Approach To The Self -- Self-Forgiveness Without Condoning The Lower Self

By The Pathwork Guide

Greetings, my most beloved friends here. Blessings for every single one of you. May you be enfolded by the force of the love and the blessings that are given forth.

In this lecture I would like to explore specific facets of the path, which is an eternal path in one form or another for all human beings, for all creation. I want to discuss how the process of the path can be furthered in the developmental stage where you are now; where at this specific stage you find hindrances that you need to comprehend more on a deeper level of your being, so that you can remove these obstructions and therefore enhance the ever-moving process of which you become more and more a part. Although you initiate the process, yet you become a part of it and you then follow it because it is greater than the you that must initiate it.

You are doing this in ever greater measure. You are growing, you are changing, and you are discovering the wonders of your inner world. But it will also be helpful to become aware of what you are doing and of what these inner rhythms are. There is a constant fluctuation first of initiating -- and thereby indirectly setting up the process that unfolds and that in rare moments of exhilaration you perceive -- and then of following this process. Most of the time you are still oblivious of being part of a process that you have set in motion through your commitment to be in truth, your commitment to grow, and your commitment to change.

That is the basic aspect of initiating the process. It is the general commitment to being in truth and the general commitment to changing what is negative, and hence destructive. But then there are specific aspects that require a deeper understanding because the human psyche is extremely befuddled and confused about certain issues that become lost in the duality of human life. In this lecture I should like to discuss one such aspect. However, before doing so I need to apparently digress. Yet this is not really a digression; you will see the connection later on.

One of man's most basic fears is the fear of death. The fear of death has its origin in the confusion resulting from dualistic thinking and dualistic perceiving. The fear itself leads to further confusion. The fear of death can be allayed by not thinking about it, but nevertheless it lurks in the soul until the personality has completely fused with divine reality. The fear persists even when intellectual understanding has been attained and when inner experience has occasionally occurred as a result of growing and of connecting with the divine nucleus. Although at times a deep knowing about the continuum of life exists, the spreading of this knowing is a very slow process. All of the soul and all of the personality have to be filled with truth -- without any fluctuation, without any temptation into erroneous, faulty conceiving and experiencing the world. To be deeply aware of the eternal nature of life requires a slow process, contingent on many other attitudes that have apparently nothing or little to do with this great question. Such a conviction can come only after overcoming many hurdles and after facing, on different levels, this basic fear, no matter what you believe in your mind. This fear can take different forms. But whatever they may be, I wish to address you on the level of your conscious or unconscious fear of death.

Life cannot be non-life, for it is the intrinsic nature of life to be alive. This may sound like a reduntant statement on a more superficial level. But if you listen deeply into yourself and if you think about this sentence, then you will perceive that there is a deeper meaning to it. For man unthinkingly takes for granted that life can suddenly become non-life. In other words, he believes that its innate nature can suddenly change into its opposite. If you truly ponder this, then you must come to the realization that this is pure nonsense. Life can only be life. Everything that is created, everything that is, can only be what it is. It cannot be what it is not, even if on a superficial level of appearance it temporarily seems otherwise. Only in the dualistic state do you live with two opposites within your soul. But this dualistic state is only a very limited state as compared to all of creation. When you work on your path, then you discover that all the opposites are illusions. In reality, they are all different facets of the same oneness. You have already succeeded in many areas of your inner life to fuse such opposites so that the contradictions become conciliated and therefore no longer exist. This must apply to all the opposites on your level of reality. So if there is a oneness about life, then there can be only life. Therefore death must be an illusion.

On the level of your consciousness you are almost totally focused on the level of manifestation and not on the level of origin, on the level of the source. Life radiates outwardly. It sends out its irradiations, its streamings, its energy currents, its rays. But these rays are only the outer messengers, bringing life forth only gradually. In the past I spoke about this process of creation in a different context. The spiral movement of growing needs repetition and it needs to link up these repetitions with different contexts and different connections. I have discussed the fact that life -- which is divinity, for life and divinity are one -- gradually penetrates the void and fills it. Once the void has been penetrated by life, then it can never again become the void. On the borderline where life meets the void energy and consciousness -- life's main aspects when expressed in human language -- congest and harden into matter. This level of matter can also be called the level of manifestation, which must not be confused with the real life, the source. Matter or manifestation is enlivened and animated by life until, in the process of evolution, it transforms and retransforms itself sufficiently so that it becomes totally one with life. But as long as it is still on the outer border, then it is only temporarily animated by the life spark that by its very nature returns again and again.

