The Universal Functioning Principle Of Growth Dynamics

By The Pathwork Guide

Greetings and blessings for everyone of you here, for every single individual who attempts, who searches, who gropes, and who struggles for inner unity. Everyone who is here is motivated, consciously or unconsciously, by this inner urge. This urge is a pull of the life force. The life force contains this push which motivates people into certain directions. They may not even be aware of the deep meaning of this inner push, nor even that it exists. Many people experience a vague inner urgency, but do not know its meaning. This urgency can be consciously experienced by everyone at one time or another. Anyone who finds himself on a committed path such as this, in which the deepest problems are sought to be resolved and the dormant potentials realized, has made this urge quite conscious. Others are still grappling with the vagueness of this urge, without really knowing what the inner unrest signifies. Individuals who steadily disregard the clamoring of this inner voice, contained in the life force, often come to deep crises in their lives. Many a crisis can only be properly understood when this deepest urge is recognized.

Tonight's lecture deals with the topic of dynamic growth, the spontaneous unification that occurs in the process of growth. I wish to discuss the dynamics -- or some of the dynamics and aspects -- inherent in the growth process. All life is, to some degree, a growth process. Again, it it either quite deliberate and committed, or it is a haphazard, unconscious attempt, obstructed by the opposite blind forces that pull backwards into a state of stagnation.

Let us understand a little more about growth dynamics. Before going deeper into this topic, I must tell you that this lecture can only be fully understood as a sequence of all lectures given this year. We went very systematically through various steps, which I shall briefly recapture at the end of this lecture. Off hand, these topics may appear to be unconnected with one another. Yet, when you follow through with a deeper understanding, you cannot fail to perceive the link and the organic sequence between them.

Let us first get a concept of the real meaning of growth. Usually people do not think profoundly enough when they speak of such things as growth, life, death, love, pleasure, etc. The concepts have become flat. This is why we must state and restate certain terms: to fill in the meaning. Growth is not merely an event in which an organism becomes bigger. Growth is, of course, also an expansion, but in a particular sense. It implies mastering something that one was unable to master before. Something, either inside the self or in its surroundings, that presented an obstruction before, becomes part of the realm of the self after the obstruction is mastered.

When an obstruction is not mastered, a disunity is present -- either within the self or between the self and the outside world. When growth has taken place, the disunity becomes unified. Hence, growth is always a unifying process. It always implies bridging a chasm, mastering a conflict, resolving a contradiction, or an apparent contradiction. This applies to all levels of being. Let us take a very simple example on the surface level of physical mastery. When an infant begins to stand up and learn to walk, there is for this infant a disunity between its physical powers, the laws of gravity, and the world around. There seems to exist a contradiction or a split between the world and itself, as long as the ability to walk has not been acquired. Once this has been accomplished, the disunity has disappeared. What was first a disparity has now become an extended field of operation of the entity in question. Its realm has been increased, it now possesses a new "piece" of the world it has not possessed before. Thus, the efforts of growth have brought expansion, increased range of being, more power, and unity where there was before limitation of power and range of being, as well as disunity. Not learning to walk renders the entity helpless, dependent, and prevents bringing out its dormant potentials to walk and thus conquer the world in this particular respect. It creates a specific unhappiness, weakness, pain, and limitation, which are all overcome when the ability to walk has been acquired.

Each phase of a human being's life signifies a new venturing out into new territory that has not been mastered before. The same applies to an entity's overall evolution from one incarnation into the other, and later on into further stages of being and creating. The sequence is always that first the inability is taken for granted and not even recognized as such. Next, it is recognized as an obstacle that could be overcome. Next, effort is being taken to do so. A little later I shall discuss what this effort consists of. Only then comes the victory, the new possession of new faculties. This applies to all levels. A psychological conflict expresses the identical principle as outlined in the example of the baby learning to walk. Before the particular difficulty has been recognized as such, there is an unconscious helplessness and a sense of limitation. Then the problem is recognized as a problem. After this the entity decides to do something about it and envisages the possibility of resolving the disunity. Then he begins a path of struggle, of searching, of groping, of testing his faculties in various ways. Eventually a new unity will be attained that grants a new power of life and power over life. Territory that before was alien and inaccessible now becomes home ground on which the person feels comfortable and at ease with himself and life. This is growth.

The possession of new home ground also gives a new security and peace. For the new power eliminates the old helplessness, with its accompanying insecurity and fear.

