The Text - Section 162
162. THREE LEVELS OF REALITY FOR INNER GUIDANCE
Greetings, my very dearest friends who are gathered here and who are blessed indeed. You
are blessed not only by your presence in the spirit of wanting to receive guidance and truth, but
primarily by every inner effort made toward the realization of your true being. The more actively
you seek this realization, the more blessings are generated from within.
A person cut off from inner reality is indeed lost. The majority of humans are almost totally
cut off from their inner reality and must therefore find their way back to it. The few who have
attained this connection always were and will be the spiritual leaders of humankind. Every effort on
this path is aimed at reestablishing such a connection for inner guidance, for the manifestation of the
inner reality.
Jesus Christ has proclaimed that the Kingdom of Heaven is within. These words are only too
often taken for granted and not much thought is given them. What does the word "kingdom"
mean? It symbolizes the absolute power and wealth which the spiritually awakened find to be a
reality. We speak, of course, of the spiritual power and wealth of love, truth, peace, expansion,
creativity, bliss, and the knowledge that the self has the power to create anything it can conceive of.
This comprises everything that life could ever be. It means attaining one's full selfhood as it is
meant to be. If only you would realize that you have not even attained a particle of the power and
beauty, truth and love, ecstasy and possibility of creative expansion which you could posses and
manifest and which already is yours, my friends! These are not empty words, this is the immediately
available truth.
The path toward the inner reality and inner guidance is laborious only because you imagine the
truth to be so far away, much farther than it actually is. You cannot conceive of what life already is,
right now, and how it could be for you if only you could see it, know it, and therefore realize it. You
still perceive this as a faraway, abstract, unreal theory, and you experience yourself as an isolated
particle in an essentially hostile or, at best, indifferent universe that has nothing to do with you. You
conceive of a static and immovable universe into which you are put and whose laws have no
relationship to your own inner laws.
This concept, and the way you therefore experience yourself in relation to life, is what makes
the path so difficult and laborious -- nothing else. Thus, the difficulty is not actual. The question is
how you can change your concept. This is what requires labor and effort. And, unbelievable as this
appears to one who has already attained the reality of being, you struggle against the fulfillment of
being your true self as if it were the most horrible fate in the world. If the illusion about the
separation between your true being and your momentary consciousness, or the separation between
the universe and yourself, did not exist, there would be an instant awakening -- a "click," as it were --
and you would know who you are and what life is.
All my lectures, all our work together, attack the problem of your illusion from different
angles. These various approaches have a certain sequential order. Generally, you find that your own
private personal path follows the same order. Yet you cannot force your individual path to imitate
the sequence of the lectures. Rather, the process is -- as some of you have already found out -- that
with this guiding help you find your own truth as a direct, spontaneous experience from within. In
the first moments of understanding, the truth usually appears so new and fresh that you think you
have never heard it before. But afterward you can verify that it confirms the teachings you have
studied and which have penetrated the deeper regions of your unconscious. You study the lectures
and then you use your own intuitive faculties, freed more and more by facing the truth you did not
want to see in the beginning. Elimination of error frees intuition and creative experience from
within. The lectures first give an impetus to this process and later fortify and confirm it when you
read them again.
Tonight our specific approach will explore three levels of reality. If you can first comprehend
and finally assimilate what I say here, this path will become much easier for you. You will eliminate
some of the illusory difficulties so that your inner guidance will manifest itself as a natural, effortless
phenomenon.
What are the three levels of reality? You may expect to hear of the well-known levels of the
physical, mental and spiritual realities, about which we have spoken in many different contexts and
connections. But this will be something else, so gear your mind to a new approach.
The first level of reality is what you think exists. The second level of reality is what actually
exists. The third level of reality is what could exist. It is preferable not to discuss this in a
philosophical, general or theoretical manner. The more specific and personal you can be in
assimilating what I outline here, and the more you can apply it to the seemingly most insignificant,
subjective experiences and reactions in your daily struggles, the better it is. Examine your
problematic reactions and attitudes, those that do not leave you peaceful, happy and alive, and try to
see how what I say tonight applies to you.
No matter how insignificant a disturbance may appear to you, or how world-shakingly
important, ask yourself, "What do I really believe exists? In me? Around me? In the interaction
between me and others? In the condition as I experience it?" Finding the answer to these questions
is not as easy or simple or self-evident as it may appear. Not at all! To penetrate this level is
perhaps the most difficult. Once this is done, the next two levels of reality will be much easier to
deal with.