Let me recapitulate. The rays of life animate the matter that is the creation of the meeting between life and the void. The void must be filled totally with life. That is the inexorable destiny of evolution. Everything that is alive is animated by the eternal divine consciousness. Consciousness is eternally moving forth and is continually changing manifestation in its myriad forms.

How does this apply to you, my friends? As always, we want to use profound metaphysical verities not just as philosophical thoughts to speculate about, but we want to apply them specifically to your human condition and to your pathwork. There is no greater truth, no universal fact of creation, no macrocosmic event that cannot also be immediately applied to man's personal development, to his growth, to his self-confrontation, and to his immediate microcosm. If the former is being used without linking it to the latter, then spirituality is being used as an escape from the self, as an an avoidance of personal purification, and as a failure to fulfill the task of one's incarnation.

Since you are geared to the level of manifestation, you confuse the manifestation that is animated by eternal life with eternal life itself. Only after a higher degree of consciousness has been achieved does this focus switch -- at first almost inadvertently. It is a byproduct of your purification work. Life can withdraw temporarily from the matter it has created. Then it allows this matter to dissolve back into its original substance. Later it will create a new form which then it animates. There is a continually changing process. It is the process of evolution.

The human consciousness needs to open its mind and to explore these thoughts, these truths that I am presenting to you here. For your fear of death stems from being identified with the manifestation that is animated by the source. You are the source. Even your present personality, your thinking, your feeling, your being, your experiencing, your capacity to will, your ability to decide -- all that is the source. Non-life cannot do any of these things. Even if much of your manifest personality will modify itself -- in other words, change and expand -- all that you know as yourself and what you feel yourself to be is source. It is not manifestation. Therein lies the confusion that creates the fear of not being. You need to learn that everything that you are now -- imperfect as this may be in certain aspects -- is the ever existing eternal life. Therefore, it can never not be. Within your present limited manifestation lie unlimited possibilities for your expansion. For the expansion of your consciousness, for the expansion of your experience, for the expansion of your creative ability to mold life and life forms, for the expansion of your sense of being who you really are. And yet in a part of your being you believe that when you withdraw that life from the matter that you yourself have created through the meeting of life and non-life you then cease to be. The truth is that all you know and are aware of as "yourself" must continue to be and cannot not be, even the limited personality as you know yourself now. That personality is what it is now, in addition to its potentialities that also exist in the Now. As these potentialities increasingly animate your matter, your self-awareness expands and then you know the truth about your unlimited continuity. Then your matter merges with the source.

In order to make this jump of the mind and to open your comprehension to these ideas, we have to overcome certain specific obstructions. There are many obstructions. And you work with all of them in one form or another. The fear of death is connected with one of the most important obstructions. This is what I will discuss now. It is the approach to the self on the arduous path of self-purification. Many of these approaches we have discussed and we have been working with. But now I wish to go into one of these in detail. For there is a great need for it in many of you, in all of you sooner or later. This is a confusion in regard to accepting the self WITH its lower self aspects on the one hand and squarely facing it with its negativity and seeing its destructiveness and its damaging effects for what they are on the other hand.

On the one hand you confuse self-acceptance and self-forgiveness with condoning and with whitewashing the negativities of the lower self. On the other hand you confuse your self-devastating guilt and your self-hate with the honest admission of what is indeed wrong in you -- and therefore needs to be changed. This specific dualistic confusion is extremely important. This double confusion can be an enormous obstacle on your path. Either alternative prevents you from growing, from expanding, and from becoming one with your God. The truth is that all the negative aspects must be fully accepted, must be forgiven, and must be seen in context with the whole personality. But they must never be condoned. Although all this has been said many times before, it is still a major stumbling block for many of you. You are stumbling again and again over this particular duality.

The fear of death -- the fear of non-life -- has a great deal to do with this. It has to do with it in two apparently opposite ways. If the fear of death lurks in your heart, then self-forgiveness is extremely difficult because one of the worst punishments is the threat of extinction. The lack of self-forgiveness brings this threat into focus. In other words, it triggers it.