All growth function must combine the voluntary and the involuntary functions. If the emphasis is not equally distributed, growth cannot really proceed harmoniously. The finished product of growth appears effortlessly. It is a manifestation of the involuntary faculties, which respond to the voluntary ones. The voluntary faculties do require effort in many ways. Effort in persistence and perseverance, in groping and searching, in trying out forever new modalities until they all fit, in self-testing, in removing defenses and vanity, in mustering courage and truthfulness with the self. All this is effort. It is perhaps the most significant effort when the line of least resistance is overcome again and again. Discovering a new dimension of life cannot occur without birth pains, which are primarily sustained effort, in order to test different approaches and new ways to finally accomplish the unification. I speak of birth pains not merely allegorically, for each new unification is a little bit of a spiritual rebirth. For birth is always a rediscovery of the self, the self in a new form, with more faculties revealed and activated. Every new skill attained is, in a sense, a rebirth. It is the discovery of a new realm of life through the discovery of a new faculty in the self. It bridges the previous chasm which was caused by the lack of that skill.

However, after the effort has been made, when actual unification, or the result of growth, finally occurs, it happens involuntarily. It seems to happen by itself, as it were. It seems to have nothing to do with the previous efforts. This can, in fact, be so deceptive that people can be deluded into believing it would have happened anyway and that all the effort could have been spared. By the same token, when the result is expected as a direct, visible manifestation of the voluntary faculties, such expectation becomes frustrating and discouraging. So it is extremely important, my friends, that you are aware of these two sides of the growth process, of creating. This applies to the smallest details, as well as to the greatest and most significant aspects of your spiritual development. It applies to meditation, which must combine the two sides, as I outlined before. And it applies to the most mundane acquisition of a new skill.

The effort of the voluntary faculties also includes a right attitude towards the voluntary and the involuntary functions. This balance must constantly be groped for. The groping itself must be tested out; it must attain the right balance between poised effort and discipline, while yet being relaxed. Each step of growth, each victory over conflict, confusion, ignorance, and helplessness represents a new skill and mastery over life, a new unification -- first of all within the person, and consequently between the person and life.

I frequently spoke in these lectures about the dualism of this earth sphere, or rather, of this state of consciousness, as opposed to the unified principle of ultimate reality. This is what I meant: All of life is a progression to attain further unity and eliminate more and more areas of disunity. Each new state of acquired unity is a safety zone, a new margin, a new home base, so to speak. As growth continues, hitherto undiscovered disunities are detected within this new home base. The entity then proceeds to venture forth into new territory, again by attempting, groping, and struggling to unify the discovered disunity. And so it goes on until total unity is found. It may even appear safer to remain in the old disunity than to venture forth into a new unity. But this appears to be so only because of the effort that is necessary. If effort is perceived as something inorganic, something that "should not exist," then it is experienced as malignant and undesirable. But if it is perceived as a movement of life, then it is experienced as challenging and pleasurable. In that attitude, the right distribution of effort and effortlessness, the right balance of voluntary and involuntary faculties will reveal itself.

When the involuntary faculties finally manifest, the new skill has become, sometimes apparently quite suddenly, an effortless, natural part of the personality. Again, this applies to all levels of the person. On the physical level anyone experiences the difference between the phase of the voluntary effort, the hard labor of practicing, learning, trying; and the naturalness when the skill suddenly becomes second nature. This can be noticed in a sport, or on the mental level, when a new attitude or new emotional responses have been acquired. For example, when you first deal with a specific destructiveness, a particular negativity, it is impossible to change this at will. Instead, you must use your will in order to grope for a deeper understanding and recognition of the problem, for seeing its origin and its effects, for facing the results; for even really wanting to change. All this is volitional. Then, suddenly, you register a new way of reacting, in which you spontaneously react in a new constructive, positive way. This is spontaneous unification. Then it is no longer necessary to put laborious effort of thinking and willing into the new skill, the new attitude, the new reaction, the new feeling, or the new activity.

