Resume Of The Basic Principles Of The Pathwork: Its Aim And Process

By The Pathwork Guide

Greetings my dearest friends here. Blessings and love, strength and joy are ever-present within and around you, always permeating you to the degree that you allow them to. With great joy do I resume the help and guidance I am privileged to give you. This coming working season promises further progress, new steps toward the realization of your ultimate being. It is going to be an intense year for all of you who follow this path. As in previous years, we shall again attempt to proceed very directly into the areas that it's most necessary to explore and experience. Your previous achievements will encourage you to try new approaches and will make your present efforts more rewarding. In fact, I may say that you will often find that what seemed, in the past, a tedious effort or too painful a price to pay for future gains to be really a most joyful and fulfilling experience. Also, the bond among you will be drawn closer, and more love and unity will reign due to your growing state, your moving energies, and your expanding consciousness.

I was asked, at the end of the last working season, to give a resume, a condensation, of the teachings that I have brought to you during all these years. This is indeed a very useful new beginning. I shall now proceed to do this as best as I can. For it is not easy to summarize the many steps, that are all necessary, the many areas that have to be looked into from different angles, the many confusions that need to be straightened out. As you know, the language itself presents difficulties and limitations, so that misunderstandings can easily occur. But whatever you do not understand, whatever is not clear, we can take up in future sessions together.

First of all, in order to really understand the nature of this path, it is important to understand, to some degree, the nature of the entity you are. What are the various components of the human entity? Whatever explanation I can give you here is, of course, somewhat oversimplified, but it is nevertheless valid. Use it as a map that gives an overall idea of the being you have to deal with when you approach yourself, and therefore others.

Man consists of different levels of consciousness. Each level of consciousness represents a conglomerate of attitudes, beliefs, and feelings. These levels of consciousness are often at total variance with each other. They express different states of development in the evolutionary movement. In the spiritual world they are expressed as spheres. Your state of consciousness always creates its own world, with its own laws, its own value system, its own philosophy, its own reality, its own mores. Each world -- state of consciousness -- has a different degree of awareness of the ultimate cosmic reality, and therefore also different degrees of limitations. These limitations determine the extent to which the abundance of the universe can be experienced. Only the ultimate reality of man's innermost being, which is the true world, is unbroken unity of being, eternal, ever-flowing life and creativity, joy and self-expression. This world does not exist in some faraway place. It permeates everything that exists. In fact, the various levels of consciousness draw you into their corresponding worlds. They do not exist in time and space, but in a reality that transcends both. Thus they can overlap. Time, space, and movement are limited conceptions of the human mind -- of this particular state of consciousness. Thus in a reality that transcends the human, physical one, two or more worlds can easily exist in one and the same space.

An entity who is not yet unified and has not yet realized its ultimate nature expresses these different levels of consciousness and is thus drawn into their corresponding worlds, either alternately or simultaneously. While the entity is in the body, this manifests as various moods, perceptions, and experiences. How often does it happen that what you deeply feel to be the truth of life and of yourself today may be totally reversed tomorrow? For tomorrow you may experience life and yourself very differently. When you are drawn simultaneously into two conflicting worlds of your own making, you will experience conflict and confusion. When the entity is out of the body, this phenomenon manifests as the entity being drawn into the actual environment and certain level of consciousness it has created and then as being drawn into the respectively created world of another level, and then another, and another, for as long as these many states of consciousness exist in the still-disunified personality. The less the self-awareness of the entity, the less does it realize that the world it experiences at any given phase of its evolution is not the ultimate one and not the only one of its own creation. The states of limited awareness of reality necessarily create suffering, and when this unhappy state of existence is believed to be the only reality, apprehension, fear, and despair are inevitable. The illusion of these perceptions can only be eliminated by the arduous path of bringing all your inner worlds into awareness.

The gamut of the various degrees of awareness, hence that of joy and peace or their lack, is truly immensely varied, until the ultimate state of reality is realized.

