Greetings, blessings, and love are pouring forth for everyone
of you here, wherever it is needed most on your journey through life. Many
philosophies agree on the importance of experience. They postulate that the
true meaning of life is experiencing it in all its facets and variations,
in depth and in its full scope. An entity who enters this sphere of life,
the material earth, is drawn into it because of his corresponding state of
consciousness. This is a limited state of consciousness in which reality is
blurred to a large extent. The only way the state of consciousness can be
expanded is by experiencing life to its fullest, and from all its facets.
This requires to come again and again, until all blocks against experiencing
life are eliminated, until all of life is savored, tasted, and assimilated.
Usually, when man hears the word "experience," he thinks of
outer experiencing. This, of course, is not the meaning. The real meaning
is the inner experience. You well know that it is possible to experience everything
conceivable outwardly, yet if the inner experience is prohibited, the outer
experience will mean very little. You can travel all over the world. You can
learn many things. You can be in many different situations and experiment
with every conceivable "experience" under the sun. You can approach life in
all its different wonderful facets: art, nature, science. You can do all things,
learn everything your brain can master. Yet, when the capacity for inner experience
is dead, the outer experience will do little, if anything. Often a full outer
experience may even increase despair, because without the inner one a person
does not understand the causes and that is very disquieting. He has everything
he ever wanted, yet the constant nagging dissatisfaction cannot be removed.
The faster he runs, the more he grabs, the more life seems to evade him. This
is because the capacity for inner experience has not been cultivated or, worse,
inadvertently eliminated.
Inner experience is possible only when you can feel. If feelings
are blocked, if feelings are not fully lived through, no inner experience
is possible. The lack of feelings deadens all of life -- the inner life, the
inner experience, and therefore makes it impossible for you to fully fulfill
your life. You will have to come back over and over, until you learn to savor
experience to whatever degree this is possible at the particular stage of
consciousness. To savor life at its fullest, the defense against feelings
must be eliminated. The fear of unpleasurable, painful feelings must be gone
through. That which is feared must be accepted, allowed, experienced as it
is at this moment. The way it is at this moment may well be a result of feelings
of the past that have not been experienced, so they lie stagnant, dormant,
"unexperienced," within the system and form a block. When you fear a feeling,
you block the experience. You anesthetize yourself. You know that. Often it
may appear that this numbing and denying process is the only protection again
unbearable pain and suffering. And yet, as many of you who are on the path
begin to find out, it is the defense and the fight against what you fear that
creates the suffering. No matter what is inflicted upon you from the outside
when you are helpless and defenseless, it cannot become a detriment in your
life, it can never cripple you, when you learn to receive it in the right
and healthy way. This is the only way you can go through, rather than around.
This is the only way you can truly eliminate what is undesirable.
When you dare to experience what comes to you, it will cease to be a threat.
In this lecture I shall show further the ramifications and
the significance of inner emotional experience, and what happens to the human
entity when experience and feelings are blocked. As I often said, fear is
the most destructive emotion imaginable. Fear that is not met and therefore
transcended becomes poisonous, toxic energy. Fear that is not even conscious,
but manifests indirectly, is that much more potent and debilitating. The fear
of feelings is perhaps the most insidious of all. For if you fear a realistic
danger, it is something you can overcome. Even if your fear of an outer occurrence
is exaggerated, this in itself would not be so harmful, except that such an
unrealistic phobia must be an expression of unrecognized, unexperienced inner
feelings. Anything that is outside of you can be dealt with on the level of
outer action. Feelings can only be dealt with when they are being experienced,
not when they are being denied.
When you are afraid of pain, or loneliness, or of your pride
being hurt, or of rejection, or of disappointment, or of frustration of your
desires, your will, or your need, in all these possibilities the primary feeling
is fear. Fear that any of these undesirable events may happen. Only when you
experience what you fear will you really experience the pain of it. Say, the
pain of rejection, or of being lonely, or whatever. So we are dealing basically
with the fear of pain. When the fear is given up, or gone into rather, the
pain can be experienced. And only then will the pain genuinely dissolve, and
you will have mastered a slice of life that you no longer need to avoid.
