This lecture grew out of an answer to a question. This was the question: "I am very puzzled by the tremendously strong reaction to the whole issue of Jesus Christ. I understand what you said about the fear of expansion that applies to all phases of expansion. But this is so strong that I have the feeling there is more to it. Could you comment on this?"
GUIDE: The next intended lecture would have amplified and answered your question completely. Since you ask it now, then I shall answer it now and use this answer as the next lecture. In order to make the answer comprehensible, I shall start the lecture in a different way from what I had planned, but that does not matter. The same message will be conveyed in it. We shall just build up from a different vantage point.
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My beloved, most blessed friends. Many of you must feel the strength of divine blessings in your lives and in your tasks. This special joy, this security, this peace, this excitement, and this deep sense that your life does have profound meaning and purpose can exist only when your life is totally dedicated to God, to His will, and to His plan. The more this is the case, the more do the clouds disappear and the fuller does life become. This spirit of service encompasses more and more of my beloved friends and takes deeper roots in your hearts. When such service spreads, then a great light springs up from your level of consciousness and it merges with the more powerful and purer light coming from our level of consciousness.
The strong reaction to the reality of Jesus Christ must be considered on two very specific and well defined levels: the personal level and the collective level. Had this question not been asked, then I would have started with the collective level -- that is, the mass image -- and would then have discussed the personal images, distortions, fears, and so on. Now I shall approach this issue the other way around.
Let us begin with the individual Christian who now feels a strong reaction against Jesus Christ. He has rebelled against his early upbringing and against the values his parents stood for. Christ has
been presented to him as a meek, passive, sexless figure who demands the
same kind of distorted self-denial from all those who are to follow in His footsteps. He reacts to the identification of Jesus Christ with a
rigid morality, with a denial of his feelings, with a denial of his sexuality, with a denial of his autonomy, and with a denial of the strong energy that creates positive aggression and self-assertion.
Thus a very confusing mixture in perception, in understanding, and in consciousness comes about. On the one hand, Christ is depicted as the embodiment of love, of truth, of wisdom, of salvation, of goodness, and of service to the Creator and His plan, and on the other hand as demanding a self-defeating denial of intrinsic values, energies, and expressions. This is the mass image of Christianity.
As all mass images, this, too, must stem from individuals who grow up with circumstances in their early environment that foster the formation of specific images. These images may have begun either in this life or in previous lives. The less a specific image has been dissolved, the more does it create conditions in the next incarnation that help to recreate the image. It is then up to the individual to use these conditions to dissolve the image.
We shall examine the mass image in detail -- from the point of view of our understanding of images -- in a little while. Let me first return to the personal reactions of a child who grew up with this confusion and who deals with it in his or her own way.
The admixture of truth and falsehood about Jesus Christ is impossible for a child to disentangle. So he has only two choices: The first alternative is that he submits to the totality of what is conveyed to him. In this case he will grow up into the traditional concept of
what it is to be a Christian: He will fear his feelings, he will deny
his sexuality, and he will put reins on his aggression, which is identified with "evil." Underneath this restraint strong impulses still exist, but they are very threatening to him. When he registers unallowed feelings, then he feels himself to be a sinner. He rebels, too. But the fear of expressing this rebellion openly is much too threatening. So, the rebellion, too, must be repressed and denied, only to create more guilt. In other words, more of a feeling of being secretly a sinner. This kind of person will use any doctrine to reinforce his denials. He will flock to orientations that take the Bible in a literal and doctrinaire sense. He feels safe only in a rigid, life-denying structure.
The other alternative the child has is to openly and consciously rebel against these strictures, these taboos that deny his very being. So he becomes the rebelling Christian that we are concerned with on this path. For the submitting Christian of the first category would never enter such a path as this. It would be totally in opposition to the safety valves that he has created.
The rebelling Christian needs reinforcement for his rebellion, for underneath it he carries doubts about the legitimacy of his rebellion. The truth is that he should indeed deny the prohibition of his feelings, the prohibition of his positive aggression, the prohibition of his sexuality, the prohibition of his self-responsibility, the prohibition of his autonomy. But he should not deny the truth of Jesus Christ, the love of Jesus Christ, the power of Jesus Christ, the Presence of Jesus Christ. In other words, he should not deny his need to take Him into his own life.
