The Way To Handle The Alternation Of The Expansive And Contracting States

By The Pathwork Guide

Greetings, blessings, and welcome, my friends. First of all, I would like to say to all of you what an extremely wonderful thing it is that you are doing. The long arduous years that many of you have spent, and the hard work of overcoming the ever-present fear of and resistance to meeting the self have brought so many fruits. Your work has created such a light, such a strong center of light, in the universal scheme of things. It has ongoing effects all around. The fruits of your efforts now begin to manifest as actual experiences in your lives. The invisible effects already existed long before you were able to detect them. But now the effects become realities in your lives. Many of you begin to feel and experience a change within yourselves that seemed impossible to even visualize not so long ago. Your lives are fuller, your pleasure is greater, your fear is lessening, and your security grows. You become more firmly rooted in the reality within yourself -- the divine reality.

Your progress is also manifest in what is beginning to happen to this group as a whole. The new gift I brought was made possible by your work. The strength, the healing blessing that can unite with your self-generated new energy, is one such manifestation that will continue to grow and to spread its light further and further. An increasingly benign circle is beginning to establish itself. The effectiveness of your work on the Path generates new energy which, in turn, makes it possible for me to bring to you a greater influx of energy. This will then facilitate your efforts and will make them increasingly more effective.

The new energy also showed in this wonderful experience you had when you combined all the small working groups. This unification meant more than you can realize at this moment. You truly witnessed what it means to transform the energy of negative feelings -- because they are met and not denied -- into love. In your individual pathwork this was experienced more and more frequently by you in the recent months. But in the combined group experience you became part of the flow of the self-perpetuating forces, without however losing your identity. You were moved by a vast force, by an inner volition that was not ego-directed. You were purified, you were uplifted, and you were strengthened by this process. It has to deepen your faith, your knowledge of the reality of the inner good life, of the spiritual realities that I am striving to convey to you.

This love that has been created by you in this group is a tangible reality. It should be cultivated, my friends. Therefore, cultivate it. Realize how the law of brotherhood unites all of you. It would wither if you did not cultivate it. But it will grow and it will become forever more effective if you treasure this newly developed state of your unity. The bond is as yet tenuous, the strings that hold you together with love are still tender because they are new. But they will strengthen as you pay conscious and deliberate attention to this new process and as you nurse it with your appreciation of one another and by expressing your innermost needs to one another, as true brothers and sisters should do. The help that you can give to one another will also heal yourselves, as a result of your growing awareness of what you have to give, and therefore of how you can help. You can sustain one another and give to each other, as you have spontaneously done during this significant group experience two weeks ago. You should repeat such experiences at intervals. This is my advice.

Now we shall start with our lecture. I would like to give you more tangible help in the changing movement of growth and the changing movement of life. The movement of life is the alternation of expansion and of contraction. You also know -- at least to some extent -- the meaning of these movements. But I would like to go deeper into this topic, for it is now necessary for many of my friends whose phase of work on the Path requires deeper understanding of this process.

Let us briefly recapitulate the meaning of the movement of expansion and of the movement of contraction. Expansion takes place when a positive, open, committed, honest, loving, giving attitude exists. The good feelings and the good thoughts create a corresponding attitude in life. This life attitude then influences the actions, the behavior, the responses, the reactions, the emanations, and the deeds. Where such an attitude holds true -- in other words, in all the respects of life in which it holds true -- it brings forth desirable experience, fulfillment, pleasure, bliss, and abundance. Such blissful, joyful life experience automatically creates an open, expanding soul movement, which is the basis for the positive, affirmative attitude toward life. A self-perpetuating benign circle is in operation.

Contraction takes place when a negative attitude toward life exists. This brings about fear, hate, distrust, pretense, dishonesty, self-deception, false ideas, negation of the beauty of the universe. Within the larger benign circle, a smaller one -- ingrown -- is at work and is at cross purposes with the affirmative conscious striving of the personality. The negative attitude creates self-hate and the self-hate increases hate for others and distrust of others. A vicious circle is in operation.

