Pathwork Lecture #094: The True Self Versus Superficial Personality Levels; Neurosis Versus Sin; Split Concepts Creating Confusion

Summary of Pathwork Lecture #094:
The True Self Versus Superficial Personality Levels; Neurosis Versus Sin; Split Concepts Creating Confusion

For a deeper, more rewarding experience of these teachings, consult the Lecture itself, available free of charge at: http://www.pathwork.org/lectures/unedited/P094.PDF

Our true self is the divine spark. It is covered up by layers of our artificial, habitual selves which falsely appear to us as fundamental. We are hindered in out growth by our false image of our true self as holy and therefore alien. In fact, there are dimensions of our lives in which we already act organically from our true self.

We harbor an image of the true self as rigidly perfectionistic, and we both rigidly and compulsively aspire to this perfection on the one hand, and rebel against this compulsiveness on the other. The truth is that our motivations and attitudes matter more that the nature of the actions we take. When we do the “right thing” out of fear and compulsion, this is self-betrayal. When we behave imperfectly out of faithfulness to who we are, and we are willing to accept the consequences, this is actually more perfect than doing the “right” thing for the wrong reasons.

Acting from the real self is not marked by confusion, anxiety or preoccupation with appearances or behavioral rules. Rather, it reflects a responsible weighing of consequences in the particular situation. Sometimes we go helplessly back and forth between an alternative favored by the inner grasping child and an alternative favored by the inner obedient conformist, and neither one is satisfying because neither one is grounded in the real self. Incidentally, this applies not only to overt actions, but also to thoughts, feelings, attitudes, and other inner behaviors. When we choose one alternative as the lesser evil, we are left feeling unhappy, and if we repress our negative feelings, they may come out later with destructive consequences. We can find our way out of such a predicament by BECOMING AWARE of our motivations and FINDING the point of relinquishing — the thing or attitude which is the object of a false need and which we must let go of in order to be able to act freely from our true self. Relinquishing what we need to let go of will free us to pursue our real needs and will leave us feeling better about ourselves.

We can understand our real self and our destructive attachments more fully by LOOKING BACK at our lives and observing where we felt confused and dependent, and where we felt free and at one with ourselves. If we observe the attachments we clung to in the first case, and let go of in the second, we will see what it is we need to relinquish, and observe that our true self is not something strange, but rather the familiar in us in the very best sense.

Essentially, neurosis and “sin” are one and the same; however, the Guide has avoided using the term “sin” because it plays to our destructive moralizing tendencies. However, a person on the Path must eventually CONFRONT the fact that neurosis is always some form of selfishness, pride, or cowardice, while continuing to accept himself or herself as he or she is at the moment. We are afraid to do this because we see the self-indulgence which might infect our self-acceptance, as well as the self-punishment which might corrupt our attempts to hold ourselves responsible. When we understand that self-indulgence and self-punishment are both grounded in pride, self-will and fear, while self-acceptance and honest self-confrontation are both grounded in humility, courage and self-responsibility, then we can let go of the former tendencies.

When we are still stuck in the state of confusion and unable to make contact with our true self, we resort to compulsion to do the right thing, which we then project as coming from the outside world and rebel against. This rebellion against rigid perfectionism and conformity has destructive aspects, but on another level it is also healthy. This illustrates the general principle that trends are not good or bad as such, but rather trends become negative to the extent they are misused by the afflicted part of our soul. The fact that there are good and bad aspects to each trend makes for internal confusion in our attitudes towards these trends, and for confusion in communication between people, who may have different aspects of these trends in mind. For instance, “love” can connote unhealthy submissiveness, while “compassion” can connote pity, which involves projecting one’s own weakness and inability to face life onto another, and which tends to paralyze rather than inspire the person who is feeling it.

Questions and Answers:

To let go of feelings for another, one would do well to FIND where one identifies with the other, and the FEAR of what the other is experiencing which underlies this identification.

When we feel an inner stiffening or hardening, this is a sign that our defenses have been triggered. When we become aware of this hardening, we can OBSERVE how it acts against our self-interest.

Doing this work is not about becoming “good” in a rigid, mechanistic “goody-goody” way. There is no “rule” that one is required to become spiritually mature — it’s just necessary in order to achieve our full potential. Doing this work does make us able to withstand that which we cannot change, but this is actually less machine-like than perpetually wasting energy railing against the things we cannot change. There is no need to fear that Christ wants us to submit and give up our free will. The more mature we are, the more alive and distinctly individual we are.

(c) 2007 — All rights reserved (see first post in general orientation category).

