Overcoming Negativity

By The Pathwork Guide

Greetings and blessings for every one of my friends. I shall immediately proceed with this lecture, which is a continuation of the last one, where we were discussing the importance of the mind, of the consciousness, with its creative aspects and powers. We were also talking about negative creation -- which is an ongoing process in every human being. If you were not negatively involved with creation, then you would not be human. In other words, you would not live on this plane of consciousness, which expresses a certain degree of development. Human beings are, in general, free to a degree, so that they also create constructively. But negative creation is still continuing in the human psyche. This means that it is humanity's task on this earth to struggle out of its negative creation and to become free from the snares of negativity. This is not easy, for the fascination with any creative process takes hold of a person so that he or she wants to remain in it. Thus a person becomes involved in any number of vicious circles simultaneously, which seem difficult to break. It is my task to help you to gradually loosen the hold of your negative involvement on distorted creative processes.

I shall continue with the specific aspects with which this pathwork is particularly concerned. Many of you begin to find within yourselves the truth of your negativity. You can even acknowledge the fact that your negativity is deliberate, and you can even see how you hang on to it. Reaching this step is of tremendous significance. There is no greater difference conceivable between those human beings who know that they create their own fate, who know that they wish to be negative, no matter how undesirable it seems, who know that they still want to retain this attitude of being negative, and those human beings who are ignorant of this fact.

Anyone who is on a path that leads to the realization of the universal self must come to this personal insight. Otherwise the path that one takes deals merely either with theoretical speculation or with alienated idealization, and not with real live experience. That is why it leads to illusion.

Since you are human, then every single one of you creates negatively. Your negative attitudes and your destructive feelings -- which you do not want to give up -- are a creation. To believe that your unhappiness and your suffering are inflicted upon you either by others or by life is utter folly. It is insanity to believe that any unhappiness can accrue from something outside the self or from someone other than the self. You may have known this theoretically for a long time and you may have paid lip service to it. However, there is a world of difference between an intellectual assent and the clear-cut realization that you do indeed create negatively. In other words, that the unhappiness which you deplore, and for which you render others responsible, is actually caused by negative attitudes that you really enjoy, and which you therefore want to maintain. If you ascribe your frustrations, your unfulfillments, or your pains to society, then you are completely off the beam. This does not mean that the ills you see in society do not actually exist. They do exist. But they could not affect you if you were not unconsciously contributing to those ills of society which you so much deplore. You do it precisely by means of your negativity, which you still continue to express in your private life.

This truth may be hard to believe when you are still at the beginning of such a path as this. But once you are really involved in it, then you must come to see that it is just that way. You are never an innocent victim. Society is the sum total or the product of your -- and many other people's -- constant negative production and creation. This realization at first is both shocking and painful, but only as long as you remain unwilling to give up your negativity. If you do not want to not give it up, then you do need the illusion that others are doing it to you. That means that you hope to come to a state of bliss without meeting that aspect in you that makes reaching bliss impossible. It also means that you hope to become a truly self-accepting and self-respecting human being without giving up all that which impairs your integrity. Thus you live in the illusion that others are doing it to you, others whom you can then blame for supposedly victimizing you. This is one of the famous -- and very frequent -- games of pretense that have been uncovered by many of you in various forms. Once these illusions and these cheating intentions have been abandoned, then the realization of your own creative power constantly at work -- though perhaps still working mostly negatively -- is as wonderful a revelation and a liberation as it was a shock at first.

I would like to discuss the various steps of working your way out of the maze of your illusions and out of the negative creation in which you seem to be so inextricably and inexorably caught. The first step must be for you to find, to determine, to acknowledge, to accept, and to observe your negative attitudes, your destructive feelings, your subtle lies, your intentions to cheat, and your life-defeating, spiteful resistance to good feelings. All these are examples of negative creating. Since these lectures are particularly directed to my friends who work personally and dynamically toward their own growth, I am sure that most of you have come in some contact with this deliberate negative production in you. But it is important that you become more aware of it, more detachedly observant of it. This comprises the first step.

The second step is that you question your particular feelings and your reactions to this negative production and this negative intent that you have deliberately chosen. Then you will see that you like it. In other words, that you find some sort of pleasure in it. Therefore, you do not wish to give it up. The pleasurable aspect of creating applies to negative creating as well. It is absolutely necessary that you first feel this and then that you admit it. Even though you understand in a general way that this is destructive and wrong, you are still captivated by the perverse pleasure of your negative production. This acknowledgment is essential. Without it you cannot grow out of your suffering and you cannot reach the spiritual selfhood that you long for.

