Interpenetration Of The Divine Light Spark Into The Outer Regions

By The Pathwork Guide

Greetings and blessings for all of you, my dearest, dearest friends. Particular blessings are given at the beginning of a new working year -- a particularly significant one. For this year sees the fruition of a spiritual form materializing into an earthly form. The building of this is a beautiful venture, with which you fulfill yourself because you fulfill your task in the universe. Whatever difficulties have to be overcome are an expression of the sum total of the body that all of you form. This group, as well as all other created entities, has its own spiritual body. It is a body consisting of many aspects, just as the individual human being consists of many aspects.

Each human being is an aspect of the Greater Consciousness, which is all one. These are mere words for most of you, but with the progress envisaged for this year these words will possibly open up an inner experience for many of you through which you will truly know that you are all one in consciousness. Perhaps you can gain an inkling of this even now when, after years of work, you are able to recognize and deal with a variety of aspects of your personality. Some of them are in disharmony with your conscious good will and some of them are in unison with it. On the deepest level there is an aspect of consciousness that surpasses in beauty, in wisdom, in strength, and in love even your best intentions, even your best capacity of bringing into unity your inner dissensions and, consequently, also your outer dissessions.

You are composed of all your aspects. First you learn to identify with each one of them. Then you learn to identify them one by one. Thus you gain an inkling of the sum total of your manifest being, what you know of as you. You learn to accept even those aspects that you do not like and thereby to transform their energy, instead of separating yourself from these aspects, so that they must manifest to you from the outside.

It is the same with creation as a whole. You are an aspect of the overall, total Consciousness, just as a specific aspect within you is an aspect of your total personality. Man's intrinsic fear to bridge the gap that exists between the little, separated ego consciousness and the All Consciousness is due to the idea that if he bridges this gap, then he will lose himself. This is totally the opposite of the truth. For the more you realize that you are All, the more you will be you, the more complete you will be, the more whole you will be, and not the less.

The aim of creation is to bridge this gap and to establish the All Consciousness. Man asks himself again and again man why this gap exists. Many explanations have been given about the so-called Fall -- the Fall from Grace or the Fall of the angels, or whatever it may be called in religious terminology.

At this time let me give you a new approach to convey the same process. This is not just to give you information and to teach you cosmology. Whatever I say about creation must be of immediate, practical value for your own development. In other words, its purpose is not merely to open you up further to the deepest cosmic truth outside of you. All these truths exist within you. Therefore, they can be found right now if you so wish. Eventually you will understand on the deepest level why you are this separated ego consciousness and why you are so afraid of letting yourself merge with the Greater Consciousness. You will know the illusion of this fear; you will know the reality of the nature of suffering, it being the result of your resistance, and therefore unnecessary. And then these words will help you to open the door to this deeper knowledge and inner experience of eternal, immutable truth.

Once again I must repeat how difficult it is to put reality into the confines of human language. For human language, its terms and its concepts, is fashioned according to a much narrower aspect of reality. Thus my words can always be misunderstood, and therefore distorted, or simply appear meaningless and ununderstandable, if not confusing and contradictory. The three-dimensional terms can hardly contain verities of multi-dimensions that the human mind is incapable of grasping. Nevertheless, if you consciously and deliberately allow the understanding of your soul and heart, of your deepest intuition, to fill you, then my words will reach you to some extent. There will be in you the echo of an inner understanding that can hardly be put into words.

