The Cosmic Feeling

By The Pathwork Guide

Blessings, greetings, and help are given. Love and strength are pouring forth. There is the divine kernel in every one of you. The aim of living is to realize this, to know who you really are, not to forget any longer. Once you know of your true identity, your real self, which is a direct divine heritage, there is no longer any fear or any suffering. The pathwork in which I guide you helps by its various approaches to eliminate the obstacles to finding out who you are.

These are mere words for most human beings; only after you have overcome certain of the obstacles do you experience occasionally the reality of your true identity. In tonight's lecture I should like to discuss one of the experiences that happen when these occasional occurrences begin to appear in your life. In that way you will be prepared, will understand their meaning, and will not reject the experience in its magnificence by trying to put it into a mold of usual human experience. This would automatically destroy it and make the re-occurrence more difficult. The purpose of this lecture is also to help you attain your true identity sooner and eliminate the purely mental obstacles.

The experience I wish to discuss is a very specific feeling, a feeling that is usually not recognized because it goes beyond the usual human experience. I did discuss how the channel opens for receiving ever increasing wisdom and intelligence of such magnitude that all problems can be resolved. The solutions come forth in a most all-inclusive way. No loose ends remain. I have discussed how you find a new creative power so that you can supply yourself with any fulfillment, any self-expression, any joy you may possibly wish. They are all close at hand, ready to be realized. I have discussed the beauty of the universe that you automatically discover, a universe in which all is well and there is nothing to be feared. In it you will find a sense of wholeness and of eternal life, the power of healing, and emotional fulfillment on the deepest possible level.

But I have never discussed this particular feeling, although it is implicit in everything else I said. For in the reality state of your true being all is one, your experiences are no longer separated and fragmented, just as you will no longer be a separate entity from God. As your outer, hitherto split off little intellect will become one with the Greater Intelligence that dwells within, so will all experiences be one and merely have different facets.

Now, in the state of your present development, you can think one thing, feel another, will something else, and even act in yet another way. This terrible fragmentation is the most painful and confusing state imaginable. Its cure lies wholly in the nucleus of your innermost self where you will find the eternal presence of God.

The particular feeling experience under discussion here might be called, for lack of a better word, the cosmic feeling. This cosmic feeling is not merely a theoretical understanding, or a feeling about the cosmos, or about a state in creation. It is a true physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual experience. It encompasses the entire person. I shall try to describe this experience as best as this can be done within the limitation of verbal conveying. Then I shall discuss the prerequisites, the four basic keys necessary to attain this cosmic feeling.

The cosmic feeling is an experience that no longer splits off feeling from thinking. It is feeling and thinking in one. This is very hard to imagine when one has never had such an experience. But some of you have occasionally experienced the oneness of feeling and thinking. The experience of this oneness is a total one. It is an experience of bliss, the comprehension of life and its mysteries, all-encompassing love, a knowledge that all is well and there is nothing to fear. The total absence of fear is something that is very hard to visualize for the average human person, because you are partly so unaware of the existing fears and partly so used to life with them that it does not occur to you that life could be otherwise. When you know that there is no death, that there is no real suffering other than a temporary manifestation of your ideas, your errors, your illusions, your misconceptions, and your intentional negativities which could end at any time you so desired; when you know that there really is no passing of time, that time, too, is a product of illusion, then there cannot be fear. This fearless love and joy, the understanding of and ability to distinguish between illusion and reality, is such a feeling experience because it transcends your personal little self. It includes everything and you feel the oneness of all in the universe.

Your lack of distinction between what is real and what is false creates apparently endless confusion and pain. You usually reverse it: you often think that what is real is nonexistent, while you believe in illusions. The knowledge of what is real and what is illusion is part of the experience of cosmic feeling. It lends an immense security, a knowledge of being truly safe. This, in turn, releases much energy that is then being experienced as bliss in every part of your being. Relaxation and excitement, peace, and pleasure you then experience as interconnected aspects, rather than mutually exclusive opposites, as is the case in the ordinary state. This oneness transcends every particle of you -- body, soul, and spirit.

