Creative Emptiness

By The Pathwork Guide

My most beloved friends, blessings for every one of you. A golden force is flowing through your inner being if you open yourself to it -- now and forever if you so wish. I spoke to you in the last lecture about the coming of a new era. This means that many human beings must be ready for this spiritual event. For many years you have worked on this path for this purpose, whether or not you were aware of it. You have filed away your impurities, and you still do so. In this way you make yourself available for a powerful force that has been released in the inner universe.

Although many spiritual teachers and many channels know this, most of them have misinterpreted this event. They believe that it will bring cataclysms on a human level, in a geographical way. I have said it before, this is not true. The changes that are occurring now are changes of consciousness. And you are all working at this. As you evolve, as you develop, and as you purify yourself, then you see that you become ready for an inner enlightenment and an awakening that has not occurred before and that is self-perpetuating in its force. It is unprecedented in history. For there was no other time in mankind's history when this power was as available as it is now. What you experience in an increasing manner is the result of this power coming upon a receptive channel. This is what we must be concerned with. For if this power hits an unreceptive channel, then crises will arise. Even if only a part of you blocks these great creative beneficial forces that could make you thrive in an entirely new way, then you put yourself under a great deal of inner, psychic, emotional, and spiritual stress. This needs to be avoided.

So on your path you have learned to contact more and more those deeper levels of intentionality where you deny truth, where you deny love, and where you deny a power that is greater -- and that therefore operates differently -- than the outer ego power you strive for. This truth, this love, this knowing, and this power come from within.

In this lecture I am going to speak about the importance of being receptive to this force, to this energy, to this consciousness, to the Christ Consciousness that tries to spread and is spreading, and that is seeping through the human consciousness where this is possible. In order to do this, you also need to understand another principle, the principle of creative emptiness.

Most human beings create an agitated mind, an overactivity of the thinking processes, an inner and an outer overactivity, because they are frightened of the possibility that they may be empty, and that therefore there may be nothing to sustain them from within. This thought is rarely conscious. But on a path such as this, the time comes when you become conscious of this thought. Then the first reaction often is this: "I do not want to acknowledge that I am afraid of this. I'd rather continue busying my mind in order not to face the terror that I am nothing inside, that I am but a shell that needs sustenance from without. I need to deny this knowledge because it is too frightening."

This is a futile course of total self-deception. It is of the utmost importance that you face this fear and that you deal with it openly. You need to create an atmosphere, a climate within yourself in which you allow this emptiness to exist. For otherwise you live in a perpetually self-deceiving way, one that is also wasteful because the fear is unjustified. How can you ever live in peace with yourself if you do not know what you fear, and if you therefore make it impossible for yourself to find out that what you fear is an illusion?

As a result of a continuous process over the centuries of your existence, you have conditioned yourself to make the outer mind a very busy place, so that when that busyness ceases temporarily, then the resulting quiet is being confused with emptiness. It seems empty indeed. But the noise must recede, and you must embrace and welcome the emptiness as the most important prerequisite because it is the channel through which you will receive your innermost Godself.

Let me put it this way: If you cannot let yourself be empty, then you can never be filled. Out of that emptiness a new fullness will arise. Yet you cannot disregard, you cannot deny, and you cannot step over that fear of your emptiness. As with everything else, you must go through it. My advice is that you challenge that false belief that you are empty and, at the same time, that you welcome the emptiness as the doorway to your divinity.

There are several psychic and spiritual laws that you need to comprehend in order to nurture this emptiness and to make a creative venture out of it. Some of these laws are seemingly contradictory. For example, on the one hand you need to challenge the emptiness and on the other hand you need to welcome it. This seems to be a contradiction, yet it is not. Both attitudes are necessary.

Another apparent contradiction is this. It is extremely important that you be receptive in an expectancy, yet this expectancy must be free from specifics. In other words, without preconceived ideas, without impatience, and without wishful thinking of what should happen and how it should happen. This is hard to explain in human words. If you are to perceive what I am saying to you, then you have to feel into it. There is also another related apparent contradiction. You need to be specific, yet this specificity must be light and neutral. You must be specific in one way but not in another. If this seems confusing now, then ask your inner being to relay its comprehension to your mind, rather than trying to understand with your mind.

