Venture In Mutuality -- Healing Force To Change Negative Will

By The Pathwork Guide

Greetings, blessings, strength, and love are poured forth once again into this gathering, which has one common purpose: inner growth, to find the truth of being. It is a long and arduous way, but arduous only because the mind is lost in its own maze. This state of lostness always creates a split will in the ability to determine and shape one's fate. Man has an outer and conscious will, and an inner and unconscious one, which only too often goes into the exact opposite direction of the former. I discussed this topic in a lecture many years ago, quite early in our common undertaking.

Much time has elapsed since then, time in the sense of development, in the sense of change, and not in the fixed sense that human beings think of time. The group has developed, as a whole and individually, to such an extent that today many of my friends who are actively engaged in this pathwork in a very personal way have come into contact with the inner intention, which is so different from the outer and conscious one.

At the beginning of this pathway, the person -- like the rest of mankind -- is only aware of what he consciously desires, wishes, wants, wills, intends, longs for. He is convinced that the lack of fulfillment in these wished for areas is a result of ill luck, or the fault of others. It takes considerable time and growth to accept the truth of life: that there must be something at work within the personality that thwarts the wished for fulfillment. But even as this, at first purely conceptual, acceptance develops, it still seems impossible to conceive that an actual inner No exists in regard to the conscious Yes. Hardly anyone can believe, to begin with, that what he so ardently strives for is denied by himself for his own inner "reasons." The disconnectedness from this inner voice is the primary problem. Any work concerned with genuine self-search and development must focus on unearthing this inner negation -- and its reasons.

The progress of so many in this group is so remarkable and so significant precisely because so many of you have actually found this inner No-saying voice. You have discovered why it says No, and although you may still be very far from being able to change it, you are at least quite conscious of your self-determining power. You can no longer feel victimized and you can set out to investigate the reasons -- motivations, convictions, and assumptions -- that create this split of your will force. It is easy to see that unification must remain out of reach as long as this conscious awareness of the split of will is absent.

In spite of the fact that this awareness -- like all awareness -- is a great relief and increases psychic energy in the whole system, man fights this knowledge about himself almost more than the actual destructiveness and evil. A good part of resistance is based on wanting to deny the split of will, the inner negation of the outer affirmation. In other words, the average human being's predicament is that he consciously wants one thing, unconsciously he wants the opposite, and then he fights awareness of this dividedness. The result is that he either strives too hard and too frantically for what he unconsciously negates all the harder, so that he finds himself in a frenzy of frustration, bitterness, and tension. Or he manages to also deny -- on a superimposed surface level -- what he longs for. He dulls his senses, his feelings, his longings.

When we started our work together many years ago and I postulated these ideas, they were, for all those who listened to me then or who later read these words, at best a theory. Some may find this theory more acceptable than others; for others it may appear utterly nonsensical. However, even for those who could theoretically accept these premises because they sense the truth of the many layers of human consciousness, there still was a great difference between believing this as a philosophy and experiencing it as a personal truth. In the intervening years the majority of my friends working on this path have indeed come across the inner will that says No to what the outer will not only says Yes to, but ardently strives for. Once again, I want to stress the importance of realizing that the greater the impatience, the more frantically you strive for a desired goal, the more you grab for it, the less you trust in its realization, the more this should be an indication that a firm inner No exists. Instead of wasting your energy into all this inner tension and frenzy in order to overcome something that appears to block you from outside yourself, you would be better advised to relax this tension and calmly set out to uncover your own inner negation of the frantic outer wish.

As I have said, the development of this group depends primarily on how many of you have discovered such inner negations of what you want so very much. This is indeed a tremendous step. Once you stop battling against being consciously aware of saying unconsciously No, once you accept your split, a great deal of dissension will have been eliminated. But by no means all of it. Many of you have found yourselves strangely stuck at this point. Contrary to what one may believe, the awareness of a totally irrational, senseless, self-destructive negation of what is desirable does not automatically eliminate it. Even when you have further unearthed mistaken conclusions, false and unjustified fears which determine the negation, even then it is often quite impossible to give it up. At this point you do have more energy and you must also be less blaming and accusing of others. However, self-blame and self-accusation seem to have increased, for what you heretofore projected onto others, you now see directed against yourself, all the more so since you are peculiarly incapable of changing the No-current into a Yes-current. This is where many of you are.

At this point I have a gift to bring you. Yet this gift is not something you can passively receive, or that comes to you without your participation. As a matter of fact, as I indicated, the gift was made possible only as a result of your significant progress. By the same token, its execution will also require your active participation. The gift has built itself, as it were, from your progress of awareness and acceptance of your negation of your conscious affirmation. You have built this gift, as it were. You made it possible that the ever-present ongoing blessedness and richness of the universe can extend itself more pointedly and potently to where you are stuck now.

