Tradition, Its Divine And Its Distorted Aspects

By The Pathwork Guide

My beloved friends, you are in the presence of Christ. He is here. He is always with you. You have God's blessings. When you are either in a disturbance or in a disharmony of any nature, then reach out so that you can be helped where you need it most.

Many of you find yourselves in turmoil because you feel that now I "bring in" Jesus Christ. This is an error in your perception. I always talked about His existence from the very beginning of my task with you. There was a period in which we had to emphasize your own inner processes, in which you had to learn the subtlety of the unconscious processes in order to explore yourself in depth. Only through this exploration can a belief in God and a commitment to all of His aspects become meaningful. Only through self-exploration can you find out God's truth. Otherwise you are superimposing a belief, thereby covering up whatever unconscious material may exist in you, material that you need to deal with.

I am a spirit of truth. Therefore, I could never and I would never lead you astray. If I speak of Jesus Christ's reality, which is an aspect of God's reality, then it is only because you no longer need to erect barriers of any sort. These barriers can take many forms. For many years we have worked with the barriers of plain, ordinary lower self traits and attitudes. Now we deal with barriers of a more subtle nature. All I am asking you to do is to open yourself up to new considerations and new possibilities. I am not asking you to accept my words blindly. If my words are not truth, then you should not accept them. But if they are, then you must not barricade yourself against them. For it is necessary to know, to grasp, to experience whatever truth exists so that you can attain your full potential and you can be who you ultimately are.

The topic of this lecture is the meaning of tradition. Let us first examine what tradition means in its best sense and then what it means when it is distorted. Many human beings have distinct images about tradition. These images trigger off conditioned reflex reactions either as soon as this term is mentioned or when human conditions reflect adherence to tradition either in its real or in its distorted sense.

Tradition in its real sense means the continuation of faith in eternal truths and in true values. Once a cosmic reality has been discovered and has been expressed in human life, then those who experience its inevitable beauty, goodness, and rightness logically attempt to continue its expression. Please keep in mind that all true values, values of whatever nature, at one point in time must have been a breakthrough from the world of spirit.

In order to keep this breakthrough alive, it is necessary to feel and to inwardly experience the particular truth in question. Ritual celebrations can do this, but they are not necessarily a guarantee for the continuous aliveness of a specific truth. A ritual can be an empty gesture. True tradition is therefore a continuous re-experience of the original breakthrough from inner worlds or from other realities, a re-experience today of a dynamic aliveness, no matter how long ago the tradition may have been formed. Tradition in its best sense means an adherence either to eternal values or to certain aspects of these values. It depends on which particular tradition we have in mind.

Tradition in its distorted sense means a dead weight, a meaningless carry-over. This does not necessarily mean that a specific tradition did not contain eternal values and truths at the time it came forth. But at the present time its true meaning may be either disregarded or forgotten, the rituals involved may be repeated mechanically, and thus the tradition has been deadened: its reality has either become flattened or even totally obliterated.

Tradition in its distorted sense might involve a truth, an experience, or a custom that was meaningful and valid at a certain time in history, under certain conditions and in specific circumstances. Continuing these same acts or attitudes or customs under completely different circumstances, under conditions where the meaning of this tradition has been lost, is therefore a process of death, rather than of life. Carrying over a tradition in an unthinking attitude, adhering to a blind habit that does not make sense, that fails to elucidate through acts or attitudes the divine truth contained in the tradition in question, signifies death. Aliveness always means a dynamic thinking process, an awareness, not a blind repetition.

So, you see, tradition can be either an intensely meaningful reality or it can be a meaningless, dead repetition of the past that no longer has any application in the Now.

The human responses to tradition are deeply imbedded in the personality. All aspects of society are influenced by each individual's attitude to tradition. It makes a lot of difference whether a person is aware of a tradition's real meaning as applicable today or whether he is in distortion, and therefore is merely repeating an act out of habit. Politics and religion, to name but a few aspects of life, are clearly influenced by and also reflect a specific society's attitude to tradition.

