Some Aspects In The Anatomy Of Love

By The Pathwork Guide

My most beloved friends, blessed are you in your whole being, blessed is your path, blessed are your endeavors to grow, to struggle, and to find your inner truth. The love of the universe permeates all that is. It is always available. The only problem is that often you are not aware of it through the false direction of your thinking and of your focus. When you struggle on your path, then you find many conflicts, many confusions, and the complicated mazes of your mind. But when you work your way through these ever narrowing spiral movements, then the issue becomes so much more simplified. In the final nuclear point of your being, the issue is love. Love is the key to all. Love is the medicine that heals all illness and all sorrow.

We shall talk about aspects of love in this lecture. And we can only speak about aspects, for to completely cover the topic of love would be absolutely impossible in one lifetime, even if it were discussed every hour of the day. It is so deep and it is so far-reaching. So we shall discuss those aspects of love which you are most in need of at this juncture on your path.

The path as a whole goes through certain phases that are relevant to the majority. This is why my friends often feel that a specific lecture particularly applies to them. Some of you may perhaps find the deeper meaning and the greater, more dynamic help a little later. But in general this topic is what you need now.

A lot of discussion exists in your world about what love really is. To many it seems to be primarily a feeling. What is it really? Is it a force, is it a feeling, is it an emotion? I say to you that it is all of that, and more. Let us speak of the fundamental personality structure in the human being in terms of reason, of will, and of emotion, and let us apply love to these functions. In this example we will see that love is literally all and everything.

It is obvious that love is a feeling, but it is not so obvious that this feeling must result from an act of will that is motivated by intelligence. So love is certainly intelligence. If you truly look at this issue in depth, in width, and in the full scope that deserves to be brought to any issue, then you will have to come to the conclusion that to hate is ignorant, no matter how justified it may appear. It is lack of intelligence. There are many forms of hatred that are never admitted to be what they are. There are also degrees of non-love. The lack of love can manifest in separateness, in hopelessness, in lack of faith, in depression, in a bleak vision of the universe, in fear, in feeling victimized, in resentment, in blame, in hostility, and in overt hatred, with many shades of the spectrum in between.

Love is certainly pure intelligence and reason. The deeper the understanding of the prevailing circumstances, the farther the vision goes, the more the person is in possession of the truth of the issue, and the less will it be possible to experience any veiling of the truth by hate, and therefore the more love must grow.

To feel the emotion of love is not possible without the will moving toward being in a loving state. If you do not wish to love, if you do not have the intention to love, and if you do not purposely express the desire to love -- that is, to fully understand -- then you will not love. In other words, you will never be able to feel love. Then you will wonder why this inability exists in you. Sometimes the will to love stimulates the will to understand fully and, consequently, understanding grows from love. At other times the understanding occurs first and results in the will to love. Either way, the feeling of love cannot exist without intelligence and without intentionality. To put it differently, the emotion follows reason and will.

If you have misconceptions that to love is to lose, or that to love is being impoverished, or that to love is being taken advantage of, or that to love means being weak, submissive, and spineless, then these ideas reflect a lack of reason, a lack of intelligence, which will hamper your willingness to love.

Love is also much more than reason, than will, and than emotion. Love is sensation on every level of your being. This is easily verified if you focus with a modicum of attention on your own reactions. When you are in a state of love, then you will see differently; you will hear differently; you will taste differently. Life around you has an altogether different flavor. You will perceive and experience everything that comes to you in a very different way. You will feel and touch differently.

When you are not in a state of love, then your sense perceptions will color those experiences that you find undesirable. They will appear unjustified to you. Whatever intelligence is brought to bear on the situation will construct reasons that will justify the reality that you want to perceive. In other words, your unloving perceptions will appear absolutely correct. But, my friends, question this. The truth that you are able to perceive in this non-loving state is very limited. It is so limited that you lack reliable perception. You merely perceive isolated fragments or aspects of the truth as it applies either to the situation or to your experience of life at this moment.

When you are in a state of love, then your body functions differently. Your breathing is different, your heartbeat is different, your pulsebeat is different. Your bloodstream functions differently from when you are in a state of hate, whether or not you are aware of hating. When you love, then you remain in a state of health. The lack of health is not necessarily a reflection of your hate. However, it may be a necessary byproduct of your inner struggle to find the way out of hate and fear and into love and trust. For that is always the inner struggle.

There are many other experiences, perceptions, sense perceptions, and sensations (some of which you do not even know to exist) that are all indications of love, expressions of love, that are influenced and determined by love. They reflect whether you are in a state of consciousness that is already enlightened into loving or in one that is still unenlightened, defensive, hating, and fearful.

