THE GOD IMAGE

Key Extracts from Lecture 52

© The Pathwork® Foundation 1999

If you use half the effort you usually use on other's faults towards your own, you will find the connection of your own law of cause and effect. And this alone will set you free, will show you that there is no injustice, will show you it is not God nor the fates nor any unjust order of a world wherein you have to suffer the consequences of other people's shortcomings, but rather your ignorance, your fear, your pride, your egotism that directly or indirectly caused that which seemed, so far, to come your way without attracting it. Find that hidden link, and you will come to see truth. You will realize that you are not ever a prey to circumstances and other people's imperfections but really the master of your fate. You will deeply understand, not only in theory but in practice, that everything happening to you is a direct or indirect result of your attitudes, deeds, thoughts, and emotions. As far as the latter are concerned, they are most powerful of all, and this is constantly overlooked.

One hindrance is that, despite the teachings you have received from various sources, you still unconsciously think about God as a person who acts, chooses, decides, disposes arbitrarily and at will. On top of this, you superimpose the idea that all this must be just. But even though you include the justice, this idea is false. For God is. His laws are made once and for all and work automatically, so to speak. Emotionally you are somehow bound to this wrong concept, and it stands in your way. As long as it is present, the real and true concept cannot fill your being. God is, among so many other things, life and life force. Think of this life force as you think of an electric current, endowed with supreme intelligence. This ‘electric current’ is there in you, around you, outside of yourself. It is up to you how you use it. You can use electricity for constructive purposes, even for healing, or you can use it to kill. That does not make the electric current good or bad. You make it good or bad. This power current is one important aspect of God where it touches you most.

The apparent impersonal love of the laws that are (understand what is implied in the words ‘that are!’) are made in such a way that they lead you ultimately into light and bliss, no matter how much you deviate from them. The more you deviate from them, the more do you approach them by the misery that the deviation inflicts. This misery will cause you to turn about at one point or another. Some sooner, some later, but all must finally come to the point where they realize that they themselves determine their misery or bliss. This is the love of the law. And they also realize the fact that deviation from it is the very medicine to avoid deviation, and therefore it brings you closer to the aim. The love of the law – and therefore of God – is also contained in the fact that God lets you deviate if you wish, that you are made in His likeness, meaning that you are completely free to choose as you wish. You are not forced to live in bliss and light. You can if you wish. All this means the love of God.

…think of God as the great creative power at your disposal. Therefore it is not God who is unjust, as your subconscious may believe, but it is your wrong use of the powerful current at your disposal. If you go on from this premise and meditate on it and, from there, on to search where you have ignorantly abused the power current in you, God will answer you. This I can promise you. If you sincerely search for this answer and if you have the courage to face it without the wrong kind of guilt feelings – and you should all be big enough for that by now – you will come to understand cause and effect in your life that led you to believe (be it until now unconsciously but, because of that, all the more powerfully) that God's world is a world of cruelty and injustice; a world in which you have no chance; a world in which you have to be afraid and hopeless; a universe where God's grace comes to a few chosen ones, but you are excluded. Only this can free you of this fallacy that distorts your soul and your life… Enumerate the injustices of your own life – do not go into the lives of others or general conditions, for there you cannot find the answer – and then try to find where you have abused the power current and connect these instances with your injustices… You have no idea what this discovery will mean to you. The greater the resistance to it at first, the greater the victory! You have no idea how free it will make you, how safe and secure. You will fully understand the marvel of the creation of these laws that let you, with the power current of life, do as you please regarding your own life. This will give you confidence and the deep, absolute knowledge that you have nothing to fear.