Mobility In Relaxation -- Negative Pleasure

By The Pathwork Guide

Greetings, my dearest friends. Blessings for everyone of you. May these blessings aid you in assimilating this lecture, not only with your outer but also with your inner understanding. All of you during the course of this year have progressed, each in his own way, most of you considerably. It is often hard to evaluate outwardly what constitutes real progress. Often the greatest progress is least noticeable in the eyes of others. New inner insight has been gained by all of you, enabling you to meet your own life in a different way. Even those of you who have not begun actual work on this path must have grown inwardly, for otherwise they would not even be here,

This lecture, the last one of the season, is an attempt to recapitulate on the material we covered in the past, and at the same time open up new areas for future work. It is meant to help you understand past material as experienced fact in your personal work -- as opposed to merely theoretical teachings -- and simultaneously to give you an overall view of the work to come. This lecture can be followed as a road map for your inner journey.

The entire universe is permeated with a vibrant life substance. This substance consists of forces of tremendous power; mankind has only vaguely begun to discover it and only to a limited degree. Whether this power is physical -- such as electrical or atomic energy -- or mind power makes no difference, for it is all the same power, or different facets of the same power. This power is a very impressionable mass, a substance that can only be governed by consciousness. The result of this molding is matter in its various degrees of density. However, it is also something more subtle than specific matter. It is life itself, as it unfolds for the individual. It is experience, it is conditions, circumstances, fate or destiny. Whatever man experiences, whatever the conditions in which he finds himself, this is the matter or form which is the outcome of a combination between consciousness and the way in which this consciousness impresses the life substance. This is a very brief recapitulation of everything I have spoken about in the course of these years. I repeat it here in order to make what is to follow more understandable.

This tremendous life substance is in continuous motion. Let us go a little deeper into the meaning of this, into the particular way and rhythm of this cosmic movement. If you truly understand this, you do indeed have another key to your life.

This cosmic movement, permeating everything that is, is a mixture of mobility and relaxation. The key of mobility combined with relaxation opens the world. It is the state of being. This is the unitive principle of being. Only through misconceptions does duality or conflict come about. The particular duality or distortion of this Unitive Principle -- mobility in relaxation -- results in the following misconceptions: On the one hand relaxation perceived as non-movement or stagnation, and on the other hand mobility seen as tense effort. This is particularly significant and important to understand for mankind's problems.

All misconceptions, as you find them in the course of your personal work, are derivatives of this duality: relaxation can exist only in non-movement -- stagnating passivity -- versus movement in anxious, grabbing, striving effort. Man has to seemingly decide between these two alternatives. Whenever such alternatives exist, strife must follow -- for it is a result of conflict. It is necessary to transcend through this duality into the unitive principle of being. Needless to say, this applies to all levels of personality. I cannot sufficiently emphasize that my talks are not in the least abstract, philosophical discourses, but very practical keys to your immediate life, my friends. Do not ever overlook this fact.

Let us begin right here and now to see how this holds true. When you examine the misconceptions, the images, as they unfold through your pathwork and you look at these misconceptions deeply enough, you are bound to find that they fall directly into this split. Even from a merely intellectual approach, you should easily see that the distortion of mobility versus relaxation is the primarily duality -- underlying all misconceptions -- and resulting in a situation in which you only see two equally unsatisfactory alternatives. This primary misconception distorts cosmic movement in its harmonious rhythm.

You will experience this truth even more dynamically and personally when you listen in to your soul movements -- your own inner expressions and emanations. Calmly observe what emanates from your own psychic forces and you will find this distortion of movement, in which you stagnate because non-movement seems so tempting. It appears to be the effortless state that the soul longs for. Or, movement seems so necessary in order not to stagnate and because guilt whips you into a striving, overly tense movement. You may not even be able to put your finger on exactly what it is you strive for. When observing the state of your own psychic emanation, you will be able to pinpoint this particular dichotomy.

This is very important, for the moment you can acknowledge this confusion and therefore this distortion of your personal cosmic forces, you will, by this admission, by that acceptance, by that observation or awareness slowly but surely come nearer to straightening out this imbalance of motion. As you proceed in reorienting your heretofore unconscious -- but now becoming increasingly conscious -- concepts, values, understanding of life and of yourself, your relationship to life and to yourself, to that extent, as a natural result, the movement begins to harmonize with the great cosmic flow. Mobility in relaxation comes more and more into being.

