The Text - Section 49
49. OBSTACLES ON THE PATH: OLD STUFF, WRONG GUILT, AND WHO, ME?
Greetings, my friends. God bless all of you, every one of you. We in the spirit world are so
happy when we have the opportunity to help human beings. And there is really only one help and
no other. It is helping you to find in yourself that which obstructs your own happiness and to find
the law of the Divine.
Many human beings smile at the idea of the existence of the forces of evil, even more than
they smile at the idea of God. Why they do is hard to say, for evil or the anti-divine is,
unfortunately, a reality in your world. Closing your eyes to reality is unreasonable. Of course, when
you look for evil outside of yourself, you will easily recognize its existence in others. If you fight it
there, you fight it in the wrong place. And if you seek the Divine outside of yourself, you will have a
difficult time finding it. So the only place to seek either evil or the Divine is within yourself.
When you hear the word "evil" or "the satanic forces," you automatically picture something
very specific and often drastic. Let us establish what belongs in the category of the forces of
darkness or evil. It is not only all the manifest cruelty and wickedness in their extreme forms. It is
all ignorance, all error, all deviation from truth in every possible form. For truth is God.
On this path, in the work you are doing, you find in your images a rigidity, an obstruction.
You rightly call this an immaturity. In this part of your personality you have remained a child.
Because of your lack of knowledge and mature insight, the forces of evil could take a hold on you
without any deliberate intention on your part of being "bad." Evil and destruction can work in you
through the basic misconception that self-centeredness will protect you from hurt or bring you a
reward. If you can detect this basic error in your images, you will make a great step forward. It is
not easy, because you are unaware of your emotional self-centeredness. You may be aware of your
fears without realizing that they come from being overconcerned with your own person and your
fear of being hurt. You withhold from others your outgoing love and feelings, which always seem to
involve a personal risk.
Identifying and analyzing your images and wrong conclusions will lead you finally to the
recognition of their common denominator: The constructive attitude is: "In my ignorance I believe
-- perhaps unconsciously so far -- that selfishness will bring me reward, will protect me from hurt.
In what way have I been selfish? In what way has my conclusion been wrong from this viewpoint?
What is the right conclusion?" If you will consider your inner problems from this angle -- after you
have found hitherto hidden emotions, reactions, and tendencies -- you will be able to make a change
in your personality that will eventually change your life.
Without exception, there are common traits in all images. Only the relative proportions of the
traits vary from individual to individual. In every image you will find inferiority feelings, guilt
feelings, hostility, hate, aggression, ignorance, resentment, childish selfishness, fear, and a few other
obstructive forces. More primitive persons manifest these traits outwardly and direct them toward
the outer world. As human beings develop from incarnation to incarnation, they finally realize that
others consider such feelings bad and wrong and that it is a disadvantage to show them openly.
Thus they hide the destructive impulses and thereby create obstructions and conflicts way down in
the depth of their being -- in contrast to the surface manifestations of more primitive persons.
When errors of selfishness and egotism exist on the surface, the repercussions occur
outwardly and directly. The destructive forces are directed openly toward the other person and
therefore bring an open result. However, when the destructive forces are kept under lock and key,
they fall back upon the self and affect others only indirectly, thereby bringing an indirect
consequence. You unconsciously choose the latter alternative, recognizing that the open and direct
way is wrong but not yet recognizing that the other way is equally wrong and brings results equally
disadvantageous. The only solution is to learn gradually to rid yourself of selfishness. This happens
first by recognizing where, deep below the surface of your consciousness, your emotions are self-
oriented in a way that is completely wrong. Then you need to learn how harmful selfishness is --
harmful not only to people you come in contact with, but harmful to yourself. And selfishness is no
less harmful if hidden and covered by surface reactions that appear as quite the opposite.
So long as you try to push the deeper feelings away because of an outer or inner "must," you
cannot succeed. This "must" indicates not only a forcing of yourself -- and, as you know, emotions
do not respond to compulsion -- but also an impure motive. You want to do away with undesired
and unadmired tendencies quickly because they make you appear in an unflattering light. Such a
motive is proof of the very selfishness that you want to eliminate and therefore it cannot succeed,
even apart from the forcing element. But if you want to rid yourself of self-centeredness because
you sincerely consider the other person, because you wish to bring happiness and love into your
surroundings regardless of your own possible hurts, then the motive is pure and you will eventually
succeed. With the help of God you will truly free yourself from the chains of error caused by the
egotism that is so destructive. You will not bury the selfish emotions and look away from them but
rather uncover them and take a good look.
