We all have needs: real, legitimate, have-a-right-to-have-them needs. One of these needs is for closeness. Another need, it turns out, is to have privacy. It’s not hard to imagine that these two can be tricky to weave together. Privacy, then, is not a nice-to-have, but a need-to-have. Being oblivious to this reality, we may find ourselves alone and then immediately set about cluttering up our inner landscape with noise So where does secrecy come in? Take apart any secrets and we’ll find the wish to hide something that we think will be unpalatable to someone…

We may rationalize our secrets by saying, “If I reveal myself, I won’t be understood,” or “People will criticize me unfairly”…In truth, when we’re standing in truth—or attempting to get to the bottom of it—we’ll make an effort to help others understand…

What’s happening when we keep secrets is that we fear we’re not in truth. Better yet, we often know we’re not but we have no intention of changing. So then we’re really being dishonest…And hey, we also sort of like the way it keeps things lopsided. We don’t have to work at finding equitable, honest solutions that allow others to participate in the party. That’s how secrets become such killjoys for relationships. And that’s why secretive people are never emotionally fulfilled…

Even the interactions between countries are often enormously impacted by secretiveness…Opaqueness, it is believed, makes for sound diplomacy…Just as individuals need to go through the painstaking process of learning to be open, so must countries…We can’t get to peace and harmony any other way. It’s like trying to live life while projecting a false version of ourselves, basically saying, “Please see me only as I pretend to be.” It’s going to be hard to forge an authentic, trusting connection on top of that.

Listen and learn more.

Read Pearls, Chapter 1: Privacy vs. Secrecy: A Boost or Bust for Finding Closeness

Read Original Pathwork® Lecture: #252 Privacy and Secrecy

Within the lines of the Lord's Prayer is everything—yes, everything—we need to live a glorious life. This is what makes the Lord’s Prayer the most beautiful of all prayers.

OUR FATHER

As we say these words softly inside ourselves, we can meditate on how this must apply to everyone, even those we don’t happen to like…In fact, we can only call ourselves children of God if we’re willing to open the gates to all the creeps and crapheads in our world. Either no one’s in this flock or everyone is, even those who bring up unpleasant feelings in us…Whenever we have angst about another, there is something in us that needs attention, no matter how wrong the other person may be.

WHO ART IN HEAVEN

Heaven is inside us, not outside. So we must look for what we’re seeking—to find our own perfection—within, where it already exists. It may however be covered over and difficult to find.

HALLOWED BE THY NAME

The way to hallow the name of God, the father, is to try to fathom his laws and follow them…Whenever we find ourselves stumped by any life situation, it means we haven’t found the specific law we’re violating.

THY KINGDOM COME

When we follow spiritual laws, hallowing God’s name, we also bring ourselves closer to his kingdom. Because it’s within.

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Read Pearls, Chapter 2: Reading Between the Lines of the Lord’s Prayer

Read Original Pathwork® Lecture: #9 Prayer and Meditation – The Lord's Prayer

We’re about to review the spiritual nature of political systems found on this planet. This includes monarchy and feudalism, socialism and communism, and capitalistic democracy. We will discover that each has a divine origin plus a handful of distortions….We’ll also see how each of them—in their divine and distorted ways—lives in each one of us…

In its original divine nature, capitalistic democracy is about total freedom of expression and abundance as it accrues from personal investment. At the same time, the divine form of this system also makes room for caring for those who, for some reason, can’t be—or aren’t yet willing to be—fully responsible for themselves…

There is no sentimental claim that such people should reap all the same benefits as those who invest their whole being into their lives. But it also doesn’t exploit such people to justify the power drive of a ruler… This form of government then is closer to the fusion of duality—to being about unity. So it is a more mature form of government than the previous categories…

So how do we manage to abuse and distort capitalistic democracy?…This system can be abused from both sides. Those clamoring for socialism can become more parasitic and blame the power structure for keeping them down. On the other extreme, those who are strong and diligent, who risk and invest, can justify their greed and drive for power. This do this by blaming the parasitic nature of those who are lazy. But abuse is abuse…

That’s the paradoxical way of spiritual things. The more developed and free we become, the greater is the danger for distortion and abuse. As such, in this system, we find the potential for a “negative fusion” when both sides are in distortion…What needs to happen is that a channel must open up to perceive divine will and establish divine law...

