Real And False Needs And Their Relationship To Human States Of Consciousness

By The Pathwork Guide

Greetings to all of you, my friends. Blessings and strength are pouring forth. If you open your hearts as well as your minds, then you can receive them.

I would like to begin this lecture, which is the last one in the season, by saying once again that most human beings are not yet aware of the immense spiritual potentials and the divine powers which they have. What do I mean when I say spiritual potentials and divine powers? I mean that these powers transcend by far the human capacities considered normal in your sphere of being.

These powers remain inaccessible, and may even be dangerous, if the human being is either not purified to a certain degree, or if his consciousness is still in a state of half-sleep. This is always connected with destructive attitudes such as selfwill, pride, fear, greed, envy, malice, cruelty, spite, and selfishness. The majority of human beings find themselves in a state of being approximately ninety percent asleep to and only ten percent awake to what exists in the world around them and what exists within themselves. The process of reawakening the self requires a great deal of effort, of commitment, and of work. It also requires the willingness to sacrifice destructive patterns, with their short-lived and expensive satisfactions. Only then can your awareness gradually grow, can your perception sharpen, and can new inner knowledge become available to you as manifestations of your awakening real self.

This growing intuitive perception, this inner knowing -- first about the self, then about the innermost being of others, and eventually about cosmic truth and creation -- extends into an experience of eternal life. The certainty of it! Awakening the spiritual potentials also gives one access to the ever present forces of life, all of which exist both within you and around you. These powers can then be utilized for healing, for helping, for increasing fulfillment, and for raising the consciousness -- both in the self and in others. However, if the little self still predominates over the spiritual, real self, then the abuse of these powers will be inevitable. Therefore, first love has to be awakened in the soul of a person so that the powers will be safe. If the energy force field of a human being is geared to low frequencies due to an undeveloped state of the soul, then the much higher frequencies of the spiritual powers can destroy health and can harm life. In other words, they can create tremendous hazards. This is why it is important for development to proceed in certain rhythms. The safest way is always to emphasize purification above all.

When purification precedes the development of the spiritual potentials and of the psychic powers, then bliss grows, fearlessness increases, and the solutions to all the problems become increasingly more accessible. The solutions will present themselves because the problems are first faced and then dealt with. Then the healing of all the ills of the mind, of the soul, and of the body will be possible.

This sounds like utopia, my friends. And it actually would bring about a kind of utopia if this blissful state were not sought out of the fear of the opposite state and out of the hope for an escape. In other words, if you wish bliss because you fear pain; if you wish life eternal because you fear death; if you wish happiness because you fear unhappiness; if you wish fulfillment because you fear emptiness, then all these desired possibilities must elude you, and therefore must remain unattainable. Thence comes the delusion that none of these possibilities exist. But this is not true. They cannot exist when they are the products of wishful thinking. You need to know that the human longing is an expression of your sensing the existence of these possibilities, but that the direction chosen by your longing is, in most cases, exactly the opposite from the one needed. My dear friends, you must enter into and fully go through what you fear -- and therefore want to avoid -- in order to overcome the fear so as to get where the previously dreaded state truly does not exist any longer. For example, only when you can fully accept your present lack of vision and you go through the resulting fear can you reach the greater state of consciousness. Then the latter is not an illusion, but a fact, a reality. It is neither wishful thinking nor an escape, but the stark reality of being and of life as it really is.

This cannot come easily. Therefore, all those who travel this road must commit themselves fully to everything that such a search really means. Most of you who are engaged in this pathwork of self-development start out in the usual way: Either you are unhappy or you want the solution to a certain problem. Or perhaps there is not even the specific awareness of an inner problem or a blockage yet. You may simply experience a vague feeling of being ill at ease with life. You wish to correct these undesirable states, although you usually do this with the unconscious hope that the problematic attitudes that render you unhappy can either remain untouched, or perhaps can even be reinforced. When the path requires the opposite, then your reaction can often be one of panic, of resentment, of struggle, of resistance, and at times even a cessation of any further efforts in the right inner direction. In other words, most of you start with a negative goal: You want to remove a negative condition. Only rarely does an individual start out with a positive goal. Many may even pay lip service to the positive goal of total self-purification and of spiritual growth. But when it comes to having the willingness to accept difficulties and to give up long-established destructive patterns, then the conscious commitment to the positive goal suddenly disappears. With most people, the positive goal is pursued and strengthened only as you get deeper into yourself.

