Conflicts In The World Of Duality

By The Pathwork Guide

Greetings, God bless all of you, my dearest friends. Blessed is this lecture.

On this Path you are going through various phases. Broadly speaking, the first level of your unconscious mind that we investigated is the level in which you harbor wrong conclusions which have formed rigid generalizations about different aspects of life. We refer to these rigid forms as images. Some images may be insignificant in themselves, yet they are important enough to distort your life in many ways.

Behind this more superficial level of your subconscious, we penetrated into a level wherein is waged a battle between opposites, the world of duality. This creates a tremendous confusion in your life. The confusion of duality exists in many respects. It concerns the big issues as well as the seemingly lesser ones. The great opposites are life and death, happiness and unhappiness, love and selfishness, light and darkness. Your confusion comes about because an attittude towards life which is supposed to lead to the desired goal often brings (at least in part) the undesired one. It takes a great deal of self-honesty and awareness to understand this phenonemon and to detect the inner error of action and reaction on your part that is responsible for this confusing result.

Religion symbolizes these opposites as the struggle between God and the devil. The confusions indicated are said to be Satan's means of confusing mankind so that it can no longer distinguish between God's way and the devil's way. That which is intrinsically selfish and destructive often appears as righteous and holy on a superficial level, and vice versa. This represents the great battle between the forces of light and the forces of darkness, which humanity erroneously imagines to be raging outside of himself, while he, merely a victim, is caught in the middle.

Having to choose between everyday alternatives that confuse you often generates confusion in you. These are not crassly good or crassly bad and they both stem from the same basic struggle in the human soul.

Modern psychology has recognized the same fundamental problem. It calls it the life instinct versus the death instinct, or the pleasure principle versus the reality principle. However, in connection with the reality principle there also exists a confusion. Often it is not clear which stands for God and which stands for the devil. Is the pleasure principle selfish and therefore destructive? Can you indulge in it without hurting others? And is the reality principle duty, responsibility, work, achievement, and therefore constructive? On the other hand, you are told that God is happiness, bliss and light, and the pleasure principle makes you yearn for that. Whether you know it or not, right here you are engulfed in one of mankind's major confusions. It will take a great deal of further work on your part before you gain more clarity and more insight. For the moment it would be most constructive for you to become aware that this confusion exists in you in the first place.

In all the conflicts that you have managed to become aware of in the course of the work that you are doing on this Path, the underlying conflict is always related to this world of duality. Behind your images and misconceptions you always find conflict. In one way or another, you always find that you are torn between two (and sometimes more) attitudes, ways of life, alternatives. By stripping them of their superimposed motivations, at the core you are bound to find the basic opposites.

But this level in which you are torn in confusion between the opposites is still not the core. There is something behind this which is the origin of the world of duality, just as the world of duality is the place of origin of your images. Strangely enough, this underlying origin becoms one of the opposites on the next level. In other words, that which is a unified core, on the next level of consciousness splits into two opposites. And this underlying core is your longing for complete happiness, for light, for love, for bliss, and for peace. The original longing is for happiness supreme, but life on earth prohibits such fulfillment. This prohibition creates the world of duality and therefore your conflict. But it is equally true to say that the world of duality created the prohibition: that it created life conditions on earth that made of reality something that opposes the pleasure principle, to speak in psychological terms; or, in spiritual terms, something that opposes the divine principle of bliss.

This puts you into a vicious circle. How to get out of it, how to find your way out into the light of truth? These are the significant questions. In the first place, you have to understand, at least in part, what is responsible for man having created a duality out of a single core. Life on earth contains physical death. Even if we remove many of life's miseries as unnecessary and as created out of confusion, physical death still remains. And physical death remains a mystery. It is unknown, and therefore frightening, in spite of religious faith. It seems to be an end, and as such is in crass opposition to man's longing for life. And life, in essence, means bliss. All the religious explanations, however true they may be, are still conjecture. Thus, by following through in logical sequence, we can see that the fear of death creates the world of duality and the world of duality creates a reality that is prohibitive of man's longing for complete fulfillment. This narrows down the margin and leaves us with the problem of death. By coping with it, we can break the vicious circle.

