The greatest voyage any human being ever undertakes is that of his creation. During the nine months in which you are slowly forming within your mother, you are traveling from some unknown world and materializing within her. The formation of the physical body can be compared to a rocketship coming from space, bringing a soul. This is the only creative experience that you undergo in which the higher force Is brought from the spiritual to the physical level.

So, we are really like salmon trying desperately to return to the home of our creation. Helping to succeed in this attempt is the real purpose of all religious and spiritual work. We are continuously reaching up into the unknown, unconsciously seeking that which is our heritage: the rebirth and return to the level of being and purity that exists in us at birth. Existing religious and spiritual organizations almost completely ignore this basic need. It is, without a doubt, our most basic instinct, and accounts for the drive within us to regenerate ourselves, which is how we mistakenly seek our immortality.

Re-creation does not bring rebirth for you, and after your product fails to fulfill you, you can become deeply bitter with your offspring. It is the greatest of all tragedies for a human being to seek this fulfillment in another; it can only be obtained within oneself. A child who does not become what a parent expects serves as an obvious expression of the parent’s self-rejection. The force of creation exists in every human being and usually is only manifested in producing children. The use of this higher force without the attainment of inner nourishment keeps people from realization and contentment even if they succeed in being successful in life. People who have obtained power and money are continually finding that material satisfaction has not brought them inner peace. Using the forces of creativity for physical satisfaction will always leave dissatisfaction in its wake. It is as though you were trying to eat food of wood and stone. Material prosperity cannot fulfill the inner appetite.

The world a parent has to offer his child includes the values which have been handed down for generations. These values in most cases are sterile, without content, in the sense that they can never give a living and full satisfaction. To marry and reproduce may be to use the highest possible forces that exist within man for lesser reasons. Reproduction without the consciousness of creativity is an animal act. Reproduction with conscious creativity is rebirth.

ONE of the basic spiritual blocks is the sense of guilt.

An essential part of spiritual growth is the removal of spiritual blocks. One of the basic blocks is the sense of guilt. To feel unworthy prevents surrender and subtly impedes spiritual growth. Guilt is an indulgence - an emotional teething ring which enables us to remain immature while whimpering that we are not good enough to have the experience we feel is reserved for "better people."

The best answer I ever heard to this type of thinking was given to me by the late Shankaracharya of Puri. "To grow spiritually you must learn to overcome your emotional blocks." Guilt is an experience of the lower level of life - the earth level. As you rise, this "garbage" falls from you and becomes the fertilizer which feeds the seed within - the consciousness you seek. The beautiful lotus rests upon the water; the roots are sunk in the scum and slime at the bottom of the lake. As you grow and surrender completely, your lower self falls away "to the bottom of the lake" and feeds the roots of your consciousness.

Another spiritual block is the combination of self-pity and fear which is just a manifestation of resistance to working deeper. External matters are important only insofar as they are a means for encompassing that end.

As the consciousness within you grows, you must be aware of the life and death cycle that accompanies moving from level to level. As you move up, you grow and shed the dead part, much as a healthy flower or plant sheds its dead leaves and forms the new ones.

Once you have begun the process of spiritual growth, it should be a continuous flow within you. It is your duty to keep this mechanism free so the process can continue. Anything which stops this is to be surrendered. Spreading the surrender is a step in developing a spiritual mechanism.

Everything that ever was or is demonstrates how limited mankind has been spiritually. Gods and prophets are used by men more for setting limitations than for inspiring unfettered growth. For most people, these significant historic figures symbolize the extraordinary, not the living potential deep within each of us. In the study of science, a child begins with the accumulation of knowledge which others have discovered. He performs experiments to train him to think in the language of the science. By the time you finish college, all that has ever been done in your field should be absorbed within yourself. You then go on to further fulfillment through your own original creative work. In spiritual work, people look at "the gods that were" from a great distance. They do not presume to repeat (by learning and experimentation) the work of the past, nor do they dare attempt anything of a new nature. Creativity must be highly original and from a person’s highest nature.

Often a person will work well during conditions of general well-being and work badly or not at all during difficult times. It is essential to work through all conditions, not just at special times. The greatest reason for this is that, by selective work, the body chemistry becomes sensitized and a chemical imbalance results. If a person works through all conditions, good and bad, he can attain the true picture of what he is. Selected conditions for working lead you to preserve the incorrect image you have of yourself.

In creative work, to sink into a calm, peaceful work pattern is relaxing, but working through a highly emotional condition pressures the exposure of vital inability and areas of weakness that are never visible when you are at peace. To work is to be objective. The best work is always performed under the most trying conditions. More of nature can be seen and felt during a storm than on a quiet afternoon. We are shaken out of our sleep and made aware during an upheaval.

The energy and activity in the average person is within his head. Your continual thinking and fighting to balance your ego - image of yourself, your indulgence in self-pity, the lack of fulfillment that you try to justify in your mind, all ravage your energy resources. The continual defense and construction of an ego - image composed of what you would like to be and how you wish others to see you occupies much time and consumes most of your energy.

The creative area of a person is the flow within him which manifests its presence in the mind. It can begin and end in the mind of an intellectual, but to be creative in the deepest sense, it must flow in a person’s full being. The full being is the total mass of a person both physical and psychic. It requires freedom from blocks in the mind, emotions and psyche. To be creative, an idea must begin in the head and travel throughout the body before it returns to the head. Spiritual force comes into a person through the head and travels through the chest, down to the navel, and up the back, returning to the head. This full cycle of flow is continual.

"Thou shalt not worship images." This law applies to the image you create of yourself within. This is the false god that keeps you from the true worship of God or your higher self. This image must be completely destroyed before the real inner being can emerge.

There is that within a human being that wants to surrender and even tries to do so. The fact that never seems to be fully understood is that surrender means complete surrender. There is usually some area in which you feel you do not have to surrender or in which surrender can be postponed. If surrender is to have effect, everything must be let go of at once. Tying a rope around yourself and letting yourself down the side of a mountain is not the same as jumping off the mountain and falling into space.

Spiritual exercises are psychic and have a definite chemical effect on the body. Therefore, they must be performed exactly as given. A difference in performance makes a difference in the way the ingredients mix and interact as in a laboratory formula, in which materials must be put together in a specific sequence in order to achieve the desired result.

The aim of spiritual or religious work or philosophy is growth. As in nature, the conditions must be understood in order for this growth to be brought about. All the deep ideas and work done are of no value unless they produce the end product, evolvement.

Conditions for inner work differ throughout the world. There are countless ways for you to pursue the unknown. But they all achieve the same result, which is nothing, or close to nothing. Only the exceptional person who is born gifted within grows. He grows in spite of everything he does wrong. He grows solely because his seed is strong enough to withstand the psychic battle. Unfortunately, the product generally falls far short of the potential.

The key to fulfilling your potential lies with developing the soul under proper conditions. The seed of the soul can only grow in its native soil. The soil is that which exists on the second dimension, or within spiritual man. Such growth is accomplished by the complete surrender of the physical self while doing spiritual exercises. When the soul grows to the point of bearing, it becomes a continual process.

The surrender of the physical self frees the spiritual self which is buried underneath. During periods of work the spiritual man develops, but as these periods last for only part of a day, it takes years for the inner man to grow strong enough to make itself known.

Spiritual groups that produce positive results are those whose work, when stripped of all drama, allows the physical and spiritual selves to separate.

The physical, by the very nature of its creative structure, can only be of a temporary life. A harvested vegetable or fruit will reach its peak and begin to deteriorate in just days. We reach our peak at about the age of thirty andthen, unless we begin to add by some creative device to the dimensions of our life, the process of degeneration sets in. The creative force acts as a kind of preservative. Body - building, sports, and the pursuit of power and money seem to serve this purpose, but only on the level of the earth.

A strong parent by controlling his child retains much youth and vitality in the exercise of his psyche. The need to control the child serves the instinct of self-preservation in the parent; it does not truly reflect the urge to protect the child. A child learns only from the use of his own instincts and creativity.

The symbol of the Immaculate Conception exemplifies the possibility that a pure soul (God) may be born within a human. Mary, a woman, a human being, of necessity had no maternal instincts or emotions directed toward Jesus, the child she was carrying. If anything, she had to be a truly great and simple person so that nothing of herself in any way inflicted itself upon the God within her. This certainly is a greater miracle than the absence of a sexual act causing the birth of Jesus.

Upon physical contact in the moment of love the seed is planted. Some soul from across the cosmos is contacted and for a period of about nine months continues to materialize within the mother. It arrives from a distant world. The mother acts as the instrument to bring the child from its own spiritual world down to the physical dimension of the earth.

The work of the spiritual man is learning how to achieve this end. For thousands of years, lack of real understanding has hampered man in his search. Today we are sending rockets into space to find that which must first be found within. What is the point of creating extraordinary instruments of space travel while the inner man remains in the spiritual antiquity of the Stone Age? The journey into space must be a spiritual as well as a physical science.

In all religions and philosophies, you encounter the struggle of man to reach into the heavens. It is as basic as the lack of understanding in us our great tendency to bring things down to our level instead of reaching into thehigher dimensions for help. The great need is to realize that our ordinary life is on the earth’s dimension and that spiritual life is on a higher and completely different dimension. There is one thing that destroys anyone’s ability to advance spiritually the inability to control the mind and emotions. In order to free the mechanism for spiritual growth, this control is the first step in beginning a spiritual life.

As the mind and emotions are housed in the physical body and are functions of the physical man, so too the spiritual body has its own mechanism. This mechanism is sensitive and rarely used but is as complete a system as the mechanism that runs the physical life. If you want to hear a bird sing you can’t stay in the middle of a city you have to go to a place where there are open spaces and trees. To learn to contact the inner self one must also begin with special conditions.

First you must realize that there is the dimension of ordinary life and the dimension of extraordinary life. These dimensions require different muscle and nervous systems. You must strengthen those muscles which carry spiritual energy. They have to be used and exercised until they are strong enough to support the flow of energy that constitutes a spiritual life. Just as a child learning to walk is supported by his parents, so too a spiritual child requires the support of his teacher so that his development will be healthy and natural. Trying to force development will cause the novice to be crippled spiritually, his mechanism twisted. It is essential to separate the mind and emotions from the psyche as they are of different dimensions.

You must find within yourself the deep, sincere need to grow.

There is a very simple exercise for this. You can work either in a group or by yourself to quiet the mind and emotions. This is done by using a point of contact. You focus on your teacher or an object as you open to your inner self. This gives you support until your muscles are strong enough to draw energy directly from the atmosphere.

The person who undertakes these exercises must believe in God, or in a higher power, or in a great potential within himself. This is necessary because the goal of the exercise is surrender, the removal of all blocks, to allow the higher force to begin the process of destroying the ego, the physical, lower force within us.

The first step involves using an object or a teacher, sitting before either in a relaxed manner. You must find within yourself the deep, sincere need to grow. You must bring the wish deep within your chest area and ask deeply, as if the voiced wish were emanating from your heart, for help to surrender. This wish must be silently repeated several times until there is a sensation of an opening, like the opening of a flower.

This is the beginning of the second dimension, or spiritual world. The opening is the inner wish that in turn opens the mechanism of the person, making a place for the higher force to enter. The aim of the exercise is to maintain the opening in the chest and to deepen it by relaxing and asking for help within this area. You are breaking down the blocks of the physical dimension. The energy is refined, and this brings about a chemical change, enabling you to use the spiritual muscles. The opening, or surrender, must be continuous during the exercise in order for the force to enter and for the process of spiritual growth to begin.

Spiritual growth is a process of exercising and expanding the psychic muscle and nervous systems until they become controlled enough so they may be used at will. It also becomes, in time, a continuous process which works together with the ordinary life process. A growing spiritual life adds a quality and depth to life.

Asking from the very depths of yourself to surrender or attain a state of nothingness is the key to opening to the flow of higher energy. As you surrender and ask to open to higher cosmic energy, work to draw this energy into yourself and channel the energy through your energy centers (or chakras, as they are called).

A breathing exercise to use for drawing in cosmic energy is as follows: you draw in the breath high up through the nose and into the heart chakra. As you start the breath into the heart, you swallow in the throat and try to feel the swallow travel down to your heart center. The swallow is to release tension in the throat chakra and allow energy to expand there. After swallowing, you continue to inhale breath into the heart center until the lungs are filled to their maximum capacity. The breath is held in the heart chakra for about the count of ten. This time count may become longer as strength is gained in the breathing.

During the time when the breath is held, you bring your mental concentration to the heart center and ask to surrender and try to feel very deeply inside the heart center. You must ask into the very core of your being, or deeply into the subconscious, to surrender to and receive the cosmic energy.

After the breath has been held for the count of ten, you exhale one fifth of the breath and inhale again, bringing the energy and the concentration to the energy center just below the navel. The breath is retained in the navel chakra for about the count of ten and then exhaled very slowly.

This double breathing to heart and navel chakras may be repeated from eight to ten times in a half hour period or about every three minutes. You should think of the breath as energy and develop the sensitivity to feel deep expansion of energy and to let the breathing be governed by that sensitivity as your strength and capacity increase.

When you are not doing the double breathing exercise, you should breathe into the navel chakra slowly, hold the breath for a few moments, and then exhale very slowly. If you feel an energy sensation in the navel or sex chakra, you should bring your attention to the tip of your spine and rock slowly from side to side on the base of the spine. This breaks up tension and allows the energy to rise up the spine to the top of the head. When you begin to do this exercise, your sensitivity may not be on the deeper energy levels. At first, you may not be able to feel definite energy sensations. This does not mean that the energy is not flowing through those channels but that you have not yet developed the sensitivity to feel it.

When this energy, known as the kundalini, rises from its dormant state, various spontaneous body movements sometimes occur. These may be uncontrolled body spasms and vibrations or heat. Also, as the kundalini force passes the throat energy center, the head may move back and forth rapidly. All these movements and indeed any experience must be surrendered to totally. There is no harm or danger in these movements as they are deep, healthful tension releases.

The kundalini energy gradually rising to the head over a period of time becomes stronger and stronger and eventually brings enlightenment.

This is an organic process of spiritual growth, continuously reaching for deeper and deeper states of surrender and openness to the flow of cosmic energy. The more deeply we attain openness and oneness with this higher energy, the more it will lift us up spiritually and the closer it will bring us to the realization of our oneness with God or everything in the universe.

Everything in the universe is energy or a manifestation of energy, and the purpose of spiritual work is to become one with that flow of higher creative energy coming from God through the cosmos.

To put a new idea into effect, one must be given added energy. To rehabilitate an alcoholic, he is given vitamins. To help a man grow spiritually, he is given a teacher. Christ said, "I give you my blood to drink and my flesh to eat." This is nourishment any teacher must provide to put into effect the new ideas he presents. To work, any teaching must have within it the vital ingredient of life a living creative force which is transferable.

The third step is to lower the point of surrender to the sex center (the seat of the sexual organs) . This is for two important reasons: first, it is for deepening the exercise, a necessity in this work; second and most important, it is for spreading the energy into the true home of creativity in you. These organs which are used for creating life, a child in ordinary life, become, with the force within, the seat of rebirth and regeneration. A transformation takes place and with it, a sensation totally new to the student. The energy refined is brought up the spine to the top of the head. It matures there and is then absorbed into the body and a real change can occur.

