E2015
Quotes pathwork lectures E2015
Week 1: Lecture 181: No matter what other people’s consciousnesses produce in your surroundings, your life experience is solely determined by what you produce.
Week 2: Lecture 153: In fact, precisely in the areas of unhappiness, the will to be negative and destructive, to cheat, to defy, to pretend, not to give but to take, to harbor hostility and self-pity, exists. Your discovery of this will facilitate your further progress greatly. You will see that there is a lawfulness involved here that does not make you an innocent victim, that does not make you helpless to construct your life well.
Week 3: Lecture 53: Once you decide by inner growth and understanding that you no longer wish and expect to shortchange life — for by wishing and expecting an unreality, you are in for trouble — you will gain a well-founded self-respect. Therefore you will love yourself in the right and healthy way; therefore you no longer need the wrong kind of self-love that only contributes, in the last analysis, to your self-contempt.
Week 4: Lecture 57: False concepts are always held onto in the mistaken assumption that they are useful or protective. Once you realize that this is not so, you will no longer hold on to them. You will then be able to say to yourself: “I no longer need approval so desperately that I sometimes violate myself, become untrue to myself, or else defy dependency by rebelling against it. I can now stand on my own feet. My inner life and value is not dependent on others. It depends on my own self-respect which I can further and live up to only by being fully aware of myself.”
Week 5: Lecture 220: The voice of God has always spoken to you, as it continues always to speak to you, always in a new way, always in a way adapted exactly to what you need most at any given moment in your life. It is an ongoing voice that you have overlooked and focused away from so that you are left with the illusion of silence.
Week 6: Lecture 142: When you know that perfection does not exist and that no one can do more than his best in any given phase, you will be more relaxed. The most important thing is that you accept your present limitations with all their consequences.
Week 7: Lecture 193: The truth leads to man’s assuming self-responsibility in every conceivable respect. Most human beings are loath to accept this. They had rather see themselves as helpless, innocent victims with all the suffering and hopelessness that go with it than accept the hope, light, and freedom of self-responsibility. This indicates the emotional immaturity of mankind as a whole.
Week 8: Lecture 127: The transition from automatism to awareness is one of the most difficult that man passes through. It is so difficult to admit that he is driven by unreasonable fears, superstitions, generalizations, obsolete situations that have no bearing on the present. It goes against his vanity, for he likes to see himself more evolved and freed than he is. The longer he denies what is, the more does he suffer. Often it is this needless suffering that finally brings him to self-honesty. It could have been avoided if his vanity were not so strong.
Week 9: Lecture 113: If you could trust the flux of time, the benign quality of the movement and growth of time, you could allow yourself to follow suit and thereby make it possible for your inner faculties to swing into harmony with this stream of time. You would then not need to manipulate time by holding it back or pushing it forward. You would not then need to fear the future, nor wish for fulfillment in the future, nor would you have to reach back in the past for a fulfillment in the past.
Week 10: Lecture 174: Your thinking is a constant movement. The only trouble is that you have conditioned yourself to let it ruminate in conditioned reflexes of habitual negativity, self-rejection, and needless limitation. But once you decide to use your thinking in a new way, you will experience the truth of life’s hopeful changeability, its endless possibilities to move into new directions.
Week 11: Lecture 164: It is of course quite true that if man were entirely in harmony with the universal forces, he would not be sick, neurotic, unhappy. But it is equally true to state that his sickness, his discontent, and his disharmony are an indication of health. For it is precisely man’s real self, man’s spirit being, which speaks through the unhappiness, sending the conscious ego a message that something should be different. The real self says to the outer personality that it conducts something in a wrong manner. This message comes from health and wants to reestablish health, well-being, and happiness.
Week 12: Lecture 145: Only when man finds the center, deep within himself, which he activates and realizes, does he fulfill his destiny, the reason for his existence. Whatever else he accomplishes serves only, if he so chooses, to make him more aware of his real self and therefore of the reality of being. Then and then only will he find a genuine security and peace, coming from within.
