Pathwork Guide Lecture No. 249
1996 Edition
March 8, 1978

My beloved friends! Greetings and blessings for all of you. May these words reach your deepest core, your inner and outer understanding, so that you will be further motivated to plow through the thicket of confusion and illusion until you experience the Great Light.

There are so many different kinds of pain in your world, for which you have but one word. It is the same with many other realities, such as love, for example. So many varieties of the manifestation of love are described by only one word. Many other human experiences are not seen in a true light because of the limitation of your conceptual understanding, as well as the limitation of your ability to experience. These limitations in turn create limitation of language. Language is your vehicle to communicate, not only with others but also within yourself, for the purpose of creating widened, more realistic understanding. Obviously this is a cyclic process, leading to benign or vicious circles. A fuller understanding will take you to fuller experience which, in turn, will expand your ability to convey and communicate it and make your experience comprehensible to yourself and others. You will then be able to organically expand your language. I venture to say that in a hundred earth years your language will contain many concepts as yet unknown. New words will exist to differentiate between different kinds of love or pain or many other states of inner experience.

In the meantime I will help this cyclic process along by discussing different kinds of human experiences now lumped together under one designation. At various phases certain human experiences need to be understood in a fuller way and differentiations have to be made. For example, now it is essential that you understand about different kinds of pain.

First let me name a few variations of pain, and then we can focus on one particular pain which you rarely, if ever, think of as one specific pain. The most familiar kind of pain, distinctly different from all other kinds, is what you feel when someone wounds you, hates you, wishes to hurt you. The confusion of not quite understanding what pains you and what goes on in you brings about another pain. The vague feeling that you have created or at least co-created your own pain without fully understanding how and why, gives birth to yet another pain, which is related to the pain of your resistance to being in truth. Then you have the distinct pain of your guilt — guilt for which you have no intention to make restitution.

Some of the above pains are obviously interrelated. For example, the unwillingness to clearly face and make restitution for your guilt leads to confusion and frustration. These, in turn, are often projected onto others whom you blame for causing your pain. These two kinds of pain create a vicious circle. Nevertheless, they are two entirely different kinds of pain — the pain of confusion and frustration and the pain of unrestituted guilt. They are so different that they might well deserve two completely different words. And, as I said, one day this will be so. It will develop organically, for human language reflects the organic development of humanity as a whole.

You have experienced and know about these types of pain, although you did not always perceive that each one is of a different nature, origin and cause, with totally different dynamics and effects. They are as different from each other as the sequential emotions within a vicious or a benign circle are different, even though they create one another. For example: Guilt creates fear, fear creates anger, anger creates self-doubt and self-hate, self-hate creates negative behavior patterns and self-destructiveness. All these emotions, although interconnected, are as different from one another as one kind of pain is from the other.

This preface to the topic of tonight’s lecture should help clear up some of the cobwebs in your mind.

The specific pain I wish to discuss, that is so important to be seen in a new light at this state of your development, is the pain of injustice. This type of pain contains more than can be expressed by this word. It is not just actual injustice happening to you here and now. Such injustice could be classified as pain of being wounded and hurt. There is more to it than that. It is a fear that the universe can allow destruction to exist without safety valves. It is the fear that nothing has rhyme or reason, that doing good — or bad — has no effect on the outcome of cosmic history and evolution.

You will say, quite rightly, that this pain, this fear, is actually a doubt, a lack of faith in a meaningful universe that consists of supreme intelligence, love, and justice. True. There is of course the pain of doubting, the pain of not experiencing God’s existence. However, not knowing that all actions, including outer and inner attitudes and states, have distinct consequences, creates a very specific pain. Realizing this establishes the faith without which you suffer the pain of doubt. So the pain of doubt is not the same as the pain of not experiencing justice. The latter leads to the former and the former also leads to the latter, but they are not quite one and the same. The pain of injustice connotes fear of a meaningless universe, of chaos. It distinctly results from — and further creates — disconnection. If effects are disconnected in the field of human vision, fear of meaninglessness results. And that is the specific kind of pain I am concerned with.

The human field of vision is more often than not too narrow to allow the perception of connections. I discussed this more generally in the lecture on cause and effect. We are now focusing on a particular aspect of the disconnection between cause and effect. We see that it leads to certain ramifications that create a very specific kind of pain.

Every phenomenon in the universe is experienced within the human soul. The larger, macrocosmic fear of injustice, that is, meaninglessness, also exists in a personal manner in the microcosm. On your path you constantly deal with this phenomenon, whether or not you are aware of it.

