Spiritual Wisdom:

"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)

"The acceptance of life with everything it brings, good and bad, and retaining a positive attitude is the true and divine way."
 
"To accept life's occasional adversities does not mean to take a dark view of everything, quite on the contrary. The true and right course says: 'I expect life to bring me unhappiness as well as happiness, and I will not flinch from life's clouds and occasional necessary darkness. For only by going through this courageously without struggling and kicking inside will I be able to bear happiness when the time is ripe."(PL #37)

"Something in you says "no" when you visualize yourself as being fulfilled in all areas of living. This is due solely to your harsh, unforgiving, and unaccepting treatment of yourself because you are not reconciled with the self-centered child existing in you, which makes unfair demands that you cannot cope with because you push them out of sight.
 
"You need to accept fully this primitive, selfish, destructive child in order to make it grow up. The only climate in which it can do so is in the full knowledge of all its manifestations. In the manner in which you accept it, without losing a sense of proportion about its "badness," to that degree will you be able to perceive, experience, and accept the highest faculties within yourself. You can only lose your sense of guilt about the former if and when you learn to look at the impulses coming from it and realizing that although this undesirable side exists, you need not act accordingly. At least, you do not deceive yourself about your own state of development, and you evaluate all its dictates without following them through. Then will you have a chance to win in this impossible battle. You will liberate yourself from the false conscience and therefore become capable of hearing the voice of your real conscience." (PL #116)

"You know perfectly well in your mind that you and others are far from being perfect, and you pay lip service to this truth. But do you really accept it in your heart of hearts? When you attempt to answer this question on the deeper emotional levels, you will see that in many instances the willingness is very small. Your reactions prove contrary to what you know in your mind. As you slowly discover your intolerance, your criticalness, your refusal to accept others for what they are, you can automatically know that you do exactly the same with yourself." (PL #185)

"You must deny, ignore, not experience this best in you as long as you deny, ignore, not experience the evil in you. You distort your concept of yourself when you deny any part of yourself, no matter how ugly it may be in its present form. " (PL #184)

"The price to pay for recognizing and accepting the destructive, evil aspect in the self seems so high. It seems that way. It really is not. On the contrary, the price of denying it is enormous. The groping seems at times so confusing until you find the method and the manner in which it becomes possible to accept destructive impulses and desires in you without condoning them; to understand them without staying with them; to evaluate them realistically without falling into the traps of either projection, self- justification, self-righteous exoneration, blaming of others, and making excuses for the self, or self-indulgence, denial, repression, and evasion. It requires continuous inspiration from the higher forces within and a deliberate articulation in requesting their help in order to awaken and maintain awareness of the destructive aspects and the proper method to handle them." (PL #184)

"It is impossible to accept yourself until you have come to the very worst in yourself. Only then can you accept your whole being; only then will you truly be convinced of the good in you — and you will therefore no longer need from others what no one can give you but yourself. The desperate struggle to be accepted by others in lieu of self-acceptance impairs your integrity even further. In some subtle way it always causes you to betray yourself and others, to sell your soul." (PL #109)

"The most difficult thing for a human being is to face the lower self, and it is in connection with the lower self that real guilt exists. You go to any length to avoid facing the lower self. Perhaps you are capable and willing to face parts of it, yet certain other parts you are absolutely unwilling to accept. You are so frightened by the possible implications, and so eager to be better than you can possibly be at the moment, that you would rather produce much worse false guilt, than accept the tiniest real guilt belonging to the area of the lower self that you are unwilling to tolerate. This condition is quite general and very important to recognize. It is still vastly underestimated.

"In order to become capable of facing your lower self in its entirety, you must first learn to accept and to forgive yourself... Accepting and forgiving means to recognize and then stop the tendency to moralize with oneself, to understand the harm of perfectionism. This may seem quite paradoxical. For, on the one hand I invite you to face your lower self, your real guilts, to make restitution for them and to purify yourself, while, on the other hand, I emphasize how dangerous perfectionism, self-condemnation, moralizing, and false guilt feelings are.

"You see, my dearest friends, to the degree that perfectionism and self-condemnation exist, to that degree you cannot accept your lower self." (PL #109)

"You do not have to be problem-free. You cannot be. You do not have to be already perfect to live fully, to increase your awareness, to grow steadily in your capacity for full emotional experience. All you have to do is to see into yourself and evaluate what you see, then make inner choices, which entail the flexibility of change. In accepting imperfection, you become less imperfect. For without doing so you can never really be flexible enough to change. Your haste, and your shame for not being perfect, create a rigid wall that makes growth and change impossible." (PL #97)