Psychic Nuclear Points Continued—Process in the Now

Pathwork Guide Lecture No. 215 | November 14, 1973

Greetings, all my dearest, dearest friends.  May you all receive the blessings, the strength and the love that are poured forth as a result of your combined efforts and commitments to your innermost being.

In this lecture I shall continue the topic I started last time.  Once again I ask you to open your innermost sensitivity and intuitiveness to understand, at least to some degree, the deep meaning of this lecture.  Bringing your intellect alone to it will not give you an adequate comprehension of the depth of the topic.  And again, as with the last lecture, what may first appear as purely abstract cosmic knowledge about creative processes will, when you pursue it and follow me all the way, become clearly and immediately applicable to your life here and now.  Your own inner processes will become more comprehensible when you perceive, to whatever degree, how these processes are directly related to and part of larger cosmic processes that continuously exist.

I explained to you in the last lecture about psychic nuclear points and psychic nuclear spiral configurations.  I will briefly recapitulate them to make this lecture more comprehensible.

Every smallest particle of creation consists of endless series of psychic nuclear spiral configurations that are intense energy movements, winding up in a climactic point which brings the particular creation into manifestation, on whatever level of reality that may be.  Each of these configurations consists of a series of psychic events of consciousness content.  In other words, these energy movements are not merely mechanical constructs that simply exist separately from mind.  They are always expressions of mind—greater mind or smaller minds, as the case may be.  Each creation has sequences of several such configurations that intertwine, interweave, overlap, form and reform themselves, create and fall apart and recreate themselves in every self-renewing, perpetuating, extending patterns of interacting spiral configurations.  Each pattern may seem, and be, a creation within itself, quite different and purposeful within its more narrow framework.  Yet, at the same time, it is part of a larger scheme of purposeful patterns of creation.

Let me give you a simple example on the physical level.  Let us suppose you decide to get up from your chair, to move through this room, walk down the stairs and out to the street corner—for whatever purpose.  That total plan is one configuration, one spiral.  Arriving at your destination is the explosive, climactic point that brings the plan into manifestation.  This particular creation has made its appearance on this level of reality.  However, before this result can come into being, you have to take so and so many steps.  Each step is a plan in itself, is an intent to move certain muscles, because even though you may move these muscles automatically by now, the intent still exists.  The intent, the movement, and the execution of the intent follow a certain plan.  The plan, together with the execution in each particle, creates many smaller spiral configurations, complete in themselves.  Of course, the terms “small” or “large” are not correct on this level of reality, but I have to use them for lack of better words in your language.  Each step is a creation of a spiral form and psychic nuclear end point, complete with consciousness content, purpose, plan and execution.  The total walk consists of a “larger” such total form, consisting of those “smaller” ones—the individual steps.  But the walk from here to the corner is not an isolated creation either.  It, too, is part of a larger plan, an intent of which the walk is just as much a partial creation as the step is a partial creation of the walk from here to the corner.  This formula is very important for you to understand because it represents the scheme of creation itself.

Let us take another example.  Suppose you wish to build a house.  Again the same principle applies.  So many partial creative spiral forms converge into a whole which, in turn, is again only a part of a larger plan.  Therefore, when planning your house, you may first have to work for a number of years to be able to purchase the property and then to hire the architect who plans and designs the house.  The architect, in turn, must execute his or her own plan and hire a contractor to organize the work with various sub-contractors who must cooperate with one another.  Then laborers and interior decorators get to work until the house is finished.

Each goes through an infinite number of a series of interacting psychic nuclear points, each totally formed in its own perfection, the whole of which becomes part of a larger plan, and so on and on.  Each step in its smallest particle is a creation in itself.  Each “little” creation is an explosion of a psychic spiral formation.  The larger creation consists of so many smaller ones, which extend and extend.  For example, the purpose of the house itself is only an infinitesimal step of a whole larger series of creative, intertwining events.  You may follow through yourself, with some imagination, how the house is, relatively, only a small step in a larger scheme.  This larger scheme, too, is only an infinitesimal step of a still larger scheme—as one human life is when considered over a whole period of its evolutionary spiral movement.

This is a very important process for you to visualize intuitively.  The examples I gave are very simple.  Yet even in these simple examples, you can perhaps imagine how many psychic nuclear points are necessary to exist and weave a whole network of larger psychic nuclear points, which in turn move, create, explode, fall apart, form together in a new meaningful pattern, related to the larger plan.  Trying to imagine the unimaginable meaning and purposefulness behind these plannings may give you an inkling of the Divine Mind at work at all times, in its benign, loving wisdom and power of creation.