Much of the resistance you encounter in your personal purification process is based on this existential fear of a meaningless universe, the passage of time, and the pain of life that results from it. Underneath the resistance to face the lower self is the pain of an unjust, chaotic, meaningless creation. Or, to put it a bit more accurately, the lower self is a direct result of the fear and pain of injustice, meaninglessness and chaos. As usual, the process then becomes self-perpetuating and works both ways: The pain of injustice creates negativity, that is, the lower self. And, conversely, the guilt about the lower self fosters an attitude of not deserving salvation, that is, not deserving eternal life, goodness, joy, total justice.

When you ponder your progression on your path, it will become clear to you that in the process of your personal work, you frequently encounter a puzzling phenomenon. It is the following: After overcoming resistance — often quite strong resistance — to face not only lower-self traits, but also their consequences and painful effects on you and your life, you experience profound relief. It is as though a weight had been lifted off your shoulders. Suddenly everything falls into place and fits. Why do you think this happens? It is precisely because you now literally and personally experience in your own microcosm that life is totally just and fair. This is infinitely more important than having to own self-destructive devices and impairment of your divine nature. These can be corrected, but a universe in which evil could win cannot be corrected and is an utterly dismal prospect.

A related manifestation is its converse: Whenever you seem to get away with your lower self, the momentary triumph is very shallow and covers a deep despair. Your dual nature is in constant battle here. One part strongly aims for covering, justifying, projecting, and thereby increasing the lower-self energies and activities. This part of you fights the path process in many ways and aims to deceive your helper, to convince him or her that your coverups are valid. But the other part of you is very unhappy when the first part succeeds. Whenever your helper fails to discover your lower-self maneuvers and is blind, together with you, about the connections — that is, cause and effect — sooner or later you resent your helper for this failure. No matter how much you may have battled at first against seeing the connections between negative intent and undesirable experience, you feel truly let down when the helper does not ally with your higher self, no matter how covered up it may still be at the time. Lack of trust in the helper is directly connected with the lack of trust in a fair universe. If you can deceive and “win” with your negativity, your evil, your destructive attitudes, you realistically and logically conclude that Creation as a whole is untrustworthy and chaotic. This is perhaps one of the most unbearable pains in the human soul!

I strongly recommend that you focus right now on what I am discussing here. Try to perceive that behind resistance to face certain negative aspects lies an even greater resistance to see that these negative patterns create inevitably negative experiences and undesirable life circumstances. Once you can admit the resistance, it will be easier to go one layer deeper and become conscious of both a deep longing to make these connections and an equally strong painful fear that no connections exist, that all is arbitrary and senseless. Resistance to making connections between cause and effect covers the fear and pain that there are no such connections. Find the moments of relief in your past work when, after having overcome resistance, you realized the intrinsic fairness of life. Remember how, after seeing the connections, you always felt much more secure about life. With this insight into hitherto obscure and unnamed reactions, you will have made the pain of injustice conscious.

This is why a path such as the one you are choosing for your development and growth, one that goes into these depths and hidden crevices, brings a new and true security. It eliminates the pain of injustice because it establishes connections between cause and effect in your own soul life that remain inaccessible as long as strong resistances are not overcome. Love of and trust in your helpers are commensurate with your goodwill and intent to help them help you see what you most deeply long for. How can you trust and believe in and experience a just universe unless you see plainly how every one of your actions, thoughts, hidden intentionalities, feelings and attitudes — positive and negative — has definitive results and effects? Little by little the personal connections unroll and reveal larger processes, gradually leading into the macrocosmic events. At first, almost all earthly events seem disconnected from one another. Things happen as if arbitrarily, nonsensically. Only when the microcosmic connections are being made do macrocosmic events reveal their meaning and connections, their causes and effects — at least to a degree.

As long as you live in the shell of matter, encased in time, there are many connections you can never fully make. They remain invisible, although at times you can intuitively sense some links. To understand that main connections exist needs faith. But true faith is to some degree experiential. It comes exactly because your inner process moves toward an increasing uncovering of connecting links. This movement allays the fear of the pain of injustice and heals the wounds it causes.

Think of your reactions when you witness earthly events of cruelty whose perpetrators seem to remain unapprehended, or when good deeds and genuine love and giving seem to elicit undeserved negative effects, or at least fail to produce just rewards. On some occasions it is possible to go beyond the surface and see deeper connections that reveal the perfect justice of life. In some instances it is truly a question of time. The connections and justice are not immediately visible, but the unrolling of time, in your dimension, makes the connections obvious. Time brings them eventually to the surface.

