Duality Through Illusion -- Transference

By The Pathwork Guide

Greetings, my dearest friends. God bless all of you. Blessed be this lecture.

As long as man is negatively involved with life, he must remain in this earth life. This particular sphere offers the conditions that are compatible with his negative involvement. Only after having overcome his negative involvement will the cycle of births in this sphere cease and then his development will continue in other spheres of living, offering new conditions, compatible with his new state.

What does negative involvement mean? It means primarily confusion of reality, confused concepts. Where there is confusion, and therefore illusion, there must of necessity be conflict -- a split of concepts. This split of concepts splits the psyche. In other words, split and conflict are the consequence of illusion and of misunderstanding. As man gains unity with himself because he first perceives and then experiences reality, then the split mends and the negative involvement ceases.

This idea has been expressed in many different ways throughout the ages. If fully understood, then there can be no posssible doubt about the fact of reincarnation, which for many people is but a vague belief, a theory. If this aspect of creation is profoundly experienced, then it must be recognized that it cannot be any other way. For, as long as man is not through with a flaw in himself which separates him from reality, then he has to live within the conditions that express this state. His state produces both the condition he lives in and his environment. These, in turn, offer him the only possible means to learn to recognize and then to overcome the state of duality. Hence, this earth life expresses the general state of man. It expresses the split -- the result of a confusion of reality.

This split is symbolized by many manifestations of earth life. For instance, so many things appear in pairs of opposites. In philosophical thinking, mankind itself is paired -- man and woman, night and day, life and death. These are but a few examples of life representing a two-way split. This two-way split applies to mankind, but not to the animal kingdom, to the plant kingdom, or the mineral kingdom, which are still in a lower state, and therefore find themselves in a more than twofold split.

Mankind is the expression of a twofold split which, as I said, manifests in many ways. Generally speaking, this is not truly understood.

Abstract meditation about this fact cannot really bring forth a profound understanding. But through the work on this Path you will gradually discover your personal, and heretofore unconscious, misconceptions. As you progress it will become amply clear that it is these misconceptions, on any given subject, that create the illusory conflict of having to choose between two alternatives. Naturally, both alternatives are dissatisfactory. As a result, they create a state of hopelessness, just because they arrive at an unrealistic conclusion. Any one of my friends who has made sufficient progress in this respect can think of specific examples. These personal examples will offer the greatest possible enlightenment. By understanding them what I say in this lecture will become a reality, a personal experience of the truth.

When you are in confusion, then you are negatively involved with life and negatively involved with others. The primary negative involvement occurs within yourself: in your misunderstanding of concepts, of aspects of reality. Unresolved confusions remain in the psyche and are bound to re-occur in each life. Life conditions are bound to bring these confusions to the fore as long as the personality persists in disregarding them and evading the issues. Unfortunately, this happens only too frequently.

The karmic relationships that are most intense and most dramatic are those between parents and children. The unresolved confusions and conflicts that produce the basic split must first be challenged in this relationship. This double relationship of the child to both father and mother is a symbol of the split which marks this earth sphere. To have one set of parents is an asset to the degree that the relationship is healthy because of a relatively free psyche. But when the negative involvement is still strong, then this double relationship to both parents enhances the inner split.

If you examine your particular main problems and conflicts, the images, the defense mechanisms, the pseudo solutions, and the wrong conclusions that you have found so far, then they will eventually reveal the basic inner attitude by which you are governed. This basic attitude is always split in half. Your fundamental attitude in your negative involvement fluctuates between these two ways of reacting. This deep recognition can be found only by those who work intensely on this Path of self-confrontation. It goes beyond isolated areas of recognition, such as specific images and misconceptions. All the pieces must form one nucleus, manifesting your personal two-way split. The full realization and the full acceptance of this fact indicates considerable progress and self-awareness. When this realization begins to take shape, then you will come to see that these two fundamental attitudes, constituting your split, represent your basic attitude to your parents.

The influence exerted upon you by one parent, and your emotional response to it, indicates one of your conflicting and distorted attitudes. An entirely different influence by the other parent, and your emotional response to it, reproduces the other side of your conflict. This twofold split is a conflict that you could not resolve before you entered this life. Your parents -- or, rather, certain of their aspects -- and your subsequent response to them personify this unmended split within your psyche. Even though when you first start working on your Path it will seem that it is your parents who have induced your particular way of reacting, the fact is that it is not your parents who are responsible for your problems. However, it is important to face and understand their faulty behavior towards you, for it is intimately connected to your inner split -- which you carried with you into this life. When you perceive how you represent your parents within your psyche -- when you sense the subtle interaction between identification, rebellion, and various other responses and reactions to them -- then you must come to experience your basic twofold split by which you are governed throughout your life. This will persist until you resolve it and mend it through insight and understanding. At this point, theories cease to matter. It is not necessary to believe in reincarnation. The important thing is the discovery that your parents express and personify your own duality, your illusory way of life.

