Chain Reaction In The Dynamics Of Creative Life Substance

By The Pathwork Guide

Greetings, my dearest friends -- all of you here. Blessings for everyone. May the truth of the words spoken reach your innermost being and put a seed into the fertile soil of the creative substance of which you are born and which bears you, as it were, all the time. For being is a continuous process. Life bears new fruit all the time. That which has already been born is forever renewed, it grows and changes, it is in a process of perpetual birth. Birth is not a one-time occurrence.

In this lecture I would like to discuss a very specific chain reaction -- both in its natural, unhampered, and therefore in its positive manifestation, and in its distortion. In its positive, natural version the particular links of this chain are the following: Life's basic characteristic experienced for what it is: as abundance, generosity, overwhelming givingness -- man's similar and hence compatible attitude -- self-possession, the ability to deal realistically and constructively with frustration -- being true to the issue, the self, the moment.

The links in the negative chain reaction are: Life's limitation and enmity against man -- man's defensive pettiness of spirit -- self-alienation, false, destructive reaction to frustration -- living for the sake of approval and impressing others, and/or (often simultaneously) living for the sake of rebelling so as to prove independence of spirit.

Every one of these links has been amply discussed by us and, in many cases, worked through on your path. But we have never seen the importance of these links as a continuum. It is therefore necessary that we talk about this at length.

One of life's most outstanding characteristics, its very essence, is its fertility, its givingness. It is truly limitless in this feature. It sprouts forth forever new and more varied experiences of bliss, self-expression, fascination. It is everything, literally everything, that mind can conceive of. This includes, of course, limited, negative manifestations. If man's mind is geared to perceive and conceive life as, a priori, hostile and mean, then this is exactly the way it will manifest to him. If he ignores life's versatility and richness, and the fact that it can manifest as anything he truly believes and desires, then he is caught in a trap from which he can escape only when he recognizes it as such. He will not escape until he challenges his silent assumption, which had seemed so natural to him that he did not stop to even notice it before: the assumption that life is limited and negative. Then he will recognize that another possibility also exists, one that might indeed bring forth a different kind of manifestation.

One might almost say that the wrong focusing on this limited expectation of life is a "trick" of the mind. Then, finding again the truth of being is a simple "click" of the mind. Life is continuously bubbling forth, with an energy, with a force of powerful creative impact, that is truly inconceivable for man's mind. Nevertheless, aspects or particles of this essence of life can be experienced once the door has been opened and life, because you make it possible, begins to present you with its gifts. I might add that the very fact that life can manifest to the exact degree of man's expectation and concept is a proof of its limitless power and generosity. This must include, perforce, limited negative consciousness. In other words, when man's mind, as an intrinsic part of life itself, is geared in a way alien to life's essence, then this very alienness must be experienced. Only as life's manifestation and man's consciousness appear as inseparable does the rift mend and life can begin to be what its potentials are.

The second link in the chain is man's attitude. I already mentioned how man's mind, his consciousness, his concept about life, his expectation of it, is a direct influence on how life can manifest. When he is aware of life's essence, of its richness and its generosity, man's entire attitude will be totally different from an attitude that stems from a conviction that life is his enemy. In the former case his very being is compatible with life's generosity. In the latter instance it is not.

Let us examine this a bit closer. When a negative conviction exists, distrustfulness is natural. Distrustfulness creates ungenerous impulses and attitudes. It is, in itself, ungenerous to suspect someone of negative motives when this person is really very favorably disposed. Whether this someone is a particular entity or life at large matters little. The principle remains the same. The suspicious, ungenerous attitude creates further negative, limiting aspects; for example, fear and greed. Both fear and greed stem from blindness and thus breed further blindness. Greed wishes to amass selfishly, when this is not necessary in the least. It creates a closed-up, tight, and very negative energy, and an atmosphere that truly excludes the person from life. Thus, he must experience lack, want, frustration, rejection, etc. He builds defenses against these eventualities. You all know about the nature of these defenses, how damaging they are, how they indeed destroy the good of life that wants to come to you.

If man, on the other hand, knows that life's essence is generous, then he will be open, trustful, and generous himself -- generous in his trust in life, generous in his being, for there is no need to hold in, to hold back, to keep the self held together in a tight package of ungiving. All feelings will stream forth generously, fearlessly, and, consequently, more of life's gifts will come to the individual who has understood the nature of life and acts accordingly.

