The real need for
love, companionship, and sharing can only begin to be fullled
when the soul is ready to love and give, which must never be
confused with the neurotic  need to be loved. But this confusion
between the two needs is quite frequent. As long as you believe that
you are really willing to love, but fate is slighting  you and
withholding from you the person who loves you and whom you can
love, you are really still ardently engaged in trying to fulll the
childhood need with a substitute parent. Once you are truly ready to
give up the old case, start to live in the now, and look within
yourself, real love will come  to you and your present real need will
be fullled. Legitimate needs can be fullled only to the degree you
experience your original feelings and your residual feelings of thepast. This means that you discover and give up the false needs that
have accrued from denying the pain of the original unfulllment. Let yourself regress into the child state, and allow the irrational
child in you to be expressed. If you give voice to this irrational side, you will nd that it
invariably says: “I need to be always loved and approved by
everyone. If I am not, it is a catastrophe” The self then talks itself
into believing this, as a means to force others to compl y, and the
non-fulllment of these insatiable demands for total, unconditional
gratication of selfwill and pride will seem indeed a catastrophic
fact of life. No matter how mature you may be in many respects of
your being, look for these hidden reactions in you whenever you
feel consistently anxious and uncomfortable in your environment. Just to think all this through  clearly will make it impos sible for
you to believe  in catastrophe quite as much. So it is necessary to
discover the concept, or rather the misconception, entrapped in your
strong reaction to an unfulllment, to a hurt, a criticism, or a
frustration. It is then possib le to recognize the unreal need and the
vengeance with which it is perpetuated, pursued, and justied. Unreal needs are demands made upon others . Unreal needs can never
be fullled. Often the dualistic misunderstanding that either you depend on
yourself and therefore must be all alone, or that you are in a
fullling relati onship and then utterly depend on the other, prevents
you from even wanting to assume self-responsibility. Doing so seems
to require giving up all hope for a loving partner. Exactly the
opposite is true. Only as you bring your feelings back to yourself,
tap the resourc es within yourself, and open the wells of your giving
and loving feelings, will fulllment become an inevitable reality. Conversely, to the degree you cling to and insist on the other’s
fullling you, to that degree you must remain lonely and unfullled
in your real needs now—thereby perpetuating the old wounds of
your childhood. Your present  state can thus be used as a gauge that
is more reliable than anything else. When the real need to remove the blocks to awareness, self-
fulllment, to intimacy and closeness with others, is expressed bythe spiritual self by discarding the false needs, a wonder ful force is
awakened. This is the all-im portant aim, out of which everything
else follows. This plea is never answered with a stone. Even if you
feel as yet too weak to make the necessary total commit ment, you
can ask to be helped to be able to do so. The help will come. Present Suering Is the Result of Pursuing False Needs
As you see how you now avoid the long-forgotten pain of the past
still festering within you, you also discover how you have remained
hooked on blaming. For no matter how much your parents failed—
for they themselves are failin g human beings—they cannot be held
responsible for your suering now. Even less can others whom you
expect to be able to make up for all the injuries you have endured. Your suering now is a result of this very distortion of pursuing
false needs and insisting on their fulllment. This mechanism seems
at rst extremely subtle, but once you have trained yourself to
observe it, it will become only too obvious. As long as you choose to
stay unaware, you may be very adept in rationally explaining your
case, but this will only make  your condition worse, not better. You
may indeed deceive others about how legitimate your case is. You
may even deceive your outer conscious self. But you can never
deceive your real inner self nor life. Life plays out its laws and rules
very squarely,  fairly, and impartially. It waits until you nd the
truth where your non-recognized, legitimate needs as a child created
fear and pain that you were unwilling and unable to experience
fully. That cup has to be emptied. Your unwillingnes s, in turn,
created false needs whose nature and meaning also became
concealed. When all this is out in the open, you can deal with it. The pursuit of false needs causes unbearable pain. It is tight,
locked, and bitter, with the added connotation of hopeles sness. It is
very dierent from the pain of a real unfulllment, a hurt, or a
deprivation. The moment these diculties are not channeled into
unreal needs, the pain can be dissolved and can transform itself
back into its original, owing, life-bringing energy current. Hardpain is a result of ghting against what is. Soft pain is a result of
acceptance . Letting Go of the Demand for Fulllment of Unreal Needs
When you specically let go one by one of your insatiable
demands and unreal needs, you will nd out that they are indeed
illusory. You started o with the premise, for example, that you
could not live without total approval, unconditional acceptance and
love, uncritica l admiration, or whatever else it may be. As you
consider the possibility that you might even gain fulllment,
contentment, pleasure, and happiness without these demands being
fullled—a novel idea at rst—you will be surprised to nd that it
is quite  possible to do so. New ways will make themselves known,
new possibilities you could never even have sensed before, because
you were so bent on the one way it had to be. Wherever there is obstruction, unfulllment, or an unyielding
wall in your life, an unreal need has to be looked for. You must nd
your own insistence that says, “It must be this way, not that way. Life must give me this; I must have it.” When you nd and express
this voice and recognize it for its fallacy, something will loosen up
instantly, The very fact that you question the validity of these unreal
needs, which you had taken for granted as being real until now, will
liberate your creative energies. Deep from your innermost being,
from the center of your solar plexus, the voice of wisdom will guide you . The energies that are being  released by following through the
process describ ed here are not merely physical energies that bring
well-being, ow, and pleasu re. They release the voice of truth and
wisdom that is your own, innermost spiritual self. When you go deep into your innermost feelings, my friends, there
will be no danger of losing yourself in unendurable pain. For no
matter how dicult your childhood was, and no matter how much
negative exper ience you had, and no matter how cruel a parent may
have been, the real cause of pain is not that. The cause is your
persistence and insistence on staying hooked on needs that are bynow false needs, on demanding that conditions be dierent, and
that life now make up for it all and give to you gratuitous ly, leaving
you as a recipient, leaving you out of the magnicent game of life. This is what really hurts and pains you now. You must start with
yourself, at all junctures. If you proceed in this way, you will be
able to allow the positive feelings to become as deep and as real
experiences as the negative and painful feelings. May you all, each one of you, nd in tonight’s lecture something
that will bring  a little more light and help to your work; a little
further incentive, hope, strength, and inner pride, so as to free
yourself from your own enslavement, to make yourself whole
instead of divided. Go all in peace, my dearest ones, on this glorious
road of self-realization and freedom. Be blessed, be in God! OceanofPDF.com10 
Innite Possibilities of Experience Hindered by
Emotional Dependency
It is a universal law that you cannot bring into existence that
which you cannot rst conceive of. From this metaphysical concept,
the Guide leads us right into our childish self that keeps us, through
our continued dependency on outside approval, within the narrow
connes of our limitations. Happiness, fulllment, is our birthright. But how can we bring it into manifestation? This is a truly mind-
expanding lecture . Greetings, my dearest friends. Again, I shall try to help you to
move on from where you may be stuck. It is being said by all great spiritual teachings that creation is
innite in its possibilities and that humanity’s potential for realizing
these innite possibilities of happiness exists in the inner depths of
each person’s being. Almost  all of you have heard these words. Some of you may believe them, at least in principle; others may
have their doubts about accepting them even in theory. Let us now
try to overcom e some of the diculties in understanding these
principles. Everything in the World Exists in a State of PotentialityFirst of all, it is necessary to understand that no one person
creates anythin g new. It is also impossible for anything new to come
into existence. However, it is possible for a person to make manifest
something that already exists . It is a fact that everything, absolutely
everything, exists already on another level of consciousness. The
word everythin g cannot convey the scope of this concept. When one
speaks about God’s innity or about Creation’s innity, this is part
of the meanin g. There is no state of being, no experience, no
situation, no concept, no feeling, no object that does not already
exist. Everythi ng in the world exists in a state of potentiality which
already contai ns the nished product within it. I can see that this
idea is not easy for human beings to embrace, for it is so contrary to
your way of thinking, being, and experiencing on your average level
of consciousne ss. But the more you can deepen your thoughts on
this subject, the easier will it become for you to perceive , to sense,
and to grasp it. Knowing and understanding this principle of
creation—that all exists already and that human beings can make
these existing  possibilities manifest—is one of the necessary
prerequisites to experiencing the fullness of life’s innite potential. Before you can create new possibilities of unfoldment and entirely
new ranges of experience in your personal life, you must rst learn
to apply these  laws of creation to the problem areas of your life
where you feel troubled, limited, handicapped, or trapped. Healthy
unfoldment of the real self follows the creation of a healthy
personality. This can happen  once you learn and comprehend that
the laws of creation can work only if you apply them rst to the
troubled areas of the personality. Whatever possibility you can conceive of, you can realize . Suppose
you are immersed in a conict from which you cannot see a way
out. As long as you do not conceive of a way out, you truly cannot
realize the already existing possibility of a resolution. If your
concepts about the way out are hazy or unrealistic, so will be the
temporary solutions that will appear to you as the only possibilities. The same applies to your life as a whole. If you truly comprehend
that an innite number of possibilities exist in any given situation,
you can nd solutions where it was hitherto impossible to do so.It is your prero gative as human beings to make use of these laws
of creation and to reach out so that these innite possibilities can
unfold, enablin g you to partake fully of life’s oerings. If your life
seems limited, it is only because you are convinced your life must be
limited. You cannot conceive  of anything more than what you have
experienced up until now and are experiencing in the present. This
is precisely the rst handicap. Therefore, in order to expand your
own possibilities of happines s, your mind must grasp the principle
that you cannot bring something to life if you cannot rst conceive of it. This sentence should be truly meditated on, for understanding this
concept will open new doors for you. You should also understand
that there is a vast dierence between conceiving of further
possibilities of expansion or happiness on the one hand, and
daydreaming on the other. Wistful, resigned daydreaming that grabs
fantasy as a substitute for drab reality is not at all what is meant
here, and is in fact a hindra nce to the proper conceiving of life’s
potentials. You need to have a vigorous, active, dynamic concept of
what is possible in reality. When you know that somethin g you wish
to bring about exists in principle, you have made the rst step
toward realizing it. Avoidance Motivation Closes Out New Vistas
Therefore, I invite every one of you to contemplate what you truly
