12 QUESTION: One hears people say again and again, “If God exists, and there is indeed a divine order, how can it be that so many terrible things happen on Earth?”
ANSWER: You all know, you have all learned, that human beings forge their own destinies. That you have to carry such heavy burdens is the result of breaking spiritual laws, often unconsciously. Still, this will not sufficiently explain to you events like wars, in which, through the decision of a few, many who seem innocent have to suffer a heavy fate. To this I reply: first of all, even in mass or group disasters, an individual will never need to experience anything that does not fit into his or her own destiny.
Second, every person, except those very few who have already reached a higher state of purification, is also sharing the responsibility for wars and other mass disasters. Not only the politicians or those few who visibly and publicly shape world history are to be made responsible for wars, but every single person who, with impure thoughts and emotions, pollutes the cosmic reservoir. And this, one day, must have its effect.
Each thought of hate, of separation, of egoism, of injustice, of discrimination, of wanting more for oneself than for one’s neighbor, in short, each thought that breaks God’s laws, is a building block in that enormous spiritual structure – war – which must first be formed in spirit before it can manifest destruction on the material plane. If only a small part of humankind sowed the seeds of peace, wars would not exist, in spite of a few unscrupulous politicians.
Most people, including you, my friends, harbor thoughts of anxiety and, if not thoughts of hate, then of mistrust and separation, such as between one group and another – and all of these violate the law of brotherhood. Each thought of this kind, each emotion, is a significant contribution to the outbreak of war.
Only when you purify yourself from within, cleanse your emotions and thoughts, and so best fulfill your destiny wherever you are placed, can you become also a carrier of peace. Indirectly, by living spiritually, people can do more for or against war than politicians or statesmen, my dear friends.
22 QUESTION: Is it true that during World War II, there was a danger point also in the battle of the heavens, parallel to the height of power of Hitler before the Russian debacle?
ANSWER: Oh, no my friends! Oh no! You see, if there was still a danger point on that score, the salvation through Christ would make no sense. Since that war between Christ and Lucifer, and since the salvation, everything is established and runs according to plan. The free will of the individual plays a role in it; there is always enough leeway left for that, in both directions.
Nevertheless, up to a certain point of development, until they have found a certain spiritual light in an overall development, collectively, people will have wars on your Earth. In principle, from a spiritual point of view, the last wars were no worse than the wars you had hundreds and thousands of years ago, because it is not a question of how many people are killed. The question is the motive. And the motives have certainly purified in the latest wars, not only the very last.
With that I do not mean to say that one side is always entirely right and the other is entirely wrong. There is always some wrong on both sides, certainly. In recent times, when people make war, they may be mistaken in their ideologies, but at least there is always some ideology behind it, even if there are some ruthless people who are completely selfish.
The majority of the people follow some cause, some idea, while in former times they had to go to war like sheep. Their rulers forced them and they had absolutely no idea why. It was just the thing to do. Then the more you killed, the greater a hero you were. The rulers simply had their own advantages as their goals – to get more land, to get more power. Though people seem to be that way now too, even the most ruthless ones have deep convictions about their own ideas and ideals, wrong as they may be in themselves.
If they were completely ruthless, today they could not get away with this anymore, and could never induce whole nations to kill each other for their selfish interests. Deep down they know and sense this. There are some people who claim that the old way is still the case today, but they are entirely mistaken.
From the spiritual point of view, the question is not how bloody a war is, how effective your weapons are. From our angle, what matters is the motive. Even if you are mistaken, if your motive has some vestiges of decency, it is far better than what happened in former times. It is true that a sincere but mistaken motive to go to war will not save you from the consequences, because ignorance does not alter the law of cause and effect.
What is absolutely true is that the sincere though false motive is not evaluated in the same way as the purely selfish and wicked one – and therefore this must also eventually have an effect. This alone should be an answer to people who claim there is no advance in spiritual development. For there is! And this is one of the many proofs.
People will reach eventually – and it is to be hoped that this will happen in the not too faraway future – an understanding that war can never be a solution. There was and is spiritual progress, but not measured by technical progress. The mere fact that technical and material progress has been going on so fast in comparison to spiritual progress will force people to come to this conclusion and this enlightenment.
As long as people do not fight their lower selves and thus become enslaved to them and to the powers of darkness, the outer expression of this state will be, among other things, war. But when this fight in individual and personal development will have reached a certain stage, when people have reached a step nearer to God in a certain definite way, wars will not be possible anymore.
