Transformation Of The Lower Self -- Summary Of The Year's Work

By The Pathwork Guide

Blessings, greetings, love, and help are pouring forth in a wonderful golden stream that permeates your inner being, and that your outer personality can connect with if you so choose. My dearest friends, in this last official lecture of your working season once again I will give a resume of what you have accomplished. Of course this can only be done in an overall, general way, but I will try to consolidate your progress in a final point, so to speak. This past -- what you call in your terms -- year has been very meaningful for all of you.

At the end of last year, in a similar summary, I told you that, after having recognized and dealt with deeper levels of your lower self, you will be able to establish contact, to a certain degree, with your higher self, and that some of the lower self aspects will be transformed. This was a decisive new phase on your path, since previously the work was hard and grinding to get through the defenses so as to really see and accept the lower self -- accept it in realism and in a constructive spirit. Years went by before the first steps of transforming work could begin. And the last year, the time segment just past, was the first step in this new phase on your path. So it has come to pass, as most of you are well aware of in yourself -- whoever is in this position -- and also among your dear friends. You see it in each other with all your critical faculties intact. It cannot escape you. The transforming work has begun, but it is just a beginning. It will continue to a much greater extent as you continue to develop on your path. You may imagine what this means in terms of ever increasing joy, love, peace, security, strength, creativity, deep friendship, and unity. Even these first steps of transforming work have so changed your relationships, your experiences, your community, your sense of well-being, and the meaning of your life. You are often startled by this change, sometimes it seems miraculous. Yet it is a mere beginning and much more of it is to come.

The increasing abundance that you experience as a result of your pathwork, both inwardly and outwardly, gives your life a much more specific focus and the awareness of your incarnatory task. It also manifests in your relationships, together and among each other, and in the community that you have begun to establish. You see a visible change where before there was often so much strife, dissension, disconnection, misunderstanding, and negativity among you. More and more you experience together understanding, warmth, acceptance, love, and true friendship. You have learned, to a considerable degree, to deal successfully with the dissensions that sometimes are inevitable. You recognized that the dissension among each other is merely a reflexion of the dissension within yourself. You put into practice what I taught you in all these years: As you unify yourself, so do you unify your relationships with others. As you recognize the best and the worst in you in proper proportion, so do you recognize the best and the worst in others with equal realism.

The progress is obvious. What were previously just words, a teaching, a way of living that could exist as your reality if you followed the path, what was a beautiful theory or philosophy for you, has now become a reality. The theory has been put to the test. The result is visible. You do not even need to be particularly perceptive in order to see and to make comparisons, and to realize what you are about to create.

In this past time span you have experienced a great deal together. You have learned to open yourself to one another. You have lost a considerable amount of shame and of resistance against baring yourselves to one another. And thus the loneliness that you all suffered from begins to disappear, sometimes in giant steps. For now you know that your loneliness can never be relieved by another person's love as long as you stay in your shameful hiding and separation, as long as you keep up your pretenses. This separation and these pretenses have been laboriously stripped off by many of you to quite an extent. And to that very same extent you find yourself in warm communion with others. Therefore, you are no longer lonely. So you truly begin to share. You have shared your sorrow and you have shared your joy. You have shared your doubts in yourselves and your doubts in your lives. You have shared your pain about yourselves and your pain about each other. You have shared the burden of your guilt. And you have also begun to share the pleasures of love and truth. For there could be no greater pleasure than sharing love and truth as a result of the other sharing. You have tasted the exhilaration of such rich living. Now you know what I am talking about. And yet this is just a beginning. You can create paradise on earth if you do not shy away from the labor of purification work. But soon the work itself becomes the exhilaration and the joy, it ceases to be painful and difficult. You find this out as you move on.

This is the work that you must continue to do. You have made a wonderful beginning in this transforming work, but much more is to come. And as more transforming work takes place, you will, individually as well as a community, create more real, deep, beautiful living together, more sharing, more creative experiences, more meaningful fulfilling of yourself. Your spiritual self will manifest more and more, and it will make you experience its eternal reality. More and more you will become the nucleus of a new culture, as I have occasionally hinted at. You are pioneers. Other groups of pioneers spring up in various corners of the earth, each in its own way, each what it should be.