The submitting Christian suffers from the same confusion, the same false fusion of truth and error. He would need to learn to do exactly the opposite
of what the rebelling Christian needs to do: He has to question the tradition as handed to him, whereas the rebel needs to accept the truth in
the tradition.
All children need parents who are strong and who are right. This gives them a sense of security. A weak and wrong parent is no protection against a frightening world. The submitting Christian accepts his parents' doctrine unquestioningly, also because he cannot bear the thought that his parents may have been mistaken.
How does this apply to the rebelling Christian? He finds his security in totally rejecting his parents' values, at least in this particular respect. He grows up with a sense of superiority. He considers his denial of Christ as more evolved. Here again confusion exists. It is indeed more evolved to deny the false denials, but it is not more evolved to deny the truths that are also in the tradition. In the consciousness of such a person there exists
a tremendous fear of finding out that perhaps his parents were right after all. In the childish consciousness everything is always either/or. All images come from the inability to differentiate truth from falsehood, because the image conclusion is always based on a total right versus a total wrong. Being right means being good, being acceptable, having the power to create a safe life, and deserving happiness. Being wrong means being bad, being unacceptable, having no power to create safety, and not deserving happiness. This applies to the self and, by extention, to the parents. The rebelling Christian can deal with the possibility that his parents were totally wrong. He is then justified in denying all they stood for. On a primitive, childish level the threat which the rebelling Christian experiences now, when Jesus Christ is being re-introduced in the path in a more dynamic way, can simply be expressed thus: "If my parents were right about the reality of Jesus Christ, then they must also have been right about my sexual feelings being sinful, about my surge for individuality being sinful, about my autonomy being sinful, about my need for self-expression being sinful. I never have the right to be angry and to express my energies in an aggressive way, for all aggression must be bad. I am also guilty and bad for having denied Christ, as my parents did in the past. This I cannot bear, so I must turn against these ideas."
The stronger the inner confusion about what is true and what is false in the parental tradition, the stronger the fear of finding out that, "I was wrong, therefore I am bad." Consequently, the threat is stronger, and therefore the rebellion against this newest phase, which seems to echo parental admonitions.
You can see that the mechanism is the same as with all image formation -- and the image dissolution. You can also see here that the personal image is multiplied many times, for many similar cases and many similar conditions exist. Thereby a mass image is being created. The
mass image of the Christian rebel harbors underneath the possibility of the Christian submitter, and vice versa. The Christian rebel fears that
if he recognizes, challenges, and dissolves his image, then he will have no choice but to become the Christian submitter. And the Christian submitter is equally afraid to let go of his image, for then that would seem to mean to
have to become the Christian rebel, who throws out the beautiful truth of Jesus Christ together with the falsehood. On this path we deal much more often with the former image. The latter exists only as an underlying threat. The image
can be dissolved only when the bright light of truth is being shed into the soul substance that has been holding these images rigidly and fixedly. Later
we will discuss the other aspects of these images -- the wrong conclusion, the vicious circle, and proving the wrong conclusion correct -- and then we will show the process of dissolving the image.
Before doing that I would like to discuss the Jewish mass image. A mass image must always start with a personal image that is multiplied enough times to create a collective image. So we shall start with the feeling of being threatened if Jesus Christ is indeed a manifestation of God. Like the submitting Christian, the Jew who denies Christ feels immensely threatened about his parents being wrong. If they are wrong in this all-important question about life, about the world, and about God, then how can they be trusted in anything? The ground seems to slip away from under the feet of the child/adult. This fear touches the person who outwardly rebels against his parents and who disagrees with them on many issues, just as much as it applies to those who are overtly in agreement with their parents about almost all the important issues of life.
So, on one level this mass image is a personal or psychological issue. That part of the soul which has not grown up cannot accept the fact that the parents can be wrong about anything, because if they are, then they must be wrong in everything.
