Excerpts from Pathwork lectures, 1996 edition
It is yet another spiritual law that energy used for spiritually positive goals is always replenished.
Your meditations and prayers must vary; you need to sense the next step of your development, and when you are not aware of it, the insight will be given if you search honestly, turning your eyes toward what has to be recognized, learned, overcome, and accepted. Take the specific problem of finding your path’s direction to God and Christ, and to your personal spirit friends who are so close to you and whose task it is to help you with it. In this way your prayers will come alive. Then, after you have asked for help to recognize your problems and for the strength to solve them, be still and listen into yourself, and then think, or rather let your thoughts surface and allow them to lead you intuitively. After a while the connections will become clear. You will know where the problem comes from, why you react the way you do, and the increasing awareness of your inner currents will help you quite a bit forward.
Again and again take the resolution to face your inner truth with courage. Cultivate truthful thoughts; think everything through clearly, independently. Thus your spiritual life will become more productive, because it will be alive, and therefore also constantly changing. It will not be according to a rigid formula which is repeated daily. And so your relationship to God will unfold toward harmony.
Fear of disappointment is a sign of oversensitivity, and the oversensitivity is a sign of a false sense of self-importance. This entire inner process centers around the ego, and that must block the stream of genuine love, having a contrary direction. The blocking goes against divine law and therefore the soul must suffer. The moment you reset the “inner switch” so you do not take your fear of what could happen to your own self so seriously, you can give your love freely.
One should differentiate between selfishness and self-centeredness. Both are wrong, but their effect is not always the same.
Those who can love in a genuine way without being afraid that their little pride might be hurt or that they may encounter some disadvantages, will never be “mistreated,” provided they guard against betraying their own integrity out of fear of losing the love of their beloveds. They may be disappointed, but they will not be unduly humiliated. Real love will never make you lose your dignity; you will always be able to stand up for yourself.
Cross-currents create not only psychological and spiritual obstacles, but also physical manifestations in the body: tiredness, weakness, and even sickness can come from emotional short-circuits. The more frequently the opposing currents clash within the soul, the more the person will lose the strength which would otherwise work productively in a healthy channel and thus renew itself all the time.
One part of the soul wants to give love—and therefore also to receive love. Whatever you give comes back to you as a wave in an eternally pulsating cycle. Of course, you have to start the cycle by giving first and not waiting for the other to start by giving to you. This part of the soul wants to fulfill itself, wants to surrender the ego, to sacrifice, and will endeavor with all its strength, with every single current of feeling, to abide by the spiritual laws. It wants to forget itself and not take its vanity, pride, and personal advantages so seriously. Such an emotional current comes from the higher self that knows where true fulfillment, happiness, harmony, and perfection are to be found.
The other part of the personality wants comfort, convenience, and will give up nothing. From time to time it sees the light of happiness, but prefers to exist in a grey, solitary world that seems risk-free to the blind part of the soul.
Any reasonable human being knows that one cannot move simultaneously in two opposite directions. Therefore it is absolutely necessary to make the inner contradictions conscious, even if resistance has to be overcome.
Even a negative decision, if it is truly meant to be carried out, is one step closer to health than the inner indecision and the desire to have it both ways. For in this way you will at least unify yourself inwardly and will no longer be torn by inner contradictions. In order to reach a negative decision at all, you must take pains to honestly confront yourself, bring the unconscious into consciousness, and commit yourself to pay at least one price, even if for the wrong alternative. Such straightforwardness serves the soul’s health, even though it may not be the best possible choice.
Most damages are caused by not making any choice and allowing all emotional currents to mingle in the unconscious, without the effort to really getting to know oneself.
You should attribute enough importance to your soul and to your entire personality to really uncover what is hidden within your self, alone if possible and if not, with help. Yet you cannot really uncover what is in you if you still insist on attributing so much importance to your pain, to your vanity, and to your fears. Only by minimizing the importance of these can you find the courage to discover what is hidden, to let go of pretenses, and to change your inner reality.
Regardless of the burden of your past lives, regardless of what you need to experience now on the outer level, you can, by meeting the inner conditions which I am showing to you again and again, heal your soul and bring your feelings—not only your thoughts and actions—into harmony with spiritual law.
Your happiness will be given to you so that you can pass it on. Then you will indeed become a link in the chain, which is the sole requisite to keep the stream of happiness alive and flowing. In this way it will never dry out.
No, the question is not the giving of some material thing; this would be much easier, much more convenient. You have to give yourself. For, if you can give yourself in the right way, you can give to everyone with whom you come into contact. However, before you can give yourself, you must have gained yourself. You cannot give what you do not have.
Few people truly possess their own selves, because they do not know themselves well enough and so are more or less lost to themselves. To the extent you recoil from your own imperfections you do not possess yourself.