Positive Concept Of Life -- Fearlessness To Love -- Balance Between Activity And Passivity

By The Pathwork Guide

Greetings, my dearest friends. Be blessed, every one of you. Blessed be this lecture. A positive concept of the universe is a benign force. Therefore, it is a benign fate for man. It gives him freedom, fearlessness to love, and a healthy balance between activity and passivity. All of this forms a comprehensive whole that allows an individual to be in harmony both with himself and with life, and thus to fulfill himself in every possible way. These three aspects depend on the awakening and the activation of man's innermost center, the nucleus that we call the real self.

None of this is possible without the activation of the real self. As long as the outer ego is the sole motivator of the individual's life, then it is impossible to have confidence in life's benign nature; it is impossible to be fearless about loving; and it is impossible to establish a healthy balance between activity and passivity. Let us look at this more closely. A healthy concept of life means a truthful concept of life. And a truthful concept of life means first the knowledge and then the experience of the truth that life is utterly benign. When man is away from the truth of life, then he must experience life as a hostile force, as something to defend himself against. We have seen this again and again on the path that you are working on. When you reach the deeper regions of your innermost being, then you see that somehow there is always a negative concept of life present.

There is a direct interaction between your faults, your defects, and a negative concept of life. It always works both ways. Because you are driven and controlled by the destructive force set in motion by your negative concept of life, you must expand you negative belief -- no matter how little you may be aware of this false belief. And because of the negative belief, you must be in a defensive position toward life. Then this attitude perpetuates the destructive trend.

In the last lecture I discussed the necessity of transforming the faults and defects of the character. Let us understand what is necessary for this transformation to be possible. The first step is always the awareness of these defects. This is not easy. But once approached with the proper attitude, then it is not difficult at all. Once you are aware of your specific defects, then the next step must be to understand the reason for their existence and to understand why you cling to them. When you look objectively and deeply, then you will find that in each specific instance a fault or a defect is supposed to ward off something that you assume will happen to you. In other words, a negative assumption is taken for granted. Once you see this, then the third step can be undertaken. And that is to question the validity of this assumption. Is it true that what you assume will happen to you actually would happen if you were not to express this particular fault? This question must be precisely posed. The possibility that it might not be so must be seriously considered. At the same time, expand your view of the significance and the effect on others of the fault in question, regardless of wether it is expressed in thinkling and feeling only or in actual behavior as well. In order to truly and sincerely want to shed a fault, it is essential to comprehend the effect that it has on others, as well as to strongly question the certainty of its protective value. Only when you are no longer so sure that it protects you, only when you begin to see that you are actually harmed by it rather than benefited, and only when you also see the harm that it inflicts on others will you want to use the energy that is invested in this fault for a new constructive attitude that then will take the place of the old destructive one. This is the way that transformation must occur. It can rarely, if ever, occur in any other way. It is impossible to transform something that you do not even know exists in you. And it is impossible to transform something when you do not know why you hold on to this attitude, when you ignore its significance, when you ignore the belief behind it, and when you ignore its effects. As long as this ignorance, this glossing over, this vagueness, exists, then transformation cannot happen.

All this is impossible to accomplish without the help of the real self. The spiritual self must be contacted directly by the ego faculties. It must be consciously and deliberately activated. Without this help, then the energy, the stamina, and the momentum necessary for the work of transformation will be missing. Therefore, the ego faculties must establish a connection with the real self, the inner self so that then the enlightenment and the vision necessary will ensue.

The second aspect under discussion is fearlessness to love. Every one of my friends working on this path sooner or later, at one point or another, begins to see that there is a fear of loving behind most predicaments and behind most conflicts. This may take different forms with different people; and even with the same person it may appear under a different guise in various expressions in his life.

The whole world has generally been aware of the importance of love since time immemorial. All truth teachings postulate that love means freedom, peace, and life. Nonlove means enslavement, conflict, and death. Nonlove creates restlessness, anxiety, and unhappiness. With all important spiritual teachings, including modern science in the form of psychology and psychiatry, agreeing on this fact, why does man nevertheless find it so hard to give himself wholeheartedly and fearlessly to the stream that comes from deep within himself? The natural mold of existence is a state of love. But man manages to cover it up and contort it into many unnatural and laborious forms of existence. All these twists and quirks alienate man from the center, where love is a natural fact, an effortless fact that flows just as gracefully as any natural phenomenon.

