Inner Experience And Outer Experience

By The Pathwork Guide

Greetings, blessings, and love are pouring forth for every one of you, wherever it is needed most on your journey through life. Many philosophies agree on the importance of experience. They postulate that the true meaning of life is experiencing it in all its facets and variations, in depth and in its full scope. An entity who enters this sphere of life, the material earth, is drawn into it because of his corresponding state of consciousness. This is a limited state of consciousness in which reality is blurred to a large extent. The only way this state of consciousness can be expanded is by experiencing life to its fullest and from all its facets. This requires to come again and again, until all the blocks against experiencing life are eliminated, and until all of life is savored, tasted, and assimilated.

When man hears the word "experience," he usually thinks of outer experiencing. This is not the real meaning. The real meaning is the inner experience. It is possible to experience everything conceivable outwardly, yet if the inner experience is prohibited, then the outer experience will mean very little. You can travel all over the world. You can learn many things. You can be in many different situations and experiment with every conceivable "experience" under the sun. You can approach life in all its different wonderful facets: art, nature, science. You can do all these things, you can learn everything your brain can master. Yet, when the capacity for inner experience is dead, then the outer experience will do little, if anything. Often a full outer experience may even increase the despair, because without the inner one a person does not understand the causes, and that is very disquieting. He may have everything he ever wanted, yet the constant nagging dissatisfaction cannot be removed. The faster he runs and the more he grabs, the more life seems to evade him. This is because the capacity for inner experience has not been cultivated or, worse, has been inadvertently eliminated.

The inner experience is possible only when you can feel. If the feelings are blocked -- in other words, if the feelings are not fully lived through -- then no inner experience is possible. The lack of feelings deadens all of life -- the inner life, the inner experience -- and therefore makes it impossible for you to totally fulfill your life. Consequently, you will have to come back over and over again, until you learn to savor experience to whatever degree this is possible at the particular stage of your consciousness. In order to savor life to its fullest, the defense against one's feelings must be eliminated. The fear of unpleasurable, painful feelings must be gone through. That which is feared must be accepted, allowed, experienced as it is at this moment. The way it is at this moment may be the result of residual feelings of the past which have not been experienced, so that they lie stagnant, dormant, unexperienced within the system and form a block. When you fear a feeling, then you block the experience. You anesthetize yourself. It may often appear that this numbing and denying process is the only protection against unbearable pain and suffering. And yet it is precisely the defense and the fight against what you fear that actually creates the suffering. No matter what is inflicted upon you from the outside when you are helpless and defenseless -- when you are a child -- it cannot become a detriment in your life, it can never cripple you, when you learn to receive it in the right and healthy way. This is the only way you can go through rather than go around or avoid.

This is the only way you can truly eliminate what is undesirable. When you dare to experience what comes to you, then it will cease to be a threat.

In this lecture I shall show the ramifications and the significance of inner emotional experience, and what happens to the human entity when experience and feelings are blocked. Fear is the most destructive emotion imaginable. Fear that is not met -- and therefore not transcended -- becomes toxic energy that is poisonous. Fear that is not even conscious, but that manifests indirectly, is that much more potent and that much more debilitating. The fear of feelings is perhaps the most insidious of all fears. For if you fear a realistic danger, then it is something that you can overcome. Even if your fear of an outer occurrence is exaggerated, this in itself would not be so harmful, except that such an unrealistic phobia must be an expression of unrecognized, unexperienced inner feelings. Anything that is outside of you can be dealt with on the level of outer action. Feelings can be dealt with only when they are being experienced, never when they are being denied.

When you are afraid of pain, afraid of loneliness, afraid of your pride being hurt, afraid of rejection, afraid of disappointment, afraid of the frustration of your desires, afraid of the frustration of your will, afraid of the frustration of your needs, then the primary feeling is fear. It is the fear that any of these undesirable events may happen. Only when you experience what you fear will you really experience the pain of it. Say, the pain of rejection, or the pain of being lonely, or whatever. So we are dealing basically with the fear of pain. When the fear is gone into, then the pain can be experienced. Only then will the pain genuinely dissolve, and you will thus have mastered a slice of life that you no longer need to avoid.

