Phoenesse: Recent Episodes
Phoenesse
Here is an orientation regarding some of the Pathwork Guide’s word choices. Because as you read along, the Guide will regularly change up the word he uses, even though he is still essentially pointing to the same thing. Included are other words the Guide uses to refer to our ego and the awakened state.
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What is the endgame of being human? Where are we all heading? What’s the point of life? Our goal is always one thing: to become our Real Self. All the many teachings from the Pathwork Guide are approaching this same task, each coming at it from a different angle. As we work in this direction, it will help if we understand how our inner self, or Real Self, differs from our outer self, or ego. What is the relationship between these two? For many of us, having heard various conflicting theories, we’re in confusion about the function of the ego.
Some postulate the ego is essentially negative and therefore undesirable. So then the goal of spirituality is to get rid of it, right? Other theories—particularly from a psychological point of view—say our ego is important, for we cannot be mentally healthy without an ego.
Which of these viewpoints is correct? Let’s find out. For if our vision on this is not clear, it will be difficult to reach our all-important goal of self-realization.
First, let’s clarify the Real Self and its essence. This is our inner self and it is an integral aspect of nature. As such, we are bound to the laws of nature. And nature is something we can trust. It’s not reasonable then, to not trust ourselves—to not trust our innermost selves. If it seems to us that nature is our enemy, this is only because we don’t understand the natural laws that nature is following.
So our inner self is nature. Our Real Self is life. We are creation. This is a better way to say it than to say we are “a part” of nature, or part of creation. Our Real Self and nature are one and the same thing.
Whenever we function from our Real Self, we are in truth and we are joyful. Our most constructive and creative contributions to life arise from our inner self. So everything that expands life—everything wise and beautiful and generous—comes from here. This is worth contemplating, as it cannot be emphasized too much. It’s essential we understand this truth, not only with our mind—we need to feel this.
If this is so, then what is the function of our outer personality—our ego? This is the part of us that operates on a level we have direct access to. Since we are directly, or consciously, aware of our ego, this is our conscious awareness. This is the part of us that thinks, acts, sorts and makes decisions.
If we have a weak ego, we’ll have a hard time coping with life. If we have an overgrown ego, we’ll be lost from our Real Self. In other words, both extremes of ego-weakness and ego-inflation will result in separation from our inner essence. And this essentially is our problem. All our conflicts in life stem from having too big an ego, or too small an ego.
Most often, it’s not that one person has a big ego and another has too small an ego. Rather, it's that both have an imbalance within themselves. We’re underdeveloped in one area of our personality and overdeveloped in another. So nature will take its course and try to reestablish a balance. Overdevelopment of our ego, then, may be nature’s way of straightening out the disturbance caused by having a weak ego in another area of our lives.
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Full Access Members read: The Function of the Ego in Relationship to the Real Self
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Our attempts to find ourselves—to understand who we are, where we belong in the world, and how we can fulfill ourselves—require a certain amount of insight and strength. Whether we lead meaningful and fulfilling lives also depends entirely on the relationship between our ego and our Real Self. If this relationship is in balance, everything falls nicely into place. All of these teachings from the Pathwork Guide are pointing to this same thing. They're prying at it from a multitude of directions to help us open to this truth as our personal experience.
We can also call our Real Self the universal life principle, which manifests in each and every one of us. It is life itself. For it is unending consciousness in both the deepest and the highest sense. It is pleasure supreme and infinite movement all rolled into one. Since it is life, it can never die. It’s the very essence of everything that moves and breathes. It is eternal vibration. It knows everything and since it can only be true to its own nature, it is constantly creating and furthering itself.
Each person—each individual consciousness—is this universal consciousness. We’re not just part of it, for that would imply we are just a little drop of it. No, we actually are universal consciousness. And this original consciousness, or creative life principle, can take many forms. When we each incarnate as those various forms, we forget our connection with the origin. At that point, a disconnection occurs. We continue to exist and we still contain the universal consciousness, but we become oblivious to our own nature. We lose track of basic spiritual laws and we lose sight of our potential. This, in a nutshell, describes the general state of human consciousness.
When we start becoming aware of this Real Self, we realize that in fact it’s always been there. We just haven’t noticed it because we were under the impression we were cut off from it. So it’s not quite right to say our Real Self “manifests.” More correctly, we begin to notice it. We may pick up on its energy or its self-directing consciousness. Of course our separated ego also comes bundled with energy and consciousness, but the intelligence of the ego alone is far inferior to the universal intelligence at our disposal. The same is true for the energy.
These two things—consciousness and energy—are not separate aspects of the Real Self. They are one. But some of us tend to be more receptive to consciousness while others are more receptive to energy. Nonetheless, they are both part of the experience of self-realization.
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Full Access Members read: What Blocks the Ego from Connecting with the Real Self
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As we make our way along our path of self-realization, these words can act like a spiritual bulldozer for each obstruction we encounter in our psyche. For at some point, we will come to a crossroads. What we are now facing is a very old inner landscape that is littered with our fears: fear of death, fear of life, fear of pleasure, fear of feelings, fear of giving up control, fear of being real, and the like. It’s already taken some genuine fortitude to come this far and see that this is what we’ve been covering up. Such fears have been hiding all along in the darkness of our psyche.
To our surprise and dismay, this is where we’re at. And now that we’re more aware of our many fears, we automatically start to feel the effect they are having on our life: What they make us do and how they make us pull back from life. No wonder we have this vague feeling we’re missing out on life. We are. We literally fear the creative process of living and therefore we miss out on it.
It’s time we find the common denominator behind all our fears so we can start unwinding the unnecessary cycles of fear, frustration and pain. If we have embarked on a path of self-discovery but haven’t yet found our fears, don’t worry, it will happen. It must. Then, when we see how we’ve been hiding from life because of our fears, we can apply these words retroactively to smooth the way. Let them plant a seed now that will bear fruit when the whole of your being is ready to see and resolve the problems in your life. And make no mistake, coping with our fears is the main problem we all face in life.
The nature of all our fears is that we misunderstand the function of our ego and how it relates to our Real Self. The problem we face in sorting out this relationship is that it’s extremely subtle and therefore hard to put into words. What’s more, as with all truths in life, it’s chock full of apparent contradictions. That is, at least as long as we are steeped in duality. Once we get over the hump of thinking and living in a dualistic way, then two opposites can become equally true. And as we’ll see, this applies to the ego and its relationship to the Real Self.
For example, it’s true to say that the ego’s exaggerated strength is the biggest hurdle to living a productive life. It’s also true to say that a weak ego can’t possibly create a healthy life. These are not opposites, people. They are both true.