This is one of the vital areas where prejudice, fear, all the old wives tales enter into play. We hold great resistance to surrendering within this area. Actually, it is totally without danger; it will do no damage and cause no lessening of the sex drive in you. Surrender in this area can help someone who is blocked sexually, and often does. This exercise requires energy to run freely through you and this frees the life flow within it never limits you. Only by fear and thinking are you closed. Consciousness opens all doors.

The word "surrender" as it is used in relation to spiritual development does not have the negative connotation it often has in ordinary speech. The act of surrender, as the term is used here, is the voluntary casting off of the thoughts and emotions that interfere with the realization of the spirit within. There is often a sense of buoyancy or floating it is a freeing of oneself from the dimension of the earth. Something within is returning to a level on which it belongs.

At first, you can only work a half-hour to an hour each day. It takes nine months of continual materialization for the soul to be born within a child. The limited amount of time expended in daily exercise makes the spiritual process of rebirth within an adult a much longer event, requiring in most cases years of daily work. This refined energy can only be absorbed slowly; trying to do so faster only builds tension.

SURRENDER is the voluntary casting off of the thoughts and emotions that interfere with the realization of the spirit within.

Creation is a special property which extends from conceiving a child to all forms of invention. It is also a degenerative process, the breakdown within us of a higher chemistry. For almost everyone, this process takes place in "highly creative periods," which may be a matter of several years, several weeks, or several days. Rare is the strongly endowed person who can create continuously.

The breakdown of chemistry during these highly creative periods leaves a person in a state of exhaustion. This is due to the fact that in creative periods certain chemicals are used up faster than they can be reproduced. In these cases, creativity is part of an unconscious death wish.

Creativity must become recreativity. Really creative people are the true riches of a country. If the gift is misused, as it usually is, it becomes a curse. It is dangerous to drain a man continually of his natural resources without replacing them; to do so will make him self-destructive. Such misuse of creativity is death-oriented.

Anyone working by himself and tearing at his chemistry can easily start a wrong chemical process and destroy his potentialities. You should demand of your teacher the process of rebirth and not just spiritual growth.

Anyone trying to attain spiritual growth should cultivate the following habits to keep his mechanism in top form:

1. Sleep eight to ten hours a night.

2. Eat three nourishing meals a day.

3. Wash often and bathe at least once a day, to remove tensions.

4. Absorb everything in depth, not through tensions.

5. Whenever the exercise touches the mind, make sure the energy does not stop flowing, which would create blocks.

6. Consciously surrender negative tensions each day. This breaks molecular structure and after daily changes it removes the bonding so patterns must change.

7. Most important, find in your teacher the basic qualities you wish to attain and draw this energy into yourself.

These are the basic essentials for maintaining your mechanism so it can function and prevent crystallization.

It is amazing that many people will study with a man they would not sit next to in a restaurant. A teacher should be clean, healthy, and vital. It is through him that your psychic system will grow.

The gifted person, the individual endowed with creative forces, must have an understanding within of what his gift is for. If he feels a need to "help the world," or if he has any other large-scale visionary ideal, he is a fool. Any creative gift in you should bring you happiness. Complete happiness and contentment are the best environment in which to work and, eventually, from which to help others. For this reason, it is essential that the creatively gifted individual have the force of procreation working within him. You must bear your creative fruits on a healthy tree. As the fruits are picked, the tree must be pruned and nourished so it will bear again in another season.

At some point, you might encounter the miracle of manifestation. Manifestation is the visualization of the energy of a situation and it is subject to constant change. This is the meanest of all spiritual gifts. It is closer to sexual excitation than spiritual evolvement. Many people end their work at this level, reveling in the thrills and chills produced by some moronic spirit who is totally earthbound. If he were more, he would not allow himself to be used for such low purposes. This should be surrendered so you can go on to real achievement in growing. It must also be noted that those captivated by this kind of spook-ridden entertainment are on as low a level as the spirits they see and hear.

This is what commonly passes for "spirituality." Rather, it is a drug that stunts growth. There is no good reason for knowing that Aunt Minnie is playing a harp in the Beyond or whether or not Father is "happy up there." This attempt to hold on to relatives who have died succeeds only with people who were not "free" in life. They perpetuate their possessiveness by returning in spirit to those who have not yet departed.

Spiritual work has one purpose - evolvement. Growth means hard work. No parlor game or seance ever helped a person grow. They may give peace of mind to the old, if that is the limit of their capacity, but a strong person should brush aside such weaknesses.

Manifestation is evidence of spiritual forces at work. Watching a manifestation is entertainment - sheer indulgence and a wrong use of higher forces.

You are lucky if you can work for years without any sign of the miraculous. You are building a strong mechanism. You might envy those who see or hear "the spirits." Don’t these lesser gifts are to be cast aside so that greater forces can work for you.

Manifestation is an illusion created when a higher force hits a lower level. It is like a distant mirage seen while driving on a desert road. The illusion of water you see is actually the force of heat hitting sand or pavement. The finer forces work on us and as a byproduct these manifestations occur. The process only impresses the novice. It must always be surrendered or growth is stopped. You work for the force to grow in strength so that it can break down the coarse, physical self, and recreate a higher being within. Like the manifestation of water in the desert which is in reality heat hitting sand, we must learn to accept spiritual manifestations as higher forceshitting the ground level of life.

It is imperative to be relaxed whenever manifestations occur during the process of growth. In themselves, the manifestations are meaningless. The apparent miracle we see is the effect of higher forces hitting the physical level of the earth. If we become caught up in the manifestation, we are taking it on a physical level alone. If we pay no attention to the manifestation and surrender it, the higher force will enter us and become food to nourish us. Rebirth is effected when the spiritual being emerges as a stronger being than the physical man. This tensionless absorption of spirit can only occur when the mind is at rest. That is why control of mind is basic to Eastern thought.

People have a tendency to become very emotional in their spiritual exercises to overdo, to work all day or for hours at a time. Work becomes similar to daydreaming, an escape from reality. It is egotism to suppose you can do this very evolved work without perfecting your inner mechanism. It requires many years of work to learn to play a musical instrument and hours of daily practice to keep in shape. Yet in spiritual work some people feel they can attain a level of proficiency in a few weeks or months. Everything is supported by muscles which hold that which is attained.

The last step in spreading and deepening the force is the opening of the base of the spine so that the force moves from the chest to the navel and then into the spine. The feeling is that of heat or a mild electrical flow up the spine. Once the force moves below the chest area and into the navel and the area of the sex organs, it is simple as opening a door to have it flow up the spine.

Here too, the head must be used like a key to open the door. You surrender within the chest area and spread the force across the chest. The mind is the greatest danger it must be continually surrendered to allow the force to spread. You must do the double work of opening within and using the mind to keep from narrowing the open area and stopping the process.

THIS is not a work of logic it is a work of work.

The student will often find that the entire work process has taken place in the mind. You think it through and in reality you have experienced nothing. To work rightly you must maintain the point you have reached; you must constantly reach deeper or the process is voided. Work must go deeper and transcend tensions; anything else is imagination. You must fight continuously against the life mechanism which insists you have done enough. This is not a work of logic. It is a work of work. Doing and results count, not emotions and thoughts of work.

Each step should be given at least seven weeks’ time to allow the process to strengthen needed muscles. The muscles that must learn to carry the force are in the same condition as those of a man who has been bedridden for a year and must retrain his legs to walk. The muscles have to be exercised and strengthened, and this work can only be performed for half-hour periods once or twice daily. Anyone who tries to exercise for hours on end instead of for the prescribed time will risk a violent eruption in his body and suffer greatly. The desired end can be achieved only by limited daily work until such time as the psychic muscle system becomes a healthy, completely functioning one. At this point, the process becomes complete and works continually. However, it never becomes automatic. It is always a conscious process.

As the mechanism becomes better developed, it opens of its own to new areas of work. The revelations produced are the result of a continual relaxing of frozen, unused psychic areas. The revelations of how to work come from inside, not from the intellect. It surfaces in the mind only after it has become a completed process. Therefore, once you are aware of this information in your head, you must realize it is a created and finished thing for which you are responsible. The responsibility for this information lies with the mind. Everyone has thismechanism at his disposal; anyone who does not use it is like a person dying of thirst by the side of a river.

Spiritual growth involves increased responsibility. Do not be like an artist who paints until his paintings so cluttered his studio that he no longer has room to function. To create means being responsible for your creations - selling the paintings you produce, keeping your palette clean, and buying the supplies your work requires. Energy that does not move or change its level creates congestion. This will end creative flow.

Creation in the physical sense is birth. A human being is born through his mother. Birth is the gift of creation through another person. It is the highest level of creativity on the earth; it gives the newborn child the gifts of the earth and the limitations of a human being. Rebirth is an autonomous creation within. The spiritual rebirth of a person requires only the contact of the spirit. Much like a physical birth, it is formed and borne within, and the bearer must suffer strain and stress. It is an immaculate conception, a true union of God and man with the end result a newly created being. The creations of the earth are mind plus emotions. The creations of the spirit are spirit. The mind and emotions must not interfere with the formation of this spiritual child of another world. A miracle is meaningless unless we are conscious of the good it brings and use it responsibly. The maintenance of growth is the test of creativity.

The first physical discomfort a student encounters usually occurs as tension or sharp pains in the upper chest or heart area. These tensions are caused by surrendering incorrectly or too quickly during an exercise. If the area you are trying to surrender is not properly relaxed and you work very hard, you will cause the muscles that carry the psychic force to tear. It is not unlike trying to lift a heavy object while you are out of condition. When you do heavy physical work during the winter, you learn not to lift when you are cold. Muscles must be "warmed up" by deeper relaxation to make them more elastic. The act of surrendering is the letting go of one dimension so that a higher dimension is open to us. To surrender halfway is to be between dimensions. This can cause many difficulties.

Spiritual work is done on a higher dimension. When the mind or emotions are in any way brought in, the experience is brought down to a much lower level. Very rarely do people let the energy rise high enough; everything needs time to build a spiritual life, or a house.

To surrender is to surrender completely; not just that which you wish to surrender or think needs to be surrendered, but a total letting go. The force should enter you and go through you carrying you into the second dimension. Nothing of the first or physical dimension should remain. You should have no sense of your body, mind, or emotions except as an instrument which is in suspension. You are either on the earth or not on the earth; any halfway work will create problems. The best work is that which is done on the second dimension and left there. After an exercise, nothing should be brought back or held on to. As the process builds up within the student, the mechanism that holds and controls the continual flow of force develops in a natural way. It shapes its own life, much like a child within the mother’s womb. Conscious work during classes and disciplined exercises condition the materialization of a higher being within anyone who chooses this way.

Real and right sensations occur as you work spiritually. There is always pain as psychic muscles come to life. The whole psychic muscle system exists only on the second dimension. As it develops, it becomes strong, more solid (more obviously physical), and it begins to integrate into the physical self on the ordinary level of life. The ability to handle two dimensions simultaneously gives an objectivity to life. Your consciousness develops enormously and the responsibility for and use of these two dimensions becomes apparent.

The "abstract spiritual life" is only for those who do not care for responsibility. A responsible man should have a conscious spiritual life for which he is directly responsible. Although spiritual life begins in a nebulous area, there is no good reason for it to exist as a nebulous quantity. The formation of a child (or any other created product) is the result of a process of materialization. As earth level is reached, the created object becomes solid and tangible, a completed thing. You must be conscious of maintaining this kind of solid growth. All creative forms grow from the nebulous to the solid state as the creativity matures to fulfillment.

We are separated from our spiritual life by layers and layers of tension. Laziness and dreams do not make for evolvement. Work, hard work, is the essential ingredient.

Every novice has the ego to try to work alone. Continual supervision is essential in the breaking down of the ego. The teacher has to be strong enough to act as the instrument to destroy the ego. The ego is replaced by spiritual muscles which can expand with life force. It takes inner nourishment to surrender.

A very important factor in the relationship of the student to the teacher is the understanding of the difference in dimension between the two. You should only study with someone you feel has gone beyond yourself. Upon first meeting, the teacher should implant this difference on the consciousness of the student. After a short period, the ego of the student and the beginning of an unrest caused by the upheaval within create the possibility of an emotional attachment to the teacher. On the occasion of this first emotion change the student should remember his initial feelings about the teacher and reaffirm them. Growth during this first period of study is only possible by a continual act of faith.

The flow of force between student and teacher is a conscious exchange helping both to evolve. The flow is the highest creative force which the teacher can open to and share with the student. A great teacher is a great student and great students are great teachers. There is always this balance between them. If a gap appears, it is because one or the other is not working deeply enough. It is for the student then to remove all blocks and search himself in order to set the relationship back into harmony. A teacher should be the servant of the student; he should help him in overcoming obstacles in the flow of the relationship any time he is asked to do so by the student.

A GREAT teacher is a great student and great students are great teachers.

Once a person has worked with truly creative, nourishing, and conscious exercises and with a teacher who is capable of directing him in these exercises he will, after a period of six months to a year, undergo many changes. Nourishment brings about growth; it is essential to feel energy being absorbed into the muscles, making for a growing consciousness.

One of the effects of spiritual work is the development of the phenomenon called "the third eye." This is the awakening of the psychic root system. Unfortunately, there has been such great emphasis on it that many people take it as the end of development. In itself it has no extraordinary value. This "third eye" is the true beginning of a higher process which when it develops is the beginning of another dimension. This "eye" appears on the person as a slight indentation one or two inches above and between the eyes. It sometimes appears as a crease line. Symbolically it is in the shape of a stem.

If the work continues well, another symbol appears above the "third eye" as a bush in bloom. Once this second symbol appears, it is easy to understand that the "third eye" is only the root of the second symbol, the flowering of the psychic center.

There is no chance for anyone to achieve this through any type of trick or operation. It is attained only through working constructively to allow the psychic centers within to function. This is not unlike the progress of a child going through various stages of development. The stages appear consecutively as a healthy child grows day by day. The commitment within a student must be undertaken forever, as these unbelievable experiences are not available otherwise. Through surrender, someone forever opens within himself areas of intelligence and self-evolvement, which once opened, must continue to grow and live. If a person makes some progress and then stops, he will lose within a year all the benefits he ever had and the possibility of ever regaining them.

The force enters between the eyes of the student as he sits before his teacher. It works down through his chest, into his sex organs, then up the spinal column to the back of the middle of the head. This is the feeding of the psychic force into the cosmic triangle.

These exercises must be done with a teacher, as the continual checking and rechecking of right work is essential . If a lengthy period of time passes without the student being examined by his teacher, the result may be the development of irregular patterns of work. These bad patterns can cause pressures and be dangerous, painful, and even fatal to your work. Positive results come from working every day with great depth and for short periods of time. This produces a strong muscular system. Working for many hours may create a weakened system and the illusion of progress.

Once a correct work pattern becomes a true part of your existence, it reminds you to work. The intake of higher forces within you has the tendency to develop an appetite for work. When the appetite is not satisfied, the hunger awakens us to work.

Discipline and responsibility are essential for a student in his exercise as well as in his life. You do not work for thrills but for the building of an instrument that functions and can grow to hold the spiritual force. What we surrender builds soil to hold spiritual force, just as leaves falling off a tree enrich the soil around the tree.

It is necessary to have a job which requires discipline. "A man must earn his bread." These values may sound old fashioned, but they have been taught from time immemorial for good reason. Physical work or earning a living is like crabgrass - it binds the soil.