Week 13: Lecture 120: Self-centeredness and dependency are interconnected. You cannot have the one without the other. Many an inner conflict rages just because of this interconnection. Man struggles against the dependency that he simultaneously insists upon as a result of his infantile self-centeredness and subjectivity in outlook.
Week 14: Lecture 82: The body is part of the spirit, and the spirit is part of the body. All are one whole. That is why Jesus Christ appeared as a human body, to show that the body is not to be rejected or denied. If you accept death, you will be resurrected in life, in the body, by the flowing life force which will truly make you experience pleasure and joy on all levels of your being — also on the physical level.
Week 15: Lecture 82: Jesus’ reappearance to His disciples clearly illustrates, “After my ordeal and after having met my ordeal in the full sense, without pretense and self-deception, having gone through it to the ultimate, I now live in the true sense of the word, in the full sense of the word. You, too, can do it. You do not have to wait for physical death, for you die many deaths every day, in all your little ordeals and struggles. In the manner that you meet these is determined the subsequent life and fullness of joy that can be yours. If you meet these ordeals and struggles in a similar spirit of truthfulness, you will to that degree experience life and joy while still in the body.”
Week 16: Lecture 2: When man creates for himself a new spiritual life, advancing to a higher degree, it cannot be without pain. It needs discipline and self-recognition, which alone is spiritually painful, as any healing process involves pain. It is the same with nature. The entire earthly creation experiences labor pain, not only such as the gales of early spring but also spiritual currents.
Week 17: Lecture 216: Your awareness of and your connection with the inner, real self will make life glorious, and so death will be experienced as glorious. That state of consciousness will make life fearless because there is nothing to fear in dying. Such fearlessness is the ultimate development of each human soul. That is the goal you are trying to reach.
Week 18: Lecture 49: Spring is the season of revival of nature. The life force penetrates everything that grows: plants, trees, grass, flowers, fruits, vegetables, the animal world, even the mineral world. And it should be the same in the human being. If the human being were in tune with the universe, if the soul were in a state of healthy growth and in no way stagnating and static, spring would revive and strengthen such a person, too.
Week 19: Lecture 184: Whenever you are in an unpleasant mood, in a threatening situation, in confusion and darkness, you can be sure that, whatever the outer circumstances may be, the essence of the problem is the denial and fear of your own destructive attitudes and your not knowing how to handle them. Admission of this fact alone brings immediate relief and deactivates the negative power of them almost instantly.
Week 20: Lecture 57: The guiltier you feel, the more you need approval in the supposition that it will alleviate your feelings of guilt and inferiority. And the more you clamor for such approval, the guiltier you feel.
Week 21: Lecture 220: If the ego specifically requests wisdom from the divine part of the self in order more deeply to recognize and find the best way to deal with the unpurified aspects, the divine voice will be heard and can be applied to where it is indeed most needed.
Week 22: QA251: The “tongues of fire resting on their heads” is not just the symbolic expression of the fire of love, the strength of the spirit that is more powerful than all else. It is actually a manifestation of this power on the energy level.
Week 23: Lecture 222: “Why do I refuse to surrender to God and give up what I know to be happiness, abundance, bliss? Why do I settle for the puny satisfaction of my spite, my destructiveness, my selfishness (or whatever it may be)? What is it in me that makes me so destructive? How much do I really pay for just allowing it to happen? Isn’t there a way to change this inner course? Why, knowing the beauty of life, do I still deny it? Why can I not affirm life and God and the flow of creativity?”
Week 24: Lecture 158: if the individual derives his sense of self only from the ego faculties, giving up the ego must seem terribly frightening. And right here is where you are caught in an insoluble conflict as long as you remain stuck in it. Unfoldment and pleasure, delight and creative living, fulfillment and happiness can only exist when the real self is activated, when you do not identify exclusively with the ego, but when you are connected and identified with the real self, with the eternal, creative substance of your being.
