Greetings and blessings for every one of my beloved friends here.\u00a0 The power of love and the strength of truth will unfold in you forever more as you grow on your path.<\/p>\n
I would like to say to you, first of all, that the majority of you have learned to be aware of and admit quite a lot of negativity.\u00a0 So far the significance of this progress cannot even be perceived.\u00a0 It makes a lot of difference whether you are aware of your negative intentionality, or whether you blindly grope, act out, and consequently suffer a special kind of confusion that hurts more than physical pain.\u00a0 The benefit of this new awareness is equally great for yourself and for others.\u00a0 In this lecture I would like to show you what the unconscious psychic interaction between you and others means in terms of the loss of love and also the pain of guilt that I talked of in the last lecture.<\/p>\n
When you are only vaguely aware of your negativity, only dimly sensing the hurt that it inflicts on others, you are caught in a battle of blame, self-justification, helplessness, self-rejection and self-doubt.\u00a0 You cannot help but hook others, with their own unconscious conflicts, into your negativity.\u00a0 You bind them in a struggle equal to the one I just described.<\/p>\n
Many of you have already started to recognize that by denying your negativity you incur a double guilt.\u00a0 First, there is the guilt for the negative attitude in question.\u00a0 This we may call the primary guilt.\u00a0 Then you are involved in the guilt for denying this negativity, which we may call the secondary guilt.\u00a0 If the primary guilt were admitted and its consequences truly accepted, it would cease to be a guilt.\u00a0 But the secondary guilt must weigh heavily on everyone’s soul.\u00a0 It is a burden that consumes much vital life energy.\u00a0 Your denial always implies inner or outer harmful acts toward others and may therefore truly be called a sin, because you punish others for your own failings, for your own negative intentions, lovelessness, untruthfulness, spite, and unfair demands.<\/p>\n
If you are aware, for instance, that you do not wish to love and you do not pretend otherwise, this is your responsibility.\u00a0 If you realize that you pay a heavy price for a loveless existence, but you let it go at that, at least you do not hook others into your guilt for not loving.\u00a0 You will be alone, of course, but you have made a choice; you know it and you pay the price for it.\u00a0 You withhold from the world your wonderful love capacity, that is true, and in that sense you fail.<\/p>\n
But when you blame others for your lack of love, even if you use their real shortcomings as your excuse, when you punish them for the result of your own unloving attitude and build cases in order to justify your own holding back, then you truly sin, my friends.<\/p>\n
This process is most widespread, most common, and yet so subtle that only people who possess a considerable amount of self-awareness can begin to recognize it in themselves, and therefore also in others.\u00a0 It is a basic attitude.\u00a0 It exists in variations and with different degrees of intensity.\u00a0 The refusal to love, when not admitted, often manifests in the following attitude:\u00a0 “I do not want to give you anything\u2014whoever “you” may be\u2014but I demand that you give me everything.\u00a0 If you do not, I will punish you.”\u00a0 This attitude is very typical.\u00a0 The more concealed and the less consciously expressed, the more insidious its effect will be on the self and others.\u00a0 It is always relatively easy to deny, rationalize, distort, conceal, or use half-truths to justify this attitude.<\/p>\n
Lately, several of my friends have become aware of this attitude and could admit it not only to themselves but also to their friends.\u00a0 When this happens, the influx of health, of the clean fresh air of psychic truth, is instant.\u00a0 It is the result of freeing yourself of the secondary guilt.\u00a0 The more you expose every detail of the disparity between your demands, your own ungiving intentions and the punishment you mete out when your demands are not being met, the more you clear yourself of guilt.\u00a0 The clearer you can see the preposterous unfairness of what you demand compared to what you give, how differently you insist on being treated from how you treat others, and exactly how you choose to punish\u2014always so that you cannot be caught, so you cannot be made accountable\u2014the quicker you will free yourself of a burden that causes depression, anxiety, worry, hopelessness, and often physical illness and material frustration as well.<\/p>\n
