Claiming The Total Capacity For Greatness

By The Pathwork Guide

Greetings, my very dearest, most beloved friends, brothers and sisters, sons and daughters. Another working season draws toward its end. But each end is a beginning, as each beginning is also an end. These are the endless cycles, cycle upon cycle, the waves which constitute the infinite flow of the river of life. If you are within the flow, then you grow and expand more and more into the universal oneness. If you stop the flow through your obstructions, then you accumulate the force and the energy, which then become blocks. Blocks are pain and suffering.

At the beginning and at the end of each working season I give an overall view, a map that gives something like a bird's eye view of the phases you have left behind, which then make you ready for the phase to come. These maps give you a better understanding of the progression. No new phase could be possible without the preceding one. In other words, no step can be skipped. Year upon year of our cooperation these maps have proven exact. Some of you are ready for the new phases at the time we discuss them, while others are preparing for them and will reach these points a little later. But that does not matter. Then there are always a few who fear and resist so much that they deliberately obstruct their progression, the natural organic movement. As a result, they are in unnecessary fear and pain. But, on the whole, this is the way we work together.

At the end of the last working season and at the beginning of this one I announced that this past year, this winter in your terms, would be mostly dedicated to the beginning of transforming work. That is, after your negativities have finally come to the surface and you have exposed them, you have accepted them, and you have taken responsibility for them, then the transformation of negative consciousness and negative energy becomes possible. The latter is impossible without the former. In other words, a vague and general awareness of your negative attitudes -- of your destructive and evil intents -- does not suffice for the transformation work to take place. First the negativities must be seen fully, in all their details; the fear of them and the shame for them must have been overcome; the hiding and the camouflaging must have stopped; the whitewashing and the exaggerated self-blame must have been relinquished. In other words, what is necessary is to simply and honestly own up to the full force of the devilish attitudes, as well as to all their puny details. Doing this will free you. But this is by no means a morbid or self-negating process. The contrary is true. Some of you may still wonder why so much emphasis on the negative is necessary for genuine spirituality to be reached. Some of you may have even tried other approaches, hoping to bypass this highly unpleasant task. But real solutions cannot be reached and integration cannot occur in those other ways.

The fruits of your hard work in this first unpleasant phase are beginning to be reaped. A number of you have succeeded this past year -- after all your arduous work with negative matter -- to affect a true transformation. The event of the Center has helped greatly in this particular aspect of the work.

These phases are not strictly and exactly divided. They cannot be. They always overlap. In other words, you may already have removed the blocks to fully facing the negative aspects in one area, and thus be ready for the work of transformation. At the same time, you do not realize that there is grave distortion and destructiveness in other areas, untouched so far by your conscious awareness. In still other areas you have already gained full purification, and therefore are clear and free. This is why it is difficult to judge whether total self-purification has been achieved or not. Only your complete dedication, your watchfulness, your awareness, and a readiness to dismiss wishful thinking and pride will protect you from any kind of an illusion -- illusion which must ultimately lead to painful disillusionment. The specific manner of this pathwork is a wonderful protection in this regard. The closeness you have developed, the intimate knowledge of yourselves that you share with each other, the perceptiveness that so many increasingly develop as a result of your progress, the greater honesty and the courage that gradually become second nature -- all of that is indispensable help. Last, but not least, one of the most important gauges of this pathwork can be used constantly to determine your stage: What is your life manifestation telling you? How rich and how full is your life? How much joy, how much peace, and how much abundance is increasingly open to you? How much less are you afraid of -- and therefore reluctant to first meet and then to expose -- the deepest regions of your innermost self? When you meet your inevitable inner blocks as a momentary crisis, then how fully do you travel through them only to find yourself more fully "you"? These are the infallible answers which, when honestly probed, will tell you the truth about whether you are stuck or not. If you are stuck but you do not know it, then you may be deceiving yourself about your progress. Perhaps because you hope that you can avoid first facing and then dealing with certain unpleasant inner material.

On the whole, all of you have traveled far since last year. You are now in a very different inner place. Many of you find yourselves for the first time connected in a way that you never believed possible, and that you doubted could really exist, in spite of having given lip service to the words you have been hearing from me for years. For the first time many of you truly believe that your inner problems can be fully resolved in a vital way. The number of friends reaching these stages increases steadily and they help to transmute the energies of the new friends joining the pathwork. The momentum, the courage, the faith, the proof, and the conviction are all vital ingredients that help you. They also help those who witness what is happening to you, who bathe in your environment.