Week 25: Lecture 181: Lack of energy, tiredness, anxiety, depression, hopelessness, illness, frustration, failures, lack of success, feelings of inadequacy, pleasurelessness, listlessness are indubitable signs that there is a destructive force in you which you still have not fully acknowledged, recognized, understood, accepted, and to which you still cling because you consider it a defense which you have no intention of giving up.
Week 26: Lecture 165: Emphasize in your meditations, “I would like to know, experience, and feel what I really feel” — about whatever the issue may be, whatever the mood of the day or the moment. Beware of either talking yourself out of it by suspecting an irrationality, or talking yourself into it by building a case. Both imply a too active mind. Let the mind be passive and gently, gently let the feeling come up — whatever it may be. The calmer you are and the more relaxed and intently you “listen” to the nature of your feeling, the more it will be the original feeling.
Week 27: Lecture 53: The procedure must always be to first find out in what way you have the wrong kind of self-love. And until you find out all these subtle emotions which are hidden, you cannot go further. But after you become aware of them, you can dig into deeper regions and find out what is the cause of it. You will usually find a lack of proper self-love, in the right way, is the cause of your distorted self-love, in the wrong way.
Week 28: Lecture 245: Surrender to God brings about a balance and harmony in the entire organism. In the mental organism, truthful perception, clarity of vision, and realistic understanding reign. Thus a great harmony and peace of mind exist. Conflicting perceptions, confusions, and therefore frustration, are wiped out. Enlightenment and insight into apparent conflicts make all the pieces of the great puzzle of life fall into place. On the emotional level, this mental clarification of opposites creates an entirely new mode of being, of reacting, of feeling.
Week 29: Lecture 101: Merely observe the wrong, childish, untrue, distorted reactions and concepts. The more you observe them, the better will you be able to learn why they are not according to reality and truth. Get a clear understanding in what way they are erroneous, inadequate, destructive, disadvantageous, unrealistic. Compare these reactions with the knowledge, as yet only theoretical, of realistic, truthful, productive reactions without trying to force yourself to feel the latter. Merely compare and understand why one way of reaction is unproductive and unrealistic, while the other is productive and realistic. Fully acknowledge that you are as yet incapable of feeling and reacting in the desired way; and without guilt, without any forcing current, fully accept yourself as you are, but know the immaturity. If you do this, without being angry and impatient with yourself, eventually your emotions will begin to take on the knowledge of your brain that heretofore could not penetrate your emotions. It will give you peace simply to see the childish emotions in action while knowing, getting to understand better and better why and in what respect is it unproductive.
Week 30: Lecture 116: Keep in mind that the goal of this path is in finding this center of your being, which is reality, which is God, and through which you find complete fulfillment — not isolated, but in unity. If you look outside in order to alleviate your isolation, you must become more isolated. If you look inside in order to alleviate it, you may appear to isolate yourself from others through this process of apparent self-concern, but you will then lessen the isolation and separateness that often causes so much suffering and loneliness.(116)
Week 31: Lecture 197: Every crisis is an integral part of creation. Therefore, crisis should be embraced and accepted by the wise ones. It should serve to remove more and more resistance. Do not resist evil in you. That means, give up the appearance, the pretense. Give in, go with the movement of life.
Week 32: Lecture 210: Many of you find yourself in an interim state in which you experience new joys and pleasures which you never knew existed. Life opens up for you as it never did. But you also find yourself in the position where as yet you cannot bear too much of it. This is because you have not made the surrender to the God consciousness total. Or you have not sufficiently faced negative aspects in you and still cling to them. So you fear the pleasure which becomes more frightening than the greyness you wish and create, a greyness of neither pleasure nor pain. You often want to painstakingly preserve this state of greyness without knowing that you do so. It is a greyness that gives you comfort, but in the long run it leaves you empty.
Week 33: Lecture 103: Let the other person be, allow him to react differently from how you wish. In this way, your life will be richer for many reasons, not only because you will have more meaningful relationships, but also because you will be less dependent on your own will.
