Evolutionary Phase In Regard To The Relationship Between The Realms Of Feelings, Reason, and Will

By The Pathwork Guide

Greetings and blessings, my dearest, dearest friends. Welcome to all of you at the beginning of this new working season. Our path together will again proceed in a very significant way. Many of my friends have made outstanding progress, some of you perhaps much more than you realize. Often what is designated as progress is not necessarily realistic, and what really is progress may seem at first to be the very opposite of progress. Only retrospectively are you able to see how much the very aspects that may have discouraged you at first are the initial steps in your personal evolution. Your real progress must bring you face to face with your pitfalls, with those things that you have been so busy to ignore. That is why coming into your own sometimes appears as an unwelcome development, one that they cannot identify as growth, to the uninitiated -- who are still self-involved. In reality this may be the most meaningful step. It may be the key to your freedom and the key to finding your true identity.

This group, this entire venture, this entire spiritual endeavor, is a pulsating, living reality, my friends. It has a spiritual form. I discussed this occasionally, especially at certain thresholds. It is indeed a growing, living organism, expanding in a more beautiful way than ever. This moving organism is very much aware of itself, as every living thing becomes as it develops. This applies to an individual entity as well as to collective entities, such as nations, groups, common endeavors. The same psychic laws apply to all. Consciousness must exist in all living organisms, at least to some degree. Group consciousness can be extremely dim, as for example in animals or in plants; it can also be very highly developed, provided the individuals who are forming the group at the time are predominantly IN a state of raised consciousness. The degree of consciousness of a group organism reflects the sum total of all its individuals, just as the overall consciousness of an individual reflects the sum total of the various layers that he is constituted of. Those layers of consciousness are the cause of inner dissension, the cause of conflict, and the cause of pain. When unification occurs, then the layers melt into one and they are activated and moved by the divine kernel.

When the overall organism tends toward growth, toward purification, and toward union in a realistic way, then those layers or aspects which resist gradually die off. Resisting the growth process does not necessarily manifest in theory, as a concept or a principle, but it may appear in practice, since what is really necessary may not be compatible with the hopeful illusion. Thus when aspects of the organism stem against the necessary steps of growth, then a self-selective process of dying off, or exclusion, sets in so as to protect the whole organism from being affected by the life-defeating attitudes. This exclusion protects the whole organism and its continuous growth. The process of physical death is a result of the same principle. Physical matter dies off because some underlying attitudes are devoted to defeating life. These are the fear of truth and the fear love, with all their derivatives. These fears induce decay, which then finally manifests outwardly.

Hence, what first appears as destruction is, at a closer view and with deeper insight, nothing but the destruction of destructiveness. Even though it may be painful to endure at the moment, it is often the most life-preserving event, born out of the overall health of the organism. For the unhealthy organism could tolerate the life-defeating attitudes much longer. Death is overcome when the whole of the organism no longer resists life, no longer resists truth, and no longer resists love so that no deadening stuff has to secrete itself off from the whole of the organism any longer. This principle is very important to comprehend in all questions of life -- both individual and collective.

This lecture is once again, as so often at the beginning of a new working season, a recapitulation in terms of the present emphasis and a forecasting, a blueprint. It foreshadows the structure or the form that will be filled out by the individuals in the year to come. When you observe retrospectively the sequence of the lectures and of the individual pathwork (those who really follow deeply by overcoming their fear of the self), then you will see that both follow this blueprint -- more or less -- in broad lines.

I have mentioned the various layers of consciousness. This is what I should like to discuss in this particular respect. Then this will open up a new understanding about why it is so exceedingly difficult to let go of the over-control of the ego. If self-realization is to be attained, then a new balance structure must be attained in which the ego assumes an entirely different role. All of you should consider what this path is. Why are you involved in it? What is its function? Often either vagueness or confusion about this create misunderstandings, and therefore unnecessary difficulties. The function of this path is not to remove one symptom or another that becomes bothersome in a person's life. In other words, this path is not a treatment of sickness. Nor is the path simply a way of becoming a better person. All of this happens, of course. But it must be fully understood by all of you, no matter how far you decide to follow, that the aim of this path is the total realization of the divine kernel. And this is not merely a theory. It is indeed possible right here and right now.

