Positivity And Negativity As One Energy Current -- Envy

By The Pathwork Guide

Greetings, my dearest friends. May the blessings of the Creative Intelligence, which exists all around you and within you, strengthen you and enlighten you so that these words find an echo and help you on your path to your real self.

These lectures are always addressed to the majority of my friends working on this path. Those of you who have not yet reached the point where you can apply the topic under discussion will nevertheless find it useful; you will be helped indirectly to reach this point a little sooner than you might otherwise. Do not feel discouraged if you cannot immediately apply or even understand these lectures when you first read them. Know that your path will bring you to the issues discussed here.

By now most of my friends have come face to face with their destructiveness. I am referring to more than the mere discovery of an emotion -- the acknowledgment of a momentary hostility, for example. I mean an overall, pervasive, basic, lingering destructiveness that has been dormant and covered up all along. It is quite a different experience to ascertain that this destructiveness exists in you, and to feel the condition you were in before it was repressed. You are now at a stage in which you can observe yourself thinking destructively, feeling destructively, and acting destructively, while before you were, at best, only theoretically aware of your destructiveness, and therefore you could surmise its presence only by the unpleasant manifestations in your life. Now you are dealing with the problem of how to change this condition because you do not like it. You fully comprehend that destructiveness is totally useless and therefore does not fulfill a single good purpose. Nevertheless, you find yourself unable to let it go. In order to be able to do so, you need to understand the nature of destructiveness much better than you do now. This subject is the main topic of this lecture.

It is not easy to become aware of yourself thinking destructively, feeling destructively, and acting destructively. But even when you do have this awareness, it is still difficult to see that your destructiveness causes you misery. But even when you are aware of the relationship between your destructiveness and your misery, you are totally unwilling, and therefore unable, to give up this way of being. The awareness both of your destructiveness and of its consequences is a major step in your development. But in order to be able to let go of your destructiveness, which is the second part of this particular phase of your evolution, you must understand its nature. And to understand it requires some repetitions so that the subject can be grasped comprehensively.

The dualistic concept of life is closely related to the lack of comprehension about man's destructiveness. Mankind thinks of destructive forces and constructive forces as opposites. Even those of you who know theoretically that there is no such division wish that you had positive feelings in place of the negative feelings that you discover. Or else you think that after the negative emotions are dissipated, then a new set of feelings will follow, one which consists of an entirely different energy or psychic material. When you speak of the two forces or two sets of feelings -- destructive and constructive -- then you are using a figure of speech, a way of expressing two different kinds of experiences. But this figure of speech is also an expression of the dualistic misconception that is prevalent in man's consciousness.

There is really only one power. This is very important to understand, particularly when you deal with your own destructiveness and negativity. There is only one life force, which energizes every expression of life. This life force can flow either in a constructive, positive, affirming way, or it can turn into a destructive, negating current. In order to understand the specific and personal way in which this process works, I will discuss it from the point of view of man in relation to his life. I will touch upon general spiritual principles only when they are necessary to help you to understand the entire topic.

When the life force is untampered with, then it is totally constructive, totally good, totally positive, and totally affirming. Therefore, it produces total pleasure for any living, feeling, perceiving consciousness. The more fully this consciousness is developed, then the fuller the pleasure it can experience from and through the pure life force, in whatever form the life force finds expression. The pure life force cannot be anything but beauty. Every life organism -- a newborn baby, a plant, a cell -- tends naturally to realize this potential. When the natural flow of the life force is interfered with, then the energy current which seeks expression is blocked, and is thus stopped from flowing to its destiny. The natural flow is stopped by outer conditions, by inner conditions, or by a combination of both.

When a young child encounters conditions in his outer environment that prohibit the natural flow of his life force, then the extent of the damage depends on the extent to which he is free from inner blockages. If inner blockages exist but still lie dormant because they have not been eliminated in previous lives, then the outer negative conditions will create a severe blockage by freezing the flowing energy current and petrifying it into a hardened psychic mass. When no dormant blockages exist, then the outer negative conditions will create only a temporary disturbance in the flow of the life force. Therefore, the outer negative condition can never be totally responsible for the condensation of energy, for the paralysis of the life stream. It can only be the final activating factor in bringing out the dormant negative inner condition. The positive life force turns into a destructive, non-life force when the outer negative condition activates the dormant inner condition. Love becomes fear and hostility; trust becomes distrust, etc. The negative force finally becomes so unbearable that it is totally numbed.

