Perfection -- Immortality -- Omnipotence

By The Pathwork Guide

Greetings and divine blessings for all of you, my dearest friends. Divine love is like an immense mantle of finely spun gold permeating the universe, enveloping everything and everyone existing in all of creation. This is an ongoing state of reality, in essence always accessible. It is only the disconnected mind that does not perceive it and that moves itself out of grace, as it were. But it is not really removed from it, it only seems that way. Then this illusion becomes a reality for the consciousness that is involved in this narrow illusion. As you grow on your path and as you find forever more and forever deeper connections with yourself, with what is in you now, you finally connect with that essence of you that is that state of grace I just described.

Your innermost universe is also the outermost universe, and vice versa. There truly is no separation. Just as time is an illusion, so is inside and outside an illusion too. It is just as much an illusion as your being separated from that mantle of divine love which is also you, for you are part of that mantle. It is not only given to you, or available to you, you are it.

I know that these are difficult concepts to comprehend, let alone to experience in your present state, a state in which a condensation of energy and consciousness has created little nuclei, as it were. Perhaps I might use the analogy of an airpocket to convey the nature or the life of matter. In the immense sea of divine reality there are, here and there, airpocket-like formations and configurations that are the products of certain states of consciousness. To those who created this particular condensation, and who are in this state of consciousness, the creation seems unique and isolated. Other than it nothing seems to exist, for what exists produced by other states of consciousness and development cannot be focused on and perceived. The airpocket that you live in represents your present reality. It may be an entirely different airpocket for others whom you can see and hear, but who live in a different world and who, therefore, have created a different configuration.

The higher self of man is the ever existing grace of God, that mantle of love, of truth, and of beauty that permeates all of being. Your higher self knows of states of reality that your conscious mind knows nothing about. Only on the journey to your innermost being do you gradually expand the knowledge and the experience that come from your higher self and that penetrate the mind of your conscious personality. What the higher self knows to be a fact, to be a reality, becomes somehow distorted, somehow no longer quite what it is in the limited state of perception of the conscious mind. In other words, when the knowledge of truth, the knowledge of the higher self, is perceived through the maze of the ego consciousness, then that same knowledge becomes somehow untrue, somehow distorted.

In this lecture I will speak about three such particular states of reality, which in the higher self are beautiful, but which in the ego consciousness become untrue, off center, distorted, and what you may call neurotic. Therefore, they must be abandoned first on that level of consciousness before they can re-emerge as truth on a deeper level of consciousness. This is very important to understand. Man constantly battles because he assumes that something is always either right or wrong. Yet one and the same thing can be truth on one level and untruth on another.

The three aspects which I want to discuss in this lecture are perfection, immortality, and omnipotence. Let us see how these three states of reality compare when they are experienced in the higher self consciousness and when they are experienced on the personality level. It will help you a great deal if you really assimilate what I attempt to give you here. Let us begin with perfection. The striving of the higher self for perfection is a legitimate movement. For the soul knows that this state of reality exists as a living, breathing reality of its own. The perfection of the spiritual reality is very different, however, from the way the ego conceives of it. Perfection in reality is an ever-changing flux. There is nothing static about it. One thing is not in opposition to another. Truth, beauty, love are ever-changing manifestations, always changing appropriately to the occasion. Therefore, perfection is a constantly moving state. But the perfection conceived of by the ego consciousness is static, limited, and exclusive, rather than inclusive. Therefore, it deteriorates into perfectionism. When this happens, then duality takes its toll. In other words, one thing seems good, while another thing seems bad.

Striving for perfection from the ego's point of view must be given up in order to truly reach the perfection of the higher self. Let us consider the motives for perfection on both levels, that of the conscious ego personality and that of the higher self. And then let us look at some of the qualities and traits manifesting in both these states.