Behind this personal and psychological level of reacting lies a whole world of history and of tradition, both in its true form and in its distorted form. Let me try to go into this aspect to some degree, as much as it is possible at this time, and for the purpose under discussion. There was a time when the Jews were the only ones who worshipped the Creator as the one God, who were in touch with Him, and who attempted to follow His commandments and laws. This beautiful reality began to disintegrate when, as is inevitable in human nature, the lower self entered into the picture. It induced pride, arrogance, superiority toward those who did not belong to the Jewish community and the Jewish faith. The Jew looked down on the pagan as his inferior. In other words, he saw himself as the aristocrat in the human family.
The reason why Jesus Christ was born a Jew is obvious. Since He is a manifestation and an incarnation of the true God, of Divine Reality, then He could only manifest among those people who worshipped this God, rather than gods, which were often spirits from undeveloped realms, and sometimes even
evil spirits. This tremendous gift of the incarnation among the Jewish people was also a test. All gifts are tests, just as all painful occurrences
are tests. The test was to recognize Jesus for Who He was. To do so would have meant overcoming personal pride, a power drive, self-interest,
and self-serving opportunism. It this had happened, then the split could
never have come about. In other words, no such conflict as Judaism versus Christianity could have resulted. Christianity would simply have become an extension in the development of Judaism, whether or not a new name would have been found to indicate this true way. Either one of these two names could have been used in the spirit of combining and extending the truth of the past into the truth of the eternal now.
On the collective level the test has failed. This is obvious. The general fear of admitting this failure is as irrational and as distorted as your fear of accepting your imperfections and your blindness. You have learned on this path that doing so is one of the most important aspects of growth, of self-liberation, of purification, of self-esteem. The defense against admitting a possible wrong perpetuates this wrong many times and creates secondary guilts that are much more severe, and therefore much harder to eradicate. The longer and the harder the resistance to truth, the more painful it is. The same holds true for collective processes and mass dynamics. The only way collective images can be dissolved and the collective consciousness corrected -- so that
it expresses the truth -- is through the commitment of a sufficient number of individuals who know the truth and who have the courage to stand up for it.
The Jews in power felt threatened -- unjustly so -- by Jesus Christ. They were threatened only in so far as they wished to deny divine truth and divine guidance. Since the leaders prevailed on the majority, only a few courageous ones turned to Christ. The separation was enforced by those who stubbornly refused to consider the possibility that He could have been the promised Messiah, because they did not wish to abdicate their negative
self-serving power. Once this separation became a reality, then more of the pagans turned to the new message and embraced it. Their heart was hungering
for it. As time went on, more pagans than Jews turned to Christ. The attitude of the pagans toward the Jews was to a large degree a response to the stamp
of inferiority that was placed on them by the people who were supposed
to carry God's love and God's word. Thus mutual enmity came into existence.
In the consciousness of the Jew both the pagan and the Christian became one and the same. He considered both as inferior and as hostile toward the Jew. The hostility was often true, but instead of asking himself how he contributed to it and how he provoked it, thus taking responsibility for the situation and seeing it as a mutual creation -- just as you have learned to do on this path -- he abdicated any responsibility and he made himself the victim of the pagan, namely the Christian, even as he continued to look down on him and to reject him.
This old history is relevant for those who are born into families
who continue to harbor this attitude in their own souls. They can choose either to use the existing family influences as a challenge -- and
thus they can help dissolve the mass image -- or they can choose to perpetuate it further, and with it to perpetuate the Jewish karma.
When you work on a personal problem and you find yourself terrified because your friends and helpers confront you -- in other words, when you defend against the possibility of that with which you are being confronted -- then you react according to the same erroneous assumption that being wrong, that having lower self attitudes, that having made mistakes is unforgivable and unacceptable. Your terror is simply that! Your belief is that you are no longer lovable if you have this or that negativity. Only as you gain courage, and therefore humility as well, do you jump into the apparent abyss
of opening your mind. And only then can you find out that your assumption was false. In fact, only when you fully admit your imperfection and your human fallibility do you become a full-fledged human being, only then do you find your true and realistic value, and only then do you find God's love for you that has always existed -- but that you could not feel due to your fallacy,
to your belief of being a sinner. This has always been the true path and this will always be the true path. It applies to collective situations just as much as to individual ones.
