Outer Events Reflect Self-Creation -- Three Stages

By The Pathwork Guide

My dearest friends, I greet you, I bless you, and I welcome you. The time is ripe to give this specific lecture because a sufficient number of my friends on the path will be capable not only of intellectual understanding, but also of putting some of the path principles to practical use. As always, I do have to repeat certain information in order to make the connections clear and to make the topic one comprehensive whole.

The human mind is squeezed into a narrow box, as it were. It is a box consisting of misperceptions and of limited perceptions. As you know yourself, then you gradually gain a proper perspective, and therefore also a proper perception of life and a proper perception of its relation to your inner self-creation. The perception of the human mind is faulty because you interpret what you see as being the whole, although you only see small segments. This partial vision alters the nature of the perceived aspect of reality, and results in a totally different picture of life, in a totally different picture of creation, in a totally different picture of the processes of life, and in a totally different picture of the process of creation. Imagine, as an analogy, a vast picture of which you only glimpse a small part through a narrow opening because the rest of the picture is covered. What you see is only one part of reality. But if you believe it to be the whole, then your entire perception is faulty, and therefore your entire understanding is equally faulty. The human mind and the human perception function the same way with regard to the real world.

It is also true that the same human mind is capable of infinite expansion and capable of transcending its present limitation. The specific limitation of the mind must and will eventually be transcended in order to realize its total scope. A lot of human misperception stems from a very one-sided focusing and conditioning. The mind conditions its own beliefs, its own perceptions, its own observations, and it perpetuates them as long as these self-conditioning processes are not being challenged or questioned. But as long as these conditioned beliefs and perceptions are being taken for granted as truths, then the mind remains in a box.

To gain a deeper understanding and a clearer picture of reality, you must first know that you brainwash yourself continually, particularly in relation to your experiences in life. As long as the connection between inner reality and inner conditions or landscapes on the one hand, and outer experience on the other is as tenuous as it is now in most human beings, the nature of life and the relationship between life and the self are totally distorted. The box in which the mind finds itself becomes painfully narrow and limited. All perceptions are untrustworthy because the main perception of life and of the self is incomplete.

The illusion that the outer life imposes experiences on you is so widespread that the brainwashing is very difficult to stop. In this lecture I would like specifically to discuss three basic stages in growth and development as seen from the point of view of your life experience.

In the first stage, that which is farthest removed from reality, all events seem totally disconnected from you. Then the world seems a fixed place in which your personal experiences come to you as a result of pure chance, of luck, or misfortune. But along the curve of growing a progression takes place. You begin to distinguish events that you yourself have created, perhaps not consciously and deliberately. Nevertheless you know that you have caused the results that you now experience. However, when it comes to outer events which seem to have nothing to do with you, then you still cannot see this. When such events disturb your state of happiness and peace, then you are still very much removed from your center. The outer event seems remote from your own inner state, only symbolically reflecting aspects of your inner self which you are supposed to deal with, but which you have refused to pay attention to until now. This ongoing refusal and self-imposed blindness removes you to such an extent from the point where you can become aware of your self-creation that the results of your own creation not only seem but actually are removed from you. In other words, they appear disconnected from your voluntary processes.

This is a very painful state because what happens to you appears undeserved. Consequently, life becomes frightening in its apparently unpredictable character. You truly seem to be a victim of circumstances beyond your own sphere of influence. This impression causes a great deal of fear of life and of distrust of life. It also perpetuates the greatest human hoax: the conclusion that human beings are victims of life. No game is deadlier and more painful. Yet no resistance is greater than that which refuses to give up this hoax by taking the blinders off and seeing beyond this very limited vision.

I have discussed this principle many times in different contexts. Some of you who are involved in this pathwork, after much overcoming of resistances and blocks in yourselves, actually begin to occasionally experience that what before had seemed to you absolutely and incontrovertibly a fixed outer event that you were put into haphazardly was really a very logical extention of your inner attitude and of your explicit intention. Such an event reflects specific distorted ideas which, in turn, engender specific distorted action, specific distorted reaction, and specific distorted volition. When this connecting bridge is established, then an entirely different world view comes into being. Little by little, the false focus shifts and one's vision of life moves into a clearer perspective.

