Three Levels Of Reality For Inner Guidance

By The Pathwork Guide

Greetings to my dearest friends. You are indeed blessed, not only by your presence in the spirit of wanting to receive guidance and truth, but primarily by every single inner effort made toward the realization of your true being. The more this realization is activated, the more blessings are generated from within.

The human being who is cut off from his inner reality is lost. The majority of human beings are more or less totally cut off from it and therefore must find their way back to their inner reality. There are a few who have attained this connection -- and they always were and always will be the spiritual leaders of humanity. Every effort on this path is aimed at re-establishing such a connection for inner guidance and for the manifestation of the inner reality.

Jesus Christ has proclaimed that the kingdom of heaven is within man. These words are often taken for granted, and therefore not much thought is given to them. What do we mean when we say the kingdom? What does the word kingdom symbolize? It symbolizes the absolute power and the wealth that the spiritually awakened find to be a reality. By wealth we mean love, truth, peace, expansion, creativity, bliss. By spiritual power we mean your knowledge of the power of the self to create anything it can conceive of. This comprises everything that life could be. It means attaining one's full selfhood, as it is meant to be. If only you could realize that you have not yet attained even a particle of the power, of the beauty, of the truth, of the love, of the ecstasy, and of the possibility of creative expansion that you could possess, that you could execute, and that already is yours. These are not empty words. This is the immediately available truth.

This path toward your inner reality and toward your inner guidance is laborious. But it is laborious primarily because you imagine the truth to be so far away, so much farther than it actually is. You cannot conceive of what life already is right now. And you cannot conceive of how it could be for you if only you could see it, know it, and realize it. You still perceive this as a faraway, abstract, unreal theory, and you experience yourself as an isolated particle in an essentially hostile universe, or, at least, in an indifferent universe that has nothing to do with you. You conceive of the universe as a static, immovable fact into which you are put and whose laws have no relationship to your own inner laws.

This concept and the way you experience yourself in relation to life are your real difficulties. They are what makes the path so difficult and so laborious -- nothing else. Thus, the difficulty is not actual, it consists of this concept. Then the question is how can you change this concept? This is what requires labor and effort. And, as unbelievable as this appears to him who has already attained the reality of being, you humans struggle against the fulfillment of being your true self as if this were the most horrible fate in the world. If the illusion about the separation between your true being and your momentary consciousness, or the separation between the universe and yourself, did not exist, then there would be an instant awakening -- and you would know both who you are and what life is.

All my lectures and all our work together attack this problem of your illusion from different angles. All these different approaches have a certain sequential order. Generally, you find the same sequential order within your own private, personal, individual path. Yet the individual path cannot be forced to imitate the sequence of these lectures. Rather, the process is that you, with this guiding help, find your own truth as a direct, spontaneous experience from within yourself. Thus, in the first moments of understanding, this truth usually appears so new and so fresh that you think that you have never heard it before. But afterward it can be verified as confirming the lectures you have studied, the lectures that have penetrated the deeper regions of your unconscious. First you read the lectures and then you use your intuitive faculties, freed progressively more and more by facing the truth which you did not want to see in the beginning. The elimination of error frees your intuition and your creative experiences from within. The lectures first give an impetus to this process, later they fortify it, and then they confirm it when you read them again.

Now our specific approach will be to discuss three levels of reality. If you can first comprehend and finally assimilate what I say here, then this path will become much easier for you. Some of the illusory difficulty will be eliminated, so that your inner guidance will manifest itself as a natural, effortless phenomenon.

What are these three levels of reality? Perhaps you expect to hear of the well-known levels of the physical reality, of the mental reality, and of the spiritual reality, which we have spoken about in many different contexts and connections. But here I am referring to something else. So be prepared to gear your mind to a new approach.

The first level of reality is what you think exists. The second level of reality is what actually exists. The third level of reality is what could exist. It is preferable not to discuss this in a philosophical, general, or theoretical manner. The more specific and the more personal you can be in assimilating what I outline here, and the more you can apply it to the seemingly most insignificant subjective experiences and reactions in your daily struggles, then the better it is. Examine your problematic reactions and your negative attitudes. In other words, those that do not leave you peaceful, happy, and alive, and then try to see how what I say in this lecture applies to you.

