Leadership -- The Art Of Transcending Frustration

By The Pathwork Guide

My most beloved friends, I greet you with divine blessings and I speak to you with the deepest joy to help you once again in your great endeavor to reach the security, the peace, and the ecstasy of your innermost soul -- the source of all life, the source of all being. We are gathered together for this immense purpose of bringing into this realm of matter and duality a new vibratory force and a new unity of consciousness. The importance, both in terms of evolution and in terms of your own development, cannot be measured in human concepts. I can only ask you to tune into the deeper meaning of your path and into the deep meaning of the community which you are in the process of creating. Try to feel the importance of this endeavor.

We speak constantly on your path about the importance of opening up, of giving up your defenses, the brittle hardness with which you think that you can protect yourself. You fear that in the open, vulnerable state you will be susceptible to negative experience that may come to you from the outside. At the same time you also now realize that beauty, love, truth, and wisdom can also be taken in from the outside. Therefore, as long as your defenses are intact, then you also prevent yourself from taking these in. This explains why you often experience that either life or people actually give you the best and the most longed-for gifts, but you find yourself unable to take them in.

However, opening up works in two directions -- in other words, not only toward the outside world. When you open up, then you also make it possible to let out what comes from the deepest levels within yourself. Because your negativities are a more subtle protective layer, and because they bar the perfection of your inner being, then they must surface first. But beyond them, the most positive, creative reality that you are can and will emerge when you commit yourself to being fully open and totally undefended.

You erroneously assume that in this open state you cannot protect yourself against abuse. Nothing could be further from the truth. Only when your higher self functions, only when you are free from your self-serving, selfish attitudes, only when you are true to your inborn integrity, only when you are true to your innate decency, and only when you follow the divine laws of the universe -- which are laws of justice, of truth, of wisdom, and of love -- can you be strong enough for real protection, for genuine assertion, and for true confrontation. Only then can you be free from guilt, and therefore from anxiety, from insecurity, from confusion, and from fear -- which are the only reasons for not being able to defend yourself against abuse.

When you first think of and then speak of opening up, of dropping your defenses, then try to conceive of this act not only as directed toward the outside, but primarily as an opening inward. Have faith in your deepest perfection so that you can trustingly allow the overlayers of your lower self to emerge in order for you to first deal with them and then to transform them.

Anyone developed enough and capable of pursuing such a demanding path as this is also capable of immense fulfillment and capable of joy. And he is also capable of leadership! On this path we are creating new leaders in many fields, in many directions, and in many ways. The purification that you undergo makes you capable of genuine leadership in the best sense. Now let us discuss the meaning of leadership in the truest sense. And let us discuss your attitude toward leadership -- first the leadership of yourself and then your leadership of others. You have many conflicting reactions in yourself toward the leadership of yourself and toward the leadership of others. Let us start with your conflicting attitude and then turn to the true meaning of leadership.

In your conflicting attitude you primarily envy the leadership of others. You are competitive and you are envious of it, though you often conceal this feeling from yourself and then resent it. Subsequently you are quite efficient in creating cases that are supposed to substantiate and to justify your unjustified feelings and thoughts. You reactivate, often unnecessarily, your old, obsolete authority problems. Anyone who is a leader in the truest sense of the word becomes your enemy and you believe that this is the truth -- in other words, you believe that that the leader is out to punish you and to deprive you.

Since you envy the leaders, then you want to be a leader, too. Yet in this childish, undeveloped part of yourself -- that often is allowed to overshadow the developed part of you -- you do not want to assume the responsibilities that go with leadership. So here you have a painful conflict and a dichotomy. On the one hand, you resent it, you envy it, and you battle against it in others; on the other hand, you want it for yourself but without fulfilling the basic prerequisites. Then you resent the true leaders either for taking it away from you, or for not giving you the same prerogatives. You make no movement toward or commitment to assuming the attitudes that constitute leadership. I hope that you can begin to see the absurdity of this position. Yet it is an extremely frequent one. Once you are aware of it in yourself, then you will not find it difficult to recognize it when it emerges again -- either in you or in others around you.

There is still another conflicting attitude in this respect. You want a leader for your own benefit. You want someone who is strong, who is powerful, who is benignly disposed toward you, and who is exclusively concerned with your lower self desires so that you can indulge in every destructive action and in every negative attitude without facing the consequences. This great leader -- more like a personal, biased god -- is supposed to magically alter the life stream and the laws of life for your benefit. This false prophet should give you all the privileges, but without demanding from you the attitudes that make up true leadership. Some of these are love, giving, a sense of responsibility, fairness, and integrity. When you examine the significance of some of your reactions, then you will see that I am not exaggerating. This is an accurate description of your irrational demands, which you then busily try to justify.