There are those who put so much value on tradition that all common sense goes overboard when a tradition is at stake. They believe that only what conforms to tradition -- to the past -- is of any value. They rigidly reject any change. This is a foolish attitude, because the very tradition they adhere to now at one time came into being through change. Without continuous change, then unchanging verities cannot remain alive and thus be lived. Therefore, true tradition must always be coupled with change. The healthy balance of the soul of the earth can be attained and then maintained only when tradition and change interphase in a harmonious dance.

Those who follow tradition blindly and meaninglessly create extreme orthodoxies in religion, in politics and, of course, within the human soul. Such orthodoxy imposes on society a heaviness and a resistance to change. It springs from the misunderstood message of the soul to preserve the truths, the beauty, and the values that were given in the past. But it is forgotten that these truths came as a result both of the soul's struggle to find divine meaning and of the personality's willingness to overcome the fear of change.

There are also those who rebel against all tradition. In other words, they rebel just as much against its meaningless, dead manifestation as they do against its real, alive manifestation. This blind attitude is a result of the belief that only new findings can be of value and that all that which has existed in the past must be either inferior or invalid. This attitude overlooks the fact that eternal values have always existed and that they will always exist. Therefore, they can always break through to the human consciousness, provided certain prerequisites are being fulfilled.

The New Age person will neither blindly worship tradition, nor blindly rebel against it. He will take every specific tradition, as it becomes an issue in his life, and he will examine it with intelligence and with self-honesty. Do you have a personal stake in maintaining this or that tradition? Does living this tradition now make sense in your life? What does it mean to you and why are you either adhering to it or rejecting it? When life's issues are examined in that way, then you will attain the most wonderful flow in which you can both continue your traditions and make them new in the most meaningful way. If you have the right attitude, then you will never rebel when an old tradition is discontinued and is replaced by new customs, by new rituals, and by new celebrations. Ask yourself if the old tradition has been superseded by truths and values that are more meaningful for you today. With this attitude you will live in a dynamic Now. You will be able to value what deserves to be valued from the past, but you will also be able to let go of the past and thus create a new future, rather than a dead repetition of the past.

On this earth sphere you talk about the old and the new. Often these words carry both positive connotations and negative connotations. It can be either way. Some people think of the old as all good, as all benign, as unthreatening, and as full of values, while anything new they regard as threatening, as disrupting, as wrong, as bad. These people are the traditionalists. Then there are those who see anything old as outdated, as undesirable, and as bad, while anything new is totally desirable and totally good. Here, again, you are face to face with an apparent duality, which you can transcend only when you see both the positive and the negative possibilities in both extremes.

On a deeper level of spiritual reality neither of these terms makes any sense. There is neither the old nor the new, and yet there is both. Everything already exists, everything has always existed, everything will always exist. What is new on earth is that a certain aspect of ultimate reality vibrates through into the world of matter. You must remember that the level of matter is a condensation of finer vibratory forms. These forms exist already in what you may call "spirit." All life pulsates: it expands and it contracts. Matter comes into existence by spiritual forms pulsating outwardly. When contraction occurs, then life withdraws and matter disintegrates. Although I have spoken about this before, you forget these ideas and you do not think of your life in these terms. The more you can remind yourself of this truth and the more you feel it through in your life and in your ideas, then the closer you will come to being in truth.

The forms that exist in the world of finer vibrations do not manifest merely as objects, although objects bear witness to the existence of these forms. There is no object on earth that does not have its origin in spirit, where it is perhaps used in a different way because of the different conditions that exist in the world of spirit. Its essence is pulsated through into matter. There it recreates its original form in a modified way, in a symbolic way, in a way adjusted to the circumstances on this level of reality.

But aside from objects, we are dealing with concepts, with abstract ideas, with values, with truths, with laws, and so on. It is hard for man to imagine that an idea existed in finer vibratory form before it reached his consciousness. The many abstract concepts and laws I have discussed with you throughout the years of our work are realities in our sphere of life. Like objects, concepts often differ both in application and in meaning in the two spheres, because in your plane you only perceive very simplified and cruder manifestations of these ideas, of these concepts, of these laws.

