Consciousness

By The Pathwork Guide

Greetings, all my friends here who receive the tangible blessing that is extended and that streams in the form of energy currents containing consciousness and strength. It flows toward you and permeates you. This is a reality which can be perceived as your own consciousness grows and expands and ventures forth.

In this lecture I would like to talk about consciousness -- aspects of it and its significance in the scheme of creation. Our work in the forthcoming months must deepen the comprehension of the power and significance of creative consciousness. Creation is indeed a result of consciousness and not, as generally assumed, the other way around. Nothing can be unless it exists first in consciousness, whether this consciousness is the Universal Spirit, the Universal Self, or whether it is the individualized self. It makes no difference. Whether what you perceive and create, and formulate in your consciousness is important, world-forming, or just a passing, insignificant attitude -- the principle must be the same.

These facts have been discussed and you know them, but you do not know them sufficiently. You still overlook the tremendous significance of what you create with your consciousness; and your being disconnected from it causes the real, the worst suffering. There is no other suffering as acute as the one when you do not know that you have created what you experience. This applies, to a lesser extent, even to the positive and desirable experiences. For if you do not know that you have created them, you will always feel helpless; you will always feel in the hands of a power which you cannot comprehend. This power is truly your own consciousness.

Now let us look first and understand a little better some of the most outstanding attributes of what consciousness really is. Consciousness is not only the power to think, to discriminate, and to choose -- which is obvious. It is not only the power to know, to perceive, and to feel. It is also the ability to will. Willing is a very important aspect of consciousness. Whether you will in your awareness, or whether you are disconnected from the fact that you will something, makes no difference. Your willing is an aspect of your consciousness and hence of what you continually create. Willing is an ongoing process, just as knowing and feeling is. Where there is consciousness, knowing, feeling, and willing always exist. Often a number of contradictory will currents create a short-circuit on the surface, which manifests as lack of awareness, numbness. Consciousness is diminished on the surface, but continues to go on below the surface. Its products manifest as tangible life experience and the entity feels at a loss, believing that what life brings is totally independent from its own willing and knowing. Any path of genuine development must bring all the confused and contradictory desires to the surface, all the beliefs -- the inner knowing -- so that the created life circumstances appear in their true light: they are the creation of the self. This awareness gives the power to re-create.

Willing, determining, formulating, knowing of an existing possibility, perceiving -- all of these inner activities are the tools of creation. Mankind can accurately be divided into those who know this and use these tools deliberately, creatively, and constructively; and those who are unaware of these facts and are victims of their ignorance, constantly creating destructively and never knowing it.

Man is the first entity on the evolutionary scale upward who can deliberately create with his consciousness. You, my friends, who search for your true identity, your real being, must come to experience the fact that you have the power to create and, specifically, how you have created what you have or do not have now. You can then see the augmented pain and tension in your being when you fight against your own creations. This is inevitably so when a personality is not yet aware, generally and specifically, of how his life is a product of his own mind activity. What he does not like he will invariably rebel against, never knowing that he actually tears himself apart in this way to an ever further degree. The rebellion may not be entirely conscious either, it may manifest in the form of vague discontent with life, a hopeless longing, a sense of futility and frustration from which he sees no way out. This, too, is a kind of rebellion.

To understand the importance of consciousness in still greater depth, it is also necessary to perceive the positive and negative manifestations or directions consciousness can take. Man harbors within him the purest of wisdom, flowing in the direction of ever expanding blissfulness, new vistas of life expression in infinite variety, and fullness of dimensions. This is the Universal Spirit. I will not say that the Universal Spirit is in you, I say that you are it, but most of the time you do not know it. But man also harbors within him the distorted expression of his creative consciousness with which he wills negatively and destructively. One could also say that this is the eternal fight between God and the Devil, between Good and Evil, between Life and Death. Whatever you call it does not matter; this is a question of culture, fashion, interpretation, personal leanings, and approach to the world. Whatever you name these powers, they are your own powers; you are not a helpless pawn in anyone's hands. This is the important question, the all-important fact of life that truly alters your entire self-perception and attitude toward living. Not knowing this will make you constantly feel victimized by circumstances beyond your control.