Week 34: Lecture 243: Ask Jesus Christ to give you a hand. He is there, always with you, always loving you. But you cannot always sense it; your state of separation still prevents you.
Week 35: Lecture 123: If you look at your desires and fears, your needs, your apprehensions, and reactions — right or wrong — at this moment, at each moment, then you find into the eternal now. In it, you can live fearlessly with the rightful confidence in the unknown. You do not have to become perfect. You are perfect, in a sense, when you can calmly face, acknowledge, and in full understanding come to terms with your present imperfection.
Week 36: Lecture 155: You are not prohibited, once you are an adult, by your past. You prohibit yourself when you continue to hold back those constructive forces which were originally forbidden by others. Here, again, is one of those famous vicious circles that result from every error, every erroneous way instituted in human living. Because the positive forces are restricted, negative forces grow. Or to put it more accurately, the positive force is twisted, disturbed, converted, distorted, and thus becomes a negative one.
Week 37: Lecture 146: A positive concept of the universe as a benign force and benign fate for man, the freedom and fearlessness to love, and a healthy balance between activity and passivity — all these form a comprehensive whole in order for an individual to be in harmony with himself and with life and thus fulfill himself in every possible way. All these three aspects depend on the awakening and activation of man’s innermost center, the nucleus that we call the real self.
Week 38: Lecture 147: It is essential, my friends, that all of you who are working on this path are concerned with and attentive to the false emotions you initiate; that you become more aware of how you constantly do this; how you do not permit yourself to let go and relax into yourself and question yourself, “Now, do I really feel thus and thus? Do I not perhaps put it on?”
Week 39: Lecture 150: It is essential that man say to himself — again and again and again — “I want to look at everything, I want to see even that where I am most resistant.” Then and then only can he fulfill himself. Then and then only can all the difficulties, all the apparently insurmountable obstructions dissolve and things fall naturally and effortlessly into their proper place and order so that a nonwasteful, meaningful life establishes itself.
Week 40: Lecture 176: Self-realization, or self-actualization, or reaching your spiritual center — or whatever other name you wish to use in order to describe the goal of all living — cannot occur unless you face your deepest negativities and hypocrisies, the deliberate intent to be negative and destructive, spiteful, and resentful, often to the degree of foregoing your own happiness just to punish someone of your past.
Week 41: Lecture 183: Every smallest shadow is a crisis, for it need not be there. It is only there because of your turning away from the issue that creates crisis. So take those smallest shadows of your everyday life, and ask yourself what is the meaning of them. What do you not wish to see and not wish to change? If you face this and truly, truly wish to face the real issue and change where it is necessary, the crisis will have fulfilled its meaning. You will discover new dimensions about the issue which will make the sun rise, and the dark night will turn out to be what it actually is — the educator, the therapist that life continually is, if you so wish to understand it.
Week 42: Lecture 115: Negative emotions are a result of closing the door to reality and to loving. That both are interdependent is evident for they are really both the same. Faulty perception means not being or not seeing reality. Warm, outgoing feelings of affection, concern, understanding are an outcome of the true perception of reality factors, and they simultaneously lead to an increase in perceiving reality.
Week 43: To be in tune with the life force is the same as being in contact with God, which is the same as living in the now. This can be the case only when you are in contact with yourself. For yourself and the immediate now are one — yourself at this moment, which may be different from yourself in the next moment. For you are no flat, one-dimensional creature, but dynamic and many dimensional. You consist of many possibilities and infinite changes of outlook, attitude, feeling, thoughts, which are the result of the various combinations of your components. Therefore your now is never the same.
Week 44: Lecture 127: You have all the help and guidance you need. The spiritual forces involved are infinitely more real and powerful than any of you realize. But these helping forces can and must do no more than sustain your own efforts. The initiative toward growth must always come from you at each stage of your upward road.
Week 45: Lecture 215: The striving for the bliss is the motor force, 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. This must occur at one stage or another. However, man also seeks shortcuts. He sometimes wants to attain the fulfillment of the longing without paying the price. The price is the labor of search, of seeking and finding, of learning, of growing, of changing, of self-purification, of traversing all self-created pain and evil.