Creation started -- if it ever started, and, of course, it never started; so when I say "started," it is trying to squeeze into the human language a concept for which there are no other words -- with the divine spark. Try to feel this truth. So, creation started with the divine spark. This spark may have been tiny in an immense vacuum. Yet in this tiny spark was the utmost of divine reality, comprising everything of consciousness, the most powerful creative energy, the most incredible wisdom and love. The infinite goodness of the Divine Creator made it His aim or His plan to gradually fill this vacuum, a vacuum of nothingness, the spark being the All. Gradually the spark began to spread and to slowly interpenetrate the vacuum. The vacuum in its darkness and its nothingness, the spark in its incredible light, its glowing aliveness, and its allness; the vacuum an infinity in the outer regions, the spark an infinity in the inner regions. Here a contradiction may appear in human, dualistic terms. How could there be two infinities? It is impossible to convey this to the human consciousness -- how it could be true that there is an infinity, but there is both a vacuum and an inner spark of eternal light, the latter filling the former.

The eternal spark -- with its infinite regions -- spreads and spreads inexorably. Try to visualize, to picture a form: a thick golden, sparkling liquid teeming with energy and with glorious creative potentials. All the seeds are contained in it. It is brilliant, it is effeverscent, it is alive, it is intensely conscious. It is endowed with every conceivable and inconceivable power to create worlds and to create beings. It spreads lowly. It aims to fill the apparently infinite nothingness. Yet this is the All, in its infinity and its eternality, inexorably filling this vacuum.

Since the All is such vibrant consciousness and powerful energy and aliveness, then it must be the ultimate that cannot help but penetrate the entire vacuum, until there is no longer a vacuum. The time will come when the outer region will be entirely filled with the inner world of light and of life.

In the process of spreading, particles of this All, of the divine spark, seem to get lost. As a result, they forget both the origin of their wholeness and their connectedness. These particles believe themselves to be isolated dots of consciousness who have been thrown into the outer darkness. Therefore, they are constantly struggling against being swallowed up by it. This struggle is an illusion. The fear of being swallowed by the void is an illusion, for the apparently isolated dot is not really isolated. The connection always exists. But in the process of penetration the advancing, spreading life and Allness is partially diminished in its manifestations. In this diminished state there are times when the outer darkness seems nearer -- and therefore more real -- than the inner life of the spark.

The outer vacuum is not evil, for evil is not nothing. Evil comes into existence when the divine spark loses its memory, when it has not yet regained the knowledge of its connectedness and therefore struggles against the vacuum. The ferocious struggle against giving up being, existing, aliveness distorts divine reality and divine energy. The temporary transition creates a state that may be called evil. But it is temporary.

This temporarily and apparently separated aspect of divine reality must inevitably be drawn back into the ever spreading All. That is, it is not really drawn back. It is rather that the ever growing fullness of the spreading spark catches up with the aspect that has moved ahead in a diminished form. All of nature, with all her manifestations and various forms of life, is part of this great and slowly advancing wave that fills the outer regions. Your life manifestation, your struggle, and your development are to be viewed in this light. Feel yourself as you bring truth and divinity into your whole being. This is the spark in you pushing to interpenetrate the outer regions. The more life on earth progresses in spirituality, in justice, in love, in truth, and in oneness, the more this creative process is being fulfilled.

Man's resistance to give up his negativity, his evil, is precisely due to what I say here. If the isolated aspect has lost sight of and memory of its connectedness, and therefore of its purpose in the whole scheme, then it can no longer identify with the All Consciousness of which it is a part. Thus, by giving up the negative attitudes -- which are an expression of the struggle against the dark vacuum -- the individual seems to be threatened with extinction. Giving up the evil would then seem like voluntarily going into the dark nothingness -- which is confused with physical death. Since the divine reality must ultimately fill everything that is, then all the particles must detect that they have always been united with the All.

The fear of the vacuum engulfing the apparently separated divine spark is what you experience when you meet an innermost terror. For what I say here, philosophical, metaphysical, and remote as it may sound, is not a faraway happening that has nothing to do with your here and now, with your present life. When you go deeply into yourself, then you will find that this is an ongoing process that never stops and that takes place constantly both in your inner life and in your outer life. You will find the vacuum, the terror of it; and you will ultimately find the Eternal Consciousness, the All Consciousness, which is you, which can never die, and which must slowly interpenetrate the vacuum.

