Greetings, blessed be all of you, my beloved friends. The force of love and truth, elicited by your seeking, is pouring forth, to continue the sequence, to forge another link in the chain, to give you what you need most at this juncture of your path.
The average person's state of mind consists of a fragmented piece of consciousness. In this fragmented state he is cut off from reality. He inevitably lives in fear and limitation. Yet he believes that this is all there is to his life, and therefore he frantically clutches at this limited, fragmented state. He stems against the natural inner movement of the soul to go beyond, to expand this limited state, because the split off ego consciousness fears that doing so will dissolve his life and annihilate his existence. He ardently protects this limited state of consciousness, while it is this very limitation that creates fear and suffering.
Broadly speaking, this is man's plight. It is his task in the cycle of incarnations to re-integrate this split off ego consciousness and to regain forever wider and deeper portions of his real self, of his cosmic existence, with its unlimited, infinite possibilities for life experience, for joy, and for the creation of the self.
Man believes this split-off ego-consciousness to be his real self. In other words, he identifies with his brain, with his outer intelligence, with his will, with his mind, with all the faculties immediately available. He does not know that to whatever degree he now possesses these he has made them available for himself in the past with great effort and with the overcoming of resistance. For there was a state in which he possessed much less awareness, much less power to create, and much less ability to experience joy. His consciousness was much more limited and confined. He had to use whatever consciousness he had to enlarge his faculties and to avail himself of as yet unused potentials and dormant possibilities. This must go on until there is no longer any split-off fragment and until man has become one with ultimate reality and cosmic consciousness. The processes of this enlargement of the self, of making apparently foreign territory his own domain, are the pathwork -- any valid pathwork.
Ego means fragmentation. As I mentioned, it is the task of every entity who is caught in this fragmentation, and therefore in the cycle
of being born and dying, to enlarge his field of operation, his perception,
his awareness, and his power to create. The difficulty of doing so is that in the limited state of the ego separation enlargement of the ego, contrary to reality, appears as the annihilation of the ego -- that is, of man's very existence, of his sense of self. In order to penetrate this illusion he needs all available force, commitment, good will, and help -- help that he must want and reach for. This is truly man's search and man's struggle. Only as he ventures forth, step by step, overcoming the inherent and innate resistance to go beyond this separated present state, does he gradually find out that there is another life beyond the ego state. He then finds that this other life is reality and that this reality is not to be feared. He finds that it is good, that it is to be utterly trusted. It means that there is ongoing life, self-awareness, and ever increasing joy. He discovers that the limited ego state which he so ardently protected is an illusion, the illusion of death and aloneness.
Awareness has to be fought for. In other words, it does not come easily, nor gratuitously. Remaining in the isolated ego state may appear safe and easy, but it leads to stagnation and death -- ever re-occurring death.
The ego uses any number of tricks in order to maintain its separated limited state and in order to prevent moving beyond it. I should like to show you what these aspects and tricks of the ego are.
In the first place, the tricks of the ego are every conceivable negativity known to mankind. They are any fault, any violation of integrity, any violation of truth, any violation of love, any violation of divine law. Since all these negativities and faults can be summed up in the triad of pride, selfwill, and fear, I will show how the ego-tricks use these traits in order to prevent self-transcedence.
The fear of the ego to lose its present state of existence -- its self-awareness -- is so great that it displaces the instinct of self-preservation. The ego uses this instinct in the battle to preserve its present awareness. Fear always blinds and distorts truth and reality. Thus the ego maintains itself with pride. It maintains its separated state by creating an unreal, artificial conflict between the self and others. "I am better than you," "I am more than you," or "I must prove to the world how admirable, that is, better than others, I am," "I must outdo others," "I must not be worse than others," "My interests counteract those of others, and vice versa." All these attitudes are pridefully put into the service of maintaining the separated state of the ego. It is always I versus you. This false belief inevitably creates a spirit of one-upmanship. Regardless of whether or not an individual in his present incarnation happens to be further in development or lagging behind another, to use this fact as
a wedge between one's own ego and those of others is completely missing the point. For, in principle, there is no differentiation. It does not even take very long on the path to find out that it is only on the most superficial level that one's interests conflict with those of others. What is really right and really good can be seen right underneath the surface. According to divine law, this is right for all concerned. Therefore all measuring, all comparing, all competing, and all striving to up others makes the confinement of separation even tighter. It increases the illusion that this pitiful existence is all there is to life.
