Faith And Doubt In Truth Or Distortion

By The Pathwork Guide

Greetings, my dearest beloved friends. Divine blessings pour forth, permeating all that is within you and all that is around you. Your path is a blessed one. In this lecture I would like to speak about a particular phase on the path, for that phase must come for everyone sooner or later. Actually, many of my friends have already arrived at that juncture.

After having invested considerable effort, time, and energy, as you go through the spiral movement of your inner being, you finally find that which obstructs you. You find that which prohibits you. You find that which is negative. When you go deep enough and you look astutely enough, then you also find out that what really obstructs you is the sum total of everything in you that is negative, and therefore destructive. The mind does not want to accept this. The mind has concocted all sorts of other explanations for unhappiness. Some of these theories may be valid as far as they go. The mind has created theories about sickness or neurosis, which though quite correct in themselves, nevertheless strive away from the fact that it is the negativity that creates these illnesses, these neuroses. Rejecting the concept of a punishing deity, humanity had to tend towards the opposite direction, and therefore has embraced all sorts of doctrines that exonerate the individual from all personal responsibility. As a result, man now finds himself a victim.

When you look deep inside of you -- after having removed your reluctance to do so -- and you no longer justify and rationalize, but you see without any embellishment those aspects of you where you hate rather than love, where you separate yourself in your defensess rather than openly trust, where you look away rather than face, where you deny rather than affirm, where you distort truth rather than be in truth, then you see the place in you where you create unhappiness and frustration. It cannot be any other way.

The human mind has known this for many centuries, but has misused this knowledge and has made it into a punitive, authoritarian judgment that elevates those who judge and that puts down those who are being judged. Religions have been particularly guilty of this distortion. Then a counter-reaction had to set in in order to re-establish the balance. However, any counter-reaction will first go beyond the truth into the opposite extreme. So all the concepts of sin, of evil, and of personal responsibility for man's unhappiness were being denied. But now the human condition has advanced sufficiently to see, once again, that the distortion of truth, the denial of love, and negative intentionality are what ultimately creates suffering. And perhaps now this fact can simply be seen for what it is -- that is, without the authoritarian punitiveness.

There is no pain that in some way is not the result of some denial of truth and of some denial of love. There is no pain that in the last analysis is not caused by a violation of spiritual law, by a basic dishonesty, and by an an ill will somewhere. Once you fully understand this, then you approach a crossroads. Many of you on this path by now have come face to face with your basic negative attitudes -- the negative nucleus, the negative cluster that is one comprehensive whole. Or perhaps it is a series of negative clusters strung together. It is an ongoing chain reaction -- really a vicious circle. You may start out with the concept of finding your problems. But when you speak of your problems, then you are really dealing only with the manifestations. In other words, with the results of this inner negative nucleus. But when you go beyond the surface manifestation -- the problematic life situation -- then you find, embedded within a wall of protective covering, the lower self attitudes, the negative intents, the destructive feelings, the false thoughts, and the destructive actions. It is not easy to see the negative nucleus in its entirety, in its connectedness, and in its cause and effect chain-reactions. This requires dedicated, committed, wholehearted work, as well as the utter will to be truthful with the self. But once you have arrived at this juncture and you have fully comprehended this negative nucleus, then a secondary phase is to follow. In other words, it does not suffice to just see this.

Many of you have experienced first seeing and then being fully aware of the negativity, taking full responsibility for it, and therefore no longer projecting it outwardly. You lose your self-deception and you fully face the negative truth within. Yet you find yourself strangely unable to really want to give it up. And this is a specific phase that everyone following a spiritual path that leads to unification must encounter sooner or later.

For fear that you may not want to -- and therefore not be able to -- give up that which distorts love and truth in your inner universe, then you must also, to a certain extent, not even want to fully see it. For a part of you may say: "I know that I cannot change, for I know that I do not wish to change. So why should I want to see it? I would rather go on deceiving myself." This is a typical obstruction. It is important for you not to allow it to barricade your way.

