Self-Acceptance
The genuine desire to better oneself leads one to accept one’s
personality as it is now. If this basic premise is the main governing
force of your motivation for perfection, any discovery of where you
fall short of your ideals will not throw you into depressio n, anxiety,
and guilt, but will rather strengthen you. You will not need to
exaggerate the “badness” of the behavior in question, nor will you
defend yourse lf against it with the excuse that it is the fault of
others, of life, of fate. You will gain an objective view of yourself in
this respect, and this view will liberate you. You will fully assume
responsibility for the faulty attitude, being willing to take the
consequences upon yourself. When you act out your idealized self,
you dread nothing more than that, for taking the responsibility of
your shortcom ings upon yourself is tantamount to saying , “I am not
my idealized self.”The Inner Tyrant
Feelings of failure, frustratio n, and compulsion, as well as guilt
and shame, are the most outstanding indications that your idealized
self is at work. These are the consciously felt emotions  out of all
those that lie hidden underneath. Actually, the basis of the tyranny
of the idealized self-image is the sense of false shame  and false guilt
that this image  produces when one cannot live up to it. In addition,
the idealized self also manifests false needs , which are superimposed
and articially created, like the need for glory, the need to triumph,
to satisfy vanity or pride. The pursuit of these needs never results in
true fulllment. The idealized self has been called into existence in order to attain
self-condence and therefore, nally, happiness, pleasure supreme. The stronger its presence, the more genuine self-condence fades
away. Since you cannot live up to its standards, you think even less
of yourself than you origin ally did. It is therefore obvious that
genuine self-condence can be established only when you remove
the superstructure, which is this merciless tyrant, your idealized
self. Yes, you could have self-co ndence if the idealized self were
really you; and if you could live up to these standards. Since this is
impossible and since, deep down, you know perfectly well you are
not anything like what you think you are supposed to be, you build
up additional insecurity with this “super self,” and further vicious
circles come into existence. The original insecurity, which was
supposedly whisked away by the establishment of the idealized self,
steadily increa ses. It snowballs, and becomes worse and worse. The
more insecure you feel, the more stringent the demands of the
superstructure or idealized self, the less you are able to live up to it,
and the more insecure you feel. It is very important to see how this
vicious circle works. But this cannot be done until and unless you
become fully aware of the devious, subtle, unconscious ways in
which this idealized self-ima ge exists in your particular case. Askyourself in what particular areas it manifests. What causes and
eects are connected with it? Estrangement from the Real Self
A furth er and drastic result of this problem is the constantly
increasing estrangement from the real self. The idealized self is a
falsity. It is a rigid, articiall y constructed imitation of a live human
being. You may invest it with many aspects of your real being;
nevertheless, it remains an articial construct. The more you invest
your energies, your persona lity, your thought processes , concepts,
ideas, and ideals into it, the more strength you take from the center
of your being, which alone is amenable to growth. This center of
your being is the only part of you, the real you, that can live, grow,
and be. It is the only part that can properly guide you. It alone
functions with all your capacities. It is exible and intuitive. Its
feelings alone are true and valid even if, for the moment, they are
not yet fully in truth and reality, in perfection and purity. But the
feelings of the real self function in perfection relative to what you
are now. The more you take out of that live center in order to invest
into the robot you have created, the more estranged you become
from the real self and the more you weaken and impoverish it. In the course of this work, you have sometimes come upon the
puzzling and often frightenin g question: “Who am I really?”  This is
the result of the discrepancy and struggle between the real and the
false self. Only upon solving  this most vital and profoun d question
will your live center respond and function to its full capacity, will
your intuition begin to function to its full capacity, will you become
spontaneous, free of all compulsions, will you trust in your feelings
because they will have an opportunity to mature and grow. Feelings
will become every bit as reliable to you as your reasoning power
and your intellect. All this is the nal nding of self. Before this can be done, a great
many hurdles have to be overcome. It seems to you that this is a
life-or-death struggle. You still believe you need the idealized self inorder to live and be happy. Once you understand that this is not so,
you will be able to give up the pseudo-defense that makes the
maintenance and cultivation of the idealized self seem so necessary. Once you understand that the idealized self was supposed to solve
the particular problems in your life above and beyond your need for
happiness, pleasure, and security, you will come to see the wrong
conclusion of this theory. Once you go a step still further and
recognize the damage the idealized self has brought into your life,
you will shed it as the burden it is. No conviction, theory, or words
you hear will make you give it up, but the recognition of what
specically it was supposed to solve and what damage it has done
and is continui ng to do will enable you to dissolve this image of all
images. Needless to say, you also have to recognize most particularly and
in detail what your idealized  self’s specic demands and standards
are, and, further, you have to see their unreasonableness, their
impossibility. When you have a feeling of acute anxiety and
depression, consider the fact that your idealized self may feel
questioned and threatened, either by your own limitations, by
others, or by life. Recognize the self-contempt that underlies the
anxiety or depression. When you are compulsively angry at others,
consider the possibility that this is but an externalizatio n of your
anger at yourself for not living up to the standards of your false self. Do not let it get away with using the excuse of outer problems to
account for acute depression  or fear. Look into the question from
this new angle . Your private and personal work will help you in this
direction, but it is almost impossible to do it alone. Only after you
have made some substantia l progress will you recognize that so
many of these outer problems are directly or indirectly the result of
the discrepancy between your capacities and the standar ds of your
idealized self and how you deal with this conict. So, as you proceed in this particular phase of the work, you will
come to understand the exact nature of your idealized self: Its
demands, its requirements of self and others in order to maintain
the illusion. Once you fully see that what you regarded as
commendable is really pride  and pretense, you will have gained amost substantial insight that enables you to weaken the impact of
the idealized self. Then, and then only, will you realize the
tremendous self-punishment you inict upon yourself. For whenever
you fall short, as you are bound to, you feel so impatient, so
irritated, that your feelings can snowball into fury and wrath at
yourself. This fury and wrath  are often projected on others because
it is too unbea rable to be aware of self-hate, unless one unrolls this
whole process and sees it entire, in the light. Neverthele ss, even if
this hate is unloaded upon others, the eect on the self is still there
and it can cause disease, accident, loss, and outer failur e in many
ways. Giving Up the Idealized Self
When you make the very rst steps toward giving up the idealized
self, you will feel a sense of liberation as never before. Then you
will be truly born again; your real self will emerge. Then you will
rest within your real self, centered within. Then you will truly grow,
not only on the outer fringes that may have been free of the
idealized self’s dictatorship, but in every part of your being. This
will change many things. First will come changes in your reactions
to life, to incidents, to yourself and others. This changed reaction
will be astounding enough, but, little by little, outer things are also
bound to change. Your dier ent attitude will have new eects. The
overcoming of your idealized self means overcoming an important
aspect of the duality between life and death. At present you are not even aware of the pressure of your
idealized self, of the shame , humiliation, exposure you fear and
sometimes feel, of the tension, strain, and compulsion. If you have
an occasional glimpse of such emotions, you do not as yet connect
them with the fantastic demands of your idealized self. Only after
fully seeing these fanta stic expectations and their often
contradictory imperatives will you relinquish them. The initial inner
freedom gained in this way will allow you to deal with life and to
stand in life. You will no longer have to hold on frantic ally to theidealized self. The mere inner activity of holding on so frantically
generates a pervasive clima te of holding on in gener al. This is
sometimes lived out in external attitudes, but most often it is an
inner quality or attitude. As you proceed in this new phase of your
work, you will sense and feel this inner tightness and gradually you
will recognize the basic damage it causes. It makes the letting go of
many an attitude impossible. It makes it unduly dicult to go
through any change that would allow life to bring forth joy and a
spirit of vigor. You keep yourself contained within yourself and
thereby you go against life in one of its most fundamental aspects. The words are insucient; you have to sense rather what  I mean. You will know exactly when you have weakened your idealized self
by fully understanding its function, its causes and eects. Then you
will gain the great freedom of giving yourself to life because you no
longer have to hide something from yourself and others. You will be
able to squander yoursel f into life, not in an unhealthy,
unreasonable way, but healthily as nature squanders herself. Then,
and then only will you know the beauty of living. You cannot approach this most important part of your inner work
with a general concept. As usual, your most insignicant daily
reactions, considered from this viewpoint, will yield the necessary
results. So continue your self-search out of these new considerations
and do not be impatient if it takes time and relaxed eort. Coming Home
One more word: The dieren ce between the real and the idealized
self is often not a question of quantity, but rather of quali ty. That is,
the original motivation is dierent in these two selves. This will not
be easy to see, but as you recognize the demands, the
contradictions, the cause-and-eect sequences, the dierence in
motivation will gradually become clear to you. Another important
consideration is the time element. The idealized self wants to be
perfect, accord ing to its specic demands, right now. The real self
knows this cannot be and does not consider this fact painful.Of course you are not perfec t. Your present self is a complex of
everything you are at the moment. Of course you have your basic
egocentricity, but if you own up to it, you can cope with it. You can
learn to understand it and therefore diminish it with each new
insight. Then you will truly experience the truth that the more
egocentric you are, the less self-condent you can be. The idealized
self believes just the opposite. Its claims for perfection are motivated
by purely egocentric reasons,  and this very egocentricity makes self-
condence impossible. The great freedom of coming home , my friends, is nding your
way back to the real you. The expression “coming home” has often
been used in spiritual literature and teachings, but it has been much
misunderstood. It is often interpreted to mean the return into the
spirit world after physical death. Much more is meant by coming
home. You may die many deaths, one earth life after another, but if
you have not found your real self, you cannot come home. You may
be lost and remain lost until you do nd the way into the center of
your being. On the other hand, you can nd your way home right
here and right now while you are still in the body. When you muster
the courage to become your real self, even though it would seem
much less than the idealized self, you will nd out that it is much
more. Then you will have the peace of being at home within
yourself. Then  you will nd security. Then you will function as a