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Full Access Members read: The Ego’s Cooperation With or Obstruction of the Real Self
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Read all Q&As from the Pathwork® Guide on The Guide Speaks, or get Keywords, a collection of Jill Loree’s favorite Q&As.
We have been looking at the relationship between our ego-consciousness and universal intelligence. When we are primarily functioning from our ego, we are going to be out of balance and mired in problems. We can also turn this around and state that if we have inner problems, we will inevitably be unbalanced and enmeshed in outer conflicts. No matter which direction we come at this from, it always adds up the same. The ego has to learn to let go of itself. So let’s talk about surrendering.
A boatload of intellectual knowledge about the role the limited ego plays relative to the Real Self won’t help us much. We must find a new approach inside ourselves that makes it possible to let go in a healthy, harmonious way. Let’s shed some new light on this important topic.
Why the Ego Must Learn to Let Go
When the ego operates in a vacuum, without replenishing itself at the inner source where our life force flows freely, it dries up, starves and withers. Literally, if left to handle the business of living without the benefit of support from the Real Self, the ego dies off. This shines a new light on the process of death, looking at it from this point of view.
This source of life is the universal self that dwells at the heart of every soul. When we incarnate, our spiritual being condenses into the coarse matter that makes up this material world. Such a condensation into matter happens because a separated part of the overall consciousness—the part we call the ego—is disconnected from the whole, from the universal self. This disconnectedness causes the ego state, which in turn results in this material life. And that is how we come to this experience of the cycles of life and death.
If any of us overcomes separation, we release ourselves from the process of dying. When we no longer fear letting go of ourselves—from our ego—a reconnection with the universal forces becomes possible. This is not something to hope for in the hereafter. It can take place at any time, in any place, since it’s a question of our state of consciousness.
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Full Access Members read: How Unconscious Negativity Stops the Ego from Surrendering
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Now let’s look at consciousness from a different angle. We humans have a hard time understanding that consciousness is something that permeates all of creation. Our human minds are geared to think of it as being exclusively related to the human form, associated with the brain and a byproduct of our personality. This is not so.
Consciousness does not need to be attached to a fixed form, so it’s everywhere. It’s also in everything, including of course every particle of matter. In inanimate matter, consciousness is solidified, the same way energy is petrified in an inanimate object. These two things—consciousness and energy—are not the same thing, but rather related aspects of manifestations of life.
As evolution follows its course, energy and consciousness become more and more mobile and vibrant, so things move faster. In the case of consciousness, it gains in awareness. For energy, it gains greater creativity to make forms and move about.
Over much time, consciousness has gone through separation. The process by which this has happened is impossible to spell out with words. The result though is that aspects of consciousness now float around in the universe, so to speak. Every trait we can think of, every attitude known to mankind, every personality trait we can imagine is a manifestation of consciousness. And each particle of consciousness that is not yet integrated in the whole needs to be synthesized and unified with all that is, to create one harmonious whole.
We’ll need to use our imaginations here to be able to follow along. For example, can we imagine that some familiar personality trait could exist separate from a person? That a trait is not the person per se, but a free-floating particle of overall consciousness?
It doesn’t matter if the trait is good or evil. It could be any of these: love, perseverance, laziness, impatience, sloth, stubbornness, kindness or malice. Each must be incorporated into manifesting personalities. For that’s the only way for each to be harmonized and purified, enriching the consciousness that’s manifesting and creating the conditions for the unification of consciousness as evolution unfolds.
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Unhappiness is an indication of sickness. Usually, though, we interpret unhappiness the wrong way, causing us to fight whatever we think is making us unhappy. In our distorted thinking, we think whatever is manifesting is itself the sickness. Yet if we were living completely in harmony with our Real Self and its universal forces, we would not be sick or unhappy. So disharmony and sickness—really any discontentment—are an indicator of our inner health. As we’ll see, there’s also a connection between health and being selfish, which we will get to in a minute.
When we are unhappy, it is our Real Self—our spirit being—that’s talking to us. It's sending the ego, or outer personality, the message that we should change something. We are going about things the wrong way. This message arises from a desire to return to health, where we will be happy and in a state of well-being.
Being truthful in life is the same as feeling good in the deepest and best possible way, without reservation, and with security and self-liking. If we’re moving through life in a way that is consistent with such a state, our innermost self will be content. So then, any neurosis—any stress, depression, anxiety, obsessive behavior—or unhappiness is a deeper sign that points to the reestablishment of health.
The more free our Real Self is the more clearly such a message will register with the ego. Some may call such an experience, “having a conscience”. For a less developed person, whose Real Self is hidden and crusted over, such signs will register less with them. Such individuals can go for a very long time—perhaps many incarnations—without feeling their inner discontent. Their qualms, anxieties, doubts and pains about how they deviate from the truth at their core don’t make it to the surface. When they violate their own integrity, they don’t register any unhappiness. They might even feel a certain satisfaction at having given in to their destructiveness.
Neurosis then is not a problem. Rather, it's a signal coming from a healthy spirit that’s rebelling against the person’s mismanagement of their soul. In our confusion, we combat the nonverbal language of the healthy spirit, thinking that’s what is sick. We then try to adjust to an unhealthy life condition, assuming that to rebel against “reality” is to be immature, unrealistic and neurotic.
People who live in such an unrealistic way also tend to flee from self-responsibility. They deny any kind of frustration, and hope to give nothing but get it all. These are the decisions a person has made, and they need to face and change their choices.
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Full Access Members read: Living with Polar Opposites and Finding the Good in Being Selfish
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Many spiritual philosophies agree that experience is all-important. We could even say the true meaning of life is to experience it, in all its many facets. That we must breathe in the full depth and breadth of it. But when a spirit being is called to this dualistic sphere—to this material plane—we are drawn here because it’s a match for where we are in our development. Our consciousness is limited, so true reality is blurred out to a great extent.
The only way we can experience more of life is if we expand. Doing so requires us to come here, again and again, until all our blocks against life are gone. Then we will have tasted, savored and assimilated all of it. And then we can experience the totality of life, in all its splendor.
Usually when we hear the word “experience,” we think of an outer experience. This, however, is not really the meaning of the word. The real meaning is inner experience. To wit, we can have outer experiences of all varieties, but if our inner experience is inhibited, the outer won’t mean much.
We can travel far and wide. And we can experience all kinds of situations, experimenting with every “experience” under the sun. We can look at life from every angle, experiencing art, science and nature. We can do all these things, learning everything our brains are able to master. But if our inner experience is dead, all these experiences will add little, if anything, to our life.
