Love – Portland, 1971

Well, you know, in the starting of a talk, I really don’t know what to say. I get started off on a subject. I may think about something while I’m on the plane or coming here or while I’m in the room or that nature. But, it never works out. I get started talking on a subject and it comes out entirely different from I ever thought. Now, one of the things I did want to say here tonight is a very important subject. And, I think it’s a subject that very few people realize and understand about it, And, that’s the subject of love.

Now, regardless, of whether we are in the infant stage or we are in the old stage, the senile stage or the elderly stage or just before where we are going across into the other worlds, it’s a question of love. It is a question that has always bothered people. I don’t think it’s as much a question of love as it is a question of inter-feeling or an inter-communication with someone else who is very close or very dear to you or with people generally. I never like to see people go into old folk’s homes because there’s always a problem that exists exactly this nature. And, if one wants to feel that he is without love in his life, it seems to be a normal thing. And, it has always been a normal thing with man and woman or child or, even, animals to have this feeling that there is a lack of this inner exchange of feeling or this inner exchange of communication with one another because they don’t seem to be able to meet on a certain level.

Now, I have found this, particularly, in a great deal of marriages where people say that they don’t love their mate or there’s something come about that changed this feeling or this sort of thing. But, in the first place, we’re going back on the old romantic idea of love that love was sex and love with a certain amount of devotion, a love with a certain amount of service and, particularly to use a colloquial, is waiting on another person. And, as has always been said, and you’ve heard it thousands of times, that marriage is a two-way street. And, if we don’t give on each end of this, that it will never go, which has a great deal of truth in it. But, what I’m trying to say to you, here, is that love is a limited thing within this world. And, it’s limited because there is a feeling that sprang up between two people in the sense that their feeling of goodwill and good nature and their feeling of unhappiness over trivials that arouses with others no matter whether they’re mates or whether they’re neighbors or any of this sort of thing, it comes up.

Now, this is one of the interesting things of life is because that we develop, within ourselves, sensitivity to the other person’s behavior. And, we should never allow ourselves to have that judgment of other people’s behavior in which that behavior is going to affect our own feeling and judgment towards them. Because once we start this then it’s a never-ending thing. We don’t only have that feeling towards one but it develops in a feeling towards 100s of others. And, it develops into a feeling, after a while, that you become a very embittered person because that life isn’t how we have shaped it. And, we all, no matter who we are, we have set our lives down in a certain pattern and expect everyone else to behave according to the pattern that we have set for them. Now, this can’t be done.

And, this is why love is unlimited, or rather limited, within this world. We can’t put down a limited thing and say this is unlimited because it has limits within this world. Now, you take animals are in the same position. They demand love or they are giving love. Take the cocker spaniel, which has always seen to be a very affectionate dog. It will give out a great deal of this emotion of love no matter what you do to it. And, it has a very forgiving nature. But, on the other hand, you can’t treat a police dog or a German Shepard in the same nature because it, of itself, will then begin to retaliate and become hostile. And, this is the same nature within people. So, you have to think here, then, of the saying “to get love is to give love” or to give out this feeling of goodwill towards people.

I’ve seen this done, so many times with people, who have been in that position of having everything that had flowed in on them and that it has given them, life has given them, a terrible beating. But, the more that it gives them a terrible beating, the more that these people seem to expand themselves and live in this aura of goodwill and apparent outward happiness and can get along in the world because they have learned to train themselves that life and people are not going to respond exactly like they feel that they are. And, they have gotten over that sensitivity that every time that they meet a person or a life situation and it treats them badly, they haven’t prejudged it. And, this is a way that our life goes.

Now, when we are young and we marry, we have certain ideals that we feel that our mate should live up to. And, if they don’t live up to this, after a while we become very unhappy with this situation and become embittered because they haven’t lived up to our ideas. And, that is all the very basic of which I have said, all the time in ECK, that we do not prejudge or have opinions on things. Because, then once we do this, then we are laying down something that’s within our own mind. And, since we are working beyond the physical laws, we, ourselves, are, that which is a law unto itself in that outer world or the worlds beyond this world. And, you must remember this, that we make our own laws.

