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Pathwork Steps
2020 Study Guide Summaries

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2020 August Monthly Newsletter

Perceiving, Reacting, Expressing

Study Guide SUMMARY for Pathwork Lecture 166
Week 1:   Freedom = Facing + Experiencing + Expressing
Week 2:  A Threshold of Spiritual Development
Week 3:  Threefold Principle of Relationship
Week 4:  Self-Love Empowers Relationship
 
NEWS and NOTES
New Friday Meeting Schedule! 2pm EST
Links to YouTube Video Summaries
Subtitle Project Update
Devotional Format of the Pathwork Lectures -
Update on project by Gary Vohlbracht
                      
Study Guide Highlights
Week 1 & 2 
Download the full study guide at www.janrigsby.org

Suggestions for Further Exploration
Reading and Film Suggestions

Study Guide Highlights
Week 3 & 4

Daily Review Pl 28
Online Study Guides

Suggestions for Pathwork Resources

 Free Weekly Teleconferences
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New Friday Meeting Schedule!

Friday online meeting time is being changed to 2pm EST
during the month of August.
This converts to 7pm UK / 8pm Europe / 9pm Near East

August attendance will determine if change will be permanent.
Access codes are in the weekly newsletter; 
Click here: https://mailchi.mp/849b94cbeff4/pathworksteps-2499594
 

Subtitles for YouTube Presentations
Recent accomplishments:

PL 36 Prayer and Meditation
https://youtu.be/zPt9eZxKumo  Introduction 6 mins
Transcript by Jan Timing by Claudia H.
Pl 44 The Forces of Love, Eros, and Sex
https://youtu.be/KGvC6U2RYZ4   103 mins
Transcript by Cynthia Morgan 
Pl 62 Man and Woman 2020 Summary
https://youtu.be/pC84bvQ7vlY  24 mins  Transcript by Jan
PL 125  Transition from the No-Current to the Yes-Current 
https://youtu.be/PoRtWaVunk0   Summary 59 mins
Transcript by Shakila F.
PL 133  Love Not as a Commandment
https://youtu.be/hzQly7lAsFI   14 mins
Transcript by Cynthia Timing by Claudia H.
PL 150 Self-Liking as a Condition for State of Universal Bliss
https://youtu.be/wjQ70cZRDT8  Summary 22 mins 
Transcript by Cynthia M. Timing by Claudia H.
PL 152  Connection Between Ego and Universal Power
https://youtu.be/I63FlKbUQ44   Intro6 mins Transcript by Jan
PL 257 Aspects of the Divine Influx
https://youtu.be/GbqBjMp0n44   Intro 6 mins  Transcript by Jan
If you are interested in correcting / editing / translating,
please contact me! 
 janrigsby@gmail.com
You Tube Videos

PL 165 Review: Download  Review of May meetings
Video: Evolutionary Phases of Feelings and Emotions  55 mins

Pl 104 Review:  Download Review of June meetings 
Video Will and Intellect as Tools and as Hindrances 1 hr w/subtitles

PL 89 Review: Download Review of July Meetings
Video Emotional Growth and Its Function Intro 7 mins

Devotional Format of the Lectures
Update on Gary Vohlbracht's project

Gary gave us the audio versions of all 258 lectures, a 6-year labor of love available at no charge on iTunes. His current project is preparing audio and video materials for teaching and studying the lectures. All of his current work can be downloaded here as a .zip file:
https://www.garyvollbracht.com/pathwork-lectures/pathwork-lectures-devotional-format/
He has also edited 170 of the lectures to correspond to his devotional materials, and also to CDs of his audio recordings. Download individually here:
https://www.garyvollbracht.com/pathwork-lectures/pathwork-lectures-2/ 

As an example, here is Gary's take on PL 166:
https://www.garyvollbracht.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/L166GaryDevotional.pdf 
Week 1:   Freedom = Facing + Experiencing + Expressing
 
Every living creature's aim is to free the eternal spirit.  This aim may be unconscious in many, but this does not alter the fact.  The burden of the encrustations is heavy, and everyone feels this heaviness.  Everyone longs for the brightness and lightness of the spirit that dwells deep within the encrustations so as to truly come into his birthright.  This pathwork is very actively concerned with fulfilling this longing. 
 
The living spirit you are, which is perpetually waiting to unfold itself in creative and joyful living and well‑being, is contained and held back by condensed emotions, by powerful feelings you do not wish to experience. 
 
The way out of this predicament seems to be to deny the existence of the feelings.  This seems the only alternative.  But the more these feelings are denied, the greater their power becomes

The key to safety, security, and all the other treasures of life is love. As long as you refuse to forgive and wish to be resentful with life, and therefore with people and with events, you will close yourself up to all the good that wants to flow from you into the world and from the world into you.
PL 166
Exercise 1a part 1 of 2:

Spend a few moments connecting to your deepest innermost longing. 

