Frozen Life Center Becomes Alive

By The Pathwork Guide

Greetings all my friends. Blessings for everyone. May the strength of love and truth help you wherever you are within yourself, within your own path. And if you have not yet made a conscious and deliberate decision to develop and to find your true self, to find your life center, so that your life can be what it is potentially meant to be, then these words may help you toward such a vital inner decision.

This lecture is directly related to where most of my friends are on this path. I want to start off by saying that the progress so many of you have made is a tremendously joyful reality. For the first time you gain a personal experience of this path being a reality that truly leads to bliss. For the first time you experience that the key to every conceivable possibility of happiness lies within you, because you harbor the richest treasure: life in its essence. Quite a few of you have come to the point where you have made the remarkable discovery that what at first you only knew in theory is now an experienced reality. You have experienced your own inner life center -- the goal of any pathwork. Thus you have seen what a world of difference there is between hearing about, reading about, or even intellectually knowing about something and actually experiencing it emotionally. After much effort and much searching a number of you have arrived at this point.

Often man sets out with the wrong expectation. He believes that when he comes in touch with his spiritual self he will suddenly be transformed into a different kind of human being. In fact, all his fruitless and painful striving goes into this wrong direction. Such striving makes the path much longer and unnecessarily painful. The words have been said, but people seem unable to hear and undertand them: You must first accept yourself and then experience yourself as you are now, even if it means to go through pain, to go through fear, and to go through anger. This experience cannot be avoided. Only by learning to do this can you come to your life center. By this act of self-acceptance, the unwelcome emotions and the negative attitudes gradually begin to dissolve. When you discover self-acceptance, then all your strife will end.

By the unpronounced -- but nevertheless distinct -- expectation that you must first be different, so that you can avoid going through the unwelcome feelings, you put obstacles in your way. Those of you who have made the wonderful experience of your life center know that it is precisely by accepting the negative emotions that you dissolve them. When you experience the negative feelings, then you simultaneously begin to feel a new aliveness, an aliveness which you have never tasted before. This is truly a wonderful, encouraging, and strengthening experience after which you can never be the same again.

But why is it that you cannot feel this life center in yourself? Why do you have to grope so ardently in order to experience something that is so deep within you? Why is it concealed from you for so long? Why can you find it only indirectly? The fact is that at one time there was a shock, and you therefore proceeded to anaesthetize yourself, to numb yourself. The greatest distress a human being can experience is not hurt, it is unfeelingness, it is inner deadness. At one time this deadness was meant to be a protection against fear and against discomfort, which the individual was not able to cope with at the time. At such a time, when one is very young, this may indeed be a temporary solution. For an immature mind, with its limitations, is surely not equipped to first meet and then to handle certain emotional experiences and to comprehend them in a realistic way. Therefore a temporary anaesthesia is needed in order for the child to survive. But if it continues, then it is a most harmful process.

When something alive is deadened, when it is made immune to respond, then all experience stops. This deadness is what creates the hopelessness that all human beings suffer from, at least to some degree. This may be either conscious or it may be concealed from awareness. It is without a doubt the greatest cross that one has to bear.

Numbness dulls pain and fear. But in doing so it also dulls life itself. In other words, it makes immobile what is supposed to move. The phenomenon of dying on the physical, material world that you are living in is the expression of many inner attitudes. In the course of these lectures I have discussed a number of them. One of the most important ones is the desire not to move. This can be verified by many people. It expresses itself in your awareness as laziness, as inertia, as apathy, even as being consciously aware of not wanting to do things: of not wanting to move your body, of not wanting to move your mind, of not wanting to move your feelings. You do not want to venture forth into life, into experience. This attitude creates deadness in you, and therefore it ultimately creates the phenomenon of physical dying. Since the will and one's attitude are always the cause of all outer happenings, then it is the same way with the universal earth phenomenon of physical dying. It is a direct result of wanting to be unfeeling, hence of wanting to be dead, hence of wanting to be non-moving.