whole human being. Then you will have broken the iron whip of a
taskmaster whom it is impossible to obey. Then you will know what
peace and security really mean. You will cease once and for all to
seek them by false means. May you all nd truth and help and further enligh tenment
through the words I gave you tonight. However, you should
understand and expect that a theoretical understanding will avail
you nothing. As long as these words remain theory you will not be
helped by them. When you begin or continue to work in this
direction and allow yourself to feel and observe your emotional
reactions connected to your idealized self, then you will make
substantial progress in your own liberation and self-nd ing in the
truest sense of the word.My dearest ones, each one of you, receive our love, our strength,
and our blessings. Be in peace, be in God! OceanofPDF.com3 
Compulsion to Recreate and Overcome
Childhood Hurts
The Guide says that depth psychology is a spiritual discipline,
because only through knowing yourself can you purify your soul,
that is, cleanse it of self-destru ctive patterns and make it ready to
connect with the inner God. The “repetition compulsion” is well
known in psychology; what this repetition is supposed to achieve,
however, has never been as illuminatingly explained as in this
lecture. Our repeated negative experiences are bound up not only
with our early childhood, but also with previous incarnations. With
the help of this lecture we can discover why we keep running in our
respective squirrel cages and how we can stop doing so . Greetings, my dearest friends. God bless all of you. May the divine
blessings extended to every  one of you help you assimilate the
words I speak tonight, so that this will be a fruitful occasion for you. The Lack of Mature Love
Because children so seldom receive sucient mature love and
warmth, they continue to hunger for it throughout their lives unless
this lack and hurt is recognized and properly dealt with. If not, as
adults they will go through life unconsciously crying out for what they
missed in childhood . This will make them incapable of lovingmaturely. You can see how this condition continues from generation
to generation. The remedy cannot be found by wishing that things were dierent
and that people would learn  to practice mature love. The remedy
lies solely in you. True, if you had received such love from your
parents, you would be witho ut this problem of which you are not
really and fully aware. But this lack of receiving mature  love need
trouble neither you nor your life if you become aware of it, see it,
and rearrange your former unconscious wishes, regrets, thoughts,
and concepts by aligning them to the reality of each situation. As a
consequence, you will not only become a happier person, but you
will also be able to extend mature love to others—to your children,
if you have any, or to other people in your environment—so that a
benign chain reaction can start. Such realistic self-correction is very
contrary to your present inner behavior, which we shall now
consider. All people, including even those few who have started to explore
their own unconscious mind and emotions, habitually overlook the
strong link between the child’s longing and unfulllme nt and the
adult’s present diculties and problems, because only very few
people experie nce personally —and not just recognize in theory—
how strong this link is. Full awareness of it is essential. There may be isolated, exceptional cases where one parent oers
a sucient degree of mature love. Even if one parent has it to some
measure, very likely the other does not. Since mature love on this
earth is only present to a degree, the child will suer from the
shortcomings of even a loving parent. More often, however, both parents are emotionally immature and
cannot give the love the child craves, or give it only in insucient
measure. During childhood, this need is rarely conscious. Children
have no way of putting their needs into thoughts. They cannot
compare what they have with what others have. They do not know
that something else might exist. They believe this is the way it
should be. Or, in extreme cases, they feel especially isolated,
believing their lot is like no one else’s. Both attitudes deviate from
the truth. In both cases the real emotion is not conscious andtherefore cannot be properly evaluated and come to terms with. Thus, children  grow up never quite understanding why they are
unhappy, nor even that they are unhappy. Many of you look back
on childhood convinced that you had all the love you wanted just
because you actually did have some love. There are a number of paren ts who give great demonstrations of
love. They may overindulge their children. Such spoiling and
pampering may be an overcompensation and a sort of apology for a
deeply suspected inability to love maturely. Children feel the truth
very acutely. They may not consciously think about it, but inwardly
children keenly feel the dierence between mature, genuine love
and the immature, over-demonstrative variety oered instead. Proper guidance and security are the parents’ responsibility and
call for author ity on their part. There are parents who never dare to
punish or exert a healthy authority. This failing is due to guilt
because real, giving, warming, comforting love is absent in their
own immature personalities. Other parents may be too severe, too
strict. They thereby exert a domineering authority by bullying the
child, and not allowing his or her individuality to unfold. Both types
fall short as parents, and their wrong attitudes, absorb ed by the
child, will cause hurt and unfulllment. In child ren of the strict paren ts, the resentment and rebellion will
be open, and therefore more easily traced. In the other case, the
rebellion is just as strong, but hidden, and therefore innitely
harder to trace. If you had a parent who smothered you with
aection or pseudo-aection, yet lacked in genuine warmth, or if
you had a parent who conscientiously did everything right but was
also lacking in real warmth,  unconsciously you knew it as a child
and you resented it. Consciously you may not have been aware of it
at all, because,  when a child,  you really could not put your nger on
what was lacking. You were outwardly given everything you wanted
and needed. How could you draw the subtle, ne borderline
distinction between real aection and pseudo-aection with your
child’s intellect? The fact that something bothered you without your
being able to explain it rationally made you feel guilty anduncomfortable. You therefore pushed it out of sight as far as
possible. As long as the hurt, disappointment, and unfullled needs  of your
early years remain unconscious, you cannot come to terms with
them. No matter how much you may love your parents, an
unconscious resentment exists in you, which prevents you from
forgiving them  for the hurt. You can only forgive and let go if you
recognize your deeply hidden hurt and resentment. As an adult
human being you will see that your parents, too, are just human
beings. They were not as faultless and perfect as the child had
thought and hoped them to be, yet they are not to be rejected now
because they had their own conicts and immaturities. The light of
conscious reasoning has to be applied to these very emotions you
never allowed yourself to be aware of fully. Attempts to Remedy the Childhood Hurt in Adulthood
As long as you are unaware of the conict between your longing
for a perfect love from your parents and your resentment against
them, you are bound to try remedying the situation in your later
years. This striving may manifest in various aspects of your life. You
run constantly into problems and repeated patterns that have their
origin in your attempt to reproduce the childhood situation so as to
correct it . This unconscious compulsio n is a very strong factor, but is
so deeply hidden from your conscious understanding! The most frequ ent way of attempting to remedy the situation is in
your choice of love partners . Unconsciously you will know how to
choose in the partner aspec ts of the parent who has particularly
fallen short in aection and love that is real and genuine. But you
also seek in your partner aspects of the other parent who has come
closer to meeting your demands. Important as it is to nd both
parents represented in your partners, it is even more important and
more dicult to nd those aspects that represent the parent who
has particularly disappointed and hurt you, the one more resented
or despised and for whom you had little or no love. So you seek theparents again—in a subtle way that is not always easy to detect, in
your marital partners, in your friendships, or in other human
relationships. In your subconscious, the following reactions take
place: Since the child in you cannot let go of the past, cannot come
to terms with it, cannot forgive, cannot understand and accept, this
very child in you always creates similar conditions, trying to win
out in the end in order to nally master the situation instead of
succumbing to it. Losing out means being crushed—thi s must be
avoided at all costs. The costs are high indeed, for the entire
strategy is unfeasible. What the child in you sets out to accomplish
cannot ever come to realization. The Fallacy of this Strategy
This entire procedure is utterly destructive. In the rst place, it is
an illusion that you were defeated. Therefore, it is an illusion that
you can now be victorious. Moreover, it is an illusion that the lack
of love, sad as that may have been when you were a child , is indeed
the tragedy that your subco nscious still feels it to be. The only
tragedy lies in the fact that you obstruct your future happiness by
continuing to reproduce the situation and then attempting to master
it. My friends,  this process is a deeply unconscious one. Of course,
nothing is further from your mind as you focus on your conscious
aims and wishes. It will take a great deal of digging to uncover the
emotions that lead you again  and again into situations where your
secret aim is to remedy childhood woes. In trying to reproduce the childhood situation, you unconsciously
choose a partner with aspects  similar to those of the parent. Yet it is
these very aspects that will make it as impossible to receive the
mature love you rightfully long for now as it was then. Blindly, you
believe that by willing it more strongly and more forcefully, the
parent-partner will now yield, whereas in reality love cannot come
that way. Only when you are free of this ever-continuing repetition,
will you no longer cry to be loved by the parent. Instead, you will
look for a partner or for other human relationships with the aim ofnding the maturity you really need and want. In not demanding to
be loved as a child, you will be equally willing to love. However,
the child in you nds this impossible, no matter how much you may
otherwise be capable of it through development and progress. This
hidden conict eclipses your otherwise growing soul. If you already have a partner , the uncovering of this con ict may
show you how he or she is similar to your parents in certain
immature aspects. But since you now know that there is hardly a
really mature person, these immaturities in your partner will no
longer be the tragedy they were while you constantly sought to nd
your parent or parents again , which of course could never come to
pass. With your existing immaturity and incapacity, you may
nevertheless build a more mature relationship, free of the childish
compulsion to recreate and correct the past. You have no idea how preoccupied your subconscious is with the
process of reenacting the play, so to speak, only hoping  that “this
time it will be dierent.” And it never is! As time goes on, each
disappointment weighs heavier and your soul becomes more and
more discouraged. For those of my friends who have not yet reached certain depths
of their unexplored subconscious, this may sound quite preposterous
and contrived. However, those of you who have come to see the
power of your hidden trends, compulsions, and images will not only
readily believe  it, but will soon experience the truth of these words
in their own personal lives. You already know from other ndings
how potent are the workings of your subconscious mind, how
shrewdly it goes about its destructive and illogical ways. Reexperiencing the Childhood Hurt
If you learn to look at your problems and unfulllment from this
point of view and follow the usual process of allowing your
emotions to come to the fore, you will gain much further insight. But it will be necessary, my friends, to reexperience the longing and
the hurt of the crying child you were once, even though you werealso a happy one. Your happiness may have been valid and without
self-deception at all. For it is possible to be both happy and
unhappy. You may now be perfectly aware of the happy  aspects of
your childhoo d, but that which hurt deeply and that certain