But in how many instances, in small issues as well as in large ones, in personal issues as well as in general and universal ones, it is quite impossible to see the connections! The unrolling of time extends beyond the human vision. All spiritual scriptures speak about the reality of ultimate justice, often perceived and experienced only after your body is left behind and your vision becomes more extended. The concept of the “Last Judgment” or “Judgment Day” is an intimation of this fact. These terms convey that there is a “time” after death when all is revealed. Human beings usually react unfavorably to this concept because they think of it in terms of a punishing deity, a cruel, unmerciful ruler who would impose more injustice on them. This ancient concept confused God with cruel earthly leaders and fathers. But the true meaning of the “final judgment” is the revealing of connections that show the unutterable beauty of the faultless justice of spiritual laws.

The joy and security of the discovery by far outweighs the personal price that needs to be paid for infringement of divine law. Even if negative karma results from the actions of a lifetime, it is joyfully undertaken once the covers fall off, because living in a just and trustworthy universe has much greater value. This is parallel to experiencing at certain stages on your path the relief of seeing cause and effect, even if it means paying the price.

On one level you resist, because you desire never to be accountable for your misdemeanors, never to have to pay the price. On a deeper level you dread this possibility, but you are also profoundly relieved to find out that every smallest particle of consciousness creates effects which, in turn, must come back to you and extract a price: positively, in a life-affirming way, or negatively, in a life-denying way, according to the cause.

How is it possible that all deeds, all attitudes, all ever so secret intentionalities can be accounted for, often decades later? How can someone’s life be adjudged long after the fact? It is important that you have some concept and understanding about the principle operating here. This will help you to open up your inner valves to intuitive experiences.

You already know that every human being contains an inner substance — sometimes referred to as “soul substance” — which reflects every particle of the person’s life. Nothing is lost, nothing glossed over. Every thought of any significance, every feeling, every intent, every will direction, every action — with all its ramifications — is imprinted into this substance and thereby made available to review. Thus a person’s life may be perused from every conceivable point of view. One’s life is truly an open book. You all contain an inner recording device, if you will. One of your greatest illusions — and you have many — is that thoughts and intentions and desires can be kept secret and should therefore have no impact. Individuals often feel resentful when others react to their unspoken intentions, their secret negative wishes, as if they should not count. Whatever seems to be got away with or unaccounted for in an individual’s life, good or bad, will ultimately be open and inevitably have its commensurate effects.

There are definite laws in operation that determine when effects follow causes — when and why, in certain instances, effects follow suit relatively quickly and are thereby immediately traceable, and when and why there is a longer time span between them. It would be much too complicated to delve into this now. All I can say at this time is that the more an entity is developed, the faster effects follow causes. Beings who are still relatively undeveloped find themselves in the darkness of groping through the webs of cause and effect, more often than not completely missing the connections, discovering them only much later, when the body is shed as a garment no longer needed.

Just as each individual carries his or her own inner soul tableau in which his or her personal records are kept, so does your planet have a soul substance into which all that ever happened on earth is imprinted and can be read as an immaculately kept record. Some human beings have special gifts of clairvoyance, through which parts of the world record are revealed to them. Of course, personal misinterpretations due to limited consciousness can distort their vision. Since the world recording system exists beyond three-dimensional time, the future — that is, certain possibilities of the reality which might most likely manifest — can be as available as the past.

The world substance is infinitely malleable, just as personal soul substance is. They are of the same “material.” Nothing that ever happened, is happening, will happen is ever lost. Everything automatically imprints itself in this substance. It does not only show the raw event — or even the plain simple thought, attitude or will direction. It also shows the most hidden motives, the most secret intention, the exact balance of ambivalent feelings and the real reasons for making a decision. It registers which alternative the individual or the collective entity is acting upon. In that way, no darkness or confusion can ever exist in the record. Much argument, dissension, painful struggling in dark and confused states of mind, is based on a most superficial level of awareness; the persons are nevertheless affected by the hidden levels of consciousness.

Clarity of vision totally eliminates all fear and pain of injustice. It shows without a doubt that you live in an infinitely just Creation in which no error is ever possible. But this awareness cannot be given gratuitously. Each entity must develop into it through struggle. This means overcoming the resistance to making every crevice of the self known and to taking responsibility for it. Scriptures of many religious and spiritual movements have always hinted at ultimate justice. “Judgment Day” means nothing else but this. It is human consciousness, with its present limitations, that interpreted judgment to imply an unloving attitude on the part of those who were supposed to judge, to imply unfairness, arbitrariness, rejection. This is clearly a projection of humanity’s own state of affairs. Divine justice is nothing more, nor less, than the full vision of all an entity expresses, so that the inevitable consequences become the measure and the medicine to grow into wholeness, that is, holiness.

