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Pathwork Guide Lecture No. 257 (1996 Edition)
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Pathwork Guide Lecture No. 257
1996 Edition
January 10, 1979

ASPECTS OF THE NEW DIVINE INFLUX:
COMMUNICATION, GROUP CONSCIOUSNESS, EXPOSURE

Blessings, my dearly beloved friends.  God's light envelops you all.  This light contains all you need.  Try to perceive it, try to feel its reality.  It is always there for you, and to the degree you refine your inner being through the purification process, you cannot help being aware of this light that flows through all the universe, through all of creation.  Those of God's children who have chosen to make the very best of their lives through such a path are especially blessed.  For with this opportunity to purify themselves and serve God, they fulfill a great need in the Plan of Salvation.

In this lecture I would like to speak about some significant aspects of the New Age.  This term has been used a lot recently by certain groups of people.  Some use it with correct understanding, some manage to make it into a cliche.  This, however, is unavoidable; it happens with all concepts of truth, because of a human tendency to be glib and lazy and to label, so as to avoid feeling the reality of a specific truth.  But those who do not fall into this trap should not give up altogether using a term that conveys a true concept.  I have often warned against this tendency in the past and have sometimes suggested new words, different expressions for the same truth, or repeated the true meaning of a specific work to keep its true concept alive.  As far as the New Age is concerned, I have stated before that at certain intervals in history a new influx streams into your world because humanity has grown sufficiently to be ready for it.  This is so now.

We have often discussed the meaning and the significance of the New Age in general terms.  We talked about the consciousness of the Christ spirit permeating this world, trying to penetrate the consciousness of individuals to an ever greater degree.

Such a powerful influx must be accompanied by certain manifestations that are not always pleasant, welcome, agreeable or even constructive.  Many events on your earth that are outright undesirable are direct results of this influx.  In fact, without them the growth and expansion of consciousness inherent in this New Age could not take place.

Your own mind is still very much geared to the immediate.  You believe that what is good and right at this moment will also ultimately be good and right.  You believe that what may appear evil to you now is also ultimately evil.  This is hardly the case.  Sometimes an outright negative manifestation may indeed be necessary for a total development to take place.  This applies to the individual as well as to mankind as a whole, or, to put it differently, to the entity earth.

In this lecture I should like to discuss some specifics that accompany the new influx.  One is communication.  Communication is a by-product of highly developed consciousness.  To the degree that development of spirit exists, the ability to communicate, to listen and express adequately and appropriately also exists.  To the degree that development is still impaired, the ability to communicate is limited.  So you see innumerable people who cannot and will not even try to put into words what they really feel and think.  They are either too proud or they demand to be understood by others without having to labor to make themselves understandable.  For it does require some labor.  Communication is an art that everyone can and, indeed, must learn.  It requires goodwill, a positive intentionality, and a will to cooperate.

Let us start by examining the outermost level.  It is no coincidence that one of the major byproducts of modern technology is communication.  Even though this level of communication applies to outer events only, it has a tremendous impact on the inner levels of humanity.  In the first place, it brings people much closer together.  In former times there was a greater sense of separateness because the distance between people and their lack of communication created the illusion that others were intrinsically different and alien, and therefore were enemies to be distrusted.  Experiencing others to be similar when it comes to the basics of living, dying, suffering and longing, eliminates much illusion, fear and enmity.  It contributes to the ever-growing unity of humankind.

Knowing what is going on in the world has a definite impact on spiritual growth.  Isolation and separateness between people in the past made the world appear too vast to be encompassed.  One's own tragedies seemed unique, hence a sense of brotherhood and sisterhood was totally lacking.  Today even the least spiritually inclined individuals experience your entire planet in very different ways.  Things no longer appear strange or foreign.  There is a greater overall awareness, because knowing the events that happen right now in a different corner of the earth has an impact on the soul's development.

