Dark forces give you the wrong idea about freedom. People think that

freedom is related to their bodies, activities, expressed emotions, and thoughts. This is a very limited concept. Freedom is related to consciousness. If your consciousness is free, you are free.

Consciousness is like a concentric circle in space: the greater the space which the circle of consciousness occupies, the more space you encompass and the freer you are.

The space of your consciousness is limited if it is identified with your body, emotions, urges, drives, glamors, illusions, vanity, and ego. It is also hindered by the special illusion that you cannot be free so long as you are stationary.

When your consciousness is really free, you do not need to act physically, emotionally, or mentally. You can make things move without moving. You can contact anything you want and enjoy anything you want without possessing it. You do not need to make your body run; you do not need to talk. When you are free, your lower self enters into silence and rest, while your consciousness penetrates into greater and greater areas of space.

You are your own consciousness. Wherever your consciousness reaches, you are there. Your consciousness can put into motion things that your physical body and other mechanisms cannot do. You can be in places or spheres where even advanced spacecraft cannot penetrate. This is why many holy ones have retreated to distant mountains and caves, while remaining more active in the life of the planet than any one of us. They can do this because their consciousness is emancipated, and they participate in the causal world to help humanity reach higher perfection.

Freedom is the ability to be conscious and active without the limitations of the body and its various activities. Disciples must continuously strive toward freedom. Often, the more they advance, the less physically active they become. They even slowly retreat to enter greater freedom in their consciousness and assist the labor of humanity in more efficient ways. This is not a form of escape, even though it may seem as such, because most worldly activities hinder their usefulness. Escape is accompanied by indifference, rejection, carelessness, and selfishness.

The withdrawal of a disciple is a sign that he is engaged in a more serious and important labor. Disciples learn to work with the souls of men rather than with their personalities. This gives them more time and a greater opportunity to reach a greater number of people.

One of the secret methods of the dark forces is to slowly take your freedom

away from you. Evil does this by spreading false ideas about freedom. For example, it says that you are free to use drugs, so you use drugs and find yourself in jail or you destroy your brain. Evil philosophizes about freedom and then builds prisons and chains to prevent freedom.

Freedom cannot be understood by speaking or writing about it. It can only be understood when one makes another person, group, or nation free. Personal freedom and group freedom can only be achieved by making other people free.

But fear controls man. Because of fear people do not allow others to be free, although they preach about freedom. They think that freedom of others will deprive them of their freedom. When fear controls a person, he must never expect to understand what freedom really is.

You can start to free people when you no longer criticize their religion, their beliefs, or their way of contacting higher values. You can start to let people be free when you do not preach to them that your way is the only way, when you no longer exploit them or use them for your selfish interests. As long as the world turns on the axis of your ego, you are a slave — and a slave is the most dangerous being in the world. If you want to enjoy life and evolve, avoid any effort that creates slavery. Your freedom begins when you free others and yourself from any kind of slavery.

You may ask about the definition of slavery. The best way to define slavery is to examine your own habits, hang-ups, dogmas, doctrines, fanaticism, and your efforts to impose yourself and your desires and vanities upon others.

Another way to understand the definition of slavery is to analyze your fears.

This can be a painful process. You can also question your motives and actions. Most of our actions are efforts to build prisons for our conscience, to mask our ego, and to deprive others of their essential freedom.

The definition of slavery cannot be given to you by others. You must find it by observing your thoughts, words, and actions in order to formulate and understand it. Once you understand the meaning of slavery you will understand the meaning of freedom, and you will be able to see the comedy and tragedy that is going on in the name of freedom — which is inspired by evil.

Freedom can be achieved by letting others be free. Slavery becomes rooted in your life every time you try to make another person, group, or nation your slave. The companions of freedom are peace and joy. The companions of slavery are pain, suffering, and war. But if a bird is used to being in a cage,

you cannot make it free, even if you leave the cage door open.

5. Dark forces play other tricks. For example, they find words and expressions which help people find direction, inspiration, and unity and then relate these words to painful, ugly, or criminal events so that people instinctively reject these words and lose the keys to certain doors on the path of their lives. Some of the words they have tried to distort are:

discrimination, nobility, virgin, sacred, wise, and so on. If you see how much these words are prostituted in the movies and literature of our day, you will get an idea about the intentions and motives of the dark forces.

The dark forces work through so-called innocent words, such as the word pity. One needs to meditate a long time to understand why Satan wants us to pity, but here are a few examples:

A family was driving along a California highway and saw a man trying to hitchhike. The woman said, “Poor man, the sun is so hot. Let’s give him a ride.” “No,” said the husband. “We don’t know who he is.” “Well,” the woman said, “do we have to know him to give him help?” She finally convinced her husband to give the man a ride. Ten minutes later, the stranger put a gun to the husband’s head and demanded that he pull off the road into the bushes. He shot all of them and escaped with the car. Only a small boy survived to tell this story.

It was a cold winter day when a stranger came to a home and asked, “for the sake of God,” to be allowed to spend a night of shelter with them. They did not have any accommodations, but after hesitating, pity forced them to take the stranger in. The next morning they woke to find the stranger gone along with the jewels and expensive coat of the woman.

A factory foreman saw that one of his worker’s behavior was not so good. He called him into his office for a talk. The next few days the worker did very well, except that he stole a few dollars from the cash register. That evening over dinner, the foreman was discussing the situation when one of his daughters mentioned that the worker in question had a son who badly needed money. The foreman went to work the next day and gave his worker some additional money. Several weeks later the foreman arrived at the factory to find that very expensive equipment and many precious things had been stolen. And, of course, the worker had departed, never to be seen again.

A friend of mine, for the sake of pity, married a prostitute. Three years later

the prostitute killed him and his child.

Pity is a dangerous feeling which can be used by the dark forces. Pity is not compassion; it is a kind of emotional blindness. Compassion has love but also intuition and intelligence. One can sacrifice, but one must not pity. Sacrifice is conscious, and one needs to prepare himself for sacrifice. A person should not risk his life to save a rabid skunk from a trap; neither should he pay one hundred dollars for a sack of potatoes.

Some governments act with pity and give political asylum to certain people.

Then a few years later, they see the headaches they have created in their country. Not only troublemakers but also dangerous spies are welcomed be-cause of pity. Pity must never be a controlling factor in our decisions. The controlling factors should be intuition, experience, and pure logic.

There are other words that Satan puts in people’s minds. For example, he says, “Be tolerant, forgiving, and silent” on occasions when tolerance will encourage crime, when forgiveness will inspire exploitation, and when silence will destroy higher principles. One should know whether words are given to him by Satan or by his own Soul.

6. Another technique is to assign their agents to enter certain groups and