Part II: Why Life Is a Struggle

The spiritual meaning of conflict and duality

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SUBMITTING AND REBELLING CHRISTIANS
Two very different responses to untruth

 

Why do so many people react strongly to the name “Jesus Christ”?

The short answer is this: we have become allergic to it after biblical words were misused by organized religion for so long.

But that does not make our reaction right—or Jesus wrong.

If we heard the description of Christ as a personal helper, a friend and a guide who is a being of translucent light and perfection, perhaps we could accept that. So let’s try not to let the words “Jesus Christ” stand in our way.

He is the Christ, and when he was incarnated, his name was Jesus.

Two kinds of reaction

This reaction to the name Jesus Christ happens on two levels: personal and collective. Let’s first look at the personal level.

Often there is a rebellion against one’s early upbringing. This includes our parents and everything they stood for. In religious settings, it often includes Christ.

Typically, Christ is presented as a meek, sexless figure who demands passive self-denial from his followers.

 

Yet we each have a powerful energy within us—an energy that drives healthy aggression, vitality and self-assertion.

 

This living force rebels against any version of Jesus Christ that seems to deny passion, sexuality and autonomy.

Over time, Christianity has come to embody a confusing mixture of truth and distortion.

On the one hand, it speaks of love, wisdom, salvation and service to God.

On the other hand, it has often demanded the denial of natural human energies such as sexuality, strength and self-assertion.

 

For a child, this mixture of truth and distortion about Jesus Christ is almost impossible to untangle.

 

So two reactions tend to arise.

One is submission.

The other is rebellion.

If we become a Submitting Christian, we submit to the entire constellation of beliefs. We grow up trying to be a good Christian who fears our feelings, denies our sexuality and restrains our aggression.

For these energies are labeled “evil.”

 

Yet beneath this restraint, powerful impulses remain.

 

Whenever these forbidden feelings appear, we experience ourselves as sinners. To rebel openly feels too dangerous, so the rebellion expresses itself indirectly.

This creates guilt—and the feeling of secretly being bad.

Such people often seek out denominations that interpret the Bible very literally, in ways that restrict their full humanity. In truth, they need this rigid structure in order to feel safe.

And they would rarely enter a spiritual path such as the one outlined by the Pathwork Guide.

 

The other possibility is rebellion.

A Rebelling Christian rejects the entire system that seems to deny their very nature.

 

These teachings are meant especially for them.

 

Rebelling Christians are right to reject anything that denies their true nature.

But rejecting distortion does not require rejecting Christ himself.

In the end, both groups face a difficult task.

 

Submitting Christians must learn to question the tradition they inherited.

Rebelling Christians must learn to recognize the truth within that tradition.

 

For the love, power and presence of Jesus are real.

Seeing the world in black and white

Having parents who are strong and right gives children a sense of security in the world. This is part of the reason a Submitting Christian accepts their parents’ religion.

It’s just too frightening to think the parents were weak, or worse, wrong.

Rebelling Christians find security in their rejection of their parents’ values. This makes them feel more superior.

 

As though their denial of Christ is more evolved.

 

It is, indeed, more evolved to deny the untruthful life-denying parts. But it is not more evolved to also deny the truths in the Christian tradition.

As children, we see things in either/or extremes. So being right equates with being good and acceptable, and being able to create happiness and security. Being wrong, then, makes one bad, insecure and unacceptable, and undeserving of happiness.

From this stance, a fear develops that asks,

 

What if, by chance, my parents were actually right about Jesus?

 

That means they were completely right, and sexuality really is sinful.

 

This creates a problem for the child whose sense of autonomy, sexuality and self-expression is now developing.

Until we do our personal work of self-development, all this will remain buried in the unconscious of a person. When this is the case, as it is for Rebelling Christians, and we begin to explore these teachings about Jesus from the Pathwork Guide, the same struggle will arise.

When this happens, we mistakenly believe we don’t have a right to be angry. That self-expression is sinful. That we cannot express previously denied energies in an appropriate but aggressive way.

 

After all, we think, if I am good Christian, I believe all aggression is bad.

 

Further, if the Pathwork Guide is now telling me Jesus Christ is good, I feel guilty and bad for having denied Christ and my parents in the past.

The stronger our inner confusion about what’s true and what’s false in our parents’ tradition, the stronger will be our fear of finding out we are wrong and bad.

 

All this reinforces our rebellion.

 

For it’s hard to bear the guilt of being wrong on so many levels. As such, we feel we must continue to turn away from Jesus.

And so, our negative reactions continue.