You have worked sufficiently on the path to admit these resistances, to question the misconceptions, to work on them, to meditate, to make a commitment towards a new way of being, and then to ask the inner grace of God to help you change. And I might say that so much change has already taken place. You know this. A few of you feel renewed in a way that you would never have believed possible. Life, both inwardly and outwardly, is an entirely new, joyful, rich experience, beyond your wildest fantasies. Where this is the case, then certain inner processes must have taken place. I will now speak more comprehensively about them in order to make you more conscious of them and also to help those who have not already done so to go through these processes. Those who have arrived at the full recognition of their negative nucleus that creates their unhappiness, their guilt, and their self-destruction, but who still cannot find the way out, will find this lecture not only helpful but necessary. This lecture is meant to help you to overcome this specific hurdle of changing, as you have already overcome so many other hurdles. And I assure you that once you are in full possession of the tools that I am privileged to give you and that you are privileged to make use of, then there is no hurdle that cannot be overcome. So it is with this hurdle of changing.

For this larger particular aspect, this hurdle on your path, I want to talk about the true and the false concepts of faith and of doubt -- and about the duality that can distort both faith and doubt. If this topic is fully understood, then it will make the next step much easier for those who have arrived at that crossroads. This is important because if change is contemplated too soon -- in other words, before the unpleasant, unpalatable truth is first fully seen, then accepted, and third dealt with -- then it cannot work. Such haste would indicate that you do not want to feel the pain of your guilt and that you do not want to accept the consequences of your being negative, and therefore destructive. It would merely be a shortcut. So the topic of this lecture can only be applied at a specific juncture.

The popular concept of faith in this era of mankind's development is that it is a blind belief in something that you have no way of knowing, something that you will never know. It means that you just blindly -- and, if I may say so, unintelligently and gullibly -- trust without rhyme or reason, usually out of wishful thinking, out of laziness, and out of ignorance. Therefore, in today's intellectual mind faith stands in ill repute. If faith were indeed what it is supposed to be according to this concept, then there would be good reason to discard all faith. If faith were a gullible lack of discrimination, then the intelligent person would rightly guard himself against anything that might even resemble faith. For he does not want to be gullible, he does not want to be stupid, he does not want to believe in something that has no substance in reality and which, therefore, cannot ever be experienced as truth. Therefore he stays on an intellectual platform from which everything supposedly real can be seen, touched, known, and proven. But the actual leap into the unknown is never made.

Yet unless a leap into the unknown is being made, then no expansion and no change can ever come to pass. For both growth and change always imply a momentary anxiety. This anxiety cannot be accepted if you believe it to be an end result, rather than a temporary leap that will land you on some firm ground. The firm ground is reality. But it is a new kind of reality, a kind of reality that you have not known before. But unless this new kind of reality is contemplated from a truly firm ground, where man can rest and function, then the leap cannot be made.

According to popular notion, faith implies a perpetual state of blindness, of not knowing, of not comprehending, of groping in the dark, of floating in a ground-less, unreal, reality-less -- if I may coin a word -- way of being. Therefore, it is extremely important to differentiate between the false concept of faith and the real concept of faith.

What is the real concept of faith? In reality, faith requires a succession of several steps or stages. Each of these stages is highly grounded in intelligence and in realism. The first stage would be to contemplate a new way of functioning, as opposed to continuing to remain in the particular negative chain reaction that you have discovered. Let us suppose that on your path you have found that a more or less substantial part of your personality functions on defensive, negative premises. As you explore your mode of reacting and your mode of functioning in life, you then find, often to your unpleasant surprise, that these modes of functioning are undesirable both for yourself and for other people. They are destructive and they cut out life. So you face this and you know this, but you do not know how else to function. To give up the only mode that is known to you without anything else to go by except a lofty theory is absolutely impossible for you. Therefore you must have a clear-cut perception of the stages you must expect to go through in order to acquire a new and better way of functioning or to expand into a new and better reality, one that is expanded beyond the narrow confines of your fenced-in present.

The first step is to consider such a new way as a possibility. You do not know yet what this would be and how you could do it. But you consider the fact that possibilities exist of which so far you know nothing. Unless you extended your thinking in that way, then you could not acquire any new knowledge, let alone consciously and deliberately change the deeper processes of your functioning. No new idea could ever present itself to a human mind unless that mind made room for this possibility. If the mind is closed to any new idea, then none will come. So, this process of making room for a new -- as yet veiled -- possibility is a substantial first step in the practicing and the acquisition of faith. In fact, it is the first step of faith. It is the faith that something may exist beyond your present vision. But this is by no means being either gullible or unintelligent. Quite the opposite is true. We will all agree that he who accepts as real only what he sees sorely lacks intelligence, wisdom, and imagination. His is a narrow, limited mind.