Working with understanding is usually the only satisfaction possible to the student during his first years in spiritual work. At this point, the student does not yet have the capacity to enjoy discipline. His instincts lead him to pursue work patterns which keep him asleep. Almost without exception, people will choose to do that which keeps them dead. Work goes against the grain. However, work can be discipline, a basic property essential to your growth. It breaks down the thickness within and creates the soil for the inner seed to root. A situation that makes you uneasy and forces you to stay at the job which everything in yourself resists can be a source of strength; you will be freed of enormous karma if you consciously accept the discipline. Many young people in military schools or under strict religious training are made into better functioning people by this type of discipline.

A man who does not engage in disciplined work cannot develop. This natural law has nothing to do with morally good or bad behavior. The spiritual purpose of work is to break down your chemistry, to transform your thickness into a field ripe for creativity. Often you work until you come up against resistance. There you stop. Yet this is the very time you should work through your resistance. The seed in you lives and grows in that material which is broken down during the conscious work process. It is spiritual soil, which holds the continual refining energy as you evolve.

That which is destroyed in a person during conscious work brings new life. Creativity comes through death, as the death wish simultaneously becomes the wish to be reborn. You must be destroyed in the process of being reborn. Spiritual exercises are valuable only under instruction; a guide is needed to insure that no harm befalls the student and that the greatest amount of growth results from his efforts. The ultimate value of spiritual work depends as much on how the results are used as on their achievement. The teacher guides the student. The miracle is of no value unless the student is conscious of it.

The destruction of the physical self during the exercise of surrender provides the necessary chemistry for the spiritual evolvement and growth. You evolve from your physical to your spiritual potential by overcoming the resistance that blocks you when surrendering yourself during the exercise. Crystallization, or the bonding that holds us to patterns, breaks down. Surrender washes out chemistry freed by crystal change. Having new chemistry, we have to perform differently.

Spiritual students often make basic mistakes about diet. Such mistakes may come from a student’s reading about the dietary habits of Eastern teachers or of the historical religious figures who ate rarefied food. This is unfortunate, because the attempt to work inwardly requires much energy. A violent change in diet can result in a chemical imbalance. Coupled with the imbalance brought about by spiritual exercises this can prove more than the system can bear. It is difficult to train a man to move heavy objects if he is deprived of essential, energy-giving foods. Those who aspire to a higher spiritual life often try to imitate the end results of evolvement- in its superficial aspects. Dressing, eating, and behaving like an ascetic does nothing to Change the inner self.

To prepare yourself for battle, you must add to the physical self, not take away from it. A soldier is given food concentrates of high nutritional content to sustain him in war. A spiritual student about to delve into the unknown should fortify his physical body. The body is all you have to help you through your battle for evolvement. Every available aid - dietary, medicinal, and human - should be used. Only ignorance will advise bodily deprivation.

Any work, to succeed, must belong to its own age, while trailblazing a path into the future . Creativity is a flow of higher consciousness bringing down to today that which is tomorrow. Always, there must be new depth and experience. It is the creative man who experiences and the fool who follows. Creating is doing. How can anyone create without experience?

To try to evolve through the experiences of someone else is balm only for the coward. Each of us is responsible for our own evolvement. The process of growing spiritually can be inspired by someone else, but the actual process must take place within yourself. To expect a teacher to do your growing for you is fruitless. Until you understand that you are responsible for your own consciousness, you are dead. To be creative, the student must allow the process of growth to take place within. This is the only purpose of surrendering. It is of no use to do spiritual work without understanding this. A person’s inner blocks keep the work from finding its proper level. All men are not born to be realized saints but they can be realized to their greatest potential. Only by allowing the highest state of separation to take place can this be achieved.

THE EFFECT of deep work on you is to turn everything into work.

To separate completely means not to exist in the physical sense at all. This is a state of complete oneness with everything. I am everything when I am nothing. This is complete surrender. It allows your potential to emerge in full.

The expression of hate, negativity, or any unhappy thought, feeling, or state results when you reach a level of resistance and do not work through it. Expression of negative feeling builds or reinforces blocks; work overcomes them. Any tool that is effective cuts through the material it contacts. Any hesitation in cutting through negative material, any verbalizing or other indulgence in negative feelings, takes force from your work. Talk is energy without effect. It is the steam leak in a steam engine. To sweat or talk is to allow force to escape. To burn the resistance or negativity within is to harness the force. The effect of deep work on you is to turn everything into work. There is nothing which cannot be burned within a person to help him or her grow. Internalize everything, externalize nothing.

Every person, every perception, every sensation conscious or unconscious - should be used for fuel. All matter in the universe is matter in flow. It can change form and be used for energy.

HOW you use food is more important than what you eat.

So, how you use food is more important than what you eat. A man who eats the best food can turn it to poison as it works through his system. On the other hand, a man can eat "poison" and turn it to food. It is not so much the quality of the food that is important as the capacity of the body chemistry to turn the food to good. Spiritual exercises build a strong chemistry capable of transforming all things into energy for work.

The psychic muscle system remains latent as a result of almost complete non-use. Only when you learn to separate yourself, to stop your physical self from operating, will you discover your spiritual self. Most Eastern religions practice forms of meditation for the purpose of quieting the mind and emotions so you may gain insight into the spiritual aspects of your nature. It is necessary to learn how to activate this spiritual or psychic self, not just to view it on occasion.

The exercises described allow for such a separation. Only when the separation of the physical and spiritual self is a reality can the psychic muscle system be used. To do this requires discipline. For this reason, self-discipline must be increased in every phase of ordinary life till it becomes a tool reached for at will.

It is impossible to preserve a self-image and reach any depth in spiritual work. The grinding down of the ego allows the higher spiritual force to control those areas of personality that protect the self image. The purpose is to break down the ego crystallization and allow the flow of life to move freely. To stop working because you find it too painful to see your own nothingness, which is no more nor less than the way the whole world sees you, shows the instinct of a fool. It is unfortunate when you live in the illusion that people see you other than the way you are. This hiding from oneself is the most ridiculous of all human situations. The truth is that peopleusually know us better than we know ourselves yet are unconcerned with our carefully projected image illusions. In the social world there exists a tacit understanding that each of us is entitled to our illusion. Everyone should see themselves for one day as others see them. We tell the story of our entire lives over and over again to all who care to listen. It is only when you understand that you are responsible only to and for yourself that you can grow. If you feel guilt for what you are, you block growth.

IT IS impossible to preserve a self-image and reach any depth in spiritual work.

Often, even after a change has been effected, you continue to pay an emotional ransom for something which is no longer a functioning reality within. Time alone changes many things in your chemistry. However, if you have no awareness of change you cannot benefit from ordinary maturing. To continue the practice of old habit patterns after the body chemistry has changed causes violent reactions. Your need-, change. In spiritual work the awareness of change helps you to mature with the least cost to your physical and psychic self.

Ordinarily, your life is a pattern of self-justification. Feelings you cannot rationalize away you seek to deal with by blocking. To take the opposite approach, to open up instead of blocking is to work toward fulfillment. This predicates happiness and harmony in life.

The only way to find these almost idealized emotions is by making others happy. For the student, this means he must assume the attitude of being wrong when anyone near or dear to him is upset or unhappy. It is easy to make an angel in heaven happy. They already have everything. To make someone happy on earth entails a lot of hard work.

In any situation, if we assume full responsibility for the negativity, we will become aware of our true behavior toward others. Even though many attacks upon us will not be totally justified, the revelations of what we fail to do for those we love more than justifies the effort. It is only through extraordinary effort that an extraordinary life is possible. Dedication must be of a fanatical nature in order to compensate for the depth of inner resistance. We must swim against the stream of the instincts which seek to drive us into the ocean of passivity, into acceptance of the status quo. Working toward evolvement is working for the possibility of what we can be. You do not accept what is. Only by the continual surrender of the now can you begin to see the future. Within, you must visualize this and keep the picture alive.

Man is God. The thing that separates the two is what we work to surrender: the physical aspect. Nothing less than total evolvement can be the aim, or the fight is lost. The battle is too difficult to allow for less. The inner goal must be complete happiness. The daily work of overcoming should become joyful and understandable. It is not possible to drag through your days and reach this lofty goal. Only by constant increase in depth and intensity can the inner strength grow. As the ability to work grows, so does the inner capacity. All that has been achieved within the first five years should be doubled within the following six months. After ten years, the student should have the ability to do in fifteen minutes that which previously took five years. Once we learn how to do, we move faster.

Each succeeding day the surrender must be deeper. This is essential so the inflow of spiritual force and energy can penetrate each newly surrendered area within. When drilling a well, it is the depth of drilling for which you pay. So, too, in spiritual work, it is only when you are either ignorant or afraid that you work on the surface alone. The whole creative flow comes from working deeper and deeper within. Space flight has no greater travel potential for man than exploration within. Our travel into the unknown of space is nothing if it is not accompanied by pathfinding movement into the greater unknown inside ourselves.

We have conquered continents. We have searched out, charted, and investigated new worlds. Our attitude has always been pompous and prideful as we broke through old barriers into new domains. It is strange that the most significant exploration, that of the uncharted inner world, remains the least understood. It is always the most obvious that requires the greatest attention and receives the least. To find the key which we are searching for in space we have only to seek within ourselves. But that requires real courage.

In this work, you always return to yourself to find answers. You contain everything in yourself and therefore hold the answers to all problems and questions. The very fact that mankind has existed through time past and still remains in the present is proof of this. Each day and each age has been a drastic threat to his mortality. We have been on the defensive constantly, preparing for attack and demise. When the earth’s human population was small, a threatened group could move over the face of the earth to escape harm. Now, with a great world population, we move out into space. The time of our greatest threat leads us to move externally but never to seek within. It is too far from our ego-preserving instincts to see this possibility which lies closest to us.

We will work until we encounter resistance. There are many reasons for this resistance but none can have any import for anyone who wishes to continue their growth. When commencing a life’s work, either nothing exists or everything exists to block you. You must be able to look toward a goal and see nothing between it and you. Any obstacles between you and the objective must be viewed as unreal. Treating these obstacles as symbols rather than realities leads you to objectivity.

The understanding that nothing exists in a real sense between you and your goal except work is the prerequisite for achieving the nearly unattainable - enlightenment. Everything and everyone becomes a test to overcome. Objectivity is only possible in an emotionless and detached context. By conceiving of the battle as a symbol rather than as real, you become detached and therefore exhaust less of yourself in the combat.

The moral values of good and bad are pertinent only as they apply to the flow of growth within. That which stops the flow of growth in you is "bad"; that which encourages the flow is "good." It is the only possible attitude. All the moral-ethical-religious structures, commandments, and codes in the world have not resulted in the highest possible form of consciousness. Rules are ordained for the purpose of controlling. At all times it is necessary to live within the conditions existing in your culture. You can grow with all the responsibilities of ordinary life. Special conditions are required for the sick, not the healthy. It is to adjust to society and transcend what we find that allows us to become strong. Change comes through encompassing and absorbing, not analyzing.

As your growth progresses within and your spiritual or higher self evolves, an awareness of the resistance within yourself and around you should commence. The psychic struggle is symbolized in the parent-child, husband-wife, friend-friend relationships. All who are close to you will work unconsciously against your psychic progress in every conceivable way. This is not a negative attitude but a natural instinct in us to keep others on the same level as ourselves. To grow, you must also raise those you are attached to. It means getting very, very strong.

The people around you are the test of your progress. In a sense, they act as your catalyst when you have reached a stage in the work where progress has solidified into real work patterns. When something within is in a process of formation, about to become a tangible reality, an outside test will occur. This takes the energy away before it becomes part of our consciousness. After attracting a gift you must consciously hold on to it. Generally, this test will be in the form of an emotionally challenging situation which, when it erupts, will either destroy the inner product or provide new energy to speed its completion.

Such patterns will occur throughout the growth period. To search for special conditions that protect the inner "child" being formed will only weaken growth. Good steel heated to greatest intensity is immersed in cool water to set the molecular structure of the metal and temper it. It is a violent treatment, but the end result is stronger than untreated steel.

In all work of this kind, you inevitably attract that which seeks to destroy your efforts. This is a psychic law similar to a physical law of nature and is a natural test of spiritual work. To feel sorry for yourself when you come close to success and always fail is our weakness on any level. The test always precedes and follows enlightenment. This is nature’s way of protecting against weak, degenerate offspring.

Many times during the intermediate stages of growth the student will suffer illness or lack of energy. This is a reaction of weakness, reflecting fear of the process of growth. It is always a good idea when you feel physical discomfort to have a physical examination. It is also a good idea to sit down and be deeply honest with yourself as to what you fear.

There are many ways of destroying the inner life and only one way to help it. Continual hard work and surrendering without analyzing is what is necessary. Go on from exercise to exercise and allow the process to build its own life energy.

A child being borne within a mother with severe physical defects will usually be aborted. This weeding out of the less able is part of the process of natural selection. The spiritual child is rarely able to survive the early stages of development within the womb of man. The extreme sensitivity of this soul child makes it prone to injury. For this reason spiritual miscarriages are much more prevalent than physical ones.

The unborn spiritual child has many of the same needs as the physical child. It requires eight to ten hours of sleep each night. During the period of inner work when the spiritual baby is being formed the stresses and strains are enormous. As is the case with a physical baby, energy for growth is taken from the parent. The major difference is in nourishing the infant. The spiritual child can only be consciously nourished during the exercises, which bring a total life flow. When the parent-man surrenders his physical self the spiritual infant breathes. If the rebirth process is begun and the student stops working, the child is destroyed.

Just as in the incubation of a physical child, the environment of a parent-to-be in a spiritual sense is of the utmost importance. There is little joy in bearing a child alone. For this reason the group, temple, ashram, or monastery that nurtures the spiritual student should be a place of joy where love and attention are given him during the period of rebirth. All the anxiety and fear that exist within the mother bearing her first child are the instincts of the student bearing the spiritual child. To be alone during this process is frightening and can be fatal to the child and even the parent. For this reason a teacher is important.

In some extraordinary cases psychically gifted people do go through the rebirth period alone, but the torment is enormous. A teacher can make this transition period a great, joyous experience.

Religion should foster rebirth, not assuage men for their sins. There are no judgments to be made except those that mark the growth of the spirit. If a teacher cannot bring the seed of rebirth to the student, his is a sterile teaching. Spirit must be transferable to grow in the student. Sterile spirit is intellect. Intellect with spirit is creativity. Creativity is the flow of energy that can give life.

Drugs can do nothing for a student seeking spiritual growth. It is never of any benefit to use artificial means to relax or force the psychic system to open. Drugs have a purpose only under certain rare conditions; even then, natural means are usually better. Many people open to their spiritual nature during a drug experience. This is like coming to a promised land. Why risk losing it by burning out the mechanism using drugs again? The extended use of drugs has a weakening effect on the psychic system. To force the muscles open artificially weakens them and they become progressively less able to carry the force. In time the whole system becomes dependent on the artificial agent. The result can be a chronic muscular breakdown and the total muscle mechanism can be badly damaged.

The use of artificial means in a fully developed physical system has bad results. The psychic muscular system, which is weak in function to start with, has no chance of resisting external influences. This is why drugs produce such spectacular effects and gather enthusiastic supporters. They offer an indication of the great psychic riches within a man. But why dynamite a gold mine that lies just below the surface? The slow, thorough work of a responsible and disciplined individual will produce rich rewards his whole life through. Tearing into the psychic tissue may produce a few golden nuggets, but this is only fool’s gold.

Building and working for long-range results is not only the best way but the only way for you to achieve realization. It is to a full and happy life that you should aspire, not to thrills.