In the physical universe, we have to live according to certain laws. But, we, in working outside of ourselves out in these other worlds, we make our own laws. And, this is the first law of all things is to be neutral in our attitude. Because, as we know, Buddha said this also, that there’s a very thin line between hate and love. Therefore, it couldn’t be love within this world when it falls into across this line. And, so many people let it fall across this line, especially when they are in very high positions and their dislike or hatred of someone else causes a great deal of confusion within the lives of many other people. And, this can be done especially if the person has a control of a big media like any big TV station or any big newspaper or any big organization that gives information to the public. It is influenced by his own attitude, basically towards life. Now they can be fair. And, it’s all the question of this to say what is fair to one person is unfair to another. What is justice to one person is unjust to another person.

So, this is why that we have tried to have justice for the majority. And, if it’s unjust, have injustice for the few. But, it never works that way. Because the unjust is never justified in the minds of a lot of people. The man who goes to prison for a crime which he never committed, and yet the law says it was justice that put him there, twenty years later they find that he didn’t commit the crime. Well, there’s an injustice that goes that far and how do you think the man’s mind is shaped over these years to the point that he may go out and create a crime which affects a great number of people?

And, this is why that we say love is limited within this world. And, that we in getting above it, and we work in these higher worlds, then we are making the law unto ourselves and this law should be that which is a goodwill and a love for all life situations and be mutual in their attitude towards things. I can’t say that we can go out and love everyone. That isn’t true. But, we can give everyone goodwill and we can feel mutual in our feelings towards him. And, if we don’t then we are creating a havoc that will later, sometime, come out in our own life somewhere, somehow. And, I’ve seen it time and time again being done.

Now, the baby or the infant will always demand love because it is working within an area of the pleasure principle. And, the pleasure principle in this world is love, what makes us happy, whether it is a bottle of booze or whether it is something else or it is God-realization. That, in itself, is what we call, except for the God-realization, would be a pleasure principle. Anything that within this world would be a pleasure principle, except when you get into the spiritual and that is the whole principle of the whole. But these other things I’m speaking of, then you must see and if you have the insight and the keenness to look at this, the child as well as the person who is in their dotage, have one problem to overcome. And, that problem is whether it is going to be the pleasure principle or whether it is going to be the death wish. And, both of these are instilled within the individual.

He’s going to have one or the other and never is this, within itself, hardly balanced. This is why so many people are going to religions and always have, especially in the time of crises any time in any period of the world. Because they feel like that they could be very happy if they could have the pleasure principle fulfilled within religion. If they couldn’t, they’d have the death wish fulfilled and then they would go across to the other side and have what they feel permanent paradise or permanent happiness.

And, this is what a great deal of what the cults and religions are sold upon, today, is the fact that we have of their fulfilling the idea of the death wish by saying, “Well, you won’t get it in this world but you can get it in the next world.“ There’s a very interesting book that was written several years ago and I forget who wrote the book but it’s called The Messiah. And, maybe some of you have read this about this fellow who came in and he was considered a preacher and he was preaching upon the death wish. And, finally they made him a very prominent national figure and they put him on TV and he got across his point so well that a lot of people were committing suicide in order to fulfill the death wish. And, this is true.

This is the fact that a number of people will put across this idea, as they did in the early days with the Christians. And, no wonder the Christians went out and were gladly eaten by the savage beasts or they would invite destruction by the Romans or the Roman soldiers in order to get into paradise. Many of them just literally starved themselves to death or did other things. Or, they tortured themselves like in the 4th century when the Christian ascetics went out into the desert and they would bury themselves, all except their heads, and the hot sun hit them. They would stay there for days on days and, when they came out of there, their heads were swollen up like balloons. And, some of them were, absolutely, raving maniacs. But, the people of the day, thought of them as being some great martyrs, someone who was giving himself to the cause of Christianity. They weren’t improving Christianity at all by the torture of their bodies because they were working toward this one thing that I am talking about, the death wish.

