The Text - Section 223
223. THE ERA OF THE NEW AGE AND NEW CONSCIOUSNESS
Blessings, love, and greetings to all of you, my dearest ones. With immense joy do we resume our
contact for the coming working period. The rejoicing in our world is great. This rejoicing can
communicate itself to you if you open yourself to it. It has to do with what many of you have
accomplished individually and together. But the rejoicing is also about what is to come. For more
growth and liberation, peace, and joy will come to those of you who really devote yourselves to your
own innermost path.
Now, my dearest friends, you have often heard from me and from many other sources that an
immense new cosmic force that will sweep the planet earth has been released into the universe. A
new surge toward spiritual truth is spreading throughout your world. New values are seeking to
push through old resistances. I will speak in this lecture about the meaning of the new cosmic force
in terms of your community, your individuality, and your growth.
The planet Earth is an entity of which each individual inhabiting it is a cell, not unlike the cells of
your body. Each of these cells is a consciousness and energy center, just as you are a consciousness
and energy center. Now the entity Earth is growing up. It is coming to an inner crossroads just as a
growing person comes to an inner crossroads.
You have all experienced at some point on your path that one part of you is ready to expand, to risk
exposure of its hidden secrets, to move toward a new vision of life, self, and a new mode of being.
The new modality does not shed the old, but transforms what is not compatible with the new, pure,
and great influx. It incorporates the pure substance of the old self into a new, expanded version.
You also know that at the same time the part of you we call the lower self obstructs this movement.
It fears, distrusts, and resists such growth. Which part you ally yourself with depends on your ego
consciousness. In such a conflict crisis is inevitable. The resisting part creates the crisis by
obstructing the inexorable evolutionary force. The less you recognize this struggle for what it is, and
the more you deny and rationalize its true significance, the greater an upheaval it will cause and the
more frightening the upheaval will appear. Conversely, the more you recognize the struggle for
what it really is and the more you act in accordance with higher self principles, the shorter the crisis
will be. In fact, the crisis will transform itself into undreamed-of bliss.
So you see, the crisis is healthy and unavoidable. Growth cannot take place without crisis, and to
the extent you resist growth, you create crisis. The lower self is not merely devious, dishonest, and
selfish; it is also ignorant. This ignorance makes it stubborn, unperceptive, as well as destructive and
negative.
Earth also possesses a lower self. Like the individual's, Earth's lower self is not only negative,
selfish, greedy, and dishonest; it is also ignorant with a vengeance. It totally resists the new
consciousness the soul is ready for. Thus there is crisis on this earth. You see the crisis as much as
you see, here and there, expanded new ways of being, new understanding, deeper vision of life, and
deeper perception of spiritual reality. The new expansive movements are not always without their
distortions and exaggerations or without their fanaticism and misunderstandings. They sometimes
miss the point of the great new influx of consciousness and avoid confronting unpurified matter in
the soul. Such abuse will turn out to be particularly costly and disappointing to the individual. The
new cosmic force has made many attempts to come through, but its meaning is poorly understood
in many quarters. So there are many spiritual movements which seek to follow the pressure from
within, without devoting themselves to the work that needs to be done within the soul. The spirit
world has been preparing for this new expansion for many centuries with a great deal of investment
and energy. Many are called but not all follow. Not all are sufficiently willing to heed the inner call.
It is best to clearly acknowledge this, to leave open the possibility for later following the call. If,
however, it is explained away and illusions and delusions accepted as if they were valid reasons for
the decision, then the soul will remain in confusion.
Now the earth as an entity is going through such a struggle. Those who resist the light of the new
consciousness have a stake in making themselves deaf and blind to it. Many of them have the
mental and spiritual equipment to follow the movement, but choose, out of pride, fear, and selfwill,
not to follow or even to notice it. There are others, of course, who are not yet ready in their
spiritual development even to know that levels of reality exist that cannot be seen with the eye. And
then, of course, some do follow the movement even though they do not quite understand what is at
stake.