Let us return to the concept of tradition. In our world the word tradition describes an aspect of a certain specific reality. It refers to the reality of valuing eternal truth in its manifold manifestations, or perhaps in a certain specific manifestation. As this attitude vibrates through into your dimension of reality, then it becomes diminished, modified, and therefore separated from its entire meaning. This is inevitable, since your reality is limited. In the fourth sphere a unity is split into a duality, whereby much of its original meaning is lost, and therefore is distorted. It is always up to man to recapture this original meaning and thus open up to a further influx of various levels, which together will depict a more complete reality. These openings occur as a result of specific mental attitudes and specific activities. They are the outcome of the struggle to see beyond the limited confines of your world.

The other aspect, counter-tradition, also exists in our world, in our dimension of reality -- which is always ready to break into your reality and thus to expand your reality. It exists as the constant movement toward renewing -- and therefore giving new life to -- these eternal truths and laws. So the old and the new exist in the timeless reality of the eternal Now. But not as old and new timewise, but as concepts or as attitudes with a specific meaning and with a specific expression behind them.

Let us consider the movement of your path, of this particular path that I first brought to you a few years ago. When you look back, then you will see a certain spiral movement. It is the movement of the great current of life. In these spirals you see that there are certain repetitions. In other words, certain phases re-encountered on deeper levels with a new understanding. These aspects appeared to be new when you first gained them in the previous curve. Thus the old truth -- the truth learned in the previous curve -- makes new sense because of the additional material that you have learned along the way. Thus what was once an entirely new truth -- a revelation -- later becomes renewed in repetition. In other words, an old truth seen under a new light. But this renewal could take place only because other truths, both new and old, have been discovered along the way. They are new in the sense that they have been unknown by the individual; they are old in the sense that they existed before they were known to the individual.

The same spiral movement exists in the personal development and the growth process of each individual. You cannot fail to see it if you observe it clearly, with full consciousness. The material of the lectures, which is the groundwork of the rhythm you follow, lays the plan for this movement that is organically adapted to a much greater reality than what you can perceive. Every expansion that you have ever experienced on this path -- and there were quite a few -- always meant the incorporation of hitherto unknown (new to you) aspects of inner reality, and therefore a new approach to your work. The organic movement flowed into seemingly miraculous changes of personality in the best sense. It brought new fulfillment and the awakening of previously dormant potentials. A new abundance made itself more and more noticeable on all levels, both in many individuals and in your path as a whole, as an entity.

Yet there was also resistance to the expansion of thinking, resistance to each innovation, resistance to each new approach, resistance to each new method, resistance to each new spiritual concept I gave you. Each new approach or each new expansion of seeing, of witnessing the world in a new light has always created a sense of threat. You wish to hold on to the old familiar approach which is known to you. In other words, you wish to keep the confines of your thinking and the confines of your perceiving untouched. That is, unexpanded. Here you become a traditionalist. In the distortion of the personality all principles exist in distortion, just as in the purified part of the personality all principles exist in truth, faithful to their real meaning.

Each new phase is greeted with rebellion against the authority that presents you with what seems to break the specific tradition that you have become accustomed to. Tradition is being created where human life takes form. It exists both in the larger social scale and on the smallest, most temporary scale. The path as you have known it, say until two years ago, had established a certain tradition with which you had begun to feel somewhat comfortable. This tradition had to be broken -- renewed -- by adding new truths to it. That is, new to you, but not new per se, for these truths have always existed. Only after accepting and trusting these new truths have they become incorporated into the body of the total work, the Path. So a temporary new tradition came into being, until the next breath of the great pulsating movement which the organism is ready for vibrated into matter. When you trust the new/old truth -- and therefore you do not obstruct it -- then you incorporate it into your life and thus your entire consciousness is widened and expanded. Wisdom, freedom, and abundance are added on to you.

Growth is not possible otherwise. It can exist only when this movement is intact and is as unobstructed as possible. Growth must combine the old and the new. It must retain tradition. It must renew it and enliven it.

