The Text - Section 119
119. MOVEMENT, CONSCIOUSNESS, EXPERIENCE: PLEASURE, THE ESSENCE OF LIFE
Greetings, my dearest friends. God bless all of you. Blessed be this path of self-realization
and self-unfoldment. All of you who make serious efforts to overcome your inborn resistance to
facing and changing what is unrealistic and therefore destructive in yourselves will begin to reap the
fruits of this endeavor. You will notice an increasing awareness of yourselves, and an increasing
liberation of vital forces and energies.
Tonight I shall attempt to link several points that we had previously looked at separately,
because you then lacked the inner understanding to establish a linkage. The general progress of this
group now enables me to go deeper. And, as you know, on the deepest level all cosmic and human
aspects unify.
A long time ago, I gave a lecture about the life force. Let us look into this again with the
greater understanding you have gained. The life force is a free-flowing energy current, manifest in
the entire universe. Wherever an organization fulfills certain essential conditions, it tunes into the
life force. The life force permeates and revitalizes it. It lives. A living organism comes into
existence.
We previously defined life from various points of view. Let us now be very simple about it.
There are three essential elements that determine life: movement, consciousness, and experience.
As you may have noticed from a number of topics in the past, as well as from other observations,
there are many triads in the spiritual structures of life. If harmony prevails in the living organism,
the triad forms a whole, in which one aspect of the triad blends, balances, and harmoniously
combines the other two. If the organism is in disharmony with the universal laws, the three factors
oppose one another. So it is with this triad.
Let us look more closely at the significance of each of these three aspects. Without
movement, life does not exist. What lives must move; when movement goes out, it is because life
goes out. The entire universe is in motion because it is alive. This principle applies equally to every
aspect of the human entity. On the physical level it is easy to observe. When muscles are not
moved, they atrophy. Part of the physical body is losing its life. On the mental or intellectual level it
is also noticeable. The brain that is not trained to think -- to move -- stagnates. It loses the capacity
for thinking. It atrophies, just as the muscles of a body do when the body does not move. Thinking
is a movement.
On the emotional level movement is generally more difficult to observe, unless one is on a
path of self-exploration. You, my friends, are becoming aware of inner conditions of your
emotional life that show how repression creates rigidity. Rigidity is the opposite of life, which is
always flexible, always in motion. Feelings are movement, too. When feelings are prohibited, or
manipulated so that they cannot function according to their own harmonious law, they deaden.
Hence, to be fully alive as far as movement is concerned, all levels of the personality must
keep on moving in a natural, organic way. Growing is moving. As I have said so many times,
without growth there is no life. And since growth is a movement, without movement there is no
life.
Movement contains the quality of reaching out. It contains the elements of relationship,
communication, love, understanding. It reaches out to the other being. Union is unthinkable
without movement, because union involves always reaching beyond the confines of the self.
The second element of life is consciousness. We have discussed this so extensively that not
much has to be said about it now. It is self-evident that to the degree that an entity is conscious, so
is it alive. There are many degrees of consciousness. The human being is the first creature in the
upward scale of life that possesses self-consciousness, awareness of itself in varying degrees. People
such as you, my friends, who pursue a path of increasing self-awareness, raise their level of
consciousness in the fastest possible way. Increased awareness of self must, perforce, increase
awareness of others, of the universe, of life as a whole. Awareness determines the measure and
direction of movement and regulates it according to reality. Movement without consciousness is
bound to lose itself in wrong channels. It may be too extreme, or it may give in to apathy and
stagnation.
On this path, you often detect how your emotional life either stagnates or is uncontrolled.
Your awareness gradually regulates this and brings harmony into your emotional life. Frequently,
you neglect physical and mental movement. But much more frequently, it is the emotional
movement that you neglect. And even your neglect of physical and mental movement is only too
often due to emotional stagnation.
