Pathwork Lecture No 118 - Duality Through Illusion

Duality Through Illusion -- Transference

By The Pathwork Guide

Greetings, my dearest friends. God bless all of you. Blessed be this hour.

So long as man is negatively involved with life, he must remain in this earth life. This particular sphere offers the conditions that are compatible with his negative involvement. Only after having overcome his negative involvements will the cycle of births in this sphere cease and his development will then continue in other spheres of living, offering new conditions, compatible with his new state.

What does negative involvement mean? It means, primarily, confusion of reality, confused concepts. Where there is confusion, and therefore illusion, there must of necessity be conflict -- a split of concepts. This split of concepts splits the psyche. In other words, split and conflict are the consequence of illusion and misunderstanding. As man gains unity with himself because he perceives and experiences reality, the split mends and negative involvement ceases.

This idea has been expressed in many different ways throughout the ages. If fully understood, there can be no possible doubt about the fact of reincarnation, which for many people is but a vague belief, a theory. If this aspect of creation is profoundly experienced, it must be recognized that it cannot be any other way. For, as long as man is not through with a flaw in himself which separates him from reality, he has to live within the conditions that express this state. His state produces the condition he lives in and his environment which, in turn, offer him the only possible means to learn, to recognize, and to overcome the state of duality. Hence, this earth life expresses the general state of man. It expresses the split -- the result of a confusion of reality.

This split is symbolized by many manifestations of earth life. For instance, so many things appear in pairs of opposites. In philosophical thinking, mankind itself is paired -- man and woman, night and day, life and death. These are but a few examples of life representing a two-way split. This two-way split applies to mankind, but not to the animal, plant, or mineral kingdoms, which are still in a lower state and find themselves in a more than twofold split.

Mankind is the expression of a twofold split which, as I said, manifests in many ways. Generally speaking, this is not truly understood.

Abstract meditation about this fact cannot really bring forth a profound understanding. But through the work on this Path, little by little, you will discover your personal, and heretofore unconscious, misconceptions; as you progress it will become amply clear that it is these very misconceptions on any given subject that create the illusory conflict of having to choose between two alternatives. Naturally, both alternatives are dissatisfactory and they create a state of hopelessness, just because they arrive at an unrealistic conclusion. Any one of my friends who has made sufficient progress in this respect can think of specific examples. These personal examples will offer the greatest possible enlightenment; by understanding them what I say in this lecture will become a reality, a personal experience of truth.

When you are in confusion, you are negatively involved with life and with others. The primary negative involvement occurs within yourself, in your misunderstanding of concepts, of aspects of reality. Unresolved confusions remain in the psyche and are bound to re-occur in each life. Life conditions are bound to bring these confusions to the fore, unless the personality persists in disregarding them and evading the issues. This, unfortunately, happens only too frequently.

The karmic relationships that are most intense and dramatic are those between parents and children. The unresolved confusions and conflicts that produce the basic split must be challenged first in this relationship. This double relationship of the child to both father and mother is a symbol of the split which marks this earth sphere. To have one set of parents is an asset to the degree that the relationship is healthy because of a relatively free psyche. But when the negative involvement is still strong, this double relationship to two parents enhances the inner split.

If you examine your particular main problems and conflicts, the images, the defense mechanisms, the pseudo solutions, and the wrong conclusions that you have found so far, they will eventually reveal the basic inner attitude by which you are governed. This basic attitude is always split in half; your fundamental attitude in your negative involvement fluctuates between these two ways of reacting. This deep recognition can be found only by those who work intensely on this Path of self-confrontation. It goes beyond isolated areas of recognition, such as specific images, misconceptions, etc. All the pieces must form one nucleus, manifesting your personal two-way split. Full realization and acceptance of this fact indicates considerable progress and self-awareness. When this realization begins to take shape, you will come to see that these two fundamental attitudes, constituting your split, represent your basic attitude to your parents.

The influence exerted upon you by one parent, and your emotional response to it, indicates one of your conflicting and distorted attitudes. An entirely different influence by the other parent, and your emotional response to it, reproduces the other side of your conflict. This twofold split is a conflict that you could not resolve before you entered this life. Your parents, or, rather, certain of their aspects, and your subsequent response to them, personify this unmended split within your psyche. Even though it will seem, when you first start working on your Path, that it is your parents who have induced your particular way of reacting, it is not your parents who are responsible for your problems. However, it is important to face and understand their faulty behavior towards you, for it is intimately connected to your inner split, which you carried with you into this life. When you perceive how you represent your parents within your psyche, when you sense the subtle interaction between identification , rebellion, and various other responses and reactions to them, you must come to experience your basic twofold split by which you are governed throughout your life. This will persist until you resolve and mend it through insight and understanding. At this point, theories cease to matter. It is not necessary to believe in reincarnation. The important thing is the discovery that your parents express and personify your own duality, your illusory way of life.

