Pathwork Additional Material No. 1

May 5, 1972

QUESTIONS TO BE ANSWERED BY HELPERS AND WORKERS

Greetings my beloved friends. God's blessings, God's power and love are streaming forth once again. Make room for the Divine Consciousness that you are and very calmly turn inward for a moment, and let it manifest through you. Trust it to free you of your shackles, of your negativities, which you think you must hold on to because they are the only things that seems to be your real self. Allow your true identity, your divinity to manifest itself through you and into your awareness. You will then recognize that it is all one, yours and everyone else's. Out of that a wonderful flow and unity will spread and will become more securely anchored in you.

Now in tonight's session I would like to start by speaking to you about the significance of this group. I have spoken about this before, but as you grow and develop in this work it will have more meaning for you. I would like first of all to say to you what it can increasingly become. Then I will give you some advice and suggestions on how each one of you can help the realization of these potentialities and what measures you can undertake to speed this along. Most of you who are involved in this Pathwork have begun to establish a much more honest and clean inner situation in which you are more open to and therefore more aware of the negative side. As you do this, you also ultimately become more familiar with the best in you. This is the progression. There is an apparently paradoxical but really very meaningful spiritual law that the more you develop the more you experience the urgent pressure created in you by the undeveloped facets of your personality. Now the group as a whole has developed sufficiently so as to create some nucleus of security, good feelings and friendship. But by no means have all the potentialities been realized. I am not only speaking of the ultimate potentialities of divinity that exist in every human being and which often take hundreds and hundreds of years to come to fruition. I am now talking about something much more immediate, which could become a reality within the next few years.

If you consider this potentiality, if you fully understand it, know it, and take it into your consciousness, if you have formulated a concept, and an idea about its realization, then your striving will become much more meaningful and more energized.

Now let us first consider for a few minutes what the meaning of such a group as yours is, even for your immediate selfish interests, quite apart from the ultimate goal of spiritual development, which is truly the reason for existence in this life. Your immediate selfish reasons for such a group is that it can be, and has indeed begun to be, the ideal family you long for in your heart of hearts. Now what does that really mean, the ideal family? This does not mean parents in the sense of the infant who does not want to stand on his own two feet, and wants to be a parasite and be taken care of. It certainly does not mean that. This is a false ideal that can never be realized. But there is a real ideal that can be reached, a simple concept, such as the justified trust that you can be accepted for whom you really are. You will give yourself the chance to experience this by risking and you will risk showing yourself in the measure you learn to accept yourself for who you really are. Do not run from this into all your evasions and defenses and therefore confusions and alienation from your center. If you accept yourself you can accept others and you can take risks in which you can expose who you really are. You have indeed already begun to experience this in your group my friends -- I mean this group as a whole. But you have only done so in a very minimal way and a lot more can be done. Just imagine the blissfulness of being really yourself and knowing you do not have to perform. You do not have to put up an image and a pretense. You can be accepted and loved for who you are.

Now these are qualities of an ideal family in the real sense, not in the illusory neurotic sense. This group can be a real family with real friendship in the most real sense of the word. You are here for each other. You need each other in the deepest possible way. Your real needs will be heard but not the neurotic ones. Your real needs will be met, you will be given friendship, understanding, good feelings, warmth. You long for all this my friends, from the bottom of your heart; you crave for it. In the course of this work, you become increasingly aware that you are inwardly pining for this closeness and in despair for it, and you are running from pillar to post to obtain it, but mostly you go about it in the wrong way. You are running after it in neurotic deviated ways, concealing your desire, not showing it, projecting, and misplacing and not knowing what you really respond to and why. But as you find yourself in this work you become more aware, first of what your neurotic unreal needs are, and consequently of what your real needs are. And as you become more honest and you can see the dishonest games you play with your life, you can shed them. You can risk being real. To the degree you risk being real you fulfill yourself and you find real friends and a spiritual family who is in an equal frame of mind.

Now in regard to this work you all act more or less as though it were a chore you have to get over with in order to start living outside this work. This is a very distorted attitude. In reality the bonds of friendship, love and understanding, of mutual acceptance and aid, are created within the working group. And it is within that you will increasingly find the kindred spirits and the fulfillment you really seek in your heart of hearts. This of course does not mean that you must give up other friendships. Closeness and friendship within will be a very natural development in which you will just simply find the attunement, the alignment, the compatibility, the relaxation and ease with one another and that will be the ultimate luxury. You will breathe easily and you will not feel constrained when you come here. This is an inevitable by-product of the work; at the beginning everything is reversed.