You need to clearly understand and differentiate between the fear of and resistance to this full vision of unconcealed revelation of all that is — of the World Soul Substance that hides nothing — and the deepest longing in your soul for exactly this knowledge and experience. For only then will you heal the profoundly painful wound of believing that you live in an unreliable universe in which there exists no justice. You need to understand the deep struggle in your soul between these two opposite will directions. When you do so, you will be able to help its resolution with your clear consciousness. What your outer self often opposes most vigorously, your inner self longs for most ardently. When the outer self succeeds and rules the will direction of the manifest, acting personality, the inner self is in the greatest despair. You feel this despair sometimes only vaguely, at other times quite keenly, but you never understand it clearly. Often you misinterpret this despair and you blame life or others for it.

So, my friends, I say to you, experience the pain of believing you live in an unjust universe. Only when you establish full awareness of this specific pain, can you then, as the next step, establish full awareness of the struggle in you to heal this pain. They are two opposite will directions. At this point, you need to understand that there is no other cure for this specific pain but to obtain the relief you resist most, that is, to ascertain the connections between the causes you set in motion and their effects on yourself and others. Once you remove your wall of resistance, you will see how foolish it was to have it, and what a relief it is to see the orderliness, the beauty, the infinite merciful justice of Creation.

Become aware of living, breathing, and being in a living substance that registers at all times all that you are, all that you manifest, all that you express, all that you strive for. Your being, your aliveness has impact on the world you live in, whether you know it or not. Do not fear this fact, do not resist it. You fear and resist knowing this because you believe that your destructive aspects are your essence, your ultimate reality. That would indeed be unbearable. That alternative is whispered into your ears by the forces of darkness whose interest it is that you remain in pain, fear and confusion, disconnected from the greater reality of life. In the darkness you prefer to struggle with the pain of an unjust universe, rather than see the beauty and justice of God’s creation and discover that you are ultimately good.

So you need to pray for the faith in your ultimate divine essence that can fully reveal itself only when you recognize what covers it up. This step of courage and faith is exactly what you need to take on your path, again and again. The awareness of having impact on life through your very being, through simply existing, will give you a tremendous sense of peace and a sense of your own values rather than frighten you. It will motivate you to unfold all your still dormant divine potentials, with which you will then mold ever-newly unfolding life.

Life’s infinite possibilities depend on every single created conscious entity, on each entity’s decision, in every fraction of time, which way to go, which way to think, act and will. You are the director of your thoughts. Your thoughts do not befall you. Through your thoughts, you create the flow of feelings and the direction of your vital energies. The You that can make these decisions is the already-manifest divinity. It is an illusion to believe that by not making decisions in your thoughts, opinions or acts, you have no impact. Even when you actively choose, you often doubt that your decisions have impact. How much more will you doubt when it comes to your non-actions, your lukewarm withholding or not taking a stand, not actively searching for truth at all times! The reality is that your non-actions are actions in themselves that have every bit as much impact as your overt actions. Your soul substance registers the hidden motives for non-action. It registers feelings and attitudes that are contained behind the decision not to act.

Since you are consciousness, since you are a divine manifestation, you cannot help breathing into the world substance by virtue of simply existing. All consciousness does that. Being must affect life, simply being. Be aware of the great privilege, the great power, the dignity, the infinite possibility that this confers on you. Know that each thought you harbor is a distinct energy formation, sending out waves and rays, creating according to the nature of the thought. Open your eyes to the beauty of the fact that you are, with your present limited consciousness, already a co-creator of reality. You can represent God on the level of manifest, material, three-dimensional reality, or you can do the devil’s work — unwittingly in your case, but no less harmfully.

Allow yourself to ponder, to meditate, to visualize that — by simply being — you send out constant rays that convey a meaning which creates distinct effects. Let this new vision lend a new dignity to your life, a new motive for becoming as creative as possible through your very being, for finding the peace and security your soul has desired for such a long time: to know that there is perfect, sublime, infallible justice in the world you live in.

My beloved friends, your sphere is ready for new and higher values, for new understanding and a deepening of insight about the nature of life. Our world is actively involved with awakening this new awareness and encouraging it to express itself in practical ways. We have made many inroads through various channels, various types of divine influx, all over your world. Little by little new ideas are spreading from various sources. Since the forces of darkness have their power over your sphere, it is unavoidable that these new values and ideas are, at times, polluted and distorted. Nevertheless, the power of awakening and growing consciousness cannot be halted. The current is in flux. The great waters of truth, of love, of wisdom, of divine reality, of the Christ consciousness seek their channels and break through obstructions. Every one of you can be instrumental in removing more of the obstructions and halting the pollution of these clear waters.