One of the most popular ways for punishing others for not responding with love to your ungivingness is to render them guilty; to build the case in such a way that they seem to be the cause for your misery.\u00a0 You convince yourself quite successfully of this because you choose to see only the result of your withholding and spiteful or perhaps cowardly non-giving.\u00a0 You choose to ignore that others cannot respond the way you would like them to when your own psyche is still steeped in this negative, non-giving attitude toward life.<\/p>\n
Your negativity says, “I will deny the truth and will blame you for not giving me all and for not letting me get away with my one-sided demands.\u00a0 And if you dare to react to this I will punish you by hating you and by blaming you even more.”\u00a0 Those who are at the beginning of their path, or those who have a very strong investment in their idealized self-image, which makes no room for this truth, will first think it is quite impossible that they, too, can harbor such an attitude.\u00a0 Your best gauge to determine whether and to what extent it exists, is to consult your mind and emotions.\u00a0 If you feel comfortable with others, without anxiety, if you expand your life in a joyous way; and if you regard occasional difficulties as meaningful stepping stones, then you have already vastly overcome this poisonous attitude.\u00a0 But you, too, must have had it and must have dealt with it in a truthful way.\u00a0 No one is entirely free from it to begin with.\u00a0 If you have not found this attitude, you must work your way through your pride, your investment in your pretense, your cowardice.<\/p>\n
When you admit your negative intentionality you perform the most fundamental act of love.\u00a0 The moment you admit what you are doing, you are performing an act of love, my friends, whether you know it or not.\u00a0 If you do not admit your negative intent, you may give a lot, but never the real thing that counts most.\u00a0 You may give things, money, good deeds, even tenderness and concern, but they are hollow gifts without setting the other free by the honest admission of your negativity.<\/p>\n
The guilt caused by your unfair demands, your spite, the withholding of your love, and the compounded guilt caused by punishing others for your misery, must erode your strength and your self-expression.\u00a0 It makes you truly weak.\u00a0 How can you, as long as you continue in this attitude, ever have faith in yourself, ever believe in your dignity as a free human being?\u00a0 You may try all sorts of artificial ways to instill self-confidence in yourself, but it will never work unless you face the secondary guilt and give it up by admitting it.\u00a0 Then you may even stay, if you so choose, with the primary guilt\u2014the guilt of not wanting to love, but at least you have assumed the responsibility for this.<\/p>\n
You see, my friends, this is a world of duality.\u00a0 So much confusion exists because of the either\/or alternative and the topic under discussion is particularly prone to such confusion.\u00a0 Humanity is stymied by the concept that either oneself should be blamed\u2014for whatever it may be\u2014or the other person should.\u00a0 Either you are bad and wrong or the other is.\u00a0 This creates a serious predicament, making it impossible to be in truth.\u00a0 If you are wrong and the other person blameless, you feel that there is something not quite right about the situation.\u00a0 You feel also that an undue responsibility is placed on you.\u00a0 If you are the one to assume the sole burden of the blame, you surely expect to be ostracized.\u00a0 This assumption is an unbearable load; it is untrue and does not permit clarity.\u00a0 It makes you feel even more inferior and unlovable.\u00a0 Your misery seems a just punishment rather than a choice you are free to alter whenever you so decide.\u00a0 By assuming the sole blame, you give permission, as it were, to others to secretly act out their own negative intentions.<\/p>\n
Or, conversely, if you have to be completely justified in explaining your behavior, then you also put yourself in a terrible predicament:\u00a0 you again feel there is something wrong; you know that making the other all bad does not fit the truth either.\u00a0 If you have to protect this pretense, which may seem desirable in order to whitewash yourself of guilt, you will become anxious, afraid, threatened with having your defenses penetrated\u2014so you cannot afford to be relaxed, natural, and close to others.\u00a0 Your stake in your “innocence” prevents intimacy.\u00a0 Again, you cannot feel right.<\/p>\n
