Importance Of Experiencing All Feelings Including Fear
-- The Dynamic State Of Laziness
By The Pathwork Guide
Greetings, my dearest friends. A great power of blessing and
of love is generated in this room, and is forthcoming to all of you here.
Every once in a while I give a lecture which is an outline,
a plan or blueprint, shedding light on the path as an overall venture -- but
each time the approach is a little different. These lectures focus on the
specific stage in which you happen to be at the time such a lecture is given.
Here I am speaking to those of my friends who are really involved in and committed
to this work, to their own intensive development, self-confrontation, and
growth in the path. In those overall lectures I attempt to give a view of
the ground that has been covered, as well as an outline of the principles
governing man's life and his relationship to the universe. Some of the material
I touch upon must be, by necessity, a repetition, but this is inevitable in
order to connect and unify, in order to comprehend and perceive, on a new
and deeper level, the principles of life and your growth in it, and the laws
that govern the soul.
We all know, my friends, how important, how essential it is
to face and accept those aspects, feelings, convictions, and attitudes in
you which are either not at all conscious, or not sufficiently so. Unless
this awareness is cultivated it is impossible to free the innermost center
of your being, the nucleus from which all life springs. This has been said
many times and much work has been done already by you in this respect. Let
us now try to see where you who follow this path are in regard to the ground
to be covered within yourself. How much have you unearthed? How much are you
aware of what is really going on in you, as opposed to the superficial explanations
you have so handy? When I address all of you together, I do not mean to say
that everyone is at the identical place or phase within his own path. Nevertheless,
an overall picture can be conveyed that is applicable to everyone of you,
even to those of you who started relatively recently, for you have benefited
from the work that others have done before. It is as though the groping of
others has paved your way to some extent, so that if you are truly willing,
you can accomplish more at a faster speed.
As far as it is possible to generalize, I can say that by now
many of you are in a position to acknowledge your destructive, negative, cruel,
hostile and selfish feelings and attitudes. You are able to see the mechanism
of your defenses to some extent -- if by no means to the full extent. But
even this partial awareness makes so much difference. It shifts your entire
position toward yourself. You no longer need to defend your defenses; to pretend
to be so perfect that everything in you ought to be "right." The ability to
own up to being fallible, human, vulnerable, irrational, wrong, needy, defenseless,
weak, and unhappy must, by necessity, increase your capacity to be strong,
truly right (not self-righteous), truly independent, and fulfilled. The admission
of heretofore apparently inadmissible feelings is the bridge to inner unity
and fulfilling self-expression of life. The acceptance of your hate will make
you more loving; the acceptance of your weakness more strong; the acceptance
of your pain more blissful. These apparent paradoxes have often been pointed
out by me, but I believe that many of you have actually begun to experience
their truth. To whatever degree you have accomplished this shedding of defenses,
and have thus become that much more real, you have gained significant ground.
It will make the further steps in that direction easier, for the beginning
is always the most difficult -- in any given phase and in every respect. To
remove self-illusions seems at first insurmountably difficult, for all human
beings vaguely believe that the underlying truth is unacceptable, and that
makes them unacceptable. Thus a double illusion must be removed: the underlying
belief, as well as the cover of it. This is always the most arduous part of
the pathwork; it cannot be accomplished in one swoop; it must be gained in
stages and sections.
This means that your future work must be even more focused
on that particular point. But in conjunction with a continuation of this facet
of the work on yourself, it is necessary that you comprehend on a deeper level
where the destructiveness and negativities come from: what is the real origin
of evil? You know, and have often heard me say, that the denial of your vulnerabilities,
the shame of helplessness, and the feeling of being unlovable create evil
and destructive attitudes and feelings. In other words, evil is a defense
against suffering, as well as confusion, by dint of no longer being connected
with the real feelings in the self.
It is therefore obvious that your work on the path can now
be more directly concerned with the hurts, the suffering, the pain you have
endured in your early life and have defended against so far. This more intense
concentration on these aspects of the self already started a few months ago,
when quite a number of you came, quite naturally -- as the organic sequence
of their path -- to a greater emotional experiencing of past feelings. You
who fall into this category have corroborated -- you have felt it as a reality
-- what I have reiterated for so many years: the denial of the experience
compels you to re-experience it over and over again; it compels you to recreate
the denied experience. This increases the accumulated pain and hurt. But more
of this experiencing must be done -- and now it can be done safely.
