QA172 QUESTION: Could you comment upon the process of opening the centers?
ANSWER: The processes must consist mainly of the Pathwork you’re all engaged in – my friends here who are really engaged in this Pathwork – in self-confrontation. That is 90 percent of the important task of it. For otherwise the other exercises and practices I talk about – or will talk about – would be very undesirable, indeed even dangerous, if they are not sustained by and fortified by this main process of the Pathwork: self-confrontation, facing the self.
For if you do not know and cannot face the undesirable fear and guilt and shame that burdens you secretly, and the actual violations of integrity that really burden your whole system – if you cannot develop the strength to overcome your problems – then any kind of practice is at best meaningless and ineffective, and at worst, dangerous.
The practices include meditation, relaxation, concentration, contemplation in a meaningful way, the harmonizing, the breathing with the meditation and the concentration – all of that in conjunction with your self-finding of where you are with your problems now: What is the problem that blocks your way now? That is the way.
And the practices I will talk about must be no more than additional means that are like little helping tools. But nothing is better destined to open the centers than facing and resolving your inner problems, whatever they are.
Many are the people – and the philosophies and the religions and the sects and the groups – who concentrate on the practices and feel they’re doing all they can for the spiritual development while they neglect to look at their problems, to look at their vulnerabilities, to look at their fears, to look at their inadequacies, to look at whatever really disturbs them and what is the real cause for the blocks.
Now, these practices themselves I will talk about, but never underestimate the relationship of importance. Therefore, I will repeat this so that you, all of you, will be protected from the danger to over-concentrate on the one in order to neglect the other.
