Make sure your resource directory (e.g. "src") is in your classpath (make sure it's a source directory in your build path in eclipse).
Make sure clazz is loaded from the main classloader.
Then, to load src/initialization/Lifepaths.txt, use
clazz.getResourceAsStream("/initialization/Lifepaths.txt");
Why:
clazz.getResourcesAsStream(foo)
looks up foo from within the classpath of clazz, relative to the directory clazz lives in. The leading "/" makes it load from the root of any directory in the classpath of clazz.
Unless you're in a container of some kind, like Tomcat, or are doing something with ClassLoaders directly, you can just treat your eclipse/command line classpath as the only classloader classpath.