This may be a new idea. You may never have thought about faith in these terms. But I assure you that this is an absolute prerequisite, and that it is part and parcel of the stages of faith. For faith undergoes a development in itself. The highly developed, integrated person will have attained the further stages of faith. What I describe here is the springboard, the fundamental step on this particular ladder.

For example, you can say: "I recognize my old way of functioning as being negative and destructive, and therefore undesirable both for myself AND for others (it cannot be either the self or others, it must be both). I do not know if there is another way. And even if there is another way, then I do not know how it would be. I do not feel such a new modality in me. But perhaps there is another way. Perhaps I truly am the expression of a divine reality that dwells deep in me, even if I have not yet experienced myself as such a divine reality. If that possibility exists, then it has the wisdom to convey to me how I can find a better way of functioning in this particular area. I will be receptive to this new possibility."

This is a highly realistic approach. It is a most effective meditation, and it has nothing to do with a blind belief in something that can never be ascertained as real or in something that is not grounded in reality. It is an honest, open approach that simply makes room for alternatives not yet experienced.

This is the indispensable attitude that every serious scientist pursues. Yet it is precisely the scientific-minded who hold faith in ill repute because they believe in the false version of faith. But the real steps in faith, that make faith a dynamic road in itself, are completely compatible with the scientific turn of mind. To consider alternatives that are as yet unknown is an attitude that is honest, objective, and humble. So the first leap into the unknown -- and into the new -- takes place in this frame of mind. This is not to say that there will be no anxiety, for every new experience is connected with anxiety. But it is an anxiety that is quickly and easily overcome.

For example, if now you find yourself secure only if you issue forth negative judgments -- in other words, if you hate others and therefore you put them down all the time -- then you can apply this first step. You can first consider that maybe there is another way and then you can open yourself to new insights. You will find that you can be secure without this particular destructiveness or negativity. You may have to work hard to establish real self-respect -- and this approach is a sure way to attain it. But no matter how hard you work, it is always worth it, for you pay literally with your life for the negative kind of security.

When you do this sincerely -- when you first grope and then you wait patiently for the revelation from within -- then you will find it. Of that you can be sure. The time will come when you will discover this new modality in which you can function in an entirely new way, one in which there is no conflict between security and self-esteem in the false sense (by being negative and hating), and openness, positiveness, and love.

In order to find this new firm ground that is conflictless, a leap must be made. It is a leap into an unknown possibility. Even when you merely open yourself to a new alternative in principle and you feel ready to abandon an old mode of operation that you are accustomed to, then there already is a certain leap. Because to some extent -- no matter how tentatively at first -- you have already left the false firm ground of your old security, which until now had seemed the only possible way for you.

More of a leap is taken on the second step in faith. With that leap you open yourself to the divine ground within you, so that it can supply you the knowledge which your intelligence cannot find. I recapitulate briefly. The first step is to make room for a modality other than the negative one that you have discovered. In the second step you allow the divine self to supply you with the answer. If this step is taken sincerely, then you will catch occasional glimpses into this divine self within: how it is, how it feels, how it operates. But then you will forget again, and you will be hurled back into the old false security of your negativity. So you will have to grope your way back through these stages again and again, until an even greater step of courage and honesty has to be undertaken in order to make this newly-glimpsed reality your own and thus into your permanent home.

That is the third step in the venture and in the growth of faith. You should say: "Yes, I have experienced something new. But I am not able to hold on to it as yet. It is not yet my permanent ground. In order to make it my homeground, I want to surrender fully to the Greater Reality in the universe. I want to let go of my ungiving state of mind and of my cheating ways. I want to give myself to the Divine Power and I want to let It guide me. I want to dedicate my life to Truth and Love for their own sake." That is the big leap. It is a leap that must be repeated many times until it is no leap at all and you realize that it only seemed that way in the imaginary separation of your little ego.

At this point you are no longer in the total unknown because you have gained glimpses of reality in the course of the second step. If you question yourself with all the logic and all the reason at the disposal of your mind, then you will find that you are not really taking such a risk. For if there is no such thing as a Divine Reality, then what do you have to lose by trusting in it? You would find nothing but what you know already. But should you find that it exists -- in other words, if its manifestations are no illusion -- then surrendering to it is the only wise and reasonable thing to do. Then surrendering to it will only temporarily appear as an abdication of your selfhood. You will soon discover that what you had perceived as constituting your selfhood is actually the most dependent and the weakest of all imaginable ways of being, of existing. Do you not constantly discover your dependency on other human beings who are just as ignorant and just as floundering as yourself? But surrendering to the divine life will make you aware that in this lies your real identity. In it you will find new security, new joys, new pleasures, and a new creativity of which you know nothing so far. Only then will you find your true and full selfhood. In other words, after you make the leap in self-surrender to a larger self that is truly YOU in the best sense.

