The Plan of Salvation

This is a chapter from my book on the Pathwork which is in “rest” mode right now.  It’s about God, the Divine Community and the reason for the creation of the Earth.  I’m posting it here for any Pathworker who isn’t familiar with the “religious” underpinnings of the Lectures.  I believe all of this.  I have no wish to push it onto anyone else; however, I do think there needs to be a discussion within the institution of Pathwork about how far away we can get from all of this and still call ourselves “Pathwork.”  Or, from a believer’s point of view, the question might be, “how far can we get away from all of this and still expect the Divine Community to help and support us?”

Anyway, the book is in an interview format because I often find that people misinterpret what I say about the Pathwork and object on that basis, and I wanted to give a voice to some of the objections I have encountered in order to clear them up.  However, I’m not going to explain who the characters are or what the abbreviations mean at this point.  Hope you find this useful:

Chapter 4. God, the Divine Community, and the Reason for the Creation of Earth

§4:1.  The Creation

§4:2.  The Fall of the Angels (Us)

§4:3.  How We Were Released from Bondage

§4:4.  How We Get Home and Rejoin the Divine Community; The Plan of Salvation

§4:5.  The Symbolism of the Crucifixion

§4:1.  The Creation

INT:  All right then.  Why don’t we move past the “how do we know this is true” stage and actually talk about the nature of the spiritual universe?

•FSP:  Yes, let’s.  And that discussion really ought to begin with the creation of the Universe, and more specifically, with the creation of the divine community of souls.

It all starts with God.  And as soon as we say even that much, there’s huge potential for confusion.  For starters, there’s the question, “where did God come from?”  And for people who really need an answer they can easily wrap their brains around, I’m not going to be much help.  Because trying to understand God in a time-based framework is impossible.  God simply “is.”  As frustrating an answer as that might be to some, the fact is that it’s the best we can do with our limited minds and our limited capacity for language.  On a few occasions, I’ve just sat quietly with the idea that “God is” and I’ve experienced these flashes of “getting” it, and “getting” how wonderful it is.  But I can’t possibly convey that in words, so I’m not going to try.  Let’s just say that the idea of the origin of God is not something that human minds are equipped to deal with.

Leaving that aside, the next layer of confusion arises around what it is we mean exactly when we say “God.”  Are we talking about a man with a beard?  A life force?  A trinity?

The best I can give you on that, based on my understanding of the Teachings, is that God is a being who exists in two distinct phases, or states, which roughly correspond to God’s masculine and feminine aspects.  In one of these states, which we can loosely refer to as the masculine or “doing” state, God is an individual consciousness, aware of itself, with the ability and the propensity to create.  In the other state, which we can loosely refer to as the feminine or “being” state, God is a force which sustains life in the Universe.  Moreover, in the feminine manifestation, God allows other awarenesses to merge with God’s, creating a vast collective consciousness, in which the awareness of each individual member is shared with the entire collective.  Any pure soul, who is able to merge with God and with other pure souls in this way, has the capacity to shift from the individual to the collective phase at will.  So while it is possible to merge with God, a soul does not give up its individuality by doing so, and can always reconstitute itself as an individual at will.

Does that make sense so far?

INT:  I suppose so.  Are you saying that God is both of these things simultaneously, or does He go back and forth or what?

•FSP:  I’m not really sure.  The key thing is that both phases are equally a part of God, although certain characteristics predominate in one phase of being and the other predominate in the other phase of being.

INT:  So am I hearing you say that somehow God isn’t integrated?

•FSP:  Not in the sense that human beings aren’t integrated.  In other words, it’s not that God has aspects which are split off and somehow no acknowledged by God.  Rather, it’s that God by nature is a being with two complementary phases.

INT:  One of which is understandable as “masculine,” and the other of which is understandable as “feminine.”

•FSP:  Among other distinctions which could be drawn, yes,  That’s true.

INT:  Well, if that’s the case, why is it that so many religions refer to God as a “He?”

•FSP:  Because so many societies and religions are dominated by men, and because people tend to project what they know onto God, thereby creating a God-image which isn’t really related to the true God.  When you see all this reference in the Old Testament to an angry, jealous God, what you’re really seeing is angry, jealous people projecting their own negative characteristics onto a personality they’re not equipped to understand.

INT:  So what’s a more accurate depiction of the personality of God?

•FSP:  This is more of an extrapolation than a direct summary of the Teachings , but I would say that if you imagine all the very best aspects of humanity – kindness, integrity, strength, creativity, etc., you can get a little bit of an inkling.  And even there, the potential for confusion exists.  If I say that God is “kind,” that may mean a noble sort of gentleness to one person, and a touchy-feely overindulgence to someone else.  So the best I can say is, think of the moments in your life when you’ve been most impressed by the capacity of human beings for good, and then extrapolate from there.  And then don’t get too attached to that image, because it’s bound to be imperfect.

INT:  All right.  That’s a little vague, but I get the idea in general terms, and I understand that you’re saying the prevailing notions of God as vindictive and angry are inaccurate.

•FSP:  Totally.  Vindictive, angry people are immature.  How could the Creator of the Universe be less mature than some of the people walking around on Earth?  It really doesn’t make a lot of sense.

INT:  And I think you’ve just hit on a big reason that so many people don’t believe in God.

•FSP:  Yes, but when you think about it, forming a conclusion that way doesn’t make a lot of sense either.  It’s throwing the baby out with the bath water.  For example, let’s say you’re living on an island and you see a lot of smoke and occasional lava coming out of a big mountain not far away from you.  Many of the other people on the island are convinced that the mountain will soon spew rocks and lava everywhere because the spirit of the mountain has indigestion.  Sure, it’s ridiculous to someone with a sophisticated understanding of the natural world.  But it’s one thing to reject that uninformed image, and another to say “the people who think the mountain is going to spew lava on us are numbskulls; therefore, the mountain isn’t going to do any such thing.”  What about the alternative, that the islanders might not correctly understand the phenomenon but that their core assessment that there’s danger might nevertheless be valid?