Those who follow it will find the deepest joy and blessings and need not fear anything. They need
only to rejoice. In following the influx, they keep in harmony with the universe; they flow with the
process, rather than obstructing it. They are also needed as physical channels for the further
penetration of the Christ consciousness into the new era. Their ever-renewed decision to devote all
of themselves to the process that has encompassed them will make their life as fulfilled and glorious
as it will be useful and meaningful to the entire cosmic evolution.
My dearest friends, the fulfillment of this surge cannot come about unless the most profound
purification process takes place. With this particular community, an emphasis on personal
purification has existed, as you very well know, for all these years. Until now, the emphasis was
directed exclusively toward your individual fulfillment. Now a new phase has arisen where your own
inner expansion has readied you to realize that individual fulfillment is the basis for the cohesive
fulfillment of the total movement that sweeps your world. In other words, more is at stake than
your individual fulfillment.
When I say "more," it may sound as though your individual fulfillment were not important, and that
may indeed appear to contradict what I have just said. I always emphasize the importance of your
individual happiness, wholeness, and freedom from obstruction. This is not a contradiction. Your
individual fulfillment, which cannot exist as long as you are unpurified and alienated from the truth
of your inner processes, is the most important thing. At the same time something much larger is at
stake. Perhaps I can put it this way: You can find total individual fulfillment only if you serve a
greater cause. Many of you, in this work, almost inadvertently found this to be so. The guidance of
events has brought you to realize, some more intellectually, some more intuitively, that you are
involved in a great task which you are simultaneously serving while you fulfill yourself. You have
found that this very service enhances your fulfillment, just as this service requires you to be a
fulfilled and happy person. You are beginning to experience that fulfillment of the self lies in
service. And service can be executed only through self-fulfillment. In other words, the apparent
contradiction proves, once again, to be a faulty perception. What appear to be opposites coexist in
oneness. Therefore the individual is only apparently opposed to the whole.
You will learn to perceive more consciously and deliberately the importance of service to the entire
Christ consciousness that is infiltrating your universe. This will very drastically change the life, the
consciousness, and the values of those who are willing to follow that movement. In my coming
lectures I will increasingly concentrate on helping you comprehend the difference between the old
values and the new; the old consciousness and the new. You will come to view your personal
fulfillment as exactly what it is: a necessary tool with which you can serve. For unhappy and
frustrated people cannot serve, cannot undertake the task of enriching life, enriching others, and
setting a desirable example. For how can the poor enrich? Nor is it possible to pretend, for
followers do know, in a deep inner place, whether those who lead are genuinely fulfilled or are just
pretending.
Only those who are fully centered in their own God-consciousness, thus able to create their lives
according to their needs and wishes, can enliven their surroundings and teach their consciousness to
others. Many different tasks exist, but all who serve in this cause must teach and lead, representing
the new consciousness and the new values in their own lives, whether through instruction or
through example, transmitting joy, love, or the capacity to be one's best.
Now, my friends, I would like to explain another dichotomy you have experienced in the course of
this work. Most of you who are starting this work have a compulsion to be good, like many other
human beings. You may fear your selfishness. But your mask has put a cloak over your selfishness
and your little meannesses. That mask makes you comply with higher standards and appear to be a
very good person. Often the real surge and message from the higher self is interwoven with the
masking cloak, the false good ness. In your pathwork many of you have already dealt extensively
with the part of you that sells out your genuine self-interest, your real rights, in order to please some
imaginary authority. You have also found that you do this not out of the pure spirit of service but
by design. You always wanted this authority to do something for you that was not fair to expect and
what you really have to do for yourself in order to become fully yourself. You work through these
issues again and again until you find the strength to relinquish the secret hope, to cease the false
service, to become more self-responsible and consequently more self-assertive. You find a balance:
The more you stop cheating in ways which you pretend do not exist and the more you stop the false
goodness, the more you assert your right to have the best in life. The guilt ceases because you live
honestly. When dependency and the consequent submission and lack of selfhood exist, service to a
greater cause is premature, because you misuse it and perpetuate the pretenses of the mask self. So
you had to learn to be selfish, my friends.
