The Life Force In The Universe

By The Pathwork Guide

Greetings in the Name of The Lord. I bring you blessings, my dearest friends.

I should like to discuss the life force in the universe. The universal life force is contained in every sphere or world, in all inanimate objects, as well as in abstract ideas, not to speak of living human beings. Nothing can exist without it. I will not discuss the manifestation of the life force in other realms, in high spheres outside your reach and understanding. There would be no point in that since you could not grasp it, my friends. I will try to discuss this subject in terms that you can apply to your everyday life.

An inanimate object is petrified life force. A beautiful idea, a truth, is flowing life force. The life force is eternal and, because of it, all life is eternal. Death is an illusion. An inanimate object (which you call dead) is so only temporarily. All life, in whatever way it manifests, must exist eternally, for non-eternal life is no life, and therefore is a paradox. The life force has all the divine attributes. It IS. It has not come into existence; it does not do, it does not work, it does not have. It simply IS. Try to understand the significance and the distinction of these words. The life force is both all around you and within you.

A human being living in complete and utter harmony with this life force would not die. Yet he would not remain in the physical body either. For your matter is petrified life force and exists only where the life force is disturbed in some way. He would gradually transform his body into a spiritual form of existence. Therefore, death is not necessary in principle and one day death will be eliminated. This is so, although its realization is in a very distant future as far as your time measurement is concerned. But in principle it certainly is possible.

Where the life force has not been violated, happiness -- if you want to choose this word for lack of a better one: complete harmony and peace -- would be yours without the trepidations, without the fears of losing it again, those fears that temporary happiness brings into the human beings.

All of you constantly violate spiritual law within your soul. If not in deed, in word, or in thought, then at least in your unconscious emotions. When this happens, then you twist the life force that could flow through you. You prevent the life force from reviving you. What I am showing you on this Path of self-finding is a gradual, slow way -- and there is no faster way -- to dissolve all the walls, all the rocks, and all the petrifications within yourself, so as to allow the life force to work in you. Whoever has experienced even a slight victory, has overcome a resistance, has found a truth or a recognition about himself, particularly if the realization appears to be an unpleasant one, has experienced a feeling of peace, of strength, and of being vibrantly alive -- until the next obstruction is tackled. This should be a living proof for you and it should help you, when thinking of these rare moments, to know that what I say here is not just a beautiful story or a remote and abstract theory without bearing on the Now. It is utter reality, accessible to you at any time you choose it by turning inwards.

The obstructions within your soul can exist only because you have violated divine law in some way. And when divine law is violated, then the life force cannot work. The word "law" often has a wrong connotation for you. When most human beings hear this word, then they react emotionally to it in a way that has nothing to do with the sense in which I mean it. On the unconscious level, law means something that you are forced or compelled to obey. It indicates an authority that is stronger than you. This emotional association tied in with the concept of law is completely opposed to its true meaning; it is quite the contrary of it. As soon as force and compulsion set in -- whether they come from the outside or from within your own self -- then divine law is violated. For divine law is inner freedom. You can gain this inner freedom only by liberating yourself from your errors. This is done by first bringing those errors into consciousness. Only after this first inevitable step is taken can you free yourself from those errors. Perhaps it may be better to say that divine truth is violated, rather than divine law. For truth is life force and truth is certainly divine law. The Path that I lead you onto shows you the truth about yourself.

The flowing life force is regeneration. The petrified life force is degeneration. Where you maintain your images, your wrong conclusions, your conscious and unconscious ignorance, and your errors, you do not live in truth, and therefore you stifle the life force which, among many other attributes, is a healing force for your body, for your mind, for your soul and for your spirit. If you realize this fact, then you will see that all physical illness is only a chain reaction, a final outer manifestation of obstructed life force.

Where you have such blocks or obstructions within your soul, then the only way to cure the malady is to prepare for the proper reception of the life force. The first step is to encounter the untruth in you, and that is not pleasant. This fact leads many people to believe that uncovering the untruth cannot be the right way. They think that because the Divine is beautiful, harmonious, and blissful to experience the very opposite is an indication that something contrary to the Divine is taking place in their life. This is a misunderstanding. How can you believe that you can simply bypass all the disharmony that you yourself have planted in your soul and come to experience divine harmony directly? You have to understand the wrong causes which you have set in motion before you can truly understand divine truth. If you have planted a poisonous plant in your garden, spoiling all the good plants, can you get rid of it without getting hold of this plant and pulling it out by your own efforts? This work is not exactly pleasant, the poison may even affect you temporarily while you are touching it, but it cannot be avoided. It is better to face the unpleasantness than to leave the plant in your garden.

