Visualization Process For Growing Into The Unitive State
By The Pathwork Guide
Greetings and blessings for all of you, my dearest friends. This lecture is another step to help you in a very specific way. In the process of growth and expansion the individualized personality must always evolve toward new states of consciousness and experience. Each state deepens in scope and it releases new creative substance with which to create desirable life experiences and worlds. In this way more of the abundance of the universe becomes available to the individual.
Visualization is essential to the creating and recreating work that you do in meditation. Unless you can visualize the state you are to grow into, then it is hardly possible to reach it. However, it is extremely difficult to visualize a new state to grow into unless an example of some sort exists. Therefore a prototype, provided by a person who has already attained the desired state, is essential for imprinting the desired concept on your mind. This map, this blueprint is the first step. It is the idea that later materializes. Without an idea, then materialization is completely impossible.
Attitudes, ways of being and patterns of behavior have a particular power to influence us. We might almost say that they are contagious. This applies to both positive and negative attitudes and to both positive and negative behavior patterns. Even feelings and the states they create can be contagious. It is a known fact that some people's opinions can influence others enough to make them adopt the same opinions. This entire process of influence through exemplary figures leads to imitation, to emulation, and to identification. All of this can exist either on a quite conscious, deliberate level, or on very subtle, subliminal, and involuntary level, depending on what figures are chosen to identify with, to adopt from, or to emulate as prototypes for a new state to grow into.
The freer the soul is -- that is, the less encumbered it is by distortions, by misconceptions, by negativity, and by destructive impulses -- then the more reliable become its choices. This applies both to the conscious choice and to the unconscious choice of figures we want to identify with, and also to the particular traits that we decide to either emulate or to discard. The ability to make such choices well depends on the purity of the state of consciousness already attained by the chooser. So, as always, the beginning is the hardest. In this case, one's own distortions may lead to choosing false heroes, and at the same time may make one utterly blind to the really desirable aspects of a possible exemplary figure, because the concepts are lacking. Only little by little can a person build the proper concepts so as to be able to recognize the desired traits, which can then be used as further road maps.
Individual personalities choose both their parents and their environment on the basis of this principle while journeying from one incarnation to the next. The proper exemplary figures set off a spark of recognition in the mind of the seekers. This then creates a vibrant energy field whose creative power molds the soul substance of the seekers who have finally recognized the true examples. When done in a truthful and creative way, this never means falsely aping or giving up one's own uniqueness. On the contrary, the emulated ways of being, traits, and attitudes are adapted to the uniqueness of the seeker who then incorporates these universal aspects into his or her own self-expression. You remain totally true to yourself when you emulate someone in a real and creative way. Only negative attitudes in the self can lead to negative identification with negative role models and hence to self-betrayal.
All parents are prototypical figures to their children. Strong rejection either of a parent or of particular traits and attitudes in the parent is an indication of the fact that a deliberate negative identification took place -- an aping which the real self now battles against blindly, because the real problem has not yet been recognized.
To the degree that both the parents and the child are healthy and purified souls, to that degree the child identifies with their positive aspects. The child will recognize what traits in the parent -- and later in other authority figures -- are to be used for its plan and what traits are to be rejected. The child can do this only to the degree that it is receptive through its own power to know the truth.
Negative identification leads to the creation of images.
As we use the term in this pathwork, images are always misconceptions and generalizations which form very limited and fixed closed systems. Negative identification, which forms an inner image, always creates a limited vision that precludes seeing available alternatives. This false vision excludes many important factors. The few that are seen are so much out of context that one's perception of life is unrealistic. Therefore, one's reaction to life must be equally unrealistic.
Positive identification can never lead to an image. Instead, it leads to visualization, which is a flexible, realistic, wide-open system with many alternative ways from which consciousness and creative action can spread. It is important for you to think about this and to really understand what I am saying here. On the spiritual path you must come to a point when
you know that you need a positive identification with a realistic, open, and freeing prototype. You need to recognize external exemplary models. If you cannot do so yet, then you first need to build an inner concept, so that you can visualize inwardly and therefore recognize outwardly exemplary figures. Later you will become such exemplary figures yourselves, to inspire others on their path when they are ready to see the truth and to conceive of themselves according to their in-dwelling potentials. A true exemplary figure inspires
you to visualize similar traits and attitudes dormant within your deeper self, which can then be brought into full expression.