The fear of death also creates the fear of movement. That is completely contrary to the reality. For life is eternally moving. Therefore, where life is withdrawn, then movement stops. But from the inverted position within the level of manifestation -- of which the passing of time is an integral part -- it seems that life is a constant movement toward dying. Therefore, changing is a movement that seems to accelerate the process of dying. By staying immobile, the illusion is upheld that time is stopped and that the status quo can be sustained. This is one of the major inner reasons for distrusting -- and therefore for resisting -- both change and growth. This illusion is so primitive that it is virtually superstitious. But this is hardly surprising on those levels of semi-conscious thinking and reasoning. In the course of your path you have found many absurd misconceptions that you hold -- and that you uphold with ferocity on this level of your being. These misconceptions govern your life to a degree that your conscious, mature mind is at first unable and later unwilling to comprehend.

I want to emphasize that remaining stagnant is courting the cessation of the manifest level. Such a desire not to move -- to stagnate -- can only accelerate the will of the animating consciousness to withdraw from this manifestation and to start afresh. When the determination and the commitment exist to change and to bring out the divine potential, then the duality will fuse into a unity in which you can be charitable with yourself, in which you can have mercy for yourself, and in which you can face your lower self because you have this basic love and this basic mercy toward all being, including your own. Then you can face your lower self unstintingly, without whitewashing it, without explaining it away, without justifying it, without shifting the blame for it unto others -- and yet without a trace of self-hate. That attitude becomes available to the personality if it can be perceived as a possibility, even as a necessity. Then it will be a goal to aspire to. It can be actualized by constantly checking up on the imbalances in these two directions and then modifying them.

To the degree that you embrace an utter commitment to move and an utter commitment to change, to that degree you can trust that the person you know and experience yourself to be must continue to be. No matter how much you change your manifestation so as to bring it into accordance with your divine potential, you still ultimately remain you. For you are God. You become more you as you perpetuate this change into more of your potentiality.

This is very important for you to understand. Everything that exists, that lives, and that breathes -- in its most minute form -- is a manifestation of God. Therefore, it is essentially divine. The stumbling block of not recognizing that fact is very prevalent. Although I have spoken about it many times in different contexts, this block has not yet been eliminated. You are still stumbling over the self-hate in you. Often you still stumble over your defense against recognizing this self-hate and feeling its pain -- because you secretly believe in the justification of this self-hate, which makes the pain of it unbearable. The fear of your unforgiveness on the one hand and -- as an apparent antidote -- your self-cuddling, your self-indulgence, and the denial of your lower self on the other always exist simultaneously. They are the expression of this specific confusion and stumbling block. They are the distortion and the inversion of the unity of total self-honesty and of self-respect.

So what you need to do is to make room for the presence of your divinity. Then your divinity can make it possible for you to face whatever exists in you because then you realize that your lower self is a creation that has come about from the meeting of life with non-life. When life meets the non-life, then energy creates matter and consciousness splits off into fragments. Truth and reality become confused because of the limited aspects. All of your duality is precisely that -- a limited aspect. You have created artifacts, artificial thought splits that confuse your mind. They are just as much a creation as matter is a creation of the meeting between life and the void, the non-life. Life finally penetrates -- it thrusts itself into -- the non-life and then enlivens it. In that process -- again and again in an ever rhythmic dance -- it withdraws itself at intervals from the life manifestation. But when matter disintegrates, then it has already been spiritualized by having possessed the kernel of life -- even if only for a temporary period. And it will re-awaken. Matter is a creation of life. For the void cannot create. It is essentially non-life, until it is being filled by life. So even when matter seems to disintegrate, it is not lifeless. It merely pursues an inverted, indirect route. The disintegration of matter will bring it together in new combinations and then the greater life spark will return to animate it again. You must realize that the process of disintegration and re-integration is a movement that leads toward that same goal. Where there is movement, life must still exist. Life in inanimate matter is an inverted movement and a much diminished animation. But that, too, must be what it is following inexorable wise laws. It goes beyond the scope of this lecture to explain these laws now.