The human condition can best be expressed, in a broad or overall way, in terms of the following levels of consciousness: the higher self -- which is the God-consciousness; the lower self -- which is the demonic self; and the mask self -- which hides the demonic self. Needless to say, there are many degrees and stages within these levels. Their overlapping, their canceling each other out, the confusion they create, and their indirect effects and chain reactions are all to be explored, understood, and mastered. That is the path. All these aspects of the personality can be either conscious or unconscious to varying degrees. The less your awareness of any of these states, the more conflict exists in your life, the less you are equipped to deal with life, with yourself, and with other people, and, certainly, the farther you are removed from the realization of your ultimate, divine self.

Lack of awareness comes from being split off from the reality of one's real, higher, divine self. But one is also split off from -- or, rather, unaware of -- the lower, as well as the mask self. This creates misunderstandings, illusions, misconceptions. It is one of the aspects of this pathwork to find these misconceptions and to correct them.

Let us now shed some light, first on the aim of this pathwork, and then on the process. The aim is, as I said, to unify all these levels so that the mask and lower selves dissolve and only the true higher self manifests and expresses itself. Only when the lower and mask selves are entirely conscious and their exact manifestations understood can misconceptions be corrected. Lack of awareness creates misconceptions. Misconceptions create negative energy and negative feelings, and they, in turn, create suffering. This chain must be reversed, but it can be reversed only when awareness of the mask self, of the lower self, and finally of the higher self can be attained through various processes and approaches.

It cannot be denied that to expand the consciousness of the limited mind represents a tremendous difficulty. For man has only this same limited mind at his disposal when he starts out. Thus this limited mind must transcend itself in order to realize its unlimited power and scope. The path, therefore, constantly requires that the mind bridge the gap of its own limitations by considering new possibilities, by making room for other alternatives for the self, for life, and for expressing the self in life. This demands the effort of coming out of an old, set, and apparently comfortable mold. But this comfort is the greatest illusion. However, all illusions seems real as long they are not considered as possibly being illusions and as long as no other alternatives are allowed.

The overall state of consciousness of the human condition is one of duality, or of opposites. I have often discussed some of the many aspects of the confusion created by the dualistic perception of reality. I do not have the time to go into this topic now at length; I have devoted many lectures to it. Here I only want to say that the confusion created by the dualistic perception of reality must be straightened out on all levels and in exact detail. This means conception, perception, and finally change. I want to emphasize once again that the unification of the fragmented self cannot take place so long as the world is perceived in a dualistic form. When issues, people, the self, the world, life, ideas, and attitudes appear to be either good or bad, right or wrong, there is distortion of reality, and consequently suffering, although the connection between the distortion and the suffering is not obvious to whomever is still involved in this illusory picture of life. Every conceivable attitude, feeling, idea, and human expression can be both good and bad. When this is experienced and no longer a mere theory, it is one of the most important marks of evolution and growth. I recommend that the lectures dealing with various aspects of this topic be studied carefully so that you can connect the importance of this issue with your own emotional and spiritual state.

The process of expanding the mind and of transcending its own temporary limitations can only be a conscious and deliberate effort toward this goal. The effort is not a labor of the will and mind, but an opening process that first considers, as I said, new alternatives, which can eventually become a reality. When you experience yourself only as a cut-off, powerless ego, and when you consequently try to put all the energy and power at your disposal into this ego, you must fail. But when you allow that you may indeed be an expression of an as yet unmanifest deeper, wider, wiser, and more loving divine self, this divine self is thereby sufficiently freed to manifest. Hence you bridge the gap between ignorance and alienation to an open state of mind that questions, waits, considers, and probes for an actual experience of the ultimate truth. Such an experience is called faith.

When the mind remains within the fences of its present limitations, transcendence cannot occur. The attempt to transcend the momentary limited mind and to experience the divine consciousness is called meditation. The process of becoming aware of and dealing with the mask self and the lower self will greatly speed up if the higher self is called into play and directed by the conscious mind to give specific guidance.