The sooner you make room for these verities and you are openly responsive to them, then the sooner you will experience the true state of your being. But when your consciousness is steeped in the separateness as the only reality -- in other words, when it takes the momentary state as the last reality -- then your mind blocks off this experience.

This is the plan of Creation, this is evolution, this is the aim. Can you see how every single one of you is a part of it? You have a task, for you are God. The Ultimate in you, the All in you, sends you forth -- it sends an aspect of Itself forth -- which then manifests as an apparently separated ego consciousness. It is the task of this separated aspect to probe its own depths so as to find the infinity of life, to find its potentiality of power, to find its potentiality of wisdom, to find its potentiality of love, to find its potentiality of beauty, to find its potentiality of eternality. For all of the Whole is also contained in the part. Thus it is your task to make your conscious being aware of this, so that you can consciously and deliberately spread your being into the vacuum. In other words, fill the vacuum with your real nature.

When you meditate deeply, then you will be able to use these concepts and truths for the immediate understanding of yourself and of your life. Most of you have gone deeply enough so that you are now ready to use these words, to intuitively connect with them, and thus to know their truth. And when you know their truth, then something very vital will change. For as you learn to accept the various aspects of yourself -- both the positive ones and the negative ones, regardless of whether you like them or not, of whether you approve of them or not, of whether they are developed beings or not -- you will know that these are aspects of the Whole, just as you are an aspect of the Whole. You will also know that what is negative, either in you or in others, is an aspect of the same Whole that is positive. Therefore, you will cease being frightened of it, and therefore alienated from it. But first you must cease being frightened of -- and therefore alienated from -- whatever exists in you. For the more you fear the aspects of yourself, the more this fear must be projected onto the outer life, onto other people, and onto outer conditions. The only way you can cease being afraid of life, afraid of other people, and afraid of death is when you meet what you are most afraid of in yourself. This is the path.

I have promised you that in this coming year I will give you more vital material and specific spiritual exercises that will help you further on your path. The first exercise I wish to give is a very important one dealing with the level of feeling. But before doing so, I want to give you a short explanation in order to make the exercise understandable.

By now all of you have been in touch with very deep feelings, feelings that perhaps you have never before dared to accept and to experience. You learned how to express them. But there is still a very important misconception in all of you about feelings, and that is the idea that you can somehow "get rid of" your negative feelings. This is a distortion. Yet I do not wish to imply with my statement that you will always be burdened by unresolved negative feelings. We must make a clear distinction between stagnant residual feelings which the personality is unaware of holding back and the personality's innate capacity to experience any feeling if the state of the soul -- the inner state -- is fluid. For example, the less a person is afraid of his repressed anger and the more he learns to accept it, to express it, to assume responsibility for it -- rather than projecting it onto others -- then the freer such a person will be to produce anger at will.

The moment you think of the process of this work in terms of getting rid of negative feelings, then you must be in confusion. As I have said many times before: you transform the energy of an inappropriate destructive feeling, you do not wipe it out. Part of your pathwork is to make yourself conscious of a state -- as yet only a possibility -- in which you are so flexible, so moving, so much in command of yourself that all the feelings can be produced because you know that this potentiality always exists in you. The false idea of a highly developed spiritual state is that it should be completely without anger, completely without rage, completely without pain, completely without sadness, or whatever. This idea is a distortion, and it leads to a rigid, unrealistic, fixed image. The more you are capable of experiencing any feeling, the less you will be enslaved by it. Conversely, the less you can summon feelings -- in other words, the more you are frightened of them -- the more you are at their mercy. This may manifest either in an uncontrolled, and therefore destructive, acting out or in the stagnation of all your creative energies, in the stagnation of all your potentials, in the stagnation of your feeling capacity. Like all falsehoods, this misconception leads to a dualistic conflict, to a double bind.