Too much is still only "known" to you -- how you suffered as
children, how unhappy you were, often in total opposition to what you believed
before. Gaining this knowledge is a necessary preparation for experiencing
it. Often without such knowledge the defenses cannot be sufficiently removed
for safe re-experiencing, so that the pathway to the emotional experience
i.e. either blocked and does not yield enough, or the crashing of the defenses
causes injury to the psyche that can and should be avoided. But you are now
truly ready, my friends, to venture into the depths of your being, where you
let go and give yourself freely to all feelings that have accumulated in you
and which could never leave your system, or transform into their natural energy
streams, because you have locked the gates to feeling your feelings.
Some time ago I was asked to discuss the problem of laziness.
I then said that this answer requires a whole lecture -- or at least needs
to be placed into a specific context, for otherwise the problem of laziness
cannot be understood. There is an intimate connection between the problem
of laziness and feelings that have not been fully lived through, felt through.
Laziness must not be looked upon as an attitude that can be given up at will,
if only the person finally comes around to being reasonable and constructive.
It is not a moralistic issue at all. Laziness is a manifestation of apathy,
stagnation, paralysis. All of this is a result of stagnant energy in the soul
substance. And stagnant soul substance is, in turn, the result of feelings
that have not been fully experienced and expressed, and have not been understood
as to their significance and their true origin in this life. When feelings
are not experienced, understood, and expressed, they accumulate, and they
create a stoppage in the flow of the life force. It is not enough to know
and to deduce that you must have certain feelings from your past, that add
up logically to the present circumstances. To be sure, such knowing is often
the necessary opening, a prerequisite in allowing yourself the deeper experience,
it permits you to make room for the possibility, which then lets the existing
fact emerge as emotional experience. However, the knowing can also be a barricade;
when you replace the feeling with knowing, the connection between these two
functions is interrupted, in the same way as when you feel but do not know
what the feelings mean, why, and how they came about, nor how they direct
your life now.
This, too, is not new, for I often pointed out to you that
feelings and knowing are not really two separate functions, but tail ends
of the same phenomenon. Thus, knowing can be as much a defense against feeling
as not knowing, denying the knowledge of the feeling can be. This is a good
example to show why rules cannot be made about these things. You will always
have to look into yourself to see how you use or misuse a given approach.
In spite of so much progress, my friends, you still have many
defenses against the full experience of accumulated feelings in you. Knowing
this will help you focus your attention and your awareness on it, so that
you can overcome it more and more. You can systematically lower the threshold
of defending against deep experiences that have accumulated in you; they become
poisonous if they are not released, and they cannot be released if they are
not felt, known, expressed, lived through as fully as possible.
To recapitulate: all that is evil, destructive, and negative
in human nature is a result of defending against experiencing painful, undesirable
feelings. Those feelings stagnate. When feelings stagnate, energy stagnates.
And if energy stagnates, you cannot move. As you know, and have heard me say
many times, feelings are moving energy currents. If the energy flows freely,
they constantly transform from one set or type of feelings into another. Not
experiencing feelings stops the movement, and therefore stops living energy.
When the natural energy flow is halted within your soul substance, you find
yourself in the position of "laziness;" movement is possible only when it
is forced by the outer will; forced movement is painful. Hence the
hankering that exists in so many people for an inactive life, which seems
most desirable. It is not enough to say that these people find the difficulties
of life too much because they are immature. This is merely a label or an explanation
of an effect. Natural movement is a spontaneous expression of the inner energy
flow that is never experienced as arduous or painful, as tiring or undesirable
in any way. So, my friends, when you find yourself in the position of stagnancy,
laziness, passivity, inertia and when you desire nothing more than to do nothing
(which is often confused with the spiritual state of being), you have a good
gauge that there are feelings in you which have created psychic toxicity because
you were loath to experience and acknowledge them.
Stagnant energy does not only trap feelings but concepts as
well. Single occurrences are generalized and held on to. It is rare that stagnant
feelings do not also include stagnant conceptualizations of life. These may
exist in the deepest recesses of the soul, totally hidden from consciousness.
