The Text - Section 176
176. OVERCOMING NEGATIVITY
Greetings and blessings for everyone of my friends. This lecture is a continuation of the last
one, in which we discussed the importance of mind, of consciousness, with its creative aspects and
powers. We were also talking about negative creation -- an ongoing process in every human being.
If you were not negatively involved with creation, you would not be human, you would not
live on this plane of consciousness, which expresses a particular degree of development. Human
beings are, in general, free to a degree, so that they create quite constructively also. But negative
creation is still continuing in the human psyche. This means that it is humanity's task on this earth
to struggle out of its negative creation and become more and more free from the snares of
negativity. This is not easy, for the fascination with any creative process takes hold of a person, so
that he or she wants to remain in it. Thus a person becomes involved with any number of vicious
circles simultaneously, which seem difficult to break. It is my task now to help you step by step to
loosen the hold of your negative involvement in distorted creative processes.
I shall continue with the specific aspects with which the pathwork is particularly concerned.
Many of you begin to find within yourselves the truth of your own negativity, and you can even
acknowledge that your negativity is deliberate and see how you hang on to it. Reaching this step is
of tremendous significance. There is no greater difference conceivable between human beings who
know that they create their own fate, know that they wish to be negative no matter how undesirable
that is, and yet retain this attitude, and those who are ignorant of this fact. Anyone who is on a path
that genuinely leads to the realization of the universal self must come to this personal insight.
Otherwise the path one takes leads to illusion and deals merely with theoretical speculation or
alienated idealization and not real live experience.
Since you are human, my friends, every one of you creates negatively. Your deliberate
negative attitudes and feelings, which you do not want to give up, are a creation. To believe that
your unhappiness and your suffering are inflicted upon you by others or by life is utter folly. It is
insanity to believe that any unhappiness can accrue from something outside of or other than the self.
You may have known this theoretically a long, long time, and paid lip service to it. But there is a
world of difference between an intellectual assent and the clear-cut realization that you indeed create
negatively, that the very unhappiness you deplore and render others responsible for is caused by
negative attitudes you actually enjoy and want to maintain. If you ascribe your frustrations, your
unfulfillment, or your pains to society you are completely wrong. This does not mean that the ills
you see in society do not really exist. They do. But they could not affect you if you were not deeply,
and still unconsciously, contributing to those very ills you so much deplore. You do it precisely by
your negativity which you still continue to express in your private life.
This truth may be hard to believe when you are still at the very beginning of such a path as
this. But once you are seriously involved in it, you must come to see that it is just that way. You are
never an innocent victim, and society itself is but the sum total or product of your and many other
people's constant negative production and creation. This realization is at first shocking and painful,
but only as long as you remain unwilling to give up the negativity. If you will not give it up you do
need the illusion that others do it. You hope to come to bliss without meeting that aspect in you
which makes reaching bliss impossible. You hope to become a truly self-accepting and self-
respecting human being without giving up what truly impairs your integrity. Thus you live the
illusion that others are doing it to you, whom you can then blame for victimizing you. This is one of
the famous and very frequent games of pretense that have been uncovered by many of you in
various forms. Once these illusions and cheating intentions are abandoned, the realization of your
own creative power -- constantly at work, though perhaps still mostly negatively -- is as wonderful a
revelation and liberation as it was at first a shock.
I would like to discuss the various steps of working your way out of the maze of your own
illusion and negative creation in which you seem to be so inextricably and inexorably caught.
Evidently, the first step must be for you to find, determine, acknowledge, accept, and observe your
own negative attitudes, destructive feelings, subtle lies, intention to cheat, and life-defeating spiteful
resistance to good feelings. All these are examples of negative creating. Those of you who work
very personally and dynamically toward your own growth have come in some contact with this
deliberate negative production. But it is important that you become even more aware of it, more
detachedly observant of it. This comprises the first step.
The second step is that, deep inside, you question your particular feelings and reactions to this
negative production, and your own deliberate and chosen intent. You will then see that you like it,
find some sort of pleasure in it, and do not wish to give it up. The pleasurable aspect of creating
applies also to negative creating. It is absolutely necessary that you feel this and admit it. Even
though you understand in general, vague terms that this is destructive and somehow wrong, you still
are captivated by the perverse pleasure of your own negative production. This acknowledgment is
essential. Without it you cannot grow out of suffering, nor can you reach the spiritual selfhood you
long for.
