What is evil?

yes your probably right laura, but i'm a bit lazy and off work at the moment which is I have so much time to post things. Sorry will read more before asking questions to answers which could be easily found
 
garethjross said:
No i don't mean the emotional aspect of the heart, I mean the understanding that you have when you can feel it in your blood and bones...
This IS the heart.
garethjross said:
i'm a bit lazy and off work at the moment which is I have so much time to post things.
Have you been reading the threads latelly? If not, please do so a bit, so i can explai my self when I say: Do you now understand the role you are playing just by being lazy?
 
This IS the heart... Have you been reading the threads latelly? If not, please do so a bit, so i can explai my self when I say: Do you now understand the role you are playing just by being lazy?
As it was said somewhere, emotion certainly is a part of 3rd density human reality but one does have to keep in mind that objectively false as well as objectively true stuff can be felt the same way in your "blood and bones". If that "immaculate void flow" includes electrons going back to the vacuum to find neutrinos with Karma information then one has a possible physics mechanism for the immortal soul so I'm not sure why an "immaculate void flow" has to have no immortal souls? If one modifies one's Buddhist beliefs to be 4th way like for the West then it could be misleading semantics for discussion in this forum to still call that Buddhism.
 
Evil is numbness and a confusion about the execution of control. When you think of the defense mechanisms operating in the human psyche, the connection between numbness and evil becomes quite clear. Children who feel hurt, rejected, and helplessly exposed to pain and deprivation often find that numbing their feelings is their only protection against suffering. This is often a useful and quite realistic protective device. Likewise, when children are confused because they perceive contradiction and conflict around them, equally contradictory emotions arise in their own psyche. Children cannot cope with either. Numbness is also a protection against their own contradictory responses, impulses, and reactions. Under such circumstances, it might even be a salvation. But when such numbness has become second nature and is maintained long after the painful circumstances have changed and when the person is no longer a helpless child, this, in the smallest measure, is the beginning of evil; this is how evil is born. Numbness and insensitivity toward one’s own pain in turn means equal numbness and insensitivity toward others. When examining one’s reactions closely, one might often observe that the first spontaneous reaction to others is a feeling for and with them, a compassion or empathy, a participation of the soul. But the second reaction restricts this emotional flow. Something clicks inside and seems to say no, which means that a protective layer of unfeelingness has formed.

We might differentiate between three stages of numbness. First, numbness toward the self, a protective mechanism. Second is the numbness toward others. In this stage, it is a passive attitude of indifference that enables one to watch others suffer without feeling discomfort oneself. Much of the world’s evil is caused by this state of soul. Because it is less crass, in the long run it is more harmful, for active cruelty induces quicker counterreactions. Passive indifference, however, born out of numbing the feelings, can go unnoticed because it can so easily be camouflaged. It permits the person to follow the most selfish impulses without open detection. Indifference may not be as actively evil as cruelty acted out, but it is just as harmful in the long run. The third stage of numbness is actively inflicted cruelty. This stage arises from fear of others who seem to expect such acts, or from an inability to cope with pent-up rages, or from a subtle process of strengthening the protective device of numbness. At first, this may appear incomprehensible. But when you think about it deeply, you will find that people may occasionally, almost consciously, find themselves on the brink of a decision: “Either I allow my feelings to reach out in empathy with the other, or, in order to deflect this strong influx of warm feelings, I have to behave in the exact opposite way.” The next moment such reasoning is gone, the conscious decision forgotten, and what remains is a compelling force toward cruel acts.

Active cruelty numbs the person who perpetrates it to an even greater extent; it not only prohibits the influx of spontaneous positive feelings but also wards off fear and guilt. The act of inflicting pain on others simultaneously kills off one’s own ability to feel. Hence, it is a stronger device to attain numbness. You must always distinguish between the active deeds of either indifference or cruelty, and emotional tendencies. The indifference or numbness may not be actively executed; it is possible to experience this nonparticipation and numbness but not act upon it. You may do all you can to help another, perhaps sometimes even overdo it, just because you do not wish, on the conscious level, to be so indifferent. The desire to hurt others may exist merely as an emotion, without ever being acted upon. However, when you feel guilt, you do not differentiate between these vital manifestations, so it makes no difference whether you feel or act in destructive, harmful ways. Hence, the entire trouble area is denied, pushed out of consciousness, where it can no longer be corrected. Admitting, acknowledging, facing an emotion, no matter how undesirable, can never harm the self or others and is eventually bound to dissolve the negative feeling. Confusing the impulse with the deed and therefore denying both, results in extreme disturbance for the self, indirectly affecting others, with no hope of change as long as the process remains unconscious.