conceive of as possibilities for your life. If you examine yourself
closely, you will nd primarily that you conceive of negative
possibilities which you naturally fear, wish to avoid, and defend
yourself again st. When you use most of your psychic energies to
defend yourself against possible negative experience, your
motivation is negative. Negative motivation does not necessarily imply a destructive
intent. For that matter, a positive motivation in this context could
also mean a very destructive intent or aim. The avoid ance of a
feared possibility implies negative motivation. Upon close
examination of your mental and emotional processes you will ndthat you are negatively motivated to a considerable extent. This is
one of the rst obstructions which enclose you in an imaginary and
unnecessary prison. This applies, of course, to all levels of your
personality. It applies to the mental level, where you cannot really
envisage the innite vistas of experience, of expansion, of
stimulation, of all sorts of wondrous and happy possibilities you
have a preroga tive to achieve in this life. It exists on the emotional
level, where you do not allow the spontaneous and natural ow of
your feelings, where you fearfully, anxiously, and suspiciously hold
back. It also exists on the physical level, in that you do not permit
your body to experience the pleasure it is destined to experience. All
these are limitations that you articially and needlessly inict upon
yourself. A Cluster of Popular Misconceptions
The next obstruction to expanding your life and creating the best
of all possibl e lives for yourself is the following cluster of
misconceptions that are widespread in the world: “It is not possible
to be really happy! Human life is very limited. Happiness, pleasure,
and ecstasy are frivolous, selsh aims that truly spiritual people
must abandon for the sake of their spiritual development. Sacrice
and renunciation are the keys to spiritual development.” We do not
have to further elucidate these deeply lodged misconceptions, which
are often more unconscious than conscious. But it is necessary for
you to discover the subtle way in which you abide by such general
concepts, no matter what you consciously believe. You may discover
these subtle reactions by observing your reluctance to take steps to
realize a perfectly harmless and normal fulllment of a genuine
need or a truly constructive aim. You feel as though something were
holding you back, paralyzing  your eorts. Although there are often
a number of other reasons for this reluctance as well—some of
which we shall discuss shortly—it is also often true that you have
simply accepte d a negative idea that really makes no sense and has
no good purpose.Fear of happiness, of pleasure, of wide expansion into one’s life
experiences is based on ignorance that such fulllment could exist
or that you possess all the powers, faculties, and resource s to create
and bring about what you wish. It is also based on misconceptions
such as, “pleasure is wrong,” or “it is selsh to want personal
fulllment.” Fear of happiness is also based on the fear of being
annihilated and dissolved if you ever trusted the ow of the
universal forces and went with them. Such trust necessitates letting
go of the ego-w ill and the ego-forces, and then surrende ring to the
benecial forces of your deep nature. Devices to Hide Weakness and Dependency on Others
Every single human being in this world harbors an attitud e of fear
and weakness. Because this corner of the personality usually induces
a stron g shame, it is kept secret, often even from the conscious
mind. Many a dierent device is invented in order to hide this
weakness and dependency that make you feel utterly helpless,
unable to assert yourself, and even unable to protect your truth and
integrity. When it comes to this area of the soul one is constantly
compelled to sell out and betray oneself in order to ward o
disapproval, censure, and rejection. The need to be accepted by
others is usually less sham eful than the means to which the
personality resorts to placate and appease others. The ways of
defending yourselves are psychologically so fundamental that you
cannot get far in your self-purication work unless you work on
seeing how they function in your life. All the defense mechanisms
you have discovered and perhaps even begun to remove are either
your ways of obtaining what you consider to be the apparently vital
acceptance of others, or your ways of hiding your shameful
submission, often by an apparently opposite attitude of indierence,
hostility, or compulsive and blind rebellion and over-aggressiveness. The Child Within You Still Wants Validation from OthersFew things give human beings as much pain and shame  as this
inner, fearful,  weak spot that makes them feel impotent and
compelled to sell out. You already know, my friends, that this area of
the personality has remained a child. The child does not yet know  that
the whole of the personality has grown up and is indeed no longer
helpless and dependent. Infants and young children truly are
helpless and dependent on the parents. But in the childish  corner of
your being you either do not know or do not want to know that this
is no longer true. The young child is dependent on parents for all the basics of life:
shelter, food, aection, protection, and, last but not least, for the
very necessary supply of pleasure. A human being cannot live
without pleasure. To deny this truth is one of the most harmful
errors. Body, soul, mind, and spirit wither without pleasure. As an
adult you are able to nd through your own eorts and resources
your own shelter, food, aection, and safety, so you are also able to
do the same with pleasure. In all these areas you must have contact,
cooperation, and communication with others in varying degrees. You cannot provide yourself with any of these necessities without
interacting with other people. But this interaction is entirely
dierent from the passive, weak dependency of the small child. The
thoroughly adult person uses his or her own best forces,
intelligence, intuition, talents, observation, and exibi lity to get
along with others in giving and taking. Your adult sense of fairness
makes you suciently pliab le to give in. And your sense of self
makes you suciently assertive not to be stepped on and abused. The often ne balance in these forces of communication cannot be
taught. It can only come through personal growth. Children are incapable of achieving this balance. They are rigidly
one-sided in their insistence to receive, for this is their need. The
same applies to pleasure. Children must have the parents’
permission to establish and utilize the source of all pleasure deep
within themselves. Through the parents’ permission the child will
develop the strength and security to make meaningful contact. When you still need another person to permit you to experience
pleasure, you are still in the position of the child or infan t. I repeat,this never implies that anyone can do without others, but for adults
the emphasis is shifted. Mature adults nd within themselves an
inexhaustible well of wonderful feelings. Insecurity and weakness
cannot exist when these feelings are activated. When part of your development is arrested, you wait for another
person, a parent-substitute, to make it possible for you to draw on
the deep sourc e of your own rich feelings. You know of and yearn
for these pleas urable feeling,  but you do not know that you are no
longer a child dependent on others for being allowed to activate and
express them. This is your human tragedy, for you thus move into a
vicious circle. Whenever a misconception is accepted as truth,
immediately a vicious circle comes into being, paralyzing the
pleasure forces, which are a good part of the energy available to
you. Your life thus becomes dull and lusterless. To deny the intense pleasure  of being, the pleasure of feeling the
energy ow of your body, soul, and spirit, is to deny life. When a
child suers such denial, his or her psyche receives a shock from the
repeated absen ce of pleasure and therefore the repeated presence of
unfullled yearning. The shock prevents growth in this one area so
that the whole personality grows lopsidedly. Your adult conscious
mind ignores the fact that a crying, demanding, angry, and helpless
child still exists within you. You do not know that you are free to
move toward pleasure, toward your own fulllment, toward the
realization of your own powers to obtain whatever you want and
need. This is one of the most fundamental splits in the human
personality. Vicious Circle and Forcing-Current
Let us now look a bit closer at this hidden corner of your psyche
where all of you have remained children. Where do you ignore this
fact and where does your inner child ignore the rights and powers of
your adult state? The particular vicious circle I mentioned before is
this: When you do not know that everything in the universe already
exists, and that you can manifest whatever you need in your ownlife, you feel dependent on an outside force or authority for all your
wants and needs. Because of this distortion of the facts, you wait for
fulllment from the wrong source. Such waiting keeps your need
perpetually unfullled. The more unfullled it is, the more urgent the
need becomes. The more urgen t the need, the greater your dependency ,
your hope, and the more frantic your attempts to please the other
who is suppos ed to ll your need. You then become desperate; the
more you try, the less you fulll your need precisely because your
attempts are unrealistic. Consciously you know none of this; you do
not know what forces drive you nor even in what directi on you are
driven. You become desperat e because in your urgency to have the
need fullled you betray yourself, your truth, and the best in you. Your frustrated striving and your self-betrayal create a forcing-
current . The forcing-current may manifest in a very subtle way and may
not be overt at all, but the emotions are all cramped up with it. This
must inevitably aect others and have its lawful and appropriate
consequences. Any forcing-current is bound to make others resist and
shrink back, even if what they are forced to do is for their own
benet and delight. Thus the vicious circle continues. The continued
frustration, which you believe to be caused by the other person’s
mean refusal to cooperate and to give, brings into your soul rage,
fury, perhaps even vindictiveness and varying degrees of cruel
impulses. This, in turn, weakens the personality even more as guilt
comes up. You conclude that your destructive feeling s must be
hidden so as not to antagonize this other person whom you perceive
as the source of life. The net of entanglement becomes tighter and
tighter; the individual is completely ensnarled in this trap of
misconceptions, distortions, and illusions with all the destructive
emotions that follow suit. You nd yourself in the preposterous
position of craving the love and acceptance of a person whom you
hate and resent for having left you unfullled for so long. This one-
sided insistence on being loved by a person one deeply resents and
wishes to punish increases the guilt, for the ever-wakeful presence
of your real self ashes its reaction into a mind that is unable tointerpret and sort out the messages of the real self from those that
come from the child inside. The fact that your need is not fullled by the other also weakens
your conviction that you have a right to the pleasure you so much
desire. You vaguely suspect that you may be wrong to even want
this pleasure. Thus you begin to displace the original, natural need
and desire for pleasure into other channels where they are
sublimated. Other, more or less compulsive, needs come into
existence. All the while you are torn between the force of the deeply
hidden original need and the doubt that you have a right to its
fulllment. The more you doubt, the more dependent you become
on reconrma tion by an outside authority—a parent-substitute,
public opinion, or certain groups of people who represent the last
word of truth to you. The more this vicious circle goes on, the less pleasure remains in
the psyche, while unpleasure accumulates. Such a person must
increasingly despair about life and doubt that fulllment is possible. There comes a point when a person inwardly gives up. There is not a single human being who does not harbor within
such a weak area, at least to some degree. In this secret corner, you
feel not only helpless and dependent, but also deeply ashamed. The
shame is due to the methods you employ to placate the person who
at any given period is supposed to fulll the role of the authority
and grant you what you need in the way of pleasure, safety, and
self-respect. The forcing-current says, “you must,” and you make demands on
others to be, feel, and do what you need and desire. These demands
may not manif est outwardly  at all. In fact, on the surfac e you may