Spiritual work is based on the ability to consciously surrender continually deeper so that the psychic system can emerge and separate from the physical self. Continual effort is essential, as the process never becomes automatic. After many years of work, recurring patterns appear. When you work each day you become more and more aware of your tensions, and thus more able to relax. Your psychic system surfaces faster, and eventually can function on a twenty-four hour basis. As it lives more, the psychic self demands more. The student will find that he turns to it normally and naturally. Changing behavior patterns will reveal this.

In the advanced student, tensions are broken down as the psychic system begins to transmit messages to the brain. As a living system it develops needs. If these needs are not satisfied it reminds the student he must use his exercise to relax. The more energy entering you, the more you can afford to open and have and evolve. It is a new function within the student, and the student must have the understanding that his inner work must be used more and more in his ordinary life.

This training does not refer solely to the meditation or work periods; it must be brought to bear on all aspects of life. If you can sit for the specified periods of time in exercise, relatively free of mind and emotions, then you arecapable of using this ability to separate mind and emotions in the course of your ordinary day.

Any situation that builds tension shuts off a person’s spiritual life. Tension keeps man on a physical dimension. During those periods when you cannot separate yourself from your tensions you are totally earthbound. This unfortunately causes you to attract from this lower level and increases your inability to rise spiritually. Continual approach to spiritual work with unresolved tensions will result in a low level of psychic function. The exercise of surrender is essential at all times before actual work can commence. Many people try to work without properly letting go of emotional tensions and mental activity. If there is no surrender, there can be no separation between the physical and the psychic selves, and no preparation for receiving the spiritual force. In no occupation can a nervous, preoccupied man do a good job. A medical doctor learns to control his mind and emotions while operating. Every highly trained man must do the same. Yet, in spiritual work, people believe they can bring a mind full of garbage to the job and achieve good results. Discipline is essential to work.

Before a state of spirituality can be achieved, a student must reach maturity. Maturity means discipline and control and an understanding of your direction. Doing the exercise must not become a mechanical, dull process. There must be a continual conscious effort and this requires direction.

Why do this work? It is no parlor game. It requires years of diligent effort for real results. Some small effects become apparent immediately, but people do not remember them for long. It is necessary to go deeply within yourself, to question your understanding and the seriousness of your need. It is crucial to understand this emotional need in order to be able to come back to it, particularly in periods of stress .

Lack of consciousness - forgetting the emotional need to grow - is the most common reason for not working deeper. We have a difficult time recalling what and who our friends are.

In all countries great numbers of people interested in spiritual or mystical work are unfit. They are irresponsible, seeking ways out - not ways in. These people do not want to accept discipline or responsibility in their lives. They make the most trouble and produce the least results. They attend the lectures and buy the books and are fleeced by the professional spiritual huckster. They continually re-infect each other with their visions and experiences. The basic requirements of holding down a job, sleeping, and eating properly are beyond their capacity. They sneer at simple good manners. They live off each other emotionally and physically. They absorb each other’s negativity and depressions. They eat out the soul in those who might under other circumstances have some capacity for real growth.

Wrong spirituality generates death and you should be able to see this if you look at the result within the group. You should try to analyze the people in the group. You should see whether or not ordinary life values have a place there before you look for the extraordinary. Are those within the group free - emotionally, physically, and financially? If there is an immediate appeal for money or contributions, how is it used? Are the members of long duration happy? Have they grown since joining? Is there harmony among those present? Why move into a family unless it offers you more than you already have? The meek are destroyed. To go blindly into anything is to throw away your potential. Unless a teacher and a group have evolved far beyond the level of the student they cannot inspire him to work. Always see if any teachers have come up from within the group. Does the group produce people who can give life and creative energy?

In land reclamation there are a multitude of ways to restore the soil: irrigation systems, chemical additives, soil desalination, contour plowing. These methods often bring land to a level of production far above that of the original. Most human adults are like badly used soil. Many of their natural resources have been sorely depleted and their chemistry brought out of balance.

Discipline is like crop rotation. When you stop misusing your own resources and readjust your living patterns, a better, more fertile balance is reached. When you begin working, eating, and sleeping regularly, the natural rhythms of your body function are restored. They begin to remove this negative chemistry.

A student who wishes to grow spiritually must work at a job for six to twelve hours daily. The harmony of the body must be put in order on the most basic levels. The person who cannot work, eat, sleep, or bathe with regularity cannot achieve the discipline necessary for spiritual work.

It may be important, before attempting to pursue the spiritual life, to have a complete and thorough medical and dental checkup. To attempt to purify yourself inwardly and overcome all psychic problems is difficult work. To be fighting off physical illness at the same time is foolish. The physical body must never be neglected, as it is the protector of the spiritual. To neglect the body is ignorance. A man being poisoned by rotting teeth or an ulcer is using enormous energy to counteract these effects.

Many feelings of illness during the first few years of work are simply resistance to working. Pains in the chest area particularly are due to resistance, which does not allow the surrender to be sufficiently deep for the force to flow into the psychic system. They may also signal a release of deep tensions. Surrender relaxes the muscle systems for the force to flow. Often you forget to continue your surrender and try to push the force, causing pain. Unless the separation of the physical and psychic selves is complete there will be pain doing spiritual work. This is caused by the spiritual force not having enough area in which to flow during the exercise.

The student should understand that it may be necessary to work for a whole hour to achieve a deep surrender that lasts only two minutes. Depth is the most important element for growth. Once you have achieved depth it is easy to broaden the area of surrender by relaxing at that point. With relaxation, the force will move outward . it is only tension and holding on with the mind that limit the scope of a deep experience. Our lack of imagination continually stops us. To achieve a truly deep experience, you must go beyond the imagination. Relax and allow the energy to enter deeply within, visualizing to be sure it spreads. It requires time to learn how to do this. When you finally reach some level of success in spiritual work and find a result, it is not the time to stop. Why limit your work? One miracle usually follows another and results inspire new impetus. Much is lost by the inability of students to understand this principle. Strike while the iron is hot and keep striking.

The psychic muscle system which carries the creative flow separates only as the physical self becomes disconnected. This does not occur only during an exercise. It is worked on and perfected during an exercise but must be carried through in ordinary life. Very little attention is required to fulfill responsibility in ordinary life, but it is advisable to make this separation in everyday situations in order to develop the power to use it in unusual situations. Learning to balance something on your head requires full attention. At first, you are afraid even to talk. After a while, the balance is internalized deep within and you can walk and talk while balancing, So too for the exercises.

Surrendering should be accomplished by letting go of all violent feelings or anything which keeps you closed. That which causes emotion of any kind is death, for it closes you. Surrender does not mean to stop feeling but to understand in order not to become emotionally involved. The great calm and tranquillity of an Indian saint is not indifference but understanding. He has learned to detach. One can acquire this detachment only if one has learned the art of surrender.

Never work on a situation unless you are above it. If you work on the same level as the situation, you put energy into it; if you work above it, you change the pattern and take energy out. To let go of all emotions, right or wrong, shows you that they do not really exist. The nervous and emotional systems keep one from realization and spiritual growth; they keep the higher psychic nerves and muscle systems from working.

THE GREAT calm and tranquillity of a saint is not indifference, but understanding.

Man has learned to educate the mind by letting go; he must learn to advance spiritually the same way. There is no limit to the capacity to grow. Our only limitations are those we put upon ourselves. If you look outside yourself, you see limitation; if you look within, you will see the endlessness of your potential.

The reward for a long period of productive inner work is the acceleration of work. The student who starts early in life develops the mechanism.

Some students search for truth, find it, and then discard it because they are unable to accept enlightenment. This is a classic error. The seeker for truth must understand that what he seeks belongs to the realm of the extraordinary. It is imperative to develop a hypersensitive mechanism that can function even under extreme conditions. To be emotional, to allow imagination or doubt to enter, is to destroy good work before it has been completed. Patience and then more patience is what is needed. The ability to comprehend the growth patterns of inner work takes many years of close study.

When a person’s work approaches a critical point, his emotions begin to plague him. The revolt within is the struggle of the emotional and psychic forces to maintain their balance. The surrender during this stressful period begins to expose a person’s wrong life patterns. As they become exposed they are threatened with complete extinction. The threatened destruction results from an explosion of higher consciousness, what we call enlightenment, which reveals the true nature of the experience. This explosion is the only method that can effect a change. Because people’s mechanisms are fairly insensitive, only through explosive revelation can they be shaken into awareness. After many dramatic explosions we begin to understand and relax, secure that what changes is good and will not be unbearable.

The more sensitive and highly developed person, who has worked for long periods of time on his inner development, yields again and again to inner and outer pressures. He allows the breaking up of his chemistry to effect the change within by identifying with the strong feelings experienced during the change. If you are on a boat moving down a river, changes on the shore are identifiable but in no way influential on the craft.

A person’s chemistry during intense work periods becomes highly unbalanced. Your system is producing energy at a rate never before required. There is an essential balance between chemistry and enlightenment. Inner conditions, not outer ones, produce the reactive agents which-great effort should be made to control emotionality. When we "explode" emotionally, we let off enormous amounts of energy; such an explosion can destroy the process taking place within us. In a scientific experiment, after the reactive agents are place in the proper container, it is essential to maintain a constant temperature for a given time period.

During the exercise of surrender, the appropriate agents for the experiment are assembled. The result of the experiment is a revelation about yourself. Emotional control is comparable to the control of temperature in a chemical reaction. It is by not giving vent to the emotions that the inner heat is built up. It is discipline in work that determines results. You must have a great enough desire to achieve to make you eat your anger and consume your need to be right.

Your ability to surrender during an emotional situation is the barometer of your ability to evolve. The need to be always right will destroy you. The anger produced in an emotional situation can create one of the most useful chemicals for inner growth. Emotion suppressed by anyone not working toward evolvement sours and destroys that person. In a person working for evolvement, it increases inner temperature and puts into process many agents essential for development.

Expressing negativity shows an inability to control emotions. This is immaturity. It is a phenomenon of nature that the immature man is stopped from growing beyond the point where his emotions have burst forth, breaking down his inner chemistry and destroying his growth. This spiritual abortion keeps a weak man from growth.

The need for self-sacrifice in this work is great. There are endless reasons not to practice the daily exercise and spiritual work. Family and personal crises continually arise. It is the test of you and the depth of your inner ambition whether or not you work through these periods. The endless vacations you take, particularly the inner ones, prolong or destroy the realizing of your potential. You must decide if the work is a game or a pursuit. To work and not achieve is not only of no benefit, it is dangerous.

It never occurs to a student that he continually misrepresents what he is being taught. By his immature attitudes and misinformation, he is destroying others. He talks at great length about deep subjects he has not the least comprehension of. In this manner, the novice, by his bragging, reassures himself, but simultaneously presents obstacles to others. People often judge their growth by those they know are involved with different teachings.

A man who has not had a true enlightenment has no right to help others in their spiritual work. His opinions are of no value. If he has any respect for growth he should discuss the potential ability of another only with his teacher. He should allow the teacher to make the appraisal. It is not for the student to teach.

Within the group at an established school there must be no exchange of spiritual experiences or gossip. An extraordinary thing about inner growth is the individuality of each person’s growth pattern. Taking another person’s experience is like trying to wear someone else’s eyeglasses. Each pattern is a special prescription for a particular person. Discussion may lead to competition and comparison, and these can only distort your ability to pursue your own growth. If a student feels he is not experiencing as fully as another group member, there is a possibility that his imagination will pick up someone else’s experience and project it into his own work. There is much unconscious cheating in spiritual classes. The less dramatic student assumes spiritual roles modeled after the realities or fantasies of others

Some individuals are born with enormous psychic gifts. They see, feel, and hear things on a spiritual dimension. Unfortunately, they are often on the lowest rungs of this spiritually dimensioned ladder. They are hypnotized by the dramatic effects they behold and seldom shake free to go further. It is far better to be less gifted but to evolve steadily according to your own nature. It takes many years to shed the life put on us by society. It is sad that there is little memory in us of what and where we were before we started our inner work.

To accept spiritual help from someone who in life did not have the evolvement necessary to teach reflects great lack of insight. There are some innocent people who use as their spiritual guides gypsies, or other equally "exotic" persons who in their own time of life may have had limited capacity for spiritual development. This parlor-game "spiritualism" is a balm only to those too weak to fight for growth. One of the greatest mysteries in life is ignorance. It is not for peace and quiet that you work, It is both difficult and painful to work continually only to learn that you are less of a human being than you would like to believe. It must be understood that only many years of ego-destroying work can make enough room in you for higher forces to grow and "good things" to surface.



It’s not for peace and quiet that you do spiritual work.



It is amazing that a person working inwardly and growing often has a complete lack of gratitude for the revelation of what he is not. All inner work is for this purpose. It is not possible to evolve without experiencing many years of finding out the worst within yourself. Such knowledge to a superficial person is intolerable. In an evolving individual there must be gratitude for this insight. Without gratitude for this ego - breakdown you can become bad-tempered, even violent.

Many people wish to see themselves as pink angels with blue wings, walking among the unfortunate, spreading light and love. It is a revelation to find that you are one of the unfortunates. Great effort is needed to produce this insight, making it possible to change your pattern and begin to feel the gratitude within. It is only when you are grateful for seeing what you are that you can change. This revelation during the surrender is what shocks you into acceptance of your true situation.

Within a working group there must be a deep feeling of individuality. You work, and you can only work, for yourself. When you feel you are working for someone else you are either immature or foolish. Nothing you can do for anyone is of value unless it helps you. If it is otherwise, the act of help is without creativity. Without creativity there can be no life force. No help can be given in a sterile fashion. Ideas without the life force are dead. For this reason reading is not a creative act unless there is great consciousness within the reader and he is in an open state of surrender. The new material must be absorbed in a creative effort in order for it to live within.

Work brings energy. It is the constant problem of the student to maintain a separation between the physical and spiritual selves while opening the spiritual self to the higher force. This is simply an exercise of work. When the two selves have come together it is necessary to make an effort to separate them. The success of all work, whether inner or outer, has to do with conscious effort. The ability to work for longer time periods increases once there is an understanding of working deeply.

The continued surrender, if correctly executed, relaxes the muscles of the psychic system. The bringing of force to the newly used muscles strengthens them. Each time you work and go deeper in your exercise the whole muscle system is used and strengthened. Your ability to work alone determines your evolvement.

The devil is that which alienates you from the conscious effort to grow spiritually. Any and all activities which free you emotionally and physically are in themselves good.

It is against the ordinary nature of a human being to really wish to be free. Therefore, we must make a conscious effort to see all situations in terms of the potential good they possess for our inner growth. Good is that which frees us. Bad is that which stops our internal progress. It takes many years until we realize that most of what we are trained to consider good is bad.

People have an instinct to perpetuate themselves as they are. It is a wise man who can reverse his view of a situation and see it objectively. In an emotional situation, if you cannot be objective, it helps to look at the problem from the other person’s point of view. You must assume responsibility for the negativity of the situation, accept the blame, and build the picture in your mind exactly as the other person must see it. Imagine yourself as the other person. You have to find a way of getting outside a situation in order to see yourself within it and profit from the view. It is always difficult, but in your search for enlightenment you must be able to see situations from as many vantage points as possible.

Seeing life situations symbolically is an excellent approach to objectivity. The people, places, and properties of a drama give many clues to the developing pattern of the situation. Consciousness of the pattern allows you to free yourself from it and rise above it.