It is one of the essential byproducts of aliveness -- of the unitive state -- to be in a healthy state of movement. The vacuum is fixed, the spark of the All is in constant movement. Man is constantly battling between these two states. He is constantly hankering for non-movement, and therefore he experiences the fear and the terror of the vacuum. He wants non-movement because of the illusion that movement will carry him into the vacuum, where he believes that his consciousness will cease. Yet the life spark within him pushes him toward movement.

Hence, on your path you are learning to move your body, you are learning to move your feelings, you are learning to move your mind so that your spirit can move you. The moving spirit must be allowed to manifest. Therefore, all the other levels of the personality must align themselves with the spirit's innate nature, which is movement.

You move your body in such a way that the energy flow can interpenetrate your entire physical system. You move your feelings by learning to let them out and feel their movement in you. You move your mind by spreading it to new ways of looking at something. This is a very essential task. Your fixed ideas prevent your spirit from moving your mind, and thus from being inspired by higher truth. I am not referring merely to general concepts, but much more to your immediate life situations and to your involvements. What usually happens is that you adopt certain opinions and certain judgments and then you invest so much of your feeling energy into them that you eventually come to believe that these actually are your feelings. The negative energy is being created by fixed untruthful -- and therefore unavoidably unmoving -- thought and mind processes. The limited truth which you believe to be the whole truth then becomes the tool of error and of self-deception.

Thus, what you may believe to be emotions or feelings often are merely fixed opinions. As a result, where your feeling capacity should unfold, there you are paralyzed. Therefore, you are unable to let the flow come into you and move you. The task of any pathwork is to bring the whole system into movement. But it requires a very finely-attuned timing to know when a particular approach is appropriate, for otherwise harm can be done. Every level of the personality requires a different approach. But before certain exercises can be used there must exist some agility in your body, some agility in your feeling self, and some agility in your mind, otherwise distortions will occur. For example, the deliberately-produced feelings may be distorted into a dramatization, into an exaggeration, into fake feelings. The selfwill may be used to put up a good show and to foster the illusion that the soul is flexible and in a state of flux.

By the same token, when the mind exercises itself by trying out new ways of seeing a situation, but with the ulterior motive of trying to get away from the necessity of facing your blame, of facing your accusations, and of facing your self-justifying victimization, then this may lead to a superimposed -- and therefore false -- serenity that actually covers up a great deal of negative feelings that have not yet been dealt with. So you can see that timing plays a great role here.

Let us now consider what I said about negative feelings, namely that it is a distortion to aim at completely getting rid of them. As long as you cultivate your capacity to produce and to experience whatever feeling is in you, then this feeling, if undesirable, will have no power over you. Nothing ever gets fixedly and definitely behind you. There is no future state where it is all accomplished, and therefore when you no longer need to move. This concept arises out of the fear of movement, of the rejection of movement, hence out of the illusion that movement is undesirable. If you are in a state of truth about movement, then movement is desirable, while non-movement is to be avoided. Conversely, if you are not in a state of truth about movement, then you will hanker for non-movement and you will attempt to avoid any kind of movement at all costs.

Let us take the physical level as an example. Suppose that you have worked sufficiently on your body so as to remove all your muscular blocks. This does not mean that now you can cease moving your body. Were you to do so, then new blocks and new stagnancies would soon form all over again. For your decision to remain non-moving would be based on a false concept of life; hence negative feelings (in this case fear) would develop. If you do no deal with this fear by first recognizing it, second by accepting it, and third by challenging it, then you give in to the false idea -- to the fear -- which then prevents you from moving on all the levels of your being.

The healthy individual continues to move, but now no longer for therapeutic reasons, but out of joyousness. Then the movement is no longer a chore, it is a pleasure. As long as it is a chore, then the temptation to go into stagnancy, and thus to give in to the vacuum principle, is great. This must be overcome by moving your mind into new directions and by deciding to move on all levels of your being, so that your spirit can first interpenetrate and then enliven all the levels with its life and with its truth. Your spirit wants to bring light into your darkness and movement into your stagnancy. If you stop moving, then you begin to die.