The same dynamics operate in both mass images and individual images. The more the truth is denied, the greater the real guilt becomes. And with the guilt grows the resistance whose purpose it is to ward off the accumulated guilt. Negative karma is the accumulation over several lifetimes of unresolved untruthful situations that have their own laws and consequences, just as truth has its own laws and its own consequences. When
you persist in viewing these consequences out of context, as mere happenings, thereby making a victim out of the Jewish race, then you take from yourself the vitality you need: the vitality to be a self-governing part in the human family. You can become an autonomous person only if you let truth stand above your defense. In other words, when the truth is more important than justifying yourself, or your parents, or your forefathers. The constant chain of cause and effect, of negative karma -- of the endless repetition of undesirable events -- can be broken, my friends. Why can you see the dynamics so clearly when it comes to personal aspects, but draw the line when it comes to the collective reality?
The answer is -- above and beyond what I said before about the terror of the child that his parents can be wrong -- that the personal guilt for denying the truth of Jesus Christ seems too painful to bear. To let go of the defense would entail giving up the victim-and-blame game. It would entail assuming part of the responsibility for much of
the past suffering. It would entail experiencing the pain of guilt for having inflicted pain, especially on One Who came in love. You may or may not have actually lived at that time. But even if you had not been present, then you become co-responsible by allying yourself with those who were directly responsible, by justifying their actions, and by never asking the crucial question: "Could it be that He was the promised Messiah?"
When you work on any personal issue where -- after much resistance -- you finally dedicate your being to wanting to see the truth, then you sometimes go through the pain of guilt. But when you do this in a spirit of life, rather than death, in a spirit of faith, rather than in
a spirit of denial, then you come to self-acceptance, to self-forgiveness. Therefore, you experience that God has already forgiven you all along. You then experience the light and the strength of wholeness. Feeling the pain of your real guilt is never a debilitating process. It is a life process, it is purification, and it leads to oneness with yourself, to oneness with others, and to oneness with God. Can you find it within yourself to try to adopt the same attitude with whatever universal issue comes up in your life? What do you have to fear if truth (God) is your major concern? By refusing this openness, then you express in no uncertain terms that the truth is not the major issue for you, but that being right is. No matter how you try to justify your antagonism toward Jesus Christ, you are not in truth when you refuse to pose this question -- Could it be that He was the promised Messiah? -- in a sincere and open way and then allow for
a period of gestation for the answer to evolve within your mind and within your heart. How can you believe yourself to be free and liberated when anything within you is closed up tight? Can the justifying of your forefathers' infallible rightness on this central question be more important than the truth itself?
Observe the feeling of threat in you now when these words are being addressed to you. Then consider the meaning of this reaction. Can you try to take some distance from it for a moment and then consider that this feeling of threat may be a distortion, that it may be irrational, that it may contain false assumptions on your part? This kind of questioning is a healing that you administer to yourself.
Let us now consider the dynamics of images. I have taught you to find your images and you have worked with them on your path in many personal issues. Now you know that your images destroy your life. A brief recapitulation is in order. An image is a false idea, a wrong conclusion formed in childhood with insufficient mental equipment to make a correct assumption. This wrong conclusion -- just as all untruth -- creates negative situations, negative feelings, and negative events. Untruth is always painful. The defense against a wrong conclusion creates a negative pattern of action and
of reaction which then affects others adversely. The misconception
is fixed and frozen in the soul substance because it is never questioned or challenged. The personality then reacts blindly in a conditioned
reflex, rather than out of the truth that is appropriate to the particular occasion. The negative effect created in others must, perforce, come back to the individual. It always appears to confirm the image -- the original misconception -- which then seems to necessitate the defense, which then creates negative reactions in others. And so it goes on endlessly. When an image exists in the soul, then the psyche is not free.