The longing is always there. Something in your innermost being knows that there exists a reality and a state of consciousness other than your present state of development. Your reaching for this higher, more fulfilling state is a legitimate, healthy need. When this need becomes conscious, then a positive goal and a positive direction can be set. But as long as your need is unconscious and is intermingled with negative goals -- such as the demand, deliver me from my unhappy state -- then you will remain in a state of confusion about the path itself. The lack of a full commitment always yields tenuous, spurious, and limited results. Then doubt will close the vicious circle by reinforcing the witholding of commitment. Because doubtful witholding makes liberation impossible, then the doubt itself is seen as justified.

Now it becomes absolutely necessary to repeat much of a lecture I gave many years ago on the topic of real needs and false needs.

This lecture is simultaneously an organic sequence, a repetition, and a completion of a cycle in which new material can be assimilated. This cyclic spiral movement enables you to start at any point and to go on from there, completing the cycle from wherever the starting point was. This explains why almost anyone on a certain level of consciousness can find these lectures useful, no matter when they started. Thus, this particular lecture will be an answer for many of you and it will shed light on the exact point where you are stuck at the moment.

The particular lecture I gave years ago to which I am referring deals with the topic of real needs and of false needs. Since then many of you have gone into your deepest feelings of fear, of pain, of guilt, and of anger. These are feelings which you first experienced in this life during your early childhood, but which you have not had the courage to re-experience. In the course of this journey toward experiencing old feelings which had not been fully experienced before, you also came across the needs that you had as a child, needs whose unfulfillment causes most of your painful, and therefore repressed, feelings. Any person who does not bring his or her unconscious feeling experiences into his consciousness must carry this repressed material into the next incarnation. The imbedded material seeks out both circumstances and people so as to bring this dormant, and therefore unassimilated, material to the fore again. Thus a set of parents or a certain environment will seem to be responsible for painful experience in childhood. In reality, the undeveloped state of the parents functions as a means to bring out images which otherwise would remain dormant, and therefore inaccessible to the consciousness, thereby blocking the total purification. Of course, it is possible to treat a painful experience in the old way of avoidance and thereby prolong the cycle. But the day comes for every entity when he or she no longer finds it possible to avoid confronting this experience openly.

You can follow this chain of events even within the present lifespan. To the degree that you have not experienced fully your past as a child, to that degree you must attract similar experiences later in life. If you have avoided your childhood, and therefore are unaware of what truly went on in you, then you tend to not recognize what you feel and what you experience now as you repeat the experience. Conversely, as you become conscious of your past feelings, then you also become aware of how past experience repeats itself. Your state of numbness about your past feelings numbs you to similar experiences in the present. That is, unless and until you make a real commitment and a real effort to awaken yourself, no matter how painful this may seem at first.

You can be alert to and have full knowledge of what happens to you now only when the similar experiences of the past are out in the open and fully dealt with. Then not only will the residual soul matter of this life be cleared up, but also, simultaneously, the legacy of your previous existences. In this phase of your path -- where you experience more and more of this residual matter -- you encounter the fact that the most painful element in you is the unfulfillment of your legitimate needs as a child. As I discussed in the earlier lecture, the negation of your real needs creates your false needs. This is tremendously important to observe at the point you are now.

What are real needs and what are false needs? In the first place, whatever is real at one period of a person's life may be utterly false and unreal at a later period. What is a real need for a child is not at all a real need for an adult. When the growing person denies the pain of an unfulfilled need, then this need does not disappear. On the contrary, the denial of the pain of its unfulfillment perpetuates the need and projects it into a later time and onto other people, so that it becomes a false need. Let us take the example of a child needing to be taken care of. In other words, needing solely to receive care, to receive nursing, to receive good feelings, to receive attention, to receive appreciation of its uniqueness. If these needs are not fulfilled, then the child must suffer. If this suffering is accepted and is worked through on the conscious level, then the person does not remain crippled, in spite of what many would want you to believe. What does create a crippled state is the belief that this pain can be eliminated only when the person is finally given all that was lacking then, even years later. This can never happen. For even if it were possible for an adult to finally obtain substitute parents who are ideal and perfect according to the notions of the deprived child, for an adult all this giving coming from the outside could never bring fulfillment.