When man hinders this flow, then it can only be because he fears it. There are many definitions of love, and man gropes for these definitions in the assumption that he has to define it in his mind and understand it with his intellect in order to make love come into his soul from the outside. This is a tortuous, twisted, and erroneous approach, for you do not need a concept in your intellect, you do not need a definition, and you certainly cannot produce love as a factor from the outside. Love exists in perfect form within yourself.

The only definition that is at all useful is to know that anything that furthers unity, inclusion, expansion, union, anything that realizes the benign nature of the universe is love and perpetuates love. Anything or anyone that ignores the divine, and therefore benign, nature of the universe and of life, and therefore moves in a direction of exclusion and separateness, is the opposite of love and therefore must perpetuate the opposite of love. The opposite of love is nonlife, it is various degrees of death -- for there are many degrees of death, just as there are many degrees of life. Nonlove perpetuates fear. Yet man fears the life, the peace, and the freedom of love and therefore he clings to the separating forces of nonlove that he carries in himself as a saving, protective device. It is, and it has become, of increasing urgency to comprehend this, for the majority of my friends who find themselves successfully working on this path of self-realization lately have come, or in the near future are about to come, to that area within themselves where they encounter something they may have totally ignored until now. They may have deluded themselves that they have love, or they may have vaguely known an inner refusal to love, but they have never faced or really understood this to be a fact about themselves. This is hardly ever an overall fact, applying to the total personality, except with the insane.

The average person has many areas where he does love and is unafraid to do so. But where the problems exist in the inner and outer life, it will become apparent that they are due to the refusal to love in certain respects that are connected with the specific problem areas. When this recognition takes place, then it is often useful to compare those areas of refusing to love with those areas where one does love. If you analyze and compare both attitudes with their results -- their effect on your outer life -- then you will realize how false it is to fear to love and how safe, secure and beneficial it is to love. The areas in you where you discover a determination not to love will also dictate, upon closer inspection, that coupled with the resistance, or rather causing it, is a fear to love. The realization of this is of crucial importance, which must not, under any circumstances, be glossed over or neglected in your self-confrontation. It is necessary that you put precisely into words: "Here, in this or that respect, I do not love, and I refrain from wanting to love because I am afraid of it." At this point you still do not know "why" this is. You may feel consternation, you may be puzzled; and you ask yourself: "What am I afraid of?" There may come some answers that might be partly valid, partly they may be a glib theoretical explanation that may or may not strike you as a cliche. Perhaps the answer presents itself that you are more vulnerable to be hurt when you love. And yet, when you say this, this is not really convincing. When you think deeply and honestly, then you will have to admit that this is not true at all. A certain answer you might come across may be that you indulge in vindictiveness, in striking out at others and at life as a whole. This is perhaps closer to the point that you need to find, and it also needs to be fully recognized, fully accepted, and fully understood. But it is still not the whole story.

The whole story lies in the third facet of what we are discussing in this lecture. Before turning to it, I want to say that the transformation from a negative attitude to a positive attitude, from a false concept to a true concept, from a destructive characteristic to a positive trait is impossible to execute exclusively with the ego. In other words, without eliciting the faculties of the real self. It is even more impossible when it comes to loving. For love is not a quality that resides in the ego. The ego has other functions. It has functions of will, of discrimination, of action. But it does not possess the faculty of love. The faculty of love is a process of feeling, which comes totally from the inner being. This is why love cannot be intellectualized, conceptualized, and understood in terms of intellectual processes, as many people attempt to do. It is a feeling that must be permitted. To give the self this full permission to love includes not only the realization of the inner being but also a positive conception of life and the universe. For if it is true that life is hostile, and therefore depriving for man, then love would indeed be dangerous. However, if it is true that life is benign, that life is liberating, and that life is giving to man -- in other words, if it is for man rather than against him -- then love is not only not dangerous, but it is the only way possible to exist in peace and harmony with the existing factors of the universe. So it is absolutely necessary, my friends, that you connect the fear to love with your negative conception and expectation of life on the one side, and the freedom from the fear to love with a positive, benign conception and expectation of life on the other. It will be interesting to observe how one and the same person can, in certain areas of life, be in total harmony with reality and thus have an abiding trust in life, with the result that his ability to feel love is well developed. The further consequences of a favorable experience in these areas are inevitable, but seldom give rise to examining this fact and to comparing it with the unhappy areas of life experience, where the exact opposite holds true. This direct interaction and causal connection must be brought into awareness and then it should be observed as much as possible.

