Continue Your Struggle And Cease All Struggle

By the Pathwork Guide

Divine and joyful blessings, my beloved friends. Your tasks become more joyful, more fulfilling, more meaningful. For many of you this is so. Your inner paths bring out this meaning to your life. As your community grows, the cleansing process must be an inexorable byproduct, my beloved ones. As you cleanse yourselves inwardly and you leave behind aspects of your personality that are not compatible with your newly awakening self, so must the entity Pathwork do the same.

So we begin a new working season. Much expansion, excitement, fulfillment, and many challenges await you. Even the unavoidable hardships must ultimately become steps leading to greater harmony and ecstasy. I wish to discuss this topic in the first lecture of your new working year.

In the great plan, also called the plan of salvation, the earth sphere is meant to gradually change into a more spiritual abode of unity, of harmony, and of light. This cannot be a process given from outside. It can come about only through a transformation of consciousness in the earth's inhabitants. This transformation of consciousness comes about as a result of laborious inner work -- the work of self-confrontation and purification -- which leads to finding new deeper levels of reality that hitherto were disconnected from your conscious being.

As the earth transforms itself, then those individual consciousnesses that either cannot or will not follow this process of growth and development create a new abode, with conditions similar to those that used to prevail in this earth sphere -- and which are still prevailing now. However, these conditions have begun to change already among a relatively small section of the earth's inhabitants. As time goes on, the number of those who contribute to the change will increase. Your specific path is a potent measure to bring this change about in the shortest time. What might otherwise take many incarnations for the individual could be accomplished in one lifetime if the pathwork is truly followed to its maximum potential. Such transformations have already been witnessed among you and they are being experienced by some of you as a strong sense of being reborn in this very lifetime.

I would like to discuss a particular aspect of this transformation of consciousness that has been mentioned before. Here I wish to emphasize specifically what previously was discussed in a more general way.

You seem to be put into an entirely objective world, all fixed and ready made. All the conditions and all the natural laws seem to be unalterable givens upon which your state of consciousness has no influence whatever. To submit to this false reality seems the most realistic and sane acceptance of life. And the problem is that to a certain degree this is indeed so. It is necessary to accept the world as you find it and to deal with it on its own terms. For even after your own consciousness begins to change, and therefore to transcend this reality, the individual lives in both realities. He fully accepts the created dualistic reality, but at the same time he recognizes the new vision gradually emerging through the fog. Most of you know this new vision in your mind, but few of you have begun to experience its reality even occasionally, and that is: The absolute knowledge that there is only good, that there is only eternal life, that there is only peace, that there is only joy, that there is only excitement, that there is only meaning, that there is nothing to fear, that there is no more pain. This state of ultimate reality also contains the knowledge that you create your own world: your own conditions and your own environment. Rather than burdening you, this knowledge gives you an immense sense of liberation and safety.

The non-acceptance of the conditions of this dualistic world -- because of the vague knowledge of another state of mind that can be attained -- is an aberration. It expresses the childish desire to gain omnipotence in a cheap and easy way. The person who indulges in it deludes himself that he can avoid -- by an act of sheer outer will -- the developmental stages that sometimes must include temporary suffering. Thus we have the apparent paradox that glimpsing reality in a false way leads to more unreality than not glimpsing it at all and fully accepting the conditions of the dualistic mass illusion. But when the limitations of these life conditions are being fully accepted and the personality deals with them honestly, maturely, productively, and constructively, then the inner evolutionary process continues organically and the mind begins to encompass other visions that were invisible before. To deal fully with your limited reality must include a process of stringent self-work, such as this pathwork offers you.

