Resistance

The instinct of survival — or self-preservation — aims at gaining, maintaining, and improving life. By its very nature it works against anything that destroys or endangers life. Just as the body needs health to live, so the soul needs health to live most constructively. In order to live, one needs to be safe from destruction and damage.

Obedience to authority has been encouraged by exponents of religion under the half-true and only partly valid argument that humanity was too much enslaved by its passions to be let free. Therefore obedience had to be stressed in order to protect society.

QUESTION: In a previous lecture about emotional growth and its function, a question was asked as to how to handle very wild emotions at a time when one has no helper available. But what does one do if the emotions are so deep-seated, so deeply buried and repressed, for such a long time, that they simply will not come out to the degree one would like?

QUESTION: How do faith in God and hope tie in with this path of self-purification? ANSWER: Do you see any contradiction between our path and faith in God and hope?

People often say that life is difficult and painful, that it is a confusing and puzzling ordeal, that there is no meaning to it. They believe that they are separate from life, but they are not! Regardless of how your life appears, it is an exact facsimile of how you experience yourself. Your personal life, as it manifests for you, is a conglomeration of all your attitudes and traits.

This cosmic movement, permeating everything that is, is a mixture of mobility and relaxation. The key of mobility, combined with relaxation, opens the world. It is the state of being, or the unitive principle of being. Only through misconception does duality, or conflict, come about.

. . . life will manifest exactly as you believe and conceive of it — not one iota differently. If your life experience and your conscious concepts are at variance, this is proof that your unconscious concepts must accord with your actual life experience.

The life force therefore consists not only of the pull toward others, but also of pleasure supreme. Life and pleasure are one. Lack of pleasure is the distortion of the life force and comes from opposing the creative principle. Life, pleasure, contact and oneness with others are the goal of the cosmic plan.

The various concepts of what evil is and where it comes from are all true, provided they do not exclude the apparently opposite approach. If you say that evil does not exist at all, on any level of being, this would be wrong. But if you state that in ultimate reality there is no evil, that is true.

A human being who is in a state of movement may not always move outwardly. But even at periods of outer rest and quietude, the movement is being felt in the joyousness, aliveness, ability to change, flexibility, and ever-pulsating nature of the whole organism.

If you commit an overt act—you kill someone—the consequences will be obvious. But if you malign another human being by questionable accusations, ill will, blindness or stubbornness; if you refuse to give him or her the benefit of the doubt and do not attempt to be open and create a different reality through honest communication with this person, your thoughts are killing him.