The effort to increase consciousness is itself movement. On the other hand, movement
without consciousness -- or a limited degree of consciousness -- hinders the harmonious movement
of all personality levels. If, for example, movement and consciousness are directed exclusively
toward outer matters, or if self-understanding is neglected, the integration of all personality levels
cannot take place. The body and the mind may develop, but the spirit suffers when the emotional
level is not infiltrated with movement and consciousness. Blind emotions of which one is not aware
are a consequence of the lack of consciousness on the emotional level. When the movement of
searching, thinking, discriminating, evaluating is not directed to hidden emotional areas, the
movement of the emotions is off balance -- in part blindly wild, manifesting, for example, in
uncontrollable hostility, and in part paralyzing the best faculties of the feeling-body.
Experience is the third element of life. The fuller the experience, the more harmonious must
be the interplay between movement and consciousness. Shallowness is lack of experience. When
your feeling-body is paralyzed, your ability to experience must suffer. When your feelings are
distorted and one-sided, it is because you misinterpret reality. In short, it indicates faulty awareness,
insufficient consciousness. The ability to evaluate an experience determines the maximum of
pleasure and the minimum of pain. For the former, feelings must be moving; for the latter,
consciousness must function.
The higher the overall development of an entity, the greater its bliss and pleasure, and the less
its pain and suffering. This is due to correct evaluation and realistic perception, and free-flowing
movement unhampered by fears, inhibitions, and paralysis. In short, the experience of bliss results
from the harmonious blending of movement, consciousness, and experience.
Experience contains the pleasure principle. The possibility for utter bliss is contained in the
life force. It is your inborn longing to partake of this experience, which becomes possible when
your entire organism is in harmony with reality, when you no longer fight against it because of
misunderstandings.
When the deepest layers of the psyche are reached, it becomes apparent that the raw, primitive
instincts are concerned only with the experience of pleasure. Behind the superstructure of moral
standards, laws, and rules lies the craving for pleasure supreme, regardless of the consequences. In
the immature creature, the pleasure principle would like to function, but insufficient consciousness
creates a discrepancy between the creature's capacity for pleasure and its environment. Hence,
intellectual maturity frequently hinders the pleasure principle, which is repressed when
consciousness does not penetrate the levels. Therefore, the ability to experience pleasure is unable
to develop. It remains childish and self-concerned. If it does manifest, it is patently destructive. If
it is prohibited from manifestation, the inherent destructiveness is not eliminated: it festers
underground while kept in check, so that no real fulfillment can be experienced. This is so because
consciousness does not penetrate the hidden layers. Movement, which should direct the search for
pleasure, is checked, so that the pleasure principle cannot unfold in the life of the individual. Thus
the faculties for experiencing maximum pleasure are thwarted.
Human beings are meant to experience maximum pleasure, but when you experience pleasure
at the expense of harming either others or yourself, you have not attained a harmonious balance
between the three elements of life. Harming oneself also arises from unjustified guilt feelings and
eventually is bound to harm others also.
One of the most damaging factors in the general development of the personality is the
influence of deeply ingrained prejudices and misconceptions. This world is so filled with generally
accepted "facts" that even the most enlightened and independent spirits blindly accept certain
postulates about why certain things are supposed to be right and good and others wrong and bad.
The sense of wrongness about the free development of human faculties to experience universal bliss
combines with personal fears and negative experiences so that the personality may remain crippled
for many an incarnation until it has the courage to free itself. Fear and shame of disapproved
instinctual drives cannot possibly mature them so that they integrate. As a consequence, many
people develop in a lopsided way. The farther someone develops in a limited direction only, leaving
other parts of the personality untouched, the greater the crisis and conflict of the personality must
be.
Society's taboos regarding the erotic and sexual forces contained in the life force have resulted
in intellectual and technical overdevelopment compared with the ability to love. The love force
cannot grow if it is arbitrarily separated from the erotic and sexual forces. They are all one stream.