The third step is to painstakingly work through the exact consequences and ramifications of
your negative production, without glossing over any detail, any effect, or side-effect. The realization
and precise understanding of the harmful effects on you and on others must become very clear. It
will not do if you assuage your guilt for your negative creation by telling yourself you only harm
yourself. It must be seen that you cannot harm yourself without also harming others, no more than
you can harm others without also harming you. This is not a law from retribution of a vindictive
authority up in heaven. It is so because you are all, we are all, they are all, everyone is the one
universal self. So what happens to you must happen to everyone else and vice versa. It is
unthinkable that anything that adversely affects you does not affect others as well. Self-hate, for
example, always manifests also as the inability to love, or even the compulsion to hate others. This
is only one example. This is not a theory; you will discover its truth, but only as you actually work
through these steps.
The third step also consists of seeing that the pleasure you derive from your negative
production is never worth the exorbitant price you pay for it, because all you deplore most in
yourself and in your life experience is a direct result of it. You sacrifice joy, peace, self-esteem, inner
security, expansion and growth, pleasure on all levels of your being, and a meaningful and fearless
existence. All this and more can never be worth the perverse pleasure you derive from your negative
creation.
See how your negative creation affects others. Some deep part of you knows this quite
accurately and justifiably feels guilty for it, makes you hate and punish yourself and rob yourself of
the real satisfactions of life. You will come to see that guiltless living can only exist when negative
creating is given up. Even the sincere and serious desire to do so will bring relief.
Still another aspect of step three is to reach for the understanding that the pleasure you derive
from being destructive in your feelings and attitudes is not what has to be given up. In fact, the same
pleasure will be transferred to positive creation, where you can expand joyfully and guiltlessly
without paying the heavy price you now pay for negative creation and sacrificing your very life --
which is no exaggeration. Exact working through of cause and effect, and seeing results and
connections, is what makes wanting to give up negativity possible. It is not sufficient to be aware of
being deliberately destructive. It must be admitted that you do not want to give this up. You must
see what price you pay. Doing so, you will become experientially connected with the cause of your
negative creation and the effect it has on you. This bridge must be established. See very clearly that
what renders you most unhappy: your anxieties, your worries, your self-dislike, your insecurities,
your discontent with life, your frustrations, your sense of wasting yourself and life, your hurt and
your pain, are all direct effects of deliberately wanted negative attitudes.
At step two you are still separated from the effects. You may see that the cause is your
destructiveness and admit it, but you do not yet see the connection with all you deplore in your life.
The connecting link between cause and effect is still absent. As long as this connecting link is not
established, you cannot really want to give up the negativity. You must see the heavy price you pay
to be truly motivated to want to give it up. It is not enough to give it up because you ought to,
knowing that it is somehow wrong or detrimental to you or others. Such vagueness will never do
the trick. The specific link must be established, which is perhaps easier than coming to step one or
two. The most difficult is to reach step two: to be fully aware of your negative creating by
destructive attitudes of your own choosing. There is a world of difference between such a state of
awareness and the state before it, when you projected your unhappiness outside, blaming the world,
blaming others, and not seeing the cause in you. Thus, step two is of the most incisive importance.
It means knowing your power, your selfhood. For to the degree you see the negative form of the
creative process in you, to that degree you gain an inkling of what you can do to produce beautiful
life experiences. Step two may be the most difficult to reach; it certainly constitutes the most drastic
change in self-perception and the perception of life processes. But working through step three is
equally important, for without it the motivation to change is lacking. However, step three is not half
as difficult, and never meets up with as much resistance as step two.
When you begin to discover the same fascination with creating in a positive way as in the
negative, but this time unmarred by suffering, guilt, fear, and self-blame, the world opens up before
you with such beauty and light that there are no words to describe it. You will taste the freedom of
being creator of your chosen life.
To facilitate the discovery of this connecting link of positive fascination with creation, you will
need to recognize the unobstructed, unconcealed destructiveness and negativity behind facades of
various kinds. For many years we have discussed and worked on the pretenses, the defenses, the
games and ploys, the idealized self-images, the specific forms of denial you seek in order to conceal
your destructiveness. All these masks are hypocritical. They always display the opposite of what
you reject and dislike in yourself. These coverups are actually infinitely more insidious and
damaging than the actual destructiveness itself. For once you face the naked destructiveness, you
confront a truth in yourself, which gives you an honest choice of your future direction. But when
you are still involved in the coverups, the roles and the games, you cannot get at the core of your
disturbance. Your suffering becomes worse; you become alienated from the cause of your
condition, and therefore you feel increasingly more disconnected and hopeless.
