CONSCIOUSNESS

Key Extracts from Lecture 175

© The Pathwork® Foundation 1999

Creation is indeed a result of consciousness, and not, as generally assumed, the other way round. Nothing can be unless it exists first in consciousness.

You still overlook the tremendous significance of what you create with your consciousness. And your being disconnected from it causes the real, the worst, suffering. There is no other suffering as acute as the one when you do not know that you have created what you experience. This applies to a lesser extent even to the positive and desirable experiences. For if you do not know that you have created them, you will always feel helpless; you will always feel in the hands of a power which you cannot comprehend. This power is truly your own consciousness, my friends.

Consciousness is not only the power to think, to discriminate, and to choose – which is obvious. It is not only the power to know, to perceive, and to feel. It is also the ability to will. Willing is a very important aspect of consciousness. Whether you will in your awareness or whether you are disconnected from the fact that you will something, makes no difference. Your willing is an aspect of your consciousness and hence of what you continually create. Willing is an ongoing process, just as knowing and feeling is. Where there is consciousness, knowing, feeling, and willing always exist. Often a number of contradictory will currents create a short circuit on the surface, which manifests as a lack of awareness, numbness. Consciousness is diminished on the surface but continues to go on below the surface. Its products manifest as tangible life experience, and the entity feels at a loss, believing what life brings is totally independent from its own willing and knowing. Any path of genuine development must bring all the confused and contradictory desires to the surface, all the beliefs, i.e., the inner knowing, so that the created life circumstances appear in their true light. They are the creation of the self. This awareness gives power to recreate.

Man is the first entity on the evolutionary scale upward who can deliberately create with his consciousness. You, my friends, who search for your true identity, your real being, must come to experience the fact that you have the power to create and, specifically, how you have created what you have or do not have now. You can then see the augmented pain and tension in your being when you fight against your own creations. This is inevitably so when a personality is not yet aware, generally and specifically, of how his life is a product of his own mind activity.

I will not say that the universal spirit is in you, I say that you are it, but most of the time you do not know it. But man also harbors within him the distorted expression of his creative consciousness with which he wills negatively and destructively. One could also say that this is the eternal fight between God and the Devil, between good and evil, between life and death. Whatever you call it does not matter, this is a question of culture, fashion, interpretation, personal leanings and approach to the world. Whatever you name these powers, they are your own powers. You are not a helpless pawn in anyone's hands. This is the important question, the all-important fact of life that truly alters your entire self-perception and attitude toward living. Not knowing this will make you constantly feel victimized by circumstances beyond your control. In order to perceive and experience your true identity as being the universal spirit, three basic things are necessary:

(1) It is necessary that you tune in on it. By knowing of its existence, this will be possible. You must become very quiet within yourself and allow it to happen. You activate it by your deliberate attempt to listen to and perceive it… Finally the universal spirit begins to manifest – not because it ‘decides’ to do so only now because you were a ‘good child’ who now ‘deserves’ it, but because you begin to perceive its ongoing presence, a presence you will then know was always there, quite near and immediately accessible – almost too near to perceive. The first manifestations may not come to you as a direct voice, a direct inner knowing, but through detours, through other mouths, and later as apparently coincidental ideas that suddenly come to you…

(2) It is necessary to fully experience and comprehend that part of your consciousness which has turned negative, which has become destructive and creates destructively. A great deal of concentration and weight was put on our pathwork to accomplish this. But this is not an easy matter precisely because, once again, man is geared to believe that his life is a fixed thing into which he was put and with which he must learn to cope independently from his inner processes of thinking, willing, knowing, feeling, perceiving. As you can now appreciate, it requires a great deal of honesty, discipline, the overcoming of resistance until an individual can make this all-important ‘switch’ within his entire approach to life, from feeling himself helpless to seeing his own creations in all respects…