The gift is a living powerful force, a healing force that can come and flow through this instrument through which I manifest, more specifically through the hands of this person. Yet, this is not an ordinary healing power on the physical level. Nor is it a healing power that allows you to be merely passive receptive. It must truly become a mutual venture. It can work only as a mutuality. The last lecture on this subject will give you more understanding of what we are concerned with here, and what the laws of mutuality are. Now I should like to explain specifically how mutuality works in this instance.

Anyone of you who is concisely and specifically aware of the negation of what he consciously desires and is strangely paralyzed at this point, in spite of the awareness of the misconceptions involved, is eligible to benefit from this healing force. It is truly a spiritual healing force -- not only because it comes from a higher realm of being, but also because it affects your inner, spiritual being; that part in you in which you determine, in which you will, in which you issue your intentions. Usually people speak of a spiritual healing force when they mean a physical healing force given to a passive recipient, and destined to remove merely a physical symptom of an inner, spiritual malfunctioning. This is truly a misnomer, for a spiritual healing force must affect the spiritual part of man, and, by necessity, requires his active contribution in the healing process. Healers who dispense physical healing power tap a powerful universal energy, but this may not necessarily affect spiritual healing in the true sense of the word.

The following steps will be indicated for all those of you who are ready to avail yourselves of this gift: you come forth, perhaps in one of the questions and answer sessions or after a lecture, and you sit very close, facing this instrument. Your part of the mutuality consists of your acknowledgment, exactly and precisely, of what you consciously wish and what you -- no longer unconsciously -- inwardly, strangely and irrationally, deny; what your inner being expresses that opposes the conscious wish. You must then state further, very exactly, that you are unable to make this inner will budge. But your outer being would like this to be the case; it would like to release the blocked force in you; it would like to obtain from your spiritual self the necessary inspiration for whatever awareness may still be missing. You may then uncover that the non-fulfillment, with all its suffering, appears preferable to the imagined dangers that lurk in an open, flowing attitude, so that negation and negativity, evil and destructiveness seem protective devices. Whatever it is you must know about yourself in order to release negation, that will come. But you must clearly state that you wish this.

When these clear-cut statements are made, when your limitation of being unable to budge the will is stated, while your ego personality states its commitment to wanting help, and you become calm, open, and receptive, then you have fulfilled your half of the mutual venture. A very strong living power and force will penetrate you through these hands. It will not directly affect your bodily ailments. Something much more fundamental will take place, which can, if you so wish, also affect your bodily symptoms. But this will happen from within yourself and as a secondary result of the power given you. This is the gift that you have made possible, that you have built yourself, as it were, all of you who work on this path. By fulfilling your part of the mutuality, you commit yourself; you open something in you and you "go on record." This "going on record," if I may use this expression, is also a very important part.

I also have a suggestion for all those who are not yet at the point of clear-cut awareness of the negation of their most cherished desires. This is to be considered as "homework" and is of the greatest, most essential help for everybody. It is as follows.

As the first step, state what is unfulfilled in your life, what you long for; lift it out of vagueness. Most people do not state this clearly to themselves. They deplore a certain situation, or even a problem in themselves, but they fail to state clearly that they wish to resolve it. The greater the problem, the less the awareness of this being a problem, an existing unfulfillment in life. Hence I suggest that you state to yourself, and preferably on paper so that it cannot elude you: "what you long for; what you would wish different in your life; what you would want different in yourself, in your personality; in what way you would like it to be different". Pose these questions very clearly to yourself.

Then the second series of questions must be raised: "What do you believe contributes to the absence of the fulfillment?" After answering these questions -- again on paper -- to the best of your ability, you go to the third series of questions: "Are you at all aware, at this point, that you say No to the specific fulfillment you miss? Are you aware of it, and, if so, what happens? How is the No expressed in your inner being? How does this inner expression make you behave in such a way that you make the conscious wish impossible to fulfill itself? On what beliefs, assumptions, and ideas do you base the negation, which is in contrast to the conscious striving (and sometimes even grabbing -- only perhaps inwardly, though at times also outwardly)?"

When you answer these questions as concisely as you know how, you will have wrought a tremendous change in your whole personality, regardless of how negative, how immature, or destructive the answers may be, or appear to be. The benefit of being aware of yourself in such a way will relieve you from the tremendous pressure you put against yourself by saying too strenuously Yes to what you say No to on another inner level. And then you come to the final question: "To what degree are you willing, at this point, to cooperate in this mutual venture and receive the healing power and really take it into you and let it work in you, until you finally release these same healing, living forces from within your own being?"

