Meditation, Its Laws and Approaches: A Summary

By The Pathwork Guide

Greetings and blessings for all of you. There is a lot of energy, love, and healing power -- healing for the soul, the spirit, and the body -- accumulated here. It comes from the unity of your desire and wish to reach forever new levels of consciousness, of feelings, and of experience -- within and without. And it also stems from entities who are not in the body and who are also present here. As I said to you occasionally before, there are many more entities involved in this venture of communication than there are human beings here. There are those who help and fulfill tasks, and there are those who learn. It is as with you, some help and learn, and others only learn at this stage. But every step of their development is a beneficial influence, and thus gives learning to others -- whether they realize it or not.

This lecture, as I promised, is going to be a summary about meditation. I will speak about what meditation is, about some of the laws inherent in it, and then, specifically, about how meditation is best to be used for this particular pathwork so as to fulfill its aim: The unification of the whole person with the as yet separated part, the lower self. Much of it will sound, perforce, repetitious, but this cannot be avoided in any summary. Yet it will prove helpful because it will give all of you a better understanding of the meaning of meditation and its laws, and will make your attempts to put meditation into practice easier.

Meditation is conscious and deliberate creating. It is one of the most dynamic and creative acts imaginable. Man constantly creates, whether he knows it or not. He creates by what he is, by what the sum total of his feelings, his conscious and unconscious opinions and convictions are, by his conceptions -- which determine his actions and reactions -- by his goals, and by his attitudes. Every thought is a creation and has its consequence. It brings about a specific result that expresses this thought. Since man consists of many conflicting thoughts, and since his thoughts and beliefs often vary drastically from his emotional conceptions, the result -- that is, his "creation" -- must be according to such a state. The mixed-up, conflicting, and confusing lives that most people lead testify to this fact.

There is an enormous difference between those who create unwittingly -- never knowing that their unwise, erroneous thoughts, their destructive feelings, and their unchecked wishes bring about a result just as surely as if they were to commit a conscious act -- and those people who attempt to check, test, and challenge their concepts; who seek for the truth; and who adjust their ideas, thought processes, and aims to it; and who purify their feelings by going through them with courage and honesty, wisdom and the foresight that what exists inside, no matter how painful, cannot simply be avoided but must be experienced. This latter attitude toward life can then result in deliberate creation of one's life. And that is meaningful meditation.

Meditation is creating because you are living in a highly potent creative substance. You live in it, you move in it, you have your being in it. Everything that consciousness emanates, sends forth, and expresses into this substance must take on form. The word you speak or think, the emotionally charged thought -- knowing it and pronouncing it -- is the creative act. The creative substance in which you live, and which lives in you, is then being impressed by the thought form with which you mold the substance. This substance is so highly potent that it moves constantly, being impregnated by thought and intent of consciousness. This is how creation unfolds in its myriad ways.

In conscious creation you emanate and express various thoughts, feelings, and attitudes -- or the sum total of them, as it creates the totality of your life. All concepts and opinions, all views and desires create a will direction, which is charged. And this creating force activates the substance as the receptive part of creation.

Understanding this principle, it will become obvious why one can tell exactly what a person is, thinks, feels, and believes -- both consciously and unconsciously -- when you see where and in what areas this person has fulfillment and abundance, and in what areas he has impoverishment and want.

It is therefore one of the most important aims on this path to make all you think and know, perceive and conceive, believe in and want conscious. Only then can you see the conflicts and the misconceptions. And only then can you begin to create meaningfully a good life. Meditation can, and should of course, be used for the very purpose of eliminating misconceptions and destructive attitudes. With the help of meditation you can become aware of what your misconceptions are and why they are erroneous. With the help of meditation you can gradually impress upon your soul substance correct beliefs.

You first use meditation in order to eliminate that which prevents you from meditation. This sounds like a paradox, but it is not. If you hold incorrect, negative beliefs, then you cannot create a good life, but you unwittingly destroy creative substance -- or, rather, turn it into a negative manifestation. Once the misconceptions are eliminated, you can actively create more desirable experience, a better and deeper feeling capacity, more creative self-expression, and more joy and serenity. All this exists in truly limitless abundance in the universe, and is available for you unlimitedly. The only limitation is your own mind which, by dint of the false ideas -- and thence resulting negative feelings and attitudes -- ignores this fact. It is this very ignorance that prevents a person from stepping beyond the fences of this ignorance.

