The Pulsation Of Consciousness

By The Pathwork Guide

Greetings, my dearest, dearest friends. Blessings for this entire coming working season, not only for this lecture, but for all the subsequent endeavors and steps on your path, which must lead you to finding home -- provided these efforts are sincere and whole. Home means your real self, your innermost self, your true self. He who is his real self is at home. He is at home in the world, he is at home in life. He is safe and secure, with a firmly established ground under his feet. Home means the inner place where all the problems find their solution. It is the inner place where no fear and no hate exist. When fear exists, then hate must exist -- and vice versa. They are really one and the same. Home is the inner place where eternal well-being and eternal life are a reality -- experienced as a fact.

At first, eternal life is relative. Gradually, it becomes absolute. Relative eternal life may seem like a contradiction, an absurdity. Yet, eternal life in the absolute cannot reveal itself in one sudden manifestation. It reveals itself gradually, as the consciousness expands and as time expands from one dimension to the other. Within three-dimensional time itself the sense of eternality grows and life itself expands -- not only in the sense that the healthier and the more whole a person becomes the more the duration of his life expands, but also in the inner sense and experience of it. But about this we shall talk another time.

Every fall, when we start a new working season, the first lecture sets the pace and the stage, so to speak. It heralds the emphasis of our concern as an overall venture, the necessary repetitions notwithstanding. It represents a blueprint of the future work and it must be, at the same time, the natural continuation of where we left off. Thus this lecture will be simultaneously the sequence of what has passed and the foreshadowing of what is to come. That is, if you study is sensitively. The topic is the pulsation of the consciousness.

All living organisms pulsate, all living organisms breathe, and all living organisms move. But strangely enough these qualities are ascribed primarily to the physical manifestations of life and are ignored as far as the consciousness is concerned. Yet the identical laws must prevail for both.

Let me briefly enumerate certain basic aspects about pulsation. Everything that lives must pulsate, it must breathe, and it must move. Therefore, pulsation and breathing are interrelated. The movement of life is contained in both. This movement is involuntary and it occurs in rhythmic intervals, provided the organism is healthy, harmonious, undisturbed. For example, think of the heartbeat of the healthy person. It is regular and rhythmic. A sick heart, or a disturbed heart, or a fearful heart automatically loses this rhythmic quality. Everything that is healthy moves rhythmically and pulsates rhythmically.

On the physical level this rhythm occurs according to that dimension of time which applies to all the physical manifestations. This is three-dimensional time. For the three-dimensionally oriented observation, the rhythmic movement is regular in its intervals. The pulsebeat can be measured according to three-dimensional time.

The involuntary movements take place according to the expanding principle, to the restricting principle, and to the static principle. Everything that lives must follow these principles. Both breath and pulsation demonstrate this truth.

All this is demonstrable on the physical level. The identical laws apply to the level of the consciousness, although there they are less obvious. It requires a certain amount of tuning in on the soul movements and on the inner reality of the self to realize these laws, to experience them. At first it is a sensing and an intuitive knowing, later it becomes as definite and factual an experience as any outer fact of life.

When the consciousness is harmonious and in accordance with the universal laws, then the rhythm occurs regularly. The dimension of the consciousness is not three-dimensional, as the physical organism is. The emotional organism or the mental organism or the spiritual organism belongs to another dimension. Therefore its rhythmic nature does not seem to have the same kind of regularity in its intervals as the physical pulsations do. To the three-dimensionally oriented person the pulsations or the cycles of the consciousness do not appear rhythmic. They appear irregular and haphazard. For example, the expansion cycle may be either longer or shorter than the restricting cycle. Or one expansion cycle may last longer than the next. Yet, according to this other dimension, this may be a lawful, regular, harmonious movement. It is meaningful within its own inner law and can be understood only in terms of the individual consciousness and of those aspects of the consciousness which each particular movement expresses and signifies.