something you greatly longed for—you did not even quite know
what—you were not aware of. You took the situation for granted. You did not know what was missing or even that there was anything
missing. This basic unhappin ess has to come to awareness now, if
you really want to proceed in inner growth. You have to
reexperience the acute pain you once suered but you pushed out of
sight. Now you have to look at this pain conscio us of the
understanding you have gained. Only by doing this will you grasp
the reality value of your current problems and see them in their true
light. Now, how can you manage to reexperience the hurts of so long ago? There is only one way, my friends. Take a current problem. Strip it
of all the superimposed layers of your reactions. The rst and most
handy layer is that of ration alization, that of “proving” that others,
or situations, are at fault, not your innermost conicts that make
you adopt the wrong attitud e to the actual problem that confronts
you. The next layer might be anger, resentment, anxiety, frustration. Behind all these reactions you will nd the hurt of not being loved. When you experience the hurt of not being loved in your current
dilemma, it will serve to reawaken the childhood hurt. While you
face the present hurt, think back and try to reconsider the situation
with your parents: what they gave you, how you really  felt about
them. You will become aware that in many ways you lacked a
certain something you never clearly saw before—you did not want
to see it. You will nd that this must have hurt you when you were
a child, but you may have forgotten this hurt on a consc ious level. Yet it is not forgotten at all. The hurt of your current problem is the
very same hurt. Now, reevaluate your present hurt, comparing it
with the childhood hurt. At last you will clearly see how it is one
and the same. No matter how true and understandable your present
pain is, it is nevertheless the same childhood pain. A little later you
will come to see how you contributed to bringing about the presentpain because of your desire to correct the childhood hurt. But at
rst you only have to feel the similarity of the pain. However, this
requires considerable eort, for there are many overlaying emotions
that cover the present pain as well as the past one. Before you have
succeeded in crystallizing the pain you are experiencing, you cannot
understand anything further in this respect. Once you can synchronize these two pains and realize that they
are one and the same, the next step is much easier. Then, by
perceiving the repetitious pattern in your various diculties, you
will learn to recognize the similarities between your paren ts and the
people who have caused you hurt or are causing you pain now. Experiencing these similarities emotionally will carry you further on
the particular road toward dissolving this basic conict. Mere
intellectual evaluation will not yield any benet. To be fruitful and
bring real results, the process of giving up the recreatio n must go
beyond mere intellectual knowledge. You have to allow yourself to
feel the pain of certain unfulllments now and also the pain of the
unfulllment of your childhood, then compare the two until, like
two separate picture slides,  they gradually move into focus and
become one. Experiencing the pain of now and the pain of then, you
will slowly come to understand how you thought you had to choose
the current situation becaus e deep inside you could not possibly
admit “defeat .” Once this happens, the insight you gain, the
experience you feel exactly as I say here, will enable you to take the
next step. It goes without saying that many people are not even aware of
any pain, past or present. They busily push it out of sight. Their
problems do not appear as “pain.” For them, the very rst step is to
become aware that this pain is present and that it hurts innitely
more as long as they have not become aware of it. Many people are
afraid of this pain and like to believe that by ignoring it they can
make it disappear. They chose such a means of relief only because
their conicts have become too great for them. How much more
wonderful it is for a person to choose this path with the wisdom and
conviction that a hidden conict, in the long run, does as much
damage as a manifest one. They will not fear to uncover the realemotion and will feel even in the temporary experienc e of acute
pain, that in that moment it turns into a healthy growing pain, free
of bitterness, tension, anxiety, and frustration. There are also those who tolerate the pain, but in a negat ive way,
always expecting it to be remedied from the outside. Such people
are in a way nearer to the solution because for them it will be quite
easy to see how the childish process still operates. The outside is the
oending parent, or both parents, projected onto other human
beings. They have only to redirect the approach to their pains. They
do not have to nd it. How to Stop Recreating? Only after experiencing all these emotions, and synchronizing the
“now” and the “then,” will you become aware of how you tried to
correct the situation. You will further see the folly of the
unconscious desire to recreate the childhood hurt, the frustrating
uselessness of it. You will survey all your actions and reactions with
this new understanding and insight, whereupon you will release
your parents. You will leave your childhood truly behind and start a
new, inner behavior pattern that will be innitely more constructive
and rewarding for you and for others. You will no longer seek to
master the situation you could not master as a child. You will go on
from where you are, forgetting and forgiving truly inside of you,
without even thinking that you have done so. You will no longer
need to be loved as you needed to be loved when you were a child. First you become aware that this is what you still wish, and then
you no longer seek this kind of love. Since you are no longer a child,
you will seek love in a dierent way, by giving it instead of
expecting it. It must always be emphasized, however, that many
people are not aware that they do expect it. Since the childish,
unconscious expectation was so often disappointed, they made
themselves give up all expectations and all desire for love. Needless
to say, this is neither genuine nor healthy, for it is a wrong extreme.To work on this inner conict is of great importance for all of
you, so that you gain a new outlook and further clarication in your
self-search. At rst these words may give you perhaps only an
occasional glimpse, a temporary ickering emotion in you, but they
should be of help and open a door toward knowing yourself better,
toward evaluating your life with a more realistic and more mature
outlook. Now, are there any questions in connection with this lecture? QUESTION : It is very dicult for me to understand that one continually
chooses a love object who has exactly the same negative trends that one
or the other parent had. Is it reality that this particular person has these
trends? Or is it projection and response? ANSWER : It can be both and it can be either. In fact, most of the
time it is a combination. Certain aspects are unconsciou sly looked
for and found and they are actually similar. But the existing
similarities are enhanced by the person who is doing the recreation. They are not only projected qualities that are not really there, but
are latent in some degree without being manifested. These are
encouraged and strongly brought to the fore by the attitude of the
person with the unrecogniz ed inner problem. He or she fosters
something in the other person by provoking the reaction that is
similar to the parent’s. The provocation, which of course  is entirely
unconscious, is a very strong factor here. The sum total of a human personality consists of many aspects. Out of these, a few may be actually similar to some traits in the
recreator’s parent. The most outstanding would be a similar kind of
immaturity and incapacity to love. That alone is sucient and
potent enough in essence to reproduce the same situation. The same person would not react to others as he or she reacts to
you because it is you who constantly do the provokin g, thereby
reproducing conditions similar to your childhood for you to correct. Your fear, your self-punishment, your frustration, your anger, your
hostility, your withdrawal from giving out love and aection, allthese trends of the child in you constantly provoke the other person
and enhance a response coming from that part which is weak and
immature. However, a more mature person will aect others
dierently and will bring out that in them which is mature and
whole, for there is no person who does not have some mature
aspects. QUESTION : How can I make the distinction as to whether the other
person provoked me or I the other person? ANSWER : It is not necessary to nd who started it, for this is a
chain reaction, a vicious circle. It is useful to start by nding your
own provocation, perhaps in response to an open or hidden
provocation of the other person. Thus you will realize that because
you were provoked, you provoke the other person. And because you
do so, the other again responds in kind. But as you examine your
real reason, not the supercial one, the reason why you were hurt in
the rst place and therefore provoked, according to tonight’s lecture
you will no longer regard this hurt as disastrous. You will have a
dierent reacti on to the hurt, and, as a consequence, the hurt will
diminish autom atically. Therefore, you will no longer feel the need
to provoke the other person. Also, as the need to reproduce the
childhood situation decreases, you will become less withdrawn and
you will hurt others less and less, so that they will not have to
provoke you. If they do, you will now also understand that they
reacted out of the same childish blind needs as you did. Now you
can see how you ascribe dierent motivations to the other person’s
provocation than to your own, even if and when you actually realize
that you initiated the provocation. As you gain a diere nt view on
your own hurt, understandin g its real origin, you will gain the same
detachment from the reaction of the other person. You will nd
exactly the same reactions in yourself and in the other. As long as
the child’s conict remains unresolved in you, the dierence seems
enormous, but when you perceive reality, you begin to break the
repetitive, vicious circle.As you truly perceive such a mutual interplay, it will relieve the
feeling of isolation and guilt you all are burdened with. You are
constantly uctuating between your guilt and your accusation of
injustice you direct at those around you. The child in you feels itself
entirely diere nt from others, in a world of its own. It lives in such
a damaging illusion. As you solve this conict, your awareness of
other people will increase. As yet, you are so unaware of the reality
of other people. On the one hand you accuse them and are
inordinately hurt by them because you do not understand yourself
and therefore do not understand the other person. On the other
hand, and at the same time, you refuse to become aware when you
are hurt. This seems paradoxical, yet is not. As you experience for
yourself the interactions set forth tonight, you will nd this to be
true. While sometimes you may exaggerate a hurt, at other times
you do not allow yourself to know that it happened at all, because it
may not t the picture you have of the situation. It may spoil your
self-constructed idea, or it may not correspond to your desire at the
time. If the situation seems otherwise favorable and ts into your
preconceived idea, you leave out all that jars you, allowing it to
fester underne ath and create unconscious hostility. This entire
reaction inhibi ts your intuitive faculties, at least in this particular
respect. The constant provocation that goes on among human beings,
while it is hidden from your awareness now, is a reality you will
come to perceive very clearly. This will have a very liberating eect
on you and your surroundings. Go your way, my dearest ones, and may the blessings we bring to
all of you envelop and penetrate your body, soul, and spirit, so that
you open up your soul and become your real self, your own real self. Be blessed, my friends, be in peace, be in God. OceanofPDF.com4 
The Real God and the God-Image
No one can avoid facing the question of God. Does such a Being
actually exist? How and where can I nd God, and what is the
truth behind the answers I have given myself so far, or behind the
confusion I feel? And what can the Pathwork Guide—an entity of
higher consciousness, an entity with an angel’s-eye view—teach us
that we have not read or heard before? Greetings. I bring you blessin gs in the name of God. Blessed is this
hour, my dearest friends. That the existence of God is so often questioned and that Divine
Presence is so rarely experien ced within the human soul is the result