When this is truly understood, there can no longer be a dividing mark between modern psychology and spiritual, metaphysical or philosophical ideas. When this is understood, so-called spiritual, and heretofore theoretical, concepts become just as much a personal experience as any psychological discovery.

I used the expression "illusory way of life" for lack of a better term. This may describe, as accurately as it is possible with the limitation of human language, how your own very distinct inner way of life governs you as a consequence of the negative involvement you re-experience with your parent. When I say "way of life," I do not only mean outer conduct, or certain characteristics that are typical of you, although they, too, may be part of and connected with this twofold split. What I mean by this expression is a certain way of automatic response, of stereotype reflexes that you repeat over and over throughout life, reacting to others as you once reacted to your parents, without your being aware of it at all. These repetitive responses belong to the split part of your psyche only. Where your soul is healthy, you are free of the blind compulsion to re-live the past.

We have often discussed this automatism, but none of my friends are as yet completely aware of it. As awareness of it grows, liberation becomes more tangible. However, this can happen only when you gain a glimpse of your personal twofold split, symbolized in your attitudes to both parents.

This child, starting a new life cycle, carries its personal unresolved conflicts. Its duality to illusion and misconception. At the same time, its psyche is very impressionable. Everything it experiences has a much fresher and more intense impact. Impressions go deeper and take root -- but always according to the child's inherent psychic health, or the lack of it, which determines how these impressions and experiences will be assimilated. The freshness and impressionability of the child's psyche causes early experience to have a more far-reaching effect than a similar experience would have for an adult. This can be easily observed, constantly and in many ways, with children. Children, for example, have a keener sense of smell and of taste. They are more curious about the most simple manifestations in life. The strong impact of life on the child's soul can be clearly seen. Negative experiences, resulting from previously unresolved conflicts, impress the child's psyche even more. But it cannot be too strongly emphasized that negative experience and involvement occur only to the degree that the psyche is still in a state of duality, in a state of illusory conceptual conflicts, when the entity is born.

This, my friends, is not the same as what I said regarding images. The principle is the same, of course, but it applies to a much deeper level. Here I do not refer to a particular image you may have, or even to your most important ones. I refer to the underlying basic conflict which is responsible for your being a human entity and living in this particular sphere of the universe. This conflict is not inaccessible. It is right here, in full view. If you realize how your attitude to both parents governs your basic life situations and is an expression of your basic personality difficulties. When you discover how you continue to respond to them, you experience your basic split, your very own brand of duality, and hence you increase your comprehension of your personal human limitations. Therefore, these limitations instantly lessen, by the mere fact that they are truly perceived. Your range will widen, your freedom will increase, your vision will be extended, your security will grow -- and, as a result, your harmony will be established. Since split and harmony are incompatible, mending the split through understanding will increase harmony.

All this can hardly be understood if one is not active on this Path, and rather advanced in self-discovery, But even then, considerable help is needed in order to reach these deep levels of self-awareness. The discussion on this lecture may offer some opportunity for such help, apart from the work itself. The best way to clarify confusions, to overcome difficulties, and to understand would be to bring personal examples as o what degree you have found splits of concept and subsequent conflict in yourself. When such conflict is better understood, it may be seen how it corresponds to attitudes toward both parents. Through such practical examples, I can show you how to proceed in this particular part of your pathwork.

When this facet of your soul is understood on a more profound and personal basis, when it becomes your experience that this is so and it ceases to be merely a theory or a philosophical postulate, you will understand and experience what we have so often discussed and what you have found within yourself only to a minor degree so far: the repetition of reactions; how you respond to later situations, to other people, in an almost identical was as you have once responded to your parents. You may, so far, intellectually understand that the parents represent your personal split, each parent on one side of it. This is the nature of the karmic link, the reason and the necessity of choice. You had to respond to them the way you did, not only because they were what they were, but ultimately because of your duality. Your brother or sister may have different reactions to them because they have a different kind of split. As you had to respond to the parents according to your split, so do you have to react to other people, later in life, in a similar way, even if the situation resembles the original situation only slightly. So, in the last analysis, the repetition is not due to the parents and their faulty ways, but to your own duality, which this particular set of parents could best manifest or represent, and therefore bring out in you.