The second facet of evil relates to control. We have discussed the importance of relinquishing too tight a control and the failure to use those controls and powers you have at your disposal for attaining a full, rich life. The imbalance this failure creates induces rigidity where flexibility should exist, as well as a helpless loss of self where resilient firmness should prevail. The imbalance is always caused by the ignorance of, and lack of differentiation between, outer and inner self. All suffering is related to helplessness. The greater the helplessness, the less the person is able to avoid pain. Children are, by their very nature, helpless, weak, dependent. Hence, the suffering they may experience requires some means, such as the numbing process, of weakening its impact. The helplessness continues to exist in adults whose psyches have remained childish or immature. The trouble spots in one’s inner life are always marked by this feeling of utter helplessness, while in the healthy areas this feeling is absent. It is obvious that helplessness and lack of control are very much connected. Since helplessness causes pain, pain causes numbness, and numbness leads to evil, it becomes clear that imbalance and lack of control are also connected with evil.

On a broader scale, helplessness is one of humanity’s greatest problems. People feel helpless toward their own body. There is a considerable area where you have control. This area broadens to the extent that you have found your inner, or real, self. Where you are distorted and the real self is hidden from your outer awareness, control ends. It is then that you feel helpless, weak, afraid. The relationship between your body, your feelings, and your personal life circumstances is the same when it comes to control. You have direct control over certain of your bodily functions. You can determine with your outer, or ego self, when and how to use certain muscles, when and how to move. In fact, a number of your physical functions are under the direct jurisdiction of your outer will and cannot work unless outer will is exerted. To summarize, all voluntary body functions are under the direct control of your outer ego. But there is a vast area of your body the outer will cannot directly reach. They work in perfect order without any deliberate or determined action of your will. The inner bodily functions are not governed by outer control. This is frightening for you, because you do not understand it. You feel you have no power over a vast area of your body, and are at its mercy. The same applies to psychic processes. You have indisputable control over a vast area of your actions, over the words you speak, over your choice of thoughts. You seem to have no control over your spontaneous feeling reactions. You may want to feel one thing but you cannot make yourself do so. You may hate to feel another emotion, but you are unable to prevent it. From suppression and repression, as you all know, strange and even more disquieting compulsions arise, with the result that you feel even more helpless in the grip of your own personality. Even though such thoughts may not be put into concise words, the feeling is: “If I do not even have jurisdiction over my body or my own reactions and feelings; and if a frightening power which I do not know and cannot control seems to be at work within me, how much more helpless must I be in the face of life itself?”

Actually, the correlation between the self and life is very direct. You do not have any more control over the faculties of your inner body and psychic processes than you have over your life. To the extent that you have found the key to your inner processes, you have found the key to the apparently fateful occurrences governing your life. Unfathomable fate seems to control your inner body, your spontaneous reactions, and a number of outer circumstances. The same relationship exists in life as between body and feelings. You have direct control over certain happenings. Your outer, direct will can determine certain actions which you know are bound to produce certain effects. If you do this, it must have that effect. But then, as with the body and the world of your feelings, there is an area where this immediate, direct control ceases. Hence the relationships with your body, your inner world of feelings, and your outer life are all the same. They are divided by a borderline up to which you have obvious direct influence to mold events and results, and beyond which this seems not to be so. There another power appears to be at work over which you have no jurisdiction, a power you do not understand and therefore fear.

More evolved spirit have occasionally noticed that where you were once helpless, you are no longer helpless at all. You not only discover power, strength, resourcefulness, and adequacy but you also begin to see that a remote control seems to be at work, governing your fate and your outer life circumstances. You realize that your control expands. You experience how the areas where you lack control recede, and the new-found areas of control are not under direct control but work by remote control. This extension of control does not, and cannot, happen through a rigid tightening of the ego forces — of will, or mind, or reasoning. It happens instead by an indirect process of remote control, which eventually becomes direct. To be more specific: your ego faculties have to be used, but not in the way this is usually attempted. They can and must be used to diminish the strength of outer will. The idea that outer will is omnipotent must be relinquished, and the outer faculties must entrust themselves to the inner. When you understand that there is a vaster intelligence immediately very accessible within yourself — no faraway deity separated from you, but an immediate and integral part of yourself. You will see, at first, remote control working where there had been absolutely no intervention, connection, or control. And eventually remote control will turn into more direct control. At first, this cannot be more than a theory you must test with good faith, willingness, and openness. Later, the theory is bound to turn into fact, into experienced reality.

If you wish to exert control over areas inaccessible to your outer will — for example, inner body processes — you overexert yourself, weakening your energies and courting disappointment and frustration. If you understand, however, that all inner processes — inner body, inner feelings, and inner life, manifesting in fate and apparently coming from outside — can be governed only by the inner person, you will not waste valuable ego energy. Instead, you will use your outer mind to make contact with the inner self, so it does what needs to be done. When you realize this, it becomes feasible. Now, how can the inner self be activated? It cannot be activated by itself, for it responds only to consciousness. Your outer, as well as inner consciousness has the power to direct this inner being, with all its marvelous resourcefulness, with its intelligence and power. This inner being, in turn, has jurisdiction over the inner processes. People have no inkling about the limitless possibilities, extending far above and beyond what they believe to be natural law.