Progress in this inner work brings about many changes: A change of attitude, a change of intentionality, a change of feelings, a change of opinions, a change in your world view, and finally a change in perceiving reality. A simple and current example on a very practical level is precisely what all of you continually experience on this path. You start out seeing a certain condition in your life in a specific way. Let us say that you are convinced that certain circumstances victimize you. You are convinced that other people are doing you a great wrong. And you are convinced that you have no recourse in changing these conditions unless these others change both their attitude and their behavior toward you. Few are those who have entered this path for whom such a situation has not come up. In such a situation you start out with a very firmly-held conviction. All the aspects that you can observe bear out this conviction. In fact, the more "convinced" you are, the more proofs you will be able to collect as to the accuracy of your conviction, of your belief. This self-perpetuating vicious circle -- this law that manipulates your vision according to your conviction -- is the ensnarlement of the mind that is so hard to overcome.

Only as a result of much good will on your part to open your mind and to let go -- at least temporarily -- of your conviction will you begin to recognize new aspects that you could not see before. Perhaps you will see how you yourself actively contributed to the situation which at first had seemed to place all of the responsibility onto the other person. You may recognize a definite intentionality to create a negative situation. This recognition will automatically shift the total picture. Not that now it will necessarily place all of the burden of guilt on you and make a victim out of the previous villain, but you will probably see how you mutually affected each other.

This comprehension will open new vistas to you. Soon you will begin to recognize entirely new aspects both of yourself and of the others involved -- both good and bad, favorable and unfavorable. But underneath this duality of good versus bad, one day you will find an ultimate, unchangeable level of truth in which all is good in a new, different, more alive, and yet dynamic way.

Here I used a familiar example that demonstrates the process of extending man's vision to new realities. In this example you find that your previous limitation was inaccurate, mostly because of its exclusivity: you saw the picture out of context, with some elements missing. And without cognizance of these missing elements, of these missing links the total picture was distorted. It was not false because your view is necessarily untrue in itself -- although that exists too, of course -- but it was false because you left out essential elements that were necessary if you were to view the total picture. What I am trying to convey here is that many realities exist in regard to one and the same situation, to one and the same condition, and to one and the same circumstance. When you truly know this, then you will beware of quick evaluations. As a result, you will assume the responsibility to search, to grope, and to make the effort to extend your vision.

The same process exists in regard to your world and its natural laws, as you know them. Your world view is based on an incomplete vision that allows only limited areas of your perception to filter into your consciousness. You see only what appears obvious and you see it on a superficial level. But as you grow personally -- and therefore as your perception of reality about your personal circumstances widens -- then your perception of creation also begins to alter. It begins to widen and to deepen. You begin to glimpse connections that you have never seen before. Now these are just as obvious as the limited reality that you perceived before.

The dualistic world view seems an incontrovertible fact. Not to see your world in terms of opposites, of duality, appears to be the crassest form of delusion. And it is true indeed that on the level of appearance duality is a fact. Life seems to die; evil always lurks in the shadows, no matter how much good also exists; light opposes darkness; night opposes day; where there is health there is also sickness. Yet another reality awaits to be recognized underneath this level of opposites. Since living on the level of duality, of the opposites, brings pain and strain, then it is the soul's greatest longing to find this deeper level of truth. This longing exists regardless of whether or not a person is conscious of it. It fills the heart precisely because it is within an individual's potential to awaken into this new level of consciousness at some point of his or her evolutionary journey.

I have talked about this before. I mention it now because I wish to show you how to attain this new level of perception and of being. It must be understood that this goal cannot be reached by using the outer will alone; it cannot come about as a result of philosophical speculation or theoretical knowledge; or even as a result of specific exercises, methods, or disciplines. The change of consciousness is the result of an intensely personal purification process that deals with the most mundane matters of your practical life and with your attitudes toward these matters, as well as with your attitude toward your general surroundings. Practical everyday matters are always an expression of subtle inner, spiritual attitudes. To skip over them and to consider them irrelevant only leads to further separation, to duality -- spirituality versus practical life -- and therefore ultimately to a delusionary spirituality that is not grounded in the Now. This is why you find this Path intensely practical and utterly compatible with your life of matter: your daily activities and your goals. The Path is not only compatible with your daily life, but it is first a discovery and then an expression of the most subtle spiritual -- or anti-spiritual -- attitudes.

