

### Relationship With God:

### Emotional Blockages Towards God

### By

### Jesus (AJ Miller)

Published by

Divine Truth, Australia at Smashwords

http://www.divinetruth.com/

Copyright 2014 Divine Truth

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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### This ebook is a transcript of a seminar delivered on 23rd June 2012 in Kyabra, Australia by Jesus (also known as AJ Miller) as part of the Relationship with God series. In it he describes the emotional blockages that prevent us from forming a close relationship with God, including the addictive and co-dependent relationships that we commonly use as a substitute for our relationship with God.

### Reminder From Jesus & Mary

### Jesus and Mary would like to remind you that any document produced by Divine Truth containing any information from Jesus, Mary or any other person includes only a portion of God's Truth that they have personally discovered.

### It does not and cannot contain the entire of God's Truth since God's Truth is infinite and humankind will forever continue to discover more of God's Truth as we progress in receiving more of God's Love.

### Please remember that due to these limitations information contained within this document may need to be revised in the future.

### Many other ebooks have been published by Divine Truth, including ebooks translated into a variety of different languages.

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Table of Contents

1. Introduction

2. The emotional cloud of damage we have towards God

3. Using substitutes for our relationship with God

3.1. Substitute relationships keep us away from God

3.2. Using addictions to avoid emotions - the example of daydreaming

3.3. Living in addiction damages ourselves and others

3.3.1. Choosing to address unloving causes within us improves our soul condition

3.3.2. Choosing to be unloving and to not confront addictions degrades our soul condition

3.4. AJ's approach to his cloud of damage with God

3.5. Being on the Divine Love Path requires us to work through our damage cloud with God

3.6. Relationships with spirits can be beneficial when they are not addictive

4. How to identify when we're in an addictive interaction

4.1. An example of how to behave lovingly when an addiction is identified

5. Becoming God-reliant

5.1. Every event in our lives is an opportunity to get closer to God

5.2. AJ's experience in becoming God-reliant

5.2.1. Trusting that God knows better than us

5.2.2. When we don't feel love, there is an emotion inside us that is wrong from God's perspective

6. Progressing in love involves more than just changing our lives

6.1. Sixth sphere spirits create change to avoid sadness

7. Developing a sincere desire for soul growth towards God

7.1. Giving up co-dependent relationships with spirits

7.2. Being honest about our feelings towards God

7.3. Meeting each other's addictions can make us feel good

8. Developing faith in God using logic

8.1. Being humble to learning God's opinions

8.2. Working through feelings that God is cruel and punishing

9. Closing Words

1. Introduction

Welcome today, guys. We're going to have a very short discussion with you and then we're going to do a bit of a musical presentation for you.

I want to discuss two things in particular with you today. The first thing is where your attention is focused, in terms of what you do in your day-to-day lives, because if we really want to have a passionate and strong life we need to learn to place God first. [00:03:51.22]

Now for most people there are huge impediments to placing God first. And when I say huge impediments, what I mean is that the largest emotional damage that we have inside us individually is actually the damage we have towards God. In a recent talk I did in Bathurst, "Why We Resist God", I explained all the levels of emotional damage that we have in our relationship with God. [00:04:22.14]

2. The emotional cloud of damage we have towards God

This damage is like a great big cloud that prevents us from being able to feel God and God's feelings for us. And when I say a cloud, there are many parts to this damage. For example there's the emotion of self-reliance, which is a part of the damage that prevents us from feeling God and having feelings for God inside us. We also have feelings of rebellion. How many of you feel like you quite frequently have those? Quite a few! So you have feelings of rebellion towards God, towards law, towards God's principles and all those kind of things. [00:05:28.02]

We also have attitudes towards God personally where we feel that God is cruel and punishing. And many of these attitudes come from a variety of sources. The primary source that they come from is our own parents because many times we were punished by them at some point, and many times our own parents have actually treated us cruelly. As a result of that we almost assume that anybody who says they love us is at some point going to be cruel to us. And you know, there's that song that goes (AJ sings), "You've got to be cruel to be kind in the right measure." There's this whole idea that cruelty is a part of tough love. So we start believing that God is exactly the same as that. And on top of that, many people have had cruel and punishing experiences where they believe God to be. I would like to explain why those experiences occur. There is a general belief that God is cruel and punishing. All of our issues we have with our parents, with the other gender are the same issues we have with God. So if we're male and we have issues with the female, then they are all issues we also have with God. [00:07:18.14]

If we start adding up the long litany of problems that we have with God, it's quite a lot. What happens is there are all of these emotions that form a sort of barrier between us and God. It's a barrier where we frequently can't really feel God at all and unfortunately generally our really strong feelings for God are very rare in our life. We may have periods of time, five minutes here and ten minutes there or half an hour here maybe, where we have strong feelings. Or we have a lot of feelings that God should fix things. You know it's only in the times when we really feel like we're under the weather in our life that we turn to God and try to connect to God. And during those times, generally you could say that we're just really demanding of God. We want God to come along and patch up all the areas of our life that we feel are bad. [00:08:19.16]

And one of the other things is that God does not respond to addictions. If I have an addiction where I'm rebellious in my life and create a whole heap of negative things as a result of this rebellion and then want God to come along and patch it all up for me so that I can go forth and create another series of rebellions, obviously God's not going to respond to all of that. And so there's this great big long list of emotions that we have towards God; demands, expectations, resistance and as a result of that, and it's like a cloud. We could just call it a cloud of damage, if you like.

There is a cloud of emotional damage about different issues between us and God

So we have this great big emotional cloud of damage. And for the majority of us we try to avoid it intellectually. We almost try to tell ourselves that that's not the case, and that we have the fewest problems with God, for those of us who feel we want to have a relationship with God. But the majority of times we have the greatest amount of problem with God. And that's a big problem. [00:09:49.17]

So there we are, we've got this huge issue with God but we still want to be loved. And we still want to be cared for and we still want to have relationships that are meaningful. So what do we do? Well we start setting up relationships with other people. And in this process we have a habit of setting up relationships with spirit people as well, as a replacement for our relationship with God. [00:10:42.15]

We use other people and spirits as replacements for our relationship with God

What I observe happening quite a lot amongst the group that lives down in this region is that you are becoming quite addicted to the relationships that replace God. As a result of that, it's very, very difficult to enter a relationship with God. You are very focused in particular on the relationships with spirits and what they give you. Many of you believe that you're receiving Divine Love when the reality is that you're receiving addictive emotions and nice feelings from spirits, and you're thinking that that's God. [00:11:28.24]

And the reason all of those kinds of things happen is that we're not prepared to address this cloud of damage that we have specifically with God. Because those emotions are the most difficult emotions that most of us find to go through. Most of us like to rebel and we like to be self-reliant and we like to hold onto ideas that our parents are nice when the reality is that many of our parents treated us quite badly. In other words we try to maintain a facade position with regard to our emotional damage with God. And if you try to do that, you will not be able to maintain a relationship with God because God is only interested in a pure relationship with you, one without facade and without addictions. [00:12:29.23]

3. Using substitutes for our relationship with God

When we are focused on avoiding our cloud of emotional damage that blocks us from God, we then start using other people, whether they're people on Earth or in the spirit world, as substitutes for the relationship. Now as you can imagine, none of these people are ever going to be able to give you the same kind of love that God is able to give you. And in fact none of these people are ever going to prove to be reliable either; particularly until they become at-one with God. [00:13:22.00]

So unless one of your so-called substitutes is at least at-one with God, you will find their reliability is automatically going to be in question. God is always reliable. So why would you want to substitute somebody that's unreliable for somebody who's reliable? I'll explain why we do that. The reason is that the substitutes usually respond to our addictions. And it feels good to have somebody respond to our addictions when we desire the addiction to be met. [00:14:05.15]

We can have addictive relationships with our substitutes to God

If you no longer desire the addiction to be met, it no longer feels good when somebody tries to satisfy the addiction. But the majority of us are not willing to confront the addiction, and so we end up in this addictive relationship with people on Earth, where we give them some kind of feelings that they like and they give us some kind of feelings that we like. And the same applies to the spirits in the spirit world. We give them some kind of feelings that they like, or even give them control of our life to a large degree, and they give us feelings that we like, or that we then interpret to be good. [00:14:46.16]

Now in the process of doing this, we set up what I would classify, and what psychologists even classify, as a co-dependent relationship. You all have heard of one of those? And many of you have probably had one of those with a partner or a friend at some point in the past. Now the problem with co-dependent relationships is that they feel good while you maintain the dependencies but as soon as you try to act from a pure perspective, in harmony with truth or love in the relationship, automatically they'll be challenged. So most people set up these co-dependent relationships and they become the only person that this person here on Earth really associates with. And this applies to spirits as well as individuals. We can associate with both groups of people quite readily. [00:15:37.14]

And we finish up associating with the people who supply us with the addiction that we want met. And the test of it is that whenever they do not meet our addiction; our response is frustration or annoyance, or some other level of anger. Now as soon as we have this emotion we know that we've been in some kind of co-dependent addiction with somebody, and they're not supplying us the thing we need anymore. And when they still don't supply what we badly want, we get angry. [00:16:16.11]

Now many of you are that angry with God because you don't feel that God supplies you the things you need. The reality is that instead of working through your anger with God about that, you've then just substituted in God's place somebody else who will supply you with the thing you need. So now you can feel inside yourself that, "Oh I'm happy with God. I'm okay with God. Me and God get along. That's fine." But in reality the addiction is telling you that you've actually substituted something that you weren't getting from God in the first place; in fact, bearing in mind that God loves perfectly, that you're not even meant to get if you were being loved. And you're saying, "I still want that," and then in the process of still wanting that, you decide to get it from a substitute who's willing to give it. And you set up a co-dependency immediately by doing it with the substitute. [00:17:22.20]

3.1. Substitute relationships keep us away from God

Now because God doesn't respond to our addictions, the substitute relationships are going to keep us away from God. By doing this we're making our own situation or our own connection with God even worse than it was before we began. And we always do it when we're challenged by some addiction within us that we badly want to have satisfied. Instead of having the feeling that it's unsatisfied, and grieving the fact that it's not satisfied, and even questioning whether or not the addiction should be within us at all, we set up a relationship with an individual or group of individuals on Earth, or in the spirit world, who will give us the feelings we're looking for. And now we don't have to confront the addiction and our addiction is getting met and so we're relatively happy. When I say relatively happy, we're not angry all the time because our addiction's getting met. But in fact as soon as somebody withdraws and our addiction is not getting met we respond in anger or annoyance or frustration, or we want to lash out at them in some way or reject them from our life in some way. That indicates that we're still in the co-dependent addiction and we have no desire to release it. [00:19:07.21]