Most human beings are still incapable of experiencing how their distortion and negativity directly affects, reinforces, and hooks into the distortions and negativities of others.\u00a0 They are still too involved in the dualistic struggle, defending their illusory self-image.\u00a0 They are therefore blind to the psychic reality of constant interaction between self and others.\u00a0 The “either the self or the other is all bad” attitude creates confusion, guilt, and self-doubt.<\/p>\n
Psyche to psyche, the following interaction takes place.\u00a0 Suppose you inwardly say, “I will punish you for not fulfilling my insatiable demands.\u00a0 I will not love you or give you anything.\u00a0 I will punish you by making you guilty, and if you want something from me, I will not give it to you.\u00a0 I punish you most effectively by making myself the victim, so you cannot blame or catch me.”\u00a0 Suppose the other person is inwardly struggling with giving up a similar defense.\u00a0 Their resistance says:\u00a0 “You must not give it up.\u00a0 Others are out to hurt, to victimize, to exploit you.\u00a0 If you open your heart to love, you will get nothing but rejection, unfairness, and hate in return.\u00a0 It does not pay.\u00a0 You had better remain closed up.”\u00a0 Just imagine how your self-victimizing attitude will reinforce the irrational resistance of the other person to being open, vulnerable, and loving.\u00a0 The frightened part of the self, which is geared to “protective” negativity and withholding, will be set back considerably in this struggle whenever it encounters such a negative intentionality.\u00a0 This punishment often takes the form of severe accusations that malign the other’s character.\u00a0 You may never have thought about it in these terms, but if you look closely, you will see that it amounts to just that.\u00a0 Or you may even use others’ real failings as excuses to punish them for not living up to your demands and for not accepting a deal from you in which they give everything and you little or nothing on that level.\u00a0 On other levels, the case may be quite different.<\/p>\n
The unconscious interaction in this area thus fortifies and justifies the conviction that negativity is a necessary defense.\u00a0 Viewed from this narrow vantage point, the position seems right.\u00a0 Thus when you pursue your negative intentionality, you are also responsible for the other.\u00a0 One of the apparently paradoxical truths of spiritual reality is that you are responsible for yourself and you are also responsible for the other, each in a different way.\u00a0 By the same token, others’ negative intentionality hurts and hinders you and they are responsible for doing this to you.\u00a0 Yet they could not succeed if you would not tenaciously hold on to your own.\u00a0 In that sense, the responsibility is yours.\u00a0 Everyone has the choice of either using the other’s bad intentions as an excuse to stay in their own or looking for a new way of responding to life.\u00a0 It is therefore equally true that you are exclusively responsible for yourself and others are exclusively responsible for themselves and that, everyone is responsible for the other person.<\/p>\n
Since ultimately there is no division between the self and the other, both must be true.\u00a0 You are the others and the others are you.\u00a0 The separation is as much an illusion as the either\/or duality.\u00a0 It is not that either you are responsible for yourself or for others, nor that others are responsible either for themselves or for you.\u00a0 There are no either\/or’s:\u00a0 it is all one.<\/p>\n
Therefore, when you end the old pattern of blaming others in order to justify your unfairness and your unloving demands, you not only unhook yourself from this terrible double-bind, you also help unhook the other person.\u00a0 Of course, others should not depend on you; they must fend for themselves and find their own salvation.\u00a0 You may say, “Others should not depend on my overcoming my negativities and problems so that they can overcome theirs.”\u00a0 And you are both right and wrong.\u00a0 You are right that it is indeed others’ responsibility and that they can do so no matter what you do, provided they really want to.\u00a0 Their effort, their investment and commitment to themselves determine the outcome, regardless of what others, including you, do.\u00a0 But you are also wrong in not seeing that by your act of truth, which is an act of love, you help set others free of their entanglements.\u00a0 When you make clear what your negative part is, you remove a great deal of confusion and doubt, so that the true picture of where and to what extent each party contributes to a negative involvement and psychic interaction can emerge.\u00a0 This has a tremendously liberating effect.<\/p>\n