Let us now attempt to be more specific about attaining the new consciousness in which creation is no longer perceived in terms of duality. Perhaps we should begin by pointing out how painful and how fearful duality really is. For this is often taken for granted so much that you cannot even perceive the pain and the fear. You do not know anything else. Since you believe that this is all there is, then how could you even begin to chafe under it? The dynamics are similar to a child hardly feeling his painful condition simply because he does not know what other, better conditions might exist. In order to change an existing condition one must feel it as so undesirable that the effort to change it is worth taking. But one must also know both that it can be changed and that other possibilities also exist.

Most human beings do not know that duality is painful, nor how painful it really is. Nor do they know that another perception and another view exists. In other words, that there is another way of living that totally eliminates this pain. Living trapped in the limited world of duality, man always fears the undesirable. He strains away from the undesirable and he strains toward the desirable. This straining is extremely painful and anxiety-producing. But this strain becomes conscious only after a great deal of crude purification work has been accomplished on your path. If you try to eliminate this strain before such crude purification work -- such as you are involved with now -- is part of your daily life, then important steps are being skipped and the process cannot take place in an organic, grounded way. So what I am discussing now may not yet be appropriate for a number of my friends. But I believe that it will help all of you to comprehend some of these aspects even before you are ready on your personal path to emphasize this new phase. If you can connect with some of my words, then it may help you to deepen your understanding of yourself as you continue to do this purification work.

In considering reality and the deeper truth, we are talking about different states of mind. If the mind becomes more firmly entrenched in the painful, fearful dualism through straining from the undesirable alternative, then it must follow that the straining must be relinquished. Yet how can I say to you: do not wish for happiness as opposed to suffering; do not wish for life as opposed to death; do not wish for health as opposed to illness, and so on? You would hardly be human if you would not deeply desire happiness, life, and health.

But there is a state of mind in which the straining relaxes, in which the undesirable can be dealt with in an almost similar spirit and attitude as the desirable. This may appear very strange to you now, but I truly say to you that this is indeed so. Perhaps the first step toward this particular state of mind is to pay attention to the byproducts -- in your feelings, in your thoughts, and in your attitudes -- as you experience either a desirable state or an undesirable state. If the desirable experience occurs, then you are likely to feel faith in the Lord; to experience His reality; you can connect with the Christ within; you can be joyful in the knowledge that all is well in this world. (I am now addressing myself to individuals who believe in -- and therefore who can occasionally experience -- the spiritual reality beyond this earth reality and not to people who have never as yet experienced this level of being). But it is infinitely more difficult to maintain the same faith and the same knowing when the undesirable experiences occur. Then the feelings immediately fluctuate, like a needle in a compass. Begin to observe your moods. When are doubts coming up? What brings on these doubts? Are they not always, in some way, connected with whether or not the desirable goal occurs?

The Christed person does not experience these fluctuations. The outer experience in no way influences which level of reality he is connected with. It is indeed true that such a person reacts to pain in no way differently than he reacts to pleasure. In that way they become one and the same. To put it differently, duality is being transcended by such a person.

This kind of detachment from pleasure and from pain is strongly fostered by Eastern religions, as well as by western mystics. Consequently, these disciplines negate wordly fulfillment and consider it an antithesis to the goal of spiritual self-realization. The pursuit of detachment leads to all the disciplines of asceticism and to deliberately imposed suffering. Yet, as valuable as these approaches may be to a degree, does not the deliberate negation of the desirable lead to a similar state of duality, only approached from the other end? He who denies the undesirable is not much different from him who denies the desirable. In other words, who does not permit himself to rejoice in it.