So love is everything. Thus we now come to the very important aspect of loving yourself. Self-love and love for others are intricately connected. Therefore, you cannot love yourself if you do not love others and you cannot love others if you do not love yourself. Conversely, if you hate yourself, then you will hate others. You may not be aware of this correlation and of the unconscious process that makes you deny your self-hate, and therefore be in need of hating others.

The inner struggle to find the ability to love yourself is unceasing. In that struggle humanity gets confused by the dualistic state of mind. And that confusion is this: "If you love yourself, does it mean that you then indulge yourself? Do you then follow the line of least resistance? Do you then rather blame others than honestly look into your lower self? Does self-love mean giving free rein to the aspirations of your lower self and of your mask self? On the other hand, does the necessity on the path to face the truth of the lower self and its subterfuges, its deceptions, and its coverings mean that you have to express and live the self-hate that is imbedded in this aspect of the personality?"

This is a very deep and tragic struggle in all of humanity. On the one hand it is tragic because to hide from it, to deny it -- and thus make it much more painful and prolonged than it need be -- is unnecessary. Yet, on the other hand, this struggle is also beautiful. You begin to experience its beauty when you permit yourself to be aware of this struggle, of this confusion, and you therefore find your first foothold in true security. Security lies first in your awareness of this struggle and then in admitting it. When you are not aware of it, then you seek the false solution to self-love, which is self-indulgence on the one hand and blaming others on the other hand.

You who are on the Path know how tempting this game appears and how unsatisfactory, how confining, and how constricing it really is. It makes you constantly fluctuate -- in a most painful manner -- between self-righteous accusations and morbid self-recrimination and guilt. The accusations never really convince you, because no matter how accurate some of them might be, you suffer the uncertainty that comes from hiding from yourself. Thus you find it impossible to love yourself and to esteem yourself on a conscious level. You swing between conscious hate for yourself and hate for others. And that is truly a very painful state that you need not endure, if only you find the way out of this maze through the help that I can give you in this lecture.

Most of you have found this state of fluctuation between hate for the self and hate for others. It remains for you to find the places in your inner being where you still live in the pseudo solution of loving yourself by indulging yourself, by blaming others, by excusing and justifying your own lower self traits and, all the more severely, heaping accusations on others. Thus your view of yourself and your view of others is always somewhat lopsided. You live in inner turmoil due to your frantic attempt to hide your self-hate from yourself. The more you do this, the more does the mistaken part of you believe that this is the way to attain self-love and self-esteem. The true, uncluttered, clear, and guilt-free awareness of other people's wrongdoing -- without your own inner wrongdoing -- will come when you dispense with this false solution. It will come when you search arduously to attain a truthful balance about facing your lower self honestly and -- not in spite of its discovery but because of it -- loving and honoring yourself all the more.

The tragedy of this pseudo solution to your self-hate is that as long as you make use of it, you become further alienated from true self-love and from true self-esteem. Therefore, if you want to find the real way to love yourself, then it is essential to first ascertain that you do lack this balance, that you are on a wrong road in regard to finding your true, divine, eternal values. In other words, that you are trying to eliminate your self-hate through false means. The moment you can admit this, then you can open your heart and your mind to all your true values that already exist; you can begin to give yourself honest recognition without hiding and without justifications; and, most of all, you can open yourself to the inner inspiration that will guide you to experience how you can acknowledge your lower self without becoming ensnared in self-hate. Then you will see clearly that the more you do this, the more you can truly love and respect yourself.

As you love yourself in the true way, without indulging your lower self and its childish demands, then you will find that being firm with yourself is just as much an expression of love as is tenderness. If you can be firm with yourself -- as opposed to self-destruction and unloving total self-devaluation -- then you can also be tender with yourself. A beautiful balance will emerge clearly. Self-discipline, strict honesty with the self, and firmness with the lower self's desire to act out will create self-honor, tenderness, and a deep appreciation for the self. The distortion of this balance is self-indulgence -- at the expense of both yourself and others -- and lacerating self-hate. This distortion is not conscious to begin with, and therefore needs to be perceived through its indirect manifestations.

Only when you seek, and you gradually attain, the right balance can you be receptive to your own divinity. Then you will finally merge with it, and thereby you will find your identity in it. I suggest that in a meditation of the deepest kind you bestow tender love upon every aspect of your manifestation, upon every organ that you neglect loving, upon every attitude, no matter how distorted. Once you face it in truth, then you can find its underlying divinity. But that is genuinely possible only when you no longer excuse, hide, deny, rationalize, project, and hate others in order not to feel your self-hate.

