Fences Man Puts Up Through Limited Illusory Alternatives

By The Pathwork Guide

Greetings, my dearest friends. God bless all of you. Blessed be this lecture. Blessed be your understanding, so as to properly assimilate the contents.

I should like to begin tonight's lecture with a short description of spiritual reality, and, as opposed to it, from this vantage point, the picture mankind represents. This connects with the topic we shall discuss.

In reality the universe is wide open, and man could move freely in it. This means that the universe is truly at man's disposal, with all its infinite rich varieties of fulfillment, of forces, of energy, of experience, of supply -- in any possibly way man can think of -- and more than he can fathom at this point of his evolution. He could make use of all of this. He could truly explore the blissful possibilities that are open to him. He could indeed be master of this wonderful world in which he can forever expand into more blissful experience, into greater wisdom and power, into wider scopes and depths of being. However, due to a number of circumstances -- many of which we have discussed in the course of these lectures -- man simply does not realize this fact. He assumes that he is bound and imprisoned in a limited world, in which he is fenced in by boundaries he cannot penetrate or control. He assumes he is a helpless victim of circumstances beyond his control. In this assumption of a limited universe -- at least as far as he is concerned -- he makes no use of the powers within himself, which are universal powers, destined for his pleasure and expansion, for his growth and experience. Not making use of these forces, he inactivates himself and thus he creates imaginary fences that need not exist at all.

Imagine wide open spaces, containing all the beauties of the world, all that an individual could possibly require for his enjoyment. But the people do not see these wide open spaces. They do not see the powers, the forces, the assets, the beauty surrounding them. They close their eyes in fear and they believe themselves to actually exist behind fenced walls. Although there is no prison, and there are no fences in reality, if man believes and acts as though he cannot move from the spot he is in, the effect will be the same. He may wait for a long time to be delivered from this helpless, passive position, but as long as he does not discover for himself that all he has to do is to recognize his freedom, his own forces and powers, he will remain fenced in, just as though these fences were real. The effects on him will be the same. This is the relationship between reality and illusion. Illusion assumes aspects whose effects appear real, but only as long as the illusion is taken to be real.

The fences could be instantly removed, with one gesture. But since man ignores the gesture, he must find his own way to discover the unreality of the fences. Others can tell him that this is so. Often man even believes what he hears -- that there really are no fences if he but opens his eyes and starts moving about, using his inborn faculties. Yet, he is afraid to try. He may listen but he does not dare to do what is necessary to do in order to move out into the great and safe freedom. He fears this freedom, and chooses unnecessary suffering instead. But one day, to his astonishment, he discovers the ease of reality, its generosity, its abundance, its stimulating peace, and he wonders why he feared it, why he opted for self-inflicted prohibitions.

These fences are rarely just simple walls. They are mazes and complicated labyrinths -- the product of man's elaborate false assumptions and the contradictory attitudes he collects as a result of them. It is his job on earth to find the way out of these labyrinthian byways. This is the freedom, the liberation this path promises and of which some of my friends have occasionally gained some glimpses lately.

How does this description of spiritual forms have personal meaning on your problems, your current attitudes or blocks? The most immediate freedom man is to discover on a path such as this is the realization of his far reaching sphere of influence. When a person finally recognizes the significance of cause and effect in his own life, a tremendous changed attitude to all of life is the result. Much preliminary work usually has to be undertaken before the pathwork brings man to this understanding. Often, he may have discovered many an image, understood a number of inner problems and conflicts, and yet he has no inkling of the immediate cause and effect -- hence the independent role he plays in his fate, in what seems like circumstances he cannot alter. For the moment, I do not discuss mystical connections of a more far reaching nature, karmic conditions, causes and effects that are once, twice, or ten times removed, but direct, visible links of cause and effect. That is, visible if one chooses to see and understand. How many times do all of you feel and think and fear and wish as though the desired outcome has no bearing on your attitude and behavior. You fear you may not be liked and helplessly hope you may be. Meanwhile, it escapes you that you could so easily determine it, if this is what you truly want and if you act accordingly. How often do you fear you may not succeed in a venture, passively, helplessly waiting for fate to determine the desired outcome? But it does not occur to you that there are many ways in which you, and you alone, can bring about what it is you want. Constantly, all energies are geared to appearing as though what you want exists in your life. Deep down you are convinced that you cannot really have it, but you are ashamed to admit this. So you pretend you possess what you might easily possess, if only you believed you could and if you spent your energies not on make-believe but on truly obtaining it. This may be success in any given field, it may be a happy relationship, being loved and fulfilled on all levels of your being. Or it may be being a certain kind of person.