The process of connecting inner attitudes to outer events requires courage, humility, and honesty. It demands the utter integrity of self-responsibility. But the relief, the safety, the new energy, and the creative strength that accrue from such a connection between the outer and the inner cannot be measured in mere words. Many of you are moving continually in this direction. As you go on, the resistance to making these connections lessens. The stake you have in maintaining the fiction of being a victim of life diminishes in the ratio in which your self-responsibility increases and becomes so pleasurable that you would no longer exchange it for the untruth of your victimization.

The more you enter into this new state, the fewer outer events will occur that are so far removed from you that the connection between you and the event can be interpreted only symbolically. Later they will be incontrovertibly recognized as your own creation (Years ago the Guide gave us a formula to use when outer events cannot be seen to connect with aspects of the self: "Treat these events like dreams and interpret them in the same manner." It is amazing how well this method establishes the connections). The more often you establish these connections -- and thus see your own hand in the shaping of your life experiences -- the less often will events occur that are so far removed from you that you can draw the connecting links only by using the event as the symbolic outpicturing of a specific aspect of your inner landscape. This brings you to the second stage in this progression.

In the second state you can see relatively easily the outer event as a result of your attitudes. This does not mean that now you can immediately cease producing these particular creations. Before you can begin to recreate your life, you need to gather a great deal of self-understanding, and you need to first expose and then release a lot of pent-up energy and stagnant feelings. However, now it is obvious to you that your experience is a result of your attitudes, of your intentions, of your beliefs, and of your feelings. In other words, you can see how this or that experience is a result of commensurate desires, defense mechanisms, destructive actions, negative behavior patterns, and so on. Even if at this point the personality still doubts its capacity to change these specific attitudes and patterns, because a still deeper level of negative intentionality -- of not wanting to change them -- has not been uncovered, at least the world no longer appears such a chaotic place. This represents a great advance on the evolutionary scale for you.

In the third stage of this progression, your attitudes, your actions, your intentions, and your feelings have become sufficiently purified, realistic, and productive that now you are able to create a life experience that is mostly positive. Outer events fall more and more into place. You are moving into a new self-generative process of positive creation, and therefore of positive experience. But in this stage you are not yet completely purified. Your mind is now much more aware of its pitfalls, and thus is capable of quickly penetrating the veil of illusion. However, some clouds still remain. As a result, you still occasionally suffer from your fluctuating moods -- which sometimes seem to come and go without any outer reason. Yet now you can no longer deceive yourself that someone or something else is inflicting suffering on you. You do know that it comes from your own mood. Of course, sometimes you may say that your dark mood is a result of so and so having done this or that to you, and this may well be true. But then such an occasion does not belong in the third stage. It belongs to either stage one or two, depending on your vision of it. Stage three means that you already know that your mood is not caused by any outside factor, but that it simply occurs in you without outer provocation. In other words, without any reason. It is as though a cloud has come over the sun and you do not know why, but you do know that the cloud is in you. Yet you are still a victim of the fluctuation of your moods. This third stage is the one that is least removed from your direct contact with your inner reality, but it is still removed. I mean that the manifestation now moves steadily closer to an overlap with your inner state as a result of your having established the links in the previous stages.

What causes those inner clouds to suddenly cover up your inner sun may vary. It may be that you repress a certain feeling, or that you repress a certain perception of those around you because you are unwilling to deal with pain or with frustration. Or you may experience the inner movement of your path, which inexorably reveals deeper material for you to deal with as you go on. Those moods are then signposts for you, enabling you to pay attention to something in you that otherwise could never have become known to your conscious mind.

When I speak of the inner reality in this context, I do not refer merely to a psychological or emotional state. The inner reality is the wide, vast universe, and you, as a personality, stand on the borderline between this wide, vast, endless, infinite inner space of divine creation, in which every conceivable state of consciousness, every expression, and every condition exists, and on the other side stands the outer void that has to be filled with consciousness, with light, with love, and with life. Your material body is the boundary, the border state. The consciousness behind the body is the carrying agent whose task it is to bring one's inner reality into a void. The difficulty is that those in this border state often forget that the inner reality is the real world, or even that there is such a world beyond the realm of matter.