There are two basic approaches to human spirituality. The first one is to emphasize, concentrate, and focus on the divine possibility within, until this possibility becomes a reality. Many movements exist that have practices, teachings, and exercises that help actively and effectively toward this end. All energies and concentration are directed toward cultivating and enhancing, manifesting and expressing the divine reality within. However, this does not necessarily mean that the other fragmentary levels of consciousness are thereby automatically eliminated and incorporated into the divine center. It is quite possible, and indeed a frequent occurrence, that such practices genuinely bring out the real higher self yet leave the undeveloped aspects of consciousness intact. Many entities have such an intense longing to realize their divine inherent nature that they forget, while in the body, that they came to fulfill a mission in the universal plan. This mission is the purification and growth of undeveloped cosmic matter. In order to do this, the second approach must be adopted. And that is to shed the light of conscious awareness and experience on the inner distortions, the ugliness, the darkness, the evil, the suffering, as well as on the inner truth, the beauty, the love, the goodness, the joy. In order to do this, you need to develop a fine sensitivity so that the organic rhythm and the alternation that each individual path expresses can be perceived; you need to know when to focus more on one aspect and when more on another; when to concentrate on the higher self so as to strengthen its staying power and make it possible for it to give further guidance; when to pay attention to the lower self with its hidden evil, its dishonesty and cheating, its camouflaged hate and malice; when to focus on the specific devices of the mask self -- how it masks itself, what defenses it uses in order to keep the lower self hidden, and so on. And, finally, you need, to know when the moment is ripe to experience feelings that have been avoided. These fine alternations must be sensed, both by the person and by the helper, for everyone has a different rhythm.

There are periods and phases when the main concentration should be on the negative aspects, on the distortions, and on the ugliness, for the danger of escaping into the positive, rather than using the positive attitudes for the purpose of purification, is always great. There are other periods and phases when you should concentrate on the positive. Do not overlook the fact that it is possible to get in touch with the divine self genuinely and then use it to camouflage the split-off, distorted aspects of consciousness. The divine is neutral and will follow the will direction of consciousness in its immutable way.

It must be clear to all of you who are here or want to join this work that our approach to spirituality and to the realization of the spiritual self is the second of the two ways. The greater pain and discomfort that appear to be a byproduct of this path are also an illusion, for as long as any blocked off, split-off, dark, distorted cosmic substance exists, suffering is inevitable, whether or not you choose to know this now. Our path is a taxing path, but it is reality. It does not lead to illusion and to splitting off. It brings out into concrete experience whatever may still smolder underground, unmanifest, but which is bound to reach the surface and create experience at one time or another. It is always easier and quicker to transcend a state when we have deliberately confronted it, when the self accepts this present inner state and wants to go through it, than when confrontation comes inexorably, as a lawful, rhythmic, universal movement on an entity's evolutionary journey. An entity who chooses such a path incorporates itself into the divine plan. The aim of this approach to spiritual reunion is to help toward a reunification of everything that has ever split itself off.

Now we come to the approach itself. Again we will summarize and discuss the fundamentals, but we cannot go into all the manifold details and considerations. The levels to be worked with on the path -- each in a different way -- are the following aspects of the human personality.

1. The level of mind and thought.

2. The level of will.

3. The level of feelings.

4. The level of physicality and physical expression.

When all these levels are conscious, when their inevitable divergence from each other is faced and accepted, a unification process can begin. When the lower self is understood, accepted, and dissolved, and when the mask self is dispensed with, then unification in the spiritual reality of being can take place in a realistic way. Now let us examine the different approaches to the different personality levels.