INT:  Right.  That’s pretty similar to the point you were making when you were talking about not rejecting an idea because it’s believed by zombies.  You’re saying that even though the common idea of God seems silly, that doesn’t rule out the existence of a God who makes more sense.

•FSP:  Exactly.  And some of the basic characteristics of God are a desire to create, experience, grow and connect. And that’s why God set out to create other awarenesses with whom God could commune and cooperate in the ongoing processes of creation and growth.  And the very first time that God did this, God actually removed a part of Himself/Herself, and used it as the foundation of another being.  After that, all subsequent beings, including you and me in our spiritual, pre-human forms, were created cooperatively by God and this first created being  The Teachings don’t say much about the specifics of that joint creative process, but they do explain that it required God to part with a smaller portion of God’s divine substance than was required to create the first created being.  So the first created being was created differently than the rest of us were, and has more divine substance than the rest of us.

INT:  So are you talking about Jesus now?   God and Jesus creating humanity?

•FSP:  No.  I’m talking about a spiritual being cooperating with God to create other spiritual beings at a time before any of us were incarnated on Earth.  Eventually, some of those other beings became confused and began incarnating on Earth as human beings in order to regain an understanding of spiritual law, and then the being God had created first incarnated as the person named Jesus.  However, the creation of conscious life initially happened on a spiritual plane.

I’m going to come back to the way all of this intersects with Christianity, but I’d like to hold off on it for now and say some more about the nature of God.  And I think it’s important to acknowledge that here I’m really offering a personal interpretation.  I’m taking bits and pieces of the Teachings, some of which were uttered a decade apart from each other, and I’m piecing them together in a way that hangs together for me.  But there’s something beyond human understanding at the core of all of this, and I think everyone who reads the Teachings is inevitable going to understand the nature of God in a personal way, and in an inevitably limited way, even if there are important aspects of truth in that understanding.

With that reservation out on the table, I will say that the way I understand the Teachings, one of God’s primary objectives is to grow – not physically, but in terms of integrating knowledge and experience.

INT:  But doesn’t God already know everything?

•FSP:  God knows everything there is, but there’s constantly more to know.  Every time you or I have any kind of experience, it adds to the pool of what there is to know.  So if I could give you a simile, which is accurate on one level and yet distorted because it’s bound up with human notions of time and space, God is like a glowing fluid ball of light expanding into an infinite darkness.  And the way God expands is to send out little individual “God sparks” who have experiences as individuals, and then God catches up to those sparks and reintegrates them.  In other words, there’s a process of growth through voluntary fragmentation followed by reintegration into the whole.

INT:  The “whole” being what, exactly?

•FSP:  The “whole,” as I understand it, being the common consciousness which is shared by God and the souls who are merged with God in the being state.

INT:  And those little sparks are us?

•FSP:  On a spiritual level, all human beings are sparks such as those, yes.

INT:  But you’re saying that this image is distorted – it’s an analogy.  Do you have a sense of what the image is actually referring to?

•FSP:  I think that probably takes us at least partially into territory our minds aren’t really programmed to understand.  So, I can tell you how I understand it, but I can’t give you any kind of guarantee that my conception actually clarifies anything.

The way I see it, the void is analogous to the potential for experience.  When we separate from God and enter the individual state, we’re able to have certain types of experiences we can’t have when we’re merged with God.  Then there’s some sort of natural process which brings us back into merger, and when we merge, we bring back with us our experiences, which become directly accessible to God and to all the other merged members of the divine community.  In that way, everything we experience and learn is shared with everyone else.  Everyone gets the benefit of what each of us goes through as individuals.  Essentially, this is how God and the divine community grow.  And while I’m probably speaking about it in a fairly bland, matter-of-fact way, I have a sense that this process of separation and reintegration is something very intense and sublime – very holy, one could say.  There’s courage involved in making the separation, and bliss and gratitude in making the return.  I’m not articulate enough to do it justice, but in my experience, it’s an image that gets deeper and more powerful as one sits with it.

INT:  So then when God “catches up with us,” whatever that exactly means, and we’re reabsorbed into the whole, don’t we cease to exist as individuals?  In this way of looking at things, aren’t we all waves on the cosmic ocean, who take shape and then get reabsorbed and disappear?

•FSP:  Not quite.  According to the Teachings, we’re able to merge with the overall God-consciousness and then re-separate at will.  It’s not like the ocean, where the next wave to appear isn’t the same wave that disappeared before.  There’s an individuality involved which is never lost, throughout successive mergers and re-separations.

INT:  Am I right then that there’s a conflict here with the Buddhist concept of physical incarnation on Earth?

•FSP:  With some Buddhist concepts, yes.  The Teachings acknowledge that the Buddhist notion of suffering as being related to attachment is correct, but they present the soul more consistently with the idea of an individual consciousness transmigrating through successive incarnations on Earth, which is part of the Hindu framework and some, but not all, schools of Buddhism.  We’ll get into that more specifically when we talk about reincarnation.

INT:  All right.  So God is sending out these sparks as scouts, more or less, and then temporarily reabsorbing them in order to absorb their experience into the divine consciousness?

•FSP:  Where it can be shared with any soul who is capable of merging with God.  We’re not capable of doing that at this point, but there are many souls who are.

INT:  Why aren’t we capable of merging with God?

•FSP:  Because something happened which interfered with this reabsorption process, and we’re all still in the process of straightening out the effects of that event.

INT:  So are you saying that something went wrong?

•FSP:  I hate to use that word.  I think it’s more useful to say that we made a choice to experiment with taking separation from God as far as we could take it, in order to see what would happen.  This choice we made interfered with the reabsorption process, and now we’re all working on straightening that out.

INT:  Let me take another stab at it.  Did God know this was going to happen?  Is this all part of God’s plan, or did God make a mistake somehow?