It is very important to understand the continuation of the unbroken line of your original split with which you were born: your parents and the later repetitions you constantly re-enact. Needless to say that none of this is obvious before sufficient inroads are made and awareness is cultivated. But soon it becomes very obvious. As long as awareness of this chain is incomplete or missing, you are not in control of yourself and of your life. I mean healthy control and not the many erroneous ways the personality seeks in order to be in control because basic awareness is lacking, and therefore one feels weak and helpless. False controls are damaging and lead further away from the healthy way of being on firm ground -- through awareness of these processes. Only when this awareness dawns upon you will you begin to be in peace and in reality.

Now let us discuss this process of repetition, which is vastly underrated, overlooked, ignored, misunderstood, or, at best, its understanding is not profound and extensive enough.

Modern psychology has found a small aspect of this process. It calls it transference. You may infer from this lecture that it goes farther and deeper than what is generally understood by this term. This so-called transference happens constantly in a person's life in all intense relationships. To the degree that the relationship is intense, the first traumatic relationship to both parents is repeated. Any negative involvement with another person expresses conflict. If there were no conflict, there would be no negative involvement. Since it expresses conflict, it must manifest both sides of the split, and therefore both parents, in the involved person. If only one person is negatively involved, his or her duality is lived out; his or her parental relationship re-experienced. If both, or more, persons in a situation are negatively involved, they are all entangled in their first experiences in this life, living out their duality with their parents, thereby engendering each other's misconceptions and fortifying the split. This is difficult to describe in theoretical terms, but whoever comes to this understanding will have no difficulty seeing this truth. This is why I suggest personal, real examples, for they lend themselves very well to amplifying and illustrating what I am discussing here.

Let us now try to gain a little more understanding, at least in theory, as to what this continuous process of transferring does -- from the inner split to the parents, to other people, and to life situations. If the psyche is geared to the first response to the parents, you are unable to perceive what really is. Blindly, you apply to others what may have no application at all. Hence you react and respond to illusion and not to the reality of each situation. The trouble is that, just because of this, you force the other person into the very reaction which would not exist if you had not assumed that it does exist. Let us take a simple example. If you are convinced of being rejected, the rejection will finally become a reality. Because of this conviction, your behavior must be rejecting. This example has often been found and discussed, but this particular process applies to any number of other facets of life and personality. Consequently, you are strengthened in the false belief of your misconception, and thereby you widen the split. You must re-experience the same sequence, again and again, until you begin to see the reality of this process and understand its workings. You cannot live in reality before you thoroughly perceive your particular unreality and are not deterred from attempting it because your false concept appears to be true. Think of the example of rejection.

Being geared to the original experience, you are convinced that what is happening to you today is real; initially it is not, but it becomes so only because of your reaction. Therefore your reactions are not responsive to the real person, to the real situation, but to imagined persons and situations, your parents. Hence, you do not live in reality. You do not respond according to reality but you send your responses forth into thin air and not to the person confronting you. What comes out of you is directed to what you think exists and not to what really exists, and thus you cannot reach the reality of the other person. If the person in question -- and most of the time this is so -- reacts in a similar way, all relationships and interactions between human beings constantly pass each other, without one ever reaching the other. Outflowing currents criss-cross, miss one another, and this is part of the reason for the prevailing loneliness of man, for his difficulty to communicate. Humans believe that they react to one another, but usually this does not happen at all, or it happens only to a very limited scale. The stream of your consciousness, supposed to be directed to, let us say, person A, never reaches A. Although you believe it does, it is actually directed to the parental situation. Not being applicable to A, A often may feel this as an injustice. He may feel excluded, or rejected. If A happens to be comparatively liberated from this blind prison, then his responses will not add fuel to the fire because, perceiving reality much better, he will know that it does not apply to him. He will not react as he is supposed to react, and this may indeed help.

Only when a person has recognized his own duality and has stopped transferring his reactions from his parents to others, will he be capable of withstanding the onslaught of misdirected responses. He will then refuse to express the duality (or one side of it) of other people because he is aware of his own. Unnecessary pain is thus avoided and help given, in the most subtle way. The negative involvement has no response and, finally, this must bring the one who misdirected his stream of consciousness to the realization that the original situation and the new situation are not identical. Even if this happens on an unconscious level, it is of help; but then one is dependent on the health and liberation of others who do not respond to one's unreality. It is certainly better to begin with the self, to find one's own split, to se the transference of it: from parents to others with whom one is involved, and gradually recognize that the emotional climate in which one lives is not applicable to the real situation.

Observing the earth sphere and humanity form our vantage point, it is indeed sad to see that people react so rarely to and in reality. This is the confusion and chaos that brings so much needless suffering to mankind. If you would perceive and react to the real person, to the real situation, then a lot of pain would be avoided. Pain is the result of illusion, the illusion being the consequence of a split, all of which forms the basic "way of life," first lived out in the parental relationship.