When you have reached these new stages that you have never tasted before, although you may have heard them described, then you also gain the courage to go deeper, into still hidden layers of covert evil. There is always the spiral configuration: layer upon layer, until the circles in the spiral become smaller and smaller. As they become smaller and gradually converge into one point, it all becomes increasingly simple. The simplicity at the final apex of the spiral is love. This simplicity means little when the circles in the spiral are still large. Then everything is still complicated by the multiplicity of the ego's separation from the Oneness. When the word love is used in that state, then it is either empty of feeling and experience -- in other words, it is just a word that is much bandied about -- or, worse, it is misused by pretending that what one speaks about is love, when it is actually many other things that have little or nothing to do with real love. When you fully experience the inner meaning of love, then you will find that everything is contained in that word.

Let me recapitulate briefly. The previous phase dealt primarily with your ability to face your negative attitudes, your faults, your distortions, your destructiveness, and your impurities. Last year was the beginning of transforming negative substance, negative matter -- energy and consciousness -- into positive. And both these aspects of the work will continue. But the second phase will become more possible. This, in turn, will lead to the natural sequence of the progression. This is the phase in which you claim your full self, you claim your total self, you claim your unique self. In other words, in which you claim your hidden greatness. This lecture will be about claiming what is yours.

It may seem peculiar, but it is a fact that most human beings have a reluctance to let themselves be what they could be. Of course, an overgrown ego makes its own claims constantly, either overtly or covertly. But when it comes to your real greatness, then you become inhibited, ashamed, even afraid. Therefore, you hold back what you could be, what you sense you already are. What is this strange wall that holds you back from being who and what you are? In other words, from being your best self, your great self, your wise self, your generous self, your loving self, your creative self, your self-assertive self, your unfolding self, your aware self, your courageous self, your humble self -- with all of its innate dignity and its innate nobility? You are all of this and more. In addition, you have your own specific turn of mind, you have your own talents, and you have your own intelligence -- with which you have something utterly unique to contribute to life and to creation. God manifests in you and through you in a most special and individualized way, totally different from all others. I have recently given a lecture in which I outlined some typical manifestations of states and experiences in which the little self merges with the divine self. I also said that there are many other manifestations which I would discuss at later periods. This is one of them. But what is it that makes it apparently so difficult to claim your greatness?

Let us gain a better grip of the reasons, a deeper understanding of this wall within you, so that you can have a greater motivation to give yourself the push you need to give yourself. When you become your full self, in the best sense of the word, then you are apparently two opposites at once. You are unique and special, while at the same time you are not special, although you are unique. You are like everyone else. You are like everyone else in the sense that you are all divine manifestations. You all have fundamental divine qualities, and you all also have obstructions. They may vary in their intensity and in their emphasis. You may differ in your development, you may differ in your openness, you may differ in your willingness to be in truth. But you all manifest as egos. Therefore, you all must go through the same fundamental struggle to transcend this ego. But you are unique in the way God can manifest through you when you remove your obstructions, and you therefore allow your specific greatness to come forth. Everyone is a genius, for everyone is God.

For the little ego, who claims the ego specialness, this is not welcome news. The little ego wants to be above others, it wants to be better than others, it wants to be superior to all others. The Godself makes no such demands. What obstructs the real greatness from flowing forth is precisely the claim of the little ego who wants to tower above others, who needs the admiration of others, who wants to compare himself to others, who wants to compete with others and then wants to subdue them and thus prove itself superior to all others. That is a particular evil that has to be ousted. This particular evil brings about many other attitudes which create shame, suffering, and many other destructive and evil patterns.

It may be well for you to say: "I only wish to be above others because I feel so worthless, because I feel like nothing." But how about trying to reverse this premise? Would you really feel to be nothing if you would not need to be so superior? I venture to say, no. Would you really become envious, jealous, petty, self-serving, spiteful, manipulative, malicious, not allowing others their own Godself -- in short, loveless -- if you did not wish to set yourself above others? Your God Consciousness and the other person's God Consciousness are never in conflict. What is in conflict is only the ego. In other words, only the separated state. This is a state of blindness and limitation. The ego is not one, it is divided. Therefore, it is often in conflict and in contradiction. The God Consciousness never is. The Godself never has to push for recognition. It recognizes itself and it is sufficient unto itself.