Therefore, pain has to be endured one way or another before you can get rid of that in you which causes, and which constantly did cause, you pain. You must distinguish between two basic kinds of pain: the degenerating pain and the regenerating pain. Even in the physical realm you have two kinds of pain. There is the pain experienced when a person becomes sick, or feels the symptoms of sickness. He is then on the downward curve, degenerating. And there is a different kind of pain -- at times even more acute than the first one -- which goes with the healing process, on the upward curve, regenerating. This cycle is a necessity before complete cure or healing takes place. Before undertaking an operation, for instance, when you first become sick, often long before you know exactly what is wrong with you, you experience the degenerating pain. Subsequently your physician might decide to operate on you. In the healing process you endure a completely different kind of pain. You all know that the wound cannot heal unless the pus has been let out, and in this cleansed state the tissues can then grow together again. The same holds true for the soul. You cannot escape it, my friends. You have the choice of either remaining on the downward curve -- in the state where you suffer from the symptoms, refusing to go to the root of the problem -- or of mustering up your courage and approaching it, cutting open the wound, and thus allowing the healing forces of nature to set in. By letting out the pus -- your errors, your wrong conclusions -- and enduring that for a while, you invite the healing. The cutting up, the operation itself would be the unpleasantness of facing that which is wrong in you. It is the low point before the upward curve can begin.

By visualizing this process, you may find it easier to understand and you may find a way out of this trap, the apparent bottleneck you now find yourself in. This blackness and this despair need not be yours. Turn around, my dear ones, try to understand what I say here, and approach the real affliction, instead of continuously paying attention to the symptoms. That is what you all continuously do. Even my friends farthest advanced on this Path are always tempted to look at the symptoms of the evil, because of their unconscious fear of facing the more poignant part of the operation. If you decide to face the operation, once you have the courage to go through with it, then the time of pain will be very limited. If you stay on the downward curve, if you turn away from the origin of the symptoms within yourself, and you attach yourself to the symptoms themselves, then you will have to endure this type of pain. The pain will let up as soon as you decide to make the operation upon yourself. This does not apply merely to taking this Path on the whole, but it applies to every step on it as well, to every individual problem in you. You may be on the Path, but you still deliberately overlook certain ailing points in your soul, seeking the remedy from the outer world, from your surroundings. This is what I meant by attaching yourself to the symptoms. I assure you that this type of pain is much worse than the healthy pain of regeneration that can set in the moment the operation is done. The more you dissolve the obstructions, the petrifications, by facing your inner misconceptions and misunderstandings -- the untruth that lives in your soul -- the more you let the life force flow through you. The sooner you do that, the sooner you will receive the life force on all levels of your being.

As I said at the beginning of this lecture, perfection is limitless and eternal. Eternal not only in the sense of time, but also in the sense of scope. You can sense and experience an infinitesimal part of all this even while you are on earth. Whoever approaches the stony and steep road of self-finding will gradually experience changes that are unbelievable, or that would be unbelievable for anyone who does not understand this process. I am not promising you miracles, my friends. Miracles in that sense do not exist. Whoever wants to believe in them, believe in that kind of salvation, does so only because it does not entail any personal effort and any overcoming of resistance. It would be too easy. No, that does not exist. This Path is one of utter reality; there are no fairy tales. The reality that I show you can be experienced by everyone. But only if he does not shy away from the labor and the price to be paid. Yes, miracles do happen on this Path, but only if earned the hard way. And that is as it should be, and that is the way you can safely believe it because only in that way it makes sense. Do not forget that the subtle change going on in the personality manifests inside first. At the beginning, it is not noticeable outwardly by others, or by changed circumstances. The final manifestation must always be that you feel differently inwardly and that you react differently inwardly. The rest follows later.

So, my dear friends, let the life force into your soul. You cannot do so by simply willing it, or by simply trying to get into a holy mood. This may help a little. A prayer will give you the necessary strength to do your part. But the work has to be done. That which at one time or another you have destroyed of the living flow has to be set right by your own efforts in facing yourself, in overcoming your resistance, in overcoming your sluggishness, in overcoming your self-pity. You should never believe for one instant that what you experience is unjust and unfair, no matter how much it may appear that way. In the last analysis, in absolute truth and reality, it is you that have caused it. Do find this cause. You have to find a different way to come out of your pain. You must change the direction you have taken and you must change the inner state you have remained in for too long. Think about this, my dear friends.

