When we find ourselves ensnarled in a dualistic confusion, we are negatively involved with people and with life, transferring our split onto them. But the worst negative involvement that happens is inside ourselves…Our life conditions will be constructed to bring it to the forefront, until we stop evading the issue and roll up our sleeves. Unfortunately, there’s not nearly enough sleeve-rolling going on around Earth-town…
We’re here because planet Earth is a perfect match for the negativity remaining in us; it offers conditions compatible with our inner landscape…We’re confused about reality and we have a headful of crazy concepts…Where this prevails there’s always conflict, due to split concepts that divide the psyche and don’t arise from the truth …So Earth is nothing more and nothing less than a classroom for people with splits…
Take a look around and we can see the opposites of duality everywhere: man and woman, day and night, life and death. This is one way Earth pairs up the halves of two-way splits…
We can see evidence of our split right there in the symbolism of having two parents. If we have a psyche that is largely free and healthy, we will be blessed with a set of parents we think of as an asset. But when our negative involvement is still pegging the meter, our parents will each bring out one side of our split…If we look at everything we’ve managed to surface so far, including our main image and defenses, our conflicts and faults, they will reveal the basic inner attitude that is governing our life. And this attitude is always split down the middle, meaning we fluctuate back and forth between two essentially opposite ways of reacting…When this realization starts to gel, we’ll see that our two fundamental attitudes are represented by our parents….
There was no way for us to work this out before we got here. So our parents, who bring our unmended split out into the open, couldn’t possibly be responsible for our problems…This basic conflict is so deep, it’s existence is the reason we have the human experience. But it’s not inaccessible…
We go through life, then, reacting to the person in front of us, not as them but as if they were our parents…Whenever we are negatively involved with someone, we can be sure our split is a factor in the fireworks…We firmly believe in something that isn’t true, and then our belief gets reinforced, so our split cracks open even wider…
Lack of awareness is truly a prison that makes life not worth living because we feel caught between a rock and a hard place. We adopted a certain way of reacting to our parents, and now we keep responding that way and getting the same poor results…The way out is through awareness that we are living in a trance…Once we break this mold, new experiences can materialize.
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Read Original Pathwork® Lecture: #118 Duality Through Illusion – Transference