Only by bringing it out and by literally testing it can you convince yourself of the positive nature of life. Then you will abandon your seclusion, your separateness, your hate, and your fear -- all of which comprise nonlove. Open yourself up, at least tentatively, to try the benign nature of life, and therefore of man, for both must be the same.

This brings us to the third aspect in this triad, which is a healthy balance between activity and passivity. A long time ago I spoke about the active and the passive forces in the universe (Lecture No 29). Although I stated a number of valid factors regarding this topic, it was not possible at that time to go as deeply, nor was it possible to establish the connection with other facets of man's inner life as we can now.

Many of my friends in the course of their self-search have encountered a strange and inexplicable distaste for activity and an equally strange and mysterious hankering for nonaction. Some find this to be stronger than others, but in whatever form, or to whatever degree it appears, it is necessary to comprehend this aspect of the human psyche. This hankering for passivity means that the person feels that passivity is a desirable state. It seems to promise the state of peace that man unconsciously confuses with the state of being, while the state of activity represents a chore, a difficulty that you fear you cannot live up to and therefore wish to avoid. Why is this so, my friends?

First of all, it is important to understand that this is a distortion and a misunderstanding of duality. It is confusing fragmentary aspects of the unitive state and separating them from their complementary fragments. In the dualistic mode of experiencing life, activity and passivity appear as opposites. In the reality of the highest state of consciousness, the state of being, both activity and passivity intermingle. It is equally true to say that the healthy state of activity is also passive, while the healthy state of passivity is also active. Only on the dualistic level does this appear to be a contradiction. The way this can best be demonstrated in terms of your immediate everyday life is by reminding you that every healthy activity that you undertake is relaxed, easy, and effortless, which seems to connote passive qualities. In this relaxation the outgoing movement of action is unstrained and contains a rhythm of peace, if I may put it in these words. If this rhythm of peace is fragmentized -- in other words, if it is experienced as a particle and not as a whole -- then it may seem to be passivity. By the same token, we can approach it from the other end, from the other facet of this unity of forces. When you feel yourself in a healthy passive state, then it is never a static state, which is motionless. I know I have said this in the past in different connections, but it must be repeated here to make the underlying significance of this lecture clear. In healthy passivity -- or in the state of being -- the action of movement does exist, it is the rhythm of the universe, the motion of peace that is unstrained.

The principle of the balance between active and passive must reign in every creative process in the universe. There cannot be a creative process thinkable without the active and passive forces harmonizing, complementing, and furthering each other. This applies to every healthy and purposeful activity in your life on the plane of existence in which you function. This applies to the more crass manifestations of this principle, such as the balance between work and leisure. But each of these facets contains both active and passive principles. For work coming forth from a healthy organism flows effortlessly, while leisure cannot possibly be invigorating and revitalizing if it is static, that is, without movement. If it were motionless, then it would be death. And death does not invigorate, only life does. And life must be movement, as I have said many times.

In distortion and duality, activity and passivity seem opposites. Hence, one appears to be movement, the other appear to be non-movement. One appears to exert strain, the other promises relief from strain. In other words, we return to the basic duality of good versus bad. One facet seems good, desirable; the other facet seems bad, undesirable.