As you learn to overcome more of your resistances and you learn not to give in to the line of least resistance, then your joys and your deep awareness of the meaningfulness both of your life and of your task will increase. I have said such words often, but they were more an announcement of what could be. Now it is different. For many of you these words are a living reality that you can experience right now in your life, from day to day. And this reality can become deeper and stronger if you so choose.

So the last lecture of this time segment will, in a different and yet similar way as the first lecture of the new time segment, give you a plan and another intensified tool as to how to go further in this transforming work. This requires new understanding on a deeper level. What I will say is particularly applicable to where you are now. Therefore, it will make little sense if you have not yet arrived at this point. The topic of this lecture will be further advice about transforming work. And your transforming work will become easier after the understanding I shall try to convey to you. Again I ask you to bear with me if some of the things I say must be repetitious. But the full context of the lecture could not become clear unless I occasionally and unavoidably made such repetitions.

Those of you who have gone into the depths and have bared aspects of your lower self, bringing your negative intentionality out into the open where you can express it, expose it, see it for what it is, have learned in this process, on the positive side, that it frees you. You can acknowledge these aspects without believing that this is the true you, and therefore becoming cast down. Quite on the contrary, you experience the truth I have always given you: When your negative intentions are secret, even from your conscious mind, then you secretly believe that you are all bad. This manifests in self-destructive patterns that you do not understand, and that you cannot trace to their origins unless and until you have the courage and the honesty to first bare your negative intentionality specifically. Then, lo and behold, something unexpected begins to happen: you accept yourself and you respect yourself more, and you know that this is only a minor part of your total self. Now you can identify aspects of the lower self without totally identifying with them.

On the negative side, you have found out that in these lower self aspects there resides a senseless stubbornness that still controls you to a degree and in an almost incomprehensible way. In your thinking, clear mind you know perfectly well that it does not make sense to hold on to a negative intention. You have experienced in other areas the bliss and the safety to let go and let God. You also begin to make the connections conscious and you see what a price you pay for your persistence in your negativity. Yet you do not wish to abandon it. You are puzzled by your attitude. And here is where you are stuck.

Why do you persist in staying in your life-denying attitude? In other words, in that attitude in you that says no to giving in to the meaning of life, that says no to beauty, that says no to love, that says no to truth, that says no to expansion, that says no to joy, that says no to peace. It refuses to surrender to God. This attitude always applies to a specific area where the lower self does not wish to budge. Therefore, it is not enough to make your ill will known to your consciousness in a general, overall way. It must be specific, in this or that trait or area.

Where this strange, mysterious stubbornness prevails, then there you are still controlled by your lower self. But now at least you know it, and that is an important step. You do need help here, my friends, precisely at this point where quite a few of you have arrived. If you bother to deal with this attitude -- rather than gloss over it, rationalize it away, make yourself oblivious of its existence -- then you come to an important point. You see -- though you still fail to understand -- this truly senseless behavior by a part of yourself, and you may even see that you have chosen not to do battle with it. In other words, you have just given in. Therefore, you have become victimized by your lower self.

But this need not be so. When you can begin to ask yourself questions about this, then you have already made another substantial step in the right direction. For example, questions like this: "Why do I refuse to surrender to God and therefore I give up what I know to be happiness, bliss, and abundance? Why do I settle for the puny satisfaction of my spite, of my destructiveness, of my selfishness (or whatever it may be)? What is it in me that makes me so destructive? How much do I really pay for just allowing this to happen? Isn't there a way to change this inner course? Knowing the beauty of life, why do I still deny it? Why can I not affirm life? Why can I not affirm God? Why can I not affirm the flow of my creativity?" These questions will lead to answers and therefore to clarification. They must be asked and they must be taken seriously. They puzzle all those who arrive at that juncture.

This lecture deals with these questions. I have often mentioned that there is a counter-movement in you. There is one movement that embraces life, that affirms life, that wants that which is divine. And there is a counter-movement that denies all that. It wants to remain in darkness, in spite of the obvious pain that this inflicts. It wants to insist on living life on its own terms, even though its terms are life-denying and destructive, both for the self and for others. This counter-movement has its history in the process of creation, of the ever flowing forth substance of life penetrating the infinite void, and thus bringing eternity and light into the non-life and the darkness of the void -- until the void no longer exists. The time will come -- to speak in those limited and confusing terms for lack of others in your dimension -- when there will be only light and only life.