These inner impurities have no adverse effect on the personality if he is truly conscious of them and if he understands them in their proper proportion to the reality of the vaster scheme of his inner life and of universal life. In other words, if he perceives them correctly, then their effect is not negative but turns into a positive one. The energy of these attitudes begins to transform itself automatically as a result of such awareness and of the proper perception. But if the self is too vain and too frightened to see itself as it is at the moment, if it either denies or exaggerates the implications -- again out of vanity and fear -- then the alternation of the life movements will bring those hidden impurities to the surface. Then it is up to the conscious personality to make the best of these periods. But the automatic procedure is the following. These negative attitudes and destructive thoughts and feelings -- that always negate the truth of life -- are bound to create a contracted state of consciousness, a contracted state of soul movements, and even a contracted state of the outer body. In this state the personality is unable to receive the abundance of universal life. He is closed in. Therefore, he must remain poor. He cannot receive, and therefore he is deprived. This impoverishment of his good feelings, and therefore of desirable life experience, furthers his bitterness, his self-pity, his accusation, and his spite. The negative attitudes bring more painful -- and therefore undesirable -- life experiences, against which the personality then defends itself by closing up further, by building an even stronger protective armor, which is the closed, contracted state. Thus a larger vicious circle becomes a self-perpetuating force in the person's life.

The negative attitude -- with its contracting movement -- is supposed to ward off negative experiences. Man makes himself more brittle and more stiff, thus warding off life itself and instituting a state of constantly unfulfilled longing. This is why it says in Scripture that the the poor become poorer and the rich become richer. This is one of the laws of life that the individual must discover in order to make the alternation of life movements a productive, growing process toward an ever-increasing transcendence of the opposites.

All this is, broadly speaking, a concise recapitulation of many of the past lectures for the purpose of introducing the theme of this lecture.

In this world -- in this sphere of consciousness -- expansion and contraction create opposite experiences: pleasure and pain. Only when you transcend this sphere of being, when you transcend this level of duality, do both expansion and contraction become blissful experiences of different sorts. But this can happen only when you have mastered the negative experience. Or, to put it differently, only when you have acquired a new reaction and a new approach to both life movements. Contrary to what you may believe, the positive experience also requires a new attitude. And we shall discuss both here. This new approach to both movements is what is to be learned by you on this level of duality. In other words, this is the quota which the soul has to master at this particular stage of its evolution.

Let us begin with the contracting state, which is due to negation and which causes more contraction. As I mentioned, the usual automatic reflex reaction to negative experience is a blind contraction, with its accompanying destructive emotions and thoughts. To be more specific, the personality invariably feels unjustly victimized, it blames others and life, it is resentful, and it withdraws his good feelings in revenge and in spite. He is also fearful of what life may bring him, for how could it be otherwise? One can never trust someone whom one blames and spites, whether this be another person, life as a whole, or God.

In order to find the key to breaking this vicious circle, the conscious, volitional self must make a deliberate effort to remove the blindness that makes you believe that the negative experience is coming to you without your having produced it. As long as you believe that you are a victim, then there is no way out. As long as you are unaware of the connection between the event and your attitude that caused it, then you must remain trapped in this vicious circle. Thus, the first step out is the sincere willingness to search for your contribution to the undesirable event, no matter what the appearance to the contrary may indicate. The moment you can truly accept this and you proceed from that premise, then you already create a different pattern of energy and consciousness within your own psyche.