Man's persistent problems in life result from blocked energy. Unblocking can occur only when the relationship between the inner negative conditions and the outer negative conditions responsible for the block is thoroughly understood. Because children's ego faculties are immature, it is impossible for them to deal adequately with negative conditions. When a human being finds himself on a path such as this one, then it is very important to understand that a negative emotion cannot be replaced by a different positive emotion. It must be reconverted to its original state. How do you do this, my friends? Each of your unpleasant, unpleasurable, problematic or anxiety-producing life manifestations is the result of a repetition. It repeats in this lifetime the situation in which the positive pleasure force was originally blocked, hindered, or prohibited, and therefore turned into unpleasure.

It is very important to understand that pleasure is not totally absent in a state of unpleasure. When you find yourself stymied in your attempt to overcome your negativity, then you need to sense, deep within yourself, the pleasurable aspect of this negativity, even if you are consciously feeling a lot of pain. Your difficulty in ridding yourself of your destructiveness also comes from attitudes that you have already explored -- such as the desire to punish, the forcing current, or the unspoken words which say, "if I am sufficiently unhappy, then I prove that the world is wrong for not giving me what I want." But these reasons for your negativity are not the deepest problem that you face in shedding it. Rather, the greatest problem is the dichotomy that you feel between the simultaneous pleasure and unpleasure in your negativity. It is necessary for you to first intuit and then to specifically feel this dichotomy.

The pleasure principle can never be completely absent even where it is distorted. Its basic ingredients must always remain -- no matter how far gone the distortion is and how difficult to shed -- precisely because the pleasurable aspect of it always exists. But negativity can be shed when you understand the fact that only the form of its expression must be changed, but that the identical life current is preserved. When it is truly understood that the painful aspects of the life current can be abandoned and that the pleasurable aspects will simultaneously increase, then negativity can transform itself. When it is emotionally understood that the same current will manifest differently -- rather than the believing that the negativity will be replaced by a new set of emotions appearing out of nowhere -- then what now seems extremely difficult will happen by itself. You can become aware of the pleasure that is attached to your destructiveness when you meditate for this specific awareness. Instead of feeling guilty about the pleasure, and consequently repressing it, you will be able to allow the current to unfold, to express itself, and thus to reconvert itself.

Mankind's attaching of pleasure to his destructiveness has been instrumental in the widespread guilt that exists about all the experiences of pleasure. This guilt, in turn, is responsible for the numbing of all the feelings.

Then how can pleasure be liberated from destructiveness if both are considered equally wrong? Although you are not consciously aware of it, you cannot live without pleasure, for life and pleasure are one and the same. When pleasure is linked to destructiveness, then destructiveness cannot be given up. Letting go of destructiveness then seems like letting go of life. This creates a situation in which on one level of your inner life you hold on to both pleasure and destructiveness, and you then feel guilty for and afraid of these two forces. On a more conscious level, you are numb, and therefore you feel little or nothing.

It is not enough to know all this conceptually, it must be related to your specific circumstances. What outer manifestation in your life is currently causing you continuous anguish? Look for those problems in your life that you cannot come to terms with, rather than for a momentary experience that is caused by a condition, and which then dissolves when new conditions arise. In order to resolve the deeply problematic conditions which are called images -- and which continually recreate similar conditions -- the blocked, and therefore paralyzed, energy must be made fluid again. This can happen only when you take the first step in this particular phase of your development by identifying the pleasure in your destructiveness. You must actually feel the pleasure that is attached to the unpleasure of the problem.

Since the pleasure current in the life force manifests primarily as sexuality in your life, then blocked destructive energy contains blocked sexual energy. It follows, then, that the outer problems must be symbolic or representative of how sexual energy was first blocked by outer conditions. The pain of this blockage caused the destructiveness, which contains aspects of the pleasure principle. Every difficult situation in life symbolizes a sexual fixation in the innermost psyche, one which you fear and therefore run away from. Because you do not face up to your fear, and therefore you cannot experience it, the outer condition becomes more and more disconnected from its inner cause where, in the sexual fixation, the pain and the difficulty are enlivened by pleasure.

Therefore, you on this path must permit yourselves to feel the pleasure in your destructiveness. Only then will you truly comprehend the painful outer situation, which may seem to have nothing to do either with your emotional life or with your sexual problems. I have mentioned that the secrets behind your conflicts, as well as the key to their resolution, lie in your secret sexual fantasies. When you find the parallel between the outer problem and the specific pleasure current in your sexuality, then you will be able to make the frozen energy fluid again. The flowing energy will then enable you to dissolve the negativity and the destructiveness, and thus eliminate the outer problem.

