The Abyss Of Illusion -- Utopia -- Freedom And Self-responsibility

By The Pathwork Guide

Greetings, my dearest friends. Blessed be this evening, blessings for all of you. This lecture is a continuation of the last one (No 58), so it would be helpful if you familiarized yourself with that lecture.

You all know that all thoughts, all feelings, all attitudes, and all convictions create forms -- forms that are just as real as your earth matter. The deeper and stronger a conviction is, the more lasting and substantial are these forms. These forms exist in your soul and they exist at the same time in the world of spirit. If you harbor attitudes, opinions, convictions, and emotions of truth and reality, then these forms will exist in a world of light and they will, in your own soul, create and bring you happiness, harmony, and what you may call luck. Soul forms of truth are made of material that lasts permanently. They will never dissolve, they can never be destroyed.

Convictions and emotions of untruth or unreality have the opposite effect. They may last for a while, but their durability is limited to the length of time that these attitudes prevail in the personality. The stronger they are, the greater is their impact and the more substantial is their form.

I have described the path that you are taking by outlining landscapes as you know them on earth. There are shrubs and thickets, narrow edges and cliffs. At times the going is rough and tedious, the way is steep and stony. At other times you find yourself on a meadow of rest and light, until you are ready to tackle the next hurdle. All this is not merely symbolic. These forms truly exist. They are the product of your inner attitudes, of your convictions, of your thoughts, and of your emotions. Many of these create obstacles through which you have to grope your way.

The more unconscious such attitudes, convictions, and erroneous conclusions are, the more powerful they are. This is logical, for anything that is out in the light of conscious awareness is open for reconsideration and for correction. In your daily life you may experience happenings that may oppose a conscious conviction. If you are not aware of your underlying attitudes and convictions, then they are not exposed for the possibility of reconsideration and change. They are rigid, and the more rigid a form, the stronger is its substance. You can easily see that unconscious forms of untruth create a tremendous obstacle in your life. If you could but visualize that all thoughts and all emotions are actual forms, objects, and things, then you would clearly understand why it is so important for you to uncover your unconscious and to look at what it contains.

These forms vary in substance and strength, according to what they represent and what is linked to them. They also depend on the character and on the temperament of the person who holds them.

Now I should like to discuss one common soul-form that, to some degree, exists in every human being. I will call this the abyss of illusion. There is an abyss in each one of you. This abyss is utterly unreal, and yet it seems very real as long as you have not taken the necessary steps to discover its illusory character.

When you cannot let go of your selfwill -- and this does not mean that you necessarily want something bad or harmful -- when you cannot accept the imperfection of this world, when you cannot accept the fact that you cannot have life and people according to your very own way, even if yours may be the right way, then it seems to you that you have fallen into an abyss. You may never have translated these feelings into such terms. But if you analyze your feelings, then you will see that this is so. There is a strong fear in you that whatever happens that is contrary to your will is dangerous. This does not apply to all areas of your life, nor to your entire personality. It is sufficient that it exists in some areas.

By examining your emotional reactions to certain incidents, you will become aware of the abyss of illusion in you. I do not ask you to take my word for it. By working in this direction, then you will experience the truth.

This abyss varies in depth and in width. Only by becoming aware of its existence and gradually discovering its unreality will this form eventually dissolve. This can happen only if you are willing to open yourself up to it completely. In this way you will see that what seems so hard to give up, what seems like a personal threat, is really no threat at all. Let us assume that someone does not accept you or acts in any way contrary to your expectations, or, let us say, that you are faced with the necessity to accept your own inadequacy. You consider this very threatening. You defend against it and you refuse to experience it. You cannot find out the reality unless you go right through it. Only after you accept either your own or someone else's inadequacies, only after you give up your own will in a situation where it seems as though your life is at stake, will you be able to truly experience the illusion of the danger of the fear, of the threat. As long as this abyss exists in your soul, then all such incidents will seem gravely endangering to you, and therefore to give in, or let go of your will, will seem tantamount to falling head-on into the abyss. Yet the abyss can only disappear if you let yourself sink into it. Only then will you learn that you do not crash and perish, but that you actually float beautifully. You will then see that what made you tense with fear and anxiety was just as illusory as this abyss.

The abyss cannot disappear by itself. It can only vanish from your soul and your life if you have once made the plunge into it. The first time it may call for great effort on your part, but each time you try it anew, it will be easier.