totally lack self-assertion. Your inability or diculty to healthily
assert yourself  is a direct result of having to hide the underlying
shameful and threatening forcing-current. It is threatenin g because
you know quite well that if it shows openly, it will evoke great
censure and disapproval and possibly even overt rejection. I invite all of you to vigorously face this area in yourselve s. All of
you must tackle it if you wish to realize life’s and your own bestpotentials, and if you wish to discover your own innite  powers to
create innite goodness in your life. The stronger the “you must” is secretly thrown at others, the more
you inactivate  your own powers. The result is that you become
paralyzed and inactive in body, soul, and mind. This inactivity
keeps you from moving into your own nucleus, the place  where all
realistic promi se and all potential for every kind of fulllment and
delight exist. You inadverten tly make yourself hang on to others,
which must elicit hate in you. Finding the treasure of your own
nucleus, on the contrary, makes you free. Then contact with others
becomes a delightful luxury that elicits love. By continually using inner, covert pressure on others because you
believe you are dependent on them, you diminish your available
energy supply. If energy is used in its natural, correct, and
meaningful way, it never exhausts itself. You know this, my friends. Energy only exhausts itself when it is wrongly used. There are
innumerable methods that human beings use in order to switch on
this forcing-current. They include compliance in varyin g degrees,
passive resistance, spite, withdrawal, refusal to cooperate, forceful
outer aggression, intimidation, and persuasion through false
strength and assumption of an authority role. Deep down they all
mean, “You must love me and give me what I need.” The more
blindly you are involved in this way of being, the more you weaken
and then further alienate yourself from the center of your true inner
life, where you nd all that you can ever need and want. Let Go—Let Out
In order to reorient the soul forces  toward health and restore their
true nature, the following has to happen: Let go of the particular
person or persons from whom you expect your life fulllment and
whom you simultaneously resent for this very fact. You must all
recognize that you place expectations and make demands  on others
that no one else but you yourself can fulll. All you need and long
for, including real love, can only come when your soul is fearless,and you know that the strength of your feelings with which you can
give and receive love is located within you. For as long as you hang
onto another person in the way of a child, denying the adult you
are, you enslave yourself in the true sense of the word. The more
you do this, the less you can either receive or give, and the less real
feelings of any sort about any vital experience can nd their home
within you. Because fear and anger  take up most of the room in your psyche, it
is essential to let out these negative emotions in the way you learn
to do in the Pathwork where no one is harmed. Letting out fear and
anger makes room for the good feelings. So many of you are still
locked and paralyzed. Expressing fear and anger is the last thing you
want to do. Even if you admit to such negative emotions in
principle, you still prefer to act them out in unconsciousness rather
than expressing them directly and taking the responsibility for them. You still claim a false perfe ction—even though you do not really
believe that it exists in you any longer—in order to favorably
dispose others toward you. Also, you cling for dear life to negative
emotions because you fear positive feelings. This is yet another
aspect of the same vicious circle. The less you see yourself as responsible for the negative feelings
you still possess as well as for your right and ability to create
happiness, the more you must live in fear. Consequently, the more
you must do something to eliminate that fear. Thus negative
motivation comes about. You live a makeshift life of avoidance
rather than create an expansive, unfolding life lled with positive
experience and pleasure. You aim to avoid the threat of expressing
your own negative feelings because they would spoil your obtaining
from others everything that you must in fact obtain from within
yourself. You stake your salvation on others from whom it can never
come. Your reorientation to life—a part from the fundamental necessity
of recognizing all these negative aspects—must always begin with
the willingness to let go. This cannot be forced upon one who has
not been made aware of the dependency itself in very exact ways. But once this is the case, it becomes possible to give up what onehas been so tightly holding on to. This loosening up must occur to
bring about a change in the balance structure of soul forces so that
benign circles can begin to perpetuate themselves. You also need to be willing to dispense with your ration alization
that appears to make your case seem justied. For you can always
succeed in presenting your life to yourself and to others  as though
your wishes, needs, and demands on others are not only justied,
since there is nothing wrong with them, but are also benecial for
the other person. This may even be quite true, as far as it goes. What you want, in principle, may indeed be good and within your
right. But when using a hidden, emotional forcing-current, you go
about seeking satisfaction in the wrong way and not granting the
other person the same freedom you wish for yourself. You do not
give the other person the right to freely choose whom to love and
accept or the right not to be rejected and hated for asserting this
freedom. You do not even give the other the right to be wrong
without being hated and totally denied. This is a freedo m which you
very much wish for yourself , and you deeply resent others when they
do not grant it to you. You are unable to defend yourself in an
adequate way in such cases only because on certain emotional levels
you do not grant this same freedom to others. When you look very
closely you will nd this to be true. And when you do so, your sense
of fairness and objectivity will help you to give up what you so
desperately hold on to, even while you emotionally still believe that
your life depends on getting the other to feel and do as you wish. Take O the Leash Around Your Neck
Once you have learned this initial condition, allowing for the
number of inevitable relapse s that must forever be newly observed,
you will make  a huge step toward that source of your inner being
where you are not chained in weakness and anxiety, or in fear and
anger. You all chafe at some leash around your neck that keeps you
dependent and anxious in a situation in which you cannot nd the
strength to assert yourself, in which you nd yourself absolutelycaught and unable to see a way out because each possibility seems
wrong. You know that none of the visible alternatives give you that
good feeling about yourself, that resilient strength and well-being in
which even dicult steps become feasible because you know they
are right for you. Most of you have at least occasionally experienced
this state of inner knowingness  when your real self was freely
operative within you. It is our aim to bring out that real self completely . In order to liberate the real self, you must nd that area of your life
where you are most bound and most anxious . Ask yourself what it is
you want from the other when you are so bound, so resentful, so
afraid, so weak, so unable to be yourself. Experience this leash
which can be given up only when you stop wanting from others
what you must supply for yourself. Verbalize concisely  to yourself
whatever you nd you need from others. This will bring you nearer
to letting go. You will then know that this is precisely the
compulsive need with which you enslave, weaken, and paralyze
yourself. When  you let go, you will experience a new, resilient
strength coming out of you that suddenly conciliates apparently
insoluble probl ems. You will become free as you let free. Only when
you can lose on the ego-level can you win on the level of the real
self, where the power is to create a good life. Conversely, your inability to give up, to be fair, to let others free,
your insistence  to win and have your way, and your refusal to lose
on the ego-level make it impossible for you to win where it counts
and where you would nd your real strength. Jesus Christ meant
this when he said that he who wants to live must be willing to lose
his life. In one of my very rst lectures, I spoke of this when I said,
“You must give up what you want to gain.”
Here we are dealing with levels of consciousness. I hope it is quite
clear that no sacrice or renunciation is required . What is meant is
that you canno t obtain what you want, and what you indeed should
have, by pressuring an outer source with all your eorts. The
emphasis must shift. If you insist that you must win on the wrong
level, you cannot truly win. If you can lose on that ego level, you will
win. You will then inevitably come into that nucleus of yourself
where every conceivable power exists. As you grant others the rightto be, whether  it is convenient to you or not, to that extent you will
truly nd your own rights. It is a steady growing process  to nd these rights. The process will
rst manifest by your no longer selling out or downgrading yourself. You will nd genuine, good defenses against abuse and you will feel
good about them. Later you will discover your ever-increasing right
for pleasure and happiness. You will nd that you move toward
visions of what your life could be, toward possibilities you never
dreamed could exist. You will suddenly permit yourself pleasure. You will no longer cramp  up against it, as you inadvertently
continue to do now. You will stop undermining the spontaneous
processes, and you will learn  to trust them. This will open a richness
of life and a security that truly are heavenly. By letting go and
giving up your inner forcing-current, you will experience the beauty
of free, unforced relationship s. When you live in the old dependency
pattern, you force others to make them do what you want. Thus you
have mutual forcing-currents. This weakens you and creates a host
of negative emotions that cause you to lose contact with the nucleus
of your real being, as well as with your good feelings. When you can
lose gracefully, you will nd a treasure within, a new way of life
that is an entirely new venture on which you are just embarking. The areas in your life where  you feel so weak and so trapped will
cease to exist. Reach into your inner being and communicate with it for the
purpose of eliminating this weakness in you that binds you and that
wastefully and needlessly holds you back in your life. No matter
how much you may glorify this holding back, it serve s no good
purpose. All of you do hold back in one way or another, just as
humankind has done for millennia, by saying that pleasure is wrong
and frivolous and unspiritual. You may have your own private
excuse to beautify your weakness and apparently make an asset out
of it. Yet in following this reasoning you cannot really come face to
face with yourself. Only by coming face to face with your weakness
and dependency, with your forcing-current that says to others “you
must,” can you also come face to face with your strength andbeauty, and with all the potentials that exist in you in a way you
cannot even fathom yet. Be blessed by the great strength that is here now, but even more
so by the great strength that dwells in you. Be in peace. Be in God! OceanofPDF.com11 
The Spiritual Meaning of Crisis
There are moments—and even protracted periods—in our lives
when suddenly everything seems to have come to an end. We are
shaken to the very depths of our being by events that compel us to
make dicult decisions, while our feelings are in such turmoil that
we don’t know what to do. Why such crises arise and how we can
handle the overwhelming problems that confront us at such times in
a constructive way is the topic of this soul-penetrating lecture . Greetings and blessings to every one of my friends. What is the real, spiritual meaning of crisis? Crisis is an attempt of
nature to eect change through the cosmic lawfulness of the
universe. If change is obstructed by the ego, the part of the
consciousness that directs the will, crisis will occur to make
structural change possible. Without such structural change in the entity, no balance can be
attained. Every crisis ultimately means such a readjustment,
whether it appears in the form of pain, diculties, upheaval,
uncertainty, or merely the insecurity that comes from starting out
on unaccustomed ways of living after giving up a familiar one. Crisis
in any form attempts to break down old structures based on false
conclusions and therefore on negativity. Crisis shakes loose
ingrained, frozen habits so that new growth becomes possible. It
