indeed have many more resources than you would like to admit. Admitting
them would demand certain obligations and the assumption of self-responsibility, but you would
rather take on false responsibilities because that seems an easier way to get approval. This, too, can
be verified only in subtle, hidden areas that are not easy to find unless you have gained considerable
self-knowledge.
To summarize: The prohibition against allowing the flow of all feelings into your conscious
mind is due to, first, fear of imperfection; second, fear of having to shed attitudes that supposedly
protect one from hurts; and, third, insistence on remaining a child because then others are
responsible for your needs, your happiness, and your safety. Again I have to admonish you that
identifying these prohibitions is not easy, even though many emotions may have reached surface
awareness already. If you persevere, you will find your fear of helplessness, since you also fear
knowing that you need not be helpless if you do not wish to be. You further fear having to give up
your childish desire for instant gratification of all your wishes.
These resistances cut you off from your life-stream, even if this stream brings in its wake some
debris to begin with. But is it not much better to let the debris float freely where you can see it?
Seeing it affords you the means of removing it; otherwise it will build up behind the barricade as the
water mounts.
Recognize the signs of resistance, my friends! Observe yourself. See how you are always
tempted to shove an unpleasant feeling aside in the hope that it will "go away." Observe how you
try to find easy explanations that do not really satisfy you. Observe how you make excuses for not
looking at these disturbances, and how everything else seems more important. Beware of the easy
rationalizations, for they are most dangerous. Preposterous rationalizations -- which exist even in
the sanest people -- are much easier to cope with because they require less effort for the truth to
penetrate. But the seemingly valid rationalizations pose the real dangers: they require sincere effort
and the cultivation of truthfulness.
Each one of you concerned with spiritual development and inner growth may pose the
following questions: "What is most important for me in order to reach the maximum possible self-
honesty? Which of my activities can help me most in this? Do I deceive myself when I wish to
believe that any activity other than self-recognition can bring me spiritual development? Is growth
possible without it? Are my efforts sufficient, or could I do more? If I could do more, why do I
permit this reticence? Could it be that I cultivate self-finding only in those areas that do not hurt,
that do not create anxiety in me? If this is so, then I must consider the likelihood that I resist
knowing what is in me. What is my attitude toward myself in this admission? If I want to persist in
my resistance, is it not better that at least I know that I lack the courage to look at myself, rather
than pretend the opposite? Do I have the courage for this admission? Can I acknowledge that there
are certain areas of my being where I am courageous and utterly willing to look truthfully at myself,
while other areas may exist where the opposite holds true?" Ask yourself all these questions and
then listen carefully. Pray that you do not deceive yourself with the answers. If you do this, my
friends, it will mean more than you can possibly imagine at this time. Once these questions are
truthfully answered, you will experience the difference between healthy and unhealthy struggle.
If there is doubt in you, and you do not want to doubt, you may struggle against the doubt by
denying its existence, but you do not remove it. This is exactly what your resistance, your barricade,
does. It is a pretense of not doubting, it is not the reality. Doubt is only one of many emotions.
There are clusters of negative emotions combined in certain attitudes that you resist recognizing.
Stop the resistance. Let the negative emotions float freely to the surface, and then you have nothing
to fear from them.
Unhealthy struggle is resistance, and it is futile because you fight to make yourself believe
something that does not correspond to reality. It is as simple as that, and must be recognized in
these terms.
Understandably, you tend to forget this, my friends, and it is my task to see that you are
reminded of it at appropriate times and to furnish you with the equipment you need, including
strong examples that approach the problem from a new angle.
So do not struggle against what is inside, regardless of what it is, for you consume your
energies in the denial. You perpetuate self-deception, and you do not achieve the result you wish.
Learn to accept that you are only human and are not despicable because you harbor the same
weaknesses as all your fellow human beings. Thus you will be kinder toward yourself and this will
enable you to face all that is in you. Harsh unkindness with oneself is not a virtue, my friends, as
you may believe. It is quite the opposite, because it is proud, arrogant, and breeds self-deception
and untruthfulness.
I also want to remind you that whenever you feel inner discomfort, it is not sufficient to look
for the deeper meaning. You also need to examine the times when you felt similarly as a child. Then
synchronize these two feelings. But it is necessary to have made some progress on this path before
this approach becomes meaningful and liberating. Otherwise it will merely be an empty, although
perhaps interesting, speculation. Do not ever forget the childhood hurts that you have not yet come
to terms with maturely make you barricade the stream, to resist, to be untruthful toward yourself, to
live in destructive patterns, inner fear, and insecurity. These hurts cause you to struggle in the wrong
direction, which puts you in disharmony with life's flow. Only if you understand this can you enter
the stream, flow with the tide of time, space, and movement in harmony with the universal forces.