The earth consciousness is ready for a great new step. As with individual consciousness, so with a collective entity: if overall growth and potential for more understanding and for acceptance of truer, divine values is hindered by parts that resist this movement, crisis and pain are inevitable. Pain and crisis are much more severe in these instances than when the overall consciousness is less developed and, therefore, on a more even keel. I have said this many times before, in different contexts. World history gives you a clear map of this phenomenon. Whenever there was war and world catastrophe, the entity earth was ready to take a step in its growth process, in the expansion of its collective consciousness, but parts of the entity hindered it through succumbing to resistances. These resistances came from quarters that either deliberately or unwittingly listened to the inspiration of evil entities and then gained power and influence over the rest of the world. Those who listened to and followed these powerful factions were, in their own way, as responsible as those who were directly instrumental in halting the process of unfoldment.

Now your earth sphere is ready for a big step forward. All the inner faculties have been prepared for this step. The forces of darkness know this and use every means at their disposal to halt the process. If they succeed, or to the degree they succeed, world crisis ensues. Every one of you has been prepared through your personal path, in which you have liberated yourself from much confusion and pain, from much guilt and fear, and in which you continue to cultivate this process and bring it to fruition. Cultivating the process in your own life enables you to become intensely aware of what is at stake here, of how instrumental you, as an individual, can be: first by creating truth and order within yourself and then, as a result of this, by helping to do the same for the entity earth.

You often speak of your “outreach program.” I say to you, my friends, that your world is indeed ready to listen, to hear, and to begin to make the effort to understand the new values and truths you are constantly learning here. Many of these values have already become second nature to you. Other values you perceive only as vague outlines and you struggle to make them part of you. Be that as it may, you — this community as a whole — are ready to reach out and present to the world much of what you have learned. When you become more aware of the power you have to mold life, you will avail yourself of this positive power and will be open to the guidance that wants to come through many of you, to reach into your surrounding world in many different ways.

I ask you to make every effort possible to comprehend this lecture. Complete this understanding by linking it up with the preceding lectures of this year. Your awareness is growing by leaps and bounds. Inner knowing is seeping through, bringing you a vision of the world as it really is. Knowledge, the experiential knowing of infinite justice, must give you the peace and security you long for in your heart. Know that all you are, all you think, will, and feel, is impressed into a malleable universe. Do not let the initial fear of this thought drive you back into your world of darkness, fear, resistance, distrust and pain — the pain of injustice. This pain of injustice can only be healed when you muster the courage of allowing yourself to know that your negativity causes pain to others and to yourself, that it has definite consequences. The courage and truthfulness of this realism, the maturity of this attitude must — far from indicating a hopeless state in you and in your relationship to God — restore your faith in Christ, in love, in goodness, in mercy, in the world as it is created. It will restore your soul, your faith in yourself and in God and in all that is good.

Since life is change, your lower self is also a constantly changing aspect of life. It contains innate capacities to transform the worst into the best. Taking responsibility for the lower self is no longer so difficult for most of you. You have learned to do so and thereby you have gained new freedom and new self-esteem. What is still difficult for you to accept is the fact that lower-self aspects have effects, and they influence more of your thinking and acting, your perceptions and your reactions, than you wish to admit. It is this very fear that causes the deeper fear of injustice. In not facing the consequences of the lower self, you try to cultivate the illusion that there are no effects. If you pursue this line of inner, unconscious reasoning to its logical end, you create an imaginary world of injustice. This suits the wishful thinking of the lower self and makes you afraid of the consequences you yourself create.

Use this clear indicator, this key: to the degree you experience fears and anxiety, to that degree you feel the pain of an unjust universe, and to the exact same degree you do not want to know that your lower self has effects and consequences. Conversely, to the degree you name the fear, you look into the pain of injustice that gnaws at your insides. Furthermore, to the degree you overcome the resistance to seeing how you wish to disconnect from the consequences of lower-self attitudes, to that exact same degree you will free yourself of an immeasurable burden and will gain a deep new security: the security that all is very well with life.

You are all blessed, my beloved friends. Many of you have learned much in your innermost being. Many of you are struggling in your growth and, as I said before, it is a noble struggle that elevates you in the best sense of the word. Continue this good struggle, be an instrument for God’s Great Plan, put yourself under Christ’s protective energy and consciousness. You live in a sea of love, you breathe into a universe of sheer goodness. Make yourself conscious of this most beautiful of all facts of life!