Gems

To our way of seeing things, we have been put into a world that is an objective, fixed place; everything is ready-made for struggle. Submitting to this version of reality, false though it may be, seems to make the most sense…To a degree, this assessment is correct. We must struggle to accept the world the way we find it and deal with it on its terms…At the same time we have a new vision of things rising up from the fog…

With this new awareness, we know—in our gut, not just in our head—that there is only good, only meaning, and nothing to fear…Knowing this is not a burden; it liberates us and makes us feel safe…But also by knowing this, it may be tempting to skip over all this grappling with duality. Let’s just go straight to the good stuff. This type of thinking comes from a childish desire to be king of the hill, even if we have to cheat our way to the top…

When we’re snagged on duality, we have tunnel vision that creates inaccuracy due to the fact we leave stuff out...Always, always, always, it’s our responsibility to search and grope and extend the limits of our vision. If we’re not in harmony, we still don’t have all the truth…

So back to that incontrovertible worldview in which we see opposites in black and white—wouldn’t it seem the epitome of delusion to not see things that way? For real, on the level of appearance, duality is a fact. Life appears to die, and bad lurks in the nook of every good cranny. There’s light and dark, and night and day, in sickness and in health…Whether we know it or not, our greatest longing is to find the deeper level of truth—that’s the silver lining…

First off, we can’t get there with our outer will alone. We won’t find it in a book or a philosophy class…In our reactions to our daily struggles, we’ll find our work…For starters, we need to realize that pain and fear are like white on the rice of duality…They’re so ingrained in our reality, we don’t know anything else. We take them so for granted, we don’t chafe under their appearance…

Most of us don’t know that duality hurts…On top of this, we often don’t realize there’s another way to view and live in the world, and that this other perception eliminates the pain of duality…

It’s virtually impossible to come out of the gates feeling the same way about two opposites; there’s no way we can force ourselves to react the same way to pleasure as we do to pain…

We can boil most of our feelings and attitudes down into two buckets: fear and desire. In the fear bucket, where we strain away from pain and death, there will be a measure of anger, resentment and bitterness…As long as we live with the straining, the associated inner tension will prevent us from realizing the ultimate unitive state in which there’s no death and no pain…

The way out of this maze is by going through the tunnel of our fear, including our anger, bitterness and rage at life—which up till now were skulking around in our unconscious—for putting us in this lousy situation of being helpless in the face of death and pain...

Even as we cease our struggling, we’ll know there is the right kind of struggle at hand. When we no longer fear and no longer reach anxiously, we’ll know that everything we desire is available right here, right now, at our fingertips. What we run from is an illusion, even though we can feel the temporary pain of it. When we move towards the pain, we unfold our real self.

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Gems, Chapter 16: Relaxing into the Struggle to Find the Oneness

Read Original Pathwork® Lecture: #253 Continue Your Struggle and Cease all Struggle

People on a spiritual path of self-knowing like to use the word “surrender”. Those of us who aren’t capable of surrendering aren’t going to have much luck finding the core of our being—our divine nature. We won’t be able to love or truly learn and grow. We’ll be stiff and defended and closed off…

One thing we need surrendering to is God’s will, because without that, we’re SOL…And let’s be clear, truth and God are synonymous…What else needs surrendering to? For one, our own feelings…We also need to surrender to the people we love. We need to trust them and give them the benefit of the doubt…

Refusing to surrender has to do with lack of trust as well as suspicion and fear, and a general misunderstanding that we’ll be giving up our autonomy along with our ability to make decisions in the future. But our holding out creates a supercharged self-will that wears a person out. As a result, we run on an empty tank…

Surrendering, on the other hand, is a movement of fullness. When we give over and let go, enrichment must follow; it’s a natural law…But, wow, it so doesn’t work to just say ‘surrendering is the key.’ If only it were that simple. For example, are we to surrender to someone who truly can’t be trusted?...