The fulfillment so painfully longed for can be attained only when you, as an adult, proceed to search within yourself for all that which you still look for outside of yourself. This must begin with the question of self-responsibility. If you remain stuck on blame -- by making both your parents and life responsible -- then you deprive yourself of the vital center of all good within you. Only when you search to alter your attitude and you discover that your suffering is induced by your attitude now can you begin to find security -- the same security which you once looked for in the sustenance given to you by others. Your anxiety will disappear to the exact degree that you search within yourself for the cause of your present suffering. And this suffering is the result of denial of the original pain and the consequent negative and destructive patterns of feeling and of thinking.

When people begin to assume self-responsibility, then they will also gradually cease to wait for the good feelings to come from the outside. They will be less dependent on being praised and loved because they will be able to give themselves the esteem which they could not give to themselves as demanding, resentful children. This is yet another step toward the goal of being centered within the real self, rather than hanging on to another. This, in turn, increases the ability to have a strong flow of good, warm feelings, and it nourishes the desire to give those feelings rather than to spitefully withold them. The ability to experience pleasure from within the body and from within the soul -- and then to offer it to others -- becomes a real alternative to greedily insisting on receiving. All these increased abilities will then fill the emptiness created by the child's unfulfilled needs.

The more the pain of the unfulfilled legitimate needs remains either unfelt or only half experienced, the more false needs will fill the personality. Such a person is then bound to make demands on others. When these demands are not being fulfilled, then the resentment -- and often the venom -- with which cases are being built against both life and others increase one's sense of deprivation, so that a continuous vicious circle seems to entrap the person in a state of hopelessness. It is not too difficult to rationalize a case and produce a blaming accusation. One can always find actual, imagined, or exaggerated and distorted reasons for focusing the weight of responsibility outside of the self. Since all this is subtle and concealed, it requires specific attention in self-observation and self-honesty to see this process at work. Only when you are capable of admitting your irrational demands and of seeing how you want to dish out punishment to those whom you blame can you truly understand the connections that I am making here.

What are the real needs of an adult? They are the need for self-expression, the need for growth, the need for development, the need for reaching one's spiritual potential, and everything that accrues from that. This means pleasure, love, fulfillment, good relationships, and a meaningful contribution to the great plan, in which everyone has his a task to fulfill. When a certain amount of growth has taken place, then this task begins to be felt and inwardly experienced, until it becomes a reality. It is a real need to perceive this growth. Therefore, the lack of this perception brings unhappiness. Then the person must proceed to search for the obstructions within his or her soul and remove them. They are always connected with the perpetuation of needs which at one time were real, but which now have become false needs.

The perpetuation of false needs creates a number of destructive conditions within the soul of a person. Since these needs can never be fulfilled, continuous frustration and continuos emptiness wipe out hope, blacken one's vision, and induce resentment, hate, blame, and often spite. A venomous passive resistance and self-punishment are used to punish others who appear to cause one's negative state. The worse these inner traits are, the greater the guilt and the self-evasion, which then make it impossible to get to the roots of the problem and to change both the direction and the focus. All of this can be reversed only when the resistance to exposing the false needs has been vigorously overcome.

Real needs never require others to comply with you and to give you what you demand. Only to the little self does that appear necessary. The real need for love, the real need for companionship, and the real need for sharing can begin to be fulfilled only when the soul is ready to love and ready to give -- which must never be confused with the neurotic need to be loved. But this confusion between the two needs is quite frequent. As long as you believe that you are really willing to love but that fate is slighting you and witholding from you the person who loves you and whom you can love, it means you are still ardently engaged in trying to fulfill the childhood need with a substitute parent. In your heart of hearts you are still angry, still blaming, still punishing, and still self-victimizing because your imagined need for love remains slighted. Once you are ready to give up the old case, to start to live in the now, and to look within yourself, then real love will come to you. Hence, your present real need will be fulfilled.

