Consciousness

By The Pathwork Guide

Greetings, all my friends who receive the tangible blessing that is extended and that streams in the form of energy currents containing consciousness and strength. It flows toward you and it permeates you. This is a reality which can be perceived as your consciousness grows, expands, and ventures forth.

In this lecture I would like to talk about consciousness, about aspects of it and its significance in the scheme of creation. Our work in the forthcoming months must deepen your comprehension both of the power and of the significance of creative consciousness. Creation is a result of consciousness and not, as is generally assumed, the other way around. Nothing can be unless it exists first in a consciousness, whether this consciousness is the Universal Spirit, the Universal Self, or whether it is the individualized self. It makes no difference. Whether what you perceive, what you create, and what you formulate in your consciousness is important, world-forming, or just a passing, insignificant attitude, the principle must be the same.

These facts have been discussed and you know them. But you do not know them well enough. You still overlook the tremendous significance of what you create with your consciousness. And your being disconnected from it causes the worst kind of suffering. There is no other suffering as acute as the one that exists when you do not know that you yourself have created what you experience. This applies, to a lesser extent, even to the positive and therefore desirable experiences. For if you do not know that you have created them, then you will always feel helpless. In other words, you will always feel in the hands of a power which you cannot comprehend. This power is truly your own consciousness.

Let us now look at and try to understand a little better some of the most outstanding attributes of what consciousness is. Consciousness is not only the power to think, the power to discriminate and the power to choose -- which is obvious. It is not only the power to know, the power to perceive, and the power to feel. It is also the ability to will. Willing is a very important aspect of consciousness. It makes no difference whether you will in your awareness, or whether you are disconnected from the fact that you will something. Your willing is an aspect of your consciousness, and hence of what you continually create. Willing is an ongoing process, knowing is an ongoing process, and feeling is an ongoing process. In other words, where there is consciousness, then knowing, feeling, and willing always exist. Often a number of contradictory will currents create a short-circuit on the surface, which then manifests as lack of awareness, as numbness. Consciousness is diminished on the surface, but it continues to go on below the surface. Its products manifest as tangible life experiences. Then the entity feels at a loss because he believes that what life brings is totally independent from its own willing and from its own knowing. Any genuine path of development must bring to the surface all the confused and contradictory desires and all the beliefs -- in other words, the inner knowing -- so that the the created life circumstances appear in their true light: they are a creation of the self. This awareness then gives you the power to re-create.

Willing, determining, formulating, knowing of an existing possibility, perceiving -- all of these inner activities are the tools of creation. Mankind can be accurately divided into those who know this and who then use these tools deliberately, creatively, and constructively, and those who are unaware of these facts and who, consequently, are victims of their ignorance. They constantly create destructively, but they never know it.

Man is the first entity on the evolutionary scale upward who can create consciously and deliberately with his consciousness. You who search for your true identity -- your real being -- must come to experience the fact that you have the power to create and how you have specifically created both what you have and what you do not have. You can then see the augmented pain and tension in your being when you fight against your own creations. This is inevitably so when a personality is not yet aware, both generally and specifically, of how his life is a product of his own mind activity, of his own thinking. He will invariably rebel against what he does not like, never knowing that he actually tears himself apart in this way to an ever greater degree. This rebellion may not be entirely conscious either. This rebellion may manifest in the form of a vague discontent with life, in the form of a hopeless longing, in the form of a sense of futility, or in the form of frustration from which one sees no way out. This, too, is a kind of rebellion.

To understand the importance of consciousness in still greater depth it is necessary to perceive both the positive and the negative manifestations or directions that consciousness can take. Man harbors within him the purest of wisdom, flowing in the direction of ever expanding blissfulness, of new vistas of life expression in infinite variety, and of fullness of dimensions. This is the Universal Spirit. I will not say that the Universal Spirit is in you. I say that you are It, but that most of the time you do not know it. But man also harbors within him the distorted expression of his creative consciousness with which he wills negatively and destructively. One could also say that this is the eternal fight between God and the devil, between good and evil, between life and death. Whatever you call it does not matter. This is a question of culture, of fashion, of interpretation, of personal leanings, and of one's own approach to the world. Whatever you name these powers, they are your own powers. You are not a helpless pawn in anyone's hands. This is the important question, the all-important fact of life that truly alters your entire self-perception and your attitude toward living. Not knowing this will make you constantly feel victimized by circumstances beyond your control.