In order to perceive and experience your true identity, as being the Universal Spirit, three basic things are necessary:

1) That you tune in on it. By knowing of its existence this will be possible. You must become very quiet within yourself and allow it to happen. You activate it by your deliberate attempt to listen to and perceive it. This is not as easy as it may sound, for the tumultuous busyness of the mind barricades this possibility. It requires training until your mind becomes sufficiently calm, able to stop buzzing and producing involuntary thought patterns. After this is accomplished to some degree, you will experience an emptiness. You will seem to listen in nothingness -- and this may even be frightening or disappointing. Finally the Universal Spirit begins to manifest -- not because it "decides" to do so only now because you were a "good child" who now "deserves" it, but because you begin to perceive its ongoing presence, a presence you will then know was always there, quite near and immediately accessible -- almost too near to perceive. The first manifestations may come to you not as a direct voice, a direct inner knowing, but through detours -- through other mouths, and later as apparently coincidental ideas that suddenly come to you. But if you are alert and sensitive, attuned to reality, you will know that these are the first manifestations of establishing contact. Later the emptiness will prove of such tremendous fullness as is impossible to express in words. As I said before, what also hinders you in perceiving the Universal Spirit's constant presence is its immediacy. This is, of course, the wonderful thing; when you discover that you harbor this presence within yourself at all times it fills you with safety, with strength, with the knowledge that you never need to be inadequate and helpless again, for this source of all life supplies you with every detail of living important to you. It fills you with rich feelings, it stimulates and calms you, it shows you the ways of handling problems, it offers the solutions that unify decency, honesty, and self-interest; love and pleasure; reality and bliss; fulfillment of your duties without diminishing your freedom in the least. All is contained there. But this wonderful immediacy presents its problems first, because your concept is that this can be sought only very far away. Being geared to experiencing the Universal Spirit only as a remote reality makes it impossible to experience its nearness.

2) It is necessary to fully experience and comprehend that part of your consciousness which has turned negative, which has become destructive, and creates destructively. A great deal of concentration and weight was put in our pathwork to accomplish this. But this is not an easy matter, precisely because, once again, man is geared to believe that his life is a fixed thing into which he was put and with which he must learn to cope, independently from his inner processes of thinking, willing, knowing, feeling, and perceiving. As you can now appreciate, it requires a great deal of honesty, discipline, and the overcoming of resistance until an individual can make this all-important "switch" within his entire approach to life: from seeing himself helpless to seeing his own creation in all respects. I might say that it is not really possible to activate the presence of the Universal Self when an entity is still blind to his negative creations. It may sometimes happen that certain channels are open where the obstructions do not happen to exist, but where the blocks, the blindness, the imagined helplessness persist, this contact cannot function.

3) Your conscious thinking processes are the first "handlebar" to the Universal Creative Spirit. With your conscious thinking you create just as much as with what is referred to as unconscious thinking and willing. Your thinking ability is actually exactly the same as the creative processes of the Universal Mind. Though it is a separated fragment of the Whole, it has the same powers and possibilities. Even the separation is not real, but exists only because this is the way you experience yourself at this time. The moment you discover the immediacy of this presence, you will no longer feel a separation between your intellectual thinking processes and those of the Greater Being. Eventually they will merge and you will know that it has always been that way, only you did not know it. Thus you have not availed yourself of your innate powers. You left them unused, or even misused them in your blind state. You can make a beginning in order to finally experience yourself as the Universal Spirit by using your conscious thinking processes, your mind activity, in a deliberate, constructive way. You can do this in two parts. First, you must clearly see how you have unknowingly used these same mind processes negatively, how you have created destructively. Then you can formulate the thought forms by stating that this is possible in the scheme of things, and by perceiving, knowing, and willing it in a relaxed, untense attitude. This also includes the willingness to change faulty and dishonest inner attitudes, for otherwise you block what you want.

