Pathwork Lecture #100: Meeting the Pain of Destructive Patterns

An Unofficial Summary of Pathwork Lecture #100:  Meeting the Pain of Destructive Patterns

For a deeper, more rewarding experience of these teachings, consult the Lecture itself, available free of charge at: http://www.pathwork.org/lectures/P100.PDF

As children, we suffer from our parents’ imperfect ability to love, and also from being treated as children rather than as individuals, which is equally destructive.  The climate of our upbringing is a continual, minor shock which can affect us even more than a sudden trauma.  We become used to this climate, accept it, and develop destructive defenses in a misguided effort to deal with it.

When the chosen pseudo-solution is withdrawal in order to avoid emotional hurt, we eventually come to understand through doing this work that we are better off feeling the pain.  However, when we work our way through our defenses, the pain we encounter will be unpleasant and will challenge our resolve.

When the chosen pseudo-solution is submissiveness, we become weak.  Moreover, we end up isolated because we are looking for a strong protector when there can be no such person in our lives, since we must protect ourselves.  Also, our weakness and dependency exerts pressure on others to enable us, and to remain strong for our sake.

All pseudo-solutions bring pain to ourselves and others.  The withdrawal solution rejects others, depriving us of the experience of loving them and depriving others of the experience of receiving our love.  The submissiveness solution similarly rejects the weaknesses and needs of others, thereby hurting them.  The aggressive solution also rejects and hurts others by its false superiority.  Whenever we hurt others, we hurt ourselves.

Our pseudo-solutions are part of our idealized self-image, which isolates us through its falsity and its self-aggrandizement, and brings us the very pain our pseudo-solutions were meant to avoid. Our perfectionism make it impossible for us to accept and deal with life, or to really live it.  We can BECOME AWARE of how all this works through sincere self-searching.  Merely observing these mechanisms begins an organic process of dissolution.  Then we are ready to cross over into a new way of life; however, initially this brings pain.  Constructive patterns will gradually emerge as we go through the work of experiencing that which we initially ran away from.  At first, however, we will continue to attract negative experiences based on our old patterns, although we will tend to respond to them in a more evolved way.

As we discover the ways in which we have misguidedly created our own unhappiness, we will discover our ability to create the fulfillment our soul is craving.  The harder we work on this path, in spite of our resistance, the sooner we will cultivate this strength and self-reliance.

More significant than the pain which caused us to institute our counterproductive defenses is the pain of all the unfulfillment we have experience ever since as a result of those defenses.  As we go through our pain, we will first feel ourselves trapped in our inability to achieve fulfillment, but then we will gradually develop the ability.

During the phase of unfulfillment, we will have the opportunity to become precisely aware of our real, basic needs.  We will become aware of our need to receive love.  As a result of having pushed this need into unconsciousness because of the pain of its unfulfillment, we inadvertently stunted our ability to give love, and this kept our need to receive love stuck in a childish phase of development.  As we go through our pain and become aware of the need to give love, we may also encounter frustration because we lack an outlet for this need.  The pressure of these unfulfilled needs is not something new — before we were aware of it, it may have expressed in sickness or other symptoms.  As we experience the pain, it will serve us to BECOME AWARE of our needs to give and receive love, the frustration, the pressure, the sense of helplessness and the temptation to evade the pain.  In the interim period of development, the inner pressure of unfulfillment may be keenly felt, and it will serve us well to REMEMBER that this phase is just a tunnel through which we have to pass.  If we persevere and resist the temptation to avoid, using our relapses as lessons, we will become more mature and versatile.

Questions & Answers:

Fear is often a defense to feeling pain.  It is healthier to face pain than to avoid it.  Running away makes us feel inadequate, and increases the unfulfillment and the pain we are trying to avoid.

Trying to “learn” to feel the need to give love is a self-manipulation.  To get to a place where we genuinely feel the need to give love, it is most productive to OBSERVE our immature emphasis on receiving.  We grow into the feeling intermittently, but our periods of being connected to it gradually get more frequent and longer-lasting.  It will serve us to approach this growth process with patience.