You are utterly confused and ignorant about what you really think and feel. As a rule you look
away from it and you are only vaguely, fuzzily aware of some disturbance, which you quickly
rationalize or find some convincing explanations for -- whatever seems most acceptable, most
"logical" or most compatible with your superficial approach to life and to yourself. Thus you
acknowledge only one of what are often many sets of contradictions and conflicting emotions, and
even that you do in a cursory, shallow way at best. Thus you almost entirely obscure the true drama
of your beliefs and opinions, impressions and reactions, concepts and ideas, hopes and fears.
Collective, oversimplified labels are supposed to express what is really going on within you. When
you say you are depressed or anxious or hopeless or angry or hurt or fatigued, you are content to call
a host of feelings, impressions and beliefs by any one of these names, as though no further search
would be necessary. Naming such emotions as a beginning to explore them would serve a good
purpose, but only too often you use the names as labels, as a final explanation. Thus you cannot
even attain the first level of reality -- of identifying your often confused and erroneous interpretation
of life, of others, and of self.
It might sound paradoxical that I call this level "reality" at all, but your mistaken interpretation
is a temporary reality -- it is what you actually feel, think and believe, whether true or false -- while
the haze and fog of unspecific awareness is a no-man's land and not even a temporary reality. This
is why it is so painful and feels so insecure and why in no state could one be more estranged than on
this level of pre-reality, if I may coin this expression.
As you know, it is part of the individual work to painstakingly examine where such collective
labels come from and why. The first reaction often is that you do not even know why you feel this
way and give yourself a quick and easy answer, which may sound exceedingly plausible and serious in
a world that shies away from a fresh, new approach. However, every problem needs examining as if
it had never existed and as if society had no predigested answers ready.
If you give some attention to what you really believe causes the specific unhappy feeling -- and
usually this requires relatively little attention -- you find some answers quite easily. As I mentioned,
it is hardly ever just one thing. Contradictory opinions and ideas exist simultaneously. One set of
contradictory ideas results in other sets of contradictory reactions, counter-reactions, defense
measures, further false beliefs and their inevitable consequences, which create more and more chain
reactions. When all this remains in the fuzzy climate of unawareness, half-awareness and easy
explaining away, how can you reach the first level of reality -- knowing what you think exists?
For example, it is not at all impossible that you think secretly at one and the same time that
you are the most important being in the universe and that you are the least worthy in the universe.
Even one such assumption is bound to have innumerable consequences, breeding further wrong
assumptions in one's dealings with the world. Each primary wrong assumption snowballs into a
host of untenable, painful, destructive beliefs and defense measures, each in itself causing
complicated webs of entanglements and growingly painful beliefs. But the two contradictory
original assumptions multiply the confusion, entanglements, misconceptions and the resulting pain.
For error is pain as truth is happiness.
Anyone working on such a path knows from experience how burdensome such
misconceptions and confusions and mutually exclusive ideas are and what a relief it is to shed them.
Each web of entanglement sets up a particular resistance against clarifying the confusion, in spite of
remaining in pain while the confusion lasts, in spite of knowing the liberated, happy state after it is
cleared up. Although you know all this, to some degree even out of personal experience, and most
certainly as a valid theory, none of you are fully aware to what extent you still dwell in the state of
pre-reality. Most of you, my friends, do not see in your day-to-day lives where just such a dualistic
concept of the self as at once the highest and the lowest is responsible for that layer of reality where
you think certain things exist without that necessarily being true.
Often, though you have actually recognized a false assumption about yourself, you still do not
follow this through to its consequences. You fail to see, for example, how this assumption affects
what you believe about others and what you believe they think of you; what a situation or incident
means in the light of your assumption; what your reactions and the reactions of others really mean.
If you clearly formulate what you believe a situation or event or someone's reaction means, then you
will know why you are unhappy in any particular form. This clear-cut knowing of why you feel the
way you do makes a tremendous difference. It also gives you the possibility of realizing that some
of your beliefs are preposterous. Again, you might have admitted this in general and as a theory, but
to do so specifically is still extremely hard. Your intellectual arrogance makes this so difficult. It is
arrogant to set yourself up above others, but it is even more damaging to overestimate your own
intellect and thus miss out on your real inherent wisdom, while negating and denying the childish
misunderstandings in your personality.