Needless to say that in this state no worry or anxiety can possibly exist. Nor does the tight pulling within drive you and torment you and make you restless. This restlessness is, of course, an expression of the inner urge to seek the path of truth that brings you toward your realization, but before you have done so, the drive can be painful and can temporarily make you seek in the wrong direction, bringing you even further away from what your innermost self seeks. The pushing may be subtle or strong and noticeable. It has its function, but it uses energy that will later be available for blissful knowing/feeling, where every fraction of Now is bliss. In the state of the cosmic feeling you experience the immediacy of the presence of God within. The immediacy of this incredibly powerful presence is at first shocking. The good feeling is shocking. It is as if literally an electric shock went through your entire system. Therefore the ego personality has to grow sufficiently strong and healthy so that it can acclimatize itself to the high vibrations of the inner presence of God manifesting in the outer person. This manifestation is then being experienced as your eternal reality and state, as your true identity. The moment you find yourself in this state you will know in a most profound way that you have always known what you now rediscover, that you have always been what you now experience yourself to be -- that none of this is really new; you had only temporarily cut yourself off from this state of feeling and knowing, of experiencing and perceiving life as it really is.

The real experience becomes possible the moment you can bear the immediacy of your divine kernel, in its aliveness, in its presence, in its consciousness, in its energy, in its sparkling reality, in its all-permeating wisdom, in its all-inclusive love, in its creative power that is yours to use as you see fit.

This description is, of course, extremely limited, for the words cannot convey the experience. What you would have to do in order to gain an inkling of the reality of these words is to pray, in this very moment, to be able to perceive a taste of it. Open your inner faculties to understand on a deeper level, my friends. In this attempt, if you can observe in yourself how afraid you are of this experience, even while you long for it, and how you consequently close it off, then, at least, you will know that there is something waiting for you, and you will not fall into the trap of the ego-trick to sit in doubting judgment, flattering yourself that this doubting attitude is "intelligent" and not "gullible." In order to distinguish between the real and the fakery or the escape and the well-meant illusion, you have to be open and "judge" with your feelings and intuitive faculties, as well as with your discriminating mind. If fear governs you, the discriminating mind is being used and abused in a perverted way. If the feelings are open in honesty, the discriminating mind will be the servant it is supposed to be, not the only master. If you can honestly admit that you are still too afraid of this feeling-experience, it is all right. You can calmly go to work on the obstacles, without self-deluding tactics that remove you further from the real goal that will be reached one day in time and space. This will avoid unnecessary pain.

Now I shall discuss what the four key points, or key prerequisites are in order to become strong and healthy enough, in order to bear this power that you are, and the wisdom that is imbedded in you, and the love that you hide inside, ready to flow out. This applies to everyone of you, without exception, to every living thing in the universe, organic or inorganic. All is permeated with this identical power and intelligence; merely the degree varies in which the power and the intelligence can manifest.

The four points are aspects of the pathwork on which we are intensely working. But they must be seen in this context also. They are:

(1) The real and true understanding of your personal cause and effect in this present life. The understanding of cause and effect in your life is an essential prerequisite for self-realization, for the realization of your divine identity. It is even essential for a lesser state, for mere good health, for being centered within and reasonably integrated; for meaningful functioning and satisfying experiences. This is so because the moment you can see the level in you where, through your ideas, concepts, intentions, and attitudes, you create your life circumstances, you have your key to create a different and more desirable life. But when you are disconnected from this creating in you, when you create unconsciously (as I explained many years ago when this channel began to function), then you are totally powerless, oblivious of your own power, and you get involved in a chain-reaction of error and distortion. You are then constantly in a state where you make others -- people, circumstances, life as a whole -- responsible for your misery. This brings further chain-reactions. This inner state -- whether you are conscious of it or not -- makes you blame, accuse, and feel victimized. This, in turn, makes you feel justified to hate, resent, and take revenge.