These are eternal verities and principles that hold true for everything, for every conceivable aspect of life. I have spoken about this generally and abstractly. Now I would like to address myself specifically to the new phase of expansion that you are going through and to the attitudes in you that make this expansion unnecessarily painful. In your fear, you confuse the issue. When you endeavor to maintain the comfortable confines of this Path as you have known it until now, then your thinking becomes muddled and disconnected from the truth in your attempt to rationalize your rebellion against something new. But it would not be this path if it remained static. The path is a movement, it is a journey. This journey -- just as any movement does -- comes to a halt when this movement is obstructed. Stagnation has been the fate of many spiritual, religious, and psychological truths that have filtered through into your world of matter. Stagnation has been the fate of much that once had deep value. People stopped the movement due to their fear of antagonizing those who obstruct further movement, who obstruct change, who obstruct expansion. They lacked the vitality to withstand the opposition to movement, and therefore to further expansion. This is why so many seemingly new organizations, new orientations, and new schools of thought constantly arise. The old is either calcified by the distorted concept of tradition, or totally disrupted by the distortion of seeking change. In other words, of seeking the new.

So far we have succeeded in keeping this path on course in regard to combining tradition and change in their best sense, thus keeping the spirit pure. Of course, opposition to both these aspects -- tradition and change -- has existed, exists now, and will always exist. But the nucleus of this path has kept a steady balance. We pray to the Lord for His Grace that this will continue.

Let us make a brief review from this point of view about the various phases of this path until now. We will abbreviate it and we will give you a general outline. This will help you to evaluate where you are at this present juncture. Before doing so, let us restate what this path is, so as to avoid any possible confusion that may have arisen through the turmoil of your mind. This turmoil is created artificially. But be this as it may, you need clarification. Some of it must, perforce, be a repetition of what I have said many times before. The aim of this path is to affect personal development on all levels to the utmost of the individual's potential. In order for this growth to take place, a variety of approaches is necessary.

The mind needs to be totally emptied. All preconceived notions need to be examined and then challenged. This means change. Then some old opinions, some old beliefs, and some old ideas will be reinstated because in this open state their truth will become discernible on a deeply felt level. This means tradition. But these old truths will live in the consciousness of the person in a new way. This means enlivened tradition, renewed tradition. Other beliefs will be totally discarded because they have been found not to make sense any longer. This again means change.

A similar process occurs on the emotional level. But it needs to be approached in a different way. In order to cleanse your emotions and to make them life-affirming rather than life-denying, you must have clear and truthful concepts. For emotions cannot live in a void -- in other words, without any mental processes -- because man is a thinking and discriminating creature. He is not meant to live by blind emotions. In order to develop his emotional nature, man needs to go through an alternating process of accepting his feelings, no matter how destructive they may be. In order to do this, he must learn to find a way to express them without damage either to himself or to others. Once he learns to accept his destructive feelings, then he can begin to change them. This requires his full intelligence and the maturity of his mental processes so that a proper evaluation of the feelings can take place. It also requires his physical nature to become healthy and enlivened by creative energy. Such change requires both a spiritual influx and divine help, without which neither the strength nor the wisdom to direct this ever-changing process to flow harmoniously can exist.

Throughout the years I have focused on showing you these various levels through many teachings. I helped you -- through guidance, through inspiration, and through advice -- to alternate from level to level. At one time you had to concentrate more on the emotional level. First you had to learn to accept and then you had to learn to deal with feelings whose force you inordinately feared -- and which you therefore denied. At other times you had to concentrate on your mental processes and on your images in order to create more realistic thoughts. At other times you concentrated more on your body so as to make it a fitting receptacle for truth, for love, for wisdom, and for service. At other times you concentrated more on your spiritual understanding, on a new outlook on creation as a whole, and on learning meaningful prayer and meditation.

Without this constant interphasing -- in other words, without the inclusion of all these levels -- then development would be lopsided. Therefore, it would finally come to a halt.

