From lecture 203, INTERPENETRATION OF THE DIVINE LIGHT SPARK INTO THE OUTER REGIONS — MIND EXERCISES:

I have promised you, my friends, that I would give more vital material and specific spiritual exercises that will help you move further on your path. The first exercise I wish to give is a very important one, dealing with the level of feeling. But first I want to give you a short explanation.

By now you have all been in touch with very deep feelings that you have perhaps never before dared to experience or accept, and you learned how to express them. But all of you still harbor a very important misconception about feelings, which is that you can somehow “get rid of” negative feelings. This is a slight distortion. Yet I do not wish to imply that you will always be burdened by unresolved negative feelings. We must make a clear distinction between stagnant, residual feelings the personality is unaware of holding back, and the personality’s innate capacity to experience any feeling if the soul is in a fluid state. For example, the less you fear your repressed anger and the more you learn to accept it, express it, and assume responsibility for it rather than projecting it onto others, the freer you will be to produce anger “at will.”

The moment you think of this work in terms of “getting rid” of feelings, you must become confused. I have often said that when you transform the energy of an inappropriate, destructive feeling, you do not wipe it out. What I want to add here is that you can make yourself conscious of the state, which is as yet only a possibility, in which you are so flexible, so much in command of yourself, that all feelings can be moved out because this potential always exists in you. The false ideal of a highly developed spiritual state is that it should be completely without anger, rage, fear, pain, or sadness. This idea is distorted and leads to a rigid, unrealistic image. The more you are capable of experiencing any feeling, the less you will be enslaved by it. The less you can summon feelings, the more you are frightened of them and therefore at their mercy. This may manifest in an uncontrolled, destructive acting out, or in the stagnation of all creative energies, potentials and capacity for feeling. Like all falsehood, this misconception leads to a dualistic conflict, a double bind.

Movement is one of the essential byproducts of aliveness, of the unitive state. The vacuum is fixed; the spark of the all is constantly moving. You are constantly battling between these two states. You hanker for nonmovement. So you experience fear of the vacuum. You want nonmovement in the illusion that movement will carry you into the vacuum, where your consciousness will cease. Yet the life spark within pushes toward movement.

Hence, on your path, you are learning to move your body; learning to move your feelings; learning to move your mind, so that your spirit can move you. The moving spirit must be allowed to manifest; that is why all other personality levels must align with the spirit’s innate nature: movement.

You move your body so that the energy flow can penetrate your entire physical system, your physical energy. You move your feelings by learning to let them out and feel their movement in you. You move your mind by opening it to new ways of looking at things. This is an essential task. Your fixed ideas prevent the spirit from moving your mind and inspiring it by higher truth. I am not just talking about general concepts, but about your current situations. What happens is you adopt certain opinions and judgments and then invest so much energy in them that you eventually believe that these are your real feelings. The negative energy is being created by rigid and therefore unavoidably false thoughts. The limited truth, which you believe is the whole truth, then becomes the tool of error and self-deception.

Thus what you may now believe to be emotions are often merely fixed opinions. And where your feelings should unfold, you are paralyzed and unable to let them flow. The task of any pathwork is to bring the whole system into movement. But it requires very finely attuned timing to know when what is appropriate, otherwise harm can be done. Every level of the personality requires a different approach. Also, before certain exercises can be used, there must exist some agility in body, feeling, and mind, otherwise distortions will occur. For example, the deliberately produced feelings may be distorted through dramatization, exaggeration, fakery. Selfwill may be used to put up a good show and foster the illusion that the soul is flexible and in a state of flux.

By the same token, when the mind exercises itself by trying out new alternatives of seeing a situation, with the ulterior motive to get away from facing blame, accusation, and self-justifying victimization, this may lead to a false, superimposed serenity that covers up a great deal of negative feeling that has not yet been dealt with. You can see that timing plays a great role here.