As you know, there is a right kind of selfishness and there is a wrong kind. The right kind of
selfishness preserves the right to unfold in the best way for you, regardless of the opinions of others
and their possibly covert reasons to exploit you. This selfishness rooted in independence can easily
recognize and refute other people's exploitative demands rather than submitting to them because of
your own hidden agenda. People with the right kind of selfishness feel deeply deserving of
happiness because they never want it at the expense of others. The distorted form of selfishness
splits the interest of self and others; the right kind unifies them.
At first, sorting out the misunderstandings is complicated, but once you have accomplished this
along the spiral movement of your path, there is no longer a dichotomy between the self and others.
When you free yourself of the real guilt of your hiding and your pretenses, of disguising your hidden
agenda and the negativity it perpetuates, you will not feel unworthy of becoming the best, the
happiest and most fulfilled person. Then service will no longer be compensating for guilt.
On this path we want to prepare as many human beings as possible for the great event that sweeps
your universe. This requires strong and guilt-free souls who act for real, not for false reasons. So
your path had to first bring out false and real selfishness in order to help you become unselfish
without sacrificing personal fulfillment.
The lower self with its lower aims must often be sacrificed. But is this really a sacrifice? It only
seems so. What ultimately emerges is a real fulfillment. Your outer ego-self will no longer
contradict your Godself. This state, however, comes only after you have learned to let go of the
mask of false service and to expose the short-sighted selfishness of the lower, little self. Then you
learn healthy selfishness, and from there you come into true selflessness that is not at all
contradictory to it.
When people follow spiritual teachings which emphasize service too soon, there is a danger that they
will use these teachings to escape from their hidden inward selfishness. Thus they will cultivate a
service through martyrdom that is not wholesome for the soul. When people refuse to become truly
independent and self-responsible, they do not under take to meet their hidden selfishness, and
therefore their service will also be distorted.
In this light, you will see more clearly the overall dynamic of your own pathwork. A figure you have
used in many other instances because it is a recurrent thought form in symbolic spiritual expressions
might be useful here also: the three circles, the mandala-shaped design. In this figure the higher self
is surrounded by the lower self, which is surrounded by the mask self and the defenses. Individually
you have dealt with this configuration again and again. The same applies to your community, as well
as to humanity as a whole.
Let us now look at your community. Those of you who are most involved in taking responsibility
for the community, who have most deeply worked and exposed themselves and are thus beginning
to reap tangible fruits of fulfillment, represent the higher self of the group. You have traveled
through the outer layers. You have learned more and more not to fear any part of yourself and you
have come to accept all of you, thereby uniting what was once divided. You can identify more and
more with your higher self, since you are increasingly able to differentiate between it and the wishful
thinking of the mask self that hides the distortion and the untruth of the lower self. You thereby
come to hear the true voice of your higher self, which you can increasingly trust. Your community
as a whole has come to this point, and I daresay you cannot help but notice it. The evidence is in
the growing numbers of new Pathwork members; in the nature of these newer people who are more
ready to understand and follow the new cosmic force; in the deeper feelings of genuine love and joy
among all of you; in the increased removing of blocks and obstructions, resolving of problems and
conflicts, so that fulfillment occurs on all levels for more and more of you. This fact can no longer
be ascribed to coincidence but is obviously the natural expression of your development.
So a good number of the inner nucleus function as the higher self of the community. This does not
mean that they are perfect; of course not. But you are sufficiently capable of establishing the
channel to the higher self. You are increasingly capable of totally committing yourself to the will of
God and of perceiving the importance of the Christ consciousness that sweeps your planet and to
serve it. As such you protect yourself in an incredibly efficient way against the onslaught of the
countermovement. You immunize yourself against the countermovement from within your own
lower self, and therefore from without, against the lower self of the planet.
Then there are those others working diligently on the path, still struggling, who are in the phase of
owning up to the lower self, laboriously getting to know it by penetrating the concealments of the
mask self. In this struggle the temptation to hide, as well as the habit of doing so, are strong
obstacles; so are guilt and the fear of exposing the truth. And the illusion of this fear can only be
eliminated gradually by testing it until you learn sufficiently to trust the process. There are those of
you who at first cannot find the channel to your higher self, and thus do not even want it. You fear
it; you do not trust it. You trust your old, destructive habitual defenses more.