 

Both Submitting and Rebelling Christians fear that if they give in, they will have to become like the other.

 

The Christian Rebel will have to submit to all the falsehoods.

The Christian Submitter will have to throw out the beautiful truth about Jesus, along with all the falsehoods.

 

When such beliefs multiply often enough, they form a collective image.

Not surprising, there is a Jewish mass image related to all this.

Similar to how Submitting Christians feel, Jews who deny Christ feel incredibly threatened about their parents being wrong. That’s because, in the immature parts of the soul, we cannot accept that our parents can be wrong about anything.

 

Because this implies they are wrong about everything.

 

The way out of this maze is to unearth the mistaken beliefs that are now buried in our unconscious.

That is what it means to do the work.

When it’s the only option

During the time of Christ, Jews were the only ones who worshipped God as being a single God. They were in touch with God and attempted to follow his commandments and laws.

As is the way with humans though, pride—which is one of our three main faults—had to creep in.

In this situation, there was this feeling of superiority among the Jews because they got it right.

This meant the pagans were wrong.

 

It was as if they saw themselves as the aristocrats of the human family.

 

The only place Jesus could have been born then, was among the Jewish people. Because he is a manifestation of the one true God. And Jews were the population that worshipped this God.

Other factions at the time worshipped multiple gods. Often, these were spirits from fairly undeveloped realms—sometimes even evil spirits.

Many of the challenges we face in life, according to the Pathwork Guide, are tests. So too, are many of our gifts.

In this way, Jesus coming to live among the Jews was a test. The test was to recognize Jesus for who he was.

 

But this directly conflicted with all that personal pride.

 

Had they passed the test, Christianity would have simply become an extension in the development of Judaism.

 

But history tells another tale.

 

Actually, everyone failed the test, Jews and Christians alike. And admitting failure is not easy to do.

The Jews may have initiated it, feeling threatened by Jesus and not wanting to give up their self-serving power.

 

But the pagans weren’t much better.

 

The separation of these two groups quickly became a reality, with most Jewish leaders denying this self-proclaimed Messiah. The pagans, on the other hand, embraced the New Message, because they were hungry for it.

Over time, more pagans turned to Christ than Jews.

Having been made to feel inferior by the Jews who were supposed to carry God’s love and God’s word, they took on their side of the fight and made the Jews their enemy.

 

This then became a vicious circle.

 

Jews then saw the pagans and Christians as one, and as both hostile and inferior. They didn’t want to see how they had co-created this hostility.

Instead, they painted themselves as victims of the pagans, that is, of the Christians—all the while lauding their superiority over them. This type of soul attitude continues to be handed down from one generation to the next, perpetuating this notion.

 

And with it, the Jewish karma.

Breaking the painful cycle

In the course of doing personal healing work, we will each, at some point, be confronted with the possibility that we have been wrong. Typically, we react as though making a mistake is unforgivable and makes us unacceptable.

 

This, we think, makes us unlovable.

 

It takes both courage and humility to jump into the apparent abyss of opening one’s mind, and then discovering that an assumption was false.

Yet this ability to admit our imperfections and human fallibility is what makes us full-fledged human beings. For this is how we find our true value.

 

It’s also how we find God’s love for us.

 

In truth, this love has always existed. But we couldn’t feel it, because it was blocked by our wrong thinking.

This is the true path for all of us, as individuals and as societies.

 

Just as truth has its own laws and consequences, so does untruth. When these types of mass images continue to be denied, guilt piles up. That adds more resistance.

 

Because who wants to feel that guilt?

 

Negative karma can accumulate over lifetimes if we keep looking away from what’s really going on.

Eventually, truth has to become more important than justifying our parents—or ourselves. That’s what breaks this endless chain of painful repetition.

To do this, we must become willing to give up being a victim and blaming others. We have to accept that we each may be holding onto a piece of collective history.

 

Most importantly, we must become willing to let go of all this.

 

When, after much resistance, we dedicate ourselves to seeing the truth, we sometimes have to sit with the pain of our guilt. We may need to experience the pain of guilt for having inflicted pain on the one who came to us in love.

 

In short, we may each need to see where we have turned our backs on Jesus.

 

But we can do this in a spirit of life rather than death, allowing us to arrive at self-acceptance and self-forgiveness.

Then we’ll discover that God has been forgiving us all along.

 

This truth ushers in the light.

 

From there, we gain a new strength and a deeper sense of oneness—with ourselves, with others, and with God.

The revolving pain of untruth

Untruth is always painful.

One source of such painful untruth is images. These are the wrong conclusions we formed in childhood when we didn’t have the mental capacity to do any better.