of the distorted God-image most human beings harbor. The False Concept of God
Children experience their rst conict with authority  at an early
age. They also learn that God is the highest authority . Therefore it is
not surprising that children project their subjective experiences with
authority onto their imaginings about God. Hence a wrong
conclusion is formed about God, which is unconsciously carried into
adulthood. Children experience all lands of authority. When they are
prohibited from doing what they enjoy most, they experienceauthority as hostile. When parental authority indulges a child,
authority will be felt as benign. When there is a predominance of
one kind of authority in childhood, the reaction to that will become
the unconscious attitude toward God. In many instances, however,
children experience a mixture of both. Then the combination of
these two kinds of authority will form their image of God. In the
measure that a child experiences fear and frustration, to that
measure will fear and frustra tion unconsciously be felt toward God. God is then believed to be a punishing, severe, and often even an
unfair and unjust force that one has to contend with. I know, my
friends, that you do not think so consciously. But in the pathwork
you are asked to nd the emotional reactions that do not at all
correspond to your conscious  concepts on whatever subject. The less
the unconscious concept coincides with the conscious one, the
greater is the shock when one realizes the discrepancy. Practically everything the child enjoys most is forbidden. Whatever gives most pleasure is prohibited, usually for the child’s
own welfare; this the child  cannot understand. It happens that
parents also do this out of their own ignorance and fear. Thus it is
impressed on the child’s mind that for everything most pleasurable
in the world one is subject to punishment from God, the highest and
sternest authority. In addition, you are bound to encounter human injustice  in the
course of your life, in childhood as well as in adulthood. Particularly
if these  injustices are perpetrated by people who stand for authority
and are therefore unconsciously associated with God, your
unconscious belief in God’s severe injustice is strengthened. Such
experiences also intensify your fear of God. All this forms an image that makes, if properly analyzed, a
monster out of God. This god, living in your unconscious mind, is really
more of a satan . You yourself have to nd out in your work on yourself how much
of this holds true for you personally. Is your soul impregnated with
similar wrong concepts? If and when the realization of such an
impression becomes conscious within a growing human being, it is
often not understood that this concept of God is false. Then theperson turns away from God altogether and wants no part of the
monster discov ered hovering  in his or her mind. This, by the way, is
often the true reason for someone’s atheism. The turning away is
just as erroneous as the oppo site extreme, which consists  of fearing
a god who is severe, unjust, pious, self-righteous, and cruel. The
person who unconsciously maintains the distorted God-image
rightly fears this deity and resorts to cajoling for favors. Here you
have a good example of two opposite extremes, both of which lack
truth to an equal extent. Now let us examine the case in which a child experiences benign
authority to a greater degree than fear and frustration with a
negative authority. Let us assume that overindulging and doting
parents fulll the child’s every whim. They do not instill  a sense of
responsibility in the child so that he or she can get away with
practically anything. The God-image resulting from such a condition
is, at rst and supercial sight, closer to a true concept of God—
forgiving, “good,” loving, indulgent. This causes the personality to
unconsciously think he or she can get away with anything in the
eyes of God, can cheat life, and avoid self-responsibility . To begin
with, such a child will know much less fear. But since life cannot be
cheated, this wrong attitude will produce conicts, and therefore
fear will be generated by a chain reaction of wrong thinking,
feeling, and action. An inner confusion will arise, since life as it is in
reality does not correspond to the indulgent, unconscious God-
image and concept. Many subdivisions and combinations of these two main categories
can exist in the same soul, and the development achieved in former
incarnations in this particular respect also inuences the psyche. It
is very importa nt, therefore, my friends, to nd out what  your God-
image is. This image is basic and determines all other attitudes,
images, and patterns throug hout your life. Do not be deceived by
your conscious convictions. Rather try to examine and analyze your
emotional reactions to authority, to your parents, to your fears and
expectations. Out of these you will gradually discover what you feel
about God rather than what you think. The whole scale between the
two opposite poles of monster and doting parent is reected in yourGod-image, from hopelessness and despair to self-indulgence,
rejection of self-responsibilit y, and the expectation of a god who
pampers you. Dissolving the God-Image
Now the question of how to dissolve such an image arises. How
do you dissolv e any image, that is, any wrong conclusion? First, you
have to become fully consci ous of the wrong concept. The second
step is to set your intellectua l ideas straight. It is most important to
understand that the proper formation of the intellectual concept
should never be super-imposed on the still-lingering, emotional false
concept. This would only cause suppression. Realize that the
hitherto suppressed, wrong concepts have to evolve clearly into
consciousness. Formulate the right concept. Then these two should
be compared. You need constantly to check how much you still
deviate emotionally from the right intellectual concept. Do this quietly, without inner haste or anger at yourself that your
emotions do not follow your thinking as quickly as you would like. Give them time to grow. This is best accomplished by constant
observation and comparison  of the wrong and the right concept. Realize that your emotions need time to adjust, and also observe
your resistance to change and growth. The lower self of the human
personality is very shrewd. Be wise to it. The injustices in the world are so often ascribed to God, my
friends. If you are convinced of injustice, the best attitude is to
examine your own life and nd in it how you have contributed to
and even caused happenings that seemed entirely unjust. The better
you understand the magnetic force of images and the powerful
strength of all psychological and unconscious currents, the better
will you understand and experience the truth of these teachings, and
the more deeply will you be convinced that there is no injustice . Find
the cause and eect  of your inner and outer actions.God Is Not Unjust
If you make half the eort you usually make when nding others’
faults to nd your own, you will see the connection with your own law
of cause  and eect and this alone will set you free, will show you that
there is no injustice. This alone will show you that it is not God, nor
the fates, nor any unjust world order wherein you have to suer the
consequences of other people’s shortcomings, but your ignorance,
your fear, your pride, your egotism that directly or indirectly caused
that which seemed, so far, to come your way without your
attracting it. Find that hidden link and you will come to see truth. You will realize that you are not a prey to circumstances  or other
people’s imper fections, but really the creator of your life. Emotions
are very powerful creative forces, because your unconscious aects
the unconsciou s of the other person. This truth is perhaps most
relevant to the discovery of how you call forth happenin gs in your
life, good or bad, favorable or unfavorable. Once you experience this, you can dissolve your God-image,
whether you fear God becau se you believe that you live in a world
of injustice and are afraid of being the prey of circumst ances over
which you have no control, or whether you reject self-res ponsibility
and expect an indulgent, pampering God to lead your life for you,
make decisions for you, take self-inicted hardships from you. The
realization of how you cause the eects of your life will dissolve
either God-image. This is one of the main breaking-points. The True Concept of God
God is, God’s  laws are made once and for all and work
automatically, so to speak. Think of God as being, among so many
other things, life and life force . Think of God as of an electric current,
endowed with supreme intelligence . This “electric current” is there, in
you, around you, outside of yourself. It is up to you how you use it. You can use electricity for constructive purposes, even for healing,
or you can use it to kill. That does not make the electric currentgood or bad. You make it good or bad. This power current is an
important aspect of God and is the one that pouches you most. This concept may raise the question whether God is personal or
impersonal, directing intelli gence or law and principle. Human
beings, since they experience life with a dualistic consciousness,
tend to believe that either the one or the other is true. Yet God is
both. But God’s personal aspect does not mean personality. God is
not a person residing in a certain place, though it is possib le to have
a personal God-experience within the self. For the only place God can
be looked for and found is within , not in any other place. God’s
existence can be deduced outside of the self from the beauty of
Creation, from the manifestations of nature, from the wisdom
collected by philosophers and scientists. But such observations
become an experience of God only when God’s presence is felt rst
within. The inner experience of God is the greatest of all experiences
because it contains all desirable experiences. This particular feeling experience might be called the cosmic
feeling . The cosmic feeling is not a theoretical understanding or a
feeling about  the cosmos. It is a true physical, mental, emotional,
and spiritual experience, which encompasses the entire person. I
cannot describe this experience adequately within the limitations of
human language. The cosmic experience no longer splits o feeling from thinking. It is feeling and thinking in one. This is very hard to imagine when
you have never had such an experience. But some of you may have
occasionally had a glimpse of it. The oneness is total. It is an
experience of bliss; the comp rehension of life and its mysteries; all-
encompassing love; a knowle dge that all is well and there is nothing
to fear. In the state of cosmic feeling you experience the immediacy of the
presence of God within . The immedia cy of this incredibly powerful
presence is at rst shocking. The good feeling is shocking. It is as if
literally an electric shock went through your entire system. Therefore the ego-personality has to grow suciently strong and
healthy so that it can acclimatize itself to the high vibrations of theinner presence  of God. This manifestation is then experienced as
your eternal reality and state, as your true identity. The moment you nd yourself in this state you know in a most
profound way that what you now discover you have always known,
that you had only temporarily cut yourself o from the state of
feeling and knowing, of experiencing and perceiving life as it really
is. This descriptio n is, of course, extremely limited, for words cannot
convey the experience. What you can do at this very moment to
gain an inkling of the reality is to pray to be able to perceive a taste
of it. Open your inner faculties, your higher self, to an
understanding on the deepest level, my friends. The Eternal, Divine Laws
God’s love is not only personal in God-manifest within the human
soul, but also in the divine laws, in the being of the laws. The
apparently impersonal love in the laws that are—understand what is
implied in the words “that are”—shows clearly in the fact that they
are made in such a way as to lead you ultimately into light and
bliss, no matter how much you deviate from them. The more you
deviate from them, the more you approach them by the misery that
the deviation inicts. This misery will cause you to turn around at
one point or another. Some sooner, some later, but all must nally
come to the point where they realize that they themselves determine
their misery or bliss. This is the love in the law—this is the “Plan of
Salvation.” Deviation from the law is the very medicine to cure the
pain caused by the deviation  and therefore it brings you closer to
the goal: union with God. God lets you deviate from the universal laws if you so wish. You
are made in God’s likeness, meaning that you are completely free to
choose. You are not forced to live in bliss and light, though you can
if you wish. All this expresses the love of God. When you have diculty in understanding the justice of the