This particular condition is a prison in which you suffer. You are truly suffocated in this prison, and therefore you seek a way out. For the longest time in the evolution of the entity, the search for a way out of this particular prison is not conscious in the manifest mind. But when an intense path such as this one has been committed to and is followed through consistently, then this awareness rises to the surface. At its first emergence this growing awareness is still unrecognized as the inner condition that has always prevailed. Neither is it seen that now you are about to eliminate it through courageously following further. Often it is believed that the outer path, the particular orientation of this path, creates this growing self-hate. Of course it is not really growing; only the awareness of it is growing. But from the vantage point of the still imprisoned individual, then it appears that way. Such a misperception sometimes creates fear of and rage against this path, and the old illusion is being clung to that the painful feelings of self-rejection are caused either by something outside yourself or by someone other than yourself. In such instances the old pseudo solution is still being coveted, be it only in the form of putting the self-doubts to sleep through a one-sided positive approach.

However, if this crucial stage on the path is successfully overcome and the temptation to flee it is intelligently recognized for what it is, then the mere awareness of this particular struggle is already a liberation. But as long as you are under the impression that your lack of freedom is imposed upon you by outside factors -- either by people or by conditions -- then not only do you struggle in vain, but, in fact, you only pull the chain that ties you tighter.

Now we come to another aspect of this problem, which I have recently discussed in a smaller setting with some of my friends. I said then that this new aspect is an important step on the path for all of you now and it will have to be gone into more thoroughly. Most of you now need to see what I am about to say. The search for liberation and the yearning for freedom has been discussed by us in many different ways. When you rebel against authority figures, then it means that you believe that through your rebelion you will attain freedom. When you protest indignantly about every frustration that life puts in your way, then it means that you believe that if there were no frustrations, then you would truly be free. Thus you are furious about what you believe is done to you by authority and by the frustrations of life.

Now I would like to shed light on a similar, related reaction, and that is your innate rebellion against any boundaries or structure. In other words, against anything that you experience as confining. I say to you that structure and boundaries are part of the loving creation. They exist in every facet of reality, in one way or another. If there were no laws and no boundaries, then the world would disintegrate in chaos and destruction. What do you think keeps the planets in their place and prevents them from clashing into one another? It is wise law, it is boundaries, it is structure. There can be no organization in the universe, big or small, planetary or miniscule without structure; there can be no community of living entities without structure, without law, without boundaries that may seem to confine some individuals here or there. At least at first they may seem so. In the real sense, it is not so.

It will be of great importance to face why you are so angry about this fact of life. In other words, why are you so suspicious of it that it hardly ever occurs to you to be open for the possibility that laws, boundaries, structure, rules -- name it what you will -- come from truth and love, rather than from hostility, and therefore from a desire to thwart you? Aside from your childhood experiences, or your interpretation of them, the real reason is that you distrust the tyrant of your own lower self that wants to rule selfishly and cruelly. By hiding this aspect, you project it outward, so that you falsely assume that all rules, that all laws, that all restrictions, and that all boundaries spring from the lack of love. When you identify love with indulgence and you identify frustration with hate, then you are constantly in confusion, in distortion of reality, and in blindness to the magnificence of creation.

Structure and law can be found in every loving aspect of creation. Look at the life of animals -- of birds or ants, for example. Animals who are free in nature obey the structure of the highest creation in poise, in ease, and with tenderness. They embrace the structure, and they breathe and expand within this structure in great freedom. It is a peculiar expression of man -- that has to do with his own evolutionary scale and with the rhythm of his rising consciousness on the one hand and equally with his lower self drives on the other -- that he has an angry rebellion against any structure, which he interprets as a manifestation that is hostile to him.

Of course, there are boundaries, laws, and rules in your world, in the human condition, that are a direct expression of man's own limited consciousness. For example, the conflict that we discussed before, that comes from using false means to follow the urge to love yourself, and from using equally false means to follow the urge to be free. For freedom and loving are inseparable conditions. Therefore, you cannot be free without loving and you cannot love without being free. So when you do not love, then you are unfree. In other words, you find yourself in the prison of the conflict I mentioned before. You chafe against this prison, against this lack of freedom. Your life is full of frustrations, many of them in your inner condition, some of them also manifesting as outer creations. Obviously these infringements and these restrictions are not necessary in the strict sense of the word. In other words, they are not an intrinsic part of creation in its divine reality. They are roadblocks that you yourself have unwittingly put in your way. They are of a different category from the laws that hold life together. Yet your rebellion and your reaction of outrage against restrictions are not only misplaced, but they also -- due to your inappropriate reaction -- increase the frustration and the restrictions. So you need to develop a new reaction.