These false ideas about life attract negative situations, feelings and events to us. But we don’t challenge our own thinking.

 

Because the mistaken idea became fixed and frozen in our soul substance.

 

We then react blindly, in a habitual way that creates negative reactions from others. When these come back to us, we think they confirm our wrong thinking.

But we are wrong.

 

Nonetheless, we put up our defenses.

And so it goes, on and on.

 

The soul is not free when an image exists.

 

Recall that Rebelling Christians mistakenly believe that if they embrace Christ, they must give up their vitality, sexuality and bodily pleasure.

This is because all of these are sinful.

 

As a result, they shut out Christ in order to have their own God-given sexuality.

 

Here’s the main problem with this: shutting out Christ means shutting out an essential part of God’s world of truth, beauty and love.

This split creates tremendous guilt and pain.

 

So instead of simply liberating our sexuality, we must become defiant about it. This is how we try to shut out the other voices inside us.

And that makes us weaker instead of stronger.

One may then feel like a failure but not know why. We may even blame this on having been raised with the influence of Jesus.

 

If only we could be more successful in completely rejecting him.

 

But of course, rejecting truth is not a good strategy for building any kind of strength.

 

Here then, is the vicious circle. We start with the wrong idea that Christ wants us to deny our sexuality. From there, we develop reactions that, in the end, weaken us and seem to bear out that belief.

 

What’s the truth?

Our life force—our vitality—holds the vigor of sexuality.

 

Here’s another vicious circle, this one connected with the Jewish mass image.

Many may still feel caught in the belief that if their ancestors were wrong in rejecting Jesus—who may have been far more than a good man—then those ancestors must have been entirely bad people who could never be forgiven.

Facing such a possibility can feel unbearable. So the possibility itself must be denied, in order not to feel co-responsible.

 

Yet, what Christ said, over and over, is that God is forgiveness.

God is mercy and understanding and love.

 

Jesus also said it is never “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.”

 

Meaning, if one continues to believe wholeheartedly in this old tradition of Judaism, it will be impossible to admit a sin and get away with it.

The punishment is just too terrible.

 

That means the truth—even the possibility of the truth—that Jesus was who he said he was, must be denied.

How we change our reality

How does this image work?

The Jewish misconception is that Jesus was a false prophet. He was a fake, and the pagans and Christians are lying, deluded and inferior.

At the same time, Christians are the victimizers, out to annihilate the Jews. This belief created a great deal of hatred on the part of many Jews, which is how it has become a mass image.

The defensive reaction against this mass image created more antagonism and even persecution. This reconfirms the apparent truth of what is basically a big misconception.

 

That is how we create our own reality.

 

The deeper a belief is buried, the more powerful it becomes—and the greater its consequences. The more guilt it creates, the more we fear facing it.

The possibility that it might reveal something unforgivable becomes almost unbearable. So we defend ourselves against the truth with even greater force.

The heart and mind clamp shut tighter.

Then we must deny even this defensiveness. And justify it as well.

 

In the end, no one can go through this process without being harmed.

 

All these images are not just distortions of truth. They create rigid walls in the soul that separate us from the best within ourselves.

These walls are what disconnect us from the source of life—from God, and from being able to give and receive love—with all its creative possibilities.

In addition to our allergy to “Jesus Christ,” many also react strongly to the word “evil.”

 

But such turning away from God is, in fact, the basis of evil.

That, in turn, is what creates “sin.”

 

When a war like this is going on within, it inevitably leads to war with others.

 

How does one go about the painstaking task of dissolving these images?

We start by poking holes in our own story. We ask probing questions from every angle.

As deeply as we can, we ask, “Is this really true?” Our goal is to shed some new light on the picture.

 

Doing so will open inner doors that were previously closed.

 

And this will start to loosen up hardened places in the soul. For this to happen, the mind must open to consider everything anew.

 

We need to get curious.

Beware false choices

Functioning societies begin with individuals doing their own inner work. At the same time, mass images must be resolved.

Otherwise, they will stand in the way of each person’s unfoldment and self-realization.

As we do this work of healing, we will become free of inner reactions to such words as “Jew,” “Christian,” “Jesus Christ” or “religion.”

 

For many people, the word “reincarnation” is equally loaded.

 

Even though it is against the current-day teachings of Judaism and Christianity, it is one of the eternal truths.

Spiritual seekers often have less resistance to this word. Since these inner doors are more open, they open readily to this truth.

 

As we grow and develop, we become more and more free of inner blocks.

When we have no stake in anything but the truth, we are then no longer bound to nationality, political party, race or creed.