The darkness of the limited mind makes it almost impossible to conceive of an actual world that exists within you and that leads to infinite spaces. You can conceive of space only in terms of the outer, reflected reality. Only the space of the three-dimensional state of consciousness appears real. Yet even your physicists today know that the relationship of time/space/movement is of an infinite variety, and therefore the time/space/movement continuum of your world -- of your state of consciousness -- is relative and only one of many possibilities, rather than a fixed, exclusive reality applicable to all the inner states. When a human consciousness dies, what actually happens is that it withdraws from its shell into another time/space/movement continuum, which is the inner world.

Just as time, space, and the relationship of movement to time and space within your specific space-reality are all results of corresponding states of consciousness, so are landscapes, objects, conditions, natural laws, the atmosphere, the climate also results of specific states of consciousness. Thus your inner world is a total product of your overall state of consciousness. In this inner world you connect with others whose overall state of consciousness approximates your own so that you share a commonly created sphere of temporary reality. This same rule applies to this earth sphere, with the only difference being that the inner states are externalized on earth in a way that is often more difficult to discern.

You also know by now that your consciousness is not just one unified state. You consist of many aspects of consciousness whose state of development may vary widely and which, consequently, may often be in total disagreement among themselves.

When the real self takes on a task before it goes into an embodiment, it chooses to take along with it certain aspects of consciousness. On the path you are helped to fulfill this task -- which your real self understood -- and that is to bring unification among the disconnected aspects of your consciousness. In addition, to refine, to reeducate, and to purify these divergent aspects. Your ego -- which is your active, determining outer consciousness -- can choose to either seek an understanding of these connections or to evade it. Your ego consciousness is the borderline between the inner light world and the outer void. When the human mind becomes entangled in the partial reality of your three-dimensional consciousness, then it can easily forget the task. Only through a struggle can it be reawakened to the Greater Consciousness. I might also add that human beings receive a great deal of spiritual guidance in this struggle, if only they are willing to perceive the help.

When the disconnected mind forgets the greater truth of being, then the conscious ego self temporarily identifies with these aspects which need re-education and purification. When that is the case, then it loses a sense of its real identity. This extremely painful state comes about only when pride, selfwill, and fear are allowed to rule the consciousness. The moment you have exposed, owned, and realistically evaluated those negative aspects which until now you had exclusively identified with, and therefore had struggled against seeing, then this shameful isolation ceases and the aspects are seen for what they are: simply aspects of the Total Self.

Therefore, it is extremely important in your pathwork that you explore yourself and that you stop hiding the negative part of yourself. For the more you hide it, the more you lose yourself in it, and therefore the greater the desperation of the illusion becomes. Only when you summon the courage and adopt the humility to acknowledge and expose the negative parts of yourself does the miracle occur: you will no longer secretly identify with those parts of you which you wish to hide. Paradoxical as this may seem at first glance, the more you expose your destructive part, the more you know your true creative self, which can then shine through; the more you expose the ugliness within you, the more you know your beauty, which can then shine through; the more you expose your inner hatred, and all its derivatives, the more you know of your already existing state of love, which can then shine through.

Just imagine the incredibly painful predicament that you put yourself in when you hide that which you are most ashamed of and most afraid of. It is precisely because of this hiding that you then compound the attitudes in yourself that you hate the most. You make them infinitely worse through the concealment and then you become more convinced that they constitute your real being. This vicious circle makes you more determined to hide. Therefore, you feel more isolated, more negative, and more destructive just because of your methods of hiding. For hiding always requires projecting your real guilt onto others, blaming, self-whitewashing, hypocrisy, and so on. Therefore you become more convinced that the hidden part is the ultimate you, for whom there is no hope. Your true task must begin by exposing all of you. I have said it so many times, because there is no way around this aspect of spiritual development. All the seekers of spiritual growth who avoid this delude themselves, and at one time or another must encounter a rude and painful awakening. You must go through this process: you must expose all your parts. Yet such an exposure also brings in its wake the awareness that the worst opinion of yourself is never justified, no matter how ugly the traits and the attitudes that you have hidden may be. The reason this opinion of yourself is never justified is because these parts are only isolated aspects of the total consciousness which your real self has taken charge of.

