The Text - Section 208
208. THE INNATE HUMAN CAPACITY TO CREATE
Greetings and blessings for every one of you here. Welcome to new and old friends searching
for their inner path.
I will speak tonight about the human capacity to create, an astoundingly underestimated
potentiality. Your creative ability is infinitely greater than you and your scientists, psychologists or
philosophers realize. With the exception of a very few enlightened ones, most people do not know
of their dormant capacity to create and recreate their lives. Some may believe in it in theory, but few
have truly experienced it.
When you adopt a human body and the ego state in this three-dimensional world, you
automatically close off the memory of other states of consciousness. These forgotten states are
much less confined, much freer, much more aware. In them you were completely capable of
molding your life, to a degree that the human consciousness cannot possibly comprehend.
The power of thoughts, feelings and attitudes is enormous. This power exists just as much
now, in your present state, but you do not see it. You do not know that you have molded what you
experience in this moment in such a precise way that there can be no mistake concerning it. As I
have often said, the sum total of all your conscious, semi-conscious, unconscious, explicit and
implicit thoughts, beliefs, assumptions, intentions, feelings, emotions and will directions --
conflicting as they may be -- creates your present experience and the way your life unfolds for you.
Your present life expresses your inner state exactly, like a faultless mathematical equation. Thus you
can use your life as a map into your inner regions. This is, after all, part of the method of the
pathwork.
Many of you have verified that hidden, feared, guilt-producing and denied thoughts and
feelings are more powerful in their negative creation than anything you deal with on the conscious
level. Fear and guilt are potent creative agents. They contain a great deal of energy. On the positive
level, enthusiasm, joy, vitality, interestedness, stimulation are also potent energy agents.
A path such as this must therefore be intensely concerned with exploring what you believe,
feel, assume and intend on layers of your personality that are not immediately accessible. Your
unconscious motives often create what you do not wish to experience at all because you do not
know what you bargain for and what side-effects are attached to your unwise wishes, false
assumptions and negative intents. Also, you ignore the potency of such psychic material and do not
see how infallibly it translates itself into the creation of matter, of events and circumstances, and of
life experiences.
When humans adopt the limited ego state, they do so for very specific purposes. You
manifest and express yourself in this limited state for the purpose of purification and unification. It
would not be possible to do such work as quickly and as effectively if you were in full possession of
your entire consciousness and your faculties, my friends. For your ego personality, as it expresses
itself now, is but an isolated aspect, or several isolated aspects, of your total personality. A much
larger, fuller and more purified part of your total personality, or real self, does not manifest overtly.
As I have often mentioned, that personality consists of aspects of consciousness. The manifestation
of certain aspects in an isolated form -- which consists of the three-dimensional reality and the ego --
affords possibilities of a focused awareness that is lacking when these unpurified aspects are
submerged in the largely purified personality. Your purified spirit can easily overlook small but
significant distortions that nevertheless act as hindrances to further developments surpassing the
scope of human consciousness. Such developments proceed in spheres of reality that you cannot
comprehend now.
It is, however, possible to activate the capacities of the larger self, to focus on it and be
receptive to its ever-present inner voice. Similarly, it is possible to focus on and be receptive to
negative aspects of your personality that lie deeply buried and that need to be purified on your
evolutionary road. This path teaches you to contact all these hidden layers and deal with them
appropriately. In other words, some parts of you are more developed and others less. The latter are
not manifest, but they are still you. The manifest, more developed part has the means to explore,
bring out and unify the other parts which you cannot yet see.
When you undertake this exploration as your main task in life, all restlessness disappears and a
deep sense of meaning and fulfillment comes into your soul. Slowly but surely life's frustrations
begin to disappear and rich fulfillment begins to take their place. For only when you focus your
attention on the reason for coming into this plane in the first place can you find your place in life.
Conversely, there are the many who arbitrarily make a split between what they call "living" and
their spiritual development. They do not want to give too much to the latter because they foolishly
fear that this shortchanges the former. The more they concentrate on outer material living without
bringing it into a cohesive, meaningful connection with wider and deeper considerations, the more
restless and depressed they become.
Whatever divine laws and attributes exist in the universe, the moment they express themselves
in the isolated ego state, disconnected from deeper inner reality, they become distorted and
destructive. Let me give you an example.