Substances of consciousness -- and with the consciousness energy, the two being inseparable aspects of the eternal life spark -- get lost from their source, as it were. The substance spreads and in the spreading it temporarily separates itself from the Whole. In that separation it is its task to find, through its own inner life spark, all its inherent godliness. It has to battle its way through the darkness and the distortion that are byproducts of the separateness. So these aspects of consciousness and energy -- these individualities -- temporarily turn sour. They invert themselves. They turn into anti-matter, into anti-consciousness, into anti-energy. This is why there must be a struggle to reawaken divine matter, divine consciousness, and divine energy.

From all of the beauty, the creativity, and the goodness this inversion creates ugliness, destruction, and evil. There have been many names for this counter-movement throughout history. But those names can become obstacles in dealing with evil, for they often have been misused in a further inverted way. They were used to dominate, to judge, to punish, to put down, to instill the fear of life and the fear of God. In other words, to make a primitive charade out of the wonders and the miracles of ongoing creation. Therefore, people turn a deaf or resistant ear to terms such as good and evil, God and the devil, heaven and hell, and many others. Yet these expressions merely describe in a symbolic way a state of consciousness that is very difficult to convey to a consciousness that is still steeped in a three-dimensional world. Thus we from our world constantly seek ways and words to convey to you facets of reality without eliciting reactions that would be inappropriate, and would thus limit your understanding. However, there exists an unavoidable limitation. The vocabulary as you know it is limited, so you must fulfill your part in the mutual venture of learning. As I grope to find the words best suited to a specific topic, so must you grope so as not to allow prejudices and word associations to create a wall that would prevent you from taking in what I give you. For what I give you is a potent tool for your further development. Do not close yourself up to a truth that I am privileged to help you perceive, even if you occasionally read a word that usually evokes a negative reaction in you.

Evil exists in degrees. Aspects of consciousness and energy are personified in entities, in individualities, in personalities, in living beings, who have their own separate aspects both of divinity and of evil. The strength with which the former can penetrate the ego structure and manifest depends on the degree to which the latter has been transformed throughout the evolutionary development. Many different varieties of distribution and intensity exist of manifest divinity and of manifest evil, and of their relationship with one another.

There are spheres of reality where the contrasts are infinitely greater than in the sphere of reality that you express in your state of development, and therefore inhabit. In the highest developed spheres and states of consciousness the degree of goodness, of greatness, of the brilliance of spirit or mind, of beauty, of wisdom, and of love is beyond your present imagination. By the same token, there are spheres of temporary reality and states of consciousness in which the ugliness, the brutality, the cruelty, the feelinglessness, the limitation of mind -- though there exists shrewdness, as opposed to wisdom -- the hatred, and the smallness of spirit are equally beyond your imagination. These separated beings -- you might call them sub-humans -- exist in a world of such darkness that there really seems to be no way out, until -- as a result of long suffering and of much groping -- the mind turns and starts thinking, and therefore expressing itself in a new and different way. This is the key. It is a key that seems hard to accept for those who are in a state of evil and suffering, and who sometimes want to insist that to turn around is a very complicated process, one that is impossible to accomplish. The consciousness and the energy in these states are so condensed and so thickened that they are more matter than the matter you know, so that to you this matter is just as imperceptible as the finer matter of higher developed consciousness and energy. Consciousness and energy always create substance. In your present state of development both the higher and the lower states of consciousness and energy are equally imperceptible.

In the lowest state of development evil is so strongly on the surface that it is completely unaware of the divine nucleus. There actually does not seem to be an inherent divine nucleus. Only through eons and ages of development does the nucleus finally become apparent, but at first only very dimly.

The human state of development is an in-between state. There are beings of various degrees of development who are incarnated and who are fulfilling themselves in other states. These degrees of development may seem to fluctuate considerably from your point of view, especially if you pick extreme representatives from either end of the scale. Nevertheless, neither the highest degree nor the lowest degree exists in the human state. You do not know the full extent of the good and the full extent of the evil because your field of inner vision does not reach these levels.