The same applies to the physical level of existence. As you observe the emanation of your thinking, feeling, and reacting and, consequently, as you observe this particular emanation, you will also see that the same imbalance effects your physical body. Since the principle of life itself is the harmony between mobility and relaxation, the phenomenon of dying must be the misunderstanding of this principle, so that a duality arises. When this misunderstanding has proceeded to a sufficiently far-reaching extent, affecting more and more levels and aspects of the entity, the phenomenon of dying on the outer levels takes place. But where this balance is established life continues and death is an impossibility.

As the psychological imbalance is straightened out, the outer, physical levels follow suit automatically. This does not mean, however, that man cannot also help from outside in, by cultivating and learning from without the art of mobility in relaxation, rather than immobility and stagnation or mobility and tension. By working at it from inside out and from outside in, the process will be accelerated and the harmony established faster. This is very important for you to follow through, my friends.

The dynamic life force is an extremely vibrant principle, and this vibrant, dynamic relaxation is particularly available to man's consciousness in the love relationship between the sexes. When man's striving or longing for this experience is attached to a negative situation, then difficulty and frustration must follow. In certain ways, my friends, we have discussed this before, but it was not sufficiently understood. And it is very important to shed more light on this topic. Now that I have explained the foregoing, I will attempt to go a little deeper into this topic.

The question is often asked why destructiveness, illness, war, cruelty exist. The answers that have been given are often not sufficiently understood, but even when they are somewhat understood, something is missing. I think most of my friends are now ready to understand this on a deeper level. I have often said that misconceptions create strife, and this is perfectly true. But there exists an additional element without which no misconception could have power. It is this: if man would merely be in a negativity, in a destructive attitude, the destructive effect would be much less. The negative manifestations on this earth plane are particularly serious or severe if and when the destructiveness is attached to and combined with the positive life principle as such. In other words, when a force, in itself positive, combines with a negativity or a destructive attitude, it is this combination that makes evil what it is -- if you want to use this word. Real destructiveness, therefore, is not only a distortion of truth and of the constructive universal powers, but this distortion must be permeated with the powerful life principle and the constructive power in its pure form. If the positive life principle were not involved and inadvertently used, then evil, or destructiveness, would be of very short duration.

The best way, my friends, that you can apply what I say here and derive more from this lecture than a vague, abstract principle, is by looking at yourself from the following point of view: all of you who are on this path have found certain hurts and pains you endured as a child. Some of you have begun to grasp, if ever so slightly, that at that moment when you were hurt as a child, a specific process took place. That is that the erotic or pleasure principle was put into the service of your hurt, your suffering, your pain. All the emotions arising from this original hurt, according to character and temperament, also combine with and attach themselves to the pleasure principle. This fact creates all personal difficulties, all unwelcome circumstances.

All the many, many souls inhabiting this earth added up together create the general strife of mankind. When you realize, after having become aware of this process, how many people, regardless of their outer action, can experience the pleasure principle only in fantasies of cruelty, you will understand that this is the actual nucleus of war -- of cruelty as a whole. This should not make you feel guilty. It should rather enlighten you and free you, so as to allow the inner processes to grow. For it is a misapplied and misunderstood hurt that has created this condition. Cruelty without the pleasure principle could never have real power. Lack of awareness of this combination does by no means alleviate the effect this has on the overall climate of mankind's emanation and its influence on the life substance.

If you have experienced cruelty, whether this cruelty is an actual fact or whether you only believe that it existed, your pleasure principle is attached to cruelty and functions only somewhat in connection with cruelty. Now, often, the guilt and shame of this is so strong that the entire fantasy life is not admitted. However, sometimes it is conscious. Awareness of pleasure in cruelty must be established and understood from this overall point of view. For if it is truly understood, the guilt and shame will be removed. As understanding grows, gradually, little by little, the pleasure principle will respond to positive events.