You have your term for this phenomenon. You call it transference, or making this superfigure your parents. But these terms become labels that lose their meaning. Parent or no parent, as long as you do not fulfill the natural prerequisites for leadership, then you have no right to envy and to resent leadership in others. In that state your case has no justification.

If you do not assume leadership for your own life first, then you will need a leader who takes on the governing of your life. For no one can exist without leadership. Then you are like a boat without a rudder. Someone must lead your life, someone must govern it. So if you choose not to do so, then others will have to do so, at least to a degree. On a neurotic level, you will ask for it in ways that cannot be given to you. But you will also ask for the freedom and the privileges which only self-leadership can confer. So you want others to lead you where it is convenient for you, but you will also resent them for it. This is why you are torn apart by many conflicts.

The question for you to ask yourself now is this. "Are you really still in such an undeveloped, immature state that you require others to lead you? Or are you much more ready to be a leader in your own right?" You must start with accepting responsibility for your own life. Then -- and only then -- you can go on to take onto yourself responsibility for your planetary citizenship, for being a bringer-in of the New Age. This leadership can take many different forms. But it must begin with apparently invisible, unnoticed attitudes toward yourself and toward your immediate environment. It must begin with simple little steps, above and beyond the self-responsibility that we usually talk about and work with again and again.

Now I should like to explore a few other such attitudes. I see that often you stay in attitudes that you have truly outgrown already. And that is very damaging. When you know that you have outgrown a childish, negative attitude, but you are in the midst of dealing with it -- in other words, when you are learning about it, when you are learning about its ramifications, when you are discovering it on ever deeper levels, and when you are discovering the variety and the subtlety with which these traits can manifest -- then you are exactly where you need to be. But often you disclaim the truth that you are much further in your development, and therefore that you are no longer in a position in which you have to continue to act out attitudes that belonged to you years ago, or perhaps even months ago. But in terms of spiritual development, these months are like lifetimes. Yet by old habit you insist on staying where you no longer belong. Therefore, consider the possibility that you may have already outgrown your jealousy. Consider the possibility that you may have already outgrown your competitiveness. Consider the possibility that you may have already outgrown your ungivingness. Consider the possibility that you may have already outgrown your selfishness. Consider the possibility that you may have already outgrown your lack of concern for others -- your indiffence. Consider the possibility that you may have already outgrown your unlovingness. Consider the possibility that you may have already outgrown your blaming. Consider the possibility that you may have already outgrown your resenting others for the results of your own ungivingness.

My dearest friends, this is what you have to ask yourselves. Now you are in the position of recognizing such negativities. But often you fail to question yourself as follows: "Do I really have to remain there?" When I say these words, then it may sound as if you had not moved -- in other words, developed and grown. You have grown so much, and therefore many of your past negativities no longer exist; instead, much more honesty and self-awareness exist in you. As a consequence, there is more love among you than ever before. But because of this growth, your remaining stagnancies have a heavier impact and more serious repercussions. This is a law of growth. When your old negative reactions recur now, then can you try to make a different choice?

Now let us discuss what leadership means. The reason you envy leadership and you resent it in others is because you believe that those who are in a position of leadership either deprived you of something or imposed something on you that is unfair. That is why you act as though you are being prevented from executing your own capacity to be a true leader. A leader in the best sense of the word has to, above anything else, want to love unselfishly. But not just theoretically and in principle, while in practical life pettiness, ungivingness, and selfishness are expressed -- and all too often denied and therefore projected. Unselfish giving must exist really and truly in the smallest acts. If you do not want to give unselfishly, then you cannot assert your own leadership. If you give grudgingly and unwillingly, because you pretend that it is demanded of you, then it cannot be called giving.

In another sense, true giving is demanded of you, for if you want the privileges of leadership -- and there are many -- then that is the price, giving. The laws of life and of creation always demand that they be obeyed because they have been created in perfection. Yet sometimes you act as if this were an unfair price. Then you are full of outraged rebellion and resentment, for which you often manage to find justification. You give only with second thoughts, only with ulterior motives, only with calculating inner bargains, only with open little back doors, and only with a great deal of begrudging, so that it is no longer giving. Since your giving is not really giving, then it leaves both others and you empty. When you take the next step and you say, "You see, I gave and now what do I get for it?" then you negate the fact that your giving was never giving in the first place. Thus you cunningly reinforce your innate resistance to giving.