The image of the rebelling Christian is this: "If I embrace Christ, then I must give up my vitality, my energy life, my sexuality, my body, and my pleasure, for all these are sinful." Therefore he creates a defense that shuts out Christ in order to affirm his sexuality. But shutting out Christ means shutting out an essential part of God's world of truth, of love, of beauty, of life. This individual creates a split. As a result,
he lives in pain, in doubt, and in guilt. Instead of liberating his forces, he must be defiant about them. And you all know that defiance is nothing but an ill-advised attempt to shut out the voices within. Therefore, instead of becoming stronger, he becomes weaker. He may cover up this weakness by a masked strength, which, however, deceives no one, least of all himself. He feels like a failure and a fraud and he does not know why. In fact, he believes that his weakness stems from having been influenced in his childhood to accept Jesus Christ and from not having been sufficiently successful in rejecting Him. Yet the more a person rejects a truth -- any truth -- the more he weakens himself in some way; the more split off he becomes; and the more conflict arises. So if you have or harbor the mass image that Christ intended you to deny your vital life-impulses, then you will develop attitudes and reactions that
in the end will seem to bear out the original misconception.
The Jewish mass image is this: "If my parents and my forefathers
were wrong and therefore killed in Jesus not only a good man but a man Who manifested God on earth, then they are totally bad people. In other words,
they can never be forgiven. I cannot face this possibility. I must deny this possibility in order not to be co-responsible with them." But did not Christ say again and again that God is forgiveness? Is He not always here with His mercy, with His understanding, and with His love? Is this not one of the great messages that He brought, namely that God does not punish mercilessly
and unforgivingly. In other words, that it is never "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth?" Here we have a vicious circle. If you believe totally in the old tradition of Judaism, then "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth" makes admitting a sin impossible. The punishment is too terrible. Therefore the truth, or even the possibility that Jesus Christ may be the truth, must be denied.
How does this image work? The misconception is that Jesus
is a false prophet. In other words, that He was a fake, that the pagans and the Christians are lying, that they are deluded, that they are inferior. At the same time, that they are the victimizers, out to annihilate the Jews. The more firmly this belief was held, the more hatred, the more discrimination, the more separation, and the more enmity grew in the consciousness of many individual Jews -- thereby creating a mass image. The defense against this mass image -- in other words, the fear of its coming true -- had to create more antagonism against the Jews and then the actual persecution of the Jews. So the misconception created a defense which, in turn, could not help but bear out the apparent truth of the misconception.
The greater the guilt -- and therefore the fear of its pain and its supposed unforgivability -- the stronger must be the defense against the truth pertaining to the issue. Then the heart and the mind close even tighter. Then even the fact of this close-mindedness and close-heartedness
must be denied, justified, and fought against.
My beloved friends, for many years you have been working on your psyche,
on your soul substance. You have dealt with many images in your personal psyche. You have come to see the damage of all the images. Your images -- which are distortions of the truth, misconceptions, and misperceptions -- inevitably create a still or unmoving soul substance that walls you off from the best within yourself, from life -- with all its creative possibilities -- from God, from loving, and from being able to receive and to accept love. In their untruth, images are evil and create sin. They create war within the soul. They create war in the personality. They create war outside with others. You have learned painstakingly the importance of challenging and dissolving your images. There is only one way to do this. You have to start to ask very probing questions. This brings a new light into the picture. It opens doors that heretofore were closed. It loosens up hardened soul substance. So, in order to dissolve any image, many questions need to be asked from all possible angles. The mind must be open so as to look at the situation and to consider everything that may be revelant to the issue.
In the last lecture I spoke about tradition in both its positive and its negative connotations. I also spoke about certain movements within this path: emphases at various periods and phases. In the last year or so it must have become obvious to many of you who observe the direction which this path takes that from the initial emphasis on individual purification and self-liberation -- through the dissolution of your false images --
we are now increasingly concerned with creating a new society. This includes dissolving whatever mass images stand in the way of the unfoldment of the
self-realized person. The new society, of which you are pioneers,
cannot afford to live with frozen images in its soul substance.
I have often said that this path represents the New Age person. It is no coincidence that a mixture of religious backgrounds is prevalent among you. For example, in your political committees you learn how politics could be run with the principles you are learning. In the running of your business, of your administration, you learn the same thing in practical application. In your artistic pursuits, you approach your creative process in an entirely new way in order to release your blocks. Why, then, would you have a different approach to religious affiliations and beliefs? In order to dissolve these particular mass images, it is first necessary to see that there are images to investigate, to question, to challenge. In other words, it is necessary to consider the subject anew,
rather than simply letting it be.