So, you have on one side, you can say the death wish, which would be the hatred of the self or the hatred of others. And, you have on the pleasure principle, it would be more like the seeking of the bliss or, on the lower planes, it would be the gratification of the body. On the higher planes, it would be more like this seeking of God. Now, it helped to the individual to make their choice of what they want. And, you find some people have found this principle, as it works on the other planes, and they are extremely happy. They want to fulfill that great point of happiness and they don’t only want it for themselves. They want it for everyone else. But, if they find this principle mainly with this world, they become great nuisances to us. They become people who go out on the street and grab you by your collar, lapel, and try to tell you that they have had it and they want you to have it, too. And, if you don’t have it, well then, your life is worthless. And, you have had this sort of person you’ve met but this is, more or less, the gratification of the physical senses or the physical body in some sense that they believe that they have met with or they have had a certain amount of enlightenment.

And, those who, really and truly, have enlightenment, don’t do that. They say, ‘Well, if you want it, alright, you can get it. But, if you don’t want it, why who’s going to bother you? Who cares whether you don’t want it or not?” See? And, they go on with their own lives and live out their own lives that way.

So, this is, in a sense, the way that an Eckist is. And, he will, might go out and he might do the street ministry or preach on the street corner and if you don’t want it, alright. It doesn’t make any difference to him. But, if you want it, he’s available. And, he never goes to a person and tries to thump one of our books and tell him all the laws and everything is laid down here because he knows it’s in there but he doesn’t try to say to everybody, “Well, unless you get it you are not going to be saved.” And, that is one of the funny things I’ve always thought about was the fact of, if we are saved, what are we saved from?

It always reminds me of a movie I saw years ago. It was a picture that was taken off of William Saroyan’s book called The Human Comedy. It was very interesting, They had this little boy who was passing at the church and he was passing the basket. And, he comes up to an old gentleman and his wife who was there and who had been the missionaries in China 25 or 30 years. And, they come home and were visiting the church and he sticks the basket under their nose, the collection basket, and says, “Have you been saved?” I still enjoy thinking about that scene today, you know, the reaction of the old man at the time. He reared up, you know, and stared at the young chap. It didn’t even phase the little boy and he went on down the aisle passing the basket and asking everybody if they’ve been saved. But, he was probably working for the minister at the time. You know, maybe he got a quarter for all of that.

Well, we have to get on the point here. You know, the animal, of itself, especially domestic animals, it has been true that wild animals that have come into the influence and the spheres of people who have given them kindly treatment, in especially feeding them, they have been in the position that they accept the love that the people are giving them. And, in turn, they will return this love. Now, you find deer in these public parks which are being fed by the rangers. They were originally very wild and they would not accept the human element because they had the problem of not knowing who they could trust. Then they found out that they could trust them and they could accept the feed from them and they could also accept the love from these people who were doing the feeding and, in turn, they could give love.

And, this is interesting because it begins to show the difference of moving from that state of distrust into this area. And, it’s always been the state. I remember a man once told me, I think he was about 30 years older than his wife, and she had her own automobile and did a lot of moving around. And, someone said to him, one day, “Don’t you trust your wife going around like this?”  He says, “The minute that a suspicion enters into my mind about my wife, then our relationship is changed.” And, this is true. He wouldn’t allow that, any suspicion whatsoever to ever into his mind. And, this is true about us dealing with people. The moment that we allow distrust and suspicion to enter our minds about our relations with another person. no matter what it is, whether it is the checkout man at a supermarket or within our own personal lives, with our children or any of the other areas, then we are allowing a distrust that is going to spread to all other areas and to a great number of other people. And, if we don’t check that and hold it back and look upon this with a neutral point then we are putting into that deep area, and I mean deep area, because it will spread like a river within ourselves and take hold and fulfill our own conscience. And, then it becomes an area in which that we, ourselves, no longer trust ourselves.