Those who have never found and consciously acknowledged a resistance in themselves still
have much to learn. They are way behind those who can freely admit, and thus cope with, their
resistance.
If there are spontaneous questions referring to this lecture, please ask them now.
QUESTION: If someone has repressed fear and then has come to realize it, and this
realization makes the fear overflow -- you discussed today how whenever there is an overflow, there
is a struggle -- how can he cope with it?
ANSWER: It is an error to believe that allowing yourself to become aware of the fear will
cause an overflow you cannot cope with. It is not the awareness that causes the difficulty, but the
attitude toward the fear and what underlies it. The wrong attitude is the unhealthy struggle against
the fear. Struggling in the sense of telling yourself that "I should not be afraid, I do not want to feel
fear because it is unpleasant," fights against the part of yourself that happens to be in fear now. The
feeling of being flooded by fear comes from bracing yourself against the wave of fear. Your
defenses against recognizing that you are in fear still operate.
You have partly removed the barricade because you realized that it prevents development, but
another part of you bargains to have the fear removed before it is fully out of hiding, with all its
ramifications. If you stop struggling against the fear, if you can say, "I, a human being like many
others, am now in fear," you will finally float and rise on the wave of fear, rather than being
immersed in it. You will swim in the fear rather than drowning in it. This will eliminate the feeling
of danger. Although the fear will still be present, it will be experienced in a very different way.
Immersion is due to struggling against the wave. The fear of drowning prevents people from
swimming, even though they have capacity to swim. Only when you swim can you see what is
behind the fear.
Nagging, persisting fears are unrealistic fears you do not cope with properly, regardless of
what the issue may be. Underneath these, you will always find other "streams of emotions" that are
blocked and thus prevented from flowing. These other emotions may be manifold: hostility,
humiliation, pride and shame, hurt, arrogance, self-importance, self-pity, insistence on unreasonable
demands, and many more. You struggle against these feelings just as you struggle against the fear.
Very often, the first layer underneath the fear consists of strong hostilities, which are particularly
taboo. If they are allowed into the fresh air of consciousness, the fear will automatically cease. I
promise this will be so, and this has often been corroborated by friends who have already gone
through this phase.
QUESTION: And if it is not a psychological fear, but a physical one?
ANSWER: Your attitude toward a physical predicament does not preclude psychological
deviations. A realistic fear will be coped with in the best and most reasonable way possible. If the
unpleasant result one fears is not eliminated, then acceptance of the unpleasantness must finally
come, if it is coped with maturely and realistically. But acceptance is impossible as long as one
struggles. The mind is divided. Part of it says, "I should accept what cannot be altered," and another
part says, "I do not want to accept it." Situations result in nagging fears whenever this division exists
goes unrecognized. Moreover, the underlying negative emotions are still kept in hiding; they simply
make themselves known in connection with a now real outer reason. But the existence of the outer
reason does not eliminate their presence. The inevitable difficulties of life can be met only if the
psychological deviations are recognized. If a real outer fear overwhelms you, then you struggle
against a part of yourself in life. And here we come around full circle to the beginning of this
lecture.
Ask yourselves, my friends, if you are afraid of certain happenings in life. Are you not
doubtful of your strength and resourcefulness to go through them? Tackle it from there. A final
word regarding this: The doubt about your own resources has to do with your childish insistence on
having to have your way, and your inability to relinquish it. The more you must have, the more you
will be in fear, and the more you will struggle against the knowledge of this fear and of your childish
insistence. The emotional maturity we seek is the ability to tolerate frustration, and to accept that
everything does not always go one's own way. That acceptance will finally enable you to master
yourself and life because you will float with the wave, instead of stemming against it. That alone will
give you self-confidence.
If you can accept not having whatever you want, that will give you the trust in yourself you
truly deserve. If you must have what you want without being able to provide it for yourself, you will
remain helpless and dependent and insecure. If you can accept frustration, you will have the
confidence of knowing that you can cope with life.
My dearest friends, meditate deeply on these last two sentences. You will then come to see
that the event you fear is much less frightening than your helpless dependency on having to have
what you want, while denying your own and life's limitations.
My dearest friends, be blessed, all of you! May the love that is pouring forth fill you with
courage and the knowledge that you have within yourself all you need to master any situation. May
this love also give you strength and wisdom, as well as the inner willingness to really understand
what I have said tonight. For this would mean such a liberation for you! It would mean the
difference between living and only half-living. You cannot do enough pondering over this lecture.
Try to make it a lived knowledge; apply it to yourself personally, rather than merely understanding it
intellectually. Receive our love and blessings. You have nothing to fear.
Pursue this work and you will become forever stronger, more creative, and more harmonious
with yourself and with your life. You will become more alive than you ever thought possible. Be in
peace. Be in God!