Say, "I do not know and I would like to know." And the inner knowing, the inner experience of a vaster truth must come from within yourself. And it can come from within yourself only to the extent you are willing to see truth. PL 66QA

You may, at first, only find a sense of heaviness or resistance -  the condensed crust that you created to ‘protect’ your longing, a process that began in early childhood.  

Allow your longing the time and space it needs to ‘bloom’. The conscious mind does not control this process; but it can invite, accommodate, and facilitate.

Week 2:  A Threshold of Spiritual Development

When you approach the threshold where you meet the apparently uncontrollable agony, pain, hopelessness, and violent anger, and where you also meet your fear of not being able to ever exhaust these negative feelings nor of being able to handle them, then you have to make a vital decision.  This decision is to bring your reason to bear on this entire question:

  1. whether to deny the existence of these emotions,
  2. or to meet and experience them, let them out into the open, with the constructive view ahead of learning how to handle them from here on. 
Two Points of Awareness: 
 
  1. Recognition that there is a bottomless fear in you about violent, uncontrollable emotions of any sort and therefore you do not wish to deal with them; and
  2. Awareness that you wish to remain negative (no one completely, but in certain areas) toward life and others. 
These first two points must be alternately and at times simultaneously worked through.  The causal connection between these two points must be clearly understood.  As you see yourself in this resentful negation, and you can even acknowledge this because this awareness has now come, you will comprehend deeper the causal connection between the two points. 
 
Exercise 2b:

When you see this negation, become honest and humble enough to pronounce it in its true existence:

"I do not want to give anything of myself.  Whenever I feel threatened of rejection, criticism, frustration of my immediate desires, I at once withdraw from life, my vital energies, my good will, my positive spirit of participation in life.  I want to remain unto myself in anger and resentment." 

When you can acknowledge this, you will instantly know that it is this attitude that makes the facing of the rage and the agony perilous. 
Examples of Pathwork Concepts in Everyday Life
Articles are added until the published date.

The Mysterious Flights of Swifts
NY Times Magazine
Swifts have, of late, become my fable of community, teaching us about how to make right decisions in the face of oncoming bad weather. They aren’t always cresting the atmospheric boundary layer at dizzying heights; most of the time they are living below it in thick and complicated air. That’s where they feed and mate and bathe and drink and are. But to find out about the important things that will affect their lives, they must go higher to survey the wider scene, and there communicate with others about the larger forces impinging on their realm. Not all of us need to make that climb, just as many swifts eschew their vesper flights because they are occupied with eggs and young — but surely some of us are required, by dint of flourishing life and the well-being of us all, to look clearly at the things that are so easily obscured by the everyday. To take time to see the things we need to set our courses toward or against; the things we need to think about to know what we should do next. To trust in careful observation and expertise, in its sharing for the common good. When I read the news and grieve, my mind has more than once turned to vesper flights, to the strength and purpose that can arise from the collaboration of numberless frail and multitudinous souls. If only we could have seen the clouds that sat like dark rubble on our own horizon for what they were; if only we could have worked together to communicate the urgency of what they would become.

Nike Ad   1 min 30 sec
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=90&v=WA4dDs0T7sM&feature=emb_logo
This Nike ad is a fake video, but it holds truth.
The danger is not that we can't tell truth from falsehood, it's that we choose not to. Pathwork is about making our choices conscious so that we can understand and take responsibility for the consequences of our choices, and make changes. This requires both the will and the ability to perceive clearly. Like a pair of eyeglasses, you not only have to use such tools, you have to maintain them - and if they become lost, damaged, or untrustworthy, to being able to recreate them based upon your inner divine knowing.

Tyranny Requires Our Consent
Police Tried to Make Me Medically Examine a Man Against His Will
Michele Harper, M.D., for Zora
It’s illegal to treat someone without consent. That doesn’t stop some of my colleagues.I turned away from the triage area, the dumbfounded police officers, and the annoyed charge nurse. I overheard nurses on both sides of the department debating the ethics of my letting the prisoner go. I heard them telling stories of how it was common hospital practice to make an intervention. After all, this is the only way oppression can function: It requires the buy-in of a certain percentage of those it actively oppresses in order to pit those groups of subjugated people against one another.

