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)