By building outer thought forms of creative unfoldment, you can tap the rich source within your own being. The beginning is made by the conscious activity of your thinking apparatus which, again, is much too near to be easily recognized. It requires a certain focusing of attention on your thinking processes, observing how you use them; how the immediately available processes of thinking, the way you use your mind, create what you have and what you do not have. Once you can reverse this process, you have discovered a tool of creation and become truly your real self. For you are the Universal Spirit who created the world. You are constantly creating your own world right now -- the life you lead.

Giving attention to your inner processes will make it apparent that much of what you thought was in your unconscious really is not hidden at all. Observe this especially when you find yourself in a disturbed or disturbing situation. See how you take so much of the situation and your reactions for granted, that you gloss over your most obvious attitudes, just those which will give you the clues to understand how your creative powers work -- here, of course, inverted and manifesting negatively. To consider every detail of the situation, to expand the range of your consideration and attention in a fresh, new approach will give you the insight you were lacking before. This self-knowledge is purification in the truest sense of the word because ultimately it establishes your awareness of your powers as creator of your life. The discovery of how you have created destructively is never a really bad experience, for it becomes immediately obvious that you have thus also the power to create beautiful life experiences for yourself; you become immediately aware of your own eternal nature, with its infinite power to expand.

So you see, my friends, we are dealing here with three levels. All of them must become accessible. Not one of them is easier to perceive than the other. It would be an error to believe that your everyday thinking processes are easier to perceive than either your destructive willing or your Divine Nature, with its endless power and wisdom. They are all equally near -- and seem far only because your vision is turned in the opposite direction. The willful destructiveness or the grandiose Creative Spirit you are are "unconscious" only because you turn your gaze, your attention away, you do not give them the benefit of the doubt that they exist, as a first step towards their discovery. It is practically the same with your daily mind activity that goes on and on, unobserved by your critical evaluation, so that you are completely unaware of how your thought processes run in the same unproductive, negative channels. Nor do you perceive that you even derive a sort of satisfaction from allowing this to go on. So all three levels are equally difficult or easy to perceive. The difficulty lies primarily in your not knowing, your not listening or giving attention to, your not observing what can be listened to, what can be observed -- once you look and listen into the right direction.

When you observe the negative thinking processes, it is important to realize a) what they do to you, how they connect with the results you deplore most in your life, and b) that you have the power to alter these thinking processes and to find new channels, new ways of self-expression for your thinking. These two facets will make all the difference in the world. This is true liberation and self-finding. This is the coming into one's own we speak of so much. This is the discovery of your true identity that represents such glad tidings. But first you must see yourself pursuing negative thought processes; see yourself brooding in the same vicious circles; see yourself almost willfully pursuing the same roundabout, very limited, very narrowly confined channels of thinking and never venturing beyond these fences, which are there to be taken by the leap of your own thinking.

Let us take the example that you are convinced you can experience only this or that negative manifestation in life. Once you observe the tenacity with which you take this for granted in any given area of your life experience, you can ask the question,B> "Does it really have to be so?"The moment this question is raised, you begin to open a crack in the door. Not even knowing that you are convinced of only this narrowly confined possibility for you makes it impossible to raise further possibilities and alternatives. And only then can you actually venture into them -- first by formulating the respective thoughts as the blueprints of creating. The world begins to open. This opening must be done by your thinking to begin with, by your saying, "It does not have to be this way, it can be another way. I want this other way. Whatever stands between me and this more desirable way I would like to eliminate it. I have the courage to face and go beyond this life experience I have given myself until now by taking it for granted that it cannot be any other way." On this conscious level of your thinking processes, the "taking for granted" has to be seen by you.

Another possibility is that you may want a positive result in any given area but, simultaneously, you do not wish to accept certain logical consequences that go with what you wish -- out of misunderstanding and by believing that accepting these consequences is undesirable for you. These are the areas of the childish resistance to give of yourself, the distorted attempt to cheat life and gain more than you wish to give. Life cannot comply with such unfair desires, while you feel cheated and resentful because you have not really clearly examined the issue. Nor are you aware of your false reasoning in resisting to give of yourself. Thus you create forms of error and distortion that stand in the way to what is possible for you.