The workings of the Greater Self surpass by far the mind's imagination and its ability to conceive that specificity would be a hindrance. Yet the mind must know what it wants, it must be prepared for it, it must reach for it, it must claim it, it must know that it deserves it, and it must state that it will not misuse it. The outer mind must make constant changes and readjustments in order to adapt itself to the greater scope of the inner God Consciousness. Your outer mind must hold itself poised for all the possibilities. Thus it will be able to mate with the inner stillness and with what appears as emptiness at first. As you do this in a spirit of positive expectancy, yet empty in mind and empty in soul, patient and persevering, a filling can take place, and therefore a new fullness can be experienced. The inner stillness will begin to sing, as it were. From the energetic point of view, it will convey light and warmth; strength that you never knew you possessed will arise. From the point of view of consciousness, knowledge, guidance, truth, inspiration, wisdom, and advice will come to you for all the daily affairs of your life, for the biggest issues and for the smallest issues.

I have said this before, but it needs to be repeated. The process of receptive, creative emptiness must be nurtured. You must learn to listen with an inner ear. Yet it is also necessary that you not put pressure on it, but that you become receptive to when and how it will decide to fill you. This is the only way to find your inner sustenance, the only way to find your divinity, the only way to become a receptacle for the great universal power that is being released and that will then manifest in your life.

This is a new and important time in the history of evolution. All of you are needed so as to comprehend and to perpetuate a renewal. It is a great change in thinking and in the perception of the laws and the values that the Christ Consciousness is spreading. The way must be open both from within and from without so as to create as many receptacles as possible.

The mind is an instrument that can be either a hindrance or an aid to this process. Your mind is only limited to the degree of your concept of its limitations. To the degree that you limit your mind, to that degree you cannot perceive what is beyond the mind. The human mind is finite. Therefore, it must aim to spread the boundary of its finiteness until it measures up with the Infinite that is beyond the mind, but that is within yourself, right here and right now. Then your mind merges with the infinite consciousness of your inner universe, in which you are one with all that is and yet infinitely personal.

As it is now, you carry your mind with you almost as a burden. It is a burden because it has become a closed circuit. Inside that closed circuit there is a certain leeway for ideas, for opinions, for concepts, and for possibilities that you have made room for in your life as a result of your education and of the mores of your society. That closed circuit contains what you have chosen to learn and to adopt as your knowledge, both as part of the group consciousness and as your personal experience. To the degree that you have grown and expanded, to that degree the closed circuit of your mind has widened. However, it is still a closed circuit. You are still burdened with -- and therefore weighed down by -- ideas of limitation for yourself and for your world. Therefore, in order to first elicit and then encourage creative emptiness, it is necessary that you be fully aware of the significance, of the importance of what I am saying here. It is also necessary that you visualize the boundaries of your mind by questioning yourself about all the things that you think are impossible for you. Where you are hopeless or where you are frightened, then it means that there must be an idea of finitiness that is locked up in your mind. Thus you lock out the great power that is here for all those who are ready to receive it honestly.

Again we have an apparent contradiction. On the one hand, it is necessary that this limited mind open itself up to other ideas and to new possibilities, as you have already learned to do in your process of meditation. And you have seen -- infallibly -- that where you have made room for a desirable new possibility, then it has come into your life. You have also experienced that when it does not come into your life, then you deny that it can do so, for whatever reason. Therefore, it is necessary that you begin to puncture that closed circuit. You cannot immediately dissolve it. You live with a mind and therefore you need your mind. It has functions in your life at this point. So what you need to do is to puncture it. Where it is punctured, then the flow of the new energy and of the new consciousness can penetrate it. But where it is not punctured, then you stay locked up within the narrow confines of this limited mind that your spirit is outgrowing fast. In order to be a receptive vehicle for the great new force that is now sweeping the inner universe of the All-Consciousness your mind must rest, it must not hold fixed opinions, and it must be neutral.

Let us return to the process of puncturing your limited mind. How do you do this? The first step is to make it known to yourself that you do hold or harbor limited beliefs, instead of unquestioningly taking them for granted. The next step is to challenge them. This requires taking the trouble to walk through -- in the well-practiced attitude of self-observation and self-confrontation -- your limited beliefs and then to think about them. When you have a false idea, then you often have a personal stake in it. This personal stake must be examined. Once you put together the negative belief and the negative intentionality in holding on to it, then you can see how you keep the circuit closed. Therefore, you deprive yourself of the inner filling which you yearn for.

