“May all of you find here or there a little key, a clarification, a helpful hint so as to shed light on your way, in your struggle to reach the light of truth, to understand your life in relationship to the universe, to understand yourself and therefore life.”

– Pathwork^® Guide Q&A #132

I once heard someone say that the most ideal form of government is a benevolent dictator. If there were such a thing as a perfect parent, maybe that’s what they would be like.

A “perfect parent,” however, would need to be well-balanced within, and then well-balanced with their partner. Getting this just right takes many lifetimes. Most of us, as parents, don’t get everything right.

As for the dictator style of governing—such as we find in a monarchy and in feudalism—according to the Pathwork Guide, it is one of the less evolved forms of governance. It only works when you have a leader who is fairly evolved.

It’s prone, therefore, to eventually involving a dictator who intentionally breaks the rules. Because, I’m in charge, so the rules don’t apply to me! Once such a leader gains power, the rest of us don’t fare well.

Historically, such dictatorial disasters have led humans to develop more equalizing forms of government, namely communism and socialism. But these also go off the rails when—as inevitably happens—not everyone makes the same effort.

Which brings us to democracy. Or in the case of the United States, capitalistic democracy. This style of political system offers us the most freedom. But such a valuable incentive comes with a price.

The price is that a democracy requires the highest level of responsibility—from all involved—to work.

It especially asks for more from the leaders.

The outer reflects the inner

Before we look more deeply at this situation, let’s touch on where these various political systems come from. If we are familiar with the many powerful teachings from the Pathwork Guide, it won’t be surprising to hear that these three primary political systems—the three main ways we govern ourselves—arise from within us.

Why is this so? Because everything does.

The Guide frequently said that our perception of the world is backwards—or inside out—from how it actually is. In reality, the world around us is always an out-picturing of what’s inside us.

The outside is a mirror of the inside.

Our world reflects the collective contents of our psyche. The micro rolls up to create the macro.

That’s exactly why the world we’re living in seems to be falling apart. People are fractured and fragmented within. This is the human condition.

The goal of life, then, is to work on putting ourselves back together. If we are not willing to look inward and sort ourselves out, our outer world is going to keep shaking and possibly collapse.

Then we will experience crisis both within ourselves and in our outer lives.

What’s happening is we are dropping the ball on the two things a democracy requires from each of us: self-responsibility and compassion. These are the two things we each must be working toward.

They are not easy to come by.

Growing up and waking up

Consider that for thousands of years, people have been slowly growing. Over time, we will gradually develop and evolve. This is why our styles of political systems have been changing.

We keep rolling forward.

Occasionally, as we roll with change, we must go through times of transition. That is what’s happening now. We are now entering into a new era. A new epoch, actually.

This is the final phase of development for humanity. We are now fully entering adulthood. This next phase could take millions of years to get through. It’s really up to us.

One of the ways life changes when we become adults is that more is now expected of us. For one thing, we must learn to be self-sufficient. Along the way, we will trip, stumble and fall, possibly quite a few times.

It takes a minute to get our bearings in life. We may follow a few dead ends.

It’s like this for children as we get ready to leave adolescence. In a similar way, humanity is now stumbling its way into growing up—into waking up.

We really have no idea what’s coming. But we can see things are going to need to change.

Two parties, two big challenges

By now, many have tasted the freedom—and also the pitfalls—of finding our own partner, choosing our own job or career path, and settling into our own space. These are the fruits that so many generations worked so hard to gain.

Such freedoms are what our evolution as humans has all been about.

At the same time, our primary relationships are often rocky. People are unsatisfied at work. Many work long hours for not enough pay. Many children are growing up in poverty. Safe, affordable housing is hard for many to find. Healthcare is wonderful, but fewer can afford it.

Why are we bungling things so badly for so many?

There are two important things to understand about our two-party democratic system:

1) A two-party democracy can easily get stuck in duality.

2) For democracy to be successful, people must develop within themselves the key positions of both parties.

