Three Levels Of Reality For Inner Guidance

By The Pathwork Guide

Greetings to my very dearest friends who are gathered here. You are indeed blessed, not only by your presence in the spirit of wanting to receive guidance and truth, but primarily by every single inner effort made toward the realization of your true being. The more this realization is activated, the more blessings are generated from within.

The human being who is cut off from his inner reality is indeed lost. The majority of human beings are more or less totally cut off from it and must therefore find their way back to their inner reality. There are a few who have attained this connection -- and they always were and always will be the spiritual leaders of humanity. Every effort on this path is aimed at re-establishing such a connection for inner guidance, for the manifestation of the inner reality.

Jesus Christ has proclaimed that the kingdom of heaven is within man. These words are only too often taken for granted, and not much thought is given to them. What do we mean when we say the kingdom? What does the word kingdom symbolize? It symbolizes the absolute power and wealth that the spiritually awakened find to be a reality. We speak, of course, of the spiritual power and wealth of love, truth, peace, expansion, creativity, bliss, and knowledge of the power of the self to create anything it can conceive of. This comprises everything that life could be. It means attaining one's full selfhood, as it is meant to be. If you would realize that you have not even attained a particle of the power and beauty, truth and love, ecstasy and possibility of creative expansion that you could possess, execute, and that already is yours, my friends. These are not empty words; this is the immediately available truth.

This path toward inner reality and inner guidance is laborious. But it is primarily laborious because you imagine the truth to be so far away, so very much farther than it actually is. You cannot conceive of what life already is, right now, and how it could be for you if only you could see it, know it, and therefore realize it. You still perceive this as a faraway, abstract, unreal theory, and you experience yourself as an isolated particle in an essentially hostile universe, or, at least, in an indifferent universe that has nothing to do with you. You conceive of the universe as a static, immovable fact into which you are put and whose laws have no relationship to your own inner laws.

This concept and the way you experience yourself in relation to life are your real difficulties. They are what makes the path so difficult and laborious -- nothing else. Thus, the difficulty is not actual, it consists of this concept. The question is, how can you change this concept? This is what requires labor and effort. And, unbelievable as this appears to him who has already attained this reality of being, you struggle against the fulfillment of being your true self as if this were the most horrible fate in the world. If the illusion about the separation between your true being and your momentary consciousness, or the separation between the universe and yourself, would not exist, there would be an instant awakening -- and you would know who you are and what life is.

All my lectures, all our work together, attack this problem of your illusion from different angles. All these different approaches have a certain sequential order. Generally, you find the same sequential order within your own private, personal, individual path. Yet the individual path cannot be forced to imitate the sequence of these lectures. Rather, the process is -- as some of you have already found out -- that you, with this guiding help, find your own truth as a direct, spontaneous experience from within. Thus, in the first moments of understanding, this truth usually appears so new and fresh that you think you had never heard it before. But afterward it can be verified as confirming the lectures you have studied, the lectures that have penetrated the deeper regions of your unconscious. You use the lectures and then you use your own intuitive faculties, freed progressively more and more by facing the truth you did not want to see in the beginning. Elimination of error frees intuition and creative experiences from within. The lectures first give an impetus to this process and later they fortify and confirm it when you read them again.

Tonight our specific approach will be to discuss three levels of reality. If you can first comprehend, and finally assimilate, what I say here, this path will become much easier for you. Some of the illusory difficulty will be eliminated, so that your inner guidance will manifest itself as a natural, effortless phenomenon.

What are these three levels of reality? Perhaps you expect to hear of the well-known levels of the physical, mental, and spiritual realities, which we have spoken about in many different contexts and connections. But here I am referring to something else, so be prepared to gear your mind to a new approach.

The first level of reality is what you think exists. The second level of reality is what actually exists. The third level of reality is what could exist. It is preferable not to discuss this in a philosophical, general, or theoretical manner. The more specific and personal you can be in assimilating what I outline here, and the more you can apply it to the seemingly most insignificant, subjective experiences and reactions in your daily struggles, the better it is. Examine your problematic reactions and attitudes, those that do not leave you peaceful, happy, and alive, and try to see how what I say tonight applies to you.

