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Conflict between Conscious and Unconscious Desires

To know yourself, my friends, to find the real you, the part of you that you have been unaware of so far, is always the aim and the question. I will now try to help you further in that direction.

It is often forgotten that the human personality has many, many facets and, therefore, one seldom understands what is really meant by “knowing oneself.” Certainly you know a bit about yourself—your conscious aims and reactions, your tastes and idiosyncrasies, and so on. But there are so many other facets you completely ignore, my dear ones. Just think of yourself and of the many people you know in your present life circumstances, as well as in the past. Think how different you are and how differently you act with certain people, with your family, or friends. In each situation there is a different “you.” Try to imagine how it would be if you acted toward person “A” as you act toward “B.” You can go through the whole alphabet and you will find that there are that many facets of you. And that is only on a superficial level, for many other facets never manifest in your surface personality. How then can you know more deeply who you are?

The first and most important step is to find out your desires, my friends. And when I speak of desires, I do not mean the important aims and goals in your life or the big issues. No, I mean that any small—and apparently insignificant—reaction on your part contains a desire of one sort or another. Think of any unimportant incident on any day when you feel disharmonious, angry, irritated, or, for that matter, joyful and optimistic. In each of these reactions lies a desire. If you wish to find out who you are, you must first ascertain the desires in each of your daily reactions. That is not as difficult as you may think, neither is it as easy. It calls for a certain technique, a training. First you must learn to conduct your daily review, which I have often suggested. The next step, instead of merely acknowledging, “I felt angry or hopeful or unhappy or joyous on such and such an occasion,” is to ask yourself why you felt these reactions, no matter how obvious the reason may be as far as other people and outer circumstances are concerned.

Ask yourself, what might be the desire behind your reaction. Ask yourself, “What do I really want in connection with this situation that makes me angry or fearful now? I am angry because I want something different. What is it that I want?” Or, “I am joyful because a desire of mine has apparently been fulfilled. What was this desire? And if I feel hopeful, is it because the chances seem greater now that some desire of mine will be fulfilled? What is this desire, in clear-cut, simple words?”

Try to make a habit of such self-questioning, my friends. Take all your reactions, every day, and examine them from this point of view. What is the desire? That will help you a great deal, my dear ones, to understand yourself much better. It will also help you understand why you became as are now and why you have these desires. But that is the next step, which at this point is premature. One thing at a time. Learn first to establish a concise, articulate awareness of your desires. Then we will examine the reason for their existence.

Your unconscious desires often deviate from your conscious ones. I think you all understand by now that this is one of the main reasons for your conflicts and frustrations. You often create similar conflicts and unfulfillments, while ignoring their full significance. The fact is that your conscious desires and aims that guide your actions are in accord with the goals of your higher self, but simultaneously lower and selfish aims are also present in your motivation. These lower aims find justification in the higher aims, which serve very well to hide their existence. It is very important to find this fact out, my dear friends. Although your actions are worthy and good as such, although the high and noble motives truly exist in you, they lose their splendor if you cannot see the lower motives coexisting with the higher ones in the very same goal. Even long before you can purify yourself to such an extent that these selfish, proud, vain, and fearful motives cease to exist in you, the fact that you simply recognize their existence purifies you to a considerable degree and therefore also purifies your right action.

You are often puzzled because you find out that you want something pure and good, and yet it brings you disharmony. The reason is that you ignore the different motives existing within in relation to the noble desire. The conscious noble motive convinces you that there is nothing wrong with your aim, and yet there is in fact something wrong, namely, that you do not know the other part that coexists in the same desire-current. You are used to an “exclusive” attitude; you think the truth of one motive excludes the truth of another, often quite contrary in nature. It will take much self-realization for you to truly understand that one motive does not exclude another. Purification does not mean merely that you change desires. It means that you separate the good motives from the wrong ones, at first by simply observing them. Do not ever try to force your feelings. It cannot be done. I cannot emphasize this point often enough. But try to become capable of saying, “Here my desire is this or that. The conscious desire is good. But I recognize that this or that selfish motive also plays a role. I will continue to perform the good act, but I will not deceive myself that I am utterly free of selfishness, vanity, or whatever other trend may be involved. I can only pray and hope that these unruly currents will weaken with time. I cannot help feeling that way now, but I hope to become free of them.”

By observing yourself in this way, again and again, the lower currents will indeed weaken until eventually they disappear. You will thus accomplish infinitely more toward your purification than by trying to force feelings away. You try to force your feelings with the best of intentions: you know certain reactions are selfish or unloving, and you do not like to be that way. It would seem possible to eliminate such trends by simply forcing them away. In reality you only cover them up and therefore give them much greater power than when you recognize their existence. In addition, you deceive yourself, because you believe you are purer than you are. You believe yourself free of lower motives, while they ferment in your unconscious.

- Excerpt taken from Pathwork Guide Lecture #45 The Conflict Between Conscious and Unconscious Desires