When I say the beginning I mean a period that may last for quite a number of years, when on an outer level you perhaps find yourself more relaxed with people you are already conditioned to respond to according to your masks and your pretenses; in situations where you are not being taxed to be real. So you are for all intents and purposes more comfortable, when these demands on your real self are not being made. When you come into such a group as this, you feel a tremendous strain because of what you see as a demand that you not function with the old faking maneuvers. Your old tricks become transparent and this at first makes you uncomfortable. But as you become more real in your process of growth this feeling reverses itself.

Even at the beginning you know perfectly well that you function on a very superficial level with people; even if you are not aware of it, something in you will find out sooner or later that this superficial level is a phoney level, a very limited level of your being. As one aspect of your being tries to deepen a relationship, you find yourself stymied; you're bored, you're frustrated. You can only go deeper and satisfy your inner yearning when you learn to be real and therefore to communicate with people on a deeper level. As you grow, the emphasis changes and your reactions become reversed. You become more interested, more relaxed, more stimulated, among friends who are involved in a similar search for their real selves and who encourage you to show yourself. As a result you become uninterested and depleted (energy-wise depleted) with people with whom you cannot be real, who demand of you to put up your false fronts, and go back to functioning on a superficial level.

At this point many of you find yourselves in an in-between state, and that accounts for a lot of your confusions and your tensions. You do not yet know that part of you is already extremely unsatisfied with a life in which you cannot be your real self -- even if that still limited real self needs to expose your negativities, your phoniness, your dishonesties. You can do this here and to some extent you do. However, there are still strains and fears in you because you are not yet quite willing, you are not yet committed to go all the way. If you understand this you will find many answers; perhaps a nervousness, an anxiety, a tension will be a little bit relieved at this moment. By making a total commitment to yourself to be real, to want a real life with real people and therefore have real friendships, real family bonds, real communion and communications, real exchanges, you will free yourself. As you make this commitment you will find yourself more and more relaxed and less and less threatened by the environment in which lies your fulfillment.

Within the nucleus of your growing community you will find your fulfillment, your unique contribution to life. You will find the kindred spirits. You will find true exchange of love and communication. This is the importance and the full significance of the plan of evolution and development from the spiritual point of view. It must always be commensurate with the joyousness and the fullness of living of the people who contribute to such a venture, with the deep sense of fulfillment that must come as a part of it. To all of you, my friends, who work on the Path, who search within yourselves, who make your first tentative steps or already more advanced steps, I say this: keep this goal and this understanding in mind, and you will have a clearer perspective of where you are going, and what this group means to you. By investing of yourself into it, through your work and your participation in it, you create for yourself the fulfillment that you so ardently crave for in your innermost self.

So much of mankind finds itself in a paradoxical situation. On the one hand, they scream in hopelessness and despair for fulfillment, and yet when it comes to taking the steps that would actually bring this fulfillment, they revolt and struggle against them. This is mankind's folly. If you can truly see this, you will already be in a different position with yourself, and something will click into place.

The most important aspect of the nucleus of this group is of course the Training Group. It is the nucleus of the nucleus. To cultivate it is therefore of the greatest importance. Nothing could be more important.

Now I would like to make a few suggestions for the helpers, for the training group, and also for what you call "the workers," the people who work on the Path with a helper. The training group itself can first realize the more immediate potentials -- not the ultimate ones as applied to all mankind. Be closer to each other, be more open, more loving, more joyful, more honest. Help one another thereby removing feelings of strangeness, or of being threatened or anxious. I have one immediate suggestion here that I think you will find extremely beneficial. In your next training group meeting, arrange to spend a whole day and an evening together -- a marathon so to speak -- and really work with one another and enjoy yourselves with each other. It should be both work and joy together for they are not mutually exclusive. It should not be entered into in a spirit of chore and hardship. Its aim is to bring you closer together and it should be entered into in a spirit of joyousness. Say everything you have on your mind about yourselves or each other. Open your hearts and your minds. Truly listen to each other. Truly try to leave defenses aside. Make room for the possibility that what you hear from each other may have some value. Meditate with one another, ask for guidance. Enjoy yourselves in the work, have a break and then go back to work. But stay together a whole day. It should not prove too difficult to arrange. Every possible guidance will be extended. Do not hold anything back whether it concerns yourselves or each other. The more you can open your heart to each other the more you will fortify the bond of love and understanding, the more joyous your nucleus will become and the more effective your help will be.

I have several questions I would like to pose to you. First to the helpers. You should not answer these questions right now, but you should think about them and answer them to yourselves. Then you can all bring your answers to the training group meeting and share them with each other.

