The Era Of The New Age and The New Consciousness

By the Pathwork Guide

Blessings and love and greetings to all of you, my dearest friends. With immense joy we resume our contact for this working season. The rejoicing in our world is great. This rejoicing can communicate itself to you if you open yourself to feeling it. The rejoicing has to do with what has been accomplished by many of you, both individually and as a whole. But the rejoicing is also about what is to come. For more of what you have experienced in growth, in liberation, in peace, and in joyousness will come this coming year for those who really devote themselves to their innermost path.

My dearest friends, you have heard from me and from many other sources that an immense cosmic force that will sweep this earth planet has been released into the universe. Its forerunners have already made themselves known for a number of years. These forerunners have various aspects, and I do not need to go into details. Suffice it to say that a new surge toward spiritual truth is spreading all over your world. New values seek to push through the old resistances. I will speak in this lecture about the meaning of this new cosmic force in terms of your community and in terms of your individuality and of your growth. I will speak of what it means and of where it leads.

Many times in the past I have spoken about the entity earth, the planet earth that is an entity of which each individual inhabiting it is a cell, just as your own entity consists of many cells. Each of these cells is a center of consciousness and energy, just as you are a consciousness and an energy center. The entity earth is now growing up. It is coming to an inner crossroads within itself, in a similar way as the growing individual who comes to an inner crossroads. You have all experienced at one time or another on your path that one part of you is ready to expand, is ready to open up, is ready to risk new modalities through exposure of its hidden secrets, is ready to move toward a new and entirely expanded vision of life and of the self, is ready to move toward a new modality of being. But it is not a new modality that totally sheds the old way of life. Rather, it transforms those parts of the old self which are not compatible with the new, pure, and great influx. It incorporates the pure substance of the old self into the new, expanded version of it.

At the same time the other part of you -- which we call the lower self -- obstructs this movement. It is fearful and distrustful of it, and therefore it resists it. Which part you ally yourself with depends on your ego consciousness. In such a struggle and conflict crisis is inevitable. The resisting part creates the crisis by obstructing the inexorable, unhaltable movement of the evolutionary force. The less this struggle is recognized for what it is -- in other words, the more its real significance is denied and rationalized -- the greater the upheaval it must cause, and the more frightening this upheaval will appear in its temporary manifestations. Conversely, the more this struggle is recognized for what it really is and the more the personality acts in accordance with the higher self principles, then the shorter the crisis will be. In fact, the same crisis will transform itself into undreamed-of bliss.

So you see that crisis is both healthy and unavoidable. Growth cannot exist without crisis. To the extent that growth is being resisted, to that extent crisis exists. The lower self is not merely devious, dishonest, and selfish, it is also ignorant. It stubbornly chooses to remain in its ignorance. And this ignorance makes it stubborn, unperceptive, negative, and destructive in various ways.

The entity earth also possesses a lower self. That lower self -- as with the individual's lower self -- is not only negative, selfish, greedy, and dishonest, it is also ignorant with a vengeance. It totally resists the process of the new influx which the soul is ready for. Thus there is crisis on this earth. You see the crisis, just as you begin to see the expansion that manifests as new ways of being, as a new understanding, as a deeper vision of life, as a deeper perception of spiritual reality. These new expansions are not always without their distortions, without their exaggerations, without their fanaticisms, and without their misunderstandings. In other words, without using the perception of the great new influx as an escape from first meeting and then from dealing with the unpurified matter in the soul. Such abuse will turn out to be particularly costly and disappointing to the individual. There are many attempts of this force to come through. But not in all quarters is the total responsibility for it first accepted and then the meaning of it thoroughly understood and lived by. So there are many individual movements which seek to follow the pressure from within. But they do so without giving themselves to the necessary work that needs to be done within the soul. The spirit world has been preparing for this new expansion for many centuries. It has been preparing for this intensely, with a great deal of investment and with much energy. Many are called but not all follow, although some may think they do. If this unwillingness to follow the call is clearly acknowledged, then it is better, for then at least the possibility exists for following this call at a later time. However, if it is explained away -- and if illusions and confusions are accepted as if they were really valid reasons for the decision to ignore this call -- then the soul is in confusion.

The entity earth is now going through such a struggle. There are those who resist the movement, and thus the depth and the light of the new consciousness. They have a stake in making themselves deaf and blind to it. Many of them would possess the mental and the spiritual equipment to follow the movement, but they choose -- out of their pride, their fear, and their selfwill -- not to follow, not even to notice it. Then there are others who do follow the influx and the force of the movement, but at first without understanding what is at stake.

