Before we can do our transformative work and reclaim our greatness, we have see exactly what is inside of us that needs transforming…It won’t do to have a vague, general sense of our destructive intentions. We’ve got to see our personal version of evil, in all its ugliness…Short and simple, we have to own up honestly to the full force of our devilish ways. And we must do this down to the very last puny detail…
But—and this may come as a surprise—it’s it’s not as bad as it may sound. This process isn’t about making us out to be monsters…Why, you may wonder, do we have to put so much emphasis on the bad? Is this really necessary to be a seriously spiritual person?…Perhaps we’ve tried other approaches, hoping to bypass the unpleasantness of the work we need to do. But sorry to say, that’s not the way it works. We can only find real solutions and true integration by following this more challenging road…
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 successes, which are new experiences for us, will fortify our courage to go even deeper, exploring hidden places in us that are in darkness. 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 that word contains everything…When the circles are still quite large, this simplicity doesn’t mean anything to us. At that point, everything is complicated by the machinations of the ego that believes itself to be separated from the oneness…
In the beginning, we must focus our work on facing whatever negativities are within us. This is 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 total capacity for greatness….It’s time to get it back…
God isn’t in just some of us. God is in all of us. This makes each of us special in some important way…The part blocking light, then, is the little ego that wants to tower above everyone else, demanding admiration. This is the unhealthy ego, which constantly compares and competes, subduing others if necessary to prove its elevated position…
It’s not possible for our God-consciousness to ever be in conflict with someone else’s God-consciousness. It’s just the ego, in its limited, blind and separated state, that’s in conflict…The ego is not and never will be the oneness because it is divided—in conflict and in contradiction. The God-consciousness in us is the One…
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 face 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…
Once we stop inhibiting 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 everything.
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Read Original Pathwork® Lecture: #212 Claiming the Total Capacity for Greatness