I mentioned before that your blocks and your fogs created by your illusions and by your distortions make you blind to the true exemplary figures, or at least to some of their traits. They cause you to be blind because your concept of what really exists in these examples is either still absent or so misconceived that your interpretation of what you see may be completely wrong. A perception of the true exemplary figures can exist only when you are already relatively free, realitively open, and relatively aware of yourself. Then, suddenly, something will click in you. A spontaneous -- almost automatic -- organic desire to develop in the same direction as your example will spring up in you. However, you will not imitate something that is foreign to your own nature. The existing basic universal traits are expressed in different ways by each unique individual. So you do not emulate to make an exact copy of a trait, but rather you adapt it to your unique individuality. Somewhere along your path you will have gained sufficient self-awareness to have a subliminal understanding of what is worthy of emulation. You will be alert to it and then use this vision to complete yourself.
As in every area of development, here, too, there are certain sequences
and certain alternations according to spiritual law. Where the blocks exist, and therefore exemplary figures are either absent or unrecognizable, there the psyche has to learn, through the labor of the pathwork, to choose realistic, positive figures as signposts. You must pay attention to this necessity and
you have to conceive an inner vision of what a unified, harmonious, integrated person who expresses contact with and unification with the divine self is like. When such a concept exists, then inner visualization can begin. Then this will make you capable of meeting and recognizing the outer figures who can help you further, who can affect you, and who can inspire you to fully become your best self.
In this lecture I wish to give you some clear-cut pointers and some initial concepts of what to look for, what to be attuned to, and what to be prepared to recognize as your own as yet dormant potentials. I will draw a picture of what it is like, inwardly as well as outwardly, to come to the point where the personality unites with the inner self, with the divine self. In other words, with the inexhaustible wealth that is every human being's inner nucleus, the center of one's being. This lecture is merely an outline that describes certain basic conditions and expressions which can be safely generalized and applied to all of you who have reached the state where your divine self is being actualized and therefore expressed. I will try to give
you a concept and a vision so that you can begin to see with fresh eyes, and perhaps be able to recognize in others, what previously you had been blind to.
When an individual comes to the state of consciously and deliberately choosing to commit himself to the divine will and to the divine reality, then the groundwork has been laid for certain vital changes to occur both in his inner life and in his outer life. This is a commitment to the All-Consciousness dwelling in every creature. It can be called by any name you choose: God, the Universal Consciousness, the Real Self, the Inner Self -- whatever name you give to that which transcends the little ego. When this wholehearted commitment has been made totally, then certain things begin to happen in one's life. Obviously, one reaches this state not by crossing a sharply defined line, but through a gradual process. Before describing this process, I wish to say that you must not be misled by the fact that you may consciously have made such a commitment and yet you find no great inner or outer change occurring in your life.
Some of you may be committed to God on a conscious level, but you
may not realize that there are other levels in you where this is not the case. You may find it easy to believe on a conscious level that this commitment to God -- that now exists merely on the conscious level -- is what you want. You may consciously be full of good will and really mean it. But unless you have experienced the contradictory level within you where you either do not wish that or where you only wish it on the terms of your own ego, which defeats the act of self-surrender, then you will balk. Unless you acknowledge your contrariness, unless you acknowledge your fear, unless you acknowledge your selfwill, and unless you acknowledge your pride, then your conscious commitment will always be blocked. Unless you own up to the contrary ego level behind your good will, then you may not even understand why certain results
are still lacking despite your conscious commitment to truth, your conscious commitment to God, your conscious commitment to love. This awareness is extremely important. The pathwork deals with it in an intensive way in order to help you to avoid one of the most insidious obstructions, your self-deception.
Therefore, we must search for and bring out that negative part of the
self which says, "I will not." You will learn the courage,
the humility, and the honesty to expose this part -- the part that even says, "I want to resist. I want to be spiteful, I want to have it all my way, or else." Only when the secret crevices of your psychic substance yield up and expose these areas can you begin -- often with a lot of struggle -- to change this negative level, this darker part of the personality. When this part remains hidden, then you are split and therefore you do not understand why your positive endeavors fail to go further.