1) How far are you advanced in your having established a true connection with your divine self? How far can you really communicate with it, experience its reality? To what extent do you feel blocked? Discuss this. Ask each other's advice. Try to put shame and competitiveness aside. You are not in a race and you do not have to prove yourself. Each individual is different. You should not compare yourselves to one another; you cannot be "graded." A person who may have a very occasional inkling may be just as far advanced as someone else. I have said this many times before. You cannot compare two human beings. It is one of the ego's tricks to do this. It is an absolute aspect of egotism and separateness. Try to desist from this. Be each true to yourself wherever you are. Therefore, do not attempt to "perform" for the audience. That would be a very disturbing motivation. But at the same time do not fail to realize that not being in communication with your divine self has a meaning. What is the meaning? How and where do you block and resist to establish communication with your true being, with your ultimate spiritual self? With the eternal creator who manifests through you? Proceed and allow others to help you. In this marathon you should also openly discuss your positive and negative motivation for being a helper.

2) To what degree and in what respect do you feel threatened by your friends, by your peers? To what extent do you wish to appear better than you are, or better than the others? Try to see the correlation between that and the feeling of threat and anxiety. And see that to the extent you are threatened, you do not want to be simple and just you. Never mind other people's opinion. As you speak about the threat and you see where it comes from, a lot of that feeling of threat and anxiety will go away. As you find your true being and your true self-acceptance you will also find acceptance by the group and that will establish real friendship. To the degree you do not have self-acceptance, you do not have friendship. Speak about your resistances and how they manifest.

I would say these are the basic questions that my beloved friends who are helpers need to ponder about and answer. If you go as deeply as you can and make this a joyful occasion, I cannot tell you what a blessing it will be.

And now I want to direct some suggestions and questions to the workers; everyone who is in the work should ask himself:

1) To what degree do you fully participate in the available activities? And if you find you do not do this, can you give a truthful answer as to why not? Try for a real answer not an excuse, or an evasion. If you are really truthful you will ultimately and inevitably come to the answer that is the nucleus of your problem. You want to help the way of the ego, not the way of the real self. You want help on the terms of the little ego where the aim is not to give up the destructive defenses, but to keep them and yet make your life O.K.; to not love and give in the real sense; to not play it straight with life and be honest with yourself and life in a real sense. Therefore certain aspects of the work are still threatening to you. You do not want to really expose completely who you are. And you will avoid those areas that appear most threatening, where you are most called upon to be real. Of course this principle applies to everyone, including the helpers, only it is assumed that the helpers will naturally participate in all activities as a precondition. But even the helpers can and should ask themselves, "Where do I feel most threatened? Where is my resistance greatest?" For helpers and workers alike, there is no better tool and more direct help than to go exactly where you are most frightened to go. When you feel lonely and unfulfilled, to the degree you go into the areas you are most threatened of and resistant to, to that degree your unfulfillment will give way to fulfillment. So ask yourself where your resistance is greatest. For that will be a wonderful yardstick for you.

2) To what degree do you trust your helper on the deepest level? To really expose the most secret of shames. Many, many times the holding back from your helper is not merely the unconscious material because of course if you are not conscious how can you possibly expose it? But I mean even conscious thoughts, suspicions, ideas, and feelings. Expose them for if you do not do so, you will have a festering sore which will come between you and your helper, and between you and your progress. Therefore, I say open up. Open up to your helper, not with the fixed idea that everything is the way you think; it may be that way to some degree, more or less, or it may not be that way at all. Keep it light. Keep it open. And above all, be in good faith and test yourself. Do you have a stake in a negative interpretation about your helper? And if you do, admit it.

Let the truth come in; ask God in you "I want the truth," and you will find out what the truth is. But risk the exposure by expressing your suspicions, open your heart and open your mind to learning different opinions and views from your helper and then look and hear and observe. It may take some time before you have a complete answer. But do not push it aside. Air out your suspicions. Your helper has to be big enough to deal with this. If he or she is not, then it is up to him or her to learn this. And that is something to be learned on the Path. The more open you are, the more genuine trust can be established. If you do not trust your helper, if you hold everything in, you cannot go very far. This will be a wonderful test for both helper and worker. How does the helper listen? How does the worker risk and expose? How then does the helper do likewise? Do not come to your helper accusingly but come questioningly. Say "I have such and such a suspicion, such and such a feeling. I must also turn the searchlight of my suspicion toward myself. Possibly I have a stake in believing this but what is the truth from your point of view?" If the helper is truthful you will sooner or later find out. You do not have to take his or her word. In that way true communication can be established, and it will be wonderful.

My beloved friends, if you follow through with these suggestions and these steps, you will see the dormant potentiality of this group awaken into a more living, organic, loving center of friendship and true family life, of true giving and receiving, true help and support of each other. If you follow my advice, and you answer these questions, everyone of you and the group as a whole will benefit from the new growth and expansion which has started already. Be blessed, be in peace.