(3) Your conscious thinking processes are the first ‘handlebar’ to the universal creative spirit. With your conscious thinking, you create just as much as with what is referred to as unconscious thinking and willing. Your thinking ability is actually exactly the same as the creative processes of the universal mind. Though it is a separated fragment of the whole, it has the same powers and possibilities… You can make a beginning in order to finally experience yourself as the universal spirit by using your conscious thinking processes, your mind activity, in a deliberate, constructive way. You can do this in two parts. First, you must clearly see how you have unknowingly used these same mind processes negatively, how you have created destructively. Then you can formulate what you now wish to produce in your life. You do this by creating the thoughtforms, by stating that this is possible in the scheme of things, and by perceiving, knowing, and willing it in a relaxed, untense attitude. This also includes the willingness to change faulty and dishonest inner attitudes, for otherwise you block what you want. By building outer thought-forms of creative unfoldment, you can tap the rich source within your own being… You are constantly creating your own world right now, the life you lead.

…we are dealing here with three levels. All of them must become accessible. Not one of them is easier to perceive than the other. It would be an error to believe that your everyday thinking processes are easier to perceive than either your destructive willing or your divine nature with its endless power and wisdom. They are all equally near – and seem far only because your vision is turned in the opposite direction. The willful destructiveness or the grandiose creative spirit you are, are ‘unconscious’ only because you turn your gaze, your attention away, you do not give them the benefit of the doubt that they exist, as a first step towards their discovery. It is practically the same with your daily mind activity that goes on and on, unobserved by your critical evaluation so that you are completely unaware of how your thought processes run in the same unproductive, negative channels. Nor do you perceive that you even derive a sort of satisfaction from allowing this to go on. So all three levels are equally difficult or easy to perceive. The difficulty lies primarily in your not knowing, your not listening or giving attention to, your not observing what can be listened to, what can be observed once you look and listen into the right direction. When you observe the negative thinking processes, it is important to realize (a) what they do to you, how they connect with the very results you deplore most in your life, and (b) that you have the power to alter these thinking processes and find new channels, new ways of self-expression for your thinking. These two facets will make all the difference in the world. This is true liberation and self-finding. This is the coming into one's own we speak so much about. This is the discovery of your true identity that represents such glad tidings. But first you must see yourself pursuing negative thought processes; see yourself brooding in the same vicious circles; see yourself almost willfully pursuing the same roundabout, very limited, very narrowly confined channels of thinking and never venturing beyond these fences, which are there to be taken by the leap of your own thinking. Let us take the example that you are convinced you can experience only this or that negative manifestation in life. Once you observe the tenacity with which you take this for granted in any given area of your life experience, you can ask the question, ‘Does it really have to be so?’ The moment this question is raised, you begin to open a crack in the door.

Another possibility is that you may want a positive result in any given area, but simultaneously you do not wish to accept certain logical consequences that go with what you wish – out of a misunderstanding and by believing that accepting these consequences is undesirable for you. These are the areas of the childish resistance to give of yourself, the distorted attempt to cheat life and gain more than you wish to give. Life cannot comply with such unfair desires, while you feel cheated and resentful because you have not really clearly examined the issue. Nor are you aware of your false reasoning in resisting to give of yourself. Thus you create forms of error and distortion that stand in the way to what is possible for you.

As far as the destructive side of the self is concerned, it will be seen more and more clearly that it is also quite deliberate in you – something you choose. It is not something that befalls you. Once you have truly progressed on this path, you have come to the point when you can finally admit this deliberate desire to choose destructive ways and attitudes. You can see that you are unhappy, actually forsaking happiness, fulfillment, bliss, fruitful living. You may be terribly unhappy about the result, but you nevertheless insist on retaining the negative willing of your consciousness. You can see how all-important it is to find this out.

It is only in the human ego existence that the thought is apparently separated from the deed and the form. The less awareness exists in an entity, the more separated thought, deed, and form appear, so much so that, as you well know, the form or manifestation seems entirely independent from the deed, the deed from the thought or will. None of these three stages are connected. An essential part of raising one's consciousness lies in precisely this connecting. No matter how apart in time and space they may appear, thought and will, deed and action, form and manifestation are all one unit.

