Image Finding

By The Pathwork Guide

Greetings in the name of the Lord. I bring you blessings, my dear friends; blessed is this hour. This material world in which you live constantly presents obstacles to you. These obstacles prevent you from seeing the world as it really is. Some of these obstacles are time, space, and motion. You all know that in the spiritual worlds time, space, and motion are completely different than in your world of manifestation. You have definite periods of time and measurement, invariable and objective. A year is a year; a month, a week, a day, an hour, a yard, or a mile exist independently of personal attitudes. In the spirit world this is not so. The same applies to distance; you have definitely designated directions -- right, left, up, and down. Again, in the spirit world this is not so. And I have good reason to mention this tonight. Some of your scientists have sensed and found some of this truth, partly through atomic science, nuclear physics, and also through the exploration of outer space. In the not too distant future, exploration of outer space will be possible for humanity. It will be as commonly accepted as air travel is today. When a pilot sits in an ordinary airplane, he does not need machines to indicate whether he is ascending or descending. He can see that very clearly. When a pilot finally flies through outer space, this will not be so, and you will all come to see in your time that which I say to you to be true. The moment you leave the gravity of this earth plane, man will not be able to determine whether he is going up or down. When the plane ascends, he will be under the impression that the ship is descending, and vice versa. This has a very significant meaning, my friends. For even though you still live in your world of manifestation, when you explore outer space by technical means, you approach the laws of the spirit nevertheless, so these phenomena should open the eyes of a thinking person. I talked to you a great deal about the necessity of exploring your soul, and particularly in the last lecture. I discussed the inner images, the inner wrong impressions and conclusions that a human entity forms in the course of several lifetimes. I spoke about the importance of finding these images. Only in this way will you be able to understand yourselves, your lives, and everything that has happened and will continue to happen as long as you have not dissolved these images. As in outer space, so is this true in your own development. For only by going down can you go up. Only by exploring the depths, the deepest regions of your subconscious mind, can you develop spiritually and ascend in the true sense. Temporarily it will appear as though you are becoming worse, as though you are regressing. Depressions are almost unavoidable, temporarily, in the search for what and who you really are. But, my friends, think of this analogy, which will soon be confirmed by your human science. It is exactly the same when you explore your soul. It will appear as though you are going down -- and you have to go down into your subconscious in order to reach the liberation and clarity of absolute truth as far as you are able to perceive it while still in the body.

I promised that I would continue tonight on the subject of image finding. There are a few facts that are important to know for all those who are diligent in this search. For those who still feel reluctant, and who merely listen to these words, what I say here will not mean very much, except perhaps to give them a little more understanding of principle. It may eventually open the door for the active, personal search so necessary for complete purification, so that they voluntarily step through the threshold from darkness into the light. Whoever has not started yet but is willing to start (as I said, it cannot be done alone), I beg those friends to ask one of the persons of the inner group to work with you. And arrangements will be made; guidance will set in. Anyone truly desirous of spiritual growth will find help; of that you can be sure.

Now, my dear friends, when you search for the images, several facts are very useful and important to know beforehand. The first one is that you do not approach your subconscious with a moralizing attitude. Your subconscious does not like it and will resist. It will fight against you and make it all the harder for your willing consciousness to come to terms with it. In the development through which you have gone so far, you have realized the importance of purification and the importance of self-knowledge. You have all started to think about your mistakes, your shortcomings, and your weaknesses. The same holds true on all levels of your being. And when I say "all levels of your being," I mean that there are several layers. There is not merely a conscious and a subconscious layer. There are several degrees of consciousness and being regarding every conceivable attitude, concerning your faults and weaknesses, as well as your qualities and strengths. In the last analysis, the wrong image and the wrong inner impression exists as a rigid form and controls your life and all happenings. It also consists of the faults you may know quite well consciously. However, you may not know that these same weaknesses exist on a separate level. However, if you approach this search with the attitude of self-moralizing, you will have difficulties. That is why I advised you the last time to start from another viewpoint. Start by thinking about your hurts, conflicts, and problems. Regard your wrong inner attitudes as ignorance and error. Actually, that is what all faults really are. That is the very best way to begin, Start by thinking about your idiosyncrasies, your prejudices, your tight emotions in certain domains of life. Think how you react emotionally to certain things and when and how these reactions repeat themselves in a pattern throughout your life. Begin by viewing your disappointments that apparently have nothing to do with your actions or reactions. Afterwards, when you recognize a certain regular pattern, you will be able to see the connection with your own inner attitudes that may so far have escaped your consciousness. This is the best beginning. Only much later, after you have made a realization and have gained a certain understanding of your inner reactions and their bearing on outer happenings, will you see that this is actually nothing less than a fault, or several faults that exist on these deeper levels, quite apart from your outer personality.