The next step that must be learned in order to break the vicious circle when the negative, undesirable experience comes to you is that you observe your contracting movement. As you do so, as you become much more keenly aware of your state of contraction, of your hardening, of your numbing yourself -- in other words, of warding off experience both from within and from without -- as you observe all the feelings involved, rage, hate, fear, guilt, blame, etc., with their meaning, and all the tightness in body, in soul, and in spirit, only then -- in this observation, in this acceptance of the tight contraction that is still automatic -- then you can proceed to acquire a different reaction. You can begin by first wanting to not contract, but to remain pulsatingly open, even to the negative experience and to the negative feeling. Soon you will see that this is far from dangerous. It does not make you more helpless, it makes you less so. What it will do is to make you more feeling. A plasticity of soul substance, a state of open vulnerability is required in order to let feelings and experiences be in you. First this must, by necessity, apply to painful experiences and to painful feelings. If they cannot be borne, then you are not equipped to experience joyful life. The idea that they are unbearable is a concoction of the limited, fragmented mind. It is not true that they are impossible to bear. If you do not make something of it -- in other words, if you do not project untruthful interpretations into the causes of these undesirable experiences and the feelings which they evoke in you -- then they can be easily borne, sustained, accepted, and then fully experienced. Therefore, let the painful experiences and feelings be in you! Go with them! Do not fight them! Accept them in the realization that somehow you must have created this condition. Then all the anger and the resentment that you feel against life will decrease. Anger, fear, resentment, and self-pity create tightness and brittleness. They also numb you to all live experience and to the truth of your momentary state. Only when you encounter the negative experience without either aggrandizing it or diminishing it -- in other words, without any manipulation -- do you truly master it. Only when you thus master it -- when you no longer fear it and therefore flee from it -- have you truly overcome or transcended the negative side of duality. And only when that is the case are you truly capable of accepting its positive counterpart.

All human beings initially try to avoid undesirable experience. They defend against it. But in this way they only make themselves more prone to it. This puts them deeper into the particular duality that is so hard to overcome until this key is discovered. It takes considerable work on the Path before you are conscious of your fear and of your running away. For, to begin with, you are hardly aware of your flight, or of the fact that you really hate yourself, that you spite spite yourself, that you pity yourself, and that you reject both life and yourself. Often many years of attentive self-search are necessary before this self-awareness is obtained. But when you have achieved this, then the phase discussed here can truly be entered into. This requires attention to your innermost soul reflexes. When you do so, then the negativities that create contraction will gradually diminish. Try to sustain the painful feelings -- not masochistically, not self-rejectingly, not in the spirit that this is what you deserve because you are such a miserable creature -- but in the attitude of: "I am capable of enduring a little pain. Somehow, inadvertently, I myself must have created it. Therefore, I will not create a new condition by denying what I myself have created."

In this way transformation is initiated. It manifests by first no longer finding the pain so unendurable. You will swing with it, you will become it, you will ride with it, you will let yourself be carried by it without losing a realistic sense of proportion about it. No hopeless depression can ever get hold of you in this spirit. The ability to handle your self-produced pain gives you self-confidence and strength. It builds a great deal of self-respect. How can you not respect yourself in this spirit of courage and truthfulness? While you are in the painful feeling in a fully accepting spirit, then the feeling of pain slowly -- and often not so slowly -- transforms itself into pleasure; the feeling of hate into love; the feeling of fear into trust; the feeling of distrust into confidence, and even into the knowledge that life is as good as you choose to make it. Then this newly gained self-respect will make you want to make the best of your life. You will no longer meet negative experience with a negative attitude -- which endlessly reproduces negative experience -- but you will meet negative experience with a positive attitude. Instead of contracting against it, you will remain open, flexible, pulsating, plastic, alive, and vibrating -- even though at first this means enduring either a pain or some other unpleasant emotion. This is one of the most important keys. But this key is unavailable as long as you are unaware of the disturbances within yourself: your destructive thoughts and your negative feelings.