The motive -- if there is such a thing from the higher self point of view -- for being perfect and for wanting perfection is love. It is the recognition that only in a state of pure love can the creation be furthered and can the great evolutionary plan be aided. God is perfect. Therefore, the Godself is perfect. It is perfect in wisdom, it is perfect in love, it is perfect in beauty, it is perfect in all-inclusiveness, it is perfect in its undivided reality, in which what is good and desirable for one must also be so for all the others. It is a relaxed state of being in which no fear, no pride, and no selfwill exist. It IS for its own sake -- simple and pure. It harbors within itself a state of deep self-recognition that contains just as much respect and just as much love for the self as for all the other creations. Hence no proving is necessary. It is wide open and it knows no formula and no rigid rule. The inner freedom and the security make it possible for the entity to spontaneously decide when to be soft and when to strongly assert a position. There is no maudlin sentimentality that fearfully shrinks from confrontation. The courage to risk rejection for the sake of help and for the sake of truth exists, but without deteriorating into an extreme position of punitive self-righteousness. Expanding, giving, and the joyous, vigorous expression of divine reality surge forth in the state of positive aggression, as well as in the state of soft receptivity and acceptance. Perfection is a breathing, living force that heals, that grows, and that creates because it exists for its own sake. In that state it constantly expresses a variety of divine qualities: love, truth, justice, beauty, creative vigor, vitality, and myriad expressions of the self and of life, forever alternating for the innate purpose of spreading divine reality into all of the void. This is a very limited explanation, for human words do not exist to describe this state. You need to use your innermost feelings, the intuitive faculties of your inner soul, to feel what I mean to convey here.

How does the striving for perfection look from the level of the ego personality? What are the motives? What are the attitudes? Obviously there is pride. It is the need to be perfect in order to be better than others. In that feeling there is already a total distortion of reality. This is a distortion that is very difficult to convey. All I can say here is what I have mentioned often. When you compare in this manner, then you are in the illusion that there is a limited quota of perfection available, so that you have to jealously guard your own and take it away from another in order to reach your goal. At the same time, another person's already developed state appears to diminish you. So, your attempt to become perfect at the expense of others defeats your very aim, for nothing could be less perfect than the inner greed, the jealousy, the envy, the tight ambitiousness, and the vanity involved here, not to speak of the very imperfect, limited view of life in which such exclusiveness seems a reality to you.

Another distortion in striving for perfection on the personality level is the fear of the inner imperfection. It is the hidden sense of worthlessness that is never squarely faced, comprehended, and worked through in its details and small everyday manifestations. Instead, a mask of perfectionism is put on in order to prove both to the world and to the self that this suspected -- and deeply feared -- worthlessness does not exist. Perfection then becomes a superimposed solution for the existing worthlessness that you do not want first to examine and then to experience. So here we are also dealing with evasion -- hence with untruth. You are untruthful in the sense of not wanting to see what you really feel and what you really think about yourself, but instead you pretend by striving for an appearance. On the ego level, perfection is an outer-directed thing, for the sake of others, for the sake of appearance.

If perfection, which is a divine state, is being sought in a state of untruth, then the false search must lead to a rigid distortion, a caricature of the real state of perfection. In this prideful, fearful, untruthful attitude you also lack faith in your deeper nature. Therefore, you hurriedly try to pretend being in a perfect state that has not developed organically. The pretense of appearing perfect -- and this may apply only to specific aspects of the personality and not to the total personality -- implies a deep dishonesty on the part of the lower self. It is truly cheating by wanting to skip the laborious work of becoming and wanting to attain the desirable result without paying the price. This, in turn, increases guilt and a sense of worthlessness that is diffuse and not pinpointed in conscious awareness.

Perfectionism is always blind and unsure, and therefore is rule-bound. It often uses truth in a misplaced way. For example, in generalizations that do not fit the occasion. Then the self becomes at times wrongly soft where confrontation and assertion would be appropriate, and at times intolerant and judgmental where acceptance would be appropriate. For many personalities either one or the other of these two attitudes seems to be godly or right, and therefore is used blindly, because it has become structured into the personality. Since the deep lack of faith in the self is not faced, then it is always projected outward in an attitude of being cynical and negative toward the world. Alternately, a false faith is put on. The self-judgments that are not being faced openly distort the personality into becoming self-righteously severe with others. Religionists often distort reality in that way, and then they rationalize their narrow attitude by using religious doctrines. Yet it is also possible to project self-indulgence and guilt in a different way by becoming overly permissive and sentimental, so that a false, mask-self acceptance develops that is only an appearance.