And now a little more advice for your work on image finding. What I have said on this subject in past lectures has surely shown you that various general concepts play a role in the human psyche. In other words, your general attitudes have to be investigated. An attitude to a concept or an idea becomes very personal in the human mind and in the human soul because all human beings in the course of their life acquire their own personal experience with regard to these subjects. Let us briefly consider the method I have presented to you so far: the various lists, which I need not enumerate here; the life story of the individual; and the practice of the daily review. With this material at hand, you can certainly be successful in your findings -- and you have been. Now I would like to give you an additional item to add to the method. Some of you have used it without realizing it. But now let us specifically incorporate it into the method.

Let us take all general ideas, concepts, and principles. I have already discussed a few, such as selfwill, pride, and fear; images; love, eros, and sex; authority. Others I shall discuss in the future. Make a list of all that is important in a person's life. Aside from the subjects I have discussed already, you will find a number of other subjects not yet discussed: money, work, emotions, human relationship. There are a number of other general subjects which you can take successively, according to the most outstanding problem of the individual. It is not necessary that a lecture be given on the subject in question. You can find a person's attitude to such a subject, regardless of whether it has been discussed in a lecture or not. Find out what is the attitude of the person. Let him tell you first what is his general idea, his theoretical idea about it, his concept on the subject which he apparently has difficulty with in his life. Then begin to question the person about his life from this particular point of view: his childhood, his adolescence, his young adult life up to middle age (or whatever the case may be). Let him tell you his parents' attitude, or their apparent attitude on this subject. Then you may find out that in the majority of people the intellectual concept is completely different from the emotional behavior and attitude. This should furnish an important clue for the images and wrong conclusions. Incorporate this into the method and use it when the time seems ripe for this. I know it has been done already in a way, but it should now be a definite program. There should be no rigid system; you have to work with your intuition and according to the individual personality. In each case it might be better to wait with this type of investigation. In due course we shall discuss as many general subjects of this sort as possible: we will look at the wrong interpretation in the unconscious, then at what the right reaction should be, and then at how it can be found. I cannot delve into a different subject of this sort every time. There are many reasons for that. For one, it takes time to assimilate each subject. If you were to hear a new one each time, then it would not be constructive. And also, there are other themes of equal importance that have to be given to you as well.

Now I would like to make a proposition which should prove exceedingly interesting to all of you. There are many frictions among you, but this is unavoidable in any human group. You are all full of good will and you do not want any frictions. The question is how to eliminate them. There are various ways. Some you try and some you either do not try or you forget to use. Let me make a new suggestion which should work out very well if you use it. You all know that any good lawyer can defend a case from two entirely different sides. He can first represent the case from one viewpoint and be utterly convincing. He can then take the opposite side and be equally convincing. Any lawyer will confirm this to you. Many practice this before or even after they have reached the point when they can practice their profession. If you have a friction with one of your brothers or sisters, then my advice would be that you become an advocate in his defense. Take the case and then try to see how the other one sees it. Then present the case to yourself first. That will be the easiest way. Then go to another person, an objective third person detached from the conflict -- perhaps best the person you work with -- and repeat this process in his presence. This would be the second step. And if you really want to reach the highest step in this particular regard, then go to the person whom you have friction with personally and do it there, and be the advocate in his defense. Perhaps he may then do the same. It takes courage and humility, the two attributes that are imperative in order to reach any success on this Path. If you cannot bring yourself to take the third and highest step, then try the first step, and then gradually the second step. But take up this task in seriousness, do not make a haphazard attempt. Try to forget yourself. Try to act on his behalf as though you actually were a lawyer and your reputation depended on it. If you defend him badly -- perhaps because in a corner of your being you still want to prove how right you are -- then you have not fulfilled your job at all. Play a game. Imagine that your life depends on presenting a convincing case for the other person. The better you represent him, the better it is for you; and not, as you may believe, the other way around. After this person has heard you as your client, he will give you additional material, so that you can succeed better. Listen to it so as to extend and strengthen the case for your client. Do you know what this will do for you? It will open new vistas of understanding for you. You are so used to representing only your own case. There you are perfect; you do not need further improvement and practice. Now learn to see the other side. Be the lawyer for your opponent, instead of for yourself. That is my advice. It will be a very good exercise. It will be the surest and fastest way -- provided you follow it through, provided you persevere -- to eliminate the friction, or at least to bring it to a minimum. It may also be a good idea for group work. First briefly state a resume of your own case. But then become a better lawyer in your own behalf or in behalf of the other person.