In this new way the negative feeling will become a tremendously positive, creative force, similar to the positive force that you have experienced here together. You did not plan to create this sweeping love among you that moved you toward each other, opening yourselves and giving to each other, thus receiving. It happened as a natural, spontaneous, unplanned event. It was the inevitable result of opening yourselves and of honestly encountering your negative emotions. You did not hide from them; you set aside your pretenses and your masks; you did not defend yourself against unpleasant feelings by being critical and judgmental of each ogher. Thereby you opened new doors. This experience was possible as a result of true growth. But this is only a beginning. Each one of you must encounter your negative emotions in this spirit with growing frequency in order to transcend the cycle of suffering and enter into a new cycle of joy and peace. Every day you can come a step further to this juncture of your path. You can look at your negative emotions without hiding. You can acknowledge them. You can observe your negative attitudes and see their deepest meaning, their significance. You can also observe the cramping up contraction and become intensely aware of this state of your being, which you still take for granted and thus do not even notice as an unnatural, painful and unnecessary state. When you listen into your unfeeling numbness, then you will detect painful unfulfilled longings and other undesirable feelings. As you allow them to simmer onto the surface, then you institute the process just described. When the painful feeling awakens in you, then welcome it. It is your life, it is your energy, it is your creative substance. With that, a positive, benign circle will build itself.

Now lat us talk about the positive circle or sequence. Off hand, it may appear that all you need to do with a positive experience is to enjoy it. But this is not true. There is much more to it that that. The more you handle the negative cycles in the way mentioned above, the more frequent positive experience will become. It will also become increasingly obvious that positive experience does not befall you by accident either. In other words, you will sense that it is a lawful result. However, unless you become just as attentive to it as you learn to pay attention to the negative experience and feelings, then you will lag behind, and therefore you will obstruct a greater expansion than is intrinsically possible at this stage. Positive experience requires attention and understanding so that you can deal with it in the best possible way.

The habitual reaction of the average human being to pleasurable experience is a momentary rejoicing. But at the same time there exist other emotional reactions that are overlooked, and the person thereby loses out. So, my friends, begin to be just as attentive and just as listening into yourselves in pleasurable and fulfilling experiences as you have learned to do in difficult and painful ones. You will soon note that in addition to the welcoming, joyful reaction there are others present. For instance, you will find a vague, mostly half-aware, anxiety and apprehension about it. On one level it is due to the fear of losing this good state again. On a deeper level it is due to the inability of enduring a greater expansion of positive experience. This exists in exact proportion to your inability to endure unwelcome feelings. This fear of not being able to endure good feelings and good experiences is denied just as much as the existence of negative feelings is denied. You simply look away from that part in you which reacts negatively to happiness. This is regrettable because it causes you more unnecessary hardship.

As I said, becoming aware of this reaction should make you look at the opposite picture, namely your reaction to pain. As long as you react to pain by becoming angry about painful experiences and painful feelings, then you are unable to live in the highest climate of pleasure, of joy, of bliss, and finally even of ecstasy. The higher vibration -- the raised level of functioning of these higher realms of life experience -- can be attained only when you go through the self-produced negation and negativity. Otherwise, the climate is too heady, the altitude is too high, so that instead of security, it must bring you anguish.

The same approach is necessary towards both pleasure and pain. First, the observation of the previously hidden reactions. The more you encounter your negation of the good life, the more you can understand why you do not live in a happier and more fulfilled state. This will have the benefit of making you less angry at life, less resentful of others, less blaming, less vindictive, less spiteful, and less self-pitying. Hence you will increase your capacity to deal with the negative experience. This, in turn, will increase your capacity to have good experience. As you let the negative emotion be and you let yourself be carried by it, without fighting it, you will become capable of the identical attitude toward bliss. You can be carried by it, you can endure it with less and less anguish, apprehension, and anxiety, as you are aware of these negative emotions in regard to pleasure.