1. The level of mind must deal with the concepts, that is, the misconceptions. As those of you who have been in this work for a longer time know, you have indeed discovered and ousted a number of misconceptions that have governed you. Thoughts and thought processes that are directed into an erroneous channel affect all other levels. They always create vicious circles. These vicious circles entrap you, they put you into a hopeless situation. And it is indeed true that as long as you move within this vicious circle, there is no hope. But the moment the vicious circle is broken, you are liberated from the entrapment. It is therefore imperative clearly to see, understand, and give up these components of attitude and behavior that create the vicious circle. This always means that a concept, a thought process, or an approach to reality must be basically changed. The misconception must be recognized as such: why it is one, how it exists, and in what way it leads one into a vicious circle. How does the vicious circle proceed? What is the corresponding true conception? How would living according to it lead to a wide-open world, into a benign sequence of creative self-expression? All this must be clearly perceived, understood, made conscious, and eventually emotionally experienced. It is not enough to have a theoretical understanding of these inner processes. Only through the emotional experience can the misconception be replaced by a true concept. Only then will the true concept take root in the psyche and open up new channels of functioning, of spontaneous behavior -- as opposed to behavior based on conditioned reflexes -- and of creative expression of feelings.

Misconceptions can be quite conscious, but you may not necessarily know that they are misconceptions. Therefore your conscious beliefs must also be tested and investigated. Misconceptions can also be vaguely conscious, in a nebulous way, when your actions and reactions testify to the fact that you are governed by misconceptions, but you have not concisely specified what they are and what their consequences are. All this must be specifically determined. For us, misconceptions can be unconscious. In that case, the pathwork must deal with making them conscious. This can only be done by examining the life manifestation. One's life does not lie. It expresses exactly what you really, inwardly, believe. You may consciously claim that you are a loving person, and indeed believe in love. But if you suffer from a loveless life, it testifies clearly that, somewhere inside of you, you do not believe in love, you do not want to love, and you have your reasons -- that is, your misconceptions -- for not loving. Hence, unconscious misconceptions can only be unearthed by looking at your life: your suffering, your frustrations, your unfulfilled longings.

All levels must be dealt with in both the conscious and the unconscious. These two approaches vary from personality aspect to personality aspect. You have to work differently with the level of the mind than with the levels of will, feelings, and of the body.

2. In order to work on the level of will, you have to understand, first of all, that there is an outer and an inner will. To put it differently, there is a voluntary and an involuntary will action. These two levels of will also have to be scrutinized, understood, and made conscious. Where distortions, misconceptions, and negativities exist in a psyche, the will forces are out of balance. Where the will should be active, it is often paralyzed and stagnant. Where it should be receptive and passive, it is tight, forced, and active. Thus a re-establishment of balance must occur as the purification proceeds. On the level of mind, you must come to distinguish in what areas you must act, initiate -- in short, use your inherent capacity to will. This may apply to actions, or it may apply equally to an attitude expressed toward life. You must also discern in what areas to momentarily accept your limitations of will and let go of the forcing current of an overactive will. This re-establishment of will currents cannot be done by the outer will. If this is recognized and the pressure of the outer will is relaxed, the inner will can come to the fore and begin its functioning. A lot of frustration is incurred by man pushing with his outer will and thus prohibiting the inner, relaxed will to manifest, or by preventing the outer will from reaching out into life.

Again, my friends who are involved in this pathwork will recognize much of the ground already covered.

3. The level of feelings: Again, where there are misconceptions of the mind -- whether conscious or unconscious -- and where there is an imbalance of the inner and outer will, feelings are destructive, stagnant, painful. The energy of the feeling body is paralyzed and blocked. Therefore, it is a substantial aspect of any process of unification and purification to experience the feeling level, or the feeling body, if you will, and let out the paralyzed blocks of feelings -- whatever they may be. They must be dealt with on the conscious level in order to be re-channeled constructively; destructive feelings can certainly be constructively expressed. If this is not being done, negative, painful feelings will stagnate on an unconscious level and will prohibit the personality from healthy functioning, from good feelings, and from the vital energy flow which is the nature of universal life. This inevitably leads to an indirect and destructive acting out of such feelings, of which, most of the time, the personality is entirely unaware. You see no other alternative than acting, reacting, and being the way you are, and you overlook the fact, which is often crystal clear to those in your environment, that you are acting out negative feelings.