•FSP:  The only sensible reading of the Teachings is that God at least knew there was a risk that this would happen.  And the way I understand the Teachings, God appreciates the opportunity to experience and grow which is presented by this situation.  Certainly, God is absolutely committed to the process of rectifying it, in a way which is true to God’s core nature. Moreover those of us who have temporarily lost this ability to merge, and who are going through some difficulties in connection with that, including taking on some distortions of our divine characteristics and having to incarnate on Earth, are making a huge contribution to the evolution of the divine mind.  God is growing as a result of our wanderings in the darkness, and the rest of the divine community will grow as well when we become able to merge again and we can make our experiences available to everyone.  The Teachings explicitly say that this contribution we’re making to divine evolution is a great source of dignity for us.  That’s a radical contrast with the traditional shame-based perspective on “original sin,” and that difference in attitude pervades everything the Teachings tell us about our spiritual condition.

I know that’s probably all pretty vague, but let me give you more of the big picture and it should start to come into focus.

God and the being whom God created alone, who is referred to in Christian terminology as the Christ, created an entire generation of souls.  Their intention was that each of us would develop into divine, more or less God-like beings – in the same general way that our children develop into adults like ourselves.

INT:  So there’s the kind of New Age aspect of what you’re saying, right?  The idea that we’re destined to become Godlike, as opposed to mere human beings who might progress to being in Heaven and singing God’s praises for all time.

•FSP:  I think perhaps that is a New Age theme, and I know that there are some explicit references in the Teachings to a new age and a new consciousness appearing on the Earth.  Nevertheless, I want to be careful about applying labels to what we’re talking about.  For instance, some people think “New Age” and free associate to crystals and hydroponic marijuana, neither of which are at all relevant to this framework.

INT:  So it’s not a “stoner” cult?

•FSP:  Not at all.  The Teachings acknowledge that we can attain a temporary raising of consciousness through the use of certain drugs, but treat that approach as an attempt to avoid the hard work of raising one’s consciousness permanently.  So while there are some people who have been through that kind of phase in their lives who find themselves attracted to the Teachings, there isn’t any support at all in the Teachings themselves for maintaining a substance-abusing lifestyle.

INT:  Interesting.  But let’s get back to the main thread.  God and Christ create this community of souls and then the next thing we know we’re living on this semi-Hellish planet and God’s nowhere in sight.  What happened?  How did we end up here?

§4:2.  The Fall of the Angels (Us)

•FSP:  I’m going to tell you how we all ended up here, and the story’s going to sound a little familiar.  But, it’s important to listen for the differences. And just by the way, the Teachings are very clear on these aspects, so it’s not like when I was talking about the nature of God and filling in gaps or interpreting.

Every soul was created with a single perfect aspect, and with every other aspect imperfect but perfectible.  So for instance, one group of souls might have been given perfect intelligence, and another group of souls perfect compassion, and so on.  And the task of each soul was to take the perfection in that one aspect and gradually extend it to each other aspect, until eventually they would become perfect, and in some fundamental way Godlike, beings.

INT:  Can I ask a question?

•FSP:  Go ahead.

INT:  Why?  Why didn’t God just create a whole bunch of wholly perfected beings in the first place?

•FSP:  I’m not certain.  But I can speculate that perhaps this was the only viable way to create a large community of souls, or perhaps it’s just in the nature of God to work through gradual evolution, as God has done on Earth.  Maybe God took more satisfaction out of creating beings who would then have a hand in continuing the job of creating themselves.  Maybe God’s generous and open to possibility in that way.

INT:  Hmm.  Interesting.  Go on.

•FSP:  So the one danger, or pitfall, in the way everything was structured was that the basic life force which makes all creation possible has the potential to be used essentially in reverse.  Thus, we have what is referred to as the light, which is the life force, and the darkness, which is the life force in reverse.  And the darkness is a very dangerous power to play with.  And while we were warned against experimenting with it, the nature of all souls is that they have free will, and the nature of free will is that it can be used destructively.  And so there came a time when curiosity got the better of the first being who was created cooperatively by God and the being God created alone, and this soul began to experiment.

Now, the soul we’re talking about is referred to in the Christian story of what happened as Lucifer.  I don’t want to refer to this being that way because there’s so much “baggage” around the concept of the devil that it makes it impossible to communicate effectively.  So I’m going to refer to this being as the “first of our generation,” or FOG for short.

INT:  FOG?

•FSP:  It’s actually an appropriate acronym, because this being is partially responsible for a lot of the fog and confusion in which we find ourselves.  Moreover, just for convenience, I’m going to refer to FOG as a “him,” even though FOG has both masculine and feminine aspects.

In any event, what experimenting with the darkness essentially did to FOG was to separate him from God in an extreme way, and to gradually make him delusional, in much the same way that drug use can make a human being delusional.  And in that unbalanced frame of mind, FOG began creating worlds out of the receptive matter of the Universe and then enticing other souls to visit the worlds he had created to get a little taste of what the darkness was like.  And, little by little, souls were attracted to these worlds, or “spheres.”

INT:  I’m having a bit of a hard time with the idea that a divinely-created soul could more or less go insane.

•FSP:  Because that makes it seem like the soul couldn’t have been divine, or because you think God would have prevented it from happening?

INT:  Both, really.

•FSP:  First of all, remember that each soul had a single perfect divine aspect, and that the goal was to extend that perfection to each other aspect.  So there was a lot more fertile ground for distortions to creep in than there would have been if we were talking about a being who was already divinely perfect in every way.  Second, one aspect of the process of becoming delusional was taking the ability to separate from the collective consciousness and pushing it to an extreme, to see what would happen under those circumstances.  And the result was a loss of a sense of ultimate connection, a forgetting of that state of being and a belief in the ultimate reality of separateness – which, by the way, is the mental state we human beings find ourselves in.  And third, God didn’t prevent this because a fundamental characteristic of God is respect for free will.  Remember from our last conversation that respect for free will is a spiritual law.  And, free will is an essential element of the Godlike perfection we’re all meant to attain, so if God wants us to have that, then God is going to respect it, not override it.

INT:  Even if the results are catastrophic?

•FSP:  Yes, because God understands the law of infinity – the fact that only that which is divine is infinite.  Sooner of later, good has to win out.  So no matter what the path back to perfection looks like, there’s never any doubt about reaching the destination.

