The Text - Section 213
213. THE SPIRITUAL AND THE PRACTICAL MEANING OF "LET GO, LET GOD"
Greetings and divine blessings for all of you here, my dearest friends. With joy and love I
resume a new working season to give you all the assistance and guidance you could possibly require.
Your growth continues to the degree you truly desire it. It has already borne wonderful fruit and
will continue to do so. Everyone of you may find in the words I am privileged to speak this evening
what you most need now. If you try to listen with your inner ear, see with your inner eye, feel with
your innermost being, and let the doubting mind rest, you will find exactly what you most need for
your development.
I have often spoken the words, "Let go, let God," and when you meditate you also
occasionally utter these words. Let us examine the true meaning of "Let go, let God" for there is a
lot more to this saying than meets the eye, my friends.
Letting go obviously means letting go of the limited ego with its selfwill, its narrow
understanding and its preconceptions. It means letting go of fears, distrust, misconceptions, and
suspicion. But it also means letting go of the insistent attitude that says, in effect, "I can be happy
only if so and so does thus and thus, or if life responds exactly as I determine." This often appears
as not wanting to give up something precious that is, in itself, legitimate and that you should indeed
have. Does letting go of the little ego's selfwill mean having to settle for unhappiness and
unfulfillment? Is the striving for fulfillment that falls under the category of "letting go" wrong?
These questions are important and we shall now deal with them.
To "let God" from the center of your being, from your heart, from your innermost self where
God speaks if you wish to listen -- that is truly the ultimate aim. Before this highest, most blissful
and secure state can exist, obstacles and dualistic confusions must always be removed.
It is usually so much easier to comprehend a philosophical concept or spiritual premise in
general terms than in its everyday applications. Your mundane reactions seem often too puny and
insignificant to be connected with the greater issues of life. Yet it is exactly in making the
connections in this so-called insignificant area that you can find the key to your confusions and
conflicts, which make it impossible for you to actually apply the great spiritual truths to your daily
life.
Let us deal with the confusion I mentioned. The great truths, as all things, can be distorted
and expressed in a false way. Thus many people are aware of the truth that the universe is benign
and giving and that they are not required by divine law to suffer, but in their present state they
attempt to bring about the fulfillment they so ardently desire with their selfwill. To tell these people
that they must let go of their forcing current seems to imply resignation to emptiness, suffering,
pain, and unfulfilled longing. To avoid this they then hold on in a tight, squeezed way that prohibits
the influx of the greater world that is light, truth, love, abundance, and all imaginable fulfillment.
The divine influx can only flow in its own harmonious rhythm when it is let loose. Energetically
there must be no hard knots. Selfwill, anxiety, insistence, forcing currents and distrust create an
energetic climate that prohibits the divine flow. The state of consciousness that produces these
tight, untrusting, insisting attitudes is antithetical to divine consciousness. An imbalance of trust is
at work here. The little, limited ego is trusted, while the greater divine self is negated. This does not
mean that the ego should be denied. But it needs to expand its creativity and wisdom precisely by
allowing the divine influx to occur.
As you know, all attitudes create energy systems. The tightness of holding on creates a closed
energy system. This can be easily observed on the outer level. Wherever tyranny and domination
exist, because the will of a few power-driven individuals imposes itself over others -- stemming from
and creating more fear -- the creative spark is squelched. A closed system always creates resistance,
even though temporarily some people outwardly submit to the force out of their own fears and
weaknesses. But the time must come when every last fearful individual will stand up and throw off
the shackles. History has always borne this out. In the confused human mind this healthy
movement is often taken for a general rebelliousness coupled with and nourished by a childish will
to refute genuine authority, truth, guidance and the need for self-discipline and self-responsibility.
Inwardly, however, people do rebel against the momentary uncertainty of stepping into an
apparent vacuum created after they have given up their tight selfwill and have begun to let go.
Instead of trusting the letting go process, people trust their own false gods.
