FOREWORD by Scott Wisler
The teachings in this book about Christ have been the foundation of my life for the past twenty-five years. In many ways, they have shaped my entire adult life.
I was drawn to Jill by her love and devotion to this account of Jesus. And by her commitment to doing the personal work required to truly live the teachings of the Pathwork Guide.
Christ is the center point from which our lives hang—our marriage, our work, everything. This Christ—the one who took on an impossibly difficult task for all of us.
It may help, then, to share my experience with this account of Christ.
The clarity remains—and it did not come from belief, but from transformation.
A personal journey to truth
Growing up, my family devoutly attended a Baptist church. Sunday School was a weekly fixture.
In the mid-1970s, around age 9, I attended a Billy Graham crusade with my parents and accepted Christ as my savior.
My parents were quite proud.
Around age 12, just after my mother died, the family switched to a Presbyterian church. The theology presented was a little different.
But I was already "saved."
Plus, later, we switched back.
At about age 20, the church's adult Sunday School offered a summer-long compare-and-contrast study of the beliefs of every sect of Christianity. It was a college-level inquiry that focused on two questions:
"How do you gain salvation?"
"And once you have it, can you lose it?"
Through a series of flow-charts, the tree showing all the various beliefs took shape: Is salvation by declaration of faith? By baptism? By good deeds?
What if you did one but not the others?
Or all of them—just to be sure you got it right.
Once you've got it, does keeping your salvation depend on how you behave?
It does? Ok, so what do you have to do?
It doesn't? Then what about bad behavior? How bad is bad?
It's enough to tie you in knots.
The answer in class was that the Baptists got it right.
For the first time I could see the answers to these two questions across the range of Christianity's sects. I took in the whole picture, flow-chart and all.
If I accepted Christ as my savior and was baptized at age nine, did that mean my salvation was permanently "in the bag"? The answer, apparently, was yes.
But I kept asking myself questions:
Did that mean my spiritual journey was over?
What was the point of my life now, if the only relevant matter was already settled?
An experience of Christ beyond dogma
Some days passed.
I was sitting quietly, relaxing after completing some chore, when I entered an entirely different state of consciousness.
I suddenly experienced a clarity I never imagined possible. I have no words to describe it.
A knowing arose in me: these beliefs and dogma were not right.
It was absolute clarity of knowing. A knowing that effortlessly pivoted my entire life.
A vision appeared of an elaborate banquet table set for a feast: plates, goblets and candles. It represented all the Christian teachings about salvation. In one motion, I swept everything to the floor. I moved with clarity, not malice.
I sat at the empty table.
Eventually, the soft pulsation of Christ appeared and silently rested with me.
I kept my experience to myself. It was too shocking to explain. Also, though I knew what was not true, I did not know what was true about Christ.
For a decade I lived my life. And I made a real mess of it. Soon, everything I had created was hanging by a thread.
I made a decision to heal myself—mentally, physically, emotionally and spiritually—as deep as I could go.
The Path that changed everything
After a couple years of searching in the dark, I found the Pathwork Guide. When I read the so-called cosmology lectures—the foundation of this book—I experienced a second jolt into this state of inner silence and clarity.
An overwhelming relief flooded me.
I found what I had been searching for.
But it was a rough ride for quite a while.
My experience was that truth had to rub against untruth for some time. It literally felt like a grinding process was happening inside me.
Like a diamond wheel grinding on rock.
The only thing that helped was staying with the process: making a commitment every morning toward finding my faults and feeling my feelings, the way the Pathwork Guide teaches.
Eventually, the doubts about Christ faded away. Not by my ego mind superimposing a conclusion on my deeper psyche. But by stripping away the layers of my destructiveness.
The clarity remains—and it did not come from belief, but from transformation.
Scott Wisler
– Jill Loree's husband and partner in Phoenesse