So you see, my friends, technology is not in opposition to spiritual development and to spiritual life.  However, it is often abused and misdirected and therefore it is seen as an obstacle to spirituality.

This again shows how everything in the universe and on this earth is intrinsically an expression of divine will and creation and can and should serve the great plan.  Nothing can be created that does not have its roots in the world of spirit.  All demonic manifestations can only be distortions and misuses of divine creation.  They can never be self-creative.

Your present ability to witness and thus to experience events with your brothers and sisters elsewhere has a significant impact on your soul.  Your ability to move relatively fast from one corner of your earth to the other brings you closer to the laws of the spirit world, where movement is instantaneous, one with thought. 

Communication is a most important byproduct of advanced spiritual states.  The ability to communicate on more subtle and personal levels has also greatly improved over the last decades.  Psychological approaches have created a greater awareness of self and therefore a greater capacity to understand oneself, to express oneself to others, and thereby to communicate.  Before this particular influx, most human beings were completely in the dark about themselves, their feelings, their needs, their true reactions, let alone those of others.  It was therefore impossible to create a bridge with another person in a significant way.

Similarly, a child in an early stage of development does not really know that it is hurt or lonely, that it needs more love, attention or understanding.  If this awareness were articulate in the child, it would be a relatively small step to convey these feelings to another person.  Without 

communication, you live in the dark, alone in a fog of confusion, isolated from others.  The Christ spirit represents exactly the opposite.  It brings the great light of awareness, of communication and of brotherhood and sisterhood.

Obviously, true communication presupposes communication with the self, with the inner levels of being that were inaccessible before.  Understanding the self is the groundwork, the foundation, for you cannot convey, explain and communicate something you do not know.  So a path such as the one I guide you on must always be primarily concerned with self-exploration and self-knowledge.  It must never stop there, however.  Self-knowledge is only the preliminary phase.

The next organic step is learning the great art of communication.  This requires intention, thought, practice, self-observation.  It means giving up the state of being only half awake, assuming unthinkingly that others should know what you feel.  It means making the effort to explain, to reach out, to search through the mazes of misunderstanding--patiently and lovingly.  Here, as in everything else, practice leads to an increasingly spontaneous and automatic ability to be outwardly what you were previously only secretly and inwardly, and to communicate this state to others.

Just use your imagination and think about the enormous difference this makes in human communication.  How often do you believe someone is mean to you when, in reality, this other person fears you and erroneously uses a coldness or rejecting attitude as a defense?  Knowing this removes your fear, your false pride, your anger.  It may enable you to meet this person in an entirely different way that, in turn, will dissolve his or her negative defense that alienates you.  So you see how communication brings souls together, eliminating walls of fear that create hate between humans.  Therefore communication is an intrinsic part of the good life.

However, the fact that you may attempt to explain yourself is not enough.  The way in which you reveal yourself is what makes communication an art.  If you explain yourself in a way that implies blame and accusation, you only create a bigger wall.  But if you attempt to explain yourself by simply conveying your feelings and needs, your impressions and assumptions in a questioning and open spirit without insisting that they be the truth, then you can 

reach a true understanding.  You can establish clarity, light and truth.  By learning the skill of communication, and practicing it as an art, you foster love and unity.

How can you assuage your loneliness unless you establish bridges with others?  How can you lose your fear of people unless you truly expose the misconception that others want to be your enemies?  You can achieve this only by taking the trouble of exploring yourself sufficiently to know what it is you really feel.  Often you believe that you feel in a certain way, yet it is not at all what is really going on in you.  You need to take the apparent risk of explaining yourself, even if this can rarely be done in one simple stroke.  You need to enter an ongoing dialogue, full of goodwill, increasing your willingness to shed your pride and to give up your stake in blaming.  This is what communication entails on an emotional level.  This is how the great oneness among all human beings will be established.  This is how fear and hate--hence war on all levels--will increasingly disappear.  In other words, true communication will contribute to bringing the Kingdom of Heaven to earth.