Man's prevalent tendency to live for the sake of appearance, rather than for the sake of truth, for the sake of his real feelings and for the sake of his real interests, goes under the same category of pride. The illusion of the separated ego state is so strong at this point that it seems more important to man to create an impression than to even consider what a tragic, wasteful sacrifice he makes for an entirely imaginary gain that can never, never be made.
All attitudes of mask, of defense, of pretense, of false shame -- the shame of exposure, embarassment about real feelings and one's inner reality regarding the spiritual self -- belong into the category of pride. They are all tricks of the ego to maintain its limited state.
Under selfwill belong all the aspects of stubbornness, of resistance,
of spite, of defiance, of rigidity. All these attitudes connote a stiffening up against change. That is, against expanding into new spiritual territory. In effect, these traits express: "I will stay where I am and as I am." The trick of the ego is to make this appear as desirable and to make open, flexible movement appear threatening and/or humiliating. Pride and fear must necessarily be coupled to selfwill, just as selfwill must be present where either of the other two dominates. Every one of these aspects harbors the other two as well.
The refusal to move may be evaluated, on a more superficial level and by dint of more personal idiosyncrasies and neuroses, as spite against a specific human being or human beings -- let us say parents or parent substitutes or general authority figures. Or there might be a spiteful attitude toward life itself. But on a deeper level the trick of the ego is to remain in the isolated, separated status quo position.
Under the category of fear belong all worry, all anxiety, all apprehensiveness. The fear exists not only in preventing the going beyond the limited, confused state per se. The trick of the ego is to make this move appear threatening and life-annihilating. Worrying and anxiety are also ego tricks in that they prevent the joyousness, the peace, and the freedom of the cosmic reality to be gained when the present state is expanded.
The entire topic of negative intentionality that we have recently explored is part and parcel of ego trickery to preserve the limited present state. Whatever the specific negative intentionality may be, it always indicates spite -- hence selfwill, which always blurs the real view and falsifies the situation, so that all desirable life experience is actually denied.
Other tricks of the ego to maintain its present safe position are to deny pleasure, to deny bliss, to deny joy, to deny expansion, to deny the creative movement into life. The fear of all these positive states is also a trick of the ego. This is such a well-known phenomenon, applying to all human beings, that it can easily be observed as applying to the common state of mankind.
Other tricks of the ego are: inattentiveness, lack of the power of concentration, abstractedness, absent-mindedness. These attitudes deny the focusing necessary for the ego to transcend itself. In order to transcend its present limitated state, the ego requires a good deal of one-pointed focusing, of being all there, as it were.
Laziness, tiredness, and passivity are tricks of the ego. They make movement impossible and they make it appear as if movement were exhausting, and therefore undesirable.
Fear of exposure and denial of showing the real feelings not only go under the heading of pride, but they directly perpetuate isolation, and therefore are being used as ego tricks to deny oneness.
Negative reactions to the negativity of others are another trick of the ego to maintain its isolated state. Where there is negativity, the energy system functions in such a way as to deny the expansion of the ego, which would effectuate self-transcendence. It denies the joyousness of true being by making something more of other people's behavior than need be. It cuts off the vision of the real life that is beyond the limited present state. Only the isolated entity experiences the terror of finiteness.
Distrust and suspiciousness are part of the general fear that makes the ego wish to remain in the unmoving present state and resort to trickery in order to deny the inherent natural movement toward the entity's ultimate fate. While fear -- distrust -- is the motivating force, the ego simultaneously uses distrust as a trick to effectuate its wish for non-movement.
The ego assumes a preposterous and paradoxical position. It is intrinsically unhappy just because of its finiteness, or what seems like finiteness in this present limited state. It is self-evident that the ego
can only see what is within its range, within its present scope of awareness, within its present field of operation. And what it sees is limited, and therefore falsified. Hence, it sees and experiences finiteness. In other words, the disconnected, meaningless universe in which the little ego is powerless and suffers senselessly. This perception of life can only alter to the degree that the ego overcomes the temptation to stay put. But the paradoxical position of the ego state is to fight for remaining in the very state that is often unbearably lonely, fearful, and meaningless.
