The Psychic Interaction Of Negativity

By The Pathwork Guide

Greetings and blessings to every one of my beloved friends. As you grow on your path, the power of love and the strength of truth will continually unfold in you.

In our last lecture of this working season I would like to begin by saying to you that the work you have accomplished during this past year is extremely important and significant. When the material in this lecture has been thoroughly understood and assimilated, then the significance of your progress will become very clear. The majority of you have learned to connect with, to be aware of, and to admit quite a lot of negativity and negative intentionality. Some have done more than others in this area, but you are all on your way.

The significance and the value of this progress cannot even be perceived as yet. There is a great difference between becoming aware of your negative intentionality and groping blindly, and therefore acting out your negativity. The state of blindness -- of vague or unspecific awarenesss -- leads to suffering a special kind of confusion that is more painful than real pain. This new state of awareness benefits you and others equally. In this lecture I would like to show you what the unconscious psychic interaction between you and others means in relation to the pain of guilt which we talked about in the last lecture.

When you are only vaguely aware of your negativity, and therefore when you sense only dimly the hurt that your negativity inflicts on others, then you must find yourself caught in a battle involving self-blame, self-rejection, and doubt. In this state of vague awareness you cannot help hooking others -- with their own unconscious problems and inner conflicts -- into your negativity. You bind them to you in such a struggle as I just described.

By denying your negativity you incur a double guilt. First, there is the guilt for your specific negative attitude. This we may call the primary guilt. Then you experience guilt for denying your negativity. We may call this denial the secondary guilt. If the primary guilt were admitted and the consequences of it truly accepted, then it would cease to be a guilt. The secondary guilt, the guilt of denial, must weigh heavily on everyone's soul. It is a burden that consumes much vital life energy. Your denial must always imply harmful acts -- either inner or outer -- toward others. Denial is always insult added to injury and therefore may truly be called a sin. It is a sin because you punish others for your own failings, for your own negative intentions, for you own lovelessness, for your own untruthfulness, for your own spite, for your own unfair demands.

For instance, if you are aware of the fact that you do not wish to love, and if you do not pretend otherwise, then you assume responsibility for your choice. If you realize that you pay a heavy price for a loveless existence, but you let it go at that, then at least you do not hook others into your guilt for not loving. You will be alone and isolated, but you have made a choice. You know it and you pay the price for it. It is true that you are witholding from the world your wonderful love capacity, and in that sense you fail. But it is worse when you blame others for your lack of love, even if you use their real shortcomings as your excuse, and when you then punish them for the results of your unloving attitude. In other words, when you build cases against them in order to justify your own holding back. For then you truly sin, my friends.

Although this practice is very common and widespread, it is so subtle that only people who possess a considerable amount of self-awareness can begin to recognize it in themselves, and therefore also in others. Making others responsible for your not loving is a basic attitude which exists in various forms and with varying degrees of intensity. When it is not admitted, then the refusal to love often manifests in the following attitude: "I do not want to give you anything (whoever "you" may be), but I demand that you give me everything. If you do not, then I will punish you." This attitude is very common. The more concealed -- and therefore the less consciously expressed it is -- the more insidious are its effects both on yourself and on others. For most people it is relatively easy to deny it, to rationalize it, to distort it, to conceal it, or to use half-truths to justify this attitude.

Lately some of my friends have been able to see this attitude in themselves and have had the courage to admit it, first to themselves and then to their friends in the group. The influx of health, of the clean, fresh air of psychic truth, is instantantaneous. This freshness is a result of freeing yourself of your secondary guilt. The more you expose every detail of the disparity between your intention not to give -- in other words, your ungivingness -- and the punishment that you mete out when your demands are not met, then the more do you clear yourself of your secondary guilt. The more clearly you can see the preposterous unfairness of the discrepancy between what you demand and what you give -- in other words, the difference between the treatment that you insist on receiving and your treatment of others, and the way in which you then choose to punish others so that you cannot be caught or held accountable -- the more quickly you will free yourself of a burden which causes depression, anxiety, worry, hopelessness, and often physical illness and material frustration as well.