No matter how insignificant or how all-important a disturbance may appear to you, ask yourself: "What do I really believe exists in me? What do I really believe exists around me? What do I really believe exists in the interaction between myself and others? What do I really believe exists in the condition as I experience it?" This is not as easy, as simple, or as self-evident as it may appear. In fact, I would say that to penetrate this level is perhaps the greatest difficulty. Once this is done, then the next two levels will be much easier to deal with. Man is utterly ignorant of and confused about what he really thinks and what he really feels. As a rule, he looks away from it and he is only vaguely, fuzzily aware of some disturbance, which he then either quickly rationalizes or which he seeks explanations for that seem most fitting, most acceptable, most logical, or most compatible with his most superficial approach to life and approach to himself. Thus he acknowledges only one of the many sets of contradictions and conflicting emotions, and even that he does in a cursory, shallow way at best. In that way, the true drama of his beliefs, of his opinions, of his impressions, of his reactions, of his concepts, of his ideas, of his hopes, and of his fears is almost entirely obscured. Man takes refuge in oversimplified collective labels, which are supposed to express what is really going on in him. For example, when he says that he is depressed or that he is anxious or that he is hopeless or that he is angry or that he is hurt or that he is fatigued, then he is content to call a host of feelings, of impressions, and of beliefs by any one of these emotions, as though no further search were required. If only he would name such emotions only as a beginning to exploring them, then it would serve its purpose. But only too often he uses the names of such emotions as a final explanation. Thus he cannot attain even the first level of reality, his often confused and erroneous interpretation of life, interpretation of others, interpretation of the self. It might sound paradoxical that I call this level of reality "reality" at all. But it is a temporary reality in that it is what the individual actually happens to feel, to think, and to believe, whether true or false, while the haze of unspecific awareness is like a no-man's land and is not even a temporary reality. This is why it is so painful and so insecure, and why in no state could one be more estranged than on this level of reality -- this "prereality," if I may coin this expression.

It is part of the individual work to painstakingly examine why such collective labels exist and where they come from. Often the first reaction is that you do not even know why you feel this way. You give yourself quick and easy answers, which sound plausible and serious in a world that shies away from a fresh, new approach. However, every problem needs examining as if it had never existed and as if society did not have its predigested answers ready.

If one gives some attention to what one really believes causes the specific unhappy feeling -- and usually relatively little attention is required for this -- then one finds some answers quite easily. As I mentioned, it is hardly ever just one thing. Contradictory opinions and contradictory ideas exist simultaneously. One set of contradictory ideas gives birth to contradictory reactions, to contradictory counter-reactions, to contradictory defense measures, to further false beliefs, and it sets off inevitable consequences that create more and more chain reactions. When all this remains in the fuzzy climate of unawareness, of half awareness, and of easy explaining away, then how can the first level of reality be reached, namely knowing what one thinks exists?

For example, it is possible that a person secretly thinks that he is both the most important being in the universe and the least worthy being in the universe at the same time. Even one such false assumption is bound to have innumerable further consequences, breeding further wrong assumptions in one's dealings with the world. Each primary wrong assumption snowballs into a host of untenable destructive deliefs and defense measures, each in itself causing complicated webs of entanglements and increasingly painful beliefs. The two contradictory original assumptions multiply the confusion, the misconceptions, the entanglement, and the resulting pain. For error is pain, as truth is happiness.

Such mutually exclusive ideas are already known to you. Anyone working on such a path knows from experience how burdensome they are, and therefore what a relief it is to shed them. You also know that each web of entanglement sets up a special fight against clarifying the confusion, in spite of feeling the pain while the confusion lasts, and in spite of knowing the liberated, happy state that will follow after the confusion is cleared up. Although you all know this to some degree from personal experience, and most certainly as a valid theory, none of you is fully aware to what extent you still dwell in the state of prereality. Most of my friends do not see in their day-to-day life where such a dual concept of the self as being the highest and the lowest at the same time is responsible for that layer of reality where one thinks that certain things exist without this necessarily being true.

Often you have actually recognized a specific false assumption, say, about yourself, but you do not follow this through to the consequences of such an assumption. For example, you fail to see how this particular assumption affects your belief about others; what you believe them to be; what you believe them to think of you; what a situation or an incident means in the light of this assumption about yourself; what certain reactions of the self and of others really mean. If you clearly pronounce what you believe a person means, what you believe a situation means, or what you believe an event means, then you will know why you are unhappy in any form. Knowing specifically why you feel the way you do makes a tremendous difference. It also gives you the possibility to realize that some of your beliefs are really preposterous. You might have admitted this in general and as a theory, but to do so specifically is still extremely hard. Man's intellectual arrogance makes this very difficult. It is certainly arrogant to set oneself above others, but it is even more damaging to overestimate one's own intellect and thus to miss out on one's inherent wisdom, while negating and denying the childish misunderstandings that exist in one's personality. By doing so, man places himself above the state that happens to be his state at the moment.