Another law of great importance is that the opening to the greater Universal Consciousness must not be approached in a spirit of magic that is supposed to eliminate the learning process, the growing, and the becoming. In whatever way this ultimate of power is supposed to fill you and to sustain you, your outer mind must go through the steps of acquiring whatever knowledge and whatever know-how are necessary. You all know this in the fields of the arts and sciences. You cannot be inspired as a great artist, no matter how much genius you have, unless you learn the craft and unless you acquire the outer mechanical dexterity necessary. If your childish lower self wants to use the channel to the greater universe in order to avoid the initial tedium of learning and of becoming, then your channel will remain closed. For this amounts to cheating, and God cannot be cheated. It is then that the personality may become doubtful that anything beyond the mind exists, because no inspirational response comes forth on the basis of using magic to coddle your laziness and your self-indulgence. The same is true of science or of any other field.

How does this same law apply to receiving inspiration for your personal life and for your personal decisions? Here, too, you must not fail to go through the work that the outer self has to do in order to become a proper channel for the God Consciousness. You do this in the pathwork. You need to truly know yourself. That means to know your pitfalls and your weaknesses. In other words, to know your lower self. You need to know where you are corruptible or where you tend to be, you need to know where you are dishonest or where you tend to be. This is very hard work, and yet it needs to be done. By avoiding it, the channel will never be truly reliable. As a result, it may contain a lot of wishful thinking, stemming from man's desire nature. Or it may reveal a truth that is based on guilt and on fear, and thus is equally unreliable. Only when you work on your development in this fashion will you come to a point when you no longer confuse gullibility and wishful thinking with faith, or you confuse doubt with discrimination. Just as the great pianist can be a channel for higher inspiration only when he goes through the finger exercises and the hard and long practice that finally make his playing effortless, so must the God-inspired person work on his purification process, work on acquiring self-knowledge, and work on developing his self-honesty. Only then does the receptacle become commensurate with the higher truths and the divine values. Then the person can be influenced, can be molded, and can be used for higher purposes: to enrich both the self and the world.

At the same time you need to cultivate a neutrality. Your devotion to fulfilling the will of God needs to establish an attitude that whatever comes from God is all right, whether you desire it or not. Too much desire is just as much of a hindrance as the absence of all desires. This desirelessness then manifests as resignation and as hopelessness. The refusal to endure any kind of frustration creates an inner tension and a defensive structure that closes up the vessel of the mind and that maintains its closed circuit. In other words, in order to be a receptacle, you need to be neutral. In order to be guided by your inner God, then you need to give up the strong, tight selfwilled Yes or No in order to make way for a flexible trust. You need to be willing, you need to be pliable, you need to be flexible, you need to be trusting, and you need to be forever ready for another turn, forever for another change that you had not contemplated. What is right now may not be right tomorrow. There is no fixedness when it comes to the divine life that springs from within your innermost being. This idea makes you insecure, for you believe that security lies in fixed rules. Nothing could be further from the truth. This is one of those false beliefs that need to be challenged. Envisage that in the idea of meeting every new situation by being inspired anew -- in other words, by knowing that what is right in one situation may not be right in another -- lies a new security that you have not as yet found. This is one of those laws of the New Age that is opposed to the old laws, according to which what is fixed, what is stable, what is unmoving, and what is unchangeable is supposedly secure.

You need to study carefully the laws that pertain to this new venture into your inner creativity and into your inner life. You must work with them. These are not just words for you to read just once. You need to make them your own. These laws are apparently full of contradictions. On the one hand you need to acquire knowledge and know-how, you must first open and then expand your mind, you must make it able to conceive of more truthful possibilities. On the other hand you must also make your mind neutral and empty. This seems contradictory from the point of view of the dualistic dimension of consciousness. But from the point of view of the new consciousness that is spreading through your inner universe, these are not contradictions. For years I have tried to show you in many areas how this principle works: Something that is truthful and commensurate with the higher laws of life conciliates the opposites that are mutually exclusive on the lower level of consciousness. What produces conflict on the lower level is mutually helpful and interactive on the higher level.

More and more you discover the truth of unification -- where dualities cease to exist and contradictions are no longer contradictions, where you experience two former opposites as being two aspects of the same truth, both having their own validity. When man begins to comprehend this principle and he applies it to his own life, to his own outlook, and to his own values, then he is ready to receive the new consciousness which has been released in realms which are far beyond your own.

When I say to you that you must not approach the divine channel in you with an attitude of wanting it to save you labor and work and the reality of living and growing, I am not saying it as a contradiction to the necessity of being passively receptive. It is simply a shift of the balance structure: Where before you were overactive with your mind, now you need to quiet down and let it happen. Where before you insisted on taking over the controls, now you must relinquish the reins and let a new inner power take over. On the other hand, where before you tended to be lazy and self-indulgent, and therefore you constantly looked for the line of least resistance -- thus making yourself dependent on others -- now you need to take over and actively nurture the principles that aid you to establish the channel to your inner God. Then you need to actively express its messages into life. So, activity and passivity need to be reversed.