In relationships, it is easy to observe that the inner pressure of the subtle forcing current
which says, "You must love me," creates exactly the opposite of the desired response. As an
individual you may feel it is impossible to give up this demand because you cannot stand not being
loved. Aren't you entitled to love? Doesn't the universe grant you this very necessary fulfillment?
How can you give up the demand and content yourself with the bleak emptiness that you fear when
you renounce this demand for love? Yet, it is clear that the very attitude of "you must" elicits
everything else but love from the other. Love cannot blossom in a closed energy system that stems
from distrust, non-love, power, and distortion of truth. It cannot breed love.
You who do the inner work of the path, constantly encounter in yourself this tightness, this
fearfulness, this holding. You may call it resistance or give it other names. Basically the resistance is
not against any human being, helper, therapist, or teaching, or even against any actual domination.
For you do not need to be tightly holding against actual domination. The tight holding, the not
letting go, always points to the inner, spiritual struggle about what to trust: the little ego or God
within. In order to do the latter, the interim states of consciousness which the mind has produced
and wishes to avoid must be traveled through. The self wishes to avoid what it has produced only
too often, whether it be pain, confusion, emptiness, or fear. Whatever the interim state, you must
embrace it so that it can be explored, understood, and thus dissolved.
There is an enormous difference between believing that this temporary state is the final reality
which must be kept at bay, and knowing that it is a temporary condition. As long as you believe this
condition is final, the self will either fight against letting go of it, or it will fall into a resignation to
being helpless and unhappy.
That is why the resistance to letting go is so strong. You prefer the status quo in which you
avoid falling into those other states of consciousness of your creation that must be traversed before
you can let go and begin to create and expand your life. You prefer the status quo, even though the
state of letting loose and letting God feels wonderful, rich, light, joyful, and safe. Many of you have
begun to experience this more often. In that way the resistance to letting go diminishes gradually. It
can never be done in one single decision. It is a decision and commitment that must be repeated
many, many times.
The tightness you feel is so often traceable to the current which says, "I want it desperately."
However, the desperation is much more a result of the tightness that shuts out God than of not
having what you want. The state of tightness stemming from fear, the distrust, and a concept of
poverty seem to justify your holding on. I repeat what I mentioned before: The giving up of the
tight selfwill implies first of all letting go of the insistence of your wish. The wish must be let loose
for the moment, which is quite different from giving it up forever. The "who, where, what, when,
and how" of the wish fulfillment must be temporarily given up. When you have let go, you may
even come back to the same "who, where, what, when, and how," but these wishes will then
manifest in a different emotional and spiritual climate. Often your insistence to have the wish
fulfilled in the one specific way that you now imagine limits the actual fulfillment. Give the creative
process rope and margin and you will then experience that it will by far surpass your hopes and
visualizations in happiness and fulfillment. Since your mind is often incapable of even conceiving
the richness of the universe, you must learn to make yourself empty at the moment and allow the
divine process to reveal itself to you. This means "letting God."
It is sometimes true that you must give up the desire of the selfwill which you do not want to
let go of. But this is only temporarily true. If you have inwardly accumulated a negative image of
your life in which you can only suffer, then you must examine and oust this image so as to inactivate
its energetic power. This cannot happen in a state of holding on and fighting against this same
innermost negative belief.
If you send out currents of domination over others with whom you are involved in
relationships, if you fight against their imperfections and immaturities that hurt you, it is only
because you do not trust that your inner God can produce fulfillment for you without having to
impose your ideas over others, no matter how right these ideas may be in theory.
Humanity is caught in this conflict: You either hold on against the blankness, pain, and
abandonment you fear will be your fate if you let go, or you resign yourself to this dismal state in
order not to hold on. This universal conflict is part and parcel of the dualistic state of mind which
prevails in your dimension of consciousness. You have often heard me explain that there are many
other confusions and conflicts from which humanity must laboriously find its way out. In this
particular instance humanity's conflict is between either using a forcing current, or resignedly
accepting a negative state, becoming hopeless, and harboring a negative concept of life. This
conflict seldom applies to all areas of life expression, but it almost always applies to some.
