Spiritual Wisdom:

"My dear friends, I want to bless each one of you here and all of your dear ones. Take this blessing, for it is again something of substance and reality, even though you cannot see it. Take this strength and harmony with you, let it work for you so as to go to battle against your lower self, for this is what life on earth is all about. Be in peace, be in God!" (PL #20)

"Destructiveness, evil, is not a final, separate force. You must think about this not merely in general, philosophical terms, as you may already have done more or less frequently. You must take the specific aspects of yourself that you are battling with in your conscience, that make you feel guilty and afraid, and apply this knowledge to all that is most distasteful to you -- in yourself and others. No matter how actually ugly some of those manifestations are -- such as cruelty, spite, arrogance, contempt, selfishness, indifference, greed, cheating, and many more -- you can bring yourself to realize that every one of these traits is an energy current that is originally good and beautiful and life-affirming. By searching in that direction, you will come to understand and experience how this is true specifically, how this or that hostile impulse is originally a good force. When you understand it, you have made a substantial inroad toward transforming the hostility and freeing the energy that is either channeled in a truly undesirable, destructive way, or frozen and stagnating.

"You must articulate the realization that these ugly traits, whatever they may be, are a power that can be used any way you wish. This power can be a creative tool to build happiness, joy, pleasure, love, expansion for yourself and others around you -- the same energy that may now manifest as hostility, envy, hatred, rage, bitterness, self-pity, blame, etc., etc. This list can be extended, but it is unnecessary, for these are only subvariations of the same theme we have worked on again and again. You all know these things in yourself, or at least you begin to know of these things in you. But still, after all this time, it is not yet possible for any of you here to truly understand that what you dislike most in yourself is essentially a highly desirable, creative power. You dislike it because it is not desirable in the form it manifests at the moment. In other words, you have to be able to learn to fully acknowledge that the way the power manifests is undesirable, but the energy current that produces this manifestation is desirable in itself. For it is made of the life stuff itself. It contains consciousness and creative energy. It contains every possibility to manifest and express life, to create new life manifestations. It contains all the best of life, as you experience life at its best -- and much more of it which you have not yet been able to experience, just as the best that has revealed itself to you of life contains the possibility of the very worst. If you can envisage the possibilities of all life manifestations, because life is a continuous flowing, moving, ongoing process, you can never become fixated on finalities, which create error, confusion, dualism." (PL #184)

"Our aim on this path is precisely the knowing and acceptance of the evil. This word acceptance has been used a great deal -- for lack of a better one -- but the meaning often gets lost behind the word. So we must pay more attention to how this acceptance is to be brought about. For only when acceptance occurs in the right way, can evil be incorporated and reformed -- in the truest sense of the word. You can then transform a force that has gone awry. Most human beings totally forget or ignore the fact that what is worst in them is essentially creative power and universal flow and energy that is highly desirable. Only when you truly realize this, my friends, will you learn to cope with every aspect of yourself." (PL #184)

"Every human being is continuously confronted with the deep problem of how to handle the destructive forces residing within himself and within those others with whom he has to deal. This problem seems an unending one, for ever since mankind has existed and can think, theories and philosophies have been built around it. And man's search, directly or indirectly, has always been concerned with this great predicament. For all suffering really comes exclusively from one's own destructiveness, negativity, or evil -- whatever name you give it. The great difficulty man is up against in this respect is that in his mind with which he tries to solve this problem, he is within the system of duality. He conceives of two opposite forces: a constructive one as opposed to a destructive one, good as opposed to evil. The moment he becomes involved in this kind of conceptualizing, he is unable to solve the problem. For he begins to negate, deny, evade, repress that in him which is indeed destructive. Consequently he is partially unaware of its existence and totally incapable of seeing it and the way in which it manifests. In other words, he is forced to act out the destructiveness indirectly -- with damaging results nonetheless. Thus guilt compounds, because the evil which he hoped to eliminate only increases when it is repressed and acted out indirectly.

"In this dualistic approach man becomes split off within himself, for he rejects a whole part of himself, which is essential, potent creative energy and without which he can never be a full human being. His sense of awareness dims as a result of repressing the undesirable part of himself. The less awareness, the weaker he is. He becomes more confused and less able to solve this, or any other, problem. The pathwork is, of course, primarily concerned with facing these undesirable parts and aspects in order to remove the self-imposed blindness. It is found again and again that such confrontation, rather than bringing devastation as it is feared, wakes up vital energy and makes you a more whole person. But the problem which still remains for all of you is how to cope with this undesirable material that begins to manifest." (PL #184)