You should not be ashamed of saying, "No, I am not ready, I do not want what I want." You should rather "settle down" at this point and explore the reasons why. At least you are then no longer in this terrible predicament of putting a useless pressure onto yourself that wastes your energies and that creates a short-circuit, and that also creates the emotional hazard of projecting the non-fulfillment you impose upon yourself by your own inner negation onto the outside world. This always induces bitterness, a sense of injustice, and therefore resentments. The world is being blamed for withholding from you what you believe all of yourself so ardently wishes.

Another aspect of this same problem, as opposed to the ardent conscious wish for a particular fulfillment, is an unawareness of your own state, of your whole inner being desperately longing for something. In such cases, a reverse approach is necessary. Or, rather, there is a third layer that has to be gone through first. The top layer is hazily unconcerned and unaware of a great need; perhaps of a very legitimate human fulfillment which, on a less conscious level, creates an urgency which, in turn, manifests only indirectly. For instance: tension, anxiety, inability to concentrate, absent-mindedness, a sense of futility about one's life, depression, lack of energy, and often physical difficulties as well. All these manifestations are the result of being unaware of a deep longing or need. At times, the legitimate human need may be polluted or distorted by a so-called neurotic need, but the deviation is seldom a total illusion. It always harbors the germ of a real, legitimate need. It must therefore not be totally thrown out, even if it is childish, destructive, and unrealistic in its present manifestation. Such additional layers of vagueness and lack of awareness must also be taken into consideration. They may even exist, in some areas of the personality, in people who, in other areas, are quite aware of their negativities and negation.

So, we have two possibilities here: there are those, at this point, or even at the beginning of such a path, who are very conscious of a lack in their lives. They suffer very acutely from this lack. Then there is the second category, those who are not truly aware of their longing, their desires, their wishes, and their needs. They have dulled them and they suffer only indirectly from the unfulfillment. This is by no means an advantage. It creates more self-alienation, less aliveness, and it requires more work until the layer of longing becomes more conscious. For this category, another approach is indicated to begin with. They should first deeply listen into themselves and ask themselves: "What is it that I really want? What is lacking in my life? Do I have all the fulfillment I long for? Is there something, deep inside in me, that knows that more is possible than I allow myself to experience?" Only when this series of questions is honestly answered can the approach outlined before be used. And I emphasize, again, that we are not dealing here with personality types -- one person falling into the former and the other into the latter category. An individual may be, as mentioned before, in different inner places regarding different aspects of his being. So the approach I now suggested can be applied by everyone regarding certain issues, attitudes, and reactions. It serves to make you more conscious of your longing -- and this is good.

There are two possibilities in regard to what is affirmed and what is negated. In some instances the affirming part of the self strives for what is healthy and furthering pleasure, love, expansion, growth, and fulfillment, while the destructive, ignorant part negates. In other instances, affirming something may be totally contrary to the unity and growth, fulfillment and health of the personality, so that unconscious negation springs from the best, most wise aspect of the self. Fixed outer values are never a reliable answer to which is which. It is therefore most necessary to keep evaluation shelved for quite a while, until the personality is much more aware of itself and the meaning of its various voices. For example, a certain vocational pursuit may appear completely acceptable and "right," but it may not be for this particular person.

Wherever you have a conflict or a problem in your life which seems difficult to resolve, and casts a shadow over your joyousness, this approach can be used. Your lack of clear awareness of saying No also prevents you from meditation in such areas. When you confront this obstruction or resistance, it is an invaluable indicator of your dividedness. You should pay all the attention possible to such a resistance.

Those of you who are ready to receive of this powerful energy can now come to me. The result may be a deeper awareness and understanding, new knowledge. But it may also be something that has nothing to do with knowledge. It may simply be a loosening up, an ability to let go of something negative, a new energy, and a flexibility within the soul substance. Or it may be both, one leading to the other. Sometimes explanations may also come from me, as this force is poured into you. At other times, whatever knowledge is needed in you will come from within yourself as the force goes to work in you -- provided you nurture it and stay open to it. The power can release your own power to be inspired and energized by yourself. This is the gift of a new mutuality that can take place and that can be built later into further and further extensions of this spiritual force, to help. Everyone who is truly willing to receive this help can receive it.

Now, are there any questions in regard to this topic?

QUESTION: Is the path of alternation between the inner and outer Yes a path of consciousness or a path of action? If the former, the only problem is really one's ability to follow it. If it is the latter, which would require radical changes in one's own lifelong commitments, then it could be very disturbing.

ANSWER: Outer action or change is meaningless unless it arises out of a very harmonious wanting it and finding it right. Then obstacles will fall by the wayside. First consciousness, feeling and awareness, must be cultivated. Then everything else follows naturally and organically. This may outwardly create disruption, but if the inner being is whole, these are necessary steps to overcome previous forms, which have no longer value in the life of the people concerned. It cannot ever be completely generalized. At times, outer changes must be undertaken in order to preserve the wholeness of the person.