The third step is to painstakingly work through the exact consequences and the ramifications of your negative production without glossing over any detail, any effect, or any side effect. The realization and the precise understanding of the harmful effects both on you and on others must become very clear. It will not do if you assuage your guilt for your negative creation by telling yourself that you only harm yourself. It must be seen that you cannot harm yourself without also harming others, any more than you can harm others without also harming you. This is not a lawful retribution from a vindictive authority up in heaven. It is so because everyone is the one Universal Self. So what happens to you must also happen to everyone else, and what happens to everyone else must also happen to you. In other words, it is unthinkable that anything that adversely affects you does not adversely affect others as well. For example, self-hate always manifests as the inability to love, or even as the compulsion to hate others. This is only one example. This is not a theory. You will discover its truth, but only as you actually work through these steps.

The third step also consists of seeing that the pleasure which you derive from your negative production is never worth the exorbitant price that you pay for it, because all that you deplore most both in yourself and in your life experience is a direct result of it. You actually sacrifice joy, peace, self-esteem, inner security, expansion, growth, pleasure on all levels of your being, and a meaningful and fearless existence. All this and more can never be worth the perverse pleasure that you derive from your negative creation.

See how your negative creation affects others. Some deep part of you knows this and justifiedly feels guilty for it. Therefore, it makes you hate yourself, it makes you punish yourself, and it robs you of the real satisfactions of living. You will see that guiltless living can exist only when negative creating has been given up. Even the sincere and serious desire to do so will bring you relief.

Still another aspect of step three is to reach for the understanding that the pleasure that you derive from being destructive in your feelings and in your attitudes is not what has to be given up. In fact, the same pleasure will be transferred to positive creation, where you can expand both joyfully and guiltlessly without paying the heavy price that you now pay for your negative creation. The exact working through of cause and effect -- seeing the results and the connections -- is what makes wanting to give up your negativity possible. It is not sufficient to be aware of being deliberately destructive. It must be admitted that you do not want to give this up. You must see what price you pay. By doing so, you will become experientially connected with both the cause of your negative creation and with the effect it has on you. This bridge must be established. See clearly that what renders you most unhappy -- your anxieties, your worries, your self-dislike, your insecurities, your discontent with life, your frustrations, your sense of wasting both yourself and your life, your hurt, and your pain -- are all direct effects of deliberately wanted negative attitudes.

At step two you are still separated from the effects. You may see that the cause is your destructiveness and you may admit it, but you do not yet see the connection with all that you deplore most in your life. In other words, the connecting link between cause and effect is still absent. As long as this connecting link is not established, then you cannot really want to give up your negativity. You must see the heavy price that you pay so as to be truly motivated to give it up. It is not enough to give it up because you ought to, knowing that it is detrimental to you and to others. Such vagueness will never do the trick. The specific link must be established. I would say that one of the most difficult inroads on this path is to reach step two: to be fully aware of your negative creating through destructive attitudes of your choosing. There is a world of difference between such a state of awareness and the state before it, when you projected your unhappiness outside, blaming the world, blaming others, and thus not seeing the cause in you. Thus, step two is of the most incisive importance. It means knowing your power, your selfhood. For to the degree you see the negative form of the creative process in you, to that degree you gain an inkling of what you can do in order to produce beautiful life experiences. Step two may be the most difficult to reach. It certainly constitutes the most drastic change both in self-perception and in the perception of the processes of life. But working through step three is equally important, for without it the motivation to change is lacking. However, step three is not half as difficult, and it never meeets up with as much resistance, as step two.

When you begin to discover the same fascination with creating in a positive way as in the negative way -- but this time unmarred by suffering, by guilt, by fear, and by self-blame -- then the world opens up before your eyes with such beauty and with such light that there are no words to describe it. You will taste the freedom of being the creator of your chosen life.

To facilitate the discovery of this connecting link of your fascination with positive creation, you will need to recognize the unobstructed, unconcealed destructiveness and negativity behind various kinds of facades. For many years we have discussed and worked on the pretenses, the defenses, the games, the ploys, the idealized self-images, and the specific forms of denial that you seek in order to conceal your destructiveness. All these masks are hypocritical. They always display the opposite of what you dislike in yourself, and therefore reject. These coverups are infinitely more insidious and more damaging than the actual destructiveness itself. For once you face your naked destructiveness, then you confront a truth in yourself, which then gives you an honest choice of your future direction. But when you are still involved in the coverups, in the roles, and in the games, then you cannot get at the core of your disturbance. So your suffering becomes worse. You become alienated from the cause of your condition, and therefore you feel increasingly disconnected and increasingly hopeless.

In order to hide your negativity from others and primarily from yourself you produce something that appears to be the opposite of what you wish to be hidden. Then the role becomes second nature. But it has nothing to do with you. It is merely a habit that you cannot shed as long as you are unwilling to look behind it. It is important that you disillusion yourself concerning the image you project into the world, and of whose genuineness you then try so arduously to convince yourself. The artificiality of this role that you indulge in must be unmasked. It always appears to be good in some way, even if only by pretending that you are a victim. But you must analyze it exactly and comprehend it in detail to see that it is nothing of what you pretend it is. It is never good. You are never that innocent and others are never that villanous. On the other hand, neither are you so hopelessly bad and unacceptable as you believe you really are underneath this role. The role conveys the opposite both of what you actually are and of what you believe you are.