I hope I will not be misunderstood. I do not mean that you should give up something needlessly or merely because it makes you happy. I do not refer to giving up something you have or possess. Nor do I speak of the realistic fears that you face up constructively. I refer to the subtle little fears in your soul, to the frustration and the anxiety you cannot quite understand, and for which you often find such poor rationalizations. Let us say that a person near you does not agree with you or has himself certain faults. You may not accept this and, as a result, you may feel tense and full of anxiety. If you analyze these feelings, then you will discover that it amounts to feeling endangered because your world of utopia is shaken: it is proven unreal. That is the phantom fear in which you believe that your very life is at stake. Otherwise you would not be so fearful. And that is the very abyss into which you should plunge in order to find yourself floating, instead of perishing.

The last time I discussed the world of utopia in the human personality. I said that the infant in you desires everything its way: it wants what it wants when it wants it. But it goes further than that. The infant wants complete freedom "without" responsibility. You may not be aware of the fact that "you" also desire just that. I am sure that if you investigate some of your reactions and if you ask yourself what they truly mean, when you come to the root of it, you will undoubtedly find that there is a part of your being that desires just that. You desire a benign authority above you who conducts your life in all ways as you desire it. You wish complete freedom in every way; you want to make independent decisions and choices. If these prove good, then it is to your credit. However, you do not wish to be responsible for anything bad that happens. Then you refuse to see the connection between such an occurrence and your own actions and attitudes. You are so successful in covering up these connections that, after a time, it takes a great deal of effort to bring these connections -- cause and effect -- out into the open. This is so because you wish to hold this authority responsible for the negative things and release yourself from any accountability.

Many of my friends who are well advanced on this path will readily confirm that this part exists in them. If you follow through this unconscious thought or attitude, then you will see it amounts to just that: You wish freedom without self-responsibility. Thus, you wish a pampering, indulgent god, like a parent who spoils his child. If this god cannot be found -- and, of course, he cannot -- then he becomes a punishing monster in your eyes and, consequently, you turn away from God altogether.

The same expectations you have of this god you often also project onto human beings: to a specific person, to a group of people, to a parent, to a teacher, even to a philosophy or a creed. It does not matter who or what. At any rate, the God image you have worked on will not be complete unless you include this very basic element in it: the unconditional fulfillment of all your demands.

It is of great importance that you find your irrational, demanding child in yourself. In the method of our work, it should not be too difficult to spot it. Although it is often hidden, and therefore can only be approached in an indirect way, it can be found in many areas of your life. I cannot show you now how it "should" be done, because the approach varies with each individual. I shall be glad to point out the way to each of you at a later date, if you so desire. However, you all have, at least in some way, just this hope and desire: freedom without self-responsibility to the full extent. There cannot be a single exception. You may wish to assume self-responsibility in some areas of your life, often mostly in superficial and outer actions, but in the deepest and the most important aspects of your life as a whole, you still refuse responsibility, yet you desire utter freedom.

If you think this through, then you will surely see that this is an impossibility. It is utopia. You cannot be free and, at the same time, have no responsibility. In the measure that you shift responsibility from yourself, in that measure you curtail your own freedom. You put yourself in slavery. It is as simple as that.

Even in the animal world you will observe the same law at work. A pet has no freedom, but it is not responsible for obtaining its own food and shelter. A wild animal is free, but it has the responsibility of looking out for itself. This must apply much more to humanity. Wherever you look, you will see that it cannot be otherwise: The more freedom, the more responsibility. If you do not desire responsibility to the degree of your capacity, then you have to forfeit freedom. In a superficial way, this applies to your choice of profession, to your choice of government, to practically everything. But where humanity has overlooked this basic truth so far is in the human soul and in man's attitude toward life as such.

The infant in you does not see this and does not want to see it. It wants it both ways. What it wants does not exist, it is illusion or utopia. The price for illusion is extremely high. The more you want to evade paying the natural and fair price -- in this case self-responsibility for freedom -- the heavier the toll becomes. This is unalterable law. The more you observe the human soul, the more clearly you will understand this. All diseases of the soul are based on just that: evasion in payment of the rightful price. The desire and the insistence on having it both ways, the easy way.

The price you pay is so heavy, so steep, my friends. You are not aware of this yet, but you will be if you follow this particular road. A part of this price is the constant effort you waste in trying to force life into the mold of your illusion. If you could but see all this inner, emotional effort, then you would shudder, because all this strength could be used quite differently. To let go of this illusion and to assume full self-responsibility seems to you so hard that it becomes a good part of the abyss. You seem to think that you will fall right in if you really assume self-responsibility. Therefore, you constantly strain away from it, stemming against it. And this consumes strength.