Then of course there are always those who are still strongly identified with their mask self. They
have the most difficult time, and they seek reasons to discredit the process and judge it. But this
does not make them any happier; on the contrary. Their stake in not growing is strong; their fear of
growing is equally strong, so they do not want to find out how unjustified the fear is. They are not
necessarily new friends, for it is not always a matter of time. These friends have to recognize that
they identify with their mask self and must begin to travel through the layers.
The purpose of my saying this here is that you should experience yourself where you are and be
aware of it. As you have learned to take responsibility for your lower self and overcame the shame
to admit it, so must you now learn to take responsibility for and not be ashamed of your higher self.
Admit where you have indeed already arrived. Then you can give yourself even more fully to it.
Then you can fully commit yourself to be a part of the great movement and feel the privilege, the
honor, the beauty and the excitement of it. To give service to a greater cause will cleanse the
residual little selfishnesses that make you fearful. You believe you cannot give all of yourself to a
greater cause because you fear to do so. But I say to you once again: It is the other way around.
You are afraid because you still cling to a little selfishness here or there. Consciously giving yourself
to a greater cause that sweeps the entire planet is in itself a cleansing process.
We will discuss the new values of the new consciousness in the lectures to come. We shall share
these new and old truths. What I have just said is one of the most important differences between
the old and the new value systems. I say "new," though they have always existed in isolated, highly
developed individuals who have incarnated for a specific task. The great difference at this time is
that the entire planet is growing up, coming into its own divine consciousness.
The first thing for all of you in this respect has to be a very conscious understanding that your life
must consist of much more than the immediate little personality. And you must also understand
that this expansion will lead to happiness, even though happiness is also its prerequisite. There is no
division between expansion and happiness. To follow the will of God cannot deprive you, so in the
years to come you will become proficient in trusting total surrender to the God within every day of
your life, in every issue, in every venture, in every decision you undertake, even in the opinions you
choose to adopt.
With the new consciousness you will not make superficial decisions with your head, wanting the
immediate fulfillment of your desire. The new consciousness makes decisions in an entirely new
way. It is aware that the outer self does not know, that it is not trustworthy and is full of
subjectively colored distortions and prejudices. The new consciousness always consults the higher
self and learns to wait quietly and patiently for the answer. It is never opinionated. It accepts that it
does not know yet. It keeps itself open. It has no stake in a certain answer. It makes room for an
answer that may be anything, be it what is most desired or its exact opposite, but it trusts that what
will come will be good. Such an approach has no fixed opinion; it empties itself. That is one of the
hallmarks of the new value system that has already begun to sweep the planet.
This clashes, of course, with the old value system, which functions merely from the surface, from
immediate little emotions, from the narrow view that has a stake in not even wanting to widen one's
perception and consider other possibilities. The old attitude clashes with the new in you, and in
your environment the clash is between those who represent the new and those who represent the
old consciousness. In this process it will become increasingly clear where you belong. It does not
suffice to say, "I belong in the new" while you continue acting in the old ways. You can say
anything, but your actions and your approach to decisions prove in which camp you belong.
More and more of you have already made the commitment and are already caught up in the
tremendous surge of the new golden light that sweeps the earth, unbearable only to those who
refuse it. They are the ones who perceive only the negative countermovement and are blind to the
light itself. When the light comes near them, they feel strong discomfort and they misinterpret it. It
brings the greatest joy to those who want it, who give themselves to it, who fight for it and serve it.
This is my message for this time.
We shall continue all future lectures from this wider vision: How you, as an individual, fit into the
scheme of the whole; how you can become happy only when you are part of the force that fights for
the growing and purification of the planet to reach its own divinity.
Your purification work on the path begins to acclimatize you to the joy and the light of what is to
come. But you must now also begin specifically to aim for this, to meditate for it, to want it.
I have truly given you what you need in this first lecture of the year. It is the kind of map I always
give at the beginning of a new working season. Be blessed, my very dearest ones. You must and
will increasingly feel how guided and protected you are, how important your venture is, what a
privilege it is to be involved with it and give your all to it. For this is not only important for the little
outer life. It is important in terms of evolution. Be blessed, my dearest ones.