iences is by elinging to external standards for completd guidanoe. This is best expressed in the first commandment, which says, "I am the Lord thy God. Thou shalt have no other gods before Me." Again, if we understand that God is within ourselves, and if we take God as meaning our own inner nature which we must discover and bring into consciousness, the commandment says very simply that we must listen to our own feelings and thoughts, rather than being ruled entirely by what other people think or feel, thus making them other gods.

SEEK GUIDANCE FROM WITHIN

I know that we all he ar the admonition to seek guidance from within and to consult the soul within in a variety of ways a great many times as we seek answers to our problems. Each person who will turn in this direction finds it the most difficult task to undertake. But even as you find this hard, so does your neighbor and everyone around you. Because it is so difficult, we tend to try everything else in the world instead. One of the alternatives we frequently employ is the mechanism of blaming. This is a mechanism we have all become conditioned to. All our lives we have been blamed for things, rightly or wrongly. Since everyone else has used it upon us as a means of avoiding their own responsibilities, we learn to become quite adept at it ourselves. As I pointed out earlier, the source of many of our problems and unhealthy attitudes lies with our parents and early authority figures. It is not difficult to trace the se

connections.

Because so many people have been blamed for so much in their lives, the healing process frequently involves helping them to realize that the responsibility for all of their difficulties does not lie entirely in their hands. The parents' share must be brought into the picture in its proper perspective. There is then a period of time in the treatment situation where the parents are blamed, or so it seems. This is permitted until the individual has been able to separate himself from undeserved guilt feelings. This must be followed by a further analysis of the parental patterns until it is glearly seen that they did not act out of malice or direct aggression, but that they too were living out a pattern in which they were caught and were quite unconscious of the consequences. This allows the hostility to dissipate and compassion to replace it. This is the (Continued on page 18)

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