The reason it is hard to admit what childish nonsense is lodged in the unconscious is because doing so contradicts the concept that man has of his so-called intelligence. But perhaps an even greater motivation for keeping the secret beliefs in the haze of vague impressions and feelings, rather than acknowledging them precisely, is the following: man has a vested interest in keeping these things secret because he vaguely feels that once they are out in the open, then he is obligated to make changes. He fears to do that precisely because he is so committed to his false idea that a different approach appears to be a threat to him. What he does not realize is that it threatens him only because of the original false idea. The illusory assumptions are compounded, one leading to another. They all have to be disentangled in order to bring order and truth into man. If he elevates himself above his actual self -- where his self is still ignorant and misinformed -- then he cannot establish order. It is hard for you to admit your utterly childish side, with all its senseless ideas and limited beliefs. The moment this childish side is out in the open, then you know that it is nonsense, and you are relieved to give up the burdensome beliefs.

In addition to such nonsense, there are also false beliefs and impressions which you even consciously assume to be true -- at least to some degree. These are even more difficult to handle.

Then there are those beliefs that you somehow sense are false, but you do not wish to alter them. In a way, to take for granted the painful premise seems preferable to another alternative that appears even worse deep in your unconscious. This, too, is an illusory assumption, for no truth is ever burdensome, hopeless, or undesirable. The complications and the interactions of all the knots, the entanglements, the false beliefs, the half truths, and the contradictions comprise what actually exists in you. And this must be faced before any further progress can be made.

This level of reality must be disentangled. If man is unwilling to see what he believes to be true, then he cannot come to see what is really true at this moment. Consequently, he is unable to reach the third level of reality by changing the present reality -- and not by wishful thinking, by illusory magic, or by denial of the facts -- into a reality that is more favorable for him.

Let us take an example of general occurrence, man's fear of rejection. This fear runs through his psychic life. Consequently, it runs through his outer life, his physical life. Rejection would not be the threat it is for most people if there were no specific assumptions connected with it. What these specific assumptions are has to be unearthed. For example, a person may believe that he is worth nothing. The rejection is such a threat only because it seems to confirm the belief in his worthlessness. Thus it is not sufficient to acknowledge a stereotype explanation by saying that one feels anxious. First it is necessary to acknowledge that the anxiety exists because one fears rejection. Second, it must be unearthed that rejection is so threatening because one feels worthless -- and one does not wish to admit this feeling. But even this does not go far enough. Third, it becomes necessary to find out what specific grounds the heretofore secret conviction of his worthlessness is based on. In other words, all these specific beliefs and assumptions must be taken out of the fog of vagueness, where they hide under the collective label of "anxiety."

When the approach is changed in the fashion suggested here and a serious investigation is conducted -- one in which nothing is taken for granted and everything is approached in a new and fresh way -- then you will find out what you believe exists. From there, you can begin to look further and you can begin to question the premises of these beliefs. You can begin to open your eyes and look objectively for what really is. In this transition from one level of reality to the next, you must also ask yourself whether you really want to find out two things: first, what you think exists, and, second, what really is or exists. All the false assumptions that you harbor seem to dictate that they must be kept secret. For example, if it were true that you actually are worthless and beyond redemption, then facing such a fact would be a hard undertaking. But then, is it preferable to live a lie by pretending that you believe in your worth while underneath you doubt it? Such considerations will give you the logic necessary to look at what you believe exists in order to find out what actually exists. The actual truth is that you have a great deal of worth, although perhaps in a different way than you may have believed until now.

At the same time you may believe that you are the most important and the most valuable person on earth who, consequently, deserves special privileges. To ascertain such a belief is difficult because your intellectual knowledge refutes such arrogance, and even creates shame. Also, admitting such an idea brings one closer to questioning its validity, which one fears all the more since in the psyche there also lurks the precise opposite extreme, and that is the assumption of one's worthlessness. If you are not special, then you are nothing. Hence, both assumptions must be kept hidden from your consciousness. Therefore, they cannot be examined. Hence, further chain reactions and compulsive behavior patterns cannot be tested as to their reality value.