If human consciousness fearfully watches over every stream of feeling, anxiously cutting out of the
life stream that which it believes to be wrong, the capacity to love must suffer -- not only love
between the sexes, but every kind of human love. The great spiritual love force knows no such
divisions, and its cultivation is impossible if a continuously watchful eye tries to pull out what is
supposed to be wrong. It is as though people attempted to play a symphony while eliminating
certain essential notes. At first, some notes may ring false, but eventually, after sufficient practice,
the notes will harmonize and form an integrated whole.
A misconception of long standing, which has only been eliminated in the last fifty years or so,
was the idea that infants do not experience erotic or sexual pleasure. The truth is that infants
experience physical pleasure more strongly than the average adult human being. The infant is not
burdened with guilts, shames and misconceptions. Therefore, the instinctual drives manifest much
more intensely. However, experience of the pleasure principle is naturally self-centered and
undeveloped -- which does not make it wrong or sinful -- because consciousness and movement are
as yet hindered. Thus, in the child's early years, its pleasure is directed to its immediate environment
-- to the parents. This phenomenon is completely natural, and only traditional misconceptions
stamp it as wrong. Generation upon generation of inherited prejudice halts the growing individual's
natural development. Fears of perversion, homosexuality and incest play a role.
But the baby knows no such boundaries. Its sexual instincts thrive without these concepts
and ideas. If guilt and a sense of sin do not drive these instincts underground, if the growing person
cultivates mental and spiritual awareness and the entire personality grows harmoniously, the sexual
drive changes. It undergoes the same process as general human development. The more the person
grows, the more he or she reaches out, first from the self to the immediate environment and later to
the world outside the family circle. The early adolescent is most preoccupied with companions of
the same sex intellectually, mentally, emotionally -- and also sexually, as an extension of the self and
of the parent of the same sex. But as growth continues, he or she reaches out to the other sex.
Overt perversion is avoided not by the inhibiting fear of sin, but by the entire human
organism growing up and out of itself. Fear of the sin of perversion tends only to drive
undeveloped instincts inward, as is true of any other human reactions.
When a person is ashamed of hate and hostility, of envy and vindictiveness, these trends fester
in the unconscious, too. You can grow out of these emotions only if you learn to face these feelings,
to understand their origin and reason. If you do not, you may not appear to harbor such feelings,
but you will harbor them nevertheless. They manifest indirectly through a general paralysis of
creative functions, of the ability to have rewarding and meaningful relationships, and of fulfillment.
It is exactly the same with the "forbidden" immature sexual feelings. They, too, must be
faced, reexperienced, come to terms with, if the personality is to grow harmoniously and fulfill itself.
These forbidden feelings are frequently on a layer below hate and resentment. Hostility and
other negative emotions may have been difficult to face because they contradict one's idealized self-
image and bring disapproval and rejection. But they are often more acceptable than pleasurable
feelings in connection with one's own family. Therefore, such pleasurable feelings are kept even
more securely locked than hate. Often hate is artificially fostered as an antidote to forbidden
pleasure, and repression of hate and anger occurs only subsequently. Thus, you must unroll this
entire process, layer by layer, until this most primitive area is reached. Then, and then only, can
organic growth take place and the personality unfold in its full splendor. Whenever a life activity, no
matter how useful, productive, or creative in itself, seems to hinder the unfoldment of your
emotional depth in experiencing pleasure, your inner being is off balance. In a balanced, integrated,
full personality, one activity will enhance the other. Creative endeavor never suffers by the full
experience of the life force in all its aspects. Quite the contrary is true.
Before prejudice, fear, and misconception tend to prohibit the natural flow of an infant's
participation in the life force, its experience of the pleasure drive is acute. Every experience in
infancy is influenced by the pleasure principle. This principle enters into all of the child's activity.