In order to hide from others -- and primarily from yourself -- you produce something that
appears to be the opposite of what you wish to be hidden. The role becomes like second nature, but
it has nothing to do with you. It is merely a habit you cannot shed as long as you are unwilling to
look behind it. It is of specific importance that you disillusion yourself concerning the image you
project into the world and of whose genuineness you try arduously to convince yourself. The
artificiality of this role you indulge in must be unmasked. It always appears to you to be good in
some way, even if only by pretending you are a victim. But you must analyze it exactly and
comprehend it in detail to see that it is none of what you pretend it is. It is never good. You are
never that innocent, nor are others that villainous. But, on the other hand, nor are you so hopelessly
bad and unacceptable as you meanwhile believe you really are underneath this role. For the role
conveys the opposite, not only of what you actually are, but also of what you believe you are.
Yet the pretended role contains the same aspects you so busily try to conceal. If you hide and
your role is that of being persecuted by the hate and unjust accusations of others, in this pretense
lies the hate itself. The front or the role is never innately different from what it covers. It is a hating
attitude to pretend being a victim of the hate of others. This is only one example. The game itself
must be exposed not only to reveal what it hides, but also to lay bare its actual aspects and what they
really mean. The negative creative energy is totally involved in this presented image. I suggest that
you take some time now to identify the various roles you have chosen. Name these roles in simple
sentences that describe what they are meant to convey. See if you can detect how the role which is
supposed to be quite angelic is as destructive as what is concealed behind it. Indeed, it could not be
different, for you cannot hide the energy of soul currents, you cannot make them different by
pretending, no matter how busily you try to make a charade out of your life.
The role or game you adopt in the illusion that it eliminates your deliberate destructiveness is
the first layer that must be confronted. Then you can begin to take the steps I have outlined.
Sometimes these steps overlap.
The more insight you have into the absolutely losing game you play with life when you hold
on to the false role that covers up destructive attitudes, the more you will be motivated to give up all
of this. You will strengthen your will. This will lead you to the fourth step, which is the actual
process of recreating soul substance. By your meditation, by prayer, by formulating deliberate
thoughts of truth about this entire matter and impressing them onto your destructive psychic
material, recreation begins and continues as you become more adept. First you need to discover
again and again your will to be hating, unforgiving, punishing, resentful, and hurt. You will become
aware of your attempt to exaggerate and drag out old injuries, to quite deliberately punish others for
what your parents did to you or what you think they did to you, and of your refusal to see their
failures as anything but a deliberate act of hate against you. When you then perceive that it gives you
pleasure to dwell on all this within yourself and not change your outlook and attitude, or your
feelings, you can begin to recreate. When you see the falsity of your pretenses, you can then remind
yourself to want to see what is underneath your particular facade of blame and victimization, in
whatever guise it may appear.
Your feelings of being injured first appear as quite real and it requires deeper probing to
discover that they are not real at all. They are cultivated habits. So are the roles you play. Each
objective acknowledgment of your pretenses -- the pretense of your role and the pretense of your
sustained injuries as the cause of your negative emotions toward people and life experience --
enables you to want to be in deeper truth, to abandon those falsities and to meet life with real and
honest attitudes. The issuing of this intention and the calling upon the higher powers in you to help
you is step four.
Another part of step four is to ask a concise question of your innermost being: "What
approach can I use to live my life without a pretense? How does it feel to bring forth better ways of
responding to life's experiences?" In answer to these questions something new will evolve. In this
re-creating process healthy, resilient, adequate, and truthful reactions will come easily from your real
nature, which needs no concealment. When you re-create, formulate your sentences very concisely.
State that what you do does not work, why it does not work, and that you wish to operate in a
different way. These sentences, if they are truly meant, have great creative power. They can be
meant, and they will be meant when you fully comprehend the harm you are doing while remaining
in your old attitudes.
These are the steps of purification in the deepest and most vital way. Purification is
unthinkable without going through these four steps. Purification is also unthinkable without
receiving active help. It is too difficult to do alone. It is utter illusion to hope -- consciously or
unconsciously -- that facing these aspects of your being can be avoided, skipped, bypassed or
whisked away by some magic "spiritual" means. Self-realization, self-actualization, reaching your
spiritual center -- or whatever name you wish to use to describe the goal of all living -- cannot occur
unless you face your deepest negativities and hypocrisies, and your deliberate intent to be negative
and destructive, spiteful and resentful; often you will even forgo your own happiness just to punish
someone from your past. To see this seems painful at first, but it will prove liberating.
Those of you who have not yet made these self-discoveries will come to it. You can prepare
for it. For you cannot allow happiness into your soul or eliminate the pervasive guilt you seek to
explain away by false guilts unless you go through these steps. No matter how much you now
believe that others or life's caprices deprive you of what you desire, it is actually you who do this.