The foregoing may seem to indicate that creation is split in dualism, something I always deny in my lectures and teachings. As I will prove to you on a very practical level, in essence the split does not really exist. But on a level of temporary manifestation it does exist, and therefore it must be recognized for what it is and then dealt with.

There is hardly a human being whose lower self could approach the intensity of the evil that exists in the so-called lower spheres. And the now manifest higher self could not approach the intensity and the beauty of the true, divine, eternal existence. I would also like to add that manifest evil is not always and necessarily an indication of an overall lack of development. It is often quite the contrary. The active, virulent evil often indicates that the potentiality to develop the divine aspects has been wilfully neglected, so that the potent energy currents of the consciousness invert themselves and manifest equally potently in a negative way. Those who are really spiritually immature and "young" often appear in the human sphere as innocuous, ineffectual, primitive minds -- the herd mentality that runs with the masses and that does not think independently. This is why a severely disturbed human being who exhibits some evil traits, but who already has a developed conscience, and therefore does not act out evil deeds, turns relatively quickly into a spirit of light and of power for the good, once his mind has truly been affected.

The distortion that results from the separation from the divine essence is only temporary. In other words, it cannot last. It is a process of filling the void. Through the ages, sooner or later that distorted, inverted, separate piece of consciousness and energy, that separate personality, must be filed, purified -- through its experience of living and through increasing its perception -- until its essence is re-discovered. That is the process of the ongoing development and evolution.

These things have been said before by various religions, sometimes in oversimplified terms. But do not forget that when religions first appear, they are channels that attempt to communicate divine truth to humanity. Often they are later distorted. They may be flattened out because the mind becomes lazy and therefore ceases to work. It prefers handed-down rules and generalizations that may or may not apply to the inner state. Even the truth of a spiritual law becomes a superficial statement when it is not found independently through the process of self-confrontation and search, but is lazily accepted on the surface in order to avoid the labor and the risks involved in personal growth. This is why religions lose their power of truth after a while. But they often start out as channels of truth. All this must be avoided here. It will be avoided as long as you stay dynamically involved in your pathwork, in your search and your personal growth.

The reason I tell you this now is to make it clearer to you what your life really means in these terms. You -- your higher self -- have taken on a task and you have taken with it, as it were, if I may use this expression, into an embodiment, into a materialization, an aspect of that anti-God matter, with its inverted consciousness and its inverted energy. You have taken it with you into your incarnation, where it is possible for you -- as your task -- to get to know it, to deal with it, and to influence it. In other words, as opposed to being influenced by it.

This aspect has its own separate will, as you find out to your bafflement and dismay. That is the point where you often get confused and stuck: that there are separate wills and separate thinking processes in you. Your consciousness, your personality as it is in the world, must make choices, including which of the wills to follow. You can choose to allow the will of your lower self to control your whole person. Or you can choose to take over and to have your conscious mind -- your conscious will -- ally itself with and align itself with the higher self. At the same time, you can choose not to suppress and repress, not to push the lower self, with its will and with its voice, out of your awareness.

You also need to think about what it means when you just go with the lower self without doing anything about it; when you still have the temptation to rationalize it, and when you do nothing to challenge the will of your lower self.

In none of you is the lower self anywhere near as intensely destructive as what I indicated before. But the lower self is always destructive, otherwise it would not be a "lower" self. It may be destructive in wanting to be malicious, it may be destructive in wanting to be selfish, it may be destructive in wanting to be ungiving. It is destructive by persisting in its limiting view: that what is selfish is good for the self. It is destructive by simply refusing the total self-surrender to the divine consciousness and to the divine will within you at every turn of the way. You forget to do this. You do not trust this surrender, even if here or there you have already experienced the blissfulness of it. But your forgetting is not really forgetting. It is a deliberate intent of that other will and of that other consciousness that you carry with you. Your outer mind always has the choice to either fall prone to it -- thus to be controlled by it, to allow it to rule you -- or to take the reins of your life into your hands. You do this first by becoming aware of that other will and then by dealing with it. That means to confront it, to counter it, to not allow it to destroy your life and thus waste valuable life substance and creative expression. It does not have to make you miss out on the blissfulness of eternal life that now increasingly filters through into your life.

