Commitment -- Cause And Effect

By The Pathwork Guide

Peace, blessings, and love for all of you, my dear ones. The hard work you have undertaken on this path, the courage, the honesty, and the humility that are involved in this pathwork have brought you, proportionately to your investment, fulfillment and peace. Many of you are now actually in the position to experience how their problems resolve -- something they have always doubted in their hearts. You now form closer and more authentic relationships with those around you -- and this is particularly noticeable within the group as a whole. It took many years of labor until this became possible.

Wherever peace, fulfillment, light, hope, and trusting closeness to your intimate friends are lacking, let this be a gauge that something in you is amiss. This gauge is so exacting. You will experience your life circumstances and your inner state in accordance with the advance you have made on your own inner path. There is no truer measurement. You can never measure yourself against others. Where you are now may be just right for you. It may be exactly where you have to be. If this is so, you will feel bright and hopeful. Another person who finds himself at the identical inner crossroads may lag behind on his personal path; behind his own potentiality. He may not accomplish his own plan that he has come to fulfill in this incarnation. Therefore he will be in strife -- with himself and/or others. Therefore, the only reliable and realistic gauge for your fulfillment of your life plan is how you feel about yourself, about your life, and about those around you.

Tonight's lecture will start off where we left off with the last lecture. It is its sequence and is supposed to help you a step further on your path -- particularly in regard to coming out of the recently uncovered negative intentionality. For many, it is necessary to continue bringing out this negative intentionality; to admit and express it honestly and openly. But a number of you have already done so sufficiently and are now ready to give it up and exchange it for positive intentionality.

The key to finding the way out is, for many, a complete understanding of the topic of commitment on the one hand, and of the topic of cause and effect on the other. These seem like two unrelated subjects and these two subjects, in turn, seem unrelated with negative intentionality. But they are all intrinsically connected, as you will see when we go a little further.

Let us first discuss commitment. What does commitment really mean? We use this word again and again without really understanding and exploring what it means. It means, above all, a one-pointedness of attention; a giving of the self in a wholehearted way to whatever the area of commitment may be. If you are committed to give your best and your all to whatever it may be, then you will concentrate on all angles of the subject. You will not shy away from investing all your energies, all your attention. You will use your available faculties of thinking, of intuition, of meditation. In other words, you will use your physical energies, your mental capacities, your feelings, and your will to activate the as yet unmanifest, dormant spiritual powers so as to make the venture constructive. This requires a wholeness of approach that can only come when the will is unbroken by negative counter-forces. In other words, in order to be fully committed, no negative intentionality must exist.

Commitment exists in every imaginable undertaking. It does not only apply to a great and significant venture, such as man's spiritual path of self-evolution -- which is the most important undertaking in life -- it also applies to any mundane little task of everyday living. To the degree you are committed, what you do will be pleasurable, free from conflict, fruitful and rewarding. It will be one-pointed in direction; it will have depth and meaning; it will be successful, and it will bear the stamp and feeling of blessedness.

If you give an undertaking your all and not half of it, how else can it be but rewarding and satisfying? But this is comparatively rare. Usually man gives only half of himself to an undertaking and is then confused, vexed, and disappointed when the result is, accordingly, incomplete.

Here is where cause and effect come in. When the effect is not being recognized as the result of the cause set in motion -- the cause being a half-commitment only -- a split in consciousness exists, with all sorts of negative chain-reactions. The resulting confusion will first breed a sense of helplessness and injustice. If you are not aware of the fact that you commit only a part of yourself to a venture, while another part says No, and if you then disregard the fact that the undesirable result is caused by this fact, you cannot help feeling embittered. You cannot help feeling that the world is a haphazard place, without rhyme or reason. Thus you will become frightened, defensive, distrustful, grabbing, anxious, ruthless and, instead of changing the counter-force that eliminates full commitment, you will use the energy to push others aside. Or you will withdraw into failure and passivity.

Disconnectedness between cause and effect regarding commitment creates the need to seek adjustment in the wrong manner. Whenever there is lack of commitment, there must always exist negative intentionality as well. In the course of this work most of my friends have recently begun to explore their negative intentionality -- that area within that very deliberately says: "I do not want to give ... my best... of my feelings... or my effort... my attention... or my honesty (or whatever it may be). I will do it because it is expected of me, or because I want the result without paying the full price. Or for some ulterior motive other than the thing in itself." It hardly needs to be emphasized how important such awareness and admission is. It is the key to understanding further indispensable connections.