Activity is often experienced as undesirable because it requires a goal direction and a sense of responsibility. It requires the selfhood of the mature person. That is, the person who copes with his own limitations and with the limitations of life as it unfolds itself for him in such a way that these limitations gradually eliminate themselves. If man is totally identified with his ego, then action must be frightening, because the ego is not equipped to undertake purposeful action without being motivated, carried, and guided by the real self. It simply does not have the requirements at its disposal. So when man is not in actual contact with his real self -- no matter how much lip service he may pay to its existence -- then he blocks its immediate manifestation. Therefore, he must fear activity, with all the demands it makes on the individual. Then the state of non-activity, or the static state, seems desirable because it does not make any demands; it does not hold any expectations or any obligations that man fears to face.

It is equally true to state that when man identifies exclusively with his ego -- and, consequently, he either avoids or neglects the existence of a more universal part in himself -- then he often is equally afraid of passivity. For then the passive state implies helplessness. The passive state must imply helplessness when, on the other side of the coin, activity is feared, and therefore either rejected or avoided. For then helplessness is a natural sequence, a direct result. If you do not act purposefully -- in the best interests of the universal laws within yourself -- then you do become helpless. As a result, you become a prey to circumstances beyond your control. Consequently, man often finds himself in a position where on one level he avoids activity -- as a result of his fear that he may not be capable of fulfilling its requirements -- and on another level he equally fears the passive state, even its healthy version because it is all confused. Then he becomes overactive as a compensation and in an alienated, compulsive way, not in a healthy, flowing way.

With these ideas that I present to you, you may see an important connection with the negative concept of life, which also implies that of your innermost self, since these two must be identical. If you suspect and fear the nature of your innermost self, then how can you want to establish contact with it? The only salvation and the only solution then seems to be to concentrate all your energies and all your forces on your outer ego self. As a result, you become more and more disconnected from your innermost being, and therefore from its life-giving powers. Thereupon you proceed to try to force yourself into a loving state, partly because you have learned that this is the thing to do and you want to comply with the regulations of society and the world around you; and partly to comply with the requirements of your innermost conscience, which can never be completely squelched; and, last but not least, in order to succeed in certain aims, such as gaining affection, gaining love, gaining approval, gaining respect, and gaining acceptance -- without which it is not possible to live. So you force yourself to love with your ego self, which is doomed to fail. As I have said before, the ego cannot possibly give you these powers. It cannot give you what it does not possess. Where you have genuine love currents, then they come from your innermost being, whether or not you admit it into existence on a conscious level. Hence these currents come into your personality almost by the back door, as it were. But when this is impossible -- because the door is too tightly locked -- then you cut yourself off from the invigoration of the life stream of love, with increasing feelings of emptiness, of helplessness, of despair, and of isolation. Then you try to counteract these feelings with a laborious effort of trying to love with your ego. These efforts exhaust you. And the more exhausted you are, the more must you shrink from activity and seek refuge in inactivity, which seems like a relief and which, consequently, becomes the desirable state. Yet it never fulfills you, it always leaves you empty and increasingly frightened, as all false solutions do. The more this way is sought, the greater the apathy becomes, for at this point healthy passivity has been converted into its distorted form -- apathy. There is little invigorating life movement and action left in it. Anyone who has ever tasted such a state knows that the static lifelessness of apathy contains a much greater terror than any live hurt, pain, or unhappiness could ever, ever be.

Contacting the real self and then allowing it into action, regardless of how doubtful you may be or how resistant or how frightened you may be of this possibility, is the central point that must be worked upon in order to consolidate all the difficulties into one simple, unifying inner movement. Without doing this, then it is not possible to find the abundance and the wide-open expansion of life that is originally and essentially available to you and in which you can expand and move without threat and find your own reality of being. Without the activation of the real self, then love cannot be possible. As a result, you are not only isolated and distrustful for ever and ever, but your conscience cannot ever give you rest. Even if nonlove is only minute in you, as compared with the vast aspects of your personality in which you do love, your conscience still will not let you rest. This may take all sorts of forms of destroying your best interests.

When you do not first establish contact with and then identify with your inner self, then activity cannot be peaceful and passivity cannot be regenerating. Activity and passivity cannot mold as one unit so that the actions in life become meaningful and relaxed, and action in itself becomes something desirable. But when you have activated your divine self, then passivity will hold no threat of helplessness, since you trust both yourself and life. All this rests upon your activation of the center of your innermost being, an activation that has to be deliberate, precise, and direct.