tears down and breaks up, which is momentarily painful, but
transformation is unthinkable without it.The more painful a crisis is, the more the will-directing part of
consciousness is attempting to obstruct the change. Crisis is
necessary because human negativity is a stagnant mass that needs to
be shaken up in order to be let go of. Change is an integral
characteristic of life; where there is life there is unending change. Only those who still live in fear and negativity, who resist change,
perceive chang e as something that ought to be resisted. They resist
life itself, and suering closes in on them more tightly. This happens
in people’s overall development as well as in specic instances. Human beings can be free and healthy in areas where they do not
resist change. There they are in harmony with the universal
movement. They constantly grow and experience life as deeply
satisfying. Yet these same individuals react entirely dierently in
areas where they have blocks. They fearfully cling to unchanging
conditions inside and outside themselves. Where they don’t resist,
their lives will be relatively free from crises; in the areas where they
do resist change, crises are unavoidable. The function of human growth is to free one’s inherent potentials,
which are truly innite. However, where negative attitudes
stagnate, realiz ing these potentials is impossible. Only crisis can tear
down a structu re that is built on premises that contradict the laws of
cosmic truth, love, and bliss. Crisis shakes up the frozen state, which is
always negative . On the path to emotional and spiritual fulllment you need to
work intensive ly in order to free yourself from your negativities. What are they? The misconceptions; the destructive emotions,
attitudes, and behavior patterns that arise from them; the pretenses
and the defenses. But none of these would present too much
diculty in themselves if it were not for the self-perpetuating force
that compoun ds each negative aspect in an ever-increasing
momentum within the human psyche. All thoughts and feelings are energy currents. Energy is a force
that increases with its own momentum, always based on the nature
of the consciou sness that nourishes and directs the energy current in
question. Henc e, if the under lying concepts and feelings accord with
truth and are therefore positive, the self-perpetuating momentum ofthe energy current will increase ad innitum  the expressions and
attitudes implicit in the underlying thoughts. If the underlying
concepts and feelings are founded on error and are therefore
negative, the self-perpetuating momentum of the energy current will
compound, though not ad innitum . The Self-Perpetuating Force of Negative Emotions
You know that misconceptions create behavior patterns that
inevitably seem to prove the correctness of the assumption, so that
the destructive, defensive behavior will become more rmly
entrenched in the soul substance. The same principle applies to
feelings. For example, fear could easily be overcome if it were
challenged and its underlying misunderstanding and mishandling
exposed. Many times manifest emotions are not direct primary
emotions: Fear may disguise rage; depression may disguise fear. The
problem is that fear creates more fear of facing and of transcending
itself. Then one fears this fear of fear and so on. The fear
compounds. Let us take depression . If the underlying causes of the original
feeling of depression are not courageously exposed, you become
depressed about being depres sed. You may then feel that you should
be able to face your depression rather than being depresse d about it,
but you are not really willing or able to do so, and that depresses
you even more. This becomes a vicious circle. The rst depression—or fear, or another emotion—is the rst
crisis that is not heeded nor is its true meaning understood. It is
evaded, so that depression about being depressed will be set o in
the self-perpetuating vicious circle. The consciousness of the person
becomes more and more removed from the original feeling and
therefore removed from itself, making it more dicult to nd the
original feeling. The increased negative momentum nally leads to a
breakdown of the negative self-perpetuation. Contrary to truth, love, and beauty, which are innite divine
attributes, distortion and negativity are never innite . They come to anend when the pressure bursts. This is a painful crisis, and people
usually resist it with all their might. But imagine if the universe
were created dierently and negative self-perpetuation continued ad
innitum . It could mean eternal hell. The negative self-perpetuating principle is most obvious in the
case of frustration and anger . Many people can see relati vely easily
that the frustration itself is less dicult to bear than their
frustration at being frustrate d. The same is true of anger at oneself
for being angry or being impatient with one’s impatience, wishing
that one could react dierently and not being able to do so because
the underlying causes are not exposed and faced up to. Thus the
“crises” of emotions such as anger, frustration, impatience, and
depression are not recogniz ed for what they are. This makes the
negative self-p erpetuation stronger and stronger, until the inamed
boil bursts. Then we have an obvious crisis. Crisis Can Put an End to Negative Self-Perpetuation
Crisis can mean, if one’s consciousness so chooses, the end of
continually swelling negative self-perpetuation. When  eruption
comes, the choices of recog nizing the meaning or continuing to
escape become  more clearly dened. Even if this eruption does not
lead to recognition and an inner change of direction, a nal crisis is
bound to come  where the entity can no longer take refuge from its
message. The personality must see eventually that all eruptions,
breakdowns, crises, mean to tear down the old structur e so as to
reerect a new and better functioning one. The “dark night” of the mystics is such a time of the breakdown of old
structures . Most human beings still fail to understand the meaning of
crisis. They continually look in the wrong direction. If nothing
would break down, the negativity would continue. Yet it is possible
after a certain amount of awakening has taken place in the
consciousness that the person does not allow the negativity to
become too rmly entrenched. Thus the negativity is preventedfrom starting the self-perpetu ating cycle. It is confronted right at the
start. Crisis can be avoided by looking at the inner truth when the rst
inklings of disturbance and negativity manifest on the surface . But a
tremendous amount of honesty is required to challenge one’s tightly
cherished convictions. Such challenge cuts out the negative self-
perpetuation, the motor force that compounds the destructive,
erroneous psychic matter until it nds a breaking point. It avoids
the many vicious circles within the human psyche and in
relationships that are painful and problematic. Growth Is Possible Without “Dark Nights”
If diculties, upheavals, and pain in the individual’s life, as well
as in the life of humanity as a whole, were viewed from this point of
view, the real meaning of crisis would be understood and much pain
could be avoided. I say to you now: Do not wait for crisis to come in
an eruption as the natural, balance-establishing event that takes
place as inexorably as a thunderstorm must take place when certain
atmospheric conditions have to be altered and clarity in the
atmosphere is to be reestablished. This is exactly what happens
within the human consciousness. Growth is indeed possible without
intense painful “dark night s,” if honesty with the self becomes
predominant in the personality. True inner looking and deep
concern with the inner being as well as giving up pet attitudes and
ideas must be cultivated. Then the painful, disruptive crisis can be
avoided, because no inamed boil will form. The process of death itself is such a crisis. I have discussed various
deeper meanin gs of death. This is yet another. Supercial death—
that is, death of the human body—takes place because the
consciousness says, “I cannot go on any longer,” or “I am at my wit’s
end.” Any crisis contains this thought. Consciousne ss always
expresses to itself, “I can no longer deal with the situation.” If the
situation is specic, a speci c crisis occurs in life. If it is a question
of one’s present incarnation as a whole, then physical death willoccur. In the latter case, the eruption takes the form of the spirit’s
breaking out of the body, until it nds new life circumstances in
which to deal with the same inner distortions all over again. Since
eruption, breakdown, and crisis always aim at discontinuing old
ways of operating and creati ng new ones, the process of death and
rebirth signies the identical principle. People tend to oppose going on to other ways of operating and
reacting, however. This obstruction is so unnecessary. It is actually
this opposition that creates the tension and strain of crisis, not the
giving up of the old structure itself. When necessary change is not
accepted willin gly, you automatically put yourself into a state of
crisis. The intensity of the crisis indicates the intensity of the
opposition, as well as the urgency of the need for change. The
greater the need for change, and the greater the obstruction to
change, the more painful the crisis is going to be. The more
openness and willingness there is, on any level, to change, and the
less necessary the change is at any given moment of the
evolutionary path of an individual, the less severe and painful the
crisis is going to be. Outer Crisis and Inner Crisis
The severity and pain of a crisis is by no means determine d by the
objective event. I think most of you, my friends, can readily verify
this. Most of you have gone through severe changes outw ardly. You
have lost a loved one, you may have coped with the most drastic
changes and objectively traumatic events—wars, revolution, loss of
fortune and home, illness. Yet you may inwardly have been much
less agitated and in pain than in situations that are outwardly
incommensurate with the agitation of your inner feelings. Thus we
can say that an outer crisis may leave you inwardly in greater peace
than an inner one. The objectively more traumatic event hurts
sometimes less than the objectively less traumatic one. In the former
instance the necessary chang e takes place on an outer level, which
your inner being accepts more, adjusts to better, and nds a newway of dealing with. In the latter instance, the need for inner
change meets with greater resistance. Your subjective interpretation
of the event makes the crisis disproportionately painful. Sometimes
one tries to nd rational explanations for such a peculiar emotional
intensity—explanations that can be called rationalizations. Sometimes both inner and outer changes and crises meet the same
inner attitude. When the process of the crisis is accepted and no longer
obstructed, when one goes with it, instead of ghting it, relief will
come comparatively quickly. Once the pus runs out of the boil and
the attitudes are adjusted, self-revelation brings peace;
understanding brings new energy and aliveness. The healing process
is at work, even while the boil erupts. The negation of this process, the inner attitude that says, “I should
not have to go through this. Do I have to? This and that and the
other is wrong with others. If it were not, I would not have to go
through this now,” prolongs the agony. This attitude seeks to avoid
the necessary eruption of the boil, which consists of a painful
entanglement of ever-increasing negative energy whose momentum
makes it more and more dicult to alter the course. The ongoing
negative cycle and its futile, automatic repetition that the
consciousness is unable to stop generate hopelessness. The
repetition and the hopelessn ess could stop only by your no longer
avoiding the necessary change. Every negative experience, every pain, is the result of a wrong
idea. A critical  aspect of this work is the articulation of these ideas. And yet, how often all of you still miss the necessary recognition by
not keeping these incontrovertible facts in mind when you meet
with an unhappy situation? Leaving Crises Behind
Once you take on the habit of rst questioning your hidden wrong
assumptions and destructive  reactions when anything unwelcome
comes your way, and fully open to truth and change, your life willalter drastically. Pain will become proportionately less frequent, and
joy will become more and more the natural state. The rhythm of
growth can then proceed smoothly, without the leaps and bounds of
breaking up negative structures in the soul substance. We have discussed the negative  aspects of self-perpetuation. Of
course, it exists primarily on the positive  side. Let us look at love. The more you love, the more you can produce genuine love feelings
without impoverishing yourself and others. You realize that you do