I recapitulate: man's compatibility with life lies in knowing that it is unlimited and that it must bring forth exactly according to expectation, attitude, and concept; therefore trusting it, and building on this trust. The firmer this conviction has become, as a result of repeatedly experiencing this truth because the focus has been adjusted, the more trustful, relaxed, positive, creative, generous, and giving the person must become. There will be none of the petty defenses, pseudo protections, and pretenses which he who distrusts life inevitably adopts. When you look closer at those defenses, those protective roles, you will see that underneath them life's essential benignness is being doubted.

In whatever respect man finds himself encased in one of his problems, in an inner conflict, in one of those neurotic battles with himself and life, he is, in that area at least, negative in his perception of life, and therefore distrustful of life. Consequently, he institutes pettiness into his approach to life. Wherever there are inner problems, there must be a negative outlook on life: distrust, pettiness, ungenerous attitudes toward life, and, respectively, toward others. All the roles and games we have amply discussed, and which we are working on, display these characteristics.

The next step in the chain reaction is self-possession versus self-alienation. If it is true that man must first be as generously squandering of himself as life is squandering itself on all created beings, provided it is allowed to do so, then the individual must first possess itself before it can give itself away. Only he who fully owns himself can give himself safely and thus find self-renewal in this giving of the self. Each step of giving seems to involve the risk of losing. It is always first an apparent abyss into which you trustingly throw yourself, only to find that all risk is illusory and the giving of self to life is the safest, most realistic attitude conceivable. But this reality must be discovered by the taking of the illusory risk. Only he who owns himself can take such a risk. Never he who is not in full possession of himself. If you do not own yourself, you have nothing to give. You are poor. For the richness of life is also in you, within you. When you ignore this fact, and build yourself, your values, your foundation, outside yourself, you become more and more impoverished, and hence cannot give anything away. On the contrary, you must strive to amass more; you must attempt to cheat life by manipulating circumstances in such a way that you gain as much and give as little as possible. Of course, I do not discuss outer, material things here, although one's attitude in this respect may also be colored by one's emotional attitude. However, this is not always exactly parallel. What I am primarily concerned with is the more subtle level of feelings. His attitude to giving of his feelings, as opposed to receiving good feelings from others, is the criterion according to which we can determine in what way this chain reaction manifests in any given respect of man's life. Most human beings, in one respect or another, to a greater or lesser degree, wish to receive all the love possible but are really not willing to give any, although they try to convince themselves that they would also love if only they were loved first, and that it be returned a tit for tat, in the exact manner as their limited consciousness figures it out.

This brings us to the next link in this chain reaction. What are the elements that determine self-possession? There are several, and we cannot go into them all at once. But I will select in this lecture two specific aspects, which were also discussed previously, although not in this context. These two aspects are far-reaching and cover a great deal of ground. I would say that they are key points, so that self-possession undoubtedly exists when these two aspects are established. The first is the ability to deal with frustration and disappointment, with life apparently saying No to you. It is one thing to know theoretically that in the last analysis every No you experience in life, no matter from where it comes to you and how undeserved it appears to be, is your own doing, and quite another to experience this truth. In order to do so, a great willingness for such experience must be summoned, which is not easy. It means overcoming the often strong temptation to indulge in feelings of self-pity and resentment, in complaining and accusing -- overtly or covertly, by your emotional reactions and expressions. The latter course often seems at first quite justified and inviting. The former implies the willingness to accept our premise, even though you cannot see it yet, and may have to search for a while until the true cause reveals itself to you. Until such time, the frustration must be borne in a productive way.

There is a right, productive and a wrong, destructive way to both accepting and rejecting a frustration in life. The right kind of acceptance automatically also brings the right kind of rejecting frustration. Right acceptance is: awareness and willingness to see that each miscondition is self-produced and voluntarily pushed out of sight. Hence the result must be borne with courage and without self-indulgence. The attitude then exists that mistakes must be paid for, and that this payment is not an unfair demand of life. This is never a negative, hopeless attitude, but rather leads to the right kind of rejection of suffering. In effect, the person expresses this attitude into life: "There is no need to suffer for the rest of my life. I am willing, with all my heart and with my best investment of myself, to find the cause and to change it. Therefore I know that life will yield the fulfillment that I desire, and deserve all the more since I act as an adult, who does not claim any special dispensation for his ignorance and destructiveness." This attitude conciliates right acceptance with the right rejection of frustration.