Another byproduct of this disconnection is the growing feeling of helplessness, with its accompanying and inevitable resentments due to unfulfilled and unfulfillable expectations; fear -- consequently defenses that cut you off further from the source of all life in you. And all the while you go on willfully ignoring how you yourself create this miserable state because it suits you better to blame others and to wait for a salvation that is never to come. It can only come when you realize your beautiful birthright: to create. And as you create negatively, as you recognize it, so can you create positively. As you create willfully, from the little ego, following the dictates of vanity, greed, laziness, and dishonesty, so can you create by letting God in you express Himself and create honestly and beautifully.

While you are involved in the subtle inner game of disassociating yourself from the causes you have set in motion by this or that specific attitude and will direction, it is of course quite impossible to use your creative powers to produce a life of meaning and fulfillment. And you wait for some other power to take over. Of course, you wait in vain. This makes your life miserable, hopeless, and futile. You are then very busy to deny this sense of miserable hopelessness and futility, so you repress it and thus you go on ignoring that there is indeed a way out, but in exactly the opposite direction from the one you have chosen.

You are fortunate in that the progress of your pathwork has brought many of you in contact with the level of your negative creation. You begin to see more clearly which specific attitudes, expressions, and intentionalities have produced manifestations in your life that you deplore and have hitherto complained about in a state of passive waiting for some miracle to happen from outside -- or you have "adjusted" to an unnecessary state of deprivation and frustration. But there is still much to be done in this respect by all of you. There are still many areas which you vaguely gloss over and do not take under the scrutiny so essential for this discovery.

Uncover that vague sense of futility in you in which you fear that your life is slipping through your fingers without having realized its essence, its beauty, and its creative joyousness that are there for the taking. Missing out on it must make you very unhappy. Now, anyone who is already involved in this pathwork will find this state less acute. But there are always some who come with only a minor part of themselves and have no real intention to open up all the way. In that case, the despair remains. It is therefore very foolish to indulge in your resistances in the pathwork and to act as if not overcoming your resistances were just as good, would not really matter, were based on some valid reasons peculiarly suited to your "individuality," or whatever other explanations you may concoct. Do not delude yourself that results can be attained without challenging your own resistances. Understand that you can never become connected with your own creative level, you can never be truly secure, unless you are aware of cause and effect.

And I say to you, once again, my friends, take it on a very practical level. Begin, every one of you, by looking at your life: in what respect are you unhappy and unfulfilled? And then proceed, with the aid of your helper, to investigate your hidden attitude in regard to the specific manifestation of your life that leaves something to be desired. I do not mean the conscious intent. I truly mean the hidden negative intentionality, the hidden lies, the hidden dishonesty, the hidden intent to get more than you are willing to give. All of this must be explored.

First this is painful. You like to cling to the illusion that you are but an innocent victim. But what unhappiness you buy with this illusion. And once you overcome this distaste of your dishonesty, of your negative creation, you will fully see and understand the negative creation you have produced; how you have produced it; what attitudes in your mind and feeling have created those conditions. These attitudes are all the more powerful when they are hidden and unrecognized.

Do not let overwhelming guilt dissuade you from this course. Recognize it as yet another ego-trick. In this overly devastating guilt you prevent yourself from lifting yourself up, from even going through the one and only act that can truly remedy the situation; and from recognizing the beauty in you through the very exposure of the ugliness. Neither aggrandize the guilt, so that it keeps you cowering down in repression and misery, nor belittle it. Allow yourself to feel the pain of your guilt, so that you fully see the whole impact, the meaning, and the ramifications, what you do to others and yourself, and how so. This will be the motivating power to change the negative creating into a positive one.

When you can truly connect with your creative level, you will find such relief; you will find the world open up. And by this understanding it will dawn upon you that if you can create unconsciously, inadvertently, and erroneously such tangible events and states of mind, then you can create consciously and deliberately, intentionally and with planning, and experience the life circumstances and the state of mind that you wish to be your own.