And, we also find the one point that comes up, too, that we, ourselves, in growing up within our own atmosphere and our own environment are filled with this suspicion and distrust. Then the problem becomes big when we are adults because we do not know any better. We haven’t learned. We haven’t been taught. And, sometimes this is a good strong point for having a good solid religious background as children no matter what it is. Because this point will, might save us in certain situations. If it isn’t a difference in knowing between right and wrong but it is the point we have been taught as children to give out a certain amount of feeling, and I don’t say a feeling of affection, but a feeling of friendliness and let it flow from the heart or we have a principle to hang onto, then we may get into the position where we are lost.

Now, I don’t think any of us are going to get into the position as a soldier might be. But, in the Korean war it was proven after the war, that those children who did not have a strong religious background, a principle on something they could hold or hold life to, that when they were captured by the communists and taken into the communist camp and were being brainwashed, that they were the first to succumb to communism. And, those who had this strong religious point built within them from childhood up, they, if they ever went over were the last to go over, they were the real tough people for the enemy to ever to put their ideas into.

And, this is one of the points that I want to bring forth to you that if you don’t have the strong basis in ECK and if you don’t get this strong foundation in ECK, then you are going to be subject, not to that sort of thing because you are not going to get in that position, but to the point that there will be people who will try to change you. Or, there will be a lot of buffeting in your life in which that you just don’t come to this, that you’ll just say, “Well, I don’t know what to do.” And, throw up your hands and walk away. But if you’re a solid basis in ECK and got the foundation, it, of itself, will hold you. And, it holds you in line because you can swing back to it and say, ”I know this. What I know is true. And, I’m not going to let myself become a victim of something else in life that is beating me.” And, therefore, you become a strong person.

You become a person because this, of itself, has made you something greater than what you were originally. Now, I say it’s hard sometimes to get yourself in this solid foundation. But, if you go along daily in everything that you do and apply these principles of ECK to this, then comes a time when there really is a crisis and you can cross that crisis on this bridge and cross it very well and not be bothered and not be shook up by it.

This is a majority of the letters that come into us that are people asking us to resolve their problem, especially if they’re from ECK, is because they haven’t really built a strong foundation, Now, your biggest foundation, or your biggest problem rather, that come will be the psychic powers or the psychic phenomena. There will always be the factor of psychicism in the world and people will take to it because, simply, it will seem much easier. But, it never lasts and those people who are on the course of the psychic phenomena or the studies of psychicism or in all those sorts of things, and if they continue them over a long period of life, they are walking the path of doom. They will keep coming back, century after century, life after life, in trying to find the proper way of going and once they come off of this path, it’s a natural path to walk, because this is the first path we usually get when we start out seeking what we’ve normally termed, God. This is the first path we go on to and we’ll follow it for a while. But, then we’ll find out that it’s merely a toy. It’s something that will not be justified in our lives. It is only for this physical universe and the first of the 4 planes up to the mental and including the mental plane,

Now, if we, ourselves, will allow ourselves to follow these paths and if we go into ECK and become initiates, especially, and then go back to that, it creates a terrible havoc in our lives. Now, I’ve had this come through at times, and straighten out and work with people who have come back from that and follow into the lower, wanting to see if they can use the lower in order to gain something, whether it be to make a few dollars or whether it is for the fact they want to find something that’s a little greater than themselves but they’ll never do it. And, this is a big problem between the two, the pleasure principle and the destructive principle, because both of them work on the lower planes. And, those who are selling the idea of the pleasure principle in teachings today or the psychic works are actually themselves creating havoc in a great number of people.

I remember, a few years ago, when I was in a certain city and some fellow there asked Gail, my wife, and I out for lunch, we went with him and he had a story to tell us. He had an experience with a man who was teaching metaphysics or psychic work and how to improve your life and get a lot of physical things into your life and all that sort of thing. And, he says towards the end of the course, this man came to me and wanted to know if he could borrow $500 from me. “And, I gave him the $500 and he gave me an IOU“ And, he says, “That’s been several years ago and I haven’t seen nor heard from him since.” So, I said, “Well, how do you think the principle operates? He’s making the money and you’re not. And, it doesn’t matter how he makes the money.” And, I says, “This should be a good example to you of how a principle of this nature works because he can’t make it work. If he had made it work, why would he come to you and borrow the money?” And I says, “You’re out $500 and you paid for a very tremendous lesson.” And, he went away. He was quite disgruntled about it because I couldn’t tell him how to get his $500 back. Well, I told him, the only way I could see is to find out what state he’s located in and write the attorney general in that state and ask him if he could get his money back or prosecute the man. And, he didn’t like that at all.