No matter how insignificant or how all-important a disturbance may appear to you, ask yourself: "What do I really believe exists? In me? Around me? In the interaction between me and others? In the condition as I experienced it?" This is not as easy, as simple, or as self-evident as it may appear off hand. In fact I would say that to penetrate this level is perhaps the very greatest difficulty. Once this is done, the next two levels will be much easier to deal with. Man is utterly ignorant and confused about what he really thinks and feels. As a rule, he looks away from it and is only vaguely, fuzzily aware of some disturbance, which he quickly rationalizes or seeks explanations for as seem most fitting, most acceptable, most "logical," or most compatible with his most superficial approach to life and to himself. Thus he acknowledges only one set of the often many sets of contradictions and conflicting emotions, and even that he does, at best, in a cursory, shallow way. In that way, the true drama of his beliefs and opinions, impressions and reactions, concepts and ideas, hopes and fears is almost entirely obscured. Man takes refuge in collective, oversimplified labels, which are supposed to express what is really going on in him. When he says that he is depressed or anxious of hopeless or angry or hurt or fatigued, he is content to call a host of feelings, impressions, and beliefs by any one of these emotions, as though no further search were required. If he would name such emotions only as a beginning to exploring them, it would serve its purpose. But only too often he uses the words of such emotions as a final explanation. Thus he cannot even attain the first level of reality: his often confused and erroneous interpretation of life, of others, and of self. It might sound paradoxical that I call this level of reality "reality" at all. But it is a temporary reality in that it is what the individual actually happens to feel, think, and believe, whether true or false, while the haze of unspecific awareness is a no man's land and not even a temporary reality. This is why it is so painful and insecure, and why in no state could one be more estranged than on this level, or prereality, if I may coin this expression.

As you know, it is part of the individual work to painstakingly examine why such collective labels exist and where they come from. The first reaction often is that you do not even know why you feel this way; you give yourself quick and easy answers, which may sound exceedingly plausible and serious in a world that shies away from a fresh, new approach. However, every problem needs examining as if it had never existed and as if society did not have its predigested answers ready.

If one gives some attention to what one really believes causes the specific unhappy feeling -- and usually relatively little attention is required for this -- one finds some answers quite easily. As I mentioned, it is hardly ever just one thing: contradictory opinions and ideas exist simultaneously. One set of contradictory ideas gives birth to contradictory reactions, counter-reactions, defense measures, further false beliefs, and sets off inevitable consequences that create more and more chain reactions. When all this remains in the fuzzy climate of unawareness, half awareness, and easy explaining away, how can the first level of reality -- knowing what one thinks exist - be reached?

For example, it is not at all impossible that a person thinks secretly at one and the same time that he is the most important being in the universe and that he is the least worthy in the universe. Even one such assumption is bound to have innumerable further consequences, breeding further wrong assumptions in one's dealings with the world. Each primary wrong assumption snowballs into a host of untenable, destructive beliefs and defense measures, each in itself causing complicated webs of entanglements and increasingly painful beliefs. The two contradictory original assumptions multiply the confusion, the misconceptions, the entanglement, and the resulting pain. For error is pain, as truth is happiness.

Such mutually exclusive ideas, as well as a host of misconceptions and confusions, are already known to you; anyone working on such a path knows from experience how burdensome they are and what a relief it is to shed them. You also know that each web of entanglement sets up a special fight against clarifying the confusion, in spite of feeling the pain while the confusion lasts, and in spite of knowing the liberated, happy state that will follow after the confusion is cleared up. Although you all know this to some degree from personal experience, and most certainly as a valid theory, none of you is fully aware to what extent you still dwell in the state of prereality. Most of my friends do not see in their day to day life where just such a dual concept of the self as being at once the highest and the lowest is responsible for that layer of reality where one thinks certain things exist without their necessarily being true.

Also, it is often the case that although you have actually recognized a false assumption, say, about yourself, you still do not follow this through to the further consequences of such an assumption. You fail to see, for example, how this assumption affects your belief about others, what you believe them to be and to think of you; what a situation or an incident means in the light of this assumption about yourself; what certain reactions of the self and of others really mean. If you clearly pronounce what you believe a person, a situation, or an event to mean, you will know why you are unhappy in any form. Knowing specifically why you feel the way you do makes a tremendous difference. But not only that, it also gives you the possibility to realize that some of your beliefs are preposterous. You might have admitted this in general and as a theory, but to do so specifically is still extremely hard. Man's intellectual arrogance makes this so difficult. It is arrogant to set oneself above others, but it is even more damaging to overestimate one's own intellect and thus miss out on one's real inherent wisdom, while negating and denying the childish misunderstandings in one's personality. By doing so, man truly places himself above the state that happens to be his own state at the moment.