"No one should think that when I mention the lower self, that this is necessarily something dreadfully sinful or wicked. Oh no, with so many, and all of you here, you have long, long ago passed this state of development where your lower self belonged to that category. But as long as a lower self is still in existence -- and with every human being it is -- it is still opposed to God, to His laws, and to the Godlike substance within you which wants to go forward, which wants the way of perfection, while the lower self constantly holds back. It is lazy, it does not want to change. This is its most significant quality and more important even than all individual faults. This is the same with everyone without any exception. He who has conquered his lower self -- at least in the respect that it has understood once and for all that it has to give in, that you, your directive personality has chosen and determined that path of perfection on which you conquer your lower self -- he is, indeed a happy person!" (PL #20)

"Begin by meeting your lower self, in courage, in optimism, in humility, and in a spirit of warfare, if I may use this expression. And once you discover it, once you shed all the masks and all the coatings, then you begin to work on these different aspects of the lower self. You do this by daily observation and self-testing, by observing again and again how far your inner currents still deviate from what you wish them to be. As you do that, as you become master over your lower self, as you learn real self-honesty, as your motives for development become purer and purer, your vision will widen, enlightenment will be given to you, and gradually your illness will disappear. So you should not even think of your illness first, but of the root of the problem. That will be the only lasting success, the only one, my dear! If your wish is recognized in the spirit world, if your wish is truly sincere that you want to purify yourself and not merely get rid of unpleasant consequences that are most visible or noticeable to you, help will be extended to you, guidance will come to you so that you can go to battle with your lower self with help, because no one can really do it alone." (PL #14)

"If your lower self has created an illness, this illness has to be accepted first. And you should rather go about finding the roots of what part of your lower self has created this illness. Thus the lower self really has to be met and completely explored. Your aim must be purification and perfection for its own sake, for the love of God you have in you, and not for the sake of not having to bear a discomfort." (PL #14)

"The lower self does not only consist of the common faults, the individual weaknesses that vary with each person, but also of ignorance, laziness. It hates to change and to conquer itself; it has a very strong will (that may not always manifest outside) and wants its way without paying the price; it is very proud and selfish; it has always a great deal of personal vanity, the ego with all its manifestations. All these characteristics are generally part of the lower self regardless of other individual faults. But there are many shades, many possibilities in which the lower self can display these general trends contained in it." (PL #14)

"Every situation you experience is the product of a word you have spoken and are perhaps still speaking constantly within in one way or another, on one level of awareness or another. It is our aim on the path to make all these words you speak day in and day out, every hour and every minute of the day, conscious so that you can understand your creation."

"The word is indeed the creative agent. The word is a psychic nuclear point or a psychic nuclear explosion that creates movement and a systematic chain reaction, one link logically and inexorably following another until the word has become deed, fact, and finished creation. The word creates an energy pattern of further psychic nuclear points, each link, each point being a "word" too, a "sub-creative agent," as it were. Each word is a blueprint without which the structure cannot be built. The word is expression and creation. It is plan, knowledge, opinion, consciousness. The word is feeling, attitude, and intentionality. The word carries immense energy powers of its own kind, differing from other energies. The word is what is behind all creation. Creation cannot exist without a word spoken, known, held, believed in, and committed to in the area of that specific creation. The word is a conglomerate of all of these and more. The word that is spoken reveals the will that motivates this particular word. It can be the divine will or the will of the cut-off, ignorant, and destructive particle of consciousness. The word is the sum total of your beliefs in any given area where you speak the word -- be it conscious or not. The word is the sun that creates the planets. It is the energizing force and it is design.

"There is so much contained in the word that it is not for nothing that Scripture starts with the postulate that in the beginning was, or actually is, the Word. There always will be the word. The word, as you know it, is the word God spoke. From that word all creation, including your personality, came into being. The word is the blueprint behind all you can see, experience, feel. There are many words creating many aspects of creation -- in the planetary system, in the mass consciousness, and in the individual consciousness."

"Most of the time you are extremely "busy" (I mean all of mankind) so as to block out the words you speak, and you produce noise in your inner system so that you do not hear your own words. A new phase on your path can now be contemplated and entered into (by some already now, by some only later) to make yourselves very conscious of the words you speak and what and how they create.

"The word can be divided within itself. When you speak opposite words that cancel one another out on different levels of awareness, you become confused and you create accordingly. If you create fog so as not to know the words you speak, to overshadow them with other words, it is necessary to painstakingly crystallize the word that is most responsible for the creation of your life situation. You should do this with both the positive and negative creations."

"Words of truth and creative beauty spoken when the underlying material is not made compatible with those levels of consciousness that speak those words can at best create a short circuit, at worst a split and a division in consciousness. This is why it is preferable if for a while "the word" is an honest admission and exposure of your negative intentionality and your lower self motives. Doing so implies attitudes of truthfulness, humility, courage, faith, and many other higher self qualities. But speaking words revealing principles of divine nature when the lower self is hidden and denied implies attitudes of wishful thinking, pride, lack of faith (fear of exposing what is not perfect), laziness (shirking the process of becoming, growing, developing, transforming in realistic, painstaking ways), and many others."

