Order as a Universal Principle

Pathwork Guide Lecture No. 205 | November 17, 1972

Greetings, divine blessings for all of you, my dearest friends.  Tonight’s lecture is on a topic I have never discussed before.

The universe is a miracle of order.  Every particle in it is always in its proper place.  Infinitesimal little cogs and wheels mesh, interact, complement one another and create an immense mechanism that humankind can never even remotely conceive of.  The harmony and grandeur of creation could not exist without the underlying principle of order; this universal order has an exactitude and mathematical precision that escapes human vision.  Only at times do you vaguely sense the existence of a greater order.  In the fragmented human perspective where everything is seen out of context, you perceive disorder and chaos.  The disorder and chaos on the human level of life are, of course, real, because they are consequences of a distortion.  You may perceive what appears as chaos also in nature, for some natural phenomena are apparently destructive.  Yet, in that very occurrence a larger order manifests itself.

Orderliness is a by-product of divine harmony.  In this lecture I will discuss what constitutes inner order or disorder, as well as outer order or disorder, and their meaning, connection, and relationship.

Inner order exists when human beings are fully conscious, when there is no longer any unconscious material in the soul.  Since there is no human being of whom this could be said, order, like other divine manifestations, exists only to relative degrees in human life.  One can experience love, truth, wisdom, peace, bliss, reality, only relatively to varied degrees.  So it is with order.  An entity that is totally conscious of itself and the universe is no longer born into human substance and material manifestation.  Such an entity’s life and whole being are in total order, with no loose ends.

Conversely, wherever awareness is lacking it indicates disorder.  If you are not aware, you cannot be in truth; things slip away from you.  You become confused.  Confusion and disorder interact as you grope in the dark, struggling to make a patchwork of the half-truths at your disposal, using anything to fill the holes and gaps of your chaos.

Most people can recognize this struggle in themselves, if they focus on it.  The disorderliness of the mind becomes frantic in the attempt to impose a false order, which heightens the discomfort and the disorderliness.  It is as if you were to shove dirt under your furniture, where it cannot be seen.  The atmosphere reeks of the hidden waste.  False opinions and obsolete behavior patterns are literally waste material, to be disposed of.  If they remain in the psyche, all your opinions, perceptions, actions and decisions will be based on half-truths or complete distortions and errors.  The result must be chaotic and disappointing.  Unless a person is willing to make order by examining carefully every single attitude, belief, reaction and feeling, he or she will continue to do patchwork until the whole fabric falls apart.  False structures always collapse.  The most radical collapse is physical death, which always affords the possibility to start anew with a clean slate.

On the day to day outer plane the same process holds.  It is not merely symbolic of the inner life, it is an expression of it.  The person who accumulates useless material in his closets and drawers, never cleans out, and thinks he can superimpose a functional order, lives in the illusion of a false order at a great expense.

There is a direct connection between order and awareness. When there is disorder in the life of a person, he or she is escaping from something, pursuing a policy of avoidance and creating the darkness of disorderliness.  You can perhaps see also another connection:  Avoidance fails to establish order on whatever level; avoidance and lack of awareness are intimately connected.  On the inner level this happens when you are not dealing with the old mental and emotional accumulations that need to be discarded so that the currently valid thoughts and feelings can fit into the appropriate channels.  One then becomes self-aware and can institute a harmonious and fluid operation within the psychic system.

On the material level, one cleans house.  The focus may be on one’s belongings, one’s things.  It may be directed to one’s financial affairs, one’s use of time.  It may mean facing and overcoming habits of procrastination, the pattern of postponing things, rather than dealing with them as they come up.  The object in every case is to free one’s life of clutter.

In inner or outer life the principle is the same.  One makes a decision to devote time, effort and care to the smooth running of one’s life.  The greater the accumulation, the greater effort one will have to expend to establish order.  In the process, new habit patterns are formed; you deal instantly with what you used to avoid, you focus your attention on whatever the moment may need.  Then a new inner peace automatically establishes itself.  No matter how much you meditate and pray or devote your energies to spiritual or artistic issues, this peace will be lacking if inner and outer disorder clutter up your life.