Thus your mind will become an instrument. It will widen, it will open up, and therefore it will puncture its limitations. As a result, it will acquire new considerations -- lightly, not tightly -- and new concepts with which your mind plays around for a while. It is this attitude of lightness in your perception, of flexibility, of movability -- in other words, of mobility of your mind -- that will make you the most receptive instrument possible so that you can receive from your apparent emptiness.

As we approach this emptiness, how does it feel? What is it all about? Again, the human language is extremely limited, and therefore it is almost impossible to squeeze experiences such as these into the context of human language. However, I will try my best to give you some tools and some helpful hints. As you listen into your inner chasm, at first it seems to be a black chasm of emptiness. What you feel at this point is fear. This fear seems to fill you up. What is this fear? It is just as much the fear of finding yourself to be indeed empty as it is the fear of finding yourself with a new consciousness. In other words, with a new being that is evolving from within you. Although you yearn for this, you also fear it. The fear exists from both ends: You want the new consciousness so much that you fear the disappointment of not getting it, and yet you also fear finding it -- perhaps because of all the obligations and of all the changes that this might impose upon you. You must travel through both these fears. You have received the tools on your path to deal with such fears by questioning your lower self.

But the time comes when you are ready, nothwithstanding the still-existing fear, because you have already made the connection, because you have the knowledge of what your lower self wants, because you have become aware of your negative intentionality, and so on. The time comes when in spite of the fear, you decide -- calmly and quietly -- to go into the emptiness. So you make yourself empty in your mind in order to meet the emptiness from deep within you. Lo and behold, soon that same emptiness will feel full. But not full in the way that you are used to. The emptiness will contain a new aliveness that the old fullness had made impossible. In fact, you will soon find that you have made yourself artificially full by packing yourself tight -- tight in your mind by its noise and tight within your channel by contracting your energy system into a hard knot of a defensive stance. With this fullness you killed your aliveness. Therefore you became needier because without your inner life you cannot be fulfilled in a real sense. The vicious circle was established by striving to get it from outside of you, since you refused to go through the necessary steps to establish it within you.

In one sense you fear your aliveness more than you fear your emptiness. And perhaps you had better come face to face with that. When you make yourself sufficiently empty, then the first initial response is an inner aliveness. Then you tend to immediately shut the lid tight again. And yet by denying the fact that you fear your aliveness you also deny the fact that you are really unhappy about your lack of aliveness. But your lack of aliveness is the result of your fear of it. The fear of the aliveness must make way for allowing the aliveness by letting yourself be creatively empty. You will feel your whole inner being -- including your body and your energetic inner being -- as if there were an inner tube that was alive, vibrantly alive. Energy goes through it, feelings go through it, and something else is vibrantly coming to the fore that as yet you cannot name. If you do not shy away from that unnameable something but you face it, then sooner or later it will turn out to be constant, ongoing inner instruction -- truth, encouragement, wisdom, guidance that is destined specifically for your life right now, where you need it most. That vibrant, alive emptiness is God talking to you. At any moment of the day it is talking to you where you need it most. If you really wish to hear it and if you attune yourself to it, then you will discern it, at first vaguely but later strongly. You need to condition your inner ear in order to recognize it. As you begin to recognize the vibrant, alive voice that speaks in wisdom and love -- not in generalities, but specifically to you -- then you will know that this voice has always existed in you, but that you have conditioned yourself to not hear it. And in that conditioning you have tightened yourself and thus packed up that inner tube that will fill you with the vibrant music of the angels. When I say the "music of the angels," I do not necessarily mean this literally, although that may exist, too. But what you need more is the instruction, the guidance, and the help in every thought you form, in every decision about what opinion to have or what attitude to adopt in a given situation. That instruction is truly comparable to the music of the angels in its glory. This fullness cannot be described in its wonder, in its treasure: it is beyond all words. It is what you constantly look for and yearn for. But most of the time you are not aware of this searching in you, and therefore you project it onto substitute fulfillments that are supposed to come from outside of you.

What you need to do is to recondition yourself and to refocus onto what has always existed within you. But your mind and your outer will have gone through such complicated procedures of confusing the issue -- and thus of complicating your life -- that it is like finding your way out of a maze, a maze that you yourself have created. Now you can re-create your inner landscape without that maze.