Actually, it is possible that such full outer experiences will add to our despair. For it’s very disquieting to not understand the cause of what is happening. A person can have everything they ever wanted, and still, a nagging dissatisfaction remains. They can try to grab for more goodies, or run for more accomplishments, but living a fruitful life becomes ever more elusive. For the inner capacity to fully experience life has not been cultivated. The inner soil has not been prepared. Worse, it has been practically plowed under altogether.
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Full Access Members read: Inner and Outer Experience
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Doing the hard work of deep personal self-development requires equal measures of courage and commitment, honesty and humility. The rewards we will receive—in proportion to our investment—are peace and fulfillment. This is cause and effect. Our problems will begin to unravel, which we may have long doubted in our hearts was even possible. We will start to form closer relationships that are more authentic.
Intimate friends are people with whom we experience peace, light, hope, fulfillment and trusting closeness. The presence of such friends, or the lack, thereof is a good gauge telling us whether something is amiss within. For this gauge is so exact! Our life circumstances reflect with great precision how well we are advancing on our spiritual path. No truer measurement exists.
We can never measure ourselves against anyone else. Wherever we are right now, might be just right for us. It may be the exact place we need to be. Knowing this can brighten our perspective and provide us with a shot of hope. Someone else, on the other hand, might find themselves at an identical inner crossroads. And yet that person may be lagging behind on their personal path.
It’s entirely possible this other person won’t accomplish the plan they had hoped to fulfill during this particular incarnation. That person, then, will be in strife—with others and/or themselves. The only reliable gauge for how we are doing on the plan for our lives is this. How do I feel about myself, my relationships and how my life is going?
Now let’s turn our attention to how we should proceed once we’ve uncovered an intention to remain mired in negativity. We will need to keep exploring our negative intentionality, owning up to it in a spirit of honesty and openness. Then what comes next—after we are truly ready to let it go—will be to exchange it for positive intentionality.
The key is that we must have a complete understanding of what commitment means, on the one hand, and cause and effect on the other. At first glance, these two things may appear to be unrelated to our negative intentionality. But they are all intrinsically linked, and we’re about to learn why.
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In this dualistic dimension, we speak of states of consciousness and energy as though they are two distinct things. But this is not correct. To start with, it’s important to realize that consciousness permeates everything in all of creation. So all energy contains some variety and degree of consciousness. That said, consciousness is what creates energy. In fact, the energy of direct consciousness—the energy of our thoughts, feelings, intentions, attitudes and beliefs—eclipses, by far, any other kind of energy, whether electrical, physical, biological or atomic.
Each thought then is energy, and our experience of this energy is what we call a feeling. So there can be no thought—not even the most sterile, cut-off thought—that doesn’t also contain a feeling. We can imagine that a very pure, abstract thought might be completely divorced from any feeling content, but this is not the case. In reality, it’s just the opposite. The more pure and abstract a thought is, the more feeling must be attached to it.
Actually, we need to parse the difference between an abstract thought and one that is cut off. We need to not confuse the two. An abstract thought comes from a spiritual state that is highly integrated. A cut-off thought is a defense against feelings and parts of the self we think are undesirable.
But even the most cut off thought can never be totally devoid of feeling, or energetic content. Beneath the surface there may be a feeling of fear or apprehension—some sort of anxiety about something the person hopes to avoid. And when such feelings are present, self-hate is usually also part of the package.
Below the surface of a purely abstract thought there will be an energy current—a feeling—of utter peace. This comes from the inherent understanding of spiritual laws that connect to the thought, and are therefore sure to produce joy. A more subjective thought is less pure. So the more subjective a thought is, the more it will contain negative feelings.
What exactly is a subjective thought? It is a thought that comes from our personal desires and personal fears. It comes from our ego, the separated state that believes it is me versus the other. Such a thought, then, is not in truth.
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When a spiritual group forms, or really any kind of group, there will be difficulties that must be overcome. These are an expression of the sum total of beings making up this “body”. For any created entity has its own spiritual body. And this body will consist of many different aspects—which are each aspects of the divine spark—the same way an individual person consists of many different aspects.
We are all aspects, then, of the greater consciousness, which is all one. These are nice sounding words, but they are not just words. If we open to them inwardly, we may be able to sense the truth that, in consciousness, we are one. We will start to get a glimpse of this as we make our way along our spiritual path, learning to recognize various aspects of our personality and dealing with them.
Some parts of us, we will find, are out of step with our conscious goodwill. Meanwhile, other parts are working in harmony. At the deepest level, there is an aspect of our consciousness that surpasses in many ways—in beauty, wisdom, love and strength—even the very best of our intentions and abilities to bring all our parts back into harmony.
One by one, we learn to identify each part of the self. And we learn to see when we are identifying with each of them. In this way, we get a glimpse of who we are. When we spot parts we don’t like, we can work to accept them and thereby transform their energy. This is how we restore negative qualities back to their positive form. We want to restore them rather than separating ourselves from them, which causes them to manifest out there in the world where we can see their destructiveness.
What we are talking about applies to all of creation. Just as we have parts that make up our total personality, we are part of the make-up of the universal consciousness. Yet we all fear bridging the gap between our separated ego—our own little consciousness—and the big all-encompassing consciousness. We operate out of the misguided notion that if we do so, we will lose ourselves. But this is completely untrue. It can’t be true. For the more we come to realize all that we are—the more we become our Real Self—the more complete we will be, not less.
What is the aim of creation? Why are we here? Exactly to bridge this gap, establishing the all-in-one consciousness everywhere. “But why does this gap exist?” is a question we repeatedly ask ourselves. There are many explanations, including the story of the Fall which, in religious terms, refers to the fall of the angels from grace. Now let’s explore another version of this same process without any religious overtones.
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Many spiritual sources are delivering messages about an immense cosmic force that is sweeping this planet. A force has been released into this universe with the goal, not of sweeping us out, but to sweep us clean. There is a surge happening in our world, leading us toward spiritual truth. New values are pushing their way through old walls of resistance. Let’s look into what this cosmic force means in terms of a spiritual community, our individuality, and our personal healing and growth. What is this new consciousness about?
Earth, as a planet, is an entity, and each person who lives here is a cell. It’s much the same as the cells of a human body. Each cell, on planet Earth, is an energy center with consciousness. Just as the cells of a body are conscious and have energy. Now, the entity we call Earth is growing up. It’s at an inner crossroads, in the same way a growing person comes to inner crossroads.
At some point on our path, we each find that one part of us is ready to expand. In this part of ourselves, we are willing to take a risk and expose our secrets. We want to move into a new mode of living, with a new vision of ourselves. In this new modality, we are not going to shed what’s old. Rather we’ll transform whatever is not compatible with this pure, new influx. We are going to incorporate the pure substance woven into the old self, into an expanded version of ourselves. This will create a new version of ourselves.
