Transition To Positive Intentionality

By The Pathwork Guide

Greetings, and God bless every one of you. Try to focus on the dimension which wants to communicate its fullness and its richness to you. You can be enriched by it if you so choose. It is a question of focus and of intent. Ask your inner guidance to help you in this endeavor so that this lecture will again be helpful as a further step in your noble search.

I would like to discuss again -- this time on a deeper level and with a new approach -- your attempt to change your negative intentionality into positive expressions. Many of you who are doing this pathwork have found out quite a bit about your negative intentionality. You are finally aware of a lot of what you previously ignored, denied, or repressed. It is needless to say how important and vitally essential this is on any path of self-knowledge, of self-confrontation, and of purification. The majority of humankind is totally unaware of what is behind apparent or even actual good intent, as well as behind apparent helplessness. The attitude of "I cannot help but feel this way" is the expression of a negative intent. Those who are conscious of and who admit their deliberate choice of a negative attitude are significantly ahead of those who are in this alienated, ignorant state about the self. But it is not enough to be aware, my friends, more must come.

I also discussed in a recent lecture that a fundamental reason for the difficulty in changing negative intentionality to positive intentionality is that secretly the self identifies almost totally with the destructive part. Hence, giving up this part of the personality appears hazardous, dangerous, and even annihilating. Then the question is how to proceed in order to shift that subtle, inner sense of identity. When negative expressions are not admitted to the self, then they congeal into a festering sore of guilt and of self-doubt which, translated into concise words, would mean: "If only the truth were known about me, then it would be that I am all bad. But since this is the real me, and since I do not want to cease existing, then I cannot want to give up me. All I can do is pretend that I am different."

This is a devastating soul climate in which confusion grows and the genuine sense of self gets more and more lost. Correct theoretical knowledge in the intellect does little to alleviate this painful and disturbing condition. In this lecture we shall deal in more detail with the process I recommend in order to create a change.

The first step is to realize that your negative intentionality is really not unconscious in the strict sense of the word. In other words, it is not at all deeply repressed material. It is really a conscious attitude and expression, only you have chosen to ignore it, until you have finally forgotten that it is there. Sustained deliberate looking away from something eventually results in really not seeing what has been there all along. The moment the eye begins to focus again, then the material immediately becomes discernible. Such material is not truly unconscious. The difference is quite important.

By now most of you accept, face, and admit some of this negative intentionality, but not all of it. You still choose to ignore some. In order to make the remaining aspects completely conscious, and also in order to bring about the change from negative intentionality to positive intentionality, it is necessary that you peruse those little, unimportant everyday thought patterns which have become so much part of you that it hardly occurs to you to pay attention to them. Yet all the thought processes have tremendous power, and must be checked out. So many thoughts and so many automatic reactions are taken for granted, and therefore glossed over, so that their significant power is ignored. Thus you can ignore a reaction of ill will, of envy, or of blaming resentment in spite of being aware of your negative intent in other respects. But it is those little habitual reactions and habitual thoughts that must be explored.

For example, you may admit an irrational anger or a hate. You may inwardly assert that these reactions are irrational, but a part of you still feels entitled to have these feelings because that part feels unjustly treated. You still react to the past and you bring your reaction into the present. The past pain and the past anguish may really be repressed in the true sense of the word. In order to make the real, direct experience accessible, it is necessary to deal with the defense in a most thorough way. The defense is always a negative intentionality in one form or another that is not truly unconscious. Your past pain -- the experience of which you deny to yourself -- becomes a present distorted reaction. And these reactions must be seen for what they are.

Let us assume that you find yourself angry and resentful in a present situation. Generally, you may know and admit that this is your negative feeling, but emotionally you still feel right about the issue. There may be a painful confusion here. One part of you senses that your demands and your responses are unjustified. Another part of you feels so deprived, and therefore is so demanding, that it reacts as though the world ought to revolve around you. This part of you prevents you from seeing the entire picture objectively.