You may outwardly tend more toward one of these attitudes, but the other also lives within
you, concealed even from your own awareness. Let us say that you are outwardly forceful,
aggressive, and temperamentally suited to get away with overriding others either by sheer force,
clever persuasion, or dishonest manipulation. In that case, you use some of your resources to cover
up resignation, despair, and distrust of life, though you do this in certain areas only. Or, you may be
outwardly a personality type who wants above all to get along with others, who wants to depend on
them and not antagonize them. Then there must be underneath the desire to dominate. Often such
domination is obtained by submission. "I will do what you say, so that you are bound to me and will
have to obey my wishes. You will be too guilty to offend me when I have proven to be so obedient
to you." I venture to say that you must have found such hidden attitudes in the course of your
pathwork.
Whatever the outer manifestation of these two ways to react in life may be, the opposite of
the overt manifestation must also exist in you. You may have become quite aware of the manifest
attitude, but may still be deluded in thinking that the opposite does not exist in you. Whoever is
outwardly dominant will find it difficult to deal with the inner hopelessness.. Whoever is outwardly
negative, dependent, weak, and submissive will find it difficult to deal with his or her covert,
dominant, and manipulative traits. They are inevitably two sides of the same coin.
At the beginning of the path of self-exploration, you may not be aware of even your overt
personality aspect. But little by little, as you observe yourself, you will become aware first of the
overt, then the covert side.
When your personality is very adept in its chosen way of dealing with the world, you find it
most difficult to recognize the hidden aspect. If you are forceful by nature, and have aspects of
strength that you partially put into the service of the forcing current, then for a long time you may
get away with this solution for warding off the disaster you secretly expect. If you are by nature soft
and pliant, but use these assets in order to manipulate others and hide the domination you wish to
exert, you may find it extremely difficult to give up the former and face the latter. If you seem to get
what you want through your chosen way which is predominant in your personality, it is much harder
for you to see what you miss. Only when life finally brings home to you that your succeeding is an
illusion, and that you are actually fighting an already existing state of emptiness which is the result of
your chosen solution, will you be sufficiently motivated to deal with this struggle.
You may momentarily seem to get, or even actually get, what you want, but you do not really
get what you yearn for. You do not get the real fulfillment you continually make impossible by the
very use of these pseudo-solutions. Let us assume you wish love and closeness with another human
being, but feel uncertain that you will obtain this desire through the other person's own free will.
Let us further suppose you then rule by possessiveness, domination, jealousy, coercion, and
demands. Remember that this can occur in either the overt or covert way and that you can rule just
as much by dependency, blaming, and making the other person feel guilty. If that person partially
truly loves you, but partially neurotically needs you or wants to exploit you, he or she will submit to
your rule, but also will resent and blame, hate and defy you for it, even though being party to the
arrangement. Thus, even when you succeed, it means little because you are constantly fighting
against those reactions for which you are co-responsible. These negative reactions in the other only
strengthen your negative image of life. And so it goes on and on.
But what will happen if you have the courage and integrity to let the reins go, notwithstanding
the fear that you might lose this person? If you lose, what have you lost? But if you win you find
the immense joy of discovering that the other wants to love you freely without your coercion,
manipulation, and domination. That is the true richness you long for. And even if you lose that
person, does this truly have to mean that you must be alone forever? Certainly not. But you may
temporarily have to dip into your bleakness so as to dissolve its power to present an obstruction. In
that way, you can "let God."
Divine creation wants you to have all the bliss imaginable. If you can confront your doubts
that the best could indeed be yours, then you can establish trust. But trust and faith cannot be built
on the rotten foundation of distrust and lack of faith. If all the energy you now use to coerce and
bend your environment would be used to establish genuine faith in the abundance of life, in the
richness your life could have, you would indeed create such a rich life. Covering up your lack of
faith, your distrust, your negative outlook, and then covering up the means you use to overcome
them, consumes valuable, essentially creative energy.
I specifically suggest that all of you look at both the overt and covert manifestations of this
struggle in you, and see in what areas of your life they exist. Look at your lack of faith when you do
not let God, when letting go seems to connote resignation into an unfulfilled state. Feel the inner
movement in you when you cease grabbing, and then visualize yourself in a confident, patient,
humble state of mind in which the universe can give you its best.