A small child believes that it is omnipotent. Psychology designates this very obvious
expression of the infant's claim to omnipotence as immaturity and destructive egocentricity. It is
that, but it is also much more. The feeling of omnipotence is a memory of another state, a state of
consciousness in which, indeed, thoughts become things and events the moment they are formed.
Time and distance are part of the three-dimensional illusory state of consciousness, so they do not
exist in a realm of much more expanded consciousness. The consciousness of the infant is still
partially tuned in on the state of its total personality. However, as the memory is translated into the
confined and limited ego state, it comes out jumbled.
Since the ego state is a concentration of the less purified state -- in combination with already
purified aspects which come to the aid of the personality in the task of this life -- the power to create
takes on a distorted, undesirable form. The ego always lives in the illusion that it is not only separate
from others, but that others are essentially antagonistic to its well-being. Everything the ego does is
always either against or in competition or in comparison with others. This is what creates its
destructiveness and egocentricity. The ego makes power a dangerous weapon, as you all well know.
You experience power as something you fear in others and feel guilty about in yourself. Power is
thus always exclusive of love and joy, for it is an intensely separating expression.
But when you conciliate your ego-split with the real self and thus discover the unitive
principle, you discover that your interest is never in opposition to the interests of others, although
on a superficial level it may first appear that way. You also discover that power and love need not
be opposites. You can then begin to use your innate power to create and recreate your life. You
may now understand better why knowledge of your power to create is dangerous as long as you
have not purified the distorted aspect that has found expression in this body and in this life, and as
long as you have not discovered the eternal inner realities, which are much more real than what you
consider outer reality.
The infant's frustration when its thoughts and wishes do not instantly become fact is obvious.
The immediacy of cause and effect -- cause being the thought or wish, effect being the experience --
is a constant "given" in the state of consciousness that goes beyond the ego. One of the tasks of
most humans as isolated ego aspects is to learn trustful patience, flowing with the stream, unwillful
receptivity.
Memory of the power to create must be temporarily cut off so that you can learn what you
came here to learn. Through the very learning of this lesson the deeper connections establish
themselves again spontaneously. However, it does not seem to be rediscovered memory. Instead,
connecting thoughts, wishes, intents, feelings and attitudes with experience seems to be a new
discovery that establishes awareness of the power to create. Then there is no longer the danger of
using power against others. The illusion that self-interest must be against the interest of others is
pierced.
I hardly need to mention that not only actual infants make egocentric and antagonistic claims
to omnipotence. Undeveloped, immature and destructive people do too, and they often act them
out. Evil does not exist as a reality in itself. Evil is always a distortion of divine truth. Every
destructive, negative attitude can easily be explored to find its root manifestation. It can then be
seen that only in its ego manifestation, in its separateness, is such a distortion destructive or evil.
The very same basic trait has an entirely different effect and meaning if it manifests in the depths of
unified consciousness -- in the larger, wider reality of the inner planes. This is why the isolated,
incarnated aspect of the total personality, manifesting in a body and an ego, must temporarily forget
its full capacity and its experience in a state that can only be wholesome when the whole self is
involved.
Wherever there are misconceptions, ignorance, false ideas, and withheld emotional matter --
spite, stubbornness, rigidity, inertia -- stagnant energy exists that must create disturbance and
negative experiences. It is very potent energy. Only when you release it directly and honestly can
you transform this energy.
You, my friends, who follow this path have often experienced the tremendous energy that
permeates you when you release the stagnant matter of pent-up negative feelings. When you
physically, emotionally and conceptually express rage, hate and fury, you make new connections
about yourself that give you a new understanding of your role in life and why you are where you are.
This very released energy is also highly potent creative stuff.
The time has come when you can convert negative energy and consciousness into positive
manifestation. To some extent you have actually begun to do so, but you are not yet sufficiently
aware of the power of the energy as it is released. If, at the moment the negative energy is leaving
your system and begins to flow, you can reconvert it and direct it into a positive channel, you can
indeed bring new creation into your life. This practice will make you understand how much creative
power you have.
These words will not be enough to convey the truth to you in a real way unless you have
overcome certain attitudes of separateness. Otherwise, this knowledge would be dangerous for you
and for others. But totally committing to the path into your own inner regions with all its apparent
hardship of self-revelation and self-confrontation will make you increasingly aware of the spiritual
reality of your own state of eternal being that cannot die. You will also become aware of the power
of your thoughts, your intent, your feelings. You will learn to be careful what thoughts you think
without either repressing or suppressing undesirable and destructive thoughts. This does not help.