When the life center is deadened, then the desire to move dies as well. Therefore you can see for yourself that as people grow older, their desire to move diminishes. This is usually explained away by saying: "Well, this is a natural phenomenon of aging." This is, once again, reversing cause and effect. Aging is a process of dying and it is a manifestation and an effect, rather than a cause. Dying is a result of -- somewhere and somehow -- not wanting to live. In other words, of rejecting aspects of living, such as feeling, breathing, and moving. If and when an entity in the course of his evolution reaches the point of totally embracing and accepting life with all of its aspects, then dying will no longer be. Anyone who suffers from the fear of death should try to understand these words on a deep level of his personal experience. He should discover that part in himself where he desires not to be alive. In other words, where he desires not to move, where he desires not to feel. When he thus connects with his own rejection of life, then he will no longer feel helpless in the fear of death. Something about it will change.

You can also observe that those human beings who stay young for a long time do not lose the desire to move. It is wrong to state that they do not lose the desire to move because they stay young for a long time. It is more correct to state that they remain young because they continue to want to move. He who does not want to move must understand the cause of it, which I will discuss now.

The fear of moving can be ascertained relatively easily once you question yourself in this respect. Once you cease to explain things away and you confront yourself with simple questions and answers in this respect, then you will be easily aware of your fear of moving. You may first feel it as a desire to be deadly immobile, which is really no pleasure at all. Pleasure is to be alive and to be moving, to be in a state of movement. When you discover your fear of moving, your distate of moving, your reluctance to move, your resistance to move -- physically, mentally, and emotionally -- then you will have discovered the cause of living in a sphere of consciousness where death is inevitable. You hasten death to the degree that you refute movement on all levels of your being. Movement is refuted because movement awakens the deadness. When the life center is feared because pain and fear cannot be dealt with, then numbness is supposed to be the solution. Movement removes the numbness. Therefore, movement is rejected as a result of ignorance of the fact that non-movement is the beginning of the dying process.

Those of you who have come in contact with a heretofore deadened life center know what a tremendous experience this is. Yes, you first experience pain. But as you learn to accept this pain -- or whatever other emotion may come up at first -- you also discover the enormous difference between pain and pain, the difference between fear and fear, the difference between anger and anger. It is the difference between an accepted emotion and a rejected emotion. When you accept the pain, then it is not half as painful, nor as anguishing. It never produces anxiety, tension, hopelessness, bitterness, and torment. It never puts you into a trap from which there is no way out. It never closes life. Even while you are in the process of experiencing the pain, there is life in you, bubbling life, wonderful life, pulsating life, and the joy is right behind the pain: in your outlook of the limitless possibilities available to you. Accepted pain is not really frightening, confusing, or conflicting. It is enlivening. As you dare to accept this feeling -- whatever it may be -- and you go deeper, then it transforms itself. Even while the pain is still there, at the same time you feel yourself immensely alive, beautifully alive. Little by little the pain makes room entirely for pleasure. Safety, hope, new experience are all available, all imminent. But only by going through what already exists in you.

Thus, your striving away from the unwelcome feelings must lead into more strife. For you are going the wrong way. If you expect the path to eliminate those unwelcome feelings before you have first experienced them and then understood them, then you must be in a bottleneck. The path is specifically geared to teach you how to accept the unwelcome feelings, not how to get out of them before you have even been in them. Here is the great misunderstanding, which is difficult to avoid, no matter how many times you read these words. Light, bliss, vital inner movement can come only when your goal is to be IN those feelings that you have always wished to avoid. The treasure of your creative life -- of your warm, eternal, moving life -- is revealed to you only if you follow this direction, never otherwise.