not take away anything from anyone by giving out. On the contrary,
more will come to you and others from it. You will nd new ways,
deeper ways, more variation s of experiencing love in giving and
receiving it, being in tune with this universal feeling. The ability to
experience and express love will grow in an ever-incre asing, self-
perpetuating, motion. So it is with every other constructive feeling and attitude. The
more meaning ful, constructive, fullled, and joyous your life is, the
more of these attributes it must generate. It is an ongoing, never-
ending process of steady expansion and self-expression. The
principle is exactly the same as that of the negative self-
perpetuation. The only dierence is that the positive process is innite . Once you establish the contact with your innate wisdom, beauty,
and joyousness and allow them to unfold, they will increase
themselves. The self-perpetuation takes over once these energies are
released and admitted to consciousness. The initial actualization of
these powers requires eort, but once the process is owing, it is
eortless. The more you bring forth of the universal qualities, the
more there will be to bring forth. Your own potentials to experience beauty, joy, pleasure, love,
wisdom, and creative expression, my dearest friends, are indeed
innite. Again the words have been said, heard, registered. But how
deeply do you know that this is a reality? How deeply do you
believe in your innermost potential to be self-creating, to be in bliss,
to live the innite life? How much do you believe in your resources
to solve all your problem s? How much do you trust in the
possibilities that are not yet manifest? How much do you believe it
is real that new vistas of yourself can be discovered? How much doyou truly believe that you can unfold qualities of peace coupled
with excitement, of serenity coupled with adventure, through which
life becomes a string of beautiful experiences even though initial
diculties are still to be overcome? How much do you really believe
in all this, my friends? Ask yourself this question . To the extent you pay only lip-service to
this belief, you will still feel hopeless, depressed, fearful or anxious,
entangled in apparently insoluble conicts with yourself and others. This is a sign that you do not yet believe in your own innitely
expanding potential. If you do not truly believe this, my dearest
ones, it is because there is something in you that you desperately
hold on to. You do not wish to expose it because you do not wish to
give it up or change. This applies to every single  one of you here, and of course to
everyone else in the world. For who has not the “dark nights” to put
up with? Some have many little “dark nights” coming and going, or
their “dark night” is gray. They may not be in a great crisis at any
given moment, but life is gray and uctuates comparatively little. But then there  are those who have already worked their way out of
this grayness. They no longer want to content themselves with
comparative safety from crisis. They are willing, deep within
themselves, to chance tempor ary upheaval for the sake of reaching a
more desirable , steady state. They want to realize their potential for
deeper joy and self-expressio n. Then the “dark nights” will become
more circumscribed, experienced either as uctuating periods of
upheaval and joy, or, in some lives, bunched up in stronger
episodes. Utter darkness, loss, pain, and confusion alternate with
heights of golden light, carrying justied hope for an eventual,
uninterrupted state of bliss. The Message of Crises
No matter how any one of you experiences crises, there is always
a message in them for you to discover about your own life. It is up
to you not to project your experiences outwardly, on others, whichis always the most dangerous temptation. Or, for that matter, to
project them into yourself in a self-devastating way, which avoids
the issue just as much as when you project it onto others. The
attitude “I am so bad, I am nothing” is always dishonest. This
dishonesty has to be exposed, so that the crisis can become
meaningful, whether it be small or great. If you learn eventually to take the smallest shadow of your
everyday life and explore its deepest meaning, you will handle the
little crises in a way that makes the swelling of the boil impossible. Hence no painful eruption is needed to destroy rotten structures. This will reveal the stark reality to you that universal life
untampered is golden joyousness of ever-increasing beauty. Every smallest  shadow is a crisis, for it need not be there. It is
only there because of your turning away from the issue that creates
crisis. So take those smallest  shadows of your everyday life and ask
yourself what they mean. What do you not wish to see and not wish
to change? If you face this, and truly wish to face the real issue and
make the necessary change, the crisis will have fullled its function. You will discover new dimensions of the issue that will make the
sun rise, and the dark night will turn out to be the educator, the
therapist that life always is once you try to understand it. Your capacity to cope with the negativity of others  grows only to the
extent that you can do what I explain in this lecture. How often do
you sense negative feelings from others but cannot handle them
because you are anxious, uncertain, and not clear about the nature
of your involvement and interaction with them? At other times, you
may not even sense the actual presence of hostility in others. Their
subtlety and indirectness confuse you, make you feel guilty about
your instinctive responses, but you are even less able to handle the
situation. This frequent occurrence is entirely due to your blindness
to yourself and your resistanc e to change. When you project all your
old negative experiences onto others, it is impossible for you to have
adequate awareness of what actually goes on in the other person,
and therefore you cannot deal with it. You will experience a
magnicent new turn in your life as you grow in your capacity to
look honestly at what disturbs you within yourself and as youbecome willin g to change. Almost inadvertently, and as if it had
nothing to do with your eorts, a new gift arises in you: You see the
negativity in others in a way that leaves you free, that permits you
to confront them, that is eective. It has no adverse eect on you. It
must, in the long run, also be benecial for others, whenever they
want it to be. When you resist change, fear grows because your innermost being
knows that crisis, eruption, breakdown, are inevitable and are
steadily drawin g nearer. Yet you resist doing what could avoid the
crisis. What I say here is the story of human life. This is where
human nature is caught. The lesson must then be repeated until the
illusory fear of change is exposed as an error. If crisis can be
understood the way I show you here, and if you really meditate to
understand your own crisis and to give up what you hold on to, and
challenge the limitations you place on the particular issue, life will
open up almost at once. You must also realize that change cannot be executed only by the
ego. The willing, conscious self alone is incapable of doing it. The
diculty of changing, and the resistance to it, come to a large
extent from having forgotten  that you cannot do it without divine
help. Thus you go from one wrong extreme to the other. One
extreme is that you think you are the one who must accomplish
inner transformation. Since you know deep inside that you cannot
do this, that you just do not have the equipment to do it, you give
up. You feel it is hopeless to make yourself change, so you do not
even really try, nor do you express the concisely formulated desire
to do so. You are right to believe that the capacity to change is missing
when you consider yourself exclusively as the conscious, willing,
ego-self. Resistance is partly an expression of avoiding the
frustration of wanting something that cannot be done and must
prove a disappointment. This extreme reaction takes place in the
innermost layer of the human psyche. So does the opposite extreme,
in which you profess the belief in a higher power, or God, who is
supposed to do it all for you. You remain in an absolutely passive
state, waiting for it. Again, the conscious self does not try where itshould. False hope and false resignation are only two sides of the
same coin: absolute passivity . But the pushing ego, attem pting to go
beyond its own capacity, must inevitably end in the same passive
state of either falsely waiting or falsely giving up hope. The pushing
exhausts the self and renders it passive. These attitudes may exist
simultaneously or alternately. The way to go about making a positive change is to want it; you
must be willing to be in truth and to change. And you have to pray
to the innermo st divine functioning within your soul to make the
change possibl e. Then you wait for the change to take place, in a
trusting, condent, and patient way. This is the absolute
prerequisite for change. When it does not even occur to you to
assume this prayerful attitud e and say, “I want to change, but my
ego cannot do it. God will do it through me. I will make myself a
willing, recept ive channel for this to happen,” you are basically
unwilling to change and/or are doubtful about the reality of the
higher forces within you. This condent,  patient waiting, this assurance and trust that help
will come when you are utterly willing to look at the truth, can be
acquired. It is not a childish attitude that wants an authority to do it
for you. Quite the contrary. This approach conciliates the attitude of
adult self-responsibility that takes action by facing the self with the
receptive attitude in which the ego knows its own limitations. In
this receptive attitude, wanting truth and change, you let God into
your soul from deep within yourself. You open up for it to happen. When this attitude is adopted, change becomes a living reality  for
anyone and everyone. When trust and faith are lacking that the
divine can actualize itself through you, it is because you have not
given yourself the opportunity to experience the stark reality of
these processes . You have denied yourself this experience. And since
you have never experienced it, how can you trust it? Also, since you still have some little escape hatch in reserve,
which keeps you from entering into life fully and committedly, you
cannot experience the marve l of the reality of the Universal Spirit
within yourself. Since you are not honest with life, you cannot really
believe in the power of the Universal Intelligence dwellin g in you atall times, which goes to work the instant you make room for it. Total commitment to it is necessary, without reservation. This
commitment is the absolute prerequisite for your disco very of its
reality within you. Even if you do not know what the outcome will
be, whether or not God’s way will be agreeable to you, the
commitment must be made. Not knowing the total answer right now
is part of it. Considerations of ways that avoid full commitment keep
you holding on to the old, distorted, cheating way of life, while still
wanting to reach for the new, liberated, free way in which you are
whole, instead  of inwardly divided and racked by the pain of this
division. But you cannot have it both ways. Your commitment to the
Ultimate Creator must becom e total, applied to the most seemingly
insignicant aspect of daily living and being. You must be totally
committed to the truth, because then you are also commi tted to the
Universal Spirit. If you thus commit yourself, you will let go of the old accustomed
shore and oat momentarily in what seems uncertainty. But you
will not mind this. You will feel safer than ever before, when you
were holding on to the old shore, to the false structure that must be
torn down. You will soon know that there is nothing to fear. You
need to summon courage to do this, only to nd that this is really
the safest and most secure way possible to live. It actually requires
no courage at all. Then, and only then, will the “dark nights” turn
into instruments of light. QUESTION : This lecture is very close to where I am. I have just begun to
discover the meaning of crisis. I feel I either have to take cover
somewhere or I have to ride through the storm, which I feel I am doing
now. ANSWER : This recogniti on is very good. It touches upon the age-old
alternatives of taking cover or driving through. It is perhaps the
most importan t question on the evolutionary path of each entity. You remain in the cycle of death and rebirth, of pain and struggle,
of conict and strife—physically as well as spiritually andpsychologically—precisely because you cling to the illusion that
going through  can be avoided and escaping will do some good. Actually, takin g cover does not do any good; on the contrary, it
increases the critical tension. The momentary relief is illusion of the
most serious nature.
