27 GUIDE COMMENT: Here is another bit of advice, my friends, on an outer detail. When you sit here, or at any time when you meditate, I would advise you to be entirely relaxed, and also not to sit with your legs or arms crossed. Hold your hands with the palms upward, for in a good meditation, whether it is a trance session or simply a meditation, strong forces are present.

You are most receptive in the palms of your hands, and these forces can better penetrate into you through them. There may be physical healing forces present, or some spiritual force that you need, and perhaps a force that will help you to overcome some of your psychological problems. Whatever it is, it is important for you. However, if you keep your limbs crossed, you cut off this current. This is why I advise you to do it.

To sit this way all the time may seem like a hardship at first, but if you learn to be entirely relaxed, you will be able to sit like this for hours and will not feel it. You will almost feel your hands lifted; you will not even have to support them in your lap any more. They will lift by their own accord, as though an outer power were at work. You will not feel any weight in them. If you can succeed in this, without too much forced concentration, you should be entirely relaxed and should feel a very beneficial effect.

QA128 QUESTION: I have noticed in my development recently that I very often get into what you call in your lectures “the stream of life.” There seems to be a steady, pleasant feeling about it and everything seems to go well. Yet, it so often happens every day that something slips and the moment I’m distracted, I’m thrown off the clear track. Then I find that something distracts me. I usually can trace that reason why it happens, but can you suggest some kind of a general method one can catch oneself doing it, so that one can switch back to the right current somehow?

ANSWER: Yes. One thing is, at this moment when it is observed, to realize: “I am now not in contact with myself. I am not in the Now of this moment with myself; I’m removed from myself.”

The meditation I further advise is: “I contact the presence within, the infinite intelligence within, requesting that I know what it is that really disturbs me now. I send this thought into the divine substance, and I release it in the full confidence it will come back. There is no need for my depression or fear, and I wish to penetrate this without compulsion or hurry or fear or tension. I quietly wait until this moment and what goes on in me in this moment and my relationship – the relationship between me and this moment – is revealed to me from within me. This is what I wish. I quietly wait.”

A meditation of this sort would then bring up why this relapse has occurred, or this apparent relapse. What are the remnants of and the still unresolved dark spots that have to be worked through?

Then the Path will proceed dynamically, without stopping, without stagnation. The cultivation of the proper assertion at the moment, pertaining to the self and its blind spots, is something of immeasurable importance. The constant assertion is that this is what you wish, and this is what you realize is possible if you enlist the help available to you. But you have to assert this desire.

Also, whatever unpleasant mood exists in you, pinpoint it, pronounce it, and pronounce also your calm desire to get to the next level of it – that it manifests, out of your unconscious, what is the significance of it. If this is done, there will be no stagnation.

QA129 QUESTION: I’m confused about ways of meditating. I know you’ve spoken about reviewing your daily life [Lecture #17 The Call – Daily Review]; I know there are people who keep their minds clear and just listen; I know there are other people who fix their mind on an idea or an object. Are these also effective ways of meditating?

ANSWER: Of course, any way that a person experiences help would be effective. Now, what is effective for one person may not necessarily be effective for another person. It is usually my advice, instead of using an object for concentration, that one uses the very fact and issues that come up in your personal life.

In other words, use yourself in order to understand yourself, and in order to understand your reactions. You may just as well combine the art of learning concentration with understanding the psychic processes of yourself. Therefore the daily review I recommend is to take the day past and look where you felt in any kind of disharmony.

In fact, you can use meditation before you begin in order to give you better concentration – by simply expressing the desire and the thought, sending this thought deep into your recesses of yourself by simply stating, “The inner forces, the wiser forces, existing within me, can give me that help to make this here meditation the most fruitful and the most constructive. And I request that this be given to me, and I know that this thought will have its effect.”

Then you go through the day and you look, where did you have negative feelings? Simply state the occasion and state the kind of feeling you registered. Constantly express the desire not to shirk any issue, to truly look at what you really felt, and then look why you felt it. This will get you most actively started onto this particular Path. From there on it will show where you are going.