What is necessary at this stage is to draw out the thought that festers in you and to examine it with that part of you which is mature. You have to follow this confused thought all the way and use all your resources and all your attention to go further in your self-understanding. Then your negative feelings, with the distorted thoughts behind them, will be met by truthful, mature, and realistic thoughts. The latter must not push the former into hiding again. This ought to be stricly avoided -- and you on this path know enough by now not to te tempted into this pitfall. The process must be a conscious dialogue, as I have explained in the lecture about the general process of meditation and purification (See lecture 182). It is an integrative process that will eventually unite the split and establish an identification with your mature, constructive, genuine self.

The first step is to admit the existence of the mistaken, destructive, mean, and unrealistic attitudes. The next step is that you must know exactly why these attitudes are negative and in what way they distort the truth. Then you can intelligently consider the realistic situation, instead of your childish, distorted view of it. If you can first express the totally irrational desire and intent behind the totally destructive attitude, and then express in what way this intent opposes reality, fairness, and truth, then whatever the negativity, then you will have made another major step toward changing it into positive intentionality. You will have removed an unnecessary defense, or brittle wall, which keeps you from experiencing reality.

Your adult thinking has to express itself alongside the childish, destructive thinking about the issue in which you are so emotionally involved. This you can do if you really want to. Your thinking processes usually function quite well if and when you so desire. The thinking processes are usually the most highly developed and can be put into the service of the purification process. Only then can the feelings begin to change so that the real and already existing feelings can be allowed to manifest.

It is absolutely necessary for you to know the ramifications and the significance of your faulty attitudes. For instance, why your anger, why your hostility, why your jealousy, why your envy, and why your unfair, one-sided demands are truly unjust. Only then will you also understand that healthy anger can be justified. When this is understood, then you can experience it cleanly, without guilt, self-doubt, weakness, and lingering ill-effects. Jealousy and envy, however, are never justified, and are never healthy reactions. Though feeling anger and hurt can be justified, as long as you do not clearly know whether your anger is justified or not, then you will always be confused. You will always fluctuate between guilt and resentment, between negation and rejection of self, of others, and of life, and between fear and blame. On the one hand you will attempt to assuage your self-doubts by strenuously building cases; on the other hand, you will be paralyzed by fear and by weakness, and therefore unable to assert yourself. You will be equally weak and confused in situations where you express your irrational, childish demands, and then your destructive intent once these demands are not met, or in situations where you should protect your rights for the sake of the truth. Often both these expressions exist in one and the same situation, which makes it all the more confusing. Your mind alone cannot solve such conflicts. The destructive elements must be admitted first; but then the mind must confront them, counteract them, understand them, and correct them.

If the adult intelligence is used merely to rationalize the painful confusion, to build defensive cases, to justify one's own situation, or to protect oneself from admitting the destructive intent, then nothing is ever gained. But if the adult mind is used to shed light on the irrational demands, making it clear that they are unrealistic and unfair and showing that the resulting emotional reactions prove destructive for all concerned, then a lot will be gained and the truth of the situation will emerge.

This is the work that awaits you for the next phase on the path. You have made good progress in admitting partial negative intentionality. But often such an admission becomes in itself a subtle escape. By merely admitting a destructive feeling over and over again -- in other words, without going further and examining it so as to find out why it is wrong and how it is wrong -- you merely open yet another little back door. You seem to do the right thing, but you refuse to really go further, to go all the way.

The temptations of evil are very subtle. Every truth can be put into the service of a distortion. This is why so much vigilance is needed. This is also why doing the right thing is in itself never a guarantee of being truthful and in harmony with universal law. This is why the rules and the theory of truth and law have always been distorted by the forces of evil. There is no one formula that can protect you from evil: only good will and sincerity of heart can do so. This sincerity of heart and this good will must be cultivated again and again. It comes from the spiritual cleansing of doing the daily review, from meditation, and from the commitment to God's world of truth, of love, of honesty, and of integrity. When the willingness exists to honor decency, truth, love, and fairness more than the apparent advantages of the fearful, holding, vain little ego, then your liberation will truly proceed in no uncertain way. When this is being done on the inner levels that you are contacting through this work now -- in other words, not just superficially, on the level of the outer being -- then your purification becomes very deep.

