Affecting And Being Affected

By The Pathwork Guide

Greetings and blessings for all of you, my dearest friends. We are all friends. There is a connection, a deep inner connection already manifest, and in some cases one that is there potentially, on the plane of the inner reality. In this latter instance, where it is as yet only a potentiality, it is certainly possible to realize it. In this connection, our mutual aim is to find the core of your real being and thus to find your real existence. This real existence is light and beauty. In this real existence there is nothing to fear. The guidance that I have given you all these years helps you and it is directed, step by step, to get through the maze of your illusions. This maze consists of your illusory fear of life, of your illusory fear of self, of your illusory fear of being. All the steps that you undertake in order to avoid recognizing and then experiencing this illusory fear alienate you from your nucleus, and thus from your true existence in bliss, in which you know that there is nothing to fear. But you must go through the fear in order to find that there is nothing to fear. The latter requires some effort and the willingness to change, and therefore to chance or risk some unknown modes of living and of being, some unknown modes of facing and of reacting.

What is this fear, my friends? It exists in many forms and in many variations. Yet there is one common denominator. It is your fear of the temporarily distorted -- and therefore demonic and hence destructive -- aspects of your inner being. This is what your consciousness, in its separation, cannot reconcile itself to. This is what it cannot accept, what it does not know how to accept. The consciousness is afraid of being overwhelmed by the destructive energies just because it has never accepted them. The consciousness is too proud and too impatient. It is too geared to limiting vision and to limited thinking to make room for all the opposites that exist within the human soul. And because of the limiting tendency of the consciousness, the opposites cannot be transcended. Only if the distortion is fully accepted can it transform itself back into its original state, into the beautiful creative force that energizes you and that gives you so much power and bliss. There can be no way into blissful reality other than giving up the wishful thinking that makes you unwilling to face the irrational, destructive aspects of yourself.

This brings me to the topic of this lecture. I would particularly like to discuss how you affect your surroundings from this destructive level of your being. How do you affect others? And, conversely, how are you being affected by others from their destructive parts? This is a complicated topic, and therefore not easy to comprehend. But it is also a very important one. The only way you can truly connect with this topic and make something helpful for yourself out of it is to have already gained some insight and to have accepted some of the irrational, ignorant, destructive parts of the childish, primitive self within you. When you come to the point where you no longer need to deny it, to project it, and to defend against this evil part but you can clearly acknowledge it, then you can truly deal with the complications that arise out of human interaction on those concealed levels that harbor your destructiveness and your ignorance -- and that of other people.

First of all, I would like to mention a basic confusion that all mankind suffers from. Whether or not individuals are specifically aware of this conflict, it always exists. The more you are aware of it, the more able you will be to face it, and therefore to deal with it, and the sooner you will dissolve it. This conflict is the following. On the primitive, irrational level you hate, and therefore you want to destroy senselessly. But you hardly know why you hate and why you want to destroy. On this level you are totally egotistical, and therefore unwilling to accept any frustration, big or small. Here you are unwilling to deal with any difficulties. Therefore, you cannot assert your personality meaningfully and effectively. Whatever the reasons may be, this irrational hate and this wish to destroy exist in every single human being.

You manage not to be aware of your hate and your destructiveness. And that is the root of all emotional sickness and the cause of all suffering. As you progress through the discipline of facing the self, first you become aware of and then you accept that destructive aspect, and thus you transcend it. As you become aware in this way, you also have to deal specifically with the confusion of your guilt. Hidden guilt is devastating. It creates a self-perpetuating vicious circle that maintains the destructiveness. The more you feel guilty, the more do you hide whatever makes you feel guilty, and the less capable you become of dissolving it and of transforming it. This incapacity, in turn, increases the guilt. Alongside of this, the more you hide from yourself, the more you frustrate yourself, and therefore the more you deprive yourself of the good that life is meant to be. Thus you become angrier, more hating, and more destructive. Even if this does not manifest in overt acts, your unconscious guilt leads you into manifest hating actions and into attitudes that reject others, that reject life, and that reject the goodness of being.

How is this guilt to be handled? There are two basic schools of thought that have existed throughout the ages on this earth sphere. One says that you are not responsible for your feelings and for your unmanifest attitudes; you are responsible only for your actions and for your deeds. So, if you hate -- and therefore you wish to kill, to destroy, to be spiteful, and to be malicious -- then you do not need to feel guilty about it.