Another obstruction to the realization of your ultimate unique beauty, to the realization of your innate greatness, and to the realization of your inborn genius is your fear of the inner evil. All fear is ultimately the fear of that. When the real nature of this fear is denied -- and therefore this fear of self is projected outward onto other people -- then outer events begin to manifest that seem to justify this fear of others. The nearer you come to transcending fear, the more you have to meet the fear of the self. Then you have to overcome the reluctance to do so. This fear creates a tremendous wall. The fear is a much greater obstruction than the evil itself. I have said this many times. This kind of fear has to do with wanting to shine above others and in the eyes of others. The claim of the little ego is, if it were translated into words: "Admire me, for I am much better than you. Love me for it." This is the ultimate folly.

The fear of the evil within is superfluous because the truth is that the evil is distorted beauty and love. The devil that resides in everyone was initially an angel. How can you confront this devil? All of you have made substantial progress in this respect. You reveal, you expose, you admit, you acknowledge, and you take responsibility to an ever greater degree. This is why transformation and the resolving of the deepest, the most persistent problems occurs with ever greater frequency in a most substantial and real way. But where this fear of self still exists, then the ego-pride is always responsible for it, at least partially. And the ego-pride is connected to your ignorance of the nature of the devil in you. First you believe that this is the final you, the real you. Then you believe that this devilish part of the self is intrinsically foreign to the Divine. Therefore, you believe that it is other than divine. This ignorance adds to the chasm. In other words, it widens the gap in your mind.

Now I would like to invite you to make room in your consciousness for the idea that this same devil -- with all its cruelty, its malice, its dishonesty, its pettiness, its hate, and its fear -- is essentially an angel. Allegorically and symbolically, Lucifer was originally an angel of light. Since he has turned into Satan, then it is the evolutionary task of all the separated entities to bring about a re-transformation from Satan back to Lucifer. In other words, from the darkness back to the light. This is an inner process. In other words, it takes place within your psyche.

The devil is your fear. The fear is your guilt for the hateful ways, for the malicious ways, and for the cruel ways of the mind and of the feelings -- which then are always expressed in action, too. Only when this guilt is faced and when the pain of it is fully experienced -- in other words, when it is not rejected but is traveled through -- only then can your guilt and your fear dissolve. Then the angel reveals itself. When it does, then you are infused with warmth, with love, with confidence, with a soft glow, with joy, and with creative expansion. When this process takes place again and again -- until all evil matter has been transformed -- then you will no longer believe that you give up something precious when you give up your demon. As a result of this false belief, you struggle with your mind to holding on to being negative. The illusion is that you lose something when you give up your destructiveness. I have often said that a great deal of energy is trapped in the evil. This is an energy that you certainly do not wish to do without, even though you do your utmost to squash it and to deny it in its present state. When you go through the process of a genuine transcendence of your evil, then you will regain all the forceful vitality that you had to inactivate in order to avoid facing the evil in you. So, not only will you lose nothing, but your gain will be enormous.

If you can learn to open wide your consciousness by first having the willingness to face the devil in you -- by having faith and confidence in your inner guidance -- then you will dispel all fear. But in reality, and not in the illusion of escaping and of cheating. You do not oust or separate yourself from anything in you. Instead, you face it fully. Then it will dissolve. Hence, its original nature will be revealed. Therefore, fully embrace this devil in you in the realization that this devil is actually an angel. Then the power and the vitality of this devil can -- by the turn of your mind, of your consciousness -- become a glowing light force of beautiful creative verve, of love, of energy, of supreme wisdom. The puny, jealous, separative consciousness of the devil -- which is constantly battling against the beautiful laws of life -- will spread wide open. I say to you: The stronger is your devil, the stronger is your angel. For the strength is the same in essence. If you allow this thought to take root in you, then you will fear your demon much less. As a result, you will be less inclined to hide it, to whitewash it, and to tremble at the very thought of your evil and of your devil.

Approach it with the ultimate of courage and faith. In that way you crystallize the beautiful angel that your devil essentially harbors. This is the transforming work that will take place in ever-increasing measure. If you do not fearlessly meet the devil in you and if you do not courageously expose it, then you cannot claim your birthright, you cannot claim your genius, and you cannot claim your unique contribution to life.

Only in that way can you conciliate the opposites, the dualities. Each duality, each mutually exclusive opposite that you meet as an obstruction is a sign that you are still divided. You are split off from something in your deeper consciousness. You are split off in your fear, in your pride, in your selfwill, in your ignorance, in your greed, and in your hate. But all those aspects can be totally reversed. Your fear will become faith and trust. Your pride will become humility. Your selfwill will become a supple, resilient, flexible giving in, going with attitude. It will become a finely attuned lack of rigidity -- a flexibility -- that allows you to flow with the rhythm of your life and to never again stem against it. Your ignorance will become awareness, perception, understanding, and wisdom. Your greed will become a special kind of trust that will make you reach out and know that there is abundance for you in every way. And you will have abundance, so that greed will be ludicrous. Your hate will become the power of your love.

