T. 31. IV. 1 – 3. Jesus: “There is a tendency to think the world can offer consolation and escape, and relief from inner problems that its very purpose is to keep! Why should this be?
Because the world is an illusory place, where choice among illusions is the only choice, and you can be in control of outcomes of your own choosing. Thus within the narrow band from birth to death, it seems a little time is given you to use for for you alone!
Although it is a time when everyone conflicts with you, you still can choose which road you think will lead you out of conflict, and away from inner difficulties that you would have ‘concern you not.’ Yet they are your concern! How, then, can you escape from them by ‘leaving them behind,’ in an imagined world of form? You will take with you, whichever road you choose to walk along, what must go with you because it is within!
Real choice is no illusion! But the world has no real choice to offer you. All its roads but lead to disappointment, nothingness, and finally to death. Thus there is no real choice among the world’s alternatives!
Seek not escape from problems in the world! The world was made so that inner problems could be ‘projected out,’ but the problems within are not thereby escaped!
Be not deceived by all the different names the world’s many roads are given. They have but one end! And each is but the means to gain that end, for it is here that all its roads will lead, however differently they seem to start; however differently they seem to go. Their end is certain, and there is, therefore, no real choice among them. All of them will lead to death!
On some you travel gaily for a while, before the bleakness enters. And on some the thorns are felt at once. The choice is not what will the ending be, but when it comes. There is no choice where every end is certain and the same. Perhaps you would prefer to try them all, before you learn they really are but one. The roads this world can offer seem to be quite large in number, but the time must come when everyone begins to see how like they are to one another. Men have died by their own hands on seeing this, because they saw no way except the pathways offered by the world. And learning they led nowhere, all hope was lost.
And yet this was the time they could have learned their greatest lesson. All must reach this point, and eventually go beyond it. This lesson, that there is ‘no real choice at all’ within the world, is true indeed. But this is not the entirety of the greater lesson here. The lesson has a purpose, though, and in this you will come to understand what the experience is for.”