Avoidance is escaping from what is.  It means you do not know what is going on—inside or outside.  You become confused and disorganized, no matter how much you try to hide this fact from your consciousness.  You well know that the path will always bring you to what you want to escape from.  As far as your inner pathwork is concerned, you create more order and more light as you face what you had evaded.  You literally feel in your being an inner cleanliness and order you had lacked before.  But when you do not know, when you continue to avoid, you dwell in a dark mire which feels very uncomfortable.

A third aspect of order is reality.  When you are in disorder, you live in the illusion that your evasions, your not dealing with what must be dealt with if you are to live in peace and comfort, will not have any impact on your life.  You delude yourself into believing that avoiding does not matter, that you will be unaffected by it, that what you don’t do has no creative impact on your life substance.  But nothing that you do or don’t do, commit or omit, is without consequences.  Not doing something creates conditions and psychic substance just as much as doing something.  This applies as much to a person’s outer habits and orderliness, or its absence, as it does to the inner life.

Lack of awareness, avoidance and illusion create disorder, which creates more lack of awareness, avoidance, and illusion, until the mind and the will decide to confront the issue profoundly, once and for all, and then commit to sustaining the order.

Awareness is dealing with and focusing profoundly and completely on whatever issue is on hand; reality is facing the effects of one’s manner of living.  They provide the terms for order and harmony.  Order creates more awareness, more ability to focus as life unfolds; it allows for more reality.

You breed disorder out of your illusion that “it will go away by itself.”  And then you suffer from it.  You may manage to escape from this particular suffering, due also to your disorder.  Because your avoidance is still active, you may manage not to be aware of your suffering.  You may try to ascribe your tensions, anxieties, discomforts, pressures, bad conscience, nagging discontent, to other matters.  The fact remains that your self-created disorder is responsible for so much of it.

It matters little whether one’s neglect of order applies to the big important issues or the unimportant ones.  The smallest neglect causes disorder and creates discomfort in the soul.  This rule applies as much to a person’s outer habits and life as to the life of the soul.

The outer life is always related to the inner life in some way.  It is important for you, my friends, that you begin to pay attention to your outer life and habits from this point of view.  So far we have dealt with this relation only vaguely.  We have not yet examined it as a gauge of where a person stands inwardly.  Outer disorder diverts so much energy that the inner life must then be short-changed.

Orderliness is a spiritual principle.  Its manifestation, or lack of it, reveals something about where the inward person stands.  The spiritually unified person is therefore also an orderly person in his or her outer habits.  He or she is not only clean in body, but equally clean in the handling of his or her daily life.  A harmonious being does not accumulate tasks by procrastination; instead of following the line of least resistance, he or she takes care of chores as they come up even when it is momentarily difficult, valuing the peace that follows.  Creating order always requires an investment of effort.  The spiritually mature person does not live in the illusion that peace of mind and comfort can be attained without investing effort, realizing that the gains outweigh the investment.  The spiritually mature person has order in all matters of life, inner and outer, and would not want it differently.  Such people relish order and are willing to pay the price for it.  They are in reality.

When people are disorderly in their outer life manifestations—in their person and personal affairs, their physical surroundings, money matters, in the tasks they have to fulfill—a very insidious thing begins to happen.  They become preoccupied with the disorder they create.  This is often an ongoing process, whether they are aware of it or not.  It never occurs to them that it could be different.  Often they fall into the further illusion that creating order requires energy they do not have.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Disorder consumes energies, wastes them, dissipates them.  Since order is a divine manifestation, and therefore natural, the moment energy is summoned—perhaps, at first, with some effort—energy will be re leased.  Then more energy becomes available, energy hitherto used to avoid reality and keep consciousness dim.