Every creative act in the universe comes about because the active and the receptive principles or forces fuse and create something new. This applies to everything, from the smallest -- and apparently most insignificant -- act to the most sublime. Whether you create a tiny object, whether the Cosmic Intelligence creates new galaxies, or whether you create your own evolutionary process, it is always that both the active and receptive principles must merge harmoniously. The same applies to the act of meditation, of course.

The various levels of the human entity can, at various stages in his development, use different approaches to meditation. Each of these approaches can vary according to which of the levels assumes the active part and which the receptive. Later in this lecture I shall be more specific about this. Now let me say only that the first stage is almost always that the conscious mind assumes the active part by speaking the word, by concisely formulating the thoughts and intents. The conscious mind issues forth, claims, and states, and the more concisely this part of the creative act is executed, the more constructive and truthful the thoughts and intents are, the fewer inner, unconscious obstructions will exist, provided they are being dealt with realistically and honestly.

Let us assume, for example, that you meditate for more fulfillment with a mate. The force of your own conviction that you deserve this, that this is indeed possible and in keeping with divine law, will depend on the extent to which you have faced and come to terms with your own wish not to love. When you are unaware of this fact, your statement and request for more fulfillment must lack conviction, and therefore will be infiltrated with doubt. But if you face your incommensurate attitude -- your hatred and your demanding love -- and truly give it up, then you can meditate first for your own increased capacity to love. Thus the obstruction to more fulfillment is realistically dealt with and therefore all resistance and the doubt that you indeed deserve the best will vanish.

The soul substance is the receptive principle. The more one-pointed, unconflicted, and uncontaminated by secret doubts -- due to unrecognized negativities -- your statement, the deeper and clearer the receptive part, the soul substance, will be imprinted. The soul substance will be molded by consciousness according to the strength, conviction, and clarity of consciousness.

The all-permeating Creator uses precisely the same principle that all human beings do, whether they know it or not. The higher the development, the more truthful and real an entity's thoughts and concepts are, the more powerful will be the energy with which the entity creates. In the case of the Ultimate Creator, the energy will not be eliminated by conflict, by the limitations of mind, and by faulty visualization.

There is also a correlation between the accuracy of knowledge, the visualization of new possibilities of expansion and experience, and proper concepts on the one hand, and the receptivity of soul substance on the other. When concepts are real and the limitless abundance of the universe is therefore perceived, then attitudes will be positive and in accordance with the cosmic laws of truth and love. Hence no defenses are required. This defenseless state makes the soul substance loose, resilient, and receptive. It will be easily impressed and be malleable. Creation can then flow forth in a constant, ongoing flow.

Conversely, when concepts are distorted -- and therefore attitudes are destructive and feelings negative -- cosmic law is broken. This causes guilt and fear, which, in turn, require defenses. The defenses cause brittleness and harden the surface of soul substance that is available for creating. It will therefore be much harder to impress and imprint.

If you can comprehend this process to at least some degree -- even if at first such comprehension is merely theoretical and intellectual, until you can gain a more feeling understanding -- it will be very helpful for your further attempts at meditation.

Meditation consists of the following stages or phases:

1) Concept

(2) Impressing and allowing to be impressed

(3) Visualization

(4) Faith

Let us see how this works.

As I said before, meditation must begin with your conscious mind. It is, as all acts are, a decision of will and intent that is being followed through. The concepts and thoughts you form with your conscious mind are your initial tools. I repeat what I said before: clarity and conviction, concise statement and unconflicted directive determine the force and energy of the process. If you feel weakness and doubt in the statement that you issue forth, it is an immediate sign that you must first deal with the obstructions, and your attention should be turned to them; such as, for example, wanting to face unaware negativities -- aspects of the lower self -- distorted concepts, etc.

When the obstructions are being removed by dealing with them, when the conscious mind formulates strongly and concisely, the inner will must be relaxed and therefore let the soul substance be impressed. You can thus create a good life, new attitudes, better experience and events -- forever more expanding.

When the mind remains within the narrow framework of its present state, expansion and creation are impossible. Meditation therefore requires that the mind take a leap into conceiving of new possibilities, new states of consciousness for the self. If you now cannot conceive of yourself free from a certain resistive attitude that blocks your way, you must first take the intellectual concept into consideration that it could be that way -- and that you wish it.