INT:  So God doesn’t really need to intervene …

•FSP:  Doesn’t need to intervene in a way which is contrary to God’s essential nature, and wouldn’t want to, because the destructive consequences of that kind of intervention on the development of our free will would far outweigh the apparent benefit.  All the suffering we experience as human beings is eventually going to feel like a bad dream to us as we look back on it.  Interference with our free will would be both more persistent in its effects and more difficult to correct.

Now I said before that the nature of all souls is that they have free will, and that’s because the nature of God is to have free will.  But when FOG made these spheres of darkness, everything that would be true in a sphere of light was reversed.  Free will didn’t operate there, and so the souls who found their way into FOG’s spheres were unable to leave.  In addition, because of all this exposure to the darkness, they gradually began to go delusional themselves, to forget God and the divine community, and to start generating their own dark worlds in which they experienced nothing but suffering.

INT:  This all sounds like the Fall of the angels, with some echoes of the story of Adam and Eve and the forbidden fruit.

•FSP:  That’s right.  But let’s be clear about something.  A traditional interpretation of all of that is that Adam and Eve sinned and that somehow their sin rubs off on us and we deserve to be punished for what they did wrong unless we throw ourselves on God’s mercy.  That’s a distorted understanding.  The truth is that we ourselves are those very same souls who experimented with the darkness and who became delusional as a result.  It’s our sin which is at the root of what we’re experiencing now, and remember from our previous conversation that when I say “sin,” I absolutely do not mean “something for which we deserve to be punished.”  What I mean is “a choice with destructive spiritual consequences.”

INT:  It sounds like you’re saying that the Fall of the angels and the eviction of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden are the same thing.

•FSP:  That’s right.  The Fall of the angels has a more spiritual emphasis, while the Adam and Eve story emphasizes the seduction aspect and the resulting human suffering, but the two stories are referring to the same event.  Thus, the traditional understanding of angels and human beings as separate spiritual races, and of demons who were once angels but who fell and now tempt human beings, is fundamentally flawed.  In fact, we’re all the same divine beings.  Angels are the divine beings who never fell, human beings are the divine beings who fell and who are working to return to God, and demons are the divine beings who fell and are still working for FOG and vainly trying to prevent the return.  We’re all members of the same spiritual family, and we’re all destined to be together again when the effects of the Fall have finally been reversed.

INT:  So you’re saying that you and I are both direct children of God, who are incarnating on Earth because we messed ourselves up by experimenting with the life force in some sort of reversed polarity or something.

•FSP:  Essentially, yes, but let me fill in some more detail.  First of all, to be technical, we aren’t souls, we’re half souls.  One of the results of the Fall was that we actually divided into separate beings, and one of the major milestones in returning to the divine community will be the healing of this split and the reconstitution of a single soul.  At this stage, though, there are actually two halves of each of us here on Earth, and that’s why we all have this awareness of and longing for the idea of a soul-mate.

INT:  So when we find the right man or woman, have we essentially just found the rest of ourselves?

•FSP:  No, not necessarily.  There’s a lot of purification and re-education that each half has to go through before reunification is possible, and it’s a lot more important that progress be made in that direction than it is that the two halves be particularly close in their lives on Earth.  So we could marry our other half, or never meet our other half, or something in between.

Also, at the risk of getting ahead of myself, because we’re going to talk about reincarnation in detail next time, I want to say that another significant thing about this split is that it accounts for the male or female nature of our incarnations.  Typically, one spiritual half of us has more masculine aspects and the other has more feminine aspects, and whichever aspects are less dominant in a particular half, that half-soul will have to incarnate as that sex in order to integrate those aspects in preparation for the eventual reunification.

INT:  So the fact that you’re a male means you have predominantly female aspects?

•FSP:  No, but the fact that the large majority of my incarnations have been male does actually point to that.  Let me tell you more about that when we really get into reincarnation.

INT:  Okay, so we’re divided souls.  And how did we come to be here on Earth?

•FSP:  The result of this Fall was that there was a separation between those souls who had fallen and were trapped in FOG’s spheres and those who hadn’t.  Actually, as I understand it, there was also a layer of souls in between – souls who had fallen to a lesser extent, but not so far as to be subject to FOG’s dominion.  And after a time, those of us who had fallen began to feel a longing to be reunited with the divine community.  And, of course, the divine community longed to be reunited with us.  The product of this mutual longing was the Earth plane, where the light and the darkness both exert an influence, and where those of us who have fallen can make a choice whether to continue following our dark currents or to commit ourselves to returning to God.  So we began incarnating on Earth, while at the same time, those of us who were connected to FOG’s worlds continued to be connected.

INT:  What does that mean, “connected to FOG’s worlds?”

•FSP:  It means that when we slept, and after we died, we would return to FOG’s spheres.  We were more or less just visiting here on Earth.

INT:  But you’re saying that this didn’t apply to everybody, right?  Some of us might not have fallen that far?  Or they might have already worked their way back?

•FSP:  Technically, yes. there are a few souls here from higher levels who have come to help.  But I think it’s probably a good idea not to underestimate how far any one of us might have fallen, or how far we might still have to go.

INT:  Well, where do you see yourself in all of that?

•FSP:  I assume that I was trapped in FOG’s spheres and that I have a substantial way to go before I can leave the earth plane.

INT:  But do you ever suspect that you’re really some sort of helper from above?

•FSP:  Sometimes that notion crosses my mind, but there’s plenty of evidence in my life that it isn’t so.  Therefore, I discipline myself not to invest in flattering scenarios that would distract me from doing my work.  In any event, it doesn’t really matter.  Regardless of how far anyone fell, if they fell at all, they have work do to and that’s where it will serve them to keep their focus.

§4:3.  How We Were Released from Bondage

INT:  All right.  Let’s say the vast majority of us were under the influence  of the first soul of our generation and we were unable to escape.  Then Jesus came and died for our sins and set us free?

•FSP:  Then the soul referred to as Christ came and incarnated as Jesus, yes.  But if you mean by “died for our sins” that Jesus allowed Himself to be punished for the sins of humanity so that we wouldn’t have to suffer the consequences ourselves, then absolutely not.  That’s a really important misunderstanding of what happened.