Unfathomable death at the end of each living period is terrifying. Although it is possible to escape from and to deny this terror, it cannot be dissolved as long as the ego remains in its present narrow confines. Sooner or later everyone is faced with this terrifying illusory end, both with his own and with that of others. But even if this terror is not acute and man escapes from it, it remains a gnawing force in his soul, a force that must always exist until the ego gives up its resisting position. In spite of the extremely uncomfortable and undesirable position of the limited, confined ego, it clings to the very condition and to the very state that makes true vision -- beyond the imaginary line of demarcation -- impossible. This is the sickness of the ego state and the perversion of it: to cling to the very thing it battles against.
All of my friends can easily recognize themselves in this description. For the pathwork makes the incongruity of the human state very obvious. I believe that it will help all of you greatly to see your plight in this light and to know that this is a universal state which you are called upon to transcend. On this path you must be concerned with first groping for
an understanding of what this state really means and then of how to transcend it.
Isolation and separateness are not only painful but tragic. They are tragic because they are unnecessary. They are also ironic because the ego clings to what it hates and to what hurts it the most. It lacks the discipline, the perseverance, the commitment, and the faith to venture beyond its present scope of awareness. Suffering must exist as long as you cling to and therefore indulge in this present state. As long as all the tricks of the ego are acted out, rationalized, denied, perpetuated, and nurtured -- as is usually the case -- man cannot help but suffer.
You all know that every step on the path forward reveals new vistas, which are very real, much more real than the previous state that you thought was the ultimate reality. Every step of the way this newly-gained reality opens life wider and fuller for you. The result is more joy, more peace, more consciousness, more understanding of the beautiful meaning of life, more creativity, more intrinsic knowledge of life's eternality versus the illusion of death, the illusion of finiteness.
But every single one of these steps could only have been won by a tremendous amount of investment on your part. He who still wants indulgence and easy, cheap results can never gain this new state. He will look wistfully beyond, yet doubt that anything else could exist that would warrant his effort and the lowering of his pride. Then this doubt becomes the excuse for the status quo that is artificially maintained. This is the sin against life: defeating life's natural movement toward evolution and toward unification.
Discipline, courage, humility, and the ability to commit yourself -- these are not attitudes you do not possess, my friends. Everyone of you possesses every conceivable attribute in the universe. The question is only this: Do you wish to avail yourself of these potentialities within you, or do you wish to claim that you do not possess them, and therefore that someone has to give them to you magically?
You often have the misplaced and confused idea that self-discipline hampers your freedom and, conversely, that the free person does not discipline himself. Nothing could be further from the truth. Freedom, in its real sense, is unthinkable without discipline. Conversely, the person who indulges himself, and who therefore rejects discipline, is unavoidably dependent, weak, powerless and, consequently, afraid. He lacks freedom. Freedom can only be gained to the degree that one uses voluntary self-discipline -- uses it for its own sake and not in order to appease and to appear good in the eyes of others. The latter attitude often leads to either actual or imaginary discipline being imposed upon the person by others. When such imposition happens -- and this is, of course, undesirable -- then it is always a result of the denial of voluntary self-discipline, which always goes together with self-responsibility.
Every expansion must be fought for with self-discipline -- by overcoming the imbedded resistance against expansion. The discipline must be used for the stringent recognition of the ego tricks and against giving in to them. This expansion is always a step beyond a known territory. In its present state -- which varies from human being to human being -- the ego is a result of what man has already gained. The territory he has gained determines the degree of his functioning, the scope of his experience, and the degree of his awareness.
When I speak of territory, I mean a state of awareness, of available creative life force, and of influx from the real world. All of these
make experiencing life deeper and more meaningful. The word territory is thus not to be understood in a geographical sense, but in a total sense.
The fences around this territory indicate the degree of the ego's self-transcendence.
Every incarnation -- on whatever level this may pertain -- requires the entity to increase the scope of his field of operation, to widen the fences around the fragmented ego, and to bring in more reality from the world beyond the illusory confinement. Indirectly this applies to all levels. Even the most mundane, outer, physical, and intellectual knowledge and skill to be acquired increases in some way the present scope of operation and of life experience, and thus indirectly contribute to the total task of self-transcendence. The acquisition of new knowledge and of new skills also demands
the cultivation of some of the attitudes necessary for self-transcendence.