When fear of pain is blindly avoided, until you no longer know
that you fear a specific pain and do not know why you feel numbed and deadened,
a magnetic energy block is being erected within your psychic system. This
energy block is a powerful force that must inevitably draw to you the very
experience you wanted to avoid. The pain you avoid must come to you from outside,
again and again, until you can no longer avoid it. This is a law of life.
If you come into this life with such a fear, your life circumstances will
bring forth the very condition that you avoided previously. I have said this
many a time. When life circumstances in your early childhood again inflict
pain and deprivation upon you, and you again protect yourself by denying the
pain rather than experiencing it to its fullest, later life circumstances
must repeat and approximate those early conditions, until you learn to open
yourself up to what you fear and let the experience be in you,
so that it can dissolve. When you learn to fully savor this painful experience,
then you truly overcome it. Then the energy of the magnetic block will be
dissolved, will enter into the general flow of life within you, and this previously
feared experience will no longer come to you.
You may temporarily succeed to ward off feared experience,
feared feelings, because your inner defenses shut off life so successfully
that nothing touches you. And your outer willpower may also have succeeded
to build an eventful outer life that fills the void to a degree, as long as
as you do not hold still. However, this is but temporary peace before the
storm. Crisis must come to you eventually, to afford you the opportunity to
overcome fear. The more you run from what you fear, the more energy you invest
into blocking off the feared feeling, the more potent the magnetic energy
block becomes, and the more certainly you attract the appropriate crisis that
could be the healing agent, whenever you choose to change the direction of
your focus of inner living.
Experience of bliss, pleasure, joy, and peace can exist only
in a fearless soul. The creativity that is your full potential, self-expression,
and expansion of your spiritual being can exist only when you are fearless
and relaxed. If there is no part in your inner being that has anything to
guard against, that has anything to cover up, that has anything to defend
or protect, then the full potentiality of your creative resources, of your
capacity for pleasure, can evolve and manifest in your personality. For if
you guard against one expression of life in you, against one type of inner
experience, it is logical that all other types must be equally hindered. This
should be easy to see. By protecting yourself against your fear of pain (or
any other undesirable state), you must be in a state of tension. Guardedness
is tension. And pleasure and creativity can only thrive in a state of relaxation.
You cannot express yourself when you guard against an inner movement of life.
You try to hold tight that this movement may not happen. You then manage not
to know what you are doing. You thus separate yourself from a vital part of
yourself. No wonder that you lose touch with yourself and no longer know who
you are. You thus live in a constant state of tense guardedness -- unfortunately
unbeknown to your conscious mind. For if you would truly know, you would have
the first necessary basis from which to proceed to change your way of life.
It is therefore the first task on any path to explore yourself deeply so that
you do become conscious of your defenses, your guards, your protective devices.
Only then can you explore the next question: what is it precisely you guard
against? In the last analysis, it is always a pain that you have suffered
one way or another.
You cannot, of course, go further than this lifetime. But this
is really all you need. For this lifetime cannot possibly bring you any other
painful experience than the one you have not previously let yourself experience.
So your early pains in this life are essentially the same as the ones suffered
in previous lives. The accumulated residual energy block not only attracts
the same events over again, as mentioned, but it also makes you incapable
of meeting new feeling experiences in a free and spiritually hygienic way.
You will be incapable of letting the new feeling live in you, so that it can
be added to the residual reservoir. On the other hand, once the specific residual
reservoir is emptied and you have fully experienced and gone through the past
accumulations, the flow of your being will deal with new pains in a very different
way.