Giving is a simple act, which also includes the thought and the intentionality behind the act. In true giving this is what you state: "I want to be an instrument of Divine Reality to enrich the world through the Divinity that wants to express Itself through me. I do not want to do this for my own ego aggrandizement. I do not want to do this for an ulterior motive. I do not want to do this for a personal advantage." That positive thought and that constructive attitude will actually bring you many advantages. It will give you self-esteem and the feeling of deserving. As a result, you will feel deserving to claim the abundance that now you desperately grope for in faulty ways. That attitude must prevail in you as an underlying, overall, all-permeating inner climate. When that attitude exists, then jealousy cannot possibly exist in you any longer. The other person's giving and the other person's values can never detract from your own. First you will know this and then you will experience it.

When your giving is faked, then neither anyone else's giving nor life's abundance can be received by you. At the same time, other people's true giving, and the appreciation and the abundance both in material goods and in emotional goods which they receive for it will fill you with envy. That can be a measurement for you of where you are in regard to true giving. True giving is an act of love. If you do not love, and if you do not wish to learn how to love, then you cannot fulfill your deepest longing.

You may pray for being able to give and for being able to love. At the same time, you may be blind to all the areas where you demonstrate the opposite in your reactions toward your fellow creatures. So leadership in its real sense is built on the love of true giving and on the true giving of love. When that attitude exists in you, then nothing can go wrong. A perfect balance will be attained in all your dichotomies, in all your conflicts, in all the apparent difficulty of making decisions which your dualistic life seems to consist of.

Another quality necessary for the leadership that is awaiting many of you is the ability to be impartial and objective. That ability is still lacking in many of you. Often you refuse to see your personal stake and your personal desires in an issue. As a result, you build justifications around your personal tainted desires. You claim to have objectivity and to have impartiality when nothing could be further from the truth. If you know that you lack this ability, then the first step toward attaining it -- a step which will bring you toward the more advanced state of objective detachment, and one that is already a manifestation of this state to a degree, as well as an indispensable prerequisite for it -- is the awareness of your existing partiality. By admitting it, you disqualify yourself from arguing the case in question. Admit how you bend reality according to your emotional desires and to your coloration of reality. As a result of your practice in self-honesty, this should now be possible for most of you. Your pathwork trains you for this highly advanced state of honesty and of fairness. By now you can admit -- confess -- that you have a personal stake in certain false assumptions. Therefore, you do not want to believe differently. You may do that quite often. Yet practically in the same breath, you also claim that you are objective. That is not possible, my friends. Truly it is not possible. For when you are blinded by your self-interest, blinded by your self-righteousness, blinded by your resentment, blinded by your demands, blinded by your fear, blinded by your guilt, blinded by your coveting, blinded by your jealousy -- in other words, blinded by all sorts of negative feelings and false thoughts -- then your assessments are not objective, for they cannot be objective.

It is truly a sign of greatness to know that in this or that area you are full of turbulent -- hence disturbing -- emotions, that in this or that area of your being you are full of conflict. As a result, you cannot form an opinion. By doing so you take a giant step toward your liberation and toward developing your capacity to become a trustworthy, reliable leader. It is the only way to form reliable assessments of others. In other words, to be really objective. A true leader must have this greatness. But your stake in first fashioning and then trying to explain away a distorted reality is a tremendous hurdle that will make you vulnerable. If you have somehow managed to attain a position of leadership, then you can be toppled by the lack of this impartiality. Not admitting it -- and claiming instead that you are free from a personal stake when you state your opinions -- makes you vulnerable. Then you must guard your position because you claim an unrightful position of leadership.

The ability to know your coloration of reality and then to voluntarily disqualify yourself is a sign of maturity and a sign of greatness. This ability will bring you to an ever-growing capacity to perceive reality as it really is, to know it, and to state it without fear -- and to be true to it even if it may expose you to criticism. Strength, self-trust, and security come from the honesty first to know and then to admit when you are not impartial -- and when you do not wish to be. We may state it thus: you have the objectivity of knowing that you are not objective.

Another essential quality of leadership is the willingness to risk exposure and to risk criticism. If you fear this, and therefore you guard against it, and yet you grab for leadership because you like the advantages of it -- the power and the prestige -- then you defeat your purpose. You create a painful conflict in yourself. Therefore, you create frustration for yourself. True leadership cannot exist under these circumstances -- for which you may then blame the world and those who, at least in some respects, have rightfully attained leadership, regardless of whether you want to first see this and then admit it or not.