So, in dealing with the feeling level, you have to learn how to get in touch with feelings that are locked up inside of you. This, too, may be discernible only indirectly, by the manifestations in your life, by your life experience.

The evoking of feelings is done, as most of you know, by a variety of approaches, which we hardly need to enumerate here. It suffices to say that the experiencing and expressing of feelings that were deemed to be unacceptable and/or unbearable, and the ability to sustain them, to handle them, is the only way a person can lose fear, anxiety, and tension. As long as you hope against hope that your life would be free from painful feelings, you hope for an illusion. And deep down you know it, yet you cling to it. Hence you are afraid and feel shaky and inadequate. But when your own feelings can be experienced, no matter what they are, you become automatically secure and unafraid, and therefore relaxed. And this state of being relaxed and loose -- in mind, will, feelings, and body -- is the indispensable prerequisite for pleasure and thus for fulfillment.

The refusal to experience painful feelings rests on the misconception that they will annihilate you or that they will prove that you are no good. This misconception must be challenged and replaced. If it is not, you will not allow yourself to experience painful feelings. The refusal to do so also creates a tight will current, so as to ward off what you believe to be annihilation. Hence, the will must be relaxed, so that it may become possible for you to experience what is already in you, and what must paralyze all your best functioning unless you go through it and thus transcend it.

4. The level of the body, of physical expression. Since it is impossible that an attitude existing on one level does not also manifest on all other levels, every misconception, every distortion, every imbalance of the will functioning, and every refusal to feel what is there inevitably also creates a physical manifestation, or bodily condition. It therefore hampers not only the person's spiritual unfoldment but, equally, his or her physical life experience. It is therefore utterly false to assume that the physical and the spiritual life stand in opposition. One is merely an expression of the other. The physical body expresses conceptual error, will imbalance, and stagnant, denied feelings in the form of muscular blocks. The tensions and energy stagnation caused by distortions on any of the other levels can affect the body by distorting it, by creating all sorts of symptoms, and, when neglected long enough, by physical illness. You can now perceive how the different levels interact.

Needless to say that the physical level must, again, be approached in a different way. As you have learned on this path, the blocks, in order to be eliminated, must also be helped from the outer level; the energy must be set in motion again; the physical feelings must be connected with the soul movements, the inner attitudes, the content of the mind. Where energy is blocked, consciousness cannot penetrate. Every cell in the human body is conscious -- a consciousness unto itself. When areas are blocked off in the body, the cell system in this area is prevented from being permeated with the divine energy stream and divine consciousness. As I have often said, the whole universe consists of energy and consciousness. Creation is an ongoing process of a happy fusion between energy and consciousness. They interact.

The pathwork is effective when it takes place on all these levels and with all these approaches. As I said, there is no outer rule that can determine when to change from one to the other. It is different with everyone. The path must be allowed to express itself from within, as a living, organismic reality. All the various avenues offered on this path fulfill important functions in order to work on one or the other of these levels.

It is necessary to attempt, again and again, to get in touch with the higher self, the divine consciousness, that is ever-present, immutable, and immediately available within you. When this is done for the purpose of making distorted levels of soul substance conscious and in order to reorient them, so as to unify all split-off soul substance, meditation must take a different road from the kind of meditation that is used for the sole purpose of realizing the divine self while disregarding the dark aspects of the self. It is a current illusion and wishful thinking that this latter approach automatically deals with the dark side of human nature. This cannot be so. You cannot overcome what you have not consciously and fully experienced. This wishful hope, with which you are all familiar, is nourished by the fact that it is indeed possible to realize the already potentially present part of the God Self. It is very important, my friends, to understand this clearly. This is why it is so often true that entities, once they shed the body, who have led a difficult and apparently unspiritual life, do more toward the universal process of evolution than some others who have led an extremely spiritual life, who may even have been so-called masters, but who have cultivated their beauty and disregarded their ugliness. They have thus failed to unify and so have unwittingly perpetuated the dualistic state of consciousness in which this earth finds itself.