What is vastly overlooked is that the limitations of the outer ego faculties exist only as long as you fail to understand that these same ego faculties must be used to directly contact the inner self, which then controls all inner faculties — including body, feelings, and apparent fate. The outer consciousness must be used to activate the inner consciousness. In spite of the tremendous power of the latter, it responds only to a direct, deliberate effort of the outer mind. It is this two-step, indirect approach to the power of the inner self that establishes what I have called remote control. This control begins to work more and more as the personality removes distortions and misconceptions embedded in the psyche. These distortions create a barrier between the outer and the inner consciousness. But as more insight is gained, little by little, and the destructive attitudes change, the cooperation between the outer and inner self extends the areas of control.

At first, this appears to be almost coincidental. Occasional certainties are put in doubt again by unavoidable relapses. You know quite well that in the process of growth problems do not vanish in one sweep. Remnants are left that continue to act up, until all distortions disappear. What was once a mysterious and random fate to which one was helplessly exposed, over which one had no control, becomes gradually visible as cause and effect operating by remote control, as opposed to the direct control of outer faculties. And as development continues, remote control becomes more and more direct. Then inner and outer faculties become one. And as this process continues, control — when to let go of the outer ego faculties, when to relinquish tight over-control, and when to use outer will in the proper way — is no longer a problem. Nor is it necessary any longer to numb oneself, to cope with helpless exposure to pain; for you are no longer helpless.
 
It has always been said that the individual’s free will determined whose influence would predominate in one’s life. While human beings were still in their immature mental and emotional states, their wills were not sufficiently developed to make conscious, appropriate, and wise choices. The strength of their lower selves and their inability and unwillingness to face and therefore transcend the lower self, frequently made them the prey to evil influences. Lack of self-knowledge inevitably led to lack of self-responsibility. Thus humanity felt victimized by evil spirits. Fear of them often led to submission to them—and this happened on a quite conscious and intentional level. And when this was not the case, it certainly occurred unconsciously by choosing the influences that corresponded to the intentionality of the lower self. Evil and its manifestation must itself become the medicine to overcome evil. People had to look within themselves to correct the effects of evil. So humanity had to go through a period of isolation and separateness from the invisible realities in order to grow into self-responsibility. You are an electromagnetic field that always attracts what is commensurate with certain levels of your innermost being.

The first of the three basic principles of evil is the most obvious to humanity. The devil was always associated with the principle which aims to destroy and to inflict suffering at all cost. The separation between the self that perpetrates suffering and the victim who suffers is so great that the perpetrator is deluded into being unaffected by the further effects of his or her acts. It is known that everything about Satan is earmarked by separation—not only from God, but also from others and from the self. This aspect of separation exists in the case of all three principles I shall discuss here. The delusion of evil in the case of this first principle lies in the misperception that your brother’s or sister’s pain is not unavoidably also your own pain. Instead of recognizing this basic truth, a person, whether in human form or as a discarnate entity who is filled with evil, experiences excitement and pleasure when spreading destruction, suffering, and pain.

The second principle of evil is materialism. This not only applies to the earth sphere, but equally and often even more to a variety of hellish spheres in which entities live in a totally disconnected way, convinced that the dead state of thickly condensed matter—much more thickly condensed than your living matter—is the only reality that exists. In such hellish spheres the suffering is not the same as the suffering deriving from the first principle which was often depicted by visionaries in your earthly sphere. This second principle is less often understood and sensed. Visionaries have not seen the spheres corresponding to and manifesting this principle. Imagine a life in which nature is totally absent. Nothing is alive; all is condensed matter. Nothing has flavor. By the same token the entity’s inner nature is equally inaccessible. Everywhere there is only deadness, mechanicalness, and alienation from all that is pulsating life, within and without. There is no birth and no death, yet the unchanging existence here is not the eternal life that is truly heavenly. This manifestation is the distortion of eternity. It is hopelessness itself as if no change were ever possible. Existence is totally mechanized. Such hopeless kind of suffering is neither more nor less desirable than suffering through direct infliction of pain. It is simply a suffering of a different kind corresponding to a different principle of evil.

The third principle of evil is little known. Although it has been only recognized in a vague way, perhaps as a byproduct of evil but hardly ever as a powerful principle itself, it is as effective as the other two principles, and like them also has its own personification, hierarchy, and realm. It is the principle of confusion, distortion, half-truth, and all the variations that may possibly exist in connection with it. It includes using truth where it does not belong or is not applicable, so that the truth subtly turns into a lie without being easily traced as such because it is presented under the guise of divine truth and seems unassailable. The resulting confusion is not just an extremely effective weapon of evil; it is an evil principle in itself. Here is an example of how the three principles interact. Confusion and distortion of reality—making a truth out of a lie and a lie out of the truth—create a numbness toward the cosmic, eternal aliveness that can be felt deep in the soul of any individual when there is truth and clarity. This numbness, created out of confusion and chaos, inevitably inflicts pain and suffering just as the lie must inflict pain and suffering. Starting with any one of the three principles most prevalent in an individual or in a collective manifestation, you will see that they must all coexist and reinforce one another.