What we come to realize is that another part of ourselves, our Lower Self, is going to attempt to obstruct this movement. This part fears and distrusts—and therefore resists—this kind of growth. It’s our ego consciousness that decides which part we will align with.
It’s inevitable that in such a conflict there will be crisis. This is created by the resisting part as it obstructs the evolutionary force that cannot be stopped. The less we are able to recognize what is happening in this struggle, the more we will deny and rationalize the true significance of what’s going on. And this will result in an equally great upheaval in our lives that will frighten us.
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Full Access Members read: The Era of New Consciousness
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This planet and the people on it are going through a growth process. Every seed that this plan of ultimate self-evolution contains, carries its own plan for fulfillment. And each seed will unfold in its own organic way, following its own inner laws. We experience this phenomenon when we do our work of personal growth and healing, the way this path guides us to do.
Again and again, we watch as an organic process unfolds that operates independently from our conscious mind and our expectations. A plan like this goes in stages, with new energies released each time we transition to a new stage.
Let’s take a look at how this phenomenon manifests on the material level, which is the most superficial level. For example, what happens in the outer growth of a person as they go through very distinct growth phases. For a baby, when they are ready to learn to walk and talk, dormant capacities unfold in them. In order for this to take place, new energies must become available to them.
On the physical level, this is the first major change that takes place after we incarnate. The next major phase of expansion happens when a child leaves home and goes to school. This big step is not just a physical one, but also involves an inner expansion. This is a step out into the world that involves unfolding the child’s built-in potential to cope with other people who live outside the home. Growth continues in this way throughout the span of a person’s entire life.
After a person becomes fully physically grown, it’s harder to notice these transitions. Nonetheless, they are just as real and distinct. Each new phase involves changes, growth and the ability to express oneself more creatively so one can better deal with the world—both the outer world and the inner one. Physicians know that there are changes in our cellular system every few years. In fact, the chemical components of the outer structure change completely. And even though we may not notice this happening, it’s real.
The changes that happen on the other levels of our being—mental, psychic, emotional and spiritual—are even more dynamic. During each stage, we take an orderly step to fulfill the plan of the seed. And the seed plan releases new energies automatically. When we are following our plan, these energies provide us with just the boost we need. They help us expand and change and grow, so we can reach a new dimension. This motion starts from within and moves outward, reaching to embrace more of reality. After all, the aim of inner reality is to reach out and transform outer reality, following its own unlimited beauty, perfection and infinite possibilities for expression.
But when the outgoing movement is obstructed—such as when the ego-consciousness hinders the process, ignoring its urgings and acting insensitive to them—then the energies can’t unfold in their natural, harmonious way. This is when these energies, which are originally constructive, turn destructive according to our human view of things.
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Full Access Members read: Changing From Outer to Inner Laws in this New Era
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Now is the time for the arrival of a new era. The arrival of this event has required that many people were made ready for it. This is true, regardless of whether or not those walking a conscious spiritual path have been aware of this preparation. So we have been filing away at our impurities, and we are still doing this work. We have also been creating emptiness to make ourselves available for a powerful force that is being released in the universe—in the inner universe.
Many channels and spiritual teachers have been aware of this event. But many have incorrectly interpreted what this event would look like. They’ve had the idea it would come by way of geological cataclysms that would affect humans on the physical level. But this is not true. The changes, which have been in progress for decades already, are changes in our consciousness. And this is exactly what we are working on here.
As we do our personal self-development work to purify ourselves, we become steadily more ready for inner enlightenment. We become ready for the arrival of this awakening force with its self-perpetuating nature. Its arrival is unprecedented. There has been no other time in the history of humankind when this force has been as available as it is right now.
If we have been doing our own healing work, then what we experience will be a result of this power landing on a receptive channel. But if this power hits a channel that is unreceptive, a crisis will arise. What we’re talking about is a tremendous, creative force that is highly beneficial, and which could help us thrive in an entirely new way. But if we block it, even if only partly, we put ourselves under great stress—psychically, physically, emotionally and spiritually. This is what we must try to avoid.
Let’s now discuss how important it is to be receptive to the energy and new consciousness arriving with this force. This is Christ consciousness and it is spreading throughout human consciousness wherever it can. But in order for us to receive it, we must also understand another important principle: creative emptiness.
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A new era has begun. It is, among many things, a time of linking and connecting in many areas, on many levels, in many ways. The primary place to connect is on the inner levels, within the personality. But we must also connect on the outer levels. Then eventually the differences between religions, nations and the like, will disappear. Does this mean that individuality will go away? Absolutely not. Just the opposite will happen.
In a very practical sense, we are now moving out of duality. During the era of duality, there was a lot of diversity on the outer levels. Meanwhile, conformity and unity was more often within a person. This had a way of wiping out true individual expression. The age of unity now ushers in a different picture. Outer differences will go away as they lose their importance. We won’t attach our personal identity to our nationality or our religion. As such, we won’t block ourselves from finding our soul’s oneness with the All because of a rigid focus on differences.
What will gain importance in the new era will be our diverse divine expressions. From unified groups, a group consciousness will arise that will allow clearly defined individuals to evolve. And these people will be able to bring an even greater unity to the group process. Let’s now turn our attention to how the pulsation of life and consciousness works behind the scenes to support such an unfolding.
Everything in the universe is divine pulsation. As the universal spirit pulsates into matter, matter becomes enlivened by the pulse of the divine. The movement of the divine, as it expands and contracts, pushes its way into the void. Eternal life advances with each expanding move, enlivening the void, or vacuum, with spirit. At the “momentary” meeting of the void with divine substance, matter is created.
This pulse we are speaking of is an aspect of life we’re well aware of on this physical plane. Our own physical bodies are alive and we have a pulse. The heart, the lungs and the bloodstream all pulsate. We are quite familiar with this phenomena. What we are not so familiar with are the more finely calibrated pulsations. These happen in the mind, in our feeling self and in the body. In addition, there is a pulsation of life that is a spiritual push. It reaches out into the void, turning the void into life.
Each manifestation of life—whether it’s a person or a different kind of organism—is itself, a pulse beat. For life penetrates everything that is, so it is in all organisms. As long as a being is alive, this pulse of universal life expands into it. It’s one single pulse. But the pulse rate is not always the same. According to the rhythm of the entity, there will be a particular pulse beat that follows particular laws.
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It’s not easy to talk about cause and effect on this three-dimensional level. But let’s try. We can start by saying that at the lowest level of development—on the scale of consciousness—there is no cause and effect. Or at least there doesn’t appear to be any. As we raise our level of consciousness, we are able to see new horizons. From our new perspective, we are able to see how effects are connected to causes we previously didn’t even know existed. When we crest the hill and reach the point where consciousness becomes completely God-infused, cause and effect will no longer exist.
