Pathwork Take-Aways
A few years back I had a discussion with a friend who was talking about an “elevator speech” about the Pathwork. That is, something that can be said to promote or explain our work very briefly — in the amount of time you’d typically spend in an elevator with a random person.
This begs a question: Are people led to our community and to the path of self-facing by spiritual intuition, by something that’s “meant to be?,” or by marketing? Is it our job to publicize the essence of the Pathwork so that it’s easily digested?
Perhaps we can do both. Picture the road on which we are traveling. Here are some take-aways:
We create our reality — and we take responsibility for our lives when we realize this.
The suffering we experience is our responsibility — and we can overcome it if we realize there is no one and nothing outside of ourselves to blame — neither our parents, nor our partners, nor the political system in which we live.
“God helps those who help themselves” is an invitation to activate the God within, as the creative agent that can transform our lives.
We victimize ourselves. It’s part of this path to find out how and why. Yet as we experience pain and suffering, those who are hurting us or others don’t get a free pass. They too are accountable for their actions. We aren’t meant to be passive in the face of hostility or cruelty, but we also recognize that there may be karmic ties and causes and effects below the surface that are part of the bigger picture of who does what to whom and why.
Understanding motivations and dissolving negative patterns
The Pathwork provides many windows into the reasons for suffering. The insights of many Lectures are rooted in an understanding of psychology and family dynamics. They tell us how to find out what kind of person we are and to understand what motivates us. They help us figure out how past traumas and our interactions with our parents and siblings created and reinforced the patterns, or images, that rule our lives. They help us see why and how we resist change and growth.
A larger perspective: Our Society and the World
Society at large is changing for the better, as consciousness is raised around the planet by many people and by spirits of higher development who are incarnating now. In Lecture 23, the Guide says in part:
“There is hardly a person, even in this room, in whom a war is not going on inside, a war that is not recognized as yet, where one trend of the subconscious wants to go this way, and the other that way. And your consciousness does not know it. This creates wars on this earth — your unrecognized hatred, your unrecognized selfishness, your unrecognized lack of love, and so on. Once you control this — it does not mean you have to be completely purified, but you control it, you are aware of it — even if only less than one-tenth of the entire human population will reach that stage, I assure you, war will be impossible.”
So the guidance is clear: by raising our consciousness as we venture into this path of self-facing, and by empowering and supporting communities that share our values, we are going to make war obsolete.
In Lecture 25, he adds:
“In a few thousand years from now, perhaps in about fifteen hundred years, the effect of this development will be very noticeable; nations, religions, and races will have few of their differences left.”
Our Goal in the World: the End of Hatred
Hitler saw humanity as made up of races in irreconcilable conflict. Eventually, a race war would take place with the winners exterminating the losers. By contrast, the Pathwork says that all differences between people are illusory, when it comes to our fundamental value. We all have a particle of the divine substance within, and no one is better or has more value than anyone else. As the Guide makes clear in the above quote, racial differences will disappear as society evolves.
Here’s a big Pathwork takeaway: We come to this earth in a series of incarnations. In one life, we may choose a particular racial or ethnic identity, and, in another, a different one. This leads to the truth that the imperative of preserving the tribe, or the family lineage, is misconceived. The ego’s conclusion that we must jealously preserve or protect our race, our people, or our ethnic group should be rejected. Apply this to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict or any other conflict based on ethnic or race hatred. The Guide is saying that when we can’t see the other as the same as ourselves, we violate the spiritual law of brotherhood. To see the destruction of another as essential to our own survival is wrong, because we can’t truly die, and the other is, truly, just as much of a manifestation of the divine as we are.
The Bigger Picture
According to the Pathwork, all of us are here to fulfill particular tasks, but they all converge on what the Guide calls the Plan of Salvation, which will ultimately result in all of us — without exception — coming home to God and the spiritual reality of the unitive state. Because there is nothing to fear, and no reason to fear — except because of our misconceptions — our way is clear to make the utmost effort to bring our often unconscious negativities into the light of consciousness, and ultimately, to transform them.