However, this awareness is not sufficient in itself, if you fail to establish the link between cause and effect. It is quite possible to be aware of this negative intentionality and still fail to establish the link in question.

Many of you who are really on the path have been able, at least to some extent, to admit some negative intentions; some deliberate withholding; some deliberate spiteful attitude. Some of you have not yet fully admitted this, but most of my friends have. Quite a few even to the full extent that negative intentionality exists. But so far there are only very few of you who are aware that those aspects of your life you deplore and suffer from most are direct effects of the causes set in motion by your negative intentionality. You still ascribe the undesirable suffering to other factors: other people's wrongdoings; coincidence; bad luck; or even some unfathomable "problem" within yourself that you simply have not yet gotten hold of.

This is a most important point. I would suggest that you all explore what makes you most unhappy in your life: what do you suffer from? Do you suffer from an overt condition, such as, for example, unfulfillment with a mate; lack of the proper mate? Then look into yourself and ask yourself: what is your intentionality in this respect? And when you can verify that there is a voice in you that says, "No, I do not want to give to love, to the relationship, to the opposite sex all my best," then you will find your suffering explained. You can draw the link between cause and effect.

If you lack financial security, explore if you can find a negative intentionality that says, "I do not want to be able to take care of myself, because if I do, I let my parents off the hook; or I may be expected to give something, which I do not want." Again, it is necessary that you connect the link that your negative intentions bring the result, regardless of how subtly and covertly they may exist, hidden perhaps under an overt over-activity into the direction of fulfillment. This over-activity may deceive you and you may be inclined to think that this should suffice to bring the positive result, while you disregard the power of the hidden negative one. If you already are aware of the latter, you may still negate its importance. If you are not yet aware of it, this is as good a time as any to start out exploring the inner regions of your mind in which you may harbor the key to the undesirable result.

Are you frightened? Are you insecure? Do you feel inadequate? Do you feel an unexplainable anxiety and tension? Do you suffer from guilt feelings that you cannot explain and that you try to talk yourself out of because the manifest guilt seems -- and on that level is -- totally unjustified? Do you deplore your weakness? Your lack of self-assertion? All of these are effects, my friends, effects of some negative intentionality that is deliberate on a level that must be totally admitted and brought out into the open. For example, if you harbor spite, stubbornness, rebellion, malice, hate, pride -- all of these traits must make you feel guilty. Such guilt may find its outlet in an artificial, unjustified guilt, as I have mentioned already some years ago. This guilt must also lead you into self-destructive acts, it must cause weakness, anxiety, unassertiveness -- and all the ills you would want to be free of, but can only be genuinely free of if and when you make the connection between these manifestations and the cause, the negative intentions, so that the latter can be given up.

By not being aware of this connection, you will find yourself in a position in which you will seem a persecuted victim, and the stronger your disinclination to admit your negative intentions is, the more you will capitalize on that position, always hoping that your resentful, blaming self-pity and helplessness will "convince" life, others, to give you the desired result that only a positive intentionality can bring about. But positive intentionality requires commitment, total, unequivocal commitment. If you are unwilling to invest of yourself in that way, then you seek the result through illegitimate means. This, of course, fortifies the guilt. The guilt increases the fear of meeting yourself in honesty, so that you convince yourself more and more that outside factors -- or harmless as yet unknown inner factors -- are responsible for your unfulfillment. And so the vicious circle continues.

Some of you have a momentary glimpse of this negative intentionality. And this is progress, as compared to the total absence of it previously. But you tend to forget about it only too soon. You then disregard its impact; you fail to draw the necessary connections. Then you go on your way again.

Some of you, as I said, have totally admitted the desire to hold on to destructive attitudes: to want to hold on to hate, revenge, vindictiveness, etc. Yet, even so, you are not yet able to see that this brings definite results. Results in your state of mind, in your attitude to yourself. And it must bring results from others toward you. For no matter how hidden you may keep these negative intentions, no matter how strongly you seem to express positive attitudes that are also present, the former must effect your actions and expressions to others much more than you realize. And, quite apart from that, it inevitably affects their soul substance: their unconscious perceptions. With the average human being, the perception will remain on that level, so that an unconscious interaction takes place in addition to the conscious exchange. It is the former that breeds rifts and troubles which are often inexplicable and mysterious to the parties involved. Confusion, self-blame, deadness of feelings are examples of responses which bring forth the as yet unexplored negativities in the other person, and so it goes around. Only the spiritually mature individuals are able to make these unconscious perceptions of negative intentionality conscious -- and that is a blessing, for it will avoid the deadly confusion that otherwise arises. They can then deal with the situation.

