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Pathwork Guide Lecture No. 201 (1996 Edition)
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Pathwork Guide Lecture No. 201
1996 Edition
May 19, 1972

DEMAGNETIZING NEGATIVE FORCE FIELDS -- PAIN OF GUILT

My dearest friends, greetings and blessings for everyone of you here.  The beginning of tonight's lecture will be a brief recapitulation of certain facets of spiritual laws which I have discussed in the past, particularly in the lectures on "images".  We shall now explore the material more deeply and let it expand further.  

The fusion of consciousness and energy is of such a tremendous power that this fusion creates an electromagnetic energy field.  This force field contains every conceivable seed or possibility of creation:  every conceivable attitude or concept about life creates such a field.  Once a force field is activated, it sets events, patterns, behaviors, reactions, and states of body and soul into its specific mold.  The magnetism of this field is so strong that ensuing actions and events are inexorably set in motion, and these actions and events continue to perpetuate the power of this specific force field.  

The force field of a specific attitude to life is also ruled by laws of attraction -- like attracting like.  Thus you who have created various force fields as a result of your attitudes, ideas, concepts, and approaches to life, attract or repulse events, people, happenings, and actions of others and also of yourself.  You set up continuous chains of action and reaction of which you often lose track:  when an event occurs in your life, you no longer know by what specific belief and consequent action you have created it.

This applies, of course, to both real and false ideas and to consequent experience which is either productive and blissful  or destructive and painful.  It is an important aspect of this pathwork to first understand this principle, and then to see where and how this applies to your personal life.

My friends on the path have discovered various force fields of distorted ideas which we call "images."  You have experienced within you how what you now know to be a misconception about life has governed your actions and reactions and has consequently brought corresponding events to pass.  You now see quite clearly that these events are hardly what they at first seemed to be, mere coincidence.  They occur by immutable law:  the law of self-creation.

You have experienced in the further course of this path the depths of the negative emotions connected with these false ideas.  You have also uncovered the negative intentionality that you had instituted as a result.  Yet you find yourself stymied in giving up the whole nucleus of the image, or force field.  Although you know the ideas are false, you cannot help reacting as if they were true. For example, you believe no woman is trustworthy because you felt your mother rejected you.  You now know that this equation is grossly false, yet you are compelled to react to all women as if they were your unloving mother.  You do not want to give up your negative intentionality regarding her, and your feelings of hate, blame, and resentment.  You do not wish to open your heart to love any woman.  Regardless of your outer, conscious belief, inwardly you now discover that this is how you react.  You seem caught or trapped in this image, although you know that it is unfair, unreasonable, unintelligent, and that it causes you and others pain and frustration, unfulfillment, and perpetual guilt and longing.

It is extremely difficult to change these force fields, but it is certainly possible.  No one who is not deeply involved in and committed to a path such as this, in which deepest self-confrontation on all levels takes place, can possibly do this.  To begin with, one is not even aware of the beliefs one holds, which then create force fields with all their ensuing chain reactions.  To discover particular images, to experience fully and without defense all the feelings involved in them, to take responsibility for the negative intentionality, are all actions that indicate significant progress and deeply meaningful work on the path of purification.  These steps are necessary pre-requisites but do not by themselves change the creative power of the force fields:  something more is needed, as many of you are discovering.  I would say that many of you on the path have now arrived at such a juncture, at least in a part of your personality:  you see, know, understand, and fully experience pain, fear and anger; you assume responsibility for your intentions and negative will.  Yet something in you holds you where you are, although you 

know quite well at what price.  This lecture is supposed to help you move ahead from here.

For those who are at the beginning of the path, or for those who still defend against fully assuming responsibility for their lives and are therefore blocked, the existing image can be deduced infallibly by looking at the life manifestation.  Life reveals what one's underlying beliefs and attitudes must be.  It cannot be otherwise.

