CREATIVE EMPTINESS

Key Extracts from Lecture 224

© The Pathwork® Foundation 1999

I spoke to you in the last lecture about the coming of a new era. This requires that many, many human beings are ready for this spiritual event… Many spiritual teachers and channels know this. But many have misinterpreted this event. They believe that it will bring cataclysms on a human level, in a geographical way. I have said it before: this is not true. The changes that are occurring, already now in progress, are changes of consciousness… It is unprecedented in history. For there was no other time in mankind's history when this power was as available as it is now.

I am going to speak about the importance of being receptive to this force, this energy, this new consciousness: the Christ consciousness that tries to spread and is spreading and is seeping through human consciousness wherever this is possible. In order to do this, you also need to understand another principle, and that is the principle of creative emptiness… You need to create an atmosphere and a climate within yourself in which you allow this emptiness to exist… As a result of a continuous process over centuries and centuries of your existence, you have conditioned yourself to make the outer mind a very busy place so that when that busyness ceases temporarily, the resulting quiet is confused with emptiness. It indeed seems empty. The noise must recede, and you must indeed embrace and welcome the emptiness as the most important prerequisite and channel through which to receive your innermost Godself. Let me put it this way: if you cannot let yourself be empty, you can never be filled.

…it is extremely important that you be receptive in an expectancy, yet this expectancy must be without preconceived ideas and without impatience and without wishful thinking. This seems very hard to explain in human words. It is something you have to feel into to perceive what I am saying to you here: have positive expectancy and yet be free from specifics and preconceived notions of how and what should happen. There is also another related apparent contradiction. You need to be specific, as I often pointed out, yet this specificity must be light and neutral. You must be specific in one way but not in another. If this seems confusing now, ask your inner being to relay the comprehension to your mind rather than try to understand with your mind. The workings of the greater self so far surpass the mind's imagination and ability to conceive, that specificity would be a hindrance. Yet the mind must know what it wants, be prepared for it, reach for it and claim it, know that it deserves it and will not misuse it.

As you do this in a spirit of positive expectancy yet empty in mind and in soul, patient and persevering; a new fullness and filling can take place. The inner stillness will begin to sing, as it were. It will convey light and warmth from the energetic point of view. Strength you never knew you possessed will arise. From the point of view of consciousness – knowledge, guidance, truth, inspiration, wisdom, and advice will come for all your daily affairs, for your life in the biggest and smallest issues. I have said this before, but it needs to be repeated. The process of receptive, creative emptiness must truly be nurtured. You must listen with an inner ear, and yet it is necessary that you do not put pressure on it but become receptive to when and how it will fill you. This is the only way, my friends, to find your inner sustenance, to find your divinity, and to become a receptacle for the great universal power that is being released.

The mind is an instrument that can be of hindrance or of aid to this process. You all know that your mind is limited only to the degree of your own concept of its limitations. To the degree you limit your mind, to that degree you cannot perceive what is beyond the mind. The mind is finite, and it must aim to spread the boundaries of its finiteness until it measures up with the infinite that is beyond the mind and that is within yourself, right here, right now. Then the mind merges into the infinite consciousness of your inner universe in which you are one with all that is and yet infinitely personal… It is therefore necessary in order to elicit and encourage creative emptiness that you… visualize the boundaries of your mind by questioning yourself about all the things that you think are impossible for you. Where you are hopeless and frightened there must be an idea of finiteness that is simply locked in your mind… It is therefore necessary that you begin to puncture that closed circuit… You do this by first making it known to yourself that you do hold limited beliefs, instead of unquestioningly taking them for granted. The next step is to challenge them. This requires taking the trouble to walk through in the well-practiced attitude of self-observation and self-confrontation your limited beliefs and to truly think about them.