In other words, the pulsation of the consciousness expresses the state of consciousness of any given moment: the degree of self-realization and growth, or their lack. Its meaning expresses the particular area where growth is needed most, or where it may be over-emphasized at the price of neglect in other areas. The experience of each individual is a result of his innermost beliefs, of his concepts, of his attitudes, of his feelings, and of his actions. How each experience is met determines the rhythm of the pulsation. People are often aware of phases or cycles in their lives. They feel that they have "good times" and "bad times." Occasionally they even sense that certain periods tend more in one direction and concentrate more on certain aspects of living, while at other periods different phases may be quite obvious. These manifestations are aspects of the pulsation of their consciousness. But they do not appear in regularly-spaced intervals, as do the physical pulsations of the organism. However, when a person is perceptive, intuitive, and finely attuned to his inner reality -- as a result of considerable self-knowledge and development -- then he clearly senses that these irregular phases are not chaotic or arbitrary. They, too, follow a certain order, although its nature may still be obscure.

Let us now try to understand what expansion, what restriction, and what the static principle mean in terms of the pulsating movement of the consciousness. The movement of expansion expresses reaching out. The restricting movement means bringing or gathering into the organism. The static movement means the assimilation of both and then the transition from one to the other. I discussed this in more detail several years ago. The significance of this threefold principle in regard to the living, breathing, pulsating universe -- in all of its aspects -- is very important.

In the healthy organism the changing from one to the other of these three movements occurs regularly and meaningfully. The spiritual significance is always growth, completion, perfection, additional creation, pleasure supreme. Since growth and pleasure are one, then the one cannot exist without the other. In organic growth, expansion represents the direct expression of development, while the restricting and the static movements indirectly further it -- through assimilation, digestion, utilization of what was gained, and rest.

In the disturbed organism -- one that is distorted by misconceptions -- the expanding movement appears fraught with danger. Misconceptions must always lead to resistance to growth. The disturbed organism is in a state of fear. And fear makes expansion appear painful and threatening. Fear contracts in unpleasure. Hence the disturbed organism contracts unpleasurably when it should expand pleasurably. And when the natural contracting movement is supposed to set in, in rhythmic change, then it cannot do so since it already is cramped, hardened, and so exaggeratedly contracted that the pulsating life movement becomes impossible.

All outer, or apparently outer, experience is really self-produced. It is a reflection of what already exists within. It could not come your way from without if it were not there within your consciousness first. For the person who is disconnected from his unconscious this seems at best theoretical and all too metaphysical. But for him who first explores and then discovers the mechanism and the reality of his own unconscious, and can therefore first identify it and then connect with it, what I say here is experienced as an undisputable fact.

When the negative outer experience comes to him who has not connected with that part of his innermost self that has produced it, then this experience is rejected. In other words, it is withdrawn from, it is cringed away from. The organism cramps up in a movement of fear away from that which seems alien, and therefore as having nothing to do with it. But since in reality the undesirable outer experience is an aspect of an existing condition within, then fighting against it amounts to fighting against the self. Therefore, to restrict the pulsation of the consciousness by hardening up and refusing the experience is completely opposed to the law of growth. I shall explain the meaning and the adequate reaction in a moment.