Legitimate needs can be fulfilled only to the degree that you experience both your original feelings and your residual feelings of the past. This means that you first discover and then give up the false needs that have accrued from denying the pain of the original unfulfillment. Let yourself go into the child state and allow all the irrational, destructive reactions of the child in you to express themselves now. When you truly own up to this part of you, then you already begin to create a new inner climate.

This is not easy to do at first. Cherished self-images and pretenses prevent almost everyone from doing this with ease. The destructive, demanding, punishing, and spiteful child usually manifests in a very obscure way, which can be easily hidden, rationalized, denied, or explained away, and the emphasis shifted to factors outside yourself. If you give voice to this irrational side, then you will find that, to varying degrees, it invariably says: "I need to be always loved by everyone. I need to be always approved of by everyone. If I am not, then it is a catastrophe." Then the self talks itself into believing this, as a means to force others to comply. The over-reaction of the self then becomes so painful that the non-fulfillment of these insatiable demands for total, unconditional gratification of selfwill and of pride does seem a catastrophic fact of life. No matter how mature you may be in many respects of your being, look for these hidden reactions in you when you feel consistently anxious and uncomfortable as certain conditions arise in your environment.

The belief in catastrophe is rarely thought about in such clear-cut terms. Indeed, once you think clearly, then it will be impossible for you to believe in catastrophe quite as much any longer. The difficulty is that your reaction that equates catastrophe with the unfulfillment of your demand to be loved and approved of by everybody is vague. In other words, the reaction is not conceptualized but is rationalized away, so that you never follow through with both your thinking and your feeling -- and thereby correlate them both. So it is necessary to discover the misconception entrapped in your strong reaction to an unfulfillment, to a hurt, to a criticism, or to a frustration. Then it is possible to recognize the unreal need and the vengeance with which it is perpetuated, pursued, and justified. Unreal needs are demands made upon others. Unreal needs can never be fulfilled.

It is an unreal need to assume that being hurt will harm you. It harms you only when you have a covert concept that it will, and you insist that it will, simply because you are disinclined to accept life as it is now and to accept yourself as you are now.

Some of you have begun to know and then to experience the truth that your pleasure, your peace, and your fulfillment never depend on others but only on yourself. But sometimes you forget this truth when you approach an as yet unrecognized territory within yourself where the false needs and the unexperienced residual feelings create a destructive focal point.

The dualistic misunderstanding -- the image -- that either you depend on yourself and therefore must be all alone, or that you are in a fulfilling relationship and then utterly depend on the other prevents you from even wanting to assume self-responsibility. Doing so seems to require giving up all hope for a loving partner. Exactly the opposite is true. Only when you bring your feelings back to yourself, only when you tap the resources within yourself, and only when you open the wells of your giving and loving feelings will fulfillment become an inevitable reality. Conversely, to the degree that you cling to and insist on the other fulfilling you, to that degree you must remain lonely and unfulflled in your real needs now -- thereby perpetuating the old wounds of your childhood. Thus, your present state can be used as a gauge which is more reliable than anything else, for life cannot be cheated. Its laws and its rules tell you the truth about where you are, even if your direct awareness is still dimmed. When fulfillment is absent, then you must probe within yourself to find where and how you project onto another what must primarily come from within you.

When the real need to remove the blocks to awareness, to self-fulfillment, to intimacy, and to closeness with others is expressed by the spiritual self by discarding the false needs, then a wonderful force is awakened. This plea is never answered with a stone. Even if you still feel too weak to make the necessary total commitment, you can ask to be helped to be able to do so. The help will come.

