This spiritual path, as taught by the Pathwork Guide, works from the outside in. It must. We have direct access to the outer layers of our psyche but only indirect influence on deeper, unconscious layers. We begin with what we have access to.
For a moment, though, let’s look at this from the other end of the telescope. In other words, let’s look at how we’ve ended up fighting between ourselves, against ourselves and within ourselves.
How did we get so lost?
Our center is at peace
Let’s start with where we ultimately want to go, which is to the center of our soul. The Guide calls this our Higher Self. It is our true self, that “heaven is within” place. In this part of ourselves, everything is in balance. There is harmony.
And where there is harmony, there is peace.
This is also the dimension in which everything makes sense. Our Higher Self holds the full length of any spectrum of truth, going all the way from one end to its opposite. When we see all the parts of truth, then everything makes sense. And when everything makes sense to us, we stop fighting.
All that peace lies deep within.
The twisted layers
Next comes the layers of our psyche that the Guide calls our Lower Self. Everything going on here is a twist or distortion of something from the Higher Self. Which means the Lower Self, which is the temporary home of our negativity, cannot stand alone. It will not live forever.
Our own negativity always grinds us to a painful halt. It’s inevitable.
This works perfectly, according to infinitely wise divine laws.
It is our own pain and suffering—caused by our own inner negativity—that will eventually motivate us to turn around and go another way.
A better way.
Since the Lower Self only exists because of the many ways we have twisted truthful things around, it can always be restored to its original truthful nature. Which is why we are here. To use our own free will to restore ourselves to our true Higher Self state.
Why is this so hard?
There are two key things to realize about our Lower Self. First, what pins it into place is hidden untruth. We have untruthful beliefs buried in our unconscious, and they are now driving us.
Because we blindly believe these untruths, which the Guide calls images, we create a world for ourselves in which these untruths seem to be true.
This is one reason unwinding the Lower Self can be so hard: our mistaken beliefs perpetually reinforce themselves.
A second reason it is so hard to let go of our negativity and its associated destructiveness is that our Lower Self is full of energy. After all, it holds all the feel-good energy of the Higher Self, even though it is currently rebelling against life.
This creates a darker version of us that is highly charged. Yes, it is hurtful, but it is powerfully energized. That is why we like our Lower Self.
When we send our hate and rage, spite and withholding out into the world and create chaos, confusion and pain, we like how this enlivens us. It makes us feel strong. It makes us want to hurt some more. And so we do.
We wrongly believe that to become peaceful is to give up all this energy—all this life force—and become blah. We don’t yet realize that we could have all that same energy running in the proper channels, and we would be just as powerful.
But instead, we could feel good.
More alive.
What stops us?
As a reminder, we are talking about our own souls here. Our own inner make-up. This is not some theoretical thing that might be true for others.
Each of us is born with a beautiful Higher Self—this is the truth of who we are—which by now is covered over with dark layers of a distorted, not-so-pretty Lower Self.
No one did this to us. Over countless eons, we have done this to ourselves. Now it’s time to see what we are doing—to ourselves and to each other—with our ingrained habits and hurtful ways. Make no mistake, anything we do to hurt others will also ultimately hurt us, and vice versa.
Since we all have a Lower Self, we all need to look at ourselves honestly and figure out where and how we are doing this: What, in me, is contributing to all this struggle?
But we really, really—really—don’t want to look within. In fact, we are tremendously afraid of doing so. We’re afraid of seeing what we’re responsible for and what we need to clean up. In short, we are afraid of ourselves.
Only by paying attention to what we’re doing—by becoming honest with ourselves—can we grow out of the state we are in and heal. Only by discovering the part our own Lower Self is playing in our suffering can we all win.
Lost in duality
Whereas the Higher Self is comfortable with opposites—they are necessary, in fact, for everything to make sense—the Lower Self is steeped in duality. This means everything gets cut down the middle into either this half-truth or that half-truth, never both.
And half-truths often do more damage than out-and-out untruths.