When you come to the point of realizing that your inner reactions come from a faulty attitude, there are two possibilities. Both represent an obstacle best removed by an awareness before you come to them. One possibility is that you finally find the same faults that you have already recognized on a superficial outer level; you may even have overcome some of these faults to some degree. It will be all the more shocking to find these same trends all over again. You will either react by saying that you already knew that you had this fault, thereby preventing yourself from the realization that you have come across something quite new, although you are aware of its outward existence. It is necessary that you approach it as something new, in spite of your being familiar with its outer existence. Unless you approach it in this way, you cannot experience and re-live these feelings, and without doing this, you cannot gain the necessary understanding. When you come across known reactions or faults in your inner images, beware of the attitude that you know it already. You may know it, but it still exists on another level, and it needs the same fresh approach as though you encountered it for the very first time. Remember this, my friends.

The second possibility is that you encounter trends that are completely contradictory to the self you consciously know. Again, this may be a hindrance because you may be tempted to say, "Oh, but this is not so; it cannot be so. I do not have this fault. As a matter of fact, the direct opposite is one of my most significant virtues." Let us take a few examples to make it a little clearer. Consider a person who has a strong sense of responsibility in his outer life. He is known by his family and his business contacts as being thoroughly responsible. Yet when he tries to understand his life and his own person and begins to look for his images, he may be shocked to find that in certain ways he is irresponsible. Perhaps he is so in different respects and in different ways, but nevertheless it is true. This may cause a reaction of puzzlement that could lead the person to reject these findings as being wrong because they contradict another part of his being. He might quickly cover up again what he was just about to bring out of hiding. Or let us take a person who is known to have a great deal of courage. By uncovering certain emotional reactions, trends, and inner facts, he comes face to face with a part of his personality where he is a coward. This realization may be such a shock, he may be so incredulous that it does not make sense anymore. Again he will say to himself that this cannot be so. He may cite a number of instances where he has proven his courage in many respects, and yet he discovers certain emotional reactions in which he is a coward. So it is important for you, my friends, to realize that you may find faults in your images that you do not have outwardly. Outwardly you have exactly the opposite reactions, and genuinely so -- not only as a mask. You always tend to think in terms of "either/or." Humanity has learned by now that it is wrong to say that a person is either good or bad. That far you have come. But the same exclusion of "either/or" holds true as well for every individual trend -- good or bad. If you have this general understanding, my friends, if you indoctrinate yourself with this knowledge, it will be much easier for you to reach the goal. In this way, when you go into the deeper realms of your being, you will eliminate difficulties that exist because of ignorance of certain general facts.

