The Wall Within

By The Pathwork Guide

Greetings in the name of the Lord. Blessings for all of you, my dear friends. Blessed is this lecture.

Every human being has the desire to strive for the ability to love, for true goodness, for light, and for truth. In other words, for perfection. This desire lives in the divine spark of every being. But this desire in its pure state does not always penetrate through all the layers of imperfection. It is as though the sun were shining through dirty glass and the rays coming out on the other side took on hazy shades. So it is with the desire for development.

But apart from this desire of the higher self, the same desire for perfection also comes from the lower self. And this happens with all those who have understood that selfishness and self-serving aims do not bring many desirable results. If you were to serve only the aims of your lower self as it exists in essence, then you would be disliked. You would certainly not be loved and admired. Therefore, the desire for goodness is also a selfish one. It is important to understand this and to recognize within yourself that the desire for goodness as such does not necessarily come exclusively from your higher self. This is a problem that is confusing for many human beings. The only way to gain clarity in this respect is to become aware of your emotions -- both of their desires and of their motives. Then you can separate the pure motive from the selfish one. This confusion is so strong at times that many people become uncertain about following through the desire for goodness, particularly after sensing that selfish motives are also involved. You should continue to aim for the right and the good both within yourself and in your actions, but you should be clear to what extent this desire is colored by your selfishness. Often this conflict is not conscious. Be aware of the fact that on the one hand you do want the good, the true, and the beautiful, but there is also a voice within that speaks quite clearly and that asks: "Is it really goodness, pure goodness, pure unselfishness if I do such and such?" Thus you become confused. You become uncertain about your own good motives.

Only the blind, those human beings who spiritually are still infants, seek selfish ends and believe that these selfish ends will serve their purpose. Whoever has outgrown this spiritual infancy knows that serving one's own ends often brings greater disadvantage than resisting such selfish impulses. At this stage, the entity has outgrown the most primitive stage but has not yet reached the stage where the desire for selfishness has been outgrown emotionally. This is the stage that most of you find yourselves in. It is this struggle that we are concerned with. The first step is always to recognize the meaning of your various desires, of your various motives, and of your various feelings. From there on, the Path becomes easier. Recognize where your desire for goodness comes from your divine spark and where it does not. Once you have gained clarity on this subject, then not only have you taken a further step in your self-knowledge, but this recognition -- even though it is by no means flattering or comfortable -- will give you added peace of mind, at least from the moment you fuly accept the idea that selfishness in yourself still has a larger place than you were ready to admit before. Once you accept that and you step down from the high horse of wanting to be more perfect than you are at present, then you begin to face yourself in the real sense of the word. This is healthy, and health, emotional or otherwise, must have a very good effect on you. It is truth; and truth is always healthy and soothing when one has made up one's inner mind not to fight against it any more.

As the human being develops spiritually and matures emotionally, self-knowledge continues on ever deeper levels. On the most superficial level of development, good is done outwardly but one harbors selfish and evil thoughts quite consciously and knowingly. When one is confronted with such a situation, then there are two forms of behavior. On this Path one tries, in a spirit of true understanding and humility, to accept oneself as one is at the moment and also to accept one's inability to change as yet. One has the courage to admit to oneself that perfection is still far away, in spite of the outer good deeds that are committed mainly in order to conform and to gain admiration. Alternatively, such conscious knowledge of evil and unkind desires is rationalized, justified, and self-righteously explained, while seeking self-justification in the shortcomings of others. This is what you would call hypocrisy. There are many people who fall into this category. But these types are so crass and so elementary that we do not have to bother with that category, which is self-explanatory and therefore does not need much discussion. The case becomes infinitely more difficult when the same hypocrisy becomes more subtle because it is deeply buried. The good desires are superimposed on top of the selfish ones, which then are suppressed and kept unconscious, partly due to the sincere strivings of the higher self and partly due to the selfish ends. Here begin the human conflicts that render a soul sick and that make the person weak. And this is what we are concerned with, for there is no human being who cannot apply what is said here towards his or her development and toward his or her freedom.