Another kind of contradiction exists that has led to much confusion in the human mind, specifically in spiritual aspirants. Is it not claimed by spiritual teachers and seers that God's will is your happiness, that God's will is your human fulfillment, that God's will is your health, that God's will is your well-being, that God's will is your healing when you are ill, that God's will is your productivity, and that God's will is your success in life? So how can you negate this life that you have here and now that the Creator has given you? Does it seem right to abdicate material existence and to deny its desirable aspects just because you know that there exists a deeper, much more permanent state of mind in which you can experience life and you can experience fulfillment without the breaks that are part and parcel of the dualistic state of mind?

All these questions seem fraught with conflict and contradiction, at least on this level of reality. In a deeper sense there are no contradictions at all. It is possible to rejoice in wordly fulfillments as expressions of inner states while no longer straining toward one state and straining away from another. This latter attitude can exist only when you know that ultimately there is the reality of God, that ultimately there is life eternal, that ultimately there is fulfillment, that ultimately there is well-being in every possible way. Because you have attained a state without straining, you will first glimpse and then you will finally experience this other reality. It is equally true to state that you can relinquish the straining because you glimpse this state. It must be approached from both ends.

It would be virtually impossible to start out with an attempt to feel the same way about two opposites. You could not possibly make yourself react the same way to pleasure as you do to pain. It is a natural movement of the human manifestation to strain toward pleasure and to strain away from pain. Even the often encountered fear of -- and therefore the denial of -- pleasure is essentially nothing but another version of the fear of and the denial of pain. So how is one to start, you may well ask? As long as the strain between two opposites of a duality exists, then you must live in fear and in inner tension. Consequently, you cannot realize your ultimate state of unity, a state in which in which there is no death and no pain.

The way to go about it at first is to stand back and to observe your reaction to pain and your reaction to pleasure, your reaction to life and your reaction to death. These reactions contain a great deal of material that you need to be clear about but that you generally ignore. These reactions have become so much second nature that you cannot see the forest for the trees. Fear and desire are only the most common denominators that designate a host of other feelings and attitudes. Your fear of death, your fear of pain, and your movement to strain away from them usually contain a great deal of anger, of bitterness, and of resentment. These feelings are not directed toward a specific person or deity. They form a more general, diffuse but nevertheless distinct state of mind. Often these feelings of bitterness and anger become so enmeshed into the system that they turn into the pain that you strain away from. In other words, what started out as a small pain manifestation -- and what might dissolve smoothly and relatively easily -- becomes more firmly entrenched, and therefore is aggravated. It is not so much these anger feelings themselves that causes the strain, but their suppression and their repression. In other words, the fact that you are unaware of them -- and therefore that they continue to exist underground -- is what has the damaging effect. Therefore, you need to make these reactions first conscious and then very clear. This is more difficult than with anger feelings directed toward specific individuals and specific events. The latter may contradict your idealized self image, your moral standards, and your overall personality. But the former anger is so irrational and so unreasonable that the ordinary person fears insanity if he riles against what life is known to be. How can you reasonably resent the existence of death? How can you be angry about it? How can you be angry that you, like all other human beings, occasionally fall ill and sometimes suffer pain? Yet there exists a rage toward life and toward creation in all human souls before the realization of the unitive, deathless, and painless state has been attained. If it were articulated, then the feeling would say: How can life -- God -- be so cruel as to impose at the end of one's existence an inevitable event that is unfathomable, that is totally unknown, and that is deeply threatening because it may be the end of one's being? No matter how certain individuals who have come to embrace atheism claim to have "accepted" to no longer exist, in this very acceptance lies the ultimate of rage. Atheism is a manifestation of extreme bitterness against a creation that seems so utterly senseless and so arbitrary that no recourse exists. Atheism is the movement that cuts off any sensibility and sentivity to the perception of deeper and different realities.

