Pearls Phoenesse

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.




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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.




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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…




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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…




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




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