Often you are free and honest in admitting your destructive and hateful feelings, but you still do not know why they are destructive. Any feeling is destructive when it is not the expression of the whole truth of a specific situation. This is why all the issues and all the effects on hand have to be evaluated and then understood. You must be clearly aware of where you are off center in your feelings, in your reactions, and in your inner, often secret, reasoning. The admission of negative feelings can be an escape if the admission is made glibly, perhaps because this is now expected of you, but without your truly knowing what they are all about.

Let us now return to jealousy, to envy, and to competitiveness. Why are they absolutely never true and justified feelings or emotional reactions? To some extent almost all human beings suffer from totally unrealistic feeling experiences. Children suffer from them with one of their parents or with their siblings or with their peers. Adults suffer from them with much of their environment. When someone else either has or experiences something that they do not, then ealousy, envy, and competitiveness come in. Why are these feelings unrealistic? They are unrealistic because the underlying thinking derives from the false assumption that the universe has only a limited supply of desirable things and of desirable experiences. Therefore, you conclude that what someone else receives is being taken away from you.

This is not at all obvious and clear in your mind, not even in your adult mind, let alone in those vague, confused emotions that you experience without knowing their meaning. As I mentioned before, it is already significant progress if you can admit such feelings, which you never would have done before. But this is not the final step. Now you must clearly learn why and in what way these feelings are illusory and destructive. You may know some of the words of truth, but you do not truly contemplate these words and bring them directly to bear on those negative feelings.

The moment you believe in the premise that you have reason to feel deprived because someone else has something that you do not have -- and this is the case with jealousy and envy -- then you negate the fact that it is you who cut yourself off from what you could have. In other words, it is not others who do this to you. You may even know in a different compartment of your mind how you act, how you think, and how you feel so that you wind up feeling deprived. You may have reached this awareness on your path. You may admit that you are either not willing to take the risk or not willing to pay the necessary price in order to have what a part of you longs for and another part of you negates. But you still do not bring this knowledge to bear on your envy of what others have, or on your anxiety that others may have more, or on your resentment that they do have more than you do.

Therefore, it would be wise if you first examined the areas of your jealousy and of your competitiveness very closely; second, if you admitted that whatever it is you envy, you also push away; and third, if you examined how you negate it, how you reject certain aspects of the thing that you envy, things which are necessary for acquiring what you envy. This would lead you to the realization that those whom you envy must have fulfilled the natural law that is inherent in all creative experience. The more you do so, the deeper will be your understanding of the fact that the universe yields unlimited good to all entities who are open to receive it. Therefore nothing needs to be begrudged.

When you envy, then see how you deliberately destroy your chance of realizing your happiness by a particular attitude which leads to a specific behavior pattern. See how you close yourself off and how you stay with the negative attitudes which deny your fulfillment. In other words, you do not make the bridge between these attitudes and either your emptiness or your unfulfillment. Therefore, you become more embittered and you feel more entitled to be resentful and negative.

The realization of your own responsibility for the unfulfillment of your needs should not and must not drive your destructive intentions into hiding again. One of the most important attitudes to acquire for proper self-respect and self-acceptance is the ability to admit being wrong without feeling unworthy and unlovable. This is a great struggle. People believe that in order to be lovable and honorable they must never be wrong. This belief brings so much havoc and confusion. It is in fact possible to admit destructiveness without feeling hopelessly worthless.

When you are jealous and envious, then it means that you lack faith in the universal reality. This reality is unlimited abundance if you but open your heart, your mind, your consciousness, and your receptive faculties. However, when you are hooked on negative intentionality, then it is impossible to be receptive. Receptivity is part and parcel of positive intentionality. Negativity and receptivity are therefore mutually exclusive. The negative person is thus constantly deprived. To one who is negative it appears that it is the outside world which does the depriving. But in reality it is that person who cuts himself off from the reality of the world's ever available abundance.