What I'm noticing regularly in my travels down here is that many of you are in this condition. Many of you who believe you're not in this condition are actually in this condition, where you are substituting relationships with spirits or relationships with other people on Earth so that you don't have to go through this damage that you have with God and actually have a deep relationship with God. The problem with that is that you can believe you're on the path, the Divine Love Path as many of us call it, or believe you're on the Way to God, and in reality be in total stagnation, believing at the same time that you're actually progressing. [00:19:55.14]

Now a person who's progressing changes noticeably to every single person around them. They become more loving in their actions with every single person around them. They also become more truthful in their actions with every single person around them, without feeling angry, frustrated, demanding or any of those other kinds of emotions. They become less angry, less frustrated, less demanding, less expecting of another person as they progress. That is the measure of progress. You'll just see love as the thing growing in the person and if that isn't happening you'll actually see love being sacrificed all the time. And this is also what I see happening for many in this area when you get together with each other. You sacrifice love, you sacrifice truth and love for the sake of the addiction that you want met with the individual. [00:21:08.07]

And each time you do that, you're just allowing this cloud of damage between you and God to grow bigger. And if you wish you can fool yourself that you're progressing towards God while that's occurring but all you're going to receive is nice feelings from the people with whom you're in an addiction. That's all you're going to receive. And to be frank after a while that's going to feel very flat and unsatisfying. That's the way it's going to be. [00:21:45.15]

Would you like to ask some questions about that? Or have I just stunned you all into silence? (Laughs) Do you notice when I raise some issues like this, one of the emotions that gets triggered is, "I'm getting told off now." You notice that emotion come up, yeah? It's a good emotion to address, isn't it? [00:22:16.07]

3.2. Using addictions to avoid emotions - the example of daydreaming

Participant: I've got a very strong addiction that is about withdrawing; I go into a daydream. I've always been a daydreamer. Would that be to do with some spirits as well? Because no matter how hard I try to stay in the now and be with my feelings, I can't get past just crying. I can't get any deeper than that. I get drawn away to thinking about something else. [00:22:52.20]

It's the emotions we judge, Terry, that are the emotions we withdraw from. So for many of you ladies, for example, you don't judge grief as much as you judge fear. And this applies to many men as well. And shame is judged most of all generally, whether it's sexual shame or just personal shame, humiliation. We judge those sorts of emotions a lot. And with the emotions that we judge the most, we have the strongest tendency to withdraw from using some method. Now for some of us the method is to go out of ourselves, away from ourselves. That's a very common method that's used in society, just make out you're not there and have a daydream and everything's fine after that. You don't have to focus on the emotion. [00:23:44.13]

Some of us like to be engaged with people. That way we don't have to feel any of our own emotions. Some of us like to eat because that's a great way of avoiding a lot of emotion. Some of us like to smoke or to drink or take some kind of physical thing that causes an addiction rather than address the emotion. It just depends on the methods we choose and the methods we choose depend on the judgements we have. [00:24:11.23]

For example if I'm a sad person but I hate smoking, I'm never going to choose smoking as a way to avoid my sadness. But if I'm sad person and I don't mind the occasional drink, then I'll definitely choose drinking over smoking as my addiction of choice. It just depends on the judgments I have towards the particular thing. [00:24:35.00]

Now for many of us, we have strong judgements about a lot of different emotions. We have strong judgements of anger, we have strong judgements about fear. We have strong judgements about shame. And because we have those judgements whenever we start to feel one of those emotions, fear, anger or shame, we then go into this place straight away of avoiding ourselves. Now as soon you go into a place of avoiding yourselves, you're going to have lots of different people around you, both on Earth and in the spirit world, who like to use that position. And for spirits it's very easy. They can then use your body while you're daydreaming. They can enjoy a bit of time on the Earth while you're out of your body trying to avoid some kind of emotion. [00:25:20.18]

So my suggestion is to make a list of all of the fears and all the judgements about emotion that you notice inside yourself. If you do that, you'll allow those emotions to be present without so much judgement. Now there's a difference between allowing it to be present and acting upon it. If, for example, there's an emotion of anger within you, if you allow it to be present, you'd say, "Yes I can feel I have this terrible anger and rage with Peter. I can feel this anger that I have. But I can't feel why it's there." So you're going to have to allow yourself to feel it. But don't ring Peter up and say, "Look I'm really angry with you because..." and off you go with him, because that's now just dumping your rage on another person, which is damaging. [00:26:16.05]

But you can feel it. You can just go, "Okay, I'm feeling it, there's got to be something underneath this anger that's causing me to feel the way I feel." Because if I were in a state of love I wouldn't be angry, would I? If I were in a state of love. So there's got to be something inside of me happening. And if you can allow yourself to be self-reflective in those moments when you, Terry, go away from your body, the moment just before is the trigger point. Whatever you were thinking or engaged with right before that moment is the thing that I would hone myself down onto. And I'd go, "Okay, something in that discussion that I was having, or that event that occurred, just before I went into a daydream, that's the thing I want to avoid. That's my addiction. I want to avoid that particular thing. I use my daydreams to get out of having to feel that." [00:27:17.19]

Participant: Yep. Thank you.

3.3. Living in addiction damages ourselves and others

Participant: With what you said before with addiction and not going through the damage cloud to God, are you saying that while we are on the path or while we think we're on the path, we're actually doing more damage to our soul and to others too? [00:27:47.22]

Yes.

Participant: The reason is that I read "30 years amongst the dead" and Madam Blavatsky is one of the people who come and she's very much regretting her teachings. She's trying to help people know the spirit world, to undo the damage she has done. [00:28:06.20]

Remember that every single choice we make to engage one of our addictions usually involves at least one other person. Whether that other person is a person on Earth or in the spirit world is immaterial, it's still another person. Because in order to get an addiction met, we need the interaction with one other person generally. Now any time we engage the addiction we have within us, we are automatically harming the people around us. And we can say or try to convince ourself otherwise but it's impossible if you look at it. Even personal addictions. For example, let's look at Terry's addiction of the daydream, which sounds like a pretty innocent addiction, doesn't it? [00:28:52.17]

But every time he steps away, he's stepping away from his relationship. This is going to have a negative effect on the relationship at some point. He's stepping away from his connection with himself, which means he allows spirits to use him when they shouldn't ever be allowed to use him. He's also stepping away from his connection with God, so therefore he will never benefit from God in that place of day dream. So there are quite a number of people he's damaging besides himself. And that's an innocent addiction. Once we get to some of the more comprehensive and difficult addictions like rage and anger and what they cover; they're all addictions, they're all telling us addictions are not getting met. Once we look at those addictions - it's an addiction to avoid our terror and our fear, for example. Quite often we will do some very damaging things to other people and therefore damaging things to our own soul. [00:29:49.07]

So in the course of a day every time you're feeling frustrated and angry with someone without looking at what the cause is, and feeling justified in the action towards that person, you are damaging your soul further. You can say you're on the Divine Love Path but in reality, if we look at a scale of what's actually going on in terms of our progression towards love, this is what's going on. In a course of a day we start off here at this point and then we do some loving things and we do some more loving things, we're slowly improving in our condition, but then all of a sudden we're just in this terrible rage with somebody and we dump it on them. And it doesn't matter even if we don't say it to them; the fact that it's coming out of our soul, that it's aimed towards them is already dumping it on them. And they might have something in them that allows it, sure, but at the end of the day it's our rage and so all of a sudden there, our soul condition went like that.

During a day we can grow in love until we get in a rage; if we address the cause of the rage we can grow significantly

3.3.1. Choosing to address unloving causes within us improves our soul condition

Now we have the opportunity here to address the underlying cause as to why we did that. And if we did there's a chance of us making a big recovery in the same day. But for the majority of us we don't do that because we justify our rage and our anger and of course we have a lot of spirits around us who want us to justify our rage and anger because they like seeing you get dark and grumpy and angry. They like this whole concept of destroying you; many of these dark spirits that surround you want you to go darker every day. Because they want you to be like they are. [00:31:31.01]

A loving choice to address the cause of unloving behaviour can improve our condition markedly

And so at this moment of rage, when our soul condition degrades, you have a choice. Now you have a choice to confront the addiction at that moment. You've just seen your own behaviour. You know it's not loving, you have a choice to confront the addiction in that moment in a true emotional manner, and actually make a huge recovery even in the same day in terms of your soul condition, because you could actually release the cause. Once you've released the cause, you're going to make your soul condition improve markedly in the course of that day. [00:32:09.11]

But for the majority of people at this point they make the choice to justify their addiction, to justify their rage and anger of not having their addiction met, and as soon as you do that you have made a major negative step in your progress. You've made a major degrading step in your progress. Now if this is the path that goes to God, this downward direction isn't a good path to choose at any time. It's never going to be a good path to choose, it's always going to create more unhappiness and more unloving behaviour in you and also around you towards others. When you're unloving towards others what do you notice? They also have a tendency if they're not developed to then be unloving with you, of course. Because this is what unloving behaviour does, it engenders even more unloving behaviour. [00:33:03.08]

And so we end up degrading our condition. Now in the same moment we can go, "Oh yeah, I've heard about the Divine Truth and I've heard about God's Way of Love and I've heard about all of the principles about the soul and all those kinds of things. I know all of that." And I suggest to you, if you're doing that, you know nothing, because to actually know something you'd be changing your heart to not justify the addiction. So every time you say or convince yourself that you know things, that you know something about truth, and yet choose to take an unloving course of action when you're faced with an addiction that is being confronted, you are in that moment choosing to be unloving. [00:33:55.02]