When this is truly understood, then there can no longer be a dividing mark between modern psychology and spiritual, metaphysical or philosophical ideas. When this is understood, then so-called spiritual and hetofore theoretical concepts become just as much a personal experience as any psychological discovery.

I used the expression "illusory way of life" for lack of a better term. This may describe as accurately as it is possible with the limitation of human language how your own very distinct inner way of life governs you as a consequence of the negative involvement you re-experience with your parents. When I say "way of life," I not only mean outer conduct, or certain characteristics that are typical of you, although they, too, may be part of and connected with this twofold split. What I mean by this expression is a certain way of automatic response. They are stereotype reflexes that you repeat over and over throughout your life: you react to others as you once reacted to your parents without your being aware of it at all. These repetitive responses belong to the split part of your psyche only. Where your soul is healthy, there you are free of the blind compulsion to re-live the past.

We have often discussed this automatism, but none of my friends are as yet completely aware of it. As awareness of it grows, then liberation becomes more tangible. However, this can happen only when you gain a glimpse of your personal twofold split, symbolized in your attitudes to both your parents.

The child starting a new life cycle carries its own personal unresolved conflicts. Its duality is due to illusion and to misconception. At the same time, its psyche is very impressionable. Everything it experiences has a much fresher and more intense impact. Impressions go deeper and take root -- but always according to the child's inherent psychic health, or the lack of it, which determines how these impressions and these experiences will be assimilated. The freshness and the impressionability of the child's psyche cause early experiences to have a more far-reaching effect than a similar experience would have for an adult. This can be easily observed constantly and in many ways with children. Children, for example, have a keener sense of smell and of taste. They are more curious about the most simple manifestations in life. The strong impact of life on the child's soul can be seen clearly. Negative experiences resulting from previously unresolved conflicts impress the child's psyche even more. But it cannot be emphasized too strongly that negative experiences and negative involvements occur only to the degree that the psyche is still in a state of duality, in a state of illusory conceptual conflicts when the entity is born.

This is not the same as what I said regarding the images. The principle is the same, but it applies to a much deeper level. Here I do not refer to a particular image you may have, or even to your most important ones. I refer to the underlying basic conflict which is responsible for your being a human entity and for living in this particular sphere of the universe. This conflict is not inaccessible. It is right here, in full view, if you realize how your attitude to both your parents governs your basic life situations and is an expression of your basic personality difficulties. When you discover how you continue to respond to them, then you experience your basic split, your very own brand of duality. As a result, you will increase your comprehension of your personal human limitations. Therefore, these limitations instantly lessen, by the mere fact that they are truly perceived. Your range will widen, your freedom will increase, your vision will be extended, your security will grow and, as a result, your harmony will be established. Since split and harmony are incompatible, then mending the split through understanding will increase harmony.

All this can hardly be understood if one is not active on this Path, and rather advanced in self-discovery. But even then, considerable help is needed in order to reach these deep levels of self-awareness. The discussion on this lecture may offer some opportunity for such help, apart from the work itself. The best way to clarify confusions, to overcome difficulties, and to understand would be to bring personal examples as to what degree you have found splits of concept and subsequent conflict in yourself. When such conflict is better understood, then it may be seen how it corresponds to one's attitudes toward both parents. Through such practical examples, I can show you how to proceed in this particular part of your pathwork.

When this facet of your soul is understood on a more profound and personal basis, when it becomes your experience that this is so and it ceases to be merely a theory or a philosophical postulate, then you will understand and experience what we have often discussed and what you have found within yourself only to a minor degree so far: the repetition of reactions -- how you respond to later situations and to other people in an almost identical way as you have once responded to your parents. Thus far you may understand intellectually that your parents represent your personal split, each parent on one side of it. This is the nature of the karmic link. It is the reason for your choice and the necessity of your choice of parents. You had to respond to them the way you did, not only because they were what they were, but ultimately because of your duality. Your brother or your sister may have different reactions to them because they have a different kind of split. As you had to respond to your parents according to your split, so do you have to react to other people later in life in a similar way, even if the situation resembles the original situation only slightly. So, in the last analysis, the repetition is not due to the parents and their faulty ways, but to your own duality, which this particular set of parents could best manifest or represent, and therefore bring out in you.

It is very important to understand the continuation of the unbroken line of your original split with which you were born: your parents and the later repetitions that you constantly re-enact. Needless to say that none of this is obvious before sufficient inroads have been made and awareness is cultivated. But soon it becomes obvious. As long as awareness of this chain is incomplete or missing, then you are not in control of yourself and of your life. I mean healthy control and not the many erroneous ways the personality seeks in order to be in control because awareness is lacking, and therefore one feels weak and helpless. False controls are damaging and lead further away from the healthy way of being on firm ground -- through awareness of these processes. Only when this awareness dawns upon you will you begin to be in reality, and therefore at peace with yourself.