The more you keep the selfish motives suppressed, the more do confusion and disorder come into existence within yourself. There is a basic misunderstanding here. You realize that the first category, the most primitive form of hypocrisy, is distateful. Therefore you suppress your true emotions because of the wrong conclusion that there is no other alternative. You either make yourself unaware of the existence of the wrong desires or you think that you would have to be like those whom you do not admire for their attitude. You simply ignore the fact that a third alternative exists, which is the only healthy one. This approach leads to the perfection you strive for: by first facing and then admitting the wrong, but without either giving in to the wrong desires or suppressing their existence. The beginning of this right procedure is always the most difficult, and that is the sorting out of your emotions and finding their meaning. In other words, facing all that you have looked away from.

The more self-honesty is learned, the deeper it penetrates into the core of the soul. But until this core is reached, it takes a lot of doing on your part. Where there are unconscious emotions, unconscious opinions, unconscious thoughts, unconscious conclusions, and unconscious desires, we can see a wall in the human soul. It is a wall that separates the conscious from the unconscious. You know that human thoughts and human feelings create forms of subtle matter that is a real substance, every bit as real as your material substance. So this wall is a reality and, alas, often a greater reality than your physical matter. For your matter is much easier to destroy than some of these walls. On this side of the wall is what you know and face. Behind the wall you store all that which is unpleasant to face. You store not only your faults and your weaknesses but also all the things that confuse you and frighten you. Due to an unconscious wrong conclusion, you continue to fear these things, and therefore you prevent yourself from facing all that is locked behind the wall.

What is the spiritual substance of this wall, my friends? Spiritual substance is not a usable material similar to the kind that you choose when you want to build a form in your material world. Then you make your choice of material according to taste and to necessity, but the material has nothing to do with you. Spiritual substance, on the other hand, is the result of your thinking, of your feeling, and of your being. You cannot use something you do not have, and you only have what you are. The substance of this wall is partly your goodwill, which is ineffective because of your wrong conclusions and your ignorance. Do not forget: the purpose of the wall is to keep the negative in hiding. One of the motives of this desire is actually goodwill misapplied. But partly it consists also of cowardice, of pride, of selfwill, and of impatience. The impatience mounts because in your ignorance you think that you can -- and therefore you wish wish to -- attain perfection more expeditiously merely by erecting this wall and thus locking up what takes much more time and effort to eliminate. You are too impatient and too lazy to really do away with what lies behind the wall. So all these trends are the materials of the wall in your soul.

As one progresses on the Path of self-knowledge and perfection, one slowly begins to take out from behind the wall certain trends and attitudes and transposes them into the consciousness. You all know the process by which this is done. It is the work I advocate and teach. With this process, the more you bring out from behind the wall, the more the wall recedes and the fewer trends remain locked. This is good work. This is the way it should be: to go on and on until more and more comes out from behind the wall. However, this wall must disintegrate one day if you want to be whole and truly healthy to the greatest possible extent. As long as you retain any part of the wall within yourself, then no matter how much you have succeeded in making it recede, you are not yet whole. You do not function as well as God meant you to function. Therefore, it must become your aim to destroy the wall altogether. In most cases this cannot be done all at once. If it is attempted, then it may cause people to suffer breakdowns and all sorts of other complications. So it is advisable to make the wall recede by gradually lifting out what is behind it. If this is done properly, then the wall not only recedes, but the substance weakens. If it is not done properly, then one may succeed in bringing out certain things and pushing the wall a little into the background, but it will remain there in full force. Perhaps it will even get stronger. In a moment I will explain how this could happen and how to ward off this danger. Now let me emphasize again how important it is to be aware of the necessity of one day completely removing your wall. This can and should happen without unduly shaking up the personality. Only after the wall has disappeared can your spiritual rebirth occur. Only then will you stand naked inside, in front of your maker, in front of yourself. This is how naked, how empty you have to become for the divine substance to fill you and to take root within yourself. As long as your rigid wall remains, however weak, however pushed back it may be, the divine substance will be ineffective proportionately to the strength of the wall. In other words, the stronger the wall, the less the effect of the divine substance that is waiting to penetrate you and fill you.

So, my dear friends, all of you who work on this Path so successfully, realize and visualize this wall within yourself. You can become aware of it in meditation. You will perceive it by observing your reactions, and then you will know where the wall stands. By locating it, it will be much easier for you to succeed in doing away with it altogether.