But there is an even deeper level of communication which you  ignore.  It is still very obscure but once you focus your attention on it, it will reveal itself as clearly as the levels I have just discussed.  All interactions between human beings ultimately contribute to the final aim:  reconciliation, oneness, brotherhood, love, understanding, truth.  In the final analysis, even the most negative interaction between individuals serves this purpose.

When two entities--either individual or collective ones--are involved in a negative interaction, a deeper purpose is being fulfilled, even if the interaction has a most undesirable result at the moment.  The higher selves of both entities are always at work.  The higher self has not created the negative interaction per se, but it uses what already exists--negativity--for the purpose of dissolving it.  The dissolution and transformation of negative material cannot possibly take place unless there is an outright manifestation.  Even if the entities involved are totally in the dark about the part they themselves play in this interaction and are still on the level of self-righteous one-sidedness, they nevertheless serve a higher purpose.  How much more does this happen when entities recognize the total truth of an interaction that may be hidden from their immediate view!

So you can see, my friends, that underneath the lower-self exchange, a higher-self exchange exists simultaneously between the entities in conflict.  This is a very important new thought for you to contemplate.  Just imagine:  two people--or groups of people--are at war on the surface.  They hate and accuse each other.  They wish each other the worst and want to harm each other.  At the same time, on a deeper level, these entities agree.  They know that what occurs on the surface serves the common good, serves truth and love, serves their unity.

On this path, when two of you are at odds with each other and you work very deeply to come to the truth of the issue, you often experience a wonderful conciliation in which love unites the same two individuals who hated and accused each other before.  You then witness what I explained just now.  On your earth sphere, in this dimension, the manifestation of conciliation happens in sequential time:  first the hate, then the search for truth, then love and unity.  On the deeper level of being, there are no such sequences.  Truth, love and unity always exist simultaneously.

Take this new vision into account.  It will help you perceive that every situation, no matter how hopelessly confused and negative it may appear, simultaneously harbors inner truth, love and unity.  Your understanding of this will accelerate the conciliations on the level of sequential time, so that enmity/search/truth/love/unity follow each other in ever quicker succession.

The influx of the Christ consciousness brings more spiritual values and laws to your plane.  Many spiritual laws and values are generally known through religions, but few are truly understood and experienced in depth, let alone lived on the innermost levels.  Still too often humanity takes these laws, confuses and distorts them, and then either disregards them altogether because, distorted, they make no sense, or hypocritically obeys them on a surface level that fails to reach the inner person.  The more humanity grows, the greater the influx of the Christ light can be, and the more it will be possible to make true spiritual values part of the human consciousness.

In this particular lecture we are dealing, first of all, with the law of brotherhood, which I have often mentioned.  Without brotherhood there is no love, without love there is no brotherhood.  Love is union.  Hate is split, dissension, isolation.  Love means mutual understanding.

Yet for understanding to grow, effort and goodwill are necessary.  In other words, love is not something that happens like a miracle, nor is union.  You cannot experience union with God unless you are able to experience union with your brothers and sisters, even with those you think are your enemies.  On the outer level you may not achieve friendship with them, for it takes both parties to really desire truth and union.  But on the inner level you may well be quite consciously connected with the higher self of that person.

Never forget that love--union with God and other people--is the result of communication.  And communication is a result of serious effort, with a commitment to use your attention and your energies, to make yourself understood in the best possible way, and to understand the other.  For both purposes, you need to empty your mind of all preconceived ideas your lower self has a stake in retaining.  You need to put aside enmity and distrust.  You need to listen deeply and openly.  You need to convince the other of your goodwill for the truth.  You need to summon the maturity to realize that others do not know what you mean, feel, think and want.  You need to explain yourself in the deepest, most sincere way possible.  If you proceed in that way, you will find no problem between you and others that cannot be resolved.  Great strength and self-esteem will grow from this, my friends.