When you can truly see cause and effect relationships in your life, not only will you be motivated to want to give up negative attitudes and intentions and to institute positive intentionality, you will also gain awareness, and emotional and spiritual maturity. Maturity is, to a great extent, the ability to put cause and effect together. The ability to put cause and effect together also indicates the degree of awareness an entity has reached through his development.

Take, for example, an infant. When an infant experiences a painful physical sensation, it is incapable, with its lack of mentality, of bringing cause and effect together. The pain-producing agent is completely blotted out from its consciousness. It merely experiences the effect -- the pain.

Then the infant grows into a young child. The young child begins to be capable of making inferences of cause and effect relationships when they are close together. Suppose the small child touches fire and burns itself. It will comprehend that the fire is a cause and the burning sensation an effect. It learns a lesson of life: if it wishes not to experience the painful burning sensation, it must avoid touching fires. Here cause and effect are close together. It has obtained, with the learning of this lesson, a first degree of maturity on the road of human development.

The same child cannot yet comprehend cause and effect relationships that are further removed from one another. But an older child can realize, for example, that a tummy ache is a result of over-eating indulged in a few hours previously. In this case, comprehension of the longer-range cause and effect relationship implies that a further degree of maturity has been reached.

The older, or rather the more mature, a person becomes, the greater will be his ability to draw connecting links between cause and effect that are less obvious, less visible, and of longer range.

The emotionally and spiritually immature person is not sufficiently aware of tracing cause and effect relationships realistically. He is totally incapable of, or rather disinclined to, adjudging that his experiences, as well as his state of mind, are a direct result of certain causes. He neither sees that past actions bring effects; nor does he see that inner, covert, indirect, hazy attitudes have their inexorable, predictable results. He may search in all sorts of other directions for the causes and answers -- maybe even within himself. But if he cannot bring the cause and effect relationship together, he will go around in a circle, not in a spiral, which is the movement of the path.

The cause and effect relationship seems broken to the human consciousness from one lifetime to the next. Only as awareness grows on such a path does the spiritually mature person grow sufficiently to sense, and later even to inwardly know, important connections of cause and effect from former lives to the present life. This inner knowledge, that explains key points of one's life in a deeply meaningful way, is a revelation that must be earned through growth and is totally different from one's being told by a psychic about former incarnations. Such inner knowledge is an organic process.

On the other hand, the ability to make predictions into the future by clairvoyants and psychics rests on the ability to see causes within the soul, whose inexorable, lawful effects cannot fail to materialize. This process is so often misunderstood. It is believed to be a "supernatural," mysterious manifestation. All sorts of erroneous philosophies arise from this misconception. For example, the idea of preordained, predetermined fate.

The gradually increasing ability of connecting cause and effect, the maturing, and the growing awareness that are involved in it, bring such peace and light. It may, at first, be very uncomfortable for you to see how you create what you deplore; how you must first give up what you ferociously clutch if you wish a different life experience. But once the beauty of these laws is perceived and accepted, the sense of safety and freedom that arises is beyond human words. It conveys, like nothing else ever could, in what a safe, just, and loving universe we all live.

Cause and effect relationships between this life manifestation and previous lives must also be established by inner attitudes. What seems like a fate beyond one's control, like, for example, where one is born, as what, how one looks, his face, body, his talents, all of this will be sensed as self-caused and self-wanted. Sometimes wanted wisely, sometimes destructively. Exactly the same principle works in this seeming "fate" as within you right now, in this lifetime. You have inwardly positive intentionality and you have negative intentionality. Both perforce create entirely different experiences and states of mind. Why should this principle change when the entity changes its vehicle? The principle is perfect and needs no exemption, interruption, and alteration.

I recapitulate: the more cause and effect can be linked, the more maturity exists; the more awareness exists; the more positive attitudes and positive intentionality will be fostered. And, proportionately, the greater the peace and rich fulfillment. Universal ever-available abundance becomes realizable in equal proportion. Lack of peace and fulfillment always connotes lack of awareness; lack of maturity; lack of awareness of cause and effect relationship, linking up to negative intentionality.

Our path -- or one like it -- can be subdivided into the following stages: you first grope, work, and struggle in order to explore deep inner layers, which consist of misconceptions, negative intentionality, and residual pain. With each individual the approach varies when one or the other of these aspects is worked on. The inner path brings it forth. It always overlaps. It always requires a back-and-forth alternation. There are, of course, also a number of attitudes and aspects that must be explored and learned. Many of them I discussed in these lectures. But the primary purification consists of these three aspects. When misconceptions can, on the innermost level, be exchanged for truth; when negative intentionality is being exchanged for positive intentionality; and when the individual no longer defends against experiencing pain, then the substantial step of initial purification has been accomplished.