It is so hard to admit what childish nonsense is lodged in the unconscious because this contradicts the concept that man has of his "intelligence." But perhaps an even greater motivation for keeping the secret beliefs in the haze of vague impressions and feelings, rather than acknowledging them precisely, is the following: man has a vested interest in keeping these things secret because he vaguely feels that once they are out in the open, he is obliged to make changes. He fears to do that precisely because he is so committed to his false idea that a different mode of approach appears to be a threat to him. What he does not realize is that it threatens him only because of the original false idea. The illusory assumptions are compounded, one leading to another, and they all have to be disentangled in order to bring order and truth into man. If he elevates himself above his own actual self, where his self is still ignorant and misinformed, he cannot establish order. It is hard to admit the utterly childish side, with all its senseless ideas and beliefs. The moment this childish side is out in the open, you know it is nonsense, and you are relieved to give up the burdensome beliefs.

In addition to such nonsense, there are also false beliefs and impressions you even consciously assume to be true -- at least to some degree. These are even more difficult to handle.

Then there are those beliefs you may sense are somehow false, but you do not wish to alter them. In a way, to assume the painful premise seems preferable to another alternative that appears, deep in your unconscious, even worse. This, too, is of course an illusory assumption, for no truth is ever burdensome, hopeless, or in any way undesirable. The complications and interactions of all the knots, entanglements, false beliefs, half truths, and contradictions comprise what actually exists in you. And this must be faced before any further progress can be made.

This level of reality absolutely must be disentangled. If man is unwilling to see what he believes to be true, then he cannot ever come to see what is really true at this moment. Consequently, he is unable to reach the third level of reality by changing the present reality -- and not by wishful thinking, illusory magic, or denial of the facts -- into a reality that is more favorable for him.

Let us take an example of general occurrence: man's fear of rejection. This fear runs through his psychic life, and consequently runs through his outer, physical life. Rejection itself would not be the threat it is for most people if there were no specific assumptions connected with it. What these specific assumptions are has to be unearthed. For example, a person may believe that he is worth nothing, and the rejection is such a great threat only because it seems to confirm the "fact" of his worthlessness. It is thus not sufficient to acknowledge a stereotype "explanation" by saying that one feels anxious. It is necessary, first, to acknowledge that the anxiety exists because one fears rejection. Subsequently it must be unearthed that rejection is so threatening because one feels worthless and does not wish to admit this feeling. But even this does not go far enough. Now it becomes necessary to find out what specific grounds the heretofore secret conviction of his worthlessness is based on. In other words, all these very specific beliefs and assumptions must be taken out of the fog of vagueness, where they hide under the collective label of "anxiety."

When the approach is changed in the fashion suggested here and a serious investigation is conducted, when nothing is taken for granted and everything is approached in a new and fresh way, you will find out what you believe exists. From there, you can begin to look further and begin to question the premises of these beliefs. You can begin to open your eyes and look objectively for what really is. In this transition from one level of reality to the next, you must also ask yourself the question whether you really want to find out, first, what you think exists, and, second, what really is. All the false assumptions you harbor seem to dictate that they must be kept secret. For example, should it be true that you actually are worthless and beyond redemption, then facing such a fact would indeed be a hard undertaking. But then, is it preferable to live a lie by pretending you believe in your worth, while underneath you doubt it? Such considerations will give you the necessary logic to look at what you believe exists, in order to find out what actually exists. The actual truth is that you have a great deal of worth, although perhaps in a different way than you believed.

Conversely, and simultaneously, you may believe that you are the most important and valuable person on earth, who deserves very special privileges. To ascertain such a belief is difficult because your intellectual knowledge refutes such arrogance, and even creates shame. Also, admitting such an idea brings one closer to questioning its validity, which one fears all the more since in the psyche there also lurks the precise opposite extreme -- the assumption of one's worthlessness. If you are not special, then you are nothing. Hence, both assumptions must be kept hidden from consciousness and cannot be examined. Therefore, further chain reactions and compulsive behavior patterns cannot be tested as to their reality value.