The child's type of experience and the psychic condition with which it is born subsequently
influence its attitude toward the pleasure principle. Hence, when the baby is caressed, fed, loved, it
experiences acute physical pleasure in contact with its surroundings. If development proceeds
naturally, as I said before, the outreaching movement induces the entity to direct the pleasure drive
outward from the self to the immediate family environment, to the outer world, and to the opposite
sex. As discussed in a previous lecture, this movement necessitates the integration of love, eros and
sexuality, which in turn is a consequence of the equal development of movement, consciousness,
and the ability to experience. The integration does not take place, however, if there are taboos,
fears, and an artificial separation of instinctual drives. Their existence prohibits the natural
development.
With growing maturity in this respect, perfect union between two individuals of the opposite
sex becomes possible. Apart from the immeasurable bliss of this experience, the union enables the
two personalities to function incomparably better in every other respect. Such healthy union does
not exclude productive activities or rewarding relationships with others. On the contrary, the more
the personality is integrated and therefore capable of experiencing its destiny -- the utter bliss of the
life force -- the more it must include others. The realm of experience widens, with each experience
perfect in its own uniqueness. Needless to say, this widened experience does not mean promiscuity.
The more you reach out, integrating all your faculties into a harmonious whole, the more you
fulfill your spiritual destiny. Beyond the human sphere, this reaching out is infinitely extended, but
this is beyond human comprehension. The concept of spiritual union is mostly a theoretical one for
human beings, although at this stage it can be said that there is no arbitrary separation between the
various facts of the great life stream that contain the pleasure principle. Life on earth is a
preparation for this supreme pleasure, and therefore it is of utmost importance to remove the
trouble spots within the psyche. The trouble spots mean that the pleasure drive was fixed in
connection with negative, unpleasurable experience by guilt and fear, by misconception, and the
faulty assimilation of experience.
This negative fixation of the pleasure drive may take two extreme forms, with many degrees
between them. At one extreme are superimposed rules, taboos, and false guilts, which cause anger
and rebellion. Such anger and rebellion are the result of fighting against what one partly accepts.
They do not indicate real freedom, which derives only from awareness and comprehension.
Outwardly, the rebellion may manifest in the living out of raw, undeveloped, primitive instincts in a
spirit of defiance; or, you may harbor fear and guilt, thus preventing organic growth. Your instincts
remain in the primitive childhood state, and what was once natural and organic becomes destructive
later in life.
At the other extreme, guilt and fear thwart the unfoldment of the pleasure principle, and the
soul is prohibited this aspect of its development. It is frustrated and feels a void, for the deep
longing for happiness is not wrong, but is in reality a spiritual factor. Overcompensation and
mischanneling are further results until the soul ultimately follows its destiny and brings all its
faculties into a growing process. Usually, there are stages between these extremes, either overt or
unconscious, so that the personality battles blindly against both extremes, fluctuating but never
being enlightened and freed.
Consequently, it is essential that everyone on the path investigate his or her primitive,
heretofore untouched feelings in this regard. They must be lifted out of hiding and seen in
connection with the personal experiences and conditions in the early environment.
It is often proclaimed that pleasure for its own sake is wrong. The truth is exactly the
opposite. When the personality is harmoniously developed, the pleasure drive includes others, it
gives and receives -- and this is as it should be. In a mature individual, the pleasure drive is not self-
centered and excluding. Hence, it cannot be antisocial. It is only antisocial and excluding if the
adult manifests his or her sexual drive in a way appropriate for a child. Children are antisocial, self-
centered, and therefore excluding. Emotions that remain fixed in the childish state are less sinful
than indicative of a lag in overall development. Frequently an immature individual will use the
pleasure drive for other needs -- for example, to enhance the ego, to diminish feelings of inadequacy,
to feel wanted and desired because one feels insecure and helpless. Often aggression and hostility
are taken up by the pleasure drive and manifest, without the person's awareness, in the sexual drive.
It is then that one may truly speak of perversion, because the pleasure principle is used for
something other than its true function. It should be fulfilled by greater self-awareness and the
outgrowing of one's problematic emotions. The pleasure principle becomes, at least partly, a
substitute for emotional growth and awareness.