First of all, you must know and believe that you have the right and the possibility to mold creative substance with your mind. You may never even have thought of this as a possibility and now, when you examine your attitude, you may find that you strongly doubt that this is so. Accept this possibility as a hypothesis to begin with, until you know that it is indeed true.

If your unconscious mind rejects a thought which your consciousness has superimposed on it, then this process will not work. You can quite easily determine whether you reject a conscious thought or not by the way you feel about it. If you do, you must first deal with the inner contradictions and use the creative process -- meditation -- in order to be successful at it, in order to overcome fear and resistance so that you face the truth that must be faced, and feel the feelings that must be felt. It may be redundant to say this again and again, but it is such an important point. Many people give up meditation because what they meditate about does not seem to work. They disregard this whole aspect and then give up.

If, for example, you have an unconscious neurotic desire for a negative alternative which you have a stake in, your conscious mind may refute this fact, may battle against acknowledging it -- let alone ousting it. While this goes on in the unconscious, the conscious "right thought" will be impotent, or, at best, will battle against an unconscious counterforce. The result may then be vacillation between two states -- one fulfillment and the other deprivation. This will continue until the hidden will for the deprivation is unearthed. Meditation is a wonderful way to test yourself and perceive resistance to the conscious positive desire for fulfillment. To what degree do you really want it? To what degree do you perhaps fear certain aspects of what you most desire? To what degree are you really willing to pay the price? Meditation can set your mind on the right track, provided you do not overlook your emotional reaction to the thought you issue forth.

Thus the conscious concept must coincide with the unconscious concept. Therefore when you choose a goal, a wish, or a state into which you want to expand for your topic of meditation, it is essential to determine that there be no conflict between conscious and unconscious concept.

This directly affects the second stage, impressing and being impressed. Both are part of you and depend on you. With a unified concept, impressing will be strong. No defenses and hiding are necessary, hence your soul substance will be able to let itself be impressed with the truthful concept that you send forth into it. You will actually feel how the concept issuing forth "sinks" into you, like a seed that falls into the soil to germinate. If this is so, there will be no impatience, but you will let the germinating process take its course. You will not disrupt it with doubt, fear, and impatience. The less you are burdened with unconscious destructive attitudes, the more you will feel the creative process at work. You will trust it, allow it to happen in its own organic way, without hindering it with selfwill and preconceived ideas that stem from the limited outer mind. Thus the new creation will slowly unfold -- perhaps a bit differently from the way you thought it may come about. This is the only and the most desirable way for creating -- indeed the only possible way. It may well be that for a while the creative process that responds to your meditation first points to more hindrances. Since you may not be prepared for such an answer, you may tend to overlook it at first and fail to comprehend that certain occurrences or reactions in you are indeed the answer you now need. The more you are prepared to accept difficulties if they occur, the easier it will be to understand the language of the creative process that you have deliberately set in motion.

It cannot be emphasized enough that meditation -- just as all creative acts -- consists of both impressing (the active principle) and being impressed (the receptive principle). The more you can feel this interaction, the more effective your creative act must be. This is why the person with strong defenses cannot meditate, no matter how well-intentioned he may be. His conscious mind may be active enough to formulate the proper concepts and he may imprint strongly, but inwardly nothing happens. He cannot be impressed because he has not removed the defenses with which he still hides from himself that which he does not wish to acknowledge.

The third stage is visualization. Let us first understand clearly what visualization means. It does not mean wishful thinking, daydreaming, fantasizing, illusory hope. All of these are attempts to whisk away hopelessness which, in turn, exists due to destructive attitudes and traits one does not wish to face and give up, and to residual feelings one does not wish to experience.

Visualization means that you can truly perceive yourself in the state you wish to attain, experience, or become. You can feel yourself in that state. You can experience yourself in meditation as loving, as opposed to being resentful; fulfilled, as opposed to being eternally wanting and empty; joyful and content, as opposed to being anxious and depressed -- or whatever else it may be that you are concerned with at any given phase of your development. Visualization follows proper conceiving. Conceiving means that you consider the new state or experience as a possibility. Visualization means that you can feel yourself in that state. It does not mean that you picture particulars, for that may easily lead to wishful thinking, which is more a hindrance than a help.

If you find yourself incapable of visualizing the desired state of mind, feeling, or experience, it is, once again, an immediate sign for you that you unconsciously block yourself with a counter-truth, and therefore maintain hardened, unimpressionable soul substance, and/or weak thought power. Then you can go work on that.