On the feeling level the same holds true. A person who is advanced in his development may have already resolved his residual feeling of hate. He may have gone through his residual pain. He may have dissipated his residual anger. Not only does this not mean that such a person cannot and will not experience these feelings ever again. Just the contrary is true. The more residual feelings have been first accepted and then dealt with -- in other words, when they are no longer feared and hence rejected -- the greater will be the ability to move the soul currents in any direction at any time. Then the person can make available to himself at will the experience of any feeling at any time he wants to. But this must not be the tight selfwill. It must be the smooth, the healthy inner will. If you do this -- in other words, if you can produce violent hate at will, if you can produce anger at will, if you can produce pain at will, if you can produce sadness at will, if you can produce fear at will, if you can produce terror at will, if you can produce equanimity at will, if you can produce peace at will, if you can produce pleasure at will, if you can produce joy at will, if you can produce love at will, if you can produce compassion at will -- then you are in possession of yourself. As a result, you can be moved from within.

Those who have a tendency to overdramatize, those who have a tendency to be willful, those who have a tendency to counterfeit their feelings should abstain from these exercises because they must first shed the mask that hides the shame of their real feelings. Those who have a tendency to use certain limited emotions as a defense against other emotions should deliberately abstain for a while from using the superimposed feelings to practice with. Let us say that someone uses fear as a defense against his spite, against his violence, against his malice, and against his hate. All these feelings must first be worked out before any exercises are attempted.

The person who is contracted, who is restricted, and who therefore is alienated from his core, is unable to produce any feelings -- or only a very limited amount. He is numb and paralyzed on that level. While the person who is already much more liberated from his constriction and from his defense -- because his residual feelings have been dealt with -- is much more flexible. Therefore, he can easily decide to be angry or he can easily decide to be sad. In other words, he can decide to be in whatever emotional state he wishes to be in at the moment.

These exercises should be done gradually and with this in mind. All of the helpers should evaluate where each individual is in this respect. This will prove immensely helpful and it will further your development. Use your inner guidance as to when and how to apply them. The knowledge of these principles is very important. When you can increasingly produce feelings at will, then you will be more able to bring out any last vestiges and remnants of residual feelings that have been neglected. But even when they are completely gone, then your emotional fluidity should continue to be practiced so that your soul substance remains vibrant and flowing. I have always mentioned how important the soul movements are. The inner cosmic movements that constantly go through you can be made conscious only when your emotional state is agile and you can therefore easily emote. Let yourself be inspired about these exercises and do them consciously and deliberately. Of course, it does require the energy of more people. It is more difficult to do these exercises alone, although eventually you will be able to do even that.

Begin by listening into yourself for what the predominant feeling at this moment is. At first it may be very faint. Therefore, you need to build it up and then to allow yourself an intense experience of the entire feeling. In other words, to allow yourself the full expression of it. After that, you can go into other feelings, as they may wish to manifest from within you. At other times either your helper may decide to concentrate on certain feelings, or your inspired mind will direct you. Always work with meditation, asking for guidance and for inspiration.

This practice of making yourself fluid and flexible is very important for your ultimate alignment with your divine center. As I mentioned, there are also mind exercises that will be given to you. In the meantime, I will give you a specific one. Take any situation that you are in now that is of bother to you, that is a disturbance in your life, and look at the construction that you have built in your mind. See how you have built a certain form with your mind by your conclusion, which you then fix forever tighter so as to convince yourself and eliminate your disturbing self-doubts. Probe with your active, deciding faculty to envisage other alternatives from the one that you have chosen until now. Play with these other alternatives. Allow your spirit to inspire you and to guide your mind into new channels, channels in which you are neither annihilated -- which you think is what would happen to if you were to abandon your fixed view -- nor in which you are continuing to hold on to your present interpretation. The latter is, to a considerable extent, responsible for the very disturbance that you suffer from. Try to see this.

