The stronger and deeper our convictions, the more substantial are the forms that exist in our soul. There’s one soul form worth talking about specifically, because it exists in each and every one of us to some degree. This form is shaped like an abyss and it’s made completely out of illusion. The size of this abyss varies for everybody. But whether it’s a crater or a dip, we have to look this threat right in the eye and not blink, taking full self-responsibility for it…

We might feel like we’ve fallen into this abyss when we can’t accept that this is an imperfect world. Or when we can’t, for the life of us, let go of our self-centered self-will…When we’re caught in this abyss, we are really in fear of not getting our way…

So let’s say someone doesn’t like us. Or they don’t behave the way we want them to. This, in itself, is not a threat…Once we accept that we are in some way inadequate, or accept that the other is, we’ll be able give up our self-will that demands perfection. But before this, it will feel like we are in grave danger if we yield, if we let go, if we give in to this apparent abyss…

It feels like we are trapped inside this abyss. And yet the only way out is by letting go and completely falling in…When we do, we’ll discover that something amazing happens. We don’t crash. And we don’t perish. We float….

It’s wishful thinking to hope this abyss is going to disappear by itself. The only way for it to vanish is by taking the risk, little by little and then over and over, to plunge into it. Good news: it gets easier every time we do this…Every time someone does something we don’t agree with. Every time someone shows up with a fault. Each time we feel fear about a frustration we can't rationalize away. All these threaten our world of Utopia. We feel our life is at stake if this is not a perfect world…

So if Utopia were real, what would it look like?...Utopia means we get everything we want, how we want it and when we want it. We also want to have total freedom—with no responsibility…But alas, it is impossible. We can’t be both free and have no responsibility. To whatever extent we shift responsibility off ourselves and onto someone or something else, to that degree we curtail our own freedom. We enslave ourselves. It’s as simple as that…

We’ve become so afraid, though, of taking self-responsibility, our fear of it has become a large part of our abyss. We fear that if we assume self-responsibility, we will fall right in and be swallowed up whole…It seems like a huge danger to let go of our demand to always have our way…We literally fear we’ll be miserable if we have to give up our demand for Utopia…

We can never be happy because buried in our unconscious is this mistaken concept that happiness requires utter perfection in all ways. But folks, none of this true. It’s all part of a grand illusion…We believe that harm can come to us through the arbitrariness of life, of fate or of the god-of-our-image, or through the ignorance and cruelty of others…For if we don’t want to be responsible for our life, someone else must be…

We are only helpless because we make ourselves so when we shift responsibility away from ourselves. When we look at things this way, we begin to see the heavy price we pay for insisting on Utopia. We pay every day with our fear…As we do this work of self-discovery, when we find the corresponding note in ourselves that is vibrating due to provocation from another, we’ll stop feeling like a victim…

Part and parcel of being a grown-up and making independent decisions is that we are bound to make mistakes. The child in us who still clings to Utopia, however, believes we must always be perfect. To make a mistake is to fall into the abyss…Life on planet Earth is not Utopia, and we aren’t perfect. This is not a tragedy.

Listen and learn more.

More whole is more happy. Our goal, then, is to use meditation to unify our whole selves, folding in the split off aspects of the Lower Self that remain in separation. Consider the truth that whatever is inside, no matter how painful it might be, cannot be avoided, but rather must be expressed and released. And that, friends, is what meaningful meditation is all about.

Our beings are steeped in a potent and highly creative substance, called our soul substance…We can think of the soul substance like a giant receptor site. The more we are able to have a single-pointed conviction that is unconflicted and uncontaminated with hidden negativities that create secret doubts, the more deeply and clearly will we mold this substance with our imprint…

In a defenseless state, our soul substance is resilient and receptive, loose and free…Conversely, when we’re holding onto distorted concepts that foster negative feelings and destructive attitudes, we are breaking divine laws. This makes us feel fearful and guilty, and that makes us feel we must defend ourselves. It’s our defenses that make the surface of our soul substance brittle and hard, which makes it much tougher to imprint…

Whenever a creative act takes place and something new manifests, it has come about through the fusion of two principles: the active and the receptive…Which means that both of these principles must be part of our meditation, if we want to use it create good things…To use meditation in a creative way, it needs to include these four stages or phases: 1) Concept, 2) Impression, 3) Visualization, and 4) Faith…

We’ll start to see that these answers, and the enlightenment that comes with them, are pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Little by little, they fit together to form a comprehensive picture. Eventually, we’ll learn to rely on this process over anything else…Real faith is a knowing, an inner experience that’s beyond the shadow of doubt. Reaching it requires we have the courage to take chances, to risk finding out the truth…

One of the most important laws, which we can also find in Scripture, states: According to your belief you shall experience…So if we believe that we cannot change, that we live in a hostile universe, and that our ultimate fate is tragedy, guess what. We will—we must—experience just that…But if we believe in the truth that abundance and joy can be ours—that we can change and grow out of our poverty, our misery and our despair—we can’t help but do so…

There is no question, problem, conflict or darkness that we can’t bring into our meditation. We lose sight of how effective it can be for the biggest as well as the smallest issues of life. In reality, there’s no such thing as big or small. Everything is important. Our whole life matters…Moreover, it won’t work to split off and ignore the undesirable parts of ourselves, hoping we can enjoy Oneness when we are anything less than whole.