The real question is: when we have enough leash to responsibly run our own lives, do we choke ourselves? It’s so easy to abuse freedom unless we confront our hidden motives at all times.

With selflessness at the top of the docket, world politics could blend together the spiritual nature of each one of these political systems, not in contradiction to each other but as one united whole. Indeed, we could create a single government that would combine the divine natures of monarchy and feudalism, socialism and communism, and democratic capitalism. Yes indeedy, we could do this.

Listen and learn more.

Read Pearls, Chapter 3: Exploring the Spiritual Nature of Political Systems

Read Original Pathwork® Lecture: #242 The Spiritual Meaning of Political Systems

We humans are a superstitious lot. There is one insidious form of superstition—pessimism—that is the hidden culprit behind many of our disappointments in life…

It all starts with an inner attitude that goes something like this: “If I believe that something good may happen, I will be disappointed because I will chase it away with my believing in it. Maybe it’s a safer bet to believe that nothing good will happen to me". This is the game we play with ourselves…

At some point, this playful game starts to go sideways. And then the fun gets lost in its tragically painful effects…Because there is power in our thoughts, and there’s no playing with that power without getting hurt…

The nice thing about our old superstitious ways is that we just speak negative beliefs and they come true. No waiting…It’s tempting to lean on that instead of investing in a very uncertain waiting period…For the journey to having faith in a positive unfoldment takes a bit of time to ripen…

We need the patience of a gardener who understands that a gestation period is required. With experience, the gardener learns that after sowing seeds, one must wait for the plants to sprout. It would be hard to trust this process until we’ve seen it in action…

There is a pitfall to watch out for: it’s easy to confuse this courage of which we speak—a vigorous faith in good outcomes—with wishful thinking. But they’re not the same…How do we distinguish between the two? With wishful thinking, we spin fantastic dreams of fulfillment without having any price to pay…In our daydreams, happiness comes our way magically and gratuitously…We think we can game the system…Daydreams, then, are nothing more than the flipside of the superstition of pessimism…

Listen and learn more.

Read Pearls, Chapter 4: Debunking the Curious Superstition of Pessimism

Read Original Pathwork® Lecture: #236 The Superstition of Pessimism

We each have a Book of Life and everything gets written down in it, for everything in every life counts. As such, every incarnation is meticulously planned by carefully following the information contained in our “general ledger”…

Be careful about comparing, judging and generalizing. Our view is very limited. We see just one life at a time, and at that, what we see is still even more limited…So whenever we’re inclined to say that our life is too difficult to bear or that someone else has it too easy, we need to back off. We wouldn’t think this for a minute if we saw all the missing puzzle pieces…

The thing that most determines what opportunities we will get to next—and what we need to work on for our overall development—is how much of our current plan we fulfill…If, according to what gets noted in our Book of Life, we don’t advance much this time around or we do a rather half-assed job of it, we may be looking at a complete do-over…

Again, don’t jump to judgment; an easy, pleasant life may not indicate that the previous one was gangbusters. It could be that merits were earned, possibly three or four lifetimes back. Likewise, a tough life might be the result of actions in our last incarnation. Or not. A zealous person may make the choice to pay off, in one lifetime, a monster demerit,. Another pays off just as great a demerit—maybe even a bigger one—but eats the elephant one bite at a time. So one more time, what did we say about comparing and judging?...

