Resume Of The Basic Principles Of The Pathwork: Its Aim And Process

By The Pathwork Guide

Greetings my dearest friends. Blessings and love, strength and joy are ever-present within and around you, always permeating you to the degree that you allow them to. With great joy I resume the help and the guidance that I am privileged to give you. This coming working season promises further progress, new steps toward the realization of your ultimate being. It is going to be an intense year for all of you who follow this path. As in previous years, we shall attempt to proceed directly into the areas that it is most necessary to first explore and then to experience. Your previous achievements will encourage you to try out new approaches and will make your present efforts more rewarding. In fact, you will often find that what in the past had seemed either a tedious effort or too painful a price to pay for future gains to be really a most joyful and fulfilling experience. Also, the bond among you will be drawn closer and more love and more unity will reign due to your growing state, to your moving energies, and to your expanding consciousness.

At the end of the last working season I was asked to give a resume, a condensation, of the teachings that I have brought to you during all these years. This is a very useful new beginning. I shall now proceed to do this as best as I can. For it is not easy to summarize the many steps, all of which necessary, the many areas that have to be looked into from different angles, and the many confusions that need to be straightened out. As you know, the human language itself presents difficulties and limitations, so that misunderstandings can easily occur. But whatever you do not understand, whatever is not clear, we can take up in future sessions together.

First of all, in order to really understand the nature of this path, it is important to understand, at least to some degree, the nature of the entity you are. What are the various components of the human entity? Whatever explanation I can give you here is somewhat oversimplified, but it is nevertheless valid. Use it as a map that gives you an overall idea of the being you have to deal with when you approach yourself, and therefore others.

Man consists of different levels of consciousness. Each level of consciousness represents a conglomerate of attitudes, of beliefs, and of feelings. These levels of consciousness are often at total variance with each other. They express different states of development in the evolutionary movement. In the spiritual world they are expressed as spheres. Your state of consciousness always creates its own world, with its own laws, its own value system, its own philosophy, its own reality, its own mores. Each world -- each state of consciousness -- has a different degree of awareness of the ultimate cosmic reality, and therefore also different degrees of limitations. These limitations determine the extent to which the abundance of the universe can be experienced. Only the ultimate reality of man's innermost being -- which is the true world -- is unbroken unity of being, is eternal, ever-flowing life, is creativity, is joy, and is self-expression. This world does not exist in some faraway place. It permeates everything that exists. In fact, your various levels of consciousness draw you into their corresponding worlds. They do not exist in time and space, but in a reality that transcends both. Thus they can overlap. Time, space, and movement are limited conceptions of the human mind -- of this particular state of consciousness. Thus in a reality that transcends the human, physical one two or more worlds can easily exist in one and the same space.

An entity who is not yet unified and who has not yet realized its ultimate nature expresses these different levels of consciousness and is thus drawn into their corresponding worlds, either alternately or simultaneously. While the entity is in the body, this manifests as various moods, as various perceptions, and as various experiences. How often does it happen that what you deeply feel to be the truth of life and the truth of yourself today may be totally reversed tomorrow? For tomorrow you may experience life and experience yourself very differently. When you are drawn simultaneously into two conflicting worlds of your own making, then you will experience conflict and confusion. When the entity is out of the body, then this phenomenon manifests as the entity being drawn into the actual environment and a certain level of consciousness it has created, and then as being drawn into the respectively created world of another level, and then into another, and into another still, for as long as various states of consciousness exist in the still-disunified personality. The less the self-awareness of the entity, the less does it realize that the world it experiences at any given phase of its evolution is not the ultimate one and not the only one of its own creation. The states of limited awareness of reality necessarily create suffering. When this unhappy state of existence is believed to be the only reality, then apprehension, fear, and despair are inevitable. The illusion of these perceptions can be eliminated only by the arduous path of bringing all your inner worlds into your awareness.

The gamut of the various degrees of awareness, hence that of joy and peace or their lack, is truly immensely varied, until the ultimate state of reality is realized.