We tend to carry over from childhood the false beliefs that (1) reality is unpleasant and therefore pleasure must be sought in fantasy, and (2) happiness can be attained only through selfishness.

Regarding the Guides’ statement in the previous Lecture that one person who gains inner truth has a greater influence on the entire cosmic development than millions who do not, this has to do with the fact that when we defend, we reject, and this builds up the defenses of others, whereas when we are open and undefended, we inspire others to adopt the same posture.

© 2009 — All rights reserved (see first post in general orientation category).

Pathwork Lecture #099: Falsified Impressions of Parents: Cause and Cure

An Unofficial Summary of Pathwork Lecture #099:  Falsified Impressions of Parents:  Cause and Cure

For a deeper, more rewarding experience of these teachings, consult the Lecture itself, available free of charge at: http://www.pathwork.org/lectures/P099.PDF

Our lives are empty without the capacity to love.  The capacity to love is not the same as a craving to receive love.  The more fearful, self-involved and dependent we are, the less able we are to let love flow through us, and the more meaningless our lives feel to us.  Freeing the capacity to love requires us to resolve our psychological problems.

As children, we focus only on a few aspects of our parents’ or caregivers’ personalities, remaining completely unaware of the remainder.  This simplified image of these people, which exists even if we know better intellectually, colors our experience of life and restricts the channel which permits to love and experience others in a real way.  It is certain that there is a connection between the most problematic area of our lives and an image we have of a parent or other significant person from our early childhood.

The remedy for the negative effects of this situation is to BECOME AWARE of how we really feel about our family members, and then to CONSIDER whether these feelings might not be related to fragmentary images of such persons.  We would do well to ASK whether we see our parents as complex, vulnerable human beings, capable of having contradictory aspects, or as one-dimensional, artificial and invulnerable robotic beings.    Having an unrealistic image of our parents, whether it is positive or negative, binds us to certain problems in our lives, and limits our power and our capacity to love, until we manage to correct the false perception.  Thus, it will serve us to CONSIDER who our parents really are, with detachment and objectivity, making an effort to see all of their facets — their childhood experiences, hurts, fears, frustrations and so on.

Giving up a glorified image of a parent may be difficult, especially when this parent was the only person we could depend upon in childhood for acceptance and love.  Giving up a hated image can also be difficult, as where accepting the humanity of that parent is felt as a justification of the harm which he or she inflicted.  Our resistance to seeing the truth about our parents is partly about losing the security we thought we had gained by creating a simple, static view of them.  It will serve us to ASK in meditation and prayer to see the truth about our parents.

We need to see the truth about ourselves in order to see the truth in others, but seeing the truth in others also helps us to see the truth about ourselves.

Even where there are practical obstacles to gaining information about our parents, as where they are deceased, there is a way.  For instance, it may by contacting someone else who knew them.  It may even be by nothing more than the sincere prayer to know, which will be answered in some way, as by a shift in perspective which makes one able to understand remembered events in a new and more informative light.

The first step is to DETERMINE whether we want to know the truth.  If we have resistance, simply ACKNOWLEDGING it and keeping the issue in consciousness will cause the resistance to fade organically over time.  If we hear ourselves saying, “I can’t find out,” it is important to ASK whether that really means, “I don’t want to find out.”

Questions & Answers:

Understanding why our parents may have been cruel brings us to an understanding that it was their problem — that they were doing the best they could at the time — and consequently we stop taking their behavior on as being about us.  This enables us to establish constructive patterns which will reinforce our feeling of self-worth.  Whether or not we believe this, or can see how gaining knowledge about our parents would be helpful, it will serve us to PRAY to see the truth in this respect.

The real meaning of the Fourth Commandment is not that we should compulsively superimpose false positive feelings for our parents over our true feelings, which is unhealthy, but that we should see them as they truly are, thereby respecting their humanity.

Spiritually, one person who gains inner truth has a greater influence on the entire cosmic development than millions who do not.

After an image has been dissolved without its root cause being found, the false need for protection may persist, contributing to the creation of a new image.

In the words of the Lord’s Prayer, “Thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven,” Earth refers to the outward material manifestations of our lives and Heaven refers to the inner psychological and spiritual levels.  Doing God’s will requires not only right actions, but an inner intention.