Once you have transcended the numbness and you have revived your frozen life center the first time, then it will never be quite so difficult to accomplish this again. But the one-time experience will not remain. For the conditioned reflexes are too deeply ingrained. The old fear will come back, perhaps not consciously at all, for consciously you may be full of good will and full of joy to remain in this wonderful state. Once you have tasted it, you will surely find it folly not to remain in this state of being. But something else in you is bound by habit patterns, and therefore does not know how else to react. Therefore, something in you shrinks back from living again -- especially when you feel the threat of a new painful experience or the threat of a new disappointment. The shrinking back from the life process numbs you again. So you must start all over again. But the more often the opening up to life is experienced, then the easier it is to attain and the more strength the ego has to do its part: to consciously and deliberately commit itself to life in all of its aspects.

When you see those automatic reflexes, then you have to accept the fact that they are processes that you cannot control by a direct act of your will. In other words, they work indirectly -- the closing as well as the opening. You open up not because you now decide this and an immediate result is visible. It seems to happen to you when you least expect it. It is nevertheless an indirect result of your searching, of your groping, of your efforts, of your will, of your commitment to the process of self-realization, of your honesty of first seeing and then facing the truth, of your good will to change and to give up your dishonest patterns. All this brings a result. But this result seems to have nothing to do with these efforts and with the giving up of these attitudes. In other words, the beautiful experience seems to be gratuitous. It seems to be the same with the opposite process of closing up. You may be open, you may be pulsating, you may be alive, and therefore you may be full of joy about this new condition. Yet you suddenly find yourself back in the old state of numbness without understanding why. Here, too, the indirect processes are at work. This means that some fear, some defense, or some inner shrinking has taken place in you that you are not consciously connected with. Your work requires you to connect with these unconscious processes. That will happen little by little when you first heed and then learn to interpret the indirect signs and the manifestations. In other words, your outer symbols. Do not allow yourself to be discouraged and to feel lost because you do not as yet comprehend the connection. In other words, because you do not see the cause and effect of why you open up suddenly and why you then close up again just as suddenly. This is an aspect of self-awareness that develops gradually.

Roughly speaking, the predominant emotions that an individual shrinks away from and therefore numbs himself againt are pain and fear -- with all their subdivisions -- as well as the anger and the rage that develop as a consequence. The non-acceptance of these feelings -- of this particular life experience -- creates the following process: you divide yourself. Any rejection of what one feels and experiences creates self-division, and therefore inner fighting against the self. One side is dead and the other is alive. The life process wants more life, with all the good it contains. For life is truth, life is love, life is experience, life is pleasure, life is movement, life is unfoldment, life is new adventure, life is new horizons of being. Living means increasing one's inherent potential as a co-creator in the universe. Living means finding the in-dwelling creative powers. All this, and more, is the life process that wants to perpetuate itself. It requires, and it is a result of, a full acceptance of what is.

You who have recently awakened this life center have experienced that pain and pain differs. The pain that is rejected is bitter, disquieting, and hopeless. The pain that is accepted has a different feeling about it. It is an opening, pleasurable experience. The accepted negativity of life eventually makes the negativity superfluous. The rejected negative experience binds you to it for as long as you keep on fighting against it.

Let us take the simple experience of fear. If you shrink away from fear and you fight against it -- and therefore you deaden yourself in order not to experience it -- then you become enslaved to the fear. On the conscious level this will manifest in any number of projected fears, which in reality have nothing to do with what you really fear. When I speak of not rejecting the negative feelings, I do not mean that you are expected to welcome pain. What I mean is that only by not shrinking from it but by opening up to whatever comes your way does negative experience cease to be. For you attract it, you hold on to it, and you are enslaved to it by being in a state of battle. By fighting against anything in life, you must also be in a state of fighting against something in yourself.

All this must not be confused with unhealthy passivity. There is a healthy way of fighting for something. This is entirely different from fighting against something. The former occurs out of strength and out of the positive consciousness of reaching for a good experience. The latter occurs out of fear and out of weakness, and therefore cringes away from experience. By fighting against the undesirable experience, you deaden something. What you deaden is an integral part of life -- something that feels. If you deaden something that feels -- even if it is negative now -- then you eliminate the possibility of feeling something positive to the degree that you deaden any area of yourself. Therefore, the side that is dead misses out. As a result, it frustrates itself. And the side in you that is alive must fight against this frustration. Any kind of numbing process, any attempt to deny a genuine inner experience, inevitably produces inner fight and self-division.