The human condition can best be expressed, in a broad or overall way, in terms of the following levels of consciousness. The higher self -- which is the God-consciousness; the lower self -- which is the demonic self; and the mask self -- which hides the demonic self. There are many degrees and many stages within these levels. The fact that they overlap, that they cancel each other out, the confusion they create, and their indirect effects and chain reactions are all to be explored, understood, and eventually mastered. That is the path. All these aspects of the personality can be either conscious or unconscious to varying degrees. The less your awareness of any of these states, the more conflict exists in your life. Hence, the less equipped you are to deal with life, to deal with yourself, and to deal with other people. And the farther you are removed from the realization of your ultimate, divine self.

The lack of awareness comes from being split off from the reality of one's real self, or higher self, or divine self. The average person is also unaware of the lower self and unaware of the mask self. This lack of awareness creates misunderstandings, illusions, and misconceptions. One of the aspects of this pathwork is first to find these misconceptions and then to correct them.

Let us now shed some light first on the aim of this pathwork and then on the process. The aim of the pathwork is to unify all these levels so that both the mask self and the lower self dissolve and only the higher self manifests and expresses itself. Only when the lower self and the mask self are entirely conscious and their exact manifestations have been understood can the misconceptions be corrected. The lack of awareness creates misconceptions. The misconceptions create negative energy and therefore negative feelings. These, in turn, create suffering. This chain must be reversed. But it can be reversed only when awareness of the mask self, awareness of the lower self, and finally awareness of the higher self can be attained through various processes and approaches.

It cannot be denied that to expand the consciousness of the limited mind represents a tremendous difficulty. For man has only this same limited mind at his disposal when he starts out. Thus this limited mind must transcend itself in order to realize its unlimited power and its true scope. Therefore, the path requires that the mind constantly attempt to bridge the gap of its own limitations by considering new possibilities, by making room for other alternatives for the self, for life, and for expressing the self in life. This demands the effort of coming out of an old, set, and apparently comfortable mold. But this comfort is the greatest illusion. However, all illusions seem real as long as they are not considered as possibly being illusions and as long as no other alternatives are being allowed.

The overall state of consciousness of the human condition is one of duality, of opposites. I have often discussed some of the many aspects of the confusion created by the dualistic perception of reality. I do not have the time to go into this topic at length now, for I have devoted many lectures to it. Here I only want to say that the confusion created by the dualistic perception of reality must be straightened out on all levels and in exact detail. This means conception, perception, and finally change. I want to emphasize that the unification of the fragmented self cannot take place as long as the world is perceived in a dualistic form. When issues, people, the self, the world, life, ideas, and attitudes appear to be either good or bad, either right or wrong, then there is distortion of reality. As a consequence, there is suffering -- although the connection between the distortion and the suffering is not obvious to whomever is still involved in this illusory picture of life. Every conceivable attitude, every feeling, every idea, every human expression can be both good and bad. When this is experienced -- and therefore is no longer a mere theory -- then it is one of the most important marks of evolution and growth. I recommend that the lectures dealing with the various aspects of this topic be studied carefully so that you can connect the importance of this issue with your own emotional and spiritual state.

The process of expanding the mind and of transcending its own temporary limitations must be a conscious and deliberate effort toward this goal. The effort is not a labor of the will and of the mind, but an opening process that first considers new alternatives which can then eventually become a reality. When you experience yourself only as a cut-off -- and therefore powerless -- ego and when you, consequently, try to put all the energy and all the power at your disposal into this ego, then you must fail. But when you allow for the possibility that you may be the expression of an as yet unmanifest deeper, wider, wiser, and more loving divine self, then this divine self is sufficiently freed to manifest. Hence you bridge the gap from ignorance and alienation to an open state of mind that questions, that considers, that probes, and then that waits for an actual experience of the ultimate truth. Such an experience is what is called faith.

But when the mind remains within the fences of its present limitations, then transcendence cannot occur. The attempt to transcend the momentary limited mind and to experience the divine consciousness is called meditation. The process of first becoming aware of and then dealing with the mask self and the lower self will greatly speed up if the higher self is called into play and is directed by the conscious mind to give specific guidance.