You need to find the entanglements among your guilt, repression, fear, early childhood
fixations of the pleasure principle, its failure to develop, and the effects this lack of growth has on
your life and interrelationships. You can find the entanglements only by looking deeply into your
hidden primitive feelings in connection with your early environment. This is not easy; it cannot be
done at once. Your psyche must be loosened up in earlier stages of the pathwork so that it becomes
possible to reexperience these early emotions. This can be done if you do not resist this endeavor.
The reward for the ensuing liberation is beyond words.
As long as the personality is unconsciously fixated on early experience, the soul cannot truly
grow and expand its experience. The fixations cannot be given up unless awareness enters into
heretofore closed areas. Then, and then only, can you come to terms with your inadequately
assimilated early experience, and your psyche become ready to truly reach out. Fixation implies lack
of movement, and therefore lack of growth. It implies lack of consciousness, for in consciousness,
proper understanding could be applied, so that the movement of the life force could dissolve the
fixation. Experience then could take place on the level for which the individual is potentially ready.
Where movement, consciousness, and experience function harmoniously, the individual is fulfilled
and essentially happy, regardless of occasional outer difficulties. In such a case, love, eros, and
sexuality are one force, and there is no conflict between the intellect, the emotions, and the spiritual
center.
Let us now look at certain basic conditions in childhood, which will help you in looking at
your own childhood. As I mentioned before, the child experiences intense pleasure in contact with
his or her parents. Whether or not of the same sex, each parent stands in the foreground at certain
periods of the child's development. This is normal and healthy for these limited periods. But such
feelings are labeled sinful and perverse. The child soon absorbs these ideas, even when they are not
expressed directly, because they permeate the atmosphere and the adults' conscious and unconscious
thinking. The result of these labels is precisely the opposite of the intended effect. The child would
naturally outgrow these feelings, but guilt, shame, and fear fixate them in the unconscious psychic
life; it becomes impossible to relate to others without the influence of these early feelings. Then
layers of destructive, artificial emotions cover up the basic condition. In this process love, being
combined with the pleasure drive, is turned into hate. Hate has to be covered with a sterile, false,
pretended love. Hence, hate is due not only to rejection and hurt, but equally to what seems
forbidden love.
In your work on this path, it has become increasingly obvious that you relate to your parents
in your other relationships, particularly with your mate. The more fixed your emotions are, the more
they indicate that powerful emotions are involved. The most powerful feelings are those connected
with the pleasure principle. If you now consider a number of previous lectures, particularly those
dealing with the influence of parents and the behavior patterns deriving from the parental
relationship, you will gain considerably deeper insight. This insight will enable you to reexperience
what keeps you rigid, what prevents your complete organic growth. Do not be afraid of facing these
feelings. Encourage them! You have nothing to fear in facing them -- on the contrary. Be alert, my
friends, and you will truly liberate yourselves. Be particularly watchful when feelings seem
problematic because there is too much blind adoration, or too much resentment -- more than the
occasion may warrant. Such overreactions indicate that you have not come to terms with natural
phases of your past development.
When erotic longing in childhood was fulfilled to a degree, due to a demonstrative and
affectionate parent, this does not necessarily guarantee healthy further development. Whenever the
sense of guilt is too strong, the entity is incapable of coming to terms with the experience. The
unresolved experience will later manifest in battling against love and erotic or sexual fulfillment. On
the other hand, if the child did not receive the fulfillment it longed for, it became convinced that its
longing was wrong, and again the adult will battle against these feelings. The healthy longing of the
soul may occasionally counteract such conflict, but the longing is always diluted by the unassimilated
original experience.
You may believe that only the experience of pleasure during childhood activates the erotic and
sexual force in the growing individual. But often painful experience melts into the pleasure drive
and fixes erotic and sexual pleasure to the painful experience. It is important to recognize this fact.