In order to first perceive and then to experience your true identity as being the Universal Spirit, three basic things are necessary:

1) That you tune in on it. By knowing of its existence this will be possible. You must become very quiet within yourself and allow it to happen. You activate it by your conscious and deliberate attempt to listen to it until you perceive it. This is not easy, for the tumultuous busyness of the mind barricades this possibility. It requires training until your mind becomes sufficiently calm: able to stop buzzing and therefore producing involuntary thought patterns. After this is accomplished to some degree, then you will experience an emptiness. You will seem to listen to nothingness. This may be either frightening or disappointing. Finally the Universal Spirit begins to manifest. But not because it decides to do so only now because you were a good child who now deserves it, but because you begin to perceive its ongoing presence, a presence you will then know was always there, quite near and immediately accessible -- almost too near to perceive. The first manifestations may come to you not as a direct voice, as a direct inner knowing, but through detours. Perhaps through other mouths, and later as apparently coincidental ideas that suddenly come to you. But if you are alert, if you are sentitive, and if you are attuned to reality, then you will know that these are the first manifestations of establishing contact. Later the emptiness will prove to be of such a tremendous fullness that it is impossible to express it in words. What also hinders you from perceiving the Universal Spirit's constant presence is its immediacy. And this is the wonderful thing. When you discover that you harbor this Presence within yourself at all times, then it fills you with safety, with strength, and with the knowledge that you never need to be inadequate and helpless again, for this source of all life supplies you with every detail of living that is important to you. It fills you with rich feelings; it stimulates you; it calms you; it shows you the best way to handle your problems; it offers you the solutions that unify decency, honesty, and self-interest, love and pleasure, reality and bliss, the fulfillment of your duties without diminishing your freedom in the least. All is contained there. But this wonderful immediacy presents its problems at first because your concept -- your God image -- is that this can be sought only very far away. Being geared to experiencing the Universal Spirit only as a remote reality makes it impossible to experience its nearness.

2) It is necessary to first comprehend and then to fully experience that part of your consciousness which has turned negative, which has become destructive, and which therefore creates destructively. A great deal of concentration and weight was put in our pathwork in order to accomplish this. But this is not an easy matter, precisely because man is geared to believe that his life is a fixed thing into which he was put and with which he must learn to cope -- independently from his inner processes of thinking, of willing, of knowing, of feeling, and of perceiving. As you can now appreciate, it requires a great deal of honesty, of discipline, and the overcoming of resistance until an individual can make this all-important switch within his entire approach to life: From seeing himself as helpless to seeing his own creation in all respects. It is not possible to activate the Presence of the Universal Self when an entity is still blind to his negative creations. Sometimes it may happen that certain channels are open where the obstructions do not happen to exist, but where the blocks -- the blindness, the imagined helplessness -- persist, then this contact cannot function.

3) Your conscious thinking processes are the first handlebar to the Universal Creative Spirit. With your conscious thinking you create just as much as with what is referred to as unconscious thinking and unconscious willing. Your thinking ability is exactly the same as the creative processes of the Universal Mind. Though it is a separated fragment of the Whole, the human mind has the same powers and the same possibilities. Even the separation is not real. It exists because this is the way you experience yourself at this time. The moment you discover the immediacy of this Divine Presence, then you will no longer feel a separation between your intellectual thinking processes and those of the Greater Being. Eventually they will merge. Then you will know that it has always been that way, only you did not know it. Thus you have not availed yourself of your innate powers. In your blind state, you either left them unused, or you misused them. You can make a beginning in order to finally experience yourself as the Universal Spirit by consciously and deliberately using your thinking processes -- in other words, your mind activity -- in a constructive way. You can do this in two parts. First, you must clearly see how you have unknowingly used these same mind processes negatively. In other words, how you have created destructively. Then you can formulate the new thought forms by stating that what you want is possible in the scheme of things, and then by perceiving it, by knowing it, and by willing it in a relaxed, untense attitude. This also includes the willingness to change faulty and dishonest inner attitudes, for otherwise you block what you want.