There is an indispensable need to have a discriminating mind that knows when to trust…Surrendering does not mean to give up our ability to make good choices. Rather, in surrendering, we may see that a change of course is appropriate…The rough terrain to navigate is the interim stage in which we’re not quite whole and therefore objective enough to fully let go into an inner yielding attitude without which it’s impossible to become more whole. So we must try…

There is, in fact, no contradiction between surrendering and standing up for what’s right. Neither is possible without the other; they are both vital halves of one complete whole…Oddly, it takes a mountain of courage to believe in God’s truth and our power to carry it out into the world.

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Gems, Chapter 15: Surrendering to the Double-Sided Nature of Duality

Read Original Pathwork® Lecture: #254 Surrender

When we embark on a spiritual path, our growth and expansion propels us toward new experiences and higher states of consciousness and unity. This is an abundant snowball that turns out smiley faces…

One essential aspect of our creative process is visualization. Because if we can’t envision the state of unity we want to grow into, it will be hard to ever get there. We need to see the prototype provided by someone who’s gone before us…People are typically very good emulators. We look around at others, especially those with attitudes and behavior patterns we identify with—which can be either positive or negative—and it’s like their way of being is contagious…They become our prototype for the new state we grow into…

We meet just the right figure who sparks a recognition in our minds and we follow their true example…It’s only when we emulate negative attitudes by identifying with negative role models that we head down a road to self-betrayal…Negative identification is what leads to the development of “images". This term “images” refers to the generalizations and wrong conclusions we make as children. When such a belief is in place, we have a limited vision of life and aren’t able to correctly see all our available options…Positive identification, on the other hand, leads to is visualization…

What this means is that we all need to find a positive model we can identify with…When we’re filled with inner blocks and foggy awareness, these distortions inside ourselves will color our ability to spot true exemplary figures…We can only see goodness when we’re relatively open and free ourselves. Then something clicks…It’s not that we will imitate something foreign to our nature. Rather, basic universal traits will express themselves through us…

First, let’s look at how our inner and outer life interrelate. Some claim only the inner life matters. But they overlook a simple fact: that isn’t how it works…Schools of thought then that teach asceticism contribute to creating a dichotomy between two things that in fact are one. So denying the outer life is not a path to enriching our inner spiritual life…

Such a distorted reaction often comes about in response to the equally distorted opposite extreme, which posits that basically, ‘it’s better to look good than to feel good.’ Such an approach negates the importance of the inner reality, possibly even denying that it exists…Both of these counter-currents are in distortion; each attempts to eliminate the other but fails to look in the mirror…

When all is said and done, true inner growth must show up in our world…Once we tap our divine source, we will make use of our own creative powers and no longer feel like a pawn on the chessboard of life…What a sense of peace to realize our life is our own creation. This perspective is quite the door opener that escorts us out of the two-dimensional existence of either-or…

Right now, every single day, we must die—we must survive a million little ego deaths to find eternal life. Then we will be ready to live fearlessly. How do we do this? We let go. We surrender…That’s how we transcend death and intuitively experience that, son of a gun, life keeps on going…

When we temporarily let go of the little self, we find the larger self waking up, and then the two come together and unify…In the end, after all that death, we realize that the little self of the ego never even really dies—it unites with the greater self. Nothing is given up…

Creating abundance from fear is not living in reality. This is a house of cards that will need to be crushed so we can dissolve our illusion of poverty. Then real richness can grow in the plentiful soil of unity…There is great cause for rejoicing over the ongoing creative process that is alive within each one of us. We only need to visualize it as reality and then set to work at clearing anything and everything in our way.

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Gems, Chapter 14: How to Visualize Living in a State of Unity

Read Original Pathwork® Lecture: #210 Visualization Process for Growing Into the Unitive State

What about the soul movement of desire—positive or negative?…Eastern philosophies are big fans of the notion that desirelessness is ideal, postulating that having desires hinders ones spirituality. And this is true. But it’s only half-true…Because it’s impossible to create if there is an absence of desire. Creation requires our ability to visualize a new state of being, and for that we must have a desire to have said state. It all comes down to how we go about this…

If our desires are overly strong and too tight, there is a misconception underneath it that says ‘I must have it.’ So then it's not really a desire, but a demand…Then if life doesn’t give us our way, it is bad and unfair. We’ll go on to prove how unfair life is through the dismal results we create with our unfair demand. Dog, meet tail…

If we want to create something good, we’ll need to start with a blueprint: a positive, real desire. And the breeze that carries forward our plans for positive creation is a soft-flowing soul movement—desire without a “must”…Embedded into the concept of desire is a paradox: the right kind of desire needs to be so relaxed, we don’t need to have it fulfilled…In other words, we need to have a desireless desire. How can this be?...