No wonder man is helpless. The first fence, then, is his belief that he cannot have what he might so easily have. The second maze, resulting from the first, is his shame about a non-existent and unnecessary deprivation. The third twisted corridor in the labyrinth of the mind is the pretense that he has, or could have if he wanted to, while he believes the opposite. In spite of believing that he cannot have, he nevertheless hopes for fate to deliver him from his deprivation. So he has fears and hopes, all based on false premises.

Man even fears himself, his own unconscious -- as though it contained a monster he has no control over, separated from his volitional processes. Moreover, he foolishly seems to assume that by pretending it does not exist, it will remain tame, but that when he looks at it, it will act up, forcing him into actions he has no way of stopping. He completely forgets that his unconscious mind is he; that once it is conscious, he is not a slave to it, but its master. Rather, it is then no longer unconscious. He stubbornly insists that he is helplessly exposed to the workings of his secret mind. He is plagued with superfluous fears of whether or not he will succeed to grow, to shed an unwelcome trait, to act constructively -- as though all this had nothing to do with his choices, but were the fateful result of a power on which he has no influence.

Even my friends who have already experienced considerable insight on this path still do not recognize how often they feel this way. It passes by unnoticed. If only you would check such reactions and immediately correct this faulty thinking -- which has such far-reaching effects on your entire evolution, on your very existence. All you need to do after such a detection is the forceful assertion that you, and you alone, determine the choices of your actions, your behavior, and your decisions. The moment you do assert this, something begins to happen within, and therefore unused faculties begin to manifest. First, by giving you still deeper understanding, then by strengthening you, they help you to begin to act differently, in a new and more productive way, geared to accomplish the goal you wish. In other words, you set new causes in motion by refusing to be a prey to your own destructive aspects. This needs a simple decision, with a clear declaration in this respect.

It is a major transition when you finally come into your own and discover that the solution to living and happiness is so simple. This simplicity rests on your willingness to dispense with the most subtle pretense to cover up an unnecessary limitation. When you dispense with the limitation, you can go out and obtain what you wish. Instead of withdrawing and pulling back, you will reach out for them. Hence, you will never worry about not being liked. Instead of causing a paralysis of your best faculties, you will discover and use them. Instead of saying No to life, to people, to success, to fulfillment, and to varied experience, you will say Yes. Instead of helplessly waiting for others, or fate, or life to make you into an acceptable person, meanwhile hiding in fear from yourself, you will determine what you wish, how to obtain it, and what to do about trends you do not like. The change lies in doing your best (in whatever area of living), rather than giving the best impression. If you look at all your past findings in that light, you can determine the vast difference between giving the best impression, so that the best will be thought of you, and actually doing the best in order to obtain a particular desired result. This is the very key that determines the real success you want -- in a vocation, in a rewarding relationship, in growth, and in self-unfoldment.

Regardless of how much many of my friends have progressed, there still exists this imagined helplessness toward living and growing, in respect to yourself and to what life is supposed to give you. Observe and pinpoint it. Finding it is always half the battle. You cannot make this decisive switch unless you first clearly see the state you must leave behind. If you do not see that you live with a fence around you, you cannot discover that this fence is imaginary and unnecessary. You can only go into the great freedom, fearlessly, when you discover that you have not dared to do so.