For example, if you feel that you cannot bear happiness, good feelings, pleasure -- if the current is too strong and disquieting -- you can create this capacity by stating this desire and intent; by being willing to give up your dishonesty, your negative intentionality, and by wanting to give honestly the best that is in you. How else can you find the endless wealth that is in you? By holding back your inner honest giving, your openness, and your commitment to life, you must increase your sense of inner poverty, that you are empty and have nothing to give. He who feels empty gives nothing. You can only feel rich and full when you wish to give. The moment you do this, you create positively, and you will gradually see the creations grow. They may sometimes take a few years to fully manifest, sometimes less. They are never completed. Positive creations can be endlessly improved upon. By truly seeing the cause and effect of your negative creation and manifestations, you become a creator. You realize your birthright of divinity.

This is an incredibly important prerequisite to be whole, to be in reality, to true self-responsibility, to opening up a channel to your divinity. This divinity is nothing supernatural or mystical, my friends. It is nothing that comes miraculously or magically from far away. Your divinity is your very power to create with the power of your thinking, by expanding your visualizations, by your ability to impress your intents into yourself, and by requesting the power of God within you to unite with your total consciousness.

(2) Learning the ability to feel all your feelings and to handle this feeling experience. It requires a bit of growing and groping until the personality learns to accept whatever feeling there is, experience it, and handle it in a constructive way. I have said so much about the "technique" of how to do this, about various important aspects, that here I will discuss this topic in terms of the particular angle we are now concerned with.

If mankind goes through the depths of unhappy feelings, it is because it has created them, and can only grow beyond them by going through them. It already occurs frequently among you that you actually experience the truth of what were first only words: by fully accepting and feeling your pain, you become commensurately capable of enduring pleasure, of sustaining it. By the humility and honesty to admit your hate and express it in a constructive way, that is, to assume responsibility for it, your capacity to love grows commensurately. By your ability to go into and fully experience your fear, you grow fearless and secure. It cannot be different. It is so because it is one and the same energy current, appearing in different frequency rates and condensation. The vibration changes as you discover the oneness of the opposites. The more you avoid one, the less can you experience its "other" side.

The cosmic feeling is of the highest frequency rate of energy. If any feeling within the ordinary human spectrum is still apparently unmanageable, then the cosmic feeling is too strong to bear.

As long as you shy away from a feeling, it becomes a wall, it becomes your enemy, and you must become frightened of your own feelings. With that you create the "twice-removed" alienation process that is so disconcerting and painful: fear of your fear, pain about your pain, hate for your hate. The split widens, the disconnection extends, until you start groping your way back.

There is no feeling in existence, no matter what it is, that cannot be fully experienced and that cannot be dealt with in a constructive, beautiful way. If you first air out your most negative feelings, such as hate, cruelty, anger, rage -- and all their byproducts, such as envy, jealousy, greed, and dishonesty -- their clean and honest expression is a beautiful manifestation of them. It is that because you no longer pretend; you risk and expose the truth and thus become beautiful as you show your ugliness. This can never be harmful, especially if you then do not use this stage in order to stay stuck on that level. (You know that anything can be misused and put into the service of the life-negating ego-tricks.) If you truly expose part of your momentary state of consciousness, without pride because you overcome the shame; and if you have the courage and trust in the universe to do this in an honest way, and ask for inner guidance to help you in this endeavor, you will experience a powerful energy that is contained in the previously hidden feelings. This energy is absolutely essential for your creating your life, for expanding your life and consciousness, for your joy and pleasure. Tiredness, listlessness, being without energy -- all this can be explained by many outer factors, but in the last analysis they are always a product of running away from feeling, from dealing with your feelings, and thus repressing your vital energy.

