24 QUESTION: How can a dormant power of concentration be revived?

ANSWER: This is very individual, but in your case I would like to give you special advice and I will need a little time – just a moment. This is what I have to say: There is both a great strength and a little tense strength in you. As long as you do not relieve the tension, it will be difficult for you to awaken the strength. In order to do that, you will need to take certain measures yourself. And when you do that, you will actually begin to feel this tenseness and when you do feel it, then you will be a step nearer to releasing this clot you have in your soul.

As long as you cannot clearly feel it, you will be unable to eliminate it, for you cannot handle something you are not aware of. You may be aware now of the existence of it by its symptoms, but you do not understand yet what it consists of. And this is why you have to find out. Your past endeavors of concentration were going in a wrong direction, my friend.

You will have to change the direction of your search, that is, you have to probe into your own soul, getting to know yourself fully. Forget about your inability to concentrate generally for the time being and start searching for your own soul, your own innermost feelings and motives. This is the only way you can dissolve the knot in you. This is the only way you will begin to feel the almost physically appearing clot in you. And when you find it, do not push it back, thinking you can eliminate it that way. On the contrary, welcome it like a long-lost friend and draw it out into consciousness.

You may ask: How do I go about it? This I could not possibly show you even in an entire lecture, but you will find the answer, my friend, by following my instructions in the series of lectures I will begin shortly. I mentioned earlier that I will start this course through which all my friends who do not attend private sessions will be able to proceed step by step in the proper direction of inner self-development, of making hidden emotions, fears or problems conscious and dealing with them properly.

Your question now touches merely a symptom of an entire psychological block and this cannot possibly be solved by one answer or simple advice I could give you now. This you must understand. The only thing I can tell you now is that you have searched in the wrong direction. You have to search much nearer, in yourself.

You have to start on the road of self-recognition in a much more profound way. It is a new way of life and you will be able to get really started when we begin the course. It will mean a lot even to those friends who come privately to work with me. This will not be a waste of time for them, but will be an additional help, even though some of what I will say will not be quite new to them.

Then you will learn, my friend, how exactly to go about dissolving this clot or block, step by step. You cannot do it by one single measure, by a certain prescribed formula, but it is a new way of life, as you will see, too. Your spiritual foundation is a good one and this helps. But it is something psychological that is in your way. I mean to concentrate on this in the course we will begin.

As long as the psychological blocks are not dissolved, the spiritual development cannot go on—or if it does go on in some way, it is not a thorough or an efficient way. There is then always a discrepancy that you have to iron out sooner or later. If you do not, it will finally backfire. There has to be harmony between the spiritual and the emotional levels.

For the time being, it is important for you to realize that you cannot dissolve such a psychological block in any other way than the one I will guide you on in this group; that you have so far searched in the wrong direction and have to alter the direction by asking yourself about yourself and giving yourself extremely honest answers. Meditate on this. Find out what your fears are, what you really desire, who you really are.

That will get you started on this road. If you succeed in finding out something about yourself in the meantime, if you can answer some questions that you have not answered so far and thus begin to gain greater self-knowledge, you may occasionally come to feel this block very clearly and what its real significance is.

This block does not merely consist of one thing, but of a number of interacting subconscious tendencies, fears and resistances. These use up your inner strength and, among other things, prevent you from being able to concentrate as much as you desire.

You are not satisfied with my answer, I know, my friend. It is not what you would have liked to hear. You would have liked to receive one ready-made recipe, supposed to dissolve your difficulty with one sweep. But, unfortunately, it can never be done that way.

It is only through the long road of self-knowledge and self-recognition that the answers will gradually make a whole, the answers that you yourself have to find. Everything else is not truth and therefore I cannot say it. But where humans do need help is to know how to go about it, and that you will learn gradually by following this course.

There is a great possibility in you, spiritually speaking, but this is blocked by psychological subconscious trends which can be dissolved only in the above-mentioned way. There is no ready-made formula. That is the truth, my friend, and I know you do not like to hear this. I can do you much more good telling you the truth than telling you something according to your expectancy. And you have the means at your disposal to find out that it is so.

