Life Manifestation Is Expression Of Dualistic Illusion

By The Pathwork Guide

Greetings, all my dearest friends here. May this coming new year be a blessed and successful one -- successful from the only point of view that really counts, and that is the finding of your true self. This expression "the finding of the real self" has been used so much that it has lost some of its meaning for many of you. This always happens when one uses an expression often, mechanically, and unthinkingly. It is therefore necessary to deeply think about, to contemplate, the real meaning of this word.

When you find your true self, you inevitably find the true meaning of life; you begin to understand life in an entirely new way. Therefore you also begin to comprehend the outer life and death manifestation. When this is understood, nothing can frighten and faze you. And this can only be understood when the inner life processes and the laws of life are perceived and experienced emotionally. This, in turn, cannot be done in an abstract and general or philosophical way. It can only happen in an ultra personal way, in a most direct approach to yourself and your subjective reactions.

One of the great difficulties in man's life is the inevitable downward curve in all growth processes. Life is growth and growth is a continuum of movement that goes in a fluctuating line. Each down brings a new up, each up must bring a new down, in order to go up again. There can be no upward movement unless there was first a downward one. Thus, there can be no life unless it has gone through a form of death. This rhythm prevails until the consciousness is no longer split within itself as a result of illusory dualism. The down movement (death) represents one side of the dualism; the upward movement (life) the other. Conciliation takes place when these movements are fully followed through, tasted, assimilated, and accepted as being a creation of the self. When the down curve is feared, struggled and fought against, one fights against one's own creative output, and is thus at war with oneself. This means a total lack of comprehension of the laws of life and of the facts of creation within one's own consciousness. Fear of the down curve means fear of change, thus stagnation is sought as a means of safety, as a means to avoid the apparent danger of moving into the self-produced curve. This curve can lead out of strife only when it is understood, accepted, and thus transcended.

The change of downward and upward curve manifests in millions of ways. The crassest one is the physical life and death curve. It is the most frightening only because the blind little self cannot see beyond the next curve, so that the whole view is concealed. Thus it appears to be an end; an end in death, at that, and not in life. In reality it is a part of a chain which ends in life without the down curve. Struggle against the perpetual change in movement only worsens the subjective experience. However, the fight and fright exist also in the less crass manifestations of this law of life. Take, for example, a journey, a change of domicile or locations. In such instances man invariably experiences depression when he terminates one phase of existence, although he may even look forward to the new beginning. Every new beginning presupposes the termination of the last phase, thus ending it, "dying" it, as it were. This applies to all levels of one's being. On the physical level this is obvious, and even though man is able to see the new beginning after the end of the old phase, he nevertheless stems against it. How much more so when the new beginning cannot be seen. The identical law applies to inner growth and movement. The new life, the new beginning of a phase, can only follow the dying of the old, which is often painful. It means battling through the waste and the mud of one's misconceptions and destructiveness. You all know that and experience it again and again on your path. No new expansion can come unless it follows the downward movement of the spirit. Translated, this means dipping into the depths of one's inner being. If pain resides in those depths, it must come out, otherwise it cannot be dissolved. The pain obstructs the light and must therefore be dug out.

The identical movement exists in breathing, as I explained before. This is the breathing of the spirit, the breathing of the universe, as it applies to each individual life manifestation.

Therefore, when you look at your life and your moods, see your bad moods as the downward curve that presages the next upward curve. Make the best of both by tuning into the subliminal intelligence that is always perceivable when it is truly desired. Then you will not stem against the downward curve and thus delay the coming through into the upper movement of your spiritual breathing and growing. You will embrace it by fully accepting it, by fully being in it and with it. There can be no more constructive and effective way of doing this than to seek to understand the personal meaning of your down-curve, to approach it as your own creation and to try to reach far enough into your own depths, asking: "What did I create and what does it mean?"

What does your life mean in terms of the inner laws and inner life processes? What does your unfulfilled longing mean in these terms? What do your frustrations mean? Needless to say, all of this can only be fully tackled when you first admit to yourself these unfulfilled longings, your discontent, your hurts, your real desires. Once this is done, squarely and honestly, you can begin to seek an understanding of why they exist and why the desires are not not fulfilled. Their very existence in your life is as much a creation of yours as a masterpiece, an accomplishment, or any other admitted creative act. The only difference is that the one you create consciously and deliberately, the other unconsciously and inadvertently. So you must seek to understand the negative creation as your own product. Unless you do this, you cannot undo the negative creation, nor can you ever find the glory of life and its riches, constantly at your disposal.