universe and the self-respons ibility in your own life, do not think ofGod as “He” or “She.” Rather think of God as the Great Creative
Power at your disposal. It is not God who is unjust; the injustice is
caused by the wrong use of the powerful current at your disposal. If
you start from this premise and meditate on it, and if from now on
you seek to nd where and how you have ignorantly abused the
power current in you, God will answer you. This I can promise. If you nd the cause and eect in your life, you have no idea what
this discovery will mean to you . The greater the resistance to it at rst,
the greater the victory. You have no inkling how free it will make
you, how safe and secure. You will understand the marvel of the
creation of these laws that let you, with the power current  of life, do
as you please in creating your own life. This will give you
condence and the deep, absolute knowledge that you have nothing
to fear. The universe is a whole of which humanity is an organic part. To
experience God is to realize oneself as an integral part of this
oneness. Yet in their present inner state of development, most
human beings can only experience God under the dual aspects of
spontaneously active consciousness and automatic law. In actuality
these two aspects form an interacting unity. The aspect of spontaneous consciousness is the active principle,
which in human terms is called the masculine aspect. It is the life
force which creates; it is potent energy. This life force permeates the
entire creation  and all creatures. It can be used by all conscious
living beings. The aspect of automatic law is the passive, receptive principle, the
life substance or feminine aspect, which the creative principle
molds, forms, and plays upon. These two aspects, together, are
necessary to create anything. They are the conditions of creation
and are present in every form of creation, whether it be a galaxy or
a simple gadget. When speaking of God, it is important to understand that all
divine aspects are duplicated in the human being, who lives and
whose being rests upon the same conditions, principles, and laws as
those pertainin g to Cosmic Intelligence. They are both the same inessence, diere ntiated only by degree. Self-realization, then, means
activating the maximum potential of God in oneself. God Is in You and Creates Through You
God, as deliberate, spontane ous, directing intelligence, does not
did for you but through  you, being in you. It is very important that
you understand this subtle, but decisive, dierence. When you have
an erroneous approach to God in this respect, you vaguely expect
God to act for you, and you resent the inevitable disappointments;
hence you conclude that there is no Creator. If one could contact an
outer deity, one could logically expect it to act for one. But waiting
for responses outside the self means focusing into the wrong
direction. When you contact God within the self, respo nses must
come and, what is more, you will notice and understand them. Such
manifestations of God’s presence within the self demonstrate God’s
personal aspect. They demonstrate active, deliberate, directing
intelligence, forever changing and fresh, adapted in innite wisdom
to any situation. They expres s the Spirit of God manifestin g through
the spirit of the human being. When you discover yourself and, consequently, the role you play
in creating your fate, you truly come into your own. You are no
longer driven but are master of your life. No longer bound by forces
you do not understand, you can deliberately use these powers in the
most construct ive way, express more of the best of you, expand to
ever greater potentials, add more to life, and therefore derive more
from it. You must discover this power and the freedom to master your life
by yourself. If life forced you into your true birthright in order to
save you from suering, you would never be a free creature. The
very meaning of freedom implies that no force or constraint can be
used, not even for good or desirable results. Not even the greatest of
all discoveries  on the road of your evolution would have any
meaning if you were compelled to experience it. The choice to turn
in the direction  that will nally yield true freedom and power mustbe left to each individual. Self-discovery—rst on the mundane, so-
called psychological level—when followed through, must lead to the
realization that you are master over the universe to the exact degree
that you master yourself. This self-mastery depends on a thorough
knowledge of yourself and on the depth and width of the concepts
your mind is capable of embracing. Since you are created in the image of God, you, too, must create . You constantly do so, whether you know it or not. You create your
life, your fate, your experiences. Every thought, every reaction,
every emotion, every response, every intent, every action, every
opinion, every motivation is a creative process. When one is torn in
contradictions and conicts between mutually exclusive
motivations, when one uctuates between automatic blind reexes
and deliberate action, the result of all this is one’s own creation. Ideas, intent, thoughts, will, feelings, attitudes as expressed by
conscious beings are the greatest forces in the universe. This means
that the power of spirit is superior to all other energies. If this
power is understood and used according to its inherent law, it
supersedes all other manifest ations of power. No physical power can
be as strong as the power of the spirit. Since the human being is
spirit and intelligence, he or she is inherently capable of directing
all automatic, blind law. It is through this capacity that God is truly
experienced. When you deliberately contact and request your higher self,
which contains all divine aspects, for guidance and inspiration, and
when you experience the result of this inner act, you will know that
God is present within you. So, my dearest friends, nd out what
distorted image you have of God that stands in the way of your God-
experience as the total, blissful cosmic feeling it is in reality. Make
yourself open to it. May the words I am giving you bring light into
your soul, into your life. Let them ll your heart. Let them be an
instrument to liberate you from illusions. I bless each one of you,
individually and as a whole. God’s world is a wonderful world and
there is only reason to rejoice  on whatever plane you live, whatever
illusions or hardships you temporarily endure. Let them be amedicine for you, and grow strong and happy with whatever comes
your way. Be blessed. Be in peace. Be in God! OceanofPDF.com5 
Unity and Duality
We live on a plane of duality. All our experiences are ltered
through a dualistic consciousness. The dualistic state is painful,
because we are uctuating between opposing alternatives; we
perceive life as a series of events which we call good or bad. The
most threatening of dualities is that between life and death. Yet we
know that a higher consciousness exists on a unied plane and that
to be in contact  with it is blissful. We strive toward unication, but
how can we attain it without denying parts of our present being? This lecture explains our dualistic condition and shows how we
can transform those parts in ourselves which prohibit unication . Greetings, my dearest friends. May this evening be a blessing and
an enric hment for every one of you here and for all who read these
words. May you open your minds and hearts so you can deeply
understand yourselves. And even if you cannot understand my
words immediately, some of them may take root in your psyche and
come to fruition later. Full understanding of this lecture may reach
you only as you work your way through the deep layers of your
unconscious where what I say here will apply. There are two basic ways to approach life and the self. Or, to put
it dierently, there are two fundamental possibilities for human
consciousness: the dualistic and the unied plane. The majority of
human beings live predominantly on the dualistic plane, where you
perceive and experience everything in opposites: either/or; good orbad; right or wrong; life or death. In other words, practically
everything you encounter, every human problem, is shaped by this
dualism. The unied principle combines the opposites of dualism. By transcendin g dualism you will also transcend the pain it causes. Few human beings transcen d the dualistic plane, so most people
experience only an occasional taste of the limitless outlook, the
wisdom and freedom of the unied plane. On the unied plane of consciousness there are no opposites. There is no good or bad, no right or wrong, no life or death. There is
only good, only right, only life. Yet it is not the kind of good, or
right, or life that comprises only one pole of the dualistic opposites. It trans cends them both and is completely dierent from either one. The good, the right, the life that exist on the unied plane of
consciousness combine both dualistic poles, so no conict exists. This is why living in a unied  state, in absolute reality, creates bliss,
unlimited freedom, fulllment, and that unlimited realization of
potentials which religion calls heaven. Heaven is usually thought to
be a place in time and space . This, of course, is not so. Heaven is a
state of conscio usness that can be realized at any time by any entity,
whether a human being in the esh, or one who does not live in a
material body. Understanding Is the Way to the Unied Plane
The unied state of consciousness is attained through
understanding or knowingness. Life on the dualistic plane is a
continuous problem. You have to struggle with the arbitrary,
illusory division of the unied principle, through which things
become oppo sites that impose conicts. This creation of
irreconcilable opposites generates a tension within and therefore
with the outside world. Let us understand this particular struggle, and therefore the
human predicament, a little better. You already have, in your real
self, a unied state of mind, regardless of how unconscious and ignorant
you may be of it. This real self embodies the unied principle. Now,even those who have never heard of such a thing have a deep
longing and a mostly uncons cious sense of a dierent state of mind
and life experience than the one they know. They yearn for the
freedom, blissf ulness, and mastery of life that the unied state of
consciousness aords. This longing is misinterpreted by the personality, partly because it
is an unconscious yearning for happiness and fulllment. But let us
understand precisely what is really meant by these words. They
mean the unication of the dualistic opposites, so that there is no
longer any tension, conict, or fear. Consequently, the world
becomes alive and the self is master, not in a tight, tense, hostile
way, but in the sense that life can be exactly what the individual
determines it to be. The freedom, mastery, and bliss of this
liberation are sought after consciously and unconsciously. The misinterpr etation of this longing occurs partly because it is
unconscious—only a vague feeling deep within the soul. But even
when the theoretical knowledge of such a state exists, it is still
misinterpreted for yet another reason. When freedom, mastery,
unication, and the resulting bliss of the unied state of
consciousness are pursued on the dualistic plane, a tremendous
conict must ensue because they are absolutely impossible to
accomplish on that plane. You strive for the fulllment of your deep
longing to transcend and nd, deep within yourself, a new state of
consciousness where all is one. When you seek this on a plane
where all is divided, you cannot ever nd what you seek. You will
despair and split yourself further apart in conicts, for illusion
creates duality. This happens overwhelmingly among people who are ignorant of
these possibilit ies, but it also happens among people who are more
spiritually enlightened, yet are nevertheless ignorant both of the
dierence between these two planes and of how they can learn to
transcend the dualistic plane in their practical daily existence. When the vague longing for, or the precise theoretical knowledge
of, the unied plane of consciousness is misread and therefore
sought on the dualistic plane , here is what happens: You sense that
there is only good, freedom, right, beauty, love, truth, life, without athreatening opposite, but when you apply this on the dualistic
plane, you will immediately  be plunged into the very conict you
seek to avoid. You then ght for one of the dualistic aspects and
against the other. Such a ght makes transcendence impossible. Let me demon strate this in a familiar, everyday human problem,
so that you can understand these words more concrete ly. Let us
assume that you are quarreling with a friend. You are convinced,
from where you sit, that you are right; therefore, immediately, the
friend becomes wrong. With dualistic understanding issues can only
be either/or.