Whether you experience your outer holding or your outer hopelessness, try to get in touch
with the hidden opposite attitude. Both facets should be on the surface so you can become fully
conscious of them. Only then will you be able to find the key which I will describe to you now.
However, just hearing about this key can never be sufficient, although it will surely help you find the
right direction. It requires a great deal of inner work for you to use this key.
First I would like to say a little more about "letting go and letting God" in your interactions
with others. I have already mentioned the apparent conflict of wanting to be loved, respected and
appreciated and your pushing for it. I also spoke about your dilemma of apparently having to give
up this wish and your confusion about whether you are entitled to it or not. It is so important to
restate that no rightful claim you make on creation can be accommodated by the universe when your
condition is a cramped, forcing, hopeless, negative one. Nor is the attitude of "you must love me"
an expression of genuine love on your part. Love and must are antithetical. Forcing does not allow
freedom to the other, whereas an open energy system always functions in freedom.
The attitude characteristic of an open energy system would be somewhat like this: "I would
like you to love me. You seem to be the person I would like to share myself with and to whom I
would like to give all of myself. If you are that person, I know that you must come to me in
freedom, out of your own volition. Even if my forcing could affect you, I would not want it this
way. I trust the universe to give me what is my fair due. If you do not wish this freely, I can let you
go from deep within and wait in faith that the person who will appreciate and freely want what I
have to give will come to me." This attitude reflects an open energy system and is compatible with
the abundance available. Abundance constantly floats around you, but your clogged energy system
erects a wall that closes you off from the ever-present abundance. Of course, the same principle
applies to all other kinds of relationships: to wanting a specific job, wanting friends, wanting people
who will buy what you have to sell, who will receive what you have to give, or who give you what
you look for.
A closed energy system with an attitude of tightly holding on is really your false and inefficient
weapon against a negative vision of the universe you live in -- or at least against a vision of life for
you. The weapon is wielded with even stronger forcefulness as it proves itself inefficient: you
become more forceful, more possessive, demanding, jealous, and domineering. Thus the energy
system closes more and more tightly and shuts out life's riches. Your illusion of life's negative
nature is strengthened, and you fight against this illusory negative vision so as not to fall into the pit
of resignation and giving up, instead of just letting go.
You have to live in an open energy system to reach out into life and comfortably, even
confidently, claim its riches. You must be rich yourself in order to be energetically compatible with
the riches of the universe. In a closed energy system you believe you are a pauper and never avail
yourself of your wealth. Knowing your riches implies, as the first substantial step, being strong
enough, generous enough, humble enough, honest enough, not to exert force over others, no matter
how subtly this force may be acted out. Not letting go implies a forcing current; forcing, no matter
how concealed, amounts to stealing, because you know you would not have to enforce anything if it
were indeed freely given you. The irony is that often what wants to be given you freely becomes
inaccessible when you force. Not letting go must violate your integrity on a deep level, which then
causes you to doubt yourself and your right to be happy. Not letting go can be equated with being a
stealing beggar. Letting go can be equated with knowing one's ultimate riches and having the
willingness to establish this fact in your consciousness. Letting go thus implies a hard, honest look
at your illusions, your pretenses, and your dishonesties.
As you know, thoughts and energies constantly create. There is an enormous difference
between creating a closed system by manipulation of others, of facts, of events, of the creative
energies around you, or creating an open energy system through trust.
The key is letting go into trust. In order to trust, you must first establish certain intermediate
links, which cannot be skipped. Those links form the bridge to a state of genuinely positive
expectation of life, where there is no pressure, no anxiety, and no doubt. Instead there is the deep
faith that the universe is benign and that you can have the very best on all levels of existence. This is
the key we are concerned with here.
An open energy system in which you positively create fulfillment and enrichment requires that
you discover your inner richness. You must become rich. If you start from your poverty, you can
never create an open energy system. You can at best create a closed energy system in which you
directly or indirectly rule, coerce, pressure, command, demand, and manipulate -- and cheat!
