E2014

Quotes pathwork lectures E2014

Week 1: Lecture 235: A crisis is a period of testing that gives you the opportunity to find what it is you need to know, see, and change — where the new commitment needs to be made. Without this momentary darkening, you may never feel motivated to undergo the necessary search.

Week 2: Lecture 191: When a forcing current (“I must not experience that, and I must experience this”) substitutes for a relaxed stream of consciousness, a flowing soul substance, the end result is crisis and more pain: the bitter pain of fighting against pain, the terror of trying to avoid fear rather than going through it.

Week 3: Lecture 16: Nothing that happens in your life is good or bad in itself. Do not believe this fallacy. The best thing that can happen to you could appear to you like a disaster at the moment. And it will be a disaster if you have the wrong attitude. And a happening that seems to you very fortunate can turn out to be very unfavorable if you do not learn your spiritual lesson from it. So everything that happens to you can be good if you make it so; if you use it from a spiritual point of view; if you learn from it so that you can continue to grow spiritually, and thus grow into happiness!

Week 4: Lecture QA213: “I want to perceive myself in truth, not to deny what is distorted and ugly, but to know I am a divine manifestation and to be capable of forgiving myself and loving who I am so that I can express love into the world. I have the capacity to express love into the world, and I call upon the greater power of my divine reality to do this.”

Week 5: Lecture 83: When you make the very first steps toward giving up the idealized self, you will feel a sense of liberation as never before. Then will you truly be born again. That is, your real self will emerge. Then you will rest within your real self, being centered within.

Week 6: Lecture 33: When tests are coming to you, as they must, you should pray that your thinking capacity will not be paralyzed too much. For that is what usually happens to a person who finds himself in a difficult situation. Just hold on to this thought: “Father, give me a clear outlook even though I find myself confused and unhappy and mixed-up at this moment. Help me not to forget what I otherwise know. Let me see Thy truth in this situation, not as it appears to me at present in my very limited outlook”.

Week 7: Lecture 133: Take your daily reactions of disharmony and meditate in the following sense. “If I am in disharmony, somewhere in me there must be misinterpretation. I wish to see the truth. If I resist, I declare that my will to be in truth is stronger than the resistance.”

Week 8: Lecture 97: The more you accept imperfection, the more joy you will give and receive. Your capacity for happiness depends on your capacity to accept imperfection.

Week 9: Lecutre 160: Whenever you are unhappy, look first of all for that side in you that says no, for whatever reason. Then look for the side that blames others even if only very subtly, indirectly, and secretly. Look at your emotions where you make a case against someone or something — against life at large, perhaps. Then see this particular displacement, where you shift. Because no matter how wrong others may be, they can never be responsible for your suffering, no matter what the appearances are.

Week 10: Lecture 211: When the mind forgets and is disconnected from the truth of being, the conscious ego self, at times, temporarily identifies with the aspects to be re-educated and purified so that it then loses a sense of its real identity. This is always an extremely painful state but happens only when pride, self-will, and fear are allowed to rule the consciousness.

Week 11: Lecture 237: Frustration is a friend. You can make it a friend by courageously and intelligently wishing to explore its meaning and allowing it to be your teacher and your therapist, as it were.

Week 12: Lecture 94: The desire to change can arise only out of true and genuine repentance. This is a strength and a courage which has, as a first step, to accept the blindness, ignorance, and imperfections that still exist, with the realization that all these, in essence, are character defects.

Week 13: Lecture 252: When the walls of separation and secretiveness fall from you, you step out into a beautiful world of light, of goodness, of singing joy, of eternal life, of fearless existence. This world can only exist in a defenseless person, free from armoring, free from denying the soft vulnerability that can experience all suffering created by the forces of evil. If you harden yourself against this kind of pain, you also deny the joy that is meant to be yours for all eternity.

Week 14: Lecture 236: “I do not wish to set myself above others. If a part of me desires this, I do not want it. I pray to the divine forces within me to help me create another kind of attitude, and therefore reality. If I want to be better than others, I must also feel undeserving to get the slightest fulfillment. I am not better than others, and I am not worse than others. All human beings are wonderful, wonderful manifestations of divinity.”