What are the two essential positions, or platforms, that a two-party system relies upon? In a nutshell, they are self-responsibility and compassion. Of course, there are many other factors and positions to also consider.

But fundamentally, self-responsibility and compassion are the two main pillars of a democracy. Without both, the whole structure will tear itself apart.

Instead of giving everyone more, there will only be more struggle—and far less freedom.

Why we need compassion

Self-responsibility is one of the main themes of all the teachings from the Pathwork Guide. They all point us back to where the source of all our problems really lives. Always, it is within us.

This is why we must turn the aim of our fingers around and search for our part in every conflict. No matter how wrong the other may be, if we are disturbed, we also play a part.

At the same time, there is a natural tendency to judge ourselves harshly whenever we discover something amiss within. When we find we are in the wrong. Each time we discover how the very thing we hate lives inside us, it’s tempting to turn our hatred toward ourselves.

First, we must see how destructive our outer life has become. Then we must realize this is an out-picturing of our inner destructiveness. Next, instead of being outwardly destructive, we may want to turn around and destroy ourselves.

This is why another main theme of these teachings is self-compassion.

As we do our work of self-discovery, we must not become our own worst enemy. That makes a difficult path even harder to follow.

The way through this is to keep coming back to compassion. We must see how the roots of our hate, spite, anger and rebelliousness live in us. Then we must transform ourselves, not slay ourselves.

Compassion is not pity

The essence of democracy is the search for the common good. For at our core, we are all connected. So when I hurt someone else, I also—in some way—hurt myself. When I help my brothers and sisters, I also help myself.

Having compassion, then, is a strength, not a weakness.

In the Q&A on compassion versus pity, the Pathwork Guide explained that these two are not the same. What’s the difference?

The emotion of pity feels heavy, so it reduces our strength and the help we can give. When we are involved in pity, somewhere we are negatively involved within. Maybe we are projecting our fear that the fate someone else is suffering will land on us. Or we might have hidden guilt we’re not in touch with.

It’s actually not uncommon for us to feel a certain satisfaction at someone else’s misfortune. Not only do we not have to deal with that same fate, but we like that someone else is being punished and going through difficulties.

This doesn’t really make sense, but it does contain a sort of backwards logic: “If other people are also going through hardships, then I must not be so bad. At least I’m not the only one suffering. This makes me glad that others are also suffering.”

An inner reaction like this creates a shock and a guilt in our psyche that we completely repress. Then we overcompensate for this by feeling an unproductive pity that makes us weaker.

We mistakenly believe our pity excuses us because it makes us suffer along with the other person. But we are doing so in a destructive way.

Our work is to discover the wrong thinking that lies behind this kind of unreasonable attitude. We start by noticing our genuine reactions, keeping in mind that we are all humans who have many unpurified emotions.

Some are childish, others are selfish. Many are shortsighted. The goal is to learn how to accept them without condemning or condoning ourselves and our bad attitudes, or justifying our bad behavior.

Our misguided perspectives will dissolve to whatever degree we really get to know them. Then our pity will transform into compassion. This will make it possible to give constructive help to people who are suffering.

We can do this with our actions as well as by communicating that we genuinely care about them.

No one wins

One of the tenets of looking within means we stop looking “out there” for someone else to blame. In truth, there is always plenty of blame to go around. We are all human.

But even after we identify how others are at fault, this never does the trick of resolving our problems. It is only by finding the roots inside ourselves that we can effectively address them.

In the case of our two-party democracy, it’s quite easy for things to go sideways. Because there is always error on both sides. So there is always someone else we can blame.

As a result, both sides get to feel self-righteous when they correctly identify the fault in the other side. Then both sides lean into the faults of the other side. Yet neither side takes steps to work on their part.

This is the stalemate that’s sinking us right now.

How duality can lead to destruction

Where does it come from, this drive that our many leaders have to destroy the functioning of our government? It arises when we distort the fabric of duality.