First of all, let us recapitulate the meaning of self-realization. I shall attempt to use new words in order to reach you in a more dynamic way. It means to bring forth as a living reality the kernel of your spiritual being -- that kernel of the self that is eternal. This is not a religious concept that is applicable for a faraway future. It is available immediately. How can some of the results or the manifestations best be described? I might say that a new area is awakened, an area that is located in the center of your body, in the region of the solar plexus. Out of this area a new life flows. New feelings, a new sense of perceiving, a new way of reacting, a new way of feeling, a new way of experiencing, a new way of responding, a new way of knowing, a new way of seeing things, a new way of seeing life, a new way of seeing people, a new way of seeing values, a new way of seeing the sequence of events comes forth. Everything is endowed with a new luminosity and with a deeper meaningfulness. The beliefs that one harbors either change or, if they remain the same in words, then they either feel differently or are the same for different reasons. The scope of an opinion, the scope of a conviction, or the scope of a sensation widens and deepens. Everything becomes fuller. The self becomes at one and the same time intensely personal and individualistic as well as universal. What appeared to have been incompatible contradictions suddenly unify, but without a breach of logic. Fear vanishes and therefore life becomes unending pleasure, just because its opposite is no longer feared. The opposite of the desired state of fulfillment and happiness is not avoided, but its illusory nature is unmasked as a result of having gone through it. Thus there is nothing to fear. The creative power of the self is available at all times, as a result of having freed the personality from fear.

These words are inadequate to describe the state called self-realization. But it may give some of you a glimmer of what is to come because perhaps you have begun to experience it to a small degree once in a while. It comes gradually, and yet at times it also comes suddenly. Again, this contradiction is no contradiction at all. This state is possible only when all the surface layers, all the contradictory trends of consciousness, have unified themselves with the innermost being.

In order to extend your understanding, it will be helpful to view man's spiritual history, his evolution, from a certain vantage point. At one phase in the history of his spiritual existence the entity was God-like. He was totally moved by the creative cosmic forces. He expressed the Universal Consciousness in every breath and in every move of his eternally-living existence. But at a certain point -- through a certain turn of the direction of his consciousness -- he removed himself from this kernel. By striving away from the innermost kernel, he has become involved in erroneous ideas and, consequently, in destructive reactions and in destructive feelings and, as a result, in blindness, in unhappiness, and in suffering. In this process, each removal from the kernel created itself as a new layer of consciousness. Each further layer covered the last one, thus thickening the wall around the kernel. When these new layers of consciousness formed themselves, then instead of being nourished by the Source, the separated consciousness functioned by itself. In other words, it was nourished by the original error, the error that brought about the overlayers in the first place. This is why man often experiences this going around in circles, the turning around endlessly, on and on. The freshness of the approach issuing from the Source is indivisible. It unifies all splits and all conflicts. In a very broad outline, this constitutes man's spiritual history and what brought him into the state that he finds himself in now.

There came a juncture when all this pain, with no visible way out, induced violence, rage, greed, separateness -- and many other destructive emotions. Theses still exist today in man's soul. Suffering, blindness, and hopelessness produce loveless feelings, selfishness, and often the most violent and the most evil reactions toward the world. At the dawn of mankind -- when man was little more aware of himself than an animal -- he completely expressed and acted out these destructive feelings. Primitive man knows no inhibitions and has no conscience. He is too unconnected from his fellow creatures to sense their pain as being identical to his own. His suffering has made him blind, and his blindness has led him into the suffering. Thus he destroys. In other words, he indulges in his destructive impulses.

At later stages in his evolution man learns that this brings him into conflict with his environment. Gradually the consciousness expands as a result of the experience of living. The first reasoning processes show the individual that letting out unchecked what he feels eventually produces more pain. Thus a social conscience develops, which is also the result of his instinct of self-preservation. But it is merely expedience that dictates this kind of conscience. It is still far removed from the inner experience of oneness with his fellow man. But he comes to the threshold where he learns to keep his urge to destroy in abeyance. Through many life experiences, through millennia of living under varied circumstances, each entity learns to develop his faculties of reason (seeing the cause and effect of his actions) and of the will (the self-discipline not to give in to these primitive impulses). You will surely appreciate the importance of this step in the entity's evolution.

At this point the realm of feelings is predominantly a seething mass of pain denied, and therefore of violence, of hate, and of malice. Yet the realm of feelings is the most alive and the most creative faculty. It is also that which is self-perpetuating. But as long as the feeling world is predominantly negative and destructive, then its self-perpetuating nature creates impulses and compulsions of a highly damaging nature. This is why it is feared so much. It is held in check only by the power to reason, to use the mind, and by the will power to hold back, to discipline, all spontaneous feelings.