Giving up the world of utopia represents the abyss. Utopia includes, among other things, the hope that freedom can exist "without" self-responsibility. To give up this world of utopia seems to you the greatest danger. You stem against it with all the might of your spiritual muscles. You lean away from the abyss and thus you lose valuable strength for nothing. It seems to you that to give up your world of utopia is dire misery. The world becomes bleak and hopeless, with no chance for happiness. Your concept of happiness in this part of your unconscious mind means utter perfection in all ways. But this is not true. To give up utopia does not make for a bleak world. You need not despair of letting go of a desire and of going into what often seems fearsome to you. The only way you can discover the illusion of this fear, of this abyss, and its phantom quality, is first to visualize it, then to feel it, and third to experience its existence in you in the various manifestations of your daily life and your reactions to them, and then to jump into it. Otherwise it cannot dissolve.

There is a very important general misconception about life. It constitutes the main result of this unreasonable desire for freedom without self-responsibility. It is the idea that you can come to harm through the arbitrariness of the god-of-your-image, of life, or fate; or through the cruelty, the ignorance, and the selfishness of others. This fear is just as illusory as the abyss. This fear can exist only because you deny your self-responsibility, and therefore you hold others responsible for your life and for your well-being.

If you did not cling so tenaciously to the utopia of having both freedom and no self-responsibility, then you could easily perceive that you are indeed independent. You are the master of your life and of your fate; you -- and no one else -- create your own happiness and your own unhappiness. If you observed these manifold connections and chain reactions, then you would automatically eliminate your fear of others -- that is, your fear of becoming a victim of others. You could link up all unfavorable incidents with your own wrong attitudes, no matter how wrong the other person may also be. Someone else's wrongness cannot affect you. This would become clear to you, and you would then lose your fear of being helpless. You are helpless because you make yourself that way by trying to shift responsibility from yourself. So you see that fear is the heavy price you must pay for insisting on your world of utopia.

In truth and reality, you cannot possibly come to harm by any shortcomings or wrong actions of another person, no matter how much it may seem that way at first glance. He who judges on the surface will not find truth and reality. Many of you judge in some ways profoundly, going to the roots of things. In other ways, however, you are conditioned to judge on the surface. In this particular respect many of you refuse to let go of judging on the surface because you still hope that the world of utopia can be a reality. Therefore, you have to fear other people, you have to fear their judgment, you have to fear fear their wrongdoings. In this part of your being you like to consider yourself a victim for the very reason I stated previously. This trend in itself is a sign of the refusal to accept self-responsibility.

If you are truly willing and prepared to accept full self-responsibility, then the vision of truth will have to come to you, namely that harm cannot come to you through others. I can foresee many questions coming up in connection with this. But let me assure you, my friends, that even a mass disaster, of which there have been many in the history of humanity, will miraculously spare some and not others. This cannot be explained away either by coincidence or by an act of the monstrous god-of-your image, who favors a few and punishes some less fortunate creatures according to his whim or arbitrary liking. Nor is the god-concept that says, "You were a good child, therefore I will reward you by sparing you a difficult fate, while another person has to be tested and has to go through certain hardships, less monstrous. This, too, is a distortion of the truth.

God is in you, and that part of the Divine that is in you regulates things in such a wonderful way that all your wrong attitudes will come to the fore, more strongly at some times and less strongly at other times of your life. Your own wrong attitudes and your inner errors will attract the apparent faults of others or the wrong or bad actions of others. You cannot be affected by any wrongdoing or actions of other people if you do not have within yourself something that responds to them, as one note responds to another.

You should not take my word for it. Anyone on the path is bound to find out the truth if he really wants to. Sincerely investigate your everyday occurrences, your everyday irritations, and your everyday annoyances. Find out what in yourself either responds to or corresponds to either a similar characteristic (although perhaps on quite a different plane) or to an exactly opposite characteristic of a person who has provoked you. If you truly find the corresponding note in yourself, then you will automatically cease feeling victimized. Although a part of you enjoys feeling victimized, it is a questionable joy. It weakens you and it is bound to make you fearful. It utterly enchains you. By seeing the connection between your inner wrong currents and the outer unwelcome occurrence, you will come face to face with your inadequacy, but instead of weakening you, this recognition will make you strong and free.

You are so conditioned to the habit of going through life concentrating on the apparent wrongs inflicted on you by another person that you automatically feel victimized. You react by blaming, and thus you never find the corresponding note in yourself. Even those of my friends who have learned to investigate themselves with some degree of honesty often fail to do so when it comes to the most mundane, everyday incidents. It takes training to condition yourself to follow this road all the way. When you discover your own contribution, no matter now subtle, to an unwelcome experience, then you will cease being afraid of the world.