So, when you discover that you do not want to find out what exists in you, find out why you do not wish to do so. What false beliefs prevent you from doing so? When you answer that question, you open another little gate that will eventually enable you to change your mind, so that you will want to find out (a) what you think exists, and (b) what really exists.

In that moment you already are two important levels closer to the inner guidance and to the inner reality, to the possibility of what could be. This is the kingdom of God, inside of you. As long as the entanglements of false opinions -- of what you believe exists as opposed to what actually exists -- is not cleared up, you cannot see that even what actually does exist need not be your ultimate state of being. To realize this leads to a tremendously important transition.

The level of what actually does exist is always an enormous relief compared with what you believe exists. Truth is never, never anywhere near as threatening as the foggy half-truths and evasions, no matter what it is. What you believe exists is a relief compared with the fog; what actually exists is an even greater relief compared with what you believe exists. The discovery of the infinite possibilities in Creation, of what could exist, is more than liberation. It opens the gates to the world, to the great freedom of co-creation, to unlimited expansion. I might say here that in mundane psychotherapy the highest obtainable goal is usually the level of reality, of knowing what actually exists. Accepting this reality, accepting one's manifest values and liabilities, accepting one's own limitations and those of the outer world, and coping and dealing with this world so as to produce one's best actions and feelings, would be the ultimate that could be expected under the very best of circumstances. This would be the point at which a patient is successfully dismissed as cured. But this is only where our spiritual path begins, although, of course, the levels overlap, and one cannot say that one must first have completed one level before reaching the next. It never quite works that way. This is why reaching for the third level now and working with it as best as it is possible at present will help the attainment of the lower stages perhaps a bit faster and more painlessly, perhaps a bit more safely and more meaningfully.

Now let us examine the third level, what could exist. What actually is -- which is what is usually called the reality -- is not a static condition. It is no more real, true, and unchangeable than the level of what one believes exists. To him who is convinced of it, it seems true and real, so that we can speak of his reality at that moment. It is the reality of his assumptions, which lead him to further ideas, which have their own actual energy and dynamics, which have their consequences that happen in experience and fact. So, what one believes and what is are not so different when one considers the vast stretches of possibilities.

When man assumes that reality is static and unmovable, he is as far removed from actual, ultimate reality as he who assumes his illusions to be the final truth. Ultimate reality is essentially flexible and movable. Man is not put into a universe that has a predetermined existence, whose conditions are fixed. Even objects are flux, are condensed energy, constantly moving. The energy is generated by consciousness and by the way it operates. Thus, the immovable outer world is a direct product of you and your consciousness. When you can begin to question whether what you found to be reality need be so, you begin to expand the horizon of your concepts, you widen your grasp, and thus you begin to increase your creative power to alter the seemingly static reality. You can expand reality to the exact degree that you wish to expand the horizon, or the frontiers, of your concepts. By concepts I mean more than the superficial beliefs and theories, of course. When your mind can truly and deeply embrace limitless vistas of experience for happiness and self-expression, then this is exactly what your reality must become. For consciousness is explosive, powerful stuff. Each thought, as you know, creates and truly builds your life -- your very own reality circumstances.

However, if the limitless expansion is unconsciously striven for as the child strives for magical omnipotence -- because the personality fears and dislikes dealing with the present limitations -- it cannot possibly work. It is first necessary to accept the present limitations and cope with them, for they are a product of what the consciousness believes. It is impossible to discover one's own creative power in the positive before one recognizes the connection between negative reality and negative beliefs. Only when you realistically accept the limitation as it is now can you transcend this limitation, in the realization that it does not need to exist. Thus, you move into the third level of reality, in which your intellect cannot help you. It is then that the inner guidance can come forth. This inner guidance will be unobstructed when you have moved from the outer level of haze and fog, where you do not know what is going on in you, to the level of what you believe exists, to the level of what actually exists in comparison, and, further, to opening your way into the third level, of what could exist.

Realizing what could exist, the ultimate truth of the inner being, of the real self, is the aim of life itself. For then man has come into his own. The more these levels are transcended, the freer guidance becomes, and the more you will comprehend those three levels of reality that are man's way of moving from being thrown into the outside world to coming back home into his inner reality.