At other times, outer changes grow gradually, as a result of awareness. But even in those instances, this does not mean that there is no activity. It may be an inner activity so intense that the change wrought in the personality is more meaningful than any outer change could be -- which might merely be enforced in order to cover up an inner fixedness and refusal to change. Again, what is indicated never lies in the outer action. What is right and good in one case may be the worst thing in another. Raising such questions as I suggested, the honesty required to answer them, and the confrontation involved, indicates a highly active state. Even the commitment to the greater Divine Power is not a passive manifestation at all. It, too, implies activeness. On the other hand, if a person waits to bring outer change until he is free from fear and resistance, expansion may never be possible. Often the person must go through these feelings, regardless of the unpleasantness, if he fully realizes the truth of his situation. It is a mistake to assume that self-surrender is an indication of passivity. It is one of the most active undertakings a person can commit himself to.

QUESTION: Why is it so hard to give up one's neurosis?

ANSWER: The creative soul substance, when it is unobstructed, unpolluted, free, and in harmony with its own creativeness, its inherent, underlying creativeness, is constantly moving. All living matter moves and moves and moves. It never stands still. Misconceptions and errors breed negativity. Negativity breeds more error. Soul substance that is trapped in error and negativity is stagnant and fixed. The difficulty lies precisely in making that fixedness fluid again. There is no particle or atom of energy or substance that does not also contain consciousness. Thus the whole universe is permeated with energy/consciousness, but not as two separate entities or aspects that exist side by side. Energy is consciousness and consciousness is energy. Consciousness that is encased in the fixed substance must also be made fluid again. It must wake up out of its own stagnation. Stagnant, fixed energy/consciousness needs its own loosening up. Fluid consciousness and energy can affect the stagnant, fixed parts only with the greatest difficulty, precisely because the true awakening must happen within the dormant part. Free flowing energy/consciousness is therefore always repulsed by the fixed state. This is what I meant by the mind being lost in its own maze. The stagnant consciousness must somehow find the way to let go of itself, as it were. As long as this is not the case, substance, energy and consciousness trapped into a fixed nucleus will remain stationary.

These words are not at all easy to understand because they deal with concepts that the mind cannot perceive. So you must use your intuitive faculties in order to sense the meaning. Those of you who have received inklings of the true world, where all is one, where existing things are not separated, will feel more what I mean here. The only way the task can be accomplished is that the fluid, enlightened consciousness, little by little, influences and affects the stagnant, entrapped energy-consciousness-substance, which is what is called "neurosis." Since the deadened consciousness is dead (which may sound like a redundant statement, but is not), it takes a great deal of patience and searching to finally influence the stagnant energy. For if free, enlightened consciousness and fluid energy would not prevail upon the fixed consciousness and fixed soul substance, it would remain fixed forever and ever. It is the free flowing consciousness/energy that eventually prevails upon the fixedness. Since it is fixed, it cannot give itself up so easily.

(After this, two people availed themselves of the offer, coming close and stating their specific, personal negation and affirmation. The forthcoming energy and power was a very deep experience for everyone present. The entire room was filled with it and radiating energy was visible to a few. Unfortunately it is not possible to describe the experience in words.)

My dearest, dearest friends: love, spiritual power, and wisdom are one. The help that comes from outside here is not the kind that will ever, ever make you passive. It must be that way. It will, more and more, prevail upon stagnant energy and consciousness and make them light again. The first step lies in your active participation as you walk the path that leads into your innermost being. The second step, stating and clarifying your conflict, as these two of my friends here have done, must generate more of the great universal power that is infinite in supply -- outside and inside of you.

This is a blessed thing, my friends. It arose out of your contribution and will continue to grow out of your contribution. It is indeed a living force. It is a reality. As all living things, its continuous life and fruitful manifestation depend entirely on the degree this remains a mutual enterprise. First between your own giving of yourself in truthfulness and the power helping you, the power coming through me. Later between your ego consciousness and the source of all life within yourself, which converge together onto the stagnant matter in order to loosen it up more and more. Maybe you can visualize the difference between stagnant matter, stagnant energy, stagnant consciousness, that hates and holds, and holds and hates -- unchangingly -- and fluid matter, consciousness, and energy, that knows of the truth of life and love. When you visualize those two ways of being, it will become easier for you to make a deliberate, conscious choice: to let the latter influence the former.

Love comes to everyone of you here. Some of this power is always coming forth whenever blessings are expressed, whenever you are open for them. These blessings can reach you somewhere and lighten your burden, lighten your undertaking in making your own stagnancy fluid again. But when you sit here defensively and doubtingly, the blessing force cannot reach you. However, it is always forthcoming to some degree, and will come now stronger and stronger as you open to it more and more, conscious of its reality, more receptive to it. Thus you will increase the power of the blessings. Be in peace, my loved ones.

The Guide
by Eva Pierrakos
November 6, 1970

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