It is important in this connection that you discover: a) the feeling of helplessness, of vague hope and fear that something should or should not happen, while not seeing how you can influence it; b) the exact cause of your unfulfillment. How you act as a consequence of your misconceptions and images; how your negative emotions make you react, what they make you emanate, and how this affects others; c) how you pretend to have or be what you think you could not genuinely get or develop into. Concise realizations, applying to specific areas of your inner and outer life, will enable you to issue thoughts and intentions into a constructive, healthy direction. This is the transition in which you remove the first, the immediate fences. This is the direct cause and effect, observable without mystical faith in occult matters.

How often do my friends assume the attitude "I have a resistance," letting it go at that, as though they had no recourse and had to passively wait until this resistance vanished by itself. It seldom occurs to them to say: "here is my resistance. Now that I know and see it, I reject it. I do not give in to it. Regardless of what I ignorantly and erroneously fear, I wish to penetrate behind the resistance. I am in power, not my resistance. My will for truth and growth is in power, the real me, who wishes all that, and not the vague, childish fears that cause the resistance." Or their entire attitude expresses: "I am afraid of being rejected. I just hope for the best, but I fear it, for I feel powerless to influence others as to whether or not they are going to like me." If you ascertain such an attitude, it will be comparatively simple to declare to yourself: "why should I not be liked? It is important to me. My inner resources will furnish me with all the qualities necessary. I will go out and be genuinely concerned for the other person, rather than merely pretending. When I am willing to like as much as I wish to be liked, I shall like myself better, because there will be no unfair exchange or demand on my part, nor pretense. Hence I will believe in the possibility of being loved. Whatever is lacking in me I sincerely wish to become acutely aware of it, and change. Since I am the determining factor, this wish must come true to the extent of the fullness of this desire."

Such inner action means taking the reins of life into your hands. You are all, at least in some respects, still within this primary fence in which you do not see immediate cause and effect, therefore being helpless -- or believing yourself to be, while not even being aware of the fact that this is the way you experience yourself. If you but see all this and then deliberately express your intent to change the process, formulating clear, strong thoughts and will currents, you must pass through this decisive threshold.

Formulating clear-cut thoughts and expressing the intent of the change you wish to perform within and without does not at all mean suppression or repression of the negative, destructive hopelessness. Repression is merely another word for deception. But when you see that you believe yourself to be helpless, you believe your desire is hopeless, therefore you pretend, and you live in make-believe, when you clearly see this you can then start to live in earnest, striving for the real goal and dispensing with the need to be concerned about what others think.

So often it is thought that asserting a negative finding means remaining in it, or waiting until a miracle happens before you grow out of the negative inner situation. While, on the other hand, it is assumed that to express the intent to no longer feel and react according to this destructive trend means to repress it and superimpose a constructiveness that is not yet natural. This may indeed often be so. But it need not. Express the will to grow out of destructive patterns and take active leadership into your hands concerning your life and your development. Realize that you have the last word, that the last word has to come from you as to whether or not and when you are going to change. This has nothing to do with superimposing or wishful thinking. Declare that you wish this kind of a relationship, for example, instead of that kind of a relationship. Declare that you wish a specific kind of self-expression, vocation, profession, with the degree of success you really desire. Then you may ask yourself what you intend to do for it. You may also question yourself whether you believe in the possibility at all of your attaining these goals. If not, why do you doubt? This is the direct link of cause and effect that must be clearly established, realized, and changed before the more remote links can be established.