The other school of thought says that thoughts and attitudes are living realities, and therefore that they have their effect on others. That means that a true guilt exists for these thoughts and attitudes. We must also consider the question of whether the hidden tendency to be destructive can leave deeds and actions totally unaffected. I just said that it is unthinkable for your hidden hate not to manifest in some way, even if your personality refrains from active deeds. It is also a deed to hold back from loving and to refrain from giving. Every so often the denied hatred manifests in an apparently harmless passivity that seems directed against the self only. But the underlying seething hatred prevents positive deeds of loving and of giving. In other words, it prevents one from contributing to life. So, in the final analysis, all acts and all deeds flow from the underlying substance and energy of the person.

These two apparently opposite schools of thought, or modes of approaching life, the world, yourself, and others, exist in everyone, and they breed a great deal of confusion. Which one is true? How do you handle this question? Before we can go any further regarding the mutual interaction between human beings on the destructive levels, this question must be cleared up first. How could it be that both alternatives are true, that both are valid, and that they are not mutually exclusive?

It is absolutely true that the guilt for your primitive, destructive self is more destructive than the evil part itself. It is true that you must accept it in order to dissolve it. But it is also true that there is a vast difference between an overt act of destruction and the mental and emotional existence of this aspect of humankind. This is true in spite of what I said before about the definite effects and influences of the hidden attitudes. Yet to assume a self-destructive, self-eroding guilt about them adds insult to injury. In other words, it only makes matters much worse. In this guilt you annihilate yourself and you become more destructive. You prohibit yourself from living.

Nevertheless, it is truly a reality that your thoughts, your feelings, your wishes, and your attitudes have power. These two apparent opposites can be reconciled by your honest attempt to make conscious your destructiveness, without justifying it with the destructiveness or the limitations of others. The moment you do this, you inactivate the destructiveness, without either denying it or hiding it. When you deny your hate, when you deny your malice, when you deny your egotism, when you deny your spite, then you breed trouble both for yourself and for others. The denial of the demon in you has very damaging effects. For example, in the denial of the evil in you you need to blame and accuse so as to make others responsible for what you feel too guilty to face squarely. Those of you who work diligently on this path have verified that you fall prey to the temptation of building cases against others and of using the actual or imaginary evil of others so as to deny your own. You distort and you exaggerate in order to falsify. You deal with half-truths, for what you use as your case may at times include elements of actual evil in others. What is not a truth, however, is to make them responsible for your misery. This is one of the most profound manifestations of denying your self-responsibility, and therefore of nurturing a dependent attitude. In effect, you are saying: "I am dependent on the evil of the other or on his freedom from it."

It is not difficult to see the bind which this puts you in. If on a semi-conscious level you express this into life this message, then on a deeper level of your unconscious you must pay the price, because then you must express into life this message: "My evil is responsible for the suffering of others." Thus you fluctuate between infantile dependency -- in which you are under the illusion that you are helpless in the face of the other person's wrongdoing -- and omnipotence, in the responsibility that this attitude imposes upon you, namely that others are victimized by your incompleteness.

Conversely, the moment you fully assume responsibility for your suffering -- by looking for your evil attitudes, for your distortions, and for your destructive tendencies, regardless of how wrong the others may also be -- then you liberate yourself from your guilt. You will then know from personal experience that just as you can be affected by others only to the degree that you either refute or ignore your negativities, others can be affected by you only to the degree to which they refute their negativities.

The capacity to acknowledge your irrational self without totally becoming it renders you free. The need to concentrate on the ills of others is a destructive act in itself. It makes it impossible to fight the evil in you. I do not mean to convey, however, that you should assume the sole responsibility and falsely whitewash the other person. When there is a negative interaction, then both must share the responsibility. But to concentrate on others, to measure yourself against others, to compare yourself to others, and thus to emotionally victimize yourself, is tantamount to a denial of your own part -- even if you pay lip service to knowing that you must also contribute to the interaction. What invariably happens when you look for your own contribution is that, in the end, you see how you both affect one another from the destructive level of your being. In other words, you truly share the responsibility. This realization is extremely liberating. It frees you from eroding guilt, without, however, removing the responsibility that is yours. It enables you first to see and then to express the other person's share in the mutual effect without being the accuser or the self-victimizing judge. This has a very salutary effect and it usually makes your expressions effective, provided the other person is willing to listen. And if he is not, then this will no longer present a debilitating frustration for you. Now you no longer depend on proving your innocence. You see and you know the truth. The cleanness of this knowledge makes you strong and it dissolves the negative energy. When you hide your evil behind the evil of others, then you invariably become weak. As a result, your fight is ineffective. Effective fight, healthy aggression, becomes possible only when you no longer hide from yourself -- from honest insight into yourself -- only when you no longer wish to cover up your destructiveness, only when you cease to be hypocritical on this most subtle of all the levels.