The_Pathwork_of_Self-Transformatio_by_Eva_Pierrakos.txt
Summarize the following text section accurately and concisely. Maintain specific details and numerical information, and use anti-repetition mechanisms:

        The real need for
love, companionship, and sharing can only begin to be fullled
when the soul is ready to love and give, which must never be
confused with the neurotic  need to be loved. But this confusion
between the two needs is quite frequent. As long as you believe that
you are really willing to love, but fate is slighting  you and
withholding from you the person who loves you and whom you can
love, you are really still ardently engaged in trying to fulll the
childhood need with a substitute parent. Once you are truly ready to
give up the old case, start to live in the now, and look within
yourself, real love will come  to you and your present real need will
be fullled. Legitimate needs can be fullled only to the degree you
experience your original feelings and your residual feelings of thepast. This means that you discover and give up the false needs that
have accrued from denying the pain of the original unfulllment. Let yourself regress into the child state, and allow the irrational
child in you to be expressed. If you give voice to this irrational side, you will nd that it
invariably says: “I need to be always loved and approved by
everyone. If I am not, it is a catastrophe” The self then talks itself
into believing this, as a means to force others to compl y, and the
non-fulllment of these insatiable demands for total, unconditional
gratication of selfwill and pride will seem indeed a catastrophic
fact of life. No matter how mature you may be in many respects of
your being, look for these hidden reactions in you whenever you
feel consistently anxious and uncomfortable in your environment. Just to think all this through  clearly will make it impos sible for
you to believe  in catastrophe quite as much. So it is necessary to
discover the concept, or rather the misconception, entrapped in your
strong reaction to an unfulllment, to a hurt, a criticism, or a
frustration. It is then possib le to recognize the unreal need and the
vengeance with which it is perpetuated, pursued, and justied. Unreal needs are demands made upon others. Unreal needs can never
be fullled. Often the dualistic misunderstanding that either you depend on
yourself and therefore must be all alone, or that you are in a
fullling relati onship and then utterly depend on the other, prevents
you from even wanting to assume self-responsibility. Doing so seems
to require giving up all hope for a loving partner. Exactly the
opposite is true. Only as you bring your feelings back to yourself,
tap the resourc es within yourself, and open the wells of your giving
and loving feelings, will fulllment become an inevitable reality. Conversely, to the degree you cling to and insist on the other’s
fullling you, to that degree you must remain lonely and unfullled
in your real needs now—thereby perpetuating the old wounds of
your childhood. Your present  state can thus be used as a gauge that
is more reliable than anything else. When the real need to remove the blocks to awareness, self-
fulllment, to intimacy and closeness with others, is expressed bythe spiritual self by discarding the false needs, a wonder ful force is
awakened. This is the all-im portant aim, out of which everything
else follows. This plea is never answered with a stone. Even if you
feel as yet too weak to make the necessary total commit ment, you
can ask to be helped to be able to do so. The help will come. Present Suering Is the Result of Pursuing False Needs
As you see how you now avoid the long-forgotten pain of the past
still festering within you, you also discover how you have remained
hooked on blaming. For no matter how much your parents failed—
for they themselves are failin g human beings—they cannot be held
responsible for your suering now. Even less can others whom you
expect to be able to make up for all the injuries you have endured. Your suering now is a result of this very distortion of pursuing
false needs and insisting on their fulllment. This mechanism seems
at rst extremely subtle, but once you have trained yourself to
observe it, it will become only too obvious. As long as you choose to
stay unaware, you may be very adept in rationally explaining your
case, but this will only make  your condition worse, not better. You
may indeed deceive others about how legitimate your case is. You
may even deceive your outer conscious self. But you can never
deceive your real inner self nor life. Life plays out its laws and rules
very squarely,  fairly, and impartially. It waits until you nd the
truth where your non-recognized, legitimate needs as a child created
fear and pain that you were unwilling and unable to experience
fully. That cup has to be emptied. Your unwillingnes s, in turn,
created false needs whose nature and meaning also became
concealed. When all this is out in the open, you can deal with it. The pursuit of false needs causes unbearable pain. It is tight,
locked, and bitter, with the added connotation of hopeles sness. It is
very dierent from the pain of a real unfulllment, a hurt, or a
deprivation. The moment these diculties are not channeled into
unreal needs, the pain can be dissolved and can transform itself
back into its original, owing, life-bringing energy current. Hardpain is a result of ghting against what is. Soft pain is a result of
acceptance. Letting Go of the Demand for Fulllment of Unreal Needs
When you specically let go one by one of your insatiable
demands and unreal needs, you will nd out that they are indeed
illusory. You started o with the premise, for example, that you
could not live without total approval, unconditional acceptance and
love, uncritica l admiration, or whatever else it may be. As you
consider the possibility that you might even gain fulllment,
contentment, pleasure, and happiness without these demands being
fullled—a novel idea at rst—you will be surprised to nd that it
is quite  possible to do so. New ways will make themselves known,
new possibilities you could never even have sensed before, because
you were so bent on the one way it had to be. Wherever there is obstruction, unfulllment, or an unyielding
wall in your life, an unreal need has to be looked for. You must nd
your own insistence that says, “It must be this way, not that way. Life must give me this; I must have it. ” When you nd and express
this voice and recognize it for its fallacy, something will loosen up
instantly, The very fact that you question the validity of these unreal
needs, which you had taken for granted as being real until now, will
liberate your creative energies. Deep from your innermost being,
from the center of your solar plexus, the voice of wisdom will guide you. The energies that are being  released by following through the
process describ ed here are not merely physical energies that bring
well-being, ow, and pleasu re. They release the voice of truth and
wisdom that is your own, innermost spiritual self. When you go deep into your innermost feelings, my friends, there
will be no danger of losing yourself in unendurable pain. For no
matter how dicult your childhood was, and no matter how much
negative exper ience you had, and no matter how cruel a parent may
have been, the real cause of pain is not that. The cause is your
persistence and insistence on staying hooked on needs that are bynow false needs, on demanding that conditions be dierent, and
that life now make up for it all and give to you gratuitous ly, leaving
you as a recipient, leaving you out of the magnicent game of life. This is what really hurts and pains you now. You must start with
yourself, at all junctures. If you proceed in this way, you will be
able to allow the positive feelings to become as deep and as real
experiences as the negative and painful feelings. May you all, each one of you, nd in tonight’s lecture something
that will bring  a little more light and help to your work; a little
further incentive, hope, strength, and inner pride, so as to free
yourself from your own enslavement, to make yourself whole
instead of divided. Go all in peace, my dearest ones, on this glorious
road of self-realization and freedom. Be blessed, be in God. OceanofPDF. com10 
Innite Possibilities of Experience Hindered by
Emotional Dependency
It is a universal law that you cannot bring into existence that
which you cannot rst conceive of. From this metaphysical concept,
the Guide leads us right into our childish self that keeps us, through
our continued dependency on outside approval, within the narrow
connes of our limitations. Happiness, fulllment, is our birthright. But how can we bring it into manifestation. This is a truly mind-
expanding lecture. Greetings, my dearest friends. Again, I shall try to help you to
move on from where you may be stuck. It is being said by all great spiritual teachings that creation is
innite in its possibilities and that humanity’s potential for realizing
these innite possibilities of happiness exists in the inner depths of
each person’s being. Almost  all of you have heard these words. Some of you may believe them, at least in principle; others may
have their doubts about accepting them even in theory. Let us now
try to overcom e some of the diculties in understanding these
principles. Everything in the World Exists in a State of PotentialityFirst of all, it is necessary to understand that no one person
creates anythin g new. It is also impossible for anything new to come
into existence. However, it is possible for a person to make manifest
something that already exists. It is a fact that everything, absolutely
everything, exists already on another level of consciousness. The
word everythin g cannot convey the scope of this concept. When one
speaks about God’s innity or about Creation’s innity, this is part
of the meanin g. There is no state of being, no experience, no
situation, no concept, no feeling, no object that does not already
exist. Everythi ng in the world exists in a state of potentiality which
already contai ns the nished product within it. I can see that this
idea is not easy for human beings to embrace, for it is so contrary to
your way of thinking, being, and experiencing on your average level
of consciousne ss. But the more you can deepen your thoughts on
this subject, the easier will it become for you to perceive, to sense,
and to grasp it. Knowing and understanding this principle of
creation—that all exists already and that human beings can make
these existing  possibilities manifest—is one of the necessary
prerequisites to experiencing the fullness of life’s innite potential. Before you can create new possibilities of unfoldment and entirely
new ranges of experience in your personal life, you must rst learn
to apply these  laws of creation to the problem areas of your life
where you feel troubled, limited, handicapped, or trapped. Healthy
unfoldment of the real self follows the creation of a healthy
personality. This can happen  once you learn and comprehend that
the laws of creation can work only if you apply them rst to the
troubled areas of the personality. Whatever possibility you can conceive of, you can realize. Suppose
you are immersed in a conict from which you cannot see a way
out. As long as you do not conceive of a way out, you truly cannot
realize the already existing possibility of a resolution. If your
concepts about the way out are hazy or unrealistic, so will be the
temporary solutions that will appear to you as the only possibilities. The same applies to your life as a whole. If you truly comprehend
that an innite number of possibilities exist in any given situation,
you can nd solutions where it was hitherto impossible to do so. It is your prero gative as human beings to make use of these laws
of creation and to reach out so that these innite possibilities can
unfold, enablin g you to partake fully of life’s oerings. If your life
seems limited, it is only because you are convinced your life must be
limited. You cannot conceive  of anything more than what you have
experienced up until now and are experiencing in the present. This
is precisely the rst handicap. Therefore, in order to expand your
own possibilities of happines s, your mind must grasp the principle
that you cannot bring something to life if you cannot rst conceive of it. This sentence should be truly meditated on, for understanding this
concept will open new doors for you. You should also understand
that there is a vast dierence between conceiving of further
possibilities of expansion or happiness on the one hand, and
daydreaming on the other. Wistful, resigned daydreaming that grabs
fantasy as a substitute for drab reality is not at all what is meant
here, and is in fact a hindra nce to the proper conceiving of life’s
potentials. You need to have a vigorous, active, dynamic concept of
what is possible in reality. When you know that somethin g you wish