By building outer thought forms of creative unfoldment, you can tap the rich source within your being. The beginning is made by the conscious and deliberate activity of your thinking apparatus which, once again, is much too near to be easily recognized. It requires a certain focusing of your attention on your thinking processes. Observe how you use them. In other words, how the immediately available processes of your thinking -- the way you use your mind -- create both what you have and what you do not have. Once you can reverse this process, then you have discovered a tool of creation and you have truly become your real self. For you are the Universal Spirit who created the world. You are constantly creating your own world right now, the life you lead.

Paying attention to your inner processes will soon make it apparent that much of what you thought was in your unconscious is really not hidden at all. Observe this especially when you find yourself either in a disturbed situation or in a disturbing situation. See how you take for granted both the situation and your reaction to it. As a result of taking both of them for granted, you gloss over your most obvious attitudes, precisely those which will give you the clues that can make you understand how your creative powers work. Here, of course, inverted and therefore manifesting negatively. To consider every detail of the situation, to expand the range of your consideration and your attention in a fresh, new approach will give you the insight that you were lacking before. This self-knowledge is purification in the truest sense of the word because it ultimately establishes your awareness of your power as the creator of your life. The discovery of how you have created destructively is never a really bad experience, for it becomes immediately obvious that you also have the power to create beautiful life experiences for yourself. In this way you become aware of your eternal nature, with its infinite power to expand.

Here we are dealing with three levels. All of them must become accessible to you. Not one of them is easier to perceive than the other. For example, it would be an error to believe that your everyday thinking processes are easier to perceive than either your destructive willing or your divine nature, with its endless power and with its deep wisdom. They are all equally near. But they seem far because your vision is turned in the opposite direction. The willful destructiveness or the grandiose Creative Spirit that you are are unconscious because you turn away your gaze, your attention. You do not give them the benefit of the doubt that they exist as a first step towards their discovery. It is practically the same with your daily mind activity that goes on and on, unobserved by your critical evaluation, so that you are completely unaware of how your thought processes run in the same negative -- and therefore unproductive -- channels. Nor do you perceive that you even derive a sort of satisfaction from allowing this to go on. So all three levels are equally difficult or equally easy to perceive. The difficulty lies primarily in your not knowing, in your not listening, in your not giving attention to, in your not observing what can be listened to, what can be observed -- once you look and listen into the right direction.

When you observe your negative thinking processes, then it is important to realize: a) what they do to you, how they connect with the results you deplore most in your life, and b) that you do have the power to alter these destructive thinking processes and to find new channels -- new ways of self-expression -- for your thinking. These two facets will make all the difference in the world. This is true liberation and self-finding. This is the coming into one's own that we speak of so much. This is the discovery of your true identity that represents such glad tidings. But first you must see yourself pursuing negative thought processes. In other words, you must see yourself brooding in the same vicious circles. You must see yourself almost willfully pursuing the same roundabout, very limited, very narrowly-confined channels of thinking and never venturing beyond these fences. This expansion is there to be taken by the leap of your thinking.

Let us take the example that you are convinced that you can experience only this or that negative manifestation in your life. Once you observe the tenacity with which you take this for granted in any given area of your life experience, then you can ask the following question: "Does it really have to be so?" The moment this question is raised, then you begin to open a crack in the door. Not knowing that you are convinced of only this narrowly confined possibility for you makes it impossible to consider -- and therefore to raise -- further possibilities and other alternatives. Only then can you actually venture into them. You do this by first formulating the respective thoughts as the blueprints of creating. Then the world begins to open up for you. This opening must be done by your thinking. In other words, by your saying: "It does not have to be only this way. It can be another way. I want this other way of life. I want to be helped to eliminate whatever stands between me and this more desirable way of being. I have the courage to face it and then to go beyond this life experience which I have given myself until now by taking it for granted that it cannot be any other way." On this conscious level of your thinking processes the taking it for granted has to be seen by you.

Another possibility is that you may want a positive result in any given area but, at the same time, you do not wish to accept certain logical consequences that go with what you wish. Perhaps you block what you wish out of a misunderstanding or by falsely believing that accepting these consequences is undesirable for you. This is the area of your childish resistance to give of yourself. It is the area of your distorted attempt to cheat life. It is the area of your attempt to gain more than you wish to give. Life cannot comply with such unfair desires. But since you do not know this, then you feel cheated, and therefore you are resentful -- that is, until you have clearly examined the issue. But you are not aware of your false reasoning in resisting to give of yourself. Thus you create forms of error and forms of distortion that stand in the way of what is possible for you.