Every bit of new knowledge and every new skill in one way or another yields -- either directly or indirectly -- more spiritual power, more awareness, more experience of joy, and a greater realization of your adequacy and of your potentiality.
To acquire either new knowledge or new skills, on whatever level, always means overcoming laziness, the temptation to succumb to the line of least resistance; it means self-discipline; it means often hard work (and the more desirable the new aspect of life is, the more real and durable it is, then the more investment of work is necessary); it means trial and error; it means the ability to convert a failure into success; it means perseverance; it means patience; it means faith; it means overcoming fear, until the new thing becomes one's own, natural possession, until it becomes part of the personality, until it becomes second nature, as the saying goes.
The ego's task is always to first accept the difficulties, to accept the hardships, to accept the overcoming, to accept the learning process. Only when the ego has learned the more mechanical aspects of the venture can the influx of the spiritual self make the new acquisition a spontaneous, living, effortless experience. Ego means effort, spiritual self means effortlessness. However, this desirable effortlessness is not given by magic, for this would mean that the ego is not being transcended but is being avoided. The ego must change its own lazy, resistant attitudes in order to transcend itself and to become compatible to unify with the cosmic, greater self. The ego must lay the arduous groundwork until the real self can come through. This can be noted in every activity, in every skill. First there is always effort. It becomes pleasurable only when it seems, and actually is, happening through you.
If it is a manual task, then the manual rules have to be learned, until they become part of the ego. If it is a mental task, then mental knowledge
has to be painstakingly acquired, often through quite mechanical processes at first. Then the new knowledge will become the person's own and the spirit can use this newly acquired expansion -- with its accompanying wider vision, knowledge, skill, energy, and accomplishment -- to play creatively. An artist who wants to bypass the effortfulness of learning the ground rules can never unfold his real creative ability, no matter how real it may initially be. These creative abilities will wither because he wants to cheat life.
The spiritual path itself demonstrates these identical principles. As I mentioned before, the ego must learn to adopt attitudes which are compatible with the universal, divine ones. As you know, this is not easy. The influx and the inspiration of the spiritual self are blocked off to the degree the ego is blindly involved in its laziness, in its pride, in its selfwill, in its fear, in its negativity, in its wish to cheat life, in its tendency to escape. But when these tendencies are being honestly recognized and gradually given up, then the influx of the world of eternal truth, of love, and of beauty becomes possible.
So what comes first is always the arduousness of making the ego flexible; of teaching it; of changing it; of making it receptive; of making it vibrant; of letting new life energy and creative flow come through to it by first identifying and then abandoning its tricks. Whether it be a new knowledge, a new skill, a new attitude toward life, or a new attitude toward
the universe, this changing of the ego always means that a new territory has become your own.
He who withers in the narrow confines of his present state because
he feels that this is safe -- and thereby eliminates the need for effort and for investment -- truly withers away. He does not permit life to regenerate him. This can happen only when inner movement exists.
At first it always seems frightening to go beyond the present confines of the ego. New land is unaccustomed, foreign, unknown. Man wants to avoid the unknown and he would rather cower in fear of it than have the courage of making it known, of making it his own. To make the unknown known, outside as well as inside, is the beauty of the spiritual path.
The ego is under the illusion that to stay in the stagnant, narrow confines of the already known territory -- and regardless of how much wider it may be compared to the territory of others, it is still narrower as compared to one's potentials and the waiting task -- is easy, is relaxing, is restful. In other words, that it is effortless. To get yourself up by your bootstraps and to get yourself moving beyond seems terribly tiresome. This feeling is an illusion because the stagnant state is really a manifestation of contraction. And contraction is by no means relaxing and restful, although it may seem so to the confused mind because of its immobility. But true restfulness is always alive and moving -- effortless moving. But this is impossible in a state of contraction. You can verify this by looking around you: the people who do the least are always the most tired. And the people who do the most are always the most energized, the most restful, the most relaxed (provided their activity does not serve as an escape from the self).
Harmonious movement is neither tiring nor exhausting, although the first manifestations may give such symptoms to you, because to go from an unmoving state to a moving state -- on whatever level -- requires at first the acceptance of temporary effort, with self-discipline, with faith, with courage, and with humility, until the effort itself becomes effortless.
