About
Karl Oakes
I wondered about how much to say about myself here, i.e., where the line might be between “enough personal background to create a basic sense of connection” and “irrelevant oversharing.” Eventually, I settled on a moderate amount of information, supplemented by a few photographs which I hope will communicate more intuitively than words.
If I had to sum myself up in a sentence, though – for purposes of this website – I'd say I'm someone who ran into some amazingly useful material about personal evolution, made fairly good use of it, and has both a desire and the ability to communicate about it.
In other words, I am a student/practitioner and a presenter of information, nothing more. I don’t have formal “credentials” which might help to validate me, nor do I claim to have “mastered” this material. My main relevant virtues, I think, are that I'm pretty articulate, and unafraid to be honest about myself. Also, I’ve travelled a considerable distance in my life, from being significantly wounded and misdirected to being physically, emotionally, and spiritually healthy, and I think you’ll sense that depth of experience in the ways I speak about spiritual and emotional growth.
Ultimately, though, the value of what I say is for you to assess on its own merit, based on your intuition and your experience – including the results you get from trying the practices.
I should also mention that my emphasis in my own practice is on cultivating groundedness – that is, emotional depth, stability, and tolerance. Another way to put it might be “serenity with rich and lively emotional roots.” One sees and hears the word “joy” a lot in spiritual contexts, and I delight in the experience of joy when it visits me, but my capacity to feel joy is directly related to my capacity to confront and endure my darkest energies and most painful feelings. There is no selective joy filter we can turn on and off in ourselves. We either have to open the gate to everything which lives in us, or keep that gate closed and deprive ourselves of delight, along with the pain.
So, the practices I advocate are partially geared to gaining fuller access to our inner selves, and opening up our emotional channels, without bypassing the unpleasant stuff.
Beyond that, I’m primarily motivated to express and encourage trust in the benevolent cosmic order of things, especially at this time of planetary upheaval and change. In so doing, I will point to the ideas and tools which have helped me walk through the depths of my pain and my despair, with a measure of trust in the light I felt I was seeing at the end of the tunnel. If you want to hear from someone who knows what it means to hit bottom, and who looks back on that from a perspective of essential wholeness, I might have something to offer you.
Turning to my personal history…
My parents were both scarred by World War II, and while they certainly loved me and did their best, each of them occasionally acted out in traumatic and damaging ways during my early childhood. Out of necessity, I repressed the memory of the most devastating of these incidents, where it lay dormant but toxically destabilizing for the next 40 years. Thus, I entered adulthood with a poor emotional foundation, and was fearful, angry, depressed, narcissistic, manipulative, and, for a time, drug-dependent as a young man. When I saw that I wasn’t able to parent my children in the manner they deserved, I made my personal work a high priority, leading to the recovery of that essential childhood memory.
Both the Pathwork Lectures and the Mankind Project were crucial supports for my progress, although I have to give honorable mention to traditional talk therapy and to to some recent work directly related to releasing the pent-up energy of trauma. At this point, I like myself and I enjoy life vastly more than I formerly dreamed would be possible, and I'm grateful and relieved to be simultaneously calm, energetic and purposeful.
Now for the slideshow. I’m inspired here by Slaughterhouse Five, a Kurt Vonnegut novel in which a race of space aliens perceive living beings as the entire spectrum of who they have been at every moment in their life. It seems to me that such an array is a truer and richer way of presenting myself. Please bear in mind that when I tell you I see something in a picture of myself, I’m telling you about what the picture brings up for me. I realize that you may relate to it somewhat differently, and that’s fine. Even if our experiences aren’t identical, I think this a rich and interesting way of telling you about myself.
In keeping with the Slaughterhouse Five inspiration, I’m going to take the unusual step of starting with a baby picture. Why? Partly because I see in it one important characteristic of who I am, but also because we’re all human, and we all enter the world vulnerable, dependent, and doing our best to make sense of the complex environment into which we’ve been abruptly thrust. We also all die, sometimes leaving this plane of existence after a period of similar vulnerability and dependency. That’s intense, and often we cope by blocking out these basic realities and pretending that our current human identities are eternal. Among other things, the Way of the Higher Self is about contextualizing these realities within a healthy spirituality so we can fully embrace the reality of our lives.
So, this is me very shortly after my birth. It seems to me that I’m having an experience of “what the #@%$ is going on here?” I remember myself asking the similar question, “why am I here?” throughout adolescence and early adulthood. This gives some context for my continuing interest in understanding and conveying a detailed explanation of the purpose of life.
This is me at age 11, when I was attending an exclusive prep school in the Boston area. (Yes, I could be a poster boy for white privilege, although it’s worth noting that my parents made considerable sacrifices to send me there.) By offering me male role models I could relate to and emulate, as well as giving me a sense of social status as an academic leader, the three years I spent there probably saved my life. I see sadness and distrust in my face, a forcing of my half-smile, and maybe a trace of the attitude of superiority I was developing as compensation for my feelings of despair.