This point is now the most crucial one for your further and more intensified transformation work. You do not cast out any devils. That is a misunderstanding of some religious orientations. When your devils are cast out, then you do not perform the task of transformation. You may succeed in casting out your devils. But your devils continue to live on, maybe not attached to you, but they do live on. Your lower self can be transformed. And you have seen this happen, my friends. It is happening increasingly. This lecture is geared to give you still better tools at this particular point, tools that you could not have used before you came to this specific awareness, an awareness that could be expressed like this: "Here I am. I see myself wanting to be destructive. I see the pain that this causes me and others around me. I see the senselessness of it. I know that it need not be that way. Yet I want to go on being destructive. I do not want to give up my pride. I do not want to give up my selfwill. I do not want to give up my fear and put them into the service of God."

That is the peculiar, puzzling point. It is so puzzling to many people that they soon push it aside again. Then they act as if it were not there. Then you take this in-between, half-aware, half-awake state for granted.

Now I shall try to explain, as exactly as this is possible with the tools at my disposal, what happens when consciousness and energy are being transformed. That will give you light, incentive, and a greater motivation to put all of your conscious being into the service of the Divine Consciousness that dwells deep within you.

In a lecture I have given this past year -- it was an extra-curricular lecture, I believe, around your Christmas time (No. 219) -- I gave you examples of what the positive, divine aspect is behind each specific negative manifestation. You asked me what positive aspects the specific negativities are distortions of, and what the original divine aspects or attributes were. I went through a number of them so as to give you a good idea of how to continue your meditation when you face a lower self aspect. You have forgotten to pursue this approach. So you often elaborate longer than necessary on the purely negative manifestation.

When you begin to see the areas of your lower self, then it is very important that your conscious mind begins to ask this question: "What is this trait in its original beautiful version? (That is, before it is inverted, distorted, made negative). If you truly meditate about it, then you will not allow the negative in you to rule you. In that way you do not cut out, but you transform it or transmute it. In other words, you neither allow those aspects to take over and rule you, nor do you cast them out and therefore separate yourself from them. In this way, you truly fulfill the task for which you have come.

Let us say that it is your stubbornness that resists to deal with this aspect of self-work, that resists surrender to the divine kernel. Could this stubbornness not be retained in a positive way and be transformed as a positive manifestation of your Godself? If you do not have to cast it out, then you will not be so resistant because then you can use this transformed stubbornness in a new and different way. If you find yourself being selfish, and if you believe that you must cast out this selfishness, then it will be impossible for you to even want to first approach and then cross the treshold where you seem to be stuck. But if you know that there is a healthy selfishness that you have every right to pursue -- a selfishness which does not exclude giving and loving and being generous -- then your resistance will wane and the devil in you will turn into an angel in this particular area.

Most of you have forgotten this important tool that I gave. Therefore, you have not used it consciously and deliberately. But the fact that I gave it to you indicated that you were ready for it. That part of your unconscious processses took it in when I talked about it and began to use it. Therefore, in this respect the progress is now well under way. But your conscious and deliberate application of these tools will make you even more ready for the universal abundance that becomes available to you as a result of your transformation work. I urge you to begin to do it now more consistently and in a more focused way.

Now you know that your inability to stand the ever-increasing pleasure in your life -- so that you often feel compelled to destroy it -- is due precisely to this dilemma. This is why you cannot find the way to transform your negativity. Once you begin to solve it, then you will experience the glory of this work. What was once negative, destructive, and even evil will turn into positiveness, into constructiveness, into sheer goodness. What was once a conflict, an either/or, will become a unification. For example, instead of seeing unselfishness versus selfishness, you will see that there is a healthy selfishness -- which is good at certain times -- and there is a time to be unselfish, and that, too, is good. It is very important to apply this approach specifically to all the areas you are dealing with. In this way your consciousness transforms itself, while it stays intrinsically its own unique, individual divine manifestation. In other words, it does not change its essence, it only changes its expression. Therefore, first by knowing this and then by experiencing it, the resistance will lessen more and more, for now you will not fear that you will lose something that is intrinsically you. And you will experience that the aspect of you which can decide the course of your attitudes and which can redirect the expression of your consciousness is the more valid you, if I may use this strange and awkward expression. At the same time, the other part that you are about to transform will become more like an appendix that you have taken with you in your task. That task is to fulfill yourself. As you do this transforming work, then a unification occurs. In the process of feeling yourself increasingly more unified and increasingly conflict-free, you will discover the intensity and the pain of the conflict that you have labored under for so long. Often on the Path you see a negative condition fully only when the ill is about to disappear. What at one time was a conflicting other, even though incarnated in your own soul substance, now becomes one with the divine in you.