The magnetic power of the force field is self-indoctrinating and self-perpetuating; it is like a deeply imprinted motor mechanism, set in motion with great energy.  Thus a stronger energy is required to deactivate this motor force and to change a negative force field into a positive one.  To put it differently, the image has to be dissolved and the creative energy that was locked up in this image is to be utilized from now on in ways that are compatible with divine law.

Now let us directly go into the main topic of this lecture.  How do you change a negative force field into a positive one?  How do you dissolve an image?  How do you recreate realistic concepts and imprint them so deeply into your soul system that positive will, feeling, and action ensue?  In other words, how do you demagnetize a negative force field?

Different approaches are necessary for voluntary and involuntary intentionality.  Of course, as you proceed with your purification, all involuntary attitudes eventually become voluntary, but at certain stages, and in certain areas this is not yet so.  For instance, you may be perfectly aware of having a strong defense against feeling a specific pain; you know by many proofs that this pain must be in you, but you cannot feel it, although you want to.  By the same token, a negative intentionality may be quite conscious, or it may manifest indirectly and you are not yet conscious of it as such.  Needless to say that in the latter case the approach must be different.

In instances of both voluntary and involuntary intentionality it is essential for the conscious mind to express its positive intent and formulate it concisely.  But this must not be done in self-delusion and by superimposing positive intent over unconscious irrational resistance and defiance.  The two voices must be brought face to face, and the conscious personality shall make the final decision.

We have discussed various false reasons for one's 

insistence on remaining in a state of falsehood and pain.  Primarily it is a question of identification.  As long as you identify only with the negative aspect of your ego self, giving up something that is the primary motivating force of this ego seems like self-annihilation, and you cannot give up what seems to be intrinsically you.  You therefore need to systematically establish identification with your real self.  Unless you do this, you will lack the volition to give up what destroys happiness and joy. 

The first steps toward this new identification with your real self, apart from simple prayer and meditation, are to reach into new modalities with your mind.  If you now hate, say with your conscious mind, "I also have in me the possibility to love.  I want this new state and wish to utilize all my hidden energies and creative forces."  Or, if you believe you can function only in a non-feeling, isolated, spiteful state, although you would want your state to be different, declare the inherent possibilities within you and say, "There are inner powers and energies I wish to mobilize.  The same me that is now locked into spite and withholding contains other, more natural and beautiful ways of being.  I want to manifest this new state as my own inherent state."

At the same time, alternately or simultaneously, the demagnetization process takes place by going deeply into your innermost stillness.  I have talked about this at intervals since the very beginning when this channel was established.  I have given exercises for learning concentration and ways to still the mind.  Yet many of my friends find themselves apparently incapable of even attempting to do this.  I might say that with increasing progress you will develop the self-discipline to give yourself time for these practices every day.  Even only a few minutes pursued regularly will pay tremendous dividends, my friends.  If you do this seriously, just becoming still and expressing your intent to hear the will of God, to feel the presence of God within you, it will happen. You can also go back to the various lectures I have given about these specific exercises and use them for a few minutes each day.  Whether you do these specific exercises or use others perhaps more to your liking, the only way to demagnetize a negative force field is to establish contact with your divine reality, your cosmic eternal self.  You must become very still and turn into your inner stillness and wait for its manifestations.

Here you have right away a contradiction that seems apparently insurmountable.  As long as a deliberate negativity or negative intentionality exists in you, your 

resistance to commune with your eternal, spiritual self will be too great.  And yet, as long as you do not call on the help of your spiritual reality, you must find yourself incapable of giving up your negative intentionality.  

Let us take for example the common and pervasive attitude of wishing to punish your parents.  You do realize that this spiteful self-destructiveness has absolutely no benefit for you, yet you feel you cannot even want to give it up.  Since you cannot want to give it up, you do not feel clean enough to let God manifest in you.  Neither can you listen to the creative spirit and attune yourself to its presence.  Then you cannot know the eternal being you really are.  

