QA124 QUESTION: I read an inspired book recently, wherein it was said that “we watch human beings and think of them as ripening. We never judge them. One may live and die, and he is simply not mature or ripe, as fruit must ripen. It takes a long time and much patience, so that one cannot live in fear of judgement – there isn’t any such thing.”

ANSWER: Exactly! Exactly! It is what I try to convey to my friends again and again. If perfection were a finished product, life would be a petrified dead thing and therefore it would be a contradiction in itself. Life is motion, and it is growth.

What is right and what is wrong varies. There is no hard and fast rule to it. This is so much better than the universe you fashion according to your fears, where you have to obey and where you want to be rewarded. Growing is perfection, but perfection varies.

One insight of a perhaps-in-itself insignificant little daily reaction is the highest spirituality, while postulating a beautiful concept of truth one cannot live means nothing. Insight into your destructiveness, acknowledging it, and thereby freeing yourself from it – that is true growth. That is coming nearer to the harmony and the peace and the truth of the divine.

This can never be a negative truth teacher, my friends. But it is so often your own hopelessness, with your very destructiveness, which you fear to look at, which makes you despair. Then this despair is projected; and often it is projected on the very Pathwork itself which you feel let you down.

Because you expect from it, unconsciously of course, a magic formula that sets your life right without the necessity of transforming in yourself, without the necessity of changing. The change, as you know and as we have so often seen and discovered and as I have often said, is the fear of the unknown. You fear change because it is unknown. You’ve got to find this specifically within yourself.

Once you pinpoint where you are afraid to change and in what respect you are afraid to change, in what specific respect and why, the hopelessness is going to vanish like snow in the sun, and you will no longer have magic expectations from the Path – and therefore you will no longer be let down.

QA147 QUESTION: My question has to do with changing my situation. It seems that it takes a series of quite terrible events to force me to actually change. I feel I am becoming accustomed to my condition, and I don’t see myself as climbing out of it in the future. Instead, I am being trapped into it more and more. What might be the first step and what is, perhaps, the attitude behind this?

ANSWER: Now, in the first place, I would like to answer here that human beings can be differentiated between the very, very, very great majority who will not take hold of the self, come to terms with the self in honesty, and look at the issues in honesty and dispassionate objectivity, unless things are desperate.

The human evolution is based on that the majority of beings do just that. They go on and on and on, and as long as there is a possibility of remaining in the status quo – even though their life is unhappy and unfulfilled and needlessly wasteful and disregards the marvelous potentials of the inner self and of life.

Even so, and even though this may be sensed, the conscious knowledge is denied. In wishful thinking, it is assumed life has to be that dismal, rather than taking hold of the self and saying, “Do I really have to live this way?”

There is a small, small, minority of people, especially after a certain point in their evolution has been reached, who do not wait that long, who say, “I will do the best. Already now – when I could easily get away with it, when my life is not that unhappy – I want to make it the best it possibly could be.” Those who do this are blessed indeed.

It is up to the individual in which category they want to belong. It does not require a special privilege granted by some outer authority or outer event to determine that you belong into this smaller minority of people.

It can be done any moment when you so decide, when you say, “This is what I want to do, this is what I’m going to do. I want to make the best of my life. Making the best of my life cannot possibly be a danger, for the more aware I will become, the more honestly I look at things, the more aware I will become of what can be detrimental or dangerous or what can be furthering for myself. To choose the alternative that furthers me cannot possibly be a danger. Therefore, this is the road I choose from now on. I will not wait till things get desperate, till there is tragedy, till there is no way out. I’ll choose now to make the best.”

If this thought is pursued, cultivated, and actively thought through – day in, day out – if this thought is meant, a new strength must come about. This is the first thing I have to say about your question.

The second thing I have to say is about change – the fear of change. The fear of change exists because of the overall negativity with which man views life, so that change only implies something threatening – something worse. The moment you are aware of the fact that you are afraid of change, you can immediately question the veracity of this concept.

You can verbalize within yourself the following question: “Is it necessarily true that change would give rise to fear, that it is justified to be afraid of it? Perhaps change can be just as much for the better. I make room for this possibility.”

Then the next question can be, “Do I want to make room for this possibility? Do I want to assume that things could be better?” Perhaps the answer that comes from within the self would be, “No, I do not want to assume that things could get better.”

But when this answer comes, then you can ask yourself, “Why? Why do I not want to assume that things get better? Why do I want to believe that things could only go from bad to worse?” Many answers are possible here, as I have said many times, not the least of them being spitefulness in some way.

Now, when you ascertain this, you can ask yourself the question, “What is more important for me, my spite or wasting my best potentials and every desirable aspect of living?”

There must come a point in this self-questioning when a choice has to be made. Each question in a way is a choice. The choice when you say, “Do I choose to wait till things get desperate so that I give up my preconceptions of ‘things could only get worse,’ or my spitefulness that wants to assume that things must get worse, or the choice of giving up a possibly wrong belief, whatever it may be?”

These choices must be made with each question. And each question that is honestly faced and tackled in this way and honestly looked upon – and even before the choice is actually made, but when the personality knows the choice here must be made, “What answer will I give to life when I answer this question?” – each such choice increases the inner strength of the personality. Each evasion of such a choice weakens the personality. This is my answer.

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