Self-Identification Determined Through Stages Of Consciousness

By The Pathwork Guide

Greetings and blessings are poured forth in a great and magnificent spiritual force to all of you here. You can partake of and assimilate this force to the degree that you truly open your heart and mind to it.

In today's lecture I will discuss consciousness from a new point of view. Many of my friends involved in this work have become ready to make use of this particular lecture and, in fact, need it very badly in order to consolidate the gains already made on their path. The lecture mainly deals with the problem of self-identification. We have discussed this in the past but, because of your progress since then, we can now go into the subject more deeply.

It may be difficult for human beings to understand that consciousness permeates the entire universe and creation. Consciousness does not simply depend on or exist through personalities, or personifications of entities. It permeates everything that exists. The human mind is conditioned to think that consciousness is exclusively a byproduct of personality, that it can exist only within the human form. In this way of thinking the brain is regarded as the exclusive manifestation of consciousness. This is not so. Consciousness does not require a fixed form. Every particle of matter contains consciousness. But in inanimate matter consciousness is petrified, in the same way that energy is petrified in inanimate objects. Consciousness and energy are not the same, but they are interdependent aspects of the manifestation of life.

As evolution progresses, this petrification lessens, and consciousness and energy become increasingly vibrant and moving. Consciousness gains more and more awareness, energy has increasingly greater power to move, build, and give form.

Through processes impossible to convey to the human understanding, consciousness has undergone a separation, so that aspects of consciousness "float around" in the universe, if I may use this expression. Each trait familiar to human understanding, each attitude known in creation, each aspect of personality is but one of many manifestations of consciousness. Every such manifestation that is not yet integrated with other manifestations of consciousness needs to be unified, synthesized, and made part of the harmonious whole. It requires a leap of imagination to comprehend the concept I am trying to convey here. Can you imagine for a moment that many familiar traits which you have always associated with a person, seen as existing only in a person, are not part of the person per se, but are free-floating particles of the overall consciousness? These traits might be good, evil, or apparently indifferent, although in reality there are no indifferent traits. Consider, for example, love, perseverance, sloth, laziness (which is more important than meets the eye and about which I shall give a lecture some time in the future), impatience, kindness, stubbornness, or malice. Whatever the traits may be, they need to be incorporated into a manifesting personality. Only then does the purification, harmonization, and enrichment of the manifesting individual consciousness take place, which brings about the evolutionary process of unifying the separate particles of consciousness.

It is important to note that the disharmonious, destructive aspects of consciousness always remain separate. They cannot be unified and integrated. Acceptance of this fact requires no leap of the imagination. Its truth can be readily verified by each individual who observes his negative traits. The positive traits, the constructive aspects of consciousness, are always a harmonious part of the Whole, thus enriching every other trait and expanding the entire consciousness. I cannot begin to convey the full reality of these ideas because the human language is much too limited. At the same time, I do not intend to give you an abstract lecture of which you can make no use. In a minute I will come to very personal and practical applications of this new way of looking at consciousness.

Each aspect of consciousness has, according to its nature, its own characteristics, its own type and frequency rate of vibratory movement, its own emanation, its own color and scent, its own tone, and many other unique sense impressions which are unknown in the human state. The senses that exist in spiritual reality far exceed the spectrum of senses perceived by human beings. There are infinitely more colors, tones, scents, etc. The human being is a conglomeration of aspects of consciousness. Some are already purified; others have always been pure and are thus an integral part of individuality, no longer separate and therefore disharmonious. These pure aspects form an integrated whole. Other aspects are negative and destructive, and are thus separate. They may be likened to appendages. It is the task of each human being in each incarnation to synthesize, unify, and assimilate these various aspects of separated consciousness. If you truly try to comprehend what I say here, you may find that this is a novel way of explaining human existence. Of course, this task of integration does not exist only on the level of human consciousness. It continues in more highly developed states of consciousness as well, only in those states the struggle is not so severe or painful. The increased awareness in the higher states immeasurably facilitates the synthesizing process. The human predicament is the result of the individual's lack of understanding of what is going on, the blindness of his struggle to unify himself, and his deliberate attempts to perpetuate this blindness.