The energy must change equally. The energy that is an emanation of your lower self is a very slow-moving energy. It is often a halted energy, condensed and heavy. Energy can be perceived with all the senses, but only on a level which the conscious mind is not aware of as a rule. Lower self energy is extremely unpleasant. As far as the visual sense perception is concerned, some of you can perceive to a slight degree energy emanations. Sometimes people have perceived the difference in the manifestations of energy -- in color, in brightness, in the pleasing aspects of their hues. The difference is obvious. The emanation of lower self energy is either dull or crass, the color expression gives off distinctly unpleasant reactions. The emanations of higher self energy -- in their color and in their brilliance -- convey peace, harmony, joy, and bliss. The perception of color on the level of spiritual reality is not cut off from the attitudes but is always connected with them. In other words, it expresses and it communicates these attitudes.

Energy also has an auditory expression, but human beings do not hear it. If the entity is highly developed, then the sounds emanating from such a consciousness are extremely beautiful and harmonious. The sounds of a lower self are disharmonious, ugly, and unpleasant to the inner ear.

The same goes for all the other senses. The fragrance of a purified consciousness is increadibly beautiful, such as you cannot imagine. The odor of an impure consciousness is equally unpleasant. It can be a stench.

On the touching level, energy is felt by other energy bodies. The energy of the higher self is felt as soft, as nurturing, as vitalizing. You perceive and therefore bathe in the energy emanation of a purified consciousness. But the touch perception of a distorted, inverted, negative consciousness is painful. It can be cutting or scratching or itching or pinching. Many different kinds of pain can be experienced, according to the specific turn of the attitude expressed behind the energy emanation.

There are many other senses that you do not know of and that therefore I cannot discuss. However, this will give you an idea that a personality, with its inherent attitudes, expresses itself in energy. And this energy conveys those attitudes in every sense imaginable. In your dualistic sphere of consciousness, what you see, what you hear, what you smell, and what you touch is apparently disconnected from the attitudes and from the energy emanations that are extremely personal and specific. Everything is hacked up and separated. Therefore, it manifests in a disjointed, disconnected way. This is often confusing for the personality. It gets tired of these separations. Therefore, sooner or later it strives to get into a more unified state of consciousness, where what is perceived is not separated from the essence, even if it manifests temporarily in a state of negativity and inversion.

So you see, my friends, when you experience a very beautiful, highly elevated, joyous state, then it means that your energy system -- whether your conscious mind knows it or not -- perceives all these energy emanations on all these sense levels that I talked about. But when you are unhappy, when you are heavy, and when you are depressed, then it means that your energy system unites with the similar energy system of others -- whether they are in the body or out of the body. Your energy body is influenced by the sights, by the sounds, by the odors, by the touching, and by the many other sense perceptions of others. There is a cross-fertilization. Your negative state influences others who are in a similar state, and vice versa. Each feeds the other. What your energy body experiences is not clear in your outer mind. Your outer mind merely registers displeasure, anxiety, or heaviness.

When you transform your negative consciousness, then you also transform your negative energy. Thereafter your life will be an ever-increasing and an ever-extending beauty. It will be -- because it already is -- like a blossom that unfolds in ever greater splendor. As you overcome each hurdle of your lower self, as you commit yourself forever more strongly to the divine will in you, this blossom will unfold itself and come to fruition -- into never ending and always increasing fruition. So you never need to fear that there is an end, for there is no end. Be blessed, my dearest ones, be in peace.

May 29, 1974