Thus you can see that the level of your conscious thinking is influenced both by the destructive side of yourself and by your universal spirit. Once you are aware of the habit pattern of your negative thoughts, then your conscious and deliberate decision can choose in which direction to formulate new thoughts. This self-determination is the key to your liberation.

As far as the destructive side of the self is concerned, it will be seen that it is also quite deliberate in you. In other words, it is something that you yourself choose. It is not something that befalls you. Once you have progressed on this path, then you will come to the point when you can finally admit your deliberate desire to choose destructive ways and evil attitudes. When you are unhappy, then it means that you yourself forsake happiness, that you forsake fulfillment, that you forsake bliss, that you forsake fruitful living. You may be unhappy about the result, but you still insist on retaining the negative willing of your consciousness. You can see how all-important it is to find this out.

The age-old question is what brought it all about? In other words, why do human beings harbor these senseless, useless, utterly purposeless desires? Why does the mind take on this direction? Religion calls it sin or evil. Psychology calls it neurosis or psychosis, or gives it any other name that differentiates between the varieties of this perverse leaning of the mind. Whatever name you may give it, it is indeed a disease. In order to heal the disease, it is necessary to understand it, at least to some extent. This is done primarily by following through the channels of your inverted -- and therefore erroneous -- assumptions, beliefs, and false ideas, with their subsequent negative emotions and negative will direction. In order to understand this, you also need to understand in a general way the dynamics of the processes of the creative mind, both in its positive manifestation and in its negative manifestation. This is why people ask again and again: "how does evil come into existence?" Sometimes they ask: "why did God put evil into us?" As though someone else had "put" anything anywhere. Once sufficient self-awareness exists and one's rejection of happiness is on the surface, then the following puzzling question can be raised: "Why do I do it? Why can't I want what feels good for me?" This question has been asked many times, both here and elsewhere in the world, where spiritual teachings are being given. At the beginning of this contact I gave an allegorical account of the so-called "Fall of the Angels," about a spirit who at one time was utterly constructive. Therefore, he was expanding into forever greater realms of light and bliss. Lucifer diverted from this course, separated himself from his innermost Godself, and thus became fragmented. How did he turn into dark, destructive channels? Any account, such as I have given and has been given elsewhere, is easily misunderstood because it is always interpreted as a historical event that has taken place in time and space. Therefore it it is completely misleading. I shall venture to give you another explanation about how destructiveness comes into being in an utterly constructive consciousness. I shall try to find a different approach that may perhaps reach you on some level and give you a deeper understanding of this all-important topic, so as to meet your destructiveness with a new understanding, thereby helping you to come out of it.

Picture a consciousness, a state of being, in which there is only bliss and infinite -- literally infinite -- power to create with one's consciousness, through one's consciousness, and by one's consciousness. Consciousness is, among its other attributes, a thinking apparatus. Thus, it thinks -- and, lo, something comes into existence. It wills -- and, lo, what is willed and thought is. This can be expanded and extended into more and more ways, more and more variations, and more and more possibilities. Life is endless in these possibilities. In the life that is not confined into the structure of the ego -- in other words, in the universal life that is free and in the consciousness that is free-flowing and free-floating -- creating happens first by thinking, then the thinking becomes a fact, it becomes a form. In the state of being the thought is immediately deed and immediately form. It is only in the human ego existence that the thought is apparently separated from the deed and from the form. The less awareness exists in an entity, then the more separated do the thought, the deed, and the form appear -- so much so that the form or the manifestation seems entirely independent from the deed, and the deed from the thought or from the will. None of these three stages are connected. An essential part of raising one's consciousness lies precisely in this connecting. No matter how far apart in time and space they may appear, thought and will, deed and action, form and manifestation are all one unit. In the state of being -- where there is no confinement, where there is no tight structuring -- this unit is experienced as a living reality. In this lies an indescribable bliss and a fascination. The whole universe is open for exploration, open for new ways of self-expression, and open for new ways of self-finding. In other words, open for giving form to forever more worlds, to forever new experiences, and to forever new effects. The fascination of creating is endless, going on and on, and finding forever new ways.

