151 QUESTION: What is the reason, and who bears the responsibility for the inability of the majority of humanity to perceive the cosmic force? Is it that most people are unaware of the cosmic force due to lack of development?
ANSWER: Yes, it is a lack of development, lack of awareness. Now, who bears the responsibility? Each individual, himself. The truth – so difficult to face for so many people – is that no one is ever responsible for anyone else. This may seem incomprehensible in view of certain historical events, or in view of superficial considerations when judging according to appearances and in possession of fragmentary truths. But in the last and deepest analysis, each individual entity is responsible for himself.
Whatever happens in the course of a life offers the opportunity for unfoldment and expansion of awareness. It is also quite true that a child in the lowest grade of school cannot understand what an adult understands. So it is not a sin when a person is unable to perceive. It is different when someone has the capacity, but is unwilling to do so – when a person could unfold and expand, but deliberately hinders it by needless destructiveness and obstinacy.
Today, humanity as a whole is exactly where it must be, where it cannot help being, for it is the sum total of all the individuals – past and present – who inhabit this Earth. Each individual has the opportunity to make every living second of life an occasion for expansion and growth. Anyone who seriously pursues this Path can corroborate this.
You can make whatever happens to you the greatest stepping stone, the best material for further growth, or you can allow it to influence you adversely. This applies not only to unhappy incidents, but equally to favorable events. They often retard growth as much as life’s traumas do. Favorable events may encourage laziness, stagnation and illusion.
What you make of anything that happens determines whether it will help or hinder the expansion of perception. People have a tendency to consider outer conditions as the decisive factors in their lives rather than their attitudes. It is always one’s attitudes that determine what is of real importance.
Cosmic forces can become available only through overcoming outer difficulties, which are the direct reflection of inner obstructions. Once you see this and know that you are responsible, you are on the road toward the realization of your real self – or to put the same thing differently – the realization of the universal powers.
QUESTION: As a physician, I ask if there is any way that the cosmic force can be applied in some way directly to human beings by physical means, by physical devices – not necessarily to solve the whole problem, but to help alleviate suffering and give direction. For instance, Wilhelm Reich’s accumulator and certain other devices, as explained by Cayce and other people who work with this – are they really attempts in that direction?
ANSWER: Yes, they are. These – and many, many others, in many corners of the Earth, which are not publicly known – are ways to channel the life force so it flows in humans where it should and could if an imbalance had not taken place in the system. It is possible to make the life force more available to the physical system through outer devices, thus opening the possibility for an inner penetration by the cosmic powers into the mental and emotional realms.
However, it must be understood that no matter how much of it can be made available through physical devices, the essence of the life force is a mental or a spiritual power. Its availability depends on mental or spiritual attitudes. The effect of physical devices must, after a while, wear off if the mentality does not become compatible with the nature of this cosmic power. It can be used physically and temporarily, to a certain degree, but that direction has a limit.
The best way to use the physical approach is to help the personality reorient itself, which may give to many the necessary stamina they otherwise lack. A change of personality does not make people lose their uniqueness, but rather makes them more uniquely themselves by eliminating distortions, imbalance, destructiveness.
The personality must become compatible with this power in order to no longer rely on devices from the outside, but to have the constant access to the inexhaustible source of this power deep within one’s own being. As long as people working from the outside understand this, all is well, because then they will not be disappointed when the effect does not last.