If only a certain percentage of human beings – by no means even half of the world population, but only a small part, one tenth, and perhaps not even that – would really follow the spiritual development and purification I advocate, overcoming their own lower trends, recognizing in self-honesty their own lower nature, and thus finishing the war that is raging in almost every human soul, the outpouring of energy forms in the form of warfare will cease to exist.
There is hardly a person, even in this room, in whom a war is not going on inside, a war that is not recognized as yet, where one trend of the subconscious wants to go this way, and the other that way. And your consciousness does not know it. This creates wars on this Earth – your unrecognized hatred, your unrecognized selfishness, your unrecognized lack of love, and so on.
Once you control this – it does not mean you have to be completely purified, but you control it, you are aware of it – even if only less than one-tenth of the entire human population will reach that stage, I assure you, war will be impossible. But to say that this war was created because of the war of the spirits cannot possibly be right.
QUESTION: Are we to understand that it does not matter so much how many people are killed and that this is not regrettable?
ANSWER: My dear, this depends entirely on the way you look at it, from what point of view. As far as you human beings are concerned, you should be very responsible, not only about the life of your fellow-creatures, but also their well-being. It is your personal responsibility. So certainly, you should never adopt the point of view that what happens to others does not matter.
This distortion may serve people’s lowest instincts. It is your sacred duty, just as it is to do your best for your own development for your own life, also to be concerned with the life of every other person. In some way, you are bound to everyone else, even your worst enemy. That person is you and you are that person. But from the spiritual point of view, the question of how many people were killed in a war is not the important matter.
There, the important matter is what the motive is, how the spiritual attitudes of everyone involved look to us. Also, you must not forget that the clockwork of the laws is so perfect that nothing unjust can come to any single individual. But that does not mean that you are free to commit sins, to be careless about the lives of others by leaning heavily on the fact that no injustice can happen to anyone anyway. You cannot do injustice to another being, but you can harm yourself by violating the laws of love.
29 QUESTION: In the case of war, is the act of killing by a soldier contrary to divine law?
ANSWER: No, it is not. For as Jesus Christ has said, render unto God what is God’s, and render unto Caesar that which is due to him. If human beings on the Earth sphere are still so far behind in development that war is necessary, then people have to fight for their country. Even if all people refused to fight, evil would not be eliminated.
War may be temporarily eliminated, but certainly not evil. War is only one of many other expressions of evil. War is not the cause: it is only an effect. It would be the same if a father allowed a murderer to come into his house and kill his wife and children without defending them. He must defend those he loves and evil has to be fought against.
In your present state of development, unfortunately, war often is still your means of fighting evil. As spiritual development grows, you will learn to go more to the roots of the problems and fight against evil in better ways. As it stands now, humanity is often forced to battle against forces that abuse free will and divine law. If people take the power upon themselves to prevent other people from living as God wants them to live, and if your world has not found other means as yet to eliminate this wrong, then war is the lesser evil.
You know from the spiritual point of view that death is not the worst thing that can happen. Spiritual death is the worst, not physical death. Every person is judged individually, and the judgement comprises also the circumstances and the environment in which he or she lives.
In the Spirit World, the real motives count more than the act, and judgement is not passed generally or collectively. Everyone is judged separately, and if a man goes to war simply to defend his country, this will not count against him. What counts is a person’s inner attitudes, feelings, reactions, motives, and sense of responsibility.
45 QUESTION: Regarding the mass images, are we then born into a race-image and a creed-image? What happens, for instance, if someone of a different creed goes on the path – more specifically the path of Christ versus the Judaic one? In a way, friction and hatred of the former creed are then generated. What is the explanation?
ANSWER: Some souls are still very much involved with their own race or creed images because their personal psychological factors, that is, their personal image currents, work together with the respective mass image. Then they will not feel inclined to break the image for some time to come. Several incarnations are necessary before a rigidity can loosen up.
Others, born into the same race or creed, are already at the point of dissolving their race or creed image. They have already dissolved their personal images to some extent, or they have different personal images that are less interdependent with the respective mass image, or they have none at all.
On this point, there is so much controversy and personal feeling that the image prejudice will prevent nearly everyone from hearing anything about the subject. The same applies to nationality. There are some people born into a country where there is perhaps a strong trend of nationalism and exaggerated patriotism. They remain in this country, and it never occurs to them that their own outlook is prejudiced.