If your fear of life and your fear the inadequacy of others is not eliminated to some degree after such discoveries, then you have not even scratched the surface. Yes, you may have found some contributing factors, but if your fear has not dissipated, then you must still be dealing with subterfuge. If you are truly facing yourself, then you must find that you cannot be truly affected by others, that you are the master of your life. Therefore, you need not fear. In other words, your findings must make you see the truth and the significance of self-responsibility. In addition, self-responsibility will cease to be something to shy away from.

If this work is done in the right way, if you have the right approach, then there is no room for guilt feelings. The very nature of guilt, which stifles your determined effort to find out more about yourself, is like saying: "I cannot help it, I have to feel guilty for something I cannot help." Therefore, inevitably a guilt feeling contains an element of self-pity. Without self-pity there could be no guilt feeling. The true and constructive way of searching within yourself must uncover many errors, many wrong conclusions, many faults, and many faulty attitudes. But you will encounter them, you will face them "without" a byproduct of guilt. In the proper attitude, you accept your inadequacies and you face up to them. In the world of utopia, you do not.

This is a good part of the reason why you reject self-responsibility. By making independent decisions, you are bound to make mistakes. The child in you, clinging to the world of utopia, believes that you must never make a mistake. Making a mistake means falling into the abyss. This is another instance of jumping in and finding yourself afloat. You then see that it is no tragedy to have made a mistake, while the infant in you thinks that you must perish if you do. Therefore, the wrong conclusion is that you must never make independent decisions for which you are responsible. It should be noted that this may manifest only in a very hidden and subtle way.

The illusion that you must be inadequate leads to your rejection of self-responsibility and to the continued wish to be free. Therefore, the world of utopia, as well as the fearsome abyss of illusion, depends upon whether or not you learn to accept your inadequacy and whether or not you learn to free yourself of the phantom fear of failure. The guilt and fear of making mistakes is so hard to bear that you set up all sorts of soul-forms that make your life miserable.

In your intellect you may know all this and you may readily admit to a variety of faults without the slightest guilt or fear. In this particular respect you have freed yourself of the abyss of illusion and the world of utopia. But there undoubtedly must be areas where you do not feel in accord with your intellectual knowledge. This is an important point. It is quite possible that you have some faults that are infinitely graver than others and yet you do not have this feeling of shame and guilt. You can admit them to yourself and you can even discuss them with others. Here you are free. Other faults, perhaps less severe, and at times not even really faults but a mere attitude, a certain shame, a kind of anxiety or reaction, may give you an acute feeling of shame or guilt. You cannot face it, you look away from it, you struggle to avoid seing it. This means that in this respect, for one reason or another, you live in your world of utopia and therefore you struggle against the abyss of illusion.

Your whole life must change in many ways if you discover the truth of what I say here. It is not sufficient to accept these concepts intellectually; you have to experience them in yourself. This can be done only by hard work in the proper direction and by your utter will to find out this particular truth. On the other hand, you need not have completely dissolved the abyss in order to be liberated to a large degree. It is sufficient that you see it and observe its existence and its effect on you and that you have made some attempts in the right direction. It is sufficient to see the connection between your erroneous attitudes and outer occurrences that heretofore seemed arbitrary. Once you recognize your fear of giving up utopia and all its ramifications, then you will have taken a tremendous step toward real freedom and true independence.

This will free you of your basic fear of life. It will "release" heretofore wasted forces for constructive purposes and it will bring forth in you a creativity you never dreamed possible. Once you realize what I say here, once it is your own and not a superimposed knowledge, you will go through life with a completely new attitude as a free being without fear. You will know, with a deep conviction, that no word and no teaching can ever give you anything better than your own realization: that everything that comes your way is self-produced. You do not have to be ashamed of it. You can make the outpicturing of it, and the unfortunate circumstances you may have to go through, a very constructive and productive medicine for yourself. This will serve to liberate you, rather than enslave you. You will realize that you have nothing to be afraid of. You are not the victim of others. You do not have to fight for the perfection of others, because their imperfection cannot harm you.

Some of you may think that it is strange that this basic spiritual truth has been obscured throughout the ages. But there is a good reason for that. Humanity in its development is "required" to reach a certain basic spiritual understanding before it can use this knowledge in the right way. For misunderstood, it could be very harmful. If man's lower nature remains dominant, then he might say: "I can kill and plunder and be selfish all I want. My wrong actions cannot harm anyone else." And, of course, that is not true, not in the sense I mean it. I realize that this seems like an utter contradiction. On the one hand I say that the wrongdoings of another person cannot harm you. On the other hand I say that if you go ahead following your lowest instincts, then it is harmful to others. Both are true. But both can be untrue if you understand this in the wrong sense. It is extremely difficult for me to explain how these apparent paradoxes still hold true. However, at a future occasion I will make an attempt to make this clear if you still need clarification. I believe that any of you who take this particular road on your path and experience the truth of my words personally will know that both are true and that these two statements are no contradiction at all.