Then there comes a point when you have won this particular battle. You can wholeheartedly embrace and trust your surrender to the Divine Consciousness. But this does not come in one fell swoop. At first this surrender must be fought for every time. You need self-discipline in order to remind yourself. Although the resistance is gone, the outer self is still conditioned to the old way of functioning, and therefore it automatically forges ahead on the top level of the mind. In this stage you need to acquire a new habit pattern. It takes time. Perhaps when you are really in trouble, in a state of crisis, then you will remember to let go and to let God. But in ordinary life, in your everyday chores, this does not occur to you. Perhaps you can do it where you are relatively free, but where your problems persist, there you still find your old obstinacy, your old distrust, and your old forgetfulness. Only little by little do you reach the state where a new habit pattern is instituted, where the act of self-surrender to the All is actualized. It wll begin to manifest when it permeates all your thoughts, all your perceptions, all your decisions, all your actions, all your feelings, and all your reactions.
First let me speak about the relationship between your inner life
and your outer life. A lot of confusion exists among people about
this topic. There are those who claim that only the inner life is important. They prohibit the inevitable movement from the inner life to the outer life because they do not see the limitation and the actual falsity of this idea. If unification and the divine process are truly in movement, then the inner content must express itself in the outer form. In short, the outer life must mirror the inner life in every possible respect. But if your consciousness either ignores this truth, or strongly embraces the opposite belief that the outer life does not matter, then you prohibit the flow of the whole process. If this happens, then the more radiant energetic matter cannot express itself on the level of the coarser matter and thereby refine the latter. You may recall that in one of the more recent lectures I described how creation attempts to fill the void. Every human being helps in this task of refining the coarser matter by bringing the inner, spiritual reality into outer expression.
The false belief that the outer level does not matter encases the spiritual truth and the inner beauty behind a wall, thus separating it from the material reality. The individual who harbors this false concept -- that the outer level does not matter -- then begins to see a dichotomy between the inner life and the outer life, which are really one. Many movements and many spiritual schools of thought preach asceticism and the denial of the outer life under the guise that this furthers the inner life, the spiritual life. This distortion is a reaction to the equally distorted opposite extreme, a position which claims that the outer form is more important than the inner content, and which may even negate the fact that an inner reality or an inner content exists at all. Instead, it asserts that only the outer form matters. True inner growth must eventually also manifest outwardly, though not necessarily with the speed designated by the outer-oriented person, who in expecting instant changes is making mistakes in judgment. It is certainly possible to express the outer form without it being a direct expression of the inner content. Therefore, be careful in your evaluations.
These two distortions are faulty counter-reactions. Each
one attempts to eliminate the other by misunderstanding its own. This phenomenon can occur on all subjects as long as the consciousness is entrapped in the dualistic illusion. During different eras and different civilizations, and under different cultural conditions, one of these opposite distortions may be adopted until the pendulum swings to the other. Only a truly connected, self-actualizing, and unified person expresses the outer form as an inevitable sequence of his inner content.
When the outer form exists without the inner content, then it is a temporary cover that must break down, even though it may resemble the glorious perfection of divine reality and its expressions. This is a process that repeats itself in many areas throughout human development. There is an ongoing law that says all the false covers must first crack and then crumble. When the outer form exists unconnected with an organic inner content, then it must disintegrate. If it exists based on faulty premises, if it exists based on appearance, or if it exists based on confusing the outer life with the inner life, then the outer form must crumble first before it
can be rebuilt as an organic expression of the inner movement and of the inner content. Only when the outer form has crashed and the inner chaos has first been exposed and then has been thoroughly eliminated can the inner beauty build the outer beauty, can the inner harmony build the outer harmony, and can the inner abundance build the outer abundance. A vision of this principle is also necessary for creating a visualization of your own movement, which can then manifest in your outer life as a result of your inner process.
Now I shall discuss specific manifestations that take place in a person who is already deeply anchored in the process of actualizing the divine life into his or her ego consciousness. What are the inner and outer attitudes, manifestations, and expressions of such a person? All decisions,
big or small, are made on the basis of self-surrender, where the little self surrenders to the Godself. It steps aside and it allows the inner wisdom to permeate it. In this process the personality begins to realize that there is nothing that is unimportant. Every thought, every opinion, every interpretation, every mode of reacting is given a chance to be permeated by
the Greater Consciousness.
