From lecture 88, RELIGION: TRUE AND FALSE:
None of you are free of the distortion of spirituality; namely, its use as escape, as a substitute for your weaknesses, as a consolation for your fears, as an attempt to appease God to get what you could easily obtain by your own efforts. When religion is a substitute, it may help for a while. It may assuage unreasonable fear. But in the long run, it cripples you and your growth. I sometimes have to refrain from stating a spiritual truth directly because your subconscious would misunderstand and misuse it. But the more problems you resolve, the safer it becomes to tell you the truth without the danger of reinforcing in you the tendency to succumb to false religion.
From lecture 68, SUPPRESSION OF POSITIVE AND CREATIVE TENDENCIES — THOUGHT PROCESSES:
Apart from these individual and very personal suppressions of your most creative forces, there are others which are universal, such as outlined in the lecture about the shame of the higher self. Another of these, to be found in every soul, is the suppression of spiritual unfoldment. This may no longer apply to you outwardly, but you may still find aspects of it within the depths of your being. If you deny yourself the expression of your spiritual nature, you damage yourself just as much as when you suppress any other manifestation of the life force. Although you may now give yourself the right to express your spiritual nature, you may certainly not have done so in the past; it will be important to learn why. It will also be important to find how much defiance and rebellion you needed to do that for which you should not need either defiance or rebellion; how much fear and shame still lingers in you about this facet of your personality, especially toward certain people. You may already surmise that the connection between the suppression of the negative and the positive aspects is often quite strong. Your dependency on public opinion and approval applies, therefore, not only to your faults, your selfishness, and your destructiveness, which causes you to form images in your unconscious mind, but it also causes you to forfeit the best part of your nature. And the latter makes you suffer just as much as the former.
From lecture 89, EMOTIONAL GROWTH AND ITS FUNCTION:
And now, my friends, let us consider this subject in the light of spirituality. You all have come originally with the idea of growing spiritually. I might say that more or less all of you hope to accomplish this without tending to your emotional growth. You want to believe that the one is possible without the other. Needless to say, this is a complete impossibility. Because of the considerable success you have already accomplished through the hard work of facing yourself, sooner or later all of you will reach the point where you have to make up your mind as to whether you really want emotional growth or you still want to cling to the childish hope that spiritual growth is possible while you neglect the world of feeling and allow it to lie dormant without giving it the opportunity to grow. Let us examine this for a moment, my friends.
You all know, regardless of what religion or spiritual philosophy or teaching you follow, that love is the first and the greatest power. In the last analysis, it is the only power. Most of you have used this maxim many times, but I wonder, my friends, if you ever knew that you were using empty words, always veering away from feeling, reacting, and experiencing. Now, how can you love if you do not let yourself feel? How can you love and at the same time remain what you choose to call “detached”? That means remaining personally uninvolved, not risking pain, disappointment, personal involvement. Can you love in such a comfortable way? If you numb your faculty of feeling, how can you truly experience love? Is love an intellectual process? Is love a lukewarm matter of laws, words, letters, regulations, and rules you talk about? Or is love a feeling that comes from deep within the soul, a warmth of flowing impact that cannot leave you indifferent and untouched? Is it not foremost a feeling, and only after the feeling is fully experienced and expressed, will wisdom, and perhaps even intellectual insight — as a byproduct, so to speak — result from it?
How can you hope to gain spirituality — and spirituality, religion, and love are one — by neglecting your emotional processes? Think about this, my friends. Begin to see how you all sit back, hoping for a comfortable spirituality that leaves out your personal involvement in the world of feelings. After you see this clearly, you will comprehend how preposterous this attitude is. Your conscious or unconscious rationalizations in still denying the awareness and expression of your emotions, even though they are at the moment still destructive to quite a degree, will take on a different light in your own eyes. You will look upon your resistance to doing what is so necessary with a little more understanding and truth. Any spiritual development is a farce if you deny this part of your being. If you do not have the courage to allow the negative in you to reach your surface awareness, how can healthy, strong emotions fill your being? If you cannot deal with the negative because it is out of your awareness, this very same negative element will stand in the way of the positive.
From lecture 104, INTELLECT AND WILL AS TOOLS OR HINDRANCES OF SELF-REALIZATION:
Thought and will are temporary tools to give directive to your outer actions and intent. They can and should be used for your physical life, for outer actions, for deciding to know the truth about yourself. But they cannot be used for spirituality. Spirituality is, above all things, love, with all its derivatives. You know very well you cannot love by forcing yourself. You may believe you do, when in reality you do not, but that does not mean you love. Love can only come into being when you remove your errors, your confusions, your preconceived ideas, and your dependency on the opinions of others. These obstacles can be removed only by fully understanding them. Then love comes into being by itself, just as the real self comes into being by itself.
You cannot make up your mind to be a good person, to love, and have compassion or humility. But you can make up your mind to find out what causes you not to be all that and so to remove what prevents you from being a good and loving person and what stands between you and a full life, of being your real self.
Can you now perhaps understand a little better why thought process, intellect, mind, and will obstruct the birth of the real self, of love, of all the qualities that are called spiritual? All this happens by itself, as a result of knowing and understanding yourself. Thought and will can only produce thought and will, they cannot produce something that has nothing to do with them. Love, transcendent understanding, and all other qualities of the real self, have nothing to do with thought and will.
To my teacher Marieke Mars who taught me self-honesty. To my courageous and loving pathwork helper Dottie Titus.