All of this requires a constant tuning in and being aware of your inner processes and responses, of the quality of your thought process, and of your responses to them.

The fourth state is faith. At the beginning, you can only grope for faith by an honestly experimental attitude. You cannot enforce faith as an act of will. This would be dishonest. It would merely mean superimposing a wishful kind of faith over inner doubts, negativities, and negation. Unfortunately, this is what happens all too often in religion, with very undesirable results. It discredits spirituality per se with many, who cannot distinguish between superimposition and real experience.

If you lack faith because you live in blindness and negation, and are therefore cut off from the truth of the universe, you must deal with this attitude in the most honest way there is. You must courageously examine this attitude itself and test yourself as to whether or not you have a stake at maintaining it, and what this stake may be. As man's nature is to love and not to hate, to be joyful and not to be in despair, so it is his inherent nature to know -- that is, to have faith in -- the benign presence of the Cosmic Spirit in him, and of the continuum of existence. If he does not know, then at one point he has decided not to know. This must be ascertained, admitted, and finally the dishonesty given us.

He must then adopt the attitude of openness, of honest questioning. Openness always means to consider a possibility that you have not yet experienced, and then give this possibility a chance -- an honest chance. This includes the wisdom of patience, the intelligence to know that there are many possibilities beyond your present scope of experience -- in everything -- and the good will to grope for the way. If you honestly seek answers, you will receive them, and the true universe will communicate itself to you.

When this attitude is being cultivated, positive results must inevitably occur. The human being who is, at that point, still in a very grave state of doubt is apt to believe that the first manifestations and answers are coincidence: "They would have happened anyway and may not mean that at all." This reaction is predictable, and even inevitable. It should not make you feel guilty and, certainly, you should no more hide it from yourself than you should hide any other reaction. Rather, confront these thoughts and, again, use honesty and intelligence.

For instance, you can say: "Yes, it does seem miraculous. There is indeed a living process and intelligence at work that surpasses what might possibly be imagination. It seems too good to be true. It is what I would like. Yet there is also another part in me that doubts that it could be true. I will give it a further chance." Right here meditation should be be used for where you are conflicted and doubtful. Examine what the doubtful side wants and does not want. Let it express itself. Request guidance for this. Then request further answers for yourself.

Answers may come in various ways: through inspiration -- sudden new ideas, usually when you least expect them; through new realization of feelings; or through a word that someone else says or that you read somewhere. As you go on, you will recognize that these answers are the manifestation of a live process that is so profoundly meaningful and organic that nothing the intellect can think up can ever match it. You will recognize that such answers, and the enlightenment that comes, are pieces in a jigsaw puzzle forming, little by little, a comprehensive picture. Eventually you will rely on this process as on nothing else. It is more real than anything can be in the material world. It is your own path that unfolds, and it eventually reveals the reason for your being here on this earth now -- the meaning of your present incarnation. When this inner experience and certainty comes, you have faith.

But until then you must deal with the stages that prevent you from it. This may be years, certainly not days. In the meantime, you must constantly examine the contents of your unconscious, or partially conscious, beliefs and attitudes, feelings and reactions. The incontrovertible experience that we call faith can come only when you give yourself the chance, when you keep an open mind and are honest with yourself. In these days man often keeps a closed mind because he fears ridicule from others. Thus his disbelief is often every bit as unnatural, dishonest, superimposed, as opportunistic, and conformist as false religion used to be in former times.

By the same token, it occurs just as frequently that a person will not allow the answer to his honest question to come to him because he fears that the answer may be No, that he might find out that there is nothing beyond the graspable and material. He is so afraid of this alternative that he does not let go enough to keep himself open and receptive. True answers can only come when there is no tight, fearful attitude, when a readiness exists to deal with whatever the answer may be. Since the negative answer is feared, the person prefers to keep it constantly in abeyance. He vacillates, theorizes, stays on the edge -- before going into the apparent abyss of commitment to testing the truth. This staying with the theory may sometimes last for many lifetimes. Courage must be mustered to risk an undesirable answer. Then truth will prevail. Theory allows for illusory faith, but never the real faith.