Your inability to feel the pleasure in your unpleasure is the result of judging yourself yourself for this distortion, and therefore rejecting yourself. Consequently, you deny, you repress, and therefore you alienate yourself further from your inner self, where the destructive conditions can be experienced, and thereby gradually altered.

Every problem must have a nucleus in which the original current has been blocked, and is therefore distorted, and in which the pleasure/unpleasure dichotomy produces an unconscious fixation. You chose a way out of this pattern, with the further consequence that outer problems form and repeat themselves. These problems cannot be overcome until their nucleus is experienced. This cause and effect applies to all stubborn problems, whether or not they seem related to sexuality.

The chain reaction that I have explained must be understood personally and then has to be worked through. In other words, you must stop running away from the distortion in yourself. You must allow yourself to see it, to let it unfold, and to live it through within yourself. Then you will see the dichotomy between pleasure and unpleasure. First you will understand and then you will experience how and why destructiveness, in whatever shape or form it manifests in your life, seems so difficult to abandon. As you do this, then the destructiveness will loosen up more easily and more quickly than when you tried to force it away.

All this may sound very theoretical to those who cannot yet understand what I have described, but many of you are at the point where these words can be used first for awareness and then for action. This will be a turning point first in your inner life and then, as a consequence, in your outer life, so that giving up your destructiveness will no longer be a problem. You cannot force change with the surface will, without a deep comprehension of the inner forces that make up your destructiveness. The outer will must be used, but only to liberate the inner powers which then make development a natural, organic, and harmonious process. Destructiveness doesn't dissolve itself by being deliberately dropped, like a cloak. And constructive feelings cannot be produced by a similar act of will. The transformation is an evolutionary process that is happening within yourself here and now.

Man's connection to envy is another area in which he finds himself extremely blocked, hindered, and impatient with his own development. This is a much more important topic than most of you realize. Here, again, a number of my friends have begun to see that envy exists where their life is problematic, and that they are free of envy where their life is free of problems. As with destructiveness, envy gives rise to self-hatred. You run away from the point within the envy which has to be transcended in order to fully emerge from the envy current and reconvert it to its original nature.

The cause of envy is the dualistic concept which expresses life in terms of either/or. The statement that envy makes is: "Either I have or the other has." This indicates the limited way in which man experiences the universe. The universe is infinite in its abundance. Really knowing this makes envy impossible, for then you realize that whatever the other person owns or whatever the other person is has not been taken away from you. Whatever you have was never taken away from someone else. The either/or misconception presents innumerable problems. In addition to creating envy, it creates guilt. Believing the either/or misconception to be true paralyzes your relaxed and powerful reach toward all the good things that can be yours. It makes you see your problems in a distorted fashion. And it produces guilt for wanting and, at the same time, it creates envy of what others have.

This distorted perception of life's conditions is also responsible for the competitive attitude that afflicts mankind. Competitiveness is particularly strong in certain civilizations during particular periods of their history. Understanding the truth about life makes it impossible for one person to measure himself against another. Comparison between two people is totally unrealistic, for it measures factors that cannot be measured. The person who is no longer caught in this error is relieved of a specific strain. When you truly comprehend the unitive principle, which states that good is never divisible, then a number of problems will be eliminated. You will not be envious, and therefore you will not feel guilty. Nor will you be faced with the apparent necessity of giving something up to someone else, because you will know that what is yours is yours and what is the other person's is his. That fact will make impossible the selfishness and the dishonesty which exist in the childish nature, where the tendency to cheat life always prevails. You will not have to try to get away with anything. Nor, once you really comprehend the unitive principle, will you have to feel special when you compare yourself with others.

The need to be special comes from a confusion about the rightful inner need for full self-realization. What is this confusion? Full self-realization always enhances the uniqueness of the individual. It does not diminish individuality, nor does it imply mediocrity. Quite the contrary is true. Then why do people believe that giving up being special means either experiencing the loss of individuality or becoming mediocre? The answer is because the need to be special contains a desire to triumph over others; it indicates an attitude of hostility to others. Wanting to be special then implies that self-enhancement can exist only at the expense of others. This is the either/or -- which must always be destructive -- that results from the erroneous concept of duality. If you need to be special, then you actually destroy the other person's value. A further consequence is that the deep-seated, self-regulating process of the conscience says No to you self-enhancement and stops your outgoing energy current. Then this current either becomes negative or it is numbed, with the result that you are either passive, paralyzed, and hold back, or you are ruthless, with the inevitable guilt and other consequences.