Week 15: Lecture 99: The moment you experience the important people of your early environment in their reality, there will no longer be a need to love self-rejection. It is only loved because the child in you believes there is nothing else. But the moment it is perceived that you were not rejected because you were unworthy, you do not have to love your rejection any more.

Week 16: Lecture 53: In the measure you feel insecure and inferior, in that measure there must be a side in you, maybe deeply hidden, in which you wish to escape living, in which you hope to get out of life without investment or risk and without “exposure” — in other words, a desire in you or a belief that you can cheat life in some way. When you find this side, you are at the root of your inferiority feelings and lack of self-respect — not before.

Week 17: Lecture 73: Once you accept the reality of your imperfect self, the resulting hurts will no longer be so serious and tragic. You will accept them as a consequence of your accepted imperfections, which you can now observe calmly while gaining more understanding about them and thus nearing perfection and maturity.

Week 18: Lecture 137: “I, with my outer being, cannot solve this problem. But I know that I must be in confusion and untruth because I am driven to think, feel, and act in a way that produces hopelessness, fear, frustration, feelings of doubt. I will now deliberately contact and activate the most constructive center of my innermost being and let it move me into the thoughts that I need to have at this moment; into the realizations I must have this moment; into actions and feelings that are good and productive in this moment.”

Week 19: Lecture 189: How different your attitude to yourself must be when you realize that it is the task of human entities to carry negative aspects with them for the purpose of integrating and synthesizing them! This affords truthfulness without hopelessness. What a dignity it lends to you when you consider that you undertake an important task for the sake of evolution. When you come into this life, you bring negative aspects with you for the purpose mentioned.

Week 20: Lecture 177: Physical health and well-being is totally regulated by and dependent on the state of pleasure a human body is capable of allowing. Since the streamings of pleasure are, at the same time, the forces of life, health, self-renewal and regeneration; health and longevity are results of capacity for pleasure. Conversely, to the degree you deny yourself pleasure — due to shames, fears, the misconceptions, negativity, impurity, etc. — to that degree you cut off your body from the wellspring of the universal flow.

Week 21: Lecture 217: However unjust an evil manifestation may now appear to you, it only appears that way because in your limited, time-bound state you are not in possession of the connections. Were you thus aware, you would see that all negative manifestations, no matter how cruel or unjust they may seem, are self-created medicine for the purpose of ultimate purification and ultimate bliss.

Week 22: Lecture 257: An outright negative manifestation may indeed be necessary for the total development to take place. This applies to the individual as much as it does to the entity mankind or, to put it differently, to the entity earth.

Week 23: Lecture 159: May you all gain more truthful understanding of the glory of life, which will make you recognize more and more that there is nothing to fear, absolutely nothing to fear, that your fear is illusion. Fear and illusion are synonymous, as life and pleasure are.

Week 24: Lecture 140: Pain and suffering are always the result of two directions, of the personality being pulled in two directions, the life and the antilife directions, the love and hate, isolation, fear directions, the positive and negative directions.

Week 25: Lecture 147: Which is essential is to see your nonlife, for then and then only can you become alive; to see you in nonfeeling, for then and then only can your real feelings manifest.

Week 26: Lecture 161: Ego existence, being totally attached and holding on to the ego levels of personality, causes fear and insecurity. It is such an insufficient life. And it is such a finite life. This is always frightening, for no one really wants to end being. But the separated ego must end. Only by finding one’s way back within the self into the greater truth, into the reality that is the law of love as it is also the law of truth, only by having done so can the ego safely give itself to the divine being within.

Week 27: Lecture 190: The capacity to own up to being fallible, human, vulnerable, irrational, wrong, needy, defenseless, weak, and unhappy must by necessity increase your capacity to be strong, truly right (not self-righteous), truly independent and fulfilled.