Wrong acceptance of frustration leads to wrong rejection of it, or vice versa. When frustration is being dramatized into annihilation, as "the end of one's world," it soon becomes so convincing that the mood indeed feels as though it were really that -- and reasons can be drummed up that make it appear that way. All the while the personality says underneath, in effect: "I refuse to suffer any disappointment. I must have what I want at all times, instantly, and in exactly my way, else I feel persecuted." This denial of self-responsiblity leads to a false acceptance, i.e., hopelessness, resignation, doom. When the small momentary frustration or difficulty or disappointment is being dramatized into a tragedy and it induces the person to have a negative outlook on life per se, then a destructive "acceptance" exists. If a disagreeable occurrence is being made into a catastrophe (often only in one's emotional reactions, which may not necessarily be openly expressed), then rigid selfwill, stiff insistence on it, arrogance -- in that the person demands special treatment from life -- and the exaggerated distortion that the difficulty is insurmountable and hopeless -- in short, selfwill, pride, and fear -- create a dark climate in the soul and a dissension within it. They disunify and make the dualistic split wider. It is always easy to get lost in two opposites, which are both wrong when they appear as real opposites. This is clearly illustrated here. Acceptance and refutation of frustration are not opposites, but can be a beautiful oneness. The attitude that comes into being from this unity expresses everything that is compatible with life's nature. It creates a relaxed, confident, trustful state. It negates unfair special treatment. It has humility, and it is generous in that it accepts its own part in the play. It is also generous in the sense of dispensing with the temptation to play the same old game of feeling victimized and accusatory.

In this way you become active and, at the same time, receptive, so that the creative substance can begin to sprout forth for you. Life' limitation for you will be overcome. When this right blend exists of the right way of accepting and refuting a frustration of life, you possess yourself. You truly own yourself. And, conversely, when you get involved with the wrong blend of acceptance and refutation of frustration in life, you become alienated from yourself. You become decentralized, for your own innermost, best forces are automatically inactivated by the wrong blend. The negativity thus generated paralyzes all that in you which is essential for true selfhood.

The second aspect which is a prerequisite for self-possession is being true to yourself. This may mean many things, as you know and as we have amply discussed. It means living for the sake of the truth of the issue that momentarily is problematic; it means being true to your feelings, opinions, and innermost expressions rather than those of others; it means being true to the truth of the moment, which may be so disguised, so covered up by complicated twists in the minds of everyone involved that, again, it requires wanting to see a reality beyond the apparent one. In any problematic situation people suffer most because they cannot disentangle the many pros and cons, the ifs and the buts. This is always so when self-alienation exists and the central point has been lost. Self-possession can only be regained when the utter willingness is expressed to see the deeper truth, which always conciliates apparent outer conflicts -- either within the person or between the person and others. This inner reality reveals itself when the self is willing to sacrifice selfwill, pride, and fear (defenses) for the sake of truth: for the sake of that which is most positive under the circumstances. Once again, this often requires, at first, a great amount of willpower to reject the line of least resistance, which is to insist on viewing the issue only according to one's personal case against life -- with all the complaints, the victimization, the accusation.

Being true to oneself must dispense with the tendency to submit, conform, and appease others, which is done solely for the sake of receiving their approval. This leads to nothing but sharp resentments and further feelings of injustice. Man must also dispense with the prideful desire to prove himself better than others and impress the world around. However, he must also dispense with the equally damaging tendency to prove his independence by sheer blind and meaningless rebellion. The latter leads to no more selfhood than the submission to other people's standards, although it is often falsely assumed that it means strength and true independence. In reality, a self is just as weak when it blindly closes itself up to other people, as the self who repeats other people's values like a parrot. Again, we have two apparent opposites. The right kind of self-assertion, including the risk to be criticized, leads to an openness of mind that can afford to truly listen to and weigh what others have to say in an honest way, asking for but one thing, "Is this a truth? Could it be my truth?" When the answer is affirmative, it ceases to be someone else's value, it becomes indeed one's own value and truth.