The truth and the solution to this confusion can be found only when you distinguish between two totally different ways of measuring or evaluating -- or, let us say, two totally different goals. When you want to be special in order to triumph over others, when your uniqueness exists at the expense of others and therefore it measures itself by others, then this uniqueness is destructive, and therefore must lead to problems. But when you realize that your own innate specialness can be unblocked -- a specialness that does not contain the need to measure yourself against others -- then even your presently distorted specialness will not create any problems. With this knowledge, you will be free first to unblock and then to unfold the best in yourself without infringing upon other people's rights or upon other people's needs. Instead, your best will contribute to others, rather than take away from them, and you will express the best in you without the need to cheat, the need to get by, or the need to get more than you give. The freed power will then activate more power, and there will be no need to put brakes on this power. Envy, guilt, dishonesty, and belittling others create the need to put brakes on one's most constructive outgoing power current. When you are ignorant of the fact that you have within yourself the possibility of self-fulfillment, then the only way you can conceive of expressing yourself is by measuring and comparing yourself with others. But when you know that you have your own quota to fulfill for your own sake, then you will not be conflicted about your own specialness.

You should always express your best, of course. But if your best is secretly designed to lord it over others, or to get away with special unfair privileges, or to obtain something for nothing, then you will get yourself in trouble. Your individuality cannot unfold because ego, vanity, and ruthlessness have replaced it. These qualities automatically hinder the positive power, and therefore convert it into a destructive power.

When you feel envy or when you feel the need to impress others or when you feel the need to be better than they are, then try to feel the constructive power behind this need. For the need to be the best is merely a distortion of the inborn urge to realize the best in you. When you do this, then you will no longer find yourself blocked and paralyzed.

Are there any questions?

QUESTION: What makes the perception of pleasure so unique and specific in relation to unpleasure?

ANSWER: This is a very important question. The answer may not seem to be a direct one, but it is. It is known that man fears pleasure when he is still full of conflicts and problems whose nature he does not understand. Anyone on this path who goes deeply enough to probe his reactions discovers the startling fact that he is more afraid of pleasure than he is of pain. Those who have not verified this fact in themselves may find it unbelievable, for they consciously resent the unpleasure and wish it away. To a degree it is true that unpleasure is not really wanted. But man cannot rid himself of the dichotomy between pleasure and unpleasure when he does not go deeply enough into his psychic processes to feel the pleasure in the unpleasure. Total pleasure is feared for a very important reason: the pleasure supreme of the cosmic energy current must seem unbearable -- too much, frightening, almost annihilating -- when the personality is still geared to negativity and destructiveness. To put it differently, to the degree that the personality has impaired its integrity -- to the degree that impurity, dishonesty, cheating, and malice exist in the psyche -- to that degree pure pleasure must be rejected. The pain of the negative pleasure is then the only way the entity can experience a modicum of pleasure. When you find that deep within yourself you fear pleasure as a danger, then you must ask yourself: "Where am I not honest with life? Where am I not honest with myself? Where do I cheat? Where do I impair my integrity?" This shows precisely where, why, and to what degree pure pleasure must be rejected. It further explains why destructiveness is held on to when man ascertains that he himself fears and therefore rejects pleasure, rather than clinging to the illusion that life is depriving him of pleasure. He can help himself by answering the pertinent questions and thus finding the elements of impairment in himself. This procedure is the way out. When he finds where he himself violates his sense of decency and honesty, then he can unlock the door which keeps him stuck in negative pleasure and which forces him to reject pleasure which is unhampered by pain.

QUESTION: Would you define pleasure as expansion and pain as contraction?

ANSWER: Yes, that is quite accurate. Pain is a contraction in the same sense that a cramp is. But there is also contraction in pure pleasure. The difference is that it takes place in a rhythmic, smooth motion, in a harmonious way. Unpleasure is an extended, protracted, cramp-like contraction.

QUESTION: The way I experience the fear of pleasure is by experiencing a fear of losing myself in pleasure. Is that what you meant?