Use the meditation in order to make the meditation more concentrated and more fruitful. When you have an issue in which you are deeply negatively involved, hold on to yourself, relax for a moment, inwardly, and send the thought into yourself, “I am now in untruth, because if I am confused or anxious or hostile or hopeless or depressed, I cannot be in truth. I wish to be in truth. And I request the divine intelligence as a presence within myself to show me where and how. I let go of all my self-will, of all my fear, of all my pride, and just want to see the truth, so that I can expand and live constructively and fulfill my destiny as a happy creature – for this is what I’m meant to be. All the limitations within me, I wish to annul them, to dissolve them, but I cannot do that unless I know what they are, and I want to look at them.”

Then take each day each little issue – none is unimportant – and determine where you were in disharmony. This is where your real problem will eventually come through, even if the outer issue seems entirely insignificant. This is the way I recommend meditation.

QA154 QUESTION: I felt this afternoon a very warm feeling inside that my whole being was controlled somehow from my center, in my abdomen, rather than from my head. I said the same thing about four months ago. But yet, in the interim, for the most part, I haven’t really felt this way – I kind of lost it. Is there any kind of concentration to get that kind of feeling back?

ANSWER: Yes. Well, the first understanding you already have is that it cannot be always a gradual, uninterrupted line forward or upward or inward. It fluctuates, because it is vacillating. It goes back and forth. The fear and the misconceptions do not recede at once; they come back. And there is this battle going on.

Now, when you are in the periods where this recedes again, where you fall into the old state, know that in the moment you lost it, there is something in you that feared the further expansion of this good feeling. You have experienced inklings of what it is to be a self, deeply centered within – where all the warmth and good feelings and pleasure and all the knowledge and all the truth and love and all the guidance and all the solutions come from.

You have come to the position where these are no longer fairy tales and theories you hear expounded and postulated by me or others. But you have actually and factually experienced this for moments.

The further expansion – for knowing this must bring further and further and further territory to be gained and conquered along this way – will always be there. “This is nice to be that far, but can I go further? Is this not then more dangerous?” the cautious fearful side inside asks.

When you feel disconnected from your center, the best procedure would be to precisely recall what I said here: something in you is afraid to go to a next step. Again determine, “I will go all the way; I want to go all the way. I want to see the truth as it applies to me at this moment. What is the truth, my truth of this moment? I direct the real self, my divine center in me, to guide me, to inspire me, to show me; I want to be aware of whatever it is I should be aware of at this moment.”

Let this instruction in all firmness and determination sink in and let it come to fruition. Let go of this decision – you utter it and you let it drop, you let go of it. There is a kind of feeling when one makes such a decision but one still hangs on to it – this may sound ununderstandable, but I think my friends who listen with their feelings will know what I’m talking about – and then one can make such a decision and it is really let go of.

You utter it, and it drops into that tremendous reservoir of divine substance in you which you feel in these positive moments. It is the creative force you mold with and create your life with and determine your circumstances with.

Now, in these moments also, when you are free, when you are God-connected, meditation will be doubly effective, because the obstruction isn’t there. You do not have to send the thoughts through all these layers that cover up this center again.

Often people find in the happy times they do not think of meditating, and in the negative times it is difficult to do so. So I would say in both times it is equally important to initiate again the interrelationship between the outer ego self with its will, where you initiate the first steps of the decision, and then let the real self go to work.

Also, this can apply to the meditation itself. I said this at one time before, and this is a very important point that ought to be remembered by my friends. You can, with your outer determination, with your ego self and your ego will, call upon the real self to meditate, to make the proper meditation at this moment.

In other words, you send in, whether it is the time where you’re disconnected or whether it is the good time when you feel open and connected in your state. Then you say into it, “I wish to be inspired with the right thoughts, the right knowing, the right instructions, the right utterances, the right acknowledging and assertions for this moment, so that the meditation is made by me, inspired by my real self so that it makes the circle. The real self inspires me, my conscious ego, with the words, which I then pronounce by the conscious ego so that they fall into the sea of creative substance.”

It is this round circular movement. And the right meditation will come out of you and will make you utter the right thought forms, which, in turn, will influence the creative substance in you so that a new, favorable situation will be created where you perpetuate and are in a self-perpetuating, self-regulating positive cycle. This is the way the positive cycles are being created, instead of from the negative one.

QA172 QUESTION: Very often I receive this guidance that suggests to ask for inner guidance from the inner self. {Yes} Just how do you go about that?