Week 28: Lecture 85: What you think you demand of the other is an externalization of your own demands of yourself. You reason that if the other were as he “should” be, then you in turn could be as you want to be, or think you ought to be: your idealized self. The anger at others is, in reality, nothing but a blame that serves to prevent you from being as you think you should be.

Week 29: Lecture 55: You can never really penetrate the wall separating you from your fellow creatures before you have penetrated the wall that separates you from your innermost self.

Week 30: Lecture 16: Your own failures, which are unavoidable, will give you strength instead of weakness when you view yourself daily and if you consider your failures with the attitude, “What can I learn about them? What does it show me where I still have to work in my efforts of self-purification?”

Week 31: Lecture 114: Learn to accept the fact that you are only human and are not despicable because you harbor the same human weaknesses as all your fellow human beings. Thus you will be kinder towards yourself, and this in turn will enable you to face all that is in you. Harsh unkindness with oneself is not a virtue, my friends, as may so easily be believed. It is quite the opposite because it is proud, arrogant, and it breeds self-deception, untruthfulness.

Week 32: Lecture 218: When you begin to perceive the incredible meaning and meaningfulness, the much wider wisdom and purpose of every event — how it is deeply connected with and a part of the wise and wholesome totality of your life, of the sequences of life — then all fear and confusion must vanish because everything you experience has its deepest meaning and connection.

Week 33: Lecture 132: The self-punishment is a substitute for giving up the guilt-producing attitudes. By doing so, you unconsciously believe that it is possible to maintain these attitudes yet absolve yourself of the guilt. Therefore you go on punishing yourself, believing that this makes up for the fact that you do not give up the destructive patterns. If you say often enough how bad you are, if you suffer enough from your guilt, you feel you are still a nice person in spite of maintaining what is, in actuality, of no conceivable advantage to you and to others.

Week 34: Lecture 149: Peace between body and soul is an inevitable outcome and product of self-realization. It is erroneous to believe that the body can simply be left aside in the great venture of integration.

Week 35: Lecture 159: What you have or do not have is a direct creation of all you think, all you feel, all you want. You may not want it wisely, and you certainly may not want it consciously, but unconsciously you do want it. When this is fully perceived, the law of life will be understood. The law of creation at work, within you, will be understood. And the tremendous power at your disposal will begin to be vaguely sensed.

Week 36: Lecture 71: If someone hurts you, what he said and did will actually be a hurt. But as long as you see only the fact that has occurred and ignore the reason, you will remain hurt. The moment you fully understand, it is impossible to be hurt any longer.

Week 37: Lecture 189: Every minute of depression or anxiety, every hopeless or otherwise negative attitude towards a situation, contains various other options. But it requires an act of inner will on your part to waken forces in you that are now dormant and to make them available. Then, when the already available potentialities are being used, a much greater power of spiritual consciousness unfolds as an organic expression, gradually.

Week 38: Lecture 232: It is very false to imagine that he who thinks so little of himself is humble and good. This is one of the many dualistic misconceptions your world is permeated with. Self-devaluation is equated with humility and goodness, and self-value is equated with pride and arrogance. Nothing could be further from the truth. For if you know your own value and your own power, and you respect this value, no matter what you do now and no matter where you are now, then indeed you must be considerate of others and value them.

Week 39: Lecture 257: Underneath the lower self exchange, there simultaneously also exists a higher self exchange between entities. This is a very important new thought for you to contemplate. Just imagine: two people (or groups of people) are at war on the surface. They hate and accuse each other. They even wish each other the worst and want to harm each other. At the same time, on a deeper level, these entities agree. They know what occurs on the surface serves the common good, serves truth and love, serves their unity although their surface levels know nothing of this.

Week 40: Lecture 247: It is not true that there must always be war, suffering, injustice on this earth. This only holds true as long the majority of human beings refuse to grow up and remain in a state of inner error, falsehood, and confusion. The stronger people like you become in your purpose, in your understanding in what is involved here, the more individuals will give up their personal pride, self-interest, small opportunism (which all amounts to lack of faith), the more you and those like you will shift the balance. Mankind will begin to grow into its innate destiny.