In other words, one of the biggest snags for a two-party democracy is the way it so easily hooks into the illusion of duality.

Briefly, duality is the situation where everything comes in pairs of opposites. Good comes with bad, day comes with night, pleasure comes with pain. Where we get lost is in believing we can live a better life by seeking only the “good” half and avoiding the “bad” half.

The moment we start thinking this way, we leave reality and start living in illusion. The illusion is our misguided belief that this can work.

The only way out of this dilemma is by going in and through. The way forward—and the only way out of duality—is by learning to make peace with both sides of every duality. We don’t do this by embracing darkness, but rather by walking through it.

This means we must face our inner distortions. We must each uncover how we’re caught in duality, within. That’s the only way to collectively find the middle of the road.

Where we get stuck

There are two parts of ourselves that are inherently caught in duality. One is the part of ourselves that fractured when we were young. This happened due to whatever pain we experienced.

The other is our ego. For now, we’re going to focus on the ego. We must have a healthy ego if we want to heal ourselves.

The ego is the part of ourselves that we have direct access to. So it’s the part that takes the lead in cleaning up our inner house. It fills the bucket with water, finds the mop, adds the soap, and starts to scrub.

But because the ego lives in duality, it will never be able to understand the awakened state. In the awakened state, we rest comfortably with opposites. The ego cannot grasp this concept.

Instead, the ego competes and tries to win at life. In its unhealed state, the ego will only look out for itself. Being stuck in duality, the ego believes this is a “me versus you” world, and not the “me and you” world it really is.

To be awake is to live unified within. This is the natural resting condition of our deeper, inner self, which the Pathwork Guide calls our Higher Self. To make peace with duality—and therefore to eventually leave this difficult dimension—we must learn to let go of our ego and live from our Higher Self.

Before we can do that, we must clear away all the obstacles dwelling in our Lower Self. Painting with broad brush strokes, our Lower Self is the repository of all our negativity, destructiveness, rebelliousness, and the like.

Waking up, then, must be a two-step process. First, we must clean our inner house so we can find our Higher Self. Then we must let go of our ego and learn to live from that deeper place within.

The power of the Higher Self

To the ego’s way of seeing life, this sounds crazy. We will never win if we do this. But the truth is that the only way to “win” is to let go and discover our inner connection. This is our connection to the divine.

From here, true abundance can flow.

At this level, we are already all connected. So what best serves us also best serves everyone.

There is enough for all of us.

Not because we take from one person and give it to another. Because we shift to a different dimension of reality.

There is no conflict at the level of the Higher Self. We can each follow the stream of goodness that flows from inside us and gradually come to live in peace and harmony. It is only at the level of the ego that we keep running into struggle and conflict, disharmony and seeming injustice.

The first step on our journey to the Oneness—to living together in peace and harmony—is to develop a strong ego. To do this work, we need an ego that is strong enough to eventually surrender itself.

In doing this, we’re listening to the voice of our Higher Self and following the guidance that flows from within.

When an ego becomes very strong but doesn’t know that the next step is to let go, things can go very wrong. Instead of aligning with the greater power available to us, the ego may become obsessed with its own power.

When this happens, the ego is not being guided by the Higher Self.

Part of the problem is that the ego has not done the necessary work of clearing away untruthful negative obstacles in the psyche. It also hasn’t learned to surrender itself. The power the ego craves—and then wields—becomes distorted and destructive.

The person gets a giant thrill from using their power to destroy things.

“It is the same process as, for instance, you know through all spiritual, religious and metaphysical teachings, that love is the key to the whole universe. Yet you have to admit to yourself first in what areas your heart does not know about this, where in your innermost self you feel hate where you would want to feel love.”

– Pathwork^® Guide Q&A #113

Shifting to balancing opposites

The shift that must happen is that we must evolve from a world run by outer rules to one run by people ruled from within. This movement calls us to learn to balance opposites, which takes time and effort to master.