When his consciousness grows and the negativity of the feeling world becomes obvious, then man does his best to deny, to cover up, to hinder, and therefore to inactivate, the realm of his feelings. However, what happens then is that in this process the spiritual self also becomes further removed. For it resides directly within the realm of feelings. The creative mass of feelings IS the divine, even if now it manifests in such a destructive way. So, when reason and the will erect a barricade around the realm of feelings so as to be safe from its negative self-perpetuating creativeness they also inadvertently erect a further barricade around the divine kernel -- the positive self-perpetuating process. Nevertheless, it is necessary for each entity to go through this phase before the direction can be reversed.

This is why you fear the realm of your feelings. You are indoctrinated with the safety measure that you have learned for so long -- and now you must unlearn it. You fear the realm of feelings because it is still, at last in part, in its primitive state. You are still imbued with the self-command that you have learned throughout many existences: "I must keep this destructiveness under control." The more the feelings are denied, the less can the destructive feelings transform themselves into their original state. Thus a consciousness that is based on reason builds itself. For a long time in the history of evolution reason and the will seem the savior, the saving grace. In other words, that which controls, that which prevents, that which dominates the realm of feelings.

Now an untold number of entities find themselves precisely in this stage. They have developed their reason and their will sufficiently to keep the realm of feelings under control. This was not a wrong turn, an erroneous direction, my friends. It was necessary. But now another way must be taken. Yet this is what seems most threatening and what seems to conflict with all your past endeavors. Humans identify with, and therefore experience themselves almost entirely as, the so-called ego -- that part which wills and which reasons. Every challenge to change the direction appears as an enormous threat to their unconscious being. For to activate the realm of feelings seems an entirely dangerous undertaking that leaves bare the most primate, the most selfish, and the most destructive feelings -- which seem to be completely bottomless and final. This explains, in the deepest possible way, the enormous threat that all individuals experience when they come to a certain crossroads in their overall development. With some people the threat may be so great that they go on over-developing their faculties of reason and of the will. As a result, a lopsidedness comes into being.

Mankind as a whole is arrested at exactly this point. This is why a very uneven development exists. In other words, for the longest time more and more emphasis is being put on the faculties of reason and of the will. It explains mankind's uneven development. Technologically he is disproportionately developed in comparison with his feeling qualities and with his capacity to experience spiritually. When emotions do appear, then they seem to be by far more negative than positive. Even man's attempt to preach love and spirituality has little to do -- in most instances -- with true emotional experience. More often than not these are ideals and theories, a philosophy he adheres to in principle and conceptually, rather than feeling it. For the feeling self still appears as the great enemy, and it is accused of being totally unreliable and even dangerous.

The poverty of feelings in the average human being is striking for those who begin to become more alive and more real. In other words, who are no longer frozen. The scant feelings which the average human being experiences are always controlled, they are always taken with a grain of salt, they are always approached very cautiously -- and whether or not you are aware of this fact does not alter it. It is part of your further path to become aware of it. For even the admission to yourself, "I feel half dead, therefore I could feel more than I do since the potential to do so must exist in me," brings you much nearer to the state of self-realization than the blindness of confusing your mere desire to feel and your mere desire to love, because you believe in it as a principle, with the actual ability to feel and with the actual ability to love.

This is the general stage in which man finds himself. He has just mastered that stage in which he primitively gave in to every impulse of the realm of feelings, which at that surface level is mostly negative and destructive. He has just learned -- with a lot of labor and effort through many appearances, experiences, and forms of existence -- to channel and to control this destructive, primitive, unguarded self that can go berserk and cause so much havoc if it is left to its own devices. Every criminal and every insane person bears witness to this fact. And everyone who is struggling in his own development feels threatened by any display of his unchanneled primitive self. This seems to be a great predicament, for how can self-realization be attained when the realm of feelings is denied, and therefore is not transcended -- in other words, when the entity does not learn to cope with the realm of feelings and discovers for himself that there is something else underneath, and therefore that the realm of feelings is not a bottomless well of unknown terror, of reasonless violence, of selfishness, and of meaningless bleakness? All of this does exist, but it is really a very thin veneer. Once the reasoning faculties have been sufficiently developed in the course of evolution throughout the centuries of the training of an individual entity, and once the entity has learned to execute his power of self-discipline, then there is no longer any danger in encountering the world of feelings. The fear that once the feelings are conscious then he will be helplessly swept away by them is unfounded. The faculties of reason and of the will are intact for all those who find themselves on this Path, for if these faculties were not sufficiently developed, then they could not go through even the rudimentary steps of such a pathwork. In other words, you would be incapable of disciplining your lives. And where you do not do this, then you do so quite deliberately, with an ulterior motive in mind. So your fear of not possessing sufficient reason and sufficient will to control any action of the feeling world is unfounded.