Week 41: Lecture 49: Emotional maturity, emotional health means to know what you want, to want what you can have, and to be willing to pay the price for it. To give up egotism on all levels of your being, to reach into the depth of your unconscious reactions (which may be so contrary to your outward ones) is true emotional maturity.

Week 42: Lecture 224: As a great pianist can only be a channel for higher inspiration when he goes through the finger exercises and hard long practice that make his playing finally effortless, so must the God-inspired person work on his purification process, on deep self-knowledge and self-honesty. Only then does the receptacle become commensurate with the higher truths and values and can then be influenced, molded, and used for higher purposes to enrich the world and self.

Week 43: Lecture 227: The planet earth has come to a stage of development in which the old structure can no longer be maintained. It cannot bear the tensions and restrictions of the old limited  consciousness. A new vision must be gained where all is one, where the self and others are perceived as one. You have to look for this new vision beneath the limited vision to which the immediate consciousness is so accustomed. This new vision brings enormous peace, security, joy, self-expression.

Week 44: Lecture 241: You could very easily make the decision again and again: “I will let go and move ahead inwardly — in my state of consciousness, in my attitude, in my approach to life, in my value system, in my thought processes, in the feelings I am accustomed to responding to my experiences.”

Week 45: Lecture 170: Unhappiness requires much less strength than happiness. This strength can only be generated if the divine powers within the self are actually, deliberately, and concisely stimulated, activated, called upon to help you in a state of bliss so as to become better equipped to sustain it, to guide you specifically that you do not inadvertently, unconsciously by dint of the deeply imprinted mechanisms, close up against happiness.

Week 46: Lecture 167: He should discover that part in himself where he desires not to be alive, not to move, not to feel. When he thus connects with his own rejection of life, he will no longer feel helpless in the fear of death.

Week 47: Lecture 192: When you go deep into your innermost feelings, my friends, there will be no danger of losing yourself in unendurable pain. For no matter how difficult your childhood was, and no matter how much negative experience you had, and no matter how cruel a parent may have been, the real causes of pain were not these. The cause is your persistence and insistence on staying hooked on needs that are by now false needs; on demanding and demanding that conditions be different and that life now make up for it all and give you gratuitously, leaving you as a recipient, leaving you out of “the game of life.” (Game is meant here in a positive sense.) This is what really hurts and pains you now.

Week 48: Lecture 137: When you remain separated from the inner nucleus, it exhausts you needlessly. When you do not make that one instant of effort where you deliberately contact the inner power to fill you with what you need at the moment and to activate you when you do not make this effort, you must use a hundred times more effort than would be necessary if you chose the purposeful way.

Week 49: Lecture 136: Man’s greatest joy and freedom is when he can give according to his potential. Conversely, the greatest pain is the result of not giving to life and to others according to one’s inherent potential. All other pain and all other frustration derive from this pain of not giving out what is within, just as all other satisfactions and pleasures are contained in the act of giving of one’s self to life without restriction.

Week 50: Lecture 128: When you discover the freedom and when you find out that there are no chains, no fences, no prison walls, that you are not helpless, that you can constantly influence and mold your fate, your immediate life; then there is happiness that you cannot imagine — the fearlessness of living, the effortlessness of growing, the beauty of experiencing, the rich variety of experience without harassment, and the bliss of steadily growing. This happiness cannot be described. All this awaits you. It is right there, where you are now.

Week 51: Lecture 157: Only when you can lose on the ego level, where you exert force, can you gain or win on the level of creation and power to form a good life. Conversely, your inability to give up, to let free, to be fair, your insistence to win and have your way, your refusal to lose on this ego level makes it impossible to win where it counts and makes it impossible to find your real strength. Jesus Christ spoke about this when he said he who wants to live must be able to lose his life.

Week 52: Lecture 219: Can each of you, at this time of commemorating the birth of your eternal Christchild within, commit yourself to accepting every part of you? I want to convey to you that there is nothing whatever that need be rejected, nothing whatever you cannot accept and forgive. The only thing that is truly destructive and makes you lose your bearing is not doing so and therefore acting out.