By Liam Quirk
“So relax, untie knots, be open.” This what the lecture Spiritual Nourishment—Willpower(PL 16) advises us to do when confronted with things we do not understand and cannot readily accept. Another way of saying the same thing might be: Be receptive, ready to receive.
I like to look at it like this: Since there appears to be so much more that I don’t know than what I do know, it makes sense to get comfortable with not knowing. Holding a welcoming space for not knowing can keep me from rushing in too quickly with explanations that are little more than a reworking of what I believe I already know—which doesn’t allow much space for what I don’t know to unfold and reveal some new insight or deeper appreciation. Being too quick to fill the space of not knowing also makes sure that I don’t have to examine faulty or incomplete beliefs I may be defensively holding onto, and that could mean a lot of missed opportunities for growth.
Why does cultivating our openness and receptivity matter so much? Since we are currently living out numerous negative creations and self-perpetuating vicious circles that are based on our images, which are our faulty beliefs about ourselves and about life, we need to explore and deeply question what we believe. This is what self-examination, self-knowledge and self-analysis require—the untying of belief knots.
Openness is in a very real sense the measure of our faith in the essential goodness of life. We value being open and undefended because ultimately there is nothing to defend against. This is expressed in Spiritual Nourishment—Willpower with a wise and also very practical definition of openness: “To be really open means being ready to hear what you might like least.” The willingness for self-honesty and self-responsibility that this kind of openness requires demonstrates that we have accepted that the purpose of life, as another lecture states, is not to be as comfortable as possible but to develop ourselves.
Being comfortable and creating sustainable happiness through self-development are very different goals. The lectures teach us that the lower self and the higher self both want happiness, but the lower self, which includes the ego, wants this happiness now and doesn’t want to pay the price of self-knowledge and overcoming one’s faults. It simply wants to be comfortable. Right now. The higher self knows that the price to be paid for real and lasting happiness is the effort involved in perfecting oneself by personally applying universal spiritual laws. This will mean being uncomfortable, maybe really uncomfortable, at times. But the higher self understands that our unhappiness is the effect or consequence of our negative intentions and creations, and that our happiness can only come after we’ve seen the direct connections between our inner negativity and our outer struggles. Nothing else will work.
Recognizing the lower self’s drive for immediate pleasure through outer means and choosing the higher self’s willingness to accept ‘what is’ as the just consequence of one’s negative intentions becomes a real milestone on the path. This ability to discern lower and higher self motives, especially when they seem to share the same goal of happiness, can be developed and reinforced by a deeper understanding of the function of the ego and its relationship to the higher or real self. In fact, deep, detailed understanding of the ego and the real self is essential to our personal development.
And this is also where we may need to hold a welcoming space for not knowing. Probably because the word ego is quite common in our everyday language, we may easily miss the implications of how this term is used in the lectures. The same can probably be said for the word personality. And let’s not forget that specifically Pathwork term—the real self. We need definite clarity on these terms because of how interrelated they are. Being a little foggy on any one of them will affect our understanding of all of them. And having definite clarity on these terms will open us to questions and realizations that we can’t reach without such clarity.
Let’s start with the real self, also known as the higher self. In Pathwork Lecture 132, The Function of the Ego in Relationship to the Real Self, we are told:
Your inner self is an integral part of nature, bound to the laws of nature. Therefore to distrust this innermost self is unreasonable, for nature can be wholly trusted. If nature seems like an enemy, it is only because you do not understand its laws. The inner self, or the real self, is nature; it is life; it is creation. It is more accurate to define the real self this way than to say it is "a part" of nature. The real self and nature are one and the same.
This last sentence is the one that should blow our minds. Generally, we tend to think of the higher or real self in a much smaller scope, but we are really off the mark when we do this. And the consequence of our false and incomplete understanding of the real self is that we are then cut off from the awe and wonder that this statement could re, as well as from the insights and inspiration that follow when we drop into contemplation of the mystery we are being invited to explore.
In fact all of the sentences in this passage are prime for deep contemplation. For example, the statement that “if nature seems like an enemy, it is only because you do not understand its laws” is especially potent as we face a viral pandemic. Not understanding the laws of nature in this sense means not understanding our real selves—as nature. This is probably a much different take on the real self than we are used to, and it reorients how we see ourselves in the world.