Those who follow will find the deepest joy and blessings and need not fear anything. They only need to rejoice. For in following the influx, they keep in harmony with the universe. In other words, they are within the process, rather than obstructing it. They are also needed as physical channels for the further penetration of the Christ Consciousness into the New Era. Their ever renewed decision to give all of themselves to the process that has encompassed them will make their life as fulfilled and as glorious as it will be useful and meaningful to the whole of evolution.

My dearest friends, the fulfillment of this surge cannot occur unless the most profound purification process takes place. With this particular community the emphasis on the personal purification has existed for all these years. Until now this emphasis was directed exclusively toward your individual fulfillment. Now a new phase has arisen where your inner expansion has readied you to realize that your individual fulfillment is the necessary basis for fulfilling in cohesiveness with the total movement that sweeps your world. In other words, more is and must be at stake than merely your individual fulfillment. When I say "more," then it may sound as though your individual fulfillment is not important, and that may appear to be a contradiction to what I just said before. I always emphasize the importance of your individual happiness, of your wholeness, of your freedom from obstructions. It is not a contradiction. Your individual fulfillment -- that cannot exist to the extent to which you are unpurified and alienated from the truth of your inner processes -- is the most important thing. At the same time there is something more at stake. Perhaps I can put it in the following way: You can find total individual fulfillment only if you serve a greater cause. Many of you in this work have found this to be so almost inadvertently. The guidance of events has brought you to realize -- some more consciously and some more intuitively -- that there is a great task involved. You are involved simultaneously in serving that cause even while you fulfill yourself. You have found that this service enhances your own fulfillment, just as this service requires you to be a fulfilled and happy person. You are beginning to experience that through your self-fulfillment. In other words, the three-dimensional apparent contradiction and dichotomy must prove to be faulty perception once again. The truth is that oneness exists in what appear as opposites. Therefore, the individual is only apparently opposed to the Whole.

In this coming working year we will deal with your expanded consciousness that will learn -- in a more conscious and deliberate way -- to perceive the importance of service to the Whole Christ Consciousness that is infiltrating your universe. This will change life, will change consciousness, and will change values in a drastic way for those of you who are willing to follow the dynamic movement. In the lectures that I will give to you from now on I will increasingly concentrate on this aspect so as to help to open up a new vista for you so that you comprehend the difference between the old values and the new values, the old consciousness and the new consciousness. You need to view your personal fulfillment as exactly for what it is: A necessary tool with which to serve. For the unhappy and frustrated person cannot serve. In other words, he cannot put himself to the task of enriching life, of enriching others, and of setting a desirable example. For how can the poor enrich others or life? That fulfillment exists in them in a much deeper place. It is this inner place that really counts, regardless of whether those who lead only pretend or are real in their state of fulfillment.

Only the person who is fully centered in his God Consciousness -- and thus who is able to create his life according to his needs and to his wishes -- can enliven his surroundings and teach them, be it through actual teaching in one form or another, or be it by the mere example of his life. In other words, by his joyousness, by his love, by his capacity to be the best he is and thus fulfill a task in the great venture. For many different tasks are needed. But all who serve in this cause must be examples and leaders. They represent the new consciousness, and therefore they must manifest the new values in their own lives.

Now I would like to explain to you yet another dichotomy that you have experienced in the course of this work. Most of you have a compulsion to be good, like many other human beings. You may fear your existing selfishness. But your mask has put a cloak over your selfishness and your little meanness. That mask makes you comply with higher standards. This is because your selfishness is interwoven with -- and therefore is mixed up with -- this masking cloak. This is why false goodness appears. In your personal pathwork many of you have already dealt extensively with that aspect in you where you sell out your genuine self-interest and your real rights in order to please some imaginary authority. You have also found that you have done so not out of a pure spirit of service, but because you had your own designs. You always wanted this authority to do something for you that was not honest to expect, and that you really would have to shoulder yourself in order to become fully yourself. You work through these aspects until you find the strength to relinquish your secret hope. In other words, until you cease your false service and you become more self-responsible, and consequently more self-assertive. You find these two in equal balance. The more you stop cheating in those secret ways that you pretend do not exist and the more you stop your false goodness, the more you can assert your right to have the best in life. The guilt ceases because you live honestly. When dependence -- and the submission and the lack of selfhood that result from it -- still exists in your life, then to speak of service to a greater cause would be premature. For then you would misuse it and perpetuate the pretenses of your mask self. Therefore, the service would be put into the wrong channel. So you have to learn to be unselfish.