Since our path deals with the harder of the two roads, it is obvious that our approach to meditation is different. Next time I will give a special lecture which is a resume, or a summary, of what I have given you over the years in regard to the various necessary approaches to meditation for this particular path. For, as you know, approaches to meditation can be as varied as the human personality, as varied as life experience. Meditation is too vast a subject to be included in this summary. The next lecture will help you on your further path, by showing you in concise outline certain basic precepts and fundamental rules of meditation.

Many human beings, no matter how committed they are to this path, are not always capable of meditating, for the very blocks of mind, of the will, of the feelings, and of the body also create a spiritual block, so that meditation cannot be practiced. Again, you must grope and seek to unblock a little here and a little there, through deep insight, through a search for recognition, through a summoning of honest courage and letting yourself feel what is in you. Through such endeavor the block to meditation will also loosen up. You can then meditate for further guidance to experience more feelings. You have to release the blocks in order to meditate, and you must meditate in order to release the blocks. At times, a person starts the path without any meditation whatsoever, for his consciousness may block off this very approach. When sufficient unblocking is done, when false spirituality is sufficiently cleared up, then a new influx of spiritual energy and consciousness can take place, and every effort becomes easier. A spiritual block can exist by either adopting a false, escapist, separating spirituality, or by negating the greater reality altogether. In both instances misconceptions must be eliminated in order to free the channel for the real spiritual influx. Real spirituality is often rejected when a person wants to reject the false, escapist spirituality but confuses the two.

When the blocks to spiritual influx begin to be eliminated, the whole process can be speeded up -- the process of awareness, liberation, healing, and unification. For on each step of the way you can avail yourself of this immeasurably powerful tool: your contact with your divine reality. I will, as I said, discuss in the next lecture some of the laws pertaining to meditation so as to help you further, although I have, of course, discussed this topic, scattered here and there, in the past. The time has come to bring all together into one comprehensive whole.

Just as the mind level can be either conscious or unconscious, so can the will, the feeling, and even the body levels. It is therefore imperative that the degree of consciousness be increased on all levels, that you connect, for example, a physical symptom -- a pain or a tension -- with the mental attitude, the thought, the emotion, and the will that correspond to and motivate the specific physical manifestation. For instance, when you begin to sense that a specific bodily tension is a feeling of hate and rage, is an overactive outer will that is prevented from hitting out, is a specific misconception, then you unify all levels and increase your scope of consciousness on all levels.

It is one of the immutable spiritual laws that lack of awareness of one area prohibits awareness of another. So, for example, if you manage to stave off awareness of your lower self and your mask self, you will not be aware of the already manifest higher self. You may pay lip service to the fact that you must be an expression of a higher, divine consciousness, but you cannot possibly feel it unless you make yourself feel your lower self and the mask that hides it. Thus how can you possibly meditate and address an aspect of the divine in you? In the slow progression of such a pathwork, it will come to pass that at times you may be conscious of your divine heritage, while at other times you will be totally oblivious, cut off from it.

Just as both the higher and lower self can be either conscious or unconscious, or at any degree between these two states, so can the mask self. The mask self is the pretense, the hiding, the facade you present to the world, the idealized self-image you want to be and invest all your energies into so as to make it real. All of these various expressions indicate the mask self. The mask self is a defense against exposing who you really are at this point in time -- although you are not, of course, exclusively the lower self, which it is the purpose of the mask to hide. However, by masking anything of yourself, you inevitably also mask your higher self from yourself. The more you try to show only your good side -- what is genuinely in the higher self but not in the mask self -- the more your higher self is masked. Again, you can be conscious of this or not. At times, you may be acutely aware of your faking, of your falsifying yourself -- and this is so much more preferable to the unaware state. At other times, because you have identified so much with your mask, you feel ashamed and uncomfortable, but you don't face this fact because you don't wish to experience and deal with such feelings. Thus a further process of splitting off sets in, in which you, more and more, lose track of who you really are. This is the state of lostness that many individuals wish to cure by some magic -- drugs, pills, formulas, even meditation. They also turn to therapies that encourage the helpless state of sickness and overlook the potent factor of will that must be used if rightly understood and applied.