"There is a direct linkage between the power of the word and self-value. They go together. For how can you speak the word of faith in your own unfoldment and fulfillment if you secretly believe that you have no value and therefore no right to experience bliss? How can you even challenge the assumption of your worthlessness that you all carry inside your hearts to some degree if you are so terrified that this is the ultimate truth of your being? Then you can only continue to block this "knowledge" and defend against it. As you know, it is precisely by and through those defensive maneuvers that you reinforce the belief in your unacceptability because all defenses are negative, destructive, and create guilt. So even when you try, on the surface, to tell yourself -- belligerently -- that you do deserve fulfillment, peace of mind, pleasure, and abundance; underneath you will fear not ever attaining all this, not really deserving it. You fear that if you did acquire these desirable assets, it would only be by "stealing," and you would be punished. So, as you speak the word for what you long for, what every human being longs for and should indeed experience, so do you simultaneously speak the word against it on another level. The same applies to everything in life. While you are in this state of division and self-denial, you must feel pessimistic and fearful about the world as such and see it only in fragments, out of context, reaffirming your fearful visions.

"Thus the process of the path is essential to establish the one-pointed word. Only through the honesty and courage of self-exposure and purification will you gain sufficient initial self-esteem to expose your devastating belief in your valuelessness. Only when you pierce through the superficial substitute maneuvers of false self-value, making room for facing your painful belief in being valueless, can you begin to see this assumption and cast doubt on your self-doubt. In that way you can constantly utter and pronounce words of truth. Even questions can be words of truth: 'Is this assertion of my value a defense or a real expression?' 'Do I underneath my superiority and arrogance falter and doubt my intrinsic value?' And when answers to these questions show that this is indeed so, then the word of truth can be expressed, perhaps again by an initial question: 'Is it true that this or that lower self aspect makes me undeserving, unlovable, bad, valueless? Or is there something else in me that would justify me to appreciate and love myself, that deserves esteem and fulfillment?' So questions are also often words of truth.

"So begin to see the words you speak behind the smoke screen, to yourself about yourself. On those deepest levels you malign yourself. You speak negative words about yourself. Those words need to be crystallized. They may exist only in a vague, hazy, inarticulated way. The power of the word is no less when it is inarticulate. There always is an immense power in the word. For the word is full of energy. Humankind at this stage of development becomes increasingly aware of energy and its importance. But you are not sufficiently aware yet that the thought and the word itself are energy -- energy of a different kind."

"Find the word in which you consequently say "I will not love, love is dangerous, it will hurt me." It is another word of untruth that creates its pattern that makes it seem a truth in which you cannot experience the fulfillment your soul longs for. You are then caught in an involuntary process that indeed echoes that word, manifests that word. The manifestation of the process in your life, the involuntary life you create for yourself while you believe you have no say in it is the direct and indirect result of those words you speak -- sometimes loudly, without knowing what you say and why you are saying it, sometimes silently without being at all aware that you say such and such a word."

"In your busyness not to hear and understand your words, you do not take responsibility for the words you speak. I purposely say "words" rather than "thoughts," for we know that thoughts are only the outcome of the underlying factors that create the word. The word is the energy explosion. The word is that which immediately creates. The thought is the content. The word is its inception, its expression, its realization in its first stage. A thought without the word would be impossible. It would be meaningless, it could not exist. So the thought is the underlying consciousness factor of the energetic process. The spoken word is the finished product of the thought behind it. I repeat: this finished product of the thought -- the word -- is not necessarily conscious or articulate or vocal.

"So my friends, take care of your words. Make room for clarity in your words. Take responsibility for the words you speak within. Your words are your life creation. Question the words you speak, whether they come from a thought of truth or a thought of untruth. "

"In your busyness not to hear and understand your words, you do not take responsibility for the words you speak. I purposely say 'words' rather than 'thoughts,' for we know that thoughts are only the outcome of the underlying factors that create the word. The word is the energy explosion. The word is that which immediately creates. The thought is the content. The word is its inception, its expression, its realization in its first stage. A thought without the word would be impossible. It would be meaningless, it could not exist. So the thought is the underlying consciousness factor of the energetic process. The spoken word is the finished product of the thought behind it. I repeat: this finished product of the thought -- the word -- is not necessarily conscious or articulate or vocal." (PL #233)

"There is no future state where it is all accomplished and you no longer need to move. This concept arises in itself out of fear of movement, rejection of movement, hence out of the illusion that movement is undesirable. If you are in a state of truth, movement is desirable, while non-movement is to be avoided." (PL #203)