This apparently theoretical discussion is not half as theoretical as it may appear on the surface. I will show you how you can immediately, and very practically, apply this to exactly where you are on your path at this moment, provided you pay attention to your soul movements. In other words, provided you focus your attention and your awareness on your emotions and on your soul movements. The previous years of your work must have made you aware, to some extent at least, of what you feel at any given moment. For example, what you register when you cramp up in fear. I have discussed the matter of soul movements again and again. Unfortunately most people are not even aware that such a thing exists. But with a little observation and by turning inward, observing the distinct movements of your psyche, then you will become acutely aware first of their existence and then of their meaning. For example, you will see the tremendous difference in your soul movements when you are in harmony with yourself, when you feel that all is right between yourself and life. These soul movements fill you with a wonderful, subtle but distinct movement that is vibrant, pleasurable, and harmonious. You can feel yourself expand toward the outer world, your whole inner organism reaching out fearlessly and pleasurably -- even when the outer experience is doubtful and not necessarily desirable. This fearless meeting of it enables you to transcend the experience, to truly assimilate it. In that way the threat soon vanishes. The restricting movement does not cramp up and congest. It remains organic. During the inward movement the consciousness, on its deepest levels, corrects the misconceptions that have brought the outer unwelcome experience about. Through not cringing away on the outgoing beat and meeting what at first appears as pain, the ingathering movement may at first intensify this pain. But soon, if it is truly met, it reduces itself naturally, and on the next outgoing beat the waste -- the misconception or the fear -- is expelled, just as the physical organism expels waste through the pulsating blood and the heartbeat. Soon the movements that follow are in pleasure where they were first in pain. The safety and the pleasure cannot be gained when the spiritual pulsebeat is stopped through hardening, through refusal of the experience, through unnatural restricting.

The better you are attuned to your inner path, the more clearly you will see how each phase of your life means something in terms of your evolution. Each phase concentrates on certain aspects of your being. And each difficulty and each hardship requests something from you. It contains a distinct message that comes from your real self. How soon are you going to understand this message and learn what you have to learn? How soon will you decide to go through it, in the pulsating openness of your psyche, rather than attempting to go around? The latter is stark illusion, for meeting the difficulty cannot really be avoided. It must reappear, perhaps in different forms, until you have healed your spiritual organism from all its afflictions. Fleeing the experience that seems painful, undesirable, or dangerous is fleeing from yourself. Just as fighting it means fighting against yourself. Giving in to the fear of the experience makes you refuse the experience. Since the experience is a result of yourself, then your refusal of it amounts to refusing yourself. Psychologically this refusal manifests in the denial of happiness and pleasure. This is why it is true that only he who can stand pain can, in the exact measure, stand pleasure.

No matter how much theoretical understanding you may already possess about the principle and the truth of the outer life being a reflection of your inner state of consciousness, it means little if you still shy away from going through the experience. Jesus expressed the same with these words: "Do not resist evil." This sentence can, like everything else He said, be easily misinterpreted and therefore distorted. The evil it refers to is deeply lodged misconceptions, with their inevitable results: fear, guilt, anger, hate, greed, cruelty, selfishness, and destructiveness of the self, of others, of life. All the negativity in the world stems from something one believes in that is not according to reality. No matter what the negative event in one's private life may be, it must be caused from within: from an inner wrong idea according to which one functions, one moves, one lives, one responds, and one reacts. I might almost equate the illusion of separateness between your outer life and your inner life with an optical illusion. Hence, nothing could be greater folly -- as well as a greater act of warfare against yourself -- than fleeing from the experience that seems to come to you disconnected from yourself.

The only way to go about it is to go into the experience. In terms of the pulsation of the consciousness, the following procedure is indicated, and is highly rewarding. When anything happens to you that you shrink back from -- regardless of whether it causes mild annoyance or stark fright or anything in between -- then remain inwardly relaxed. Observe the automatic reflex reaction in your soul movement: how it automatically tenses up. By remaining open and relaxed to the experience, no matter how painful or how frightening it may appear, you allow it to happen to you. Thus you admit that it is yours and then you proceed to find its origin in you. You declare in your mind the desire to explore it and to understand its cause. You also live up to this declaration with your emotional self by allowing the healthy pulsebeat of your psyche to continue its natural process. Thus you remain in an open state, one that enables you first to comprehend and then to respond in an infinitely more adequate way than when you are in a tense state of war and defense.