The creation of inner and outer disorder is therefore a tool of the unconscious negative intentionality.  This may be a new angle for you to view outer disorder.  In whatever way disorder exists, it fulfills the purpose of resistance to harmony, truth, health, and wholeness.  Disorder creates tensions and preoccupations; it consumes valuable creative energy that could otherwise be used to find God within.  I repeat:  Though one may not be conscious of the anxiety that disorder creates on any level, the anxiety is there.  One’s affairs are left unattended, as life constantly slips away, waiting to be lived, fulfilled in the morrow.

It is easy to see that if you accomplish your tasks on time, you have control over your life.  You do not accumulate old waste, you deal at once with the necessary issues, you do not avoid, procrastinate, or delude yourself that it does not matter.  This is healthy, necessary control.  It is a function that the ego should perform.  Disharmony and distortion create imbalance and a false lack of control exists where control should be.  This always also creates the split-off opposite distorted condition:  False control tries to compensate for the false lack of control, and vice versa.  The overcontrol on the feeling level will be easier to relinquish when control is exerted where it is functional.  If you hold yourself together in the right way and right place, it is easier to abandon yourself and relinquish control where that is right and to give in to feelings and involuntary processes.

A person with right ego control is capable of surrender in ways that the person who lives in chaos is not.  In chaotic states it is virtually impossible to let go of controls because, unless one’s ego has been strengthened through self-discipline, one would drown in one’s own chaos.  So, you see, self-discipline is an unavoidable prerequisite for spiritual and worldly fulfillment.  It makes abandonment to involuntary processes safe.  The self-disciplined person can surrender to spirituality, to sexuality, to the deeper feelings and processes.  It is safe.  He or she stands on the firm ground of reality, fulfilling the functions of the ego, rather than—falsely—dispensing with it.

Order always means discipline.  The immature person refuses discipline in any form, associating it with parental authority against which he continues to wage war.  This behavior is among the obsolete waste material of soul stuff.  The more you look for parental authority to take care of your life, the more you rebel and the less do you adopt attitudes that would make you capable of fulfilling your life with ease and peace.  Thus do you misinterpret self-discipline for deprivation.  What an error!  Actually, the more you refuse voluntary self-discipline, the more you unavoidably deprive yourself of the peace and comfort that are its rewards.  You deprive yourself of the deep pleasure and bliss of the involuntary life stream that you can only allow to come through you when your ego stands on the firm ground built by self-discipline.

Create a new climate in your life that will facilitate your growth and development, the solving of painful problems, the fulfillment of your real needs.  By learning self discipline, you will establish order in your life:  In the way you arrange your time, your money, your possessions, your surroundings, your personal appearance.  Arrange your day in such a way that you, at least most of the time, take care of tasks as they come.  Organize the details in such a way that your day will run smoothly.  Devote time and effort to create this new order and to clean up old disorder, and then sustain it.  Deliberately meditate for the energy, consciousness, and guidance to follow through.  If you experience a great deal of resistance to doing so, let your helper help you express the negative intentionality and deal with the meaning of it, as you do in all other matters.  Begin to view your outer life as a reflection of an inner attitude and intent.

If the resistance is not too great to establish this new mode of life, you will see what a difference it will make.  Burdens will fall off your shoulders.  You will relish a peace and comfort that will give you clarity to solve your inner problems and to surrender to the deeper self.  When you have control where it is needed you can relinquish control where it is not needed.