Competitiveness -- which is a variation of envy and of jealousy -- also departs from the wrong premise that self-value is determined by measuring and comparing the self with others. This, too, is a total distortion of reality. No human being can be measured and compared with another. No matter how accomplished, how adequate, how creative, and how fulfilled other people are, they are not better than you and they are not more than you. In other words, they are not any more favored or any more privileged than you who envy them. They have possibly found their niche in life, their fulfillment, and their center, while you still negate, while you still struggle against being in your center, while you still struggle against realizing your own potential.

So you put yourself in the most preposterous position of negating the riches of the universe, and then doubting the universe and its natural laws which want nothing more than to bestow upon you the greatest fulfillment, expansion, and joyful self-expression. You willfully doubt and negate abundance under the guise of intellectual considerations, and yet you inwardly begrudge what others have.

I cannot emphasize enough that your understanding of the destructive and contradictory attitudes contained in envy, in jealousy, in resentment, in competitiveness, in blame, and so on should not drive these feelings underground again. They must remain on the surface and be seen for what they are, until you genuinely change these energy currents. Do not forget that every feeling consumes energy. This wasted energy cannot work for you, but must work against you in a way that will both hurt you and deprive you, for you are driving a separating wedge between yourself and the richness of creation.

This lecture is meant to motivate you to calmly observe, to probe for, to measure, to examine, and to evaluate your destructive intentions, and then to understand why and how they are destructive. Do the same with the truthful and realistic attitudes in comparison. Ask for guidance and for inspiration for this process. Ask for help so as to experience increasingly the abundance of the universe. Then you will not have to struggle with the little mind and push and grab and grasp on the one hand, and deny and negate on the other. Denial and negation express distrust. The energetic movement of denial and negation is a closing up, which makes it totally impossible for the universe to come to you and to give you its riches. Only when you are open and receptive can the universe give you its riches. The universe is so rich, so fertile, so malleable with the creative power of the mind that it will give you anything that you allow yourself to receive, provided this giving does not violate the law of love.

When you first open up to being in a receptive state, then you must also be prepared to let out what is in you. To be open and receptive means to be undefended, to be inwardly relaxed, to be unafraid of whatever may come -- whether from inside of you or from outside of you. For example, if you fear and therefore ward off pain, or if you do not know that you can experience pain without falling apart, then you cannot possibly be in an open, undefended, relaxed state of soul and of mind. If you defend against an undesirable feeling or a negative experience, then you automatically acquire evil -- in other words, negative attitudes.

Hence, the first step toward establishing a receptive attitude is to let out the evil that is in you, to no longer deny it, to lose your fear of your destructive self. Then you can experience pain. And as you lose your fear of self, your fear of pain, and your fear of evil, then you will be in the appropriate state of receptivity. If your consciousness then actively prepares for the riches of the universe and conceives of whatever it contains, then you will see that you participate in the abundance of the universe to the exact degree that you desire.

Know that the abundance of the creative power that is at your disposal must transcend every limitation that you seem to encounter. Whatever hurdle you may come across, if you can believe that the creative divine force can eliminate it, then it will be done. This is not a magical power that works for you without making you deeply responsible for the process of creation. On the contrary, it is a lawful process that involves you totally and that makes you totally self-responsible. For example, if you doubt that you can overcome an ingrained negative attitude, then this doubt must create an apparently insurmountable obstacle to your purification. But if you assume responsibility for this evil, while also knowing that you are an expression of the Divine Power which can create anything you wish, then your purification will be accomplished. The more you know that, the faster it will be done.