This is what years ago I called "images" that are held within the psyche.
I helped you find these images, and you saw how you were compelled to re-experience
misconceptions and stagnant feelings. Over and over again you are entrapped
in the cycle of reproducing the past -- in one way or another -- until you
summon the courage to live through now what was not lived through then. You
cannot come out of these cycles -- no matter how good your intentions are
and how much effort you use in other ways and as a substitute for experiencing
your feelings -- unless you really and fully do so. You must cross the threshold
behind which you still harbor deep feelings; they are so hidden that you are
not at all aware of them, and therefore you can still delude yourself that
present unhappiness and bad moods just befall you out of nowhere, out of bad
luck.
We mentioned many times that the human predicament is the dualistic
split, which is nothing but a delusion of perception. This delusion has many
facets. One is a split in man's consciousness of himself. He may feel one
thing, believe another, and act without knowing how both these functions govern
him. Lack of awareness of what man feels and what he really believes creates
another facet of the split. When you unify knowing and feeling, you work towards
mending and integration, which manifests as a wonderful new awakening and
a sense of wholeness.
When feelings are not experienced in their full intensity
and reality, the inner life flow becomes stagnant. The person will, consequently,
find himself inexplicably paralyzed. His actions become ineffectual; life
seems to obstruct all his goals and desires. He finds closed doors to realizing
his talents, his needs, himself. So-called laziness may be one manifestation.
A lack of creativity is another. A feeling of general despair, without being
able to pinpoint it, may be another. In this latter instance, the person may
often use a current event or difficulty to explain away his inner state. A
sense of futility and confusion about life, and his role in it, must develop
in man when he resists living through the feelings he harbors, and goes on
harboring, because he deludes himself into the assumption that avoiding the
feelings will hurt him less than exposing them. There are many other manifestations
which I have discussed many times. The inability to feel pleasure, to fully
experience life, is one of the most widespread effects. There is no other
way to become alive than the course I suggest again and again.
The necessity to bring together feeling and knowing must become
more obvious to you, my friends -- not only because of my words to you now
and before, but also by the result of your own progress of the journey into
yourself. You have already tasted how it feels when you release the waste
material of years of accumulated feelings. It is waste material, with its
own toxicity, that you accumulate when you do not feel your feelings. And
when you think thoughts you do not know you think. And when you act without
knowing what motivates your actions, and when you then contrive explanations
for them.
The total experience of a feeling is as possible as your willingness
and readiness to venture into it. The feelings are often accumulations of
centuries and millennia -- not just decades. Each life incarnation presents
you with the task to cleanse yourself by experiencing and understanding. You
are purified when there is no more waste material. After you terminate one
life cycle, the next will afford you the opportunity to bring to the fore
previously accumulated waste material, by facing the conditions, the circumstances,
and the environment into which you are drawn by an inexorable law of life.
But memory of the previous life incarnations is blotted out, so that you have
only this life's past experiences available. The dimming of memory is a byproduct
of the life-death cycle in which everyone is caught who denies feeling experience.
It is self-induced by the very factor we are now discussing. When you go on
denying awareness and feeling experience of what you lived through in this
very life, you perpetuate the cycle of dying and being born; this process
always manifests the break in continuity of awareness. Conversely, you eliminate
this break of continuity of awareness -- and thus the cycle of dying and being
born -- by living through whatever has accumulated from this life, where it
is possible to re-establish the links of memory. If all feelings of this life
are fully experienced, then all residual matter of previous lives will automatically
be dealt with because the trauma of now is only a trauma because the previous
pains have been denied.
You can do this, my friends, if you trust in the process and
venture of letting go, truly letting go. And here is, again and again, the
problem. You cannot let go if your innermost being defends against feeling
your feelings, against what you know inside of yourself, against establishing
the connecting link between those feelings, your inner knowledge, and your
current action patterns. The paralysis that is often deemed laziness, and
is moralized as such, is therefore to be viewed as a very indirect symptom.
It seems as though this, as well as many other symptoms, prevented you from
living. But what really prevents you from fully living is your fear of and
your resistance to living the feelings you did not accept when they painfully
came to you.