One of the most popular ways of punishing others for not responding with love to your ungivingness is to render them guilty. In other words, to build a case against them so that they seem to be the cause of your misery. You can easily convince yourself of their guilt because you choose to see only the result of your witholding and your spiteful or cowardly non-giving. You choose to ignore the fact that as long as your psyche is still steeped in this negative attitude toward life, then others cannot respond the way you would like them to.

Your negativity says: "I will deny the truth and I will blame you for not giving me all that you have and for not letting me get away with my one-sided demands. And if you dare to react to this, then I will punish you by hating you and by blaming you even more." Those who are at the beginning of their path, or those who have a strong investment in an idealized self-image that makes no room for such an admission will think that it it impossible that they, too, can harbor such an attitude. Your best gauge to determine whether or not it exists and to what extent it exists is to consult your inner state. In other words, the state of your mind and of your emotions. If you feel secure; if you feel unafraid; if you feel at ease; if you feel comfortable with others; if you are without anxiety; if you expand your life in a joyous way; and if you regard occasional difficulties as meaningful stepping stones, then it means that you have already vastly overcome this poisonous attitude. But you, too, must have had this negative attitude at one time or another and you must have dealt with it in a truthful way. No one is entirely free from it at birth. If you have not yet found this attitude, then you must work your way through your pride, your investment in your pretense, and your cowardice in order to uncover it.

When you admit your negative intentionality, then you perform the most fundamental act of love. Whether you know it or not, the moment you admit what you are doing, then you are committing an act of love. If you do not admit your negative intentions, then you may give a lot, but you will never give what counts most. You may give things, you may give money, you may give aid, you may perform good deeds and altruistic acts, or you may even give tenderness and concern, but these are all hollow gifts without the one gift of setting the other free by honestly admitting your negativity.

The guilt caused by your unfair demands, by your spite, by the witholding of your love -- and the compounded guilt caused by punishing others for your misery -- must erode your strength and your power of self-expression. It makes you truly weak. As long as you continue to stay in this attitude, then how can you ever have faith in yourself, how can you ever believe in your dignity as a free human being? You may try all sorts of artificial ways to instill self-confidence in yourself, but they will never work unless you face the secondary guilt of blaming others for your witholding, and you give up this blame by admitting it. Then, if you so choose, you may even stay with the primary guilt -- the guilt of not wanting to love -- but at least you assume the responsibility for your decision.

This is a world of duality. So much confusion exists because of the either/or alternative which operates in almost every area of life. I have discussed duality in connection with several issues. The topic under discussion here is particularly prone to the confusion that comes from a dualistic approach to life. Man is stymied by his belief that either he is to be blamed for whatever the problem may be or the other person is, that either he is bad and wrong or the other person is. This duality creates a terrible predicament. It makes it impossible to be in truth. If you conclude that you are wrong and that the other person is blameless, then you sense that there is something wrong in this conclusion. In this distortion, you also feel that an unfair responsibility is placed on you. If there is an either/or attitude regarding the issue, and you are the one to assume the sole burden of the blame, then you will certainly expect to be ostracized. This assumption of all the blame is an unbearable load. It is untruthful and it does not permit you to see reality clearly. It makes you feel even more inferior and even more unlovable. Your misery seems a just punishment, instead of being the result of a chosen attitude, which you are free to alter whenever you so decide. By assuming the sole blame, you give tacit permission to the other person to secretly act out his own negative intentionality.

Conversely, if you have to be completely right, and therefore you justify your behavior, then you also get yourself into a terrible predicament. Again you feel that there is something wrong. The assumption that the other is all bad does not fit either. Although such a pretense may seem desirable in order to whitewash yourself from guilt, if you feel that you have to protect yourself in this way, then you must become anxious, afraid, tense, and threatened by the possibility of having your defenses penetrated. In such a state, you cannot afford to be relaxed, natural, and close to others. Your stake in being innocent prevents intimacy.