Not seeing that the negative creations are your own product makes you inevitably rebel against them. Thus you find yourself in the peculiar position of quarreling with yourself. What one hand produces the other denies and fights against, without knowing that it was your own other hand that did it. You thus quarrel with fate, with life, with all the good that could work for you if only you were ready to take the blinders off.

Then, typically, in this state of rebellion, always someone or something else is being blamed. When you do so, you are not connected with the causes and processes within the self -- and that is the whole trouble of all suffering. No matter how many times and in what different words I say so, this is still not fully observed by any of my friends working on this path. Almost all of you still overlook how many times you feel unhappy, and you only vaguely face this unhappiness. Therefore you are unable to connect it with yourself. But even when you do know that you are unhappy, and even when you have faced the exact reason for it, you still rebel against it as though it were produced by something else but you. Hence, you are still alienated from your own powers of creation, in spite of having faced up to your feelings. The grandiose creative process, constantly at work within yourself, reveals itself often first in its negative manifestation.

Even when man believes in the creative powers, in their unlimited possibilities, he images them coming to him as a sort of special reward after he has overcome his blindness, his disconnectedness, his difficulties. He must become a "finished product," as it were, before he can partake of the universal creative power -- this is the vague concept that most people, including all of you, have. This is a distortion of reality. The very unhappiness you suffer from is as much a creative output as the creation of good you dream about. As long as this is not wholly understood, it is quite impossible to partake of creating, to mold one's fate, to feel safe and at peace with the world.

You see, my friends, the creative power at work within yourself is so immense, it is so constantly operative, as you so far have no notion of. It operates according to your consciousness. This includes, of course, the conscious and the unconscious mind -- your total being. What you have or do not have is a direct creation of all you think, all you feel, all you want. You may not want it wisely, and you certainly may not want it consciously, but unconsciously you do want it. When this is fully perceived, the law of life will be understood. The law of creation, at work within you, will be understood. And the tremendous power at your disposal will begin to be vaguely sensed.

It is a grandiose power. Do not permit it to work inadvertently, arbitrarily, haphazardly, by your unwise, destructive and sloppy thinking processes, your fears, your misconceptions, your ignorance. In short, by allowing so much material to remain unconscious and thus disconnected from you. For then destructive processes will determine the creation of yourself and your life to the exact degree that they exist. Again and again, my friends react as though their unconscious did not exist. They are aware of desiring something. It still does not occur to them that their own unconscious must work in the opposite direction from this desire if the desire remains unfulfilled. They do not search within for the reason of the unfulfillment. They do not ascribe their state as a product, or creation of themselves.

Seek the forms within your own powerful soul substance that bring you everything you have and everything you do not have. The separation between your conscious and unconscious mind is your greatest enemy. For, the moment this separation is eliminated, you will no longer be governed by inner forces you do not know and therefore fear. And yet man's greatest fear and resistance is to eliminate this separating wall. He struggles so fiercely against the elimination of this separation. This is such folly, for only in this separation is he helpless. And only in this separation is he practically forced to ascribe his unhappiness to dark powers that seem to have nothing to do with him. Thus he fears the world, as well as his own inner being. Because he fears his own inner being, he does not want to go into it. And because he does not want to go into it, he separates himself from it and therefore it seems as if it needed to be feared. Not wanting to go into it logically results in lack of awareness, lack of knowing what is going on, not only about one's inadvertent destructiveness, but also about the creative power that could work for, not against, man. This is one of the great and important vicious circles that man stubbornly refuses to change into a benign one.

The creative power within is therefore not only constructive, benign, good, and wise, it is also destructive, vicious, evil, and stupid. This does not make it any less divine as far as its origin and its essence are concerned. It is just as much error, misconception, and evil wishes as it is truth, reality, and love. When I say this, this means, of course, that it is so in its present manifestation due to man's temporary state of mind. It does not mean that it is inherently so. The power works eternally, neutrally, and unquestioningly according to the entity's consciousness and direction. The creative power expresses through you according to what you are at any given moment. It penetrates your entire being and is molded by all you are, by what and how you breathe in and out, by all you think, all you feel, all you will and desire; it is an expression of all your attitudes, the crassest and most obvious as well as the most subtle and concealed. All this is so powerfully creative that dynamite and atomic energy is nothing in comparison. Those physical energies mentioned create a one-time impact of tremendous physical effect. But the energy of life is a constantly-working, powerfully-imprinting, molding, directing dynamic force. And you use it whether you know it or not. Each thought is using it, each desire is using it, each hidden fear is using it, each shrinking away from experience is using it.