This seems to require a great deal of trust in life, of trust in the universe, of trust in others, and of trust in your innermost self. For by remaining relaxed and undefended in your soul substance, you seem exposed to danger. But is it not a stark illusion to suppose that this unnatural, evasive way of self-defense is a more trustworthy protection than the way I suggest here? The point could be argued at length, but the best course is to take a chance and find out. You are bound to discover the truth of these words. Then you will see how what at first had seemed like a dire threat or an unbearable pain, to be avoided at all cost, soon turns into profound enlightenment, into safety, into well-being. You will feel your entire organism -- both the inner organism and the outer organism -- vibrantly alive and growing.

When the restricting, tense, congested movement pulls in automatically where it should remain vibrantly pulsating, then its meaning can be translated into words. They are: "I do not want this experience." This presupposes that the experience has nothing to do with the causes within yourself. It presupposes that others, that circumstances, or that chance have brought this experience to you. Therefore, when you detect the shrinking back movement of your soul currents, then you know that -- at least on that level -- you ignore the connection between the outer reality and the inner reality. You also know at this moment that you are living in an illusion. And all illusion breeds pain. The painful experience that you wish to avoid by interrupting your natural spiritual pulsebeat rests precisely on such an illusion. By refusing what is yours -- either good or bad -- your mentality denies your self-responsibility for the unwelcome experience, and your emotions disturb the natural rhythm of the pulsation of your entire organism. This amounts to a deliberate stopping of breathing and of the pulsebeat through some artificial, unorganic means.

Once again, I would like to point out how parallel these laws are for the spiritual level of man and for the physical level of man. What I explained about the advisable approach to the healing of your disturbed psyche applies in exactly the same way to the physical body. Just as the soul movements should remain untense, open, relaxed regardless of the disturbances in order to eliminate these disturbances in a real way, so should the body be treated. Let us assume that someone has a damaged heart. Would he cure this ailment if he shrinks back from this fact in tension, in fright, and in contraction? Certainly not. This would only make it worse. In this movement or in this reaction he expresses his refusal of the fact that he has acquired a damaged heart. The only way to correct the damage is to relax what has been unduly tensed up. For that purpose a full acceptance of his condition is inevitable. Even purely chemical medication attempts to loosen up artificially the cramp, and therefore to re-establish an easy, smooth, vibrant, flexible pulsation. To think of such comparisons between the physical level and the psychic level will be quite helpful. It will give you an idea of the unification of creation and will make what I say here more practical.

When you attempt to put into practice what I advise here, at first it will seem risky to remain undefended and relaxed inside when something threatens you. Needless to say that I am talking about psychological reactions. In other words, about outer experiences that cause negative, destructive emotions and reactions in you. I do not mean the occasional physical threats outside. There, the quickening defensive tightening is automatic and healthy. But it lasts only a very short time and it is the exception. If a condition re-occurs regularly in your life, then this is an altogether different story. In these instances, when you notice the fearful shrinking back of the restricting movement, then try to remain open. Let the inner movements occur in their natural way, uninfluenced by this fearful level of your consciousness. Allow the natural organism to continue uninterfered the pulsation of expansion, of restriction, and of the static movement. The natural restricting movement will open up by itself. It will carry you naturally into the next organic expanding movement. You will distinctly experience how what was painful on the first pulsebeat of expansion diminishes with each pulsebeat. Each set of movements will expand your self-realization, your grasp of your inner truth as it relates to the event in question. It will fill you with peace, with well-being, with safety, and with pleasure. Each outgoing movement will increase this positive condition. Let it happen from within, just as you must let the physical pulsation happen without interference by a fearful, distrusting attitude. Cooperate with this inner lawfulness by simply wanting to see the truth in you.

I recapitulate. Observe your soul movements. Understand their meaning. Allow them to function naturally. In other words, do not let fear cramp up their natural pulsation. Let the involuntary, self-regulating lawfulness establish harmony within by not interfering with fear and with resistance. At the same time, cooperate with your whole being, with your sincerity, and with your integrity, in your willingness to see the truth in you. In other words, in wanting to understand the connection between yourself and your unwelcome emotions and those outer conditions that cause these emotions. Do this ego-cooperation in a firm, relaxed way. Relaxation must be combined with full commitment. Often tension replaces a lack of such full commitment to the inner truth.

