Delivered from Insanity?

Yesterday afternoon I made a journal entry about feeling I was going crazy.  What was this craziness like? I felt I was connected to no one and no thing. It wasn’t fear I felt in this, more confusion, a cluelessness about life. And while I was aware that I could tolerate these feelings and just hang in there, the idea of insanity could not be ruled out.

So how could I go from feeling my connection to the Pathwork Guide and so much passion about Life as shared in my previous post to feeling I was going crazy? I wasn’t sure beyond the simple vicissitudes of this human life, but the wide swing in mood in such a short period did not escape my notice.

A Pathwork Helper friend of mine recently shared a piece of writing he did on Jesus Christ. I had not gotten around to reading it until yesterday.  He held a kind of “The jury is still out on this one for me” attitude that was similar to my own as expressed in my recent blog on Jesus Christ.  But what was key was that he led me to Pathwork Lecture 51 Importance of Forming Independent Opinions.

So yesterday afternoon I dove into this lecture, and as usually happens, it was just what I needed in the moment.  It is broken into two pieces.  The first half was on accepting what is, or go crazy. How appropriate!   The second really talked about the importance of knowing why we hold the opinions we have, pointing out that we hold them often due to a strong thread of emotional bias.  This particularly applied to opinions that mattered to us, and for me this of course included my opinions about Pathwork.   And about Jesus Christ.

It is now 3:00 AM.  I woke up with a clear opinion in mind regarding Jesus Christ that I want to share. But before going there, it is important to state my opinion that God does not look down and punish us for our “sins” or human shortcomings that cause us to get wrapped up in evil in some way.

No, my opinion is that the choices I make, the attitudes and beliefs I hold have their natural consequences, that in my human condition I am pretty blind to ultimate reality beyond this earth plane and that blindness, this not being awake, leads to my making a lot of really pain-producing decisions, for myself and for others.

In my opinion Jesus Christ did not die for my sins so I can go to heaven and be delivered from the natural consequences of my blind behavior.  If I harm another, the consequences are the harm I cause, not God adding a sentence of punishment on top of the harm I cause.  Oh I rationalize and blind myself to the harm I cause, and so am not even aware of the full damage I have done and its consequences to others and to me, so I may at earlier times attributed the pains in my life to random misfortune, Satan, or a punishing God. But in point of fact, they are the natural consequences of all my human blind actions.

It is my opinion that if I don’t wake up and see what is going on and how I am causing myself all the misery I am so frustrated about (like my areas of unfulfillment with Pat, and many more places where I limit my happiness and fulfillment) then I am truly lost. This lostness leads me down a negative vortex of increasing problems, but those negative consequences are not the same as being punished by a wrathful God. These are my opinions!

My context for Christianity from my conservative Lutheran heritage was the teaching that there was a righteous all-powerful God needing to punish me temporally and eternally for the wrongs I have done, and at the same time that same righteous all-powerful God loving me so much that he sent Jesus Christ, His Only Son, to bear the punishment for the sins I have committed in this lifetime by dying on the cross for my sins.   This is the opinion I picked up from my family and my church. It is not MY opinion.

But regarding Jesus Christ, I had thrown the baby out with the bath water. If my opinion is that Jesus Christ did not die on the cross for my sins so I could go to heaven, then what is my opinion about Jesus Christ?  I had a strong opinion about who Jesus Christ was not, but no opinion of who Jesus Christ was or is or what difference that makes to me and my life. Here I was an agnostic at best.  Not an atheist, just an agnostic.

Then waking up in the middle of the night and question arose that seems pivotal. “OK, Gary, in your opinion Jesus Christ did not deliver you from God’s punishment for your sins, but WHY ARE YOU REFUSING HIS HELP IN YOUR LIFE?

I was stopped cold by this question. Is my opinion that Jesus Christ does not exist in another plane of consciousness, the spiritual realms of consciousness?  Of course my opinion is that in my limited human consciousness I am incapable of knowing the answer to this question one way or the other.

But I have come to resonate so much with the deep truths of the Pathwork lectures, is it at least possible that there are spiritual realms of consciousness, that the Pathwork Guide resides in that level of consciousness and somehow speaks to me, us, from that realm?  I realize this IS my opinion.  I realize I cannot prove it in any conventional earth-bound scientific way, but something in me Knows the reality of this much broader reality beyond this limited human existence.

I see that it is inconsistent of me to hold this opinion about the existence of many higher realms of consciousness and reality on the one hand, and simply deny the reality and existence of some entity we have somehow experienced on our earth plane and named Jesus Christ.

My Helper friend reminded me that the Pathwork Guide calls Jesus Christ our Master Helper. So let me invite Jesus Christ into my being as my Master Helper. Certainly something to sit with!

Selection from Pathwork Lecture 51: Importance of Forming Independent Opinions.