Mankind has tried to cope with this problem for as long as it exists. Unfortunately, the way it chose was bound to fail. It is just as unsatisfactory as when you make unconscious attempts to solve a so-called psychological problem in your life by shortcuts, by evasions, and by being afraid to face the issue squately. Instead, you superimpose ready-made answers, which may even be true as such, but they are not true for you because you have not arrived at them out of strength and courage that come only through facing the issue, but rather by avoiding it, out of fear and weakness. This is one way of trying to cope with the problem. Religious people who cling to faith out of fear are the prototype of those who would attempt this way.

Another attempt is negation. It is the negation of the very thing that one longs for most, in the terror of not ever getting it, and thus rushing right into what one fears most. This self-destructiveness can be found on all levels. It works in your attitude toward less significant aspects of life, but it is basically your way of coping with the problem of death. The prototype is the atheist, the materialist. Both types do not realize that in essence they are doing the same thing. They must be violently opposed to one another because each type represents the opposite of what he unconsciously thinks to be his only solution for coping with the great problem. Neither one has found the answer. The answer must come out of the self. It can come only by courageously facing these problems, these questions, these confusions, these fears, and by examining your way of coping with the problem up to now.

When I speak of the longing for God, then this is very distant and very abstract. When you imagine divine bliss, such as a spirit being may enjoy, then your automatic association, perhaps unconsciously, is usually quite different from the happiness that you long for as a human being. You imagine it as something dull, sterile, boring, uninteresting. There are many people who believe that the very presence of unhappiness makes happiness flavorful. Of course, it is not so. Since the word happiness implies so much vague and faraway spirituality, let us choose another word. Let us choose the ord pleasure supreme on all the levels of your being. Your deep-rooted longing for this pleasure supreme is constantly in conflict with reality as you know it on earth. This is the result of your inability to come to terms with death.

Modern psychology claims that this deep rooted longing stems from man's desire to return to his mother's womb, when he lived in a state of being without worry, responsibility, or hardship. The more he grows, the more he is faced with these realities of life and therefore the stronger does the struggle become. But in truth this longing goes back further. It stems from the fact that man has, imbedded in his spirit, the vague memory of a life in another state of consciousness when he knew nothing but pleasure supreme, bliss supreme, without any opposite. Gradually, by stages and to a degree, you can recapture this state even while you are still an incarnated entity. It is not enough to remove your images and your wrong conclusions; but by doing so you are bound to encounter the real level of the world of duality. Once you comprehend this at its deepest core, you come face to face with your struggle against death, or against anti-pleasure, if I may call it that.

As I indicated before, there are two major ways that the unconscious attempts to cope with death. Both are based on negation, but one is based on evasion, the other by deliberately facing it. In either alternative you tensely struggle against it. You struggle no less when you deliberately choose death out of cringing fear in a negative spirit of weakness. It is altogether different to face it with healthy acceptance, out of strength.

When I use the word death, I do not mean merely physical death alone. I mean all the negative aspects of life, everything that opposes your pleasure drive. Death means more than unhappiness. It means loss, change, the unknown, The unknown may contain something better than the state you are in now, but by the fact that it is unknown, it becomes terrifying. All that signifies death in little ways. There is no human being who does not die many deaths every day.

Your attitude towards death, in all its aspects, determines your ability to live and to experience pleasure. The healthier your attitude towards death, the more the life force can flow through you, and the more healthy and enduring is the gratification of your pleasure drive.

The first step is for you to detect how tremendously you struggle against death. You must become fully aware of it, just as you need to become fully aware of your constant longing for pleasure supreme. Both may hidden. Find which of the two alternatives you have chosen in order to cope with death: the evasion of that which you fear or an inclination towards what you fear out of fear itself. Both are always present in each human being, but one may be predominant.

In the latter attempt, you sabotage the happiness that you could have because you are afraid of losing it again or of not getting it to the extent of your desire. This happens in the spirit of: "Since it is unavoidable anyway, then I might just as well get it over with." A crass example of this procedure is suicide.