Thus man has to learn to go into the direction opposite from the one that hitherto he has taken. In other words, instead of mastering, of constraining, of holding back the feelings, he has to learn to allow them into his consciousness, to accept their existence, to let them be, and to observe them. In other words, he has to learn to meet them without fright. Thus he will see how easy it is to let the feelings be without having to act upon them, and deliberately choosing the ensuing action instead.

Perhaps it is still not clear why it is necessary in the first place to hold back, to constrain what eventually has to be let go of without hindrance. The answer is really simple, and important to comprehend. When you observe a primitive person or an animal, then you see that the consciousness does not yet allow either for reasoning or for the will. Therefore these faculties cannot be put to use, so that when the impulses come to the surface, then they dominate. The will and reason are underdeveloped, and therefore they cannot stem the flood of the impulses, of the destructive emotions. Therefore many lifetimes have to be spent in order to train the reason and the will. Only when these faculties have been developed can it be completely safe to allow primitive, destructive feelings to the surface without being compelled into action. A Path such as this requires much self-discipline and much reasoning faculty in order to overcome the ingrained fear and the consequent resistance that this is, in itself, a built-in safety measure. Even if reason and the will still have their weak spots, they strengthen themselves organically exactly where needed by the courage, the honesty, the self-discipline, and the will power necessary to come to this juncture. This is why there is nothing to fear.

Man's overall unconscious imprints are still so powerful that he is frightened of his feelings. So he uses his reason and his will to deny their existence, to discipline them away from his consciousness. He does not comprehend that he no longer needs these controls, provided he is on a meaningful path of honest self-confrontation. After millennia of training -- during which reason and the will have been used for honest and humble self-confrontation -- he can now safely afford to allow himself to feel what he feels without falling into the pitfall of having to act upon the feeling, whether or not such an act is good in itself. Now you can simply recognize your feelings. Now you can execute your relaxed will power. This is where you are, my friends, or where you could be.

Those human beings whose overall development makes them ripe for and ready for the realization of their divine kernel must now unlearn, or relearn in a new way. A new balance structure has to be established. The very primitive man is lopsided, in the sense that he is completely controlled by his emotions, while his will and his reason are still too frail to enter into the process of living. Today's man, generally speaking (I do not think of the exceptions on both ends of the scale) is at the point where reason and the will are overgrown, while the emotional life is thwarted. This makes union with the divine kernel as difficult (although not as far removed) as in the first stage. For the divine kernel is a living, breathing, pulsating, energizing mass of the highest consciousness and wisdom. It is self-perpetuating and self-creating in an ongoing process. It is so potently alive that there are no words to describe the intense nature of its aliveness. When the feelings are feared, and therefore are denied, then aliveness is by necessity also denied, whether or not the entity is aware of this connection. Reason and the will can never bring aliveness into the personality by themselves. They cannot bring the consciousness of the divine nucleus into the personality by themselves either. This is why the people who are most dominated by reason and by the will, and who therefore have their feelings most controlled, are those whose aliveness is very precarious.

However, you who really want to come into the spiritual inheritance of your divine nature must not confuse spirituality with mere spiritual ideas. You must bring your living, feeling self into play, even if this cannot happen in any other way than meeting and facing your destructiveness and your pain. When you fully experience the hate and the pain in you without flinching, then you will be surprised by what happens. Much sooner than you think the hate, the violence, and the pain will dissolve and will give way to a new aliveness. A sea of feelings will crystallize pleasure supreme, the capacity to experience such heights of joy as you never dreamed possible. With it, if you make room for it, a new sense of cosmic reality arises out of you. All of you are strong enough to go this way. The danger of being forced into actions against your reason and against your will is truly an illusion in the state you are in now. The problem you have is your difficulty to admit that you are not yet who you want to be. But what an expensive price you pay for living life as if! Once you decide to meet yourself as you are and you go through the pain of some of your feelings, then you will quickly convince yourself that not only is the realm of feelings not bottomless, as you secretly fear, but that its veneer is really relatively superficial. Once you learn to cope with these feelings by just letting them be, then they will dissolve so quickly that soon thereafter you will come to feel this new aliveness and this new delight.

