There are three conditions we need for expanding awareness of our true identity as universal spirit:

1) We have to be willing to tune into it…The only snag is our own misperception that all this can be found only in a galaxy far, far away.

2) We will need to get up-close and personal with the parts of our consciousness that have gone off the deep end into negativity and destructiveness...Our problem is our mistaken notion that our life is a fixed mold we have been plopped into and must now learn to cope with. We think it’s all somehow separate from what we think, will, know, perceive and feel.

3) We need to use our thinking apparatus to reach out to the universal spirit and create, and we need to realize that we create with both our conscious and our unconscious thinking and willing…

Creating is pure fascination, and this fascination doesn’t cease simply because what we create is, at first, perhaps a little less pleasurable or brilliant. It’s like passing our finger over the flame of a candle; if it doesn’t hurt too much the first time, we might do it again, but more slowly…This is when things start to go South…

Our creations start to take on a power of their own. For every created thing has energy invested into it, and this energy has a self-perpetuating nature; it gathers its own momentum. The consciousness that teed up this fun experiment may want to play a little longer than is “safe,” until it no longer leaves itself enough power to reverse the course of things…Our consciousness must counteract the momentum by “remembering” what it already knows—it could be another way…

Then the world becomes our oyster, wanting us to find that pearl.

Listen and learn more.

Gems, Chapter 1: Expanding Our Awareness and Exploring Our Fascination with Creation

Read Original Pathwork® Lecture: #175 Consciousness: Fascination with Creation

We may periodically have the universal dream of either riding on a train or being about to take a train, anxious that we may miss it, have missed it, or are getting off the train. So, do we follow the movement of the train, or do we stay behind? We have choices.

We may not always make choices consciously, but we do always choose intentionally. For instance, if we choose to go on a path of self-searching, hoping to find more meaning in life, we are making a choice. Just as we are making a choice when we choose not to do this…When we live any day as though it doesn’t matter, we are making as active a choice as when we decide to listen within and figure out what is going on…

Choices, choices, choices. Do we want to follow our inner evolutionary process or stay behind? We got options…Am I willing to be all-in? From one side of our mouth we may be saying ‘all aboard,’ but nevertheless, we’re holding something in reserve…

Let’s be realistic here. It’s impossible to always be following our inner movement faithfully 100% of the time. If we were that aware, we wouldn’t be here on this dualistic planet…Holding on to the false reality we create with our misconceptions about life, our strategic defenses and our illusory fears, somehow makes us feel safe…We’re lazy and easily lured by the line of least resistance. We particularly enjoy the illusion that there's no requirement to move along on our evolutionary journey…

The notion of an “illusory reality” may sound like an oxymoron, but it’s not. We constantly make up stories about life that simply aren’t true. This causes us to live in this temporary state of illusion…Strange as this may seem at first, there isn’t anything we experience that doesn’t need to happen exactly as it does. This isn’t because a God-in-the-sky is meting out punishments and rewards; that kind of thinking totally misses the point. Rather, our experiences are the net result of where we are on our journey…

To be angry, self-rejecting or impatient about where we are in our growth process is akin to a child being upset because it is not yet an adult…We stunt our growth when we’re impatient about our current state. We end up hating ourselves, denying this, feeling guilty and projecting this onto others. That’s how we cripple ourselves from expanding our consciousness—that’s how we miss our train.

Listen and learn more.

Gems, Chapter 2: The Evolutionary Process & Why We Can’t Stop It

Read Original Pathwork® Lecture: #218 The Evolutionary Process

The swing of the pendulum alternates between emphasizing individual and group consciousness. It has been in motion since mankind first set foot on planet Earth. During each phase, we move to a higher level of development, leveraging what we have learned from the previous phase.

Over the past few hundred years, the emphasis has been on the individual. We were learning certain lessons related to individual rights. We have the right to be ourselves, to be different, to not conform, and to become more self-responsible. As we turned the corner into the current century, this phase approached its end.

This doesn’t mean the individual is no longer important. But rather the emphasis must now shift once again to the group. It is important to distinguish between the healthy development of group consciousness and the blind movement of creating a mass consciousness. In the latter, people feel disconnected from themselves, from nature and from each other.

Whereas group consciousness honors and supports individuals, mass consciousness eliminates them. Mass consciousness doesn’t require individuals to stand in their own right. Actually, it thwarts this, imposing conformity and blind following.