First of all, you will remain open, vulnerable, and experience
the pain softly, gently, without inner fight, and fully knowing why you are
in pain. This integration of your experience will make the wave, slowly or
quickly -- according to the nature of the experience -- pass and the pain
dissolve into the stream of life within you. This open, relaxed, unguarded,
unfighting state also makes inspiration and resources available that are otherwise
inaccessible. You will be guided from within to find new ways of actions and
of behavior that will be effective in your outer life and your environment,
so that you prepare new ground for new experiences. Going through what you
fear eliminates the fear, and the fearlessness opens new creative channels
and entirely new resources that will first come as a total and unexpected
surprise. Also, a new, ever increasing vibrancy of life must fill your being
when you live in this way. You will be filled with the joyousness of knowing
that all is well in the universe.
The outer control of the will, when used to avoid feared feelings
and to forcefully produce the joy that cannot be had unless you live in an
unguarded state, must finally, and again and again, be smashed by life that
cannot be willfully manipulated by the fearful, small, controlling mind. When
a forcing current ("I must not experience that and I must experience
this") substitutes a relaxed stream of consciousness, a flowing soul
substance, the end result is crisis and more pain. The bitter pain of fighting
against pain. The terror of trying to avoid fear, rather than going through
it.
The state of duality that is significant of man's state of
consciousness is primarily a result of fear that is not fully lived through
and therefore dissolved. By saying, in effect, "This I must not experience,"
you create a duality. Your fear makes a Yes and a No current. And that is
the entire basis of the painful state of duality. It can only thrive in a
state of avoidance, of being closed to one thing, which creates a tense, urgent
grabbing movement into the opposite direction. This prohibits the real flow
of life.
When an inner attitude of strong denial exists (which is the
basis of fear), rage, anger, violence must follow suit. Rage and anger dissolve
when the fear of pain is being given up and the pain fully experienced. Then,
when this happens, the pain will dissolve and turn into its original nature,
which is blissful, peaceful vibrancy of the river of life, of which you are
a part, and which flows through your being.
Fear of feelings therefore not only means the warding off of
bliss and the expression of creative life through you, but also it means that
you are split and in a state of disunity. The unification of the human state
of consciousness into a higher state of consciousness can take place only
by going through what you fear, and never by going around and by warding off
and by avoiding.
When fear of experiencing his feelings induces man to block
off his capacity to feel, this impoverishment creates the need for a substitution.
This substitution is the mind. In order not to feel the deadness, the impoverishment
of the inner being, and in order to have a sense of existing, the outer mind
is used much more than is its natural function. If you cannot exist through
your flowing, feeling, experiencing being, then the mind, the intellect, and
the will take charge exclusively, or almost exclusively, of the deadened feeling
part. This gives temporarily the illusion of being alive. But the aliveness
is precarious. It is, in the long run, not even convincing, because consciousness
without feeling lacks the spark of the spirit that puts a glow on life. Its
incompleteness is dry and sterile. You may arrive at the most brilliant formulations
with your mind, but if your mind is not unified with the inner feeling experience,
you will, in secret moments, doubt your aliveness, your reality of being.
It happens so frequently in this civilization, at this juncture of the general
evolution, that man possesses a brain, but finds himself unable to live fully.
What is usually called these days an identity crisis is the result of being
split off from the feeling self. This, in turn, exists only when feelings
are being avoided, fought against, denied, resisted, repressed. When man does
not know who he is, he must be "lost." He can never know who he is when the
mind substitutes its so-called "life" for the inner, feeling self.
Let us look into specific feelings now, what happens to them
when they are denied. Let us take sadness: when something in you says, "I
must not be said, I should not be sad," you rebel against something
that exists. This rebellious attitude will soon create a concept in you --
actually a misconception -- that being said is catastrophic, and if this catastrophe
befalls you, you must perish. This unspoken, unarticulated assumption creates
fear and often, if this becomes more exaggerated, fear turns into terror.