There are particular phases in human development where an entity finds it almost impossible to come out of his or her negative defense system, and of the conviction that this defense is necessary, unless one of those people with whom the person is entangled lets them off the hook by admitting his or her own negative intentionality, destructive attitude, dishonesty, and meanness.\u00a0 Just imagine how you would feel when someone close to you, who has given you pain by pointing out your real and your false guilts, but who has also confused you by the denial of his or her guilt, suddenly said to you:\u00a0 “I realize that I do not want to give you love.\u00a0 I want to demand from you and then blame you, accuse you, and punish you when you do not comply with my demands.\u00a0 But I do not allow you to feel hurt, because although I want to hurt you, I do not want to be made to feel guilty by your hurt.”\u00a0 Just imagine how this would set you free!\u00a0 How such an admission can suddenly clear up many confusions!\u00a0 It is not very likely that you would respond to this act of love by being self-righteous and acting the all-innocent one who has always known this and is now established as the innocent victim.<\/p>\n
If you admit your similar unfair demands, your cowardice in giving your feelings, and your negative intentionality, it may indeed be hurtful for your pride, but truly for nothing else!\u00a0 The other who hears it has, in that moment, received a gift of love from you, even though you may still not want to love with your heart, with your feelings, with your inner being.\u00a0 But you have begun to love by being truthful.<\/p>\n
By setting others free from the false guilt you have placed on them in order to conceal your own, you allow them to look at their own real guilt without self-devastation and without this painful inner struggle in which the mutual guilts and accusations are all confused.\u00a0 Release and clarification often lead to the solution of the deepest problems.\u00a0 It is as though the personality needed this “outer” grace, this helping hand.\u00a0 For the dishonest placing of guilt on others makes their true self-revelation almost impossible; it implies that if they admit guilt you are right in accusing them of being bad and of being the cause of your misery.\u00a0 This is how people are hooked together in denial, guilt-projection, either\/or struggle, confusion, and negative interactions.\u00a0 Someone must begin to loosen the hook-up and disentangle the knots.<\/p>\n
Negative intentionality is a defense.\u00a0 It stems from the innate belief that the world cannot be trusted and the only way the self can protect itself is by being as mean as the world is supposed to be\u2014or meaner.\u00a0 When you admit your ill will, you help others to begin to trust in the decency of the world and of people.\u00a0 You can then begin to ponder, “Maybe it is not so dangerous, after all.\u00a0 Maybe I am not all alone in my hidden shame and guilt.\u00a0 Maybe I can let go.\u00a0 Maybe I, too, can admit these feelings without being held solely responsible.”\u00a0 What a difference this would be in your attitude toward life, in your spiritual position as a human entity!<\/p>\n
Your energy system must begin to change.\u00a0 When you all work together in this honest way, love is not a command issued by the will and the mind; it is not an abstraction; it is not emoting, or a sentimental gesture.\u00a0 It is vigorous, assertive, and free.\u00a0 Honesty is the most needed and most rare form of love among human beings.\u00a0 Without honesty, the illusion will always remain that you are separate from others, that your interests are contradictory, that in order to protect your interests you must defeat others, and vice versa.<\/p>\n
Only when you know your own negativity, my friends, truly own up to it, assume responsibility for it, and no longer project it onto others while distorting reality in order to be able to do so, will you suddenly gain new insight into other people’s doings, so that even when they do not admit it, you will know what is happening.\u00a0 And that, too, sets you free.\u00a0 That, too, takes you out of the confusion and the guilt of “Where am I at fault in my misery?\u00a0 How have I caused it?\u00a0 How have others caused it?”\u2014thus fluctuating between blame and self-blame.\u00a0 Neither leads to any solution.\u00a0 But the moment you assume responsibility for your negative, destructive attitudes toward others, even if others are not willing to do likewise, you see the picture clearly.\u00a0 You unhook yourself, not only by your admission and self-knowledge, but also by comprehending the negative intentions, the acting out, the dishonest projections of the other person.\u00a0 This is why everyone who admits the worst in themselves inevitably feels elation, liberation, energy, hope, and light as the immediate result.<\/p>\n