Most human beings are not yet capable of seeing how their own distortions and their own negativities directly affect, reinforce, hook, and play into the distortions and the negativities of others. They are still too involved in the dualistic struggle, still too involved in their own defense, and still too involved in the protection of their illusory self-image. As a result, they are blind to the psychic reality of the constant interaction between the self and others. The attitude that says either the self or the other creates a terrible predicament. It creates confusion, guilt, and self-doubt.

In the interaction from psyche to psyche the following takes place. Suppose you inwardly say: "I will punish you for not fulfilling my insatiable demands. I will not love you. I will not give you anything. And I will punish you by making you feel guilty. And if you want something from me, then I will not give it to you. I will punish you most effectively by making myself your victim, so that you cannot blame me or catch me." If the other person is inwardly struggling with giving up a similar defense, then his resistance will say: "You must not give up your defense. For others -- who are the enemy -- are only out to hurt you, to victimize you, to exploit you. If you open your heart to love, then you will get nothing but rejection, unfairness, and hate in return. It does not pay. So, you had better remain closed up."

Just imagine how your self-victimizing attitude will reinforce the other person's irrational resistance to being open, vulnerable, and loving. The frightened part of the other's self -- which is connected to protective negativity and to witholding -- will be set back considerably in its struggle whenever it encounters the negative intentionality that exists in your self-victimizing and punishing attitude. The punishment often takes the form of severe accusations that malign the other's character. You may never have thought about it in these terms, but if you look closely, then you will see that it amounts to just that. You may even use a real failing of the other person as an excuse to punish him for not living up to your demands and for not accepting a contract from you in which he is to give you everything and you are to give little or nothing in return.

The unconscious interaction just described fortifies, justifies, and increases the false conviction that negativity is a necessary defense. Viewed from this limited vantage point, the defensive position seems right. Thus, you can see that your negative intentionality makes you responsible both for the other person and for yourself. It is one of the apparently paradoxical truths of spiritual reality that you are responsible for yourself and you are also responsible for the other, though each responsibility is different. By the same token the other person's negative intentionality hurts you, impairs you, and hinders you, and therefore he is responsible for doing this to you. Yet his effect on you is also your responsibility because his negativity could not succeed in hindering you if you were not tenaciously holding on to your own. Everyone has the choice of either letting the other's negative intentions be an excuse to maintain his own, or else to look for a new way of responding to life. Thus it is true to say that you are exclusively responsible for yourself and that others are exclusively responsible for themselves. At the same time, it is just as true that you are all responsible for each other.

Since ultimately there is no division between the self and others, then both statements must be true. You are the others and the others are you. The separation is just as much an illusion as it is an illusion that you are caught in an either/or, in a duality. Again, it is not that you are responsible either for yourself or for the other, or that the other is responsible either for himself or for you. There are no either/ors. It is all the same.

Therefore, when you change the old pattern of blaming others in order to justify your unfairness and your unloving demands, then you not only unhook yourself from this terrible bind and double bind, but you also unhook the other person. You may well say: "Others should not depend on my overcoming my negativities and my problems in order for them to overcome theirs." And you are both right and wrong. You are right that overcoming his negativity is the other's responsibility and that he can do this regardless of what you do. In other words, regardless of what others do, including you. But you are also wrong in not seeing that by your act of truth, which is an act of love, you help to set the other free from his entanglement and from his struggle to separate his negative contribution from yours. When you make clear what you are doing, then you remove a great deal of confusion and of doubt. As a result, the true picture of where and to what extent each person is contributing to a negative involvement and to a psychic interaction can emerge. This kind of truthfulness has a tremendously liberating effect.