To the degree that struggle and tension exist in a "personification," to that degree the various aspects of consciousness are at odds with one another. The difficulties indicate that the entity is unaware of the meaning of the struggle and is trying to identify with one or several of these aspects without knowing which or what is the true self. Where is the true self located? What is it? How can it be found in the maze of this discord? Are you your best? Or are you your worst? Or are you some of the many aspects in between? Are you your over-severe conscience that annihilates you for your negative traits? Or are you the destructive demon? Is your rage at the demon in you, or is your total negation of that demon's existence, an expression of your best self? Surely this attitude toward the demon seems very moral and conscientious, but is it really? Whether you know it or not, this ongoing inner struggle and search exists. The more conscious the struggle, the better, of course. We must now try to find answers to these questions by giving full attention to this problem. Sooner or later, any path of self-development must come to terms with these questions, with the deep problem of self-identity.

For a human being to identify with any of the above mentioned aspects is a distortion of reality. You are neither the negative traits, nor your self-punishing conscience, nor even your positive traits. Although you have managed to integrate these positive traits into the fullness of your being, this is not the same as equating them with who you are. It is more accurate to say that the being who effected this integration is you, that the one who determined, decided and acted, thought and willed is you, and, by achieving this integration, absorbed what was previously an appendage that had its own contradictory direction and expressions. As you well know from your pathwork, each aspect of the self possesses its own will. As long as your struggle is blind, you are submerged in and controlled by the wills of various aspects of yourself. In this state, the self that can decide on a different outcome has not yet found its power. This blind involvement enslaves you and inactivates your creative energy. As a result, you lack a sense of self, and this leads to despair.

When you blindly believe that you are your negativity, your destructive aspects, you become trapped in a special kind of inner battle. When you believe yourself to be only your negative part, there must be two opposing reactions. On the one hand, you will desire self-annihilation, self-punishment, and feel violent self-hate in an attempt to eliminate the negativity in you. On the other hand, you will be afraid to give up the negative traits, or even fully face and investigate them, because you believe them to be your only reality. So you are thrown back and forth between "I am so terrible, so bad, so despicable that I have no right to exist and must punish myself out of existence," and "I must remain as I am, unchanged and unimproved, for this is my only reality and I do not wish to cease to exist."

This conflict is too painful to face when it is believed to be a real issue, so the entire issue is put aside, as it were, and covered up. One then leads a life of pretense, which shifts one's sense of identity into a pretense also. One then struggles against even acknowledging or exposing, let alone giving up, the pretense, because the only alternative to the pretense is the above-mentioned struggle. No wonder human beings have so much resistance. And yet, what a waste of energy, for none of this reasoning is based on reality. There is a real self that equals neither the negative aspects nor the adamant self-annihilation nor the pretense that covers it all up. To find this real self is our concern.

Before the universal self can fully manifest in you, there is already one aspect of it available right now, which can be immediately utilized. This aspect is your conscious self at its best, as it is now. This conscious self is a limited present manifestation of your spiritual being, but it is truly yourself; it is the "I" you need in order to create order from all your confusion. This already-manifest consciousness exists in many realms of your life. You take it for granted, but you have not yet brought it to bear on the areas of conflict in which you continue to be blindly controlled by the consequences of your false self-identity.

For instance, the "I" that is able to make the decision to truly face a conflict, to observe its various expressions, is the self with which a person may safely and realistically identify. To the degree the personality awakens and gains consciousness of itself, to that degree it can make such decisions, choices of attitudes, and determinations. By the same token, to the degree that such decisions, choices of attitudes, and determinations are made, to that degree the consciousness awakens and expands. This immediately available consciousness of every living human being is usually not fully put to use to confront his greatest sufferings and conflicts. The full scope of its power is not directed toward resolving the struggle at hand. When the entity begins to do this systematically, a major change is taking place. At such a point, a new stage of development is reached.