INT:  Do you want to clear that up?

•FSP:  What actually happened was that Christ was very intent on doing whatever was necessary to set us free from the bondage we were in, which included not only separation from the divine community but also a lot of suffering, but it was very important to accomplish this in a way which would ensure that eventually, every single lost soul, including FOG, would return.  So the approach had to be one which modeled the essence of who God and Christ are.  If, hypothetically, Christ had caused FOG a lot of pain until FOG finally gave in and set the lost souls free, then FOG would have had no reason to want to be a part of any divine community where Christ was in some way above FOG, and certainly FOG’s assistants would have had no reason to think that God and Christ were any different from or better than FOG.  So FOG and his henchmen would have become even more resistant to returning Home, and that would have defeated the prime directive.

INT:  I’m hearing a theme you’ve referred to before:  No soul is disposable.

•FSP:  Right.  I mean if God and Christ had been willing to give up a small number of souls, they could have yanked the rest of us free very easily.  But every single one of us is precious to both of them.

INT:  Which makes the idea of casting us into Hell pretty antithetical.

•FSP:  Totally.  Again, that’s a human image of abusive parenting being projected onto the blank slate of our understanding of God.

So, anyway, Christ approached FOG and asked what it would take for FOG to free the lost souls.  And FOG replied that Christ would have to incarnate on Earth, as a man, without any divine protection, so that FOG would have the opportunity to tempt Him – because FOG really believed that under these circumstances, it would be possible to lead Christ astray.  And so we all know what Christ went through as Jesus, and we know that in the end, in spite of everything, He asked God to forgive those who were tormenting Him.  So FOG lost the bet, so to speak, and under the terms of the agreement, the lost souls were supposed to go free.  But, predictably, FOG reneged on the deal, and so it became necessary to have a struggle between the forces of light and darkness.  And the forces of light deliberately handicapped themselves to illustrate the love they felt for those they were fighting, and they still won because light is so much more powerful than the darkness.  And so, FOG was forced to open the gates of his realms.

INT:  I didn’t follow that part about handicapping themselves.

•FSP:  The forces of the light could have crushed the forces of the darkness easily, but they deliberately and conspicuously limited their own power in order to make it clear that they weren’t taking any pleasure in dominating the forces of darkness.  They were drawing a distinction between their motivation, which was to free the lost souls by force only because there was no other way to accomplish that goal, and FOG’s motivation, which was to enslave and dominate everyone forever.

INT:  I’m trying to imagine what a battle between these spiritual beings looks like.  I can’t get this silly image from an episode of “South Park” out of my mind.

•FSP:  Yeah, I saw that too.  I really don’t know how to answer that.  I’m imagining this energetic push of wills against each other, but I really don’t have any idea.  I’m sorry.

INT:  Doesn’t matter.  You know, I wonder if we really should have admitted to watching “South Park”.  Maybe that can be edited out.

•FSP:  Edited out why?

INT:  Well, it just doesn’t seem that fitting.  Here we are talking about these lofty subjects.

•FSP:  Does it embarrass you to admit to watching “South Park”?

INT:  Yes, I suppose it does.

•FSP:  Why?

INT:  Well, it’s an intelligent and funny show in some respects, but I’m sure I don’t have to explain what a low level it goes to in order to achieve humor sometimes.

•FSP:  And all that immature stuff doesn’t turn you off as much as you imagine it would if you were more evolved?

INT:  That’s about right.

•FSP:  So, you’re suggesting a vanity-based edit?

INT:  Well, if you want to get technical about it.

•FSP:  I want to be precise about it, yes.  Because it touches on a great misconception which holds people back in their spiritual development.  Being spiritual isn’t about shutting down or hiding every aspect of ourselves which might be a little immature.  Truly being spiritual is above all about one thing:  being honest.  If I’m still at a stage of development where some silly things can make me laugh, my dignity lies not in pretending that isn’t true, or in trying to force myself to be different.  It lies in being willing and able to say, “this is an aspect of who I am right now.”

INT:  Well, hypothetically, what if an aspect of where you are right now is that you want to rob banks?  Is it okay to do that as long as you’re honest about it?

•FSP:  No.  Robbing banks violates spiritual law, in the sense that it’s an attempt to get something for nothing and it disregards the legitimate interests of other people.  So if you do it, you will create destructive spiritual consequences for yourself according to the law of cause and effect.  However, simply wanting to rob banks, as immature as that might be, is “okay” in the sense that if that’s where you are, then that’s where you are, and freely admitting it will do a lot more to help you grow out of that phase than pretending you don’t have that desire or trying to force yourself not to have it.

INT:  All right.  I won’t ask for vanity-based edits, as you call them.

•FSP:  You can if you want.  But I’m saying that there’s no need.

INT:  Understood.

•FSP:  Anyway, getting back to the main thread, the result of the victory of the forces of light in this sort of war you described is that FOG set the lost souls free?

•FSP:  Yes, but it’s important to be clear.  The gates of Hell were opened, but the lost souls were still in rough shape.  They were completely confused about the true nature of reality.  They had a sense of longing for connection to something, but they didn’t know how to interpret it.  And they had suffered so much that they were very defensive – not really very open to loving vibrations.

INT:  Because they had suffered at the hands of FOG’s demons?

•FSP:  Mostly they had suffered because their basic spiritual aspects had been so distorted by the Fall that they were putting out chaotic negative energy into the spiritual environment, and the Universe was giving them painful feedback to that energy.  Actually, let me try to explain that in a little more detail:  The entire Universe is permeated with a receptive spiritual substance which responds to the creative energies which are directed towards it.  This is an oversimplification, but think of a sort of “magic clay” which takes the form of whatever someone imagines.  This is related to the law of attraction, in the sense that if I’m incarnated on Earth and I’m putting out a lot of hostility, then I’m going to create hostile circumstances for myself.  Hostile people are going to come into my life.  However, outside the confines of the Earth plane, this receptive substance will actually go so far as to create entire worlds which correspond to the energies we direct towards it, whether we direct those energies intentionally or not.  So if I’m carrying some dark, violent energy in the mix of who I am, that energy is going to give rise to a world of violent conflict, or a “sphere” of violent conflict as the Teachings refer to it, and I’m going to have unpleasant experiences on that sphere until I clean up my own internal energies enough that I no longer give rise to such a sphere.  So the bottom line is that the lost souls have been in some pretty dark places, all ultimately of their own making,

INT:  All right, so the lost souls are free, but they’re in bad shape.

