From lecture 211, OUTER EVENTS REFLECT SELF-CREATION — THREE STAGES:

To gain a deeper understanding and a clearer picture of reality, you must first know that you brainwash yourself continually, particularly in relation to your experiences in life. As long as the connection between inner reality and inner conditions or landscapes on the one hand, and outer experience on the other is as tenuous as it is now in most human beings, the nature of life and the relationships between life and self are totally distorted. The box in which the mind finds itself becomes painfully narrow and limited. All perceptions are untrustworthy because the main perception of life and self is off center.

The illusion that outer life imposes experience on you is so widespread that the brainwashing is very difficult to stop. In this lecture I would like specifically to discuss three basic stages in growth and development as seen from the point of view of your life experience.

In the first stage, that which is farthest removed from reality, all events seem totally disconnected from you. Then the world seems a fixed place in which your personal experiences come to you as a result of pure chance, luck, or misfortune. But along the curve of growing a progression takes place. You begin to distinguish events that you have created, perhaps not consciously or deliberately; nevertheless, you know you have caused the results you now experience. However, when it comes to “outer” events which seem to have nothing to do with you, you still cannot see this. When such events disturb your state of happiness and peace, you are still very much removed from your center. The outer event then seems remote from your inner state, only symbolically reflecting aspects of your inner self which you are supposed to deal with but have refused to pay attention to until now. This ongoing refusal and self-imposed blindness remove you to such an extent from the point where you can become aware of self-creation that the results of your creation not only seem but actually are removed from you. They then appear disconnected from your voluntary processes.

This is a very painful state because what happens to you appears undeserved and life becomes very frightening in its apparently unpredictable character. You truly seem to be a victim of circumstances beyond your sphere of influence. This impression causes a great deal of fear and distrust of life. It also perpetuates the greatest human hoax: the conclusion that human beings are victims. No game is deadlier and more painful. Yet no resistance is greater than that which refuses to give up this hoax by taking the blinders off and seeing beyond this very limited vision.

I have discussed this principle many times in different contexts. Some of you who are involved in the pathwork, after much overcoming of resistances and blocks in yourselves, actually begin to occasionally experience that what before seemed to you absolutely and incontrovertibly a fixed outer event you were put into haphazardly, was really a very logical extension of your own inner attitude and explicit intention. Such an event reflects specific distorted ideas which, in turn, engender specific and distorted action, reaction, and volition. When this connecting bridge is established, an entirely different world view comes into being. Little by little the false focus shifts and one’s vision of life moves into a clearer perspective.

As you know, connecting inner attitudes to outer events requires courage, humility, and honesty. It demands the utter integrity of self-responsibility. But the relief, safety, new energy, and creative strength that accrue from such a connection between the outer and the inner cannot be measured in mere words. Many of you are moving continually in this direction. As you go on, the resistance to making these connections lessens. The stake you have in maintaining the fiction of being a victim of life diminishes in the ratio in which your self-responsibility increases and becomes so pleasurable that you would no longer exchange it for the untruth of victimization.

The more you enter this new state, the less will outer events occur that are so far removed from you that the connection between you and the event can only be symbolically interpreted. Later they will be incontrovertibly recognized as your own creation. The more often you establish these connections and thus see your own hand in the shaping of your life experiences, the less will events occur that are so far removed from you that you can only draw the connecting link by using the event as a symbolic outpicturing of an aspect of your inner landscape. This brings you to the second stage in this progression.

In the second stage you can relatively easily see the outer event as a result of your attitudes. This does not mean that you can immediately cease producing these particular creations. You need to gather a great deal of self-understanding and need to expose and release a lot of pent-up energy and stagnant feelings before you begin to recreate your life. However, it is mostly obvious to you that your experience is a result of your attitudes, intentions, beliefs, and feelings. You can see how this or that experience is a specific result of commensurate desires, defense mechanisms, destructive actions, negative behavior patterns, and so on. Needless to say that in this stage it is impossible to feel quite so helpless, anxious, afraid, victimized, and hopeless. Even if the personality still doubts, at this point, its own capacity to change these specific attitudes and patterns because a still deeper level of negative intentionality, of not wanting to change them, has not been uncovered, at least the world no longer appears such a chaotic place. For you this represents a great step forward on the evolutionary scale.

In the third stage of this progression, your attitudes, actions, intentions, and feelings have become sufficiently purified, realistic, and productive for you to now create a mostly positive life experience. Outer events fall more and more into place. As I discussed in the last lecture, you are moving into a new self-generative process of positive creation and experience. But in this stage you are not yet completely purified. Your mind is now much more aware of its own pitfalls and is thus capable of quickly penetrating the veil of illusion. However, some clouds still remain, and you will occasionally suffer from your own fluctuating moods which sometimes seem to come and go without any outer reason. Yet now you can no longer deceive yourself that someone or something else is inflicting suffering on you. You know it comes from your mood. Of course, sometimes you may say that your dark mood is a result of so and so having done this or that to you, and this may well be true. But then such an occasion does not belong in the third stage. It belongs to either stage one or two, depending on your vision of it. Stage three means that you already know your mood is not caused by any outside factor, but simply occurs in you without outer provocation or reason. It is as though a cloud has come over the sun and you do not yet know why, but you do know the cloud is in you. Yet you are still a victim of the fluctuations of your own moods. This third stage is the least removed from your direct contact with your inner reality, but it is still removed. I mean that the manifestation moves steadily closer to an overlap with your inner state as a result of your having established the links in the previous stages.
Once you have reached the second stage in which you begin to recognize experiences as products of your attitudes, you will soon have more and more experiences where this is easy to detect, and fewer and fewer experiences that are a total outer projection and symbol of inner reality. At this stage you may still be stuck here or there and find yourself consciously resisting positive creation. Nevertheless, this affords you the opportunity to focus your efforts, attention, and energies on becoming conscious of further buried material that causes this blockage. Now at least you know where you are stuck and why. You can choose and direct your focus in a meaningful way. You can reverse the course of what is now a meaningful sequential chain: thought, created intent and action or the lack of it.

From lecture 38, IMAGES:

Another indication of an image is the repetition of certain incidents in one’s life. An image always forms some sort of pattern, whether it is a behavior pattern in response to certain occasions, or events that seem to happen to you without your doing anything to invite them. In fact, consciously you may fervently wish for the very opposite of your image. But the conscious desire is the weaker of two impulses, since the unconscious is always stronger.

The unconscious does not realize that its attitude prohibits the very wish you consciously express but cannot fulfill. The price for your unconscious pseudo-protection is the frustration of the legitimate desire. This is very important to understand, my friends; it is equally important to understand that people and events can be drawn to a person as if to a magnet on account of such inner images. This may be difficult for you to see, but it is so. The only remedy is to find out what your image is, on what basis it was formed, and what your wrong conclusions were.

Often you do not notice the repetitive pattern in your life, my friends. You pass over the obvious. You still keep assuming that certain occurrences are due to coincidence or that some arbitrary fate is testing you, or that other people are responsible for your repeated mishaps. You therefore pay much more attention to the slight variations of each incident than to the common denominator underlying them.