He who fears hurt, who fears pain, who fears disappointment, who fears frustration -- whatever the feeling may be that he fears -- fears experience per se. If he fears experience, then he must guard himself against any experience. On the conscious level he may not be aware of this. In fact, he may believe that he is totally open to and ready for the good experience, if not for the painful one. But if the painful experience is feared, then one is cautious, unspontaneous, defensive -- and thus equally walled off from any kind of experience. The destructive effect will be that the warm feelings that bring love, companionship, and intimacy cannot be fully felt. At best they are dulled, and often are merely abstractions of the mind. Nothing renders the individual so insecure and so inadequate. Nothing is so disquieting and so hopeless. If you wonder about your capacity to experience deep, warm feelings of love, then try to find out how you defend yourself against any negative feeling and negative experience. Then you will have your key.

The fear of emotional experience breeds frustration, discontent, and emptiness. These, in turn, breed battling against that which is the product of one's inner processes. By instituting death processes and by shrinking away from whatever experience there is, you divide yourself. And that is the most painful of all experiences: your fight within yourself, your self-division. Any outer strife in your earth sphere is nothing but a symbolic representation, an outpicturing, of the self-division that is going on in all human beings in varying degrees. This self-division not only is the real cause of outer strife, of warfare, of injustice, of conflict, and of all the malconditions you can possibly think of, it is also the most painful experience within the human individual. Man finds himself in a constant state of inner tension, a state where he pulls simultaneously into two opposite directions: into life and into a rejection of life, and therefore into a defense against life. The inevitable frustration that results from this divided self -- with its divided motivation and its divided direction -- is fought against even more. Here you have a good illustration of the process. By fighting against such a frustration in a blind and destructive way the cause cannot be eliminated. It is understandable to say on the surface: "Why should I accept such a frustrating life?" But only by accepting the frustration can it be understood. And only in this way can its cause be eliminated. Only by going through the experience of frustration can the other emotions that cause it surface -- the fear of the pain of disappointment, a fear which numbs the feelings, a numbness which creates the frustration.

Your numbing process -- in other words, your shrinking away from the feelings and the experiences within yourself -- not only enslaves you to the negative experience which you deny, it also creates a self-division. In other words, a painful inner warfare with yourself. When I speak of "accepting" negative emotions, then it must not be confused with masochistic, self-denying, morbid attitudes toward negative experience. It is not required from you to welcome it. This applies to a more subtle level of your feelings. Those of you who have already experienced a process of unnumbing their life center know what I am talking about. You do not have to morbidly dwell on a negative emotion, but you do not have to shrink from it in fear either. You should say: "Here it is. I let it be. I do not want to fight against it in some inner movement of rejecting it. I truly want to dissolve it by letting it be. I want to let it dissolve itself and then I want to see what happens." This has nothing to do with morbid wallowing.

When you come to the traumatic experience that created the numbing in this lifetime -- which always happens in early childhood -- then it is often not possible to reconstruct it directly, for mental memory does not suffice, even if it exists. But it is necessary -- and it is surely possible -- to reconstruct the emotional experience by comprehending certain problematic reactions now. Then this will be recognized by you as a repetition of early experience -- of course, once you do not avoid being in this problematic emotion right now. Sooner or later on the path you must discover that your problematic reactions now reveal the original trauma. You are then bound to discover precisely where, how, and why you numb yourself against pain of any sort. This feared pain amounts to a sort of shock reaction. I do not mean a one-time experience that created a one-time shock. A child can be in a protracted shock, in a protracted painful situation or subtle climate, in an environment that he responds to by a more or less intense shrinking and numbing defense. This is a shock reaction. When this shock reaction is re-created in your present day reactions, then with your new awareness you will see what your soul movements in you do. You will gradually learn to institute new reactions and different soul movements. Instead of shrinking away from the feared pain -- and thereby creating all these harmful, life-defeating attitudes that I mentioned -- you will learn to cope with such experiences in a new way. In other words, you have to reconcile yourself to finding an entirely new approach to these experiences that at one time have made you shrink away from them and that have caused you to anaesthetize yourself against pain and against fear.