Laziness is a protection against the movement of the soul substance,
which threatens to bring up those feelings you think you can go on avoiding
without blocking your very life. Thus laziness is simultaneously an effect,
as well as a defense. Movement stirs up what lies stagnant. By fully understanding
this, by mustering the courage to feel what is there for you to feel, you
can redirect your inner will and your intent toward overcoming this self-induced
protective stagnation.
The true serene state of being that every soul unconsciously
longs for is not cautious passivity that must avoid movement, that makes movement
appear undesirable. The true spiritual state of being is a very active state,
although it is a calm and relaxed state at the same time. It is joyous movement
and action. It is only the passivity of the fearful self that creates
the frenzy as a counter-action against the stagnation. The personality fights
against stagnation by superimposing compulsive actions, and then becomes more
alienated from the truth of his stagnation, and from the reason for the stagnation,
which is the fear of feeling his feelings -- including fear. Only when you
fully feel and understand this truth, only when you stop fighting against
it and you dissolve what causes it by feeling your feelings, can you come
out of the frenzy and the paralysis. In other words, you must come to feel
the fearthat lies in laziness -- in all types of stagnation.
This fear sits in everyone -- even in those who are not overtly
lazy, who are not aware of other symptoms this denied fear creates. This basic
human condition of fear must be allowed to surface. You must allow it to take
over -- in the right setting of course. When you experience this fear, you
will find two basic elements in it. The one is the childhood conditions which
were so painful that you thought you could not let yourself feel them, so
that you cut yourself off from them; and the other -- even more important
and significant -- is the fear of the fear: the fear of experiencing the fear.
This is where the real harm lies.
A number of years ago I gave a lecture in which I discussed
the phenomenon of self-perpetuation. I illustrated how a denied feeling compounds
itself, so that it multiplies. For example, denied fear creates fear of fear,
and then fear of feeling the fear of the fear -- and so on and on. The same
is true about other feelings. Denied anger creates anger at being angry; when
this is denied, one becomes even angrier for being unable to accept the anger,
and on and on. Frustration itself is bearable when you fully go into it. But
when you are frustrated because you "ought" not to be frustrated, you become
even more frustrated because you deny it, and then the pain extends. I often
remind you of this process; it is so significant and important because it
points so clearly to the necessity of feeling directly, no matter how undesirable
the feelings may be. If you compound your pain because you deny feeling your
pain, this secondary pain must become bitter, twisted, and unbearable. If
you accept and feel the pain, a dissolving process begins automatically.
Many of you have experienced this truth a number of times in your pathwork.
Fear, anger, frustrated needs -- whatever the feeling may be -- they all follow
the same process.
Thus, when you feel the fear of your fear and can let yourself
drop into the fear, this fear will quickly give way to another denied feeling.
This denied feeling itself -- whatever it may be -- will become easier to
bear than its denial: the fear of experiencing it. Fear itself is more bearable
than the fear of the fear. In that way you can progress to the nucleus of
accumulated waste energy of denied feelings. Fighting your feelings, defending
against them, creates a whole extra layer of experience that is alienated
from the core and therefore is artificial and more painful than the original
feeling it fights against.
Your whole conscious self has to gather all its faculties,
all its resources, and use all the ground you have gained so as to become
fully determined to feel your fear; to experience the fear -- the fear of
deep, painful, hurtful, frightening feelings in you.
The only way is in and through. I have said this to you so
often that it has become redundant. And yet few of my friends have been so
far able to completely heed these words. However, sufficient progress has
been made in the past to effectuate the new influx that will now permit all
those who want to go deeper into themselves to do so and to come out freed
and cleansed and able to truly live. Many of you have opened up in the right
direction and are going into the right direction. Further guidance will be
given; as always before, you will not be left alone at this point, where you
are teetering. You will be helped to actually go into and through this experience.
It is important now to focus your meditation in this direction.
You, who have convinced yourself of the great power you thus generate, have
learned, and are learning, that this specific focusing and conscious direction
evokes an inner guidance, which enables you to follow through. The proper
direction is twofold:
1) Your commitment to go in, and not around, yourself.
Humankind is, with few exceptions, continually going around, rather than through.