3.3.2. Choosing to be unloving and to not confront addictions degrades our soul condition

And if you choose to be unloving every single time an addiction is confronted your soul can only degrade in its condition of love. It can only go down. It can't go up. The only way for it to go up is to notice our unloving behaviour when the big event occurred that triggered our unloving behaviour, to actually want to see the cause without blaming anybody else and without trying to even enlist anybody else's assistance to do so, because this is personal growth towards God. This is something that we are personally responsible to do. Nobody else is personally responsible to tell you anything about how you've been loving or unloving. Nobody else is responsible for your life. Nobody else needs to tell you every single moment you've been unloving. When you say, "Oh yeah, okay, I can see that I've been unloving," and then you go to them, "Well why was I unloving?" - Well they don't even have a responsibility to tell you why. They've only got to be responsible for their own selves and finding out why they've been unloving, if they have at any point in time. [00:35:06.22]

So if we focus on the cause we have great potential in every event to have a major change of our condition, a major change. Once we've released the cause, now our soul has jumped in its standard way of operating, in terms of a condition of love. There's been a growth in the course of this day. And this kind of growth, once you release the cause emotionally of why you do something, that kind of growth is permanent because you'll never do the same negative thing again. [00:35:47.19]

The reason we often do the same negative thing each day or each week or each month is that we're yet to release the emotional cause as to why we choose to do it. Once we've released the emotional causes, why we choose a negative course of action, we will never make the same choice again. We'll have learnt all the lessons involved with that choice and we'll never make the choice again. If we make this change or transition every single person around us will notice, "Wow, you know every time I went up to them before and I said a certain thing they'd always be angry. Now I can go up to them, say the same thing. In fact I can go up to them and almost say anything and they're not angry." And so that indicates immediately to every single person around you that there has been some sincere and real change inside of the individual. [00:36:43.16]

And so I feel what's happening to a lot of people, Rita, is that they're making progress to this point, they think they're doing well in the course of a day. Then something inside their soul attracts an event, and the event causes them to act badly. They act unlovingly. Let's define badly as acting unlovingly. They act unlovingly but now they start to see the results of the lack of love. And now, in that moment of seeing the cause, the addiction they have that they want met, that's the point of time that they could change. They can make a different choice. [00:37:30.02]

Many of us are not making a different choice. We make the same choices we've always made. And because we make the same choice we've always made, we just degraded our condition a little further on that particular choice. So we can tell ourselves or convince ourselves that we're on a path to God, while at the same time being on a path to self-destruction. Just because we know things in our mind, it means nothing if our heart isn't getting changed. If our heart and our actions are not changing then any mind-based learning is really pointless. What's the point of coming along to sessions learning about the soul, emotions, God, the universe, how all that works, if there's no change inside of the soul that causes you to become a more loving individual? There's really no point. You want to ask some more? [00:38:27.19]

Participant: Yeah. The second part of the question is that I sometimes think maybe it is better not to tell everybody about the path because they don't really know the consequences. [00:38:39.20]

(Laughs) So you're saying that God's path is flawed? Basically this is what you're saying; that God's path is flawed because there are consequences that are not very nice and so it's far better to not tell people the truth about God or God's path just because you're having trouble individually practicing it. Can you see some problems with that reasoning? [00:39:05.11]

Participant: Yeah, but if I tell people and they think they're on the path, but instead all they do is really meet their addictions, then they are degrading their soul even more by being on the path now, with the "path" in inverted commas. [00:39:23.09]

They're not degrading their soul even more. They've always been having these addictions in the past, haven't they? Most of our addictions get established by the time we're seven years of age. From the time we were seven years of age we've been engaged in fulfilling the majority of our addictions that were well-established by that time of that age. So bearing that in mind, any person who comes along who listens to the Divine Truth who's 25 or 30 years of age has been practicing their addictions for at least 14-21 years. That person who's 27 or 28 years of age, for 21 years they've been practicing their addictions already. They've already been degrading their soul for 21 years. [00:40:12.01]

Participant: Yeah but now they're doing it on top of being on the path. Do you know what I mean?

No, I don't.

Participant: They're not just degrading their soul by being normal...

No, you're justifying unloving behaviour by saying its far better for somebody to be ignorant than it is for somebody to know the truth. I don't agree with that ever. It's never better for somebody to be ignorant than for them to know the truth. [00:40:38.22]

Participant: I can't do any damage to my soul and to other people by spreading the word even though I might be in error?

Certainly you can.

Participant: So what do you do then?

Practice the truth, do it right! That's what you can do. What you're trying to do with me is justifying doing it wrong. That's what you're trying to do, and I'm saying, "No, don't do that. Practice the truth. Look at this cloud of damage you have with God and start working your way through it sincerely." Don't go, "Oh, I've got a cloud of damage with God. Oh well. That's the way it is for the rest of my life," so that's what I do. I ignore that cloud of damage with God and I go, "Wow, now I've got this damage with God and I know it's there, I can feel it's there and I can see it's there, now that I know that it's far better for me to just not tell anybody else about the truth because they might have a cloud of damage with God that gets exposed," and I feel very uncomfortable about telling anybody. [00:41:39.01]

Participant: Yeah that's exactly what I'm thinking.

Exactly!

Participant: And wasn't saying.

And it's very, very flawed isn't it? Because at the end of the day we all need to confront this cloud of damage we have with God if we're ever going to be happier than we currently are. Now, many of us go, "Oh, but I'm not perfect yet, I'm a work in progress." If I had one dollar for every single time I've heard from somebody that they're a work in progress every time I've pointed out an unloving behaviour, I would be a multi-millionaire. Over the period of my life, I'd be a multi-millionaire just from one dollar from every one of those persons. [00:42:17.00]

You'd be surprised how much we desperately want to justify maintaining our addictions. If you look at our day-to-day lives, we desperately want to justify maintaining our addictions most of the time because whenever somebody points out one of the addictions, generally we get angry and upset with them. So that immediately tells us that we want to justify the addiction. And we desperately want that, and I'm going, "Why do you want this? This is never going to result in happiness." [00:42:55.05]

3.4. AJ's approach to his cloud of damage with God

Can I explain to you how I approach my own relationship with God? It's really very, very simple. I've still got some cloud of damage myself, in this relationship with God. That's me there, same as you. Here's little old me, with this cloud of damage in my relationship with God. There's only one difference between what I do with it and what you do with it. Only one! Do you know what it is? I refuse to get the addictions met by third parties. It's really quite simple. [00:44:03.16]

AJ refuses to enter addictive relationships with people in place of his relationship with God

These are the third parties, whether they're on Earth or in the spirit world, it doesn't matter where they are. They're just people who are willing to meet your addictions because they have addictions of their own that they'd like you to meet. The only difference between me and the average person is that I do not allow myself to enter these addictive places with people. I have some personal ethics about doing that, because I know the big problem with me entering this addictive place is that I'm just going to be avoiding my damage cloud if I do that. [00:44:40.07]

So what I feel is this: My relationship with God is my number one priority. Anything that's unfulfilled in that relationship with God is grief that I need to feel. So any unfulfilled emotion that I have in my relationship with God, I need to work through something to feel it. I need to work through something emotionally to feel it. If I engage in addiction with one of you, rather than feeling that emotion, then I have missed an opportunity that God has just given me to get closer to God in the event that has occurred. I've just missed the opportunity. [00:45:23.18]

A part of being humble is to trust God that if you sort things out with God, everything else will get better as a result. The problem is that the cloud of damage tells us that that is not true. So inside, the majority of us do not believe that if we sort things out with God our entire life will get better. Instead we try to sort our life out without God. We substitute other relationships for the relationship that would benefit us the most because we're unwilling to work through our issues with the person with whom our relationship will be most benefited. [00:46:11.10]

3.5. Being on the Divine Love Path requires us to work through our damage cloud with God

And so we're just creating this problem for ourselves. We believe we're on the "path towards God" but the reality is that you can't be on the path towards God just by having a heap of intellectual knowledge about the path towards God. You can't be on the path towards God by just having the knowledge. You can listen for years to Divine Truth and still never be any closer to God. To actually be closer to God, there has to be some sincerity to work through this damage cloud, this cloud of emotional damage and belief systems that we have towards God. We have to have some sincerity in working through it if we're ever going to be closer to God than we currently are. [00:47:01.17]

Now if there is no sincerity in working through that, how can you say you're on the Divine Love Path? You're not on the Divine Love Path. You've heard about the Divine Love Path. There's a big difference between hearing about it and actually being on it. Remember in the first century I said, "The way to God is a very narrow, confined way." Very narrow, very confined. The reason it's narrow and confined is that God does not meet a single one of your addictions. God is also going to refine you in this process of working towards God. And if you're not willing to embrace the process of being refined, and you desperately want the addictions or co-dependencies to be met with somebody else, then of course you can talk about all the Divine Truths that you have learned intellectually, but very few of them are ever going to enter your heart until you put the principles into practice. [00:48:13.00]

And I suggest to you that if you are constantly getting your addictions met you'll never get a single step closer to God, whether those addictions are physical in nature, like food or alcohol or drink or drugs or anything like that, or whether they're emotional in nature, which is sometimes more insidious. Emotional addictions are far more insidious because a lot of the times we don't even notice them at all. And we'll never get a single step closer to God while we hold on to these addictions. [00:48:51.12]

3.6. Relationships with spirits can be beneficial when they are not addictive

Participant: I came up to Armidale about six months ago and that was a guided thing for me. So spiritual relationships are good in a lot of ways.

They are. I agree.

Participant: And that's one of the reasons I'm here, because I was guided to be here and guided to do things. And then things are falling into place. [00:49:14.03]

Exactly! So I'm not saying, "Don't have a relationship with spirits". Definitely having a relationship with any person is always a great thing. But not when it's in an addiction, not when it is satisfying co-dependencies that are helping you avoid the cloud of damage you have with God. There are many people in the audience who are doing that with spirits at the moment. They have these co-dependent addictions with spirits where the spirit gives them a nice lovely feeling and then they feel good about themselves and that's just helped them avoid some of the issues they have between themselves and God. [00:49:51.17]

Participant: I actually find that when I get to a point where I am angry or whatever, as soon as that happens the darker spirits come in and then I know exactly that I've got an issue to sort out, and that's when it starts. And it took me a long while to work that out. [00:50:11.12]

Yep. Well that's awesome.

Participant: It's hard, but you do get there.