Work patterns which become habitual often lull the student into a state of sleep. A comfortable balance is reached after great effort has been expended. This must be surrendered. In advanced spiritual work a student may achieve a certain level of development after long, tedious, and painful work. Upon the realization of the achievement, work stops. But spiritual work is like no other. It is endless. A channel swimmer reaches the beach and his work is finished, but a man pursuing enlightenment must, after reaching the object, immediately surrender it. There must never be a sense of self - satisfaction about completing work. All work belongs to a chain of greater and greater work. The man who rests between great efforts only succeeds in hardening his work pattern, making it more difficult to break through to the next beginning.

It is possible to judge a man’s creativity by the amount of time needed before he commences his next effort. Lesser men take time to enjoy their completed efforts. A reservoir of creativity is one mark of the conscious person. Unused creative power has a tendency to dissipate itself. Because it is a vital force it recharges itself during proper usage and gives its own satisfaction when being worked. A man who is in the business of creating and finds the going tough is either a novice in the trade or is using his talents incorrectly. The purpose of creativity is to bring its bearer to his highest potential; it is of little consequence if its products do good for others.

Pure creativity does not require recognition. Only man’s ego requires this personality display. Once the creative effort is done it should be left alone. To come to a finished effort a second time is impossible. It has passed the point of vital creation, and recreation is needed to produce a similar effort. Creativity lives only at the moment of its birth, and if the student tries to prolong the moment he destroys the experience. Creativity in the state of surrender lives in the flow of its movement. Creativity must be a moving force to live.

Truth has no meaning for you until you reach within yourself the level of creativity in which truth exists. That is why it is essential to work and surrender and reach these truths through your own growth. This becomes a unique and vital experience. The full nourishment of the truth will charge you with the energy to continue your growth. Trying to read about an experience in advance to prepare yourself for it only bleeds the experience of the unique chemistry necessary to make it possible.

A man who returns time and again to a past creative effort is a man afraid to go ahead. He has lost forever the joy of birth and purity. Eventually, he destroys his own product. This is the effect most parents have on children. To inflict a grown man’s mind on the purity of a child is to give it shape without understanding. All a parent can do is feel gratitude for the miracle of creativity. The parent’s responsibility to this creation is only to allow it to find its own channel of growth. A child left alone or allowed to be with other children is usually a happy child. No other animal spends more time and energy on its offspring than man does. Most animals allow their offspring the freedom to evolve naturally.

Only man hides from his heritage of race, religion, and color. Until we accept what is, we will never be able to grow. We have to first reach within ourselves a true understanding of ourselves and our heritage as human beings. To reject religion, race, color, and country keeps a man from seeing his true condition. You cannot be free of any of these responsibilities until you accept them. They will only serve to plague you all your life. Nothing leaves you until you are free; then everything falls from you. When you can make choices as a free man you will feel no emotion about them and will therefore choose for valid reasons, effecting good as a result. Work of all kinds should be fulfillment of creativity and not sublimation.



You cannot escape anything if you are really working.

Many people enter spiritual work to escape responsibilities. You cannot escape anything if you are really working. If the flow of creative energy is strong it will grow despite blocks it meets. The product of an obstructed creative flow is a monster. Something without a full mechanism for balance is born. Similarly, a sick man can only produce a distorted child. It is the distorted product that most people see. It is equally distorted for the man who produces it. This is a development without control and joy. Creativity should produce happiness and joy; anything less indicates wrong work or the presence of blocks .

Creativity without happiness breeds strange creatures. Man is the only creature that reproduces through choice and selection. Other animals mate by the dictates of nature, in season, and produce natural offspring. A man born from an uncreative mating process, out of harmony with nature, must be a victim of psychic disorders. For other animals, seasonal mating puts the creative force into direct harmony with nature. In man, the original lack of harmony must be overcome in the attempt to grow spiritually. Instinct tries to keep us from overcoming the disharmonious birth act with all its growth limitations. The real need is to bring harmony and understanding to the areas of the psychic root system. These include relationships with parents and siblings and loyalties to race, religion, and country. An uprooted person has no productive position in life. He must be accepted, and he himself must accept that which he comes from before he can grow further. A completely free psyche is necessary to go into a new dimension of growth.

To free yourself from all these basic roots by accepting them is to be realized. It is complete harmony. As such, it brings happiness to all it touches. A man without close responsibilities never can regain his root system. He is dependent on those to whom he transfers his root responsibilities and from whom he can withdraw them at will (because the ties are tentative instead of natural and profound). To enjoy full psychic freedom means to be responsible for yourself and those naturally aligned with you. No man is free who is fulfilled by another.

The whole purpose in life for a student is this pursuit of the psychic root system. Functioning harmoniously with this system, you have the capacity to evolve to the full realization of your potential. It is the most difficult of all searching for we are afraid to stand alone and be free. For countless centuries man has been a dependent animal. It is not necessary to separate us from our society but for us to function independently.

Incidents of mob violence are evidence of man’s insensitivity. People lack deep inner refinement and cannot function independently. We cannot reach any depth until we have assumed the full functioning of our psychic root system. To be free of group reaction and dependency on the teacher, to become detached so that we can have our own individual connections with God, is the purpose of working with a group. Unconsciously, we contribute our maximum energy to the group. Because of our tensions, we are limited in the amount of energy we can extract from the group. However, when the need is strong enough and we are deeply open, we can draw vast amounts of energy from the group. This giving and taking of energy constitutes a creative relationship which operates at all levels of consciousness.

There are many phenomena apparent during all stages of your psychic development. These miracles are manifestations of higher forces becoming visible when a new level of work is achieved. It is as if each level were guarded by a dragon who takes certain precautions to protect the treasures of that level. Each time you reach a condition of enlightenment you must overcome some test which hinges on an inner emotional state. As the end of a period of work approaches, and as the work is about to crystallize into a new understanding, an additional obstacle always becomes apparent to block or delay the end result. This obstacle causes a great last surge of energy to explode the work into an enlightenment.



THERE is only one thing more important than finding a great teacher and that is leaving him.



The advanced student seeking ways to increase his work should understand that great portions of time are wasted if he is not conscious of the direction of his life energy. In exceptional cases a person’s mechanism is so fine that when he begins this inner work there is an immediate grafting of the psychic mechanism onto his own physical system. In these cases higher development will occur without the aid of a teacher. The natural psychic must be aware of his gifts and protect himself from those who would hurt his mechanism by working upon it.

There is only one thing more important than finding a great teacher and that is leaving him. There is a great tendency among teachers to set too long on their student eggs. These teachers like to teach and over teach instead of helping the student in developing the creative process within himself. Many times a teacher is excellent but limited in his understanding of psychic development. Too often it happens that a man who has studied for some years decides to teach. Even if his motives are none but the highest, he must not feel that high motives alone qualify him for his position. The high ideals within us are sometimes death to another man.

A set mind is dangerous, even if it is set in a fairly intelligent way. No man who is not flexible should teach. A teacher’s inability to teach objectively is very destructive to any student who moves outside of the pattern the teacher feels is right. It is not the job of a teacher to break the will of a student. It is not the job of any man to destroy that which he cannot replace with a greater development. A teacher who is in personal conflict with a student should release the student for both their sakes. Teaching should be a harmony of learning between teacher and student. Any teacher who is not learning is not doing a creative job and is not teaching. Creative teaching is continual growth for the man who teaches and for all the products of his teaching.

The development of a fully open mind is essential if you wish to pursue the endless growth possible for a human being. This is total surrender of the mind on a physical plane. It does not mean that the mind stops functioning. You simply re-channel the energy of the mind until the higher mind develops. It is impossible to build a dam unless the water is diverted. This does not mean the water is destroyed. It is carried away from its natural channel until such time as the dam is completed. At this time the capacity has increased many times and the water (energy) can be drawn at will. Your ability to use your higher forces at will is a test of your development.

The mind should be a clean instrument, not twisted with emotion and corroded with bad habits. You should notgive surgical instruments to a child as toys. Man misuses his mind as a child does a fine precision instrument. One of the purposes of meditation is to quiet the mind and relieve it of undue pressures. This occurs during the separation stage of the exercise. The mind and emotions must be quiet in order for the separation to occur.

The exercises should work themselves into your everyday life. There are countless opportunities in an activity - filled day to carry the discipline of the exercises into difficult areas of living. If you are capable of separating the spiritual from the physical, you can certainly separate the physical from the emotional.

The separation of the emotions from your everyday activities is similar to the exercise of spiritual separation. It requires a conscious desire on your part to quiet that part of yourself which judges things as right and wrong. You must surrender all thought about what you feel or believe. You must begin to see that this "thinking" only keeps your mind active and consumes your energy. Also, your ideas, the subjects of your thoughts, are wrong ones, as they have made you what you are now. To hold on to and fight for your ideas, thoughts, emotions, is to hold on to their life inside you, which will not allow you to change. Your values are those principles you inflict on others unconsciously. A conscious man knows that everything is in a continual state of flux and so there is no point to holding on to anything. You must be at one with the flow.

The point of inner work is to bring the ordinary consciousness of surrender to the mind in everyday life and in all activities. A man who surrenders within his spiritual self but does not surrender within his physical self is only going through the sensation of surrender. Surrender is the total letting go of everything in a human being on all levels of his existence.

The separation of the spiritual self without the surrender of the physical self limits the level of growth which a man can attain. The end result of spiritual surrender without physical surrender is the production of a very pure soul on the level of the earth. Such a soul has all the enlightenment of a saint but all the prejudice and personality of an ordinary man. Most religions prescribe purification of the soul but not of the body. The instrument of the body must be made responsible to the direction of the spiritual force within and cease to function of its own accord.



NOTHING in your mind can understand the process of growth. Growth begins with the letting go of the mind.



A man who surrenders his mind for the sake of his development functions differently from an intellectual. One of the first stages of the change in the mind through surrender is the cessation of all thoughts. Every time you find yourself thinking you must stop your mind. This is accomplished by simply letting go of the mind. You simply release the thought or thought process. You must not even indulge it by allowing the completion of a sentence. Continual cutting off of the mind in this fashion slows the cumulative effects of mental activity. it is like cutting off water in a stream. The water digs a new channel and continues to flow. Energy normally used by the mind must be re-channeled. When it is blocked from entering the mind it digs a path deep into you. This energy builds up as in a reservoir and works its way into the deeper mind within, not the superficial mind we recognize within the head. The thought process then enters you through the head, goes to a depth within you, and flows through and out. The feeling is as if your words flow through the chest to the mouth. Nothing comes from the mind in the familiar pattern. The enormous difference in energy use between this "new" thinking and the old lessens the strain on the body and enables you to surrender your emotions.

The mind is the slayer of the soul, says the Bible. This is a profound statement. The mind is the great enemy of man’s development. Only a fool tries to apply logic to the exercise of letting go. Nothing in your mind can understand the process of growth. Growth begins with letting go of the mind. To stop working and analyze the experience destroys it. You can speculate forever about life on the moon, but even if you visit the satellite, you have to be versed in at least twenty different scientific disciplines to understand what you see. People generally choose to ignore the fact of their abysmal ignorance in their attempt to achieve a secure psychological state. It is like having one foot on the shore and another on the deck of a ship slowly moving out to sea. One foot or the other must be moved. The fool falls into the water and considers it a "life experience."

Spiritual work continually carries you into the uncharted areas within yourself. It is necessary to have great courage for the exploration. Courage is the product of discipline or innocence, often both. After many years the innocence disappears and all you are left with is discipline.

Controlling the emotions is a choice open to a person trying to develop. Most of our emotions are psychologically created to protect the ego image whose projection makes us most comfortable. There is much in us that does not wish to work and much in society that permits this nonfunctioning. Regardless of your background, the possibility of spiritual growth and complete happiness exists for every human being. When someone cries that he never had the right chances or that he is a victim of social abuses, or that he did not have the opportunity of a good education, he is producing convenient excuses for not working to overcome his condition.

Whole nations turn against their neighbors and destroy them during wars. People who shun eating meat tear the limbs from those they hate in the passion of conflict. The man who wishes to grow must understand within that he has no right to emotions until they are completely controlled.

A spiritual student must let go of all outside emotional stimulation. Usually, such stimulation only keeps a person from those responsibilities he is loath to assume. People have been killed during demonstrations and riots and left behind them children and aged parents who needed them. Their idealism did not allow them to believe any harm could come to them as they were working for something beautiful and real. A person who fulfills all of his requirements is a rare human being.

Big issues and public causes can be like dope. They stimulate you and blind you to your own work. They make you feel important by placing you within a greater identity. No deep growth can be achieved through this kind of attachment, as it is totally without consciousness and understanding. It blocks you from finding your deeper self within. Identification with an organization or cause is no substitute for self realization.

An outstanding example of this type of identification is a nationalist movement. People kill, destroy books, stifle ideas - all in the name of a high ideal. In the process, a lesser evil has been replaced with a greater one.

Hitler exemplified nationalism. His cry was to raise the nation to glory. Jews, liberals, and all who opposed him were destroyed. When the war ended, many Nazis could hardly believe they had been a part of such devastation. People in a mob are readily hypnotized. There is no culture free from its own destructive potential; when it achieves power, it is exposed to this inner danger.

Before you can understand, you must be free within yourself. Such freedom can result only from the breaking down of all you now identify with. When this is done, you have the energy for growing - energy saved from other pursuits, particularly negatively aspected ones. A situation is negative if it takes energy from you for a purpose other than building your consciousness. Any effort, conscious or unconscious, not performed through the act of surrendering, is negative.

Your total potential is directly related to your energy. This energy is your natural resource. The man who is without energy is usually bleeding it away emotionally, intellectually, or physically. A thyroid condition, glandular malfunction, or other bodily imbalance can steal enormous amounts of energy. These medical problems may be easily solved by diet changes or by medication.

The accumulation of physical and psychic poisons can also drain you of your vital forces. Associating with drug addicts, with mentally or emotionally disturbed people, or with unhappy or depressed people can weigh on you greatly. To allow anyone to eat into your energy is poor policy.



IDENTIFICATION with an organization or cause is no substitute for self-realization.



A student is never allowed to begin instructing others without the permission of his teacher. The development of the psyche is like the growth of a tree; it takes years for it to bear fruit. When it does bear, the tree drops its seed automatically. You seed when your psyche has matured, and you seed best without intent. A tree’s seeds are picked up by the wind and carried off - it is not the tree’s will. A great teacher should drop the seeds of his teaching without selectivity. They should be for all who reach for them. Selectivity in a teacher is of the mind and emotions; it chooses those he thinks are the right soil for his teaching to grow in. The creative seed grows in each of us differently, and the giving of it should not involve choice. The teacher must develop a neutral chemistry so that only the efforts of the student motivate him. The manifestation of a higher mind in a human being can come in any disguise. To try to penetrate the person is not the task of the teacher. His duty is to give. A cow can be milked by any hand that knows how to squeeze the teats. This principle also applies to teaching. A teacher should give his creativity without thought or emotion. His only responsibility to creativity is to keep it continually in flow.

A teacher who feels he can judge the student is caught in his own ego. This judgment will slow down the flow of the creative force. A great teacher is simply an open flow of creativity.

What passes for consciousness in most people is really an illusion. This illusion is particularly limiting to people who are trying to attain spiritual growth. Automatically, they reject information and help, claiming to understand what is being given to them. Before you can change you must become aware that this "understanding" is intellectual egotism - and you must surrender it.

The mind must be totally removed from the creative force as the inner work begins. The flow of creativity must travel throughout the mechanism. If the force enters the mind or emotions and is stopped there, it builds blocks. These blocks build tension. It does not matter how much force comes through you but how much of it you absorb into your internal system. If the force comes through the mind and emotions and you interlay digest it, then the force is within your spiritual system and will produce harmony.