Since the possibilities are endless, infinite, and limitless, the consciousness can explore itself also by confining itself, by fragmenting itself off – to ‘see what happens,’ as it were. It experiences itself – instead of expanding more, it contracts; instead of unfolding, it tries out how it feels to draw in; instead of exploring further light, it wants to see how it is to feel and experience darkness. Creating is fascination per se. This fascination is not eliminated simply because what is created is – first perhaps only by slight degrees – less pleasurable or blissful or brilliant. Even in that may lie a special fascination and adventure – just to tentatively try, if I may use these very limited words. Then it begins to take on a power of its own. For everything that is created has energy invested in it, and this energy is self-perpetuating. It takes on its own momentum. It goes on. The consciousness who has created these channels and pathways may experiment longer and more than it is ‘safe’ because it no longer leaves itself enough power at the moment to reverse the course. It may get lost in its own momentum, unwilling to stop, and later it no longer sees how to stop on this course. [This is the ‘Fallen Angel’ theme.] Creation then takes place entirely or primarily on a negative scale until the results are so unpleasant that it seeks to get a hold on itself and counteract the momentum by ‘recalling’ its real knowledge of what could be. At any rate, it knows there is no real danger, for whatever suffering you human beings feel, it truly is illusory in the ultimate sense. Once you find your true identity within, you will know it. It is all a play, a fascination, an experiment, from which your real state of being can be recaptured if only you will truly try.

The momentum of creating contains incredibly powerful energies. These energies have impact, they impress the all-pervading creative substance – that stuff which responds to creative mind, which is molded into form, event, object, occurrence, state of mind, or whatever.

This force is even stronger when it is used for the positive, stronger because in the negative there must always be conflicts and contrary longings and will directions which weaken the force. In the constructive, expanding direction, this need not be so at all. Once the switch can be made, something will ‘click’ in the activities and processes of the mind. It will flow into a new direction that comes more easily and naturally without the torture that negative creation always entails. The more consciousness has separated itself in awareness from the whole, the more it is fragmented, the greater the structuring must be. The wholeness of consciousness is unstructured. This is the state of being in all its blissfulness.

This is where it is all going, my friends. Part of your attempts must therefore go in the direction of bringing order into the confusion of the workings of your mind, its self-involvement, its blindness to itself, and how it thus gets lost to itself. It is not the world outside yourself that confuses you; it is the world within your own consciousness with all these aspects I mentioned here. You can now begin to contemplate the fact that you can deliberately will creative construction by consciously stating, formulating, thinking, and willing a state of happiness, aliveness, fulfillment, truth, love, growth – generally and in all possible particulars which would make you happy. The climate of this may first seem ‘strange,’ unusual, unfamiliar. You need to acclimatize yourself to it. Picture yourself in such states, and call upon the universal power within to fortify your conscious mind with the necessary creative energy. The will to happiness must become so strong that the causes for unhappiness must be seen and eliminated – and this too must truly be wanted. Then the creative power will grow; the divine self will inspire and show the way. You will learn to recognize it and receive it in your conscious brain… Make use of what I have said here. I mean actively make use, not just reading this as a beautiful theory, but deeply knowing its immediate usable value and applying it every day of your life. On the day when you see your destructive creating and then deliberately change it, you will indeed have done something wonderful. The will to be happy and to unfold in life is the foundation stone of your power to create. The more concisely this is formulated – also as to your willingness to eliminate attitudes that hinder the result – the more effective your creation will become. Be blessed, receive the power that is streaming forth, and increase the power by your conscious, deliberate, willing expressions and formulations. Express your willingness to grow, to be happy, to be constructive. Do this not by willing in a tight, insistent, constricted way, but in a relaxed, confident way, contemplating that all possibilities exist as potential realities, realizable for you the moment you know and will this with all your undivided being. The power is there, it is in you. All you have to do is tap it, use it, build with your conscious mind the channels that can free it, and become very quiet and calm. Listen and tune in on it. It is there forever and forever, in its grandiose power, in its wonderful wisdom, in its ultimate knowledge that there is nothing but bliss, already now, within you.