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Read Pearls, Chapter 5: Preparing for Reincarnation: Every Life Counts

Read Original Pathwork® Lecture: #34 Preparation for Reincarnation

Imagine we live in a great big house that has one room we don’t use, so it becomes a room for storage. We push a few things into it helter-skelter and if we had to tidy it up at that point, it wouldn’t take too long. Imagine over time we let things pile up until that room’s filled to the brim. We’re lazy and don’t want to hassle with sorting things and putting them away as we go. Now we’ve got a tougher job on our hands. It’s just like this with the time we have at our disposal…

If we have a problem area and at the first sign of feeling troubled we heed it saying, “Why am I just a little disturbed?”—rather than packing it away into the storeroom of our unawareness—we will be able to sort out what it’s about in jig time…But if instead we let it ride, pushing it out of our mind, it will fester underground. Now it starts to create negative patterns and vicious circles that seem to trap us in wicked chain reactions that eat our lunch…

Listen and learn more.

Read Pearls, Chapter 6: Unwinding Humanity’s Relationship with Time

Read Original Pathwork® Lecture: #112 Humanity's Relationship to Time

There’s an obstacle many face. It’s the tendency for people to build on deficit. This is intrinsically linked to this belief in an empty, poor, ungiving world…Whenever we stack positive beliefs on top of negative ones we are only half-aware of, we are building on deficit. So if we secretly believe we are unlovable or unacceptable, despite our surface behaviors to the contrary, we’re building on deficit…

The trouble with building on deficit is that it appears to work, at least for a while. It’s temporarily convincing…With this as the foundation we are standing on, pouring our energy into our mask and our Lower Self, we don’t dare to expose our deficits—the inner bankruptcy that smolders underneath. This is why a path of spiritual purification is about bringing out all of our Lower Self maneuvers. We must stand there poor, no longer covered up with a fake veneer…

Any personal crisis is nothing more than a bankruptcy exposed. We can wait for this to happen on its own. Or we can create a controlled fall by working mindfully with a spiritual helper or counselor…Of course our spiritual and emotional “finances” appear on the physical level as well. We often live above our means, coasting on debt and covering one hole with another newly created hole…

The fear that causes us to hold and hoard is in error…Giving through faith—even before we’re convinced that our fear of giving is unfounded—is like pulling out poisonous weeds and planting beautiful seedlings instead…Then we can release the faith that is in us. Not as an act of blind belief in wishful thinking but as a new ground rule for life.

Listen and learn more.

Read Pearls, Chapter 7: Basking in Grace & Not Building on Deficit

Read Original Pathwork® Lecture: #250 Inner Awareness of Grace – Exposing the Deficit

In the beginning was the word. Words, in fact, are the blueprint necessary for building any structure…Nothing in creation can exist unless a word has been spoken, known, held, believed in and committed to…

Holy Scripture starts by postulating that in the beginning was—or actually is—the word. The word is eternal; it will always be. It is from God’s spoken word that all creation came into being, including our personalities…So what do we do with this truth? Well, for one thing, we can become aware that every situation we experience in life is the product of words we ourselves have spoken…

Our goal: establish a one-pointed word…They are no less powerful when they are not articulated well. Vague and hazy words need to be crystallized and brought out from behind the smoke screen…The silent word is not necessarily less powerful than one that is uttered. In fact, words that wash across our vocal chords may well have much less energy than the ones held inside that are rooted in strong beliefs…

We can tune into the underground noise and observe and identify our words. Then we will gain a much better understanding of how we create our lives…Holding onto a nihilistic belief about a terrible world may seem preferable to seeing our own painful belief that we’re not worthy of the joy of life. But folks, if we believe this, we’re not in truth…

Until we unwind all this for ourselves, we may be convinced that the positive words spoken on the surface are all that count. We might then use the fact of our opposite experiences as proof that life is unfair and untrustworthy. That our own inner processes have no bearing on what goes on. People, we then think, are victims of life…Once we go a little further in our work though, we will uncover our unfortunate self-hate and our lack of faith in our own Higher Self. Knowing this information will help in our search for the imposters. Those are the parts of ourselves who still speak on our behalf but don’t represent our best interest.

Listen and learn more.

Read Pearls, Chapter 8: Articulating the Power of the Word

Read Original Pathwork® Lecture: #233 The Power of the Word