 

We combine all their truths and reject all their errors.

 

Anything that is in truth combines and unifies.

Untruth separates.

 

Untruth creates mutually exclusive dualities: If I am a Jew, I cannot be a Christian. If I am either, I cannot believe in reincarnation.

 

These are all false choices that separate.

 

If we must be one thing with a vengeance, we cannot be it in its best sense.

 

The same dynamics that divide individuals also divide entire societies.

Finding the way out

The way out is to look for this place of prideful stubbornness. Because great strength, autonomy and freedom lie in surrendering ourselves fully to God.

Our work then, is to constantly be cleaning out our psyches. For they are filled with confusions, images and emotional tightness.

 

Usually, though, we try to force ourselves into societal traditions that may or may not fit.

 

Being a genuine individual means we seek God’s truth at all times—not the prevailing belief of a party or group. After all, a group of authentic individuals is never in opposition to the individuals themselves.

 

We suffer greatly from not yet understanding this truth.

 

This happens at the level of entire countries, where pride and dignity are confused with character and self-value.

When countries cannot reach a peace agreement, each is steeped in its own rightness, claiming the other is wrong. Neither wants to see the ways in which they are both right and both wrong.

 

But we’re getting there.

Humanity is beginning to wake up.

 

The process is slow, and we bog it down further with our resistance to doing our own work.

We also resist growing by not questioning our habitual ways of thinking. By holding onto our rigid ideas of how things are.

 

We’re lazy, and we tragically believe that the old ways are safe. Therefore, we must worship them and hold onto them.

 

That’s how they get in, the forces of evil.

And they can plunge us into destructiveness of all kinds.

 

People who follow their true destiny are humanity’s Higher Self.

Those who resist it are humanity’s Lower Self.

 

Both are here.

 

The one that wins is the part that is stronger.

How inner war creates outer war

It’s not true there must always be wars.

This only has to happen as long as the majority of us refuse to wake up, and grow up these aspects that are in error.

For in the end, all of our pride and self-interest actually amounts to a lack of faith—faith that we really can make a difference and change the world.

 

But how do we come by such a faith?

 

We have to experience it, by applying our will in the direction of coming to know God’s will. This starts with our responsibility to tackle our personal images.

We also have an obligation to the whole human race to take on our collective mass images.

 

The place to eliminate them is where they live—inside each of us. When we do this, we can shift the balance for all of humanity.

 

Our own lives are at stake here—and so much more.

 

We start by seeing it is possible to resolve our issues with another person. This will give us a glimpse of how it could be for a whole society to get along.

It’s always possible to unwind surface dissension, if we are willing to go together, to deeper levels.

 

This kind of unity has nothing to do with mere “tolerance.”

Tolerance still implies separation—one group allowing another to exist.

 

Going forward, if we want to move from a state of separation to one of unity, we must evolve through these three stages:

 

• We are locked in animosity and therefore separate
• We are tolerant of others
• We find the place of unity with them

 

Getting to the level of oneness underneath our diversity requires that we mature—both as individuals and as people living together in society.

By losing, we gain everything

Let’s take all this back to the topic of Jesus Christ.

Good for us, for the most part, we are no longer barbarians who kill each other for being a Jew or a Christian.

When this happens today, the majority think it’s a horrible crime.

 

Still, we remain largely locked onto a stance of intolerance about others who don’t believe what we believe.

We can search for those areas where we want to annihilate the other for being different.

 

Often today, this is right there in the scathing things we say and write to each other.

For the “enemy” is somehow challenging our sense of safety in the world.

 

This happened in the time of Jesus, when he was seen as a dividing force. Back then, people chose to reject Jesus, rather than look within themselves to see where dissension was really living.

 

Jesus Christ came to be a bridge.

 

He came to help us cross over to a new stage of love and truth, where we could know unity.

But there is no room for mere tolerance if we want to live in unity.

 

Rebelling Christians will benefit from realizing that it is simply a wrong interpretation to think they must give up pleasure—especially physical pleasure—if they embrace Christ.

Rebelling Jews can come to see that God gave them a huge gift when Christ was born in their midst.

 

That was such an act of love.

 

We need to challenge our assumptions so we can clear up these misunderstandings.

 

Consider too, that the truth may be different from the positions we have taken. That when we give up our fixed ideas, we will gain what we feared we would lose: genuine autonomy.

The big difference lies in seeing we are not at risk for losing anything.

 

And what we stand to gain… is everything.

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Read Original Pathwork^® Lecture: #247 The Mass Images of Judaism and Christianity