The Text - Section 253
253. CONTINUE YOUR STRUGGLE AND CEASE ALL STRUGGLE
Divine and joyful blessings, my beloved friends. Your tasks are becoming more joyful, more
fulfilling, more noticeably meaningful. Your inner paths bring outer meaning to your life. As your
community grows, the cleansing process must be an inexorable byproduct, my beloved ones. As
you cleanse yourselves inwardly and leave behind aspects of your personality that are not compatible
with your newly awakening self, so must the entity Pathwork do the same.
Now we begin a new working season. Much expansion, excitement, fulfillment and many
challenges await you. Even the unavoidable hardships must ultimately become steps leading to
greater harmony and ecstasy.
In the great plan, also called the Plan of Salvation, the earth sphere is meant to change
gradually into a more spiritual abode of unity, harmony and light. This cannot, of course, be a
process given from outside. It can only come about through a transformation of consciousness in
the earth's inhabitants. Transformation of consciousness comes about as a result of laborious inner
work -- the work of self-confrontation and purification -- which leads to finding deeper inner levels
of reality that were hitherto disconnected from your conscious being.
As the earth transforms, those individual consciousnesses who cannot and will not follow this
process of growth and development will create a new abode, with conditions similar to those that
still prevail in this earth sphere. However, these conditions have begun to change already among a
relatively small section of the earth's inhabitants. As time goes on, the number of those who
contribute to the change will increase. Your specific path is a potent agent to bring this change
about in the shortest time. What might otherwise take many incarnations for the individual could be
accomplished in one lifetime, if the pathwork is truly followed to its maximum potential. Such
transformations have already been witnessed among you and are experienced by some of you as a
strong sense of being reborn in this very lifetime.
I would like to discuss a particular aspect of this transformation of consciousness, giving
special emphasis to what was previously discussed only in general. Humanity's greatest
imprisonment, from which stems all fear and pain and suffering, is the duality in which the human
mind is entangled. The mass mind then builds an environment and creates conditions that express
this bent of consciousness. It is perhaps the most difficult task of the evolutionary journey to
penetrate this seeming reality, namely, that the world is dualistic.
You seem to be put into an entirely objective world, all fixed and ready-made. All conditions
and natural laws seem to be unalterable givens upon which your state of consciousness has no
influence whatever. To submit to this false reality seems indeed the most "realistic" and sane
acceptance of life. The problem is that to a certain degree this is indeed so. It is necessary to accept
the world as you find it and deal with it on its own terms. For even after your own consciousness
begins to change and transcend this reality, the creation of the mass mind still remains intact. In that
transitional state, the individual lives in both realities. He or she fully accepts the created, dualistic
reality, but at the same time recognizes the new vision gradually emerging through the fog. Most of
you know this new vision in your mind, but few of you have begun even occasionally to experience
its reality: the absolute knowledge that there is only good, that there is eternal life, peace, joy,
excitement, meaning, that there is nothing to fear, that there is no more pain. This state of ultimate
reality also contains the knowledge that you create your world, your conditions, your environment.
Rather than burdening you, this knowledge gives you an immense sense of liberation and safety.
Non-acceptance of the conditions of the dualistic world -- because of the vague knowledge of
another state that can be attained -- is an aberration. It expresses the childish desire to gain
omnipotence in a cheap and easy way. Those who indulge in it delude themselves that they can
avoid -- by an outer act of sheer will -- the developmental stages that sometimes must include
temporary suffering. Thus we have the apparent paradox that glimpsing ultimate reality in a false
way leads to more unreality than not glimpsing it at all and fully accepting the conditions of the
dualistic mass illusion. But when the limitations of these life conditions are fully accepted and the
personality deals with them honestly, maturely, productively and constructively, then the inner
evolutionary process continues organically and the mind begins to encompass other visions that
were invisible before. To deal fully with your limited reality must include a process of stringent self-
work, such as the pathwork offers.
Progress in this inner work brings about many changes -- changes of attitude, of intentionality,
of feelings, opinions, of your world view and, finally, changes in perceiving reality. A simple and
current example, on a very practical level, is precisely what all of you continually experience on this
path. You start out seeing a certain condition in your life in a specific way. Let us say, you are
convinced that circumstances victimize you, that other people are doing you a great wrong, that you
have no recourse to change these conditions unless the others change their attitude and behavior
toward you. Most of you have felt something like this. In such a situation you start out with a very
firmly held conviction. Everything you can observe bears out this conviction. In fact, the more
convinced you are, the more "proof" you will be able to collect as to the accuracy of your
conviction. This self-perpetuating vicious circle, this law that manipulates your vision according to
your conviction, is an ensnarlment of the mind that is very hard to overcome.