ANSWER: This is not as simple as it may appear. And even the friends who are on the Path have to learn this only gradually because there is no formula for it. Number one, the realization must be cultivated that the deliberate activation with the mind, with saying, “I want this specific guidance,” is tremendously powerful and brings a result.

The more specific you are about it, the more effective the result will be. The more general and vague it is, the more difficult it will be to perceive it, for it responds exactly in the way it is brought forth.

What we call meditation is this process of dialogue between the mind that activates it and the mind that then relaxes and lets the activation take place. You must learn to understand the language as it unfolds – in inspiration or from outside – as it comes in many different ways.

But it comes if it is truly wanted. The truly wanting to get answers, to be in truth, is the key. If you truly want it and you formulate that desire and you become more specific in the desire, then you establish this contact with the divine self, with the cosmic truth within you.

Also, understanding where you are on your path in each moment is necessary in order to make the right meditation. Because the right activation and meditation today may not be relevant tomorrow if you move forward.

So you have to meditate in order to be able to make the right meditation. You have to want to be in the truth of the moment, and with that truth of the moment, elicit the strength and the capacity to go on from there.

QA175 QUESTION: I would like a review on approaches to meditation. I’m feeling stuck, but when I’m here, I don’t feel so stuck – I feel the contact that makes it easier for me. Beyond anger, I have a block in my body between my shoulders, and not having an outlet for the anger, it is sometimes directed toward my daughter, my little girl. I realize that the body work can help me through this. But also, I have a block toward the body work because of my own self-destructive tendencies and my fear of the movement.

The feelings that are released in my body through movement makes me fear that all the self-destruction is then let loose. There’s a terror and an irrational kind of acting out sometimes – little spurts here and there. I’m afraid because my daughter is the nearest one and is the most helpless one; my daughter is the recipient of this.

ANSWER: My suggestion is that you work exactly in your meditation, first of all, with your resistance. In the first place, your anger, your resistance, your hate manifests in not wanting to move and to move only where you are safe.

Meditate directly with this facet and say that there is something in you that wants this – that does not want to give it up – but that there is another part in you that does not want to maintain this situation. Request and activate and believe in the truth of this help coming forth, that you want out of this situation. That way you will regain contact.

You have to tackle exactly that problem. Many people use meditation, but they use it generally. They use beautiful abstract concepts and even personal ones, but they skip the step that is most necessary – namely, where their own resistance lies, where they are or where they should be within themselves at this moment.

To seek that step, it is also necessary to request guidance and inspiration for that. You can ask, “Where is it that I am now? What should I see at this moment? I want this particular guidance – to be now where I am within me on the Path. And I want this contact.”

And then instead of forcing the contact, drop it and wait for it; it will then come to you, if you really want it. Ask yourself if you really want it. If you really want it, wait patiently for it after you have expressed this.

QUESTION: Last spring, you gave us some approaches to reach the divine center, the life energy. I’ve been trying this, and I find that I have a misconception about this alert, relaxed body: the only thing I can think of is red alert, danger, stiffen – instead of relaxation.

ANSWER: Here is one of those dualities where, on the one hand, man thinks or conceives or experiences alertness in connection with tension, and relaxation in connection with stagnation and paralysis. In truth, the true state, the divine state, the self-realized state, or anything nearing this state, is relaxation and alertness.

QA201 GUIDE COMMENT: Now, let us all become very still, and I will say the words, and inside of you, try to go along with these words: “Be still and know I am God, the ultimate power. Listen to this power within, to this presence and to these intentions. I am God, everyone is God. God is all, in everything that lives and moves, that breathes and knows, that feels and is.

“God in me has the power to make the separated little ego know the ultimate power to integrate this ego. I have the possibility to feel all my feelings – to deal with and handle all my feelings. This possibility is there in me, and I know this potentiality can be realized the moment I know it. And I now choose to know I can be alive; I have the strength to be weak and vulnerable.

“I can accept my numbness now, my insecurities, my feeling state and my nonfeeling state. I can listen into this state and wait. I can be still and feel into me. I can be still and hear my superior intelligence, the God intelligence, instruct me. I can establish this contact. I will pay the price by giving the best I have and am to life. I will live my life honestly in wanting to give the best. For then I will be able to receive the best without cringing. I do not fear to invest the best of myself into life.”

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