If you can imagine a human being going through life physically half anaesthetized, then you can imagine what such a life would be. It would be a very dull life, a very incomplete life, a life with very limited experiences, and with a very low degree of awareness. This is what human beings constantly do when it comes to their spiritual and emotional life. This inner anaesthesia eventually also affects the capacity to feel in the body, so that it affects all the levels of being when the process continues for any length of time. For it progresses in a self-propelling way. The anaesthesia has to melt. In other words, it must be undone. As it first thaws out, you are bound to experience pain -- the very pain that you once had frozen. The pain cannot heal unless you are courageous enough to feel it now without exaggerating its intensity -- which is a "pain killer" in itself. If the pain is accepted in its real nature -- without either denying it or aggrandizing it -- then it will soon diminish and then eventually disappear completely. This is altogether different from repression. The latter binds vital life energy. The former frees it for joyful, pleasurable experience, for strength and for delight. Observe it, rather than control it. Let it be. The more you inwardly tense up against it, the more unbearable the pain will become. The more you relax toward it, the less severe it will be. By fearing the pain, you shrink from it and you reject it. Then you fear the fear, and therefore you numb both the fear and your fear of the fear. Thus you alienate yourself further from where you are alive. By doing what I suggest here, you are using a new way, a new approach to deal with what was afflicted in you. In other words, with the afflicted area of your psyche. This way of dealing with your inner affliction is not illusory wishful thinking. On the contrary, it is the most real attitude that a human being can adopt. Your split soul will mend, it will unite, it will heal.

This process cannot be adopted in one sweep. Therefore the deadening process cannot be stopped in one sweep either. It happens gradually. Little by little the death process will be eliminated. Eventually you will come out of this cycle where you have to constantly fear death because you court it, and where you have to fear pain because you do not encounter it in a meaningful, effective way which would eliminate it in a realistic, healthy, proportionate, relaxed manner.

Those of my friends who find themselves in this stage on the path where they have, perhaps for the first time, felt the life of their inner center and who have also felt how it closed up again, now have to proceed with renewed vigor in the same direction. Only, this time prepare yourself -- first in your mind and then gradually in the deeper realms of your emotional being -- to meet the pain with a new attitude: to feel into yourself and to observe your shrinking. As you observe your automatic shrinking, your tensing up, and your tightening up with as much detachment as you can muster, you will see that the shrinking away will lessen. The cramp, the frozenness will diminish. Your awareness of what you do inwardly will diminish the intensity and the compulsive drive to perpetuate it. Life can only bring you what you have perpetuated. When you no longer reject pain, when you no longer reject fear, when you no longer reject negativity -- in other words, when you deal with them in a relaxed, real, and unifying manner -- then you will truly have outgrown the pain, outgrown the fear, outgrown the negativity. All of you who are at this point on the path, and who have experienced the enlivening beauty of being real, need to know that by no longer rejecting the pain, you will make it a deeper, and eventually joyful, experience.

Are there any questions now -- first in regard to this topic, my friends?

QUESTION: The conflicts you speak of... doesn't all movement come from conflict?

ANSWER: No, movement does not come from conflict. On the contrary, movement is life. Where there is life, there is movement. If there is no movement, then there is no life. When the conflict continues to increase, then the movement at first diminishes and then eventually stops. The totally integrated and totally self-realized entity -- who exists beyond this dualistic earth sphere -- is in a perpetual state of joyful movement. The dualism -- that is, the conflict -- is the result of your denial of movement. The dualism here is not only life versus death, but it is also movement versus non-movement. Although death is accepted by the healthy personality as one of the phenomena of this state of consciousness -- and thereby its fear is eventually eliminated -- the time comes in the evolution of a being when the dying process no longer exists, when there is only life. In other words, when there is forever more unfolding movement.