First, however, you need to sacrifice your pride, your stubbornness, your pleasure in having a case against someone or your fear of finding out that you are wrong and bad.  You must put all this aside.  In that way you will greatly contribute to the ever-growing flow of communication that is unprecedented in your era.  In that way you help herald an important aspect of the Christ consciousness--within yourself and others.  You then truly become a servant to God's plan.

Desist from yielding to the temptation to keep yourself locked up in isolation and resentment.  Desist equally from yielding to the temptation to accuse and blame.  Make yourself neutral, at least temporarily, until you have the chance of finding out what the truth is.  Do not fear the truth.  It will be so liberating!  It will let you off the hook of your own secret self-accusation and it will free others of your accusations.  You may well find imperfections in both yourself and others, but these imperfections will have a new 

connotation that will free you of hurt and shame, as well as the need to put hurt and shame on others.

Yes, my friends, this is what you have been doing in your work all along.  I am not telling you about a new process, but I want to shed a new light on it now, from a new angle, so that you can deepen your commitment to follow through.

The new influx of the Christ consciousness sweeps through your world with tremendous force, yet its manifestations are not always recognized.  At first the influx reaches humanity's inner consciousness.  Wherever there is the slightest potential, consciousness begins to change gradually, subtly.  It may change through new ways of thinking about life or through a desire to find a way to understand the self and life more profoundly.  Even those who are less ready and developed may lend a hand, perhaps unwittingly, to the unfolding of the Great Plan.  They, too, become instruments, even though their instrumentality may appear entirely negative.  Through their sphere of influence and activity they affect events, which then conspire to bring about new conditions.  It is again, as I explained before, the higher self of such a person working in conjunction with the Plan and using the negative outer will to contribute positively to the whole picture.

The new influx--called the New Age--also affects outer events, often in a most obscure way.  What may appear an entirely undesirable, negative occurrence is, in reality, a necessity for establishing new values and reestablishing life based on spiritual premises, truth and love.  In other words, destructiveness that has advanced so far that it can no longer be changed, molded or transformed, needs to be destroyed before a new and better structure can be erected.

Many destructive events on your earth are of this kind.  You need to learn to distinguish between those events that are outright unnecessary and directly opposed to life, being expressions of evil, and those that fall into the category I just described.  The distinction is not always immediately clear, but as you train your inner vision and become more aware of these processes of creation, your perception will become more accurate.

Many of you already see that new values are springing up all over, working their way laboriously through the thicket of obsolete values, the old negative and destructive 

attitudes toward life.  The new values are still small and delicate plants that need nurturing with courage, with commitment to the larger cause of life and with the ever-necessary self-honesty that fosters development and expansion of individual consciousness.  The more people nurture this growth, the stronger the new plants will become on your planet.

The process is always based on a cellular structure.  It begins with the single cell, the individual consciousness that needs to change.  Such individual change cannot take place in isolation, but always in conjunction with others.  For individual consciousness is part of the collective consciousness, the great whole.  Individual values and development can only be measured by interaction with others.  Communication is one aspect that improves interaction until there is no separation.  The more individual cells of consciousness begin to purify and align themselves with the divine will, the more they will affect the totality of the earth entity.  The cells meld into one structure, although they each have their individual life.

You have a great deal of ambivalence about this melding.  On the one hand, you fear giving up what you call your individuality.  You believe that your uniqueness, your particular divine manifestation, is dependent on your separation.  You falsely assume that in oneness with the whole you lose what is uniquely yours.  In reality it is just the other way round.  Thus you struggle against the innate fate of all created beings--the striving toward oneness.  You resist and fight it, to your great chagrin.  For, on the other hand, the longing for oneness can never be relieved without oneness being achieved.  The longing is desperate in your soul, and the pain of not experiencing oneness is excruciating.  Not knowing of this longing, not feeling the pain, is even worse; it is a state of apathy, unaliveness, confusion and secondary pain.  It is a state that you can never understand because it is a result of a long chain reaction whose origin is precisely the pain of denying oneness.