Others, born into the same country, feel an urge to get out, to see other countries and people, and thus broaden their view. It is the same with the religious mass-images. One person is still more involved, the other is beginning to come out of it. One is more developed, at least in this respect. In another respect the one who is still one-sided and prejudiced may be further along. But in this one respect, the former has begun to destroy the effect caused by the mass image of his or her civilization.
What you see going on in your time is a gradual but very definite destruction of mass imagery about nationalism. Therefore, from our point of view, even the upheaval and the dreadful sorrows of war have their good points. For without these upheavals, people would not go from one country to another and broaden their views. This destroys their mass images and, eventually, often affects their personal images. The same will happen in religion.
Therefore, it is shortsighted to think that a dreadful occurrence on this Earth, even war, does not lead humanity toward development and spiritual fulfillment. The fulfillment is so inevitable that it must happen one way or another.
Even if humanity still has not found the way to peace, the wrong alternative must also lead toward the goal of unity and freedom from illusion, or mass images. Certainly, violence and hatred, prejudice and selfishness, all the causes of war, are unspiritual. But many people still find themselves in such a state.
Only by going on and on will they gradually lose such blindness. Yet, despite the existence of such currents, development cannot be checked, for the result of wars and similar upheavals is always toward the one end: spiritual evolvement, union, freedom from one’s own inner chains. If you look at history from this angle, you will think a little differently.
As it works in the individual, so it works for humanity as a whole: the hardship one goes through because one has sown the seeds for it, is the very medicine for becoming free of it. That does not mean that you should propagate war.
46 GUIDE COMMENT: You see, my dear ones, all the miseries on this Earth, the real problems such as criminality, war, injustices of any kind, disease, and other serious problems, are the result of faults of long standing. When we spirits are asked what is the remedy for this or that situation – be it general or personal – the answer cannot be given so easily. For a whole chain reaction has to be followed through, and often in an unpleasant way, until you get to the roots of the problem.
All severe problems are due to some raging, vicious circle that has to be crystallized out and understood in order to find these roots. The final and last link of the whole chain reaction – the one that manifests outwardly, while the previous links are hidden from sight – has to be helped, certainly.
But this treatment will always be a painful one, particularly if the inner root is not sought while the outer remedy is applied of necessity. So, for instance, war is certainly tragic, but it is in certain instances a last resort that is even necessary, because humanity has neglected to look for the inner roots of the problems.
QA254 QUESTION: In a lecture once, you responded to a question by saying that if only 10 percent – or even less – of the world’s people recognized the existence of their unconscious negativity and took responsibility for it, there would be no more war. My job involves working with people with the goal of raising consciousness and sparking action to end war. Yet, much of the work is done on an outer level alone.
My personal conflict is that I sense that what you said is, in fact, the key to this goal. Yet, I wonder if this can be communicated to people who are not part of a Pathwork like ours, and who may be skeptical and/or who may say they want to work to end war but that the personal purification process has little connection to this effort. I wonder too how this recognition of unconscious negative intent can be brought to the general public.
You once told me I was at war inside, and so it was no wonder I felt a conflict about my work to end war. I still feel this inner war and still have unresolved doubts about the role of war in human evolution. I would like your guidance about this conflict and I want to be open to whatever help you can provide that will help me to do this task in truth.
ANSWER: It is entirely possible to communicate the truth to people not on this Path. Some will understand and be enriched; others will not. In fact, they will not want to understand. When you communicate a divine truth, you can never receive a guarantee that everyone will agree and accept. Also, you can make clear that it is not a question of either doing all that is necessary on the outer level or working with people’s inner, secret negativities. Both need to be done, of course.
But so far, the need for the latter has been grossly negated – ignored. You can risk giving forth what you know and it will have very important effects. Your inner warfare has been greatly reduced. But you must know that. You also know that certain wars are a lesser evil than the alternative that would be the result of not going to war.
Such a situation is the result of long neglect of the truth, long evasions, illusions, and acting out of negativities in a mutuality. Just as with individuals, so here, the crisis must be taken as a means to change one’s entire approach to life. For those who are interested in eliminating war, long-range views must be taken that often appear to be far afield.
When wars are truly understood in terms of building up over long periods of time, it will become quite clear that personal negativities directly effect collective happenings. So be not afraid of voicing your truth. You will be guided and are blessed in this task.