Only as a result of much goodwill on your part to open your mind, to let go -- at least
temporarily -- of your conviction, will you begin to recognize new aspects that you could never see
before. Perhaps you will see how you actively contributed to the situation that seemed to place all
the responsibility on the other person. You may recognize, on even deeper levels, a definite
intentionality to create a negative situation. This recognition will automatically shift the total picture.
Not that it will place all the burden of guilt on you now and necessarily make a victim out of the
previous villain, but you probably will see how you mutually affected each other.
This comprehension will open new vistas. You will soon come to recognize hitherto
unsensed aspects of yourself and of the others involved -- both good and bad, favorable and
unfavorable. Underneath the duality of good versus bad you will find one day an ultimate,
unchangeable level of truth in which all is good in a new, different, more alive and very dynamic
way.
I have used a familiar example that demonstrates the process of extending human vision to
new realities. Here you can find that the previous limitation was inaccurate, mostly because of its
exclusivity. You saw the picture out of context with some elements missing, and without
cognizance of these the total picture was distorted. It was not false because your view was
necessarily untrue in itself, but it was false because you left out essential elements that are necessary
to view the picture in its totality. What I am trying to convey is that many levels of reality are valid
about one and the same situation, condition, circumstance. By knowing this, you will beware of
quick evaluations, and you will assume the responsibility to search, to grope, to make the effort to
extend your vision.
The same process applies to the world and its natural laws, as you know them. Your world
view is based on a very incomplete vision in which your limited perception filters what goes into
your consciousness. You see only what appears most obvious and you see it on an entirely
superficial level. But as you grow, as your perception of reality about your personal circumstances
widens, so does your perception of creation begin to alter, to widen and deepen. You glimpse
connections you have never seen before, and which are now as obvious as the limited reality you had
perceived previously.
The dualistic world view seems an incontrovertible fact. Not to see your world in terms of
opposites, of duality, appears the crassest form of delusion. And it is true indeed that on the level of
appearance duality is a fact. Life seems to die, evil always lurks somewhere in the shadows no
matter how much good also exists. Light opposes darkness, night opposes day, where there is
health there is also sickness. Yet another reality awaits to be recognized underneath the level of
opposites. Since living on the level of duality brings pain and strain, it is the soul's greatest longing
to find the deeper level of truth. The longing, as I often said, exists regardless of whether or not a
person is conscious of it. It fills the heart precisely because it is within an individual's potential to
awaken into this new level of consciousness at some point of his or her evolutionary journey.
I have talked about this before. I mention it now because I wish to show you more
specifically how to attain this new level of perception and of being. You must clearly understand
that this goal cannot be reached by using the outer will alone. It cannot come about as a result of
philosophical speculation or theoretical knowledge, or even as a result of specific exercises, methods
or disciplines. The change of consciousness happens entirely due to an intensely personal
purification process that, to begin with, always deals with the most mundane matters of your
practical life, with your attitudes toward them and toward your surroundings. Practical everyday
matters are always an expression of inner, subtle, and finally spiritual attitudes. To skip them and
consider them irrelevant only leads to further separation -- the duality of spirituality versus practical
life -- and therefore ultimately to a delusionary spirituality that is not grounded in the Now. This is
why you find this path so intensely practical and utterly compatible with your life of matter, your
daily activities and your goals. The path is not only compatible with your daily life, but it is a
discovery and an expression of the most subtle spiritual -- or anti-spiritual -- attitudes.
Let us now attempt to be a little more specific about attaining the new consciousness in which
creation is no longer perceived in terms of duality. Perhaps we should begin by pointing out how
painful and fearful duality really is. For this is often so taken for granted that you cannot even
perceive the pain and the fear. You do not know anything else. This is all there is, so how could
you even begin to chafe under it? The dynamics are similar to a child's hardly feeling his painful
conditions simply because he does not know what other, better conditions might exist. To change
existing conditions, one must feel them as so undesirable that the effort is well worth taking. But
one must also know that they can be changed, that other possibilities do indeed exist.
Most human beings do not know that duality is painful, nor how painful it really is. Nor do
they know that another perception and another view exist, another way of living, that totally
eliminates this pain. Living trapped in the limited world of duality, you always fear the undesirable
and strain away from it toward the desirable. This very straining is extremely painful and anxiety-
producing, but it becomes conscious only after you have accomplished a great deal of crude
purification work, such as you are involved with now. If you try to eliminate a specific strain before
the purification work is fully part of your daily life, you will skip important steps and the process
cannot take place in an organic, grounded way. So what I shall discuss now may not yet be
appropriate for a number of my friends, but I believe it will help all of you to comprehend some of
these aspects, even before you are ready to put the emphasis on this new phase on your personal
path. If you can connect with some of my words it may help you to deepen your understanding of
yourself already as you do the simple purification work.