As you go through these steps, you become aware of your higher self. But not as a theory or as a philosophical premise, but as a stark reality, right here and now. You experience yourself as the real entity that you are, that you have always been, and that you will always be, no matter what the isolated aspects of consciousness fabricate in the way of delusion and folly. This is a great and wonderful task. In the process you learn about your inner reality and all its various aspects and levels of consciousness. You see the outer event in relation to your inner landscape. The inner landscape is then no longer some symbolic or colorful analogy. It is a stark reality.

Now let us return to the three basic stages in this specific respect. As you work with the precepts of this path and you establish the connection between yourself and the outer events in your life -- no matter how remote from your volition and from your responsibility they may seem -- a curious reversal begins to take place in your vision of the self and in your vision of life. The outer event, which at first had seemed to be the cause, now becomes the effect, and vice versa. In other words, what at first had seemed merely a symbolic analogy, namely the inner landscape, is now a stark reality, while the outer events become symbolic representations of this inner condition. This new perception brings about a whole gamut of new reactions to life. A deep inner sense of security arises because now one's thoughts, one's desires, one's feelings, and one's attitudes are no longer handled irresponsibly on the illusory premise that they do not count, and therefore that they are of no consequence. This new awareness brings with it a sense of your being a creator in the scheme of things.

If you do not resist going beyond the faulty, limited logic of your materialistic consciousness -- in which your life appears to be a given fixed thing into which you are put -- then you will experience the cohesiveness between the outer events and your inner life. The peace, the joy, the security, and the sense of oneness with all of life that are the inevitable results make the former resistance against this state seem utterly ludicrous. Yet you human beings struggle against this awareness more than against anything else. You seek all sorts of explanations. Throughout history humanity has created different answers to explain away the results of its inner creations in order to avoid taking responsibility for them. In other words, you refuse to relate the outer events to your inner state. You have a stake in ignoring this truth and not putting it into practice. Yet nothing could be as liberating as this new approach to yourself and to your life.

Nothing else can give you the means to create your life anew, to recreate it. Once you have seen your negative creation, then you have the tools to institute positive creation, where the same principle prevails. You have conditioned yourself to gloss over the negative thoughts and the negative interpretations that you harbor. You have conditioned yourself to ignore seeing the deliberately built up stake that you have in seeking justification for your faults, for your spite, for your malice. You would rather do anything than to see that you yourself deliberately choose an unhappy experience for nefarious reasons. You produce and create -- often on a vast scale -- painful, debilitating, and frustrating experiences. Then you use this fact as a justification to become more bitter, more resentful, more punishing, more witholding of the best of your being. You lose track of the volitional element of these creations, and therefore your suffering becomes very real. The more you lose the connection with your self-creation, the more bitter and the more hopeless your suffering becomes. Then you pretend to yourself that your thoughts and your intentions have nothing to do with your experiences. You try to convince yourself that they can have no real power. But eventually you begin to see that they do have power.

The creative power of your thoughts, of your intentions, and of your emotional attitudes is often ignored because of the time element between cause and effect. The childish mind sees the effects of the causes only in an immediate, obviously apparent, closely-knit unit. Only the more mature mind can discern an effect that is removed from a causal agent. Where negative intentionality exists, the mind remains proportionately childish and blind. Therefore, its perceptions are commensurately limited.

Once you have reached the second stage, in which you begin to recognize your experiences as products of your attitudes, then you will soon have more experiences where it is easy to detect their causes and fewer experiences which are a total outer projection and a symbol of your inner reality. At this stage you may still be stuck here or there and you may find yourself consciously resisting positive creation. Nevertheless, this affords you the opportunity to focus your efforts, your attention, and your energies on becoming conscious of further buried material that causes this blockage. Now at least you know where you are stuck and why. As a result, you can choose to direct your focus in a meaningful way. You can reverse the course of what is now a meaningful sequential chain: thought, created intent, and action -- or the lack of it.