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:

        Self-Acceptance
The genuine desire to better oneself leads one to accept one’s
personality as it is now. If this basic premise is the main governing
force of your motivation for perfection, any discovery of where you
fall short of your ideals will not throw you into depressio n, anxiety,
and guilt, but will rather strengthen you. You will not need to
exaggerate the “badness” of the behavior in question, nor will you
defend yourse lf against it with the excuse that it is the fault of
others, of life, of fate. You will gain an objective view of yourself in
this respect, and this view will liberate you. You will fully assume
responsibility for the faulty attitude, being willing to take the
consequences upon yourself. When you act out your idealized self,
you dread nothing more than that, for taking the responsibility of
your shortcom ings upon yourself is tantamount to saying, “I am not
my idealized self. ”The Inner Tyrant
Feelings of failure, frustratio n, and compulsion, as well as guilt
and shame, are the most outstanding indications that your idealized
self is at work. These are the consciously felt emotions  out of all
those that lie hidden underneath. Actually, the basis of the tyranny
of the idealized self-image is the sense of false shame  and false guilt
that this image  produces when one cannot live up to it. In addition,
the idealized self also manifests false needs, which are superimposed
and articially created, like the need for glory, the need to triumph,
to satisfy vanity or pride. The pursuit of these needs never results in
true fulllment. The idealized self has been called into existence in order to attain
self-condence and therefore, nally, happiness, pleasure supreme. The stronger its presence, the more genuine self-condence fades
away. Since you cannot live up to its standards, you think even less
of yourself than you origin ally did. It is therefore obvious that
genuine self-condence can be established only when you remove
the superstructure, which is this merciless tyrant, your idealized
self. Yes, you could have self-co ndence if the idealized self were
really you; and if you could live up to these standards. Since this is
impossible and since, deep down, you know perfectly well you are
not anything like what you think you are supposed to be, you build
up additional insecurity with this “super self,” and further vicious
circles come into existence. The original insecurity, which was
supposedly whisked away by the establishment of the idealized self,
steadily increa ses. It snowballs, and becomes worse and worse. The
more insecure you feel, the more stringent the demands of the
superstructure or idealized self, the less you are able to live up to it,
and the more insecure you feel. It is very important to see how this
vicious circle works. But this cannot be done until and unless you
become fully aware of the devious, subtle, unconscious ways in
which this idealized self-ima ge exists in your particular case. Askyourself in what particular areas it manifests. What causes and
eects are connected with it. Estrangement from the Real Self
A furth er and drastic result of this problem is the constantly
increasing estrangement from the real self. The idealized self is a
falsity. It is a rigid, articiall y constructed imitation of a live human
being. You may invest it with many aspects of your real being;
nevertheless, it remains an articial construct. The more you invest
your energies, your persona lity, your thought processes, concepts,
ideas, and ideals into it, the more strength you take from the center
of your being, which alone is amenable to growth. This center of
your being is the only part of you, the real you, that can live, grow,
and be. It is the only part that can properly guide you. It alone
functions with all your capacities. It is exible and intuitive. Its
feelings alone are true and valid even if, for the moment, they are
not yet fully in truth and reality, in perfection and purity. But the
feelings of the real self function in perfection relative to what you
are now. The more you take out of that live center in order to invest
into the robot you have created, the more estranged you become
from the real self and the more you weaken and impoverish it. In the course of this work, you have sometimes come upon the
puzzling and often frightenin g question: “Who am I really. ”  This is
the result of the discrepancy and struggle between the real and the
false self. Only upon solving  this most vital and profoun d question
will your live center respond and function to its full capacity, will
your intuition begin to function to its full capacity, will you become
spontaneous, free of all compulsions, will you trust in your feelings
because they will have an opportunity to mature and grow. Feelings
will become every bit as reliable to you as your reasoning power
and your intellect. All this is the nal nding of self. Before this can be done, a great
many hurdles have to be overcome. It seems to you that this is a
life-or-death struggle. You still believe you need the idealized self inorder to live and be happy. Once you understand that this is not so,
you will be able to give up the pseudo-defense that makes the
maintenance and cultivation of the idealized self seem so necessary. Once you understand that the idealized self was supposed to solve
the particular problems in your life above and beyond your need for
happiness, pleasure, and security, you will come to see the wrong
conclusion of this theory. Once you go a step still further and
recognize the damage the idealized self has brought into your life,
you will shed it as the burden it is. No conviction, theory, or words
you hear will make you give it up, but the recognition of what
specically it was supposed to solve and what damage it has done
and is continui ng to do will enable you to dissolve this image of all
images. Needless to say, you also have to recognize most particularly and
in detail what your idealized  self’s specic demands and standards
are, and, further, you have to see their unreasonableness, their
impossibility. When you have a feeling of acute anxiety and
depression, consider the fact that your idealized self may feel
questioned and threatened, either by your own limitations, by
others, or by life. Recognize the self-contempt that underlies the
anxiety or depression. When you are compulsively angry at others,
consider the possibility that this is but an externalizatio n of your
anger at yourself for not living up to the standards of your false self. Do not let it get away with using the excuse of outer problems to
account for acute depression  or fear. Look into the question from
this new angle. Your private and personal work will help you in this
direction, but it is almost impossible to do it alone. Only after you
have made some substantia l progress will you recognize that so
many of these outer problems are directly or indirectly the result of
the discrepancy between your capacities and the standar ds of your
idealized self and how you deal with this conict. So, as you proceed in this particular phase of the work, you will
come to understand the exact nature of your idealized self: Its
demands, its requirements of self and others in order to maintain
the illusion. Once you fully see that what you regarded as
commendable is really pride  and pretense, you will have gained amost substantial insight that enables you to weaken the impact of
the idealized self. Then, and then only, will you realize the
tremendous self-punishment you inict upon yourself. For whenever
you fall short, as you are bound to, you feel so impatient, so
irritated, that your feelings can snowball into fury and wrath at
yourself. This fury and wrath  are often projected on others because
it is too unbea rable to be aware of self-hate, unless one unrolls this
whole process and sees it entire, in the light. Neverthele ss, even if
this hate is unloaded upon others, the eect on the self is still there
and it can cause disease, accident, loss, and outer failur e in many
ways. Giving Up the Idealized Self
When you make the very rst steps toward giving up the idealized
self, you will feel a sense of liberation as never before. Then you
will be truly born again; your real self will emerge. Then you will
rest within your real self, centered within. Then you will truly grow,
not only on the outer fringes that may have been free of the
idealized self’s dictatorship, but in every part of your being. This
will change many things. First will come changes in your reactions
to life, to incidents, to yourself and others. This changed reaction
will be astounding enough, but, little by little, outer things are also
bound to change. Your dier ent attitude will have new eects. The
overcoming of your idealized self means overcoming an important
aspect of the duality between life and death. At present you are not even aware of the pressure of your
idealized self, of the shame, humiliation, exposure you fear and
sometimes feel, of the tension, strain, and compulsion. If you have
an occasional glimpse of such emotions, you do not as yet connect
them with the fantastic demands of your idealized self. Only after
fully seeing these fanta stic expectations and their often
contradictory imperatives will you relinquish them. The initial inner
freedom gained in this way will allow you to deal with life and to
stand in life. You will no longer have to hold on frantic ally to theidealized self. The mere inner activity of holding on so frantically
generates a pervasive clima te of holding on in gener al. This is
sometimes lived out in external attitudes, but most often it is an
inner quality or attitude. As you proceed in this new phase of your
work, you will sense and feel this inner tightness and gradually you
will recognize the basic damage it causes. It makes the letting go of
many an attitude impossible. It makes it unduly dicult to go
through any change that would allow life to bring forth joy and a
spirit of vigor. You keep yourself contained within yourself and
thereby you go against life in one of its most fundamental aspects. The words are insucient; you have to sense rather what  I mean. You will know exactly when you have weakened your idealized self
by fully understanding its function, its causes and eects. Then you
will gain the great freedom of giving yourself to life because you no
longer have to hide something from yourself and others. You will be
able to squander yoursel f into life, not in an unhealthy,
unreasonable way, but healthily as nature squanders herself. Then,
and then only will you know the beauty of living. You cannot approach this most important part of your inner work
with a general concept. As usual, your most insignicant daily
reactions, considered from this viewpoint, will yield the necessary
results. So continue your self-search out of these new considerations
and do not be impatient if it takes time and relaxed eort. Coming Home
One more word: The dieren ce between the real and the idealized
self is often not a question of quantity, but rather of quali ty. That is,
the original motivation is dierent in these two selves. This will not
be easy to see, but as you recognize the demands, the
contradictions, the cause-and-eect sequences, the dierence in
motivation will gradually become clear to you. Another important
consideration is the time element. The idealized self wants to be
perfect, accord ing to its specic demands, right now. The real self
knows this cannot be and does not consider this fact painful. Of course you are not perfec t. Your present self is a complex of
everything you are at the moment. Of course you have your basic
egocentricity, but if you own up to it, you can cope with it. You can
learn to understand it and therefore diminish it with each new
insight. Then you will truly experience the truth that the more
egocentric you are, the less self-condent you can be. The idealized
self believes just the opposite. Its claims for perfection are motivated
by purely egocentric reasons,  and this very egocentricity makes self-
condence impossible. The great freedom of coming home, my friends, is nding your
way back to the real you. The expression “coming home” has often
been used in spiritual literature and teachings, but it has been much
misunderstood. It is often interpreted to mean the return into the
spirit world after physical death. Much more is meant by coming
home. You may die many deaths, one earth life after another, but if
you have not found your real self, you cannot come home. You may
be lost and remain lost until you do nd the way into the center of
your being. On the other hand, you can nd your way home right
here and right now while you are still in the body. When you muster
the courage to become your real self, even though it would seem
much less than the idealized self, you will nd out that it is much
more. Then you will have the peace of being at home within
yourself. Then  you will nd security. Then you will function as a
whole human being. Then you will have broken the iron whip of a
taskmaster whom it is impossible to obey. Then you will know what