An important key for this purpose is the following. Often my friends say: "Oh yes, if only I could, but I am not yet capable of wanting to." And then they proceed to wait for a miracle to happen, either from within or from without, so that they will suddenly want to act constructively. In this instance the expressed intent to activate a universal center within. They wait as though something other than their own immediately available self will propel them. But this can never be. You could wait forever and ever, until the moment when you say, "I will do it. I want to do it. I will try to do it, regardless of my resistance, of my doubt, of my fear." You explore the possibility of finding this nucleus of power, of intelligence, of feeling, and of harmony by giving it every chance. Commit yourself to this possibility, even if at this moment it is but a possibility. How else can it become a factually experienced reality? It cannot do this by theory or by anything that happens either from outside or inside, other than by your making it possible to happen. With this approach you will make it possible, even if only tentatively to begin with, so that it will gradually reveal its reality to you. This action on your part must be your commitment to it.

Are there any questions regarding this topic?

QUESTION: Is the life center that one commits oneself to located in the subtle bodies, or is it in the physical organs or structure? Or where is it?

ANSWER: It is in all of them. It is life itself, which infuses everything where it can find an opening. By its own nature, life cannot be more in one and less in the other. For it is actually not in a geographically locateable spot. In man's illusory vision regarding time, space, and movement, it seems as though it is located deep within the solar plexus. This is not an illusion in the sense that this is actually where it manifests most noticeably. But this is so only because this is where man is most receptive, most vulnerable, and most open. It actually flows through every layer of man's organism, of the organization that constitutes the total entity. But this provided it is both activated and unobstructed by the organism. To the extent that it is not activated, to that extent it cannot reach the outer layers of man's personality. In physical sickness, the body has remained unactivated for some time in the areas of the illness, due to corresponding mental blocks and emotional blocks. In other words, distortions and misconceptions.

When man is sick in his outlook, in his attitudes -- and therefore in his life experience and in his life manifestation -- then it is in those psychic areas that the real self is blocked off and therefore its emanations cannot penetrate. There one can say that it does not reach the outer levels of the personality. Therefore, it is correct to state that it is found only in the depth of the spiritual subtle body. This is why years ago I said that man must first penetrate the mask self that hides his destructive attitudes. He is afraid to do so because he thinks that this destructive self is the last reality of his person and that the only good exists in the facade. Only when this first battle is won can the destructive currents be let out so that they can reconvert themselves into their original form of the hidden real self, which then begins to manifest. This is the only way the real self can become a reality. Then it can surge through the outer personality levels and heal the distortions. A totally self-realized person will be enlivened by the real self on all levels, the physical level not less than the emotional level and the mental level.

QUESTION: I have reached the point where I meditate to activate the real self in order to get love to come through, having found my misconception about spirituality and the physical body. But it is still dead. I have not been able to activate it.

ANSWER: This is quite natural, my friend. Do not forget how deeply indocrinated this fear is in you. How many years, already in this lifetime, not to speak of any others, you have conditioned yourself to a pattern of reaction, to an orientation, and to a way of operation. Therefore, it cannot be broken suddenly. This is even more true than you are aware of. You have just reached the first inklings of this fact, which is a tremendous victory on your path. Little by little you will proceed to realize how deeply this fear is ingrained in you. You will become aware of more specific reasons for this fear, as well as of the same reasons that you already know, but which you have not yet experienced on a deeper level of your self. As you do so little by little, then the heavy wall, the thick fog, the mazes of confusion that covered the real self, with its strong and wonderful feelings, will dissolve. You have already gained some preliminary insight into this fear, but this insight will increase as you observe your reactions when you utter the wish to feel love in your whole person, also in your physical body.

QUESTION: You relate death with lack of love. How can you then explain physical death?

ANSWER: The manifestation of physical death in this sphere of human existence is precisely the result of duality. Duality is the result of erroneous concepts. Error means, in the last analysis, and to return to the topic of this lecture, a misunderstanding of life and of the universe. Therefore the individual believes life to be dangerous, hostile, a force against which he must defend himself. This defense must exclude all attitudes of openness, of inclusion, of the movement toward the other. In other words, love. When this movement -- this love -- is lacking, then stagnation, stasis, nonlife ensues. In other words, death.