The commitment to going in and through should be the motor force in this specific
meditation. Your declaration and statement that this is what you want and
intend to do must create a new condition in your soul substance. The request
for specific guidance for it will immediately loosen up some of the stagnant
matter. The laziness that makes you avoid, postpone, and procrastinate will
dissolve sufficiently at this point to set a new energy influx in motion.
The voluntary attitude of commitment will create an involuntary energy influx
and will activate the guiding wisdom of your spiritual self. Meditation in
this way, stating your intention and your wish to experience all accumulated
feelings and rid yourself of waste, is the best and the most effective beginning.
In addition, the right balance and timing, and inner and outer guidance will
come forth in just the way you need it for your personal requirement. You
will learn to become attuned to this guidance and to sense it, rather than
miss out and be blind and deaf to it. For it always exists as a waiting potential
-- not just for this phase of your path, but for every single specific phase
that you need to go through.
To repeat what I said in other contexts: the outer, volitional,
voluntary self must play its part, so that the involuntary self can take over.
This involuntary self manifests in two entirely different ways: a) the higher
wisdom and guidance just mentioned; and b) the surfacing of the self that
often writhes in, but denies the experience of, residual pain of long ago.
The former aspect of the involuntary self helps and guides this latter aspect
of the manifestation of the involuntary self.
Through this approach energy is released that can be used for
this all-important purpose. How often are you convinced you lack the energy
-- and/or the time -- to go into the depths of your feelings, while you spend
a lot of energy for other activities which may well seem more important at
the moment, but, no matter how vitally important they are, they cannot ever
be more important than going into yourself, for this is your reason for living,
your task, as well as the key to productive living right now.
2) The second important aspect of meditation isto summon
your faith that going in will not annihilate you. What I say
here may be very helpful: without this act of faith, at least to some extent,
you will not have the courage to do it. Or, to put it differently, if the
safety and validity of this course is not clearly conceived and perceived,
your disinclination to experience painful feelings will inadvertently lead
you to create an artificial doubt, a fear that going in is dangerous, as well
as an artificial illusion that it can be avoided, while integration, health,
and full life can still be realized. Avoidance of feelings always creates
such dualistic paradoxes: both false doubt and false hope.
Many years ago I gave a lecture which is also pertinent to
this topic now. It was called "The Abyss of Illusion." I said that the path
of self-realization and unification contains many junctures in which it is
necessary to let the self fall into what appears to be a bottomless abyss.
Falling into it threatens to annihilate the entity. I said that up to a certain
point in the individual's evolution he crouches in front of this abyss, holding
on and not daring to jump. He is very miserable in this state, but he still
believes that the pseudo safety of this cramped, fearful position is preferable
to annihilation. Only when he finally trusts sufficiently to risk the jump
can he find out that he floats. I said that many such junctures are necessary,
each time to make the discovery all over again that it is safe to jump.
So it is here, in regard to letting yourself fall into the
apparent abyss of your feelings -- painful, frightening feelings. Unless you
do so, you will remain in the crouched, uncomfortable position in which it
is really quite impossible to live and enjoy yourself. The necessary faith
to take the jump can be activated by confronting the issue squarely and examining
what is at stake. You have to give consideration to the fundamental question,
which can be summed up as follows: "Is there at the basis of human reality
a bottomless pit of negativity, destruction, evil? Or are these aspects of
distortion that need not exist?" If the universe is benign and trustworthy,
good and safe, then you cannot and need not fear to let yourself be what you
are. There are many junctures where man's faith is put to the test, where
you have to face the discrepancy between what you claim to believe and what
you actually do believe. If you believe in man's ultimate spiritual nature,
then you have nothing to fear. If you do not, then it is necessary that you
are aware of this underlying doubt, and that you confront it as to its real
nature. This will, at least, protect you from the illusion that you have faith
in man and his spiritual nature. If you come out with the conviction that
you really believe that man's ultimate nature is bad, destructive, fearsome,
and chaotic, then the true motive for this belief must also be examined. Such
confrontation with what one truly believes versus what one thinks one believes,
and the reason why, must always be honestly worked through, as you well know.
It must not be overlooked in every single issue of importance. Help and guidance
can and should also be activated through meditation for this specific purpose.