There is a right kind of selfishness and there is a wrong kind of selfishness. The right kind of selfishness preserves you right to unfold in the best way, regardless of the opinions of others and their covert reasons for wanting to exploit you. This kind of selfishness can first recognize and then easily refute other people's exploitative demands, rather than submitting to them because of your own secret demands on them. A person with the right kind of selfishness feels deeply deserving to acquire happiness because he will never want it at the expense of others. It is a distorted, wrong kind of selfishness which splits the interest of the self and the interests of others. In the right kind, these interests must be one and the same.

At first it is a complicated procedure to sort out the misunderstandings. But once you have accomplished this along the spiral movement of your path, then there is no longer a dichotomy between the self and others. The self and others are one. When you free yourself of your real guilt for your hiding, for your pretenses, for disguising your hidden agenda, and for the negativity that you perpetuate, then you will feel worthy of becoming the best, the happiest, and the most fulfilled person you can possibly be. Then service is not a substitute for and a compensation for your guilt.

On this path we want to prepare as many human beings as possible for the great event that is sweeping your universe. This requires strong and guilt-free souls who do what they do for the real reasons, not for the false ones. So your path first had to bring out both your false selfishness and your real selfishness in order for you to become unselfish -- but without sacrificing your personal fulfillment. The lower self, with its lower aims, must be sacrificed. But is it really a sacrifice? No, it only seems so. What emerges is real fulfillment. Then your outer ego self is no longer in contradiction with your Godself. But this state comes only after you have learned to let go of the mask self of false service and have learned to expose the shortsighted selfishness of your lower self, of your little self. Then you can learn healthy selfishness. After that you can come to true selflessness that is not contradictory to the right kind of selfishness.

When people follow spiritual teachings that emphasize service too soon, then the danger exists that they will use these teachings to escape from their inwardly-residing selfishness. Thus they will cultivate a martyrdom service that is not wholesome for the soul. When the personality refuses to become truly autonomous, truly independent, and truly self-responsible, then he will not want to meet his hidden selfishness. Therefore, his service will also be distorted.

In this light, you will comprehend the movement and the dynamics of your pathwork on an overall basis. Perhaps I can use a figure you have used in many other respects, because it is a recurrent theme in thought forms and in symbolic spiritual expressions: the three circles, the mandala-shaped design. In this figure the higher self is surrounded by the lower self, which is surrounded by the mask self and by the defenses. Individually you have dealt with this configuration again and again. The same applies to your community as a whole, as well as to mankind as a whole.

Now let us look at your community. Those of you who are most involved in taking responsibility for the community as a whole, who have worked deeply and have exposed themselves -- and who are now beginning to reap the fruits of their labor in the form of tangible fulfillment -- represent the higher self of the group entity. You have travelled through these outer layers. You have learned not to fear any part of yourself and you have come to accept all of you, thereby unifying what was once divided. You can identify more and more with your higher self, since you are increasingly able to differentiate between it and the wishful thinking of the mask self that only hides the distortion and the untruth of the lower self. Thereby you come to the true voice of your higher self, which you can increasingly trust. Your community as a whole has come to this point. And I dare say you cannot miss feeling it. The evidence lies in the increase in the number of new pathwork members; in the nature of these newer people who are more ready to understand and to follow; in the deper feelings of genuine love and joy among all of you; in the increased removal of blocks and obstructions; in the resolution of problems and conflicts, so that fulfillment on all levels occurs for more of you. This fact can no longer be ascribed to coincidence. It is the natural expression of your development.

So, a good number of the inner nucleus function as the higher self of the community. This does not mean that you are perfect, of course not. But you are sufficiently capable of establishing the channel to your higher self; you are increasingly capable of totally committing yourself to the will of God; you are increasing capable to perceive the importance of the Christ Consciousness that sweeps your earth planet; and you are increasing capable to serve this cause. As such, you protect yourself in an incredibly efficient way against the onslaught of the counter-movement. You immunize yourself against the counter-movement from within your lower self, and therefore from without, against the lower self of the planet.

Then there are those who are working diligently on the path, but who are still struggling. They are still in the phase of owning up to their lower self. They are laboriously getting to know it by penetrating the concealment of their mask self. In this struggle, the temptation to hide, as well as the habit to do so, are strong factors; so are guilt and the fear of exposing the truth. The illusion of this fear can be eliminated only gradually by testing it out until sufficient trust in the process evolves. Then there are those of you who at first cannot find the channel to your higher self. Thus, you do not even want the channel to your higher self. You fear it, you do not trust it. You trust more in your old destructive defenses that you are habituated to.