What is evil, my friends, all the evil that is so deplored? Evil is all the error, the confusion on the outer, hazy level of prereality, as well as on the level of what one believes exists, which is not even quite conscious, so that man is driven into actions and feelings that are truly destructive and are called evil. They blur out the spiritual light of oneness. The existence of evil is the blind drive of not knowing, the vagueness of misbelief, distortion, error. If you truly comprehend these words, my friends, it will be quite impossible for you to ever hate anyone or believe in the evil nature of certain human beings. You will sense that it is impossible to hate any human being, for such hate is senseless. You can hate the evil of error and the error of evil, you can hate the effect of error and the vagueness of not knowing what you believe or what others believe. That you can hate, but you can never hate the person ensnarled in the error of not knowing what he believes. That is truly the most alienating state: not knowing what one believes, assumes, and concludes.

As I indicated before, you must beware of judging yourself or others on having reached any of these three levels on the whole. It is always a question of fluctuating and overlapping. An individual may have attained in his development a state of fluctuating between the second and third levels. He may have activated sufficient power from the third level to guide him in all his life expressions. But where he is still trapped in his haze, this guidance does not easily penetrate and cannot be heard.

QUESTION: What if one doubts that one's needs are justified? Isn't it also a question of what should be?

ANSWER: This is part of the confusion. If you do not know what you are supposed to want, what is a legitimate need on your part, you get confused between the childish aspect, which desires unreasonable and unrealizable love and attention, and the adult, legitimate need for human warmth and affection . In this confusion you may reject yourself for the latter, while, at the same time, you rebel against not obtaining the former. These confusions must all be brought out into the open and examined so that you can put order into them.

In addition to this confusion there may be confusion about what the other person really feels. Your own confusion inevitably breeds confusion about what exists in the other person. The childish level may conclude that you are being rejected, since the unrealizable demands are not fulfilled. You may not be able to recognize actual love, because it appears in a different way from what you imagined in your present state, in which you may not be able to make room for differences in self-expression. You may also misinterpret the actual rejection as a personal one and not recognize that this is the manifestation of another person's immaturity and fear of love. All these interactions and mutual currents must be investigated.

The way you can gauge whether you have arrived at what you ought to know about yourself at the moment is the only reliable gauge there is: "Do you have the feeling of utter relief and liberation, of being energized and light?" If so, you can be absolutely sure that you have attained, at this moment, the level of self-knowledge that you ought to have. When this feeling is missing, you can be quite sure that there are many answers that are still outstanding and that you need to find. You need to ask yourself the appropriate question.

QUESTION: I am aware of the fact that I distort reality. I wonder how this applies to my work situation, wherein I am caught in a hostility cycle with my boss. At least on my part I feel very hostile to him. This is very real to me, although I know I am over-reacting to it. Would you comment on this?

ANSWER: As you already know, this has really not much to do with your boss. It is all a question between you and your father. You have to ask yourself the relevant questions. What do you really feel about him? What do you believe he felt about you? And why? If you tackle only these questions, you will already be more in clarity on the level of what you believe exists, rather than being in the fog of not quite knowing what bothers you. Out of these questions more questions will arise, of course. But let us not hurry ahead, just concentrate on these three questions, without taking anything for granted. It is essential that you ask yourself, and answer, these questions. Then you can tackle the next level of considering what is.

For you who heard this lecture, even if you did not always concentrate on my words, something went into your heart, where a seed can grow into a wonderful fruit. Allow this to happen, my friends, for life is so good. The truth is happiness, while unhappiness is always error and misconception. Do not ever forget this. This fact may lead you to have more initiative about discovering the misconceptions of your suffering.

On this day that commemorates the leading faith of this hemisphere, you can perhaps find a special strength in this memory of your forefathers. Not because a special day in itself is of any value, or importance, as such, but because at times man needs an outer impact or push in order to set something in motion within. For some, religious memories and commemorations may represent such a push. For others, this may not be necessary. They, in turn, may need other reminders and incentives, or another impetus that gives them a motor force with which to find a way out of the entanglements on the outermost level of fog-bound existence, which causes so much anxiety and suffering.

Be blessed, my very dearest ones, the love of the universe, the truth and beauty of the universe are within you and around you at all times. Always there, my friends, always. Make yourself see the truth by calling upon the inner guidance so that you and the inner guidance eventually become one. Be blessed, be in peace, be in God.

The Guide
by Eva Pierrakos
April 12, 1968

Back