The open energy system which creates richness flowing into you both from within and
without must come from your own richness that can afford to lose at the moment. Then you can
afford to tolerate the temporary pain of finding what really obstructs the fulfillment of the
unfulfilled need, and ultimately remove it by changing an inner attitude. This is the way to create
richness from poverty.
A sequence of steps must be undertaken in this process. Step number one: recognize the
conflict we have just discussed where you struggle between resorting to hopelessness or to pushing,
holding, and applying pressure from above. Step number two: see that this conflict exists because
you operate from the premise of an imaginary poverty, convinced that you could not have what you
need if you gave up the pushing, holding, pressuring struggle. You believe that you are condemned
never to experience the fulfillment you long for, without which your personality cannot thrive. Step
number three: commit yourself totally to working out the real reasons for your unfulfillment in the
usual way you learn on this path. This must be done in a spirit of honesty, perseverance, patience,
and humility. Humility means not blaming the universe for your poverty in a particular area of your
life, but instead searching for your distortions that have created this poverty.
Most human beings have some areas where they feel rich and some where they feel
impoverished and therefore needy. It is hardly ever just one way. So discover the areas where you
feel rich and where you feel poor. Perhaps you feel rich in having certain creative talents where you
feel completely confident and where you sense that you have this limitless abundance within you like
a stream that never ceases to flow. But at the same time you may feel poor in regard to ever finding
true mutuality. Another person may feel very secure in that area, but feels very doubtful about ever
having abundance and security on the financial level. You all know by now how to search for the
misconceptions, negative intentionality, and destructive attitudes that must underlie such a blocked
condition. You have to be quite clear where you feel rich and where you feel poor. Where you feel
rich, you will always be rich because there you must also have a giving and honest attitude. But
where you feel poor, you will continue to be poor until you establish richness within through giving
and honesty.
In actuality, richness always exists with everyone. But if you do not know that you possess
that richness and are blind to it, you will truly believe and experience only your poverty. The poorer
you believe yourself to be, the more you must react as if you had nothing to give. Haven't you all
found in your pathwork that you hold your feelings in check, because giving them out would create
unendurable emptiness inside you, an emptiness that can only be filled by others?
Let us see what happens when you believe yourself to be poor. I said before that every kind
of pushing, domineering, forcing, or manipulating amounts to cheating. The translation of such an
attitude into concise words would be, "I shall force you to give me what you do not want to freely
give. If plain power is not adequate, I shall do so by trickery. I shall make you feel guilty for not
giving me what I want from you. I shall accuse and blame you for victimizing me. I shall turn it all
around and accuse you of doing what I secretly do to you. For instance, I shall claim that you
dominate me because you refuse to comply with my goal to force you into submission to me." It is
easy to see that this attitude has nothing to do with love. Such an attitude is unfair, cheating,
prohibitive, and infringes on the other person's freedom, or at least attempts to do so.
The free, loving attitude characteristic of an open energy system says, "I would be happy to
have your love. But, loving you, I shall give you the freedom to come to me if and when you so
choose. If you do not wish to love me, I have no right to make you feel guilty by pretending that
this devastates me." This is the true honesty, decency, and integrity that creates richness. You are
entitled to want to be loved, or to have money, or to have fulfillment, but if you go about it any
other way, your means become prohibitive and, in the deepest sense, dishonest. Because you feel
poor, you think you must steal; because you continue stealing, you remain poor, for only the honest
can feel deserving of riches. The energetic form of the forcing, holding attitude is that of a tight
prison or a short leash.
Stealing creates guilt, and the guilt produces doubt that you are entitled to receive freely.
Right here you create for yourself a climate of impoverishment in which you must indeed doubt
your capacity to create richness. You also violate spiritual law, and it is extremely important to find
out in what way.
During the process of self-exploration, you will also find your lack of faith in a universe that
will yield what it already wants to give you. You make it impossible for the universe to give to you
because of the closed energy system you have established. It is exactly the same in a relationship.