When you discover that you do not want to find out what exists in you, then find out why you do not wish to do so. What false beliefs prevent you from doing so? When you answer that question, then you open another little gate that will eventually enable you to change your mind, so that you will want to find out first (a) what you think exists, and then (b) what really exists.

In that moment you already are two important levels closer to your inner reality, and therefore to your inner guidance. In other words, to the possibility of what could be. This is the kingdom of God inside of you. As long as the entanglements of your false opinions -- of what you believe exists as opposed to what actually exists -- are not cleared up, then you cannot see that even what actually does exist need not be your ultimate state of being. To realize this leads to a tremendously important transition.

The level of what actually exists is always an enormous relief compared with what you believe exists. Truth is never as threatening as the foggy half-truths and evasions, no matter what it is. What you believe exists is a relief compared with the fog. What actually exists is an even greater relief compared with what you believe exists. The discovery of the infinite possibilities in Creation -- of what could exist -- is more than liberation. It opens the gates to the world, to the great freedom of co-creation, to unlimited expansion. I might say that in mundane psychotherapy the highest obtainable goal is usually the level of reality. It is that of knowing what actually exists. Accepting this reality, accepting one's manifest values and one's liabilities, accepting both one's limitations and the limitations of the outer world, and coping with this world and dealing with this world so as to produce one's best actions and one's best feelings, would be the ultimate that could be expected under the best of circumstances. This would be the point at which a patient is successfully dismissed as cured. But this is only where our spiritual path begins, although the levels overlap and one cannot say that one must first have completed one level before reaching the next. It never works that way. This is why reaching for the third level now and working with it as best as it is possible at present will help the attainment of the lower stages perhaps a bit faster and more painlessly, perhaps a bit more safely and more meaningfully.

Now let us examine the third level, what could exist. What actually is -- which is what is usually called reality -- is not a static condition. It is no more real, no more true, and no more unchangeable than the level of what one believes exists. To him who is convinced of it, it seems true and real, so that we can speak of his reality at that moment. It is the reality of his assumptions. These lead him to further ideas, which have their own energy, their own dynamics, and their consequences that happen in experience and in fact. So, what one believes and what is are not so different when one considers the vast stretches of possibilities.

When man assumes that reality is static -- and therefore unmovable -- then he is just as far removed from ultimate reality as he who assumes his illusions to be the final truth. Ultimate reality is essentially flexible and essentially moveable. Man is not put into a universe that has a predetermined existence, one whose conditions are fixed. Even objects are flux. They consists of condensed energy. Hence, objects are constantly moving. The energy is generated by consciousness and by the way it operates. Thus, the supposedly immovable outer world is a direct product of you. That is, of your consciousness. When you can begin to question whether what you found to be reality needs to be so, then you begin to expand the horizon of your concepts. You widen your grasp, and thus you begin to increase your creative power to alter the seemingly static reality. You can expand your reality to the exact degree that you wish to expand the horizon, or the frontier, of your concepts. By your concepts I mean more than the superficial beliefs and theories. When your mind can -- truly and deeply -- embrace limitless vistas of experience for happiness and for self-expression, then this is exactly what your reality must become. For consciousness is explosive, powerful stuff. Each thought creates and builds your life. In other words, the circumstances of your reality.

However, if this limitless expansion is unconsciously striven for as the child strives for magical omnipotence -- because the personality fears, and therefore dislikes dealing with, the present limitations -- then it cannot possibly work. It is first necessary to accept the present limitations and to cope with them, for they are a product of what the consciousness believes. It is impossible to discover one's creative power in the positive before one recognizes the connection between the negative reality and negative beliefs. Only when you realistically accept the limitation as it is now can you transcend this limitation, in the realization that it does not need to exist. Thus, you move into the third level of reality, in which your intellect cannot help you. It is then that your inner guidance can come forth. This inner guidance will be unobstructed when you have moved from the outer level of haze and fog -- where you do not know what is going on in you -- to the level of what you believe exists, to the level of what actually exists in comparison, and, further, to opening your way into the third level, of what could exist.

Realizing what could exist -- the ultimate truth of the inner being, of the real self -- is the aim of life itself. For then man has come into his own. The more these levels are transcended, the freer your inner guidance becomes to manifest, and the more you will comprehend those three levels of reality. They are are man's way of moving from being thrown into the outside world to coming back home into his inner reality.

