Karma and hidden wrong beliefs work as a team.
According to the Pathwork Guide, when we prepare to embark on yet another earthly life, certain problems are left closer to the surface of our soul, so to speak. To help illuminate these problems, the perfect parents are selected as a match for us, along with our place of birth and other life circumstances.
All this is carefully orchestrated for our benefit: for us to become aware of our hidden faulty beliefs and challenge them, if we so choose. Karma and our hidden wrong beliefs—what the Guide calls “images”—work as a team.
During childhood, 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. We can’t come to know and then eliminate a fault or problem we’re not aware of.
To become aware of a fault, something unpleasant usually has to happen. Otherwise, let’s be honest, we’d never give our inner disharmonies a minute’s notice. We’d sweep them under the rug and move on, never coming to know the truth of ourselves.
These faulty conclusions, or images, that we’ve drawn about life are ours alone. No one gave them to us. Not even our parents. We came up with these wrong conclusions about life long ago. We stuffed them out of awareness and then forgot about them.
They exist and they are responsible for all the challenges we face in life. Now here we are, incarnated again, hoping this time to find and face them.
Karma is nothing other than cause and effect. It works just as reliably within a single lifespan as it does over the span of several lifetimes. If we want to see the truth of how karma works clearly demonstrated to us in this lifetime, we only need to do the work of uncovering our hidden, wrong conclusions about life.
Once we’ve come upon our image, we will know—to the core of our being—that, yes, it’s really this way. Whichever way we look at our life, the equation will now come out even.
We incarnated to find our images
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 will have to tackle our own resistance to finding them. Along with our reluctance to believe that we’re hiding untruths that attract drama and hurt in equal measure.
If we push onward in exploring and examining ourselves from every aspect, one day the awareness will suddenly be there.
We will know: This is it! This is what I have always believed to be true. And it’s not true!
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 trick or magic, just a truthful realization that makes everything fall into place.
Even before we can dissolve the image, simply knowing that we harbor this misunderstanding will set us free to a large degree. Once it has been exposed, 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. Immature parts of ourselves are still living inside of us. These childish parts of our consciousness have not assimilated what we have otherwise already learned.
They are stuck holding onto old painful feelings. They act like a magnet attracting more of the same. Just remembering this 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 bear these feelings. This is all part of the prying-open process that is necessary for healing and growing into fully functioning adults.
And that, friends, is precisely what we came here to do.
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Adapted from original Pathwork® Guide Lecture #184: The Meaning of Evil and its Transcendence