There are particular phases in human development during which an entity finds it almost impossible to come out of his negative defense system by himself. At these times, he cannot give up his conviction that his defenses are necessary unless a person with whom he is involved lets him off the hook by admitting his own negative intentionality, by admitting his own destructive attitude, by admitting his own dishonesty, by admiting his own meanness. Just imagine how you would feel if someone close to you, who has given you pain by pointing out both your real guilt and your false guilt -- but who has also confused you by the denial of his own guilt -- suddenly said to you: "You know, I do not really want to give you any love. I only want to demand from you. And when you fail to comply wth my demands, then all I want to do is just to blame you, to accuse you, and to punish you. I do not allow you to be hurt either, because although I want to hurt you, I do not want to be made to feel guilty by your hurt." Just imagine how this would set you free. Just imagine how this would suddenly clear up many confusions. It is not likely that you would respond to such an act of love by being self-righteous and acting like the blameless one who has always "known" the other person's negative intentions and is now established as the innocent victim.

If you admit your unfair demands, if you admit your cowardice in not giving of your feelings and in not admitting your negative intentionality, then it may indeed be hurtful for your pride, but hurtful for nothing else. The person who hears your confession in that very moment has received a gift of love from you. Even though you may still not want to love with your heart, with your feelings, with your inner being, you have actually begun to love by being truthful.

By setting the other person free from the false guilt that you have placed on him in order to conceal your real guilt, you allow him to look at his own real guilt without self-devastation and without this most painful of inner struggles in which various guilts and accusations are all confused. This clarification and this release from guilt often lead to the solution of the deepest problems. It is as though the personality needed this outer grace, this helping hand. Your dishonest placing of guilt on another person makes his honest self-revelation almost impossible because if he admits his guilt, then it implies that you were right in accusing him of being bad and the cause of your misery. In this way people are hooked together in denial, in guilt, in projection, in either/or struggles, in confusion, and in negative interaction. Someone must take the first step to loosen the hook-up and to release the knots.

Negative intentionality is a defense. It stems from the innate belief that the world -- in other words, others -- cannot be trusted. Therefore, the only way you can preserve yourself from unfair exploitation and from harm is by being just as mean as the world is seen to be -- or even meaner. When you admit your ill will, then you help others to begin to trust in the decency of the world, in the decency of people. Then they can begin to ponder: "Maybe it is not so dangerous after all. Maybe I am not all alone in my hidden shame and in my guilt. Maybe I can let go. Maybe I, too, can admit my negativity -- just as he or she has done -- and thus not be held solely responsible." What a difference that would make in human interactions, in a person's attitude toward life, and in the total spiritual state of a human entity!

If you act in this way, then your energy system must begin to change. When you all work together with this kind of honesty, then you will find that love is not a command of the will and of the mind. You will find that rather than being an abstraction or a sentimental gesture or an emoting, love in its essential nature is active, vigorous, assertive, and free. Honesty is the form of love that is most needed and that is most rare in the interaction among human beings. Unless this expression of love exists, then the illusion that you and others are separate will always remain, the illusion that your individual interests are contradictory will always remain, and the illusion that in order to protect your own interests you must defeat those of others -- and vice versa -- must always remain.

Only when you know your negativity, only when you truly own up to it, only when you assume responsibility for it -- and thus you no longer project it onto others, distorting reality in order to be able to do so -- only then will you gain new insight into the behavior of other people. This insight will enable you to know what is happening within them, even when they do not admit it. As with honest self-exposure, this capacity for insight will also set you free. It will take you out of the confusion and the guilt of trying to assign responsibility with such questions as: "What am I doing? What is the other doing? Where am I to blame? Where am I at fault in my misery? How have I caused it? How has the other caused it?" This questioning fluctuates between self-blame and blaming others. Neither road leads to any solution. But the moment you stop blaming someone else and instead assume responsibility for your negative, destructive attitudes toward others -- even if others are not willing to do likewise -- then you see the picture clearly. You unhook yourself, first by your admission and your self-knowledge; then, as a consequence, by your ability to see and to comprehend the negative intentions, the negative acting out, and the dishonest projections of the other person. The two together set you free. Then you are truly independent. This is why everyone who admits the worst in himself -- who confesses -- inevitably feels elation, liberation, energy, hope, and light as an immediate result.