This is the nature of the total consciousness you seek. To begin to function, you must surrender. The surrender begins to effect a balance. At first, you will find great difficulty in making decisions. The mind and emotions which ruled you previously now provide resistance. Now you are working for the overall good of your system; previously you worked for an inner despot. A wise king works to serve all his people and provide for their welfare. If his counselors have vested interests he must ignore their advice. The mind and emotions are your inner enemies and you must learn to avoid their advice. Surrendering leads to deeper understanding and transforms bad counsel of the mind and emotions into eventual good.

Only in a condition of complete inner harmony can you understand your own potential. In this condition you comprehend the responsibility for maintaining growth and the development that inner balance allows. A student should never be satisfied with a finished product. Work is forever and endless; it either grows or disintegrates. The creative force is vital only in the moment of flow. People like to think the reward of work is the end of working. The reward of work is increased capacity to perform.

Once you learn how to perform a task, repetition of the task is easy. It required years of experimentation to create the first automobile. Today, with modem production methods, it takes only a matter of hours. If this does not happen in spiritual work, it is because of ignorance of the process and your failure to be responsible for it. Everything you do in the first seven years of inner work, you should be able to duplicate in any five minutes thereafter. For this acceleration to occur, continual work and growth are necessary. With discipline, once the creative tools are shaped, continued growth is assured. Your inability to use your creative tools effectively is due to the resistance you allow to grow within. If you maintain the pace of inner work, your intensity will be constant and you will forge from peak to peak in your inner growth. There will grow within you a divine understanding of your potential and your capacity for fulfilling that potential.



TO GROW spiritually involves destruction of the self. It is the greatest combat you can be involved in, and it is never-ceasing.



All this is predicated upon work in your spiritual exercises. It is this work which produces increased consciousness and intensity of pattern. When you feel a great calm within you during spiritual work it is an indication that you are not working. Work produces growth, not tranquillity. Some people who meditate do so to quiet the self and achieve great peace. To grow spiritually involves destruction of the self. This is not a quieting experience. It is the greatest combat you can be involved in, and it is neverceasing.

A student must be conscious of the psychic relationship that exists between him and his teacher. If there is a true intention on the student’s part to grow, he is accepted by the teacher. Upon acceptance, he becomes part of the teacher’s psychic root system. This is the highest pattern of growth, as it takes place in another dimension and the psychic feeling of the student is continuous. If he is in a state of surrender in his attitude, the entire psyche and unconscious system of the teacher is at his disposal. The student who attains this relationship will be in an ecstatic state but not one of realization. He must still perform the exercise of physical and spiritual separation.

A bad student is better than the most perfect disciple who is not a student. A disciple works for a teacher and a student works for himself; when the two come together within one human being, progress is made. One can deny a disciple but a student demands recognition - A great disciple is a slave, for he works for another. A student is a free man. He studies with a teacher because he consciously knows his teacher can instruct him in that which he requires.

The passive attitude attributed to the Oriental mystics is often greatly misunderstood. Theirs is not an attitude of indifference, but one of disassociation through understanding. The greatest discipline is necessary to remove those mental and emotional reactions which are identification. It is through understanding that identification is surrendered. The discipline is so difficult that the man who achieves it has full realization of his fellow man’s problems. In the Orient, the man who strikes the first blow has always been considered the fool. There is a saying that a stupid man sweats and a wise man uses his heat as energy.

To have this control is to have objectivity. Surrender, or the art of objectivity or control, allows you to view situations without prejudicial involvement. Everyone who touches a man who can be objective is helped, for anyone who attacks him is left exposed by the contact. The attacker, having no justification, stands naked and can observe the wrong he has committed or would commit. It is helpful to others, enabling them to see their own negativity.

A truly great teaching, like a truly great teacher, is of such simplicity that the student’s first encounter with it produces the immediate impression that it has always existed. To enter into truth you should have the realization that it is a fulfillment, that it is timeless, that it is infinite in quality and quantity. it should require no analysis. A person who finds truth and seeks to destroy it by analysis reveals his insecurity. You must learn how to hold on to the miracle that is at once apparent on first meeting. You must understand that this moment is a gift given to the seeker as a reference point for any tension subsequently found within. A teacher is a light which the student dims by carrying it into the airless cave of his unconsciousness. To accept simply is to allow the light to spread. To carry it within is to extinguish it.

The miracle of truth is its availability to all of us. The evidence for this is birth. However, this first gift is gratuitous and all others require consciousness. The realization that a man can receive only by the surrender of self - the ego that proclaims I AM - is essential. You must feel I AM NOT before you are in a condition to receive help.

In choosing a teacher or teaching it is essential to encounter the experience in an extraordinary dimension. That is, you must feel, see, sense the relationship in its totality immediately on first meeting. This sense of extradimensionality is the guide in the progress of the relationship. The miracle of meeting always takes place on a much higher level than the student can be aware of. The novice must understand this and keep this knowledge within to guide him. The depth of resistance within a student determines whether or not he will attempt to analyze the experience in a new dimension. A miracle is an experience in another dimension. The student must understand this or there is no hope for his progress. A miracle is a gratuitous gift. It is taken away when you try to carry it into ordinary life. To profit from a miracle you must understand its properties. It is the gift of a higher force God - and it can exist only as long as it remains in the dimension from which it came.

Spiritual growth is a process. The process can be likened to feeding a cow. If you force the cow to eat continually you kill it. You have to learn the capacity of the animal the amount of food that produces the greatest quantity of milk. The same is true of us. Each of us requires a different amount of food and we each have a unique productivity level. The quantity of food is immaterial. It is the consistency of the diet that is crucial. You cannot starve a cow for a month and then feed it six times daily and expect it to function as before. The effect of the starvation is to shrink the capacity. Regularity of meals produces the healthiest animal and gives the best results.

Most people are sick in body and spirit to some degree. Before starting spiritual work you must look within to ascertain the degree of your illness. No real teacher will ever refuse to help anyone but the violently insane. Your ego must allow you to admit to the seriousness of your condition. If you were fully conscious of your condition, of course, you would not need a teacher. If you do not find problems of some kind within, your condition is hopeless. A disturbed man with no realization of the scope of his illness will only continually attack his teacher; the relationship of student to teacher cannot exist.

A teacher is an instrument. The function of this instrument is to work on a higher dimension for the student - a function that takes place in the realm of miracles, or higher energy. Miracles are a process of evolution into the higher dimension. The student must be in a state of inner surrender so that when he is in contact with his instrument (his servant; all teachers are to serve) he is prepared for an internal feeding. This teacher-supplied nourishment helps him to grow spiritually stronger. No teacher can impart this inner strength to a student who sits, rocklike, waiting for something to occur, or to the intellectual who is trying to pry the secret from the teacher’s mind - where it does not exist. Nor can he nourish the highly emotional student who does not feel worthy of receiving the teacher. It is your right to receive this nourishment.

If a teacher is truly endowed, his purpose is to transmit his understanding to you. If you feel unworthy, why study? To seek evolvement means to understand what you lack and to surrender inside, an act of logical humility. Seek and ye shall find. Deny and be a fool, might be a logical sequel. Silence is golden only in the wise, who understand the nature of work.

A fool without the gift of understanding how to work should ask, ask, ask. If he receives no answer it is either because his teacher, too, is a fool or because he has been given the answer and is too stupid to understand it. The answer cannot be subjected to analysis. The mind must surrender to it. It is not the mind. No teacher can truly teach through the mind. Some teachings may be more logical than others but to be valid all must come from another dimension. The question to be answered either comes from a student in the state of surrender and is answered so, or issues from a novice who must, upon not understanding, surrender his questions within. If the novice does so continually the answer will come eventually. The more the question is of the mind, the less the likelihood of an answer. If no answer comes from within yourself, you may ask it of your teacher when you are in a very deep state of surrender. Just as it is a physician’s duty to heal, it is a teacher’s duty to produce spiritual results. There is no rule against bothering a teacher. Teachers exist for the purpose of being questioned.

Miracles are results of certain changes in the electricity of the body. These forces are products of psychological changes which bring about new chemical conditions. These changes enable a manifestation to occur which we call a miracle. A miracle in itself is nothing. A miracle accomplishes nothing unless it is in a sequence. Then it is an indication of inner process or spiritual development. A miracle is nothing if the person worked on is not conscious of its having taken place. Many miracles occur but few are recognized. The process of spiritual development not only produces miracles but sensitizes the inner instrument to an awareness of them.

The inner surrender helps to bring about the chemical change within when the student is in the presence of a more highly evolved individual. Such an individual has a strong chemistry and therefore conducts more force, thus making it easier for enlightenment to come about.

Miracles occur during periods of deep meditation through shock or explosive revelation. The student’s chemistry goes through a process of extreme change, making it more receptive to the flow of force. To make the experience last as long as possible you must feel grateful and relax. Nothing except the fullest inner relaxation and surrender can extend the experience and allow a greater depth of flow.

After the initial contact with a more highly evolved being or through psychic experience, more and deeper experiences are possible. The seeker after these spiritual advances must make a conscious decision whether he will want the process to move to a deeper commitment. If he feels I AM NOT, a deeper commitment is possible; if he feels I AM, it is impossible.

Sit alone and in comfortable clothes. Try to be freshly bathed. Feel within yourself, trying to get a sense of your insides. Do not ever work from your head. The head is for the dimensions of the earth. Expect miracles only. Try to find a place in your chest to put another you. Ask from this depth of yourself for help to surrender. Ask several times and each time try to increase your sense of nothingness. Realize that you are asking for help and that it is never given when ego is involved. "I now ask from my inner depth, please help me to surrender so I may receive the gift of higher consciousness. I am nothing and you are everything. Please help me." Beg, cry, crawl. It is necessary to implore this unseen agent as if you were fighting for the life of your dearest child. Until you feel this you are without capacity to open.

This process of surrendering will build up slowly until something within has realized the true reality of your nothingness. Then you will be spiritually worked. A man with an ego works spiritually; a man with humility is spiritually worked. It is foolish to expect your inner being to respond to work immediately. God’s gift is the first realization. The next is the understanding that we have the ability to change through consciousness and discipline. That such a possibility exists should evoke gratitude. Instead, it usually has the effect of speeding the student’s search for a quicker, easier way. There is only one way; that way is to be spiritually worked. This means total surrender. The force, the miracle, is given, and you must ask for it as a real human being with the realization that it is only given when the value of the force is understood. It enters us as an expression of higher will and for the purpose of guiding us to change, not to reinforce our own will and direction.

All higher energy works for change. A person receives higher energy through surrender - it does not require special conditions of even a teacher. Energy demands only that if you ask from within for help to surrender, and allow even thirty minutes a day, the force will grow within you. In time the force will make all things different; as you transcend into higher levels, blocks dissolve and patterns change.

There are many strange and amazing experiences which occur as you progress spiritually. These happen as you activate your psychic system and exercise the muscles which conduct the flow of higher creativity.

Among students beginning their spiritual exercises, occasions when the force begins to manifest itself within them are common. This marks the beginning of the separation between the spiritual and the physical selves. When it enters a person for the first time, the force can produce a variety of sensations. The feeling of floating or a sense of great detachment can result, in which you can reach a state of flight-sleep. Sometimes you will feel you have been doing your exercise for only a few moments when in reality an hour has passed. Often a feeling of dizziness will be experienced when you rise from your exercise. This is because the force is of a lighter and finer quality than ordinary life.

Each person experiences the effects in his own way. it is quite possible that you will not recognize the quality of all your experiences. Extraordinary experiences in themselves do not proclaim spiritual progress. It is often the case that a simple-appearing person, not undergoing any apparent extraordinary effects, has been building within a very deep spiritual mechanism. It is best protected by not having any surface drama. Time and effort bring forth a well-developed spiritually functioning person.

Working every day you take into your psychic system properties which exist naturally in the atmosphere. It has the effect of a balanced diet. There is in us, as in all nature, a continual change of chemistry, and when spiritual exercises are done regularly, harmony is created within and without.

Your capacity grows with the practice of the exercises. They are of great therapeutic value as well. They enable you to surrender the negative forces that result in disease. To understand is to not react. The lack of identification with emotional problems keeps you healthy. Health increases work capacity as energy constantly rises. Working deeper creates a positive force in your life which continually increases as it is used. The breaking down of all negative aspects of your life gives you continued new energy and accelerates your growth.

There is always a refining taking place in you as growth continues. Less emotion gives you a more relaxed attitude, which results in a capacity to attract things on all levels. There is always a healthy and vital look in anyone working well from within. The flow of energy continually refreshes the whole system of the human being. It is essential to keep the mind clear and inactive because at a moment of greater energy there are present those forces which have always worked to your detriment. These negative forces can tap the energy flow within and use it for their own purposes. The continual misuse of this higher energy for wrong ends is what destroys many students before they work long enough to benefit and learn control.

As the flow of energy increases in you, you must work deeper in your surrender to absorb the forces correctly, It is essential to extend the growth within so that there is a right use of the force. Continued work begins to channel the right psychic connections. If you use all your increased energy for psychic work, you will build new patterns for yourself and preserve your energies within the structure of these patterns. There is only one way to succeed and that is to work each day with increased depth and energy. For most people it takes years for a change to be effected. Unless the acceleration occurs, they never have a possibility of enlightenment.

The exercises train your mind, emotions, and chemistry to function. This training requires great time and effort. Often, people take the time and trouble to create the mechanism, one that can produce a million units of force flow per day, and then ask only for ten units. There must be within you that which can visualize the extraordinary possibilities and can open to them. What cannot be visualized is not psychically possible. There is an endless potential for the student who has imagination enough to be open to these inner possibilities. Force is able to flow only so far as we are open to it. It is less necessary to be intelligent than it is to be imaginative.

There are obstacles to our growth in our upbringing and ingrained sense of social right and wrong. Many times a student will sit before his teacher and not ask a question pertinent to his work because he feels he should not disturb the teacher. The placing of the teacher in a separate category, psychologically removed from the student - as if the teacher were not there for the student’s benefit - is destructive. Until the student feels free to use his teacher whenever he needs to, there will be no growth. A man whose need is strong does not stop at bad manners. These ideas of right and wrong, good and bad, block us from our destiny. Nothing large or small should hinder your next step forward.

A great teacher is in harmony with each of his students, even if they number in the millions. Each must be given the care and time essential for his growth. The limitation is always with the student. if you do not feel important enough to bother your teacher, your need is not worth recognizing. The obstacle must be overcome in the student. The student must feel his attachment to the teacher so that night or day he is continually drawing energy from the teacher. The chemistry for resolving these problems begins only when the question is voiced. Nothing changes or connects as part of the mechanism in you until it has been stated. The expression may be voiced, written, or shown in a student’s attitude. It permits the chemistry to start reacting within you, and the results follow.



IT is less necessary to be intelligent than it is to be imaginative.



The psyche continually meets opposition, and by overcoming the opposition it becomes stronger. It is like any body muscle which gains strength with use. You must begin to see that only situations which are real challenges are of value to you psychically. The people you pay enormous emotional prices to know are those who keep you alive. Challenge is needed to keep you active; it brings weakness to the surface and exposes bad life patterns. To overcome a difficult situation with another is of more value than to always find satisfaction and quiet with someone. Growth comes through work.