I know all this has been said many times before, but I am addressing myself now to the
emotional levels you are uncovering through self-search and not to your intellectual surface
knowledge. Try to apply all this to the recognitions you have made and are continuing to make, to
an emotional reaction of yours that at first glance seems to have nothing to do with all this, to
something you have found out about yourself on this road.
Two types of stumbling blocks may confront you when you come across new recognitions
and you lift from your unconscious mind an emotional reaction that is creating conflicts in your soul
and in your life. Such recognitions are obviously unpleasant to face at first. The two obstacles seem
to contradict one another, yet you may experience both. The first is the tendency to dismiss a
recognition of something within yourself because -- on a surface level -- you have known the same
thing all along. You are tempted to put it away quickly, saying, "I know this already. It is nothing
new." Beware of this danger, my friends. The majority of your findings will deal with trends and
tendencies you already know in a vague way.
If your search shows you again a trend you already know, it means that you have not used this
knowledge properly. You have not yet applied it to all levels of your being. You have not
assimilated it completely. You have not made connections between this knowledge and other
trends. You have not realized the full significance, meaning, and consequences of this trend.
Therefore, you need to continue working with the recognition. You have to discover it afresh, as
though you were dealing with something you have never known. Only then will you be able to
understand the chain reaction this wrong attitude has caused within you, eventually also harming
your relationships to other persons and thus recoiling upon you from both inside and outside.
So beware of the reaction, "Oh, but I know this already." If diligent search confronts you
with a recognition you already know, treat it as though you had discovered it for the first time. If
this is what you find, it is what you need to find all over again. Coming up from your own
unconscious this particular trend tells you, "You will find me as often as is necessary. If you can
find me again, it means you have not used this knowledge to the full extent."
The other obstacle to progress on this path is the exact opposite. Through the years, you have
formed a certain picture of yourself. You are known to yourself and to your friends and family as a
person with certain predominant qualities and faults. You may find in your unconscious a few traits
so completely contrary to what you otherwise are that you dismiss them, saying, "This is all
nonsense, this cannot be true." You are so convinced of being the opposite of what you discovered
that it simply does not make sense. You overlook the fact that both can be true. It is difficult for
you to accept the revolutionary news within your soul because you are used to thinking in terms of
"either/or." If you are what the recognition shows you to be, you believe the outer and known
trend must be unreal. Therefore, you cannot accept the new finding. But you should understand
deeply that it is possible to be split in a particular tendency: you can in some realms of your being
have the quality already known to you; and in other realms -- where there are obstructions -- have
the exact opposite quality.
Let us assume that one of your foremost qualities is generosity. You know how generous you
are. All who have ever been in contact with you know it. Yet all of a sudden you find a stinginess,
an avarice, in you, emotionally if not factually. And if you ask your friends who know you best, "Is
it true? Am I stingy?" they will of course say, "No, you are quite the opposite." And they do not say
so to be polite. They really know you as a very generous person. You have displayed your
generosity in all your actions. Yet deep down there is this one corner where you are most
ungenerous. So both are true. For another example, let us assume you are known to be a very
courageous person. It may be your outstanding quality, one that you manifest in many realms of
your life. You are convinced that there is no trace of cowardice in you. So that when you do come
across a streak of cowardice in yourself, you may reject the discovery because it seems to you to
make no sense.
So beware of both obstacles to progress, my dear friends. Your reactions to your own
recognitions are of utmost importance. For only from your reactions can you determine your
progress and success.
Another point I should like to discuss tonight is your reaction to your guilt feelings. As I said
before, everybody has guilt. Every image is interwoven with guilt. It is important to understand that
there are two kinds of guilt -- unjustified guilt and justified guilt. Often you unconsciously use an
absurd, unjustified guilt as a shield and hide the true guilt behind it. Why? Because deep down you
know that the unjustified guilt is ridiculous. It is as though you wanted to say, "You see, I declare
myself guilty, but I have no real reason to do so." You cannot get rid of the gnawing voice of that
which should really be acknowledged, faced, and changed. Yet you do not want to face it, hence you
look unconsciously for something you cannot be blamed for. Thus you argue with your inner voice
of absurd guilt, trying to convince it that it has no reason to bother you. Of course, all this happens
unconsciously. Ironically, the true guilt may be infinitely smaller than the absurd guilt you use as a
wall to hide behind.