•FSP:  Yes, and they’re still generating a lot of negative experience for themselves, and that carries over into their incarnations on Earth – which is why so much of what goes on here is so unpleasant.

INT:  So Christ has set them free, but they don’t immediately benefit from that?

§4:4.  How We Get Home and Rejoin the Divine Community; The Plan of Salvation

•FSP:  Being set free from bondage to FOG is an absolutely magnificent thing, but it’s only a milestone in the long, ongoing process of returning to God which has been taking place on Earth since before the Stone Age.  In order to progress spiritually and start generating more positive spheres, and then eventually join the spheres that are presently populated by the divine community, the lost souls have to integrate their own negativity.  In other words, they have to become aware of it, acknowledge that it’s part of them for the moment, and allow an organic process of maturation and purification to occur.  And most of them don’t have a clue that that’s the way everything works.  So therefore, their learning process is pretty slow.  And by the way, when I say “they,” I really mean “we.”  This applies to the entire human race, with the possible exception of a handful of enlightened souls who fully understand this and are here to help.

INT:  Let me get something clear about that.  You’re saying that this liberation from bondage applies to everyone, not just Christians, right?

•FSP:  Everyone who was in bondage has had the gates of the prison opened, yes.  Whether they’re Christians in one incarnation or another has nothing to do with it.

INT:  So they don’t have to accept Jesus Christ as their savior in order to be saved.

•FSP:  No, they don’t.  The Teachings say that somewhere in the spiritual maturation process, in the course of successive incarnations, each and every one of us will eventually come to an understanding of what Christ did for us and feel gratitude, but there’s no condition attached to the benefit – no pressure whatsoever to view Jesus in any particular way.

INT:  Just this expectation that eventually we’re all going to “get it.”

•FSP:  Exactly.

On a personal level (optional):  Do you have any emotional reaction to hearing that eventually, all of us are going to understand and feel grateful for Christ’s actions?  If so, just hold that reaction in your awareness, with the assurance that this book and these Teachings in no way require you to feel positively about this idea.  Whatever resistance you might have, whether mild or fierce, is welcome and respected as fully as every other aspect of who you are.

INT:  So why is all of this so obscure?  Why doesn’t God or Christ just appear in the sky and say, “this is the way it is?”

•FSP:  For the simple reason that a lot of people aren’t ready to understand the way it is, and no matter what God or Christ told them, they wouldn’t be able to interpret it correctly.  It would inevitably get distorted, the same way the Second Commandment did.  People who aren’t ready to hear something are actually better off not hearing it, so they won’t form a distorted understanding which will block their growth in the future.  This is why, incidentally, Jesus spoke in parables when He spoke to the masses.  The real meaning of the parable would seep into the awareness of those who had an intuitive capacity to get the point, and meanwhile the rest of the people had no idea what He was talking about, so they didn’t form a false conception of important spiritual concepts.

INT:  Did Jesus speak in parables when he spoke to you and the other disciples?

•FSP:  No.  That was a different kind of situation.  We had all sorts of opportunities to ask questions, and He would catch us when we expressed misconceptions in our speech and behavior.

INT:  Is that something you specifically remember, then?

•FSP:  Not exactly.  I have a sense of it, and the Teachings actually mention it as well.

INT:  But you’re saying you still didn’t absorb a lot of what Jesus was teaching, and that’s why you’re still incarnated here.

•FSP:  Well, I was pretty headstrong.  And I liked to think I understood things more fully than I did.

INT:  That’s not so unusual, is it?

•FSP:  No, but some of us are more intense about it than others.  And then there’s the added complication of having denied Jesus three times after he was arrested.  A big motivation for me after that happened and after Jesus died was to redeem myself somehow.  I think my motivation for working hard to establish the Church was as much to make up for what I had done as it was to help other people.  So there was basically a significant aspect of vanity involved.  And then to have the Church spin off in the direction it did …

Sorry.  I got a little lost there.  I guess my point is just that there’s unfinished business which has kept me connected to the Earth plane.  But let’s get back to the lost souls after the incarnation of Christ.  Following the incarnation of Christ, the doors of Hell are open, so to speak, so that we’re not inexorably bound to spheres of darkness.  Nevertheless, each one of us still has to find the way back to the divine community, on our own, using our own free will.  It’s absolutely essential that we develop the capacity to use our free will in the service of the light.  And, it’s absolutely essential that we go through an organic maturation and purification process, which will make it possible for us to inhabit the Heavenly spheres.  So, to make sure that we can do that, God structures things so that while we’re on Earth, the more we violate spiritual law, the more pain comes to us, and the more we follow spiritual law, the more pleasure comes to us.

INT:  So if we violate spiritual law, we suffer.  Is this divine punishment?

•FSP:  No.  The whole idea of punishment is a spiritually misguided concept.  God doesn’t punish, God instructs and supports, all the while deeply respecting our free will.

INT:  So suffering is instruction and support?

•FSP:  Well, it’s instruction.  Divine support manifests a little differently.  Let me ask you this:  are you familiar with aversion therapy?

INT:  Is that where they give people electrical shocks to get them to stop doing certain things?

•FSP:  That’s right – electrical shocks or other forms of unpleasant stimulation.  And generally speaking, it’s regarded as reprehensible, because there’s usually some other way to address the behavior, and because changing the behavior in question isn’t important enough to justify such an extreme measure.  But, the use of aversion therapy is a little more ethically complicated when you have someone who’s a real danger to themselves and/or others and there isn’t any other way to get through to them.