The pretended role contains the same aspects that you so busily try to conceal. If you hide and if your role is that of being persecuted by the hate and the unjust accusations of others, then in this pretense lies the hate itself. The front or the role is never innately different from what it covers. It is a hating attitude to pretend being a victim of the hate of others. This is only one example. The game itself must be exposed, not only to reveal what it hides, but also to lay bare its actual aspects and what they really mean. The negative creative energy is totally involved in this image that is presented both to the world and to the self. Therefore, I suggest that you now take some time to identify the various roles that you have chosen. Name these roles in simple sentences that describe what they are meant to convey. See if you can detect how the role -- which is supposed to be angelic -- is just as destructive as what is concealed behind it. Indeed, it could not be any different, for you cannot hide the energy of your soul currents, you cannot make them different by pretending, no matter how busily you try to make a charade out of your life.

The role or the game that you adopt -- in the illusion that it eliminates your deliberate destructiveness -- is the first layer that must be confronted. Then you can begin to take the steps I have outlined. Sometimes these steps overlap.

The more insight you have into the absolutely losing game you play with life when you hold on to the false role that covers up your destructive attitudes, the more you will be motivated to give up all this. In other words, you will strengthen your will. This will lead you to the fourth step, which is the actual process of recreating soul substance. Recreation begns by meditation, by prayer, by formulating deliberate thoughts of truth about this entire matter and then by impressing them onto your destructive psychic material. It continues as you become more adept at it. First you need to discover your will to be hating, your will to be unforgiving, your will to be punishing, your will to be resentful, your will to be hurt. Then you will become aware of your attempt to exaggerate and to drag out old injuries, to deliberately want to punish others either for what your parents did to you or for what you think they did to you, and then your refusal to see their failure as anything but a deliberate act of hate against you. When you perceive that it gives you pleasure to dwell on all this within yourself -- and that you have no intention to change your outlook, no intention to change your attitude, no intention to change your feelings -- then you can begin to recreate. When you see the falsity of your pretenses, then you must remind yourself that you want to see what is underneath your particular facade and your victimization, in whatever guise it may appear.

Your feelings of being injured at first appear to be real. Therefore, it requires deeper probing to discover that they are not real at all. They are cultivated habits. So are the roles that you play. Each objective acknowledgment of your pretenses -- the pretense of your role and the pretense of your sustained injuries as the cause of your negative emotions toward people and toward life -- enables you to want to be in deeper truth, it enables you to abandon those falsities, and it enables you to meet life with real and honest attitudes. Step four consists of the issuing of this intention and then the calling upon the higher powers in you to help you.

Another part of step four is to ask a concise question of your innermost being. "What approach can I use in order to live my life without any pretenses? How can I bring forth from within me a better way of responding to life's experiences?" In answer to these questions something new will evolve. In this recreating process, healthy, resilient, adequate, and truthful reactions will come from your real nature, which needs no concealment. When you create, then formulate your sentences very concisely. State that what you do now does not work. Then state why it does not work and then state that you wish to operate in a different way. If they are truly meant, then these sentences have great creative power. They will be meant when you comprehend the harm that you are doing as long as you stubbornly remain in your old attitudes.

These are the steps of purification in the deepest and most vital way. Purification is unthinkable without going through these four steps. Purification is also unthinkable without receiving divine help. For it is too difficult to do alone. It is an illusion to hope -- either consciously or unconsciously -- that facing these aspects of your being can be avoided, that this step can skipped, that it can be bypassed; or that they can be whisked away by some magic spiritual means. Self-realization, self-actualization, reaching your spiritual center -- or whatever other name you wish to use in order to describe the goal of living for everyone -- cannot occur unless you face your deepest negativities, unless you face your hypocrisies, unless you face your deliberate intent to be negative, unless you face your deliberate intent to be destructive, unless you face your deliberate intent to be spiteful, and unless you face your deliberate intent to be resentful. Often you will forego your own happiness just to punish someone from your past. This is painful, or seems painful at first. But to the degree the realization is painful, to that degree it will prove liberating.

Those of you who have not yet reached this realization about yourself on your path will eventually come to it. You must come to it, and therefore you can prepare for it. For you cannot allow happiness into your soul and you cannot eliminate the pervasive guilt that you seek to explain away by false guilts unless you go through these steps. No matter how much you believe that either others or life's caprices are depriving you of what you desire, it is actually you who do this. For you can let in what life is always ready to give you so richly once you make room for it in your consciousness and in your self-creating. Many are the people who want to reach spiritual heights but who harbor the unexpressed illusion that to face what I am discussing here can be avoided. They run from pillar to post, and whenever they are confronted with their own unpalatable truth, then they run away. The imaginary need to run proves so illusory. There is no need to run away from yourself.