You will learn to deal with such material, to challenge its accuracy and be open for other alternatives.
Learn to understand what it is in you that makes you want to think that way and what price you pay.
Begin to see creation as the relationship between the causes and effects that you have always seen as
unrelated.
As this growing process proceeds, re-creation takes place. It is not a reward for good
behavior. It is a simple act, instituted by the self that is now in a much increased state of awareness,
that now knows what it is doing and why.
Many of my friends on the path have begun to experience this process as an ever-increasing
living reality that can be absolutely trusted. It is unfailing in its lawful process. But recreating or
creating must never be a willful act. It must never be used while bypassing anything within your
psyche. There are metaphysical and spiritual orientations which know of this creative thought
power, but overlook the danger of skipping steps within the psyche. They become hypnotized, as it
were, by a truth they have discovered -- the truth of self-creation. And they can create and recreate
wherever the psyche is relatively free from obstruction. But where the psyche is stuck, self-creation
is blocked. Stagnant energy becomes even more potent, creating a conflict that tears the soul apart.
The soul does not develop harmoniously when the personality works on that which is already free
and neglects that which needs attention. In that state the use of power -- even if it is not overtly
expressed against anyone -- becomes so dangerous that it may sooner or later lead to a personal
crisis. Such crisis would be avoided if the personality would focus on the undeveloped part.
This is the reason why this specific path requires a lot more courage and honesty than most
other orientations in practice today. But it is a safe and truly unifying path that leaves nothing
limping behind. It creates real harmony of the soul, precisely because the process is slow and there
are no quick, magic results. For a long time, the focus must be on the dark areas. That is for your
own protection, my friends, because in this way you avoid a splitting off process that would defeat
the task for which you have come into this life. You have come to fulfill your task by concentrating
on those very aspects you feel least inclined to deal with. That is the very reason you squeezed
yourself into this narrow, uncomfortable, confining and often painful state in which you temporarily
dwell. Only aspects of you are here, to be sure, but that which identifies with these narrow aspects
must suffer when the total reason for being in the human ego state is not yet conscious.
You need to know why you came and what it is you have to do here. What is the weakness
you have to bring out? What is the ugliness you do not want to see? These are the obstructions that
keep you from creating freely. Even now, you could create infinitely more than you do, and do it
consciously, wisely, beautifully and satisfyingly, although not to the same degree as when you are
free from the ego-body state. That is, you do constantly create, whether you know it or not. The
trouble is that you do not know what creations you produce unwittingly. You create with every
breath you take, with every thought you think, with every attitude you display. These are powerful
agents, my friends, and you need to know what you are doing and how you create. Your
disconnection from the creative seeds you plant and their results causes unnecessary pain and
frustration. Often you see the result only much later, without the slightest awareness of what in you
has produced it. The awareness can be recaptured if you so desire.
Focusing constructively -- which is very different from doing it in a maudlin way -- on the
undeveloped aspects in you means that you fulfill the task for which you came into this particular
world. It means that you unify yourself so that you can actualize your potent creative power and use
it consciously and deliberately in your life now.
The creative process and the specific techniques to learn are given to you slowly. I have
shown you some techniques of meditation. When you meditate, you create. In this concentrated,
relaxed state, energy and consciousness focus in such a way that powerful creative seeds are released.
But meditative and other creating techniques must be a secondary preoccupation for the reasons just
mentioned. However, when a certain foundation of inner self-purification and self-awareness exists,
these techniques can be expanded. It will then be safe, from the point of view of this spiritual path.
Your being will then truly be grounded in reality and in a unifying process, so that you will not
ignore any aspect you have come to fulfill.
The organic process of learning creative meditation, recreating life experience, will come as an
intuitive, spontaneous expansion of your consciousness. Just as you will intuitively understand
cosmic reality from experience rather than theory, so will you learn to avail yourself of your innate
powers and resources.
There is an inner mechanism that is extremely important for you to understand that I would
like to elucidate for a minute. My friends, working on this path you must have experienced quite
frequently that your helper may suggest a specific meditation and commitment in meditation to a
positive self-expression that you deeply desire because you miss it. Yet as you pursue that self-
expression, you experience an inexplicable resistance to follow through. Something in you seems to
stop you or you forget to do it on your own. It simply does not occur to you. Perhaps your
thoughts have no energy, conviction or clarity. They are diffuse and you feel that they have little
effect. At times you may even consciously experience an outright resistance to meditate for the very
thing you most desire. What is this block?
