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

Before closing the lecture, I want to give another exercise in the form of meditation on the triad of pride, selfwill, and fear. See the same bothersome situation from the viewpoint of pride: How are you acting from pride? Then visualize the same situation, focusing on how it would feel to give up pride. If the only alternative seems to be humiliation, then start probing for other possibilities. Ask for inner guidance to experience yourself without pride, yet without humiliation and with dignity. You have to make a real inner volitional step to be able to see yourself in a new way that reconciles dignity and humility and leaves out both pride and humiliating submission. If you are ready for this possibility, even before you can experience it, the divine life will produce it from within. But you must make yourself receptive to it.

Then do the same with selfwill. Envisage yourself in a new state of reaction in which you are neither self-willed nor spineless and exploited; in which you assert yourself but can let go and give in. The proper balance will come from your core in specific ways for specific situations. But the mind has to be open and flexible enough to let in new possibilities. And you must cultivate your spiritual capacities so that you can entrust yourself to the inner guidance.

Have the courage to go through the anxiety that comes up at first when you attempt to give up pride and selfwill. Then, last but not least, you come to the fear. The fear cannot possibly vanish before pride and selfwill are abandoned. For fear is a product of both, as you know at least in theory. Also see the fear in terms of distrust of the universe. You evidently believe that only your selfwill and pride can protect you from danger. This implies that the universe is untrustworthy and that all you have as a safeguard is this puny protection: your pride and selfwill. Question this premise and experiment with new alternatives. Open yourself for the divine reality to flood through you. Maybe now, maybe later, but come it must, and it will penetrate you with a state of consciousness in which there is no selfwill, pride, and fear, and where your conflicts, outside and inside, are transcended.

Do an exercise in trust in which you open yourself to the possibility that the universe will yield whatever you need. Experiment for the moment with this thought: “How would it be if I were to trust the universe, if in this particular situation I gave up the fear that comes from my distrust, and therefore from pride and selfwill? Allow your central core to fill you with an inkling of a state in which you can react without selfwill, pride, and fear.