People nowadays talk on your earth sphere about depth psychology. What you are doing is exactly that. But in order to win this battle, you also have to learn depth prayer, depth meditation, and depth thinking, my friends. At first you think intellectually in prayer or meditation, but when you arrive at the findings of the inner self, you have to go deeper. There are rare moments when you are filled with God and His laws of truth. This may happen to you occasionally long before you have discovered deeper levels of consciousness. This feeling is not something that can be forced by a voluntary act; it cannot be controlled. It is Grace, my friends. And it will become a more or less permanent state when you cleanse your subconscious of all falsehoods. What I mean by depth prayer or meditation is that you take everything you have found out about these repressed or hidden reactions -- whether they concern trends you find repeatedly or whether you come across quite different reactions than your known outer ones -- and think about their significance, their meaning, their effect on you and others. Compare them with spiritual law as you now know it; think about it both from the spiritual and practical point of view. Work with this newly found knowledge by re-feeling and re-experiencing it. Then think about it again as objectively as you know how. Pray to God for further enlightenment and strength to change the erroneous reaction in you. You simply shift your thinking to a deeper level and apply it to the knowledge you have found, either the apparently repetitious or the shockingly new and different. This may not be easy for some of my friends to understand, particularly for those who have not started on the search. But I am sure that most of my friends who have advanced in this direction will understand what I mean. It is a very subtle matter and a very important one. Do not leave the newly found understanding alone, for it may then very well slip back into the same old pattern. You can easily deceive yourself and think that merely because you have found out an important and significant piece of knowledge about your soul that this is all that is necessary. You can have the theoretical knowledge and still go right on reacting in the same old way. It is not sufficient to find inner understanding about you hidden trends and reactions, if you then just leave it at that. The work only begins after such a recognition. And that is the meditation in depth, and on the level you have discovered. If you do not, you will retain what you have found, but gradually it will become more and more remote, and remain as a theoretical knowledge in your brain, while underneath you go right on reacting as before, without having succeeded in integrating and unifying your erring emotional reactions and inner conclusions. As I often say, emotions are more habit-bound than your outer trends, and, on top of it, they are so elusive that it may easily escape your attention that in spite of your efforts, your old patterns go right on working. You are so used to shoving uncomfortable knowledge into your subconscious that you cannot get out of this habit from one day to the other. It needs a great deal of training, concentration, and effort. New habit patterns have to be established, until you recognize the signs of the hidden trends that must be made conscious. You have to develop a special sensitivity for that -- and that takes time, of course. It is also possible that you go into an opposite extreme, which is just as harmful as the old reaction and just as bound by your image. This may happen either because you are unconsciously impatient and want to correct your soul tendencies in a hurry and by drastic means -- and this, of course, is not feasible. This may happen too because you are angry at yourself and act in a spirit of defiance against yourself, as well as against the world at large. This procedure is just as wrong as the old established pattern. You merely use a different manner of operation. Beware of these two pitfalls, my friends. The only way to do so is to work with the understanding you have gained, quietly, patiently, and steadily, accepting your temporary inability to react differently, knowing that slow growth is the only possible way. Take the newly found knowledge and view it from various angles and pray and meditate on that and not on the outer level on which you have worked before. You may also have established a habit pattern for your prayer and meditation. This was useful and good while you were in the last phase of your development, but now you have to shift the level. You have to go into a deeper realm.

Another point I want to bring to your attention, which is of equal importance, is that it is a strange phenomenon that everything connected with these wrong inner images causes the person acute shame. It may not even be something that is shameful, objectively speaking. There might not be any justification for it, if it were out in the open; and you would not feel that it deserves this reaction if you encountered it in others. After you have had the courage to bring it out into the open, you will experience for yourself how this feeling of being embarrassed and ashamed completely vanishes. But before it is out, when you are still struggling with it, you will feel this shame very strongly. You may have a fault that is infinitely worse, but by having discovered it a long time ago, you have accepted it; you have come to terms with it; therefore, you do not feel ashamed of it anymore. You may even be able to discuss it openly with others. However, something that is a much lesser fault, or a trend that apparently has nothing to do with a fault or with the recognized standards of sin, causes you acute shame as long as you have not come to terms with it. Let us say, you find out a very strong influence by and dependence on one of your parents. Something that is in itself nothing to be ashamed of, something that is discussed generally every day. You have been unaware of this trend so far; you ignored how much and in what manner you were influenced, and how much you are still dependent on similar emotions. Yet, when you first come across this realization, it causes you this feeling of acute embarrassment. This is a typical image reaction, my friends. And if you realize this before hand, you will again make things easier for yourself. You will not be under the impression, under the emotional, subjective impression, that you stand alone in this world or that you alone have such feelings. For that is what your emotions believe and why they feel so ashamed. This is the separateness you have built for yourself with all your wrong defenses and under which you suffer in such instances. But if you realize that this is a common fact that everybody is going through, that it is a symptom to be expected, you will be able to counteract your subjective and fallacious emotional impressions by not giving heed to it, instead of continuing to let yourself be governed by it. Only by doing so will you free yourself of the separating wall that encloses you in darkness, loneliness, and fear, in guilt and false shame. Only in this way can you evolve as a free person, with your head up high, instead of being governed and suppressed by your wrong impressions and false shames. It only takes a moment of courage to go through that which seems so shameful, by facing yourself as you are. That is the only way for you to discover that you have lived in a phantom world of fears and shames that have absolutely no reality whatsoever. Remember that.