Real faith is knowledge, inner experience, in which there is no longer any doubt. Real faith can be acquired only if you are ready to risk an undesirable answer, and then are ready to deal with that. If you are truly prepared to deal with whatever is in life -- in you -- then you can take chances and will find out truth. If you are not prepared to do that and content yourself with theorizing sophistry -- living by proxy, as if -- you can never go beyond the step of inner argumentation.

It must also be understood that this honest commitment and readiness to deal with what really is goes hand in hand with the similar attitude toward the lower self. To the degree you hide from yourself and are unwilling to face and deal with it, to that degree you will not find the courage to deal with anything else -- universal truth included.

All four stages are, of course, directly related with one another and interdependent. Now I will discuss a few laws pertaining to meditation, which are also familiar to my friends. But it will be helpful to see the sequence and continuity in an overall picture.

One of the most important laws is what all Scripture reiterates: according to your belief you shall experience. This is actually already quite clear from all I have said before. Since you are living in an infinitely malleable substance of creative, impressionable "mass," your belief molds and creates. The powerful, sizzling sea of energy in which you move, breathe, think, and express can, therefore, manifest anything you can conceive of -- from the most dismal state of hell to the most sublime state of heaven, with every degree in between. This realization can truly bring a profound change in your life. I would suggest that you deeply think about this and request inspiration and guidance in a meditation for this particular aspect. This is where visualization comes in. In conceiving, impressing and being impressed, visualization, and faith you express ant act upon a specific belief, which you must then experience as the created response, as it were.

If your belief (concept and visualization) is that you cannot change, or that the universe is hostile, or that your ultimate fate is tragedy, then indeed you will -- you must -- experience just that. All your actions and reactions are geared to bring this about. The entire image topic is ample proof of this. Conversely, if you truly believe that you can change, or that the universe is abundant joy in every respect -- and that you can experience this truth -- then indeed you cannot help but do so. If you are honestly committed to this, then you will feel increasingly free to believe in the possibility to experience the abundance of the universe.

A finely calibrated mechanism sends forth its messages according to which you yourself cannot violate the divine laws beyond a certain degree. So, for instance, if you are unconsciously launched on a road of hate and spite, you cannot believe in the possibilities of love and fulfillment. If you unconsciously want to cheat life by wanting more than you are willing to give, then you violate another important law, so that, no matter how much you may try to believe in the possibility of life's abundance, it will not work, it will not "take" -- your substance will refuse the impression -- until you remove this violation of law. Life cannot be cheated -- and it is well that way.

Another law is that you cannot skip a step. If you want a certain result, but this result depends on the elimination of obstructions which violate another law, then the obstruction must be dealt with first. Therefore, your meditative aim may have to be altered along the way. If you are not willing to correct what stands in the way, then the result cannot come -- creation in this area cannot take place.

Here can lie either a vicious or a benign circle. The vicious circle is: if you unconsciously hold back and do not wish the honest commitment to truth and honesty, to giving as much as you wish to receive, but want childishly and unfairly to get more than you are willing to give, then your conviction will be lacking. Or, if you want a positive result without wanting to make the necessary change in your own being, you will inevitably doubt that change is possible for you. Thus your concept, your belief, your visualization will be too weak and your soul substance too brittle to be impressed. This will reinforce your doubt and negation.

Conversely, when you fulfill the law of truth and love, of honesty and openness, when you remove the defenses and face the lower self, when you are willing to change, then you will feel that it is your birthright to experience the intrinsic nature of the universe: absolute abundance. If you are, somewhere, stuck along the way and blind, it is up to you to find the answer. It is never as obscure as you want to believe. It is always possible to find when you really want to.

One of the most helpful things to remember is the fact that you can meditate to meditate: that you can ask for guidance and inspiration to find the right topic, concentration, concern, words, and attitudes at any given phase of your path. You can meditate for the soul substance to become aware of where it is walled in and cluttered up with untruth, to receive the help to loosen it up. Meditation can and should be used for every step along the way. Where you feel that the resistance is too great, you must know that you do not want the positive, but wish to remain in the negative. Then this must be dealt with. Meditation becomes really problematic when you deny your negative desire but commiserate about the result. The moment you know that you want the negative, you are one step further, because then you can meditate about that.