to bring about exists in principle, you have made the rst step
toward realizing it. Avoidance Motivation Closes Out New Vistas
Therefore, I invite every one of you to contemplate what you truly
conceive of as possibilities for your life. If you examine yourself
closely, you will nd primarily that you conceive of negative
possibilities which you naturally fear, wish to avoid, and defend
yourself again st. When you use most of your psychic energies to
defend yourself against possible negative experience, your
motivation is negative. Negative motivation does not necessarily imply a destructive
intent. For that matter, a positive motivation in this context could
also mean a very destructive intent or aim. The avoid ance of a
feared possibility implies negative motivation. Upon close
examination of your mental and emotional processes you will ndthat you are negatively motivated to a considerable extent. This is
one of the rst obstructions which enclose you in an imaginary and
unnecessary prison. This applies, of course, to all levels of your
personality. It applies to the mental level, where you cannot really
envisage the innite vistas of experience, of expansion, of
stimulation, of all sorts of wondrous and happy possibilities you
have a preroga tive to achieve in this life. It exists on the emotional
level, where you do not allow the spontaneous and natural ow of
your feelings, where you fearfully, anxiously, and suspiciously hold
back. It also exists on the physical level, in that you do not permit
your body to experience the pleasure it is destined to experience. All
these are limitations that you articially and needlessly inict upon
yourself. A Cluster of Popular Misconceptions
The next obstruction to expanding your life and creating the best
of all possibl e lives for yourself is the following cluster of
misconceptions that are widespread in the world: “It is not possible
to be really happy. Human life is very limited. Happiness, pleasure,
and ecstasy are frivolous, selsh aims that truly spiritual people
must abandon for the sake of their spiritual development. Sacrice
and renunciation are the keys to spiritual development. ” We do not
have to further elucidate these deeply lodged misconceptions, which
are often more unconscious than conscious. But it is necessary for
you to discover the subtle way in which you abide by such general
concepts, no matter what you consciously believe. You may discover
these subtle reactions by observing your reluctance to take steps to
realize a perfectly harmless and normal fulllment of a genuine
need or a truly constructive aim. You feel as though something were
holding you back, paralyzing  your eorts. Although there are often
a number of other reasons for this reluctance as well—some of
which we shall discuss shortly—it is also often true that you have
simply accepte d a negative idea that really makes no sense and has
no good purpose. Fear of happiness, of pleasure, of wide expansion into one’s life
experiences is based on ignorance that such fulllment could exist
or that you possess all the powers, faculties, and resource s to create
and bring about what you wish. It is also based on misconceptions
such as, “pleasure is wrong,” or “it is selsh to want personal
fulllment. ” Fear of happiness is also based on the fear of being
annihilated and dissolved if you ever trusted the ow of the
universal forces and went with them. Such trust necessitates letting
go of the ego-w ill and the ego-forces, and then surrende ring to the
benecial forces of your deep nature. Devices to Hide Weakness and Dependency on Others
Every single human being in this world harbors an attitud e of fear
and weakness. Because this corner of the personality usually induces
a stron g shame, it is kept secret, often even from the conscious
mind. Many a dierent device is invented in order to hide this
weakness and dependency that make you feel utterly helpless,
unable to assert yourself, and even unable to protect your truth and
integrity. When it comes to this area of the soul one is constantly
compelled to sell out and betray oneself in order to ward o
disapproval, censure, and rejection. The need to be accepted by
others is usually less sham eful than the means to which the
personality resorts to placate and appease others. The ways of
defending yourselves are psychologically so fundamental that you
cannot get far in your self-purication work unless you work on
seeing how they function in your life. All the defense mechanisms
you have discovered and perhaps even begun to remove are either
your ways of obtaining what you consider to be the apparently vital
acceptance of others, or your ways of hiding your shameful
submission, often by an apparently opposite attitude of indierence,
hostility, or compulsive and blind rebellion and over-aggressiveness. The Child Within You Still Wants Validation from OthersFew things give human beings as much pain and shame  as this
inner, fearful,  weak spot that makes them feel impotent and
compelled to sell out. You already know, my friends, that this area of
the personality has remained a child. The child does not yet know  that
the whole of the personality has grown up and is indeed no longer
helpless and dependent. Infants and young children truly are
helpless and dependent on the parents. But in the childish  corner of
your being you either do not know or do not want to know that this
is no longer true. The young child is dependent on parents for all the basics of life:
shelter, food, aection, protection, and, last but not least, for the
very necessary supply of pleasure. A human being cannot live
without pleasure. To deny this truth is one of the most harmful
errors. Body, soul, mind, and spirit wither without pleasure. As an
adult you are able to nd through your own eorts and resources
your own shelter, food, aection, and safety, so you are also able to
do the same with pleasure. In all these areas you must have contact,
cooperation, and communication with others in varying degrees. You cannot provide yourself with any of these necessities without
interacting with other people. But this interaction is entirely
dierent from the passive, weak dependency of the small child. The
thoroughly adult person uses his or her own best forces,
intelligence, intuition, talents, observation, and exibi lity to get
along with others in giving and taking. Your adult sense of fairness
makes you suciently pliab le to give in. And your sense of self
makes you suciently assertive not to be stepped on and abused. The often ne balance in these forces of communication cannot be
taught. It can only come through personal growth. Children are incapable of achieving this balance. They are rigidly
one-sided in their insistence to receive, for this is their need. The
same applies to pleasure. Children must have the parents’
permission to establish and utilize the source of all pleasure deep
within themselves. Through the parents’ permission the child will
develop the strength and security to make meaningful contact. When you still need another person to permit you to experience
pleasure, you are still in the position of the child or infan t. I repeat,this never implies that anyone can do without others, but for adults
the emphasis is shifted. Mature adults nd within themselves an
inexhaustible well of wonderful feelings. Insecurity and weakness
cannot exist when these feelings are activated. When part of your development is arrested, you wait for another
person, a parent-substitute, to make it possible for you to draw on
the deep sourc e of your own rich feelings. You know of and yearn
for these pleas urable feeling,  but you do not know that you are no
longer a child dependent on others for being allowed to activate and
express them. This is your human tragedy, for you thus move into a
vicious circle. Whenever a misconception is accepted as truth,
immediately a vicious circle comes into being, paralyzing the
pleasure forces, which are a good part of the energy available to
you. Your life thus becomes dull and lusterless. To deny the intense pleasure  of being, the pleasure of feeling the
energy ow of your body, soul, and spirit, is to deny life. When a
child suers such denial, his or her psyche receives a shock from the
repeated absen ce of pleasure and therefore the repeated presence of
unfullled yearning. The shock prevents growth in this one area so
that the whole personality grows lopsidedly. Your adult conscious
mind ignores the fact that a crying, demanding, angry, and helpless
child still exists within you. You do not know that you are free to
move toward pleasure, toward your own fulllment, toward the
realization of your own powers to obtain whatever you want and
need. This is one of the most fundamental splits in the human
personality. Vicious Circle and Forcing-Current
Let us now look a bit closer at this hidden corner of your psyche
where all of you have remained children. Where do you ignore this
fact and where does your inner child ignore the rights and powers of
your adult state. The particular vicious circle I mentioned before is
this: When you do not know that everything in the universe already
exists, and that you can manifest whatever you need in your ownlife, you feel dependent on an outside force or authority for all your
wants and needs. Because of this distortion of the facts, you wait for
fulllment from the wrong source. Such waiting keeps your need
perpetually unfullled. The more unfullled it is, the more urgent the
need becomes. The more urgen t the need, the greater your dependency,
your hope, and the more frantic your attempts to please the other
who is suppos ed to ll your need. You then become desperate; the
more you try, the less you fulll your need precisely because your
attempts are unrealistic. Consciously you know none of this; you do
not know what forces drive you nor even in what directi on you are
driven. You become desperat e because in your urgency to have the
need fullled you betray yourself, your truth, and the best in you. Your frustrated striving and your self-betrayal create a forcing-
current. The forcing-current may manifest in a very subtle way and may
not be overt at all, but the emotions are all cramped up with it. This
must inevitably aect others and have its lawful and appropriate
consequences. Any forcing-current is bound to make others resist and
shrink back, even if what they are forced to do is for their own
benet and delight. Thus the vicious circle continues. The continued
frustration, which you believe to be caused by the other person’s
mean refusal to cooperate and to give, brings into your soul rage,
fury, perhaps even vindictiveness and varying degrees of cruel
impulses. This, in turn, weakens the personality even more as guilt
comes up. You conclude that your destructive feeling s must be
hidden so as not to antagonize this other person whom you perceive
as the source of life. The net of entanglement becomes tighter and
tighter; the individual is completely ensnarled in this trap of
misconceptions, distortions, and illusions with all the destructive
emotions that follow suit. You nd yourself in the preposterous
position of craving the love and acceptance of a person whom you
hate and resent for having left you unfullled for so long. This one-
sided insistence on being loved by a person one deeply resents and
wishes to punish increases the guilt, for the ever-wakeful presence
of your real self ashes its reaction into a mind that is unable tointerpret and sort out the messages of the real self from those that
come from the child inside. The fact that your need is not fullled by the other also weakens
your conviction that you have a right to the pleasure you so much
desire. You vaguely suspect that you may be wrong to even want
this pleasure. Thus you begin to displace the original, natural need
and desire for pleasure into other channels where they are
sublimated. Other, more or less compulsive, needs come into
existence. All the while you are torn between the force of the deeply
hidden original need and the doubt that you have a right to its
fulllment. The more you doubt, the more dependent you become
on reconrma tion by an outside authority—a parent-substitute,
public opinion, or certain groups of people who represent the last
word of truth to you. The more this vicious circle goes on, the less pleasure remains in
the psyche, while unpleasure accumulates. Such a person must
increasingly despair about life and doubt that fulllment is possible. There comes a point when a person inwardly gives up. There is not a single human being who does not harbor within
such a weak area, at least to some degree. In this secret corner, you
feel not only helpless and dependent, but also deeply ashamed. The
shame is due to the methods you employ to placate the person who
at any given period is supposed to fulll the role of the authority
and grant you what you need in the way of pleasure, safety, and
self-respect. The forcing-current says, “you must,” and you make demands on