Now I shall speak about a danger you must guard against. It is the hazard of getting off to a good start in extricating some hidden trends from behind the wall, but in actuality strengthening the wall by unconsciously employing half measures. This happens when a true thought, a true teaching, a true philosophy, or a true recognition serves as the facade of the wall behind which you continue to hide, using the truth as a means for hiding. And it happens so frequently, my friends. No truth is exempt from this fate. Many people search for truth, and truth can come to you through many channels. But no matter how sincere this search is, in almost everyone there is a resistance to facing certain things within. These two apparently contradictory desires can be combined while continuing the search for truth and also using these truths as shields in the wall. So you can hide your faults, your emotional conflicts, your fears, and your negative trends behind a truth. This is easy to recognize in its crass and superficial version. You recognize it in any fanatic, in anyone who adheres rigidly to dogma, in whatever religion it may appear. Such a person may commit all sorts of wrong deeds and have all sorts of wrong reactions, even as he or she propounds his or her particular religious truth.

But do not forget that in principle the same thing goes on in almost every human being, only in a much more more subtle way. If you become sensitive, if you raise your intuition, then you will be certain to notice when one of your brothers or sisters is using truth in this way, and you will object to it. Yet you ignore the fact that you do the same thing, only you use another truth to hide behind. This may be a religious truth, a spiritual truth, a metaphysical truth, or a philosophical truth. It may be pure ethics and morals, without any religious implications. It may be psychology, psychiatry, analysis. Any findings, any terms, any words you use that are true as such are good. But the moment they are used in that other way, then they are abused, and therefore they lose their reality. They become something dead, rigid, and therefore meaningless. There is no truth exempt from this fate if you are not watchful, if you do not look out for this in yourself. The very teachings I give you can be abused in the same way. It is never done on purpose, of course, but unknowingly. For instance, when you speak of and use certain terms, and in mentioning them you do not feel their true meaning anymore, then the time has come to check yourself as to whether you have unconsciously fallen into this trap. You may even hide behind a true recognition you have made about yourself -- let us say an image, a wrong conclusion, certain faults you have found. You may hide behind that; you may use that as the outer facade of your wall. It is as though something in you says, "I go that far, but no further. I am willing to admit such and such now, but no more. The admission of certain faults and certain inner wrong conclusions will pacify those who help me to reach the core of my being. Then it cannot be said that I am unwilling. But that which really bothers me I will not give up." And this is a good way to be able to go on hiding.

Perhaps all this sounds strange to you and you still may not grasp what I mean. Let me try to make it a little clearer. Let us assume that you start on this Path with good faith and with good will, and that you have made certain progress. You have made certain major findings and recognitions, whatever these may be. You have overcome the stage when your resistance to facing yourself manifested in finding excuses and rationalizations for not going on such a path, in spite of your "search" for it. In this first stage the psyche finds all sorts of excuses and doubts. Now you have overcome this stage. Thus you have broken through the first resistance and you have pushed the wall considerably into the background, thereby allowing certain information to filter through. At this point you have overcome the initial resistance and you are well launched on the Path itself, while previously you were only struggling to get on it. But do not imagine that once truly on the Path then all resistance is overcome for good. For as long as you maintain the wall, resistance is inevitable. Only the form and the manifestation of the resistance will be different. While before you had all sorts of doubts, of misgivings, of excuses, and of pretexts about entering this Path, now you work and therefore you make discoveries, but still with some reservations. And in order to justify this reservation, you take the findings that you have made so far and you build them up. You may even let them grow out of proportion in significance in order to prevent yourself from penetrating deeper. You use these words again and again until they become rigid, and therefore no longer furnish you with the vital life force. Any truth must provide a living, vitalizing force. If it no longer does, if the words have become automatic, then the time has come to examine yourself from this point of view and to find your wall. Once you are aware of it, then you can wage a healthy battle with your ignorance and with your resistance.

Only you yourself can find out when you are hiding behind your wall and what truth you are using in order to do so. Only by examining your feelings, by listening into your emotions, can you get the answer. The fact that you have overcome the initial resistance and have won your first victory is, in most cases at least, a milestone indicating that you will not leave this Path again. But this does not mean that other resistances do not lie in wait, that other victories do not have to be won. And although you may never leave this Path, you may get stuck at a certain point from which you always go around in circles without penetrating deeper. This happens when truth and true findings are used as hideouts.