When you are torn by apparent futility, by the pain of equally undesirable alternatives at your disposal, which make life itself futile and undesirable, you are in a state of utter disunity, in the particular respect of your pain and your conflict. Your assumption that there is no way out is a denial of the growth process that life is at all times. On the other hand, your willingness to find a solution is a commitment toward life and toward a new area of expansion of your personality. It is the readiness to find new mastery over present helplessness and constriction. The greatest difficulty is always the first step, when you do not even know what your specific disunity, or, rather, what the specific disunities are. For there are, of course, many disunities in various respects. The voluntary faculties must consolidate in order to find, state, face, and confront the specific disunity of the moment to be overcome, to name it, as it were. Then, as mentioned, the inner commitment and investment toward overcoming it is part of the volitional faculties. Only after this step does an alternative process develop, in which the involuntary yields recognitions, inspiration, guidance, and revelation, point by point, adding more pieces to the puzzle, until it all fits together. In this alternation every new insight requires new commitment, and new search, until the next organic step reveals itself. So it goes on. This is really a description of the path itself, which is all that. Part of the voluntary faculties is always to make room in your mind for the fact that a particular unity potentially exists where there is now a particular disunity. It is necessary to affirm that this unity, which still eludes you, can be attained and that, in fact, you will attain it. The amount of investment will determine the outcome. It is often true that the desire is affirmed in principle, but when it actually comes to some of the more difficult steps of the voluntary part of the dynamic growth, they are not chosen. Unpleasantness, or apparent unpleasantness, is shirked. The self does not wish to expose itself where vanity, appearance in the eyes of others, are challenged; here cherished prejudices and illusions are, and must be, challenged. The areas of stagnation must be stirred up and the total personality must cooperate and invest into this process if spontaneous unification is to occur.

This investment of the mind and will, of the emotions and attitudes, as far as emotional, psychological, spiritual growth is concerned, corresponds to sustained practice when physical, or purely mental, new skills are attained. The latter are, in themselves, also unifications where previously disunity existed.

Along this road, the first appearances of effortless spontaneous unification will not remain so all at once. It will disappear again, because the unification has not yet been made total. New material, new aspects, must still be sought; new attitudes still be acquired; new mastery deepened and widened. Hence, more voluntary effort must follow suit, until the second appearance of this specific unification spontaneously manifests. And then it must alternate again, until the third, fourth, fifth appearance of spontaneous unification, of effortless, involuntary functioning is being made, until very gradually the new skill has become second nature and is incorporated into the personality.

Whether the acquisition of a new mastery applies to physical, mental, emotional, or spiritual skills, it always means the overcoming of a rift, an imaginary rift, but nevertheless a deeply experienced and painful chasm. It always means that the illusory duality or disunity is finally bridged, has melded into its natural and real state.

Disunity is always painful, unpleasurable. Pleasure, which was the topic of the last lecture, always depends on unity. Expansion into life means a constant forward movement through which a hitherto alien and apparently hostile world becomes one's own home, so to speak. Each unification means that you have made an apparently foreign aspect of the world your own world, so that you have found new ease, new comfort, new experience in comfort, ease, and peace in the world -- through your efforts of unifying the rift.

It is exceedingly important to understand all this, my friends. You have often used the terms expansion, growth, experience, and so on, quite freely. But, as is so often the case, words are being used without the full understanding of what they convey on a deeper scope.

To recapitulate: effortless, spontaneous growth and unification occurs only as a result of effort and struggle. This requires a forward movement into life. This movement must be poised and relaxed. Effort must be exerted, but it is a disciplined, relaxed effort, rather than a tense or rigid one. The latter reveals unconscious reluctance. The former is possible because there is no reluctance. When it is therefore felt that relaxed effort is impossible, you should search for and determine the unconscious reluctance to move forward. The relaxed movement is pleasurable in itself, while the rigid movement, that covers the hidden reluctance, is painful. Instead of denying the hidden reluctance, you must focus on it.

The relaxed and determined movement into life to accomplish further and further unifications is pleasurable in itself, although difficult, challenging, and often even taxing. Each accomplished unification brings further pleasure and each further pleasure leads to more unifications. And so it goes on, endlessly -- the stream of life. Unification brings and is pleasure, when it is no longer believed to be something that should be already "over with." The whole Cosmos will thus be unified into the self and the self into it.

The constriction, the restriction, the static, the non-movement, the stagnation denotes that the personality contents itself with a very limited state. Therefore, growth dynamics is also, apart from unifying disunity, mastering ignorance and negativity. It is a mastery also over the misconceptions. Misconceptions always lead to more splitting, division, disunity. But they stem from an erroneous attempt to find unity. You have heard me say before that neurosis is, in itself, an erroneous attempt to find health and well-being. It makes, in its own blind way, peace with something traumatic and painful. On your path, you have found, again and again, those misconceptions that equate, for example, love with pain and danger; pleasure with humiliation and shame; self-assertion with unacceptable aggression; and many others. Thus, a vital aspect of living must be denied because its apparent byproduct is too undesirable. These are typical examples of false unifications that must be split again -- disunified -- in order to find harmony, fullness, wholeness, and real unification.