When your destructive attitudes remain unfaced -- and therefore untouched -- then you live in a painful ambivalence. For you can never go in one direction when you want to be negative. There is always the real self clamoring for ultimate reality and therefore pulling in the opposite direction. The unification of the inner direction can happen only when the personality is genuinely constructive. In other words, without any hidden destructiveness. Try to perceive the pain of being torn apart by going into two opposite directions. This struggle is more painful, more confusing, and more paralyzing than anything else that goes on in the human psyche.

In order to re-establish the being that you were long before this earth life, before you became involved with negative creating, and to re-experience yourself as the eternal you which you essentially and ultimately are, you first have to consider and then to test the possibility of positive creating. Then you will see that to create positively is really more natural and rather easy, for it is an organic process. Negative creating and destructive attitudes are artificial and contrived, even though you are so used to them that they seem more natural. The positive is effortless. At first it seems that to abandon the negative -- which has become second nature to you -- is too great an effort. It seems too great an effort because you believe that by giving up your negativity you then create a positivity that is completely new. If this were so, then to create it would be impossible in most instances. But the moment you realize that the positive creation is already within you, only covered up, and that it can unfold and reveal itself the moment you allow this to happen, then abandoning your negativity becomes a relief from a heavy burden that has pulled you down all of your life -- and in many lives before this one. Even while you hate, the ability to love already exists in you. Even while you distrust, the ability to trust already exists in you. Even while you take a dim view of things -- and therefore you prevent a favorable outcome by expecting the worst -- the ability to know that life is good, and therefore that it can be trusted, already exists in you. All this -- and much more -- exists within you already. Itt only needs to be allowed to surface, like the sun coming out from behind the clouds. You will see that it is possible to feel this positive undercurrent. Simultaneously, you will experience the joy that permeates the entire being of any person making this discovery.

When we say that God is within you, then this is what we mean. It means that the Greater Consciousness -- with infinite wisdom of the most personal order -- is available to you at whatever moment you need it. It means that there are powers of creative strength, that there is energy, that there are feelings of bliss, of joy, and of pleasure supreme available to you on all levels. It also means that underneath the level where you are ill with your negativity, a new/old life exists in which all the reactions to all possible contingencies are clear, strong, entirely satisfying, and right for each occasion. It means that a resiliency and a creativity of reacting already exist now behind the false roles of pretense, beyond the grip of your destructiveness. It means that underneath your outer deadness, a bubbling aliveness exists already. At first it will shine through at moments only. Eventually, it will manifest itself as your steady inner climate.

Before you can live in this steady climate, you will have to go through two basic phases that deal with the negativity that humanity is still involved in. Most human beings still find themselves in the first basic phase of negativity. This phase is initiating negativity. In the first phase you automatically react to situations with the destructive pattern that you have adopted after some traumatic experience in your early life. You maintain the negative reactions which you could not avoid producing in your childhood and which were then -- under those circumstances -- even life-preserving. But when the same reactions are repeated in situations later -- when there is no longer any cause or reason to use them -- then such reactions are not only neurotic, they are also initiating negativity, regardless of whether the other people involved act like your parents or not. The four steps I explained in this lecture are all destined to deal with this first phase.

The second phase deals with the negativity that is merely responsive. When individuals have freed themselves from the initiating negativity -- and therefore they are clear in this respect -- then their reactions are positive when others do not react negatively toward them. But the negativity still flares up reactively, as a result of their responding to the negativity of others. You may say that this is perfectly natural. For that matter, everything or anything is perfectly natural. But this is still not the purified state. It is not the state of truth. To respond in that way to the negativity of others is still an action that is based on an illusion. There is a better way to respond. Even though the other person may unload a great deal of unjustified hostility on you, it is an illusion to fear it and therefore to set up your negative defenses. You can depend on yourself much more adequately without withdrawing, without becoming defensive, without becoming destructive with your feelings. There is no need to see life as bleak and as hopeless just because someone acts destructively toward you. Therefore, this responsive negativity must also be straightened out. But this can be done only after the initiating negativity has been wiped out. The vast majority of the human race is still in the first phase. When the slightest thing goes against your will -- in other words, when you experience any degree of frustration -- then you tend to bring out your original reaction of negativity. Often you even do this as a precautionary attitude. In other words, just because you might experience frustration, just because you might experience a delay, just because you might experience a criticism, or just because you might experience the negativity of others.

I think that most of you can sense the importance of this lecture, especially if you use it as referring to your own life, instead of a mere theoretical discussion. Then it will prove of vital significance in your personal evolution. Be blessed. Love and strength are given forth to everyone.

October 10, 1969