When cause and effect cannot be immediately linked, where they are once -- or several times -- removed, the result must be temporarily accepted, but only as long as the links are not established, as long as cause and effect remain obscure. The instant they are on the surface, the direct links of cause and effect become obvious; the negative result dissolves instantly and new effects are created. But how can you come to this further removed stage -- karmic results -- when you do not see the obvious, immediate connections, accessible to any common sense viewer, once the resistance is relinquishing. If you do not see what you can do right now to change what it is in you that constantly creates undesirable results, how can you come to a wider view of cause and effect, so often ascribed to an unfathomable fate? The first phase in this respect, the phase where cause and effect are obvious if one chooses to see them, has nothing to do with spiritual faith, with metaphysical factors. All that is necessary is seeing what is there to see, what even your nearest and dearest know but do not dare to tell you because they rightly feel that you may be hurt and do not wish to accept what they observe. Due to this self-inflicted, fearful blindness, you are paralyzed, you do not move where you should move. As a compensating factor, you struggle and move too much where you should be serenely quiet. I am speaking of inner soul movements. In proper balance there is calmness, in which you let the result of your efforts come to you, without strain on your part.

A major distinguishing point of man in evolution is his attitude toward effort. Free, voluntary and joyful effort is the result of spiritual awakening. Effort against one's will, because life requires it, seeming to be forced on the individual, is the result of their still being enfenced, enmeshed in their limited understanding of spiritual reality. Yes, they do require effort, too, for he who ceases effort ceases to live. But their effort is always labored, against the stream. Inwardly they would rather not make the effort. Their idea of bliss, their final goal of fulfillment, is non-effort, in a stagnating sense. Their outlook amounts to a belief that there is a finished state in which one does absolutely nothing. They dread to even hear such words because they imagine the truth to be laborious and fraught with the forced, laborious effort they use -- the only kind they know about. They hanker after a state of complete stagnation, of non-movement, as it were. This would indeed be death. This is why people in this stage are particularly afraid of death. He who has already attained the realization that effort is bliss, that movement is no chore but happiness itself, does not fear death because he does not wish it. In this stage effort becomes effortless. It is joyful movement, in beautiful rhythm. It spreads more joy, fulfillment, peace, accomplishment, rest. At the very beginning, it may mean overcoming a certain resistance to it, but one voluntarily does so, in free choice, because the desired result is worth the effort. Hence, the overcoming quickly leads to a state where energy becomes self-generating. A momentum is created in which the effort becomes free-flowing. It soon ceases to feel like "effort." It becomes perfect movement, swinging on and on, into further constructive unfoldment and self-expression.

Effort taken against one's will -- in order to conform, to get approval, or ward off disapproval, or because it is simply necessary to survive, but one resents this necessity -- creates fatigue, and hence makes every further step of effort even more laborious, causing greater resentment. Free and voluntary effort, due to choice and recognition of its fairness, never makes one tired.

If you look at your individual path from this point of view and question your soul movements, you may derive some very important answers. How do you feel about the effort required for any of your daily chores, about the effort of this pathwork, about the effort of living as such? Do you have to be constantly pushed, perhaps by yourself as well as by life, while still another part of you resists? If this is so, then resentment against life itself must be much stronger than you think. It is important to ascertain it. Or have you arrived, at least in certain areas, where your effort is free-flowing, where you have already brought yourself into the momentum, where the self-generating effort carries you, and you no longer have to exert discipline? In this case, you no longer feel effort, but you feel movement -- and you enjoy this movement. Then you are truly over a major threshold. But the voluntary effort has to be exerted first by the self, and without resentment, in order to generate sufficient momentum so that it becomes free-flowing. When this is happening, then all blocks, all problems, all fences can be removed with the greatest of ease. To want, and to express to want, sufficient effort, without resentment and labor, is possible only when it is understood that this effort does not lead to hardship, slavery, and suffering, but to happy experience, freedom, and pleasure.

In the course of these years we have amply discussed that misconception is responsible for all suffering. This includes the illusory fences, the labored, resented, tiring effort. Man puts himself in the paradoxical position of wearing himself out in a non-existing prison. He labors and slaves and chafes under the effort of rattling at the prison bars that have no reality, while he refuses to step outside and freely move toward further expansion, joyful mastery of self, and universal bliss.