So, you see, my friends, both these schools of thought are true. These apparently opposite orientations are reconciled by the key I constantly recommend to you: Face your evil, your irrationality, your primitive, destructive aspects without losing sight of the fact that this is only a minor aspect of you. If you completely identify with this hidden part, then it is impossible for you to live and equally impossible to assume responsibility for it. Conversely, the more you hide it, the more do you secretly believe that this is your real self, your only truth. When you take it out of hiding, then the wonderful reality dawns upon you that there is so much more to you than you have secretly given yourself credit for. In using this key you cannot act out the evil, either directly or indirectly. You cannot spread evil. Your evil thoughts, your evil feelings, and your evil wishes can be dealt with in a direct and effective way only when they are acknowledged. The moment you deny them, then poison is emanated from you onto others. This poison also spreads into your psychic system and into your physical system.

This shows -- in a clear-cut example that you can verify every day of your life if you truly look at your interactions in your relationships -- that the key to life is the honest acknowledgment of your primitive, destructive part. That key will finally open the gates that will make you capable of sustaining the bliss of the real world, which constantly tries to communicate itself to you, but which you must ward off either fearfully or blindly as long as these areas of your being have not been acknowledged. In other words, as long as you fearfully deny and resist your negativity.

Let us now discuss how you affect others from your positive, self-realized, purified levels -- and not just from your negative levels. The clear, free, liberated, purified levels -- the levels where you are constructive, where you are creative, where you are in truth, where you are loving, where you want to give of yourself, where you are strong, where you are self-assertive, where you do not permit the other person's destructiveness to impinge upon you -- have a very strong effect on your surroundings. The effect exists on all levels. On the overt, manifest level of actions, of deeds, and of words you will have a particular strength, a direct influence for the good, and you will set an example, although your strength at times will be misunderstood. Those who try to render you responsible for their suffering when they pin their evil on you will no longer be successful, because you have learned to face your destructive self. At times this may cause resentment, but in the long run it will have a very purifying effect. On the unconscious level, the energies that emanate from you will have an even stronger effect. Your pure energy can penetrate the fog and the murkiness and can dispense the poison. Such a free person can bypass the evil layers and reach directly beyond them, activating the best in the other person. This may then give the other person an inkling of what he can be, so that he will no longer have to hide from himself.

To whatever degree you are thus liberated, the effect is immense. You affect the equally liberated levels of inner existence, of psychic reality, of others so that a wonderful, marvelous energy is increasingly generated. This energy multiplies and multiplies, reaching out and uniting with other similarly created energy streams. So it takes on more momentum and it seeps through all the muddiness, the murkiness, and the darkness which the negativities create. It can effectively penetrate the poisonous walls of separation created by error, by ignorance, by lies, by malice, by hatred, and by illusion. To the degree this liberated level is strong, to that degree it has the power to dissolve evil -- both in the self and in others. Now you know that this strength in you depends on acknowledging your irrational destructiveness. That is the key. Your strength depends on the degree to which you are doing this constantly.

When you are in an in-between state -- in other words, when you fluctuate because at times you use this key but you refrain from doing so in other areas -- then there will be a fluctuating battle between you and others on the unconscious levels. Where your liberated state is still weak, then it may succumb to the ferocity of the accusations and the blame of the other person -- perhaps purely unconscious and therefore unspoken -- because this other person is still strong in the denial of his self-responsibility, and therefore has artificially aggrandized his self-righteous accusation. In other instances or in other relationships your liberated strength may have the greater effect, and therefore may win over the already weakened negative self of others. Their projections and their accusations may not be counteracted if you yourself are still in the state of denial, and therefore of accusation. But they can be easily counteracted when you are freed to some degree as a result of using the great key to life under discussion here.