I recapitulate: when the self is only concerned with its appearance in the eyes of others, regardless under what circumstances or on what level; or when the self is only concerned with proving that it is not -- and thus blindly rebels and spites -- in both instances there is no self-possession. You must get lost to yourself when you follow either -- and often simultaneously or alternately both courses. You will find your own essence if you search for the truth, the underlying conciliating reality -- which reveals itself when you are willing to give up all negative, destructive attitudes. This willingness must be concisely expressed and guidance asked for. If the willingness is lacking, it should rather be faced and examined, for there must be grave misconceptions hindering this desire. Nothing could be more harmful than denying that the self is not willing to abandon destructive attitudes and then pretend on the surface that what happens is really undeserved.

Blind rebellion, thus a closed mind, means that the self is as bound as the apparently too open self that wants, or believes it needs, to please everyone. In both instances selfhood is lost because the truth of the matter is lost under the rubble of false compliance or false rebellion. The truth of the moment can be found when both these false alternatives are dispensed with.

Life's abundance and generous giving will manifest for you and give you the best when you give it your best by being committed to the truth of the issue at all times, regardless of how difficult this may be, or may appear to be, to face. Only then can you be as constructive and resourceful as you wish in order to experience life with its inherent characteristic: utter abundance and goodness. Otherwise, your desire for happiness must be counteracted constantly by an equal fear of happiness, so that you repel it while you strive for it.

This is not as complicated, and, paradoxically, not as easy, as it may appear. The complication ceases when you commit yourself over and over again to the ultimate truth in every issue of your life. It is not easy in that the self abhors to give up the pretenses and games. It likes to play to an audience, even if none exists.

If these two aspects are observed -- the handling of frustration and being true to the ultimate reality of the self and the situation -- you will be a functioning, creative being. You will do away with the roles and pretenses. You will allow yourself to fully see and pulsate, for that must be the truth of being. You will accept your own temporary state -- not with despair but with hope, because the hope will be justified in view of the positiveness and the realism with which you approach yourself. In this attitude you cannot fail to discover the generosity of life; a life that bestows and again bestows upon you its goodness, far more than your wildest dreams could think of. Life will come to you as a reflexion of your own soul, in an unending series of new self-expressions, new forms of pleasure, and depths of unifying relationships; new challenges mastered; new fascinations; and deeper well-being and peace. These are not empty promises, but facts -- facts of life. You will find yourself in forever new ways, in excitement and serenity, as you lose the negative attitudes, the defensive games.

When man is involved in the negative manifestation of this chain reaction, the limited, bleak nature of life he experiences seems the reality, and words such as these seem wishful thinking. The longer one dwells in the destructive defenses of accusing and self-victimizing, the more real this temporary limited and false life becomes, and the tighter the prison doors close, although those doors have been self-erected. They are nevertheless prison doors and must be opened by the self. The false reality, the apparent reality, draws in the self that has created it. For there seems to be nothing outside, there is no outside for him who has tricked himself in that way.

Man must find his way back, in his long, long journey, to the truth of the nature of life; he must see the trick his mind has played on him by focusing only on negative views of life, thereby developing negative attitudes, and therefore experiencing life in the exact way he is perceiving it.

The average human being is involved in this trick of the mind in some areas. These are then referred to as "his problems." But he is by no means negatively involved in all areas of his life. So it would be a mistake to ascertain either the positive or the negative chain reaction in you as the only truth of your condition. You will find that you have both. In some individuals the positive is stronger, in some the negative. Look at the area of your life where you find yourself fulfilled and happy. You will undoubtedly see that your concept and expectation of life in this area is very positive. This is not so because life has been good to you. It is the other way around. Having confidence in the richness of life in this respect, you are relaxed, unfearful, trusting. You are not easily threatened or frightened. You maintain a positive attitude, even if there are occasional difficulties and disappointments, which you more or less master whenever they come up. Thus the good that life gives you becomes more and more effortless and self-perpetuating. When you look closely, you will see that, at least in this particular area, you can afford to be yourself; you are not strained or anxious, and not particularly worried about what others think about you in this respect. You possess yourself, thus you can afford to be generous and give of yourself. You are neither submissive nor rebellious. Ideas or advice from others are considered for what they are, and either accepted and made your own, or rejected without fear of displeasing.