Understanding these principles even to a small degree will give you another insight, namely that even an insignificant act like walking from here to the street corner is indeed a creation.  It requires the most brilliant creative genius to set in motion the energy systems, the muscular coordination and control and the innumerable components necessary to execute such a creative act with all that forms part of it.  And walking from here to the street corner is not an isolated creation.  You must have a reason to walk there, and that reason, again, is only a small part of a larger plan or scheme.  This interweaving, forever accelerating, enlarging, self-perpetuating process of creative patterns, each in itself a perfection within its own fragment, and this fragment only a part of a larger fragment, and so on and on, is a vague sketch of the creative process itself, always at work.

Imagine the creation of a planet, of the human anatomy, of a mathematical system, of the literally infinite qualities contained in the ether.  Still, you may not even vaguely perceive how many entire systems of creation, systems within smaller systems, are contained in the creation of each of these examples.  The smallest particle of air is in itself a perfect creation of a psychic nuclear spiral point and climactic explosion.  Each of these particles is a part of a larger scheme, again, as I illustrated with other examples.  I only wish to convey that the smallest or biggest creation—from your point of view—undergoes the same serial law that is the basis of creation itself.  This is why I repeat myself.  It will help you to perceive this process when you look at your inner makeup, your reactions and the creations of your mind.  For the same principle exists of course with positive and negative creations.

Since the universe is filled with Being, there could be no smallest measure where there is non-being.  Each of these nuclear points has a content and a meaning.  It is not separate from consciousness.  It is an integral part and a result of consciousness.  And when you understand the inner meaning of a nuclear point, when you perceive a nuclear spiral point, fully comprehending its meaning and purpose, its message, you will have transcended, to a certain degree, the narrow confinement in which you suffer from seeing the world out of context.

The less you see that these smaller part-creations are only fragmentary particles of a whole, the more you believe that the smaller particle is all there is and has no connection with anything else—simply because you cannot perceive more, and thus the more fragmentized you must be yourself, in your momentary consciousness or sense of awareness.  When I say momentary, I mean this awareness exists only as long as you reside within the narrow confines of human limitations.  Conversely, the more you perceive that everything that you can experience is only a smaller part and fragment of a larger and still larger ongoing plan—like the one step you make as part of the whole walk, and the walk being a fragment of a larger plan in your mind—the more you are aware of and connected with the All-Consciousness, the Whole.  Therefore, you are nearer to bliss.

Time itself is a manifestation of this fragmentation.  For time, as I often said, is nothing but the illusion of a disconnected view of reality.  In the framework of this particular topic, time is a perception only of the partial steps, the “smaller” creative units of spiral nuclear points.  You do not see the whole structure of this particle.  This is why you suffer so often from the feeling of senselessness.  When you are in this limited state of consciousness, you are indeed fragmented and oblivious of the larger process.

Time, according to the human state of consciousness, is experiencing what is as a sequence rather than as a part of a whole.  You see things linearly rather than fully, endlessly in width, depth and scope, in dimensions that the human mind cannot even perceive at this point of its development.  Each moment of time, to speak in your terms—each moment of being, to speak in my terms—is in itself a psychic nuclear construct, containing meaning and consciousness, containing a purposeful design.  Each fragmentary second is that.  If you string along second upon second upon second—not only sequentially, but in depth and width—you may perceive that there is no time, that this is a point of creation that is endless and is always there.  And that is what we might call the “now point.”

It is not entirely impossible, in your present state of development, to occasionally experience the “now point”—the sense of it.  But this requires much higher states of conscious ness, which must be earned.  Humankind, as a whole, has now just about left kindergarten.  When consciousness grows and matures a little and therefore perceives life not only as the immediately obvious fragment, but senses that the fragment is a part of a larger fragment, and so on and on, then the consciousness prepares itself for experiencing the “now point.”  People may have only occasional inklings of such a perception, but these will be enough to imprint on their minds that there is much more to this life than what they immediately experience in life.

Being in the “now point” means being completely in the now.  This is what we are going to talk about in the second part of this lecture.  Only when you are in the eternal now are you truly in bliss, truly secure, fearless, and absolutely certain—not as wishful thinking, but as absolute, realistic, justified inner certainty—of the beautiful meaning of life that is a continuum, that does not stop merely because certain momentary manifestations seem to stop.