Negative intentionality is a defense against experiencing pain. Misconceptions are a result of both. So there is an intrinsic connection between these three aspects. Maturity also lies in an ability to experience what one has produced without fighting against it. The mature soul fully savors them. This is the only way evil will cease to exist. Evil lies in all defenses. It is obviously in any type of negativity. And it results from misconceptions.

It is every individual's task on the evolutionary road to eliminate evil. To transform it back into its original state: pure energy and loving, truthful consciousness. Thus many lifetimes are required to accomplish this phase of purification.

Evil has produced pain, and the fear of and defense against pain produces more and worse pain, as well as more evil. The illusion of the defense can be experienced the moment the person fully opens himself to experience the pain -- and I do not mean here the false pain. There is a pain that is in itself a defense, as you all know and have sufficiently worked out. This is an unbearable, twisted, bitter pain that stems from a forcing current that says, in effect, "You see, don't do this to me, life."It lacks the mature willingness to let be what is. The latter stops controlling, manipulating, hiding -- it simply is. In this way of experiencing pain, you approach the state of being -- with all its peace and bliss. Some of you have tasted this already, and more of you will do so increasingly, until you shed all defenses and are thus free to adopt positive intent: to express the best into life.

False, defensive pain contains bitterness, self-pity, resentment -- thus it destroys peace. Real pain is peaceful because it assumes full self-responsibility without self-manipulation. It neither says, "poor me, it is all being done to me," nor does it say, "I am hopeless, I am so bad that I can never exonerate myself." Both these attitudes are untruthful -- and therefore part and parcel of evil.

Undefended, real pain opens doors, brings light, and exposes the core of the self, with its resiliency, creativity, and depth of feeling and knowing. No longer is negative intentionality needed when the soul has learned to make itself available for what life offers, even if it is occasionally pain. When residual pain has been worked off, current pain, when it comes your way, is experienced for what it is -- without denial or exaggeration, without imposing artificial interpretations on the event. Then no misconceptions, no negative intentionality, no evil, no suffering exist. This state brings the end of fear. No more fear of death, fear of life, fear of being, fear of feeling, and fear of experiencing the height of universal love which is, strange as this may seem, man's greatest fear.

The second major phase in the evolutionary progression is that the soul learns to acclimatize itself to universal bliss. To the degree evil exists (misconceptions, defense, negative intentionality, refusal to experience one's self-produced pain), to that degree bliss is unbearable. But even when the soul is free from evil, at first it still requires strengthening to withstand the enormous power of the spirit. The blissful pure energy is of such strength that only the purest, strongest can live comfortably in it. The truth of this principle can be recognized to some degree within the human development. It happens to all of you that you can no longer bear bliss, pleasure, ecstasy, happiness. You feel more comfortable in grayness. The power of the universal spirit is incompatible with the slow-moving energy of evil, defense, unexperienced pain.

This is why in these gatherings as they are now, as a result of your development, you first respond with crying to the pure influx of spiritual power. You are all gripped by this strong feeling and it first elicits tears in you. It brings out as yet unexperienced residual feelings of sadness, longing, pain. But while you experience this, you already feel the liberation, the spiritual nourishment, the joyfulness, the exaltation, and the love that are poured forth. In the past these were merely words. Now they have become a reality as a result of your honesty to expose yourselves in truth to each other. This fortifies the bond of love and your ability to sustain the strength of the blessing and the force given. It is thus quite logical that you first experience this force with crying. Later a new joy will manifest within you. Inklings of this new joy are already there, for even now you feel very differently when you are here and when you participate from the way you used to. Your very tears open your channels of joy.

Some of you who are still too tightly defended will not let the force come in yet. You make yourself hard and safe. But your continual exposure to the power of the spirit, of openness, of honest exposure to the temporary truth of evil within you will eventually make you strong enough to let go and become feeling and real. But do not, by all means, justify your defensive hardness by judging and doubting. This is your greatest defense against who you really are and what you really are. And what a folly this is! For you deal yourself out of life and then complain.