You can thus see that the level of conscious thinking is influenced by both the destructive side of yourself and the Universal Spirit. Your conscious decision can choose in which direction to formulate your thoughts, once you are aware of their habit patterns. This self-determination is your key to liberation.

As far as the destructive side of the self is concerned, it will be seen more and more clearly that it is also quite deliberate in you -- something you choose. It is not something that befalls you. Once you have truly progressed on this path you have come to the point when you can finally admit this deliberate desire to choose destructive ways and attitudes. You can see that you are unhappy, actually forsaking happiness, fulfillment, bliss, and fruitful living. You may be terribly unhappy about the result, but you nevertheless insist on retaining the negative willing of your consciousness. You can see how all-important it is to find this out.

The age-old question is: what brought it all about? Why do human beings harbor these senseless, useless, utterly purposeless desires? Why does the mind take on this direction? Religion calls it sin or evil. Psychology calls it neurosis or psychosis, or gives it any other name that differentiates between the varieties of this perverse leaning of the mind. Whatever name you may give it, it is indeed a disease. In order to heal the disease, it is necessary to understand it to some extent. This is done, primarily, by following through the channels of your own erroneous, inverted assumptions, beliefs, false ideas, with their subsequent emotions and will direction. This can be done only up to a certain degree without also understanding in a more general way the dynamics of creative mind processes in the positive or negative manifestations. This is why people ask again and again, "how does evil come into existence?" They sometimes ask, "why did God put evil into us?" As though someone else had "put" anything anywhere. Once sufficient self-awareness exists and one's own rejection of happiness is on the surface, the same puzzling question may be raised, "Why do I do it? Why can't I want what feels good for me?" Many times this question has been asked here, as well as elsewhere in the world, wherever spiritual teachings are being given. Once, a long time ago, at the beginning of this contact, I have given an allegorical account of the so-called Fall of the Angels, about a spirit who was once utterly constructive and expanding into forever greater realms of light and bliss, diverting from this course, separating himself from his innermost Godself and becoming fragmented. How did he turn into dark, destructive channels? Any account, such as I have given and has been given elsewhere, is very easily misunderstood because it is always interpreted as a historical event that has taken place in time and space. Therefore it it is completely misleading. I shall venture, once again, to give another explanation about how destructiveness, in an utterly constructive consciousness, comes into being. I shall try to find a different approach that may, perhaps, reach you on some level and give you a deeper understanding of this all-important topic, so as to meet your own destructiveness with a new understanding, thereby helping you to come out of it.

Picture, my friends, a consciousness, a state of being, in which there is only bliss and infinite -- literally infinite -- power to create with, through, and by one's own consciousness. Consciousness is, among its other attributes, as I mentioned, a thinking apparatus. Thus, it thinks -- and, lo, something comes into existence. It wills -- and, lo, what is willed and thought is. This can be expanded and extended into more and more ways, variations, possibilities. Life is endless in these possibilities. Creating happens by first thinking, then the thinking becomes a fact, becomes a form, in the life that is not confined into the structure of the ego, the life that is free, consciousness that is free, flowing, and free floating. There, the thought is immediately deed and form. It is only in the human ego existence that the thought is apparently separated from the deed and the form. The less awareness exists in an entity, the more separated thought, deed, and form appear, so much so that, as you well know, the form or manifestation seems entirely independent from the deed, the deed from the thought or will. None of these three stages are connected. An essential part of raising one's consciousness lies precisely in this connecting. No matter how far apart in time and space they may appear, thought and will, deed and action, form and manifestation are all one unit. In the state of being, where there is no confinement, where there is no tight structuring, this unit is experienced as a living reality. In this lies an indescribable bliss and fascination. The whole universe is open for exploration, for new ways of self-expression and self-finding, giving form to forever more worlds, experience, and effects. The fascination of creating is endless. It is an endless fascination, going on and on, finding forever new ways.