Like all disease, the devils near you are cause, effect, and medicine. Their proximity and their effect on you is caused by your own unpurified, limited, and undeveloped consciousness. Your unpurified consciousness has the effect of drawing devils near you who confuse you with lies so that you no longer know what is truth and what is untruth. Your confusion induced by them can be used by you as a medicine, if you so choose. You can use it as an indication that you need to develop and purify these unattended parts of your soul. Instead of fearing the devils or denying their existence so you can overcome your fear, you need to recognize their voices and learn to distinguish where these voices come from. This is in itself a very necessary step in your development. If you ignore or deny their existence, how in the world can you become aware of them and counteract them? If you do not know that at times they surround you and inspire you, you unknowingly become their tool. If you do not consider that lies may be whispered into your thinking apparatus, you will not use your capacity to question and doubt the thoughts that filter through you. It is necessary to become aware of the connection between your lower self, which, due to its ignorance, fear, and lack of faith, creates destructive defenses and negative intentionality, and the voices of satanic entities. Together these two sources of negativity wreak havoc in your life and in the lives of those around you. The time has come when you need to know clearly, fearlessly, and intelligently what the facts of life are in this respect. Because the stronger you become in your higher self and its positive intentionality while at the same time leaving certain aspects of the lower self unattended to, the more you become prey to evil influences who are much more concerned with you than with those who are not particularly aware of subliminal forces and whose life is not dedicated to God.

When one makes the effort to question one’s own thoughts and to claim one’s determination to follow the way of truth and light, the power of the spirits of lying instantly wanes. This may not be immediately discernible to the entity who cannot see the light of its own will to be in truth, nor can he see the entities surrounding him or feel their influence. The effect may come only some time later, but come it must. How often do you allow yourself to be submerged by thoughts of untruth and confusion and be drowned in them, until their effect disconnects you from the spark of life, until you suffer the pain of untruth and confusion! It is clear that the hidden part of your lower self that resists exposure and transformation is unable to allow the personality to stand the light. So prayer is not enough, neither is good will and meditation, visualization and logic. None of them will make you really accessible to the light as long as there exists a hidden agenda in your soul. In this area you become connected to the forces of darkness and you are a target for them.

What exists in microcosm within the human soul also exists in the macrocosm. Every inner drama is a reflection of an outer drama and vice versa. Every battle within the human soul between the forces of light and darkness, between the higher self and the lower self, is also waged on a universal level, enacted by many entities at different stages of development. Every personality goes through this battle within himself or herself; every personality experiences it occasionally in his or her surroundings; and, last but not least, every personality will become involved in larger issues that also represent the universal battle between good and evil. The individual’s role in this battle very much depends on his or her conscious, deliberate choice of where he or she wants to be. When issues are tinged by personal emotions, desires, or interests that belong to the realm of darkness, and these personal emotions are not recognized as fogging the vision, then one truly becomes a target for one or all of the three principles of evil. Cruelty will be hidden under the guise of expressing your feelings, while maligning and distortion will become the tools of cruelty and the intent to hurt. Disconnection from deeper reality will blind you to the true meaning of events. Confusion will be rampant so that truth will be used for lying and lies will be called the truth. The forces of evil have been allowed to find entrance through your lower self which you have not dealt with sufficiently.

Use your good will to see the truth. See both the truth of your hidden lower-self motives and the truth of your higher-self good will, and give up the line of least resistance and its negative pleasure which makes you persist in a destructive course bringing clouds of pain and darkness to you and those around you. The key is really quite simple. It is so tempting to follow negative thoughts and come to believe them. It furthers a lower-self fixation to indulge in the negative pleasure of negative thoughts, suspicions, blames, and accusations which may or may not be true. Raise the pertinent questions. The first would be, “What is the truth here? I want to know the real truth.” The second question is, “Do I want to know the truth in this or that issue?” If you can answer these two questions truthfully and in depth, you will dispel the clouds of darkness which carry the three principles of evil.

Clarification will come when the truth is really wanted, even if a part of the truth at this moment is still that you do not want the truth, that you want to attack, to blame, to see people or events in the worst light. The reason why you secretly wish this can only be explored when you no longer deny feeling this way. The truth will shimmer through slowly but inexorably, once you admit a negative intentionality which then attracts expert spirits of lying and of confusion. Clarity will dissolve the pain of your guilt that is frequently not allowed to surface. You keep it down by strengthening the destructive process of projecting on others what you fear in yourself. Clarity will also help dissolve the pain you inflict on others with this evil projection. Do not ever delude yourself into believing that negative intent and negative thoughts do not inevitably reflect in your actions and affect others in an insidious way. Thoughts can never remain separated things. They create results and events in one form or another. The clarity which comes from honestly pursuing and answering the above questions after you have delved into your hidden thought processes which are seldom completely unconscious will dissolve the pain. It will reestablish your connection with eternal life.