Since the movement is continuous, what’s right at one point in time may be totally wrong at another. When we reach the switchover point—whether we’re talking about a person or the whole planet, doesn’t matter—strong new energies will come flowing in from another sphere. If we attempt to halt this movement—by not feeling, not trusting or not following our own inner movement—a painful crisis will erupt instead. The energy has to go somewhere.

Listen to learn more.

Gems, Chapter 3: How Consciousness Evolves Between Individuals and Groups

Read Original Pathwork® Lecture: #225 Evolutionary Stages of Individual and Group Consciousness

As we humpty dumpty our way down the road of personal healing, we will increasingly come to believe that it’s possible to resolve our inner problems; we can put ourselves back together again…Our own heretofore-unheard-of successes fortify us with courage to go even deeper, exploring inner nooks and crannies where evil lurks. Level by level we go, traversing a spiral configuration until the circles become so small they converge into a point…

Then the way becomes so simple—we just walk out of the final turn of the spiral into the simplicity of love. When we fully embody what love really is, we will comprehend how everything is contained in that word…When the circles are still quite large, this simplicity doesn’t mean spit to us. At that point, everything is complicated by the machinations of the ego that believes itself to be separated from the oneness…

So in the beginning, our work must be focused on facing whatever negativity is within us: our faults of self will, pride and fear, our wrong conclusions about life, and our selfish, destructive attitudes…All this must continue as we roll forward into the second phase of our work: claiming our greatness….It’s time to get it back…

When we untangle all the threads, we realize that all evil is, at its untwisted core, made up of beauty and love. So it’s quite superfluous for us to fear evil. The devil in each of us was originally an angel…

The devil is our fear. It makes us feel guilty for the cruel and hateful workings of the mind, and for unpleasant feelings that show up in the way we act. It is only by staring directly into the headlights of our guilt and our fear—fully travelling through whatever inconvenient feelings smolder within—that they will disappear. Then the angel will show its face. Then we can move forward in claiming our greatness…

Once we stop squashing and denying these aspects of ourselves, and start genuinely transcending evil, we will gain back every ounce of vitality we had to inactivate in order to avoid looking at the evil. In the end, we lose nothing; what we gain is ginormous.

Listen and learn more.

Gems, Chapter 4: Claiming our Total Capacity for Greatness

Read Original Pathwork® Lecture: #212 Claiming the Total Capacity for Greatness

It’s important not to push away our fears and longing when they surface; we’ll need to screw up the courage to feel the pain of our problems and turn toward facing our deepest fear. To be honest, that’s not what we usually do. We turn away and go on and on, one incarnation after another, dragging karmic ballast along with us. At some point, we’ve got to stop and face the music…

Let’s see what it would mean for us to personally experience this state of awareness and be in deep union with God…In this state, we have no fear. Our whole being is permeated with a sense of being utterly safe and at home in the world…You could say we feel cozy with life. Life fits us like a glove...The vibrational frequency of this state of safety bears no resemblance to a false faith Bandaided over faulty ideas…

It’s not that God isn’t always present—it’s that we don’t always know it…But if we have a felt sense of the reality of Christ, it will colorize all we see, touch, hear and feel. A glow of joy and peace will emanate from our being into our surroundings…Whether we know it or not, we want this more than anything else…

To be truly anchored in a genuine state of union with Christ is to be deeply anchored here, in the life of matter…We can’t reach a state of union by separating ourselves from our current existence in our bodies…In this state of union, opposites begin to come together; we no longer need to battle them. We will know our own power to heal and create…we’ll have a deep inner knowing that it’s impossible to cease to be, which is our deepest fear. There probably won’t be any clanging bells or flashing lights with this awareness…

It takes wisdom to realize that that highest, most exalted state of consciousness imaginable could never come quickly or cheaply or easily. We’ll need to devote ourselves to this task of cleaning up our own inner mud puddles.

Listen and learn more.