Outer disorder in a person’s life always reflects the inner attitude:  It mirrors the inner sense of false abandonment, of wishful thinking and avoidance.  It reflects your illusory state.  Outer order in a person’s life, however, is not necessarily a sign of inner harmony and order reached.  It may, and often is, an indication of the exact opposite.  Then orderliness is not an expression of inner clarity, but a compensation, a false attempt to resolve inner disorderliness.  When orderliness becomes compulsive and you are tense and obsessed, afraid and anxious when established routines cannot be met—that is a reliable sign of inner disorderliness.  If orderliness becomes a burden in a person’s life, or exists at the expense of feelings, of expansion, of relaxation, of freedom, then the innermost being is sending a message to the conscious self.  The message says, “make order in yourself.”  But the message comes through garbled because the outer self is insufficiently attuned to the inner self.  The outer self is still too resistant to communicate with the inner self to trust in its guidance and decipher its messages.  Resistance to creating inner order is, as you know, always strong.  One person reflects this in his outer life; another type of personality misreads the message and applies it only to the outer plane.  Order in such instances always becomes compulsive and obsessive.  The compulsive orderliness creates as much trouble and hardship in the person’s inner life as disorderliness does.  The degree varies, of course.  The strongest manifestations are wash compulsions, and the like.

This factor is important to understand so that you do not fall into the error of blind, flat evaluation.  Look very carefully to sense the climate of a person’s life.  If the personal atmosphere is relaxed and easy and the orderliness creates more ease than strain in a person’s life, then it is indeed an expression of the divine orderliness you find in the universe.

You have now another tool with which to look at yourself in a newer light and gain new understanding.  Those who are helpers can apply this tool for their own benefit and for those whom they help.  Wherever you find disorder in your outer life, in whatever areas it may manifest, begin to focus on your discomfort about it.  Allow yourself to feel how much it disturbs and harasses you.  You may be surprised to learn how many of your anxieties and tensions you had ascribed to insolubly deep conflicts will vanish as you discipline yourself.  Of course, the resistance to self-discipline, the need to make disorder in your life, is an expression of such deep problems.  The new awareness of its importance will help you greatly to tackle the problem also from the outside and actually rearrange your life in a new way.  You may now be far enough to do so because you so choose, with an inner understanding, not merely to perform an outer obedient act.  The latter would not be very meaningful, because you would resent it and make the changes in the expectation of pleasing the parental authority who is supposed to give you what you demand.  If you then failed to comply, you would feel falsely guilty, which would rather hinder you.  This is why I waited for so long to discuss this topic.

Pay attention to how disturbed you really are by your disorder.  The resisting part in you knows that if you free yourself of the burden of disorder, your inner work will be much easier.  And the resisting part wants to avoid just that.  The disorderly person is never able to concentrate.  The same applies of course also to the compulsively orderly person who merely compensates for the inner disorder.  Disorder makes concentration and focusing impossible.  The mind must wander, preoccupied with things undone, with disorganized life and chaos.  The mind may not directly wander toward the disorder, toward the immediate disturbance created by the disorderliness.  It may wander elsewhere.  But if you follow the wandering thought through and examine the content and climate behind it, you will see how disturbed you are by the many little things in your life that you do not wish to tackle and set in order.

Often people negate personal order as an important aspect of life.  They may even feel it is pedantic to speak of it, because it has nothing to do with the important questions of creativity, or spirituality, or life.  But it is a fact that the great questions always rest on many little ones.  When the little attitudes fall into place, as creation does in every tiniest detail, then your creative expression will be less hampered, much more free.  I ask you not to underestimate this topic.

You are now all profoundly enough involved with the deeper levels of your negation and destructive intent so that there is little danger for you to use outer orderliness as a false gauge and a false evaluation of your inner state.  And those who newly joined the pathwork are enveloped by the rest of you who are sufficiently aware of yourselves to avoid the danger of glib judgment.  This danger is another reason I waited so long to give this lecture.

As a task for all of you, I suggest that you look at your life from the point of view expressed in this lecture.  In what way have you created an order that affords you ease and relaxation?  In what way do you resist doing so?  In what way do you suffer from disorder?  Are you aware of the fact that you do suffer from it?  If you are not, search inside and see the indirect discomfort.  Suddenly you will recognize many little actions and reactions in your daily life in a new light.  You will become intensely aware of how much you do suffer from your disorder and how it was always so.  See how your disorder makes you lose yourself in the wrong way and thus prevents you from losing yourself in the right way.