Thus, my friends, you see that when you go down, you gain clarity and understanding of the shadows in your soul and their reason for existence. When you look at your erroneous emotional conclusions, you will discover that through fighting your imagined shames and resistances with the tools of patience, sound endeavor, and will power, you will find that in actual and absolute truth this is the only way you can ascend in spirit. Thinking that this apparent descent can be avoided and yet spiritual development and growth attained is utterly impossible. It is self-deception and wishful thinking. It cannot be done.

QUESTION: You said that humans were all given the same amount of time. Does that mean that time is different to each individual spirit?

ANSWER: What I mean is: Let us say you have an hour. An hour will remain an hour, regardless of how it appears to you. This is true whether it is pleasant or unpleasant. You can still measure it and it still remains objectively an hour. Your own impression, what you think and feel during that time, is subjective and has no bearing on the objective hour that has passed. Now, in the spirit world it is exactly the opposite. Objectivity is the validity of the spiritual attitude; everything else, every measurement or any other value, is subjective. Is that clear? (Yes, thank you very much)

QUESTION: I find it very hard to understand that which concerns meditation and prayer in depth. If you have approached a problem already, how can you approach it on a deeper level?

ANSWER: The approach on a deeper level of the same old problem happens automatically as you go on working. But when you have uncovered it, then you have to think, meditate, and pray with these new findings all over again. Whether you discover the same trends that you were aware of, or partly aware of, or whether you discover some completely new reactions and feelings, you have to approach these findings with a spirit of newness, or a new surge, so to say, with a new outlook and a new feeling, where you vibrate in the experience of this realization. And then you have to think about it; pray with the new material in order to assimilate it properly; pray that you will be able to integrate it with your personality, so that the latter will become well-rounded. Such new findings usually do not fit into the mental picture a person has made of him or herself. It stands out just like a sore point. In order that these distorted emotions become whole and healthy, one has to utilize these findings in thinking about them in the way I explained in this lecture.

QUESTION: You wanted to talk tonight about the problem of desirelessness and desire versus renunciation.