We need to come into a state where we are ready to give up what we desire. We can deeply long for something and then also accept the pain of not having it. Sounds like a tall order…We don’t want to feel any pain or any of its derivatives: frustration, disappointment and rejection. We resist. And that’s what splits us off from ourselves, fragmenting our consciousness into smaller and smaller bits. But if we can get our arms around acceptance and non-resistance in the right way, we can heal and gather ourselves…

In the end, everything hinges on our reaction to pain. We have to learn that pain is just as trustworthy as the rest of the universe. We can’t split off certain aspects because they are painful and continue to trust all the rest…And yet, we can’t fail to open to the beauty of our eternal being if we are willing to accept both the beauty and the beast that lives inside us right now. Then we’ll see that the good is forever-me, and the bad is for-now-me…

When we open up to desiring to see both the good and the bad in both ourselves and the other, we experience the unitive principle. Seeing how there is plenty of negativity to go around, and how there is also goodness on both sides of every fence, will eliminate hate…In short, a desire to blame is always a desire to not see ourselves…

To create a desire for a new inner state, we need to feel all the “musts” that squash fulfillment. Even if they yield short-term results, “musts” are not our friends…But as we learn to let go our death-grip on our desires, rewards will blossom like flowers in the sun.

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Gems, Chapter 13: Landing our Desires by Letting Go of our Demands

Read Original Pathwork® Lecture: #206 Desire: Creative or Destructive

We often think of finding faith as having a blind belief in something we have no way of knowing…And indeed, if that’s what faith’s about, it would be right to discard it. For who wants to be stupid and believe in something that has no grounding in reality and can never be experienced as truth?...

This perspective keeps us perched on a platform from which the only things that are real are what we can see, touch, know and prove. From here, we will never have to leap into the unknown. But here’s the rub: the only way to expand and change is by leaping, gulp, into the unknown…

True faith involves several steps, or stages, each highly grounded in intelligence and reality…So step one in acquiring faith is to consider that new possibilities exist of which we currently know nothing…From here we can meditate on opening to the divine within to show us how to find better ways of functioning. There is nothing unrealistic about this approach. There is no blind belief called for…

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Gems, Chapter 12: Four Pragmatic Steps for Finding Faith and Addressing Doubt

Read Original Pathwork® Lecture: #221 Faith and Doubt in Truth or Distortion

There is a rich, nougat filling at our core. The work for each one of us is to know that, underneath it all, this is who we are…What we’re looking for is a very specific feeling that is outside our usual rainbow of feelings that tops out at love…It’s so rare, it has no name. For lack of something better, we could call it ‘that cosmic feeling’…

Just imagine what it would be like to have the total absence of fear. For many of us, we’re so unaware of all our fears and so used to them—it’s like we’re a fish and they’re the water we’re swimming in—it doesn’t occur to us there could be life beyond our fears…So in this state, there can be no worry or anxiety; nothing makes us feel restless…

This is an experience that’s at once spiritual and emotional as well as mental and physical; it envelops a whole person. And there are four keys that make it possible to attain:

We need to get the cart and horse in the right order in our lives…Now, we’re creating negatively; we could just as well be creating positively. Instead of following the will of our little ego that thrives on vanity, greed, laziness and dishonesty, we could be letting God express through us, creating honest-to-God beautiful things…

We have to uncover the negative creator inside ourselves. We have to see clearly what outer manifestations came from which inner intentions. All the stuff we deplore and complain about, waiting for a miracle to take it away, or the stuff we’ve given up on and have instead settled on deprivation and frustration as our unnecessary daily plight—all this points to the work we have to do.

We’ve got to learn to handle our feelings. All of them, not just the ones we like…And the only way to get beyond them is by going through them…It’s weird, but when we are able to accept and feel our pain, we expand our ability to sustain pleasure…There is no feeling that is so bad we can’t air it out and flip its expression back to its positive configuration.