Now let us discuss this process of repetition. This is vastly underrated, overlooked, ignored, misunderstood; or, at best, its understanding is not profound and extensive enough.

Modern psychology has found a small aspect of this process. It calls it transference. You may infer from this lecture that it goes farther and deeper than what is generally understood by this term. This so-called transference happens constantly in a person's life in all intense relationships. To the degree that a relationship is intense, to that degree the first traumatic relationship to both parents is repeated. Any negative involvement with another person expresses conflict. If there were no conflict, then there would be no negative involvement. Since it expresses conflict, then it must manifest both sides of the split -- and therefore both parents -- in the person involved in the conflict. If only one person is negatively involved, then his or her own duality is lived out. In other words, his or her parental relationship is re-experienced. If both, or more, people in a situation are negatively involved, then they are all entangled in their first experiences in this life. They are living out their duality with their parents, thereby engendering each other's misconceptions, and hence fortifying the split. This is difficult to describe in theoretical terms, but whoever comes to this understanding will have no difficulty seeing this truth. This is why I suggest real personal examples, for they lend themselves well to amplifying and illustrating what I am discussing here.

Let us now try to gain a little more understanding, at least in theory, as to what this continuous process of transferring does -- from the inner split to the parents, and from the parents to other people and to life situations. If the psyche is geared to the first response to the parents, then you are unable to perceive what really is. You blindly apply to others what may have no application at all. Hence you react, you respond to illusion and not to the reality of each situation. The trouble is that because of this you force the other person into the very reaction which would not exist if you had not assumed that it does exist. Let us take a simple example. If you are convinced of being rejected -- if you are certain that you will be rejected -- then the rejection will finally become a reality because of this conviction, for your behavior must be rejecting. This example has often been found and discussed. But this particular process applies to any number of other facets of life and of the personality. Consequently, you are strengthened in the false belief of your misconception -- and thereby you widen the split. You must re-experience the same sequence again and again until you begin to see the reality of this process and you understand its workings. You cannot live in reality before you thoroughly perceive your particular unreality and are not deterred from attempting it because your false concept appears to be true. Think of the example of rejection.

Since you are geared to the original experience, then you are convinced that what happens to you today is real. Although initially it is not, it becomes so because of your reaction. Therefore your reactions are not responsive to the real person or to the real situation, but to imagined persons and to imagined situations, namely your parents. Hence, you do not live in reality and you do not respond according to reality. Instead, you send your responses forth into thin air and not to the person confronting you. What comes out of you is directed to what you think exists and not to what really exists. Thus, you cannot reach the reality of the other person. If the person in question -- and most of the time this is the case -- reacts in a similar way, then all relationships and all interactions between human beings constantly pass each other by without one ever reaching the other. Outflowing currents criss-cross, and therefore miss one another. This is part of the reason for the prevailing loneliness of man and for his difficulty to communicate. Humans believe that they react to one another. But usually this does not happen at all, or it happens only to a limited scale. The stream of your consciousness, which is supposed to be directed to person "A," never reaches "A." Although you believe that it does, it is actually directed to the parental situation. Since your reaction is not applicable to "A," then "A" may often feel this as an injustice. He may feel either excluded or rejected. If "A" happens to be comparatively liberated from this blind prison, then his response will not add fuel to the fire because -- since he perceives reality much better -- he will know that it does not apply to him. He will not react as he is supposed to react, and this may help.

Only when a person has recognized his own duality and has stopped transferring his reactions from his parents to others will he be capable of withstanding the onslaught of misdirected responses. Then he will refuse to express the duality -- or one side of it -- of other people because he is aware of his own. Thus unnecessary pain is avoided and help is given in a most subtle way. The negative involvement has no response. And this must finally bring the one who misdirected the stream of his consciousness to the realization that the original situation and the new situation are not identical. Even if this happens on an unconscious level, nevertheless it is of help. But then one is dependent on the health and the liberation of others not to respond to one's unreality. It is better to begin with the self. In other words, to find one's own split, to see the transference of it -- from the parents to others with whom one is involved -- and to gradually recognize that the emotional climate in which one lives is not applicable to the real situation.

Observing the earth sphere and humanity from our vantage point, it is sad to see that people rarely react to reality and in reality. This is the confusion and the chaos that brings so much unnecessary suffering to mankind. If you would first perceive and then react either to the real person or to the real situation, then a great deal of pain would be avoided. Pain is the result of illusion. This illusion is the consequence of a split, all of which forms the basic way of life that is first lived out in the parental relationship.