Listen and learn more.

Bones, Chapter 18: How to Use Meditation to Create a Better Life

Read Original Pathwork® Lecture: #194 Meditation: Its Laws and Various Approaches – A Summary (Meditation as Positive Life Creation)

As we slowly but surely make progress on our path, we become more alive. And we're more honest in our feelings and ability to relate. We “sacrifice” old reactive patterns and discover that we have not given up anything good, and we have gained plenty. It’s hard to remain skeptical. Yet at some point in our journey, we are going to run into a wall. It's made of our previously concealed but now plenty-conscious negative intention.

In our whacky, mixed-up psyches, we unconsciously want whatever it is we fear…Further, whatever we experience, we also unconsciously want. All of these teachings rest upon these immutable facts. We need to keep this in mind when we come face-to-face with our basic attitude toward life that basically says No…

So much of the resistance we encounter—in ourselves and our companions—is due precisely to our not wanting to see that a senseless, destructive streak of negative intention is in us…We’d rather hold onto our spite and go on blaming some fate that has befallen "poor innocent me," than to move from our position…When we do finally see it, it is not a tragedy—it’s a huge blessing…

Listen and learn more.

Bones, Chapter 17: Overcoming our Negative Intention by Identifying with our Spiritual Self

Read Original Pathwork® Lecture: #195 Identification and Intentionality: Identification with the Spiritual Self to Overcome Negative Intentionality

Self-perpetuating cycles of pain are what result from the conflict created when two creative forces go in opposing directions inside us…Naturally, everyone’s favorite direction is toward the light…But in reality, this is a world in which there are forces that oppose the light…

Take, for instance, the physical level. The entire physical being is striving for health and wholeness. When there’s a disturbance that pulls the other way, we feel pain…If we were aware that in addition to our desire for health, we have a hidden desire for non-health, the struggle would go away. For we’d be hard pressed to hang onto a desire to be unhealthy if we were consciously aware of it…

So what’s really clogging up the works is the stuff in our unconscious; this is what creates the seeming gap between cause and effect…The cause, then, is the hidden negative wish; the effect is that there’s a disturbance in our system. The end result? Self-perpetuating cycles of pain…

There is another plane of existence, the spiritual plane…Since the spiritual plane is where the positive direction originates, this plane doesn’t contain a negative direction. It simply cannot. This is the plane of unity…When we are free from conflict and pain, we are in unity…

The kicker here is to remember that under every distortion, what’s real—what’s infinitely positive—still exists…So then any time we have something negative in our make-up, it’s never all of us…The part that sides with life is going in the direction of love. The anti-life side, on the other hand, is hell-bent on hating and isolating and staying in fear…

We step across a major threshold on our spiritual journey when we make the discovery that some part of us wishes for a negative outcome…When we don’t know we have a deliberate dark streak, we suffer far greater. We feel singled out as a victim and don’t get that we have a stake in the pain we’ve created…We must see that negativity is only a temporary reality. It will eventually grind to a halt as it takes us to our knees…

Whenever we are separated from others, we’re swimming in the sphere of negativity. So then regardless how much we want union and wholeness, there is another side doing the sidestroke of resistance. The more we deny this, the more it hurts. Don’t forget, it’s not possible to want 100% isolation and separation…

The part of this drama that makes it so compelling is that we get a precarious pleasure from indulging in our destructive ways…We don’t want to give up our pleasure…We now hold the tools in our hands to make different choices. Perhaps we can now see a way forward to living a life that is free from pain.

Listen and learn more.