The only way to come out of this self-contradiction that holds you immobilized with magnetic force, in spite of your knowing what you are doing with your life, is to begin to use thought processes in a new way.  Let us take the same example:  "I want to punish my parents by my own misery and spite and non-giving," or, "I do not want to love my parents, so I cannot love anybody else because I want everyone to become better parents for me than those I really had."  Once you are aware of this attitude -- and a good part of the pathwork consists of becoming aware of such things -- then you can see yourself hooked and trapped there.  

The freeing new thought process might be to begin with, "I do not want to stay in this position.  There are powers within me that make it possible for me to change and feel good and secure about the change.  I do deserve it.  This change is my birth-right which I claim.  I can subsist on good feelings.  I can sustain and endure them, just as I can endure pain or disappointment.  I now decide to no longer believe in the fallacy that I can bear neither painful or good feelings.  If there are any areas within me where I still battle and defend against either the painful or the loving feelings which are the giving and the receiving of love, the power in me can make me conscious of them.  It can help me lift myself out of the groove that has been set by the negative force field and bring a new force field into being.  I pray for the power, the belief, the faith, and the volition to be totally committed to living my life in a good, deeply feeling and honest way."

Even if some part of you still resists while you say these words, my friends, if your innermost will pronounces these words strongly and decisively, without covering up or denying the negative will, but meeting it head on, a new power will be created by the force of the intent within your 

thought.  Only too often you wait for change to take place without your deciding for a new thought process about the issue in question.  It is the thought that must change first. In thought lies the intent.  This intent can then seep deeper and deeper into the still resisting layers of your consciousness.  In that way the process takes place on the outermost and the innermost levels:  on the outermost, by the volitional thoughts you issue forth; on the innermost, by the divine power you mobilize when you meditate for this specific help.  In this way, you cannot fail to inactivate the power of the old negative force field, and create a new force field that will bring you into ever increasing fulfillment, meaningful life, joy, peace, and love.

The lack of understanding that exists in human beings about the power of thought and the power of feeling, and how these two together create magnetic fields which in turn create life experience, is very regrettable.  The next decades will bring a change in this.  You always have to begin where the thoughts and feelings are accessible, and that is in your conscious mind, in your conscious thinking, willing, and doing.  If this were not so, it would be impossible to ever solve any problem.  And it has been proven -- on this path, as well as elsewhere -- that often the most severely disturbed individuals completely reverse their painful lives into happy, healthy, unified, fulfilled lives, while individuals with much less disturbance stay put.  The reason for this is that the former are more motivated to act on behalf of change and therefore succeed.

If you had to rely on mysterious processes you could not activate, you would indeed be left to a haphazard fate.  But this is not the case.  The immediate thought process is always available and your habit of thinking can be changed quite easily to begin with.  A thought inevitably brings a new feeling, which then brings a new attitude.  But you always have to begin where it is accessible, and you have to leap with your thought over the barrier of the "I cannot" into the realm of "It is possible."  You can say, "These potentials exist in me and I claim them.  I want to make them available."

More and more of you have recently begun to establish contact with your divinity.  You have begun to experience who you really are.  But still your hesitancy to avail yourself of this new power often keeps you unnecessarily away from the beauty of your inner reality.  To reach it requires more and more investment, but could there be anything more wonderful?  Could there be anything more worthwhile?  This is the very aim of this path; you will no longer be needy because you will know 

that everything exists within you to fulfill every one of your needs.  And instead of looking for where the needs can never be fulfilled, namely outwardly, from parents or parent substitutes, you will look inwardly where you can never be disappointed.