What are absurd guilts? They are most of all the guilts you feel because you are not perfect. It
is commendable to want to become perfect. It cannot be recommended enough that you try to
replace hatred, resentment, aggression with love and unselfishness. But before you can do that, you
must first acknowledge and accept your present state of development -- your present inability to feel
different than you do -- instead of wanting to immediately become more than you are now. If you
feel guilty because you are still what you are, you obstruct the very goal you want to attain. I know,
my friends, that I repeat many things many times, but I must do so. I want to stress that it is an
unjustified guilt feeling when you blame yourself for not being perfect now. Such unjustified guilt
extends into all areas of the human personality. If all of you who work on this path go through your
images from this viewpoint, you will find where your guilts are unjustified.
Another unjustified guilt -- fueled by a mass-image -- is your reaction to your sexual drive.
Each one of you feels guilty about it, if not on the surface, where you have been affected by
intellectual influences, then certainly way down deep in your emotions. Guilt about the sexual drive
is unjustified, absurd guilt. It may be true that your sexual energy does not flow in the right channel
because it does not merge with love. That it does not is precisely because you have felt guilty about
it and suppressed awareness of it as much as you could. Hence your sexual drive could not mature
with the rest of your personality and integrate with warm, loving, giving, unselfish feelings. Instead,
it has remained childish in its self-directedness and egotism. Your unconscious sexual fault,
therefore, lies in the misdirection and separateness of your sexual drive rather than in its existence as
such. Its existence is no reason for feeling guilty. You act on a misunderstanding when you attempt
to eliminate that which seems sinful to you, and then feel guilty because you cannot do so. The
remedy is not to eliminate the sexual drive but to cease to be afraid of love -- to relinquish a fear that
is selfish in nature. If you allow yourself to love, your sexual drive will merge with your love, and
there will no longer be any reason to feel guilty about sex. Try to understand that, my dear friends.
Try to understand how confused your unconscious thinking is. You feel guilty about a God-given
force instead of feeling guilty about your fear of loving, which is born of selfishness and
separateness. Combine your sexual drive with the one and only reality and remedy in the universe --
love. You can combine love and sexual energy only by developing your soul by the very path you
are taking.
So here we have a few very common unjustified guilts. What, on the other hand, is justified
guilt? When you hurt other people in your ignorant belief that selfishness is your protection --
whether you hurt them actively or passively, by commission or omission -- then your guilt is
justified. Differentiate clearly, my dear friends, between the guilt of being imperfect at this stage and
the guilt of hurtful self-will. Being imperfect should not in itself make you feel guilty. But the guilt
for hurts you inflict on others -- no matter how unintentional -- out of your imperfection, blindness,
and ignorance is justified guilt that you should meet squarely and courageously. There is a world of
difference, although fine and subtle, between the two types of guilt I have described. Please think
about this. It is so important.
What should your attitude be toward justified guilt? What would be healthy and constructive?
It would be to say to yourself, "I could not help it in the past. I was ignorant and blind and selfish.
I was too much of a coward to dare to love and forget my own little ego. I admit that I have hurt
other people by this attitude and I am now willing to learn exactly how I hurt them. It makes no
difference whether I inflicted the hurt by deed, word, thought, or emotional reaction; by what I have
done or left undone. I truly want to change. With the help of God I will succeed. In order to do
so, I must clearly see the direct or indirect hurts my attitude has inflicted upon others." Then, think
about the hurts you inflicted on other people. Ask God to give you the insight to understand. Have
the courage to shoulder your responsibility without the pride of destructive wrong guilt feelings that
make you exaggerate your own "badness" and lead you to feel hopeless about yourself.
There are three possible wrong reactions as you recognize the hurts you have inflicted on
others: hopelessness about yourself -- the negative, destructive guilt feelings that make you despair
of yourself; self-justification -- the blaming of others for real or imagined wrongs that "forced" you
to react that way; or denial -- the fearful refusal to look at imperfection which may not fit into the
picture you have of yourself. At different times you may experience any one of these reactions.
Beware of each! Find the right way: Feel with the person you have hurt, take the justified guilt
upon yourself, wish to become different, desire to give up your fear of loving. This attitude is
healthy and constructive. The hurt you feel when you realize the hurt you have unwittingly inflicted
-- unintentional hurt because it was committed out of your wrong image conclusions -- is healthy: it
will give you the incentive to lose your fear and your selfishness.