Let us suppose you are lonely. Let us suppose you long for a full and fruitful partnership -- an
abundance of joy, of exchange, of sharing, of mutuality on every level. You do have the birthright
to experience this and other fulfillments, for the universe's abundance is there for everyone. No one
is excluded. Nevertheless, it may hardly even occur to you to actively sow the seed in meditation --
which means creating it -- by a clear, definite thought in that direction, by a commitment to wanting
it, to experiencing it, to realizing and bringing this experience into actuality. You may be perfectly
aware of the principle of such meditative practice, nevertheless you desist from employing it. What
is even more significant is that when, upon suggestion, you do formulate the creative thought
pattern, you find a strange and inexplicable reluctance in you. It is as though a wall in you prevented
you from the clear, concise commitment to what you most ardently yearn for.
Have you ever thought about the meaning of this resistance? You want something
desperately. You intrinsically believe it could exist for you. Your mind accepts the principles of
creation. Yet you will find your mind strangely paralyzed when it comes to truly letting go of your
thoughts, to sending your thoughts into the fertile soil of the creative substance, or what I call the
soul substance, where any seed will grow to fruition.
The reason for this reluctance is very simple. It is the same self-protective, finely calibrated
mechanism that knows that something in you is not yet ready for this experience. You yourself have
put obstructions in the way. Perhaps there is an unwillingness to give and to accept reality on your
level. Perhaps there is a concealed negative attitude toward the other sex you are not prepared to
resolve. Whatever the obstruction is, confront it, explore it, understand and dissolve it. If you do
not, and you still create with a strongly focused mind and will, the superimposed outer will must
have its effects accordingly. A "willpower construction" conflicts with the inner denial and
obstruction. The inability to meditate and create is meaningful and should be heeded, for it will
reveal the nature of the obstruction so that you can eliminate it. Otherwise you create willfully on an
ego level, which cannot satisfy your heart and soul.
The ego mind has the power to create. It does so continually. But if it creates separately from
the inner being, the results must be disappointing. Willpower, the outer will, can indeed be effective
up to a certain degree. It creates matter, sub-matter and experience, but not to your blessing. It
creates with a willfulness that lacks wisdom, understanding, vision and depth. It lacks inner
connectedness and wholeness, so that what it constructs is often more painful than desirable. In the
example we have chosen this would manifest in creating a partnership in which those areas in the
self that have been neglected would color and affect the relationship, poisoning it as if from
underground.
When you find your inner voice resisting the creative thought process, this should be a sign
that there are steps to take in self-exploration. You must shift the focus of creation to exploring the
meaning of your reluctance to create what you long for. Find out what stands in the way. Instead
of the desired experience, you must create the awareness and comprehension of your obstruction to
it. This will then eventually dissolve the reluctance, so that you find yourself wholly free to plant
new creative thought material into the rich soil of your soul substance.
You cannot create anything that does not already exist in the universe, my friends. Everything
exists within you already. All the answers, all the knowledge, all the power to create, to feel, to
enjoy, to experience -- all worlds exist within. For the true universe is inside, while the exterior
world is but a reflection like a mirror image. Everything you ever need to know about yourself and
your life exists within. You can actualize this knowledge if you learn to focus, to want it, to aim for
it, to commit to it, to create it. Some of the answers exist on more superficial levels, in the so-called
subconscious. Some are on much deeper levels. All is accessible if you undertake the exploration.
Therefore creation and recreation are primarily a focusing. If you create from the ego level, it
will be a tense, anxiety-producing focusing. If you want to create from your inner being, it must be a
relaxed focusing. It will be relaxed precisely because you do not skip any steps. You listen into your
inner self, and if you detect obstructions, you will heed and then deal with them. Thus you create
the condition in you to comprehend your obstructions.
This is one aspect of the creating and re-creating process. It is a very important aspect that
can be used not only by those who are already on the path but even by those who are just entering
such a path. All of you can listen into yourself and ask your innermost being where to go, in which
direction to focus. But learning how to listen is an art in itself and often comes only later on the
path. It requires some degree of self-knowledge. This is not easy to summon up for the novice, but
it is possible, at least temporarily, to lay aside selfwill and open up to whatever the inner voice sends
forth. It requires, for example, awareness of your wishful thinking, of your stake in wanting a
certain answer and not another, of your fear of getting a different answer. All these attitudes and
feelings may be subtle and well concealed or rationalized, so that some degree of self-discernment is
necessary for the voice to be truly free. You will trust the voice only to the degree you have freed
yourself. Each time you consciously and deliberately lay aside your selfwill, you will become
stronger and freer. State how your selfwill manifests, what you want and don't want to hear. Then
express your trust in the divine voice. Then your faith will stand on a firm, realistic foundation.