Let yourself vibrate without defending your soul substance, even though it may seem risky. It appears as if you were thus too vulnerable and too exposed. But this is not true. It merely re-establishes the healthy heartbeat of your psyche. It does not mean that you invite damaging, destructive actions either from others or from yourself. Quite the contrary is true. Healthy self-assertion can happen only when you are not cramped up inside. In other words, when your natural pulsebeat functions according to its own organic law.

As I said before, this material is not difficult or abstract for those who have already explored their innermost self to some extent or for those who take in these words with all of their attention. If you think fully about these words and you apply them to yourself, then you will see how immediately practical they are. Look at what you really feel. See what fear, pain, guilt, and anger make you do within. In other words, see how you contract. Observe these soul movements. Then it will become quite obvious that all is as I say here.

By shrinking either from the undesirable condition or from the undesirable experience the entity hopes to avoid it and therefore refuses it, thereby avoiding and refusing himself, as it were. This causes a hard, bitter, twisted pain because the way to meet it is unorganic and utterly futile. When you openly meet either the condition or the experience in the manner discussed here, then at first it will be a pain, too. But the pain will have a completely different characteristic. Soon it will turn into a softness that can dissolve much more easily. It is a growing pain, not a death pain. It is a pain that creates more life and better life, and thus it will eventually transforms itself into pleasure. The energy contained in the emotion can find its way back to the original essence.

When you remain truthful, open to the pain, open to the fear, or open to any other destructive emotion, then you will neither masochistically aggrandize and exaggerate it, nor will you deny it -- either in self-delusion that it does not exist, or in a refusal to meet it by pulling away from it. You will simply go through it and thus reconvert it to its original nature of bliss.

It always seems to require an enormous amount of courage to do this. But that, too, is an illusion, my friends, because it actually requires infinitely more courage, in a wrong and futile sense, to go through all the unnecessary pain of avoidance and of flight. The effort required to shrink back both from yourself and from what you have produced in inner and outer conditions is much more strenuous than the effort required for the course I am showing you here.

When pursuing this course, then the pain must become bliss, because you have transcended it instead of fleeing from it, because you have understood its deep significance in terms of your personal growth. Thereby you allowed it to remain in its natural healthy rhythm, even with the experience that is caused by error, by illusion, and by unhealth. This is the only way in which health, security, and well-being can be re-established.

Until now we have concentrated considerably on the mental activity involved in your search for your true self, in your search for your misconceptions, and in your observation of your mental and emotional processes. Even the observation of your emotions was done with a more mental approach. In the time to come some of the new approaches on this path -- which might be summed up briefly as a combination of the metaphysical and the physical -- some of you will learn to observe, to feel, and to experience the soul movements better than ever before. These soul movements -- with their innate, in-built rhythm and with their lawfulness -- determine your entire life. They determine your state of being. They determine your state of consciousness. They determine your freedom from or your enslavement to your images and misconceptions. They determine the depth, the scope, and the nature of your experiences in life. They determine the degree of your aliveness. They determine the degree of your pleasure. They determine your body structure. They determine your fulfillment. They determine your abundance on all levels of being. Your soul movements are the heartbeat of your spirit.

Now, are there any questions regarding this topic?

QUESTION: What kind of experience do you mean? What if someone offers me a trip with LSD? Would you advise to go through with it, just for the sake of the experience?

ANSWER: No, certainly not. Nothing of the sort. I do not mean that a person should do anything and everything. This would be completely destructive and would be a crass misunderstanding of what I am talking about. A human being must exert discrimination and choice. He has the freedom to either choose certain experiences or to reject them. I am now discussing the principle of this question and not the matter of LSD, whether or not it is advisable. I have already discussed this some time ago and I see no need to repeat it now.