Then there are always those who are still strongly identified with their mask self. They have the most difficult time and they seek reasons to discredit the process and to judge it. They are always looking for reasons to do so. But this does not render them happier. Quite on the contrary. Their stake in the non-growing state is strong and their fear of growing is equally strong. As a result, they do not want to find out how unjustified this fear really is. These are not necessarily new friends, for it is not always a matter of time. These friends have to first recognize that they identify with their mask self and then they must begin to travel through these layers.

The purpose of my saying this is that you should experience yourself where you are and know it. As you have learned to take responsibility for your lower self and to overcome the shame to admit it, so must you learn to take responsibility for your higher self and not be ashamed of it. In other words, to admit where you have already arrived. Then you can give yourself to it even more fully. Then you can fully commit yourself to be a part of the great movement and feel the privilege, the honor, the beauty, and the excitement of it. To give service to a greater cause will cleanse your residual selfishness that makes you so fearful. You believe that you cannot give all of yourself to a greater cause because you fear to do so. But I say to you once again that it is the other way around. You are afraid because somewhere you still cling to your little selfishness. Consciously and deliberately giving yourself to a greater cause and to a movement that sweeps all of the planet is in itself a cleansing process.

The values of the new consciousness are precisely those. We will discuss a lot of the new values in the coming lectures. We will share these new truths and these old truths. What I say here is one of the most important aspects of the difference between the old value system and the new value system. I say "new," though it has always existed in isolated individuals who were highly developed and who incarnated for a specific task. The great difference at this time is that the planet earth is growing up as a whole. Therefore, it is coming into its own divine consciousness.

The first thing for you in this respect must be a conscious understanding of the fact that much more must be involved in your life than the immediate little personality. You must also understand that this must lead to happiness, while at the same time happiness is a prerequisite. In other words, there is no division. To follow the will of God cannot deprive you. In the years to come you will become more proficient in trusting the total surrender to your God within every day of your life, in every issue, in every venture, in every decision you undertake, even in the opinion you choose to adopt. In the new consciousness you will not make decisions with your head -- superficially -- wanting that the immediate desire be fulfilled. The approach of the new consciousness makes decisions in an entirely new way. It realizes that the outer self does not know, that it is not trustworthy, that it is full of subjective and colored distortions and prejudices. The new consciousness always consults the higher self and then learns to wait quietly and patiently for the answer. It is never opinionated. It accepts the fact that it does not know yet. It keeps itself open for the new influx. It has no stake in a certain answer. It makes room for an answer that may be anything, whether it be that which is most desired, or totally its contrary. But it trusts that what will come will be good. It has no fixed opinions. It empties itself. That is one of the approaches of the new value system that must, that will, and that already begins to sweep the planet.

This clashes with the other value system. The old value system functions merely from the surface. In other words, from the immediate emotions, from its narrow view, and from its narrow perception. It is a value system that has a stake in not wanting to widen one's perception and a stake in not wanting to consider other alternatives and other possibilities. This old attitude is bound to clash with the new way of life. It clashes within you and it clashes in your environment between those who represent these two kinds of consciousness and these two different approaches. That is the clash of factions on this earth planet. Where you belong will become more and more clear. It does not suffice to say, "I belong into the new," while you continue acting upon the old ways of functioning. You can say anything you want, but your actions and your approach to your inner and outer decisions are the final reality that proves in which camp you truly belong.

More of you have already made this commitment. Therefore, you are already taken up by the tremendous surge of this new golden light that sweeps the earth and that is unbearable for those who refuse this light. They are the ones who perceive only the negative manifestation of the counter-movement and are totally blind to the light itself. When the light comes near them, then they feel a strong discomfort, and therefore they misinterpret it. It is the greatest joy for those who want it; for those who give themselves to it; for those who fight for it; for those who serve it. This is my message for this time.

We shall continue all future lectures from this wider vision: how you as an individual fit into the scheme of the Whole; how you can become happy only when you are part of this force that fights for the growing up and the purification of the planet to reach its own divinity.

Your purification work on the path begins to acclimatize you to the joy and to the light of what is to come. But now you must also begin to specifically aim for this. In other words, to want it and to meditate for it.

I have given you what you need in this first lecture of the year. It will be your map that I always give at the beginning of a new working season. Be blessed, my very dearest ones. You must and you will increasingly feel how guided and how protected you are, how important your venture is, and what a privilege it is to be involved in it and to give your all to it. For this is not only important for the little outer life. It is important in terms of evolution. Be blessed, my dearest ones.

September 25, 1974