The only thing stopping us from feeling our pain or our rage is our dishonest vanity—we want to appear other than how we really are…Also, it’s not true that if we go into our pain we will perish. It won’t kill us and we won’t become lost in it. Pain is just stagnant, stuck energy that is waiting to be released, re-enlivened and healed.

The impetus for developing a positive intention can’t be to comply with some rules; it’s got to come from the core. We have to want love and truth for its own sake…We can find our negative intention in the answers to the questions: Where am I still unhappy? Where am I anxious? Where do I have ‘issues’?

We must learn to listen within, quieting the busy outer mind so we can be receptive…We need to watch out for how the ego wants to cut us off from our own feelings, and from our own heart. Thoughts and doubts are tricks of the ego to keep our attention wandering.

If we see ourselves doubting, we can doubt our doubt, and expand into new possibilities. Only then will we deeply know that these teachings are telling us the truth.

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Gems, Chapter 11: Four Avenues for Reaching the Cosmic Nougat at our Core

Read Original Pathwork® Lecture: #200 The Cosmic Feeling

Awareness doesn’t just show up, served to us on a silver platter; we have to fight for it. It won’t come easy or cheap. But sticking with the isolated ego state is no picnic either. What stops us are the tricks of the ego used to keep its me-Tarzan mojo going…

For starters, the ego will trot out every conceivable negativity known to humankind…We can bundle all these ugly traits under the triumvirate of pride, self-will and fear, which are the main ways the big, bad Lower Self avoids self-improvement…The ego also maintains its separateness by pridefully putting up an artificial conflict between itself and everyone else: “I must prove to the world how much better I am; I must out-do everyone”…Comparing and competing only sharpens our sense of separation…

It is also pride that makes us live for the sake of how we appear in others eyes, rather than for the sake of truth and real feelings and our own interests. Our whole goal then is to create an impression…We tuck a lot of prideful behaviors behind our ego, including all our defensive strategies—submission, aggression and withdrawal—and their cover-up masks. These power masks, love masks and serenity masks are intended to hide them…These are all tricks designed to keep us small. No joke, that’s what the ego is going for…

Per the ego, we must stay very afraid. For instance, we fear exposing our real feelings, which denies relating deeply with others. Here are a few more things up the ego’s sleeve: inattentiveness, absentmindedness and lack of concentration. For how can we possibly transcend ourselves if we can’t pay attention?...The ego uses these tricks to keep us in isolation. But we’re like ventriloquists the way we throw our refusal to move on something like another person’s idiosyncrasies or shortcomings...

The way out of this jam is for the ego to overcome its temptation to stay little—to stay put…We must grope in the dark, using whatever parts of ourselves we have at our disposal, to understand how the ego operates and then cut off its funding…

The ego comes from the same material we ultimately want to reunite with. So it’s not to be ignored, insulted or denied…The healthy parts of the ego are the parts that hold the light for self-discovery. The weak, sick parts often want to give up simply because we can’t stand ourselves for one more day…. when we transcend our ego, we tear down unnecessary fences and expand the scope of our field of operation. We bring in more reality…Then the true mosaic of life, made up of eternal truth and beauty and love, becomes ours.

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Gems, Chapter 10: Spotting the Tricks of our Ego and Getting Over Ourselves

Read Original Pathwork® Lecture: #199 The Meaning of the Ego and its Transcendence

The more we ramp up our commitment—and really mean it—and make an effort every day to find our blocks and distortions, the more energy and excitement we will feel. But if we focus on selfish ends, we’ll be more insecure, battling a frightening sense that life is meaningless. Here’s the vicious circle: life is meaningless, we push selfishly for minor fulfillments, we feel divorced from Christ, and life feels more meaningless. Then we wonder why we feel depressed in the worst way.

Some of us have climbed off this hamster wheel, but we’re still only making a half-hearted effort. We’ve got one foot in heaven and the other on a banana peel. In truth, if we dedicate our life and talents to God, we will flourish in our daily life. Best yet, our splits will heal and unify, so unbelief will turn to belief, fear to trust, hate to love, ignorance to wisdom, separateness to union, and death to eternal life. Holy palooza.