At the same time, there may be, and probably is, another area in you in which conditions are totally different. Everything pertaining to the negative chain holds true. Human beings who have only the positive chain reactions, or only the negative ones, are the exception. The former is a self-realized person; the latter cannot function at all in reality. He is not within society and is perhaps in jail, or he is a mentally ill human being. Most human beings are somewhere in the middle. They have some positive and some negative chain reactions working within them. Their path of growth must lie in the discovery of the latter, so that they can be transformed into the former. The more this process takes place, the nearer self-realization comes.

If you approach yourself from this particular point of view and really work through these chain reactions, you will see, my friends, that the battle is at first enormous. To make the "click" from the negative to the positive chain seems impossible. In this battle you have to take into consideration that there is another reality beyond the one you experience. This will be easier to do when you have first established a connection with and awareness of a positive chain reaction within yourself. You have then an excellent basis of comparison on every point we have raised here. If you do this in depth and with a felt experience of all the links under discussion, you have a very good key to understand yourself and your problems.

When you actually come to the full recognition of the negative belief about a specific area of unfulfillment in your life, and when you go deeply enough, always with the help of meditation, you will see, first only in ever so subtle and concealed a way, that it is tempting to believe in the negative. After a while, you will see that this attitude is actually quite strong and obvious, and not so subtle at all. The temptation consists of a variety of feelings and attitudes. For instance: it seems secure to expect the worst, one cannot be disappointed. This is particularly important because of the inability to cope with frustration. There is also an element of spite in this negative attitude and expectation of life, as if the individual wanted to accuse life of meanness. These are, perhaps, the most important aspects of the fascination and attraction to hold on to a negative outlook. If this satisfaction cannot be relinquished, there is no hope to come out of the cycle of doom. The false doom must be challenged, and only you can do this. The more often you therefore express the desire and the firm intention to see another reality behind the one you are used to in the particular area in question, the more infallibly this will happen. First gradually and with interruptions -- first as a vague outline of a new landscape appearing on the horizon, a new vista. But it will feel more real than anything you have ever known, even though it is tenuous at first. It must be recaptured again and again, for the old fascination with the negative belief is ingrained, and the habit must be broken over and over. You will probably experience something like this: a limited, hopeless-seeming situation appears to offer only very few alternatives -- usually one good one and one or several undesirable ones. If what you conceive of as the desirable situation (and it may actually be desirable) does not come to pass, you then indulge in the temptation of playing the doom game with life, fortifying the negative chain reaction. But once you have challenged it and you begin to envisage new possibilities, a completely different solution may appear. This may not be the ideal end result. That may require the overcoming of further obstacles within yourself and entail greater effort and patience. But, oh, in the very process of going through these steps lies indeed the fulfillment you wish. Without it, it would be quite impossible. And you will discover this, too, in the new vista of the new landscape. It will give you deep feelings of bliss, security, reality, and meaningfulness. The desired end result will become truly your own production, and not something handed to you from outside yourself. Therefore you will have a grip on it and on life, and there will be no fear that you might lose this grip in spite of your own power to do something. And this power of control is yours, quite regardless of others involved in the situation. No matter how they may fail, there is always recourse for you by taking this suggested road.

This is another important point: not to be misled by limited expectations of possible alternatives. This is why it is so very important to let the mind be flexible and wide open, not to close doors with preconceived notions, but let life present its own manifold possibilities, which you cannot even perceive when you are totally geared to only one or two ways. You have to make yourself wide open for other possibilities than the ones conceived of. When the ability exists to take No for an answer, this flexibility will also be there. You will see how very often the No turns into a Yes, once it is thoroughly understood.

Everyone of you who follows this intensive pathwork should use this key. Although every link in the chain reaction is, in itself, not a new discovery, their connection and continuity is of great importance. You will see something about yourself that needs clarification, so that "switching tracts," so to speak, will become easier. This way you can make a new reality unfold for you.

Take this lecture into your innermost being and work it through. See yourself in terms of these chain reactions. See in what way the positive and the negative ones apply to you. Be blessed, every single one of you. Receive the love and the power that stream forth into your hearts and into your minds. Be in peace.

The Guide
by Eva Pierrakos
January 16, 1970

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