As a result of misconceptions, negativity and destructive attitudes, all forward movement appears dangerous. It must, indeed, often bend in order to unify. It must stir up what has found a temporary, costly, wasteful, and limiting "peace." It moves out of an apparently safe place into danger. The stagnating, restricting, limiting life, in which one does not dare to venture forth, seems safety. Everyone of my friends who is already involved in this pathwork has gone through and confronted some of the more hidden and irrational feelings, attitudes, and responses, such as we discuss here. When we speak of resistances, which you begin to be aware of, this is what is always, in one form or another, behind them. If you really question them with an open mind and in a very simple fashion, you will find that resistance to growth is fear; and the insistence to stagnate and remain as you are, even though you dimly know that this means sacrifice of happiness, pleasure, wholeness, love, and expansion, is due to the idea that this is the only way you can be safe. In other words, the misconceptions that further stagnation are illusory safety in a limited way of life. Ignorance, non-mastery seem to be security. Seeking a tiny point where you have your basis of life, your frame of reference, your movement, your being, with a narrow circumference, amounts to an abdication of your universal destiny. This contenting oneself with the limiting fences is life and growth-denying. It denies pleasure. It makes do with a very unnecessary waste of the most valuable spiritual power man possesses in his deepest soul. But, in order to unfold these powers, challenge, effort, and mastery are the privilege man has. This privilege must be freely chosen. Then growth becomes adventure and pleasure.

In view of this truth, it is a sin against life not to grow. This may appear a crass statement, but it is nevertheless true. Since you are an expression of the Divine, since you are God, it is your birthright and your destiny to fulfill yourself by making more and more, and greater and greater unifications; to acquire more and more spiritual skills in order to bridge disunity; to do away with disunity; to create bliss by more unity in forever new areas.

Many people are active in forever increasing their physical and/or mental skills. This is also valuable. It is a movement toward life as well. It also represents mastery over disunity. Not knowing what one is particularly interested in represents a limitation. The attainment of the skills affords a new pleasure and self-mastery. Thus another piece of the Cosmos has been made into one's own world. Also, the steps leading to this new mastery are in essence the same as those which are necessary when the inner universe is being discovered and enlarged. The same attributes are fundamentally necessary, even though one deals with outer, and often mechanical, aspects of living, while the outer serves as a mere substitute for the inner enlargement of life, it is still preferable to total stagnation, which is bound to end up in temporary, physical death. Real spiritual growth and mastery, dynamic growth on the inner level, spontaneous unification of emotional, psychological, and, therefore spiritual, rifts holds the inner balance and harmony, out of which grow organically, naturally, effortlessly, and spontaneously the intuitive guidance and knowledge toward outer unifications. Physical and mental skills, intellectual growth, all have their value. But when they are sought as a substitute for the inner growth, they must miss their mark, and they can often become an exaggerated activity. When inner growth is the center of one's being, everything else falls into place without the pendulum swinging from one extreme to another. Unessential goals will fall away.

When cosmic truth is ignored, disunity must exist to whatever extent ignorance exists. It is every single entity's fate to bridge over this ignorance by struggling toward these unifications, step by step. They are most difficult on the most hidden, innermost, emotional levels, since emotions cannot be directly willed, nor can they always even be quite conscious. It therefore requires a search for determining the disunity before the work of unification can begin. Human beings go through several stages in their overall evolution. When they are more primitive, they must deal with the outer levels. Later their task lies in the unification of the inner world.