No human being, no individual, no entity can ever find peace and inner fulfillment, joy, wholeness, security, and his intrinsic genius -- with which he contributes uniquely to the creation -- unless he can be dedicated to a cause outside himself. However, this must not be a therapeutic ploy. In other words, you must not force yourself to be dedicated and selfless in order to gain these desirable rewards of glowing health and of fulfilled living. But it is something that you ought to clearly understand and use as yet another signpost to where you are. For example, if you still see the ultimate of life's fulfillment as a totally selfish and self-serving enterprise in which everything is supposed to be geared around you so as to suit you, then you should honestly admit it. If you explore your fantasies in this respect, then you will see exactly where you are. It is very important that here -- as in all other matters -- you be completely honest. So if you see that there still is no genuine desire in you to serve a larger cause -- in other words, to forget your little self-interest, at least some of the time, for the sake of larger issues -- then you will understand your loneliness, your disconnectedness, your fear, your guilt, and your inability to realize your talents. You must know that you do have the innate capacity in you to be self-forgetful, but that your little ego thwarts this natural state. Perhaps you hold on to certain misconceptions that prevent you from wanting to go beyond yourself. For example, you may falsely believe that dedication to a cause beyond your little ego implies masochistic suffering, deprivation, poverty, the frustration of personal fulfillment, and the frustration of one's needs. The truth is that it is just the other way around.

Only when you can give to creation of your unique contribution in a selfless spirit can you feel entitled to receive, can you feel entitled to be fulfilled, can you feel entitled to have abundance in all ways. If you feel inhibited and reluctant to claim this full self-expression, then it would be good if you were to look at your selfishness. In other words, at your lack of interest to add to the universe. You may conceal this selfishness under a false selflessness which may actually be more selfish than your overt selfishness. Your false selflessness may be part of your mask. In other words, of your need to appear good in the eyes of others.

Many of you have begun to be dedicated to a greater cause outside yourself. This comes as a result of an organic process that develops as you face your little ego with all its self-serving opportunism and its vanity. You grew naturally into a more developed state and now you feel the wonderful fulfillment that arises from serving a spiritual cause. That is, from giving to creation. You may not have specifically connected your increased peace, your increased joy, your increased liberation, and your increased creativeness with the fact that now you are much more interested in giving something of yourself to this cause of helping more and more souls to purify themselves and to reach higher states of inner truth. Perhaps by making this connection, you will be further encouraged in the right direction.

Once again we have both a vicious circle and a benign circle. When you are afraid of your inner evil -- and therefore you stay in hiding -- then you cannot claim your total, wonderful ego-less self. You remain selfish. Therefore, you are only concerned -- in a negative way -- with the interests of your little ego, with its puny advantages, and with its unwillingness to give to life. Thus you become more and more impoverished. As a result, you become unhappy, and therefore embittered. Hence, you feel more justified to withold and to give nothing. And so the vicious circle continues.

But when you transform this vicious circle into a benign one, then -- almost inadvertently -- you are led organically from within to an attitude of selfless giving. But this does not mean giving in to the neurotic and unhealthy demands of others. It means giving in the best sense of the word. By giving to others you cannot help also giving to yourself. For in reality there can be no attitude toward the self that is different from one's attitude to others, and vice versa. Thus giving to a cause beyond the little self is the greatest self-enrichment imaginable. But no matter how much you pretend and you feign -- even to the point of making yourself believe that your giving is genuine -- life cannot be cheated. Your life speaks the truth to you about this -- just as it does in all other matters.

He who deprives himself of the supreme satisfaction of giving to a cause beyond the little ego and beyond the little self-interests cannot know peace, cannot know joy, cannot know fulfillment, cannot know self-esteem, cannot know the deep sense of being deserving of the best that life has to offer. There is an exact correlation here. To the degree that you offer -- generously and trustingly -- the best that you have to give to life, allowing God in you to take over, to that degree you will feel entitled to spread your arms wide and to receive the best that life has to offer. Conversely, to the degree that you hold back in the puny fear that this might damage your self-interest, to that degree you must hold back from receiving life's riches. There can be no mistake in this calculation. There is a finely calibrated mechanism installed in the deepest regions of your psyche that works in absolute perfection.

When your giving to life becomes so whole that you are deeply or emotionally willing to forego, to give up your little vanity -- in other words, your giving for the sake of appearance -- for the sake of the greater truth, in the realization that this is necessary, then the abundance of your life will surpass your present understanding.