For that you must come with a clean heart.  It is necessary to give up the dishonesty, the hiding, the projecting, and the game playing that exist on subtle levels in your consciousness and which you often manage to deny, even now, after you have temporarily admitted them into your consciousness.  It is certainly not only possible to do this, but eventually everyone's fate to do so.  To be free from these dishonesties is the natural, universal law, and really the easiest way.  This is inexorably your fate.  To hold on to what is most difficult and contorting and hurtful for your soul is senseless, because one day you must become your whole, real, joyous self:  not this little ego, but the ultimate Creator of whom you are a manifestation.

If you listen into your deepest stillness, calling upon the Creator within you, the stillness in you will answer. This is inevitable if you really want to know peace.  If you do not want to know peace, joy, and all conceivable fulfillment, then you have your clue:  you wish to hold on to something dishonest that you are loath to give up.  Look at it, look at it squarely.  When you see it, you can confront yourself about why you want to hold on to it.  Then you can make that leap in your thought process.

Here I come to the second part of this topic.  One of the important obstacles to wanting to establish the channel with your real being and wanting to give up dishonesty is your guilt for pain you have inflicted, or are still inflicting.  I touched upon this subject before, but the time has come to go into it more carefully.

Over these last years you have learned to open up to the pain you have endured, pain that has been inflicted upon you, first, by your parents when you were a child, and later by others.  You have learned to no longer defend quite so much against such pain, and more and more you can feel and experience it fully and thus free yourself.  However, your entire psychological movement has turned away from the other aspect of pain:  feeling the pain of your guilt for having inflicted pain on others.  This is so for partially good reasons.  Every truth can be distorted.  In the days of pre-psychology, religion had indoctrinated man with a distorted, debilitating guilt feeling:  false guilts, fear of a punishing God, a guilt that did not make it possible for human beings to live in dignity and in the knowledge of who they 

ultimately are.  In order to straighten out such distortions, the pendulum must always temporarily swing to the opposite extreme, until the right balance of truth is found.

I make a clear distinction between remorse and guilt:  remorse is the deeply felt pain of your wrongdoing, yet without losing sight of your divinity.  You become a better, stronger person when the pain of remorse is fully savored.  Guilt crushes the self and denies its intrinsic divinity.  The current trend, as a result of the pendulum having swung away from the opposite extreme, makes all guilt appear neurotic.  In fact, there is a difference between neurotic false guilt and real guilt and one can hide the other. I have spoken of this before.

If you cannot bear pain that others inflict upon you, then you cannot experience in a constructive way the pain of your own guilt either.  The guilt of your own distortions must be fully faced, felt, and understood in all its ramifications and chain reactions.  Otherwise you can never be clear with yourself and unless you do so, you cannot be whole.  You cannot look at yourself with love and respect, which means that you cannot be who you really are.  Do this in a very realistic and well-proportioned manner, without exaggeration, hiding, or dramatization.  It is possible to recognize the chains you are forging with your negative attitudes and the hurts you inflict with them, either directly or indirectly.  The hurts of omission are no less hurtful than those of commission.  Have you not been deeply hurt by what was missing in your life as a child?  Was it your parents' inability to give more warmth, good feelings, and closeness?  Well, you are inflicting the same on others by your vindictive imitation and perpetuation of the very attitude that hurt you most.

If you are crushed by the pain of your guilt, this is only because you have decided to opt for this reaction, my friends.  Whenever you so wish, you can question the necessity of being crushed and listen to your inner stillness for the possibility of a new reaction.  Yes, you will feel the pain of guilt, and so you should.  But as with the pain others have given you, if you can fully accept it, it ceases to be pain.  When you fully feel the pain and are motivated with your whole heart to give up the negative pattern, the pain of guilt will make way for a wonderful new energy:  for light, hope, love, and beauty.

Violations of spiritual law can only be corrected when you learn to feel the hurts you have inflicted and still inflict without feeling annihilated or worthless, without 

crumbling under a load of guilt.  Feel the pain of your withholding, of your spite, of your maligning whether in your mind or in actuality.  When you hold on to any kind of negative intentionality, you cannot help depriving and hurting others, just as these attitudes must inevitably hurt you.  For there is no conceivable difference between yourself and others. Whatever you do to others, you do to yourself, and vice versa.  I have said this many times before, but in your mind you still make a distinction, so much so, that you go on being spiteful and hating.