The unconscious is congenitally opposed to giving up its subterfuges. It considers coming out into the open to be a grave danger. It is ignorant and it makes utterly erroneous conclusions in this respect, as in many others. Therefore, it is opposed to the crumbling of the wall, and it concocts all sorts of ruses to prevent you from working in this direction, no matter how good your will may be. This should be an important indication for many of you of what the danger point may be at this time, showing you in which direction to look within yourselves so as to gain further victories and penetrate deeper into your souls. This will help many of you to avoid stagnation, for now you will know from which angle to approach yourselves.

Is this clear, my friends? Are there any questions in connection with this subject? If there are none now, perhaps after you have read this lecture and thought about it you will have some questions about it next time.

Think well about what I have said. It is a hidden danger, a subtle danger. If you are truly desirous of making the wall crumble in order to become empty in your soul, then you will try to feel quite clearly where and in exactly what way your own wall exists. It is always easier to feel it in the other person, but one is utterly unaware of it in oneself. You may be hiding behind a different truth, behind a different recognition, yet you may be hiding just as much as the other person. Take it into your prayer. Ask God to help you first to see the wall and then to give you the courage and the humility to break it down.

Now I should like to say to my friends that a plan has materialized so that a second smaller group should be formed similar to the first so-called inner circle. This would be very advisable. In such common group work you can accomplish a great deal. You can help one another. Every one of you who is working in image-finding teams should get into additional group work where you can discuss your problems, your difficulties, and your successes. At the same time, it will help many to form a bond of brotherhood. We encourage and bless this undertaking.

And now, my dear friends, I am ready for your questions.

QUESTION: Are currents, as you use the expression psychologically, used by the unconscious mind or the conscious mind as an instrument? In other words, is the unconscious mind an instrument or is it the conscious mind, or are they connected or identical?

ANSWER: We cannot say it is either way. A current is actually the result of your feelings, of your thoughts, of your emotions, and of your attitudes. It is the sum total of your conscious and unconscious trends and traits. It is that which governs you and what happens to you and it directs your life into certain channels. Let take the current of selfwill. It is there. You use it, whether consciously or unconsciously makes no difference. Using the selfwill causes a current, and the current causes an effect. The current of selfwill is not the same as the selfwill itself. It is the working selfwill. For the selfwill could in effect be dormant, it could be unused. Then the current would be weak, or so hidden in its effects that the personality would never know what caused these effects. But if it is used, even in the unconscious, even if it does not manifest as such, even if it manifests in a very roundabout and hidden way, then the manifestation of it is caused by the current. Imagine it like electricity. You must have certain conditions in order to produce an electric current. It is exactly the same thing. The electric current is a result of the condition that can bring it forth. Is that clear?

QUESTION: But the conscious or unconscious mind would then be the instrument or storehouse?

ANSWER: A storehouse is not the same as an instrument. It is the mind that produces it, either the unconscious mind or the conscious mind. Or you can say that it is the personality -- which is made up of the conscious mind and of the unconscious mind -- that produces it. Therefore, it is not an instrument. An instrument is something passive. But the mind actively produces currents.

QUESTION: Where does a "must" end and a duty start? How do you distinguish between the two?

ANSWER: The must, or the compulsion, is always the result of untrue, mixed, and confused motives. Duty is something that is entirely voluntary. If you fulfill a duty, without compulsion, then you do so because you decided to. It may be something that life seems to force upon you. But once you recognize that you cannot live entirely as you would choose, that life brings certain situations and certain predicaments that one has to accept whether one likes it or not, then the healthy attitude is to say Yes to life as it is. Then you will voluntarily accept a duty. Whereas if you do not accept it emotionally and you do the duty because you have no other choice, then you are acting under a compulsion, against your will, and it is therefore a "must." I have taught you, for instance, that life's imperfections have to be accepted in that way. This includes many things that become your duty. If you constantly rebel against these imperfections but are nevertheless compelled to accept them even though this rebellion may take place unconsciously, then you conform against your will. You simply have to accept them because life demands it. There is nothing you can do about it. You do so like a child who is forced to obey against his will. The mature attitude is the free one. The real kind of freedom does not mean always doing exactly as one pleases, but rather accepting what is necessary in a spirit of inwardly saying Yes to it. In other words, the borderline is in the very fine distinction between saying Yes to an imposed or inevitable duty, and struggling against it then and being forced to accept it against one's will.