Since the possibilities are endless, infinite, and limitless, the consciousness can explore itself also by confining itself, by fragmenting itself off -- to "see what happens," as it were. It experiences itself: instead of expanding more, it contracts, instead of unfolding, it tries out how it feels to draw in; instead of exploring further lights, it wants to see how it is to feel and experience darkness. Creating is fascination per se. This fascination is not eliminated simply because what is created is -- first perhaps only by slight degrees -- less pleasurable or blissful or brilliant. Even in that may lie a special fascination and adventure -- just to tentatively try, if I may use these very limited words. Then it begins to take on a power of its own. For everything that is created has energy invested in it and this energy is self-perpetuating. It takes on its own momentum. The consciousness who has created these channels and pathways may experiment longer and more than it is "safe" because it no longer leaves itself enough power at the moment to reverse the course. It may get lost in its own momentum, unwilling to stop, and later it no longer sees how to stop on this course. Creation then takes place entirely, or primarily, on a negative scale, until the results are so unpleasant that it seeks to get a hold of itself and counteract the momentum by "recalling" its real knowledge of what could be. At any rate, it knows there is no real danger, for whatever suffering you human beings feel, it truly is illusory in the ultimate sense. Once you find your true identity within, you will know it. It is all a play, a fascination, an experiment, from which your real state of being can be recaptured, if only you will truly try.

Now, many human beings still find themselves in the state in which they do not yet want to really try. They still find fascination in the exploration of negative creation -- at least to some extent of their inner being. Some separated entities have never gone so far, beyond the point where they lose the immediate awareness of who they really are and their power to re-direct their explorations. Others have temporarily lost this awareness. But they must find it again the moment they really want to. It is well that all of you remember this fact.

The momentum of creating contains incredibly powerful energies. These energies have impact, they impress the all-permeating creating substance, that stuff which responds to creative mind, which is molded into form, event, object, occurrence, state of mind, or whatever. This is why the imprints in the soul substance are so deep and nothing but the greater power of molding mind can erase false imprints which govern your events. Everything around and within you is both the masculine principle of determining, etching consciousness and the feminine principle of molded, responding life substance. Find this truth within you and the universe will become yours all over again, as it once was.

Thus if the creative consciousness does not alter the course at a certain point, it becomes caught within its own processes, the processes it has generated. Part of the power and momentum is a quality of being "self-imitating," if I can use this expression. It is very hard to convey this aspect of creative energy. Human beings can experience the urge to imitate others, This is frequent and manifests in many forms. The same characteristic exists in regard to self-imitation. It is a process of deeply imprinting something upon the substance of life. Let me give you an example of the power of imitation and creating in this fashion new ways of experience. Many of you must have experienced the strange urging you have when you see a cripple who limps, perhaps, or who has a facial tick, to imitate his bodily posture or facial aberration. Have you experienced the sometimes irresistible desire to imitate something that is highly undesirable for you? At the same time there is a kind of revulsion and fear of doing this because you sense somehow that by doing this you set something in motion that you might then imitate again and again, and cannot stop doing so. The power and the energies of creation have this self-perpetuating effect, which only consciousness, with its knowing, its will, and determination can alter into another direction. Creating becomes so involving and the pleasure of it so engrossing that, once set in the direction of negativity, the pleasure in negative creation continues to keep the soul in its spell until the consciousness steps in with its deliberate counter force. Even if what is created is painful, the pleasure of creating is difficult to abandon, as long as the individual ignores that positive creation is also possible.

As negative creation proceeds, consciousness seems to become more and more fragmented -- not really, my friends, but your awareness cannot experience your connection with the World Spirit which you are.