The terror of sadness creates a compulsive urge to avoid sadness -- avoid
feeling it. If life forces you to, and you finally do feel it through the
circumstances you inevitably attract, your reaction of terror, due to your
conviction of having to perish, will produce such strong inner turmoil that
you may, indeed, break down. On the surface you may be utterly unaware of
the rebellious anger in you that is at the bottom of the terror and the misconception
that make you struggle so arduously and painfully against sadness. When you
then experience sadness, in this mental and emotional state, the nature of
this experience is indeed infinitely painful, bitter, and unbearable -- but
not because straight sadness cannot be borne. Any straight, direct, clean
feeling can easily be borne, no matter what it is and why it exists. What
is indeed unbearably painful, bitter, frightening, and hopeless is the result
of the inner struggle and the turmoil the misconception creates. This is why
the scriptural saying, "According to thy belief it shall be done unto
thee," is verifiable in the reality of living. It does not connote
a magical intercession from heaven, in terms of reward for faith and punishment
for doubt. It simply describes the dynamics I discuss here. It is the mind's
overactivity that produces the image, "I will perish if I have to be
sad," although it may not be the conscious, articulate mind. You built
mental concepts that sustain the belief that sadness is unbearable, and even
dangerous, and thus you justify your refusal to feel sad. You may do this
by building cases against others who make you sad. The mind busily attempts
to justify why you should not have to endure this feeling. Thus illusions
are being built. And it always seems most difficult to abandon one's cherished
illusions.
Whenever it first happens that an original experience -- say,
of sadness and pain -- is denied, it becomes displaced. It will be re-experienced
in subsequent situations. Displaced and denied sadness becomes self-pity,
hopelessness, bleakness, depression. These emotions are indeed debilitating
and destructive, while the clean, direct, original feeling of sadness, if
fully experienced without making it more or less, and if it is brought back
to where it originally started in this life, will dissipate. When you let
it happen to you, without manipulating it by exaggerating or denying it, it
will run its natural course. This is extremely important to remember and to
try out, as it were, again and again.
But if the original, clean experience of sadness is denied
in any form, and thus distorted, it becomes part of a vicious circle, from
which it is always difficult to extricate oneself. Part of this vicious circle
is, of course, also the denied anger and rage for being made sad by life,
by other people.
Let us take the feeling of anger: if it is cleanly experienced,
because perhaps someone damages you, hurts you, inflicts injustice upon you,
it will resolve itself. Other people's denial of their inner truth, their
real feelings, must inflict pain upon you just as much as you must inflict
pain upon others by not allowing yourself to experience what is -- whether
you intend to do so or not, whether you are aware of it or not. This pain
can be inflicted every bit as much by omission as by commission. The climate
of omission in a child's life is indeed often more difficult to cope with
because there is no actual occurrence one can pinpoint the pain on, so that
it is more difficult to acknowledge and feel it, and thus eliminate it from
your psychic system. Your initial reaction to pain with anger is totally normal
and healthy. If you can accept your anger feeling with the proper understanding
that such a reaction does not require to act against others in a destructive
fashion, you will accept this anger, without either judging or justifying
yourself or others. If you will let yourself feel and experience it and follow
it through to the pain, it will dissolve, it will liberate you. If you deny
it, it will turn into spite, cruelty, hostility, which then, in turn, as you
well know, also need to be covered up in order to conform with society's standards.
Thus you become further alienated from what you really feel, and the original
feeling becomes more distorted.
Let us now see what happens when the original feeling of despair
and loneliness is denied, when the inner person says, "I should not
have to deal with this, ever; I should be spared this experience of despair."
By this denial, you turn it into bitterness, isolation, faithlessness -- the
apprehension that there is no way out for you. If the original despair is
cleanly experienced, without making conclusions and mental concepts, the feeling
will dissolve relatively quickly. If you allow yourself to feel it, without
your mind making something of it, if you are attuned to what is happening
in you, you will come out of yet another tunnel into the light of entering
the life stream. When I speak here of the clean experience of momentary despair,
it must not be confused with a subtly forced hopelessness that is the result
of a forcing current. The forcing current is a manipulative process that expresses
into life and toward everybody whom one substitutes for those who caused the
original hurt in childhood, "You must now give me all I ask for and
you must protect me from all unpleasurable feelings. My hopelessness will
convince you that this is what you must do for me." When such irrational
"messages" of the hidden self can be deciphered and admitted, the manipulative
artificial hopelessness (which is always unbearable) will give way and the
new insight will lead back to the clean, original feeling one has avoided.