ANSWER: On a previous occasion I said that desirelessness is a word that can be very easily misunderstood and misinterpreted, especially if a person happens to have an image in which he is afraid to live, afraid to feel, and afraid to love. The outer intellectual knowledge he may gain through spiritual teachings may be an echo for this very image and may be used by him as a rationalization and justification, something the subconscious is constantly on the lookout for. With the knowledge you have gained in the meantime, you will now understand better why I said at the time that desirelessness has to be approached carefully, otherwise it will do more harm than good. A person with an image as cited here is very much afraid to face the world, to face his feelings, and to face the unavoidable disappointments, so that he withdraws and uses the term of desirelessness as a camouflage and to fit his image. This is a very common phenomenon. Only he who has no such fear can understand desirelessness and renunciation in its true meaning and not in its distorted one. Wherever there is such an image -- and many, many people have this to a greater or lesser degree -- the only way you can reach true and genuine desirelessness is to face your fear of life and love. To risk and bear the hurts of it first, rather than to try to forcefully prevent yourself from going through this necessary stage of development is important. Only after having tasted voluntarily the hurts connected with desire will you grow out of it. You cannot do it by going around it, my friends. You cannot force yourself into a state you have not yet attained; this would amount to a lie and even to cheating. As long as you still have desires, you have to acknowledge this and go through them in order to honestly grow out of them. Only after you have gone through that, gradually, in the organic growth that spiritual development always is, will the hurts become less, not because you fear and avoid them because you are unwilling to face them. That can be the only way renunciation and desirelessness can be obtained without error and self-deception. And only each individual personality can be the judge of how useful it is at the present time to meditate about desirelessness. Only if and when you are completely fearless of hurts and disappointments is the time ripe, my dear ones, and not before then. If you have forced yourself into a state of resignation, you have chosen with the unconscious motive of escaping that which you fear. This is the only valid procedure there is, namely accepting your state of still having desires and accepting their price. This will be different from the desires of a person who has no spiritual aims. The latter will let his selfwill push ahead and will be controlled by his desires, he will revolt and rebel against everything and everyone who stands in his way of having his desires gratified. But you who are on this path can evaluate these currents, viewing them from a distance and controlling them in consciousness, neither giving vent to all of them nor suppressing their existence. If you listen within yourself and interpret your feelings, you will be able to see where your selfwill, where your pride, and where your ego claims gratifications that your higher self deems wrong. He who knows that the purpose of life is not the gratification of selfwill, or that its sole purpose is not happiness, but that it is given to you to learn both from happiness and from unhappiness, will not give in to the desires of the lower self. If he cannot help it at times, he will learn an additional lesson from that. Only he who does not escape unhappiness can achieve true desirelessness, perhaps only at a much later period. So therein lies the answer, my friends. And with these words I hope you will not use the idea of desirelessness and renunciation to rationalize away your inner fears of life, of love, and of being hurt. Is that clear? (Yes, I will bring it up in the Bhagavad Gita at several points.)

QUESTION: The next problem is selfishness in prayer.

ANSWER: I have also discussed this on various occasions, but I will do so again, perhaps with a slightly different slant, my friends. I know there are many people who are afraid that when they pray this is merely selfishness. Here I can only say, my friends, that it depends very much on how you pray and what your motive is. You cannot say about anything that it is either selfish or not. Unless it concerns crass acts, in all desires and attitudes it is your motive that counts, and it always depends on the how. The answer to this is really very simple. If you pray for things because you want them and because it is pleasant, and that is all there is to it, then of course it is a selfish prayer. Apart from that, it will do no good at all. For only a spiritual force coming out of your soul will have an effect. Such prayer indicates a misunderstanding of life, and is therefore an untruth, even though you do not commit a deliberate lie. Nevertheless an untrue thought, innocent and in good faith as it may be, cannot meet with the true forces of the Cosmos. Like attracts like, and this law cannot be changed. One of the first things you learn on this path is to ask yourself about your own motives why you desire a certain thing; that you ask yourself the "why" of certain emotional reactions of yours, and if you cannot give yourself the answer, it is a good beginning to pray for the will to recognize yourself fearlessly and truthfully. This cannot be construed as selfishness. Thus you will pray that your motives will become purified. Furthermore, there is certainly nothing selfish if you wish only good for other creatures, and if you can bring yourself to pray for those who have harmed you -- and meant it -- that in itself is a purification. And if you pray for strength and understanding in order to be able to overcome your own cowardice in order to face yourself and in order to overcome your resistance to develop yourself, there is nothing selfish in that. If the doubt exists in you that the unavoidable happiness that results out of purification -- after a certain point is reached -- is in itself a selfish act, then it would seem that it is a higher aim to remain unpurified so as to be unhappy, because this would mean selflessness. In this connection, you must understand that God's laws work in this way: Only he who is happy can give happiness to others. I do not mean a cheap and easily obtainable happiness, but the real thing that comes only by hard labor and that no one can take away from you. You will never see an unhappy person who can truly give happiness to others. That is impossible. He may do a certain good deed, a single unselfish act, but it cannot possibly make another person happy. Therefore, if you are afraid of selfishness because happiness is attained by your purification and development -- and this should be your main prayer, apart from praying for others -- consider this happiness as a byproduct, as a means to an end, and not as the end itself. Even if selfishness, namely the desire to become happy, enters a little bit at the beginning of your upward climb, recognize this, but do not mind it too much. This selfish motive is not as pure, and you are still imperfect. This selfish motive is not as pure as the one stated here, namely the happiness that should be only a byproduct, a means to an end, but it is certainly a step forward in the realization of truth. Only by purifying yourself can you become happy, while the person who has a lower degree of consciousness believes that happiness results out of giving in to all the desires coming out of the lower nature. If you are not free from selfishness -- and scarcely a human being is -- it is certainly healthier to see this clearly, instead of pushing and forcing it away; in that way it will only hide in your soul and cause you more harm than the clear and courageous recognition of its existence. Know that the aim is a higher one, but know that you are emotionally not there yet. Also recognize that secluded happiness is impossible. The separating wall must fall off, and that is what all of you are afraid of: you feel endangered by it. You do not realize that in desiring to keep your separating wall, you defeat your own purpose and you contradict illogically your own desire to develop that which exists just as strongly in spite of your fear of it. You all desire happiness and you all desire to give happiness, yet you cannot achieve either one of them without losing your separateness. And how do you lose your separateness? You do this by doing the very thing that seems hardest to you. Perhaps it is giving up your pride, going through your apparent shame. When you approach this problem in this way, you will realize that in prayer of this kind there is certainly nothing selfish. For God wants you to be happy. It is a long tradition of misunderstanding, an often unpronounced conception, that to be Godly means to be unhappy and severe. This image is engraved in mankind on the whole. This is supposed to be martyrdom. No, my friends, it is not so. So do not feel guilty if you also become happy. That certainly does not mean that you should pray for happiness. What you should pray for is the strength and the ability to overcome and remove the obstacles you have placed between yourself and happiness. This removal must mean to go through the self-inflicted unhappiness, created by error and ignorance, not by shirking it; but the outcome at the end of the tunnel must be the clear light of peace, harmony, beauty, and joy that must be yours regardless of other people's actions and deeds. This is the spirit you should have when you pray.