There are two basic approaches to human spirituality. The first one is to emphasize, to concentrate on, and to focus on the divine possibility within until this possibility becomes a reality. Many movements exist that have practices, teachings, and exercises that help, actively and effectively, toward this end. All the energies and all the concentration are directed toward cultivating and enhancing, manifesting and expressing the divine reality within. But this does not necessarily mean that the fragmentary levels of consciousness are automatically eliminated and incorporated into the divine center. It is quite possible, and indeed a frequent occurrence, that such practices bring out the real higher self, yet they leave intact or untouched the undeveloped aspects of consciousness. Many entities have such an intense longing to realize their inherent divine nature that while they are in the body they forget that they came to fulfill a mission in the universal plan. This mission is the purification and the growth of undeveloped cosmic matter. In order to do this, then the second approach must be adopted. And that is to shed the light of conscious awareness and experience on the inner distortions, on the ugliness, on the darkness, on the evil, on the suffering, as well as on the inner truth, on the beauty, on the love, on the goodness, on the joy. In order to do this, you need to develop a fine sensitivity so that the organic rhythm and the alternation that each individual path expresses can be perceived. You need to know when to focus more on one aspect and when to focus more on another. For example, you need to know when to concentrate more on the higher self, so as to strengthen its staying power and therefore to make it possible for it to give further guidance, and when to pay attention to the lower self with its hidden evil, its dishonesty, its cheating, its camouflaged hate, and its malice. You need to know when to focus on the specific devices of the mask self -- how it masks itself, what defenses it uses in order to keep the lower self hidden, and so on. Finally, you need to know when the moment is ripe to experience feelings that have been avoided. These fine alternations must be sensed both by the person and by the helper, for everyone has a different rhythm.

There are periods and phases when the main concentration should be on the negative aspects -- on the distortions and the ugliness -- for the danger of escaping into the positive, rather than using the positive attitudes for the purpose of purification, is always great. There are other periods and phases when you should concentrate on the positive. Do not overlook the fact that it is possible to get in touch with the divine self and then to use it to camouflage the split-off, distorted aspects of consciousness. The divine is neutral. Therefore, it will follow the will direction of the consciousness in its immutable way.

It must be clear to all of you who want to join this work that our approach to spirituality and to the realization of the spiritual self is the second of the two ways. The greater pain and discomfort that appear to be a byproduct of this path are also an illusion, for as long as any blocked off, split-off, dark, distorted cosmic substance exists in you, then suffering is inevitable, whether or not you choose to know this. Our path is a taxing path, but it is a reality. It does not lead to illusion and to splitting off. It brings out into concrete experience whatever may still smolder unmanifest underground, but which at one time or another is bound to reach the surface and then to create experience. It is always easier and quicker to transcend a state when we have consciously and deliberately confronted it -- in other words, when the self accepts this present inner state and wants to go through it -- than when confrontation comes inexorably, as a lawful, rhythmic, universal movement on an entity's evolutionary journey. An entity who chooses such a path incorporates itself into the divine plan. The aim of this approach to spiritual reunion is to help toward the reunification of everything that has ever split itself off.

Now we come to the approach itself. We will summarize and discuss the fundamentals, but we cannot go into all the manifold details and considerations. The levels to be worked with on the path -- each in a different way -- are the following aspects of the human personality.

1. The level of mind and thought.

2. The level of the will.

3. The level of feelings.

4. The level of physicality and of physical expression.

5. The level of life experience.

When all these levels are conscious and when their inevitable divergence from each other is faced and accepted, then a unification process can begin. When the lower self is first accepted, then understood, and finally dissolved, and when the mask self is dispensed with, then unification in the spiritual reality of being can take place in a realistic way. Let us now examine the different approaches to the different personality levels.