Also state in meditation that you wish to be aware of your
special methods of avoidance, that you no longer want to deceive yourself
in this regard. It is better to go on avoiding the jump into the abyss and
knowing that you do so, and why you do, than denying your fear of it and pretending.
By freely admitting your fear, you are more in touch with yourself than when
you deny the fear. By confronting the validity of the fear, you may often
find that the real reason behind the fear is shame and its concomitant, pride.
Denied pride and shame often create fear. The idea that it is humiliating
to have certain feelings or be in certain vulnerable states, the idea that
you "ought" not to be where you are, the feeling that your past suffering
as a child is due to your being unacceptable and unlovable, create the tendency
to deny the state you are in. The pressure of this denial then creates fear
-- and the fear, in turn, requires the person to concoct theories that justify
the fear. If a person convinces himself that it is indeed dangerous to feel
his feelings, this conviction may bring forth a breakdown and a crisis that
is merely a result of this deep conviction. It says in Scripture: "According
to thy belief it will be done unto thee." This is not a magical process. The
fear that is generated, if it is sufficiently strong, leads to terror, and
the terror can bring the person into an acute state of crisis. But the true
underlying core is often merely shame/pride, and the misconception that the
childhood pain existed because of personal inadequacy, which the individual
is too ashamed to expose.
Thus crossing the barrier of embarrassment, humiliation, shame
-- and pride -- will dissolve fear. These issues must be confronted and squarely
faced. Only then can the way be smoothed to let yourself into yourself. Meditation
is a requirement without which the way is needlessly more difficult. With
this approach and attitude you can build the climate you need to go into the
abyss of fright, loneliness, helplessness, pain, and the anger that is generated
because of the suffering you had to endure. Every tear not shed is a stoppage.
Every protest not voiced sits in you and makes you express where it is inappropriate.
All these feelings seem bottomless pits, but once you jump into them you are
bound to find that there is something deep inside of you that some of you
have begun to experience as a reality, whenever you have not avoided the reality
of your painful negative feelings. That something is the divine nucleus that
dwells in you and of which you are an expression; it is a light, a warmth,
an aliveness, and a security; this is a stark reality, but it can be experienced
only when you go through the heretofore denied reality of avoided feelings.
The realization of your spiritual self, with all its joy, safety,
and peace, is right "behind" the sadness and pain. It cannot be activated
by a direct act or will, nor by practices and actions that leave out what
I try to convey to you again and again. But the realization of your spiritual
center manifests inexorably, as a byproduct and as an indirect act of will
to go through your denied and not experienced feelings.
I will terminate this lecture by telling you that the fear
is not real. It is truly an illusion, but you must go through it by feeling
it. Through the gateway of feeling your weakness lies your strength;
through the gateway of feeling your pain lies your pleasure and joy; through
the gateway of feeling your fear lies your security and safety; through the
gateway of feeling your loneliness lies your capacity for fulfillment, love,
and companionship; through the gateway of feeling your hate lies your capacity
to love; through the gateway of feeling your hopelessness lies true and justified
hope; through the gateway of accepting the lacks of your childhood lies your
fulfillment now. When you experience all these feelings and states,
it is essential that you do not delude yourself into believing that they are
caused by anything you experience, or fail to experience, now. Whatever the
now brings it does so only because the past still resides in your system.
This, too, is redundant, but it needs to be said again and again.
Through these gateways you will find true life. All the many
temptations that beckon you to follow paths which imply that it is possible
to find the spiritual reality of yourself without going through these gateways
are wishful thinking. There is no way around what has accumulated in you and
has poisoned your whole system -- your spiritual, your psychological, and
often also your physical system. This poison can be eliminated only by feeling
what you hoped you could avoid feeling. Then new energy influx comes in ever
greater measure. Many of you have experienced to some degree what I am saying
here -- and therein lies your growth. But you all have to go further in this
regard. The self-punishment for hatred and spite, for cruelty and greed, for
selfishness and one-sided demands upon others, must be transcended into the
terror of your fear, your shame, your pain. When you stop fighting this, you
will become real, open, and alive.
Blessings to you all.
The Guide
by Eva Pierrakos
March 26, 1971
Copyright 1971, the Center for the Living Force, Inc.