What a path such as this primarily aims at is the realization of this truth, the understanding of this fact of life, and the elimination of the separating wall between the conscious and unconscious mind.

You must not imagine that the conscious and unconscious are two different minds. They are one and the same. They only appear as different when the unconscious part of it is first discovered. It then appears to be a creature completely unconnected from the conscious aims and desires. Only little by little, when these two parts of the individuality unite, does it become obvious that they have been one all along, but were split asunder artificially; and one part then was "forgotten," was denied to exist.

It is the same thing as far as the Universal Mind is concerned. Man's consciousness is not a separate thing from the Universal Consciousness. In fact, there is no distinct borderline to delineate the difference. Again, as with the conscious and unconscious of the personality, so with the individual and the Universal Consciousness. This applies both to the aware and unaware parts of it. It is impossible to determine where the individual consciousness ends and the Universal one begins. Your own immediate conscious mind, right now at your disposal, is the fringe of the vast Universal Mind. To express the thought that man is connected with the Universal Mind does not really properly convey the truth, for this might imply that two different things are connected. But this is misleading, for the two are not different in nature, in essence, in origin. They are the same. Again, as with the conscious and unconscious, they are merely separated by lack of awareness.

The conscious mind you express in your daily living is separated from the vast Whole, the Universal Mind, only by an illusory belief that you are separate. You do not possess an aspect of this Universal Mind, you are not even a separated part of it. You ARE it.

What is now unconscious was conscious at one time. When we speak of conscious and unconscious, it is not something that happened to you. It is something that you made. You made it unconscious, as you continue to make material unconscious daily. This applies even to material you have known before this life. Even that is but "momentarily forgotten" because you thought it more expedient to forget it. No matter how unaware one is of what goes on within, you discover it is nothing more or less than a re-discovery. It usually feels as though one had known it all along. This applies just as much to repressed psychological factors of this life, as to the so-called great metaphysical truths you were not aware of in your intellect. All knowledge in the universe is essentially in you. Your consciousness has separated itself from it and has therefore "forgotten." This is true for the erroneous, destructive part, as well as for the Universal Mind. You are a manifestation of the latter.

When the separation vanishes, the illusion vanishes as well -- namely that you are a separate being. Your fear of giving up this illusion is so tragic because you believe only in this illusory separate state as being real, as having identity. You believe that you lose your identity, thus your very life, when you lose your separation. This is totally false. The separation must vanish. The separation exists due to innumerable errors, which in the course of such a path you begin to discover and uncover.

The main error in this separated state is duality -- all either/or. We have talked about many dualistic aspects, many false alternatives man belabors and suffers from. He gets more and most lost in a trap because he thinks he must make a choice between dualistic, and therefore erroneous, alternatives, based on completely false premises. I have discussed many of them and you, in your individual path work, have found many more than we can discuss here.

Tonight I shall discuss a specific, extremely important, and very fundamental dualism, based, as usual, on erroneous concepts. This is universal and, in one way or another, to some degree, applies to all human beings. It is the following duality: pleasure versus goodness. When I say pleasure, this includes all personal happiness, fulfillment, gratification on all levels, self-interest, self-assertion. In the duality, all this contradicts goodness and unselfishness and must therefore be sacrificed. The opposite facet of this same duality is self-deprivation for the sake of decency, honesty, morality. "You must be good or else!" Goodness and unselfishness then mean renunciation of bliss.