Pathwork Lecture #93: Main Image, Repressed Needs & Defenses Linked: Conflicts Before Clarification

Summary of Pathwork Lecture #93:
Main Image, Repressed Needs & Defenses Linked: Conflicts Before Clarification

For a deeper, more rewarding experience of these teachings, consult the Lecture itself, available free of charge at: http://www.pathwork.org/lectures/unedited/P093.PDF

 

As we work on the Path, we are bound to experience confusion and depression before we reach an overall understanding of our inner conflict. Our psyches are threatened and tend to resist when we grow towards letting go of our defense mechanisms. We also resist because of our discouragement about our relapses, which must necessarily continue to occur until we understand, on a personal, emotional level, the nucleus of the problem of our life.

In the work discussed in the previous Lectures, we encountered our images about life. There is always a single primary image relating to the main unfulfillment in our lives. We also have dealt with repressed needs, and with defense mechanisms such as aggression, submission and withdrawal. There is a basic defense within us which we have to come to FEEL, so that we may understand its destructive influence upon us. We also need to BECOME AWARE of the specific, personal connections between our images, needs and defenses.

An image is a rigidified over-generalization about life based on early painful experience. It incorporates an equally rigid pseudo-solution, which is ineffective because of its rigidity and actually tends to bring about that which it is meant to avoid. As the pseudo-solution brings more pain, we try harder to make the pseudo-solution work, and thus we create a vicious cycle. We also initially repressed the hurt we experienced in childhood, and because we want to avoid the memory of the humiliation and have concluded that our needs can not be met, we repress our needs as well.

As an example, a male child who experiences his mother as cruel will form the image that women are unloving and rejecting, and this image will cause him anxiety as an adult when it clashes with his desire for female affection. If this child’s mother also conspicuously approves of the child when he succeeds in school, he may relate to approval for his success as a second-best substitute for the love he isn’t getting. Thus, there may be an image that success brings approval and that approval is tantamount to love. As an adult, he may be successful, at the expense of balance in his life, but his need for love will not be met by his external strivings. Moreover, he will repress the need because he prefers to avoid his pain, and because he resists confronting the error of his underlying assumptions. Also, his unbalanced striving for success, and the underlying arrogance and fearfulness, will actually make it more difficult for him to receive the love he longs for. Such a man would do well to push through his fear of discovering that he is intrinsically unlovable and bring the whole unconscious mechanism to light, whereupon he would make the vitally important discovery discovery that it is his defense, rather than his essential nature, which operates to make him unlovable. It should be noted that even if a person’s preferred “solution” to the problem of life is submissiveness, there will be the same rigid arrogance at the core, with the same distancing influence on other people.

The process of bringing the underlying assumptions and the defense mechanisms to awareness is a gradual one, requiring us to OBSERVE ourselves persistently over time. As we do so, we will gradually let go of our superimposed defenses, and our true, undefended self will emerge. Letting our true self manifest will be a challenge, because it will run so counter to our lifelong habits of being. We will also have to grapple with the confusion between the healthy letting go of arrogance and an unhealthy drifting into submissiveness. Submission comes from our unconscious attachment to needs we are unwilling to relinquish — we give ourselves away in order to avoid the “defeat” of not having those needs be satisfied. This process of submission causes us to feel contempt for ourselves, and to compensate by moving towards arrogance and aggression. The uncomfortable conflict between our submissiveness and our aggressiveness may also lead us to withdraw from life, as a false solution to the conflict.

We would do well to CONTEMPLATE our main image, or if we have not yet found it, to consider our main problems in life and then to FIND it. From that starting point, it is productive to DETERMINE the part of the defense mechanism which did work for us, and the hidden claim which the defense failed to satisfy, as well as the needs involved with our image. We need to FEEL our real needs, our superimposed false needs, and the defensive wall in ourselves, and then NOTICE the difference in our behavior and reactions when we are feeling the defensive wall and when we aren’t. This will help us see the effect that our defense has on others, so we can understand how the defense only brings us more of the unfulfillment it was meant to avoid. When we understand that our defense doesn’t work, we will be willing to let it go.

Questions and Answers:

A person who is aware of his or her defense and stuck between not wanting to act on it and not wanting to suppress it knows that the defense is destructive but still has an unconscious belief that the defense is advantageous. When we get that the defense isn’t productive, then we can let it go, even though we may feel some anxiety around the feeling that we are defenseless and vulnerable. The process of letting the defense go is one of relaxing the energetic hardened mass within us, as opposed to straining to hold back the expression of the defense.

The fact that a defense mechanism may “work” for us on one level does not mean that it doesn’t also have all sorts of subtle destructive effects. If we FIND our unpronounced claim and desire, we will find our repressed and neglected need and see how the defense inhibits the full expression of who we are. Automatically, energy will shift away from the pursuit of the defense and towards fulfillment of our real needs.