Here we see that, once again, the lowest forms of consciousness have something in common with the highest forms. But there’s an enormous difference in what they hold, in terms of attitudes and underlying feelings and thoughts. We can easily understand that primitive consciousness sees the world as an unconnected series of events that are unrelated to cause and effect. It may be harder for us to understand how in the highest realms it doesn’t exist at all. And this reality is nearly impossible to convey using human words.
Here on Earth, every act has its consequence. That’s not so hard to realize. It’s not quite as easy to see that the same relationship exists between our thoughts or our subtle inner attitudes and the overall circumstances of our life. But the more developed we become, the more we will be able to perceive cause and effect on these less obvious levels of consciousness. On this spiritual path, such perceptions gradually become more acute, and in fact this is very strongly emphasized.
If we commit some overt act—let’s say we kill another person—the consequences will be obvious. But we are also killing another person when we malign them. We do this through our questionable accusations, blindness, stubbornness or ill will; when we refuse to give another person the benefit of the doubt; when we don’t try to use honest communication or openness to create a different reality. Such secret “killing” has consequences that are just as severe as physical killing.
At first, the effects of this kind of action might be hard for us to perceive. But as we raise our consciousness, we will start to see there’s a definite connection between cause and effect. This exists even if the cause was not an overt act but a hidden thought we had previously ignored.
In our current state of consciousness, living in this three-dimensional world, we often find ourselves to be, in many ways, halfway. Our world is not all bad, but it’s also not all good. Our personalities too are not all bad, but also not all good. We don’t live in heaven, but we also don’t live in hell. Our lives represent both extremes.
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The term New Age has been used a lot. Some people have used it with the correct understanding, others have managed to turn it into a cliché. This is unavoidable. It happens with truthful concepts due to people’s tendency to be lazy and glib. They use a label so they don’t have to feel the reality of a certain truth. But for those who can avoid this trap, they should not give up altogether on using a term that conveys a true idea. It is due to this tendency that different words these teachings use different words to express the same truth.
Also, from time to time, the true meaning of a particular word is given in an effort to keep its true concept alive. As far as the New Age is concerned, it has been stated already that at various intervals in history, our world is swept with a new influx that comes streaming in. When this happens, it is because humanity has grown enough to be ready for it. This is what is happening now.
As we enter fully into this new era, the consciousness of the Christ spirit is now permeating this world. It is attempting to penetrate each person’s consciousness to a greater and greater degree. When this powerful new influx arrives, it is accompanied by certain things that may not be pleasant, agreeable, welcome or even constructive. Events happening on Earth right now that most people consider to be downright undesirable are a direct result of the influx of this energy. But in truth, without this, the expansion and growth in consciousness inherent in this new era couldn’t happen.
Our minds are still very much geared to the immediate future. We believe that what is right and good in this moment will also be right and good in the ultimate end. If something appears right now to be evil, it must also be evil in the long run. This, however, is seldom the case. Sometimes, what appears to be an outright negative manifestation was actually needed for full development to happen. This applies to each person as equally as it applies to humanity as a whole. Or to put it another way, to the entity that is Earth.
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At this point in time, many people are as comfortable with the term “inner space” as they are with outer space. But most people think of inner space as merely a symbol of a person’s state of mind. This is not the case. Inner space is actually a real world—a vast reality. This in fact is the real universe and outer space is a mirror image of it—a reflection. This is the reason we can never quite grasp outer reality. We can’t be truly absorb, experience and understand life when we only view it from the outside. That’s why life is so frustrating—and often so frightening—for so many.
It’s not easy to understand how it’s possible that inner space could in itself be a world—the world. The difficulty lies in the limited time/space continuum of our three-dimensional reality. We perceive everything we touch, see and experience from a limited perspective. Our minds are conditioned to perceive things a certain way and at this juncture, we’re not capable of perceiving life another way. But that doesn’t mean our current way is the right way, the only way, or complete way.
The goal of any spiritual path is to perceive life in a way that goes beyond the outer reflection. Our aim is to focus on the new dimensions we discover in inner space. In some spiritual disciplines, this may be clearly stated as the intention, and in others it might never be mentioned as such.
But when we reach a certain point of development on our path of purification, a new vision wakes up, sometimes gradually and sometimes more suddenly. Even when it seems to happen suddenly, this is only an illusion. All awakening happens as a result of taking many steps on a spiritual path and fighting many inner battles.
Scientists have discovered that each atom is duplicated in the outer universe, as we know it. This is an important recognition. As we have come to understand, time is a variable that depends on the dimension from which it is experienced. It’s the same for space. In the same way that there isn’t an objective, fixed time, there isn’t an objective, fixed space. So our real being can live, move and breathe—and cross vast distances—within an atom, according to our outer system of measurement.
Just as the relationship to time changes in different dimensions, the relationship of measurement changes when a spirit withdraws into the inner world. This explains why we seem to lose contact with what we call “dead” people. Our awareness changes because they now live in the inner reality, which for us, can only be an abstract idea. And yet the thing that is really abstract is outer space.
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What is Pathwork?
Pathwork is a lifelong spiritual path of self-discovery that helps us understand the workings of life. It also helps us heal our emotional wounds. And fosters harmony and balance within our own being, as well as with others and God.
Who is the Pathwork Guide?
The Pathwork Guide is the entity who is actually speaking. And he is using Eva as the medium, or channel, through which he spoke. Owed to Eva’s dedication to her task as well as her willingness to do her own work, the material continually evolved. So it deepened over the course of the 22 years she gave monthly lectures.
Note, in those days it was the literary convention to use masculine pronouns generically. But that is not why we say the Pathwork Guide was a “he”. It’s more that people who were present during the lectures sensed the Guide as masculine. For the sake of consistency and to avoid referring to the Pathwork Guide as an “it,” we’ll proceed to speak of him respectfully—but holding this loosely—using the male pronoun.
To the deeper question about who exactly is the Guide, we don’t know. The Guide said that his name was not important. And that we should learn to trust our own discernment rather than rely on the reputation of the source as our reason for listening, trusting or believing. As you may know, the Pathwork Guide was a big champion of this type of self-development.
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The Guide offers profound teachings that are only valuable if they are put into service in understanding and unwinding our everyday disharmonies, both large and small. One has to actively apply the Guide’s teachings to be served by them. That’s really the key.
But the lectures are long—roughly 10-12 pages each—and dense, so it takes some mental stamina to get through them. This is where Phoenesse can help.