Yes. So sometimes you'll have a certain trigger or an event in your life that occurs and all of a sudden this darker spirit who's in a rage comes to you and you know, "I've attracted him, so there's some reason why. There's something in me now that wants his justification or wants some co-dependent thing going on with him. And what is it? I've got to find it out." It could be that I'm terrified of him. That might be something I need to work through. Or it could be that I love him being with me because he makes me feel strong, and he makes me feel like I can get on with life and angrily work may way through life. Whatever the reason is, it's great that we have a relationship but it's not great that we substitute this relationship for our relationship with God. So I don't see any harm in a relationship as long as we don't use the relationship as an addiction. [00.51. 11]

Participant: An excuse.

As an excuse, yep! And this is where a lot of times I see people who say they're on the path towards God, on the Divine Love Path, shall we call it, or the Way towards God; quite often they are avoiding God like the plague. And instead they are trying to get all of these addictions met from everybody else, even other people who say they're on the path towards God. [00:51:39.23]

And many times I see these co-dependencies being created rather than people actually purely embracing the principles of truth that will help them get through this damage cloud, which in the end will have them feeling a very close bond with God. So close that you can become at-one with God in all the ways you act and feel. And everyone around you will notice that. Everyone around you will notice the changes that are being made when you're on that path. [00:52:07.18]

With co-dependent addictive relationships, everybody patting everybody else on the back and going, "Isn't it so wonderful, we're all doing so well," none of them are growing at all, and none of them actually have a close relationship with God. That's very damaging. So we need to be very careful we do not choose to use our relationships in a co-dependent manner. That even applies to our relationship with our partner, our friends, our acquaintances; and whenever we go to a group of any kind that we're not immediately involved in trying to get some kind of addiction met in the group. [00:52:42.12]

And many times with many people I see this happening when I come down here. It is an issue that you face here of trying to get these co-dependent addictions met through these inter-relationships, which is just avoiding the damage cloud that we need to address if we're ever going to be close to God. [00:53:20.20]

4. How to identify when we're in an addictive interaction

Participant: I'm curious as to how I can practice this in my life. If I'm in communication with someone and I catch myself being unloving, how do I practically put that into practice? Do I stop and communicate that I'm being unloving to the person? [00:53:49.04]

Often when in the situation you don't realise, do you? And then it's afterwards you go, "Oh dear, there I was again," you know. [00:53:56.00]

Participant: True.

So you can't really make rules about how to do it. But can I make some suggestions? Firstly, we can discuss love and what love is. And then there's the issue regarding truth and what truth is. And then there's the issue of when we feel good but we're not in harmony with love and truth, and that's called addictions. That's when we're not in harmony with love and truth but we feel good anyway; that's when we're getting some kind of addiction met. [00:54:26.16]

Interactions with others can be in love, truth or addiction

Now perhaps initially we're going to have a lot of difficulty in determining what loving behaviour is. But if we allow ourselves, we can be far more open to what our emotional addictions are. In any discussion with a person you can generally tell whether you are in an addiction with each other just by how you feel when you walk away from the discussion. When you walk away from the discussion, how do you feel? Do you feel emotionally depleted? Because if you feel emotionally depleted either there is something in yourself that you're not facing, that causes you to try to go into intellectual denial about, which suppresses you emotionally, or there was a 'taking' from you going on by the other person, which means you were prepared to give something to them that they wanted and that caused you to feel exhausted. [00:55:27.21]

So it can be quite easy to tell after the event. My suggestion is that every interaction you have during the course of a day, ask yourself the question, "What am I feeling in this interaction?" And after the interaction is finished, what do you feel? Now if you're in addiction and you have an interaction with a person in truth, you'll find you probably feel angry with the interaction, because you want the addiction met, and they're not meeting the addiction. In terms of the way emotions are handled, we've got our grief. We've got our fear, and most of times these are belief systems that are false that stop us from feeling our grief. Then we've got our addictions. And our addictions are belief systems that are false that stop us from feeling our fears. [00:56:32.00]

Layers of emotions that are within us

Now when our addictions don't get met, the majority of people either go into one or two different states. One state they go into is denial. In other words they say, "You know, I just don't get along with that person. You know, they're a nice enough people but I don't know if I really want to spend much time with them." And why would we feel that way? Most of the time it's because there's a certain addiction not getting met, but we deny it. They don't cause us to be angry, but they cause us to go into a state of denial. The other state we go into is that we get angry. If it's a big addiction that we have, generally we'll get angry.

Say in an interaction with somebody, somebody brings up some truth with us. Remember that truth is the only way fear will be confronted. So you need this truth before you can grow, because the only way fear - false expectations appearing real - gets confronted is through truth. But you get fed the truth and because it's not a nice lovely emotion you're getting along with it, it's not a nice feeling from the person that makes you feel all warm and fuzzy, you get angry with them. That's telling you immediately that your addictions are being confronted. [00:57:51.10]

So to tell in an interaction with any person or anything around you in the course of a day (and by the way you can have a lot of interactions in nature that can cause you to get just as angry as interactions with people) - if any interaction causes anger inside you, you know there's got to be a big addiction in there that you're covering in that moment. [00:58:20.14]

Now to notice it you're going to have to be sensitive. That's the key; to be sensitive to your own feelings emotionally, to be self-analytical and questioning of yourself. After a while you won't have to do that because as you progress and as you emotionally release more and more of the causes of things, every interaction becomes a lot more perfect with each person. And you don't have to think about what actually happened in the interaction because you're automatically in a greater state of love in every interaction. But when we start we're not like that, we're in all these addictions that we've had since a very, very young age. Most of us have had these addictions for 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 years. How many of you are in your 80s? No 80s? Any 70s? So you've had these addictions for 60-something years. That's a long time to have an addiction, isn't it? So you know obviously it's going to be tough confronting them when we've lived in them for that long. [00:59:23.24]

And by the way there are many spirits in the spirit world who have been in the spirit world for thousands of years and still in addictions in the same way. They've had thousands of years of their addiction without dealing with it. We don't want to be like that. We want to be in a more progressed state of love than that. So my suggestion is to be sensitive and self-analytical with your own emotional feeling whenever you are engaged in anything. Stay connected with yourself and how you feel and analyse how exhausted you feel. Do you feel tired? Do you feel exhausted through the interaction? What else do you feel in the interaction? What other feelings do you have? Do you have any frustrations, or annoyances that you just covered over? You know, in almost any discussion with a person, you can be truthful and honest about what you feel. [01:00:18.09]

Now in this audience I could point out interactions that many of you have had with each other that I can see plain as day. For example even when a person's walking up to you to have the interaction you already want to run away. There's many interactions I see happening in the course of the times down here where I see one person walking up to the other person, and that person's going, "Not me! Not me! Not me! Not me!" (Laughter) Already they're in a feeling of not wanting to be involved in an interaction with that person. [01:00:56.22]

4.1. An example of how to behave lovingly when an addiction is identified

Participant: What do they do in that situation? Do they stand there and own that and say, "I don't want to talk to you," but in a loving way? [01:01:04.08]

Yeah, you say, "Look..."

Participant: "I don't really want to talk to you at the moment."

Yeah, the person comes up. So Matty, you come up to me. Come up here. Now Matt's often in a bit of neediness with me, aren't you, mate? Yep. (Laughter) Perhaps we can grab that microphone so Matt can talk into it. So, Matt walks up to me. [01:01:29.14]

Participant: "Hey, Jesus."

And says, "Hello," and oftentimes I'll give Matt a big hug. And then I just say, "Matt, I can't do anything more with you right now." And Matt goes, "Why?" And I say, "Because there's just so much neediness coming out of you towards me that I don't even feel like I'm getting the real person here, right at this moment. And it feels overbearing for me. My dear brother, if you can just go away and work your way through that, then we can have some kind of relationship." [01:02:02.23]

Now if I'm over here and Matt's walking up to me, and I'm going, "Argh. He's just going to be needy again and it's just terrible. Argh." And then Matt says, "Hello, AJ." And I say, "Hello, Matt. How are you going?" What's happening now? [01:02:19.07]

I'm meeting his addiction.

Participant: Yeah. And I'm starting to feel good then.

You're starting to feel good. I'm feeling worse because I have to be fake in my interaction with Matt. I'm having to act all cheery when I'm not necessarily feeling all cheery and I'm just feeling like, "Oh I'm a bit overpowered by the neediness coming out of Matt," and the feeling in me is like, "I'd just like to try and get away." But because I feel like I should be "polite", I go, "Oh yeah, how are you going, Matt?" And we talk about this and talk about that and we have a half an hour discussion which is unfulfilling for both of us generally and then Matt walks away and goes, "I wonder what that was all about?" And I walk away going, "I know what that was all about, and I just avoided a whole heap of things in that." [01:03:06.13]

And it hasn't benefited both of us. But I can be loving and truthful with Matt and Matt and I have this relationship where Matt comes up, I give him a hug and say, "Great to see you my friend. Can't talk to you anymore now though because there's so much neediness coming out of you!" And sometimes Matt even comes up to me and says, "Yeah, I know, I can feel it again!" (Laughter) And off he walks even before we get to have the hug. Don't you? [01:03:33.09]

Participant: Yeah, I do.

So he knows there's an addiction there at least. At least he knows. Now if I pander to this addiction, if I were self-reflective I'd come away going, "Okay I'm feeling a bit tired from that interaction with Matt. Obviously I'm willing to give him his addiction. There's got to be some reason in me that causes me to be so willing to not be honest with Matt, and not to be honest about how I'm feeling. There's got to be something going on." And it could be that I'm addicted to just looking good. And I don't want Matt to think that I'm bad. And so I go, "Oh, I can't tell Matt that, because otherwise Matt will think that I'm bad and I've got this lovely addiction that I want everybody to like me." And so then I engage the situation, "Oh Matt, how are you doing? Isn't it great? Good to see you." We talk about all these nothing things for the next fifteen minutes or so, and in the end myself and Matt have not benefited from that discussion. In fact if you look at it, I have just engaged a potential soul injury being exposed and in the same moment denied that I have it and denied my opportunity to address it. I've denied my opportunity to become more truthful. [01:05:01.09]

Participant: Both of us too.

For both of us. And I've denied Matt's opportunity to actually understand what is coming out of him. I've denied him the opportunity to see himself as he truthfully is from the perspective of how somebody else feels. That's what I've done. [01:05:25.00]

Participant: Thank you.

So some kind of self analytical action needs to be taken. [01:05:44.17]

Participant: And a willingness to be honest at all times.