This must be the road. You will need help and guidance every step of the way. And this is what we shall concentrate on this coming year. A great deal of guidance has already been activated and has come to your aid in approaches from all kinds of new sources and ways. In this lecture I would like to discuss another such aiding step, which you can make use of and which constitutes an important aspect on our road. When in your pathwork you have reached a certain phase of awareness of your emotions, then you will come to see what you are constantly doing with many of your feelings. What you are doing is using the busy, busy mind -- the overemphasized reasoning faculty -- to fit your feelings into pictures. In other words, to build theories as to why you feel a certain way. The mind is so overtrained in its busyness -- over-using reason -- that you think that you need a reason to feel in a certain way. Thus it often escapes you what the real motives are or how the situation really is. You immediately weave a web of reasons -- of explanations which are connected to fixed images -- in order to build and to fit your concepts around and into the real feelings, until their very life is squeezed out. Since the feelings are feared and since reason is supposed to be your saving measure, then you concoct reasons for feeling. You are always full of explanations as to why you feel a certain way, until no feeling remains, only theory and explanation. This is so important, my friends. When you can see this, then you will be able to use this aid that I am giving you here.

Let us take the example that you feel hurt. In many instances this hurt is completely denied, even to the self. It is manipulated into an accusation -- often elaborately and sometimes even using partially true factors about the perpetrator of the hurt. But this can only be a tiny particle of the whole of the picture at best, either about the personality or for the motives for the hurting act. Thus there is no longer any reality in the elaborate and reasonably-sounding explanations and evaluations. The denied hurt turns into anger. This, too, is denied. The anger is also explained away by theorizing what brought about the hurtful action. All of this makes it impossible to really experience the original hurt. And when an actual experience is denied, then you cannot leave this experience truly behind you. In other words, you cannot really be done with it. And so it happens that you often build a false, exaggerated hurt on top of this structure. It is the game that we mention so often that says: "Do you see what you have done to me? No my hurt forces you to act differently." This kind of artificially-exaggerated hurt is the result of all the false layers that separate the consciousness from the original real hurt. The false hurt is an unbearable pain that leads to desperation and never to a conclusion or to a satisfactory solution. The real hurt is a gentle, soft experience. It is never unbearable, it always leaves the essence of the personality intact.

If you can let yourself feel such a hurt, simply and without adornment, stating the fact that it hurts and why it hurts you, then a new pattern is being created. If you can simply let the feeling be in you, then you will learn not only to deal with your feelings undangerously, but also to deal with your surroundings just as safely. This is the safest, the most realistic way which will, at the same time, establish a new lifeline to the creative nucleus, to your true identity. If you can endure this hurt and you can let it be, even if you do not know or you do not understand what hurts you, admitting your confusion and its additional elements of hurt -- then you will not have to become violent, you will not have to become angry, you will not have to become destructive, you will not have to become vindictive, you will not have to become mean. All of these are only reactions to a feeling that you do not want to endure. This is the harm of denial, which builds further layers of removal and of alienation from your true self. You must learn to become calm with your mind and to stop denying the feelings through the mind's agitatedness of fitting the hurtful event into fixed images and into theories. Let it be! Feel what you feel without having to do anything -- either in action or in reasoning it out. Then you will experience a wonderful process. The negative, painful feeling will dissolve by itself -- very naturally. Not in illusion because you look away from it and you cover it up underneath thick layers of misapplied reason and misapplied will, but naturally, as every living process must dissolve itsef back into its original state, provided the natural process is not being interfered with. The original state is not pain but pleasure, it is not suffering but joy, it is not deadness but life, it is not hopelessness but the forever expanding rich abundance of life. All of these desirable facts of life cannot be forced into a self. If they are to be real and enduring, then they must come naturally, organically, and spontaneously, as a result of not flinching away from what is now, from what one really feels. This takes place as a gradual process. That is, gradual in proportion to and to the degree to which the actual sensations and the original feelings are experienced without either denying them or exaggerating them -- both of which amount to the same thing. Thus you awaken your spiritual center, which then will fill your entire being. You will be filled with a sense of being safe, with strong, beautiful new feelings, and eventually with new knowledge, with new insight, with new perceptions, with new intuitions -- and even with new faculties. They will spring from deep within, filling you with the sense that they are truly you. In other words, they are not pretenses or faculties whose manifestation depends either on others or on circumstances outside your control. You will gain understanding that is based on completely different dynamics from the understanding you produce in this artificial process of fitting any feeling you allow yourself into a superstructure of explanations and of reasoning. Seeing these superstructures as spiritual forms, we spirits see how most human beings go around with huge lopsided forms growing out of their subtle bodies, forms which cause such heaviness. They must be dissolved in the process of evolving.