Some of you have gained a small inkling of what I am talking about here, but only a nebulous inkling as yet. The more aware you become of the re-experiencing of your old way of life -- of your basic split, of the basic conflict represented by your parents -- the more you will live IN reality and the more do you free yourself of the repetitive chain of illusion. Once you cease re-enacting the old drama of your duality, then you will respond spontaneously to the real situation, which then will no longer be as it had seemed to be previously. In other words, it will be as it is, and not as it had appeared to you.

Psychotherapists and psychiatrists have understood this phenomenon in their relationship with their patients. But only segments of this human predicament have been comprehended in the framework of the evolutionary process determining the laws of reincarnation. I want to help you to understand this phenomenon on a deeper level and from a broader basis. This can be done only by becoming aware of it within yourself. As you gain this awareness, then you will see the misunderstanding and the damage it creates. Your eyes will begin to open to the real situation. The more conscious you are of your automatism -- of your stereotype responses -- the more they will cease to exist by the mere fact that you are conscious of them. You will see how the husband or the wife, or the child, or the friend were never fully reacted to as to their own selves, but rather as extensions of a previous experience. This so-called transference from parents to others also applies to your children. For if this way of life is not given up, then no relationship is uninfluenced by it -- certainly no relationship of any importance and intensity. You must be caught in this trap until you become aware of this condition.

This is the freedom that this pathwork is meant to give you. It can come only through self-awareness. The lack of awareness imprisons you and it makes life not worth living, because you are constantly caught between two dissatisfactory alternatives. You even react to your father and to your mother in the way of life that you have adopted. Then you respond both to them and to life as a result of their impact on you. The response to one parent may be a reaction to and a correction of an unwanted situation with the other parent. In other words, it may be a compensation. The two sets of basic attitudes together form your basic split, your way of life. At the same time, you are a result of this. A new experience of life's manifold manifestations is possible only after having broken the repetitive chain: first from the duality to parents and then to others. Then life becomes vibrant in joy, in peace, in meaningfulness, in newness, and in richness.

This is a very important subject that is of the greatest possible value to you. I hope that many of my friends who are active on this Path in this coming working season will, at the very least, gain some vague glimpses of this, and thus begin to understand what is expressed in this lecture. This is where the direction leads you to and where the guidance is given if you are willing to follow the road. In many cases, many different aspects will have to be illuminated before this insight can be reached. But if the Path is pursued, then it will eventually happen.

A few years ago, I gave a lecture on duality. At that time you understood parts of this topic. Now you are ready for a deeper level of understanding. I now approach this topic from a different angle, according to your present state of development. I venture to say that even in the best and the most favorable of circumstances it will take considerable time before you can truly apply this lecture to yourself.

Are there any questions now regarding this subject?

QUESTION: Is not the influence of brothers and sisters almost as strong as the one exerted by parents?

ANSWER: It is only a result of the relationship to the parents. Even if a relationship to a sibling is outwardly more problematic and negatively involved, it is a secondary result. If the matter is profoundly explored, then it must be found that the sibling relationship is always directly dependent on and related to the parental relationship. The parents express -- or symbolize or manifest -- your own basic split. In other words, the particular way of life with which you deal with this split. Therefore all your other relationships are geared to this conflict within through the conflict outside, with your parents.

I have given you a lot of material, my friends. It will take considerable work to assimilate it, if you truly wish to gain at least an inkling of a personal experience of these words, In other words, to have an inner knowledge of this lecture. In many cases it may be years before you get to this knowledge. But when you do have this inner knowledge -- the inner experience of this truth -- then the meaning will be beyond your possible anticipation. It will truly release you from a straight-jacket: from a hopeless choice between two equally dismal alternatives -- your basic previous way of life. Then you will enter into a new freedom.

My dear ones, may the strength and the blessing given unto you fill you with a new energy, whose impact will make it possible for you first to reach and then to confront these depths of your being. May you summon the courage to overcome the fear that produces your resistance. Only then will you convince yourself how useless, how unreasonable, and how unfounded your fear was. This fear makes it seem as if reality is to be feared, and therefore that it is better to cling to illusion. How false these unrecognized reasoning processes are! What a pity that you often persist in poisining your life with this falsity.

Some of my friends are near a self-recognition in this respect. Some have already gotten to the point of understanding this basic conflict. But none of you are as yet aware of how you repeat the original situation with others. This awareness has to be more fully cultivated so as to be more clearly recognized. May this blessing extended to you help you in this direction. No endeavor and no blessing could be more useful, more important, more vital, more rewarding, and none can bring you closer to life -- in the true sense of the word.

Be blessed, all of you, in this most meaningful work that you undertake. Be in peace, my dearest ones. Be in God.

October 18, 1963