Yeah. Most of us have so many addictions to other people liking us that we're not willing to be honest and truthful people in a loving manner at all. Not in a loving manner. It only comes out when we're in a rage and then we say all these words which we later regret, but the reality is that most of the time we feel them anyway, we just never say them. And the reason it comes out in a huge ball of rage is that we don't honour them when those feelings are actually present. [01:06:20.20]

And bear in mind that I could feel something else from Matt and I could have a problem with that. I might want to feel that Matt likes me, and so I'm unwilling to be truthful about what else I feel as a result. I might want some feelings from Matt that are unloving towards Matt as well. And I need to have a look at that in this process. We've all got this damage cloud and the only way to deal with it is to stop our addictions. We need to stop the addictions with people because then they all get exposed and then we start seeing what we actually have with God. [01:07:08.08]

Participant: Then we have a clear path.

Then we have a much clearer path to God. Once we start rubbing out this damage cloud, once this damage cloud gets thinner and thinner and thinner, obviously we have much more opportunity to know God, to understand God, to feel God, and for God to feel us. Since we've got a lot of very heavy emotions about God, God's going to be going, "Yeah I don't know if I want to feel that one from her. That one can stay with her." Every single time we have any emotions towards any individual, including God, obviously those people feel it. You feel each other well enough. Like if Matt comes up to you and he has a feeling of neediness, you know when he's needy, don't you? Straight away. [01:07:56.24]

So surely God knows. If you know, God surely knows that emotion. And that emotion is preventing the relationship with God. Once we work through the damage cloud we have a much better opportunity to have a relationship with God. [01:08:15.09]

5. Becoming God-reliant

Participant: AJ, I feel like I have no concept of how to be God-reliant. I feel that I learned as a child how to take care of myself in a practical way and that I was the only person who could do that. And so I've done that and it hasn't worked very well. But nevertheless I feel like I don't know how to be God-reliant. [01:08:32.17]

Let's address the two issues. The first issue is, you said you've become self-reliant, but it hasn't worked very well. [01:08:41.09]

Participant: That is very true. In the last week, I went, "You know what? I've been taking care of myself, doing everything for myself. I'm the only one that knows what to do for me." That type of thing. Not allowing. And I went, "Gosh this is really not working." [01:08:54.22]

And it hasn't worked as well.

Participant: And I don't know what to do now. And I was thinking, "Yeah, maybe God-reliance is..." I don't even know what that is or how it works or anything.

Well what I've found with God-reliance is that firstly you need to understand one basic truth, and that is what you're coming to terms with right now. That truth is that it's impossible to be self-reliant and to be completely satisfied. Actually it's impossible to be self-reliant and do a very good job with it as well. And that even applies to everyone who becomes perfected in the spirit world. It's still very, very difficult because they miss out on all of these beautiful joys as well. We need to acknowledge that self-reliance is not, in the long term, going to be very beneficial. Most of us have tried it for a long enough time and know that it's not that successful. [01:09:40.22]

5.1. Every event in our lives is an opportunity to get closer to God

So then we go into this idea of what is God-reliance? Well, I'd love to give a talk in the future about God-reliance and what that is completely. But if I can give a bit of summary for you, this is how it feels for me. I trust that everything that God brings me in the course of one day is an opportunity to get closer to God in that day. Everything. So that includes every negative event. Every event that makes me unhappy is an opportunity to get closer to God as well. See most people get the negative events and they have a good yell at God, and say, "Why have you brought me this negative event?" Not understanding that these negative events only really occur, in terms of their responses inside of themselves, because they're out of harmony with love or truth in some way. [01:10:37.11]

So the way I see it is that every single event is a positive event bringing me closer to God. The way it feels to me is that every single event gives me an opportunity to make a choice of engaging my relationship with God or of avoiding it. Every event! Every interaction I have with each one of you is an opportunity for me to either engage my relationship with God or to avoid it. Now the reason I've learned to be so truthful with everyone and so honest and straightforward with everyone is that I feel myself getting closer to God every time I do it. It's not because I believe it's the right way. [01:11:25.11]

5.2. AJ's experience in becoming God-reliant

Many people believe that I believe that what I'm teaching is the right way. Can I explain how it actually feels for me? And this has been the case over my last two thousand years, so it's been a well-established way. This is the way I see myself. This is little me. In comparison to the infinite God that I wish to connect to, I am this finite being who started out in my first century life very, very tiny and who has grown just a little since then in comparison with my relationship with God and who God is, and what God's capacity is. So little me is there trying to discover truth.

AJ views himself as "little me" in comparison to God

And what I've learned is that God can be trusted in every single aspect of my life. And in the first century I was quite young when I felt this feeling. It began with a logical thought for me, in the sense that I used logic to look at the universe around me and see the love in the universe around me, and I observed that humans were different to the love that I observed. [01:13:00.16]

That is, instead of looking at humans and judging God through my relationship with humans, I looked at the rest of the world that was less affected by humans and then looked at what that told me about this God. And what that told me, firstly intellectually, was that this God was more loving than any other person that I had ever met. It wasn't a feeling yet, it was just logic. And also I noticed in the first century that this God was cleverer than any person that I'd ever met. And this God was more truthful than any person I'd ever met. Because I noticed around about me this automatic reflection of truth in my environment of every single person when something happened and that caused me to believe that God was more truthful than any person I'd met. And that caused me to have some faith, the quality of faith, and the quality of trust, that God was the being that I could trust above all others. Even above myself. [01:14:21.00]

5.2.1. Trusting that God knows better than us

In other words, I started realising that the way that I could grow was not by trusting myself but instead by first trusting the God with whom I wanted to connect; first trusting that God was loving, that God was truthful and more clever than I could ever imagine. And then I could trust that because God was obviously more loving than any other person I'd ever imagined, God had more desire for me to learn from God than any other person had any desire for me to learn. And so I engaged this process with God where I stopped being hung up on what I believed. I was no longer focused on what I believed. And I'm still now, right now, even though you might believe differently, not hung up on what I believe. [01:15:24.00]

AJ realised that God was more loving, clever and truthful than other people, including himself, and therefore he should believe God over himself

I am willing to change what I believe the moment that it's proven to me to be false. And that's one thing I learned in the first century. The only way that you can change most rapidly is by getting rid of all the things that are false, that are untrue, things that you believe or feel that are not benefiting you right at this moment. When I say not benefiting you, anything that's false, anything that's not in harmony with love is not benefiting you. You can hold on to it as long as you like, but it's not going to benefit you. [01:16:00.23]

So what I learned to do was to stop believing myself. Now I know people are going to take this discussion and twist it around into what something I did not intend, but what I mean by stop believing myself is that I stopped believing that I was somehow the person who knew all truth. I stopped believing that I was somehow cleverer than every other person around me. I stopped believing that I was better or worse than any person around me in fact. I started to forget myself so much in the process, in the sense that I was more interested in what God felt about everything than in what I felt about it. [01:17:00.23]

Can you see that if you're more interested in what somebody else feels about something, then you'll take on a lot of their beliefs? Now there are huge dangers doing that with another person because they're just as injured or sometimes even more injured than you are and if you give up what you believe in for the sake of what the other person believes, you're going to get yourself in a lot of trouble doing that. But because God is perfect in love, and because God is cleverer than any other being on Earth or in the spirit world, and because God knows all truth, you are very safe doing that with God. You're able to do that safely. [01:17:47.05]

You're able to have the concept inside yourself that you can stop believing yourself whenever you see something or feel something that seems to be contrary within you. So any time that you feel any emotion that's not in harmony with love, that's your measuring stick, that tells you that you are hanging onto a belief inside yourself that from God's perspective must be false. [01:18:18.11]

You know how if there's some injustice that occurs, many of you start getting really angry? You feel that anger rise within you? Well that anger is not love. So that immediately tells you that there's an emotional belief inside little you that is completely out of harmony with God's perspective of the universe. Everyone goes, "But it's just!" And I'm saying, "It might be just, but the fact that you don't feel love means that there's something out of harmony, belief system-wise, inside you, that is no longer God's belief but yours that you're holding on to. [01:19:05.07]

Because the reality is that when you're at-one with God do you think you'll be going around saying, "That's unjust. I'm going to fight that. And that's unjust; I'm going to fight that"? Do you think you'll be doing that? You'll be pointing out the injustices without the anger coming out of you. When you're in a state of love, you'll point out injustice but you won't be angry about it. When you're not in a state of love, you're pointing out injustice but you're angry about it. And if you're angry about it, the anger is telling you that you're not loving and so there's a false belief inside of little self who wants to disagree with God on a subject, whatever that subject is. [01:19:53.23]

5.2.2. When we don't feel love, there is an emotion inside us that is wrong from God's perspective

So instead of doing that I go, "No, if it's an argument between me and God, God's always right and I'm prepared to always be wrong." The majority of you are not prepared to always be wrong when it comes to an argument between you and God. When you're completely humble, you'll get to that point, because you'll have to get to that point in the end to have a relationship with God. You'll get to the point where you realise that if there's an argument between you and God going on, you're always wrong. And when you understand emotionally that you're always wrong, you can then analyse and feel inside you where you're wrong, because every time you do not feel a feeling of pure, sincere, wholehearted love, it's telling you that the emotion inside you is wrong. [01:20:48.14]

That's God's message to you, every single time. Every time you do not feel sincere, pure, wholehearted love in any situation, God is already showing you that you have a belief inside yourself that's automatically out of harmony with God. Because God feels sincere, complete, wholehearted love for everything. When you're at-one with God you'll feel the same. [01:21:20.02]

So this is where it's pretty easy to be honest. A lot of us go, "But I don't know what love is" and to be frank with you, I feel that's a big cop-out. You can feel when there's not a wholehearted feeling of love compared to a feeling of love. You can feel it. All of you are capable of feeling it. You've had situations in your life where you've had a pure moment. You remember those times? When you've had a pure moment in an interaction with another person or another thing, or one of God's creations, or just looking at a view or something like that. Most of us have had at least one of those interactions in our life where we had that sincere pure feeling of love come out of us. That's the feeling that should be present in every thing we say, do, and think. And if it's not, then there's a belief inside little us that's out of harmony with love. [01:22:20.14]