There is no pain that, if you meet it constructively and without false ideas and projections, will not prove to be a tunnel through which you go comparatively quickly, releasing energy, love, and power. There is no hate so ugly, or negative intentionality so awful that by honestly expressing it, rather than acting it out against others, will not yield powerful energy and will not add to the beauty of your loving, your living, and to the beauty of your environment that you create. No hate, no pain, no fear is ever a permanent condition, but love, pleasure, security, peace, and bliss are permanent conditions. Hate, pain, and fear are but frozen energy, distorted consciousness. Every time you feel reluctant to go into a pain, into an anger, into your inner existing rage, it is only dishonesty that makes you reluctant: the wish to appear different from the way you really are. This is the reluctance and the resistance, as well as the artificially cultivated exaggeration of the fear of pain that thus makes it really unbearable, because you cringe from it. When you overcome the imagined need to pretend, if you can be who you are, there is no feeling that cannot be a source of creative energy. Being honest includes the willingness to challenge your concept that going into the pain will make you permanently stay in it and perish. These conscious or unconscious assumptions must be questioned.

By exposing what you feared to expose, you can learn to deal with it, not otherwise. Many of you already see more and more that releasing the stagnant, sick energy of hidden distorted feelings turns them into a powerful agent for joy and creativity.

The whole spectrum of feelings must be gone through in a feeling way: as I said, only when you can allow and deal with negative feelings can you accept and sustain good feelings. By the same token, only when you can accept and sustain good feelings of the ordinary human spectrum can the ability to accept and sustain the cosmic feeling grow. It is very important to understand this progression of your feeling nature. This will explain to you why you are so often incapable of holding on to good feelings. You see yourself contract again, right after you have opened up and experienced pleasure, love, warmth, goodness of life. You know that this principle exists, but you still do not use it enough as the gauge it is: it points to unrecognized, unaccepted, unexpressed, still repressed negative feelings. And if occasionally a glimmer of the cosmic feeling comes and it slips away only too fast, it is a sign that your love capacity is not as developed as it can and will be. The strongest human love experience is only a lukewarm, mild shadow in comparison with the cosmic feeling, which encompasses everything.

(3) Positive Intentionality. Not just superficially, not just in order to comply with some rules, but from the core of your real being, where you want truth and love for their own sake, not for what you wish to gain. It must exist on that deep level where you now discover, and are constantly discovering, and are about to discover, the negative intentions toward life; your dishonesty toward life, which are the true causes of your unhappiness. The moment you can see it, do not negate it, do not look away from it, but really work with it until, on this deep level, there is the strong expression of positive intentionality. The commitment to it comes as you are willing to apparently "risk" it. Then there will be love. Love for the universe, love for others, love for creation. Your love will lack totality to the degree negative intentionality festers in your psyche. And you cannot have the cosmic feeling unless you have love. The experience of love is, as mentioned, on a lesser energy scale than the more comprehensive total experience of cosmic feeling, which includes love to the highest possible degree, but which also includes many other feeling/knowing experiences and expressions.

The commitment, in honesty and truthfulness, to make a fair exchange with life, to play it honestly, to give to life, must be made over and over again, day in and day out, searching for deeper hidden recesses where still negative intentionality may exist, and then reversing it in a deliberate creative act of expressing positive intentionality.

How can you gauge where hidden negative intentionality exists? You can gauge it very easily, by simply asking: "Where am I still unhappy? Where am I anxious? Where do I have problems with myself, with life, with fulfillment with others?" No matter how easy it may be to ascribe the cause to others -- and it may surely also be true -- there is nevertheless something in you that you do not see where you create negatively. That is your gauge and you can use it every day. It is completely accurate, it cannot lie. Nothing could be more reliable. In your daily review, every night, ask yourself: "Is my life as fulfilled, as happy, as joyful, as rich, and as meaningful as it could be, as I long for it to be? Do I have to content myself with what I have now?" Then you have your answer, and you can choose to explore yourself further by asking: "What do I contribute to this situation? How do I create it?" Of course, you cannot do this alone, but you have a helper.