It is a known fact that spiritual growth brings you the gift of knowing other people's thoughts, intentions, feelings, and will direction. This ability is not magic that is bestowed upon you. It is a natural phenomenon that occurs because in reality you and others are one. Therefore, when you can read your own mind accurately, then you cannot help reading the minds of others just as accurately, since there is really only one mind. The depth of the other person's mind that previously was a closed book is only a closed book as long as you hide and run away from the depth of your own mind. Because of the possibility of abuse, it would be dangerous to be able to read other people's minds and inner beings simply as a result of psychic power. But when this ability grows organically, as a byproduct of knowing your own inner make-up, then it is a natural phenomenon. Therefore, it cannot be abused in the service of power drives and of negativity.

It now seems as though the human entities are completely separate beings. But when truthfulness, as we have discussed it here, has been realized, then the truth will be seen exactly as it is. It will be obvious that all is one. In other words, that there is only one Consciousness. What a liberating experience to see into others and to know them, and therefore to no longer be confused and torn. This ability grows from giving up your stake in hiding, from giving up your stake in projecting, from giving up your stake in denying, from giving up your stake in distorting. In other words, it grows from giving up an attitude which not only confuses others around you who are in a similar state, but with which you confuse yourself just as much.

In the last lecture we discussed the pain of guilt. The worst pain of guilt is felt when you do not know what part you play and what part another person plays in a given painful situation. This kind of suffering comes only from concealment. It tears you apart. In this suffering you are like a trapped animal searching blindly. You do not know that you are your own victim. You have trapped yourself by choosing not to be honest, by avoiding honesty.

As a human being unfolds into a more expanded state, then he needs tools and modes of operation which are different from those which he required previously. Let us take the simple analogy of someone who conducts a business. When the business is still small, then the businessman has an organization that is suited to this particular size. The organization which he has created is meaningful for the purpose and the scope of the firm. In other words, it is appropriate, and therefore is harmonious. But when the business expands into a larger concern, then the kind of organization created for the previously smaller establishment no longer fits. If the businessman were to rigidly maintain that same structure, then it would no longer be appropriate. Therefore, the business could not run smoothly. The head of the business would encounter a great many obstacles that weren't in his way before. What was appropriate and meaningful at one time would no longer fit now. What was harmonious at one time would be cause for disharmony now, because the circumstances are different. If the businessman were too rigid to make changes -- and therefore he persisted in holding on to the old proven way -- then he would either fail in the expanded enterprise, or, at the very least, he would find it not only difficult but quite arduous to live and to work. The same law applies to your inner expansion. As you grow, you learn about yourself, you learn about others, and you learn about the world. As a result, you experience life in deeper and more varied ways -- which is, after all, your reason for being incarnated. As you continue to grow, then you gain new understanding and you learn to experience feelings which previously you have avoided. When you do all this, then you are setting the stage for an expanded operation, as it were. In practical terms, this means that attitudes that at one time were useful now become both destructive and limiting.

It often happens on the path of evolution that entities grow in various ways -- and by their growth prepare the ground for new attitudes toward life -- and yet they also impede this expansion by their refusal to give up their old attitudes. So you must prepare yourself to be flexible and to adapt yourself to new ways of responding to the world, my friends. You must prepare yourself to respond differently -- in a new way -- to other people's reactions toward you; you must prepare yourself to respond in a new way to what happens around you; and you must prepare yourself to respond in a new way to what happens within you. This change will come about by first understanding that your old response is a conditioned reflex designed to fit a smaller way of functioning in life; second, by first questioning that reflex and then the meaning behind it; and last -- and this is the basic theme of this lecture -- by choosing love rather than separateness as your way of being in the world.