And we're arguing with God on that matter because if we weren't arguing with God we would already have God's viewpoint. God's viewpoint enters you really well when you don't argue with it, or when you don't fight it. And that's all I do. All I do is remind myself that whatever belief I have right now will potentially have to be changed. Now there are certain beliefs I feel right now that will never have to be changed because I've managed to have them all through my growth towards God over two thousand years. But there are certain feelings in me now that I know for certain will have to change because I recognise that they are completely out of harmony with the feelings of love for everything around me. And I know they're going to have to change. [01:23:15.02]

But arguing with God about them is not going to help you change them. And I find that the majority of people spend a lot of their time arguing with God but because there's this cloud between them and God they don't think it's arguing with God. Because it's like, "I can't really feel God so..." but if you allow yourself to feel love, you'll see that many times you don't feel love in the course of a day? [01:23:48.09]

How many of you woke up this morning going, "Oh I just love jumping out of bed, every single day! I've got a lovely life to live today! It's going to be fantastic!" If you're with a partner, you look at her and you just go, "God she's gorgeous," and if she's not already awake, just wait for her to wake up so you get an opportunity to say that to her. How many of you feel that in a course of every single day you wake up? Because that's what you're going to feel when you're completely in harmony with God. You're going to feel like jumping out of bed, getting things on. Or if there's something very interesting in bed next to you, then you might not jump out of bed but you'll definitely be very interested in what's going on around you. (Laughter) You won't always be trying to shut it down. [01:24:34.13]

And many of you have had this feeling of love at some point for some thing in your life, particularly if you cast your mind back to your childhood. Usually most people have had at least one thing happen in their childhood where they had that really pure feeling. That's the feeling that will be present with you all the time once you're at-one with God. That will be present with you in every thing that you do. In fact it will be impossible for you to engage any other thing without that feeling been present. [01:25:12.12]

So if you can focus on every belief inside you, assume you're potentially going to change it in the future, then that will help you give up this concept that you know what is right. And you could also tell yourself that there is only one other person in the universe who knows everything that's right, and it's not Jesus. It's God. I feel quite sad that I'm often attributed as being God because the reality is that only God knows everything and only God knows everything that is right. Even once we're at-one with God and after that we're constantly going to be learning new things all the time, although once we're at-one with God we'll be less resistive to learning the new things. [01:26:09.09]

Before we're at-one with God, we are the most resistive to learning new things. And we've got to give up the resistance. And what's helped me a lot to give up my resistance is firstly, even when I don't even feel trust for God, I at least intellectually tell myself I can trust God. Even if I don't feel faith in God, I tell myself intellectually at least that I can have faith in God because at the end of the day I do observe these things in my universe around me that tell me that I can have this faith and trust in this God of love. And therefore the only reason why I'm not connecting with God has to be inside myself. [01:26:53.08]

Now many of you would like to believe that the only reason you don't connect to God is that other people are to blame. But does that sound very logical? It's like you saying, "I want a relationship with this person, and this person over here is to blame for me not having it." Does that make much sense? It doesn't, does it? Now that person there might certainly share in the blame of your not having a relationship with them, but they cannot share in the blame of you not having a relationship with God. And so every single time you blame other people, who are also God's children, every single time you project anger and rage and other emotions at a person, you are actually not honouring this relationship you say you have with God, because if you honoured that, you couldn't ever treat other people, God's children, in a negative way. [01:28:02.03]

Your question was firstly about self-reliance, so my statement is to reflect upon what the universe tells you about whether you can rely on God. Once you've determined whether you can rely on God or not, give up the concept that you have to believe in yourself in order to have a happy life.

Participant: And do it all myself?

Do...?

Participant: Everything. Take care of myself.

Everything in your life yourself. Yes. The reality is that this relationship with God will teach you self-responsibility but you won't believe you have to create everything yourself. In fact once you get closer and closer to God, your soul does create a lot of things itself but you don't feel like you have to do it all. That's another false belief inside of little me that's keeping me little actually. [01:29:01.02]

Participant: Thank you for that.

6. Progressing in love involves more than just changing our lives

Participant: My question was about what you were saying, about the fact that we go into addiction instead of having a relationship with God, and that ideally our lives should be very dynamic and full of love. So I was just kind of feeling into that I feel like I have this addiction where I get into a certain living situation and I'll just kind of perpetuate that pattern. [01:29:49.18]

Can you describe the living situation?

Participant: Let's say I have a comfortable house and it's working out comfortably with whomever I'm living with. I'll have a job that's reliable but then at a certain point I feel like everything gets stale and old. And my pattern is then to pick up and start all over and find a new place. And I don't feel like that's necessarily love either, that whole cycle. [01:30:33.12]

I agree.

Participant: I can't really see what's going on with all that whole process there.

Different is not progress. Now I need to discuss this with you. You believe different is progress and so my suggestion is for you to look at your addiction to making something different by changing your actions. If you look at it, the only way you can progress is by changing your emotions. So many men are actually addicted to changing their actions to make things different without attempting to change their emotions to make progress. [01:31:34.15]

So inside yourself, you have some very, very strong emotional addictions that you do not wish to change. Those addictions cause you to get into a place of stagnation and then, because you now feel stagnant and you don't like the feeling of being stagnant, you want to change an action so that your life becomes different, without addressing the addiction that created the life that you currently have. As a result of that, you are creating a mirror image of your life every place you go to. In other words you move to a new location, but it's the same life. And then you move to a new location because you're bored with that life, and then you create the same life again. [01:32:23.03]

And this is a serial thing that's happening. It's happening over and over again, so that's telling you that you're not wishing to address the actual addiction that creates that life. So my suggestion is to stay longer the next time in the next life you create and feel the addictions that created it rather than avoiding that life and moving on to a new one, and therefore skipping over the addictions for another period of time. [01:32:56.00]

Participant: Yeah I guess it's just hard to see what they are.

The problem with our addictions is that most of the time everybody else can see them but we can't see them ourselves. God can see every one of them of course, but often, because of the cloud of damage we have, we don't want to know it from God. But many times people in our lives are sharing with us what our addictions are and we're in complete denial of them because we believe they're wrong. And this is why I said earlier, at some point we have to see that we're wrong if we want to progress. To change you have to be wrong. It's great to be wrong. It's great even to know that you're wrong because then you can change. [01:33:43.18]

6.1. Sixth sphere spirits create change to avoid sadness

Participant: So what happens in that process when the 'different' occurs, why does it suddenly feel like it's better for a while?

You're doing exactly what many sixth sphere spirits do to avoid their sadness. Your primary reason for doing this is to avoid your sadness.

Participant: I see.

A sixth sphere spirit gets bored with one aspect of his life and so he just goes and finds something new to do and then he's no longer bored. And then when he gets bored with that new thing, he goes and finds another thing that's new and then he's no longer bored. Does that sound familiar?

Participant: It does. (Laughs)

So his belief is that, "I can avoid this feeling of boredom by doing something different." But the reality is there's an emotion in him that creates his boredom that needs to be released and he's unwilling to address it, just like you are unwilling to address yours. So my suggestion is to start praying about what emotions those are and have a sincere desire for God to expose them. Can I point out something? Whenever you have a sincere desire with God, you'll be answered pretty much instantly and definitely within the same day. When it's sincere! So if you sincerely want to know the cause of you choosing different things rather than progressing and you ask God to show you, within one day God will have shown all the things you need to know. [01:35:26.23]

The problem is whether we're sensitive enough to realise what God's showing us. If we believe we're right, we're going to be very insensitive to God showing us that we're wrong and that's a part of your problem Alexis, just like it's a part of the sixth sphere spirit's problem. They go from different experience to different experience to different experience because they believe they're right. They believe that it's the only course of action that they can take and they believe that they don't have any emotions that are causing that. And so they keep doing it. [01:36:08.14]

When a person from the higher Celestial spheres goes to them and says, "Look, you've got an emotion creating this. There's an emotion inside you of dissatisfaction and you're dissatisfied because you haven't got a relationship with God," they go, "What? No, no that's not true. You know I don't believe that. You're just one of these crazy Christian spirits that God doesn't even care about, that's why you can go to the higher spheres." And they all have this viewpoint of not wishing to analyse and look at themselves as a result. And those kinds of spirits have been with you a lot of your life. They're the same spirits, believing that if Alexis takes a different course of action he's actually progressing when in reality Alexis now knows that whenever he seems to choose a different course of action, he ends up with the same result every single time. And that's telling me that something in the soul isn't progressing. And if you had a true longing and desire from God to know what that thing was, God could show you within this day. [01:37:11.15]

Participant: Yeah. It's funny you say that because I was just reflecting also on the fact that the last place I used to live, if I were to transplant it to Australia, this little place here would be the closest reflection of it (Laughs). And I moved half way across the world! (Laughs) [01:37:30.02]

Exactly! It's so amazing what happens when we choose to not grow in our causal emotional state, in our state of love, and we choose to just take different actions. We end up creating exactly the same thing, even right down to the same kinds of people surrounding us as those who surrounded us before; everything's the same. And I don't know about you but I don't go much for everything being the same. The great thing for you now is that you've gone and created a different action, got the same result, created a different action, got the same result... you've done this a number of times now. Enough times now, surely? (Laughs) So you could go, "Yes, maybe this changing the action is not the thing to do." [01:38:16.19]

Participant: I could become a travel agent! (Laughs)

Yeah! And you can see why some people do choose certain types of jobs, because it keeps them doing different things without actually having any need to change their emotional condition, it makes them feel engaged in their life without them actually progressing. It's far better to notice that, as you are doing now, pray about it and have a sincere desire for God to tell you the answers about it because if your desire is sincere, and I want to remind each of you again, you will within this very day get the answer. If your desire to know is sincere!

7. Developing a sincere desire for soul growth towards God

Participant: I've got two questions, AJ, maybe three. Talking about sincere, how do we develop that sincerity?

Dave, many of the questions you ask are not sincere, just as that one isn't. Can I instead a question back at you? You've asked me many questions over the course of my relationship with you, since I've known you. How many of those things have you actually put into practice? Do you feel that you have changed significantly in the time that we've known each other? [01:39:51.04]

Participant: There have been some changes but no, I haven't really tackled any of the bigger issues.