There are many things you may not like to do but you consider them your duty, whether they are pleasant or not. The difference between a must and a free duty lies entirely in this very attitude.

QUESTION: What is the connection and the difference between the aura of a person and his or her present sphere, and the soul picture?

ANSWER: These are entirely different things. One has nothing to do with the other. The sphere is built up by your deeds, by your thoughts, by your attitudes, and by your feelings. In other words, by your life. It does not change quickly, because change in the personality cannot come about quickly. Therefore, the sphere is something more static. It is something that is built up and that will remain until the personality changes. It is the product of your life, which afterward will become the spiritual home.

The aura is the emanation of the personality and has nothing -- at least not directly -- to do with what you build. Perhaps we can best explain it this way. The sphere is the result of your activity. The activity may also be an unconscious one; it is the activity of the soul. The aura is the product of your passive state. It is the product of that in you that is the state of being. It is what you are and not what you do. That is the best way I can explain it. I have no other words. A clairvoyant can see your aura, which emanates from your subtle bodies and which penetrates the physical body. It reflects, in fluctuating colors, various moods and various diseases of the body and of the soul, as well as the type of basic character you have. The spiritual sphere you build out of your activity can be seen by very few clairvoyants, unless they are given such sight with our help for a specific purpose. It is something that few human beings carry about with them. I cannot express it in any other way. I know it is difficult to understand, but you will have to make the best of these words.

QUESTION: In connection with your lecture on authority, could you give any further advice to a person who finds that with regard to a particular form of authority he is unconsciously a law upholder but consciously he is definitely a law breaker, to the point of acute resentment, dislike, and intolerance toward this particular authority?

ANSWER: I will gladly answer this question. Once this recognition has been made -- that unconsciously one is a law upholder whereas one rebels consciously, particularly against a certain form of authority -- then this is the foundation. Without this recognition nothing can be changed. The next step is what I advise you to do again and again whenever you observe your reactions in your everyday life. Think from this viewpoint: "What do I feel? How would I want to be? Why do I react this way? What lies behind this reaction? What are the emotions that drive me to react like this in one instance and exactly in the opposite way in another? Why am I at one time a law upholder and at another a law breaker?" When in this work you ask yourself questions of this sort, and when you finally succeed in answering them by learning to make your emotions conscious and articulate, then you will understand the deeper layers of your being which are responsible for the reactions you have recently discovered. But they are not yet the final answers. They only lead to them. Make constant and detached observations of your daily reactions. Find your attitude toward them and then learn from them what lies behind them. This in itself is already a curing agent to a large degree. But in addition, by doing all this without haste, without tension, but in steady perseverance, you will see all the wrong conclusions that are connected with such attitudes. Then the important thing is to think about what the right conclusions would be. By cultivating this in thought and observing how the emotions -- which work more slowly than the brain mechanism -- still adhere to their old patterns, these same emotions will begin to change gradually, and at first almost unnoticeably. This is the only way.

In this connection, I would like to say something that I have recently said in one of the private sessions, because I deem this important enough for all of you. Authority is not only that which emotionally represents the enemy, the restricting forces that prohibit you from doing what you wish. Authority can also be represented for you personally by the very people you love most, because you are dependent on them. That is another facet that you should consider. It applies to many of my friends. After childhood it may repeat itself in the adult in a different version. Most of you go through this in childhood. You love your parents, and yet they are the authority. The conflict came into existence because you cannot help feeling dependent on the one you love, and therefore this person becomes the authority to you. The answer to this question is to examine your love. Find the right middle path. On one extreme stands the lack of giving up the self, and therefore the inability to love at all: too strong a selfwill, not letting go of the self, the fear of letting it go. On the other extreme is an overdependence that exists out of the tendency to let go too much in the wrong direction. Where such lack of balance exists, there other unhealthy and harmful currents prevail. The balance has to be established by first of all becoming aware of this problem and then looking at it squarely for a time, until you recognize either of these two wrong extremes.

