The Pathwork Lectures — A Mystical Text

This morning Pat led me to page 41 of Christopher Pramuk’s, At Play in Creation – Merton’s Awakening to the Feminine Divine. She read the words aloud so that I could recognize how I experience the body of 258 Pathwork Lectures as a Mystical Text – and it worked!

On page 41 of his book Pramuk is writing about his own experience in reading Thomas Merton’s Hagia Sophia – a writing he considers a “mystical text.” He writes,

 “The best grasp of mystical texts, as Mark Burrows reminds us, comes ‘not in criticism of the text, but in the ‘performance’ of reading, that moment when the mystical text becomes the occasion for a ‘merging of the way of knowledge and the way of love.’”

For over fifteen years I have had a “love affair” with the body of Pathwork Lectures that have so informed, formed and inspired my spiritual and personal growth “from the inside out.” This love affair has materialized in several ways, including my website and blog, my reading/recording the 258 lectures (a six-year project resulting in over 200 hours of recorded material that has served followers of Pathwork around the world), and, since 2014, the creation of a textual form of the lectures, which I have called “The Devotional Format of the Pathwork Lectures.”

I introduce each lecture in the Devotional Format with these words:

 “This Pathwork lecture is rendered in an expanded poetic format, what I call a Devotional Format of the lecture. In this sense it is my interpretation of the intent of the lecture. I may have interpreted portions differently from you, and when this is the case, I ask you to ponder the words for your own interpretation.

 I did this Devotional Format so I can take the words into my heart, phrase by phrase, much as I would in reading poetry — devotionally.   I invite you to slowly read and ponder this format of the text – with an open heart to experience the Pathwork Guide’s Presence, Wisdom and Love emerging from among the words. May the Pathwork Guide’s Wisdom come to live you.”

 I am very appreciative of Pramuk’s expressing so poetically how to take in Mystical Texts (as I certainly experience of the Pathwork Lectures to be and try to convey in my introductions to each lecture) – and it is my intention and prayer that, in using the Devotional Format, people following the Pathwork program for their own spiritual growth experience a transmission of the Pathwork material into their hearts, souls, and minds – in short, into the very essence of their lives.

 Link to description and listing of Devotional Format of the Pathwork Lectures:

 Link to Devotional Format of Pathwork Lecture 253 (as an example)

Shared in love, Gary