And now I am ready for your questions. Before we deal with your planned questions, are there any questions regarding any of the subjects discussed in these lectures?

QUESTION: Science today says that life is light and consciousness. Does that correspond to what you said, intelligence and light?

ANSWER: Of course. Only it is much more than that. Intelligence and light are only two details. The life force is everything good that exists. Everything that is negative or detrimental is petrified life force. It is divine truth or divine law that has not been adhered to.

QUESTION: What are the main qualifications and prerequisites for team-workers and after how long a training and self-purification in general terms should and can they start working as team-helpers?

ANSWER: This is quite difficult to generalize. But I will try to answer as well as possible. One of the general qualifications is a certain psychological talent. Who has this talent and who does not will show rather quickly. In most cases even the person himself will be aware of whether or not he has this talent. There is certainly nothing to be ashamed of if one does not have it. Not everyone has the same talents. Anyone who is halfway honest with himself will know whether he has a number of qualifications that, all put together, are "the talent" required for this particular work. Some of these are insight, intuition, the power of deduction, the power of observation, a very warm interest in other people, a positive feeling, and also a basic detachment. The time element is impossible to fix. It varies. Some people may be capable of doing this work sooner than others. It depends on themselves. But what is one absolute prerequisite before anyone can begin to do this kind of work is the realization that not all images have to be found and dissolved before one can work with others. That is not even necessary, although some findings have to be made, some results have to be there. In other words, a certain success and a certain relief must have been experienced before the work with someone else can be executed successfully. That is an absolute prerequisite. Before this relief and this experience has come to a person, then he would not be able to help another. He would have to have had the feeling, he would have to know what it is like; and only then would he have the conviction. As long as a certain relief and a certain victory has not taken place, then he would be so much in darkness and so ensnarled in his own difficulties that he could never have open eyes for another. The necessary detachment and intuition would be missing. So that is the criterion by which you can proceed and judge. Each one of you must know best. Therefore, ask yourself: "Did I have that experience? Am I convinced yet? Did I overcome certain basic problems in myself? Do I truly understand what in me caused my main problems?" I repeat, the images do not have to be dissolved, but the relief that is the inevitable result of understanding certain causes and effects in one's own life must have been experienced.

QUESTION: On re-reading the last lecture regarding the wall, it seems to me that when we are supposed to realize the wall, we also are supposed to realize, almost physically, that this wall is present. Is that correct?

ANSWER: I do not know what you mean by "physically." I mean that you should visualize it, you should feel it as a concrete something in your soul. After a while, you will get to this point. You cannot see it physically. It is just that you feel a hardness in you, something that prevents you from being completely empty and flowing.

QUESTION: I think that occasionally it can be seen in revery and before waking.

ANSWER: That is possible. It can also be seen in a dream.

QUESTION: Is it only after the wall has disappeared that one's spiritual rebirh can occur? My question is this: does this disappearance occur when you have become conscious of everything that was behind the wall or only after you have actually purified yourself?

ANSWER: The spiritual rebirth can occur after you are completely conscious of everything that was behind the wall. Then the regenerating forces of nature can begin to work. But try to realize what it means to be completely conscious. It includes applying the findings to one's reactions at all times, and that is certainly not so easy.

QUESTION: Can one be completely conscious of all of one's wrong trends?

ANSWER: The time must come. I do not say that it has to come in this life with all of you. Perhaps there are very few with whom this is possible, but eventually it must come with everyone. Until this point is reached, then you go on incarnating again and again. [Yes, but I thought it was in the distant future] In most cases it is. But you can reach quite a distance in this life -- and thus you speed up all the succeeding lives because your psyche becomes impregnated with the process of self-search. In other words, it becomes second nature, and therefore it will remain in the soul so that the entity will benefit by this habit in the future incarnations.

I will retire into my world and leave all of you with divine blessings and with divine strength. May the new friends who have found their way here take the trouble and have the patience to find out whether they want to find the many answers that this path has to offer. Let none of you be hasty. Receive at least particles of this life force that is contained in every blessing. How much you can absorb depends entirely on your own state of mind. Bitterness, anger, and self-pity are all blocks to the life force. Remember that. So try to open your own doors. Be blessed, my dear ones, be in peace, be in the Lord.

March 13, 1959