This sense of eternality is the true bliss.  For when there is no fear, there is complete relaxation.  The word “relaxation” could be misleading and I hesitate to use it, but the human language is limited and we have to do as best as we can with the terms available.  So let me describe what I mean.

A completely fearless state, without contraction and tension, is the state that makes a personality susceptible to the ever-existing bliss of the universe.  This, however, is far from being a passive state.  Lack of tension does not imply flaccidity or motionlessness.  It is an ever-moving state in which the pulsatory changes of tension, in a different sense, alternate with openness and total receptivity.  In the ordinary human sense, the flexing is associated with tightening and defense.  In the pure state the tightening is a kind of charging, so as to give spring to the creative movement that follows from it.  This alternating movement of charging and letting go is a creative whole which makes the entity participate in the creation.  Both these movements are relaxed in the sense of being without fear and defense.  They express a state of deep knowing that all is well in the universe.

This state is immensely blissful.  The longing for this bliss deep in the heart of all human beings can never be extinguished.  And when you fragment your consciousness and create the false reality of the three-dimensional world, inwardly you are still connected with the greater reality of eternal being and with the eternal “now point.”  Your manifest consciousness will constantly strive for this state, whether you know it or not.  This striving is in itself the motivating force to grow, to search, to move, to accept the temporary hardships which are self-created, and to walk through them as through tunnels, so as to free the self from the obstruction.

This requires, as you all know, a motivating force.  For you constantly fluctuate in a battle between wanting to move and follow the longing, or resisting movement and giving up what your heart knows exists.  This is a tremendously important struggle that each entity must go through.

At one period in the evolutionary ascent, the struggle is won.  The commitment is made to movement, even if it seems to bring momentary discomfort or hardship.  Of course that is an illusion.  Discomfort and hardship exist and must manifest, whether or not you decide to move in the direction of your own inner destiny.  To follow this move is the only real way you can understand the hardship and therefore really dissolve it.  Denying the hardship only appears temporarily to eliminate it, so that the hardship appears to be created by the decision to turn inward into the direction of the real self.  This is also an illusion.

The striving for the bliss is the motivational force that tips the scale of the inner battle between movement and stagnation, between reality and illusion, between fulfillment and despair, on the side of movement, reality, and fulfillment.  It must occur at one stage or another.  However, you also seek shortcuts.  You sometimes want to fulfill the longing without paying the price.  The price is the labor of searching, of seeking and finding, of learning, of growing, of changing, of self-purification, of traversing all self-created pain and evil.

Now let us briefly consider what such shortcuts may be.  Several are possible.  Let me list a few.  Sexual activity can be such a shortcut.  In sexual experience the blissful Now is most often experienced, although very rarely sustained.  When sexuality is an escape from the problems, difficulties and unpleasant aspects of reality, then it is sought as a cheap way of attaining a semblance of universal bliss, which the heart knows exists.  Of course, as all cheating, it cannot work.  The bliss will, at best, be a very illusory and shortlived one.  When the blissful universal state of the eternal Now is attained through honest growth, sexual union will be but one expression of it, as the result of two beings relating on the deepest, most honest level, who fuse their spirituality, their emotional selves, their minds, and their physical beings.  The bliss that results from this is then a foretaste of the “now point,” or, the “now point” will be temporarily experienced.

The most blatant false search for the “now point” is through drugs.  Indeed, the drug experience removes the physical, three-dimensional boundaries and thus reveals the reality behind the great curtain.  But when this revelation occurs without earning it by making the state of consciousness compatible with this experience, then the price is high.  I hardly need to illustrate the point.  The same applies, of course, to alcohol.

Such a shortcut is always a combination of two aspects of the personality.  On the one hand there is the great urge to be in a blissful state, which a part of the personality “remembers” and desires, on the other, there is a resistance to doing the work.  Attempting to compromise between these two sides leads to such false ways of attaining the “now point.”  The fall from the bliss state is then all the more painful and the state of ordinary, physical consciousness all the more dark.  In Scripture the Fall of the Angels is often symbolized as a one-time happening.  But it is a reality outside time that occurs whenever the fragmented state of consciousness accrues by violating some spiritual law.  The false search for the “now point” is a violation in that it wants to gain the result without paying the price.  The insistence to be in heaven without being ready for it makes the personality plunge into hell.

Meditational exercises are another way in which human beings often seek the bliss state.  Offhand it would appear that this is an honest search, for it almost always entails a lengthy practice of concentration exercises and sometimes even a quite ascetic way of life which is supposed to prepare the personality for the experience.  This, too, is every so often an illusion.