Some of you have gained a small inkling of what I am talking about here, but only a nebulous inkling as yet. The more you become aware of the re-experiencing of your old "way of life," your basic split, the basic conflict represented by your parents, the more you will live in reality and free yourself of the repetitive chain of illusion. Once you cease re-enacting the old drama of your duality, you will respond spontaneously to the real situation, which will no longer be as it had seemed to appear previously.

Psychotherapists and psychiatrists have understood this phenomenon in their relationship with their patients. But only segments of this human predicament are comprehended in the framework of the evolutionary process, determining the laws of reincarnation. I want to help you understand this phenomenon on a deeper and broader basis; this can be done only by becoming aware of it within yourself. As you gain this awareness, you will see the misunderstanding and the damage it creates. Your eyes will begin to open to the real situation. The more conscious you are of your automatism, your stereotype responses, the more they will desist by the very act of being conscious of them. You will see how the husband or the wife, the child or the friend, were never fully reacted to as to their own selves, but rather as extensions of a previous experience. This so-called transference from parents to others also applies to your children. For if this "way of life" is not given up, no relationship is uninfluenced by it -- certainly no relationship of any importance and intensity. You must be caught in this trap until you become aware of this condition.

This is the freedom that this pathwork is meant to give you. It can only come through self-awareness. Lack of awareness imprisons you and makes life not worth living, because you are constantly caught between two dissatisfactory alternatives. You even react to your father and mother in the "way of life" you have adopted, and you respond to them and to life in consequence to their impact on you. Response to one parent may be a reaction to, and a correction of, an unwanted situation with the other parent -- a compensation. The two sets of basic attitudes together form your basic split, your "way of life," and you are, at the same time, a result of this. A new experience of life's manifold manifestations is possible only after having broken the repetitive chain from the duality to parents to others. Then life becomes vibrant in joy, peace and meaningfulness, in newness and richness.

This is a very important subject, and it is of the greatest possible importance. I do hope that many of my friends who are active on this Path will, in this coming working season, at the very least gain vague glimpses of this and thus begin to understand what is expressed in this lecture. This is where the direction leads you to, where the Guidance is given if you are willing to follow the Road. In many cases, more and different aspects have to be illuminated before this insight can be reached, but if the Path is pursued, it will eventually happen.

A few years ago, I gave a lecture on duality. At that time, you understood parts of this topic. Now you are ready for a deeper level of understanding. I approach this topic now from a different angle, according to your present state of development. I venture to say that, in the best and most favorable of circumstances, it will take considerable time before you can truly apply this lecture to yourself.

Are there any questions now regarding this subject?

QUESTION: Is not the influence of brothers and sisters almost as strong as the one exerted by parents?

ANSWER: It is only a result of the relationship to the parents. Even if a relationship to a sibling is outwardly more problematic and negatively involved, it is a secondary result. If the matter is profoundly explored, it must be found that the sibling relationship is always directly dependent on and related to the parental relationship. The parents, as I said before, express, or symbolize, or manifest, your own basic split, your "way of life" with which you deal with this split. Therefore all other relationships are geared to this conflict within, through the conflict outside -- the parents.

*****

I have given you a lot of material, my friends. It will take considerable work to assimilate it, at least months, if you truly wish to gain merely an inkling of personal experience, of knowledge of these words. In many cases it may be years before you get to this knowledge. But when you do have this inner knowledge, the inner experience of this truth, the meaning will be beyond your possible anticipation. It will truly release you from a straight-jacket, from a hopeless choice of two dismal alternatives -- your basic previous "way of life." You will enter into a new freedom.

May the strength and the blessing given unto you, my dear ones, fill you with an energy, with an impact, that makes it possible for you to reach and confront these depths of your being. May you summon the courage to overcome the fear that produces resistance. Only then will you convince yourself how useless, unreasonable, and unfounded was the fear. The fear makes it seem that reality is to be feared and that it is better to cling to illusion. How false these unrecognized reasoning processes are! What a pity that you persist, so often, in poisoning your life with this falsity.

Some of my friends are very near some recognition in this respect. Some have already begun to get to this point of understanding, this basic conflict. But none of you are as yet aware of how you repeat the original situation with others. This awareness has to be more fully cultivated, more clearly recognized. So, may this blessing here extended help you in this direction. No endeavor and no blessing could be more useful, more important, more vital, more rewarding, and none can bring you closer to life -- in the true sense of the word.

Be blessed, all of you, in this most meaningful work you undertake. Be in peace, my dearest ones. Be in God.

The Guide
by Eva Pierrakos
October 18, 1963

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