The harmfulness of the misconception of this duality is impossible to fully grasp unless one contemplates its ramifications very carefully. Sacrificing pleasure includes everything. Since life is pleasure, life itself is thus renounced. Since health is not possible without allowing the life force, with all its pleasurable effects, to surge through the system, ill health is a result of this duality. Intense physical pleasure is a legitimate need and longing because it is part of the universal law of life. Selfhood, autonomy, self-assertion are aspects of maturity and self-responsibility. They are intensely pleasurable and must also be forsaken when pleasure is supposed to be wrong, and is therefore denied. Thus the individual remains in a painful state of dependency and lack of identity, of weakness and helplessness, because, remotely, he feels as though this were the more "decent" and "unselfish" way to be. The other seems to be too "aggressive," vigorous, forbidden. Hence, the spiritual pleasure of knowing the power within, and one's own potentials to create destiny, must also be forsaken in this duality. It, too, seems too pleasurable and "assuming," not meek enough. All these delights are abandoned in the distorted belief that they are wrong. Man believes that if he asserts himself in such a way, if he arrogates himself of the powers that are his to begin with, he is "selfish and sinful." Yet only because he is really selfish and sinful (although not selfish and sinful because of his need for selfhood and ecstasy) must he believe this falsity, and, because of this falsity, he cannot shed the real selfishness, greed, and cruelty.

For, the moment he truly understands his freedom and his powers, he does not need to be selfish, cruel, and greedy. For then there is no false alternative, no split, or choice to be made between pleasure and goodness. But as long as man believes that in order to be good he must renounce pleasure, he must fluctuate between these two alternatives. He cannot possibly commit himself wholeheartedly to either course. It is impossible for man to find peace while this choice seems to be imposed on him. Therefore he is both selfish and pleasure-denying. The more he feels compelled to deny himself pleasure, the more selfish he must become in order to blindly fill the void. And the more selfish he becomes, the more he must punish himself for the selfishness and convince himself that he does not deserve pleasure.

The delight of living, the delight that life is in its very essence, must remain concealed as long as this duality exists; as long as man chafes under those impossible alternatives; as long as he thinks that he must choose between giving up his hopes for complete fulfillment for the sake of decency and goodness, or having to bear the brunt of badness (even if only in his secret self-evaluation) for the sake of tasting some of the delights that life offers and that life intrinsically is.

This is a very deep duality, and when you look closely deep within yourself, you will find that you, too, are influenced by it to a greater extent than you may believe. This duality does not merely come from personal influences in the individual's early surroundings. They existed, of course, but only because this is such a general, universal distortion. The destructive part of the Universal Consciousness is deeply imprinted with this duality, it is imbued with such false divisions.

When an individual comes to the point where he deeply experiences the original unity of life in this respect, he discovers the tremendous truth that there is no such choice to be made: that he can reach for every possible delight, pleasure, fulfillment, gratification, and ecstasy conceivable and be, at the same time, a totally generous, giving, self-surrendering person. In fact, self-surrender and giving are not only not depriving, as it is feared when one still lives in duality, but are enriching. In theory you may already accept this, but when the emotional awakening comes, it is world-shaking; it is as though you would shed burdens of unnecessary shackles and discover the great freedom of the world, of growing, of being, of reaching out, and growing and growing -- in more strength, integrity, in love and wisdom, in power to create, in awareness of things as they really are, in the ability to experience pleasure supreme.

Now, my friends, you may be surprised at the expression "the destructive part of the Universal Consciousness." For it is usually assumed that the Universal Consciousness is only constructive. Here, again, arbitrary divisions are made that do not exist. As you have a personal constructive and personal destructive unconscious, so there exists the consciousness of this earth sphere, of every nation, of every city, of every group. Just as with the individual, this consciousness is partly constructive and partly destructive, what is contained in it is partly aware and partly not. Just as the individual is an expression of the Divine and can manifest the unified power and goodness of it when he reaches into his depth, transcending the waking, conscious mind as well as the destructive unconscious, so can the group consciousness, the larger bodies of people whose combined creative life substance forms one unit, accomplish such a change.

The more individuals dissolve their destructive conscious and unconscious processes and transcend them by reaching into the unified divine depths, the more the world consciousness must change. Thus each individual contributes much more to the shape of the world by his own development and growth than he can possibly appreciate. There is no other salvation than the discovery of the ground of one's own being, which is so alive, so powerful, so full of potentials and possibilities -- infinite in good, infinite in abundance. If the ego intelligence can accept this as a possibility and work with it by deliberately activating this power, the in-between layer of error, destruction, and suffering will give way much faster than otherwise. Little by little, you will see that the substance is all the same, it is essentially the identical life stuff. There is a parallel between the discovery of the self, consisting of an apparently quite separated destructive, self-willed part, and a still more hidden infinite divine power (both being essentially the same as the conscious mind), and between the discovery of the unity in regard to pleasure and personal goodness and decency.

Are there any questions in regard to this topic?