So, you see, the degrees and the variations of human interaction are as infinite and as manifold as are the human states of consciousness. When the unconscious levels of two people affect each other, then all the varying fluctuating states of both must be taken into account. What becomes the predominant overt result at any given moment is determined by the degree to which the key of life is being used -- or is not being used -- either by one or by both. Warfare and mutual destruction are the final outcome of two entities -- whether nations or individuals -- who are not using the key. The more you use this key -- and therefore you stop hiding behind the ills of others -- the more you will strengthen your whole being. Therefore, you will enable your real self to manifest. Then you will unite with the liberated aspects of others. You will affect them and you will encourage them to transcend their negativities, thereby helping them to experience their real self that exists beyond those negativities. Thus a new feeling of self is being born: the knowledge that the negative self is not the only reality. This interchange will take place not necessarily as a result of what you say. It depends rather on how you affect the other person's being. Then what you say will also have a different impact. How you say it, how you act, and how you feel toward others will be determined by your strength, which is created by meeting your negativities. In that way you spread good.

Your unrecognized -- and therefore unadmitted, projected, and denied -- destructiveness immediately affects that counterpart in others. Mutual accusation, self-righteous blaming, and the compulsion to build a case are all evasive tactics that build up the negative interaction, and therefore the strife, the conflict, the pain, and the confusion.

Now let us reverse the process. How are you being affected by others? Quite a few human beings live in a certain amount of harmony and of strength, having worked their way through sufficiently to no longer initially spread destructiveness. However, in the current phase of their development most human beings are still in the state of a fearful defense against living, even when there is no cause for it and when they are in touch with those who are ready to give them love and help. Thus they spread evil by virtue of being closed up to truth, closed up to love, closed up to giving, and therefore closed up to receiving. But a number of developed human beings are no longer in this state. Therefore, they are free enough to give out the best of themselves undefended. However, this does not make them immune to being affected by the destructiveness of others. They may be affected by the unconscious negative thoughts and destructive feelings -- in other words, the polluted energy -- of other people, and thus they are victimized and dependent. It is as though they expressed into life: "I demand perfection around me so that I can remain in the clarified and blissful state that I have gained." When this is still the case, then a lot more progress has to be made, for true immunity comes only when this dependency no longer exists. In other words, when the other person's negativity can no longer affect you. When it does affect you, then it means that there must be self-doubt and guilt in you as a result of not having faced all your confusions, all your destructive impulses, all your irrational aspects and all your illusory aspects. It means that no matter how much you have done this already, there are still uncleared areas in you, for otherwise you would not be so vulnerable, and therefore so easily affected by the ills of others. This means that you must return to this earth life and live in this sphere of duality, where you must battle with the opposites -- pleasure and pain, life and death, good and evil. You cannot transcend these opposites as long as you do not use the key of life.

When you are affected by the negativities of others, then you must explore what makes you so vulnerable. I venture to say that this dependency and this vulnerability -- on the psychic energy level -- must have a correspondence to a psychological refutation of self-responsibility, and therefore to an insistence to blame either life or others for your misery. In other words, there must be some area in which you are not meeting yourself honestly. For if you do it wholly and completely, then the negative energy and the negative emanation of others will have no effect on you at all. As a result, you will not need to build your false defenses, where everything reverberates and nothing comes through to you. After all, this is one of the reasons these defenses are built: to ward off the pain of other people's cruelty, of other people's hostility, of other people's meanness, and of the unjustified demands which they make upon the world, and therefore also on you. You may be conscious of this fear, but only gradually do you begin to explore these defenses and to find out that these defenses ward off everything that life has to give to you so abundantly. Thus these defenses are to your own detriment. They prohibit the good of life from coming into you and they prohibit the best of you from coming out into life. They prohibit your being filled with the best there is -- your own good feelings. This is made impossible by these unconscious debilitating defenses.

When these defenses are abandoned, then you can deal with life and you can deal with the psychic substance of others, where exchanges of love and truth can take place. Every individual manifests universal truth in a unique way. This variety gives living a special excitement without disrupting one's inner peace. The flow of interchange enriches you so deeply that there are no words to describe it. It is the opposite way of living from the one that results from being encased in your defensive walls, which completely separate you, and which create great loneliness. These defenses create an unhappy existence. They create an existence that is limited, therefore dependent, and therefore suffering or painful.