In the search for images, in self-discovery, you have found, and are continuing to find, a number of general and personal misconceptions. Now, my dearest friends, if you take all these misconceptions, put them together, and search for a common denominator, you must inevitably find that any wrong conclusion amounts to a limited concept of life, creation, the universe, the self. You suffer because you believe that suffering is necessary and inevitable. If man believes that he must bleed, he will naturally cut himself in order to fulfill this imaginary law. He must then find it confirmed. This is the nature of all images. The limitation man ascribes to life, and to his relationship to life, always amounts to an arbitrary either/or attitude. We have discussed this at various times. This either/or attitude, gravely and falsely limiting spiritual reality, the cosmic forces at man's disposal, amounts to the following: apart from the general misconception that suffering is a necessity, thereby courting suffering, the either/or attitude has three important subdivisions, contained in all personal and mass images: 1) This is good, or it is bad; it is either black or white; right or wrong. 2) There are but two equally undesirable alternatives. No other way seems open. 3) The false idea that only one desirable, or a limited amount of desirable, form of self-expression can be chosen, while others have to be given up. It is either this or that fulfillment, not both; not two apparently mutually exclusive ways of life.

We have discussed all these either/or attitudes, but it is important to understand them in this context. Let us now see, once again, why these limitations are so false and so damaging.

When you seek clarity in an issue but you consider it merely from the point of view of right and wrong, good or bad, this is a shallow and insufficient evaluation, leaving out many aspects of importance, many considerations of reality that cannot be found on the narrow level of either/or. The scope and depth of reality is much wider. This happens only because you do not question the issue in a spirit of really wanting to see whether or not it is constructive, productive, life-asserting, and life-affirming, versus the opposite; whether it is growth-producing for all concerned -- and this, after all, is the central question of all life issues -- or limiting and destructive, and what is constructive and what is not constructive about the good and the bad, the right and the wrong. What you are used to doing in this either/or is to quickly assume a ready-made rule, without questioning it. You echo something blindly, without quite knowing why. And if you are challenged, you feel cornered, and you lean on authority and conformism, without ever using your own resources and your mind to find out why you adopt or reject, why you condone, and why you condemn. It does not occur to you that considerations other than right or wrong may exist in an issue. Your lack of questioning the real issues makes you overlook the real scope, which would carry you way beyond the fence. The fence of unquestioned standards of right versus wrong seems a protection against disapproval or rejection. Thus you fence yourself in, with the result of having to constantly deal with wrong choices; choices that do not exist in reality, but only because you adopted views other than your own. Taking on such views and standards without questioning and probing, without arriving at the real issues, without even the will to see what is really important and true, stems from the concern to conform and gain approval, and respectively to ward off disapproval, rather than from sincere concern for the issue itself. Here we find again what I mentioned first: living in earnest versus living for the sake of pretense. Assuming ready made opinions is always connected with pretense, the need to be concerned with what others think.

The next is the choice between two equally undesirable alternatives. Such a limited and negative choice must, of course, be the result of an equally limited and negative wrong conclusion. Untruth can only breed further error. It cannot breed truth. Wrong conclusions are always the result of stale, stagnant, unfresh, obsolete ideas which remain unquestioned. If you do not dare to question your own taboos, you cannot widen the horizon of your life and find so many beautiful possibilities. You are doomed to constantly make choices between equally undesirable and painful alternatives.

The third either/or is the assumption, the erroneous belief, that only a limited degree of fulfillment and happiness exists. You have to choose between either this or that goal, desire, wish. Connected with this there exists the idea that your happiness or fulfillment takes away someone else's, so you do not dare to wish for your own, in the fear of being selfish. Within the fence, the universe is so limited that there is not enough room for a full life of each created being, and even one area of fulfillment seems to deprive another of this particular fulfillment. But beyond the fence, where no envy and jealousy exist, there also is no such limitation. There the universe is seen for what it really is -- unlimited. Within the fence, you think you have to make choices. These choices need not be made beyond the fence.

