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The Path... The Path is
a way of life. It is the way toward our innermost truth,
which is beautiful. Some of you may doubt this, because
many of the glimpses you took inward showed ugliness and
pain and you quickly turned away. This going inward
seemed dangerous. Yet, the mere fact that you are here
shows that you know the journey is worth taking.
We all have an outer mask. This is what we present to the
world. We think that by pretending to be different from
what we think we really are, we'll get the love and the
approval we crave for, because deep inside we feel we are
bad, unworthy. But when we explore this bad unworthy area
in ourselves, we get down into the deepest layer, our
center which has all the beauty and all the wisdom and
all the creativity. Roughly, we can make a diagram of a
circle, the outer layer the mask, underneath the negative
traits, and in the middle the light.
How do we know this is true? By experiencing it.In this
work, the outer mask is quickly pierced and we come to
the question, why do we need it in the first place? If we
are so beautiful inside, why are we so ugly, so that we
have to cover it up? The ugly layer is the Layer of
Defenses. But what do we have to defend ourselves
against, and why with so much hatred and venom?
One of the Guide's basic explanations for this is that we
form misconceptions in our childhood about the world,
about people, ourselves, about the nature of life. These
he calls images, since they are rigidly embedded in our
soul substance. Some of these misconceptions we actually
bring with ourselves from previous incarnations, but we
can't work with these and it is certainly not necessary
to dwell on this aspect. We work with this life. Let's
say a girl has an overprotective Mother and a rejecting
Father, or at least she experiences her parents in this
way. She will grow up believing that she can get
everything from women, but nothing from men. This belief
will attract to her rejecting men and protective women
and she will really believe that her misconception that
all men are cruel and all women are kind, and will let
her get away with anything, will be confirmed. She will
not be able to have a satisfactory relationship with a
man until she works out her misconception and thereby
becomes open to a different kind of experience. This of
course is an oversimplified example. Our misconceptions
create very complicated life patterns. To continue this
examples this girl will armor herself against the
supposed cruelty of men in some way, perhaps by being
cruel herself in order not to experience the pain of
rejection. She might sell out to other women, play the
child and hate herself for it. She might be ashamed of
her lack of success with men and play the vamp, or the
intellectual woman, or whatever. She will hate herself,
more and more convinced that life is treating her
unjustly. By now she has forgotten that originally there
was this great hurt of not getting from her father what
she wanted. She has also forgotten her guilt for trying
to get it by betraying her mother, who was good to her,
and playing up to the father. Life seems a chaos with no
way out. She will have trouble in her job, because she
will make her boss into her father or mother. She will be
very tight insides because she has repressed the original
feelings of hurt, and then she had to repress the
feelings of hatred, cruelty and anger. She believes her
mask of sweetness is her true self and that people take
advantage of her.
Our inner beliefs, our misconceptions, penetrate all the
aspects of the human personality: our body, our feelings,
our thinking, and our spirituality. Every human being has
these aspects, and in order to become whole, united with
ourselves and with the Universe, we have to see the
distortions in all these aspects and work with them. When
we are afraid, for instance, we tighten our muscles. The
original flowing feelings of a baby become blocked also
in the body as the child tightens the flow of his
feelings. The body shows these blocks very clearly, and
John Pierrakos will give a lecture this afternoon on just
this aspect of the pathwork, how we learn through the
bioenergetic work to recognize and loosen up the knots,
to let the feelings through and become connected with our
body again. Many people are disconnected - hate their
body and live in the head. In order to find out what our
real feelings are at any moment, what other feelings
those feelings cover up, we work in private sessions and
in groups.
We use our intellect to incorporate the emotional
recognitions into our whole system, to correct our
misconceptions, to reformulate our concepts in line with
the experienced truth. Also, we learn truthful concepts
by listening to the lectures of the Guide. Specifically,
we commit ourselves to finding out this truth, we
meditate in specific ways to establish contact with our
inner core and with the creative and loving forces of the
Universe. We learn that there are very specific spiritual
laws which govern life and that these laws are just, and
that when we violate them, we violate ourselves. The
basic law is the law of self-responsibility. We are
responsible for what we are, and not our parents or life
who "did it to us". We make choices constantly,
we react to outer situations in our own ways and thereby
we create consequences that, in turn, will bring about
certain events. When we don't see the relationship of
cause and effect in our lives, it is because so many of
the causes are pushed down into our unconscious. To dig
up those causes from where we have pushed them in order
to avoid facing them, is our task. As long as our
negative feelings are unrecognized, they have power over
us and over our lives. As we recognize them, we can
observe them in action, see their destructiveness
clearly, and change them.
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