What is evil, my friends, all the evil that is so deplored? Evil is all the error and all the confusion on the outer, hazy level of prereality, as well as on the level of what one believes exists. Since this is not conscious, man is driven into actions and feelings that are truly destructive and are called evil. They blur the spiritual light of oneness. The existence of evil is the blind drive of not knowing, the vagueness of misbelief, distortion, and error. If you truly comprehend these words, then it will be impossible for you to ever hate anyone or to believe in the evil nature of certain human beings. You will sense that it is impossible to hate any human being, for such hate is senseless. You can hate the evil of error and the error of evil, you can hate the effect of error and the vagueness of not knowing what you believe or what others believe. That you can hate, but you can never hate the person ensnarled in the error of not knowing what he believes. That is truly the most alienating state: not knowing what one believes, not knowing what one assumes, and not knowing what one concludes.

As I indicated before, you must beware of judging either yourself or others on having reached any of these three levels on the whole. It is always a question of fluctuating and overlapping. An individual may have attained in his development a state of fluctuating between the second level and the third level. He may have activated sufficient power from the third level to guide him in all his life expressions. But where he is still trapped in his haze, then this guidance does not penetrate and therefore it cannot be heard.

QUESTION: What if one doubts that one's needs are justified? Isn't it also a question of what should be?

ANSWER: This is part of the confusion. If you do not know what you are supposed to want -- in other words, what is a legitimate need on your part -- then you get confused between the childish aspect -- which desires unreasonable and unrealizable love and attention -- and the adult part of you, which has a legitimate need for human warmth and for affection. In this confusion you may reject yourself for the latter, while at the same time you rebel against not obtaining the former. These confusions must be brought out into the open and examined so that you can put order into them.

In addition to this confusion there may be confusion about what the other person really feels. Your own confusion inevitably breeds confusion about what exists in the other person. The childish level may conclude that you are being rejected, since your unrealizable demands are not being fulfilled. You may not be able to recognize actual love, because it appears in a different way from what you imagined in your present state. This is a state in which you may not be able to make room for differences in self-expression. You may also misinterpret the actual rejection as a personal one and not recognize that this is merely the manifestation of another person's immaturity and fear of loving. All these interactions and these mutual currents must be investigated.

The way you can gauge whether you have arrived at what you ought to know about yourself at the moment -- the only reliable gauge there is -- is to ask yourself: "Do you have the feeling of utter relief and liberation, of being energized and light?" If so, then you can be absolutely sure that you have attained, at least at this moment, the level of self-knowledge that you ought to have. When this feeling is missing, then you can be sure that there are answers that are still outstanding and that you need to find. In other words, you need to ask yourself the appropriate questions.

QUESTION: I am aware of the fact that I distort reality. I wonder how this applies to my work situation, wherein I am caught in a hostility cycle with my boss. At least on my part I feel very hostile to him. This is very real to me, although I know I am over-reacting to it. Would you comment on this?

ANSWER: As you already know, this does not really have much to do with your boss. It is all a question between you and your father. You have to ask yourself the relevant questions. What do you really feel about him? What do you believe that he felt about you? And why? If you tackle these three questions only, then you will already be more in clarity on the level of what you believe exists, rather than being in the fog of not knowing what bothers you. Out of these questions then more questions will arise. But let us not hurry ahead. do not be impatient. Just concentrate on these three questions, but without taking anything for granted. It is essential that you first ask yourself these questions and then that you answer these questions. Then -- and only then -- you can tackle the next level, that of considering what is.

For you who read this lecture, even if you did not always understand my words, something went into your heart, where a seed can grow into a wonderful fruit. Allow this to happen, my friends, for life is so good. The truth is happiness, while unhappiness is always error and misconception. Do not ever forget this. This fact may lead you to have more initiative about discovering the specific misconceptions that cause your suffering.

On this day that commemorates the leading faith of this hemisphere, you can find a special strength in this memory of your forefathers. But not because a special day in itself is of value, or of importance, as such, but because at times man needs an outer impact or a push in order to set something in motion within himself. For some people, religious memories and commemorations may represent such a push. For others, this may not be necessary. They may need other reminders and other incentives, or else another impetus that gives them a motor force with which to find a way out of their entanglements on the outermost level of fog-bound existence, which causes so much anxiety and suffering.

Be blessed, my dearest ones. The love of the universe, the truth of the universe, and the beauty of the universe are both within you and around you at all times. They are always there, my friends, always. Make yourself see the truth by calling upon your inner guidance so that you and your inner guidance eventually become one. Be blessed, be in peace, be in God.

April 12, 1968