Fear and pain are the essence of all negative experience. It is often the case that a human being
functions erotically or sexually only in connection with fear and pain; when fear and pain are absent,
the pleasure principle cannot manifest. I cannot stress sufficiently how important it is to look into
your areas of negative pleasure and connect them with the childhood circumstances that produced
pain and fear. Then you can find the fixation directly and without detour. It is obvious that as long
as a person is fixated on negative erotic or sexual pleasure, it is impossible to maintain a fruitful,
dynamic relationship. It must always end, and therefore such a person cannot experience what his
or her soul longs for.
Nevertheless, this is not as negative a factor as you might think, because the child alleviates
the pain by allowing the pleasure principle to influence the painful experience, which might
otherwise have been unbearable for the child's undeveloped ego. If painful experience is eroticized
or sexualized, it permits the entity a limited experience of the revitalizing life force, which is better
than the alternative of thwarting the pleasure drive altogether. In most instances, the person
unconsciously combines these alternatives to deal with painful experience.
It is of utmost necessity to dissolve all these fixations and thus set the life force free.
Frustration, every lack of fulfillment, self-dislike, guilt, disease, lack of energy or creativity, any
negative aspect of creation must ultimately be connected with this facet of human development. All
human beings contain within their psyches the infants they once were. And the infant responds
and reacts as it once did. It is concerned only with the simple wish to experience pleasure. Either
this pleasure was given, or it was not. The parents had the power to give or to withhold. The basic
struggle of the infant is to attain the pleasure and eliminate that which stands in the way. This
simple, primitive struggle still exists within each individual. In itself it is not sinful, shameful, or
wrong. As the psyche grows out of this primitive state, the flavor, emphasis, and ramifications of
the search change.
One parent may have given more pleasure, the other more pain. Both parents may have given
both. In any case, the pleasure and pain go on battling within you until they are brought out into the
daylight of consciousness. Then the struggle continues in an entirely different way, in a healthy and
constructive way that leads toward spiritual maturity.
All images, pseudo-solutions, misconceptions and inner conflicts arise from the infant's
struggle between attaining pleasure and avoiding pain. The infant's fusing of pain and pleasure as a
"way out" must not be confused with the unity between pleasure and pain when overcoming the
duality of life on earth. The former is a blind attempt to overcome the duality and, as such, not real
and productive.
On your further steps on the path, my friends, consider this lecture together with the last one.
Working them through as one unit will facilitate matters greatly. Try to detect the hidden fear of
your feelings that stems from humanity's strong separation of general human affection from the
erotic sexual flow. In reality they cannot be so completely separated. Your fear of your feelings
cramps you and makes you manipulate them in a subtle but distinct way. You erroneously fear that
your undeveloped, primitive instincts will lead you astray; in reality, becoming aware of these
instinctual drives will merely attune them to the development that you have otherwise achieved.
Do not misunderstand my words, my friends. I do not advocate that you live out your
childish instincts. All I mean to say is that all children have these instincts. And they still exist to
some degree in each of you until you truly face them and free yourself from your self-imposed
prison. When you do face and come to terms with these heretofore hidden primitive feelings, when
you overcome your unreasonable fear and shame to do so, you will outgrow them and reach out
further. Then you will truly relate. The new person will no longer be a substitute for the original
parent you still seek. Then you will not only experience new fullness of living and bliss, but your
productive activities will also reach a new height, being executed in peace and harmony. Tension,
frustration, irritation -- these constant companions that result from instincts you cannot accept in
yourselves, and therefore fear and run away from -- will leave your psychic system.
I venture to say that every one of you, at least to some degree, will find that your erotic
response occurs only when there is at least a slight element of rejection, fearfulness, insecurity, or
pain. When these negative emotions are completely absent, the erotic response may also be absent.
It is often quite impossible to establish the proper climate in which to function erotically, because
complete rejection is not possible either. Even if you feel beyond the need or wish for partnership
fulfillment, because you have reached advanced earthly age, dissolved your fixation, or faced your
original childhood conditions, it is equally important that the life force revitalize other areas in your
life. When you fail to resolve fixations, you block the life force, and this blockage has consequences.