You can see that the claim for perfection must be abandoned for the sake of the truthfulness and the humility of accepting your imperfection. That is the threshold through which you must go in order to gradually make room for the ever-existing and ever-unfolding perfection of your soul, a perfection that will be experienced very differently when you approach it in this way. The humility of giving up perfectionism and the honesty to pay the price for developing slowly into a more genuinely perfect being are indispendable prerequisites -- they are, in fact, already aspects of perfection. It may seem paradoxical: accepting humbly your limitations, your imperfect state, and looking at it creatively, constructively and specifically so as to understand it and to make the necessary connections, is already a manifestation of the Godhead within.

Now we come to immortality. Again the state of the soul, the state of reality that the higher self knows to exist, is immortality. However, when the consciousness is disconnected from the higher self, then the message of the higher self becomes warped. Therefore, the translation of this awareness reaches the conscious thinking process as the fear of death, just as the message of the higher self that perfection is possible reaches the conscious personality as the fear of imperfection. The fear of death says really, on the deepest level: "I want to experience the state of immortality that I know exists, even though I am temporarily caught in the dualistic airpocket of life versus death -- an either/or." In that experience, in that vision, when you are in one, then you do not see the other. Therefore, you fear giving up the one for the other.

The fear of death implies a lack of faith in the ever-ongoing reality of all life, of all consciousness. However, when selfwill and fear motivate the conscious mind of the outer personality, then this truth of immortality is distorted and is looked for in order to avoid the fear of death. Adopting the spiritual principle of immortality in order to deny the feeling in which the fear of death may still exist is a neurotic manifestation. The personality fears to go through the tunnel of his own fear. Only when that tunnel is faced with courage, as all feared feelings must be, and is gone through, will the eternal life become an experienced reality, whether you are in the body or outside the body.

The motivation for believing in immortality plays a tremendous role here. If you hide your fear of death, your lack of faith, your disconnectedness from your inner creation of this dark fear, and if you superimpose on them the truth from outside, then you have to abandon immortality and accept your mortality until you can become truly immortal.

Now let us look at the third of this triad, omnipotence. Again, the state of ultimate reality of the soul knows its own omnipotence, its own Godness. In other words, it knows of its own power to create, of its own power to heal, of its own power to create worlds, and of its own power to re-create the self in myriad joyful forms and to dissolve these forms and to re-create them. This state of omnipotence is perceived in a distorted form -- like the other two -- by the conscious personality. When this distorted message from the higher self state comes through the thin funnel of the channel that exists as yet very narrowly, then its manifestation is the childish claim for omnipotence that you all know exists in infants -- and that exists in the infantile aspects of the adult as well. In that distorted, immature state the selfwill dictates total omnipotence: "I want it my way. There must be no obstacles, no delays, regardless of the cost to others. I want my will done immediately, regardless of the consequences." That sense of omnipotence of the outer personality is an insistence on magical solutions that are supposed to eliminate dealing with the self-created reality now; for example, the need to deal with frustration, with pain, with difficulties, with struggle: to learn from them and to grow from them.

Obviously, this is destructive. It implies selfishness, lovelessness, a ruthless disregard for others to the point of cruelty, unrealism (the false belief that the obstacles can disappear by a sheer act of will, rather than by learning from them through acceptance and thus transcending them), a limited outlook on the reality of creation, lack of trust or faith and, again, the cheating that wants to avoid the labor of the struggle of growth.

Therefore, it is necessary for the growing, maturing individual to abandon his claim for omnipotence and for magic -- with all the negative traits that are inherent in this claim -- and to have the humility to accept his limitations. Once you do this, then you can go through the doorway and gradually expand your power to create. But then this occurs on that other level and in a totally different way.