I advise all my friends to specifically commit themselves more and more to seeing their lives in these terms: "What is lacking in my life and how did I create it? How much am I willing to be in truth with myself? All the way?" That is the great question.

Now take the third state in which you confront your moods. All of you have been in situations when a mood has suddenly changed from sunny to rainy without any reason. At first this may appear more frustrating than a case when you can pin this fluctuation on some outer reason. At the same time, it leads you more directly towards your nucleus. You can no longer blame it on others and thus escape from your truth. As long as other people can be used as scapegoats for your bleak moods, then you are farther away from the truth than in those instances when nothing untoward happened and yet your mood suddenly changed. This seemingly cause-less change is so frustrating that you inwardly start rebelling and objecting. The reason this occurs is because you still have a stake in blaming others for your state. You must then struggle against the flow of your inner movement. The childish part in you declares that nothing pleasant should ever change. If you feel good now, then it should be final. The demand for and the belief in the finality of the present favorable mood also creates the other side of the coin: when you are in a difficult, depressed, and bleak mood, then you despair because, again, you must think that this mood is also final. You do not allow yourself to connect with the inner movement of the flow. If you learn to listen into and to follow your inner lifestream in a focused and attentive way -- by using your finest inner perceptions -- then you cannot fail to perceive that within you there is constant movement.

The analogy often used in dreams, as well as in other symbolic language, is that one's sojourn in a human body is a journey. This analogy has often been made throughout spiritual history. It reveals a profound truth. The inner path is in constant movement through the stages of soul matter that have to be traversed. This journey is not just a word. It is a constant flowing movement. It carries you through your inner landscapes. It carries you through the landscape of your higher self, which is beautiful and brilliant. But if the task that you have come to fulfill is left behind, then you will not experience this beautiful landscape very often, because you get stuck and you stay in the landscapes of those other aspects of consciousness which you have not yet united with and then integrated with your real self.

What happens when after a lifetime you withdraw into the inner universe with these various aspects of your personality? You live in them alternately. The aspects that you have have not succeeded in unifying with your higher self remain separated fragments in their own self-created worlds. You must occasionally reside in these separate worlds. The amount of time, for lack of a better word, depends on the intensity of each state. Each will be a world like this material world, but with different conditions, with different dimensions, and with different laws. These will then appear to be the only reality for as long as your mind is fixated on them, just as this sphere seems to be the only reality while you are exclusively focused on it. All of these worlds are worlds of consciousness and worlds of action. Since you have many different aspects, then you will reside in many different worlds. But only when you are in the highest world of your developed consciousness will you know that the other worlds are neither your ultimate worlds nor the only worlds. While your consciousness is focused on any one of these other worlds, then you forget your real identity. As a result, you function just as a human being does, not knowing your real divine identity as long as you identify with the less developed aspects of your being. Then the sojourn in the lower worlds of those aspects does seem final for you as long as it lasts. This finality is an illusion. Only when you are in the greater reality of your light world do you know that the only final reality is beauty, love, truth, light, and bliss. All the other states are temporary.

When your mood clouds over and you fall into despair, and you struggle against this mood, then it means that you do not follow your inner movement. As a result, you continue to believe that you are in the world of darkness, which you are convinced is the final world. The fact that you are willing to consider these thoughts of truth -- without struggle and panic, without fearful ideas of finality -- will make you aware that there is a movement taking place within you. This awareness will make an enormous difference, for it will lead you to explore and then find out what the movement into the cold means for you. Therefore, instead of struggling against the darkness, accept it as a temporary state and move with it. By fighting it, you only stop the movement. By accepting it, you follow the movement -- and it will carry you through. If you accept the pain and you consciously and deliberately connect with its meaning, then it ceases to be pain. And so it is with the bleak or negative mood. See it as a cloud and follow the movement that carries you, with the aim of comprehending its meaning. Each cloud has a meaning. If you commit yourself to first knowing and then comprehending the meaning of your mood, then your inner path will reveal the answer to you.