Since the possibilities are endless, infinite and limitless, then a consciousness can also explore itself by confining itself, by fragmenting itself off -- to "see what happens," as it were. It experiences itself. Instead of expanding more, it contracts. Instead of unfolding, it tries out how it feels to draw in. Instead of exploring further light, it wants to see how it is to feel and to experience darkness. Creating is fascination per se. This fascination is not eliminated simply because what is created is less pleasurable or less blissful or less brilliant. Even in that may lie a special fascination and adventure -- just to tentatively try it, if I may use these very limited words. But then it begins to take on a power of its own. For everything that is created has energy invested in it and this energy is self-perpetuating. In other words, it takes on its own momentum. The consciousness who has created these channels and pathways may experiment longer and more than it is safe because it no longer leaves itself enough power at the moment to reverse the course. In other words, it may get lost in its own momentum, and therefore is unwilling to stop. But then it no longer sees how to stop this course. Creation then takes place entirely, or primarily, on a negative scale, until the results are so unpleasant that the entity seeks to get a hold of itself and to counteract the momentum by recalling its real knowledge of what could be. At any rate, it knows that there is no real danger, for whatever suffering you human beings feel is truly illusory in the ultimate sense. Once you find your true identity within, then you will know it. It is all a play, a fascination, an experiment from which your real state of being can be recaptured, if only you will truly try.

Many human beings still find themselves in the state in which they do not want to try to regain their real state of being. They still find a fascination in the exploration of their negative creations -- at least to some extent of their inner being. Some separated entities have never gone so far. Tthat is, beyond the point where they lose the awareness of who they really are and of their power to re-direct their explorations. Others have temporarily lost this awareness. But they must find it again the moment they really want to. It is well that all of you remember this fact.

The momentum of creating contains incredibly powerful energies. These energies have an impact. They impress the all-permeating creating substance, that stuff of life which responds to the creative mind and which is molded into a form, into an event, into an object, into an occurrence, into a state of mind, or whatever. This is why the imprints in the soul substance are so deep and why nothing but the greater power of the molding mind can erase the false imprints which govern your events. Everything that is around you and everything that is within you is both the masculine principle of determining, etching consciousness and the feminine principle of molded, responding life substance. My dear friends, find this truth within you and then the universe will become yours all over again, as it once was.

If the creative consciousness does not alter the course at a certain point, then it becomes caught within its own processes, the processes that it has generated. Part of the power and of the momentum is a quality of being self-imitating, if I can use this expression. It is very hard to convey this aspect of creative energy. Human beings often experience the urge to imitate others. This is frequent and it manifests in many forms. The same characteristic exists in regard to self-imitation. It is a process of imprinting something upon the substance of life. Let me give you an example of the power of imitation and of creating new ways of experience in this fashion. Many of you must have experienced the strange urging that you have when you see a cripple who limps, or someone who has a facial tick, to imitate his bodily posture or his facial aberration. Have you not experienced the sometimes irresistible desire to imitate something that is highly undesirable for you? At the same time there is a kind of revulsion and a fear of doing this because you sense that by doing this, you then set something in motion that you might wish to imitate again and again. In other words, you cannot stop doing so. The power and the energies of creation have this self-perpetuating effect, which only the consciousness -- with its knowing, with its will, and with its determination -- can alter into another direction. Creating becomes so involving and the pleasure of it is so engrossing that once set in the direction of negativity the pleasure in the negative creation continues to keep the soul in its spell until the consciousness steps in with its deliberate counter force. Even if what is created is painful, the pleasure of creating is still difficult to abandon -- but only as long as the individual ignores the fact that positive creation is also possible.

As negative creation proceeds, the consciousness seems to become more fragmented. Of course, it is not really fragmented. But your awareness cannot experience your connection with the World Spirit which you are.

I do not know to what extent these words can reach you. But if they can, then they will prove of tremendous help for you as you think about them and you meditate on them. They will help you not only to comprehend, but to find the right way of fighting against and eventually eliminating the destructiveness that is within you. The power of your mind creates the negative. This force is even stronger when it is used for the positive creation. It is stronger when it is used to create the positive because in the creation of the negative there must always be conflicts, contrary longings, and opposite will directions which weaken the creative force. In the constructive, expanding direction this is not so at all. Once the switch can be made, then something will click in the activities and the processes of the mind. Then the mind will flow into a new direction, one that comes more easily and more naturally, one that is without the torture that negative creation always entails.

