Sadness

191.

Inner and Outer Experience

Pathwork Guide Lecture No. 191  |  April 23, 1971

Usually, when humans hear the word “experience,” they think of outer experience. This, however, is not the meaning of the word. The real meaning is the inner experience. You know that you may experience all things outwardly, but if the inner experience is inhibited, the outer experience will mean little.

106.

Sadness Versus Depression—Relationship

Pathwork Guide Lecture No. 106  |  September 14, 1962

Let us first define the difference. In sadness you accept without self-pity a painful fact of life as something beyond your power to change. When you are truly sad, without depression, you not only feel it as a healthy growing pain free of hopelessness, but you are sad due to an outer circumstance, knowing it is going to pass. There is no superimposition, no hiding, no shifting of emotions. In depression the outer circumstance may be the same, but your feelings of pain are, to quite an extent, due to other reasons than the outer occurrence.

4.

World Weariness

Pathwork Guide Lecture No. 4  |  April 22, 1957

[T]here are a variety of possible causes for world weariness. Of course the yearning for God and perfection plays a role here too whether consciously or not, as well as the nostalgia for one’s true spiritual home that dwells in every human being. For here on earth you are only visitors, it is not your true home. But that is never the main reason for the indefinable longing. Its background is more complex, and this is what I want to talk about now.