At the end of this lecture I would like to say a few words about the new humanity in the New Era. What is the new humanity? The new humanity is always a receptacle of the Universal Intelligence, of the Divine Consciousness, of the Christ Consciousness that permeates every particle of being and of life. The new humanity is not functioning, deciding, thinking from the habitual head, from the intellect. For many centuries the intellect had to be cultivated as a stepping stone on the evolutionary scale. But now the overemphasis has gone on for too long. This does not mean that you revert to the purely blind, emotional desire nature. It means that you must open yourself up to a higher realm of consciousness within humanity and then let this unfold. There was a period in evolution when it was just just as hard for people to find their ability to think, their ability to weigh, their ability to discriminate, their ability to retain knowledge, their ability to remember -- in short, to use all the faculties of the mind -- as it now seems hard to find contact with the higher self. The new human has extablished a new balance in the inner system. The mind, the intellect, must not be left out. The mind is a tool that must become unified and at one with the Greater Consciousness. For ages people believed that the faculties of the mind and the intellect were the highest form of development, and some still believe this now. As a result of this false or limited belief, they make no attempt to journey farther and deeper into their inner nature in order to find greater treasures. On the other hand, there are many spiritual movements that practice discarding the mind and inactivating it altogether. This is equally undesirable because it creates a split rather than a unification.

Both these alternatives in their extreme are half-truths, though they can have relative validity. For example, in the past people were like beasts. They were undisciplined and irresponsible as far as their immediate desires were concerned. They were totally driven by emotions and by desires, regardless of ethics and morality. So for that stage the development of the intellect fulfilled its function. The intellect also fulfilled its function as a sharp tool of learning and of discriminating. But when it ends there, then it becomes a farce. A person who cannot become animated by his or her divinity becomes a farce. By the same token, the practice of leaving the mind temporarily inactive is advisable, and I recommend it myself. But to accuse the mind as if it were the devil and to oust it from one's life is missing the point.

In either way a person is not full. He needs all his functions to be intact in order to express this divinity. Without a mind one becomes a passive amoeba. When the mind is deemed to be the highest faculty, then one becomes an overactive robot. Then the mind becomes a computerized machine. True aliveness exists only when you are able to wed the mind with the spirit and you allow the mind to express the feminine principle for a while. Until now the mind has been engaged in the masculine principle: action, drive, doing, control. Now the mind has to express the feminine principle, namely receptivity. This does not mean that you will become passive, by no means. In a different sense, you will be more active, more truly independent than you were before. For when the mind receives inspirations from the God Consciousness, then they must be put into action. But this putting into action -- this execution -- has to be harmonious and effortless, not like a cramp. When your mind is receptive, then it can be filled with the higher spirit within you. Then its functioning becomes totally different, forever new and exciting. Nothing becomes routinized, nothing becomes stale, nothing becomes redundant. For the spirit is alive. Therefore, it is forever changing. This is the energy and the experience that you have increasingly at your Center, where the new influx works so strongly.

The new human makes all his decisions from this other consciousness because he has worked his way to being receptive to the spiritual being within. Thus the results in this person's life would sound utopian for someone who has not begun to experience this. I am happy to say that a number of you are already part of this strong cosmic movement for which you have made yourselves available. You experience hitherto undreamed-of expansion, joy, and the resolution of problems that you never thought possible. As you serve a greater cause, then you find that there is no limitation to your fulfillment, no limitation to your peace, no limitation to your productivity, no limitation to your creativity of living -- in every way and on every level. In other words, there is no limitation to your joy, there is no limitation to your love, there is no limitation to your happiness, there is no limitation to the meaning of your life. The time has passed when each individual could live only for his or her selfish immediate little life. This can no longer be. Those who still insist on this selfish way of life lock themselves out from a power that will turn destructive in a mind that is still geared to selfishness. Your selfishness comes from the false belief that you are happy only when you are selfish and that you are unhappy only when you are unselfish. That false belief is one of the first myths that you need to first explore and then to challenge.

So you create a new life both for yourself and for your environment. It is a life that humanity has not known before. You are preparing for it and others are quietly preparing for it all over the world. These are the golden nuclei that spring up out of the gray, dark matter of untruthful thinking and of unproductive living. So, my most beloved friends, further that channel in you. It is the excitement and the peace that you have always wanted. Enter this new phase with courage and with affirmation. And get out of that attitude towards yourself as if you were beaten down. You are not beaten down, unless you affect this role. You can get up and you can become who you truly are, and therefore you can experience life at its best.

All of you are blessed, my very dearest ones. The blessings will give you the sustenance you need in order to go all the way with all of yourself and to become enlivened by, activated by, and actualized by the God within you. Be in peace.

October 23, 1974