In this connection I want to come back to avoidance.  Avoidance exists across the board.  You want to avoid seeing your negativity, your destructiveness, your dishonesty, the little thoughts about how you wish to cheat, even if you do not actually do it.  This can be so easily overlooked and glossed over.  These invisible, secret thoughts and attitudes seem harmless to you and you delude yourself that they have no impact on you.  You want to avoid the feelings that are inconvenient.  The price you pay for avoiding is literally insanity.  However, if you confront what you would rather avoid, the golden point in the middle, the wonderful point of truth and reality will suddenly appear.  Deep within the dreaded area, through the dreaded area, you find the golden point of light, truth, and unification, the golden point of God.

Every area of avoidance bears within itself that golden point.  Every dreaded point bears its golden center.  Go toward it and all woe dissolves.  Go away from it and you increase your suffering, your confusion and darkness.  You may think that there are areas that cannot be faced, that have no golden point at their ground:  The areas of your terror or your evil.  This is not so.  As long as you avoid your terror and evil, they live in you as phantoms.  These phantoms create disaster and chaos.  Turn around one hundred and eighty degrees.  Instead of going away from it, go into it, no matter how bad it may feel, at first.  If you summon your courage and honesty and persevere with a minimum of faith, you will penetrate the darkness and come to what I call the “golden point” in the center of your being.  It is in the center of the area that you most dread.

There is no horror that does not bear the golden point within itself.  There is no death that does not bear the golden point of life.  There is no darkness that does not contain the golden point of brilliant light.  There is no evil in you that does not bear the golden point of your goodness.  If you can hold to this truth—and it is truth indeed!—it will become so much easier for you not to avoid, but to go through the tunnel of darkness, into the golden area.  This is my message for you tonight.

A particular blessing is given for the meeting to follow.  It is yet another step in creating the earthly place where such wonderful work, unfoldment, and love can exist.  You have special blessings for this meeting, and a great deal of guidance.

Now, as my instrument comes out of the state of trance, as you are quiet and listen to the music, I ask that you all meditate specifically for giving something of yourself to this venture:  Your positive attitude; your positive intentionality, your goodwill, your good thoughts, your intention of giving your good feelings to it.  If you do this, and the more you do this, the more wonderful the venture will grow.  What will take place there increasingly will be something that cannot take place when you are all in different locations in the city, where you cannot focus in the same way and be by yourselves in the same way.  What increasingly will take place is the transformation from negative to positive energy, from negative to positive consciousness.  We have begun to do this, to some extent.  It is not coincidental that the new movement I had announced for this working year comes at the same time as your Center in the country is being established.  There it will best take place.  Your ability to make this transformation, to sustain and feel comfortable with positive feelings, energy and consciousness, will grow as a result of having owned up, and continuing to own up, to the negative.

The work will go on constantly in these two ways, alternating between exposure of negativity and transforming the negative into the positive.  You will learn more techniques and approaches as you become ready for them in your progress.  You will have the means, the peace, the privacy and the surroundings in which it will be possible to do this work.

Use this gauge:  Where the positive is unbearable and cannot be sustained, it is an indication that, with all the recognitions you have made, you still have not fully accepted and exposed yourself; you have not quite understood or faced negative attitudes in you.  They may not even be different from those you already know in principle, but your knowledge is not sufficiently deep and wide.  Full acceptance is still absent.  You are still submerged in those attitudes, as if half blind.  You are not really cognizant of the way and the strength with which you perpetuate these attitudes.  So your ability to bear good feelings, intimacy, love, and pleasure is an exact indication of that.  The work in the Center will particularly help you with the transforming aspect of the twofold task.  This is a wonderful thing to look forward to.  Just think of the meaning of it all:  You will no longer need to take refuge in your negativity, which appears to be more comfortable than love, closeness, and pleasure.  Love, closeness, and pleasure will be the most comfortable and easy state to live in.  This is the natural state, and that is what you will attain.

Blessed be everyone of you, my dearest ones.  Feel and accept the love that pours forth from the spiritual side.  Be blessed, be in peace.