But, this is one of the things that you have to remember, that the psychic will always fail. The spiritual will never let you down. It is always the world of success. The psychic world or the lower worlds have always been found that the failure is here. And, the failure is here because we depend on the human quality. We depend upon human love. We depend upon human ability. We depend upon all of these things to take care of us. They don’t do it. And, the quicker we learn this, the quicker that we are headed toward the God area and that which becomes success to the individual within the God worlds. When he once takes his mind off of being a success in life then he becomes a success in life because the attention is all taken away and, those obstacles that he has built up there, all collapse because they don’t have anything to push against. Once we are pushing against something, like within these psychic worlds, obstacles build up in front of us and it’s like going up against that wall over there. And, we cannot get through it. But, when we withdraw ourselves from that and put our attention someplace else and away from that, then these walls will collapse and we go on through.

There’s a very interesting thing. I once knew a fellow who knew this very well. Every time that he got into one of these situations, he immediately went off someplace else and started an argument a or big fight with someone else all the way away from this in order to get his attention off of that. And, while he was over there having the argument and fight with someone else, these walls would collapse because he would not have his attention on it. And, he knew this was only a cycle he was going through. So, he would finish up the cycle and he’d come back and he would go right on back through to whatever goal he was going to. And, this is a point which we must always think about. And, this comes up in the work of ECK, that lots of times we hit a wall and we can’t learn. We can’t progress. We don’t know what to happen. We don’t know what it is but it is a level of learning which is shut off to us at this particular point. And, the level, well, I can best give it as the education level, where we start over here and we go along and we grasp and learn everything we’ve learned on that level and then it stops here. And, we don’t know what to do. Everything is closed down.

The minute that we withdraw from that, then we go up to the next level and start working again across to another level and we’ll spend our time in that. Finally, we come up against another wall and, then again, we are running into a cutoff of everything and we go through the same process again. And, then we zig-zag up to this top level. And, finally, we hit into these high areas, the high spiritual areas.

These are the things which people, living within themselves, cannot judge or they cannot understand because the matter of feelings, the matter of emotions, all of this comes up in front of each of us and clouds our sight. And, we cannot see ourselves objectively. And, we always point at the other fellow or something else in life and say, “That is the cause of my problem.” It isn’t because the emotionalism has created this problem within us and we can’t see. We can’t see when we come up against this wall. We don’t understand this. And, sometimes we go through a tremendous amount of torture. And, it’s mainly self-torture and a question of loneliness, a question of feeling unwanted, feeling unloved, feeling unhappy about the situation. All of these emotions will overcome us. And, we’ll either sit there and stew in our pot like Job did or we’ll go down.  And, then we have to fight this thing all the way back up to get to this point again.  And, then the door hasn’t opened yet.

It’s the old saying that, “The door of the soul opens inwardly.” And, this is true within these planes, because [even though] we can get the glimpse of the beauty of that other area there, the door doesn’t open. We’re so unhappy because we can’t get the door opened to get through into this beautiful world that’s beyond. So, the less that we push on this, the greater the door opens. And, once we cease to push then it gradually opens of its own accord and we go right on through into the other worlds. And, we find the beauty because we have become, in a sense, detached from all these things that have worried us, that have gotten to the problem, that has given us all the varied things that have brought us to this point.