This is the all-important aim, out of which everything else follows. As you see how you now avoid the long-forgotten pain of the past still festering within you, then you also discover how you have remained hooked on blaming. For no matter how much your parents failed -- for they themselves are failing human beings -- they cannot be held responsible for your suffering now. Even less can others whom you expect to be able to make up for all the injuries that you have endured. Your suffering now is a result of this distortion of pursuing false needs and of insisting on their fulfillment. At first this mechanism seems extremely subtle. But once you have trained yourself to observe it, then it will become obvious. As long as you choose to stay unaware, then you may be very adept at rationally explaining your case. But this will only make your condition worse. You may indeed deceive others about how legitimate your case is. You may even deceive your outer, conscious self. But you can never deceive your real, inner self, nor can you deceive life. For life plays out its laws and its rules squarely, fairly, and impartially. It waits until you find the truth where your non-recognized legitimate needs as a child created fear and pain, both of which you were unwilling and unable to experience fully. This cup has to be emptied. Your unwillingness, in turn, created false needs whose nature and whose meaning also became concealed. When all this is out in the open, then you can deal with it.

All repression and all hiding create vicious circles and negative chain reactions. The false needs create evils, such as cruelty, vindictiveness, and so on. The guilt and the resulting self-hate for these make the original pain seem justified in your secret evaluation of yourself. But you do not wish to admit this, so you go on continually projecting your blame onto others. The energies entrapped in holding down the force of all these feelings swell and become increasingly more powerful, thereby creating crisis upon crisis. They can be released and used for your good only when you first bring out everything that is hidden in you and then you evaluate it in truth. This requires the courage to accept your evil without totally identifying with it. This, in turn, will instantly set the course of your life in the direction of fulfilling your real needs now.

The pursuit of false needs causes unbearable pain. It is a pain that is tight, locked, and bitter, with the added connotation of hopelessness. It is different from the pain of a real unfulfillment, the pain of a real a hurt, the pain of a real deprivation. The moment these difficulties are no longer channeled into unreal needs, then the pain can be dissolved and it can transform itself back into its original flowing, life-bringing energy current. Hard pain is a result of fighting against what is. Soft pain is a result of acceptance.

Once the covering crust of the outer numbness has been removed by your efforts on your path and the defensive layer insulating you from these inner conditions has been lifted, then you are bound to experience your various feelings, both your real needs and your false needs, and the resulting soft pain and hard pain. To find your way through the maze of these confusions, it is essential for all of you to know the difference between the former and the latter. If you experience residual feelings but you are unaware of the fact that you are immersed in expressing your insatiable demands, which are your false needs, then you may get lost in the hard pain. For the hard pain, coming from your insistence on your false needs, contains the vengeance. The suffering itself is a frequent weapon for punishing parents, for punishing projected parents, and for punishing life. It says: "Do you see how bad you are and what you have done to me? Your not complying with my demands deserves the punishment of my annihilation." And the blind person -- who is involved in this process without being aware of it -- can indeed allow himself to go overboard and be pulled into this undercurrent.

Therefore, it is important to test the kind of pain that is being expressed. Does it lead to bleak hopelessness, to sustained abysses where no light seems to dawn? Then it can be safely assumed that the level of venom prevents the real experience of the residual original pain. For in the case of experiencing real pain, then an inner organic wisdom guides both the rhythm and the duration of each experience. Each time there will be a deep insight and the connecting links will bring more light and more hope. But when they are absent, then you should not go deeper into this hard pain, because you are -- unconsciously and therefore unwittingly -- punishing others with this pain. The work should be directed toward recognizing what is really going on. Then one can safely go into into the residual experience and free oneself, for then it will be done in an entirely different spirit. One's attitude will be one of hope and purpose, rather than that of a helpless victim who is being led to slaughter.

Your fear to go into yourself all the way is due much less to the real pain. Soft pain, which is due to unfulfilled real needs, may momentarily result in forceful expressions of crying, of yelling, of writhing, and of hitting, but there is a safe inner ground due to the absence of a venomous forcing current that sends a message of vengeance into the world. The mellow sadness of real pain and of real needs dissolves into its own streamings. The unbearable, hard, and dangerous experience of pain is due to the false need that says: "You must give me what I need, what I insist upon. If you do not, then I will perish with a vengeance."

This voice must be discovered. It exists to some degree in everybody, without exception. The more concealed it is, then the further away you are from dissolving it and transforming your energy currents. Then you have to let yourself experience this voice and recognize it for what it is, rather than identifying with it. As long you are totally identified with it, then you cannot confront it and test it. But the moment you observe it as being only a part of you, then you will instantly know that this is not all there is to you. That aspect of you which observes it is more you than that which is being observed. And the aspect of you which questions the voice that cries with vengeance, which has a dialogue with it, and which probes for the truth of its implied message, is even stronger. It continues to become stronger, until it finally takes over completely. This eliminates the need for total self-rejection, which is the outcome of totally identifying with the voice of the false need.