So you are constantly torn between two unsatisfactory and damaging attempts to negate death. These artificial, forceful, cramped attempts bring you so much nearer to that which you want to avoid and to forfeit than to that which you wish to gain. So it is not in the acceptance of death itself that you will find strength and cure. What matters is how you do it. If you do so out of fear and negativity, both of which lead to self-destructiveness, then it is altogether different from the healthy, strong acceptance of the inevitable. By facing it squarely, by not cringing away from it, you will learn to come to terms with it, as you should, thereby freeing the life force in you, which remains bottled up as long as you do not learn to cope with death in the healthy way.

On the one hand you dimly sense that in acceptance lies the solution. But you also sense that in acceptance lies annihilation. That confuses you, but as long as this confusion is not brought out into consciousness, then you cannot begin to find your way out of the maze.

Because of this confusion, man often resorts to religion in any of its varied forms. But in this spirit, it happens out of negation, out of cowardice, out of evasion, and out of the fear to confront that which man fears most. Thus, religion, no matter how true what he believes may be, will not really help him, just as the wrong kind of acceptance will not help him. This kind of religion will not help because it is accepted out of weakness, which is a pollution of his motives. He deeply senses the untruth of his motivation and he despises himself for it. Moreover, the superimposed faith has no real power to help him. He accepts God, and everything that this implies, not out of real conviction, nor out of deep, truthful, genuine insight, but because he is afraid. Thus, the enemies of religion are often right when they state that it is an opiate. By the same token, the enemies of materialism are right when they are against it. This is not so only because the materialistic view of the world is not the truth, but also because the motivation for accepting it is just as wrong as the opium of religion.

The more we look into this subject, the more we find that the solution lies in facing the unkown, in confronting the fear of it, and in learning the strength to die. He who knows how to die knows how to live.

You do not have to wait for actual physical death to occur in order to learn this. All the other aspects of death that are comprised in daily living can help you in this. He who does not know how to die cannot ive. He cannot reconcile the opposites. He cannot reconcile the dualism in his own soul. Hence he cannot free the life force that lies in him unutilized.

My friends, do not be afraid to recognize that to a greater or lesser degree faith, too, is an intellectual superimposition you cling to out of your weakness and fear. The strength this frank admission will give you will enable you to build a real faith, a genuine faith, an inner conviction, an inner knowledge. In other words, to have an inner experience of the truths which so far you have known only intellectually. This will come after you have learned, to some degree, to cope with death in its full sense. As long as your ability to die is based on the superimposed knowledge that life goes on and that death is an illusion, then your faith is built on sand. But if you take the great courageous step to face your unbelief, to face your uncertainty, to face your fear, and if you come to terms with that, accepting the unknown if and when it becomes necessary and building up this strength, ohen a true conviction and the experience of spiritual truth will become part of you. It will become part of you because then you learn to live. The life force will be released and a great measure of your longing will be fulfilled even while you are still on earth.

If you seek, you will find an area of your being that clings to life only in order to avoid death. This motivation contains negation and thus the life force is negated, too. But if you face and come to terms with death, then your embracing of life will be done in a positive spirit, and that alone will solve the problem of duality, since duality arises out of negation.

At some point along the road of development and growth you have to tackle this problem. For some, the time may come sooner, for some later, but come it must for everyone.

Do not be afraid that you may be disloyal in facing where your faith is superimposed out of terror. In facing it, you can cultivate the greatest of all strengths in the knowledge, in the acceptance of the uncertainty of dying a little bit everyday, not out of evasion, nor in negatvity, but as an integral part of life. To the degree that you grow in this direction, in that measure the life force will flow through you and will give you a foretaste of what real happiness, pleasure supreme, and true security are, even while you are still in the body.