The aim of this path is a development of consciousness that is almost unprecedented. But there is a relatively small group of individuals in your world who are ready for this evolution of their personal being, thus contributing to the evolution of your entire sphere of consciousness. A renewal of this kind brings about an untold expansion of personal happiness and fulfillment. Yet personal happiness and fulfillment must not be the primary aim. The primary aim must become -- at one point along the way -- service to the greater cause. When this happens, then the willingness to sacrifice soon turns out to be the most fulfilling fact of life. Sacrifice appears less and less as a sacrifice, until it turns out that God's will coincides with self-interest in the best and the most far-reaching way. The Godman, the New Man, evolves out of this work that includes the totality of the individual: the physical level, the emotional level, the mental level, and the spiritual level of his being, until they are all integrated into one whole and no longer separated. Thus the thinking IS the feeling, the thinking IS the bodily sensation, the thinking IS the prayer. This wholeness represents the utmost of liberation, power in the best sense, individuation, and what may appear as a contradiction: total surrender to God's will -- which is really the individual's will.

So this path is many things. It is a psychology, for you work on your psychological attitudes, on your feelings, on your unconscious processes. It is a philosophy, for you adopt new ways of seeing the world. It is a physical orientation, for you work with your body. It is a sociology, for you learn new modalities with which to function in your social environment. It is a new political system, for you learn to combine both tradition and change in a new way. It is religion, for you learn about Creation: your part in it and your relationship to God. It is all of these things and it is none of these things. It is the creation of a new planetary man, with new values and with old truths renewed. This new man will gradually take over and will then influence, step by step, those who want to obstruct this development.

When you look back on the material I brought you and taught you, then you will see that I have stematically emphasized these alternations. I have concentrated on different levels and on different aspects at different times, only to come back -- after a certain period of absorption -- to the previous levels. I started by giving you an overview of spiritual reality in the most simplified way. Then I went on to convey new concepts of thinking, most of the time aimed at bringing the split of duality into a new unity -- just as I am doing now with tradition and with change. Then I entered into a new phase of exploring inner, unconscious levels and attitudes. I taught you how to experience your pain, your helplessness, your rage. I helped you first to see and then to accept both your mask and your lower self. I opened up to you the vista to your higher self. Then I re-entered into the spiritual realms with your thoughts and your feelings. You have worked very hand along the way, my dear friends. Phase by phase, spiral movement after spiral movement, we have followed this journey. Each phase seemed new -- and therefore was always opposed, for reasons that you could always find and rationalize. And each new phase was also old because none of these eternal truths are totally new. They may be new in their application and in their combination. When your mental processes were challenged, then there were always those who did not want to tamper with them and who resisted. When your emotional processes were worked with, then there were always those who resisted psychological therapy. When spiritual truths were discussed, then there were always those who did not want religion. Each of these arguments was and is nothing but the fear of expanding yourself according to who you are meant to be, to who you potentially are on an unmanifest level of reality.

At the present time, the mention of Jesus Christ elicits the same kind of resistance that has always existed when an extended approach -- an old/new truth -- was introduced anew. When unconscious irrational feelings were lifted to the surface, then many of you were terrified and some friends even left the path. The same happened when responsibility for the lower self became an essential aspect of the pathwork. When prayer or meditation was explained in detail and its dynamics were taught -- so that you can use this essential tool -- then many turned away with resistance and rebellion -- which was always rationalized, of course. When the body was included into the total work, then the same reactions came up. When different spiritual realities were emphasized -- and Jesus Christ is one of them -- then this, too, was used as an opportunity to avoid the total revision of the aspects of the personality. In other words, the healing of the soul. Yet none of these aspects were surprising, since all of them were foreshadowed and were discussed at the beginning of my manifestation through this instrumentality. I also explained that concentration on these various levels of being will alternate and will follow a certain rhythm.