Since divine reality is truth and love, then truth and love must be your motto, to which you have to totally surrender all of your being. When you come to this point, then you will see that the alternatives are simple. Your not surrendering to truth and to love as divine attributes -- in other words, to the divine will -- is based almost exclusively on self-seeking and on vanity. In other words, what others think of you is more important than truth and love. So your immediate little advantage is not abandoned for the sake of truth and of love. Thus the leap in faith -- the faith that by being true to the divine will, to truth and to love, more profound advantages will accrue on all levels of your being -- is not made. Of course, the results may not be noticeable immediately. But that leap into the unknown must be made for the sake of truth and love. In other words, for the sake of the will of God.

Let all of your life, let all of your actions, let all of your directions, and let all of your goals be dedicated to the truth and the love that are essential divine attributes and divine expressions, both inside of you and outside of you. That is the greater leap that will land you on a new ground -- the divine ground. It will bring you into a new reality. It is a reality that is so widely expanded that it defies your present imagination. At the present time you cannot even conceive of what it means to function without conflict. This is because you are so used to living in a state of perpetual conflict that unconsciously you take your conflicts for granted. Therefore, you know nothing else. My dear friends, you suffer from so many conflicts when you do not abide by truth and love. These conflicts tear you apart. But when you gradually grow in self-awareness, then you become attuned to seeing this inner state -- though at first without knowing exactly what the trouble is and how your life could be changed. I herewith give you a key. Those conflicts pull out your life force and strangle it. That need not be if you make the leap to truth and to love as the ultimate reason for being in your life.

When you do this consistently, then you arrive at the fourth step. Here faith becomes an experienced reality. In other words, it is already a proven fact that is so securely anchored in you that no one can take it away. The difference between this state and the first glimpses gained on the second step is that those glimpses are known to be real while they happen to you, but when you inevitably sink back and you lose this state of Grace -- as it has often being called -- then you doubt again. Then you think that perhaps it was an illusion after all and that the tangible things that happened would have happened anyway. Here is where the false doubt comes in, about which we shall speak shortly. But in the fourth step you do not experience this at all. What you have gained remains your own reality. You know that it is more real than anything else that you have first known and then experienced. Even if you temporarily lose this good state and if in the spiral movement you revert to the residue of your negativity, now you always know that which is real and that which is false. In other words, there is no longer any confusion. Now you know the glory of the truth of God.

This newly revealed reality defies the narrow confines of the little mind. Therefore, it cannot be put into a test tube. But it has much firmer ground than that. If the world confronts the outer reality that you experience, then you may begin to doubt it. But you can no longer doubt the reality of the inner universe that you have gained as your homeground as a result of your consistent surrender to it. When you have arrived at the fourth step in the venture of faith, then this reality can never be doubted. The proofs and the experiences are too real. They tie up all the loose ends in a way that one's imagination could never accomplish. Do not shy away from the momentary anxiety that the leap into an unknown reality always induces. Do it for the sake of truth and love. Or, if you will, for the sake of God, for the sake of your inner Godself.

Now let us look at the other side of this dichotomy, and that is the question of doubt. Doubt in the real and constructive sense does exist, for if you lived without doubt, then you would be gullible. That would fit into the category of the wrong and distorted version of faith. This gullibility -- this lack of the right kind of doubt -- contains many negative aspects. It contains wishful thinking. It contains the unwillingness to first accept and then deal with the unpleasant aspects of the self, the unpleasant aspects of others, and the unpleasant aspects of life in general. This comes from laziness. The person who does not doubt in the right way wishes to avoid the responsibility of making decisions, the responsibility of making choices, and the responsibility of executing his autonomy.