When the fear of pain is blindly avoided -- until you no longer know that you fear a specific pain and you do not know why you feel numbed and deadened -- then a magnetic energy block is being erected within your psychic system. This energy block is a powerful force that must inevitably draw to you the very experience that you wanted to avoid. The pain that you avoid must come to you from outside, again and again, until you can no longer avoid it. This is a law of life. If you come into this life with such a fear, then your life circumstances will bring forth the very conditions that you had avoided previously. When the life circumstances in your early childhood inflict pain and deprivation upon you and you protect yourself once again by denying the pain rather than experiencing it to its fullest, then later life circumstances must repeat and approximate those same early conditions, until you learn to open yourself up to what you fear and you let the experience be in you so that it can dissolve. When you learn to fully savor this painful experience, then you truly overcome it. The energy of the magnetic block will be dissolved -- it will enter into the general flow of life within you -- and therefore this previously feared experience will no longer come to you.

You may temporarily succeed in warding off feared experience -- feared feelings -- because your inner defenses shut off life so successfully that nothing touches you. Also, your outer willpower may have succeeded in building an eventful outer life that fills the void to a degree -- as long as you do not hold still. However, this is but a temporary peace before the storm. Crisis must eventually come to you in order to afford you the opportunity to overcome your fear. The more you run from what you fear -- in other words, the more energy you invest into blocking off your feared feeling -- the more potent the magnetic energy block becomes, and the more certainly will you attract the appropriate crisis that could then be the healing agent -- whenever you choose to change the direction of the focus of your inner living.

The experience of bliss, the experience of pleasure, the experience of joy, and the experience of peace can exist only in a fearless soul. The creativity that is your full potential, your self-expression, and the expansion of your spiritual being can exist only when you are fearless -- and therefore relaxed. If there is no part in your inner being that has anything to guard against, no aspect in you that has anything to cover up, no area of your being that has anything to defend against or to protect, then the full potentiality of your creative resources and the full potentiality of your capacity for pleasure can first evolve and then manifest in your personality. For if you guard against one expression of life in you -- in other words, against one type of inner experience -- then it is logical that all the other types of experience must be equally hindered. This should be easy to see. By protecting yourself against your fear of pain -- or against any other undesirable state -- you must be in a state of tension. Guardedness is tension. And pleasure and creativity can thrive only in a state of relaxation. When you guard against an inner movement of life, then you cannot express yourself. You try to hold tight so that this movement may not happen. Then you manage not to know what you are doing. Thus you separate yourself from a vital part of yourself. No wonder that you lose touch with yourself, and therefore you no longer know who you are. Thus you live in a constant state of tense guardedness -- unfortunately unbeknown to your conscious mind. For if you would truly know, then you would have the first necessary basis from which to proceed to change your way of life. Therefore the first task on any path is to explore yourself deeply so that you become conscious of your defenses -- of your guards, of your protective devices. Only then can you explore the next question: What is it precisely that you guard against? In the last analysis, it is always a pain that you have suffered in one way or another, at one time or another.

You cannot go further than this lifetime. But this is really all you need. For this lifetime cannot possibly bring you any other painful experience than the one you have not let yourself experience in your previous lives. So your early pains in this life are essentially the same as the ones suffered in previous lives. The energy block resulting from the residual feelings accumulated in you not only attracts the same events over and over again, but it also makes you incapable of meeting new feeling experiences in a free and spiritually hygienic way. You will be incapable of letting the new feeling live in you, so that it must be added to the residual reservoir. On the other hand, once the specific residual reservoir is emptied out and you have fully experienced and gone through the past accumulations, then the flow of your being will deal with new pain in a different way.