I do not know to what extent these words can reach you. But if they can, they will prove, as you meditate and think about them, of tremendous help for you. They will help you not only to comprehend, but to find the right way of fighting against and eliminating the destructiveness within you. The power of your mind creates the negative. This force is even stronger when it is used for the positive. Stronger because in the negative there must always be conflicts and contrary longings and will directions which weaken the force. In the constructive, expanding direction this need not be so at all. Once the switch can be made, something will "click" in the activities and processes of the mind. It will flow into a new direction that comes more easily and naturally, without the torture that negative creation always entails.

The more consciousness has separated itself in awareness from the Whole, the more it is fragmented, the greater the structuring must be. The wholeness of consciousness is unstructured. This is the state of being in all its blissfulness. After the separating fragmentation has occurred, the slow stages of development take the following course: Lost consciousness gradually works toward a state of self-consciousness. This state needs the structuring in order to be protected from the chaos of the negativity and destruction. When these are met and eliminated, unstructured blissful consciousness is attained again. The ego, with its confinement, is the structuring which protects the entity from its own destructive creating. It holds it in check. Only when consciousness expands into the channels of bliss and truth can the structuring remove itself. So, at one time in your evolution, you were chaotically unstructured. As you grow and evolve, the structuring walls off this chaos, so that, at least for a while, consciousness can deal with its aware levels without being hindered by the inner chaos. Thus the available thinking processes can become the tools which show the way out of the negative creation and confining structure. Looking beyond the structure and into the chaos, comprehending it, realizing the power of the mind processes constantly in use, affords you the possibility to reverse the downward curve that makes you constantly seek that which denies life, love, pleasure, and happiness; which courts decay, waste, and pain. That part of your Universal Self that has remained whole knows that the pain is short and illusory, but that part of you which is involved in the chaos does not know this and suffers.

Let us review. Conscious mind processes can swing the pendulum from the ongoing destructive creating to consciousness' original state, expanding, blissful creating. The confining structure will dissolve and the ultimate state of being, unstructured consciousness and experience, energy and blissful being, will reinstate themselves and become your existence. This is where it is all going, my friends. Part of your attempts must therefore go in the direction of bringing order into the confusion of the workings of your mind: its self-involvement, its blindness to itself, and how it thus gets lost to itself. It is not the world outside yourself that confuses you, it is the world within your own consciousness, with all these aspects I mentioned here.

You can begin to contemplate the fact that you can deliberately will creative construction by consciously stating, formulating, thinking, and willing a state of happiness, aliveness, fulfillment, truth, love, growth -- generally and in all possible particulars -- which would make you happy. The climate of this may first seem "strange," unusual, unfamiliar. You need to acclimatize yourself to it. Picture yourself in such states and call upon the Universal Power within you to fortify your conscious mind with the necessary creative energy. The will to happiness must become so strong that the causes for unhappiness must be seen and eliminated -- and this, too, must be truly wanted. Then the Creative Power will grow, the Divine Self will inspire you and show you the way. You will learn to recognize it and receive it in your conscious brain.

This is, again, a rough outline for this working season. The progress that has been made by my friends will enable them to make use of what I have said here. I mean actively make use, not just reading this as a beautiful theory, but deeply knowing its immediately usable value, and applying it every day of your life. On the day when you see your destructive creating and then deliberately change it, you will indeed have done something wonderful. The will to be happy and to unfold in life is the foundation stone of your power to create. The more concisely this is formulated -- also as to your willingness to eliminate attitudes that hinder the result -- the more effective your creation will become.

Be blessed, receive the power that is streaming forth and increase the power by your conscious, deliberate, willing expressions and formulations. Express your willingness to grow, to be happy, to be constructive. Do this not by willing it in a tight, insistent, constricted way, but in a relaxed, confident way, contemplating that all possibilities exist as potential realities, realizable for you the moment you know and will this with all your undivided being. The power is there, it is in you. All you have to do is tap it, use it, build with your conscious mind the channels that can free it, and become very quiet and calm. Listen and tune in on it. It is there forever and ever, in its grandiose power, in its wonderful wisdom, in its ultimate knowledge that there is nothing but bliss, already now, within you.

The Guide
by Eva Pierrakos
1969

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