INT:  For instance …

•FSP:  Let’s say someone is smashing their head against hard surfaces and won’t stay focused on anyone else long enough to engage in any kind of therapeutic discourse.  Let’s say everything known has been tried and aversion therapy by shocking this person whenever they bang their head is the only thing left which might get this person to stop putting themselves at serious physical risk.

INT:  So are you saying that this unreachable head-banger represents us?

•FSP:  Yes I am.  Compared to a healthy, pure soul who has the capacity to enter the state of being and merge with God, that’s how far out of touch with spiritual reality and healthy spiritual functioning we are – to different degrees, of course, but even the healthiest ones of us are still carrying some very important misconceptions which limit our ability to connect with our spiritual family.

INT:  That’s a little difficult to accept.

•FSP:  I know.  I don’t know how to stress this enough.  While the core spiritual reality of God’s infinite love for us is a deeply wonderful thing, there are also other aspects of spiritual reality which are pretty unflattering, and there’s a lot of pride that’s going to get in the way.  But if we can get past our pride and accept that we really might be seriously confused, then all sorts of wonderful things can happen for us.  And we end up not feeling that we’ve lost anything by giving up our flattering conception of ourselves.

On a personal level (optional):  Do you have an emotional reaction to this image of the human race as a collection of metaphorical “head-bangers” who require an intervention in order to be brought back to spiritual reality?  Is there something you would prefer to believe about who we are?  If so, just hold this reaction and this preference in your awareness.

INT:  I’m not sure my resistance to believing that is all about pride.

•FSP:  Well, the issue is definitely going to come up again.  For now, would you be willing to grant that we’re all the head-banger just for the sake of argument?

INT:  All right, for the sake of argument we’re all the head-banger.  And so God is sitting there shocking us whenever we start going at it?

•FSP:  No.  It’s more automatic – more built in to the fabric of the Universe.  Remember last time, when we were talking about invisible fencing?

INT:  Oh, yes.  And it’s structured that way because otherwise we wouldn’t develop this vitally important capacity to use free will.

•FSP:  Yes.

INT:  And is pain something real?  Or is it just an illusion?

•FSP:  Pain is based on our investment in various illusions about the Universe, but the experience of pain is definitely a real experience.  An experience which we make a lot more difficult when we resist it, by the way.

INT:  Now, what about people who are obviously and manifestly evil, and yet who get away with it?  Where’s this painful feedback system working in their cases?  Or how about young, innocent children who are sold into slavery or get killed in car crashes?

•FSP:  Let’s take those separately.  As far as obviously evil people getting away with it, the first thing is that they may be appearing to get away with it and actually suffering in some way that we’re not necessarily aware of.  And the second thing is that everyone goes through periods of good times and bad, with a hard or easy period sometimes even spanning more than one lifetime, but eventually everything we do catches up with us.  It’s inevitable.  So you might have looked at Adolf Hitler in 1941 and said he was a perfect example of someone getting away with it.  And actually, this question leads right into the answer to the second question, i.e., what about innocent children who suffer?  You don’t know who they were or what they did in a past life.  You have no way of knowing what might be catching up to them.

INT:  That sounds kind of harsh.  Are you really sure you’re not talking about some sort of punishment?

•FSP:  It’s not punishment.  It’s a matter of spiritual learning and a sense of spiritual justice which we ourselves as souls understand and agree to.  When we’re in spirit, after we have an experience of karma catching up to us, we’re not upset about it in the same way we might be while in the body.  We have a perspective and a sense of how it serves our overall evolution.  It’s like waking up from a nightmare, and then understanding the lesson the dream was meant to convey.

INT:  I’d like to hear more about that, but I’m wondering if that takes us into the specifics of reincarnation.

•FSP:  I don’t know how much more I can tell you.  I guess I would say, suppose you’re a soldier and you get carried away and inflict a lot of suffering on innocent civilians.  There’s a way that being a victim in the next life helps you to understand what the consequences of giving in to that kind of energy are.  And if you are someone’s victim and they eventually have to deal with the consequences of what they’ve done to you and they awaken spiritually to an extent as a result, then you’ve actually done a service to that person, or that soul really.  You’ve given them an opportunity to see something about themselves they needed to see.  So you’ve given something back to the community of souls and there’s a sense of balancing there which feels good – spiritually, anyway.

INT:  You’re talking about a sort of atonement.

•FSP:  Yes.

INT:  I’m glad you said all that because when we started talking about Jesus dying for our sins, I had in mind the traditional interpretation, which is that humanity had amassed this whole negative karmic bank account, so to speak, and Jesus spared us from destruction by standing in for us.  Taking the hit in our place.  And I’m pretty sure you were saying that’s wrong – that we still have our own karmic bank accounts.

•FSP:  Yes, while the traditional interpretation of Jesus dying for our sins is in some ways close to the truth, it’s distorted just enough to make it substantially and importantly wrong.  Our sins – and again, I’m using the word to mean “actions or thoughts with destructive spiritual consequences” – had already gotten us into a terrible situation.  By suffering and dying on Earth, Christ did two things.  First, He modeled a way of life; second, by accepting FOG’s challenge to incarnate on Earth without protection in exchange for FOG’s agreement to free the lost souls, He took a big step forward in freeing us from FOG’s trap in a way which ensured that absolutely everyone would eventually be recovered.  But in no way, shape or form did He repeal the law of cause and effect as it applies to us.  We still have to go through the process we have to go through, and we still have to be willing to work and suffer.  And, by the way, it makes absolutely no sense that God would have wanted it any other way.  The only reason God wants anyone to suffer is so that they will come to their senses and learn to live in harmony with spiritual law.  If someone else suffers “on my behalf,” I don’t learn a thing.  So there’s no point.

INT:  Well, I think the rationale is that the Law is the Law, and it’s vital to uphold it.

•FSP:  The Law is the Law, and it is vital to uphold it.  But the Law is supremely intelligent as well.  So if the story involves upholding the Law in a way that generates a silly result, then the story just isn’t true.  It might be close to true, but there has to be a distortion in there somewhere.