On the other hand, you cannot live completely exposed while you are still in your present state when you have not yet explored those levels of your being where you blame others for their evil because you shy away from facing your own. In this state you must be extremely vulnerable -- which might be rationalized by a prideful claim of being so sensitive. But this sensitivity is not a sign of a unique individuality in the divine sense. It is a distortion in itself and it is not necessary. In this state, everything must penetrate you, and therefore hurt you. If you do not avail yourself with vigor again and again with vigor of the key I have handed you, then you need your destructive defenses that shut you out of the magnificent game of life.

It is your task to find a mode of being in which you are adequately defended, not sickly defended; a way of being in which you are realistically defended, not unrealistically defended. This realistic and adequate defense against being adversely affected by the evil of others is the total meeting of your own evil -- the daily-renewed determination to do so. The signs are always there. Your gauges are the helpful hints that life offers you. They consist of your anxious reactions, of your angry reactions, of your confused reactions. Perhaps at first you do not recognize them. If you refrain from habitually pushing aside what disturbs you and rationalizing it, then you may first find that you are upset about what others do to you. It may seem, or it may be, an injustice. But do not remain on that level of talking yourself into it, convincing yourself that this justifies and explains your disturbance. When you resist this temptation and you go beyond it, then you are heeding life's lesson and one of life's signs.

One day lived in a blissful state -- in which you are alive and deeply in contact with your innermost being, and thus with the whole universe, emanating joy and having deep and meaningful exchanges with others, a state in which you do not have to ward off life both from within and from without -- will make you know that on that day you have not defended against anything. Also, you may have been fortunate on that day to come into the psychic circumference of a strong, clear, liberated, spiritual energy and consciousness. In other words, no unconscious destructiveness of others came your way. You may think that such a negative influx is not directed against you because you are you, but simply because you are another human being, and therefore you represent the enemy.

If the reason for the bliss is the latter, then are you truly safe and free? Are you not still in a dependent state, and thus inevitably anxious and distrustful, whether or not you experience this anxiety and this distrust at all times? The answer is obvious. You must surge on in order to become wholly yourself, and therefore to no longer be in need of your destructive defenses that ward off everything and that shift the responsibility for your state onto others.

Most days offer the opportunity to do this. The reactions of discomfort that you register should be taken into your field of vision. They harbor the clue you need. Whatever your reactions to others may be -- reactions that do not make you glad with yourself and with others -- they should be examined. The incidents that come to you and your reactions to them are reminders that the greatest therapist of all extends itself to you -- life itself. There is something for you to see and to find, something that until now you have not recognized. Why are you so vulnerable? If you heed the sign for what it is, if you heed the pain or the discomfort that you suffer now and you decide -- with all the vigor and all the determination of your courageous self -- to say "I want to see that part in me that is responsible for being affected by another person's evil," then you cannot fail to discover it. You will be more liberated and more secure than ever.

Unfortunately, the temptation to concentrate and to focus on the other person's shortcomings, on his evil, or on his ills sets you off from where you should be. Whatever you see in others may or may not be correct, as the case may be. You will truly have peace and clarity about it only when you heed the sign and you fully understand why you are vulnerable and exposed to the real or imagined negativities and destructiveness of others.

I cannot emphasize strongly enough the need to make use of this key. I would like to say to you, my friends, that those of you who pursue this taxing but very real pathwork will eventually find this true, undefended, open, flowing state of security, of bliss, and of peace. The path is taxing only because it leaves no room for projection and for escape, no matter how hard one tries. Some fall by the wayside because in this incarnation they are not willing to go all the way with themselves and because they would rather dwell on blame. But those of you who follow me all the way cannot help but find the truth of being. It cannot be denied that precisely because this path allows no escape this path is a hard taskmaster. It dispenses with all the sentimentality that encourages your weakness and your self-evasion. But because of this, it keeps the promise it makes, as more of you begin to actually find out and to experience. You will find your real values only when you have mustered the courage to find your evil, distorted aspects. You will find your true capacity to love and to be loved -- not as a concept, as a thought, or as an ideal. In other words, not as an illusion, but as an actually experienced reality in your everyday life. These are not empty promises and faraway ideals. These are the promises that life makes and that life holds out for the person who uses the key to life on this plane of existence. The more you do this, the less you will need to defend against pain, and therefore against the bliss of life, the gift of life that comes to you at all times.

January 15, 1971