Bones, Chapter 16: How Pleasure Gets Twisted into Self-Perpetuating Cycles of Pain

Read Original Pathwork® Lecture: #140 Conflict of Positive versus Negative Oriented Pleasure as the Origin of Pain

We have both a conscious mind, the stuff we know, and an unconscious mind, the stuff we don’t know we know. The unconscious is by far the stronger of the two…The unconscious should be credited with far more than it typically is…It’s what controls our fate…Fate is nothing other than the events that occur due to the governing forces of our unconscious. It’s the tiger and we’re the tail…

The black hole of our unconscious includes our petrified wrong conclusions about life, our destructive patterns of behavior, and our negative emotions caused by our unresolved problems. All this we have stuffed down in there and forgotten about…Our unconscious is a repository for the constructive building blocks of the universe too—unending creativity, utter wisdom, divine truth and love. Yessiree Bob, it’s all in there…

Let’s now learn how to go about interpreting the language of our unconscious in our daily lives…Knowing this particular language will do more for us than knowing a dozen foreign Earth-languages…

The universe is made up of two main currents: a yes-current and a no-current. The yes-current contains all the good stuff; it aligns with truth and it breeds love and unity. The no-current deviates from truth and is destructive; it breeds hate and disunity…Of the two currents, we tend to spot the yes-current more readily because it is mostly conscious. But when we bump up once again against a persistent unfulfillment, we can be sure that there are both a yes-current and a no-current at work, effectively cancelling each other out…

The more we squelch the no-current, thinking this will drive it out of existence, the more we simply drive it further underground where no logic can oppose it. This is how it becomes more powerful than the conscious yes-current. This also causes the yes-current to become more urgent and frantic…The way to defuse all this is by surfacing the no-current, listening to its faulty premise, and gradually letting go of the mistaken belief that it needs to continue…

What we need to do is circle back to doing our Daily Review, doubling up on our efforts to detect the no-current. If we don’t do this, it may be almost too elusive to catch…We’ll start to see how we cringe slightly at the thought of having fulfillment within our grasp…Maybe we’re not willing to pay the price for having it. Maybe we don’t feel we deserve happiness. The problem could be any combination of these things…

Simply becoming aware of the perpetual drip of our no-current—even before we understand what it’s all about—will deliver much-needed relief from the water torture of our hopelessness…We’ll pinpoint where our hostility is smoldering, artfully camouflaged or explained away by the easy-to-blame provocations from others. These are the mechanisms we need to learn about, because they are the language of the unconscious. To successfully spot them is to successfully decipher the code of this ancient dialect…This is how we crack the no-current…

We can start to look at frustrations and difficulties as helpful pot stirrers. For if nothing ever happened to stir the pot of our unconscious, obstructions would lay there like petrified wood…Once we start saying yes to finding our no, we’ll establish a link with our unconscious mind, which includes the deeper, wiser part of us…When we observe ourselves in a calm and cool sort of way, without a lot of frantic hand waving, we’ll be able to translate the language of the vaguely-felt unconscious into articulate words…We don’t need to go through crazy gyrations looking for unicorns.

Listen and learn more.

Bones, Chapter 15: Learning to Speak the Language of the Uncon...

As children, we learned that the highest authority—even higher than Mom & Dad—is God. So it’s not a surprise that we bundle up all our painful subjective experiences with the Ones-Who-Say-No, and dump them on God. Presto change-o—a God image has been created…

As kids, authority figures were forever popping up everywhere. And when they stopped us from doing whatever it was we enjoyed most, we viewed them as hostile…To whatever degree we experienced fear and frustration, to that same degree we’ll fear and be frustrated by God…For many people, God is punishing and severe. We might also believe that God is unfair and unjust—a contrary force we must grapple with...

Before we know it, we will have grown an inner image of God that makes him out to be a monster…Believing this to be true, we turn away from God altogether, wanting nothing to do with that monster in our minds…This, folks, is often the real reason someone turns to atheism…

When doting parents give in to every whim, they don’t instill a sense of responsibility in the child…In such a person’s eyes, God will let us get away with anything, so we can cheat life and skip out on responsibilities. Certainly, we might know less fear, but since life can’t be cheated, our wrong concept is going to take us down a road to conflict…

Our personal God-image will in some way be a combination of these two main categories…Because our God-image is so basic it taints all our other attitudes about life. It pushes us into hopelessness and despair, believing we live in an unfair and unjust universe, and also launches us into self-indulgent behavior where we reject self-responsibility because we expect God to pamper us…

These submerged ideas must get pried up from the muck of our unconscious thinking…This is not a quick-fix process…We can give ourselves time to adjust, while we keep holding our own feet to the fire of truth…Emboldened by our Lower Self, our emotions will resist changing…So prayers will be important…Our emotions will gradually grow up and out of previously erroneous reactions…

If we want to know the truth but aren’t all that committed to overcoming our resistance to it, then at least we should realize that we’re the ones obstructing the light and our own freedom, not God…The realization that cause and effect is on us, not an angry or indulgent God, is one of life’s main breaking points…And it’s that breaking point alone that could release us from this notion that we’re a victim…The laws of God don’t turn us into puppets—quite the opposite, they make us whole and set us free…

Clearly, talking about God is not easy. And yet, we must try. One major stumbling block for all of us is that we think about God as a person…God is; he (she, it, they) just is…Among other things, God is life. And God is also the force that enlivens life…Through us and all around us flows this powerful “electric current;” it’s up to us how we want to use it…

The way spiritual laws work, the more we deviate from them, the more we live in a misery that causes us, at some point, to turn around and realize that we ourselves are the source of our misery, not God and his laws…To love the laws is to love God…Nestled in these loving laws is God’s willingness to let us deviate from divine laws, if we wish…No one is forcing us to live in light and bliss.