The more you progress in the art of meditation, the more aware you must become that it is a constant interaction between the active and receptive principles, between the voluntary and involuntary faculties. After this first stage of meditation, in which your mind performs the active, impressing part and affects the receptive soul substance, other possibilities arise in which the various levels of human consciousness assume varying roles of active and receptive interaction. Your conscious ego mind can activate the divine process and let it respond. The spiritual self is being impressed and called forth by the conscious good will and by the mind. But then another interaction must come about. The manifesting spiritual self must become the active principle and the conscious mind become receptive, listening, pliable, impressionable. It must be tuned in to and understanding of the messages that come forth.

Still another possibility is that you use your conscious ego mind, again in the active way, but address it this time to the lower, destructive part of the self, so that it will manifest and express itself in its messages. Subsequently, you must again become receptive and listening with your conscious mind, so that the lower self can truly be "heard." This does not mean that the conscious mind gives in to it, identifies with it, is, in that sense, impressed by it. But the conscious mind listens and absorbs, evaluates and discriminates.

As your conscious mind can let itself be instructed by the spiritual self, so can the lower self be instructed by both the conscious ego mind and the divine self -- perhaps in that order. After you have listened to the destructive nonsense of the lower self, without impinging on its free expression, you can tell in what way it is wrong, why it is so; what are the misconceptions and the damages, the undesirable results. An interaction, a dialogue develops.

Perhaps a bit later you can request the divine self to issue instructions to the lower self. Let the divine self talk to your conscious mind and your undeveloped lower self. Listen to it, let it teach and inspire you on all levels. Let it talk or write to you through you.

When the divine self instructs the usually unconscious lower self, this can happen in various ways: you may actually hear and be a witness to an inner dialogue conducted by these two levels of your being. The ego can then actively ally itself with the former. Or the process can happen during your sleep, without your conscious mind being directly involved. The process may create some momentary turmoil, which you may at first not understand. It may be a result of your wish to purify the lower self. After you have fully recognized its specific ways (and this is always necessary, it cannot be skipped, since you must assume responsibility for it), the process of influence by the divine self may take place on the involuntary level. You must become very listening, very much tuned in, very receptive in order to become aware of the process. This last is a much more advanced state that comes about only when the previous stages are already mastered and practiced.

However, there are occasional periods in all human beings' lives when such an inner process may go on without actually being involved in such a path. This may be due to previous intent before the incarnation started. The entity may have reached a specific crossroads where this inner guidance is instrumental for an outer decision and commitment for a real path, with all that is necessary. Such guidance may come in periods of upheaval, through powerful dreams or a specific succession of events. If a person is not already deeply involved with and attuned to the inner reality, he is not able to decipher the meaning. He needs help and guidance by others. Even then, the full understanding of the significance may come only much later.

If the conscious and unconscious mind of a person do not obstruct such an inner process but wait and listen, tremendous development takes place following such periods. More unfoldment, more enlightenment must come. But if conscious resistance and unconscious negation, fears, and blocks bar the way, then a very harmful process is set in motion because the inner expansion pushes forward and the outer blocks prevent it. That leads to crisis. It may occur on any level, or on all levels. It may cause a breakdown if the pull into expansion on the one hand and obstruction on the other are too strong. It is always the outer, the obstructing side that must give way to the inner urge to expand. For the latter is the divine and true voice that knows the right timing. All crisis should be viewed in this way.

The further you go on the path, the more receptive to the inner process you will be; the more you will be able to alternate between receptivity and initiating, from level to level. The increasing awareness of and attunement to the inner processes, to the inner world of truth, finally eliminates the great wall that separates the ego from Reality.

Meditation can be applied to all life experiences -- inner and outer experience and self-expression. If it is rightly done, it alternates. If the outer fulfillment has no inner obstruction, then meditation for fulfillment will immediately bring about proper concept, impressing and being impressed, visualizing and faith in the result. The creative process will be at work and you will feel it. But when there are inner obstructions, meditation must turn its focus on them, so that meditation on the outer desirable goal can be resumed later.

Whether you use meditation first for the express purpose of experiencing life in a more meaningful way, or whether your primary concern is to experience the Creator within, it matters not. For both mean the same and bring about the same. If you experience God in you and know that you are His manifestation, your life will be rich and fulfilled. Or, if you start with the richness of life, you can only succeed when you know that this is the nature of creation and the will of God. For both aims, you must remove inner obstructions if you want true unity and not the false unity that comes from splitting off the undesirable part you do not wish to deal with.