My advice, dear friends, is that when you have a basic understanding of your images and
image conclusions, for your own clarification separate the unjustified from the justified guilts. Find
where you might have hurt others by your wrong conclusions, directly or indirectly, in fact or in
intent. If you have the courage to be truly sorry for the hurts you have unwittingly inflicted on
others, if you can take that justified guilt upon yourself and face it, it will give you more strength
than you realize. It will foster a healthy and constructive attitude. It will set the life force in motion
in your soul. For, among many other things, life force is truth and courage. Accepting justified guilt
is being in truth and it takes courage. The life force will then seep through all your devious channels
and affect them, so that slowly but surely you will dissolve all the destructiveness of the forces of
evil that rage in you due to your ignorance and emotional immaturity.
Are there any questions on this subject?
QUESTION: The first question refers to the last expression you used. Would you kindly
define emotional maturity?
ANSWER: Emotional maturity is, foremost, the capacity to love. Many people imagine they
have it. Of course, emotional maturity is a matter of degree. But wherever fear of being hurt, fear
of disappointment, or fear of life's risks exists, emotional maturity does not exist. Emotional
maturity knows no selfishness. This is relative on earth, of course; it cannot be absolute as yet in
your sphere of existence. The more selfish you are, the more immature you are. You may be
extremely unselfish in the little outer things but the outer unselfishness can camouflage your
emotional selfishness or ego-centeredness. You may give away your possessions, but you are afraid
to love or risk being hurt, and thus you withhold love from others. Therefore, you are emotionally
immature, although you may have reached intellectual maturity. Emotional maturity means being
unafraid to pay the price of living. And the price of living includes an occasional hurt or
disappointment. The mature person knows this, expects and accepts it, and realizes its worth.
When you withdraw into seclusion and become egocentric, you thwart not only others but yourself.
Emotional maturity also means being unafraid of your own emotions: if you have negative
emotions, fear of them will not make them disappear. On the contrary, only by facing those
negative emotions can you understand their origin, their reason. Only then can you gain real control
over them, rather than the false control of suppressing them. In emotional maturity you will no
longer fear your positive feelings, either, because you will accept an occasional hurt. You will risk
expressing your positive feelings rather than withholding them from others, because enveloping the
other with warmth, comfort, and tenderness is more important than what might happen to you later.
Emotional maturity means being able to make a full decision and to accept that you cannot
have your cake and eat it too. Unconsciously, most people constantly want to have it both ways,
which brings them into conflict with themselves and their surroundings. The emotionally mature
person knows that there is always a price to pay. Emotional maturity or emotional health means
knowing what you want, wanting what you can have, and being willing to pay the price for it. To
give up egotism on all levels of your being, to reach into the depths of your unconscious reactions --
which may be so contrary to your outward ones -- and come to know them fully is to attain true
emotional maturity.
These are universal truths, taught in all religions and philosophies of any value. Humanity has
tried for a long, long time to live up to these ideas. Yet people have largely ignored the danger of
self-deception, they have ignored their habit of using the many layers of consciousness to hide
reactions that do not accord with these truths. So you will often find people who act outwardly
according to the universal truths, yet you feel that their behavior is not quite genuine. Inwardly they
are hiding many reactions that are contrary to the universal spiritual truths.
The path on which I have the privilege of leading you will avoid these dangers; your outer
and inner reactions will become one. So let us be clear about our aim. We want to find that part in
you where you are still undeveloped, where you are primitive in your selfish reactions. Your
selfishness may come as a shock at first because it is so different from your sincerely felt outer
reactions. Whether these outer reactions are really sincere, that is, the best you can do, or whether
they are an almost conscious hypocrisy, the outer mask must be dissolved in order to look into your
soul. There you will find many trends and feelings diametrically opposed to your conscious beliefs
about yourself.
Your mask has not brought you the gratification you thought to obtain through it. Finally,
this made you angry. When you unconsciously assumed the mask of goodness you may have bent
over backwards trying to hide what was behind it. Now you feel abused, taken advantage of,
without realizing that it was not true goodness that was so unrewarding but rather false and
compulsive "goodness." Drawing the wrong conclusion, you may now be tempted to go to the
other extreme and act out the part you discover behind the first mask of unselfishness, believing that
now at last you are true to yourself. Yes, this part exists in you, and you have to acknowledge it.
But recognize that the rebellion and anger too form only a superficial layer and look behind them.