First you need to distinguish between the two kinds of boundaries: loving and meaningful ones (whether they are cosmic or human), and the ones created by yourself through error and misperceptions. When you clearly recognize both, then it will be easier for you to re-educate the willful tyrannical child, and therefore you will be able to lovingly accept both kinds of boundaries. The first kind in recognition of its intrinsic meaningfulness, the other kind in recognition of your own past and present limitations that created them. You can use them in order to understand yourself and the universal laws better. By thus embracing the self-created boundaries, you transcend them most meaningfully. Soon the frustration will become a new doorway to freedom. What at first had appeared to be an infringement will soon turn out to be an opportunity to grow and to become freer.

You often find yourself in a position in which you rebel against your own tight structure, the structure of your false needs. For example, the need to be always indulged in. As long as you fight against it, then you only pull the net tighter. Only when you relax your rebellion and you open your mind and inner feelers -- so that you can comprehend what your struggle is really all about -- will you see what your own tight structure really means. By temporarily accepting the structure of your own creation -- with its own inner logic and its own laws -- you can relinquish it, you can grow beyond it, and it can even become a matter of choice.

You constantly overlook the tremendous freedom that you possess in the choice you have regarding how to think, how to interpret, and how to react in any given situation. You fail to comprehend that through this choice you have the power to create. Therefore, you can change the condition. Instead, you are busy demanding from others that they present you with the condition which you fail to create through choices of different thought material.

These concepts are of the utmost importance for you to understand, my dearest ones. For all too often you continue to remain in this unnecessary struggle. The more you rebel against what does not require rebellion and you overlook what it is within you that really imposes on you your self-infringement, the less can you find self-love in its true form and the liberation that you innately yearn for.

As you accept the narrow structure and you recognize it for what it is -- namely, the product of your own limited thinking -- your scope of freedom will widen. But it does not widen by rebelling against the necessary outer boundaries, against what appear to be restrictions. Freedom comes from an intelligent recognition of the structure and from the choice to accept it. This choice is not made out of fear, out of weakness, out of dependency, and out of submission. Nor is it a rebellion of your inner tyrant which disregards reason and wisdom. It is made with the will to see the truth and the meaning and to lovingly accept, on those grounds, the narrow structure of the present, even if this at first seems to put a restriction on your personal desires. This is an act of love and freedom. The first two alternatives are both unloving and unfree. They are not deliberate choices, but are blind, automatic reactions, and they bear the seed of hate, of distrust, of suspicion, of selfish demands, of the maligning of truth.

There will come a time when you will find that the outer infringements on your freedom will steadily diminish. You will be able to dissolve these infringements without childish temper tantrums and blind rebellion. In order to attain this ever widening scope of freedom, it is necessary first to find how many times your reactions are thoroughly misplaced. Then you can develop a knowing reaction, instead of continuing in your blind reaction. This knowing, conscious, probing, objective, deeply honest search for the particular truth under these particular circumstances will immediately fill you with the self-esteem that you can never develop as long as you pursue a road of blind selfwill, and then of accusing fury when the demands of this selfwill are not being met. This open mind and this open heart will allow you to love, to be free, to be in truth, and thus to trust and to respect yourself. Then you will see which boundaries, which restrictions, and which rules are meaningful and which are not meaningful. You will create conditions which make the unmeaningful restrictions unnecessary, and you will tenderly and lovingly embrace and go with the restrictions that you find meaningful. You will accept them even when this seems to impose at first a momentary disadvantage on you. This open and intelligent frame of mind can be cultivated by you -- and can be attained much faster than you think, provided you stretch your own consciousness and thus you make room for this possibility.

Freedom does not mean what the infant in you imagines, no boundaries at all and always following the line of least resistance. That is the strongest enslavement imaginable. Nothing could be less free. In that attitude you depend constantly on something that cannot be, no matter how much you try to force it, to manipulate, and to cajole it. You become the slave of unreality, and reality defeats you.

Now I suggest to all of you a small assignment that you may incorporate into your self-observations and your daily review. When you find yourself in rebellion, no matter how you try to explain it and justify it, forget the issue and the pros and cons for the moment and focus all your attention on what your feelings are. Do you feel rebellious? Do you react blindly? Do you let in other considerations? What is your state of mind? When you ask yourself these questions, then you will get the clearest answers you need. Therefore, you will immediately be able to determine whether you are in a state of love, or whether you are in a state of hate. Then you can ask yourself further questions and you can compare: "How do you really feel when you are in a state of love and how does that differ from this rebellious, blind state that you find yourself in now?"