If you can make such differentiations, you will have gained a great step forward
toward self-awareness which, in turn, will make it possible for you to experience
original feelings and go through their tunnel at whose other end you will
find the realistic good tidings of spiritual reality. The reality that life
is ultimately benign. And when I say "ultimately," I do not mean in a faraway
beyond. I mean whenever you have the courage and the faith to truly feel what
is in you, when you explore what is in you; when you let happen to you what
is in you; when the hardened armor plate of your defense against unpleasant
feelings is loosened up and you feel and you cry, and you tremble, and you
writhe, and you experience directly and cleanly the original feeling. Then
all residual feelings will dissolve. The new experience of everyday living
will be a fluctuating wave of life as it comes to you. You will not live behind
a wall, through which nothing can come to you and nothing can come out of
you. That is the true isolation of the disunified, fearful being, who issues
a forcing current into the world that says, "I must not feel this, I
say No to it," and is therefore in a state of tight denial and defense.
Let us now take the feeling of fear. When you deny it, it becomes
vague anxiety that is infinitely more disturbing because you have nothing
to focus on and cope with. By facing the fear directly, you proceed into other
feelings, such as pain, despair, and anger. Thus, the way out becomes possible.
Anxiety is displaced fear and, as such, offers no way out.
If you feel vaguely disturbed, irritated, or disquieted, without
really knowing what happens to you, do not gloss over it. You create further
layers of disunity and disorientation. Focus onto your sensations, trust in
the fact that something more tangible, something that you can deal with, lies
in you and waits for you to take it out of hiding. This will lead you more
and more into a fuller experiencing of your feelings -- from the now to the
then, from the present to the past. And when you empty out the past accumulation,
the present will truly be the present, rather than give you the illusion that
you react to the present, when you really react over and over to the past
you constantly keep avoiding.
Anyone of you who truly decides to go into the nucleus of your
very being can do so at any time you so wish. It requires your decision to
look, feel, and experience what is in you; to no longer externalize what is
in you. When you no longer fear -- let us say, pain -- pain can no longer
come to you. When you no longer fear fear, you cannot experience fear any
longer. When you no longer fear disappointment, because you know you can experience
it, and when you can let it happen to you and go to its very end until its
energy current re-transforms itself into its original flow, then disappointment
can no longer happen to you.
You must understand, my dearest friends, that anything undesirable
that happens to you comes to you only because you say, "No, I must not
experience that, and what can I do to avoid it?" Indeed, most people
are motivated into such work as this because they really seek for better ways
to avoid the undesirable feelings, and when it finally dawns upon them that
exactly the opposite direction must be taken, many leave such a path as this,
because they are unwilling to accept the truth that avoidance is futile. They
insist on their illusion.
It is therefore of utmost importance that, at this particular
juncture, you question yourself: "To what degree are you afraid of a
feeling in you? Which is it?" For nothing outwardly can in itself
be so frightening. Only what it will do to you, what unpleasurable feelings
will it elicit in you, what pain will it make you experience. By going into
the undesirable feeling, you will see the miracle happen as a stark reality,
not as a principle you hear expounded: the acceptance of pain makes the pain
pleasurable. The less you block pain, the more and the sooner will pain turn
into pleasure. Thus you witness the process of unifying duality.
At this point of our work together we shall go more and more
into the deepest, most direct experiences of your residual feelings, alternating
with your present feelings. By learning to give up the fight against them,
you will, for the first time, lose fear. I will help you and guide you, as
usual. Start off right now -- all of you who listen tonight and all those
who read these words -- what are the feelings you fear? Really face that.