Extended fasting, concentration exercises, chanting and self-hypnotic reiteration of meditational phrases can indeed produce results.  There can be a temporary experience that reveals the great world behind the curtain.  But if all these practices are substitutions for self-search, self-purification, and for change from the depths of the distortions, they will, in essence, be similar to the more crassly destructive escape routes we mentioned before.

If meditational exercises are mechanical, the way is an illusory one.  Only when the “now point” is a result of slowly earned development will the new perceptions be truly yours.  Otherwise you will put a lot of energy forcefully into something that you cannot maintain with a feeling of ease.  It must eventually split off from your undeveloped parts, which you then push out of consciousness.  Thus a tremendous contradiction occurs.  The blissful “now point” is truly a result of unification.  If you do not honestly attain this unification and you seek shortcuts, then instead of unifying, you will become even more split.  In fact, in such a case the personality was less split when it began than it will find itself after temporarily tasting and savoring the blissful “now points” by artificially induced means.  I include mechanical exercises and practices as such means.

There is only one safe and secure way to attain the blissful “now point,” the revelation of reality in its unlimited dimensions.  That is by fulfilling the task for which you have come.  Only a path such as this can help you do so.  You must learn to go through your pain:  the pain of your illusion, of your guilt, of your undeveloped side.  Ultimately this is what it all amounts to.

What is the real nature of your state when you have lost the “now point”?  You are not aware of spiritual reality, you are cut off from it.  You think that the temporary reality you have created—an illusory reality, if I may coin this apparently paradoxical phrase—is reality.

I now come to the most crucial part of this lecture.  I said before that being in the “now point” is being aware, intensely aware, of the meaning of this “now point.”  Whenever you strive away from the “now point,” you lose awareness of its meaning.  You then create a superimposed false reality.  This happens in several ways.  In the first place, not being in the eternal now, in terms of time, is due to being either in the past or in the future—not in the present, in the infinitesimal present.  One can be in the present to some degree, but still not truly aware of the “now point.”  Either you are in each minute already ahead—perhaps in the next minute, the next hour, the next day, or even some faraway “future,” in a wish-dream of how one day it will be or should be or could be by magic.  Then you bypass the “now point” that could give you the key to actually working toward that cherished future point.  Or you hang on to something from the past that governs you, often without even knowing it.

Your pathwork brings you in contact with both.  Often you become aware of how your past still influences you only after much laborious groping.  This influence makes you react to something that takes place now as if it were still in the past, and in this distorted vision you actually believe the event to be the same as a past one.  Not that this belief is articulate.  If it were, you would be nearer to the “now point.”  The fact that you are convinced your present reaction is an appropriate one to the now is a measure of your alienation from the “now point.”

The degree of such superimpositions from the past to the present is much, much stronger than even you, my friends, realize, though you have seen some examples of this.  As you grow further, you will become more conscious of this “time projection.”  What you often believe are free actions, determined by the current situations, are not at all freely chosen, but are determined by events and reactions you had that may or may not have been appropriate in the past.  In either case, they are not appropriate now and lead to distortion of reality, thus to a false creation that blots out your connection with the real now.

By the same token, when you view your life objectively, you will see how much your wishes and your striving into the future determine your experience—and therefore your lack of true depth experience—now.  So you lose the “now point” as a result of the past and the future that tear at you, as it were, from both directions.  Crassly speaking, it is this lack of awareness of what really takes place that creates the time illusion.  Or, to put it differently, the false reality, the lack of self-awareness, creates a fragmentation and a disconnectedness.

However, to be in the “now point,” to comprehend its meaning, not to live in the past or in the future, is not something you can directly determine in your mind by an act of will.  The act of will comes into play, but it must go toward establishing self-awareness in all those mundane aspects that are unwelcome for you to face and deal with.  Only then will you be in truth.  Only in that way can you establish a sense of reality.  And only as a consequence of doing that will a new sense of timelessness evolve spontaneously, effortlessly, when you least expect it.  It will come as a byproduct of your search for your truth.

Only indirectly, as a result of self-exploration, will the past cease to be the present.  You will then trust the future completely because you will know that it can only be an extension of the now.  If you are in full truth in the now, you build a “future”—in your terms—that can be wholly trusted.  Thus you don’t need to toy in a wishful way with the future because you don’t need to escape from the present.  Then the forever now takes on a new reality.

