According to the Guide, when we are preparing to embark on yet another earthly life, certain problems are left closer to the surface of our soul, so to speak. And according to these problems, the perfect parents are chosen along with our place of birth and other life circumstances. All this is carefully orchestrated so we can become aware of our buried beliefs and challenge them, if we so choose. So karma and our hidden wrong beliefs—what the Guide calls “images”—work as a team.

During childhood then, we have particular experiences because we have certain parents and live in a specific environment. This is what was determined to be the most suitable place for us to land—according to our history of incarnating—for bringing out our problems. This isn’t a punishment. The purpose, rather, is to allow us to develop and purify ourselves.

After all, we can’t come clean and eliminate a fault or a problem we’re not aware of. And to become aware of it, something unpleasant has to happen. Otherwise, let’s be honest, we’d never give a minute’s notice to our inner disharmonies. We’d sweep them under the rug and move on. Ahem, that in fact is exactly what we’ve attempted in the past, and yet here we are: same ol’ problem, different day.

Our faulty conclusions about life are 100% ours. No one gave them to us, not even our parents.

To be clear, our faulty conclusions about life are 100% ours. No one gave them to us, not even our parents. We came up with them a ways back, stuffed them down into our unconscious, and then completely lost sight of them. Now here we are once again orbiting the sun, hoping this time to find them and face them. For they exist and they are responsible for all the challenges we face in life. Yeah, they matter that much.

Karma, as many of us know, is nothing other than cause and effect, and it works just as reliably within a single lifespan as it does over the span of several lifetimes. If we want to clearly see the truth of how this works in this lifetime, we only need to do the work of uncovering our wrong conclusions about life, which by now have become our faulty, hidden beliefs.

Because once we’ve come upon our image, we will know to the core of our being that, yep, it’s really this way. Whichever way we look at our life, the equation will now come out even.

Images are what we came here to find

Finding our images—our buried misunderstandings—is much like prying open an old paint can. We’ll need to work at them from all angles, gently probing and loosening them up from all sides. We’ll have to tackle our own resistance to finding them along with our reluctance to believing we’re squirreling away untruths that are attracting drama and hurt in equal measure.

But if we push onward in exploring and examining ourselves from every aspect, all of a sudden the awareness will be there. We will know: This is it! This is what I have always believed to be true. And it’s not!

In that moment, our entire life will make sense. We will understand all our failures and we will know ourselves in a new way. We will also come to understand those around us. There won’t be any test, any trick or any magic, just a truthful realization that makes everything fall into place.

We’ll have to tackle our own resistance to finding them.

Even before we can dissolve an image, the simple knowledge we harbor a hidden misunderstanding will set us free. Then once we expose the entire can of worms, we’re on our way out of misery. But for as long as we leave these parts submerged in our unconscious, part of us simply can’t grow up. This means that immature parts of ourselves are still living inside of us. These are parts of child consciousness that have not assimilated what we have otherwise already learned.

These parts are also stuck holding onto old painful feelings, and they act like a magnet attracting more of the same. So just remembering is not enough. Until we penetrate the irrational levels of our thinking and relive the emotions buried there, we’ll remain trapped.

We will have to walk through the old unfelt feelings we couldn’t bear to feel when we were little. Now, however, we can. This is all part of the prying-open process that is quintessential for healing and growing into fully functioning adults. And that, friends, is precisely what we came here to do.

—The Guide’s wisdom in Jill Loree’s words

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Read Original Pathwork^® Lecture: #184 The Meaning of Evil and its Transcendence