In considering reality and the deeper truth we are obviously talking about different states of
mind. If the mind becomes more firmly entrenched in the painful, fearful dualism through straining
from the undesirable alternative, then it follows that you must give up the straining. Yet how can I
say to you, do not wish for happiness as opposed to suffering, life as opposed to death, health as
opposed to illness? You would hardly be human if you would not deeply desire happiness, life,
health.
But there is a state of mind in which the straining relaxes, in which the undesirable can be
dealt with in an almost similar spirit and attitude as the desirable. This may appear very strange to
you now, but I truly say to you, my beloved friends, this is indeed so. Perhaps the first step toward
this particular state is to pay attention to the byproducts in your feelings, thoughts and attitudes as
you experience either a desirable or an undesirable state. If the desirable occurs, you are most likely
to feel faith in the Lord, to experience His reality and connect with the Christ within. You can be
joyful in the knowledge that all is well in this world.
I now address myself to individuals who do believe in and can experience occasionally
spiritual reality beyond the earth reality, and not to people who have never as yet experienced this
level of being. It is infinitely more difficult to maintain the same faith, the same knowing, when the
undesirable experiences occur. The feelings immediately fluctuate like the needle in a compass. Just
begin to observe your moods. When do doubts come up? What brings on the doubts? Are they
not always in some way connected with whether or not the desirable goal is attained?
The Christed person does not experience these fluctuations. The outer experience in no way
influences which level of reality he or she is connected with. It is indeed true that such a person
reacts to pain no differently than to pleasure. In that way pain and pleasure become indeed one and
the same. To put it differently, such a person transcends duality.
This kind of detachment from pleasure or pain is strongly fostered by Eastern religions, as
well as by the Western mystics. These disciplines negate worldly fulfillment and consider it an
antithesis to the goal of spiritual self-realization. The pursuit of detachment leads to all the
disciplines of asceticism and to deliberately-imposed suffering. Yet, valuable as these approaches
may be up to a degree, does not the deliberate negation of the desirable lead to a similar state of
duality, only approached from the other end? Whoever denies the undesirable is not much different
from one who denies the desirable and does not permit himself to rejoice in it.
Another kind of contradiction also exists that has led to many confusions in the human mind,
particularly among spiritual aspirants. If, as spiritual teachers and seers claim, God's will is your
happiness, your human fulfillment, your health, your well-being, your healing when you are ill, your
productivity and success in life, how then can you negate this life that the Creator has given you?
Does it seem right to abdicate all material existence and deny its desirable aspects because you know
that there exists a deeper, much more permanent state of mind in which you can experience life and
fulfillment without the breaks that are part and parcel of the dualistic state of mind?
All these questions seem fraught with conflict and contradiction -- at least on this level of
reality. In a deeper sense there are no contradictions at all. It is perfectly possible to rejoice in
worldly fulfillments as expressions of inner states, while no longer straining toward one state and
away from another. This latter attitude can exist only when you deeply know that ultimately there is
the reality of God, of life eternal and of fulfillment and well-being in every possible way. Because
you have attained a state without straining, you glimpse and finally experience this other reality. Or,
you can relinquish the straining because you have glimpsed this state. It must be approached from
both ends.
It would be virtually impossible to start out with an attempt to feel the same way about two
opposites. You could not possibly make yourself react the same way to pleasure as to pain. It is a
natural movement of the human manifestation to strain toward pleasure and away from pain. Even
the often-encountered fear and denial of pleasure is essentially nothing but another version of fear
and denial of pain. How then is one to start, you may well ask. As long as the strain between two
opposites of a duality exists, you must live in fear, in inner tension, and you cannot realize your
ultimate state of unity in which there is no death and no pain.
The way to go about it at first is to stand back and truly observe your reactions to pain and
pleasure, to life and death. These reactions contain a great deal of material that you need to see
clearly but that you generally ignore. Your reactions have become second nature, so that you cannot
see the forest for the trees. Fear and desire are only the most common denominators that designate
a host of other feelings and attitudes. In your fear of death and of pain, and in your movement to
strain away from them, there is usually a great deal of anger, bitterness and resentment. These
feelings are not directed toward a specific person or deity. They form a more general, diffuse, but
nevertheless quite distinct state of mind. These feelings of bitterness and anger become so absorbed
into the system that they themselves turn into the pain you strain away from. In other words, what
started out as a small pain manifestation and what might dissolve smoothly and relatively soon,
becomes more firmly entrenched and aggravated. It is, once again, not so much the angry feelings
themselves as their suppression and repression that cause the strain. The fact that you are unaware
of them and they can therefore exist underground causes the damaging effect. Therefore you need
to make these reactions very clear and conscious.