QUESTION: I have a personal question which might very well pertain to this topic. It includes two things that I would like to have you comment on. First, I have been in a highly energized state lately, which seems to be related to my job. It has prevented me from sleep and forced me to resort to taking tranquilizers. Secondly, I will see a person very soon whom I have been close to in the past. I am extremely frightened and ambivalent about this person and feel that I can't remain in control when in this person's presence. I think the sexual terror I have is very strong in this situation.

ANSWER: Yes, this indeed pertains very much to the topic of this lecture. But these facets are connected with one another, they are interdependent. Your highly energized state is a direct result of displacing the natural sexual force. It has no way of finding expression in pleasure, which is what it is meant to do. This deprivation of pleasure renders you ill to some degree. The fact that you forbid yourself the intense pleasure on all levels you are meant to experience, out of false fears and ideas, creates an energy you cannot properly assimilate. There must be a perpetual turnover of energy in a healthily functioning person. This cannot take place when the destiny of the pleasure current is willfully and artificially stopped. This pleasure comes about when the stream of energy is followed. It leads to loving, giving and receiving, uniting, opening up to the forces of life and to the innermost self with all its powers, as well as to another person with whom one shares these delights. When this is followed through, the system of man functions well. Every energy unit has its own metabolism, its own rhythm or turnover. The fright of meeting this person is due to the energy of the pleasure principle in you being strongly activated. Thus your misconception that union with the other sex and the pleasure of this union are bad and dangerous comes to the surface more directly. And this is is good, for it permits you to look at it, to see it in action, to see its power within your consciousness, and to convince yourself of how preposterous this fear is. So that time can, again, be made into a further stepping stone of growth for you if you thus understand what happens to you.

Even in your work situation the problem is essentially the same. This is a new experience for you. It is a good experience in that it shows that you had mastered a handicap. It shows that you are coping successfully with reality to a much greater degree than ever before, It shows that you can take and accept certain aspects of life that you had never been willing to take and accept before. You not only good work as such, but you have overcome blocks and difficulties within yourself. Only a short time ago, they seemed insurmountable. Your personal strength and good will have led you to this growth, which must be experienced as pleasurable. Finding out one's strength, resources, abilities, resiliency, and any asset you can name, is pleasure. Yet you deny yourself this pleasure -- the pleasure of your own accomplishment -- as you deny yourself all pleasure. It is as though there were a film standing between you and experience, a thick, glazed film, like a plastic wall. This wall separates you from the ability to be touched by experience. This does not only apply to you, of course. Growth means, among other aspects, the gradual thinning and eventual dissolution of this film, so that man experiences directly. The meaning of this is profound, for as long as man shrinks back from this direct, naked experience, he must be in trouble with himself, he must be weak, dependent, afraid, and, above all, deprived. The more one sheds misconceptions and wakes up to life, the thinner this film becomes, and the more directly one experiences life. The thicker the film is, the more aware you should become:"Here an I, and outside, through this transparent glazed wall, I see experience, but it does not touch me." Whenever experience touches you because the emotions are there, you shrink back from it in fright. This fright is a wrong conclusion. Experience of pleasure, as well as of unpleasure, cannot ever harm you, unless you believe that it will harm you. And the harm comes exclusively from defending yourself against experience, by closing yourself up against it. And that is the harm. The anxiety states you experience are exclusively a result of fearing pleasure, as well as unpleasure. In other words, of fearing to be touched by experience, and by building a defensive wall against it.

In order to come out of this state, you have to recognize that your unconscious is not yet as willing as your conscious mind. Accept this for the moment, for this is the prerequisite for influencing it. Deal with your resisting unconscious in an intelligent way. Speak to it in a relaxed way. Say to it: "You are wrong in fearing experience. Nothing bad can happen to me if I have pleasure, nor if I am hurt or disappointed. These are illusory fears. I do want the resiliency that is essentially mine. I do call upon these powers deeper within me than the false fears and ideas. I no longer wish to reject experience. My fear of so-called good or bad happenings is based on illusion." Thus you will learn, little by little, to let yourself experience whatever comes your way. Let it come to you, do not ward it off.

May you all gain more truthful understanding of the glory of life, which will make you recognize more and more that there is nothing to fear, absolutely nothing to fear, that your fear is illusion. Fear and illusion are synonymous, as life and pleasure are. Be blessed, be in God.

The Guide
by Eva Pierrakos
January, 1968

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