Surrender to God Within The Pathwork of Self Transformation Selected Excerpts Bantam Doubleday Dell Pub., Pathwork Press © 1990, Softcover

"In the state of union you will deeply know that all things, all feelings, all emotions, all thoughts, and all experiences already exist, and that you, in common with many others, tune into and share the existing forces through self-produced conditions."
Lecture 75 - The Great Transition In Human Development

Visualize any kind of emotional experience, from the lowest to the highest, as a stream or current. You, according to your personal frame of mind, state of emotion, general development, character tendencies, as well as passing moods or outer happenings, tune into one of these currents while, often simultaneously, you are partly tuned into another conflicting one. With that approach a drastic change is bound to occur in your entire inner and outer outlook. From a separate, self-centered being, you are bound to become, little by little, the being you actually are; and that is difficult to describe in words.

In your limited thinking capacity you feel that only as a unique individual do you have dignity and the chance for happiness. You also feel (often unconsciously) that if you are but a cog in a wheel, you do not count. You are still under the illusion that you are but one grain in a sea of sand and that your happiness is therefore not important. Another illusion is that you have the right to individuality. As such, you are a separate being and therefore essentially alone and unique. At best, others may be in a similar plight. All these assumptions are wrong, but they all exist in you in some measure. As long as these misunderstandings exist within you, they generate an unnecessary battle in your unconscious. It is unfortunate. Of course you are opposed to giving up your individual right to be happy and important. But if this inner error were cleared up, it would make the fight much easier. You would still have to fight, but it would be easier.

The truth is -- and you will experience it one day -- that in the new state you will see yourself as part of a whole -- no more and no less -- you will know that you can share with many others something that already exists, and you will be a happier person. You have the right to happiness; you have more, rather than less, dignity and individuality because of this fact. Your dignity will increase as your pride of separateness decreases. The fullness and richness of life will increase in the measure that you leave your state of separateness, which you have espoused out of the wrong assumption (again unconscious) that separateness and uniqueness will afford you more. But you think that in order to have more, you have to take away from others; that is the error and the conflict. In the old separated state this conclusion seems self-evident. In the new state, after the transition, it is not true. The importance of your welfare is infinitely greater just because you are a part of a whole. The moment you gain but a momentary glimpse of that truth, you will never be torn again by the old conflict that your happiness is selfishness and that if you refrain from this "selfishness," then your happiness is unimportant. However, your concept of what happiness is may drastically change, at least in some respects. "
Lecture 75 - The Great Transition In Human Development

"It suffices to say that the ego is a split off particle of the vaster consciousness still remaining in all men. Unless this split off part is integrated with its origin, it dies off."
Lecture 158 - The Ego's Cooperation With or Obstruction to The Real Self

"The person who has throughout a lifetime -- and often during several lifetimes -- over-emphasized his ego, in the mistaken idea that this is not only safety but life itself, becomes tired. He becomes tired because every wrong soul movement -- based on misconceptions -- is exhausting. It makes him cramp up in order to desperately hang on."
Lecture 158 - The Ego's Cooperation With or Obstruction to The Real Self

"Such false relief can take many forms. One of the more crass forms is insanity -- where the ego is completely disabled. In less crass cases it takes the form of neurotic manifestations, where the ego is unable to use its faculties of strength, selfhood, self-responsibility, etc. Or it can take the form of alcoholism, drug addiction, and all the other artificial ways of obtaining relief from an over-tense ego that is deprived of pleasure because it is too frightened to surrender to the creative process."
Lecture 158 - The Ego's Cooperation With or Obstruction to The Real Self

"The ego must know that it is only a servant to the Greater Being within. Its main function is to deliberately seek contact with the Greater Self within. It must know its position."
Lecture 158 - The Ego's Cooperation With or Obstruction to The Real Self

"The ego must lend its wholehearted support, its one-pointed effort, its most constructive attitude, and its undivided attention to the inner path."
Lecture 158 - The Ego's Cooperation With or Obstruction to The Real Self

"When man identifies himself exclusively with the ego, with the outer conscious self, when his sense of self is predominantly associated with the ego functions, he becomes completely imbalanced and his life becomes emptied of substance and meaning. Since the ego cannot replace, or in any way come near, the resourcefulness of the real self, it is inevitable that such a person -- and this comprises the majority of human beings -- becomes tremendously frightened and insecure. The individual must feel inadequate and his sense of life -- of living, of self -- must become very flat and unenjoyable. Substitute pleasures are then -- often frantically -- looked for, which are hollow and leave him exhausted and dissatisfied. The ego cannot produce deep feelings and a deep flavor of living. Nor can it produce profound and creative wisdom. The ego can only memorize, learn, collect other people's creative knowledge, repeat, and copy. It is equipped to remember, to sort out, to select, to make up the mind, to move toward a certain direction -- outwardly and in inner emphasis and approach. These are its functions. But it is not its function to feel, to deeply experience, and to deeply know -- to be creative. When I say "creative," I do not merely mean artistic creativity. Every simplest act of living can be creative, provided you live activated by the real self. Every act is uncreative when you are cut off from the real self, no matter how much effort you put into it. In fact, the real self is effortless. Wherever it manifests effort exists, but it is always effortless effort. This, too, may appear as a contradiction."
Lecture 158 - The Ego's Cooperation With or Obstruction to The Real Self

"You also experience on your path the fact that the more courage you muster to face your truth, the more humility and honesty you bring to bear on your whole inner person, the more alert and awake you become. This is an inexorable byproduct that cannot fail to manifest. You, suddenly or gradually, see, understand, and perceive others in a way you could never do before. You begin to recognize the negativities of others without being personally affected and upset. You no longer struggle against the negativity of others in a blind, resentful way, without really seeing clearly, only perceiving vaguely, as through a fog. You see really clearly, you comprehend intuitively the connections that make the transgression no longer a personal annihilation. You thus also begin to see and perceive the beauty of others in a way that fails to make you jealous, but that fills you with awe, wonder, and gratitude."
Lecture 220 - Reawakening From Deliberate Anesthesia Through Focusing On The Inner Voices

"This focusing must be done quite deliberately after a certain stage of development and purification. The focusing will yield to connections, to listening, and to hearing. Now, the state of consciousness of humanity as a whole makes such focusing quite impossible. This is a result of mass conditioning. Thus, even those who would essentially be developed enough to do so do not even try. Their still-unresolved problem may be a fear of ridicule and disapproval from the world around them, and the courage is lacking to establish the inner self as the center of individual life. The whole of humanity is conditioned in such a way so as to focus only on certain phenomena outside and inside, at the exclusion of other aspects of reality, until only that which is in focus seems real. Thus, a whole world exists around you that you simply do not see and experience, that seems like a fantasy of others when it is being discussed. This limitation of perception is the result of a conditioned reflex in focusing, which, in turn, is the result of the aforementioned anesthesia."
Lecture 220 - Reawakening From Deliberate Anesthesia Through Focusing On The Inner Voices

Seth