As your whole system, the whole organization of your human apparatus grows, you become more acclimatized to happiness, to fulfillment, to bliss, to pleasure, to abundance, to true expansion, to the joyousness of the divine energy and the divine consciousness that dwells within you. Only then are you in harmony with the nature of creation, which is all of those things. Only then can you allow the divine consciousness to unfold in you. Only then can you awaken to the fact that it has always been there, that it always instructs you, that it always guides you. In other words, that it is an ongoing process in you that is never dead. You are usually dead to it because your busy outer mind is so accustomed to its own noise, to its self-revolving erroneous thought processes. If you are unaware of the negating movement towards the expanding experience, then you become prone to losing it again very quickly, but without understanding why. This breeds hopelessness. Hence, there is always so much disappointment. The fear of this disappointment mars the good experience, so that the disappointment becomes inevitable. When you are in a blissful state and you count on never losing it again -- which is your way of denying the reality of your present state, namely your fear of pain -- then the loss becomes a tragedy, instead of a predictable stage that you can learn from because it brings forth unpurified soul stuff.

Therefore, it is my suggestion that when you find yourself in a joyful state, then let your concentration and your meditation be particularly concerned with observing your more vague and hidden reactions. Do you fear losing this state? Or do you fear remaining in this state? Admit these reactions with all the candor that you have become more accustomed to in regard to your negative feelings. Observe your automatic soul movement in regard to pleasure and joy. Does it respond with involuntary contraction, notwithstanding your conscious desire and aim? This observation will afford you the possibility to become attuned to what is really going on in you. Then you will see the reactions which are usually glossed over -- emotional reactions which sorely need your conscious awareness.

As you become aware of this, which is the absolute key, you can begin a new process. Do not push yourself into a state in which you are not as yet capable of functioning. Admit this and it will automatically increase your ability to live in this new state. As you observe this, you can prepare yourself for the negative phase, so that you will no longer contract against it quite so much. You can let your soul movement be, rather than manipulate it. In that way you will increase your capacity to endure all of life: first the pain and then the pleasure. As you observe your inability to do so, you come closer to enduring both pleasure and pain. That is the unification and the transcendence. This attitude of your observation of yourself makes you more real and more alive.

Each time you come through a negative period of contraction in this self-observation, then your ability to endure pleasure grows. You become more acclimatized to function on a higher level of being. This is a very important concept to comprehend. Your reaction to pain -- your denial of it and your refusal to ride with it -- is the reason for its existence. It is intimately connected with your incapacity to live in bliss. Only as you see this can the manifestation change. Only as this happens can the dialogue between your conscious mind and the involuntary responses of your soul movements continue. This dialogue is an essential prerequisite. The dialogue should consist of stating and acknowledging -- in clear-cut words -- your contracting reaction, with all that this implies. State how you momentarily make yourself brittle; state how you deny what is; state how you prefer to be numb. As you state it, you awaken this part of your soul substance. As you do so, the pain will no longer appear so frightening or so deep, and therefore so rejectable. You will endure it without the terrible cramp that you inflict upon yourself.

Then the second aspect of the dialogue can begin, in which your conscious self also states, but this time in response to the previously stated and admitted negation. You state the truth that I am trying to convey to you: that you wish to experience what is; that you have the strength and the honesty to do so; that you no longer wish to deny life; that you know that by feeling pain you prepare yourself to sustain pleasure; that you wish to increase your aliveness by courageously meeting your own feelings -- thus universal bliss. Such statements into yourself produce an affirmation of life and an affirmation of your feelings.

My dear friends, even you who have accomplished so much are still unaware that in some respects you still blame yourself, that you still accuse yourself, that you still feel sorry for yourself, and that you still hide from life. As you look into those reactions and you encounter them in the way I have suggested, the change in you will become more complete and more grounded in the reality of your divine existence. Focus on your actual reactions to pain and to pleasure. As you do so, your capacity to endure them will change. Lo and behold, the endured pain will transform itself, naturally and if is by itself.