The motive on the higher self level for experiencing the divine state of omnipotence has nothing to do with pride, with selfwill, or with fear. It does not exclude others, but it always includes them. It is a powerful force of self-expression that never infringes on others. The omnipotence attempted by the immature state always infringes on others and wants to limit them for the sake of its own greater power. It tries to subjugate others and then to use them as tools for its own omnipotence. The divine state of omnipotence enjoys the equal omnipotence of others. In this state there is never a power struggle between the entities.

So let us see how you need to give up a state in order to regain it on another level in a different way. You need to temporarily lose sight of the goal. You need to give up your claim for perfection for the ego reasons of fear, of pride, of comparison, of vanity, of the fear of your insufficiency. You need to have the humility to see your imperfections. That is the surest and the fastest way to make you more perfect.

Your belief in immortality needs to be abandoned temporarily, even though it may be accurate, because in spite of this belief you still cannot conceive of the change -- of the switch of consciousnesss on a feeling and experiential level -- that takes place when the body is left behind. In other words, these are still only words for all of you. And when you use these words in order to deny your vague unrest, your anxiety, or your fear -- the fear of that unknown state -- by superimposing on it true principles and the facts of the greater life, then it is important that you temporarily give them up. Then you need to admit your fear, to admit your puzzlement, to admit your state of anxiety, to admit your feeling of being totally at a loss. For you are truly confronted with a wall through which as yet you cannot penetrate. It is true that this wall is of your own making. It is true that this wall is a result of your disconnectedness and of the turn which your mind has taken in the particular airpocket of your condensed reality. However, that self-created wall can crumble only when you accept its existence and you let yourself feel the feelings that this self-created wall elicits in you. So you need not abandon the ideas. But you need to admit that the ideas are only ideas for you and that your feelings are still far removed from them. You also need to admit that you fear that black wall of the unknown which you must traverse.

You have to go through similar walls of the unknown practically every day of your life if you wish to live fully and not in self-limitation and in self-deprivation. The more you do this willingly, the more the walls will dissolve, even the great wall. Then this will make it possible for you to experience this switch of consciousness even while you are still living in the body. You traverse walls of unknown terror in your pathwork as a result of your commitment to your feelings, feelings that you had denied: pain, hate, self-rejection, guilt, rage, all shades of fear and terror, as well as the often even more feared feelings of love, of sexuality, of bliss, of oneness. As you learn to travel through these feelings, in spite of the initial fear to do so, you traverse black walls and then you experience a wonderful new freedom, a wonderful new liberation, a wonderful new enrichment. A previously unknown state becomes a known state. It does no good to tell yourself how you believe that these feelings are not to be feared, while you avoid experiencing them. In other words, while you avoid going through the dark tunnel which they seem to be. Only then are you truly free of them so that your fear of them will never return to the same degree. As you repeat this every time the fear of your residual feeling surges up again -- until eventually no fear of any residual fear or of any inner state remains -- you will find that it is the same with the great fear of the apparent final tunnel.

When you embrace expansion into new territory in your daily life -- in other words, when you stop hindering your expansion because you have the basic faith and the basic courage to go into an unknown state -- then you make the unknown into a known. Every feared unknown -- whether it be a feeling that you designate as being negative, or whether it be an expanded new state of experience that is truly positive -- seems to you a black wall that you fear, and therefore that you wish to avoid. Thus, you prevent the ever-flowing movement of your life from taking its natural course. So, by temporarily abandoning the outer belief in -- or the hope for, or the principle of, or the theory of -- immortality and by accepting your fear of mortality, you can go through a black wall and thereby you truly realize immortality as an experienced fact. The same holds true with perfection, with omnipotence, and with many other states of reality not discussed here. This is also true of the feelings you are terrified of. Once you traverse them, then you will experience the true state that proves that these feelings are not to be feared.