Another law of great importance for this purpose is that the opening to the greater universal consciousness must not be approached in a spirit of magic that is supposed to eliminate the becoming, the growing, and the learning process. Now, in whatever way this ultimate of power is supposed to fill and sustain you, your outer mind must go through the steps of acquiring whatever knowledge and know-how are necessary. You all know this in the fields of arts and sciences. You cannot be inspired as a great artist, no matter how much genius you have, unless you learn the craft and the technical outer dexterity. If the childish lower self wants to use the channel to the greater universe in order to avoid the initial tedium of learning and becoming, the channel will remain closed. For this amounts to cheating, and God cannot be cheated. It is then that the personality may become seriously doubtful that anything beyond the mind exists because no inspirational response comes forth on the basis of using magic to coddle the sense of laziness and self-indulgence.

At the same time, you need to cultivate a neutrality. Your devotion to fulfilling the will of God needs to establish an attitude that whatever comes from God is all right whether you desire it or don't desire it. Too much desire is as much a hindrance as the absence of all desire that manifests as resignation and hopelessness. The refusal to endure any kind of frustration creates an inner tension and defensive structure that closes up the vessel of the mind and maintains the closed circuit. In other words, you, the receptacle, need to be neutral. You need to give up the strong, tight, self-willed yes or no to make way for a flexible trust to be guided by your inner God. You need to be willing, pliable, flexible, trusting, and forever ready for another turn, another change you had not contemplated. What is right now may not be right tomorrow… Envisage that in the idea of forever meeting every new situation by being inspired anew, by knowing that what is right in one situation may not be right in another, there lies a new security that you have not as yet found.

More and more you discover the truth of unification where dualities cease to exist and contradictions are no longer contradictions; where you experience two previous opposites as two aspects of the same truth, and both as having their validity. When man begins to comprehend this principle and applies it to his own life, his outlook, his values, then indeed he is ready to receive the new consciousness released in realms far beyond your own. So also when I say you must not approach the divine channel in you in an attitude that it saves you labor and work and the reality of living and growing, I am not saying it as a contradiction to the necessity of being passively receptive. It is simply a shift of the balance structure. Where you were before overactive with your mind, you now need to quiet down and let happen. Where you insisted to take over the controls, you must now relinquish this control and let an inner, new power take over. On the other hand, where you tended before to be lazy and self-indulgent and looked for the line of least resistance and therefore made yourself dependent on others, you now need to take over and actively nurture the principles that help establish the channels to your inner God. You also need to actively express its messages into life. So, as I said many years ago, activity and passivity need to be reversed.

The time comes when, in spite of the fear, you decide calmly and quietly to go into the emptiness. So you make yourself empty in mind in order to meet the emptiness from deep within. Lo and behold, very soon that very emptiness will feel, not full, not in the same way full as you are used to, but the emptiness will contain a new aliveness that the old fullness made impossible… You will feel your whole inner being including your body and your energetic inner being as if there was an ‘inner tube’ that is alive, vibrantly alive… That emptiness, that vibrant alive emptiness is God talking to you. At any moment of the day, it is talking to you where you need it most. If you really wish to hear it and attune to it, you will discern it, first vaguely, later strongly. You need to condition your inner ear to recognize it. As you begin to recognize the vibrant alive voice that speaks in wisdom and love – not in generalities, but specifically to you – you will know that this voice has always existed in you, but you have conditioned yourself not to hear it.

The mind, the intellect, must not be left out. It is a tool that must become unified and one with the greater consciousness. For many ages man believed that the faculties of the mind and intellect were the highest form of development, and some still believe this now. So they make no attempt to journey further and deeper into their inner nature to find greater treasures. On the other hand, there are many spiritual movements which practice to discard and inactivate the mind altogether. This is equally undesirable because it creates split rather than unification… The practice of leaving the mind temporarily inactive is advisable. But to accuse the mind as if it were the devil and to oust it of man's life is missing the point.

Now the mind has to express the feminine principle – receptivity. This does not mean that man will become passive, by no means. In a different sense he will be more active, more truly independent than he was before. For when the mind receives inspirations from the God consciousness, they must be put into action. But this putting into action is harmonious, effortless, not like a cramp.