peace and security really mean. You will cease once and for all to
seek them by false means. May you all nd truth and help and further enligh tenment
through the words I gave you tonight. However, you should
understand and expect that a theoretical understanding will avail
you nothing. As long as these words remain theory you will not be
helped by them. When you begin or continue to work in this
direction and allow yourself to feel and observe your emotional
reactions connected to your idealized self, then you will make
substantial progress in your own liberation and self-nd ing in the
truest sense of the word. My dearest ones, each one of you, receive our love, our strength,
and our blessings. Be in peace, be in God. OceanofPDF. com3 
Compulsion to Recreate and Overcome
Childhood Hurts
The Guide says that depth psychology is a spiritual discipline,
because only through knowing yourself can you purify your soul,
that is, cleanse it of self-destru ctive patterns and make it ready to
connect with the inner God. The “repetition compulsion” is well
known in psychology; what this repetition is supposed to achieve,
however, has never been as illuminatingly explained as in this
lecture. Our repeated negative experiences are bound up not only
with our early childhood, but also with previous incarnations. With
the help of this lecture we can discover why we keep running in our
respective squirrel cages and how we can stop doing so. Greetings, my dearest friends. God bless all of you. May the divine
blessings extended to every  one of you help you assimilate the
words I speak tonight, so that this will be a fruitful occasion for you. The Lack of Mature Love
Because children so seldom receive sucient mature love and
warmth, they continue to hunger for it throughout their lives unless
this lack and hurt is recognized and properly dealt with. If not, as
adults they will go through life unconsciously crying out for what they
missed in childhood. This will make them incapable of lovingmaturely. You can see how this condition continues from generation
to generation. The remedy cannot be found by wishing that things were dierent
and that people would learn  to practice mature love. The remedy
lies solely in you. True, if you had received such love from your
parents, you would be witho ut this problem of which you are not
really and fully aware. But this lack of receiving mature  love need
trouble neither you nor your life if you become aware of it, see it,
and rearrange your former unconscious wishes, regrets, thoughts,
and concepts by aligning them to the reality of each situation. As a
consequence, you will not only become a happier person, but you
will also be able to extend mature love to others—to your children,
if you have any, or to other people in your environment—so that a
benign chain reaction can start. Such realistic self-correction is very
contrary to your present inner behavior, which we shall now
consider. All people, including even those few who have started to explore
their own unconscious mind and emotions, habitually overlook the
strong link between the child’s longing and unfulllme nt and the
adult’s present diculties and problems, because only very few
people experie nce personally —and not just recognize in theory—
how strong this link is. Full awareness of it is essential. There may be isolated, exceptional cases where one parent oers
a sucient degree of mature love. Even if one parent has it to some
measure, very likely the other does not. Since mature love on this
earth is only present to a degree, the child will suer from the
shortcomings of even a loving parent. More often, however, both parents are emotionally immature and
cannot give the love the child craves, or give it only in insucient
measure. During childhood, this need is rarely conscious. Children
have no way of putting their needs into thoughts. They cannot
compare what they have with what others have. They do not know
that something else might exist. They believe this is the way it
should be. Or, in extreme cases, they feel especially isolated,
believing their lot is like no one else’s. Both attitudes deviate from
the truth. In both cases the real emotion is not conscious andtherefore cannot be properly evaluated and come to terms with. Thus, children  grow up never quite understanding why they are
unhappy, nor even that they are unhappy. Many of you look back
on childhood convinced that you had all the love you wanted just
because you actually did have some love. There are a number of paren ts who give great demonstrations of
love. They may overindulge their children. Such spoiling and
pampering may be an overcompensation and a sort of apology for a
deeply suspected inability to love maturely. Children feel the truth
very acutely. They may not consciously think about it, but inwardly
children keenly feel the dierence between mature, genuine love
and the immature, over-demonstrative variety oered instead. Proper guidance and security are the parents’ responsibility and
call for author ity on their part. There are parents who never dare to
punish or exert a healthy authority. This failing is due to guilt
because real, giving, warming, comforting love is absent in their
own immature personalities. Other parents may be too severe, too
strict. They thereby exert a domineering authority by bullying the
child, and not allowing his or her individuality to unfold. Both types
fall short as parents, and their wrong attitudes, absorb ed by the
child, will cause hurt and unfulllment. In child ren of the strict paren ts, the resentment and rebellion will
be open, and therefore more easily traced. In the other case, the
rebellion is just as strong, but hidden, and therefore innitely
harder to trace. If you had a parent who smothered you with
aection or pseudo-aection, yet lacked in genuine warmth, or if
you had a parent who conscientiously did everything right but was
also lacking in real warmth,  unconsciously you knew it as a child
and you resented it. Consciously you may not have been aware of it
at all, because,  when a child,  you really could not put your nger on
what was lacking. You were outwardly given everything you wanted
and needed. How could you draw the subtle, ne borderline
distinction between real aection and pseudo-aection with your
child’s intellect. The fact that something bothered you without your
being able to explain it rationally made you feel guilty anduncomfortable. You therefore pushed it out of sight as far as
possible. As long as the hurt, disappointment, and unfullled needs  of your
early years remain unconscious, you cannot come to terms with
them. No matter how much you may love your parents, an
unconscious resentment exists in you, which prevents you from
forgiving them  for the hurt. You can only forgive and let go if you
recognize your deeply hidden hurt and resentment. As an adult
human being you will see that your parents, too, are just human
beings. They were not as faultless and perfect as the child had
thought and hoped them to be, yet they are not to be rejected now
because they had their own conicts and immaturities. The light of
conscious reasoning has to be applied to these very emotions you
never allowed yourself to be aware of fully. Attempts to Remedy the Childhood Hurt in Adulthood
As long as you are unaware of the conict between your longing
for a perfect love from your parents and your resentment against
them, you are bound to try remedying the situation in your later
years. This striving may manifest in various aspects of your life. You
run constantly into problems and repeated patterns that have their
origin in your attempt to reproduce the childhood situation so as to
correct it. This unconscious compulsio n is a very strong factor, but is
so deeply hidden from your conscious understanding. The most frequ ent way of attempting to remedy the situation is in
your choice of love partners. Unconsciously you will know how to
choose in the partner aspec ts of the parent who has particularly
fallen short in aection and love that is real and genuine. But you
also seek in your partner aspects of the other parent who has come
closer to meeting your demands. Important as it is to nd both
parents represented in your partners, it is even more important and
more dicult to nd those aspects that represent the parent who
has particularly disappointed and hurt you, the one more resented
or despised and for whom you had little or no love. So you seek theparents again—in a subtle way that is not always easy to detect, in
your marital partners, in your friendships, or in other human
relationships. In your subconscious, the following reactions take
place: Since the child in you cannot let go of the past, cannot come
to terms with it, cannot forgive, cannot understand and accept, this
very child in you always creates similar conditions, trying to win
out in the end in order to nally master the situation instead of
succumbing to it. Losing out means being crushed—thi s must be
avoided at all costs. The costs are high indeed, for the entire
strategy is unfeasible. What the child in you sets out to accomplish
cannot ever come to realization. The Fallacy of this Strategy
This entire procedure is utterly destructive. In the rst place, it is
an illusion that you were defeated. Therefore, it is an illusion that
you can now be victorious. Moreover, it is an illusion that the lack
of love, sad as that may have been when you were a child, is indeed
the tragedy that your subco nscious still feels it to be. The only
tragedy lies in the fact that you obstruct your future happiness by
continuing to reproduce the situation and then attempting to master
it. My friends,  this process is a deeply unconscious one. Of course,
nothing is further from your mind as you focus on your conscious
aims and wishes. It will take a great deal of digging to uncover the
emotions that lead you again  and again into situations where your
secret aim is to remedy childhood woes. In trying to reproduce the childhood situation, you unconsciously
choose a partner with aspects  similar to those of the parent. Yet it is
these very aspects that will make it as impossible to receive the
mature love you rightfully long for now as it was then. Blindly, you
believe that by willing it more strongly and more forcefully, the
parent-partner will now yield, whereas in reality love cannot come
that way. Only when you are free of this ever-continuing repetition,
will you no longer cry to be loved by the parent. Instead, you will
look for a partner or for other human relationships with the aim ofnding the maturity you really need and want. In not demanding to
be loved as a child, you will be equally willing to love. However,
the child in you nds this impossible, no matter how much you may
otherwise be capable of it through development and progress. This
hidden conict eclipses your otherwise growing soul. If you already have a partner, the uncovering of this con ict may
show you how he or she is similar to your parents in certain
immature aspects. But since you now know that there is hardly a
really mature person, these immaturities in your partner will no
longer be the tragedy they were while you constantly sought to nd
your parent or parents again, which of course could never come to
pass. With your existing immaturity and incapacity, you may
nevertheless build a more mature relationship, free of the childish
compulsion to recreate and correct the past. You have no idea how preoccupied your subconscious is with the
process of reenacting the play, so to speak, only hoping  that “this
time it will be dierent. ” And it never is. As time goes on, each
disappointment weighs heavier and your soul becomes more and
more discouraged. For those of my friends who have not yet reached certain depths
of their unexplored subconscious, this may sound quite preposterous
and contrived. However, those of you who have come to see the
power of your hidden trends, compulsions, and images will not only
readily believe  it, but will soon experience the truth of these words
in their own personal lives. You already know from other ndings
how potent are the workings of your subconscious mind, how
shrewdly it goes about its destructive and illogical ways. Reexperiencing the Childhood Hurt
If you learn to look at your problems and unfulllment from this
point of view and follow the usual process of allowing your
emotions to come to the fore, you will gain much further insight. But it will be necessary, my friends, to reexperience the longing and
the hurt of the crying child you were once, even though you werealso a happy one. Your happiness may have been valid and without
self-deception at all. For it is possible to be both happy and
unhappy. You may now be perfectly aware of the happy  aspects of
your childhoo d, but that which hurt deeply and that certain
something you greatly longed for—you did not even quite know
what—you were not aware of. You took the situation for granted. You did not know what was missing or even that there was anything
missing. This basic unhappin ess has to come to awareness now, if
you really want to proceed in inner growth. You have to
reexperience the acute pain you once suered but you pushed out of