To the degree you are aware of wanting one answer and not another, you will avoid confusion
and diffusion. Otherwise you delude yourself into believing you receive divinely inspired answers
which are nothing more than your ego's wishful thinking. Only when you have attained a state in
which you can be very clearly aware of the personal stake of the ego and of wanting a certain thing
in one way and not in another can your own inner answers begin to be reliable.
But if you are already aware of your stake and inclination to distort rather than be impartial to
the answer you wish to get, in that awareness itself you create a new channel of truth into your inner
reality. You may then perceive a deep, deep inner voice that speaks truth. Then the focusing will be
meaningful, relaxed, and yet concise enough to create new thought forms and therefore new,
desirable experiences.
A second important aspect about re-creation is the time element that you, on the ego level,
have to deal with. Impatience is another distortion from a fuller state of consciousness, in which
creation is immediate. The thought produces the form the moment it is uttered. Impatience is the
memory of this experience, without the connectedness with the inner being, so that the lesson the
ego has to learn is not comprehended. Only on the ego level is everything separate: effect from
cause, soul from soul, form and experience from thought, inner from outer. Life itself appears to
you a static, "objective" fixed thing into which you are put. It seems totally separated and
disconnected from your inner processes. These are the same illusions as your concept and
experience of time, distance, and movement. They are all byproducts of the limited, separated ego
state. Everything you experience seems to exist only in those seemingly objective terms of the ego.
The more you focus in that direction, the more it will seem that way to you. In reality, your life is
merely a subjective expression of yourself, not a fixed, objective, immovable reality. Once you learn
to be more focused into the inner reality, you will perceive much more this other, fuller reality, in
which the separated aspects move together in a wonderful and meaningful web of interaction and
wholeness.
Part of the creating process is the patience to let things be, learning to trust life to express
back to you what you put into it. That requires waiting for the seed to grow. Do you wait in doubt?
Do you wait with impatience? Do you wait in fear? Do you wait in tension? Or do you wait in
quiet trust? Or is your trust perhaps a gullibility and an expression of wishful thinking, so that you
cannot possibly trust your trusting? Do you want whatever it is so badly that you create a forcing
current which prohibits fulfillment because its tension and its emotional mind-content defeat
creation? If the waiting is truly relaxed, you will have no doubts about the fulfillment. You know
that the seed will grow into a wonderful flower.
The recreating process unfolds forevermore when the ego personality unites with the other
aspects of self that had previously not manifested on the surface. The more this happens, the more
joyfully you will create. It may sound confusing when I say that you have to learn not to cringe away
from pain, and then say that it is your birthright to be in a state of joy. It may sound like a
contradiction when I say you have to be willing to give up -- at least for the moment, and in the right
spirit -- what you wish to create and that you must have faith in being able to create. But these are
contradictions only on the most superficial ego level where the duality of either/or reigns supreme.
In reality these are mutually interdependent principles that must unite in harmony. As you cramp
yourself into any desire that is too strong, you close the doors to joy and relaxed inner creation.
Cramp always indicates negation, doubt, a negativity that you must unearth and specifically deal
with.
In the delusion of the ego, you perceive life as your enemy, foreign and antagonistic to you,
while you are its victim. In that delusion you cannot create. So you will see, my friends, that your
realization on this path of how you create your suffering will inevitably free you to create your
happiness.
Let me close by saying that you are a great deal more than you can possibly believe now. If
you walk in the direction of finding your real self, of identifying with it through the layers of
darkness, you must discover the unending beauty of the universe. With every breath you take you
fill yourself with its potent love and wisdom. There is nothing that surrounds and permeates you
that does not express the magnitude of a divine and benign creation. The more aware you become
of it, the more joy and gratefulness must spread in your heart. The unending beauty of the universe
can be experienced as reality rather than theory only when you work your way through your dark
areas.
Be blessed, every one of you. Feel the love that is extended to you from a realm in which you
have many friends who have guided you here. Be in peace.