First of all, you will remain open, vulnerable and you will experience the pain softly, gently, without any inner fighting, and fully knowing why you are in pain. This integration of your experience -- both feeling and knowing -- will make the wave, either slowly or quickly -- according to the nature of the experience -- pass and the pain will dissolve into the stream of life within you. This open, relaxed, unguarded, unfighting state also makes available inspiration and resources that are inaccessible otherwise. You will be guided from within to find new ways of action and new ways of behavior that will be effective both in your outer life and in your environment, so that you prepare the ground for new experiences. Going through what you fear eliminates the fear. Now the fearlessness opens up new creative channels and entirely new resources that at first will come as a total and unexpected surprise. Also a new -- and ever-increasing -- vibrancy of life must fill your being when you live in this way. You will be filled with the joyousness of knowing that all is well in the universe.

When the control of the outer will is used in order to avoid feared feelings and to forcefully produce the joy that cannot be had unless you live in an unguarded state, then this false control must finally be smashed by life again and again, because life cannot be willfully manipulated by the fearful, small, controlling mind. When a forcing current -- "I must not experience that" and "I must experience this" -- substitutes for a relaxed stream of consciousness and for a flowing soul substance, then the end result is crisis and more pain. It is the bitter pain of fighting against pain. It is the terror of trying to avoid fear, rather than going through it.

The state of duality that is significant of man's state of consciousness is primarily a result of fear that is not fully lived through and therefore dissolved. By saying "I must not experience this," you create a duality. Your fear creates a Yes-current and a No-current. And that is the basis of the painful state of duality. It can thrive only in a state of avoidance -- that is, of being closed to one thing. This then creates a tense, urgent grabbing movement into the opposite direction. This prohibits the flow of life.

When an inner attitude of denial exists -- which is the basis of the fear -- then rage, anger, and violence must follow. Rage and anger dissolve when the fear of pain is being given up and then the pain is fully experienced. When this happens, then the pain will dissolve and it will turn into its original nature. This is the blissful and peaceful vibrancy of the river of life of which you are a part and which flows through your being.

Therefore, the fear of feelings not only means the warding off of bliss and the warding off of the expression of the creative life through you, it also means that you are split, and therefore in a state of disunity. The unification of the human state of consciousness into a higher state of consciousness can take place only by going through what you fear and never by going around. In other words, by warding off and by avoiding.

When the fear of experiencing his feelings induces man to block off his capacity to feel, then this impoverishment creates the need for a substitution. This substitution is the mind. In order not to feel the deadness -- the impoverishment of the inner being -- and in order to have a sense of existing, then the outer mind is used much more than is its natural function. If you cannot exist through your flowing, feeling, experiencing being, then the mind, the intellect, and the will take charge of the deadened feeling part. This gives one the illusion of being alive. But this aliveness is very precarious. In the long run it is not even convincing, because consciousness without feeling lacks the spark of the spirit that puts a glow on life. Its incompleteness is dry and sterile. You may arrive at the most brilliant formulations with your mind, but if your mind is not unified with the inner feeling experience, then in secret moments you will doubt your aliveness, your reality of being. Although man possesses a brain, he often finds himself unable to live fully. What is usually called an identity crisis is the result of being split off from the feeling self. This exists only when feelings are being avoided, fought against, denied, resisted, repressed. When man does not know who he is, then he must be lost. He can never know who he is when the mind substitutes its so-called "life" for the inner self, for the feeling self.

Let us look into what happens to some specific feelings when they are denied. Let us take sadness. When something in you says, "I must not be said, I should not be sad," then you are rebelling against something that exists in you. This rebellious attitude will create a misconception that being said is catastrophic, and the conclusion that if this catastrophe befalls you, then you must perish. This unspoken, inarticulated assumption creates fear. If this fear becomes more exaggerated, then the fear often turns into terror. The terror of sadness creates a compulsive urge to avoid sadness. In other words, to avoid feeling it. If life forces you to be sad and you finally feel it through the circumstances that you inevitably attract, then your reaction of terror -- which is due to your conviction of having to perish if you are sad -- will produce such strong inner turmoil that you may actually break down. On the surface you may be utterly unaware of the rebellious anger in you that is at the bottom of the terror and equally unaware of the misconception that makes you struggle so arduously and so painfully against sadness. When you experience sadness in this mental and emotional state, then the nature of this experience is infinitely painful and bitter. Therefore, it is unbearable. But not because straight sadness cannot be borne. Any straight, direct, clean feeling can be easily borne, no matter what it is and why it exists. What is unbearably painful, bitter, frightening, and hopeless is the inner struggle against this particular experience and against the turmoil which your misconception creates. This is why the scriptural saying, "According to thy belief it shall be done unto thee," is verifiable in the reality of living. It does not connote a magical intercession from heaven, in terms of reward for faith and punishment for doubt. It simply describes the dynamics I am discussing here. It is the mind's overactivity that produces the image that says, "If I have to be sad, then I will perish." Of course, it may not be the conscious, articulate mind. You build a mental concept that sustains your false belief that sadness is unbearable, even dangerous. Thus, you justify your refusal to feel sad. You may do this by building cases against others who allegedly make you sad. In other words, your mind busily attemps to justify why you should not have to endure this feeling. This is how illusions are being built. And it always difficult to abandon one's cherished illusions.