others to be, feel, and do what you need and desire. These demands
may not manif est outwardly  at all. In fact, on the surfac e you may
totally lack self-assertion. Your inability or diculty to healthily
assert yourself  is a direct result of having to hide the underlying
shameful and threatening forcing-current. It is threatenin g because
you know quite well that if it shows openly, it will evoke great
censure and disapproval and possibly even overt rejection. I invite all of you to vigorously face this area in yourselve s. All of
you must tackle it if you wish to realize life’s and your own bestpotentials, and if you wish to discover your own innite  powers to
create innite goodness in your life. The stronger the “you must” is secretly thrown at others, the more
you inactivate  your own powers. The result is that you become
paralyzed and inactive in body, soul, and mind. This inactivity
keeps you from moving into your own nucleus, the place  where all
realistic promi se and all potential for every kind of fulllment and
delight exist. You inadverten tly make yourself hang on to others,
which must elicit hate in you. Finding the treasure of your own
nucleus, on the contrary, makes you free. Then contact with others
becomes a delightful luxury that elicits love. By continually using inner, covert pressure on others because you
believe you are dependent on them, you diminish your available
energy supply. If energy is used in its natural, correct, and
meaningful way, it never exhausts itself. You know this, my friends. Energy only exhausts itself when it is wrongly used. There are
innumerable methods that human beings use in order to switch on
this forcing-current. They include compliance in varyin g degrees,
passive resistance, spite, withdrawal, refusal to cooperate, forceful
outer aggression, intimidation, and persuasion through false
strength and assumption of an authority role. Deep down they all
mean, “You must love me and give me what I need. ” The more
blindly you are involved in this way of being, the more you weaken
and then further alienate yourself from the center of your true inner
life, where you nd all that you can ever need and want. Let Go—Let Out
In order to reorient the soul forces  toward health and restore their
true nature, the following has to happen: Let go of the particular
person or persons from whom you expect your life fulllment and
whom you simultaneously resent for this very fact. You must all
recognize that you place expectations and make demands  on others
that no one else but you yourself can fulll. All you need and long
for, including real love, can only come when your soul is fearless,and you know that the strength of your feelings with which you can
give and receive love is located within you. For as long as you hang
onto another person in the way of a child, denying the adult you
are, you enslave yourself in the true sense of the word. The more
you do this, the less you can either receive or give, and the less real
feelings of any sort about any vital experience can nd their home
within you. Because fear and anger  take up most of the room in your psyche, it
is essential to let out these negative emotions in the way you learn
to do in the Pathwork where no one is harmed. Letting out fear and
anger makes room for the good feelings. So many of you are still
locked and paralyzed. Expressing fear and anger is the last thing you
want to do. Even if you admit to such negative emotions in
principle, you still prefer to act them out in unconsciousness rather
than expressing them directly and taking the responsibility for them. You still claim a false perfe ction—even though you do not really
believe that it exists in you any longer—in order to favorably
dispose others toward you. Also, you cling for dear life to negative
emotions because you fear positive feelings. This is yet another
aspect of the same vicious circle. The less you see yourself as responsible for the negative feelings
you still possess as well as for your right and ability to create
happiness, the more you must live in fear. Consequently, the more
you must do something to eliminate that fear. Thus negative
motivation comes about. You live a makeshift life of avoidance
rather than create an expansive, unfolding life lled with positive
experience and pleasure. You aim to avoid the threat of expressing
your own negative feelings because they would spoil your obtaining
from others everything that you must in fact obtain from within
yourself. You stake your salvation on others from whom it can never
come. Your reorientation to life—a part from the fundamental necessity
of recognizing all these negative aspects—must always begin with
the willingness to let go. This cannot be forced upon one who has
not been made aware of the dependency itself in very exact ways. But once this is the case, it becomes possible to give up what onehas been so tightly holding on to. This loosening up must occur to
bring about a change in the balance structure of soul forces so that
benign circles can begin to perpetuate themselves. You also need to be willing to dispense with your ration alization
that appears to make your case seem justied. For you can always
succeed in presenting your life to yourself and to others  as though
your wishes, needs, and demands on others are not only justied,
since there is nothing wrong with them, but are also benecial for
the other person. This may even be quite true, as far as it goes. What you want, in principle, may indeed be good and within your
right. But when using a hidden, emotional forcing-current, you go
about seeking satisfaction in the wrong way and not granting the
other person the same freedom you wish for yourself. You do not
give the other person the right to freely choose whom to love and
accept or the right not to be rejected and hated for asserting this
freedom. You do not even give the other the right to be wrong
without being hated and totally denied. This is a freedo m which you
very much wish for yourself, and you deeply resent others when they
do not grant it to you. You are unable to defend yourself in an
adequate way in such cases only because on certain emotional levels
you do not grant this same freedom to others. When you look very
closely you will nd this to be true. And when you do so, your sense
of fairness and objectivity will help you to give up what you so
desperately hold on to, even while you emotionally still believe that
your life depends on getting the other to feel and do as you wish. Take O the Leash Around Your Neck
Once you have learned this initial condition, allowing for the
number of inevitable relapse s that must forever be newly observed,
you will make  a huge step toward that source of your inner being
where you are not chained in weakness and anxiety, or in fear and
anger. You all chafe at some leash around your neck that keeps you
dependent and anxious in a situation in which you cannot nd the
strength to assert yourself, in which you nd yourself absolutelycaught and unable to see a way out because each possibility seems
wrong. You know that none of the visible alternatives give you that
good feeling about yourself, that resilient strength and well-being in
which even dicult steps become feasible because you know they
are right for you. Most of you have at least occasionally experienced
this state of inner knowingness  when your real self was freely
operative within you. It is our aim to bring out that real self completely. In order to liberate the real self, you must nd that area of your life
where you are most bound and most anxious. Ask yourself what it is
you want from the other when you are so bound, so resentful, so
afraid, so weak, so unable to be yourself. Experience this leash
which can be given up only when you stop wanting from others
what you must supply for yourself. Verbalize concisely  to yourself
whatever you nd you need from others. This will bring you nearer
to letting go. You will then know that this is precisely the
compulsive need with which you enslave, weaken, and paralyze
yourself. When  you let go, you will experience a new, resilient
strength coming out of you that suddenly conciliates apparently
insoluble probl ems. You will become free as you let free. Only when
you can lose on the ego-level can you win on the level of the real
self, where the power is to create a good life. Conversely, your inability to give up, to be fair, to let others free,
your insistence  to win and have your way, and your refusal to lose
on the ego-level make it impossible for you to win where it counts
and where you would nd your real strength. Jesus Christ meant
this when he said that he who wants to live must be willing to lose
his life. In one of my very rst lectures, I spoke of this when I said,
“You must give up what you want to gain. ”
Here we are dealing with levels of consciousness. I hope it is quite
clear that no sacrice or renunciation is required. What is meant is
that you canno t obtain what you want, and what you indeed should
have, by pressuring an outer source with all your eorts. The
emphasis must shift. If you insist that you must win on the wrong
level, you cannot truly win. If you can lose on that ego level, you will
win. You will then inevitably come into that nucleus of yourself
where every conceivable power exists. As you grant others the rightto be, whether  it is convenient to you or not, to that extent you will
truly nd your own rights. It is a steady growing process  to nd these rights. The process will
rst manifest by your no longer selling out or downgrading yourself. You will nd genuine, good defenses against abuse and you will feel
good about them. Later you will discover your ever-increasing right
for pleasure and happiness. You will nd that you move toward
visions of what your life could be, toward possibilities you never
dreamed could exist. You will suddenly permit yourself pleasure. You will no longer cramp  up against it, as you inadvertently
continue to do now. You will stop undermining the spontaneous
processes, and you will learn  to trust them. This will open a richness
of life and a security that truly are heavenly. By letting go and
giving up your inner forcing-current, you will experience the beauty
of free, unforced relationship s. When you live in the old dependency
pattern, you force others to make them do what you want. Thus you
have mutual forcing-currents. This weakens you and creates a host
of negative emotions that cause you to lose contact with the nucleus
of your real being, as well as with your good feelings. When you can
lose gracefully, you will nd a treasure within, a new way of life
that is an entirely new venture on which you are just embarking. The areas in your life where  you feel so weak and so trapped will
cease to exist. Reach into your inner being and communicate with it for the
purpose of eliminating this weakness in you that binds you and that
wastefully and needlessly holds you back in your life. No matter
how much you may glorify this holding back, it serve s no good
purpose. All of you do hold back in one way or another, just as
humankind has done for millennia, by saying that pleasure is wrong
and frivolous and unspiritual. You may have your own private
excuse to beautify your weakness and apparently make an asset out
of it. Yet in following this reasoning you cannot really come face to
face with yourself. Only by coming face to face with your weakness
and dependency, with your forcing-current that says to others “you
must,” can you also come face to face with your strength andbeauty, and with all the potentials that exist in you in a way you
cannot even fathom yet. Be blessed by the great strength that is here now, but even more
so by the great strength that dwells in you. Be in peace. Be in God.
The true need for love and companionship can only be fulfilled when the soul is ready to love and give, and not when we try to force others to fulfill our childhood needs.
What is the true nature of the need for love and companionship?
The main obstacle is our insistence on pursuing false needs and demanding that others fulfill them, which leads to a vicious cycle of unfulfilled needs and dependence on others.
What is the main obstacle to fulfilling our real needs?
The key is to recognize and let go of our false needs, and to take responsibility for our own fulfillment and growth, rather than relying on others to fulfill our needs.
What is the key to breaking free from this cycle?
A crisis is an attempt by the universe to bring about change and growth, and to help us break free from our negative patterns and attitudes.
What is the purpose of a crisis in our lives?
We can overcome these forces by acknowledging and accepting our own limitations and taking responsibility for our own change, and by trusting in the Universal Spirit and its power to guide and support us.
How can we overcome the negative self-perpetuating forces that prevent us from changing and growing?