The freer you become of blind fears, guilts, and misconceptions, the more you can choose freely
with penetrating, realistic awareness, rather than being forced into patterns. Going with the life
stream can only be right in every possible respect. Opposing it out of blindness, ignorance,
stubbornness and fear is bound to cramp and hinder you where you least desire it.
When dealing with the pain and pleasure that are fused because you could not assimilate your
painful experience otherwise, note that on the one hand, as long as this condition prevails within
you, you shortchange yourself in the most tragic and unnecessary way. For by facing your condition,
you can change it in a way that will give you and others immeasurable happiness. On the other
hand, it is also important to see a wider view. Although the fusing of pleasure and pain in the
conflicted psyche may be called perversion or masochism, it is still a blessing. The life force must
enter into distorted areas, even when compelled to manifest in an erroneous, inverted way until you
grow out of the conflict; otherwise, you would become more and more incapacitated, weak, and
empty in all areas of living. You could not grow at all, nor could you enjoy any kind of pleasure.
Think of the individuals who derive no joy from living. They are always those who have
inadvertently stopped the enlivening stream. Humans often accuse this stream of being evil, because
they arbitrarily divide it into acceptable and unacceptable categories, and see its primitive
manifestation as unchangeable rather than a temporary stage.
The childhood phase must be reexperienced and seen in its proper light, my friends. Many of
you are approaching the stage in which you can do so; some of you have already made considerable
headway. Others are still too blocked and fearful. But even they will eventually muster the courage
to discover that they really did not need to fear this phase, because it is natural. It is not shameful.
It is in the scheme of universal development. I cannot tell you how grateful you will be to yourself
for not shirking this vital part of your development. You all have seen in the past how exhilarating
and liberating it was when you overcame your resistance to going deeper. The greater the struggle
and resistance, the more meaningful was the insight and the more liberating the effect. It is no
different in this respect, my friends.
This lecture may be interpreted as psychological material. But nothing could be further from
the truth. In the last fifty years or so, humans have attained great insights in this area from a purely
psychological point of view, which is concerned with personal happiness in this life. But I speak of
something that reaches further. It opens the spiritual vistas of union. It includes all facets of your
evolution. It is important to understand my message from this point of view. The aim of the
spiritual unfoldment discussed in this lecture reaches beyond the personal pleasure you can
experience. Although the latter is a result of overall, harmonious development and certainly does
not oppose it, the development of the soul has even more far-reaching significance in the
evolutionary plan.
The universal life force embodies greatness, beauty, and purity. It is human impurity that
makes one facet of the life force seem impure.
Some of my friends may yet have difficulty understanding all this. Some of you may believe
that I am being repetitious. But those of you who are really deeply exploring yourselves and are
about to reach these areas will not find my words repetitious or impossible to understand.
This lecture should give you a great deal of material. If you truly pursue your inner
development, not just in outer gestures, it must have a lasting effect on your psyche and the
direction of its search and unfoldment. It must be food for thought; otherwise, you will continue to
fear the element in you that paralyzes the best in you -- until you summon the courage and effort to
do what your spirit is waiting for you to do.
Since there is no more time for questions tonight, I will give you all the time you wish when
we come to the discussion reserved for this lecture. I will then answer all questions and discuss all
examples or problems brought to me.
I want to close this lecture with the statement that those of you who do not shy away from
this deep and ultimate growing process in this life are blessed indeed. You can indeed rejoice! Do
not be put off by the crisis that is always possible when one unreasonably fears to face something
that is hard to accept. The ignorant child, believing it has to hide, reacts very strongly before it is
brought out of hiding. After this crucial liberation, you will no longer deal with little reliefs, small
insights, subsequent relapses, and the repetition of the process. This step means a substantial and
significant growth of lasting value, of lasting impact.
Be blessed, all of you! Receive the vibrant life force, containing all that cannot be evaluated in
terms of right or wrong, of good or bad. It is all one. Be in peace. Be in God!