What About God?

I made this a separate page because I know that there are people for whom any mention of God is a distraction from other consciousness work, because of the emotional buttons it pushes. I mean that with no disrespect. I was perhaps fortunate to have been brought up in an atheist family, because I never experienced the painful distortions which cause people to associate God with illogical thinking, hypocrisy, judgmental shaming, suppression of emotions, devaluation of the feminine, and so on. My progression in life was that I was a committed atheist, complete with an educated scientific counter-narrative, and then I had some experiences I couldn’t reconcile with that set of beliefs. Soon afterwards, I encountered an explanation of God in the Pathwork Lectures which made emotional and intellectual sense, and I find myself believing it. It’s not a voluntary act on my part. It’s just what makes sense to me.

None of that necessarily has any relevance to your journey. As I’ve said elsewhere, all of the practices which make up The Way of the Higher Self will provide a benefit to anyone who engages in them, regardless of whether or how that person conceives of and relates to God. So, if you’re experiencing something along the lines of “I don’t need this BS” right now, we can both honor that, and I hope you find value elsewhere in these offerings.

If, on the other hand, you’re in touch with a longing for connection with God, or you want to unpack your thoughts and feelings about God, or you’d like to enhance your spiritual work by removing barriers to God you can perceive in yourself, then this page and the associated episodes may prove interesting and useful to you.

MY MIRACULOUS EXPERIENCES / INTERVENTIONS

There’s so much rich detail about what I refer to as the three miracles in my life, all of which occurred within a pretty short period when I was 24 to 26 years old, that an introductory text like this isn’t the appropriate place to share it. I will do so in video/podcast episodes, however, and link it to this page. A bullet-point summary of those three events might look like this:

The first time in my life that I pray – to be shown that God exists if that is the case – I am immediately answered with a spectacular vision in the clouds.
The second time in my life that I pray – to be part of the Divine Plan, if there is such a thing – I am immediately presented with an extremely unlikely opportunity to prevent someone from throwing his life away.
At a moment when I am irresponsibly putting my own life and that of others at risk, I am elegantly chastened by a highly unlikely intervention, and told specifically why I am here on Earth.

This sounds kind of hyperbolic, I realize, and yet I assure you that this summary is entirely fair and accurate.

On top of that, during the same period, I also had another experience I’ve only spoken about once or twice in the intervening years, and which, I realize upon reflection, I have tended to push out of my awareness, so that I go for years at a time without remembering it. I suppose it was also a miracle, but it didn’t leave me feeling good the way the other ones did. Like the third experience referred to above, it was definitely an intervention.

This intervention involved me doing something dangerous – although there was no way for me to have known at the time how dangerous it was – and being told internally not to do it again in a way which involved such a felt sense of the enormity of God that I was absolutely terrified. I don’t mean that I was afraid God was going to hurt me. Rather, it was as though life is an airplane ride, and for a brief few minutes God took me out onto the wing, with the madly rushing air and the cold and the noise and the Earth way down below and said, “son, I need you to pay attention.” It seemed then and still seems now like an exposure to a meta-reality, in which God dwarfs us in the way that a galaxy dwarfs an ant, and exposure to that simple fact is terrifying simply because it’s overwhelming.

My point in bringing these things up is not to qualify myself, along the lines of “listen to me because God has shown Him/Her-Self to me.” Nor is it to prove the reality of God, along the lines of “God spoke to me and saved my life therefore God must be real.” It’s simply to disclose how I came to be someone for whom God is real and who is interested in removing the barriers I erect to being in regular connection with God. If you’re a doubter, and even if you’re a forceful doubter, I respect you in that more than you might think. I’m simply trying to balance that respect with my desire to be authentic.

GOD IN THE PATHWORK LECTURES (as processed by me)

There are 258 Pathwork Lectures, in which the word “God” appears a total of 1977 times. Thus, my summary of what the Lectures have to say about God is inevitably subjective and incomplete. If you were to ask other people familiar with the material to summarize the Pathwork concept of God, there would likely be common elements, but also noticeable differences of emphasis.

One important point the Lectures make is that we all have a God-image, that is, a personal construct of who and what God is. Even those of us who are atheists have such a concept, except it takes a slightly different form, as a “Universe-concept,” or “nature-of-life-concept.”

A bullet-point summary of the nature of God as described in the Pathwork might look something like this:

God is both person, and principle and force.
God is both masculine and feminine.
In God’s “masculine” aspect, God decides and creates.
In God’s “feminine” aspect, God simply “is,” and is available for merger with other pure beings.
God is loving and sharing by nature.
God created us as spirit children, with the intention that we would grow and develop.
God gave us free will, and is committed to preserving it, because that is in God’s nature.

To me, what is important about this summary is not only the picture of God it draws, which is very different from the traditional Judeo-Christian image of the stern, judgmental patriarch, but also what it says about us, namely:

We were not created as human beings. We were created as spirits, with the potential to develop into Godlike creatures ourselves. That is to say, we are extra-dimensional and eternal, with latent capacities to create worlds as God does. A person’s physical body is merely a vessel, or an avatar, which a split-off portion of that soul’s consciousness (the ego) operates in order to be able to navigate three-dimensional reality.

The obvious question raised by this postulate is, why? If we’re Godlike, what’s the point of putting us through this angst-filled and uncomfortable ride through life as a mortal, material being?

The answer given first in the Pathwork Lectures – and I say “first” because the subject is approached from a compatible but thematically different angle in a later Lecture – is that we are the beings described in what the Abrahamic religions refer to as the Fall of the Angels, commonly understood as the expulsion of certain heavenly beings who had deviated from spiritual law. In the Pathwork framework, as I understand it, we “fell” by experimenting with certain fundamental energies in a way God had clearly warned us not to, leading to a gradual contamination and deterioration of our consciousness which made it impossible for us to remain in the heavenly spheres and to merge with God and other heavenly beings. Thus, we weren’t expelled so much as we made ourselves vibrationally incompatible.

Because of the intense bonds of love among all heavenly beings, this was a tragic development for all those affected by it – those of us who fell, and those who lost our companionship as a result of this vibrational descent. And so, great effort was put into rescuing us, in a manner – and this is crucial – that would not harm us spiritually by interfering with our free will. In other words, a sub-reality had to be structured for us in such a way that we would choose to realign ourselves with spiritual law. Thus, we live successive lives in material bodies, learning from experience that our deviant attitudes (callousness, cruelty, laziness, irresponsibility, deception, etc.) inevitably cause us pain. In Eastern terms, we are on the wheel of existence. In Western terms, we are in Purgatory, or, as the Lectures put it, in “a purgatorial sphere.”

The end result of all of this reincarnating and relearning is that absolutely all souls, even the most twistedly and sadistically evil, will eventually return to the Divine Community (my term), and Creation will resume from there. And all the suffering it took for us to get back “to the garden” (see the Bible, and also Joni Mitchell’s Woodstock) will be as though we had experienced it in a dream – so much more real is the spiritual meta-reality in which our true beings live.

So, to get back to the question of who God is, in this scenario, God is as loving as could be imagined, as He/She has engineered a system in which every single one of us returns, not a one of us is harmed in any real way, and our free will remains uninterfered with, so that we can each learn to use it constructively as we were meant to. How cool is that?!

About Karl Oakes