To the extent that the conscious self uses its already existing power to execute its good will, its already existing capacity to be positive, committed, truthful, courageous, and persevering in the struggle at hand, and its already existing ability to choose its attitude toward a problem, to exactly that degree the consciousness expands and becomes increasingly permeated with spiritual consciousness. The spiritual consciousness cannot manifest as long as the already existing consciousness is not being fully put to use in the conduct of one's life. When the present consciousness is fully put to use, new inspiration, new realms of vision, understanding, profound wisdom, and experience well up from the depth of the person. But as long as the line of least resistance is followed and the personality gives in to blind involvement, as long as one gives up on finding a true self-identity and settles blindly for a "would be" existence, as long as one follows the rut, stuck in the old groove of habitual reactions and defensive explanations, as long as one indulges in compulsive thinking, in negative, hopeless, circular thinking, then the consciousness of the self -- as it exists now -- is not being fully put to use. As a result, the consciousness cannot possibly expand. It can neither transform and synthesize the negative aspects with which it falsely identifies, nor can it realize deeper aspects of the spiritual self. As long as existing powers are not fully put to use, additional powers cannot possibly be realized. This is a law of life that applies to all levels of being. It is very important to understand this, my friends.

When you identify with one or even a cluster of aspects, and believe that these aspects are you, you become submerged in them. At the very beginning, when I started giving lectures, I used the terms "higher self," "lower self," and "mask self." These are very abbreviated terms which include many variations and subdivisions. As a convenient frame of reference, however, we may classify certain aspects as belonging to one or the other of these three basic categories.

Needless to say, the genuine will for good is an expression of the higher self. But there is another will for good, which is different from the higher self will, but which can easily be confused with it. This will is the will to be good for the sake of appearances, for the sake of denying the lower aspects of the self. The demonical, destructive aspects are obviously an expression of the lower self. But although it may easily pose for the higher self, the motivating force behind the desire to punish these destructive aspects with total annihilation is a giant guilt that is not an expression of the higher self. In fact, this guilt is more destructive than the destructiveness itself. It arises entirely out of the false self-identification mentioned above. If you believe you are your demon, you seem to have no other choice than to annihilate yourself; yet, because you dread annihilation, you hold on to that demon. On the other hand, if you observe the demon, you can begin to identify with that which observes, and the struggle can then be taken up by the conscious, determining, choosing self.

You must never forget that none of you is involved in this struggle with your entire being. If you were, there would not even be the possibility of your coming out of it. There are many aspects of your being in which you are using the power of your creative thinking processes, where you are expanding your mind, and thus building productively. But we are focusing now on those areas where you are not expanding and productive.

As long as the human entity is unable, or rather, unwilling to recognize his destructive aspects, he must be lost in them. As a result of this negation, he is involved in an annihilating struggle in which it is impossible for him to identify with his true self. As I said before, the failure to recognize, name, and observe the destructive elements indicates that the self believes it is the destructiveness. Although the desire to hide the destructive aspects is more destructive than whatever it is you hide, the desire also indicates that you wish to be free from destructiveness. Thus the desire to hide destructiveness is a misplaced, misunderstood, and misread message from the higher self. It comes from incorrectly applying and interpreting the longing of the spiritual self.

Let us discuss how you can better activate and utilize the conscious self so that you can expand it and make room for the spiritual consciousness to permeate it. Every one of my friends on this path who has worked diligently and conscientiously to shed his mask, to give up defenses, to overcome the resistance to exposing apparently shameful faults, has experienced that the acknowledgment of the negative traits creates a new freedom. Why is this so? The obvious answer is that having the courage and honesty to make such an acknowledgment is in itself a relieving and liberating experience. But the freedom comes from more than the courage and the honesty, my friends. The reason for the liberation is this: through the act of acknowledging negative traits, a subtle but distinct shift in identification occurs. Before such acknowledgment, you were blind to some or all your destructive aspects. The blindness indicated that you believed these aspects to be you. Therefore, because you identified with traits unacceptable to you, you could not afford to acknowledge them. But the moment you acknowledge the hitherto unacceptable, you cease to identify yourself with the unacceptable and identify instead with that in you which is capable of the acknowledgment, which makes the decision to acknowledge.