There can never be a genuine acceptance of ending one's being. Such false acceptance is always either an angry resignation or despair about life and its pains. At the same time, accepting eternal life can also come from identical reasons of fear. So you need to go through your inner fear and your previously unconscious anger, bitterness, or rage at life for "imposing" on you death and pain. In other words, for putting you in a position in which you find yourself helpless against these common human experiences. As you become aware of these feelings and you accept their apparent unreasonableness and their childishness, you will be able to make new connections. You will see how these unrecognized feelings have channeled themselves. In other words, in what particular way they have found expression. And since this kind of deflection can never lead to clarity, to truth, to harmony, and to unity, the deflection leads you further away from the fulfillment of your soul's longing -- namely your inner knowing of the unitive state. Thus, the less aware you are of what you feel about these general existential matters of life, the more irrational these feelings will become; the less you can permit yourself to face them (or so you believe), and the more deflected they will be. You become more ensnarled in the dualistic state, with all of its painful strains and anxieties. The denied fear creates more fear. The denied longing creates more anxiety. Only the courage to go through these feelings will purify them, until they emerge as gold does in the hands of the alchemist. Both the fear and the desire will become a driving force, in a most positive sense, to find your longing; to find that in this longing there exists a kernel of true knowing about the reality of fulfillment.

From this stage of transmitting your irrational feelings comes -- slowly and at first with many interruptions -- a state in which you want life not because you fear death, but because you know that there is no death. You know that leaving the body brings a better life. These words have often been spoken, but they are rarely experienced as inner truth. To do so a specific approach on your path, such as I outline here, must be pursued. There is a vast difference between hanging on to life because you fear the annihilation of all that you are -- or of who you have become -- and affirming life because you cherish the task that your life on earth means. With the latter attitude, you will rejoice in bringing parts of the greater life -- of the real life -- into this limited dualistic plane, thus spiritualizing the matter that you temporarily inhabit. In other words, your body.

The same applies to pain and to painful experiences. If one suspects pain to be the ultimate reality, then there must be a lot of anger connected with experiencing it. If pain is assumed to come only to life's stepchildren, then this belief, too, must create bitterness and rage. Often these feelings actually augment the pain, they extend it, until the pain can become the medicine it is meant to be. Then you can use it as the indicator of these other feelings so as to ferret them out and become acutely conscious of them. If pain is defended against on the deepest possible psychic level, then there comes into existence a tightening that prevents healing. Healing requires a relaxation of the entire human system in order to connect with the ever present divine healing currents that penetrate all that is. A system that is defended against -- be it against such common human experience as pain, suffering, and death, be it against one's own feelings of rage and bitterness about what seems insane to resist and to oppose -- is in a state of tension. Therefore, it is unable to heal itself.

This state of deep relaxation of the body, of the mind, and of the feeling self brings about the attitude I described at the beginning of this lecture. It is a state that may seem impossible to attain. This kind of equanimity does not express a disregard for earthly pleasure and for life in the body. But it no longer fears their absence. A person who is in this state does not rush into death and into pain, but he feels an inner peace because the glimpses of reality follow more quickly in succession. This is so because the person in question has begun to closely observe his reaction to his fear and his reaction to his desire in regard to life, his reaction to his fear and his reaction to his desire in regard to death, his reaction to his fear and his reaction to his desire in regard to pleasure, his reaction to his fear and his reaction to his desire in regard to pain. As these observations become more honest, more clearly defined, and more detached -- in other words, as that which is being observed is not being confused with who the person is as a whole -- then a new state of mind, the unitive state of mind, is automatically and inexorably, if ever so slowly, ushered in.

So, my beloved friends, try to think about all this and begin a new outlook and a new direction, wherever this is possible, on your individual paths. It will prepare you for the great fusion that must ultimately come about for each created being, a fusion that no longer knows the pain and the separateness of the dualistic state of mind.