It has often been mentioned that the New Age, or as it is also called, the Aquarian Age, brings about group formations, group consciousness.  Such a process has not existed in the same way before.  Of course, humanity as a whole is a group on a larger scale.  Society could not exist unless group consciousness were cultivated to some degree.  But until now individuals were mainly concerned with 

themselves and their own interests, regardless of the effects of such self-concern on the rest of the world.

Not that this attitude has now disappeared.  Far from it.  But a new awareness is growing in which people are beginning to see that if they pursue nothing but their self-interest to the detriment of others, they go far beyond violating moral and spiritual laws and values.  They are beginning to see that they themselves must eventually suffer from this attitude as much as, if not more than, those they disregard with shortsighted selfishness.

The human family could not exist without a group spirit.  But most societies have not yet put sufficient weight on spiritual values.  They are unaware of any new influx and they proceed by old standards and values that are often based only on expediency and on the most shortsighted goals.  It is surely no coincidence that in your time new groups, new communities of all sorts are springing up all over.  Many of them are misguided.  Many succumb to the influence of destructive forces and evil spirits.  This can never be different on your plane of consciousness.  Wherever there is divine influx, the demonic forces send out their own influences to corrupt those who are not purified, to tempt them and to destroy them.  This does not change the fact that new communities must spread which represent the new values and which become models for new ways of life.  The point is always to be wakeful and to never neglect the work of self-purification.  This is the only key of safety.  If you follow this through painstakingly, in the spirit of service to fulfilling God's will, then evil forces cannot confuse you.  You will always know, you will find the answers, you will ultimately stay clean, even if there must be some temporary manifestations of your lower selves.

I wish to discuss now another manifestation of the new influx:  exposure.  Again, you can see this aspect individually and collectively.  It can hardly be missed, it is so obvious.  Through psychology, and recently through profound spiritual work, exposure of self has reached depths unknown before in your history, with the exception of initiates, who formed small minorities in different cultures.  Now exposure of the deeper levels of self has reached unprecedented degrees.  Even the least knowledgeable people have attained a certain degree of awareness that there are deeper levels of being which determine their lives.  You may now take this for granted, yet it was by no means always so.  

This new ability to explore the self is a combination of communication and exposure.  The willingness to expose leads to communication and communication leads to oneness, to alignment with the Christ spirit that sweeps with great force through your world.

The resistance to exposure is always present.  It is obvious that refusal to expose creates isolation.  When you deny exposure it always means that you have a stake in maintaining a rotten structure, a structure that you need to eliminate and replace.  This unwillingness clearly implies the wish to continue living a lie.  Dedication to the truth must bring the willingness and the courage to expose and to change.

If it is not done willingly, secret matters will be exposed through outside forces, through crises that will bring them to the surface.  Once the force of the new influx is set in motion, it cannot be halted.  The more opposition it encounters, the more painful the crisis will be.

This has also become very obvious in your public life.  In very recent times, a great deal of hidden destructiveness has been exposed and communicated to the public.  Again, this has never been the case before in the same way and to the same degree.  And it continues.  Something new has been set in motion.  Through communication, through exposure, the whole world knows of political misdeeds that would previously have remained secret.  Through the evolving group consciousness a great interplay and interaction takes place that allows all of humankind to participate in the drama of development.

Viewing world events with this understanding is important.  It is exactly the process you follow on this path:  you expose your lower self, you share it, you communicate it to others.  Can you think of a better way to establish love, trust, closeness?

Again and again I show you parallels between the development of the individual and of the planet.  All the processes you learn to apply to yourselves also apply in some form on the collective level.  Exposure has never existed in the way it does now.  Masks are beginning to fall, lower-self aspects begin to show clearly, with less concealment than ever before.  Thus events and intentions can be recognized for what they really are, without the camouflages that bring so much lying, so much suffering, so much confusion.