Ask yourself this question: "Is it really true that I must perish because I have endured pain, or because I am enduring pain now?" Then you will have to answer that this is not necessarily the only possibility. Continue by asking yourself: When is it so and when is it not so? What does it depend on, as far as I am concerned? When all these questions are seriously confronted, then you will see that it is not true that you must perish, or even lead an unhappy life for the rest of your remaining days just because you have endured pain. No pain can ever make you perish. It is only your attitude toward pain that will make you perish. If you resist and you harden yourself against the pain, then the pain compounds and it will literally crush you. Only when you are being crushed -- not ever by the pain that others inflict upon you, but by what you inflict upon yourself -- can you confront this attitude in yourself. That means to have a dialogue with it, as I said before.

When you specifically let go, one by one, of your insatiable demands and of your unreal needs, then you will find out that they are indeed illusory. For example, you started off with the premise that you could not live without total approval, without unconditional acceptance, without unconditional love, without uncritical admiration of your unerring understanding, or whatever else it may be. As you consider the possibility that you might gain fulfillment, contentment, pleasure, and happiness without these demands being fulfilled -- which is a novel idea at first -- then you will be surprised to find that it is quite possible to do so. New ways will make themselves known, new possibilities that you could never have sensed before, just because you were so bent on the one way it had to be.

Where there is an obstruction, where there is an unfulfillment, or where there is an unyielding wall in your life, then an unreal need has to be looked for. You must find your insistence that says: "It must be this way, it must not be that way. Life must give me this. I must have it." When you first find and then express this voice and you recognize it for its fallacy, then something will loosen up instantly. The fact that you question the validity of these unreal needs -- which until now you had taken for granted as being real -- will liberate your creative energies. From your innermost being, from the center of your solar plexus, the voice of wisdom will guide you. It has already guided you before in the areas where you were not blocked. But it could not guide you where you are in the greatest need for guidance both from within you and from outside yourself. Then it is possible to use these released energies to plough the way further where the thickets still have to be cleared. Then these energies can go to work to dissolve the soul substance that is still hardened by hidden preconceived -- and therefore unarticulated and unchallenged -- convictions, by insistence, by tight selfwill, by negation, and by the repression of feelings and of thoughts.

The hardened insistence must not be confused with determination, it must not be confused with a relaxed good will, it must not be confused with commitment, and it must not be confused with the one-pointed focusing of energy, all of which are such indispensable prerequisites for the pathwork. The cramp of the hardened selfwill intensifies the original residual pain many times over. It creates a painful tension in the system, one which is always blamed on others -- how they have failed you in the past and how they are still failing you now in the present. Then you have no choice but to give up the future.

The energies that are being released by following through the process described here are not merely physical energies which bring well-being, flow, and pleasure. They release the voice of truth and the wisdom that is your innermost spiritual self. When you come out of your darkness, then you will learn first to recognize it and then to trust it. Then it will show you the best approach to plough your way between the two extremes and find the middle way. These extremes are the blind wishful thinking that listens only to what you want to hear and which makes you deaf to the real truth, and the cynical distrust of all the deeper truths from your spiritual self, which makes you equally deaf. So you have to search for your way between these two extremes.

When you go deep into your innermost feelings, then there will be no danger of losing yourself in unendurable pain. For no matter how difficult your childhood was, no matter how much negative experience you had, and no matter how cruel a parent may have been, the real cause of your pain is not that. The cause is your persistence and your insistence on remaining hooked on needs which now are false needs, on demanding that conditions be different, and on demanding that life make up for it now and that it give to you gratuituously, thereby leaving you as a recipient, leaving you out of the magnificent game of life. This is what really hurts you and pains you now. You must start with yourself at all junctures. If you proceed this way, then you will be able to allow the positive feelings to become experiences which are just as deep and just as real as the negative and painful feelings.