By now, perhaps we can see how we have cut ourselves off from the truth of who we are. We are so cut off, in fact, that we no longer know what or who to believe. Worse, we can’t believe or trust our own selves.
Or if we do, and if we are not yet living from our center, we are putting our faith into only half the equation, hoping everything will still come out even in the end.
But in reality, it can’t. Because when we are lost in duality, we are not in reality. More to the point, in dualistic thinking, we don’t even want things to be even. We want to have more, to have it all, to always win, and to not pay the price for it.
This, of course, can never lead us to harmony.
To make more sense of all this, let’s look at the specific example of ambition. What does it look like in its extremes: lack of ambition and over-ambition? What’s the original good quality behind these?
Let’s also look at the harm both distortions cause, what they are connected to, and how this all links with spiritual laws.
Lack of ambition
If we peel back the curtain and look at the original good qualities underneath a lack of ambition, we will find benevolence or kindness, humility, harmony and a certain type of tolerance.
A person described this way would not always need to stand out and shine. They wouldn’t feel the need to be better or higher than others. After all, striving too hard to triumph over others does not bring peace.
Now, if we are someone who lacks ambition, it is tempting to hear this and think: “Maybe I should hang onto this fault, because it’s not all bad.” Not so fast. There is a wrong extreme in lack of ambition that is quite harmful.
If we cave in to our lack of ambition, we will be left wanting. Spiritually speaking, this can really set us back. For example, by being sluggish, we may stop developing ourselves. In the end, self-development is the way we must go if we want to become truly happy and secure.
Said another way, if we are unhappy and we also lack ambition, we have given in to the path of least resistance. This is the path of the Lower Self. We will continue to face conflicts as long as we decide to go this way; our hunger, neediness and insecurity will persist.
Spiritual law: Paying the price
The best way forward is to use the positive side of a fault to give us strength to work on overcoming it without feeling guilty. Too often though, we only see the good side of our fault, and we ignore the downside.
That said, the people all around us usually see all sides. But when they bring up our lack of ambition, we get upset. We are only aware of the better part of the picture. Humans are ambivalent like this, filled with contradictory currents, half of which we are totally unaware of.
This doesn’t mean we should cultivate ambition about everything. We must pick and choose where to spend our time and energy. Then, once we do this, ambition is often the price we must be willing to pay to have what we truly want.
We must become willing to pay the price of doing the hard work needed to overcome our deep-rooted laziness. This involves fighting and struggling in the right way to tear down the webs of darkness and walls of loneliness surrounding us.
Spiritual law: We can’t cheat life
Maybe you’re thinking “I’m not ready to do all that work.” Okay, then make that choice. Consciously. It’s far healthier to realize this and become aware of the choice we are making than to kid ourselves.
Perhaps we just want to give up a little bit of our laziness—you know, make a little effort—but we still want the whole result. But if we’re hoping for peace of mind without making a serious effort, this really amounts to some kind of spiritual theft. It means we want the harmony but are not willing to pay the price of doing hard spiritual work.
What exactly does this hard work consist of? Recognizing and overcoming our faults, without exception. In this case, it means tackling our lack of ambition.
As long as we have to force ourselves to do this kind of deep healing work, we have not truly overcome this fault. Our emotions are still resisting and rebelling. As such, we are still not one with our true selves.
What we need to do is notice this and keep working. Eventually, God’s grace will affect us and help us so that what was once an effort will come more easily.
Uncovering the gap
We may balk at this notion that we are out to steal the good stuff. Obviously, this is not a conscious thought. Yet if we want the goodies without being willing to pay the price for them, this is stealing. And it’s hiding in our unconscious. Then fear, anxiety and pain arise.
There is frequently a huge gap between what we consciously think and say we want, and what lurks in our unconscious. Whatever we unconsciously believe will always undermine us. We, of course, usually just ignore that hidden, contrary current. And the anxiety.
The way to spot such currents is by looking at the symptoms. Our unconscious currents are creating these symptoms all the time. These symptoms are the things in life that are not going the way we want them to. On and on we go, overlooking these symptoms and—simultaneously—not understanding “why is life doing this to me.”