When an original experience -- say, of sadness or of pain -- is denied, then it becomes displaced. It will be re-experienced in subsequent situations. Denied -- and therefore displaced -- sadness becomes self-pity, hopelessness, bleakness, and depression. These emotions are debilitating and destructive. In contrast, the clean, direct, original feeling of sadness will dissipate if it is fully experienced without making it more or less than it is, and if it is brought back to where it originally started in this life. When you let it happen to you without manipulating it either by exaggerating it or by denying it, then it will run its natural course. This is important to remember and to try out again and again, as it were.

But if the original experience of sadness is denied in any form, and is thus distorted, then it becomes part of a vicious circle. And it is always difficult to extricate oneself from a vicious circle. Part of this vicious circle is also the denied anger and the denied rage for having being made sad either by life or by other people.

Let us take the feeling of anger. If the anger is experienced cleanly -- perhaps because someone has damaged you, has hurt you, has inflicted injustice upon you -- then it will resolve itself. Other people's denial of their inner truth -- of their real feelings -- must inflict pain upon you, just as you must inflict pain upon others by not allowing yourself to experience what is -- whether you intend to do so or not, whether you are aware of it or not. This pain can be inflicted every bit as much by omission as by commission. The climate of omission in a child's life is often more difficult to cope with because there is no actual occurrence that one can pinpoint the pain on, so that it is more difficult to acknowledge it and to feel it, and thus eliminate it from your psychic system. Your initial reaction to pain with anger is totally normal and healthy. If you can accept your anger feeling with the proper understanding -- namely that such a reaction does not require you to act against others in a destructive fashion -- then you will accept this anger without either justifying yourself or judging others. If you let yourself feel it -- in other words, experience it -- and if you follow it through to the pain, then it will dissolve. As a result, it will liberate you. But if you deny it, then it will turn into spite, into cruelty, and into hostility -- all of which also need to be covered up in order to conform with the standards of society. Thus you become alienated further from what you really feel. Therefore, the original feeling becomes even more distorted.

Now let us see what happens when the original feeling of despair -- perhaps resulting from your loneliness -- is denied. In other words, when your inner person says, "I should not have to deal with this, ever. I should be spared this experience of despair." By this denial, you turn it into bitterness, into isolation, into faithlessness -- the apprehension that there is no way out for you. If the original despair is experienced cleanly -- in other words, without drawing any conclusions -- then the feeling will dissolve relatively quickly. If you are attuned to what is happening in you and if you allow yourself to feel it without your mind making something of it, then you will come out of yet another tunnel and you will enter into the light of the life stream. When I speak of the "clean experience" of despair, it must not be confused with a forced hopelessness that is the result of the forcing current. The forcing current is a manipulative process that expresses into life and toward everybody whom one substitutes for those who caused the original hurt in childhood the following: "You must now give me all that I ask for and you must protect me from all unpleasurable feelings. My hopelessness will convince you that this is what you must do for me." When such irrational messages of the hidden self can be first admitted and then deciphered, then the manipulative artificial hopelessness -- which is always unbearable -- will give way and the new insight will lead you back to the clean original feeling that you have avoided. If you can make such differentiations, then you will have taken a giant step forward toward your self-awareness. This self-awareness will make it possible for you to experience the original feelings and to go through their tunnel at the other end of which you will find the realistic good tidings of spiritual reality. You will find the reality that life is ultimately benign. And when I say "ultimately," I do not mean in a faraway beyond. I mean when you have the courage and the faith to feel what is in you, when you explore what is in you, when you let happen to you what is in you. In other words, when the hardened armor plate of your defense against unpleasant feelings in you is loosened up and you feel and you cry and you tremble and you writhe. In other words, when you experience your original feeling directly and cleanly. Then all your residual feelings will dissolve. The experience of everyday living will then be like a fluctuating wave of life as it comes to you. You will no longer live behind a wall, through which nothing can come to you and nothing can come out of you. That is the true isolation of the disunified, fearful being, who issues a forcing current into the world that says, "I must not feel this, I say No to it." Such a person is in a state of denial and defense.