Doing the Work
Inspired directly by the Guide, Phoenesse offers a fresh approach to these timeless spiritual teachings. Phoenesse—pronounced “finesse”—is a registered service mark of Phoenesse LLC, founded by Jill Loree.
In the Real. Clear. seven-book series, Jill Loree has rewritten nearly 100 of the teachings using easier-to-read language, and organized them by topic. Podcasts of each teaching are also available online.
In the Self.Care. How-to-Heal teaching series, Jill Loree offers a high-level overview of the work, identifying the various parts of the self and showing how to actually go about doing the work of healing.
You can also read an overview of the Guide’s teachings on the Phoenesse website:
www.phoenesse.com
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After each lecture, attendees were encouraged to ask questions. In addition, once a month Eva and the Guide would hold dedicated Question & Answer sessions. Unlike the original lectures, which were prepared by a council of spiritual beings, the Guide answered these questions himself. For this reason, the Q&As embody a somewhat different vibe from the lectures, which—in addition to their shorter length—makes them easier to digest.
The Q&As were either related to the lecture just given, to a person’s personal issues, or to life in general. They offer a wisdom and perspective that has the potential to change a person’s worldview. Jill Loree has sorted the thousands of questions into topics to make the answers more accessible, and has made them available for free online:
www.theguidespeaks.com
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The key to becoming who we truly are is this: We must overcome our fear of ourselves. This is the fundamental prerequisite for being all that we can be. In fact, in the final analysis, every kind of fear amounts to a fear of the self. For if we had no fear of our innermost selves, we couldn’t possibly fear anything in life. We wouldn’t even fear death.
But when we start to make our way along a path of self-confrontation, we don’t know that what we really fear is what lurks in our own unplumbed depths. And so it is that we so often project this very real fear of self onto all kinds of other miscellaneous fears. Then we deny we have those fears, and we set about covering them up.
Until one day we wake up and realize we have some enormous fear of some particular aspect of life upon which this tsunami of fear of our self has landed. Or maybe we just end up fearing life itself and so endeavor to avoid living it altogether. We do this in the same way we avoid knowing the self, to whatever extent we fear it.
To go one further, we’ll sometimes project our fear of life onto the fear of death. Since really life and death are two sides of the same coin. So actually, if we fear one we’re going to also fear the other. Fear of life and death, then, are a package deal.
Only when our search for self-knowing has gained a little traction do we become aware that what we’re really most afraid of is ourselves. We can recognize this by the backpedaling we do when it comes to seeing our part in our problems; when we resist, in all the more or less obvious ways we do so; when we won’t face our terror of letting go of our defenses, which would allow us to experience our natural feelings.
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As we’ve probably heard by now, love is the greatest power there is. Every spiritual teaching or philosophy, along with every religious scholar and psychology professor, proclaims this truth: Love is the one and only power. If you’ve got it, you are mighty, strong and safe. Without it, you are separate, scared and poor. Sounds simple enough. Yet this knowledge doesn’t really help us unless we’ve discovered where—deep down inside—we can’t love or won’t love. Why is it that we resist loving? Why do we have fear of loving? Unless we sort out the answer to this question, no eternal truth about love can possibly help us.
If we’ve already made some progress on our search for inner knowing, we’ve probably already run headlong—after considerable digging and exploring—into our fear of loving. Becoming aware of such a fear is quintessential for taking further steps. It’s not enough to have a theoretical understanding that such a fear of loving exists; we have to actually experience this fear. For people who don’t yet wish to know themselves, such an awareness will not yet exist.
But even for those of us who have become aware of this inner conflict, we may not yet fully comprehend the why of it. Why am I so afraid of loving? Let’s explore some of the facets of this perplexing phenomenon, a topic we’ll return to in future teachings when we illuminate this very basic problem from other angles.
Let’s start with this: Those who cannot love are immature. And when we are immature, we are not living in reality. To live a life based on unreality, then, must lead to conflict and unhappiness, for where there is untruth there is ignorance and darkness.
Maturity, as such, means essentially having the ability to love.
Alas, we all hold fragmented aspects within ourselves that are trapped in childhood states. And these child parts require an unlimited amount of love. For these child fragments are one-sided, unreasonable, demanding, and lacking in understanding, as all immature creatures are. Its laundry list of impossible wants includes: to be loved by everyone, to be loved 100%, to be instantly satisfied, and to be loved in spite of our selfish, unreasonable ways. This, in a nutshell, is why we are afraid of loving.
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Life is a trap, of a kind, stuck as we are in this struggle to overcome the duality between life and death. From this fundamental predicament stem all our other problems, fears and tensions. It shows up in our fear of death, of course, as well as in our fear of aging and our fear of the unknown. What’s the common root of all these fears? The passage of time.
In an effort to deal with these basic fears, humanity has devised various philosophies and spiritual or religious concepts. But even if these concepts are true, evolving perhaps from someone’s attempts to pass on a true experience, they’re not going to do the trick in relieving our tension. Truth be told, the only way to truly overcome our fears—to reconcile the great divide of this giant duality—is to dive deep into the mega-unknown we all fear so much: our own psyche.
Well, how hard could that be? Turns out, it sounds simpler than it is. For to explore the hidden corners of our own minds, we have to do more than resolve dualities. We’re going to need to discover all the facets of our innermost selves, without glibly explaining away any tensions and disturbances we encounter along the way.
Our incentive is this: To the degree we are in the dark about what is going on inside, to that degree we will fear the passing of time; we will fear the great unknown. When we’re young, it’s easy to brush these things aside. But sooner or later, if we won’t face ourselves, we’ll come face-to-face with our fear of death. To the extent, however, that we know ourselves, we will feel fulfilled in life. And to that same degree death will not be feared. Instead, it will occur as an organic development, and the unknown will no longer seem like a threat.
Doing this work of self-discovery is no picnic, friends. Plus, there are escape hatches everywhere. If we look for them, we’ll even find them within the framework of this particular path of growth and healing. The only way then to succeed in unifying ourselves is by ruthlessly searching to see, evaluate and understand ourselves.
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If we boil it down, there are essentially two philosophies about this thing we call life, and they are apparent contradictions. One imparts the perspective that if we are truly mature, spiritually and emotionally, we need to learn to accept life on life’s terms. And often those terms are hard to take. Our best approach will be to accept what we can’t change. When we won’t accept life, this theory says, we breed anxiety and disharmony. Then our peace of mind will be destroyed by the tension this creates, and we make our situation worse. So the gauge of a mature, well-rounded personality, from this perspective, is how well we are able to accept the inevitable. Are we OK with our destiny? And how cool are we with, say, death? What’s there to fear?
