Spiritual Wisdom:

"There exist a number of words which many of you have become allergic to -- words used in the Bible and in organized religion, words that have indeed often been misused and abused. But these words have nevertheless a true origin that should not be forgotten. The name of divine manifestation in form -- Jesus Christ -- is, as you well know, one such word. If you heard a description of God as form, as personal helper, friend, guide to you, as all-forgiver, as a being of translucent light and perfection, you could accept it. So do not let the word Jesus Christ stand in your way. He is the Christ, and He was Jesus when He incarnated.

"Similarly you have associations with the words sin, hell, evil, devil. All these words have been grossly abused. That is true. But they nevertheless only indicate the same facts and factors that we now call by different names such as lower self aspects, negativities, destructiveness, a painful state of mind, etc." (PL #258)

"Let us close with a deep focusing all together on the One, the one power that motivates, the one life that you are an expression of, the one love that colors everything into radiant beauty, the one peace that surpasses all understanding, the one joy that vibrates and resonates through the pores of the universe that you are part of. Continue your tasks of self-purification thus spreading this great light and being carriers of the Christ. The love that envelopes the universe, the permeates the universe, can be borne by your purified sould. You become acclimatized to do so. Let this love surge through you and be one with it. Be your God. Be the Christ." (PL #239)

"When you no longer negate the ugliness in you, you will not have to negate the beauty in you any longer. There is so much beauty in every one of you that is already free and manifest -- beauty that you totally negate, ignore, do not perceive and experience! And I do not only mean the potentiality as yet to be developed, I mean the actualized beauty. You can think of this. Pray for its awareness as you pray for the awareness of the ugliness. When you can perceive both -- not one wiping out the other -- you will have made a substantial step toward a realistic picture of life and of yourself that will enable you to deal with life and yourself and to integrate what now tears you asunder." (PL #184)

"As you learn to accept the various aspects of yourself -- the positive and the negative ones -- and thus unify yourself, so will you feel in exactly the same way about your surroundings. And you will know that all people -- whether you like them or not, approve of them or not, whether they are developed beings or not -- are aspects of the whole just as you are an aspect of the whole. You will also know that what is negative, either in you or in others, is an aspect of the same that is positive. You will cease being alienated from and frightened by it. But you must first begin to cease being alienated from and frightened by whatever exists in you. For the more you fear aspects of yourself, the more this fear must be projected into outer life, onto other people and outer conditions. The only way you can cease being afraid of life, other people, of death is when you meet what you are most afraid of in yourself. This is the path. This is the path!" (PL #203)

Q. Is divorce against spiritual law?

A. Not necessarily. We do not have fixed rules like that. There are, of course, cases when divorce is an easy way out, a mere escape. There are other cases when divorce is reasonable because the choice was made in immaturity and both partners lack the desire to fulfill the responsibility of marriage in its true sense. If only one is willing, or neither, divorce is better than staying together and making a farce out of marriage. Unless both are willing to take this journey together, it is better to break cleanly rather than to let one prevent the growth of the other. That happens. It is better to terminate a mistake than to remain indefinitely in it without finding an effective remedy. One should not, however, go out of marriage lightly. Even though it was a mistake and does not work, one should try to find the reasons and do one's very best to search out and perhaps overcome the hurdles that are in the way due to one's own inner mistakes, and try to make the best of it if both are in any way willing. It cannot be generalized to say that divorce is either wrong in any case or that it is always right. One should certainly do one's best even if the marriage is not the ideal experience that I discussed tonight. Few people are ready and mature enough for it. You can make yourself ready by trying to make the best of your past mistakes and learn from them.

"Visualize your aggressive forces being put into the service of positive aims. You can claim refutation of negative influences. You can talk to your own false thoughts with firmness and reasonableness. See yourself doing that. Invite Christ to be your assistance in this endeavor. Then claim with all the vigor at your disposal, all the aggression that is beginning to transform from negative to positive, that you want only the will of God; that you trust that the will of God will bring you the best you could ever hope for; that any distrust of the will of the Highest is a lie you need to rid yourself of. The more aggression you put into such declarations and intents, the better the seeds will grow in your soul substance.
 
"Your aggression itself needs to be transformed. This will enable you to become who you are meant to be -- who you actually are already on another level of reality. Perhaps some of you can occasionally begin to visualize another picture of yourself. Imagine your real being, free from all the encumbrances that burden you now. Whether these encumbrances are in your body, in your psyche, or in your relationship to others and the world, does not matter. They are all expressions of pain, the pain you suffer from some untruthfulness contained within your psyche. It is not easy to ferret out what this untruthfulness may be. Sometimes it is right on the surface and will become clear to you after only a slight effort on your part to want to see it. Other times, your defensive blocks blot out your own view, but they are nevertheless obvious enough to others who could help you if you let them. This is why working with others is such an important aspect of this pathwork -- both in the helper/worker relationship as well as in groups, as well as in your interactions in your daily life. But then there is also untruthfulness so deeply buried that it may take a long time and much trial before you can make it rise to a sufficient surface level to be recognized.
 