This is in a certain way more difficult than with anger directed toward specific individuals and
specific events. The latter may contradict your idealized self-image, your moral standards, your
overall personality, but the former anger feels very irrational and unreasonable. An ordinary person
may fear that it is a symptom of insanity to rile against what life is known to be. How can you
"reasonably" resent the existence of death? How can you be angry about it? How can you even be
angry that you, like all other humans, fall occasionally ill and suffer pain? Yet there exists a rage
toward life and creation in all human souls before realization of the unitive, deathless, painless state
has been attained. The feeling is, if it were articulated: How can life -- God -- be so cruel as to
impose at the end of one's existence an inevitable event that is unfathomable, that is totally
unknown, that is deeply threatening because it may be the end of one's being?
No matter how certain individuals who have come to embrace atheism claim to have accepted
the idea that they will no longer exist once they die, in this very "acceptance" lies the ultimate rage.
Atheism itself is a manifestation of extreme bitterness against a creation that seems so utterly
senseless and arbitrary that no recourse exists. Atheism is the movement that cuts off any
sensibilities and sensitivities to the perception of deeper and different realities.
There can never be a genuine "acceptance" of ending one's being. Such false acceptance is
always either an angry, bitter resignation or despair about life and its pains. At the same time,
accepting eternal life can also come from identical reasons of fear. So you need to go through your
inner fear and your previously unconscious anger, bitterness or rage at life for imposing death and
pain on you, for putting you in a position in which you find yourself helpless against these common
human experiences. As you become aware of these feelings and accept their apparent
unreasonableness and childishness, you will then be able to make new connections. You will see
how these unrecognized feelings have channelled themselves and in what particular way they have
found expression. Since this kind of deflection can never lead to clarity and truth, to harmony and
unity, the deflection leads you further away from the fulfillment of your soul's longing -- namely the
real inner knowing of the unitive state.
The less aware you are of what you feel about these very general existential matters of life, the
more irrational these feelings will become; the less you can permit yourself to face them -- or so you
believe -- the more deflected they will be. You become more ensnarled in the dualistic state with all
its painful strains and anxieties. Denied fear creates more fear. Denied longing and desire create
anxiety, not peace. Only the courage to go through these feelings will purify them until they emerge
as gold does in the hands of the alchemist. Both the fear and the desire will become a driving force,
in a most positive sense, to find your longing, to find that in your longing exists a kernel of true
knowing about the reality of fulfillment.
From this state of transmuting your irrational feeling comes, first slowly and with many
interruptions, a state in which you want life not because you fear death, but because you know that
there is no death. You know that leaving the body brings a better life. These words have often been
spoken but they are rarely experienced as inner truth. To do so, a specific approach on your path,
such as I outline here, must be pursued. There is a vast difference between hanging on to life
because you fear annihilation of all you are and have become, and affirming life because you cherish
the task your life on earth means. You may rejoice in bringing parts of the greater, real life into this
limited dualistic plane and in thus spiritualizing the matter you temporarily inhabit.
The same applies to pain and painful experiences. If one suspects pain to be the ultimate
reality, there must be a lot of anger connected with experiencing it. If pain is assumed to come only
to life's stepchildren, this, too, must create bitterness and rage. Often, these feelings augment the
pain, extend it, until the pain can become the medicine it is meant to be. Then you can use it as the
indicator of these other feelings, so as to ferret them out and become acutely conscious of them. If
you defend against pain even on the deepest possible psychic level, a tightening occurs that prevents
healing. Healing requires a deep -- and more than physical -- relaxation of the entire human system
in order to connect with the ever-present divine healing currents that penetrate all that is. A system
that is defended against common human experience such as pain, suffering and death, or against
one's own feelings of rage and bitterness about what seems insane to resist and oppose -- is in a state
of tension and therefore unable to heal itself.