And then attempt to open yourself up to these feared feelings and try to let
happen what you thought would be undesirable, unacceptable. You will see what
happens, if you go through. You will see that many of these concepts and ideas
I discuss over the years are not mere faraway philosophies, sentences I utter
to expound on a principle. They have a very concrete and immediate meaning
that you can verify as stark reality if you truly follow through. And quite
a number of you have done this already, of course, and have truly found out
that what appears first as a black, frightening, endless abyss turns out to
be a tunnel at whose other end you come into light. Everyone can experience
this. It is never an endless abyss, for life in its true essence is not darkness,
it is light. It is not destruction, it is construction. It is not evil, it
is good. The evil of life, destructiveness, the demonic forces, are fear
of experiencing what is in you, your feelings. For out of that fear, you
build your destructive defenses. That is the only reason why destructiveness
sets in, in every one of its facets and forms. The fear of feelings, of painful
experience, makes you arrogant and isolated, cruel and greedy, selfish and
life-denying. It makes you untruthful on the inner and most vital level of
your being. For if you deny what you feel, you are not in truth with yourself.
All of this is evil, if you wish to choose this word, or any other. Destructiveness
lies exclusively in the walls you build against experiencing what is in you.
You thus convert constructive energy into destructive energy. The inner lie
of denying experience of the feeling self creates a falsification of your
real self. It falsifies you, until you no longer know who you are. It creates
the false hope that you can eliminate undesirable feelings by avoiding them,
and it creates the false hopelessness that the tunnel of painful feelings
is a bottomless pit of horror and annihilation. Thus you waste your life energies
by stemming against the truth and thereby creating unnecessary pain.
The negation of the original feeling in this life leads to
greedy, insatiable demands -- the demand that all frustration should be spared
you, that you should never be criticized, that you should always have your
way, that others should always love you, and love you your way. As long as
these demands are not recognized and abandoned, and the original pain cleanly
felt and gone through, you will be caught in the ever fluctuating see-saw
of submission and rebellion, which is another vicious circle. You submit to
others' equally insatiable, unreasonable demands and their power struggle
for control in order to finally have them do your bidding. You rebel because
you are ashamed of and hate yourself for this submission, and must prove your
"independence." In both attitudes you violate the real interests of your real
self. In neither are you aware of the blind drives that lead you into submission
and rebellion. The only way you can truly be independent is when these demands
cease, which will be when you can experience whatever comes to you because
you have produced it and it exists within you.
It is often being said by current psychology that a child is
incapable of reacting differently to pain than by building its numbing defenses.
This is true only when in previous lives residual pain was not met and gone
through, experienced, and thus eliminated. To whatever degree a human entity
has done this, even in childhood the severest of circumstances will be experienced
in an undefended way. The pain will be endured and gone through until it naturally
ceases, without leaving a mark, just because it was fully savored. This strengthens
resiliency, the ability to live life fruitfully and productively, and it certainly
increases the capacity for experiencing pleasure and deep feelings. It is
the living principle of, "Do not resist evil." It requires blindness
not to see that children actually have this capacity to a great degree. They
can cry bitterly one minute and laugh genuinely the next, just because the
pain has taken its natural course. It is only where pain has not been experienced
that defensive numbness is instituted, hence neurosis, destructiveness, deadness.
It will not do to generalize and assume that no child can help but react in
this self-numbing way to all traumatic and difficult situations.
May the power that is within your own being be allowed to fill
your whole substance, your whole organism -- the spiritual, the emotional
the mental, and your physical being. The full experience of your feeling self
is spiritual hygiene and avoids stagnation of the soul. It is the metabolism
of your total organism; just as the accumulation of physical waste that is
not allowed to be expelled and eliminated creates disease of the body, so
does unassimilated, unexperienced feeling matter create disease of the soul.
Your full commitment to everything you can possibly feel; your observation
of what feelings, and events that bring forth specific feelings, you fear;
and your commitment to at least begin to try, to approach, to experience,
and to face them is the health process that will unify your entire being.
This will make your life the fullest experience that is possible, and will
permeate you with the realization that you are using your life to its fullest
and to its best, in its deepest sense and with its innermost meaning.
A lot of love is pouring forth for all of you. May you be able
to feel it.
The Guide
by Eva Pierrakos
April 23, 1971
Copyright 1971, the Center for the Living Force, Inc.