When one's universe is being enlarged by attempting unifications of painful disunity and conflict, trust in the involuntary functions is essential. This trust can be gained only slowly. For everyone starts out by not having experienced it yet. Thus, you must give yourself the opportunity to experience it. All the necessary effort will be wasted if the involuntary functions are not allowed to manifest. They cannot manifest, or be recognized, when the consciousness does not make room for them and pays attention to them -- in a relaxed, calm, patient, and trusting way. This is a vital part of the growth procedure. When you realize that your efforts cannot bring a direct result, but an unexpected, spontaneous, dynamic one, perhaps when you least expect it, and you wait with an inner readiness, then harmony between the voluntary and involuntary faculties will establish itself in principle. That is the most important thing. By harmony I do not necessarily mean that the effort is equal in measure. Months of groping with the voluntary processes of mind and will may spontaneously bring forth an inner feeling that springs up in the fraction of a moment. It does not last long, but its depth and intensity, its significance in terms of change, of security, and of the realization of what life is are so profound that it cannot be measured in terms of all your volitional efforts and investment. Hence, the harmony between the voluntary and involuntary faculties exists primarily in making room for both in your attitude, awareness, expectation, outlook, and activity. It requires your intuitive groping for how and when you combine and alternate these two functions.

Let us assume you have already painstakingly gone through the suggested four steps in my lecture about negativity. When it comes to the fourth step, you are often obstructed by the vagueness with which you approach the spontaneous manifestation of the involuntary powers in you. Your not really believing in them weakens your assertion and your affirmation to want to have the positive attitude, as opposed to the negative one. Or you want to give up your fear and resistance to pleasure, and give up the roles and pretenses that stand in the way. This wanting must be affirmed in calm trust, in firm conviction. At this point the voluntary must make room for the involuntary, until the indirect manifestation, the spontaneous unification, will occur. You will let it happen by a relaxed and determined wanting it. This is the marriage of the voluntary and the involuntary, the active and the passive principles.

If growth is seen in this light, a lot of fear, hopelessness, and wasteful effort will be eliminated. You will have a more consolidated effort. At the same time, you will be less impatient with the time element that is involved in order to create the unification where now disunity exists.

Before turning to your questions I would like to show you here the importance of the sequence of the lectures I have given this year. In the first we were dealing with the creative process itself: with the creating of positive or negative life circumstances that every human being, either deliberately or unintentionally, follows through by his very being -- by what he believes, thinks, wills, feels, and aspires. I have shown that living and being inevitably means creating, for the life substance is constantly being molded by every expression of the conscious and unconscious being of an individual. In relation to this particular lecture on the dynamics of growth and unification, it is self-evident that the person who ventures forth into life in the spirit of overcoming disunity creates an altogether different life than he who contents himself in narrow confines. In the second lecture I discussed the importance of man's negativity and how it creates misery, failure, and discontent -- and yet how difficult it seems to abandon it, since the creative process is holding a fascination over the person. In connection with the present lecture, the creation of negativity and a narrowly confined life that continually turns and revolves around itself; negativity that creates disunity rather than unity, pain rather than pleasure. In connection with the dynamics of spontaneous unification and growth processes, it is up to an individual's inner commitment and decision to create a wider life, a unified life, bliss and pleasure, rather than a narrow life, disunity, and pain. With regard to the third lecture on pleasure and its importance in creation, it is self-evident, when considering the contents of this present lecture, that pleasure is possible only in a unified, expanding, ever-enlarging state. By traversing the self-imposed narrow fences, you make more and more of the universe your own, thereby fulfilling your destiny. The voluntary and involuntary functions are, in reality, not separate. They are separated, or not separated, as your intelligence, your individual consciousness, is separated, or not separated, from the universal intelligence. It depends on your degree of awareness of universal truth. They are separated only due to your own splitting off in consciousness. But in reality it is all one and the same. One and the same consciousness, one and the same faculty of power, of intelligence, of creativity, of knowing, of flowing. That is the reality. But as it manifests to you, in your present state of awareness and in your human limited state, you seem to be dealing with two entirely different faculties and two entirely different "brains": the inner and the outer, the conscious and the unconscious, the directly available and the indirectly available.

These words are only a blueprint from which you can work and attempt more and more spontaneous unifications out of disunity, and more disunity after a limited unity that brings further, wider, and more differentiated disunity to work through and to mend, so as to obtain wider, deeper, and more differentiated unity. And so on and on. So that your life expands and you become more and more master where you are now weak, helpless, and dependent; so that you become more and more blissful where you are now in pain; so that you become more and more in truth where you are now in error. Error, pain, suffering, helplessness, stagnation, and disunity are one unit. And pleasure, growth, unification, and expansion are another. May you make your choice over and over again. Commit yourself to your choice over and over again -- to that which is truth, to that which is love, to that which is growth. Be the Gods you truly are.

The Guide
by Eva Pierrakos
December 5, 1969

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