This is why the pathwork is, above everything else, a process of making things conscious. This self-awareness unifies you, unifies the split in you, unifies conflicts in you, and establishes your sense of self, and your knowledge that the universe, with all its bliss, is yours.

A very important aspect of this work is yet another level of self, beyond the physical body. The reason I failed to include it in our enumeration of levels is that this is generally not recognized as a level of human personality in human thinking. This is the level of life experience. Generally, life experience is perceived as a separate entity, as it were, as if the human entity were put into a fixed life. It is overlooked that every person's life experience is as intrinsic an expression of his or her inner being as the body is. And it is only recently that a few advanced thinkers have begun to see the body as such a connected expression of the whole person. There are still many who view man's body manifestation as being almost as much disconnected from his inner life as his life experience. In reality, the life experience is totally symptomatic of the inner state of the manifest personality. Our path uses this most important tool and truth in order to determine the inner state.

This more truthful and comprehensive vision does away with the fallacy of man's helplessness. The truth leads to man's assuming self-responsibility in every conceivable respect. Most human beings are loath to accept this. They would rather see themselves as helpless, innocent victims, with all the suffering and hopelessness that go with it, than accept the hope, light, and freedom of self-responsibility. This indicates the emotional immaturity of humanity as a whole. It also indicates the sense of guilt that is attached to admitting fallacy and distortion. Paradoxical as it may seem, the more helpless you pretend to be vis-à-vis your life experiences, the less an inner, healthy, relaxed will functions, and the stronger the tight selfwill of the little, ineffective ego becomes in order to ward off the imagined unjust life experience. What a waste of valuable energy!

It is an intrinsic aspect of this work that you eventually shed the illusion of your being an innocent victim and avail yourself of the key to freedom -- which is self-responsibility. This is not a postulate or a philosophy that cannot be verified. Those who go into this work honestly and deeply enough must inevitably find out that the good and the bad life experience -- both -- are exact impressions of their thinking, their willing, their feeling, and of their physical being.

There are many other aspects of the pathwork that are important to understand, but they are the details that help fill out these fundamental principles. You will find them in past and future lectures and in answers and questions.

Try to absorb and use what I gave you tonight. It will help you to know that where you are going and what you may be unwilling to experience is universal, necessary, and not at all unacceptable. It will also make you more aware of the inner rhythm and reality that is the path. Those who commit themselves to the path will experience that there is a living, organic reality in the path. It manifests, instructs, and shows you that whatever you experience has a meaning for you. The difficulty is that at times you do not want to listen to it. You want to tune out; you want to go with your selfwill and give in to your own ideas, which often camouflage your fear of meeting yourselves head-on. You may then seek out various ways that make it easy to camouflage yourselves. When that happens, the voice of the path can no longer be discerned. That is why it should at all times be cultivated. Then this voice will speak louder and clearer each time you ask it. Ask it with a truly open attitude, an attitude that is willing to listen to a consciousness that is you, and yet that is greater than your conscious you. Then you will see that this greater you is real and the little consciousness is only a separate particle. When this begins to happen, unification is beginning to happen.

Be blessed, my dear ones, all of you. Know that the love and truth of the universe are your ultimate goal, your ultimate fate, which nothing in the world can alter, even if the little mind is uselessly and stubbornly afraid of the process. Be blessed, go in peace into this year's work, with joy, for the universe holds such rich fulfillment for everyone. These are not empty words. The truth of these words will make itself known when you first fully face the opposite -- your unhappiness, your suffering, your distortions. As you do so, the truth of your ultimate fate will become a reality.

The Guide
by Eva Pierrakos
September 24, 1971

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