Other ways in which you lose the “now point” of each fragmentary moment in time in which you exist—in which you breathe, in which you think and will and feel and experience—are very familiar to you who have spent time and effort on this path.  They are even known by psychological schools which attempt to find the inner self.  They seem to have little to do with cosmic and creative processes.  In your world, today, they seem quite humdrum concepts, far removed from such topics as we discuss now.  But they are indeed very intensely connected with the processes under discussion.  These are (1) displacement, (2) projection, (3) denial.  I will give simple examples of each to use for your further self-exploration.

Suppose there is something painful in you that you struggle against—and you all know how much you struggle in that respect.  You then may lose the “now point” through displacement.  Let us take the example when you love a person dearly who hurts and angers you.  You do not wish to offend that person.  If you show your feelings, the consequences may incur the loss of that person whom you need and are dependent on.  This would cause a pain you wish to avoid.  Nevertheless that person has done something to you that pains and angers you.  Acknowledging that pain may also destroy a bubble of illusion you do not wish to give up.  Perhaps the illusion is that the beloved person ought to be perfect and never do things to hurt you.  The purpose of your illusion itself is to avoid unpleasantness—in this case, confrontation—and/or risk the possible loss of the loved one.  You hope to avoid all risks, discomforts and pains by building an illusion into which you invest quite a bit of energy so that you can maintain its fictional reality.  Even so, the energy of the pain and anger you experience is very real and you need to dispose of it.  The illusion is that by not acknowledging the pain and anger they will simply go away.  The mechanism by which you try to “solve” this problem—often so automatic that it is not even perceived—is to put your feelings for this beloved and important person onto another person, perhaps on another issue.

This other person may not mean as much to you.  His or her anger, rejection and retaliation may be less “dangerous” to you.  Or you are so secure in this person’s love, tolerance and understanding that you can safely put this load on him or her.  In that way, you have “solved” the problem by finding a necessary outlet for a tight energy accumulation, without jeopardizing the relationship with the all-important figure in your life.  This is what I call displacement.  Quite apart from guilt about the dishonesty of such a shrewd device, it also creates a false reality.  You begin to live in a self-created world that has no bearing on what reality is.  This makes you completely unaware of every fractional “now point.”  You cannot discern its meaning or message until you are willing to set it all straight again.

Many of you are sufficiently advanced on your path and have experienced any number of times that when you fully face the most undesirable, dishonest and petty infringements of truth in you, you get into a state of bliss.  You reach it even before you necessarily change that part of you, simply by dealing honestly with the issue.  The reason for this is that you are in the particular “now point” of your untruthfulness, of your deceitfulness, of your negativity.  Displacement creates chaos and disorder.  It creates a total confusion about what really is.  It creates a total disconnectedness from the continuum of your inner existence.  Thus it must create fear and fragmentation.

The example I used is a very frequent one and exists in your lives to a much larger degree than you presently realize.  Here and there you see some of your displacement, but not nearly to the degree it still goes on in all of you.  You so often shift something from one person to another, from one situation to another.  Sometimes you are just too lazy and too resistant by habit to deal with the real situation.  Then it comes out in the false one.  There can be no question about coming into your forever changing and self-renewing and ongoing “now point,” unless you stop that procedure, unless you fully make up your mind to see what you are doing and to what extent you are doing it.  The lack of awareness of how you are doing it makes the problem much greater.  The minute you see you have the problem of automatic displacement, the problem is already diminished.

Let us now take projection.  You are a little more familiar with that, but even here you are often quite blind to how you react to others, precisely because you do not wish to see something in yourself.  Sometimes the other person may indeed have the undesirable trait, though at other times this may not even be the case.  But whether or not it is, it matters little.  The important thing to see is that you abuse the energy that you should use toward facing, confronting, and dealing with an aspect of yourself by becoming angry and annoyed at the other person instead.  You do this because you wish to maintain an illusion about yourself—namely that you do not have the trait in question.

Denial is of course quite self-explanatory.  You neither displace nor project what you do not wish to experience, but you attempt to simply deny its existence.  All these procedures—being influenced by the past, striving toward the future, displacement, projection, and denial—are attempts to get away from the “now point,” in the illusion that something can be avoided that is in any way unpleasant.  You create a new reality by force that is not founded on truth.  In essence this means abusing the creative faculties.  What you really accomplish is the creation of more fragmentation, a further alienation from the psychic nuclear “now point” with all its glorious meaning and relationship to the whole.

The love of all your friends who work in this beautiful venture is streaming forth to all of you.  The blessings will multiply in your hearts and in your deeper minds as you let yourself feel these blessings.  Be your innermost God.