There is just one thing I would like to add. At first it may appear that it has nothing to do with the apparent paradox, yet when you think more profoundly about it, you will clearly see that it has. I have often said that your own unconscious affects the unconscious of another person. This is so true and so apparent that all you have to do is to open your eyes to have it constantly confirmed in your life. You know that the human personality consists of various levels, or, expressed in a different way, of various subtle bodies. According to the level you give out, you affect that particular level of the other person. What comes out of your true being, of your real self, will affect the real self of the other person. What comes out of the layer of your mask self or out of the layer of your defense will affect the similar or corresponding mask self or defense mechanism of the other person.

I will give you just one example at random that I am sure many of you have experienced. When you are shy or reticent, then it creates in the other person a similar effect, although he may express it in an entirely different manner. If you are genuine, or if you act out of a level of pride, then the other person will respond in kind automatically. If you are spontaneous and genuine, then you will find a similar immediate response in the other person. All you have to do is to observe this. You have to observe yourself in order to establish from what layer of your personality you have acted. Then you can take the other person's behavior and mannerisms and compare. However, you will soon stop being deceived by appearances. Your shyness may be open, whereas the other person's shyness may be covered under a mask of brashness. However, you will recognize the shyness behind it. This is so important and it has to do with the apparent paradox that you cannot be harmed by other people and that it would still be harmful to go ahead on that assumption and indulge in your lower instincts.

If there are any questions, I shall be glad to answer them.

QUESTION: A few times you mentioned guilt and shame. Couldn't one be ashamed of something without having guilt feelings?

ANSWER: Yes, of course. This is always a question of terminology. There is a healthy kind of shame that is constructive and strengthening. You can also call it repentance. If you recognize that you have unwittingly hurt others by a wrong tendency, and you feel truly sorry about it and this gives you the incentive to change, then it is good. If shame does not weaken you, but rather strengthens you, then it contains no guilt. If it is free of self-pity, of the flavor of "poor me, I could not help it, I should be helped, people are unfair to me," then it is a healthy kind of "repentance" that has nothing whatever to do with guilt. So it is possible that shame exists without guilt. And it is also possible the other way around, namely that a person has an acute guilt feeling and is not necessarily ashamed.

QUESTION: Many times you stated that our psyche is in some way an electromagnetic field. Is there, from your point of view, any similarity with the electromagnetic fields of modern physics? Or are they different in vibration rate?

ANSWER: The rate of vibration or frequency can be very different. It depends on who or what it is. The frequency rate of vibration varies between an animal and a plant; it varies between two animals, and it varies between two human beings, let alone all the other things. Everything that has energy -- and you know that even your material objects are full of energy -- has or is an electromagnetic energy field. These fields also vary between one object and the other. It depends on the material of which it is constructed, and it even varies between objects of the same material, because many other factors also play a role. But the basic principle is the same. It exists in everything, from what is apparently a dead object to what is obviously a live organism. But their emanation, their frequency, their rate of vibration, their color, their scent, and all their other attributes or manifestations, many of which I could not even describe, for you have not yet discovered them and therefore they are unnamed in human language -- some which you may never discover on this earth plane -- all these vary according to a great number of factors that influence this magnetic field. But in principle, yes, they are essentially the same.

QUESTION: Could this also be applied to our tonal system, within the range and over the range of our auditory perception?

ANSWER: Yes, absolutely. I can foresee a time on your earth plane -- some of you may still see the beginnings of it -- when you will have machines with which to measure a personality's frequency rate of vibration, in tone, in color, and in certain other manifestations; that is, in energy emanation, if I may call it that. (Also in scent?) That may take longer, it would be much harder to establish technically. But it may come too, eventually. Such a machine will prove extremely helpful. (Could it also be used for therapy?) Physical therapy, as well as mental therapy. It could be used for all sorts of other things. Not to speak of the importance of proving the existence of man beyond the physical.

I retire with my blessings for each and every one of you, my friends. The strength and the light that I am allowed to bring from my world are now flowing to each one of you. May they help you, wherever you are on your path, whatever your problems are. May you feel the love with which we come to you. Be blessed, be in God.

March 4, 1960