Error equates nonlove. Nonlove is directly opposed to life as it really is, in its potential, in its waiting readiness to unfold when it is allowed to do so because inappropriate and untruthful concepts do not block the way. This life is a continuum. It is an eternally moving process that can be sensed only when the personal psyche allows this moving process. This is a mathematical equation.

QUESTION: I can see that, but I know that I am destined to die, even if I am able to love.

ANSWER: No, there are degrees. Man is in an interim stage of evolution. The entity does not come from a total state of nonlove in which there is a very small amount of life -- inorganic life would be the closest to a state of life with no love -- to a state of total love, where there is no longer any split, any division, and any false concept. In other words, where the universal consciousness is totally realized. Hence where there is no duality and, consequently, no concept of life versus death. The stages of evolution are very slow.

QUESTION: In my work on the path I found out that I never loved anything or anyone, that my only way of loving is neurotic. Listening to your lecture, I am interested to find my real self in this respect. Can you give me some help?

ANSWER: I would advise you to ask yourself specifically to what extent you believe that life is against you, so that you do not dare to love. Put this down in very specific ideas you have. In what particular respects do you assume that life is against you? (Questioner: In all ways.) Nevertheless, it does not suffice that this be admitted so generally, for this is not quite accurate either. It has to be made specific. After this is done and you look at the written statements, then begin to wonder. Tell yourself: "Maybe I am mistaken. Maybe it is not that way." You have to make allowances for the possibility that you may be mistaken. So often man remains in a bottleneck on his path because he does not move away from the wrong conclusion. He has found it and he knows in principle that it is wrong, but he remains with it under the guise of "this is the way I feel." He waits to feel differently without any effort on his part. But this can come only when he seriously questions his conclusions and he admits that it can be different and then he looks at this different possibility or way of life. The challenge of an assumption must take place after the assumption is put into precise words. For example, "I expect life to bring me this or that way, at least as far as I am concerned." Then you make room for a truth that could never enter into the closed chamber of your dark, abysmal misconceptions about life and about your innermost nature.

QUESTION: We have lost a friend recently who was very close to this work. I wonder whether we could be in touch with him somehow.

ANSWER: The important thing is not to be in touch with any specific individual in the non-physical world, but that all beings, regardless of where they are, be in touch with that center of the innermost self that is universal. Everything else falls into place and it unifies those who reach out in love. To establish contact that way is not necessary, nor is it really helpful for anyone concerned. It shifts the emphasis from that which is important to that which is really unimportant. I know that some people may be disappointed with such an answer and may erroneously believe that this is either a rebuff or a lack of concern. This attitude seems denying because the concept they still have about life and about the self is not yet geared to a universal understanding. Eventually they will see that there is really more truth and more love in putting the emphasis on all that which furthers the contact with the one and only thing that matters -- namely, self-realization. Then love between individuals happens healthily and naturally, in the best possible way. Contact with people who are no longer in the body can never be a really fulfilling venture. It must lead, in some fashion, to escape from the emphasis that is so important. It is often sought to alleviate doubt and pain, but it never really does so in a genuine and lasting way.

QUESTION: But wouldn't it give strength to the deceased person to be in contact?

ANSWER: No. Anyone who is oriented toward striving and growth will have all the contact necessary in his own world. The same laws exist there as they do here. When you do not want to reach out beyond your limitations and your erroneous concepts, then no one in the world can help you. But the moment you do, then help comes from all sides. Why should this be different in another dimension of consciousness? Love gives strength and this can be extended and expanded no matter where the individuals are. For that, a manifest contact is not necessary.

May the love, the strength, and the truth expand in you -- in your own innermost being. To the degree that you let this happen, to that degree you will be susceptible to the love, to the strength, and to the truth that come from others to you. They are in the air around you, in the air you breathe. Your gaze will change, your realizations, and your perceptions will change to the degree that the love, the strength, and the truth from your innermost being unite with those of others. Be in peace. Be in truth. Be in yourself!

October 7, 1966