Week 46: Lecture 58: The rulership principle is inherent in every soul, and it needs to be faced before you can really outgrow your chains. Without recognizing this, you cannot recognize your desire for unhappiness, your provocations in that direction. And it is of great importance that you face and see this in its true light. If you can really accept yourself — in your most deeply seated emotions, not merely in theory and with your intellect — as one in the string of humanity, being as imperfect as the next one, being liked by some, disliked by others, approved of by some, disapproved of by others, you have truly reached maturity, and you will no longer find it necessary to damage yourself by inviting misery.
Week 47: Lecture 257: The consciousness of the Christ spirit permeating this world, trying to fill the consciousness of individuals to an ever greater degree. It is fairly obvious that such a powerful influx must bring in its wake manifestations that are not always pleasant, welcome, agreeable, or even constructive. Many events on your earth are outright undesirable but are, nevertheless, direct results of this influx. In fact, without them the growth and expansion of consciousness inherent in this new age could not take place. Your own mind is still very much geared to the immediate. That which is good and right at this moment is always, in your idea, also ultimately good and right. And the converse is equally believed in although that is hardly always the case. 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 48: Lecture 67: To have caused a mishap or tragedy should be understood not only in the sense of retribution, of deserved fate, but in the sense of the inner will functioning self-destructively in some manner. Once you find the reason why you unconsciously harbor destructive tendencies and wishes, you will alter them with the understanding that they are no solution and as a consequence you will feel safe. Whenever you feel unsafe, this is so because of yourself, never because of others. The latter is one of the greatest illusions of humankind.
Week 49: Lecture 235: As you train your positive will to no longer deny the courage to believe in the best in you and the best in life, so will you be carried by the larger force of that which is the ultimate you. That goes beyond the little intellect with which you are so used to govern your precarious safety. There is much greater safety that comes when you have the courage to believe in the best — not wishful thinking, not in fear of the bad, but in the strength that there is nothing in you that you cannot see and face and go through, that there is only light at the end of each such tunnel.
Week 50: Lecture 42: So whenever you judge others in your mind, whenever you resent their faults think well: “Don’t I have, in a different way perhaps, but nevertheless, a similar fault? And does not the other person I judge so harshly have qualities I lack?” And then start to think of such qualities the other has and you do not possess. Also, think whether you do not have different faults than the person you judge and resent. All this will help you to view your anger at other people’s faults more objectively. And should, by any chance, the outcome of such deliberations really be that your faults are so much less, your qualities so much superior to the other, all the more reason for you to cultivate your tolerance and understanding. For then you would be indeed in a higher state of development which gives you, above all, the obligation to be understanding and forgiving.
Week 51: Lecture 254: You believe that you are safe only when you hold yourself separate, suspicious, and stiff. The truth is that by total surrender to God you not only find true safety and security; you also become capable of surrendering to others if and when this is indicated and furthering for your life. Only when the total surrender to God exists is your channel clear enough to recognize truth from falsehood, to see who should and who should not be trusted and followed. You can shed yourself in safety, as your soul demands, without danger of losing yourself.
Week 52 Lecture 219: Perhaps you can see your tree that you light, as a symbol expressing the many, many candles that have to be lit and be aflame within you in order to bring the total consciousness to its eternal glow on the outer level of your manifest existence. Each recognition, each insight, each honest admission, each shedding of a partial mask, each breaking through of a defense, each step of courage and honesty where you take responsibility for your negativity is a lighting of yet another candle. You bring light into your soul by bringing truth into your darkness.
Week 53: Lecture 167: You do not have to morbidly dwell on a negative emotion, but you do not have to shrink in fear from it either. You should say, “Yes, here it is. I let it be. I do not fight against it in some inner movement of rejecting it. I want to truly dissolve it by letting it be. I see what happens and let it dissolve itself.”