"Once the untruthfulness is on the surface, and you are able and willing to see and confront it, this is the moment in time when aggression can be transformed. This is also the moment when a further visualization can take place. Imagine that your true being -- which means your being in truth, all in truth -- observes that suffering part of you, the part that is squeezed into a smaller world in which you sometimes appear to suffocate. Your real being that is without any shades of untruthfulness, error, distortion (sin) is therefore in total well-being. There is no pain there. This true being observes your earth being that has undertaken to correct the distorted part. It observes with compassion for the momentary difficulties, but without tragedy, for it knows that all is well and that the temporary suffering must lead to salvation." (PL #258)

"The process of birth is never, under any circumstances, a one-time phenomenon. It is always gradual. Even on the purely physical plane, a human being is not born complete. The baby leaves the womb of the mother and first becomes merely a physically separate entity. Even this physical separation is still not complete right away. It takes a while until mother and child are truly separate entities. And I do not mean this in terms of independence and self-sufficiency, for obviously the child is not able to fend for himself for a long time.
 
"If you think carefully, you will note that all the childhood years are part of the birth process. Gradually the mind is being freed, released, being born into the physical reality, as it were. More gradually the person's spiritual nature and higher values are being born, though not always. They often remain unborn, waiting for a future existence to be released. Talents often take time to be born, in most instances considerable time. Accomplishments which the soul has acquired in previous lives need to be nurtured, the technicalities learned for this body, so that the inner knowledge has an adequate instrument to express itself." (PL #255)

"The more individual cells -- consciousnesses -- begin to purify and align with divine will, the more the totality of the earth entity will be effected. The cells meld into one structure although they each have their individual life. There is a great deal of ambivalence in regard to this melding. On the one hand, man fears giving up what he calls his "individuality." He believes that his uniqueness, his particular divine manifestation, is dependent on his separation. He falsely assumes that by oneness he loses any of what is uniquely his. In reality it is just the opposite. Thus he struggles against the innate fate of all created beings -- the striving toward oneness. He resists and fights it, to his own great chagrin. For, on the other hand, the longing for this oneness can never be assuaged until it is beginning to take place. The longing is desperate in the soul, the pain of not experiencing it is excruciating. But not knowing of this longing, not feeling this pain, is the worse state of apathy, unaliveness, confusion, and secondary pain that can never be comprehended because it is a result of a long chain reaction whose origin is exactly the pain of denying oneness." (PL #257)

"There are isolated moments in which you experience the hand of God in your life, the breath of God, as it were. Such a moment may occur at any time, triggered off by certain experiences either within or outside of you. It is then when the inside and outside fuse, and it all becomes one reality. It is then that you know God's reality. There simply is no longer any doubt about it. The peace and joy you then experience cannot be put into words. You know that all the isolated goals you pray for become only this one central point: experiencing the reality of God. When this is the case, you are already pure, at least in that moment in time, for the purity of your unclustered, unobstructed spirit is freed through all the shells and layers. So you do not have to pray for purification.

"In such a moment, you know all you need to know -- in that instant in time. So you do not have to pray for insight and enlightenment and understanding. You understand, you know, you are enlightened. In such a moment, love flows through every vein of your body and soul. So you do not have to pray for love. In that moment, you activate the greatest healing power there is. So you do not have to pray for healing. In such a moment, you have strength, imagination, resourcefulness, and creativity. So you do not have to pray for success. In such a moment, you also have measure, so that you know what is right and possible for your earthly existence at this juncture of your evolution.
 
"So all the various prayers flow into this one central point. When these rare moments occur, you are bathed in the grace of God. With such an experience you come to understand that all you really need to pray for is to experience God's presence, God's hand in all of life, God's breath in your own existence. But until such time, it may often be necessary to fragmentize your prayers for your own focus and deeper understanding of what is necessary at any given time in your life. You need to impress yourself with certain aspects that need to be concentrated on." (PL #255

"The birth of Christ celebrates and symbolizes birth, not only birth of an entity, of a human being, but birth of new expressions, of new ways of expressing God in life, birth of new levels of consciousness. The celebration of birth always follows the celebration of what you experience as death. It is an endless chain, a continuum of consciousness, but each birth always gives rise to new joy. And death is nothing else but another form of birth. It simply is the reverse side, symbolized in your religious history by Easter, where resurrection follows death. " (PL #239)