Open yourself so as to let out what is in you and so as to let in what the universe is ready to give you. This means that what comes out of you must also be pursued further, as I explained in this lecture. Bring together the level of your feelings and the level of your mind. Probe first for the meaning of your feeling experience, then for the validity of such a feeling, and third for the reality behind such a feeling. In other words, find out if the assumption that underlies a specific feeling reaction is valid. It is not enough to know vaguely that a feeling is unrealistic and therefore destructive. Such vague knowledge only helps you to maintain an underlying belief. This belief must first be unearthed, then it must be reconsidered, third it must be understood exactly, and finally it must be changed. A destructive attitude is the expression of an underlying value judgment. These value judgments must be very clear as to their accuracy or their fallacy. You must be clear about the interpretations you choose to make when you have certain reactions, and you must know where they are true and where they are false. Grope for that reality when those little, inadvertent emotional reactions go on in you which you usually leave unattended. In other words, do not overlook them. Use time and concentration in a relaxed manner to pursue this aspect of your pathwork.

Doubt can be eliminated only when you first make room for and then try out a trusting attitude. If you merely admit your distrust, but without going further to find out what it means, why it is wrong, and how it could possibly be otherwise, then you must remain in the status quo. So it is with many of you at this point on the path. You can say: "Yes, I have hate in me. Yes I have envy in me. Yes I have blame in me. Yes I have bitterness in me. Yes I have irrational demands in me," or whatever they may be. "Yes, I am spiteful. Yes I want to destroy. Yes I am jealous. Yes I want to take everything and give nothing." But if you do not examine the deeper meaning of these attitudes -- in other words, if you do not fully realize how unrealistic your underlying assumptions, beliefs, and interpretations are -- then you cannot give up the defensive negativity and come to experience life. You have to examine the thinking and the conclusions inherent within your spite, inherent within your distrust, inherent within your jealousy, inherent within your hostility, and so on, because these conclusions exist only in your mind.

Human beings have all kinds of little thoughts every day and every hour of their lives. They do not pay attention to them, but these thoughts mean a lot. Your thoughts have so much power. All thoughts create. Both your thoughts and your feelings create your actions and your experiences. They create the state of your body, they create the state of your mind, they create the state of your soul, and they create the state of your spirit.

The negative intentionality that we recently discussed and brought out into the open is a stark reality. It is a creative process -- negatively creative, but just as creative as when you build a positive experience. You still do not wish to see this, even though you admit your negative intentionality. Admit that you deliberately wish to maintain and to perpetuate a negative expression in some area of your life, though not in all areas of course. For when you negate the effects of this negativity on others, then you must be blind when their negativity affects you. This is a painful and confusing state. Such an interaction can be resolved only when you know your own part clearly, only when you can see your negativity as a distortion of reality, and only when you can see the effect it has on others.

To the extent that you negate, and therefore ignore, the effect that you have on others, to that extent you will vaguely feel something disquieting. In such a state you will be confused about the negativity of others reaching you. In other words, you will not know what it all means. You will sense something and you will fluctuate between resentment and guilt, as I mentioned before. This lack of clarity about yourself must make you weak, frightened, wrongly assertive, and inappropriately unassertive.

In this state you will be unable to distinguish between the actual negativity on the part of others toward you and the attitude of others that is not negative at all but perhaps merely inconvenient to you. You will feel just as resentful and just as unfairly treated and just as injured as when people are truly mean and truly spiteful to you because of their own negative intentionality. However, when you know yourself, then you will also know the difference between these two possibilities in others, and therefore you will respond appropriately to these two entirely different experiences. As it is now, you are unable to distinguish between these two phenomena. Hence you often try to assert your rights when you really do not allow others to have theirs, because you simply wish to be a greedy, demanding, and unreasonable child. On the other hand, you are often equally blind to the negativity in others and you falsely placate them, only vaguely sensing that there is something wrong. You may resent them and rebel against them, but this is not a clean and clear reaction that comes from deep self-knowledge and from understanding your inner unreality.

