Restraint

"The first act of freedom is to not submit to that which is not free within yourself... It is not only Knowledge that will hold you back. You must hold yourself back. This is a daily practice... The personal mind will do what it does. Don't get entangled with it. Your job is to know when to hold yourself back."

"Self-restraint means you must hold in abeyance many of your own reactions to allow a deeper and more pervasive response to emerge and to guide you. You must hold back your angry speech and your frustrated words on many occasions. Exercising this forbearance enables you to realize something you know that is at a deeper level. This requires great patience, for you must wait for things to come about."

"As Knowledge becomes stronger within you, your personal mind will have a greater foundation upon which to base itself, and increasingly its self-doubt will disappear. Then you will face a different kind of doubt, a doubt that is a warning sign within you to tell you that something may not be right and may require greater observation or verification of some kind. This is doubt born of Wisdom. This is when you sense something is not quite right or that the decision that you are about to make may not be the best decision and you feel a restraint inside. This is not self-doubt. This is doubting something on the outside. This is healthy and wise. This is part of your inner guidance system working for you to guide and protect you and to keep you from going astray. The more you are sensitive and responsive to this, the more difficult it will be for you to make a mistake."

"Perhaps you felt the restraint within yourself. Perhaps someone else warned you. Perhaps you made your decision with a sense of deep resignation instead of joyful anticipation. What was that like for you? Because you need to know that when you meet the next turning point, the next fork in the road, you will know the powers that will lead you in the right direction, and the forces that will lead you in the wrong direction."

Capacity for Affecting Others

"The more technically capable your race becomes, the more restraint you must exercise in using this capability in the physical world. The more potent you may become in affecting others within the context of your personal relationships, the more restraint you will need to exercise and the greater must be your discretion."

Maturity

"Those individuals who have become wise have had to realize that they have to be careful of what they say to anyone, anywhere, at any time. They are careful because they realize that all self-expression affects relationships and generates a response in others. They want to cultivate genuine relationships, and they want to nurture a genuine response. They do not want the tribulation that goes with irresponsible self-expression. To the wise, then, this restraint is not seen as self-repression. They are able to fully express themselves. They are able to express their feelings, their anger, their sadness, their joy, their inspiration, their disappointment, and so forth. They have developed this skill. Now they know they must use it wisely. People in the first stage of dependence cannot express their feelings effectively, for they cannot experience them fully."

"The third stage of interdependence, where you begin to interact in relationships from a position of responsibility and self-awareness, is the stage where your discretion becomes ever more important because without it you produce unwanted and often disastrous results, for yourself and other people. Here you must learn restraint. And here you must learn discernment in order to determine when and where you must express yourself. Restraint is important here because you must often withhold what you want to say."

Wise Speech

"If you want to say something to someone and you feel restraint, don’t say it. If the feeling of restraint is deep within you, do not say anything. However, if the restraint is at the surface of your mind and deep within you, you know you must communicate something, then you have to take the risk and find the words, without apology."

See Also

Steps to Knowledge