The other school of thought postulates we don’t need to accept any of this unpleasantness. All this stuff about accepting hardship, including death, is totally unnecessary. Our only destiny is the one we create for ourselves. And whenever we decide, we can mold ourselves a new destiny. A better destiny. One in which we no longer suffer. Real spiritual awakening, this side says, comes with the awareness that we don’t need to accept suffering. That unfathomable abundance can be had, right here, right now.
Talk about two sides of the street! How confusing is that? But if we search for both of these perspectives, we’re likely to find them in just about any great spiritual teaching, including these from the Pathwork Guide.
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Our greatest joy in life comes from giving, to whatever extent we are able. It comes from reaching our potential, we might say. On the flip side, our greatest pain is derived from not meeting our full potential in giving to others and to life. Every other pain and frustration cascades from this pain of not offering up what we have to give. Turning this around, all pleasure and satisfaction flows from giving freely, no ifs, ands or buts.
Why then are we so stingy? Why do we refuse to give freely of ourselves? This stems from our fear of the parts of ourselves we don’t yet see and know, which creates patterns that keep chunking out pain.
And for as long as we keep those parts hidden, we won’t be free. We’ll become a pretender who is always on guard. This means that wherever we are harboring distortions inside, we are living a lie. And none of this needs to happen. It’s a needless lie we’re living based on a false fear of own selves.
Some people, when they start doing this work of self-knowing, meet their private, hidden parts quite quickly. They dial them up, agree to have a chat, and directly go on to overcome their fears, walking out into the world a free person. But others, even some who have the best outer intentions to find themselves, skirt around the issue and get nowhere. They have this vague hope they can get all the way home without having to expose and clean up every last bit of inner dirty laundry.
The question is, are we ready to stop living the “big lie?” Are we ready to let go of all this pretense? It’s a tough choice. It’s a battle really, and it matters a lot if we win this one. To this end, let’s look at where this illusory fear of the self comes from, and just as importantly, let’s find out what happens if, instead of overcoming it, we coddle it.
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Our biggest struggle in life is the push and pull we face between our desire to overcome our loneliness and isolation, and our simultaneous fear of having close, intimate contact with another person. Often these are equally strong, tearing us apart from the inside and creating a tremendous strain.
The pain of feeling isolated always pushes us to try to escape from it by becoming more close with someone. Should such attempts appear to be getting somewhere, our fear of closeness will erupt and cause us to pull back again, and push the other away. And so the cycle goes with people, first erecting uncrossable barriers between ourselves and others, and then knocking them back down.
If we’re walking on a spiritual path of self-realization, sooner or later we’ll see the predicament we’re in. For every disharmony, disturbance and shred of suffering we uncover has the same simple common denominator: our struggle between desiring and fearing closeness. And it’s our insistence to holding onto both of these feelings that creates the barriers that keep us in separation.
Our relationships with other people will only go well when we are motivated by our innermost selves. For our intellect and will alone can’t navigate the delicate balance of allowing our own self-expression while also receiving the self-expression of others. There isn’t any rule we can make to manage the rhythm of mutual exchange. And our outer brains are out of their league here.
The ego-mind is also not equipped to negotiate the fine balance needed between asserting ourselves and allowing another to assert themselves, between giving and receiving, between being active and being passive. And there are no pat formulas we can lean on. This doesn’t mean our outer intellect has no value. It’s an instrument that thinks mechanically, makes decisions, and determines rules and laws. But by itself, it doesn’t have the intuitive sense or flexibility needed to meet each moment as it comes. It doesn’t have the capacity to respond adequately. For that, we need to tap into the core of our being and activate our inner command center that’s dynamically responsive. Then and only then can our relationship with someone else be spontaneous and satisfying for both of us.
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Underneath our ordinary, neurotic, unconscious wrong thinking lies a difficult conflict embedded in all of humanity: We have a deeply ingrained longing to be happy and, at the same time, we fear happiness. And this fear is directly related to our fear of letting go. By the same token, our longing to be happy must also be a longing to be released from the clutches of our little ego. The two are linked. Let’s now dive into a deeper level of this topic so we can come to a new understanding.
Everything exists in both a right understanding and in distortion. Letting go of the outer ego is no exception. It’s possible then to let go in an unbalanced, distorted manner, which is unhealthy. Now first, what are we talking about when we say “let go of the ego?” These are the faculties we have direct access to: our volitional thinking and our will that we have the power to direct.
Here’s a simple example of the difference between direct will and indirect will on the level of the physical body. With our direct will, we can decide to move our hand, directing how it will move and what we’re going to pick up with it. But for our heartbeat or circulation, we have no direct control. We can however regulate our heartbeat and circulation by controlling the movement of our body.
Our will also works the same way on the mental and emotional levels. We do have the ability to change unpleasant feelings, but it’s futile to try to do this directly or quickly. What’s more, when we direct our will in the wrong way, we can throw our psyche into a state of disarray.
When we overexert our will, then, by trying to exert it in areas it can’t directly control, we waste energy and debilitate ourselves. It’s the equivalent of throwing all our might into changing our heartrate using our sheer outer will. If this works at all, it only worsens our condition. In truth, we have lots of way to improve our circulation, but forcing—by using our outer will—isn’t one of them.
We human beings do this a lot: We use the wrong approach. We force our will where it doesn’t belong and then neglect using it where it could be doing a lot of good in our personal development. When we don’t use enough will in the right way, our ego becomes weak. When we use too much, our ego becomes so exhausted it will try to escape from itself. Letting go like this, though—from weak motives instead of from a place of inner strength—is an escape that can become quite dangerous to the self.
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To have self-fulfillment, we need to be in harmony with ourselves and with life. There are three topics that form the basis for achieving this harmony:
1) Having a positive concept of life that sees the universe as safe.
2) Being free and fearless to love.
3) Holding a healthy balance between the forces of activity and passivity.
Let’s weave these together to see how they create one comprehensive whole. For they all depend on awakening our innermost self and activating the core that we can call the Real Self. Without that, it’s our ego running the show. And as long as our ego is our sole motivator in life, it will be impossible to have confidence that life is safe. This will make it impossible to be fearless about loving. It will also make it impossible to find that delicate balance between being active and being passive. Let’s take a closer look.
To have a healthy concept of life is to have a truthful concept of life, which is that life is utterly benign. Life is safe. When we stray from knowing this truth, we’ll experience life as hostile and we’ll feel the need to defend ourselves against it. On our spiritual path, as we dig through the layers of our psyche in an effort to untangle any disharmony, somehow we always find that we’re sitting on a negative concept of life.
A negative concept of life is not a benign thing, because it interacts directly with our faults. And this interaction is a two-way street. First, we’re driven by the destructive forces caused by our negative concept of life. This expands our negative beliefs, even if we’re hardly aware of them. Second, our negative beliefs cause us to take a defensive posture toward life, and that perpetuates our destructiveness.