Now, as we go on and we go, more and more, in these deeper areas, the more sensitive we become. And, this is the thing in which that we must watch, in living within this world, because the greater our sensitivity is, so many times, the greater our vanity grows. And, that is the one point that you have to watch, of love, because you think that no one understands you. You think that, when you are cheated of a few cents at the drugstore or someone else may give you the wrong change in there, then you, in your vanity, cannot be treated in this way. For heaven’s sake, you’ve got to think about how many people that are taken 2 cents away or 1 cent away, even within the state of Oregon every day. Then you begin to think, “Well. I’m not the only fellow that gets that.”

But, this is true. As we grow in this sensitivity, we have to watch all these little areas. Because somebody says something to us that hurts, the sensitivity and the ego or the vanity has to surround that in order to keep it protected. But, if we will do this. If we will become neutral in our point of view, neutral in our thinking and neutral in our idea and towards other people that, after all, these people, too, they are people who have their own problems, then we begin to think about, “We can get along with that individual.” Because he has not intentionally done this to us. And, the same thing goes within the family affair. A person who, within the family, begins to develop this sort of thing within the family and becomes sensitive, as young children will do and going through their teen ages and on up through their young manhood or womanhood, they develop this a great deal, because what do we all do? We put a worth upon ourselves. We put a value upon ourselves in saying that we must be respected in this certain area. Unless we are respected in this area, then we are not being treated right. And, therefore we are not being treated right, we withdraw from the world. We will go to people who will give us this love and who will give us this feeling of worthiness.

Now, I have seen this, time and time again, within people and even people of all ages, even people who, after they pass middle age and they go into work of this nature, they develop this sensitivity. And, this sensitivity develops in a vanity within their ego and they think, “Well, the Master has ignored me or I’m not getting close to him, or this person or my mother or my father or my friends are doing these things to me. And, so many times, this vanity or this ego works upon the imagination and it builds these problems. And, actually, they’re not problems. They are only that, which we ourselves, have developed. And, it will push in and it will push in upon us until one day it all explodes, maybe in violence, maybe in the realization, maybe in another way in coming to the point that there’s something wrong here and I must examine this and look at it deeper. And, if I look at it a little deeper, maybe I will find the reason why it happened. Maybe it comes out of something that I had ever since my youth, Maybe it was a factor that I came out with a temper. And, a temper is usually covering up for such sensitivity. And, one must begin to think about, he looks at these little things. And, it hits us all. None of us, as ourselves, are free of this. So, you begin to think, “Well, how can I be free of it? What can resolve the problem for me?”

The more you are into the work of ECK, the more you will find about one thing, is that, after a while, you will get to the point that you’ll pay no attention to this. You’ll get to the point where it doesn’t mean anything anymore. You’ll go about and you’ll do your business, your own business, your own work. Everything, you do the best you can, and you leave it alone. And, if people are feeling this way towards you or things you do say or things you do arouse other people, you can always say, very apologetic, “I’m sorry.” And, usually, that nullifies the situation. But, you’ll find out one thing, too. The more and the greater that you are within ECK, the more that people will begin to resent something within you because you’ve got something and they haven’t and they can’t find out what it is.  

And, you are going to have, some of you, some buffeting, some problems, something that comes up from time after time that these people don’t know what they are doing, what they are that they have to find out what you have. And, believe me, there is a principle that’s within this world that works constantly called “The Anti-Success Device.” Nobody likes to see his neighbor successful. See? Nobody likes to see the other person get ahead of them. But, if you got something and they can’t discover it and they fall into this trap of “The Anti-Success Device” and they are very unhappy. They think that you are getting something that they haven’t got. And, they’ll talk to you about it and you’ll smile  and say, “Well, I haven’t got anything you haven’t got.” Then it becomes very mysterious to them and they are unhappy with it. They think that you are not telling the truth.

These are the things I come into the points of getting across to you, that we, ourselves, in the world of ECK, have a different type of feeling towards people that other people don’t have and that is we are happier people. And, by being happier people, for some reason, no one likes to see a happy person if they’re unhappy. And, the majority of people are unhappy. So, I mean by this, go on living your own way and go on living, being like you are. And, remember, that it only takes love to get love. May the blessings be.