So I say to you, my dear ones: surge forward on this road of exploring, admitting your negative intentions, your spiteful deliberate withholding. Admit it. And then make the next connection. Investigate what you really dislike in your life and in your state. What would you like changed? Make the bridge between these two aspects. This will give you an additional motor power and motivation to want to feel old, unexperienced feelings -- pain, longing, sadness, fear, etc. When you are totally committed to feeling what is in you, you will become free and truly alive. As you let go of the defenses, you will make the transition from the false pain of complaining bitterness over to the real pain that is soft and melting. And joyous -- yes, joyous. This real pain carries the germ of real life. This germ will soon reach your consciousness and grow into a plant when you make the first step of commitment to your feelings and to experiencing what life is without holding back. How joyful life can be for you -- if only you give up your stubbornness. How warm and rich could be your good ties with others, your positive relationships.

I say to you, my friends, great responsibility accrues from being incorporated into the great plan. Everyone of you who pursues this path has such a responsibility. Everyone of you. Such responsibilities are never burdens. They are the greatest privilege a human being can experience. Nothing could make man as happy, as fulfilled, and as free. Another hallmark of maturity is one's attitude toward responsibility. The childish person will experience responsibility as a burden and as an unwelcome, undesirable constriction. The more mature he becomes, the more he sees that freedom and responsibility are interconnected, interdependent, and inseparable. You can never be free when you do not feel responsible.

The unhappiness you breed with your negative intentionality is not only your own, but also what you exude and give out to others. You do give it to others, inevitably so. Whether you know it or not, it must make you feel guilty, rightfully guilty. For whenever you are negative and withholding, you are not only unloving, but you actually deprive or hurt others. This may not take place on the level of actions, but, as I said before, it is every bit as tangible, and even more so, on the level of invisible interaction. The more so when the other person is not intuitive and aware enough to see what is happening.

The physical level of action is only result. The inner level and inner reality is cause, and thus determines. This is why an apparently good action has often disastrous results. It is so when the parties involved act right, but this action is undermined by covert negativity. On the other hand, an apparently very bad occurrence may be a blessing. The underlying motives, factors, and inner attitude in how the experience is being met are in truth and positive in this instance. The unmanifest levels are much more real and incisive than the manifest level. Hence, your negative intentionality, even if it does not appear as an overt act, has its dire consequences -- not only for yourself, but also for others. It hurts and it deprives.

If the others are sufficiently free of their own defenses, they will experience the hurt because they are aware. They will experience it cleanly, and therefore it will leave them unmarked. It will be a momentary hurt, but it will not add to the repressed residual pool. But those who still have to battle within their own masks and defenses, with their own negative intentionalities, experience a bitter pain: a new rejection, even though they may not be really conscious of their own reaction. It is then, of course, up to them whether to make the pain conscious and go on from there on their own path of development, or to choose to fortify, justify, and increase the old defensive and negative pattern.

I say all this to you, my friends, because your responsibility is growing due to the effects of the good work you are doing. Hence the impact of everything you issue forth grows likewise. The more you advance, the stronger the impact of your still existing negativity becomes. This is another spiritual law, about which we shall talk another time. The progress of this group as a whole creates a new positive energy that transcends the effective work itself. The work has inevitable results, but the invisible ones surpass your comprehension at this stage. Your commitment to what you are doing, the help you give to each other is very beautiful. Realize that you thus fulfill a spiritual responsibility. On the invisible plane both the positive and the negative actions and attitudes have also commensurately stronger impacts and effects now. Realize this and let this be a help and incentive.

I come around full circle and close this lecture by saying: commit yourself wholeheartedly to your truth, to giving your best, to giving up the negative intention, the spiteful withholding. Now that you see it, want to give it up, and let God within you help to bring in the opposite positive attitudes. The blessings are truly immeasurable. Perhaps this lecture, as a sequence to the last, will help you again a step further to make new positive commitments, again and again and again. Whenever you find another facet of still lingering negative intentionality, make the corresponding positive commitment. Elicit in this way a new spiritual energy that will bring you forever greater blessings.

I will leave you, so that you work a little among yourselves, as you have been doing lately. And this is so wonderful. It brings you closer together; it generates a pure and strong energy. And you can all easily feel this to be so. You help each other; you expose yourselves and accept each other. Thus, by expressing openly your hate, you become loving -- in a truly genuine way. Forever greater blessings must arise, and will arise. When you are troubled, seek the truth, and all will be well. Commit yourself to the truth, and all must be well. Be blessed, my dear ones. The love of the universe envelopes you.

The Guide
by Eva Pierrakos
December 17, 1971

Copyright 1971, the Center for the Living Force, Inc.

  Back