A balance of healthy activity and healthy passivity brings us into harmony with the state of being, which means heaven.

Masochism results from finding pleasure only in the pain of rejection, and giving up on ever finding anything better.  Many other aspects may be relevant to any individual person, and may require exploration, but this core is always present.

Where there is resistance coupled with an unwillingness to look at it, this is where we must focus attention in order to open the love channel within us and lead a meaningful life.

Rejection of pleasure may have its root in rejection of the self.

Sadism and masochism are the same current, directed outwardly in one case and inwardly in the other.  Ultimately they are the same, because we hurt ourselves when we hurt others, and if we hurt ourselves, we must eventually hurt someone else.

© 2009 — All rights reserved (see first post in general orientation category).

Pathwork Lecture #045: The Conflict Between Conscious and Unconscious Desires

Summary of Pathwork Lecture #045:
The Conflict Between Conscious and Unconscious Desires

For a deeper, more rewarding experience of these teachings, go to the Lecture itself, available free of charge at: http://www.pathwork.org/lectures/P045.PDF

The only purpose of life is self-purification, which depends on self-knowledge. One cannot force change by using one’s will. Will is to be used to discover the lower nature of one’s emotions. Purification comes from accepting with humility the truth about what one finds.

To know the hidden facets of one’s self, one must find the desires which underlie any emotional reaction, positive or negative. The foundation of this work is the daily review: we would do well to go beyond noting what caused disharmony and ASK, “what do I really want in that situation which causes fear or anger?” It is productive to FIND the frustrated desire, and to LOOK also at how whatever brings happiness either fulfills a desire or make it seem more likely that a desire will be fulfilled. Once an articulate awareness of desires is established, the work proceeds to FINDING their origins.

Lower self motives find hidden expression through actions seemingly motivated only by the higher self. This is why actions with apparently noble motives can yield disharmony. We would do well to OBSERVE all of our motives and openly ACKNOWLEDGE them to ourselves, without forcing our feelings, which only shoves them into unconsciousness where they can do more harm.

Emotions are really just more intense versions of thoughts. It takes a long time to break emotional habits, which are even harder to change than long-held opinions. To do so, we must OBSERVE our emotions without judgment or evaluation, and in mindfulness of the fact that good motives do not exclude the simultaneous truth of a bad motive. We would also do well to CONNECT our current desires to our childhood desires, and to RECOGNIZE and EXPLORE areas of confusion and knots of conflicting desires, since our outer conflicts, miseries and unfulfillments logically flow out of them. In finding what we really want, we also have to COME TO TERMS with the fact that there is a price to be paid.

Mass images (images held by humanity as a whole) strengthen personal images. For instance, we are all affected by the mass image about the duration of life.

As we become aware of our emotions, we would do well to TAKE RESPONSIBILITY for the effect they have on others, rather than unleashing them irresponsibly.

We each have an appropriate guardian angel, who observes us. Guardian angels may also meet our first steps towards God with helpful energy. They do not interfere with our judgments, but make sure that we are affected only by what we ourselves have spiritually set in motion according to the law of cause and effect. We also attract negative spirits who are in harmony with our negative aspects.

Questions and Answers:

All guardian spirits are “organized” spirits. (*Summarizer’s note: “organized” means engaged by Christ to help in the Plan of Salvation — see Lecture 22, Salvation.)

The age at which we die is influenced by the mass image, but is ultimately a function of our life plan. When we reach perfection, we no longer need to go through the process of life and death. Some guardian spirits are still in the incarnational cycle. When we fulfill a mission, we receive a higher, more powerful guardian.

All moods are based on underlying desires. Joy may come from the satisfaction of a healthy desire, and if it is not tinged with disharmony or fear of losing the joy, one need not delve into it.

When a lower self motive is present, one may still act, but one should recognize the bad motive. Recognition is the beginning of purification.

The law of affinity is that like attracts like. In essence, it is the law of cause and effect.

Some souls are more tightly bound up in mass images of race, creed or nationality than others. The conflicts this creates will eventually free them from these images.

© 2005, 2007 — All rights reserved (see first post in General Orientation category)