The state of deep relaxation of body, mind, and the feeling self brings about the attitude I
described at the beginning of this lecture, a state that it may seem impossible ever to attain. This
kind of equanimity does not express a disregard for earthly pleasure and life in the body, but it no
longer fears their absence. People in this state do not rush into death and pain, but feel an inner
peace because the glimpses of Reality follow more quickly in succession. This is so because they
have begun to observe closely their reactions to their fears and desires in connection with life and
death, pleasure and pain. As these observations become more honest, more clearly defined, more
detached -- while that which is being observed is not confused with who the person is as a whole --
a new state of mind, the unitive state of mind, is automatically and inexorably, if ever so slowly,
ushered in.
So, my beloved friends, try to think about all this and begin a new outlook and direction,
wherever possible, on your individual paths. It will prepare you for the great fusion that must
ultimately come about for each created being, a fusion that no longer knows the pain and
separateness of the dualistic state of mind.
As you search in this direction, you will also find, once again, a "reverse unity" which, in its
own way, will help you to understand the nature of your mind that is steeped in dualistic confusions.
This is the fact that every so often you believe you fear one end of the spectrum and strive for and
desire the opposite end of it. But as you confront your real feelings, as opposed to your illusion
about yourself, you find that you fear the apparently desired end at least on one important level of
intentionality perhaps every bit as much as that which you consciously fear. So you realize the
"unity" of fear. Life is feared as much as death, pleasure as much as pain, success as much as failure.
Out of this "reverse unity" a real unity can grow, when you comprehend the nature of the fear at
both ends of the spectrum. As you get in touch with both fears, you have inadvertently attained a
certain measure of equanimity. The strain automatically relaxes and you are then confronted with
the issue of faith. There comes the point on your path when it is a question of just that. Do you
wish to be open to your surrounding universe and look at it from the point of view of justifying
faith? Do you only see, perhaps wish to see in anger and bitterness, the out-of-context fragments of
life that seem to imply cruelty and meaninglessness? This question may occupy you over years of
serious and beautiful struggle, the most noble struggle in the human soul. But the time must come
when inner, deeply experienced answers will appear.
Negation of truth, beauty, love, and the meaning of creation always stems from bitterness, fear
and anger. These attitudes can only produce more justifications of such negation, hiding the vistas
that harbor the most realistically grounded affirmation of all opposites -- of life and death, pleasure
and pain, light and darkness.
When you can maintain this vision even while in pain, when you can know that God does it
right even while you face the Great Unknown -- however near or far it may be -- your mind will be
stilled. The struggle that attempts to find a way out of the pain of duality, only to draw the net
tighter by the very nature of the struggle itself, will have ceased. The tense movement away from
one and toward another "goal" will cease and the underlying unity of all life will be experienced.
Do not confuse the ceasing of a particular level and kind of struggle with apathy, passivity and
lack of initiative, however. You know very well how important your committed active effort is, how
noble your struggle, as I point out again and again. Struggle on one level, in a certain way, is
necessary. It is the inevitable prerequisite for plowing through the mazes of the mind. Struggle on
another level, in another way, is the movement that ripples the water and prevents the peace that
flows from the Most Holy.
Right here is another of the dualities that exist in your world: about struggle. Many spiritual
movements totally negate its necessity and advocate the detachment, not only from worldly matters,
but from all striving. They are completely correct in that they know what I attempt to make you see
here. They think of that level where fear and desire annihilate unity and trap the mind into deeper
illusions of the world. But they do not connect with that level of the personality that needs to strive
and struggle. They ignore that there exists a healthy and constructive struggle. The pitfall of this
approach is that through its very one-sidedness it leads, from a subtle direction, again into more
duality and thus perverts the peace that may be experienced, at first occasionally, into a passive
standstill.
Then you have spiritual approaches that advocate the struggle and the work. They, too, are
correct. They know the necessity for it and help the followers to summon the energies and the
stamina. But they often ignore that other level, where struggle defeats the purpose and only ripples
the waters more stormily.
To you, my friends, I bring the truth of both ends of this particular human split. Continue
your struggle and cease all struggle. Grope for where struggle must continue and where it must
cease. And you will experience at some time the incomparable peace of no longer fearing what you
do not want and no longer reaching anxiously and strenuously for what you do want. You will
know that all that could ever be desirable is right here, attainable right now, ever-present at the tips
of your fingers. All that you fear and strain away from is nothing but illusion, even though you may
be in the midst of experiencing it. So you will truly become still and know God. You will know
God in all that is, in the best and worst, in what you want and what you do not want. Both are what
your deeper self knows is intensely desirable, much better than what you think you want and not at
all what you fear.
This is but a vague outline for your further path, perhaps a whiff that can be caught now.
Even that vague gleaning will prepare you better for your further glorious path, my blessed, beloved
friends. You all live and move and have your being in the Christ consciousness, in the Christ
Principle!