Gems, Chapter 5: Facing our Deepest Fear and Unfolding our Greatest Longing

Read Original Pathwork® Lecture: #243 The Great Existential Fear and Longing

Balance doesn’t come by way of a mathematical formula; it’s not a fifty-fifty deal. There are no simple rules. For example, what’s the right balance between sleep and being awake? While this will vary somewhat from person to person, nobody needs twelve hours of sleep a day. So it may outwardly seem out of balance to get eight hours of sleep followed by sixteen hours of activity. But in terms of inner balance, that sounds about right. The long and short of it is this. We have to look within to find the right measure and not rely on rules…

But human beings like to find refuge in rules; we like hard and fast directions we can accept without thinking…So what we’re hoping for is a shortcut when what we really need to find is the spontaneous functioning of our true self…That’s the part of us that knows just how to be and what to do, in just the right measure, in any situation.

When we do the work of uncovering our unconscious bits and cleaning them up, we are reestablishing balance. With our frozen blocks freed up, we then find the right measure of things intuitively. We know when it’s right to be outgoing and to what extent, and when we should be gathering ourselves and holding ourselves together. We will know when it’s time to be active, and when we should chill and just be quiet…We’ll naturally know when to assert ourselves, and when to be flexible and give in…

Listen and learn more.

Gems, Chapter 6: Finding Balance Within Instead of Banking on Outer Rules

Read Original Pathwork® Lecture: #228 Balance

If we hindered the cycles of physical change by somehow constricting space for physical expansion, atrophy and finally death would occur. We would destroy life. The unseen aspects of an organism—the psychic, spiritual, mental and emotional levels—are no different. Yet humans carry with them a mass image—or a collective hidden belief. It says we should fear change, which then saddles us with overcoming fear of death.

The notion perpetuated by this widespread belief is that there is security in not changing. This is not a namby pamby thing; to wit, it is this very belief that is responsible for the creation of death. For our life experience is molded by our convictions…

This fear of expanding creates a narrow space we must wedge our psyche into…If we are afraid of change, we will atrophy the spiritual muscle we need to develop in order to expand; we’ll box ourselves into a nonmoving state and scarcely breathe in an effort to thwart change. That explains, in a nutshell, the human condition…The way out of our dollhouse-sized existence is to create a new consciousness within that doesn’t fear change. That trusts change as a natural and desirable way to live…

The illusion of time is a side effect of the ongoing movement of everything that is alive. Time also arises out of the misguided belief that we should avoid the future and cling to the past if we hope to go on existing…It’s odd, in fact, how much courage it requires to take the apparent risk of believing in something new and positive…

We’re not given a fear of death in order to manipulate us into taking some initiative (even though that wouldn’t be a bad idea). Nay nay, our fear of death is something we ourselves create through our fear of moving and changing.

Listen and learn more.

Gems, Chapter 7: Rolling with Change and Overcoming Fear of Death

Read Original Pathwork® Lecture: #230 The Universality of Change – Reincarnative Process in the Same Life Span

The pain of injustice contains much more than can be expressed by this word “injustice.” Because our pain is not just about injustice that is happening to us in the here-and-now. It includes a fear that we live in a world where destruction can happen—and there are no safety valves.

It’s the fear that there’s no rhyme or reason to anything, and that nothing we do—good, bad or otherwise—will have any effect on the outcome. The pain of injustice distinctly results from feeling disconnected and leads to feeling disconnected. There it is. When we can’t connect results with their cause, we panic, and this fear of meaninglessness sets in.

We need to go back to considering this point that whatever exists in the macrocosm—the world at large—also exists in the microcosm—our own self. So the first place to look at creating a shift is in our own psyche. No other way around it, we’ve got to do our own work. Otherwise we’ll spend our lives tilting at windmills outside ourselves, and never see that the distortion of truth must live within us. For if it did not, the outer chaos of the world wouldn’t light a fire deep in our bellies.

All we do and desire and strive for and accomplish—it has an impact, whether we realize this or not. We don’t need to fear or resist this reality. We only do so because we think our destructive bits are the whole pie—our ultimate essence and final reality. If that were true, it would indeed be unbearable.

But that alternative is what the dark forces whisper into our ears. They want us to remain in pain and confusion, disconnected from the greater reality of life. For if we stay in the dark, we’ll rail against the pain of an unjust universe; we won’t see the beauty of God’s creation and the justice that permeates it all. We won’t see the truth that—really and truly, Scout’s honor—it’s all good.

Listen to learn more.

Gems, Chapter 8: The Pain of Injustice and the Truth About Fairness

Read Original Pathwork® Lecture: #249 The Pain of Injustice – Cosmic Records of All Personal and Collective Events, Deeds, Expressions