Now I would like to mention three different states of human consciousness. These states are specific grades of development which I have not discussed before, but which become relevant in connection with the present phase of our work. On the scale of development, the least developed state in this particular respect is that in which a person lives in fantasy. He may stand in life apparently quite realistically. He may hold a job, he may have a family and friends, he may go through all sorts of activities. But his real life of pleasure lies in fantasy. I mentioned this the last time in a different context. This is more prevalent than you may realize, even among you, my friends, at least in some respects. For instance, the preoccupation of the mind with would-be situations belongs to this category. Daydreaming, playful thoughts of conversations: how they should be or how they might have been; the living through of fulfillment in a concocted series of mind pictures. All this belongs into this state. And all of it uses up valuable life energy that cannot be regenerated. For if energy is misused, then it does not renew itself. Thus the energy is unavailable for real living. As a result, real living becomes more fraught with apparent danger, so that refuge into a fantasy life is the only avenue of fulfillment. Vicarious living can also take place by over-identification with figures in books and plays. Escape into them is often due to this fantasy living, rather than living of the self.

The second grade in this scale is to live for the sake of impressing others. This aspect has been found to exist in all of you who work on the Path. There are different forms of this manifestation. You may do what you are doing -- either overtly and deliberely or in a subtle and hidden way -- for the sake of gaining approval from others. You may express this state of consciousness by echoing opinions and values that you have never truly examined and which, therefore, are not your own. You may put yourself into a tight little box of prescribed behavior and values that is not the true expression of yourself and that does not further your real self: your own pleasure, your innermost individual qualities, your potentialities, and your talents. For whatever distorted and neurotic reasons you may be hooked on this level, it must be recognized and then abandoned, just as the previous one. In spite of having recognized such attitudes in you, they may still exist on more subtle levels. Therefore, you should envisage this possibility and observe yourself from this point of view. Living for the sake of impressing others is much more permeating than you know.

The most developed and the most real state in this particular triad is when you live for your own sake, when you do things for their own sake, and you want things for their own sake.

Most individuals live on all three levels. These aspects interact and overlap. There may be some areas of health where you are on the third level, other areas where you are on the second level, and still other areas where you are on the lowest level. The degree varies with everyone. Some people are much more developed, and therefore live predominantly on the third level, and only minor aspects of their personality remain undeveloped. With most people it is the other way around. How is it with you? Are you able to see and to acknowledge where you are in this respect? To the extent that you live in either of the first two spheres of consciousness, to that extent you foster an ongoing frustration in you. You perpetuate an ongoing negation of life and a negativity of feelings, of thoughts, and of attitudes. You contract and you institute the vicious circle in question.

Hence, a dearth, a lack of good experience may impel you either to seek substitute fulfillments in fantasy or to obtain approval and envy from others. In both instances it is a would-be, or an "as if" life. In this "as if" life, you lose yourself. That is, you lose your hope, your sense of real fulfillment, and your sense of real experience. The latter can come only if you first live through what is in you, and only if you invest all your energies into the reality of the moment: of what you are now and of where you are now. You need to observe what is going on in you and then you need to accept this momentary state without fighting yourself. For, the more you fight -- even for the good -- the more do you contract. And the more you contract, the more do you perpetuate the negative cycle. the vicious circle. But not fighting must never mean giving in to resistance and to fear. It cannot mean looking away from yourself. The material in this lecture will prove to be of tremendous importance and help if it is truly worked with. In other words, if it is really used and not just glossed over.

And now, my friends, we will turn to the mutual enterprise we started the last time, whereby a power and a new influx of energy can help you to overcome stagnation and transform a negative condition. Let those who are ready and willing to commit themselves to wanting to overcome their present stagnation, to wanting additional help come forth.

[Four people came forth, consecutively. Each made a personal statement and received, either with some accompanying words or without, a very strong current of energy, a force of light that could be seen by a few but felt by all. It is unfortunately not possible to convey this experience in words. Perhaps the readers can use their inner senses to tune in, to participate somewhat in spirit and benefit also by the force that is coming through so strongly. Not only those who came forward personally benefited from this force, but to a degree all who were present]

December 4, 1970