Spiritual movement is effortless. By spiritual movement I mean the movement of ultimate reality, of the totally unified entity. The stagnant state of non-movement is really very effortful, because stagnation requires an enormous amount of often unconscious effort in order to sustain the resistance against the natural inclination of the soul to follow its destiny. This unconscious effort then makes itself known as tiredness, as exhaustion, and as weakness, all of which furnish the excuse to remain even more in the status quo. The ego uses as tricks the results of its own errors.
All of life is movement. Movement is not effortful when the entity is in harmony with his life. But it seems temporarily effortful until this harmony is being established by re-orienting the ways of the ego. Then you move within the rhythm of your own life stream. When
you can feel the rhythm of your life stream, then you have already acquired a certain amount of self-awareness and you are already within the movement of expansion.
Those who are on a path such as yours will find that some aspects of yourself are already within the cosmic movement and that other aspects still resist. They stagnate and hold. The moving part of you is also the aware part of you. That part is capable of recognizing the meaning of the resistance to movement. That part can meditate in the way I just explained: on seeking a deeper understanding of your task in life and on seeking
the meaning of your life in the light of this lecture. You will find a greater motivation to request guidance so that the stagnating part in you will yield to the moving part in you. Little by little you will energize the contracted consciousness that has separated itself from the Whole.
When I speak of the ego, I do not wish to convey that the ego as such is to be totally negated, denied, and insulted. The ego is a part of the Divine Consciousness. Therefore it holds all the aspects of the Greater Self from which it has separated itself, even if currently they are still distorted, and therefore misused. The basic energy and the consciousness of the ego is made of the same substance with which you ultimately unite once again.
The ego must be healthy in order to transcend itself. That is, in order to venture beyond its present confines and make as yet unknown spiritual land, as yet unknown knowledge, as yet unknown experience, as yet unknown creative potentialities first known and then eventually your own. In order to do this, the ego must adopt attitudes which are compatible with its original nature. All the tricks of the ego -- all the negativity and the evil that are imbedded strictly in the ego -- have to be recognized for what they are, with a very incisive, sharp self-honesty. The habit of indulging in denial, of indulging in glossing over, of indulging in rationalization, of indulging in projection must be given up. The searchlight must be ruthlessly turned on the little self. Only when you can put the strong light of truth with one part of your ego consciousness on other aspects of your ego consciousness can these other aspects adopt healthy and truthful attitudes. Then the ego gradually becomes healthy. Ad only the healthy ego can transcend itself and unify with the Divine Consciousness, which is always healthy.
The weak, sick, distorted part of the ego often wants to give itself up just because it cannot bear itself any longer. The burden of itself is too heavy. Then various forms of ego escape, such as drugs and other means of false ego transcendence, are being adopted. But such ego transcendence is highly dangerous and is just a variation of insanity. For insanity itself is an attempt of the ego either to lose itself or to transcend itself because it can no longer bear itself. In all of these false and dangerous attempts, the entity always seeks to avoid effort, it seeks to avoid pain, it seeks to avoid inconvenience, it seeks to avoid those aspects of life with which it does not agree or which it does not understand. It seeks cheating shortcuts. These can never work and always require a very high price. The subsequent reaction of the entity may be to hold on even tighter, thus making healthy ego transcendence just as impossible as the false one.
The only way is to use the healthy part of the ego to shed light on the sick part of the ego and to use the honest part of the ego to shed light on
the dishonest part of the ego. Ego transcendence then takes place in the safest possible way. New territory is now being acquired. Territory that at first was frighteningly foreign, unknown, and apparently dark will become known, familiar, light. With this new safety a sense of eternality is being created in the self. The deepest feelings, new knowledge, and the experience of life's continuum grow. And thereby an enormous amount of pain
and of fear are automatically eliminated. But this cannot come cheaply. It requires every investment and every commitment on your part. He who does it genuinely must then reap the fruits in a most concrete and tangible way.
The greater your efforts become, the more of a spiritual force do you lawfully elicit and make your own. Every step of truth and each step of good will activates, automatically and inexorably, the powerful and creative spiritual force within you and around you.
Blessing and love for all of you, my dearest ones.
March 24, 1972
Copyright 1972, the Center for the Living Force, Inc.