© 2007 — All rights reserved (see first post in general orientation category).

Pathwork Lecture #92: Repressed Needs — Relinquishing Blind Needs — Primary and Secondary Reactions

Summary of Pathwork Lecture #92:
Repressed Needs — Relinquishing Blind Needs– Primary and Secondary Reactions

For a deeper, more rewarding experience of these teachings, consult the Lecture itself, available free of charge at: http://www.pathwork.org/lectures/unedited/P092.PDF

All the distortions in our life are connected to our repressed needs and to our unawareness of them.

Instinctual needs are derived from the instincts of procreation and self-preservation. They may be healthy and normal, but they become destructive when repressed. The needs of the idealized self-image (ISI) are based on vanity and pride. Often, normal instinctual needs and unhealthy ISI needs intertwine, causing us to feel guilty about normal needs — a guilt which is supported by distorted mass images. This guilt causes us to starve such needs, which in turn causes them to be displaced, and when we answer the urgency with which they are expressed in displaced form, we create experiences which further starve our needs. This fuels a vicious cycle of defense, psychic starvation, and ineffectual, pain-inducing action.

It is not only sexual needs which we inappropriately repress, but also other needs of which we are not even aware.

In order to satisfy a need, it is often necessary to relinquish something else and to tolerate temporary frustration for the sake of eventual gratification. We are unable to make this kind of choice intelligently when we are not even aware of the true nature of our displaced need, and when the urgency of the need and the illusion that immediate fulfillment is possible drive us to hang on to what we can get. The lack of satisfaction reinforces our false belief that our instinctual needs are wrong, and this induces us to push the whole vicious cycle further out of awareness. We would do well to GET IN TOUCH with our instinctual needs and their validity, and OBSERVE how we have sabotaged their satisfaction. This process will lead us to an perceive an inner energetic focal point where we are unwilling to let go in favor of actual gratification — an unwillingness which causes helplessness, dependency and the illusion of being caught between two unsatisfactory choices. In this condition, we are in fact caught between the part of us which denies the validity of our real needs and the part which rebels against the denial. We are caught as well between the part of us which gives in to the compulsive energy of our false needs, and the part which rebels against this submission. The way out is to BECOME AWARE of our real needs and to LEARN how to fulfill them responsibly and effectively. This will lead to the gradual disappearance of our false needs. It will also lead us to understand that our self-contempt, which we attribute to the existence of our real needs, is in fact based on our unwillingness to relinquish. Becoming able to relinquish is a tremendous source of self-respect, which enables us to let go of false needs and take the necessary steps to satisfy our real needs.

It is important not to jump to conclusions regarding the focal point where relinquishment is required. When we have done the work to find it, we will not experience the letting go as a sacrifice which makes us virtuous, but will rather understand how the letting go serves our interests.

Repressed needs cause us to have secondary, rather than primary, reactions to situations. We react to our images rather than being intuitively connected to what is actually happening. We see things in black and white terms, are preoccupied with and dependent upon the reactions of others towards us, misjudge situations, and react only with conditioned responses. This is because the repression of our needs causes us to cling to illusion rather than experience reality.

Questions and Answers:

Needs such as vanity and domination over others are not real needs. When we discover them, we would do well to OBSERVE them without moralizing, and DISCOVER the underlying healthy needs which have been repressed.

We can tell that a need is false by considering the nature of its fulfillment. If the satisfaction is shallow and fleeting, often to the detriment of another person or another legitimate personal need, then the need is false. The satisfaction of a real need, on the other hand, is constructive for ourselves and for others.

A need for harmony is valid, but is distorted if it leads one to forfeit other important needs.

Having a severe reaction to discovering inner distortions is a sign that we cling to a belief that the distortion is beneficial, and are seeking to escape the confrontation with our self. We would do well to UNCOVER this belief rather than trying to force the distortion away. To the extent that we are impatient because we falsely believe that we must be perfect, we impede this process of understanding.

As we progress on the spiral of development, the interval between our escape and resistance mechanisms and our awareness of them gets shorter and shorter, until they synchronize. Then, gradually, the distortion itself will begin to arise less frequently until it is eventually replaced with a spontaneous new reaction.

Prayer is helpful, but only if we are willing to do the work of self-purification. If we pray with an expectation that God will do the work for us, then we have a distorted attitude about life and our prayer will be unavailing. We would do well to DETECT this faulty approach to prayer in ourselves. Spirituality without a willingness to do the emotional work of self-confrontation is false religion.

© 2007 — All rights reserved (see first post in general orientation category).