When this group came together you were all separated islands. In other words, each one of you was concerned with his own suffering. Each one of you was completely walled off from his inner self. Consequently, you were also completely walled off from each other and completely walled off from life. In that state you were totally unwilling to give to life. Many of you find that this still holds true to some extent. But you make this discovery even as you are already devoted to giving of yourself to a cause beyond yourself. My dear friends, I want you to know that you are all engaged in the most noble cause there could possibly be for an entity to be active in, and that is the purification, the healing of souls. In that way you contribute in the most vital way possible to the great evolutionary plan.

The venture that you are engaged in gives you a wonderful opportunity to help others. The work of purification that you do must be transmitted to others in some way. Your giving can take many forms. It will be in your own unique way. Your inner creative intelligence must make the decision, for only you know how you are best suited to contribute. What you can determine with your conscious mind is the intent, the wish to surrender your will, the desire to activate that in you which is greater than your ego in order to increase the strength of your group, in order to add to the light it already is. The more honest you are in this respect, the clearer the muddy waters will become. Then the obscurity and the opaqueness will diminish. To the degree that you honestly know your self-servingness, to that degree you are a step nearer to truly selfless giving.

The reason that you cannot claim your greatness is because of your little self that is constantly on the lookout to gain its little advantages. These advantages may be material. They may also be the pride to show off and thus to gain admiration from others. In other words, to appear better in the eyes of others than you secretly believe you are. But when you free yourself of this attitude, then it will be infinitely easier for you to claim your true self, with all its capacities, with all its potentialities, and with its uniqueness. Then you will allow yourself all the abundance that now you have only in a very limited way -- and often at the price of guilt. You will be appreciated just because this is no longer your aim. You will no longer be ashamed of being the best that you can be. The holding back from being your best will stop to the degree that you uproot the pride of your little ego, to the degree that you uproot your stingy witholding from life, to the degree that you uproot your spiteful non-givingness, to the degree that you uproot the self-servingness of your little ego, to the degree that you uproot your hypocrisy, to the degree that you uproot the hiding of your true state, and, last but certainly not least, to the degree that you uproot your fear of the evil inside of you. This is a fear that exists because you ignore the fact that your evil contains the essence of your angel. Within every devil there slumbers the angel that desperately wants to come out.

If you lack humility, then you cannot allow your greatness to come forth. But in your humbleness there will be no need to hold back your greatness. There will be no pushing and no proving. It will be a quiet inner knowing. Then it is both unimportant and unnecessary that others recognize you. They will come to recognize you only when you no longer need it, and therefore you no longer insist upon it. But as long as this recognition by others is necessary, then it means that it is the little ego who is talking to you and who is asking for it. Your ego does not possess either a sense of proportion or a sense of reality. Since it is groping in the dark, then it fights in the wrong direction.

Visualize yourself in a state of greatness in humility. Visualize yourself in a state without ego. Visualize yourself in a state in which you do not have to prove anything. Visualize yourself in a state in which you do not have to compare yourself with others, either positively or negatively. Visualize yourself unafraid of the worst in you because now you know that the worst in you will transform itself into the most beautiful, into the wisest, into the strongest, and into the most loving force.

By hiding it, it becomes puny and dangerous. But in exposing it you make it possible to envisage this new potential.

In the next Question and Answer session many important things will be discussed. Prepare your questions about the two topics you wish to ask my advice on: the approach to children's upbringing and the prospect of making a sanctuary for animal and plant life in the Center. The answers will be important beyond the present scope of your understanding.

I bless you and I tell you once again that your work and your growth are an ever-increasing beautiful energy form in the spiritual world. If only you could see its beauty, then you would be astounded. If you could perceive the value, the importance, and the significance of what you are doing, then you would know a deep joy.

Sooner or later you will know this, even while you are still in your body. At first you will sense it, then you will perceive it, and finally you will experience it inwardly. Knowing this will make you stronger and more responsible. All of you will become more conscious instruments, each in your own way, each in your own beautiful, perfect way. Each one of you is a little piece that completes the whole and that fits together exactly with all the other pieces. One piece is not able to function without the other pieces. Each has its own unique contribution to make. Therefore, no need for jealousy or for having to prove oneself is ever necessary. Only when you know that will you also know your unique greatness, your total beauty, and your innate wisdom.

Love permeates all your undertakings. Every step of the way is meaningful and significant in your life. I want you to know that your life is very valuable. You are all blessed. Be in peace.

June 1, 1973