The more frequent one is the tendency of not giving up the self at all. Look at it again and again. Merely acknowledge it, and then pray for guidance and for recognition. Then your emotions will gradually find the right middle way. The person for whom the loved one becomes the authority because of an overdependence will then learn that in the healthy and true love one does give oneself up entirely, but one gains the self in a new way that does not keep the personality unfree and dependent. You must gain yourself, you must get yourself back renewed and freer than ever by letting go of yourself entirely. This fear of giving up the self is such a common failing, it is such a common cause of sickness. But there are also cases where the opposite exists. And opposites are more similar and nearer to one another than you may think. The person who truly gives up the self will choose the right way and the right circumstances, where no abuse is ever possible, where the other's maturity meets one's own maturity. The immature person will blindly choose the object that may abuse the giving up of the self. And this very fear creates the extreme of prohibiting the self to give itself up at all. Maturity is conscious understanding and this, in turn, raises the intuitive powers that will make the right choice wherein no one takes undue advantage.

QUESTION: How does the spirit world judge a person who is searching for truth yet escapes from himself and chooses the easy way out?

ANSWER: That depends entirely on the development of the person in question. There are people who merely try to live right and not commit crimes, who live an average, decent life. For them this is the most that can be expected. It requires all of their effort to do just that. It is all they are capable of in this incarnation. Such a person finds more fulfillment than one who goes on the path only half-heartedly and then stops midway. The latter may not be doing his or her best. You human beings are always inclined to judge everyone alike. We cannot do so, because everyone is of a different spiritual age. Everyone has reached a different stage of development in different aspects of his or her personality. There are different basic factors to be considered. The characteristics, the strength, and the task are different, according to former incarnations. But if, on the other hand, someone capable of searching for and facing the self gives in out of laziness, out of pride, or for whatever reason, and thus follows the line of least resistance, then the result must be felt by the entity, not because we in the spirit world judge in a moralizing way or because we punish. All that is wrong. There is no such thing. You punish yourself. If you go against your own plan, if you do not do what you set out to do when you came into this life, then you draw circumstances toward you that will finally corner you, and this is for your own good. Many of my friends can observe this with some people. Life corners them, not because God punishes them, but because they have set certain forms in motion that oppose their life plan. When the life plan is violated, then it is the life plan itself that begins to work so as to bring about its own fulfillment. If the choice of the personality is directed against it, then the life plan must work differently than if the plan were adhered to. But the result must always be the same.

The intervening experience is certainly different, as is the time element. But the result must be the same. For the life plan works to establish balance and harmony. The more the personality works ignorantly against this balance and this harmony, the more disharmonious must be the process of establishing balance and harmony, but come it must in the end. Such is the healing force of nature. The same healing force works in the elements, in the body, and in the soul. When something is done that seeks to bring the universal forces out of balance, then the healing forces of nature set in so as to bring back the balance. But this very balancing may often seem like an upheaval. When you have a thunderstorm or an earthquake, then it is exactly the same kind of outburst that happens in the soul when you go against your plan. But in the end it re-establishes the balance. For nothing else can make you see and reconsider the direction you have taken except the apparent upheavals of your own making, which are the medicine of nature. (Of course, I speak generally now and not to any one person in particular.) For a long time you may delude yourself into believing that all the mishaps in your life are due to injustice, to malice, and to the faults of others. But there is a limit as to how long you can go on believing that. Eventually the situation must arise when you are cornered in your own errors, when you are confronted with the undeniable fact that you yourself have produced the misery -- and that will wake you up and will make you change your course. This is the way we view it; it is not even a question of how we view it. We know that this benevolent healing law simply exists in the universe. And when se see a human being, then we know at once by the forms in the soul, by the pictures within, whether that soul is going entirely according to his plan; whether partly so, deviating only a little but but not enough to lose his course entirely; or whether his soul is entirely away from his own road, and thus produces and slowly builds up the conditions that finally appear like a tragedy, but which are nothing but nature's healing forces.

My dearest friends, I am allowed to bring to all of you and to all of your dear ones, here on earth as well as in the spirit world, blessings. Blessings of healing, blessings of love, blessings of strength, blessings of courage. Continue on this path, my dear ones. And those of you who have not yet found the way, pray that God will show you His will and His truth, which is the only truth. Open yourselves to be receptive for this truth only. Go in peace, my dearest ones, receive our love, which envelopes every one of you. And if you send out your inner feelers, then you will all know that you are not alone. Be in God.

February 27, 1951