When we’re weak and won’t stand up to evil in others—when we won’t fight for the truth—we’re encouraging evil. We’re saying the perpetrator isn’t that bad, that it’s OK and maybe smart, and see, other people also support it. We fear that if we stand up for decency and exposing the evil, we’ll be the one who gets ridiculed. We sell out in order to not be rejected….

So here’s something interesting to ponder: the active principle in distortion—as murderous and harmful as it might be—is never able to cause as much damage as the receptive, passive principle in distortion. So the lowliest attribute on the bad-ways-to-be scale of humanity is not to be hateful, it is to be lazy.

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Gems, Chapter 9: Why Lazy is the Worst Way to Be

Read Original Pathwork® Lecture: #244 "Be in the World but Not of the World" – The Evil of Inertia

The pain of injustice contains much more than can be expressed by this word “injustice.” Because our pain is not just about injustice that is happening to us in the here-and-now. It includes a fear that we live in a world where destruction can happen—and there are no safety valves.

It’s the fear that there’s no rhyme or reason to anything, and that nothing we do—good, bad or otherwise—will have any effect on the outcome. The pain of injustice distinctly results from feeling disconnected and leads to feeling disconnected. There it is. When we can’t connect results with their cause, we panic, and this fear of meaninglessness sets in.

We need to go back to considering this point that whatever exists in the macrocosm—the world at large—also exists in the microcosm—our own self. So the first place to look at creating a shift is in our own psyche. No other way around it, we’ve got to do our own work. Otherwise we’ll spend our lives tilting at windmills outside ourselves, and never see that the distortion of truth must live within us. For if it did not, the outer chaos of the world wouldn’t light a fire deep in our bellies.

All we do and desire and strive for and accomplish—it has an impact, whether we realize this or not. We don’t need to fear or resist this reality. We only do so because we think our destructive bits are the whole pie—our ultimate essence and final reality. If that were true, it would indeed be unbearable.

But that alternative is what the dark forces whisper into our ears. They want us to remain in pain and confusion, disconnected from the greater reality of life. For if we stay in the dark, we’ll rail against the pain of an unjust universe; we won’t see the beauty of God’s creation and the justice that permeates it all. We won’t see the truth that—really and truly, Scout’s honor—it’s all good.

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Gems, Chapter 8: The Pain of Injustice and the Truth About Fairness

Read Original Pathwork® Lecture: #249 The Pain of Injustice – Cosmic Records of All Personal and Collective Events, Deeds, Expressions

If we hindered the cycles of physical change by somehow constricting space for physical expansion, atrophy and finally death would occur. We would destroy life. The unseen aspects of an organism—the psychic, spiritual, mental and emotional levels—are no different. Yet humans carry with them a mass image—or a collective hidden belief. It says we should fear change, which then saddles us with overcoming fear of death.

The notion perpetuated by this widespread belief is that there is security in not changing. This is not a namby pamby thing; to wit, it is this very belief that is responsible for the creation of death. For our life experience is molded by our convictions…

This fear of expanding creates a narrow space we must wedge our psyche into…If we are afraid of change, we will atrophy the spiritual muscle we need to develop in order to expand; we’ll box ourselves into a nonmoving state and scarcely breathe in an effort to thwart change. That explains, in a nutshell, the human condition…The way out of our dollhouse-sized existence is to create a new consciousness within that doesn’t fear change. That trusts change as a natural and desirable way to live…

The illusion of time is a side effect of the ongoing movement of everything that is alive. Time also arises out of the misguided belief that we should avoid the future and cling to the past if we hope to go on existing…It’s odd, in fact, how much courage it requires to take the apparent risk of believing in something new and positive…

We’re not given a fear of death in order to manipulate us into taking some initiative (even though that wouldn’t be a bad idea). Nay nay, our fear of death is something we ourselves create through our fear of moving and changing.

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Gems, Chapter 7: Rolling with Change and Overcoming Fear of Death

Read Original Pathwork® Lecture: #230 The Universality of Change – Reincarnative Process in the Same Life Span