Let us now take the feeling of fear. When you deny it, then it becomes a vague anxiety that is infinitely more disturbing because you have nothing to focus on, and therefore to cope with. By facing the fear directly, you proceed into other feelings, such as pain, despair, and anger. Thus, the way out becomes possible. Anxiety is displaced fear and, as such, offers no way out.

If you feel vaguely disturbed, vaguely irritated, or vaguely disquieted -- in other words, without knowing what is really happening to you -- then do not gloss over it. If you do, then you create a further layer of disunity and of disorientation. Rather, focus onto your sensations and trust in the fact that something more tangible, something that you can deal with lies in you and that it is waiting for you to take it out of hiding. This will gradually lead you into a fuller experience of your feelings -- from the now to the then, from the present to the past. When you empty out the past accumulation, then the present will truly be the present, rather than giving you the illusion that you react to the present, when you really react over and over again to the past that you constantly keep avoiding.

Anyone who truly decides to go into the nucleus of his being can do so at any time he wishes. It requires your decision first to look at what is in you and then to feel what is in you, to experience what is in you. In other words, to no longer externalize what is in you. When you no longer fear pain, then pain can no longer come to you. When you no longer fear fear, then you cannot experience fear any longer. When you no longer fear disappointment -- because now you know that you can experience it and you can let it happen to you and you go to its very end until its energy current re-transforms itself into its original flow -- then disappointment can no longer happen to you.

You must understand that anything undesirable that happens to you comes to you only because you say: "I must not experience that! What can I do to avoid it?" Most people are motivated into work such as this because they are seeking better ways to avoid their undesirable feelings. When it finally dawns on them that exactly the opposite direction must be taken, then often many leave this Path because they are unwilling to accept the truth that avoidance is futile. They insist on clinging to their illusion.

Therefore, it is of the utmost importance at this particular juncture that you question yourself. "Which feeling in you are you most afraid of and to what degree are you afraid of feeling it?" Nothing that is outside of you can be as frightening as what is in you. You unconsciously fear what it will do to you, what unpleasurable feelings it will elicit in you, what pain it will make you experience. By courageously going into the undesirable feeling, you will see the miracle happen as a stark reality, instead of a principle that you read about. The acceptance of the pain makes the pain pleasurable. The less you block the pain, the sooner the pain will turn into pleasure. Thus you witness the process of unifying duality.