First you must unearth what it is that you really believe. When you have done this, then those same beliefs must be made flexible. After that, other beliefs must be considered. In other words, your mental outlook must be widened about the topic that you now protect rigidly with certain fixed opinions. You believe that your judgments, your thoughts, and your opinions are the result of a specific disturbing situation. I say that it is precisely the other way around. The disturbing situation is a result of your tendency to harbor just such thoughts, just such judgments, and just such opinions because of an underlying motivation and intentionality. Perhaps these can be faced with less resistance when you make your mind more flexible so as to try out new alternatives as interpretations. If this tendency to build a cluster of opinions and certain judgments under certain circumstances exists, then it is always there in abeyance, waiting for the next occasion. In other words, the psychological deviations are connected to a fixed, inflexible mind. In other words, to a rigidity on the level of thought that must be dealt with in active, focused exercises. The more you are willing to do this -- and you request inner guidance and inspiration so that your mind may be able to take the steps beyond the confines of the construct -- then the more flexible your mind is going to become.

As the years go by, you will learn to do this better and better. Your task is to bring your whole being -- your physical being, your emotional being, and your mental being -- into alignment with your divine center through your ability to be fluid and flexible on all levels. That should be the motto for the work that you begin this season.

Before closing the lecture, I want to give you another exercise in the form of a meditation on the triad of pride, of selfwill, and of fear. In what respect are you in an unhealthy state of pride? Then visualize this same situation by focusing on how it would feel to give up this pride. If the only alternative seems to be being humiliated, then start probing for other possibilities. Ask for inner guidance. Then try to experience yourself without pride -- in a healthy state of dignity -- but without humiliation. You have to make a real inner, volitional step to be able to see yourself in a new way that conciliates both dignity and humility, but that leaves out both pride and humiliating submission. If you are ready for this possibility, even before you are able to experience it, then the divine life will produce it from within yourself. But first you must make yourself receptive to it.

Then do the same with selfwill. Envisage yourself in a new state of reaction in which you are neither selfwilled nor spineless, and therefore exploited. Visualize yourself in a state in which you can both assert yourself and let go, and therefore can give in. The proper balance will come from your core in specific ways and for specific situations. But your mind must be open enough and it must be flexible enough to let in new possibilities. Then the spiritual capacities in you must be cultivated so that you can entrust yourself to your inner guidance.

Have the courage to go through the anxiety that will inevitably result when attempting to give up your pride and your selfwill. Then you come to the fear. The fear cannot possibly vanish before both the pride and the selfwill have been abandoned. For fear is always a product of both. Also see your fear in terms of distrust of the universe. You evidently believe that only your selfwill and your pride can protect you from danger. This implies that the universe is untrustworthy and that all you have as a safeguard is this puny protection: your pride and your selfwill. Question this premise and then experiment with new alternatives in this respect. Open yourself for the divine reality to flood you with a state of consciousness in which there is no selfwill, no pride, and no fear, and therefore where the conflicts -- both outside and inside -- are transcended.

Now do an exercise in trust. Open yourself up for the possibility that the universe will yield to you whatever you need. Experiment with this thought: "How would it be if I were to trust the universe, if in this particular situation I gave up the fear that is a result of my distrust -- therefore of my pride and of my selfwill?" Allow your central core to fill you with an inkling of a state in which you can react without selfwill, without pride, and without fear.

These are preliminary exercises to practice for your further development.

Love and blessings are being given to everyone with a tremendous force that you can utilize. Let it open your inner being so that then it can flow out of you and into your outer being. The universe is good and beautiful, and there is nothing to fear, neither inside nor outside, no matter how much it may appear otherwise due to your present distortions. Let love into you so that it can then come out of you. Be blessed, be in peace.

September 22, 1972