Exposure is very much a part of the new influx.  It is a direct expression of the Christ consciousness that sweeps through the inner and outer planes of this planet at this time.  Spiritual development without exposure can, at best, be only a half measure that leads eventually to a stalemate.  But unless exposure is infused with love, it becomes self-defeating.  Show respect for the person who has the courage to do it willingly.  Those who refuse to open up willingly must not be allowed to destroy their environment and to influence events through their concealment.

The courage and strength necessary to bring about exposure wherever appropriate and necessary stems from the inner conviction that it is done in the service of a larger cause--in other words, in love.  The more you expose yourself to yourself, and subsequently to others, the more you will discover your true intrinsic worth.  You will know that the already developed higher self is the part that makes the exposure possible.

It is the same with the planetary entity.  The earth's higher self is conducting all the exposures that occur now on the political front.  Do not think of the New Age as a general, vague force.  It is a consciousness by and in itself.  Specific aspects manifest in various parts of your earth as the need arises.

As all consciousness, the New Age consists of many aspects that complete a harmonious whole.  In this lecture I discussed three particular aspects:  communication, group consciousness, and exposure.  We also discussed the inevitable parallel between all these aspects manifesting on the individual and on the collective levels.

You are quite well versed on the individual level, since this was the emphasis of your pathwork all along.  Although there are still some obstructions and resistances, in principle you are reconciled with this process and you comprehend its intrinsic necessity and value.  You can observe how the same process happens on the collective level and this will help your expansion as an individual.

By seeing the same principle repeated in microcosm and in macrocosm, you develop a deeper understanding.  Through this understanding and through your ever-intensified efforts toward self-exposure and communication with your immediate circle of dear ones with whom you share your process of development, you greatly contribute 

to the earth's evolution.  Although it may not be possible for you to see this influence directly and immediately, you will gradually sense it; it will become an ever-growing realization.

You still need to apply more awareness and attention to how you may use these aspects better in your own community life.  Often, there still exists a blindness to self-exposure and to the exposure of others that fails to bring the truth to the surface.  This undermines communication--and hence love and union.  You would enhance communication if you made a more profound effort to explain yourself, and to help others to do likewise through a non-threatening attitude.

Communication could also vastly improve if you helped others to be more receptive to what you know and have to teach and, similarly, if you were more open and receptive to where you could learn from others.  Too often a bland, dull numbness encases you into a half-vague, opinionated, incomplete, secretive holding onto assumptions that closes all doors.   This is where your spirit friends wish you to improve and make of your beautiful, golden, ever-growing community a greater glory, expressing the Christ, serving the Highest.

I want also to call your attention to a specific observation: watch the parallels between the outer and inner growth and the expression of your group entity's higher self.  At times one is ahead of the other.  At other times it is reversed.  A certain balance should be maintained, though it can never be completely even.  This is not necessary.  If the imbalance between inner and outer growth does not become too great, it can easily be adjusted.  No crisis will accrue from this imbalance.  It is all in the scheme of things.  So far your inner development has always exceeded the outer, and this is truly the more important, the more solidly grounded way.  But the time has come when you can consciously help the outer growth catch up and make it more an expression of your inner reality.

Look at this beautiful world with the eyes that see the whole, that comprehend the Lord's working behind all that is.  Let your hearts be filled with the freshness of life's healing power that flows from the Source that encompasses all that ever was created and ever will be created.  This Source resides right in your own center, even when you are unable to connect with it or to experience its reality through 

your confusions and your momentary suffering.  It is always there.

You are all surrounded by the great force that flows with such renewed vigor through your universe.  Be blessed, my beloved ones.  Pursue your commitment to the end, never let up in your devotion to serve God.

Edited by Judith and John Saly

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