When taking responsibility for your creation must be combined with a profound knowledge of the invisible worlds and the laws according to which you attract or repel entities of different nature and development who then influence you and reinforce the force field within your soul. Each of the many areas of your soul may be influenced by the highest or by the lowest forces. The choice is up to you. The law of attraction and repulsion is purely relative. For example, if you have reached a comparatively high level of development, the areas which remain to be transformed and are not recognized by your consciousness—even though they may not be particularly destructive or outright wrong—exert through their unrecognized parts a greater attraction to evil than does the negative charge of a person who is on an altogether lower plane of development.
 
The Vicious Circle

The vicious circle begins in childhood, where all images are formed. The child is helpless; it needs to be taken care of; it cannot stand on its own two feet; it cannot make mature decisions; it cannot be independent of weak and selfish motives—and therefore must depend on other human beings to a certain degree. Hence the child is incapable of unselfish love. The mature adult grows into it provided the whole personality matures harmoniously and provided that none of the childish reactions remain hidden in the unconscious. If they do, only part of the personality will grow while another part will remain immature. There are very few adults who are as mature emotionally as they are intellectually. The child desires to be loved; in fact, it needs to be loved. If an adult existed who was able to give a semblance of divine love, the conflict we are discussing here would not arise. But even in this case, the inner problems of an entity would never be solved. For nothing can really be solved by what another person can or cannot do! That is why life on this imperfect and unpurified planet is necessary for every soul who is not yet pure.

The child comes in contact with more or less imperfect surroundings that bring its inner problems to the fore. Because of the lack of divine love, the child in its ignorance craves an exclusive love that is neither divine nor humanly possible. The love it wants is selfish; it does not want to share love with others, with brothers or sisters or even with the other parent. The child is often unconsciously jealous of both parents. Yet, if the parents do not love each other, the child suffers even more. So the first conflict arises from two opposite desires. On the one hand the child wants the love of each parent exclusively; on the other, it suffers if the parents do not love each other. Since the love-capacity of any parent is imperfect, the child misunderstands that, despite the imperfection, most parents are still fully capable of loving more than one person. The child feels excluded and rejected if the parent also loves others, however. In short, the exclusive love the child craves can never be gratified. Furthermore, whenever the child is prohibited from having its way, that serves as an additional “proof” to the child that it is not sufficiently loved.

This frustration causes the child to feel rejected, which, in turn, causes hatred, resentment, hostility, and aggression. This is the second part of the vicious circle. The need for love that cannot be gratified causes hatred and hostility toward the very people one loves most. Generally speaking, this is the second conflict of the growing human being. If the child hated someone it did not love at the same time, if it loved in its own way and did not desire love in return, this conflict could not arise. The very fact that hatred exists for the very person one loves dearly creates an important conflict in the human psyche. It is self-evident that the child feels ashamed of these negative emotions, and therefore it puts this conflict into the subconscious where it festers. The hatred causes guilt because the child is taught early that it is bad, wrong, and sinful to hate, particularly one’s parents whom one is supposed to love and honor. It is this guilt, living on and on in the subconscious, which in the adult personality causes all sorts of inner and outer conflicts. Moreover, people are unaware of the roots of these conflicts until they decide to find out what is hidden in their subconscious. The guilt has a further, and again inevitable, reaction. Feeling guilty, the unconscious says, “I desire to be punished.” Thus a fear of punishment arises in the soul, which again is almost always completely unconscious.

With the fear of punishment a further reaction sets in. Whenever you are happy and enjoy pleasure, in spite of this being a natural longing, you feel you do not deserve it. The guilt of hating those it loves most, convinces the child that it is undeserving of anything good, joyful, or pleasurable. The child feels that if it were ever to become happy, the punishment, which seems inevitable, would be that much greater. Therefore the child unconsciously avoids happiness, thinking to atone in this way and thus to avoid even greater punishment. The avoidance creates situations and patterns that always seem to destroy everything most dearly wished for in life. It is this fear of happiness that leads a person to all sorts of unhealthy reactions, symptoms, endeavors, manipulations of emotions, and even to actions which indirectly create patterns that appear as if they happened involuntarily, without the personality being responsible for them at all. Thus a further conflict comes into existence. On the one hand, the personality is yearning for happiness and fulfillment, on the other, a fear of happiness prohibits the fulfillment. Although the desire for happiness can never be eradicated, yet, due to this deeply hidden guilt feeling, the stronger one desires happiness, the guiltier one feels. Many personal as well as mass images are gathered along the way, all helping to fortify this chain reaction.