To admit what childish nonsense is lodged in the unconscious is so hard because this
contradicts the concept you have of your "intelligence." But perhaps an even greater motivation for
keeping your secret beliefs in the haze of vague impressions and feelings rather than acknowledging
them precisely is that you have a vested interest in keeping these things secret because you feel
vaguely that, once they are out in the open, you will be obliged to make changes. You fear to do
that precisely because you are so committed to your false ideas that a different mode of approach
appears to threaten you. But you do not realize that it threatens you only because of your false
ideas. The illusory assumptions compound, one leading to another, and you must disentangle them
all in order to bring order and truth. If you elevate yourself above your own actual self, above where
your self is still ignorant and misinformed, you cannot establish order. It is hard to admit the utterly
childish side, with all its senseless ideas and beliefs. The moment this childish side is out in the
open, you know it is nonsense, and you are relieved to give up the burdensome beliefs.
In addition to such nonsense there are also false beliefs and impressions you even consciously
assume to be true -- at least to some degree. These are even more difficult to handle.
Then there are beliefs you do not wish to alter even though you may sense they are somehow
false. The painful premise seems preferable to another alternative that appears, deep in your
unconscious, even worse. This, too, is of course, an illusory assumption, for no truth is ever
burdensome, hopeless or in any way undesirable. The complications and interactions of all the
knots, ensnarlments, false beliefs, half-truths and contradictions comprise what actually exists in you.
You must face them before you can make any further progress.
You absolutely must disentangle this level of reality. If you are unwilling to see what you
believe to be true, you cannot ever come to see what is really true, at this moment. Consequently,
you will be unable to reach the third level of reality. That you can only do by changing the present
reality into one that is more favorable for you, and this cannot happen by wishful thinking, illusory
magic, or denial of the facts.
Let us take a frequent occurrence as an example: your fear of rejection. This fear runs
through your psychic life, and consequently through our outer, physical life. Rejection itself would
not be the threat it is for most people if there were no specific assumptions connected with it.
These specific assumptions are what you must unearth. For example, you may believe that you are
worth nothing; what makes rejection such a great threat is that it seems to confirm the "fact" of your
worthlessness. Thus it is not sufficient to acknowledge a stereotype "explanation" by saying you feel
anxious. It is necessary first to acknowledge that the anxiety exists because you fear rejection.
Subsequently, you must unearth that rejection is so threatening because you feel worthless and do
not wish to admit this feeling. But even this does not go far enough. Now it becomes necessary to
find out on what specific grounds you base the heretofore secret conviction of your worthlessness.
In other words, you must take all these very specific beliefs and assumptions out of the fog of
vagueness, where they hide under the collective label of "anxiety."
When you change your approach in the fashion suggested here and conduct serious
investigation, when you take nothing for granted and approach everything in a new and fresh way,
you will find out what you believe exists. From there on you can begin to look further and begin to
question the premises of these beliefs. You can begin to open your eyes and look objectively for
what really is. In this transition from one level of reality to the next, you must also ask yourself the
question whether you really want to find out, first what you think exists, and second, what really is.
All the false assumptions you harbor seem to dictate keeping them secret. For example, should it be
true that you actually are worthless and beyond redemption, facing such a fact would indeed be a
hard undertaking. But then, is it preferable to live a lie by pretending you believe in your worth,
while underneath you doubt it? Such considerations will give you the necessary logic to look at what
you believe exists, in order to then find out what actually exists. The actual truth is that you have a
great deal of worth, although, perhaps, in a different way than you believe.
Conversely, and simultaneously, you may believe that you are the most important and valuable
person on earth, who deserves very special privileges. To ascertain such a belief is difficult because
your intellectual knowledge refutes such arrogance and even creates shame. Also, admitting such an
idea brings you closer to questioning its validity, which you fear all the more since in the psyche
there also lurks the precise opposite extreme -- the assumption of your worthlessness. If you are not
special, then you assume you are nothing. Hence, you must keep both assumptions hidden from
consciousness and you cannot examine them. This keeps you from testing the reality of further
chain-reactions and compulsive behavior patterns based on such assumptions.