Okay. I would agree with that. You've had some changes, but the big issues that are inside you still are not addressed, I agree. My next question to you would then be, does that then demonstrate sincerity; that you want to be sincere? And it's a hard question. I'm not trying to pick on you, I'm just trying to help you ask the hard questions that you need to ask yourself. This is something I need to point out to a lot of people. There are many people on the planet who believe they understand Divine Love and they believe they are receiving Divine Love. They do sincerely believe they are receiving it. But what I notice is this: there is where they began their relationship with God many, many years ago, for some of you it was only a few years ago, but for many people I've met it's been 10, 20, 30, 40 years ago that they feel they began this relationship with God, understanding Divine Truth. [01:40:56.14]

And what I see now, looking back at their life, is very little progress. If God's way up high. In many of them this is exactly what I see in that time if I draw it as a graph.

Many people who believe they understand Divine Truth are not progressing in love

And in the end where they are now is almost identical to the person I met 30 years ago. Do you know people like that in your life that seem to be identical to when you first met them? [01:41:27.02]

We need to be honest with ourselves. That means we do not have a sincere desire to change. So what is a measure of sincerity? A measure of sincerity is our actions and results. Do you know what I mean by those two things? In our day-to-day life, if our actions are not changing automatically, then there is little sincerity in us wanting to change. And if the results of what we do are much the same as they've always been, then there is an indication that we're making very little change. Therefore we're not receiving Divine Love because Divine Love causes us to change. Automatically; if you receive it, it will cause you to change. [01:42:28.22]

Firstly we need to be honest with ourselves. Any question regarding sincerity, Dave, has to begin with honesty with self.

7.1. Giving up co-dependent relationships with spirits

I would like to be honest with you and say you are addicted to your relationships with spirits that are surrogate relationships for God. You love your relationship with spirits so much that you are not willing to let go of them, because if you do let go of them it will trigger lots of grief for you. So you want them to stay in this relationship with you. As you know, you've had many spirits around you the entire time that I've known you. So here's Dave (AJ draws on the whiteboard), you've got groups of spirits around you who make you feel certain things, they make you feel powerful, they make you feel strong, they make you feel like you know what you're doing. They make you feel like you know better than other people. [01:43:37.18]

Maintaining addictions with spirits indicates a lack of sincerity to change

And as a result of that they feed all of these addictions in Dave, where Dave himself doesn't feel very good about himself. And because Dave himself does not want to feel those particular emotions, you prefer to have these spirits give you the addictions every single day rather than develop a relationship with God. You prefer that. [01:44:03.16]

Participant: Yeah and I don't want to be aware of it. I was thinking I could say, "I'm not aware of these spirits feeding these addictions but..."

You are aware of them feeding your addictions. You're definitely aware of them. And in fact you and I have had at least twenty conversations where I've told you they are feeding them. You obviously don't trust what I'm saying to you if you're not aware. The reality is that they are feeding your addictions very, very heavily and the only reason we engage such a condition is that it helps us avoid grief, it helps us avoid the feelings we don't want to touch. [01:44:43.21]

The moment that you choose to be more honest with yourself and stop avoiding the actual emotions you do really feel will be the moment that these spirits and their relationship with you will be instantly challenged. Now in the past you've almost come to the point of challenging it, and then usually within a day or so you've acceded back to the addiction because you don't wish to feel that intense grief about a lot of different issues that you have inside yourself. [01:45:23.11]

And because you do not wish to feel that, you are not being sincere about your relationship with God. To be more sincere you'd have to tell yourself the truth, and that is, "I actually don't care if I have a relationship with God or not at this point, all I care about is preventing my grief and I'll do anything to make sure my grief is prevented. And if that means having some relationships with some spirits, I'll do that. If that means having a relationship with some people here who'll give me nice feelings, I'll do that." That is a place of honesty. Honesty and sincerity go hand in hand with each other, yes? You said you had three questions? [01:46:18.21]

Participant: (Laughs)

Do you remember the last two now?

Participant: Yeah I'm not sure how appropriate they are now. But one of them was: in the past handful of days, I've realised that I don't want a personal relationship with God. I don't trust God. [01:46:37.17]

7.2. Being honest about our feelings towards God

No. This is where I say, many of us are not being honest about how we really feel about God. We like the idea of having a relationship with God. We like the idea that some day we'll be perfect. We like the idea of it, but the unfortunate thing is that we really don't want it and that's because of the cloud of emotional damage that we have between us and God. Now for us to deal with the emotion that we really don't want God, we're going to have to challenge a lot of our beliefs about God. Many of you come from a background where you believe that you're going to get punished if you say to God you don't want a relationship with Him. Because of your Christian background many of you believe that. [01:47:34.04]

Many of you believe in a punishing God because you had a punishing dad or a punishing mum and so you believe that if you don't do what God wants, something bad is going to happen to you. Many of you believe that. Now I'm saying that certainly bad things can happen to a person walking away from God, but only because of the choices they make that are unloving. In the sixth dimension of the spirit world there are many people who are in a loving state, at least with each other, and who enjoy their lives. Nothing bad happens to them and they're not connected with God. God doesn't punish people just for not wanting to connect to God. God gave you the gift of free will so that you could choose to not connect with God if that's what you wanted. [01:48:23.19]

My suggestion is to embrace the emotions you feel between yourself and God and actually work your way through them by embracing them. Be truthful with God about them. "Yeah, I think you're a cruel bastard. Fifty million children die every year on this planet. So at the end of the day you don't care about fifty million people every year. There's lots of people get murdered; you don't fix that up. You know there are governments on the planet that murder people over and over and over again and you don't do anything about that." For many of us, if we voiced these emotions, we'd start connecting with our cloud of barriers that we have with God, but \we suppress those emotions and then we ask ourselves, "Well how can I be sincere?" The way to be sincere is be honest with God about how you really feel. [01:49:22.01]

Many of us feel pretty negative about God. We're going to have to go through those emotions and actually come to terms with the truth about those emotions and then release them before we're going to have a different feeling. You can intellectually manufacture something beyond that but it's not going to work. What is the third question? [01:49:43.16]

7.3. Meeting each other's addictions can make us feel good

Participant: It was about something you were talking about earlier, how we can feel drained after we've had an interaction with somebody. So conversely I suppose if we feel good maybe we've been taking from somebody? [01:49:59.19]

Definitely, Dave! Very good to understand that! So if there are two of you having an interaction and you come away from the interaction going, "God I've just got to have another one of those! It felt really good for me!" that's a very good indication that before that point in time you weren't feeling good and after that point in time you got a nice feeling from somebody that made you feel better. So that tells you there's an addiction in play. There was also an addiction in play in the other person in that they gave you the feeling without going, "No, Dave, I can't engage that with you." There's an addiction in play in them as well, giving you the feeling. [01:50:37.19]

Mary and I often comment about how often people come along to a seminar because of how they feel afterwards. Many people feel quite good after they've come along to a seminar and that's the only reason why they've come. They haven't come to make a sincere change or confront their relationship with God in any way. They just come because it feels nice to talk about things about the soul, and it does, but if you go away and then you feel bad again, and you don't address anything, then it tells me that you're in an addiction to avoid all those bad things. It's the same principle. [01:51:18.09]

If there are two people in any interaction and one goes away feeling good, and the other one goes away feeling bad, what do you think has happened? One's taken from the other. If there are two people in the interaction and they both come away feeling good, what's potentially occurred? Two possible things! They've been in truth and love with each other; that's one possibility, and the other one is that they've been in a co-dependent addiction with each other. That's the other possibility. We've got to know which one it is, don't we? Now I don't know if you notice but every time you talk about truth and love you get confronted, do you not? Do you think people who are in a co-dependent addiction would confront each other? No. They don't like confronting each other; what do they like doing? They like pleasing each other. You get to make each other feel good then. [01:52:28.01]

If you have been in a conversation that has been completely truthful and completely loving and you've been completely honest about all your emotions, and both of you have gone away feeling good, that is the best kind of interaction you could have had. It's a very good indication that you've both been in harmony with truth and love in that interaction. But if one of you comes away feeling bad, and one comes away feeling good, there's a proof there that it wasn't necessarily a loving interaction. Some of you are going to say, "But what if you get confronted with truth and the other person feels good about it and you feel bad about it?" Well it's always pretty much going to be the case that a person comes away feeling good when they have given to the other. [01:53:29.16]

Every time you give sincerely to another person, you will always generally come away from that feeling good; those interactions are always pure on the part of the person giving. If you've given to somebody and you come away feeling bad, what does that tell you? There's got to be an addiction in your giving, otherwise you would never have gone away feeling bad. [01:54:11.02]

8. Developing faith in God using logic

Participant: I wanted to ask you something about faith in relation to what you were explaining earlier about your relationship with God. I just wanted to ask, even though we can't believe in ourselves as being right and in truth unless we are in harmony with God's Truth, would you say that you have faith in yourself as God's creation that you can become at-one with God? Would you say that is a faith? [01:55:28.24]

No, there's times when I don't even have that. And there have been many, many times in the past where I haven't had that. I don't believe having faith in yourself is a very productive thing in the long run either. I believe faith in God is productive because let's say little me has a belief inside myself that I'm unworthy. How many of you feel that one with God? Yep, so pretty much everyone; we feel unworthy. That's little you having that feeling.

Many of us feel unworthy to have a relationship with God

Now you're all aware intellectually, that that feeling must be wrong. It must be out of harmony with love because it's blocking your relationship with God. All of us are aware of that, but has it helped us get any closer to God on the issue? Obviously not because God's opinion of us is that, "You are the pinnacle of my creation." That's what God feels about you. "You are the best thing that I ever created." [01:56:27.23]

Participant: Would you say that God has faith in us then?

Well, no. I feel God has faith in Her own creations. God has faith that She... when I say faith, I don't even think its faith, its reality. The fact is that God knows what She created and it was good, she said it was good the moment She created it and my feeling is that from God's perspective, God's never changed on that opinion. Once God forms an opinion on a certain subject that opinion stays for good, so God feels you are good. "You are the pinnacle of my creation." [01:57:05.09]

Participant: So God doesn't need faith.