As long as you do not acknowledge the aspects you hate in yourself, you are blind to them and therefore helplessly controlled by them. But when you acknowledge them, something else in you takes over that can do something about them, even if all it can do initially is merely observe and grope for a clearer understanding of the underlying dynamics. You create a totally different situation when you identify the ugly traits as opposed to being identified with them. The moment you identify them, you cease being identified with them. This is why it is so liberating to acknowledge the worst in the personality after having battled the ever-present resistance to do so. The acknowledgment becomes easier as you make the clear distinction between the aspects you dislike in yourself and your being those aspects.

The moment you identify the destructive aspects, name them, state them, articulate them, observe them, a self exists which identifies, names, states, articulates, and observes. This self is capable of choosing among many options and possibilities, the most basic being this stating, observing, naming, etc. When you make the choice to do this, you no longer need to persecute yourself mercilessly with your self-hate. But as long as you have missed out on this all-important process of identifying with that in you that is capable of observing, facing, dealing with, recognizing, and adjusting, there seems to be no alternative but to hate yourself and make devastating self-judgments. It is possible to make negative judgments in a truthful spirit, but there is all the difference in the world between believing that you are only what you judge and knowing that your ultimate reality is more like that part which acknowledges the presence of destructiveness and has many options other than destroying.

How different your attitude toward yourself must be when you realize that it is the task of human entities to carry negative aspects with them for the purpose of integrating and synthesizing them. This realization permits truthfulness without hopelessness. What dignity you assume when you consider that you undertake an important task for the sake of evolution. When you come into this life, you bring with you negative aspects to be integrated. There exist certain meaningful laws which determine what aspects you bring with you, but we cannot go into that now. Every human being fulfills an immense task in the universal scale of evolution. An entity who does not offer, let us say, to fulfill such a task may be quite free, purified, evolved, and harmonious, but it is not contributing to evolution, as each of you here is doing. This chosen task gives you great dignity. This dignity is so much more important than the momentary suffering that results from not knowing who you are. You are not your ugly traits. Do not ever forget that. But there is a difference between total negation of these traits and the acknowledgment I am trying to convey to you here. It is one of those subtle apparent contradictions that arise so frequently when dealing with the realms that lie beyond duality, realms that are much more similar to ultimate reality. It is necessary to acknowledge the ugly aspects as part of you and to take responsibility for having them before you can truly understand that you are not these aspects. It is possible to be responsible for them without believing that they are your only reality. Only when you can do this can you come to the wonderful realization that you only carry something with you which you have taken on for a certain purpose. Only then can you come the next step: integration. To recapitulate, we have the following steps, stages, or states:

(1) The half-asleep climate of not knowing who you are and blindly battling against that which you hate in yourself -- consciously, semi-consciously, or unconsciously.

(2) The first state of awakening, when you acknowledge, name, articulate, and observe that which you do not like, when you feel that this is an aspect of you, rather than the secret, ultimate truth about you.

(3) The awareness that the "I" is that which observes, confronts, etc. This same "I" can make new dispositions, decisions, and choices. It can look for new, hitherto undreamed of opinions and possibilities to be realized not by magic but by "trying out" attitudes that were totally negated and ignored before. For example, this "I" can make the decision to pursue self-acceptance and, at the same time, maintain a sense of proportion, to grope for new ways and learn from mistakes and failures, to not give up when immediate success fails to arrive. This "I" can choose to put faith into unknown potentialities, which can manifest only as new attitudes are adopted by the consciousness, and to adopt those new attitudes for which the consciousness is ready.

These decisions lead to:

(4) The eventual connection with and understanding of the previously hated and negated aspects of the personality. The deep understanding of these aspects brings about their dissolution and integration. This occurs simultaneously with the ever expanding consciousness incorporating more of the spiritual reality, which can then unfold to ever-greater degrees. This is the purification process.