The person who doubts in the right way moves toward faith and is in faith. But the person who doubts in the wrong way creates a tremendous split. The question is not only what you doubt, but also how you doubt and why you doubt. What are the real motives for doubting? Let us say that you doubt the existence of a Supreme Intelligence, of a creative Universal Spirit. In such an attitude you claim that you doubt. But you really mean that you know that God does not exist. This is not only impossible, for you cannot know this, it is also dishonest, because you take your limited present perception as the final reality. Moreover, such a statement contains a further dishonesty, namely the hidden stake in such a belief. It is just as tinged by wishful thinking as the wrong kind of faith is. There are numerous reasons for this personal stake, such as the fear of one day having to face what the personality frantically avoids facing now. There is wishful thinking in believing that life ends or in believing that nothing has any rhyme or reason, because then nothing matters anyway. So faith in a non-God exists in order to hope for no consequences.

When people deny the value of a spiritual path of self-confrontation, although possibly not the existence of God, then this, too, harbors the hope that such a confrontation can be avoided, that it is unnecessary. Doubt of this kind is seldom doubted. It is always justified with, "this happens to be my belief, which is as good as yours." It is presented as if this kind of assumption were truly arrived at honestly and deeply.

If you doubt something which you do not want to know -- for whatever reason -- then your doubt is dishonest. This wrong kind of doubt has a lot in common with the wrong kind of faith. They are both governed by wishful thinking. Those who are proud of their doubting never question their doubts. Perhaps because they do not wish to appear gullible in the eyes of others. So all of your doubts must be questioned. Do you have a personal stake in what you doubt? What are the honest reasons for your doubts? On what real considerations do you base these doubts? If you doubt your doubts -- if you question them -- then you will arrive at the truth that governs you in this respect, and thus you approach faith.

If you doubt others -- instead of doubting or questioning your own motivations, your own distortions, your own false opinions, your own subjective judgments, and your own negativities -- then you deny the truth in yourself. Only when you are in your truth can you lose the self-doubt that gnaws at you behind all the suspicions and all the doubts that you harbor about others. This projected self-doubt must not be confused with intuition and with perception. These feel different and they lead to a different expression and therefore to a different interchange. If you use false intelligence in order to substantiate your doubts, your distrusts, and your suspicions so as to avoid the discomfort of self-confrontation, then you create a greater split between you and reality, and therefore between you and your truth. Thus you manufacture suffering, discontent, and a vague unease that you cannot really pinpoint.

Here we have a typical dualistic picture. We have apparently two opposites: faith and doubt. Religion will glibly say that faith is right and that doubt is wrong. Intellectually-minded people will say, equally glibly, that faith is wrong and that doubt is right. The two factions quarrel. Each believes that faith is wrong and that doubt is right. Yet on both sides there exists a real version and a false version. In the real version, faith and doubt are not mutually exclusive opposites. They both complement each other. The real kind of doubt selects, weighs, and differentiates. In other words, it gropes for the truth and it does not shy away from the mental labor of dealing with reality. This leads to the various steps of faith. In each of these steps the right kind of doubt is necessary. For example, when you hesitate to leap, then you first must doubt or challenge your fear. Second, you have to question your assumption that this fear may be the ultimate reality. When you tend toward the lazy kind of faith, then doubt must awaken you into mental activity. When you tend to doubt in the destructive way, then faith must protect you from being submerged in it, and thereby blot out the moments of truth which you have already experienced.

There is a key to how you can always find the unity in this respect -- in other words, have both the right kind of faith and the right kind of doubt -- and thereby come out of your ill-placed faith and of your ill-placed doubt. That key is your dedication to truth and to love. Even long before you experience -- because you believe in It -- a Divine Spirit that dwells in all that is, and therefore that governs all that is, you can safely use truth and love as your guiding posts, as your directives to surrender to so as to govern your own life. In other words, to let go of something that is untruthful and unloving into that which is truthful and loving. As you make truth and love the center of everything you do, then you will experience the living God within you. Then you will experience the strength, the health, and have the know-how necessary for you to solve all your problems and to get out of all the negativities that now you seem locked into -- and therefore that you seem unable to give up. That venture in faith is the movement that combines faith and doubt as one complementing whole in the service of truth and of love.

In our next gathering I will answer your questions, whether they concern this topic or any other. I will be very happy to help you in any way I can.

Now I shall leave you with the blessings of the Divine Spirit that dwells within each one of you. Believe in this Spirit. If you have faith in its existence, then It will make Itself known to you. For it is the greatest Reality that exists. Nothing could be more real and more immediate. You are all blessed!

July 1, 1974