These must not be merely words or mental concepts. Nor should you engage in a willful trying to love or in a sentimentalized emoting that covers many things that you do not wish to admit. You must put these new attitudes into action. Admitting your negativity is always an act of love toward the universe, whether it is done directly to the person in question when this is possible, or to a helper who is not personally involved with your negativity. Where you find your negativity, then contemplate that one day you will want to give it up out of love for the universe and out of love for yourself.

Love is the key. If you do not open your heart, then you must wither away. You have all seen that no matter how true or how right something may be, how intelligent your analyses are, how many insights you have into the background, the history, and the dynamics of a condition that causes you trouble, no real change can ever occur unless you commit yourself to opening your heart. You cannot be fulfilled unless you let yourself feel deeply with your heart. And it is no use pretending that you want to love, that you even do love, as long as you are afraid of feeling your feelings. To the degree that you avoid your feelings, to that degree you hold back from loving.

You cannot be strong, you cannot be courageous, and you cannot love yourself unless you love others. It is equally true that you can love others only to the extent that you love yourself. The first step must be to be willing to love. You do not start loving simply because you choose to. You have to call upon the divine nature of your innermost nucleus to give you the grace of loving. The grace of God may manifest through you by making you open your heart and lose your fear of your feelings and your fear of being vulnerable. That is all you need. If you do not love, then you have nothing. If you love, then you have everything.

But if you love falsely, as a pretense, then it is much less loving and much more deceptive and harmful than when you admit your hate. Admitting your hate is more loving than an apparently loving act that denies the existing hate. Think about this, my friends.

May the next few months in which you have time to assimilate the material I have given you and during which you are without direct contact help you to establish more and more the most real and the most vital of all direct communications -- that with your spiritual self. But in order to do this, you must first eliminate your self-deception and your pretenses. They always block the way to God in you.

Those of you who have not yet found where and in what way you are unloving should set out to do so. Do not let yourself be deceived by your awareness of the areas where you are already loving. Ask yourself how fulfilled you feel in your love. How warm and how unthreatened do you feel with others? How comfortable do you feel in life? That is your answer to how loving and to how truthful you are. And then perhaps the first step of love can be taken: to admit your hate, to admit your punitiveness, to admit your spitefulness. To the degree you do these things, to that degree you start loving. You have started on the bottom rung of the ladder of love the minute you admit the ugly truth that you wanted hidden and for which, in addition, you rendered another person responsible. You did this either by totally distorting reality, or by using something that was partially true as an excuse for your negative attitude.

To understand all this requires a lot of meditation and genuine good will. But then what a key this is to your life. You must truly want to see this. When you do, then you will also understand how tremendously significant this working year has been for the majority of the people in this group, for everyone has admitted at least part of their existing negative intentionality. The less you resist expanding into a new state of functioning when you are organically ready for it -- in other words, the more willing and the less resisting you are to expand into a state which includes others -- then the smoother will be the transition into such a new state. It is a state, a way of life, that is much more truthful, much more loving, and much more productive.

I ask you now to commit yourself to go further and more deeply in this direction. Commit yourself to go all the way, and thereby you will help both yourself and those around you. Allow this to happen. It is the greatest blessing there can be. In doing this, you will create the necessary climate, both inside and outside, for a new inner environment.

This was a blessed working year, my friends. Many of you have manifested your spiritual growth in the form of greater inner peace, of greater security, and of visible expressions of a more fulfilled life. The following years will become more fulfilled as you expand this nucleus of spiritual learning and purification. You are blessed indeed. Every step of truth and every step toward love unleashes more spiritual energy. Every step of decency activates more of your divine nature. Be this divine nature.

June 16, 1972