1. The level of the mind, of thought. To work on the level of the mind means to deal with the misconceptions. Those of you who have been in this work for a longer time have first discovered and then ousted a number of misconceptions that have governed you. Thoughts and thought processes that are directed into an erroneous channel affect all the other levels. They always create vicious circles. These vicious circles entrap you. That is, they put you into a hopeless situation. And it is indeed true that as long as you move within this vicious circle there is no hope. But the moment the vicious circle is broken, then you are liberated from the entrapment. Therefore, it is imperative to first see, then to understand, and finally to give up these components of attitude and of behavior that create the vicious circle. This means that a concept, a thought process, or an approach to reality must be changed. The misconception must be recognized as such: why it is one, how it exists, and in what way it leads one into a vicious circle. How does the vicious circle proceed? What is the corresponding true conception? How would living according to this true concept lead into a wide-open world, into a benign sequence of creative self-expression? All this must be clearly perceived, then it must be made conscious, third it must be understood, and eventually it must be experienced emotionally. It is not enough to have a theoretical understanding of these inner processes. Only through the emotional experience can the existing misconception be replaced by a true concept. Only then will the true concept take root in the psyche and therefore open up new channels of functioning -- in other words, of spontaneous behavior, as opposed to behavior based on conditioned reflexes -- and the creative expression of one's feelings.

Misconceptions can be conscious. But you may not necessarily know that they are misconceptions. Therefore your conscious beliefs must also be tested and investigated. Misconceptions can also be vaguely conscious, in a nebulous way. In other words, your actions and your reactions testify to the fact that you are governed by misconceptions, but you have not concisely specified first what they are and then what their consequences are. All this must be determined specifically. Since misconceptions can be unconscious, the pathwork must deal with making them conscious. This can be done only by examining the life manifestation. For one's life does not lie. It expresses exactly what you really, inwardly believe. For example, you may consciously claim that you are a loving person and you may consciously believe in love. But if you suffer from a loveless life, then it testifies to the fact that -- somewhere inside of you -- you do not believe in love, and therefore that you you do not want to love. And you have your reasons for not loving, namely your misconceptions about what love is. Hence, the unconscious misconceptions can be unearthed only by looking at your life: at your suffering, at your frustrations, at your unfulfilled longings.

All the levels must be dealt with in both the conscious mind and the unconscious mind. These two approaches vary from personality aspect to personality aspect. You have to work differently with the level of the mind, with the level of the will, with the level of the feelings, and with the level of the body.

2. The level of the will. In order to work on the level of the will, you first have to understand that there is an outer will and an inner will. To put it differently, there is a voluntary will action and an involuntary will action. These two levels of the will also have to be scrutinized, made conscious, and then understood. Where distortions, misconceptions, and negativities exist in a psyche, there the will forces are out of balance. In other words, where the will should be active, it is often paralyzed and stagnant; and where the will should be receptive and passive, it is tight, forced, and overactive. Thus a re-establishment of balance must occur as the purification proceeds. On the level of the mind, you must distinguish in what areas you must act, you must initiate. In short, use your inherent capacity to will. This may apply to your actions, or it may apply equally to an attitude expressed toward life. You must also discern in what areas to momentarily accept the limitations of your will and to let go of the forcing current of an overactive will. This re-establishment of will currents cannot be done by the outer will. If this is recognized and the pressure of the outer will is relaxed, then the inner will can come to the fore and can begin to function. A lot of frustration is incurred by man by pushing with his outer will and thus either prohibiting the inner, relaxed will from manifesting, or by preventing the outer will from reaching out into life.

My friends who are involved in this pathwork will recognize much of the ground already covered.

3. The level of feelings. Where there are misconceptions of the mind -- whether conscious or unconscious -- and where there is an imbalance of the inner and outer will, there the feelings are destructive, stagnant, painful. The energy of the feeling body is paralyzed and blocked. Therefore, it is a substantial aspect of any process of unification and purification to experience the feeling level, or the feeling body, if you will, and to let out the paralyzed blocks of feelings -- whatever they may be. They must be dealt with on the conscious level in order to be re-channeled constructively -- for destructive feelings can certainly be expressed constructively. If this is not being done, then negative, painful feelings will stagnate on an unconscious level and they will prohibit the personality from healthy functioning, from good feelings, and from the vital energy flow which is the nature of universal life. This inevitably leads to the indirect and destructive acting out of such feelings -- which most of the time the personality is entirely unaware of. You see no other alternative than acting the way you do, than reacting the way you do, and than being the way you are. And you overlook the fact, which is often crystal clear to those in your environment, that you are actually acting out your negative feelings.