The New Age society knows neither Judaism nor Christianity, as they are known today. Yet it knows both. It takes the truth from both and it expands it for it to filter through the newly evolving and expanding consciousness. The New Age person is so free that no word can trigger off emotional reactions, whether this word be Jew or Christian, Jesus Christ or religion. For many people the word reincarnation has a similar connotation. It is against the teachings of both Judaism and Christianity, at least as they are taught today. Yet it is one of the eternal truths, regardless of whether it fits into the religion embraced by certain individuals or not. Does it not strike you as peculiarly significant that this word -- or the concept behind the word -- fails to elicit as strong a reaction from you as the word Jesus Christ? You may or may not believe in it to begin with, but there is no strong emotional involvement with, nor a stake in, denying this idea. Because your doors are much more open in this regard, then sooner or later you will experience inwardly, within yourself, the truth of reincarnation.
The new man and the new woman are free from emotional involvements that block the truth. They have no stake in holding on to anything, or in denying anything, except to finding the truth. This commitment is firm and it is always expressed toward the Creator. Thus the truth can flow freely. The New Age person is not bound to nationality, to political party, to race, or to creed. He combines all of their truths and he rejects all of their errors. Remember what I explained in the lecture about New Age politics, in which democracy, communism, socialism, monarchy, and capitalism are all combined in their truths in the best sense, while their untruths -- which create separation and set one man against the other -- are left out. The same applies to any other human expression. In religion, too, the truth combines and unifies, whereas untruth separates. Untruth and separation create evil, dissension, hostility, outer and inner warfare, mutually exclusive dualities. "If I am a Jew, then I cannot be a Christian. If I am either, then I cannot believe in reincarnation. If I believe in monarchy, then I cannot see the good in socialistic and communistic ideas. If I am progressive, then I cannot be for tradition." All these are false choices that separate. When you are one "versus" the other, then you are that one thing with a vengeance, thus you cannot be it in its best sense.
In the current turmoil about Jesus Christ, those who are burdened with their own fear and mass images often do not hold their own best traditions in their heart. They often pride themselves to be not even religiously inclined
at all. So when analyzed, then their violent reactions against the possibility of Christ's existence turns out to be a prideful stubbornness, a false sense of individuality.
Genuine individuality can never be associated with any group consciousness, with any religion, with any nationality, with any political party. True individuality blossoms only when God's truth is sought in all issues and at
all times, so that a personal inner experience can flower. The individuals will then create the new group consciousness that is made up of free men and women for whom God's will reigns first and above all else. A group of such people is never in opposition to the individual, but the one furthers the other.
Your earth suffers from the existence of human beings who have not yet understood this truth. They are are still too immature to grasp the immense strength, the autonomy, and the freedom that lie in giving over totally to God, while working constantly on cleansing the psyche of impurities, of ignorance, of confusion, of false images, of emotional tightness, and of the displacement of individuality into a kind of societal traditionalism. The suffering in your world is caused exclusively by these attitudes, that are often confused with dignity -- pride in the desirable sense -- with strength of character, and
with self-value. Look at warring countries that cannot come to a peace agreement. Each is steeped in its own rightness, holding the other wrong. Therefore, neither can see -- or wants to see -- that both right and wrong exist in the two camps. This example is obvious. But the same ill exists in much subtler issues that do not seem connected with the world's dissension and suffering.
Humanity is beginning to grow up. The process is slow and
it is often hindered by personal resistance to growth, by habitual ways of thinking whose pattern is never questioned, by rigidified ideas that people refuse to let go of, by personal laziness and, last but not least, by the tragic error that the old ways are safe and must therefore be worshipped and held on to. It is through these attitudes that the forces of evil have access to the human consciousness and plunge it into destructiveness, which then manifests in various ways. The whole process of growing up is hindered, it is delayed, with unnecessary suffering created along the way. You are familiar with these dynamics in your individual paths. Humanity as a whole goes through identical dynamics. The more individual human beings can remove their blocks and cleanse their souls -- their psychic substance -- the more humanity as a whole will become ready. As an individual, you have a part in you which wants to give the best to your evolution and which wants to overcome resistances and fear. You also contain another part that seeks reasons to stop this process. Humanity as a whole has also these two parts. Individuals who follow their true destiny are humanity's higher self. Those who resist it are humanity's lower self. As in your individual struggle, it all depends on which part is stronger. So humanity goes through the same shifting balances.