So, when you discover that you do not want to find out what exists in you, push on and find
out why not. What false beliefs prevent you from doing so? When you answer that question, you
open another little gate that will eventually enable you to change your mind, so that you will want to
find out (a) what you think exists, and (b) what really exists.
In that moment you are already two important levels closer to the inner guidance and to the
inner reality, to the possibility of what could be. This is the Kingdom of God inside you. As long as
you do not clear up the entanglements of false opinions -- of what you believe exists as opposed to
what actually exists -- you cannot see that even what actually does exist need not be your ultimate
state of being. To realize this leads to a tremendously important transition.
The level of what actually does exist is always an enormous relief compared to what you
believe exists. Truth is never anywhere near as threatening as the foggy half-truths and evasions, no
matter what it is. What you believe exists is a relief as compared to the fog, and what actually exists
is an even greater relief compared to what you believe exists. The discovery of the manifold
possibilities in Creation of what could exist is more than liberation. It opens the gates to the world,
to the great freedom of co-creation, to unlimited expansion. I might say here that in mundane
psychotherapy, the highest obtainable goal is usually the level of reality of what actually exists. To
accept this reality -- your manifest values and liabilities, the limitations of yourself and the outer
world, to cope with the world so as to produce your best actions and feelings -- this would be the
ultimate that psychotherapy can expect under the very best of circumstances. It would be the point
at which a patient is successfully dismissed as cured.
Our spiritual path begins precisely here. Of course, the levels overlap and you cannot say that
you must first have completed one level before reaching the next. It never quite works that way.
This is why realizing now that the third level exists and working with it to the best of your present
abilities will help you attain the lower stages perhaps a bit faster and more painlessly, perhaps a bit
more safely and more meaningfully.
As to the third level, what could exist -- what in the spiritual sense is usually called the reality -
- is not a static condition. It is no more real, true and unchangeable than the level of what you
believe exists. If you are convinced of it, it seems true and real, so that we can speak of your reality
at that moment. It is the reality of your assumptions, which lead you to further ideas, with their
actual energy and dynamics, with all their consequences that happen in experience and fact. So,
what you believe and what is are not so different when one considers the vast stretches of
possibilities.
When you assume that reality is static and immovable, you are as far removed from actual,
ultimate reality as anyone who assumes illusions to be the final truth. Ultimate reality is essentially
flexible and movable. Humankind is not put into a universe that has its predetermined existence,
whose conditions are fixed. Even objects are in flux, are condensed energy, constantly moving. The
energy is generated by consciousness and by the way it operates. Thus, the immovable outer world
is a direct product of you and your consciousness. When you can begin to question whether what
you found to be reality need be so, you begin to expand the horizon of your concepts, of your
mental grasp. This increases your creative power to alter the seemingly static reality. You can
expand reality to the exact degree you wish to expand the horizon, or the frontiers, of your
concepts. By concepts I mean more than the superficial beliefs and theories, of course. When your
mind can truly and deeply embrace limitless vistas of experience for happiness and self-expression,
this is exactly what your reality must become, for consciousness is explosive, powerful stuff. Each
thought, as you know, creates and truly builds your life -- your very own reality circumstances.
However, if you strive unconsciously for the limitless expansion as the child strives for
magical omnipotence because the personality fears and dislikes dealing with the present limitations,
it cannot possibly work. It is necessary to first accept the present limitations and cope with them,
for they are a product of what the consciousness believes. It is impossible to discover your own
creative power in the positive before you recognize the connection between negative reality and
negative beliefs. Only when you realistically accept a limitation as it is now can you transcend it, in
the realization that the limitation does not need to exist. Thus you move into the third level of
reality, in which your intellect cannot help you. It is then that the inner guidance can come forth.
The inner guidance will be unobstructed once you have moved from the outer level of haze and fog
where you do not know what is going on in you, to the level of what you believe exists, then to the
level of what actually exists in comparison, and further, to opening your way into the third level, of
what could exist.
Realizing what could exist, the ultimate truth of the inner being, of the real self, is the aim of
life itself. Then you come into your own. The more you transcend these levels, the freer inner
guidance becomes, and the more you will comprehend those three levels of reality which are your
way from "being thrown into the outside world" to coming back home into inner reality.