Find in you that which knows how to keep the proper balance. Your true self is neither as good as it
appears to be on the surface nor as "bad" -- as full of hate, aggression, rebellion, and anger -- as you
are behind your mask. All your negative reactions are essentially one reaction to your puzzlement at
life, the outcome of your wrong emotional conclusions. Acknowledge your anger and rebellion,
experience what you have suppressed for so long, but do not consider it the final truth of your self,
as if you were the person who would act and live out all these unruly feelings. Discover the
difference between suppressing these emotions and accepting them as a symptom of your not
knowing the answer to your life, of not yet having found the key to your being.
Try to understand this approach, my dear ones, and you can avoid unnecessary pitfalls. To
find the answer to your life, you must exercise the courage to admit the negative second layer of
yourself without remaining in it. You must recognize its falseness as you have already recognized
the falseness of the mask layer you have built on wrong conclusions. Then you can be true to
yourself without exaggerating the new layer that you discover. You will grasp that your former
"unselfishness" was ineffective because it was false, not because unselfishness as such is ineffective.
This approach will lead you safely into emotional maturity. It will make you truly men and women.
I say this advisedly, I do not say human beings now, I say men and women. For no one can be truly
a man or a woman who does not have emotional maturity.
QUESTION: Would you please explain the reason for the tiredness of many people,
especially in spring?
ANSWER: Tiredness is always a sign that the life force has been misused in the organism of
the soul. Tiredness results from suppressing the destructive forces of the soul, barring them from
the light of consciousness which can direct them into the right channels until they finally dissolve. If
hostility and aggression are suppressed, if fears are suppressed and not faced, if hatred is ignored
because hate does not correspond to your ideal and makes you feel guilty, the self is destroyed. The
self-destruction takes different forms and creates different symptoms in different organisms.
Tiredness is one such symptom.
Spring is the season when nature revives. The life force penetrates everything that grows:
plants, trees, grass, flowers, fruits, vegetables, the animal world, even the mineral world. And it
should be the same in the human being. When a human being is in tune with the universe, when the
soul is growing rather than stagnating, spring revives and strengthens. But it cannot do so where
obstructions exist. An obstruction is created by an element foreign to the divine life force. Self-
deception amounts to untruth, and untruth is hostile to the life force. Suppression is always self-
deception; therefore, when self-deception or suppression exists, the life force cannot regenerate you.
On the contrary, it will affect you adversely because something like a short circuit occurs when two
opposing forces clash in the soul. The life force wants to come into you -- and also out of you, for
deep down in your soul exists the whole universe, and therefore a fountain of life force. But the life
force cannot fill your being, because the opposing forces bottle it up.
Without suppression and self-deception, spring would revive you. Fatigue is a symptom that
you are suppressing knowledge and recognitions from yourself. Let fatigue be an incentive to
redoubling your intention and effort to break down your resistance to facing yourself. For only then
can you truly become whole and healthy in body, soul, and spirit, in your feelings and in your mind.
Be grateful for any symptom that shows your inner state.
QUESTION: My question is about Job. For what failures or shortcomings in his life was he
made to suffer so much?
ANSWER: For lack of self-recognition and for self-deception out of pride and fear. There
was in him an impatience to be already perfect -- an impatience connected with spiritual pride. He
used his desire for good to suppress basic instincts rather than facing them with courage and
sincerity.
QUESTION: Is it true, as some interpreters have it, that he played himself up as the patriarch
who deserved all the grace of God -- in other words, that he was self-righteous?
ANSWER: Yes, that is pride. There was pride in this respect, but also in other respects. And
he manifested extreme self-will. His self-will wanted to be already at a point that only hard labor
and the humility of self-recognition can attain.
QUESTION: Would you kindly repeat what you have said previously about expectation,
especially in the form of "positive thinking" as opposed to acceptance?
ANSWER: Each of these basic religious attitudes has a healthy form, which become distorted
when you embrace its extreme. Rightly understood, positive thinking means knowing that
everything must turn to good, finally, because the divine power is the absolute truth and cannot be
conquered by destructive forces. But that does not mean that you can simply do away with the
effects of your own past and present errors. On whatever level of your personality the effects exist,
you must accept and go through them. The most constructive attitude is a positive acceptance of
yourself and life's risks. It includes the humility of accepting yourself as you are now -- without
expecting a perfect life when you are not yet perfect -- and the courage to face yourself and to face
life as it is.