Firmness and flexibility are examples of opposites we must learn to balance. The ego thinks of firmness as rigid, inflexible rules. In reality, the truth is always fluid and flexible.

As the Pathwork Guide explains, in the Spirit World, the more structure something has, the more flexible it is. Our work is to develop firmness—find solid ground to stand on—yet hold our positions with fluidity.

The swinging pendulum of evolving

It’s clear we’re not ready to give up our laws and rules. We’re not collectively developed enough for that. But perhaps we can look at our one-sided stance regarding any particular topic. Can we see how we are being rigid and one-sided in our position?

If so, our work may be about loosening our grip. What other perspectives are we not able to see?

As the Guide points out, a good attorney is able to argue both sides of any situation. This is a skill everyone can work to develop: the ability to see and understand all sides.

At different times, we will need to work with both sides. The way of growth follows the path of a pendulum swinging from side to side. During each swing, we shift to the opposite side.

Each time, we will approach the middle way a little more. Eventually, we will reach the point when we can see both sides clearly. That’s when we truly have something of value to offer.

In short, we must do our own work before we are in position to help others. We simply can’t give what we don’t have.

Said differently, until we have learned how to stay in the middle of the road, we will just keep trying to pull others into the ditch with us.

Working all sides

Everyone in both camps is called to develop self-responsibility. That is the task of being an adult. But in the camp of those who have the power, the scales are tipped so that more, not less, is required of them.

There is a spiritual law that says: from those to whom more has been given, more is expected.

This is one of the choke points of democracy.

“How do we manage to abuse and distort capitalistic democracy? One aspect is the abuse of power by a stronger few. These are the more willful individuals who impose disadvantages on those who can’t or won’t stand up for themselves.

In truth, disadvantage will be the natural result for people who refuse to fend for themselves, and who become parasites at the expense of others. But through the distortions in this system, those who exploit others become parasites themselves.

They use the very ones who want to leech off others.

Instead of working to help these people wake up and adopt more fair and appropriate ways of being, they play right into their hands. They end up validating the excuses of those who are lazy and cheating, who say it is an unfair world they live in and that they are victimized by the greedy.

Because they are.

So this system can be abused from both sides. Those clamoring for socialism can become more parasitic and blame the power structure for keeping them down. On the other extreme, those who are strong and diligent, who risk and invest, can justify their greed and drive for power by blaming the parasitic nature of those who are lazy.

But abuse is abuse, regardless of which angle it comes from.”

–Pearls, Chapter 3: Exploring the spiritual nature of political systems

The real work is humbling

Every time we face a disharmony in life, we are being shown something that we can use to learn and grow. Let’s face it, we will never reach the promised land—whatever that means to us—without making mistakes and course-correcting.

Every conflict becomes a chance to look within and make a change.

This is going to be humbling.

We’re going to discover that we don’t know everything and we’re not always right. In fact, we must discover this. Because if we were already standing fully in truth, we would be living in peace.

Becoming humble is the antidote to pride. And pride, according to the Pathwork Guide, is one of our three primary faults. It is only by seeing ourselves more clearly—by truly facing ourselves as we are right now—that we will get over this mountain.

“The truly wanting to get answers, to be in truth, is the key. If you truly want it and you formulate that desire and you become more specific in the desire, then you establish this contact with the divine self, with the cosmic truth within you.”

– Pathwork^® Guide Q&A #172

Changing the story

The history of our country is filled with stories of courage and inspiration, as well as challenge and destruction. All our collective stories have brought us to this moment in time.

During this period of transition, we have the chance to change our story—to craft a stronger ending.

We must find the way to heal our fractured selves. That’s the only way to heal our fractured nation. There is no governing body outside of us that can heal us. We must be the ones who heal the way we govern ourselves.

“The answer always lies within the self. For if it were otherwise, man would indeed be lost.”

– Pathwork^® Guide Q&A #130

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