So if you cannot bear the momentary pain of being misunderstood and the temporary pain of being criticized -- regardless of whether rightly or wrongly -- then you do not have the firm foundation necessary to be a true leader. Leadership means constant risk. If you do not wish to take this risk, then how can you claim a case for yourself in your jealousy, in your resentment, and in your rebellion toward those who assume the responsibilities of leadership with all that this implies?

Still another essential quality of leadership that the infantile personality lacks, and is unwilling to even consider, is the attitude toward frustration. We have discussed this before in previous lectures, but again and again I see many of you being blind to what is going on because you do not acknowledge your anger and your fury when something does not go your way. So I want to spend a little more time on this all-important topic.

True unification and the wholeness of the personality can come only when the dichotomy of frustration versus fulfillment has been conciliated. But how can it be conciliated when one of the dualities is being fought against and the other is being grabbed at? If you have a strong "I must have it" for what is desired by you on the one hand and an equally strong "I must not have it" for the opposite of what is desired by you on the other, then you are in a painful state of duality. You erroneously attempt to reduce the tension of this painful state by pressuring life into giving you the fulfillment of you desire by eliminating all frustration. Thus you never learn how to really transcend frustration so that it will no longer occur. Of course, you never succeed in this attempt and you only become more frustrated. You can be sure that as long as you experience frustration, then you have to learn from it. Generally speaking, this is your position in regard to frustration.

What kind of approach would be fruitful toward frustration and would eventually lead to its transcendence? And when I speak of transcendence, I do not mean a false transcendence of making yourself so disconnected from your feelings that you simply do not know how tense, how anxious, and how desirous you actually are. I mean a genuine transcendence that is highly alive, conscious, dynamic, and full of the feelings that flow harmoniously with the stream of life. There are steps that need to be taken for the attainment of this state.

The first step on this particular ladder would be to say: "If this particular frustration is either painful or undesirable, then I will trust it anyway. I will trust my faculties to bear it; I will relax into it; I will learn from it; I will learn how to handle it. In other words, I will make the best of it. I will learn a lesson from this particular frustration and I will not act as if it were a catastrophe. Perhaps it is not a catastrophe, perhaps something good can come from it." That open attitude is the first step that will bring you almost at once into a new state of highly reduced anxiety and of highly increased security. For your anxiety is fostered by your dependence on something that cannot be and by your assumption that you have to manipulate the reality around you to suit your most infantile misconceptions and your unreal need for instant gratification. In other words, you belive that everything has to be exactly according to your momentary limited vision. This is a vision which is totally cut off from the sequence of cause and effect both in your life and in universal life. So the first step is to make room for relaxing your reaction of utter disgust and outrage about any frustration. In other words, your fear and your anger about it. First you have to challenge and to question this reaction. Then you have to consider the possibility that it may be faulty and erroneous. In this way you make room in you for a new faculty. In this particular case it is the faculty that you can allow things to happen. As a result, you will find a new strength and a new wisdom to deal with something that does not bend according to your selfwill. This gives you immense self-confidence and self-reliance that the constant obedience to your selfwill could never confer on you. This is a very important first step, my dearest ones. It is the first step that leads to a much more beautiful step.

The next step on the ladder of learning how to transcend frustration is the conscious and deliberate active search for the meaning of that particular frustration. What does the particular frustration that you are dealing with at this time have to teach you? For there is no frustration that does not contain a joyful, valuable, and liberating lesson for you. Most of the time you are completely unwilling to consider such a possibility. You are so bent on battling the occurrence of the frustration that its lesson gets lost. As a result, you pass by a valuable mark on your path, a high mark, an opportunity for growth. Thus you create the necessity for new such opportunities to be frustrated which will inevitably come to you. They must come, no matter how you battle against them. The more you battle against them, then the more rigid you will become, the worse the frustration will appear, and the more your frustrations will grow in size, in intensity, and in significance, until they overwhelm you. In this overwhelming there may be a chance that you discover the illusion which you have created, the false belief that frustration is an enemy. The overwhelming has the capacity to loosen up your tightness against frustration, and consequently against all of life.

Frustration is a friend. That is, you can make it a friend by courageously and intelligently wishing to explore its meaning and allowing it to be your teacher and your therapist, as it were.

This will bring you to the next step on this ladder. This is your discovery of the meaning of your frustration. He who knocks shall be opened. He who searches must find. The meaning will always astound you. The wisdom of it, the realization of how necessary this lesson is. What you gain from it in new strength, in new wisdom, and in new liberation will already alter your outlook toward frustration, so that when another such lesson comes you will be much less afraid, much more confident of its meaningfulness for you, and much less resistant to repeat these steps. It will give you a new trust in life and a new vision of the Consciousness behind all things, even behind the frustration that you have battled against. This is a substantial step toward conciliating the dichotomy of frustration versus fulfillment.