For you can let in what life is always ready to give you so richly, once you make room for it in your
consciousness and your self-creating. Many are the people who want to reach spiritual heights but
who harbor the unexpressed illusion that to face what I am discussing here can be avoided. They
run from pillar to post, and whenever they are confronted with their own unpalatable truth, they run
away. The imaginary need to run proves so illusory. There is no need to run away from yourself.
Whenever destructive attitudes remain unfaced and untouched, you live in painful
ambivalence. For you cannot ever go in one direction when you want to be negative. There is
always the real self clamoring for ultimate reality and pulling in the opposite direction. Unification
of inner direction can only happen when the personality is truly and genuinely constructive without
hidden destructiveness. And can you perceive the pain of being torn apart by going into two
opposing directions? This struggle is more painful, confusing, and paralyzing than anything else that
goes on in the human psyche.
In order to reestablish the being you were long before this earth life, before you became
involved with negative creating, and to reexperience yourself as that eternal you which you
essentially and ultimately are, you have to consider and test the possibility of positive creating. You
will then see that to create positively is really so much more natural and easy: it is an organic
process. Negative creating and destructive attitudes are artificial and contrived, even though you are
now so used to them that they seem more natural. The positive is effortless. Offhand it seems that
to abandon the negative that has become so much second nature to you is too great an effort. It
seems too great because you still believe that by giving up negativity you create a positivity that is
something completely new. If this were so, to create it would indeed be quite impossible in most
instances. But the moment you realize that the positive creation is already there within you only
covered up, and that it can unfold and reveal itself the moment you allow this to happen,
abandoning negativity becomes a relief from a heavy burden that has pulled you down all your life --
and in many lives before this one. While you hate, distrust, take a dim view of things, or prevent a
favorable outcome by expecting the worst, the ability already exists in you to love, trust, and know
that life is good and can be trusted. All this, and more exists within you already, and needs only to
be allowed to surface like the sun coming out from behind the clouds. You will see that it is
possible to feel this positive undercurrent. Simultaneously you will experience the deep joy that
permeates the entire being of any person making this discovery.
When we say that God is within you, we mean precisely this. Not only is the greater
consciousness with infinite wisdom of the most personal order available to you at whatever moment
you need it, not only are there powers of creative strength and energy, feelings of bliss, joy, and
pleasure supreme available to you on all levels, but also, right underneath where you are ill with your
negativity, a new "old life" exists in which all reactions to all possible contingencies are clear, strong,
and entirely satisfying and right for each occasion. A resiliency and creativity of reacting already
exists now behind the false roles of pretense, beyond the grip of destructiveness. Underneath your
outer deadness a bubbling aliveness already exists. At first it will shine through at moments only.
Eventually it will manifest itself as your steady inner climate.
Before you can live in this steady climate, you will have to go through two basic phases that
deal with the negativity that humanity is still involved with. Most human beings find themselves still
in the first basic phase of negativity. This phase is initiating negativity. The second phase is
responsive negativity. In the first phase you automatically react to situations with the destructive
pattern you have adopted after some traumatic experiences in early life. You maintain negative
responses which at one time in your childhood you could not avoid producing, and which were
then, under those circumstances, even life-preserving. But when the same responses are repeated in
situations later, when there is no longer cause to use them, then such responses are not only
"neurotic"; they are also initiating negativity, quite regardless of whether the other people involved
act like your parents or not. The four steps I explained in this lecture are all destined to deal with
this first phase.
The second phase deals with the negativity that is merely responsive. When individuals have
freed themselves from initiating negativity and are clear in this respect, their reactions are positive
whenever others do not react negatively toward them. But the negativity still flares up reactively, as
a result of their responding to the negativity of others. You may say this is perfectly natural; for that
matter, everything or anything is "perfectly natural." But this is still not the purified state. It is not
the state of truth. To respond in that way to the negativity of others is still an action based on
illusion.
There is a better way to respond. Even though the other person may indeed unload a great
deal of unjustified hostility on you, it is an illusion to fear it and set up your negative defenses. You
can depend on yourself much more adequately without withdrawing, without becoming in any way
defensive, without becoming destructive with your own feelings. There is no need to see life as
bleak and hopeless because someone acts destructively toward you. Therefore this responsive
negativity must also be straightened out, but this can be done only after the initiating negativity has
been wiped out. The vast majority of the human race are still in the first phase. Whenever the
slightest thing goes against your grain, whenever you experience any degree of frustration, you tend
to bring in your original reactions of negativity. You even do this, in many instances, as a
precautionary attitude, just because you might experience frustration, delay, criticism, or the
negativity of others.
I think most of you can sense the importance of this lecture, especially if you use it as
referring to your own life instead of a mere theoretical discussion. Then it will prove of vital
significance in your personal evolution. Be blessed. Love and strength are given forth for everyone
here.