It is not true that there must always be war, suffering, and injustice on this earth. This only holds true as long as the majority of human beings refuse to grow up and persist in remaining in a state of inner error, of falsehood, and of confusion. The stronger people like you become in your purpose and in your understanding of what is involved here, the more other individuals will give up their personal pride, will give up their self-interest, will give up their small opportunism -- all of which amounts to a lack of faith. You, and those like you, will shift the balance. Mankind will begin to grow into its innate destiny.
But how is faith to grow? Only when the desire to know God and His will is applied to all issues can God manifest to you. And only then will faith become a realistic experience, instead of being an empty word. Just as you have a duty toward yourself to liberate yourself from all your personal images because they hinder you -- in other words, because they frustrate your scope of aliveness and your ability to experience love, truth, and beauty -- so do you have an obligation toward the human race to free
it from all mass images. You have to start by eliminating your own mass images. In other words, not only is your life at stake, but also much more.
Visualize the New Age person and the new society in a way you have never done before. Visualize the new you in a way that is both joyous and free. Visualize the new society in which dissension and separation have no longer any room because when they come up, then they are being treated on the deeper levels -- as you learn to do individually. You have learned on this path that when there is enmity between you and another person, it can always be resolved when you truly wish to be in truth and when you go beneath the surface to the deeper levels. Visualize this new society that you are in the process of building -- and that one day will be a model for the whole world.
The unity that I am talking about has nothing to do with tolerance. Tolerance implies that there is still a difference, whether people feel superior about it or not, but surely a difference. Regarding unity versus separation, there are three stages in mankind's evolution: 1) Separation in outright enmity; 2) tolerance; 3) union, unity, oneness. To find this oneness underneath the diversity means peace, it means love, it means truth, it means growing into a mature humanity.
Applying this concept to the topic of Jesus Christ, I can see that mankind has outgrown the stage of killing each other merely for being a Jew or merely for being a Christian. When I say this, I mean that when this still happens, then the majority of mankind rather than condoning it, considers it a horrible crime. Mankind's most prevalent attitude today, at least on the surface, is for the Jew to tolerate the Christian and vice versa. But underneath the surface, you need to find those areas where you still wish to annihilate the other merely for being different -- thus challenging your insecurity about your spirituality and your religious background. Some of you have already done this and thus have traversed a tunnel through which you can find the next stage that you are intrinsically ready for: oneness, unity. The differences are wiped out. So you find that Jesus was never a dividing force. It was the Jews and the Christians who, as a result of their distortions, have created this false impression. Jesus Christ came to be a bridge. He came to be further stage of love and truth for all mankind. He came to unify all of mankind. In this new unity, tolerance no longer has any room. You
are all one in all the great traditions that have reached the earth and that contain aspects of the truth. Combined, they tell more of the whole story: the story of creation, the story of humanity, the story of man's relationship to God, the story of God's presence in man's life.
Therefore, wipe out the superficial differences and find the great bond of inner oneness. But not by eliminating Him Who has been turned into a controversial figure, but by eliminating the artificial, erroneous controversy that is based totally on the human limitation of vision and therefore on misunderstandings. If the Jew feels put aside because of Christ, then he should try to see that having sent Christ into a Jewish incarnation was God's great act of love for His Jewish children. If the Christian feels that he must deny his energies and his pleasure principle if
he embraces Christ, then he should try to see that this is merely a wrong interpretation. My dear friends, wipe out your misunderstandings and challenge your assumptions. Then consider the possibility that the truth may be totally different -- different in such a way that not only do you lose nothing, but that you gain everything. When you give up your fixed ideas, then you will actually gain all that you ever feared losing.
The new light nourishes and strengthens all of you. It accelerates its force and its impact as your soul become freer, more open,
more questioning -- in a spirit of truth-searching -- and more filled with good will toward God's gift of love for you. In other words, Jesus Christ. The universe extends its tender love to each one of you, both as individuals and as a new group of humans on whom the spirit world sets so
much hope. You are all blessed.
January 11, 1978
Copyright 1978 by Center for the Living Force, Inc.