The Text - Section 203
203. INTERPENETRATION OF THE DIVINE LIGHT SPARK INTO THE OUTER REGIONS -- MIND EXERCISES
Greetings and blessings for all of you, my dearest friends. Particular blessings are given to the
beginning of a new working year -- a particularly significant one. For this year sees the fruition of a
spiritual form, materializing into an earthly form.
The building of this is indeed a beautiful venture, with which you fulfill yourself because you
fulfill your task in the universe. Whatever difficulties have to be overcome are an expression of the
sum total of the "body" that all of you form. This group, as well as all other created entities, has its
own spiritual body. A body consists of many aspects, just as the individual human being consists of
many aspects.
Each human being is an aspect of the greater consciousness, which is all one. These are mere
words for many of you, but they might possibly open up an inner experience for you through which
you will truly know that you are all one in consciousness. Perhaps you can gain an inkling of this
even now, when after years of work, you are able to recognize and deal with various aspects of your
personality. Some of these are in disharmony with your conscious goodwill; others, in harmony.
On the very deepest level there is an aspect of consciousness that surpasses in beauty, wisdom,
strength, and love even your best intentions and capabilities in bringing harmony to your inner, and
eventually outer, disharmonies.
You learn to identify with each one of your aspects and identify them, one by one. Thus you
gain an inkling of the sum total of your manifest being, what you know as "you." You learn to
accept even those aspects that you do not like and thereby transform their energy, instead of
separating yourself from them so that they manifest as external forces.
This applies to all creation. You are part of the universal consciousness, just as a specific
aspect within you is a part of your total personality. Your intrinsic fear of bridging the gap between
the little, separate ego consciousness and the all-consciousness stems from the idea that if you bridge
this gap you will lose yourself. This, of course, is totally untrue. For the more you realize you are
all, the more you will be yourself, the more complete you will be, not less.
It is creation's overall aim to bridge this gap and establish everywhere the all-consciousness.
Again and again, you ask yourself why this gap exists. Many explanations have been given about the
so-called fall -- the Fall from grace or the fall of the angels, or whatever it may be called in religious
terminology.
Let me now give you a new version of the same process. This is not just to inform you and
teach you cosmology. What I will tell you about creation will be of immediate, practical value for
your own development. Not only will it open you further to the deepest cosmic truth outside you,
but you will find all these truths within you right now, if you wish to see them. Eventually you will
understand on the deepest level why you identify with this separated ego consciousness, why you are
so afraid of letting yourself merge with the greater consciousness. You will understand how illusory
this fear is, and you will see that suffering actually comes from your resistance and is therefore
unnecessary. These words will help open the door to deeper knowledge and to the experience of
eternal, immutable truth.
Once again I must remind you how difficult it is to express reality within the confines of
human language. For the terms and concepts of human language are fashioned according to a very
narrow aspect of reality. Thus my words can always be misunderstood and distorted, or simply
sound incomprehensible, confusing, and contradictory. Your three-dimensional terms can hardly
contain the multidimensional verities beyond human grasp. Nevertheless, if you deliberately allow
the understanding of your heart and soul, of your deepest intuition, to fill you, my words will reach
you to some extent. There will be an echo of some inner understanding that can hardly be put into
words.
Creation "started" -- and of course it never really started, so when I say "started," I am again
squeezing a concept into human language, a concept for which there is no other word. Try to feel
this truth! Creation "started" with the divine spark. The spark may have been tiny in an immense
vacuum. Yet in this tiny spark was the utmost divine reality, comprising everything that is conscious
within the most powerful creative energy, the most incredible wisdom and love. The infinitely good
divine Creator aimed to fill this vacuum, a vacuum of nothingness, with the spark of the all.
Gradually, the spark began to spread and slowly penetrate the darkness and nothingness of the
vacuum. The spark had incredible light and glowing aliveness and allness. The vacuum formed an
infinity in the "outer" regions; the spark, an infinity in the "inner" regions. Here a contradiction may
appear in dualistic human terms. How could there be two infinities? It is truly impossible to convey
this to the human consciousness -- how it could be true that there is an infinity, but it is both
vacuum and inner spark of eternal light, the later filling the former.
The eternal spark spreads inexorably its inner infinite regions. Perhaps you can visualize its
form in a picture: imagine a thick, golden, sparkling liquid, teeming with energy and glorious
creative potentials, containing within it all seeds. Brilliant, effervescent, alive, intensely conscious, it
is endowed with every conceivable and inconceivable power to create worlds and beings. It slowly
spreads, aiming to fill the apparently infinite nothingness. This is the All, in its infinity and
eternality, inexorably filling the vacuum, until there is no vacuum.
Since the All is such vibrant consciousness and powerful energy, it cannot help but penetrate
the entire vacuum. The outer region will be entirely filled with the inner world of light and life.
In the process of spreading, particles of this All, this divine spark, seem to get lost and
"forget" the origin of their wholeness and connectedness. These particles believe themselves to be
isolated dots of consciousness, thrown into the outer darkness and struggling against being
swallowed up by it. This struggle is an illusion; the fear is an illusion. The apparently isolated dot is
not really isolated. The connection always exists, but in the process of penetration, the advancing,
spreading life and allness is partly diminished in its manifestation. In this diminished state there are
"times" when the outer darkness seems nearer and more real than the inner life of the spark.
The outer vacuum is not evil, for evil is not nothing. Evil comes into existence when the
particles of the divine spark lose their memory, and have not yet regained the knowledge of their
connectedness and struggle against the vacuum. The ferocious struggle against giving up being,
existing, aliveness, distorts divine reality and energy. The temporary transition creates a state that
may be called evil. But it is temporary.