Many aspects of civilized life stand in the way of the supreme bliss that could be had, to some degree, even on earth. These aspects are a direct result of the inner duality which, in turn, is an outcome of the inability to die. Civilized life constantly imposes on you alternatives between pleasure and unpleasure. For instance, let us consider work -- work that is not always according to your creative abilities and inclinations, and therefore not according to your liking or pleasure. The conditions of work, with all the do's and don'ts, are a result of policital, of economic, and of sociological factors which are a result of the inner duality. They necessitate a struggle for living that encourages ambitiousness, drives, compulsions. In addition, they often confront one with necessary obligations, obligations that may be necessary within the framework of your present life on earth. All this creates a reality principle that stands in crass opposition to the longing for and the fulfillment of the happiness that could be yours. This individual inner problem of duality has collectively brought about a civilization that makes life unnecessarily difficult for you. But as each person begins to face this problem, he helps to change this world and these conditions in a way that is subtle but nonetheless decisive. Your often unpleasant reality is, in many respects, necessary and it is a collective manifestation of the inner duality. As you begin to cope with this problem within yourself, you not only become able to cope with this unnecessary reality in a much better way, but you also help to change it.

There is another conflict and confusion in this respect which I wish to touch upon at this time. In the course of this work, you may have become acutely aware of the desire for happiness, for love, for fulfillment, or, to put it in the words I used earlier, for pleasure supreme. You have discovered that much of this longing is your unfulfillment as a child, which now manifests as an exaggerated craving. You learn to distinguish between the healthy wish for mature love and the childish craving need for being loved. In this awareness, you free yourself to some extent of this craving need. Nevertheless, it is necessary for you to understand where this excessive demand comes from. It must come from somewhere and, as I said, it comes from the vague memory imbedded in the spirit. You may then pose this question: "If this wish has a spiritual origin, then why is it unhealthy?" The answer is that it is unhealthy partly because it is impossible to have such excessive demands gratified on this earth with the reality that mankind has created. Nor is the answer complete when we say that childish craving is one-sided, while mature love is the willingness to give and to love as much as one wishes to receive. For, in the adult the childish craving subtly merges with the mature love capacity, so that the individual's argument will always be: "If only I would find such love, then I would be willing to give my all." And this is often true. Hence the answer must still be deeper. The difference between the immature desire and craving and the mature wish for love and for pleasure supreme is not determined by the intensity, but by the time element on the one hand and by the illusion of self versus the other person on the other hand.

There is a conflict wherein the gratification of an instinct towards wish fulfillment may, at the same time, prove damaging to another person. It may make you selfish. Thus, you have to decide between your pleasure, which is divine purpose, and unselfishness, which is divine purpose as well. How is one to cope with this duality? You may remember a recent lecture I gave on the great transition in human development. In it I showed you the illusion of the self versus the other. There is no such thing. You cannot truly experience bliss at the expense of another. But the realization of this truth will come only as you proceed on this Path through all the steps I help you to take. This wider vision will be attained by a reflection on the time element. Instant gratification -- the child's way -- often seems to necessitate a choice between one's own pleasure versus that of the other person. However, in a wider range of vision this ceases to be true. The more mature a person is, the better he will be able to connect cause and effect even if they do not stand close together. Time is a product of your world of illusion, therefore the length of time existing between cause and effect makes a great deal of difference both in your comprehension and in your evaluation. The more a person matures spiritually and emotionally, the more does he outgrow illusion in all aspects, and although he is still in time, he begins to sense its illusory character. Practically, this manifests in his ability to see cause and effect even if they do not follow in direct succession. When they do not follow one another in direct succession, then even a small child begins to make the connection and to learn from it. Therefore, the process of growth is determined also by the ability to connect cause and effect even when they are separated in respect to time.

In order to learn this, you have to connect past and present causes and past and present effects. You learn this in your work on the Path anyway. But you also have to cultivate patience if it concerns the present. If your instinct towards wish fulfillment of your pleasure interferes with another person, or if for other reasons you cannot receive the gratification that you long for at once, then in cultivating this wider outlook and in taking the demand for instant gratification out of the wish -- which may in itself be healthy -- you will come to see the law taking its natural course. You will begin to lift yourself out of time, at least to some degree.

So the problem of happiness versus selfishness exists only within the relative time element.

When your longing for happiness is not fulfilled instantly, then this, too, appears as death. It often feels like bleak misery, and in that sense it is apparently death to you. When you give up the desire for instant gratification, while nevertheless wishing to obtain what you seek in principle, then this corresponds to the healthy way of coping with death. The giving up of the wish altogether corresponds to the unhealthy acceptance of death. As you become stronger in the healthy way, then you are bound to experience that you do obtain it eventually in the measure that you grow. In that way you cannot help but become aware of the illusion of actual physical death, not by intellectual superimposition, but by your strength in coping with the little everyday dyings and confronting them in a healthy manner.