Spiritual growth brings you the gift of knowing the inside of other people:\u00a0 their thoughts, their intentions, their feelings.\u00a0 This is not magic; it occurs naturally because in reality you and others are one.\u00a0 As you read your own mind accurately, you cannot help reading those of others\u2014since in reality it is all one mind.\u00a0 Other people’s minds are closed books only as long as you hide from your own mind.\u00a0 To be able to read others’ minds would amount to dangerous magic if it came from an individual’s psychic power.\u00a0 Such power could be abused.\u00a0 But whenever this ability grows organically as a byproduct of knowing your own inner makeup, it is natural and cannot be abused in the service of power drives and negativity.<\/p>\n
What now seems like an altogether separate entity will be seen for what it is in undifferentiated reality, when deep truthfulness has been achieved.\u00a0 It will be seen that all is one, that there is only one consciousness.\u00a0 What a liberating experience to know and to see into others, to no longer be confused and torn!\u00a0 This ability grows from giving up your stake in hiding, projecting, denying, and distorting; it grows from giving up an attitude that not only confuses others around you who are in a similar state, but confuses you every bit as much.<\/p>\n
We discussed in the last lecture the pain of guilt.\u00a0 The worst pain of guilt comes when you do not quite know what is your part of an interaction and what is the other’s.\u00a0 This kind of suffering comes only from concealment.\u00a0 It tears you apart, makes you suffer, searching blindly, like a trapped animal.\u00a0 But you are your own victim.\u00a0 You have trapped yourself by choosing not to be honest.<\/p>\n
Whenever human beings unfold into a more expanded state they need different tools.\u00a0 Let us take the simple analogy of someone who runs a business.\u00a0 When the business is still very small, the organization is adapted to the size and purpose of the firm.\u00a0 It is appropriate and therefore harmonious.\u00a0 But when the business expands, the organization created for a small establishment no longer fits the larger one.\u00a0 It would no longer be appropriate and could not run smoothly.\u00a0 If the owners were too rigid to change and persisted in holding on to the old, proven way, they would either fail in the expanded enterprise, or would at least find it very difficult to operate.<\/p>\n
The same law, my friends, applies to your inner expansion.\u00a0 As you grow and learn about yourself, and therefore about others and the world, you experience life in deeper and more varied ways\u2014which is, after all, your reason for being incarnated.\u00a0 As you gain understanding and learn to experience feelings which you have previously avoided, you are setting the stage, as it were, for an “expanded operation.”\u00a0 In practical terms this means that attitudes which were once useful now become destructive and limiting.<\/p>\n
It happens so often on the path of evolution that entities grow in various ways and prepare the ground for necessary new attitudes toward life.\u00a0 Yet they can impede this expansion by their refusal to give up certain attitudes.\u00a0 So you must adapt yourself to new ways of responding to the world, my friends, responding differently to other people’s reactions toward you, to what happens around you and also to what happens within you.\u00a0 This will come about, first, by knowing that your old response is a conditioned reflex created to fit a smaller way of functioning in life; second, by questioning that reflex and the beliefs behind it.\u00a0 Last but not least\u2014and this is the basic theme of tonight’s lecture\u2014by choosing love, rather than separateness, as your way of being in the world.<\/p>\n
Again, this must not be a mere word, a mere mental concept, a forced try, or a sentimentalized emoting that covers up many things you do not wish to admit.\u00a0 It must be put in action depending on where you are inwardly.\u00a0 Admitting your negativity is always an act of love, whether it is done directly to the person in question, where this is possible, or to a helper who is not personally involved with your negativity.\u00a0 It is still an act of love toward the universe.\u00a0 Wherever you find your negativity, my friends, even while you still choose to stay with it, contemplate that one day you will want to give it up in love for the universe, in love for yourself.<\/p>\n