INT:  Okay.  So Jesus opened the doors, but it’s still up to us to walk through, and if we trip and fall and scrape our knees along the way, that’s the way it has to be.

•FSP:  Yes, and our knees will heal, and wonderful things will lie ahead.  This is the essence of what the Teachings refer to as the Plan of Salvation, which is the single highest priority in the entire spiritual Universe at this time.  Every soul who didn’t Fall is devoted to it, and many of us who did Fall are also committed to its success.  And the Plan will continue to be the highest priority until such time as FOG himself abandons the course of separation and rejoins the divine community.

INT:  So FOG is going to be the last one to come back?

•FSP:  That’s right:  “The first shall be last.”  The first to fall shall be the last to return.

INT:  Now am I right that you’re working for the Plan of Salvation?

•FSP:  As are you, my friend, or you wouldn’t be talking to me about this.

INT:  Really?

•FSP:  Absolutely.

INT:  What if I’m not comfortable with that?

•FSP:  Well, you could be uncomfortable on a material level of awareness – on an ego level, that is – and still committed to it on a spiritual level.  But tell me about being uncomfortable.

INT:  I’m not comfortable with salvation-based religion because it seems to me that it’s a short step from “I’m saved and you’re not” to “I’m saved and you’re not and therefore I have a right to convert you or kill you.”

•FSP:  First of all, no one is saying “I’m saved and you’re not.”

INT:  All right.  I’ll grant you that you haven’t exactly said that, but you’re not going to pretend that you don’t see yourself as more evolved than people who reject these kinds of ideas, are you?

•FSP:  The distinction a practitioner of the Teachings might make between themselves and someone who rejects these kinds of ideas might be “I’m consciously and deliberately working on clearing up my misconceptions and rejoining the divine community, and you’re doing the same thing with less awareness and less of a coherent framework for what you’re doing.”

INT:  So there’s no sense of superiority?

•FSP:  There might be a sense of superiority, but that would be material to work with in that person’s personal journey.  The idea that I’m “better” because I have an understanding of something not everyone understands is a manifestation of pride, and that’s an attitude it’s important to pay attention to.  But in terms of what the Teachings actually have to say, the distinction relates to how aware one is of what’s really going on, not to how valuable someone is or whether God is going to accept them.

INT:  Okay.

•FSP:  And let me comment on another aspect of what you said.  I suppose it’s a “short step” from drawing distinctions between yourself and others to thinking you have a right to oppress them if you’re out of touch with spiritual law.  But the Teachings are about evolving towards a willing acceptance of the law of love, the law of respecting free will, and so on.  There’s no way anyone can reconcile that with forcing someone to believe something they don’t believe, or devaluing someone because they don’t believe it.

INT:  I wouldn’t have thought anyone could reconcile Christianity with burning people at the stake, but they did.

•FSP:  Yes, but, as I’ve said before, I don’t think we can allow the ability of deeply confused people to distort a particular concept to keep us from making our own judgment about whether the concept is true.  If you’re suggesting that I should be careful in the way I explain this not to leave room for destructive misinterpretation, I’m very willing to try to do that.  But I would say that’s a completely different issue from whether the actual content of the Teachings is true.  Wouldn’t you agree?

INT:  I agree with that.  I was just expressing how the conversation was affecting me.

•FSP:  Okay.  I hear you.

INT:  And tell me again why it’s important that we know all this …

•FSP:  It’s important that we know that God loves us; that God allows bad things to happen on Earth because it’s the only way for all of us to find our way back; that when we finally do get home, we’ll relate to our suffering as a bad dream we’ve awakened from; and that all the other imagery we have about God is about human beings, not about God.  We need to know all of that so we’ll be willing to trust God and the divine community, to ask for help in finding our way home, and to ask for wisdom and understanding instead of hoping for favors.

INT:  And is that pretty much the big picture?

§4:5.  The Symbolism of the Crucifixion

•FSP:  Almost.  There’s just one more thing I’d like to mention.  When I said that Jesus modeled a way of life, that concept extends to the crucifixion, which actually had a symbolic pictorial meaning.  Jesus’ suffering on the cross and then living on in His etheric body was meant to illustrate the process it would serve us well to go through.  We can allow ourselves to suffer the ways that internally, our energies run at cross-purposes to each other, without any fear that the pain will kill us.  In fact, we’ll live on, in a higher form.

INT:  Help me understand what you mean by our inner energies being at cross-purposes.

•FSP:  I’ll go into greater detail about this when we talk about love, but as an example, there exists at our cores, coming from our higher selves, a powerful desire to connect – to give and receive love.  Coming from a more superficial level of our beings are various misguided things we do to try to force or manipulate others to love us, and to protect ourselves from being rejected.  Ironically, these strategies of ours tend to keep us emotionally isolated, and they bring conflict into the relationships we have.  So there we are at cross-purposes, with a deep desire to connect on the one hand, and a whole system of inadvertently preventing connection on the other.

INT:  And we just have to passively accept that?

•FSP:  Not in the sense that we ought to resign ourselves to our whole lives being that way, no.  But when we bring negativity into our lives this way, surrendering to the pain with the intention of understanding how we ourselves brought it about is the most constructive thing we can possibly do.

INT:  If that’s the case, why didn’t Jesus just say that?  Why does everything have to be so symbolic and obscure?

•FSP:  We talked about that, remember?  It has to do with people back in that time generally not being educated enough or self-aware enough to be able to understand that kind of direct message, and about avoiding the harm which could come from having them attach the wrong interpretation to a direct expression.  The symbolic image gets through to souls who are ready to understand it, without having these negative effects on those who aren’t ready.

INT:  Yes, you just went over that a few minutes ago.  I guess it still frustrates me.

•FSP:  You’d prefer things to be stated more explicitly?

INT:  Definitely.

•FSP:  Then the Teachings would speak to you in a way you might find more satisfying.

INT:  Yes, I’ve noticed in the little I’ve read so far that the form of expression is very direct and detailed.

•FSP:  In any event, I think that wraps up what I was hoping to cover this time around.

INT:  Good.  I’m looking forward to hearing about reincarnation next time.