To the extent that an individual life is led in this way, to that degree consciousness as a whole, as it permeates all, is less split off into its particles and is more unified. When you assimilate what I have said here, you will understand several all-important facts. First of all, you will see the tremendous importance of recognizing the distorted, demonic traits. You will take full responsibility for them and so, paradoxical as it may seem, liberate yourself from your identification with those aspects. You will know fully who you are, and that these aspects are but appendages or attachments, which you can draw into yourself as you dissolve them. This means that their basic energy and undistorted nature can become part of the consciousness that you manifest. This is the first step of true self-identification: that which observes is you, not that which is being observed. Thus, no matter how undesirable any aspect of you may be, it becomes wholly possible for you to deal with it, to accept it, to explore it, to work with it, and to no longer be frightened by it. The capacity to observe and judge, to note and evaluate, and, last but not least, to choose the best possible attitudes concerning what is observed, constitutes the true power of your real self, as it already exists. The knowledge of self, the finding of self, freedom, and liberation are the first steps toward realizing the greater consciousness, the universal, divine consciousness in you. As long as these steps are not taken, your innermost, spiritual consciousness remains a principle, a theory, and a potentiality to be realized only in the future. You may give intellectual credence to spiritual consciousness, but you cannot truly realize it within you until you use the consciousness that is already available, but not being used, on your so-called problems. Only as you work your way through the four stages outlined above, can your conscious mind expand sufficiently to let in the as yet unmanifest painful opposites that will enrich and move your life toward more joy and pleasure.

The moment proper self-identification takes place, a deep and apparently bottomless terror disappears from the human soul. Often this terror is not consciously experienced. Only when you are on the threshold of the states I described here, only during the change from being lost, blind, and not knowing what and who you are, to the first inklings of true self-identification, do you become aware of terror. This is a transitional period, which may last weeks or many incarnations. You may hide the terror from yourself or face it. The more you face it, the sooner you will come out of it. When you hide it, you gain nothing, for the terror will leave its indelible marks on your life, and these are not one iota less painful or limiting than the actual experience of the terror. In fact, the contrary is true.

That terror exists only because you do not know that there is a real you beyond that which you hate. Because of this terror, you constantly hesitate to even identify what you hate. As long as you lack the courage to explore the reasons for your fear, you cannot find out that it is not justified, that you are much, much more than what you fear you are. The human personality is often on the brink of taking this step. But because this brink feels like a precipice, the personality hesitates, and so prolongs its own pseudo existence. When this point is not dealt with, terror remains in the soul. The terror is then denied and repressed, and this repressed terror has additional adverse effects on the personality, which becomes more and more alienated from its true nucleus.

When you finally decide, and make the full commitment, to bridge this gap, the terror disappears. You realize that you can find out who you are and that life is full, rich, open, and infinite. The moment you experience that you are that which observes, and not that which is being observed, there is no longer any need to either annihilate yourself, or settle for existing only as a fraudulent mask, a hateful demon, or a petty, selfish egotist. So, self-identification removes the terror of annihilation -- not just of death, but of annihilation. There is a difference between the two, as you may all sense.

We shall now return once more to the conscious mind, as it already exists in you at this moment. Your mind is now in the state of being able to acknowledge and observe aspects of the self. That which observes has many choices. Your attitude toward your demonic, undeveloped, undesirable traits is the key to expanding your consciousness. You hear so much today about the concept of consciousness expansion. This is often believed to be a magical process that occurs suddenly. That is not true. To attain true spiritual consciousness it is first necessary to pay attention to the material within you that you have not yet fully used, and that you are not fully using right now. Every minute of depression or anxiety, every hopeless or otherwise negative attitude towards a situation contains various other options. But an act of inner will on your part is required to awaken forces in you that are now dormant and to make them available. Then, when the already available potential is being used, a much greater power of spiritual consciousness will unfold, gradually and organically.

People often engage in various spiritual practices and then wait for a miraculous manifestation of the greater consciousness, while their immediate mind and thought power is trapped in grooves of negative attitudes, feelings, thinking, and outlook. These people must either be disappointed or experience delusions. No exercises or efforts, no hopes for grace as an intervention from outside can bring you genuine awareness and manifestations of your spiritual self.