Now, the fear of being punished and the fear of not deserving happiness create a further and more complicated reaction. The unconscious mind thinks, “I am afraid to be punished by others, although I know I deserve it. It is much worse to be punished by others, for then I am really at the mercy of others, be it people, be it the fates, be it God, be it life itself. But perhaps if I punished myself I could at least avoid the humiliation, the helplessness, and the degradation of being punished by forces outside myself.” These basic conflicts of love and hatred, of guilt and fear of punishment exist in every human personality, only the degree varies. The compulsive desire for self-punishment due to wrong and ignorant conclusions exists in every human being to some degree. Thus the personality inflicts punishment on itself. This may happen in various ways, either by physical disease that the psyche produces, or by various mishaps, difficulties, failures, or conflicts in any area of life. In each case the area affected depends on the personal image the child has formed and carried around during this lifetime until it is found and eventually dissolved. Thus, if an image exists regarding profession and career, for instance, it will be fortified by the inherent desire for self-punishment; difficulties in this respect will constantly arise in the person’s life. Or, if an image connected to love and marital life exists, the same pattern will hold true there. Hence, if and when you do not succeed in a conscious and legitimate desire, and looking at your life you find the pattern that the fulfillment of the conscious desire was constantly frustrated, as though you had nothing to do with it, as though an unkind fate had happened to you, you can be sure that not only does an image and a wrong conclusion exist within you, but that, in addition, the need for self-punishment is also present.

A further chain reaction in this vicious circle is the personality’s split in its desire currents. The original split between love and hate, which started the vicious circle, causes further splits, as you can see quite clearly by now. One of the conflicting feelings is the need for self-punishment, yet, on the other hand, the desire not to be punished coexists with it. Thus a hidden part argues, “Perhaps I can get around it. Perhaps I can atone in another way for my great guilt of hating.” The imaginary atonement amounts to a kind of bargaining. One does so by setting such a high standard for oneself that it is impossible to live up to it in reality. This little inner voice argues, “If I am so perfect, if I have no faults and no weakness, if I am the best in everything I undertake, then I can make good for my past hatred and resentment.” And since the little voice was at one point repressed into the unconscious, it did not die; it is still alive in the present. You get over something only if you can air it out. That is why the same old hatred still lingers on in you. That is also why you constantly feel guilty. If it were really a matter of the past, you would not feel this acute guilt all the time, even though the guilt is not conscious. You think that by being so perfect you can avoid punishment. In this way a second conscience is being created. In reality only one conscience does exist: it is the higher self, which is eternal and indestructible; it is each human being’s divine spark. Do not confuse this conscience with the second conscience that has been artificially created out of compulsion to atone for a supposed sin, or even for a real failing. Neither imaginary sins nor real failings can be atoned for by the artificial and over-demanding conscience; in reality no one needs to be punished. As you all know by now, the way to eliminate real failings is very different and much more constructive. If and when you finally differentiate between these two kinds of conscience, you will have taken a great step forward.

The good and pure divine conscience is, of course, concerned with your progress, with your spiritual development, and with the fulfillment of your personal task in life. It is also concerned with your personal law. When I say personal law, this should not be misunderstood. It does not mean the kind of behavior that self-willed, primitive, undeveloped or antisocial people display. It does not mean living in a fortress of separation, sometimes by one’s own law of selfishness. Such people disregard not only the law of their government, but also divine law. The personal law I refer to is part of divine law; it always remains within the framework of the divine and never contradicts it. Yet every child of God is different in development as well as in character and temperament. Each person has different qualities and shortcomings. Therefore, every human being needs something different for each life, and often something different for each period within the same life. What applies to one person does not necessarily apply to others.

Divine law is wide and very flexible. It knows none of the rigidities and generalizations of the human misinterpretations of divine law. Such misinterpretations may close in some individuals. They feel acutely what is expected of them and what they consciously think is right oppresses them. Perhaps their selfish instincts are still so strong that their real and divine conscience has that effect, but perhaps it is leading them according to their personal life plan. So perhaps your surroundings lead you to do something that in itself is right and yet that may not be the right thing for you. On the other hand what your real conscience wants you to do may at first appear contrary to the ethical and moral law of your environment. Though this may sound strange to you, yet when you think more deeply it is not so strange. Your divine conscience will never be at variance with divine ethics and morals. So if you have the courage and independence to think through what the outer morals are, you will find that in many cases they may conform with the divine law, while in some they may not. Sometimes the outer morals are rigid and senseless. By adhering to them, you may inflict more harm on others and yourself than by following your own personal divine law.

Divine law is always determined first and foremost by whether it hurts others. There may be situations in your life when it is inevitable to hurt others; these situations arise from your former ignorance. In such instances you must deliberate and weigh carefully, asking God for enlightenment about which decision will bring less hurt all around. As you hear the voice of your divine conscience, it will give you peace and freedom. Let me emphasize again: your personal law and plan can never be immoral or unethical in reality. At times it may appear to be so according to human rigid standards, which always have the tendency to go by the letter and not according to the deep meaning. Rigid standards of humanity must often by their very nature be ungodly and compulsive in the same sense as your second, artificial conscience. For what lives in the individual always lives in humanity as a whole. Only by deeply feeling into yourself and only by complete self-honesty can you grasp the meaning of the true and real conscience that will guide you right if you do not let the voice of the second compulsive conscience overrule the real conscience.