The third step on the ladder brings you into a much deeper -- though more subtle -- and more radiant world. When you have taken the two previous steps, then you can begin to practice something very beautiful. You know, at least theoretically, that the reality of God exists in every fraction of a second in time, in every fraction of measurement, in every fraction of experience, in everything that is -- whether it be an entity, a being, a creation, an object, an experience, or whatever. Divine Reality -- in its grandiose joyous truth, in its aliveness, in its meaningfulness, in its purposefulness -- lives in everything that is, in everything that ever was, in everything that ever will be. I have said these words before. I deliberately repeat them here, for they apply to frustration as well. As you approach frustration through the steps I have proposed here, then the point of the frustration will narrow. Perhaps you will be able to focus on it in a meditative attuning, and then let yourself fully experience that point of the frustration -- after you have learned the lesson it has to teach you. Then flow with it, go with it, accept it, embrace it. Completely reverse your attitude toward frustration from rejecting frustration to accepting frustration. Then what you will experience will surpass your imagination. In its deepest one-pointedness you will discover the divinity of life. In this case, the divinity of a particular frustration. And then it will no longer be a frustration. It will become the highest fulfillment imaginable, much more so than the fulfillment you craved for away from the frustration.

That is the point where you have overcome frustration, where you have mastered it, and therefore have truly transcended it. But not transcended it in the false way of denying your frustrated feelings and pretending that you do not mind it on the mask self level, but truly overcome it. You will no longer fear frustration because now you know that you can deal with it. In this process, you have come to realize that you have the equipment, the capacities, the resources, and the creativity to deal with frustration. At the same time, you have also utilized your frustration as a beautiful lesson. Consequently, you have come to the divinity of it, where it is all one, where there is God and fulfillment within the frustration.

This is your road, my friends. This is what many of you now need on your path. Now, I am not saying that every leader in this world who is a rightful leader in the positive sense has totally transcended frustration in this way. But I will say that to the degree that true leadership exists, to that degree his attitude toward frustration is, at least in most instances, a fairly mature and realistic one. Therefore there no longer is an attitude of outraged insult in you the next time a frustration is being felt by you.

When you free yourself of these impediments -- your selfishness, your insistence to never experience frustration, your unlovingness, your ungivingness, your ego aggrandizement, your jealousy, and your resentments -- then you have removed the major obstructions to your fulfillment. My friends, at times you still go around commiserating about this or that unhappiness or unfulfillment, and you choose not to connect it with those attitudes I am talking about here. They are the creators of your unfulfillment, of your frustration: Your unlovingness, your selfishness, your lack of impartiality, your bias, your one-sidedness, and your outrage when you meet with a frustration. With your unwillingness to expose yourself to the possibility of being frustrated, you limit your life to very narrow confines and you make yourself unnecessarily vulnerable in a brittle way.

Happiness means many things. It means all the things I discuss here. When you have come to your resources, to your inner greatness because these lessons are being learned, then you must be a leader in one way or another. Leadership does not always take the form of visible outer manifestations. It also exists in more subtle ways. In fact you will be an authority in your own right, in the best sense of the word. You cannot be that unless you reconsider the attitudes that I have mentioned, and unless you see your jealousy and your envy as being the painful illusions which they really are. But often you still do not take them seriously. That is, you do not acknowledge having them and then you try to justify them. Then you act act as if others who have more authority took it away from you.

So I implore you to be where you can really be now. Shed these unnecessary attitudes. It is time to do so for many of you. You have acknowledged and faced some of these attitudes. Now it is time to let them go. Let this lecture go deeply into you. Heed it! Use it! Make it the help it is meant to be! You have nothing but joy and gain to expect from doing so. Your sincere attempt to become who you are already in this respect is now truly possible. You believe that the person you can be has not been born yet. This is not true. The truth is that he or she is already waiting to be released when you let go and you open yourself up to what wants to emerge from within you. The only reason the outer, separated, obsolete part of the self still takes such dominance is because your willful personality allies itself with this part, rather than aligning itself with the part of you that is much stronger and much more real. This part of you is ready to emerge into manifestation.

Let me part from you in manifestation only. For I am always here. I am always close to you. I love everyone of you dearly and deeply, as we all do in our world, who are so concerned with the beautiful creation that you are part of. So I say, be blessed, rejoice, and have faith that your life is a glory and that it will be an always more glorious fulfillment. Be blessed my beloved ones.

January 14, 1976