Next up is ego. This same lecture tells us that the ego is “the outer level of personality … the part that thinks, acts, discriminates, and decides.” For the most part we probably grasp this fairly well because we do tend to identify our “selves” with how we think and act. But there are a couple of twists here that we need to be aware of and focus on. The first implication we need to explore is that the ego is “the outer level of personality.” This is vitally important because we tend to have a lot of confusion or fogginess around the differences between the ego and the personality—and this confusion quite often has significant impact on how we view our path of spiritual development.
Much of this confusion, the lectures suggest, is connected to our fear of losing ourselves, of somehow losing our individual sense of self and therefore no longer existing. Actually, the lectures usually use stronger language and speak of our fear of being annihilated. And it makes perfect sense that if we equate the ego with that individual sense of self, then we will of course resist on some level all calls to transcend or even do away with the ego! But the ego and the individual personality are not the same. And there is no danger of losing your individual sense of self by transcending the ego. Quite the contrary, in fact; we actually become more ourselves and experience more of our individual personality as we untie the knots of the ego’s distortions. One of the early lectures, The Human Role in the Spiritual and Material Universes, clarifies a lot of this:
The ego is a part of the lower self and the individual personality is the sum total of all that the being is in its momentary state of development, including the lower and the higher self. What passes is only the lower self, which makes you heavy and earthbound with its ego and which limits your individual capacity to experience the divine in every respect, be it a personal spiritual experience, love for your neighbor or compassion, or whatever. Imagine, then, that you have two "selves" who fight each other. This I always tell you. Once you are advanced enough to feel the difference and know how to discriminate one from the other within your soul, you will not only understand my explanations better, but you will also be much closer to the spiritual experience itself. When one clings so tightly to the ego, it is not only because it is so difficult to overcome any aspect of the lower self, but also because one has the misconception that with the ego one would also have to give up the individual personality.
If you are reading this closely, you will understand that 1) the ego is part of the lower self, 2) overcoming the lower self’s ego does not mean giving up the individual personality, and 3) the individual personality includes the lower and the higher or real self.
All of this will appear confusing if we do not understand and hold the context of ego transcendence. In short, we must use the faculties of the ego (thinking, acting, discriminating, deciding) to create a healthy self, and this process of purification teaches us to embody spiritual law in a manner that will open us to greater and greater experiences of ultimate reality that go far beyond the ego’s limited scope. This is probably easier said than done, though, because the ego resists our efforts and resorts to all kinds of trickery and subterfuge to keep from moving beyond its present state because it can only really see and experience its perceived finiteness and separateness. Anything and everything beyond that separatist perspective is seen by the ego as annihilation.
Experiencing true happiness by fulfilling our personal destiny, however, requires transcending the ego. Developing ourselves beyond the ego is in fact our only path to sustainable happiness because the suffering and struggle that the ego rails against are paradoxically the products of the false ideas and beliefs of the ego’s finite scope. This does not make the ego “bad.” The ego is our vehicle for transcendence and development. We must connect the dots between our inner negativity and the struggles of our daily lives, and we can do this by realizing that this inner negativity is the domain of the lower self and its separatist distortions of life’s positive creation. In connecting those dots and applying ourselves to positive creation, we learn the lessons of spiritual law and transcend the ego by becoming more ourselves.
Another way to see this is that the personality, your individual personality that existed prior to your lower self’s ego, is the only doorway to the universal. This means understanding, as explained in The Human Role in the Spiritual and Material Universes, that your “individuality, the capacity for personal experience, will only increase and in no way decrease, and that only the ego dissolves” as you more fully realize your real self. The ego dissolves because it is no longer needed, having fulfilled its task to bring us to the truth.
This is the golden key to understanding and eventually realizing what the lectures refer to as ultimate reality, the consciousness of unity known also as Christ consciousness. The personal is revealed as the universal because it has always been and can only be the universal. Our path is all about becoming our real selves by first of all developing a healthy, strong ego. This process of self creation teaches us spiritual law through self mastery. Only then do we fully understand that we are already everything we desire to become.