When your real conscience speaks to you, you will be liberated regardless of whether your decision turns out to be what your emotions desire for the moment. Here is the difficulty: there are no rules. At one time your real and divine conscience may tell you to do what is unflattering, uncomfortable, and against your selfish desires. Then your hope that your inner voice warning against your selfish desire may be your compulsive conscience is unjustified. At times the right way may be what both your real and your compulsive conscience are saying only the motives may be different. At other times, your real conscience directs you toward the very thing you desire most, but you have no courage to obey it because your compulsive conscience speaks too loudly. This voice says, “I am too guilty. I must not be happy. I do not deserve it.” But when the voice of your divine conscience speaks to you, you must feel liberated; you must feel in complete harmony with yourself and with the world, whatever the decision, whatever the outcome, whatever the difficulties may be. Very few people can penetrate to the voice of the divine conscience at all times and be conscious of it. They are constantly whipped by the slave driver of their compulsive conscience, which has come into existence by the chain reactions I mentioned earlier.

The compulsive second conscience makes demands that are impossible to fulfill. Each time you fail to live up to these standards, you feel disproportionately dejected. With each failure to satisfy the compulsive conscience, you feel more strongly that you cannot avoid punishment. You feel the need for punishment even more than before you invented this second conscience. You say to yourself, “If I am not even capable of being as good and as perfect as I should be with most people, then how can I be perfect with those I hate? Therefore I know how much I deserve to be punished and despised.” The bargaining you wanted to do did not work out. It could never work out. So the price you pay for the second conscience is high—so much higher than the price everyone must pay to live life healthily! What happens when you cannot attain these goals? Inevitably the result must be a feeling of inadequacy and inferiority. Since you do not know that the standards of your compulsive conscience are irrational, unreal, and impossible to realize, and since you believe, behind your wall of separation, that others can succeed while you alone do not, you feel completely isolated and ashamed, with your guilty secret of not only hating, but also of being unable to be good and pure.

You may say, “It is right and good to become perfect.” You may say, “Does not the divine conscience wish this perfection too?” Certainly it does. I said before that at times the divine and the compulsive conscience may strive for the same thing. In the first place, though, the way it is achieved differs in each case. The divine conscience knows you cannot be perfect yet; it wants to show you step by step how to attain perfection by degrees, by accepting yourself as you are now without guilt and fear. The compulsive conscience does not know anything of the kind; it has to be perfect now. Furthermore, the motives of these two voices vary. The divine conscience has time; it desires its ultimate goal for the purpose of loving better; it knows that the perfection of divine truth is the only way to give love and happiness and to become happy and be loved.

The second conscience is motivated by weakness and fear. It bargains; it wants to avoid something that may or may not be good, healthy, and deserved—it depends how you look at so-called punishment. It is too proud to realize that you simply cannot be perfect yet. It is also too proud to let you accept yourself as you are now. You must therefore feel inferior because you are not able to live up to your high standards. All inferiority feelings in human nature can be reduced to this common denominator. As long as this fact is not felt and experienced, you cannot shed inferiority feelings. You have to uncover the whole vicious circle and see its lack of reason; you have to live through the emotions that led you to create it. Only then will you dissolve this chain reaction point by point and create new concepts within your emotional self.

Whatever rationalizations you use to explain your inferiority feelings, they are never the real cause. Others may indeed be more successful in one way or another, but this by itself could never make you feel inferior. Without your artificially high standards, you would not feel the need to be better than or at least as good as others in every realm of your life. You could accept with equanimity that others are better or do better in some areas of life while you have advantages that others may lack. You would not have to be as intelligent, as successful, as beautiful as other people are. This never is the real reason for your feelings of inadequacy and inferiority! This truth is borne out by the fact that you see the most brilliant, most successful, most beautiful people often having worse inferiority feelings than others who are less brilliant, less successful, or less beautiful.

This inadequacy and inferiority serve to further close the great vicious circle. Again, your unconscious little voice argues, “I have failed. I know I am inferior, but perhaps, if I could just receive a great amount of love and respect and admiration from others this would feel like the same gratification which I originally yearned for and which was withheld from me back then, thereby forcing me into the position of hating and creating this entire circle. The admiration and respect from others would also be the proof that I was justified, for it is possible to receive now what my parents have denied me. But it will also show that I am not as worthless as I suspect when I fail to live up to the standards of my compulsive conscience.”