As I mentioned before, you must understand that every one of these truths exists in the spiritual reality. Thus, it is neither old nor new, and yet it is both. It is old because it has always existed. It is new because now it breaks through into your level of reality. These aspects of reality may not have the same name, for in the world of spirit names do not exist in the same way that they exist in your dimension of reality. But their essence does exist. What you first perceive and then experience here on earth about these approaches and these realities are mere segments. For it is hardly possible to experience a total reality on your level of consciousness. Then this leads to naming the thing. It inevitably leads to creating false associations to the thing. And it leads to a partial and therefore distorted vision of the thing.

When psychology made its appearance on earth, it was then for you an entirely new thing. Yet in the world of spirit these levels of consciousness are open, visible, observable, and therefore accessible. They cannot possibly create the controversy that the appearance of psychological realities created on your earth sphere for a long time. Then psychology often came to mean an opposition to spirituality -- a contradiction which is utterly false. So you still find this day that many spiritual leaders -- ministers, priests, and rabbis -- are against psychological depth work.

Jesus Christ has always existed. He is, He always was, and He always will be the Great Light that emanates directly from God. He is the manifestation that God gave form to. He is the most divine embodiment in the universe. For many of you who react strongly in the most negative way when you hear the name Jesus Christ, this fact in itself would not and could not carry any negative connotations. Long before the birth of Jesus Christ, the ancients knew of this Great Light and they knew that one day It would manifest as a human form. Why is this fact still resisted so much? At one time this resistance occurred entirely due to political and power reasons, just as now new and more honest political approaches are resisted. Those in power would be disadvantaged by them and thus would oppose them. Your personal irrational reaction to the truth of Him who was foretold by your forefathers but then denied is based solely on false tradition -- which is nothing but the fear of change. Thus your reactions are emotional, and therefore irrational. They do not allow a calm, open, fresh approach with your mind that can question this issue objectively and therefore make room for the possibility that your forefathers may have erred at a certain point of their evolution. They have halted their process. Thus, they interrupted the line of their inner movement -- both individually and as a people. This happens constantly in human development in many other areas, with many different individuals and with many people. Why is this possibility so stubbornly rejected that many people do not even permit a consideration of it? You do not permit your hearts to be open to a truth that hitherto you had felt disinclined to accept. But the truth can fill you only when you remove your tight so-called knowledge and you make room for a different knowledge. If this open attitude exists and if what your originally believed to be the truth is indeed the truth, then you will come back to it anew. But if it turns out to be faulty, then you will remove an obstruction that can only limit you and bind you. In either case, your liberation and your selfhood -- the discovery of an inner truth that is both personal and universal -- can lie only in this openness and in this willingness to let go and to consider different possibilities. Thus your fear that you will lose your autonomy is totally false, and is therefore irrational. Real autonomy must rest on what is a cosmic and universal truth, not on a personal -- and therefore possibly false -- opinion about universal truth.

The personal longing that brought you to this path, regardless of what you consciously had in mind, can be fulfilled only when you bring your personality into alignment with spiritual truth, whatever that may be at any given time of your evolutionary journey. Some of you struggle violently against this movement, but ignorantly so. The deepest reason for this struggle is fear. The tragedy is that this fear is entirely unfounded, and is therefore needless. While there is everything to fear from obstructing -- and therefore from not even considering -- a larger truth that you have not allowed into your heart as yet.

With this, my beloved friends, I deeply bless you and I pray with the angels and with the spirit helpers on my side that all of you may find the courage, the wisdom, the openness, and the freshness to give new consideration to old truths and thus to flow with the beautiful rhythm of your inner journey, so that it may be in harmony with the larger and vaster cycles that permeate the universe. You thereby create both tradition in the best sense and change in the best sense. You retain the values of the old and you constantly eliminate values which are no longer applicable. This follows the same laws of digestion and elimination that apply to the body. The system could not be kept cleansed and working well if this process were not allowed. The healthy body lives both positive tradition and positive change in its marvelous apparatus of digestion, of assimilation, and of elimination.

A great blessing and an influx of energy sweeps through your community, it sweeps through the earth, it sweeps through all the hearts that are open, that are receptive, and that are willing. God's love envelops you all.

December 14, 1977