This is me in my mid-twenties. I have several photographs of me during this period in which I look more peaceful and happier. I chose this one because I can see in my expression some hints of the impatience and irritability I was afflicted with at the time. I was “sitting on a lot of stuff,” as the expression goes, and also smarting from the breakup of my first marriage, entered into at an inadvisably early age. I remember spontaneously bursting out sobbing one evening when a friend of mine with a guitar and some Country & Western tendencies sang the Willie Nelson lyrics,
Don’t boss him, don’t cross him
He’s wild in his sorrow
He’s riding and he’s hiding his pain
It was a difficult time.
This is me in my late 30’s, while visiting my parents in France. I had managed to soften somewhat, but I was still caught up in compensating for pain I couldn’t understand or process, given that I hadn’t yet recovered my crucial repressed memory. I chose this picture because of the T-shirt I was wearing, which expressed my spiritual/intuitive side. In that respect, there was a little bit of “coming out” happening here. It’s important to note, however, that I was also keeping myself pretty clean-cut so I could blend into the mainstream when I wanted to – because I didn’t trust that spiritual/intuitive aspect enough to claim it.
This is the photograph I originally chose when I did the first draft of the website, which included only a single image of me. I suppose it’s the generic “picture of me when I looked a little younger” which is tempting to publish when one starts to advance in years. Beyond that, though, I saw it as subtly reassuring: obviously my cat is super-comfortable with me so I must be a nice, trustworthy guy, right? (I’m not pretending that’s completely logical; I'm just telling you what went through my mind.) This is the first photo in this series which was taken after I had gotten involved with the Pathwork and the Mankind Project and also started integrating the repressed trauma, and I can see the difference in my eyes and in my smile.
Here’s another photo I briefly toyed with posting when I was still envisioning a single image. I could imagine a caption such as “Enjoying the precious natural beauty of my coastal surroundings” or some such thing. The photo appealed to me – on one level, that is – because I imagined that the “typical” visitor to my website might be subtly impressed by how open and expansive it is. Look at me embracing life! On the other hand, the photo is non-connective because it doesn't show my eyes. Also, posting this on its own wouldn’t really be honest – not because I don’t feel this way sometimes, but because it doesn’t accurately reflect my primary orientation towards “emotional depth, stability, and tolerance.” In other words, this is not the dominant vibration I express. Watching my ego attach itself to this picture, and briefly toy with showing you what I thought you might expect and like – instead of who I authentically am – was a catalyst for my eventual decision to post a collection. And, my disclosing and naming that ego-attachment, and the temptation to posture (without indulging it), is illustrative of the path I'm doing my best to walk, explain, and model.
Finally, here’s a recent selfie of me, which I took in my kitchen when I was just “being there,” in a relaxed and generally contented state of mind.
Most conspicuously, I see here that I’m getting older, and that brings to mind my efforts to confront mortality in a constructive, spiritualized context. I’m “just passing through” in this life, as we all are, but I want to engage this experience of humanity as fully and richly as I possibly can, with full consciousness of its impermanence, as well as to leave something useful behind.
I also see someone who has been through – and managed to integrate – a lot of difficult experience. I see a combination of light-hearted detachment and ability to remain present with pain. I see calmness, compassion, and acceptance, along with a certain kind of flexible strength, grounded in a source of confidence unrelated to the ego. Also, for the first time in this progression, the word “trust” comes clearly to mind, and that brings me to one more thing I want to say about myself:
Although I was specifically told in my mid-twenties that I would one day teach this kind of material, and while I’ve always carried the memory of that, it wasn’t until recently that I felt comfortable actually manifesting my vision. Late in 2018, I began a round of personal process specifically devoted to clearing out the obstacles which were preventing me from following through. And while I came across fear, shame, and other familiar personal “stuff,” it wasn’t the existence of those things which was in my way, as much as the ways I was still protecting myself from fully feeling and going through them.
On the one hand, this little bit of holding back was keeping me from grounding myself more deeply. On the other, it was making me judge myself a bit for not fully walking my talk. I could sense that in this condition, I would be an ineffective messenger. People would sense not only my “unfinished business,” but also my own self-judgment about it, and that lack of inner harmony would speak more loudly than what I actually had to say. So, I kept hard at that work for several years, postponing this enterprise in the interim.
In finally going public with this material, I’m not by any means saying that I’m “done” integrating and evolving. If you’re looking for a transcendent being (whatever that might be), you should definitely keep looking. I am saying, though, that my own subjective standard of “how far along I need to be to be a decent representative of these truths” has finally been satisfied. I’m not trying to convince you to make the same assessment. I just want you to know that I’ve waited a long time to do this because I respect both the material and my audience, and I didn’t want to subject either it, or you, to an insufficiently mature version of myself.
Looking back at the progression of pictures overall, I see an arc of growth towards wholeness, strength, and happiness, and I’m optimistic that I can keep progressing for as long as I’m here on Earth. Honestly, I wish things had unfolded more quickly, but I’m grateful that they unfolded at all. We can’t take that for granted in our lives. Awakening and healing take work, and our culture doesn’t give us much guidance in how to go about it. That’s the gap the Way of the Higher Self is intended to help fill.
So, there you have it. Because I’ll be using some aspects of my own personal process in the videos and podcasts, you’ll inevitably get to know more about me over time as you watch and listen. I promise that, as I’ve tried to do here, I will keep my ego out of those explanations as much as possible, and stay concentrated on relaying what is true for the purpose of offering service.