QUESTION: May I ask why it is so difficult to start praying at all?

ANSWER: You all know that your development does not proceed upwards along a steady line or, so to say, "downward." It fluctuates. It goes up and down in spirals. And sometimes, while you are on a downward curve, you do not realize that this downward curve is a step higher than the last upward curve you were on. Although the last upward curve was, on the whole, lower than the present downward curve, every upward curve feels better. You felt an elation and a liberation that you do not feel on the downward curve which you have worked yourself up to now. Whenever you are on a downward curve, you encounter conflicts and problems and contradictions that you have not yet solved. They disquiet you, they make you unrestful and fearful, until you have laboriously worked them out and understood them, until you have fitted them into the whole picture as fast as this is available to you now. When this is done, the upward curve sets in again, when you enjoy the clear air of a little further gained truth. But when the downward curve comes again, you must delve into the darkness of your own confusion and error, and that cuts you off from the Divine Stream. You may over-simplify this by saying: "Things are depressing, I experience unpleasant things, and that is why I am cut off from the Divine Flow." You are right, only it is a half-truth, and that is always dangerous. The unpleasant things you are experiencing are but a reflection and a necessary effect of the cause you have within yourself and that waits to be dug out. And that is why in such times of being on the downward curve -- this may vary in length according to the personality and the inner problems to be solved -- the flow is cut off. You are surrounded again by the strong impressions of the world of manifestation. You cannot penetrate any more into the feeling of reality you have tasted at other times. And it is necessary; it demands a battle on your part to attain victory again. Every victory means a new upward curve. It is quite natural that in such periods of temporary darkness you cannot feel God's absolute truth, that you do not vibrate with it. This cannot be forced by will. But what you can and should do in these periods is to think clearly and reasonably about your findings in the light of what you now know, although temporarily this knowledge sits only in your brain. And you have to wait until you become filled with this knowledge again.

The Guide
by Eva Pierrakos
November, 1958

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