The Undefended Self: Living the Pathwork

unconsciously we are attracted to and choose partners who remind us, however subtly, of the parent(s) from whom we still desire the love that we felt we missed in childhood. We then try, by force of will, to make them give to us and make up for what we didn’t get when we were young. It is as though we suffered a defeat then, and are trying to “win”

The emotional self-betrayal of the withdrawal mask is almost complete. The feelings of the real self are trusted so little that only a small degree of engagement with life and others can be tolerated. Often the person withdraws into the intellect or into an inner spiritual life. Someone may have had genuine spiritual experiences of inner serenity,

You have to learn to let go of a desire for pleasure supreme and make do with limited pleasure before you can realize that absolute pleasure is your ultimate destiny. The doing with the lesser is an acceptance of the reality of the limitation of this dimension. For that, the ego faculties are necessary. Only when your ego deals adequately with the

The spiritual path also progresses in circles that create an ever-deepening spiral of growth: we dissolve images and learn new ways of being, then we go deeper and see the errors in the ways we now follow, and we dissolve those blockages. Facing a particular issue, we work something through only to circle around at a later time and face the same is

The emptiness and even temporary depression we feel on releasing an image is the “abyss” that comes from surrendering a false belief that had seemed to make our lives understandable. An image creates a false unity of belief and experience which gives us a kind of security because it seems to make our lives coherent and our experiences familiar. But

Scientists and artists have shared the experience that their most creative achievements, or most profound insights into the nature of the universe, came after letting go of mental hard work and allowing some deeper wisdom or vision to come through them. Having touched into a deeper reality where a mathematical truth, a beautiful painting, or an exq

Yet it remains true that it is a rare person who will consciously undertake this journey, and fewer still will choose it as a way of life. It is neither easy nor painless to see our own lower self clearly, without denial and without self-denigration. It is difficult to stop blaming others and to take full responsibility for our own happiness. To se

We can also look at the origin of the lower self from the larger perspective of the soul’s journey. From this viewpoint, each incarnation is only a fragment of the journey of the soul through many lifetimes. The lower self is then seen as a cumulative creation, resulting from every negative choice we have made in all the lifetimes we have lived on

The mask self is the outer layer of the personality, the self we superficially identify with, the face we show to the world. It is the self we think we ought to be, or wish we could be, based on idealized mental images.