As to omnipotence, you are already working extensively on this on your path. You discover the infant in you that demands omnipotence and magical solutions. If you express these claims and these desires, then you must also express the rage that inevitably ensues when these desires cannot be fulfilled. You need to learn to accept the limitation of your present personality. That personality is limited. You need humility to accept this and you need faith to give up what you believe you must have right now, especially if it is a forceful movement that disregards the rhythm of life, both of your life and of the life of others. Only by that action of love, of trust, of decency, of honesty, and of humility can you then come back to omnipotence in an entirely new and different way. You are in the process of discovering new strength, new creative power, new abilities, and new intuitive faculties that you never thought possible before. These are a result of your giving up the false version of perfection, the false version of immortality, the false version of omnipotence -- and the false version of other states into which you need to develop gradually.

You can see, my friends, that when states of reality on the level of cosmic truth and creation filter through the limited opening into the ego personality and are misunderstood and distorted by the conscious personality, then these same states, which are divine truth, become lies and neurotic manifestations.

Mankind's confusion of these states at this point of your time, of your history, is very significant. Let us shed light on the evolutionary movement in this respect. When religion was strongly represented in the life of humanity, then this truth was postulated. But at that point in its development, humanity had to first consider these principles intellectually. In the state of its development at the time these principles could not possibly have been followed emotionally. But it was a necessary beginning at a certain stage of development. It is always like this. First a new idea has to be considered -- it has to be taken into consideration -- before it can be incorporated into the deeper consciousness. These new truthful ideas must first come from the outside in order to facilitate the opening of the channel, so that then they can be borne out by and experienced from the inner self. Higher developed factions of the inner religious movements always knew that these states of perfection exist within man as a potentiality to be realized. They always knew that God is within and they always postulated this. However, at that time it could not be more than a theory and a far-away goal. Then this truth was misunderstood, misrepresented, and misused by the prideful, domineering, fearful ego. As a result, perfect states were forced, pretended, and punitively dictated in order to allay the fear of facing the places where these states could not yet exist within the personality.

This abuse and this misuse -- in other words, this dangerous escape from the necessary developmental steps -- necessitated a new movement in your history. This came with psychology. As psychology developed, then these distorted manifestations were recognized by it as being illusory pseudo-solutions. They were designated as neurotic states that the individual abandoned naturally as he became more mature, at least to some degree. In the best of instances there was an acceptance of limitation, of imperfection, and of mortality through psychology.

Then, however, this very important psychological movement also began to deteriorate as a result of the dualistic state, in that it lost sight of the fact that yet another step existed. Yet another level had to be reached, one in which the false became true again. In regard to the triad of this lecture, perfection, immortality, and omnipotence truly do exist. So a total denial of these states by psychology is equally untrue, although at first necessary in order to follow the curve of growth.

In the New Age, in which everything leads first to a discovery of and then to a fusion with the inner levels -- in other words, to a fusion of the dualities, of the either/or principle -- it will be found that neither are you perfect now, nor do you give up perfection forever; that neither are you immortal now, nor do you give up immortality forever; that neither are you omnipotent now, nor do you remain limited and separated forever. You will find that different truths apply to different levels. On the outer level of your personality you are indeed not perfect; you are indeed mortal; you are indeed far from omnipotent. But contained within you absolute perfection exists already, immortality exists already, omnipotence exists already. But only as you abandon your insistence on possessing them right away will you know what is perfect and what is not perfect, what is life and what is death, what is power and what is weakness.

When you are in the dualistic confusion, then you do not know. You often think that you know what is perfect and what is imperfect. But you do not, because you do not understand and you cannot see far enough into the chain reactions. You do not perceive the dynamics. Often you believe that something is death when it is really life, and that it is life when it is really death. For example, when you deaden your faculty to feel, your faculty to deeply experience, your faculty to vibrate with life, then you think that you are alive. And when you slip through the gate, then you think that you are dead. Even during life in the body you believe that experiencing your pain is death, that experiencing your terror is death, that experiencing your imagined worthlessness is death. In other words, you believe that experiencing any of these states will annihilate you. When you muster the courage to go through it in a real way, then you will find that you have gained new life. In fact, in those feelings that you had feared as death itself is contained so much of your life energy, so much of the vitality that you have deliberately deadened. So you see, my friends, even knowing what is the one and what is the other cannot be possible on the level of the personality, of the conscious mind now. When you truly know this, then you will learn not to insist on the perfection, on the immortality, and on the omnipotence that grow out of your fear, out of your lack of faith, out of your self-hate, out of your limited vision, out of your pride, out of your impatience, and out of your distrustfulness. You will learn to abandon them as you go through the feelings that create your urgency to be in these states. Thus you will traverse gates, tunnels, and walls.