Let us now consider what I said about negative feelings, namely, that it is a distortion to try to get completely rid of them. As long as you cultivate your capacity to produce and experience any feeling, the feeling, if undesirable, will have no power over you. You can never put your feelings fixedly and definitively behind you. There is no future state where all your goals are accomplished and you no longer need to move. This concept arises in itself out of fear of movement, rejection of movement, hence out of the illusion that movement is undesirable. If you are in a state of truth, movement is desirable, and non-movement is avoided.

Let us take the physical level as an example. Suppose you have sufficiently worked on the physical and emotional levels to remove all your muscular blocks. This does not mean that now you can cease moving your body. Were you to do so, new blocks would soon form all over again. For your decision to remain static would be based on a false concept of life, and negative feelings, in this case fear, would develop. If you do not deal with this fear by recognizing, accepting and challenging it, then you give in to the false idea, the fear, which prevents you from moving on any level.

The healthy individual continues to move — not for therapeutic reasons, but out of joy. Movement is then no longer a chore; it is a pleasure. As long as movement is a chore, the temptation to become stagnant and give in to the vacuum is great. This must be overcome by moving your mind into new directions; by deciding to move on all levels, so that your spirit can penetrate and enliven all levels with its life and its truth. Your spirit wants to bring light into the darkness and movement into the stagnation. If you stop moving, you begin to die.

On the feeling level, the same holds true. People who are advanced in their development may indeed have resolved residual feelings of hate. They may have gone through their residual pain. They may have dissipated their residual anger. This does not mean that such people cannot and will not experience these feelings ever again. On the contrary: the more residual feelings have been accepted and are no longer feared and rejected, the greater is one’s ability to move the soul currents in any direction at any time. Such people can now experience any feeling at will. The experience, however, must not come from tight selfwill; it has to come from the smooth, healthy inner will. If you can do this, if you can at will produce violent hate and anger; at will produce pain and sadness; at will produce fear and terror; at will produce equanimity and peace; pleasure and joy; love and compassion; then you are indeed in possession of yourself and can be moved from within.

Those who have a tendency to overdramatize, to be willful and to counterfeit feelings, should abstain from these exercises because they must first shed the mask that hides their shame of their real feelings. Those who have a tendency to use certain limited emotions as a defense against other emotions should deliberately abstain for a while from using the superimposed feeling to practice with. Say, someone uses fear as a defense against spite, violence, malice, hate. All those feelings must be worked out before any exercises should be attempted.

It will not be difficult for you to see that people who are very contracted, restricted, and alienated from their core are unable to produce any feelings — or only a very limited amount. They are numb and paralyzed on that level, while the people who are already much more liberated from the constriction and defenses because the residual feelings have been dealt with are much more flexible and can easily decide to be angry, sad, or be in whatever emotional state they wish to be at the moment.

Gradually, exercises should be done with this in mind, and each of you should evaluate where you are in this respect. This will prove immensely helpful and further your development. Use your inner guidance about when and how to apply them. The knowledge of these principles is very important. When you can increasingly produce feelings, you will be more able to bring out any last vestiges of feelings that have been neglected. Even when these feelings are completely gone, you should practice emotional fluidity to keep your soul substance vibrant and flowing.

I have always mentioned how important soul movements are. The inner cosmic movements that constantly go through you can be made conscious only when your emotional state is agile, when you can easily emote. Let yourself be inspired about these exercises; do them deliberately. Of course they do require the energy of a number of people. It is much more difficult to do these exercises alone, although eventually you will even be able to do that.

Begin by listening into yourself to find what your predominant feeling is at this moment. At first it may only be faint and you will need to build it up and allow yourself to experience and express it fully and intensely. After that you can explore other feelings as they begin to manifest. At other times your helper may decide to concentrate on certain feelings or your inspiration will direct you. Always work with meditation, asking for guidance and inspiration.

This practice of making yourself fluid and flexible is very important for your ultimate alignment with your divine center.