In order to deal with the feeling level you have to learn how to get in touch with feelings that are locked up inside of you. This may be discernible only indirectly, by the manifestations in your life, by your life experience.

The evoking of feelings is done by a variety of approaches, which we hardly need to enumerate here. It suffices to say that the experiencing and the expressing of feelings that were deemed to be either unacceptable or unbearable, and the ability to handle them and to sustain them, is the only way a person can lose his fear, his anxiety, and his tension. As long as you hope against hope that your life would be free from painful feelings, then you are hoping for an illusion. And deep down you know it, yet you cling to it. Hence you are afraid, so you feel shaky and inadequate. But when your feelings can be experienced, no matter what they are, then you become automatically secure and unafraid, and therefore relaxed. And this state of being relaxed and loose -- in your mind, in your will, in your feelings, and in your body -- is the indispensable prerequisite for pleasure and thus for fulfillment.

The refusal to experience painful feelings rests on the misconception that either they will annihilate you or that they will prove that you are no good. This misconception must be challenged and replaced with the truth. If it is not, then you will not allow yourself to experience your painful feelings. This refusal creates a tight will current so as to ward off what you believe to be your annihilation. Hence, the will must be relaxed, so that it may become possible for you to experience what is already in you -- and what must paralyze all your best functioning unless you go through it and thus transcend it.

4. The level of the body, of the physical expression. Since it is impossible that an attitude that exists on one level does not also manifest on all the other levels, then every misconception, every distortion, every imbalance of the will functioning, and every refusal to feel what is there also creates a physical manifestation, a bodily condition. Thus, it hampers not only the person's spiritual unfoldment but equally his or her physical life experience. Therefore, it is false to assume that the physical life and the spiritual life stand in opposition. The truth is that the one is merely an expression of the other. The physical body expresses conceptual error, will imbalance, and stagnant denied feelings in the form of muscular blocks. The tensions and the energy stagnation caused by a distortion on any of the other levels can affect the body by distorting it, by creating all sorts of symptoms and, when neglected long enough, by physical illness. You can now perceive how the different levels interact.

The physical level must be approached in a different way. As you have learned on this path, in order to be eliminated the blocks must also be helped from the outer level; the energy must be set in motion again; the physical feelings must be connected with the soul movements, with the inner attitudes, with the contents of the mind. Where energy is blocked, there the consciousness cannot penetrate. Every cell in the human body is conscious. It is a consciousness unto itself. When an area in the body is blocked off, then the cellular system in this area is prevented from being permeated with the divine energy stream and the divine consciousness. The whole universe consists of energy and consciousness. Creation is an ongoing process that results from a happy fusion between energy and consciousness. In other words, they interact.

The pathwork is effective when it takes place on all these levels and with all these approaches. As I said, there is no outer rule that can determine when to change from one level to the other. It is different with everyone. The path must be allowed to express itself from within as a living, organismic reality. All the various avenues offered on this path fulfill important functions in order to work first on one level and then on another level.

It is necessary to attempt, again and again, to get in touch with the higher self, the divine consciousness, that is ever-present, that is immutable, and that is immediately available within you. When this is done for the purpose of making the distorted levels of the soul substance conscious and in order to reorient them so as to unify all the split-off soul substance, then meditation must take a different road from the kind of meditation that is used for the sole purpose of realizing the divine self while disregarding the dark aspects of the self. It is a current illusion and wishful thinking that this latter approach automatically deals with the dark side of human nature. This cannot be so. You cannot overcome what you have not consciously experienced fully. This wishful hope is nourished by the fact that it is possible to realize the already potentially present part of the Godself. It is important to understand this clearly. This is why it is often true that entities who have led a difficult and apparently unspiritual life once they shed the body do more toward the universal process of evolution than some others who may have led an extremely spiritual life, who may even have been so-called masters, but who have cultivated their beauty and have disregarded their ugliness. Thus they have failed to unify themselves. Hence, they have unwittingly perpetuated the dualistic state of consciousness in which this earth finds itself.