sight. Now you have to look at this pain conscio us of the
understanding you have gained. Only by doing this will you grasp
the reality value of your current problems and see them in their true
light. Now, how can you manage to reexperience the hurts of so long ago. There is only one way, my friends. Take a current problem. Strip it
of all the superimposed layers of your reactions. The rst and most
handy layer is that of ration alization, that of “proving” that others,
or situations, are at fault, not your innermost conicts that make
you adopt the wrong attitud e to the actual problem that confronts
you. The next layer might be anger, resentment, anxiety, frustration. Behind all these reactions you will nd the hurt of not being loved. When you experience the hurt of not being loved in your current
dilemma, it will serve to reawaken the childhood hurt. While you
face the present hurt, think back and try to reconsider the situation
with your parents: what they gave you, how you really  felt about
them. You will become aware that in many ways you lacked a
certain something you never clearly saw before—you did not want
to see it. You will nd that this must have hurt you when you were
a child, but you may have forgotten this hurt on a consc ious level. Yet it is not forgotten at all. The hurt of your current problem is the
very same hurt. Now, reevaluate your present hurt, comparing it
with the childhood hurt. At last you will clearly see how it is one
and the same. No matter how true and understandable your present
pain is, it is nevertheless the same childhood pain. A little later you
will come to see how you contributed to bringing about the presentpain because of your desire to correct the childhood hurt. But at
rst you only have to feel the similarity of the pain. However, this
requires considerable eort, for there are many overlaying emotions
that cover the present pain as well as the past one. Before you have
succeeded in crystallizing the pain you are experiencing, you cannot
understand anything further in this respect. Once you can synchronize these two pains and realize that they
are one and the same, the next step is much easier. Then, by
perceiving the repetitious pattern in your various diculties, you
will learn to recognize the similarities between your paren ts and the
people who have caused you hurt or are causing you pain now. Experiencing these similarities emotionally will carry you further on
the particular road toward dissolving this basic conict. Mere
intellectual evaluation will not yield any benet. To be fruitful and
bring real results, the process of giving up the recreatio n must go
beyond mere intellectual knowledge. You have to allow yourself to
feel the pain of certain unfulllments now and also the pain of the
unfulllment of your childhood, then compare the two until, like
two separate picture slides,  they gradually move into focus and
become one. Experiencing the pain of now and the pain of then, you
will slowly come to understand how you thought you had to choose
the current situation becaus e deep inside you could not possibly
admit “defeat. ” Once this happens, the insight you gain, the
experience you feel exactly as I say here, will enable you to take the
next step. It goes without saying that many people are not even aware of
any pain, past or present. They busily push it out of sight. Their
problems do not appear as “pain. ” For them, the very rst step is to
become aware that this pain is present and that it hurts innitely
more as long as they have not become aware of it. Many people are
afraid of this pain and like to believe that by ignoring it they can
make it disappear. They chose such a means of relief only because
their conicts have become too great for them. How much more
wonderful it is for a person to choose this path with the wisdom and
conviction that a hidden conict, in the long run, does as much
damage as a manifest one. They will not fear to uncover the realemotion and will feel even in the temporary experienc e of acute
pain, that in that moment it turns into a healthy growing pain, free
of bitterness, tension, anxiety, and frustration. There are also those who tolerate the pain, but in a negat ive way,
always expecting it to be remedied from the outside. Such people
are in a way nearer to the solution because for them it will be quite
easy to see how the childish process still operates. The outside is the
oending parent, or both parents, projected onto other human
beings. They have only to redirect the approach to their pains. They
do not have to nd it. How to Stop Recreating. Only after experiencing all these emotions, and synchronizing the
“now” and the “then,” will you become aware of how you tried to
correct the situation. You will further see the folly of the
unconscious desire to recreate the childhood hurt, the frustrating
uselessness of it. You will survey all your actions and reactions with
this new understanding and insight, whereupon you will release
your parents. You will leave your childhood truly behind and start a
new, inner behavior pattern that will be innitely more constructive
and rewarding for you and for others. You will no longer seek to
master the situation you could not master as a child. You will go on
from where you are, forgetting and forgiving truly inside of you,
without even thinking that you have done so. You will no longer
need to be loved as you needed to be loved when you were a child. First you become aware that this is what you still wish, and then
you no longer seek this kind of love. Since you are no longer a child,
you will seek love in a dierent way, by giving it instead of
expecting it. It must always be emphasized, however, that many
people are not aware that they do expect it. Since the childish,
unconscious expectation was so often disappointed, they made
themselves give up all expectations and all desire for love. Needless
to say, this is neither genuine nor healthy, for it is a wrong extreme. To work on this inner conict is of great importance for all of
you, so that you gain a new outlook and further clarication in your
self-search. At rst these words may give you perhaps only an
occasional glimpse, a temporary ickering emotion in you, but they
should be of help and open a door toward knowing yourself better,
toward evaluating your life with a more realistic and more mature
outlook. Now, are there any questions in connection with this lecture. QUESTION : It is very dicult for me to understand that one continually
chooses a love object who has exactly the same negative trends that one
or the other parent had. Is it reality that this particular person has these
trends. Or is it projection and response. ANSWER : It can be both and it can be either. In fact, most of the
time it is a combination. Certain aspects are unconsciou sly looked
for and found and they are actually similar. But the existing
similarities are enhanced by the person who is doing the recreation. They are not only projected qualities that are not really there, but
are latent in some degree without being manifested. These are
encouraged and strongly brought to the fore by the attitude of the
person with the unrecogniz ed inner problem. He or she fosters
something in the other person by provoking the reaction that is
similar to the parent’s. The provocation, which of course  is entirely
unconscious, is a very strong factor here. The sum total of a human personality consists of many aspects. Out of these, a few may be actually similar to some traits in the
recreator’s parent. The most outstanding would be a similar kind of
immaturity and incapacity to love. That alone is sucient and
potent enough in essence to reproduce the same situation. The same person would not react to others as he or she reacts to
you because it is you who constantly do the provokin g, thereby
reproducing conditions similar to your childhood for you to correct. Your fear, your self-punishment, your frustration, your anger, your
hostility, your withdrawal from giving out love and aection, allthese trends of the child in you constantly provoke the other person
and enhance a response coming from that part which is weak and
immature. However, a more mature person will aect others
dierently and will bring out that in them which is mature and
whole, for there is no person who does not have some mature
aspects. QUESTION : How can I make the distinction as to whether the other
person provoked me or I the other person. ANSWER : It is not necessary to nd who started it, for this is a
chain reaction, a vicious circle. It is useful to start by nding your
own provocation, perhaps in response to an open or hidden
provocation of the other person. Thus you will realize that because
you were provoked, you provoke the other person. And because you
do so, the other again responds in kind. But as you examine your
real reason, not the supercial one, the reason why you were hurt in
the rst place and therefore provoked, according to tonight’s lecture
you will no longer regard this hurt as disastrous. You will have a
dierent reacti on to the hurt, and, as a consequence, the hurt will
diminish autom atically. Therefore, you will no longer feel the need
to provoke the other person. Also, as the need to reproduce the
childhood situation decreases, you will become less withdrawn and
you will hurt others less and less, so that they will not have to
provoke you. If they do, you will now also understand that they
reacted out of the same childish blind needs as you did. Now you
can see how you ascribe dierent motivations to the other person’s
provocation than to your own, even if and when you actually realize
that you initiated the provocation. As you gain a diere nt view on
your own hurt, understandin g its real origin, you will gain the same
detachment from the reaction of the other person. You will nd
exactly the same reactions in yourself and in the other. As long as
the child’s conict remains unresolved in you, the dierence seems
enormous, but when you perceive reality, you begin to break the
repetitive, vicious circle. As you truly perceive such a mutual interplay, it will relieve the
feeling of isolation and guilt you all are burdened with. You are
constantly uctuating between your guilt and your accusation of
injustice you direct at those around you. The child in you feels itself
entirely diere nt from others, in a world of its own. It lives in such
a damaging illusion. As you solve this conict, your awareness of
other people will increase. As yet, you are so unaware of the reality
of other people. On the one hand you accuse them and are
inordinately hurt by them because you do not understand yourself
and therefore do not understand the other person. On the other
hand, and at the same time, you refuse to become aware when you
are hurt. This seems paradoxical, yet is not. As you experience for
yourself the interactions set forth tonight, you will nd this to be
true. While sometimes you may exaggerate a hurt, at other times
you do not allow yourself to know that it happened at all, because it
may not t the picture you have of the situation. It may spoil your
self-constructed idea, or it may not correspond to your desire at the
time. If the situation seems otherwise favorable and ts into your
preconceived idea, you leave out all that jars you, allowing it to
fester underne ath and create unconscious hostility. This entire
reaction inhibi ts your intuitive faculties, at least in this particular
respect. The constant provocation that goes on among human beings,
while it is hidden from your awareness now, is a reality you will
come to perceive very clearly. This will have a very liberating eect
on you and your surroundings. Go your way, my dearest ones, and may the blessings we bring to
all of you envelop and penetrate your body, soul, and spirit, so that
you open up your soul and become your real self, your own real self. Be blessed, my friends, be in peace, be in God.
The genuine desire to better oneself, leading to acceptance of one's personality as it is now.
What is the main governing force of motivation for self-acceptance?
The idealized self is a rigid, artificial construct that weakens the center of one's being, leading to feelings of guilt, shame, and compulsion, causing a vicious cycle of self-punishment and self-rejection.
What is the idealized self, and what is its impact on the individual?
Recognizing the discrepancy between the idealized self and the real self, and accepting one's current self, is the key to understanding the idealized self.
What is the key to understanding the idealized self?
One must become aware of the pain and re-experience it, allowing oneself to feel the emotions and come to terms with the past. This can be done by recognizing the similarities between the current and past experiences, and understanding the root cause of the pain.
How can one re-experience the pain of childhood to overcome the idealized self?
The real self is the only part of one's being that can grow, be, and live. It is the source of intuition, and only through understanding and embracing this real self can one truly connect with the concept of God and achieve self-realization.
What is the role of the real self in understanding the concept of God?