Love is the key.\u00a0 If you do not open your heart you must wither away.\u00a0 You have all seen that no matter how true some diagnosis may be, how many insights you have gained into the background, history and dynamics of a condition that gives trouble, unless you commit yourself to opening your heart, no real change can ever occur.\u00a0 You cannot be fulfilled, my friends, unless you let yourself feel from the heart.\u00a0 And it is no use pretending that you want to love, that you even do love, as long as you are frightened of feeling your feelings.\u00a0 To the degree that it is so, you hold back from loving.<\/p>\n
You cannot be strong and courageous, you cannot love yourself, unless you love.\u00a0 It is equally true that only as you love others can you love yourself.\u00a0 The first step must be to be willing to love.\u00a0 You do not start loving simply because you so choose.\u00a0 You have to call the divine nature of your innermost nucleus to give you the grace of loving.\u00a0 The grace of God may manifest through you in making you open your heart and lose your fear of feelings, of being vulnerable.\u00a0 That is all you need.\u00a0 If you do not love, you have nothing.\u00a0 If you love, you have everything.\u00a0 But if you love falsely, as a pretense, it is much, much less loving and much more deceptive and harmful than when you admit your hate.\u00a0 Admitting your hate is more loving than an apparently loving act that denies the hate.\u00a0 Think of this, my friends.<\/p>\n
Take the time to assimilate the material I have given and to establish the most real and vital of all direct communications:\u00a0 that with your spiritual self.\u00a0 To do this, you must eliminate your self-deceptions and pretenses.\u00a0 They always block the way to God in you.\u00a0 Those of you who have not yet found where and how they are unloving should set out to do so.\u00a0 Do not let yourself be deceived by where you are already loving.\u00a0 Ask yourself how fulfilled you feel in it.\u00a0 How warm and unthreatened you feel with others.\u00a0 How comfortable do you feel in life?\u00a0 That is your answer to how loving and how truthful you are.\u00a0 And then maybe the first step of love can be instituted:\u00a0 Admit your hate.\u00a0 Admit your punitiveness.\u00a0 Admit your spitefulness.\u00a0 To the degree you do so, you start loving.\u00a0 You have started on the bottom rung of the ladder of love the minute you admit the ugly truth that you wanted hidden and for which, on top of it, you rendered the other person responsible.\u00a0 You did this either by distorting reality or by using something that was partly true as your excuse.<\/p>\n
Understanding this, my friends, requires a lot of meditation and genuine good will.\u00a0 But then, what a key this is to life!\u00a0 You must deeply want to see this.\u00a0 The more you resist expansion into a new mode of operation when you are ready for it, the greater and more painful the necessary crisis must be.\u00a0 The more volitional and unresisting, the smoother the transition into a new, more truthful, more loving state will be.<\/p>\n
Now commit yourself to go further and deeper in this direction.\u00a0 Commit yourself to go all the way with it and thereby help yourself and those around you.\u00a0 Allow this to happen.\u00a0 It is the greatest blessing that can be.\u00a0 You will create the necessary new climate for a new environment\u2014inside and out.<\/p>\n
This was a blessed working year indeed, my friends.\u00a0 Many of you have manifested spiritual growth in visible expressions of a more fulfilled life, of more peace and security and of outer fulfillment as a result.\u00a0 The following years will become more so, as you expand your nucleus of spiritual learning and purification.<\/p>\n
You are indeed blessed.\u00a0 Every step of truth, every step toward love, unleashes more spiritual energy.\u00a0 Every step of decency activates more of your divine nature.\u00a0 Be this divine nature!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When you are only vaguely aware of your negativity, only dimly sensing the hurt that it inflicts on others, you are caught in a battle of blame, self-justification, helplessness, self-rejection and self-doubt. You cannot help but hook others, with their own unconscious conflicts, into your negativity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"lecture-categories":[13],"lecture_tag":[1265,1368,1219,1614,1717,1118],"class_list":["post-2668","lecture","type-lecture","status-publish","hentry","lecture-categories-pathwork-lectures-1996-ed","lecture_tag-guilt","lecture_tag-interaction","lecture_tag-love","lecture_tag-negativity","lecture_tag-psychic-interaction","lecture_tag-relationship"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n