What is evil, my friends -- all the evil that is so deplored? Evil is all the error and confusion
on the outer hazy level of pre-reality -- as well as on the level of what you believe exists, which is not
quite conscious -- that drives you into actions and feelings which are truly destructive and are called
evil. They blur out the spiritual light of oneness. The existence of evil is the blind drive of not
knowing, the vagueness of misbelief, distortion, error. If you truly comprehend these words, my
friends, it will be quite impossible for you to ever hate anyone, or believe in the evil nature of certain
human beings. You will then see that such hate is senseless. You can hate the evil of error and the
error of evil, you can hate the effect of the error and the vagueness of not knowing what you believe -
- or what others believe. That you can hate, but you can never hate the person ensnarled in the
error of not knowing what he or she believes. That is truly the most alienating state -- not knowing
what one believes, assumes and concludes.
As I keep saying, you must beware of judging whether you or others have reached any of
these levels on the whole. It is always a question of fluctuation and overlapping. You may have
attained a state of fluctuating between the second and third levels. You may have activated
sufficient power from the third level to guide you in all your life-expressions. But where you are still
trapped in your haze, the guidance does not easily penetrate and you cannot hear it.
QUESTION: What if one doubts that one's needs are justified? Isn't it also a question of
what should be?
ANSWER: This is part of the confusion. If you do not know what you are supposed to
want, what is a legitimate need on your part, you get confused between the childish aspect that
desires unreasonable and unrealizable love and attention, and the legitimate adult need for human
warmth and affection. In this confusion you may reject yourself for the latter, while at the same
time you rebel against not obtaining the former. You must bring all these confusions out in the
open and examine them so that you can put order into them.
In addition to this confusion, there may be confusion about what the other person really feels.
Your own confusion inevitably breeds confusion about what exists in the other person. The
childish level may conclude you are being rejected, since the unrealizable demands are not fulfilled.
You may not be able to recognize actual love, because it appears in a different way from what you
imagine in your present state, in which you may not be able to make room for differences in self-
expression. You may also misinterpret the actual rejection as a personal one, and not recognize that
this is the manifestation of another person's immaturity and fear of love. You must investigate all
these interactions and mutual currents.
The way you can gauge whether you have arrived at what you ought to know about yourself at
the moment is the only reliable gauge there is: Do you have the feeling of utter relief and liberation,
of being energized and light? If so, you can be absolutely sure that you have attained, at this
moment, the level of self-knowledge that you ought to have. When this feeling is missing, you can
be quite sure that many answers are still outstanding and that you need to find them. You need to
ask yourself the appropriate questions.
QUESTION: I am aware of the fact that I distort reality. I wonder how this applies to my
job situation, in which I am caught in a hostility cycle with my boss. At least on my part I feel very
hostile to him. This is very real to me, although I know I am overreacting. Would you comment on
this?
ANSWER: As you already know, this has really not much to do with your boss. It is all a
question between you and your father. You have to ask yourself the relevant questions. What do
you really feel about your father? What do you believe he felt about you and why? If you tackle
only these three questions, you will already be more in clarity on the level of what you believe exists,
rather than being in the fog of not quite knowing what bothers you. Out of these questions more
questions will arise, of course. But let us not hurry ahead. Just concentrate on these three questions,
without taking anything for granted. It is essential that you ask yourself and answer these questions.
Then you can tackle the next level of considering what is.
For you who heard this lecture, even if you did not always concentrate on my words,
something went into your heart, where a seed can grow into a wonderful fruit. Allow this to
happen, my friends, for life is so good. The truth is happiness, while unhappiness is always error
and misconception. Do not ever forget this. Knowing this may lead you to have more initiative
about discovering the misconceptions of your suffering.
On this day that commemorates the leading faith of this hemisphere, you can perhaps find a
special strength in the memory of your forefathers -- not because such a special day in itself is of any
value or importance as such, but because at times you need an outer impact or push in order to put
something in motion within. For some, religious memories and considerations may represent such a
push. For others this may not be necessary. They, in turn, may need other reminders and
incentives, or another impetus that gives them a motor force with which to grind a way out of the
entanglements on the outermost level of fog-bound existence, which cause so much anxiety and
suffering.
Be blessed, my very dearest ones. The love of the universe, the truth and beauty of the
universe, are within you and around you at all times, my friends, always. Make yourself see the truth
by calling upon inner guidance so that you and your inner guidance eventually become one. This
will happen when you have experienced it sufficiently often as real. Be blessed, be in peace, be in
God!