Even if your life is fulfilled and happy, and you see it become increasingly richer -- and the continued pathwork will bring about such a change, without fail -- you can still ask yourself: "Where are there areas where I still feel flat, where I do not experience the joy that I know otherwise to exist?" That is your clue to look inside of you, in your heart of hearts. What in this innermost corner do you really mean, express, and intend toward a certain aspect of your life? It is really very simple to do this, my friends, and once you focus in this way, you will see it is as simple as a diagram you can draw with the simplest stroke. It is truly no mystery.

(4) The capacity to connect with your innermost divine nucleus. The other three points I discussed are surely prerequisites to this. The fourth point cannot truly be practiced and successfully realized unless the other three are executed. But this fourth is also another approach to cultivate. Listen into yourself, become calm, receptive, quiet the busy, loud mind. Start with the premise that there is a deep nucleus of knowing, feeling, intelligence, power, and presence. Focus on it lightly, without the feeling of "I must now experience it." Calmly wait. Learn the ability to become inwardly relaxed and calm. See your own inner rushing, driving, grasping, and hurrying. Observe it and then you can stop it. It may first be a pain, but this is then an opportunity to feel it without resistance. Learn the great art of tuning in. Ask your innermost Godself for this specific help, too. Persevere. Realize the other three points. Give your attention, your good will, your best. One day the channel will, must, open. Contemplate the possibility that there are faculties within you that you have not yet experienced.

There is another, inner ear with which you will eventually hear; there is an inner eye with which you will see; there is an inner power of perception with which you will perceive. These faculties are not yet in use, but they can be awakened. As you put your thoughts of the mind to rest; and the doubts, which are a trick of the ego; and you increase your capacity to be attentive to your inner movements, because you look through the tricks of the ego not to let you be attentive; as you, again and again, ask for inner guidance, you will perceive, one day, and later increase, a new faculty in you. With one, the inner ear will suddenly open and you will hear God in you. You will know it is no imagination, nothing could be more real. With another, the inner eye will see, perhaps symbolic forms or pictures. It may see on an inner level, where seeing is knowing. It may see the light of truth and love. That seeing will communicate itself into understanding, for that must always follow suit in order to integrate the experience with the conscious ego personality. With another, it may manifest first with an ability to express the inner knowing with thoughts: "it" thinks in you, "it" instructs you. Or, perhaps, "it" writes through you. There are many different ways in which new knowing, new seeing, new hearing, and new experiencing will come from the divine kernel within. The integration of this into the personality is the expansion I talked about in the last lecture.

Everyone can be helped by this lecture to understand where he is on his path, regardless of whether or not he can actually put everything to use at this point. That may come later.

Before turning to your questions, I should like to say, once again, that the power, the strength, the love, and the help that are invested in the venture of this group as a whole are so wonderful that it is hard for anyone to overlook the reality of it at this point. For the power grows steadily through your visible progress and liberation and the faith you gain through what you experience and see around you. While being at these gatherings, you can gain so much by letting your heart feel the power here. Do not cut it off, do not allow the ego-tricks to cut you off from your heart and feelings. You will then know that I say the truth. If you recognize your own doubting, negating ego as the trick it produces, and you doubt your doubts, you can open your hearts, my friends.

As I withdraw from this instrument, try again to use the powerful energy here. There are so many different ways to use it. Perhaps there are people here who do not love each other, who have had friction with each other, or misunderstandings. Maybe they can use this powerful energy to come to the middle of this circle and truly and honestly confront each other. Another way may be to have one person who wants help to have the whole group give its energy to find the necessary clue in him or her. Ask in the meditation that follows, with which you generate more of this beautiful energy, to inspire you. Use this energy to move you where God in you directs you. Surrender to this divine power and guidance. Allow them to happen. Enrich yourself and do not shy away from the risk and from the momentary resistance. Do not cut yourself off from it. Be blessed, my dear ones.

The Guide
by Eva Pierrakos
April 21, 1972

Copyright 1972, the Center for the Living Force, Inc.

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