Even in the best relationship, if the most genuine love is forced and coerced, it will automatically be
withheld. Your demand for love will be resented even by those who comply out of their own
neurotic motives. You cannot receive the existing or growing love because your prohibitive energy
form does not allow it. An attitude of unfairness and dishonesty is always present when you grab
and do not "let go and let God." Pressure creates counter-pressure. Letting go affords the
possibility to experience genuine divine law, to experience what is. Whatever darkness or negativity
may be there temporarily must be seen for what it is, so that its ultimate essence of light and beauty
can reveal itself. Only when you let go can others be free to love you.
You may indeed be entangled in a relationship where love does not come forth freely. But
this is only so because your distortions and your concept of impoverishment will draw to you
someone who is incapable of giving you love. You may have to first let go of what you want from a
specific person and accept the momentary apparent state of impoverishment and emptiness. Travel
through this interim state until you can find through your own increasing inner health, freedom, and
richness that love is given to you freely. Once you have tasted the difference between what you get
through pressure and control, and what you get when you let free, you will never desire the former
any more. The former is indeed meaningless. It cannot enrich you because you extracted it out of
your own sense of poverty -- a false sense of poverty, but nevertheless a sense of poverty.
The richness that is necessary for having, being, and living in an open energy system where
people, love, richness, and the universe come to you freely, can only be created by you when you
give as fully as you wish to receive. These words have often been spoken by all religions and
philosophies of value. They are surely not new. But giving is so often a false mask, a ploy that only
hides the cheating, bargaining, dishonesty, selling out, and negativity that are present in the heart.
Since the inner world of true interaction cannot be deceived, you must reap what exists in you
according to your belief. This is why letting go so often means, at first, plunging into this inner
negative world that you have created and hidden both from others and from your own awareness.
But you should also remind yourself that this is not the ultimate you to which you are either doomed
or from which you must hide. By admitting the existence of this negative part, you can change it.
Honest self-facing includes courage and humility, and never induces hopelessness, even if you
first examine the world of poverty you have created in your consciousness. Experience its pain as a
tunnel through which you travel in the spirit of facing your own creation. When you deny this
process and choose instead to feel victimized by life because of the pain you yourself have created
out of ignorance, dishonesty, and negativity, you cannot help but stay poor.
Out of that courage of really seeing yourself, the further attitude of letting go inevitably grows.
This attitude says, "If others want what I have to offer, I will gladly give it to them. If they do not
want it, I will let them go. If this is painful, I will accept this pain and explore its origin in me. I will
trust in the ultimate benign nature of life to give me what I need, even if at the moment I am still
not capable of experiencing it."
This meditation, my friends, must be the final step in the sequence I outlined, so you can
extricate yourself from the incredibly painful and hopeless dichotomy in which all humanity is
caught. One person may be more involved in it than another, even though some are caught in it
only to a small extent. Nevertheless, every human being is trying to get out of this pattern. You
create richness and an open energy system by seeing how your demands and your tight holding
defeat your fulfillment and imply an insult to the universe. The demand says, "I do not believe I can
have, unless I push, pressure, cheat, manipulate, and force it to come to me."
When you undertake these steps, release first the holding and then let go of what you acquired
through this forcing attitude of selfwill and pressure. This means you may not immediately obtain
from the outside what you desire. You must first create the inner attitude in which you can accept
the not having with good grace and still feel, perhaps even because of it, your inner wealth. The
capacity to do without what you want will enhance your self-esteem and your integrity. This will
begin to enrich you from within, from your own resources. Then the fulfillment from without
becomes almost secondary -- in spite of there being often a genuine need for outer wish-fulfillment.
However, such fulfillment has to become a natural byproduct of your inner state. Also it should not
be something you cannot do without. If that is the case, you are centered in others and not in your
own being. The outer fulfillment, important as it may be, is simply an organic development of your
inner state. First you must establish the inner state in which you can let go of what you want to
have, even if this leaves you feeling empty, pained, and needy. However, do not lose sight of
another state of consciousness into which you could flow if you did not resist your present state.