At this stage the resistance to pay attention to everything that occurs is overcome; a new habit has been formed, so that the divine process is now self-perpetuating. It is so much part of the whole person that it operates even on those rare occasions when the personality forgets to establish the contact, when perhaps an old raw area might still flare up and push the personality into the wrong direction. The inner self is sufficiently freed to manifest so that it can send forth warnings, disagreement, advice -- and then leave the decision of whether or not to follow such advice to the outer personality. This is already a state of grace. Confidence and trust have been established as a result of repeated proof that the divine reality brings truth, wisdom, goodness, and joy. At first the divine will is not trusted. It is confused with untrustworthy parental authority, which may often have proclaimed something as being good for the child that later proved not to be so. At the stage in question this confusion no longer exists. The self is fully aware of the fact that the divine will is truly in accordance with all that the heart may possibly desire. This trust grows gradually every time you overcome your resistance and you go into the apparent abyss of surrender, of giving up the narrow selfwill.
This self-perpetuating divine process brings a vital revolutionary change into the entire person. I can touch upon only a few of its
many manifestations. Thoughts of truth will be sent forth into your being, notwithstanding the limited thoughts that you still habitually follow. You will hear an inner voice instructing you with a wisdom that your outer self cannot possibly produce. According to this wisdom, there is never any need to hate, there is never any need to feel self-rejection, there is never any need to reject others. The answers and the revelations will show you the oneness and the unity of all, which will then completely eliminate fear, anxiety, friction, and despair.
Surrendering the knowledge of the limited ego to the knowledge of the deeper self -- so as to exert all the energy, all the courage, all the honesty, and all the self-discipline toward making the deeper knowledge self-perpetuating -- leads to ultimate fulfillment. Without this as the essential foundation, then no joy, no pleasure, no fulfillment can exist for long. Even while they do exist, the fulfillment becomes unbearable, and finally can
no longer be accepted. Therefore, give up your stake in your negative reactions, give up your stake in the subborn opinions of your little mind, give up your stake in the laziness that forces you to succumb to the old habits of your separated self. You will thus gain true life. Wait patiently, but be ready to receive divine wisdom, which you can activate if you so desire. When this state has first been instituted and then strengthened, then certain other manifestations begin to appear, both inwardly and outwardly.
You will find an immense security. This is a security that you can gain only when you discover the reality of the spiritual world within you and also operative around you. Then you will know the deep peace that
comes from knowing the meaning of your life and the meaning of all life. You will intuitively know the connections and therefore you will be permeated by a sense of fulfillment and safety that surpasses all words. Then all this will no longer be a theory or a belief that you either cling to or deny, but it will be an experiential fact which you can recognize again and again. There is always a way out of every darkness. Therefore, there is never any reason to despair. You will know that nothing happens without a cause -- and a good cause at that -- and you will know that you are always capable of using whatever you experience to heighten your blissful life. The dark spots will become opportunities for further light, and therefore they no longer need to be avoided, whether they be pain, guilt, fear, or whatever. Again and again you will experience the wide open system of creation.
You will know your own creative power. Therefore you will make use of it, rather than feeling like a helpless object in a fixed world. Peace and the knowledge of the rightness of life come from realizing that your world, your experience, and your life are your own creation. This realization opens many doors. You no longer live in the two-dimensional world of either/or, but now you avail yourself of the many-faceted reality at your disposal.
The confidence and the fearlessness in which you live will then release an immense amount of energy and joy. As you lose your fear of pain, because now
you can experience pain, then your fear ceases to exist. As you lose your fear of anger, because now you can accept your anger, then your anger no longer exists. As you lose your fear of hate, because now you can accept your hate, then your hate no longer exists. The same energy is now free for better expressions. You now become capable of pleasure and capable of joy. Therefore, you no longer need to reject them. Instead of creating loneliness, you can now create relationships: the bliss of the most intimate relationship with one mate and the satisfaction of deep, open friendships. Pleasure will no longer frighten you because now you know, in every pore and in every cell of your being, that you deserve it. Your every pore and your every cell are the expressions of a consciousness that now is in harmony with your own God Consciousness.