Now, my friends, let yourself feel the pain of inflicting pain:  feel it without crumbling, without exaggerating, without doubting your divine heritage.  If you can do this, you have found the all-important key that will make you want to open up to your divinity with all its joy and with its eternal reality of love.  If you cannot bear the pain of your guilt and look away from it, then you cannot feel deserving, and hence you must block the contact with God in you.  So this is one of the most important keys you need.

Facing the guilt for the pain you inflict on others is really not very different from facing the pain you have received.  In both instances you can exaggerate it and make yourself incapacitated for life, or you can decide not to feel it at all.  Or you can allow the feeling, and say:  "Yes, others have made mistakes.  I have made mistakes.  They were blind and groping, and so was I.  They were in darkness and I was in darkness.  This is regrettable, but this is what we are all here for.  I now lift my head in the dignity of who I am.  I know the greater power within me will help me to feel the pain I have given and the pain I have received."  This attitude can now be cultivated and pursued, my friends.  You do have the courage; you do have the greatness; and you do have the possibility within yourself to feel this and become stronger and better, not weaker and worse, as you fear.

It is absolutely necessary that you trace all the connecting links between cause and effect, and be totally aware of pain received and pain given.  See how one leads to the other, back and forth, in an endless chain reaction.  It is in your power, any time you wish, to break this chain.  When you decide to go into this area of your being to look at it, express your intent to avail yourself of all divine help in you.  Call upon this help.  Become so still that you can listen.  Feel it and know its presence.

The apparent paradox is that the more you hide from the pain of your guilt, the more ruthlessly you punish 

yourself.  Conversely, it is true that the more you face and feel that pain, the less you will need to punish yourself.  The negative attitude of hiding from yourself what you are doing and really feeling creates a negative force field that perpetuates itself in the following way:  punishing yourself for your unfaced guilt, you must stay in the very attitude that accumulates more and more guilt.  You are truly caught in one of the most tragic of vicious circles:  because you imagine that you cannot face the pain of your guilt, you cut yourself off from your heart, your center of being, and from your innermost life.  You feel forever undeserving of joy.  If you are undeserving of joy your needs must remain eternally unfulfilled.  If you feel undeserving and unfulfilled you go on punishing the world for this painful frustration.  You dare not turn to the wondrous magnificence of your inner presence to help you out of this trap because doing so would instantly fill you with light and joy.  You feel that because you have given pain you do not deserve such an experience.  But how can you break the negative pattern unless you avail yourself of the power of God within you?  And you cannot experience God within you without also experiencing joy, peace, and light.  How are you ever going to break the vicious circle unless you use this key?

Go into your inner stillness right now.  Declare that you wish to feel the pain that is held in you, as it was given and as it was received, and that you wish to be the beautiful person you really are.  Feel both the pain of your guilt and the beauty of your real self.  Thus you alter the course you have set in motion and create a new force field because you demagnetize the old one.  This is the way now, my friends.  As you do this, as you feel the pain of the guilt and the pain of what has been done to you, it will become one and the same pain.  You will then forgive yourself as you forgive others, as it was said in one of the greatest prayers.  Then you will be free:  free to let go and let God manifest through you more and more in your everyday life. Be infused with inspiration and wisdom, with joy and peace.

These are not mere words, my friends.  They are the unshakable reality that can be verified by anyone who wishes to go on this path all the way.  These are not promises nor abstract philosophies and principles.  These are concrete actions to be put into everyday living.  You will then no longer depend on others, but will be your real self, your divine self.  You will therefore have true relationships, not dependent relationships.  This is your ultimate fate.  It is up to you how soon you make it come true.

Edited by Judith and John Saly

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