By Charles Cresson Wood
I was surprised to recently learn of the suicide of a person who I consider to be a courageous, outspoken, and daring leader. I am making reference to Nora Vincent, who more recently went by the name of Ned Vincent. Besides being a columnist for several well-known publications, Vincent wrote a best-selling book called “Self-Made Man.” The book detailed her journey from identifying as a woman to identifying as a man. At age 53, a few months ago, after she had long ago accomplished the exterior transition of her appearance to that of a man, she went to Switzerland to be part of a medically assisted suicide process. She said that she couldn’t take it any longer, and she felt “alienated and dissociated” living as a man. While I agree that the male role model in America can be “suffocating and alienating” (to use her words), I would have thought she had already demonstrated that she had ample personal resources from which to draw, so that she might traverse that most recent challenge.
While this author is not contemplating suicide, the article you are reading speaks to a point in time that many of us occasionally encounter. That is the point where we think/feel/believe that we can’t go on any longer. This is the place where we are at our wit’s end, where we have lost all hope of being able to deal with a situation. Using the Pathwork viewpoint, this article affirms the reader’s ability to go through anything that they may encounter. Even better, using the Pathwork process, we can all learn from and grow from that experience, becoming a more empowered, loving, and God-connected individuals as a result. Stepping-up to still greater personal responsibility, we can also embrace that these painful moments are just another attempt to evade and flee from the difficulties that we ourselves have created (Occupation with Self lecture #33).
Let’s be clear that it is not necessary that we go through such life-challenging moments. We can, says the Pathwork Guide (Spiritual Meaning of Crisis lecture #183), be doing our personal spiritual process so that these painful moments need not occur. That steering away from these crises happens because we have proactively picked-up on and paid attention to our deeper problems, our on-going issues, and the shocking events our lives, and then used those problems as “grist for the mill” in our personal spiritual process. If, and when, we do encounter such painful moments, where suicide might be contemplated, or at least where a sense that we cannot go on living this way is encountered, it is important that we then recognize that we have a powerful spiritual opportunity. In those moments, something needs to be broken down, needs to be torn-apart, needs to be abandoned, about the way we have been living. A new possibility is emerging on the horizon, and a painful crisis is the natural and right way of bringing our attention to what must now be changed.
How exactly is this avoidance of these high drama moments accomplished? The Images lecture (#38) explains that it is through knowing yourself, genuine acceptance of what is, the humility to honestly look at it, the prayer of asking for Divine assistance, coupled with the willingness to change, that we can cure our souls. We can glide through situations that otherwise would be seemingly unsurmountable, if we go where we most don’t want to go. A friend of mine had to have breast cancer, the accompanying confrontation with death, and the subsequent hell of both surgery and chemotherapy, to honestly confront her self-hate. Ideally, we don’t want things to get that self-destructive, but sometimes these dramatic events are what’s necessary to bring our attention to a spiritual error that must now be corrected. Ideally, we are dealing with the relatively minor events of our lives -- such as hearing the truth in an insult from someone we thought was a loyal friend -- and using those events to reestablish a new balance, to learn the spiritual lesson that must now be learned, to make the changes that this new understanding requires. In other words, we must be willing to regularly go, where we least want to go, in order to heal and liberate our souls (God: Father Image lecture #13).
Unfortunately, some of us are especially resistant. This author, for example, needed the big-time drama of bankruptcy, divorce, and the demise of a small entrepreneurial business – all happening at once – to be shown that his prideful notion that “he was on his way” was utter nonsense. Hopefully, you, dear reader, don’t need this type of painful situational feedback from life. Hopefully you will flow, move, accept, and flexibly adapt using the Pathwork process to open-up yet more vistas of pleasure, surrender and enlightenment. But if you can’t yet do that, there may come a point where death, and another life, will be the only way for you to find new and fruitful circumstances where you can do the spiritual work that you came to earth to do (Meaning of Evil lecture #184).
This belief and faith, that all challenges can be traversed, and in fact learned from, opens-up the possibility that we could be living beyond fear. Our identification as God-creations, or in the words of the Guide, as our Higher Selves, which are beyond the circumstances of this life, allows us to embrace all that life might bring to us, as still more learning opportunities. It is in that place, of confronting the truth and overcoming whatever hurdles life throws at us, that we can start to appreciate our God-powers, specifically our infinitely expanding potentiality. It is from that place of fearlessness, that place of who and what we essentially and eternally are, that we Pathworkers can be extraordinary warriors for the influx of Light into the world (Salvation lecture #22). In that place is an incredible new possibility, not only for our own personal transformation, but for the transformation of the entire world.
“It is the will of God that you live your life to the fullest in the spiritual sense. This drive expresses also in holding onto your physical life. And spiritual death is contained in the lower self that is bound magnetically, magically, to the world of darkness, that denies God and his laws. In this tendency lies the denial of life, the spiritual, as well as the physical, when you deny the laws of life in which you have to meet it and yourself, a death wish is contained in this as sort of a by-product. This death wish does not always manifest so strongly as to commit suicide. In a lesser degree it is to be found in all denial of what this life brings you and demands from you.” (Occupation with Self lecture #33)