QA197 QUESTION: In an old lecture [Lecture #71 Reality and Illusion – Concentration Exercises], I found your description of concentration exercises for trying to be in a state of not thinking of anything in particular. In doing this, I felt as if I were going into some kind of a state. Maybe you can help me by telling me what it means?

ANSWER: Can you describe how you felt that state? How you experienced that state? Did you experience fear about it? Did you experience resistance about it? What particularly did you feel?

QUESTION: First my breathing became very labored and deep, and then I felt as if I were pushing against something, as if I wanted to break through something and I couldn’t. I almost could say it was like going into a trance, but I didn’t go through it.

ANSWER: In the first place, there is fear in you of letting go into the involuntary processes. You know that. It is much less. You have made indeed a very, very great progress this last year, particularly the last few months. So you did break through one aspect of your wall that was inaccessible until a few months ago.

But there is more to be broken through, and if this fear, this inner holding, this unconscious holding, still exists – even though you may consciously express your desire to let go all the way, to trust in the spiritual forces – it is because you still hold on to some negative patterns – much less than before, but you still do.

It is important that you really see in what specific way you do this, and then to the degree you can make a total commitment to give up the negativity, the negative intentionality, and make a commitment to the opposite positive intentionality, to that degree your fear will go.

Some processes will take place in you in which, in your own individual way – and this is different for every human being – you will experience ultimate reality, or snatches of it, to the degree your consciousness can experience this. Out of this, eventually a new expression will form, where again in your own individual way, the channel will be instituted by which you, for your path, can help other people in a more specific way.

That is what awaits everyone who is truly working on the Path. Not one is better than the other; not one is superior or inferior. All the various ways in which spiritual truth comes through into the Earth life and manifests creatively in the channel being cleared, more and more and more, that is exactly what is needed; for many different ways are needed to help people in different ways.

Even for people in this one nucleus – in this one group – many, many more wonderful things will come. You have already seen in the last few years how this group is constantly expanding, because fortunately you are not closing yourself up. You are truly growing. You are truly open, so that it does not remain a stagnant closed thing, where only that what you have already discovered is the valid thing.

For whatever validity it may have at the moment, it ceases to be valid if it remains stagnant on that point. This is the fate, unfortunately, of organized religion, or even of many other philosophies. They stay with what they have, and which was valid, but which becomes stagnant if it does not move on. And so far, thank the Lord, you have moved and grown. Therefore, you expand.

When I speak of expansion, I do not mean this merely numerically. That is the much less important thing, for numerically growing could also happen when spiritual stagnation exists. But as you really grow in caliber and the depth of your own path, to that extent you will open channels in the individuals, and so also in you. In individual ways, you will help other people and let the spiritual reality come through.

QA249 QUESTION: I have been doing the meditation you suggested that stops the thinking process. Recently, I have gotten much more energy from this meditation. The energy that surges can be very strong. I would like any suggestions you might have on how to handle and not misuse this energy. Also, do you mean to just try to stop the thinking for five minutes, twice a day, or to actually spend more time in getting the thinking stopped for five minutes?

ANSWER: You do not need to do this exercise more than about five minutes per day. Consider this merely as an exercise for the purpose of opening your channel. The energy released from this exercise should be intended for purposes of service to God’s plan, to God’s will, to purification and transformation of self.

It would be advisable to make a commitment to this effect every time you are about to do this exercise. State your intent to be in total truth, to remove all obstacles to truth, to give up all false ideas and fixations. There are some in you, still now. They are so firmly entrenched that you do not even consider them, and your progress goes around them, as the water circumvents the rocks in a stream.

But the time comes when this blockage must catch up with you, unless you freely choose to direct your gaze deliberately to all areas of your life, even those that you have kept inviolate until now. The more you free your soul in this way from encumbrances – false ideas, prejudices, fixations – the more this energy will nourish every particle of your soul and of your entire being.

This will enable you to become whole and to fulfill the utmost of your potentials in this incarnation. The released energy stream needs to be directed purposefully and wisely where it is most needed, where you possibly can still not see this need. But God knows and will guide you once you open your mind to this possibility.

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