Since our path deals with the harder of the two roads, our approach to meditation is different. The next time I will give a special lecture which is a summary of what I have given you over the years in regard to the various approaches to meditation for this particular path. For the approaches to meditation can be as varied as the human personality, as varied as life experience. Meditation is too vast a subject to be included in this summary. The next lecture will help you on your further path by showing you in concise outline certain basic precepts and fundamental rules of meditation.

Many human beings, no matter how committed they are to this path, are not always capable of meditating, for the blocks of the mind, of the will, of the feelings, and of the body also create a spiritual block, so that meditation cannot be practiced. You must grope and seek to unblock a little here and a little there, through deep insight, through a search for recognition, through a summoning of honest courage and through letting yourself feel what is in you. Through such an endeavor the block to meditation will loosen up. Then you can meditate for guidance in order to experience more feelings. You have to release your blocks in order to meditate and you must meditate in order to release your blocks. At times a person starts the path without any meditation whatsoever, for his consciousness may block off this approach. When sufficient unblocking has been done and when false spirituality has been sufficiently cleared up, then a new influx of spiritual energy and of divine consciousness can take place. Thereafter every effort becomes easier. A spiritual block can exist either by adopting a false, escapist, separating spirituality or by negating the greater reality altogether. In both instances the misconceptions must be eliminated in order to free the channel for the spiritual influx. Real spirituality is often rejected when a person wants to reject the false, escapist spirituality but confuses the two.

When the blocks to the spiritual influx begin to be eliminated, then the whole process can be speeded up. That is, the process of awareness, of liberation, of healing, and of unification. For each step of the way you can avail yourself of this immeasurably powerful tool: your contact with your divine reality. As I said, in the next lecture I will discuss some of the laws pertaining to meditation so as to help you further, although I have discussed this topic in the past. The time has come to bring it all together into one comprehesive whole.

Just as the mind level can be either conscious or unconscious, so can the will level, the feeling level, and even the body level. It is therefore imperative that the degree of consciousness be increased on all levels. It is also imperative that you connect, for example, a physical symptom -- a pain or a tension -- with the mental attitude, with the thought, with the emotion, and with the will that corresponds to and that motivates that specific physical manifestation. For instance, when you begin to sense that a specific bodily tension is a feeling of hate and rage, is an overactive outer will that is prevented from hitting out, is a specific misconception, then you unify all your levels. Therefore, you increase the scope of your consciousness on all levels.

One of the immutable spiritual laws is that the lack of awareness of one area prohibits the awareness of another. So, for example, if you manage to stave off awareness of your lower self and awareness of your mask self, then you will not be aware of your already manifest higher self. You may pay lip service to the fact that you must be the expression of a higher, divine consciousness. But you cannot possibly feel it unless you make yourself feel your lower self and the mask that hides it. Thus how can you possibly meditate and address an aspect of the divine in you? In the slow progression of such a pathwork it will come to pass that at times you may be conscious of your divine heritage, while at other times you will be totally cut off from it, and therefore oblivious of it.

Just as both the higher self and the lower self can be either conscious or unconscious, or at any degree between these two states, so can the mask self. The mask self is the pretense, it is the hiding, it is the facade that you present to the world, it is the idealized self-image you want to be and that you invest all your energies into so as to make it real. All of these various expressions indicate the mask self. The mask self is a defense against exposing who you really are at this point in time -- although you are not exclusively your lower self, which it is the purpose of your mask to hide. However, by masking anything of yourself you inevitably also mask your higher self from yourself. The more you try to show only your good side -- what is genuinely in the higher self but not in the mask self -- the more your higher self is masked. You may be either conscious of this or not. At times you may be acutely aware of your faking, of your falsifying yourself -- and this is preferable to the unaware state. At other times, you feel both ashamed and uncomfortable because you have identified with your mask so much and for so long. But you do not face this fact because you do not wish to deal with and then experience such feelings. Thus a further process of splitting off sets in, in which you lose track of who you really are more and more. This is the state of lostness that many individuals try to to cure by magical means. They try to use drugs, pills, magic formulas, even meditation. They also turn to therapies that encourage the helpless state of sickness and that overlook the potent factor of the will that must be used if it is first understood properly and then if it is applied correctly.