QUESTION: Is not the difference of the sexes a conflict that brings life?

ANSWER: It is a conflict for those people who are in conflict. But for those who are beyond conflict, then the two sexes do not create more conflict. Conflict can never create life, though life may exist in spite of conflict.

QUESTION: About the point where the anaesthesizing began... I feel somehow... well, it seems that in the cycle of life abandonment plays a big role. You are abandoned by your parents. Then, in your turn, you abandon life when you die. I am very involved with this abandonment.

ANSWER: Where the inner shock reaction is -- in other words, where the frozen life center is -- that is what must be experienced. With you the emphasis is on abandonment. With each human being another particular, specific point exists which is the trauma. The shock reaction in the soul in one case may exist in regard to the feeling of not being loved; in another entity in the fear of being left alone -- as with you; in still another person that the personal value of the individuality is negated. There are many other variations of basically the same experiences, or of similar experiences. Each one must find his own emphasis: what is triggered off most strongly in the soul? In the last analysis it is always the fear of pain: the pain of not being loved, the pain of not being protected, the pain of not being being warmed, the pain of not being accepted. Roughly speaking, that is the basis. Yet each individual has different conditions, and therefore the personal, specific way varies. In your case, abandonment is the key, as it were. Therefore, what you will have to learn is this. In order to transcend the fear of being abandoned, no longer shrink from the feeling of: "I am being abandoned. I cannot allow myself to experience this state." The words are too limited to adequately describe the inner attitude necessary in order to change the dynamics of your soul movements. If you try to listen with your inner antenna, then you will know what I mean. You have been threatened with abandonment every day since your childhood. Until recently you have denied this fear, and therefore you have ignored it. Now you begin to be conscious of it. You must go through it. When you see this phantom of abandonment, then you must observe your inner reactions to it. No mental process, no mental conceptualizing can help you to transcend this fear. Rather, you first have to see what "it" does in you. This is a more correct way of stating the process than what "you" do. It is nothing that you do volitionally in a direct way. Something in you does it when abandonment threatens you, and it cramps up in you. As you observe this, you already have gained a different, healing perspective in your courageous self-observation. Then you can see yourself cramping up, numbing yourself, denying the experience of abandonment. As you see yourself do this, then you know that in this denial and in this fighting you only increase your fear. In other words, you make the experience inevitable. You constantly live in the shadow of it because of your inner way of handling it. Now you may be able to experiment with this new way. Therefore say: "All right, I shall try. I would like to react differently. Instead of tensing up against it and freezing myself, I shall endure what I feel. I will stop fighting with emotions which are vital life energy and which can be used in a more constructive way." As you do this, you will -- perhaps for the first time -- truly experience the pain of abandonment, even if its being repeated is only a threat. As you experience it in this way, then it is already less painful. As you do this, some new strength will begin to gather in you. You will suddenly see new ways, different ways of avoiding abandonment. A new initiative will reveal itself to you naturally. A new and productive way of fighting for love and of fighting for closeness will come to you. This is not cramping up and shrinking away from. It is a relaxed activity that leads to fulfillment. The old way is freezing the life energies in order not to feel. This also results in creating weak, passive dependency. It also results in your not finding the resources necessary for meaningful action. The defensive attitude cripples one's vitality and one's joy, and it exudes negating attitudes that are bound to bring the very thing that one fears most -- in your case, abandonment.

In order to make the deadness alive, to awaken it, you first must feel the deadness in you. You have means at your disposal to bring it to life again. For there is a live part in you with which you can will, with which you can act, with which you can overcome. There is still something in you that enables you to work on the path. You can decide whether or not you want to be fully alive and whether or not you want to be fully feeling, and thereby come to experience the best that life is, the best that you are. Be life, be God, for that is who you truly are.

November 8, 1968