I grew up saying the standard Lutheran prayer before meals: “Come Lord Jesus, be our guest, and let these gifts to us be blessed. Amen.” At my friend’s house, where they were Methodist, they said: “God is great, God is good, and we thank him for this food. Amen.”

Personally, I questioned if “food” really rhymed with “good.”

That second prayer raises an even better question, though: is God all good? This seems fair to ask, given the way we live surrounded by duality. Where good and bad are always a package deal.

If you ask for salt, life will also hand you pepper.

Per the Guide’s teaching in Chapter 5 of After the Ego: “We have been geared for century after century to see the world through the lens of good or bad. It’s understandable that we’ve gotten lost in our confusion…Only in truthful perception do we accept both opposites, allowing them to mutually aid one another…Religion itself has furthered this division, making God good and the devil bad. This is, at best, a half-truth.”

Consider the fact that the devil, Lucifer, was among the first created beings. No matter what has happened since the Fall, under all those dark robes remains a magnificent light.

More brilliant, in fact, than almost any other.

To miss this truth is to be blind to half of reality. The minute we believe seeing half a truth is the same as seeing the whole truth, we are involved in error.

The teaching in After the Ego goes on, “All error can lead only to more error and misinterpretation of life. Eventually, we get incredibly lost in this maze.” Perhaps this can serve as a good reminder that no matter how “bad” someone may seem, if we try, we might also glimpse their inner goodness.

Going back to God and that dinner prayer, is it true that God is only good?

Said differently, does God also have a bad side?

There is a good side and a bad side

Eons ago, long before the beginning of time, something bad happened. In a nutshell, human beings—who were spiritual beings at the time—got in trouble. Our punishment was a bit like being sent to our room.

In this case, we were sent into darkness. Which raises at least two questions: what did we do that was so wrong? And who handed out this dreadful punishment?

Where we went wrong

The long and short of what we did wrong is quite simple: we got sideways with God. We did this by not supporting the leader God had given us. We did this knowing full well that doing so defied the will of God.

That really was the rub.

Call it insubordination. Disobedience. Sedition. Poor judgment. In the end, God was not happy. This is what led to the Fall. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

Before any of us came along, God had created the very first being. As the first, this being was slated to be the one in charge. To this end, this being was created with more light than anyone else.

Actually, this being was created with so much more of God’s light that this highest-ranking spirit has both feminine and masculine characteristics, all rolled into one. This was the only way that such a being could be capable of creating all the other divine beings who later came into existence.

Any creation requires the presence of both the “let it happen” and “make it happen” energies embodied in the receptive and active principles. We may also think of these as feminine and masculine aspects.

After a time, it was Lucifer—the second in command, if you will—who eventually steered us all into the ditch. Eaten up by envy over the magnificence of Christ, Lucifer began an eons-long campaign to become king himself. He was clever, charismatic, persistent and patient, and over time, he gathered an enormous following.

What Lucifer failed to account for was this: God was backing Christ, and God never wavered. From the very beginning, God had clearly and nicely requested that everyone look to Christ as their king.

This was God’s plan. This was God’s will.

As it turns out, aligning our will with God’s will is always going to be in our own best interest. Every time, staying on God’s good side brings us to our heart’s deepest desires.

Yet as it was then, so it is today: we always have the choice about whether we align our will with God’s will, or not.

Who handles discipline?

Disciplining children well—even when done with the very best intentions—is not easy. Add in our shortcomings as humans, and most parents fall short in how well we discipline our children.

Yet raising a child without any guard rails at all isn’t just poor parenting, it’s dangerous. Kids need boundaries, guidance, reminders and corrections.

It must be said we shouldn’t limit God to having human parental qualities. God exists within, above, beyond and outside the human form. Or as the Pathwork Guide succinctly said it, “God is life and life force.”

So while not a “person” kind of parent, it could certainly be said that God is the guardian of us all. As in: God has created an infinite number of spiritual laws that guide us.

They operate, in short, by making it painful in the long run to make choices that go against God’s will. This is called cause and effect. There’s no old man in the sky handing out rewards and punishments.

Spiritual laws work much like gravity. They function automatically, the same for everyone.

Going back to the time when Lucifer drummed up his rivalry against Christ, Lucifer overlooked one important thing. His defiance was not really aimed at Christ. Lucifer was going against God. Which brings us to the point in the story when we witness the wrath of God.

In essence, by aligning with Lucifer, we all got on God’s bad side. We are still paying a heavy price for it. Now, as we painstakingly work our way back home to God, we must work our way up from separation.

To do this, we must stop aligning with darkness.

In other words, our work now is to consciously make choices that align with the light. We can only do this by sifting out truth from untruth and unraveling our self-created negativity.

Here on Earth—where both light and dark are present in everything—this is no small task.

God never left us

It is true that God’s punishment was severe, casting us out of heaven and into the dark depths of Hell. (It’s obvious God doesn’t want us to make that mistake again!) But it’s also true we had plenty of chances to make a better choice before God triggered that event.

To be clear, we’ve brought this discipline upon ourselves through the choices we made. To be even more clear, whatever difficulties we experience now, we are somehow still contributing to their creation.

All our various prisons are of our own making.

It is God’s plan and desire that we each break down our walls of separation, so we can live in freedom and unity. Although God did indeed banish us, God never abandoned us.

Living here in this land of duality, this may be hard for us to reconcile.

God continues to provide us guidance and inspiration for getting back home. It arrives in the form of the spiritual guidance and protection that surrounds us and encourages us to go the right way.

The more we tune into this, the closer it can come.

Restoring our good side

Our inner light begins and ends with God. Therefore, it has no beginning and no end. This light is our essence, and it can never be destroyed, only dimmed.

We can twist, distort and deny it, yet the light remains. This means we can always fully restore it. When we do the work of spiritual healing, that is what we are doing.

We are restoring our inner light to its original bright and truthful form.

Once we get this ball rolling, things get easier. But starting out, the way may be hard. This is due to our accumulated inner clutter.

As we progress, we will gradually align more with truth. This will organically bring us into alignment with God and God’s will for us.

We will then clearly see how the roots of all our problems—which roll up to create the world’s problems—lie within. We’ll start to realize that all disharmony comes—in one way or another—from an untruth.

And untruth always leads to pain.

We cover pain with hate and anger. This leads to avoidance and denial, control and manipulation. All of which create more disharmony, which further hides the truth of the matter.

The longer this vicious circle goes on, the more difficult the work of unwinding it will be.

Light is truth

Eventually, when we’re shining and sharing the same authentic light as God, God will see we are ready to return, for good. But there’s no faking true light.

God always knows the truth.

Because God is truth.

When we become filled with light, we will know truth and we will feel at peace. When that happens, we will feel like we’re already home. It’s our choice whether to head in that direction.

Don’t forget, we are all made in the image of God. Meaning, like God, we have free use of our will. The question is, are we willing to use it in service of doing our work of healing, of unwinding our hidden untruths and their associated disharmonies?

Are we ready to start living on the good side of life?

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