The transformation of physical man to spiritual man is the breaking down of the coarse, heavy material in the physical man and its use in the creation of the spiritual man. This suggests that the insights which occur during this period of change would have to surface as shocks - You see the worst of yourself, your coarse, crude matter, being destroyed and refined to build the spiritual. This essential process becomes difficult and sometimes impossible for gentle people. A man can kill another in cold blood but cannot abide the possibility that he did not really love his mother. There is no objectivity to these situations, and for that reason it is impossible to overcome them without understanding them by detaching and transcending them.

Illusions are situations which do not have properties. Loving someone who does not encourage or return your love is the greatest and most frequent example of such a condition. This kind of love has no properties on which to base a love relationship. A wise man runs from such situations. Illusions are the most potent drugs of all, as their power remains constant unless one simply walks away.

Your ability to experience and then surrender the experience determines your rate of growth. Experience is fuel for growth. Surrendering the experience is stoking the fires with the fuel. As the ability to experience and surrender grows, the capacity to evolve increases.

When you begin your studies you have within yourself the accumulated experiences of this life and past lives. Burning these tensions as they are surrendered creates the fuel for growth. After the process has been at work for some time there might result a situation of great passivity, as the accumulation of negative material within you diminishes. Subsequently, this slows the burning of what negative quantities remain. This is similar to using up one level of coal when mining. It requires digging deeper. It is rare for such an event to occur because most people do not relinquish their negativity easily. If, however, the unusual occurs and a state of great passivity based on lack of negative fuel develops, you have a choice of living a life of serene inner freedom or experiencing new situations with which to fuel your growth. The best way to flush out your negativity is to become a teacher. Teaching exposes so many vulnerable sides of a person that only through this role will the advanced student find a wealth of material for growth. It will also grind out ego and expose areas which can be surrendered.

When someone begins to teach he must understand his true situation. The truth of his situation is his own inadequacy reflected in the natures of the students he attracts. The role is such that the beginning teacher must realistically begin with less sensitive students. This follows the psychic law of attraction. It can be compared to the situation of a doctor beginning his intern

ship. At first, he is entrusted with only the most routine cases. As his sensitivity grows with experience, he is given more and more responsibility, until he is ready to handle a practice of his own. It is important, always, to realize your limitations. To prescribe beyond a level of your attainment is ego, and dangerous to the student. It is best to perform on a level that can be consciously maintained rather than to do the extraordinary and by so doing develop another need. In spiritual work, as in medicine, the cure should not be more harmful than the disease.

Spiritual responsibility lies in the constant attention given another without destroying your own growth. It is the function of a teacher to serve and to grow while doing so.

A person who is surrendering to attain inner growth does not discard his responsibility to those who depend on him. All responsibilities that exist when you begin the process of inner growth are tests of your condition while studying Any creative person who requires special conditions in order to create is weak in his creative flow; by trying to maintain his rarefied requirements he will never attain inner strength.



LIFE offers you the essential materials for you to overcome.



You learn to separate the spiritual and physical by learning to quiet the mind and emotions. As your attention span increases the mind and emotions function with less conflict. The ability to maintain consciousness and responsibility increases. This increased ability should be met with increased responsibility. Increased earnings bring added life complexity, but your continued inner growth produces increased energies with which to cope with the added complexity.

These energies result from lessened identification with, and from a falling off of, emotion-laden situations. The evolving process occurs on all levels. To grow spiritually without growing on all other levels of existence would in time so ratify your existence that you would attain a state of purity rather than one of growth. Life offers you the essential materials for you to overcome. It keeps you growing and vital. As human beings we can grow only when we work. As the capacity to work deepens, the progress accelerates.

You are drawn to the level of work you are capable of achieving next. Most great Hindu saints achieved realization in jungle areas. They emerged from their primitive states with the beginning of enlightenment and thereafter became gods to the simple beings dwelling around them. As their reputations grew they attracted more and more sophisticated followers and eventually became more sophisticated themselves. You must work on the level of your own capacity.

People often visit teachers and are found lacking or find the teacher lacking. This may indicate a wrong chemistry on which to base evolvement. It is essential that there be a relationship similar to a love attraction between teacher and student. The initial meeting of a student and teacher should have some remarkable chemistry; otherwise a great deal of work will have to be done to create it. Teaching spiritually involves transporting the student into another dimension. A chemical affinity is a basic requirement if the relationship is to succeed. The student must work at breaking down barriers within himself against the teacher. The teacher, with his number of students, cannot take this responsibility on himself. The teacher must have positive feelings toward each student. To have any prejudice against a student will establish a psychic barrier which can hurt the student enormously.

Through work, the respect of a teacher increases greatly and opens the connecting channels which feed the student. The teacher is fed through the creative bond between himself and the student. If he cannot bring this creative flow into existence, then the teacher slowly loses his own force.

The psychically disturbed student is without control. His problem is an inability to function. There is a weakness within him which can be helped only by discipline. Discipline has the great function of solidifying the loose psychic system. It nourishes that within that does not function and permits the Psychic force to flow from one center to another. It does not solve the long-range problem of building the inner mechanism. Many body chemicals must change their physical state before their function suits their purpose. You must have the inner material to conduct higher forces, material that is accumulated through years of inner work. Most disturbed people do not function well enough in letting go, so they do not have the inner soil to hold higher experience.

Work in an ordinary sense sets the human mechanisms functioning on the physical level. If the mechanism is not working correctly, you can detach yourself from it for the duration of spiritual exercises. If the life flow is conscious we can work with it without conscious awareness of the physical mechanism. We have transcended it and are in a higher state of being. The force will complete itself as if the mechanism were healthy. In mentally disturbed people, the mechanisms of their spiritual and physical selves are bound together, retarding the growth process. We should be able to separate our mental and physical selves. A man can step off a sinking rowboat onto land. He can see the atmosphere above him and relate to everything higher. If his mind turns toward the sinking boat he may become emotional. His weakness is only in his mind; his condition is strong as long as his mind stays detached. Detachment is the ability to move on different planes and be able to see them as separate. Great progress has been made with mental patients when they are given a job and kept functioning. Responsibility and discipline are the vital needs of a student and must be increased constantly.

There is an unconscious psychic bond between teacher and student that enables the student to work properly even when there is no physical contact. The exercises, having come through the teacher, function as an extension of their common psychic consciousness. The flow of force from the teacher is a continual one. It is your responsibility to bring the level of your work to the level on which you connect with your teacher so that you may draw on the higher energy the teacher transmits.

After many years of work you may attain a new level of experience. This is a result of opening to the teacher, which opens you to take from life. Working in close harmony with the teacher prepares the muscles which carry at first only the special connected energy, and later all energy. If we work for spiritual value, we can begin to learn directly from life, in the teacher’s absence. It is not necessary for you to maintain a physical relationship with a teacher. Many great teachers leave behind after their death material within their students which continues their growth. This is the highest level of fulfillment for the teacher. His creative effort is reborn in the student as the student achieves the level of the teaching. Men have been taught by Buddha, Christ, and many other gods years after their deaths. The internal spiritual force exists for those who can reach it.

A man who achieves enormous growth is the accumulation of all he has encompassed in his life - not only from contact with great teachers but from contact with men and things. He is responsible to all these contacts for his existence; if he opens to them, they become part of the total creative force within him and feed him psychically. If he rejects any of them, he rejects his own potential for growth.

The exercise of responsibility on all levels is our function. Through responsibility we meet those situations necessary for our growth. It is the natural selection and attraction in our lives which will lead us to our enlightenment. Seeking out strange and unusual life conditions is unnecessary and often dangerous.

An apple growing on a tree is functioning in the proper relationship to that tree. It is healthy and is nourished by life without any unusual effort on its part. Nature works and fulfills its responsibilities. As you grow, you will find continual nourishment from the relationships with all you contact. If your search for an inner life is sincere, it will cause you to be fulfilled on a physical level. The physical level with all its problems drops away and you are free to concentrate your energies on growth on the spiritual level. It is necessary to fulfill all responsibilities of a physical nature and bring them to perfection in order to be free of them. A man who rejects these responsibilities is like an apple that wishes to be nourished without the tree. Inevitably, it will fall from the tree and rot on the ground. The process of growth related to the tree does not fulfill itself until the rot of the apple helps nourish the seed and creates a new tree. You must work from the physical to the spiritual level and must not reject that which you would like to leave behind. Life must free you and reject you when you have achieved all the work on a particular level. The door to the physical life closes when there is nothing left for you to do on that level. It is natural and not an expression of will but of nature. These are simple processes which take time. We are very impatient and that is why most of the deepest psychic development is not possible for us.

There is a tendency in those who begin the adventure of spiritual growth to try to understand and analyze the process. This is a mistake. The process, if respected and left untouched, will grow and continually change.

The ultimate surrender occurs when a permanent detachment between the physical and spiritual selves is achieved - only after years of work. Only then is true freedom possible. For you to be unbound by your mind and emotions so you can see all things in the true light of their objective existence removes all strain from your life. It is the inability to be in a state free of the subtle doubts and fears of the unknown which plagues the uncontrolled man forever. The insecurity of not knowing what might be destroyed during an explosive emotional situation, and not having any control, can be a deeply frightening idea. That the idea does not occur is also frightening. Inability to banish fear during an important business confrontation is an example of the impossible tangle of emotions in the mind and psyche found in most of us. Persons confronted by a would-be murderer have been known to fight and fight, pushing the assailant into a position where he has to kill them. The provoker, caught up in the thrill of the emotions he is bringing about, is unable to stop the pattern.

The man who is in a state of separation has begun to leave the physical level and is capable of much more intense inner work. Inability to separate your states keeps you earthbound. It enslaves you to all the coarse values of the earth. The illusory wants or rejections of your being are not clear as you can never separate your values and fears. Never to be at peace within is the price most people pay for living on this earth. Anything such people attain is without reward as their inner condition can never accept earthly attainment as a completed work. The rare exception is the man who works merely for the sake of working. He fulfills himself as a simple animal does. Should he be overtaken by illness, his world collapses around him. This kind of a person can fulfill no one other than himself, because his work consumes his total energy.

The fulfillment of the highly detached man must be through the creative force he consciously calls upon for his growth. His talents will enable him to move in many areas, as creativity brings life to all it encounters. The understanding of the enormous effort required to attain this condition also frees him from the illusion of being able to help others. It is our individual effort, essentially, that can produce this freedom.

One of the great losses of force is that which occurs when others take force from us, inhibiting our growth. There is an enormous waste of energy by students in their desire to share and help others. The farmer who tosses corn into the fields sees a great deal of it eaten by birds. Your inner growth should be seed for your further growth, not feed for scavengers. It is innocence that produces this loss in you. It is also one of the great tests; that which you continually put back into yourself will be what you eventually become spiritually. We are only what we build up within ourselves. To continually give to others is to have no hope for our own fulfillment. Sacrifice is a conscious effort, and only the stupid man performs it as an emotional gesture.

The best reason for growth is happiness and to fulfill our creative spiritual potential A happy man is not bound by his possessions and requires no special return for that which he does for others. His growth encompasses all.



CONSCIOUSNESS is not a fire by which to warm yourself but a dimension acquired by work.



We ought to be grateful for all that we attract. The people we know are the reflection of all that we are. If they are happy, we are right within ourselves. If they are not, we are wrong. Nothing matters outside of the positive results of our actions. Anyone can justify being wrong. Right needs no justification, it speaks for itself. Reason is not needed to justify growth; growth is its own reason. Work must be able to bring results and happiness. The consciousness of work is the responsibility of the student. He must be able to work deeper continually. Consciousness is not a fire by which to warm yourself but a dimension acquired by work. Conscious work is the fuel of consciousness.

You must always find within your fellow man something to love. Love breaks down the barriers within people. Anyone who is alive is worthy of being loved, for the ability to live is a creative act.

Each day must be viewed symbolically in our search for evolvement. The act of waking from sleep is in itself an amazing experience which requires understanding. The sleeping hours are usually given up to non-creative effort. Our ability to rest and refresh ourselves is taken too much for granted. There is nothing more profitable to us than the use of our sleeping hours for spiritual growth. The very act of surrender to sleep provides the clue to the possibility of work it contains. For most people, it is the only time in which they can allow for the separation of the physical and spiritual within. Sleep is one of the great creative efforts you are capable of in an unconscious state. During sleep, the forces of another dimension feed you. It is considerably more beneficial to you if you can prepare yourself in advance for this amazing experience and therefore increase your potential growth. Sleep is always essential, food is not.

You should have within an understanding of the purpose of life and ask for help inwardly to reach that purpose while preparing to go to sleep. This sets the inner mechanism in a direction which can open a new depth. Surrender completely within and ask with great sincerity and from a great depth so that you enter this state of surrender with a new sense of dimension. The availability during sleep of all the unconscious material rarely reached during waking hours is enormous. Try to feel like a sponge, empty and receptive to everything which will fill you during the night.

People who are aspiring to evolvement and higher consciousness should be actively engaged in life and business as much as possible so that the increase in capacity for doing can be used in all situations. The attempt to raise the spiritual inner man under rarefied conditions produces a quantity which will not survive under ordinary conditions of life. It will be a rare, exotic plant of no use to a creative life. Exposure to the full range of conditions will destroy it. If your growth withstands these tests, you will be fit to survive the pressures of the heights attained through enlightenment.

To become continually more conscious enables you to raise the level of your life. Your ability to earn more money and assume more responsibility, which increases your sensitivity and creativity in all areas, are qualities which draw you more into the world and attract the world to you. The serenity, wisdom, and happiness which are the qualities of an enlightened man certainly deserve to bring him tribute on all levels. He must also be able to exist above the tensions these responsibilities attract. This gives him the vitality to transfer the life force. Tension and energy are essential together as tension creates the container and energy the content. The flow of life force exists as a state of being in very highly evolved saints. If they are also vital in their lives, the vitality sends the force into people who come to them. If they are in a semicoma, or passive, it takes enormous vitality on the part of the students to draw this life force into their own being. This ability to work in depth on all levels is the hallmark of an enlightened being. No saint in the Far East was ever in need except by choice. A man who requires tribute from another is far from enlightenment. One of the tests of the spiritually advanced is his ability to attract to himself, without involvement, all types of people and things.



ANY fool can be free of possessions. Having riches and being free of worldly possessions is true freedom.



Any fool can be free of possessions. Being without worldly goods is not necessarily a symbol of simplicity. Having riches and being free of worldly possessions is true freedom.

Growth brings a person more and more activity. As his energy and freedom increase, his movement accelerates. The more exposure any material has, the cleaner it burns and the more heat it gives.

There is nothing so simple as nothingness. However, it is attained only through freedom, not by shunning the acquisition of possessions and relationships.

Purity is not the objective of a student seeking enlightenment. Purity is a breaking down of experience until all negativity is removed and a state of tranquillity is reached. Continual experience provides continual material to be broken down. It is like an assembly line; raw material must be kept in readiness for increases in production. A wise producer keeps more than a day’s supply of materials stockpiled for use. Warehouses of experience are necessary to work at full capacity spiritually. True simplicity is a man working deeply at his spiritual life. It is sad that the picture of what a spiritual seeker should be has been so twisted by our society. It can be a person living a rather ordinary life with extraordinary value. The drama in our society externalizes the spiritual drama, leaving no energy for the inner life. A deeply spiritual life should be externally calm and internally like a blast furnace.