Naturally, these thoughts are never reasoned out consciously; yet this is the way emotions argue below the surface. So the circle closes where it started, and the need to be loved and admired becomes much more compulsive than it originally was. All the various points of these chain reactions make the need much stronger. Besides, there always exists a suspicion that the hate was unjustified—which it was, but in a different sense. The personality unconsciously feels that if such love does exist at all, then the child was right, and your parents, or whoever else it was who did not give it to you, were wrong. Thus the craving for love becomes more and more strained and tense with weak, unhealthy, and completely immature motives. Since this need can never be fulfilled—and the more this becomes apparent, the greater the guilt becomes—all ensuing points in the vicious circle become worse and worse as life goes on, always creating more problems and conflicts. Only when you desire love in a healthy and mature way which does not cover sick motives, and only when you are willing to love to the same degree as you desire to be loved, thereby taking the “risk of life,” will love be forthcoming.

Remember that the sick personality in which this vicious circle is strong can never take that risk as long as it continues to desire immature childish love. As long as it cannot risk anything for love, it does not know how to love maturely. The child is not supposed to take that risk; yet the adult is. The inner child has only the immature desire and craving for love, and wants to be loved and cherished, cared for and admired even by people the individual has no intention to love in return. And with those people who may have the intention to love in return, to some degree, the proportion between their willingness to give and their compulsive need to receive is very uneven. Because of this basic unfairness, such a scheme cannot work. For, divine law is always just and fair. You never receive more than you invest. When you invest freely, without weak and compulsive motives, you may not get the love back immediately from the same source you invested it in, yet eventually it must flow back to you, this time in a benign circle. What you give out will flow back, provided you do not give in weakness, with a motive of proving something. If the motives for the limited love you give are unconsciously based on the great vicious circle, you can never receive love in return, even if by chance you come across a person who would basically be capable to love more maturely than it is possible in the environment you usually attract by your hidden currents. Let us suppose, for argument’s sake, that all your needs in receiving love could be gratified while you invest only a minimum of emotion. Even then your need could never be gratified. This is because of the simple reason that your inner suffering needs a different answer. The love you crave in the mistaken idea that it will set you right is not the answer. In other words, you look for a remedy that is no remedy for your sickness, so your hunger for love will remain, never to be stilled. It is like a bottomless well. Thus the circle closes.

It is your work on this path to find this circle within yourself, to experience it, particularly as to where, how, and in respect to whom it lives within you. All this has to become a personal experience before you can really dissolve it. If you let this circle be only an intellectual knowing, without emotionally reliving it, the knowledge will not help you. To repeat: if you cannot identify the various points of the vicious circle in your emotions, the existence of the chain reaction will just be another piece of theoretical knowledge you have absorbed, entirely separated from your emotions. Therefore, once you find this circle in your personal work you can break it, but only after realizing where the wrong premises are. You will have to see that as a child you were justified in having certain feelings, attitudes, needs and incapacities which are now obsolete. You also have to learn to be tolerant with your negative emotions. You have to understand them. You have to discover where you deviate in your emotional tendencies, requirements, and desires from you conscious knowledge. You may know perfectly well, and even preach, that you have to give love and not be so concerned with receiving. But all of you, in your emotions, still deviate from such intellectual knowledge. The discrepancy has to be made fully conscious before you can hope to break the circle. Only after you have realized and fully absorbed all that, and after you have thought about the irrationality of certain hitherto hidden emotions, will they begin to change, slowly, gradually, when you do not expect them to change the very moment you understand their lack of reason. Giving them leeway, and realizing that they are habit-bound will do it. If you discover their wrong trends again and again, long after you have initially understood their childishness, then, and then only, will these emotions slowly begin to mature. So far you have not realized that your emotions have often claimed that you wanted to receive more than you were willing to give. They also insisted that you be loved exclusively. And you still live—unconsciously—with the wrong conclusion that if a dear one loves someone else, he or she necessarily loves you that much less. All this is immature and based on entirely wrong conclusions. Only by lifting these emotional reactions into consciousness can you realize this. Then you will become aware, point by point, of the great vicious circle. After the emotions have come to the surface, you will be able to think them through, considering how and why they are wrong. When you face them—their ignorance, selfishness, and immaturity—without being ashamed, and apply your conscious knowledge to them, catching yourself whenever you fall back into old, bad emotional habits, your subconscious will gradually reveal more and more wrong conclusions. Each act of recognition will help you further to break your personal vicious circle. Thus you will become free and independent.

The human soul contains all the wisdom, all the truth deep down. But all the wrong conclusions cover it up. By making them conscious and then working them through point by point, you will finally reach the goal of unfolding your inner voice of wisdom that guides you according to the divine conscience, according to your personal plan. When the divine laws are violated in your inner and outer reactions, your divine conscience leads you inexorably in such a way as to restore order and balance in your life. Situations will occur that seem like punishment, while they are actually the remedy to set you on the right track. Wherever and whenever you deviate, the balance must be reestablished, so that through your difficulties you will finally get to the point where you change your inner direction. You will change, not necessarily in your outer and conscious actions, but in your unconscious childish requirements and aims.
 
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