This temporarily and apparently separated aspect of divine reality must inevitably be drawn
back into the ever-spreading All. That is, it is not really drawn back. Rather, the ever-growing
fullness of the spreading spark catches up with the aspect that has moved ahead in a diminished
form. All of nature, with its various life forms, is part of this great, slowly advancing wave that fills
the outer regions.
Your own life, your struggle and your development, should be viewed in this light. Feel
yourself as you bring truth and divinity into your whole being. This is the spark in you pushing to
penetrate the outer regions. The more life on earth progresses in spirituality, justice, love, truth and
oneness, the more it fulfills this creative process.
All this explains your resistance to giving up your negativity, your evil. If the isolated aspect
has lost sight of its connection with, and its purpose in, the whole scheme, it can no longer identify
with the all-consciousness of which it is a part. Thus, giving up the negative attitudes that express
the struggle against the dark vacuum seems to threaten the individual with extinction. Giving up evil
seems like voluntarily going into the dark nothingness -- which is confused with physical death.
Since the divine reality must ultimately fill everything that is, all particles must reunite themselves --
or, rather, discover that they have always been united with the All.
The fear that the vacuum will engulf the apparently separated divine spark is what you
experience when you meet your innermost terrors. For, what I say here, philosophical,
metaphysical, and remote as it may sound, is not a remote event, unrelated to your present life.
When you go deeply into yourself, you will find that this fear is ongoing in your inner and outer life.
You will find the terror of the vacuum, and you ultimately will find the eternal consciousness, the all-
consciousness, which is you and can never die, and which must slowly interpenetrate the vacuum.
The sooner you make room for these verities and openly respond to them, the sooner you will
experience the true state of your being. But when your consciousness is steeped in the separateness
as the only "reality," when it mistakes the momentary state for the ultimate reality, your mind blocks
off the experience.
This is the plan of creation, this is evolution, this is the aim. Can you see how you, every one
of you, are a part of it? You have a task, for you are God. The ultimate in you, the All in you, sends
you forth, sends an aspect of itself forth, which then manifests as an apparently separated ego-
consciousness. It is the task of this separated aspect to probe its own depths and potentials to find
the infinity of life, power, wisdom, love, beauty, and eternality. For all the whole is also contained in
the part. It is your task indeed to make your whole conscious being aware of this, so that you can
consciously and deliberately spread your being into the vacuum, filling it with your real nature.
When you meditate deeply, you will be able to use these concepts immediately to understand
yourself and your life. Most of you have gone deeply enough to be ready to use these words, to
intuitively connect with them. Once you see their truth, something very vital will change. For as
you learn to accept both the positive and negative aspects in you and thus unify yourself, you will
begin to feel the same way about your surroundings and you will know that all people -- whether you
like them or not, approve of them or not, whether they are developed beings or not -- are aspects of
the whole, just as you are. You will also know that the negative, either in yourself or in others, is
merely an aspect of the positive being. You will cease feeling alienated from and frightened by it.
But you need to begin first to stop being alienated from and frightened by whatever exists in you.
For the more you fear aspects of yourself, the more this fear must be projected into outer life, onto
other people and outer conditions. The only way you can cease feeling afraid of life, of other
people, of death, is to meet what you are most afraid of in yourself. This is the path. I repeat: This
is the path!
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. Eventually, I will also give you some mind exercises to do. In
the meantime, I will give you a specific one. Take any situation you are in now that is bothering you;
any disturbance in your life. Look at the construct you have built in your mind with your tightly
fixed conclusion to convince yourself and eliminate disturbing self-doubts. Probe with your active,
deciding faculty to envisage alternatives other than the one you chose. Play with these other
alternatives. Again, allow your spirit to inspire and guide you into new channels, which can show
you that you will not be annihilated if you abandon your view fixed to the present interpretation.
This fixed view is to a considerable extent responsible for the very disturbance you suffer. See this.
Often you must first unearth what it is you really believe. But once this has happened, those
beliefs have to become flexible. Consider other beliefs. Broaden your outlook about the very
subject you so doggedly protect with certain opinions. You wish to believe that your judgments,
thoughts, and opinions result from a specific disturbing situation. I say that it is the other way
around. The disturbing situation is a result of your tendency to harbor just such thoughts,
judgments, and opinions because of an underlying motivation and intention. Perhaps these can be
faced with less resistance when you allow your mind to become more flexible and try out new
alternative interpretations. If the tendency to build a cluster of opinions and judgments under
certain circumstances does exist, it is always there in abeyance, waiting for the next occasion. In
other words, psychological deviations are associated with a fixed, inflexible mind that must be dealt
with in active, focused exercises. The more you are willing to do this and request inner guidance and
inspiration so that your mind can step beyond the confines of the construct, the more flexible your
mind will become.
As the years go by, you will learn to do this better and better. Bring your whole being -- your
physical being, your emotional being, and your mental being -- into alignment with the divine center
through the ability to be fluid and flexible on all levels. That should be the motto for the work you
begin this season.
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.
These are preliminary exercises, my friends, to practice for your further development.
Love and blessings are being given to everyone here, with a tremendous force that you can
utilize. Let it open your inner being so that it can then flow into your outer being. The universe is
good and beautiful, and there is nothing to fear, neither inside nor outside, no matter how much it
may appear otherwise, due to your present distortions. Let love flow into you so that it can come
out of you. Be blessed, be in peace.