The connection between the pleasure principle and cruelty can manifest either actively or passively. That is, pleasure is experienced either with inflicting cruelty, or with enduring it -- or both. Often, the fact that the pleasure principle is attached to such a negative condition and is strongest and functions primarily in conjunction with cruelty creates a holding back from actual experience, or limits it and makes the actual experience of love impossible. Or it exists only as a vague yearning that cannot be maintained or followed through. For then love is not the tempting, pleasurable experience it is on another level of personality. The conflict that arises from yearning for love and not knowing why one rejects its actuality -- the fear of the negative attachment of the pleasure principle -- often creates a deep hopelessness that can be understood, and instantly relieved, only when this particular fact is profoundly comprehended.

In less crass cases, when the child experiences not so much outright cruelty as perhaps vague rejection or non-acceptance, the mechanism of the pleasure principle, of the soul forces, will then attach itself to a similar situation and can, in spite of the conscious desire for acceptance, function only in conjunction with rejection. There are many degrees and variations of this. There are, for example, situations when a child experiences partial acceptance and partial rejection. Then the pleasure principle is attached to an exactly similar situation. This, then, creates a conflict in the actual relationship.

The first obvious instance of cruelty being attached to the pleasure principle or the life principle -- they are both the same -- will make a relationship so hazardous that it is often avoided altogether. Or it is experienced as a fear about which one is puzzled. One feels incapable of following through with it. Or, one is so inhibited because the shame of the desire for either inflicting or enduring cruelty may prohibit all spontaneity and make the person withdraw and numb his feelings.

My dearest friends, this is a tremendously important principle to understand. It applies to mankind as a whole, as well as to the individual. Generally, it has not been sufficiently understood due to the fact that psychology and spiritual sciences have not merged sufficiently. Vague attempts have been made by psychology to grasp this factor, and it has been understood in some measure, but its vast significance in terms of civilization and its fate, or its evolution, is not understood. The world is now ready to understand this facet of life.

Evolution, my friends, then means that each individual, through the process of personal self-confrontation and self-realization, gradually changes the inner orientation of the pleasure principle. In spontaneous reaction, more and more individuals will respond to positive events, situations, and conditions.

You all know that such inner change cannot be willed directly. The direct expression of your outer will can and must go in the direction of maintaining and sustaining your pathwork, which increases your ability to understand and cultivate your will to have the courage to look at the self; to find and overcome resistance. And as you do this, as you use your will and your ego faculties in this productive manner, the real change happens -- as some of you already begin to experience -- almost as though it had nothing to do with these efforts, but is a byproduct, an unconnected unfoldment. That is the real thing. This is the way progress and growth must happen. Through this process of growth, gradually, little by little, one individual after another reorients soul movements, soul forces. The expression of the cosmic movement within the psyche will then attach itself to purely positive conditions and circumstances. Positive or pleasurable feelings will no longer be derived from negative circumstances.

Man is now used to the latter, hence he represses the fact of the combination of pleasurable feelings and negative events. Instead of repressing it, denying it, looking away from this fact, he must face it. As he faces this fact, and as he understands it, without guilt or shame, he must learn, in the course of growing, that all imperfection must be accepted and understood before it can be changed. So it will be in this respect: to the extent that he succeeds in facing and understanding this conflict, the pleasure principle will run into different channels. As this happens, mobility will exist without tension and anxiety. And relaxation will exist without stagnation.

All of you, my friends, must try to find your specific inner marriage between the pleasure current and a negative condition. As you find, in specific terms, this "marriage" within your own soul forces, you will know and perfectly understand certain outer manifestations of your problems. This relief that will come from thorough understanding will be experienced only when you have the courage to face this "marriage". As you are capable of clearly and concisely formulating this "marriage" between positive and negative forces, you will see clearly why you kept yourself hidden from yourself and from life; why you withdrew from your own feelings; why you repress; and why you stand guard over the most spontaneous and creative force within yourself. You will see why you block it out, sometimes with a great amount of pain, and then you try to rationalize and explain it away. Even using currently fashionable psychological truths to camouflage this simple fact, my friends.