ANSWER: Yes, this is precisely what I meant. It can be explained, when you think about it, in terms of trust. When, either consciously or unconsciously, you sense your hidden little mechanisms for not being straightforward with the life process, when your response to life is negative in any form, and when, consequently, your sense of integrity is impaired, then you cannot trust yourself. Nor can you trust yourself when you run away from the nucleus of your negative pleasure principle, as explained in this lecture. Your negative pleasure first has to be accepted, then has to be understood, and finally has to be inwardly lived through with full self-acceptance before you can trust yourself to be unguarded. As I have often said, your innermost self, your own psychic energies, and the life energies are of one and the same substance. You cannot trust yourself without trusting life. If you distrust yourself for any reason, either right or wrong, then how can you lose yourself into yourself and into life? A trust must exist, and this trust is, in principle, absolutely justifiable. But in practice, in specific manifestations, it is often not justifiable. Full self-acceptance must be established before trust can exist. Then there will no longer be any fear of losing yourself, because trusting will be experienced as bringing you back to yourself, richer than ever.

QUESTION: Is the principle of pain and pleasure characteristic of this earth sphere?

ANSWER: It is characteristic of this earth sphere, but this does not mean incarnated beings only. It means all those who are in this specific state of consciousness, regardless of whether they are in the flesh or out of the body. It applies to all those whose consciousness is geared to the concept of dualism, and who, consequently, cannot perceive the conciliating, unifying way of creation, of life, and of themselves. In all these cases, pleasure and pain must exist as opposites. As I said at the beginning of this lecture, the good and the bad forces, pleasure and pain, are thought of as two separate forces, not as one and the same energy current.

QUESTION: It seems to me that when I do something I don't like, which is meant to invite anger or guilt or jealousy, I have someone else whom I hold responsible for my being the way I am. Is this a valid observation and what should we do about it?

ANSWER: Even if some of the blame is put on the other person's doorstep because that is partially true in the situation -- and this is usually the case with sane human beings -- then there must be something in you that you ignore and which bothers you, for otherwise there could not be a problem, there could not be a disharmonious feeling in you. It is relatively easy to accept the other person's shortcomings or failings. Otherwise, one would not be involved in situations where these failings cannot help but to affect the self negatively. Therefore, the fact of such disturbances points to unknown elements which must be ascertained in order to eliminate the destructive feelings. This anger is essentially directed against the self. You may be angry because you are angry, and you cannot accept this emotion in yourself. You may become angry because you cannot accept a similar or a corresponding aspect in yourself. That is, that which angers you in the other may exist in a slightly different form in yourself. In short, the following question must be asked: "What is it in me that has produced this situation? How am I a co-producer of this situation? In what way do I contribute to it?"

The second thing I have to say here is this. Often a person cannot find the answer because he looks for the cause either in a limited way or in a moralistic manner. The way he may contribute to the situation may be altogether different from what he thinks he contributes, and therefore feels defensive about. For example, a person tries to exonerate himself because he sense a badness in himself. Actually, his contribution may not be at all bad or mean. Rather, it may be that he underestimates his value, that he underestimates his rights, that he underestimates his entire person. He may be weak, submissive, not assertive enough, and thus encourage a negative situation in a different way from that which he vaguely defends against in himself. Such a weakness is always the result of some disturbance of the psyche that exists on a deep level, and therefore cannot help but create negativity and destructiveness. The way to eliminate this weakness is not by forcing the destructive feelings away; this cannot succeed. One must work on a very deep level with these problems. Often weakness is confused with goodness, and strength is confused either with ruthlessness or with selfishness. In these confusions, man does not find a way to resolve the problem and find clarity.

Therefore, I suggest a meditation that reaches deep into the self and that says: "I want to see where I possibly violate some spiritual law, where I am wrong in the usual sense of the word. I would also like to know where I am weak and where I am confused, and thus allow negative emotions to come into existence. Where is it that I am not aware of my value and, because of this lack of awareness, I fight in the wrong way? I would like to see these elements and I want to straighten them out. I want to see both these aspects."

These various aspects usually interact. In other words, they are not unconnected elements. For example, the lack of self-assertion on one level may induce an angry over-assertion on the surface. When the meditation is directed into such channels, then a new vision may come, a vision that was hitherto blocked.

May your understanding grow so that you sense your own distortions and how these distortions are a valuable life energy that can be activated in the specific way I have shown you.

Be blessed, every one of you. Receive the strength and the power that flows into you and then make use of it. Travel this path to the nucleus of your inner being. Be in God.

December 2, 1966