This confusion in your interaction with others is extremely important for you to understand and to use as a yardstick. When you are clear within yourself, then you will not be upset about the other person's negativity and destructiveness toward you: you will know it for what it is. You may become angry, but you will not be confused, weak, guilty, or afraid, nor will you be diminished and annihilated. By the same token, when the other person expresses his life, his feelings, or his rights which may not coincide with your desires, then you will be able to accept this. First you will know how unjustified your rage is, but then, if you truly understand it, your rage must vanish and you will allow others to be, even if that interferes with your desire, with what you want.

The little infant will then no longer make its claims of "all for me and my will, never mind others." These claims must be expressed, but they must be known to be deeply unrealistic and destructive. It also needs to be understood how and why they are so. Only when this awareness is full and clean will you be free and will you liberate yourself from the terribly painful confusion about others dealing with you that I mentioned earlier. You will no longer feel uncertain about what your appropriate reactions to others should be.

This is the way to reach the position of being willing and able to give up your negative intent and your negative expressions into life. In other words, this is the way to make the transition into positive intentionality. The positive expression is, for example, to give up the jealousy because you can genuinely wish to obtain what you covet and because you are prepared to pay the price. You will want to examine in what way you grab without accepting the necessary conditions which you refute. Cultivate this thought: "There is enough for me. I can allow others to have. Let them have it. Do I really want it? Do I pay the price for what I envy? Do I really make my commitment to whatever it is that I resent and envy other people for? If I do not make these commitments, then do I have the right to want to take it from them or to begrudge them for having it?" Then you can pray for your ability to love, right in the here and now in this respect. In other words, to let others have their joy.

As you treat yourself, so must you inevitably treat others. This is known to you. But the reverse is equally true; as you treat others, so will you treat yourself. If -- out of your generosity and your fairness -- you let others have what they want, then you will suddenly find that you can also let yourself have what you want. The great anxiety that you still experience when you expand and open up to the universe will gradually -- and sometimes suddenly -- disappear. You will be able to sustain your experience of the joyous universe as it constantly vibrates within you and around you. It constantly instructs you. You will recognize the voice of truth and love. You will feel and experience the manifestation of rich joy. But you will not as long as your heart and your mind are small and tight, as long as you do not want to let others have it, as long as you contain your positive forces in a fearful, untrusting, and spiteful attitude. But when you can risk and trust in God -- and you overtly express this trust in God's world -- then you will know the joy of reality.

The time has come when more and more of you can take these steps of transition, but not by negating the evil and the underlying pain, but by taking the realistic steps by which the evil becomes transformed. You will allow yourself the full experience of all your feelings and you will give power to your consciousness to govern the life that you want to have. Are you afraid of this or that experience? You can immediately create a new condition by stating into yourself: "Is it really necessary for me to be afraid? Is it possible for me to experience this or that joy, for me to experience this or that creative self-expression, for me to experience this or that pleasure?" Or you can say: "Is it possible for me to first experience my pain, to experience my anguish, to experience my fear, and to experience my despair in a safe and wholesome way? I now claim this ability so that I can go through the latter and come to the former."

This is positive creation at work. This can be done. Request your inner guidance at every step of the way, and ask it to give you alertness and awareness so as not to push underground what must be dealt with. As you do this, not only you will you know in every fiber of your being, but you will feel and experience that what you fear is an illusion and that the universe is a rich and joyous place. (Here the force was given to a few people. About the force see Lectures 185 and 186.)

All of you who have received the special force today take it in and let it merge with your own power, for it is but one power. The power that comes from here will merely help you to open your own channels, so that your creative power can then pour out of you.

I will now leave you with this energy. Meditate with it; work with it; open up, as you have done in the recent months increasingly. Let this energy envelop you and move you to where you have to go. Let the inspiration come, so that all of you who are here will come to express it in your own way. Be a channel so that this energy can help you to the next step on your path -- wherever you may be, or whatever this may mean in each case. I ask all of you in your meditation after this lecture to try to express your trust in the universe; to try to think that you can indeed have abundance, that you can inded have joy, and that you can indeed have the fulfillment of your life, of your incarnation -- and know that such fulfillment brings you a deep peace. Be blessed, all of you, my dear ones.

February 11, 1972