The more the consciousness has separated itself in awareness from the Whole, the more it is fragmented, and therefore the greater the structuring must be. The wholeness of consciousness is unstructured. This is the state of being in all its blissfulness. After the separating fragmentation has occurred, then the slow stages of development take the following course. The lost consciousness gradually works toward a state of self-consciousness. This state needs the structuring in order to be protected from the chaos of the negativity and the destruction. When these are first met and eventually eliminated, then unstructured blissful consciousness is attained once again. The ego, with its confinement, is the structuring which protects the entity from its destructive creating. It holds it in check, so to speak. Only when the consciousness expands into the channels of bliss and truth can the structuring remove itself. So, at one time in your evolution you were chaotically unstructured. As you grow and evolve, the structuring walls off this chaos, so that the consciousness can deal with its aware levels without being hindered by the inner chaos. Thus the available thinking processes can become the tools which show the way out of the negative creation and the confining structure. Looking beyond the structure and into the chaos -- comprehending it, realizing the power of the mind processes which are constantly in use -- affords you the possibility to reverse the downward curve that makes you constantly seek that which denies life, that which denies love, that which denies pleasure, that which denies happiness, that which courts decay, that which courts waste, and that which courts pain. That part of your universal self that has remained whole knows that the pain is short and illusory. But that part of you which is involved in the chaos does not know this, and therefore suffers.

Let us review. The processes of your conscious mind -- your conscious and deliberate thinking -- can swing the pendulum from the ongoing destructive creating to the original state of consciousness, which is expanding and blissful creating. The confining structure will dissolve itself and then the ultimate state of being -- which is unstructured consciousness and experience, energy and blissful being -- will reinstate itself and will become your existence. This is where it is all going, my friends. Therefore, part of your pathwork must go in the direction of bringing order into the confusion of the workings of your mind: its self-involvement, its blindness to itself, and thus how it gets lost to itself. It is not the world outside yourself that confuses you, it is the world within your consciousness, with all these aspects that I mentioned here.

Begin to contemplate the fact that you can consciously and deliberately will a creative construction by first thinking of and then stating, formulating, and willing a state of happiness, a state of aliveness, a state of fulfillment, a state of truth, a state of love, a state of growth -- both generally and in all the possible particulars -- which would make you happy. At first the climate of this may seem strange, unusual, unfamiliar. Therefore, you need to acclimatize yourself to it. First picture yourself in such states and then call upon the universal power within you to fortify your conscious mind with the necessary creative energy. The will for your happiness must become so strong that the causes of your unhappiness must be seen and eliminated. But this, too, must be truly wanted. Then the creative power will grow and the deivine self will inspire you and will show you the way. You will learn to recognize it and to receive it in your conscious brain.

This is a rough outline for this working season. The progress that has been made by my friends will enable them to make use of what I have said here. I mean actively make use, not just reading this as a beautiful theory, but deeply knowing its immediately usable value and applying it every day of your life. On the day when you see your destructive creating and you consciously and deliberately change it, then you will have done something truly wonderful. The will to be happy and the desire to unfold in life is the foundation stone of your power to create. The more concisely this is formulated -- also as to your willingness to eliminate those attitudes in you that hinder the results you want -- the more effective your creation will become.

Be blessed. Receive the power that is streaming forth and increase this power by your conscious and deliberate willing expressions and formulations. Express your willingness to grow, express your willingness to be happy, express your willingness to be constructive. But do not do this by willing it in a tight, insistent, constricted way, but in a relaxed, confident way. Contemplate the fact that all the possibilities exist within you as potential realities. They are realizable by you the moment you know this and you wish it with your whole, undivided being. The power is there, it is in you. All you have to do is to tap it, to use it, and to build with your conscious mind the channels that can free it. Then you have to become very quiet and calm. Listen for it and tune in on it. It is there forever and ever, in its grandiose power, in its wonderful wisdom, in its ultimate knowledge that there is nothing but bliss already now within you.