This same principle exists on the level of the consciousness. The split perception of reality that we talk about so frequently exists in many diverse forms. They create the suffering that man goes through. The further the movement of life advances, the more these split concepts unify, and therefore eliminate suffering. The mind that is aware and that animates a unit of consciousness tries to grope with the split concepts until they become clarified and unified. Clarification and unification are possible only when there is a commitment to divine truth and only when there is the courage for truth. For then truth is love and love is truth. Then life will increasingly be experienced for what it is. It is all. It can never be anything else. It will not be confused with the manifestation that harbors the spark. In that spark is everything that you know yourself to be. The consciousness that you are now is bound to your body. Therefore, particles of that consciousness remain as reflexions within each molecule, within each cell, within each atom of the matter that your consciousness has created. Thus your body is an expression and a reflexion of your consciousness. But when your consciousness withdraws from your body, then it remains exactly as you know yourself to be now. The body that has been animated seems to disintegrate from the point of view of the limited consciousness on the manifest level. But it, too, goes through an immense process in which each cell finds new cells and creates new forms, thereby making room for new vehicles. Each cell of a body that has been left behind by the animating life harbors within it a tiny spark of that life. There is no inanimate object that is not somewhere alive, that is not somewhere a part of the life process. That tiny spark travels through channels that are infinitely lawful, meaningful, and harmonious, following certain laws of attraction and repulsion. These laws that are impossible to bring into the framework of the human consciousness. When cells reunite themselves into new combinations, then they create genes. The genes within the human structure change as the consciousness changes. The genes are not the same today as they will be in a few years, provided the entity is constantly growing and is constantly moving.

All these particles of matter that are invisible to the human eye, but which nevertheless are matter, contain inherent aspects of consciousness. Thus there could be no cell in a dead body that is not an expression of the total personality that at one time has enlivened and animated that cell. That determines the further journey of the disintegrating and re-integrating cells.

Off hand this may not seem connected with the topic of approach to the self in regard to self-love and to self-honesty -- or, in distortion, self-indulgence and self-hate. To put it differently, in regard to self-forgiveness on the one hand and to self-confrontation on the other. But I say that it is extremely relevant, my friends. Perhaps when you meditate deeply, then you will first perceive and then intuitively know the relevance. There is a direct connection between self-hate, the fear of punishment, the fear of death, and the disintegration of the cell structure that falls into a channel where it is then attracted to a commensurate new form.

The thoughts that you think are creations. They have their own cell structure and their own matter, although the density of that matter is invisible to you. If you live in a split-off duality in which you have to hate yourself in order to face the truth of the lower self, in order not to feel and experience the self-hate and the fear of dying, of death, of non-life, then you live in a certain specific channel. As a result, you create thoughts and invisible forms that bring you into an ever repeating pattern of confusion, and therefore of suffering. You are now ready to encompass an entirely new approach to yourself. It is truly new, and yet not so new. You have taken tiny steps toward that new approach to yourself. But you are now ready to take a greater step and to complete that approach. It is the attitude of a total dedication to self-confrontation, of a total dedication to self-respect, of a total dedication to self-love, of a total dedication to self-forgiveness in its true proportion. You can allow God in you -- which you can do the moment you choose. Then you can develop that godly attitude. That is, to be in a state of self-love in the healthiest, in the most divine way without a trace of self-indulgence and without the denial of what is true in your lower self. Then you can have respect, love, and compassion for your wonderful struggle, for your wonderful honesty, even while you also see your still existing dishonesty, your still existing cowardice, and all the other ugly attitudes of your lower self. But now without forgetting who you are. The facing of your lower self deserves mercy, forgiveness, and love. This is what human beings have prayed for during the centuries and the millennia of their existence. They have addressed a God outside of themselves because they believed that dispensation given from the outside would make up for the mercy, for the forgiveness, and for the love which they withold from themselves.

That is my message, my friends. I leave you with a great blessing and with the suggestion that you become more observant of your thought processes. In other words, the daily little thought patterns that you are so used to. You take them so much for granted that it never occurs to you to consider their creative power and also to consider that you can choose other thoughts. These thought patterns that are repeated every day are your worst enemy. This thought process is insidious, for you are accustomed to it. Learn to take a little distance from your thoughts. Observe yourself following them, giving them life, giving them animation and energy, and thereby creating a state of fear, of self-hate, of distrust, and of hopelessness. This is what I ask you to do: Proceed every day of your life with this observation of your thoughts.

With this I give you a great and wonderful blessing that all of you can take in and increasingly feel. It is a palpable life force. For us, in our world, it is visible, and for some of you it is visible to a small extent. But you will experience its reality, you will bathe in it. I will speak to you again and again and I will give you what I have to give. Be blessed, my beloved ones.

December 18, 1974