The creative energy inherent in thoughts and thought processes is totally underestimated by most human beings. As a result, the many possibilities for creating and recreating life are neglected. Making use of this creative power is a challenging and fascinating undertaking. As of this moment, you can explore the recesses of your conscious mind to search for new, better, more creative ways of meeting difficulties, for more realistic, constructive ways of reacting. You do not have to react the way you do. You have at your disposal many alternatives, many possibilities of thinking and directing your thoughts, thought processes, and attitude patterns toward a new goal. To whatever degree proper self-identification has not taken place, to whatever degree, in one area or another in yourself, you are still secretly identified with that in you which you hate most in yourself, and therefore resist observing in yourself, to that degree your consciousness is unable to make use of its options and possibilities.

When you begin to pose the question to yourself: "What attitude do I choose toward what I now observe in myself and do not like?" you will have made one of the most significant discoveries possible in the present phase of your evolution. This step does not require a breakthrough to the deeper spiritual self. It simply requires using what you have already made available in the course of centuries and millennia of evolution.

For instance, what might be some options in the face of your observing dire, destructive attitudes and intentions in yourself? You can choose to be totally dismayed and hopeless about it. This is the option you have chosen until now, only you have not been aware of it. You can choose to think that it is impossible to ever be different and that this is all there is to you. Or you can choose to think that you have the power to make an immediate and drastic change. This last attitude is no more positive than the previous one because it is based on unreality. Because of its unreal basis, the attitude must lead to inevitable disappointment, and then to an apparently even more justified negativity. Unrealistic hopelessness and unrealistic, magical hope are the two extremes of the pendulum swing, part of a vicious circle.

But do you not have other options available? With your mind as it is now, is it not possible to choose other modalities? Is it not possible to say, for example: "It is predictable and likely that I will forget and become involved again in the old blindness and my conditioned reflexes. But this backsliding need not deter me. I will have to struggle and grope for my key over and over again. But I will do this. I can do this and thereby gradually build a new strength and find new resources and energies. I will not be deterred by the fact that the building of a beautiful edifice requires patience. I will not be childish enough to expect this to be done at once. I want the change and I will use all my powers to bring it about, but I will be patient and realistic. I would like the spiritual powers in me to guide me, but if I cannot perceive their guidance yet because at the beginning of this undertaking my energies are too dense and my consciousness too dulled, I will trust and wait and persevere. I want to give my very best to the venture of living. I will invest my best, and this includes patience for building slowly and the gradual cultivation of awareness and observation. I will try over and over again to face, to observe, to name, and to identify what I do not like, without being identified with it. I will grope for new ways of understanding my negativity so that I will eventually grow out of it."

Such an attitude is at your disposal. It is not magic. It is an immediately available choice. You can leave here tonight with the attitude that you would like to observe and name rather than be submerged in what you hitherto did not wish to identify and observe. The option to choose this or other attitudes exists in every possible dilemma and difficulty.

Knowledge exists in you which you can bring to bear upon what you observe. If you use this available knowledge and adopt the attitudes I have suggested, you thereby expand that knowledge and extend the range of possible attitudes and feelings. The more you do this, the more you can be sure that the infinitely greater, unlimited consciousness of the as yet submerged spiritual self will integrate itself into your conscious mind, so that you will be your spiritual self. As I said previously, this integration happens best via a threefold dialogue: the dialogue between the conscious mind and the demonic aspects; the dialogue between the conscious mind and the divine self; and the dialogue between the divine self and the demonic self. In all three dialogues, each side alternately speaks and listens, as in any meaningful conversation. But this threefold dialogue is useful only at a later stage of development. In the meantime, the more you can perceive and observe yourself as I have described here, the easier it will become to make the next leap, the realization of your true spiritual entity. You will then truly know that this incredible, beautiful, limitless consciousness is the real you, in whom all the power lies and who has nothing to fear.

My friends, once again this lecture requires diligent working through. Because it is difficult, much of the material cannot be taken in at first. It requires not only concentration and good will, but also the use of meditation, to contact the realms of the spiritual reality and power that will help you absorb what I have said and put it to use.

The Guide
by Eva Pierrakos
February 12, 1971

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