Here is how life actually works: If we want the good stuff, we must discover how we, ourselves, are the ones blocking it. If we want to reap the fruit, we must put in the effort to get it. Not because we are told to or because we want to be “good.” But because there is always a price to pay for what we want.
What’s most important is that we come to the point of doing this work of self-development by ourselves, for ourselves, genuinely wanting what it offers. We need to be responsible and mature enough to make the right effort. We must stop fighting ourselves and fighting God, and then claiming the world is not just.
Frankly, we must become ready to stop being so foolish.
The other extreme: Over-ambition
Going to any extreme is not good. Let’s now look at the other distorted side: being over-ambitious. Here, the original good quality involves having strong willpower and being ready to pay the price by putting in the effort. We have a desire to work and are willing to serve for the highest good of all concerned.
But when our goals aren’t so lofty, then the real goal of our over-ambition is just to serve ourselves. Meaning, when there is a selfish twist to our ambition, we will have a power drive that is self-righteous. We will be greedy, seeking to have more and be more.
Over-ambitious people often become ruthless in getting what they desire at the expense of others. Even if we don’t act this way outwardly, having such unhealthy desire currents running the wrong way inside us will rob us of peace as well as true self-confidence.
The key lies in finding just the right balance between our desires and our ambition. This is the kind of harmony we can find only by unwinding our faults and learning to dwell in the realm of the Higher Self.
The search for self-confidence
As said earlier, when we are not in connection with our Higher Self, we can’t trust or believe in our own selves. In fact, there is a direct correlation between connecting with our Higher Self and having true self-confidence.
In other words, when we become lost in duality by aligning with our Lower Self, we will lack genuine self-confidence. Living in such an unsteady state, we won’t be able to tolerate our current imperfections and accept that others are also imperfect.
As a result, we may feel defeated and collapse into lack of ambition. Or we may lean into a forcing current, hoping to overcome our missing self-confidence and cover our inner despair. We may even do both, showing lack of ambition in one area of our life and over-ambition in another.
Further, when we become lost in duality, we believe that either we are all bad or the world is all bad. In this sort of dualistic thinking, being bad lines up with death, which is seen as the opposite of life. To avoid death, we unconsciously decide we need to become perfect, which is seen as the opposite of being all bad.
This, we think, will save us. Being perfect, we believe, will restore our self-confidence.
This too is a dead end.
Becoming perfectly lost
Now we become lost in perfectionism. Unfortunately, being perfect is not a real part of this world of duality. It is a mirage that causes us pain as we fail and flail, flipping from one side of this make-believe coin to the other.
It is either “I’m perfect, so I’m good!” or “I can’t be perfect, so I’m all bad.” Sometimes we get stuck or become paralyzed, not doing anything at all. We don’t want the truth of our imperfections to be revealed. In other words, we lack ambition but may not know why.
Often, when we realize that being perfectly good is out of the question, we flip over to being perfectly bad. Now we are intentionally living contrary to whatever is good and true. Now we are fighting with the world as well as with our own Higher Selves.
Just look at how incredibly lost we’ve become.
We are even lost from our own true selves.
Follow the light
Following the Lower Self—taking the path of least resistance—eventually leads into a dark hole, from which there may seem to be no way out. But there is always a way out. The way out is to look within.
We must turn around and face ourselves. We must work to see the truth about what’s really going on inside us. And we must struggle in the right way to find a new way forward.
While it is true that we all have dark layers of Lower Self, we also all have some connection with our inner light. If this weren’t the case, we wouldn’t be ready to be human. The task of being human involves using the light already available to us to transform our remaining darkness.
We can each turn our attention to this inner light and ask for help. Such prayers, the Guide teaches, will always be answered. Then we must learn to listen and follow those who can truly show the way.
While any truth may become twisted or distorted, what’s divine is never really lost.
And neither are we.
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Adapted, in part, from the Pathwork Q&A on Ambition