Perhaps the summer months, which are a temporary interruption of your active pathwork, will nevertheless lead you to prepare for the coming working season. Make attempts to find the two factors I have discussed tonight:

1) Discover the subtle, but nevertheless distinct, distortion of the unitive principle of mobility in relaxation. Where do you have mobility and tension? Where do you have relaxation and stagnation, immobility? Observe it in your mental makeup, in your emotions, as well as in your body.

2) Discover in what respect the life and pleasure principle is attached to a negative condition. To what extent does this manifest (perhaps in your fantasies), and how does this hold you back from self-expression, from union, from experience, from a fearless state of self-realization with a kindred spirit?

Now, are there any questions in connection with this topic?

QUESTION: I would like to understand a little more concretely about this marriage between the forces of love and circumstances of, for example, cruelty. For instance, in a case of a child who feels rejected by his mother. In this case, does the "marriage" then mean that the person cannot experience pleasure unless he also experiences revenge -- some kind of sadistic wish toward the mother? (Perhaps only in fantasy, never in reality, and then the person is usually unaware of the fact that the partner represents the mother).

ANSWER: Yes, it might be exactly that. Or it might be that pleasure can be experienced only in connection with being rejected again, or a little rejected, or being fearful that rejection may occur.

QUESTION: But he didn't experience pleasure when he was rejected.

ANSWER: Of course not. But the child uses the pleasure principle in order to make the negative event, the suffering, more bearable. This happens unconsciously, unintentionally, and almost automatically. Inadvertently, as it were, the pleasure principle mingles and combines with the negative condition. The only way this can be determined is by investigating one's fantasy life. In that way the "marriage" is established. The automatic reflexes are then geared to a situation that combines the inherent pleasure with the painful event.

QUESTION: And he wishes to reproduce this rejection?

ANSWER: He does not consciously wish this, of course. No one really wants to be rejected. The trouble is that he consciously wishes to be accepted and loved, but unconsciously he cannot respond to a completely accepting and favorable situation. The pleasure principle has already been led into the negative channel and can be re-channeled only through awareness and understanding. The very nature of his conflict is that his pleasure principle functions in a way he consciously wants to avoid. It cannot be said that he unconsciously desires rejection, but the reflex had already been established at a time when this way of functioning made life more bearable for the child. Do you understand that?

QUESTION: I don't quite understand how pleasure can be experienced at all when someone is rejected, except in the form of revenge. That I can understand.

ANSWER: Perhaps you can imagine also -- one sees this over and over again -- that when someone feels too secure in being accepted and loved, he loses the spark of interest. This, too, is rationalized by claiming it to be an inevitable law, happening through habit, etc. But it does not have to be that way, if it were not for the factors discussed in this lecture. The spark, the interest, the dynamic flow exists only when there is an unsure, or an unhappy situation. You see this frequently. Sometimes the negative condition exists only in fantasies. These fantasies are, in one way or another and when closely examined, attached to suffering, humiliation, hostility, or whatever. This is then called masochism or sadism. Do you understand now?

QUESTION: Yes, I think I do. Since every child experiences rejection, and since every child is insatiable in his demands, when will there be an end to this situation? Because it always starts with each incarnation, and each situation again?

ANSWER: You can see that there is differentiation among human beings. There are those who function in a much healthier way, where the pleasure principle responds more strongly to a positive situation. This is the evolution taking place. When a completely positive situation exists in the psyche, then reincarnation is no longer necessary. Evolution then proceeds on other levels. To a certain degree, every human being has negativity and this negativity is somehow activated, enforced, and nourished by the life principle. But degrees exist, and they are a clear indication of the evolutionary process. For, you have those human beings, at one extreme, who cannot even have any direct relationship with another person; who live merely in fantasies, which are utterly attached to negative experiences. On the other hand there are those human beings who, in the course of their growing up, in the process of maturing, have brought fantasy life and reality life, in the most positive and favorable sense, together. I discussed this in another context. In this connection, this bringing together of fantasy and reality does not mean repression of fantasy life, but true overcoming of it, because reality is more desirable and more pleasurable, just as positive circumstances are. Between these two poles, many degrees exist. By that, you can the evolutionary progress.

QUESTION: Does mobility and tension, and relaxation and stagnation lessen as you remove the pleasure principle from the negative?