You can use meditation to truly meet your deepest fears and deal with them. You can ask for guidance and enlightenment, strength and courage. For man does not need to live in fear. But the fears only vanish when you go into them and expose their phantom nature.

There is no human being who does not fear death, for man lives with a wall within him that separates him from the process that exists beyond death. That, too, can become a topic of meditation. You can want to remove this wall and ask for necessary guidance. But are you truly willing to fulfill the conditions? If you are, you can remove the wall. You can live without fearing death. You can experience the truth of eternal life right here and now, in the body. But it means giving up all the ego attitudes; all the tremendous preoccupation with everything that sustains and cultivates the ego: pride, selfwill, fear, vanity, separateness, duality (that there is a difference between you and others, that one should be more important -- either you or the other). All these erroneous, illusory attitudes are part of the ego consciousness and defeat awareness of who you really are: the Greater Consciousness that knows no wall and therefore fears nothing. You may delude yourself not to fear death by not looking at it, but your fear will manifest in all sorts of other ways. But as long as you are an ego, encased in its walls, you must fear death, even as you wish it for destructive reasons of escape and hostility. You can truly remove this fear when you abandon the ego attitudes. When you play fair and square with life, without cheating; when you do not set yourself above others and therefore do not feel below them. For the one is conditioned by the other, as you know but choose to forget.

Any question, any problem, any conflict, any darkness can and should be taken into meditation and should be dealt with honestly. The only problem here, my dearest friends, is that even when you already have experienced the truth of meditation and have genuine faith in it, you still tend to forget to use this wonderful communication. It simply does not occur to you to use it at all times; you forget how effectively it can be used for the smallest and the biggest issues of living. In reality there is no big or small. Everything is important. Every issue makes room for the alternatives of constructive attitudes or destructive ones; truthful or erroneous ones; divine or demonic ones. Hence, everything can be important or unimportant, depending on the vantage point; hence everything can be taken into meditation.

As you meditate in order to remove your blocks, so will you increasingly be lived through, lived by, and be a manifestation of the divine expression as this particular entity you are now. Then there is no more wall, no more ego, you are the divine consciousness. You no longer need to go into specific acts of meditation, in the sense of thinking, concentrating, consolidating your thoughts and listening; shutting out the vagaries of the mind that want to take you away. You will not have to make an effort. You will just emanate creating. You will live it, breathe it, be it. Every expression and thought and feeling will be a creative, meditative act when the real you will be free.

There are other stages I wish to discuss briefly that are important to know. When the personality is least enlightened, he will use petitionary prayer. We do not need to go into this, for none of you is in this state any longer. The concept that an outer deity hears, rewards you arbitrarily and so on is obviously the result of a childish, undeveloped state. If such a person pleads humbly enough, he imagines, the wish will be granted by this separated other entity. Even these primitive petitionary prayers may often be "heard" because the power of conviction, the visualization, and the laws of "according to your belief you shall experience," are followed. The power of the thought does it. Love, humility of spirit, and honesty may also help the power of thought to be effective, in spite of the primitive belief.

The next stage is already much more enlightened, and that is a request. It means that you request of yourself to go into a certain direction; that you know that these processes are bound to respond, and that what you desire is in keeping with the immutable divine laws.

The third stage is knowing that it must be that way; that it will be that way; that you have a right for every fulfillment; that you deserve it because you are willing to give up all negative, obstructing attitudes. This total commitment makes you know that the divine power and consciousness within you is bound to respond.

The fourth and most advanced stage is when you know it has happened even before it has so manifested. This occurs with an inner "click" in which you experience the ongoing, immutable living process. This state has eliminated all doubt because negativity and negation in you have been eliminated.

You may in some areas of your life be in the second, in other areas in the third, and still others in the fourth of these stages. It is a good gauge for you. The fourth stage means you are in a state of union.

My dearest friends, when I withdraw and you stay here together for a while, maybe one of you spontaneously feels like meditating aloud and then, little by little, others can participate. Let it become a spontaneous expression. You can thus generate here a marvelous energy which can be used for any purpose on your path. You can eventually use it directly on a person who feels he needs it for a specific purpose, in a way similar to the power I now give. It will, in its own way, be an even stronger tool. The energy of many is not only more powerful, but it will also help you to realize what power you can generate when rightly channeled. Let yourself be inspired and let come what comes. Be blessed with love, and truth, and power.

The Guide
by Eva Pierrakos
October 22, 1971

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