You cannot step out of the fence unless you discover that you are a free creature, with self-responsibility. Part of this is the willingness and the eagerness to question all doctrines, rules, regulations, opinions handed down to you. Such questioning must be done deeply, thoroughly, and independently, deeply probing into the really important questions of living and growing. You must refuse to accept a view without yourself arriving to its validity. You must learn to determine yourself what you want, what to think, how much you are willing to invest in order to obtain what you wish, and whether this would be a sufficient and fair exchange. You must learn to delve into yourself to summon the necessary resources and strength from within, in order to obtain what you wish. If you declare that you wish it and want to realize the necessary prerequisite within yourself, the answer must come from your higher self. You will find the capacities you need. Clear-cut, concise formulation of what you wish, in what way you need to grow, and where you need help, will bring forth answers from the deepest source of truth and wisdom from within, from the cosmic forces inside yourself.

When you fully understand the immediacy of cause and effect, comprising the first fences, the closest sections of your private maze, you will then be able to remove fences that are a result of further links. How can you understand a karmic condition -- other than in theory -- if you do not first fully experience the truth of immediate cause and effect? For example: a relationship is disharmonious, but you do not see how you constantly contribute to it by actions, thoughts, and feelings which you emanate. After you become aware of this, you have immediate recourse to change the relationship. But when an individual goes on and on in blindness, he will come to the point where he finds himself alone, where he has no relationship, where he lives in conditions in which a new relationship seems almost impossible to create. This, then, is a cause and effect further removed, not so easy to determine. But when the more immediate phases have been worked through, you will be able to understand, connect, and experience cause and effect even when they are far apart.

In order to deal with the removed cause and effect situations, it is important to understand an apparent contradiction. On the one hand you hear, and, through a deeper understanding of yourself, you begin to convince yourself that suffering is unnecessary. On the other hand, acceptance and relinquishing of your selfwill is necessary in order to be in inner harmony. This seems, indeed, like a contradiction, which may give rise to puzzlement and confusion. Now, when I speak of "acceptance," do I mean acceptance of suffering? Of course not. But, in an indirect sense, it may temporarily appear so, but the emphasis is an entirely different one. The emphasis is that you have to learn to accept your own limitations and their results. If you rebel against your past ignorance because it brings present hardship, then such rebellion stands in the way of removing that which has caused the hardship in the fist place.

Accepting your own limitations does not mean resignation and wanting to remain in this limited state. It much rather means true self-responsibility. It means the awareness that you are a free creature, who is not interfered with before he discovers his strength and freedom. It is wonderful that it is that way. When man cannot accept his limitations, he does not accept self-responsibility, therefore he cannot come out of the fence. The consequences of your past ignorance have to be accepted, but only as long as you persist in retaining the particular ignorance or misperception that has created the suffering. The moment you get up and truly decide to wish to change -- which seems to require the courage of ruthless self-honesty, which is so difficult for many -- the past negative cause dissolves and you will feel the inner freedom to express happiness and to fully desire happiness: without tension, without urgency, without guilt, without the fear of happiness -- which would be a negative wish for happiness. Calmly and with certainty you will know that you can have all the happiness you wish; that it does not interfere with any constructive issue in the world, nor does it deprive anyone. Nothing stands in the way. This will be the soul condition in the moment you are truly willing to change the cause that has brought the effect of unhappiness. When this decision is fully made, then further removed cause and effect links become immediately accessible.

The more you establish and experience the immediate links of cause and effect, the more secure you must become, and the more trusting in the nature of the universe and its benign character. As you remove fence after fence, a trust is established which you can send out by the currents you emanate, when you deal with further removed effects. In other words, when you find yourself in a position that is evidently the result of a long chain reaction of negative beliefs and misconceptions, the apparent outer hopelessness to change the condition will give way because, as your inner consciousness changes, you trustingly send out and express the wish for fulfillment, in the knowledge that this is in keeping with spiritual reality in the measure of your inner change. Thus you build the new condition. Such expression of trust is possible after experiencing again and again selfhood and its results, as opposed to self-alienation and imprisonment and its results. This knowingness of the law that must fulfill itself will bring its proof. The trust you send out must come back to you. You will deeply know, without a doubt, that just as your limited concept bred its results, your understanding of the abundance of creation must breed corresponding results. This knowingness is like a ray that reaches out and must come back in fullness.