Positive thinking, when abused, avoids facing that which is now. It can be successful only
where a basic inner perfection already exists to some degree. Otherwise it must fail and therefore
bring disappointment. It tends to be in a hurry believing one can whisk away deep-rooted
personality problems -- problems that require patience and perseverance to dissolve -- by resorting
to a mere formula.
Acceptance also can be abused and misinterpreted. In its healthy form, acceptance helps to
shoulder one's imperfections and their consequences, recognizing that one cannot change all at once
by a mere act of will. It shows the humility and patience to take any unpleasant result as a healthy
medicine. However, it does not mean being pessimistic or looking forward to negative happenings
if they are unnecessary. In its sick sense, acceptance fosters masochistic tendencies, hopelessness,
and the self-deception of indulging in resignation that is not only unnecessary but sickly. It fosters
wrong guilt feelings and seeks to punish the self for them.
You must differentiate between the right and wrong forms of both these basic religious
attitudes. The wrong kind of positive thinking is self-willed and impatient. The wrong kind of
acceptance fosters "martyrdom," seeing oneself as the victim. One extreme always creates another.
Thus the healthy way is the middle path: accepting the effects of one's imperfections and going
through them in a spirit of courage and humility. By paying the price you will find happiness and
peace. Bearing your cross, which you always make yourself, will give you peace. Accept that you
cannot change your emotions in a hurry, which the wrong interpretation of positive thinking tries to
do. Eventually your emotions will begin to change, but only after you have accepted them.
QUESTION: In other words, one's expectation of failure or success in an undertaking has no
bearing whatsoever? It doesn't matter whether or not one goes into an undertaking with an attitude
of hopelessness?
ANSWER: One's attitude always has a bearing, but you cannot say that an optimistic attitude
brings a good result and a pessimistic outlook a bad one. As long as you are not clear about
yourself, you can have a positive and optimistic attitude consciously, but unconsciously you can also
have the opposite. This can happen for various reasons, one being that you do not quite know what
you really want. Since you do not understand the reasons, when this conflict results in a negative
outcome, you become disappointed and lose courage. At the other extreme, some people constantly
assume a negative attitude because they are so afraid of disappointment; they try to avoid the
disappointment by shielding themselves with the negative attitude. So underneath both the positive
and negative attitudes something else may be hidden.
The important point is not so much what you consciously think. It is much more important
to learn to become aware of what you unconsciously feel. A mere thinking formula can never be
truly effective in getting what you consciously want. You need to understand your inner self, your
unconscious reactions, your inner conflicts and problems. Only through such understanding will
you finally find the right attitude toward a forthcoming venture, a hope, or anything else in your life.
Until you gain the right understanding, the recommended attitude is neutrality: let go of your
self-will without being either optimistic or pessimistic. Just wish to learn from anything that
happens to you. Let whatever happens be an indication of where you are and what problems to
tackle. You can consider any happening as a reflex of your unconscious reactions. If you observe
your emotions, you will finally break through into yourself and get the recognitions you need for a
more thorough self-understanding. Whatever happens to you now is mostly a repetitive pattern
created by your image conclusions. Focusing your attention on recognizing the inner roots of outer
events will give you the key to your life. So far, the whole personality may have battled against such
recognitions.
There is no miracle key. Nothing can be truly solved unless you understand your unconscious
motives and trends. Outer measures may sometimes seem effective, but truly, your life problem can
be solved only when you overcome your resistance to looking into yourself -- when you let down
your inner walls of defense. What do you defend? Why do you have to defend yourself? Ask
yourself such questions when you feel this resistance and this battle in you. I speak to all of you
now, my friends. Then you will not need an external, forceful rule to find the right attitude for
different situations in life. Such rule is a crutch.
Once you know your unconscious mind, you will just naturally be; you will take life as it
comes. And you will have success and failure. Life should bring both, and you will be equipped to
meet both. Both will make you strong. If a person is so concerned to have the proper attitude to
guard against failure or disappointment, it is an indication that failure and disappointment are greatly
feared. And if you fear them so, you lack healthy resistance. I mean resistance in the positive sense,
as when you resist disease, and not the resistance that should disappear when you are on the path of
searching into yourself. Fear is a disease.
Now, my dearest friends, God's love and forces of truth are given unto you. They stream to
you. They penetrate and fill your heart. Rejoice in truth, learn the joy of discovering truth that you
have feared and that may not be flattering. For this is a great joy. Learn this healthy activity.
Become strong in it and meet life as you should. For in this way you will become loving men and
women. Be in peace. Be blessed. Be in God.