One more aspect about the connection between the conscious mind and the higher self. As you can perceive from the foregoing, when the connection is partial -- and the fact that it is only a partial connection is not comprehended -- then damage might occur. The same process that I explained with these three aspects can exist in many other ways. I do not mean to imply that the conscious mind should not attempt to connect with the higher self. Quite the contrary. But what is important is to know that a beautiful opening in only one area is no guarantee that a similar opening exists in all the other areas. There are human beings who have established a connection with their higher self -- and therefore a working channel -- in a certain area of their inner life. Therefore, in that area there may may be a flowing, beautiful channel. As a result, there the conscious mind can be inspired, guided, and instructed by its inner God. But if the conscious personality then believes that this fact means that he is now truly safe because he has the connection in all of the areas of his inner life, then that false belief could become a danger. Where the disconnectedness still exists, then there the channel is not open. Therefore, the higher self cannot come through, no matter how open and how truthful it may be in another area. It is a mistake to believe that an open channel in one area guarantees that it can instruct you truthfully or to believe that it can point out the blind spots that still exist in the personality. Where the personality is still resistant, blocked, defended -- and has a stake either in not knowing or in not admitting this attitude -- then there the channel cannot function.

This is a specific danger point on the road to opening the divine channel. Many have faltered here. Before the channel opens up, then this danger does not exist to the same degree. Other dangers exist instead. But once a channel has been established, then the false belief exists that the divine self -- which functions and which communicates so beautifully in that one area -- can point out where the blind spots are. Such a person will then become self-enclosed. The still existing pride may close him to any help from others, who may be able to point out to him what the channel cannot reveal. Now that more of you experience this newly awakened channel as an immense source of joy and strength, let me particularly warn you about this, so that the pitfall can be avoided. Many highly developed spiritual innovators and channels have later deteriorated because of their ignorance of these dynamics. The inner God never forces something on the self that the self does not actively seek. This is a law that is never broken. This is why continuing the pathwork with a helper and with your friends in a group is so essential -- perhaps in a different sense -- even more after the channel begins to work.

Ask yourself: Where do I still resist and defend? Where do I hold on and have a stake in not letting in anything that seems threatening to me? To the degree that you can acknowledge that such an attitude in you does exist, to that degree you are already better off, for then you have the tools to work on it and you understand that this wrong attitude limits both your perception of reality and your channel to your higher self. Even where the open channel functions already, it might be mistranslated -- and therefore misused -- in order to perpetuate the resistance. Such distortions exist not only in regard to the triad I discussed here, but in many areas of life, too numerous to list. Be aware of this possibility! An incomplete opening and a partial state of receptivity -- in other words, being still in a partial state of defendedness -- distorts the messages from the higher self, whether they come in the form a longing, in the form of a striving that is not articulated, or in the form of actual instructions and words.

Your path is a blessed, blessed venture. If only you could see the difference in your inner landscape after the initial steps that you have undertaken. And they are always the most difficult steps. If only you could see the still more glorious, expanded inner landscape that will become your homeground when your commitment to all of yourself and to the truth of being is constantly renewed until it is rooted in you! If you learn to have faith during the occasional periods of darkness in your life, then these periods will shorten as your path progresses. They will become less fearsome and less frequent. Continue on your beautiful journey, my beloved friends, there is no better one. All of you are blessed every step on your way, in love and in faith. Be your God.

October 22, 1975