ANSWER: Of course, they interact. You can see how this interaction, to the extent that there is a combination or a "marriage" or a melting between the positive life or pleasure principle and a negative situation, brings tension and anxiety. To the extent that anxiety and tension exist, immobility appears a welcome relief to the strain of moving away from the self. When such a short-circuit hinders the real experience of the pleasure principle, stagnation is the result. It is a non-movement, whereas the whole cosmos is in perpetual, beautiful motion. When man, within his own psyche, establishes the same cosmic movement, he is in harmony with the cosmic forces.

QUESTION: This is the clearest understanding I have ever had of what has happened to me in this "marriage" of negativity and the pleasure principle, of having set up a rejection. Seeing it as clearly as I do now, recognizing exactly how it operates, what do I do about it further?

ANSWER: It is extremely important that you become aware of the specific negative condition to which the pleasure principle in you reacts. This awareness must be not only intellectual, but you must actually feel and experience this mechanism within yourself. You must allow yourself this awareness. Reach deep into your innermost self and remove the restriction to allow this into your consciousness. Realize that allowing it into your consciousness is not a devastating judgment over you. It is not the end of you. It does not stamp you as lost, as you unconsciously believe, but rather as the opposite. This is a new beginning and a way out of an erroneously assumed devastating judgment you thought applied to you. When you allow the clear-cut, concise formulation of this particular melting point into your emotional experience -- how the automatic reflexes of the pleasure principle are geared to the negative -- when you experience this with courage, knowing that this need not and will not remain, as you quietly and calmly desire to grow, then you cannot help but come forward.

In this connection I would like to add one more factor -- not just for you, but generally. It is also useful for you, my friends, to distinguish that two prevalent reactions exist as far as this conflict is concerned. Both of them are mostly unconscious, or semi-conscious. The one reaction, applicable to you here and to many others as well, is the strict denial of being conscious of this combination mentioned here, so that you have no awareness of it, even in fantasy. This is so by dint of fear, guilt, shame, and the belief that one is "terrible" because of it. The other reaction, applicable to those who are perfectly aware of their fantasies but who are unable to experience the principle in any other way than in fantasy -- whether or not they actually have relationships with others -- is the case when sex and love are separated, or eros and love, or eros and sex. Here there is a semi-conscious resistance to give up this fantasy life because it is believed that then the pleasure will be lost altogether. It cannot be conceived that the pure, healthy pleasure principle manifests much more beautifully and satisfyingly when positive melts with positive. It is imagined that this would be dull and boring. This is concluded because the actual, real-life relationship in such instances is never as satisfying as the fantasy. Hence, one assumes that giving up the fantasy means giving up the pleasure. And, of course, one does not wish to part with one's pleasure.

These are two two kinds of resistance. First, it is important to distinguish which resistance applies to you. Is it the one of never acknowledging the automatic reflex of pleasure being geared to a negative situation? Or is it the resistance to giving up the entire complex, in the fear of having to do without any pleasure? Both resistances are the result of misconceptions. These resistances, for example, create a confusion of motions, either the mobility of striving away from that which is now -- hence effort, tension, fear, or stagnation -- or of not wanting to change, in the fear of losing out in the process.

As I said at the beginning of this lecture, all dichotomy, all duality can be brought to the simple common denominator of this basic split movement. When you see this, it will be quite helpful.

You have sufficient material to work with, to meditate about, and to apply to your own personal work during the coming summer months. I want to bless all of you as this term comes to an end. The short interruption symbolizes a new threshold in which you prepare for new growth and consolidate what was accomplished. The past year was a particularly fruitful one for most of my friends, and for the group as a whole. It promises to continue that way. There is no doubt, my dearest ones, that everyone of you who truly wishes will find more and more the beauty, the peace, the dynamic life, and the inner security that exist in the self-realization you have begun to cultivate. Hence you experience moments of living in the eternal Now of yourself, instead of striving away from it. Transcending each Now must bring you all answers. If you recall this simple fact in your meditations, in your approach to yourself, your meditations will become more fruitful as you go on. What you have to look forward to in the time to come will be even more liberating than you have already begun to experience. Be blessed, be in peace, be in God.

The Guide
by Eva Pierrakos
June 25, 1965

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