What I do mean in this lecture is the experience of events, of conditions, and of emotions that one cannot choose. They just come to you. A recurrent condition elicits again and again difficulties, crises, disharmony, and destructive feelings. It is these experiences that man often refuses, denies, flees from, when they are really nothing but the expression of something in himself that he overlooks. As long as he prefers to overlook it, then it must reoccur with reliable regularity. Of that you can be sure.

QUESTION: There are two experiences that come to mind. One is orgasm and the other is death. I was wondering that the pulsation and the vibration seem to lead you to a point where these vibrations and pulsations cease. In both there seems to be no more vibration and no more pulsation.

ANSWER: It is an illusion that they cease. Of course, this illusion is much more difficult to establish about death because your three-dimensional orientation and your three-dimensional perception is not geared to see that it is an illusion. It merely sees the physical, and that has indeed stopped living, stopped vibrating, stopped pulsating. It is unequipped to observe the consciousness behind the physical system, where living, breathing, pulsating, vibrating -- and therefore thinking, feeling, and being -- go on all the time.

As far as orgasm is concerned, it is certainly an illusion that pulsation or vibration stops. This is what I said at the beginning of the lecture. When the rhythmic manifestation of pulsation is not observable to the three-dimensional perception, then the pulsation of the various levels of the consciousness is geared to different laws. Only when you become attuned to your innermost self will you perceive these manifestations. There is nothing on the three-dimensional level that you cannot -- and therefore that you will not -- experience on a different dimension by a further expansion of your consciousness, whether or not this occurs in a state of physical death or while being in the body. In fact, more, and not less, can be experienced -- nay must be experienced -- as the being expands and therefore grows into further dimensions.

The truth of these words will become accessible right in this life when you no longer cramp up against a fearful experience, but you allow your innermost soul movement to continue into the experience which you wanted to deny.

As you all know from our work together, this fear of experience does not exist only regarding the negative, painful experience, but just as much, and often more so, regarding the most positive, desirable, and desired experiences in the universe. Utter bliss -- pleasure supreme -- is feared to the extent that pain is denied. He who can first accept pain can then endure pleasure. The two experiences that you mentioned, death and orgasm, are the deepest experiences that a created entity can go through. They are that because the ego relinquishes its hold and the individual surrenders to the cosmic, universal forces -- in love and in trust. True orgasm is not possible unless this attitude exists. And healthy death also occurs only with this inner attitude. Then it becomes a joyful, growing experience. It is easy to observe that the healthier a human being is, the less he fears this total trustful surrender. Such an individual experiences the greatest amount of bliss. And also such an individual does not fear death.

I repeat, the ability to stand pleasure, delight, ecstasy depends on the ability to assimilate -- in an appropriate and truthful way -- pain and frustration, in the understanding that they are the production of the self. To put the same idea in different words. If you can meet your own negativity, your own fears, your own anger, your own rage -- in other words, all the traits in you which you do not like -- in a rational and unexaggerated way, but really meet them face to face and then understand them, then you produce the condition I discussed. To exactly that measure you then become capable of experiencing delight, pleasure, happiness. There is a direct relationship between the two. You will invariably see that the person who cannot accept pain in a healthy, constructive, and realistic way cannot accept pleasure either.

I shall be glad to answer your questions on this topic, as well as any problem you may have, at our next meeting. Be blessed, all of you. May every one of you start this working season with a new approach to your path and with a new approach to your blocks that prevent from living because they separate you from life. Go deeply into the reality of the Divine within yourself and ask God in you to strengthen you in your determination to grow, in your determination to unfold, in your determination to expand, in your determination to unify, in your determination to correct the areas that block you from life, that block you from all that is good. Let guidance come from within you to help you to realize the futility and the unnecessary waste of resisting this growth. May you become more and more attuned to these inner soul movements and thereby begin to re-establish your beautiful cosmic balance. This will also affect the availability of the Divine in you, with which you can then integrate and establish your full, independent selfhood. Be blessed, all of you. Be in peace, be in God.

September 15. 1967