This is why the pathwork is, above everything else, a process of making things conscious. This self-awareness unifies you, it unifies the split in you, it unifies the conflicts in you, and it establishes your sense of self, and your knowledge of the fact that the universe, with all its bliss, is yours.

A very important aspect of this work is yet another level of self, beyond the physical body. The reason I failed to include it in our enumeration of levels is that this is generally not recognized as a level of the human personality in human thinking. This is the level of life experience. Generally, life experience is perceived as a separate entity, as it were. In other words, it is as if the human entity were put into a fixed life. It is ignored that every person's life experience is just as much an intrinsic expression of his or her inner being as is the body. It is only recently that a few advanced thinkers have begun to see the body as such a connected expression of the whole person. There are still many who view man's body manifestation as being just as disconnected from his inner life as his life experience. In reality, the life experience is totally symptomatic of the inner state of the manifest personality. Our path uses this most important tool and this most important truth in order to determine the inner state.

This more truthful and more comprehensive vision does away with the fallacy of man's helplessness. The truth finally leads man to assuming self-responsibility in every conceivable respect. Most human beings are loath to accept this. They would rather see themselves as helpless innocent victims -- with all the suffering and all the hopelessness that go with it -- than to accept the hope, the light, and the freedom of self-responsibility. This indicates not only the emotional immaturity of humanity as a whole; it also indicates the sense of guilt that is attached to admitting fallacy and distortion. Paradoxical as it may seem, the more helpless you pretend to be vis-a-vis your life experiences, the less does the inner, healthy, relaxed will function. Therefore, the stronger does the tight selfwill of the little ineffective ego become in order to ward off the imagined unjust life experience. What a waste of valuable energy!

It is an intrinsic aspect of this work that you eventually shed your illusion of being an innocent victim of life and that you then avail yourself of the key to freedom, which is self-responsibility. This is not a postulate or a philosophy that cannot be verified. Those who go into this work honestly and deeply enough must inevitably find out that both the good life experiences and the bad life experiences are exact expressions of their thinking, of their willing, of their feeling, and of their physical being.

There are many other aspects of the pathwork that are important to understand. But they are the details that help to fill out these fundamental principles. You will find them in past and future lectures and in past and future questions and answers.

Try to absorb and use what I gave you here. It will help you to know that where you are going and what you may be unwilling to experience is universal, that it is necessary, and that it is not at all unacceptable. It will also make you more aware of the inner rhythm and the reality that is the path. Those who commit themselves to the path will experience that there is a living, organic reality in the path. It manifests, it instructs, and it shows you that whatever you experience has a meaning for you. The difficulty is that at times you do not want to listen to it. You want to tune out. You want to go with your selfwill, and you give in to your own ideas, which often camouflage your fear of meeting yourselves head-on. Then you may seek out various ways that make it easy to camouflage yourselves. When that happens, then the voice of the path can no longer be discerned. That is why it should be cultivated at all times. Then this voice will speak louder and clearer each time you ask it. Ask it with a truly open attitude, an attitude that is willing to listen to a consciousness that is you and yet that is greater than the conscious you. Then you will see that this greater you is real and that the little consciousness is only a separate particle. When this begins to happen, then unification is beginning to take place.

Be blessed, my dear ones, all of you. Know that the love and the truth of the universe are your ultimate goal, that they are your ultimate fate. Therefore, nothing in the world can change it, even if the little mind is uselessly and stubbornly afraid of the process. Be blessed, go into this year's work with peace and with joy, for the universe holds such rich fulfillment for everyone. These are not empty words. The truth of these words will make itself known when you first fully face the opposite -- your unhappiness, your suffering, your distortions. As you do so, then the truth of your ultimate fate will become a reality.

September 24, 1971