God doesn't need faith. God knows. You only need faith when you don't yet know, is that not correct? Once you know, you no longer need faith because you now have complete knowledge, you know for certain. You only need faith to help you over the things that you don't know yet. In other words faith can be built through logic. For example, I know, looking at the universe I see a God of love. The fact that two people on the planet can love each other unconditionally and give to each other unconditionally without any strings attached tells me that God must be the same. [01:57:45.16]

Secondly, I know that God is very clever. I look at the human body and we haven't even discovered how it works yet. We've been studying it for years now, and when I say years, honestly it's been a couple of hundred thousand years since the human body was discovered and most people still have no idea how it works. The brain itself, hardly anybody knows how it works. They guess all these things and everything but they're still discovering more and more; there's so much untapped knowledge. [01:58:10.19]

So God knows, and we don't. Now this is just a logical proposition at this point, because it's not something we feel. If we felt it, we'd be acting totally different in our entire life, but in reality we are only intellectually aware that this must be true. Those two things at least, that God is loving and clever, must be true.

We can use logic to see that God is loving and clever

Now, faith says, "Okay, they must be true because I see the evidence around me that they are true and so I'm going to hold onto that truth until somebody proves otherwise to me. I'm going to hold on to that truth and work on the basis that that is true until such a time that somebody proves differently." That's what faith does.

That's how every thing that man has ever created has come into being, by somebody having an idea that they had enough faith in, then creating and proving whether it was true or not. Every single thing that man's ever done has been based around this idea that came from somewhere; one person on the planet had to have faith that it would come true at some point in the future. [01:59:27.09]

And so all I've done is, I've gone, "Okay, let's apply that same principle to my relationship with God." So instead of discovering the Law of Aerodynamics or working out gravity, and measuring things to do with physics, and using this noggin of mine to determine a lot of scientific truth, the first scientific truth I want to determine is God. That's the first scientific thing I want to go towards, so I've just looked at the world around me in the same way that a scientist would look at the world around him or her and discover truths about the universe as a result. I've discovered truths about God that I know are true even though at times I might not feel them, but I do know that if I engage this process with God, if I work through the reasons why I don't feel them right now, eventually I will feel them. [02:00:24.21]

Right now many of you do not feel that God is a loving God. Many of you look at the Law of Attraction for example, and you think sometimes it's a bit cruel. You go, "What about the 50 million children that die of starvation between the age of zero and five? What about them? That seems to me to be like a pretty bad attraction." And we start seeing the Law of Attraction as a negative thing. Now I look at that and I go, "Right, I do feel the Law of Attraction is a negative thing." So I feel that inside me (I don't feel this now but I have had that inside me in the past), and then I work through the emotional issues with God about the Law of Attraction being a negative thing until such a time that I no longer think the Law of Attraction is a negative law. [02:01:18.19]

8.1. Being humble to learning God's opinions

Now, how did I work through it? By trusting that God was a God of love and was clever enough to design a perfect system, and also trusting that I am flawed in my understanding. That's how I did it. But many of us do not want to feel that we're flawed in our understanding and so instead we go and tell ourselves a lot of other things. For example many of you would like to think you're unworthy, but the reality is that many of you do believe that you're actually better than God. Do you not see that? Well, a person who wants to argue with God about God's Laws, what's that doing? Isn't that believing that you're better than God? So every single time you argue with God about one of God's Laws, you're automatically thinking you're better than God. That's not a person who's unworthy, that's a person who's arrogant. Quite often we think we have one set of emotions when in reality we have another. [02:02:28.19]

You could look at any relationship you have with an individual. For instance, perhaps there are two of you in a relationship and one person believes that the other person is to blame for the problems in their relationship. Can this person who is blaming the other really say that they feel unworthy of the relationship? Don't they feel that the other person's unworthy of the relationship?

A person who blames another for their problems is in a place of arrogance rather than unworthiness

Let's apply that to God. If I believe God's at fault for things that God's done in my relationship with God, aren't I basically saying that God is unworthy of a relationship with me? So who am I really thinking is unworthy? God. I'm thinking, "I know better than God and God's the one who's unworthy." [02:03:31.12]

To be honest many of us feel that with God because we look at the things that are happening in the world that we don't understand and we've yet to work our way through emotionally, and we go, "Wow, I can't agree that 50 million children die every year, so there's something wrong with God allowing that." Many of you think, "I wouldn't allow that." And so then you go, "God's allowing it, but I'm not allowing it so God's got to be worse than I am." Now is that a feeling of unworthiness? No, that's a feeling of anger or not understanding, isn't it? A feeling like confusion, it's a different type of feeling. [02:04:15.05]

8.2. Working through feelings that God is cruel and punishing

Often we list a feeling that we believe we have because we don't want to face the feelings we actually have. Many of us do this. You remember I drew at the start of this discussion the cloud of emotions that we have? This emotional damage cloud we have with God is preventing our relationship with God, and one of those feelings is that many of us believe that God is cruel. We do. Many of you, right now, believe God's cruel. Now I'm not even saying you don't have any justification for your belief, I'm just saying that's how you feel. I'm not judging it; I'm just saying this is how you feel. [02:05:17.05]

Of course if you believe God's cruel, you're not really going to want a relationship with God, are you? Would you want a relationship with a person on Earth that you believed was cruel? You'd have to be in a pretty abused state to want a relationship with a person who's cruel. You look at the Christian background of religion. A lot of it believes in a cruel, punishing God. So they want a relationship with a cruel, punishing God. Do you want one? I don't know about you, I don't want one. I don't want a relationship with a cruel punishing God. If there is a God of love I'd like a relationship with that God, but if I believe God is cruel, can you see I'm going to have a real struggle having a relationship with Her? [02:06:12.16]

And if I believe God's punishing, I'm always going to be afraid of getting it wrong, aren't I? How many of you are afraid of getting it wrong all the time? The more you learn about Divine Truth, the more afraid you're becoming; how many of you are finding that? Why? Because this emotional damage is not being confronted; this belief that now that you know this law God is going to punish you somehow. So now I'm starting to worry, get confused. "What do I do? What do I do? Probably the best thing is to not do anything!" Like Rita said earlier. "Maybe that's the best choice I can make; not do anything!" And the reason we don't want to do anything is that we're afraid of this God who created these laws. [02:07:07.00]

It's emotional damage we hold in us that's like a cloud preventing us from the relationship with the real God. We have all these concepts that God is all these things and we try to shut them down and we try to make them go away but they're not going to go away until we confront them. They're not going to go away. If I just look at those two beliefs that God is cruel and punishing - I've personally had to work through a lot of issues about those two things. About my understanding of the universe and how it works, and about how I am in error about the universe and how it works. And is God actually a cruel, punishing God? I've had to work through all of those things sincerely, because if I don't work through them I'll never grow in this relationship with God because I'll believe things about God that are false. You can't just go and switch an intellectual switch and go from one point, which is, "I believe that God's cruel and punishing" to, "Oh! Now I believe God's loving." It doesn't work like that. [02:08:19.05]

There are things you're going to have to go through emotionally to come to terms with a different belief. And if we're not prepared to face those particular things, we're never going to get there. What I see is that this kind of feeling is quite frequently being avoided by most people. They have them but they're being avoided and because we don't want to face those feelings every time we think about our relationship with God, there's one emotion that often comes up quite quickly; that "it's all too hard."

When we don't face our false beliefs about God we can be inclined to give up because it's all too hard

How many of you have had that emotion with God? Yes! See now we're being realistic. Do you think that one's going to prevent us from having a relationship with God? Of course it is. [02:09:14.06]

9. Closing Words

These are the kinds of things we need to address emotionally if we're really going to progress; to actually feel the feelings. The way I see that the injury is mine is: a person who is in a state of love with me would find a relationship very, very easy. And if I were in a state of love with another, I would also find the relationship very, very easy. If I'm feeling that it's all too hard, I've got to have some false beliefs in me that I need to change. Logically, I must. [02:10:04.06]

If we're honest with these emotions, we can start to address the issues we have with God. If we can address the issues we have with God, then we can establish a relationship with God. We won't be going around all the time trying to get everybody in our sphere of operation to satisfy our unhealed emotions, because we've already healed them and we feel we have a relationship with God that is established. So we feel very, very happy in that relationship and we don't even need another relationship. We may desire our soulmate, but we don't need our soulmate in order to be happy, because we're in a relationship with God. [02:10:49.09]

All things come from God, including all of our happiness potentially; it can come from developing that relationship. I'm not saying that God just pumps you full of happy emotions. What I'm saying is that God helps you release from yourself all of the unhappiness that's in you, so that no unhappiness exists in you. Therefore every thing that you embrace causes you to feel more happiness. So in the end we're not going to be like this big addictive sponge for God to make us feel good all the time because that would be an unloving relationship, would it not? And God wouldn't abide by that kind of unloving relationship. [02:11:39.06]

Instead we'll perfectly embrace all of our emotional injuries, releasing them and getting to the state where we no longer have any but where we still passionately desire this relationship with God. Once we're in that state, now love can be exchanged between ourselves and God. And if love can be exchanged between ourselves and God, we have the capacity to continually receive Divine Love after that point and our soul will be expanding and growing as a result of that love being received. But it won't be a one way street; we'll also be giving love to God in that process. Just like any other relationship is never a one way street if it's going to be a good relationship. [02:12:33.01]

Of course God's capacity to give you love is much greater than your capacity to give God love. However one thing is very important to remember with that; the fact is that your love is something that God cannot take from you without you wishing to give it. So for that reason it always brings God much joy when you love God because it is the one emotion that God cannot take from you that God would love to have from you. And for that reason there's a lot of joy in God's heart every time She feels your love. So it's going to be a reciprocal arrangement in terms of your growth in relationship with God. [02:13:26.07]

Anyway, hopefully that discussion has helped you to just look sincerely at your real issues with God. Last week in Bathurst we gave a talk about "Why We Resist God", and a lot of it had to do with things that we've discussed today. The day before we had had a discussion called "The Eternal Benefits of a Relationship with God," and that discussion went down like a lead balloon actually. (Laughs) And so then we had to go and address the reasons for that, which were about why we resist God. We need to be with God where we are right now, rather than trying to fake things with God. [02:14:18.11]

So rather than focusing on trying to get your addictions met through other people or other relationships, my suggestion is to be more ethical than that. Stop trying to get these addictions met and instead feel the underlying reason that the addiction is present and what's missing in your relationship with God that causes the addiction to be present. If you can do that, then you have an opportunity to grow quite significantly. [02:14:53.17]