How Climate Refugees Move Across Continents
[article on a cause and effect calamity that will affect all of humanity. regardless of the decisions each of our nations makes]
ProPublica, The New York Times Magazine, and the Pulitzer
Center, have for the first time modeled how climate refugees might move across international borders. 
For most of human history, people have lived within a surprisingly narrow range of temperatures, in the places where the climate supported abundant food production. But as the planet warms, that band is suddenly shifting north.  A 2017 study in Science Advances found that by 2100, temperatures could rise to the point that just going outside for a few hours in some places, including parts of India and Eastern China, “will result in death even for the fittest of humans.”
Migration can bring great opportunity not just to migrants but also to the places they go. As the United States and other parts of the global North face a demographic decline, for instance, an injection of new people into an aging workforce could be to everyone’s benefit. But securing these benefits starts with a choice: Northern nations can relieve pressures on the fastest-warming countries by allowing more migrants to move north across their borders, or they can seal themselves off, trapping hundreds of millions of people in places that are increasingly unlivable. The best outcome requires not only goodwill and the careful management of turbulent political forces; without preparation and planning, the sweeping scale of change could prove wildly destabilizing. The United Nations and others warn that in the worst case, the governments of the nations most affected by climate change could topple as whole regions devolve into war.
[= intro to a much longer article]
Week 3:  Threefold Principle of Relationship
 
  1. As the wish to remain negative is being given up, and exchanged for a wish to be outgoing, positive, giving, the fear of self will vanish.
  2. Then the threefold principle about relationships [Perception, Reaction, Expression] will change from the negative to the positive. You will perceive yourself correctly; you will react productively to what you perceive; and you will express it in a meaningful way.
Exercise 3b:

As a meditation, say:

"I invest the best I have got into my life. 

I will not withhold anything of myself. 

I want to contribute to the cosmic unfoldment and plan of evolution with all the faculties I have
‑‑ those already manifest, but perhaps not used in this way, and those that are still dormant in me.  I want to contribute.

Only as a thoroughly fulfilled and happy person can I do so, not ever as a suffering one."
PL 166
Week 4:   Self-Love Empowers Relationship
 
Relationship is the very essence of life.  No one is capable of living productively without warmth and love, without sharing and mutual understanding.  It is truly in the scheme of things of the universal creative spirit. 

You cannot possibly have a good relationship with others unless you first have a good relationship with yourself.  Therefore these threefold aspects must first be applied to yourself.
PL 166
Exercise 4a:     Spend some time with these questions. Your answers will differ depending upon the quality of relationships in different arenas of your life. Human beings are complex, and relationships become exponentially more complex! Consider answering the questions 3 times, based upon the different relationships you used in Week 3 to explore vicious and benign circles.

How do you perceive yourself? 
How do you react to what you perceive in yourself? 
How do you express that which you perceive in yourself?

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What to we do in the meetings?
Learning a complex task requires hours of practice + getting feedback. Pathwork teachings are often seen as completely opposite of the usual social and cultural perspectives, so practice can be difficult and lonely.  We share our process with others and hear theirs.  I offer 'coaching' -- spotting misconceptions or unconscious beliefs that may not align with your conscious thought process. Plus suggestions, support, ideas about how to integrate the Pathwork concepts into our personal spiritual practice.

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Daily Review PL 28


"This daily review can be conducted any time of the day, most suitable to you. When you ponder over an accumulation of days, in which ou took notice of your reactions, you will undoubtedly find a recurrent pattern." 
Constructive Attitudes in Self Confrontation PRS5

If you do it sincerely, you will see that your whole life will change. Your whole life will change! 
Pl 28

Exercise: Keep a record of incidents that disturb you.

Record your most immediate feelings and reactions, even if these are obviously short-sighted or at odds with your values and beliefs. Some of our most contentious social and political issues may be the result of people reacting without any filter!

Each week, focus on a different sub-topic.

All you need is a ½ page of lined paper per day, or use a small notebook or diary.  Create 4 columns. At some point during each day, jot down brief notes about each incident (limit:10 per day). Eventually, this can become a thought process. The Guide refers to Daily Review as ‘spiritual hygiene’.

1. Two to three words to identify each incident (no details)
2. What feelings or emotional reactions came up
3. The judgments or conclusions you came to at the time

At the end of each week, read through your entries and complete the last column:

4. What do you notice today that you did not notice at the time? Are there patterns?

5. Using your preferred form of meditation (sitting, walking, or while doing 'mindless' chores) reflect upon the common denominators in different aspects of your personal work, especially when these relate to early childhood experiences.

The Guide refers to Daily Review as ‘spiritual hygiene’.

Free Pathwork Resources

Listening to the Lectures: Free Downloads
Gary Volbracht created his own recordings of all 258 printed Lectures.  These are available on iTunes at no charge, and can be downloaded individually.  https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/pathwork-lectures-by-eva-pierrakos/id819545226?mt=2
His current project is preparing audio and video materials for teaching and studying the lectures in a devotional format.  His work can be downloaded here as a .zip file:
https://www.garyvollbracht.com/pathwork-lectures/pathwork-lectures-devotional-format/

Researching the Lectures Online
This is a ‘formula’ for searching the Pathwork lectures on a particular word or phrase: type  "your phrase" site:pathwork.org/lectures 
into your search engine / browser bar. Replace the words ‘your phrase’ with the word or phrase you are searching for. This works like the search bar on the foundation website and will search only the public lectures (1996 edited). To search my website, you would type:
"your phrase" site:janrigsby.org
 

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Study Guides © Jan Rigsby 2020
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