When you are in a state of love, then you do not submit. Submission, in terms of this topic, is the price that you pay for the hope of attaining self-love through others, and for a benign authority that you wish to placate so that it may give you a life of unrestricted indulgence. For this impossible aim you sacrifice your freedom and your integrity, and then you blame the outer world for the result. You conceal the true motives for your submission by pretending that you do so only because you are innocent and good and your only problem is that you have not yet learned to rebel and to hate.

In a state of love and freedom you probe and you weigh with an utterly open mind, and then you choose on the ground of the truth that you are able to comprehend in that way. The choice is a totally voluntary act. You may want to choose to embrace and accept a particular infringement of your freedom. But in that frame of mind your choice will be a totally different act from submission. It will make you stronger, freer, and more loving both to yourself and to others, and open to the condition pertaining to the issue in question. Or you may reject the infringement in clear, wise, intelligent assertion, in comprehension of the deeper meaning of this choice. This will never be confused with blind rebellion -- with the false kind of freedom -- but will be just as creative an act as the acceptance of the infringement is in other circumstances.

You are coming into a state of consciousness in which these old blind reactions no longer have any room. In the past, when they were less obsolete, and therefore less of a discrepancy, you would not even feel as uncomfortable as you must feel now when you blindly revert -- out of old habit -- to reactions both toward yourself and toward your environment which are already outdated in your present state of development. You are no longer in a state in which you need to go on hating yourself when you are not always in perfection. You are already in a condition in which you can truly face aspects of your lower self and find more of your self-love. You are no longer in need to blindly rebel against others and then to hate them when they do something that either seems momentarily to your disadvantage or that feels unwelcome. You are no longer in a state in which you cannot bear a little frustration. You are already in a state in which a little frustration can become a threshold to freedom and to expansion for you. Think about this, my friends, and then relinquish the habitual taut reactions that you have in many areas of your life.

Before terminating this particular message to you, I would like to speak about a state of evolving love in you that, as a result of your pathwork, you are bound to encounter, and that you need to comprehend for what it is. There comes increasingly the opening up from within, where your heart begins to throb in love -- for others around you, for the Creator, for the beauty of the creation. In this state you experience an intense pleasure that permeates your total being. But when self-love has not yet been completely established, then in these moments you will contract in a frightened reaction, finding yourself unable to endure this state of lovingness, for it is too ecstatic. Inside a tiny voice of self-hate still proclaims that you do not deserve it. And thus you close yourself up involuntarily against this state, almost in an unbidden reaction on an outer level. When, in this back and forth struggle of your soul, you increasingly feel the spreading love of the universe, but when self-love has not yet quite taken foothold in you, then particular kinds of fear may arise. The fear of death, the fear of illness, the fear of losing what is dearest to you. You may then revert back to the old drab, gray state so as to feel more secure and less afraid of loss.

Now it is very important that you recognize these manifestations for what they are. When you do not love yourself, and therefore you hate others in order to deny your self-hate, when you rebel against others and you wish impossible false freedoms, then the experience of deepest love -- for the universe and by the universe -- will be unbearable, and therefore you will produce false fears. You may even experience physical manifestations. There are many ways in which the same syndrome can manifest in an individual's life. Whatever it is, there will appear a renewed urge for self-destruction in this half-way period, in which more ability to love, to feel, and to perceive has grown but remnants of self-hate remain because a stake to hide still exists.

I want to suggest a specific meditation. Ask the highest forces within you and around you about the areas that we discussed in this lecture. "Where and how do you hate yourself? Where and how do you project this self-hate onto others, and thereby increase your self-hate? Where and how do you prevent your freedom by the childish denial of boundaries and structure, of laws and rules, both in small and large areas? Where and how do you feel, within yourself, that you are unworthy? Where and how do you love your soul? Where and how do you love your mentality? Where and how do you love your body?" Go deeply into the meditation, in which you let yourself know that you are divine, but that you also need to fully face yourself in all your aspects, thereby only increasing that sense of divinity. Let your consciousness align itself with the divine will of loving yourself. But of loving yourself without indulging yourself; of loving yourself without whitewashing your lower self but seeing it straight; of loving your beautiful structure; of loving your incarnation; of loving all that is around you, even that which seems to infringe on you in some way. Recognize its lesson and then begin to love it.

I now bless every single one of you with the golden light of the Christ; with the eternal power of love, of truth, and of beauty. Be enveloped in it, breathe it, know it, and live it.

April 7, 1976