Once you overcome this conflict, then the pathway will be smoothed towards the real strength of living, which lies in the strength of dying.

Are there any questions with regard to this subject?

QUESTION: Can you show us how to approach this subject in our everyday life, in this work? How can we learn to eliminate time?

ANSWER: This is a misunderstanding. You cannot eliminate time as long as you live on earth. You can only develop a different understanding, a wider vision. Cause and effect move closer together, and therefore the illusory character of time lessens in your perception of it. You begin to sense something behind your time. The best practical approach, to begin with, is the process you are using in this work. You have all begun working on this Path with the conviction that so many mishaps in your life were caused by other people's faults, or by an unkind fate. As you proceeded, you found, not as a theory but as a fact, how reactions or attitudes of yours were responsible for such occurrences. This has come to you as a wonderful revelation. You may not have such success in every aspect of your life as yet, but you have begun, and you can now connect cause and effect. You were incapable of doing this before since cause and effect were not close together. However, careful investigation has revealed the connection. The more problems you find, and therefore the more problems you resolve, then the closer you come to sensing the illusory character of time. So, in this respect, you have a new assignment of work to enter into, and the more you do so, the closer you will automatically come to sensing the dimension behind time. I do not want to use the word eternity. This other dimension behind time is still not the ultimate, for behind this is still something else, and then still something else for which I have no words at my disposal.

Sensing the illusory element of time will show you that there is no conflict between your happiness and the happiness of another.

As to the practical approach in learning to face death in your everyday life, it is so self-explanatory that I need hardly go into it. Work first towards the recognition and awareness of the basic current of your longing for pleasure supreme, as well as of your apprehension of death in all its facets. This should not prove too difficult if you look at your various moods and emotions. It is a matter of focusing your attention on it. Your daily little fears, apprehensions, and anxieties all represent a form of personal death. Then see how you really react to it. Determine in what respect you use either of the two wrong ways in your emotional approach. Learn to become aware of everything you cringe from. Do not repress it. Then you will begin to see that you fear not only the negative, but that you also fear change because it is unknown to you. It is the great battle between another pair of opposites. One is the surging spirit going forward, the other is the supposed safety of sameness. Stagnation is a distortion of the timeless element of being.

You may say that you are aware of your longing for happiness, as well as of your fear of the negative. No, my friends, not one of you is aware of the existence of these two currents in you even to a minimal extent. So much is conditioned away, if I may use this expression. This work must bring into clearer focus the awareness of what you basically long for and what you fear. As this awareness grows, then you will understand what I am talking about here.

QUESTION: I do not understand what you mean by saying that our reality is negative for us so that we cringe away from it. This is what I understood you to say.

ANSWER: There is sickness and physical death. There is the world of matter bound to decay. There is struggle and work for daily subsistence. There are obligations imposed upon you that you may not like. Life is constant change that brings losses and unknown factors which create anxiety in you. All these factors seem to block the way towards what you wish: the gratification of your wish for pleasure supreme. You do not like it, but it is your reality at this stage of your evolution.

QUESTION: Can you explain a little more clearly how healthy acceptance opposes unhealthy acceptance, as for instance in a martyr?

ANSWER: The unhealthy attitude contains, above all, a spirit of defeatism. As I indicated before, the very fear of an occurrence makes you rush into it. Your repressed desire for the exact opposite of what you fear, whether or not it is desirable, makes you abandon your desire. This healthy attitude says: "Yes, death is unwelcome. I really do not know what will happen and therefore I do not like it. But it is part of life and when it comes my way, then I will be strong enough to accept it. Others have gone through it and so will I. I will meet it in full awareness of my uncertainty. I am now aware that I still fear it, but what I will learn to accept cannot be avoided, and thus I will eventually lose my fear of it." This applies to every other negative facet of life and it can be practiced every day. It is very difficult to put into words. Perhaps visualizing a soul movement of tensing and letting go will help you to understand. When you struggle away from something frightening, then you tense up and pull away. This pulling away in tension pushes you into it. The courage of facing the self with honesty and a relaxed attitude will produce the necessary strength. The lack of these attributes will either push you into what you are trying to avoid or make you run from it. Both have the same end result, namely negation.