I realize that this has not been an easy lecture. It will require very intensive study -- inner study. And, above all, application to yourself, so that it is not only a general, theoretical understanding. You must determine where, in yourself, you limit yourself in an either/or, in the idea that suffering is inevitable, in the ignorance of the power inherent in your knowing, and in the concise formulation of it. Thus your universe is closed to you, and sets up your fences. Institute your own momentum of effort, so that you swing into effortless effort concerning your development, your removal of the fences, your self-unfoldment, and your self-expression. Effortless effort becomes the movement of this Path itself.

* * * QUESTION: My daughter needs a little guidance and further help. Last summer you helped with certain advice, some of her guilts. She has found this to be so, but she hasn't been able to connect it emotionally. She has tried, and used a lot of effort, but it was not effortless -- I can see that. She was frantic in trying. And whether that blocks it or not, I don't know. She cannot change it to the yes-current. What is the next step?

ANSWER: Sometimes it is impossible to indicate a specific next step, for it depends upon where she responds. It might be any number of aspects that lead to the same nucleus of the problem. It might be wherever an inner response occurs. So one has to try until one finds an aspect where it clicks. It makes no difference from which angle she approaches it. The question is searching for the approach where she is, at the moment, least resisting, least fearful.

One of her great stumbling blocks is a tremendously strong either/or. It is unusually strong in her case. It is "either I am happy or I am unhappy. If I am happy, there must be perfection on all counts. Then I will live. If I am unhappy, I must die." There is nothing between perfect bliss and absolute annihilation. This is what makes her so frantic.

This advice may help her over the present muddle. The advice is that she try to contact the unlimited cosmic intelligence inside and around her to help her see that this either/or is false, illusory. As long as man desires positive experience out of fear of the negative opposite, he deals in confusion and error -- hence his thoughts and emotions are cluttered with debris and are an obstruction, rather than a help toward attaining the goal. This is what I meant about the apparent contradiction between acceptance and the knowledge that suffering is not necessary. It seems difficult to reach the state of expressing a yes-current for happiness without fear of its opposite.

It makes no difference by which road you arrive at the truth. The truth is that there is nothing to fear, there is no suffering. You may arrive at this conclusion by finding it unnecessary to accept suffering, and you may succeed in shedding the fear. Or you may arrive at the same conclusion by having to go through the fear in order to find out that it was an illusion. Behind the wall of apparent suffering, of annihilation, and fear stands the spiritual reality of eternal, unchanging bliss. In her meditation she should work on this factor, expressing the wish to get into a truthful concept about her frantic fear. Then the block will disappear, the way will be open. If she truly desires to remove the imaginary threat, to concisely formulate what it is she fears, and that she also desires a realization of its unreality, the answer must come. Whenever one meditates in such a fashion, in good faith and sincerity, in fullness of will, the answers come.

Please prepare for questions. Do not let the opportunity go by. The more personal they are, the better for all of you.

If you can only halfway utilize and apply to yourself what I have said tonight, you indeed begin to dissolve the fences into the thin air which they actually are. They have no real substance. When you discover the freedom, and when you find out that there are no chains, no fences, no prison walls, that you are not helpless, that you can constantly influence and mold your fate, your immediate life, then happiness is something that you cannot imagine. The fearlessness of living, the effortlessness of growing, the beauty of experiencing, the rich variety of experience without harassment, and the bliss of steadily growing. This happiness cannot be described. All this awaits you. It is right there, where you are now.

I bless you once again, my friends, with all the love that exists in the universe; with all the strength. Make it your own, for this strength is an effortless strength. Through knowing the truth, you must discover that you are indeed free to use the riches God has given you. Be in peace, be in God.

The Guide

by Eva Pierrakos
October 30, 1964

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