Many of you find yourselves in an interim state. You begin to experience new joys and pleasures that you never knew existed. Life opens up for you as it never did before. But you also find yourself in the position where you still cannot bear too much of it. This is because you either have not
yet totally surrendered to the God Consciousness or because you have not yet sufficiently faced the negative aspects in you, and therefore you still cling to them. Hence, you fear pleasure, which becomes more frightening than the grayness that you still wish for -- and therefore which you create. It
is a grayness of neither pleasure nor pain. Often you want to painstakingly preserve this state of grayness without knowing that you do so. It is a grayness which seems to give you comfort. But in the long run it leaves you empty.
An inevitable manifestation of the continuous process of actualizing your deep self is the incredible creativity that blossoms from your inner life. You are creative in ideas, creative in alternatives, creative in talents, creative in the richness of feelings, creative in the ability to live with others and to relate to them. You find the treasure of your creative powers, the wealth of your feelings, and the fullness of your being. But only as you go through the emptiness can you find that fullness. And that requires courage, which comes into being when you pray or meditate for it. First you must want the fullness and then you must commit yourself to it. This fullness of feelings, this wealth of creative ideas, and the ability to live in the Now, with all its excitement and peace, will deepen and widen. It will not consist of mutually exclusive opposites, but rather of different facets of the same fullness. The times when you seem to lose it will come less often and will be less severe.
Since now you have the power to create, then you can create an intuitive understanding of yourself, you can create an intuitive understanding of others, you can create an intuitive understanding of life. Your total attitude of relaxation about every part of yourself eliminates the need either to cover up or to escape from anything in you. This undefended state must make you aware of other people on their deepest levels. You read their thoughts and you understand the deeper connections both within them and between them, so that you can help them, you can have empathy for them, and you can love them. You need never fear others. Therefore, you no longer need to defend against them with your destructive ego defenses.
Outer manifestations must follow suit. Your health will be glowing. You will have vitality and energy as you never had before. The energy that you expend will always be replenished -- and more. All your functions will be in perfect working order. All your physical systems will be coordinated. This will affect your outer looks. You cannot help being beautiful when you
are in such vibrant health and harmony. It will show in the grace and the poise of your movements, in the balance and the coordination you express, in the brilliance of your skin, in the suppleness of your form. The improvement will come in varying degrees, but it is always possible. Think of these as your
own possibilities. You will be able to materialize them because you already are essentially that person.
But you cannot materialize these possible improvements if you either have a stake in believing that you cannot all be that, or if you want all that vitality, all that health, all that radiance, and all that beauty for egotistical reasons of competitive power drives. For then your inner guilt
will not let you have them.
There are those who have these desirable qualities in outer expression only. In that case, the time will come when these mere outer forms must break down before they can be rebuilt as a result of being connected with the inner content. There is an innate system of divine justice built into all of consciousness. When a life expression is sought that does not come as the harmonious outer result of an inner reality, then it will either not succed or it will break down after it has been created. The real inner guilt that psychologists ascribe to neurotic quilt operates here. Such guilt is "neurotic" only when it expresses itself in distorted perfectionism, which hides the unwillingness to give up the real guilt. So when you find in you a resistance to happiness, then first look for the areas of justified
guilt and then for their meaning.
Your inner unity with your eternal self will make it possible for you to use your creative ability to explore any area of universal truth that you wish to comprehend. Now you know the power of thought and the power of the creative consciousness. Therefore, you can focus on it as a result of the self-discipline that you have learned. Thus you can cultivate a creative receptivity so as to experience the eternal state beyond physical death. However, this perception is not reliable as long as you seek it out of your fear of death. It is reliable only when you do not fear death because now you can die, just as now you can be in pain. When you want something because you fear its opposite, then the result cannot be reliable. You can create only out of fullness, never out of need and poverty.
So the difficulty lies in initially creating fullness. Seeking the opposite of what you fear is an escape and it leads to a split rather than to a unification. Exactly the opposite road must be taken. You must die many deaths right now, every day in your life,
in order to discover the eternality of life. Only then will you live fearlessly.
How can you die all these little deaths? Follow exactly
the process I have described. Let go of your little ego, let go of your little opinions, let go of the negative reactions that you have such an investment
in. You have to die to those. The little ego, with its little investments, must die. In that way you can transcend death and then you can intuitively experience the reality of life ongoing.
