QA171 QUESTION: Are there any natural laws governing the limits of experience?
ANSWER: No. The natural laws are also the spiritual laws. The limits are set by the mind, by what the mind can conceive of, by the limits the mind sets. That is the only limit that exists. There is no other. Now, that may seem like very little, and it actually is very little, but it is also a lot, for a person who is, through millennia – literally through millennia – indoctrinated with certain beliefs and concepts, is bound by them until he bursts free of these limitations.
This can happen only to the extent a human being truly knows and accepts himself and overcomes the destructiveness of false beliefs. For there is no other source of destructiveness than false beliefs. Once you discover – through going into yourself – your false beliefs, you eliminate the destructiveness that exists in your soul and often in your actions, unbeknown to the good intentions you have.
As these destructive actions cease, because false knowledge about yourself and your relationship to the universe and others ceases, the limitations – the fences of the mind – recede.
It is as though all human beings are moving in a very narrow channel, not because the channel has to be narrow, but because the mind believes it is narrow. As your own self-knowledge and self-acceptance grows – and therefore your productive, constructive experience of yourself and life – the channels widen more and more and more.
As I said at one time in connection with a lecture, you discover at a point that the fences that have surrounded you were illusions. They were truly nonexistent. It is as though a human being has moved all his life in a prison and hasn’t known that there is a wide-open space. He just imagines himself in a prison.
That is the only limit that exists – what you believe. And when I say believe, it is not just only the conscious belief, of course, but much more important, your unconscious ideas and concepts.