As you search in this direction, you will also find a reverse unity, which, in its own way, will help you to understand the nature of your mind that is so steeped in dualistic confusions. This is the fact that every so often you believe that you fear one end of the spectrum and you desire -- and therefore you strive for -- the opposite end of it. But as you confront your real feelings, as opposed to your illusions about yourself, then find that you fear the apparently desired end -- at least on one important level of your intentionality -- perhaps every bit as much as that which you consciously fear. So you realize the unity of fear. Life is feared just as much as death; pleasure is feared just as much as pain; success is feared just as much as failure. When you comprehend the nature of the fear at both ends of the spectrum, then out of this reverse unity a real unity can grow. As you get in touch with both fears, you will have inadvertently attained a certain measure of equanimity. The strain automatically relaxes and then you are confronted with the issue of faith. There comes a point on your path when it is a question of just that. Do you wish to be open to the universe that surrounds you and to look at it from the point of view of justified faith? Or do you only wish to see -- in your anger and in your bitterness -- the out-of-context fragments of life that seem to imply cruelty and meaninglessness? This question may occupy you over many years of serious and beautiful struggle, the most noble struggle in the human soul. But the time must come when inner, deeply experienced answers must come.

The negation of truth, the negation of beauty, the negation of love, the negation of the meaning of creation always stem from bitterness, from fear, and from anger. They can only open more vistas that justify these negations and that hide the vistas that harbor the most realistically grounded affirmation of all the opposites -- of life AND death, of pleasure AND pain, of light AND darkness.

When you can maintain this vision even while you are in pain, when you know that God does it right, even while you face the great unknown -- however near or however far it may be -- then your mind will be stilled. The struggle that attempts to find a way out of the pain of duality -- only to draw the net tighter by the very nature of the struggle itself -- will have ceased. The tense movement away from one and toward another goal -- the straining -- will cease and then the underlying unity of all life will be experienced.

This ceasing of a particular kind of struggle on one level must not be confused with apathy, with passivity, with the lack of initiative. You know how important your committed active effort is and how noble your struggle is. Struggle on one level, in a certain way, is necessary. It is the inevitable prerequisite for plowing through the mazes of the mind. Struggle on another level, in another way, is the movement that ripples the water and that prevents the peace that flows from the Most Holy.

Right here is another of the many dualities that exist in your world, namely about struggle. Many spiritual movements totally negate its necessity and advocate detachment, not only from worldly matters but from all striving. They are completely correct in that they know what I attempt to make you see here. They think of that level of the personality where fear and desire annihilate unity and trap the mind into deeper illusions about the world. But they do not connect with that level of the personality which needs to strive and to struggle. In other words, they ignore the fact that there exists a healthy and constructive struggle. The pitfall of this one-sidedness is that through its one-sidedness it leads, again from a subtle direction, into more duality and thus perverts the peace -- that at first may be experienced only occasionally -- into a passive standstill.

Then you have those spiritual approaches which advocate the struggle and the work. They, too, are correct. They know the necessity for it and they help their followers to summon the necessary energy and stamina. But they often ignore that other level, where struggle defeats the purpose and only ripples the waters more stormily.

To you, my friends, I bring the truth of both ends of this particular split. Continue your struggle and cease all struggle. In other words, grope for where struggle must continue and grope for for where struggle must cease. And one day you will experience the incomparable peace of no longer fearing what you do not want and of no longer reaching anxiously and strenuously for what you do want. Because then you will know that all that could ever be desirable is right here, attainable right now, ever present at the tips of your fingers, and that all that you strain away from is nothing but illusion, even though you may be in the midst of experiencing it. So you will truly become still and know God. You will know God in all that is, both in the best and in the worst, both in what you want and in what you do not want. Both are what your deeper self knows is intensely desirable, much better than what you think you want, and not at all what you fear.

This is but a vague outline for your further path, perhaps a whiff that can be caught now. Even that vague gleaning will prepare you better for your further glorious path, my blessed, most beloved friends. You all live, you all move, and you all have your being in the Christ Consciousness, in the Christ Principle.

September 20, 1978