When you live without the fear of death -- because you have experienced dying so many times -- then you will know that in principle physical death is the same. You find it to be so by temporarily letting go of your smaller self only to find a larger self awakening, which then unifies with your little self. So you see, not even the little self or the ego really dies. It is enlarged and it is united with the larger self. It is not given up forever
-- unlike what is commonly believed. But it appears to be given up, and you must be ready to take that plunge.
When this happens, then a measure of eternality will manifest in your life right now. It will manifest not only by eliminating the fear of dying, but
also in a more immediate practical sense. It will keep you vital and youthful, thereby giving you a foretaste of the timelessness and the agelessness of the true life.
Another outward manifestation is abundance. Since real life, spiritual life is limitless abundance, then you must begin to manifest that to some degree when you actualize your divine self. If you can make room in your consciousness for outer abundance as a reflection of the universal abundance, then you will create it, and therefore you will experience it. But if
you want to experience it because you fear poverty, then you will create a split. The abundance which you create out of the fear of poverty is
not built on reality. Therefore, its flimsy structure must be crushed, so that then you can let yourself be poor, and therefore dissolve your illusion of poverty. Only after this can the real, unified richness grow. Only when you first can be poor can you allow yourself to be rich, as an outer expression of the inner content. Then you will not want to be rich for the sake of power, or for outer gains in the eyes of others, or out of greed, or out of fear, but in order to be a true divine expression of the abundance that is the nature of the universe.
Another outer manifestation of the continuous process of actualizing the divine life is the proper balance of everything. For example, the balance of assertion and of giving in. The spontaneous knowing of when one is appropriate and when the other is appropriate comes from within. Or consider the proper balance between right selflessness and right selfishness, as opposed
to wrong selflessness and wrong selfishness. All these balances and all these dualities will become harmonious elements in a spontaneous unification. The intuitive knowledge of when, of what, and of how will come not because you decide it with your mind, but as an expression of the inner truth and of the
inner beauty that now reach expression on the outer level, appropriately and beautifully.
There will be a poise and a beauty in your whole bearing. There will be in you a courtesy and a chivalry that never need to fear being ridiculed or being taken advantage of. There will be order without a trace of compulsiveness, order in all the things of your life. Order and beauty are related, and therefore are interdependent. There will be generosity in you. There will be a giving and a receiving as one ongoing stream. There will come to you a deep ability to be grateful, as well as an ability to appreciate others, to appreciate yourself, and to appreciate the whole creative universe.
A new freedom to be soft and vulnerable will make you truly strong and
will take away your shame. Concurrently, you will experience a new freedom
to be strong and assertive -- even angry -- without false guilt. You will
know intuitively, and therefore you will act from within, because now you are in constant contact with the wisdom, with the love, and with the truth of your inner reality, of your divine reality.
The emotional loneliness that is the self-chosen lot of so many people will gradually begin to disappear. In your development you learn to be real. In other words, to function without your masks and your pretenses. Consequently, you begin to feel comfortable in closer intimacy. As you simultaneously cease to fear the pain/pleasure syndrome, then true ecstasy and a deep fusion on all levels must give you the deepest fulfillment that a human being can experience. You will progress to new heights and to new depths of experience, where you explore the inner universe in unison. Loneliness and the torture of conflict about the simultaneous need for closeness and the fear of closeness will no longer exist. Such a relationship will fuse on all levels. The abundance of the universe expresses itself in the all areas of life. Therefore, you will feel it in the sharing, in the respect, in the warmth, in the ease, and in the comfort with which you can be intimate and fused with another person, or in giving to and receiving from another person. Your security in your own feelings will make you equally secure about being loved.
You will experience the deep satisfaction of giving, of helping, of fulfilling a task, and of being devoted to doing so. You will rejoice in the ongoing creative process that is at work in it.
All of these are gauges for you. These gauges are not to be used to put yourself down in impatience and intolerance. They are gauges that you can use in order to create conscious and deliberate inner visualizations about any one or all of these life expressions. Then you will be more strongly motivated to search further for what still stands in the way. This lecture will give you many tools and a lot of material for your work.
The love of the universe spreads over all of you and reaches deep into your hearts, my dearest friends. Be blessed in God.