I have advised you, as a tool of the pathwork, to use what I call a daily review. Go through the day in term of the various moods that "overtook" you during this specific day. I say overtook in quotation marks because this feeling is an illusion, as if you looked through the wrong end of a telescope. You yourself produce the mood, but you do not know it. It is a movement in you, it is an aspect in you: In other words, it is your inner landscape. The mood expresses a specific meaning. It is up to you to allow your inner self to produce the answer, and then to bring these various moods into your pathwork and to follow through these patterns. If you observe them, then you will derive a tremendous meaning from them. Your disconnectedness from the meaning of your mood makes it appear as it it "overtook" you, just as the outer event appears to you to be independent from anything that you have within you. As long as you do not know -- and as long as you do not want to know -- that part in you which is compatible with the mood that created and attracted the energy field which inevitably drew this outer event to you and you to it, then you will feel disconnected from it.

Perhaps as a result of my attempt in this lecture to bridge the gap between psychological reality and spiritual reality it will now become possible for you to use spiritual reality as a practical guideline. You all know that as a rule psychological reality stops short at the self-creating aspect of your inner being and ignores self-responsibility for anything but outer, conscious actions. You also know that as a rule spiritual reality, in the way it is mostly spoken about on earth, does not provide you with the psychological means to make practical use of the truth that your reality -- both inner and outer -- is your own creation. Then spiritual activity becomes an escape from the psychological factors. But it is equally true that in the way psychology proceeds today it, too, becomes an escape from one's deepest self-responsibility. Thus, it robs one of the conscious and deliberate capacity to create and to recreate. Here I am attempting to unify the two as two sides of the same truth. By leaving out one facet, then the other becomes an escape from and an incomplete approach to humanity's struggle on earth.

Before concluding this lecture, I would like to speak about a historical progression in terms of self-responsibility. In ancient times, human beings experienced themselves as being completely dependent upon the gods. In centuries not so far removed from your own a religious counter-movement had taken over in which the failings, the poverty, the illness, and the insanity of human beings were held against them. They were ostracized as sinners and as outcasts and were judged by others. This was a distortion of the reality, of the truth that everyone creates his or her state and his or her experiences. However, if such a reality is misused in a separative, loveless, judgmental spirit, then the truth becomes a dangerous half-truth. Therefore, it has to be temporarily left behind so that a new and better balance can come about. Thus the past century, whose spirit is still prevalent now, negated the concept of self-responsibility. In broader terms of evolution, this century's attitude is a counter-balance to the previous distortion and half-truth. The present tendency is to insist that the suffering person is an innocent victim. As a result, the suffering person is seen as a victim of life. The call for self-responsibility is still confused with the previous blaming, arrogant, punitive attitude. Thus human beings are weakened and are misled about their potentialities. Psychology ignores the important factor of real guilt -- that must be recognized for what it is -- behind every so-called neurotic and unjustified guilt.

Only now, in the evolutionary spiral movement of humanity as a whole, do people become capable of assuming responsibility without the distortion that blame is. Now you can find the way to own up to your negativities without despairing because now you can transcend the limited consciousness of this stage. Your journey has taken you sufficiently far that you have matured spiritually. As a result, you are ready to find the balance, the love, and the truth of creative self-responsibility. The truth of self-responsibility can now be regained on a new level. Instead of using this truth against others so as to set your little ego above them, now this truth can be used on your own self. The truth of self-responsibility can be practiced not as a punitive accusation, but as the highest form of human dignity. Therefore, only when you want to be in truth about your negativities and in truth about your destructiveness can you find the grandeur of your creative self. Then you will know that you are a creator and a God-carrier. The pendulum must swing until love and self-responsibility are no longer split into apparently mutually exclusive opposites, but become one comprehensive whole.

My dearest friends, I bless all of you from the world of love, of truth, and of vital energy. Use this energy to go deeply into yourselves and to become one with one another. Be in peace.