Listen and learn more.

Bones, Chapter 14: Exposing the Mistaken Image we have About God

Read Original Pathwork® Lecture: #52 The God-Image

There is one fundamental quality that is the core element of who we are…This means that each one of us have kept a kernel of perfection—our original nature—basically intact in our core essence, although it’s now covered by the Lower Self and layer upon layer of imperfections. So we have two missions. One is to sense what our basic light is, and the other is to realize how these three buzzkills of self will, pride and fear collude to cover it up…

They are the fundamental blockers of our essential light…We must see the role that each of them plays and not buy, for one minute, the notion that this trio applies to ‘everyone but moi’…

Self will wants what it wants, when it wants it. It will strive to have its way, regardless of who or what it has to mow over to get it. It doesn’t even care if it brings hardship and imprisonment upon the self in the process…Self will, then, is both blind and immature, and it works in opposition to spiritual law as much as in violation of human laws. And it really doesn’t care…

How then does our self will connect with fear? Well, if we’re sheltering a truckload of self will—often extra-powerful because it is lurking in our unconscious—we’re going to live in perpetual fear that we won’t get our way…The problem isn’t that this is true; the problem is our warped perspective that this is necessary…

We’re snagged on pride when our ego thinks we’re more important than other people, so we want advantages for ourselves…If we feel another’s humiliation counts for less than our own, we have too much pride. And who among us hasn’t thrown someone else under the bus to save our own hide?...We need to not take ourselves so seriously. Our pride doesn’t matter half as much as our overly self-important little ego would have us believe…Only when we’re ready to stand on equal footing with others will we be free of fear…

It’s not hard to see then how self will and fear go hand-in-hand. It’s equally simple to see how pride and self will are birds of a feather…We’re super-quick to blame the faults and imperfections of others, making them responsible for our own inner disharmony. But maybe one day, we’ll realize there isn’t anyone else to blame…

For as long as we’re ensnared in self will, pride and fear, we can never be happy. It’s not possible…In knowing this, we hold a treasure: we have the key to fixing all our problems.

Listen and learn more.

Bones, Chapter 13: The Ubiquitous Faults of Self-Will, Pride and Fear

Read Original Pathwork® Lecture: #30 Self-Will, Pride and Fear

If we apply these teachings to our lives, they will work for us in finding out the truth. There is nothing we must believe…If we want to become capable of experiencing genuine happiness, we must learn how to course-correct back into alignment with spiritual laws… None of this can happen by merely concentrating on our outer problems. We must look deeper and find the corresponding inner problems, which always, always, always are the cause of the outer ones…

Expressing our love for God in our beautiful prayers and profound meditations is a wonderful thing. But we must also do the work. And what is “the work?” Just this: to master the Lower Self…As long as we don’t recognize how our Lower Self works, it will continue to rule the roost, hiding behind handy excuses and cloaking its devious ways…

We might perform a nice act and check the box on good-deeds-done-for-today, but if our actions aren’t supported by good, clean feelings, this doesn’t count for much…We will need to learn to grapple with the unconscious mind, which is where the Lower Self operates…

Every fault we harbor stands like a brick wall in the way of unfolding pure loving feelings or insight or understanding. It’s in this way that we do indeed do harm to others. All the livelong day…Another equally impactful hindrance is our fears, which we generally don’t put in the same category as faults…Our fears are like a wet blanket on our inner light of love and understanding; after all, when we are in fear, we are not in truth. So on this path of purification, we will not only come face to face with our faults—our character weaknesses—we will need to face all our fears…

Asking another to tell us how they see us, especially our faults, is tricky business…The best approach is to go with the one who knows us best…We can ask for guidance in receiving unpleasant truths from others. So then their input can be used in a productive way…If our wish to overcome our faults is sincere, we will have made the very best beginning one could imagine…

For certain, this path is a difficult one. But God is not the one making it so hard…We must never lose sight of this truth: everything we suffer from in life results from—directly or indirectly—our shortcomings and our fears. If we had no shortcomings, we would have no fear. And our fear and insecurities are what make us so miserable. They spoil everything.

Listen and learn more.

Bones, Chapter 12: Finding Out the Truth about Ourselves, Including Our Faults

Read Original Pathwork® Lecture: #26 Finding One's Faults