At this point of our work together we shall go into the deepest, the most direct experiences of your residual feelings, alternating with your present feelings. By learning to give up the fight against them, you will lose your fears for the first time in your life. I will help you and I will guide you as usual. All of you who read these words can start off right now by asking yourself: "What are the feelings you fear?" But really face that. Then attempt to open yourself up to these feared feelings and try to let happen what you thought would be undesirable, and therefore unacceptable. If you go through it, then you will see what happens. You will see that many of the ideas I have discussed over the years are not mere faraway philosophies, sentences I utter to expound on a principle. They have a very concrete and immediate meaning that you can verify as a stark reality if you follow through. And a number of you have done this already. Therefore, you have discovered that what at first appears to be a black, frightening, endless abyss turns out to be a tunnel at the other end of which you come into the light. Everyone can experience this. It is never an endless abyss. For life in its true essence is not darkness, it is light. Life in its true essence is not destruction, it is construction. Life in its true essence is not evil, it is good. The real evil of life -- destructiveness, the demonic forces -- is the fear of experiencing what is in you: your feelings. Because of that fear, you build your destructive defenses. That is the only reason why destructiveness sets in, in every one of its facets and forms. The fear of feelings -- the fear of painful experience -- makes you arrogant, makes you isolated, makes you cruel, makes you greedy, makes you selfish, and makes you life-denying. It makes you untruthful on the inner and the most vital level of your being. For if you deny what you feel, then you are not in truth with yourself. All of this is evil, if you wish to choose this word, or any other perhaps more to your liking. Destructiveness lies exclusively in the walls that you build against experiending what is in you. Thus you convert a constructive energy into a destructive energy. The inner lie of denying the experience of the feeling self creates a falsification of your real self. It falsifies you, until you no longer know who you are. It creates the false hope that stems from the illusion that you can eliminate undesirable feelings by avoiding them and it creates the false hopelessness that stems from the illusion that the tunnel of painful feelings is a bottomless pit of horror and annihilation. Thus you waste your life energies by stemming against the truth and thereby you create unnecessary pain.

The negation of the original feeling in this life leads to greedy, insatiable demands. It leads to the demand that all frustration should be spared you. It leads to the demand that you should never be criticized. It leads to the demand that you should always have your way. It leads to the demand that others should always love you and that they should love you your way. As long as these demands are not first recognized and then abandoned and the original pain is not cleanly felt and gone through, then you will be caught in the ever fluctuating see-saw of submission and of rebellion, which is another vicious circle. You submit to the equally insatiable, unreasonable demands of others and their power struggle for control in order to finally have them do your bidding. You rebel because you are ashamed of your submission and you hate yourself for it, and therefore you must prove your so-called independence. In both attitudes you violate the real interests of your real self. In neither are you aware of the blind drives that lead you alternately into submission and into rebellion. The only way you can be truly independent is when these demands cease. This will take place only when you can experience whatever is in you because you know that you yourself have produced it.

It is often said by current psychology that a child is incapable of reacting differently to pain than by building its numbing defenses. This is true only when in previous lives the residual pain was not met and gone through -- experienced -- and thus eliminated. To whatever degree a human entity has done this, to that degree even the severest circumstances in his childhood will be experienced in an undefended way. The pain will be endured and gone through until it ceases naturally -- without leaving a mark -- because it was fully savored. This strengthens the resiliency, the ability to live life fruitfully and productively, and it also increases the capacity to experience pleasure and deep feelings. It is the living principle of: "Do not resist evil." It requires blindness not to see that children actually have this capacity to a great degree. They can cry bitterly one minute and laugh genuinely the next because the pain has taken its natural course. It is only where pain has not been experienced that defensive numbness is instituted. Hence neurosis, destructiveness, and deadness. It is incorrect to generalize and to claim that no child can help but react in this self-numbing way to all traumatic and difficult situations.

May the power that is within your being be allowed to fill your whole substance, your whole organism: your spiritual organism, your emotional organism, your mental organism, and your physical being. The full experience of your feeling self is spiritual hygiene that prevents the stagnation of your soul. It is the metabolism of your total organism. Just as the accumulation of physical waste that is not allowed to be expelled and eliminated creates diseases of the body, so does unexperienced -- and therefore unassimilated -- feeling matter create diseases of the soul. In other words, neuroses. The approach is the following: "Your full commitment to feel everything that you can possibly feel. Your observation of what feelings you fear and of the events that bring forth specific feelings." In other words, your commitment to at least begin to try to approach them, to experience them and to face them. This is the healing process that will unify your entire being. Doing this will make your life the fullest experience that is possible and it will permeate you with the realization that you are using your life to its fullest and to its best, in its deepest sense, and with its innermost meaning.

A lot of love is pouring forth for all of you. May you be able to feel it.

April 23, 1971