QUESTION: What is your attitude towards the ascetic? Is he running away from it all? Does he face up to reality, or is he avoiding it?

ANSWER: In general, an ascetic tries to buy himself out of what he fears. He forfeits all pleasure and all happiness by self-imposed hardships. In other words, he chooses unnecessary hardship because he so greatly fears another hardship.

QUESTION: How about the spiritual ascetic?

ANSWER: It is exactly the same. It is often a great self-deception and a complete denial of the life force. The principle of death is feared so much that the life force is completely negated, It is a very self-destructive and damaging form of coping with death.

QUESTION: How do you account for the supreme pleasure that comes from mastery in achievement and accomplishment of the so-called unpleasant problems?

ANSWER: Here, again, it depends on the motive and on the way it is done. If it is genuine and healthy, then the process here described has been lived. Since the duality is a result of negation, then one can only find the way out of duality by no longer negating it, but facing up to it. Then this will show the unity behind the duality, so that pleasure and pain become one.

There are also imaginary, superimposed -- and therefore unhealthy -- ways of doing this and they are all illusions.

QUESTION: Doesn't the healthy state deny the unpleasant emphasis?

ANSWER: No. I would say it is just the opposite. Death ceases to be, but this happens in a genuine way only after it has been fought through by facing the fact that it still exists, at least for you. By denying it, you may run into the danger of negation and evasion. If the end result is artificially clung to, then it has the opposite effect. You cannot deny that which still exists in you.

QUESTION: Is it life and death, or life or death?

ANSWER: It is life AND death.

QUESTION: Therefore it could not be unpleasant. Otherwise it would be life "or" death. So death must be a pleasure. Doesn't the healthy attitude therefore deny the unpleasant emphasis?

ANSWER: Let us not confuse the end result with the pathway that leads to this end result. Many religious philosophies have taught this truth. The end result has been used in order to shy away from facing that which still seems unpleasant, if for no other reason than it is unknown. Before you can truly experience the fact that death is pleasure -- in a healthy way -- you first have to go through your own distortion, in which it does seem bleak and frightening. Only after going through it will you come to the realization that life and death are one, that pleasure and pain are one.

QUESTION: Is it not equally an illusion to think that the problems of everyday living and the crass things that you come across are unpleasant? Aren't they pleasant for him who has mastered them? Therefore, this does deny the unpleasant principle, except in terms of an unhealthy state or attitude.

ANSWER: Once you have arrived at that state, then you will find it so. But until a person can arrive at that state, then it would be dangerous for him to try to talk himself into it. Too much of this has been done already. One has to be very careful, since evasion and self-deception are always close at hand. The temptation is so great for man that he fears to face the truth. The truth is never unpleasant, but it may often appear so in your state of temporary and distorted vision. Man has to strip himself of a truth that he himself has not yet arrived at and meanwhile face the untruth that still lives in him. He has to come to the very difficult abyss of illusion that for him is still an abyss.

QUESTION: I think this has to do with an interpretation of the word "deny." If you interpret deny as meaning that it does not exist, then it is false. But if denial is intepreted to mean that it is not a real factor, then it has another meaning.

ANSWER: Yes, that is true. But, you see, there are so many human religious denominations that originally had this truth when they taught denial of death. But man -- due to his inclination to arrive at the end result through shortcuts in order to avoid the unpleasantness of facing the illusory abyss -- clings to such words and then misuses them. The result is a superimposed faith, clung to out of fear and weakness. So let us be careful and always keep in mind that what seems most frightening -- death in all its aspects -- must be faced before it denies itself.

This was no easy lecture, my friends. It will give you much food for thought and material for your progress. Whatever is unclear, do not hesitate to ask. If there are sufficient questions of importance we may arrange another question period, according to your need.

Be blessed, each one of you. Divine strength and divine love envelope you. This is a reality. May you feel it and may you carry it with you into your lives. Be blessed. Be in peace. Be in God.

March 3, 1961