You may note that for the longest time our path was concerned with meeting in honesty your actions, your thoughts, your concepts, your beliefs, and your attitudes. Now you must learn to honestly register and then endure your feelings. At first the gentle hurt appears more difficult to bear than the artificially aggrandized one, because the latter seems to promise dramatic action from without. It is a direct expression of saying No to the real and much more gentle hurt. No dangerous destructiveness will arise when the soft and gentle hurt is accepted. Out of it soft and gentle good feelings will arise, swelling forever stronger, and forever more securely rooted, carrying the self into a most fruitful and creative life. More vibrant energy, deep truth, a new perception, and a greater wisdom must come forth from the center of your being.

The process I just described requires many specific approaches and guidance along the way. We will be concerned considerably with this in many ways. There will be many opportunities in which you can learn this. You can all begin right now, in a simple and direct way, by emphasizing in your meditations: "I would like to know, to experience, and to feel what I really feel" -- about whatever the issue may be, whether it be the mood of the day or the mood of the moment. Beware of either talking yourself out of it by suspecting an irrationality, or of talking yourself into it by building a case. Both imply a mind that is too active. Let the mind be passive and very gently let the feeling come up -- whatever it may be. The calmer and the more relaxed you are, and the more intently you listen into the nature of your feelings, then the more it will be the original feeling and not the cover. In other words, not the result of denying the original one. Once you permit yourself the impact of the original feeling, then you are much nearer to the life center out of which all good flows. Meditate that you request guidance. Meditate that you have the strength to endure a little pain, a pain that is in you anyway, only so much worse as a result of what you are doing to it and with it. Tell yourself that the pain is the gateway to pleasure, the gateway to fulfillment, the gateway to joy, the gateway to happiness. Know that only by encountering the original pain can you eliminate the artificial deadness of the realm of feelings, a deadness which slowly spreads and which then makes the faculties of reason and of the will act like a robot, so different in nature from the vital flow of life that is the byproduct of the realm of feelings.

In our next lecture I will discuss another facet that will help you to no longer fear the realm of feelings. I will talk about how to genuinely eliminate the destructiveness that you fear so much that you shut out life itself. What I gave you here is a vital key for all of you.

Do not fight the pain, for in fighting it, you avoid the experience whose full acceptance is necessary in order to really grow out of it and to become both stronger and happier. Thus you will learn to recognize the subtle and yet enormous difference between genuine feelings and manufactured, and therefore dishonest, emotions.

Remind yourself again and again that there is no problem that cannot be resolved, that there is no point on which the Path needs to stop for anyone. The expansion of creative living, of the forever growing capacity to experience the goodness of life, is truly infinite. Thus the path ceases to be a threatening or laborious chore when you meet your obstructions and your illusions, but becomes liberation itself. Even self-realization is not one specific, finite goal. The person with the gravest afflictions and with the greatest distortions who says, "I will go all the way, there is no stopping me because I know that the creative force in me will go to work to the extent I let it" is nearer to total fulfillment and to the realization of his true self than one whose intellectual powers, his reason and his will faculties function just enough to hide his inner alienation -- and who therefore thinks that his way need not go through the pain.

Let the Divine Consciousness infiltrate your entire being, my friends. The way I show you and the path I guide you on will make this more than a hope, an ideal, and a far-away goal. The reality of this will show you how different life becomes. This can be yours if you really want it. Your mind has the choice. This year, once again, great and wonderful forces are brought here and they stream forth. They are partly the result of your sincere good efforts, of the overcoming that has already occurred, and of the love feelings that exist here already. Partly they are an influx from spiritual realms which are concerned with furthering important ventures on this earth. I bless all of you -- all of my new friends as well, who have joined this path and who have the excitement and the adventure ahead of them: the path of discovery of a new and beautiful world, even if occasionally the illusion of pain must be endured for a short time. Blessings for my familiar friends also, with whom I am proud and happy to work. Blessings for all of you for this entire year to come. Be God!

September 13, 1968