Bones

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. Yet 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… This fear is an illusion—it’s an abyss. And the only reason it exists is because of the way we avoid self-responsibility. 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, we want to find the corresponding note in ourselves that is vibrating due to provocation from another. Then we’ll stop feeling like a victim… Part 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. Read Bones, Chapter 19: The Giant Misunderstanding About Freedom and Self-Responsibility Read Original Pathwork® Lecture: #60 The Abyss of Illusion – Freedom & Self-Responsibility

More whole means more happy. Our goal, then, is to unify our whole selves. We do this by 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. Rather, it must be expressed and released… And that is what meaningful meditation is all about… 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 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 can also be found 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 the Oneness when we are less than whole inside. 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 gradually make progress on our path, we become more alive and more honest in our feelings and ability to relate. We “sacrifice” old reactive patterns and discover that nothing good has been given up and plenty has been gained. It’s hard to remain skeptical… At some point in our journey, we are going to run into a wall. It’s made up of our previously concealed but now quite conscious negative intentionality… In our unhealed psyches, we unconsciously want whatever it is we fear. Further, whatever we experience, we also unconsciously want. All these teachings are built upon these immutable facts. We need to recall this when we come face-to-face with our basic attitude toward life that 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 this, 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

Pain is what results 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 wouldn’t be likely to hold onto a desire to be unhealthy if we were consciously aware of it… What’s really obstructing us is the material 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? 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 thing to remember is 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 focused on hating and isolating and staying in fear… 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

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 then we stumble across some disturbing life event. Or we bump up once again against a persistent unfulfillment. When that happens, we can be sure 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… 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… Listen and learn more. Bones, Chapter 15: Learning to Speak the Language of the Unconscious Read Original Pathwork® Lecture: #124 The Language of the Unconscious

As children, we learned that the highest authority—even higher than our parents—is God. So it’s not a surprise that we bundle up all our painful subjective experiences with the people who say no to us, and put them on God. This is how our God-image gets created… As children, authority figures were cropping 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 God 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 is often the real reason someone turns to atheism… 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… For 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 misery. At some point, this misery causes us to turn around and realize that we ourselves are the source of our misery. Not God and God’s 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. The other is to realize how these three faults 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 me”… 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 step on 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? If we’re sheltering a mountain 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… 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. For now we hold 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

This path is based on the simple law of cause and effect… If we apply these teachings to our lives, they will work for us. 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 are always the cause of the outer ones… Every fault we harbor stands 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… Another equally impactful hindrance is our fears, which we generally don’t put in the same category as faults… Our fears work to tarnish 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… 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 directly or indirectly from 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

We’re here because this planet is a perfect match for the negativity remaining in us. It offers conditions compatible with our inner landscape… We’re confused about reality, and our mind is full of incorrect concepts… And wherever confusion prevails, there’s always conflict. Conflicts are split concepts that divide the psyche. They arise when some aspect, inside us, is not in truth. … So Earth is nothing more, and nothing less, than a classroom for people with inner splits… If we look at everything we’ve managed to surface so far, including our main image and defenses, our conflicts and faults, they will reveal the basic inner attitude that is governing our life. And this attitude is always split down the middle. Meaning, we fluctuate back and forth between two essentially opposite ways of reacting… When this realization starts to take shape, we’ll see that our two fundamental attitudes are represented by our parents… . There was no way for us to work this out before we got here. So our parents, who bring our unresolved split out into the open, couldn’t possibly be responsible for our problems… This basic conflict is so deep, it’s existence is the reason we have the human experience. But it’s not inaccessible… We go through life, then, reacting to the person in front of us, not as them but as if they were our parents… Whenever we are negatively involved with someone, we can be sure our split is a factor in the fireworks… We firmly believe in something that isn’t true. But then our belief gets reinforced, so our split cracks open even wider… Lack of awareness is truly a prison that makes life not worth living. Because we feel caught between two equally unappealing alternatives. We adopted a certain way of reacting to our parents, and now we keep responding that way And so we keep getting the same poor results… The way out is through awareness that we are living in a trance… Once we break this mold, though, new experiences can materialize. Listen and learn more. Bones, Chapter 11: Our Habit of Transferring our Split onto Everyone Read Original Pathwork® Lecture: #118 Duality Through Illusion – Transference

Let’s talk about pain. And more importantly, let’s discuss how to dissolve pain… The climate we grew up in affected us—it was like perpetually receiving a minor shock… We suffered and believed our suffering was unchangeable. And this conditioned us to create defenses—highly destructive defenses… We repressed the original frustration and pain we couldn’t deal with, and we put it out of our awareness. There, it smolders in the unconscious mind… Our defense mechanisms of aggression, submission and/or withdrawal fully developed… Our images are also a form of defense, designed to fight against painful experiences by erecting a rigid wall constructed entirely from wrong conclusions… In every case, we hurt others while also inflaming our own wounds. Because thanks to the law of cause and effect, hurting others has ramifications for us. There will be consequences. So, not only have we done nothing to calm the original pain, we’ve invited more of it… Rather than abandoning our limping pseudo-solutions, we wrap them into our idealized self-image. Here, the agenda is to make us feel better than everyone else… Since the nature of the idealized self is falseness and pretense—we act perfect since we can’t be perfect—we feel alienated from ourselves, from others and from life… We’ll come to realize that pain feels far better than being alienated from ourselves and feeling numb… Listen and learn more. Bones, Chapter 10: Unpacking the Pain of our Old Destructive Patterns Read Original Pathwork® Lecture: #100 Meeting the Pain of Destructive Patterns