By examining our faults, we can begin to unwind all this. The first step, as is so often the case, will be to become aware of our faults. While not easy, this isn’t that difficult if we approach the task in the right way. Once we have a list of our faults, the second step is to understand why they exist. Why do we cling to them? If we look closely, we’ll see they are intended to ward off something bad we feared would happen to us. So they sit on the fixed foundation of a negative assumption we take for granted.
Listen and learn more.
Full Access Members read: Three Things that Underpin Self-Fulfillment
Two Power-Packed Collections: After the Ego & Blinded by Fear Listen Now Find Which Pathwork Teachings Are in What Phoenesse Books • Get Links to Original Pathwork Lectures • Read Original Pathwork Lectures on Pathwork Foundation website
Read all Q&As from the Pathwork® Guide on The Guide Speaks, or get Keywords, a collection of Jill Loree’s favorite Q&As.
Every person on Earth has an apparently nonsensical fear of bliss to some extent. Even though it makes no sense, there it is, and this fear exists side-by-side with our longing for bliss. Yet bliss is our birthright. We have every right to live in a state of supreme bliss and sublime joy, which are qualities we struggle to adequately describe in any language.
No matter how unhappy we are, somewhere deep inside we haven’t forgotten that this fear is not natural. Indeed, if this weren’t the case, it would be far easier to accept our frustrations in life. For what does it mean to be unhappy if not to be frustrated about not having what we want? Embedded in our unhappiness, then, is the promise that the opposite could be true: we could be happy. Since both are present, we feel ambivalent about how we should be experiencing life. From this follows another ambivalence: Is it OK to long for pleasure, or should we fear it?
For some of us, we have much less fear than desire. If this is us, we feel relatively fulfilled and our lives are rich and joyful. We have a deep capacity to experience pleasure, and we have a trusting attitude toward life. Since our concept of life is positive, life expands. For us, it’s not that hard to overcome our remaining defenses and fears that close off expanding further into bliss.
Most people, however, fear happiness more than they desire it. If this is us, we will basically be unhappy, feeling life is passing us by. Life will seem meaningless and like we somehow missed out on it. Our capacity for experiencing pleasure will be very limited. We will be numb and mired in apathy. In our lifeless state we won’t trust and will be withdrawn from life, and we will resist looking within ourselves for the cause of our suffering.
Listen and learn more.
Full Access Members read: Our Fundamental Fear of Bliss
Two Power-Packed Collections: After the Ego & Blinded by Fear Listen Now Find Which Pathwork Teachings Are in What Phoenesse Books • Get Links to Original Pathwork Lectures • Read Original Pathwork Lectures on Pathwork Foundation website
Read all Q&As from the Pathwork® Guide on The Guide Speaks, or get Keywords, a collection of Jill Loree’s favorite Q&As.
From Proverbs and Tiny Songs
You walking, your footsteps are the road, and nothing else; there is no road, walker, you make the road by walking. By walking you make the road, and when you look backward, you see the path that you never will step on again. Walker, there is no road, Only wind-trails in the sea.
– By Antonio Machado (1875–1939), translated by Robert Bly
They say to be careful when pointing a finger at someone else because you always have three pointing back at yourself. Never have I felt this to be truer than while writing this book.
I’ve done a lot of work on myself. And as I’ve worked my way through challenging feelings stemming from my childhood, I’ve sensed the truth: This doesn’t make me a hero. It means I belonged in the remedial class. What I experienced in my childhood was a reflection of my soul dents and inner splits that I came into this lifetime to heal. I’ve gotten my money’s worth, shall we say.
When I was a junior in college, I upgraded my employment situation from throwing pizzas at Sammy’s to serving drinks across the street at Houligan’s bar and restaurant. Houligan’s was a downtown establishment that was more upscale than your average college bar along Water Street. Tips in the bar area, however, generally consisted of leftover change, and since the cocktail waitress wage was $2/hour, tips mattered. After a while, I slid over to bartending where you still got some tips, but received a minimum wage of $3.25/hour. On a slow weeknight in a college town, that was like getting a nice raise...
I was born and raised in Barron County, a humble, rural area in northwest Wisconsin. In high school, I learned from my mom, who was then the Barron County Treasurer, that Barron County actually has more cows than people. Through the years, I’ve shared this tidbit a number of times, as though it explains some things. Exactly what, I don’t know...
Near our house in Barron was a dam that created a small body of water, just a widening of the Yellow River really, which was traversed in two places by a road and a railroad track. We lived along the road, not far away, and I have vivid memories related to this body of water. The first is that there was a peninsula we could walk to by way of a fairly large field directly behind our house...
From what I understand, the complexion of this homogenous white-bread area has changed quite a bit in recent decades, owing to the availability of jobs at the turkey plant which support so many families in the region. Asians, Hispanics and Africans—including refugees from the civil war in Somalia—are now all part of what makes up the little burg of Barron. For me, until I got to college, I had only white kids for classmates...
The old house we lived in was, I’ve been told, quite a dump when my parents bought it for the grand sum of $6500. (My mother cried—and they were not tears of joy—the first time my dad showed it to her.) I don’t think it’s a matter of comparing that sum to today’s dollars. No, it’s a reflection of how much work the place needed. But of course, I didn’t know any of that when I was a kid, and my parents had made good headway by the time my memories kick in...
Northern Wisconsin is a hotbed of people who are handy and good at crafts, and my parents were champs. I remember pulling over along a roadside somewhere because my mother had spotted cattails that hadn’t yet exploded and gone to seed. We had those cattails as part of a decoration in our house for many years. I still think of her when I see fresh cattails somewhere. She once made a light for over our cabin’s kitchen table by painting a pattern on a cardboard ice cream bucket and cutting out little triangles for the light to shine through. Very crafty...
My life pivoted when I was eight and we moved to the larger city of Rice Lake, 12 miles to the north. During the time we lived in Barron, my dad had received his master’s degree in music from the University of Wisconsin–Superior. I can’t say I had any awareness that this was going on, but our move to Rice Lake involved his taking a teaching position at UW-Barron County campus in Rice Lake, a two-year school that was an extension of the statewide university system. He would teach there until he retired...
For my mom, the rock against whom I have pushed. You’ve shown me where my work was, and that’s what I’ve needed to find; that’s where I’ve needed to shine my own light. It has been a gift to follow in your footsteps, hard as that has been at times.
For my dad, whose path has also been my path. You’ve been showing me the way, even when it was so rocky for you.
And for Pete and Jeff, who were also my wayshowers. Thanks for holding the light.