This is the way to establish the inner state of richness that is compatible with universal law in a
Creation forever ready to give you whatever you truly need for your happiness.
Now I want to say a few words about guilt, an especially important topic in this connection,
and clarify the difference between guilt, shame, and remorse. I have often referred to justified and
unjustified guilt. I have also spoken about the destructive nature of guilt, which devastates the self
and prohibits the vision of your ultimate divine being. Now let us see in what way guilt, shame, and
remorse differ from one another.
When you feel guilt, you say, in effect, "I am beyond redemption. I deserve to be devastated."
Since you are an integral part of Creation, of the universe, of God, you thus insult yourself as you do
when you do not trust life's abundance, goodness, safety, justice, richness, and beauty. No matter
how negative, destructive, mean, malicious, spiteful, dishonest, and manipulative you discover a part
of you to be, it is only one part, only a temporary aspect which the real you has brought into material
manifestation so you can recognize and alter it. Never think that this is all of you. You must beware
of this dangerous distortion.
There is a direct correlation between this self-devastating guilt and your distrust of life. It is
essential that you deal with this double-edged distortion and set it right. In this kind of guilt, you
inevitably cut yourself off from your own divine flow. Thus you feel you have to immediately go to
the opposite extreme of whitewashing your actual failings and faults, those areas which you need to
face squarely and honestly. The defense against your shortcomings is always correlated with a self-
devastating guilt. And the self-devastating guilt is correlated with a denial of the true nature of an
all-giving, all-loving, all-fulfilling universe available to all created beings. Beware of this guilt, my
friends, for it does not lead to self-purification. It is not a realistic or constructive attitude.
Now what about shame? Shame is the emotion concerned with vanity and appearance.
Perhaps you are ashamed to expose something in front of others because you want to pretend to be
other than what you are. The idealized ego-image takes predominance over what is real. Thus you
lose touch with the treasure of your real self. So there is a difference between guilt and shame.
Guilt relates to your inner self; it devastates you and you exaggerate it, playing a game with yourself.
Shame applies to your image, your pretenses toward the world outside.
True remorse has nothing to do with either guilt or shame. It simply recognizes your
shortcomings, limitations, faults, impurities, and negativities. It admits that there are parts in you
where you violate spiritual law and thus violate your deepest integrity. To feel regretful, to admit the
truth that these impurities are a useless waste of energy and inflict harm on others and yourself,
sincerely wanting to change through self-confrontation, is entirely different from self-devastating
guilt or shame. Remorse makes it possible to say, "Yes, it is true, I have this or that dishonesty,
pettiness, false pride, hatred, malice, or whatever, but this is not all of me. The very fact that I can
recognize it, regret it, and want to change it, allies me with my divine self which will ultimately
overcome whatever negative traits I feel remorseful about." The "I" that dislikes and wants to
change destructive, untruthful, deviating aspects remains basically intact, even while noticing that
something is amiss. So do make the distinction between guilt, shame, and remorse, and see that
guilt is very much part of a lack of faith in All That Is.
My dearest beloved friends, there are many spiritual helpers around you and around everyone
who is venturing on such a path of self-development. Some of you may doubt the reality of spiritual
existence beyond the body, but whether or not you have these doubts, it is a fact. There is a whole
world which for you is intangible but which is extremely tangible in reality. In fact, it is much more
tangible than the world you know as real. The world you know as real is a reflection, a mirror image,
an outer projection into which your real self is thrust in order to fulfill a task. Give the free gift of
real love by letting others be, even if this means a loss at the moment. Let go in trust and faith that
life wants to shower you with its gifts. The more you establish an attitude of truth in you, the more
you will know the inner beauty, the inner world of reality that can never perish.
As you persevere on your genuine path, your growth becomes more and more tangible. It
progresses in ever-accelerating beauty as you master the difficulties. You resolve your problems in
an ever more profound way and your experience of joy and security, peace and pleasure, becomes
deeper, longer lasting, and less fraught with subsequent fearful contraction. You become more
capable of fulfillment because of your honest investment in facing yourself in truth. Divine
blessings are with you. Be in peace.