An open fire fed by enormous logs burns large amounts of fuel. A potbellied stove uses less wood but gives more heat. So, too, a calm exterior not only conserves the inner fuel but, being less visual and external, does not capture the mind. It also heats deeply and for longer periods of time. A person seeking truth should not be caught by outer drama or illusions. Within a spiritual being, deep surrender should collect fuel from everyone and everything. It is our conscious need that continually brings us this material for our internal furnace. Everything, to be of service to make us grow, should be consumable - surrendered and used as fuel.

It is a sign of a working man to be always deeply at work converting life experiences into enlightenment. A monk in a monastic order might contemplate a rarefied experience five hundred times and glory in each glimmer. A man who is working should be too full of experiences to find time for recording them as they occur. He is a producing factory twenty-four hours a day and is too busy with work to count or examine the product. Work is for the breaking down of what we are and all the experiences we have in a state of surrender. It is as if the experiences were fuel and the surrender a furnace- Feeding our experience into the furnace produces the heat of evolvement. As the feeding continues the raw material becomes a more refined product which produces greater heat. The enlightenment, this heat, must also be surrendered to result in the building within of a psychic system.

A man who searches for the results of his work looks for it in his physical body; this, in effect, produces a bridge between his physical and spiritual selves which does not allow the force to build correctly. This kind of evolvement is without hope because nourishment is being given to both aspects at once. The experience fed into the furnace is to free, destroy, and give rebirth to the physical body, not just to nourish it. To nourish it would be only to increase resistance. Enlightening the physical body gives it insight into the total process of enlightenment. This allows it to become self-sufficient and to be able to defend itself from destruction. The fact is that the physical body must die many times. This is essential if a permanent separation is to result. The mind must be kept apart and in no way give the mechanism of the inner work to the outer man. Why educate the mind, which is the slayer of the soul?

That which is needed to free a person will take place through inner effort alone and requires no conscious help whatsoever. The process is a natural one and works through surrender, not manipulation. It is for this reason that the mind is made quiet before you can do spiritual work. If your mind is connected with spiritual growth, it becomes capable of fighting the spiritual. We are trying to transcend the mind so the spirit can guide.

An impassive attitude is best acquired through passions that have been understood and cooled.

Compassion is an expression of great objective understanding, not an idiot’s response to someone else’s emotional mess. All understanding must come from enlightenment and not from a philosophy swallowed as a whole emotional experience. As a product of refined energy, enlightenment always brings with it the need to transcend, to become one with the higher energy. People should work until they raise their level. It is rare for someone to move into a new level and surrender totally that which he or she was previously attached to. We are enlightened much like a man who awakens in an apple orchard and leaves with a pocketful of apples. His is the thrill of a petty thief, not of a conscious man who would build a home in the orchard and meditate there. Stay on the higher level, understanding that it is stupid to steal something and then return to your ordinary life. You can stay where it is. It is yours until you again rise above it.

You must evolve to a point where a particular need in energy or talent can simply be called up. People usually spend too much energy on a simple need. You do not cook a cow when all you want is a hamburger. There are often bad results when a man tries to take onto himself another’s evolvement. He has a total pattern response rather than the finer development which produces a sensitive instrument. Learning is the gradual absorption of energy so that your inner tree of life grows. It is not grafting onto yourself a part of another person.

One of the dangers to development is the student’s taking onto himself the complete mechanism of his teacher. If there is strong contact between student and teacher as development takes place, there are times when the psychic system of the teacher will seem to control the student. He will feel possessed by his teacher. There is nothing to fear from this. It is only a stage of growth through which he is traveling. The exercise of surrender cannot allow anything to adhere to you that is not useful for your growth, or anything to enter that is foreign to your system. Another person’s growth is foreign to you and cannot stay in your system unless you are holding on to it. If this problem ever becomes difficult, a deep inner surrender and a request for the release of all negative psychic forces not essential for your development will flush out all undesirable forces.

This must be done or there can be no further development, as in the classic case of accepting the image of someone we worship as a god. This places a complete limitation on your psychic growth, a dangerous and totally destructive activity. When you look to a goal, represented by an individual you look up to as a god, you are usually vanquished by the concept. Any ultimate we come close to causes crystallization, and to prevent this it is essential to always raise your goal as you approach it. The process should be directed to growth and not to a role which represents the work in place of the real thing. To accept any work as a finished product is wrong. There is only work and more work in a true state of surrender. Results or achievements are just levels of attainment and you should not work to reach any one level. Work is fulfillment, and fulfillment is an endless process. To seek a particular level as your goal is to close the door on the endless potential within and to slow down the chemistry needed to achieve even this limited aim.



THE FIGHT for an inner life and to overcome the resistance to change is the true life and death struggle.



The fight for an inner life and to overcome the resistance to change is the true life and death struggle. Nothing is of greater consequence, for failing this is to accept the death and destruction that crystallize anyone in whom the life force stops flowing. In most people the flow of the life force is a completely unconscious act. When someone fails during an illness, it is often said, "They lost their will to live." The seriousness of the situation at hand must become a reality. There is within us the most extraordinary capacity to adjust to the worst imaginable situations. War, concentration camps, men turning into beasts are all forgotten by the majority who experience these terrors. The ability to forget helps us to survive. This obvious blessing becomes an enemy, however, when a person endeavors to grow spiritually. The reason for the exercises and all discipline is to keep us remembering. The exercises must become so much a part of you that you begin to hunger for them as part of your diet. The necessity for discipline is obvious. We cannot produce anything without it.

Everything in nature has its cycles and patterns. Everything that becomes a living part of you does so when it forms part of your pattern. Practicing the exercises over and over again through the course of time makes them a natural function. The positive effect produced becomes an essential part of your chemistry and develops within you an even deeper need. Until a pattern develops with the chemical need for the inner work, there is no possibility for continuity. It must become a fact of life for you that you cannot survive the early stages of your development unless you work every day.

When you accept an image of another person as God or another’s pattern of development as your own, you are distorting the energy by bringing it through your mind. Spiritual energy, to do its job, works according to its own nature, which is creativity in the pure sense. It requires surrendering your will so that "Thy will be done." You must allow the spirit to guide you; it is incorrect for you to guide it. We cannot handle soap bubbles, and spiritual force is even finer than soap bubbles. We can follow the bubbles easily only if we keep our consciousness on them.

Pressures and unhappiness result from growing through exercising the will. A man who has given up his own realization, because of his inability to surrender, for the realization found in another is like a beggar who looks at someone else’s meal and refuses to eat his own crust of bread. But the beggar is luckier, because he may someday know what a full meal tastes like. A man not enjoying what he can have today will never enjoy anything. Every day there is something wonderful in our lives. There is an exquisite flower, even in pain, if we can become detached.

Each person represents a symbolic situation for the person pursuing spiritual development. To attain understanding, you must see each person as a potential force for your own good. From this you obtain direction and objectivity, which you must then consciously surrender. While in threatening situations, all thoughts and ideas must be kept flowing so that the energy will present a solution. Usually the feeling within us upon being threatened is to protect the image of ourselves. As you develop you attract situations which are a test of your growth. Because the situations are a threat emotionally, you cannot stay open and perceive that which challenges you, and therefore you close and reject them. Inner work and surrender require a situation to be kept in a state of flow. Because the student does not close to the situation, new insights become apparent every day. It is through this change of pattern that you free yourself.

There is usually inertia in us that leads us to maintain our patterns, regardless of our discomfort and lack of harmony. Movement and change are the most difficult qualities for us to accept as essential for life. Usually ourwhole purpose is to make a situation secure and free of change.

Our strongest drives are for material gain and not for inner change and enlightenment. Most people pursuing a spiritual life feel realized as they add to their inner existing spiritual patterns. However, these patterns all exist on one level and therefore cannot be considered evolving. You should be working to evolve, not to maintain a level.

Instinct is the emotion of an animal which maintains itself on one level throughout its life. Man, being an animal on many levels simultaneously, cannot maintain himself by his instinct but must continually change and evolve if he is ever to understand his true nature. He never loses many of his animal instincts but seams to rise above them and consciously control them as creative flow. Consciousness is the understanding and control of instinct so that we are free to use the creative flow for our higher evolvement. Consciousness brings freedom, in which we have to continually exercise our discipline to pursue the inner flow that brings about our growth. It is never an automatic process. A man pursuing a higher spiritual life will never know the quiet that an animal enjoys. We were not made to sleep as an animal does, but to continually overcome ourselves. We must fight for the choices which allow us to grow spiritually, according to our spirit, not our instinct.

It is difficult for a man seeking spiritual enlightenment to maintain a seeking mind and an open attitude. Usually a person who has progressed spiritually will bring to a teacher all of his mind and attitudes instead of his surrender. Either you are seeking with an open attitude in a sense of nothingness, or else you are blocking and presenting obstacles to growth. Many of the problems that occur between a slightly advanced student and his progress have to do with his own growth. When you enter a temple or place of Teaming it should be as a student or disciple and not as a critic. A spirit of meditation is called for, not a state of lamentation. Leave all heaviness outside.

I have many times met great teachers and found obvious differences of attitude and direction between myself and them. I never tried to analyze these differences or in any way challenge the teachers. By accepting the total whole which is given, our psychic system takes from the teaching that which is required.

A great deal of the effort in learning is given to surrender so that there is not internal conflict during the assimilation process. In the very act of relating, you take a psychological stand in which the results are predictable. If you find yourself always approaching your teacher in an argumentative state, you should leave, or else a long, unfruitful relationship may develop. To assume the position of student is to approach someone you credit with a quality you desire. By surrender you allow information and energy to be transmitted. It is difficult for a person to maintain an open attitude as resistance during a teaching relationship increases. Psychic transference produces in a student many emotional situations which are symbolic of the resistance which in an "intellectual" learning situation manifests itself as intellectual differences.

Your learning psyche undergoes continual emotional upheavals which challenge your everyday life pattern. If you cannot overcome them, you will be lost in them and thus lose your immediate objective. Often while studying in a new temple a student encounters activities taking place which act as magnets drawing his attention. This situation is calculated to test your attention. You should not be diverted from your first purpose. A person who will settle for less than the complete being of his teacher will identify himself with the various activities that are taking place.

I have seen a teacher and his disciples pass a full day in discussing various Indian books, theorizing, and analyzing. This has nothing to do with spiritual development but succeeds in creating an image of the intellectual man who can proudly tell his friends how he and a swami agreed on a particular theory. Spirituality exists in a higher dimension; only by surrendering the lower dimension can one attain the higher.

One of the unfortunate aspects of spirituality is the need for the student to have recognition from his teacher. Sometimes a miracle which is essential for the growth of the student will take place. If there is need of recognition, it is the duty of the student to present this fact to the teacher. You can only expand those qualities which you receive recognition for from your teacher. The spiritual gift must always be tested for it to exist. The gift must also be used for it to grow and it must be defended if it is to stay alive. A man who assumes his growth and keeps it a secret from his teacher does not attract the natural enemies of his growth. I always told my experiences to my fellow students. It was like exposing a gas and having it become a liquid. The change of state made visible something I could not previously see. Never retain in the world of imagination what can be brought into reality.

An animal, with its natural sense of self-preservation, has the instinct when in danger to hide itself in its natural environment. Man, in a situation that threatens him or that involves new conditions, usually reacts emotionally. In a threatening situation, he usually tries to retain the familiar conditions of his existence. I have had friends move great distances, shipping furniture which cost a great deal more than it was worth, even though the furniture did not fit the new home. They were paying emotional ransom to make the transition in their lives less painful. It is bad to do this when you break a deep relationship. Old attachments may take from a new relationship essential energy which might stunt its future. In spiritual work it is essential at some time to separate from the teacher so that our connection with God or higher creative energy can be stronger.

Emotional reaction is based on our inability to accept the changes which express our growth. This also tends to slow our growth. We are unable to accept two conditions simultaneously and function objectively. The possibility of understanding and overcoming any type of threatening situation is decreased by changing any of the otherwise familiar aspects of the situation. Usually when you are threatened you will try to protect yourself by withdrawing from the situation and will project your insecurity onto other people. If it were possible for you to accept the external conditions while the new situation develops, you would be able to maintain your objectivity as existing conditions help reinforce and nourish both situations.

The force of death feeds the force of rebirth and this creative force may threaten an evolving person. The move from one stage to another in development leaves a vacuum. The student is usually so overjoyed to attain a new level of being that he forgets to watch for those forces which try to take it away. Each move you make brings about a test which tries the newly acquired growth. if you cannot, through a higher consciousness, overcome the test, you lose that which you think you attained and must once again work through that which you feel you have just finished. The most difficult part of holding the evolvement is overcoming the assumption that the advance is permanent. When facing the old conditions again, you are less prepared psychologically than you were before taking the original test.

If someone is faced with a threatening situation, it is often possible for him to isolate the situation, thereby moving out of his own familiar objective conditions into unfamiliar psychological surroundings. This allows for the more rapid development of the new situation. A new situation within the confines of your ordinary life develops slowly and is threatened by all previously existing conditions. It is much easier to fall in love out of town, away from the criticism of your family and friends. The hunger is also greater as there is a lack of nourishment about.

Previous conditions tend to retard the growth of the new situation and test it by known relationships and familiar environments. It is not a question of the situation being right or wrong, but of giving it a complete test which is fair for all those involved. For example, a man who is interested in a woman who for some reason is unacceptable to his friends and family will always isolate the relationship to avoid bringing forth criticism. Usually it is the psychic threat that produces a permanent negative attitude. Strength comes about by exposing the situation to all tests and being able to keep it healthy. Rooting can occur in the dark, but growth takes place in the light.

We identify ourselves with whatever level we are attached to. People fighting for their material life hear and read continually about the things which pertain to business, changes in the economy, etc., and are completely wrapped up in that. People who are involved in their sexual life are continually dieting and working like an army preparing for battle. They see every look as either acceptance or rejection. Their entire energy goes into this level of being.

To grow spiritually is to see everything as God. Endless stories have been handed down as folk tales which express the inability of man to see God. A classic one is about a beggar coming to the door asking for food and being rejected. The beggar turns out to be God. It is the symbol of how people respond to the outer appearance rather than to the inner need.

When we have attained control over the physical level, through responsibility and discipline, we can then express our energy on a higher level. Tension on one level keeps the energy from rising to a higher level and expressing itself, thus giving us a choice. The ability to surrender has to do with having the quality either to transcend the situation and thus move on to another level, or to fulfill the situation on the level at which it occurs, and through maturity, detach in a natural way. A man who works and earns a good living and who has normal values should in no way risk his life for money. If he does, then money is his God. There are people for whom sex is God; there are people for whom power is God. There are people who have everything in life and yet pursue a political career which puts them under enormous pressure, exposes them to great degradation, and in every way makes life intolerable. These kinds of extremes reveal what the need is.

Society has made certain objectives desirable and made them symbolic of an ultimate goal. In religion it is the priest or minister who becomes the heavenly image. Ironically this is no longer a spiritual position but a political position that does not serve to advance the spiritual life but rather control it through power. Regardless of the capacity of the development of a person when he enters the church, once he assumes a power position, he becomes that. His natural love of God has to be demeaned "for the good of the church." The man who idealistically enters politics because he wants to effect a change begins to be ensnared in the party, in the buying and selling of votes, and slowly becomes a party politician. People are endlessly expressing the feeling that they have done the most good for the most people, instead of doing the right thing. The continual appeasement of the pressures they attract keeps them from relating to the highest creative potential within themselves. Creative energy, the opportunity to change, or seeing the hand of God expressed in a situation, has to do with the ability to see a higher quality in a situation.

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Index

CHAPTER TWO

Spiritual Work:

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